seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefav2f20001_7 seefav2f20008_16 seefav2f200017_24 seefav2f200025_28 seefav2f200029_36 seefav2f200035_48 seefav2f200051_61 seefav2f200062_68 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 sj_v2_35.pdf sj_v2_37.pdf sj_v2_39.pdf sj_v2_41.pdf sj_v2_44.pdf slavic and east european folkloristics at the canadian museum of civilization: an overview robert b.klymasz, canadian museum of civilization in keeping with the growing recognition of canada's multicultural profile and its concomitant discovery of terrae incognitae, the canadian museum of civilization (nee national museum of canada, and later national museum of man), canada's national museum of anthropology, began the earnest collection, documentation and study of slavic and east european folklore materials in the early i%o's thanks in most part to the pioneering work of kenneth peacock. (earlier, incidental slavic and east european materials appear sporadically in the museum's collections of such figures as m. barbeau and l. boulton.) from the outset these efforts emphasized the new canadian experience. (in any case, conditions in eastern europe at that time discouraged the undertaking of credible folklore research in the homelands.) this in turn prompted the accumulation of complementary primary data that, from a global perspective, now serve to enhance our appreciation of slavic and east european folklore. in the course of these early activities, the traditional canons whether slavic, baltic, yiddish or finno-ugric -usually served as launching pads as researchers and field workers (such as j.l. perkowski, v.r tilney, l. degh, m.t.ls.m.g. salo, b. kirshenblatt-gimblett, and others) struggled either to salvage pearls from the past or to cross the gaps that divided classical old country lore from north american realities. after all, what does one make of such seeming aberrations as polish jokes that are not even delivered in polish, or ukrainian village harvest songs performed on the cemented balcony of a highrise condominium in·downtown toronto? among the "pearls" was the latter-day discovery of an unpublished collection of russian incantations recorded (on paper) among canada's newly arrived doukhobor immigrants a century ago by one of v.i. lenin's more illustrious cronies, v.d. bonch-bruevich. (his original field notations, located in russian archives, are currently being prepared for publication.) the inital focus on oral lore (folksongs dominated this phase) soon mushroomed to include attendant phenomena. ritual, belief: art and material culture emerged as areas that also warranted attention if the museum was to mount well-researched and comprehensive exhibitions on the nation's east european legacies. this trend is reflected in the multi-disciplinary study of a hungarian settlement on the prairies ("the bekevar project") in the 1970s, two exhibitions marking the centenaries of particular slavic communities in canada ("art and ethnicity: the ukrainian tradition in 22 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 canada" [1991] and "spirit wrestlers: the doukhobors" [1996]), and the development of a national icon collection featuring works of east europeanlbyzantine influence by most of the country's iconographers. the extensional directions outlined above continue today. foremost in this regard is the on-going "gimli community research project" that since the mid-l990s has approached the study of a smail town on the prairies as a longtenn. open-ended investigation from a variety of perspectives. ukrainian folk traditions constitute an important component of this particular multiand inter-disciplinmy investigation. similarly, a compilation of reports on cantorial traditions in canada, scheduled for publication later this year, includes several pieces of direct interest to slavic and east european folklore studies on this continent. although the move in favor of multi-ethnic projects continues, occasions for in-depth mono-ethnic research still surface. for example, to salute the 150th anniversary of one of canada's oldest polish settlements (wilno, ontario) in 2007, the museum's canadian centre for folk culture studies may fonnulate a suitable project to mm this milestone. however, to facilitate any future work in the area of slavic and east european folklore and cultural traditions, a critical guide to relevant areas in the museum's collections is currendy a priority that has yet to be addressed. 23 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 microsoft word seefa2001.doc 34 conference report the poetics of folklore: seminar in memory of b. n. putilov a scholarly seminar entitled “the poetics of folklore” and dedicated to the memory of b. n. putilov (1919-1998) was held from the first to the third of march in st. petersburg. he is known to specialists on folklore in many countries, but primarily in slavic. most of putilov’s monographs (more than 500 works came from under his pen) are devoted to the epic poetry of the slavs. they begin with the bylina, that is, with one of its earliest genres, and end with its rather late manifestations in the russian historical song. slavic historical ballads and the heroic songs of the montenegrins also formed part of his interests in this field. putilov was attracted to the most acute problems in the study of russian folklore, problems which many historians, philologists, and ethnographers sought to solve. in regard to study of “the epic and real historical fact” he occupied a position close to that of v. ia. propp. putilov considered that the past, which lies at the basis of the bylinas, “is not the past of the chronicles and is not even an idealized historical time.” the most archaic links of the bylina are represented by numerous “ethnographic motifs which lead to mythology, paganism, and magical practices . . . .” (this is cited according to putilov’s last formulations of this problem in his book “ekskursy v teoriiu i istoriiu slavianskogo eposa” [excursions into the theory and history of the slavic epic], st. petersburg, 1999, pp. 93, 96). putilov perceived the method for his work on epic texts to lie in historical typology. he provided an original treatment of this theory although he emphasized his dependence on v. m. zhirmunskii. the ideas of m. parry and a. lord found a response in putilov’s scholarly activities. he was one of the initiators of a series of conferences which were dedicated to the memory of a. lord and which took place in various cities of the former ussr. he also was the author of an extensive afterward to the russian translation of the book “skazitel” [singer -“singer of tales] and of an article entitled “shkola parry-lorda v mirovom eposovedenii” [the parry-lord school in the study of world epics] (“zhivaia starina,” no. 2, 1994). it is difficult to evaluate the true significance of putilov if one does not know a particular circumstance. having begun his career during the “struggle with formalism,” he turned out to be one of those who consistently and progressively turned the soviet view of the folklore text into something independent from the then current requirements to seek in folklore the “correct” views of events and adherence to the canons of “socialist realism.” it is true, however, that in the routine conditions of academic institutes where putilov worked his whole life, such impulses did not acquire the same impetus and did not provoke the same social resonance that the activity, for example, of the tartu semiotic school achieved. the seminar did not include many reports about the epic. the majority of the talks were connected with a different sphere of putilov’s interests: traditional culture and folklore as one of its parts. (in this seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 35 regard i refer to his book “folklor i traditsionnaia kultura” [folklore and traditional culture], st. petersburg, 1994, which is still pertinent to the present day situation in russian folkloristics. the reflection of passing or departed reality formed the basic question of the seminar and was examined in three aspects. first: a refraction of lexicographic problems. as s. e. nikitina (moscow) claims, “a frequency count of the folklore language produces dubious results as an indicator of traditional mentality if, when compiling a frequency dictionary of folklore, you do not consider genre.” second: relationship to individual themes and images in folklore. all reports about the bylina (t. a. bernshtam, a. a. gorelov, e. l. madlevskaia), and reports about archaic conceptions connected with the use of salt in christening ceremonies (a. k. baiburin) and with the kinship system reflected in non-ritual lyric songs (s. i. zhavoronok) were devoted to this second aspect. third: the individual narrative unit. m. l. lur’e, on the basis of demonological stories (“bylichki”), devoted her talk to one of these units --the motif. reports about traditional space conceptions emerging through the tale (k. e. korepova nizhny novgorod), through fragmentary historical legends (v. v. vinogradov), or through those enrooted entirely in contemporary life (i. a. razumova petrozavodsk; a. f. belousov, i. s. veselova) formed a special part of the seminar’s program. in the spirit of putilov’s interest in the way parry and lord studied the transmission of an oral epic, at the seminar reports were presented about the learning of funeral laments in the russian north (s. b. adon'ieva), and about the types of vocal timbers and performance devices in byelorussian ritual songs (g. v. tavlaj). several talks were concerned with various aspects of folklore poetics and stylistics: a general view of the controversial sides of this topic, about the cumulative principle in incantations (i. f. amroian toliatti), about the still debated concept of the “formula” in folkloristics (iu. a. kleiner), and about song stanzas (m. a. lobanov). a. f. nekrylova talked about the poetics of the formulation of signs or tokens (“primeta”). in his communication g. a. levinton clarified some points in the study of epic verse by n. s. trubetzkoy and r. o. jakobson. the seminar was supplemented with communications about folklore phenomena that were little known to the assembled audience: pre-islamic ritual songs (n. n. abubakirova), folklore genres accompanying the funerals of the udmurt pagans (t. m. miniiakhmetova izhevsk/tartu), and azerbijanian proverbs connected with the epic hero kior-ogly (f. cheleby). the sessions of the seminar took place in the russian institute for the history of the arts and in st. petersburg university. the petersburg linguistics society (with support from the soros fund), the propp center, and the above named institutions organized the seminar. m. lobanov russian institute for the history of the arts, st. petersburg (translated by james bailey) seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 untitled 186 kononenko, natalie. slavic folklore. a handbook (greenwood folklore handbooks). westport, connecticut and london: greenwood press, 2007. additional features: glossary, bibliography, web resources, index. xvi + 209. $55.00 (hardcover). isbn-13:978-0-313-33610-2. natalie kononenko’s recent volume in the greenwood folklore handbooks series is a most welcome addition to the ever-growing body of scholarship on slavic folklore in english. the author states at the very beginning that the book is intended for the non-specialist, for the reader who knows little of slavic history or folklore. but that does not mean that the specialist and especially the student of slavic folklore will find little of interest in it; to the contrary. the introduction focuses on the setting for what is to follow: the branches of the slavic peoples, early evidence of slavic lore, slavic mythology, and three old east slavic documents of some value, the likely spurious book of veles, the primary chronicle, and the recounting of igor’s campaign of 1185 (not 1085 and robert c. howes, not howse). many, if not most, modern russian and western scholars reject the notion that the story of igor is an oral epic (see “on igor’s campaign” on the web) but accept that it no doubt contains material from earlier oral sources. but these are minor points. the chapter “definitions and classifications” takes the reader through the prose and poetic genres of slavic folklore. the bulk of the examples are from ukrainian and russian but kononenko refers to other traditions as well. the descriptions of the russian, ukrainian and south slavic (serbian) traditions are the most thorough. oddly enough there is no mention of the russian spiritual verses, the dukhovnye stikhi. especially informative sections on rite and ritual and on material culture complete this chapter. examples of most of the genres discussed in chapter two of this book are presented in a separate chapter, “examples and texts.” the majority are ukrainian, often translated by the author, although there are russian texts and one slovak tale as well as some shorter texts from macedonian, polish and serbian. all are well chosen and well translated. indeed, one only wishes that this chapter could have been expanded. a survey of scholarship and approaches to slavic folklore constitutes the third chapter of kononenko’s book. one may take issue with her statement that it was “the beginning of the century (nineteenth) and its last quarter” (p117) that were the most important periods in folklore studies. surely with regard to the east slavs it was the middle folklorica 2008, vol. xiii reviews 187 third of the century that was the most significant, although the groundwork was to some extent laid earlier, as the author’s observations seem to show. for reasons that are not quite clear to this reader, kononenko continues to refer to the discourse, tale or song of igor’s campaign, which was certainly not “russia’s only medieval manuscript”(p121), apparently relating it to the folk epics recorded in modern times. the survey of russian and ukrainian collecting and scholarship is brief, a feature dictated by the scope of the book as a whole, but kononenko refers to the main trends and most of the main publications covering the topics. for many folklorists her observations on folklore and music, dance and songs especially will be particularly helpful, as are those on rituals that continue to be practiced even up to the present time. one wishes that space had permitted the author to describe in some detail such modern phenomena as urban folklore, “new age” birthing techniques, and graffiti. the history of scholarship among the west and south slavs is quite different because these peoples, with the partial exception of the poles, were not under russian domination and soviet control until after world war ii. there is some attention paid to polish and serbian folklore scholarship and some names of european and north american scholars are mentioned, and considerable space is devoted to parry and lord, whose work on the composition of epic verse cannot be overstated. the work of émigré scholars is also noted. unfortunately, one might be left with the impression that neither the czechs nor croats possess any folklore, as they are not mentioned in the text. a good bibliography concludes the chapter. the last chapter of the book, “contexts,” deals with the interaction between folklore and literature, art, and music, again with the primary focus on ukrainian and russian. the nationalist tendencies of both peoples have been exploited to the maximum, judging from the numbers of writers, composers, and artists kononenko quite properly claims have made use of folkloric elements in their work. not all would identify blok’s “prekrasnaia dama” with a rusalka, while the ties of village prose to traditional folklore are not well documented. i found the passages dealing with the uses of folklore in the post-khrushchev period particularly well done. no doubt students at all levels will be inspired to continue research along many of the lines suggested by kononenko’s work here. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 188 the ties between ukrainian folklore and the other arts are less well known to the english-speaking world. although some of the names of the artists are known outside ukrainian scholarly circles, most of the more recent ones are probably not, and again kononenko does us a service in bringing them to our attention. the polish poet, jan kochanowski, whom the author refers to as “perhaps the greatest slavic poet prior to the nineteenth century,” was among the earliest (sixteenth century) writers in that language and probably the first to make use of folk poetry in his verse. he was followed in his use of polish folklore by mickiewicz, sienkiewicz, wladyslaw reymont, the composer chopin and others. in postcommunist poland the author points to the sponsorship of polish folk music festivals across poland, all assisting in keeping polish folk traditions alive. a single paragraph devoted to czech folklore and literature mentions the names of some writers who were in one way or another influenced by folklore themes and materials but there is nothing of božena němcová, (1820-1862), pseudonym of barbora panklová, whose babička/granny (1855) captured the spirit of the czech country folk and remains a classic of czech literature today. she also collected (and edited) czech folktales and legends even earlier. milan kundera might have deserved a mention, as might the great czech composers who incorporated folk themes into their works: dvořák, smetana, and janáček. the south slavs also receive little more than passing attention, which is a pity, because good collections of serbian and croatian folktales exist, and much bulgarian and macedonian folklore is known in the west. the south slavic groups of north america have done an especially fine job promoting song and dance. slavic folklore: a handbook concludes with a fine glossary, a bibliography, an index, and a good guide to web resources. these are of great value to readers who have only english. all in all this is a most useful work for the beginning student, especially one who wants to gain a good overview of russian and ukrainian folklore and folklore scholarship. jack v. haney seattle washington usa microsoft word seefaf01c.doc 35 r e v i e w russian old believers: three videos old believers. directed by margaret hixon. berkeley, calif.: university of california, extension media center, 1981. 29 minutes, vhs; the old believers. directed by john paskievich. national film board of canada. 1989. 57 minutes, vhs; savoniha, a siberian old believer. a film by costanzo allione. available from mystic fire video, www.mysticfire.com. 1997. 30 minutes,vhs. for a folklorist, the term “old believer” is about as helpful as the term “protestant.” old believers may inhabit isolated wilderness settlements, living every detail of daily life in accordance with hallowed tradition, or they may live in a novosibirsk apartment, adopting their neighbors’ norms as their own, pretty much undistinguishable from the society around them. what makes them old believers, of course, is their faithfulness to russian orthodox church life as it existed prior to liturgical reforms introduced in the seventeenth century. historically, old believers’ adherence to the “old,” pre-reform liturgy often included adherence to what they understood as “old” ways of life, most famously illustrated in their rejection of western habits (such as shaving off beards) introduced by peter the great. thus, their liturgical conservatism was often part of a broader cultural conservatism. under intermittent persecution from the russian government and the official, reformed church, many old believers fled to isolated regions of russia or left russia altogether. this dispersal, plus internal divisions within old belief, resulted in hundreds of small old believer communities scattered around the world; more or less in touch with each other, more or less in agreement with each another, and more or less culturally conservative. among these, it is the culturally conservative communities that have attracted the most scholarly and popular attention, as they often preserve colorful aspects of russian traditional culture which have disappeared elsewhere. the videos under review represent part of the popular examination of old believers. none of the film-makers involved have any scholarly training in russian traditional culture. all made use of scholarly consultants, but the videos are essentially journalism – produced by generalists seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 36 for a general audience. all meet high technical standards and all are easily accessible to the english-speaking viewer. old believers, directed by margaret hixon, modestly sets out to document a wedding in the old believer settlements of marion county, oregon, in the years 1979 and 1980. set in the berry farms of the willamette valley, it records the preparations, celebration, and significance of one real-life wedding. along the way, the film briefly touches on a wealth of traditional arts (such as embroidery, clothing construction, weaving, vernacular architecture, folk song, and foodways) and beautifully presents a whole series of rituals; the “devichnik” or engagement party, “selling” the bride and her braid, the wedding feast, the delivery of the dowry and subsequent bargaining, the ceremony of bestowing gifts and advice on the newlyweds, and tossing the groom’s father to the ceiling. the narration throughout is unobtrusive, supplying just enough detail to let general audiences feel in touch with the action on the screen. while the narrator supplies some basic historical background, we mainly hear the old believers themselves (in english, with subtitles or with voice-over translations), as they describe wedding preparations, hopes for the future, or memories of life before coming to the usa. traditional russian costume fills every frame, and old believer voices grace the soundtrack with sacred and secular song. the viewer feels like a guest in a foreign home at a busy and happy time, with the narrator as a friend who can explain briefly what is going on, but who has no time for lengthy lectures on cultural assimilation. this topic does appear, but only momentarily, just as the “pech’” (russian stove) and the “zybka” (hanging cradle) and the “pel’meni” (russian ravioli) appear in glimpses. viewers alert to assimilation issues will catch several fleeting glimpses – in the words of the bride and the weaver and the cantor’s son, and in the “have a pepsi day!” t-shirt among the handmade “rubashki” (traditional-style russian shirt). but, resolved to let the old believers speak for themselves, hixon refrains from forecasts and pronouncements. the narration ends with the words: “like their ancestors before them, the children face challenges of their own. and life goes on.” in canada, however, the end is near. in john paskievich’s film the old believers, we see three old believer women, in traditional dress, strolling through the glittering west edmonton mall. the eldest takes in the glamour, the frivolity, the lasciviousness of the whole scene, and remarks that “when the end of the world comes, it will probably start here.” 37 director, writer and narrator of the old believers, paskievich has a great deal to say about the place where old believers encounter the outside world. his film is at once a vehicle for these comments, a documentary about a year in the life of the reutov family, and a presentation of old believer history, ritual, and theology. a large amount to pack into sixty minutes, and the results are uneven. the presentation of old believer history, theology and ritual is by and large accurate, although pronouncements such as that “all old believer houses are built beside a river” cause the informed viewer to wince. still, some essentials such as “the past is always present” and the concept of the physical world as a window through which we can glimpse heaven are presented accurately enough. his documentary of a year in the life of the old believer reutov family on their remote alberta farm is also largely successful. we see the family matriarch consulting the calendar to determine what food is canonical for that day, girls eating raw eggs at the start of a singing party, harvest scenes, easter celebrations, and non-old believer guests being served far from the family table. we see children and adults gathered to sing dukhovnye stikhi (spiritual songs) from a book. we see the men going off to the woods for a week of forestry work. the shots of forestry camp life in the woods and slaughtering the pig in a muddy farmyard convey the gritty physicality of life on the land. these are marvelous scenes. however, paskievich’s heart lies in examining the zone where old believers and outsiders interact. he examines the walls old believers erect when they meet the outside world – walls of ritual purity, isolationism, exclusivity and “stubborn certainty” in matters theological. he also examines the reaction of the outside word to old believers – historically, persecution under the tsars and the communists; and in modern north america, a kind of benign neglect combined with the seductive alternative of a materialistic, individualistic way of life. this seduction occasionally proves powerful enough to break through the old believers’ walls, and paskievich dwells on schoolchildren trying to reconcile physics with biblical teachings, on a reutov daughter who married out of the faith, on the rock music infiltrating into engagement festivities. presently paskievich mounts a pulpit, telling “us” that in comparison to the old believers, “we” are like children with no memories and no purpose. he equates “our” society’s physical pollution with the moral pollution that old believers strenuously try to avoid. it is all too much. seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 38 this pompous attitude constitutes a real shortcoming, as do the disingenuous use of historical images and inappropriate soundtrack music. it is still a worthwhile film, however, one which will provoke much discussion. in savoniha, a siberian old believer, we meet a ninety-year old semeiskii old believer woman whose experience of war, revolution, religious repression and general hard times led to a profound understanding of forgiveness. savoniha’s earthy, practical, inward peace suffuses the film as thoroughly as the late autumn sunlight and the floating, polyphonic songs on the soundtrack. and while italian filmmaker allione is essaying a spiritual portrait of an individual, not an ethnographic portrait of a group, there is much here to interest the folklorist. while savoniha’s translated words reveal her personal history and spiritual depth, the camera follows her and her neighbors about their daily business in the siberian old believer village of kuitun. we get a close look at the hills, the fields, the architecture, the herds of horses and the muddy streets. villagers harvest cabbage, feed the pigs, milk the cows, herd the livestock from horseback. one woman blesses water drawn from her well, then sprinkles it on the buildings of the family compound. this is a culture where the spiritual and the physical interpenetrate to the point of blending. savoniha makes clear that her clothing and amber jewelry are as much a part of her religion as the words of old believer preachers and the birch tree to which she makes her confession. “earth is our heaven.” she declares, and this bent old woman, at the end of a turbulent and difficult life, quietly gives us all a lesson in forgiveness. margaret mckibben north seattle community college 21 notes of a translator on bogatyrev's monograph: maeical acts. rites.. and beliefs of subcarpathian rus' patricia a. krafcik, evergreen state college petr grigorevich bogatyrev was without question one of the most significant russian folldorists of the twentieth centwy. his participation in the organization and activity of the moscow linguistic circle which, along with the petrograd society for the study of poetic language, gave birth to the russian formalist school, and his subsequent work with the prague linguistic circle nurtured his own pioneering interests and activities in the field of ethnography. his life in stalinist russia was, naturally, not without tragedy. he suffered immensely as a result of his work "abroad" as a translator for the soviet embassy in prague between 1922-1939, as well as for his association with "foreign folldorists," among them his compatriot roman jakobson who chose to immigrate to the united states on the eve of the nazi invasion of czechoslovakia while bogatyrev returned home to russia. amidst the valuable pieces of scholarship he left behind are his studies of rusyn folldore from the carpathian molmmln~, which he researched in a series offield expeditions dming the 1920s and 1930s. of these, the greatest gem is his monograph entitled magical acts. rites. and beliefs in subcaj:pathian rus'. published initially in a french translation by the institute of slavic studies (lnstitut d'etudes slaves) in paris in 1929 lactes ma~ques. rites et crovances en russ;e subcm:pathique). here, he succeeded in describing what in the 1920s was still, as he stated in his diary, one of the most archaic of slavic peasant cultures. the relative isolation of the region with its scattered mountain villages allowed for the smvival of traditional folklore and for the perpetuation of ritual and magical practices which elsewhere were fading or already extinct. bogatyrev's monograph offers a full and systemic description of the ritual-mythological aspect of rusyn peasant life. after a lengthy introduction in which he discusses his use of the synchronic method in his research illustrated with numerous examples from rusyn folklore practices and beliefs he moves through the feasts of the orthodox and greek catholic liturgical year descnding in intricate detail various folk rites and beliefs connected with each of them. finally, he scrutinizes significant moments in the peasants' lives birth and baptism, weddings, and funerals, as well as their experience of the world of apparitions and supernatural beings and, here again. describes intriguing folk rituals related to these. in 1998, the first english translation ofbogatyrev's monograph under the title vampires in the car.pathians: magical acts. rites. and beliefs in subcaj:pathian rus'. was published by columbia seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 22 university press's east european monographs series under the auspices of the carpatho-rusyn research center as part of the center's own series entitled "classics of carpatho-rusyn scholarship." for this publication i reworked an initial translation by independent scholar stephen reynolds. for the sake of accuracy, i consulted closely both the original french publication and a subsequent russian publication of the work which appeared in the soviet union in 1971 a few months before bogatyrev's death (as magicheskie deistvie. obriady i verovaniia zakar.pat'ia in a single-volume compilation ofbogatyrev's works entitled voprosy teor;; narodnogo iskusstva. moskva, pp. 167-296). along the way, i discovered that some individual lines and a handful of whole paragraphs had been entirely omitted from the soviet version. it is certainly possible that the author himself might have had a band in revising his own work, but the nature of the omissions seems to suggest that they were most probably made by a censor. what might have disturbed a soviet censor in 1971 about bogatyrev's scholarly observations in this study ofsubcarpathian rusyn folklore of the 1920s1 the problem passages, as it tmns out, did not concern subcarpathian rusyn folklore per se at all. the passages which the censor found dangerous or offensive were, in fact, largely those in which bogatyrev went beyond rusyn folklore to reach for some kind of analogy to an item under discussion which he knew and found useful from the russian context. these are passages, then, which might be of special interest to both rusyn and russian folklorists. for instance, the :first omission occurs in the introduction under a section subtitled "the cmrency of magical actions and rites." in discussing generally the persistence of folk. beliefs into modem times, bogatyrev notes that folk. religion has remained as powerful as christianity among all the nationalities in russia, including russian peasants and that, for example, there has been a "rebirth of paganism ... not only among the cheremis [mari] of the steppe, but even among those of the district of krasnokoksajsk. ... " (p. 16 in the english translation; p. 182 in the soviet version) the censor's omission begins at this point, with bogatyrev's observation that: "this renaissance obviously occurred during the time of the russian revolution of 1917 and the soviet regime." immediately hereafter, two full paragraphs are missing from the soviet version. in them bogatyrev notes that "orthodoxy and sorcery ... form an unexpected union" throughout rural russia, and the sorcerer or sorceress in every village is as important as the priest, the schoolmaster, and the fe/'dsher [a sort ofhea1th officer]. "formerly," bogatyev remarlcs, "sorcery was forbidden and practiced only clandestinely. now it is done openly." sorcerers have even kept up with social progress, he states, and now record their conjurations in registers, two of which bogatyrev says he has in his possession "in which very old recipes based on the powers of herbs, earth, and metals are seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 23 accompanied by bizarre conjurations." in a third paragraph on this same page, bogatyrev was permitted to state that he himselfhad observed how widespread superstitions were among "prague actors and in various segments of the urban population which sounds like he is referring only to czechs, so apparently the statement was acceptable to the censor but then the censor omitted bogatyrev's next stunning announcement that superstitions were also widespread among the russian working class, "from which the auditors at the wolker's university founded in moscow by the soviets were recruited." narrative endnotes attached to all of these observations are also missing from the soviet version. in 1hese notes, bogatyrev drew from the observations ofv. g. tan-bogoraz who offers examples of contempomy vestiges of old practices and beliefs in a 1924 compilation, entitled storyi i nol!)'i bvt. tan-bogoraz wi1nessed, for instance, a sorcerer's attempt to exorcise severnl preswnably possessed women in a wolkers' neighborhood in leningrad in 1923, an event which had attracted few in 1917 but drew an enormous crowd six years later. bogatyrevadds that a priest who intervened to save 1he sorcerer, whom the crazed women had attempted to 1hrow off a bridge, was himselfbeaten by 1hem. it is not hard to see that the soviet censor could not permit these observations which stood in such blatant contradiction to 1he enlightenment which 1he october revolution of 1917 was thought to have contributed to 1he new soviet man and woman. further in his study, bogatyrev discusses what he calls motivated and unmotivated magical actions. in the first, practitioners feel they know and can explain why they are undertaking certain actions. in 1he second, practitioners are not certain why they must engage in certain actions within a particular rite or ritual, but rather "conform themselves to the details rigorously out of fear that otherwise they will destroy all1he power of the magical action or will neglect some essential detail." bogatyrev believed 1hat the peasant population of subcarpathian rus' engaged largely in motivated magical actions, but that unmotivated magical actions formed 1he bulk of such activities on 1he part of "persons belonging to the middle social stratwn in the towns of russia: shopkeepers. workers, and certain professions (actors, for example) among whom, for various reasons, superstitions are widespread" he went even further to observe that the intellectual class and this most certainly means the russians since there was no intellectual class among the rusyn peasantry he was studying engages in bo1h motivated and unmotivated magical actions, as well as turning some magic actions into games or attempting rational explanations of1hem. needless to say, all of this was omitted from the soviet version of the monograph. (p. 26 in the english; p. 193 in the soviet version) a final example of an omitted paragraph is found in the last section of the monograph dealing seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 24 with "apparitions and supernatural beings.» here, bogatyrev discusses the complex art of storytelling with its interweaving of fact and fantasy, and how narrators may couch their retelling of an event in traditional tale forms in order to appeal more successfully to their audience. he illus1iates this phenomenon with reference to a legend, "recently in circulation in russia, of a communist's wife who brings a devil into the world.» "this legend, " he says, "is presented as an account of a real event, but in some variants exhibits the influence of folk tales.» bogatyrev draws from the research of russian folklorist v. smimov who "recorded three variants of the legend at kostroma," and observes that "augmented by current motifs. the legend spread throughout russia and reached as far as ukraine." as with all the material described above and omitted from the soviet version, one can only imagine the censor's horror at this observation. (p. 143 english; p. 289 soviet) unfortunately, we may not ever know exactly what bogatyrev's role was in the production of the soviet publication of his monograph magical acts and the other studies which appeared in the volume published in 1971. after losing his positions as head of the literature department at moscow state university and the institute of ethnography of the soviet academy of sciences and undergoing official and brutal "criticism" at the end ()fthe 194os, bogatyrev by 1971 was no doubt grateful for the rehabilitation which allowed him to work again for what turned out to be only five years in the academy of sciences and moscow university. the publication of his some of his scholarly research by 1971, even if scrutiiiized by a censor, also no doubt gratified him we can only now hope for the publication of all ofhis scholarship, including an uncensored version of his fascinating monograph on rusyn folklore. seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 microsoft word seefa2001.doc 36 internet report folklore and cultural anthropology on the internet compiled by: a.v. koz’min and a.s. arxipova rossijskij gosudarstvennyj gumanitarnyj universitet; moscow, journals anthropology of east europe review: central europe, eastern europe and eurasia (aeer) http://www.depaul.edu/~rrotenbe/aeer/ subject: anthropology of eastern europe contents: articles from 1983-1998 (english) anthropos (anthropos insitute) http://www.raps.com/anthropos/stagl.htm subject: cultural anthropology contents: list of publications from the institute, table of contents and abstracts of the journal anthropos. (english) de proverbio: electronic publisher of proverb studies and collections http://info.utas.edu.au/docs/flonta/dp,1,1,95/grzybek.html subject: proverbs contents: volumes of the journal de proverbio from 1995, collections and dictionaries of proverbs in electronic format. (english) fabula: zeitschrift fur erzahlforschung journal of folktale studies revue d’etudes sur le conte populaire http://www.degruyter.de/journals/fabula/index.html subject: folklore and folktale contents: index of volumes from 1997-1999. seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 37 folklore: an electronic journal of folklore (published by the institute of the estonian language) http://haldjas.folklore.ee/folklore/index.html subject: estonian, russian folklore, traditional and urban folklore. contents: volumes from 1-3 (june 1996-may 2000), directory of authors. (german) journal of american folklore http://afsnet.org subject: american and world folklore. contents: general news about the society, lists of publications, members, index of the journal of american folklore. (english) journal of folklore research (indiana university) http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/home/html subject: american and world folklore. contents: fragments of books, list of special issues. (english) marvels and tales: journal of fairy-tale studies http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/marvelshome/links.html subject: study of fairy-tales and fairy-tale structure. contents: index of volumes and articles, abstracts of several articles, useful links. (english) new york folklore http://www.nyfolklore.org subject: american folklore, folk literature, popular literature, folklore and contemporary culture. contents: table of contents of the journal new york folklore, description of the folklore archives. (english) seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 38 slavic and east european folklore association http://www.virginia.edu/~slavic/seefa subject: slavic folklore. contents: translations of russian articles, articles from western slavists, articles (completely on-line) from 1997 to 1999. (english) personal web-pages jewish folklore homepage http://www/folklore/org.il subject: jewish folklore. contents: description of the archives, academic institutions, list of publications, collections of periodicals with abstracts, abstracts of books. (english) the ring of folklore and urban legend http://www.geocities.com/athens/1401/urbanlegends.html subject: urban folklore. contents: descriptions of legends, book reviews. (english) urban folklore http://www.nardis.com/~twchan/afu.html subject: urban folklore contents: links to newsgroups on urban folklore and material from them, articles form different sources. (english) archives, libraries, and publishers archives of latvian folklore http://haldjas.folklore.ee/bif/latinst.htm subject: latvian folklore. contents: map of the archive, description of projects. (english) 39 provinciearchief antwerpen http://www.provant.be/archief/inhoud.htm subject: archive of publications. contents: list of periodicals with their contents, including tijdschrift voor geschiedenis en foklore, uitgegeven door de commissie voor geschiedkundigeen folkoristische opsoekingen der provincie antwerpen. (dutch) the george and mary foster anthropology library at berkeley http://lib.berkeley.edu/anth/index.html subject: information about the library. contents: catalogues including documents on related research, links including a journal database. (english) university of north texas press http://www.unt.edu/untpress/series/txfolk.htm http://www.unt.edu/untpress/subjects/folklore.htm subject: information about the publishing company. contents: list of publications on folklore, including the texas folklore society. (english) academic institutions institut fur europaische ethnologie http://www.hu-berlin.de/ethno/seiten/index.htm subject: information about the institute. contents: list of archives, addresses, and projects. (german) the institute of ethnomusic http://aidenis.mch.mii.lt/kankles/ subject: lithuanian kankles music and the musical instrument itself. contents: information about the players and masters, references to folklore resources, a full description of related materials. (english) seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 40 collections of links folklife and folklore http://www.i5ive.com/linkcategory.cfm/folklife_and_folklore/1387 subject: a large collection of links organized by category. contents: lists of links on related material. (english) stadtund unversitatsbibliothek bern http://stub.unibe.ch/html/haupt/suche/volks/index.html subject: the library. contents: links for folklore and ethnographic resources. (german) the jyvaskyla virtual library http://jyu.fi/library/virtuaalikirjasto/roads/perineng.htm subject: the library. contents: links for folklore and ethnographic resources (finnish) folklore and cultural anthropology at universities abo akademi university http://www.abo.gi/fak/hf/relvet/fl_pr_eng.htm subject: folkloristics at the university. contents: list of staff with additional information. (swiss and english) california state university, fresno http://www.csufresno.edu/folklore/folklinks.html subject: folklore at the university. contents: list of courses, instructors, description of the archives, index of english ballads in different forms together with programs for viewing. (english) 41 harvard university: the program in folklore and mythology at harvard http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~folkmyth/ subject: programs of instructions on myth and folklore at the university. contents: information on the programs, course descriptions, list of faculty. (english) indiana university, bloomington: department of folklore & ethnomusicology http://www.indiana.edu/~folklore/ subject and contents: general information, description of projects, lists of faculty and publications, including sound and video analysis and instruction lab, which discusses the musical directors’ work in tuvan music. (english) katholischen universitat eichstatt http://www.ku-eichstaett.de/ggf/vk/vkhomep.htm subject and contents: information on the instructors. (german) kobenhavns universitet: center for folkloristik http://www.hum.ku.dk/folkloristik subject: the staff at the center. contents: addresses of the staff and center. (danish) universitat basel: seminar fur volkskunde/europaische ethnologie http://unibas.ch/volkshunde subject: the seminar on ethnology and ethnography. contents: list of publications, personnel, and seminar programs. (german) universitat mainz http://www.uni-mainz.de/uniinfo/fachberiche/philologie1.html subject: department and institute addresses. contents: address of the department of ethnography. (german) seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 42 universitat passau: chair of volkskunde http://www.phil.uni-passau.de/volkskunde/engl_index.html subject: department of ethnography contents: information on the instructors, lists of publications on folklore, descriptions of classes. (german) university of california – los angeles http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/anth/folkinf.html subject: resources for folklore on the internet. contents: list of links to folklore resources on the internet, including those related to library at ucla. (german) university of iceland oddi, sturlugata: faculty of social sciences http://www.hi.is/pub/fel/thjodfr/teachers.html subject: folklore studies at the university. contents: course descriptions, titles of publications, information on instructors. (english and icelandic) university of oregon: english department faculty in foklore/ethnic literature http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~eng/faculty/fields/folkethnic.html subject: information on the department. contents: short description of the tuition-based courses on-line “instruction in folklore studies” including scottish material, information on instructors, folklore resources on the internet. (english) university of oslo http://www.hf.uio.no/iks/soria-moria/indeng.html subject: folkloristics. contents: information on students and description of projects. (english) 43 university of pittsburgh: department of germanic languages and literatures, d.l. ashman http://www.www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html subject: german folklore and mythology contents: translations of stories and legends divided by type, individual pages dedicated to distinctive gods with text translations about them. (english) university of texas, austin: department of anthropology http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~folklore subject: information about the department. contents: general information, abstracts of publications, descriptions of courses and dissertations, list of courses. (english) university of turku: folkloristics department of cultural studies http://www.utu.fi/hum/folk subject and contents: information on the department (english) universitat wien: institut fur europaische ethnologie http://www.univie.ac.at/volkskunde subject: information about the institute. contents: general information, course descriptions, list of publications. (german) uppsala university: department of cultural anthropology and ethnology http://www.etno.antro.uu.se/eng.html subject and contents: information about the department. (english) seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 44 societies and associations american anthropological association http://www.ameranthassn.org subject: information about the association. contents: information about the organization, several publications from their catalogue, abstracts for publications in the american anthropologist (june 1998-june 2000). (english) american association for the advancement of slavic studies http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~aaass/ subject: information about the association. contents: information about the organization, link to sites of public periodic publications. (english) american association of teachers of slavic and eastern european languages http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~aatseel/ subject and contents: information about the association. (english) american folklore society http://afsnet.org/ subject: folkloristics, american and world folklore. contents: information about the organization, list of publications, information about the staff, index for the journal of american folklore. (english) folklore fellows’ communications http://www.folkorefellows.org/ subject: information about the society. contents: information about the organization, full catalogue of publications, abstracts of publications, information about summer schools, abstracts of papers, articles from the network for folklore fellows. (english) 45 international society for contemporary legend research http://www.panam.edu/faculty/mglazer/isclr/isclr.htm subject: information about the society. contents: general information, description of research subjects, compilation of the publication contemporary legend (1991-1994). (english) nordic network of folkloristics http://www.hf-fak.uib.no/i/ikk/nnf/nnfintro.htm subject: folkloristics of scandinavian countries. contents: information about the staff, the coordinators, and project titles. (english and norwegian) soyuz: the research network for postsocialist cultural studies http://www.swarthmore.edu/socsci/soyuz/index.html subject: information about the association. contents: general information, information about the staff, and a bibliography. (english) virginia folklore society http://minerva.acc.virginia.edu/~vafolk/public.htm subject: information about the society. contents: index for the journal folklore and folklife in virginia: journal of the virginia folklore society, a volume from 1979 completely on-line, list of publications, history of the society, general information, description of archives. description of audio-publications. russian federation aborigeny sibiri http://www.nsu.ru/icen/grants/etno/ subject: ethnography of siberia for students. contents: bibliography, introduction to history, material culture, illustrations. (russian) seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 46 blatnoj folk’lor http://www/aviso.com.ua/blat/ subject: songs of criminals. contents: texts, articles about the performers. (russian) kiberstol http://ruthenia.ru/folktee/cyberstol/about.html subject: contemporary urban folklore and popular culture. contents: texts, materials including graphics and research. (russian) russkaia tradicionnaia kul’tura http://ru.narod.ru subject: ethnography and folklore of the russians contents: texts, sound files, texts from books and articles, graphic information, personnel. (russian) fakul’tet etnologii evropejskogo universiteta v spb http://www.eu.spb.ru/ethno subject: folkloristics and ethnography contents: information about the faculty, programs, list of dissertations, abstracts of publications. (russian) fol’klor novgorodskoj oblasti http://soros.novgorod.ru/grants/iea712w subject: folklore and folkloristics of the novgorod region. contents: collection of articles about the development and condition of folklore in the region, descriptions of rituals, publications of texts, songs and limericks (russian) 47 fol’klornyj arxiv nizhegorodskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta im. n. i. lobachevskogo http://www.unn.ac.ru/folklore/fcontru.htm subject: folklore of the nizhegorod region. contents: descriptions, list of publications, directory, several material archives. (russian) etnickeskie obshchnosti v tomskom regione http://www.tomsk.spectr.ru/et subject: ethnography of western siberia. contents: materials on the history and ethnography of the khan, the village, etc., including descriptions and illustrations. (russian) antropologia goroda. subkul’tury http://www.pehaly.narod.ru/index.html subject: contemporary culture, subculture. contents: program of courses, articles, bibliography. (russian) russian’s poetic speech http://math.ucsd.edu/~broido subject: contemporary urban songs. contents: texts, sound files, articles, search engine indexed by genre. (russian) (translated by lindsay minnis) seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 microsoft word folk03fdw.doc 37 reviews jack v. haney, the complete russian folktale. armonk, new york: m. e. sharpe. vol. 1: an introduction to the russian folktale (1999), 144pp. $50.95 (cloth) isbn: 1-56324-489-6, $20.95 (paper) isbn 1-56324-494-2. vol. 2: russian animal tales (1999), 296pp. $65.00 (cloth) isbn 1-56324-490-x, paper n/a. vol. 3: russian wondertales: i. tales of heroes and villains (2001), 494pp. $68.00 (cloth) isbn 1-56324-4918, paper n/a. vol. 4: russian wondertales: ii. tales of magic and the supernatural (2001), 500pp. $68.00 (cloth) isbn 156324-492-6, paper n/a. jack v. haney, professor emeritus of the university of washington, seattle, has devoted much of his career to the study and teaching of medieval east slavic literature. his publications include two books on the life and works of maxim the greek, and articles concerning the skazanie o kniaziakh vladimirskikh (tale of the princes of vladimir), slovo o polku igoreve (the igor’ tale), and the povest’ o petre i fevronii (tale of peter and fevroniia of murom). professor haney also has a significant scholarly interest in russian folklore, and this interest has led him to a truly monumental undertaking — a scholarly annotated edition of russian folktales including at least one text of every known tale type, arranged according to the internationally accepted aarnethompson (at) system of classification. translated collections of russian folktales in western languages have appeared from time to time, but i know of no collection which approaches this one in its breadth and depth, or which gives the reader such a truly representative sample of the vast amount of tale texts published in russian. until now, many english-language readers have relied on the excellent translation from the aleksandr afanas’ev collection by norbert guterman. however, this thick volume with 178 tales represents only a part of the entire afanas’ev corpus, which contains almost 600 tale texts (or more than 600, if one counts the ribald or vulgar “secret tales” originally published anonymously abroad, some of which appear in this new edition). distinguished as it is, the afanas’ev collection is only one of many others; professor haney’s series draws on the many folktale collections made in russia both before and after afanas’ev, and makes hundreds of texts available to english-language readers for the first time. the first volume, an introduction to the russian folktale, discusses this complex genre both in general terms and in the russian tradition specifically. not every folklorist will agree with professor haney’s definition of the folktale and its complex relationship to myth and legend. his observations on the wealth and diversity of the east slavic tale tradition (through a comparison of the relative numbers of recorded tale types in the russian, ukrainian, belorusian and english traditions) are especially interesting and valuable for readers unfamiliar with folktales from this part of the world. his remarks lead one to hope that more folklore from the particularly rich “fringe” areas of the ukrainian lands will appear in translation. there is a brief discussion of folktale structure, with an obligatory nod to vladimir propp, and to eleazar meletinskii and his colleagues. in a footnote, professor folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 38 haney points out that propp never significantly took on the question of female-centered folktales; he himself concludes that they have a different structure (one attempt to elucidate such a structure was made by dagmar burkhart in a 1982 article), and that heroine-centered tales “never involve any testing beyond the initial test for deportment.” would it be stretching propp’s scheme too far to suggest that in at 432 (often called the tale of finist iasnyi sokol (finist the bright falcon) in russia), when the heroine contends with the woman who has her husband-to-be under enchantment and manages to wake him up and recognize her on the third attempt, we are in fact looking at something like propp’s functions of struggle/victory or difficult task/resolution (or meletinskii’s second test)? the problem of female-centered folktales and their relationship to male-centered narratives, which propp considered normative, is still in need of clarification, and has been interestingly discussed in recent work by francisco vaz da silva and isabel cardigos. in the second and third chapters of this volume, professor haney provides a short history of folktale recording and collecting in russia, and a brief account of medieval minstrelsy and the later fate of the minstrels, or skomorokhi. this history is often summarized in russian surveys of the folktale, but has not often appeared in english; professor haney’s discussion also includes his own insights as a scholar of medieval literature. the fourth and fifth chapters present evidence for a “myth-ritual” interpretation of russian folktales, as propounded by vladimir propp in his 1946 work, istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki (the historical roots of the wondertale). while propp’s conclusions in this work are still widely accepted by russian and other slavic scholars, many folklorists and anthropologists in the english-speaking world are likely to disagree with professor haney about the possible ritual origins of folk narratives. nevertheless, he presents much information that is interesting concerning documented rituals in east slavic culture: birth, wedding and funeral rituals, the ritual “rebaking” of children, a ritual known in some parts of russia in which a girl was asked to jump down from a bench into a skirt, when she first began to wear one, and the role of the bear and horse in folk tradition. volume 2 in the series includes 150 texts of animal tales, representing tale types at 1-299. volume 3 and volume 4 present russian wondertales, at 300-485 and at 500-737, respectively. volumes 2-4 together include a total of 400 tale texts. volume 5 will contain about 105 texts of legendary tales, representing at 750849. two subsequent volumes will include anecdotes and tales of everyday life. the volume of animal tales includes a very useful introduction that discusses some general questions as well as the possible history and origin of the russian animal tales. professor haney concludes that most of them are derived from oral tradition; the influence of literary fables from india, aesop’s fables, or medieval literary animal tales from western europe (the reynard the fox cycle) would have been minimal. he comments on the relatively simple structure of animal tales, and discusses the most prominent animal characters in the russian repertoire (the fox, wolf, bear, and others). professor haney points out what appears to be the special status of the bear, and its relationship to st. sergius. most interestingly, he argues that these tales originally had a didactic purpose, which reflected the conservative values of the “patriarchal, inward-looking, and self-sufficient” old russia. in his introduction to the volumes of russian wondertales, professor haney revisits some of the theoretical issues in more detail. he discusses the problem of tale type classifications, which are imperfect but at the same time indispensable. of particular importance are the fairly frequent and stable narratives formed of 39 more than one tale type, and professor haney presents a few examples. he examines vladimir propp’s morphology in greater detail, and summarizes some significant subsequent scholarship in this area, especially that of elli köngäs maranda and bengt holbek. he presents certain conclusions of e. a. tudorovskaia regarding the possible age of the folktale genre and various folktale plots. speculation about how old the folktale genre (or even specific tale types) might be is of course fraught with difficulty. professor haney points out that russian folktales make no mention of grand princes or dukes, the rulers of the kievan and muscovite eras, while the first tsar, ivan iv, appeared in the sixteenth century. while not claiming that russian folktales originated during this period, he finds that “this does appear a likely time to begin looking for them, especially when one considers that it was precisely in the sixteenth century that the christianization of the russian peasantry reached its greatest intensity and this might have provided some impetus for the creation of different kinds of tales.” nevertheless, it seems equally likely that the almost ubiquitous “tsar” in russian folktales might be simply a newer, historically later designation that replaced an older one. professor haney briefly discusses the question of analogues, mentioning the indo-european and diffusionist theories of the nineteenth century, as well as the “solar mythology” school that influenced afanas’ev among others. in connection with the theory of diffusion of tales from india to europe, he mentions theodor benfey, but does not mention an important later development in this area, the so-called finnish school or historic-geographic method. professor haney briefly mentions scholars who have taken a psychological approach to the study of folktales, but his own discussion interprets the folktale in historical terms, rather than as a product of fantasy. a very interesting segment concerns the special status of some tale tellers, who might have been seen as magicians or sorcerers by their contemporaries. professor haney points out the occasionally recorded taboos surrounding storytelling, which included prohibitions on telling tales during spring and summer, or during the day. he also includes an excerpt of a tale from the sokolov brothers’ collection in which the hero tells a tall tale to an old man in the forest in exchange for fire. the young man’s humorous tall tale recalls similar tales from other traditions; in an essay on european wedding customs, géza róheim presents some hungarian examples of tall tales close to this russian one. although this tall tale is “meant to be regarded as comic nonsense,” professor haney finds that one motif in particular recalls certain slavic creation myths: the young man falls into a swamp and contrives to have a wolf pull him out. haney connects this with slavic versions of the earth diver myth, in which god has the devil (or sometimes a bird) dive to the bottom of a primeval ocean to retrieve sand or earth to create the world. (various forms of this creation narrative are found among the east and south slavs, elsewhere in eastern europe, in siberia, and in native north america). another detail that professor haney finds significant in this tale is that a duck builds a nest on the young man’s head while he is in the swamp. haney concludes that in this tale, and in a version of “koshchei’s death from an egg” (a combination of at 552 and at 302), there are “echoes of a slavic creation myth that involves a cosmic egg laid by a diving duck,” and that some of the russian wondertales contain ancient mythic materials in the guise of “mere stories.” several questions arise. first of all, the east slavic folklore tradition includes many creation myths. in a 1998 study, vera kuznetsova examines more than 300 versions of east slavic creation myths, many of which contain the earth diver episode, while most involve the rivalry or antagonism of god and the devil. south slavic tradition folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 40 (especially bulgarian folklore) also possesses many interesting narratives about the creation of the world that depart significantly from the judeo-christian account received by the slavs at the time of their conversion. because these versions exist or existed fairly recently in slavic oral tradition, why is there a need to posit the presence of a forgotten creation myth in some slavic folktales? why would the slavic folk narrative traditions forget one creation myth, transforming certain of its elements into a humorous or serious folktale, while maintaining another creation narrative, explicitly performed and understood as an account of the creation? more versions of either of these two excerpts and more argumentation would be needed to provide convincing evidence that, in this case, an ancient myth has been transformed into an entertaining folktale. professor haney briefly surveys the most significant actors of the russian folktale, and ends this introduction to volumes 3 and 4 with speculation about the potential meanings of the folktale. he finds that the russian wondertales can be divided into three groups, by the age and gender of the protagonist. there are tales about children who undergo no transformation, there are tales about girls of marriageable age, and there are male-centered tales. in the tales about young adult women, professor haney interprets the wicked stepmother as a representation of the young woman’s mother-in-law in real life. he provides a description of the complex traditional russian wedding ritual, and discusses the male-centered tales as a sequence of tests, showing that the young man is ready for integration into society as an adult. of course, the bulk of these volumes consists of the tale texts. the reader cannot fail to be struck by both the quantity and quality of this collection, representing virtually all regions of this vast country, and by the impressive number of sources, some of which are practically unobtainable in north america. those who love folktales will derive hours of pleasure perusing this collection, but most importantly, those with a scholarly interest in the folktale will find texts that have never been available in english, as well as professor haney’s instructive and valuable commentary. the notes include information about the tale teller, if this is available, about the place and time of collection, and about the relative frequency or popularity of a particular tale type in the russian and east slavic tradition. for the first time, scholars and students of folklore who do not read russian will be able to find, quickly and easily, an example of each at type known in the russian folk repertoire. anyone who has ever translated between two languages as idiomatic as russian and english knows what a difficult and time-consuming task this is. the translator of folklore faces additional challenges: most texts are recorded in their original dialects, far from the literary standard or the speech of educated city dwellers. many contemporary russians would find much that is incomprehensible in these texts. professor haney’s translation is fresh and lively, and captures the nuances of the original, often humorous nuances. his solutions to certain problems of translation are clever and sometimes make one smile; in a northern russian tale from a. i. nikiforov’s 1936 collection, the princess’ two sons vod vodovich and ivan vodovich, conceived from drinking two glasses of water, are rendered as “wat waterson” and “ivan waterson.” the villain of a tale from the white sea coast, voron voronovich klëkot klëkotovich, semigorodovich, is called “raven ravenson shriek shriekson, son of the seven cities.” a humorous rhyming joke that ends some tales, when the foolish narrator 41 misunderstands what a bird says (sin’ kaftan! rather than skin’ kaftan!) and gives up his kaftan, is translated: “i mounted up and rode off, and a little bird cheeped: ‘blue kaftan.’ i thought it said, ‘remove the kaftan.’” about two hundred years have elapsed since the brothers grimm began their work, and it is astounding that so little of the rich folkloric heritage of the slavic and eastern european peoples has appeared in western translations. professor haney’s series represents a significant step in filling this lacuna, presenting much material that is not easily accessible, and making the voices of this rich tradition heard beyond the borders of their native land and language. for folklorists and students who wish to compare russian folktales to the tales of other traditions, the presentation of these tales in order by their at type number and the meticulous annotations will prove extremely helpful. english-language readers owe a great debt of gratitude to professor haney for this truly outstanding and unprecedented labor of love and erudition, a contribution of inestimable value that will no doubt become a standard reference work. andreas johns university of california, berkeley folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 ukrainian village weddings; collected in central ukraine. 1998 natalie kononenkoy university of virginia the ukrainian village wedding is a complex affair with many important functions. it cements the union between the bride and the groom, establishing them as a new unit which will help perpetuate not only their respective families, but the whole village. the wedding contains fertility symbols to insure that the couple will bear children. it serves to honor the parents who reared the young people about to wed. just as the wedding serves many functions, so it contains many moods. there is solemn religious expression and there is a great deal of frivolity and merry-making. the revehy that is part of the wedding is itself multifunctional. it balances the solemnity of the serious part of !he wedding and the rigors of farming, bringing all participants, which often means a good part of the village, closer together. it subverts the normal order of life in the village, permitting theft, open eroticism, and disrespect for people in authority. it also contains ancient sacrificial overtones which actually emphasize the value of certain authority figures, specifically the parents. i will concentrate on the role of the parents in the wedding and especially in the tsyhanshchyna or "gypsy fest," the day of revehy, which follows the wedding proper. the tsyhanshchyna, during which the parents are abused, serves both to subvert the power of the parents and to confirm it. furthermore, wbat is done to the parents bas many of the elements of an agrarian festival, a ritual to insure crop fertility. thus the wedding, a pivotal ritual in ukrainian culture, reaches beyond the family and the village and tries to affect nature itself. i collected materials in central ukraine, specifically cherkas'ka oblast ~d kyivs'ka oblast,in ..the summer and fall of 1998.(1) the description of the wedding which follows is based primarily on my field work. there is a great deal of variation from village to village and even greater variation between regions. still, the weddings i witnessed share a basic structure with weddings across ukraine. contemporary village weddings in central ukraine last two to three days and may be abbreviated versions of weddings celebrated in the past. some older people complained that today's youth fail to perform all of the steps of the wedding. by the same token, i saw great interest in reviving what . people understood to be traditional and pre-soviet and in performing the wedding in its full form, including wearing traditional vyshyvanka (embroidered ukrainian clothing) instead of the western-style white gown with veil. an interesting compromise is to wear the white gown and veil for the civil part of the marriage ceremony (the registration of the marriage contract) and to wear 65 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 ukrainian clothing for all steps of the wedding celebrated in the home.(2) the traditional wedding in central ukraine starts with a formal engagement. the groom and several respected elders, usually two older married men called starosty (elders), visit the home of the bride and make a request to her parents for her hand in marriage. this visit. variously called dohliadyny (viewing), domovyny (agreement), and other tenns, involves an exchange of gifts. the groom's side provides a bottle of horilka (vodka) and the bride drapes the starosty with rushnyky (ritual towels). each side gives the other a loaf ofbre3d. many ukrainian-americans and urban dwellers in ukraine have reported hearing that a bride could reject her suitors by giving them a harbuz (pumpkin) instead of a loaf of bread. however, in real life, this seldom occurs because the young man and young woman had already courted and agreed to wed before the formal domovyny with their elders.(3) the length of the engagement varies. one week is usually considered the minimum because that is the amount of time necessary for cooking and other preparations. the ritual part of the marriage process begins on the thursday or friday before the actual wedding with the baking of a special, semi-sweet bread called a korovai. on saturday, or on friday and saturday morning if there are many guests, the bride and groom, often accompanied by a friend, the druzhka in the case of the bride and the boiaryn in the case of the groom, walk the village with a smaller, usually round ritual bread. called a shyshlca, each summoning his and her respective wedding guests. on friday evening, the unmarried female friends of the bride gather for the devich vechir (girls' evening). during the devich vechir, the bride bids farewell to her friends and together they make the hiltse, usually a pine branch which is decorated with ribbons, berries, and "flowers" made out of ears of wheat arranged in a circle. the hiltse is used to grace the table during the wedding meals. saturday is the day for signing the civil marriage contract. sunday is the day for the church service, if there is one. the main ritual, whether the civil or the church ceremony, is followed by a separation of the couple and the fetching of the bride by the groom's wedding train. in most cases, the groom takes the bride back to her own home and leaves her there, retmning with his friends and family to his own house. a meal is served at each house, after which the mother of the groom dispatches him and a special poizd ("train") to the home of the bride. this train is met with mock resistance, especially at the gates of the bride's house, and the groom bas to pay a ransom, usually horilka and small amounts of money. after the ritual resistance, the groom's wedding train is admitted. in the house, small children demand money of the groom and then permit him to join the bride's family at the table. a more elaborate meal is served and the bride's korovai is cut and distributed; the guests offer gifts to the bridal couple in exchange for 66 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 horilka and pieces of the korovai. after the meal, the whole wedding party travels to the groom's home for more food, drink, and dancing. often, this trip back includes the ceremonial delivery of the bride's wedding chest. called a sunduk or skrynia, and a ritual procession with a special pair of icons draped in rushnyky. the meal at the groom's house concludes with the cutting the groom's korovai. it is distributed among the guests along with horilka and, as at the bride's house, all of the guests offer gifts to the couple when they accept their horilka and korovai. the morning after, there is a ceremonial breakfast for the bridal couple, sometimes accompanied by remnants of proofs of virginity, such as the presentation of a red kerchief by the groom to his best man. this kerchief is then hung on the roof or the gate.(4). the parents asswne prominent roles throughout the wedding process. to list some of the most important points: for the couple to be engaged, an agreement between the bride and groom is considered insufficient and a fonnal request must be addressed to 'the parents. parents are in charge of the wedding preparations. it is the mother of the bride and the mother of the groom who swnmon women to bake the korovai and the shyshky. when the bride and groom issue invitations, they often go to the opposite parents and godparents first, that is, the bride invites the groom's parents and godparents and he invites hers. in the civil or church ceremonies, the mother of the bride and the mother of the groom spread out the rushnyk on which the couple will stand for their wedding vows. after the vows, the bride and groom bow to both sets of parents and often to the godparents .. the mother of the bride ties the couple's hands together and leads them off the stage after a civil wedding. at the home of the groom, it is his mother who dispatches the wedding train and, at the home of the bride, her mother blesses the couple, ties their hands together once more, and leads them to the car or wagon which will take them to the groom's household. the groom's parents greet the new couple when they arrive and, at both houses, it is the parents who begin the gift-giving and the expression of good wishes to the couple which concludes ceremonial meals. the solemn part of the wedding is followed by a period of frivolity variously called kury (chickens), tsyhani (gypsies), tsyhanshchyna (gypsy fest), or vechirky (evening party, though the festivities last all day). it can take the form of a day of general thievei}' and mischief. where wedding guests steal chickens (the reason for the term kury) and other small food stuffs from any house in the village, bring them to the groom's house, and prepare and conswne them. sometimes wedding guests "attack" all those who chose to return to normal life instead of continuing the wedding celebration. they sneak into their homes, remove gates from binges, hide equipment, and commit other pranks. the most popular form of post-wedding revelry is the tsyhanshchyna like the one i witnessed in 67 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 hrechkivka, smilians'kyi raion, cherkas'ka oblast on august 23. 1998. we were driving down the street when we noticed people in costume. at the gate leading into one of the yards there was a man dressed as a doctor. he would administer medical "aid" to anyone entering and collect a fee. the "aid" consisted of taking the guest's temperature with a broom handle "thermometer." "injecting" him or her with water. and then applying iodine/lipstick, thus marking all who had been subjected to the entrance ritual. inside the yard there were many people. a few in costume. and many quite inebriated. a meal was served which we did not attend. we joined the party several hours later as they were walking down the street. several young men were pulling a decorated cart in which were seated the parents of the bride. the groom. we were told. was an orphan. if this had not been the -case. his parents, would have been the first to suffer a cart ride. the cart and the menlhorses were accompanied by a large procession, many of whom were now in costume. some were dressed as gypsies. the source of the term tsyhanshchyna. several were cross-dressed and others were dressed in rags or simply had on extravagant makeup. as this procession headed down the street. the cart was intentionally bounced up and down or pulled over the roughest avidlable terrain .. evety-so-often, the menlhorses would "rear up" and someone would announce that they needed a drink of waterlhorillea. when the procession encountered anyone who was not part of the wedding party. one of the costumed revelers would offer the bystanders food and horlllea and receive in return a small gift for the bridal couple. the procession headed down to the river. with some effort, the cart was pulled down the bank and into the water where it was overturned. dumping the bride's parents into the stream. since the water was shallow at that spot. several men attacked the couple. especially the father. dousing him. trying to push him into deeper water. or trying to get him to fall so that he would get completely wet. the dunking of the parents was soon followed by general pushing and shoving. attempts to get people into the water with as much of their attire on as possible. many people. and especially children. simply disrobed to their underwear and went swimming. the tsyhanshchyna may seem frivolous and raucous with the result that. during soviet times. authorities exerted great pressure on people not to include it in weddings. objecting especially to things like the head tractor driver cavorting around the village in drag.{s) nonetheless, it is an important and necessary part of the wedding. as its persistence despite soviet censure shows. for one thing. as victor turner. v. ja. propp and others have pointed out, a period oflicense exists in all mpmli11gful ritual. providing tension release and balance to the solemnity. and sealing the serious rite with the magic oflaughter.(6) for another. there are many important and serious components to the tsyhanshchyna. the abuse of the parents has elements of sacrifice for crop fertility. what is done to 68 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 the parents combines ritual lowering of people who nonnally assmne a high and powerful position with affirmation of the value of parents, for only something that is truly precious can be deemed worthy of sacrifice. turner argues that ritual is characterized by anti-structure; it is a period when the normal order of things is reversed the anti-structure permitted in ritual produces catharsis and has a powerful emotional impact. turner distinguishes two types of rituals: life-cycle rites, of which the wedding is one, and calendary rites, such as christmas and new years. according to turner, the two types of rituals .are distinguished by the type of anti-structure which occurs in each. in life-cycle rituals, a person is elevated to a new status. the ritual process of elevation, however, includes a ritual humiliation or lowering of the initiate, before he or she is inducted into higher status. this humbling permits a more potent experience of elevation; it bonds the initiates to one another, and it gives the person going through the rite a better understanding of those who have not been elevated and of the difficulties of life. the ritual lowering of the bride and groom in ukrainian weddings occurs during the various meals when theit friends taunt each other and the couple with insulting and sometimes sexually explicit songs. while life cycle rituals are aimed at people, calendary rites are supposed to affect the outside world and often have something to do with magic that is supposed to insure crop fertility and a good harvest. in calendary ritual, reversal affects everyone ..not just select individuals going through marriage, or initiation, or whatever the rite may be. people in high positions humble themselves while people in low positions receive special attention and honor. actions normally prohibited are condoned. in ukraine, for example, people are allowed to hit each other on the sunday before easter (called pussywillow sldlday, verona nedilia) and the blows with the pussywillow branches are supposed to affect the health of those struck and the fertility of their crops. normally boys are more aggressive than girls, but girls attack boys during the midsummer holiday (zeleni sviata) and throw them in the river, again for the same pmpose of high crop yield. cross-dressing, pranks, and thievery are practiced during the winter holidays rizdvovy sviata. the reversals characteristic of calendary rites, besides contributing to crop fertility, are supposed to ease some of the pressures which normal strictures create by allowing indulgence in their opposites. interestingly, the tsyhanshchyna, while part of a life-cycle ritual, has many of the traits of calendary rites. it is a world of anti-structure with easily identifiable elements of reversal. gypsies, normally considered lowly outcasts, rule. where most of the time there are clear gender distinctions, during the tsyhanshchyna people cross-dress. often the parents are made to dress in each other's clothes. although i did not see this, i have been told that sexual "apparati.," usually made out of fruits 69 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 and vegetables, are attached to the parents and sometimes rigged with strings which cause them to move. behavior which is normally severely chastised (immodesty, theft) is the nonn. and, of course, parents, people normally accorded respect and obedience, are mocked and abused. there is more going on in the tsyhanshchyna than just tension release. the anti-structure features listed above are not selected at random. many are clearly related to the wedding. it is not necessmy to explain how sexuality is part of the wedding and how the immodesty of cross-dressed parents with moving sexual "parts" might acknowledge and express the tension between the demands for sexual restraint under everyday circumstances and sexual activity on the wedding night. the gypsies after whom the tsyhanshchyna is named also reveal a wedding problem. as gypsies are . considered outsiders, wanderers alien to the village social structure, so the bride is an outsider who suddenly enters the groom's household. as gypsies are believed to steal and wedding revelers are expected to do so during the tsyhanshchyna, so there is a feeling of financial loss in the wedding exchange. the abuse of the parents does not involve random acts of disrespect. to a certain extent, the parents go through a life cycle ritual when their children marry and receive an elevation in their status as a result. in the weddings i attended, the couples were going to move in with the parents of the groom after the wedding. expect in the case where the groom was an orphan and, in that case, they were planning onjoining the household of the bride's parents. this was supposed to increase the prestige and prosperity of the households. thus, a certain amount of ritual humiliation would be appropriate to the parents because they, like "thecouple, will experience some status elevation. but the tsyhanshchyna cannot be explained by its connections to the wedding alone for it resembles calendary ritual and crop fertility magic to a significant degree. as already mentioned, the reversals of the tsyhanshchyna affect not just individuals, but the whole community. more important, the tsyhanshchyna has a sacrificial quality. the river dunking which i witnessed is a fairly common multiform of the post-wedding attack on parents. its sacrificial quality becomes apparent" in the context of other multiforms. there is a great deal of water and fire symbolism. as would be appropriate for sacrificial acts connected to crop fertility. my interviewees told me about lowering parents down well shafts, about driving the cart with the parents through bonfires made of straw; i saw a photograph of such an incident. one person told me that when he, as a godparent, stood in for the deceased father, he and the groom's mother were dumped into a patch of nettles and nettles, because they "burn," are like fire.(7) in one account, the well method produced an actual sacrifice. the man being lowered down the shaft became entangled in the ropes by which he was suspended and was strangled. several people said that the parents were taken to the local garbage dump and deposited 70 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 there. while this is not a particularly glorious form of sacrifice, the idea that the parents are to be gotten rid of during the tsyhanshchyna is so close to the surface that it was actually articulated by several of the interviewees, most of whom added that this was done because a new couple now existed and the older couples were no longer necessary. in addition to elements of fire and water sacrifice, vegetation symbolism was in abundance. i have already mentioned that opposite sex "apparati" were attached to the parents. it is significant that all infonnants said these had to be made out of squash or eggplant for the mother and melons for the father. if sex were the only concern, items other than fruits and vegetables could be used. in the tsyhanshchyna i witnessed, the parents were draped in garlands of leaves, very much like the king and queen of spring or fall agrarian festivals. thus the contention between the tsyhanshchyno and vegetation was made by the villagers themselves, though probably not on a conscious level. my informants were not aware of the sacrificial quality of their attacks on the parents of the bride and groom and no one mentioned the connection to crops .. as far as they were concerned, this was all great fun; as well as an occasion to eat and drink some more. what is done to the parents, however, seems to accomplish more than counterbalancing the solemnity of the wedding .. the tsyhanshchyna offers the parents up as a sacrifice, perhaps not getting rid of them, as tossing them out in the garbage would suggest, but subjecting them to water and fire, typical symbols of vegetation and other fertility. for a sacrifice to be effective, the item destroyed must be one of value and thus the tsyhanshchyno confirms the power of the parents as well as subverting it furthermore, what is done to parents in a ukrainian wedding shows that human life is inextricably connected with the cosmos. important life cycle ritnals like the w~g extend their ritual power beyond the couple, the family, and even the village, to influence the course of nature. in ukrainian beliet: the wedding is a central rite in the life of an human being and all people must wed. this is confirmed by the existence of a . death wedding, a funeral ceremony celebrated as a marriage rite, which is performed for young people who die before they have a chance to marry. it is confirmed also by the material presented here where symbolism from agrarian ritual and crop fertility magic is incorporated into the marriage rite and the occasion of the wedding is used to influence all of life, that of the couple, that of their families, the village, and the world of nature. notes 1. for their help with collecting, i thank halyna kornienko and natalia havryliuk. i also used the archival resources of the institute of folklore, ethnography, and folk art in kyivand for her guidance in using this archive, i thank halyna dovzhenok. for published sources on the the wedding see: hnat 71 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 tantsiura. vesillia v seli zialkivtsiakh. kyiv: redaktsia chasopysu "narodomavstvo," 1998, vesillia u dvokh lmyhakh. ed. m.m. shubravs'ka and o.a. pravdiuk, kyiv: naukova dumka, 1970, and pavl0 chubyns'kyi's obria4y: rodiny. kresliny. svad'ba. pokhoronv. volume 4 of iu~o-zadqdj1yioldel russkozo imperalorskofo feogrqficheskof:o obshchestva: malerialv i izsledovaniia. 1877. 2. photographs from the wedding of halyna matlash kapas'. 3. in s.kopachiv, obukhivs'kyi r-n, kyivs'ka obi. halyna manasivna habata told me that while city folk all ask about the custom of the pumpkin, this existed in theol)' only. there were no requests for a bride that she knows of where a pumpkin was presented instead of a loaf of bread. recorded 11-1698. 4. the kerchief custom was collected from liubov danylivna lutchenko, s. bolhodukhiv, chomobais'kyi r-n, cherkas'ka obi., 8-8-98. 5. valentyna kyrylivna bol)'senko, m.kyiv, told me this on october 23, 1998. bol)'senko did extensive collecting of material on weddings and published vesil 'ni z\!)'chaiito obria4y no ukrai"ni: isloryko-etnohrqfichne doslidzhennia. kyiv: naukova dumka, 1988. she said that both she and her informants had to conceal the existence of the tsyhanshchyna. 6. victor turner, the ritualprocess: structure and anti-structure. (ithaca, new york: cornell university press, 1969). v. ia. propp, russkie avamye prazdniki. (1963; reprint, sankt-peterburg: azhuka, 1995) .. 7. mykhailo dymytrovych koval', s.velykii khutir', drabivs'kyi r-n, cherkas'ka obi., 8-14-98. 72 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 microsoft word seefa2001.doc 3 articles male mythological beings among the south slavs joseph l. conrad university of kansas the south slavs have a long tradition of belief in protective domestic spirits and in malevolent demons of the field, forest and water.(1) such mythological creatures were prevalent among all slavic peoples and are part of the common indo-european heritage.(2) whereas most beliefs of this type receded among the east and west slavs by the end of the nineteenth century, they were maintained in many areas of the balkans until the beginning of the second world war.(3) ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the 1960s-1980s has shown that many farmers and stockbreeders in the more remote villages (of former yugoslavia) have not abandoned their traditional beliefs. for example, the protector housesnake,(4) mischievous forest and dangerous water spirits, and many lesser mythological beings have been reported in several south slavic territories in the last forty years. many traditional domestic rituals have their origin in the conviction that the family ancestor's spirit resides under the threshold or near the open hearth and, if properly cared for, will ensure happiness and good fortune for the family. in russia that spirit was manifest in the domovoj, "house spirit," but as this name itself was taboo, he was referred to in euphemisms such as ded or deduška, "grandfather," and xozjain "master." offerings of food, especially bread and salt, the traditional symbols of hospitality, were routinely left for the domovoj at night before the family retired. the corresponding belief in a protector-ancestor spirit in the south slavic territories saw the male founder of the family incarnate in a housesnake which was euphemized most commonly in serbo-croatian as čúvarica "protector," čúvarkuća "house protector," and kúćarica "household one," and in bulgarian stópanin or stópan "master of the house"; compare english "stoop," i.e., the threshold, the resting place of this spirit.(5) the south slavs' perception of mythological beings was based on a dualistic view which incorporated both positive and negative features. this was true of snakes as well. most snakes were considered incarnations of demons living in the underworld (donji svet) and were to be killed on sight, poisonous or not. yet the white snake rarely seen, but thought to live under the threshold, in the foundation, or near the house was considered to embody the spirit of the family's first male ancestor. in serbia the protector snake was sometimes believed to live in the foundation wall near the threshold, but in most areas it was said to dwell in, behind, or under the hearth. likewise, both locations were thought to be the dwelling place of the domovoj in pre-revolutionary russia, and each has been the site of domestic rituals in all parts of the slavic world. the family's albino protector snake not only caught seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 4 mice and kept other, more dangerous snakes from the house, but was considered the source of good fortune and well-being. representing a positive force, it was most often visualized as white. the white snake was called by many names, the most common being (f.) sretna zmija "snake of (good) fortune" and (m.) zmijski kralj/knez, "snake king/prince." incorporated into the christian belief system, it was thought in some areas to be sent by god himself. care was taken to protect the čuvarica, for it was believed that if it were killed, the master or another person in the household would soon die. as a mediator between the underworld, nature, and humans, this snake was thought to understand speech, to be able to teach man about medicinal herbs, and to induce fertility in wives and female livestock. many legends associate man and snake, and metamorphosis of one into the other is common in south slavic folklore. belief in a protector snake spirit has almost disappeared. yet, as recently as the early 1970s macedonian field researchers examined evidence of a snake cult in the skopje suburb of orman, which is known for the veneration of snakes, a custom surviving among the older generation. many people still believe in the power of the zmija-sajbija, or proprietor snake, and they are convinced that if the snake should leave its dwelling place permanently, misfortune will come to the family of the house in which it lives. many orman residents collectively celebrate both the coming of spring and the return of the snakes from hibernation on march 22 (orthodox), a day which is officially called denot na proletta "spring day," but which retains its religious name, četirieset mačenici, or "forty martyrs." in 1969, after a new church was built at the foot of zmijarnik ("snake hill"), hundreds of villagers celebrated this holiday by bringing bits of their clothing and laying them on the ground in the hope that the returning snakes might touch them and thereby ensure good health and fortune for the owners. belief in the magic power of this ritual imitation of the snake's shedding of its skin, i.e., a symbolic renewal of life, was strong enough that relatives brought the clothing of the sick to the sacred hill. it is believed that only those whose clothes are "blessed" by a returning snake will be cured or have their wish come true. post-world war ii field research in bosnia, croatia, serbia, and macedonia has demonstrated that mythological beings remain integrated into the belief system of a notable portion of the (mostly) rural populations. for example, ethnographic research conducted in the 1950-1960s in the bilo-gora region some seventy kilometers east of zagreb (including the sizeable towns of bjelovar, koprivnica, virovitica, grubišno polje, and križevci) disclosed several tenacious beliefs stemming from pre-christian demonology. a prime example is the male spirit called ved, who lives in the forest (his name is derived from the old church slavic verb věděti "to know, to have secret knowledge"). védi (pl.) were thought to be as tall as a house and physically similar to men, but covered with hair. (compare the russian lešii who were usually perceived as old men of human size and whose primary activity was frightening lone wanderers in the forest.) the croatian vedi were thought to inhabit the forest, long considered a transitional zone between our world and the "other world".(6) there they lived in sociable groups or even in their own cities. 5 their singing and talking could be "heard" from far away. according to local tradition, there were both good and bad vedi. the latter usually avoided humans and stayed in the forest; hence, they were called šúmski vedi, or "forest vedi." if a person strayed into the forest and came upon one or more of the latter he could be tortured, starved, or beaten before being released. conversely, good vedi could be counted on for help. each family or household had its own ved for protection against hail, floods, and other dangerous natural phenomena. thus the dual perception of vedi incorporated both the positive features of the domestic protector spirit, and negative, demonic qualities associated with forces from the underworld. several expressions survived in the bilo-gora area which attest to the folk belief in this combination forest and domestic spirit. a common exclamation in the kajkavian dialect of this region was daj, bože, da nam naši vedi pomognejo! ("god, let our vedi help us!") another expression suggests that the borderline between good and bad vedi was less than clear: while a family depended on its own spirit for help, that same ved could be induced to harm an unliked neighbor's family and crops. this may be illustrated by the expression: bože ljubljeni, daj da nam naši vedi pomorejo, a da nam njihovi vedi ne nahudijo! ("dear god, let our vedi help us and don't let their vedi harm us"). it was believed that after one pronounced such a prayer, the spirit would come quickly to the person's aid. belief in the vedi has generally receded by now, but many of the older generation in bilo-gora still spoke of the them in the late 1960s. a second male spirit, the vodénjak or vódeni čóvjek "water man," has proven more durable in the bilo-gora region, as elsewhere in former yugoslavia. the vodenjak is thought to live in whirlpools or other places where there is deep water. when someone drowns it is usually said that the vodenjak has claimed his victim, or has taken him to his realm deep below the surface. reports as to the physical appearance of this dangerous spirit are fairly consistent: when seen in the water, he is naked but his skin is green and entirely covered with blue or green hair which makes him look like a submerged tree stump. out of the water, he looks like a man but is dressed in green and carries a stick for beating his victims and implementing magic charms. he is thought to be very strong, so strong that a person can rarely escape his grasp. explanations of drownings as being caused by the vodenjak are very frequent in the bilo-gora region (as elsewhere in southeastern europe). in serbia, the water spirit is known as nečástivi, "evil one" or "devil," especially in northeast serbia, surrounding the town of donji milanovac; because of the danger of invoking his presence by calling his name he is usually referred to as ónaj stári "that old man" or onaj máli "that little man." his reported size varies between fifty and one hundred centimeters, and he is similar in appearance to the common european devil, i.e., he has a cloven hoof, horns and goat's ears (usually disguised by a bathing cap or red [turkish] fez), and he is dressed in black or white, colors of chthonic gods. he is said to change his shape at will, and often to take the form of a baby or relative calling someone to the river. it is thought unwise to answer if one's name is called three times at night, for it means that the nečastivi has set the time for one's seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 6 death. the various localities' water spirits are thought to gather once a year on devils' day (djavolji dan) and, after their elder gives them instructions for the remainder of the year, they are said to celebrate by dancing the kolo (round dance). the serbian villagers of this danube region believe that it is dangerous to see one's reflection in the water: should this happen the spirit will try to claim that person as his victim. danger lurks not only in the water, but also nearby: if one falls asleep on a river bank or in a moored boat there is a chance that the water spirit(s) will dance the kolo around the site; or one may awake, as reported in the case of three fishermen, several kilometers downstream. field researchers have recorded much "eyewitness" testimony telling of such incidents, and these and similar explanations are especially common in july, the month in which the nečastivi is thought to be most active. the mythology surrounding the serbian variant of the water spirit is well developed. for example, as in the case of vampires, the water demon can only be "seen" by persons born on a saturday. and sighting of the nečastivi by a villager is a sign that death or misfortune is soon to strike. yet, it is also believed that certain women voluntarily fraternize with them. such women are reputed to go out at night in order to visit with the spirits. they are said to be naked and with hair unbraided but with their genital area demurely covered by a pan or pillow (to protect them from the devil's lust). it is said that if a woman has sexual relations with one of them her husband will soon die and she herself will become infertile or her next child will be born without a skeleton. many villagers in this region are convinced that some women give themselves freely to the water spirits and thereby gain power over them. such women are usually the village conjurers (vráčare/bájalice). they take care to reinforce their power by whispering magic charms (básme,)(7) and by performing special rituals involving nine grains of wheat (i.e., thrice three, the most important magic number, which increases their power threefold), nine pieces of salt, garlic, and a special staff with which they strike the water. when the spirit appears the conjurer tosses money as a tribute to him, or promises an animal or human sacrifice. if this ritual is done properly, her wish will be fulfilled. conjurers in this region are often hired to enlist the aid of the water spirit in support of the customer's desire for success in fishing, hunting, and even catching thieves. furthermore, it is thought possible to sell one's soul to the nečastivi to ensure successful fishing. as in the case of other such demons and devils, the pact guarantees only temporary success; eventually, the spirit will claim what is his. when a drowned man is found, a proverbial expression confirms this belief: došao ðavo po svoje. ("the devil came for his own"). a third male creature, and one considerably less dangerous than the water spirits, is the croatian vrag or "devil," who can be met in a forest, a meadow, or on a path, but is most often encountered at crossroads (the traditional haunting place of witches as well). this minor demon dares not enter a church, yet he is often reported to have been in the vicinity of nearby cemeteries. in croatian bilo-gora he is 7 described as physically similar to a man, but bearing the familiar distinguishing marks of traditional european devils: a cloven hoof, horns, and a tail. it is thought that the vrag is strong enough to stop a pair of running horses; however, in combat with humans he is neither crafty nor agile. rather he is thought to be a relatively simple and trusting creature who can be deceived easily. for example, the vrag likes to fight with priests and women, but he always loses the contest. he is afraid of the cross, holy water and rosaries, and his constant goal is to turn believers from the "true faith," to win over souls by "registering them in his book." the ved, vodenjak/nečastivi and vrag are examples of male mythological beings which are supernatural extensions of, or mediators from the underworld. yet there is a fourth male creature, one who originates from the soul of a deceased human: the vampire. belief in vampires is still strong in certain areas of southeastern europe and the mediterranean basin, but for our purposes is most concentrated today in macedonia. common croatian-serbian terms for vampire are vúkodlak "wolf-hair," vámpir, and ténac "shade" (= ghost) or "werewolf;" in macedonian he is called vóper or vópir (cf. russian upýr', polish upiór), gróbnik "graveman," and tálasam, a term derived from arabic, which has a second meaning in macedonian: (probably from turkish) "evil house spirit." according to reports from macedonia, when seen, the vampire may look like a person but, as he has no skeleton, his body is filled only with blood. his voice can be heard and his red eyes seen, but he has no shadow. he can also change his shape freely; he is most often seen as a cat, rabbit, rooster, or in fact any living creature. like other south and east european vampires, the macedonian voper attempts to suck blood or at least to frighten his victim to death. however, when less violently inclined, he merely makes noises in the house, stirs up the ashes in the hearth, or starts fires (!). not a wholly negative creature, he is commonly believed in macedonia to return to his former place of work and even continue to live with his widow. explanations of the origin of this phenomenon are generally traditional, the most common being that an animal jumped over the deceased as the body lay in state. for this reason, no corpse is left unguarded at night: a "wake" is held for three days and nights. should it happen that a cat, chicken, rooster or dog jumps over the body, the offending animal (thought to be the devil in disguise) must be made to jump back over it in the reverse direction so as to prevent the creation of a vampire from the devil's theft of the deceased's soul. other reasons given for the origin of macedonian vampires are that a person died during the "unbaptized days," that is, in the period between christmas and epiphany (january 6) when christ was said to have been baptized; died a violent death and was not mourned properly by ritual lament; died with an unfulfilled wish; or died on the spot where a star fell. in addition, there is another explanation which has been given: a vampire is "a corpse which has been urinated on by the devil (mrtovec što go pomočal ģavolot). seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 8 to summarize, many of these spirits support a dual function: the family's protector spirit, whether snake or progenitor incarnate, is counted on for health, fertility, and prosperity. the family's adopted ved is likewise helpful, but those of neighbors may be detrimental to one's well-being. the christianity-inspired vrag is a generally mischievous sprite, and one seen most often in a humorous light; still, the best defenses are caution, one's own superior wits, and a firm belief in the principles of the church. but the pre-christian, purely mythological vodenjak, nečastivi, and especially the semi-human vukodlak, vampir or voper, are dangerous spirits to be avoided if at all possible. the water spirits are demons lurking below to catch the unaware, yet even they can be the source of power for certain villagers (ordinary women as well as female conjurers); one must always be careful in and near the water. there are yet other mythological beings in traditional south slavic folklore which have become for the most part only figures in legends and folktales. in addition to the male creatures discussed in this paper, there are those such as the vúčji pástir "wolf shepherd" thought to control the countryside; drékovi, souls of deceased soldiers; drekavci, souls of children who died during the nekršteni dani; and the christian ánđeo i đávo, angel and devil. note: there are a number of female spirits including personified diseases such as ćúma or kúga, the plague, and karakónđula, an old hag who is thought to ride drunken men at night.(8) there are likewise many meteorological and animal spirits, e.g., ala, the summer hail demon; duga, the rainbow thought to drink from rivers, lakes, and oceans; zmaj, the serpent which spreads fire everywhere and is visualized as a bolt of lightning; or even psoglava, a dog-headed monster with iron teeth who lives in a dark cave in a land where there is no sun, but who comes to our world to seek out victims for gnawing. no longer believed in as are the personified male and female spirits, these may still be named as the cause of otherwise inexplicable phenomena in many parts of former (and present) yugoslavia and constitute a significant portion of the body of folk belief in the mythology of the south slavs.(9) notes: 1. research for this study was conducted at the zagreb institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku (formerly zavod za istraživanje folklora) under the auspices of a senior fulbright research grant (sponsored by the council for international exchange of scholars) consultations were held with folklorists and ethnographers in the slovene and serbian academies of sciences and arts, as well as with those in museums and universities in ljubljana, zagreb, and belgrade. a somewhat expanded version, "mythological beings in south slavic folklore," was read may 6, 2000, at the balkan and south slavic conference, held at the university of kansas, lawrence. 2. for a comprehensive survey of traditional slavic mythology, see a afanas'ev, poètičeskija vozzrenija slavjan na prirodu, i-iii (moscow: 1865-69; reprinted in slavistic printings and reprintings 214/1-3 [the hague-paris: mouton, 1970]). more specifically for the east slavs, consult s.a. tokarev, 9 religioznye verovanija vostočnoslavjanskih narodov xix-načala xx v. (moscow: akademija nauk, 1957). see also the more recent enciklopedičeskij slovar': slavjanskaja mifologija (moskva: ellis lak, 1995). for discussion of balkan mythology, špiro kulišić, stara slovenska religija u svijetlu novijih istraživanja posebno balkanoloških. sarajevo: anbih, dijela, knj. lvi. centar za balkanološka ispitivanja, knj. 3, 1979. 3. for a general introduction to south slavic folk belief, see e schneeweiss, serbokroatische volkskunde. erster teil: der volkstümliche glaube (second edition, berlin: walter de gruyter and co., 1961), pp. 3-33. for a similar introduction to bulgarian folk belief, see christo vakarelski, bulgarische volkskunde. zweiter teil: geistige kultur (berlin: walter de gruyter and co., 1968), pp. 207-47. specialized information concerning almost all aspects of yugoslav mythology can be found in veselin čajkanović, mit i religija u srba. izabrane studije (beograd: srpska književna zadruga, kolo lxvi, knj. 443, 1973). for a more recent treatment of the mythological spirits and demons discussed in this chapter, see slobodan zečević, mitska bića srpskih predanja (beograd: vuk karadžić, 1981). for traditional bulgarian mythology, see mikhail arnaudov, očerci po b"lgarskija folklor vol. 2 (sofija: b"lgarski pisatel, 1969). 4. zmija, the usual word for snake, is fem sg. but refers to the male progenitor of the family. as it is related to zmaj, "serpent" which is masculine, it fits into the category of male mythological spirits. 5. please note that the accent marks are not those used by traditional linguists for croatian/serbian-rather they are merely to indicate the stressed syllable for those interested in south slavic folklore 6. similarly, rivers are considered fixed boundaries between "this" world and "that" or "the other" world 7. for discussion and analysis of charms and rituals used by vračare, bajalice, and their basme, see joseph l conrad, "magic charms and healing rituals in contemporary yugoslavia," southeastern europe 10 (1983):99-120. see also my "bulgarian magic charms: ritual, form, and content," slavic and east european journal 31, 4 (1987):548-62; and "slovene oral incantations: topics, texts, and rituals," slovene studies 12/1 (1990):55-66. for comparison, see conrad, "russian ritual incantations: tradition, diversity, and continuity," seej 33, 3 (1989):422-444. for a solid collection of south slavic charms, see ljubinko radenković, narodne basme i bajanja (udruženi izdavači: niš: "gradina," priština: "jedinstvo," kraguevac: "svetlost," 1982). see also his recent narodna bajanja kod južnih slovena (beograd: balkanološki institut sanu, and "prosveta," 1996). 8. for information concerning more important female demons, see conrad, "female spirits among the south slavs," seefa journal vol 5, no. 2 (fall 2000):27-34. 9. for commentary on these lesser demons in northeastern serbia, see slobodan zečević, "narodna verova seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 ews the newsletter oj the slavic & east european folklore association volume 1, number 1, spring 1996 the slavic & east european folklore association was formed at the 1995 meeting of aaass. association president jajties i3u.iley's wel­ coming message de­ scribes the goals and mission of the associa­ tion. president's message: welcome to seefa the first seefa newsletter ... is an experiment be­ cause we are gradually trying to discover and respond to members' interests, needs, and reque~ts. the tlrst is­ sue has turned out to be concerned mainly with russian folklore. a situation we hope will change as mem­ bers become willing to contribute information about the folklore of other areas. the actual content of the letter has evolved. in part be­ cause the editor. bruce mcclelland, plans to start a web home page which can contain much more detailed and extensive informa­ tion than a brief prtnted bulletin. conse­ quently we have lim­ ited the first issue to just a few general top­ ics. our thanks to all of those who have so gen­ erously responded to our persistent email re­ quests. since a letter about the organizational i ! meeting of seefa on ! october 27th during the aaass convention ii in washington, d. c. was sent out in janu­i ary, only a summary i will be presented here. i, bylaws for seefa i were approved, and an executive board coni sisting of a president, vice-president. secre­ i, tary-treasurer. newsletter editor, and one ! member at large was i elected for a two-year term. i it was decided that seefa should become i affiliated with mass 'i since its annual confer­ ences attract people in a wide diversity of i fields concerned with ii folklore. legal advice was to be sought about i incorporating see fa i as a non-profit organi­ i zation. seefa should i also seek to maintain i contacts with other or­ ganizations involved with the study of east­ ern europe and the countries of the former soviet union. other topics and an­ nouncements at the meeting are consider­ ably expanded in the newsletter. by the time i i i i i ! i i 1 i i i i i i i i i i 1 , j of our next meeting during the aaass con­ vention november 2023 in seattle we should be ready to ap­ ply for affiliation with aaass. one other question which has been raised by maijorie balzer is whether seefa should cover the folklore of other groups in the for­ mer soviet union be­ sides that of the slavs. article ii of the by­ laws states the pur­ pose of the new folklore group. "seefa is a scholarly, non­ profit organization de­ voted to an exchange of knowledge among scholars interested in back page col 1 inside i seefa officers 2 i '96 aaass folkwre i program 2 i announcemenis 2 \ translation i opporti.jnmes 3 ! treasurer's ngfe 3 ,-----------------membership announcements conferences seefa officers application 1996-1997 reviews, during the last few bibliography years several internapresident tional conferences. par-t he first issue of plmmedfor seefa ticulatly those organized james o. bailey the seefa newshome page by folklorists in st. petersslavic department letter is being sent burg. have taken place. 1432 van hise hall to all those who reas examples of the 'the international albert 1220 linden dr. sponded to the kinds of information that bates lord conference" university of wisconsin first anthe see fa world wide has been held four times madison. wi 53706 nouncement web site will be offering under the sponsorship of (608) 271-3824 about the new the peter the great mugroup in the in the future. margaret seum of anthropology jobailey@facstaff.wisc.edu spring 1995. if beissinger has written a and ethnography: may short review of albert have not yet belord's last book. the 1992. november 1993. vice president come a member of singer resumes the tale. august 1994 (in jan l. perkowski seefa. please while james bailey has yakutsk). and november slavic department send your name. prepared a bibliography 1995. the fifth conferaddress. telephone ence will take place from 109 cabell hall number. email adof recent publications august 21-25 in almaty. university of virginia about russian folklore. a dress. fields of inlist of current translation kazakhstan this coming charlottesville. virginia 22903 terest. and projects has also been summer and will include (804) 924-6686 comments with a compiled. performances by central jlp2y@virginia.edu check or money orasian epic singers. for inder made out to tour of 111i1man formation contact rone1le secretary-traclsurer seefa (dues are alexander: $15 per year and parry couection at alexande@qal.berkeley.edu jeanmarie rouhier$10 per year for aaass willoughby students). and a few other conferdepartment of russian and mall to the secreences are: eastern studies tary-treasurer: margaret beissinger "skomorokht problemy 1 055 patterson office tower will be organizing a "tour" i perspektivy izucheniia." university of kentucky of the milman parry colnovember 22-26. 1994 in jeanmarie rouhler· lection housed in st. petersburg. lexington. ky 40506-0027 willoughby widener library at harfax: (606) 257-3743 department of russian and "nasledie vladimira iakeastern studies vard university during ovlevicha proppa v sovrejrouhie@pop.uky.edu 1055 patterson office tower the annual convention of mennoi nauke." may university of kentucky the aaass to be held this lexington. ky 40506-0027 year in boston. interested 15-20. 1995 in st. petersmember-at-large jrouhle@pop.uky.edu burg. (see "zhivaia ronelle alexander members of seefa will starina," 3. 1995.) be invited as a group to "riabininskie chteniia slavic department take the mta "across the 95 ... september 4-8. 5414 dwinelle hall river" to cambridge to 1995 in petrozavodsk. university of california view the historic collec(see "zhivaia starina. .. 4. berkeley. ca 94720 tion of recordings and 1996.) (510) 642-8301 tapes from the many field "iskusstvo ustnoi traditalexande@qal.berkeley.edu trips in the former yugosit istoricheskaia morfoloslavia of milman parry gila. .. march 20-22 in st. and albert lord. the time petersburg. (devoted to newsletter editor and date will be anthe 60th birthday of 1.1. bruce mcclelland nounced later. zemtsovsky.) 1956 lewis mountain rd. source: james bailey charlottesville. va 22903 (804) 293-3283 bam4c@virginia.edu seefanewsletterspring 1996 2 seefanews from the secretary1996aaass linda ivanits, "death ritual in opportunities for translating and treasurer convention the volgograd area today" publishing folklore discussant: non-profit status: the two sessions on natalie kononenko in the survey made a year seefa is applying to folklore at the mass conteaching slavic folklore ago, respondents frequently vention in 1995 were so mentioned the need for trans-be classified as a nonwell attended that we deorganized by: lations into english for their profit corporation. this status requires that cided to apply for three in guntis smidchens courses on slavic and east seefa be incoporated 1996-al1 have been ap(guntiss@u.washington.edu). european folklore. snejana proved. preliminary contempest has noted that two in the state in which the tents of the panels are as chair: kinds of translation project funds are located. on follows: robert bowie. grants are still offered by april 15, articles of incorhomage to a.b. lord, panelists: neh: poration were filed with university teachers the state of kentucky. parry-lord: theory in the 90s jan perkowski, "the lure of (202) 606-8467 once they are approved organized by: dracula" fellowsuniv@neh.fed.us by the secretary of ronelle alexander guntis smidchens, "russian and college teachers state, we will apply for (alexande@qal.berkeley.edu) ethnographic methods in the (202) 606-8467 non-profit status with chair. american folklore classroom" fellowscollnd@neh.!ed.us) the federal government. matthew kay. james bailey, "should ameriroberta reeder has p~lnted members of the univercan students read propp?" panelists: out that unesco publishes sity of kentucky law ronelle alexander, 'tradition discussant: original and translated edischool have been most and performance from the izaly zemtsovsky tions of primary source mategenerous in their advice singer's point of view. " rials, that is, anthologies of and are currently reviewin addition, norman folk lyncs. stories, and oral ing the non-profit panatalie kononenko. 'the leamingham has brought toversions of history. but no pers with me in ing technique of ukrainian gether a panel that will inscholarly analyses of folk mapreparation for the fedminstrels: dictated and sung terest folklorists: terials. unesco also suppleeral application process. texts." the interface of folklore and ments funding by other membership and dues: lyubomira parpulova-gribble. literature: the slavic middle publishers. for information contact: fernando alnsa. seefa currently has 'traditional formulas as ages unesco publishing, 31, rue received dues from 37 points of convergence beorganizer: francois bosvin. 75015 members. a portion of tween orality and literacy" paris. france. phone: 45-68these receipts will be discussant: norman ingham 4734; fax: 42-73-3007. used to file the applica(n-ingham@uchicago.edu) tion for non-profit status margaret beissinger. chair. linda ivanits will be the ediwith the federal and govritual and custom in slavic milton ehre tor of a new series called ernment. a portion has folklore. panelists: "folklores and folk cultures already been used to organized by: norman ingham. "folklore into of eastern europe" to be pubpay the filing fee for the llshed by m. e. sharpe. indlarticles of incorporation snejana tempest literature: siovo 0 polku vidual texts of studies with the state of ken(stempest@middlebury.edu). ~ and zadonshchina" dealing with the folklores tucky as well as to prochair. valentina izmirlieva. 'the 72 and cultures of this area are duce this edition of the snejana tempest. names of god, 72 diseases, suitable, and may be prenewsletter. later edipanelists: and the arcana of the slavs. " pared by a single author or multiple authors. texts for tions will be financed by jeannette lacoss, "contempopriscilla hunt, "folklore into thecourses on slavic or compara-the membership fund as rary childlore: coping with diso/ogy: th~ ta/~ qf p~t~r ana tlve folklore and folklife. rowell. solution and change. " feyronia" ral sociology. anthropology. jeanmarle olga strakhov. "negation formudiscussant: and ethnography arc be parrouhler-willoughby tlcularly welcomed. lae in slavic incantations and harvey goldblatt wil@psu.edu spells. " seefa newsletter spring 1996 3 ! iii ii ii -. i'i!''"· !''''~l ~ in !i "-. , 0 0 h[[un 1 rl ~ '[ ~ ~ i '0 • i . ,. "1' --, [~ , i i ! i ;~ h. i~:ii ~ -9,., ~ ~ ~ , . " • .~ ! "" ;" ~~~f~ l • ··~h~~~q ~-~ eo : ~ 0 0 , . [~;nai~l rs 6' '0 • • q'=~h'!la f • • " "' • • (j) • • " ~ i [ hpj,mi ! •• .. ., q, 0• -. " .. j i:' ~q ~l(f· il" · !!i " l' ~ . . p~ _ :.-: h '" ;:1 l~~ ~';<h~ ,. , ~ i j:'p, ;iq 0' h ~~" ~h ". ,. t il"~ i '"' " .. -0 " ,in , ~,~ ' " .' .~ " ~ ~hi i1hf~ --• • . , . , • 0 ! , • • • " • 0 i • i editorial satement 86 r e p o r t s f r o m c o n f e r e n c e s panel report: aaass 2001 issues in the collection of folklore in the former soviet union during the soviet era, foreign scholars were restricted to working in cities. approved cities were listed on the visa and any travel beyond authorized limits was difficult indeed. folklore fieldwork in the soviet union, therefore, was out of the question and most american folklorists and anthropologists who were able to do real collecting in east europe and eurasia, conducted their work in the balkans or other states outside the soviet union proper. with the collapse of soviet rule, fieldwork has become a real option and members of seefa have been engaged in such work. at the annual meeting of the american association of the advancement of slavic studies, seefa sponsored a roundtable on fieldwork entitled “issues in the collection of folklore in the former soviet union” so that members could share their experiences. the session was chaired by jason merrill; the participants were sibelan forrester (swarthmore college), natalie kononenko (university of virginia), laura olson (university of colorado), and jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby (university of kentucky). issues raised ranged from the practical, to dealing with russian and ukrainian colleagues, to abstract issues such as defining the field of folklore. all participants stressed that working conditions are difficult and that, when it comes to the equipment needed for fieldwork, it is best to bring it from the united states. electricity can be unreliable and batteries are a must. forrester suggested using rechargeables. she noted that, while batteries can be purchased in most cities, having ones own rechargeable batteries is an extra bit of insurance that guarantees power when needed. furthermore, she added, rechargeable batteries make wonderful gifts for russian colleagues upon departure. a drawback to rechargeable batteries is that they to behave differently from regular batteries, she cautioned. they run out with a sudden thunk, rather seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 87 than losing power slowly. still, a thunk on the tape may be better than a longer period of slow decay of sound quality, she observed. all participants agreed that it is important to reduce the weight of the equipment carried as much as possible since transportation can be as unreliable as the electricity and the researcher may well need to carry all equipment over substantial distances. kononenko, who has begun using digital equipment extensively, suggested a digital wallet. this is much smaller and lighter in weight than a laptop computer and can be used to store space-consuming files, such as digital photographs, while in the field. files stored on a digital wallet are then easily uploaded to a computer. the clothing worn by the researcher and the gifts that she gives her informants are issues that lie somewhere between the practical and the cultural. as forrester noted, markedly foreign clothes can attract undesirable attention. she suggested that, if financially possible, the scholar should underpack and buy things like a simple winter coat in the market. if you end up with clothes you would never wear at home, she said, you can give them to someone when you leave. earrings make great gifts, she stated, because they can be small and as inexpensive as you wish. furthermore, it is not hard to find kinds that you know no one there will have, and they are easy to carry around in the field. a great gift for a lot of men, especially a driver or colleague who is a specialist in solving technical and logistical problems, she continued, is a folding tool with various parts and blades. in forrester’s village experience, the most popular gifts were fluffy knitting yarn (angora) and a pair of very warm gloves that she had brought from the us for herself. kononenko noted that she had difficulty getting informants to accept financial compensation for their time. she said that, in her experience, doing farm labor for the informant was most appreciated. she has also after her return to the united states had success sending money to people in villages at whose homes she stayed via an american company called meest. when staying at a home, she observed, one should be aware of the very limited resources of the host. thus, it is a good idea to bring food to share, especially food that might be difficult to get in a village. washing bed linens may very well be difficult for a village host and so bringing one’s own sheets and towels and even seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 88 pillows and comforters is advisable. these can be purchased in cities or borrowed from urban friends. the logistics of securing visas were also a topic of discussion. while visas are no longer necessary for work in ukraine, kononenko suggested that they nevertheless be obtained because changes in regulations may not be known in villages and extra documentation, such as formal letters of invitation or research permission can always be useful. rouhier-willoughby agreed that, while it is no longer true that every city visited need be on the visa itself, it is best to cover one’s bases by listing every possible city where you might work on the visa application. in addition, she said, a cover letter from your department chair or yourself stating the nature of your work improves the chances your visa will be processed smoothly. allow at least a month for processing if at all possible, she urged, but pay the extra fee for a two-week turnaround. that way, if the visa has an error or gets lost in the mail, you have time to get another. keep copies of all invitation letters, application forms, cover letters, and so on to ensure that you can get another visa quickly, she concluded. rouhier-willoughby noted that she usually includes an overnight postage-paid envelope to get the visa back quickly with a guarantee of tracking. depending on the length of the trip, she said, you may want to consider a multiple entry visa. these are more expensive, but they have the advantage of being valid for longer than three months, and having a multiple-entry visa can save the hassle and potential complications of renewing a visa in-country. be sure to keep xerox copies of your visa and passport with you at all times and separate from your originals, she said, and leave copies in the united states as well with someone you can reach in case documentation is lost and you need confirmation of its existence. all participants agreed that working with russian and ukrainian colleagues can be both a great benefit and a burden. forrester suggested that, if time and resources allow, one should consider adjusting or building research plans upon arrival, because piggybacking on local expeditions or networks can be to everyone’s benefit. the money from american grants, she said, can pay for a great deal, while local specialists’ knowledge of the seasonal rhythms in the area being studied can be invaluable. by the same token, she noted, one should beware of local partners who may try to overmanage 89 you and your project, either by “helping” informants stay “on topic” or by not allowing you to fully participate in the expedition. despite assurances from some that americans would never be able to speak openly with village informants, forrester found that there are ways of taking advantage of being a foreigner. if modulated by proper respect and cultural awareness, the traditional american informality (panibratstvo) and general lack of pretension attached to things like being a university professor can make an american scholar more accessible and less off-putting to a village granny than a chicly dressed and somewhat condescending urban russian academic or researcher might be. in general, foreigners visiting russia are shown great hospitality, and being foreign allows the researcher to ask seemingly naive questions such as, “so why did the young people on the kolkhoz stop following traditional wedding practices in the 1930's?” this can help uncover unexpected or divergent “received” opinions from different informants, or classes of informants. rouhier-willoughby talked extensively about the challenges that interviews present.most people reject interviews outright, typically because they feel they have nothing of interest to impart. at the second or third request, informants usually agree to an interview. sometimes they want to talk right then and there. if a person begins to tell you about his/her experience and you are not ready to record an interview, rouhierwilloughby said, you should make notes about the impromptu conversation as soon as possible. when you are able to conduct a recorded interview, you can use these notes to elicit additional specific information; this is important because interesting material is often left out of the recorded interview precisely because the informant believes he/she has already said it and it need not be repeated. many people are nervous about the idea of being taped, rouhier-willoughby added. because of issues of modesty and memory, the most difficult group of people to interview is often older women, in particular when discussing birth. modesty can be dealt with not only by reassurances of anonymity, but also by proper use of euphemisms to describe the process, particularly of birth, rouhier-willoughby’s research topic. if you are not sure whether you have the proper vocabulary, she said, you should meet with a native speaker beforehand to review the questions you will use. when asking questions, it seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 90 is often a good idea to have a preamble such as, “other russians have told me x, y, or z” or “in our country, this is how we perform this ritual; how do you do it?” a barebones question often results in a bare-bones answer of little interest, she added. it is important to allow a great deal of time for the interview to proceed at a leisurely pace and in a quiet place, rouhier-willoughby continued. once the tape recorder is shut off, people often remember an interesting detail or two and she suggested keeping a note pad handy to jot down final statements. another possibility is using digital tapes. these can run for a much longer period of time and allow the collector to keep a recorder on even when there is no interview in progress. for turning the field recordings into useable data, rouhier-willoughby recommended finding a native speaker to transcribe interview tapes. all participants agreed that definitions of folklore in the countries of the former soviet union differ greatly from ours. rouhier-willoughby reported that, despite some changes in folklore collecting since the breakup of the soviet union, several longstanding traditions of the discipline still affect collection. first is the perception that folklore does not exist outside of the village. anyone studying any kind of lore in an urban setting faces a great deal of resistance from both informants and from many other folklorists. rouhier-willoughby has worked around this problem by informing people that she is an ethnologist, rather than a folklorist. second, even in village work, one encounters the opinion that the study of ritual is not folklore. rouhier-willoughby’s current research is primarily on birth and, for her, the easiest way to deal with objections that medical practitioners are not representatives of folkways is to state that she is comparing the traditional folkways of the midwife to modern practices. her medical informants often feel they are just typical russians who do not possess any lore of interest. thus, she tells them that she is interested in how the system has changed over the centuries and that she needs modern informants to compare with older documents or with village life. if collaborating folklorists are resistant to collecting folklore in an urban setting or recording contemporary practices, it is easier either to make contacts through non-folklorists or to adapt terminology so that it is more in line with local expectations, she concluded. 91 kononenko noted that her ukrainian colleagues were dismissive of contemporary practices, even in the rural setting. thus, they thought she should not observe contemporary rituals, but only interview the elderly about practices of the past. furthermore, they were dismissive of any practices with soviet elements. while such an attitude is understandable in this era of rejecting the recent soviet past, especially in nonrussian areas such as ukraine, documenting the mix of soviet and indigenous elements can be of great interest to american researchers, as kononenko noted. kononenko also discussed sharing information with colleagues in the post-soviet states upon completion of field research. she has been developing a database which can be viewed at http://nmc2.itc.virginia.edu/sourcecatslfk/index.html (please type <guest> into both slots to view). a web-based platform can provide russian and ukrainian scholars with an opportunity to publish their work at a time when paper publication can be difficult. furthermore, digital exchange of information can allow collaborative work and the development of new ideas. a web site demonstrating a prototype model of a ukrainian village farm can be viewed at kononenko’s home page (http://faculty.virginia.edu/kononenko). kononenko demonstrated her database with the help of anne ingram, a member of the university of virginia instructional technologies group. she also announced that she is seeking grant support for her own work and for the work of her ukrainian and russian partners. jason merrill (drew university) and natalie kononenko (university of virginia) seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 http://nmc2.itc.virginia.edu/sourcecatslfk/index.html http://faculty.virginia.edu/kononenko earthw atch project "folklore of rural russia" yelena and sergei minyonok, institute of world literature, ran, moscow this research aims to document the rich and varied folklore and ethnographical traditions of southwestern russian by utilizing a variety of recording methods (field notes, audio records, video records, photographs). the research will be centered near the towns rognedino (brianskaia province), roslavl (smolenskaia province) and betlitsa (kaluzhskaia province). detailed studies will be conducted on the following subjects: a) ritual folklore; b) mythological stories about spirits of nature and the home; c) folk songs; d) traditional women's everyday and festive clothes, towels and floor coverings; e) peasant houses and household buildings. we hope to identify a number of regularities of shared local traditions within the study area based on the volume of data collected, thus clarifying the complex folklore and ethnographical picture of the southwestern russia. our goal is to broaden and popularize our russian folklore heritage. team dates in field: team 1: may 27 june 9, 1999 (recording and investigating of the trinity ritual (troitsa), ritual folk songs, mythological stories). team 2: july 15 26, 1999 (recording and investigating of the ritual of the holy icon of kazanskaia virgin mary, folk songs, mythological stories). team 3: august 2-13, 1999 (recording and investigating of folk songs, mythological stories). team 4: january 23-february 3, 2000 (recording and investigating of folk songs, mythological stories). those who are interested in taking part in these expeditions should contact the progarm manager of the project deb pollak e-mail: dpollak@earthwatch.org fax: (61 7) 926-8632 phone: (617) 926-8200 or (800) 776-0188 page 5\ fall \998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 mailto:dpollak@earthwatch.org folkoristics at the 1998 international congress of slavists dejan ajdacic, belgrade the twelfth international congress of slavists was held in krakow from august 27 to september 2. 1998. with the participation of over 1000 slavists from around the world. the greatest number of works in folklore and related disciplines, about 70. were presented in the section "slavic mythology. archeology and folk culture." while several other works were presented in linguistics sections (s. tolstaia, j. bartminski, a. plotnikova, t. lukinova and others). the polish organizers printed a book of abstracts "streszczenia referatow i kommunikatow," and the full texts will be published in the national collections. sections devoted to language and to literary history noted relatively low participation of slavic folklorists from non-slavic countries (one each from belgium. the usa. greece and japan). the slavic mythological pantheon appeared in the research of ph. malingoudis (on the basis of greek toponyms), a. matiukhin (on the great goddess), a. olteanu (comparative romanian and slavic mythology), e. zaikovskii (veles and the belarusians), z. karanovic (perun and mokosh in mythological songs). very valuable works were devoted to reconstruction of ancient layers of slavic folk cultures: v. petrukhin spoke about the old russian burial, j. bartminjskii about the fatherland in polish and russian linguistic concepts of the world, s. tolstaia about the name and principles of naming people in folk culture, nevskaia and sedakova about the symbolism of the road, a. gura on the symbolism of animals, p. plas about the wolf, a. plotnikov on the areal aspects of balkan slavic ritual terminology. demonology entered the work of l. vinogradova (problems of comparative study), l. radenkovie (on the devil among the balkan slavs), i. ito (the poludnica and rusalka), t. vrazhinovski (in contemporary macedonian folklore), e. miceva (on good and evil powers). religious and christian concepts in poetry concerned several authors (v. bakhtin, a. brzozowska. e. krekovichova. d. simonides), while the relationship of pagan and christian strata was examined by h. czajka. two russian papers were printed about the miracles of christian relics in the contemporary era (a. tarabukin and e. kuleshov). more general examinations of folk culture were presented by a. anikin and s. azbelev. a generic approach was dominant in the papers of several scholars, some of whom were not present: t. lukinova and n. kononenko (the baian') , k. wroclavski (ballads), k. chistov (laments), v. juzvenko and a group of authors (epics), g. kilianova, a. bricina, j. doschek, n. miloshevic (prose), t. agapkina (oral competitions at the spring holidays), s. botie (the croatian frula today), r. ivanova(journalists' folklore today),l. feldman-chale (the croatian lay theater), and m.elchinova (discourse analysis). e. clowes's comparison of disney and soviet film cartoon versions of winnie the pooh was most interesting. slavic folklore in a non-slavic environment drew the attention of l. fialkova, o. mikitenko and a group of authors. the topic of interethnic aspects of folklore was represented in the studies of l. malash (belarusan-polish), v. penchev (bulgarian-czech), and d. noy (polish-yiddish). our understanding of the history of slavic folkloristics was deepened in work by v. gasparikova (sreznevski among the slovaks), a. toporkov (the role of the slavic philologist in theories of myth in the 19th century). s. gric (kolesa and mosinski on the poles'e). the relationship of folklore and literary attracted the attention of l. marks (in croatian prose), d. ajdacic(in east and south slavic literatures), z. bojovic (in works of the renaissance and baroque), j. szocki (popular polish literature at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries). for the first time, twenty roundtables were held at the conference, one of them devoted to folklore. z. profantova from bratislava spoke about the grammar of folk myth and folklore, along with h. janasek-ivanickova, z. vanovicova and k. mikhailova. at the meeting of the commission for folklore of the international committee of slavics, a letter was read from the absent president of the commission, viktor gusev, who suggested a more active collaboration on several general themes in the period ahead. folklorists had the opportunity at the congress of slavists in krakow to acquaint themselves with new folklore publications, and to exchange information and experiences in numerous fertile discussions and contacts. at the final plenary session, it was announced that the next congress will be held five years hence in slovenia. seef a journal page 48 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 cherkasy folklore conference natalie kononenko. university of virginia a conference entitled "problems in oral history research in eastern european villages. 1920s-1940s" took place at the cherkasy regional ethnographic museum, cherkasy, ukraine. august 4-7, 1998. the conference was sponsored by the center for the study of oral history and culture (kyiv). the cherkasy oblast ethnographic museum, the journal rodovid. and the institute of art. folkloristics, and ethnology of the national academy of sciences. the 20's. 30's and 40's were the period of extensive social engineering in ukraine and elsewhere in eastern europe. collectivization was forcibly introduced and the great famine decimated the ukrainian countryside. in choosing this time period, the organizers of the conference did have political intent. among their motives. as this conference participant can discern them, were: 1) to draw attention to collectivization and the famine. both of these topics receive a great deal of attention among the ukrainian diaspora in the united states and europe. but far less in ukraine, where the main focus is on the devastation of the second world war. 2) to encourage the collection of what we call oral history, especially recollections of the time period covered by the conference. ukrainian understanding of what is included in the field of folklore is different from that in the west and oral history is not a traditional folklore topic. 3) to involve oral materials in the data base used for historical writing. some of the papers delivered at the conference, especially those by the conference organizers, did take a more political, oral history approach. william noll's paper was entitled, "who will write the cultural and social history of the ukrainian village." oleksandr fedoruk talked about national cultural treasures and politics. also, politicians were present at the plenary session and the audience did make political statements, calling for attention to and financial help directed at their particular interest group. most of the conference, however, was a traditional folklore meeting and speakers reported on recent field work. thus mykola kornienko and viktor huhlia talked about local pottery, halyna kornienko described the clothing used in funerals, and maryna iur talked about the designs on bridal chests. hanna koropnychenko described her work on lyric songs, mykhailo khai talked about folk instruments, and nadiia kuksa reported on the craftsmen who made instruments. oleksandr solodar talked about a folk musician of the past who performed an interesting mix of traditional and non-traditional songs and laurie simmes described a ukrainian-american who also has some native american background and discussed how he has combined the two aspects of his heritage in both his songs and the musical instrument he plays. nataliia havryliuk talked about folk life cycle ritual. mykhailo koval' and ol'ha xymych discussed traditional woven belts. zoia hudchenko, olena murzyna, and raiisa svyryda talked about folk architecture. there were a number of other interesting papers and those who wish to obtain a copy of the conference program, including abstracts of papers, can probably do so by faxing william noll at 011-380-44-295-4064. page 49 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 in addition to the papers. conference participants were taken on tours of the ethnographic and other museums. they were treated to a musical program featuring various local artists and groups. the various meals provided opportunities to chat and to listen to the attending folklorists sing the songs they had collected. after the conference. the ethnographic museum in cherkasy and the folklore institute in kyiv sponsored a field work expedition to the chornobai district of the cherkasy region. our host was the director of the local elementary school. serhii liubyvyi. we also had an opportunity to do some collecting in the adjacent zolotonosha district. the ethnographic museum in cherkasy. mr. liubyvyi. and other people interested in folklore and ethnography in the cherkaska oblast are happy to host other american folklorists. either alone or as a group. i found the field work experience to be excellent and the price quite reasonable. i would recommend cooperative work with the people that helped me and will be happy to put any individual or group in contact with them. seef a journal page 50 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 microsoft word seefa2001.doc 31 book reviews nadia stangé-zhirovova. une autre russie. fêtes et rites traditionelles du peuple russe, paris: peeters. 1998. xxii + 265 pp. 15 illustrations. bibliography. index. isbn 2-87723-380-4. une autre russie is, as the title suggests, an account of that aspect of russia which lies hidden from the view of most non-russian observers, the traditional world of the russian peasant. as such, the book is similar to linda ivanits' russian folk belief in not being targeted primarily at folklorists. the content of the two books, however, does not as a whole coincide; nadia stangé-zhirovova focuses mainly on calendar rituals, though she similarly aims to interpret and elucidate as well as merely describe. she thus rightly places emphasis on an explanation of the integral and crucial role played by traditional festivals in the peasant world. the book opens with a historical survey that notes the gap between élite and people after the conversion of the former in 988, emphasizes the unity of russians' world view in the muscovite period when rural dwellers had finally accepted christianity, before outlining the renewed but deeper gulf between élite and people in the post-petrine period. chapter iii illustrates this more recent cultural gap through an examination of nineteenth-century russian writers' views of the narod, as well as literary reflections of the social dichotomy. in between comes a discussion of the specific features of russian popular belief, which also clarifies the author's approach to her subject. as she makes clear in the introduction, she is a product of the nikita tolstoi school of ethnolinguistics and wrote her thesis under the supervision of boris uspenskii. no surprise then to find an emphasis on the archaic nature of much of russian folk belief, on paired opposites and dvoeverie. although she notes that syncretism is a feature of popular christianity everywhere, she still uses the russian term with its implications of russian uniqueness and has not followed recent historical debate (notably by eve levin) about the term and its usefulness or accuracy. discussion of calendar rituals is preceded by a general discussion of the compulsory nature of folk festivals and of bakhtinian-style patterns of reverse behavior, the importance of interdictions on certain actions or behavior at given times as well as a discussion of the peasant's cyclical view of time and the role of festivals in guaranteeing the future prosperity of the community. the chapter includes an interesting discussion, based on the french scholar rené girard's work on african customs (la violence et le sacré, paris. 1972) of feast and anti-feast. this chapter is succeed by detailed discussion of the actual festivals, pride of place being given to yuletide (sviatki) and to pre-lenten festivities (maslenitsa). these are clearly presented and well-documented, using varied material from different periods and areas. following the general principle in the book she also examines the treatment of each festival in russian literature. the last section of the book offers a much more detailed examination of the popular image of saints than linda seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 32 ivanits had space for in her russian folk belief (armonk, ny, 1989), especially of sts george and nicholas. brief sections are also devoted to the prophet elijah, sts michael, demetrius and theodore. these sections are also well-documented, though would have been strengthened by a closer look at the vitae and byzantine cults of these saints. the interpretation of the cult of sts nicholas and george is based upon uspenskii's filologicheskiia razyskaniia v oblasti slavianskikh drevnostei (moscow, 1982) and ivanov and toporov's work on myth (issledovaniia v oblasti slavianskikh drevnostei. moscow, 1974), whose hypotheses are presented as proven. unfortunately, the author is not familiar with gail lenhoff's important critique of uspenskii's argument. the book concludes with a brief survey of folk culture after the revolution and in the post-soviet period. at one point nadia stangé-zhirovova deviates from her interpretative dependence on propp (agrarnye prazdniki), uspenskii, nikita tolstoi and others, whose work, however interesting, cannot always be regarded as more than fascinating hypothesis. at the end of the chapter on shrovetide carnival (pp. 1256) she summarizes views on the destruction of the maslenitsa doll, which sokolova interprets as symbolizing the end of winter, but others as a representation of death, with the doll replacing an earlier human sacrifice. basing herself on girard's views, but in fact adopting an approach familiar to social historians and anthropologists, she sees the destruction of the doll as a way of channeling the violent impulses inherent in peasant society and so assisting the general psychological health of the community. perhaps because she links this with the idea of an earlier human sacrifice she does not pursue this line elsewhere, though in places this interpretive line could have been rewarding. overall, there is much that is valuable in this book, including some interesting analyses of individual folk songs and rituals, as well as sound judgments about the role of festivals in the traditional calendar. she convincingly demonstrates the importance of rituals of fertility and of death and rebirth in the calendar cycle. although us colleagues may not have francophone students, british and canadian teachers of courses on russian folklore, who do encounter them, will find this volume a useful addition to their reading lists. nadia stangé-zhirovova has read widely in russian and in french (the virtual absence of recent russian publications in the bibliography may perhaps be explained by publishing delays). what initially seemed shocking to at least this anglophone slavist was the almost total absence of references to work published in english: four in all, of which only one, frank miller's folklore for stalin: russian folklore and pseudofolklore of the stalin era (armonk, ny, 1990) is on russian folklore. there are also just two references to german sources. this lacuna helps to explain the uncritical acceptance of the views of russian scholars, however distinguished, as well as the absence of any reference to work on gender roles in folklore. upon reflection, the situation seems less shocking than sad, because although i was aware of a few of nadia stangé-zhirovova's articles, the bibliography threw up a number of works in french on russian folklore which i did not know. assuming (hopefully without arrogance) that my ignorance is not entirely atypical, 33 this suggests a lamentable lack of academic contact. it is regrettable that works like l. gruel-apert, la tradition oral russe (paris: p.u.f. 1995) and f. conte, l'héritage païen de la russie. le paysan et son univers symbolique (paris: albin michel. 1997) are so little known among the english-speaking slavists interested in folklore. perhaps seefa can persuade french-speaking folklore scholars not only to join the organization, but also to send their books for review. we may then, perhaps, hope for a reverse initiative which would break the virtual hermetic seal between the two academic communities. faith wigzell school of slavonic and east european studies, university college, london seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 editorial satement 92 c o n f e r e n c e r e p o r t s a n d p a n e l s e. e. lineva: a conference “e. e. lineva: the hundredth anniversary of her field recordings,” a conference of both a scholarly and applied nature was held on november 23-25th, 2001 in the old russian city of vologda. evgeniia eduardovna lineva (1853-1919) occupies a special place in russian and american culture. in the 1890s she and her husband, a political émigré, lived in america. there lineva, a professional singer, organized a russian folk choir which performed successfully at the chicago universal exhibition held to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of columbus’ discovery of america. after her return home lineva took a more serious interest in russian folk song, undertaking a number of folklore expeditions to various parts of the country. to lineva belongs the distinction of being the first to use the phonograph to record folk songs. she used it on her first expedition in 1897 to villages in nizhnii novogord, kostroma, simbirsk, tambov and voronezh provinces. in 1901 the folklorist traveled to the kirillovo-belozersk area of novgorod province, now part of vologda oblast’. one result outcome was the collection velikorusskie pesni v narodnoi garmonizatsii [russian songs in their folk harmonization] (pt 1, st. petersburg, 1904; pt 2, st. petersburg, 1909), in which the music was deciphered to the highest professional standards. it was the centenary of that expedition of 1901 that prompted the conference. the conference was not the only event commemorating lineva held in the vologda area: s. k. chernova (cherepovetsk museum association) talked about the celebration in may 2001 of the jubilee of lineva’s belozersk expedition which began in the district town of cherepovets in novgorod province, now part of vologda oblast’. since folklore expeditions formed an important aspect of lineva’s activities, it is not surprising that several papers were based on material collected on present-day seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 93 expeditions which followed in lineva’s footsteps. a. m. mekhnetsov (folklore and ethnographic center, st. petersburg) emphasized in "the results of expeditionary investigations of the beloozer’e folk traditions,” that lineva, whose views of folklore reflected her time, considered the folk song above all as a work of art. for her the aesthetic principle was the chief and virtually the sole factor in russian song culture, an attitude that prevailed in her 1901 expedition to belozersk. by contrast, it was a view of the song as an element of folk culture that dominated among folklorists taking part in the expeditions of the st petersburg conservatory between 1967 and 2000. this approach allows the song to be considered within the system of traditional culture as a whole. the speaker emphasized that there is some compensation for the diminishing opportunities of recording an authentic performance of classical peasant lyrics to be found in present-day attention to the characteristics of the folk song in everyday life. i. b. teplova also drew on the experience gained during these same expeditions in her talk, “the collection of folklore materials by e. lineva and the sokolov brothers, and modern recordings by the st. petersburg conservatory.” g. p. khristova (voronezh state academy of the arts) traced the history of the collection of musical folklore in the voronezh area from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present day. lineva, as well as her modern counterpart, m. e. piatnitskii, played an outstanding role in the study of voronezh folklore. however, as previously noted, lineva’s stress on the aesthetic essence of a song inevitably led her to disregard many song forms, for example the calendar song with its undeveloped melody. this gap was filled in part by collecting done in the second half of the twentieth century by a. v. rudneva (moscow conservatory) as well as voronezh state academy of the arts. in her talk, “e. e. lineva and modern recordings of molokan musical culture,” n. m. savel’eva (moscow conservatory) presented material from moscow conservatory’s expedition of 1970 following the path of lineva’s expedition of 1910 to russian dukhobor and molokan villages in the caucasus, to the settlements of religious sectarians who had broken away from the official orthodox church. for its time, that expedition of 1970 broke through the ideological prohibition on collecting folklore in enclosed religious communities. now recordings of molokan sung folklore, their seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 94 religious hymns (psalms) and rhymed texts on biblical subjects, oriented toward the poetics of the later romance, have been made in tambov, moscow, tula, the amur area and other regions. the material collected should solve the question of whether these hymns originated from a single source (tambov, the location of the first molokan settlement) or from every place they settled and assimilated local oral musical tradition. sound recordings of the same psalm from different regions revealed each variant’s clear melodic individuality. l. p. makhova (st. petersburg conservatory) gave a paper on “the historical life of the eighteenth-century ballad ‘van’ka kliuchnik’ in lineva’s recording, and in its folk and literary variants.” she presented a musicological analysis of different variants of the ballad whose melody ranges from the epic to that of the “protiazhnyi” song. lineva made a huge contribution not only to field work, but also to the theoretical interpretation of music in the oral tradition. a. a. banin (state republican center of russian folklore, moscow) discussed this aspect of the heritage of folkloristics in his talk, “on e. e. lineva’s contribution to semiotic theory about folk tradition.” he recalled her successful attempts to study several variants of the same song (luchina, luchinushka, ne odna vo pole dorozhen’ka inter alia). an understanding that one variant cannot give a full understanding of a song compelled her to search for the typically stable form of a melody, recording and analyzing several texts of the same song. banin pointed out that lineva’s approach to music in the oral tradition has allowed modern scholarship to consider how each ethnos originally engendered not one, but two acoustic languages: verbal and musical. in her paper, “the history of the study of intoned shouts and the discoveries of recent expeditions,” i. s. popova (petersburg conservatory) emphasized that the segmentation of exclamatory speech into units to which measures of intonational and melodic analysis can be applied, was already under way in lineva’s day. the speaker demonstrated a wide range of modern recordings of intoned cries in the system of calendar rituals (in particular, maslenitsa). the genetic potential of the cries, that is, their development into song forms, was a key element in popova’s approach. 95 g. ia. sysoeva (voronezh state academy of the arts) in “the south-russian protiazhnyi song (toward a typology of forms)” raised again the problem of genre in the russian folk song: is the protiazhnyi song a genre or a type of performance? apart from lineva’s expeditions and her contribution to ethnomusicological theory, other aspects of this exceptional woman’s creative activity were covered at the conference. using lineva’s letters to a. i. ivanchin-pisarev, t. g. ivanova (institute of russian literature, ran, st. petersburg) was able to attribute the story “poslednee slovo” [the last word] about a russian intellectual’s life in america to the folklorist. the story was published in the journal russkoe bogatstvo [russian wealth] in 1897 under the name of e. somova. in a second paper ivanova surveyed lineva’s materials preserved in the academy institute of russian literature (pushkin house) in st petersburg: the field notebooks of 1897, the molokan recordings of 1910, the materials from the 1912 expedition to the south slavic lands of the then austro-hungarian empire are in coll. 34 of the folklore depository, along with the collector’s decipherment of the music and her photographs, including those from her american period. lineva’s phonocylinders are kept in the phonogram archive in pushkin house. the conference papers covered more than the topics of lineva herself and her varied and fruitful activities; those genres in the folklore of the vologda region to which lineva did not pay special attention in her collecting and research were also discussed. g. v. lobkova (petersburg conservatory), “the features of epic melodies from vologda oblast’,” a talk accompanied by sound recordings, pointed out the connection between the melody of the bylina “il’ia muromets and tsar kurkas” in f. m. istomin and s. m. liapunov’s collection (pesni russkogo naroda: sobrany v guberniiakh vologodskoi, viatskoi i kostromskoi v 1893 godu [songs of the russian people: collected in the provinces of vologda, viatka, and kostroma in 1893], st. petersburg, 1899) and the melodies of religious songs and ballads recorded in the second half of the twentieth century. dispensing with the idea that of the performer as the most important constituent in the formation of a musical-poetic text, the basis for which may be found in lineva’s seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 96 writing, i. v. paradovskaia (vologda pedagogical university) analyzed songs about yuletide fortune-telling (sviatochnoe gadanie). her talk revolved around the performers’ own understanding of the folk song. in his talk, “a hundred years after e. e. lineva: holiday-game culture at the turn of the century,” i. a. morozov (academy institute of ethnology and anthropology, moscow) shared his experience of conducting a survey on folk games. his questionnaire had been designed to establish the correlation between traditional and non-traditional games today. demonstrating the possibilities of applying a cartographic method to the study of folk games in the babaev region of the vologda oblast’ was a very significant factor here. g. p. paradovskaia (vologda pedagogical university) spoke on traditional dance and its varieties in the vologda region. inter alia she emphasized the archaic forms of choreography connected with ritual dance function, and the differentiation between girls’ (restrained) and women’s (more energetic) dance. l. g. solov’ev (children’s arts school, cherepovets) talked about the tradition of playing the “kirillov” accordion in the western part of the vologda region. he separated teaching from the transmission of tradition in instrumental music. in “the song tradition of kokshen’ga (tot’ma district, vologda province) in the recordings of m. b. edemskii, 1905-24,” m. a. varilova, s. n. smol’nikov, and s. iu. baranov (all vologda pedagogical university) shared the results of their work on material collected by the well-known collector, m. b. edemskii, at the beginning of the twentieth century, and now scattered round various archive depositories in the country. a number of talks were devoted to the folklore and ethnographic aspects of the folk culture of the vologda region. the ethnographic context they presented helps us gain a fuller understanding of the place of the protiazhnyi song, which lineva in particular studied, in the folk cultural system. in “folk ideas about the soul’s journey to the ‘other world’ after death” a. v. kulev (vologda scientific method center of culture) analyzed funeral ritual in the western part of the area in terms of action, theme and words, dwelling in particular on lament motifs. in his report e. a. sokolov (vologda pedagogical university) presented his experience of interpreting recruit ritual and laments. 97 s. r. kuleva (vologda scientific method center of culture) presented a paper on “ritual visits to homes in the annual calendar cycle (from materials collected during expeditions to the cherepovets and ustiug regions)”. such visits were made at various times of year (such as the eve of st philip’s fast (filippovo zagoven’e), christmas, new year, easter, and st. john’s and st. peter’s days) and all possessed the same structure. apart from the calendar cycle, ritual visits were also observed in wedding and funeral rituals. the speaker emphasized that they bring all members of the community together and demonstrate the integrity of the rural world. s. i. zhavoronok (european university, st petersburg) gave a talk entitled “stories about and by znaiushchie (folk healers) (from material collected on expeditions to the zubov sel’sovet of the belozersk region),” in which she revealed the current status of these representatives of folk culture and proposed her own classification of them. besides the folklore tradition of the vologda (and voronezh) areas, the folk culture of the smolensk area was discussed by s. v. podrezova (european university, st petersburg) in her talk “facets of the correlation between poetic text and melody in the melismatic folk singing of the easter anthem ‘khristos voskrese’ [christ is risen].” this troparion, the text of which has various sources (orthodox and folk spring song tradition), is sung here between easter and ascension under various circumstances. when it entered a folk environment, the orthodox text began an existence determined by the laws of oral tradition, that is, it developed variants on both a verbal and a musical level. this was clearly demonstrated in sound recordings. many papers to varying degrees raised the question of performance in the russian folk song tradition. this aspect received special attention in the paper given by n. n. giliarova (moscow conservatory): “e. e. lineva and current methods of ethnomusicological research.” the speaker especially emphasized that in lineva’s understanding the performer was the most important constituent in the musical-poetic text. in connection with this, the readiness of a song group to improvise within the framework of folk tradition was of particular significance in the youth folklore movement which has developed widely in recent years. the time of the pompous choir, strictly maintaining the musical decipherment of a single recorded authentic folk variant or even seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 98 of a variant which has been arranged by a musician, seem to have passed. today folk groups study the art of authentic folk improvisation. convincingly illustrating her point, the speaker played the same song recorded twice from the same performers, once outside and once indoors. these recordings, made under different circumstances, gave the impression of being two different songs. two highly successful ethnographic concerts, held in the vologda musical school (november 23) and the oblast’ philharmonic (november 24), clearly illustrated giliarova’s arguments. over two evenings the conference participants and others enjoyed the skill in performance of four youth folk groups, from st. petersburg state conservatory (directed by a. m. mekhnetsov), moscow state conservatory (directed by n. n. giliarova), and the folk ensembles, “volia” from voronezh (directed by g. ia. sysoeva) and “traditsiia” from vologda (directed by s. r. kulev). songs from lineva’s collections, sung in a melismatic manner from material collected during their own expeditions were included in the choirs’ repertoires. these youthful groups demonstrated that they had mastered authentic folk song performance. overall the conference showed that vologda is currently one of the best centers for folklore study in russia. t. g. ivanova. institute of russian literature, st. petersburg. (translated by james bailey) seefa nji8:ws the newsletter of the slavic and east european folklore association volume n, number 1, spring 1997 a message from the president the seefa business meeting took place on november 16th during the aaass convention in boston last year. not only were we once again meeting in a cramped room, but we also were pressed for time. reports were given by the president james bailey and secretary-treasurer j eanmarie rouhier willoughby. bruce mcclellan, who had just resigned as newsletter editor to take a position with irex in russia, was unable to attend. the new editor is jonathan perkins who is a graduate student at the university of kansas. seefa continues to grow. we have received non-profit status for the organization and we also applied to aaass and received approval for affiliation. this gives us one "free" panel at the convention and the right to a meeting room. unfortunately so many proposals were made for panels at the 1997 convention that affiliated organizations have been asked to forego special meeting rooms. to date nothing more has been said about this but the prospect looms that we once again will be jammed into someone's hotel room much time was devoted to the newsletter and to the web page. it was suggested that items be included such as works in progress, dissertations on folklore, syllabi for folklore courses, notices about conferences, mini-reviews, descriptions of folklore programs, opportunities for field work, and surveys of recent studies of the folklore in eastern europe and the former soviet union. needless to say, such coverage can be achieved only when members volunteer information. es-pecially needed are contributions about the folklore of tnlditions other than russian. while folklorists in russian have responded well to seef a and have agreed to write short pieces about their current work, one would wish that folklorists in other traditions would participate more. this of course brings up the role of foreign scholars in seep a. considering the fact that so many people from other countries give papers at the annual aaass convention , seefa might wish to invite such folklorists to take part in future panels. such arrangements might prove beneficial to everyone involved. a question was brought up about the availability of audio-visual materials for folklore. the three films about russian calendar rituals made by galina shapovalova were mentioned a note about how to purchase them is on the fmal page of this newsletter. since the university of virginia, charlottesville has extensive holdings, jan perkowski promised to compile a list of materials that should appear in the next newsletter. any information about such items, however brief , would be appreciated. ronelle alexander spoke about the fifth lord conference that was held in almaty and about possible future plans for such conferences. linda ivanits spoke about the 1. e. sharpe series on east european folklore. after the panel on epics, which mrs. albert lord attended, we went across the river to harvard widener library where we met in the room of the milman parry collection. once again there was standing room only for us to hear mrs. lord talk about her husband and about some of his experiences collecting in yugoslavia. it was a memorable time for which we have to thank thomas butler and margaret beissinger. -james bailey, university of wisconsin seefa officers 1997-1998 president james o. bailey slavic department 1432 vanhise hall 1220 linden dr. university of wisconsin madison, wi 53706 (608) 271-3824 jobailey@facstaff.wisc.edu vice president jan l. perkowski slavic department 109 cabell hall university of virginia charlottesville, virginia 22903 (804) 924-6686 perkowski@virginia.edu secretary· treasurer jeanmarie rouhier­ willoughby department of russian and eastern studies 1055 patterson office tower university of kentucky lexington, ky 40506-0027 fax: (606) 257-3743 jrouhie@pop.uky.edu member·at· large ronelle alexander slavic department 5414 dwinelle hall university of california berkeley, ca 94720 (510) 642-8301 alexande@qal.berkeley.edu newsletter editor jonathan perkins dept. of slavic languages and literatures 2134 wescoe hall university of kansas lawrence, ks 66045 (913) 864-3313 jperkins@falcon.cc.ukans.edu a note from the treasurer the most important news from a fmancial point of view is that the irs approved us for non-profit status this fall. the arrangement will need to be reviewed in several years to ensure that we are not making a huge profit on our yearly dues. hardly likely, but nevertheless, the irs has its rules. the current fmancial holdings of the organization total $624.39. our membership has grown to a total of forty eight over the last year. however, our student membership is still quite low. for the sake of the future of the discipline as well for the organization, we ask that you mention seef a to your students and encourage them to join. this column serves as the official reminder that it is time to renew your seef a membership for 1997. while many of you have already renewed, we ask those of you who have not yet sent in a check, to please submit your dues with an update of the following information: name; home address; work address (please indicate preferred mailing address); email; fax number; telephone number (home and work); areas of interest in folklore· , research in progress; suggestions for the newsletter. the check should be made out to seefa and sent to the secretary/treasurer at the following address: j. rouhier-willoughby, 1055 patterson office tower, dept. of russian and eastern studies, university of kentucky, lexington, ky 40506. thanks to all of you who have already submitted your dues and to our new members for their support of the organization. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby correction in the piece "bibliographic series: russian folklore" by tatyana ivanova the dates covered in the index published by the new private publishing house 'dimitri bulanin' in 1996 were given incorrectly. the volume covers the years 1800 1855. folklore expedition of the russian institute for the history of the arts a folklore expedition entitled lithe bearer of the folklore tradition ii was carried out from june through september 1996. to the experts of the russian humanities scholarly fund this program seemed worthy of encouragement and, as a result, we, the participants of the expedition (members and graduate students of the folklore sector of the institute), were awarded a grant. the personality of a connoisseur and performer of folklore has long interested russian folklorists. an impressive list of literature, beginning, perhaps, with the portraits of epic singers sketched by a. f. hilferding in his "onega bylinas,ii reflects this trend. however, the subject has acquired renewed attention in each historical period. for example, during the economic reforms that are now taking place in the russian village, the personality of the performer has once again become important to folklorists. we went to the countryside fearing that traditional rituals and folklore would be buried under current events. thus,· before the expedition set out, government regulations appeared about granting each peasant an allotment of land. however, the peasants with whom we dealt (our informants were elderly people) were indifferent to this. old people were not capable of undertaking such a holding and they had no equipment for cultivating the land since it was too expensive to buy. what most disturbed people was the many months' delay in the payment of pensions and salaries. from time to time there were instances when old women would refuse to recall the songs and rituals of their youth they were not in a mood to do so. but nevertheless, the time, during which traditional folklore decays and is forgotten, has its own existence and depends, far less than can be supposed, on the latest political events. according to the program, the participants of the expedition visited various regions of northern russia, that is, the archangelsk, vologda, novgorod, pskov, and tver districts. the trip was divided into two parts: in the beginning each of the participants went to "his" or "her" region separately not only to embody the general idea of the expedition within each individual's plans and to pursue them on the spot, but also to choose an area where we could go all together on a second trip and could study the region's folklore tradition exhaustively. the participants of the expedition had various specialties: folklore philology (a. nekrylova, m. lur'e), ethnomusicology (v. lapin, m. lobanov, m. roditeleva), musical instruments (a. romodin), and ethnography (s. kuchepatova). each had his or her own long established scholarly interests and each worked individually as he or she understood the bearer of the folklore tradition. although we had assumed this division from the very beginning, when we met and discussed the initial work that had been accomplished, we nevertheless were able to arrive at a general understanding. we then made a second trip solely to the. western part of the andreapol region of the tver district. . the most numerous collected materials represent calendar, ritual, and wedding songs, a multitude of chastushkas which maintain a lively existence, several traditional tales, stories about demonological personages, and a multitude of recordings of rural accordion players and of instruments that are more rarely met in the village today balalaikas, violins, and shepherd's drums (barabanka). in addition, there are the stories of village residents of various ages (including children) who are, in the opinion of the residents, bearers of folklore, and recordings of talks with the bearers themselves. materials concerning the typology of singers, musician instrumentalists, and tellers of tales as well as materials on the typology of population centers from the point of view of the conditions that support folklore traditions there were also gathered. m. a. lobanov, russian institute for the history of the arts, s1. petersburg . recent works on bulgarian folk verbal art although the last decade has witnessed a significant interest in more modem manifestations of the dynamics of folklore, bulgarian folklorists have not ceased searching for new approaches to the so-called "classical" folklore heritage. radost ivanova's book "epos-ritual-myth" is one example of this. the author adopts e. m. meletinsky's "evolutionary" approach and focuses on genesis and gradual change in the epic tradition from archaic mythology to more recent historical epic narratives. ritual and myth in this study serve as a cultural "medium" for the existence of epos in time. radost ivanova attempts to reconstruct those epic works, of whose existence there is only indirect evidence, and which are closely interwoven with seasonal rituals and myths. the central epic character of marko kraleviti is analyzed as composed of multiple layers of features, revealing a more archaic image hidden behind that of the prilep ruler. the more archaic figure is regarded as the "culture hero" who engages in contests with demons controlling water sources. viewed from this perspective, the older epic narrative is linked to a group of myths and rites associated with the cosmogonic act of the vernal renewal of vegetation. analysis of a cycle of seasonal rites throughout the balkans and the mediterranean region leads ivanova to view these rites and the older epos as typological parallels of the same "calendrical" version of the creation myth. the subsequent "historicization" of the archaic epic model has led to its direct link with historical persons and events, while the connection to the myth has gradually faded. (marko at this stage fights a real ethnic enemy and frees his enslaved fellow countrymen, yet the images of the hero's helpers, the antagonist, and even the chains of slaves still yield evidence of the mythological layers of the epic tradition.) the epos-ritual connection is also explored in "evolutionary" terms on the b~sis of the wedding theme as found in songs about the marriage of the epic hero. a parallel is sought between the "culture hero" and the epic "bridegroom" in terms of their actions and semantics. plamen bochkov's book "the unknown hero" is an attempt to analyze lesser known or forgotten epic themes from an unusual perspective. the work leads the reader through the complex set of characters found in the bulgarian epos and reveals through them the changing fate of the bulgarian people over time. analysis is carried out within the context of balkan history in the middle ages, an epoch of heroes, blind singers and their long songs. "epos­ ethnos-ethos" situates the bulgarian epic tradition in the context of slavic and balkan cultures. it also offers some new approaches, and raises new issues. bulgarian folk narratives have also been the subject of numerous recent publications. perhaps the most significant among them is the "index of bulgarian folktales" by liliana daskalova perkowski, doroteia dobreva, iordanka kotseva, and evgeniia mitseva. the authors, research scholars from the institute of folklore of the bulgarian academy of sciences, completed this complex volume in 1985, but it appeared only a decade later due to circumstances related to problems and recent changes in publishing. the (tale-type) index presents in a systematic form more than 5,500 existing versions of tales collected between 1830 and 1985 and scattered in various published and archival sources. it is preceded by an earlier attempt at classification made by mikhail amaudov (1905), which, however, is rather limited in terms of genre scope and number of texts. earlier collections of tales often contained references to previously published versions of the texts. however, it was impossible to obtain comprehensive data about all folklore subject­ matter and themes, and all tale versions and variants. furthermore, given the international distribution of tales and motifs and their tendency to migrate, comparative research is only possible through quick and easy access to a reliable and comprehensive reference source, especially one which follows a well-known, internationally established model. therefore, the bulgarian tale­ type index has adopted the classification system of antti aame and stith thompson's "the types of the folktale," whose practical usefulness has been undisputed, despite the continuing discussion about its merits and flaws. the authors had to introduce some changes, while strictly adhering to the international model: tale-type titles are sometimes modified to reflect an established national tradition; some subgenres are also named in accordance with established local practice at the time (e.g., legendary, instead of religious tales).' new, specifically bulgarian, material is incorporated through careful use of thompson's patterns of marking types and subtypes, and by indicating all newly introduced "oicotypes" with an asterisk preceding the type number. close to 900 new entries are thus introduced into what are considered to be the most appropriate available slots. each unit (type, subtype) is furnished with a title, plot scheme, ample notes with cross­ references to other types and indexes, notes on existing studies, on parallels in folk songs, parables and proverbs, etc. more importantly, precise cross-references are provided to the indexes of turkish folktales (of eberhard­ boratav) and east slavic tales (of l. barag et al.) thus connecting three major narrative traditions which have undergone mutual influence over time. more than 5,500 texts have been selected, analyzed, and systematized after a careful and thorough search through scholarly and popular collections and publications, regional studies, periodicals, and major archives where folklore records have been stored for a long time. for various reasons, not all regions of bulgaria have been equally well covered by collectors in the past. there remains, therefore, a certain gap due to the disproportionate coverage of the country's territory. the index, however, being an open system by design, has laid the foundation upon which further additions can be made if necessary. fitting a narrative tradition as as diverse and dynamic as the bulgarian one into a rigorous classification scheme previously established to accommodate other cultural traditions, is by no means an easy task. the authors have managed to follow strictly the at scheme, without displacing, misplacing or combining tale-types and, instead, have expanded the crossreferences among the latter. there has been a danger of doing away with the characteristics of the national narrative material while fitting it into the at model, particularly in regard to such aspects as tale classification and the understanding of the tale­ type as an autonomous narrative, that is, one told as a single story. however, the authors have presented each type in a way that allows the international scholar, familiar with the at index, to fmd his/her way around in the material and, at the same time, to grasp the specific nature of the national tradition. each type is introduced by means of an extensive yet sparse plot scheme, with the more elaborate types, e.g., those of magic or romantic tales, broken down ·into chief constituent parts and marked by a special system of markers. the bibliographic data for each version is followed by a short formula. this manner of presentation allows for the reading (reconstruction) of each version. often, specific details are also given that further characterize each single version. the volume also comes with an elaborate index of names and objects, as well as a bibliography of all major studies on bulgarian folktales. "bulgarian folk ballads" by liliana bogdanova et al. presents this genre in a comprehensive fashion. mainly new recordings from a variety of regions in bulgaria are included. part i includes mythical, religious, and legendary songs and ballads. part ii presents ballads of everyday life, historical events and persons, as well as ballads .about the life of rebels and outlaws. each text is supplied with ample notes and a bibliography of all published versions. the second volume also contains all relevant indexes, data about singers/informants and collectors, and a glossary. "nauka i izkustvo" introduces a new series of folklore material with the books compiled by albena georgieva, evgeniia mitseva, doroteia dobreva and svetla petko va. it follows· two earlier series -"bulgarsko narodno tvorchestvo" (12 vols, 1961-63) and "bulgarska narodna poeziia i proza" (7 vols, 1981-83), in which all major verbal genres are represented by selected annotated texts and by extensive introductions. the same pattern is followed in the new series. the main difference is that in the new series, each book focuses on a major theme and the texts published are supplemented and/or "interpreted," as if "from within," by other related folk material, an approach that creates the semantic context inseparable from the text. thus, a. georgieva's book focuses on folk legends of origin and ethical issues, e. mitseva's on folk demonology, d. dobreva's deals with jokes and anecdotes, and s. petkova's book deals with folklore about the plague and other pestilence. among the texts are earlier recordings as well as more recent and previously unpublished ones. each text is accompanied by other related records of folk concepts and beliefs, songs and stories, ritual practices, proverbs and riddles, as well as by detailed notes and references. comprehensive introductory essays provide an in-depth analysis of the correspoilding matter. liliana perkowski, university of wisconsin the development of conceptual dictionaries of oral folk culture in the institute of linguistics of the russian academy of sciences work is being carried out on a lexical description of the language of russian folklore according to genre distinctions. the texts of religious verses (dukhovnye stikhi) and lamentations have been selected for comparison. besides the director s. e. nikitina, e. i. kukushkina is also taking part in the work. a model of the lexical entry in a thesaurus, a variant of which appears in s. e. nikitina's book "oral folk culture and linguistic consciousness" (moscow, 1993), serves as the main instrument for investigating the folklore word. at present each entry consists of four parts. the first includes information about the frequency of a word in the selected texts, its grammatical characteristics, word formation, phonetic and morphological variants, and a brief interpretation. the second part of a lexical entry, the thesaurus proper, represents an analogue of the questionnaire which the head word "answers" with words or word combinations in the same language this generates the ·semantic explication of the word. the thesaurus comprises about forty points, that is, names of the semantic relations that are typical for folklore texts static and dynamic (circumstantial), equivalent, and hierarchal. it is essential that the same thesaurus pattern be used for words of different types, such as the names of objects, actions, or people, because this, depending on how the thesaurus pattern is filled, will permit a formalized and non-trivial classification of folklore words to be received. an illustrative part follows the thesaurus part. the last part of the lexical entry represents a. commentary which includes technical as well as remarks about content and which sometimes may be extensive. at the present time, with a varying degree of completeness in the commentary, more than one hundred words in the texts of religious verses and lamentations have been described. among them have been delineated groups of words that designate the sphere of speech (iazyk, recht, imia, golos/glas, slovo, govorit', nazyvat'), basic elements of the human personality (um, razum, dusha, serdtse, telo/plot'), kindred relations (batiushkalotets, matushkalmat'), and spatial elements (doroga, put', more, zemlia) , descriptions of which clearly show differences among genres in a general folklore model of the world. a modified model of the lexical entry has been used for describing the terminology of the spiritual culture of russian confessional groups (old believers, dukhobors, and molokans). s. e. nikitina. institut iazykoznaniia, moscow see fa at 1997 aaass convention it appears that seef a is attracting people to the folklore sessions at aaass. while we had three sessions on folklore and two related sessions at the last convention, some seven sessions have been approved for the next convention. the following people have had panels accepted: james bailey, "aspects of the slavic oral epic tradition"; anne ingram, "ukrainian folklore"; emil draitser, "russian humorous folklore"; george kalbouss, "the slavic and east european heritage in the united states"; jann lacoss,"reflections on childlore: children's folklore as a cultural mirror"; robert rothstein, "twentieth-century readings of traditional russian folklore"; guntis smidchens, "finno ugric identity today." for information about the "peasant consortium" contact christine worobec, department of history, p.d.box 5190, kent state university, kent, dh 442420001. email: cworobec@kentvs.kent.edu. for information about the "popular culture association" write to professor ray b. browne,department of popular culture, bowling green state university. bowling green, oh 43403. telephone: (419) 372-7865 the russian journal "zhivaia starina" from 1890 to 1918 the russian geographic society (st. petersburg) published the journal tlzhivaia starina. ti to the present day its publications offer a source of information about folklore genres, beliefs, mythology, and other aspects of folk culture. in 1994 the state republican center of russian folklore (moscow) revived tlzhivaia starina, ii the main editor being the recently deceased n. i. tolstoy. the editorial board has taken into consideration . the best traditions of its prerevolutionary predecessor. together with articles on classical genres of folk literature, surveys and reviews, a chronicle of events, and bibliographies of new publications occupy an important place. as though in contradiction to the name of the journal, works about contemporary russian folklore are given much space. unlike the old tlzhivaia starina, ii the new publication, which comes out four times a year, is richly illustrated. tlzhivaia starinatl serves as a link between the scholarship of the past and that of the present day. the journal pays particular attention to those scholars who have made the fmest contributions to the study of russian folklore. in the journalls first issue in 1994, articles are devoted to the centenary of the birth of p. g. bogatyrev; in the second issue a. i. nikiforov, who is known for his works about the russian folk tale, is remembered; the third issue for 1995 is dedicated to vi. la. propp; and in the fourth issue for 1995 materials are presented about p. i. riabinin-andreev, one representative from the family of epic singers in zaonezhia. the journal also strives to establish links between russian and world scholarship. for example, b. n. putilov writes about albert lord (1994, no. 2) and t. g; ivanova offers a review about the russian edition of lord's book lithe singer of tales tl (1996, no. 3). russian scholars have also been acquainted with the works of bronislav malinovski (1994, no. 4). almost all issues of hzhivaia sta.ri:da" touch upon folk beliefs, mythology, and rituals, thus reflecting the tone set by n. i. tolstoy in his articles based on common slavic materials (1994, no. 2; 1996, no. 1, 2). mythological personages are at the center of attention in one issue (1996, no. 1); a large section is devoted to mummery (1995, no. 2); and the ritual log ceremonies of various peoples are examined (1995, no. 4). perestroika in russia touched every aspect of the life in the country, including the study of folklore where many previously forbidden subjects were opened to scholarship. for instance, not only pagan ideas, but also christian motifs are now being included among "folk beliefs"; "orthodoxy and folk culture" are the subject of one issue (1994, no. 3); and religious verses (dukhovnye stikhi), whose study was prominent in prerevolutionary scholarship, have now been recognized as belonging to folklore (1994, no. 1, 3; 1995, 1; 1996,1). the journal, responding to trends in the study of folklore in russia today, reflects the interest of scholars in the present day culture of the russian people: contemporary mythological stories among campers (1996, no. 1); anecdotes (1995, no. 1); contemporary legends about petersburg (1995, no. 1); songs among the prisoners of stalinls camps (1995, no. 1); songs of juvenile criminals (1995, no. 1); and children's folklore (1995, no. 2). the spiritual culture of the people is examined not only in its oral, but also in its written form the fourth issue for 1994 presents articles about folk beliefs in old russian literature. however, "zhivaia starina" also covers material culture, something that is evident in the third issue for 1996 where articles appear about the worshiping of crosses at different times and in different regions of russia, as well as works about the semiotic origin of the shroud in the culture of various peoples. one hopes that the revived journal iizhivaia starina ll will have a long and productive existence. tatyana ivanova, pushkin house, petersburg announcements the folklore sector of the russian institute for the history of the arts would welcome enquiries about the participation of american students and folklorists in future expeditions should funding become available. contact m. a. lobanov, russia, 190000, s1. petersburg, isaakievskaia pl., 5, rossiiskii institut istorii iskusstv, sektor folklora. fax: 011n/812/315 -7202. the late st. petersburg folklorist galina gregorevna shapovalova made three films entitled "winter and spring holidays," "summer and fall holidays," and "the wedding ceremony." the films were "staged" by the peasants in one russian village in the northern volga area where she had collected folklore materials. ronelle alexander, james bailey, and pat arant have video copies of the films and pat has translated the running commentary. those interested in purchasing a vhs video of these films should contact viktor ivanovich mikhailov, direktor, audio visual'nyi tsentr sankt­ peterburgskogo universiteta, russia, 199034, st. jonathan perkins, editor dept. of slavic languages and literatures 2134 wescoe hall university of kansas lawrence, ks 66045 petersburg, universitetskaia naberezhnaia 7/9. telephone: (011-78-12) 218-9520. fax: (01178-12) 218-31-84. the cost is $100 per video. arrangements for payment should be made in advance. at the seefa meeting last november natalie kononenko introduced ye1ena and sergei minyonok who are folklorists at the institute of world literature, ran, moscow. they have been carrying on collection work in the smolensk, kaluga, and bryansk provinces under a grant received from earthwatch. volunteers may take part in four expeditions that have been scheduled for the 19971998 season: team 1: june 29 july 12, 1997; team 2: july 16 -30, 1997; team 3: august 2-16, 1997; team 4: january 15-27, 1998. for information contact earthwatch, 680 mount auburn st., p. o. box 9104, watertown, ma 02272-9924. telephone: (617) 926-8200. fax: (617) 926-8532. send e-mail to info@earthwatch.org. you can see their website at http://www.earthwatch.orglxlxminyonok.html. seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 a collection of translations of russian folk songs: . e. e. lineva's visit to america (1892-1896) james bailey, university of wisconsin, madison mikhail lobanov, russian institute for the history of the arts, ran, st. petersburg, russia when evgeniia eduardovna paprits-lineva (1854-1919) emigrated with her husband for political reasons, they first went to et;tgland (1890 to 1892) and then to america where they lived in new york (1892-1896).(1) although she was a trained opera singer who had performed as a contralto in moscow, vienna, budapest, paris, and london, she may have taken an interest in folk songs before leaving russia.(2) while in new york she selected a group of russians living there and organized them into a choir. early on she must have met henry e. krehbiel who was music critic for the new york tribune and at the time was giving public lectures about folk songs. initially, this acqullintance led to joint lecture-concerts in carnegie hall at the end of november and beginning of december 1892.(3) lineva's choir was invited to perform at the international exposition in chicago in 1893 as part of the russian contribution, which also included an exhibit of paintings by russian artists. the choir, which found the means to travel to chicago only after an american philanthropist, charles r. crane, helped sponsor the trip, turned out to be one of the most popular programs at the exposition(4) and subsequently gave concerts in milwaukee, boston, and philadelphia. in connection with her choir's performances, lineva published a collection of translations . entitled russian folk songs as sung by the peo.ple and peasant wedding ceremonies custommy in northern and central russia (chicago, 1893). this volume, which is essentially a scholarly and not a popular publication, consists of "a note on russian folk music" by h. e. krehbiel (pp. 5-9); a .description of the russian peasant wedding (pp. 10-25); translations of twenty seven russian, seven ukrainian, and five sacred songs; and a concluding essay entitled "russian folk-songs" (pp. 53-63). it should also be pointed out that most of the songs have explanatory notes, sometimes rather extensive ones, and that the english in the songs, notes, and final essay reads quite smoothly. lineva's chicago collection, bearing the french spelling of her name (eugenie linefi), has never caught the attention of russian folklorists and consequently supplements knowledge about her work as a collector and investigator of russian folk songs. after lineva returned to russia in 1896, she soon started recording folk songs with a phonograph and from that time published only songs that she herselfhad collected. when she tried to repay the money to crane for the chicago trip of her choir, he sent back double the amount to the russian geographical society with the stipulation that the 24 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 money be used to collect folk songs. lineva received these funds through the st. petersburg song commission and, in 1901. used them for her expedition to collect songs in the cherepovets district of the province ofnovgorod. in the introductions to the two volwnes of songs and melodies that she brought out later.(5) lineva expressed her appreciation to krehbiel for introducing her to the phonograph, for her experience in america which inspired her to collect folk songs. and to crane for financing her expedition in 1901.(6) in the introductions to her two volumes. lineva laid down several principles for collecting. editing. and interpreting the melodies of russian lyric folk songs; these remain valid to the present day. her main innovation was using the phonograph to record songs during a live performance by a choir. this allowed her to show how songs actually consisted of several voices. each of which represented a variation of the main voice. and each of which was developed continuously from the beginning to the end of the song. in this respect, lineva followed iu. n. melgunov who first attempted to demonstrate the "polyphony" (mnogogolosie) typical of russian lyric songs.(1) in. addition. lineva considered that folk songs often retained ancient beliefs and customs. that they were a national treasure. that they could not be explained through the european musical system. and that russian composers should utilize folk songs to create national russian music. she also pointed out that songs should be collected from the finest singers. that the melody and verbal text were subject to improvisation and existed in variants. and that the songs should be studied by chronology and by geographic regions. she distrusted earlier collections because they had been adapted to the european harmonic system and because the verbal texts and melodies were usually "edited, corrected, or improved." she insisted on accmate transcriptions that could be obtained only through sound recordings.(8) beginning in ·1903. she became the secretary of the musical-ethnographical commission and, through it. she helped organize "ethnographic concerts" of peasant singers. in 1906 she was active in founding a folk conservatory in moscow where singers "from the people" were trained and where she herself taught courses about folk music for many years.(9) for these reasons. e. e. lineva occupies a prominent place among the finest russian folk song collectors and musicologists. although reviewers wrote about the concerts of lineva's choir with enthusiasm. they provided no information about the works performed. nevertheless, the collection russian folk songs yields some clues in this regard. "when fate took me to america" (as lineva recalled later). "the idea came to mind in new york to organize lecture concerts for the popularization of russian national music .... bui after i undertook the compilation of the program. i realized that i had little music. then i turned 25 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 to several acquaintances in russia. ..with a request to send me the best collections of songs."(10) by "the best" she apparently had in view those in which the songs had been transcribed most accurately and reliably. unfortunately, the songs that lineva received and published in her american collection have been presented without the melodies and without their sources. comparison of the translations with songs in earlier publications shows that lineva relied largely on published materials, drawing mainly on the two collections of lu. n. melgunov who first had discovered the most feasible means of fixing the extremely complicated polyphony of russian lyric folk songs.(1i) lineva repeatedly paid tribute to melgunov as a collector because he was the first to establish that each singer of a choir perfonns a variant (podgolosok) of the basic melody and that these variants are formed into an original hannony, a feat he accomplished without the aid of sound recording. (12) melgunov took down the songs separately from each participant of the singing group, did not bring the voices together in a score, and presented all the vocallin~ separately.(13) somewhat later, the composer p. i. blaramberg put together a choral score of these individual voices and published a small collection for a cappella singing which was much closer to the true character ofa peasant song.(i4) melgunov's collections were also appealing because they offered a thorough recording of the verbal texts; for instance, the couplets always coincide with the melody whereas in other collections this coordination is often disrupted. among the twenty seven russian songs lineva selected for her collection, she took ten or eleven from melgunov's recordings; perhaps six were taken from blaramberg's arrangements.(15) lineva also had at her disposal the collections of m. a. balakirev, rimsky-korsakov, and k. p. vilboa; in addition, she received from russia a recent study prepared by n. m. lopatin and v. p. prokunin.( 16) she had the older collection of ukrainian songs prepared ·by alois ledlichka (17) and. among the newer ones. the first issues ofm. v. lysenko's collection.(is) in all of these publications, the folk songs were presented according to the manner customary at that time, that is, in the form of a melody for a single voice with piano accompaniment, or, as with lysenko, in an arrangement for chorus, but also with piano accompaniment. although from her later work we know that lineva strove for ethnographic authenticity, we do not knowhow her choir performed these "borrowed" songs during their concerts in america. there also are other puzzles, one example of which is the well known "dubinushka" (no. 19). several songs on the theme of this barge hauler's refrain have been written by poets who have emphasized the liberation of the russian people from oppression ("i have heard many songs in my native land ...••) and were current in a populist and later in an intellectual milieu.(19) an authentic 26 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 "dubinushka" with a peasant melody was published in the collection of lopatin and prokunin where only one couplet of the text is given. in lineva's chicago collection "dubinushka" is presented in a traditional form, but with a longer text consisting of several couplets, something that has no parallel in musical publications before ·1893. one may conjecture that this song was transcribed by lineva in the 1880s before her emigration, or that it was known to one of the participants in the choir. yet another riddle in lineva's american publication concerns the origin of her version of the famous "gloria" (slava, no. 20). lbis song as it is known from the eighteenth-century collection of lvov and prach,(20) traditionally accompanies fortune telling during the christmas season. in the first part of the nineteenth century the poet v. a zhukovskii wrote a "gloria" that celebrates the russian sovereign using the solemn melody. in lineva's collection, "gloria" is transformed from a fortune telling song into a wedding song. since such a change of genres rarely occurs in the russian folklore tradition, one may presume that the work of some unknown poet served as an intermediary. a different problem is presented by the song "i feel like sleeping" (spitsia mne, no. 7) which has not been published along with the music and appears in just three variants collected in the provinces of orel and kursk, the most well known and accessible one being in the p. i. lakushkin collection.(21) although lineva apparently took lakushkin's variant for her chicago publication, we do not know what melody the russian choir used for this song because it, like the other songs, is given without the melody. a similar question concerns the wedding song "match maker" (svatushlw, no. 23) which was recorded in the nineteenth century and has never been published with a melody. the english translation in lineva's chicago collection taken from a song in pushkin's play "the mennaid" (rusallw).(22) besides this, the lyric "match maker" was included by a s. dargomyzhskii in his opera by the same name and became a popular choral song.(23) most likely, it is this operatic excerpt that appeared among the "folk songs" in the repertory oflineva's choir. needless to say, the songs mentioned do not satisfy today's standards for an ethnographic concert. despite these drawbacks, lineva's collection has to be viewed within the context of the recording, publication, and study of folklore of its time. the fact of the matter is that, precisely in her later work, lineva was to contribute much toward the establishment of more professional standards in the study and collection of folklore. although she wanted to convey to the american public information about the history add traditions of the russia of her time through song, the materials she received did not completely satisfy these demands. as a result, she was compelled to depart from ethnographic meticulousness. in spite of this, critics and the public perceived the concerts of the russian choir as authentic folklore presented on the stage of the concert hall. 27 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 the decision was taken to perform a theatrical version of the repertory at the disposal of the russian choir at the chicago exposition. lineva chose the wedding ceremony (24) as a scenario that could connect all the songs in the choir's repertory. in actuality, only a few wedding songs were sung by the choir and even those were taken mainly from the collection of rimsky-korsakov. lineva probably did not have sufficient ethnographic materials to reproduce the wedding ritual adequately. one may therefore conjecture that. for the american public, she may have annotated the "wedding play" in detail and she may have created it partly according to her own observations. partly from information obtained from the people in her choir or other russians living in america. and partly from her own invention. although such an expediency violated the authenticity of the wedding ceremony, one nevertheless should not be too hasty to condemn the scenario. the conditions for changing the decorations, the costumes of the performers, and other stage props, and the desire to acquaint the american public with a maximum number of episodes from the russian peasant wedding could have forced lineva to depart from a conscientious reproduction and to combine elements from various local traditions into a single 'composite work. in her introductory remarks about the russian wedding and in the scenario which is divided into acts and scenes. a peasant marriage is examined from the position of customary law, the economic interests of a patriarchal family, and a history of several marriage practices in russia: marriage through abduction of a girl. the remnants of this custom, and the church blessing. in this regard. lineva may have been familiar with the book of the woman historian a. ia. efimenko, investiptions of the life of the people. issue 1: custouwy law.(25) as would become apparent in her later works, lineva was an excellent observer of life, a trait that is also evident in her description of the peasant wedding in the chicago collection. many small details and ritual actions in the wedding ceremony have been inadequately discussed by russian ethnographers, both before and after her work; consequently lineva's volume can serve as an important source for studying the wedding ritual even today. for example, the bride ties a towel to the arm of the match maker as a silent token of her agreement to the marriage, or at the wedding feast the couple observes the old custom of kissing to make the shouted word "bitter" (gorko) sweet. by the same token, small details of lineva's scenario differ from the concluding parts of a real folk wedding. thus in lineva's essay and also in the scenario it is stated that the parents of the bride and the bride herself: having prepared the table for the arrival of the match makers, sit at the table in festive attire so as to appear at their best for the match makers. in reality the parents of the girl. even if they know that someone is seeking a match with their daughter, always try to pretend that they are not aware of the ttue meaning of the visit. according to ancient peasant views. match making 28 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 was shrouded in secrecy and was accompanied by fear of failure; only later was it gradually converted into a festive occastion for the parents on both sides to get acquainted. lineva followed this development in her scenario when, fu expectation of the match makers, young people with their songs are brought out on the stage as though they have been invited to an evening party. having consented to the match maker's proposal, the bride began to weep and lament before all the guests. such weeping usually took place only after the departure of the match maker and only in the presence of the members of the household. yet another reason for lineva's divergence from ethnographic authenticity in her scenario is the fact that the wedding ceremony could last several days, and even several weeks. for public performances, lineva's choir had to compress episodes that would take place on different days in reality. in order to justify the presence of the bride's girlfriends in the episode about match making, the author has them "express" their scorn to the match maker bec8use he has taken away their friend, and to perform their laments over the bride. although this part does not correspond to events in an actual wedding ritual, the ensuing parts of the scenario more closely approach an authentic ritual. the scenes about how the bride is handed over to the "travelers" (poezzhane the groom's entourage) and about how she is accepted in the home of the groom's parents are ethnographically accurate, although they have been delineated more clearly in the stage version than they are in real life. the essay "russian folk songs," which is cited in the conclusion of the chicago collection, supposedly appeared in frank leslie's popular monthly. but we have not succeeded in finding it. one has an impression that lineva wrote it about herself in the third person. this work is important for studying her biography because it contains facts which have not been included in other works about her life. thus only from this source is it possible to learn that choir directing had attracted lineva since childhood. at fourteen she was chosen assistant director of the church choir in saint catherine's institute for noble girls where she was educated, and after finishing this institution, she served as choir director for two years. in the second half of the 1880s she was director of the student choir at moscow university for five seasons right up to her emigration to england and then to america. thus her creation of a russian choir in america should be perceived in light of these formerly unknown facts as a direct continuation of a vocation which had always appealed to her. most biographical works about lineva, by contrast mention only her career as an opera singer,(26) her last appearances taking place in the bolshoi theater in moscow during the 1882-1883 season. what she did as a musician after this time and before her departure to england becomes known from the chicago collection. 29 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 e.l kann-novikova delineates the second half of the 1880s as the beginning of lineva's interest in russian folk songs and the beginning of her folklore collecting activities.(27) unfortunately, none of (ineva's field materials relating to this period have been discovered and published so we do not know whether such materials exist, whether they have been preserved, or whether the biographer is correct. the information in the essay in the chicago collection confirms kann-novikova's statement. lineva began her fieldwork when she joined a group of wandering pilgrims (/calekiperekhozhie) who begged for alms and sang religious songs (dukhovnye stikhi). as· early as the 1880s she had occasion to visit various places in russia and ukraine, and had an opportunity to hear different local styles of singing. however, the songs in the chicago volume apparently were transcribed by other collectors, thus demonstrating that before her departure from russia she had probably not taken down folk melodies or at least had no transcriptions worthy, in her opinion, of being published. lineva began her publication activities only after she had returned to russia and engaged in fieldwork with a phonograph, beginning ii11897.(28) one may postulate several reasons why e. e. lineva and h. e. krehbiel became acquainted. krehbiel (1854-1923) served for forty three years as music critic of the new york tribune~ he was the author of many books about music, and he was an early advocate of the need to study folk songs seriously.(29) during the 18905 he gave a series of lectures about folk songs and eventually published a volume entitled afro-american folk son~s: a stu<b' in racial and national music (new york, 1914). following the idea of dvorak that afro-american folk songs were created largely in america and that they should be drawn upon by american composers, krehbiel contributed to a still continuing debate over the nature of afro-american music, its sources, and its originality.(30) like lineva, he regarded folk songs as "musical ethnography" and he pleaded for accurately recorded verbal texts and melodies. since krehbiel and lineva shared many of the same attitudes toward folk songs, their collaboration was not accidental. the association with charles r. crane (1858-1939) 8iso resulted from several coincidences. according to the work of l. j. bocage,(31) crane was the son of a wealthy chicago manufacturing family, began traveling around the world at an early age, and visited russia or the soviet union twenty four times, first in 1884 and last in 1937. his interest in russia may have begun because samuel smith, his wife's uncle, lived in russia, helped build the railroad between st. petersburg and moscow, and eventually settled in russia permanently. although he never learned to speak russian, crane took a deep interest in russian liturgical music, long supported a russian choir in st. nicholas cathedral in new yotk, and made a gift of russian church bells to harvard university. crane was a 30 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 noted political leader and philanthropist who supported many activities; for instance, he organized a series of lectures on slavic culture at the university of chicago in the 1900s, inviting maksim kovalevskii, pavel miliukov, and thomas masaryk to take part. for many years he supported the teaching and research activities of one of the early american slavists, samuel harper, who worked at the university of chicago.(32) during one of his trips to russia, crane was introduced to nicholas it, became friends with prince georgii lvov, and met many members of the provisional government in 1917. crane was twice nominated ambassador to russia, but declined both times. he founded and endowed the institute of current wodd affairs in new york city and left three volumes of memoirs along with ten volumes of letters. one would expect that more information about his acquaintance with lineva, her concerts which he attended assiduously, and perhaps her chicago collection of russian folk songs can be discovered in crane's papers. in his study of crane's activities, bocage includes nothing about lineva, but mentions that crane attended a concert of russian folk songs in moscow in june 1917.(33) one would like to believe that crane and lineva met once again, since she was living near moscow at this time. lineva's small volume of english translations of russian folk songs reveals several surprising incidents in the history of russian folldoristics as well as of american-russian cultural relations. at the same time many intriguing gaps remain that can be filled only by extensive study of the materials of h. e. krehbiel and charles r. crane in american archives. one is also inclined to speculate whether krehbiel, who introduced the phonograph to lineva, may have recorded some of the songs performed by her russian choir. in several ways, the chicago collection indicates that lineva had already fonned most of her basic ideas about the characteristics of russian lyric folk songs by this time. notes 1. lineva's life and activities are covered in the monograph by e. kann-novikova, sobiratelnitsa russkilch narodnylch pesen: evj:eniialineva [a collector of russian folk songs: evgeniia lineva], moscow, 1952. in his memoirs, idealv i deistvitelnost' [ideals and reality], berlin, 1930, pp. 80-94, n. a borodin describes the life of the linevs in new york. for more recent studies and publication of archival materials, see two articles by i. i. shevchenko: "k istorii vystuplenii russkogo /chotae. e. linevoi v amerike (1892-1894 gg.)" [toward the history of the appearances ofe. e. lineva's choir in america (1892-1894)], nauko i leultura russkogo zarubezh 'ia. st. petersburg. 1997, pp. 226-43, and "iz istorii moskovskoi narodnoi konservatorii (1906-1918)" [from the history of the moscow folk conservatory (1906-1918)], fo/'k/or i fo/'klorizm. vyp. 2, leningrad, 1989, pp. 80-110. 2. kann-novikova, p. 37. 3. shevchenko, "k istorii," p. 228. 4. in archival materials shevchenko discovered reviews about the performances of lineva's choir and included translations of them in her article "k istorii." 31 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 5. see appendix 1 for a bibliography of pertinent collections of folk songs. lineva's two volumes contain only a small selection of the several hundred songs that she collected in her field worl,6. lineva, velikorusskie. vyp. i, p. xiv, vyp. 2, pp. ii-iii. 7. iu. n. melgunov, russkie oesni nedosredstvenno s folosov naroda zqpisannye is obiasneniiami. vyp.i-2. 8. besides the introductions to her two collections, lineva also elaborated her ideas in her paper "ober neue methoden des folklores in russland," iii. konwess tier intemationalen musikfesellschqft: bericht. vienna, 1909, pp. 233-44. 9. shevchenko, ··lz istorii." 10. e. e. lineva, "iu. n. melgunov kak novator-i:;sledovatel' russkoi narodnoi pesni" (iu. n. melgunov as an innovator and investigator of the russian folk song], russkaia m~kal'naia fazeta. 1903, no. 23124, stlb. 566. 11. see appendix 2 for the possible sources that lineva drew upon for the songs in her chicago . collection. 12. for an article about melgunov, see: m. a lobanov, "vydaiushchiisia issledovatel-fol'klonst' [an outstanding researcher-folklorist], sovetskaia 7ti14-yka.1971, no. 10, pp. 135-39. 13. in melgunov's collections all songs are given in an arrangement for piano. the composer and choir director n. s. klenovskii did this for the first volume and the composer p. i. blaramberg for the second. 14. p. i. blaramberg, 12 russkikh oesen iz sbomikamelpnova. dolozheny na folosa p.l. blarambergom. 15. after melgunov learned about the invitation of her choir to the chicago exposition, he planned to come to chicago and laid out for her the publication in america of his autobiography and memoirs, in particular those about franz list. but this was not fated to take place; during her stay in chicago lineva learned about melgunov's death. see her article: "iu. n. melgunov." 16. n. m. lopatin and v. p. prokunin, sbomik russkikh narodnvkh liricheskikhpesen. 1-2. 17. alois iedlichka, sobraniie malorossiiskikh narodnykh pesen. 1. 17. m. v. lisenko, zbimyk uuaiins'kilch pisen. 1-2. 19. v. i. bogdanov, "dubinushka," in pesni russkilchpoetov. ed. v. e. gusev, vol. 2, leningrad, 1988, no. 571 [1865]; a a olkhina, ··dubinushka," in pesni russkilch doetov.vol. 2, no. 610 [1870s]. yet another text of "dubinushka, " which is close to the folk song version, belongs to n. a panov, pesni russkilchpoetov. no. 617 [1895]. 20. nikolai lvov and ivan prach, a collection of russian folk soilis. facsimile pp. 297-98 ("uzh kak slava tebe, bozhe, na nebesi" [glory to you, god, in the heavens)). the melody has been used by numerous composers, including beethoven; see facsimile p. 439. 21. pesni. sobrannye p. v. kireevskim: zqpisi p. i. lakushkina. vol. 2, no. 93. 22. a s. pushk:in, "rusalka," polnoe sobranie sochinenii. vol. 5, moscow, 1957, scene "kniazheskii terem, " pp. 436-37. 23. curiously lineva at a later time heard a version of"svatushka" that folk singers had transfonned from the chorus in dargomuzhii's opera. see: e. lineva, ··zhiva ii narodnaia pesnia?" [is the folk song alive?], russkie vedomd.'.ti.no. 31, january 31, 1903, p. 3. 24. among the numerous stu~es of the wedding ceremony, see the following: n. p. kolpakova, lirika russko; svadbv [lyrics of the russian wedding], leningrad, 1973, pp. 241-64, and the articles in the volume russkii narodnyi svadebnyi obriad [the russian folk wedding ritual], 005. k. v. chistov and t. a bemshtam, leningrad, 1978. 25. lssledovaniia narodnoi zhizni. ~pusk 1. obvchnoe provo. moscow, 1884. 26. in the essay being examined from the chicago collection (p. 59) some hitherto unknown but curious facts have been communicated about the biography oflineva as a singer. for instance, her 32 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 perfonnance without accompaniment of the folk lyric "luehinushlui' so pleased english listeners that she started thin icingabout organizing a russian choir. 27. kann-novikova, p. 37. 28. eugenie linea: "ober neue methoden, " p. 235. 29. in particular see the obituary by richard aldrich, "henry edward krehbiel." music and letters. vol. 4, no. 3 (july, 1923), pp. 266-68 .. 30. for infonnation about krehbiel's role in this controversy, see: d. k. wilgus, anelo-american folkson~ scholarship since 1898. new brunswick, nj, 1959, pp. 345-64, and guthrie p. ramsey, jr., "cosmopolitan or provincial," black music research journal. vol. 16, no. 1 (spring. 1996), pp. 1142. 31. l. j. bocage, the public career of charles r. crane. fordham university ph.d., 1962. 32. samuel harper, the russia i believe in. chicago, 1945. 33. bocage, p. 131. appendix 1. collections of folk songs m. a. baiakirev, sbornik russkikh narodnykh pesen. sostav/ennyi m a. balakirel!j'l1l[collection of russian folk songs, compiled by m. a. balakirev], st. petersburg. 1866. o. i. blaramberg. 12 russkikh pesen iz sbornika me/gunova o%zhenv na ~%sa p. 1b/arambe,¥om [12 russian songs from the collection ofmelgunov set to voices by p. i. blaramberg], moscow, 1888. p. i. iakushkin, pesni. sobrannye p. v. kireevskim: zqpisi p. j.lakushkina [songs collected by p. v. kireevskii; recordings ofp. i. iakushkin], vol. 2, leningrad, 1986. aloiz ledlichka, sobranie ma/orossiiskikh narodnykh pesen [collection of little-russian folk songs], ehast i, st. petersburg. 1860. e. lineva, ve/ikorusskie pesni v narodnoi t:amlonizatsii [great-russian songs in their folk harmonization], vyp. 1~2,st. petersburg. 1904-1909. m. lysenko, zbimyk ukraiins'kikh pisen' zibrav i u nory zaviv m lvsenko [collection of ukrainian. songs transcribed and set to music by m. lisenko], pershii vypusk, kyivand odesa, 1890; druhyi vypusk, kyiv, 1891. n. m. lopatin and b. p. prokunin, sbornik russkikh narodnykh iirieheskikh desen [collection of russian folk lyric songs], chasti 1-2, moscow, 1889. nikolai lvov and ivan prach, a collection of russian folk songs. ed. m. n. brown, ann arbor, 1987 [1790]. . lu. n. melgunov, russkie pesni neposredstvenno s j:%sov naroda zqpisannve is obiasneniiami [russian songs transcribed directly from the voices of the people and with explanations], vyp. i, moscow, 1879, vyp. 2, st. petersburg. 1885. n. a. rimsky-korsakov, sbornik russkikh narodnykh pesen [collection of russian folk songs], chast i, st. petersburg. 1876, cbast 2, st. petersburg. 1877.. k. vilboa, russkiie narodnye desni. zapisannye s narodnoj:o na.,pevai arranzhirovannve dlia odnoj:o j:%sa s akkomoanementom (ortepiano k vi/boa [russian folk songs transcribed from the folk melody and arranged for single voice with piano accompaniment by k. vilboa], st. petersburg. 1860. appendix 2. sources of the songs in linev a's collection lineva no. 1 melgun.ov i no. 1 or 2, balamberg no. 9: lineva no. 2 melgunov nno. 7; lineva no. 3 melgunov i no. 4; lineva no. 4 balakirev no. 3; lineva no. 5 melgunov i no. 8; lineva no. 6 melgunov i no. 9 (a or b); lineva no. 7 lakushkin nno. 93; lineva no. 8 vilboa no. 59; lineva no. 9 lopatin and prokunin no. 83; lineva no. 10 melgunov n no. 15 (a or b); lineva no. 11 melgunov i no. 7; lineva no. 12 lopatin and prokunin no. 86; lineva no. 13 melgunov i nc 18; lineva no. 14 lopatin and prokunin no. 57; lineva no. 15 1; lineva no. 16 melgunov n no. 14; 33 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 lineva no. 17 balakirev do. 36 and melgunov i no. 29; lineva no. 18 melgunov i no. 30; lineva no. 19 1; linevano.-20 'i;linevano. 21 balakirevno. 8. 2nd variant of text; linevano. 22rimskii-korsakov no. 91; lineva no. 23 pushkin "rusaika" and dargomyzhskii "rusaika"; lineva no. 24 rimskii-korsakov no. 56; lineva no. 25 rimskii-korsakov no. 75; lineva no. 26 vilboa no. 41; lineva no. 27 rimskii-korsakov no. 88; lineva no. 28 iedlichka i no. 38; lineva no. 29 1 (very popular); lineva no. 30 'i; lineva no.31 lysenko i no. 38; lineva no. 32 lysenko i no. 11; lineva no. 33 lysenko nno. 6; lineva no. 34 lysenko i no. 13; lineva no. 35-37 1; lineva no. 38 words by kheraskov and music by bortnianskii; lineva no. 39 lord's prayer. 34 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 d,avdlkas russian children's taunts (1) balina weiss, university of massachusetts, amherst the drazni/ka· is a short, humorous verse used by children to tease, taunt and play pranks on other children (and only rarely on adults). the origins of the draznilka are rooted in adult folklore in the ancient tradition of nicknames and in traditional taooting rhymes and songs used in wedding ceremonies.(2) the coarse humor and the use of nonsense rhymes, inversions, constant epithets and other fommlaic devices also point to skomoroshina, nebylitsa and raeshnik as sources of drazni/kas.(3) the drazni/ka raises the general epistemological question of how to define children's folklore: what are its sources, who are its creators and who are its performers. this is a particularly important question, since many russian sources include under the headings of children's folklore compositions by adults, such as poteshka, pribautka(4) and ko/ybel'naia pesnia (lullaby). some of the genres that fell into disuse among adults "descended" from adult literatme and oral tradition and became subject to creative adaptation by children through a process of genre transformation in children's games, story-telling, or the draznilka.(5) early students and collectors of children's folklore commented on the problem of trying to define the boundaries that separate adult from children's folklore. pavel shein wrote that children's humorous verse (he called it pribautka) constituted the most authentic examples of children's folklore, since the child and not the adult was the creator and performer. shein's description of the drazni/ka is still useful today: [the drazni/ka is] a pribautka, which mischievous small children use to poke fun at each other and at adults, making fun of their names, ... their station and ... their physical shortcomings, as well as their non-russian origins and so on, often without even having any reason, just for the love of word-play.( 6) this last comment about a child's natural affinity for playing with words, written in the second half of the nineteenth century, is wholly in accord with the views of modem scholarship. a century later, iona and peter opie made a similar observation, as did others who noted that children use rhymes not only for practical reasons, to help them remember, but for the deeply ingrained need to play with words and to experiment with language.(7) in the 1920s georgii vinogradov introduced the term "children's satiric lyrics" (detskaia satiricheskaia /irika) in his groundbreaking study under the same name. even though the study has ~ widely quoted and praised, the term did not take root in soviet scholarship. kapitsa rejected vinogradov's terminology and like many others after him, used the generic drazni/ka to refer to the 35 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 rhymes.(8) most russian collections of the draznilko present a special problem. they rely heavily on early somces from the nineteenth centuiy, which means that they draw almost exclusively on material collected from villages and the provinces. soviet collections also tend to favor traditional somces of folklore, the village and provincial towns, and underrepresent large urban centers. moreover, the draznilko created pedagogical and philosophical problems for soviet scholars; the crude language and obvious delight children took in inflicting pain on their chosen victims seemed to point to the amoral nature of children. vinogradov, addressing this very issue in his writing, pointed out that children's taunts were likely to be more direct and more painful because young children do not use irony to attenuate the attack and because children are more prone than adults to use crude language.(9) nevertheless, he insisted on unflinching honesty and faithful recording of children's behavior in their natmal environment; he also was against the elision of scatological references and obscenities from children's speech and the use of dots to replace phrases or ideas offensive to adults.(io) vinogradov's position was an exception. in soviet collections, as well as in some in post-soviet ones, offending words are excluded along with the texts in which they occur. some scholars disparaged the draznilko as being little more than a vehicle for obscenities.( ii) others were made uncomfortable by the evidence of aggression and references to the negative aspects of everyday life. in his introduction to a collection of folkloric texts, vladimir bakhtin states that in most draznilkos the target is not an individual with a particular physical or mental trait over which he has no control, but undesirable social behavior; thus the draznilko can be viewed as a tool for behavior modification: "the children as a group instill in themselves and each other the rules of good behavior. "(12) and mikhail mel'nikov went even further in denying the negativism of the draznilko: draznilkos attacking ethnic dignity have disappeared from the repertoire of soviet children ... [along with] texts about. ..lice, and ...poverty, that is, everything that is unfamiliar to today's children.( 13) function and uses of draznilkas while the draznilko has roots in adult folklore, specifically, in the tradition of assigning nicknames, important differences also occur. nicknames are attached to an individual as a pertnanent epithet, while the use of a draznilko is tied to a particular occasion.(14) moreover, nicknames can be used in place of proper names in conversations about the person, while draznilko cannot be. (cf. the nickname ivan the terrible and the draznilko andrei-vorobei.) nicknames are frequently used behind a person's back, while a draznilko has to be said directly to the victim's face.(15) the draznilko can cover a rather wide range of aggressive behavior: from mild, friendly 36 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 alesha-balesha, [hislyour] mother is no good.(18) ribbing to "ritualized taunts~ between competing groups of children (similar to the african-american "dozens") to grievous insults that serve as a prelude to physical violence. teasing, or a "license to joke," is based on a "joking relationship" between two individuals (or groups); it can be interpreted as a symbolic inversion of a real message.(16) a teasing droznilko tends to bridge the distance between two players and to emphasize equality between them. a teasing draznilko directed at two friends acknowledges the strong bond between them and can be interpreted as a positive statement: boba s kokoi, boba and koka koko c boboi koka and boba pami udalye: are brave lads. boba kuritsa slepaia, boba is blind as a bat koko misko supovaia, koka is like a soup bowl boba angel, bobo bog boba is like an angel, i izodrannyi sapog. boba is like god and a worn out boot.( 17) an even cruder example can be interpreted as having a positive meaning, since it emphasizes the friendship between two boys: "[vot idutj dva akrobata: odin jehui,drugoi lopata" (here are two acrobats: one is a dick and the other a spade.) a teasing draznilko can be used to cement a new friendship as in the following telling example from vinogradov: . girls sometimes like to use an affectionately jocular tone in their conversations. "let's see, how can i needle you?" a sevenor eight-year-old girl pensively asks [her new friend] olia. and, after a moment...she quickly repeated in a sing-song fashion the non-offensive line: "olia-bolia, olia-bolia" ... the nickname alesha-balesha was born in the same way ...as was a jocular ditty from the same village: alesha-balesha, mat' nekhorosha. in contrast to the teasing draznilko, a taunt is an expression of aggression, a deliberate insult meant to hurt and publicly humilate another person. a taunting draznilka tends to reinforce hierarchical order within the group. above all, it creates an insmmountable gap between the aggressor, whose moral or physical superiority is asserted, and the designated victim.(19) most draznilka-taunts are directed against an individual child and focus on physical or mental shortcomings: "cross-eyed," "stupid," "red-head" are common insults. the draznilko also derides undesirable behavior, e.g., "iabeda-goviadina," "plaksa-vaksa," "zhadina-pomadina" (tattle-tale, a cry-baby, a greedy child, respectively). among younger children, who still belong to sexually segregated groups and have not yet begun to date, one of the most common and painfully embarrassing taunts is to pair a boy and a girl and call them bride and groom as "ti/i-tili-testoizhenikh i nevesta" (tili-tili, dough! 37 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 here are the bride and groom). a child who participates eagerly in the activities promoted by adults is often viewed as a traitor. belonging to a govemment-(adult)-sanctioned group, in other words, being seen as part of the "adult establishment" will earn a heap of scorn: "predsedadulia, dulia, dulia!" (cbaindan-fig, fig, fig) (directed against a good student, presumably someone active in school organizations, hence "predsedater). this occurs in another taunt from soviet times: oktiabrenok, riol'ehikpetia, little"octobrist peter, podavilsia pri minete, choked while "eating". a posmertno govoriat, it's rumored that after isk/iuehen iz oktiabriat. he died, he was kicked out of the october organization.(20) taunts ridiculing individuals can be expanded to include an entire family, father, mother, grandparents. it must be noted, however, that the draznilko rarely targets adults. some draznilkos focus on adults in particular professions and occupations. for example, priests are a common subject of derision, as in a very popular ditty: grom gremit, zemlia triasietsia, pop no kuritse nesetsia. thunder roars the ground is shaking, the priest is galloping on a hen. most taunts, however, challenge adults and adult authority indirectly by breaking taboos and the rules of "good" behavior expected of children through the use of parody, crude expressions and references to genitalia. both adults and children can be ridiculed for belonging to a particular ethnic group as in the following taunt: "evrei po/no zhopa ehervei," (jew with an ass full of worms), or, directed at another group, "armiashka v zhope dereviashka," (armenian with a piece of wood in the ass ).(21) some insults have literary sources, drawn from the names of folkloric heroes or literary characters.(22) a little boy with a name like ll'ia could be called jokingly li'ia-prorok (the prophet elijah) or taunted as 1/'ia muromets, ll'ia ofmurom no zhope 7pugovits. with 7 buttons on his ass.(23) a spat between two boys can grow to involve other children and lead to a verbal contest or duel between opposing sides. the insults traded are delivered in a sing-song unison with increasingly louder voices as each group tries to drown out its opponent. the stand-off lasts until children exhaust their creative and physical resources.(24) structure of draznilkas drazni/kos are mymed, epigrammatic verses, usually no longer than six lines. the drazni/ko, 38 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 baba-yaga with a leg of bone with a hooked nose with a head like a stump with an ass like a box.(30) like other fonns of folklore, is built on fonnulas: cliches, stock expressions, snippets from popular songs. rhymes, or epithetic pairs, that serve as building blocks in creating a new draznilka. paradoxically. it is the very natme of the cliche that makes improvisation and endless variability possible.(25) these ready-made formulas, moreover. facilitate communication among children and help them comprehend and cope with the "ridiculousness of life ... [and] the absurdity of the adult world" around them.(26) vinogradov described three types of teasers: the draznilka a rhymed couplet based on an expanded nickname (name-epithet combination); izdevka a taunt, a more hostile draznilka, usually 3-6 lines long; and a poddevka a verbal prank based on questions and answers. draznilka is a generic term applied to the first two groups and sometimes includes verbal pranks as well. the draznilka is usually based on rhymed nicknames a binmy construction which is a common feature of russian folklore. rhymed nicknames us~y consist of proper name-epithet combination with an obligatory internal rhyme. at the heart of such combinations is wordplay based on similarly sounding yet semantically unrelated words. a name can be paired with another noun "lvan-bolvan" (ivan-blockhead), "vitia-titian (vitia-teat); with a variation of the same name"vasia-vasenok" or with a similar sounding name "sema-eroma."(27) the epithet in the paired combination can also be a nonsense word, as in "fedia-media." this. in fact, is the most productive means of rhymed-nickname formation in the draznilka. the epithet is derived from the proper name by replacing the first consonant by one or sometimes two other consonants. if the word begins with a vowel, one or two consonants are added. as in "olia-bolia. "(28) the paired unit does not always have to contain a proper name. it can be replaced by a noun denoting some trait, usually a negative one:(29) "zhadina-goviadina." (stingy-beef) "reva-korova" (cry-baby-cow) or the more fanciful "predsedadulia, dulia dulia." a clever porbnanteau creation from predsedatel' (chairman) and dulia (fig). such pairs of common nouns can be used by themselves as a draznilka. especially when it is repeated several times in a sing-song fashion and very loudly to drown out protest. a taunting draznilka-izdevka is derived through the process of accretion, when the child extends the epithet in the paired nickname by piling up additional modifiers; as the verse lengthens, the dramilka gains in strength: babaiaga kostianaia noga nos kriuchkom golova suchkom zhopa iashchichkom 39 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 baba-yaga is of course a common nickname applied to any old(er), mean woman. lines 3-5 transform a widely-known and rather boring draznilko (lines 1-2 borrowed from folktales) into a funny, biting taunt the paired unit usually appears in the opening line of the verse, where it sets the rhythm. but its location is not fixed, and it can appear in the middle or in final position. moreover, the pair itself can be split: jdi priamo. priamo-priamo, go straight ahead where tam bol'shaia iama, you'll find a large pit tam zhivet boris, boris, the chairman predsedotel'dokhlykh krys, of dead rats, lives there a zhena ego larisa with his wife larisa, zamechatel'naia krysa. who is a splendid rat herself. here we have a popular pairing "boris predsedotel' dokhlykh krys" and "larisazamechatel'naia krysa" inserted in the middle and end of a draznilko; internal rhymes are turned inside out as it were to mark the ends of lines: boris/krys, larisa/krysa. a rhymed nickname is frequently developed to include another set of modifiers. such extended epithetic pairs can appear as a list of undesirable traits, as in anna-banna, anna [bath]tubby vshivyi bok lice-infested [side] tit'ki miagki with teats as soft kok klubok. as a ball ofyam.(31) most extended epithetic pairs are realized as rhymed couplets: "babayaga/kostianaia noga". other lines or couplets can be added and tied with simple rhymes: aabb; aabbcc, or aabbb and aabbc are the most common rhyme schemes.(32) as the stanza lengthens, the epigrammatic draznilko changes and acquires a narrative character; direct or rhetorical questions (and even rhetorical answers) are frequently employed devices:(33) reva-korova, cry-baby cow doi moloko. give [melus] some milk. skol'ko stoit? how much does it cost? dva piatako. two nickels. humor, rhythm and rhyme are the sine qua non of the drazni/ko. humor is achieved in a variety of ways. rhyme, unusual combinations of disparate elements and hyperbole are perhaps the most commonly used devices in achieving a comic effect: iasha, iasha ne balui iasha, iasha don't kid around a to slon otkusit jehui. or an elephant will bite off your dick.34 the draznilko has a strong rhythmic structure and regular beats. although many collectors 40 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 refer to the draznillca as a ditty (pesenlca). vinogradov describes it as "choral poetry". he points out that children discriminate between chanted texts that rely on precise meter and rhythm. such as counting rhymes. and texts that are executed in a sing-song. such as the draznilka. it is not unusual to find irregularities in the rhythm and meter of the draznilka that would not be tolerated in counting-out rhymes. however a child singing or reciting a draznilka in a sing-song will readily make up for missing beats by adding a syllable or lengthening a vowel.(35) group perfonnance chanting in unison is an important component of taunts. as are sjjecial gestures. rhythmic movements and the skipping or hopping that frequently accompany the draznillca.(36) and finally. as has been demonstrated, the draznillca cannot exist without rhyme. rhyme binds together absurd combinations and "underscores the unreal. made-up and ludicrous [shutovskogo] elements in the text "(37) in addition to playing a crucial role in the structure of the draznilka. rhyme acts both as a conservative force. and as a dynamic device, the very feature that allows a child to adapt a shop-worn expression to a particular situation within formulaic constraints.(38) the efficacy of an adult joke depends on delivery and timing. in the draznillca. rhyme plays a similar role; it is what makes a draznillca work.(39) "zhid parkhatyi" (lousy jew) is a common insult, but it takes a rhyme to turn it into a draznillca: "zhyd parkhatyilnomer piatyi. " which is realized here as a rhymed couplet. an acquaintance. a redhead, remembers the following taunt as the one that caused her the most pain: "ryzhaia psina. bez benzina!" (red-head doglbitch, without gasoline). she could understand the first part, but "why 'bez benzina'?" she asked plaintively. indeed, her tormentor effectively used the rhyme to bring together two semantically unrelated phrases. the unexpected combination and the rhyme heightened both the hwnor and the derision and increased the pain. verbal tricks (catch rhymes) are a special form of victimization. as in the draznillca. verbal tricks depend on rhymes; the victim is set up so that he or she falls for a false premise.(40) the chosen victim is weaker. usually younger. and less experienced than the aggressor. moreover. the same trick cannot be played twice on the same victim. tricks can also be accompanied by a physical action: -skazhi idop. -say "bedbug" -klop. -bedbug -po lbu khlop! -bang your head! [slapping the head]. the structure of the draznillca is stable: there is a great consistency and regularity among the vast number of examples across many generations. children rely on a fairly small repertoire of ready-made "derision formulas. " that is. well-known texts of jeers and taunts, in which a word or a phrase can be replaced by another to fit a particular situation. a child's creativity and originality are 41 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 expressedm a particularly apt choice and adaptation of a ready-made formula to a given situation and in a felicitous combination ofmaterials borrowed from various sources.(41) a successfuldraznilka will make its victim feel singled-out and isolated, even though it is made up almost entirely of cliches and stereotypical images: the tearful child tends to feel that the calls are entirely personal; newly made up to apply only to him. he wonders if he will ever escape from the shame of the hateful verses ...yet, newly made-up as the children often believe these verses to be, most of them have been helping tears to flow faster for generations.( 42) it is common to find the same line appearing in different draznilkas: "tebia/ee liubit muzykant" is a popular ending. equally widespread are echoes of well-established lines: the above-cited example "podavilsia pri minete" is an updated version of "govnom podavilsia." children often resort to popular songs in creating new draznilkas. the chastushka (ditty) and hmnorous "novelty" song. which like the draznilka can be crude and funny, are especially well-suited for such use.(43) in odesa a popular draznilka addressed to an overweight jewish child in the 1950s was: 1a nikomu ne dam, i won't give away [food] to anyone, pust' kushaet abram, let abram eat, pust' budet zhimyi may he be fat i zdorovyi kak baran. and healthylbig as a ram. these lines are borrowed from the refrain of a song popular in odesa. "starushka ne spesha. dorozhku pereshla ... " (an old woman slowly crossed the street). in a draznilka we know who is being attacked, but we can only surmise who the aggressor is. one example of an identifiable male voice is the following: "na/osha, dva rublia i nasha" natasha, two rubles and she's ours. "ours" here clearly refers to boys. overall, however, the draznllka does not have an easily identifiable male or female voice. vinogradov associated friendly jocular teasing. like the "olia-bolia" example cited earlier, with girls. virtanen, in her study of finnish children's lore based on 30,000 samples collected from 6to 18-year-olds, observes that, by and large, girls tease other girls while boys torment other boys. erotic and sexual teasing. she writes, are the girls' "special province".(44) her study, however, does not include truly obscene taunts and it is difficult to imagine most girls yelling: prikhodi ko mne alesha come visit with me, alesha, u menia pizda khorosha! fve got a nice cunt! as far as obscene rhymes are concerned, girls are frequently passive consumers of a culture shared with boys. thus, while both sexes could recite a ditty popular in odesa in the 1950s: "khui i pizdajbrat i sestra" (dick and cunt are brother and sister), only boys could be seen scribbling the 42 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 kat'ka stupid procedure consists of three parts, a [radiator] fan, a car battery and a gear-box.(47) graffitti on the walls of buildings. similarly, while both boys and girls knew a bawdy parody of the 1920's street song "tsiplenok zharenyi ... " (fried chick], only boys would indulge in a public perfonnance. the identity of the speaker is more often revealed in a teaser-rejoinder, as in the following example, where the speaker is intentionally misinterpreting "nakhaf' (boor) and turning it into "makhaf' (masculine fonn of "waved"): [to an insult ending in "nakhal!" (a boor)] "ne makhal. a dirizher! " i did not wave; i am a conductor! an identifiably female voice can be heard in the response of a girl who was probably called "dura" (stupid) and who in turn calls her tonnentor "sop/ivyi nos" (snot-nose): 1a durochka, snegurochka, i am a stupid snowmaiden, moi papa-ded moroz, uncle frost is my daddy, a mamochka fialochka, my mother is a violet, a ty sop/ivyi nos. and you are a snot-nose. as can be seen from the above examples, the target of a draznilka is not entirely without resources. the chosen victim can use a draznilka counter-taunt to turn the table and mock his or her tormentor. in answer to "mishka medv.ed'inauchi menia perdet" (mishka-bearl teach me how to fart) one can say: 1apemu, ty poimai. i will fart, and you catch it. nikomu ne otdavai. don't give it away to anyone.(45) a boy or girl may choose to use a magical incantation to undo the evil effect of a jeer: shel shel krokodil a crocodile walked by, tvoe slovo proglotil, he swallowed your word, a moe ostavil but he let my word stand i pechat' postavil. and sealed it. the draznilka' unlike other fonns of children's satire, contains very few references to the realia of every-day life or to social interactions among children. vinogradov sought an explanation for this in the fact that the draznilka, as a rule, is directed ag8inst an individual, not against an enemy group or an abstract system.( 46) the soviet draznilka contains little detail that reflects the society in which the children were raised. references to city life, work in the factory, modem technology are not very common. one example with references to soviet industrial society is a draznilka composed, as it were, from spare parts: kat'ka dura protsedura, sostoit iz trekh chastei, ventilator, kumulator i koroboka skorostei. 43 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 another example reflects soviet bureaucracy: zhenia, zhenia zhenia, zhenia zhenotde/! women's section! (48) the widespread crises of the 1920's gave rise to a draznilka-chastushka with indirect references to poverty and deprivation: fu-ty nu-ty, fie, fie on you, lapti novye obuty. she is wearing new slippers. lapti novy, her slippers are new, piatki goly, but her heels are bare soma /chodit bosiakom. and she walks barefoot.(49) bezprizomiki, the children lost and orphaned in the wake ofwwi and later during the civil war, rode trains under cars, and in coal boxes. the following draznilka is directed at a "voobrazhulia" (braggard) who has a fancy hat, but leads the life of a vagabond voobrazhulia pervyi sort, hey, first class braggard kudo edesh'? na kurortl where're you going? to the spa? shapochka s pumponchikom your hat has a pompon edesh' pod vagonchikom. but you're riding under a car.(50) in the last ten to fifteen years we have witnessed trends that may spell the end of the draznilka in its present form. a relatively new form of satire has become popular among elementary-school-age children and young adolescents. the origins of "sadistic verses" (sadistskie stishla) are literary and urban; they are quite distinct from the draznilka. it is easy to find areas, however, where both overlap. we need only to replace the impersonal mal'chik (boy) or devochka (girl) that populate "sadistic verses" with, for example, fedia to turn it into a draznilka: malenkii mal'chik [fediaj igral v vodolaza a little boy [fedia] was playing diver smelo spuskalsia no dno unitaza, he boldly dived to the bottom of the toilet bowl dobraia teta nazhala pedal' a nice auntie stepped on the flush-pedal mal'chik [fediaj umchalsia vpodvodnuiu and the little boy [fedia] disappeared under the dal'. (51) water. perhaps what we are witnessing is a process of transforming the draznilka into a form with a darker and more cynical world view. notes 1. i wish to thank natalie kononenko for her encouragement, james bailey and snejana tempest for their helpful comments, roman and irina yakub for updating my obsolete arsenal of draznilkas and robert a rothstein for his indispensable help. 2. james bailey, three russian lyric folk song meters (columbus, ohio: slavica publishing, inc., 1993), p. 203. 3. skomoroshino satirical or humorous epic songs or tales of russian minstrels (skomorokhs); works of mixed genres that often parody the style and characters of russian bylinas (epic heroic 44 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 songs). russell zguta described these as "nonheroic" epic songs. see r. zguta russian mid!;trelshistoty of the skomorokhi (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 1978), pp. 92-98. nebylitsa "humorous plotless skomoroshina," long considered to be too trivial for the adult world, is particularly closely associated with children's literature and children's !;jlklore. l.m. lvleva, "skoromoshiny" in siavianskii fol'k/or (moscow: nauka, 1972), pp. 12, -122. raeshnik or raekhumorous vers libre with varying meter and length of lines tied together with paired rhymes: aabb, etc. 4. poteshka and pribautka refer to nurseiy rhymes. the poteshka is accompanied by physical activity, such as touching, counting or massaging different parts of the child's body. the distinction between the two can be quite murky. nurseiy rhymes of all kinds, as well as lullabies, belong to what g. s. vinogradov aptly named poeziia pestovania (poetry of nuituring the child with tender, loving care) orfol'klor materinstva (folklore of motherhood). cited by 0.1kapitsa in detskii fol'klor [children's folklore] (leningrad: priboi, 1928). pp. 52-53. 5. e. v. pomerantseva, 0 fusskomfol'klore jf'n russian folklore] (moscow: nauka, 1977), p. 70; g. s. vinogradov, "detskaia saliricheskaia iirijw" [children's satirical lyrics ] in sibirskaia zhivaia starina 3-4 (1925), 66. 6. cited by vinogradov, p. 67. 7. "[t]he rhymes expressing general dislike have an impersonal air. one has a feeling ...that the children are being rude just for the fun of being rude." lona opie and peter opie, the lore and language of schoolchildren (london: oxford university press, 1973 [1959]), p. 175. 8. kapitsa p. 109. 9. vinogradov, p. 76. 10. vinogradov, p. 95. 11. v. p. anikin, russkoe narodnoe poeticheskoe tvorchestvo [rdssian folk poetiy] (leningrad: prosveshchenie, 1987), p. 364. 12. v. bakhtin, skazki. pesni. chastushki. prislov'ia lenins:radskoi oblasti [faiiy tales, songs, ditties, sayings of the leningrad region] (leningrad: lenizdad, 1982),p. 471. 13. m. mel'nikov, russkii detskii fol'k/or [russian children's folklore] (moscow: prosveshchenie, 1987), p. 68. 14. mel'nikov, p. 66. 15. cfm. jorgensen, "teasers and pranks" in children's folklore a source book. ed. b. sutton-smith et al. (new york: garland publishing inc., 1995), p. 222. 16. jorgensen, p. 220; also j. mechling, "children's folklore" in folk groups and folklore genres. ed. e. oring (utah: utah university press, 1986), p.104. 17. vinogrado~, p. 101. 18. vinogradov, p. 74. 19. cf. mechling, p. 104. 20. m. armalinskii, (comp), detskii eroticheskii fol'k/or [children's erotic folklore] (minneapolis: m.1.p. company, 1995). p. 36. this is a more obscene version of a popular draznilkacited by a. n. martynova, comp., detskii poeticheskii fol'klor. antolo~ia [children's poetic folklore. an anthology] (sl. petersburg: dmitrii bulanin, 1997), p. 281: vas'ka-vasenok vas'kavasenok khudoi porosionok poor piggy na kamushke rodilsia was born on a rock govnom podavilsia and choked on a piece of shil. 21. armalinskii, p. 82. 22. martynova, p. 292; v. a. vasilenko, rob izuchenii sovremennogo detskogo fol'k/ora" [on the study of contempotaiy children's folklore] in sovremennyi fusskiifol'k/or. ed. e. v. pomerantseva (moscow: nauka, 1966), pp. 192-3; also vinogradov. 45 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 23. vinogradov, p. 75. 24. for a detailed description see vinogradov, pp. 69 if 25. vinogradov, p. 77; also g.!. mal'tsev, traditsionnye formu/v russkoi narodnoi neobriadovoi liriki [traditional formulas of russian non-ritual folk lyric poetry] (leningrad: nauka, 1989), pp. 13, 43-44. cf. ivleva's comments on the chain-like structure of the nebylitsa: they are built of discrete components with vmying contents. such a chain can be broken off at any link and other links can be added. the structure of the nebylitsa accounts for its dynamic character and makes improvisation possible (p.122). 26. opie & opie, p. 18. 27. vinogradov, p. 78. 28. see e. a. zemskaia, "iazykovaia igra" [word play] in russkaia raz~ovomaia rech' (moscow: nauka, 1983), pp. 193-194, on "s/ovo-ekho" and parallel constructions in turkic languages and l. virtanen, "children's lore," shldia fennica 22 (1978), pp.62-63, on rhymed nicknames in finnish taunts. roman" noveishaia russkaia poeziia" [the latest russian poetry] in his raboty po poetike (moscow: progress, 1987 [1921]), pp. 271-316. english speakers are familiar with this process from the yiddish-based structure, where "shm" replaces the initial consonant or consonants: "president-shmesident. " 29. vinogradov, p. 77. 30. vinogradov, p. 100. 31. vinogradov, p. 97. 32. for more details see vinogradov, pp. 79-84. 33. vinogradov, p. 70. 34. annalinskii, p. 36 .. 35. vinogradov, pp. 80-81. one of the most readily recognizable american taunts dispenses with the text altogether and is based on a chanted melody: nya-nya, nya-nya, nya-nya. 36. d. s. likhachev, "smekh kalemirovozzrenie" [laughter as worldview] in "smekhovoi mir" drevnei rusi (leningrad: nauka, 1976), p. 64; also virtanen, pp. 80-81. 37. likhachev, pp. 64. 38. mechling, p. 109. 39. cf. j. sherman and t.k.f. weisskopf, greasy grimy gqpher guts: the subversive folklore of childhood (little rock: august house, 1995), p. 12. 40. jorgensen, p. 214. 41. vinogradov, p. 77. 42. opie & opie, pp. 187-188. 43. vinogradov, p. 98; martynova, p. 299. 44. virtanen, pp. 69-70. 45. vinogradov, p. 98. 46. vinogradov, p. 76. 47. martynova, p. 299. 48. martynova, p. 296. 49. martynova, p. 311. 50. bakhtin, p. 182. 51. cf. a popular drazni/ka-chastushka from the 1930s: andrei-vorobei andrei-sparrow v ozere kupalsia was swimming in the lake. ruki-nogi utonuli his arms and legs drowned a zhivot osta/sia. but his belly stayed on the surface. (martynova, p. 275) 46 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 editorial satement 74 m e m o i r recollections of peasant life in kizhi district (1) regina kalashnikova, the kizhi museum, petrozavodsk aleksandra vasil’evna andreeva-riabinina, née rigachina, was born in the village of garnitsy in 1907 and died in petrozavodsk in 1992. she was the wife of petr ivanovich andreev-riabinin (1905-1953), the well-known singer of byliny and a member of the soviet writers’ union. these excerpts from her memoirs offer glimpses into the life and background of the riabinin family. translator’s note the riabinin family occupies a unique place in the history and study of the russian oral epic, because members of four different generations were performers. the first, t. g. riabinin (1801-1885), is considered one of the finest russian epic singers. his epics were recorded by p. n. rybnikov in 1860 and by a. f. gil’ferding in 1871. the second, i. t. riabinin (1844-1908), gave invited public performances in various russian and foreign cities. the third, i. g. riabinin-andreev (1873-1926), and the fourth, p. i. andreev-riabinin, continued this family tradition into soviet times. they all came from zaonezh’e in north-western russia, located north and west of lake onega, and now part of karelia. members of the family lived on the island of kizhi on lake onega and in the nearby village of garnitsy. karelia with its main city, petrozavodsk, has a mixed population comprising primarily russians and karelians, a finnish group. during world war ii karelia witnessed prolonged fighting between finnish and soviet forces. regina kalashnikova is a folklorist on the staff of the kizhi museum near petrozavodsk. for ten years she has been collecting materials from the descendants of several epic performers for a book to be entitled “peasant recollections.” (james bailey) seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 75 how i got to know p. i. andreev-riabinin well, how shall i put it? i was walking out with this fellow for two years and the whole time, he he was a neighbor of ours he’d keep staring at me. whenever he passed by (my house was right on the edge of the village), he’d be singing away, always with a song on his lips. and i’d be thinking, “why aren’t i in love with petr? look what a great singer he is! oh lord, it can’t be right to torment that lad like this.” (she laughs.) and he says to me: “i woke you. i woke you up so as you’d hear my voice.” that’s how much in love he was. but as far as that other fellow was concerned, he was for ever saying: “you’re not going to marry pavlukha; oh, no, it won’t happen!” then petr’s sister olia came over to fix up a match between us: “well, go on, you know it’s you he likes the best in this village; you’re a girl who knows about work!” there was a holiday coming up: st elijah’s day (il’in den’, august 2nd in the orthodox calendar), and she just went on and on at me: “shura, do let’s come to an agreement. drop your sweetheart and marry my brother.” petr came over for the holiday and we went to his sister’s place in sennaia guba. there we were in sennaia guba. we spent some time there together, and then of course we went to garnitsy. after that he wasn’t going to give me up. that’s how things happened. the wedding was set for august the tenth.(2) it took place during the working season. that was some wedding. people came from petrozavodsk and there was a big crowd. ours was the last wedding crown.(3) i asked, “are we really going to get married in church?”, and he said: “come on, let’s do it, they’re still conducting church weddings!” after us no one got married in church. i had this dress; it was made of silk, raspberry colored. such a beautiful color, it was. it shone, first bright, then dull, now one color, then another. so interesting. no one else had a dress like that. on my head i wore a pearl net and beads and in my ears earrings. my mother did some buying and selling. she lived in leningrad, buying and selling things, and bought these beads and rings. peter had on a grey suit, his jacket was grey, and his pants were black. he didn’t own a suit, but he did have a good jacket. that’s how we got married. my mother gave me a cow for my dowry, and a sheep too. and so everyone in the village carried my possessions from my house to his; five trunkloads of belongings i had. so, so many things my seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 76 mother had woven for me! ours was the last church wedding. we were the last ones to get married in church. the andreev-riabinin family we set out with my father-in-law; the nets had been laid in lake onega. there were ever so many nets there. and so he says, “looks like the weather’s calm. let’s go out on the lake. you, shura, sit down, take the bow oars and peter the ones behind. and i’ll sit on the stern.” and so off we went. we caught so many fish, we happened upon so many that the boat was full. there was no room for more. but what were we to do with the fish, with the weather so warm? where should we take it? “let’s go to town,” he said.(4) the weather was calm, and we started rowing. there were two of us rowing; me at the front and petr at the back, while he, that’s my father-in-law, sat on the stern of the boat. it was getting on for evening when we got there; it was calm, and the weather was fine. we moored the boat. and didn’t people come running up to get some fish! my father-in-law had so much he put an extra kilo in for free for every two of white fish, perch, and pike they bought just to get rid of it all. the townsfolk sure got a good deal there! fine fishermen they were! this was before the war. goodness me, such a lot of fish there were then! once he came home and i was horrified; what could we do with a fish that big? it was a pike. petr was a tall man, but the fish’s head was up to his shoulder and the tail down by his legs, that’s what he’d caught. he finished it off with a harpoon. can you imagine catching such a big fish as that! when he stepped through the door, i said to him, “have you gone out of your mind?” he dragged that big fish along by himself – i don’t know how much it weighed! we had a large two-storey house.(5) we certainly worked hard, we really drove ourselves. we kept two horses, and three cows as well. in the yard there were sheep, twelve of them. then i brought another cow from my mother’s. chickens, we had so many of them. it was a lot to cope with, but we managed! in the morning we’d get up at five and go off mowing! we’d walk together to the grain field. our fields all had 77 stone walls round them, not wooden fences, or stakes, but stone. our parents, those old folks really knew the meaning of work! the performance of byliny i heard byliny, lots of times. my father-in-law used tossing as he sat weaving his nets. then petr took up singing. he was five when he started. his father didn’t teach him specially, he just had a talent for it somehow. so he began singing and people started sending for him to come to leningrad. he brought us a radio to listen to.(6) there he was singing in moscow and there we were at home listening to him. it was a round black thing and we’d sit and listen to it. it was so clear! he went on singing for three hours at a time. he didn’t pause; he just kept on and on singing. he had his concerts there, and then he’d bring home gifts for us. he was given a gramophone – i kept it safe all through the war. he was presented with an engraved watch. all kinds of gifts he’d bring home. when you couldn’t get cheese in the village, he brought back a square lump of cheese and we invited the neighbors over for a meal. the singer korguev came to see us in garnitsy and konashkov often visited garnitsy too.(7) but they didn’t sing like our folk. our people, that is, petr, and his father, ivan gerasimovich, they somehow sang more interestingly. i remember ivan gerasimovich well. he was a good man; he really was! he lived in petersburg, and worked there, as far as i remember, in kolpino, but i don’t remember what his job was. my own father was a cabinet maker in kolpino, too. now, when was it that ivan gerasimovich died?(8) he and petr went to the collection point for logs, the winter was really, really hard, and they slept in some dugouts. he probably got chilled there in the dugouts. they came home and he got sick. pneumonia it was. he kept pleading with me: “shura, don’t forget your old father-in-law.” he was a good person. he was sick, so sick, but somehow they couldn’t cure his pneumonia. he was at home, not in the hospital. they buried him in sennaia guba next to the church. he was a good man, ivan gerasimovich, a very good man. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 78 p. i. andreev-riabinin’s favorite activities it was going out in his boat. then we were still lighting beacons. we worked, lighting the beacons; opposite our village, where lelikovo is, the steamer used to go by. there was another beacon opposite longasy. we rowed, first lighting the lamp on one and then on the other beacon. when the weather was calm, he went alone. but when it was windy, we had to go and light the lanterns together. sometimes we even spent the night there. a little house had been built where the lanterns were – the two of them. how he loved going out in his boat! when he was out in the boat, you could hear songs echoing all over the lake. such a strong voice he had, a good voice. people loved singing then! i loved it too, but when my son was killed and my husband died, i gave it all up. my son died in 1944; he wasn’t quite eighteen. before it happened i had a dream; the roof was torn off, but the walls were left standing.(9) the black horse in the morning we used to get up at five and start mowing because we had two horses and three cows to feed. we kept two working horses and bred a horse for riding, a big black steed he turned into. my, what a splendid animal he was. he could carry me for ever. i remember riding him. once my mother-in-law was cooking, some big fish, ruff they were; she steamed them in the stove, big ones with their roes. then she said to me: “take them to the fields to petr.” i said: “fine, off i go.” i set out with a basket on my arm, and mounted the horse. suddenly he saw something lying in the field, a wooden sled with a bale of hay on it. he shied at it, and carried me off like the devil. i barely managed to cling on – i lost all the fish, the basket fell off and the horse’s legs got tangled up in the straps, so he stopped, and we rode back home. i told her – my mother-in-law, that is: “you know, mama, you may not like it, but all the fish have flown away into the clearings in the woods, the pot with the ruff in, those big fish!” “well, so be it,” she said, “we’ll do another pot.” such an easily spooked, mad horse! once petr and i were going to petrozavodsk, so hold on tight! we were riding to petrozavodsk on the horse, but just then petr was ordered to go to leningrad. it was winter. we arrived at the abramov bridge. the horse was racing along like a mad 79 thing, huge, strong and well-fed. there was a priest walking across the abramov bridge, somehow he got caught up we were driving a sled. the priest got caught up and dragged off. the horse must have dragged him about two meters and the priest fell over right there on the bridge, the abramov bridge. the horse went crazy; we put a bag over his eyes and tightened it so that he couldn’t see and wouldn’t scare anyone. how could i ride home on a horse like that? petr said: “fine, some of our neighbors are staying there. you take the neighbors’ horse and give this one to egor buev.” egor lived next door to us in the village. petr left, i saw him off, then ran to see egor and he agreed. “okay, fine, you cross the lake and then, perhaps, he’ll be a bit quieter.” we set out and the horse galloped off like one possessed. egor was riding ahead, and i was behind, and he managed to grab hold of my horse. “enough, you take my horse.” when petr came back from the city i told him: “i’m not going to ride with you any more, definitely not! you can go and ride the horse yourself, or else go to leningrad on the train. i’ve had enough of that horse!”despite that, i did like horse riding, even when it was that horse. later we gave him up to the collective farm. a pretty pass things had come to! we cried and cried. peter and i just cried and cried! war. evacuation from garnitsy my brother-in-law, stepan ivanovich, said: “shura, don’t even think of staying here. petrukha is a communist, you mustn’t stay,” he said. “otherwise they may do something terrible to the kids and to you. just don’t stay!” i remembered his words all my life; i must not remain under finnish occupation. peter was on the front line in the trenches the whole time. he was blown out of the trenches and afterwards wasn’t quite right in the head. he came home shell-shocked, and didn’t live long after that. he just curled up and died. just jumped straight into his coffin. we were evacuated. we had got as far as kizhi, when opposite zubovye a plane attacked and began bombing us and our barge. then the steamer went and untied the ropes joining it to the barge, abandoned it and sailed off. the barge was rocking and drifting in the open water between the two villages. so, there i was with six children and not enough rope. everyone else had tied their kids to themselves because we were seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 80 being bombed. perhaps the barge would be holed and we’d all drown. i didn’t have enough rope, six kids and me the seventh. then volodia, the oldest, grabbed hold of me and said: “mama, if someone doesn’t come to rescue us, and we’re going to drown, then let’s all of us go down together, in a group.” the plane dropped its bombs first on one side of the barge and then on the other, but didn’t manage to hit it. the barge wasn’t holed. and then when perhaps a couple of hours had gone by the steamer came and took us under tow. that’s how we were rescued, but we sure were terrified, every one of us. my, oh my! aleksei mikhailov riabinin (born march 30, 1921 in the village of potanevshchina). a direct descendant, the great-great-grandson, of the world-famous bylina singer, trofim grigor’evich riabinin (1801-1885). stalin comes to kizhi. this is what i remember. goodness, for sure it was summer, 1933 or thereabouts, probably when they opened the white sea canal . . . . bright white nights in town you don’t notice them so much... and leshka rusinov and i were outdoors. he isn’t alive any more; he died. we looked up and saw a steamer coming... it was the “anokhin.” no hooters or anything, it approached so quietly. it was, i should think, about midnight; we didn’t have watches. there wasn’t a living soul about apart from us two; everyone else was asleep. rusinov owned a small boat and we were busy getting the boat ready for the next day. we ran to the wharf. should we grab hold of the hawsers? we did and the gangplank too. people started coming down the gangplank… they emerged... three of them, there were... who came out first? probably the bodyguards, in civilian clothes. just like nowadays, they had bodyguards. about ten people disembarked. none of the steamship’s crew left the boat. the captain was on the bridge and just went on standing there. that was all. and then three more people appeared. later we found out they were stalin, voroshilov and kirov. really! they were all quite short and had the same air about them. we, as they say, were craning our necks to see, though we didn’t know… if we’d known it was them, we might have remembered a bit better what they looked like, of course. but we didn’t know. “how do we get to the church?” they asked. services were still being held in 81 the church because we still had a priest. there was a watchman attached to the church. he was fond of swearing, really bad. egor was his name, but we always called him uzhotkin, though his surname was really serov. in the watchman’s hut there was a sort of entrance room for people to wait in for passenger steamers to arrive. he had a little cubbyhole of his own there, and apart from being the watchman he was also the bell ringer. “who has the key?” they asked. “uncle egor, i expect.” egor? mm, yes, egor. we knocked at his door. before this happened we used to have fun at the old man’s expense. we would run up to his window and make a scratching noise as though the dead were trying to scare him. that’s what we did now. out he came… swearing away: “what the...” immediately we said, “pop, take it easy!” he glanced round and shut up instantly. he said, “i don’t have the keys. the priest, father aleksei has them.” he says to us: “lioshka, go on then, you nip off and get the keys, get the priest to come!” so off we ran to navoloko where the priest lived. it really wasn’t that far. and when we turned up, the priest’s wife began trembling; as soon as she had opened the door to us, she was shaking. you know how in those days everyone shook with fear. so the priest came. and we were told to shut up and told “where do you think you’re going?” and they wouldn’t let us near there again. how long they spent there i don’t know; we didn’t count the time. they only went into the big church, of our savior. they didn’t go in the church of the intercession. the church of the intercession apparently didn’t interest them. perhaps they were in the church about twenty minutes, perhaps a half hour. not long, not long. then they came out and went back to the steamer, which left without sounding its hooter or anything. and it went off in the direction of velikaia, where there was a channel, through krasnoe field, and on to povenets. that’s all we saw. so i saw them.(10) trofim grigor’evich’s grandchildren my grandfather kirik gavrilovich used to sing byliny and tell lots of folktales. in those days we lived in potanevshchina. scholars would come from the city and seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 82 record him, on something, i don’t know what its proper name is now, but then it was called “a round cylinder,” i do remember that… i remember my grandfather… well, my grandfather looked very much like trofim grig’orevich; the same beard, grey, and the same face… grandfather worked right up to the day he died… he and i had brought some hay, we’d gone to get some hay in winter, so as to trample the hay down in the sled. he climbed onto the stove and there he died, just lay down and that was that. an easy death it was. when grandfather died, my father took down all the icons. he took down every last icon. kirik gavrilovich is buried, like all the riabinins, by the walls of the church of the intercession. our house was big, beautiful, and had two stories. we lived downstairs, upstairs was a clean apartment for guests. there was a third room leading off from the barn – that’s where our petersburg grandmother lived. agropena gavrilovna was the sister of grandfather kirik. she had helped build this house when she lived in petersburg. she gave money. she spent her whole life in petersburg. how do people end up there? egor uzhotkin he also spent his whole life in petersburg. he was a cabinetmaker. they sent people who came from big families there to be apprentices. and that’s how she got to live there. she stayed and learned to cook. then she started working as a servant for various good families, wealthy ones. her room in the barn had two windows. everything in her room was in the petersburg manner. everything was white, the bed was white, everything was covered in white. she didn’t have benches round the walls but had chairs instead. my mother brought her her coffee; she did love her coffee, but it had to have cream in. she dressed in city style too. for a long time she had been a cook for count tatishchev, for the gagarin family;(11) she cooked for important people, even the tsar, according to the stories … the tsar, i think, was a guest at gagarin’s house. she served him food, cooked it all herself. it was delicious, all splendid stuff. then the tsar even asked her to cook in the palace. when the revolution came, she was well rewarded. they gave her a lot of gold, some money and other such things … apparently, it was too heavy for her to carry, and at the train station two men said to her: “we’ll carry your things, and put them in the car for you.” they started settling her in the car, but they went in one door and exited out the other, 83 and that was that. she was left with nothing, just paper bills, paper money. later we papered the sitting room with it. mikhail riabinin the wedding druzhka my father was well known in zaonezh’e as a druzhka.(12) he often went to weddings and took my mother with him. he would be dressed like everyone else. the only difference was that he had a towel slung over one shoulder. it was a towel with decorations on it. he had a whip with a small handle. when he was about to go into someone’s house, he’d open the door, tap the shelf-pole (polka-voronets) under the ceiling with the whip and keep mumbling: “girls, young married women, the skirts are short” (devki, molodki, iubki korotki), i’ve already forgotten the rest… it was funny, you know, sounded good, and rhymed sort of like it was verse. properly speaking, it was verse. here is one story he ;iked to recall. if someone wanted to put the evil eye on a wedding (it was called portezh), he could figure this out. how could a wedding be “spoiled”? in winter a piece of bear fat would be put on the road and the horses would balk. when people were on their way to the wedding ceremony in the church, the bear fat would be shoved under the snow. there was someone who was thought to be a sorcerer of sorts: ivan petrovich pershin, who lived in seredka, a village nearby. everyone said he was a sorcerer, there’s the sorcerer. he would stick something under the snow… (he knew something.) but my father could figure it out. he’d ride in front on his horse, in zaonezh’ie this person is called the chief matchmaker (vershnik). he would dismount and lead his horse by the bridle. the horse would approach that spot and rear, that is, stand on its hind hooves. then my father would clear away the snow it meant there was something there, he’d pull it out and throw it away. then the whole wedding party would ride on. a tale of sorcery if you walk from seredka to vorob’i you come across an inlet and quiet backwater. you can see vorob’i from kizhi, it’s not far at all. near seredka there was a glade in the wood that had been trampled flat, sort of like a bald spot. it was there seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 84 that the young folks used to gather to enjoy themselves. they had fun. they’d (pair up and) break off from the dancing and... then a devil turned up in that backwater.(13) he was scaring people. the water was constantly moving, though he didn’t appear in person. everyone was terrified of walking round there. so some of the young fellows went off to see pershin, “ivan petrovich, the devil has appeared in our backwater.” “don’t worry, i’ll get that devil for you!” fine. and off he went with a harpoon and speared a pike. it was that that had been frightening everybody. now attached to the pike was a hawk. its wings were outspread; it apparently had tried to take some prey that was too big for it and couldn’t carry it off. its claws had dug into the pike, which had then dived and the hawk drowned. and so there it stayed, rigid and stuck to the pike. meantime the fish was still alive, and as it swum around, it stirred up all the water. and so they thought: “it’s a devil.” that’s how the devil appeared in that place. of course, it was terrifying. and the pike was a good size. perhaps some people wouldn’t believe that was true, but there’s no denying facts. notes 1 first published in zhivaia starina, no. 1, 2001, pp. 26-29. (trans.) 2 1925. they were married in the church of st nikola in sennaia guba. 3 during the wedding ceremony in a russian orthodox church crowns are held about the heads of the bride and groom. (trans.) 4 in petrozavodsk (about 60 kilometers from garnitsy). 5 our grandfather ivan trofimovich riabinin built the house in 1894 on money from performances singing byliny. 6 a reproduktor was a radio receiver that received only one station. in some instances it was also impossible to adjust the volume. (trans.) 7 m. m. korguev and f. a. konashkov were also epic singers from whom songs were collected. (trans.) 8 ivan gerasimovich andreev-riabinin died in february 1926. he caught cold at the collection point for logs; they were preparing logs in the forest. 85 9 dreaming of a ruined house indicates the death of a relative according to folk dream beliefs of the area. (trans.) 10 avgusta alekseevna akkuratova (1921-1999), the daughter of the priest in kizhi, aleksei stepanovich petukhov (shot 1937), confirmed this story during a conversation with staff from the kizhi museum. 11 the tatishchevs and gagarins were noble families well-known in st. petersburg. (trans.) 12 “misha kirikovich was a fast talker,” according to m. m. rusanova from pogost village ( born 1911), in a recording made 3rd august and held in the author’s personal archive. 13 the druzhka acted as master-of-ceremonies at weddings. he not only protected the young couple from the evil eye, but during the day he often entertained the guests with his delivery of traditional wise-cracks (pribautki). the most feared of the mythological spirits was the vodianoi, who dwelt in quiet but deep pools. he might pull the unwary into the water and drown them. during the course of the nineteenth century he was increasingly confused with the devil. (trans.) translated by james bailey and faith wigzell seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 new materials on russian folklore from an american archive tatyana shentalinskaia. moscow, russia folkloristic discoveries relating to the old stratum of traditional culture continue to be made in russia on the threshold of the new millennium. this time new facts have come from america, from the archival materials of the jesup north pacific expedition. when in 1897 the american museum of natural history conceived of the expedition for the comparative study of the culture and genesis of the peoples in north-eastern siberia and north-western america and began work, russian scholars were brought in to take part. vladimir bogoraz (1865-1936) and vladimir jochelson (1855-1937) headed the siberian north-eastern section of the expedition. both had had experience living on the kolyma river as political exiles and experience in ethnographic research in this region. despite its peripheral position among the main scholarly tasks of the expedition these scholars did not overlook the phenomenon of the enclave of russian culture on the kolyma river (yakutia) and the anadyr river (chukotka), and its preservation of an old stratum of folklore. as is generally known, ethnic groups distinguished by a mixture of the blood of russian newcomers and aborigines has been formed since the middle of the seventeenth century on the kolyma and anadyr rivers, as a result of the discovery and colonization of this siberian outlying area,. first of all, this included the yukagirs, chuvans (one of the yukagir tribes), yakuts, and absorbed russianized families from these and several other tribes. the russian language, orthodoxy, and russian folklore remained the cultural milieu that nourished the non-material manifestations of these groups. bogoraz made transcriptions of russian folklore on the anadyr river in 1901 and jochelson on the kolyma river in 1902. these scholars had phonographs at their disposa1.( 1) the texts of the russian songs taken down by bogoraz in the 1890s during his kolyma exile have for the most part been published and have attracted the attention of philologists long ago. the texts of the bylinas transcribed by him during the american expedition have also been discovered in the archives of the academy of sciences in petersburg. in particular, this concerns the notebook "phonograph. texts for the recordings in markovo in 1901." (markovo is a russian village on the anadyr river.) g. l. venediktov, who published these materials, established the following facts: "obviously the notebook on the whole does not represent decipherings of the photo-recordings -the fate of the cylinders with the recordings is unknown."(2) this means that the music and melodies recorded on the phonograph were unknown and were not listened to. the fate of the cylinders can be conjectured. since the president of the american museum of natural history, the banker and philanthropist morris jesup, subsidized the expedition, it would be natural to expect that the whole collection had been sent to america. seefa journal page 18 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 now, after an exchange of archival materials became possible, i have received the sought for recordings. this was not at all simple because even though the phonograph collections of bogoraz and jochelson belong to the museum in new york, they are preserved in the archives of traditional music, indiana university, bloomington, indiana. i wish to express my appreciation to the archive of traditional music at indiana university for making the materials available and also to david anderson who pointed out the location of the phonograph cylinders, to professor carol scott leonard, and to the archivist marilyn graf, all of whom arranged to send copies of the recordings to me. lt is difficult to overestimate the significance of the recordings for the study of russian folklore. eighty two specimens appear in the copies sent to us. of course the quality of the sound vastly complicates not only their deciphering and notation, but also their identification. nevertheless we have identified the majority of the specimens. these are the bylinas: "alyosha popovich," "dyuk stepanovich," "dobrynya and marinka," "ivan kulakov," " liya muromets on the falcon ship," seven historical songs about events of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one ballad, three christmas "vinograde" and six canonic carol hymns, six lyric songs, two wedding songs, eighteen round dance and game songs, and twenty five dance songs and instrumental tunes (for violin and balalaika). preliminary knowledge of the material is a big help. the author herself happened to record and publish the folklore of the russian speaking kolymians and anadyrians in the 1960s and 1980s.(3) the recordings of the jesup expedition have significantly expanded the geography of the location of russian epic melodies, having moved it almost to the very north-eastern border of our country. the recordings of the unique kolyma genre of love improvisation called the "andylyshchina" are especially interesting. the name itself is noteworthy -a word with a yukagir root and russian suffix. the genre emerged from the contact and blending of two cultures. on the one hand, the endemic kolyma culture includes features characteristic of the so-called "personal songs" of the siberian aborigines; on the other hand, features of several russian genres have been absorbed. recordings of the "andylyshchina" amount to only a hand full and the melodies were published for the first time only two years ago.(4) i think that this genre as a phenomenon must be taken into account by contemporary ethnographers in their conclusions about the way in which the kolymians have formed a special ethnos with its own self-consciousness and its own name.(5) i would add that they have done so with a self-consciousness capable of generating a new folklore genre. and finally the specimens of violin tunes from the sound collection of the jesup expedition will become an important contribution to russian ethnomusicology. until now only verbal descriptions of the playing of the kolymian and anadyrian musicians and their homemade instruments were known. these recordings have also expanded the boundaries of the location of page 19 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 russian violin tunes that until now have been known to exist only in western siberia. we now have much work ahead of us: continuing the deciphering and notation of the specimens. analyzing new material originating a century ago. and introducing them into the context of facts already known to the study of folklore. notes i. "the jesup north pacific expedition." the american museum journal. vol. 3. no. 5 (october. 1903): 109. i 15. 2. russkii folklor. vol. 24 (1987): 148. 3. see. for example: t. s. shentalinskaia. "russkaia pesnia an chukotke" [the russian song in chukotka]. sovetskaia muzyka. no. 11 (1972); "markovskie vecherki: russkie narodnye pesni" [markovo evenings: russian folk songs]. magadan, 1983. (a collection of songs recorded in the village of markovo on the river anadyr.); "russkaia epicheskaia poeziia sibiri i dalnego vostoka" [russian epic poetry of siberia and the far east]. novosibirsk, 1991. (the article "napevy russkikh epicheskikh pesen sibiri i dalnego vostoka" [melodies of russian the epic songs of siberia and the far east], the musical texts, commentaries to them, and an attached recording.) 4. t. s. shentalinskaia. "andylyshchina (zhanr-endemik)" [the andylyshchina (an endemic genre)]. in ekspeditsionnye otkrytiia poslednikh let. spb., 1996. 107-14. 5. 1. erunov. "russkie starozhily nizovev kolymy: istoriia formirovaniia" [the russian old-timers on the lower reaches of the kolyma: history of their formation]. rossiiskii etnograf. no. 12 (1993): 108-25. seef a journal page 20 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 6 articles as the year 1900 drew near_ linda ivanits, penn state university almost ten years ago when i was working in the tenishev archive in what was then the museum of ethnography of the peoples of the ussr in leningrad, i stumbled on several files that reported rumors of the end of the world. 1 though i was working on a different subject, i found these reports highly cmious and jotted down a few notes for each of them. all were from 1899; evidently many peasants feared that the advent of a new centmy would bring the worst. in view of rumors now circulating about the approaching millenium, i thought might be fun to take another look at these reports from the russian counttyside of exactly a centmy ago. correspondent v. beliaev of penza province (gorodishchensk district) reported rumors that rocks would soon fall from the sky and signal the end of the earth. some peasants were strongly under the influence of these nimors; some were not.2 more elaborate information comes from iaroslavl, saratov, and novgorod provinces. a. balov, a correspondent the danilovsk district of in iaroslavl province, wrote that many peasants expected the world to end either november 4th or 13th, 1899. some believed that a star with a tail would appear and bum up the earth (zemlia); and some said that the earth (zemlia) would be destroyed but that the world (mir) would continue to exist. other peasants thought that a fiery rain would fall upon the earth and destroy it "as was predicted in holy scripture." rumors of one sort or another were pervasive throughout the district where balov was working. he noted that some peasants of this region were familiar with the apocalypse and that a large number were under the influence of a brochure translated from polish entitled "the end of the world" ("konets mird'), whose cover pictured a globe with a comet flying toward it. in addition, he attributed some of the rumors to pilgrims who, he believed. were always ready to tell terrifying stories for food and drink. even so, some peasants reacted skeptically: they either cited the gospels ("but regarding the day and the hour ...only the heavenly father knows"), argued that the antichrist had not yet appeared. as he must before the end of the world, or simply pointed out that all past rumors of this sort had proved false. those who expected the end of the world spent the nights of november 4th and 13th in prayer before the icons while the more skeptical peasants mocked them. balov added that more women than men tended to believe these stories.3 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 particularly colorful accounts came from the provinces of samtov and novgorod. correspondent n. denisov, a teacher in the village ofbobylevka in the balashovsk district of saratov province, attributed a good deal ofhis village's fear of the end of the world to an old spinster called "mother anis'ia" mother anis'ia lived in a in a cell dug into the earth; her walls were covered with icons and holy pictures. though she had a good deal of money, she chose to remain there rather than build a better hut because she interpreted the gospel passage saying"w oe to those living on earth" to mean that the antichrist would have dominion over everything and everyone on the face of the earth, but those living in the earth could be saved. denisov noted that she profited considerably from the superstitious villagers. hearing rumors that rocks would fall from the skies and that the village of bobylevka would collapse into the earth, peasants went to mother anis'ia for instruction. she told them to bring her offerings and added that she could not answer for what they had brought her previously. these earlier gifts, she claimed, had been sent to mount athos, but the monks had returned them with the message that they could not accept them because the end of the world was near. so, she said, she sent them to jerusalem, but was not sure they would be accepted since she had received word from there that they did not have long to live: bronze gates which had never been opened had opened of their own accord and no one could shut them. people continued to bring offerings of gifts and money to mother anis'ia on november 14th there were processions of peasants praying and singing hymns. some of them entered a chmch where, by chance, a forty-day memorial service was in progress. the priest, amazed at the large number of people who wanted to go to confession and communion, was unable to persuade them that the end of the world was not imminent. after the liturgy the religious procession continued on its way. one peasant, who happened to be retmning to the village at 11:00 p.m. on a night when the end of the world was expected, noticed that there were lights in many huts and that people were sitting around in clean shirts doing nothing. when he tried to convince his own family to go to bed, his wife became angry at his lack of fear, and he was forced to spend the night with a neighbor. another person, who believed the end was at hand, attempted to dig a well in his basement so that when the antichrist placed all the water under his power, he would have something with which to quench his thirst.4 working in the cherepovetsk district ofnovgorod province correspondent e. antipov also encountered rumors of the end of the world, which the novgorod peasants, like those from saratov and iaroslavl provinces expected to come november 13/14 1899. peasants prepared for the end by praying, fasting, and going to confession and communion; many spent the night of 7 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 8 november 13th in church. when nuns from a local monastery panicked, a st. petersburg abbess attempted to send them the reassurance of fr. john of krondstadt who insisted that the rumors were unfounded and that "anyone who believed in empty talk must be an empty person." the nuns continued to fear the worst, especially when the peasants started lighting bonfires in the woods. many of the peasants expected that the world would end when a comet or planet collided with the earth (in this file the peasants use the terms kometa and planeta interchangeably). a good deal of talk centered on the antichrist who, they believed, would come and reign for three and a half years before the end; peasants reasoned that "every person who did not want to die from hunger of thirst would have to go over to the antichrist. only he would be able to give bread and water. it would not be possible any more to find food and drink anywhere else; christian blood would flow in rivers and lakes instead of water. " all sorts of strange explanations were given for why the comet or planet did not collide with earth. some suggested that the planet had fallen into the sea and had caused many ships and people to drown; in the place where the planet had fallen an island had formed, and from this island war would break out but all rulers of the earth wanted to possess this island because from time to time the lord would send his angel to inform people about the will of god. some claimed that the planet had fallen into a swamp and a mountain had formed on which devils from all ends of the earth had gathered. here the antichrist would make his appearance. peasants from the village of stepanova heard a terrible sound on november 13/14. they interpreted this to mean that a comet (planet a) had collided with earth, but that the earth was stronger and only a little piece had broken off while the comet had shattered. one piece, supposedly, was in "piter" (st petersburg) and was being displayed to the people. one particular curiosity of antipov's report was that various peasants of the province attributed a major role in saving the earth to the americans, who supposedly had been preparing for a collision for a long time. they thought that americans had cast gigantic cannons with huge balls, and as soon as the alien planet came close, they began to fire. on the first shot the planet stopped; on the second it split; on the third it splintered; and on the forth the little pieces were scattered all over. the peasants announced that "if it weren't for the americans, there would have been no way of coping with the planet." in a different village, peasants claimed that americans had forged a thick, long chain with gigantic hooks at both ends. a few men had gone up to the threatening planet in a balloon and attached one end of the chain to the planet which was on course to fall on the earth and the other to still another planet which stood motionless. the americans had stayed on this other planet to make seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 9 sure that these planets did not go off course. one soldier from archangel reported that in the north peasants went out with sticks to watch for the alien planet and push it away when it got near earth. they managed to push it away, but the peasants themselves disappeared; they got stuck to the planet and were canied out to sea. now three ships were preparing to search for the peasants. antipov, like balov, mentions the presence in his area of a brochure entitled "the end of the world" (here, "konchina mira"), which some novgorod peasants thought had been written by a german. everything in it was true, the peasants argued, but the printers had mixed up the numbers; only the german knew the combination that signaled the real date of the end of the world, but he was now in a madhouse. other peasants claimed that the brochure had been written by an english student who started writing books and deceiving people because he needed money. still others claimed that it had been written by a frenchman or a turk; they concluded that if a russian had written it, he would have been sent to siberia notes: i.my research in the tenishev archive was supported in part by a grant from the international researches and exchanges board (irex), with fimds provided by the national endowment for the humanities and the united states information agency. 2.gosudarstvennyi muzei etnograjii ,fond 7 (etnograficheskoe biuro 1m. v. tenisheva hereafter, gmetenishev]), cd. lehr., 1284. 3.gmetenishev, ed km., 1750. 4.gme-tenishev, ed. leht., 1481. 5.gmetenishev, cd. leht., 806. seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 microsoft word seefaf01c.doc 11 notes on a joint russian-american expedition to the semeiskii old believers of transbaikal marcus c. levitt university of southern california, los angeles, california in june-july 2000, a joint russian-american expedition collected folk songs and recorded religious rituals from the semeiskii old believers of transbaikal (zabaikal’e). the expedition was organized by vladimir kliauz of the institute of world literature and the institute of natural and spiritual heritage in moscow, and prof. marcus c. levitt of the university of southern calfornia (los angeles), accompanied by prof. richard mcilvery of usc’s thornton school of music who produced state-of-the-art digital recordings. an undergraduate research grant from usc, with additional special support from the albert and elaine borchard foundation, funded the expedition. three usc undergraduate team members were included: cinema production major natalie ross; music industry major amy deng; and art history and business major camille perkins. they helped with the recording and pursued projects of their own. the team also included psychologist mariia shchapova, who served as an interpreter, and liubov’ il’iushenkova, a folklorist from the oblast’ center of folklore in chita. this expedition can boast of the following “firsts.” it was the first to make on-site recordings of semeiskii folk music with professional quality equipment. (there do exist other recordings of this music, but they were produced in studios in novosibirsk and moscow.) recordings were made under authentic field conditions – around tables in people’s homes, in local club buildings or cafeteria, and without time limits. the recordings thus also include the authentic sounds of eating, drinking, coughing, laughing, and occasional arguments over lyrics! a cd of the songs recorded in ukyr has recently been produced in moscow. (see the announcement at the end of this article.) second, the expedition was the first to record on videotape the unique semeiskii celebration of trinity day in ukyr. on the morning of trinity day, june 18, 2000, a birch tree branch was dressed up in scarves at one end of town, and the next day it was marched to the opposite end of the village and “drowned” in the river – all to the accompaniment of song, dance, and home brew. third, the expedition recorded – probably for the first time – semeiskii pominki (funeral meals) in two villages (kochen and gutai), thus allowing comparative analysis. further, the expedition began to investigate the semeiskii use of and attitudes toward icons (led by seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 12 camille perkins). the expedition also made a somewhat scandalous discovery – one of the most renowned of the organized, official local semeiskii choruses from urluk, which has existed since the 1960s, is not “semeiskii” at all, but orthodox. in general, the expedition tried to avoid the official choruses that were set up in the brezhnev era, and sought older, more authentic local musical traditions. in line with brezhnev cultural policy, these choruses advertised an explicitly “semeiskii” ethnic identification – the term itself had been forbidden under stalin – but forbade any indications of religious adherence, creating a peculiar kind of state-sponsored, ersatz nationality. during the expedition, we had occasion to make video recordings of a dozen rituals, including various healings, which are discussed in the accompanying article by vladimir kliauz. * * * my initial reaction on arriving in transbaikal was mixed. on the one hand, it was a tremendous thrill to have traveled so far and to see this incredibly beautiful part of the world. and our group was met almost everywhere with wide-open arms. on the other hand, we also encountered first hand some very dismal aspects of contemporary russian life, so that our trip was sobering, disturbing, and even disillusioning in some ways. the transbaikal region is now the poorest in russia in per capita income and has been extremely slow in adapting to the postcommunist situation. it is one of the most sparsely populated regions in russia and is in continuing demographic decline. the economy, especially the agricultural sector, is in bad shape and most of the villages we visited were reduced to subsistence farming and animal husbandry. (the situation is such that raising crops and meat for market is unprofitable, given the high cost of fuel for transport and upkeep, among other factors). the government-run state farms, which had served not only as the primary employer, but also as the institution which was basically responsible for the infrastructure of village life – the hub around which transportation, communications, energy (availability of electricity, coal, gas, gasoline), as well as health care, education and cultural life mostly revolved – suddenly disappeared, leaving a gap that still remains. one of the positive aspects of the new russia, the new freedom of speech and religion, has sparked a religious revival among many groups in transbaikal – orthodox, old believer, and buddhist alike. however, this revival is also subject to the general economic deterioration and in most cases must be financially supported from outside (whether from moscow, tibet, or elsewhere). the religious revival seems to be taking place almost from ground zero, not only 13 economically, but also in the sense that the ussr, it seems, did a highly successful job in eradicating religion. a basic goal of our trip was to collect the remnants of semeiskii folk culture in their music and local rites. the roots of the semeiskii old believer community – which may be said to be an ethnic sub-group within the larger russian ethnos – probably stem back to the schism within the orthodox church. “probably,” because their historical identity was fixed by the fact that they were forcibly re-located to transbaikal in the 1760s-1780s by catherine the great, and their prehistory is shrouded in conjecture. the label “semeiskii” probably derives from “family” (sem’ia) and the fact that they were deported to siberia not individually as convicts usually were, but as an entire community, in families (catherine appreciated their value as colonists). they were apparently moved from somewhere in poland, where they had sought asylum after the schism, but this refuge evaporated as the lands on which they were living were incorporated into the empire by catherine’s partitions. little information survives concerning their origins and relocation; community records, often written into or kept in books, were largely destroyed during the stalinist repressions of the 1930s and only fragmentary data remains [bolonev 1994: 48-59]. the special style of semeiskii singing which we came to record reflects various aspects of their community’s difficult history – in the religious, musical, linguistic, and broader cultural sense – as it retains elements of the folk heritage they preserved from the time before the schism, as well as elements which they brought with them from their late seventeenth to mid-eighteenthcentury home in eastern europe. two basic features of semeiskii singing are almost certainly connected to the traditions of the priestless old believers. (the following is based on uspenskii [1968: 39-40, 61-65], who cites smolenskii, potebnia, and jakobson in correlating phenomena observed in modern singing to those before the schism.) the first is khomovoe penie (khomoniia, penie po khomoniam), which refers to using a special pronunciation in church singing by which extra vowels are inserted between consonants and after a final consonant; this is also known as razdel’norechnoe and naonnoe penie (“na-on” because the reduced vowels, or jers, “ъ” or “ь” were expanded to the full vowels “o” or “e,” harking back to the era before vowel reduction occurred). the official church (as well as some old believer groups) rejected this in favor of more ordinary and comprehensible pronunciation (called narechnoe penie – from “na-rech’” – following speech; this was also known as istinnorechnoe penie and as penie na er). priestless old believer old-style khomovoe singing also incorporated other kinds of complex vocalic – so called glossolalic – inserts. glossolalic refers to glossolalia, or “speaking in tongues”; the stress here is seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 14 on a special sacred method of prayer-singing that is comprehensible to god, but not necessarily to many human beings. in contrast to the reformation in the west, which aimed to make religion more comprehensible and accessible, the old believers in general tended in the opposite direction, that is, to preserve the ways of the past, however obscure. the second special feature of semeiskii singing also relates to the issue of comprehensibility raised during the schism – that is the official church’s preference for singing in unison over older forms of complex polyphony, such as the mnogogolosie (polyphony) that the semeiskie use [dorofeev 1989: 16]. semeiskii song is never performed solo, but always by two or more singers in complex patterns of leader and responses. dorofeev describes it this way: in semeiskii polyphonic singing (mnogogolosnyi raspev), as in south russia, it is impossible to make out the main melody as it is usually understood, that is, performed by a single voice. the melodic thinking of the folksingers . . . is in its ancient origins polyphonic. in both cases, as a rule, a middle voice initiates, but after this beginning it no longer carries the melody, which is developed as it moves from one voice to another [dorofeev 1989: 16]. a further element of incomprehensibility for even the russian-speaking outsider is the fact that semeiskii singing, like the everyday spoken language, bears traces of old contacts with polish and belarusian, which are felt particularly in the pronunciation of certain vowels and consonants. this, however, as dorofeev [1989: 19] points out, is a different problem from that of inserted vowels, which is “of a purely musical character.” but all of these factors taken together often create the impression “that the song is being performed in a foreign language.” in any case, the semeiskii style of singing clearly has complex and ancient roots, and is no way primitive or benighted. the special vocal heritage undoubtedly helped and still helps cement semeiskii cultural identity. at the same time, i have serious doubts that the singers we heard and recorded had much sense of the specific nature of their musical heritage. no doubt, direct musical connections between older forms of church singing and the semeiskii music-making that we heard are extremely hard to make, simply for paucity of historical evidence. during our entire trip, we only recorded one religious song (dukhovnyi stikh), although we did record several variants of it. this work, "son presviatoi bogoroditsy" [dream of the most holy mother of god], is among the best known of the dukhovnye stikhi, and also exists among the semeiskie in several other generic variants, including a prayer and an incantation. dorofeev [1989: 14] states this as follows: 15 until the very end of the nineteenth century the main type of semeiskii singing was liturgical and religious (kul’tovoe penie i dukhovnyi stikh), while folk singing, as is known, was proscribed by the elders (ustavshchik). at the turn of the century, and particularly after the great october revolution, religious and folk singing changed places in the semeiskii cultural paradigm, as folksongs sounded freely and took the main place in the life of the semeiskii community. according to some nineteenth-century ethnographers and travelers, the semeiskie allegedly did not even sing or know any songs. however, we may take this as an indication that they did not perform for outsiders, a reflection of their broader religious sensibility. religious songs were not meant for those outside the faith, and secular ones, as dorofeev suggests, may have been discouraged or forbidden. in this sense, while the revolution persecuted and curtailed religious practice, it also to some degree “liberated” folk singing. (this dilution of the old believer heritage also made possible our expedition, participation in semeiskii life, and the opportunity to make recordings; in general the impulse to preserve folk traditions often marks their imminent demise.) during our trip we did not come across any song books, whether printed or manuscript, which have remained popular among some other old believer groups. baba tania in gutai told us that she possessed some, but that they had been borrowed for use in another village. most of the semeiskie in the transbaikal region, as suggested, apparently belonged traditionally to the priestless old believers. others, as we learnt, came to adhere to edinoverie (unified faith), a church group whose clergy was educated and sponsored by the official orthodox church. it was created in 1800 during a period of relative toleration towards the old believers; the official church hoped that by allowing the members of edinoverie and their priests to practice the old rite, they could bring the old believers back into its sphere of influence if not fully into the church. it was initially very successful [robson 1995: 17], despite understandable opposition from the priestless old believers. however, it came as somewhat of a shock to me to see how very “sovietized” these old believers were, and how they were lacking in elementary notions of religion and of their own heritage. i needed to remind myself that virtually everyone we met (with very few exceptions) was born and raised after 1917. the average life expectancy (for those born today) in russia for men has gone down to about 56 years and for women about ten years more, and is still declining; the numbers are lower in siberia. among the current population (according to recent cia statistics) men only live to an average of sixty two years, and women to age seventy three; and of the 13% of the russian population now over sixty five, 68% are women seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 16 (they outnumber men over sixty five by 2.2 to 1). (in the 1870’s rovinskii [1873] recorded opposite trends – the greater longevity and population growth of the semeiskie.) the point here is that the living connection to pre-revolutionary russia is virtually gone. the cohort of singers whom we recorded – sixty-three people in seven villages – was almost all women who had an average age of just over seventy years. as the statistics above indicate, their average male counterparts had been dead for about eight years. that put their average date of birth at 1929-30; they were thus were born in russia during the violent process of collectivization (which affected the entire country), and lived through the other horrific aspects of the stalin era, including the second world war. they lived the majority of their adult lives (after age twenty three, on average) under the post-stalinist soviet regime (which they generally looked back to with great nostalgia, as a time of security and relative prosperity). not much of the old way of life could survive these apocalyptic times. on the other hand, religious persecution in russia was no new thing, and traditionally the orthodox and old believers alike have both been extremely adept at surviving within an authoritarian context. these were frequently minimalist and grass-roots religious movements, often with little or no obvious external institutional structure to keep them going. the notion of sobornost’ (of divine collectivity) and of the church as a supra-individual, divinely inspired body an ideal that persists despite (and perhaps even more strongly in reaction to) persecution is one continuing reason for this stubborn spiritual and also practical longevity. i had come to transbaikal with images of the thriving old believer communes in the u.s. and canada in mind. i certainly did not expect anything so prosperous or well-organized in today’s russia, and i knew that russia’s old believer population, which numbers in the hundreds of thousands or even millions (the exact number of old believers across russia is hard to know), had long shed its expectation of imminent apocalypse and adapted to modern russian life. still, i was somewhat shocked – and subsequently surprised at myself for being shocked – at the extent to which the old ways are not only gone, but almost completely forgotten. on our first meeting with some villagers from ukyr, who accompanied us home from petrovsk-zabaikalskii, our point of departure, the co-leader of the expedition, vladimir kliauz, was quite bemused when i expressed concern about whether the semeiskie would mind eating with us outsiders, and whether they might find our presence constraining should they want to preface their meal with some sort of prayer of grace. (it turned out to be a very naïve expectation – something like coming to a dining hall in an american university and expecting the students to sit quietly and 17 say grace before chowing down.) in the course of our stay we heard plenty of toasts, but not one blessing before a meal (excluding explicitly ritual situations, which we had to seek out actively). in the first group of villages we visited, which were also the most isolated, the semeiskii people we met did not understand the term “old belief.” they think of themselves primarily as semeiskii, an ethnic rather than confessional grouping. far from having a sense of the things that differentiate orthodox from old believer, or one old believer group from another, those we spoke to here consider themselves simply orthodox, even though the rite they adhered to, to the extent they had a religious identity at all, was that of the old faith. we could tell this, among other things, by the fact that most of the people we met there made the sign of the cross with two instead of three fingers (one of the signal markers of the old belief). for them this has lost its special semiotic significance; it is simply the way it is done. folk songs and the semi-religious, semi-secular folkloric rites which we were recording and investigating remain one of the few areas in which some of the older cultural practices and values are reflected. one of the other broader issues we confronted on our travels – which faces anyone trying to understand “folklore” – was the difficulty of untangling the complexities of this mostly forgotten past. further confusion arose for me from the simple but disconcerting fact that from village to village the self-image, and the sense of cultural and religious identity were often quite different, making it hard to make to any general conclusions. (note that i frequently use words such as “seems” and “apparently”). my colleagues in folklore active on the expedition circuit had warned me that traditions and beliefs generally vary greatly from area to area and village to village. this was very much the case in the area we visited. these differences in cultural selfconsciousness often seemed to depend upon the specific local history of a village. for example, in ukyr, our expedition’s first stop, and the farthest point on our journey (within sight of mongolia), there was a sharp differentiation between the almost purely semeiskii population there and the neighboring mostly cossack settlement of menza. menza had been on the side of the whites during the civil war, while ukyr was on the side of the reds, and had been burned down in 1921 by troops under baron roman von ungern-sternberg (known among villagers as “the baron”). ungern-sternberg, known for his ferocity, rallied retreating antibolshevik forces in mongolia and wreaked havoc among the mongolians, chinese occupiers of mongolia, and russian villages across the border. however, the dividing lines between ukyr and menza were not only political and confessional, but also economic, as they had competed for generations over hunting grounds, pasture land, and readily tillable soil (that had become seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 18 especially scarce in transbaikal by the end of the nineteenth century). in other areas of transbaikal, other semeiskii villages apparently took the side of the whites (this one of many instances where it is dangerous to generalize about them). in this particular case, ukyr seems to have been traditionally pro-soviet, and at both ends of the village stand monuments capped by red stars commemorating the destruction and rebuilding of the village in 1921. in contrast, the semeiskie living in larger villages with mixed ethnic and religious populations, especially those we visited in buriatiia or buriat regions, which have a fair percentage of buddhists, had a much sharper sense of what separated them from other groups. these concern differences, on the one hand, between buddhists and orthodox, and, on the other hand, differences among the various semeiskii factions and between the priestly and the priestless. they also showed a greater degree of wariness about dealing with outsiders and foreigners. as noted, almost everywhere we went we were greeted with open arms. yet who we were, or what religion we belonged to, stimulated very little interest, apart from the amazement that we were really from the u. s. and even spoke english! perhaps they simply could not formulate the questions? the one place where some of us encountered wariness of outsiders was in bichura, a relatively large village in buriatiia (pop. 14,000) with an historically mixed population. on one occasion, when going visiting, those in our group were asked to wash their hands out in the courtyard before entering the house, and were spit upon as an act of ritual cleansing (the muscovites among us had to go through this procedure as well; the spitting was not meant as an insult). in ukyr, which, as we noted, was razed in 1921, there was no church left standing, and we encountered no religious books and very few icons (those that did exist were mainly metal). the orthodox church in neighboring menza had been turned into a hospital and was subsequently left to fall apart; it is now a ruined shell with cows and pigs grazing inside. this cossack village had been settled before ukyr, earlier in the eighteenth century, as an outpost of the empire. in 1998 this area was rededicated as part of the krasnochikoiskii parish (in the past it had been part of the urlut district, centered in urluk). during our journeys in the region we ran into the current priest from the regional center krasnyi chikoi, father valerii, who was making the rounds of the villages and organizing discussions. he was chaperoned by a businessman also from krasnyi chikoi. their trip combined electioneering with pep talks about local economic and spiritual revitalization. 19 the semeiskii population of ukyr included both priestless old believers (whose roots were probably in the community of the fedoseev sect (fedoseevtsy) in gutai), and adherents of edinoverie. (the fedoseev sect is a radical priestless community, named after its eighteenthcentury leader feodosii vasil’ev, who traditionally maintained what has been called “ritual apartheid” [robson 1995: 37], although there was also a rich community in moscow.) according to baba evka (evgeniia fedotovna aref’eva), the former religious leader (pop – village priest) of ukyr, the town church that the cossacks destroyed had belonged to edinoverie. (pop evka was one of our oldest informants – she was born in 1911 and had a rudimentary church education.) kochen was our second stop. the village is also known as arkhangel’skoe – its official, as opposed to its popular name). this was also a very early settlement and was close to the city of krasnyi chikoi. it had eventually extended to a second settlement, novaia derevnia (official name maloarkhangel’skoe). certainly, one should not confuse contemporary village sizes and populations with those of the past, for during the soviet period there had been several massive forced relocations and village consolidations, with the goal of centralizing of the population to a greater extent. kochen probably also had a mixed semeiskii population of members from edinoverie and of the priestless; the edinoverie church burned down, probably before 1917, and we heard stories about icons that had been saved from the conflagration. its religious school continued to function through the 1920’s, an influence that is discernible in the singing. kochen was one of several villages where there had been a very active choral collective in soviet (and sometimes continuing into post-soviet) times. baba ania, who helped us organize our recording session there, also aided us in hunting out those who knew the old songs and special semeiskii style. the old musical traditions were alive in kochen, where one small group of four women invited us into a courtyard for an impromptu outdoor song session. as vladimir kliauz realized later, some of this group’s repertory reflected folksong traditions of northern russia (on this aspect of semeiskii singing and on the mixing of traditions, see vladikina-bochinskaia 1975). the expedition traveled in a bus that we had rented for the trip; in each village we drove around town picking up the performers, many too weak to walk any distance. for the recordings, we tried to avoid modernized versions of songs, those that had been adapted by the official choruses for stage performance in front of modern audiences. changing them to fit particular time limits, and standardizing the music for transcription and orchestration altered the basic character of this music. seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 20 the leader of the kochen religious community is baba vera, who, unlike pop evka, has no special title (most of the older women are referred to as “baba”); she showed us a variety of prayer books that she had copied out by hand. in kochen they say that baba vera is simply the one who “deaconizes” (d’iachit). in general, we observed a variety of types and titles and ways of referring to religious leaders in the various places we visited (such as pop, nastavnik, or ustavshchik – priest, mentor, or elder). these religious leaders also often fulfill the role of a znakharka (folk healer or medicine woman). baba vera performed a ritual incantation over water to ward the evil eye off vladimir kliauz, and in the same village, another woman, baba polia (polina shekunova), performed a similar healing of natalie (on these rites and incantations, see kliauz’s piece that accompanies this article). in gutai the population was mixed and the sense of local religious identity mostly gone. there had been three cemeteries in the town, apparently one old believer, one orthodox, and one of some other group, but the townsfolk themselves could not tell us whose. since the old believers here were (or had been) mainly priestless members of the fedoseev sect, they had had no church, so that orthodox peasants (we were told) had been forced to go to neighboring nizhnyi narym for church services. under stalin gutai became an active mining town and forced labor site (it is possible that the third cemetery belonged to the gulag – concentration camp). the molybdenum mines closed in 1958, leading to the town’s decline. (we arrived in the drunken aftermath of funeral meals [pominki], and were told that the young men in the village were systematically dying off due to chemical poisoning . . .) seven of the nine gutai singers whom we recorded were not born in the town, which accounted for the somewhat heterogeneous and not fully harmonized songs we recorded. even the community’s old believer religious leader, baba tania, who was the daughter of priestless parents, had been away from the town for almost eighteen years (in petersburg and other places), and had only been practicing there for seven to eight months. the handwritten prayer books she showed us were primitive and inaccurate. she had had no formal religious education and was unable to read slavonic (the language of old believer prayer). the memorial service we observed her lead was not really a service at all, insofar as there were almost no prayers (or inappropriate ones). rather, she made a series of crossings and bowings before a domestic icon shrine, accompanied by multitudinous repetitions of gospodi pomilui (god, have mercy). 21 urluk, our next stop, was one of the most prosperous towns we visited. its state farm had disobeyed gorbachev’s directive and had not disbanded, and had turned into a private concern called “agrofirma” after the fall of the ussr. the population, though still down from what it had been, was far greater than in gutai (pop. 1,900), and we were told that because of the better employment situation there was less alcoholism. salaries are still often paid in grain rather than cash, but the town has also kept open its rest-house (hotel) and cafeteria (for which we were grateful). i note in passing that we saw plentiful use of alcohol in the places we visited, several times connected to funeral meals or send-offs (provody – i.e., of young men into the army; as in times past, still a cause for great sorrow). we also had one brush with violence, when a teenager (also a visitor) was stabbed in the leg near where we were staying. the villages almost all have doctor’s assistants (fel’dshery) and clinics (medpunkty), although for serious procedures one must travel to krasnyi chikoi, the regional center, for care. somewhat surprisingly, there was a complete absence of police in all the villages we visited. there was a small number of police in krasny chikoi, where the head man (with whom we had to register) told us that in 1999 there had only been 190 reported crimes in the entire krasnyi chikoi region (which is huge but sparsely populated) – largely thefts but also several domestic cases of murder connected with alcohol abuse – and that every one of them had been solved. (might there have been some exaggeration here?) traditionally, the semeiskii communities have been self-policed and this appears to be the continuing practice. the police head said that in contrast, in the darasunskii area, also within the chita region, where he had worked before, there had been two thousand or more than ten times more reported crimes over that same period. urluk also has a relatively active religious and cultural life. there had once been both orthodox and edinoverie churches here (both were torn down in the 1930’s), as well as a local orthodox monastery which had boasted a famous local holy man (st varlaam, who lived in the later nineteenth century). the monastery had also been razed to the ground in the 1930’s. today there seems little apparent differentiation remaining between the orthodox and old believer communities. this was probably due to the pressure on both religious groups on the part of soviet authorities, which served to level the differences between them. baba nastia is the main leader of the old believers, presiding over an informal system of elders (here popy, “priests”), despite the fact that she was raised orthodox. she had had some religious education in her youth and had sung in a church choir, so that she knew the prayers; a group of the town’s old believers had come to her for ministration some time in the 1960’s. baba nastia told us that a film crew had seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 22 come to urluk from moscow in 1997 and recorded her easter service for tv. she had also received the blessing of an itinerant old believer priest for her work. however, this year, when a newly renovated orthodox church was about to open in the town (the il’inskaia church, scheduled for august 2000), with a newly appointed priest from the new krasnyi chikoi parish, her function was about to be superseded. (this was a pattern we saw elsewhere – a young male priest comes into town and displaces the elderly woman who has maintained the religious life of the community, sometimes for decades . . . ) the orthodox parish authorities in krasnyi chikoi chose urluk the site for a reopened church (the second after the one in krasnyi chikoi itself), perhaps because of the reputation of its monastery, which has also attracted the recent interest of church authorities. but curiously, of the two old ruined churches in town, orthodox and edinoverie, they chose the old believer church for reconstruction. this was probably largely because there was almost nothing left of the old orthodox church of the kazan’ mother of god. however, the fact that a formerly old believer church was chosen for consecration to serve the orthodox is another indication of the leveling of religious identity here. this was confirmed by other things we observed. for one, the semeiskie that we met made the sign of the cross with three fingers, and even the local intellectual we met, il’ia ivanovich svistunov, a school teacher, local historian, and collector of icons, did not understand our question about how many fingers one should use in crossing oneself (he used three). another peculiarity we encountered in urluk was that several of the russian orthodox semeiskie we met and interviewed, including the wonderful 93-year-old baba nastia, referred to themselves as khokhlatskii (from the ukrainian khokhol, peasant – a somewhat denigrating term when employed by modern russians). we were unable to find out how this term came to be used. vladimir kliauz suggests two possibilities, one, that this was a relic of the time when the semeiskie lived in poland; they referred to the catholic church as the “polish church,” and by analogy they may have been called khokhly as they were associated with nearby ukraine. against this hypothesis is the fact that we did not hear semeiskie in other villages use the term, and indeed it seems strange that they would adopt this term for themselves. on the other hand, there are some ukrainianisms in some of the local songs we recorded (especially in bichura). a second possibility is that some orthodox peasants from ukraine had settled in urluk at some time in the past, and people began to refer to the entire orthodox community using this term. 23 the chorus in urluk was also more professional and cosmopolitan than any we had seen before; it had even had gone on tour and made studio recordings. the chorus had a local composer and accordionist, ivan manikovskii, as organizer, and its repertoire in general was more modern than that we were seeking. among the performers that gathered to perform for us, some were able to sing in the semeiskii style, but there was obvious tension between the singers and their leader. they ended up taking turns choosing what to sing (as noted earlier, we concluded that this should not even be considered a genuine “semeiskii” chorus, as even their repertory is basically orthodox). our next stop was bichura, a large town in the buriat republic; we were very pleased that it was big enough to support a hotel, albeit a crumbling old soviet-style fleabag, but with running water. bichura dates to the first third of the eighteenth century, and was a regional center, first settled by cossacks. it was also a religious community before the revolution, and there had been eight active churches of various denominations (including an old believer chapel that had been taken over by the members of the edinoverie, according to rovinskii [1873: 114], who noted its minimal following in 1873) and two datsans (buddhist monasteries). on the way into town we passed the still-standing baldam-brebun buddhist monastery, which we were told was once the largest in russia, with 1000 monks. it had been shut down in the 1930’s, but was reopened in 1991, and in the process of being restored and rebuilt. we found that here in buriatiia the semeiskie were more divided into religious groupings, and more self-conscious both of their religious identity as christians and their differences from other christian groups. (this is the town where strangers had to be cleansed by spitting before entering the house.) in bichura our attention was immediately drawn to a brand-new functioning church with a sparkling tin cupola, which turned out to be a newly opened “ancient-orthodox” church (drevne-pravoslavnaia tserkov’). this old believer denomination (which we had not heard of before), we learned, had split off from the belokrinitskii concord of priestly old believers in 1923. the members of the belokrinitskii concord have their own hierarchy, including an active episcopate, and they also practice the full range of sacraments. amvrosii’s controversial practice of consecrating belokrinitsky clergy on his personal authority as well as other disagreements over sacramental practices led to various fissures within the movement, of which the ancientorthodox church was evidently a later offshoot (for details of the belokrinitskii concord see robson 1995: 31-32). seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 24 andrei torshin, the official in charge of the bichura church and the one who had seen through its construction (there had been various problems, mainly financial, and it had taken four years to complete) bent our ear endlessly with picayune discussions of church doctrine. he was probably particularly sensitive to church regulations because of his distressing personal situation. he had been born locally and gone to a seminary near moscow, but, as he told us, since he had been divorced and remarried, he was barred from becoming a full-fledged priest. the church had been completed in january, 1999, and was about to receive its first pastor, a priest whose job would include painting an iconostasis for the church. the land for the church had been donated by baba tania (tatiana fokeevna ivanova), whose house had formerly been the venue for a group of the town’s semeiskii old believers. (despite this, baba tania expressed reservations about andrei and the ancient-orthodox church and said privately that she considered the belokrinitskii practices “more correct.”) in baba tania’s house, in which we held a recording session, there was a ceiling-high cabinet full of ancient old believer books (the first printed old believer religious books we had seen on our trip), several of which were read from during a prayer meeting at her house. (andrei read a poem about the life of archpriest avvakum from a recent old believer magazine published in central russia.) in a local newsletter (edited by the indefatigable andrei), baba tania recalled the religious life of the old believers in bichura under the soviet (presumably stalinist) regime: once or twice a year clergymen would come from moscow to the old believer churches to officiate (over baptisms and weddings). but the elders (ustavshchik) were responsible for the day to day service (sluzhba implies a church service so these were most likely members of the belokrinitskii concord – m.l.). on every street lived several elders, who passed down their book knowledge (gramota) to worthy people. [but] an elder could take not care of all the needs [of the community] . . . every church also had elders (starosta) who were responsible for its decoration and upkeep. clergymen from moscow came regularly before easter and christmas for confession, and in the summer to perform marriages. when people heard that a clergyman had been sent for, they all decided to get married. once, more than 80 couples got married. but that was the last time, because after that the clergymen were arrested. only the elders were left. but then they started persecuting the elders (quoted in torshin 2000: 2) in bichura we also heard stories and saw evidence of atheist goon squads (including men from the town itself) who had burned, defaced, and done other nasty things to the town’s icons in 25 the 1930’s (presumably at the time the churches had been torn down). in the new ancientorthodox church we saw displayed several examples of these defaced icons, which had been scratched and slashed – this made the ritual of piously lighting candles before them all the more moving. during the brezhnev period, the old believers no longer went in fear of getting arrested, but gathered at “prayer houses” such as baba tania’s to carry out baptisms, marriages, and burial services – still in secret, for fear now of losing their jobs. the tradition of the elders, we learned, was dying out, because they themselves were dying off. it was unclear to me whether the spanking new church and its over-enthusiastic almost-pastor were going to provide a workable substitute, especially given what seemed to be the absence of any young people in the church. the one instance of youthful religious initiation we witnessed on our trip was in our next and last stop in the small village of kuitun, also in buriatiia, where andrei had recommended us to the new priests of the town’s single church, also of the ancient-orthodox denomination. the older (but junior) priest, the bearded father sergii, had lived in the town and served as an elder before the church was built; the younger, beardless, main priest (also father sergii) had been sent to take over and to paint the church’s iconostasis. we arrived in town just in time to witness and record the quadruple baptism of an infant, two small children, and a young mother. the service took place on a weekday afternoon. apart from the priests, the people being baptized, and one adult woman (the mother of one of the children?) we were the only ones in the church. the baptismal party consisted solely of women (apart from the infant boy). the man who had driven them to the church waited the several hours outside in his car; it was not clear if he was a relation or just the driver. in general, the religious activities we witnessed, including the singing, were almost exclusively female (and not only because there were few menfolk remaining). of the sixty-three people whose songs we recorded in seven villages, only two were men, and we only met one male elder (at baba tania’s in bichura). as in bichura, the tradition of the elders seems about to be totally displaced (or replaced) by the new church, which also seems to be the prospect for urluk after baba nastia stops her activity. in kuitun, small enough that religious differences are effaced, the one active church will apparently suffice to serve all. in several homes in this town, we were invited in to see beautiful, in some cases almost wall-length, private iconostases, which had served either as shrines for the priestless, or, more likely, as a substitute for the old closed church. small though the town is, it enjoys two singing collectives, one of which had even gone on tour to germany in 1993. like the chorus in urluk, the group that gathered to perform for us seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 26 (with members of both collectives) was in vladimir kliauz’s term “concertified” (okontsertivshiisia), and gave a self-conscious performance with several staged numbers for which they got up and danced (as if on stage). bibliography bolonev, f. f. 1975. kalendarnye obychai i obriady semeiskikh [calendar customs and rites of the semeiskie]. ulan-ude. bolonev, f. f. 1985. semeiskie: istoriko-etnograficheskie ocherki [the semeiskie: historico-ethnographic essays]. ulan-ude. bolonev, f. f. 1994. starobriadtsy zabaikal’ia v xviii-xx vv. [old believers of transbaikal in the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries]. novosibirsk. dorofeev, n. i. 1989. russkie narodnye pesni zabaikalia: semeiskii raspev [russian folk songs of transbaikal: semeiskii song style]. moscow. robson, roy r. 1995. old believers in modern russia. dekalb. rovinskii, p. a. 1873. “materialy dlia etnografii zabaikal’ia” [materials for the ethnography of zabaikal’e], ii and iii. izvestiia sibirskogo otdela imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva, 4: 2, pp. 98-107 and 4: 3, pp. 113-32. torshin, a[ndrei]. 2000. “vospominaniia o trudnoi istorii bichurskoi tserkvi” [memoirs of the difficult history of the bichura church]. tserkovnyi vestnik: drevnepravoslavnaia gazeta. bichura: drevnepravoslavnaia tserkov’ v chest’ pokrova presviatoi bogoroditsy. no 2 (6) january, p. 2. uspenskii, b. a. 1968. arkhaicheskaia sistema tserkovnoslavianskogo proiznosheniia: iz istorii liturgicheskogo proiznosheniia v rossii [an archaic system of church-slavic pronunciation: from the history of liturgical pronunciation in russia]. moscow. vladikina-bochinskaia, n. m. 1975. “narodnoe pesennoe tvorchestvo zabaikalskikh semeiskikh” [folk singing of the semeiskie of transbaikal]. byt i iskusstvo russkogo naseleniia vostochnoi sibiri. pt 2. zabaikal’e. novosibirsk, pp. 126-45. 60 let vostanovlennoi drevnepravoslavnoi arkhiepiskopii. drevnepravoslavnaia arkhiepiskop: novozybkov, 1983. [pamphlet; no author indicated] an audio cd entitled “pesni semeiskikh ukyra” [songs of the semeiskie of ukyr] – recordings made by the expedition – was published in moscow earlier this year (institute 27 nasledie, 2001). it includes fifteen original recordings as well as a liner with the words. a very small quantity of these cds is available from prof. marcus levitt at $15 each plus $1.50 postage. send a check (payable to him) to: department of slavic languages and literatures, university of southern california, los angeles, ca 90089-4353. e-mail at levitt@usc.edu seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 microsoft word seefaf01c.doc 28 video-recording ritual incantations and folk cures (1) vladimir kliauz institute of world literature, moscow during an expedition to collect folklore materials from the semeiskii old believers in transbaikal, we had occasion to make video recordings of a dozen rituals, including the preparation of a birch tree for trinity day, funeral meals (pominki), a blessing for the road, a church service, a baptism, and various healings. during their more than two hundred year history in transbaikal, the semeiskie, who are living bearers of old russian and slavic oral tradition, have developed their own unique local practices. their folk songs have been analyzed from this point of view [eliasov 1969; dorofeev 1989], and our expedition gathered additional primary material of this kind. another of our goals was to explore semeiskii traditions by examining other oral genres, including, in particular, incantations (zagovory). it was p. a. rovinskii who in 1873 was the first to publish semeiskii incantations. he examined two incantatory rituals or charms, one of which was performed to cure “dry cough” (sukhoty) and the other, children’s insomnia (nochnitsy) [rovinskii 1873: 123]. subsequently other texts were published by n. kirillov [1893: 117], g. m. osokin [1906: 114-15], and v. voskoboinikov [1930: 83-84]. in 1934 a. m. astakhova joined a multi-part expedition to transbaikal. it was sponsored by the buriat institute of culture and the institute of anthropology of the academy of sciences. astakhova was extremely interested in incantational poetry, although, according to a. n. martynova, curator of the folklore archive at the institute of world literature, her trip was also motivated by the fact that her son had been forcibly settled in the area after his arrest, and she hoped to see him. in any case, her work on this material is worthy of respect, considering the circumstances under which she was collecting. here it should be remarked that from the 1930s through the 1970s there was an unspoken ban on studying popular religious, mystical, or even mythological belief systems. it was not until 1986 that f. f. bolonev was able to publish some of the texts astakhova had collected among the semeiskie of the tarbagatai region. in the 1970s and 1980s various semeiskii incantations were cited by folklorists as examples of a tradition that was dying out or being transformed [davushkina 1975; polishchuk 1975; bolonev 1978; bolonev 1986]. the most recent publications of such material came out at the very end of the last century [rkofsdv 1997; naumenko 1998]. most of this material was seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 29 recorded from the semeiskie in the tarbagatai, mukhorshibirskii, bichurskii, kitkhtinskii, and other regions of what is today buriatiia. in the krasnochikoiskii region of chinskaia oblast’, to the east, where our expedition went, and where the semeiskie comprise a significant proportion of the population, there had never been any organized collecting. our expedition revealed the incantation tradition to be alive and well. our goal was to record incantations in performance – we were able to catch on videotape several instances of the ritual act of curing the evil eye (sglaza or porcha). members of the expedition, camille perkins, mary macilvery, natalie ross, and vladimir kliauz , assumed the role of patients seeking a cure from the znakharka (the folk healer, the woman who performs the ritual). we were almost never refused permission to film, so long as we could manage to convince the healer that the person really was sick. this was not difficult, considering that sglaza is a somewhat amorphous illness, often with no visible physical manifestations. its main symptoms, for example, are sluggishness, a general malaise of an unspecific nature, low spirits, or a sense of failure. on comparing the video recordings of the ritual acts we had recorded in several villages – ukyr, urluk, and arkhangel’skoe (kochen), which were between 30 and 200 kilometers apart – we discovered that the performance of the ritual was almost identical, although the incantations themselves were not. the ritual of healing the evil eye among the semeiskie of chikoi, and apparently also among the local orthodox population, consists in the recitation of incantational formulas and a certain sequence of actions by the znakharka and her patient. these also make up a “text,” that is, the playing out of a plot among the given participants or protagonists. this takes place within the special confines of the home and comprises several standard elements. during her actions, each znakharka recites particular words and incantations – they may be pronounced loudly or quite softly. (in the latter case we were able to learn the words later.) as is evident from analysis of the video recordings, the formulas used in the actual ritual are often made up of a complex of texts; each performer has her own repertoire and blocks of texts. the main block is recited during incantation over the water to be used in the healing. the incantation recorded from a. i. aref’eva from ukyr was composed of motifs from the spiritual verse (dukhovnyi stikh), “son presviatoi bogoroditsy” [dream of the most holy mother of god]. the ritual plot centered on the mother of god taking and carrying water to wash away disease. in the incantation recited by e. e. mikhailova, also of ukyr, there was a direct address to the mother of god to provide salvation from the evil eye: seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 30 mat’, presviataia bagoroditsa, spasi, pamilui, raba bozhava – takova ta – at spuskav, at kriksav, at siksav, at diannykh, budennykh, paludennykh, ata vsiakaia niachesti atliataisia, at buriatskava glaza, evreiskava glaza . . . . [mother, most holy mother of god, save, have mercy on the servant of god, such and such [here the patient is named], from [unclean spirits] which terrify us, from those which make us scream, wet our beds (siksav), from those which give us no rest in the day or at night, on workdays or at noon, let him fly from all these kinds of impurity, from buriat evil eye, from jewish evil eye…] this incantation was originally meant to cure a small child of sleeplessness, but, as is typical of folk healers, all the texts she knows are brought to bear on any given diagnosis; all the more so in the case above, in which the evil eye is clearly connected to insomnia. further on, the incantation refers to water which runs (bezhit) and washes off tree roots (in this way, it is understood that it will wash away the person’s sickness). the words of a. m. andreeva’s incantation consist mainly of an appeal to god and the saints, asking them to help the znakharka drive away the evil eye (porcha) and charm the water so that it can wash away disease. p. k. shekunova of arkhangel’skoe also appealed to the mother of god, angels, and saviors: bogoroditsa, angeli, khraniteli, spasiteli, sokhranite, v putiakh, u dorogu, ot zlykh liudei, ot neschasnova sluchaia, ot glaza, ot chernova . . . . [mother of god, angels, preservers, saviors, safeguard me while away on the road, from evil people, from an unhappy incident, from the evil eye, from the black one…] the next segment of text, not used by all folk healers, is recited while the patient is being treated with the water that has just been charmed. at this point a. i. aref’eva appealed to the mother of god to save and preserve her patient. after she had prepared the water, a. m. andreeva gave it to her patient (v. kliauz), instructing him to wash with it at home while pronouncing the following words: “s gogolia voda, s rab bozhova vladimira vsia khudova” [may all things evil fall away from god’s servant vladimir like water off a duck’s back]. thus the main elements of the incantations, enacted by the znakharka during the cure for evil eye, consist of the following: an address to the heavenly powers (god, the mother of god, angels, saints) for help in healing, and the washing away of disease (such as the evil eye or fear) by means of water. these motifs are directly connected with the invariable elements of the ritual 31 act. analysis of the video recordings reveals those elements to be the following: the znakharka pours water into a vessel; she salts the water, while making the sign of the cross; she prays before an icon or icons and genuflects; she pronounces an incantation over the water (she “whispers” [shepchet] or “charms” it [nagovarivaet]); she takes some of the water into her mouth and sprays it on the patient; she has the patient drink some of the water; she leads the patient to a place in the home which is opposed in some semantically significant sense to the “beautiful corner” containing the icons. such a place may be a threshold, cellar, or behind the stove); she pours some of the water into (or on) the patient’s hand so that the patient may wash with it, or she washes the patient herself. a recent description of this ritual among the semeiskie of buriatiia, in the village of saratovka, tarbagatai region, contains the same elements [stadnik 2000]. the question arises as to whether the group of features that comprise the semeiskii ritual cure for evil eye is of local relevance only, or whether it is more broadly typical of all russian incantations. existing scholarly literature is unable to furnish a precise answer to this question. while it suggests that comparable ritual actions for curing such things as the evil eye and fear are carried out in other areas of russia, it is unclear what the standard practice is, and what the precise connections between the various component parts are. further video recordings are necessary, although, unfortunately, these are still rarely made by russian folklorists. despite the significant similarities among the ritual healings we recorded, each took place within its own spatial, verbal, material and individual-psychological parameters, and remains unique. our observations show that while the behavioral pattern of the znakharka and patient was generally similar, in each case there were some elements relating to what we may term the individual znakharka’s “school,” the methods and understanding inherited from her “teacher” (uchitel’). thus p. k. shekunova of arkhangel’skoe poured water on the hands of her patient through a door handle, an act she said her father had taught her. a. m. andreeva sat her patient down in front of her, made the sign of the cross over him using a cross which she held in her hand, and blew air all over him – something a priest characteristically does during baptism. significantly, we learned that in the past andreeva had attended church, where she had even sung in the choir, so that she was familiar with church ritual. in urluk, andreeva fulfills the functions of both znakharka and priest (she is even called pop – parish priest). this dual function is typical for the semeiskie in the villages of the krasnochikoi region, but it is unusual that andreeva has come to fill it, given that she was not born locally. seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 32 other elements of the ritual also depended on the particular situations involved. for example, in healing natalie ross, p. k. shekunova first had her daughter massage the patient’s head (popravit’ patsientke golovu), because we had told her that natalie had fallen down twice that day – the znakharka considered this to be one indication of the evil eye. it was thought that she had possibly had a concussion (strusila golovu), which, by the way, shekunova’s diagnosis confirmed by using a woolen cord. shekunova presided over the entire healing, watching carefully as her daughter gave the massage. the ritual as performed by e. e. mikhailova of ukyr and v. f. negodiaeva of arkhangel’skoe differed from the others in that there was no actual act of healing. these folk healers merely recited the incantation over water, and the patients were then told to drink and wash with it over the next few days. in general, the healing ritual that mikhailova performed was something of an experiment, because she was not asked to cure the evil eye or a traditional illness, but instead to help the patient with pain in her knee. at first mikhailova was unsure of her ability to cure a knee problem, but she nevertheless agreed to try. she did an incantation over water and told the patient to apply it to the painful place and to drink some as she wished. this experiment indicates that, for the znakharka, “charmed” water is a kind of universal cure that may be applied in the treatment of a range of illnesses. notes 1. this project was carried out with the financial support of the rossiiskii fond fundamentalnikh issledovanii, grant number 00-06-80222. bibliography astakhova, a. m. 1928. “zagovornoe iskusstvo na reke pinege” [incantational art on the river pinega]. krest’ianskoe iskusstvo sssr. leningrad, pp. 33-76. bolonev, f. f. 1978. “o nekotorykh arkhaichnykh elementakh v zagovorakh russkogo naseleniia vostochnoi sibiri” [concerning several archaic elements in the incantations of the russian population of eastern siberia]. traditsionnye obriady i iskusstvo russkogo i korennykh narodov sibiri. novosibirsk, pp. 66-78. bolonev, f. f. 1986. “o narodnoi meditsine i zagovorakh russkogo naseleniia zabaikal’ia” [on the folk medicine and incantations of the russian population of transbaikal]. genezis i evoliutsiia etnicheskikh kul’tur sibiri. novosibirsk, pp. 114-129. 33 dorofeev, n. i. 1989. russkie narodnye pesni zabaikal’ia: semeiskii raspev [russian folksongs of transbaikal: the semeiskii song style]. moscow. kirillov, n. 1893. “interes izucheniia narodnoi i tibetskoi meditsiny v zabaikal’e” [the interest of studying folk and tibetan medicine in transbaikal]. etnograficheskoe obozrenie. no. 4, pp. 84-136. naumenko, g. m. 1998. etnografiia detstva [the ethnography of childhood]. moscow. osokin, g. m. 1906. na granitse mongolii: ocherki i materialy k etnografii iugozapadnogo zabaikal’ia [on the mongolian border: essays and materials on the ethnography of southwest transbaikal]. st. petersburg. polishchuk, n. s. 1975. “byt i kul’tura semeiskikh” [the daily life and culture of the semesikie]. byt i iskusstvo russkogo naseleniia vostochnoi sibiri: zabaikal’e. novosibirsk, pp. 102-12. rovinskii p. a. 1873. “etnograficheskie issledovaniia v zabaikal’skoi oblasti” [ethnographic studies in the transbaikal region]. izvestiia sibirskogo otdeleniia rgo. st. petersburg. vol. 3, p. 123. rkofsdb 1997 – russkii kalendarno-obriadovyi fol’klor sibiri i dal’nego vostoka [russian folk calendar rituals of siberia and the far east]. comp. f. f. bolonev and n. v. leonova. ed. t. g. leonova. novosibirsk. savushkina, n. i. 1975. “narodnoe ustno-poeticheskoe tvorchestvo v russkikh selakh” [poetic folk oral creation in russian villages]. byt i iskusstvo russkogo naseleniia vostochnoi sibiri: zabaikal’e. novosibirsk, pp. 113-25. stadnik, iu. a. 2000. “kinetika zagovornykh lechebnykh ritualov semeiskikh zabaikal’ia” [the kinetics of incantatory healing rituals of the semeiskie of transbaikal]. zhivaia starina. no. 1, pp. 30-31. eliasov, l. e. 1969. narodnaia poeziia semeiskikh [the folk poetry of the semeiskie]. ulan-ude. voskoboinikov, v. 1930. “primety i sueveriia semeiskikh” [omens and superstitions of the semeiskie]. buriatievedenie (verkhneudinsk). nos 3-4, pp. 11-12. an interactive cd-rom about the semeiskie of transbaikal is due to be published at the end of 2001. entitled “traditsionnaia kul’tura starobriadtsev (semeiskikh) zabaikal’ia” [the traditional culture of the old believers (the semeiskie) of transbaikal], the disk has been seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 34 compiled and edited by vladimir kliauz. this special cd has been designed as an electronic reference work, and will offer, in interactive form, material on the folklore, music, and customs of the semeiskie. it contains a complete bibliography on the culture and history of the semeiskie (more than 500 titles from 1701 through 2001); an electronic library of their folklore (more than 600 works); full texts of rare and key primary and secondary sources; a photo gallery of about 300 images; and video materials (22 clips) of contemporary customs and rituals of the semeiskii villages of transbaikal. the disk will also be searchable, using the “yandex system,” which allows searches of both scholarly and folkloric texts. “traditsionnaia kul’tura starobriadtsev (semeiskikh) zabaikal’ia” [the traditional culture of the old believers (the semeiskie) of transbaikal] has been prepared with the financial support of the “open society institute” foundation. the price is $30 to include postage and handling. to reserve a copy, send a check (payable to marcus levitt) or contact professor marcus levitt, department of slavic languages and literatures, university of southern california, los angeles, ca 90089-4353. email: levitt@usc.edu (translated by james bailey) editorial satement 99 r e v i e w e. v. barsov. prichitan’ia severnogo kraia, sobrannye e. v. barsovym [laments of the northern region collected by e. v. barsov]. prepared by b. e. chistova and k. v. chistov. 2 vols. st. petersburg: nauka, 1997. literaturnye pamiatniki. 500 + 655 pp. among the numerous “classic” collections of russian folklore that have been republished during the last decade some are simply reprints while others involve textual analysis and informative commentary. the work under review represents an outstanding example of the second type. the two volumes consist of funeral, recruit, and wedding laments, several pieces by e. v. barsov, extensive textological notes and commentary, an article by k. v. chistov about laments (i, 400-495), a linguistic study of the language of laments by the dialectologist a. s. gerd (ii, 603-618), and a glossary of non-literary words. while most of the laments were recorded by barsov from irina andreevna fedosova (1827-1899; i, 420-21), a few, which have been added to this edition, were collected from her by o. kh. agreneva-slavianskaia (opisanie russkoi krest’ianskoi svad’by, 3 vols., st petersburg, 1887-89). several photographs have been included. barsov (1836-1917) recorded laments from 1867 to 1869 in the north-western city of petrozavodsk (i, 429), mainly from fedosova but also from several other women performers, and published the texts in three parts (i, 496). the first (1872) contains funeral laments, the second recruit laments (1882), and the third (1885) wedding laments. the third appeared in two issues of the series “chteniia v obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh” and inexplicably breaks off in the middle of a wedding song. almost since the appearance of the first volume barsov’s collection has been regarded as a fundamental source of information about russian laments. not only did it evoke responses from scholars, writers, and cultural figures in russia, but also from abroad, including the english scholar w. p. ralston (i, 271-273). k. v. chistov, a folklorist who often combines the study of folklore and ethnography, has written many articles and two books about fedosova (narodnaia poetessa i. a. fedosova, petrozavodsk, 1955, and irina andreevna fedosova: istorikoseefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 100 kul’turnyi ocherk, petrozavodsk, 1988). in his essay “‘prichitan’ia severnogo kraia, sobrannye e. v. barsovym,’ v istorii russkoi kul’tury” [laments of the northern region collected by e. v. barsov in the history of russian culture], chistov places barsov’s collection in its historical and cultural context. in his essay and endnotes chistov also provides a many-sided commentary about the role of myth, interpretation of rituals, historical realia, as well as explanations of dialect words and expressions. in particular chistov focuses on textological problems which in several respects are inherent to the collection. barsov himself was dissatisfied with the publication of the laments (i, 270), complained about numerous mistakes in the first volume, and inserted a list of “supplements and corrections” (i, 322). his revealing article “o zapisiakh i izdaniiakh ‘prichitanii severnogo kraia’; o lichnom tvorchestve iriny fedosovoi i khore ee podgolosnits” [on the recordings and editions of laments of the northern region: irina fedosova’s own artistic production and the chorus of supporting voices] (i, 262-77) was discovered only in 1948 and was published in 1975 (i, 393). here barsov describes the conditions under which he recorded fedosova’s laments. (her name is often pronounced with the stress on the third syllable). with her second husband she moved from the zaonezh’e area beyond lake onega in karelia to the city of petrozavodsk on the western bank of the lake, where barsov met her. he had to conduct his recording sessions with her in her husband’s carpentry workshop amidst noise and distractions. furthermore, he took her laments down “from dictation” rather from a sung performance (i, 264), a method that strongly affects the accuracy of verbal texts. as chistov points out in detail (i, 464-67), yet other problems arise in studying fedosova’s laments, in part because the genre in itself causes difficulties. funeral laments actually consist of a series of rituals extending from the death of a person to the burial ceremony and the wake afterwards. the emotional atmosphere surrounding a funeral is such that the “text” is fragmented; as a result it appears no one has recorded a russian lament during an actual funeral. published laments thus represent “poetic” recreations which combine several rituals and which have been performed later, sometimes many years afterwards. as chistov points out (464), “in the past funeral laments were not supposed to be performed outside the ritual; this was considered blasphemous.” 101 however, there also existed what are called memorial laments (“pominal’nye prichitan’ia) which were performed on anniversaries or ancestral holidays. it is likely that many of fedosova’s songs belonged to this kind of lament. although only women sing laments in the recorded russian tradition, a few indications exist, especially in the medieval chronicles, that men also performed laments. insofar as fedosova herself is concerned, she had an exceptional talent for improvisation, something she demonstrated when on request she created a “lament” about a woman’s daughter before an audience in moscow (i, 478). these are the reasons why folklorists may refer to her funeral laments as “plachi-poemy” [lament poems]. questions thus arise as to how “traditional” her laments are and to what extent they are the artistic creation of a talented but individual performer. in his essay chistov presents the history of the publication of barsov’s collection, corrects factual errors about fedosova’s life, and describes her performances in several cities (maksim gor’kii witnessed one), the role of improvisation, how many russian writers have drawn upon her laments, folklore textology, and the lament as a genre. in particular chistov remarks that one of barsov’s main achievements was to focus on the individual performer; barsov, along with a. f. gil’ferding in his collection of onega epics, was one of the earliest collectors to turn attention to this aspect of orally created literature. k. v. chistov and his late wife b. e. chistova started working on this new edition of barsov’s laments in 1973 (i, 324) but saw it through to publication only in 1997. with extraordinary care they have gone over the approximately 30,000 lines that were collected from fedosova (i, 275), seeking obvious misprints, mistakes, and distortions. they note each editorial change in the “textological commentary” where they also quote the original reading. thus they observe the highest textological standards by citing and justifying each modification in the verbal text. one of the more curious results of such painstaking work concerns the discovery that fedosova often “swallowed” the last two syllables of the pervading dactylic ending (i, 472), a performance technique that evidently also existed in the serbian tradition. as the chistovs demonstrate in their edition of barsov’s laments, folklore textology, or the accuracy of the published texts, seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 102 should play an important role in later editions because collections of folklore, particularly those brought out before the introduction of the tape recorder in the 1950s, cannot automatically be assumed to be as reliable, as, for instance, editions of written literature usually are. in an undertaking as large as this, one would expect to find some discrepancies. i noticed several minor errors in bibliographical references and will cite two examples; i. m. kolesnitskaia, “russkie svadebnye prichitaniia v zapisiakh [publikatsiiakh] xix veka,” fol’klor narodov rsfsr, ufa, 1976 [1975], vyp. 2, 160-180 [169-180] (ii, 600); a. v. gura, “poeticheskaia terminologiia deistvuiushchikh lits [not in title] severnorusskogo svadebnogo obriada,” fol’klor i etnografiia russkogo severa [not in title]: obriady i obriadovyi fol’klor, l., 1972 [1974], 171-180 (ii, 601). the chistovs should be congratulated for their thorough textological work, for including an extensive explanatory commentary, and for presenting all those interested in russian folklore with an excellent new edition of one of the finest collections of russian laments. their contribution will provide an excellent and reliable source for the study of traditional laments for many years to come. james bailey the university of wisconsin microsoft word fall04w.doc 6 articles myth, motif, and motivation: pavol dobšinský’s theory and practice of the wondertale david l. cooper university of illinois, urbana-champaign pavol dobšinský was a štúrovec, a member of that first generation of slovak literary figures who gave direction to the nascent slovak literary movement following ľudovít štúr’s decisive break from czech literary language in 1846. like many others, he was a lutheran minister, trained in one of the lutheran secondary schools. his studies began at the lyceum in levoča in 1840 at age twelve, just three years before its ranks were swelled by students from the lyceum in bratislava that had been closed by a hungarian church commission. the reasons for closure were the suspicious activities going on there, including the students’ active collecting of prose folklore and štúr’s lectures on folk poetry and prose. dobšinský soon became one of the most active student collectors of folktales. in 1858, along with augustín horislav škultéty, he began publishing the second collection of slovak folktales, slovenské povesti (slovak tales).(1) that same year he went to banská štiavnica to become professor at the lutheran lyceum and editor of the literary magazine sokol (falcon). the folktales came out serially in small volumes until the sixth and last in 1861 when dobšinský took a pastoral position in drienčany and could no longer communicate with his publisher. in the late 1860s dobšinský led the matica slovenská cultural organization’s collecting efforts that led to the publication in 1871 and 1874 of two volumes of a collection of slovak national songs, tales, proverbs and sayings, riddles, games, customs and beliefs, with contributions from dobšinský in every category. in 1880 he published his own volume, a description of folk customs, beliefs and games, one of the first significant works of slovak ethnography. the following year, he was finally able to return to the publication of folktales, and by 1883 had published eight volumes of prostonárodnie slovenské povesti (slovak folktales). in all, dobšinský published just over 150 folktales in his lifetime. in addition to his collecting and publishing efforts, dobšinský presented some theoretical observations on the folktale in his úvahy o slovenských povestiach (reflections on slovak tales), published in 1871. this is a major, 170-page consideration of the nature and significance of the wondertale. it is in some ways the culmination of his generation’s work on slovak prose folklore, which had focused primarily on the wondertale genre in its collecting and publishing activities. perhaps because of his wider collecting efforts, begun while this volume was in preparation, dobšinský included many other types of folktales in his later folktale publication: humorous tales, novelistic tales, legendary tales and so on. but the fascination was always with the wondertales, which dominated the early publication of tales here as elsewhere in europe. in this, dobšinský was following in the footsteps of his slovak teachers, especially štúr, and in the traditions they had already established for the interpretation of these tales. another major influence on dobšinský’s theories is the late romantic school of the folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 7 brothers grimm, which linked märchen to mythology and founded the mythological interpretation of folktales. dobšinský did not know the grimms’ work at first hand, but only through the mediation of the czechs, karel jaromír erben and ignac hanuš. always lurking in the background, as dobšinský’s discussion of myths and tales evokes a picture of the early slavs, is the pre-romantic czechoslav idealization of slavic antiquities, which drew upon such diverse sources as nikolai karamzin’s history of the russian state, herder’s chapter on the slavs, the czech forged manuscripts, and any historians, ancient or recent, who made even passing positive comment that could be related to the slavs.(2) finally, and perhaps most fundamental of all, dobšinský’s training as a lutheran minister and his background in christian theology made it impossible for him to draw certain kinds of conclusions about folktales, in which few today would fail to spot a range of pre-christian elements. here one may question the accuracy of his own statement about his methodology in the introduction to the book. “in these reflections,” he says, “i have stepped out into the field to which the tales whisked away my spirit of themselves and by themselves ... let us begin now to disenchant in ourselves the obvious secrets of our tales, and thus to disenchant those secrets from the tales alone, almost without any other source of assistance or supplement, though we could easily make use of such” [dobšinský 1871: 5].(3) he thus claims that in conducting his analysis he has ignored any sources other than the tales themselves. the claim to let the tales speak for themselves is crucial to dobšinský’s project, which seeks to fulfill the purpose for which the tales were collected in the first place, beginning when he was a lyceum student. that goal was to discover what the tales had to say about slovak antiquities. it had been stated first by the real pioneer in the collection of tales, samuel reuss, the father of two of dobšinský’s fellow students and a minister in revúca, for whom dobšinský later worked as secretary from 1848-55. reuss himself never ventured any interpretation, as a sufficient number of tales was not available. in 1853 an interpretation of slavic folksongs was offered by štúr in his book o národních písních a pověstech plemen slovanských (on the folk songs and tales of the slavic tribes), published in czech by the matice česká cultural organization. here he claimed that the evidence of the tales would be consistent with that of the songs, but the evidence would be better preserved, more pure. “if they [the tales] had all reliably made their way to us,” štúr claimed, “we would know the theology and cosmology of our most ancient ancestors” [štúr 1955: 214, 220-21].(4) dobšinský believed he had enough tales to venture an analysis. in “disenchanting” the tales to discover their secrets, though, there was little reason for him to distrust the methods and conclusions of his teachers, and his conclusions are consistent with theirs, if no less interesting for that. the claim that he is drawing everything from the tales themselves, however, becomes at times a blatant fiction. the first section of úvahy discusses the “báječnosť povesti,” the mythical qualities of the tales. here dobšinský distinguishes between these tales and historical legends and thereby delimits the type of historical information one can expect to extract from the tales: they are not a source of historical fact, but only of a historical way of thinking, one associated with the nation’s childhood. the reality represented in these tales is one of thought, of the imagination. we understood these tales, he notes, especially well at a particular point in our lives: “those were the glorious times of our childhood when we thought as children, and pictorial 8 imagination prevailed over dry reason” [dobšinský 1871: 8].(5) the tales represent not abstract thought, but pictorial thoughts. one might note how dobšinský here anticipates something of what lévi-strauss had to say about myth in the savage mind. how then does he view the relationship of these tales to myth? dobšinský compares them to greek myths and finds that they are about the same things: about nature and natural phenomena rather than human relations. such a conception is entirely in line with the solar mythological school’s method of interpreting folktales, built on the work of the grimm brothers and others, like max müller, which dominated tale studies in the middle third of the century, and dobšinský ends this section with an interpretation of three tales along those lines. he had learned this method of interpretation from the czechs erben and hanuš whose work he cites. in this section, dobšinský is entirely up to date with the trends in folktale studies in europe. it is worth noting, however, one difference in dobšinský’s interpretation: where the grimm brothers held that folktales were the fragmentary remnants of myth, dobšinský holds that these tales preceded myths [dobšinský 1871: 17]. the order, however, is not particularly important. both conceptions allow one to ignore the differences between mythological tales and wondertales and to interpret the latter as if they were disguised forms of the former. the transition to the next three sections of dobšinský’s book is worth noting. while on the one hand he declares that the figures in the tales actually represent natural phenomena, at the same time he wants to say the opposite, that the character dalajláma is not just a symbol of the sun. he argues that the sun is also a symbol of dalajláma as a god, and proceeds to outline the theology (bohoveda), cosmology (svetoveda), and anthropology (človekoveda) of the tales on that basis. in other words, these sections present a reading of the tales that is inconsistent with the solar mythological theory he has just outlined: if the tales developed as a kind of symbolic language for speaking about natural phenomena (such as the movement of the sun), then the characters of the tales must be taken as symbols of heavenly bodies. to take the sun as a symbol of a character from the tales, then, is to utterly confuse the nature of the symbolic language. the tales cannot be read as a way of learning about the gods, because the gods are there only to teach about the heavens. if dobšinský contradicts the solar mythological school and his own first section, however, the method in this section is entirely in line with the slovak school of interpretation, and its genesis lies in štúr’s suggestion above: “if [the tales] had all made their way reliably to us, we would know the theology (bohoveda) and cosmology (svetotvorstvo) of our most ancient ancestors.” for his discussion of the cosmology of the ancient slavs and their conception of the creation of human beings, dobšinský refers to various ukrainian, russian, and slovenian mythological tales, which erben had gathered and published in his study of slavic mythology. erben is in fact also the hidden source of almost every conclusion dobšinský reaches concerning the theology of the slavs. while he refers to slovak tales to illustrate what he is saying, it is not the tales that drive his argument, but rather erben’s article on slavic mythology in the czech encyclopedia published by rieger. like erben, he concludes that the slavs recognized one heavenly god. erben’s source for this is the sixth-century byzantine historian procopius. dobšinský illustrates this point with the character of the king of time from the wondertale of that name. also like erben, he marks the dualism of the slavic gods, the split between good and evil. erben’s sources are the russian primary chronicle and other ancient slavic texts that give the names of gods, like folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 9 bělboh and ljutbog [erben 1870: 603]. dobšinský points to the witches and dragons that oppose the heroes in the tales. and so he proceeds, illustrating erben’s conclusions with material from the tales. dobšinský is ingenious in making the wondertales mirror what he has gleaned from elsewhere about the ancient slavs, but his lack of a distinction between mythological tales and wondertales has him straining throughout to make them agree. ultimately, too, erben is not the source for all of dobšinský’s conclusions. while erben spoke of the recognition of a single heavenly god, but went on to describe the many other gods known, dobšinský concludes that the ancient slavs were essentially monotheistic [!], and proceeds to list the characteristics of this praboh (ur-god): omnipresence (všadebyt), omniscience (vševed), omnipotence (všemoh) and so on. such conclusions flow naturally from his training in theology — how else is one to conceive of a single god after all — but they can in no way be attributed to the tales. it is worth noting here that in his book on slavic songs štúr, noting the greater purity and better preservation of the worldview of the slavs in the tales as compared to the songs, had observed that “that worldview is pantheism, which still has an unbounded authority in the slavic folktale” [štúr 1955: 214].(6) however, such assertions were edited out of the first edition at the recommendation of erben [štúr 1955: 258]. had he known of štúr’s authoritative opinion, dobšinský might have been forced to reconsider the question of monotheism. just how authoritative štúr’s example was can be seen further in the next three sections of the book, which analyze “pomery človeka k božestvu, k ľudstvu, k prírode” (the relations of man to the godhead, to humanity, and to nature). štúr’s book on the slavic folksong can be divided into two parts, the first treating the relation of man to nature, the second man’s social relations. as in the previous three sections, dobšinský expands on štúr’s scheme by one section. unfortunately, as in the previous sections, dobšinský illustrates his argument with examples from the tales rather than deriving it from them. now more than ever the driving element is his religious training: for example, he argues that the ancient slavs were remarkably moral in their relations and says, “it could not have been otherwise with a nation that had risen to such a sublime spiritual conception of the godhead as we have just described in the previous subsection” [dobšinský 1871: 82].(7) in so doing he adds another level of contradiction. if in the first section dobšinský had insisted that the tales were not about human relations but about nature, and in the second section interprets them as if they are about gods, now he interprets them as if, after all, they are about human relations! dobšinský follows štúr in asserting that the basis of all social relations for the ancient slavs was family love [dobšinský 1871: 82, štúr 1955: 90]. one may agree that family or clan relations formed the social basis for the ancient slavs, but the term “family love” introduces christian morals into a place where it does not belong. štúr at least recognized the pantheism of the slavs, but what about their paganism? the lack of a solid distinction between pagan society and christian society is not new, however, to štúr and dobšinský. it was entirely characteristic of the czechoslav preromantic idealization of slavic antiquities, which projected its humanistic program into the ancient slavic past and, in doing so, made judicious use of such sources as herder, karamzin and older historians. this legacy was difficult to overcome. note that erben attributes the observation that the slavs recognized one heavenly godhead to the sixth-century byzantine historian procopius, who also noted the democratic character of their society. it is typical of that discourse not to question either procopius’s motivations for such observations or their factual 10 basis. the christian-pagan divide was the subject of a novel, záře nad pohanstvem (the dawn over paganism), by josef linda, one of the suspected authors of the czech forged manuscripts, which became canonical sources for projections of czech antiquities. the theme of the novel is ostensibly the struggle between pagan and christian slavdom, embodied in the murder of saint václav by his brother boleslav, but as karel krejčí has noted, the two sides do not really represent opposites: “a pagan figure from the forged manuscripts or from linda’s novel and a christian of the type of bolzano (bernard, a contemporary philosopher who taught religion at prague’s university – d. c.) were people of the same worldview who simply in different ways invoked the same rousseauesque god and loved their democratic czech nation, animated by the noble ideal of humanity” [krejčí 1949: 179].(8) dobšinský’s very christian version of slavic antiquity, then, is entirely in line with this tradition. the bulk of dobšinský’s book may then be interesting from a cultural-historical perspective, but fails to offer a good reading of the tales themselves. fortunately, in the last section of his book on “starobylosť a zachovalosť povestí” (the antiquity and well-preserved nature of the tales), dobšinský finally turns to a description of the poetics of the wondertale, and although here, too, he is developing the work of one of his teachers, reuss, his method is at last to focus on a description of the character of the actual tales. his description of the formulaic language, abstract setting and expressive language of the tales, as well as their narration of the fantastic without doubt or wonder reveals his deep familiarity with the oral tale tradition and its expressive means. the question still remains as to whether dobšinský introduced any christian elements into his published tales, just as he did into his analysis of them. this may be a false question in so far as the folk tradition from which the tales were collected had certainly experienced the influence of popular publications from the period of the catholic baroque. there is, therefore, no reason to assume that christian morality was foreign to the living folk tradition, as dobšinský knew it. still, modern research on the international tale tradition emphasizes the stringing together of various motifs and structural units in forming folktales and notes that the question of the moral motivation of the plot is secondary, if not irrelevant to how the tales work [propp 1968, lüthi 1982]. in this respect we may consider the tale “radúz and ľudmíla” (at 313 c [+ 327]), which dobšinský prepared for his first collection of tales. radúz is sent out from home to find work, and comes to a house inhabited by a witch, a warlock, and the beautiful ľudmíla where he is taken in. on each of the next three days, the witch assigns radúz an impossible task, which he is to complete by the next day, and with the help of ľudmíla, who steals the witch’s magic wand, he completes the tasks. the witch becomes suspicious, though, and plans to cook radúz in the morning. ľudmíla learns of the plans and promises to help radúz escape if he will promise never to forget her. he does and they escape. they are followed and three times, by changing their shapes, escape detection by the warlock and the witch. but in their final escape, the witch curses them so that they shall live apart seven years and radúz shall forget ľudmíla the first time he is kissed. radúz and ľudmíla come to his town to find it in mourning. all of his family has died except his mother, the queen. radúz decides to enter alone and stake his claim to the throne and then to come back for ľudmíla. he avoids a welcome kiss by his mother at first, but when he lies sleeping, she kisses him and he promptly forgets ľudmila. he marries folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 11 another, and ľudmíla is left waiting for the seven years to pass. finally she is revealed to him, he remembers her, sends his wife away and marries ľudmíla. this is what dobšinský has to say about marriage in the section of his book on human relations: “delirious, raving, eccentric or any other immorally directed lovemaking is alien to our tales, and the desires of men and women are always the desires of pure love, directed towards the marriage bond. . . . the tales do not admit such things, or when they do for a time, they always later dissolve every marriage bond not founded on the mutual love of the conjoined or which was the result of force or stemmed from selfish or any kind of impure intentions” [dobšinský 1871: 83-4, emphasis added].(9) dobšinský does not specifically mention radúz and ľudmíla in this section on marriage, but it was one of the tales that he had prepared himself for the first collection (apart from dobšinský himself and škultétý, many others were involved in preparing tales for the first collection). the motivation for radúz dissolving his first marriage so quickly might be that it had been forced upon him in some sense by an impure outside cause, the witch’s curse. however, the motif of the forgotten bride is not given this motivation in the primary manuscript source used by dobšinský in compiling this tale [polívka 1925: 2:264]. like other tale publishers of his generation, dobšinský, when preparing tales for publication would gather together a number of variants of the given tale and pick one he considered the “best preserved” to use as the basis for his version. he would then add language and motifs from other variants in order to produce the fullest possible version. the manuscript variant on which dobšinský based his version of radúz and ľudmíla does not include a curse put on the heroes by the witch. radúz simply forgets her once he returns home. however, another manuscript variant does have the curse, and dobšinský evidently added this available motivation to account for the motif of forgetting [polívka 1925: 2:261-68]. dobšinský’s goal was always a fully preserved version of a story, which allowed him to add motifs and motivations for motifs from other variants if he felt this would make the story more complete.(10) his goal does not seem to be to keep the tales in line with some preconceived version of their morality. he does not add motivations that are absent in the manuscript recordings and that therefore did not belong to the folk tradition. at times his addition of material, as in this case, contributes to a reading that is in line with his christian viewpoint on the tales, but his additions are always justified as coming from the folk tradition, if not very directly. at some level, dobšinský recognized that the folktales did not entirely match his idealized description. at one point he expresses some embarrassment at the nature of some of the humorous tales he published, although he emphasizes the necessity of preserving such tales. he notes that the tales are symbolic in nature and require interpretation, so that the surface conflict with a given morality gives way to something entirely different at a deeper level [dobšinský 1871: 153, 80-81]. in other words, when human relations conflict with morality, dobšinský returns to a mythological interpretation. his multiple perspectives and approaches to interpretation of the tales allow him to find what he wants and needs for his different purposes, without, evidently, worrying about the inherent contradictions in them. it was left to later folklorists to provide an integrated approach, which did not attempt to force a christian interpretation onto the slovak wondertale. 12 notes 1 the first collection of slovak tales was published by ján francisi, under the pseudonym janko rimavský, in 1845 and was entitled slovenskje povesti (slovak tales — note the unorthodox orthography: the collection was published prior to štúr’s codification of slovak). francisi had also been a student of the lutheran lyceum. 2 the “czech forged manuscripts” refers to those manuscripts whose “discovery” was carefully staged by václav hanka, josef linda, and possibly others in 1816, late 1817, and late 1818: the píseň pod vyšehradem (song under vyšehrad), the rukopis královédvorský (královédvorský manuscript) and rukopis zelenohorský (zelená hora manuscript). these represented fragments of would-be ancient czech lyric and epic poetry that projected an idealized picture of the oldest czech society. “czechoslav” was a term of national self-designation that enjoyed a brief prominence among patriotic czechs, moravians, and slovaks during the period, giving way somewhat later to “czechoslovak.” 3 vystúpil som v týchto úvahách na pole, kam uchvátily povesti ducha môjho samy od seba a samy sebou. ... ale poďme už odklínať v sebe zjavné tajnosti našich povestí, a preto odklínať jich len z nich samých, temer bez všetkých druhých výpomociek a doplňkov, trebárs by sme také aj na pomoc brať mohli. 4 keby sa boli k nám všetky verne dostali, znali by sme našich najdávnejších predkov bohovedu a svetotvorstvo. 5 boly to blahé časy nášho detinstva, kde mysleli sme ako deti, a obrazotvornosť maľobná prevládala nad suchým rozumom. 6 názor tento je panteizmus, ktorý v národných povestiach slovanských má ešte panstvo neobmedzené. 7 ináč ani byť nemohlo u národa, ktorý povzniesol sa ku tak vznešenému duchovnému ponímaniu božestva, jak sme to práve v predošlom pododdieli vysvetlili. 8 pohan z rukopisů nebo z lindovy záře a bolzanovský křesťan byli lidmi téhož světového názoru, kteří jen různým způsobem vzývali téhož rousseauovského boha a milovali svůj demokratický, ušlechtilou ideou humanitní prodchnutý český národ. 9 povesti naše jako neznajú blúznivého, rojčivého, výstredného lebo jakokoľvek k nemravu smerujúceho milkovania sa a túhy rodu muža i ženy, jedine a vždy tej túhy a lasky čistej k manželskému spojeniu smerujúcej. . . . povesti nedopúšťajú alebo kde dopúšťajú na čas, tam nasledovne zatracujú každé manželské spojenie, ktoréby nezakladalo sa na vzájomnej láske spojených, a tak už i vynútené bolo čiby zo sebeckých lebo akýchkoľvek nečistých úmyslov pochádzalo. 10 we should note here that, while in its ideal form the european folktale perhaps has no need for the motivation of motifs, in the living folk tradition the motivation of plot elements was not uncommon. dobšinský’s editorial practices tend to maximize the motivation of the tales. when read against the russian tales of afanas’ev, the slovak tales feel more logical, connected, and coherent; or, alternatively, more sedate, less whimsical, with less of an overt fantastic element. folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 13 bibliography dobšinský, pavol 1871. úvahy o slovenských povestiach. martin, slovakia: matica slovenská. erben, karel jaromír 1870. “slovanské bájesloví.” in f. l. rieger and j. malý (eds), slovnik naučný. vol. 8. prague: i. l. kober. krejčí, karel 1949. “doslov.” in josef linda, záře nad pohanstvem. prague: nakladatelství elk. lüthi, max 1982. the european folktale: form and nature. bloomington: indiana university press. polívka, jiří 1923-31. súpis slovenských rozprávok (collection de contes slovaques populaires). 5 vols. martin, slovakia: matica slovenská. propp, vladimir 1968. morphology of the folktale. 2nd edition. austin: university of texas press. štúr, ľudovít 1955. slovanská ľudová slovesnosť. bratislava: slovenské vydavateľstvo krásnej literatury. 15 in the field with russian scholars: observations by an american researcher laura olson, university of colorado those who do fieldwork are always dependent upon the goodwill of many people, but in the former soviet union there was an additional level of dependency. often foreign researchers relied upon the kindness and the company of native scholars to do fieldwork outside of major cities. this was partly due to the fact that foreigners needed to obtain permission to ttavel. legally one could not simply board a train and get off where the terrain looked promising. but russian scholars could help one obtain permission to accompany them. on an expedition. now things are different in russia. one can literally just get off the ttain where things look interesting. but this approach has several disadvantages, perhaps foremost among them. being the distrust of villagers, about which russian scholars warn foreigners.(l) in some areas people are notoriously distrustful even of unknown russian visitors, and things are getting worse as crime rates rise in villages and villagers become more afraid. russian scholars in the north, the urals, and siberia talk of long fieldwork days when they were never invited beyond the tbreshold ofa house; others report that they are allowed access to certain information only upon repeated visits, after spending hours helping babushkas hoe their gardens.(2) for foreigners who do not have the opportunity to return twice yearly to a favorite village to build trust with villagers, an introduction by a well-known and well-loved scholar helps overcome tremendous barriers. i was able to watch this principle at work this past spring, when i was invited by villagers in kaluzhskaia oblos!' to videotape a funeral repast on the fortieth day after the death of a sixty-year old man. i was a stranger to these people, so i was shocked that they agreed to be filmed by me. when i entered the room where the repast was to take place and saw the widow lamenting, i decided not to film.. it was too private a moment. but the local woman who had brought me there motioned to my camera bag. "take it out!," she whispered. i thought i heard wrong, so i did not move. but she repeated the gesture, more forcefully, and i did take it out. what i filmed for the next few moments reflected my sense that i was intruding: i kept the camera moving over the dishes of prepared food and the photograph of the deceased on the mantel, fearing to expose the grief of the widow by filming her face. later on, as i made eye contact with the participants in the ritual, i relaxed. i realized that most of them. completely accepted my presence. when the repast was over, several people thanked me for filming. they said they were grateful for my interest in their lives and seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 16 traditions. their acceptance of me was not because of anything i did to earn it, but entirely due to the continuing hard work of elena and sergei minyonok, folldorists at the institute ofwodd literature, moscow, whom i accompanied on this trip. elena has visited this village more than six times since 1986 and the villagers treat her almost like family. the local women asked for details about elena's newborn daughter, and even gave her advice on how to breast-feed her. in a long-established russian tradition of city intellectuals trying to give social aid to villagers, elena regularly counsels her informants on such non-folldoric matters as how to get medical care in moscow for their heal1h problems. she also has brought needed cash to a few of the villagers by arranging orders for hand-knitted and crocheted goods, and by renting local houses, purchasing local food, and employing local women as cooks for visitors, who have included foreign volunteers and both foreign and russian tv crews. the minyonoks regularly wolk with foreign volunteers through earthwatch institute as a means of supporting their research. elena reports that it is not always simple to take foreigners to villages. she sees some mistrust and resentment there (and l too, saw evidence that my presence was not universally accepted in the some of the villages i visited); but the majority of the villagers appreciate these visits, remember the foreign volunteers, and ask about them even years later. however, the volunteers can be difficult to wolk with for another reason: they are unskilled and most do not speak russian. the minyonoks spend additional energy translating and instructing when they bring volunteers along. the minyonoks, as many of the russian scholars i spoke with, would relish the chance to wolk with american scholars whose wolk dovetails with their own. during fall, winter, and spring 1998-99, as i traveled through russia meeting folldorists and musicologists active in the folldore revival movement (about which i am writing a book), a common theme emerged: most have no funds to do research. because of the current economic situation in russia, many institutions, which formerly had budgets large enough to support several expeditions a year, now can afford very few or none. scholars are looking for grant money or other money with which to pay for their travel and equipment expenses. their salaries are minuscule and are not paid regularly, so few can travel on their own money. but american researchers who are interested in joining up with these scholars can help by obtaining grants to pay for train fare, hotels and other incidentals, and even equipment. on a very small scale, i "funded" two expeditions with scholars at the moscow conservatoty laboratoty of folk music this past fall. the expenses for two people, including train tickets to areas in south seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 17 russia. local hotel rooms or homestays., and meals for one week did not exceed $300. additionally, in one situation i paid for a village house of culture to lend us their van and driver for the cost of gas alone (total was less than $15 for 3 days oflocal driving). in each case, the expedition was organized using the musicologist's contacts in the area (usually an official at a culture department in a provincial city). after the musicologist had asked that contact to help me, i would arrange the details of the trip by phone from moscow. for their help in arranging and accompanying me on these trips, i also paid the scholars a modest honorarium. in this type of arrangement, american researchers can benefit from the musicologist's contacts and expertise, and the musicologist is able to travel to areas sihe might not otherwise have the chance to visit however, the accommodation of two scholars' different interests can be difficult since research styles tend to differ widely among researchers with different training, it is wise to communicate yow'needs as fully as you can in order to avoid disappointment to give an idea of the possible differences in research styles, i will recount some experiences from this past fall. for one expedition, i did not arrange the details of the trip beforehand, but left these up to the musicologist, natalia giliarova (chair of the themy division of the moscow conservatory), and her local contact, the principal of a grammar school in volgograd ob/ast'. during the expedition we visited six villages, saw classes and presentations at a grammar school, high school and college with folklore programs, attended a village wedding and a small-town festival, and toured two museums and a world war nmonument i was grateful for the exposure to this rich and varied material, but found this pace difficult for the type of work i was trying to do (largely interviews with village singers and culture administrators). visiting six villages in three days meant going to two per day, for twoto threehow'visits each. it was explained to me that this way, we would make full use of the tiansport available to us. giliarova agreed that the pace was a little fast, but says she works this way normally and finds it adequate to get a sense of the status of traditional culture in a village. she then re-visits villages which interest her, and stays longer (1-2 days) the next time. since i will probably not have the opportunity to re-visit those villages, i would rather have spent more time there on the first visit in arranging trips with scholars, i would make sure to specify the minimum length of time i needed in each village or institution. in the trips i took with music scholars, the fact that my goals differed from theirs sometimes led to difficulties conducting interviews or sessions with singing groups. the general aim of these musicologists (the ones i worked with had been trained at the moscow conservatoiy, but their approach was similar to that of musicologists i had observed elsewhere) is to produce good archival seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 18 recordings of songs or music, from which a transcription (into musical notation) can be readily made. in their recordings, they want to present the features of the local musical style in the most accessible (audible) way possible. furthermore, many of them are interested exclusively in the oldest stylistic features that exist. thus, it is not uncommon for a russian musicologist to coach singers on stylistic features (e.g. in one case, a musicologist suggested that the upper voice, podgolosok, end on the same note as the other voices, instead of an octave above them). they also remind them of the "correct" text (i.e., the fullest one or the one that was recorded earlier), suggest a different starting pitch, or ask specific members of the group to change parts or be silent during specific songs. one scholar talked to me about the necessity to "ubirat' griaz" [remove the dirt] from recordings as they are made in the field (not later). he explained that this meant the musicologist bad to induce singers who sing "out of tune" to be silent, and sometimes to reduce an unwieldy group of singers to three or four well-chosen individuals. all of the musicologists i worked with tended to nm fieldwork sessions like a film or theater director, giving directions such as "stop! do it over from the beeinn1ng!" this approach bad the advantage of keeping a session orderly: there was no question about who was leading, the conversati~ did not get out of hand, and the recordings were clear and served a clear purpose. furthermore, this approach made economical use of limited time. curious about how the villagers perceived this approach, i asked a group of informants whether they liked being coached in this manner; and they answered with a clear "yes." they said they thought that the musicologist's comments helped them sound better and that she knew how their music should soldld. they respected her opinion and trusted that she was bringing them closer to the "original" style of their village. that this was a goal they themselves strove for could clearly be seen during my stay among them: these villagers corrected a song text themselves by going to an older women who was reputed to know many songs, and checking their text with her (it turned out they had combined three separate songs). they later insisted on singing the songs "properly" for our recording. however, some of these villagers' goals and values differed from those of the musicologist. when this same group of villagers offered to sing bawdy chastushkas during a recording/interview session held over dinner, the musicologist tried briefly to stop them. she was not successful: the group's (and my own) wishes prevailed. her actions show clearly how some musicologists choose their material based upon their own ideas (not their informants' ideas) of what is valuable and what is not. when asked later on why she did not want these chastushkas recorded, the musicologist was not able to specify a reason; she said she just felt it was wrong.(3) in fact, soviet-era training forbid the collection of various categories of material, including erotic material. the field of seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 19 erotic folklore has become accessible to scholars only dming post-soviet years.(4) that erotic folklore is one of elena minyonok's specialties reflects her somewhat unorthodox, or at least post-soviet, style and interests. although trained as a folklorist, elena also worlcs on singing. she is interested in the life of the villagers who sing. and in the ways that their geographical, social and family groupings affect their singing (in tenns of repertoire and stylistic featmes). she collects information not only about local folklore, traditional life ("byt '" and material culture) and songs, but also the villagers' histories (for example, where they were born, their marital history, how collectivizjdion and world war naffected them, and their relation to the changes cmrently taking place in society). this information helps her compose a complete picture of folklore ttansmission. instead of being exclusively interested in the oldest songs, elena is interested in what repertoire people choose to sing and why. her chosen method involves interviewing members of the group singly or in pairs, allowing them to direct some of the flow of the singing and 1aiking that goes on. she is interested in analyzing them musical style of the region, but does not typically ask for correction of pitch, texts, and stylistic features. clearly, she does not believe in the existence of a single "original" style, quality, or text that must be replicated in field recordings. a syncretic, holistic approach to folldore such as this is gaining popularity in russia. i saw attention to all aspects of traditional culture, including material culture and past and modem-day life and the interrelation of these aspects not just among professional folldorists (and, it must be noted, some musicologists as well), but also in many of the leading amateur folk ensembles and schools in the countiy. for example, a folk performing and research group based at penn university collects all genres of folk verbal culture in villages of penn oblast' (including songs, faiiy tales, and fantastic tales or bylichkas) and learns to sing and tell these in dialect since their goal is not only to perfonn, but also to immerse themselves in local culture, they learn stories and songs, including those that are not suited to the stage because this material deepens their own knowledge of tradition (pieces in this category include, for example, funeral and wedding laments, and longer stories). fmthermore, tradition itself is broadly defined by this group: they sing not only ri1uai and calendaiy songs, but also "late" (late nineteenth or early twentieth century) romances, since they believe it is important to learn and honor whatever is in the repertoire of their village informants. the members of the ensemble (many of whom are undergraduate students ofhistory and ethnography) also collect information about how to weave and embroider, and the place that these practices traditionally occupied in daily life. both men and women members make traditional costumes from scratch (that is, from raw materials), and they reported that museum cmators have tried to purchase their costumes for museum collections, seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 20 because they took the costumes for folk "originals. " amateur groups such as these, which receive extremely little if any institutional support, are generally also open to the possibility of doing joint fieldwork with visiting scholars from abroad. it has been my experience that working with such groups in fieldwork situations can be easier than working with professional musicologists, since these amateur ethnologists have not received extensive training as to how to conduct field sessions, and are generally not collecting with any goal in mind other than to increase their own knowledge about local traditions. because they are located relatively close to their informants and have the ability to see them more often, they may be more willing to let the foreign scholar lead the sessions. furthermore, trips with amateur ensembles from the provincial city to fieldwork sites may include adventures such as side-trips to visit grandma. i hope this short account will stimulate dialogue in this publication on folklore research styles. additionally, i would be glad to correspond with other scholars interested in this subject, and to answer questions related to what i have written here. contact me at lolson@colorado.edu. notes 1. in 1990, after having successfully completed 8 months of fieldwork in villages in bosnia and bulgaria where i knew no one, and was accompanied only by two american colleagues, i was told by russian researchers that i could not do the same in russia. "eto ne balkan, " they said. i have not put this information to the test by trying visits to villages where i knew no one. i suspect that the notion of russian villagers'lack of receptiveness to strangers and foreigners is somewhat exaggerated, but have no hard facts to counter it. it would be interesting to hear from those who have tried it. 2. information based upon interviews with folklorists, musicologists, and ethnographers in st. petersburg, perm, and novosibirsk, during december 1998 and may, 1999. 3. this musicologist did not think it improper to record erotic motifs in ritual songs, and in fact was herself collecting parodies of wedding laments, some of which were erotic. she also was not averse to the collection of non-erotic chastushkas. her aversion to erotic chastushkos may be based upon an assumption that these were a "lower" form of chastushka, a kind of street folklore that belongs in the street, not in archives. 4. information from interviews with moscow folklorists and musicologists, november, 1998 and may, 1999. seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 mailto:lolson@colorado.edu. microsoft word seefa2001.doc 26 v. ia. propp and ethnomusicology: memoirs and approaches (1) izaly i. zemtsovsky stanford university allow me to begin with some personal remarks. i was the only ethnomusicologist among the students of v. ia. propp. that being the case, i consider it my duty to discuss those features of propp's scholarship and that part of his legacy which specifically concern music. i have already completed an article entitled “propp the musician” that will appear in “russian studies.” here i turn to a part of propp's work which has not yet been examined and focus on his contributions to ethnomusicology. propp wrote little about music, at least in his studies that have appeared in print. on occasion, he would mention musical motifs appearing in tales or epics. one striking example is a passage from “the historical roots of the magic tale” (2) that clearly reveals his love of music. propp wrote: "it is impossible not to mention the beauty and the lively splendor of certain greek concepts. the greeks, it appears, were the first to introduce music, which was not the magical music of flutes and drums, but which was intended for everyone. such music later permeated europe, appearing in everything from the tale “the little red flower” to the angels pictured playing violins and trumpets at the feet of mary. after citing a series of supporting examples, propp concludes with a discussion of the “singing tree” in russian folk tales (3). when propp wrote about music, his style had a characteristic musicality and acquired a certain melodiousness. the following line from "the secret forest" (4) almost bursts with music: “the sound of the flute summons the spirits” (zvuki dudki vyzyvaiut dukha). music is capable of resurrecting the dead and turning them into wolves. propp was intrigued by a legend on this topic which boas had collected and published (5). “then the wolves brought in a corpse. they wrapped it in a wolf pelt, laid it down near the fire, and began to dance around it, chanting to a specific beat. then the dead man got up and began to stumble about. the longer they sang their chant, the more confidently the man moved. finally, he actually began to run about like a wolf.” a few examples will suffice. we can see and hear how music sounds through the pages of propp's books. this being the case, we might expect the author to begin contemplating music alone and to move toward ethnomusicology. this was indeed the case. propp's most substantial contributions to the field appear in his book “the russian heroic epic” (6) and in his articles on the classification of folklore genres. (7) in his book on epic poetry, propp made two important musicological observations. first, he noted that in an epic singing coincides with the text, something that, as he observed, is not always the case. furthermore, he pointed out that the musical style used in the performance of one narrative genre “is self-contained and cannot be used in the performance of other narrative types.” propp's second contribution involves his reaction to the notion of “epic calm,” an idea that was wide spread in soviet epic studies. he expressed his seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 27 position clearly in statements such as the following: “epic calm exists only in some poorly formulated theories. as for the people themselves, they see an epic as something vibrant. this is apparent in the fact that epics are sung and in their type of musical performance, which borders on the ecstatic.” (8) we can only wonder how propp, never having had the opportunity to hear a live performance of balkan, indonesian, or central asian epics, could make such a profound observation. when discussing genres, propp considered their relationship to music to be one of their central distinguishing features. he wrote that studying any aspect of poetic folklore without considering its relationship to music was the same as looking at only part of a picture. he repeatedly advocated cooperation between folklorists and musicologists. he was convinced that “text and musical performance form an organic whole and that the meter of poetry cannot be studied apart from musical rhythm and vocalization.” he maintained that the lines of a song cannot be delineated except by examining them in their sung form and that studying music along with the text plays a decisive role in determining the origin of a song. he believed that such considerations should apply not just to individual songs, but to entire genres. nonetheless, propp himself never wrote specifically about these subjects; neither did he treat them in their own right, isolated from other topics. he nevertheless was a musician by nature. during childhood he learned how to play the piano, and he knew and valued music in general, in particular folk music. even so, he considered himself to be a dilettante in musicology. he made a clear distinction between musician and musicologist; once correcting an unfortunate confusion of these two words in a paper i wrote as an undergraduate. in october, 1963 vladimir propp was in the audience at a meeting of the union of composers and listened to my lecture on the genesis of lyric folk songs. during the discussion that followed, he made no comments. the next day he called me and spoke the following words which i wrote down after he had finished speaking: “i did not speak because i was surrounded by eminent specialists in the field of song. as you know, i can be reticent. but here is what i have to say. first, you have a hypothesis. second, this hypothesis is new, original, and convincing. furthermore, philological studies support your theories. ideally there should be a series of lectures on this topic, but i thank you for just this lecture. it was very interesting.” these words convey the essence of propp: he was humble, he was kind and supportive, and he expressed himself clearly and succinctly. actually propp violated his self-imposed ban on commenting about musicology when he agreed to serve as the opponent for two doctoral dissertations in ethnomusicology. one such occasion occurred on march 14, 1963, when feodosii antonovich rubtsov defended his dissertation and the other was on october 20, 1964 when i defended mine. in passing, i should add that propp's responses to the two dissertations were expressed in detailed papers some eighteen to nineteen pages in length. someday i hope to publish them in a collection entitled “the unpublished works of vladimir propp.” seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 28 in spite of his ability to write cogently, propp was again strikingly modest. when in 1959 he advised me to choose musicology as my profession, he pointed out that it was an exceptionally timeconsuming and difficult discipline in which i should receive as much training as possible. he added: “you can always become a philologist on your own when you feel the need to do so.” these words coming from my teacher – and philologist – decided my career. in may, 1961 when he was responding to my letter about his collection of lyric folk songs, a collection appearing in the library of a poet series and having a foreword on folk music for a general audience, (9) propp wrote modestly but decisively: “the only purpose of my foreword is to introduce the folk song, a goal which many say has been adequately accomplished. at one time i abandoned any thought of writing something about songs because that would have required training in music. it is too late for me to receive such training. i hope that you will perform that task someday.” propp wrote these words to a twentyfive year old youth who had just decided to dedicate his life to folklore. even though i have numerous publications about folk songs, i still consider my teacher’s admonition to be unfulfilled. now i would like to present several of propp's thoughts which i call “propp's lessons.” they concern ethnomusicological issues and include parallel problems and supporting observations. the “lessons” represent ideas in propp's thinking which were not realized in separate scholarly works. one of propp's most remarkable contributions and one which has still not received deserved attention, is his attitude that folklore genres are not abstract categories, but are specific units which should serve as the starting point for scholarly study. the boldness of this position was extraordinary. in my opinion, it was based on accepting several simple hypotheses and moving from them to a unifying concept. the five hypotheses are cited below: 1) “membership in a genre category is not a formal feature of a folklore work.” (10) “making artificial (generic) distinctions is not productive”(op. cit. p. 60). “establishing generic categories requires accurate terminology and correct techniques of systematization"(op. cit. p. 64). 2) the generic system of every culture is unique. “for every people one needs to identify a genre system that belong to this people and one needs to describe all genres that belong to that system”(op. cit. p. 39). “a system of folklore genres developed for one culture cannot be mechanically applied to the folklore of another culture. only the principles used in the classification can be international, not the materials themselves”(op. cit. p 38). 3) “a genre is determined by poetics, usage, manner of performance, and relationship to music. as a rule, none of these traits in isolation can be used to characterize a genre; a genre is determined by the aggregate of these traits. oral literature scholarship, ethnography, and ethnomusicology cannot alone solve these scholarly problems”(op. cit. p. 39). 4) “the study of one genre in isolation, apart from others, cannot yield sound conclusions because folklore works in various genres are often closely linked. (examining single genres) fails to show us the 29 richness and the unique features of the poetic tradition in a particular culture; this also does not reveal features which distinguish one tradition from others.”(op. cit. p. 39) 5) “a classification system is useful only when it is as detailed as the material demands” (op. cit. p. 40). “folklore scholarship is dominated by a fear of finely delineated categories” (op. cit. pp. 39-40). propp illustrated these hypotheses by his analysis of russian folklore genres, a subject to which he devoted the cited articles. in february, 1965 propp came to my home on the eve of my birthday and gave me as a memento an offprint of this article which he had just received. it comes as no surprise that he highly valued this article: in it he managed to chart the genre system of all russian folklore. working from the fifth of his hypotheses, propp wrote about the genre of an early historical minstrel (skomorokh) song, one which was “to date represented by a single plot” (op. cit. p. 61). he founded a system of russian historical song genres based on the historical epochs in which they originated, the social strata to which they belonged, and the features of their musical performance (p. 63). i would like to focus attention on the fifth hypothesis because it has a special significance for the theory and practice of folklore genre studies. this hypothesis is also supported by folk music: i have written on this subject in my analysis of calendar songs, particularly the winter and spring songs (koliadka, vesnianka). from the musical point of view, the genre interrelationships among calendar songs become clear from analysis of their melodies. however, propp was able to perceive genre relationships by using the text alone and he was able to delineate relationships that no one had recognized previously. propp's first hypothesis, developed within the framework of verbal folklore, has similar implications. in ethnomusicology, which at present may be losing sight of generic distinctions, propp's work recalls the interaction among the productive genres of a tradition. a “productive” genre is one that can serve as a generative model. an accurate picture of genres cannot exist without including this “productive” group. any genre exists only as long as it serves as a generative model. propp's second hypothesis touches the very heart of an oral and traditional art. it is fundamental because it deals with the folk way of thinking. it helps us see that the thinking process of the folk is a central question. in the first chapter of his “historical roots of the magic tale,” propp devoted special attention to primitive thought. manner of thought is, to propp, “a category that can be historically determined” (11). all causes and explanations, no matter what they may be, “always function through the prism of a specific world view” (p. 20). propp admitted that it was extremely difficult to recognize and explicate these different patterns of thought, but a folklorist cannot ignore them. he made similar observations in his analysis of calendar customs and rituals, showing how they were related to the concerns of the earliest peasants.(12) all folklore genres are products of their corresponding world view behind which lies a semantic system. it in turn is determined by its historical circumstances. this second hypothesis is, in many respects, the foundation on which all of propp’s theories and those of his successors are based. even discursive problems such as historicity and comparativism are seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 30 linked to this hypothesis. in ethnomusicology worldview and manner of thought are central, even though they do not always receive the attention that they deserve. in some musicological studies, for example, everything seems to fit and yet the author's conclusions appear to hang in mid-air, no matter how psychologically or semantically interesting they may be. almost invariably the reason for this problem lies in the author's failure to understand the key role of musical thought as the generative and transforming engine behind all of these relationships. propp's first book, “the morphology of the folktale” (13), contains the germs of the second hypothesis. strictly speaking, this inspired book represents a synthesis of a whole group of ideas and methods, many of which governed propp's scholarly thinking his entire life and some of which were, for understandable reasons, not developed further. i do not have an opportunity here to examine propp's “morphology of the folktale” in greater detail and to write about the significance that it and related books have for musicology and folk song analysis. i will merely point out that propp offers us many observations and methodological suggestions that are useful for the study of traditional folk music. such analysis might constitute yet another of “propp’s lessons”; it shows us that the artistry of folklore forms should be analyzed and it gives us an analytical tool. notes 1. this paper was originally presented at a st. petersburg conference held in 1995 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of propp's birth. 2. v. ia. propp, “istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki,” leningrad, 1946. 3. “istoricheskie korni,” p. 275. 4. “istoricheskie korni,” p. 90. 5. “istoricheskie korni,” p. 64. 6. “russkij geroicheskij epos,” 2nd edition, leningrad, 1958, pp. 55-56. 7. “printsipy klassifikatsii folklornykh zhanrov” [principles of the classification of folklore genres] and “zhanrovyi sostav russkogo folklora” [the genre system of russian folklore], “folklor i deistvitelnost” [folklore and reality], moscow, 1976, pp. 38-39, 53. 8. “russkij geroicheskii epos,” p. 537. 9. “narodnye liricheskie pesni” [folk lyric songs], leningrad, 1961. 10. “folklor i deistvitelnost,” p. 37. 11. “istoricheskie korni,” p. 20. 12. “russkie agrarnye prazdniki” [russian agrarian festivals], leningrad, 1963, p. 113 ff. 13. “morfologiia skazki,” leningrad, 1928. (translated by natalie kononenko) 25 reports report on the balkan summer seminar9 june 1999 margaret b. beissinger9 university of wisconsin-madison the international summer school of the institute for sociological, political, and juridical research of saints cyril and methodius university (skopje) took place june 7-26, 1999 in obrid, republic of macedonia organized by jovan donev (of the above institute), the seminar was titled "the bright side of the balkans: mutuality in a common future." the seminar brought together scholars from the united states and europe (who lectured on specific topics regarding the balkans) and participants (most of them young faculty and candidates for the doctoral degree) mainly from eastern europe and the former soviet union. it was funded by george soros and the open society institute of macedonia. each of the three weeks of the summer school was devoted to a broad topic in which the balkans were treated from the standpoint of mutual common areas. the invited professors delivered lectures at the beginning of the week, setting the stage for the discussion sessions that subsequently took place. the first week-in which i participated included lectures on balkan identity. grace fielder (university of arizona, tucson) spoke about common historical and political myths in the balkans; i treated balkan cultural and oral traditions; and victor friedman (university of chicago) lectured on morphological similarities in the balkan languages. additional lectures during that week were also given by scholars from greece, albania, and macedonia. the participants were then responsible for writing and delivering brief position papers on these topics followed by directed questions and discussions. the second week covered regional problems. rastko mocnik (university of ljubljana, slovenia) and carole hodge (university of glasgow, great britain) spoke on nation-building, totalitarianism, and the legacy of the great powers' policies in the balkans. finally, 1he 1hird week included discussions on the balkan agenda for the twenty-first century in terms of regional policy treated by bogdan szajkowski (university of exeter, great britain) and caterina garsia segura (pompeu fabra university, spain). cultural events and field trips were planned for each week. the week i attended, we went to a folk ("narodna") music concert, toured two monasteries, and visited a tiny mountain village near 1he seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 26 western border of macedonia ohrid was a beautiful and serene setting for a seminar devoted to peoples who have not always been at peace dwing the 1990s. in fact, while i was in ohrid, slobodan milosevic signed the peace treaty, and the bombing by nato ceased. the work that lies ahead for mending and rebuilding the balkans is overwhelming. rm hoping that the "brightness" which we at the seminar contemplated for several weeks becomes a reality in the balkans before too long. seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 select bibliography of polish folkloristics for the period: 1990-1998 anna brzozowska-kraj~ maria curie-sklodowska university, lublin, poland the bibliography reveals trends typical of polish folklore studies. and demonstrates various understandings of the term "folklore" by contemporary polish folklorists. it especially reflects both textocentric and anthropocentric tendencies. as well as attempts at broadening the field of research. popularizations of folklore and most literary transformations of folk motifs are excluded from this bibliography. primary sources (texts) berysmieszne i ucieszne. humorslaski. ed. d. simonides. warszawa: "cyldady". 1992. an anthology of silesian humor. edited by an emine,lt polish scholar. dealing with the folklore of upper and lower silesia. these popular jokes are classified into groups according to their subjects: married life. miners' work. priests. doctors. peasants. etc. co~ zf:1yzoteponiechat. {humoreski podhalaflskiej. ed. and inoo. a. brzozowska-krajka, krakow: oficyna podh~im1~ka. 1997. a selection of humorous tales from the podbale region (in the west carpathians). the book briefly presents the history of the highlanders' humorous tale in the main stages of its development: anonymous tales. semi-anonymous tales (from the tmn of the nineteenth century). and comic stories written by contemporary authors. czubala. d.• wsoolczesne le~n4y mieiskie. katowice: uniwersytet sl~ 1993. the first edition of contemporary polish urban legends: a broad selection of texts collected in silesia. a comparative dimension is achieved by the inclusion of texts collected in russia. belarus. ukraine and mongolia. monographic chapters deal with polish. european and non-european research on urban legends. with methods of field research. and with other questions that model further investigations of this genre. czubala. d., nasze mity wsp6lczesne. katowice: fundacja d1a wspierania slllskiej humanistyki. 1996. an extensive anthology of polish contempoouy legends collected through local studies since the late 1970s. its core consists of tales from little poland (malopolska) and silesia. it is the first publication of this kind in poland. 11 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 dialejqy polslde i folk/or z rotnvch re~on6w. ed z. sobieszynski, poznai1: uniwersytet a. mickiewicz&, 1991. a dialectological work consisting of a book and an audio cassette. it contains a selection of folk texts (legends. rites. customs) from various regions of poland, collected from 1960-65. the texts are published in a simplified phonetic transcription. dobkiewiczowa, k.. szkarlatnv rycerz. podania i ooowidci 0 zamkach ilasldch. katowice: wydawnictwo sl~k, 1990. a collection of litemy adaptations of silesian folk legends and tales concerning old castles of this region. gawecfy z przeszlosci g6mego slaska. ed. w. korzeniowska, opole: instytut sl~ki. 1990. historical folk tales from upper silesia, arranged according to subject and in chronological order from the beginnings of the polish state (the ninth century) to contemporary times. kadlubiec. k. d.• gomiqy smiech.(komizm ludowv oogranicza czesko-oolskie~o). wroclaw: polskie towarzystwo ludomawcze. 1995. series editor: c. hemas. vol. 1. a monograph of the humor of the polish-czech borderland, focusing on miners' tales mainly from the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. it also contains some fairly modem narratives. the book is divided into two parts. the first part constitutes a study of miners' humor. stressing the uniqueness of their mentality as well as the specificity of living in a borderland. the second part comprises comic tales told by various regional stoly-tellers. ksiej:apiesn; biesiadnvch. ed. e. lagunionek, bialystok: luk, 1994. a selection of polish popular songs and ballads. most of them are anonymous folk songs. some are folk texts adapted by professional song and dance ensembles.. the edition also contains songs from various epochs written by polish poets and playwrights (e.g. m. balucki. k. przerwatetmajer. j. tuwim). which have become popular throughout the ages. some popular russian ballads and songs are also included. ligon. s.• rery i boik; ilaskie. katowice: pik. 1994. the book contains both original folkjokes from silesia and coidiclitemy texts. e.g. dialogues. stories and sketches written by s. ligojifor his radio programs. lysko. a. demony ; duszld boiszowskie. qpowieici iudowe z g6mego slaska. bojszowy: stowarzyszenie milosnikow ziemi rodzinnej korzyniec. 1992. tales from silesia (the region ofpszczyna) collected from 1988-92. they deal with mysterions phantoldsand unusual events from the world of silesian folk beliefs. myths and demonic 12 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 characters. lipowski, j .• roz widzieli straine l0tj,lie h ciantoryi ...gawetty /udowe z nawsia kolo jablonkowa na slash cies~ldm_ wroclaw: tart (studio wydawniczo-poligraficme). 1992. a collection offolk stories from the polish-czech borderland and a study of the jablonkow dialect (the region of cieszyn). lysiak, w .• downy humor /udowy pomona zachodnie~o. mi~ch6d: eco. 1993. a collection of humorous folk tales from pomorze zachodnie (the area of the western coast of the baltic sea) from the turn of the nineteenth century. lysiak, w., mnisia gora. podania i baiki warciaflsko-noteckie~o miet4yrzecza. mi~ch6d: eco, 1992. a collection of traditional folk texts (legends, fairy tales) of the borderland of great poland (wielkopolska) and brandenburg (at the fork of the rivers warta and notec). the book presents beliefs, legends. superstitions and folk medicine common in this region at the turn of the ninet~th century. nowak, z., diabe/ski strze/ec: po/side basnie i /e1{enqy-warszawa: nasza ksiegamia, 1991. a substantial collection of fairy-tales and folk legends, many with little known plots. from all over poland. o.,powie.scii /etjenqy swieto~slde. ed. r wojewodzki, foreword a. krupska-perek, kielce: ston 2, 1996. an anthology of various genres of folk prose from the kielce region. the texts are arranged by subject: legends and explanations of natural and supernatural phenomena, history and human fate. traditions, beliefs, superstitions. folk medicine, etc. one section contains humorous· tales. all texts are from the twentieth century (some are from the first half of the century, others are contemporary). piesni domowe i do/ne spiewanki. ed. m. brzuskowska, zamosc: muzeum zamojskie, 1990. a collection of traditional (nineteenth century) folk songs from the zamosc region. it comprises songs of different genres, especially ballads and ritual songs (for weddings, harvests, etc). there are notes to each text with comments on symbolic meanings of particular words. expressions and images. podania. /etjenqy. basnie po/skie. ed. a. sojka, pozlul1i:podsiedlik, romanowski i spoika. 1997. a collection of ancient fairy tales and legends. their folk and historical motifs are discussed by well-known polish authors, e.g., j. i. kraszewski, a. oppman, e. szelburg-zarembina, et al. 13 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 polslca hal/ado ludowa. antolo~a. eel e. jaworska, krak6w: polskie wydawnictwo muzycme, 1991. an anthology of polish traditional folk ballads classified according to 43 plot types, e.g., "a lady kills her husband, ""three roses on a grave," or "ungrateful daughters." the texts are classified into thematic groups, e. g., murder, loss of virginity, infidelity, infanticide. the author's afterword characterizes the selected types of ballads as crime stories, didactic ballads (parables) and humorous songs. it also provides an overview of research on this genre. swirko, s., rok dlaei rok trad. kalendarz przvsiow i drow'0stykow rolniezveh. poznan: wydawnictwo pomanskie, 1990. a selection of the most interesting proverbs concerning village life and the work of a fanner in his immediate natural environment (approximately 200 examples, from the fifteenth century to the present). turek, k., koleqy fomoslaskie. wvbor tradel i opraeowanie. katowice: g6rnoslltska oficyna wydawnicza, 1995. a collection of upper silesian secular carols and christmas carols, with notes. the texts come from printed and handwritten sources (fifteenth-nineteenth centuries) and from contemporary local records. zinkow, j., krakowskie i iuraiskie (wvbor) dodonia. lefemfy. zwyczaie. 2nd eel, revised and enlarged, krak6w: platan, 1994. a selection of traditional folk tales and legends from cracow and its environs (the so-called jura krakowsko-c~stochowska). it also contains folkloric traditions and customs still observed there but which have lost their original religious and ritual character. dictionaries and lexicons kaczmarek, l., skubalanka, t., grabias, s., slownik gwary studenekiei. lublin: uniwersytet marii curie-skjodowskiej, 1994. as a dictionary of polish students' slang, this is a unique book of language humor. it is divided into thematic sections, e.g. man, external appearance, clothes, physiological functions, the campus, love, friends, etc. kowalski, p., leksykon. znaki §wiata. omen. przesad znaezenie. warszawa: pailstwowe wydawnictwo naukowe, 1998. a lexicon of superstitions and omens rooted in slavic mythology that reveals common elements in the traditional beliefs of various nations. magic in slavic mythology and culture is 14 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 presented in the context of ewupean and world folklore. the author's foreword discusses the characteristics of a folkloric and magical understanding of the world (i.e. space and its elements, nature and human activities). krzyzanowski, j., madre} f:lowie dose dwie slowie. warszawa: panstwowy instytut wydawniczy, 1994. a lexicon of polish proverbs, sayings and quotations from the works of eminent men of letters compiled by a famous polish folklorist and historian of literature. each entiy contains an interesting and witty, yet profound, factual analysis. slownik slereoty.p6w i $jlt1iboli/udom!ych.1.1: kosmos. ed. j. bartmiilski and s. niebrzegowska, lublii1: uniwersytet marii curie-sldodowskiej, 1996. a lexicon of folk stereotypes and symbols connected with cosmic space, the sky, stars, fire and stones. this is the first part of a seven-volume series of lexicons representing the ethnolinguistic approach to folklore favored by jerzy bartmiitski and his disciples, co-authors of the edition. ethnolinguistics interprets man, the world and natural phenomena in terms of archaic language stereotypes. the material recorded comes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and was collected by dialectologists, folklorists and ethnographers. the lexicon is useful for comparative and historical studies of language and folklore. st~pniak, k., slownik taiemnvch gwar drzestpeqych. in cooperation with z. podgorzec, london: puis publications ltd., 1993. a unique dictionary of the slang of prisoners, criminals and members of other folk groups. studies ba.rtmiilski, j., fo/k/or ie~k doetyka, wroclaw: ossolineum, 1990. the author understands folklore as oral and collective verbal production. he emphasizes some basic aspects of the language of folklore as a poetic into-dialect. he analyzes the structure of folk songs and problems of style, (e.g., compactness and the ritualistic function of repetition). he also examines folk song texts in the context of lexical statistics. brzozowska-krajka, a., symbolika dobowego cvklu powszedniego w do/skim fo/k/orze irar!yc~nym. lublin: uniwersytet marii curie-sldodowskiej, 1994. english version: polish traditional folklore. the magic of time. trans. w. krajka, boulder-lublin-new york: east european monographs, m. curie-sldodowska university, columbia university press, 1998. this book discusses the temporal structures of peasant everyday life inherent in various verbal and nonverbal forms of polish traditional folklore. the author's anthropocentric and interdisciplinary 15 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 approach results in a comprehensive presentation of the examined phenomena through a complex analysis that considers the various codes making up the folk vision of man and the world. the english version of this study is the first substimtial scholarly publication in the field of polish folkloristics easily accessible to american, english-speaking and international scholars. dadak-kozicka, j. k., folk/or sztuka 2{ycia.u bridel antropologii muu'ki. warszawa: instytut sztuki pan, 1996. this book presents studies in polish musical folklore from an anthropological perspective an area of study thus far not well developed in poland. this is an attempt at formulating the anthropology of music in theoretical terms. the author applies the structuralist distinction between the spheres of langue and parole of a verbal text to musical folklore. dynak, w., z dzieiowpolskiei piesni lowieckiei. wroclaw: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu wroclawskiego,i991. a monograph on polish hunting songs from peasant and student folklore, both anonymous and attributed. the author analyzes both archaic texts from the nineteenth century and modem (twentieth century) examples. dynak, w., lowy. lowc;yi zwier:{)lndw dr:{)islowiachdolskich.wroclaw: towarzystwo przyjaciol polonistyki wroclawskiej, 1993. the author analyzes hunters' proverbs, discusses their jargon, and points out both their origin among the nobility and their structural features: didacticism, figurativeness and vividness. he also reconstructs the realm of hunters' superstitions and magical practices. part of this discussion deals with the game and birds that most frequently appear in these proverbs. firlet, e. m.• smoczajama lia wawelu. his/ona. lefenda. smoki. krakow: universitas. 1996. the book deals with the history and the legend of the dragon den at wawel hill. it also discusses the role of the dragon motif in myths, faity-tales and legends. as well as in works of art. the author primarily discusses polish culture. especially the folklore of the cracow region, but he also refers to the role of the same motifs in myths and works of art from other cultures. folk/or sacrom reli~a. ed. j. bartmiilski, m. jasmska-wojtkowska, lublin: instytut europy srodkowowschodniej. 1995. proceedings from an international scholarly conference dealing with the category of sacrum (the sacred) and with religious values in folklore. the book includes papers by folklorists from poland, russia, bulgaria and slovakia. they are divided into three parts: traditional beliefs. rites and cultic practices; the realm of folk songs. proverbs, faity tales and prayers; and present-day folk and 16 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 popular culture. the articles present the "poetics of sacrum " in slavic folklore. folkjorys(yka. l)ylema(y i perspek(ywy. ed. d. simonides, opole: uniwersytet opolski, 1995. proceedings from a symposium of polish and slovak folklorists, representing both philological (including ethnolinguistic) and anthropological approaches. they discuss the present state of folkloristics (in poland and in countries at a similar stage of development), possibilities of its growth, and its position among the humanities and in university education. folkjorys(yka 1. zes-ty(ynaukowe. ed. p. kowalski, opole: uniwersytet opolski, 1995. folkjorys(yka 2. zes-ty(ynaukowe. ed. t. smoj.iilska. opole: uniwersytet opolski, 1996. these festschrifts edited by the institute offolkloristics, opole university, present the scholarly interests of the opole center of folklore studies. they concern not only silesian folklore and .its role in the lives of the contemporary inhabitants of this region but also the folklore of other parts of poland, including written and oral forms of both traditional and modern folklore. folkjorys(yka. materialy dla studentow filolo~i polskie;. part 1, ed. p. kowalski, t. smoliilska, opole: wyzs7j1szkola pedagogicma, 1992. a selection of scholarly works by polish folklorists, ethnologists and ethnolinguists, intended for students of polish philology specializing in folkloristics. jaworska, e., katalo~ dolsldei balllk{y ludowei. wroclaw: ossolineum, 1990. a catalog of ballad motifs and texts of similar genre and type. the classification contains more than 2000 variants which come from published sources ranging from collections from the romantic period to modern times. ballads are placed into 11 thematic groups (e.g. murders, tragic events, reunions, etc.). the collection was created under the influence of the catalog of czech folk ballads compiled by m. sramkova (prague, 1970). kapelus, h., 0 tune zlotoro~m. szkice koledowe. warsuwa: instytut badail literackich pan, 1991. a collection of essays on polish carols, their poetics, cultural basis and regional variants. kasjan, j. m., usta i pi6ro. studia 0 literatune uslnei i pisanei. toruil: uniwersytet m. kopemika, 1994. the book is a collection of essays on various genres of verbal folklore (fables, riddles, charms) and contains examples' from contemporary folklore of the chelmno region (ziemia chebnii1ska in northern poland). kowalski, p., samotnosc i wsd6lnota. ins~e w pnestneniach wsd6lczesne~o ~ia. opole: wyzs7jiszkola pedagogicma, 1993. 17 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 this volume.deals with chmch votive (prayer) books and children's graffiti. these two kinds of texts have completely different definitions of time, space and man. the author considers these two contemporaneous folkloric fonns of inscriptions using the anthropology of everyday life. kowalski, p., prosba do pana boga. rzecz 0 festach wotywnych. wroclaw: towarzystwo przyjaciol polonistyki wroclawskiej, 1994. the author's research was based on contemporary entries in votive books a new field of interest for anthropologically oriented folklorists. the analyzed material reveals imitations of traditional mentality and the special role of the category of sacrifice. lewandowski, a., radkiewicz, j., bocian w mowie i folk/one. zielona gom: wyzs'zjjszkola pedagogiczna, 1991. a study of the role of the stork in polish language and folklore, based on recordings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. the authors present various aspects of knowledge about storks (biological descriptions and systematizations are included). libera, l., romantycznosc i folk/or. 0 tworczosci jacka malczewskiefo i boleslawa lesmiana. poznaij.: scientia, 1994. a comparative study offolklorism in the artistic output ofb. lesmian (an eminent poet of young poland polish modernism) and j. malczewski (a distinguished painter of the period). the author reconstructs the imagination and artistic visions of malczewski and lesmian taking into account the expressive function of folkloric and mythical traditions. lugowska, j., w swiecie ludowych opowiadafl. teksty. gatunki. intencie. wroclaw: uniwersytet wroclawski, 1993. the book expands the traditional genre classification and typology of folktales by including the criterion of the creative intention of the peasant narrator. the following kinds of intention are distinguished: infonnative, moralistic (a warning against violating a commonly accepted system of values), comic (evoking laughter), compensatory, and deliberate frightening of a listener. the publication also reflects upon this folklore genre as a unit of classification and contains a textual grammar. lysiak, w., ludowa wi~/a przeszlosci: historyzm folk/oro wielkopolski. pozriaii: uniwersytet a. mickiewicza, 1992. this study is devoted to the image of the past immanent in and interpreted by the folklore of great poland (wielkopolska). it reveals mechanisms for the mythologization of history and people's sensitivity to the temporal limits of imagination and of their knowledge. the scholarly thesis is 18 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 supported by approximately. 200 folk texts, mainly from the region ofwielkopolska: legends, tales connected with names of places, historical tales, reports of eyewitnesses. lysiak, w., w kref:uwielkopolskich demonaw i przekonafl niedemonicznych. mi~dzychoo: eco, 1993. this book deals with traditional folktales from great poland (wielkopolska) based on beliefs in demonic, half-demonic and nondemonic beings. its rich folkloric records date back to the turn of the nineteenth centuiy and come from the collections ofo. knoop, l.w. malczewski and v. schweda. madyda, a, w doszukiwaniu iednosci czlowieka i §wiota. folk/or w tworczosci stanislawo vincenzo. tortn1: towarzystwo naukowe w toruniu, 1992. the author turns our attention to the folklore of east carpathian (ukrainian) highlanders in the works of stanislaw vincenz. this material was crucial to the creation of his tetralogy no if!ysokiei ooloninie. the author analyzes the highlanders' historical tales qegends), memoirs, anecdotes, songs, riddles, etc. as elements of the world presented in vincenz's novels. niebrzegowska, s., polski semik ludowv. lublin: uniwersytet m. curie-sklodowskiej, 19%. this work constitutes a linguistic description of the oral transmission of folk dreams as a genre of folklore. the material was gathered in various regions of poland through questionnaires. theoretical discussions are supplemented by a glossary of dream images. sielicki, f., folk/or dzieciecy i mlodzietowy no wileiszqynie w okresie mied2j1woiennym.wroclaw: uniwersytet wroclawski, 1992. this monograph is a detailed presentation of the folklore of children and young people of the wilno region (the author's native land). it contains texts which were popular between world wars i and ii: lullabies, nursery thymes, plays, fairytales, riddles, music and dances. the book is based on ·the reminiscences of the author and those of his informants from the same region. the texts were collected from 1971 to 1988. sielicki, f., piesni polskie spiewane no wileiszc¢flie w okresie mied2j1woiennym.wroclaw: uniwersytet wroclawski, 1992. a collection of polish folk songs popular in the wilno region between world wars i and ii: religious songs, humorous songs, children's songs, soldiers' songs, etc. texts were taken from the . reminiscences of the author and his informants, and were collected from 1979 to 1991. sielicki, f., podanio. le~en4y. ane~doty i p~slowio no wileiszqyi1lie w okresie mi~d2j1woiennym_ wroclaw: uniwersytet wroclawski, 1993. the seventh part of a study devoted to the history, culture and folklore of the region of wilno. 19 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 it deais with folk prose: tales (especially humorous), legends, ghost stories, proverbs and sayings. the material was taken from reminiscences of the author and his informants, and was collected from the 1960s to the present. sierociuk, j., pies" ludowa i i{wora. lublin: krajowa agencja wydawnicz8, 1990. a dialectological study of the language of polish peasant folk songs, based on recordings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from all over poland. the author suggests the tenn "folklect" for the artistic language offolk song as distinct from "colloquial dialect", i.e. peasants' everyday speech. simonides, d., 0 wsp6lczesnvch pamietnikach dzieci: monogrqjia folklorystyczna, opole: instytut sl~ki, 1993. this monograph about children's albums was based on intensive research and collecting. the author points to the early renaissance origin of this genre and to its significant place in contemporary children's subculture. she characterizes its mode of existence as 'wellas its rules of folk creation, i.e., their fonnulaic nature and anonymity. smolidska, t., rodzina 0 sobie. folklorystyezny aspekt rodzinnei tratlycii kulturowei. opole: wyzs'dl szkma pedagogicma, 1992. this book deals with the question of creation, function, transfonnation and disappearance of folklore within a family. it is based on sociological-ethnographic studies as well as local research, and deals with the structure of family life, family participation in folklore and with family folklore-creating situations. the aim of this work is to provide a model of folkloric family life. slaskie uciechy i zabawy (materialy etnolo~czno-folklorystyczne). ed. i. bukowska-floreilska, bytom: muzeum gomoslllskie, 1991. a collection of articles about the main categories of play and humour in silesian ritual and . nonritual folklore of adults and children. turek, k., ludowe zwyczaie. obrzel/y i piesni povzebowe na gomym slasku. katowice: uniwersytet slllski, 1993. this study is devoted to funeral rites in upper silesia, especially funeral songs, and is based on both traditional and modem records. w~zowicz-zi6lkowska, d., mi/osc ludowa. wzory mi/osci wiesniaczei w polskiei piesni ludowei xviii-xxwieku. wroclaw: polskie towarzystwo ludoznawcze, 1991. a monograph on love in polish traditional folk songs from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. the author examines various patterns of love and attitudes toward human sexuality in the 20 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 culture of polish peasants and in their ballads and songs, which are analyzed from a structural point of view. the attitudes to love revealed in these folk texts vary from frivolous, jocular or even obscene to the tragedy of unfulfilled desire. the songs present youthful and romantic feelings ranging from marital affection to sinful and illicit love. w krau badan nod fo/horem. materioly pokonferencljne w dziesiecio/ecie smierci franciszka kotuli. ed. a. kopoczek, k. ruszel, rzeszow: wyzsu szkola pedagogiczna, 1995. a collection of articles concerning well-known collectors of folklore from eastern little poland (malopolska): f. kotula, z. wierzchowski, l. magierski, b. gustawicz. the vohnne also contains studies of the musical folklore of this region. ws~stek krag ziemski. antrop%gia. historia. /iteratura. works dedicated to professor czeslaw hernas. ed. p. kowalski, wroclaw: uniwersytet wroclawski, 1998. the essays in this volume are dedicated to professor czeslaw hemas, who was a pre-eminent polish folklorist and a specialist in old polish literature. they cover roles of encoding meanings in folklore, the identity of a folkloric text, various relationships between belles-lettres and popular literature, and studies of individual folklore genres (beggar's songs, lullabies, andjokes). zlatanova-strenk, n., rodowocfy. ldea wsp6/noty w przekazach rodowodowych (no wybranym materia/e slowiaflskim). warsuwa: uniwersytet warsuwski, 1992. this book discusses the sense of community in genealogical texts from selected slavic materials. it views genealogy as a cultural phenomenon a complex image reflecting various aspects of a sense of community. the study offers some methodological suggestions for the sociological research of group consciousness. the theory of genealogy is the author's main field of interest. the book demonstrates the potential of a pragmatic approach to diverse forms of genealogical knowledge and stresses the importance of folklore texts as family saga. the study calls for further research into various genealogical texts. z za~adnien po/skiei ieu/tury mu~cznei. studia fo/k/orystyczne. ed. a. dygacz, katowice: uniwersytet si2lski, 1994. this book presents research on musical folklore from lower silesia, upper silesia and cieszyn silesia and miners' folklore, as well as polish and czech songs. analogies between problems of origin and interethnic problems are emphasized (translated by agnes monies-mizera) 21 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 gable traditions: lessons for life jann la~ university of virginia vyshel ezhik iz /umana vynul nozhik iz karmana budu rezat'. budu bit' vse ravno tebe vodit' (1) we all recognize 1he call to play, 1he start of a game. the counting-out rhyme signals 1he beginning of a social structure 1hat mirrors, to a certain extent, 1he society in which its playen live. games help children prepare for adult life and for emotions associated wi1h interacting in 1he adult world. scholars have studies games wi1h regard to socialization and 1he lessons 1hat 1hey instill in children about real life; as remnants of (often religious) ritual1hat is no longer practiced; and as reflections of historical and social events. i will look at some games that are currently played in russia, putting 1hem in perspective wi1h regard to all of 1hese interpretations.(2) my goal is to postulate what 1he perpetuation of 1hese games reveals in 1his time of changing culture. why do children play 1he same games 1hat 1heir parents (and possibly grandparents) played? what messages, social and o1herwise, are children communicating to each o1her to and about 1heir society? games and values games hold several characteristics in common and fulfill certain developmental functions for . 1he children who play 1hem. for example, 1hey allow children an outlet to relieve tension and aggressions.(3) they also teach and build several skills, including strategy, rule-making, and physical strength. they mirror real life more closely 1han do organiz£d sports allowing much more flexibility . in organization and rules, and 1hey encourage self-expression.(4) games such as "tretii lishnii" (three's a crowd) or "priatki" (hide and seek) exemplify such versatility, as different play groups employ different rules for 1hem. if three individuals (adults or children) from disparate regions are asked how to play any of 1hese games, each will likely descn1>edifferent rules or try to "correct" 1he o1hets' variants. this indicates that 1he rules are flexible and reflect 1he ideals of each individual play group. such versatility is especially characteristic of folklore. play also provides 1he opportunity to exercise contro1.(5) games pennit controlled disorder, 1hat is, disorder wi1hin 1he predetermined or agreed-upon guidelines. when playing, children can run seemingly amok, as long as 1hey remain wi1hin the boundaries set by 1he rules. rule breakets are chastised and/or excluded from further play. games also pennit children to mock conventional 47 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 roles.(6) within the stm.cture of the game, children assume the role of mother, bride, child, village aggressor, or oppressed for example, in the american game "mother, may 11" one child asswnes the role of mother, exercisiiig control over the other players. in playing these roles, children may choose to mock them. this affords the players a chance to vent often sublimated emotions associated with their appointed roles in life. "priatki," for example, deals to a certain extent with separation anxiety. although the goal is to avoid capture, the allure of the game lies in the players' confidence that someone cares that they are missing and will look for them. this parallels the emotions associated with leaving the family temporarily (e.g., to go to school). as in the game, children believe that they will be missed and someone will seek them if they do not return. whereas in the adult world parents may chastise children for ridiculing adult roles or for making fun of their elders, games provide an appropriate venue to couch such acting out. in mocking roles, children usually do one of two things: play the actual role relatively appropriately (i.e., act out their perception of how an adult would act) or reverse the normative role (ie., act out the role in a manner directly opposite to the expected norm). this is significant, in light of the fact that play also allows children to prepare for roles that they will play in life. even through reversals, games reflect real life and are models of a larger system of power. reversals refer to acting out the opposite of socially-accepted behavior. reversals reinforce social norms by showing how life should not be. in looking at the games that children play at any given time, one must take into account the society that influences' them. to a certain extent, individuals reflect the societies in which they live. behavior, according to mary douglas, is a result of social programming. society teaches the individual to do everything.(7) mor~ver, individuals reflect the larger society of which they are a . part. douglas theorizes that cultures tend to define themselves in terms of the relationship between the individual in society and the group. russian society has traditionally been highly structured. that is, there have always been official and unofficial rules governing behavior. during the pre-soviet period, russian culture favored the group over the individual, as evidenced by family and village life. soviet culture built upon that, expanding and redefining the "group" to include all of society. using douglas' classification system, russia can be categorized as grid weak and group strong, indicating that the larger group (society) holds greater influence and importance than the individual (grid).(8) in recent years, russian society has been experiencing a shift, with the individual gaining greater importance. with the change to a maricet economy and the "official" establishment of a middle class, there has also been a rise in emphasis on the individual. it appears, however, that the group as an institution has 48 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 retained its status. this raises a question as to the relationship of folklore to society. as society is chang;ng to a more even pairing of group and individual importance, what social values remain significant to children'! they are playing the same games that their predecessors played when society theoretically had a different focus. what aspects of behavior are children trying, on a subconscious level, to maintain'! traditional games russian children's folklore includes hundreds of games. for this study, i have chosen a few that have deep roots in russian culture, dating back at least several generations. these games have not changed significantly over time and remain enduringly popular. children still play all of the games to be discussed. while several other games also reflect the significance of the group, i have selected three as typical of the different types of children's games to be discussed. as an example of a game for smaller children, i have chosen "gusi-gusi" (geese-geese).(9) this type of game is typically played by children aged 5-8. several similar games exist, all with similar goals. these include tagging players and incorporating them into a different group.{lo) the players start by choosing the leaders, a "mama goose" and a "grey wolf" once the vedushchie (leaders) are chosen, the game begins. to start the game, the mama goose stands at one end of the playing field the goslings (all of the children besides the mama and the wolf) stand at the other end. the wolf remains in the middle of the field. the mama and her goslings engage in a poetic interchange: mama: gusi, gusi! goosey, goosey! goslings: ga-ga-ga! honk-honk-honk! mama: est' kholile? do you want to eat? goslings: da-da-da! yes-yes-yes! mama: nu, letite! well, fly on over! goslings: nam nel'zia! we can't! mama: pochemu? why not? goslings: seryi volk za goroi the gray wolf behind the hill ne puskaet nos domoi. won't let us come home.( ii) another variant ends in the following way: goslings: nom nel'zia idti domoi we can't go homeseryi volk pod goroi the gray wolf is behind the hillzuby iochit, he's sharpening his teeth, nos s"est' xochet. he wants to eat us. mama: nu letite well, :flyon over kat ichotite! as you wish!(12) at this point, the goslings run across the field. the wolf attempts to tag as many of them as possible. each gosling that he tags becomes a wolf. the game continues, with multiple wolves catching an ever-diminishing cotps of goslings. ( 13) 49 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 what does this game teach? keeping in mind that its target audience (i.e., players) is children who are entering kindergarten or are old enough to do so, it teaches them to become independent from their mothers, which is apropos for this age. the goslings attempt to rejoin mother but often end up in the larger group of wolves; they end up with their peers rather than their family, as depicted by the "mama." the wolves work together toward one goal: increasing the group as much as possible. although the goal is to avoid joining the group, the latter gains in importance and desirability as it grows. this may indicate that the group still holds a strong position in society. other "wolf' games display similar characteristics. in past generations this game may have reinforced the notion of working together; it still may. in this variant, i have seen players create strategies for corralling the remaining geese or isolating the "weak" ones in order to tag them. for the children who play this and similar games, the group still apparently holds a prominent place. another game that i collected in 1991 also reflects the preeminence of the group. whereas in "gusi-gusi"" the individual formed a new group, "tretii lishnu" exemplifies the type of game where the majority of players unite against one player, making the task of joining the group more difficult.( 14) instead of one player "beating the odds" (or the rest of the players), the majority excludes the one outsider, who is quite literally outside of the group. in "tnt;; lishnii, " players stand behind each other in two concentric circles. one player is denoted "extra;" he is the chasee. the chaser is "it." as it chases the extra, the latter may opt to replace himself with another player. to do so, the extra stands in front of another player (in one of the circles), who then becomes extra. in some variants, only the inner circle may be replaced, at which point the inner player steps back into the outer circle and the outer player becomes extra(15) 1 have seen and read about several variants, and have noticed that there are basic rules and regional ones.(16) for example, when players run through the circle, they must hop on one foot. when one runs outside the circle, he or she may run normally. if the player being chased is caught, he is out of the game or becomes "it, " depending on the local rules. children create the rules for each game from a mix of "standard" rules that everyone "should" know and their own play group's rules. similar to "gusi-gusi, " the group "comes to the rescue" of the individual. the difference lies in each group's definition of what constitutes the desirable group. in "gusi-gusi," the original group is desirable yet helpless to come to the aid of its members; it eventually loses power and is replaced the "new" group (i.e. wolves), can help each other and becomes the dominant group. in "tretii lishnii," converselly, the initial group retains power throughout the course of the game. this is further evidenced by the (unofficial) rule that when the player being chased tires, he can replace himselfwith 50 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 another. in this way, the individual who is not part of the group must work harder to become part of it. whereas the group members easily replace each other, the chaser must catch his prey in order to rejoin the group -a considerably more difficult job. this reflects village life, in a way, in that individuals from outside must work very hard to gain acceptance. this game also reinforces the notion that the group has an easier time playing, sharing the burdens so that no one individual has too hard a time. even the imagery reinforces the notion that being part of the group is preferable to being an outsider. in these games for young children, the message reflects society as a whole, as characterized by douglas' criteria. brian sutton-smith has noted that games "replicate the larger systems of power of which they are a part. "(17) these games strengthen the notion of group importance and strength, indicating that childhood play parallels the larger social structure. as noted earlier, russian society has traditionally stressed the group over the individual. although these structures may be changing and the individual is gaining in importance, the group remains a strong influence on everyday life. children realize this on some level and act it out in order to reinforce the social importance of the group. another game in which the group protects its members is "boiare." like "trelii lishnii," an individual is pitted against another group. the difference here lies in the fact that she already belongs to another group that can aid her.(1s) players of this game range in age from 9-14. a team game, "boiare" recreates a historical social event: marriage. perhaps reflecting bride capture or parodying the rituals associated with fetching the bride for a village wedding, it depicts one group approaching another in order to demand a bride. rather than coming into existence as "watered-down ritual" as the rite itself diminished in importance, this game very likely existed alongside the actual ritual, providing children an outlet to parody marriage and the ceremonies surrounding it. folldore typically reflects history and social life; this game is no ex.ception.(19) players stand in two teams, in lines facing each other, several feet apart. with hands linked. each team in turn yells or sings its lines while walking forward and back as a group: team a: boiare. a my k vam prishli, boyars, we have come to you, molodye. a my k vam prishli. young ones, we have come to you. team b: boiare. a zachem prishli, boyars, why have you come, molodye. a zachem prishli? young ones, why have you come? team a: boiare. nom nevesla nuzhna, boyars, we need a bride, molodye. nom nevesla nuzhna. young ones, we need a bride. team b: boiare. a kakaia vam nuzhna, boyars, which one do you need, molodye. a kakaia vam nuzhna? young ones, which one do you need? then the team chooses a "bride." 51 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 team a: boiare, nom vot eta nuzhna, boyars, we like that one, molodye, nom vot eta mila. young ones, we like that one. the other team, of course, does not wish to surrender her. they reply with excuses: . team b: boiare, u nei zubki boliat, boyars, she has a toothache, molodye, u nei zubki boliat. young ones, she has a toothache. team a: boiare, a my k doktoru svedem, boyars, we'l take her to the doctor, molodye, a my k doktoru svedem. young ones, well take her to the doctor. this goes on with several excuses, ultimately ending with these words: team a: boiare, om durochka u nos, boyars, she's our stupid one, molodye. 000 durochka u nos. young ones, she's our stupid one. team b: boiare. ne voliaite duraka, boyars, don't hold on to the stupid one, vydovaite oom nevestu navsegda. send us the bride forever.(20) in one major variant, the chosen player then runs toward the opposing team and attempts to break through their "chain." if she is unsuccessful, she must join the opposing team. if she is successful, she may return to her team with an opposing player in tow as a prize. in this game one group is forced to yield up individuals, which they do quite unwillingly. surrendering a.group member to an unknown group is dangerous, as no other group will care for her like her own. this teaches players about the role, significance, and strength of group bonds. the game demonstrates this physically by requiring the "stranger" to sever the group's bonds by breaking through the chain of hands. as in "tretii lishnii," the group comes to the aid of the individual.(21) the individual, however, is ultimately responsible for her own fate. she must break through the barriers of the other group in order to return to her own group. this game is currently extremely popular in elementary . schools in pskov, where i carried out my fieldwork.(22) this may indicate that children are, on some level, realizing that the individual is gaining power -the strength required to break through the group . hints that there is some emphasis on the individual. the notion of the strength of the group, however, remains more powerful. while the individual is gaining, the group still stands strong. reflections of life i have asserted that these three types of games, exemplified by the examples given, reflect the importance of the group in children's self-socialization. of course children have played and continue to play other, more individually oriented "tag-type" games. i certainly cannot purport that group games are taking over or have been the sole type of games for generations. rather, that the grouporiented games persist indicates that they fulfill a need (one of many) in the socialization of the players. the reinforcement of the group is only one aspect of this socialization, but it is apparently important to children, as evidenced by the fact that they still play such games. if the players did not sense on some level that these skills were useful, they would shun the games.(23) 52 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 the game types discussed all depict different types of group dynamics. "gusi-gusi" facilitates the process of leaving mother's protective wing to join the potentially dangerous (yet supportive) group of wolves. "tretii lishnii" demonstrates the ditlicultiesencountered when one does not belong to the group, as well as the strict rules associated with rejoining.(24) "boiare" reflects the larger social construct of out-marriage, directly parodying and mirroring the feelings associated with growing up and leaving home. these games are petpetuated because they reinforce social norms that children deem important. several folk games indicate this in their structure. although russia is currently changing economically and socially, allowing the individual higher status in the group, children still recognize the importance of the group and its dynamic. the older ideals remain because children need something relatively stable to cling to, especially in times of social duress. folklore is traditional; it reflects social ideals. the more things change, the more children's folklore stays the same, by necessity. hence even with the rise of the individual as a significant component of russian society, the group remains a dominant factor. one must keep in mind, however, that even in light of the cultural implications associated with children's games, children perceive play as simply pretend. as far as they are concerned, they play to have fun. reinforcement of social constructs through the unofficial education of play is a bonus. notes 1. source 103: ira boreiko, age 19, 1st year, pgpl collected 29 november 1995. 2. this paper deals primarily with some of the observations that i have made regarding the games that i have collected in the course of my fieldwork. 3. s.a zavarzhin, "aggressive fantasies in childhood and adolescence, " russian education and soci~ty 36 (oct. 1994), p. 30. 4. mary and herbert knapp, one potato. two potato (new york: w.w. norton & company, 1976) p.49. 5. elliott avendon and brian sutton-smith, the stu4y of games (new york: john wiley & sons, inc., 1971), p. 6. 6. brian sutton-smith, "towards an anthropology of play, " in steven phillips, jr., ed., studies in the anthrqpology of play: p~rs in memoty ofb. allan tindall (west point, ny: leisure press, 1977), p.228. 7. mary douglas, natural symbols (new york: pantheon books, 1982), p. 65. 8. douglas, p. 59. 9. this game is also called "gusi-iebedi" ("geese-swans") and "gusi i volle" ("geese-wo1f"). cf. "karavai" in b.n. putilov, editor, delsk;; ooelicheskii fol'ldor (s.-peterburg, dmitrii bulanin, 1997), pp. 369 and 539. and "gorelki," in putilov, pp. 361-62 and 534-35. the latter more loosely fits the game type. putilov includes several such games, as does. s.k. jakob in vsdomnim zabv(ye ifjiy (moskva: "detskaia literatura," 1990). 53 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 10. cf. "volk i deti' in putilov, p. 363 and «fgra s volkom" in a. m. novikova, russkoe narodnoe ooeticheskoe tvorchestvo (moscow: vysshaia shkola," 1987), pp. 71-72. 11. i first encountered this particular variant at ferrum college in 1982. collected by the author from sasha saari, a russian teacher at the college. 12. rn. putilov, p. 364. cf. iakub, 94-99. 13. this is only one variant; several others exist. 14. cf. "kostromti' in putilov, pp. 366 and 538; and "boiare" in putilov, pp. 367 and 539, also collected by the author from natasha novoselova, age 16, moscow and natasha tuliakova, age 16, moscow. july 29, 1991, at james madison university, harrisonburg, virginia at the virginia governor's russian studies academy. 15. collected from aleksandr bogach, age 16, volgograd, and anna kuznetsova, age 16, volgograd. july 29, 1991, at james madison university, harrisonburg, va. at the virginia governor's russian studies academy. aleksandr forgot part of the game; his friends filled in the gaps where he left off. i also observed aleksandr and his friends playing this game as they taught it to american students. 16. cf. iakub, pp. 77-81 and s.a. shmakov, lj:rg (moskow: ny magistr, 1992), p. 58. shmakov calls this game "vtoroi lishnii." 17. sutton-smith, "towards an anthropology of play, " p. 226. 18. this is as opposed to "gusi-gusi," where the group can have no defense nor strategy. 19. v. bakhtin, skazki. pesni. chastushki. pris/ov 'ia leniwadskoi oblast: sbomik (leningrad: lenizdat, 1982), p. 8. 20. collected by the author from natasha novoselova, age 16, moscow and natasha tuliakova, age 16, moscow. july 29, 1991,. at james madison university, harrisonburg, va. at virginia governor's russian studies academy. cf. putilov, p. 367 and 539. 21. in "tretii lishnii," i define the individual being helped as the extra, rather than the it. 22. interview with barbara jenkins, september 18, 1998. ms. jenkins had recently returned from teaching at the bishko/a (bilingual school) in pskov for two years. 23. as children master skills, they outgrow various genres of childlore, shunning them as "babyish" or "stupid." 24. just as folk groups exhibit versatility in their unofficial rules for inclusion, it is noteworthy that this game is flexible in its rules: several local variants exist. joining the group means jumping through different hoops, depending on the play group. 54 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 microsoft word seefaf01c.doc 49 teaching russian folklore r e p o r t designing a russian fairy tales course david j. birnbaum, suzanne daly, helena goscilo, julia sagaidak houkom, john kachur, gerald mccausland, alexander prokhorov, petre petrov, irina reyn, dawn seckler, benjamin sutcliffe university of pittsburgh background by 1996 the department of slavic languages and literatures at the university of pittsburgh, like many other slavic departments in the country, had experienced a significant decline in both the number of russian language majors and overall enrollments in our language classes. on the other hand, in addition to russian and other slavic languages, our department had a long history of teaching russian literature and russian culture in english, and these courses had always proven popular among undergraduate students seeking to satisfy one or another of the university's general education requirements. because we identified general education as a successful but still underutilized area where a slavic department can play a significant and visible role in a post-cold-war university, one of our faculty proposed that we expand on our generaleducation successes by offering a new course in what for us was a non-traditional area: russian fairy tales. in order to maximize the number and range of students who might enroll, this new course would have no prerequisites and would strive to accommodate even incoming freshmen with no prior training or preparation. although one principal motivation underlying the development of this course was the expectation that expanding our department's role in the undergraduate curriculum would serve the important educational mission of making russian culture more widely available and accessible to the university community in general, two other considerations also influenced our planning. first, we hoped that offering a new and potentially seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 50 popular course could increase our department's overall student credit hours, since we recognized that our administration could not reasonably be expected to allocate new resources to a department that did not participate in undergraduate education in a numerically significant fashion. second, we hoped that the access to additional students provided by a popular new course in english would enable us to recruit interested students into our department's other offerings, both those in english and those involving russian language study. initial assumptions and course development our principal source of primary fairy tale texts was, of course, afanas'ev's collection, but we understood from the beginning that our course should involve more than just an opportunity for students to read russian fairy tales. accordingly, we set ourselves the additional goal of encouraging students not only to read and learn about russian fairy tales, but also to approach the study of fairy tales from new perspectives. with this in mind, we integrated the tales themselves into four contextual modules: 1. russian folk belief (based on linda ivanits' book with the same title). 2. a psychoanalytical approach to the study of fairy tales (based on bruno bettelheim's uses of enchantment). 3. a selection of primarily sociological readings (e.g., feminist and neo-marxist approaches to fairy tales, marina warner). 4. reflections of russian fairy tales in nineteenthand twentieth-century russian literature (pushkin, gogol', tolstaia, sadur) and visual arts. to help provide a familiar context for the study of unfamiliar russian texts from unfamiliar theoretical perspectives, we incorporated selected western texts (grimm, perrault, disney) into the course, as well. and to help focus the students' attention on the theoretical foundations, we promised them on the first day of class that by the end of the course they would never again read fairy tales the way they had previously, a goal that students almost invariably agree we have achieved by the last course meeting. in addition to primary fairy tale readings and secondary theoretical readings, the course has relied heavily on non-literary sources and transpositions of russian and non-russian fairy tales, including film (from the pagan festival scene in andrei rublev to contemporary animated and non-animated american cinema), ballet (e.g., swan lake), opera (e.g., sadko), orchestral music (e.g., prokof'ev's cinderella, musorgskii's night on bald mountain), painting and drawing (e.g., 51 vasnetsov, bilibin, zvorykin, icons, palekh, folk art), and costume and stage design (e.g., bakst, benua). the course was taught for the first time by two instructors to approximately sixty students, a number that has increased steadily since that time, and that would probably continue to expand if we did not cap it at the limit of our teaching resources. the remainder of this report describes how we have adapted the structure of the course in response to this growth in popularity. what makes russian fairy tales popular general education requirements while students select their major subjects according to their professional aspirations and, if we are fortunate, their intellectual interests, in many universities, including ours, their choice of other courses is often controlled by the need to satisfy a large and complicated set of general education requirements. russian fairy tales at our university satisfies a requirement in nonwestern foreign culture. while many students enroll in our course because of a genuine interest in the subject matter, many others simply consult a list of courses that satisfy this requirement and choose from among them something that sounds reasonably familiar or appealing. many such students might never have enrolled in a course in russian fairy tales had it not been accepted by the undergraduate curriculum committee as satisfying a general education requirement. reputation several courses at our university have achieved a reputation with both undergraduate students and their advisors as interesting, educationally valuable, and accessible to students with little previous training not only in the subject matter of the course, but in college-level education in general. these courses are not "easy a's" (the percentage of a-type grades in russian fairy tales has fluctuated between a low of 6% and a high of around 20%), but they do not require, for example, that students have acquired the skills they will obtain later by completing the university's basic expository writing course. furthermore, one of our graduate students has a regular, full-time job in our university's undergraduate advising center and has ensured that all undergraduate advisors are aware that russian fairy tales will provide a meaningful course not only to specialists in folklore or children's literature, but also to the average first-semester freshman. through word of mouth on the part of both students and advisors, russian fairy tales has almost never failed to fill to capacity. we have kept people apprised of its existence by seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 52 offering it every semester and in an increasing number of venues. in general, our advising center has informed us that one of the keys to maintaining interest in a popular course is to offer it every semester, so that both students and advisors can rely on it as a permanent option. subsequent development texts as new instructors have taught the course, the literary and non-literary texts have changed in many ways. an instructor with a particular interest in structuralism and formalism added an essay by jakobson and bogatyrev on folklore as a special form of communal creativity, as well as selections from propp's morphology of the folktale. another instructor with similar interests introduced excerpts from max lüthi's european folktale. the release of snow white: a tale of terror after the course had first been established enabled us to incorporate an effective cinematic representation of the horror aspect of this classic fairy tale as a treatment of the same subject matter dramatically different from the version produced by disney studios. while feminist approaches to the study of fairy tales have remained a constant part of the course, the specific feminist theoretical texts have changed with the interests of the instructors. more philologicallyoriented instructors emphasize, for example, ruth bottigheimer's analysis of verbs of speaking in the grimms' tales in her 1986 fairy tales and society: illusion, allusion, and paradigm. more culturally-inclined instructors have concentrated instead on the sociologically-oriented essays in jack zipes's don't bet on the prince. enrollment russian fairy tales has grown to the point where in fall 2000 the main course (taught by two instructors) quickly met an enrollment cap of over 200 students. student interest remained so great that the advising center urged us to add another section of 100 students (taught by a single instructor), and provided extra funding to support this course. we regularly offer an additional section of this course in the university's extension school, called the college of general studies – an arrangement that makes the content available to nontraditional students who may need to take courses on weekends, in the evening, or off campus in some of the surrounding communities. cgs underwrites the cost of a teaching assistantship to support this instruction. most recently, we have begun teaching russian fairy tales in the university's summer sessions (a time when our department had traditionally scheduled only language courses), and the university has made 53 additional teaching assistantships available to summer instructors. we are mindful, of course, that we are not a "department of russian fairy tales," but, by trying to respond to student demand to the extent that our faculty and graduate teaching assistant resources permit, we have managed to make the slavic department part of the education of hundreds of students every year who might otherwise never have known that we exist. technology much as our materials have changed in response to the different and growing knowledge of an increasing number of instructors, so have our classroom methods. the multimedia nature of this course was new for many of the instructors – our early sessions were taught in classrooms that required us to bring in and set up slide projectors, vcrs, cd players, and tape players. we quickly learned not to attempt to use more than one or two different pieces of equipment in a single meeting, and we also learned to schedule the course in classrooms already configured for multimedia teaching whenever possible. here we were fortunate that the university of pittsburgh had been diligent in anticipating and satisfying, through equipment purchases and installations, an expanding interest in media-supported instruction. as our class size grew to over one hundred students, we began using transparencies and overhead projectors, enabling students in ever larger auditoria to follow outlines of lectures while taking and organizing their notes. in the second year the course was offered we developed a support site on the world wide web, where we repost the overheads and visual images that we use in class, and where we also publish supplementary material (such as a glossary of russian terms used in linda ivanits' russian folk belief). most recently, we switched from overhead transparencies during lectures to microsoft powerpoint, which has enabled us to incorporate still images directly into our presentations and thus eliminate the use of a separate 35mm slide projector. one of our greatest organizational challenges has been preparing the web versions of the powerpoint presentations sufficiently in advance to enable students to print their own copies and to bring them to class as a way of organizing their notes. evaluation of students our evaluation methods began with attendance, class participation, short essay testing, and two optional extra-credit writing assignments: an original fairy tale (which had to conform to the conventions of the genre as studied in the course) and a more traditional research or analytical paper. seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 54 examinations and quizzes originally, the course required four examinations during the semester, with examination structures that combined multiple choice types of questions (true/false, mix-and-match, short identification) with short essays. as the enrollment grew to the point where it became impossible for the two instructors to grade over two-hundred essay examinations, we shifted, reluctantly, to four machine-graded multiple-choice tests. we subsequently added short-answer quizzes, which are laid out on a single page in a way that makes it possible for a single person to correct two hundred of them in less than an hour. in the spring 2001 semester the examand quiz-based portion of the grade relied on four examinations (25 points each, for a total of 100) plus the best four of however many quizzes we administer (10 points each, for a total of 40). some instructors have awarded additional points for regular attendance and for oral participation, while others have found it too difficult to keep track of oral participation in a course of this size. class participation student participation in class was one of the original requirements of the course, since all our instructors have considered active learning an indispensible part of effective undergraduate teaching. as the size of the course has grown, the instructors who continue to incorporate class participation explicitly in the grade have had to develop new ways to track it. one successful strategy that we developed to promote participation has been to award vouchers to students as they speak (intelligently) in class. we have found that handing out these physical tokens to recognize their contributions has two benefits: it helps focus the students' attention on the importance of participation and it makes it easier for us to keep clear and consistent records of how much each student participates (students write their names on the backs of their vouchers and return them at the end of the session, so that we can update our grade books accordingly). as a different approach to expanding the opportunity for student participation, in the fall 2001 semester for the first time we are teaching the large section of the course with over 300 students in a new format, with meetings of the entire class twice a week and "recitation sections" (of 25 students each) once a week. following our university's suggested guidelines, the person with primary responsibility for the course conducts the two large meetings and also one recitation section, while teaching assistants or other instructors (including one undergraduate teaching assistant, an accomplished russian major) each conduct up to four one-hour recitation meetings. in addition to providing a smaller and more comfortable environment for student participation, 55 we anticipate that the additional assistants will enable us to add short essay questions to our examinations and perhaps to incorporate a small number of short writing assignments. we have been guided in this development by the experience of colleagues in other departments, such as anthropology, where there is a tradition of teaching popular undergraduate courses to several hundred students at a time. extra credit as was noted above, some instructors have provided optional extra-credit writing assignments as a way of addressing student interest in creative participation. given the high enrollment and limited personnel we have been able to devote to this course, the extra-credit options are manageable only because not all students take advantage of them. in fact, one reason instructors enjoy these assignments is that so many students who are successful in the course in general (and who do not actually need the extra credit to improve their grades) choose to submit them. what we have learned russian fairy tales continues to be far and away the most popular course in our department. its popularity has inspired us to add other new and successful english-language general education courses in slavic culture (“science fiction: east and west” regularly meets its enrollment cap of 50 and our new course “vampire: blood and empire” reached its cap of 120 within a week of the beginning of the course registration period the first time it was offered, and has enrolled approximately 200 students in three sections in the fall 2001 semester). our department's overall student credit hours have increased steadily over the past several years, even while such numbers have stagnated or fallen in many other slavic departments. currently our enrollments are roughly average for arts and sciences departments at our university, which is an above-average achievement for a slavic department at the start of the twenty-first century. as noted above, we are not, of course, a "department of russian fairy tales." while adding new general-education courses, we have maintained successful older ones, including surveys of russian culture and russian literature. the personnel to support our new courses has come primarily from consolidation elsewhere in our curriculum, including a more efficient distribution of lower-enrollment advanced russian language courses and graduate seminars. furthermore, because undergraduate general education has a high priority at the university of seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 56 pittsburgh, our dean has provided additional teaching assistantships and instructors to cover increased enrollment in russian fairy tales and other general education courses. we have noticed that a few fairy tale students subsequently decide to study russian language, and even more enroll in our other general-education courses, but thus far russian fairy tales has not proven as fertile a recruitment tool for our language program as we had hoped. one reason for this is surely that many students simply do not have room in their schedules (alongside majors, minors, general education requirements, internships, study abroad, etc.) to make the sort of long-term commitment required for serious language study. but we suspect that another reason is that we have not done all we can to recruit effectively. with this in mind, last year for the first time we incorporated a "russian alphabet in thirty minutes" module in the fairy tales course. we hope that the experience of learning to recognize bilibin's signature in cyrillic at the bottom of his drawings will tap into the excitement that some students experience when learning a new alphabet, and will also help overcome the irrational fear on the part of some students that they will be unable to come to terms with an alphabet of only thirty-three letters, half of which they already know either from english or from campus fraternity and sorority life. because the alphabet module is intended to support a general recruiting goal, we scheduled this session to fall just before students begin selecting their courses for the coming semester. the world wide web site for the university of pittsburgh's course in russian fairy tales is http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~tales/ and is accessible to the general public. other slavic departments interested in developing their own courses in russian fairy tales are welcome to visit that site and to adopt any materials that they consider useful. we look forward to improving our own course in response to innovations developed by colleagues at other institutions. interested readers can reach david j. birnbaum at djbpitt+tales@pitt.edu. the names of other faculty and graduate students who have taught our russian fairy tales course over the past several years, and who contributed to this report either directly or through their development of course materials, are listed at the beginning of this report. microsoft word fall04w.doc 55 reviews mark joffe and joseph krafczik. perun, the god of thunder (studies in the humanities 43). new york: peter lang, 2003. xiv + 118 pp. $53.95 (cloth). isbn 0-820441201. it is hard to know what to say about this book. serious slavists and folklorists will be disappointed. it may be useful to the non-slavist as a brief (eighty nine pages of text) survey of beliefs about the slavic god perun, thunder, fire, buried treasure, magic plants, ritual cleansing, and so on. it certainly lists at high speed just about everything that might by some frazerian stretch of the imagination be linked with perun. the problem with slav deities is that there is little hard information about them. in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when possession of an ancient pantheon and a national epic mattered to national esteem, a great deal of enthusiasm and imagination went into supplying the missing biographical details from folklore and the free use of analogy with other cultures. this book, which claims that it draws its inspiration from afanas’ev, is firmly in that tradition. both the authors are slavists by training and teach college courses in folklore, and the book does betray distinct traces of classroom simplification. it is not that one can point to much in particular and say it is incorrect (what can be wrong in folklore or mythology, except other scholars?), but it must also be said that the book is full of sweeping comparisons and unsupported assertions, selective use of unattributed etymologies (vasmer is listed in the bibliography but not in the text or notes, like several other items), use of bogus, frivolous, or incompetent sources (the velesova kniga is quoted several times without even a health warning, as is the worthless abc-clio encyclopedia of russian slavic myth and legend), uncritical use of other sources (the prince igor’ story is discussed at some length as a twelfth-century epic with no mention that there are, at the very least, some questions about its textual integrity), failure to mention a whole range of relevant work (for example, no reference in the text to b. a. uspenskii on the association of veles and perun with st nicholas, although his book is mentioned in the bibliography, nor, at the level of bibliography of the subject, the standard serial bibliography russkii fol’klor, or kulikovskii’s bibliography of slavonic mythology). the book relies heavily on afanas’ev and rybakov, both eulogized in the preface, perhaps one reason why the opinions offered have distinctly old-fashioned flavor at times. other sources are a rather haphazard selection, but on the plus side the authors do quote linda ivanits at several points. the “introduction” is a short and unexceptionable survey of the early history of christianity among the south and east slavs, and a quick introduction to the pantheon, if such it was, of the slavs. the rest of the book is not arranged in chapters but in short topical sections. it takes us through the (few) references to perun in the earliest slav and other medieval texts, and an excursus on the etymology of the name (with none of the etymologies dated or sourced); through supposed analogs in other cultures (p. 13 “perun in his various aspects is encountered among other aryan religions”); through various aspects of russian culture and belief, even “the lame leg: a short digression” (with no reference to carlo ginzburg). the final eighteen pages, “poetic mythology applied” (an arbitrary selection of examples limited to the igor’ tale and the works of gogol’ and sologub), do not mention perun. at $53.95 this is not a bargain; for a third of the price students and interested folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 56 non-specialists can get elizabeth warner’s russian myths (2002), which covers the same area of folklore and mythology far better. w. f. ryan warburg institute university of london folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 editorial satement 29 the anthropology of birth in russia and ukraine the midwife in traditional ukrainian culture: ritual, folklore and mythology (1) olena boriak m. ryl's'kyi institute of art, folklore and ethnology ukrainian national academy of sciences starting to do anthropology, no one knows in advance where it is going (mary t. douglas) as is well known, the bible opens with the creation and recounts the carefree life of the first two people in paradise. this blissful state soon comes to an end when adam and eve are driven from paradise. eve is told: �in pain shall you bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband� (gen. 3, xvi). �now adam knew eve his wife, and she conceived and bore cain, saying, i have gotten a man with the help of the lord� (gen. 4, i). an unbroken chain of births followed, a story that mingled joy and sorrow [stol, wiggermann 2000: ix]. such was the beginning of the anthropology of birth. in this article i shall be drawing upon a database collected in the field over the last few years in the middle dnieper region of ukraine, as well as on archival material. the latter includes the unique notes of the ukrainian folklorist and ethnologist, liudmyla shevchenko (niece of the great ukrainian poet taras shevchenko) [boriak 2001b: 42-56], and s. verkhrads'kyi, professional physician and ethnographer. from the 1920�s through the 1940�s they succeeded in collecting some outstanding material from peasants in various regions of ukraine, in particular polissia, famous among ethnologists for the archaic nature of its oral tradition [e.g. kabakova 2001]. in ukraine, just as elsewhere, the traditional midwife (baba or grandmother) coexisted with those who had received some training. the latter had undergone brief courses, qualifying as licensed nurse midwives, but usually practiced in city regions. over time obstetrics became a profession and developed its own body of knowledge: zamois'ka academy, set up in 1593, was seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 30 the first medical faculty to train medical practitioners. after 1702, physicians learnt their knowledge of pregnancy and delivery at the kyiv-mohyla academy in a special medical course set up originally by professor apanas maslovs'kyi. at the end of the eighteenth century a medical college opened in l�viv. its initial director, andrii krupyns'kyi was the first to forbid midwives without formal training to attend deliveries. it was at this period that specialist literature on midwifery appeared, the most famous being the textbook written by m. ambodik-maksymovych (1744-1812), a native ukrainian, who had studied at kyiv-mohyla academy before taking specialized medical courses at the university of strasbourg and establishing a clinical midwifery institute in st petersburg. the institute was in fact a brilliant group of male obstetricians; this had been a characteristic phenomenon in medieval europe. in addition, the name of george rein, a professor at kyiv state university should be mentioned. he made efforts to set up special training courses for village midwives. indeed he was the only professional in the field to realize the pitfalls of the standard policy of avoiding any association with traditional midwives; the latter were seen as socially inferior by physicians. although the knowledge that physicians possessed was more accurate, they had no systematic way of acquiring the living personal experience and knowledge of the traditional midwife. thus he called their work �experimental obstetrics,� and he even devised a special questionnaire for gathering information about their work, intended to further research into the practical aspects of birthing. we know that one of the first formal midwife training programs was set up in 1783 at the obstetrics school in chernivtsi. in 1803 the first maternity home opened in kyiv. later, thanks to the special efforts of adherents of the �zems'kyi� reforms of the 1870�s, special schools of midwifery, exclusively for women, were created in all provincial and district centers. the problem with them was their effectiveness. thus, at the beginning of the twentieth century, according to a report for the kyiv zemstvo, only 3.8% of births were assisted by a trained midwife. this situation remained unchanged over the next several decades. according to the records of the first obstetrical conference, held in kyiv in 1927, 90% of ukrainian women had no professional assistance during delivery. in 1934 the first maternity hospital to be set up on a collective farm opened in the zhytomyr region. what then was the reason why 90% of ukrainian peasant mothers did not receive professional help prior to the mid-twentieth century? the answer lay in the services provided by the midwife or baba (grandmother), normally an uneducated old woman, widowed and beyond 31 child-bearing age, who had usually brought up several children of her own. many midwives, therefore, had learnt their trade from personal experience, but it was also quite possible for them to be childless. in the latter case, they would claim that they had acquired their knowledge from god. in reality, they probably learned from observing and helping during their neighbors� (or relatives�) deliveries or by assisting an established midwife. when serious complications arose, and when it was feasible, village midwives would summon a physician or more experienced midwife. the word baba is an extremely broad notion, represented by several indo-european roots and by a considerable variety of words in many indo-european languages. in general, the principal words in this category are applied to female relatives: slavic baba = grandmother, old woman; lithuanian boba = old woman; also middle high german bobe and new england �baby� [buck 1949: 94]. the variations in the meaning of the word for midwife extend into all slavic languages, bulgarian, serbian, slovak and czech in particular. according to egyptian mythology, the morpheme ba expressed one of the elements that made up the human spirit, and denoted soul and life. in babylonian literature bau (baba) was the goddess of medicine. it is evident, therefore, that the oldest meaning of baba is that of an old woman, and this reflects the reality of ukrainian midwives, given that the �swaddling craft� (povyval'na sprava) was only practiced by women beyond child-bearing age, that is, those could no longer fulfill their primary gender role.(2) but the meaning of baba is not simply a metaphorical one. at this point i shall briefly survey the uses of the word. in addition to the meaning just mentioned, i would also like to point to an unusual link with mythological personages, such as the "iron grandmother" (zalizna baba) and the "rye grandmother" (zhytnia, rzhana baba), whose bogeyman images were used to frighten naughty children. we also have the mythological baba, sereda (wednesday) and p'iatnytsia (friday), who are closely connected with domestic weaving; the personage of the christmas carol (koliada); the figure of the baba iaga from the magic tale, who is both warrior and kidnapper, and at the same time helper and donor; and finally the �stone image� baba, found as ancient anthropomorphic sculptures in the steppe regions, placed by nomads on graves and linked to an ancestor cult. in this context it is interesting to note that in the polissia region babka denotes an ant, and is thus connected with the ancient concept of the incarnation of the human soul in an insect (c.f. butterfly (babochka) in russian, and polish baba meaning �ladybug�). seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 32 other significant etymological meanings of the root in ukrainian connect it with illness (babytsi). it is also the name of an ancient autumn funeral feast in polissia (baby), as well as being used in ukrainian astronomical terminology, where baby is a name for the pleiads and babyn poias (grandmother�s belt) is a rainbow. it is also the case that babka is widely connected symbolically with bread of various kinds: the easter cake (paskha), a special christmas bread called baba and a wheaten loaf (c.f. the ancient slavic root, bob-, meaning �blow� or �bloat�); compare also the name of the dandelion, kul’baba in ukrainian. the word baba was not the only word for a midwife. we can identify more than fifteen, grouped around a number of key concepts: giving birth (rodyl'na), delivery (branka), the umbilicus (pupova, puptseva, pupna), cutting (rizna), swaddling (spovytukha, povyvakha) and combinations of these terms, such as baba-branka, meaning �the one who delivers [the child]� or puporizna, �the one who cuts the umbilicus.� all of these words may also be combined with other word groups. when we examine the derivation of some of these terms, it emerges that the old russian word rod also possesses a range of meanings, including family, clan, birth, generation and grammatical gender. the indo-european root *ghen(to bear), on the other hand, is linked to the lithuanian word zembeti (germination) and greek genea (birth), and the ukrainian (belarusian, russian) word for wife zhinka (zhona, zhena) derives from this stem. moreover, the semantics of this word include the concepts of the sacred, of divinity and supremacy (compare common slavic *gena with indo-european *guena, old indian gna (goddess) and english �queen�).(3) when we examine these words, we find that the range of their nuances is extensive. indo-european *bher,*bhar is related to the old indian bharat, bibharti, meaning �to carry�, �to bring� or �to bear� (irish brith, english �bring�). in this context it is interesting to note that the name of the great irish goddess and saint bridget derives from *bhrghnti (> briginti > brigit/bridget). the sanskrit cognate form brhati means �great�, �uplifted�, �high� or �exalted�. thus, the name of the brigantes (brigantia, briginu), provided it denotes an attribute of the people, most likely means �the exalted, noble or ruling people� [olmsted 1994: 360]. we should note that bridget was invoked as the patron saint of childbirth by women in the hebrides, and revered as the virgin mary�s midwife [ross 1967: 361]. the geographical distribution of the terminology for midwife is also extremely significant. the term baba (grandmother) was normal in polissia, where the village culture is known for its extremely archaic features. throughout the territory on the right bank of the 33 dnieper river the most characteristic term was baba-branka (grandmother-deliverer), and in the north-western region of volhyn' also occasionally puporizna (cutter of the umbilicus). in eastern ukraine on the left bank of the dnieper the midwife was variously termed. the terms mainly derive from baba and the word for umbilical cord: baba-puporizna, pupova, puporizka, and locally, baba, scho v'iaze pupa (the grandmother who ties the umbilicus) and porodil'na (she who attends the birth). in southern ukraine as in northern polissia, the most typical term was baba (babyshka) [havryl'i'uk 1981: 68]. as is clear, all of these terms derive from the midwife�s functions. certainly, during those moments, when a �new� small person, �another,� an �unknown� creature emerged, an extraordinary �performance� took place, one that included practical actions, directed towards helping the woman in the birthing process, as well as caring for the newborn child and conducting rites of separation, transition and incorporation. the traditional midwife (baba) was the only person who possessed the entire repertoire of essential skills, and consistently performed the relevant ritual actions, as well as uttering the necessary verbal formulae and making predictions about the child's destiny. accustomed as we are to late twentieth-century obstetrics with its emphasis on prenatal care, hygienic conditions and medical technology, some of the methods and medication used in old-style childbirth inevitably evoke fascination and horror. there is, of course, the danger of romanticizing the birth experience of earlier generations, which was often painful and dangerous. however, we should bear in mind that, according to official statistics, cases of death in childbirth as a consequence of the ministrations of an unskilful midwife were rare indeed.(4) it was the husband�s duty to summon the midwife. when the midwife went to attend the birth, she brought the tools and equipment common to her craft: implements such as a knife (usually consecrated at the church), a piece of cloth (both linen and hemp) and a swaddling band, along with herbs (both medicinal and symbolic). she also took along a piece, more specifically a crust, of bread and some salt. the midwife might even bring a pot containing cooked kasha (boiled cereal), some dumplings (also stuffed with kasha, potatoes or cottage cheese) and pancakes. there is some evidence to suggest that she might also take these three dishes to the young mother the following day. sometimes all these dishes were collectively named var (boiled foods), meaning dishes that had not been roasted. one of the features seen as defining the midwife�s supernatural powers was the belief that, even before entering the house of the woman in childbirth, she could foretell the future of seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 34 the as yet unborn infant. this kind of divination formed the substance of bizarre oral stories about her capacity to �see� details of the child's future life. these short narratives are all formulaic in character, and local to the middle dnieper and polissia regions. they are remarkably similar and tell that, before she went into the house of woman in labor, the baba would always look through the window. if she saw either a rope (the symbol of suicide), or a tub with a water (indicating drowning) this would indicate that the life of the child about to be born would end badly. informants are unanimous in insisting that such predictions were fulfilled. last year in the cherkasy region i recorded an amazing folk story about a midwife who had foreseen the poet taras shevchenko's destiny before his birth; in the window she saw a banquet with a very intelligent man at the head of the table. this, of course, was taras shevchenko. midwives were also familiar with a specific set of signs, on which they based their predictions about the future of the child shortly to be delivered. examples of these include the position of child's face in delivery, the timbre of the first cry, the color of the eyes and nails, and so forth. on entering the house, the midwife went directly to the woman in labor without greeting anyone, although in certain circumstances she could utter the orthodox easter formulaic greeting: �christ is risen!� an analysis of birth techniques employed by the midwife reveals that traditions differ little throughout ukraine. with each delivery the midwife gained experience, learning through trial and error, and little by little developing more effective ways to comfort women and facilitate birth. she relied upon the birth mother�s natural strength and good health, her own experience and knowledge and god's will. that did not prevent her from using herbs, with many using both potions and spells to assist the birthing process. she would force the woman to walk, usually around the table, on each corner of which a small heap of poppy seeds or salt had been placed, or to jump or step (over the door step, a towel, a pair of man's trousers or a shirt, a fireiron (kocherga) or the trough for kneading dough). the midwife then untied every knot and plait on the clothing not only of the woman in labor, but also everyone present. after that, she would open the stove-door, while simultaneously closing the windows and doors of the house, just as the priest might be asked by the midwife to open the holy doors in the iconostasis to facilitate delivery. other symbolic actions performed by the midwife include blowing into the chimney of the stove, and, in fact, we find that, throughout every stage of delivery and during the postnatal period, the stove with its close connection to ideas about fertility played an important symbolic role. 35 the woman usually delivered in a kneeling position, especially if the delivery was uncomplicated. this allowed the midwife to catch the child. in ukrainian, the process of labor and delivery was described in terms of �searching� (shukaty) and �catching� (lovyty) the child. sometimes the woman would hold on to a towel (or belt) tied to a beam (svolok), in which case both squatting and standing positions were possible. her husband might assist the midwife if the delivery was more difficult. the woman in labor could sit on his lap, and he would help by holding and supporting her, and even by shaking his wife. a husband assisting his wife might be considered a remnant of couvade on ukrainian soil.(5) lying down, whether on a bed, the earth floor(6) or even the stove, appears to be a later tradition, influenced by the obstetrical practices of licensed midwives.(7) if necessary, the midwife could even alter the position of the baby or help it with her hands. if the placenta was not expelled by itself, the belly was massaged, and if that did not help, the placenta was removed by hand. properly speaking, the rites of �separation� of the child from its mother began with the infant�s first cry. once the child had been safely delivered, he or she was carefully inspected by the midwife. if the infant appeared not to be crying, or crying only feebly, she tried to blow the �divine spirit� into it. if that did not help, she would call him by his father�s name, if he was a boy, and, if a girl, by her mother�s, adding the extra syllable “hu� to differentiate the child from the parent. thus, the son of peter would be summoned by the formula: �petro-hu.� the next step was to sever the umbilical cord with a knife (tradition strongly forbade the mother from doing this herself, the explanation being that �in the world above she wouldn�t get to see her child.)� hence the midwife was the only person allowed to cut the umbilical cord. in the pokuttia region, the babka turned the baby upside down, and tapped its little feet three times against the central beam in the ceiling. the midwife�s final act was to take the soft part of a piece of bread and to wipe the body of the newborn dry. in certain areas, the umbilical cord with drops of blood still on it was used instead of the crust of bread. then the midwife dealt with the placenta. she washed it, wrapped it in a piece of cloth (or placed it in a pot) and buried it together with some money, bread, a small quantity of salt and sometimes also some grain. there is some evidence that the midwife buried it in the ground together with a hen and a rooster. sometimes she would sprinkle grains of rye over the new mother and infant, as well as over the placenta. the custom of burying the placenta was explained by the need to protect the child and its mother. there was a belief, that if the midwife buried the afterbirth under the doorstep, it could make a woman sterile (the same fate awaited the seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 36 young mother if the umbilical cord was tied by the midwife with male, rather than female, hemp).(8) by analyzing the appearance of the placenta the midwife could predict the number of additional children the new mother would bear, yet another manifestation of her role as prophet. finally, she buried the placenta in a special, �marked out� place, either inside the house (not far from the stove, under the holy corner (pokut) or under the sleeping area (pil)),(9) or outside under a fruit tree, especially a cherry. sometimes placentas could be buried under the barn floor or the outhouse floor, but never where people might walk on it. the severing of the umbilical cord and the expulsion of the placenta marked the stage of separation. at the next stage, transition, both mother and child required the assistance of the midwife yet again. what traditional midwives did to the child at this stage reveals that the newborn�s body, even after delivery, was perceived as a flexible, malleable object, perhaps something like woven cloth,(10) rather than the inflexible unit that obstetrical science takes the body to be. the midwife actually shaped and molded what was perceived as the formless, amorphous mass that was the infant�s body. the specific actions performed by the midwife included: rubbing and then pulling on the small infant's hands and feet, pressing on the top of his or her head, pressing on his chin, pulling the nose and so on. all of these actions are all associated with the idea of forming (or sometimes even changing) an infant's external appearance, its body matrix, and simultaneously perfecting and strengthening its status as a human being. it is worth noting that special attention was paid to the infant's eyes (this action continued the day after the baptismal ceremony, and is called �peeling open the eyes� (ochedyryny). the next steps were to bathe and then tightly swaddle the child's' body with the swaddling-cloth. the items most commonly used for this were an old man's shirt, the midwife's skirt or sometimes a man's trousers or a woman�s chemise. once the infant had been wrapped in the swaddling clothes, he or she was tied with the swaddling-band. the band was typically a belt which had already been used by someone, and, in some cases, it might be supplied by the midwife. these actions served to consolidate all the ritual acts that had gone before. the custom of thanking the midwife at the baptismal party by giving her money while saying the formulaic expression na spovyvach (this is to pay for the swaddling band) is a well-known one. when the midwife completed this list of duties aimed at ensuring the medical and psychological needs of the infant and the young mother, her role as an active member of the birth process was over. still, her involvement in the life of the child and the mother continued 37 and an examination of her functions in the postnatal period can help elucidate her ritual significance and reveal some of the mythological ideas and folk beliefs underlying her ritual role. the midwife's first actions after the birth, such as using old, second-hand clothes for swaddling, for example, were steps in the process of adapting the newborn and helping him or her fit into the human world. we may add to the list of her activities the �naming� ceremony, through which the new child becomes a separate person and a member of a social group. in the whole of the area on the right bank of the dnieper the custom of �name receiving� (otrymaty im'ia) was well known. it was the midwife who visited the priest immediately after the delivery for precisely this purpose. an interesting practice of exchanging or selling infants� names is attested. the priest received a compulsory gift (usually a chicken together with some bread and millet), and the midwife in return �received� the name, which was registered officially later at the baptism ceremony. it is well worth noting that the midwife was entitled to baptize the infant in the first minutes of life if the child�s life was in danger. this procedure was called �baptizing with water� (khrestyty z vody). in such cases the midwife gave the infant its name herself, usually eve for a girl and adam for a boy (though sometimes the names would be ivan and maria). the church would then recognize the procedure as a true baptism, so that the infant would not die unbaptized. once childbearing as an act of commencement of a new life had taken place, food and drink were the first consideration. the first postnatal party, known as rodyny, was an exclusively female gathering in which the midwife always participated. the next ritual meal was part of the baptismal ceremony, and was held between thirty and forty days after the birth. and finally, a special ceremony, attested throughout ukraine, was usually held during the christmas holidays and which was aimed specifically at honoring the midwife. all these ritualized meals related to childbearing were, at the same time, an extension of the acts of �incorporation� performed by the midwife. of particular interest is the polissian rite known as babyna kasha (midwife�s kasha).(11) at home the midwife would cook up some stiff kasha, usually out of millet, milk, eggs and fat, which she then took to the new mother. from the kyivan part of polissia comes a very interesting detail; before entering the mother's house with the kasha, the midwife sought permission with the words: �i am from a far-off land, permit me to spend the night here� [hovirky 1996: 71]. this striking example of the connection between the image of the midwife and a traveler illustrates the midwife�s seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 38 acknowledgement of her own liminality. at the end of the meal, the midwife put the pot with the babyna kasha on the table. sometimes she decorated it with a �flower� (see below), or covered it with a kerchief, bread and salt. the culmination of this rite was the smashing of the pot to smithereens. the pot was to be smashed in such a way that the kasha remained intact. the godfather was the person called upon to break the kasha pot and he did it usually after the guests had thrown some money onto a special plate. before the pot was broken, he sliced off the top of the kasha and gave it to the young mother, along with the money. similar actions attested in other parts of ukraine include the smashing of a pie, babyn pyrig (�grandmother's� pie). the midwife spread the pie with honey, broke it to pieces, and distributed it to all the women present at the festive meal. all these actions were accompanied by formulaic wishes, blessing the new mother and motherhood in general. after the expression of good wishes, those present took a piece of kasha, put it on a piece of the broken pot or wrapped it in an apron, and took it home to give to their children to ensure their health and future growth. in northeastern ukraine the custom existed of making kasha from milk and millet, and then offering it to the guests at the very beginning of the special meal. this may well be the simplest form of babyna kasha as a ritual dish. the ceremony of babyna kasha was regularly followed by another ritual: �driving out the midwife's kasha.� when the baptismal party had ended, or on the next day, it was customary to seat the midwife on a harrow, or, when there was snow, on a sledge, and pull her through the village to the tavern (korchma). there she would cover the table with a gift of a piece of linen or a kerchief, on which a bottle of vodka had been placed. this ceremony ended with the participants all together lifting up the midwife with their hands, or on a chair, and shouting hurrah. the custom is appropriately known as �raising the midwife with a �hurrah�!� in another variant the midwife was deliberately thrown into a pool, pond or snowdrift, depending on the season and the weather. the flower rite (obriad z kvitkoiu), another aspect of the midwife�s role, was performed during baptism ceremonies all over the huge area on the right bank of the dnieper. before attending the baptismal meal, the midwife made up a bouquet of flowers. the word �bouquet� is something of a misnomer, because it was usually only a bunch of guelder-rose or ears of wheat or rye. the bouquet could also be made of different herbs, such as mint, myrtle, lovage and garden flowers like french marigolds. in areas near kyiv, it was customary to decorate the pot containing the babyna kasha, on which a kalach (a round flat bread, often with a hole in the 39 middle) had been placed, with this special �flower.� the �flower� rite existed in numerous variants. the midwife gave a �flower� gift, either the �flower� alone or the �flower� plus a kalach or pies, to the child's godparents, or to all those present, while uttering the special formulaic wish: �the number of flowers indicates the number of children.� an expanded version also included dipping the �flower� into plates containing holy water or red wine, before lightly sprinkling the drops onto the faces of the mothers and children present [havryl'i'uk 1981: 152-53]. i should also mention that it was considered vital to take the �flower� home after the baptismal meal; the �flower� could not be thrown away. the baptismal �flower� was then used in domestic medicinal practice. the midwife also made a special presentation of the �flower� to any childless woman. there was a belief that, if, on the way home from a baptismal meal, you met the mother of god, who asked where you had been, you had to show her a �flower� [havryl'i'uk 1981: 168]. i suggest that the ritual use of the �flower� may distantly reflect ancient beliefs, connected with the cult of a female goddess. the image of the latter (usually depicted with flowers) has numerous parallels in other cultures; the goddesses of life and fertility, demeter, persephone and zhyva (a west slav deity) are often decked in flowers. after the delivery both the new mother and her helper typically washed their hands, at times also their arms up to the shoulders and feet to the knees. hence this rite is also known as �water-pouring� (zlyvky) or �water-bathing� (obmyvannia).(12) this ritual cleansing did not occur at a specific point after delivery. it could be performed immediately after delivery, but in the majority of cases the ceremony formed a distinct part of either the rodyny or childbirth party, or the baptism. it could be performed on the second, third, seventh, ninth, or fortieth day after the birth of child, all of these being considered special time periods. whenever it was performed, the ritual was obligatory because �the midwife had bloody hands� and needed to be purified. in some villages, she was even forbidden from attending a different pregnant woman until she had ritually cleansed her hands together with her previous client [havryl�i�uk 1981: 89-114]. while in the territory on the right bank of the dnieper it is the midwife who is �cleansed,� in the middle dnieper area, and further south in the azov region, including donetsk and luhansk, it is the new mother who undergoes this procedure. mutual �cleansing� of midwife and young mother is characteristic of the southern part of the middle dnieper area and the central slobozhanshchina region in eastern ukraine. this ritual action requires some clarification. the idea of washing the midwife's hands is comprehensible, as is the mutual cleansing of the hands of seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 40 both mother and midwife. childbirth might not seem as impure as death, but birth is still about blood, whether on the child, the afterbirth or from the cutting of the umbilical cord. the birth of new life can certainly be considered polluting. what is particularly relevant to the argument here is that the person who undergoes ritual cleansing is not the newborn, but another involved in the birth, either the mother or the midwife. the phenomenon of displacing uncleanliness onto another, specifically someone already as loaded with ritual potency as the midwife, allows her to assume even greater mythic meaning.(13) at this point we should consider the relevance of aristotle�s idea that a woman�s blood flows like that of an animal that been stabbed, evidently taken from hypocrites, where female blood, and the blood of childbirth in particular, is compared to the blood of sacrificial victims, hot, red, quick and coagulating [duby and perrot 1992: 469]. in this context it should be noted that in polissia, where the purification ritual of the midwife washing her hands with water does not exist, we find instead the ritual of bringing the midwife pyrohy, or pies, at christmas. in this area, there is a belief that the midwife must receive a gift of food at christmas from the women whose babies she had delivered, or else she will be tied to a post (or a cross) until her �granddaughter,� meaning her client, brings her pies. it is significant that in some areas the explanation for the washing ritual is virtually identical, namely that the midwife will be tied to a post or a cross until this ritual has been performed. [havryl'i'uk 1989: 29]. the root of these beliefs leads back to the idea of sacrifice, since the idea of a midwife being tied to a post made her seem like an animal about to be sacrificed and the distribution of food and ritual washing are also elements in sacrifice rites. in those areas where the cleansing ceremony is performed, the midwife makes special preparations for it by baking pies and cooking some kasha. she then takes these, along with a bottle of vodka, to the house of her �granddaughter.� here, �granddaughter� means the woman whom she had assisted in childbirth. in some cases the midwife only took kasha. among other dishes sometimes prepared by the midwife for this occasion was fruit compote (uzvar), an obligatory ritual dish on christmas eve, together with kuttia and brandied fruits (varenukha), prepared by stewing fruit with honey and alcohol, though in the second half of the nineteenth century varenukha was replaced by vodka. sometimes the midwife regaled those present with these dishes at the end of the meal. the �cleansing� ceremony was accompanied by a special formulaic dialogue containing the idea of an apology: �excuse me, grandmother,� to which the midwife replied: �and you 41 forgive me for shedding your blood.� the water that was used for the cleansing ceremony was usually holy water or so-called �untouched� water (nepochata voda) and, if any was left over after the �cleansing� had been completed, it could not be thrown away but had to be poured under the stove inside the house. in all cases the ritual ended with the midwife receiving a gift of linen and loaves of bread. in the central dnieper region, after the cleansing of both midwife and new mother, the latter presented her �delivery assistant� with no less than seven (!) round loaves of white bread. one further significant custom is unique to slobozhanshchina. usually it was enacted together with the �cleansing� ceremony and was called �leading to paradise� (vesty v rai). the core element in this rite consists in the following: the midwife took the young mother, who was carrying her child, by the hand (sometimes they held onto a towel), and led her round the table three times. in answer to the traditional question from those present: �where are you going?� the midwife would say: �to paradise.� someone would then say: �take us with you.�(14) we may compared this to the ancient custom of walking around the altar (or, variously, a sacrificial post or table), which was also performed for reasons of purification. the last event in the postnatal chain of ritual actions where the midwife played a key role was the custom of bringing her pies (nosyty babi pyrohy) at christmas. the ukrainians, unlike the bulgarians, did not have a special midwife�s day (babinden). nevertheless, the custom of honoring the midwife was widespread. it most often coincided with christmas eve, though sometimes it could occur on the following two days. alternatively, the new mother would honor the midwife nine or forty days, or six months after her delivery. the �honoring� consisted of the �granddaughter� bringing the midwife a gift of food, usually a fixed number of pies (three, seven or nine).(15) the �grandmother� accepted them and in exchange gave the young mother a food gift. sometimes she organized a meal for �new� mothers, that is those who had given birth during the previous year, as well as for �old� mothers.(16) this christmas pie exchange was the final element in the rituals associated with the midwife. it is now time to draw some preliminary conclusions. there is no doubt that the midwife's role was marked by a number of rituals. she was an active person, putting into practice and preserving her professional knowledge, which we might like to term popular preventative medicine. at the same time she played the prime role in incorporating the newborn into his or her new family and community. the wide variety of acts she performed also affirms her status as defender and guarantor of the future of mother and child alike. simultaneously, she acted as the seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 42 line of communication between all the actors: the unborn child, the new mother, the new father, the godparents and the community as a whole. amongst the wide-ranging possibilities for interpreting the ethnological data, i propose focussing on just a few. in the first instance we should direct our attention to elements relating to sacrifice. overall, there is a dearth of evidence about sacrifice among the slavs. in sreznevskii�s dictionary of old russian, which quotes from a wide range of written texts, we find the following, taken from a sixteenth-century copy of a popular florilegium, the tsvetnik: �grandmothers (baby) cooked kasha for the gathering of rozhanitsy� (here meaning �goddesses of birth�). the textual evidence of the tsvetnik implies that the cooking of kasha relates to the ritual worship of the goddesses [sreznevskii 1903: 3, col. 141 s.v. rozhanitsa]. the modern data about midwives tends to confirm the suggestion that the archaic rite mentioned by sreznevskii was essentially the performance of a sacred ceremony containing traces of sacrifice. without the rite there was no sacrifice, and, vice versa, without the sacrifice there was no rite. traditional ukrainian village customs contain only survivals, traces, symbols and codes of ancient sacrifice. the folklore about midwives affirms that such traces do still exist, when we realize that their attributes were identical to those presented at animal sacrifices in ancient times: a knife (also an ax) which lets blood and, therefore, is equivalent to the tools for shedding blood in sacrifices;(17) an altar/post (and a table which possesses very strong analogies with the altar); a vessel for washing the hands; a pot containing boiled cereal; boiled rather than roasted dishes, ribbons and garlands as attributes of the sacrificial animal; the pot containing offerings covered with a cloth; the act of bringing the dishes to a �banquet� and their subsequent exchange, and even communal feasting.(18) it is also worth noting that priests received offerings of sacrificial cakes or loaves and pies, prepared at home and brought to the sanctuary [van straten 1995: 155]. they were gifts for the god. these close parallels indicate that the feast upon the birth of a child may be considered a relic of the sacrifice ceremony. in this respect note, too, a striking linguistic link where the same root appears in the three concepts, victim/guzzle/priest: zhertva/zherty/zhrets. from the features of ukrainian birth customs listed above that show sacrificial elements, it would appear that there was no separate practice of sacrifice among the slavs because the ideas and elements of sacrifice became associated with birth, birth rituals and the midwife. we should also take into account that certain goddesses were sporadically worshipped as child nourishers throughout the ancient civilized world, in greece, italy, cyprus, egypt, africa 43 and elsewhere. in greece, gia and demeter were particularly worshipped as child nourishers, the kourotrophoi. there is no doubt that there existed a personification of the mother and/or nursing principle, and that special cults, rites and offerings were associated with this principle.(19) but it may be asked, whether and to what extent the same can be true for the slavic world. it is known that the slavs established states virtually at the same time they adopted christianity, thus negating the possibility of preserving what might otherwise have been �national� mythological traditions. the peculiarity of slavic mythology, as a consequence, consists in the predominance of ritual and customs over narrative myth. the mythological layers of pre-slavic culture were destroyed, and all we have are mythological elements filtered through christianity. in the first volume of his history of ukraine-rusy hryshevsky noted the dearth of goddesses in the slavic pantheon, declaring the alleged existence of �all manner of vesny, lady, morany (to be) based on dubious sources, (including) even zhiva...� (the female deity of west slav mythology, who embodied the life force) [hrushevsky 1991: 320],. it has also been suggested that rod and rozhanytsy were distinct personages in slavic mythology. the main source of our evidence is a homiletic work fulminating against pagan superstition, composed sometime between the eleventh and early fourteenth centuries in rus�, and largely based on one of gregory the theologian�s sermons. in it mention is made of the meal dedicated to rod and the rozhanytsy, for which �bread, cheese and honeycomb were cut� [hrushevsky 1993: 225]. over the last two centuries scholars have variously considered these figures either deities of fertility and ancestral protection (shepping), or embodiments of fate (divy doli) (afanas�ev), or else ancestral spirits (solov�ev, kliuchevskii). hryshevsky put forward the idea that the features of the mother of the tribe and the goddess of destiny (parki) were combined in this image. rybakov considered that rod was the supreme deity. none of these theories, however, attempts to link the rozhanytsy to the mythological image of the baba, the old-style village midwife. in advancing this thesis here i offer the following summary of the supporting evidence, which is based on the following attributes of the midwife: a) the swaddling-band (sometimes made by her, this being reflected in the term spovytukha; b) the knife (she would brings the mother in labor a knife that had been blessed, this being reflected in the term baba-rizna); c) a pot with kasha (cooked and decorated by her and brought to the young mother); d) the flowers (picked by herself, brought to the young mother's house and distributed among those present). there is separate evidence that a flower was a specific �emblem� of the midwife; e) hemp (and seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 44 thread, linen or cloth). the argument is also based on the offerings to the midwife that had great symbolic significance: a) the bread (pies and the twisted bread kalach); b) the linen/towel (and cloth); c) the evening supper (sometimes held on the dates traditional for funeral ceremonies). it is clear, moreover, that the image of the midwife attains its special mythological status also through her wide range of functions and ritual actions (as well as the motivation for them), in particular: a) the divination of the infant's future; b) the ritual of �leading to paradise" (vesty v rai), an example of a rite of passage, and simultaneously one of the forms of the cleansing ceremony; c) �the washing of the midwife's hands� (and �the bringing of pies to the midwife�), which emphasized her liminal status; d) the custom of �taking the midwife for a ride,� for which the midwife must pay by giving something in return (here i am inclined to see the transformation of the funeral ritual of �seeing someone off to the other world� (provody na tot svit)); e) the annual honoring and even worship of the midwife on specific dates (christmas eve, christmas itself �the bringing of pies to the midwife� honoring �those who bring life.� we should also remember the terminology and meanings discussed above. there is certainly enough evidence to allow us to view the image of the midwife, with its clear code of attributes, symbols of fertility and possession of supernatural features, as a relic of the pre-slavic, pre-christian, pagan era. with this in mind, we may accept the view that the midwife's ancient pagan image was transformed into some of the features of a pagan goddess, some of whose names have been preserved in historical sources: the great mother, the rozhanytsi and, later, mokosh. the folkloric and ethnographic data connected with the traditional personage of the baba awaits further systematization and interpretation. the midwife, who was the only person who both �enacted� and round whom childbirth rituals revolved, seems to offer a key to the obscure area of slavic mythology. notes 1 this article has been prepared with the support of the us state department's fulbright program. i am also deeply indebted to my mentor natalie kononenko, professor in the department of slavic languages and literatures, university of virginia for her encouragement and support. 2 there was a belief that if a midwife was menstruating while assisting a delivery, any child she delivered would be �scrofulous.� if she bore a child herself, she would become an 45 object of derision on the part of the whole village, and villagers would term that child a mute [archive of the institute for arts studies, folklore and ethnology, ukrainian national academy of sciences (iasfe), f. 14-3, 452, fol. 32]. interestingly, the same nickname was given to a child who died before being baptized. according to oral tradition, the devil asked god to give him the soul of an unmarried girl who was not a virgin. god refused, and instead gave the devil the soul of a midwife's child. 3 the first mention of the word midwife in english dates from 1303. some scholars are inclined to explain its meaning as connected with the idea of assisting (it is suggested that �mid� = �with,� so �with-wife,� someone with a woman during childbirth [rooks 1997: 3]. others have suggested it means wise woman (in hebrew and aramaic we have the word h kama meaning �the wise one,� while the babylonian maternal goddess, mama is called eristu, a literary word meaning �wise� [stol, wiggermann 2000: 171-72]. in a direct parallel we have french sage-femme, which likewise means �wise� or �good woman�). the danish term for �midwife� is jordmoder, �earth-mother,� and in jewish tradition the old midwife is called bubbeh (yiddish for �granny�) [klein 1998: 101]. 4 the special official annual report by the governor-general of kiev, volhynia, and podillia notes only a single incidence of child mortality as a consequence of a midwife�s incompetence [boriak 2001: 57]. 5 in 1928 a folk narrative about a husband helping his wife in childbirth was recorded in the poltava region. the husband agreed to participate on condition the child was a boy. on the midwife�s orders he climbed into the loft and made a hole in the ceiling. the baba then took a rope, tied one end of it to, as the story puts it, the man�s �great wisdom� (i.e. his penis), and gave the other to his wife �to amuse herself.� when her labor pains intensified, the woman pulled on the rope. her husband, bathed in sweat, just kept groaning. after his role was finished he could not do anything except sit and look at his legs. when the midwife informed him that he at last had a baby son, he sighed heavily, and said, �so that�s why giving birth is so difficult!� [archive iasfe, f. 1-5, 418, fol. 73-74]. 6 one of the folksongs, sung at baptismal parties includes the following words: �glorious god, glorious on earth, the women who were lying-in slid down from their sleeping place onto the earth� [archive iasfe, f.1-5, 420, fol. 116]. 7 according to legend, it was louis xiv who insisted women in labor should lie flat, a position that gave him the best view of the birth of his own children. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 46 8 hemp grows as male and female plants, which look quite different, the female being much bushier. the flowers of the female plant have to be fertilized by pollen from the male plant in order for seeds to be produced 9 the professional physician and ethnologist, s. verkhrads'kyi noted that up to fifty afterbirths had been buried under the earth floor of peasant houses he had seen. if we take into consideration that the folk name for the placenta was �nest� (hnizdo), then each house, with its burried placentas, genuinely symbolized the ancestral nest [boriak 2000: 453]. 10 according to fieldwork data, collected in the cherkasy region, the midwife would ask for a bunch of hemp to be put into her coffin after death (compare this with the local tradition of presenting the midwife with a bunch of hemp at the baptismal party). in ukraine a hank of combed but unspun hemp is given to mark new beginnings, because it is seen as unformed, but full of potential. furthermore, the idea of a close connection between childbirth and weaving (hemp was woven into cloth) is echoed in other ethnic traditions. for example, in andean culture, midwives' terminology for certain massage techniques includes the concepts of �braiding� and �twisting� the body. (my gratitude to denise arnold for kindly giving me this information). carvings depicting votive offerings to the goddess quite often show a large spinning wheel. 11 the custom was also widespread in russia, belarus and the baltic states. 12 in northern india the midwife was known as dak' dul bu [unknown] dhi, meaning the �water-pouring old women� [culshaw 1949: 124]. 13 amongst numerous parallels in other ethnic traditions note that in an ancient babylonian text of an incantation, a woman lying�in is termed �taboo� or �dirty� (musukkatu), indicating that she was considered polluting. this may be concluded from various passages where a woman who had given birth would bathe herself or wash her hands [stol and wiggermann 2000: 205]. 14 one more parallel from the ancient greek world may be mentioned here: on the fifth day after the birth, the amphidromia took place, during which the child was ceremoniously carried around the hearth in the house. the same day a ceremony of purification for those present at the birth was held [dillon 2002: 254]. 15 in ukraine young mothers were called �granddaughters,� and the children the midwife had delivered were also called her �grandsons� and �granddaughters.� 47 16 in this context it is interesting to note that various ceremonies were associated in athens with the birth of a child: notably the amphidromia on the fifth day, and the so-called �seventh-day festival� on the seventh, about which little is known. during the dekate (tenth-day) ceremony it was the father's duty to give his child a name. celebrations then followed. it was also the occasion for a pannychis, an all-night festival, at the core of which lay a sacrifice ceremony as a kind of thanksgiving for the birth of a child. such celebrations thanked the gods for the safe delivery of the child and his or her survival over the first difficult days. women played a prominent role in this event. in the euboulos play at the tenth-day feast in honor of the child they were called upon to dance all night long, and prizes of ribbons and apples, or, nota bene, cakes and loaves, were on offer. it would appear that women celebrated the dekate separately and differently from men [dillon 2002: 233]. 17 note, however, that the goddess also used a knife to cut a few hairs from the bull�s forehead, subsequently throwing them onto the fire, something that may be compared to the ritual of cutting a child's hair at the party to celebrate his or her first birthday [havryl'i'uk 1986: 217]. 18 the evidence about animal sacrifice comes from all over the ancient greek world, from kerkyra to the greek cities of asia minor, and from rhodes to the northern shores of the black sea. it dates from the end of the seventh century to the end of the fourth century bc. vase paintings (dated to the sixth and fifth centuries bc) and votive reliefs (dated fourth century) are the main sources of evidence. 19 for example, ancient evidence about saami culture from sweden and finland in particular includes data about the goddess akko �grandmother� or akka �the old woman.� in southern lapland their names were used for four different female divinities (according to missionary accounts). first we have madder-akka, who made the bodies of all unborn children in her womb, and then handed over the child (now provided with both a body and a soul) to her daughter sarakka (or sarak). sarakka was a kind of universal midwife. she had two sisters: uks-akka, who dwelt under the tent door (uksa means �door�), and juksakk (juks is assumed to come from juoksa, �bow�). the function of uks-akka was to keep the baby from falling down and hurting itself in the tent, whereas juks-akka had the faculty of changing girls into boys in their mother's womb. when a child was born, sarakka boiled cereal was eaten in honor of the divine midwife [collinder 1949: 169]. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 48 bibliography boriak, olena. 2000. �sil's'ka baba-spovytukha v statusi rodopomichnytsi (novi materialy z istorii narodnoho akusherstva v ukraini)� [the village midwife as facilitator of birth: new materials on the history of childbirth in ukraine]. visnyk l'vivs'koho universytetu, seriia istirychna. vols 35-36, pp. 441-55. boriak, olena 2001a. �stan narodnoho akusherstva v xix st.� [the status of folk childbirth and delivery]. ukrains'kyi istorychnyi zhurnal. vol. 2, pp. 49-61. boriak, olena 2001b. �z rukopysnykh fondiv imfe: materialy do �zhinochykh studii� u pol'ovykh zapysakh liudmyly shevchenko� [from the manuscript repository of the imfe: the resources for women�s studies in the field recordings of liudmyla shevchenko]. arkhivy ukrainy. vols 1-2, pp. 42-56. buck, carl darling 1949. a dictionary of selected synonyms in the principal indoeuropean languages: a contribution to the history of ideas. chicago, ill. collinder, bjorn 1949. the lapps. princeton, n.j. (nraf publication, ethnography collection, web address: http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/cgi/e/ehraf/ehraf-idx). culshaw, w.j. 1949/1998, tribal heritage: a study of the santals. london. (hraf publication, ethnology collection, web address: http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/cgi/e/ehraf/ehraf-idx dillon, matthew 2002, girls and women in classical greek religion. london and new york. duby, g. and m. perrot 1992. a history of women in the west. cambridge, mass. vol. 1. havryl'i'uk, n.k. 1981. kartografirovanie iavlenii dukhovnoi kul'tury: po materialam rodil'noi obriadnosti ukraintsev [mapping spiritual culture: on the source material for the birth rituals of the ukrainians]. kyiv. havryl'i'uk, n.k. 1986. �slidy davn'orus'kykh tradytsij v rodyl'nij obriadovosti ukraintsiv kintsia xix-pochatku xx st.,� [traces of ancient russian tradition in ukrainian birth ritual at the end of the 19th-early 20th centuries]. in: horlenko v. (ed.), etnohrafiia kyeva i kyivschyny: tradytsii i suchasnist' [the ethnography of kyiv and the kyiv region: traditional and contemporary practices], pp. 211-31. kyiv. havryl'i'uk, n.k. 1989. �kyivs'ko-polis'kyi variant tradytsiinoi simeinoi obriadovosti na foni sumizhnykh terytorii.� [the kyiv-polissia variant of traditional family rituals, as compared http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/cgi/e/ehraf/ehraf-idx http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/cgi/e/ehraf/ehraf-idx 49 to neighboring territories.] in: zhelezniak, i. (ed.), kyivs'ke polissia (etnolinhvistychne doslidzhennia) [kievan polissia (ethnolinguistic research)], pp. 24-40. kyiv. hrytsenko. p. (ed.) 1996. hovirky chornobyl's'koi zony: teksty [proverbs from the chernobyl� zone. texts]. kyiv. hrushevsky, m. 1991. istoriia ukrainy-rusy [history of ukraine-rus�]. vol. 1, kyiv. hrushevsky, m. 1993. istoriia ukrains'koi literatury [history of ukrainian literature]. vol. 1, kyiv. kabakova, h.i. 2001. �otets i povitukha v rodil'noj obriadnosti poles'ia� [the father and the midwife in the birth ritual of poles�e]. in: belousova, e. (comp.), nekliudov, s (ed.), rodiny, deti, povitukhi v traditsiiakh narodnoi kul'tury [birth customs, children, midwives in traditional folk culture]. moscow, pp. 107-29. klein, michele 1998. the time to be born: customs and folklore of jewish birth. philadelphia. olmsted, garrett s. 1994. the gods of the celts and the indo-europeans. innsbruck. ramer, samuel c. 1992. �childbirth and culture: midwifery in the nineteenth-century russian countryside.� in: farnsworth b. and l. viola (eds), russian peasant women. new yorkoxford, pp. 107-20. rooks, judith pence 1997. midwifery and childbirth in america, philadelphia, pa. ross, anne 1967. pagan celtic britain: studies in iconography and tradition. london and new york. sreznevskii, i.i. 1903. materialy dlia slovaria drevnerusskogo iazyka po pis'mennym pamiatnikam [materials for a dictionary of old russian based on written documents]. vol. 3, st petersburg. stol, m. and f. a. m. wiggermann 2000. birth in babylonia and the bible: its mediterranean setting, groningen. trubachev, o. n. (ed.) 1974. etimologicheskii slovar' slavianskikh iazykov. praslavianskii leksicheskii fond [etymological dictionary of the slav languages. the common slavic lexical stock]. vol.1, moscow. van straten, f.t. 1995. hiera kala: images of animal sacrifice in archaic and classical greece. leiden, new york. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 microsoft word folks05.doc 54 reviews andreas johns. baba yaga. the ambiguous mother and witch of the russian folktale. (international folkloristics 3). new york: peter lang, 2004. 352 pp. isbn 0-8204-6769-3. $29.95 (paper) andreas johns� book contains a well-researched analysis of the character baba iaga (just one of many versions of her name, as johns notes). the book opens with a discussion of previous analyses of the character, some of which inform johns� own work and some of which he concludes are misguided or outdated. he then turns to a topic that is perhaps the most interesting in a fascinating book: an overview of baba iaga in the slavic world. while the book�s title refers to the russian folktale, johns examines the range of this figure in russia, ukraine, and belarus as well as similar characters in slovak, polish, sorbian, bulgarian, bosnian and slovenian tales. he then discusses similar characters in non-slavic traditions, namely hungarian, german, french and romanian, ural-altaic and siberian. another rewarding feature of this book for specialists is the variety of textual sources johns used. he draws data on baba iaga from tale collections, ritual, wood cuts (lubki) and even from epic song. many of the tales discussed are not readily available in every western library or in translation, so that the book serves as an exhaustive survey of iaga as she appears in collections from various east slavic regions (as well as from farther afield, as noted above). he also provides some valuable translations of these texts in an appendix. however, it is his exhaustive knowledge of the texts that is ironically one of the downfalls of this book. at the beginning of the four chapters that contain his analysis, johns provides extensive plot summaries of the tales relevant to that section. a reader may get lost in the minutiae and may overlook the main issues in the tale types under discussion. while johns is to be commended for his attention to detail, the minor variants might have been presented most successfully either in an appendix or at the end of each chapter. the main tale features could have been highlighted at the beginning, with an index system for other (less significant) versions. the bulk of the book is dedicated to an analysis of iaga�s role in russian lore. johns categorizes baba iaga tales into three types: the donor iaga; the ambiguous iaga; the evil witch iaga. while this classification is not particularly revealing on the surface (nor very surprising to those who know russian tales), johns� extensive research helps to flesh out why these three versions of the character occur and in what type of tale. his analysis of the three types is informed by ethnographic material and by psychological theory. johns concludes that the primary issue in the three types of baba iaga is the nature of the hero with whom she interacts. the most relevant factors include the age and sex of the protagonist. johns argues that the baba iaga in tales with children represents a mother figure. for boys, baba iaga is overwhelmingly threatening, while for girls, she is much more ambiguous (she rewards good girls, but punishes the bad). it is here that johns introduces ethnographic material as well as freudian and developmental psychology. he observes that boys in russian society need to separate from the mother more completely than daughters do in order to attain adulthood. baba iaga then represents the negative aspects of motherhood, so that the boy feels less guilty about asserting his masculinity and independence. by contrast, girls did not feel the same type of resentment toward their mothers, since they folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 55 left home to marry in the pre-revolutionary period, while boys remained in the household. as a result, the tales in which iaga represents a girl�s mother are much more balanced, since the conflicts between mother and daughter were fewer. in addition to ethnographic data, johns also uses freudian theory to support his claims; for example, a boy must learn that his sexual desire for his mother is unacceptable, and iaga�s hideous nature helps him to distance himself from the temptation of incest. while one may object to the freudian bent, johns� argument about the nature of the household and the role of children within it is convincing. the psychological pressure was intense on a boy who was growing up in a society that highly valued masculinity and yet was inextricably tied to his mother, who was still present in the household. this paradigm of the young male who disobeys his mother in order to enter into adulthood occurs frequently in russian lore, from dobrynia in epic song to the boys in baba iaga tales. one would only wish that johns had done some more extensive research in ethnography. his sources are relatively limited (primarily zorin (1981) on weddings and tempest (1997, 2001) on gender and childhood). his argument would be bolstered by additional research from the wide variety of sources available. given his assiduous work unearthing tales with baba iaga, the lack of completeness in ethnographic material is disappointing. on the basis of his conclusions about baba iaga�s attitude toward boys and girls, johns expands his analysis to include tales in which she interacts with men and women. the donor type almost exclusively occurs with men who are searching for their brides, a fact that johns asserts relates to the role of the russian mother who helps to arrange her son�s marriage. baba iaga is no longer negative, since the man has already asserted his adult status; now the mother helps the son to move toward independence and sexual maturity. by contrast, adult women are faced much more often, not with the positive donor, but with the ambiguous and villainous baba iaga figures. the ambiguous iaga either helps a young woman find a husband (as with the male donor tales) or tries to prevent her from finding him (often in the same tale, various baba iagas help or hinder the heroine). johns relates this fact once again to the social system of the russian village. a daughter may continue to view a mother figure as ambiguous as she grows to adulthood. for an adult daughter, a mother is potentially both a competitor for male affection and an accomplice in finding it, due to women�s roles in matchmaking and the marriage ritual. the villainous baba iaga, according to johns, represents the mother-in-law. the evil image projected in these tales with women is a result of the fear of the mother-in-law and her power. interestingly, often baba iaga asks the heroine to perform impossible domestic tasks. young women may well have felt that their mother-in-law was demanding the impossible in her role as a worker in the new household; the evil witch helped them to cope with such conflicts. where possible, johns also connects the teller to the tale content; in some cases, collectors did not provide extensive information. however, his analysis of the interaction between the teller and the text is informative and enlightening. overall johns� book is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the tale. while the monograph has some flaws, they are outweighed by thought-provoking analysis of baba iaga. if for no other reason, the wide variety of tale texts included in the volume make it a valuable contribution to the literature. both specialists on the tale and slavic folklorists will benefit from johns� exploration of a wide variety of folk sources about this most fascinating of russian tale characters. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 56 works cited tempest, snejana. 1997. �stovelore in russian folklife.� in musya glants and joyce toomre (eds), food in russian history and culture. bloomington: indiana u.p., pp. 1-14. _______. 2001. �acquiring an identity: gender distinctions in russian childlore and rituals.� in peter i. barta (ed.), gender and sexuality in russian civilisation. london: routledge, pp. 89-104. zorin, nikolai v. 1981. russkaia svad�ba v srednem povolzh�e. kazan�: izdatel�stvo kazanskogo universiteta. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby university of kentucky seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 vol_v_no_1_2000_page7.pdf seefav1s20009_26 seefav1s200027_40 seefav1s200041_48 ukrainian folklore conference in kyiv for young scholars natalie kononenko, university of virginia another ukrainian folklore conference, this one focusing on younger scholars and their work, is scheduled for april 17 and 18, 1999. it is to take place at the kyiv taras shevchenko university, formerly known as the university of kiev, volodymyrska street 60, room 329. kyiv 33, ukraine 252033. the topic of the conference is the ethnic history of europe's nations with the following subtopics emphasized: ethnocultural parallels between the nations of western and eastern europe traditional ethnic culture of the slavs ethnic processes and the problem of ethnic identity preservation national minorities and the problem of ethnic identity preservation problems of europe's nations traditional cultural preservation the sponsors of the conference are: the kyiv taras shevchenko university the institute for political and ethnosocial research of the national academy of science the international fund "renaissance" the state committee of ukraine on the affairs of nationalities and migrations accommodation for conference participants will be at the university hotel. the program will include the paper sessions and a cultural program. (i assume the latter means performances by various folklore groups. trips outside of kyiv can probably be arranged if you ask well enough in advance. the cost, in my experience, has been quite reasonable: $ i00 plus gas for a driver and car for one week and the university owns a field research station in kaniv which can be used as a hotel and base for field work.) to participate, please send a 6-8 page abstract of your proposed talk plus a registration fee of $89 to: the department of ethnology faculty of history kyiv taras shevchenko university volodymyrska street 60 kyiv 33 ukraine 252033 tel.: 011-380-44-221-0218, fax: 011-380-44-224-3181 e-mail: tov@rpd.univ.kiev.us the materials are due by jan. 1 but will probably continue to be accepted. i would suggest that you send them by fax. when i was there, the e-mail was not functioning, so be forewarned. valentyna borysenko, the person who gave me this announcement, says that it is intended to focus on young researchers, to encourage them, and to provide a venue for them to present their work to the public. so, if you have graduate students or even older undergraduates who would like to spend april in kyiv and meet the very charming and well-educated young folklorists and ethnologists of kyiv, this is their chance. dr. borysenko tells me that, even though the focus is on young researchers, there will be no age limit to conference participants, so you can spend seef a journal page 52 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 mailto:tov@rpd.univ.kiev.us april in kyiv too. as with the other conference announcements which i posted, i request that you first try contacting dr. borysenko directly. if, despite earnest effort, this does not work, get back to me and i will see what i can do. my emaii address is nkm@virginia.edu page 53 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 mailto:nkm@virginia.edu microsoft word seefaf01c.doc 57 r e v i e w jason merrill. russian folktales: a reader, newburyport, ma: focus, 2000. viii + 74 pp. bibliography. notes. glossary. isbn 0-58510-014-5. russian folktales: a reader is a text designed for intermediate or advanced students of the russian language. the book assumes a knowledge of vocabulary and grammatical structures typically associated with the completion of one to two years of college russian; that is to say, it is suitable after the completion of any of the basic textbook series commonly used in university russian classes in the us, e.g. golosa, live from moscow, or nachalo. the book begins with an introduction for students discussing the nature of the folktale as a genre and the history of its collection in russia. this brief overview is followed by a bibliography containing both english language and russian language materials. this bibliography, which includes not only tale collections but also scholarly works on the russian tale, is useful for students who intend to pursue research on the tale or simply to do additional reading of russian tales. the book is loosely divided into seven chapters, each of which is dedicated to a tale. while the tales need not be read in order, the tales merrill has chosen move from shorter, less complicated stories to more complex ones. this structure benefits the student reading tales for the first time. the initial two chapters in the book, devoted to brief animal tales, give students the opportunity to adjust to tale language in a manageable way. merrill has chosen to break the longer magic tales in the final five chapters into pieces. this decision was a wise one. while more advanced students may be able to read one of the longer tales in one sitting, those at the intermediate level can read the pieces of tales without becoming overwhelmed. merrill is well aware of the oddities of tale language and the factors that may confuse students faced with this genre. before the first chapter he includes a general overview of unusual forms and patterns students may encounter for the first time, such as the feminine instrumental ending -oiu or the use of internal rhymes. this section concludes with a set of russian discussion questions to get students thinking about the genre of tales as a warm-up exercise to reading tales, such as what tales they read as a child, who are common tale characters, how are tales different seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 58 from literature, etc. such pre-reading exercises continue throughout the book. they include: brainstorming and discussion exercises; introduction to cultural realia, such as proverbs and the nature of daily life in russian villages; discussion of unusual grammatical forms; and vocabulary building based on roots of words found in the tales. each tale (or part of a tale) is followed by a set of questions based on the tale content. they allow students to check their comprehension while also acting as a springboard for discussion of the tale in class. other more creative postreading tasks include: retelling the tales from the point of view of one of the characters, such as the wolf in “prince ivan, the firebird and the grey wolf”; writing a newspaper article or letter relating the events in the kingdom; description of characters and locations, both in writing and in drawings; and role plays. the skills practiced in these exercises are those essential to advanced proficiency, namely narration, description and comparison. the glossary that follows the text is comprehensive and includes notes on forms for both nouns and verbs. one disappointment is that the perfective or imperfective pairs of verbs are not indicated in the notations under each verbal entry. some of the words, such as …imia and ...zhizn’, seem strange choices if one assumes an.intermediate to advanced knowledge. eliminating those words would easily allow for the inclusion of aspectual partners. i applaud the author’s decision not to gloss words in the text. i agree that they not only detract from the text itself, but, considering the extensive nature of the glossary, are also unnecessary. however, i find his decision to include stress marks on each word distracting. the typeface is small, and the stresses on i and y make the letters resemble ukrainian vowels. in fact, the layout is my main complaint with the book. it is difficult to read thanks to the size of the font, and the overall presentation lacks interest. the periodic discussion questions are offset and numbered, but are not really readily identifiable on the page, since they are in the same small font as the text. i would have chosen to number the lines, since the layout makes it difficult to find certain portions of a tale or discuss student questions about the text. merrill has also chosen to gloss certain larger portions of each tale that may present difficulty to the student. while this idea is a worthy one, these glosses are buried in the back of the book between the last story and the glossary. it would be much more efficient to have them at the end of each story and save much page turning from glossary to notes to story. overall, this text is a valuable addition to the readers available to students of the russian language. merrill has chosen his stories wisely to showcase the most famous characters of russian folktales, such as baba iaga, the firebird, little sister fox, koshchei the deathless, 59 vasilisa the beautiful and the simpleton. it provides a much-needed introduction to a genre of russian folk literature usually only read by students in translation. those of us who teach folklore or culture classes to russian language students will find it of great use. however, it is no less useful to language teachers who want to introduce their students to the style of language and to the cultural realia contained in the folktale. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby university of kentucky seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 editorial satement 50 the preservation of national childbirth traditions in the russian homebirth community (1) ekaterina belousova in russia labor and birth were transferred from home to hospital shortly after the 1917 revolution. a set of measures intended to promote state hospitals and reduce the authority of traditional birth attendants and healers was introduced. as a result, birth in hospitals became the norm, and the tradition of home midwifery was interrupted.(2) as the setting of birth changed, the ritual practices and physical treatments of homebirth were forgotten. though hospital maternity practices preserved the essential archetypal structure of birth as a rite of passage [belousova 2001], the traditional actions associated with birth disappeared. the practical experience of traditional midwifery was neglected and it was not integrated into the new tradition. another reason for these events was general change in the perception of the laws ruling the world, of human nature and, as a consequence, the organization of the human body. the soviet authorities heavily promoted a positivist and materialist manner of thinking. the new mentality was secular, with atheism promoted by the communists in mass media, school and workplace. the destruction of churches and severe repression of the clergy were part of the war against any perceived threat to materialist thinking. in fact, russian popular faith presented a complex phenomenon, a mix of russian orthodox and pagan elements. people often considered pagan rituals and beliefs as christian and experienced difficulty in differentiating one from the other. state ideology decried pagan customs as superstition and those who practiced them were persecuted. the private life of soviet citizens was generally scorned and ignored. the limits of the family were far from hermetic; the communist party had the right to regulate the life of the family, approve marriages and divorce proceedings, discuss cases of adultery in public and recommend models for the proper organization of family life. childbirth, too, was treated as a public event, given that it related to the appearance and upbringing of a new citizen, who was expected to perform certain functions within the social system. maternity leave was brief and within two months babies were sent to baby-care units to be reared in accordance with the principles of a communist upbringing. positivist thinking became dominant in medicine as well. the psychic and spiritual dimensions of illness were rejected; only the body was treated. consequently, biomedical seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 51 techniques formed the basis of treatment. the separation of medical knowledge into specialisms furthered the treatment of particular organs in isolation, while the links between bodily functions were ignored. holistic attitudes in healing, presupposing a view of the person as a whole came to be regarded as irrelevant. the mechanistic view of the human body promoted the idea of a norm and deviations from it. the process of birth was now regarded as a predictable mechanical process requiring standardized interventions in the case of deviations from the norm. thus, routine medical stimulation of birth, amniotomies and episiotomies became the norm in hospitals. in spite of all the restrictions and prosecutions, russian orthodoxy, traditional healing and folk beliefs were preserved on the fringes of soviet society. grannies baptized babies in secret and taught them the main prayers and basic tenets of christianity. on occasion people would consult traditional healers in the countryside. a black cat crossing the road caused fear and was perceived as a sign of trouble ahead. the biography of an individual could be seen as a sequence of mystically connected events. superstitious beliefs managed to coexist peacefully in the popular consciousness along with a rationalist frame of mind. traditional knowledge preserved its authoritative status, and was even used to support new scientific discoveries [ovchinnikova 1998: 233-35] the history of the homebirth movement in russia has been influenced by political, economical and social developments. 1980 marks its beginning, when the marginal scholar igor charkovskii, accompanied by a small group of people, arranged for four water deliveries in two specially designed glass pools in a moscow apartment [martynova 5:2]. after that, more and more people became involved in the family club known as �zdorovaia sem’ia� (healthy family). they began giving birth at home on their own or with people experienced in homebirth in attendance. they also promoted alternative patterns of health treatment and childrearing. in the early 1980's homebirth was an underground dissident movement. in the first place, for both individual and his or her family this was a struggle for privacy. homebirth adepts claimed that they did not want to share responsibility for their own health and family life with state institutions like antenatal clinics, hospitals, baby care units and schools. they called their philosophy soznatel’noe roditel’stvo (conscious parenthood). birth and childrearing were supposedly special events in the life cycle of the family. unassisted birth was their ideal. people already experienced in helping others in birth would work free of charge. proselytism and dissemination of information about the benefits of homebirth was an important part of their activity. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 52 an additional issue in the ideology of homebirth was the rehabilitation of the spiritual dimension of human life. homebirth agents viewed the human body as closely connected with psychological processes and spirituality. in the early days, the spiritual dimension of birth possessed an eclectic character. childbirth customs from many different world traditions were garnered from sources of varying reliability and deliberately combined by those propagating homebirth: in their minds it�s total confusion. some things they remember and some things they�ve read somewhere, but this knowledge is anything but systematic. for example, they read some kind of medical literature about the placenta, and it�s mentioned there that in folk belief the placenta is used as an amulet. so they say: �wow! we have to tell people about this, we must share this information!� so everything [their knowledge] is based on jumbled facts. [alla] at this point in time elements of russian orthodox rites coexisted in homebirth practice along with pagan russian beliefs, myths taken from various primitive societies, yoga, zen-buddhism and transpersonal psychology. this kind of �basic spirituality� is characteristic of a new age paradigm. combining these myths with rational scientific data, homebirth proponents formulated a complex system of humanity, the human body and bodily processes. childbirth was considered an important event along the spiritual path of the baby and of the family as a whole. thus social institutions should not intervene, since they would ruin the spiritual experience. lay birth assistance acquired the name of dukhovnoe akusherstvo (spiritual midwifery) in the homebirth community, since it focused on the spiritual guidance of parents. the third important theme in the ideology of homebirth was connected with ecology. as opposed to the common �profane� vision of personality as a unit of the state, homebirth agents suggested that humans belonged to the natural world and were responsible for its well-being. in this system, humans were seen as deeply integrated into �natural� processes and connections. the human body was considered cosmically oriented and axiologically heterogeneous, in possession of certain special organs and bodily functions responsible for cosmic communication. human beings had to support the world by maintaining �natural� connections with it, as well as by avoiding and preventing any �artificial� ones. they were supposed to develop extra-sensory abilities to allow them to communicate with the natural world on different levels. parents were to bring up a new generation capable of resisting the destruction of the world and nature as a result of various inversions of �natural� processes, pollution and nuclear war. the keyword in the 53 homebirth group�s self-representation discourse was �natural,� as in the term estestvennye rody (natural childbirth). this variant of homebirth ideology was especially relevant in the totalitarian context of the soviet union. the hybrid multicultural character of homebirth mythology, worries about the fate of the earth, and interest in similar processes in the west were characteristic of soviet homebirth ideologists, who saw themselves in the context of an immense multinational country. in late 1980s and early 1990s, during perestroika, eschatological expectations among the public generally increased, and discussion about impending disintegration and collapse in all the spheres of life (pollution, radiation, medicine, education, business and finance, agriculture, railroads etc.) was widespread.(3) these attitudes provided additional support to the ecological myth propounded by homebirth supporters. at the same time, people now felt they could ask for supernatural help. mass baptism and the rehabilitation of the russian orthodox faith was characteristic of perestroika, as well as interest in magic and in psychic phenomena. healers, sorcerers, astrologists and hypnotists became extremely popular. the most popular, such as anatolii kashpirovskii and alan chumak, used to address the whole country and offer healing on national television. private business became legal, and numerous small publishers and newspapers began specializing in books on dreams, the interpretation of omens, folk healing and the supernatural. these changes in popular consciousness drew people to homebirth thanks to its concern with spirituality. in the early 1990�s the first �parenting schools� were set up. by that time some of the people involved in homebirth had turned professional. now that private business was legal, they were entitled to set up their own schools. officially, these were only allowed to teach �pregnant couples� how to give birth in accordance with their views on childbirth, since assistance at homebirths was still prohibited by the state. in fact, �instructors� at these schools also assisted illegally at home deliveries. the very first parenting schools preserved the initial tendency towards a multicultural approach to homebirth. �instructors� in the schools taught future parents �oriental� philosophical and mythological concepts and ritual practices (e.g. chakras, karma, mantras etc.). these notions, inevitably reinterpreted, coexisted peacefully in their worldview along with their interpretation of russian traditional customs and modern science. their special interest in ecology and the preservation of the natural world was reflected in the names of the schools: �ecologiia sem’i” (family ecology), �akva” (aqua, supposedly suggesting waterbirth), �akva-marina” (a pun on seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 54 sea birth and the name of the school�s head, marina dadasheva), �pangea� (connoting the chthonic aspect of the birth myth). homebirth adepts paid a great deal of attention to homebirth movements in the west. now that contacts with the west were easier to establish, they sought out, translated and published works by western homebirth and waterbirth pioneers, all the while incorporating much of their practices into their own work. thus, grantly dick-read, frederick leboyer, michel odent, ina may gaskin, sondra ray and other proponents of alternative childbirth became authoritative figures in the russian homebirth community [dik rid 1997; leboie 1988; oden 1994; gaskin 1986; rei 1985]. the homebirth dissident movement little by little transformed itself into a business. at present, about twenty licensed parenting schools are operating in moscow, while st petersburg has five. there are parenting schools in tver, nizhnii novgorod, ekaterinburg, novosibirsk, khabarovsk, vladivostok and many other large russian cities. parenting schools have developed their own special courses on �conscious conception�, pregnancy, childbirth and the early development of children. rates for these courses vary. for example, in moscow a course on pregnancy and childbirth usually ranges from $100-350. the fee for assistance in childbirth is flexible and depends on the financial situation of the family (typically $200-500).(3) the schools are now perceived as providing a distinct range of services. the emerging middle class has joined the artists and intellectuals who were the initial target group for �natural childbirth� educators. * * * the fall of the soviet union was a crucial point in the construction of russian national identity. the internationalist conception of the soviet state as a �family of peoples� was no longer relevant. russian nationalist and fundamentalist movements appeared on the scene and gathered strength. russian national identity was accompanied by the rehabilitation and revitalization of the russian orthodox church and christian traditions. references to russian peasants and the slavs of old as �our ancestors� were often to be heard in russian nationalist discourse. these processes deeply influenced homebirth ideology. in the mid-1990's a new trend appeared in the homebirth movement: �russian orthodox� midwifery. some midwives who had previously venerated nature and practiced eclectic traditional customs reinterpreted their vision of childbirth and midwifery, such that russian orthodox principles and traditions became the central focus of their work. professor n. zharkin, the head of an experimental clinic in volgograd, has been practicing waterbirth since 1996 and identifies his activity as �spiritual midwifery�. he 55 comments as follows on the main principles of �russian orthodox� understanding of the birth process: our experience demonstrates that the rehabilitation of russian orthodox traditions of childbearing underpins the provision of not only gentle, but even enjoyable childbirth (partus felix), one that leaves a permanent impression on the hearts and minds of mothers, babies, fathers and anyone witnessing the event. these traditions include a lot of elements, but the most important are the following: love and trust in god; a prayer to the mother of god, who protects mothers in childbirth; releasing; that a child, while not yet born, belongs to god and that she or he already has a soul that is able to experience all the human feelings of joy, pain, fear and so on. this is a perception of childbirth like the miracle of the savior�s birth, that is the birth of the savior of her maternity (sic), which is repeated in every mother. and when the mother�s soul unites with the baby�s in childbirth, and both are protected by the veil of the mother of god, it is hard to imagine that any kind of medical complications might occur. [zharkin] appeals to the power of nature were therefore now interpreted as sinful and dangerous. �you shouldn�t ask for health from � who knows what � from [an uncertain] �nature�!� said liudmila vasil�evna, the leader of the �kupel’” (font) parenting school in st petersburg. �oriental� practices and terms were rejected and claimed as harmful when used by russians. zharkin tells the following story concerning the danger of applying �oriental� practices to those with an �russian orthodox mentality�: a russian orthodox woman was due to give birth to her second child. she was advised by her midwife to attend classes in a group practicing transcendental meditation. there she was given a mantra for meditation. the medical record of her pregnancy showed nothing unusual, nothing out of the ordinary. she had had no problems giving birth to her first baby. her current pregnancy also developed initially without any problems. only in the last month did she start to feel a general weakness that got worse. she didn�t go into labor on the due date, and there were indications of fetal postmaturity. so she roomed in our clinic to speed the start of labor. pharmacological treatment and acupuncture, normally effective when applied together, didn�t have any effect in her case. as she�d reached forty two weeks and there still were no indications that she was ready to give birth, the question of cesarean section arose. in the course of further conversation, details of her [new] spiritual practice came to light, something the patient seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 56 had not mentioned previously. with her approval a priest was summoned to take her confession, during which she revealed the mantra. he advised her to pray with all her heart to the mother of god, which she did. labor started the next day without it having to be induced, and finally she gave birth to a healthy baby. [zharkin]. some of the adherents of �russian orthodox� midwifery insist on the primacy of russian tradition on russian soil, at the same time rejecting any suggestion that the traditions of other peoples inhabiting russia equally merit preservation. ultimately, it was the �consolidation of the russian (or the russian orthodox) family� that was proclaimed as the new task for the homebirth movement, since it would result in the �restoration of russia� itself: once a doctor came for a home visit. he was a jewish guy. he saw those kids who�d been delivered at home, and he said: �if everybody gave birth at home, we would see russia reborn. � [oleg] the main thing is to preserve the family, bring people to the faith, and restore russia. let children be devoted to the russian soil. may parents love their children, children their parents, and all of them love russia. then russia will truly exist. [liudmila vasil�evna] the main focus of our club is on the reinforcement of the family, so that it will not be destroyed but instead expand with strong and healthy children, and so that families will preserve the spirit of russian orthodoxy� we want to see people and organizations who care about the survival and consolidation of the russian family. [stepanova 2001] as a result, waterbirth and infant swimming needed orthodox supportive material as well. homebirth ideologists began to associate their practices with the healing power of baptism. the founder of the movement, igor charkovskii, recently expressed the view that �russian orthodox culture is more developed than western. according to russian orthodox custom, the baby is immersed in water on the eighth or ninth day of his or her life. the mystery of baptism solves a baby�s health problems better than any medical discovery. [charkovskii 1999]. in fact, for many of the parents attracted by �natural childbirth,� it was precisely the russian orthodox flavor of parenting schools that turned them into supporters of homebirth. along with church tradition, numerous pagan russian childbirth practices have been adopted, widely used and a rational explanation for them sought, because midwives were not really aware of their pagan character and believed them christian. in reality, the rural midwife was an ambivalent figure in traditional russian culture. on one hand, midwives were perceived 57 as witches, possessing supernatural power and having contacts with demonic forces [kabakova 2001: 76]. they used spells and magic widely during childbirth. midwives voluntarily acquired marginal status in society. by attending births, they shared the alleged impurity of the birth process [levin 1991]. however, traditional midwives often denied that they possessed supernatural powers, practised magic or made contact with the powers of evil. they were perceived as mediators between the woman in labor and the heavenly powers [listova 1989: 146]. they largely used christian objects such as the cross, icons, holy water and myrrh along with russian orthodox prayers. the extreme piety of midwives has been widely noted. contemporary �russian orthodox� midwives are perceived as dealing with heavenly forces. although special psychic abilities are often ascribed to them, there is a tendency to speak about these in christian code. since dealing with �unknown forces� and supernatural phenomena is perceived as sinful and dangerous, it is necessary to reject the idea of the midwife possessing inner supernatural abilities and ascribe them instead to divine guidance. the midwife�s entry into the profession is seen as a result of heavenly guidance, a gradual recognition on the part of the midwife of her spiritual calling. midwives interpret events in their lives as signs from heaven indicating the necessity of leaving their current profession to begin offering a service to people: much later, when i already felt i was being guided from above, i began to understand that my own baby was sent to me from heaven, a gift. the lord presented me with this child as a reward, because i had succeeded in understanding my mission on earth, even though at that time i hadn�t been baptized. i appeared able to understand what god wanted me to do. he led me towards gentle, natural childbirth, and i was capable of listening� i was due in about four or five weeks at that time. it meant that conception had taken place in april, right after the first baby i had delivered myself! what a surprising coincidence! later i understood that the lord had given me this gift because i had chosen the activity, for which i had been sent to this world� on january 8, i gave birth to a little girl, who was later given the name of anna, in accordance with my grandmother�s wishes. much later i learned that 8 january was a holiday: midwife�s day! and now my [daughter] anna is studying midwifery, too. [martynova 10: 3]. midwives associate themselves with the podvizhnitsa (holy laborer), describing their work as sluzhenie (service). they claim they do not care when, or even whether, they are paid by the seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 58 parents they have assisted. �it�s okay, god will take care of me,� said irina martynova. liudmila vasil�evna emphasized that the main reward a midwife gets is when parents mention her in their prayers. a �russian orthodox� midwife is supposed to obtain a priest�s blessing before assisting at a childbirth. practicing midwifery without such a blessing is seen as improper because births in this case lack supportive protection: you must have a priest�s blessing to be a midwife. i did. liudmila vasil�evna, ol�ga ivanovna and alena did, but lena ermakova � she didn�t. she works somewhat in the american style [irina martynova, home midwife] although midwives of this kind sometimes look after people not belonging to the russian orthodox church, they strongly prefer to work with russian orthodox. �it is easier to work with people, who �speak the same language,�� said natal�ia, a specialist in the teaching of children at the �rozhdestvo” (nativity) parenting school. irina martynova explained that a christian outlook is supportive during birth, as pride (gordynia), regarded as a grave sin in the christian religion, prevents parents from having feelings helpful during labor, in particular complete penitence and humility, which are seen as essential for easy dilation and coping with labor pains. marina dadasheva has claimed that working with unbaptized people is harmful to midwives. when this happens, she might be tempted to ascribe her success to her own skills and not to god, something she recognizes as sinful pride on her part: sometimes you deliver a baby and come home quite pleased with yourself, but then everything starts going wrong, in your own family and so on. the reason has to be pride. that is why i prefer not to deal with unbaptized babies. today i was going to work with a sick child. i asked the mother to have him baptized by today. but she didn�t do it. so i had to delay the session, and wait until the baby has been baptized. humility brings peace to the soul. a pregnant woman must receive absolution, communion and a priest's blessing before childbirth. this is believed necessary to make labor easier for the woman since �god is punishing a woman in labor for all her sins� [anna]: first, we devote a lot of time [at our prenatal classes] to talking about faith, the divine channel of communication and christianity. communion and confession are essential before childbirth. they really act as a form of purification before birth; they should take place. and the mystery of confession, of course, gives a lot to a woman. she comes to 59 the birth without fear, or pain in her body (i mean, spiritual pain). [marina dadasheva, home midwife]. absolution and communion are also supposed to protect the baby from sharing the mother�s psychological problems: before i was due, i went to church and confessed so that the baby would arrive in this world without any problems at least, without my problems� so as he wouldn�t share my problems. i didn�t want him to have any problems; that he might live in peace, live his own life, and follow his own fate. [ira] the birth of babies with mental and physical disabilities traditionally brought into question the mothers� behavior. when such children were born, the mother was asked how she had sinned [bernshtam 2001: 103]. significantly, it was believed that god chose a punishment that corresponded to the sin. irina martynova, a midwife, commented on the birth of the baby with down syndrome as follows: i think that the woman�s job was involved. it was a sign from god. this woman worked in a psychiatric clinic, and particularly with down syndrome children. then she herself gave birth to a down child. maybe, there was something she did wrong when she was working there. maybe she treated her patients badly. that�s how it goes: the way you sin, that�s the way you�ll be punished. [martynova 71: 9]. it is considered important for a mother-to-be to ask her relatives to forgive her and for her to forgive others (prosit’ proshcheniia; prostit’). this practice used to be widespread in traditional russian childbirth ritual. although it reflects christian values, it is not part of church doctrine. contemporary midwives propose a rational explanation of this practice. it is explained as promoting dilation, as it supposedly allays the woman�s anxieties and thus encourages her to relax: you know, one of the customs is spiritual purification before birth. i mean, forgiving any offenses you�ve caused and asking people to forgive you. there is something similar in russian orthodox tradition. i don�t think it�s just a rite. people say it�s difficult giving birth without it. it can easily be explained from a psychological point of view. [birthing without forgiving] prevents a woman from giving birth normally, from proper dilation. and, most of all, resenting the man, the father [is harmful]. [svetlana abramova, the director of �zhemchuzhinka” (pearl) parenting school] seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 60 the ritual also has other less rational explanations. there is a tendency to trace superstitious connections between life events, such that forgiveness provides for a successful birth, because secrets between spouses may result in health problems and even the death of the baby: her [midwife�s] main idea is as follows: �a woman gives birth the same way she lives in general.� you should solve your family problems before birth. once there was a woman who had had lots of abortions and hadn�t told her husband about them, and her baby died in birth. [ksenia] another important russian traditional practice was for the woman in labor to say farewell (proshchat’sia) to her relatives and neighbors as well as to cosmic entities, such as the sun and the night. in the past this formula is said to have initiated the birth ritual [vlaskina 2001: 65]. as a rite of passage, childbirth ritual suggests the symbolic death of the mother. thus, saying farewell here echoes the funeral ritual. today death symbols are also incorporated into views on childbirth: �father vladimir tsvetkov usually says that you should prepare for labor and birth like you would for death� [liudmila vasil�evna]. the orthodox church has an ambivalent attitude to homebirth. however, there are priests sympathetic to it, and who support particular parenting schools. whenever possible, a priest is invited to bless the place where the birth will occur. the room is cleaned and purified and icons, icon lamps and candles put in place. the priest hears the parents' confessions and blesses them: right before the birth the priest came to see me. he heard my confession again, and my husband's as well. there were lots of icons in the bathroom, as well as in the room where we were with the little one after the birth. it was a kind of coincidence: before all that i didn�t believe� i mean� everybody has their own personal god, more or less close to them. but these events changed everything. it was as if i�d been hypnotized. and the priest prayed too. and said: �don�t be afraid of anything�� i wasn't worried about the possibility of infection, as the water had been blessed. [ira] the priest's blessing during the birth is reported to help women with difficult labors and give them extra strength: once i saw a woman in labor. before the blessing she was practically fainting. she clearly wasn�t going to be able to cope. she looked so pale, almost blue� then the priest came and sanctified the bathtub with holy water. the girl sat up straight, she did, and gave birth five minutes later. [natasha] 61 �russian orthodox� midwives pray during childbirth. it is said that midwives� prayers �reach their destination� [ekaterina cited by vika]. prayer is considered �a powerful therapeutic device� [natalia]. certain saints are the patron saints of childbirth, and some specific icons are seen as especially supportive, particularly those depicting the virgin mary. thus the icon �bogoroditsa feodorovskaia” (feodorovskaia mother of god) supports maternity; �pomoshch’ v rodakh� (help in giving birth) protects women in labor; �znamenie� (our lady of the sign) helps prevent the umbilical cord getting entangled; and �mlekopitatel’nitsa� (milk-giver) promotes successful breast-feeding. praying to the icon of st. virinea helps to prevent postpartum hemorrhage. st. nicholas is believed to protect people in and on water, relevant in the case of waterbirth. st. panteleimon the healer cures medical problems in general, and as well as those related to birth. other female saints such as sts. anastasia, catherine and barbara are still the patron saints of women and birth, just as they used to be in traditional russian culture [popov 1996: 443; naumenko 1998: 28; nekrylova 2000: 58; bernshtam 2000: 101]. paraskeva-piatnitsa was especially venerated in traditional russian society as the patron saint of female activities, marriage and childbirth. paraskeva-piatnitsa is the christian �successor� to the pagan slavic goddess, mokosh� [slashchev 1995; ivanov and toporov 1982; ivanov and toporov 1995b]. in russian folklore paraskeva is sometimes presented as a rural midwife [maksimov 1994: 426427]. nowadays paraskeva-piatnitsa is considered the patron saint of midwifery, and her icons are used in homebirth: by then, her older daughter, masha, had painted and presented me with an icon of paraskeva-piatnitsa, the patron saint of my service� i knew this saint looked after me in my work, and for ages i�d been dreaming of getting her image to have with me when i go off to attend women in birth. and so the lord gave me the icon of paraskevapiatnitsa via this family who painted icons, through these russian orthodox connections. [martynova 11:4] thus �russian orthodox� midwives bring special icons to the birthplace to help them in their work. ksenia, who is not a christian, says of her midwife, �she uses particular icons and prayers, which help her to go deep into the birth process. she is a magician, and these are her magic objects.� the parents also pray during labor, and their relatives go to church to pray for a safe delivery, and there write the mother�s name on the liturgical prayer lists. one old-believer mother said that she and her husband used to recite spiritual verses during childbirth, in a seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 62 somewhat ecstatic manner, something taken seriously amiss by their �russian orthodox� midwife: we did everything differently. we shouted: �theotokos, have mercy on me!� (bogoroditse, pomilui!) and so on. oleg recited various canons. it was all on a religious basis. the bathroom was full of icons; all the candles were lit� and during labor i kept shouting, not �mommy, mommy!� but �theotokos, have mercy on me!� so there really was special energy around. and when i gave birth, i suddenly broke into song. i had suddenly acquired a voice � an absolutely splendid one. and with all my strength i began singing spiritual verses and prayers. our midwife nearly fainted. [natasha] after the baby has been born, the midwife is expected to perform the ritual ablution (omovenie). in the early stages of the �natural childbirth� movement, considerable emphasis was placed on the positive physiological effects of water procedures in general and pouring cold water on the baby (oblivanie) in particular. this action supposedly stimulated the bodily mechanisms responsible for thermoregulation. this effect is still acknowledged by midwives. however, now the stress is on its religious and ritual aspects, bearing in mind that in russian traditional culture rural midwives practiced pogruzhenie (immersion) of the baby for protective purposes [dobrovol�skaia 1998: 20; kuz�muk 1998: 18; vlaskina 1998: 16]. while praying, the contemporary midwife pours some holy water into a bucket of regular water. she then says �in the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit,� pours some water over the baby�s head and body, and immerses the baby�s feet in the bucket of water. then she pours all the water in the bucket over the baby and says �amen.� in some cases, in the absence of a priest, rural midwives performed a ritual known as povitusheskoe kreshchenie (the midwife baptism ceremony) [listova 1989: 148-49]. it involved reading some special prayers and naming the baby. nowadays some of the �russian orthodox� midwives have been blessed by their confessors and allowed to perform this ritual: babies are baptized straight after birth, using holy water. she�s been given the priest�s blessing for this. she recites a prayer, pronounces the name right away, and pours a bucket of ice-cold water over the baby. when you give birth, she [the midwife] turns off the light, not like in hospitals, where there are incredibly bright lights. here there are only candles, icons and icon lamps. everything is pure and blessed. [alina] this ritual is considered an emergency baptism, no substitute for the actual ceremony. it is assumed that the baby will be baptized again later in church. however, after this ritual has been 63 performed, the baby is considered protected during the period before the real baptismal ceremony takes place. the �midwife baptism ceremony� is especially relevant in cases where the baby�s life is in doubt. if the baby dies before official baptism by a priest, a church funeral service can still be held, because the child has already been christened by the midwife. according to church doctrine, as well as in the popular beliefs of many societies, postpartum blood flow made women ritually impure [listova 1996]. consequently, there were certain church and popular traditions that imposed special prohibitions on the mother and those who attended the birth. there were also rituals of purification reintegrating ritually impure people into the community. since the tradition of having babies at home had been abandoned, contemporary liturgical books do not contain prayers for the purification of the house, the midwife, or those present at the birth. when homebirth established itself as a tradition related to russian orthodoxy, the need arose for prayers of this kind. a petersburg priest who favors homebirth, father vladimir tsvetkov, found in the archives a mass written in 1651 by patriarch iosif, containing a special cycle of eight prayers for the purification of the place where a birth has occurred, of the midwife, new mother, the people who have attended the birth and the baby when first laid in a cradle. now some priests supporting homebirth use these prayers on a regular basis. in russia, as elsewhere in the christian world, a new mother was prohibited from entering the church for forty days. this tradition is alive today, with the new mother being purified on the fortieth day when the baby is baptized. together with this period of time, there was also a tendency towards baptizing babies as early as possible, usually from three to nine days after birth, given that so many died very young. by contrast today, the baptismal ceremony is often delayed until the baby is several months old. * * * there are also many pagan and quasi-pagan magic practices and techniques used in home midwifery, though the midwives generally view these as christian. therefore, their beliefs can be compared to those of russian women in the past, who were adepts of a popular christianity that was a mixture of russian orthodox and pagan beliefs [levin 1991]. midwives use herbs and potions, rather than allopathic medicines in their practices. they also encourage women to use amulets. at parenting classes pregnant women are taught to sew baby shirts with russian traditional decorations, which are, in fact, old pagan symbols intended to ensure by magical means the baby�s health and well-being: seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 64 i also used to embroider little motifs on niutka�s clothes: a baby hat and a diaper. they showed us how to do it. these are our specifically russian motifs � milk rivers with jelly (kisel’nye) shores. so that you have plenty of milk. and then you have to sew little shoots and flowers, so that the baby shoots up. all kind of ancient russian motifs. it is fun. this diaper hung over aniutka�s little bed for ages, the diaper and the baby hat. [katia] and in all this mess there i was sitting and embroidering a baby shirt with all those solar symbols. and i got really miserable about it. what happens if i don�t do it? they [the childbirth instructors] just take it for granted you�re going to stop wearing t-shirts, embroider a russian shirt with motifs, if possible get baptized, and then everything will be okay. [vika] the names of parenting schools often use christian symbols: �rozhdestvo� (nativity), �blagovest” (a peal of bells, the word has the same root as blagoveshchenie (annunciation), and therefore the name of the school connotes the christian contexts of childbirth), �kupel’� (font, presenting the idea of waterbirth in terms of baptism). however, some schools also have names pagan in origin but reinterpreted from a christian standpoint. for example, one of the petersburg parenting schools is called �bereginia.� the word �beregini� referred to multiple pagan female deities and has been interpreted etymologically by different ethnographers to mean water, hill or mountain spirits [tolstoi 1995; ivanov and toporov 1995a]. however, the word was adopted by this school's founders in the singular, and re-etymologized to suggest it came from �berech’� (to take care of). the school�s director, ol�ga vinogradova, rejects any connection between the name and pagan deities and interprets it as an epithet applied to the mother of god, who is believed to care for pregnant women and mothers in childbirth. zhanna tsaregradskaia, the founder of �rozhana� parenting center, interprets their name as a �slavic� word meaning a woman in labor. in fact, it recalls the word rozhanitsy, a term applied in pre-christian russia to pagan deities associated with childbirth [ivanov and toporov 1995c]. the bathhouse was the traditional location for the delivery of babies. it was perceived as an axiologically special place, possessing both sacred [baranov 2001:15-16] and demonic connotations at the same time. in russia it was here that yuletide divination took place. it was supposedly dangerous for a woman with liminal status (such as during labor and for forty days after the birth of the baby) to go to the bathhouse alone. she might be suffocated (zadavit’) by an evil spirit, and her baby replaced with a changeling (podmenysh). as childbirth was seen as the 65 mother�s journey to an �alien� world, it had to be symbolically established in the spatial code of the ritual. as the symbolic representation of that �alien� world, the bathhouse was perceived as a distant place, even though it was located near the house. it would appear that contemporary bathhouses do not possess demonic connotations in the homebirth community, being associated instead with purification. the future mother's soul must be purified through confession and communion. in addition, she is physically purified in the steam of the bathhouse. as ira put it: �we also went to a bathhouse in ozerki. spiritual preparation takes place in church, and physical preparation, in the bathhouse.� midwives rent rooms in public bathhouses for several hours a week and here meet the pregnant women in their care. some of the midwives also use the bathhouse as a place where their clients can listen to lectures, do exercises, share problems and receive regular checkups. however others claim that preparatory classes should not interfere with the true purpose of the bathhouse. they suggest that bathhouses should be used for purification procedures, communication and relaxation: they also arrange checkups there in the bathhouse. i�m opposed to that. in a bathhouse you should stay relaxed. it should take an hour or so to do a careful checkup on one woman. how can that be fitted in? [liudmila vasil'evna, home midwife] an expectant mother is supposed to go to the bathhouse as well as to church just before she is due to ensure she is pure in spirit and body. since women cannot go to a public bathhouse and give birth, they generally use their own bathroom as the birthplace. in the past rural midwives performed numerous magic practices to hasten dilation and make labor easier; for example, they recommended that women in labor unplait their hair, untie any knots in ribbons and belts, and unfasten any clasps [firsov and kiseleva 1993: 139-40].(4) this loosening, unplaiting and unbinding symbolically represents the �unbinding� of the uterus [baiburin 1993: 94], corresponding to the release of the major reproductive forces on the macrocosmic level [vlaskina 2001: 67]. they also opened anything normally kept closed, such as doors, windows, gates, locks and boxes, with the aim of helping the birth along [naumenko 1998: 33]. while in the past these actions belonged in the domain of magic, today they are explained as psychological necessity. it is assumed that this ritual opening symbolically influences the unconscious of the woman, thus helping her to release the child: such a thing as untying knots, unplaiting the hair etc. works on the inner �clamps�� it works like an image, a myth, like entering some special space � unbinding those knots. i don�t tell women that they necessarily have to open everything when they go into labor. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 66 i am not fanatical about these things. however, while i was attending one particular woman, i said [to her relatives]: �go and open everything�. that woman had some kind of inner �clamp�. [sargunas 1998] when they were in labor russian village women were supposed to keep moving, walking around and changing position [vlaskina 2001: 67]. one of the well-known means of hastening a prolonged labor was for the midwife to lead the woman around a table [firsov and kiseleva 1993: 140; naumenko 1998: 33]. contemporary midwives have preserved this technique. they explain that it produces an extended state of consciousness in the woman, considered helpful for the final delivery of the child. vika notes that �her labor was prolonged, so to speed up the contractions they had her making circles around the room until she felt like she was inside a wheel.� the lithotomy position required in hospitals during delivery is not viewed as conducive to labor by home midwives. the traditional upright position is preferred. the necessity of remaining vertical during labor constituted an important element of the semiotics of labor. during the ritual the female body was viewed within a major cosmic context. the upright position put the woman in a symbolic relationship with god on the one hand and the earth on the other.(5) the supine position during labor was seen as physiologically harmful and ethically improper [baranov 2001: 17-18]. nowadays, semi-sitting and squatting positions during active labor are popular, and they are possible in a bathtub where most homebirths occur. one interesting example of how contemporary midwives rework traditional ritual is folk singing with an �open voice,� thought helpful for women in labor. it is said that if the woman sings this way, it helps hasten dilation, provides assistance in the second stage of labor, and helps the woman to cope psychologically with labor pains. midwives present this technique simultaneously as an old tradition and a new discovery, one with both a physiological and a psychological basis: we owe our contemporary state of knowledge about birth traditions and the possibility of using the voice to the dmitrii pokrovskii ensemble. based on the material collected on numerous folklore expeditions and what little has been written on the subject, a method of entering the birth process via the voice has been devised. it is unique in the contemporary civilized world. [postnova] the dmitrii pokrovskii ensemble is a famous folk music group, whose repertoire was collected during numerous expeditions to russian villages. simultaneous citing the authority of tradition and science proved a very effective rhetorical device in post-soviet russia [ovchinnikova 1998: 67 235]. however, these songs were not initially designed for childbirth. an important element of the russian birth ritual was that the woman had to keep silent, as she supposedly temporarily left the human world and, consequently, lost all human characteristics, including her voice [sedakova 1999]. it was also believed that the fewer people who knew about a woman being in labor, the easier the birth would be. thus, contemporary midwives incorporate traditional practices into new contexts, and simultaneously try to rationalize them. certain ritual actions are performed with the placenta and the umbilical cord after a baby is born. igor charkovskii calls the womb the �resonator of cosmic communication� [akva: 33], while the midwife tat�iana sargunas calls the placenta �the cosmic aerial� [tat�iana sargunas, home midwife]. normally, the cord is not cut off before the placenta has been delivered. ideally the procedure is performed twenty-four hours after the birth. it is said that this delay ensures that the child receives the proper amount of cosmic energy from the placenta, which is regarded as a mediator through which energy is transferred from the universe. the placenta is put into a vase filled with water and kept near the baby. however, in fact the cord is often cut sooner for a variety of reasons: our ancestors, the slavs, practiced waterbirth. they used to cut the cord at sunrise. the placenta, it�s an energy generator, you know, and they were solar people� but we certainly have to fit in with our life today and our conditions. [irina martynova, home midwife] thus after a certain period of time the midwife ties the cord. the cord is bound three times with coarse thread. while tying the knots, the midwife says, �in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. amen.� clamping the cord is regarded as harmful because it is believed to cause umbilical hernia. the baby�s cord is specially wrapped in a kosynka (a three-cornered piece of cloth). when it dries and falls off, the parents usually keep it. some midwives recommend keeping it in a ladanka (a small bag, containing sacred objects, worn as an amulet) together with a small icon of the baby�s patron saint. although sometimes the midwife cuts the cord herself, the baby�s father generally performs the procedure, which is supposedly a traditional custom. however, the data on traditional russian childbirth reveals that this was something the midwife did. that it was her responsibility is reflected in the one of the traditional terms for the midwife, puporezka (the cord cutter). one of the traditional rituals that did actually involve the father was when the baby was seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 68 wrapped in one of his old shirts [popov 1996: 465-66; baiburin 1993: 43-44; kabakova 2001: 9799]. nowadays both these actions are seen as a psychological as well as a physiological necessity: you see, i never practice any particular rituals, and i wouldn't advise anyone else to do so either. wrapping the baby in the father's shirt just serves to transmit the father's [friendly] microflora to the baby. it just transmits to the baby the maternal and paternal energies and microflora. as for the cutting of the cord, i can see it�s a very important symbolic thing for a man. it�s such an important process� i can't explain why. i think it influences male psychological patterns; the very fact that he�s been allowed to touch the baby, and even more, to take such a significant action. [svetlana abramova, director, �zhemchuzhinka” (pearl) parenting school] the husband�s participation in contemporary homebirth procedures preserves certain aspects of the russian traditional couvade ritual. a man was supposed to share his wife�s pain, and a set of ritual practices existed, in which male labor pains were symbolically represented. he was supposed to groan together with his wife, and various painful acts were performed on him, such as the midwife tying a thread around his penis and tightening it during every contraction [kabakova 2001: 67]. nowadays the husband is involved directly in the birth process; he is supposed to join with his wife in breathing, groaning, vocalizing, relaxing and pushing together with her through the contractions: igor�: through the contractions, i experienced very special sensations. at first, i hardly realized what was happening to me. the water was full of svetlana�s energy, and it transferred all her feelings, pains and complications to me. like her, i had abdominal pain. i had back pain. between contractions, i relaxed as well, all the pain went away, and i felt a degree of relief. [sargunas 1992] in some older (not specifically christian) groups inside the homebirth community, the mother and the father of the baby together eat the placenta both for ritual purposes and for its nutritional value. this practice is viewed as a way of restoring the parents� strength after the birth. however, �russian orthodox� midwives suggest burying the placenta in a park or in the countryside under a tree (a ritual without analogy in russian tradition): the placenta is to be kept in water, until it is clear whether the baby will have complications. if there are any, you should keep it longer, changing the water from time to time. just let it live in warm water for a certain length of time. then the father has to 69 bury it in a lonely place, it�s the father who must do it. there are some rituals of this kind. these aren�t pagan birth rituals, but folk ones. [alla] the placenta should be put into the freezer. it was necessary to keep it for some time. just in case the doctor needed it for analysis. anyway, we kept it. and then we buried it under a tree, when forty days had passed, i believe. [tasha] some midwives suggest burying the placenta under the corner of a country cottage (dacha), a ritual that did exist in the russian tradition. holding a funeral for the placenta, especially on the fortieth day after the birth, that is after the traditional period of ritual transition is over, reflects the popular perception of it as a living creature, a double of the baby itself. thus, nowadays the placenta still deserves great respect and should be treated carefully in accordance with the rules that apply to human beings. a number of midwives also preserve the traditional folk practices concerned with the care of the baby; for example, zhanna tsaregradskaia, the head of the �rozhana� center, suggests that the baby should be kept at home for forty days after the birth, and that the parents should avoid contact with visitors. this old custom was originally explained by fear of the evil eye during the period when the child was especially vulnerable before baptism. tsaregradskaia, however, explains this practice in terms of child psychology, noting that the baby is not yet ready for contact with a wider world full of strangers. she also insists on the necessity of keeping the baby swaddled in a small cradle, asserting that the baby is used to the tightness of the mother�s womb and feels uncomfortable when kept in an open space with its arms and legs left free [tsaregradskaia 2001].(7) however, this point of view is not shared by the majority of midwives, who suggest that babies should be kept naked, and able to move freely, preferably outdoors. from the time they are born they should also swim in a large bathtub and do a great number of specially designed physical exercises. after the birth, traditional midwives in the past used to �repair� (pravit’) the baby in the bathhouse, using special massage and manual therapy. contemporary midwives are in favor of this. �oriental� midwives call this practice �baby-yoga,� as it follows certain yoga positions.(8) however �russian orthodox� midwives reject this name, since they insist on using russian traditional terms for anything connected with childbirth: you really shouldn�t use those foreign words. there are russian words for it. [in peasant culture] they used to call it komkat’ (crumpling). [liudmila vasil�evna] seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 70 as with many other folk techniques, the positions and exercises have had to be reconstructed and reinvented by �spiritual midwives� in accordance with their experience and their understanding of bodily processes. once the birth is over, the parents are expected to give the midwife some presents as well as paying her. the gift symbolically represents an exchange of values [mauss 1950]: in the case of childbirth it is an exchange between the �human� world that receives the baby and the �alien� one, which is compensated via a mediator, the midwife. money also tends to function symbolically. irina martynova noted that people who do not pay their midwife properly may fall sick. once a family that had treated her badly lost the apartment where they lived and all their savings. on the other hand, the midwife should not feel resentful when she receives less money than she expected. liudmila vasil�evna observed that when the midwife is not satisfied with the amount of money she receives, problems including infant deaths will result in her practice. these beliefs demonstrate that the midwife is still perceived as a ritual specialist and a mediator between two worlds. in russian traditional culture the cycle of birth rituals incorporating the new member into the community concluded with the baptismal dinner. the �babina kasha” ritual (midwife�s porridge) took place over dinner. the midwife made some sweetened porridge, and then collected payment for it from the guests. in this way the community rewarded the local midwife and formally thanked her for providing it with a new member, thus maintaining the fecundity of the community as a whole [listova 1989: 157-160; kabakova 2001: 111-115]. elements of couvade were incorporated into the festival: plenty of salt was put on the father�s porridge. in some places, the pot containing hot porridge was tied to his abdomen, and then people smashed it with sticks [kabakova 2001: 113]. in some of the parenting centers the babina kasha ritual has been preserved. here is the description of this custom as practiced in the �dragotsennost’� (gem) parenting school: commentator: kirill is nine days old. he was born here, in the waters of the black sea. today his parents, stanislav and tat�iana, have arranged a festival in his honor. everybody has came to eat some sweetened porridge and drink wine. according to tradition, a father of a baby has to eat the first spoon of porridge. plenty of salt and pepper is added. supposedly, by eating this disgusting dish, the father takes upon himself all the troubles the baby might otherwise have had in the future. [vas�kova 2001] 71 the presentation of the baby to the group by the midwife then follows. the presentation is accompanied by the jokes and laughter that in traditional culture were an essential part of all fertility rituals. * * * in general, the ritual actions performed by contemporary homebirth midwives differ considerably from those of the past. since the folk tradition of midwifery had been broken, the midwives who entered the profession in the late twentieth century were obliged to re-create tradition. however, in order to lend authority to their practices, they assert that this represents a continuation of older beliefs. they declare that they practice �traditional childbirth,� rather than �non-traditional childbirth,� the term medical personnel apply to their work. in trying to recreate a monolithic body of tradition, they aim to collect and assemble different pieces of information about traditional midwifery and childbirth. however, using this information in the traditional manner is impossible. contemporary midwives inevitably have to fill in the lacunae, reinterpret the vague customs of the past and add new ones based on recent scientific advances. however, though the actual form that various ritual actions took have been altered and reinterpreted, the main archetypal structures of the ritual are intact. when people speak about their feelings as ritual participants, we can observe these patterns. during the ritual, latter-day participants feel deeply integrated into a body of cosmic connections. thus, midwives� devotion to their work and parents� deep respect for them, the careful treatment of the placenta, as well as the sanctification of maternity and experience of extended states of consciousness during labor, are all examples of archetypal structures at work during the ritual. so, too, is feeling part of humanity or one�s country through all its history, speaking directly to god and believing in the invisible ties connecting seemingly distant events. whether particular elements of traditional customs are being interpreted and reproduced properly or not, the ritual continues to function as a means of transmitting society's values to its members and preserving safely the orderly principles of human life in relation to the universe. notes 1 this article is a part of a larger project, �the natural childbirth movement in russia: an anthropological perspective,� supported by the research support scheme of the open seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 72 society support foundation, grant no.: 997/2000. it is based on material collected during my field research in moscow and petersburg in 2000-2001, including participant observation as well as interviews with �spiritual midwives� and people with personal experience of homebirth. these were in-depth unstructured interviews conducted at the interviewee�s home or at the parenting school. before that, in 1995-1999, while working on my dissertation [belousova 1999], i interviewed another group of seventy women from petersburg, moscow and the russian community in the estonian cities of tartu and tallinn who had given birth in hospital. for the current article, i have also used books and journals published by parenting centers, as well as newspaper articles and documentary movies about homebirth and relevant russian web materials. where the quotation is not attributed, it has been drawn from records of interviews held in my personal archive. i would like to thank all my informants for sharing their experience and deliberations with me. 2 for more detailed data on the history and practice of maternity care in the soviet union, see: levi 1950; holland and mckevitt 1985. 3 see nancy ries for an excellent discussion of these issues in the post-soviet period [ries 1997]. 4 the icon of the mother of god, �help in birth-giving,� is the only icon to portray the virgin with her hair uncovered. 5 for the purposes of comparison, the cost of birth assistance and rooming in moscow commercial maternity hospitals ranges from $400-2500. while free facilities remain universal, families who can afford these prices prefer the commercial option. 6 commenting on the semiotics of the lithotomy position in american hospital birth, robbie davis-floyd claims that it is supposed to symbolize the worship of maleconnoted technology (�babies born of science and technology must be born �up��) as opposed to women�s natural world (which is associated with �down�) [davis-floyd 1992: 124]. 7 according to students of �national character,� popular during the rise of the psychological school in american anthropology (1930s � 1940s), the docile behavior of russians when dealing with authority, and their sporadic violent �explosions,� resulted from them being tightly swaddled as babies [gorer and rickman 1949]. this �swaddling 73 hypothesis,� still receives widespread support, including from some outside the �natural childbirth� community. 8 on baby-yoga positions see: trunov and kitaev 1993. bibliography baiburin, a. k. 1993. ritual v traditsionnoi kul�ture: strukturno-semanticheskii analiz vostochnoslavianskikh obriadov [ritual in traditional culture: the structural and semantic analysis of east slavic rites]. st petersburg: nauka. baranov, d. a. 2001. �rodinnyi obriad: vremia, prostranstvo, dvizhenie� [birth rite: time, space and motion]. in e. a. belousova (ed.), rodiny, deti, povitukhi v traditsiiakh narodnoi kul'tury [birth rites, children and midwives in folk tradition]. moscow: russian state university for the humanities, pp. 9-30. belousova, e. a. 2001. �prima materia: sotsializatsiia zhenshchiny v rodil�nom dome� [prima materia: woman�s socialization in a maternity hospital]. trudy fakul�teta etnologii [research papers from the ethnology department]. st petersburg: european university in st.petersburg press. vol. 1, pp. 73-95. bernshtam, t. a. 2000. molodost� v simvolizme perekhodnykh obriadov vostochnykh slavian: uchenie i opyt tserkvi v narodnom khristianstve [youth in east slavic rites of passage: church doctrine and experience as presented in folk christianity]. st petersburg: peterburgskoe vostokovedenie. charkovskii, igor� 1999. �kolybel� chelovechestva ili industriia invalidnosti� [the cradle of mankind or the industry of disability production]. interview by i. semenov. igor� charkovskii's website: http://charkovsky.chat.ru/frames.htm. davis-floyd, robbie e. 1992. birth as an american rite of passage. berkeley-los angeles-london: university of california press. dik-rid, grantli 1997. rody bez strakha: original�nyi podkhod k estestvennomu rozhdeniiu rebenka. st petersburg � moscow � kharkov � minsk: piter. 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(eds), balto-slavianskie issledovaniia [balto-slavic studies]. moscow: nauka, pp. 175-97. ivanov v. v. and v. n. toporov. 1995b. �mokosh�.� in v. ia. petrukhin et al. (eds), slavianskaia mifologiia. entsiklopedicheskii slovar� [slavic mythology. an encyclopedia.]. moscow: ellis lak, pp. 264-65. ivanov v. v. and v. n. toporov. 1995c. �rod.� in v. ia. petrukhin et al., slavianskaia mifologiia. entsiklopedicheskii slovar� [slavic mythology. an encyclopedia.]. moscow: ellis lak, p. 335. kabakova, g. i. 2001. antropologiia zhenskogo tela v slavianskoi traditsii [the anthropology of the female body in slavic tradition]. moscow: ladomir. leboie, fridrikh. 1988. za rozhdenie bez nasiliia. moscow: n.p. [russian translation of: leboyer, frédérick. 1984. pour une naissance sans violence. paris: seuil]. 75 levi, m. f. 1950. istoriia rodovspomozheniia v sssr [the history of maternity care in the ussr]. moscow: ussr academy of medical sciences. levin, eve. 1991. �childbirth in pre-petrine russia: canon law and popular traditions�. in barbara evans clements et al. (eds), russia's women: accommodation, resistance, transformation. berkeley: university of california press, pp. 44-59. listova t. a. 1996. ��nechistota� zhenshchiny (rodil�naia i mesiachnaia) v obychaiakh i predstavleniiakh russkogo naroda� [female impurity (associated with childbirth and menstruation) in russian customs and beliefs]. in a. l. toporkov (ed.), seks i erotika v russkoi traditsionnoi kul�ture [sex and the erotic in russian traditional culture]. moscow: ladomir, pp. 151-74. listova, t. a. 1989. �russkie obriady, obychai i poveria, sviazannye s povival�noi babkoi (vtoraia polovina 19 � 20-e gg. 20 v.)� [russian rituals, customs and beliefs connected with the rural midwife]. in m. m. gromyko and t. a. listova (eds), russkie: semeinyi i obshchestvennyi byt [russians: their family and social life]. moscow: nauka, pp. 142-71. maksimov, s. v. 1994. nechistaia, nevedomaia i krestnaia sila [the evil, unknown and heavenly power]. st petersburg: too �poliset.� mauss, marcel. 1950. �essai sur le don. forme et raison de l�echange dans les sociétés archaïques�. sociologie et anthropologie. paris: puf. martynova, irina. 1999-2002. �istoriia vodnykh rodov v rossii� [the history of waterbirth in russia]. pts. 1-9. mailing list rozhdenie bez nasiliia [birth without violence]. http://birth.ft.inc.ru. no. 1-82. naumenko, g. m. 1998. etnografiia detstva. sbornik fol�klornykh i etnograficheskikh materialov [the ethnography of childhood. a collection of folk and ethnographic materials]. moscow: belovod�e. nekrylova, a. f. 2000. �sviataia varvara v narodnoi kul'ture� [st. barbara in folk culture]. in m. l. lur�e (ed.), traditsiia v fol'klore i literature: stat'i, publikatsii, metodicheskie razrabotki prepodavatelei i uchenikov akademicheskoi gimnazii sankt-peterburgskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta [tradition in folklore and literature]. st petersburg: akademicheskaia gimnaziia sankt-peterburgskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, pp. 52-65. oden, mishel� 1994. vozrozhdennye rody. moscow: akva. [russian translation of odent, michel. 1976. bien naître. paris: seuil.] seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 http://birth.ft.inc.ru/ 76 ovchinnikova, ol�ga. 1998. chto nam stoit dom postroit�: traditsionnaia krestianskaia kul�tura kak osnova postroeniia sovremennykh russkikh populiarnykh tekstov i kul�turnoi praktiki. [traditional russian culture as a basis for contemporary russian popular texts and cultural practice]. tampere: tampereen yliopisto. popov, g. 1996. �russkaia narodno-bytovaia meditsina� [russian popular medicine]. in m. toren (ed.), russkaia narodnaia meditsina i psikhoterapiia [russian popular medicine and psychotherapy]. st petersburg: litera. postnova, iu. v. �o rabote s golosom v rodakh� [about working with the voice during labor]. web site of �dragotsennost�� parenting school http://www.gemschool.ru/art_post2.html rei sondra, 1985. ideal�noe rozhdenie. abbreviated translation by m[ikhail] t[runov]. moscow. [russian translation of: ray, sondra. 1985. ideal birth. berkeley: celestial arts.] ries, nancy. 1997. russian talk: culture and conversation during perestroika. ithaca and london: cornell university press. sargunas tat�iana, sargunas alexei (eds.). 1992. akva: besedy s igorem charkovskim. rasskazy o rodakh v vode [aqua: conversations with igor charkovskii. waterbirth stories]. moscow: t-oko. sargunas, aleksei. 1992. novyi svet: voda i rozhdenie [novyi svet: water and childbirth]. documentary film. aleksei sargunas (dir.). moscow: akva. sargunas, tatiana. 1998. �ritual i estestvennye rody� [ritual and natural childbirth]. paper given at a round table discussion: �povitukhi, rodiny, deti v traditsionnoi kul�ture� [midwives, birth rites and children in traditional culture]. moscow: russian state university for the humanities. sedakova, i. a. 1999. �krik v poveriiakh i obriadakh, sviazannykh s rozhdeniem rebenka� [crying in childbirth beliefs and customs]. in s. m. tolstaia (ed.), mir zvuchashchii i molchashchii: semiotika zvuka i rechi v traditsionnoi kul'ture slavian [the audible and the silent world: the semiotics of sound and speech in traditional slavic culture]. мoscow: indrik. slashchev, v. v. 1995. �paraskeva piatnitsa.� in v. ia. petrukhin et al., slavianskaia mifologiia. entsiklopedicheskii slovar� [slavic mythology. an encyclopedia.]. moscow: ellis lak, pp. 297-98. stepanova, e. 2001. �bereginia.� chadushki. pravoslavnaia gazeta dlia detei i roditelei. [progeny. the russian orthodox newspaper for children and parents.] no. 2 (7), december 2001. http://www.gemschool.ru/art_post2.html 77 tolstoi, n. i. 1995. �bereginia.� in n. i. tolstoi et al. (eds), slavianskie drevnosti. ethnolingvisticheskii slovar�. [slavic antiquities. an ethno-linguistic dictionary]. vol. 1. moscow: mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, pp. 155-56. trunov, mikhail and leonid kitaev. 1993. ekologiia mladenchestva: pervyi god [infant ecology: the first year of life]. moscow: ecologiia sem�i. tsaregradskaia, zh. v. 2001. psikhologiia novorozhdennogo [the psychology of the newborn]. moscow: n.p. vas�kova, natal�ia 2001. podvodnyi roddom [the underwater maternity hospital]. documentary film. natal�ia vas�kova (dir.). vlaskina, t. iu. 1998. �donskie bylichki o povitukhakh� [�true stories� about traditional midwives in the don region]. zhivaia starina. no. 2 (18), pp. 15-17. vlaskina, t. iu. 2001. �mifologicheskii tekst rodin� [the mythological text of the birth rite]. in e. a. belousova (ed), rodiny, deti, povituhhi v traditsiiakh narodnoi kul�tury [birth rites, children and midwives in folk tradition]. moscow: russian state university for the humanities, pp. 61-78. zharkin, n. a. �dukhovnoe akusherstvo i pravoslavie v rossii� [spiritual midwifery and orthodoxy in russia]. http://www.mama.ru/birth/zha03.htm seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 http://www.mama.ru/birth/zha03.htm editorial satement 13 articles towards the systematization of stanza forms in the russian folk song m. a. lobanov russian institute for the history of the arts, st. petersburg in both byliny and literary poetry texts are organized such that each succeeding line adds something new to the exposition, which proceeds without interruption from the beginning to the end (abcde�). in literary verse the division of a poetic text into stanzas does not alter this principle. folk songs, in which stanzas are formed by the regular repetition of lines or by the regular inclusion of a refrain, traditionally differ, because these features do not supplement the information being conveyed in the text. such repetitions are explained by the melody of a song, which is more developed and longer than the accompanying verbal material. this demonstrates the non-linguistic nature of stanza forms, which were in their formation long ago connected with choreography and the music created by it. just as a stanza in poetry represents a group of lines, so the melody of a song is an articulation of several musical sections, which may be related to each other by similarity (аа), contrast (ав), or a combination of both (such as авав or аавв). the end of a song's stanza is perceived together with the end of the melody and the following stanza is perceived from the outset as a repetition of this melody. however, the melody alone, without the text, does not permit a more detailed judgement about the internal structure of the stanza in a given song. thus rudneva [1994] demonstrated that several kinds of poetic stanza can be sung to a melody with the same sequence of musical sections; the reverse correlation seldom occurs. on the contrary, the text of a well recorded song permits the stanza structures to be classified with maximum accuracy. in reality, the number of lines in a stanza simultaneously represents the number of musical sections in its melody. in this case, the line represents a single rhythmic principle which determines both the melody and the words of a given song; over and above this, it also contains a specific verbal pattern for combining poetic lines into stanzas. as a measure of the overall musical-poetic rhythm, the line is more accessible and intelligible than the melody. it is no accident that stanza forms are classified by line in literary as well as in musicological studies. although some argue for song stanza forms to be studied as a coordination of word and melody, and although musicologists have accumulated some experience seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 14 in applying such a method, nevertheless the literary approach to stanza forms remains the dominant one and is likely to remain so in the future. however, the study of versification as applied to folksong verse, has expressed relatively little interest in stanza forms, tending to exclude them from consideration.(1) in the present article stanzas will be examined from the viewpoint of the organization of a song's verbal texture, and an attempt made to trace the development of stanzas in russian folk songs through a systematization of its forms. folk song stanza forms are not heterogeneous according to the degree of their �crystalization.� when simple and distinct stanza forms exist, clear classification features can be used systematically to separate them one from another. but there exist as well intermediate forms which cannot easily be classified. should they be considered a simple stanza or a long line divided into its component parts? or should they be regarded as a couplet or quatrain? at the same time, such intermediary forms can be just as stable as those in the first category, since they have a definite structure, are reproduced and preserved in the tradition. if stanza forms in folk songs are viewed as something that continuously evolves, stanzas of the first type can presumably be connected with stages in the crystalization of forms, and the second type with crises and transitional periods. as will be shown below, four groups of crystalized forms and at least three intermediary forms can be distinguished in the overall picture of stanza forms in russian folk songs. insofar as the line serves as the measure of stanza complexity, the stichic (line by line) form can be taken as the first level in the systematization proposed here. the stichic form has been observed in northern byliny, laments, some game songs (including those of children), some cradle songs, and the sposeefasken verse of �wisecracks� (pribautki) and incantations. the stichic form is known to many european peoples, but in russian texts in this form (in particular those from the russian north) a consistent rhythm predominates in the melody and, correspondingly, in the lines sung to it. a free-verse like line in this form occurs in laments local to the riazan�, penza and southern part of nizhnii novgorod regions, as well as to the area on the border of russia and belarus. i vy, sherye kukushechki! i chto zh vy perestali kukuvat�? i vy, melki ptashechki, i ne stali shchebetat�? i razliubimyi moi diatenyk priiatnyi! 15 i chto zh ty tak ot menia uletel? [razumovskaia 1998: no. 38] for traditional sung folklore what could be called the line as stanza represents the next level in the complexity of stanzaic patterns. here the creativity of folk poetry reaches an apex unsurpassed in succeeding levels of complexity. with very simple means it is possible to convert a line into a stanza, that is, into a structure which consists of at least two verse sections: a refrain word or several such words are inserted after each line. experiments with melismatic transformation (raspev) in the performance of epic texts in stanzas have been carried out by using precisely this simple form. the bylina �il�ia muromets on the falcon ship� and the historical song about the death of mikhail skopin-shuiskii are examples; both were sung in siberia with the refrain vinograd’e krasno-zelenoe. 1. po sinemu moriu po khvalynskomu, vinograd’e krasnoe, zelenoe. 2. khodil-gulial sokol-korabl�, vinograd’e krasnoe, zelenoe . . . [makarenko 1913: 133] a different variant with essentially the same composition is also possible: the refrain word then appears before the content line. similar features occur in ritual songs and also in laments, where the refrain words without meaning, oi, toshneshen’ko, ox-ti mnetsen’ki, or, in the tradition of eastern vologda, o-e’ei are only encountered before the content part of the line.(2) thus for example: oi, toshnekhon’ko, ty moia da milá lada, oi, toshnekhon’ko, ia ved� shla da primetila, oi, toshnekhon’ko, ia svoiu da milú ladu . . . [efimenkova 1980: no 39] or: okhti mnetsen’ki, moe serdeshnoe ditiatko, okhti mnetsen’ki, seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 16 ty kuda nariazhaesh�se, okhti mnetsen’ki, ty kuda sobiraesh�se . . . [efimenkova 1980: no 69] general speaking, concluding refrain words are more often perceived as a separate section allowing the preceding stanza to be understood. however, words of this kind at the beginning are usually fused with the content bearing part of the line. no matter how many words are in the refrain, in the examples cited the refrain is almost equal to the content line of the stanza. sometimes the refrain can be shorter, as, for example, the refrain words ekhi, lady, or slava in wedding songs and yuletide fortune-telling songs (podbliudnye pesni). in any case, the crystalized �stanza with a refrain� will either exceed the number of syllables in the longest lines in russian folk poetry (for example, the thirteen-syllable line predominating in northern byliny and funeral laments, or the line of 8+6 syllables), or it will not be consonant with any meters in sung verse, where a given number of syllables is not exceeded. in the reverse case, as will become evident later, this can develop into a critical situation and become a transitional phenomenon. another way of forming a stanza out of a single line is to repeat the line which concludes the preceding stanza in the beginning of the next stanza (ab, bc, cd . . .). in this instance, a song is expressed in couplets, but actually only a single recurrent new line contributes to the formation of this simple stanza form. a similar stanzaic pattern is common in wedding and also in non-ritual lyric songs. u stola bylo u stolika, u stola bylo besednogo. u stola bylo besednogo, protiv zerkala khrustal'nogo, protiv zerkala khrustal�nogo. tut stoial-to dobroi molodets . . . [zemtsovskii 1974: no. 58а] if we add to this that a line taken from a preceding stanza can be doubled in the following stanza, thereby forming a three-line structure, it becomes clear that the above type also has variants. a stanza of this type can be found in wedding songs from south-west russia and also in the songs of some siberian settlers: 17 1. stupaite, boiare, stupaite, boiare, da ne boitesia nochi. 2. da ne boitesia nochi, da ne boitesia nochi, bog vam na pomochi. [pokhabov 2000: no. 26] and finally there is a third type: pars pro toto. here each line is changed into a complete stanza thanks to its repetition in toto (аа), or to the repetition of parts of it (а/а2; а /а2 а2 ; а /а2 а2 а2; а1 а1а2 а2; а1 а1 аа; аа а2 а2), or to combinations formed from the repetition of parts such as refrain words (а/ r а2; а /а2 r а2).(3) in effect, the first variant is the universal one, encountered in the ritual, round dance, non-ritual lyric and dance songs of all east slav peoples. the second and third variants are characteristic of songs connected with the dance or some other regular movement, although this is not obligatory. а/а2 1. sveti, sveti, mesiachek, segodniashniu noch�, ei, segodniashniu noch�. 2. prosveti dorozhen�ku s kontsa i v konets, ei, s kontsa i v konets . . . [rubtsov 1991: no. 108] а /а2 а2 1. a na gore tserkovka tserkovka, tserkovka. 2. na tserkovke buldovka buldovka, buldovka . . . [rubtsov 1991: no. 12] а /а2 а2 а2 1. da ne po polu zhemchug katalsia, katalsia, katalsia, katalsia. 2. da i pavel zhenit�sia sriazhalsia, sriazhalsia, sriazhalsia, sriazhalsia . . . [kolpakova 1967: no. 142] seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 18 а1 а1а2 а2 shlo-proshlo solntse, shlo-proshlo solntse da pozad� lesov, da pozad’ lesov . . . [novikova i pushkina 1986: no. 77] а1 а а2 kupalenka, kupalenka � noch� malen�ka, noch’ malen’ka . . . [razumovskaia 1998: no. 44] а1 а1 аа seiu, veiu, seiu, veiu, seiu, veiu bel lenochek, seiu, veiu lenochek . . . [kaluzhnikova 1997: no. 70] аа а2 а2 vniz po matushke po volge, vniz po matushke po volge, vot po volge, vot po volge . . . [vlasov 1992: no. 69] а / r а2 1. oi, poseiu konopelku, rano-rano, konopelku. 2. ne na pakhotnu zemelku, rano-rano-rano, vot zemelku . . . [kolpakova 1967: no. 123] а / а2 r а2 1. a my maslentsu sostrekali, sostrekali, dusha, sostrekali. 2. my na gorushku vykhodili, vykhodili, dusha, vykhodili . . . 19 [zemtsovskii 1967b: no. 3] а1 а1 а/ r а2 r а2 poshel kozel, poshel kozel, poshel kozel v ogorod, ai, liuli, v ogorod, ai, liuli, v ogorod . . . [from the author�s own field recordings] these quotations from song texts clearly correspond to the level defined by the text in the systematization of stanza forms. however, in the versification of russian folk songs forms have been preserved where the regular subdivision of a line and repetition of an isolated colon or augmentation of the refrain have been realized within the poetic line. in this case, a structural category representing something intermediary has been created; this is still not a stanza, but it is also not a unified line. such a situation reveals a crisis, which in this instance has been expressed in the development of a new form within the old framework. thus a line, which has a fixed caesura, consists of 4+3 syllables and coincides with the four-foot trochee, is accompanied by the regular repetition of the last colon. acquiring the form а а2, such a line corresponds to one of the variations in the verse of the well-known russian song �kamarinskaia.� vo gorenke vo novói, vo novói stoial stolik dubovoi, dubovoi . . . [lobanov 1998: no. 59] compare: nabelenaia, namazanaia, aloi lentoi opoiasanaia . . . [zhekulina 1979: no. 417] the fact that in the folk tradition a similar form with a doubled colon is perceived not as a stanza but a line, is demonstrated also by the rhymed couplet in the first pair of the above lines: vo novói – dubovói. it is understandable that because of the rhymes these lines with doubling are combined in couplets. however, attachment to a line rather than expansion into a stanza is proven, in our opinion, also by the metrical equality of the expanded group to a line which corresponds to a longer meter. for example, this occurs when the content part of a line ends with refrain words. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 20 iz-pod kustyshka olen�, liuli-liuli, pod rakitovym olen�, liuli-liuli . . . . [kolpakova 1967: no. 148] compare: edin nov monastyr� stanovilsia molodoi chernets sprovostrilsia . . . [kolpakova 1963: no. 103] but if a line with a refrain or repetition is not equivalent to a longer meter, this must undoubtedly represent a phenomenon related to the level of a stanza. the next clear level in the systematization of song stanza forms involves the couplet, that is, a real couplet formed from different lines. in russian sung folklore couplets were formed in two different ways, the first involving a long line with caesura being broken up into two short lines. couplets of this kind acquired the same principles of stanza formation as are produced during the conversion of a line into a stanza, but without the same diversity. thus the composition of a stanza, in which a refrain word comes after a complete line but a colon in this line is repeated (а / r а2 ), has been preserved, but it has passed to the level of combined lines (авrв). iz boiarskikh-to vorot vykhodil shel�ma-kholop, da ai, zdunai, moi zdunai, vykhodil shel’ma-kholop. [kolpakova 1963: no. 252] songs, sung with a similar disposition of the text but with the refrain ei, liubo, liubo da liubo da liuli recast from the earlier refrain ai liuli, became drill songs in the russian army in the nineteenth century. a composition with repetition of the last line of the preceding stanza at the beginning of the next stanza (ab/bc) was converted into the repetition of couplets (abcd/cdef). although this form is common in dance songs, in the example quoted below from a ballad the text contains a large proportion of lines with rhymed couplets. this is an indisputable indicator of short lines and not of hemistichs in a long line. 1. pod iablon�iu zelenoiu, pod kudriavoi, zelenoi, sidel molodets takoi, da 21 nezhenatyi, kholostoi. 2. sidel molodets takoi, da nezhenatyi, kholostoi, nezhenatyi, kholostoi, da derzhal gusli pod poloi . . . [balakirev 1957: № 26] the same compositional repetition of the ending of the preceding stanza in the beginning of the next stanza has been even more distinctively transformed in �largo songs� (protiazhnaia pesnia)(4) with a specific kind of apanadiplosis (vydelennyi zapev).(5) in russian songs this is a universal type of stanza in which the repeated part does not comprise more than one third of the text in a new stanza. don cossack byliny, which are performed as largo songs, were most likely transformed from a stichic into a stanza form in precisely this manner: 1. ne svetila da krasnaia solnyshka da-i ona . . . ona rovno de . . . oi, rovno deviat� let, 2. e-oi, rovno deviat’ let, ai, da na desiatym da vot tolichka godochku da krasna . . . krasnaia proglia . . . ai, no proglianula, 3. e-oi, ona proglianula, ai, da prosvetila byla krasnaia solnyshka da-i ona . . . ona vse chisto . . . ai, vse chisto polia . . . [dobrovol�skii and korguzalov 1981: no. 88] a second way of forming couplets does not involve the transformation of one thing into another, but arose completely independently. couplets of this kind consist of short lines which are primarily rhymed. like the stichic form they can be considered one of the earliest forms in the systematization of stanzas. they are not widespread in russian folklore, occurring mainly in lullabies: baiushki,baiu! kolotushek nadaiu. bai da liuli! khot� segodnia umri. u nas grechikha na toku, ia blinov napeku, seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 22 a tebia, ditiatku, na pogost povoloku . . . [anikin 1991: 70] a more interesting variant emerges when only one of the lines is doubled. in the example quoted below the stanza is organized according to the formula abb. however, the eight-syllable line is not composed in the four-foot trochee, but in syllabic verse with a caesura and hemistichs of 5 + 3 syllables. this song is obviously derived from ukrainian tradition, where three-line stanzas with the pattern aab are common. 1. stoliki moi zastlany, gostiushki moi zazvany, gostiushki moi zazvany. 2. ia na vas, gosti, divliusia, da gorilochki nap'iusia, da gorilochki nap’iusia . . . [samarenko and etinger 1978: no. 87] another possible structural complication of the couplet as a stanza form in north russian comes from its enrichment through a developed refrain. in principle this takes place in narrative songs where the stichic form has been reworked into a stanzaic form because of the interlaying of the text with refrain words. the same method, but in regard to the couplet, is applied in barge hauler refrains (pripevki) such as dubinushka or khodom-vodom. they represent sets of short couplet songs not connected by content and alternating with a refrain consisting of a number of poetic lines: nu, rebiata, prinimaisia, za dubinushku khvataisia. ei, dubinushka, ukhnem, ei, zelenaia sama poidem, podernem, podernem da ukhnem! [banin 1971: 175] what is known as the stradanie, a special, two-line variant of the chastushka,(6) belongs to the same level in the stanzaic organization of a song text. a regular chastushka in the form of a quatrain often follows each stradanie couplet. through its content, this quatrain is connected with the couplet in the initial part (zapev) of the stradanie. however, this lends a new quality to the 23 form since a small two-part couplet is formed. several multi-stanza songs, chronicling presentday local events, are sung to the tunes of two-part stradaniia of this kind. in them the text, which has a similar couplet structure, develops from beginning to end without stanzaic repetition: okh, vy sygraite �razlivnova�(7) okh, dlia movo serdtsá bol�shova. ne vozite po bol�nitsam, ne studite moiu krov�. nichavo bol�novo netu � menia muchaet liubov�! . . . [from the author�s own field recordings] the couplet represents the limit of complexity in the line of the traditional russian �long song.� when the quatrains of literary versification were absorbed into the peasant song, it emerged that in largo songs quatrains could be mechanically divided into two couplet stanzas though cross rhyme was ignored. only the basic framework of meters remained in the folk melody (raspev), while rhyme was not always observed. 1. ia vechor-to kak v etu poru vykhodila ia po . . , oi, i poguliat�. 2. vykhodila ia poguliat’. ottogo ia tol�ko vykhodila, chtob milogo dru . . , i druzhka uvidat�. 3. chtob milogo uvidat', ia vechor-to druzhka milogo unimala ia no(i) . . , okh, ia nochevat�, 4. unimala ia nochevat': � ty-to nochui-ko, nochui-ko, moi liubeznoi, nochui nochen'ku, nochui, okh, i u menia. 5. nochui nochku ty u menia � � oi, rad by ia, rad by tol�ko da nochevati, boius', dó svetu, e-okh, i ia prospliu, 6. boius', dó svetu prospliu. � � oi, ty-to ne boise-to, miloi, ne pugaise, ia sama-to pora . . , oi, porane ia vstaiu . . . seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 24 [zhekulina 1979: no. 44] in a different stanzaic pattern, the analogous reduction of the quatrain to the level of a couplet also took place in the later songs of the various cossack traditions. in them the song stanza was formed simply by doubling each pair of lines in the quatrain. 1. vstala, prosnulasia zoren�ka iasnaia, slyshatsia zvony podkov. vstala, prosnulasia zoren’ka iasnaia slyshatsia zvony podkov 2. edet v nabege stanitsa udalaia sotni orlov-kazakov edet v nabege stanitsa udalaia sotni orlov-kazakov . . . [kaluzhnikova 1998: no. 19] for the reasons given above, we have to disagree with rudneva, who suggests that �songs with a four-line poetic stanza became established (emphasis ours, m. l.) in the rural environment . . . through city songs set to the words of russian poets being introduced to the population at large� [rudneva 1994: 49]. the traditional poetic thought of the people, formed on the basis of the long chorus song, did not accept the new stanza form, but disrupted it and accommodated it to its own long established canons. here again we can distinguish a crisis zone in the systematization of song stanzas. the division of a long line into two short ones also constitutes a crisis zone, since the first method of forming a two-line stanza in russian folk songs is connected with a division of this kind. in other words, the majority of the items being systematized and examined on the level of a couplet, turn out to possess ambiguous and unstable characteristics. among all the possible features inherent to transitional and crisis phenomena, just two actually exist; one is rising (from the level of a line to a couplet) and the other is descending (from the level of a quatrain). the quatrain was fully assimilated by the russian folk song only in the chastushka, the single, so-called �stable form� in russian poetic folklore. when literary verse found a distinct resonance in the folk tradition, the quatrain came to represent the fourth level of stanza complexity. nevertheless, the chastushka contains examples of a stanzaic melody with repetition of the couplet which completes a preceding stanza at the beginning of the following stanza (�sormach� and analogous forms of the chastushka in povolzh�e).(8) however, the rhymed 25 quatrain with incomplete cross rhyme is strictly observed in this type of chastushka. there also are other kinds of rhyming which confirm the four-part poetic stanza of the chastushka.(9) thus in the stanza formation of russian folk songs we can observe four levels of complexity in the development from a stichic form to a quatrain with cross rhyme. parallel to this phenomenon there has been a decline followed by the complete disappearance of the repetition of lines. the rhythm of the line as a song�s contents and the rhythm of the melody have fused. productive phenomena in the long song have disappeared along with the tendency to develop a quatrain. the multi-stanza song appeared at the same time as the chastushka and continues to appear. however, its life and productivity have not been inspired by traditional village culture village because of its different social base. notes 1 in particular, in his recent seminal book on the verse of lyric songs james bailey [1993: 17-18] only touches upon stanza forms in regard to repetition in the text of songs. he points out the necessity of separating word repetition relating directly to the song text, which, for this reason, pertains to the literary study of verse, from repetition arising from the musical structure. in his opinion, the latter demands a primarily musicological analytical approach. however, those musicologists, who study the stanza forms of songs, focus on their own field and try not to touch upon the poetic word. one thinks of the highly innovatory research done by kvitka [1971], who examined stanza forms in the songs of many slavic peoples from the musical time durations in the melody of the lines in a stanza, but not from the organization of the lines. in the songs which interested him, stanzas were formed through the repetition of its basic lines (aabb). the first a and last b were fitted into bars of 2/4, and the last a and first b into bars of 3/4. this produced the rhythmical stanzaic form abba which is characteristic of traditional melodies among many east european peoples. 2 the lines of efimenkova's texts have here been divided into separate phrases to demonstrate each verse more clearly. 3 in the discussion that follows, a = a full line; а1 = the initial hemistich of this line; а2 = the concluding hemistich of the same line; r = the refrain word which corresponds to a hemistich. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 26 4 the protiazhnaia pesnia is not a genre but a musical form according to which the verbal text is fragmented by word-breaks, repetitions, and inserted particles and exclamations. for a monograph on the subject, see: zemtsovskii [1967a]. 5 the term was coined by gippius [1957: 236]. 6 a type of song originating towards the end of the nineteenth century. these short �ditties,� which are frequently composed in quatrains, are often rhymed, are �fast� (chasto), are normally performed in chains, are usually highly topical and represent the most productive song genre in present-day russian folklore. for a recent study of the chastushka and especially of the stradanie, see: lebedinskii [1984]. 7 razlivnova [on tap] refers to the name of a specific chastushka melody from the western part of tver� oblast'. there is a play on words here: razliv is also a musette, that is, a specific timber in an accordion, and also a way of selling draft alcoholic drinks from barrels rather than in sealed bottles. 8 sormach is the chastushka melody common in nizhnii novgorod oblast' and further south in povolzh'e. the name is derived from the village of sormovo (presently a district of nizhnii novgorod). 9 for rhyming in the chastushka see: iarkho [1984: 143]. bibliography anikin, v. p. 1991. mladenchestvo, detstvo [youth, childhood]. moscow. bailey, james 1993. three russian lyric folk song meters. columbus, oh. balakirev, m. 1957. russkie narodnye pesni dlia odnogo golosa s soprovozhdeniem fortepiano [russian folk songs for one voice with piano accompaniment]. moscow. banin, a. a. 1971. trudovye artel'nye pesni i pripevki [work artel� songs and refrains]. moscow. dobrovol'skii, b. m. and v. v. korguzalov 1981. byliny: russkii muzykal'nyi epos [byliny: russian musical epic]. moscow. efimenkova, b. b. 1980. severnorusskaia prichet' [north russian lament]. moscow. gippius, e. v. 1957. �sborniki russkikh narodnykh pesen� m. a. balakireva� [m. a. balakirev�s collections of folk songs]. in: balakirev, m. russkie narodnye pesni. moscow, 193347. 27 iarkho, b. i. 1984. �sootnoshenie form v russkoi chastushke� [correlation of forms in the russian chastushka]. in: kholshevnikov v. e. (ed.). problemy teorii stikha. leningrad, 137-67. kaluzhnikova, t. i. 1997. traditionnyi russkii muzykal'nyi kalendar' srednego urala [the traditional russian musical calendar of the middle urals]. ekaterinburg and cheliabinsk. kaluzhnikova, t. i. 1998. pesni ural'skikh kazakov [songs of the ural cossacks]. ekaterinburg. kolpakova, n. p. et al. 1963. pesni pechory [songs from the pechora]. moscow and leningrad. kolpakova, n. p. et al. 1967. pesennyi fol'klor mezeni [sung folklore of the mezen']. leningrad. kvitka, k. v. 1971. �ritmicheskaia forma tipa abba v pesniakh slavianskikh narodov� [rhythmical form of the stanza abba in the songs of the slavic peoples]. in: id, izbrannye stat'i v dvukh tomakh. vol. 1. moscow, 37-45. lebedinskii, l. n. 1984. narodnaia muzykal'no-poeticheskaia miniatiura [folk musical and poetic miniature]. moscow. lobanov, m. a. et al. 1998. nizhegorodskaia svad�ba: pushkinskie mesta � nizhegorodskoe povolzh�e � vetluzhskii krai [the nizhnii novgorod wedding: the places associated with pushkin; nizhnii novgorod povolzh�e to the vetluga region]. st petersburg. makarenko, a. a. 1913. sibirskii narodnyi kalendar� v etnograficheskom otnoshenii [the siberian folk calendar and its relationship with ethnography]. (zapiski imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskoeo obshchestva). vol. 36. st petersburg. novikova, a. m., and s. i. pushkina. 1986. russkie narodnye pesni moskovskoi oblasti [russian folk songs of moscow oblast�]. part 1. moscow. pokhabov, v. f. 2000. kul�turnoe nasledie russkikh kuzbass [the cultural heritage of the russians in the kuzbass]. moscow. razumovskaia, e. n. 1998. traditsionnaia muzyka russkogo poozer�ia [traditional music of the russian poozer�e]. st petersburg. rubtsov, f. a. 1991. russkie narodnye pesni smolenskoi oblasti [the russian folk songs of smolensk oblast�]. leningrad. rudneva, a. v. 1994. �o vzaimosviazi stikha i napeva v russkoi narodnoi pesne� [on the interconnections between verse and melody in the russian folk song]. in: russkoe narodnoe muzykal'noe tvorchestvo [russian musical folklore]. moscow, 11-69. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 28 samarenko, v. and m. etinger. 1978. russkie narodnye pesni astrakhanskoi oblasti [the russian folk songs of astrakhan oblast�]. moscow. vlasov, a. n. 1992. a v ust'-tsil'me poiut [and in ust'-tsil'ma they sing]. (no place given). zemtsovskii, i. i. 1967a. russkaia protiazhnaia pesnia [the russian largo song]. leningrad. zemtsovskii, i. i. 1967b. toropetskie pesni: pesni rodiny musorgskogo [toropets songs: songs from musorgsky's homeland]. leningrad. zemtsovskii, i. i. 1974. uglichskie pesni [uglich songs]. leningrad and moscow. zhekulina v. i. et al. 1979. traditionnyi fol'klor novgorodskoi oblasti: pesni, prichitaniia [the traditional folklore of novgorod oblast': songs and laments]. leningrad. (translated by james bailey) editorial satement 92 william hansen. ariadne�s thread: a guide to international tales found in classical literature. ithaca and london: cornell university press, 2001. 548 pp. $45.00. index, bibliography. isbn 0-8014-3670-2. when theseus went into the labyrinth to face the minotaur, he had something no other youth had had before him: ariadne�s thread. the beautiful ariadne, daughter of king minos of crete, fell in love with theseus as he waited to be sacrificed and offered her help. she gave him a thread to unravel as he walked into the depth of the labyrinth and, using ariadne�s thread, theseus was able to find his way back out once he had slain the minotaur. like ariadne�s thread, hansen�s book guides us through the labyrinth of story. his stated purpose is to take classical, meaning greek and roman, narratives and to discuss their relationship to international tale types and motifs. thus, the story of theseus and the minotaur is linked to the widely known and popular folktale the girl as helper in the hero�s flight, at 313c. in the oral version, a woman, usually the daughter of a witch or ogre, falls in love with the hero and promises to help him on the condition that he marry her. after fulfilling various tasks assigned to the hero by her parent, the girl helps him escape by using her magic, turning herself into a well and the hero into a bucket, or casting her comb behind her, at which point it turns into a dense forest. the magic tricks of the girl successfully deter her parent, but the witch or ogre casts a spell so that the hero will forget the girl. usually, the spell takes effect only if the hero performs some action, such as kissing a relative upon his return. the girl warns him not to do so, but he forgets or disobeys, at which point he becomes oblivious to his rescuer and his promise to her and almost marries another. in most tales, though not in the story of ariadne, the girl manages to disenchant the hero and restore his memory at the last moment. the two are then reunited and live happily ever after. when discussing the connection between girl as helper and ariadne, hansen gives the folk versions of this story, their variations, and a bibliography showing where published texts may be found. he discusses the relationship of the folk narratives to classical literature; in this case, theseus and ariadne is but one of three stories that he analyses. finally, he provides copious and wonderfully detailed notes. and girl as helper is but one of the almost one hundred tale types treated by hansen, each of which he covers with equal thoroughness and with seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 93 exemplary sensitivity. truly, this is a monumental work, an encyclopedic compendium of information. while the discussion of international folktales and their realization in classical literature is the heart of hansen�s work, he offers us additional services of great value. his introduction covers the history of folktale scholarship clearly, succinctly, and in eminently readable form. hansen explains the aarne-thompson tale-type index with equal skill. the bibliography at the end of the book is a treasure trove. perhaps most interesting are hansen�s speculations on the relationships between narrative genres. the aarne-thompson tale type index was developed to catalogue folktales and thus we associate the international plots that hansen discusses with folktales in general, and fairy or magic tales in particular. these are stories that are admittedly fantastic. they take place �once upon a time� in a kingdom �three times nine kingdoms away.� their actors have names that are generic (jack, hans, ivan) or descriptive (goldilocks, cinderella, beauty). the classical stories that have related plots and motifs are not magic tales at all, but belong to the category of legend: they are tied to a specific time and place and the actors in them are people who supposedly really lived. thus, in the narrative of ariadne/girl helper, the international version takes place in an unspecified time and place and the girl is known simply as the witch�s or ogre�s daughter, while in the greek narrative, the story takes place in crete, the girl is ariadne, the daughter of minos, and so forth. the usual supposition has been that stories of the legend variety, the ones based on fact or alleged fact, were the originals and that fantastic tales recorded in the early modern period were a later development, an evolution of classical, �factual� tales. the reasoning behind this supposition was the assumption that the human narrative process does not make a story ex nihilo, but starts with a description of a real event which, with time, is forgotten, allowing the narrative to acquire more general and often fantastic attributes. bolstering this line of thought was the fact that classical literature predates recordings of oral folktales. hansen states that his work in classical literature has convinced him that the more general magic tales are the �original� stories and that the greek and roman legends are concretizations of them. and, of course, his entire book shows us in detail how legends and magic tales are related, how, if we take into account the differing characteristics of legend and tale, these two genres can be seen to share the same tale types. hansen�s work has important implications for contemporary narrative scholarship. in ukraine, where i work, as in most other countries within the continuum covered by the at index, seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 94 the people who tell magic tales are few. this situation is usually taken to indicate that oral traditional literature is dying, destroyed by television and other mass media. in the same geographical area, legends abound, but are often dismissed. they are not taken seriously because they are seen as expressions of superstition rather than as art, no matter how long, complex, and well-told they may be. legend plots, as hansen teaches us, are related to tale types. for example, what i have encountered as true accounts of the return of the dead to instruct the living to stop grieving is also at 769. as hansen also points out, certain genres carry prestige at certain times. folktales were once disparaged as lesser literature, if they were considered literature at all. perhaps we should not be so ready to dismiss contemporary legends but should look at their relationship to magic tales, as hansen does for classical literature. moreover, perhaps we should recognize that magic tales, fantastic though they may be, are not entirely art for art�s sake, but are as bound to their time and place as legends. guided by ariadne�s thread, i can now see that a lovely folktale about a snake husband, which i encountered in my fieldwork only once, is related to commonly told legends about conflicts between mothers and daughters. what hansen�s work teaches us is that, even though the snake husband is a folktale and thus one of the few items of its genre still told orally, it should not be seen as an oddity but as one manifestation of a variety of narratives on an important real-life issue. hansen has produced a monumental work. he has dealt with an enormous volume of material his study is a wonderful reference tool. more importantly, he has compared stories that are usually considered distinct. classical literature is often associated with high art and folklore with low. magic tales are usually distinguished from true stories rather than linked to them. hansen�s work reveals connections where distinctions are normally made. as ariadne�s thread led theseus out of the labyrinth, so hansen�s offers to lead us out of the potential trap of old conceptions of narrative. natalie kononenko university of virginia microsoft word folk2006[3] sheryl format3.doc reviews 123 margaret paxson. solovyovo: the story of memory in a russian village. washington, dc: woodrow wilson center press, 2005. distributed by indiana university press. glossary of russian terms. bibliography. index. 389 pp. $24.95 (paper). isbn 0-253-21801-2. how does tradition survive in the russian village after dekulakization, collectivization, and decades of soviet marginalization? the village is a primary source of “russianness,” and many city-dwellers retain strong family ties there. almost all village residents who remain year-round are elderly, but younger relatives return in summer to help with work and then share in the harvest. what will happen as the older generation dies, personal connections grow tenuous, and traditional ways of life are lost? margaret paxson’s ethnography emerges from this kind of pathos: her hostess realizes she can no longer care for the family cow, and this means a shift from farming to life on a not-very-generous pension. paxson’s solovyovo: the story of memory in a russian village is based on her doctoral dissertation, itself the result of extended fieldwork in a village near belozersk, in the russian north. the book offers rich information on the folklore and folk life of the area and some very interesting oral history, especially on the 1930s and the second world war. evocative photographs by lucian perkins, interspersed between chapters, make the location easier to visualize. paxson identifies it only in her afterward as “the village i have called solovyovo,” a gesture of renaming that both protects her informants’ privacy and creates a sort of imaginary place, generalized by its nowhereness though located more or less exactly with regard to towns big enough to find on a map. until the 1990s no american researcher could have undertaken such a project, a fruit of post-soviet access and scholarly collaboration. paxson found the village and met its residents by way of russian anthropologists, though it is her own personality and observant nature that provoke their responses and gather an enormous mass of information. sifting and shaping this material to bring out its meaning, paxson arranges it in chapters on “being ‘one’s own’,” “radiance,” wonders, healing, etc., and frequently using one or another helpful concept from theory and scholarship – she pulls in not only anthropology, ethnography, folklore and folklife, but also political science, history, and linguistics as needed. footnotes and bibliography root the book in surrounding discourses of soviet and russian studies without folklorica 2006, vol. xi 124 interrupting the main text’s flow. the overarching theme of memory encourages a loose structure, informative but not sharply pointed. paxson evokes the structure of russian traditional society beginning with the khoziain and khoziaika – from her own hosts, the man and woman of the house, through domestic and nature spirits, local kolkhoz heads, and national leaders such as stalin and yel’tsin. (her data predate putin, whose approval ratings seem to depend largely on voters’ perception that he is a strong “khoziain.”). paxson’s lyrical style marks the book strongly, as befits a village she has named plausibly but also evocatively for the nightingale. one example is a paragraph that ponders the importance of icons, family portraits, portraits of state figures, numinous beings in the “red/beautiful corner” (krasnyi ugol – paxson uses english to express the word’s dual meanings): workers belong in the corner, as well – thousand-year-old ancestor workers. perhaps the ancestor workers are more akin to the domovye than to stalin, whose supremely soviet image can look out from that corner as well. perhaps the ancestor workers grant, from that corner, the power of the collective svoi through the long line of the rod, where stalin’s power is that of a distant, oft-forgotten nation khoziain. the danger comes, of course, when that raging power is not forgotten. when he dips into the corner space to subjugate and punish a nation full of svoi. (262) the book invites readers to spend time, taking all 300-some pages to learn what the author has gathered and ponder what she asks and suggests, letting its significance accumulate and settle. this may make it more accessible and fascinating to any reader, but perhaps less so to readers who want to skim for facts fast and effectively, to lift a few quick quotes or polemical assertions rather than submerging themselves in the rhythms of the text. the paragraph i cite also shows how paxson leaves key russian words in her text (svoi, obrashchenie, rod, and others); she tends to explain or define rather than translating. a two-page glossary of terms makes this easier on a reader without russian. i wonder about the consequences of not creating or adopting english words; it creates some verbal awkwardness in the text, where words retain their russian significance but float free of their russian grammatical attributes. paxson weaves the russian terms into a web that is deliberately ambiguous in its deployment of meanings – here, too, she asks the reader to enter the mental and linguistic world of the village rather than to stand aside in analysis. citing from the interviews she collected, paxson keeps her reviews 125 translations as literal as possible, respecting the style and delivery of her informants, but on the other hand sometimes making them sound less coherent than they surely were. the book is occasionally marred by sloppy editing, missing words, and inconsistent spelling of russian words. the inconsistencies can be unfortunately distracting, given the book’s many merits. for all the book’s local inflection and deep grounding in russian history, paxson raises issues germane to village life in other countries, including small towns in the us, with their residual folkways that are, similarly, both threatened and amazingly persistent. given its role in the national self-image and the relatively recent past of so many russians, the village remains important despite its economic difficulties and shrinking population. the woodrow wilson center press must be commended for making this thick, valuable and thought-provoking study so affordable. solovyovo: the story of memory in a russian village is a wonderful resource not only for specialists and researchers, but also for teaching or recommending to students, and for giving to friends or relatives who wonder why we find slavic cultures so fascinating. sibelan forrester swarthmore college folklorica 2006, vol. xi microsoft word folk03fdw.doc 24 victory day celebrations: memory and validation jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby university of kentucky the soviet union was characterized by an array of holidays related to socialist ideology and nation building, including may day and victory day in may, women’s day in march and revolution day in november [lane 1981; serbyn in press]. while the effects of the fall of the soviet union on daily life have been extensively documented, folklorists have yet to examine its concomitant effects on these socialist holidays. this paper, which examines the evolution of one of these holidays, is based on data collected at the fifty-sixth celebration of victory day (may 9, 2001) in novosibirsk and in interviews with five novosibirsk residents, all ethnic russians. my informants, all residents of novosibirsk ranging in age from 27 to 65, were raised with these holidays. for these people, they constitute a tradition akin to calendar rituals in the russian village. the soviet national holidays, primarily an urban phenomenon, united city residents and celebrated seasonal change (e.g. may day was not only a celebration of the worker, but also of the coming of spring) as well as furthered political aims. at the present time, labor day and revolution day are almost exclusively communist celebrations, despite the fact that they remain national holidays. however, victory day is celebrated by a large proportion of the population in the russian territory of the former soviet union. (1) here i examine why celebration of this holiday has survived nearly intact when other soviet holidays are much more restricted in practice. in addition, i shall discuss whether the soviet functions of the holiday have still been preserved or whether the holiday serves other purposes in the post-soviet world. victory day celebrations in the soviet period victory day (den’ pobedy) marks the day of germany’s surrender in 1945 and the victory by allied forces over hitler’s army. while nearly all the european allies have celebrated or do celebrate some version of victory day, this day was of particular importance to the soviet union. politically, the victory over germany demonstrated the might of a socialist army in the face of western imperial and capitalist attacks on its native soil and communist way of life. while russia was aligned with other “imperialist” countries as part of the struggle, its resolve in the face of german incursions on its soil was crucial to the defeat of the germans. although western democratic powers such as france and austria fell, russia managed to withstand the assault and drive the germans back. this demonstration of political and military might was particularly apt at that time in soviet history. russia was suffering from economic depression brought on by stalin’s industrial shock therapy. doubt at the effectiveness of these measures was assuaged by the victory of the soviet military-industrial complex over the technologically advanced germans. thus, defeat of the enemy was a vindication of socialist ideals and a means of instilling national unity into a multi-ethnic population. however, victories were not limited to those in the political venue. there were socio-cultural triumphs as well. as early as the late 1920s, stalin was attempting to use holidays to foster good will. the soviet cycle of ritual observances promoted celebration and release among a people hard hit by his restructuring of a largely folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 25 rural country into an industrial powerhouse [petrone 2000: 14-16]. his draconian measures had resulted in a social crisis of epic proportions. as the ranks of the disappeared swelled, the soviet people endured repression, daily deprivation and many went in fear of their lives. in recognition of the ongoing crisis and need to keep utopian ideals alive, in november 1935 stalin announced to the stakhanovites, “life has become better, comrades, life has become more joyous, and when you are living joyously, work turns out well.” [petrone 2000: 6]. in her study of soviet holidays of the 1920s and 1930s, petrone [2000: 6] notes that stalin not only backed participation in festivals in general, but also during the thirties created or reinstated many holidays in order to offset the stark rigor of the period. a similar situation arose in the aftermath of world war ii. the soviet citizenry was faced with another period of severe hardship in a recurring cycle of deprivation. the institution of victory day as a national holiday was an attempt not only to honor the fallen and their families, but also to help mitigate resentment and anger among the general populace. with such a goal in mind, the german army became the perfect scapegoat for the weary soviet citizen. it represented a nation that had betrayed the soviet union by attacking the country after stalin and hitler had signed a non-aggression pact. in addition, it stood for western democracy and industrial might, and as such was in essence an enemy. the war had allowed all soviets to unite behind a common standard regardless of socio-economic background or political affiliation. in the aftermath of a devastating war, this type of unity was particularly important for the society to heal and regain balance. the first victory day celebration was held in 1945, the day after the war had ended and that year it was officially proclaimed a national holiday [lane 1981: 145]. as a result, it is celebrated throughout the former soviet union on may 9 and not on armistice day, may 8. in 1965 under brezhnev it was designated an official holiday [lane 1981: 145], meaning that now no one worked or attended school on that day, whereas previously celebrations had taken place after work. soviet victory day celebrations served multiple purposes. serbyn [in press: 5], boym [2001: 60], lane [1981: 142] and merridale [2000: 227] write that world war ii served as a means of uniting a multi-ethnic country that before the war had experienced little authentic sense of national unity or patriotism. in addition, merridale [2000: 273] and lane [1981: 147] discuss the function of victory day as commemoration. merridale argues that the holiday on the official level commemorated not the dead, but the victory, while lane views individual practices as a means of commemorating war victims as well. during the soviet period, the celebration of this holiday had three phases: a parade through the center of the city featuring the surviving veterans; commemoration of the war dead at the city world war ii memorial; and a meal with family and friends [lane 1981: 145-47]. it was thus structurally similar to soviet may day celebrations, which featured a parade, official recognition of international labor and a meal at home. however, victory day focussed not on workers but on soviet military might, the people’s victory over their enemies and the commemoration of the victims of war. the parades of the soviet era not only required the attendance of every important political figure on a raised dais on the main city street or square, but also of all members of the community fit enough to attend. they watched as current members of the military marched to honor the veterans as well as the fallen. the soviet union used this particular holiday as a way of demonstrating its military might. between the companies and folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 26 units rolled tanks, airplanes and various types of weaponry. the parades, in this sense, served as a warning to the west of the foolishness of entering into armed conflict with the soviet union. they provided reassurance for those who had lived through industrialization and the war that their sacrifices were not in vain. the military industrial complex for which they had worked so hard and had sacrificed so much to create would keep them and their children safe in the event of another war. similarly, because its people had persevered in their struggle against germany, the ussr was now able to pursue technological achievement to create the military apparatus required for the protection of its sovereignty. most importantly, the veterans themselves marched in the parades. those who had fought at the front donned uniforms, medals and badges. they were garnering recognition of their sacrifices for the nation and for fellow citizens. non-combatants who had contributed to the war effort (for example, doctors, medical personnel and air raid wardens) or those who had suffered the extremes of war (for example, survivors of the siege of leningrad) likewise marked their status, by wearing uniforms or pinning on znachki (badges) or medals. such people fell into the category between the civilian and the military; they offered the veterans the honor they so richly deserved, but at the same time themselves received the thanks of fellow citizens who had played lesser roles in the war. once the morning parades were over, in each city the community gathered at the local war memorial. political speeches and remembrance of the wartime sacrifice of veterans and the fallen for their country formed the focal point of these gatherings. they permitted the various constituents of the crowd to merge into a body of soviet citizens. with honor paid to them in the parades, now the veterans were united with their families and those they had struggled to save. these commemorative gatherings served a dual function. the soviet government used the victory day gatherings both to reinforce its political and ideological agenda as a socialist state as well as to foster feelings of national unity [serbyn in press]. at the same time the tributes to the veterans also served to reinforce the pride of the common citizen in their country and belief in the strength of its representatives. here was a people with the ability to withstand an enormous threat to their homeland despite outrageous casualties and severe deprivation and who achieved victory where others would have or did fail. victory day, therefore, reinforced essentially mythic beliefs about their national character. in addition the war memorial was the locus of personal remembrance of the dead. my informants oleg and marina k. told me how people who had lost loved ones during the war (and nearly everyone had) brought flowers to lay on the tomb of the unknown solider, near the eternal flame or on similar war memorials dedicated to local victims. public acknowledgement of how members of one’s family had died not only assuaged grief, but allowed each person to experience the sense of sacrifice that the veterans had earlier claimed for themselves alone. in other words, it showed that veterans were not the only members of society to have suffered for this victory. everyone who had been touched by the war through loss or deprivation deserved to be acknowledged on this day. finally, both couples i interviewed (oleg and marina k. and valentin and nadezhda p.) stated that the holiday ended with a dinner for friends and family at home. this celebration among intimates was the culmination in a day of national solidarity. in the public celebrations, the soviet people came together to honor 27 those among them who had served, sacrificed or died during the war. they then united as families to celebrate their love for one another and commemorate personal familial sacrifice. they would tell stories of the wartime period, drink toasts to those who had passed on and to those still living and celebrate their endurance in the face of hardship, past and present. victory day celebration in novosibirsk, 2001 the celebration observed in 2001 in novosibirsk, ten years into the post-soviet period, retained the same essential form as the soviet celebration. it consisted of an early morning parade down the central avenue of the city and past the main square; commemoration and a miting in the afternoon at the world war ii memorial; and a meal at home. the parade began at 10 a.m. the south side of the street, bordering lenin square on krasnii prospekt (red avenue) in novosibirsk, was reserved for civilian spectators. the north side of the street was reserved for military units; novosibirsk is home to a military academy as well as to various active military units. both the cadets and soldiers were assembled when we arrived. the parade began when the local commanding officer, an army general, rode past the troops in an ancient black volga convertible. as he passed, each company saluted him. at the dais occupied by the mayor and other city dignitaries, the car stopped. the general saluted and announced that the parade in honor of victory day would commence. as each company marched by, a military band played traditional soviet marches and war songs. when all the cadets and active duty soldiers had passed the crowd of onlookers, a largish group of veterans of the afghan war in uniforms of the time proceeded to march by. they were followed by a small group of twelve world war ii veterans, also in their uniforms. the band marched to the center of the street, played several more soviet era tunes and then moved off down the road. their departure signalled the end of the parade. the parade did not include any display of weaponry or military equipment. while the crowd enjoyed the performance of the band and each of the companies of soldiers, they were clearly most taken with the world war ii veterans themselves. the most frequent comment was how few were left and how sad that was. while we were waiting for the parade to begin, more and more people, many with young children, arrived. the crowd was blocking their access to the parade route. parents approached the barriers along the street, where survivors of world war ii (overwhelmingly women) were standing. each one asked if his/her children could stand near the barricade where they would be able to see. when an elderly gentleman wearing non-combat world war ii badges complained, one elderly woman asserted, “oni zhe deti. eto ved’ ikh istoriia, dolzhny znat’” (they are just children. it is their history after all, they should know it). strangers, primarily the elderly women, took it upon themselves not only to ensure that the children could see, but to explain the significance of the veterans and the parade to them. after the parade ended, we adjourned to the world war ii memorial for the miting. a dais had been erected in front of the huge statue of soldiers that marks the entrance into the park. behind the statue are the eternal flame and a memorial wall, similar to the vietnam veterans’ memorial wall in washington, listing the name of every soldier from the region who had died in the war. representatives from various political organizations, primarily communist in orientation, lined the paths leading to the dais. however, there was also a folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 28 group demanding peace in chechnia. alongside them flower sellers were doing a thriving business. on the dais itself were a group of military cadets and various military commanders alongside the assembled war veterans. in front of the dais stood not only various military officers and non-combat veterans, but also a huge group of civilians. the crowd was so large that the raised dais was not visible to the majority. when we arrived, the director of the novosibirsk military academy was introducing a cadet from the academy. the cadet proceeded to deliver a tribute to the world war ii veterans and to explain the significance of their actions for the country and all its citizens. his brief speech focussed on the sacrifice of that generation for the country as a whole. he emphasized their victory over fascism and their defense of their country from invaders. the cadets saluted the veterans, and the formal miting ended. the crowd then entered the park itself after passing by the commemorative statue. people had brought flowers with them, or had bought them from vendors nearby to lay: 1) at the foot of the statue; 2) near the eternal flame; and 3) in or near the memorial wall of the fallen. families found their loved one’s name and inserted a flower into the raised brass letters on the wall. the civilian community gathered with surviving veterans near the memorials and renewed acquaintances with friends. one interesting ritual involved the eternal flame. the novosibirsk flame is set in a brass bowl that is sunk into a granite block wide enough to stand or sit upon. children threw coins into the flame as though it were a wishing well. this may be seen as an entertaining way of teaching children to place something near the flame on victory day. some mothers, as my russian friend did, also purchased flowers for their children to place on one of the memorial places mentioned above. the final ritual in the memorial section of the park involved finding the names of deceased relatives on the memorial wall. families stood and searched, pointing out to their children (or to visiting american guests), the names of grandfathers, uncles and cousins who had died in the war. thereafter, people moved further into the park grounds, where world war ii military equipment, tanks, airplanes and jeeps, are located alongside the various paths. the veterans and their families had their pictures taken with this equipment. parents also photographed their children as they climbed up and into them. basically, the battle equipment of world war ii had been turned into a giant playground, indicating that this was a celebration as much as a remembrance. parents strolled along enjoying the beautiful weather, as their children moved from vehicle to vehicle. the two main paths in the park parallel each other and are joined by several bisecting paths. generally, each family walked to the end of the right-hand path and then up the left-hand path back toward the memorial wall. at the end of the left path, a veterans’ organization was giving out bowls of grechka [buckwheat kasha] to all comers. after about an hour of family fun, people began to disperse to their homes. i had been invited back to my friends’ home for a meal. since it was a holiday, we stopped and bought a cake and champagne. the meal was not markedly different from most meals i had shared with this family (with the exception of the special holiday provisions). they did not gather with their extended family (although that was a common practice for them on holidays). it seemed that the fact that the holiday was on a wednesday, with the next day a work day, prompted a change in their typical behavior. had the holiday been on a friday or saturday, they would have 29 likely gathered at one of the parents’ homes to celebrate. in sum, the general structure of this holiday did not differ markedly from celebrations of victory day during the soviet period. the functions of victory day in the post-soviet era i propose now to address the question why this holiday has been preserved nearly intact, while other soviet holidays are now much more limited in scope and appeal. during the soviet period, as noted above, victory day served a multitude of purposes including fostering soviet unity, demonstrating the superiority of socialism, celebrating victory and heroism, providing healing from the psychological trauma of the war, demonstrating the endurance of the soviet (russian) people in the face of adversity and commemorating the fallen. at different points in soviet history, one or more of these functions were emphasized more strongly than the others. this is not surprising, as rituals serve multiple purposes, as turner has shown in the ritual process. one commonality is the creation of communitas among people from all walks of life: we are presented, in such rites, with a ‘moment’... in and out of secular social structure, which reveals ... some recognition ... of a generalized social bond that has ceased to be .… it is as though there are here two major ‘models’ for human interrelatedness .… the first is of society as a structure, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions .... the second, which emerges recognizably in a liminal period, is of society as an unstructured ... relatively undifferentiated comitatus ... who submit together to the general authority of ritual elders [1969: 96]. the end result of communitas is a feeling of unity and coherence among those who pass through the ritual together and with it the dissolution of social distinctions and resentments. what particular social tension must be released varies from year to year or even from person to person, such that victory day might affect a war veteran in a manner quite different from its impact on his or her child or grandchild. similarly, as a society changes, the rituals and their purposes alter with it. as a result, victory day, like any calendar ritual, has evolved through the years not only in form, but also in function. as one would expect, the political and military functions of this holiday have declined in the post-soviet era. no longer can victory day serve to illustrate the superiority of the soviet system and its military forces or to promote soviet unity. as a result, the emphasis has shifted to people and community, away from ideology. social change may therefore help to explain why may day and revolution day are no longer widely celebrated among the general populace. while i have not conducted research specifically on these holidays, it would seem likely that they were so closely identified with political ideology, that they serve no purpose for the average person today. the government has not abolished them, and they remain part of the russian annual cycle, but they have evolved from celebration of soviet ideals into merely an additional day of vacation. naturally, communists still mark the holidays with political gatherings and small parades. we may conclude then that the preservation of victory day in the post-soviet era is due to other factors. certainly commemoration of the dead was one of the primary functions of victory day in the soviet period. the visits to the eternal flame and world war ii memorials testify to this. the rituals conducted there are also connected with funeral practices and commemoration. people laid flowers at the memorial as is folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 30 customary at gravesides in urban and secular funerary tradition and memorialized their deceased loved ones at the meal, just as they do at traditional russian pominki (wakes).(2) in recognition of these traditions, in 1994 the russian orthodox church established victory day as a religious holiday, pominovenie usopshikh voinov (remembrance of fallen warriors). not all those who participate in the holiday are orthodox, but it does seem that russians, regardless of their personal religious beliefs, choose to remember the victims of war on this day, suggesting that the impulse behind the holiday is not primarily a religious one. the novosibirsk celebration, importantly, retained the soviet commemorative practices. russians commemorate their dead yearly on the anniversary of their deaths as well as on roditel’skie subboty (parents’ saturdays) and around the time of easter and trinity sunday. these practices continued through the soviet period [paxson 1998]. remembrance on victory day is particularly important since the nature of war and the length of time that has passed may both mean that descendants do not remember or even know exactly when a family member died. thus, commemoration with a wake on the correct date is unfeasible, but this holiday allows people to fulfill their responsibilities to remember the dead yearly. in this respect on victory day the park itself becomes a sacred space akin to a cemetery. in a gesture taken from modern secular funeral and commemorative practices, families place an even number of flowers near the eternal flame or at the memorial wall.(3) that wall, engraved with the names of the dead, serves as a huge gravestone. through annually repeated commemorative and funerary acts people pay homage to the fallen, just as they do to the dead at the graves of family members at a burial or commemorative occasion. victory day as celebrated in novosibirsk includes two other practices that might also be associated with the traditional funeral: the tossing of coins and eating of kasha. coin throwing is part of the traditional funeral; coins are thrown before the casket when it is carried out of the home or also into the grave itself. warner notes that her informants expressed varied reasons for this practice: “some... said the money is for the journey to the ‘other world,’ others that the money is to ‘buy a place’ in the cemetery” [2000: 264]. while this act is a funeral practice rather than being related specifically to commemoration, it might seem to support my claim that the memorial space functions as symbolic graveyard. however, it appears that this interpretation may be imposing a folkloric reading on this ritual. when in the summer of 2003 i interviewed sixteen residents of novosibirsk about funerary practices, not a single one mentioned this custom. this does not necessarily indicate that the tradition was not originally connected to funerary customs, but does reflect the fact that the contemporary urban funeral in this area has not retained this custom. it is of course possible that the tradition was initiated by a sector of the population that remembered the rite and began to perform it at the eternal flame, with it subsequently spreading to the population at large. interestingly, coin tossing at the world war ii monument is not limited to victory day. according to liuba s., whenever people visit, be they newlyweds or simply visitors to the park, they throw coins into the bowl. the money is used for the upkeep of the statues and surrounding park. this custom honors the dead by ensuring the proper upkeep of their memorial space. thus it may not be consciously connected to the funeral, but it does recognize the importance of the sacred space of these particular ancestors to the city and community. 31 the other act with possible connections with funerary customs is the grain (buckwheat) served by soldiers in the park. natalie kononenko has suggested in a personal communication that it may be connected to the ritual use of grain, particularly kut’ia, the grain dish traditionally served at wakes. kut’ia was originally made from wheat and honey but is now typically rice with honey and dried fruit such as raisins. the siberians i interviewed all serve the latter type of kut’ia at both the wake and at commemorative meals on the ninth and fortieth days after death as well as on the anniversary of the death. buckwheat is not a traditional funeral dish in novosibirsk, though the european russians (from moscow and vladimir) i interviewed do serve it in lieu of kut’ia.(4) thus the connection of this particular type of grain to the funeral rite would not be obvious to siberian russians. in addition, on july 7 2003, novosibirsk city day, a day not associated with commemoration of the dead, soldiers were once again serving buckwheat kasha. while buckwheat is therefore not seen in siberian russia as connected with the dead through funeral customs, it does seem to be associated with wartime hunger and deprivation and is thus linked to the suffering of war victims. eating buckwheat, particularly buckwheat prepared by soldiers, i would suggest, brings the community closer to their ancestors; they remember them by eating the same simple food they ate. the commemoration of ancestors then is one significant reason why russians have preserved this holiday, while the popularity of other celebrations of the soviet era have waned. however, this celebration performs an additional important social function for post-soviet russians. during the soviet period, as noted above, victory day reinforced pride in the country as a whole and the belief that sacrifices before and during the war had not been in vain. in fact, world war ii established the ussr as a major player in world politics and, in its view, the savior of western democratic, industrialized nations in the face of fascism. soviet russian citizens knew (or believed they knew) that they were instrumental in the victory. without their contribution to the effort the western powers would have been lost and overrun by an evil force. this attitude allowed the average soviet russian citizen to come to terms with daily hardship. their outlook can be summarized as follows: while there might be more material goods in the west, they would not exist without us. we know that our sacrifices have allowed the west to survive and as a result, we have been rewarded in more important ways than with money, but with national pride and international power instead. the durability of this attitude toward the war was illustrated at a recent gathering of americans and russians in versailles, kentucky. one of those present, a russian emigrée, informed the group that without the americans, the war would have been lost. while none of the russians present agreed with her opinion, two men from volgograd were particularly outraged. that city (along with leningrad) represents most graphically the sacrifices soviet citizens underwent and the fortitude they displayed during the war. to denigrate russia’s role in the war, especially to volgograd residents, is to threaten an entire world view. one of the primary effects of the fall of the soviet union has been an identity crisis for the average russian. the traditional soviet russian view of their nation no longer applies. the country went from superpower to afterthought in history, a minor player on the world stage. economic shock therapy, which produced a social crisis remarkably similar to stalin’s industrial shock therapy, accompanied radical political upheaval. the country was overrun by representatives of an ideology previously regarded variously as evil, folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 32 decadent and corrupt, albeit enticing and desirable. the end result was unemployment (and a rise in alcoholism), rising crime and increased poverty, particularly for those on fixed incomes. for the “new” russians, outcomes were more positive, since they adjusted remarkably well to economic change. these different responses within the post-soviet system have set up a crisis in the social fabric and a severe rift between socio-economic classes. the typical citizen has borne a huge burden, while others have succeeded beyond measure. when faced with hardships during the soviet period, there was at least community in the illusion that everyone suffered equally. in the post-soviet world, the average person has had to cope with daily attacks on his or her core beliefs and with a rich élite seemingly indifferent to their plight. in this context, one can see another reason why the popularity of communist holidays such as may day and revolution day in november might wane. without the support of a communist government, and with the growing perception that the communists had either failed or betrayed the country, those holidays now serve little or no purpose for the average person. victory day, however, survives because it glorifies the time when the soviet union was at its most powerful today when the population feels particularly vulnerable. sabonis-chafee [1999: 368] argues that the endurance of soviet-era celebrations is related to the desire for a return to greatness. she bases her claims on boym’s [1994] theory of nostalgia in the post-soviet world. boym proposes that there are two kinds of nostalgia at work: utopian and ironic. utopian nostalgia “puts the emphasis on the return to that mythical place on the island of utopia where the ‘greater patria’ has to be rebuilt, according to ‘its original authentic design.’ ironic nostalgia ... acknowledges the displacement of the mythical place without trying to rebuild it” [boym 1994: 284]. victory day allows russians to restore their pride as a people and as a nation, to revel in nostalgia for a time of greatness. at a time when the country seems weak and unstable, the people can reassert their faith in the nation and themselves. notably, merridale [2000: 214] states that for pensioners and veterans victory day provides them with the feeling of certainty that they felt during the war years, especially in view of the current chaos in their lives. similarly, boym notes that the soviet world view was “extremely powerful and intoxicating; and its loss is greatly missed in the post-communist world” [boym 2001: 59]. victory day provides an annual opportunity to renew that sense of security, and to indulge the nostalgia for soviet power; in essence not only to commemorate the fallen soldiers, but also mourn a fallen nation. children therefore must take an active part in this ritual in all its stages. the older celebrants ensure that they are at the forefront of the parade line. at the memorial park, they lay flowers and toss coins into the eternal flame and climb into the vintage tanks and planes. certainly, they hear the stories about the dead, both at the park and at the meal that is the culminating point of the day. they commemorate the dead in the sacred space of the memorial park and thereby ensure that the important folk remembrance of the ancestors continues. the cadet who honored the veterans in his speech symbolizes the significant part that the young play in commemoration. they must additionally understand the essential role their nation played in world history. when they sit in the tanks and hear the stories about their forebears’ sacrifices, they begin to grasp the might of their nation and its major role in history. if this generation of children is not inculcated with patriotic feelings, russia, it is felt, 33 might slip even further from the international stage. children must inherit these beliefs in order to ensure that the country retains a modicum of power and pride. like the traditional calendar rituals of the village, both soviet and post-soviet victory day were multifaceted rites. throughout soviet russian history they have evolved to serve a variety of significant purposes for the nation and its citizens. even ten years into the post-soviet world, at a time when most of the people who remember the war years are gone, people still actively celebrate this holiday. clearly, the commemorative aspects of the rite tie this celebration to the russian folk tradition of days of remembrance and pominki. however, victory day in post-soviet russia remains so active in the peoples’ imagination because of its additional functions of celebrating the greatness of soviet russia and its people, educating its children about their country’s glorious past and repairing a nation’s damaged psyche. once again this rite offers the country healing, not from the aftermath of a war, but from the consequences of the fall of the soviet union. notes 1 while victory day is celebrated non-russian regions of the former ussr, i make no claims as to the popularity of the holiday or the attitudes toward the holiday in those areas. my research concerns only russians in the former rfssr. 2 for a more detailed discussion of traditional funerary and commemorative practices, see baiburin and levinton [1990]; firsov and kiselova [1993: 287-88]; mahler [1935]; shapovalova [1998: 197-201] and worobec [1994]. both lane [1981: 82-86 and merridale [2000: 341-42] discuss urban soviet-era funerals, while warner [2000] describes contemporary village funerals. 3 in popular tradition even numbers of flowers are used only in funeral bouquets or to place on graves during pominki and on other days of remembrance. uneven numbers are used for weddings, birthdays and on other happy celebrations. thus, the fact that even numbered bouquets were placed indicates the connection between the events of victory day and commemoration of the dead. 4 faith wigzell (personal communication) notes that kut’ia is still served at funeral and commemorative meals in european russian villages as well as among devout orthodox believers in cities. my informants in european russia included atheists and jews as well as orthodox, but none were strict observers of orthodox traditions. bibliography baiburin a. k. and g. a. levinton 1990. “pokhorony i svad’ba.” in v. v. ivanov and l. g. nevskaia 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(http://condor.depaul.edu/~rrotenbe/aeer/aeer16_2.html#paxson) petrone, karen 2000. life has become more joyous, comrades. celebrations in the time of stalin. bloomington, in: indiana university press. sabonis-chafee, theresa 1999. “communism as kitsch: soviet symbols in post-soviet society.” in consuming russia. adele m. barker, ed. durham, n.c.: duke university press, pp. 362-82. serbyn, roman. in press. “historical memory in ukrainian state building.” shapovalova, galina g. 1998. russkaia obriadovaia poéziia. saint petersburg: russko-baltiiskii informatsionnyi tsentr. turner, victor 1969. the ritual process. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. warner, elizabeth a. 2000. “russian peasant beliefs and practices concerning death and the supernatural collected in novosokol'niki region, pskov province, russia, 1995. part ii: death in natural circumstances.” folklore. vol. 111, (2), pp. 255-82. worobec, christine 1994. “death ritual among russian and ukrainian peasants: linkages between the living and the dead.” in stephen p. frank and mark d. steinberg (eds), cultures in flux: lower-class values, practices, and resistance in late imperial russia. princeton: princeton university press, pp. 11-33. interviews interview with nadezhda p. (mathematician-programmer, 58) and valentin p. (mathematicianprogrammer, 60), summer 2001 inteview with oleg k (engineer, 32) and marina k (secretary, 27), summer 2001, summer 2003. interview with liubov’ s. (art teacher, 47), summer 2003. http://condor.depaul.edu/~rrotenbe/aeer/aeer16_2.html#paxson editorial satement 78 report living in the virtual material world peter w. holloway and natalie kononenko university of virginia material culture is one of the three main divisions of folklore. how people chose to dress, how they build their homes and how they decorate them is important to the people themselves and to their sense of identity. it is also important in the teaching of folklore. letting students see what a culture looks like is invaluable in terms of conveying an accurate impression of that culture. in the classroom, material culture has the advantage of providing an additional stimulus, a visual one, so that students who are visual learners can better grasp abstract concepts such as variation. quite often, those students who have a hard time understanding variation in a verbal text, such as a legend, understand variation when they are shown three different renditions of a traditional object, such as three variations of a ritual towel depicting a tree of life, as for example, in figure 1 below. figure 1 seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 79 the traditional village house is an especially important item of material culture when it comes to areas such as ukraine. a house is constructed human space. it is a microcosm of the ukrainian view of the universe. many important cultural ideas are contained within the house and can thus be illustrated by it. for example, in ukrainian culture, differences such as those between inside and outside, our own and other, are very important. the house illustrates this in many ways. the door of the house does not face the street. rather, one must come into the yard before one can go into the house; the house can only be entered from within the protective enclosure of the farm compound. rushnyky, or ritual towels, embroidered pieces of cloth that are considered to have potency, protect all openings, be they concrete openings such as windows, or metaphoric openings such as icons and pictures, which are �windows� unto the other world. icons are situated opposite the door, so that anyone entering a home, or even a room, must look upon them. this is believed to protect the residents of the home from evil. and inside/outside is but one of the many important culture ideas encapsulated in the traditional house. the house is also important because of what it teaches about living conditions. ukrainian village houses are quite small, especially for the number of people that live in them. for example, as many as twelve people at one time would stay in the two-room village house that we used for our work. things like personal space and privacy are not operative cultural concepts. in addition to showing the very cramped living conditions of ukraine, houses show the wealth of the countryside, or the lack of same. or, one could argue, they demonstrate that what is valued is different from what we might consider important. showing students a traditional house, therefore, is a very desirable aim. but, of course, arranging for the average student to travel to ukraine to get the experience of the village house himself, while ideal, is impractical. with all this in mind and with the advent of ever more sophisticated digital technology, we set out to reproduce a traditional ukrainian house in virtual form. the house chosen was not entirely typical in that it was a double house, with two rooms constructed at the very beginning, rather than added on as children married and the family grew. still, it was a hand-built house of wattle construction and, because all such houses in a village are traditional, it was representative. the main reason for choosing this house was access. with a certain wariness of strangers, ukrainians are reluctant to admit people into their homes. even if this cultural feature did not exist, the invasiveness of our work, as will be described below, required that we deal with a family that we knew well, one that would not mind us taking measurements and photographs all over their home. the techniques of digital construction are seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 80 presented below in an attempt to share our experience at digitally reproducing folklore with others. virtual reality (vr) has become a popular way of displaying three-dimensional (3d) structures on the world wide web (www).(1) very sophisticated sites have been built advertising museums(2) or cities.(3) recent exhibitions at the national gallery of art have had extensive sites promoting them.(4) in contemplating the creation of a virtual ukrainian house, we were worried that the technique used by most of the above sites would not be applicable to our project. these sites used the simplest technique for generating a vr movie. this involves setting a (digital) camera upon a motorized turntable, which then rotates in steps, with a picture being taken each step. approximately thirty pictures are taken and then joined into a 360-degree panoramic picture, which is then made into a quicktime vr panorama movie with software. quicktime vr is an extension of quicktime technology produced by apple computers.(5) we were concerned that such a technique would not work in the confines of a space as small as the four meter-square room of a village house. furthermore, such camera turntables are expensive and heavy. weight is always a concern with fieldwork in places like ukraine where transportation is frequently a problem and all the equipment has to be moved or carried, usually by the folklorist, to the site. instead of using such a turntable, we opted instead to make a replica of the entire farm on the computer and then make the vr movie from the replica. a vr panoramic movie is not a film that plays like a video. rather, it produces a 3-d space in which the viewer can �move� using a cursor, panning left to right and right to left and zooming in and out. when a vr panoramic movie is opened on a computer with apple quicktime software (available free from apple) the viewer sees a stationary scene with the mouse cursor displayed as a circle (!), as the mouse is moved with the left mouse button depressed, the circle changes to a solid arrow (!) with the arrow direction indicating the path of movement. the scene view then moves in that direction. there are also buttons at the bottom of the computer screen to zoom in or out. all this gives viewers the impression that they are in the actual scene and are looking around and moving. in addition, the scene can contain embedded �hot spots�. when the mouse cursor passes over one of these areas the cursor changes to an open arrow (!) and, if the mouse button is clicked, the scene changes. the new scene can be a new panorama, a high-resolution enlargement of a portion of the original panorama, a standard movie sequence, a sound file, or a combination of these. once in the new scene, the viewer can return, or proceed to another scene. each of these individual scenes is assembled by computer software 81 (we chose vr worx) and each scene is called a �node�. our final virtual farm contained 45nodes (see below). we will describe in some detail the procedures used, including our mistakes, in the hope this may be of value to others. the house chosen is located in iavorivka, drabivs'kyi raion, cherkas'ka oblast' and belongs to polina iakivna (baba polia) and vasyl' ivanovych latysh (did vasyl'). the house was begun in 1951 by baba polia's parents, iakov hryhorovych basans'kyi and his wife odarka dmytrivna, both born in 1894. the house was completed in 1953. the house is wattle construction and it was built by the basans�kyi family using hand tools only. we suspected that no plans existed and we would have to �survey� the whole farm and house ourselves. this was, in fact, the case. the equipment we took from the united states was: a 2-mega pixel digital camera, a small tripod, memory cards, a small storage device for downloading the contents of the cards,(6) a universal serial bus (usb) card for a computer, a usb memory card reader for a computer, an ultrasonic measuring device accurate up to 120 meters (sonin),(7) a metric tape measure, a compass, and many batteries. as it turned out, electricity in the village house was much more reliable than we expected and a portable computer would have obviated much of the equipment. by the same token, we could have been unlucky and gotten no electricity and no pictures. in addition, with electricity we could run the equipment off (universal voltage) �cubes�. in kyiv we bought flood light bulbs, holders, and wire to make a primitive lighting setup. this did not work. the digital camera could not handle the mixture of natural-light and tungsten-light. as shown in figure 2, the house is approximately 11x 7 meters, and sits on a farm of approximately 60 x 60 meters. the dimensions of the house exterior were measured by driving four stakes (a-d) into the ground some distance from each corner. the distances between visible stakes and from each stake to each visible corner of the house were then measured with the sonin instrument (these measurements are shown by dotted lines in figure 2). the length of each wall was also measured. the sonin, which has both �emitter� and �receiver� units, was invaluable as the house is surrounded by bushes and trees. in brief, these measurements are combined to generate the footprint of the house by taking one stake (a) as a fixed point. all points visible from it are then somewhere on various arcs drawn with a figure 2 seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 82 compass. the position of stake b is somewhere on an arc and its precise position can be defined by arcs drawn from other arcs. we had actually devised and checked this technique in the us, and all �defined� points are self-consistent with many measurements. we then set out to measure the dimensions of �our� bedroom and furniture size and placement. both the sonin and the tape measure were used and yielded almost 100 distances. digital photographs were taken from precise positions (as it turns out we never used the camera positions). close-up photographs of the many family photographs and embroideries were taken. the process was repeated for each room of the house, but the number of our measurements became fewer as we could not �completely� disrupt the living arrangements of our adopted family. we also took fewer close-up photographs in the other rooms for the same reason. we regretted both of these economies as the quality of items used for creating the hot-spots in the main room and the kitchen is not as good as we would have liked. also, we omitted measuring the thickness of the walls. from our external and internal measurements, they work out at 50 cm thick, which is reasonable for external walls given the construction methods. with all that we omitted, during the four days we were actually on the farm, we still took over 500 digital photographs of the interior and exterior of the house. when we returned to kyiv, we bought and installed a cd recording device in a friend's computer. we also installed the software we brought from the us to allow us to download the images from the storage device to the computer. we then made cds to bring back to the us, but we asked our friend to keep all images on his computer until we had ensured that our copies had made it to the us. when we returned to the us, we sought advice on software purchases and finally settled on strata 3d plus,(8) a 3d graphics program, vr worx,(9) a series of programs to make vr movies, and quicktime pro. strata is a very good program, but takes a long time to learn and generates enormous files. the program provides many �tools� for generating 3d objects (cubes, cones, spheres, tubes are pre-made). it also provides various �textures� which can be applied to the surfaces of the objects. because of the popularity of the program, their web site contains many files that will generate furniture, vegetation, animals and so on, when downloaded (for free) and incorporated into a strata scene. however, we did not want to use the generic furniture items; we were endeavoring to make an exact replica of the house and farm in iavorivka. all the walls, furniture, kitchen utensils, even the well, had to be generated from simple shapes and covered with colors and textures that replicated those in the house in ukraine. for readers who are unfamiliar with 3d 83 drawing, computer assisted design (cad), or architectural programs, we will describe in some detail how a few of the items in our bedroom were made. the exterior wall starts with a cube. it is stretched to fit the dimensions we had measured for the wall in the house. a photograph of the actual white-washed wall is applied to the �bedroom wall�, and this generates a replica of the wall in iavorivka. to make the objects on the wall, such as family photographs, another, much smaller, cube is made and then stretched very thin, until it corresponds to the dimensions of a family photograph plus frame. a digital photograph of the actual family picture is then applied to this object, and stretched to fit. the result is the �family photograph� in its computer rendition. it can now be moved around in strata and positioned so as to be just in front of the �bedroom wall�, at the correct height and distance from other objects. other digital photographs were similarly used to make the �hanging rugs� and �embroideries�. a more complicated object is the brass bed shown in figure 3. again, we were attempting to make an exact replica of the bed, including bed frame. a cube, with slightly rounded edges, was made and elongated into the shape of the mattress. in the village, we had had the foresight to take a photograph of the bedspread hanging flat outside the house. this image of the entire bedspread as a flat surface provided us with the material for producing a virtual bedspread for our digital house. portions of the flat bedspread photograph were �cut out� using a computer photo-editing program (each portion had to be �re-touched� to remove shadows). figure 3 figure 3 seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 84 these pieces corresponded to the top and side of the actual bed mattress as seen in our photographs of the bedroom. these separate pictures can be imported into strata and applied to sides of 3d objects on the computer. when these pictures had been positioned and adjusted for size, this resulted in the �virtual mattress, covered with the bedspread� (second image in figure 3). the brass frame was made in the way an actual brass frame would be made and the shapes, dimensions, and designs were based on the actual bed in the house in iavorivka, documented by taking measurements and photographs of the real bed. the various shapes were then drawn as lines (straight, curved) after which, strata can �apply� a circular cross section, turning lines into tubes, like the tubes in the brass bed frame. this results in the formation of various �tubular� structures, which can be joined together and colored. the brass bed was actually the first complex object made, as a way of learning the program. from the time strata was obtained, the generation of the complete brass bed took four weeks of intensive use. as just noted, much of this time was taken up in learning how to use the program. the steps to the brass bed are shown in figure 3. note that lights, which cast shadows, are provided with the program. a photograph of the actual bed in the village bedroom is on the lower right of figure 3. as we learned more and more about strata, progress became more rapid. figure 4 shows what we had achieved after six weeks of work, even though a great deal of time was wasted in trying to have both exterior and interior finishes to walls. the exterior views of our virtual farm we made later were constructed from a separate model. the most complex model is shown in figure 5; with three rooms this became so unwieldy (250 megabytes, over 200 objects) that additional rooms were done separately. figure 5 figure 4 85 with strata, �virtual cameras� can be placed in the �virtual rooms� and �virtual photographs� can then be taken. the program allows the positions (including height) and lenszoom to be adjusted in the composition of the photograph. the layout of the bedroom is shown in figure 6, with the camera view angles indicated by the lines. when the �virtual photograph� is taken, it is seen on the computer and can be saved. the �photograph� taken by the �camera� in the left picture is seen on the right and shows the brass bed, family photographs, and hanging rug described earlier. the same �camera� can also be used to generate a 360-degree panoramic picture (figure 7), which is then converted into a quicktime virtual reality panoramic movie with the program vr worx. once all the individual panoramic movies are generated, they are combined with vr worx. at this point the graphical interface of the program allows still pictures or sound files to be incorporated. the final 45-node scene for the entire virtual farm is shown in figure 8. each circle is a �node� and the arrows show the allowed movements. when each �node� is viewed in the program, �hot spots� which link to other �nodes�, are inserted and can be moved on the scene. this allows, for example, a click of a mouse on an embroidery in the vr panorama to show an figure 6 figure 7 seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 86 enlarged view of the embroidery, whereas a click on a doorway allows the viewer to move into another room. these transitions are shown diagrammatically in figure 9. sound files from tapes we made in ukraine were assembled with still pictures into qtvr movies with quicktime pro and then incorporated into the qtvr panorama movie. we have always been conscious of the limited resources of many of our slavic and east european colleagues. most do not have access to high-speed lines and their computers are not the latest models. with this in mind, we tried to keep the size of the files that have to be downloaded to a minimum. for example the un-compressed vr movie made from the above 45node scene is 69 megabytes in size but, by judicious use of compression of different portions of the scene, quite reasonable vr movies of 2.4 megabytes can be made. most recently we have begun to make another type of vr movie that is particularly suited to displaying material culture. these are vr object movies. this time, when these are opened in quicktime, a stationary view of an object is seen with the cursor appearing as an �open hand�. when the mouse button is clicked, the hand �closes�. the object can now be rotated through 360-degrees, stopping at any point in the 360-degrees rotation to view the object from that side or angle. to make these vr object movies, an object is placed on a turntable (lazy susan in the us) and rotated through 10-degree steps with a digital picture being taken at each step. after 36 photographs have been taken, vr worx is used to assemble these into a qtvr object movie which produces the rotatable stationary object. below in figure 10 are shown eight of a 36-photo sequence of natalie kononenko (standing very still). a turntable capable of supporting a person can be made for less than $20 and is ideal for showing ukrainian native costumes. a 3-d presentation of a costume offers great advantages over the usual front figure 8 figure 9 87 and back views of traditional clothing printed in books. the pleating of the jacket (korsetka) and the fullness that it adds to the body are much more apparent in the side, than in the front or back views. thus, a 3-d rotatable presentation of traditional clothing gives a much more accurate idea of cultural body ideals. a useful extension of this is to make qtvr object movies of articles in the virtual house that could not possibly be otherwise isolated, much less placed on a turntable. the stove (pich) in a village house has great symbolic significance, as well as dominating the entire house by its size. it is desirable to convey this to students. yet, there is no way of showing a real stove as a discrete item. a stove is not only huge; it is built into the house walls as the house itself is constructed. using digital technology, we have found a way of isolating the stove and presenting it as a separate, 3-d item that can be examined from all sides. the stove from the virtual house in strata can be isolated. strata can place a �virtual track� around this object and will allow a �virtual camera� placed on the track to move along it, while pointed towards the object. by adjusting the �speed� at which the camera moves, a 36-frame movie can be generated. when this is viewed normally, one sees a rapidly spinning stove. this movie can now be disassembled into individual frames by quicktime pro and then reassembled into an vr object movie by vr worx. the appearance of the scene in strata, with the �camera� on the �track� around the stove is shown in figure 11 (the first three �camera� positions on the track have been numbered for clarity). figure 10 figure 11 seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 88 the generation of the whole virtual farm has been time-consuming, but much of this involved learning three new software programs. we feel that the effort was very much worthwhile and hope that our experiences might shorten the trial and error period for others. our work, entitled ukrainian village project, can be seen on the www at: http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~nkm/. the website, as it now stands, includes the complete virtual farm, the object movies described above, plus other materials such as a section on ritual towels or rushnyky. the website is ever-expanding, with additional descriptions of folklore and photographs added as time and resources permit. for example, we hope to include a section on contemporary ukrainian performers, complete with sample sound files, within the next year. at the moment we have no way of efficiently showing the videos that we have made, which are quite a few in number. we have extensive movies of two ivan kupalo festivals that we attended and photographed in 2001. there is a ritual �egg-ceremony� cure of our son performed by a traditional healer. we photographed walk-throughs of two village houses and our �home� village. since the videos cannot currently be displayed on the www, we are willing to make them available to anyone interested in an alternative format. if you would like digital copies of our videos, please send us two blank cds and a stamped self-addressed padded envelope and we will be happy to make copies and send them. we should add that our movies are un-rated by the film rating board of the classification and rating administration of the united states, but are suitable for small children and folklorists. notes 1 http://www.multimedialibrary.com/qtvr_section/qtvr_menu.html 2 http://www.exploratorium.edu/vr/index.html 3 http://www.virtuallyvancouver.com/index2.html 4 http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/webtours.html 5 http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtvr/ 6 http://www.mindsatwork.net/ 7 http://www.sonin.com/ 8 http://www.strata.com/ 9 http://www.vrtoolbox.com/ http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~nkm/ http://www.multimedialibrary.com/qtvr_section/qtvr_menu.html http://www.exploratorium.edu/vr/index.html http://www.virtuallyvancouver.com/index2.html http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/webtours.html http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtvr/ http://www.mindsatwork.net/ http://www.sonin.com/ http://www.strata.com/ http://www.vrtoolbox.com/ microsoft word seefaf01c.doc 63 iu. a. novikov. skazitel i bylinnaia traditsiia [the performer and the bylina tradition] st. petersburg: rossiiskaia akademiia nauk, 2000. 374 pp. the titles of the four chapters in this volume state the main topics of examination: 1) the dialectics of the existence and historical development of the russian epic, the bylina; 2) the characteristics of regional traditions; 3) the theory of the schools of performers' art within the context of regional traditions, and 4) the oral bylina tradition and the printed word. ten appendices provide graphic representations of the interconnections among the songs of selected performers. to some extent this study represents a continuation of the author's earlier work bylina i kniga [the bylina and the book], vilnius, 1995. investigation of the russian epic involves diverse problems, many of which arise out of the richness of the tradition. some three thousand recordings have been made between the middle of the eighteenth century and the 1960’s when the tradition became moribund. collectors have furnished a wealth of information about the performers and the performance context. textology, or the accuracy of the recordings, must always be kept in mind, because collecting and editing methods have varied considerably over a span of two hundred years. since the verbal texts of oral epics are subject to change and exist in variants, the question arises as to what extent these characteristics involve innovations by individual performers and to what extent they reflect the gradual evolution of the epics as they are affected by historical, social, cultural, and linguistic changes? do the epics represent reliable reflections of historical events or are they primarily artistic expressions of oral literature? does tradition predominate or do individual performers introduce changes into the songs? to what degree and in what ways do literacy and printed editions of epics influence singers and their repertory? does the russian epic have a single origin or has it developed regional traditions over a period of many centuries? how do singers learn their songs? does a close relationship exist between teachers and pupils in the acquisition of songs and the epic idiom? does the russian epic consist basically of songs with a single plot or does it exhibit an implicit tendency to develop cycles of songs centered around a single hero, as occurs in some other epic traditions? these are some of the questions which folklorists have raised about the bylina. novikov touches upon most of these topics by summarizing and reevaluating the various interpretations and theories about the characteristics of the russian epic. seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 64 in this sense, his book represents both a logical continuation and a major contribution to investigation of the russian tradition. novikov's work should be viewed within yet another context. russian folklorists have contributed much toward the development of textological methods for studying the verbal texts of oral literature and they have made numerous studies of the distinctive poetic language in russian folklore. in these respects, novikov's investigation represents a skillful application of these methods to the verbal texts of russian epics and results in a kind of close analysis that he terms "critical textology" (p. 14). he thus further elaborates the means for evaluating the accuracy of verbal texts recorded from a living epic tradition. novikov's contribution is also timely because efforts to publish a compilation of all russian epics have been underway for some time. the editors of such an immense undertaking face complex textological problems which in part involve a decision about which texts are suitable for inclusion. in his first chapter, novikov addresses the continuing debate about how "historical" the bylina may be. the adherents of the "historical school," which was active from the last part of the nineteenth century into soviet times and whose tenets are still followed by some folklorists, treat the epics as a kind of historical document. although, for instance, social classes in kievan rus’ (ninth through the thirteenth centuries) are reflected in the epics, many archaic linguistic elements are preserved, the hero's code of honor is observed, and archaic ethnographic customs may be retained, for novikov the "bylina is not a historical chronicle, but a poetic story about the past" (p. 22). little factual information about life outside the world of the epics appears, no language barriers exist between the russian heroes and their enemies or neighbors, and few descriptions of the seasons, local color, or landscapes are included. in addition, novikov notes that in texts recorded over the past two hundred years perceptible changes have taken place. the psychological state of the heroes has drawn increased attention, and the role of fantastic and mythical elements has declined. furthermore, such modifications of a general russian epic tradition have taken place to differing degrees in different northern geographical regions; women have become the main performers, other genres (laments and magic tales) have been mixed with epic, plots have been simplified or rationalized, and a tendency toward cyclization of songs about a given hero has intensified. novikov demonstrates all these characteristics through a comparison of the variants of selected epics, in each case also offering well reasoned interpretations. contrary to a commonly accepted assumption, he shows that the wandering religious singers (kaliki perekhozhie) had little influence on the development of the bylina (p. 106). 65 in his second chapter, novikov devotes attention to the delineation of regional traditions, particularly in northern russia where most epics have been recorded. by distinguishing such textological features as redactions, versions, and variants of selected songs, he shows how the individual features of local traditions may be distinguished. he emphasizes that local traditions are highly stable and that innovations are usually avoided. novikov criticizes the theory that the dissemination of epics in northern russia was connected directly with novgorod’s colonization of these regions. his comments particularly pertain to the “novgorod theory” as it is expressed by s. i. dmitrieva in her book geograficheskoe rasprostranenie russkikh bylin [the geographic distribution of the russian bylina], moscow, 1975. he notes that she considers only songs recorded before 1917, includes songs mentioned by singers but not actually recorded from them by collectors, and makes no distinction between the place where a song has been recorded and where it has been learned by a given singer. novikov further points out that it is problematic whether a chronological shift can be detected in the origin of older "heroic songs" and newer "novelistic songs." early collectors took down songs mainly from men who favored "heroic epics", whereas later collectors often included women performers who preferred "novelistic epics." each kind of song may have had an early or late origin. novikov also considers that "historical songs" did not come just from the south but also originated in the north. in his third chapter, novikov focuses on the theory about schools of singers, especially as presented in v. i. chicherov's posthumously published book shkoly skazitelei zaonezh’ia [the schools of performers in zaonezh’e], moscow, 1982. this theory rests on the presumption that a direct connection or genealogy exists between texts recorded from teachers and pupils; it is based on similarities in phrasing, "common places" (short traditional episodes resembling albert lord's definition of "themes"), repetitions, versions of the plots, and performance manner (p. 179). for novikov this approach exaggerates the role of individuals, because he considers that the epic milieu controls and limits innovation. the collective tradition and epic memory in each region represent the true school for each generation of performers (pp. 180-183, 190). for example, the almost legendary singer elustaf’ev has generally been regarded as the teacher of several outstanding singers. in particular, this pertains to the founder of a dynasty of performers, t. g. riabinin, who is often considered the finest russian epic singer. on the basis of his textological analysis and other factual information, novikov concludes that riabinin learned his songs from several performers and not just from elustaf’ev. by comparing the songs of other performers and other information about them, novikov demonstrates that singers do not learn songs from a single seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 66 teacher while they are young, but continue assimilating new songs throughout their lives. he shows that some singers have acquired songs from as many as five to six other performers. novikov devotes his final chapter to the influence of published collections of epics on the singers. he emphasizes how important this is for the projected compilation of all russian epics because many songs, even in "classical" collections, are derived from printed sources and not from an oral tradition. novikov thus continues the earlier investigations on this topic by a. m. astakhova. popular editions of epics, particularly that of v. p. avenarius (kniga bylin [the book of byliny], 4th ed. moscow, 1893), which went through fourteen editions at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, usually involve an amalgamation of songs which have been composed about one epic hero and recorded from different singers. such collections also reflect an effort to "correct" the language according to literary norms. unfortunately, many students of the bylina have ignored the question of the bookish origins of some published texts. novikov states that his "method for comparative analysis of byliny is based on their examination within the context of regional epic traditions and references to extra-textual data" (p. 272). against the delineated background of a particular regional epic tradition, such "bookish" texts stand out for several reasons. the "grand champion" in the exploitation of printed texts was the literate singer marfa kriukova (1876-1954), from whom an astounding total of 250 songs was recorded, only thirty nine of which have traditional sources (p. 330). novikov remarks that the assimilation of printed texts increased during the soviet period and deserves study as a separate topic, but he insists that such texts should be excluded from the projected compendium of russian epics mentioned earlier in this review. in his conclusion, novikov sets forth fifteen main points to be considered during investigation of the russian epic tradition. thanks to his comprehensive familiarity with this tradition and studies written about it, he has provided a refreshing and path-breaking investigation of russian epics. his work requires much knowledge on the part of a reader but, through his detailed analysis of individual songs as examples of specific topics, he offers numerous succinct interpretations. one regrets that he did not include an index of the cited songs because this would have made the volume much more accessible to those studying particular epics. although novikov, following the conclusion of v. m. gatask, rejects the validity of the lord-parry formulaic technique for russian epics (p. 216), he might have considered patricia arant's book compositional techniques of the russian oral epic, the bylina, new york, 1990, in which she applies this method to a study of the songs of t. g. riabinin. 67 limitations on the length of a review allow only a few of novikov's interpretations and conclusions to be mentioned here. all students of the russian epic should read his book carefully and thoroughly. james bailey the university of wisconsin seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seef a discussion group snejana tempest, university of michigan, ann arbor i welcome all members of seef a to take part in a discussion group that has been organized and has the e-mail address: seef a@umich.edu. i have put all seef a members on the list of the discussion group. please let me know if you do not wish to be part of the discussion group. my e-mail address is: tempest@umich.edu. i will be glad to add the names of anyone who has been missed seef a journal page 54 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 mailto:a@umich.edu. mailto:tempest@umich.edu. microsoft word folk04se.doc 49 mikaela iakovlevna mel’ts, 1924-2003 with the passing of mikaela iakovlevna mel�ts on october 25, 2003 the study of russian folklore has suffered a great loss. her name is known to everyone involved in the study of the oral literature of the russian people, no matter whether they live in russia, western europe or in america. mel�ts� bibliographies on russian folklore have become reliable guides for both novice folklorists and mature specialists on russian folk culture. mikaela iakovlevna mel�ts, née druskina, was born april 21, 1924 in st. petersburg, or leningrad as it was then. her career began in june 1942 during the second world war. at the time she was in the urals, in the city of perm� which had become a refuge for many of those evacuated from leningrad. there mel�ts started work in a factory, but she soon became a student in the history and philological faculty at the local university. after her return to her native city she continued her studies at leningrad state university, graduating in 1947. already during her study at lgu mel�ts started working in her future specialty, at first in the library of the academy of sciences and later by contracts in the institute of russian literature (pushkin house) an sssr. in august 1947 she became a regular member of pushkin house. she was invited to join pushkin house by m. k. azadovskii who then headed the oral folklore sector. azadovskii determined the specialty that mel�ts eventually came to have, that is, the bibliography of russian folklore. mel�ts� first publication on folklore bibliography appeared in 1956. this is an exhaustive selection entitled �bibliografiia avtoreferatov dissertatsii po problemam narodnogo poeticheskogo tvorchestva 1949-1955 gody� [bibliography of dissertation abstracts on poetic folklore 1949-1955]. it was published in the first volume of the recently established pushkin house series, russkii fol�klor [russian folklore], moscow, leningrad, 1956, 1: 313-46. in 1961 mel�ts prepared the first volume of her fundamental bibliography russkii fol�klor. 1945-1959 [russian folklore], leningrad, 1961. in this publication mel�ts set new standards for the bibliography of russian folklore by creating a model for a differentiated bibliography. through bibliographic methods she was able to enhance the syncretic essence of folklore as a cultural phenomenon. materials and studies reflecting the philological, ethnographic, musicological and historical aspects of folklore were included in the bibliography. already in the first volume mel�ts offered readers a balanced and well thought out generic and thematic grouping of the material. a chronological principle for the disposition of the material in each rubric permitted an exposition of the history of the study of folklore in the post-war period. reference annotations and auxiliary indexes of names and geographic places furnished additional meаns for retrospective searches. mel�ts subsequently turned russkii fol�klor into a series. the following volumes reflected the history of the study of folklore over seventy five years: russkii fol�klor. 1917-1944 (leningrad, 1966); russkii fol�klor. 1960-1965 (leningrad, 1967); russkii fol�klor. 1901-1916 (leningrad, 1981); russkii fol�klor. 1966-1975. pts 1-2 (leningrad, 1984-85). these volumes, which quickly became authoritative throughout the world, not only included massive documentation for the field, but also through bibliographic methods defined the most important future trends for scholarship about the �living past.� during her long and productive life mel�ts published more than thirty bibliographic selections on various topics in the study of folklore. all these folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 50 selections turned out to be in great demand among scholars. for many years she collaborated with the international publication internationale volkskundliche bibliographie = international folklore bibliography = bibliographie internationale d'ethnologie and provided it with information about current works on the study of russian folklore. mel�ts retired in 1979 but remained apprised of all the new writing on folklore and continued to work intensively. one after another her surveys and reviews of works by other people came out. in 2000 she published a fundamental bibliography entitled poeziia a. s. pushkina v pesennikakh 1825-1917 gg. i russkom fol�klore (po materialam pushkinskogo doma) [the poetry of a. s. pushkin in song books from 1825 to 1917 and in russian folklore (based on materials in pushkin house]. this reference book, which immediately became valuable both in the field of pushkin studies and for the study of folklore, both sums up the topic of �pushkin in song books� and at the same time offers a reliable guide to further study of the subject. mel�ts made a significant contribution not only to the bibliography of folklore, but also to the history of russian bibliography on the study of folklore. she wrote a series of articles such as: �m. k. azadovskii kak fol�klorist-bibliograf� [m. k. azadovskii as folklorist and bibliographer], russkii fol�klor, moscow, leningrad, 1964, 9: 307-21; �ukazatel� russkoi etnograficheskoi literatury a. n. pypina� [index to the russian ethnographic literature of a. n. pypin], sovetskaia etnografiia, 1966, 5: 149-55; �neosushchestvlennyi fol�klorno-bibliograficheskii zamysel p. k. simoni� [p. k. simoni�s unrealized folklore-bibliographic plan], sovetskaia etnografiia, 1967, 2: 97-102; �russkie fol�kloristy-bibliografy kontsa xix nachala xx v.� [russian folklorist-bibliographers from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century], ocherki istorii russkoi etnografii, fol�kloristiki i antropologii [excerpts from the history of russian ethnography, folklore study and anthropology], moscow, 1971, 5: 76-101]. in 1970 mel�ts defended her dissertation for the degree of candidate of sciences on the subject russkaia fol�kloristika i problemy bibliografii fol�klora [the study of russian folklore and problems in the bibliography of folklore]. the bibliography of russian folklore did not form melt�s sole scholarly interest. during the many years she was in pushkin house she took an active part in everything in which the sector of oral folklore was involved. for example, together with n. p. kolpakova and g. g. shapovalova in 1957 she prepared the collection izbrannye poslovitsy i pogovorki russkogo naroda [selected proverbs and sayings of the russian people], moscow, 1957, and slightly later a basic edition entitled poslovitsy, pogovorki, zagadki v russkikh sbornikakh xviii-xx vekov [proverbs, sayings, and riddles in russian collections of the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries], moscow, leningrad, 1961. mel�ts also wrote numerous articles about the history of the study of russian folklore. 51 the name of mikaela iakovlevna mel�ts will be preserved in the history of russian scholarship. in the memory of those who knew her personally she also will remain as an exceptionally benevolent, forgiving and cultured person. tat’iana ivanova manuscript department institute of russian literature (translated by james bailey) folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 ews the newsletter of the slavic & east european folklore association volume 1, number 2, fall 1996 the second seefa newsletter much has happened since the meeting at aaass a year ago when we approved by­ laws, elected officers, and decided to seek af­ filiation with mass. our secretaiy-treas­ urer jeanmarte rouhier-willoughby has labored mightily and has at last applied for approval to receive non-profit status from irs. we have also re­ quested affiliation with mass, a matter that should be settled at this year's conference in bos­ ton november 14-17. if approved, this would al­ low us one "free" ses­ sion and a meeting room. special apprecia­ tion has to be expressed to those "founding con­ tributors" who helped to pay for vartous applica­ tions required to receive nonprofit status and for the first newsletter. they are: ronelle alex­ ander, james bailey, margaret beissinger, charles gribble, nor­ man ingham, linda ivanits, natalie kononenko, lyubomira president's message parpulova, jan perk­ owski, jeanmarte rouhierwilloughby,and robert rothstein. seefa at aaass we will have three ses­ sions on folklore and two related sessions at this year's aaass con­ ference (see the en­ closed list). we will have a business meet­ ing at 3:00 on satur­ day at a place to be announced. in particu­ lar we need to discuss the make up of the newsletter and web page, the involvement of foreign folklorists, and the broadening of seefa to cover the folklore of all countries in cis. we trust that members will come for­ ward to organize pan­ els for next year's aaass conference in seattle to be held no­ vember 20-23. with the present news­ letter we are experi­ menting by presenting brief surveys about folklore activities and publications in several east european countries. we have also started including re­ ports about confer­ ences on folklore (ronelle alexander), short reviews (mar­ garet beissinger), and remarks by three rus­ sian folklorists. all of these items, some in expanded form, will be made available in seefa's web page by our newsletter editor bruce mcclelland. we hope that all this schol­ arly information will be useful to the members of seefa, especially those who are actively teaching folklore courses today. we would appreciate your comments, sugges­ tions, and contribu­ tions to future newsletters, and we would welcome ideas about other activities that seefa might be­ come involved in. a few such items are re­ search in progress, translations, course materials and syllabi, folklore courses and programs, and ex­ change programs. my personal thanks go to all those who have contributed to the sec­ ond newsletter. re­ sponse has been so large that we will have plenty of materials for the third letter. james bailey, president. special appreciation has to be expressed to those '.founding contributors" woo helped to payfor various applications required to receive nonprofit status and for the first newsletter. inside aaass panels 2 treasurer's note 3 · editor's note 3 · book review 3 coriferences 4 · folklore dictionary 4 ethnottulsicology 4 · bibliographic series 5 ~~~~ folklore 6&7 2 seefanewsletterfall 1996 1996aaass convention: folklore panels there will be four, rather than three, sessions on folklore at the mass convention in 1996, as well as two related sessions of inter­ est. the list below is an update of the list published in the previous newsletter. thursday, november 14, 5:30 ritual and custom in slavic folklore. organized and chaired by: snejana tempest jeannette lacoss, "contemporary childlore: coping with dissolution and change olga strakhov, "negation formulae in slavic incantations and spells." linda ivanits, "death ritual in the volgograd area today" discussant: natalie kononenko friday, november 15,1:15 pm homage to a.b. lord: parry-lord theory in the 90s organized by: ronelle alexander chair: matthew kay. ronelle alexander, 'tradition and performance from the singer's point of view." natalie kononenko, "the learning technique of ukrainian minstrels: dictated an, sung texts." lyubomira parpulova-gribble, "traditional formulas as points of convergence between orality and uteracy" discussant: margaret beissinger: saturday, november 16,4:15 pm teaching slavic folklore organized by: guntis smidchens chair: robert bowie. jan perkowski, "the lure of dracula" guntis smidchens, "russian ethnographic methods in the american folklore classroom" james bailey, "should american students read propp?" discussant: lzaly zemtsovsky sunday, november 17, 12:30-2:30 pm, section 14-23 childlore, slang, and folk humor of post-soviet russia chair: emil draitser snejana tempest, "gender roles in childlore" nellee holmes, "fishki i prikoly pri prepodavanii russkogo slenga" emil draitser, 'where the russian jokes go: folk humor of post-soviet russia" saturday, 10:15 am the interface of folklore and literature: the slavic middle ages" sunday, 8:00 am "shamanism in siberia and inner asia." this just in ... note from the treasurer as you know from the last newsletter, seefa is pur­ suing non-profit status with the irs. the first step was to submit articles of incorporation for a non­ profit corporation with the state of kentucky, where our funds are located. the articles were filed and quickly approved. unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the ap­ proval of our non-profit status. the materials were sub­ mitted over three months ago and a decision was ex­ pected by october. however, in august irs requested additional information about our activities as well as an amendment to our articles of incorporation. as of sep­ tember 23, the revised materials have been submitted so that we are waiting a final decision on the application. we had a burst of interest in membership early last year, but over the summer applications dwindled. our membership currently totals 40. we ask that you please pass information about how to join seefa to those who may be interested in the field. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby. secretary-treasurer. brief review: albert lord's final book albert lord's final-and posthumous-book, the singer resumes the tale (edited by mary louise lord) was issued last summer (1995) by cornell university press. lord had already written sub­ stantial portions of the book when he passed away in july 1991. thanks to the extraordinary dedication and perspicacity of his widow, the classicist mary louise lord, the volume was completed and edited in the several years following lord's death. it offers a wealth of interpretation and analysis in ten chapters that range from studies of the "nature and kinds of oral literature" to transi­ tional texts. lord's later-in-life project on the lyric latvian "dainas" is presented, as are valuable contributions to the study of homer, anglo-saxon poetry,. ballad, and serbo-croatian epic. a wonderful chapter entitled "rebuttal" nearly comes to life as one can "hear" the dignified and almost-defiant "voice" of albert lord take on a number of his critics and successfully defend his claims to the orally composed nature of much of traditional poetry. the vol­ ume is a fitting final statement from a scholar who revolutionized critical thinking on oral literature in the 20th century. margaret beissinger farewell from the editor 111ere was, last year, some concern expressed by seefa's board of directors, when i appliedfor the position of newsletter editor, that i might soon be going to eastern europe under the auspices of irex. well, that concern has been borne out, but not in the expected way. for, rather than going off to do ethnographic .fieldwork on vampires in bulgaria under an irex research grant, i have in­ stead. accepted the position of director of !rex' s eurasia internet programs. so this will be the second. and last, newsletter in which i will have been involved.. 111e editorship of the newsletter has been passed into the able hands of jonathan perkins, afolklorist at univer­ sity of kansas. his appointment to replace me was una.rumously approved by the seefa board of directors. in terms of plans for the newsletter, i must con­ fess that i did not have enough time to implement many of the suggestions and wishes of the membership and the board.. i will pass to my succes­ sor my own wish listfor the newsletter as it grows to accommodate a growing membership. 111e specific areas that i would have liked to en­ hance over the first two issues include: incorpora­ tion of more materials concerning eastern europe, including romania; inclusion of more notices of upcoming events supplied by members; and. fi­ nally, a greater emphasis on the design andjunc­ tionality of the web page, using it to unk to sites concerned withfolklore all over the world. i will of course, stay in touch with seefa, al­ though i will be living in moscow for the next two years. since i will be spending most of my time traveling to many places lying between vladivos­ tok to moldova, and between minsk and tblisi and almaty, there is even a good chance i will be able to supply some actual d.ei.us to seefa as i encounter it. i amgladfor my chance to have helped seefa get off the ground. and thank the board of direc­ tors for giving me that chance. -bruce mcclelland seefanewsletterfall 1996 3 seefanews dictionary of the language of russian folklore a scholarly school for the study of linguo-folkloris. tics has been formed under the di­ rection of professor at. khrolenko in the ancient russian city of kursk. study of the language of russian folklore rep­ resents the basic purpose for the ac­ tivities of the school. main emphasis is placed on investiga­ tion of the seman­ tics of the folk-po­ etic word. at. khrolenko's mono­ graph the seman­ tics of the folklore word (voronezh, 1992) sums up many years of work in this area. the lexicological research of the kursk linguo-folklor­ ists has established a reliable base for realizing an ex­ tremely complex and laborious pro­ ject called diction­ ary of the language of russian folklore. no such lexico­ graphic work exists either in russia or in other countries, although work in this area is being conducted by three other groups. these are: 1) the moscow schoolofethnolin­ guistics under the direction of the re­ cently deceased page 8 conferences fifth albert bates lord conference held in almaty the fifth albert bates lord international confer­ ence was held 20-25 au­ gust, 1996, in almaty, the capital city of kazak­ stan. as at previous lord conferences, the meeting included a blend of schol­ arly papers and encoun­ ters with singers representing a living tradi­ tion. the conference was hosted by the almaty kur­ mangazy state conserva­ tory of music, and was held concurrently with the 150th anniversary of the birth of the kazak epic singer dzhambul dzhambaev. members of the lord conference were thus able to attend events connected with this larger celebration, noteworthy among which were a con­ cert featuring epic singers who had won in competi­ tions across central asia, and a country fair featur­ ing lavish meals in color­ fully decorated yurts and an elaborate horse race. morning sessions of the conference were devoted to scholarly papers, and after­ noon sessions to encoun­ ters with traditional per­ formers. one afternoon seminar was centered upon the traditional epic of the mangistau region, and the other on the epic tradition of the sir valley. the topic of this latter seminar was the epic sing­ ing tradition from the re­ gion of kzyl-orda, and was organized by almas alma­ tov and alma kunan­ baeva. singers from this re4 seefanewsletterfall 1996 gion gave a convincing demonstration not only of their art but also of their awareness of it as a con­ tinuing tradition. at the conclusion of the confer­ ence, it was announced that a school of kazak tra­ ditional epic, under the di­ rection of almas almatov, was being founded in kzyl­ orda. since almatov and several of his singers have attended practically all the albert lord conferences, and since one of the major goals of the lord confer­ ences is to bring singers and scholars together in a mutual learning experi­ ence, it seemed especially fitting that the founding of his school should be an­ nounced at this fifth con­ ference. in addition to formal conf~rence events, foreign visitors also enjoyed the baths of almaty (said to be the best of the entire for­ mer ussr), and were treated not only to an ex­ cursion into the beautiful mountains right outside almaty but also to several outstanding feasts. the hospitality and friendship of the kazak hosts left an unforgettable impression on all those who were lucky enough to attend. we look forward to further interaction with central asian singers at sub­ sequent lord conferences, either in central asia itself or elsewhere in the world. ronelle alexander university of california, berkeley 'thnomusicology in ussia in recent yecus from the 1950s through the 1970s in the ussr, when state <esthetics considered the highest value of music written by com­ posers to be its connec­ tion with folklore traditions, musical folk­ loristics, or ethnomusi­ cology, had close connections with gen­ eral musicology. the composers' union brought together spe­ cialists in the folklore section, financed expe­ ditions, conferences, and publications, and founded the folklore commission where a catalogue was devel­ oped and an ~normous number of songs was collected. in the 1970s, scholarship about the folk song was en­ grossed with cartogra­ phy and developed contacts with other fields, especiallyeth­ nography. in the 1980s, the folk­ lore ensemble move­ ment started-small groups of urban sing­ ers wished to perform ancient songs in an authentic manner, car­ ried out expeditions to learn how to sing di­ rectly rom rural sing­ ers, and made musical transcriptions. this in tum has led to efforts to change ethnomusi­ cology from a research into a performance dis­ cipline and has influ­ enced the training of new personnel. in the past, ethnomu­ sicologists used to meet at conferences with colseefanews ethnomusicology, cont'd leagues from the former un­ ion republics, but such meetings have practically ceased for financial reasons. the publishing houses "nauka" and "sovetskii kom­ pozitor" used to publish folk­ lore materials, but since 1991 they have not brought out a single new collection of songs or a single book about folk music. although new collections have been appearing in the provinces, they are difficult to obtain and leave much to be de­ sired. the series "compila­ tion of siberian folklore" and its splendid publication ofyakut olonkhos are ex­ ceptions. worried about the loss of a national musical tradition. schools in russia have started teaching russian folk music as a special sub­ ject: musical colleges and higher educational institu­ tions have opened folklore departments for the prepara­ tion of teachers. a utilitar­ ian approach predominates so that the "ethno-" is strengthened at the expense of" -musicology." formerly a musician-folklorist had to know harmony, polyphony, playing the piano. orchestra­ tion, and the history of mu­ sic just as well as any other musicologist, but this no longer is always the case. while many ethnomu­ sicologists interested in practical performance _ have come together in a union of folklore ensem­ bles, ethnomusicologists interested in research have grouped themselves around the russian acad­ emy of sciences and the association "musical folk­ lore" at the institute for the history of the arts. two other important detant developments need to be mentioned. first. the in­ fluence of the school of e.v. gippius (1903-1985), with its interest in struc­ tural typology of russian folk melodies, is steadily growing thanks to his stu­ dents, the late b. b. efimenkova and m. a. en­ govatova at the gnesin mu­ sical academy in moscow. second. v. v. mazepus' school in novosibirsk fo­ cuses on studying the tra­ ditional singing of the minor peoples in siberia. in these ways the scholarly potential of russian eth­ nomusicology, to all ap­ pearances, is being preserved. mikhail lobanov russian institute for the history of the arts. sl petersburg, russia call for websrres seefanews, which is · currently available on the web at http:// faraday.clas. virginia.edu/ -bam4c/ seefa.htm · is seeking to build links to · slavic, east european. and · folklore-related web sites. · please send urls of inter· esting sites to the editor of : seefanews. bibliographic series "russian folklore" since 1961, bibliog­ raphic indexes of russian folklore have been pre­ pared at the institute of russian literature (pushkin house). russian academy of sciences, st. petersburg. russia. mikaela melts, who founded the bibliographic series "russian folklore." published five volumes (in six books) covering materi­ als from 1901 to 1975. she established the subject of the bibliographic system and the structure of the in­ dex. the bibliographies in the series contain informa­ tion about works devoted to russian oral poetry and published in russian in the former soviet union. according to the tradi­ tions of russian folkloris­ tics. the term "folklore" is understood to involve works of oral literature, folk beliefs and mythologi­ cal conceptions, rituals, and customs. the materi­ als in the bibliography are grouped by a generic-the­ matic principle, that is. ep­ ics, tales, songs, ritual po­ etry. works on the history of russian folkloristics, and works on the interrela­ tions of oral and written traditions. an auxiliary name and geographic in­ dex facilitates a search for information in the bibli raphy. the last four volume the bibliography have b prepared by tatyana g. lvanova, who has pub­ lished two books devote to contemporary folklori tics for the years 19761980 (leningrad, 1987) and for the years 19811985 (st. petersburg. 1993). she also prepare retrospective volume for the years 1881-1900 (l ingrad, 1990). the new vate publishing house "dmitrii bulanin" in 19 brought out the volume covering the years 1800 1955. this firm, whose dress is institute of rus sian literature, naberezhnaia makarov dom 4, st. petersburg, sia 199034, specializes publishing scholarly lite ture in the humanities. thus a bibliography of t initial period in russian folkloristics has now be made available. the ne volumes of the bibliog­ raphy for the years 198 1990 and 1991-1995 a being compiled at the p sent time at the institut russian literature. tatyana g. ivanova. institute of russian literature. invitation to visit the milman parry collection margaret beissinger has arranged a visit to the milman parry collection after the session "homage to a. b. lord" 1: 15 to 3: 15 on friday november 15th. she will hand out directions and will lead all those interested to meet in room "c" at harvard widener library at 4: 15. mrs. lord plans to come to the session and to speak, along with tom butler, during the get-together at the collection. because of the long day. unfortu­ nately it will not be possible for mrs. lord to invite us to visit her home to see albert lord's study after the public reception for the harvard slavic department from 5:00 to 7:00 in the rotunda of widener library. seefanewsletterfall 1996 5 special insert selected bibliography of ma terials on russian folklore james bailey, the university of wisconsin, madison as everyone who has tried to follow and perhaps to pur­ chase recent books about russian folklore knows. there no longer is any certain way of finding out what is actually published in russia. the whole system has changed. old publishing houses have vanished. new ones have ap­ peared. many items appear in provincial cities. and there is no central listing of current or planned publications. short bibliographies appear in the somewhat popular journal "zhivaia starina" which is coming out for the third year. the present bibliography offers a selection of books that have appeared since 1990 and suiveys trends that may be taking place. while a rather broad interest exists in publishing items con­ cerned with russian nationality. ethnography. ethnomusi­ cology. folklore. customs. and beliefs. there also are many books that have a popular appeal. have questionable schol­ arly quality, and reflect an interest in astrology. the occult. or the supernatural. one disturbing sign is that very few collections of russian folklore itself are coming out. per­ haps because private publishers see little demand for it. but this may also reflect the fact that institutions have few funds to finance expeditions to collect folklore in the field. because of publishing costs. plans for bringing out the long desired compendium of russian epics. for instance. have been shelved once again. at the same time there are several positive signs for the study of russian folklore today be­ cause a number of new fine scholarly works are appearing. many older "classics' are being republished. basic reier­ ence works are coming out. and neglected genres such as incantations. memorates (bylichki). and spiritual verses (dukhovnye stikhi) are being published in anthologies. only occasional efforts seem to be made to adapt the study of russian folklore to american "dorsonism" although s. lu. nekliudov in his article "posle fol'klora." "zbivaia starina." no .. 1 (1995): 2-4. pleas for such an approach to collect and study contemporary folklore. here i will cite just a few items. see the web page for the bibliography. "folklor i etnograficheskaia deistvitelnost." ed. a k. baiburin. st. petersburg: nauka. 1992. (a collection of arti­ cles about mythological texts and rituals. reconstrution of archaic concepts. and analysis of folklore texts.) lvanova. t. g. "russkaia folkloristika v biograficheskikh ocherkakh." studiorum slavicorum monumenta. vol. 1. spb.: ran. 1993. (a study of nine russian folklorists around the tum of the twentieth century.) ivleva. larisa. "riazhene v russkoi traditsionnoi kulture." spb.: rossiiskii institut istorii iskusstv. 1994. (a fascinat­ ing study by the late larisa ivleva.) jazyk russkogo fol'kiora. ed. z. k. tarlanov. petrozavodsk: petrozavodskij gosudarstvennyj universitet. 1996. (the lat­ est volume of a series edited by tarlanov.) khrolenko. a t. "semantika folklornogo slova." voronezh: voronezhskii universitet. 1992. "narodnye znaniia. folklor. narodnoe iskusstvo: svod et­ nograficheskikh ponjatii i terminov." eds. b. n. putilovand g. shtrobakh. moscow: nauka. 1991. nekrylova. a f .• and n. i. savushkina. compo "narodnyj teatr." moscow: sovetskaia rossiia. 1991. (probably the fin6 seefanewsletterfall 1996 est and most complete anthology of folk plays. petrushka. vertep. and urban folklore including the raek.) nikitina. s. e. "ustnaia narodnaia kultura i iazykovoe soznanie." m.: nauka. 1993. (a specialist on old believers writes about the differences between the written and spo­ ken word in folklore.) novichkova. t. a "russkii demonologicheskii slovar." spb.: petersburgskii pisatel. 1995. (contains many memorates and draws upon archival materials.) "pesennaia lirika ustnoi traditsii." compo and ed. i. i. zemt­ sovskii. spb.: rossiiskii institut istorii iskusstv. ("folklor i folkloristika") (a recent volume in the excellent series "folk­ lor i folkloristika" put out by this institut now under its older name.) putilov. b. n. "folklor i narodnaia kultura." spb.: ran. 1994. (the latest volume by one "dean" of russian folkloris­ tics.) "russkii folklor: bibliograficheskii ukazatei1800-1855." t. g. lvanova. compo st. petersburg: institut russkoj litera­ tury. 1996. (the latest volume in the indispensable series of bibliographies on russian folklore.) "skomorokhi: problemy i perspektivy izucheniia." ed. v. v. koshelev. spb.: rossiiskii institut istorii iskusstv. (collec­ tion of papers given at a conference november 22-26. 1994 and organized by koshelcv who has revitalized study of the skomorokhs.) "slavianskaia mifologiia." v. lao petrukhin. et al .. ed. m.: el­ lis lak. 1995. "slavianskie drevnosti." vol. 1. a-g. ed. n. i. tolstoi. m.: mezbdunarodnye otnosheniia. 1995. (the frrst volume of an encyclopedia being prepared by the lnstitut slavi­ anovedeniia i balkanistiki.) smimov. iu. i.. and t. s. shentalinskaia. eds. and comps. "russkaia epicheskaia poeziia sibiri i dalnego vostoka." no­ vosibirsk: nauka. 1991. sokolov. b. m. "bolshoi stikh 0 egorii khrabrom." m.: nasle­ die. 1995. (although this book was written long ago by one of the finest russian folklorists in the twentieth century. it was published only recently.) vlasova. m. "novaia abevega russkikh sueverii." spb.: severozapad. 1995. (an illus­ trated dictionary of folk beliefs.) special insert recent books: ukrainian folklore natalie kononenko, university of virginia generally little seems to be happening in regard to folklore in ukraine. what is most disappointing is that the classics are not being reissued as they are in russia. more pre­ cisely, the classics are being reissued, but in a condensed and popularized form rather than by reprinting the origi­ nal. chubyns'kyi's book just came out, but it is expensive and contains only two volumes of excerpts. language may be an issue since many of the classics were in written rus­ sian with texts in ukrainian, often even in dialect and fairly close to the actual oral text. since the ukrainians are try­ ing to be purely ukrainian, folk classics in russian may be unacceptable. kulish's collection "zapiski 0 luzhnoi rusi" came out in an edition printed in kiev by the respectable publishing house dnipro in 1994. it is difficult to under­ stand why dnipro does not republish more works of this kind. kulish's book is not my favorite either because i find him pompous, self-aggrandizing and condescending to the folk, but at least the volume is a start. many of the things that are popular in russia today are also popular in ukraine: incantations, herbal medicine, and demonology. it would be wonderful if hnatiuk's three-volumed book on de­ monology were reprinted. the collection of incantations was a disappointment-a lot of paper but not much text, and more a popular edition than a scholarly one. some of the herbalist books and the herbalism/ ecology books seem to be good. the following is a list of recent acquisitions of ukrainian folklore. i cannot guarantee that other things have not come out and have escaped my attention. i would appreci­ ate it if readers of the seefa newsletter would add their own comments and fill out my list. 1. "zapiski 0 iuzhnoi rusi, v dvukh tomakh." sostavlenie i izdanie panteleimona kulisha. originally published in 1856, republished in 1994, kyiv: dnipro. a reprint of a clas­ sic that contains all kinds of things-epic poetry and its performers, legends and beliefs, tales and their tellers, and songs-in russian. 2. "ukraiins'ki prykazky, prysliv'ia i take inshe zbirnyky markovycha ta inshykh uklav m. nomys." originally pub­ lished in 1864, reissued kyiv: lybid', 1993. another reprint of a classic collection of proverbs and sayings. 3. "ukraiintsi: narodni viruvannia, povir'ia demonolihiia." kyiv: lybid', 1991. a collection of articles, many by well­ known scholars of the past-ryi's'kyi, franko, hnatiuk, and efimenko. 4. pavlo chubyns'kyi. "mudrist' vivkiv." 2 vols. kyiv: mystet­ svo, 1995. pavlo chubyns'kyi's work is a classic that has wonderful materials on wedding rituals, funerals, epics, and many other things. however, the 1995 "mudrist'" is not the same as the original and can best be described as "chubyns'kyi lite." it is still a useful book, but i was hoping for a republication and was disappointed. 5. "ukraiins'ke narodoznavstvo." eds. s. p. pavliuk, h. i. horyn', r. a kyrchiva. l'viv: feniks, 1994. a basic volume containing information on all sorts of things-house con­ struction, farming techniques, beliefs, and folk food. the book is probably heavier on material culture than on spiri­ tual cultural but is still quite useful. 6. "dvanadtsiat'misiatsiv: narodnyi kalendar." iu. s. kova­ lenko. kyiv: ukraiina, 1993. this volume goes through the year month by month but is a little on the "cute" side. chubyns'kyi's book above covers the yearly cycle in suc­ cinct form-i prefer it. 7. ·ukraiins'ki zamovliannia." m. n. moskalenko, m. o. novikova. kyiv: dnipro, 1993. a collection of charms that has lots of pictures and wide borders but not much text. nevertheless, this seems to be the best there is even if it does not have an ideal format or presentation. 8. "ukraiins'ka narodna meditsyna: istoriia i praktika zori­ ana boltarovych." kyiv: abrys. 1994. i haven't had a chance to look at this volume carefully, but it shows how interest in folklore medicine is as high in ukraine as else­ where. 10. "ukraiins'ke narodne maliarstvo xii-xx stolit'." v. i. sventsits'ka, v. p. otkovych. kyiv: mystetsvo, 1991. a vol­ ume of ukrainian folk painting that is gorgeous and expen­ sive but is worth it. look at "christ the grapevine." 11. "ukraiins'ki perekazy." m. vozniak. krakiv /l'viv: ukrai­ ins'ke vydavnytsvo, 1994. this collection, which contains mainly historical legends, is essentially popular rather than scholarly. for example, the second half claims to be derived from oral sources and lists vozniak as collector, but noth­ ing is stated about whom he collected each piece from, where, or when. 12. "heroiichnyi epos ukraiins'kohoh narodu: khrestoma­ tiia: o. m. talanchuk and f. s. kuslyi. kyiv: lybid', 1993. epos in the russian/ukrainian sense-epics, historical songs, legends, tales, and also carols. a useful but not ground-breaking publication. seefanewsletterfall 1996 7 jrompage4 academician n.i.tolstoy, 2) s.e. nikitina's moscow group work­ ing on a thesaurus for the lan­ guage of the russian lament and spiritual verses, and 3) the polish school under the direc­ tion of jerzi bartminski. the kursk project is distin­ guished by its maximum empha­ sis on linguistics. the semantics and pragmatics of the oral-poetic word is elucidated only by consid­ ering all the textual and extra-tex­ tual connections of the lexeme be­ ing described, an approach that avoids subjectivism in the evalu­ ation of linguistic facts. the pro­ ject of the kursk linguo-folklor­ ists has been supported by the russian humanities scholarly fund. interim results (such as preparing a conference, glossa­ ries, or trial dictionary entries) are being published by kursk scholars in a series called "folk­ lore lexicography." five issues of this series have already come out during the years 1994-1996, and the sixth and seventh issues are now in press. practical work on the diction­ ary has stimulated active theoreti­ cal research and has placed into investigators' hands an extremely promising methodology by which it is possible to delineate what has been impossible to achieve by other scholarly means. the kursk linguo-folklorists, particu­ larly by comparing dictionary en­ tries based on russian and eng­ lish folk songs, have revealed the individuality of the folklore men­ tality of both ethnic groups. pre­ liminary results have been pre­ sented in o.a.petrenko's monograph "ethnic mentality and the language of folklore" slavic & east european folklore association (kursk, 1996). on the basis of the dictionary being compiled, promising theoretical research is being carried on in regard to questions such as the territorial differentiation of the language of folklore, the evolution of folk-po­ etic speech, its genre charac­ teristics, the morphemics of the folklore word, and others. the kursk linguo-folklorists are prepared to collaborate with specialists of other countries in contrastive and comparative re­ search on the folklore language of various ethnic groups. inquiries may be addressed to: a. t. khrolenko. ul.gogolia, d. 25, kv. 19, kursk, russia, 305004 a. t. khrolenko. kursk, russia 109 cabell hall university of virginia charlottesville, va 22903 inside president's message 1 aaass panels 2 treasurer's note 3 editor's note 3 bookreview 3 coriferences 4 folklore dictionary 4 ethnorrwsicology 4 bibliographic series 5 soecial: biblioarap!w of i(ussian and okrauuan folklore 6&7 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 russkii shkolnyi fol'klor. at 'vyzyvanii' pikovoj damy do semeinykh rasskazov. [russ~an school folklore: from 'summoning' the queen of spades to family stories] moscow: ladolllic 1998. 744 pp. aleksandr y. pigin. petrozavodsk state university. in spring of 1998 the moscow scholarly publishing center "ladomir" published this new book in the series "russkaia potaennaia literatura" [russian secret literature]. the editor of this volume is the prominent petersburg folklorist and investigator of russian culture and everyday life, a. f. belousov, who also compiled the first collection of school folklore in russian folkloristics, which appeared earlier (shkol'nyi by' i fol'k/or: y 2 ch. [everyday school life and folklore: in 2 parts], tallinn, 1992). urban school folklore is a new topic of study in russian folkloristics. the world of children's subculture so contradicted the aims of official soviet pedagogy that it was perceived not merely as a marginal and forbidden sphere, but even as "nonexistent." for this reason the "discovery" and the systematic study and publication of school texts were impossible until the late 1980s and early i990s. the collection under review is the most complete anthology of russian school folklore to date, and the most diverse in terms of the materials presented. the thematic and generic range of texts published here is extraordinarily broad. the collection will acquaint a reader with oral and written children's folklore, love lyrics and scabrous verses, children's games of make-believe countries, children's magic and mythology, and texts both comic and sentimental: methods for summoning the queen of spades, "zaum" [trans-sense] in children's poetry (by a. l. toporkov); children's scary stories, children's utopias (s. m. loiter); ballads (s. b. adon'eva); girls' manuscript love stories (s. b. borisov and s. i. zhavoronok); girls' albums in the twentieth century (y. y. golovin and y. f. lur'e); the album of a children's colony (m. y. kalashnikova); "the school chronicle" -a peculiar kind of "explanatory dictionary" of school life (y. f. lur'e); schoolchildren's parodic poetry, street graffiti, poems whose comic effect results from the "deception" or disappointment of the expectation of a vulgar rhyme (m. l. lur'e); "sadistic doggerel" (a. f. belousov); and family stories (i. a. razumova). the scholarly value of this edition depends not only on the published texts, but also on research materials. in his introductory article, belousov attempts to trace the historical development of school folklore, which is indissolubly connected with the history of the russian school in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. the fundamental conflict of school folklore consists, in the investigator's opinion, in the clash of "constructive" and "destructive" attitudes towards study, and of norms of adults' and children's culture. belousov's conclusion is brilliantly supported by his analysis of several examples of school folklore, which are organized as "parodia sacra." these expose their topics to mockery, "turn them inside out," or take various manifestations of grown-up culture to absurd extremes ("sadistic doggerel" and parodic school poetry). page 43 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 the introductory articles to each of the collection's sections are also of considerable interest. i will pause briefly to discuss only three of them. in his article on the queen of spades in school folklore, a. l. toporkov not only describes the methods for "summoning" this specific "demonologic" character, but also reveals the "particular myth-making possibilities" of children's creative activity, following the mechanism of folklorization of a literary work (push kin's story "the queen of spades"). this last aspect is of particular interest in the context of the general cultural problem of the transformation of "elite" texts into "apocrypha" upon their transmission into a "heterocultural" milieu. s. m. loiter's article, on children's "scary stories," also deals with children's myth-making. she interprets these stories as mythological tales whose main theme is death. loiter devotes most of her attention to characterization of mythological characters in the "strashilki" [scary stories], the manifestation in the texts of archetypal motifs and archaic mythological concepts (such as shape-shifting, "armlessness-ieglessness," or zoomorphic survivals). this section ends with an index of types and plot-motifs for children's scary stories ("strashilki"), which will be useful to researchers beyond their study of children's mythology. one particular discovery is that this collection is the first to treat children's family stories as folkloric texts. the author of this section, i. a. razumova, establishes the basic thematic varieties and narrative forms of family stories (such as legends about a family's history, the origin of the family's name, or stories about children that resemble jokes), and characterizes their functions in family tradition. all the research materials in the collection, articles, and commentaries to the texts are compiled in a professional manner, without the slightest attempt to shock the reader or force any ethical ("pedagogical") evaluation. the anthology ends with a republication of two articles by g. s. vinogradov (1887i945), the foremost investigator of russian children's folklore ("children's satirical lyrics" [1925] and "children's secret languages" [1926]), prepared by a. f. nekrylova and v. v. golovin. (translated by sibelan forrester) seef a journal page 44 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 microsoft word folk04se.doc 52 reviews w. f. ryan. the bathhouse at midnight: magic in russia. university park, pa: the pennsylvania state university press, 1999. 504 pages. isbn 0271019662. $71.50 (hardback). 0271019670 (paper). $24.95. why does pushkin�s tat�iana turn pale on seeing the horned moon to her left? why did the dostoevskii family consider their father�s sudden return from a trip to the village of darovoe a bad omen? why do chekhov�s peasants make the sign of the cross when they yawn? one can find the answers to these and hundreds of similar questions in the bathhouse at midnight. will ryan�s superb study of russian magic takes its title from the most propitious time and place for magic in the russian village. it represents the culmination of a career of scholarship devoted in good part to magic and rituals in russia, beginning with his doctoral dissertation on old russian astrological and astronomical terminology and continuing through a series of studies on the history of science and magic texts in russia.(1) his bathhouse will remain the standard work in english on russian magic for some time to come. the breath of its grasp, the depth of its treatment of specific subjects, and the good judgment and erudition ryan displays throughout make it an essential reference book for slavists and folklorists. ryan opts for a descriptive and, to a large extent, comparative approach and wisely avoids squeezing his material into a neat interpretative system. for, while it is possible to represent specific beliefs, rites, places, objects, and texts associated with magic with a good degree of concreteness, one treads on shaky ground in attempting to superimpose a particular anthropological, social, or psychological grid on this material. ryan�s familiarity with the classical and patristic traditions as well as with the texts concerning magic in europe since the middle ages enables him to situate the russian tradition within a broad context. in addition to russia�s byzantine inheritance, he discusses the oriental and, especially, european texts that seem to have made an impact on russian practice, and he rather quickly dispels preconceptions about the uniquely slavic quality of russian magic. he notes that at the outset of his endeavor he was forced to confront the �banal truth� that �there are few magical texts, practices, beliefs or objects which are exclusive to russia or even to the slavs, or for that matter anywhere else: after allowing for elements of natural selection as a result of local climate, flora, fauna, language and historical circumstance, most things can be seen either to derive from, or have analogues or cognates in other cultures.�(1) ryan thus concedes that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to sift out indigenous traditions from those which are �borrowed,� and, since the oral and written traditions readily swap material, attempts to determine what �originated� in popular practice and what belongs to the legacy of the written word tend to be just as frustrating. for ryan magic seems integral to the whole human experience. ancient civilizations left records of occult practices, and magic continues to flourish in post-soviet russia. the multiple attempts of the eastern and western churches to put the breaks on magic as a remnant of pre-christianity were futile, and, ironically, the lower clergy often figured among its more avid practitioners. in fact, particular uses of religious objects and gestures sometimes blurred the line between magic and religion, as in the employment of wonder-working icons folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 53 for protection and victory in battle or the sign of the cross as a defense against devils [238, 229]. another indistinct boundary ryan elaborates on is that between magic and politics, since, it was believed, witchcraft could be used to the detriment of the tsar and his family. ivan the terrible both practiced magic and persecuted those he believed guilty of practicing magic [244]; boris godunov instituted an oath against the practice of sorcery for those in his service [413]. during the reign of tsar aleksei mikhailovich one of the tsaritsa�s servants was tortured on suspicion of practicing harmful magic when she stole a mushroom and some salt from her mistress and then spilled the salt [415]. ryan includes many other instances of this sort. the organization of the bathhouse at midnight is practical and facilitates its usefulness as a handy reference work. it is divided into sixteen chapters that cover, among other things, popular magic and the evil eye; the functions of wizards and witches and russian�s extensive terminology for them; divinations, omens, and signs; dreams and predictions from the human body (itches, twitches, sneezing and the like); spells and curses (including a discussion of the structure of the zagovor and abundant translated texts); talismans and amulets; materia magica (with a very lengthy and useful roster of real and fantastic plants prescribed for magic rites); texts as magic (including �the letters of christ to abgar,� �the letter to st. peter/st. nicholas,� �the dream of the virgin,� �and �the twelve fridays�), numerology, geomancy, alchemy, and astrology; and a final chapter on the church, the law and the state (including a roster of witchcraft cases that the synodal court dealt with in the 18th century). to account for the overlapping nature of sub-divisions within magic, the individual chapters contain a good deal of cross-referencing and there is an extensive index at the back of the book. the book includes a general bibliography in addition to the informative footnotes that accompany each chapter. eighteen illustrations complement the discussion by helping us visualize new year�s divinations, zmeevik amulets, triasavitsy (supposed daughters of herod responsible for illnesses), the circle of solomon, and other things. all in all, ryan�s book is a marvelous contribution to slavic studies. it is great fun to read as well. linda ivanits the pennsylvania state university microsoft word seefaf01c.doc 60 new research on russian folklore r e v i e w s svetlana b. adoneva. skazochnyi tekst i traditsionnaia kul'tura [the text of the tale and traditional culture]. st. petersburg: izdatel'stvo sankt-peterburgskogo universiteta, 2000. 183 pp. as the title suggests, this book explores the russian folktale (specifically the magic tale, the volshebnaia skazka) and its relationship to traditional culture. since this question has often been ignored or overlooked by russian folklorists, this new study is a welcome addition to russian folktale scholarship. in her first chapter, adoneva investigates the logical structure of folktale narrative. she finds that every event in the folktale is the result of a character's activity, the expression of a will, or the response to such an act. thus the folktale character typically acts in response to a communication. adoneva proposes a typology of several kinds of dialogic folktale interactions. more interestingly, she feels that the narrative consists of pairs of actions, related as cause and effect. these pairs of actions do not, however, form a longer “causal chain.” next, adoneva discusses the nature of space and time in the magic tale. for this narrative world, space and time are not neutral categories, but are experienced subjectively, and values are attributed to them accordingly. in her third chapter she discusses the nature of folkloric discourse. she identifies two narrative modes, one denotative and profane, and the other sacred, in which a word, image, or act can also stand for a number of related ideas or concepts. adoneva argues that the distinguishing feature of the magic tale, and what makes it an "artistic" text (unlike the texts of memorates, fabulates, or incantations) is the fact that it is simultaneously profane and sacred, employing both narrative modes. adoneva relates the features of the magic tale to what she describes as a traditional mentality. looking at various superstitions, she finds that they always imply meaningful, intentional signs, an active will, and an actor with intentions; unusual events do not “just happen.” seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 61 to the traditional mind, the world is full of dialogue or dialogic interaction with beings who act with certain intentions and to whom one must respond in a certain way, as do the characters of the folktale. the traditional mind does not seek causes or natural laws, but rules of behavior for interaction with the spirit world. likewise, the folktale hero(ine) does not resolve problems by analysis or experimentation; solutions are simply provided by custom or “knowledgeable” persons. many students of folklore are likely to disagree with adoneva's view of the folktale structure as lacking an overall “causal chain.” the discovery of vladimir propp's morphology, and the development of this line of research by e. m. meletinskii and others would seem to suggest that there is a logical overall pattern to the folktale's narrative structure. this seems especially apparent in the relationship between propp's functions 8-8a (villainy/lack) and 18-19 (victory/liquidation), which are separated by numerous other functions, but which motivate and give a logical direction to the narrative. another question concerns adoneva's definition of the two narrative modes and the identification of “sacred” folkloric speech as typically metaphorical. if this is so, do the frequent metaphoric images in proverbs necessarily make proverbs sacred? in the tale material she adduces to support her arguments, adoneva only refers to single examples of a given tale type. at times this may lead her into error, as when she implies that there is a lack of logic in a tale from the afanas’ev collection (tale no. 128, a version of at 301); the version she cites does not explain why the hero's brothers appear beside the hole, through which he has descended to the underground kingdoms. even though an explanation may be missing from this particular version, it seems likely that the tale teller and listeners would have in their minds memories of previous performances of this tale; in many versions, the hero's brothers or companions initially lower him into the ground, so that their appearance there later is to be expected. it is possible that some of the folktale's features and characteristics that adoneva discusses can be better explained by the needs and limitations of oral narrative and performance than by the presence of a traditional mentality or world-view. it is surprising that adoneva's study does not include more consideration of the folktale as a performance event, or as a form of entertainment. one of the criteria most consistently suggested by folklorists in many countries in an effort to define the folktale has been its status as fiction; at many times and in many places it has been recognized by teller and listeners as fiction, an entertaining story. while adoneva points out many intriguing similarities between the imagery seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 62 in folktales and incantations, for example, it is also clear that the folktale was not usually regarded by its audiences in the same way as the incantation, whose words had the power to influence human affairs. although one may disagree with some of her conclusions, adoneva's book is a stimulating discussion with many interesting observations and should be read by anyone with a serious interest in the russian folktale, or its interpretation. andreas johns university of washington-seattle microsoft word seefaf01c.doc 39 b e l a r u s i a n f o l k l o r e a r t i c l e the current status of belarusian calendar-ritual tradition maryna a. tryfanenkava. belarusian state university, minsk the most accurate and fullest understanding of the contemporary status of bеlarusian calendar rituals may be acquired by combining synchronic and diachronic methods of investigation. synchronic study bases itself on materials which have been collected, systematized, and published in recent years. diachronic study assumes the analysis of publications and significant scholarly works of past years. the starting point has to be the first half of the nineteenth century, since it was at this time that a wide interest in folklore emerged in connection with the activity of the romantics. this interest served as a stimulus to the beginning of systematic collecting. earlier information is too meager and fragmentary to make judgements about the status of the folklore tradition prior to the nineteenth century. the folklore of every people, the belarusians included, is not monolithic and homogeneous; its existence and development are determined by the sum of its local phenomena. by synthesizing synchronic and diachronic approaches it is possible to trace the dynamics of distinct regional and local folklore traditions. at the same time, it becomes clear (bearing in mind, of course, the inevitably fragmentary nature of the information), that belarusian folklore as a whole has remained relatively stable over the past two hundred years. this statement should be understood within the context of warnings being made even in the nineteenth century about the rapid extinction of folklore as a cultural phenomenon. what is more, in certain instances the contemporary tradition appears more varied than recordings and publications of the last century would lead us to assume. for example, some rituals include a larger number of texts; such is the case with the spring ritual “leading the arrow” (vozhdenie strely) (1). it was first described at the beginning of the 1920s, although songs had been recorded much earlier. briefly stated, its ritual actions are as follows: women leave the seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 40 village, singing as they go, and in a field bury specially prepared objects (women’s adornments, a doll, or a green twig, which, properly speaking, represent the “arrow”). as they say, its purpose is to draw lightning away from the village. in the second half of the twentieth century numerous detailed recordings have been made in the area of south-eastern belarus where this ritual is still practiced. however, it would be overly confident to assert that in this case we are dealing with the evolution of a folklore tradition, since the collection of materials in the nineteenth century was not conducted on a sufficiently wide scale to obtain a complete picture. at the same time, when comparing modern and nineteenth-century recordings, individual losses come to light, particularly those concerning archaic ritual practices. for example, nowadays we have no information about the spring ritual whose central personage was iarila (2), apart from a single description from mid-nineteenth century belarus and the fragment of a song. the same can be said also about the rituals komoeditsa (3) (a festival in honor of the bear) and “the wedding of the chimney” (zhenit’ba komina) (4). however, it is entirely possible that these phenomena have not disappeared entirely, but simply that for the time being no one has been lucky enough recently to have recorded them. in this sense, the history of the ritual “leading the bush” (vozhdenie kusta) (5) is interesting. descriptions of the ritual and the songs associated with it appeared a number of times in nineteenth-century periodicals. for a long time after that it was thought that the ritual had disappeared entirely; only in the second half of the twentieth century was it rediscovered in the pinsk district of brest oblast’ (western poles’e in south-western belarus). a somewhat different picture may be observed in the case of the ritual games played during koliada (6), which possessed an erotic character: iashcher (7) and “tereshka’s wedding” (zhenit’ba tereshki) (8). although people no longer perform the games themselves, the songs that go with them are still being recorded. thus the calendar-ritual tradition represents a complex evolving system, where a synchronic cross section serves to throw light on the various historical stages in the existence of its individual elements: 1) viable existence when the given element is used in accordance with its functional purpose. for example, a specific cycle of songs is sung during the performance of the corresponding ritual. this category includes folk festivals and rituals that have survived up to the present, such as koliada, bounteous evening (shchedryi vecher) (9), carnival (maslenitsa) (10), the summoning of spring (zazyvanie vesny) (11), the volocheb ritual (volochebnyi obriad) (12), the st. george’s day rituals (iur’ev den’) (13) (in particular the rituals of driving the cattle out to 41 pasture for the first time and “shaking off the dew” (striakhivanie rosy) (14)), as well as “seeing off the rusalka” [water sprite] (provody rusalki) (15), kupal’e (16), and many others. 2) loss of function. when, for example, a ritual disappears but its songs are preserved. these, however, may migrate into other groups such as general spring songs. in so doing, the personages in them and their attributes may undergo transformation and substitution. such a phenomenon (a “bare” song, i.e. one without its ritual context) was observable even in the nineteenth century. thus the spring ritual of “weaving the birch tree” (zavivanie berezki) (17) is no longer performed, but the songs, which at one time were connected with the ritual, maintain their calendrical associations through being sung in spring. the saint george’s day round dance through surrounding fields (iur’evskii khorovodnyi obkhod) (18) has also disappeared, although the songs are still sung on saint george’s day on the sixth of may. 3) passive preservation. when songs are performed at the request of a collector, but exist only in the memory of the bearers of the tradition, as, for example, ritual round dance songs. 4) total disappearance of both ritual and the songs connected with it. these include those already mentioned above: komoeditsa (a ritual, invoked to help awaken the bear in the spring), “the marriage of komin” (komin is a chimney through which the smoke from the stove passes). it may well be that losses of this nature are in actual fact greater even than comparison with the nineteenth century suggests, but we cannot hope to know anything about them, since no collector has ever come across these hypothetical rituals and festivals. the existence of belarusian folklore tradition as a whole, as well as its individual elements at the current point of time (as also in any other historical period) is determined by the dialectical interaction of the processes of development, stabilization, and loss, which are conditioned primarily by social and economic factors. it is obvious that folklore as such is preserved in so far as the conditions for its existence are preserved. a striking example of the almost total disappearance of traditional folklore is demonstrated by those west european countries, where the provinces are not economically backward compared with the cities, and folklore and ethnographic elements are utilized basically in order to create local color in festivals and celebrations. it is hard to say whether the same fate awaits the calendar-ritual tradition of the belarusians. there exist a multitude of factors which cause apprehension as well as a degree of optimism, although on the whole calendar rituals seem more vulnerable than, for example, nonritual lyrics. the mass media and official cultural activities play a dual role in relation to the belarusian seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 42 calendar-ritual tradition. on the one hand, outside interest in folklore, especially when television crews or radio reporters turn up, enhances its significance in the minds of its bearers. on the other hand, television reconstructions of rituals and ceremonies, festivals and mass celebrations have purposes other than the preservation of authenticity. they frequently fuse different traditions together with the aim of popularizing folklore as a whole. attempts to introduce elements that are untypical of a given local regional tradition are often connected with the activities of culture workers. for example, in the village of motol’ in the ivanov district of brest oblast’’ culture workers have organized a celebration of kupal’e which is not characteristic of the area. one can understand what kinds of considerations motivated these people, because kupal’e is undoubtedly one of the most striking and, more importantly, wellknown festivals with elements of spectacle and an obvious bacchic component. villagers tell collectors that this is “not their” festival, although they have already become used to celebrating it in the way they have been taught. apart from this, from time to time new elements may be introduced by incomers from other localities. thus in the village of tyshkovicha in the ivanov district of brest oblast’’ a newcomer tried to foster the tradition of “leading the bush.” when she moved away, it was dropped. in the memory of the performers there remained only the bush song, which was also recorded from one of the former participants of the ritual with the remark that they never used to sing anything like this before. accidental factors play no less important a role in changing local traditions. global catastrophes and wars cause enormous losses. thus, after the accident at the chernobyl atomic electric station whole regions in the south-eastern part of the country found themselves in the fallout zone. thus local tradition was doomed to disappearance or to short passive preservation in the memory of the migrants. after the end of the second world war traditional folklore took its place in the list of irreplaceable losses. for example, in some places the ritual of “seeing off the rusalka” (provody rusalki) and the rusalka game disappeared – old-timers can still recall them from pre-war days. nonetheless, the well-known conservatism and stability of belarusian national character is highly suited to the task of preserving folklore. changes are certainly not adopted immediately (if they are adopted at all), but only after a certain passage of time –enough for perceptible internal resistance to be overcome. in particular, this relates to country folk, who have gone on living “inside” the tradition, guided by long-standing customs and rules, and who condemn any 43 lapses in the accepted way of doing things. unfortunately, a sad feature of the end of the twentieth century is intensified migration from countryside to city, something that is undoubtedly a consequence of difficult economic circumstances. nevertheless, the bond between urban and rural relatives often remains unbroken. in particular, urban dwellers go off to take part in festivals such as kupal’e, koliada and easter. they also take part in toloka (19), a festival that occurs in spring and fall. the spring version has everyone joining in carting manure out to the fields and the fall version takes place when the harvest is finally brought in. thanks to this, toloka and gettogether songs (besednye, i.e. drinking songs) have been preserved. notes 1. “leading the arrow”, an ancient pagan ritual at the heart of which lies the ritual reproduction of the sacred marriage of the earth and the god of the spring thunderstorm. the arrows-shafts of lightning were the latter’s main attribute. at the present time, the “arrow” (a small piece of metal, a green branch, a ribbon, or doll) is buried in a field where winter rye has been planted, so as to protect the village from lightning. 2. iarila (meaning a passionate person full of life) is the name for the slavic god of spring fertility and erotic power. 3. komoeditsa (literally, the eating of clods, but here, lumps of pea kasha) is a prechristian ritual involving the magical waking of the bear from its winter hibernation, thereby accelerating the arrival of spring. during the ritual people ate pea kasha and turned over from side to side in imitation of the bear. 4. “the marriage of the chimney” is a fall ritual in honor of the domestic hearth, the smoke from which passed outside through a special pipe (komin). the komin was decorated with flowers and ribbons, then grain and nuts were thrown onto the fire and wedding songs sung to the “groom” and “bride,” who represents “work.” 5. “leading the bush” was a late spring ritual involving a visit around the homes in the village by a “maidenly troop” headed by a “bush,” that is, by a girl adorned with greenery and flowers. the cult of green vegetation and the cult of ancestors (the bush = the family) were synthetically fused in the ritual. 6. koliada, the ancient pagan holiday in honor of the winter solstice, during which the ritual visit around peasants’ homes was performed by groups of young people singing seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 44 congratulatory, laudatory, and incantational songs. 7. iashcher, a ritual game round dance, during which girls by turn first gave up, and then demanded back their wreaths from iashcher (= snake = dragon), thereby freeing themselves from the power of the dragon-like divinity of the world below the earth or beneath the water. 8. “the marriage of tereshka”, a ritual erotic game, when those chosen from among the older participants to play the “mother” and the “father” bring the boys (tereshki) and girls together as couples. here tereshka generally stands for any boy who has finally decided to get married. 9. “shchedryi vecher” (that is, rich or bounteous evening) took place on new year's eve. it was marked by groaning tables, carnival visits around homes, and varied games and entertainments. 10. maslenitsa, the ancient holiday when winter was seen off, lasting a whole week. it was accompanied by the burning of the maslenitsa, an anthropomorphic scarecrow symbolizing winter. on the last day people began to sing songs summoning spring. 11. “the summoning of spring” involves the performance at specific times of magical incantational songs, directed toward spring and its heralds, the birds. 12. the volocheb ritual, which coincides with easter, consists of a spring ritual visit around homes in the village by groups of men who perform congratulatory-incantational and praise songs. the ritual possibly developed in connection with the cult of the slavic god of wealth veles (volos), from whom the name of the ritual has been derived. 13. saint george's day”, april 23 (or may 6 in the old style calendar). a holiday in honor of saint george, the patron saint of domestic cattle and agriculture. the ritual of driving the herds out to pasture, and st george's dew (iur’eva rosa) for the first time is part of this event. folk belief attributes miraculous power to the dew. 14. “shaking off the dew”, the custom of walking round a field on saint george's day with a loaf of bread, which was placed beside the shoots of rye growing there. if the shoots were higher than the loaf, a rich grain harvest was to be expected. 15. “seeing off the rusalka”, the ritual of rusalia week, the week following trinity sunday. the ritual consisted of a solemn procession of girls with a rusalka at their head – a role performed by a beautiful girl in a large garland and with her hair loose. they processed out of the village into a cultivated field where the rusalka was left alone and everyone else returned home. 16. kupal’e, a pre-christian holiday coinciding with the summer solstice, and performed 45 on the night of june 23 (or june 6, new style). collecting medicinal herbs, lighting bonfires, bathing in the river in the morning, and watching the sunrise made up the components of kupal’e. at the heart of the kupal’e ritual lay the idea of the marriage of the sun and the earth, in honor of which the fiery fern flower supposedly bloomed in the forest. 17. “weaving the birch tree”, a trinity week custom, connected with the cult of a green tree. girls choose a birch tree in the forest, lead round dances around it, weave garlands and tell fortunes with them, share a meal, and swear sisterhood with the birch tree and with each other. 18. the st george’s day round dance procession comprised a procession of young people through cultivated fields on the saint’s day, and the performance of incantational and magic songs to ensure a good harvest. 19. toloka, a folk custom involving collective help in farm work rewarded solely with food and drink, rather than money. numerous songs glorifying toloka were sung — here toloka is a general name for a group of voluntary helpers. bibliography the present bibliographic supplement is thematic, and contains folklore texts and investigations published in recent years about the calendar rituals and poetry of the belarusians. an english translation is provided in brackets after the title in belarusian. collections of folklore texts since 1970 the institute of art history, ethnography and folklore of the belarusian academy of sciences has been publishing a multi-volume compilation entitled belarusskaia narodnaia tvorchasts’ [belarusian folklore], containing both contemporary folklore and earlier recordings up to and including the nineteenth century. the texts are grouped according to generic and thematic principles; each volume is prefaced by an introductory article, and includes scholarly commentary and collecting attribution, as well as an indication of variants. in the case of songs, musical commentary and notation are provided. the following volumes in the series are devoted to belarusian calendar rituals: 1. valachobnyia pesni [volochob songs], minsk, bnt: 1980. (bnt: belaruskaia narodnaia tvorchasts’, an bssr. instytut mastatstvaznaǔstva, etnagrafii i fal’kloru). 2. vesnavyia pesni [spring songs], minsk, bnt: 1980. seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 46 3. vosen’skiia i talochnyia pesni [fall and toloka songs], minsk, bnt: 1981. 4. zhanits’ba tsiareshki [the wedding of tereshka], minsk, bnt: 1993. 5. zhniǔnyia pesni [harvest songs], minsk, bnt: 1974. 6. zemliarobchy kaliandar: abrady i zvychai [the agricultural calendar: rituals and customs], minsk, bnt: 1990. 7. zimovyia pesni [winter songs], minsk, bnt: 1975. 8. kupal’skiia i piatroǔskiia pesni [kupal’e and st peter’s day songs], minsk, bnt: 1985. 9. paeziia belaruskaga zemliarobchaga kaliandara [poetry of the belarusian agricultural calendar]. minsk, bnt: 1992. a number of collections of regional folklore have been published by belarus state university in the series belaruski fal’klor u suchasnykh zapisakh [belarusian folklore in contemporary recordings]: 1. belaruski fal’klor u suchasnykh zapisakh. tradytsyinyia zhanry. brestskaia voblasts’ [belarusian folklore in contemporary recordings. traditional genres. brest oblast’]. comp. v. a. zakharava, minsk, 1973. 2. belaruski fal’klor u suchasnykh zapisakh. tradytsyinyia zhanry. gomel’skaia voblasts’ [belarusian folklore in contemporary recordings. traditional genres. gomel’ oblast’]. comp. v. a. zakharava, r. m. kavaleva, v. d. litsvinka. music compiled by v. i. ragovich, minsk, 1989. 3. belaruski falk’lor u suchasnykh zapisakh. tradytsyinyia zhanry. minskaia voblasts’ [belarusian folklore in contemporary recordings. traditional genres. minsk oblast’]. comp. v. d. litsvinka. music compiled by g. r. kutyrova, minsk, 1995. a number of issues have come out in the series belaruski fal’klor u zapisakh vykladchykaǔ i studentaǔ [belarusian folklore recordings made by teachers and students] under the general name metadychnyia ǔkazanni i iliustratsyiny materyial da praviadzennia fal’klornai praktyki studentaǔ i kursa filalagichnaga fakul’teta [methodological guidance and illustrative material for first-year students of the philological faculty undertaking fieldwork in folklore]. these are based on recordings of calendar and ritual poetry made in the last ten years: no. 1. kaliandarnaia abradnasts’ ivanaǔskaga raiona brestskai voblastsi [calendar rituals 47 of the ivanov district of brest oblast’], minsk, 1997. no. 2. kaliandarna-abradavaia paeziia [calendar and ritual poetry], minsk, 1997. no. 4. valachobnyia pesni [volocheb songs], minsk, 1998. no. 5. kupal’skaia abradnasts’ [kupal’e rituals], minsk, 1999. abradavy fal’klor gomel’skaga palessia [the ritual folklore of gomel’ poles’e]. comp. v. s. novak, gomel’: gomel’ski tsentr navykova-tekhnichnai i dzelavoi infarmatsyi, 1998. vianok belaruskikh narodnykh pesen’ [a wreath of belarusian folk songs], minsk, 1988. pesni belaruskaga paazer’ia [the songs of belarusian poozer’e] comp.z. ia mazheika, minsk, 1981. pesni narodnykh sviat i abradaǔ. comp. and ed. n. s. gilevich [the songs of folk holidays and rituals], minsk, 1974. pesni siami viosak. tradytsyinaia narodnaia liryka minshchyny [songs of seven villages. traditional folk lyrics of the minsk area]. comp. nil gilevich, minsk, 1973. studies batrashevich, g. a. belaruskaia narodnaia paeziia vesnavoga cykla i slavianskaia fal’klornaia tradytsyia [belarusian folk poetry of the spring cycle and the slavic folklore tradition], minsk, 1985. belaruskiia narodnyia abrady [belarusian folk rituals]. comp. l. p. kastsiukavets, minsk, 1994. gurskii, a. i. zimniaia poeziia belorusov [the winter poetry of the belarusians], minsk, 1980. kruk, i. i. sledam za sontsam. belaruski narodnyi kaliandar [in the wake of the sun. the belarusian folk calendar], minsk, 1998. lits, a. s. kupal’skiia pesni [kupal’e songs], minsk, 1974. lits, a. s. valachobnyia pesni [volochob songs], minsk, 1989. lits, a. s. zhniǔnyia pesni [harvest songs], minsk, 1993. litsvinka, v. d. sviaty i abrady belarusaǔ [festivals and rituals of the belarusians], minsk, 1997. mozheiko, z. ia. kalendarno-pesennaia kul’tura belarusi. opyt sistemnotipologicheskogo issledovaniia [the calendar song culture of belarus. an attempt at a seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 48 systematic and typological study], minsk, 1985. prablemy suchasnaga belaruskaga fal’kloru [the problems of contemporary belarusian folklore], minsk, 1969. sysoǔ, u. m. z krynits spradvechnykh [from eternal springs], minsk, 1997. tavlai, g. v. belorusskoe kupal’e: obriad, pesnia [belarusian kupal’e: ritual and song], minsk, 1986. (translated by james bailey) microsoft word folk03fdw.doc 42 catherine merridale. night of stone: death and memory in twentieth-century russia. new york and london: viking penguin books, 2002. 403pp. notes, bibliography, index. paperback. $16.00. isbn 014 20 0063 9. for the best part of two years, from 1996 to 1998, the historian cathy merridale travelled around russia and parts of the former soviet union in the company of her russian research assistant, an ethnographer. her aim was a study of mentalité, in this case death à la russe. basing her work on the oral testimony of survivors (including families of victims), together with memoirs and other written sources, she was looking at the ways the terrible bloodshed, the fifty million lives lost from war, violence, famine and disease between 1914 and 1953, have affected the lives and aspirations of ordinary russians. night of stone is the result. oral history and folklore study have a good deal in common, especially when the testimony comes from those close to the traditional worldview, and the book does indeed have much to offer the folklorist. part of this stems from the author’s realization that, to understand the specificity of the russian reaction to the tragedies of their recent history, she needed to be aware of the cultural context, in particular folk funeral rituals and death beliefs. death rites, it is generally agreed, are more resistant to change than other life-cycle or calendar rituals. without her ethnographer assistant by her side to provide information and sources, it seems probable that night of stone would have been another book by a historian, paying lip service to traditional oral culture with a paragraph or so based on a book or couple of articles. here, by contrast, one of the strands running through the book details the ways in which traditional death beliefs maintained their hold over the population in various ways throughout the soviet period and do so still today. the book begins by presenting the cultural context: the practices laid down by the orthodox church, the state funeral of alexander iii, and then, mirabile dictu, a whole seventeen pages devoted to folk belief about funerals, death and the afterlife (pp. 29-46). chapter ii examines the reasons for russia’s high mortality rates, trying to escape the mythologizing constructs of russian intellectuals or the deprecating attitudes of some western commentators. among the many factors (epidemics, famine, binge drinking, poverty, the low value placed by officialdom on human life, repressive policies, urbanization and so on), traditional peasant attitudes to disease and healing, it is suggested, also played their part. chapter iii looks at the evolution of the secular revolutionary funeral in the decades up to the revolution. chapter iv focuses on death and privation in the civil war period, when essentially people reacted in three different ways: by experiencing trauma, by participating in the new collectivism, or, in the countryside, gaining solace as they always had done from religious rituals and beliefs. it took about ten years for an official substitute cult of the dead (with hagiographic overtones) to begin to emerge, notably in the funeral of lenin, which is described in chapter v. this chapter also examines the attack on religion: the opening of saints’ coffins, the closure of churches especially in the late twenties, the obliteration of cemeteries, and the attempts to bring in cremation and a soviet-style funeral. for the folklorist what is particularly interesting is that in the 1920s cremation was not to be for those with families, but for outcasts and the homeless; exactly those who, it was traditionally believed, did not deserve a proper burial, and might only be remembered at semik. folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 43 the pages that follow in chapters vi and vii depict the grim horrors of collectivization and the terror. while the show trials and deaths of 1937-41 cut swathes through the ranks of party members, officials, intellectuals and jews, collectivization had a devastating impact on the rural population, killing five to seven million people including whole communities especially in ukraine. memory, so important in russian traditions about the dead, has in this instance largely evaporated, either because of psychological coping mechanisms, official lies, or the wholesale deaths of those who experienced the famine of 1933. during both of these terrible events one part of the population coped by closing its eyes and ears to what was happening to others. it may well be, though merridale does not remark on this, that the division of people in the traditional worldview into “one’s own” and “others’” made this stance psychologically easier. by contrast, wilful ignorance was impossible during the war of 1941-45. perhaps twenty five million people from all sectors of the population died, eight to ten million of them on the battlefield. everyone was affected and involved in some way, and everyone had to cope. as many have noted, the presence of an external enemy united the country and helped the civilian population to endure hideous privation. solidarity and endurance are a traditional response within the peasant worldview, with its emphasis on external hostile forces on the one hand and mutual community action in the face of them on the other. chapters ix, x and xi deal with the post-war soviet period. particularly interesting is the way in which stalin chose to play down commemoration, because he feared a resurgence of religious belief in the wake of a general mood combining thanksgiving for victory and mourning for the dead. as a substitute, the population was exhorted to believe in the socialist utopian future and focus on heroism rather than personal mourning. for many this strategy worked. socialist propaganda was stepped up, and in 1949 even the folktale was submitted to scrutiny by a committee determined to weed out its “backward” features (p. 250). as the following chapter notes, the post-stalinist thaw period witnessed attempts to escape the stultifying socialist rhetoric about the present and future and perhaps seek answers in religious belief. the official response, as far as death was concerned, was to redouble efforts to promote socialist funerary rituals, and make another (failed) attempt to institute cremation. though the habit of silence had been partially broken, the tradition died hard, as veterans and families of the dead from the afghan war realized as their attempts to talk about and deal with the realities were stamped on. it was only with the advent of glasnost that the tide of bones, as chapter xi so eloquently puts it, of those who had died untimely deaths and whose memory had been obliterated finally surged into public view. the folkloric parallels and inversions are evident. these millions of people resembled the traditional “restless dead,” in that they too had been in limbo, unable to pass into tot svet. they were, however, not restless, but in the darkness of oblivion where they could not be commemorated openly. not restless but not resting either. with greater openness in russian society their memory could finally be commemorated and their bones laid to rest. the concluding chapter pulls together many of the points of discussion, notably rejecting the myth of russian culture as barbaric, as well as underlining the significance of the russian rejection of victimhood. in so doing the author casts doubt on the universal validity of the concept of post-traumatic stress syndrome. the chapter also considers the question of continuities in russian funerary tradition. while one must applaud the folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 44 accuracy and detail of the information about traditional rites, as well as the recognition of the importance of burial in native soil and commemoration of the family dead, as far as the folklorist is concerned, merridale still occasionally underplays the striking continuities in basic attitudes to death. the reason may well be connected with her ethnographer informants. in the introduction she notes that in russian funerary ritual “there is little that has not been altered, superficially at least, even the meaning of the dead” (p. 8). the evidence of the book strongly contradicts this statement, unless the emphasis is placed very heavily on the “superficially at least,” and by the end the author herself feels impelled to express her scepticism about the standard view in russian ethnography that by the late 1960s soviet policies had destroyed tradition (p. 339). a brief conversation with a western folklorist would have cleared up the mystery, and allowed her to be more confident in her assertions. the prime concern of russian folklorists and ethnographers is nostalgic; they aim to capture an ancient, disappearing rural culture, and there is no doubt that, compared with the elaborate traditional funeral rites and beliefs collected before the revolution, much has disappeared. western folklorists, on the other hand, are interested in continuities and change as well, and would agree that the key attitudes and beliefs relating to death still persist. they might also have presented folk beliefs about death by starting from the basic concepts in the traditional worldview rather than from everyday rural life. understanding, for example, the ramifications of svoi (one’s own) and chuzhoi (others’), mentioned here in passing, sheds light on death, on the way to live, on concepts of the earth, attitudes to outsiders, foreigners and so on. the author would have found reading some of the work of the moscow ethno-linguists helpful here, but it looks as though she was linked to the ethnographic traditions of the institute of anthropology and ethnography. typically in russia each major institute tends to focus on its own approach to the subject. a folklorist might also have further pursued the cultural underpinnings of the russian acceptance of suffering, and rejection of victimhood, as well as the significance of story telling in russian culture. there is also one error, unfortunately highlighted by being used as a chapter title. in this book tot svet is wrongly translated as “another light” (with “pale light” presumably rendering belyi svet, “the world” (p. 123)). though svet does mean “light,” its other meaning, “world,” is found in the very earliest slavonic texts where the phrase onyi světŭ means the world beyond the grave. many of the points above are questions of emphasis, and do little to diminish the value of the book for anyone with an interest in the way history and tradition have affected and continue to affect russians. the tale is a profoundly tragic one. it is told without hysteria, but with compassion, frequent admiration and sorrow; merridale is clearly aware that her own life will never be the same after the time she spent with people who had endured so much. at times it feels that her respect for their endurance and desire not to intrude too much into their painful memories and their psyches make her shy away from hard, possibly negative conclusions about her informants and their culture. she prefers to listen to the informant who asked her to try to make her readers understand. in this she succeeds. faith wigzell school of slavonic and east european studies, university college london microsoft word folkxiv_author.doc fortune-telling and magic in post-soviet russia folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 57 traditional magic or european occultism? commercial fortune-telling and magic in post-soviet russia and their relationship to russian tradition faith wigzell university college london-ssees london, uk abstract the article examines the vibrant commercial magic and fortunetelling industry in russia today. based on fieldwork in petersburg conducted in 2006, supplemented by printed and, in particular, web material, it seeks to show that, despite the many similarities with its counterparts in europe and north america, russian fortune-telling and magic are clearly shaped by local traditions. in the context of the article, tradition is taken to include not just rural folk magic and divination, but also urban traditions of the late imperial period as well as those resulting from soviet policies and practices. it emerges that as far as magic services are concerned, the range of services offered are those demanded by the client, largely stemming from folk tradition. by contrast discourse, approach and ritual often owe much to western esoteric literature, and perhaps also to pre-revolutionary occultism and the soviet interest in psychics. in the case of fortune-telling, today’s professionals (gypsies apart) have adopted more complex and sophisticated ways of telling the future (tarot and astrology). old ways of fortune-telling are so widely known that they must offer something different to clients. tradition survives in many ways, sometimes transmuted, sometimes partial, but it makes the russian magic and fortune-telling scene distinctive. folklorists were never sympathetic to assumptions, usually from outside russia, that the demise of the soviet union in 1991 represented a radical break with the soviet past. they need no convincing that traditions die hard, or that they evolve in response to social and political change, and, as they do, interact in the modern world with spoken, written and visual media. consequently, folklorists are able to contribute to the current exploration of continuities and change [e.g. rouhier willoughby 2008; panchenko 2010]. following this trend, in this article i too focus on continuities in one area of contemporary russian life, the 58 vibrant commercial magic and fortune-telling scene. in this case tradition encompasses both rural folklore and other traditions, soviet or earlier, since to separate them seems artificial and impoverishing. it would seem an appropriate moment to make this assessment, now that the uncritical russian passion of the early 1990s for all things foreign has abated. in 2006, with the invaluable help of a research assistant, dr marina hakkarainen, i conducted a series of interviews in petersburg with professional esoteric specialists, amateurs, students and devotees.(1) the focus was on those who predicted the future, but it soon became clear that fortune-telling could not be separated from the broader esoteric commercial scene, since specialists often offer future prediction as part of a range of services. given both the size of the market and the existence of two full length studies of magic healers and occult cosmologies [lindquist 2006; honey 2006], i have excluded alternative health treatment, although consultations and actions intended to improve clients’ emotional and psychological health are included, since they are an essential component of the services offered by astrologers, magic specialists and even fortune-tellers. the decision to focus only on fortune-tellers and magic specialists provided the impetus to add to the recorded and collected data with extensive internet material, not just from the many esoteric web sites, but also hostile and friendly articles, chat rooms, opinion polls and readership surveys. how vigorous is the market for magic and fortune-telling in russia today? it is, i contend, more visible and vibrant than in many west european countries. apart from the horoscopes in women’s magazines there are three mass market publications catering for those with a particular interest in astrology and divination: the glossy monthly liza goroskop, one of the stable of liza magazines for women, and the cheap monthly newspapers orakul and predskazanie orakula [the oracle’s prediction]. free local papers contain adverts for predictive and magic services, and bookshops regularly sell a range of fortune-telling and other esoteric material. choice there is aplenty; to take one example, the publishing house ripol klassik lists 69 books on astrology, 29 dreambooks and 45 fortune-telling guides, though some of these are repackaged versions of others in the catalog. a wider range can be purchased at esoteric shops along with tarot packs galore, occult literature and magazines for the specialist such as ezotericheskii vestnik [the esoteric herald] and tainaia vlast’ [secret power]. they also sell new age items like crystals, runes, incense, amulets and gemstones and advertise forthcoming events, courses and occult services. all these fortune-telling and magic in post-soviet russia folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 59 items and more can also be obtained from the many esoteric web shops and sites. although many individuals post one-line advertisements offering to elucidate the future and help with personal problems, the most visible form of commercial activity takes the form of esoteric centers, some of which operate from prestigious premises; in 2005 it was estimated that there were twenty in petersburg, though the majority would have been dedicated primarily to alternative medicine. centers place advertisements in the press and online offering consultations and courses in astrology, chiromancy, tarot, clairvoyance and magic, and their specialists frequently appear on television to make prognozy [predictions], especially around new year when their forecasts for the coming year are widely reported in the newspapers. the runet contains a staggering number of sites (150 and still counting) offering to help you solve your personal problems through magic and ensure or determine your future, as well as numerous online journals devoted fully or partially to prediction. one of russia’s most popular tv programs, now in its sixth season, is a reality show bitva ekstrasensov [battle of the psychics], the most popular program of the tv company tnt in the week of 20th october 2008 and 38th most popular program overall in the week of 13th october [tns gallup media].(2) after an initial episode, the eight most successful ekstrasensy [here = psychics] compete in following weeks for the crown denoting the best in russia. the program was then in its sixth series. the vitality of the esoteric services market in russia today is self evident, but the boom years were the early 1990s. then a torrent of esoteric material of all kinds was reprinted or, more often, translated from western sources, and fortune-telling guides sold in their hundreds of thousands. astrology caught on in a big way, and contacts were made with western esoteric practitioners of all kinds. forms of prediction previously virtually unknown in russia, tarot and runes in particular, but also the i ching and other eastern mantic and esoteric beliefs acquired a mass following. meantime, psychic distance healing gripped the nation; kashpirovskii, the best known ekstrasens, not only attracted millions to his television show, but, according to a poll of 60,000 readers of komsomol’skaia pravda in 1990, was far more widely trusted (by 67%) than their local council (only 16.4%) [kp 1990]. in today’s less fevered commercial esoteric market, it might appear initially that there is little that cannot be found in the uk at glastonbury or at a psychic fayre – astrology, runes, amulets, clairvoyance, psychic 60 healing, tarot, channelling, work on karma or aura – specialists in all of these advertise widely in the media: “светлана, специалист по карме. нетрадиционное решение кармических проблем”(3) [svetlana, specialist in karma, offers a non-traditional resolution of your karmic problems], “парапсихолог. чистка ауры и коррекция биополя” [parapsychologist. cleansing of your aura and correction of your biofield], or “магистр анатолий шварц. возврат любимых навсегда” [magister anatolii shvarts. permanent return of your loved ones]. if, however, it looks as though russians have jettisoned the folk and prerevolutionary urban tradition and co-opted western esoteric and predictive practices without placing a distinctive stamp upon them, closer scrutiny dispels this idea. cultural and historical context is crucial. in fact the commercial esoteric market has many facets in which tradition is reflected directly or indirectly. i propose to look first at fortune-telling, more specifically the types of commercial fortune-telling and fortune-teller found in pre-revolutionary urban russia, tracing, where possible, their fate in the winter of the soviet period and reemergence (or not as the case may be) in the late 1980s. if a given mantic skill is rarely offered by professionals, has it survived in some other commercial form (books, internet and other media), or only at domestic level? the second part of the article considers the role of tradition in magic services. the most popular professional fortune-telling services today are tarot and astrology (which is concerned as much with character as future possibilities) followed by chiromancy, the i ching, runes and, at the bottom end of the market, coffee-cup reading and fortune-telling with ordinary cards. dream divination is generally only offered as part of a range of other services. with the exception of the i ching and runes and partial exception of astrology, all the mantic skills popular today reach back to tsarist times in some respect or another. then, the skills practiced by professional fortune-tellers reflected less the types of divination in the russian village than those popularized through fortune-telling manuals. these functioned as the prime conduit of western popular mantic skills from the late eighteenth century to the revolution. their contents were assimilated to the point of the books being regarded by readers as truly russian items, and hence they came to constitute a secondary folk tradition [wigzell 1998: 44-45]. professionals took their cue from the books. oneiromancers (dream interpreters), cartomancers and chiromancers seem to have been the most popular in the nineteenth century, though there were also bibliomancers, clairvoyants, geomancers, fortune-telling and magic in post-soviet russia folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 61 numerologists and others. the only available figures are of those registered with the st petersburg police in 1913: 286 chiromancers and 103 cartomancers as well as sixteen astrologers and “predictors of fate” [shakhnovich 1996: 5]. the absence of dream interpreters does not mean that they did not exist. dream interpretation has not traditionally been regarded as a form of divination in russia, and oneiromancers may have been differently classified.(4) after 1917 the professionals gradually found life more difficult, especially towards the end of the 1920s. in petersburg in the early nep years they had gathered in the black cat café on nevskii prospekt opposite the hotel europe. they eked out a living by appearing in socalled “psychological experiments” in the foyers of cinemas (actually fortune-telling or clairvoyance), or else acting as hypnotists’ assistants at public performances [shakhnovich 1996: 6, 10]. in early 1930s leningrad, mikhail shakhnovich, a young scholar who was interested in the history of religion and the occult sciences, tracked down a dozen or more former and current professionals. these included at least one cartomancer, chiromancer, astrologer, dream interpreter and clairvoyant.(5) life by then was much tougher. those still operating were all women, probably because it was easier for them to avoid regular work, whereas the cabbalist and astrologer, rafael’, was now working in a housing office. even then, one elderly woman was working openly on sennaia ploshchad’ [hay market], where she had been since 1915. she had a regular clientele from different parts of the city – sales assistants, cashiers and artistes –, whom, she said, liked her because her charges were modest and her predictions often correct. shortly afterwards, fortune-tellers and their skills went underground, operating, if at all, at amateur level. professionals only re-emerged in the 1990s. judging by my informants, the most pervasive mantic skill in the late soviet period was cartomancy, but using conventional playing cards rather than tarot. tarot first appeared in russia at the very end of the nineteenth century as part of the interest in the occult. it acquired russian devotees in the early twentieth century [decker and dummett 2002: 199-203], but its appeal seems not to have spread outside elite circles into the wider commercial sphere before the revolution. although cards with distinctive symbols had been known from the 1840s, they too seem not to have been widely used in the early twentieth century [wigzell 1998: 32-3]. cartomancy was not restricted to professionals. by the revolution, reading the cards was a skill common among women all over russia. introduced to an urban readership in the 62 late eighteenth century, it was then taken to the provinces and countryside by servants and other seasonal or temporary town dwellers [wigzell 1998: 62-3]. the widespread availability of conventional packs of cards, together with the relative simplicity of the interpretive method, not only facilitated its passage into oral tradition but later assisted its survival in the soviet union, when most households owned the basic equipment of a pack of cards. when one informant alisa remarked that doubtless her first acquaintance with fortune-telling was when someone told her fortune in the cards, though she didn’t remember, she was implying that, in her social environment, card reading was commonplace.(6) her testimony was supported by other informants whose introduction to fortune-telling came via cartomancy. the tradition usually ran in families, often reaching back to tsarist times; for example, oksana’s friend learnt it from her grandmother, and liza from her great aunt who in her turn had been taught by her mother (liza’s great grandmother). both were talking about a village context, but unofficial fortune-telling took place all over the soviet union, according to informant vasilii vasil’evich; in his case it was his mother, a resident of volgograd, who had been taught to read cards by her grandmother. survival strategies were the same as for other mantic skills, discretion or trivialization. discretion was crucial in the soviet period. as with other unofficial activities, word of mouth, known in russian as sarafannoe radio, worked very effectively. vasilii vasil’evich explained that in soviet times his mother’s clients found out about her via the grapevine. that oral transmission was the normal modus operandi is confirmed by larisa gribova from talan: rosakademtsentr narodnogo tselitel’stva i psikhologicheskikh praktik [talan – russian academic centre for traditional healing and psychological practices] in moscow, who said in an interview that both her mother and grandmother practiced cartomancy: в нашем доме всегда гадали, к бабушке и маме приходило столько желающих узнать свою судьбу, что принять всех было просто невозможно! да еще и времена были такие, что приходилось гадать тайно, вот люди и ждали своей очереди много месяцев. [in our house fortunes were always being told, and so many people came to see my mother and my granny to discover their fate, that they could not manage to see all of them! in those days it all had to be done in secret and people would wait several months for their turn.] [orlova 2009] fortune-telling and magic in post-soviet russia folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 63 whether from choice or out of necessity, cartomancy can be viewed as entertainment; liza’s great-grandmother, being president of the sel’sovet did not, indeed could not, take it seriously, though she continued with readings for fun. whether those who had their fortunes told by her took it quite so lightly is another matter, since, as gribova’s testimony reveals, for many it remained a serious enterprise. other divinatory skills similarly survived in the domestic and amateur sphere thanks to trivialization strategies and discretion. in volgograd, vasilii vasil’evich’s mother not only read the cards but coffee cups too, on the rare occasions that ground coffee was available. she had to be careful at all times. like cartomancy, coffee-cup reading was a skill practiced by women in families or among friends, often for fun. dream divination was somewhat different; it had always been a family affair, but at the end of the soviet period, societal change had led, at least away from rural areas, to more dream divination being conducted among friends, as well as to a greater emphasis on entertainment [wigzell 1998: 172]. nonetheless there were those prepared to interpret dreams for a wider audience. one informant, nina vladimirovna, noted that in soviet times one of her work colleagues would not only lay out the cards but also interpret dreams, though not for money. the oneiromantic tradition that best survived the years when printed dreambooks were generally unavailable was the folk one, albeit with the admixture of some well-known “literary” dream symbols [wigzell 1998: 172-3; razumova 2001: 94-104].(7) although translated dreambooks were hugely popular, not just with pushkin’s tat’iana, and their contents fairly stable, they have proved less durable than the old oral tradition. the survival of mantic skills thus depended on families and groups of like-minded people being discreet and at times accepting trivialization. chiromancy, however, presents a partial exception. between 1880 and the revolution, the revival of interest among more affluent groups attracted by the pseudoscientific claims of chiromancy led both to the publication of more chiromantic texts [wigzell 1998: 35] and a rise in the number of professionals, as the figures for registered chiromancers in petersburg in 1913 reveal. despite this period of relative prestige just before the revolution, over time chiromancy descended the social scale, coming to be seen mainly as the property of gypsies, just as in western europe. the strong ethnic prejudice against gypsies in russia may have contributed to its decline in the domestic sphere, but it should be remembered that women, who were the active bearers of tradition through the soviet period, had never adopted palm reading with the same 64 enthusiasm as they had some other skills. nonetheless, interviews threw up the odd reference; nina vladimirovna mentioned that in the 1980s one of her female colleagues, now a respected academic, used to read the palms of friends and colleagues. since informant nora pavlovna also knew of people who, inter alia, practiced chiromancy in the soviet period, and of others who had either been imprisoned or sent to psychiatric units for fortune-telling, it is clear that chiromancy retained some adherents throughout the soviet period among groups other than the gypsies. it might be expected that over more than six decades of soviet education and propaganda, belief in magic and fortune-telling would have withered away. in fact, for all their zeal, soviet efforts to combat “superstition” met with only partial success. in the late soviet period (1982-3) a survey was conducted in the krasnoiarsk region among 3000 students and 900 “young specialists” (young graduates and grad students), just those who would be expected, after sixty plus years of socialism, to have plumped for rationality and science [nemirovskii and manuil’skii 1987: 70-75]. in their analysis nemirovskii and manuil’skii decided to place those who rejected superstition outright into one category, and all the others believers, waverers and “don’t knows” into another. they argued convincingly that those who replied “malo veriu” [i believe a little] and “zatrudniaius’ otvetit’” [i find difficulty in answering] probably felt too embarrassed to admit to superstitious beliefs [nemirovskii and manuil’skii 1987: 71]. the results were surprising. asked whether they believed in the immortality of the soul or revelation from on high, the great majority replied in the negative (82% and 90%, with a fair number of “don’t knows”), suggesting that anti-religious propaganda had been effective. on the other hand, asked whether they believed in divination, omens, prophetic dreams or witchcraft, replies were much more equivocal. a majority, over 60%, did not believe in fortune-telling (though nearly 40%, therefore, did think there was or might be something to it). the situation was more acute as far as belief in prophetic dreams was concerned; here only half the students and a mere 38% of the young specialists were skeptics the latter group, being older, were perhaps more prepared to say what they really thought. girls were more than twice as likely to believe in divination as men [nemirovskii and manuil’skii 1987: 73]. the two authors noted that “scientific-materialist” views dominated among their subjects, even if they coexisted with belief in the fantastic, but in fact it is the strength of belief in traditional divination and fortune-telling and magic in post-soviet russia folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 65 witchcraft that is most striking. and lest it be thought that school leavers and college students in krasnoiarsk were untypical, the authors provide comparative figures for the altai region, where belief in traditional divination and witchcraft even was slightly higher. the persistent traditional interest in magic and divination, largely surviving through oral transmission, thus underlay the esoteric boom that occurred once the political atmosphere changed. in the frenzy of the late 1980s and early 1990s the fate of various skills differed. professional dream diviners did not regain a footing in the contemporary market place, though esoteric specialists like natal’ia, the tarot reader i visited, will interpret dreams as part of a consultation, but this is not a service that she or anyone else promotes heavily. informant masha thought that people would not trust professional dream interpreters and would not pay for their services. a more credible reason, given the propensity of the public to pay for other services, may be that, although dream-telling is common among female friends, its key position has always been in the heart of the household, where it contributes to the activation of moral and behavioral norms and creation of “a microclimate of communication” and trust [razumova 2001: 85; also wigzell 1998; 50, 122]. families do not always have to be in physical proximity, as marina, my research assistant, indicated, when she said that her cousin in moscow always phones her in petersburg to chew over a disturbing dream. it appears that the role of dream-telling in family communication and cohesion has stifled the activities of professionals. if, at the end of the soviet period, families had largely to rely on oral transmission of dream meanings, now they can, and evidently do, reinforce this oral knowledge by recourse to a published dreambook. in the view of informant dasha, the existence of such books further limits the appeal of professionals, although it must be remarked that this is not the case with tarot or astrology. the translated dreambooks and reprints of pre-revolutionary editions typical in the 1990s have given way to books authored by russian citizens, though the most frequently reissued text is a translation of the large dreambook compiled in the early twentieth century by an american, gustavus hindman miller. even if the boom is over, dreambooks remain extremely popular. for example, one of the russian equivalents of amazon lists well over 200 different editions [ozon.ru]. some of these seek innovation within the dreambook tradition, notably by devoting whole books to interpreting erotic dreams as in violetta khamidova’s сексуальные сны. расшифровка и толкование эротических снов [sexual dreams. deciphering and 66 interpreting erotic dreams], but novelty can be combined with tradition as in o. smurova’s series which recognizes the role of the family, such as полный семейный сонник. 150,000 толкований [complete family dreambook. 150,000 interpretations]. interestingly, the conventional marketing ploys of tsarist times are being re-used: declarations about the expertise and experience of the author, emphasis on the huge range of dream symbols or the connection with famous sages and dream interpreters. the sages of tsarist days have faded from prominence, with only miss hussey surviving on title pages, joined now by nostradamus, the bulgarian prophetess vanga and freud.(8) as before 1917, the sages are foreign and not necessarily dream interpreters, or, in the case of freud, not an interpreter of dreams in the traditional manner. it is possible that the russian dreambooks reprinted from the late 1980s, together with newly translated foreign texts with a long publication history such as miller, may have inspired authors and publishers to copy the traditional presentation of prerevolutionary popular dreambooks, but it must surely be the case that some of these marketing strategies would have been adopted anyway. one omission remains: given the respect in which many hold traditional village wisdom, it seems surprising that so little overt use has been made of the native folk tradition. nowadays there are many personal dreambooks by named russian authors, far more than before 1917, but if they draw on local area tradition, they do not advertise the fact. increasingly print is being rivaled by the internet. many fortunetelling sites contain a section where you can discover the meaning of your dream, but, over and above that, numerous specialist sites focus on sleep and/or dream interpretation: try sleepexpert.ru; sonnik.funplanet.ru; sonnik.net.ru; sonnika.net.ua; snov.net.ru; sonniki.com.ru; sonniki.info; sononline.ru; russkiy-sonnik.ru; prisnilos.su or sonnyk.ru. as aleksandr panchenko has noted, marketing strategies on the internet echo those of the tsarist period, in fact, it may be added, much more closely than do books. piracy is the order of the day, though a good proportion of the texts posted on the web are not those republished without permission in tsarist times, but recent arrivals in russia or recent compilations [panchenko 2010: 8-9]. many sites, such as russkiy-sonnik.ru, offer several different dreambooks. others follow another method employed by book publishers before 1917 in combining material from different sources. for example, the dreambook section of astromeridan.ru allegedly combines material from 20 different printed texts. the interpretation offered by each is grouped under the dream symbol, with fortune-telling and magic in post-soviet russia folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 67 the result that there may be several conflicting interpretations, allowing the user to choose the most congenial or appropriate. though piracy and marketing ploys (lurid covers, exaggerating the contents, attribution to sages, emphasis on novelty and usefulness) all replicate the publishing practices of the tsarist era, it is unlikely that this is a conscious return to tradition, and more a natural competitive response in a poorly regulated market. the large number of websites either fully or partially dedicated to offering traditional dream interpretation indicates the vitality of the tradition among a younger generation, given that internet access is strongest among the under-forties. for the same reason it also suggests a level of participation among the relatively well-educated. at first sight this conclusion conflicts with poll findings which show that: в вещие сны больше всего верят домохозяйки, неквалифицированные рабочие, пенсионеры и в целом женщины (в 2,2 раза чаще мужчин), с образованием ниже среднего, низкими доходами, проживающие в сельских поселениях. [the people most likely to believe in prophetic dreams are housewives, unskilled workers, pensioners and women as a whole (2.2 times more than men), with lower than average educational attainment and low incomes, living in rural areas.] [samokatov? 2001].(9) firstly, there is no need to contest the idea that more people in the above categories believe in dreams these would in any case be those most likely to be active bearers of oral tradition – but these groups do not exclude others. for example, although informants were not asked specifically about oneiromancy, dasha, a student, volunteered that she believed in prophetic dreams. secondly, internet users may well not be firm believers in prophetic dreams, instead accessing these sites wholly or partially for fun. finally, polls show that the under-24 age group is the most likely to be interested in the esoteric field as a whole [vtsiom 2008, 2009]. if dream interpretation features commercially but not professionally, the same is not true for cartomancy, chiromancy and coffee cup reading. cartomantic tradition has survived but in transmuted form. with a highly educated population in today’s russia, professional fortune-tellers need to emphasize that their mantic skills are superior to those of the average non-professional; the commonest tactic is to emphasize the complexity or deeper meaning of tarot. liza, for example, said it took her 2-4 years before she felt she had fully grasped the complexities of tarot, while nora pavlovna saw tarot as akin to meditation and self-understanding 68 and therefore a path to spiritual development. as she said in her entry in the 2007 petersburg directory of alternative practitioners; “это не только предсказательная система, это глубокое философское учение о строении мира, общества и человека” [this is not just a system of prediction, but deep philosophical teaching about the structure of the world, society and humanity] [gorskaia 2007: 21]. as a consequence, the old tradition of reading conventional cards, which has no such discourse attached to it, is made to appear crude and unattractive, except to traditionalists who are mainly clustered at the bottom end of the market. this does not stop amateurs acquiring some skill at tarot, whether from the many popular books (258 listed on ozon.ru) or online, or else by studying at an esoteric center. the situation with coffee cup reading is similar; it is only available from the most basic professionals, but the existence of manuals devoted to the subject (four in the ripol klassik catalog, for example) and numerous guides online reinforce my personal impressions of widespread popularity among amateurs. my coffee cup has been read two or three times, not at my instigation, by educated and often sophisticated women, most recently by dasha in the café where i interviewed her and two friends. in their case, they had all acquired their knowledge orally, but others doubtless do not. it is reasonable, however, to assume that the information gained via print and internet will soon be reinforcing the oral tradition in the course of transmission among friends. chiromancy, as mentioned above, has to a great extent become the property of gypsies; in this sphere transmission is oral and enclosed, gypsies being extremely careful not to pass on any of their mantic knowledge to outsiders, according to vasilii vasil’evich. they are, however, the most despised type of fortune-teller. informant irina talked of a time around 1990 when she wasted her money on a “гадалка примитивная как цыганка” [a fortune-teller primitive like a gyspy]. informants aleksei, liza and alisa saw them as skilled confidence tricksters, but at the same time dasha, linda, tania, and masha, as well as alisa, feared them because, they said, if you upset them, they may put a curse on you or predict catastrophe, even death. in traditional village life, the sorcerer’s links with the “unclean force” evoked terror, something actively encouraged by the sorcerer himself [shchepanskaia: 2001: 78-80]. if therefore you were brave enough to go to the sorcerer for a prediction or to solve a problem, it was because you believed his magic was particularly strong. the same dynamic operates here; fear of the gypsies’ alleged power over people (ability to hypnotize people out of their money) is matched by a sense that they may have genuine fortune-telling and magic in post-soviet russia folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 69 psychic powers. this difficult relationship may well assist in the preservation of both their chiromantic practice and their closed oral tradition. such is the contempt and fear in which gypsy palm-reading is held that it has probably hindered the re-emergence of chiromancy into the mainstream commercial sphere. those who practice professionally choose a respectability strategy known from the late eighteenth century in russia: stressing the scientific nature of what they do. such was the case with boris nikolaevich in petersburg. when i asked him whether i was destined to become a grandmother, he replied that he was not a koldun [sorcerer], and could not tell without looking at my children’s hands. his approach was, he said, essentially an empirical one, involving scrutiny of many thousand palms, testing the various interpretive hypotheses in books for himself, and so developing his own skills. the same impulse lies behind the use of the term “chirologist,” preferred by some in russia, as in western europe and the us. at the nonprofessional level, chiromancy features on many websites as well as in books; the internet bookshop ozon.ru lists over a hundred, though many are re-packagings of the same text. in 2005 a popular tv series called khiromant featured a man whose father had been interested in chiromancy, and who himself develops a real predictive skill. nonetheless, palm-reading is less popular than other forms of divination and character reading, and there are certainly fewer chiromancers/ chirologists than astrologers or tarologists. it may be concluded that, despite the huge popularity of astrology, which owes little to oral tradition, and recent imports like runes and oriental predictive practices, the forms of divination popular among the urban population before 1917 have managed to survive, albeit sometimes transmuted, and sometimes only domestically rather than professionally. in the case of professionals, traditional practice forms the basis on which innovation can take place. the tendency towards increasing complexity reduces the possibility of the more complex mantic skills entering oral currency, but is essential for professionals in protecting markets and bolstering prestige. * * * * * in russia today many professionals who offer prediction are primarily or additionally involved in purveying magic services. these are not only popular but highly lucrative, judging by the price lists observed at esoteric centers. given the access magic specialists have to oriental and new age esoteric beliefs and practices, it is a surprise to discover 70 the extent to which many draw on russian tradition. this tradition is rich and varied, but since the nature and range of traditional magic practitioners and their activities in pre-revolutionary russia have been extensively documented and discussed in english [ryan 1999; ivanits 1989: 83-124], they will only be sketched out here. briefly, the three main categories of magic practitioners in pre-revolutionary russia were the ved’ma [witch], the koldun [sorcerer] and the znakharka [folk healer], who by the turn of the century was the commonest of the three [ivanits 1989: 111].(10) the znakharka, whose activities mingled folk medicine and magic, was generally regarded as benign [ivanits 1989: 116], while both witches and sorcerers were feared for their supposed ability to command otherworldly powers, and hence control the natural and human worlds. they were believed to cause harm in various ways, notably by “spoiling” (putting a spell on) crops, animals or people, causing failure, illness and other woes. they could, however, be enlisted for good, perhaps to punish the source of a spoiling, or rid someone or something of a spell cast by another witch or sorcerer. like folk healers they were consulted for love magic (spells and potions), as well as to find lost property and identify thieves and murderers. in addition, sorcerers had a defined protective role in marriage ceremonies. since it was thought easy to spoil a marriage, a sorcerer would be invited as an honored guest to ward off potential evil forces [tolstoi 1999: 531-2]. rising literacy, social change and the increased mobility of the last decades of the tsarist regime resulted in some members of the peasantry moving towards a rationalist world view, and it might be assumed that this process would have accelerated dramatically after 1917. however, as a. trachevskii noted in 1930: “if the official religion of the priests is in decline, then the religiosity of daily life (bytovaia religiia) in all its manifestations – belief in omens, spells, house sprites – still has a firm hold on peasant life” [smith 2007: 91]. in the period before world war ii the soviet government was keener on uprooting religion (an ideological rival) than dealing with everyday “backwardness.”(11) what efforts they did make had less impact than the spread of schooling and modern medical facilities and, above all, the brutal dislocation of rural life following collectivization. though these factors weakened belief in magic, they failed to dispel it. during the war less attention was paid to either religious or magic belief, but towards the end of the 1940s official hostility intensified [zubkova 1998: 69]. nonetheless, the context of belief required to maintain the presence of magic practitioners still hung on in the late soviet period, when, as mentioned above, belief in the fortune-telling and magic in post-soviet russia folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 71 supernatural remained strong among the young in provincial russia; of the school leavers questioned in the krasnoiarsk region 47% of girls believed in witchcraft, while around 50% of the 900 young specialists at scientific research institutes had some level of belief. folk healers survived by being both valued and discreet. for example, baba valia, a znakharka living in karelia, began practicing folk healing in the 1940s within her extended family, only beginning to operate more openly in the early 1990s [il’ina 2007]. belief in witchcraft still answers a need in rural areas where life is hard, functioning in the traditional way by finding external reasons for problems, very possibly by scapegoating a neighbor [vlasova 1998:72]. the village koldun lost his role as protector of weddings when the traditional folk wedding ritual disappeared [golovanova 2007], but survived in many regions through the soviet era as a powerful and frightening figure, though he is today a less common figure than either the folk healer or the witch [vlasova 1998: 242, 249; loginov 2000]. nor were towns an esoteric-free space. though the soviet authorities attempted to root out belief in magic, at the same time they themselves stimulated interest in the esoteric through scientific research and officially sanctioned entertainment.(12) hypnosis and mind-reading, which had been popular from the 1880s, flourished in the circus in the 1920s and again in theaters in the 1940s [mannherz 2005: 145]. everyone in the 1920s had heard of ornal’do and in the post-war period of wolf messing, and there were other lesser names. scientific research into psychic phenomena mainly focused on telekinesis and telepathy, but was banned between the mid-1930s and 1960. then in the early 1960s the psychologist leonid vasil’ev, who had been involved in research of this nature when it was permitted, published a hugely popular book внушение на расстоянии [mental suggestion at a distance] [vasil’ev 1962]. another, таинственные явления человеческой психики [the mysterious phenomena of the human psyche], while seeking to demolish belief in the paranormal by offering scientific explanations of diverse psychological phenomena such as dreams and extrasensory perception, inevitably served to intrigue and excite [vasil’ev 1962, 1963]. for many, science and magic were intertwined. thus in the 19823 krasnoiarsk surveys of superstition, the highest percentages of believers were for those who gave credence to telepathy and clairvoyance; indeed this was the only category, apart from belief in ufos, where boys were as likely to believe as girls [nemirovskii and manuil’skii 1987: 71-73]. it is likely that, generally speaking, boys, who 72 are consistently shown to be less interested in traditional esoteric beliefs, found officially sanctioned scientific research into telepathy fascinating and socially acceptable, while among the girls a fair proportion were in tune with the traditional world of the individual with clairvoyant abilities, and were doubtless the same people who also believed in omens and prophetic dreams. apart from magic healers, contemporary magic practitioners include specialists claiming psychic abilities of various kinds and dealing with a range of non-medical problems. the terms they use to describe themselves reflect a concern to either align themselves with, or distance themselves from, traditional magic. the first category consists of those who call themselves mag [magus], a term that existed in tsarist russia but was not widely used, spetsialist, which has connotations of technical expertise, magistr (which can be said to link the ideas of magic and expertise, even if through false etymology) or master. all indicate a desire to imply esoteric sophistication and learning by avoiding close association with “primitive” village magic, and in particular the harmful black magic of the rural sorcerer or witch. the alternative is the koldun (or its feminine form koldun’ia) [sorcerer], which derives directly from the native esoteric tradition, and is a stigmatized term, but one that can evoke fear. it is little used by those who work in esoteric centers, but features on the internet, where black magic is more evident. occasionally it appears in the classified ads in free newspapers. variants are vedun/vedun’ia (lit. the knowing one, m. or f.), baba or babushka, village woman or granny, and, more rarely, ved’ma [witch], all of which have folk connections. there is one other term that comes from literate culture in the nineteenth century but indicates a rejection of occult learning for a reliance on intuitive and psychic powers without suggesting folk occultism: iasnovidiashchii/aia, literally meaning clairvoyant but essentially equivalent to the “psychic” of the english-speaking world. it seems to be used more by women than men. the way magic specialists describe themselves is designed to appeal to their targeted clientèle, rather than, in the majority of cases, express any genuine connection with traditional rural magic. one aspect concerns claims about the manner in which they have acquired their skills. in russian folk belief the means of acquiring occult knowledge for a sorcerer was via inheritance or a pact with the devil and occasionally was acquired unwittingly or unwillingly. for the znakharka it was inheritance or, more specifically, transference, usually from an elderly relative [ivanits 1989: 95-97; dobrovol’skaia 2001: 97-98]. at times the idea of fortune-telling and magic in post-soviet russia folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 73 powers inherent at birth is made more explicit, if only symbolically, for example in the notion that witches and sometimes sorcerers are born with tails. there is understandably far less emphasis on learning, though a type of sorcerer known as a chernoknizhnik [lit. “black bookman”] was believed to own books of magic [tolstoi 1999: 528]. today, “inherited” is a valued epithet, especially among those who emphasize links with tradition through their selection of title, koldun, vedun and so on. they frequently describe themselves as potomstvennyi [hereditary], as, for example, do gennadii stepanovich ponomarenko (3rd generation) or hereditary sorcerers a’lbert astaf’evich lider (13th generation) and koldun fad on their respective websites [lider; fad].(13) however, potomstvennyi is such a powerful asset that it may also be employed by a mag, magistr or spetsialist. as this example reveals, the dividing line between the (allegedly) traditional koldun and the magic specialist who avoids links with tradition is fuzzy. the wide area in which professionals define themselves is best demonstrated by looking more closely at what informants said about themselves and their work. magic specialists, especially kolduny are leery of giving interviews, and i had in any case targeted those who predicted the future. nonetheless, we did manage to talk to two, a female mag and a male spetsialist, both of whom were well educated and aware of how to present their activities to us. we also learnt about a iasnovidiashchaia called marina. information about iasnovidiashchaia marina came not direct, but from her enthusiastic client, larisa. it was less detailed but nonetheless revealing. in 2006 marina charged 700 rubles per visit, a modest sum, perhaps partly a function of her location far from the center of petersburg. according to larisa, she possesses a psychic gift which allows her to acquire information from the cosmos not a traditional form of discourse. however, marina does not provide the common service of regaining the affections of a spouse by pronouncing a magic charm [privorot], but rather views her gift as a specific form of psychotherapy [инструмент определенного типа психотерапии]. at first sight marina’s practice seems to have no real connection to tradition, except in general terms with the psychics of the soviet period. neither her discourse nor her services seem traditional, and we had no information about the rituals she employs. however, larisa then recounted an interesting story. the mother of one of her friends, lena, had seen marina, who immediately diagnosed cancer (a characteristic psychic achievement). numerous hospital tests revealed nothing, but 74 eventually the clairvoyant was proved right. after a longish period of treatment, lena’s mother died. marina had predicted that during her illness she would “vampirize” her daughter, i.e. suck out all her strength. and so it turned out. “мать был таким человеком, который был энергетическим вампиром” [the mother was the sort of person who is an energy vampire]. lena’s mother had become very difficult and lena was doubtless under a great deal of strain. hardly surprising then that she should feel enervated, but all three women interpret this in traditional folk terms expressed in contemporary terminology. in russian oral tradition the commonest form of such a tale refers to a revenant, usually a dead husband but sometimes a devil or a dragon in the form of the husband who returns at night to visit the widow, causing her to fade away [baiburin 2001: 98-99]. it was a conventional way of explaining grief and distress that had impacted physically. here the terminology is not traditional; the word “vampir” is not a russian term, stemming instead from bram stoker and the vampire industry. it became wellknown in the 1990s when western texts about magic and the supernatural flooded into russia. the situation is also slightly different, in that it is a sick mother, not a revenant spouse who is the “vampire”, but it fits with the folk belief that internal problems are caused from outside, and that physical decline may be caused by one family member sucking the life out of another. “energeticheskii vampirism” came to be seen in the 1990s as a real problem affecting many people [astrogor; kandyba]. as the memorate reveals, there are those who still believe in the phenomenon. nadezhda pavlovna, director of oracle, the academy of irrational psychology, who gave us a lengthy interview, strongly emphasized heredity even though she calls herself mag. she came from a buriat family with a tradition of shamanism reaching back five generations. her daughter now worked with her, and she noted that her own granddaughter had very obviously inherited the family gift; at the age of five she was able to say what was inside a kinder surprise and get it right every time. nadezhda pavlovna’s primary qualifications were in chemistry, but she had subsequently studied psychology in order to reinforce her natural psychic skills. nonetheless, the vocabulary she used to describe what she did came from occult teaching. magic for her was a kind of religion, she said, because all religions rely on influencing the personality. there were different psycho-techniques which could reach information from the unconscious, and could be used to influence the personality of clients. she herself possessed a “гибкая психика fortune-telling and magic in post-soviet russia folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 75 способна к адаптации… дело в том, что когда идет считывание информации, то нужно себя погрузить в ноль сознание” [flexible psyche capable of adaptation… the thing is that when information is being acquired, you have to plunge yourself down to nil consciousness], that is, into an altered state of consciousness. she saw no conflict between her gift and her training in psychology; both used dialogue, questioning and possibly a computer, though she personally was able to acquire information from clients solely through her own psychic abilities. then, having perceived the nature of the client and the problem, her aim was korrektsiia sud’by [correction of someone’s fate] by helping the client change his or her attitudes, thereby solving a problem or difficult situation in other words a form of psychotherapy. when problems were very deep-seated, change could not be effected in one session, so normally the client who wanted his/her spouse to come home made a return visit after six weeks, and then further visits for up to six months, depending on progress on the home front. although she was keen to deemphasize magic, she admitted that she used ritual and tarot as a means of working with clients, though tarot for her was a diagnostic not a predictive tool. thus far there is nothing traditional in her discourse, and indeed, since oral tradition did not possess a language for describing occult powers, none would be expected. her practice can be said to approximate the folk healer’s only in the most general terms: both use questions, intuition and rituals. if nadezhda pavlovna has a link with esoteric tradition, it is more with the psychics of soviet entertainment and research than with the shamanism of her buriat family background. however, when she began talking about the services she offered, a folk element emerged. according to her regular ads in early 2006 in the free petersburg newspaper tsentrplius, nadezhda pavlovna offers a number of services including the return of loved ones without any harm to the client; a ritual designed to attract a fiancé(e); defense against sorcery and removal of any kind of negative, as well as the resolution of family, marital, financial, business, and accommodation problems. she said she mainly did what she called privorotnye deistviia [actions to turn someone’s affections], which in this case usually meant persuading a spouse to return to the marital home. love magic, especially privorot, was an important aspect of village magic [ivanits 1989: 113]. however, in both advertisements and interview nadezhda pavlovna emphasized that she was not offering the conventional magic charm and ritual of privorot, but help for individuals in understanding their own emotional problems, so that they can then change their own fate by altering their 76 perceptions and behavior – an approach very similar to clairvoyant marina’s. this person-centered approach is far removed from the traditional worldview that, by externalizing problems, allows for the removal by magical means of alien elements. in fact, nadezhda pavlovna’s advertisement exhorts readers not to use magic privorot, which may impact on health and wellbeing and is condemned by the church, but to choose her bezgreshnyi [without sin] method. nadezhda pavlovna’s connections with folk tradition were therefore limited to her stress on hereditary powers and the services she offered which were tailored to fit clients’ expectations, and owed little to her family involvement in shamanism. almost the first thing vasilii vasil’evich said in the interview was: “zanimaius’ okkul’tizmom” [i am engaged in occultism]. however, he played down links with heredity or traditional magic even more insistently than nadezhda pavlovna, and this explained his choice of the title spetsialist rather than mag or koldun. though his mother had told fortunes, he had only become interested in the occult in the early 1990s, when he was intrigued by the distance healing and psychic abilities of kashpirovskii and chumak. despite his mother’s view of her skill as a gift, he suggested that it came partly from her natural sociability and empathy, which made her perceptive. he saw no real dividing line between magic and psychology, arguing that anyone seriously interested in occultism must be thoroughly versed in psychology in order to be able to distinguish psychological from occult effects. like nadezhda pavlovna he had studied for a higher degree in psychology in order to “объективно оценить… узнать что официальная наука об этом пишет” [evaluate it objectively …see what official science had to say about all this], and he is continuing to deepen his knowledge. vasilii vasil’evich, who has lectured in psychology, thus operates on the borderline between psychotherapy and parapsychology, illustrated best when he said that if clients need medical psychiatric help he sent them to a medically trained psychiatrist, and if they clearly needed psychological help, he did not tell their fortunes or perform any rituals, but treated them in his capacity of psychologist. as he said, sometimes this involved a small deception involving psychosomatic techniques: если кто-то решил что у него сглаз или порча.., и он убежден на сто процентов что это так, и ему ничто не поможет кроме так снять у него этого колдовства, тут бесполезно говорить <<тебе необходимо … другая помощь.>> бесполезно. послушает и пойдет к другому специалисту, который все равно снимает эту порчу… а для отхода сглаза можно снять порчу. провести ритуал, просто формально, без fortune-telling and magic in post-soviet russia folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 77 реальных каких-то действий. тогда человек успокаивается … и дальше выполняется нужная работа …главная задача, чтобы человеку стало хорошо… [if someone has decided the evil eye or spoiling has been put upon him, and he’s 100% convinced of it, and that nothing will help other than having the curse removed, it’s useless telling him: “you need a different kind of help.” he listens, and then goes off to another specialist, who will remove the spoiling… for the evil eye to go away you can remove the spoiling, perform a ritual, just formally, without any real effects. then the person calms down… and the necessary treatment can begin. the main aim is that he should get better] the occult tradition to which vasilii vasil’evich belongs is not a rural one, but rather stems from urban occultism of the late tsarist era his magic knowledge is drawn from the writings of the famous french occultist and physician papus (1865-1916). though both these magic specialists played down the role of folk tradition in their work, the majority, not least those calling themselves koldun, are happy to advertise a range of traditional services, even when they claim to take their knowledge from non-russian esoteric beliefs such as voodoo or new age [e.g. shango, zinaida]. not all village magic and fortune-telling has made a direct transition; obviously, beliefs and procedures relating to the economic sphere of life potential or actual agricultural disasters such as drought, crop failure, animal disease or cows going dry have little place in an urban setting. the impulse towards magical help or useful prediction in that sphere does, however, survive in the competitive and often cruel economic circumstances of russia today, now taking the form of business astrology, prediction and magic. these are widely advertised services which usually involve drawing up an astrological chart, laying out the cards or conducting a ritual to predict or ensure business or work success. more specifically, as galina explained, they might help to select personnel, find out if it is a good time to open your premises or go on a business trip. by contrast, since matters of the heart and concerns over family welfare are eternal, it is services dealing with problems of this nature that have transferred most easily and with the least adaptation into the modern world. for example, koldun mstislav’s website typically advertises return to the bosom of the family, privorot and the opposite, otvorot (making someone fall out of love), rituals to bring two hearts together and join two fates (usually known as removing the “crown of spinster/bachelor-hood”) [мstislav]. another highly traditional group of services are those that koldun mstislav describes in non-traditional terms as izbavlenie ot 78 negativnykh programm [escape from negative programming], modernspeak for the removal of any kind of sorcery [sniatie liubogo koldovstva]: porcha [spoiling], sglaz [evil eye], rodovoe prokliatie [family curse]. the follow-up to negation of the curse is protection against sorcery, which is also frequently offered. all these, whatever the language employed, are traditional, and in the pre-revolutionary village along with healing formed a large part of the work of folk healers and sorcerers [tolstoi 1999: 348]. rather more surprising at first sight, given the existence of a modern police force, is the survival of criminal investigation techniques (uncovering thieves or murderers). it may reflect, perhaps, a lack of confidence in the detective powers of the police, but also that certain losses that matter a great deal to individuals are not taken very seriously by the police. in 2006, in a free petersburg newspaper the karmic specialist svetlana was offering to find people, cars, thieves or valuables [tsentrplius 2006]. clearly the targets of detection have changed; murderers are left to the police, and now attention is less on the perpetrator than the stolen or lost items. the reference to lost people refers mainly to the disappearance of husbands, and the client may not only want to know where he is but also order a love spell to bring him back. methods too have changed. in the village the methods were very varied [dobrovol’skaia 2001:103; ryan 1999:111-2; ivanits 1989: 116-8], while nowadays the method depends on the specific esoteric skill of the professional: galina recounted how she had drawn up a special astrological chart in order to discover the whereabouts of lost keys. the circumstances of life today have increased demand for some traditional services. one such is the offer to solve addiction to alcohol and gambling, usually described as “заговоры от пьянства и азартных игр” [charms against drunkenness and gambling] and indeed any other kind of addiction. there is a parallel here with the visits of thousands of pilgrims to the famous miracle working icon of the “neverdraining cup” in expectation of a cure for their own or their loved ones’ drink problem [weichert 2003: 27-30]. for addiction and any other problem relating to family and loved ones, the tradition has emerged of presenting a photograph of the afflicted person to the esoteric specialist, so that magic rituals can be effective even though the person concerned is not present. the clairvoyant marina, the tarot specialist natal’ia, and the mag nadezhda pavlovna all expected this, and, unsurprisingly, webbased esoteric specialists make widespread use of this method. other services are new responses to a changing society, such as rituals to make fortune-telling and magic in post-soviet russia folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 79 you more attractive to the opposite sex, an expression of the modern belief in the right to happiness. contemporary magic specialists, whatever they call themselves, all stress their desire to help people with their problems. the professionals we interviewed, all of whom seemed entirely sincere, emphasized this point strongly. they acknowledged the existence of charlatans, who were, naturally enough, not them. this not to say that black magic is not on offer, even if few sorcerers openly offer black magic services like mikhail gor [gor], who describes himself as the “sil’neishii koldun rossii” [the most powerful sorcerer in russia]. those that do are mainly on the web, which being poorly regulated, allows them to post material designed to scare [e.g. shango; amanar]. mag tamerlan, for example, makes no bones about being a black magic specialist, and therefore more powerful [tamerlan], while koldun mstislav at the end of his list of services mentions situations when revenge is necessary: “устранение опасных объектов, обряды магической агрессии” [the removal of dangerous objects and rituals of magical aggression] [mstislav]. after all, those who visit a magic specialist believing the evil eye is upon them, or consider that family problems are the result of the malign intentions of an individual, known or unknown, believe in black magic. what is black magic for the mistress to whom a husband has fled is white magic for the wife who wants him back. nadezhda pavlovna seemed to recognise this when she said that it was ridiculous to suggest there was black and white magic. magic was either present or it was not. it should not be imagined that the procedures performed by magic specialists are traditional. despite assertions about their hereditary calling, sorcerers generally do not claim that they offer traditional russian magic rituals. this may be because there are few standard rituals for non-medical problems, and it would be unwise to risk exposure as a fraud by a client familiar with her local tradition. indeed magic specialists face serious difficulties in creating client confidence and trust. in 2005 the reputable opinion poll organization fom (fond obshchestvennoe mnenie) conducted a poll into the market for occult services in russia. 50% of women polled and 32% of men thought magic could affect your health or fate, but kertman pointed out that actual figures were higher because many people did not view village magic (mainly healing) as magical. 67% of those who were believers and 75% of non-believers thought that most commercial magic specialists were charlatans. furthermore, the activities of professionals were set against what were seen as the much more trustworthy and genuine traditional 80 rural magic specialists. in case of need you looked “в основном в деревнях где еще сохранились старые традиции” [basically in villages where old traditions survive] [kertman 2006: 73]. if this was not possible, you followed personal recommendation “только не по газете, не по объявлению” [only not from the newspaper, not from an ad] [kertman 2006: 73]. asserting a relationship with traditional magic, genuine or not, thus becomes part of a marketing strategy on the part of commercial specialists to increase trust and attract clients. what is most important here it that it is the clients rather than the practitioners who retain a traditional magical world view. since contemporary urban magic specialists must adapt their offerings to fit the market, the choice of offerings is primarily determined by the customer. as a consequence, the range of services is highly traditional, but not generally discourse, approach or even ritual. and naturally, the more professionals present their services in a traditional manner, the more their clients, who tend to be poor, young and/or less well educated [kertman 2006:54], will continue to conceive of life’s difficulties in the old ways. traditional attitudes are a factor in the question of remuneration of fortune tellers and magic specialists alike. according to folk tradition, paying a folk healer or other occult specialist would nullify the cure, charm or prediction and even might have direr consequences, but gifts were given and expected [wigzell 1998: 127]. naturally, in the soviet period it was illegal to earn money from esoteric services, and many informants emphasized that they did not charge. for example, nadezhda pavlovna said she was well known in her factory for her psychic skills, but, because she did not take money, the authorities left her alone. in the post-soviet period the view that direct payment to an esoteric specialist is to be avoided remains strong. in the fom survey of 2005, one focus group participant referred to the belief that if you paid a znakharka, nothing would work out and her gift would vanish. another said: и они никогда, я знаю, в очень редких случаях берут денежку, и вот только продуктами вот, какими-то услугами… [and they never, well only in rare instances do they accept money, but only food or some favors] [kertman 2006: 74]. the focus group in voronezh were scathing about commercial magic specialists, seeing them as fraudsters: 2nd female participant: это просто бизнесмены. [they’re just businessmen.] fortune-telling and magic in post-soviet russia folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 81 1st female participant: он выбрал себе свой бизнес, он зарабатывает на этом деньги. [he’s decided what business to go into, and that’s how he makes his money.] 1st male participant: он одурачивает людей и получает при этом деньги. [he makes fools of people and gets paid for it.] [kertman 2006: 75]. the sense that higher wisdom or service to others is incompatible with payment for services rendered evidently deterred some of our informants from becoming full-time professionals: irina, who had intended becoming a professional astrologer, thought that an astrological reading was something spiritual, designed to help, and money should not be involved. when times were hard in the mid-1990s she had accepted presents, but only what people could afford. she was not the only one to be uneasy about money. lidiia, who works semi-professionally as an astrologer and tarot card reader minimized what she charges by calling it piat’ kopeek [5 copecks], by which she meant small sums of money like 10 or 50 rubles a far cry from the 600r. that natal’ia charged me, let alone the huge sums, up to $15,000 dollars, charged by mag tamerlan. she does not count this money as income. galina, who used to work part-time professionally, disapproved of the monetary approach to astrology. those who work in centers such as nadezhda pavlovna or boris nikolaevich avoid the problem by getting the client to pay the cashier or receptionist. vasilii vasil’evich, who works independently, declared that he never took money in his own hand, while natal’ia who read the tarot cards for me in her own apartment, also wanted the money placed on the table. for those who advertise on the internet and work with clients at a distance the problem may be said to be solved, as money is not handed directly to the specialist. the fact that money passes hands at all reduces the level of trust in commercial practitioners, who have to struggle to minimize the effect of longstanding attitudes. finally, i note that a visit to a fortune-teller or magic specialist has been presented here as a serious step for the client, while observing that in the soviet era the survival of both divination and magic was assisted by their rebranding as entertainment, among friends in the case of the former and on the stage in the case of the latter. this development was not new for traditional divination, which was seen as fun, especially at yuletide [vinogradova 1981], something that is compatible with believing in the possibility of learning about the future. today amusement probably generates a sizeable percentage of the online fortune-telling audience, and even of paying visitors to a fortune-teller. magic is a different matter, since people normally only visit when there 82 is a problem. fun seems unlikely, but curiosity is possible. in the fom survey, 16% of those who had visited an esoteric specialist and 11% of those who might in the future were motivated by curiosity. the retreat of the magic world view means such people do not fear the consequences of not taking magic seriously. it is perhaps surprising that there are not more like them. it is clear that traditional elements are pervasive in the commercial esoteric scene in russia today, taking on a variety of guises, but strongest in the range of services proffered. when personal distress is conceived in traditional terms as the action of malign forces, requiring magic rituals to solve the problem, folk tradition continues little changed. magic specialists, and to a lesser extent fortune-tellers, must deal with their clients’ ways of looking at problems, even if they wish to solve them in more modern ways. nonetheless, in using their clients’ conceptual categories, like porcha, sglaz or privorot, they perpetuate the magical world view. some traditional folk services like gypsy chiromancy or the finding of lost and stolen objects survive with minor adaptations. old attitudes to payment flourish and so cannot be ignored by esoteric commercial specialists of all kinds, including astrologers, who in other respects do not follow russian tradition. in some instances tradition is transmuted, as in the replacement of ordinary playing cards with tarot, or exists primarily at domestic and amateur level, like coffee-cup reading or dream interpretation. the impulses that lay behind folk tradition remain; hence, if in the village the chief economic concerns were the harvest or the farm animals, in modern russian cities it is business astrology, tarot or magic that will help you in your work or business enterprise. and it is not just folk tradition that continues; modern publishing of fortunetelling texts in book or web form replicate many of the tricks of prerevolutionary publishers. soviet psychics have left their trace on today’s magic specialists, as indeed has the elite occult tradition of the early twentieth century. commercial practices evolve in response to new demands, leading to the development of new traditions such as the request to bring a photograph to a consultation, or the evolution of an advertising language for esoteric services, such as the offer to remove the venets bezbrachiia [the spinster’s crown]. as a result of this, the commercial magic scene in russia today is distinct from its western european counterparts and this distinctiveness is a consequence of russian history and tradition. fortune-telling and magic in post-soviet russia folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 83 notes 1 i am grateful to the british academy for funding fieldwork, and in particular to dr hakkarainen, without whom access to esoteric professionals would have been well-nigh impossible. 2 these figures relate to audiences in russian towns of over 100,000 people. 3 the term “netraditsionnoe tselitel’stvo” [non-traditional healing] is to be contrasted to traditional healing. healers who claim to be practicing folk medicine (many are not in fact) have the legal right to exist in russia. the government has very slowly begun to clamp down on non-traditional practitioners, and it is less likely in 2009 than in 2006 that “non-traditional” would be employed in promoting esoteric services. here svetlana is clearly trying to appeal to a more sophisticated clientele. 4 for example, in russian library subject catalogs, oneiromancy and fortune-telling appear in different sections, and today on websites, if you click on gadanie [fortune-telling], you will not generally be offered a reading of your dream. 5 shakhnovich’s work did not appear in print until 1996 [shakhnovich 1996]. the book has some value for its information about professional fortune-tellers in petersburg, but is marred by its absence of references, biased selection of material and tone of contempt. 6 in accordance with ethical research guidelines, all names have been changed. 7 razumova’s interest in dream interpretation relates to her topic of the family. in the course of her discussion she highlights a number of dream symbols and their interpretations familiar to her informants (mainly from karelia and the archangel region). the dream objects include those that did not usually feature in pre-revolutionary dreambooks, such as mushrooms and berries, those with variant interpretations where both the oral and the literary tradition are represented, such as cats, and those where the two traditions coincide, such as teeth. in her material, as in my own surveys of 1989-90, folk symbols and interpretations are seen to have endured better than dreambook material. 8 in cartomancy the situation is different. mlle lenormand’s picture symbol cards, popular in the nineteenth century, are now on sale again, though the mademoiselle has become a madame in the intervening years. the cards lack the connection with the hermetic sciences attributed to tarot. 84 9 this text is undated, but may be by vadim samokatov a writer on esoteric, sexual and other topics. the poll was certainly carried out by vtsiom, who poll 1600 people about their beliefs annually, but i have been unable to trace this particular one, and assume it is 2001, because in 2002, the vtsiom survey in this area was focused on st petersburg. of the 1000 people interviewed, 53% believed that dreams can foretell the future. since then the proportion of people believing in fate, omens and magic has certainly fallen. vtsiom no longer asks about dreams, 10 there were many other names in different areas, as well as names for those who specialized in, say, locating lost property or telling fortunes. 11 albeit ineffectually, as steve smith has shown [smith 2007]. 12 a parallel exists with the development in the 1920s of eschatological protest in the form of heavenly letters and memorates about visions of doom. steve smith sees them as a reaction to the bolshevik project to promote a scientific and rational society, but which had engendered turmoil and uncertainty, and hence actually encouraged “superstition” [smith 2005: 336]. 13 there are parallels with fortune-tellers. as noted above, cartomancers often claim to have learnt the skill from an older relative, but when informants wanted to talk more broadly about the gift of occult powers rather than their divinatory method, which was normally learnt (astrology, tarot), they talked of coming from families with a clairvoyant or divinatory bent, or of being born with a gift, like nora pavlovna, the occult tarologist. list of informants aleksei, born 1956, academic, amateur astrologer, draws up horoscopes for friends. alisa, born 1960, academic sociologist. boris nikolaevich, 50s, professional chiromancer, otherwise teacher in a scientific institute. dasha, born 1983, student, client, devotee and amateur practitioner. galina, born 1970. formerly professional astrologer, now a manager. irina, 40s, secondary education, office worker and astrologer. rejected professional path. fortune-telling and magic in post-soviet russia folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 85 larisa, born around 1963, affluent new russian, not working, client and admirer of marina, a professional clairvoyant with qualifications in psychology. lidiia, born 1960, an architect by training. semi-professional astrologer and tarologist. linda, born 1982, graduate, 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(ed.). 1999. толстой, н. и., ред. славянские древности. этнолингвистический словарь в пяти томах [slavic antiquities. an ethnolinguistic dictionary in five volumes]. т.2. москва: международные отношения tsentrplius 2006. центрплюс. no. 14, april 2006: 18. vasil’ev, l. l. 1962. васильев, л. л. внушение на расстоянии [mental suggestion at a distance]. ленинград: лгу. vasil’ev, l. l. 1963. васильев, л. л. таинственные явления человеческой психики [mysterious phenomena of the human psyche]. 2nd enlarged ed. москва: госполитиздат. vinogradova, l. n. 1981. виноградова, л. н. “девичья гадания о замужестве в цикле славянской календарной обрядности (западно-восточнославянские параллели)” [girls’ divination about marriage in the cycle of calendar ritual (west and east slav parallels]. славянский и балканский фольклор 2. москва: наука, 13-43. vlasova, marina. 1998. власова, марина. русские суеверия [russian superstitions]. санкт-петербург: азбука. vtsiom. 2008. “астрологические прогнозы и гороскопы: верить или нет” [astrological predictions and horoscopes: to believe or not to believe]. press release no. 1129 issued 26 december 2008 by vserossiiskii tsentr izucheniia obshchestvennogo mneniia. cited on http://wciom.ru (consulted 15 april 2009). vtsiom. 2009. “жизнь под знаком зодиака: в кого и во что верят россияне?” [life beneath the sign of the zodiac: in whom and in what do russians believe?]. press release no. 1134 issued 15 january 2009 by vserossiiskii tsentr izucheniia obshchestvennogo mneniia. cited on http://wciom.ru (consulted 18 may 2009). weichert, bettina 2003. “de-toxing the nation: icon worship – a sobering experience?” folklorica 8 (1): 23-32. 90 wigzell, faith. 1998. reading russian fortunes: print culture, gender and divination from 1765. cambridge: cambridge university press. wigzell, faith. 2003. “the dreambook in russia,” in dreams and history: the interpretation of dreams from ancient greece to modern psychoanalysis. lyndal roper and daniel pick, (eds.) philadelphia, pa/hove: brunner-routledge. zinaida. зинаида. on http://www.sun-magic.ru (consulted 27 may 2009). zubkova, elena 1998. russia after the war: hopes illusions, and disappointments, 1945-1957, transl. and ed. hugh ragsdale. armonk ny: m. e. sharpe. if it dries out, it's no good: women, hair and rusalki beliefs philippa rappopo~ university of virginia introduction there is something instinctual about communicating social behavior and intentions through hair. i have spent summers in russia with my hair pulled back demurely, trying to remain inconspicuous, the observer rather than the observed. i noticed how, almost uniformly, little girls wear hair ribbons which are bigger than their heads; how mod young women in mini skirts wear their hair loose; how relatively reserved women pull their hair back; how the older ones keep their heads covered in kerchiefs. in his article "magical hair" (1957), edmund leach discusses hair as a prominent feature of rites of passage across cultures. he writes: from [an] anthropological point of view, [rites of passage] retlectthe progression of the individual through set stages in the social system; these stages correspond to different degrees of maturity, different types of permitted sexual behavior, different allocations of social power ...even the most skeptical anthropologist must admit that head hair is rather frequently employed as a public symbol with an explicitly sexual significance ...marked changes in hairdressing vel)' commonly accompany the changes in sexual status that occur at puberty and marriage, but the pattern of change varies.(i) in russia today, age and sexuality are expressed through hair, but the type of expression has changed, reflecting changes in society and worldview.(2) this paper examines earlier manifestations of east slavic beliefs about hair and sexuality as expressed in the traditional wedding ritual complex and in customs related to the rusalko. in the wedding ritual, the bride is "sold" to her new husband and his family, and must leave her home and village. as part of the ritual, she "sells" her braid to her new husband, and is valued for the thickness of her braid i will argue that this act is symbolic of a woman's giving over her sexual potency and autonomy to her husband and to her new marriage. in addition to discussing the role of hair in ritual, i will suggest an interpretation of the wedding as a sort of a blueprint of the histol)' of the wedding ritual itself. the ritual itself: in my opinion, reflects a transition in the role of women in a society increasingly influenced by the orthodox church. the rituals as with all folklore, beliefs are articulated in a variety of ways. traditionally, young girls and women were distinguished from each other by dress; they were also distinguished by hair and headgear. customs and rituals involving hair portray a system of social position. a young girl wore her hair either loose or in one braid on the back of her head. the single braid may have been adorned 55 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 with ribbons, flowers, beads, or feathers. a girl's headdress did not completely cover her hair, and was open on top. married women, on the other han<l wore their hair in two braids which were hidden in a headdress. their headdress was covered with a white or red kerchief: decorated with embroideries of birds and animals. in her article "the woman in the ancient russian family (tenth to fifteenth centuries)," natal'ia pushkareva describes eleventh and twelfth century practices which permitted married women to show their hair only to their husbands, or which prohibited people from removing a woman's headdress, on penalty of a large fide, because such an act was considered an affront to a woman's honor. by the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, married women were supposed to keep their hair covered because uncovered hair was believed to bring unhappiness.(3) in his book about the folk costume of moravian slovakia, petr bogatyrev discusses women's headgear. he maintains that the maiden-costume of some moravian-slovak communities functioned not only to show the age and status of a woman, but her sexual morality as well. he states that when an unmarried girl lost her virginity, she was required to wear the married woman's headdress, and in some cases, she suffered the "disgrace of having her hair cut off.( 4) the link between sexual conduct and hair is also evident in east slavic customs. as recently as 1998, natalie kononenko interviewed a ukrainian woman who stated that if a woman is not a virgin, she must wear a married woman's headdress.(5) pushkareva maintains that the wedding rituals of the tenth through fifteenth centuries show the diminishing domestic and social status of women with the increasing influence of the church. this diminishing status is articulated in many ways, one of them being rituals related to hair and head apparel. during the wedding ritual complex, hair is treated in two ways. it is controlle<l through covering, braiding and concealing. it is also "sold" to the new husband. all of these acts represent a type of submission. according to some of the major works on the wedding ritual, by folklorists and musicologists such as d.m. balashov, lu.1. marchenko, n.i. kalmykova, g.s. maslova, n.v. zorin, and m. zabylin. the wedding ritual complex begins with the securing of a match. once the engagement is agreed upon, the first act done to the bride is the zaporuki, or covering. other names for this act include zaporuchivat' (to cover lightly), zakryvat' (to cover in the sense of closing or locking) and zaveshivat' nevestu (to cover in the sense of curtaining off the bride). during the zaporuki, the groom, the matchmaker and the father of the bride pray together, light candles before the icon, hold hands and drink tea and wine to seal the agreement. the bride is covered with a kerchief by her father, and she begins to lament.(6) in some areas, the kerchief covers only the bride's head; in other areas, it covers 56 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 her entire body.(7) this act signals the beginning of the wedding period for the bride, and from this moment on, she ceases to be a functioning member of the household. she is relieved of all her household duties, and instead spends her time preparing her dowry. although customs vary by region. this usually sets off a period in which the bride stays only with her girlfriends, save for an occasional visit by the groom.(8) thus the covering or concealing of the bride's hair is a symbolic separation of her from her family. in terms of hair, the next important time of the wedding complex is the final week. or weeks, before the wedding. the bride's hair is repeatedly washed and combed. sometimes greased with honey and butter, and braided (often with kopecks) by her girlfriends or brothers.(9) again. there is a lot of regional variation. balashov writes of "the appearance of the bride before the table." he describes this event as the most solemn moment of the ceremony because it is the first time that the bride is shown publicly to the groom. during this encounter~ the bride laments the loss of her krasota (beauty), and volia (will), which balashov describes as symbols of virginity. often the bride asks for some light. saying she wants her beauty back. in response, someone turns down the head covering. and the bride leaves. she may also throwaway her will (volia) in the form of flowers. and then ask for them back. only to despair that it is no longer her fate to wear them.( 10) the terms used for items that cover the hair show a direct connection to free will. beauty and sexual potency, as does the attempt to control the potent hair not only by covering it. but also by washing and combing. one of the more chilling aspects of the braiding is as a means of protection. ethnographer:..; 1m. kolesnitskaia and l.m. telgina note a sequence in the ritual complex in which the bride requests that her friends unbraid and replait her hair, weaving the ribbons in tightly, so that her new mother-inlaw will nev::'j he able to undo the braid. this motif appears often in wedding laments from northern russia. with the image of metal knives or locks, which the friends must plait into the hair, to lock the braid this imagery suggest that the braid is directly symbolic of the girl's sexual organs, which she requests to be locked up. to protect her from the groom and his family. (11) the bride's hair is also washed and rebraided during the devishnik, or bachelorette party, which occurs on the night before the wedding, and it may be braided on the morning of the wedding itself. this grooming often occurs while the bride is washing herself in the bathhouse (for the first time since the engagement), and is accompanied by more lamenting over the loss of her beauty. according to one description. the bride tells her girlfriends that she has hidden her beauty in inaccessible places such as the stove under the threshold, but that if they can find it. they can have it. she then gives them her hair ribbons. there is a sense in these rituals that the bride is bequeathing her 57 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 premarital will to her girlfriends through her hair ribbons, and also through her bath water. the girlfriends drink the water in which the bride has bathed. perhaps as a magical act, so that they, too, will many.(12) the next part of the ceremony is extremely interesting for the way in which hair used to articulate power and danger. the whole wedding party goes to the church. this segment is considered to be a dangerous time, because the bride is believed to be the most suscepbdle to sorcery or perhaps it is those around her who are susceptible. significantly, her hair is loose, and she is covered with the pokryvalo, a cloth which covers the bride's head and sometimes her whole body.(13) according to balashov, marchenko and kalmykova, the groom places this covering on the bride and .puts her in the cart to take her to the church. presumably this is done in the belief that if the bride does not leave of her own power this time, she will be unable to leave on her own in the future.(14) again, there are regional variations on this theme. maslova writes that the bride's covering is removed in church by a member of the groom's family or party, and she is then covered again with a shawl or bridal veil. maslova emphasizes that uncovering the bride and significantly her hair somewhere other than in the church was dangerous and could invite spoiling or sorcery. zabylin writes that in perm, the matchmaker leads the bride and groom to a comer of the church where she places the married woman's headdress on the bride's head and rebraids her hair. when they leave the church and arrive back at the house, the matchmaker leads the newlyweds away from the rest of the guests and rebraids the bride's hair into two braids the signal that she is now a married woman and places the proper headdress on her. then everyone is called to the table for the meal. in some areas of ukraine, the bride's hair is done in ~o braids before the groom arrives in the moming.(15) one of the culminating events of the wedding is the okruchivanie (winding up, or wrapping around). having said a ritual farewell to her braid, the bride now has her hair braided in two and wrapped up under the headdress.(16) the one time when the hair is not controlled is ~ the trip to church. pushkareva notes a distinction between the folk part of the ceremony and the chmch part, stating that the popular ritual was considered indispensable to the validity of the marriage, while the church ceremony was not essential.(17) it is crucial that, at the juncture between the folk and the church segments of the ceremony, the bride's hair is loose. this ritualized journey to the church, considered to be the most "dangerous" sequence in the entire ceremony, may represent and document a transition in ritual and in history from pre-christian to christian influence. the loose hair of the bride at this point may be a remnant of a former, pre-monogamous society and symbolic of the bride's sexual fertility, and of her 58 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 fteedom, which she is about to relinquish upon partaking in the church service. pushkareva also states that the emphasis on virginity is a church influence rather than a folk custom.(l8) is it possible that the ceremonial switching of the crowns that is typical of the orthodox church wedding represents a reversal of the power structure between a woman and a man? it is probably no coincidence that the .bride, who is valued for her reproductive ability, is considered to be sold to her husband under the symbolism of selling her braid. maslova notes a belief that the symbolic sale of the braid to the new husband is an indication that he is the master and the bride is his slave.(l9) this symbolism is only barely hidden in the wedding ritual complex. is this why the bride laments? the rusalka in contrast to the bride, there is a female folk figure in traditional east slavic lore whose hair is permanently loose and uncontrolled; she is the rusa/lea. the rusa/lea of traditional beliefs is a powerful and enticing figure. she is described as a pale, lithe, often beautiful female spirit who lives in the water, forests and fields. she sits with other water spirits on the shore, yelling and laughing, or dancing and singing in the moonlight of clear, summer nights. she is known to swing on tree branches, waiting to entice an unsuspecting male passer-by, whom she often attacks and (peihaps inadvertently) tickles to death. the rusalkds characteristic physical attributes are her long, light-brown, blond, or green, loose hair, her blazing eyes, and her magnificent breasts. she is noted for her beautiful voice and melodious laugh. on the rare occasions when the rusalka is dressed, she wears white. in addition, some sources report that if the rusa/lea, and especially her hair, ever dries out, she will perish.(20) the rosallea was believed by many nineteenth century peasants to be the soul of an unbaptized or stillborn baby, or the wandering soul of a young, unmarried but often betrothed woman who bad died an untimely death, or who had become pregnant out of wedlock and drowned or hanged herself. in this way, she may be seen as a symbol of potent yet not-quite-tapped fertility, and as such is celebrated and feared during the spring festival, rusal'naia nedelia (mermaid week), during which people played music, danced and sang to celebrate new vegetation. it was during this week that the rusa/lea was believed to leave her wateiy home to wander in the forests and fields, and bring moisture to the crops. peasants decorated their homes with fresh green birch branches (the rusalkds tree), and young girls often went to the woods and decorated actual trees with cloth, thread and garlands, and then danced the khorovod (circle dance) and swore vows of friendship and sisterhood. but the water creature was also feared at this time. to appease her, peasant women left offerings in the woods of scarves and linen. others attempted to minimize the rusa/kds hann by using the sign of the cross, magic circles, garlic, wojdiwood,incense, pokers and channs.(2l) 59 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 at the end of rusal'naia nedelia, village girls escorted an effigy of the rusalka out of the village and back towards her forest or water home. in some areas they burned or tore up and distributed pieces of the dummy in the grain field. in other areas, they pretended to be priests and blessed the dummy. in still other areas, they combed her hair, bid farewell to her at the local body of water, fastened stones to her coffin, threw her into the water, and danced the circle dance. interpretations of these rituals acknowledge both the frightening aspects of the rusalka in the need to banish her, as well as her moist, life-giving attributes and the attempt to renew the cycle of fertility and vegetation. (22) the rusalka is considered by some to be a remnant of goddess worship. in some ukrainian sources, she is called bohynia (goddess).(23) accordingly, she is a powerful, yet playful, female figure who can be tamed by a cross, baptism and marriage. at this point, she makes a lovely wife. otherwise, apparently out of loneliness, she tries to bring men to her home to live, which for a human man, implies drowning.(24) the rusalkds description shows very handily the inversion which occurs to an important pre-christian figure with the growing influence of christianity. what was once sacred becomes profane; what was positive becomes negative. the rusalka is probably a descendant of mokosh', the goddess of fertility, bounty and moisture, and the protectress of women's work and the fate of maidens.(25) her taming by the cross may reflect just that the taming of belief in the rusalka' as a powerful supernatural figure due to the influence of christianity, which did not acknowledge the pagan gods and goddesses. it is possible that the rusalka is a remnant of an older society in which women were freer to express their sexuality. many slavic sources state that, with the influence of nomadic patriarchal tribes and, later, of christianity, slavic cultures became increasingly more patriarchal and monogamous marriage was instituted. the influence of the church may have served to break the identity of village girls with the rusalka, and instead, to make them enemies who compete for the same village men. it may also have served to criticize the uninhibited sexuality and sensuality which the rusalka continually expresses. one of the rituals associated with rusal'naia nedelia is actually a mock remnant of the wedding ritual. propp writes that in some areas, when the girls return from the fields, they make bonfires and jump over them. boys approach the girls and the girls try to throw their crowns on them, while the girls mimic the rusalka, trying to catch the boys and ticlde them.(26) in light of the crowning sequence in the church ceremony, these games almost certainly pair the future bride with the rusalka.(27) additionally, the constant washing of the bride's hair is also reminiscent of the rusalkds hair, which must always be moist. 60 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 in her article "women as performers of oral literature: a reexamination of epic and lament, " natalie kononenko enumerates the similarities between the wedding ceremony and the funeral. she writes about the rusalka: it is tempting to see the rosalka as a remnant of a pre-christian deity, forced . underground, or, more literally, underwater by a new religion. it is also tempting to see the rosalkds life as a reflection of an early social order where there was no marriage and women accepted men into their domain to father children. speculation aside, folk belief articulates clearly that a woman who resists marriage, especially one who gets pregnant outside marriage is bad. a woman who does not submit to the symbolic death of the wedding must accept the literal death of the rosalka. a woman who does not become spiritual as a married woman should, must become a spirit and a bad one at that.(28) in this light, marriage may be seen as an institution through which both human women and rosalkas lose their freedom. human women are sold to their new husbands through the symbolism of their hair which is then hidden from everyone except the husband; rosalkos, beings with unbound hair and the souls of dead women, are in a sense brought back to an acceptable life only when overpowered by the institutions of the church a cross, baptism and marriage. this connection between the ru~alka, a lovely aquiline maiden, who sings in the woods and romps around naked with her hair flowing freely, and the east slavic bride who sits covered with cloth and sings only dirges, may also be expressed in wedding laments. in one lament, plach no devishnike, the bride says that she sits in a sad place, with her hair plain, loose and disheveled. she then addresses her beauty (krasola) and releases it to the fields, meadows, forests and rivers.(29) in another lament, plach nevesty v den' svad'by, the bride releases her will (volia), and it flies to the woods and alights on a :firtree. when· she tries to retrieve it, someone has chopped down the tree, in a . freudian deflowering.(30) it may be that these images are references to the attributes of the rosa/ka, such as beauty and free will. which the unmarried girl possesses but then relinquishes in marriage. this loss of freedom exists on two levels: on one level. it is a loss of freedom that any new spouse undertakes in pledging fidelity to one person. on another level. in conjunction with the patriarchal bent of the church and the wedding ritual complex, it is specifically the bride's yielding of her own will to her dominant husband. this image is recalled in maslova's discussion of the ritual "selling of the braid," which she interprets as a symbol of the bride's submission to her husband.(31) conclusion pushkareva notes a transition in the wedding ceremony from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. specifically, she describes the earlier wedding ceremony as one which was based on a contract which had been agreed upon by both bride and groom. by the sixteenth century, though. due 61 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 to "subjugation by the golden horde •... strengthening ofa despotic political system ... [and] the growing influence of an ascetic christian doctrine. "women in the higher classes lost their personal. proprietary and hereditary rights.(32) this sense of historical transition from non-patriarchal to patriarchal influence is reflected in the actual traditional wedding ritual itself. and in specific rituals dealing with hair. the tidying of the hair for the wedding may be an implicit attempt to order. own. or contain the chaotic freedom associated with the woman and her sexual energy and expressed in the rusa/ka. in addition to making order out of a type of chaos. the constant washing. combing and plaiting of the bride's hair may be an attempt to conjure up the fertility of the rusa/ka. much like the grooming of a garden. so that the bride may bring this potent productivity to her marriage.(32) in any even~ hair is indeed a potent means of sexual expression, whose roots go deep in russia. ukraine and belarus. even after the disintegration of the traditional wedding ritual. hair is still used to express social and sexual behavior. nadezhda azhgikhina and helena goscilo describe a series of contests organized in moscow in the 19905 for miss bust. miss legs. miss erotic. and miss hair. the contestants in the 1994 competition for miss hair wore only bikini briefs and loose hair.(33) they may not have consciously conjured up the image of the rusalka. but surely the rusalka was hlllghlng stage left. notes . 1. edmund leach. "magical hair." myth and cosmos. ed. john middleton (new yoik: natural history press. 1967) 103. 89. 2. for a discussion of contemporary sexual expression through hair. see nadezhda azhgikina and . helena goscilo's article "getting under their skin:the beauty salon in russiad women's lives" and .other articles in part i of russia women. culture. ed. helena goscilo and beth holmgren (bloomington, indianapolis: indiana university press. 1996). 3. n.l. pushkarew. "the woman in the ancient russian family." russian traditional culture: religion. gender_ and custommy law. ed. marjorie mandelstam balzer (new york and london: m.e. sharpe. 1992) 11l also in s.p. shkol'nikov. pricheski. f%vnye "hory i "/crasheniia dlia stseni (minsk: vysheishaiia shkola. 1975) 73-78. and g.s. maslow. narodnaia odezhda v vostochnoslavianskikh traditsionnvkh ohvchaiakh i ohriadakh xlx-nachala xx v. (moscow: nauka. 1984) 50-54. see also women in russian histoiy_natalia pushkareva (new york and england: me sharpe. 1997) for descriptions of hair. headdresses and other clothing of the aristocracy. 179-185. 4. petr bogatyrev. the functions of folk costume in moravian slovakia (the hague: mouton, 1971) 73-74. 5. odarka iakivna pan'ko. s.domantovo. zolotonis'kyi r-n, cherkas'ka obi.. collected by natalie kononenko. 8-13-98. according to odarka pan·ko. women who bore children out of wedlock were called pokry/icy and had to wear the headdress of married women. 62 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 6. d.m balashov, 1u.i. marchenko, n.i. kalmykova, russkaia svad'ba: svadebnyi obriad na verkhnei i srednei kokshen'~e i na qftiu~e (moscow: sovremeonik, 1985) 33-34. 7. maslova, 54-55. 8. balashov, 33-34, maslova, 8-11, and n.v. zorin, russkaia svad'ba v srednem povolzh'e (kazan: kazanskii universitet, 1981) 87-89. 9. maslova, 47-50. 10. balashov, 131-137. 11. i.m. kolesnitskaia and l.m. telgina, "kosa i krasota v svadebnom fol'k/ore vostochnykh slavian," fork/or i etnovqfiia. 00. b.n. putilov (leningrad: nauka, 1977) 113-114. 12. zorin, 98-101, balashov, 131-132,207-209. 13. m. zabylin, russkii narod: e~o obvchai. obria4y. predaniia. sueveriia i poeziia. (1880; reprint, st. petersbwg: brait tait, 1994) 289-292, and maslova, 54-55. 14. balashov, 131-132. 15. zabylin, 120-121, 128-134. 16. maslova, 55-60. 17. pushkareva, women in russian histoly_ 94. 18. pushkareva, women in russian hist0ly. 33. 19. maslova, 47-49. 20. e.v. pomerantseva, mifolo~cheskie oersonazhi v russkomiol'k/ore (moscow: nauka, 1975) 68-74, linda ivanits, russian folk belief (new york and london: me sharpe, 1989) 75-76, natalie (moyle) kononenko, "mermaids (rusalki) and russian beliefs about women", new studies in russian language and literature. (columbus, ohio: 1987) 221-223. 21. ivanits, 75-79, pomerantseva, 72-79, kononenko, "mermaids," 224, anda.n. manas'ev, poeticheskiia vozzreniia slavian" na orirodu vol. m (1869; reprint the hague, paris: mouton, 1970) 240. 22. d.kzelenin, ocherki russkoi mifolo~i: umershie neestestvennoiu smert'iu i rusalki (1916; reprint, moscow: indrik, 1995) 264 and vladimir propp, russkie awarnye prazdniki (1963; reprint, saint petersburg: azbuka, 1995) 88, 90-92, ivanits, 80-81. 23. volodomyr hnatiuk, etnovqfichnyi zbyrnik t.2, vyp.2, "znadoby do ukrai"nv'koii demonolohii," (l'viv: naukove tovatystvo imeny shevchenka, 1912), 191-198. 24. lvanits, 75-76, kononenko, 225 .. 25. ivanits, 16. 26. propp, 90. 27. these games may even be viewed"as plays for dominance: the girls try to win the boys by tickling them, as the pre-christian rusaljul would, while the boys try to catch the girls according to the rituals of the church. 28. natalie kononenko, "women as performers of oral literature: a reexamination of epic and lament.", women writers in russian literature. 00. toby w. clyman and diana greene (westport, connecticut and london, england: greenwood press, 1994) 23. 29. k-v. chistov, ed. prichitaniia. biblioteka poeta series. (leningrad: sovetskii pisatel', 1960) 366-368,417. 30. chistov, 368-371,417. 31. maslova, 47-49. 32. pushkareva, "family" in balzer, 105. 33. these grooming lines recall for me lines on clay figurines from the east slavic areas, dating back to 6500-3500 be. the figurines are generally considered to be female talismans, or fertility cult objects. perhaps the combing lines in the hair and the incised lines on the figurines may be likened in some distant way to the gardener's grooming lines in mat' syra zemlia (mother moist earth), another 63 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 nomen, in addition to the rusalka, associated with dampness and fertility. in the goddesses and gods of old eurqpe: myths and cult fmjtges (1974; reprint, berkeley, los angeles, new york: university of california press, 1992) marija gimbutas writes that parallel lines symbolize streams and mythical creatures considered to be the source of water (112-151). perhaps they are very distant relatives of the rusalka, the east slavic goddess who bring moisture to the fields. 34. azhgikina and goscilo, "getting under their skin," 113-115. 64 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 editorial satement 95 a. a. gorelov (ed.). byliny v 25 tomax: byliny pechory [byliny in twenty five volumes: the byliny of pechora]. vols 1-2. (svod russkogo fol�klora.) st. petersburg and moscow: nauka, 2001. 772 + 782 pp. isbn 1-59051-029-1. the present review concerns the first two volumes of a compendium of russian epics (byliny) which will consist of twenty-five volumes. these splendid dictionary size volumes, which were completed for publication in 1984, but appeared only in 2001, contain 281 songs and eighty melodies from the far northern region along the pechora river, which empties into the barents sea. numerous photographs of folklorists and performers are also included. the first volume opens with three sections which are devoted to the principles of publication (pp. 11-20), a general introduction to the russian epic (pp. 21-78) and to the epic tradition in the pechora region (pp. 79-150). the third section comprises seven essays, devoted to the ethnicity, history and publication of pechora epics, to other genres, the language and melodies of the epics. different groups of specialists have contributed to each essay. extensive commentaries, eight appendices, and four indexes are also provided in the two volumes. melodies have been included before the pertinent verbal texts. it is unfortunate that a cd accompanies only two hundred of the two thousand copies, especially since the inclusion of a cd with anthologies or studies of folklore has become common practice. ultimately works of �oral literature� should be heard and not just read. for many decades russian folklorists have dreamed about publishing a compendium of russian epics. the folklorists at the academy institute of russian literature in st. petersburg have at long last begun to realize this dream. one can appreciate the magnitude of their accomplishment only by understanding some of the difficulties involved in such an undertaking. some two thousand variants have been published, and perhaps a thousand more exist in manuscripts scattered in numerous archives. since the appearance of the collections of rybnikov [1861-1867] and gil�ferding [1873] scholars have expressed different opinions about how the texts should be grouped, that is, by collector, singer, plot, genre, geographical region or chronology. perhaps the most influential approach was introduced by gil�ferding who arranged epics from the onega region by performers. he also included a short introduction about each singer, about the person from whom they had learned their songs, their repertoire, occupation, the number of melodies they used, and the quality of their performance. thus gil�ferding anticipated practices which were accepted later by collectors working in other traditions, and which led to a focus on individual performers and the characteristics of �oral� as opposed to �written� literature. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 96 in the compendium under review the songs are presented first by geographical region, next by subject or plot (siuzhetnye gnezda), and finally by chronology. this permits a focus on the features of the epic tradition in a given region and its sub-regions. in the past folklorists sought to distinguish the characteristics of a general russian tradition which was assumed to be present in all geographic areas inhabited by a russian population. however, in recent decades many scholars have endeavored to determine the unique characteristics of a folklore tradition or genre in a specific region. this latter approach offers several advantages; determining local realizations of a particular plot, delineating singers who diverge from the tradition by improvising their individual versions of a song, and detecting the influence of printed sources on the singers, especially as the russian epic gradually declined in the twentieth century. the addition of detailed indexes allows one to find all the epics of one singer or those recorded by a given collector. several principles have been observed in the selection of suitable items from the existing mass of material, which includes fragments, prose versions, retellings from popular publications, artificially created soviet epics called �noviny,� �hidden reprints� and extensively edited but questionable texts. only someone who has worked closely with the verbal texts of folk songs and is familiar with studies of folklore textology can appreciate the enormous work that has gone into the preparation of these two weighty volumes. not only does the quality of performers range widely from those who are outstanding, average or poor, but the quality of the recordings themselves varies greatly, especially those made before the introduction of the tape recorder in the 1950s. gil�ferding was the first to discover that an accurate text can only be obtained from a sung performance and not from a spoken retelling [astakhova 1966: 192], which often omits repetitions and filler particles so essential to the creation of the verbal rhythm. besides problems which arise from different techniques used to take down the verbal texts under field conditions, yet others may occur when collectors �correct� the texts, for instance, by adapting them to the norms of the literary language. singers may remember only parts of songs, may combine one song with another, may confuse the names of characters, and may lapse into prose. in some cases collectors first wrote down a spoken retelling and then revised it during a subsequent sung performance. in the commentary to each song the compilers of these two volumes have assiduously compared and quoted textual variations. another problem concerns the composite epic (svodnaia bylina) in which a singer may join together several or all the songs about a particular hero. in many cases composites can be 97 traced to publications intended for popular consumption, especially that of avenarius which went through several editions in the second half of the nineteenth century. for the most part, russian folklorists have considered that russian epics consist of a single episode or exploit of a hero, and that the combination of two or more episodes represents �contamination.� this is in contrast to other epic traditions, such as those in central asia, where composite epics are both common and accepted. it might prove worthwhile to examine the russian tradition from a somewhat different viewpoint, that is, to consider that it falls somewhere between the two poles of plot singularity and plot multiplicity, and that it had an incipient tendency to develop composite songs but did not fully realize that potential [astakhova 1948: 98-105; putilov 1988: 15-16, 33-38]. in the general introduction about the russian epic for the entire series (pp. 21-78), it is stated that �here we will not touch upon the nature of epic verse ..., the composition, or even the problem of the epithet, but we will note the main features which delineate the epic and which also connect the epic of various peoples with each other� (p. 24). the approach is not explicitly defined, but myths are evidently regarded as forming the most ancient epic plots, which over time are modified and become obscured. although a number of byliny are examined from such a viewpoint, we will mention only �potyk,� an extremely complex epic whose variants differ greatly. briefly stated, potyk is sent by prince vladimir to hunt along a river, where he is about to shoot a swan when it turns into mar�ia the white swan. she asks him to marry her on the condition that when one of them dies, the other must enter the tomb. eventually she dies, potyk enters the tomb, and, after various complications, she is revived only to be enticed away by the king of lithuania. after a long search, potyk finds mar�ia, who three times offers him a poisoned drink. twice he takes the drink, dies, and is miraculously revived, but the third time he kills mar�ia with the help of her sister whom he afterwards marries. the interpretation of �potyk� is based on the assumption that kievan rus originated in the second through the fourth centuries of our era , and that marriage in this epic reflects a conflict between the slavs and the iranian speaking scythian peoples in the steppes during this early period (pp. 34-35). in the further development of this bylina potyk ceases to be a �cultural hero� and becomes a bogatyr’ of the kievan cycle. even later the action is transferred to lithuania and the lithuanian king who abducts mar�ia the white swan. although it is mentioned that neighboring germanic peoples left no trace in the russian epic (p. 30), iarkho [1910], georg polívka [1903] and boris sokolov [1927-1929] point out a number of similar motifs and themes, especially that of the �unfaithful wife,� which appear in germanic tales, sagas, and epics. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 98 furthermore, zhirmunskii [1979: 206-07] cautions that the presence of mythological elements does not necessarily prove that an epic is ancient in origin, because they may have been absorbed from other genres, especially the magic tale, at a later time. as one of his examples, zhirmunskii cites the bylina �potyk.� one could add that the theme of the �swan maiden� occurs in many traditions, especially in those of central asia and the arctic regions. although one cannot expect all aspects of the bylina to be covered in such a limited introduction, in such a major and comprehensive work about the russian epic one nevertheless would have appreciated some presentation of the bylina as oral literature. for example, mention could have been made of compositional devices such as the traditional introduction (zachin) and conclusion (kontsovka), or the slavic negative antithesis, all of which are just as meaningful as �hyperbole,� which is singled out as the main feature in the composition of the bylina (p. 24). skaftymov [1924], reacting against the historical school, delineated many characteristics of the bylina as an expression of �artistic literature,� in particular emphasizing the role of the �resonating background� in enhancing the central hero as opposed to other personages. one also misses references to putilov [1976] and the typological historical approach that he applied to the comparative study of russian and south slavic epics in an effort to combine aspects of the historical and mythological approaches. although the history of the collection of byliny is covered in detail, the history of the study of byliny is incomplete, one-sided, and subjective. one would have preferred a more objective and systematic survey of the various interpretations of russian epics, their origins, their interaction with history and their evolution over time. the remaining essays in the first volume are distinguished by the high quality of their scholarship and their thoroughness. considerable information is presented about the ethnicity, occupations, way of life, and epic tradition in pechora. in this regard only a few main features will be pointed out. in the twelfth century russians migrated from novgorod to the pechora area which was then and is still today inhabited by the nenets (samoed). in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries old believers moved to the region, an event which has probably contributed a strong religious element to pechoran epics. the main occupation of the men in this isolated region was fishing both on the pechora river and in the barents sea, something which also is reflected in the texts. unlike other northern areas, few women learned to perform epics and family traditions of passing on songs were rare. although chicherov [1982] sought evidence to support his idea that schools of singers developed in the north, the materials available about the pechora tradition do not 99 confirm the existence of such groups. on the contrary, singers appear to have used a variety of sources for their byliny rather than having a single teacher (p. 92-94). onchukov [1904] first discovered and recorded byliny in the pechora area in 1901. in the years 1929 to 1929 astakhova [1938, 1951] led an expedition which collected epics in several northern regions including pechora. from the 1930s into the 1960s other expeditions were carried out to the pechora area but only a few of the materials on epics were published at the time, a situation which the first volumes of the compendium rectify. it is fortunate that musicology has been given a firm place in the presentation of the bylina and that accessible melodies have been included in the first two volumes. even though the accompanying cd is derived from recordings made as early as the first decades of the twentieth century on wax cylinders, the sound quality is exceptionally good and reflects the culmination of years spent deciphering materials in the fonogrammarkhiv in the institute of russian literature. in regard to the melodies of the songs the late v. v. korguzalov concludes that russian epics were sung according to a �free rhapsodic form� and a �tirade recitative� (rapsodicheskoe svobodnoe intonirovanie and tiradnaia rechitatsiia, pp. 133, 138) by which the melody is varied, an embryonic but fluctuating stanza form emerges, and the lines in the verbal text are subject to wide syllabic variation. although trubetskoi�s study of the rhythm of the verbal text is cited [trubetskoi 1987], no mention is made of roman jakobson�s influential article in which he conjectures that the original east slavic epic line consisted of ten syllables, was related to the serbo-croatian deseterac, and in russian was subsequently transformed into an eleven-syllable line corresponding to a trochaic pentameter with a dactylic ending [jakobson 1966]. using a system of transcription developed with the german linguist christian sappok at bochum university, the contributors to the essay on the language of russian epics present a phonetic analysis of several songs (pp. 126-31). the varying accentuation of many words is accurately indicated and phonetic variation, even in the performance of a single singer, becomes apparent. this represents a vast linguistic improvement over attempts, often dilettantish, by some early collectors to convey phonetic detail in their publications of the bylina. on the one hand, such analysis has an important place in the study of the language of epics, even though it emphasizes how close the language, at least in regard to phonetics, is to the dialect of the peasant singers. on the other hand, scholars such as evgen�eva [1963] and ossovetskii [1979] have endeavored, mainly on the basis of vocabulary and, to a lesser extent, morphology and syntax, to establish the poetic features of a supradialectal and traditional folklore koine. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 100 on the whole the folklorists who have contributed to the first two volumes in the compendium of the russian epics are to be congratulated for the immense and painstaking effort that they have made in a highly complex and enormous undertaking. apart from the few points of criticism raised above, these two volumes provide a solid basis for investigating the russian epic tradition for many years to come. they also demonstrate the high scholarly standards of russian folklorists and of their contributions to the study of russian epics. one can only hope that the ensuing volumes will appear regularly, and that they will be as thoroughly and conscientiously well prepared as the first two have been. bibliography astakhova, a. m. 1938, 1951. byliny severa [northern byliny]. 2 vols. moscow, leningrad. _____. 1948. russkii bylinnyi epos na severe [the russian bylina epos in the north]. petrozavodsk. _____. 1966. byliny: itogi i problemy izucheniia [byliny: summary and problems of study]. moscow and leningrad. avenarius, v. p. 1885. kniga bylin: svod izbrannykh obraztsov russkoi narodnoi epicheskoi poezii [a book of byliny: a compendium of selected examples of russian folk epic poetry]. 3rd ed. st. petersburg. chicherov, v. i. 1982. shkoly skazitelei zaonezh�ia [performers� schools in zaonezh�e]. moscow. evgen�eva, a. p. 1963. ocherki po iazyku russkoi ustnoi poezii v zapisiakh xvii-xx vv. [essays on the language of russian oral poetry in recordings from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries]. moscow and leningrad. gil�ferding, a. f. 1873. onezhskie byliny, zapisannye aleksandrom fedorovichem gil�ferdingom letom 1871 goda [onega byliny, recorded by aleksandr fedorovich gil�ferding in the summer of 1871]. st. petersburg. iarkho, b. i. 1910. �epicheskie elementy, priurochennye k imeni �mikhaila potyka�� [epic elements attached to the name �mikhail potyk�]. etnograficheskoe obozrenie. no. 3-4, pp. 49-79. 101 jakobson, roman. 1966 [1952]. �slavic epic verse.� in: selected writings. vol. 4, pp. 414-63. the hague. onchukov, n. e. 1904. pechorskie byliny [pechora byliny]. st. petersburg. ossovetskii, i. a. 1979. �nekotorye nabliudeniia nad iazykom stikhotvornogo fol�klora� [some observations on the language of verse folklore]. in: a. n. korzhin (ed.), ocherki po stilistike khudozhestvennoi rechi [essays on the style of artistic speech], pp. 199-252. moscow. polívka, georg. 1903. �zu der erzählung von der undankbaren gattin.� zeitschrift des vereins für volkskunde. no. 13, pp. 399-412. putilov, b. n. 1976. metodologiia sravnitel�no-istoricheskogo izucheniia fol�klora [methodology for the comparative-historical study of folklore]. leningrad. _____. 1988. geroicheskii epos i deistvitel�nost� [heroic epos and reality]. leningrad. rybnikov, p. n. 1861-1867. pesni, sobrannye p. n. rybnikovym [songs collected by p. n. rybnikov]. 4 vols. st. petersburg. skaftymov, a. p. 1924. poetika i genezis bylin [the poetics and genesis of the byliny]. saratov. sokolov, boris. 1927-1929. �noveishie trudy inostrannykh uchenykh po russkomu eposu� [recent work by foreign scholars on the russian epos]. khudozhestvennyi fol�klor. no. 23, pp. 34-58; no. 4-5, pp. 9-35. trubetskoi, n. s. 1987 [1937]. �k voprosu o stikhe russkoi byliny� [on the question of the verse of the russian bylina]. in: izbrannye trudy po filologii [selected works on philology], pp. 352-358. moscow. zhirmunskii, v. m. 1979. �epicheskoe tvorchestvo slavianskikh narodov i problemy sravnitel�nogo izucheniia eposa� [the epic creation of the slavic peoples and problems of the comparative study of epos]. in: sravnitel�noe literaturovedenie [comparative literary studies], pp. 192-280. leningrad. james bailey the university of wisconsin, madison seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 l.m. ivleva. the pretheatrical-game language of russian folklore: the problem of theory and typology. st. petersburg: dmitri bulanin, 1998. izaly zemtsovsky. visiting scholar, university of california at berkeley. following her book "riazhene v russkoi traditsionnoi kulture" [mummery in russian traditional culture], spb., 1994, the second masterpiece of the prematurely deceased folklorist larisa mikhailovna iv leva (1944-1995) has appeared. this is her posthumously published candidate's dissertation, prepared by vera ken, "doteatralno-igrovoi iazyk russkogo folklora: problema teorii i tipologii" [the pretheatrical-game language of russian folklore: the problem of theory and typology], dmitrii bulanin, spb., 1998. as it has been compiled by vera ken, the book also includes interesting materials from the discussion of the dissertation in november 1985 during the public defense at the russian institute of the history of the arts (formerly the leningrad state institute of theater, music, and cinematography); three of the author's articles written at various times (1974, 1988, and 1992) and published in various editions but thematically linked with the dissertation; and also a list of ivleva's published works (about 55). ivleva's manuscript, even though the rough version was completed about twenty years ago, has not become obsolete in the slightest. moreover, it presents and illuminates new tasks for the study of folklore -"the quest for a formula in drama study that combines ritual, folk game, and theater" (p. 38). this is exemplary academic research on the theory and typology of an enormous stratum of folklore. the work is all the more valuable because, before ivleva this area was variously called "folk or folklore theater," "theatricalness of individual elements of folklore," or even "carnival." with solid argumentation, ivleva has rejected evolutionary theories about the origin of the theater from ritual and, in essence, has founded a new field of study -"game culture" [igrovaia kultura]. "this culture at times is identified with theatrical culture and at times it is defined entirely as the culture of folk laughter (narodnosmekhovaia kultura), but it can not be placed entirely within either framework. this is not theater and this is not carnival -this is a ritual that has existed in game forms and in many things connected with the tradition of ritual laughter" (p. 181). i will cite some examples of ivleva's reasoning. the first concern methodology: "the fact that the russian theater did not develop directly out of a ritual or a children's game does not deny their similarity in essence nor the impossibility of their comparison according to some fundamental criteria, just as the assertion of a genetic relationship between them in the best case is capable of explaining their similarity, but at the same time this does not give an interpretation of existing differences. thus, the relationship is only an individual case presupposing and explaining similarly; in other cases this problem must be solved in a more general form .... such a justification and such a principle are evident for us in the structuraltypological approach ... " (p. 35). the second citations concern the specific interpretation of the personages in mummery: from our point of view, the mistake of many investigators lies in the fact that they page 45 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 have perceived and analyzed the personages of mummery as types taken directly from life n they perceived their social qualities and features as one-dimensional. which impoverishes them outside the prism of the mythological world being reflected by them. it is natural that in such a way "only the upper layers of semantics are 'counted,' and that the view of the investigator in general does not penetrate to its deep layers .... precisely in this lies the fact that mummery is not an imitation of life and is not an elementary reflection of it. mummery is first of all the embodiment of a specific idea about the world, that is, a reflection of a much higher order" (p. 92). thoroughly studying russian folklore material, ivleva theoreticaliy and practicaliy has founded a new scholarly discipline, which in principle goes beyond any ethnic framework, and which she has named "ethno-drama study." ivleva departs from that fact that although the problem of the approach to folklore-ethnographic phenomena through drama study has existed for a long time, the phenomena themselves have stili not become the object of drama study as scholarship. for turning a subject into an object of the corresponding scholarship, the subject must be described in the "meta-language" of that scholarship. in the capacity of such a meta-language ivleva takes the idea of "game," not of game in general, but of game specificaliy in its interpretation as drama study, that is, as a special language that, as a system, is determined by two obligatory tiers of features. the first is connected with "reembodiment" and the second with action as the graphic means of depicting a character. everything else -dialogue, gesture, mimicry, mask, costume, and scenery -represents only secondary and occasional features. ivleva elaborates a "general theory of the game" and delineates a system of game language. according to the author, and by its origin, "the world of game" turns out to be an extremely archaic type of human conduct. ivleva's conception is formulated in a "theory of game language." the game language of folklore, the game model of the world, and the game form of expression, which encompass the heterogeneous strata of folklore material, are phenomena of a different order and dissimilar functions, and they become the "object" of her study. ivleva organizes this study according to the requirements of typology, introducing these requirements methodologicaliy correctly and consistently. the theory and methodology established in the first chapter find their practical application in the second chapter on the basis of material from russian folklore. in the book the approach through drama study is combined with the principles of ethnographism, which is subordinated to the new purposes of the research. structural-typological analysis prepares and precedes historical-genetic analysis as this approach was bequeathed by v. va. propp, l. m. ivleva's teacher. during the defense of the dissertation, the work received the solid support of boris n. putilov (1918-1997), one of the most important representatives of the typological approach in the study of slavic folklore. (his response is printed in the appendix.) he pointed out the innovative features which ivleva had contributed to the typological theory. among them is the seef a journal page 46 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 opposition of the so called "graduated" idea about the type, which assumes the delineation of "typological gradations," to the classificatory approach. this understanding of typology as a graduated description in contrast to the classification description is especially promising for the future. it permits the delineation and understanding of what is so characteristic for the folklore tradition, that is, mixed, liminal, transitional, and variation types, as well as the "consecutiveness of intermediate gradations which connect the two types with each other" (p. 62). in a review it is not possible to cover the whole richness of l. m. ivleva's book. the well .thought out table of contents in itself conveys an idea about the questions that have been covered. i am convinced that the day is not far off when the book under review will be translated into english and other languages. the long awaited introduction of the original and talented conception of ivleva into international scholarship can have great meaning for the study of folklore, ethnography, study of drama, and related disciplines in the humanities. (translated by james bailey) page 47 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 microsoft word folk04se.doc 54 jack v. haney, the complete russian folktale. vol. 5: russian legends (2003) armonk, new york: m. e. sharpe. xxviii + 211 pp. $65.00 (cloth). isbn 1-56324-493-4. volumes 1�4 of professor jack v. haney�s series, the complete russian folktale, were reviewed in the fall 2003 issue of folklorica [37-41]. volume five, russian legends, continues the series. the folktales in this volume represent tale types 750�849 in the aarne-thompson (at) classification system. compared to the wondertales (or fairy tales) in volumes 3�4, these narratives may be less familiar to many readers, and are more difficult to define. the aarne-thompson index refers to them as �religious tales,� while the east slavic tale-type index calls them �legendarnye skazki� (legendary tales). professor haney chooses to refer to them as legends, but points out in his introduction to this volume that they fall between folktale and legend. while this is a problem for folklore scholars, who are still debating the differences between folktale and legend, the traditional performers of these narratives freely moved between and combined the two. in both russian and western folklore studies, the term �legend� is used to designate a prose narrative which the teller and audience accept as true. unlike the folktale, the legend does not have a special compositional or stylistic form, and the performance of legendary narratives may not require the same artistic skill that the folktale does. russian folklorists distinguish historical legends, christian or religious legends, and �superstitious tales,� among others. the last group includes narratives referred to in western folklore scholarship as memorates or fabulates (equivalent russian terms are bylichka and byval’shchina), firstor thirdperson narrative accounts of encounters with supernatural beings (nature and place spirits such as the leshii, vodianoi, rusalka, and others, as well as witches, revenants, devils, and shapeshifters). russian legends also include narratives about buried or other treasure, and local legends that explain the origin or disappearance of specific rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, or villages. the narratives in russian legends are close to christian and religious legends, but like most folktales, and unlike some legends, they are not set in a specific time or place. they often feature jesus christ, the apostles, saints nicholas, peter, and paul, the archangel michael and other angels, il�ia the prophet, as well as satan and devils. as professor haney discusses in his introduction, many of these narratives reflect the influence of the medieval and later apocryphal tradition (such as the popular apocryphal text about the mother of god�s visit to hell). there may be traces of the slavic pre-christian pagan religion in tales about il�ia (nos. 410 and 503). in some of these tales, a human protagonist visits hell, or observes the punishments inflicted on sinners there. another frequent theme is the reward given to a poor but generous man or woman by a holy figure, while a stingy wealthy character is punished. penance and redemption are also important, and some narratives concern a protagonist who saves himself or his soul from the devil. the texts in this collection are probably most interesting for the light they shed on popular religious and moral conceptions that often differ from those of official religion. a very ambiguous christ appears in one narrative (no. 404); after a poor widow has fed him and the apostles, he allows a wolf to eat her only cow. only folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 55 at the end of the tale does christ explain to the apostles that the widow will be rewarded in the next world. king david appears as an adulterer (no. 418), while king solomon is crafty rather than wise in getting out of hell and into heaven (no. 457). st. nicholas the wonderworker convinces a thief to stop stealing in one tale (no. 504), in very tangible terms. the thief, forced to hide in the skin of a dead cow, is told that it is just as sickening for the saint when the thief lights a candle for him in church. in another narrative, a peasant �blinds� an icon of st. nicholas ugodnik and outwits a priest who had reproached him for drinking milk during a fast period (no. 505). some narratives express the anticlerical feelings of the peasantry: a devil helps a peasant become wealthy, and outwits the priest who is carrying on an affair with the peasant�s wife (no. 473). a reading of these tales reveals a complex attitude toward the christian religion; while there is reverence and awe before the divine, concern with the problems of good and evil, sin and redemption, these narratives bring the holy figures �down to earth,� make them more concrete, and sometimes present them as adversaries. other tales in this collection also display typically russian or east slavic folk conceptions. the earth does not accept the body of a dead man who has been cursed by his mother (no. 419). in a humorous narrative, a young man sent to hell is given the task of guarding hundreds of souls. he agrees to release the souls to an angel in exchange for half a bottle of vodka, and then the devils release him from hell, thinking he has eaten the souls (no. 453). a number of the tales are close to fairy tales or wondertales. no. 465, the tale of the sea tsar and vasilisa the wisest, is essentially a version of at 313, but with an unusual ending: the man who has unwittingly promised his son to the devil manages to outsmart the devil by hiding his son in dog and goat skins. readers more familiar with the fairy tales will find that certain common motifs are sometimes used differently in these �religious tales.� in text no. 403, the hero is told he may go into all but three rooms of a stranger�s house. but in this case, looking into the �forbidden room� does not lead to a real catastrophe for the hero; instead, he sees his parents and wife boiling in pitch, punished for their cruelty and stinginess. most of these tale-types are found in europe, with varying geographic distribution. some are found throughout europe, such as at 791: in this popular and humorous narrative, peter and christ sleep in the same bed. their drunken or stingy host beats peter, and peter changes places with christ. the host wants to beat his other lodger, and beats peter again. this tale type is represented in this volume by no. 446, and contains an interesting twist. when peter and christ walk the earth, women are in charge. it is the mistress of the house who beats peter, and afterwards peter begs christ to take away women�s rights. other texts in this volume, while they may, in their general outlines, clearly be related to european parallel versions, nevertheless contain details or developments unique to russia or the east slavic countries (such as text no. 402, a previously unpublished archival recording). in some instances, there are divergences between the at and east slavic indices, an indication of a sometimes distinct folktale tradition in eastern europe. it is precisely the uniqueness of these russian folk religious narratives, which are rarely translated and unfortunately not well known, that will be of great interest to students and scholars of folklore, especially those who do not read russian. as in the preceding volumes in this series, professor haney�s annotations and the arrangement by at tale-type number place these narratives in an international context and facilitate comparative 56 study, and the excellent translation and judicious choice of sources (many obscure or difficult of access) combine to provide special insight into russian traditional oral literature and folk religion. andreas johns university of california, berkeley folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 microsoft word fall04w.doc 57 laura stark. peasants, pilgrims, and sacred promises: ritual and the supernatural in orthodox karelian folk religion. helsinki: finnish literature society, 2002 (studia fennica folkloristica 11), 229 pp. isbn 951-746366-9. $29.95 (paper) laura stark’s book deals with an interesting albeit complicated topic: the religious culture and everyday ritual practices of orthodox karelian peasants living on the borderlands between northwestern russia and finland. orthodox karelians are not the only group speaking a finnish language and inheriting finno-ugrian cultural traditions, while at the same time sharing the popular religious practices of the russian orthodox. other groups in the region include the setu living on the boundary between russia and southern estonia, the tikhvin and tver’ karelians and the veps. although a number of scholarly works examining the folk religion of these groups have appeared in recent decades, numerous issues have yet to be clarified. the special interest these groups present stems from their popular culture, which appears to result from interrelationship with and dialog between heterogeneous linguistic, cultural and religious communities, that is, between the world of the finnougrian peoples of the european north and that of the orthodox slavic peoples. as laura stark points out, “orthodox karelia lies across an important boundary running down the middle of europe, which has historically divided the continent into two different cultural and religious zones” (p. 11). in my opinion, the “boundary position” of orthodox karelian culture (as well as the culture of the veps, setu et al.) allows for the analysis and discussion of a number of important issues relating to the problem of “folk religion” in general. first of all, the material provides good ground for the comparative analysis of the so-called “pre-christian” or “archaic” elements in folk religious practices. scholars in the twentieth century have often argued that the “popular religion” of agrarian communities in eastern europe was to a greater or lesser extent based upon the “prechristian” cultural heritage. however, this point of view has also been subjected to criticism; it is equally possible that those beliefs and practices labeled as “pre-christian” and “archaic” might have arisen long after the introduction of christianity, and we should hence consider them as manifestations of popular orthodoxy, popular catholicism or even popular protestantism. of course, the analysis of cultural categories or points of view possessed by nineteenth-century peasants does not normally presume any distinction between “christian” and “pre-christian” (or “non-christian”) beliefs and practices. however, the opposition is still being discussed by historians and historical anthropologists, and, therefore, we have to pay attention to it – at least, in its diachronic perspective. another important point related to the popular religious practices of the orthodox karelians refers to the problem of social interaction and conflict as determinants of the very notion of folk religion. it is well known that, usually, popular religious practices are a sphere of constant competition between local communities of believers and religious or state officials of various ranks. late twentieth-century historians have often used the concept of acculturation to describe the impact of the reformation, counter-reformation and enlightenment on the popular culture of european peasants. as robert muchembled argues, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the patterns of agrarian culture in western europe were considerably transformed and even destroyed by legions of devoted missionaries who tried to impose new religious ideas and categories on the so-called folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 58 “magic world view” (see muchembled). however, the russian case differs. both the church reforms of peter the great and the various reorganizations of religious life made by his successors resulted in, one may say, the localization rather than the transformation of agrarian religious practices. thus, relations between local believers and official church representatives in orthodox russia during the “synod period” (early eighteenth century – 1917) appear more complicated than in catholic or protestant countries. sometimes priests and monks tried to change peasants’ religious practices and customs; sometimes church officials were themselves influenced by the traditions of their rural flock. in the case of the orthodox karelians, the situation is still more complicated, since karelian rural believers did not speak the same language as their priests. in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, karelia was an important center of the old belief movement. as georg michels points out, “old belief preachers provided the first contact with christianity for many non-russian peasants” of the region (p. 227). it is also worth noting that the majority of tikhvin karelians (the descendants of seventeenth-century migrants from ladoga karelia) profess the old belief to this day [see fishman 2003]. incidentally, laura stark’s concept of the old believers as “the russian orthodox sect” with a strong tendency towards the “conservation of archaic ritual details” and “strict adherence to a standard of authenticity in its customs” (pp. 18–19) is not entirely accurate. at the level of popular religious practice, the old belief culture in many respects resembles that of other orthodox peasants. be that as it may, both language as well as the confessional boundaries, that separated karelian peasants from russian church officials, served to determine some of the distinctive features of karelian folk religion. stark shows that parish priests were less important in the popular religious practices of orthodox karelians. at the same time, the local population paid great attention to neighboring monasteries, which were viewed as sacred centers and visited by pilgrims. this specific situation is, naturally, highly productive for a discussion of the role of official and unofficial components in popular religious practice. last but not least, the study of orthodox karelian folk religion can contribute a great deal to discussion about the scholarly notion of “folk” or “popular” religion as applied to daily practices of rural communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. in fact, folklorists and anthropologists are still discussing the key issues of the topic: which popular concepts, motifs, plots and rituals belong to the sphere of folk religion and which do not? how can we divide religious practice and religious ideology in agrarian society? what functional and cognitive factors determine the peculiar features of folk religious practice? from this perspective, laura stark’s monograph presents numerous valuable insights and materials enriching our understanding of popular religion in modern europe. proceeding from a set of influential twentieth-century anthropological theories and explanatory models (the model of reciprocity and exchange between humans and supranormal beings; the idea of purity and impurity as cultural boundaries, as suggested by mary douglas; the theory of “limited good” put forward by george foster and the cognitive approach to the study of religion as formulated by veikko anttonen and pascal boyer), the author consistently analyses four spheres of orthodox karelian popular culture which she considers “folk religious”: rituals and beliefs related to ideas about illness and healing; those connected with relations between human society and the forest spirits; funeral and memorial rites directed at the dead; pilgrimage folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 59 customs and cults of sacred places. the reason for this thematic choice is related to stark’s definition of folk religion, which is based on “two primary elements: first, folk religion refers to practices and beliefs in which the sacred is defined by the local community rather than by a religious institution. second, folk religion is characterized by an emphasis on reciprocity and exchange between humans and divine or sacred agents” (p. 30). in this context, stark prefers to differentiate the terms “folk religion” and “popular religion,” the latter referring “to the religious practices and beliefs of individuals from varied class and social backgrounds in a network of diverse and complex relationships.” although, in my opinion, it is difficult to imagine “pure” folk religious practices preserved by a given local community without any influence from external social structures and religious institutions, stark’s approach is undoubtedly fruitful for the study of the “elementary religious forms” characteristic of the agrarian societies of northeastern europe. the author’s analysis of the data on orthodox karelian folk religion permits us to conclude that this cultural system was based upon two different but complementary types of ritual activity, “the sacred boundaries complex and the sacred centers complex,” which “addressed different types of crises and offered different solutions to them” (p. 192). the first complex presumed the threat of impurity (“disorder, depletion, danger, and anomaly”) from the “other side,” that is from the various forest spirits and forces or from the dead. “these threats existing in the local sphere were minimized by setting up symbolic boundaries between the farm or community on the one hand, and the forest or dead by the other … such boundaries were not solid walls but rather ‘gates’ which allowed some traffic between the two spheres, since the forest nature and the dead were still potentially useful for social continuity, if only contact with them could be ritually controlled” (p. 192). the second complex addressed those “types of communal disorder,” which “were seen to come from within the community itself rather than from outside it, and this included undiscovered crimes against fellow villagers and unexplained illness. since they came from the ‘inside’, these threats could not be dealt with by setting up boundaries. they had to be countered instead through the power of a symbolic center outside the community, which represented purity and the highest ideals of orthodox karelian culture. in traversing the distance from periphery (home farm or village) to center (monastery), it was thought that such disorder or impurities could be brought to light and rectified through exclusion or healing” (p. 193). in stark’s opinion, both ritual complexes “involved communication and morallyregulated exchange with sacred agents, that is to say, human-divine relations were manifested as a type of exchange transaction.” this “reciprocal” model of folk religion is one of the key points in the interpretative model proposed by stark. she lays special emphasis on the notion of a ‘promise’, or vow, which “formalizes” the “reciprocal relations between humans and sacred agents” in orthodox karelian folk religion, though in fact, it has to be remarked that this notion is common in the popular religion of most european agrarian societies, whether orthodox or catholic. although the model elaborated by stark is obviously reliable and, to some extent, new in traditional european folklore research, it sometimes appears too sketchy. in my opinion, it would have been more interesting to discuss not only the “reciprocal nature” of popular religious practices and ideas, but also their particular social, cultural, and historical backgrounds. most of the rituals, beliefs, legendary motifs and plots, and so on that laura stark describes are widespread in the various traditions of the orthodox slavs and other 60 christian peoples of eastern europe. in fact, the religious practices of karelian peasants constitute a part of the popular orthodox culture of the northwestern regions of the former russian empire. therefore, it would have been more appropriate to find out which cultural items discussed by stark are common to both russian and finnish peasants in the russian north-west and which are unique to the orthodox karelians. it does not, however, appear that the author possesses a knowledge of the russian language and culture sufficient for that. the result is not only an absence of comparative analysis, but also a degree of misunderstanding about the data on karelian popular religion itself. one example concerns the discussion of “the autumn george” festival in karelian villages. the author notes that “in official church tradition there were actually two different saints named george, but in the folk tradition these two were melded into a single figure” (p. 50); “the two st. georges were great-martyr george the victorious (april 23) and hieromartyr george, bishop of armenia (september 30)” (p. 203, note 38). in fact, the orthodox church knows more than ten different saints named george. however, the hieromartyr and armenian bishop whose memory is celebrated on september 30 of the julian calendar is not george (georgii) but gregory (grigorii). in east slavic popular religion, “the autumn george” (egorii osennii or osennii iur’ev den’) is usually celebrated on november 26 in the julian calendar. a specifically russian orthodox festival, it commemorates the consecration of st george’s church in kiev, built by iaroslav the wise in the eleventh century. the festival is also familiar from its distinctive role in the history of russian serfdom. using data recorded in karelia in the 1930s, stark points out that “on autumn-george the cows were taken into the cowshed and tethered,” and that the “two saints named george became fused into a single st. george who was conveniently associated with the entire period during which the cows would spend their days grazing in the forest pastures” (p. 131). that “spring-george” is the first day of the summer grazing season for cattle is familiar from various traditions of the slavic and finnish peoples of eastern europe. however, in russian folk culture the end of the season is the feast of the intercession (pokrov, october 1), a date close to the festival of the hieromartyr gregory. as for “autumn george” day (november 26), the latter was not associated with cattle, but might be celebrated as a local festival in a particular village. the same tradition can be found amongst the veps, another orthodox group of finno-ugrian origin inhabiting the regions close to karelia [vinokurova, 28–32, 35–36]. it would, therefore, be interesting to know whether the karelian ‘autumn george’, as reported by laura stark, is a peculiar local interpretation of the orthodox calendar, based upon confusion between the christian names george and gregory, or a mistake on the part of a field researcher, or else a personal calendar interpretation on the part of the informant. unfortunately, laura stark does not recognize the question, since she follows the confusion herself. moreover, this is not the only example of a confusion between saint’s names. it may be that the same problem occurs in respect to st. basil and st. blaise (see pp. 199 and 209). of course, mixing up saints’ names is not enough to nullify any valuable scholarly findings and insights, especially for an anthropologist who studies living cultures and societies rather than their history. however, from such a perspective, the book by laura stark also occasionally seems contradictory. as it turns out, the data used in the study was mainly borrowed, as far as i understand, from archival and published collections and reports by finnish scholars in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries (predominantly in the folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 61 1930–40s). i do not doubt the professional skills of the collectors (who include well-known scholars such as martti haavio), but, at the very least, contemporary methods and strategies of folklore field research differ greatly from those of the early twentieth and, especially, the nineteenth century. it does not even matter who carried out this field research, finnish scholars or russian/soviet folklorists (whose collections and opinions are completely neglected by stark). in my opinion, every anthropologist who wants “to let the ‘voices’ of the performers and narrators be heard” or “to defer to the folk interpretation” (pp. 16–17) should try to carry out his or her own field research on all possible occasions. my personal experience of field study in the area of popular religion in contemporary russia suggests that the data collected nowadays is in every respect comparable with that recorded by previous generations of scholars. furthermore, it seems that, although stark declares her intention “to decipher the codes used by informants and collectors alike in referring to a past, vanished world view” (p. 17), she does not in fact try to assess or criticize such problematic scholarly notions as the dichotomy of “christian” and “pre-christian” beliefs, or the concepts “shamanistic world view” and “religious syncretism.” sometimes, the lack of field research experience leads her into highly dubious interpretations. i can not agree, for example, that ritual incantations addressed to “an entire kin community of nature spirits, complete with fathers, mothers, grandparents, children, etc., as well as representatives of a class society: judges, priests, kings, servants, slaves” really does represent the peasants’ idea of how “another world” is structured and organized (see pp. 52 and 78). in fact, such ritual formulae are based upon the idea of classification and do not reflect the actual beliefs of their performers. certainly, i do not doubt that the monograph reviewed contains numerous valuable insights into the popular culture of the orthodox karelians and contributes a great deal to the study of folk religion in general. i share most of the theoretical positions and approaches employed by laura stark. however, here we face a general problem in ethnological and folklore research. the question is: should we just apply this or that anthropological theory to our data without special attention to the historical, social and cultural specificity of the material under consideration, or should we analyze and discuss this specificity in the first place. in my opinion, theories, however useful and innovative they may be, do not require their explanatory potential per se to be reconfirmed; what is more interesting is to discuss particular situations in which our theories either do or do not apply. for me personally, it would be more interesting to learn about the specific features of orthodox karelian folk religion in comparison with analogous cultural practices among neighboring finnish and russian groups. nonetheless, laura stark’s book should be regarded as an interesting and important piece of research, which makes its readers think over and discuss a large number of key issues in anthropological research as it relates to folk religion. works cited fishman, olga 2003. zhizn’ po vere: tikhvinskie karely-staroobriadtsy [a life in the faith: the karelian old believers of the tikhvin region]. moscow: indrik. michels, georg 1992. “the violent old belief: an examination of religious dissent on the karelian frontier”, russian history, 19 (1-4): 203–29. 62 muchembled, robert 1985. popular culture and elite culture in france, 1400–1750. baton rouge, la: louisiana state university press. vinokurova, irina 1994. kalendarnye obychai, obriady i prazdniki vepsov (konets xix – nachalo xx v.) [the calendar customs, rituals and holidays of the veps (late 19th-early 20th centuries]. st. petersburg: nauka. alexander panchenko institute of russian literature st. petersburg folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 mr. afanasiev's naughty little secrets: "russkie zavetnye skazki" jack v. haney. university of washington. seattle if one were to judge solely from nineteenth century collections of russian folktales, the russian peasant never swore, never abused priests or their wives, and indulged in procreative acts only in the most delicate fashion. the collections of the populists (narodniki), who were mostly school teachers by occupation if not training, are devoid of such things, as is the great collection in three volumes of alexander afanasiev. but afanasiev collected many tales that he clearly intended to publish in his "narodnye russkie skazki" [folk russian tales] which were banned by the tsarist censors on the grounds that they were obscene or anticlerical. clearly, such tales existed and were in circulation throughout russia. the history of these tales that could not be printed in russia until 1991 is most curious. but far from sufficiently studied. first mention of them dates to 1856, when the ethnographer and lexicographer, vladimir oal', wrote afanasiev about them in conjunction with oal's transmittal of several thousand folktales that were to serve as the basis for afanasiev's three volume collection. by 1862 afanasiev had compiled the collection of anticlerical and obscene tales known in manuscript form as "narodnye russkie skazki. ne dua pechati" [folk russian tales. not for print]. afanasiev died in 1871, and there is no evidence that he knew they would ever be printed. most probably it was in 1872 that the "russkie zavetnye skazki" [russian secret tales] appeared. (it could have been as late as 1875). the place of publishing was geneva, that citadel of calvinism! there is nothing in the first edition to identity any editor, publishing house, or date or city, and the facts have had to be teased out of a great variety of sources. suffice it here to say that yurii sokolov long ago established that the tales were from afanasiev's collection. they appear to have been taken to western europe, probably to london first, by v. i. kasatkin, a young friend of afanasiev. there the russian emigre circles, which included n. p. ogarev and a. i. herzen, decided to publish the tales anonymously. why they waited until 1872 or later to publish them is unknown. if the date was connected to afanasiev's death, then there is in any case no mention of him in the book. there are seventy seven tales in the collection, and this order has been observed in all subsequent editions. the tales have been catalogued according to the aarnethompson system, and each is indexed in the "sravnitel'nyi ukazatel'siuzhetov. vostochnslavianskaia skazka" (sus) [comparative index of types. the east slavic tale], the indispensable guide to the east slavic folktale. throughout the nineteenth century these tales were not officially known to exist, although it is clear that copies of the geneva editions, usually the second (1879), circulated and made their way into both public and private collections. nor were afanasiev's obscene tales the page 5 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 only ones collected. the next important collecting was not done until the twentieth century. by nikolai onchukov (18721942), who spent the years 1900-08 working in the far north under the auspices of the russian geographical society (rgo). in 1908 "severnye skazki" [northern tales] appeared, a very large and important collection of tales edited by onchukov, but with the participation of the linguist a. a. shakhmatov, the prose write mikhail prishvin, and others. this volume contained but a portion of the total onchukov collection, and among the tales that were not -could not -be printed were "zavetnye skazki," mistranslated into english as "secret tales." (the word "zavetnyj" was first used by v. i. oal' in its muscovite sense, "forbidden"). these "forbidden" tales were not published, but it is clear from the writings of scholars that they were familiar with them. some of the tales from afanasiev's archival texts, in sanitized form, found their way into the three volume edition of the folktales published in 1984, and as they had been discussed in the literature by v. la. propp and others since the mid-seventies, it is fair to say that afanasiev's secret was out! but it was not until 1997 that afanasiev's manuscript finally was published in its entirely, i.e., four decades after it had become part of the archives of the institute of russian literature (pushkinskii dom) of the russian academy of sciences in st. petersburg. * the manuscript of "narodnye russkie skazki ne dlia pechati," constituting one hundred fifty eight tales (not all of them complete), appeared together with oal's famous collection of obscene proverbs and sayings, many scabrous folk songs, tongue twisters, incantations, etc., in a volume that is part of a series of erotic texts, including the tales of onchukov. the "geneva" edition appeared in 1992 in an edition from moscow and paris with an important article appended by l. v. bessmertnykh. there have been several editions of afanasiev's naughty little tales in english, and each has been reprinted. the first of them was entitled stories from the folk-lore of russia (rouskiya zavetnu~va skazki), and the translator is believed to have been one charles carrington, an englishman who worked in paris. this edition is reproduced by g. legman in russian secret tales: bawdy folktales of old russia, first published in new york in 1966. besides its ribald illustrations, the edition of 1966 is noteworthy for its folkloric annotations presumed to be by the famous folklorist, giuseppe pitre. the latter discuss the tales within their eurasian context, but ignore the slavic roots entirely. the other english edition is by yury perkov, whose edition erotic tales of old russia appeared in berkeley in 1980 and then again in 1988. whereas the carrington translations often resort to circumlocutions and stylistic substitutions to convey the very racy russian, perkov's emphasizes the vulgarity of the original, and, make no mistake, the original is very vulgar. the perkov edition does not include all the tales of the geneva editions. he eliminates those based on word playas being essentially untranslatable. what the student of russian and russian folklore will find most fun, i suspect, is perkov's inclusion of the russian texts in the volume, although not side by side. seef a journal page 6 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 the most recent addition to the english language versions of russian bawdy stories is a reprint of the old carrington translation introduced by g. legman, an authority on erotic literature, if not russia: russian secret tales: bawdy folklore of old russia, baltimore, 1998 (isbn 0-8063-4778-3) this edition features a new introduction by the noted folklorist from the university of california, berkeley, alan dundes. dundes faults folklorists and especially publishers -past and present -for their prudish refusal to countenance "obscene" folkloric texts. he notes that the collection of the brothers grimm contained not a single risque tale, as if the germans had no such humor in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries! danish and norwegian scholars collected obscene tales in the 1830s, but the world could not know that until 1977. the censorship continues in almost every tradition. it seems to have been especially bad in the united states, and has continued to the present time. dundes briefly recounts the dreary story. dundes is not on very sure ground when he turns to the russian folktale, and here it is the russian scholars writing in english who are at fault. he relies too much on the faulty translation of yuri sokolov's "russian folklore" in his discussion of afanasiev, for instance. afanasiev's collection, in its second edition, inspired aarne's ordering as may be seen by the fact that afanasiev's numbers are often identical to aarne's types, as is the general layout of tales: animal tales, wondertales, then tales of everyday life. and of course russian scholars refer to afanasiev's tales by his numbers and continue to this day to publish his tales in the same order as they were published in the second and third editions. so, too, are the tales of the brothers grimm published in the same order from edition to edition. but russian folktales from other collections are always referred to by their at numbers and certainly not with reference to afanasiev's collection. too, dundes can scarcely be faulted for not knowing that if the tales contained in this volume are not identified by at number, it would have been a simple matter for the editor to equip the edition with that information, as it is all included in sus. of the two editions, the folklorist will prefer legman's because of pitre's commentary. the russianist will want to read the tales in the original, and here the russian edition of 1997 is by far the best. the casual reader in english will find perkov's closer in spirit and language to the original. the obvious solution is to have all three. *for reasons that remain unclear to this reader the edition was dedicated to the 850th anniversary of the founding of moscow! page 7 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 mark siobin, ed. retuning culture: musical changes in central and eastern europe. durham and london: duke university press, 1996. 310 pp. margaret h. beissinger. university of wisconsin, madison retuning culture: musical changes in central and eastern europe is an impressive volume that deals with the transitions that have occurred in soviet/russian and east european musical culture during the twentieth century. it deals foremost with how culture adapts to. reflects, and indeed is often emblematic of political change. as such, it is an impo"rtant and novel contribution to studies of slavic and east european oral traditions and expressive culture in the contemporary world. an introduction by mark siobin (a well-known ethnomusicologist who teaches at wesleyan university) that treats larger issues of modernity, identity, and continuity is followed by thirteen essays, ranging from discussions of popular and rock music to folk music revivals, rom (gypsy) musicians, the music of muslim and other ethnic and religious minorities, nationalism, 1989 as a revolution, economics, and aesthetics. the larger east european framework, within which all of these inquiries are placed, here includes soviet russia and ukraine, poland, czechoslovakia, hungary, former and post-war yugoslavia, romania, bulgaria, and macedonia. indeed, as slobin notes, "the essays are case studies of specific musical milieus, which have implications for larger social, cultural, and historical patterns" (12). like in many edited books, the articles are at times somewhat uneven in quality, but overall, they are informative and creative in approach, especially those in which concrete empirical findings are enhanced by theoretical readings. the thread that is woven through all of the studies in this book--in greater or lesser degree--is that politics and music intersect powerfully in times of change. in terms of recurrent themes, a number of key areas emerge in the volume as a whole. for one, the interplay between the intelligentsia and the masses in the formation, development, or manipulation of musical culture during different historical periods in east europe is explored in several of the essays. another recurrent concern--expressed in a number of studies--is the political (and particularly national) implications of various types of music-making as societies struggle for identity and recognition. finally, several authors juxtapose minority musics during the communist and post-communist years, viewing continuity and innovation in political and cultural terms. six essays address questions of how intellectuals (or figures controlling cultural dissemination such as in the media) affect traditional and popular music in east europe. barbara rose lange, in an excellent article titled "lakodalmas rock and the rejection of popular culture in post-socialist hungary," explores how the musical preferences of "ordinary hungarians" are represented in "wedding rock," a genre that she defines as "the rendition on electronic instruments of rural hungarian popular music ... derived from the nineteenthand early-twentieth-century hungarian theater and dances songs known as magyar nota" (78), music seef a journal page 38 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 that was originally played by rom musicians in small string ensembles. she examines. in particular, the tensions generated by wedding rock between ordinary hungarians (who in general are devotees of the genre) and intellectuals (who have by and large rejected it as antithetical to "pure" hungarian folk music). pure hungarian folk music was vigorously promoted during the inter-war period by bela bartok and zoltan kodaly, who favored the collection and study of such music over magyar nota, a genre they considered "a shallow, sentimental, and therefore false expression of hungarianness" (p. 86). as lange notes, /akoda/mas rock was an outcome of the transitions from socialism to capitalism. but as it emerged, it called upon earlier cultural debatesn"the conflicting visions of hungarianness from the pre-socialist period" which "contradicted the high aesthetic constructions of the intellectuals" (90). lakodalmas rock was rooted in the taste of ordinary people, tastes that the "nationalist intelligentsia could not reform" (90). in noting the unbridgeable gap between the masses and intellectuals on this issue, lange pointedly reveals that those of the "elite who had tried to manipulate these tastes were shocked that the other upon whom they depended to mirror the nation had violated their cherished ideal of pure hungarianness" (90). in her "southern wind of change: style and the politics of identity in prewar yugoslavia," ljerka vidire rasmussen also expertly examines relationships between elite and mass musical culture. she discusses the rise of "oriental music" in yugoslavia of the 1980s, especially as performed by a group of musicians from serbia and bosnia called "ju_ni vetar" (southern wind), who "set a stylistic model. .. within the largest folk-based music market in the former yugoslavia--'newly composed folk music'" (99). during the last years of federal yugoslavia, as the internal structure began to collapse, the "oriental" of this music became equated with otherness and thus became a threat to various communities. in a stark example of what rasmussen calls "oppositional dynamics" (99), the oriental was marginalized and excluded by the media, yet simultaneously had tremendous mass appeal. ultimately, as she notes, "viewed against the background of the general economic decline and ambiguity of political direction [in the 1980s], the oriental controversy was no more than the surface manifestation of what was euphemistically and hopefully called 'the political crisis'" (99). and indeed the controversies generated by this oriental music ultimately represented a metaphor for "yugoslavia" itself. for, as rasmussen succinctly concludes, this metaphor appears as "a casualty of its own strategy: positioning itself politically and culturally between the west and an imagined east, yet failing to reconcile the resulting overlap internally" (116). judit frigyesi ("the aesthetic of the hungarian revival movement") likewise turns to relationships between intellectuals and folk music, in particular in connection with the development of the dance-house movement of the 1970s, one of a series of folklore revivals that have occurred in twentieth-century hungary. she explores how this revival was implemented by the urban intelligentsia and how "the musical tradition that previously belonged exclusively to the peasantry" became "also the music of the educated middle class" (54). frigyesi page 39 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 concludes, in effect, that each revival movement is "the most recent stage in the intellectuals' approach toward folklore," representing a general trend in hungary "that aims at modernizing and continuing peasant music" (73). moreover, "dmitri pokrovsky and the russian folk music revival movement" by theodore levin is a portrayal of a well-known russian folk music revivalist who was active from the 1970s to the mid-1990s. most interesting are levin's perspectives on pokrovksy as he functioned within various factions of russian society which exploited folk music for mostly nationalistic purposes. "kundera's musical joke and 'folk' music in czechoslovakia, 1948--?" by michael beckerman is a discussion of zert (the joke), a novel published in 1967 by milan kundera. beckerman traces how the characters in this novel reflect the shifting attitudes toward folk music in czechoslovakia from 1948 through the i960s. he then offers a brief description of his own field experiences from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s in order to point out the ambiguities of the socialist and post-socialist periods and the music that they generated, observations that serve to reinforce similar themes in the joke. anna czekanowska's "continuity and change in eastern and central european traditional music" also addresses the role of tradition in society-here, polish--as it has undergone transitions during both socialism and post-socialism. in discussing change and continuity in polish folklore, czekanowska places much emphasis on the "mythologizing of the past," which she observes most dramatically in the polish diaspora where the "preservation of tradition," is "often influenced by myths that refer to an idealized past, especially when this past was lost involuntarily" (95). a second large thematic grouping loosely places three essays together; they refer to ethnic and national identities and aspirations as mirrored in music. in her fine "ilahiya as a symbol of bosnian muslim national identity," mirjana lausevic explores the ilahiya--a type of muslim religious hymn, a genre in narrative form that conveys "a strong religious, ethical, and educational message for the believer" (i 24)--as a bosnian muslim political symbol. in particular she examines how this genre moved from the "subculture" in terms of its function among bosnian muslims to a position of prominence as a cultural and political symbol, especially between 1988 and 1990, as the yugoslav "superculture" progressively deteriorated. catherine wanner ("nationalism on stage: music and change in soviet ukraine") also considers the role of music as a powerful form of political expression. she discusses the chervona ruta music festival, a ukrainian nationalist song festival, first held in 1989 and then again two years later. in 1989, it was a "celebration of ukrainian culture ... aimed to promote the ukrainian national revival that was already underway" (137). by 1991, however, the festival-an event that took place only eight days before the failed coup--became an arena for the channeling of anti-soviet sentiment into aspirations of empowerment by championing ukrainian independence. as wanner points out, the songs and audience's response to them "provided a forum in which to reject the soviet definition of what it means to be ukrainian" (142). she skillfully examines how political power and evolving national identity are expressed seef a journal page 40 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 through music, song, and other potent cultural and historical symbols. the essay by steluta popa ("the romanian revolution of december 1989 and its reflection in musical folklore") also offers a glimpse of politics as reflected in music. popa provides brief biographical sketches of seven informants as well as the transcribed lyrics (then newly "post-communist") to a number of songs that these informants sang immediately after the "revolution" in december 1989, when the long-time dictator, nicolae ceau*escu, and his wife elena were summarily executed. popa's presentation illustrates how innovative lyrics were adapted to established folk forms in a moment of sensational political change, admittedly an interesting process of re-composition; she offers virtually no interpretation, however. furthermore, there is no follow-up as to what became of those "revolutionary" lyrics as the 1990s progressed. in actuality, there is much more to be said about politics and music in romania. romania has undergone and continues to undergo dramatic transformations from communism to post-communism; furthermore, romanian society also includes a significant ethnic minority (roma) that was (before 1990) and still is responsible for the performance of much traditional and popular music, a topic most romanian scholars are loath to write about. finally, four essays bring together questions of minority representations through music in communist and post-communist russia and east europe. margarita mazo's essay ("change as confirmation of continuity as experienced by russian molokans") explores the maintenance of culture and identity among the molokans, a small russian christian community. mazo examines in particular how the molokans seek continuity in both russia and the diaspora through a strong tradition of singing. three outstanding essays treat the important contributions and implications of rom musicmaking in the balkans. in "music and marginality: roma (gypsies) of bulgaria and macedonia," carol silverman argues persuasively that "music is constitutive of politics" as she depicts balkan roma (and especially rom musicians) as "powerless politically and powerful musically" (231). she presents a brief history of roma and then discusses their music, mobilization, and resistance in bulgaria, followed by a treatment of rom music and identity in macedonia. silverman aptly notes, with regard to balkan rom music, that "both the socialist and post-socialist periods reveal how various hegemonies, be they state policy or global capitalism, have penetrated musical realms" and that roma "have at times resisted these ideologies and at times used them for their own creativity and survival" (249). donna buchanan's incisive analysis, "wedding musicians, political transition, and national consciousness in bulgaria," treats svatbarska muzika (wedding music)--a genre in contemporary bulgaria performed mainly by roma and distinguished by instruments (many of them electric), repertoire (much of it narodna or folk music), and style (including high volumes, improvisation, virtuosity, wide vibrato, and ornamentation). she suggests that when viewed within the framework of the socialist-to-post-socialist political transition, wedding music "exemplifies specific aspects of bulgarian sociopolitical and sociohistorical discourse"; namely, it page 41 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 represents "a contemporary metamorphosis of cultural tropes pertaining to the historicized patterning of ethnic interaction within bulgaria" (20 i). buchanan turns to an in-depth discussion of the "star" of wedding music--the turkish-rom clarinetist ivo papazov--and his wedding orchestra "trakiya" in order to explore the interaction that she posits between music, social and ethnic identity, and political ideology. she convincingly argues that wedding music was a harbinger of the transition of bulgarian society as it moved from socialism to post-socialism and that wedding musicians "continue to serve as agents or vehicles of the transition by invoking myriad sociocultural affiliations through the varied stylistic components of their music" (228). yet another essay on contemporary balkan music and politics is timothy rice's "dialectics of economics and aesthetics in bulgarian music." rice argues that bulgarians, regardless of their political and ethnic diversities, all "create and interpret music within symbolic webs of meanings, political struggles for power and influence, and evolving economic structures" (176). in examining paradigms of twentieth-century economics and traditional music, rice provides a comparative appraisal of narodna and svatbarska muzika as exploited during the 1980s by musicians, audiences, scholars, and the state. he ultimately asserts that "music can be understood as economic practice, as social behavior, and as a symbolic system with the powerful ability to make aesthetic sense while hiding meaning," and goes on to propose that "bulgarian musicians and their audiences at the end of the communist period exploited music strategically to these ends in parallel with other economic practices, social behaviors, and symbolic systems" (198). rice's essay makes clear the importance of maintaining a balanced perspective in the interpretation of music and how it relates to its various referents: aesthetic, social, and economic. retuning culture is, without a doubt, a highly successful and illuminating volume. it represents innovative and provocative thinking on the interface between music and political culture. one is reminded over and over in the essays of this book--and indeed sometimes quite eloquently--that politics and economics, not to mention social, ethnic, religious, and other cultural phenomena, all have profoundly informed and continue to inform the meaning of change as a dynamic force in east european music-making during the twentieth century. seef a journal page 42 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 microsoft word folk04se.doc 47 obituaries joseph l. conrad, 1933-2003 joseph l. conrad, professor of slavic languages at the university of kansas, lawrence, was born on june 26, 1933 in kansas city, missouri, and passed away in lawrence on december 21, 2003, surrounded by his family. he is survived by his wife, galina, one son and two daughters. he worked almost to the very end. in august 2003 he gave a paper at the congress of slavists in ljubljana, but health problems arose during the trip, and a diagnosis of fourth-stage pancreatic cancer was made after his return home. joseph did his undergraduate work at the university of kansas, and upon graduation received a fulbright award for study at the johann wolfgang goethe-universitaet in frankfurt during the academic year 1955-56. after the year in germany he entered graduate school at the university of texas, where he studied slavic and indo-european linguistics with winfred lehmann, among others. his dissertation was on nikolai marr, whose linguistic theories and the battle to make them dogma had a strong negative impact on the work, careers and even lives of many soviet scholars. he received the ph.d. in 1961. joseph was an assistant instructor at the university of texas from 1956-59, and then an instructor and assistant professor at florida state university from 1959-62. the university of texas recognized his abilities and invited him back as an assistant professor in 1962. he remained at austin until 1966, when kansas, his alma mater, called him as associate professor and chair to build a strong department of slavic languages and literatures. his success at this task was recognized in many ways, including promotion to the rank of professor in 1971. during the 1960s his research interests turned from linguistics to literature. his first article, an outgrowth of his dissertation, is on marr�s theories, but the remainder of his more than forty articles are on literature or folklore (except for three on language teaching and programs). chekhov was the subject of nineteen of his articles, starting with his third article and continuing through his paper at the august 2003 ljubljana congress. like most scholars of his generation, joseph was originally primarily a russianist, but a trip to yugoslavia in the summer of 1970, followed by three summers (1971, 1972, 1975) as resident director of a cooperative summer serbo-croatian language program in zagreb kindled a lasting passion for yugoslavia and folklore. his first article on a folklore topic appeared in 1980, and it was followed by fourteen more in the ensuing twenty years, with incantations and charms the most frequent topic. folklore was the subject of his most popular course at kansas, and the classes filled up to the last seat. his house became an extension of the classroom, with many folkloric objects and displays. several of joseph�s students now occupy senior positions at american universities, and the slavic program at kansas remains one of the most important. he received numerous grants and awards, including six irex awards and fulbright awards to croatia and slovenia. he served ten years as chair of the department at kansas and ran eight summer programs in the usa, russia, and yugoslavia. he was frequently invited as an folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 48 outside evaluator of programs or applications for grants (twenty-five times) and candidates for promotion and/or tenure (nineteen times). he was also a good friend and good company to spend time with. we shall miss him greatly. charles e. gribble the ohio state university, columbus folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 folkloricav_1 1.pdf folkloricav_1 2.pdf folkloricav_1 3.pdf folkloricav_1 4.pdf folkloricav_1 5.pdf folkloricav_1 6.pdf folkloricav_1 7.pdf folkloricav_1 8.pdf folkloricav_1 9.pdf microsoft word seefa2001.doc 10 eschatological expectations in a changing world: narratives about the end of the world in present day russian folk culture aleksandr panchenko. institute of russian literature, st. petersburg it is not necessary to prove that eschatological teachings and beliefs play an important role in all christian confessions. it is just as obvious that the form these beliefs take depends on the cultural and historical context. on the one hand, ideas about the end of the world and about the fate of humanity serve as an object of professional interpretations of the bible, ecclesiastical works, and apocryphal literature. on the other hand, eschatological ideas and beliefs actively function in an unspecialized folklore context, at times exerting significant influence on everyday communication. i will discuss this latter aspect of eschatology and will use it to arrive at a deeper understanding of the social and cultural functions of the “last days” in the orthodox tradition. the material for this study consists of ethnological data referring mainly to russian peasant culture from the end of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. available data permits speaking about a special type of eschatological narrative that was characteristic for the russian peasantry of this time. such texts cannot be understood outside the features of their performance. therefore, analysis of adequately recorded and well documented stories, in particular present day field materials, receive special significance.(1) some preliminary remarks are necessary. the material can be grouped into two generalized, traditional types of “eschatological” behavior. the first is represented by eschatological expectations which do not exert a fundament influence on the way of life or the behavior models of their bearers. peasant, aristocrat, orthodox church member, and old believer can anticipate that the world will end some day and still behave as normal members of society, carrying out their customary social and economic duties. the other type can be called eschatological movements whose participants consider the end of the world has already begun or is immanent. they are convinced that it is necessary to abandon their traditional way of life and to change their behavior radically. the consequences of these movements, which are usually headed by a charismatic leader (or leaders), can be quite diverse, ranging from mass suicides to armed rebellions. of course the two types of eschatological behavior are not isolated from each other and they often interact. nonetheless, each of them has its own specific traits. the texts under consideration belong to the first type of behavior. “folk hearsay” the end of the world, the antichrist, and judgment day have often been the subject of russian folklore and ethnographic literature.(2) however, only one work has been devoted specifically to analysis of this material(3), a recent article by a. f. belousov(4). it is based on folklore recordings made in the 1970s among russian old believer bespopovtsy [those without a priest] in the south baltic region. the analyzed texts, however, are seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 11 characteristic not only for the old believer tradition (at least in the twentieth century). investigating the eschatological statements made by the south baltic bespopovtcy, belousov departs from two methodological principles. first, he tries to discover a correlation between present day folk expressions about the “last days” and “ancient eschatological imagery.” by the latter the author means symbols found in written apocalyptic texts (both canonic and apocryphal). however, the author points out that “a proper understanding” of this imagery “is often absent among the informants”(5). second, he simultaneously undertakes a synchronic analysis of the eschatological views of the informants and a search for bookish prototypes. as a final result, his analysis can be reduced to determination of basic concepts and oppositions which can be correlated with ideas about the end of the world. although the methods used by belousov suffice to analyze folk eschatology, they can not be considered to be comprehensive. first of all, they do not allow firm statements to be made about the functions of the eschatological texts being interpreted(6) as well as about their morphology and typology. in addition, they provide predominantly structural (i.e. universal) explanations of those images and motifs which have no direct prototypes in written works. finally, even in regard to borrowings from written sources, apparent or not, it remains unclear precisely why they were incorporated into folklore texts. the question about the correlation of oral and written forms in russian folklore in general and folk religious traditions in particular requires special reservations. since the work of a. n. veselovskii and his followers on the subject of christian legend and religious verse, this problem has been considered in connection with the dynamics of individual motifs and plots that have passed from written texts to folklore, or, vice versa, from an oral to a written literature. however, a rather large number of difficulties exists. first, historical-genetic analysis allows establishing the fact of borrowing and, in some cases, determining the historical conditions of the latter. the social and cultural reasons for these processes, as a rule, can not be explained from such a perspective. besides this, it is not always clear, whether we are dealing with a borrowing from a specific written work or simply with a realization of a traditional culture topic. this question has special importance when oral and written eschatological legends are compared insofar as both abound in “common places” which mark violations of the boundaries of social and anti-social, and which involve typical descriptions of natural anomalies. besides all this, it often turns out to be unclear whether “the vector” of primary borrowing was directed from written work to oral literature, or vice versa. students of christian eschatological literature have frequently emphasized the “purely folk character” of individual episodes in apocrypha and legends about “the last days”(7). finally, there exits another, to some extent paradoxical, type of interaction between oral and written traditions. this presumes that what is being deduced from a written text (or ascribed to it) has no correlation to its real contents. on the one hand, such reading is supported by the norms of “peasant hermeneutics”; on the other, it is conditioned by religious and mythological ideas about the role of written seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 12 literature in general and books in particular. in spite of fact that bookish citations are sometimes found in eschatological narratives by russian peasants, their relative weight is low in comparison with pseudobookish citations.(8) thus, the task of explaining the contents and specific functions of a folk eschatological story can not be achieved exclusively by historical and literary methods. in my opinion, the most important question here concerns the correlation between the contents of such texts and the mechanism of their generation, i.e. traditional means of narration. in this regard, we will examine the narrative structure of a present day eschatological story. it seems that investigators who always try to find written sources for various motifs in folk eschatological narratives are often led astray precisely by the paradox of pseudo-bookish attribution. according to present day field observations, most informants emphasize the bookish origins of the eschatological information known to them. (it is curious that such attribution of eschatological predictions is equally characteristic for orthodox church members and for old believers, although the role of reading differs in each group.) a story about the end of the world can be communicated not only after an interviewer’s questions, but also during a conversation about prayers known in the family of the informant, or about books being kept in the village. the following are several examples. you see, many centuries have passed, and it is just so in writings, it is in writings. well, i . . . what is there to say, am semi-literate, but my grandfather was literate, he had a bible. have you heard about that book? and he read it. it goes up to the second millennium, it has been described for two millenniums. well, everything has been written about this. all that has been written is just true.(9) they say then there is the bible, there was such a book. < . . . > whether it is a church book, i don’t know. some clever man has written it, this bible. and it had been written so, that . . . it . . . so it has just come to pass, it is just so.(10) i have only heard that it . . . that old woman . . . it has prayers . . . little books . . . here they read these . . . .how are they called . . . that’s what they read . . .(11) . . . yes the end of the world. my mama said my grandmother was with them . . . she was old. she no long could see – well, she would talk, would call us. we were little, there were three children. she would call us, would speak, and would stroke us on our heads. “you’re really too small,” she would say, “i would tell you many things, would teach you.” then she would say that she had read the bible, what would happen, then all this began, the whole country, the whole 13 land was entangled with wires. you see earlier they didn’t understand that there would be wires, that’s what all these were.(12 ) these are typical openings for apocalyptic stories. here the “bible” is presented as a generalized image of a sacred cosmological book which can be compared with the golubinaya kniga [book of the dove] and with “the jerusalem manuscript” of russian religious verses and legends. the information contained in it requires special decoding, something which brings to life the figure of the “literate villager” (or “old women”), telling his neighbors about what he has “read.” it is indicative that the bible is equated with books and “prayers” in general, and – from a wider perspective – with manuscript collections of “charms,” i.e., “sorcerer’s” writings. thus, a written text having a magical character is considered to be a source of eschatological information.(13) another important feature in the performance of present day eschatological narratives is the discussion of signs about the end of the world as coming true or having come true. here certain rhetorical turns with fixed framing formulas such as “it is just so” or “it has just come true” are used: that the wide world, they say, would be covered with webs. here it is covered with wires. here it is. son, they say, will beat his father and . . . or the father will beat his son. well that’s the way it is: brother kills brother.(14) and everyone always said, those who read, that there would be such a time, that people would devour each other, and people would live several kilometers from each other, and there would be iron horses – daughters, just as it is! now here comes a tractor, it mows, it rakes, it makes bales – people are no longer needed. isn’t it true? that’s how it has come about now.(15) there was a book “paradise lost and returned.” how people were born and that everything on earth as it is now is written there. that a woman will wear man’s clothes, will get drunk to the point of madness, that satan will sit on throne and will look around and point out what is done from all countries. that’s the way it is now.(16) it appears that the generation of such texts is connected with the idea of prophecies having come true. in other words, the source of eschatological hearsay is usually not found in motifs from the christian apocrypha, which are being compared with actual events, but derive from the events themselves, which are constructed as signs of the end of the world. unfortunately narrative analysis can be applied only to texts collected according to methods of field recording that have become widespread only in the twentieth seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 14 century. however, it is entirely possible that the mechanisms for generating eschatological stories were similar, if not the same, among peasants during the last part of the nineteenth century. now let us turn to the contents of the texts under consideration. proceeding from the reasons mentioned above, i shall discuss corresponding images in accordance with their interpretative sense instead of their possible apocryphal sources. several groups of motifs can be distinguished. the first is connected with an interpretation of technological innovations. most stories recorded in the twentieth century mention an earth covered with “webs” (corresponding to electric wires or telegraph lines – if the text was recorded in the beginning of the century) and flights of “iron birds.” when speaking about the latter, informants usually indicate planes, but the notion about iron beings can be spread to other aspects of technology. here lived this vovochka and he had a bible. and he said that . . . he would sit on a bicycle . . . on a bicycle . . . he would sit . . . a guy, he would take it between his legs and would ride оff. and people said to him: drop it, how could he ride! then there were no bicycles, nobody knew about such bicycles. a bird, he said, will fly . . . made of iron. well, they said, what have you thought up! . . and all this is there in the bible, he had a bible and he spoke, he told about this.(17) the mechanism of interpretation is obvious: the image of iron birds is used to add eschatological meaning to technology, and the image of the earth covered with webs is employed to conceptualize electricity and, possibly, means of mass communication. in passing, it can be remarked that the same perception of telegraph wires was noted in the kostroma provence in the 1910s.(18) it is obvious that esenin’s lines about “the stone hands of a highway” “squeezing the countryside’s neck” both typologically and chronologically belongs to the same kind of imagery.(19) the image of iron birds has special interest in this context. i have not met any direct correspondence to it either in eschatological apocrypha or in canonical texts. with some allowance, the notion of iron birds could be correlated with the image of apocalyptic locusts (“and they had breast-plates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots . . .” (revelations 9, 9) or with the “dog’s flies” from the apocryphal “word of the holy prophet isaiah, the son of amos” (“they will eat your flesh and drink your children’s blood and tear out your infants’ eyes”)(20). it would be natural to assume that iron birds have appeared in the present day eschatological narrative because of the spread of airplanes. moreover, balloons and zeppelins at the end of the nineteenth and in the beginning of the twentieth century had been perceived by russian peasants as a sign of “the last days.”(21) however, the notion that birds with iron beaks “will torment people before the end of the world” was recorded in orel provence in the 1860s even before the beginning of air flight.(22) in some prose variants of “the jerusalem manuscript”(23) relating to the same time, birds with “iron noses” are also mentioned among the future punishments for mankind’s sins: “if you are unrepentant i shall open my mouth and inflict you with thunder, lightning, hail and famine, great 15 darkness, and black birds with iron noses that will peck you.”(24) this image apparently has more archaic folklore roots. without mentioning all possible analogies,(25) we can limit ourselves to the closest examples, i. e. the imagery of the russian magic tale. “black ravens, iron noses” carry the servant to the mountain in the variant of the story “golden mountain” (at 936) which a. n. afanasev published.(26) in his variant of the tale “neznaiko” (at 532) the stepmother goes to kill the magic horse and says: “let him croak! thirty three ravens with iron noses will come flying here, they will peck out the flesh and will take the bones to the edge of the world!”(27) finally, in the tale about marvelous gifts (at 563) recorded on the tersk shore of the white sea, “a bird with an iron nose and wooden tail” figures as a giver: “the old man took out his axe and went to the forest, he struck a tree, he struck another, then a bird with an iron nose and wooden tail jumped out.”(28) evidently, “birds with iron beaks” appear in the magic tale as representatives of the other world, they are often hostile to people, and are unequivocally connected with the symbolism of physical death. thus the eschatological image of iron birds / birds with iron beaks appears to be heterogeneous since it may be influenced by different narrative traditions. however, its extraordinary dissemination in present day peasant narratives about the end of the world can be explained only by the interpretative functions of the latter. another group of motifs describes social disorders in the rural world: enmity between blood relatives, drunkenness, or robbery. on the one hand, traditional eschatological topics are reproduced here: the vast majority of legends about the end of the world predict the destruction of the habitual norms for public order as preceding “the last days.” on the other hand, here we are also dealing with a particular social and age effect involving the conceptualization of the dynamic aspects of rural life. all coming changes are inevitably described by representatives of older generations as ethic deviation. these motifs are supported by a rather extensive group of formulas that contrast “old times” and the present day in special idealistic stories about “the past” and formulaic lamentations about “the present”: “the devil no longer possesses us, but people possess the devil,” “they don’t believe in god now, they believe in devil.” both can be reproduced outside an eschatological context, but their closeness to hearsay about the end of the world is undoubted. however, this problem deserves special analysis.(29) the third group has a more universal character. it concerns notions about a small number of people on the earth and their physical weakness: “two people will remain for each one hundred kilometers, and they will look for each other,” “people will look for each other for each one thousand kilometers,” or “two people will carry a venik (a switch of birch twigs) to the bathhouse.” sometimes the direct influence of eschatological writings can be traced. thus the prophecy about people who can find room on a seven-meter tree evidently has its origin in the story about widows known according to the interpolated wording of the “revelation of methodius of pathar” and “the life of andrew the urodivy” [holy fool].(30) many features in these notions indicate their close connection with the aspects of peasant cosmology known in local legends. in a certain sense they are a symmetric parallel to north-russian legends about settling the territory seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 16 and about the physical strength of ancient people. thus, according to one of the typical motifs in legends about founding villages,(31) one of the settlers learns about existence of another settler by a venik or pomelo (whisk) floating down the river (more rarely by chips, rubbish, or feathers). here our grandfather said – “i heard it myself” – that supposedly somewhere higher up there was a house, alone. and here, a little farther, another. and a whisk floated to this house. that is what this event began with. a whisk came floating. < . . . > so this owner went by this whisk to look for the supposed house. this means, there were inhabitants somewhere since a whisk came floating by (it used to be, everybody had a whisk, and when it would become bad they would throw it out. so they threw this whisk in the river). so he went and found, as people said, another house. a second owner lived there. so that’s how things started there . . . < . . . > the name of the first resident either was khristov or some kind of . . . . the first house was in ilomancha. there was one here too, only it’s unknown, in what place, somewhere here, in ladva. but i don’t know, in what place.(32) thus the people of “the last days” are described in a present day eschatological story with the same cosmological motifs as the “first people,” although, so to say, “with a different sign.” in connection with the same group of notions, it is necessary to mention the motif of “the measured earth”(33) which is often used as a token of the end of the world. it implies that “during the last days” “the whole earth will be measured in vershki or piadi.”(34) a. f. belousov assumes that this notion “is a distinctive form for assimilating the idea about the predestination of ‘the end of the world,’ which will to come as a result of calculating the measure (number) lying at the basis of the world.”(35) however, it appears that the determining role is not played by the speculative idea of the universe being calculated, but by a traditional ritual practice of measuring the human body.(36) the latter could be oriented both toward constructing a “ritual double” of a person and by acquiring magic power over his body. apparently the motif of measuring the earth (or land) in the stories being examined derives precisely from this circle of ideas and presumes “alienation” of the earth, and its submission to external and hostile forces. besides this, a definite role could be played by anthropomorphic worshipping of the earth which has been characteristic for the russian peasant tradition. it is likely that the direct stimulus for emergence of this motif in eschatological folk hearsay was played by p. a. stolypin’s agrarian reform which destroyed traditional land community and initiated division into private plots of land. however, in present day eschatological stories the measuring of earth (land) is associated with collective farm nationalization, which was the complete opposite to stolypin’s reform. 17 he said that the whole land would be measured in vershki: there would not be individual, but common ownership of the land.(37) it has all come true. boundaries – what boundaries? those boundaries! there were individual plots before, and this boundary . . . here is what they’re doing, they will make . . . boundaries, raise, and harvest. well, that’s what they thought up! but it has just come about: they made collective farms, they began making boundaries, tying knots: you harvested just so much, i harvested just so much.(38) a definite connection with the traditional semantics of measuring can be observed in the eschatological interpretation of the general census in 1897. such an attitude toward the census was reported among the peasants of various regions in european russia. however, the determining role was apparently played by the old believers’ idea about “antichrist’s seal”(39): . . . the schismatics saw the meaning of the census as a precursor of the antichrist even in the very census lists. two kinds of them, a and b, were set aside, in their opinion: one was for the followers of the antichrist and the other was for the followers of god. those who conducted the census told how they had been intensely asked and implored to be included in the b list and not in the a list. here and there the schismatics, as soon as they heard about the general census, began to organize meetings at which they unanimously decided that this census was a sign of the presence and manifest enthronement of the antichrist in the world and a snare for his acceptance. for this reason it was necessary to avoid the census by all possible means.(40) it should be added that the antichrist, as a rule, does not figure in the eschatological narratives recorded during the second half of the twentieth century, differing from those in the last part of the nineteenth century. it would be possible to assume that the difference resulted from the peasants’ lowered level of religious instruction in the soviet period, but the same picture has been observed among old believers among whom the level of religious erudition has been more stable.(41) belousov explains this situation by the old believers’ theory of “the spiritual antichrist,” but it seems to me that this could scarcely have exerted any significant influence on the folklore tradition. it is more likely that the reasons are also enrooted in the social and historical dynamics of russian folk culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. messianic legend and hearsay about the antichrist presume a correlation of eschatological ideas with one or another historical (or pseudo-historical) figure being the central personage of a legendary subject. the ambivalence of this kind of ideas is demonstrated by folk ideas about napoleon whom they could perceived both as the antichrist and as christ. a special sect of napoleon worshippers even existed in seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 18 moscow in 1840-s. the events of the early decades of the twentieth century apparently changed the social and state priorities of the peasantry: impersonal hostile forces replaced a personified antichrist.(42) finally, let us turn to the very end of the world. it is curious that present day eschatological narratives frequently do not describe it (much less succeeding events). the description is limited by a list of possible signs (“there will come such a time that people will seek each other for a thousand kilometers – and to find them . . . this will be the end of the world”). if the description is nevertheless present, judgement day is often replaced by a simple renewal of the world, which, generally speaking, is more characteristic for the eschatological myths of primitive peoples.(43) thus, for instance, one married couple living in the northern part of the novgorod region offered the following interpretation of the desolation and renewal to come: wife: that’s how adam and eve will remain, then it will be so, maybe, just so again, then it can and will be so. husband: then, maybe, they will slowly start again. researcher: that is, only two people should remain? wife: yes. husband: they must find room on a tree of seven sazhen. wife: there will remain as many people, as can find room on a tree of seven sazhen.(44) the present article does not exhaust all the thematic and compositional aspects of the folk eschatological narrative in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. however, the presented materials are sufficient to speak about the tendencies that have been traced here. the folk explanations of the “last days” use both motifs of traditional cosmology and themes of christian eschatological writings. however, at the same time the peasants’ eschatological narrative creates a special kind of imagery which fulfills an interpretive function. on the one hand, the signs of the end of the world are described as having happened; on the other hand, a certain sacred cosmological text is construed as their source. it seems that the basic meaning of folk stories about the end of the world consists of an adaptive interpretation of the dynamics in social life, i. e., changing forms of day-to-day life or innovations of a technological character. thus an eschatological story turns out to be one of the main means of macro-social conception existing in russian rural culture at the end of the nineteenth and in the twentieth century. in other words, when a present day peasant faces a problem of understanding social reality, which is beyond the bounds of the habitual forms of everyday life, he resorts to the interpretative mechanism of an eschatological narrative. the same role was apparently played by messianic legends “about deliverers” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, peasant hearsay about “freedom” and “distant lands.”(45) how such a mechanism of interpretation works can be demonstrated in examples of two eschatological stories which 19 juxtapose the image of apocalyptic horsemen (revelation, 6, 1-8) and episodes of most recent world history: and this was according to the bible that two cocks would fight, you see. well, the red will win. well, we defeated germany.(46) informant: that’s what will be . . . and at first, they say, they said, that it was written in . . . : the red horse will trample the white one, and then the white one will trample the red one. that’s to say it turned out. a lot of years have passed. we won the great patriotic <war> . . . all the same the red horse overcame. but the white horse won without a war. it destroyed everything. researcher: and what is the white horse? informant: well, democrats. america. everyone. they smashed the soviet union . . . you see, the soviet union was strong, but they smashed it in a moment. everything went to pieces. all the communists have changed into these bureaucrats.(47) why does a social and historical conceptualization of present day russian peasants acquire precisely an eschatological coloring? the reasons for this deserve special investigation. it is possible, of course, to speak about the reaction of peasant conservatism (“tradition”) to the dynamics of urban culture. it also is possible to propose that social self-description of russian peasants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries inevitably presumed a certain historical doom. finally, it is possible, following m. eliade, to discuss the universal functions of eschatological myths. but it is obvious that this “naive sociology” assumed and continues to assume a deeper sphere of meanings than it is accepted to think. in russian historiography the sole attempt to analyze consistently the social determinants and functions of peasant legend belongs to k. v. chistov. however, he, for entirely understandable reasons, limited himself to rather vague judgements: utopian legends and movements “are engendered by despair and hope,” “they result from realization about the impossibility of living in contemporary conditions and from a hope for a social miracle”(48), and that they represent “an individual syncretic variant of folk journalism,” which expresses a “negative” social ideal characteristic for the peasantry during the crisis of feudalism.(49) meanwhile, it is obvious, that the interaction of folklore texts and the practices of everyday life with social structures has a sufficiently complex and variable character.(50) it seems, that the above mentioned eschatological expectations of the russian peasantry, having functioned during the twentieth century in the form of narratives about “the last days,” are, to an essential degree, connected with processes of acculturation, i.e., in a technological sense the influence of a more highly developed culture on a less developed culture. such processes, which are accompanied by a change in social structure and reorganization of axiological systems, inevitably cause a specific social tension. it is seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 20 often expressed by different messianic movements. a classical example of such movements concerns melanesian “cargo-cults,” which became widespread in the first half of the twentieth century. their basic content was reduced to an expectation of large ships which were loaded with numerous goods and on which their ancestors were to arrive. after the appearance of the ships the golden age was to begin: all the colored were to become white, abundance was to reign, and work would not be necessary. waiting for the ships and ancestors was accompanied by deliberate neglect of traditional ritual and everyday norms, and also by an imitation of the whites’ behavioral practices. both legends and rituals connected with the cargo-cults represent a whimsical mixture of traditional mythological and ritual models and motifs of christian dogma.(51) although the cited eschatological narratives differ considerably from messianic legends of the melanesian natives,(52) they coincide in one point: their main function consists in the adaptation of cardinal changes in social structure under the influence of an alien civilization having a technological character. in both a simple translation of meanings from the language of one culture to the language of another is not taking place, but instead principally new semantic constructions are being formed. at the same time, the utopian optimism of the melanesians has led to a short duration of their messianic movements, while the pessimistic mood of russian peasants has ensured a rather stable reproduction of eschatological narratives through several generations. notes 1. besides published data, field recordings from 1997 – 1999 will be used – they are preserved in the archives of the ethnology department of the european university in st. petersburg (henceforth euspb) and of the folklore cabinet of the philological faculty in st. petersburg university (henceforth fk spbgu). 2. a. n. trunov, “poniatiia krestian orlovskoi gubernii o prirode fizicheskoi i dukhovnoi” [the ideas of the peasants of orel provence about physical and spiritual nature], zapiski imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskago obshchestva po otdeleniiu etnografii, t. ii, 1869, p. 41-42; m. a. ivanitskii, “materialy po etnografii vologodskoi gubernii” [materials on the ethnography of vologda provence], izvestiia obshchestva liubitelei estestvoznaniia, antropologii i etnografii, t. 69: “trudy etnograficheskogo otdela” t. 11, vyp. 1 (sbornik svedenii dlia izucheniia byta krestianskogo naseleniia rossii, vyp.ii, pod red. n. kharuzina), moscow, 1890, p. 118; p. l. iudin, “k istorii russkogo raskola” [toward the history of the russian schism], russkaia starina, 1894, no. 1, p. 182-86; m. dikarev, “tolki naroda” (antikhrist – myshiny tsar – gadiuki) [hearsay of the people (antichrist – mouse tsar – vipers], etnograficheskoe obozrenie, kn. xxiv, 1895, no.1, p. 125; m. dikarev, “tolki naroda v 1895 g.” [hearsay of the people in 1895], etnograficheskoe obozrenie, kn. xxviii, 1896, no.1, p. 144-46; m. dikarev, “tolki naroda v 1899 21 godu” [hearsay of the people in 1899], etnograficheskoe obozrenie, kn. xliv, 1900, no.1; d. n. ushakov, “materialy po narodnym verovaniiam velikorussov” [materials on the folk beliefs of the great-russians], etnograficheskoe obozrenie, kn.xxix–xxx, 1896, no.2-3, p. 196; v. g. suvorov, “religiozno-narodnye poveria i skazania (zapisany v kaliazinskom uezde tverskoi gubernii)” [religious folk beliefs and legends (recorded in the kaliazin district of tver provence],” zhivaia starina, 1899, vyp. iii, p. 394; a. i. ivanov, “verovaniia krestian orlovskoi gubernii” [beliefs of the peasants of orel provence], etnograficheskoe obozrenie, kn.xlvii, 1900, no.4, p. 70; v. smirnov, “otnoshenie derevni k voine” [the attitude of the village toward the war], kostromskaia derevnia v pervoe vremia voiny (trudy kostromskogo nauchnogo obshchestva po izucheniiu mestnogo kraia, vyp. v), kostroma, 1916, p. 123-24; iv. kostolovskii, “narodnye poveria zhitelei iaroslavskogo kraia” [folk beliefs of the residents of the iaroslavl’ land], zhivaia starina, 1916, prilozheniie no. 5, p. 40-47; n. e. mazalova, “narodnaia meditsyna lokalnykh grupp russkogo severa” [folk medicine of the local groups of the russian north], russkii sever: k probleme lokalnykh grupp, red. t. a. bernshtam, st. petersburg, 1995, p. 94; nizhegorodskie khristianskie legendy (nizhnii novgorod christian legends], sost., vstup. st. i komm iu. m. shevarenkovoi, nizhnii novgorod, 1998, p. 49-50; a. v. tarabukina, “eskhatologicheskie rasskazy ‘tserkovnykh liudei’” [eschatological stories of church people], antropologiia religioznosti (almanakh “kanun,” vyp.4), st. petersburg, 1998, p. 397-454; m. n . vlasova, russkie sueveriia: entsiklopedicheskii slovar [russian superstitions: encyclopedic dictionary], st. petersburg, 1998, p. 16-22; m. n. vlasova, “tolki krestian o komete 1899 goda” [hearsay of the peasants about the comet of 1899], antropologiia religioznosti (almanakh “kanun,” vyp. 4), st. petersburg, 1998, p. 386-96; “sviashchennoe pisanie v narodnykh pereskazakh” [holy scripture in folk paraphrases], predislovie e.v. kuleshova, podgotovka teksktov e. dankovoi i k maslinskogo, zhivaia starina, 1999, no. 2, p. 45; v.v. shevelev, “kon-kamen” [the horse-stone], zhivaia starina, 1999, no. 2, p. 49. 3. questions about the correlation between apocrypha eschatology and russian religious verses (stikhi dukhovnye) have been examined by v. sakharov in his book eskhatologicheskie sochineniia i skazaniia v drenerusskoi pismennosti i vliianie ikh na russkie dukhovnye stikhi [eschatological works and legends in old-russian literature and their influence on russian religious verses], tula, 1879). however, the author did not touch the problem of peasant “rumors and hearsay” about the end of the world. 4. a. f. belousov, “poslednie vremena” [the last days], in aequinox: sb. pamiati o. aleksandra menia, moscow, 1991, p. 9-33. 5. op. cit., p. 13. 6. with the exception of a pseudo-evident observation that the old believer bespopovtcy “have lived from the very beginning on the eve of the end of the world, in the cheerless atmosphere of the ‘antichrist’s reign’ which began with the establishment of heretical ‘innovations’ in the russian church” (op. cit., p. 9). thus it is supposed that a discussion about the signs of the end of the world is natural for seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 22 the culture of the bespopovtcy. however, in actual fact it turns out that the state of eschatological expectation can be regarded as the main determinant for the picture of the world for present day orthodox “church people” (a. v. tarabukina, eskhatologicheskie rasskazy tserkovnyx liudei [eschatological stories of the “church people”], p. 397-454). eschatological stories are also widespread among russian peasants and townspeople who have a low level of knowledge about the church. 7. v. m. istrin, “otkrovenie mefodiia patarskogo i apokrificheskie videniia daniila v vizantiiskoi i slavianorusskoi literaturakh” [the revelation of methodius of patar and the apocryphral visions of daniel in the byzantine and russo-slavic literatures], issledovaniia i teksti, i, otkroveniie mefodiia patarskogo, chteniia v obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh, 1897, kn. 2 (181), otd. iii. p. 209. 8. it should be added that similar citations can be discovered in the oral folk tradition and also, for example, in old believers’ polemical written tradition. in one of the old believer manuscripts v. m. istrin discovered a statement about the negative characteristics of making the cross with three fingers which was supposedly present in the “revelation of methodius of patar: “in the last days people will pray with trinity, that is, with three fingers without the embodiment of god’s son and for that they will be condemned to eternal torment . . .” (op. cit., p. 247). 9. sviashchennoe pisanie v narodnykh pereskazakh [holy scripture in folk paraphrases], p. 45 (recorded in 1996 in the village of slepnevo, toropets region, tver oblast). 10. euspb (sound recording no. eu-khvoin-99-pf-20). village of mikheevo, moshenskoe region, novgorod oblast 10.07.1999. n. s. ermolaev, year of birth 1931. 11. euspb (sound recording no. eu-khvoin-99-pf-15). village of zadele, khvoinaya region, novgorod oblast 07.07.99. v. e. ivanov, year of birth 1930. 12. folklore cabinet of the philological faculty of spbgu. belozersk collection, 14-25. village of nikolskoe, vashkino region, vologda oblast, 15.07.98. l. a. evteshicheva, year of birth 1930. 13. on some aspects of the functioning of a magical written text in traditional culture see my work: “magicheskoe pismo”: k izucheniiu religioznogo folklora” [a magical letter: toward the study of religious folklore], antropologiia religioznosti (almanakh “kanun,” vyp. 4), st. petersburg, 1998, p. 175-216. 14. euspb. (sound recording no. eu-khvoin-99-pf-20). village of mikheevo, moshenskoe region, novgorod oblast 10.07.1999. n. s. ermolaev, year of birth 1931. 15. euspb. (sound recording no. eu-khvoin-99-pf-34). village of ustreka, moshenskoe region, novgorod oblast 15.07.1999. n. a. ivanova, year of birth 1927. 16. nizhegorodskie khristianskie legendy [nizhnii novgorod christian legends], p. 49 (no. 187). recorded in 1997 in the village of teplovo, kulebakino region, nizhnii novgorod oblast. 17. euspb. (sound recording no. eu-khvoin-99-pf-27). village of shilovo, khvoinaya region, novgorod oblast 12.07.99. n. ia. ivanov, year of birth 1927 and a. v. ivanova, year of birth 1926. 18. v. smirnov, “otnoshenie derevni k voine,” p. 123. 23 19. a. f. belousov proposes that the source of the image of the earth wound around with web served as “one of the basic motifs of old believer eschatology, a motif that depicts the final victory of evil on the eve of the end of the world by ensnaring the earth with the antichrist’s net” (a. f. belousov, “poslednie vremena,” p. 12). however, it is clear that interpretative and not genetic mechanisms play a dominant role in formation of this image. 20. i. ia. porfirev, “apokrificheskie skazaniia o vetkhozavetnykh litsakh i sobytiiakh po rukopisiam solovetskoi biblioteki” [apocryphal legends about old testament personages and events according to manuscripts of the solovki library], sbornik orias, t. xvii, no.1, 1877, p. 266. here a. f. belousov perceives the influence “of the apocalyptic image of the great red dragon” (revelations 12, 3) and also of the eagle “from visions about the last days by the author of the third book of ezdra which is popular among old believers” (belousov, “poslednie vremena,” p. 14). 21. a. o. beliaev, “o bezbozhii i antikhriste” [about atheism and the antichrist], t.1: podgotovlenie, priznaki i vremia prishestviia antikhrista, sergiev posad, 1898, p. 956; smirnov, “otnoshenie derevni k voine,” p. 123. 22. trunov, “poniatiia krestian orlovskoi gubernii,” p. 41. the image of “birds with iron noses” has also been recorded by belousov (belousov, “poslednie vremena,” p. 14) 23. “the jerusalem manuscript” (of “the epistle of sunday”) is the russian version of the legend about a heavenly letter that had been widespread among various christian confessions during the middle ages. 24. p. a. bessonov, kaleki perekhozhie: sbornik stikhov i issledovanie [itinerant singers: a collection of verses and research], vyp. vi, moscow, 1864, p. 90 (no. 568); compare p. 92-93 (no. 569). 25. compare b 15.7.13.1 of the “motif-index of folk-literature” by st. thompson. 26. a. n. afanasev, narodnye russkie skazki v trekh tomakh [folk russian tales in three volumes], ed. by l.g. barag and n. v. novikov, t. ii, moscow: 1985, p. 218-19 (no. 243). other russian variants mention “an eagle,” “a big bird,” or simply “a bird.” 27. op. cit., p. 446-47 (no. 295-96). 28. skazki terskogo berega belogo moria [tales of the tersk shore of the white sea], ed. d. m. balashov, leningrad: 1970, p. 320-23. 29. compare s. a. shtyrkov, “konstruirovanie kollektivnoi istoricheskoi pamiati v lokalnoi traditsii: vozmozhnyi podkhod k postroeniiu interpretatsionnoi modeli” [contructing collective historical memory in a local tradition: a possible approach to the organization of an interpretive model], in staroladozhskii sbornik, st. petersburg: staraia ladoga, 1998, p. 128. 30. “then every woman be be a widow, and seven women will look for a single husband and will not find him; and having heard of this, young boys will come to them from other countries and will begin committing lechery with them like pigs, having no sense” (v. m. istrin, “otkrovenie mefodiia patarskogo i seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 24 apokrificheskie videniia daniila v vizantiiskoi i slavianorusskoi literaturakh,” teksty: i, “otkrovenie mefodiia patarskogo,” chteniia obshchestva istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh, 1897, kn. 4 (183), otd. iii, p. 127. compare a. n. veselovskii, “opyty po istorii khristianskoi legendy, ii, legenda o vozvrashshaiushchemsia imperatore” [studies in the history of christian legend, ii, the legend about the returning emperor], zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 1875, may (ch. clxxix), p. 68-69. compare: “before the end of the world there will remain as many just people as can find room on a tree seven meters high. when a bear passes by the tree, the women will ask: ‘hasn’t my husband come?’” (mazalova, “narodnaia meditsina,” p. 94). 31. motif e2a according to n. a. krinichnaia, predaniia russkogo severa [legends of the russian north], st. petersburg: 1991, p. 281. see also: n. a. krinichnaia, russkaia narodnaia istoricheskaia proza: voprosy genezisa i struktury [russian folk historical prose: questions about their genesis and structure], leningrad: 1987, p. 33-35. 32. krinichnaia, predaniia russkogo severa, p. 30 (no. 10). recorded in the village of ladva, prionezhskii district, karelian assr. 33. it must be emphasized that in russian folklore the concepts of ground, land, and earth are expressed by the same term (zemlia) and are often indistinguishable. 34. nizhegorodskie khristianskie legendy, p. 49 (no. 185); compare: v. smirnov, “otnoshenie derevni k voine,” p.123. vershok (1 ¾ inches) and piad (span of the hand) are ancient russian linear measures. 35. belousov, “poslednie vremena,” p. 32. 36. see the materials on this problem collected by a. v. svirnovskaya in her essay “izmerenie tela: identifikatsionnye praktiki” [measuring the body: identification practices], in mifologiia i povsednevnost, vyp.2 : materialy nauchnoi konferentsii 24-26 february 1999, compiled and edited by k.a. bogdanov and a.a. panchenko, st. petersburg: 1999, p. 79-80. 37. nizhegorodskie khristianskie legendy, p. 49 (no. 185). 38. euspb, (sound recording no. eu-khvoin-99-pf-27). village of shilovo, khvoinaya region, novgorod oblast 12.07.99. n. ia. ivanov, year of birth 1927 and a. v. ivanova, year of birth 1926. 39. see beliaev, “o bezbozhii i antikhriste,” p. 955-59. 40. op. cit., p. 957. 41. belousov, “poslednie vremena,” p. 21-22. 42. eschatological stories about the antichrist developed in the twentieth century in “intra-church” folklore and among educated old believers. see: a. v. tarabukina, “eskhatologicheskie rasskazy,” and l. s. soboleva, “amerikanskoe sochinenie ob antikhriste-kompiutere v interpretatsii uralskogo starovera” [an american work about the antichrist computer in the interpretation of an old believer from the urals], in 25 issledovaniia po istorii knizhnoi i traditsionnoi narodnoi kultury severa: mezhvuzovskii sbornik nauchnykh trudov, syktyvkar, 1997, p. 118-30. 43. see: m. eliade, aspekty mifa [aspects of myth], moscow: 1995, p. 62-68. 44. euspb, (sound recording no. eu-khvoin-99-pf-27). village of shilovo, khvoinaya region, novgorod oblast 12.07.99. n. ia. ivanov, year of birth 1927 and a. v. ivanova, year of birth 1926. 45. see: k. v. chistov, russkie narodnye sotsialno-utopicheskie legendy xvii -xix vv. [russian folk social-utopian legends of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries], moscow, 1967, and narodnye traditsii i folklor: ocherki teorii [folk traditions and folklore: essays on theory], leningrad, 1986, p. 189246. 46. sviashchennoe pisanie v narodnykh pereskazakh, p. 45 (recorded in 1996 in the village of nagove, toropets region, tver oblast).. 47. euspb, (sound recording no. eu-khvoin-99-pf-15). village of zadele, khvoinaya region, novgorod oblast 07.07.99. v. e. ivanov, year of birth 1930. 48. chistov, narodnye traditsii i folklor, p. 230. 49. chistov, russkie narodnye sotsialno-utopicheskie legendy, p. 327-40. 50. see, for instance: g. a. fine, “the third force in american folklore: folk narratives and social structures,” fabula, 1988, bd. 29, heft 3/4, p. 342-53. 51. see: m. eliade, mefistofel i androgin, st. petersburg, 1998, p. 206-32. 52. in this connection, it is worth mentioning the ideas of the dutch scholar s. brower who compares the stereotypes of conduct and the ideologemes of the early russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century with the cargo-cults: s. brouver, “paradoksy rannei russkoi intelligentsii (1830-1850): natsionalnaia kultura versus orientatsiia na zapad” [paradoxes of the early russian intelligentsia (18301850): national culture versus orientation to the west], in russkaia intelligentsiia i zapadnyi intellektualizm: istoriia i tipologiia, compiled by b. a. uspenskii, rossiia/russia, novaia seriia, no. 2 (10), moscow: venice, 1999, p. 49-66. seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 1 microsoft word folkxiv_author.doc 188 фиалков, лев и лариса фиалкова (сост.). народы мира о жизни и смерти, здоровье и болезнях, больных и врачах. пословицы и поговорки. [fialkov, lev and larisa fialkova (compilers). peoples of the world on life and death, health and illness, patients and physicians. proverbs and sayings]. haifa: jkdesign, 2009. bibliography. 166 pp. isbn 978-965-7391-08-2. proverbs and sayings are the smallest genre of oral narrative. people the world over employ them in the most varied situations. proverbs and sayings are used at work and during leisure and they reflect both happiness and sorrow. proverbial performance is accepted by every social group, in both urban and rural settings, and in every part of the world. proverbs and sayings help establish a connection to ancient folk wisdom and this helps us to come to terms with everyday troubles and misfortunes, to accept our destiny, or to find a solution in tragic circumstances. the folk philosophy that was transmitted from generation to generation has been augmented via expressions that arose in more modern times, right up to and including the folkloric visions of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. proverbs tend to reflect humankind’s concern with fundamental issues such as life and death and the ephemeral nature of objective reality. they mirror the folk philosophy of rational thinking, optimism, and commonsense. in this sense they are the opposite of fairytales and legends, which tend to allow for fantasy and irrationality. the present anthology of folkloric expressions collected by two authors, a physician father and folklorist daughter, represent a thematic compilation of proverbs and sayings devoted to human health, life and death, and texts dedicated to medicine. this method of presentation is rather atypical: the authors do not arrange the pronouncements on human life, death, and illness that they have collected according to geographic origin. rather they organize the collected texts from different ethnic regions according to common themes and articulated visions on life and health. this allows them to celebrate the similarity of folk wisdom in its global diversity. the book contains ten chapters, each divided into several thematic sections. the first chapters present proverbs that deal with the nature of life. there are assorted proverbs that express the fact that human life is fleeting while the world remains eternal. there are proverbs about love of life and work, proverbs that counsel patience in sorrow, and proverbs that remind us of the inevitability of death. proverbs presented in this section reflect the folklore about the different characteristics of the folklorica 2009, vol. xiv reviews folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 189 phenomenon of human existence from birth through death. we, of course, find the old insight that “смерть не выбирает” [death is not choosey (or picky)] and that “перед смертью все равны” [everybody is equal before death]. the chapter devoted to age contrasts old age and youth. the largest part of the book is a collection of proverbs that reflect different aspects of human health, illnesses, healing, doctors, and patients. in every culture people appreciate good health, strength of the body, and longevity and notice the connection between the health of the body and the health of the soul. the authors observe that the famous latin expression “a healthy spirit in a healthy body” (v zdorovom tele zdorovyi dukh) is often held to be a local saying by many nations (58). moreover, the proverbs from this section emphasize the universality of health as a foremost human value. in this section, proverbs articulate folk understandings of the etiology of illness and outline the mental and physical conditions of being ill. appreciation of healing and various aspects of medical ethics is the subject of the chapter devoted to doctors. all cultures teach us to respect the skills of the healer and to pay homage to the physician. there is, however, a special section dedicated to quack doctors and sorcerers who, in many cultures, are represented by negative characterizations. patient behavior is another aspect of folklore covered in the texts presented, along with the process of curing and the use of remedies. the two last chapters are connected to health indirectly: good sleep is a synonym of good health for many peoples, while the use of alcohol is associated with mental ill health. for all cultures represented in the book, alcohol and drunkenness reveal the blemishes of human nature. alcohol also leads to losing one’s mental and one’s physical health and, eventually, to an untimely death. according to the authors, the saying “more people drown in glasses than in rivers” has many international counterparts (157-8). the book ends with a bibliography, giving the sources of the proverbs and sayings from many countries that are presented in the book. the list itself can be a valuable starting point for those researchers of popular culture, social customs, and folk medicine, who are interested in learning more about the smallest genre of oral narrative. the general reader who is interested in folklore will find resources for further reading as well. unfortunately, the bibliography is not complete. the authors miss, for example, a thematic compilation of proverbs and aphorisms by gavrikov v. a. and n. a. gavrikov. мудрое слово о здоровье и 190 долголетии: изречения, афоризмы, пословицы, поговорки (krasnodar: krasnodarskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1984). this collection would have added many topical proverbs to their texts and enriched the spectrum of books listed in the bibliography. finally, as a thematic compilation of proverbs that is addressed predominantly to the general reader, the book lacks explanatory material. there is only a short foreword. extended introductory articles, or introductions to each of the chapters, are missing. such introductory material could have served to better outline the authors’ approach and to help the reader situate the texts. also, researchers of oral narrative will find that all ethnic proverbs and sayings have been translated from their original languages into russian, thus likely losing some elements of their authenticity. to be sure, if one were to conduct further research on this subject, one would need to go directly to the primary sources and not rely on a translated compilation such as this. in so far as the anthology relies on translated texts, whose originals were meant to convey the proverbs’ authentic meaning, it does not necessarily provide the firmest ground for scholarly research. it does, however, supply much in the way of furnishing the general reader with an expanded global vision and a broad understanding. hanna chuchvaha university of alberta edmonton alberta, canada untitled devastation of soviet local studies and folkloristics 115 the devastation of soviet local studies and folkloristics t. g. ivanova institute of russian literature st. petersburg, russia in the 1920s in various cities and even villages of the soviet union there existed hundreds of local studies societies which carried out extensive and productive work, investigating local flora and fauna, economics, history, ethnography, and folklore. the system of local studies societies and museums, which encompassed all of russia, gave the provincial intelligentsia an opportunity for valuable interaction and helped it to realize its knowledge and enthusiasm in matters useful for the country. however, in 1928 and 1929, the solidified bolshevik regime decided to stifle any independence of public thought in the provinces. according to the formulation of s. o. shmidt (1989), “what we now call the year 1937 (that is, the worst year of stalin’s purges – trans.) came for local studies in 1929 and 1930” (p. 16). at the third all-union local studies conference, which took place in moscow in december 1927, a change of regime was carried out in the central bureau of local studies (tsbk – цбк), that is, in the main local studies organ of the soviet union. the regular secretary of the academy of sciences, the well-known orientalist s.f. ol’denburg, conceded his place to the party functionary p.g. smidovich. continuing the ideological offensive against local studies, the bolsheviks strove to oppose the tsbk to its local studies center. in april 1929, a local studies section was organized at the communist academy (which, in turn, was created as a counterpart to the “old regime” academy of sciences). on october 1, 1930 this section was transformed into the society of specialists and marxists for local studies. the journal “local studies” (краеведение), which had been published since 1923, was renamed “soviet local studies” (советское краеведение). articles with characteristic titles such as “for bolshevik vigilance in local studies” turned out to be definitive. at the iv all-union local studies conference in march 1930, local studies were conclusively subordinated to the bolshevik regime. in 1932 one article in “soviet local studies” stated with great satisfaction: for long years local studies in the ussr were farmed out to the ‘old’ specialists in local studies. forced out by history from the course of social and political life, these ‘specialists’ found a refuge in local studies. here they folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 116 ‘sat out their time’ until 1929. and after this they carried out their advocacy about the ‘political indifference’ of science and the distinctive vocation of the specialist in local studies – to strive to learn about one’s region in the past and present, and to learn about it ‘in general,’ that is, outside of class, not only in isolation from the tasks of building socialism and the class struggle of the proletariat, but often also in opposition to these tasks, in the name of ‘the sacred past’ (святой старины). hence the prevalence of grave digging in local studies, and the prevalence of populist theories in the history of a region and in its ethnography. from this emerged lairs of sabotage in many local study organizations, lairs which were exposed and revealed (although not unmasked completely) only in the last one-and-a-half to three years (klabunovskii 1932: 67). in our opinion, s.o. shmidt (1997) formulated the reasons for the devastation of soviet local studies precisely: the fact of the matter is that local studies societies and in general the work of specialists in local studies were an expression of democratic initiatives which sometimes date back to pre-revolutionary traditions and even to the ‘zemstvo’ (an elective district council from 1864 to 1917. trans.). the introduction to the acquisition of knowledge frequently took place by avoiding official channels, and by evading standardized methods and obligatory ‘guiding instructions.’ this no longer corresponded to the new trends which were generated by circumstances characteristic for the cult of stalin and the bureaucratization of our public life. moreover, when they strove to level everything, specialists in local studies considered it their duty to discover originality. by all the experience of their occupation and by the experience of their region’s history they cautioned against attempts to unify management methods without taking into account local features, both natural and social, which had been supported by established customs (p. 165).(1) arrests and court trials connected with the devastation of local studies took place at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s in various parts of the ussr. folklorists turned out to be among the specialists in local studies who were arrested and exiled from their native places. one of those who suffered at that time was the outstanding russian folklorist nikolai evgenevich onchukov (1872-1942) who discovered the bylina tradition on the pechora river and compiled a collection of “northern tales” (“северные сказки”) [onuchkov 1904; onuchkov 1908]. at the end of the 1920s, onchukov was living in leningrad and was working at the central bureau of local studies. he was arrested on september 1, 1929, and stayed in prison until june 23, 1930, when the verdict of the court exiled him to the city of nikolsk in the northern region (северный край) which now is called the vologodskaia oblast’. onchukov was incriminated for participation in “a counter-revolutionary devastation of soviet local studies and folkloristics 117 conspiracy in the bureau of local studies.” this accusation was specified in the statement of a scholar to the commission on matters of personal amnesties – p.g. smidovich. on march 11, 1932, onchukov wrote to the highest court from nikolsk: on september 1, 1930 (an obvious slip of the pen – 1929. t. i.) i was arrested on a charge according to article 58.2, ‘membership in a counterrevolutionary organization and an attempt to convert local study organizations into counter-revolutionary organizations.’ i not only never belonged to any c(ounter)-r(evolutionary) organization, but i never even dreamed about such an organization. i actually worked in the central bureau of regional studies, but my work there bore an exclusively scholarly character (according to my specialty i printed two articles and twenty-two reviews in ‘kraevedenie’ and in ‘izvestiia tsbk’). i had no connection with any organizational activity and had not attended a single conference for specialists in local studies. i never was an enemy of the soviet regime. i always considered that the soviet regime was historically inevitable.... (rgb-a). in the course of the investigation n.e. onchukov was reminded of his “sins” during the civil war, that is, his collaboration with the kolchak regimes in siberia. this has been established from a note written by onchukov’s wife, anna aleksandrovna bulavkinaonchukova. she most probably prepared the note for v.d. bonchbruevich, an old bolshevik with a pre-revolutionary party record. in the post-october period, he worked in the cultural field. in the abovementioned note it is stated, the essence of the accusation against n. e. in leningrad boils down to the fact that he wrote against bolsheviks in newspapers after he happened to be in the occupation of kolchak ... . thus the arrest was provoked by the denunciation of a half-insane person who, in his diary enumerated, all local studies specialists who worked in the leningrad section of the local studies society (in it n. e. served one year as secretary). the whole section was arrested for having planned a conspiracy against the soviet regime (rgalia). onchukov’s exile, which was provoked by the “case of regional studies,” fortunately did not last long. the efforts of the scholar for an early return from exile met with success. by decree of a special session at a commission of the gpu(2) he was permitted to return from administrative exile on may 26, 1932 (rgb-b). on a form issued on june 30th by the local department of the gpu in nikolsk, the scholar received the standard certification that he was freed from exile and had a folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 118 right to live freely in the ussr (rgali-b). onchukov returned to leningrad. however, on his way to “free residency in the ussr” several obstacles emerged; the authorities refused to give onchukova, his wife, a permit to live in leningrad. in the beginning of the 1930s v.d. bonchbruevich tried to improve onchukov’s fate by appealing to s.m. kirov, the head of the leningrad party organization (rgali-c). this stage of onchukov’s purgatory concluded happily; the scholar remained in leningrad and even received an academic pension. however, the political atmosphere in the country was growing more ominous. the provocative murder of s.m. kirov on december 1, 1934 allowed the stalinist regime to unleash a new campaign of repressions. on april 1, 1935, just like tens of thousands of other representatives of the russian intelligentsia, onchukov was expelled from leningrad. penza was designated as his place of residency (rgali-d). here on october 5, 1939, the aged scholar was arrested again. the trial took place from march 17 to 20, 1940. because he had attended church and in some campaign had condemned the so-called “voluntary” annexation of western ukraine and western belarus to the ussr, onchukov was sentenced to ten years deprivation of freedom. the scholar passed away in a prison camp near penza in march of 1942 (ivanova 1996(1998): 242-51). such was the fate of one outstanding collector of russian folklore. the circumstances of onchukov’s life and death were typical of the stalinist epoch; once a person had attracted the ominous attention of the punitive organs he, as a rule, became their victim a second and even a third time. the fate of other russian folklorists was decided at the turn of the 1920s to the 1930s in cases against specialists in local studies. the mechanisms for the devastation of local studies “in the provinces” can be examined on the basis of the voronezh materials (the name then was the central black-earth district – центрально-черноземная область). in february 1929, local circles and societies were disbanded and a single organ was created, the district bureau of local studies of the central black-earth district or tscho (областное бюро краеведения центрально-черноземной области). in the fall of that year, articles were published in the voronezh press directed against “old-regime” specialists, those working in local studies organizations that had been formed in pre-revolutionary russia. the labels “pseudo-scholar” and “pseudo-specialist in local studies” were directed, for example, against the learned secretary of the district bureau of local studies, s.n. vvedenskij. a tscho conference of specialists in local studies took devastation of soviet local studies and folkloristics 119 place in january 1930, in voronezh. at that conference, the local society of regional studies was renamed and called the society for the study of the local region the goal of which was to build socialism in the country. at the same time, “deliverance” from the old leadership also took place. the first arrests among specialists in local studies in voronezh took place over the course of several months, beginning in november 1930. from february to april 1931 arrests were also carried out in kursk, tambov, orel, staryi oskol, lipetsk, zadonsk, elets, and ostrozhosk. as in other such instances, the members of the gpu concocted the mythical voronezh district counter-revolutionary organization “specialists in local studies” which supposedly had connections with the mythical “all-national union of the struggle for the liberation of a free russia.” repressive authorities claimed that the academician and outstanding historian s.f. platonov was the head of this organization. thus the “case” of the specialists in local studies was connected to the “case of the academicians.” authorities arrested a total of ninety-two specialists in local studies in the central black-earth district. the investigation was concluded in may 1931, and on june 5, without holding a trial, a “troika”(3) pronounced the sentences: five people were sentenced to execution; the remainder were sentenced to prison camps and to exile for periods ranging from three to ten years (akin'shin 1992: 173-78; akin'shin and lasunskii 1990: 56-66). aleksei mikhailovich putintsev (1880-1937), a well known literature scholar and folklorist, was among those arrested in the voronezh case. a graduate of the history and philology faculty in yurev university (now the city of tartu in estonia), he taught in gymnasiums and secondary schools in tsaritsyn, samara, kazan, and kamyshin from 1906 to 1918. in 1906, putintsev became a full member of the voronezh scholarly archival commission, and in 1913, a full member of the russian geographic society. putintsev’s first works, which were connected with voronezh folklore (materials on the local trinity ritual, songs, and chastushkas), appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century (putintsev 1907; 1913a; 1913b). besides his works on folklore, the scholar also published his early works about the nineteenthcentury voronezh poets a.v. kol’tsov and i.s. nikitin in the “memorandums of voronezh province” (памятные книжки воронежской губернии). these works made him one of the founders of joint literary and local studies in russia (putintsev 1910; 1913c). from 1920 to 1930 putintsev was a professor in the literature and linguistics department of the pedagogical faculty at voronezh state university. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 120 during the devastation of local studies in voronezh, the scholar was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison camps. his folklore collection of skomoroshinas and chastushkas in voronezh perished while he was in a camp. the scholar spent part of his sentence on the river pechora. in 1933, putintsev was freed and from 1933 to 1935 he worked in orel in a local pedagogical institute. in 1935 he was a professor for a very short time in the perm pedagogical institute and, from 1936 to 1937, in the tambov teacher’s institute. the scholar died from natural causes on may 16, 1937 (lasunskii 1969; akin'shin and lasunskii 1990). repressions connected with the devastation of soviet local studies were directed against another prominent folklorist of the 1920s, vasilii ivanovich smirnov (1882-1941). he was a native of the pereslavskii district in the province of vladimir, a descendant of a family of clergy. he graduated from a vladimir religious school (владимирское духовное училище) and then studied in the history department of the moscow religious academy (московская духовная академия). as many representatives of his generation, at a critical moment in his life he changed his religious ideals to socialist ideals. in 1905, in pereslavl, smirnov organized a social-democratic circle, was arrested, and spent four months in prison. subsequently he moved to kostroma where he taught in a local religious seminary and men’s gymnasium. with the formation of the kostroma scholarly society for the study of the local region in 1912. smirnov, who was keenly interested in archeology and ethnography, became its secretary. in 1921 he occupied the post of chairman. under his direction, the society became one of the most successful such organizations in the country in the 1920s (pernet 2001: 15-21). during the years of its existence from 1912 to 1930, the kostroma scholarly society for the study of the local region published more than sixty works among which were forty-one collections of “works” (труды). in the “second ethnological collection” (второй этнографический сборник), which came out in 1920, smirnov published an extensive article entitled “folk funerals and lamentations in the kostroma region” (smirnov 1920). smirnov’s article “the sunken bells” (потонувшие колокола) which concerns a legend similar to the famous legend about kitezh, appeared in the “third ethnographic collection” (1923). his article “folk divinations of the kostroma region” was published in the “fourth ethnographic collection” devastation of soviet local studies and folkloristics 121 (smirnov 1927: 17-21). another work by smirnov presented rich material on legends about buried treasures (smirnov 1921). it should be pointed out that, in the beginning of the 1920s, kostroma folklorists had apparently still not fully understood the essence of the new regime and its repressive character. the mechanisms of selfcensorship, by which scholars would be guided in the 1930s, obviously had not yet been elaborated in a scholarly milieu. in his article “the devil has been born”, smirnov (1923) traced the transformation of old motifs about the birth of the devil under new social and political conditions. the devil, according to numerous variants collected by smirnov, was born from a peasant woman whose husband, a communist, had committed an outrage against an icon. by the end of the 1920s this kind of publication had become impossible. when a change in leadership was taking place in the kostroma scholarly society in 1929, v.i. smirnov, not wishing to see the collapse of what he had created and understanding that events surrounding him could lead to his arrest, moved to ivanovo. for several years here he worked in the district museum for local studies. in the summer of 1930 he organized archeological excavations near ivanovo, thereby continuing activities which he had enthusiastically carried on in kostroma. smirnov was arrested on november 15, 1930. the materials of the investigative case against v.i. smirnov, which were published by l. i. sizintseva, allow us to understand the accusations of a “professional” nature that were leveled against specialists in local studies in those years. one point in the accusations apparently concerned the fact that local studies, as a particular phenomenon in the cultural life of the country, was in opposition to the centralization of science. for a political regime which strove for absolute control over all spheres of life, local studies, which assumed both initiative and independent action in the provinces, were unacceptable. on october 22, 1930, during his incarceration and while answering a similar accusation, smirnov explained to the investigators: my basic idea about the work of local studies was this: a local area needs to be studied no less than the center. this needs to be done in the locality, if possible by local people, after the necessary conditions for this have been created. knowledge, i judged and continue to think, should not be a property only of central scholars who cannot serve the whole country. perhaps such an understanding of the questions also can be called the decentralization of knowledge.... it seemed necessary to me to lower the scholarly, or at least the work of collecting material, to the level of the “uezd,” then to the “volost’,” and finally to the village (selo).... if all this has to be considered anti-soviet folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 122 decentralization, then this implies no understanding of what local studies are (sizintseva 1990: 35). the second point of the accusations advanced against v.i. smirnov concerned the fact that he, as the head of the kostroma scholarly society, supposedly incorrectly assigned priorities in the activities of the museum which was part of the society. from the materials published by l. i. sizintseva, it follows that one of the members of the society (in the publication designated as e.a. g-n., higher education, an economist) testified at the inquest that smirnov “devoted his main attention to questions which were not connected with the national economy, but with descriptions of witches, byliny and o<ther> pulp having nothing in common with building socialism” (sizintseva 1990: 34). another witness (p.v. v-v., a former type-setter, who became a soviet functionary and who worked in the kostroma museum), testified at the inquest: the ethnological institution which smirnov managed was such in 1929 that i advocated its liquidation, since it, instead of studying the everyday life of workers, was occupied with the study of superstitions, beliefs, sorcerers, and forms of bread baking. i consider that smirnov, without a doubt, is a person alien to the existing order; his ideology, without a doubt, is hostile to the policy of the soviet regime (соввласти) and of the party. after the revolution and while directing the scholarly society and museum, he selected people similar to him in spirit . . ., he carried on work which was not directed toward the building of socialism. both the scholarly society and the museum were a base for a<nti> soviet groups with goals of carrying out a<nti>soviet and anti-social activities (sizintseva 1990: 34). the absurdity of such accusations, which were provoked by the deep ignorance of those who formulated them, does not require any special commentary today. on january 15, 1931, v.i. smirnov’s sentence was pronounced: ci<tizen> smirnov was guilty of the following: while being the director of the kostroma society of local studies and of the kostroma museum, he carried out counter-revolutionary directives in the activities of these organizations, received from the leningrad bureau of local studies, and representing a counter-revolutionary center in local studies (reshetov 2000: 46). accusations of this kind were qualified according to the sadly famous article 58/10 and article 58/11. v. i. smirnov was sentenced to exile in archangel. there he succeeded in getting a job in the northern devastation of soviet local studies and folkloristics 123 geolo-hydro-geodesic trust as a specialist on museums. at the trust the scholar created a geological museum (1932) which exists to the present day. through a combination of jobs smirnov, as an archeologist, collaborated with the archangel district local studies museum (193441), carried out several archeological excavations, and in the years 193436 organized expeditions to the summer and winter shores of the white sea. he succeeded in publishing the results of this research in the journal “soviet ethnography” (советская этнография). the scholar passed away on october 21, 1941 (see kuratov 2001; sizintseva 1992: 263-76; filimonov 1975; bochkov 1974). together with the accusations formulated by investigators during interrogations, analogous accusations against v. i. smirnov were reflected in the scholarly literature of the time. extremely interesting material, characteristic of the period under discussion, appears in the collection of articles entitled “against sabotage in local studies literature” (против вредительства в краеведческой литературе [ivanovo-voznesensk], 1931). the collection is based on the papers of the session of the ivanovo district society of historians and marxists which took place february 17, 1931. while criticizing v. i. smirnov’s brochure “treasures, landowners, and robbers: ethnographic essays on the kostroma region” (клады, паны и разбойники: этнографические очерки костромского края), g. ladokha (1931) points out that smirnov makes no allusion to the “class approach, or to the class analysis of reality” (p. 26). ladokha even deduced “direct counterrevolutionary attacks” in smirnov’s work. the fault found in one of the scholar’s articles relates to stories from the time of the civil war, especially stories about the leader of the rebellion against the soviet regime, ozerov. in the eyes of ladokha, the mere mention of ozerov’s name was criminal. “it is difficult to more openly come forward in print against the soviet regime” concludes ladokha. “this article would be a perfect adornment for any white-guard journal” (ladokha 1931: 28) (“white guard” was a general name for those who fought against the communist revolution. trans.). another kostroma folklorist, mikhail mikhailovich zimin, was subjected to attacks in the beginning of the 1930s. we do not know whether zimin was affected by political repressions or whether he was arrested. the ideological “unmasking” of his articles, like the unmasking of v. i. smirnov’s writings, occurred in the above mentioned collection, “against sabotage in local studies literature.” ladokha (1931) pointed out that the publications of zimin were “ideologically hostile to the folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 124 working class and to the socialist revolution” (p. 27). citing an extensive passage from one of zimin’s articles, ladokha (1931) remarks: in the quoted fragment we find everything one could wish for: a condemnation of the ‘huge breakup of the village’ and a longing for the vanishing semi-serf everyday life and its ‘good old customs’ ... , and a deep unconcealed animosity toward the cultural influence of the factory and the city (p. 27). ladokha also turned his attention to the publication of recruit laments which zimin recorded in 1919. the essence of zimin’s publication is as follows. in his introductory remarks reflecting objective reality, the folklorist indiscreetly contrasted the pre-revolutionary recruit ritual with mobilizations for the red army during the civil war. the collector wrote: the people’s grief became especially deep, during present day mobilizations. in august 1919 during a trip to the kovernin and makar’ev districts i happened to see farewells with ‘deserters.’ they gathered in large parties and walked on foot. they were mourned over as dead men or as people who had alreday been sentenced to death. they were seen off as though to ‘certain’ death which they would meet either at war or in kostroma (zimin 1920: 2). in the material recorded by zimin in 1919 we can read the following in a mother’s lament over her son while he was being taken into the red army and: из-за ково ты воевать пошел, ладо милое? уж власти все безбожные, уж постам-то они не постилися, уж не почитали ни среды, ни пятницы ........................................................................... уж взяла бы я в праву рученьку саблю вострую, и срубила бы я буйну голову начальникам (zimin 1920: 8-9). [because of whom have you gone to fight, my dear beloved? all the authorities are unbelievers, they haven’t observed fasting, they have observed neither wednesday nor friday i would have taken a sharp saber in my right hand, and i would have cut off the heads of the commanders.] ladokha commented on zimin’s article in the following way: devastation of soviet local studies and folkloristics 125 “here we see before us specific counter-revolutionary and anti-soviet writings, written absolutely openly, and again one has to be amazed that all this could have come to pass in our soviet publications and rather than in foreign literature” (p. 28). ladokha’s article and those similar to it became for many years a model for the soviet study of folklore. by 1931, the field of soviet local studies, which had been one of the most important elements in the development of the study of folklore in the 1920s, was totally decimated. societies for local studies continued to exist formally, but the atmosphere of freedom, which had permitted realization of the creative efforts by tens of thousands of people in all parts of the country, was destroyed. local studies societies were officially closed in 1937. notes 1 see also about the local studies in 1917-1930: fleiman, e. a. 2001. флейман е.а. краеведческое движение в поволжье в 19171930 г.: идеи, события, люди [the local studies movement in povolzh’e 1917-1930: ideas, events, people]. кострома. 2 gpu (главное политическое управление) was the main punitive organ – a predecessor of the kgb (комитета государственной безопасности). 3 “troika” – an extra-judicial organ of stalin’s time consisting of three people and issuing exclusively guilty verdicts. bibliography: akin’shin, a. n. 1992. акиньшин а.н. “судьба краеведов (конец 20х начало 30-х годов)” [the fate of the local studies specialists (end of the 1920s beginning of the 1930s], вопросы истории 6/7: 173-178. akin’shin, a. n., lasunskii, o. 1990. акиньшин а., ласунский о. ““дело краеведов” центрального черноземья” [“court case of the local studies specialists” central black-earth district], отечество: краеведческий альманах 1: 56-66. bochkov, v. 1974. бочков в. “подвижники костромского краеведения: в.смирнов [activists in kostroma region local studies]” in второе дыхание: глазами краеведов [the second folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 126 breath: through the eyes of the local studies specialists]. ярославль, 42-61. filimonov, s. b. 1975. филимонов с.б. “эпистолярный архив в.и.смирнова” [epistolary archive of v. i. smirnov], археологический ежегодник за 1974 год: 315-323. ivanova, t. g. 1996(1998). иванова т.г. “новые материалы к биографии н.е.ончукова” [new biographical materials of n. e. onchukov], russian studies: ежеквартальник русской филологии и культуры 2(4): 242-251. klabunovskii, i. g. 1932. клабуновский и.г. “через советское краеведение – к освоению естественных богатств страны” [from soviet local studies to development of the country’s natural resources], советское краеведение 5: 67. kuratov, a. a. 2001. куратов а.а. “смирнов василий иванович” in поморская энциклопедия [encyclopedia of the pomor land], ed. в.н.булатов. архангельск. 1: 373-374. ladokha, g. 1931. ладоха г. “историческая и этнографическая “наука” в издании костромских краеведов” [historic and ethnographic “scholarship” in publications of kostroma ethnographers] in против вредительства в краеведческой литературе [against sabotage in local studies literature]. иваново-вознесенск. lasunskii, o. g. 1969. ласунский о.г. а.м. путинцев – историк литературы, фольклорист и этнограф. краткий очерк деятельности и библиография трудов [a. m. putintsev a historian of literature; a folklorist and an ethnographer. a short essay on his work and a bibliography]. воронеж. onuchkov, n. e. 1904. ончуков н.е. “печорские былины” [legends of the pechora region], записки императорского русского географического общества по отделению этнографии. санктпетербург, vol. 30. onuchkov, n. e. 1908. ончуков н.е. “северные сказки” [northern folk tales], записки императорского русского географического общества по отделению этнографии. санкт-петербург, vol. 33. pernet, s. 2001. пернет с. “василий иванович смирнов как ученый и личность” [vasilii ivanovich smirnov as a scholar and an individual], вестник костромской археологической экспедиции 1: 15-21. devastation of soviet local studies and folkloristics 127 putintsev, a. m. 1907. путинцев а.м. “вымерший народный обычай” [a folk custom which has disappeared], памятная книжка воронежской губернии на 1907 год, отд. 3: 32-33. putintsev, a. m. 1910. путинцев а.м. “песни кольцова и народные в отношении приемов поэтического творчества” [kol’tsov’s songs and folk songs as a means of poetic creativity], памятная книжка воронежской губернии на 1910 год, отд. 3: 47-55. putintsev, a. m. 1913a. путинцев а.м. “талагайская свадьба” [talagai wedding], памятная книжка воронежской губернии на 1913 год, отд. 3: 94-119. putintsev, a. m. 1913b. путинцев а.м. “собрание народных песен из сел: старой хворостани, машкина, аношкина и бодеевки короткоякского уезда воронежской губернии” [a collection of folk songs from the villages of staraia khvorostan', mashkino, anoshkino and bodeevka from the korotianskii region, voronezh district], памятная книжка воронежской губернии на 1913 год, отд. 3: 119-134. putintsev, a. m. 1913c. путинцев а.м. “детство и юность и.с.никитина” [childhood and youth of i. s. nikitin], памятная книжка воронежской губернии на 1912 год, отд. 3: 1-158. reshetov, a. m. 2000. решетов а.м. “смирнов в.и. архангельские туеса” [smirnov v. i. birch-bark vessels of the arkhangel’sk region], живая старина 3: 46. rgali-a. российский государственный архив литературы и искусства [russian state archive of literature and the arts], фонд 1366, опись 2, n 11, л.11. rgali-b. российский государственный архив литературы и искусства, фонд 1366, оп.1, n 115. rgali-c. российский государственный архив литературы и искусства, фонд 1366, оп.1, n 118. rgali-d. российский государственный архив литературы и искусства, фонд 1366, оп.2, n 11, л.2. rgb-a. российская государственная библиотека [russian state library], отдел рукописей, фонд 369, коробка 312, n 20, л.1. rgb-b. российская государственная библиотека, отдел рукописей, фонд 369, к.312, n 16, л.1. shmidt, s. o. 1989. шмидт с.о. “краеведение – дело, значение которого не может быть преувеличено” [local studies: an event the importance of which cannot be exaggerated], памятники отечества 1 (19): 16. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 128 shmidt, s. o. 1997. шмидт с.о. “краеведение в научной и общественной жизни россии 1920-х годов” [local studies in russia's scientific and public life in the 1920s], in шмидт с.о. путь историка: избранные труды по источниковедению и историографии [a historian's path: selected works on primary source study and historiography]. м. 165. sizintseva, l. 1990. сизинцева л. “антисоветский” музей: краеведение глазами гпу” [an “anti-soviet” museum: local studies through the eyes of the gpu], родина 11. sizintseva, l. v. 1992. сизинцева л. в. “и.смирнов (1882-1941)” [i. smirnov (1882-1941)], отечество: краеведческий альманах 5: 263-276. smirnov, v. i. 1920. смирнов в.и. “народные похороны и причитания в костромском крае” [folk funerals and laments in the kostroma region], труды костром. науч. о-ва по изучению местного края 15: 21-126. smirnov, v. i. 1921. смирнов в.и. “клады, паны и разбойники: этногр. очерки костромского края” [treasures, landowners, and robbers: ethnographic essays on the kostroma region], труды костром. науч. о-ва по изучению местно края 26. smirnov, v. i. 1923. смирнов в.и. “черт родился (творимая легенда)” [the devil has been born (a legend in creation)], труды костром. науч. о-ва по изучению местного края 29: 1720. smirnov, v. i. 1927. смирнов в.и. “народные гаданья костромского края” [folk divinations of the kostroma region], труды костром. науч. о-ва по изучению местного края 41: 17-21. zimin, m. 1920. зимин м. “плачи по призванным на военную службу (из записей в ковернинском крае костромской губ., в 1916 и 1919 годах)” [laments for military recruits], труды костром. науч. о-ва по изучению местного края 15: 2. translated by james bailey microsoft word folk03fdw.doc 35 conference report “le chemin, la route, la voie dans la littérature et la civilisation russe,” (the path, the road, the way in russian literature and civilization), university of paris-sorbonne, may 21-23, 2003 sponsored by the slavic studies center at the sorbonne, the international conference “le chemin, la route, la voie” featured a number of papers on folklore topics. francis conte, the director of the sorbonne slavic studies center and the organizer of the conference opened the meeting with a paper entitled “a general introduction to the topic of the road, the route, the path.” he spoke about the differences between animal migration and human travel, pointing out that animal migration, as much as it may follow a specific route, is instinctual while human travel is conscious. he then contrasted the path, which follows natural contours, to the constructed road, which often requires overcoming nature to build a thoroughfare that suits human needs. his purpose was to focus the attention of the conference participants on the relationship between humans and the road. next was al’bert baiburin of the european university in st. petersburg presenting a paper entitled “the road of remembrance and forgetfulness.” his presentation drew attention to another aspect of consciousness, namely how travel is conceived and how remembering or forgetting places left behind influences the course of human life. the final paper of the first session, “the additional element in the structure of the expeditionary group,” written by t. shchepanskaia from the kunstkamera in st. petersburg and read by kabakova of the sorbonne, talked about folklore and ethnographic fieldwork and the effect of travel on the collection of data. shchepanskaia analyzed interactions among the members of ethnographic expeditions and their perceptions of self and other. the second half of the morning program began with a paper by tat’iana tsivian of the slavic and balkan studies institute in moscow, “the fatal journey of kolobok.” she took the russian children’s story, “kolobok,” compared it to the equally simple-sounding nursery rhyme “humpty-dumpty,” and revealed a serious, ritual substratum. afternoon papers with folklore content included s. vieillard’s “proverbial reality and poetic message: on catherine ii and her description of a voyage to the crimea.” natalie kononenko of the university of virginia talked about “road as symbol in the ukrainian funeral” in which she described the funeral procession through the village. she postulated that the funeral procession is believed to separate body and soul, permitting them to undertake their respective journeys. lesia britsyna of the folklore institute in kyiv spoke on crossroads, a sacred place and one often prohibited to humans. she pointed out that certain lexemes are routinely associated with crossroads and claimed that the stability of verbal expression mirrors consistency of belief. the afternoon ended with a concert of folk songs on the topic of roads and travel performed by the group “tsvetnitsa.” one folklore paper was presented on the second day of the meeting, when elena berezovich of the university of ekaterinburg spoke on “road names in the topography of the russian north and the folk picture of the world.” she used the extensive data collecting conducted by her university to isolate folk concerns. the names of roads are based on where they lead and other points of orientation. they can also be named after their conditions and their use, she said. folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 36 the rest of the conference featured papers on literature and history. speakers discussed karamzin, chekhov, belyi, mandel’shtam, il’f and petrov and iordan radichkov. they looked at groups of writers, such as those who dealt with utopian subject matter and those who wrote in the 1960s-80s. french travel accounts were contrasted with russian. they described the rise of the institution of the war correspondent and the picture of the russo-turkish conflict in the balkans presented by correspondents to their readers back home. russian populist movements were the subject of one paper, while another author showed the conference participants how tariff records could be used as a source of data. plans are afoot to place further information on the conference on the sorbonne web site: http://www.recherches-slaves.paris4.sorbonne.fr/. natalie kononenko university of virginia http://www.recherches-slaves.paris4.sorbonne.fr/ microsoft word folk04se.doc 3 articles the singers of northern russian religious verses (1) sof�ia v. fedorova petrozavodsk state university before discussing the singers of north russian folk religious verses (dukhovnye stikhi), it may be sensible to begin by characterizing not the singers but their songs. russian folk religious verses are usually based on a christian literary source: the bible, a hagiographic tale, the life of a saint or an apocryphal text. the formal characteristics of the verses, composed at different periods, vary so widely that many russian folklorists consider it impossible to try and group all popular religious verse together into a single folk genre [nikitina 1993: 45-46]; some scholars suggest dividing dukhovnye stikhi into a separate system of genres parallel to the one used for traditional secular folklore [selivanov 1995: 8�10, 57�59]. the older type of religious verse, known as �starshie,� are predominantly narrative in form, and in their poetic style close to the russian byliny and folk ballads; the junior (�mladshie”) dukhovnye stikhi, sung mainly by the old believers,(2) are lyrical in nature and frequently imitate literary verse. in the nineteenth century collectors recorded religious poetry in many provinces in the european part of the russian empire [kireevskii 1848, varentsov 1860, bessonov 1861 1864]. in the twentieth century, especially the first half, hearing and recording dukhovnye stikhi was still possible in some remote rural areas of the country, but nowadays, although the tradition of performing religious verses lives on, it does so only in old believer communities. in this article the focus falls on one particular area, the russian north, and more specifically on those who sang the dukhovnye stikhi. apart from references in works by nineteenth and twentieth-century ethnographers and folklorists the article draws primarily on archival material from the folklore collections of the archive of the karelian research centre of the russian academy of sciences in petrozavodsk. this material relates to the period 1911-98. the main bearers of folk religious poetry are usually said to be the kaliki perekhozhie, semiprofessional, often blind or disabled itinerant singers, who sang dukhovnye stikhi in crowded places and asked for alms in return [fedotov 1935/1991: 14-25]. however, this statement requires amplification when we refer to the situation in the north of russia, the area in which stikhi were especially popular. in olonets, archangel and vologda provinces, apart from the kaliki, religious verses were sung by the rural population, both orthodox and old believers. information about the singing of religious verse by north russian peasants can be gleaned from the writings of various nineteenth-century folklorists and ethnographers [barsov 1867; maslov 1905: 13; miller 1895: 27-28]. in addition, dukhovnye stikhi have been recorded from ordinary villagers by nineteenth and twentieth-century collectors on numerous occasions, with the overwhelming majority of twentieth-century variants being recorded from women. what were the relations between the kaliki and the peasantry in the north of russia, how did villagers treat the itinerant singers and under what conditions did they take over their repertoire? these questions were almost entirely ignored by nineteenth-century ethnographers [maksimov folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 4 1987: 450-473; vereshchagin 1855: 362; khrushchev 1901: 192-94]. what scanty data does exist can be supplemented by notes made by collectors and the reminiscences of peasants both found in the folklore collections of the archive of the karelian research centre of the russian academy of sciences (henceforth called the �karrc archive�). the collection of religious verse, one of the fruits of the folklore expeditions organized by the institute of language, literature and history of the karrc, includes more than 260 texts covering almost the whole of the twentieth century, from 1911 till 1998. some of these recordings come complete with comments on the manner of performance, the person from whom the singer had learnt the song and the particular conditions under which it was usually performed. apart from this, notes about the dukhovnye stikhi and their bearers can be found in fieldwork reports and collectors� journals. for instance, numerous comments on religious verses are to be found in collections 8 and 79, containing material from the expeditions to zaonezh�e (the area to the north and east of lake onega) in 1940 and 1956. both types of verse, the general russian (�starshie�) and the old believer (�mladshie�), were recorded by folklorists in the villages located along the eastern frontier of karelia, in an area inhabited mainly by russians, descendants of settlers who came from the novgorod area.(3) “starshie” stikhi constitute the majority of the texts; the variants of this type (more than 180 recordings) constitute three quarters of the regional collection, whereas the old believer tradition of religious poetry is inadequately represented in the folklore collections of the karrc archive. there is not one mention of the manuscript codices of religious verse used by old believers in the folklorists� diaries kept in the karrc, though we know that in the russian north such codices were not only carefully preserved in the twentieth century, but new ones were even being compiled.(4) most of the individual old believer songs are only found in the karrc archive in a single variant. nor can we be sure that all the examples of “mladshie” stikhi were recorded from adherents of the old belief or those sympathetic to their views, since some (e.g. �the testament of a dying mother� [zaveshchanie umiraiushchei materi]) were disseminated throughout the russian north by the kaliki perekhozhie [karrc archive, coll. 27 № 184; coll. 79 № 726, 728], and may well have been adopted by the official orthodox population from them along with other stikhi. what is more, soviet collectors avoided asking performers point-blank about their religious affiliation, for fear of attracting their mistrust. and for their part, informants were usually far from willing to disclose the information. several villagers refused categorically to sing religious verses in the presence of outsiders, or even their own neighbors [karrc archive, coll. 8 № 36; coll. 26 № 10]. describing her expedition to karelia in 1980, the scholar, s. e. nikitina, who has studied folk religious verse, has remarked that �the �stikhi� did not exist on the surface but were deeply concealed within the bearers� consciousness, as though they were something that ought not to be made public (a characteristic comment would be: �i will sing and then i�ll be jailed, and taken away�)� [nikitina 1993: 57]. it goes without saying that in the soviet period ideology placed constraints on the collecting of dukhovnye stikhi. organizing a special expedition was out of the question, though there were several expeditions that recorded byliny and ballads. dukhovnye stikhi were only written down incidentally, if time permitted, and usually did not constitute the main aim of fieldwork. quite often folklorists had no time to record the religious 5 verses and could do no more than note their existence; sometimes they would record one or two variants out of the five or six available [karrc archive, coll. 8 № 2, 21, 35; coll. 44 № 1]. not all the religious verses in the karrc archive have attributions. for instance, the names of performers have not been recorded by i. m. and v. p. durov, the amateur folklorists who gave the karrc archive thirty six texts of religious verses they had recorded between 1911 and 1935 in the pomor�e area (along the white sea coast) [karrc archive, coll. 27 № 176 � 82, 184 � 98; coll. 28 № 50 � 64, 124 � 25]. some of these texts may have been transcribed directly from the kaliki perekhozhie, since one of the sections in i. m. durov�s manuscript is entitled �the beggars verses� (�stikhi nishchei bratii�). commenting upon the texts, durov indicated that religious verses were �sung by the old inhabitants of pomor�e during �meetings,� that is, during the gatherings of old folk (men or women); by the bespopovtsy (priestless old believers) on feast days; or by beggars seeking alms in homes in the villages of pomor�e� [karrc archive, coll. 27 № 184].(5) i. m. durov is probably the only twentieth-century collector in the karrc archive who had the opportunity to observe kaliki perekhozhie with his own eyes. when folklorists from petrozavodsk arrived in zaonezh�e the itinerant singers had already vanished. however memories of them were still fresh at that time, while the religious verses acquired from them were preserved in the memory of the local population for several decades. it was women who were the primary singers of dukhovnye stikhi in the north of russia in the twentieth century women. songs recorded from middle-aged and elderly women constitute four fifths of all the texts in the local collection (about 200 variants). in all a mere twenty texts, including fragments and retellings, have been recorded from men.(6) before their disappearance religious verses had become part of the sphere of female folklore genres for many reasons. women�s folklore is generally considered more conservative, and in the soviet era women were much more pious than men. it may be that in the 1930s men were wary of performing dukhovnye stikhi about the saints, christ and the mother of god in the presence of folklorists, especially if the latter were under an obligation to promote atheism on the collective farm. it is quite possible that in the nineteenth century men too sang religious verses, since in the russian north there was a widespread prohibition on singing anything except stikhi during fasts (particularly in lent). religious verses were performed by many of the famous northern russian singers: t. g. and i. t. riabinin, v. p. shchegolenok, n. a. remezov, f. a. konashkov inter alia. the karrc archive contains evidence of verses performed by the whole family or by older relatives for the younger folk as they worked together at home [karrc archive, coll. 79 № 92]. two songs were recorded from a married couple who used to sing together [karrc archive, coll. 79 № 1076, 1077]. but it was only women who had the kind of work that was traditionally specifically linked to the singing of verses. before the revolution and during the first decade thereafter, unmarried girls and in some cases married women would gather together in lent to spin, and their meetings, spinning �bees,� were usually accompanied by the choral singing of dukhovnye stikhi [barsov 1867].(7) many of the performers recorded by folklorists from the karrc remembered the custom of singing religious verses during lent [karrc archive, coll. 8 № 4, 98, 99; coll. 44 № 3; coll. 51 № 276; coll. 79 № 326, 433; coll. 80 № 33]. as a rule the art of performing stikhi was transmitted from older women to their younger folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 6 relatives along with the skills of spinning and weaving. many performers told the karrc collectors that they had learnt dukhovnye stikhi from their grandmother, mother, nurse or neighbor. for instance, when p. e. popova from niukhcha had finished singing the verse about the ascension she remarked: �i got this song from my mother� in our family my mother sang this song on the eve of palm sunday� [karrc archive, coll. 126 № 27]. a. m. isakova from shueretskoe recalled: �the old women would all meet: �children, let us teach you to sing stikhi’� [karrc archive, coll. 36/1 № 42]. statements that the dukhovnye stikhi had been learnt from the kaliki perekhozhie are equally common. a. t. shelonikova from vygozero told collectors: �the beggars would arrive from kargopol�. they�d ask for alms. they visited the houses (po fateram khodiat),(8) sat and sang. they stayed near the entrance, sat down on the bench and sang. the old women learnt their stikhi from them. the beggars would go around in groups of a dozen or so ...� [karrc archive, coll. 79 № 433]. a few performers of both kinds of dukhovnye stikhi (that is, both the �starshie� and the �mladshie”) recounted that either they or their relatives had learnt a particular song from beggars who had lodged in their house for a few days [karrc archive, coll. 79 № 726]. when t. a. lepetukhina from the village of lapino had finished singing the verse about saint paraskeva and the anchorite, she recalled that �the blind beggar oprosim, who had sung this stikh, usually stayed in her grandmother�s house � other beggars also often came to spend the night at their house and sing stikhi� [karrc archive, coll. 79 № 751]. we should mention that, apart from religious verses, the repertoire of the kaliki perekhozhie also included ballads; it was normal for singers to lump them together and to call them both “stíkhi” (with the stress on the first syllable). both were often sung to the same melody or to one very similar. we can find comments following the texts of several ballads recorded in the pudozh district by members of the 1940 expedition to the effect that the texts had been learnt by the singers from the kaliki perekhozhie [karrc archive, coll. 8 № 4a, 139, 235]. sometimes after they had finished singing, performers would start recalling the kaliki who had also sung a particular spiritual verse, but without saying directly that the stikh had actually been learnt from them. when f. a. konashkov finished the song about saint paraskeva and the anchorite, he suddenly began demonstrating how the kaliki would beg for alms after they had stopped singing: �and we glorify you, christ the lord! (and then the kaliki would ask for a few scraps).� (i slavim tebia, khriste bozhe! (i kusochkov i poprosiat kaliki)). [karrc archive, coll. 15 № 35а]. the verse about the ascension is also followed by a comment about the kaliki who sang it, which contains a typical begging formula, �for the sake of christ the lord, give us alms� (gospodi khrista radi podaite milostinku) [karrc archive, coll. 79 № 644], and one of the many variants of the verse about the two lazarus brothers even incorporates this request into the text itself: �brother, please go to the blue sea “skhodil by ty, bratets, ko siniu moriu, brother, bring me a ladle of water.� prines by da bratets, kovshechek vody.” �the will is not mine but god�s.� “volia ne moia, volia bogovaia.” lord jesus, give us now some charity. gospodi isuse, nun’-ko milostyniu dai. 7 the text is followed by the comment: �with these final words they concluded the stikh, crossed themselves and asked for alms� [karrc archive, coll. 79 № 24]. most of the evidence about the itinerant performers of religious verses refers to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. these recollections, combined with the observations of pre-revolutionary ethnographers, permit us to form an overview of the relations between the kaliki perekhozhie and the peasantry. itinerant singers came to northern russian villages in twos and threes or in larger groups (known as an artel’) of about ten to twelve men. the resident population greeted them with sympathy and compassion. one of the earliest pieces of evidence about the way northern russian peasants treated the kaliki dates from the mid nineteenth century. according to the ethnographer vereshchagin �villagers have respect for them, listen eagerly to their songs, try to please them and provide them with abundant supplies of food and all sorts of other stuff� [vereshchagin 1855: 362]. a. i. levina was the only performer recorded by the karrc folklorists who expressed an overt dislike of stikhi; she used to �run away� so as not to have to listen to them, but she remembered this as a deviation from the ethical norms of behaviour, viewing it as a sin on her part: �may god forgive me, i didn�t like the kaliki� (kaliki eti, prosti gospodi, ne nravilis’ mne) [karrc archive, coll. 36/1 № 38]. in the itinerant singers� audience there would be children [karrc archive, coll. 145 № 41; coll. 79 № 648] as well as adults and old folk [karrc archive, coll. 79 № 433]. in warm weather the kaliki usually sang their stikhi beneath the windows of the peasant izba (wooden house), or else sitting on the front steps or just on a stone [karrc archive, coll. 8 № 139]. it was more common for them to come, however, by foot or by cart in winter and early spring, in advent and lent, and to sing in people�s houses. they would stay with their peasant hosts overnight or even for several days. the housewife who invited her married neighbors in for a spinning �bee� might well choose to ask an itinerant singer in to sing religious verses for them. as a rule the singers visited every house in a village. they were not supposed to go right into the interior of the house, but rather to stay very near the entrance and sit on the bench there that was sometimes known as �the beggars� bench� (nishchenskaia lavka). typically the kaliki perekhozhie could also be heard singing on the main church festivals as well as other religious holidays, fairs and times of merrymaking [a. s. 1910; rybnikov 1989: 48-49; troitsyn den� 1857]. according to data collected from the peasants� of zaonozh�e, the majority of itinerant singers came from kargopol�. one of the participants in the 1956 expedition to zaonezh�e remarked that �almost every old woman who heard �stikhi� from the kargopol� beggars as a child knows them now. in the north in the early twentieth century the métier was very widespread and gave a good living� [karrc archive, coll. 79, expedition report 4]. this piece of information corroborates the view of pre-revolutionary scholars who considered the kargopol� area one of the few places in the vast territory of the russian empire where the old traditions of kaliki singing still survived [maslov 1905: 13; miller 1895: 27-28]. itinerant singers from the kargopol� area traveled not only around zaonezh�e and along the white sea coast, but also along the onega river in the neighboring districts that were part of archangel province [vereshchagin 1855: 362]. folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 8 thanks to i. p. khrushchev, we can gain some understanding of the way stikhi spread among the itinerant singers. in 1866 he traveled along the river oiat�, where he came across a lame beggar, nikita bogdanov, who was earning a crust singing religious verses on church festivals in the parishes along the river banks. he was from the area and had started begging in his old age; in order to do this he had learnt about ten religious verses with the assistance of some blind old men he had met in the alexander svirskii monastery (in the lodeinoe pole district of olonets province, now leningrad oblast�). evidently the kaliki would spend a number of days in the monastery. khrushchev pointed out that the singer �has grasped the essence of stikh singing so well that he has complete mastery of it and makes his own variations when he sings� [khrushchev 1901: 191]. instances of impoverished peasants performing stikhi and byliny for alms in their district or even in their own villages are not exceptionally rare for the russian north. we should note that for those who sang out of necessity there were no restrictions on genres. m. a. prokhorova from burakovo recollected that �her grandfather mikh[ail] fedorovich deshagulin lived in poverty and sang various stikhi and byliny very well � mikh[ail] fed[orovich] sang byliny while people worked, at spinning �bees� and church festivals. people paid him between two and five kopecks for singing a bylina, �gave him alms�, as m. a.says. he had little to live on, went begging and even so died in poverty� [karrc archive, coll. 79 № 366а]. rybnikov noted the existence of a �transitional� kind of performer, somewhere between the semiprofessional itinerant singers and peasant skaziteli (narrators).(9) he presumed that they were mostly itinerant tailors who �have their own place to live and are not really short of money� [rybnikov 1989: 82]. it seems probable that in case of need both tailors and impoverished peasants could use their performance skills to earn a living. t. a. feshov, a peasant from izhgora, was one such �semi-itinerant� singer. he maintained a household and was not the poorest person in his village, but nevertheless sang dukhovnye stikhi and byliny and told wondertales all over the district where he lived. he was known as a good narrator and, according to informants from podberez�e, �made his living by singing� (kormilsia pesniami) [karrc archive, coll. 8 № 38]. judging from what the peasants recollect [karrc archive, coll. 8 № 8, 21, 35], tikhon feshov possessed an artistic streak; he seldom sang at home but enjoyed performing in public. during festivals, surrounded by a crowd of listeners he would perform for pleasure rather than wages; when he wanted to earn money he would go and sing for those in charge of the posting station. t. a. feshov died in 1930. several performers from kolezhma described the singers whom they often heard when children: �crosseyed van�ka and oksiukha, they�d be wandering around these parts, together, they were husband and wife� god alone knows where he lived, singing stikhi throughout the whole wide world! for his singing people gave him bread or flour, some gave sugar, others tea, various things. when they arrived, they�d ask to spend the night and people would let them in. they came from some place, somewhere far off� ivan was close on fifty; they were dressed ordinary like: he wore a hat on his head, and she had a headscarf. they didn�t have any children� they sang a lot, but i don�t remember what now� [karrc archive, coll. 145 № 41]. it is probable that this couple lived not too far from kolezhma, since they visited the village fairly regularly, during every fast [karrc 9 archive, coll. 145 № 36]. they also seem to have been impoverished peasants who went to remote villages, asking for charity but did not fully adopt a vagrant way of life. this supposition receives confirmation from the fact that several informants recalled their names. by contrast the names of genuine kaliki perekhozhie who were of no fixed abode or who lived outside zaonezh�e and pomor�e have almost never been retained in the memories of their listeners. this particular reminiscence is notable for one further detail: one of the wanderers mentioned in it is a woman. most of the evidence about the kaliki talks about older men; only two informants have any recollection of vagrant women [karrc archive, coll. 8 № 100; coll. 79 № 726]. there may, however, have been more women among the �semi-itinerant� performers. t. m. bashkirova from vodlozero told the karrc collectors that in her childhood she had gone from village to village with her mother, singing songs, and presumably asking for charity [karrc archive, coll. 8 № 241]. the famous storyteller m. d. krivopolenova was another person who wandered around the villages of northern russia after she had lost all means of support in her old age, but was reluctant to became a burden on her daughter. her extensive repertoire certainly included both dukhovnye stikhi and byliny [ozarovskaia 1916: 9]. the kaliki perekhozhie and the semi-itinerant singers must have continued their wanderings through the russian north in the 1920s, at least until collectivization. this emerges from an observation about the village of nigizhma made in a collector�s journal during the expedition of 1940 to the pudozh district: �both the kaliki and other singers were invited into wealthy houses. they would perform byliny for a crust of bread, and rich peasants were only too eager to listen to them. what the peasants have to tell gives the impression that the itinerant singers had always been there, and local singers like feshov were also going from village to village [karrc archive, coll. 8 № 21]. in response to a question about those who peformed byliny peasant informants �always mention the kaliki and say they knew them� [karrc archive, coll. 8 № 21]. villagers talked about the itinerant singers as a phenomenon that had only recently disappeared. when the kolkhozes were formed, semiitinerant singers like t. a. feshov also had to vanish. undoubtedly it was the kaliki perekhozhie who were chiefly instrumental in the dissemination of religious verses throughout the russian north. thanks to their peripatetic existence dukhovnye stikhi became an essential part of the settled rural population�s repertoire. the influence of the phenomenon of kaliki upon the emergence of a semi-itinerant type of singer is also undeniable. thus in the russian north of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries we can distinguish three kinds of performers of religious poetry, each interracting closely with the others: the kaliki perekhozhie, the semi-itinerant singers and ordinary villagers (predominantly women). notes 1. research for this article was made possible thanks to the financial support of the ministry of education of the russian federation (graduate student grant, code № а03-1.6-342). folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 10 2. the old believers split from the main orthodox church in the latter part of the seventeenth century, refusing to accept the reforms instituted by the then patriarch, nikon. 3. according to the modern administrative division of the karelian republic these villages are part of the districts of loukhi (chernaia rechka), kem� (kalgalaksha, gridino), belomorsk (sumskii posad, kolezhma, niukhcha, lapino, shueretskoe), medvezh�egorsk (kosmozero, kizhi, seredka, shun�ga), pudozh (avdeevo, zaozer�e, burakovo, izhgora). 4. several codices can be found in the karelian collection in the archives of the academy institute of russian literature (pushkin house) in st petersburg [malyshev 1965: 38-52]. 5. the bespopovsty (priestless old believers) are one of the branches of the old believer movement, formed after the priests who had been consecrated before patriarch nikon�s church reform died. since no bishop had joined the old believers, they had no way of consecrating their own priests, hence the name �priestless.� the bespopovsty, who rejectied priests from the official orthodox church, instead selected lay preceptors who would administer the sacraments of christening and confession. as early as the eighteenth century the bespopovsty had themselves split into dozens of so-called persuasions and unions, one of which was the pomor�e union (pomorskoe soglasie) with its center on the bank of the vyg river. the old believer community, settled along the vyg and leksa rivers, had a considerable impact on the religious life of the russian north in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. 6. approximately forty texts in the karrc archive are unattributed. 7. a similar tradition existed in vologda province [lobkova 2003: 81]. 8. �fatera� is a distortion of the word �kvartira� (apartment), here meaning the part of a peasant house in which the family lived. 9. p. n. rybnikov was the first person to record the folklore (mainly byliny) and ethnography of olonets province on a systematic basis. the publication of four issues of the songs collected by p. n. rybnikov [pesni sobrannye p. n. rybnikovym], 1861�67, began a new phase in the study of russian folklore and stimulated folklore collecting in the russian north. bibliography a. s., 1910. �olonetskie traditsii� [the traditions of olonets province]. oloneckie gubernskie vedomosti [the olonets provincial gazette]. № 89, p. 1. barsov, e. v. 1867. �iz obychaev obonezhskogo naroda� [on the customs of those living around lake onega]. olonetskie gubernskie vedomosti [the olonets provincial gazette]. № 11, pp. 177-78. bessonov, p. 1861-64. kaleki perekhozhie [the blind itinerants]. issues 1-3, 1861. moscow: a. semen; issue 4, 1863. moscow: bakhmetev; issue 5, 1863. moscow: tip. lazar. inst. vost. iazykov; issue 6, 1864. moscow: tip. lazar. inst. vost. iazykov. 11 fedotov, g. p. 1935/1991. stikhi dukhovnye (russkaia narodnaia vera po dukhovnym stikham) [religious verses (russian folk belief according to the religious verses)]. reprinted with an intro. by n. i. tolstoi from the paris ed. of 1935. moscow: gnosis. kireevskii, p. v. 1848. russkie narodnye pesni, sobrannye petrom kireevskim [russian folk songs collected by petr kireevskii]. мoscow: izdanie obschestva liubitelei rossiiskoi slovestnosti pri moskovskom universitete. vol. 1. russkie narodnye stikhi [russian folk verses]. khrushchev, i. p. 1901. �zametki o russkikh zhiteliakh beregov reki oiati� [notes on the russian inhabitants living along the oiat� river]. in: i. p. khrushchev, sbornik literaturnykh, istoricheskikh i etnograficheskikh statei i zametok [collected literary, historical and ethnographic articles and notes]. st petersburg: m. akinfiev and i. leont�ev, pp. 175�99. lobkova, g. v. 2003. �dukhovnye stikhi v narodnykh traditsiiakh vologodskoi oblasti� [religious verses in the folk tradition of vologda region]. in t. g. ivanova (ed.) lokal�nye traditsii v narodnoi kul�ture russkogo severa (materialy 4 mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii �riabininskie chteniia � 2003�) [local traditions in the folk culture of the russian north (procededings of 4the fourth international research conference �riabinin�s readings-2003�)]. petrozavodsk: karnc ran, pp. 80-89. maksimov, s. v. 1877/1987. �kaliki perekhozhie� [the blind itinerants]. in id. god na severe [a year in the north]. vol. 2. moscow: khudozhestvennaia literatura, pp. 447-78. malyshev, v. i. (comp.) 1965. drevnerusskie rukopisi pushkinskogo doma. (obzor fondov) [old russian manuscripts in pushkin house (survey of the collection)] moscow-leningrad: nauka. maslov, a. l. 1905. kaliki perekhozhie na rusi i ikh napevy: istoricheskaia spravka i melodiko-tekhnicheskii analiz [the blind itinerants in russia and their tunes: historical information and melodic and technical analysis]. st petersburg: tip. glavnogo upravleniia udelov. miller, vs. 1895. �kaliki ili kaleki perekhozhie�. encyclopaedia. st petersburg: f. a. brokgauz, i. a. efron. vol.14, pp. 27-28. nikitina, s. e. 1993. ustnaia narodnaia kultura i iazykovoe soznanie [oral folk culture and linguistic consciousness]. moscow: nauka. ozarovskaia, o. e. 1916. babushkiny stariny [grandmother�s byliny]. petrograd: ogni. rybnikov, p. n. 1861-67/1989. �zametka sobiratelia� [a collector�s note]. pesni, sobrannye p. n. rybnikovym [songs collected by p. n. rybnikov]. vol. 1. petrozavodsk: karelia, pp. 47-83. selivanov, f. m. 1995. russkie narodnie dukhovnye stikhi: uchebnoe posobie dlia filologicheskikh fakul�tetov [russian folk religious verses: a textbook for philological departments]. ioshkar-ola: mari state university. troitsyn den� v kargopole. 1857. olonetskie gubernskie vedomosti [the olonets provincial gazette]. № 26 � 27 (unofficial part), pp.140-42. varentsov, b. 1860. sbornik russkih dukhovnyh stikhov [collected russian religious verses]. st petersburg: d. e. kozhanchikov. folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 12 vereshchagin. 1855. �starina pro zmeiu v rakhleiskom tsarstve (iz sbornika g. vereshchagina)� [the bylina about the snake in the kingdom of rakhlei (from the codex belonging to mr. vereshchagin)]. pamiatniki i obraztsy narodnogo iazyka i slovesnosti: pribavlenie k izvestiiam imp. akad. nauk po otdeleniiu russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti [remains and examples of folk language and lore: supplement to the proceedings of the department of russian language and literature in the imperial academy of sciences]. st petersburg. pt 4., cols 362�66. microsoft word folkf05f.doc 5 articles contemplating music and the boundaries of identity: attitudes and opinions regarding the effect of ottoman turkish contact on bulgarian and macedonian folk musics karen a. peters university of wisconsin-madison “it is ... preposterous to look for an ottoman legacy in the balkans. the balkans are the ottoman legacy.” maria todorova [1996:46] introduction: contemplating musical boundaries and national borders in the course of the fieldwork that i completed in southwest bulgaria prior to writing my dissertation [peters 2002], i recorded a dozen representative events, primarily informal celebrations, all hosted or attended by the group of friends whose musical practice was my study’s point of departure [peters 2002: 208-10].(1) informal group singing was a significant activity on such occasions, and i observed that approximately 80% of the songs sung in the course of these recorded events could be divided roughly equally into bulgarian songs and macedonian songs [peters 2002: 208, 211-12].(2) in bulgaria, “macedonian” is generally understood as a regional designation referring to its southwest corner, which along with much of northern greece, a bit of albania, and the entire republic of macedonia, forms geographic macedonia (figure 1). furthermore, this designation is often understood in the same sense when applied beyond bulgaria’s national borders: as recently as 1999, an estimated 51% of the bulgarian population still considered the republic of macedonia’s macedonian population to be ethnically bulgarian [stoyanova-boneva, nikolov, and roudometof 2000: 239, citing survey statistics from analytical creative group 1999]. in the republic of macedonia, however, where most of the macedonian songs in question are also commonly sung, “macedonian” is in no way considered to signify “bulgarian,” but is rather an ethnonational designation in its own right. in other words, the proper ascription of macedonian songs, and indeed of the macedonians themselves, has at times been a bone of contention between the two countries, among others.(3) ascription of macedonian songs as regional or national is not the only aspect of song repertoire that has been viewed differently by bulgarians and macedonians. scholars and others in bulgaria and the former yugoslavia have at times held differing views regarding the relative significance and quality of their village and urban song. in the case of bulgaria, village music and folklore were valorized and utilized in the construction of a unified national identity [see, e.g., buchanan 1991, rice 1994, and silverman 1983 and 1989].(4) thus one of the more remarkable things about the songs that i encountered during the course of my fieldwork was that, for the most part, they were not examples of the village folklore that was represented in the pre-1990s bulgarian folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 6 literature to the near exclusion of everything else,(5) but rather of urban folk and popular songs. i later found that had i begun my research with macedonian sources rather than bulgarian, i would have been presented with a somewhat different point of view, as macedonian scholars have long accepted their cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic urban music as being emblematic of macedonian identity and therefore worthy of study and note. in this article, then, i will present descriptions of, and attitudes expressed towards, bulgarian and macedonian village and urban song, as found in the writings of two representative music scholars, one bulgarian and the other macedonian. in so doing, i will foreground the differences in these opinions and attitudes as regards the presence of foreign musical features in these songs, with particular attention to those often considered to have been derived from ottoman turkish classical music. finally, i will argue that these differences in attitude may be attributed at least in part to modern bulgarian and macedonian identity construction projects, which intensified with the attempted superimposition of mononational borders on the multicultural balkans as the ottoman empire disintegrated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. in the bulgarian case, it is noteworthy that certain of these attitudes and opinions continue to be held by particular segments of bulgarian society as that country increases its attention to its image abroad in anticipation of membership in the european union beginning in 2007. the historical bulgarian perspective: village (folk) and urban song the bulgarian urban song has had a relatively short road of development. appearing around the middle of the [nineteenth] century, it did not succeed in expressing the important characteristics of the life of the people, of its feelings and mood. its musical worthiness is far from that of the village folk song. a large part of the urban songs were born and died as ephemera, responding to the topical, the shocking, and the short-lived, scooped up many times from the filthy lower strata of the bourgeois-capitalist city. more valuable and meaningful are the revolutionary songs of the bulgarian proletariat [kaufman 1967:56].(6) from the late nineteenth century until fairly recently, most bulgarian folklorists and musicologists were almost exclusively concerned with their village folk music, which was considered to be purely bulgarian and therefore an important factor in the project of identifying, describing, and defining modern bulgarian identity as a whole. bulgaria’s multicultural urban music, on the other hand, was considered lacking in the “purity” attributed to village music and was not similarly valued. nevertheless, between 1952 and 1966, the eminent bulgarian scholar nikolai kaufman managed to take time from his engagement with the collection and study of bulgarian village song to research and write a book about bulgarian urban song. the book, b lgarski gradski pesni (1968), consists of an extended essay followed by a collection of 580 songs and variants, most of them predating the end of the second world war. not surprisingly, a number of these songs can be considered macedonian, a fact that has led macedonian ethnomusicologist or i or iev – whose opinions will be examined presently – to accuse kaufman of “mystification” [1986: 103]. in his book, kaufman compiles a list of differences between bulgarian urban and village song [1968: 13-14]; these are reproduced in figure 2. some items on the list speak to differences between the way of life 7 and worldview of urban and village populations that are reflected in the songs they create and the circumstances of their creation and performance, while other items deal with structural characteristics such as musical meter, scale or mode, and form. a curious aspect of these structural characteristics is the apparent absence of turkish and greek musical features – this, in spite of the fact that kaufman elsewhere asserts that bulgaria’s early urban songs “were largely a product” of the urban songs of these peoples [1980: 436]. instead, the musical characteristics by which he distinguishes bulgarian urban song from village song appear to be largely western european: the predominant use of simple and compound musical meters; the use of major/minor tonality and functional harmony; melodies that utilize triadic movement; and symmetrical, quadratic phrase structures.(7) in fact, kaufman expressed great antipathy towards turkish music, an antipathy in keeping with a general post-world war ii bulgarian government policy that culminated in the todor zhivkov regime’s attempt to forcibly assimilate the country’s turkish minority in the 1980s [silverman 1989:147-48]. kaufman wrote that the musical culture of the turks living in ottoman bulgarian towns was on a much lower level than that of the bulgarians. he asserted that even at the time of his writing, turks living in bulgaria continued to sing primarily love songs whose subject matter he described as “thematically poor” (bedni tematichno). while kaufman did not dispute what was considered their generally high poetic quality, he nevertheless characterized these songs as “fundamentally erotic, often nourishing bad taste” (v osnovata si e erotichna, podkhranvashta chesto loshite vkusove), and hence inappropriate for the nineteenth century bulgarian youth who sang them. he further portrayed the melody of turkish song as “monotonous” (ednoobrazna) and “maudlin” (mawkish, syrupy) (sladnikava). in general, kaufman maintained that the meter, ornamentation, and melodic material – based on turkish modes (makamlar) employing augmented seconds in a manner different, he maintained, from that found in the native bulgarian village folk song – were sufficiently foreign to require a song’s bulgarization in order to gain acceptance among the bulgarian populace [1968: 25-26, 71-73, and passim].(8) while there is no doubt that the bulgarian urban population was inclined to bulgarize foreign borrowings to a greater or lesser extent – and not only in cases of adaptation of turkish songs [kaufman 1968: 10-11, 16, 26-27, and passim] – i suspect that turkish music was not really so foreign to the bulgarian urban populace of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as kaufman represents. recent writings on the subject of contemporary bulgarian ethnopop music discuss that music’s antecedents not only in terms of older urban songs such as those found in kaufman’s study, but also in terms of an instrumental practice called chalga (or chalgiia)(9) with a repertoire that bulgarian musicologist rozmari statelova describes as “[having] an eclectic character and [reflecting] the intonational appearance of the balkan town in the middle of the 19th century” [1999: 14].(10) statelova goes on to quote bulgarian musicologist elizaveta v lchinova’s description of chalga as encompassing: popular bulgarian folk songs, dances, and instrumental melodies; folk melodies and dances characteristic of the minorities, folklore forms of the neighboring balkan peoples, european dances that were fashionable at that time such as the waltz, polka, and mazurka; and melodies of urban songs widely distributed [throughout bulgaria] ... [1999: 14-15, quoting v lchinova 1989:136].(11) folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 8 hence, i suspect that less-bulgarized turkish or turkish-style songs may have been consciously omitted from kaufman’s collection, along with other songs that may have been deemed ideologically inappropriate. even if such editorial bowdlerizing was practiced, however, it apparently was not enough to “redeem” urban song in kaufman’s eyes: as expressed in his book, kaufman’s opinion is that bulgarian urban song is on the whole poorer than bulgarian village song, exhibiting as it does less musical and textual diversity, less amenability to flexible treatment, and ultimately less polish as a result of not undergoing continual communal re-creation. whether or not kaufman’s opinion is accepted as stated – and indeed, there is good reason to suspect that he was not completely free to express his own opinion (12) – it reflects the dominant political ideology typical of that era, forming as it does part of his overall negative characterization of many of these songs as products of a “bourgeois-capitalist” urban environment, as in the quote that heads this section [cf. dimov 1999: 53-54]. it should be noted, however, that denigration of urban music preceded the establishment of the (socialist) people’s republic of bulgaria in 1944. as i noted earlier, village music was privileged by late nineteenth century bulgarian folklorists and other intellectuals as a pure expression, even an artifact, of bulgarian identity, while urban music was described as “insipid” and “lowbrow.” to some extent, this negative attitude towards urban music clearly had something to do with its foreign content, but budding bulgarian nationalism may not have been solely to blame. in an effort to align itself with western europe, characterized as civilized and culturally superior, and to distance itself from its recent ottoman past, turkish and romani musical characteristics were disparaged by bulgarian intellectuals, who associated these manifestations of “oriental” [orientalna] culture with backwardness, with the primitive and the uncivilized [dimov 1995: 11, levy 1999 :66-67] – associations still made in certain bulgarian circles to this day [dimov 1999: 46, 53-56; levy 1999: 66 and 2000: 69-72]. the macedonian perspective: “older” and “newer urban” folk song here should be emphasized the boundless function and power of music as a medium for inter-regional communication that smashes all barriers and rises above antagonism and divisions between people. on this basis, macedonians spontaneously absorbed the beautiful from the music of the turks who were their enslavers [ or iev 1992: 14]. in contrast to the situation described for bulgaria, macedonian ethnomusicologist or i or iev, rather than distinguishing strictly between village and urban song, makes a slightly different distinction, one between what he terms simply “the older” (postarite) songs – without distinguishing between village and urban – and “the newer urban” (ponovite gradski, starogradski (old town)) songs [ or iev 1996: 277, 278]. in making this distinction, or iev notes that it is impossible to determine a particular point in time dividing “older” from “newer.”(13) he also writes that it is not possible to determine what portion of the musical features in the newer urban vocal tradition are indigenous and what portion are foreign, a circumstance reflective of macedonia’s 9 geographic location at what he terms “the center of mutual cultural influences from east and west” [1996: 277] – a circumstance that is true of bulgaria as well, and indeed, of the balkans in general. although or iev did not draw up a formal list comparing the “older” and “newer urban” macedonian folk songs as kaufman did for bulgarian village and urban song, such a list, extrapolated from a brief essay he wrote surveying macedonian folk song [1996], can be found in figure 3. keeping in mind that macedonian and bulgarian musics overlap and are otherwise closely related, or iev’s accounting of the characteristics of the newer urban macedonian song form a striking contrast to kaufman’s list of bulgarian urban song characteristics, as they include not only western european musical features, but macedonian and “oriental” features as well. striking too are the differences between the two scholars’ assignment of certain structural features; the most salient of these are summarized in figure 4. particularly puzzling are their assessments of meter: kaufman finds complex meter to be characteristic of bulgarian village music but writes that it is rare in the urban music or iev, just the opposite, finds it the exception in the older folk music but quite common in the newer urban folk music. complex (cf. london [2001: 284-86]) or “unevenly-divided” meter (e.g. neravnodelni slozhni taktove [dzhudzhev 1980: 97]) is a feature so commonly associated with bulgarian music that béla bartók referred to it at one time as “so-called bulgarian” [1992 [1938]]; and it is just as firmly associated with macedonian music.(14) yet while bulgarian scholars such as kaufman consider these meters indigenous, macedonian scholars such as or iev consider their origin open to conjecture, with asian (turkish or romani) origins a distinct possibility [see, e.g., hadžimanov 1969]. similarly, or iev considers the use of scales incorporating the interval of an augmented second to be a notable characteristic of the newer urban macedonian song that is not present in the older folk song, but rather has its origin in the model system of turkish classical music.(15) kaufman, on the other hand, does not consider such scales typical of bulgarian urban song; furthermore, when scales or modes with augmented seconds are encountered in bulgarian village music, bulgarian scholars have generally considered them to be indigenous or else derived from sources other than turkish classical music.(16) obviously, then, or iev did not consider the presence of turkish features in macedonian song to be problematic. rather than impoverishing the music, rather than rendering it of little value in the project of identifying, defining, and describing macedonian ethnonational identity, or iev wrote that these attributes add to the beauty and diversity of the newer urban songs, as can be seen in the quotation that heads this section. thus, although he clearly values the older songs with their presumably archaic musical traits,(17) or iev also values the newer songs, believing that they reflect progressive development through time; in fact, just the opposite of kaufman for bulgarian song, it is the newer urban song that or iev finds to be more melodically, textually, and structurally diverse, presumably a result of the hybridization that was officially denied to be a feature of bulgarian music. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 10 conclusion in this paper, i have presented, primarily through the writings of nikolai kaufman and or i or iev, the differing opinions and attitudes of macedonian and bulgarian scholars regarding foreign music – in particular ottoman turkish music – and the presence of its features in macedonian and bulgarian songs. it should be noted that what are often referred to as “oriental” musical characteristics, that is, turkish and romani characteristics, are also found in the urban musics of the other balkan peoples, and thus a number of scholars have suggested that these features might well be considered pan-balkan [cf. pettan 1996: 35 and passim; dimov 1995: 13, 14-15 and passim; buchanan 1999]. or iev appears to agree, writing in a study of urban song in the eastern macedonian towns of radoviš and strumica that the changes wrought on the music as a result of foreign contact were typical not only of the newer urban songs of those and other macedonian towns, but also of … the wider balkans in the urban songs of the other southern slavic peoples. in connection with this should be stressed in particular the extraordinarily developed inter-regional communications that enabled similar musical means of expression to be used in a much wider area than in the older practice … [1986: 103]. the widespread presence throughout the balkans of urban music with these features suggests that the alleged antipathy of the bulgarian people in regards to turkish music and music exhibiting turkish features may well have been overstated (cf. rice [2002] and the works by dimov, levy, and statelova cited earlier). yet perhaps as a result of the sociopolitical constraints of the time in which he produced the bulk of his work on bulgarian urban song, nikolai kaufman represented himself as dismissive of much of that music, appearing to value only the village folk song presumed to be characteristic of pre-ottoman bulgaria, or urban songs of a patriotic or other ideologically-appropriate nature, and singled out turkish music and musical features for special criticism. as i have pointed out, kaufman’s stated negative opinion of popular forms of urban song with turkish and romani features situates him and others sharing this opinion in an ideological chain that links the beginnings of the modern bulgarian identity construction project – a project that, among other things, sought to distance bulgaria from its ottoman past and place it firmly within the european realm – with certain contemporary bulgarian educated elites who, once again focusing on the border between occident and orient and what they perceive as a “civilizational choice” (tsivilizatsionniia izbor) between the two, have bought into representations of the latter as backwards, primitive, and uncivilized. finally, kaufman’s expressed antipathy towards music with turkish features may also have been indicative of something that had nothing to do with the ottoman turks per se. he has more than once stated that the common origin of macedonian and bulgarian song, and hence of the macedonian and bulgarian people, must be sought in the older village music [kaufman 1984: 62-63; 1989: 62]. thus while macedonians had as much reason as bulgarians to resent their former ottoman overlords, they nevertheless had an arguably more concrete and pressing concern: that of asserting an identity separate from the bulgarian, a concern also noted by anthropologist keith brown in his recent study of modern macedonian national identity [2003: 152 and passim]. linguist victor friedman hints at a similar concern when he observes that, in codifying the modern macedonian literary language, 11 ... the position of turkisms was an issue from the very beginning. there was one current of thought among some macedonian intellectuals that maintained that turkisms should be encouraged and preserved because they were characteristic of folk speech and also emphasized macedonian’s differentiation from the other slavic languages [2003:16; my emphasis]. although this is not the “current of thought” that eventually won out, the fact that it had its adherents lends support to my suspicion that macedonian attitudes towards the turkish and other foreign features in their music might to some extent be attributable to a desire on the part of macedonia’s educated elites to distinguish the macedonians from the bulgarians.(18) i would further suggest that being culturally and historically close to the bulgarians, who had been permitted to established their modern state somewhat earlier – 1878, as opposed to 1944(19) and thus had a significant head start in the demarcation of their own modern ethnonational identity, it was logical that macedonian intellectuals such as or iev would utilize the ongoing urban music tradition in the construction of a macedonian identity, particularly since the analogous bulgarian tradition had already been rejected by that nation’s intelligentsia. in concluding, then, i would like to point out that circumstances such as those that i have outlined here should serve to remind us that the putatively objective defining factors to which a given music is thought to conform may be subject to ideological manipulation – conscious or unconscious – and thus should not be taken at face value. rather, they require on our part a careful scrutiny informed by extramusical factors. notes 1 field research for the period october 1995 through june 1996 was supported by an individual advanced research opportunities grant from the international research and exchanges board (irex) with funds provided by the national endowment for the humanities and the united states department of state under the title viii program. none of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed herein. an earlier version of this paper, derived from chapter 6 of my dissertation [peters 2002], was presented as part of the panel “negotiating identity across borders: ottoman turkish musical legacies in the balkans” at the 49th annual conference of the society for ethnomusicology, tucson, arizona, november 3-7, 2004. i would like to thank margaret beissinger for suggesting that i publish this paper, as well as her helpful comments on an earlier draft. 2 for purposes of my study, i defined as “macedonian,” songs so represented by the people singing, recording, composing, writing about, or publishing them; and as “bulgarian,” songs sung in that language or one of its dialects and not otherwise categorized as macedonian. the reality, of course, is that the two categories overlap. 3 particularly greece and serbia. discussion of the so-called “macedonian question” as it pertains to these peoples is nevertheless beyond the scope of this paper. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 12 4 it should be noted that at least some of the bulgarian scholars involved deny that such manipulation took place. the accounts of various people that i met during the course of my fieldwork regarding the government’s control of music and musicians during the so-called “communist” period, however, appear to corroborate the above-cited writings of buchanan, rice, and silverman in this regard. 5 since the “fall” of bulgaria’s totalitarian regime on november 10, 1989, this apparent paradox has been noted by bulgarian scholars as well [e.g. dimov 1995:4]. for a discussion of this and other changes in regard not only to folk music, but to folklore research in general, see rice [1999]. the 1995 dimov essay cited above is only one of many examples of a shift in scholarly focus to contemporary bulgarian popular music forms, especially those with elements of various balkan musics. for other bulgarian examples of such studies, see dimov [1999 and 2001]; levy [1999, 2000, and 2002] (this last in english); and statelova [1995, 1996, 1999, and 2003]. 6 all translations from bulgarian and macedonian are my own. 7 similar to poetry, “meter” in music refers to a regularly recurring pattern, but here of stressed and unstressed beats rather than syllables. each repetition of such a pattern is referred to as a “measure” or “bar” (analogous to a “foot” of poetic meter). a musical “phrase” can be, and commonly is, made up of a specific number of such measures. in most western european music prior to the twentieth century, measures most commonly contained 2, 3, or 4 beats of equal length that could be subdivided by two (in simple meter) or three (in compound meter). to this day, musical structures, especially in popular music, often consist of pairs of phrases of equal length, lengths of 4 and 8 measures being the most common. “tonality” refers to melodic structures based on major and minor scales – ascending or descending series of pitches, used throughout a section or entire piece of music, that bear specific hierarchical relationships to each other. “harmony” refers to the simultaneous sounding of two or more of these pitches, while “functional” in this context references the harmonic exploitation of tonality’s hierarchical relationships. finally, a “triad” consists of three specific (usually non-contiguous) notes from a scale that are sounded either simultaneously (harmonically) or sequentially (melodically, hence “triadic movement”). 8 in general, “modes” resemble scales in terms of consisting of a series of ascending or descending pitches with specific hierarchy, but incorporate additional features such as characteristic musical phrases, gestures, and ornamentation. harmony, particularly functional harmony, is not generally a feature of modal systems. “augmented second” refers to a specific interval (distance) between two pitches. commonly present in the pitch series that form part of the turkish modal system, they are almost entirely absent from the analogous pitch series comprising western european major and minor scales. 9 macedonian musicologist dragoslav ortakov notes that in macedonia, however, rather than foregrounding instrumental performance as was typical elsewhere in the balkans, singing accompanied by instruments was the focus of the genre [1986: 82]. 13 10 “intonation” [intonatsiia], a term frequently used by bulgarian music scholars, is a concept worked out by soviet musicologist, theorist, and composer boris asaf’ev. a complex concept, musicologist malcolm brown has described it as follows: so as to establish unequivocally its association with the phenomenal world, the concept of “intonazia” is defined in its primal sense as any phonic manifestation of life or reality, perceived and understood (directly or metaphorically) as a carrier of meaning. in other words, an “intonazia” in its simplest form is a real sound produced by something, be it creature or natural phenomenon ... with which meaning is associated or to which meaning is ascribed. thus, a musical “intonazia” results when some “intonazia” from life experience is transmuted into a musical phrase; as such, it retains from the original intonational source that quality, property, or characteristic essence which expresses meaning and therefore possesses the power to quicken man’s emotions and touch his sensibilities [1974: 559; also see krader 1990 and zemtsovsky 1997: 189-92]. 11 for more on this genre, more commonly known as chalgiia/ algija, see v lchinova [1989] and d. kaufman [1990] (for bulgaria) and džimrevski 1985 (for macedonia). in the english language, ethnomusicologist sonia tamar seeman has written an m.a. thesis on macedonian algija (1990) that is frequently cited. it is not commonly available, however, and i personally have never been granted access to it. 12 in fairness to kaufman, he elsewhere defends the study of bulgarian urban song and, by extension, at least a portion of the genre, by pointing out the (then current) ideological soundness of some of it and noting as well the bulgarization of the presumably objectionable foreign material found within it [1968: 16]. indeed, his continuing engagement with the study of bulgarian urban song suggests that it is something that he does in fact value, and thus the statement above (and numerous similar statements made by other scholars) should likely be considered a reflection of the constraints under which he and his colleagues were working in bulgaria during the so-called communist period. 13 for a fuller discussion, see ortakov [1982: 29-33, 39-24 and 1986: 79-88]. to summarize ortakov, between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, ottoman turkish musical characteristics began to find their way into the older indigenous macedonian folk music system that formed the basis of the newer folk style. with increased contacts with western europe and its music in the nineteenth century, a separate, newer urban folk style crystallized. it is not clear precisely how ortakov’s historical outline might map onto or iev’s newer urban folk/older folk distinction: as or iev noted, it is impossible to determine a particular point in time dividing the newer from the older style. also missing from ortakov’s discussion is the role played by the roma, who entered the balkans at roughly the same time as the ottoman turks, and their music. 14 such meters can be envisioned in two different but related ways: (1) as meters where the measure is divided into beats of equal length that are grouped in twos and threes (i.e. the measures are divided unevenly); and (2) – following from the groupings in (1) – as meters where the measure is divided (unevenly) into beats of two different lengths, the shorter of which is two-thirds the length of the longer. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 14 15 for an example, cf. or iev [1996: 279], dzhudzhev [1980: 329-30], and signell [1977: 32, 35] regarding scales based on the turkish hicaz, tetrachord (four pitch scale segment). 16 many of the names of turkish modes (makamlar), which are in turn applied to the macedonian and bulgarian scales that borrow their features (e.g.“hidzhas” [hicaz]) are found in the analogous arab and persian modal systems as well: until the sixteenth century, the turkish modal system derived much of its theory from arab scholars [reinhard and stokes 2001: 915]. since bulgarian and certain other balkan scholars have rejected the notion that ottoman turkish musical features are present in their village folk musics, the relationships among these modal systems have permitted them to attempt to circumvent the ottoman connection by comparing their folk musics with arab, persian, and other modal systems instead. the turkish modal system, however, is not identical to any of these other systems [pennanen 1995:99]; thus this matter requires further investigation. 17 the presence in some bulgarian and macedonian village songs of combinations of certain traits, often described by scholars as “restrictive” (narrow ambitus, one-part structures, and so forth), is generally assumed to be indicative of a song’s antiquity (see, e.g., or iev [1996: 278]). that some of these traits are common to the village musics of other slavic peoples further suggests that they may be survivals of a common ancient slavonic or proto-slavonic style [bartók 1978 [1951]: 54], or perhaps something even older [czekanowska 1975: 251]. these traits are generally found in songs connected with calendrical and life-cycle rituals, as well as with specific types of work (e.g., harvest songs). 18 seeming to further support this view, while i was a participant in the irex/ban bulgarian studies seminar in sofia in july of 1995, our primary instructor, a linguist, told me that she had once asked a macedonian colleague why there were so many turkish words in the macedonian language, words that were not present in the bulgarian. the answer she received was, “because it makes my language more colorful,” an answer that seems to echo or iev’s positive evaluation of macedonian urban folk songs as more diverse than their older, monoethnic counterparts. our instructor implied, however, that the real reason for this use of turkish words was that it was a way of distancing the macedonian language from the bulgarian, a suspicion that appears to be borne out by friedman’s observation. 19 while both bulgaria and geographic macedonia were liberated from the ottoman empire by the russians pursuant to the treaty of san stefano in march of 1878, geographic macedonia was handed back to the ottoman empire by the european “great powers” in the berlin treaty three months later. liberated again in 1912, geographic macedonia was partitioned among bulgaria, serbia, and greece. a macedonian state did not come into its own until 1944, when the portion formerly awarded to serbia was recognized as a constituent republic of the yugoslav federation. 15 figure 1 geographic macedonia in southeastern europe (after poulton 1995: xvi) folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 figure 2 comparison of bulgarian urban 1 and village song characteristics [n. kaufman 1968: 13-14] characteristic urban song village song 1. point of origination towns and cities primarily villages 2. author/composer known in many cases most often unknown 3. typical text structure lines rhymed, grouped into verses lines unrhymed, not grouped into verses 4. typical vocabulary includes words from the literary language, includes local village words; neologisms foreign loan-words, and neologisms specific not present to the urban milieu 5. (textual) thematic material as a rule, themes reflect urban life; relatively themes reflect village life limited in comparison to village song; fewer motifs, poorer presentation and expressive means 6. (communal) re-creation, songs remain relatively unchanged (and songs polished by singers through variation therefore unpolished) through successive successive performances; greater performances; fewer song variants number of song variants 7. non-complex meter simple triple and compound duple especially simple triple and compound duple not characteristic typical (except in southwest bulgaria) 8. tempo rubato rarely encountered after c. 1878; when quite common encountered, songs differ substantially from tempo rubato village songs in ornamentation and melodic line 9. ambitus wide (octave or more) narrow (fourth, fifth) 1 excluding some pre-liberation love and historical songs, as well as many later love songs that combine features of urban and village song. the latter songs, however, according to kaufman’s analysis [1968b: 78-79], largely fit the description of urban song presented here. sixty such songs, a number of them macedonian, are included in kaufman’s collection. 1 6 characteristic urban song village song 10. scale major and minor scales predominate, more diversity of scalar material; subtonic especially in later songs; leading tone used used 11. melody especially after c. 1878, movement following triadic movement rare (except for use of tonic and dominant triads (more rarely, tonic triad in certain rhodope mountain subdominant) predominates songs) 12. functional harmony, songs are most often based on clearly outlined functional harmony not characteristic; final cadence functional harmonies: tonic – (subdominant) – subdominant – tonic relationship typical dominant; final cadence is nearly always of final cadence dominant – tonic, often preceded by tonic 6/4 13. form most songs in 3/4 and 6/8 (esp. after c. 1878) phrase structure is often asymmetrical employ a symmetrical, quadratic phrase structure (4+4, 2+2, etc.); asymmetrical phrase structure is rarely encountered 14. interpolations, refrains esp. after c. 1878, rarely encountered (repeated) insertion of single words or short phrases into a line of text typical of many village songs, as is insertion or addition of a refrain 15. complex meter little metric diversity; 5/8 (2+3), 7/8 (3+2+2), characteristic: meters ranging from 5/8 to 8/8 (3+2+3), 9/8 (2+2+2+3) encountered only 17/8 in various groupings of 2 and 3 beats rarely, most others of this type not at all encountered 16. anacrusis typical of a large number of urban songs, not characteristic esp. those in 3/4 and 4/4 (more rarely, 2/4) 17. transmission often written oral 1 7folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 figure 3 comparison of macedonian newer urban and older (primarily village) song characteristics (extrapolated from or iev [1996]) characteristic2 newer urban song older song context [entertainment/educative-communicative work, ritual implied by enumerated subject matter] who sings (gender) sexes roughly equal, although males are exclusively female, except for koleda dominant in the sense that they are freer to (christmas/winter solstice) songs, as well travel and have more chances for interaction as diaphonic songs sung by men in the through business and trade tetovo-gostivar district vocal performance practice single groups, sexes mixed; monophony single groups or 2-3 antiphonal pairs, or harmony in parallel thirds single sex; monophony and/or drone-based diaphony, depending on region; three-part singing in aegean macedonia only instrumental accompaniment usual not usual non-complex meter [7] present, but not to the extent found in the older simple duple and triple songs complex meter [15] common, ranging from 5/8 (2+3) to 20+/8; rare enough to be considered a chance 7/8 (3+2+2) is the most common; some other occurrence common meters of this type are 8/8 (3+2+3), 9/8 (2+2+2+3 and 2+3+2+2), 11/8 (2+2+3+2+2), and 12/8 (3+2+3+2+2) tempo rubato [8] present, but not to the extent found in the characteristic (most common) older songs 2 numbers in brackets correspond to a characteristic’s number on the list in figure 2. 1 8 characteristic newer, urban song older [village] song ambitus [9] may exceed an octave, permitting freer unusually limited: minor second to a melodic movement and melodic contrast perfect fifth than in the older songs scale [10] more diverse than in the older songs; three limited by ambitus, but still diverse; with most common are phrygian, major, and scales or without semitone; most common is a with an augmented second, (hidzhas most tetrachord with a semitone between the common of this type); older scales continue second and third degrees (e.g., fgabb, to be used as well with g as the finalis), and with tonal centers on the finalis and the third above it; if anhemitonic, there is a single tonal center on the tonic form [13] more diverse than in the older songs; twoand one or two parts (second part often a four part forms most common; more than four variant of the first); three and four part parts not uncommon songs rare interpolations, refrains [14] large number of interpolations; refrains only interpolation referenced in this developed to the point of forming a separate context is the glas [ = bulgarian izvikvane], (sometimes two-part) section in the overall a type of stylized outcry usually found at form of a song beginnings and ends of lines, but also possible in the middle; refrains short, less developed word interruption [not present] present, w or w/o subsequent completion overall impression formally and melodically well-developed formally and melodically undeveloped; employs archaic elements, many of which were common to all slavic people 1 9folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 20 figure 4 comparison of kaufman and or iev i. comparison of village/older songs kaufman or iev characteristic (bulgarian village song) (“older” macedonian song) non-complex meter simple triple and compound duple simple duple and triple not typical, except in southwest typical bulgaria complex meter characteristic: meters ranging rare enough to be considered from 5/8 to 17/8 in various a chance occurrence groupings of 2 and 3 beats encountered – considered indigenous scale more diversity of scalar material limited by ambitus, but still than in the urban songs; to the diverse extent present, scales with augmented seconds are considered indigenous overall impression musically and textually more formally and melodically diverse than urban song; more undeveloped; employs amenable to flexible treatment; archaic elements, many of more polished as a result of continual which are panor pre-slavic communal re-creation 21 ii. comparison of urban/newer songs kaufman or iev characteristic (bulgarian urban song) (macedonian “newer”/urban song) non-complex meter simple triple and compound not present to the extent found in the duple especially characteristic “older” songs complex meter little metric diversity; complex characteristic: meters ranging from meter encountered only rarely 5/8 to 20+/8 in various groupings of 2 and 3 beats encountered – considered possibly of turkish and/or romani origin scale major and minor scales more diversity of scalar material predominate, especially in later than in the “older songs”; three most songs common are phrygian, major, and scales with an augmented second, which are considered to be of turkish origin overall impression on the whole, poorer than formally and melodically village song well-developed folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 22 works cited analytical creative group acg ltd 1999. “nationwide survey of the bulgarian population.” unpublished. bartók, béla 1978 [1951]. “morphology of the serbo-croatian vocal folk melodies.” in béla bartók and albert b. lord, yugoslav folk music, volume one: serbo-croatian folk songs and instrumental pieces from the milman parry collection, ed. benjamin suchoff with a foreword by george herzog. 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(eds), entsiklopediia na b lgarskata muzikalna kultura [encyclopedia of bulgarian musical culture]. sofia: b lgarskata akademiia na naukite, 55-56. kaufman, nikolai 1968. b lgarski gradski pesni [bulgarian urban/town songs]. sofia: b lgarskata akademiia na naukite. ___________ 1980. “bulgaria ii: folk music.” in stanley sadie (ed.), the new grove dictionary of music and musicians. vol. 3. london: macmillan, 431-38. ___________ 1984. “za edinstvoto na pesenniia ni folklor” [regarding the unity of our song folklore]. b lgarska muzika 35 (9): 57-66. ___________ 1989. “pirinskiiat folklor i edinstvoto na b lgarskata narodna muzikalna kultura” [pirin folklore and the unity of bulgarian folk music culture]. in todor i. zhivkov (ed.), edinstvo na.b lgarskata folklorna traditsiia [unity of the bulgarian folklore tradition]. sofia: b lgarskata akademiia na naukite, 35-62. krader, barbara 1990. “recent achievements in soviet ethnomusicology with remarks on russian terminology.” yearbook for traditional music 22: 1-16. levy, claire (kler levi) 1999. “replika po povod proiavite na popfolka” [a remark regarding popfolk expressions]. b lgarsko muzikoznanie 23 (1): 66-70. ____________ 2000. “produtsirane na poslaniia v s vremennata “etnicheska” muzika” [producing meanings in contemporary “ethnic” music]. b lgarsko muzikoznanie 24 (3): 69-89. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 24 _____________ 2002. “who is the “other” in the balkans? local ethnic music as a different source of identities in bulgaria.” in richard young (ed.), music, popular culture, identities. (critical studies 19). amsterdam and new york: rodopi. london, justin 2001. “rhythm.” in stanley sadie (ed.), the new grove dictionary of music and musicians, 2nd ed. vol. 21. london: macmillan, 277-309. ortakov, dragoslav 1982. muzi kata umetnost vo makedonija [the musical art in macedonia]. skopje: makedonska revija. ___________ 1986. ars nova macedonica: osnovni esteti ki procesi vo makedonskata umetnost od xix vek so poseben osvrt vrz muzikata.[fundamental aesthetic processes in 19th century macedonian art, with particular reference to music]. skopje: makedonska kniga. pennanen, risto pekka 1995. “folk music research and the national in the balkans.” east european meetings in ethnomusicology 2: 94-104. peters, karen a. 2002. “macedonian folk song in a bulgarian urban context: songs and singing in blagoevgrad, southwest bulgaria.” ph.d. dissertation, university of wisconsin-madison. pettan, svanibor 1996. “gypsies, music, and politics in the balkans: a case study from kosovo.” the world of music 38 (1): 33-61. poulton, hugh 1995. who are the macedonians? bloomington: indiana university press. reinhard, kurt and martin stokes 2001. “turkey §iv: art music.” in stanley sadie (ed.), the new grove dictionary of music and musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 21. london: macmillan, 913-18. rice, timothy 1994. may it fill your soul: experiencing bulgarian music. chicago: university of chicago press. ___________ 1999. “the revision of bulgarian folkloristics and folk music research in the post-communist period (1990-1996).” in bruno b. reuer (ed.), musik im umbruch: kulturelle identität und gesellschaftlicher wandel in südosteuropa/new countries, old sounds? cultural identity and social change in southeastern europe: beiträge des internationalen symposiums in berlin (22.-27 april 1997). (veröffentlichungen des südostdeutschen kulturwerks, reihe b, wissenschaftliche arbeiten, band 85). munich: verlag südostdeutsches kulturwerk, 187-202. . _________ 2002. “bulgaria or chalgaria: the attenuation of bulgarian nationalism in a mass-mediated popular music.” yearbook for traditional music 34: 25-46. seeman, sonia tamar 1990. “continuity and transformation in the macedonian genre of algija: past perfect and present imperfective.” m.a. thesis, university of washington. signell, karl l. 1977. makam: modal practice in turkish art music. seattle: asian music publications. silverman, carol 1983. “the politics of folklore in bulgaria.” anthropological quarterly 56: 55-61. _________ 1989. “reconstructing folklore: media and cultural policy in eastern europe.” communication 11 (2): 141-60. statelova, rozmari 1995. prezhiviano v b lgariia: rok, pop, folk, 1990-1994 [experienced in bulgaria: rock, pop, ethnopop, 1990-1994]. sofia: riva. 25 _________ 1996. “tsennostno-smislovi aspekti na populiarnata muzika v b lgariia” [aspects of the value and meaning of popular music in bulgaria]. b lgarsko muzikoznanie 20 (2): 64-91. __________ 1999. “folk t: k m s shtnostta na iavlenieto i negovoto definirane” [bulgarian ethnopop: towards the nature of the phenomenon and its definition]. b lgarsko muzikoznanie 23 (1): 5-44. _________ 2003. sedemte griakha na chalgata: k m antropologiia na ethnopopmuzikata [the seven sins of chalga: towards an anthropology of ethnopop music]. sofia: prosveta. stoyanova-boneva, bonka, stephan e. nikolov and victor roudometof 2000. “in search of ‘bigfoot’: competing identities in pirin macedonia, bulgaria.” in victor roudometof (ed.), the macedonian question: culture, historiography, politics. (east european monographs 333). boulder, colorado: east european monographs, 237-58. todorova, maria 1996. "the ottoman legacy in the balkans." in l. carl brown (ed.), imperial legacy: the ottoman imprint on the balkans and the middle east. new york: columbia university press, 45-77. . v lchinova, elisaveta 1989. “svirdzhii (chalgadzhii) ot sredata na xix vek: mezhdinna forma mezhdu selskata i gradskata muzikalna kultura” [instrumentalists (chalga musicians) from the middle of the 19th century: an intermediate form between village and urban musical culture]. muzikalni khorizonti 1213: 134-37. zemtsovsky, izaly 1997. “an attempt at a synthetic paradigm.” ethnomusicology 41 (2): 185-205. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 microsoft word folk2006[3] sheryl format3.doc 126 marina balina, helena goscilo, and mark lipovetsky, eds. politicizing magic: an anthology of russian and soviet fairy tales. evanston, illinois: northwestern university press, 2005. 418 pp. $24.95 (paper). isbn 0-8101-2032-1. fairy tales seem so innocent. we often view them as pure entertainment, a chance to escape from political realities to a fanciful, imagined world. yet, as scholars have shown, tales have serious repercussions in real life, inculcating socially acceptable gender roles, advocating submission to authority, and so forth. the editors of this book propose to show the use of fairy tales by the soviets. the magical “thrice-ninth” kingdom of the traditional russian folktale, they point out, had features in common with the utopia that soviets presented as their future. soviet writers, therefore, worked with this connection, creating tales for children that advocate proper soviet behavior and mores. as soviets used tales for their purposes, so tales were used against them. the book’s editors contend that writers who wished to express their discontent set the action of their satirical stories in fanciful, tale-like kingdoms so that they could not be accused of speaking against the soviet state. to support their premises, the editors present translations of three groups of tales: those taken from collections of real folklore, tales written with serious intent and meant to educate children, and tales and plays intended for an adult audience that ridicule the soviet system, especially its bureaucracy. thus there are three sections to this book and each has an introduction where the tales included are briefly discussed. the book structure implies that section one should give us a sense of presoviet, unpoliticized lore so that we can compare soviet tales to this material and thus better understand how political intent was realized in story. the premise that tales were used for political purposes by the soviets and by those who wished to speak against them is certainly valid, but this book fails to present it in a convincing manner. the most fundamental issue is a fuzzy definition of what constitutes folklore. we never learn what the editors consider to be a real russian fairytale. as a result, the relationship between folklore and its various literary reworkings is never clear. tales, both folk and literary, seem to be selected at random, sometimes using one criterion, sometimes another, and one never gets a sense of how magic was politicized, one never learns how either the soviet system, or the protests against it, worked. folklorica 2006, vol. xi reviews 127 section one presents twelve stories that are said to be translations of true folktales taken from afanas’ev, the classic collection published toward the end of the nineteenth century. russian magic tales are numerous indeed. why were these particular narratives selected for this book? this question is not answered. do the editors feel that the tales they chose exemplify the idea of a fanciful, utopian other-world particularly well? do they believe that these tales were especially popular during the soviet era and thus typify the sort of traditional lore to which people would have been exposed? perhaps. almost all are indeed well-known tales. but then “the magic ring,” a tale with blatant discussions of sexuality, does not belong. obscene tales were prohibited during both the soviet and tsarist periods and were available only in editions published abroad. and it is even questionable whether most of the texts are, in fact, translations. they read like retellings and all we are told about them is that they were “translated…from narodnye russkie skazki a. n. afanas’eva v 3-kh tomakh.” full identification of sources is given for the last two tales only. section two presents stories that are not folklore, but written by known authors and meant to socialize children, teaching them how to be good citizens of the soviet state. what is the relationship of the stories in this section to the ones in section one? none of them can be considered a reworking of a folktale. “the malachite casket” is the narrative most like russian fairytales, with the mistress of the copper mountain recalling the copper kingdom of the tale printed on pages 2831 of section one. but the two tale plots are radically different and there is no discussion of the relationship between them. “the adventures of buratino” and “the old genie khottabych,” both of which are quite popular, but published here only in excerpted form, are indeed wellknown tales consciously rewritten to deliver a soviet message. but buratino is an adaptation of pinocchio and khottabych is loosely based on aladdin. can these be considered russian folktales? russians would have known them from literary sources and the originals are most certainly not russian. perhaps we are supposed to view fairytales as children’s literature and section two as what became of children’s literature when soviet guidance was imposed. malchish-kibalchish, a story that contains essentially no magic, seems to be included only because it is children’s literature. but true folktales were never exclusively children’s literature, though they have come to be associated with children in more recent times, and “the magic ring” cannot be considered a children’s story under any circumstances. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 128 several of the writers whose stories were selected for inclusion in the section of protest fairytales consciously used folklore in their written work. zamiatin’s bitter “tales for grown-ups,” excerpted here, depend on a knowledge of folklore to underscore the absurdity of actions such as legislating cholera away. shukshin’s lighter “before the cock crows thrice,” also excerpted, shows the archetypical ivan on a tale-like quest – only his mission is the acquisition of a very soviet “bumazhka” (paper): he must obtain a certificate of knowledge; knowledge itself is not the issue. the remaining three selections do not claim a relationship to fairytales and two are not tales at all, but plays. in them we find fanciful elements that might possibly be associated with folklore. lancelot battles a dragon in schvarts’s play of that name and seeks to rescue a maiden. the troika in the story by the strugatskys rules in a magically removed kingdom which is on an impossibly high floor of a building rather than laterally distant and located thrice-nine kingdoms away. but the connection to folklore is not discussed. the introductions discuss the relationship of the tales in that section to each other; they do not deal with relationships across sections. what “that very munchausen,” another play, has to do with folklore is not clear. munchausen does make things happen by willing them, but this brings it closer to zamiatin’s literary skazki than to fairytales. the book under review seems to be a print version of readings assembled for a course. as such, the texts here were presumably accompanied by explanations, discussions, other readings, other texts: information that overcame the problems noted above. without supplementary material, this book might be used as a reader by others if they are careful to provide their own context. special care should be taken to contextualize the folk materials published here. as already noted, folktales are not treated with the same care as literary works, making them seem less valid as texts. soviet engineering of folklore itself, a topic treated by frank miller in folklore for stalin, is ignored, as if only soviet literary works are important. natalie kononenko university of alberta contributors who are used to bibliographical reference systems operating in the various countries of central and eastern europ 74 russian folk traditions. institute of russian literature (pushkinskii dom) and norman ross: 2000. sixteen cd set. $420 russian folk traditions is the second of two compact disc sets released in the united states by norman ross publishing (available for order on their web site at http://www.nross.com/cart/pd02.html). the first, nonrussian folk traditions (ten titles on twelve discs), features recordings of folk music from the peoples of central asia, the caucasus and siberia. russian folk traditions consists of fifteen titles on sixteen discs of material culled from the phonogram archives of the institute of russian literature (pushkinskii dom, russian academy of sciences) in saint petersburg. the discs are entitled: russian epics; ballads; historical songs; spiritual poetry; lamentations of the russian north; wedding songs and incantations; pagan calendar songs; lyrical songs; recruit and soldiers� songs; fairy tales; limericks (chastushki); children�s folklore (including lullabies); incantations; instrumental music; song traditions of the russian dukhobors (two discs). each disc features a playlist (in russian) that includes the title and running time of each piece; the name of the performer; the date and location (republic, province [oblast�], region [raion] and/or village) of the recording; and the name of the recorder. the strength of this set is the sound quality of each and every recording. those of us who have struggled to decipher tapes of poor-quality vinyl records reproducing even poorer-quality recordings will reap great benefits from this set. digital re-mastering has rendered all the material, even that taped in the early years of the twentieth century, clear and audible. these recordings make it much more likely that russian folk music will engage students, since the sound quality allows the beauty of the folk material to shine. while i welcomed owning this music and used it in my russian folklore class, overall i find that this set suffers from a significant number of limitations. the first problem is minor and could easily be corrected; in some cases the playlists are incorrect, which renders the information provided useless. this is particularly noticeable on the russian epics disc, where, for example, a purported twenty-minute track runs for only nine minutes, and the playlist states that there are eight epic tracks, while there are in fact twelve. a more serious lapse from the point of view of specialists is that the publisher does not include invaluable ethnographic information about the recordings. i was left to wonder whether the songs were still sung actively at the time of the recording or whether they were memories of past celebrations that had died out. in addition, whether these songs represent current practice or past performance, establishing who performed a song, to whom and at what point in a ritual is necessary to comprehend its significance. it is also unclear why these particular songs or prose recordings were chosen. those who are not specialists in russian ethnomusicology or folk music cannot determine whether they might represent a particularly fine example of the genre or might be distinctive in form, style or melody. what is most vexing about this lack of information is that all the expertise and information necessary to make this set a valuable scholarly tool is certainly available from the personnel and archives in pushkinskii dom. since none of this information is provided, it is impossible to use these songs as an effective folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 http://www.nross.com/cart/pd02.html 75 teaching or research tool. we can only hope that the publisher chooses to rectify these lapses in any future endeavors into folk music and in later releases of this set. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby university of kentucky folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 marking death: representations of beliefs about the dead in ukrainian cemeteries anne ingram, university of virginia cemeteries are repositories of concrete depictions of beliefs about the dead. their location and layout, the vegetation growing on and around graves, and grave markers all serve as physical representations of beliefs about the dead, of the relationship between the living and the dead, and reflect cultural concerns. as i mentioned in my doctoral dissertation, the dearly not-quite departed: funerary rituals and beliefs about the dead in ukrainian culture, the arrangements of graves. the placement of grave markers, and the inscriptions on grave markers in ukrainian cemeteries have symbolic significance; they illuminate elements of ukrainian beliefs about the dead. although i cannot present every aspect of this subject here, i will demonstrate that an examination ofthe material culture of funerary rituals, and of cemeteries and their contents, provides evidence of concern with boundaries and demonstrates that death is depicted in terms of territorial boundaries. the data in this article comes primarily from my field work in ukraine. the bulk of my fieldwork was carried out in the spring and summer of 1997 with native folklorists and ethnographers in central, southern, and western ukraine. the material culture, such as grave markers and cemetery layout, is depicted in photographs from my fieldwork in all three regions in my dissertation, although i am not able to include them here. the focus of my discussion here will be territorial symbolism depicting beliefs about the journey the dead undergo and that depicting the relationship between the living and the dead. my analysis relies heavily on mary douglas' theories on order, disorder and anomaly. \ although she discusses neither funerals nor ukrainian folklore in her work, these theories can illuminate a number of aspects of ukrainian funerary rituals, including territorial symbolism. according to douglas, humans have a need to impose order on existence in order to deal with the multitude of occurrences, objects, and people they encounter in daily life. people impose order by creating categories and attempting to fit all that they encounter into these categories. those elements which do not fit are anomalies: douglas defines anomaly as "an element which does not fit a given set or series."~ she predicates portions of her theories on the concept that societies are structured and therefore have boundaries and margins, and points out that margins can be dangerous. both boundaries and margins are anomalous (or at least ambiguous) in that they belong to neither one nor the other category, hence their designation as potential dangers. tied into this concept is the idea that the body serves as a symbol for society, and concerns about entrances and exits (which are margins in that they are the outer limits of the object in question) can be represented on the body. these ideas are relevant in that a number of instances of marking and crossing boundaries appear not only in funerary rituals, but also in graveyards. based on my visits to a number of cemeteries in different regions of ukraine, ukrainian page 21 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 graveyards have similar locations and layouts, vegetation, and grave markers. there are, however, some differences based on age, location, and status of the graveyard. very old graveyards have different layouts and vegetation than newer ones, and city cemeteries are located in slightly different areas than those serving villages. also, cemeteries which are "closed," meaning people are no longer buried in them, have different layouts and vegetation than those that are "open," or currently used for burials. ukrainian village graveyards are usually located on the outskirts of the village. it is fairly rare to find one within the confines ofthe village, and on those occasions that one does, the graveyards are invariably old ones. this, in combination with the fact that most graveyards are outside of villages, indicates that they were probably outside ofthe village when they were first designated as cemeteries, and that the village later expanded, encompassing the cemetery as it did so. old cemeteries are easily identifiable; in addition to having markers with long-ago death dates and/or inscriptions illegible from years of erosion by weathering, they also have a large number of uncared-for graves and graves with no marker at all. graves are cared for as long as there are living relatives in the area; when there are no longer living relatives and no one remembers whose graves they are, the graves are left to deteriorate. it is also very possible that city and town cemeteries originally lay beyond the boundaries of the settlements. however, one has to keep in mind that there are more severe space limitations in cities and towns. the boundaries of graveyards, based on my extensive visits, are clearly marked. ukrainians mark the territory of graveyards in one of two ways: with a fence or with a ditch. city and town cemeteries generally are marked with a fence, as are most village cemeteries. these fences are usually metal and ofthe picket variety; they are very tall. all fenced cemeteries have at least one gate. if there is more than one gate, one gate is designated as the main entrance. village cemeteries are sometimes marked only by a ditch surrounding the perimeters. there is still, however, a well-worn path leading to the cemetery which serves as the main entrance. thus, in villages, towns, and cities, the territory of a cemetery is clearly delineated and separated from other territory, and there are defined passages in and out of the cemetery space. the separation ofthe cemetery from the rest of the settlement is significant, in light of issues of boundary-crossing. the dead are very clearly separated from the living, and confined within a bounded space. access to their space is limited; there are traditional entrances and exits to and from that space. the cemetery is a physical representation of traditional beliefs; the dead are separate and reside away from the living, and access to the dead, as well as their access to the living, is restricted rather than free. while there are a number of instances of boundary-crossing and concern about boundaries in ukrainian funerary rituals, due to space limitations i will mention only a few here. the bounding of graveyards is one example of this concern, as is the following belief, cited by iv. seef a journal page 22 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 ben'kovskii in his discussion of reasons the folk give for placing money in the coffin or the grave: no llpyromy }i{e oli1,hchehilo, cnbilliahhomy mhoio kak1, b tom }i{e 3acnabckom1, yt3l1t h ot1, toro }i{e nhtla, tak1, h b1, c.monqahax1,. ctapokohctahthhobckaro yt3l1a. " rpolllh mepl.\ebh b1,mofhitiy knanyt ha tee. iii,o ha thm1, cbhth llyllia mae ctohthi ha bapth, kono hkohcb lipambi. h hk1, mae nph colih rpolllbi, to ckopo bhllkynbil.\h bhllb tbleh bapth h llobro ctohth he liylle; a hk1, he mae qhm1, bhllkynbitbich, -to liylle 3 llobro ctohthi ha bapth ". according to the second explanation, which i heard in the same zaslav'skyi uezd and from that same person, as well as in the village of moichana, starokonstantinovs'kyi uezd, "money is placed in the coffin for the deceased because in the other world the soul has to stand on guard, by some kind of gates, and if it has money, it can quickly buy off the guards and will not have to stand long, but if it doesn't have anything to buy [them] off with, then it will stand on guard a long time." ben'kovskii's explanation does not coincide with any ofthe explanations i heard. however, the implication that the dead reside in a different place does appear in contemporary belief, and gates are an important element in ukrainian funerary rituals and beliefs, as in ukrainian life. in the funeral proper, the gate of the fence surrounding the yard and the gate at the entrance to the cemetery are both marked and treated as special during the funeral procession. the existence of gates at the boundaries of the other world ties in with other beliefs about the dead and ukrainian worldview. the gates also are symbolic of the boundary crossing that occurs in the journey from life to death; the journey and the accompanying boundary crossing are physically represented in the journey from the home to the graveyard through several gates during the funeral service. just as the cemetery is bounded, so, apparently, is the other world. in addition, ben 'kovskii notes that if the corpse's mouth is open, the head will be tied with a scarf to force it shut. he offers no explanation for the practice of closing the mouth, but in light of beliefs in both prerevolutionary and contemporary ukrainian folklore that the corpse's eyes must be shut, open facial orifices seem to present a danger to the living.4 this practice may at first glance seem unrelated to the belief that the other world is protected with gates and the practice of bounding cemetery territory. however, the link becomes clear if one considers douglas' theories on body symbolism. the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. the body is a complex structure. the functions of its different parts and their relation afford a course of symbols for other complex structures ...powers and dangers credited to social structure [are] reproduced in small on the human body.5 douglas also states that the margins to which a society attributes power or danger depends on the concerns of the society.6 using douglas' theories on the body human as a symbol for the body politic, page 23 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 samantha masone has demonstrated that for the east slavs. beliefs and practices involving the mouth represent societal concerns about margins. according to the quadrant system conceptualized by mary douglas, russian and ukrainian societies, particularly as they existed under the communist system, are more closely aligned with the characteristics of quadrant d than with any other quadrant...the social mentality ofthese groups typically places an emphasis upon the protection of the group from outside forces. naturally, margins or orifices are of vast importance to both the society and its members as points of contact with such foreign influences, and thus possible entry. ifwe accept the theory of mary douglas that orifices ofthe body are thought to mirror the margins or boundaries of society, this means that there are a limited number of openings to deal with on the physical body. for these particular slavs, the mouth is the orifice of primary importance on the physical body. this is evidenced by the fact that there are a number of everyday rituals which the russians and ukrainians engage in that involve taking food or drink into the body.? thus, the belief that the mouth must be shut is connected to the other instances cited, as it is further evidence of a concern about boundaries. the mouth serves as an entrance and an exit, much as a gate does; the mouth takes in food and air, and allows air and the soul to leave the body. closing the mouth seems to be primarily aimed at protecting the living, but it may also be intended to protect the dead; the dead while in transition are both dangerous and in danger, in accordance with douglas' theories. more interesting for this discussion are the implications ofthe above for attitudes toward boundary crossing. the body boundaries of the deceased are closed, the house and yard are closed up. the cemetery too is bounded, entrance and exit are often physically controlled with gates as in the case of the yard, and at least at one point there was a belief that the other world was bounded. also, according to this belief, the other world is not only bounded, but there are guards at its borders. taken as a whole, these indicate a concern with territorial boundary crossing, but also with the crossing of category boundaries, or anomaly. the living and the dead are separated by the boundaries of the graveyard and the boundaries of the other world; there seems to be an attempt here to firmly fix these categories and their limits or margins with physical representations of boundaries. death is, in a sense, the ultimate disorder, and break with the community. it leaves a gap in the social structure; the roles that the deceased filled are left empty. plans and expectations are left in disarray. order is reestablished by firmly fixing boundaries between living and dead and between different types of dead. although it lies beyond the scope of this discussion, i should mention that several categories of dead can be distinguished in ukrainian practices, legends, and beliefs. one of these categories is the unquiet dead, who differ from the "normal" dead due to factors such as the age at which they died and the nature of their deaths, as d.k. zelenin posits in his discussion of east slavic dead.s in ukraine, unquiet dead traditionally have been buried separately from those who are not unquiet9 seef a journal page 24 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 inside the gates or ditch, the layout of the graves differs according to the age ofthe cemetery. while graves in newer cemeteries are arranged in rows, with narrow spaces between each row and each grave, older cemeteries do not display the same sort of linear layout. in these, the graves seem to be squeezed in every available space, and some graves are very difficult to access. there are no identifiable rows or aisles, simply winding paths through the markers. even in the newer cemeteries, there are rarely defined paths between graves -there are simply spaces where it is possible to walk. in "open" cemeteries. there are generally old and new sections which are fairly distinct. in "closed" cemeteries, the two are generally mixed. the cemeteries start out with orderly linear layouts--an attempt, perhaps to impose order on disorder. however, just as disorder and anomaly inevitably occur in life, graveyards too become disordered, and then are "closed". order is created, subverted, and reestablished in the physical space of the cemetery. vegetation in ukrainian cemeteries is perhaps the most surprising aspect for americans. although most cemeteries, and particularly those in cities, seem to have a caretaker, they do not provide "perpetual care" or other individual services standard in american cemeteries. in those regions which are grassy, the grass in the graveyard is not a sea of perfectly manicured greenery. there are no sprinklers, no mowing services. grass is allowed to grow freely between graves, on abandoned graves, and in empty spaces. large trees may grow out of older graves. on some newer graves one can find both green and flowering plants. one woman said that pine trees and roses were the items most frequently planted on graves. 10 another said that roses were planted on the graves of young people, and that cherry, plum, aspen, and lilac trees were planted on graves for all dead, but that maple trees and cranberry were never planted on graves. i i she did not specify why these are not planted on graves, but the fact that there are customs indicating which ones may be planted points to the fact that this practice is significant and symbolic. if it were done simply for the sake of decoration, or for no real reason at all, there would not be customary taboos on planting certain trees. in addition, the practice is represented on ritual towels or rushnyky, which incorporate symbolic motifs in their designs. one example is a rushnyk in the collection of the the regional ethnographic museum in cherkasy, which has embroidered depictions oftwo fenced graves with trees growing on them.12 the placement of plants and trees on graves may be linked with the physical representation of graves and houses and with vladimir propp's comments on the connection between vegetation and the dead. just as trees and plants are planted in yards, so they are on graves. the custom also recalls the connection between agricultural fertility and the dead. as propp noted, ... bunho. xto, no rpeqeckum npenctcumehuhm. nokohhuku. haxonhch non 3emneh. mornu umetb bnactb han yp0)j{aem ... tak 06ctohno neno he tonbko y rpekob u pumnhh, tak oiictohno neno u y npebhux cnabhh. bot noqemy 3a60ta 0 nocebax coqetaetch c 3a60toh 0 nokohhukax u hocutnbohkuh xapaktep: ycomllux hano page 25 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 ymhtiocthbhth,hano bhlpa3hthhmcboiotiloliobh,noqhtahhe. ho 3toromano. l1x hano nonnep:>kathnhllj,eii,nhthemh tentiom,hano chhmhtpane30bath, hano octabtihthhm eny ha momtiax... ho h 3toromano. hano oliecneqhthhm he totihko:>kh3hh,hohiieccmepthe.hano nphoiillj,hthhx kkpyrooiiopoty:>kh3hh-cmepth-:>kh3hh,kotophim:>khbet nphpona h kotophiiihy:>keh3emtientihiw,hano, qtolihiohhh 13camhcnocoiictbobatih3tomykpyroooopoty· ... it is clear, that according greek conceptions, the dead, located in the earth, could have power over crops ...so it was not only for the greeks and romans, but also for the ancient slavs. this is why the concern about crops combines with concern about the dead and bears a dual character: the dead must be propitiated, love and honor must be expressed to them. but this is not enough. they must be supported with food. drink, and warmth, it is necessary to share meals with them, to place food on their graves ...and this is not enough. it is necessary to provide them not only with life, but with eternal life. it is necessary to associate them with the circuit of life --death -life, in which nature lives and which is necessary to the farmer, necessary, so that they themselves promoted this circuit. although he is speaking of russian holidays and beliefs, his comments are apropos for my discussion: the east slavs share a number of beliefs, and customs similar to ones propp discusses appear in the ukrainian tradition. just as there are prohibitions on what may be planted on graves, there are prohibitions against taking items from graves. the same woman who listed the types of trees placed in graveyards stated that one could not take fruit from the graveyard. 14 another woman said that you cannot take flowers, or anything from the graveyard, but did not know why.15 two reasons were given by one ukrainian: she said that it is a sin to take anything from a cemetery ("mhe ka:>kethchllj,0qe rphx3a1ihpath.") and added that the deceased might come after you if you take things from the cemetery. 16 the prohibition on taking items from a cemetery and the belief that the dead will come to yoll if you do so makes sense if one understands that graves are traditionally believed to be the houses of the dead. several of the terms used to describe a coffin come from the root "house", and the motif of coffin as hollse appears frequently in both old and contemporary laments. evidence ofthis belief is not limited to oral culture. grave markers, and particularly metal crosses, are overwhelmingly painted in the colors used to decorate houses. the colors primarily used to decorate houses are blue and green, and to some degree white. in western ukraine, silver appears. i was first struck by this in the village ofvelikyi khutir in cherkas'ka oblast'. every house we passed or visited in that village was covered in white paint, and the corners and windows ofthe homes were painted in green, with very few exceptions. the few exceptions had blue in place of the green. i later mentioned this fact to halyna kornienko, the folklorist with whom i collected in cherkas'ka oblast', asking her why. she answered that if the graves are houses, it makes sense to paint the markers, since houses are also painted. her seef a journal page 26 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 reply is logical if one takes it farther, the connection becomes more clear. the villagers could paint the graves any color; there are other colors of paint. their choice of specifically the colors used to decorate houses makes the house/grave connection explicit. this is not the only evidence of the physical representation of graves as houses, however, in the interest of space, i will not give further examples here. instead, i will limit myself to mentioning a few examples from rituals connected with the dead which also demonstrate this belief. for individual memorial rituals, the living go to visit the dead and leave food and drink on the graves for the dead.17 the same custom is practiced in many regions on some holidays. 1mone woman stated that provoden' is the proper holiday for visiting the dead, saying that her grandmother told her that people should not go to the cemetery on easter, when the dead go visiting one another. 19 these ritual practices and the beliefs associated with them demonstrate that the dead are depicted as residing in the cemetery, and that their graves seem to function as homes. the issue of the colors used to paint grave markers is only one of several productive paths of inquiry into expressions of beliefs about the dead in material culture. styles of markers and grave types also provide valuable evidence of beliefs and practices. marker styles have changed to some degree over time and also differ regionally. the oldest markers are generally stone, metal and wooden crosses. one wooden cross i found in western ukraine is interesting in that it has been carved with plant designs, a further indication of a link between the dead and vegetation. another variant style is the roofed cross, of which i found contemporary examples in central and western ukraine. these are certainly modern variants of a traditional marker style; hnat koltsuniak includes five drawings of roofed crosses in the table accompanying the detailed article on types offolk crosses in kolomyishchyna he wrote eighty years ago.20 these roofed crosses seem to be further examples of the physical representation of the grave as home. another popular type of marker, which i found many times in all three regions of ukraine, is a tree. this marker is constructed of off-white or dark brown stone and carved to form a realisticlooking tree trunk. i was told by one man in cherkas'ka oblast'21 that these markers were used on graves of jews and poles, and i did find the largest number of them in a "closed" jewish cemetery in kherson, but the names on these markers in all other cemeteries does not support this statement. trees . are frequently used motifs on rushnyky, and the tree of life is a cross-cultural motif. when one also considers that trees have traditionally been planted on ukrainian graves and that there is a connection between the dead and vegetation, the markers become more significant and seem to fit a pattern. in addition to those markers which are exact replicas of trees, i also found markers which are mixtures of the tree and other elements of grave marker styles. for example, the tree and the cross are frequently encountered in one grave marker.22 mykola mozdyr notes that there is a correlation between the tree and the cross in his detailed discussion of markers and their makers.23 page 27 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 although similar markers appear in different regions, there is also regional variation. some southern markers appear neither in central nor western ukraine, and some western markers do not appear in either southern or central ukraine. regional variations are to be expected in grave markers. since there is regional variation in other elements of funerals. a further example of vegetation motifs is the placement oflarge metal tulips on either side of a grave. a phenomenon apparently unique to southern ukraine. although i asked a number of people about these, no one assigned them any particular significance. however, they seem to be part of the grave as house theme, as i also saw the tulips used as a motif on the gate of the fences. which are used throughout much of ukraine to enclose homesteads, and in place of the carved horse head traditionally located at the edge of the peak ofthe roof. the correlation between house and marker colors and the use of the tulip motif on both homes and graves are further evidence of the perception of the grave as a house. the use of the tulip is also interesting when considered in conjunction with propp's comments on the connection between vegetation and the dead, and the longstanding relationship between the living and the dead. the tulip may be a symbol both of the linkage between the dead and agricultural fertility and the fact that relationships are not severed by death, as visits to the cemetery for memorial services and holidays, to cite only one of many pieces of evidence, attest. just as markers and decorations can shed light on belief, so too can the graves themselves. tjnlike american graves, ukrainian graves rise at least slightly above the level of the surrounding ground. the simplest graves are simply low rectangular mounds. others have a large rectangular stone perpendicular to the grave marker, a sort of platform which serves nicely as a table when bringing food to the cemetery. finally, some graves are surrounded by metal, stone, or wood; these materials are used to create a rectangle, the center of which is filled with earth. all ofthese grave types mark the territory of the grave, and in the case of the latter two types, bound it. this is significant because of issues of boundary crossing. not only is the cemetery bounded, but so is the grave, and one is not to cross those boundaries. a group of family graves may be surrounded by a fence. aside from bounding the family graves, this also recalls the classic ukrainian homestead, which is inhabited by several generations and bounded by a fence. thus, both the graves themselves and cemeteries display evidence of concern about boundary crossing. individual graves, family graves, and the territory of the cemetery are all clearly bounded and separated from adjoining territory, as are homesteads. the cemetery is like a village of the dead. the dead have their village parallel to that ofthe living. the two are separated by physical boundaries. this delineation of living and dead seems to be an attempt to physically fix the boundaries of the two categories, physically control the upset of order, and establish order on disorder. this is supported by the existence of categories of dead; not only living and dead but living and several types seef a journal page 28 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 of dead can be distinguished. there are normal dead, split into the subcategories of dead in transition and incorporated dead, and anomalous dead, which split into the subcategories of those who will remain anomalous and in transition until their natural death would have occurred, and anomalous dead who can be reclassified through a variant of the standard funerary ritual, the wedding of the dead. to paraphrase douglas, in the search for order, there is a constant battle with disorder. order is imposed on the disorder of death, disorder appears, and order is reestablished in a continuous cycle. attempts to maintain order are depicted through physical representations. the graves also provide evidence to support characterizations in laments of the grave as home, as do some grave markers. notes note: full names for all interviewees are in my private archive. the abbreviation s. standsfor village (ceno). r-n.for region (paiioh). and obi. for county (oeliactb). i. mary douglas, purity and danger: an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo (n .p., n.p., 1966; reprint new york and london: routledge, 1992). 2. douglas 37. 3. iv. benkovskii, "smert', pogrebenie i zagrobnaia zhizn' po poniatiiam i verovaniiu naroda". in kievskaia starina, t. 54, 1896,254-255. 4. iv. ben'kovskii, 244. 5. douglas, 115. 6. douglas, 121. 7. samantha sturmer, "open wide: dental care as social symbol" (m.a. thesis, university of virginia, 1993), 13 and 15. 8. anne ingram, "the dearly not-quite departed: funerary rituals and beliefs about the dead in ukrainian culture" (ph.d. diss., university of virginia, 1998), 125-134, and d.k. zelenin, ocherki russkoi mifologii: umershie neestestvennoiu smertiu i rusalki (n.p., n.p.: reprint, moscow: indrik, 1995) 138-140, 150-152. 9. ingram, 125-128, 135-136. 10. agrapina kharytonivna, collected by author and halyna kornienko, s.moshny, cherkas'kyi r-n, cherkas'ka obi., 4-16-97. ii. halyna ivanivna, collected by author and halyna kornienko, s.subotiv, chyhyryns'kyi r-n, cherkas'ka obi., 5-9-97. 12. ingram, 192. 13. vladimir propp, russkie agrarnve prazdniki (leningrad: leningradskyi gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1963; reprint, st. petersburg: azbuka, 1995) 33-34 (page numbers refer to reprint edition). 14. halyna ivanivna, 5-9-97. 15. nadezhda ivanivna, collected by author and hanna chumachenko, s.kardashynka, holoprystans'kyi r-n, 6-1-97. 16. klavdiia opanasivna, collected by author, smt.kalanchak, kalanchats'kyi r-n, 6-4-97. 17. for example, vira vasylivna, collected by author and halyna kornienko, s.velykyi khutir, drabivs'kyi r-n, cherkas'ka obi., 4-22-97; mariia lakivna and nadiia fylipovna, collected by author and halyna kornienko, s.popivka, zvenyhorods'kyi r-n, cherkas'ka obi., 4-29-97; nataliia mykolaivna and husband, collected by author, m.tsiurupins'k, tsiurupins'kyi r-n, khersons'ka obl.,6-8-97; liudmila andriivna, collected by author and hanna chumachenko, s.oleksandrivka, bilozers'kyi r-n, khersons'ka page 29 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 obi., 6-13-97: mykola petrovych and ekateryna ivanivna, originally from western ukraine, collected by author and lena golikova, s.verbivka, beryslavs'kyi r-n, khersons'ka obi., 6-14-97. 18. for example, ol"ha lurievna, collected by author and halyna kornienko, s.moshny, cherkas'kyi r-n, cherkas'ka obi.. 4-16-97: halyna ivanivna, 5-9-97; nadezhda serhiivna and iryna mykhailivna, collected by author and nataliia timchenko, s.kardashynka, holoprystans'kyi r-n, khersons'ka obi., 5-31-97. 19. agafiia evmenivna, collected by author and halyna kornienko, s.subotiv, chyhyryns'kyi r-n, cherkas'ka obi.. 5-7-97 . . 20. hnat koltsuniak. "narodn"i khresty v kolomyishchyna". in materiialy do ukra"insko"ietnol"ogi"i, t.1920, (l 'viv: naukove tovarystvo imeny shevchenka, 1919). 21. informal conversation with mykola mykolaiovych, s.ryzyne, zvenyhorods'kyi r-n, cherkas'ka obi.. 4-29-97. 22. ingram, 202-204. 23. mykola mozdyr, ukra"in'ska narodna skul 'ptura (kiev: naukova dumka, 1996), 11. seef a journal page 30 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 contributors who are used to bibliographical reference systems operating in the various countries of central and eastern europ 76 vladimir s. kliaus. traditsionnaia kul�tura starobriadtsev (semeiskikh) zabaikal�ia. cd-rom. required system: pentium pc 233 mhz, 64 meg ram, 48x cd-rom, windows 98, internet explorer 5.5. flash player and flash active x are provided on the cd. images, audio, video, a searchable full-text bibliography of 500 titles. 2001. $32.00. compact disks are capable of holding an enormous amount of information and have the advantage of presenting data in a variety of formats. thus, the same cd can hold text, sound files, video and still images. kliaus and his collaborators have utilized the capacity of digital technology to give us a treasure trove of old believer data on one cd. the cd under review has a short introductory essay. it also contains a terrific bibliography that is divided into useful categories such as the history of old believer settlements, dialect studies, collections of folklore data, including children�s folklore, calendary and life cycle rituals, and collections of prose, song and incantation texts. there are lists of studies that focus on material culture and studies that deal with old believer farming techniques. literary works that mention old believers are referenced, as are archives with repositories of old believer materials. the bibliography goes beyond published and archival works to include lists of available audio and video recordings, old believer web sites and old believer organizations. i am not an old believer specialist, but the bibliography seems marvelously complete. furthermore, in addition to giving citations, the bibliography allows the user to click on selected shorter pieces, usually articles, to view the full text. according to the introduction, the provided articles are the ones that are hardest to find. thus the bibliography of this cd either directs the user to the source of a particular item or, in those cases where location is difficult, provides the item itself. finally, the cd has a yandex search engine. with a russian keyboard installed, words can be typed, or pasted, into the search page where boolean searches can be performed in any one of thirty different categories. the search engine works beautifully, searching all of the text files, bibliographic citations, folklore texts and article texts on the entire cd. this allows not only location of desired studies or texts; it allows actual research on the cd itself. a scholar can type in a word or a phrase and see in which types of folklore texts it appears, and in which contexts. the cd goes well beyond providing an excellent bibliography and search engine. there are collections of photographs for twenty-two old believer villages and a set of photos of icons. the sets of photographs contain both recent ones made by kliaus and his colleagues on their expeditions to the zabaikal region and copies of old photos. there are also fourteen sets of audio files from twelve villages and twenty-three short video clips. the audio files offer a variety of genres. songs of various types are included and there are examples of prose texts such as tales and legends. some of these are transcribed; most are not. again, most are new recordings, but digitized versions of songs collected in the past are also included. the short video clips show several types of healing rituals, baptisms, commemorations of the dead, and private and public prayers. a selection of song and prose texts from published sources is included. folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 77 the old believer cd may contain a vast quantity of information but it does have problems, both technical and scholarly. for example, some materials are thoroughly documented and others are documented poorly. the problem is most acute with the photographs. we are told in which village they were taken, but often that is all of the information given. thus, we do not know who the people in the photographs are or what is important about them. are we supposed to notice their dress? are they the performers who are the sources of the songs or narratives in the audio files? are they performing a ritual? i did notice the costumes and the ritual acts, but there may well be other things that i overlooked. some of the old photographs that have been digitized for this cd do have captions, but the resolution is often so bad that the captions are virtually illegible. in addition, the resolution of number of the new photographs, the ones taken by kliaus and his team, is quite poor. it seems that the members of the expedition learned to use their digital camera over time and the quality of some of the photos is good; however, most of the photos have huge pixels and thus are blurry. the reflection off the icons often obscures the icon itself. the copies of black and white photos have not been put through a filter to remove the frequent moiré effect. similar problems appear elsewhere. the lighting on a number of videos is bad and this makes it hard to see what is going on. the videos are extremely short and, in addition to the many technical problems, one questions the editing of the clips. were these really the most important actions? should not a woman�s discussion of her aches and pains be cut so that we could see more of the wax ceremony she is doing? or is her complaint about her own problems relevant to an understanding of her as a folk healer? probably the worst in terms of technical problems is the audio files section, in which one is supposed to click on the village in which the recordings were made. a page then opens with a picture of the medium in which the recording originally appeared: a record, a cd, or a set of earphones, presumably meaning that the recording was on a tape or an audiocassette. the user then has to run the cursor over the record or cd or earphones and a list of song titles should appear. i say �should� because this does not always happen. the cursor has to be dragged in a particular direction and that direction only and, sometimes, before the user has a chance to drag the cursor as far as the desired song title, all titles disappear and the process must begin anew. in the case of one set of sound files, i never managed to get the song titles to come up at all. once the sound files are opened, they are quite good. the source is always given. if it is an existing recording, there is full bibliographic information. if it is a new recording made by kliaus and his team, we get the name of the performer or performers and a picture, the date of collection, and the name of the collector. for a number of songs, there is a transcript of the song, story or other audio recording. in short, if you can get the sound files to open, they are excellent and the selection is good, so that there are samples of all basic oral genres. the next technical issue is one of venue. the cute pictures of phonograph records, cd�s and earphones, as well as many of the other features of this disk, are done in flash, which is a quirky program that makes this cd unusable in the classroom. having discovered that there were good genre samples on this disk, i wanted to play them for my students. this proved impossible because, while i could use the cd at home, the equipment in classrooms could not handle it and it routinely crashed. the same proved true with the videos: i could watch folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 78 them at home, but not show them to my students unless i copied them over to another cd at home and played the videos off my own disk. somewhere between the problem of documentation and technical difficulties is the lack of directions on how to use the cd. when the user puts this disk into the computer, it loads automatically. what comes up is a map with some production credits and directions for exiting the cd; there are no directions for opening it. because i am familiar with a variety of digital conventions, i soon understood that i was to click on the part of the map that showed the region where old believers live. i am not so sure that someone with less familiarity with digital technologies would know where to begin. similar problems appear all the way through. i discovered the library only recently and more or less by accident. there are no directions to guide the user, who must then randomly click on objects to see what, if anything, happens. with all of the technical difficulties this cd presents, i am still very glad i own it. even though i do not teach old believer folklore, the healing practices of this group are similar enough to mainstream russian practices for me to use the video clips in class. the same applies to the sound files. as already noted, the various materials are not easy to use and need to be copied to make them run smoothly. but having illustrative material of this sort adds so much to a course that it is worth the effort. i am grateful for the photos, bad quality images included. even though they are too fuzzy to use in class, they are interesting as comparative material for my own research. i should also add that, as someone who does fieldwork, i am most sympathetic to kliaus and his team. in the countryside, lighting is not always good, the electricity may be switched off and batteries impossible to find. does that mean it is not worth photographing a ritual practice? i would say one does the best one can; data, no matter how marginal, is infinitely preferable to no data at all. i also work with digital technologies and, again, kliaus and his team have my sympathies. when working with digital formats, one tries to anticipate where users will look, what they will click on, how they will proceed through the assembled data. my team and i are always looking for feedback so that we can improve our work. i hope that this review will help kliaus and his team produce an even better cd in the near future. natalie kononenko university of virginia microsoft word contentsqsoft.doc 156 zuzana profantová, ed. traditional culture as a part of the cultural heritage of europe. the presence and perspective of folklore and folkloristics (etnologické štúdie 8). bratislava: institute of the ethnology of slovak academy of sciences, 2003. 140 pp. isbn: 8089069-09-6. during the soviet era, the united states and the soviet union, with its soviet bloc countries, differed in their respective definitions of what constituted folklore. in the former communist nations, folklore was defined narrowly as oral literature, folk music, and folk dance. in the united states, many genres and traditions that were either ignored or placed under the domain of ethnography or ethnology in the communist bloc countries were categorized as folklore. examples include, among others, studies of material culture, such as pottery, and modern genres, such as graffiti, which berkeley folklorist alan dundes dubbed “latrinalia.” since the fall of the soviet union and the demise of communism, russia and the former bloc nations have struggled to adapt to changes in ideology, in government, in lifestyle, and in worldview. under the influence of globalization and westernization, people and countries have been required to change. the old definition of folklore has come under scrutiny and has been found to be too narrow to accommodate a global, modern, technological age. lively discussions have ensued regarding challenges and definitions. in traditional culture as a part of the cultural heritage of europe, zuzana profantová has edited a compendium of articles that explore the challenges that a modern age brings to defining, recording, and archiving folklore for posterity. the articles grew out of an october 25, 2002 conference in bratislava that was inspired by unesco’s “convention on the protection of the world cultural and natural heritage” (1972). in “past, present, and future of the 1989 unesco recommendation on the safeguarding of folklore in memory of lauri honko,” vilmos voigt traces the history and political ploys involved in the eventual passing of the resolution that was initially written jointly by lauri honko of finland, voigt of hungary, and ralph rinser of the smithsonian. unesco folklorists were intent on creating a document on “how to conduct and protect fieldwork, archives, publication and dissemination of genuine folklore,” how to deal with copyright issues, and how to distinguish between folklore, fakelore, and folklorisms (21). folklorica 2007, vol. xii 157 radost ivanova writes about the modernization of bulgarian folklore (“processes of modernization in the folklore tradition”), wigdis espeland writes about norwegian identity (“folklore on stage: identity in local, national and international context”), and ilona nagy explores the influence of the computer on the results of the 2002 hungarian elections (“folklore in statu nascendi—hungarian election 2002”). most of the twenty articles address slovakia’s challenges. hana hlôšková traces the academic development of the study of folklore in “teaching folkloristics at universities in slovakia.” she states that in slovakia folkloristics is a part of ethnology since it addresses the evolution of folklore, its performers, content, and form (45). until 1991 an education in ethnology was offered only at the faculty of arts at comenius university in bratislava. folkloristics dealt with oral folklore, and folk music studies were a branch of musicology. hlôšková places into historical context the names of great scholars, such as karel chotek, piotr grigorievič bogatyriov, jiři polívka, and andrej melicherčik. at present, the department of ethnology is headed by milan leščák. juraj hamar discusses problems connected with the presentation of folklore on stage in “folklore on stage in politics and the media.” he complains that the state no longer sponsors groups on the basis of merit as it did earlier, and therefore monetary considerations predominate. this leads to a noticeable lowering of artistic level and the replacement of traditional groups with groups that have mass appeal. he states that the idea that folklore was the puppet of communism is a sad legacy of totalitarianism that has led to the discrediting of folklore by the intelligentsia (67). ivan murín continues the theme in “on the problem of movement and dance analysis in contemporary fieldwork records.” dance has undergone modern transformations, but residues of folk dance can be found at weddings, at maypole dances, and at shrovetide. murín suggests that computer analysis and virtual modeling are a starting point for analyzing dance transformations. in “the heritage of folk prose in modern fantastic fiction,” ondrej herec lends a jungian interpretation of folk prose and speculative fabulation, which encompasses the genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy. he refers to the commercialization of fandom with accompanying computer games, tv series, toys, films, and other products that have transformed the medium from written word to other forms. in a study of wwi narratives (“shifted focuses? thematic studies of oral narratives in contemporary folkloristics”) gabriela kiliánová folklorica 2007, vol. xii 158 has found that, since the end of the 1960s, wwi stories about the experiences of ordinary men and women have disappeared in slovakia and have been replaced with wwii stories. wwi hastened social changes, leading, for example, to the emancipation of women. slovakian stereotypes of heaven and hell are explored by helena tužinská in “decoupled cognition. example of mental representations of heaven and hell.” in her opinion, concepts of heaven are hedonistic, ascetic, or ambivalent, and concepts of hell are spiritual or a mix of natural and spiritual,l with emphasis on hell as a place of punishment. the authors of several articles discuss genre classification and changing definitions of familiar terms, such as ethnography, ethnology, and folkloristics. (milan leščák in neue situation und alte offene fragen der folkloristik” and ingo schneider in “folkloristics, volkskunde, european ethnology in changing world. some remarks on presence and future of our disciplines”). schneider gives an example of hip hop as a modern system of meaning, tracing it back to rap. zuzana galiová states that slovak folklorists are just beginning to record and compile genres, such as urban legends and rumors, and to explore ways of analyzing the material. she urges folklorists to begin thinking about changes in genre classifications. dana bittnerová discusses the relationship of written folklore to oral folklore in “replication of written texts in various genres of written folklore.” she covers written folklore and its pictorial aspect among young people, the military, and among adults (graffiti and internet folklore). in “the relation of verbal and technical forms of communication” marija stanonik focuses on how technology has affected communication throughout its various stages: phonograph, tape recorder, video technology, and electronic media. she concludes that impersonal media messages on the computer and cell phone have replaced intimate handwritten messages. there are a few misspellings and awkward translations into english, apparent even in the titles, but the collection of articles is interesting because it highlights the process that folklorists of the former communist nations are undergoing in redefining folklore to include new genres. the collapse of a totalitarian system, coupled with the advances of a technological age, has necessitated an expansion of the old concept of “classical” folklore. bonnie marshall meredith, nh contributors who are used to bibliographical reference systems operating in the various countries of central and eastern europ 33 betwixt and between: the cult of living saints in contemporary bulgaria (1) petko ivanov department of anthropology and department of slavic studies, university of chicago valentina izmirlieva department of slavic studies, columbia university (with photos by petko ivanov) the exemplary persona of christianity known as the saint is a junction of antinomies: �hereness� and �thereness�, immanence and transcendence, familiarity and incomprehensibility. in social terms, however, the saint is above all the figure of a religious virtuoso emerging at the interface of official and popular religion.(2) various hagiolatric communities, from loosely defined local groups to well organized religious societies and sects, constantly cultivate their religious specialists who are often dubbed �saints� and treated as saints while still alive. such holy persons, aspiring for saintly status in their lifetime who have not been canonized by the official church, are usually designated in the scholarly tradition as �folk,� �near-,� �would-be,� �living� [see, e.g., macklin and margolies 1988], or in general not-quite-saints, to differentiate them from their canonized, �otherworldly� colleagues. the majority of cases of modern folk saints (19th-20th c.) within bulgarian hagiolatric communities are healers and clairvoyants sometimes called �living saints,� who only rarely enjoy popularity beyond the narrow scope of their initial local cults. against this background of ephemeral and amorphous saints a few cases stand out as epitomizing the general tendencies of popular religious saint-making in bulgaria: the miracle-maker of silistra angelush trifonov (1827-after 1904), the holy virgin korteza khadzhiiska from sliven (c.1873-after 1920), the prophet bona velinova from grigorevo (1885-1960), the venerable stoina dimitrova from the district of melnik (1883-1933), and the most celebrated near-saint of present-day bulgaria, the oracle from the town of petrich vanga dimitrova (1911-1996). this study is based primarily on ethnographic data about them, (3) as well as on wide-ranging narrative material reflecting bulgarian folk cosmological concepts. saints are analyzed here as cosmological agents of the communities that worship them and their status is compared and contrasted with the communal status of other cosmological figures, such as vampires or witches. our approach is centered on the folk term �living saint� in an attempt to outline a structural profile of the saintly figure in bulgarian popular religion from the viewpoint of the ethnography of speaking, that is, the study of speech episodes in their social context. the paper is built upon our trust in the capacity of folk terminology to manifest an insider�s understanding of folk phenomena. its first, descriptive part, presents a case-study of the unofficial cult of the venerable stoina, as seen through the term �living saint� used in the cult. the second, analytical, part is an attempt to reconstruct the bulgarian folk concept of living holiness that underlies the ostensibly divergent and often contradictory discourses about different living saints. folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 34 i. the saintly career of a village clairvoyant zhiv svetets, the exact bulgarian equivalent of �living saint,� has two equally paradoxical usages in folk discourse. it is used not only for live local healers and clairvoyants but also for canonized saints with wellestablished christian and folk cults. the term apparently encompasses two different metaphors with inverted tenors and vehicles: living saint vs. living saint. in the first metaphor the title �saint� which implies dead, or �very special dead� [brown 1981: 69-85] is applied to living people; in the latter the presumably dead saint is presented as alive.(4) when using the term zhiv svetets, however, the members of the folk communities we study do not differentiate between these two hidden metaphorical predications. moreover, they do not seem to separate the two usages of the term. one can only assume that behind the confusing variety of folk locutions there exists an implicit yet uniform concept of living holiness. this concept is not immediately obvious to the outsider because folk communities tend to define their own terms through stories rather than through propositions. they do not conceive of a living saint as the sum total of his/her distinctive features but as a set of events. this is why the only way to reveal the implicit folk concept of living holiness is by analyzing the concrete events around a living saint as they are articulated in folk parlance. the case of the venerable stoina of sushitsa is particularly suitable for such a venture. both before and after her death she has been venerated as a living saint by various folk communities in south-western bulgaria; she is believed to be a close associate of other �living saints� like st. george. the rich data that has been collected provides an abundance of locutions and narratives that comment on the concept of living holiness in its original folk context.(5) from divine election to social selection stoina dimitrova was born on september 9, 1883 in the hamlet of haznatar, sérrai region (since 1913 part of greece, where it is called chrisohorapha). according to the legend, her birth was marked by a sign from god: a pigeon landed on her cradle signifying the beginning of an exceptional life. when she was seven, stoina lost her sight. she contracted smallpox, and at the critical moment when her parents thought she was dying a terrible storm broke out. the door opened and the house was lit by an unbearable light. the child told her parents not to be afraid: st. george had come to visit her. that day she became permanently blind, but thanks to a gift from heaven to the saint she was granted a different spiritual sight.(6) vanga dimitrova, stoina�s successor, receiving her call in a whirlwind (see note 17). [an icon from �st. petka�s� church in rupite, petrich district.] 35 when she turned sixteen she performed her first miracle: st. george appeared once again and told her to dig in the yard of her parents� house, where she discovered an icon of the saint with an icon-lamp. the village built a small chapel at the place of the discovery and stoina started living there. in 1913 (during the balkan wars) her relatives, like many other bulgarian families from the region, migrated northwards, to the inner territories of the country.(7) along the way stoina parted with them forever and headed alone to the church of st. george in sushitsa, following, as she explained, her call �to serve the saint.� the church of sushitsa is situated outside the village, in an isolated hilly place right next to the village cemetery. stoina chose this space inhabited by saints and the dead, living there to the end of her days. at her request a small room was built for her in the upper level of the church, in the woman�s section. since there was no precedent in bulgaria for people to live inside a church, this act of stoina�s alone marked her out as exceptional, not only in her own community, but in the tradition as a whole. everything in the daily routine of this extraordinary hermit woman was also unusual. she ate only communion bread and dressed like a nun only in black, although she never took the veil. peasants from sushitsa led her around the district to preach, and people came to her to confess their sins, as if she were a priest and not an illiterate woman. above all, however, she was distinguished by her �gift from god,� allowing her to see things beyond the range of normal. she recognized people �from their breathing,� called total strangers by their names, knew without explanation why somebody was visiting her. people came to learn secrets from the past and events of the future, to get advice on communal or personal problems, or to satisfy their curiosity about the end of this world and life in the next. stoina had all this �very special� knowledge because she was in constant contact with the transcendent; so people in sushitsa still believe. witnesses claim that she often talked with the saints who came to visit her. especially important were her contacts with st. george. in the district they say she is the sister of st. george, thus interpreting stoina�s relation to the saints exclusively in kinship terms. stoina not only communicated with the saints but also acted together with them, on numerous occasions miraculously saving �her village� from turkish attack with the help of st. george. many stories tell how she punished blasphemers, thieves and murderers with miracles of retribution, and this portrays her again as a protector of the community and its values. the most celebrated gift stoina possessed, her healing skill, was also attributed to her contacts with the saints. when sick people came to see her, she would talk to the icons and say what instructions she had been given by the saints. she practiced exclusively faith-healing, occasionally with the addition of herbal medicine and other folk the �living� st. george guarding the entrance to sushitsa�s church folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 36 medicine methods. her most frequent prescriptions were for the ill person to take holy communion in several (usually seven) particular churches, to sleep overnight in a church or a monastery, or simply to pray. protector, healer and clairvoyant, stoina was respected as a holy person throughout the region around sushitsa, and the system of patron-client relationship involving her spread. knowledge about her extraordinary powers and abilities traveled around the country, although she never became the object of institutional propaganda and her worship was supported by purely folk mechanisms. her vita relates that she was visited by many prominent people with different social backgrounds, including some political figures, �all of them coming to her in the firm belief that she was a living saint.� recurrent near-death experiences the most unusual events in stoina�s life were her near-death experiences, that is recurrent experience of periods of clinical death. the narratives about these events closely follow the rich bulgarian tradition of neardeath folklore, which interprets apparent death as a journey to the other world.(8) this tradition sees the deadalive person as split into a subject traveling among the dead, and an apparently dead body remaining among the living. in accordance with this dichotomy near-death narratives are divided into, firstly, reports about an otherworldly experience by these visionary (ich-erzälungen or retellings), and, secondly, testimony about the concomitant events in this world. afterlife reports confirm the stereotypical folk vision of the other world as a village where the dead live in families and neighborhoods, where the topography sometimes reminds the sojourner of the cemetery in his native village.(9) the righteous eat and drink what was brought to their graves during memorial services, while sinners sit hungry to one side. this segregation is often further elaborated in terms of the christian distinction between heaven and hell. the folk texts recounting stoina�s impressions of the other world do not deviate from this standard vision. in fact, they so closely match other folk narratives that it must remain unclear whether stoina really related them, or they were ascribed to her as a consequence of cultural inertia. the testimonies about events surrounding stoina�s near-death experiences center round a circumstance which preceded them, when the saint notified the village that she would die, and gave strict orders not to bury her, because she would �revive� in seven days time. when she then �died� in accordance with her prediction, the village of sushitsa faced a dangerous situation created by the undefined status of her body: a corpse which might be alive. (usually near-death experiences happen unexpectedly and the person resuscitates barely in time to halt his own funeral.) public opinion was split between two equally risky alternatives. not to bury a corpse in a timely and proper manner would mean doing nothing to prevent death�s invasion into the world of the living [cf. tilney 1970]. to disobey the orders of the saint, however, would mean provoking her rage and resulting in the village being punished. finally the peasants adopted a policy of compromise. they did not initiate preparations for the funeral, but they took preliminary measures to protect themselves from stoina�s potentially dead body: they locked it up in her room to isolate it from the living and to keep animals from jumping over it, which would mean it turned into a vampire. 37 although the suggestion that stoina be buried was intended to defend the traditional order, it is now retrospectively interpreted as doubt in her holiness that disgraces not only those who supported it, but even their descendants. the general tendency in all the folk material about this first near-death episode is to present it as the ultimate proof of stoina�s prophetic and thaumaturgic powers, and, consequently, as the event that confirmed conclusively the social recognition of her saintliness. naturally enough given her proven abilities stoina knew exactly when and how she would die. the unsurprising prediction about her death was simply the final sign of her being one of �the very special living� and, simultaneously, the first indication of her joining the ranks of �the very special dead.�(10) she died on december 22, 1933 in her room inside st. george�s church in sushitsa and was buried in a special place next to the church. her funeral is remembered in the district as an exceptional event. �it wasn�t like other times. many people and several priests came. the village priest made a speech. �she was a holy woman,� he said. �this woman was like our lord for us. now our life is gone.�� the posthumous cult and its impresarios the death of stoina coincided with a period of general decline in the village and the district as a whole. especially after world war ii small frontier settlements were gradually abandoned by younger people and fell into oblivion. the sushitsa priest died in 1942 and was never replaced. the small church and the tomb of stoina in its yard became as desolate as the village itself. all the consequences of sociopolitical change in the country were interpreted by the people in the district as resulting from stoina�s death. the community�s patron saint had died and now the district was unprotected and forgotten. �after her death,� our informants keep saying, �they forgot about us.� this undefined �they� means the authorities, both secular and divine. thus the temporary forgetting about stoina is seen as another miracle, negatively emphasizing her patronage. �the saint, however, did not let herself and her holy deeds be completely forgotten,� reads her vita. in the 1980s she started �appearing� in the dreams of various people in the district with specific instructions: to restore her tomb, bring people there and write her vita. the folk veneration of stoina began to mushroom. the tomb. her tomb became a focus of special attention. a new gravestone was ordered, the sexton began to light the lamp on the grave on the eve of sundays and, more importantly, church holidays and commemoration feasts began to be organized at the tomb on the dates of stoina�s birth and death. pilgrims regularly come to the tomb to light candles and leave gifts (mainly food), and take some earth from it away with them, believing it to possess curative powers, and often carrying it in a small bag as an amulet. venerable stoina�s old and new gravestones folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 38 the insane are brought there to sleep overnight at the tomb -a common therapeutic practice for insanity, conventionally associated in folk tradition with the shrines of established christian saints.(11) various miracles have happened at stoina�s tomb signifying her posthumous saintly status. according to her vita a halo may appear around it, with stoina herself �seen� coming out of the grave to cure pilgrims. those who are disrespectful to the tomb are severely punished. soon after she passed away two men tried to destroy her tomb �out of primitive atheism.� one of them immediately became insane; the other one later died by accident. �you must not attempt to harm a saint,� concludes the account of the episode in the vita instructively, �because god punishes you according to your deeds.� two icons of the venerable stoina, the second for sale at € 200 the icons. another object of intense veneration is the other indication of stoina�s recent physical presence: her icons. the oldest was painted during stoina�s lifetime. one legend even claims that the blind woman painted it herself, adding a miraculous flavor to the act of its creation, thus supporting belief in its thaumaturgic powers. another is the gift of a grateful artist whose child was cured by the saint from beyond the grave. as a result of a veneration that was too active, the old icon was even set on fire by burning candles, but although it has now been singed in various places, it has lost neither its admirers nor its powers. a bottle of water is always kept close to the icons, as well as next to the icon of st. george downstairs, because people believe that when living saints come to visit, they may be thirsty. the sick sleep in the room under the icons �for their health.� pilgrims all test their righteousness by trying to stick coins on the surface of the icons: if the coin adheres, the person is thought to be righteous, if not, then he is a sinner.(12) photographs of the icons are widely distributed among believers. they are placed on the iconostases of many churches side by side with the icons of canonized saints and are included on many domestic iconostases together with the family�s patron saints. 39 the vita. the most essential element in the spontaneously developing folk cult of stoina is her vita. at the beginning of the 1980s, zoia velikova, the granddaughter of stoina�s sister, began to have numerous dreams about her great aunt. zoia interpreted this repetitive dream as a series of visions through which she was given an important message: stoina is a saint and the sister of st. george, and she, zoia, has been �chosen� to write the vita of her saintly relative under direct instructions from her. zoia is a genuinely religious woman in her seventies who lives in petrich, a town close to sushitsa. she often gets together with other pious elderly women from the town. they visit churches and monasteries, read and exchange popular religious texts, mainly contemporary redactions of medieval apocrypha like epistoliia za nedeliata (epistula de die dominica), suniat na bogoroditsa (somnus deiparae), etc.(13) after being inspired by her dreams, zoia, together with two other women from her circle, elena khadzhiiova and verka veleva , started to record legends about stoina: testimony to her sanctity. all the stories circulating about the saint of sushitsa form in their totality her folk hagiography. the three �hagiographers� simply put together different bits and pieces of it in a flexible open structure and named this first text zhitieto na prepodobna stoina [the vita of the venerable stoina]. the vita itself reveals the mechanism of its creation: �what we have written has been recorded from many people, even as we were traveling through the countryside, and whatever people tell us, that we write down.� the process of recording various stories is present also in the structure of the text, in the middle of which there is a typical vita conclusion, after which various episodes are added by agglutination regardless of chronological order. the expansion, rewriting and revision of the vita continued and is still in progress. the picture is especially complicated because different copies/variants show various degrees of deviation one from the other. some of them add new episodes; others redistribute already existing ones, thus presenting compositional variants with only slight stylistic changes; in a third group stylistic changes are substantial, and so on. most copies dating from the 1980s were made by verka and elena, but nowadays there are numerous second and third �generation� variants. in a manuscript tradition of this kind copies proliferate exponentially and the changes in the resulting texts are not only unpredictable but also synchronically impossible to view as a whole. what is observable, however, is the actual process of the folk creation of a hagiographical text, which can retrospectively illuminate similar medieval phenomena about which we only occasionally possess any data.(14) the vita of the venerable stoina from the city of sérrai, published 1998 folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 40 all the available variants reveal the deliberate intention to follow the hagiographical canon, although they are far from being paragons of the genre. the later copies reflect a tendency to increase the cohesion of the text by following more closely the chronology of related events, by introducing leitmotifs (e.g. the perceptible accumulation of vocabulary based on the slavic root *svet-, �light�), and by framing the episodes with admonitory formulae borrowed from the language of the liturgy. the text not only describes itself as a zhitie [vita], but also functions as one. it is read aloud as a sermon by priests at stoina�s tomb on her commemoration days as well as after the holy liturgy in st. george�s church in the town of petrich. the elderly women from zoia�s circle also often read it aloud when they meet, always making the sign of the cross before the reading, as they would with any sacred text. like many medieval vitae, the ultimate intention behind the text is to make the claim for canonization. this intention is declared openly in one of the marginal notes of the initial variant of the vita: �to be canonized.� the management of the cult. in the 1990s, following the fall of communism, the cult underwent the first stages of institutionalization.(15) nowadays, a local tourist agency provides accommodation for the numerous pilgrims to sushitsa, and organizes and advertises the services, followed by ritual eating and drinking at the tomb. new copies/variants of the vita and photographs of the saint�s icons are being disseminated throughout bulgaria, and a short version of the vita with the blessing of a local priest from petrich has been published in booklet form. the cult industry also includes a range of newly painted icons available to the religious souvenir market for up to €200 each, and local entrepreneurs have rushed to cash in on stoina�s popularity by selling bottled mineral water named after her and advertised as a �kiss from paradise.� the growing popularity of the cult finally reached the leading national newspapers, both secular and religious, where a number of accounts, both pro and contra stoina�s as saint, were published. political parties �prepodobna [venerable] stoina� bottled mineral water the model of the new monastery and bank account details for donations (demokratsia newspaper, 1995) 41 began showing interest in the cult, resulting in a nationwide fund for the restoration of st. george�s church in sushitsa and the construction of a new monastery complex around it. this initiative was advertised as �our patriotic duty� to�preserve this holy bulgarian place,� which in its turn will assist �the spiritual revival of the bulgarians� as well as their �campaign against sects mushrooming in the country.�(16) the reconstruction began in 1996 with the reburial of stoina in a splendid new sepulchre, while the building of the new monastery is still in progress. thus the veneration of the �living saint of sushitsa,� initially restricted exclusively to its local folk milieu, not only gradually acquired all the elements of an eastern orthodox cult (veneration of the tomb, pilgrimages, feast days, icons, hagiographical texts), but also began to be used manipulatively in the socio-political life of the country. ii. living holiness in its folk interpretation the key term �living saint represents the most concise articulation of folk respect for the venerable stoina both in her lifetime when she acted as a local vrachka (clairvoyant and healer) in the region of petrich,(17) and after her death when she acquired the major characteristics of a christian saint. her case thus unites the two groups of living saints that we have isolated for analytical purposes: healers and clairvoyants from the world of the living, and saints from the world of the dead. the material about her cult, therefore, offers an analytical perspective for revealing the common characteristics of the two groups that motivate their designation using a single folk term. two broader folk categories, that of sainthood and of life and death, corresponding to the two components of the metaphorical term, underlie the folk narratives about the venerable stoina and other living saints. equally they challenge the insider�s preconceptions and require further elucidation. a saint in need is a saint indeed official hagiography presents saints as figures of an inner duality modeled on the principal dichotomy of the christian universe. it counterposes two apparently incompatible aspects of saintliness: the intrinsic quality of being a saint, the result of divine election, and the transformational process of becoming a saint, the result of reproducing a series of exemplary acts. thus only official christianity offers simultaneously in the one a web-page promoting �wine tours� in the melnik district folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 42 person a locus of miraculous power for support, and a paradigm of christian behavior for imitation [cf. cunningham 1980: 13ff]. popular religion views sainthood exclusively in terms of divine election [cf. sternberg 1925]: saints are chosen, they do not become. that is why in folk hagiography holy people may act as saints straightaway, the narratives about their miracles completely replacing the ecclesiastical review of the exemplary biography this folk identity of saints solely as thaumaturgic agents also determines the type of hagiolatric communication in the folk milieu. saints are viewed as figures of communal and personal support, as numinous helpers in time of crisis when only a miracle can restore the habitual order of life. thus the complexities of their official christian cult is reduced mainly to a patron-client agreement based on the principle of reciprocity: �veneration for help already received,� or, in its more profane variant, �give-and-take.� religious figures in bulgarian popular religion(18) generally emerge as outstanding figures in their communities through a miraculous event, involving direct contact with the other world, which is interpreted as a sign of their divine election and commonly articulated in folk discourse by the topos bogova darba [a gift from god]. in slightly different terms we may say that saint-making in popular religion is a process of recognizing divine election through social selection. the hagiolatric communities select their saints from among people who have publicly demonstrated their charisma, i.e. their divine gifts, of which curative and clairvoyant skills are the most typical. these qualities are attributed to the constant communication of living holy people with the other world. local healers and clairvoyants are believed to act under the immediate instruction and guidance of otherworldly saints and to work together with them for the welfare of the community. thus living saintly people and long dead canonized saints, their different status in the eyes of the church notwithstanding, do in fact share a common clientele and a common patron status in hagiolatric communities. the heterogeneous group of earthly and heavenly numinous helpers in a given community has its own local hierarchy, which has little to do with the ecclesiastical rationale for their reputation, or its lack thereof. the place of the saints in the hierarchy of local religion is determined by their efficacy as proven by successful precedents, and by their activeness demonstrated in a variety of �apparitions� understood broadly as otherworldly intrusion into this world [cf. christian 1981]. successful precedents and apparitions govern both the local views about the saints� specialization and the rituals for choosing personal or family saints, and patrons of churches and territorial or ethnic communities.(19) the most famous saints in local religion receive the title �living,� an epithet, which if interpreted literally appears infelicitous, because it is awkwardly redundant in the case of those still alive and oxymoronic in the case of canonized saints. its usage suggests that in this context �living� implies an additional quality directly related to the efficacy of their service to the community and the process of their social evaluation and hierarchization. all the references to living saints in our material occur at the climax of narratives about holy figures, in which they have demonstrated their protection of communal values with maximum intensity. thus one of the most popular legends about the venerable stoina included in her vita tells how she and st. george miraculously 43 saved her village of dolna sushitsa from being set on fire by a turkish military squad. at the decisive moment st. george, on horseback, jumps out of the fresco above the church door to join stoina in her single-handed resistance to the turks. the narrative usually concludes with the exclamation: �stoina is the sister of st. george. he is a living saint, and she is one too!�(20) saints like st. george, st. minas or st. john of rila are commonly �seen� or �heard� walking in churches dedicated to them and their �corporeal� presence is otherwise registered across the territory of bulgaria. it is not mere chance that it is precisely these saints who are credited with being �national guardians,� svettsi-granichari [protectors of the state�s frontier].(21) the icons of a living saint can be no less active, as the term zhiva kuna (living icon) demonstrates:(22) they can move, cry, heal and actively communicate with those who come to them for help. if other, �non-living� saints are saints only in potentio for the community, living saints are saints in praesentio. the others �remain on their icons,� we were told, but living saints �come out� of them to be part of the community through their actions, healing and protecting. thus the modifier �living� emphasizes the immediate presence of the saints, their capacity to be perceived as acting within their hagiolatric communities. this explains why the living saint is not a category fixed to a particular group of saints once and for all, but rather a conditional term designating a mobile and open group of community religious helpers. saints are living when they are immediate benefactors in the here and now, and only so long as their activity remains beneficent for the community. if they stop being of help, the reverence displayed towards them is promptly replaced by veneration of one of their more efficient colleagues. moreover, the community is expected to apply sanctions against �useless� saints, since they have violated the patron-client agreement. in this case canonized saints are ritually �punished� by hitting and breaking their icons(23) and expelling them from the village, just as �holy� clairvoyants and healers are publicly exposed as pseudo-saints, charlatans or witches. we can conclude that the epithet �living� as an axiological modifier of the title �saint� is used in folk discourse not as an antonym of �dead,� but as a synonym of �acting� or �in use� (cf. the similar functions of this epithet in other folk set phrases like zhiva voda, �living water,� zhiv vŭglen �living charcoal,� zhiv diavol �living devil,� etc.). its usage presupposes a functional distinction between active (useful) and passive (useless) saints that in popular religion replaces the more abstract ecclesiastical distinction between canonized and noncanonized saints. the living saint as liminal figure the fluid group of living saints has an ambivalent position between this and the other world. their existential status challenges our modern common-sense understanding of life and death and of the relation between them. in the cosmological views of the communities that we study the worlds of the dead and of the living are two discrete yet isomorphous parts of a common socio-communicative system [cf. garnizov 1986: 2526]. after death people are still capable of helping and harming their living descendants. they appear in the dreams of the living to offer warnings or helpful advice, or cause hailstorms if they have been insulted by the behavior of their fellow villagers. in a similar manner the acts of the living in this world can facilitate or cause problems in the existence after death of their kinsmen, in-laws, and other social partners. whatever is given in folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 44 this world for the dead (food, clothes, etc.), becomes available to them in the other world. if, however, people in this world cry too much for a deceased relative, it rains there and bothers the dead. in other words, a village folk community consists to a degree both of its living members and their dead ancestors.(24) always interested in providing maximum harmony in social relations, communities cultivate this interdependence between their living and dead members. they ritually fortify the existential barrier between them and restrict their contacts to special liminal zones in order to neutralize any possible harmful consequences from intercourse between the living and the dead. these are the spatial zone of the cemetery, which is believed to be in both this and the other world, and the temporal zones of zadushnitsa [all souls� day] and the period from easter to pentecost when the dead are �dismissed� from heaven for a family reunion [marinov 1981: 561; cf. georgieva 1985: 109-110]. extraordinary members of the community, however, (healers, clairvoyants, witches and sorceresses among the living, saints and vampires among the dead) have the ability to cross the ultimate existential limen in both directions, something that places them between structures and beyond communal control. these �very special personas,� if we may call them this, extending in a unorthodox manner peter brown�s apt term [1981], are all �liminal figures� (liminars), liminality being interpreted here not as a particular state of transition, but rather as the potentiality to be betwixt and between [turner 1969]. the �specialty� of the very special living is their ability if required to be present among the dead while they are still alive. their near-death experiences can take various forms: clinical death or coma interpreted as a visit to heaven and hell; transitory death (witches are believed to be still-born and then to be brought back to life artificially),(25) possession, i.e. the �taking away� of living people by the dead (mandatory for both healers and sorceresses [pócs 1989: 39-44]), metempsychosis (cf. the belief that every night the soul of a witch leaves her apparently dead body and travels as a butterfly [marinov 1981: 308]). the passage from this world to the next is the ultimate expression of their liminality. it is the liminal period of transition from neznanie (�unknowingness,� one of the folk terms for the near-death experience [angelova 1948: 256]) to sacred knowledge. reiterated through constant contact with the dead in a sort of a spiritual apprenticeship, it determines their extraordinary abilities: extrasensory perception, and power over disease, climate and fertility. their transcendent experience is also linked to the presence of symbolic markers of death in their physical and social behavior, like blindness (clairvoyants), sterility or infertility, signs of physical decay like mold (witches), the use of �dead� or black entities in the practice of sorceresses (the water with which a corpse had been washed, eggs from a black hen, etc.). the liminality of the very special dead is likewise manifested by their reappearance in this world. unlike the ordinary dead they �return� to be among the living and this paradoxical existence between two worlds marks them with �life� qualities anomalous to their status of dead people: visibility, physical activity, the incorruptibility of their corpses (saints, vampires), their sexual potency and fertility (vampires). from a functional viewpoint liminality is the ambivalent potentiality to help/harm beyond the restrictions of natural or social laws. liminars thus exemplify with unprecedented intensity the ambiguity of the 45 life/death relationship that threatens the intended social harmony. in accordance with the principal ethical dualism of folk cosmology communities transform this problematic ambivalence by focusing positive liminal energy only onto certain liminars, conceived as helpers (saints, healers, clairvoyants) and the negative energy onto their alleged antagonists, the adversaries (vampires, demons, witches, sorceresses). the similar powers helpers and adversaries possess are attributed to the activity of antipodal forces (the divine gift vs. the devil�s work) and are interpreted antithetically. if both healers and sorceresses control disease, a healer cures people of them, while a sorceress inflicts them on others. both saints and vampires tend to take revenge with terrifying cruelty, but vampires strike promiscuously, with no respect for justice and order, while saints punish in order to confirm the social structures for the benefit of the community as a whole. as a result of this interpretation the inherent amorphia of the liminal group is interiorized as a bipolar structure, and is sanctioned as such by corresponding paradigms of social interaction with it. the functional classification of liminars into helpers and adversaries counterbalances the blurred dichotomy between the living and the dead. helpers, as well as adversaries, act together across the existential border and the living members of each group are expected to join their otherworldly partners after death: witches and sorceresses are potential future vampires [georgieva 1985: 111-112; perkowski 1988: 451], just as healers and clairvoyants are presumed to be the heavenly saints-to-be. such a classification presupposes unequivocal social behavior toward antipodal liminal agents. in the constellation of social links those deemed adversaries are personae non grata, communal felons, who are ostracized, persecuted and subjected to severe punishment.(26) according to communal norms both they and their clients are sinners, and that is why adversaries need to act secretly in secluded places and times. there is a tendency to eliminate these liminars forcibly from social structures, thus cleansing the community and reestablishing its threatened harmony. helpers, on the contrary, are the focal points of the recurrent restoration of communal structures. not only is their social status high, but the community itself gains prestige in the eyes of the outside world through them. they, and especially their vanguard, the living saints, are guarantees of social stability, prosperity and order, and their patronage is one of the most important ways of identifying the community as an autonomous social entity. a graphic closure our analysis can be summarized in figure 1 which represents the folk concept �living saint� as a figure 1 folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 46 cross-section of four broader categories: the existential categories of living and dead, and the functional categories of helpers and adversaries.(27) based on a reconstruction of the context in which the term �living saint� operates, we have established that each of its two components has both functional and existential connotations. zhiv can mean both �active� (functional) and �alive� (existential); svetets respectively, means �thaumaturgic helper� (functional) and �dead� or �having temporarily died� (existential). the term �living saint� as a functional designation, therefore, refers to the general characteristic of some very special living and dead folk agents to function as active helpers in their hagiolatric communities. at its existential register the term refers to the liminal status of these agents, which determines their capacity to act as otherworldly benefactors in this world. notes 1 preliminary versions of this article were read at the 8th and 9th biennial conferences on balkan and south slavic linguistics, literature and folklore, held at the university of chicago (1992) and indiana university (1994) respectively. a bulgarian translation of the second part appeared in the special issue �christianity and folklore�(ed. katia mikhailova) of the journal bŭlgarski folklor [vol. 26/3, 2000: 4351]. we wish to express our gratitude to prof. norman w. ingham, prof. bill darden, prof. paul friedrich, and prof. james fernandez for their valuable comments and suggestions. 2 an excellent survey of the polemics surrounding the term �popular religion� is o'neil [1986]. for a well compiled bibliography of studies in popular religion, see dinzelbacher [1990]; cf. wilson [1983], where a specialized bibliography on the cult of saints is provided. pioneer anthropological studies of christian folk saints include articles by romano [1965] and macklin and crumrine [1973], dealing with latin american material, and christian jr. [1973], based on western european cults. more important subsequent contributions in the field are the book by best [1983], the symposium papers on saints and near-saints edited by macklin and margolies [1988], and the case studies of padre cícero romão batista (1844-1934, brazil) by slater [1986], fray leopoldo de alpandeire (1864-1956, spain) by slater [1990], and padre pio da pietralcina (1887-1968, italy) by mckevitt [1991a and 1991b]. 3 see izmirlieva and ivanov [1991b]; cf. also the short descriptions of bona velinova and vanga dimitrova in notes 14 and 16 below. on similar cases among other balkan peoples see kazimirović [1940: 457-526], pavlović [1965: 209-53] and blum [1970: 48-51, 62-63]. the only short description of near-saint phenomena from the balkan slavic region hitherto available in english is information about the holy woman of retchane (first half of the 20th century) given in obrebski [1977: 16-17]. 4 cf. similar observations in woodward [1990: 17], who claims that, canonically speaking, a living saint is �a contradiction in terms,� since the christian church considers the death of the holy person as a conditio sine qua non for canonization. 47 5 the material on which the following description is based was collected 1985-2001 by the authors, initially with the support of the institute of folklore at the bulgarian academy of sciences and the department of old bulgarian literature at st. climent of ohrida university in sofia. our informants are mainly from zlatolist, a small mountainous village in south western bulgaria, close to the ancient towns of melnik and petrich [for a description of the region see gibbons 1980]. the village is more popularly known by its old name (dolna) sushitsa, which was in official use until 1951. part of the recorded material and two versions of stoina�s vita were published in the journal bŭlgarski folklor [izmirlieva and ivanov 1990; 1991a]. 6 in another variant stoina lost her sight in a whirlwind. according to folk belief, the souls of the dead or of samovili [wood-nymphs] spin in a whirlwind. they not only cause blindness to whomsoever they manage to take away, but also endow him or her with clairvoyant abilities [see kolev 1980: 78-79]. 7 the source material about the events of 1913 directly concerning the region of sérrai were published in english by anastasoff [1977: 308-14]. 8 this interpretation is included in the most common bulgarian folk terms for the phenomenon: prenasiane �the act of crossing or being carried across a barrier,� and primirane �the state of being dead for a while� vs. umirane �the act of dying.� on bulgarian near-death folklore see marinov [1981: 274-75, 322]. a wide-ranging and detailed picture of similar east slavic materials is provided by bilij [1930]; for observations on the �genre� of �visits to the other world� as presented in folk texts from poles�e, see tolstoi and tolstaia [1979]. a good cross-cultural study on the subject is zaleski [1987]. 9 see georgieva and garnizov [1989: 117]. presenting the world of the dead as a �village, where god is the local mayor� [slaveikoff 1904: 51] is also typical of other folk texts (songs, fairy-tales, etc.). more broadly, the vision of the other world, as documented in near-death accounts, fits the heterogeneous picture of life after death constructed in folk ballads (especially the motif, �a sacred person visits the dead� [see vranska 1940: 172-83]), as well as a corpus of religious eschatological texts (apocrypha, visionsliteratur, the iconography of the last judgment, etc. [see matl 1971]). 10 the interpretation of saints as �very special personae� is suggested by peter brown�s [1981] concept of canonized saints as �the very special dead� of the christian church, as well as by blum's [1970] notion, �the extraordinary dead� from his ethnography of greek �rural religion.� we unpack the rich implications of brown's concept by applying it to living saints and introducing the term �the very special living.� 11 at the tomb of st. naum in ohrid, for example, such practice has been registered since the early 19th century [grigorovich 1915: 152]. 12 the ancient roots of this practice are discussed by katsarov [1933: 195]. 13 for the contemporary oral and written tradition of these texts among the balkan slavs see kretzenbacher [1975] and badalanova [1993]. folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 48 14 see, for example, the commentary of theodoros balsamon (� after 1195) to canon 63 of the quini-sext (trullan) ecumenical council: �his holiness, lord patriarch nicolaus muzalon, as he found the vita of st. paraskeva who was worshipped at the village of kalikratia, a vita written by a peasant ignorantly and unworthy of the angel-like life of the saint, ordered it to be committed to the flames and assigned the task to deacon basilic of writing her vita in a manner pleasing to god.� [balsamon 1865: 733c]. 15 another example of an institutionalized cult is that of bona velinova (1882-1960), the professional prophet of the religious movement �the good samaritan,� which was extremely popular in bulgaria between 1925 and 1944. the movement had its own newspaper, published numerous books and had organizations throughout the country [see izmirlieva and ivanov 1991b: 7]. 16 in the newspaper demokratsia no. 1549, mar. 8, 1995, p. 8. cf. dneven trud. no. 92, mar. 2, 1995, p. 2; standart. no. 976, june 4, 1995, p. 33. in the autumn of 2002 the bulgarian tv channels �skat� and �2001� broadcast a 25 minute documentary about the venerable stoina followed by a studio discussion led by the journalist antonina topalova. for an argument against stoina�s cult, see tsurkoven vestnik. no. 23, dec. 1, 2001, also available at http://web.hit.bg/cv102/23yyyy/prepodobna_stoina.htm. 17 the successor to stoina in the region is vanga dimitrova (1911-1996), the blind oracle from petrich who is the most famous contemporary bulgarian vrachka [see ostrander and schroeder 1970; perkowski 1995; valtchinova 1998; iliev 2000]. the biography and powers of vanga and stoina are strikingly similar, and the stories about their call and the circumstances under which they became blind are completely identical. the two women are presented by our informants as congruent patrons of the community and related by spiritual kinship. vanga seems to approve of these analogies, since she is actively involved in the creation of stoina�s cult. the linking of the vrachka from petrich with the saint of sushitsa in the popular mind and in folk discourse is even more significant when set against the rather different socio-political forms of their practice. while stoina�s activities were always christian in their external manifestations, vanga never openly committed herself to any religion. moreover, her activities were supported by the state, and she was used by the communist élite, including todor zhivkov�s family [see sokoloff 1990 and kinzer 1995]. 18 in the rich bulgarian folk nomenclature for religious and quasi-religious specialists [see marinov 1981: 339-47 and conrad 1987: 559] the generic term is vrach (and especially its feminine counterpart vrachka), which implies both curative abilities and extrasensory perception. for more information about folk-doctors in the balkans, see kemp [1935: 205-28]. 19 the most popular ritual for choosing a patron saint is khvashtane na svetets [literally �the catching of a saint�]. several candles named for the candidate saints are lit and whichever burns the longest, that person is then proclaimed the patron saint, the durability of the flame being interpreted as a sign of the saint�s vitality and eagerness to become involved in the affairs of the community. http://web.hit.bg/cv102/23-yyyy/prepodobna_stoina.htm. http://web.hit.bg/cv102/23-yyyy/prepodobna_stoina.htm. 49 20 see izmirlieva and ivanov [1990: 83-84, no. 11; 1991a: 69-70, nos 37 and 76, no. 65]. similar plots are extremely popular in bulgarian (and more broadly in balkan) folklore. in english see the legend about st. john of rila who �came out� of his icon to save his monastery from a turkish invasion [thornton 1939: 251-252]. 21 a good illustration is the legend of how �st. george did not permit the greeks to enter the country� during the greek-bulgarian border incident in 1925 [see izmirlieva and ivanov 1991a: 69, no. 36; the historical background to the event is given by barros 1970]. 22 see, for example, vakarelski [1935: 238]. living saints are also believed to oppose actively the censing of their icons, because only the dead should be censed [boiadzhieva 1993: 119]. 23 see markov [1907: 46-47]; cf. uspenskii [1982: 114-16, 182-86] for parallel cases among the eastern slavs. 24 in the bulgarian context the social unity of the living and the dead is exemplified by the ritual kanene za praznik [invitation to a feast]. at all important calendar or family feasts peasants invite both their living and dead relatives using analogous ritual attributes, and performing analogous ritual acts. the dead, especially those who have recently passed away, are individually invited at their graves (conceived of as their homes), and later, during the feast itself, they are assigned places next to the living at the common festive trapeza [the table with ritual food on it]; cf. also the custom of inviting dead relatives to weddings [ivanova 1987: 31-32]. 25 see marinov [1981: 307]. a variant of being still-born is to be born at �death time,� known in bulgaria mainly as the �unclean time� (mrŭsni dni; the period between christmas and epiphany [cf. conrad 2001]), which is a precondition for the person to become a witch or/and turn into a vampire after death; cf. pócs [1989: 77, note 154]. the birth of other figures in bulgarian folk demonology is also linked to death: the plague, for example, is believed to be born of a dead mother. 26 vampires are exterminated usually by professionals called vampiradzhii [�vampire-killers� [beynen 1988: 458-59]; living adversaries are battered to death when caught in the act, publicly disgraced and often excommunicated. 27 the absence of a negative counterpart to living saints in our chart reflects the absence of a well constituted head of the adversaries in bulgarian folk cosmology. this lacuna alone is a notable fact that raises interesting theoretical questions, which, however, go beyond the scope of our present discussion, since it is focused primarily on the cosmological status of the saintly figure. bibliography anastasoff, christ 1977. the bulgarians from their arrival in the balkans to modern times: thirteen centuries of history. hicksville, ny: exposition press. folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 50 angelova, rositsa 1948. �selo raduil, samokovsko� [the village of raduil, samokov region]. izvestiia na seminara po slavianska filologiia pri universiteta v sofiia. vols 8-9, pp. 131-410. badalanova, florentina 1993. �apokrifen tekst i folkloren kontekst, ili �mitarstva� i �prevŭplŭshcheniia� na �epistoliia za nedeliata�� [the apocryphal text and the folklore context, or the tollbooths and the transformations of the �epistula de die dominica�]. slavianska filologiia. vol. 21, pp. 114-23. balsamon, theodoros 1865. �opera quæ reperiri potuerunt omnia: canonica, juridica, dogmatica.� in j.-p. migne (ed.), patrologiæ græcae. vol. 137. paris. barros, james 1970. the league of nations and the great powers: the greek-bulgarian incident, 1925. oxford: clarendon press. best, gerhard 1983. neue heiligenkulte in westfalen. 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1989. fairies and witches at the boundary of south-eastern and central europe (folklore fellows communications no. 243). helsinki: suomalainen tiedeakatemia. romano, octavio ignacio 1965. �charismatic medicine, folk-healing, and folk-sainthood.� american anthropologist. vol. 67 (5/1), pp. 1151-73. slater, candace 1986. trail of miracles: stories from a pilgrimage in northeast brazil. berkeley: university of california press. slater, candace 1990. city steeple, city streets: saints� tales from granada and a changing spain. berkeley: university of california press. 53 slaveikoff, pencho 1904. �the folk-song of the bulgars.� in henry bernard and e.j. dillon (eds), the shade of the balkans,. london: david nutt, pp. 23-87. sokoloff, connie 1990. �seers soothe bulgaria�s earthly woes.� sunday times, aug. 19, 1990, overseas news section. sternberg, leo 1925. �divine election in primitive religion.� in congrès international des américanistes: compte-rendu de la xxi-e session. deuxième partie tenue a göteborg en 1924. göteborg: museum, pp. 472-512. thornton, philip 1939. ikons and oxen. london: collins. tilney, philip 1970. �supernatural prophylaxes in a bulgarian peasant funeral.� journal of popular culture. vol. 4 (1), pp. 211-29. tolstoi, nikita and svetlana tolstaia 1979. �o zhanre �obmiraniia� (poseshcheniia togo sveta)� [on the genre of the �visit to the other world�]. in b. gasparov and iu. lotman (eds) vtorichnye modeliruiushtie sistemy. tartu: tgu, pp. 63-65. turner, victor 1969. the ritual process: structure and anti-structure. chicago: aldine. uspenskii, boris 1982. filologicheskie razyskaniia v oblasti slavianskikh drevnostei: relikty iazychestva v vostochnoslavianskom kulte nikolaia mirlikiiskogo [philological researches into slavonic antiquities (relics of paganism in the east-slavic cult of saint nicholas)]. moskva: mgu. vakarelski, khristo 1935. bit i ezik na trakiiskite i maloaziiskite bŭlgari [the way of life and language of the thracian and anatolian bulgarians] (trakiiski sbornik, 5). sofia: trakiiski nauchen institut. valtchinova, galia 1998 �entre religion, tourisme et politique: la naissance du pèlerinage de rupite, bulgarie.� ethnologie française. vol. 28 (3), pp. 396-405. vranska [romanska], tsvetana 1940. �apokrifite za bogoroditsa i bŭlgarskata narodna pesen� [apocrypha about the mother of god and the bulgarian folk song]. sbornik na bŭlgarskata akademiia na naukite. vol. 34, pp. 3-208. wilson, stephen 1983. �annotated bibliography.� in s. wilson (ed.), saints and their cults: studies in religious sociology, folklore and history. cambridge: cambridge up, pp. 309-417. woodward, kenneth l. 1990. making saints: how the catholic church determines who becomes a saint, who doesn�t, and why. new york: simon and schuster. zaleski, carol 1987. otherworld journeys: accounts of near-death experience in medieval and modern times. new york and oxford: oxford university press. folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 27 book reviews review of senosios raitijos ir tautosakos s=lveika: kultiirine lietuvos didziosios kuni&aikitystes patirtis jurare siekonyte, lithuania an international conference entitled "the interaction of old literatme and folldore: the cultural experience of the grand duchy of lithuania" was held on december~, 1997, in vilnius, lithuania, at the institute of lithuanian literature and folldore. this conference was dedicated to the 450th anniversmy of catechisms.. the first lithuanian book written by martians mazvydas. participants in the conference came from lithuania, latvia, russia, belarus, poland, ukraine, hungary and germany and included historians, folldorists, scholars of mythology, literature scholars, library specialists, and linguists. the conference stressed interdisciplinary approaches to the multilingual written records of the grand duchy oflitbuania (gdl). the records are of great historical and cultural importance to the contemporary world, and twenty six.papers focusing on the thematic, semantic, symbolic and contextual aspects of these records were presented. the conference papers have been published in book form in senosios rastiios ir tautosakos saveika: kultiirine lietuvos didziosios kuni(?ik~ty~ patirtis. vilnius, lietuvil! literatiiros ir tautosakos institutas, 1998. they are in four languages: english, lithuanian, russian and polish. for purposes of this review, we will report on the folldore articles. most of the folldore papers treat slavic themes. j. novikov discusses russian folldore texts which mention lithuania and the lithuanians. he reports that the ethnonym "litva" is found in russian epic songs (byuna) and that lithuanians are mentioned in legends, proverbs, and riddles. b. kerbelyre analyzes the story about algirdas' march on moscow, as it is attested in the yevreinov redaction and in the bykhovets lithuanian manuscript chronicle, and concludes 1hat, while this narrative shares many symbols with russian oral tradition, it is nonetheless an independent legend. a nepokupnij, an author interested in the wedding songs of ukraine, belams and poland, observes that 1he ethnonym "utva" can sometimes be used in these songs to refer to the bridal couple. this would indicate that contact between the lithuanian!; and the slavs dates back to antiquity. the aim of o. belova's article is to analyze apoctyphal and folldore motifs in the old russian "tale about the birds." the author concludes that this literary monument absorbed local folk beliefs and preserved a seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 28 fragment of traditional folk culture. a. semenciuk discusses the attitude toward the lithuanians reflected in polish chronicles. he notes that the polish chroniclers dlugosh, miechowski, bielski, stryj"kowski were not only historians, but also geographers, ethnographers, folklorists. approximately half of the papers deal with the acceptance of christianity in the gdl. some papers cover mythological topics. v. petruchin uses slavic parallels to give a new interpretation the sovij myth in the johannes meletius chronicles. j. i..aurusas engages in a polemic with other scholars on the topic of duke sventaragis and suggests that the etymology ofsventaragis indicates that the name means "burial :fire." v. voigt's paper is a comparative study of baltic and finnic gods. the author acknowledges the lack of similar studies and tries to awaken interest in this topic. the cultmai heritage of the gdl includes ethnic minorities and n. a. motozova and v. n. cekmonas discuss the contemporary folklore of lithuanian old believers, focusing on the decline of oral tradition among them as people gradually forget real events and distort them. g. miskiniene examines the manuscripts of lithuanian tartars which reflect ethnic and philosophical features characteristic of muslim nations. in sum, senosios i'astiios ir tautosakos saveika: kultiirine lietuvos didziosios kunigai1c~es patirtis helps us discover new facts and new faces in lithuanian history and shows us that this field is still open to exploration and new interpretation. seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 microsoft word contentsqsoft.doc 149 emily d. johnson. how st. petersburg learned to study itself. the russian idea of kraevedenie. university park, pa: pennsylvania state university press, 2006. notes. bibliography. index. ix+305. $55 (cloth). isbn 0-271-02872-6. johnson’s how st. petersburg learned to study itself. the russian idea of kraevedenie would at first glance seem to be the latest in a long line of books on st. petersburg. however, while this book is a cultural history, it differs significantly from other histories such as lincoln’s sunlight at midnight: st. petersburg and the rise of modern russia (2001), clark’s petersburg: crucible of cultural revolution (1995), and salisbury’s 900 days: the siege of leningrad (1970). rather than focus on the city itself and the historical events surrounding it, johnson studies the development of two issues of no little interest to those who study folk conceptions of society and nation. not surprisingly, the first of these is the development of the petersburg myth within the framework of guidebooks on the city. second, and what is unique about this volume, is how this issue serves as the backdrop for the development of a discipline unknown in the western world, kraevedenie or ‘local studies.’ the term is generally defined as: “the study of the natural environment, population, economy, history, or culture of some part of a country, such as an administrative or natural region, or a place of settlement” (3). specialists in this field “investigate and describe both natural and manmade landscapes, study the ways in which human society and environment affect each other, and decipher the semiotics of space. they deconstruct local myths, analyze the conventions governing the depiction of specific regions and towns in works of art and literature, and dissect both outsider and insider perception of local population groups” (3). in sum, while there exists a strong environmental science component of the discipline, they often rely on the same material that folklorists study to gain an understanding of an ethos. in fact, folklore study formed an integral part of the field itself. as johnson notes, once the central bureau of kraevedenie was established in 1921, it served as an umbrella organization both for teachers and for researchers who wanted to “collect information on russia’s national resources and climate, study regional folklore or identify and preserve local historical monuments” (158). the city of st. petersburg itself, of course, has long history as the topic of study, not only in non-fiction, but also in literature. from the earliest days of the city, when pushkin wrote his bronze horseman to folklorica 2007, vol. xii 150 brodsky’s poems on his native city, it has captured the attention of foe and friend alike. as johnson points out, “opposition to the petrine reforms in the early eighteenth century gave rise to a host of anecdotes, prophesies, and curses that labeled peter i the antichrist and his new capital an unholy seat” (30). at the same time, johnson argues, many chose to “represent its creation as a supremely important stage in the fulfillment of russia’s divinely foreordained and much heralded historic destiny” (19). johnson takes as her starting point guidebooks about petersburg, which have a heralded tradition in russia and which made a significant comeback in the city itself during the perestroika years. these books form the basis of this study. like clark before her, johnson’s interest lies in the various sociocultural trends that contribute to historical events, in this case the development of the “identity discipline” of kraevedenie. according to johnson, an identity discipline is “a field dominated by scholars who strongly identify with the subject of their scholarship, perceiving it as ‘self’ rather than ‘other.’ in such areas of specialization, the distinction between researcher and researched remains blurred at best” (5). similar disciplines in the western tradition include gender studies, african american studies, and queer studies. within the (soviet) russian context, kraevedenie “has always been closely associated with the historical and ecological preservations movements, various forms of local boosterism, and, to a real extent, anticentrist sentiment.” the strength of this work for a folklorist is the author’s examination of the wide variety of social and cultural influences that played a role in the development of kraevedenie and indeed in the development of folk conceptions about petersburg, about russia and indeed about the field itself more broadly. in her analysis of the most significant authors of guidebooks about st. petersburg, including grevs, antsiferov, gollerbakh and iatsevich, johnson touches on the preservation movement as initiated by the world of art movement, literary scholarship, oral lore, political trends from the post-revolutionary period through the fall of the soviet union, and pedagogical theory (namely the excursionist movement of the 1920s). the interaction of political material and folk understanding of society is particularly enlightening. to take just one example, she studies (165) how specialists in petersburg itself, the locus of this field, suffered from purges during the stalin years because they “sometimes showed a disconcerting propensity for both independent thought and coordinated action. in a period of growing centralization, the kraevedy often spoke out in favor of diversity and 151 modest regional independence” (165). however, in the post-stalin era the field was viewed as “harmless or perhaps even positive way for soviet citizens to spend their leisure time” (177). as a result of this view, kraevedenie began to reemerge as a discipline for scholars who were more liberal in their views; it provided protection from rigid disciplinary and political control and allowed for an extent of creativity and flexibility not seen in traditional humanities disciplines. the most revealing and indeed important contribution to those in folklore studies are the chapters dealing with development of the discipline at the turn of the century and after the revolution. the final chapter on literary kraevedenie seemed to drag and was less focused than the author’s earlier analysis. but this is a minor quibble about a book that makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of how folk conceptions of state and identity interact with “high” culture in the emergence of a discipline. at its core this book is roughly equivalent to bronner’s following tradition: folklore in the discourse of american culture (1998), which traces the development of folklore as a scholarly discipline in the united states. johnson examines how the field of kraevedenie, unknown in the west, emerged within the (soviet) russian context and how it played upon and reacted to various social forces in the process. the author concludes that: disciplines, in other words, are best understood as by-products of social exchange, of interaction between communities of scholars, public and private agencies, institutions, and interest groups. the boundaries which contain them arise gradually as the result of a myriad of small acts…disciplinary constructs will often, particularly in the early stages of their development, resemble ungainly conglomerates. most, like kraevedenie, will combine within themselves elements that might reasonably be judged heterogeneous, groups of research, theories, and work of scholarship that proceed from different intellectual traditions and are in significant respects dissimilar. (216) this book will be of interest to those in a variety of fields: folklore, cultural history, literature, anthropology and pedagogy and is a welcome addition to the canon of works of cultural history centered on st. petersburg. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby university of kentucky folklorica 2007, vol. xii bahato komariv bahato iahid. bahato moshky bahato hrybiv. lakyi rik na bdzholy takyi i na vivtsi.(4) 10 omens, proverbs and tales: genre fluidity in folklore mna pasichniuk, university ofkyiv the starting point for this study is the omen. omens are a specific genre of folklore. they preserve knowledge by codifying it in concrete and objective form. omens are found in every known folklore tradition. in contemporary ukrainian folklore scholarship, omens are considered a minor genre, often relegated to the field ofparemiology, and studied in isolation.(i) following pavlov, we can define the omen as a paremiological unit whose primary function is prediction.(2) further, we can apply the foidlulaproposed by elie koingas-maranda and pierre maranda:(3) "if a, then b, if not c" where c=o we can then define the omen by the foidlula:"if a, then b", where one half of the equation is the phenomenon that does the forecasting and the other half of the equation is the thing forecast for example: lots of mosquitoes lots of berries. lots of gnats lots of mushrooms. if it' s a good year for bees, it will be a good one for sheep. but the purpose of this study is to show that omens do not exist in isolation. indeed, they can be transformed into other units: they can be interpreted as another paremiological type, namely the proverb, and they can even be expanded into short narratives, prose of the non-magic tale variety. permiakov, one of the founders of cliche theoty in contemporary folklore scholarship, believes that omens are monosemantic; that they are an analytic form of the cliche and possess properties that characterize them alone. these properties include: 1) a single and unambiguous meaning which arises from the meanings of the constituent parts. 2) an absence of the use of imagery, metaphor, and other devices; all words are used in their primary meaning. 3) a requirement that all constituent parts of the omen be equally unambiguous.(5) if any of these traits is absent, then we no longer have an omen, but an homonymous proverb; that is, a proverb which has the same form as the omen, but has a broader, metaphorical meaning. some examples are: sylnyi doshch dovho ne ide.(6) soloveiko spivae poky v iachmeni kolosu nemae. a heavy rain does not last long. a nightingale sings as long as there is no barley. seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 11 doshch v obid-zapriahai ta i dodomu iid'.(8) doshch z ranku-nadivai dranku ta pohaniai upole, laicpokazavsia kolos, todi propav ioho as soon as the ears of barley holos.(7) appear, his voice disappears. if the above texts are given a straight-forward and monosemantic interpretation, then they are omens. that is, in a certain context, these texts could be interpreted as presenting information about the duration of heavy rain and the duration of a nightingale's song and, because omens have a single and unambiguous meaning, that information alone. by the same token, these two texts can be understood as proverbs. here, concrete images (rain in one case and the nightingale and barley in the other) are used to make statements about abstract ideas: the relationship between dmation and force in general, or the relationship between inspiration and how long it lasts. these abstract concepts are applicable to any situation. if applied to a human being, these texts could be commenting on a person who begins sometbing with great enthusiasm, but does not exhibit great tenacity, or someone whose inspiration lasts only as long as there are not distractions (the ear of barley). ifread this way, the texts can only be categorized as proverbs. proverbs demand realization as metaphors; they cannot have a straight, monosemantic meaning. thus, a reading that relies on literaiy device assumes that the texts are proverbs. it should be noted that, if read as proverbs, the two texts are essentially synonymous. another important trait of omens is that they are fixed and exhibit virtually no variation from one telling to the next. to facilitate their memorization and hence their fossilization, omens have been endowed with a wealth of formal features: unusual and striking word order, rhythm, rhyme, assonance. some examples are: chaika sila no vodu-chekai dobroi pohody if a seagull has landed on water, good weather is on the way. if it rains in the moming, put on old clothes, and drive (your horses) out to the field, if it rains at noon, hitch up (your horses) and go on home. omens of this type are strikingly similar to proverbs in appearance and form. but if we keep in mind that the function of omens is to predict the future and that omens have only a single meaning, then the above texts are clearly omens. it should be noted again that prediction and monosemantic function are the features that distinguish omens from all other paremiological units. commenting on the highly structured and polished nature of the omen, greenblatt hypothesized that the information contained in omens was at one point conveyed by much more loosely structured utterances. he:further hypothesized two lines of development: a metaphorical and proverbial one which capitalized on the greater freedom of expression which had once characterized the transmission of forecasting clues and a fossilization of the information that still had a direct, non-metaphorical meaning into the ornate, seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 koly no stritennia moroz buvae, to medvid' svoiu budu rozbyvae. koly no stritennia moroz, medvid' rozbyvae 12 polished omens we see today.(9) if we now look at the phenomenon of "free" expression. we see that this, too, is still connected to omens. our initial definition of an omen is that it is a paremiological unit with the structure "if a, then b" which serves to predict the future. certain omens, in the course of their existence, lose their characteristics as paremiological units and come to approximate non-magic tale prose. thus the transformation of the traditional omenlparemiological unit can go in a number of directions. very often, an omen is expanded, while still conveying the same infoimation. when this happens, an important role is played by elements which serve to delineate a phenomenon more narrowly, or provide motivation. or further interpret the original paremiological unit. let us examine variants of an omen about candlemas (febrwuy 21 febrwuy 15, old style): when it is below freezing on candlemas, then the bear destroys his lair. when it is below freezing on candlemas, the bear destroys his burrow, svoiu havru, a koly vidlyha, to napravliaie.(10) but if there is a thaw, he repairs it. these two variants of a single omen demonstrate expansion of the underlying paremiological unit. the pivotal element in first omen is a temperature that is below freezing. logically, this can be contrasted with its opposite (thaw) and then the results of the opposite, namely the thaw, can be conjectured. the example above contains only minimal expansion. furthermore, the second text, though more lengthy, is still the same type of paremiological unit as the first; it is still an omen. next, let us examine the incoinplete omen.: na stritennia zyma z litom zustrichaiut'sia.(11) at candlemas, winter and summer meet we also find instances where this text has been expanded into its complete form: na stritennia zyma z litom sia strityla. at candlemas winter and summer meet. koly no stritennia moroz peremozhe tepio, if cold conquers warmth on candlemas, to borshche bulle lito. then the summer will be all the more vigorous koly teplo peremozhe moroz, if warmth conquers the cold, dovshe poderzhyt zyma.(12) then it will be winter a while longer. theoretically, a text of this type could continue to be expanded, producing an infinite number of variants. seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 13 the above examples show that, no matter how a calendaiy omen (as in the above case) is expanded, it still remains a paremiological unit. but if a "complementaiy and explanatory plot" develops on the basis of an omen, in which the omen appears in a narrative about a single event, then the text breaks out of the paremiologica1 category. an example is the following: strichalisia zyma z litom, v p 'iatnytsiu vony pobylysia i lito prozhene zymu, lito kazalo do zymy: tikai, uzhe hodi tobi pakuvaty, vzhe zzila vse, sheho ia prystaralas', zyma stala plakaty i tikaty. (13) winter and summer met. they quarreled on friday and wagered whether summer could defeat winter. smnmer said to winter: flee quickly. you have hung on long enough. you have already eaten everything which i stored away. and winter started to cry and flee. the transformation that we see in the above text cannot be explained by a simple, unilateral accumulation of changes. in fact, we have tried to show that an omen can undergo a complete category shift here, the material is no longer a paremiologica1 unit, but the nucleus for the plot of a prose text. the goal of this study was to demonstrate how an omen can be transformed and reinterpreted to become another paremiologica1 unit, namely a proverb. in this case, the transfoimation can hinge on something as minimal as context. it is possible that if the basic traits of an omen, namely that it foretells the future and has a monosemantic meaning, are ignored then the same words can be taken metaphorically to have a more general and abstract proverbial meaning. the other aspect of this study has been an attempt to show that a ~ed minor genre, the omen, can be transfoimed into one of the major genres: narrative prose. here we see that an omen is perhaps more open-ended than previously supposed. explanatory, motivating, and other materials can be added to an omen even as it retains its status as a paremiologica1 unit. at the same time, if an omen becomes the subject matter of a narrative built upon it, then it transcends the narrow confines of the paremiologica1 unit and becomes an element of narrative prose. notes i. permiakov, g. l. osnovy strukturnoi oaremiolo~i. moscow, 1998; tokarev, s. a. nsushehnost' ; proiskhozhden;e magi;," issledovani;a; material v po voprosam pervobytnykh reli~ozjulkh verovanii. moscow, 1959, vol. 51, pp. 7-76. 2. pavlov, e. g. "opyt klassifikatsii narodnykh primet," paremiolo~cheskie issledovaniia. moscow, 1984, pp. 294-300. seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 14 3. e. k. koingas-maranda, p. maranda, "structural models in folklore," midwest folklore. vol 12, 1962, pp. 133-192; reprinted in zarubezhnye issledovaniia po semiotike forldora. moscow, 1985, pp. 241-243. 4. prysliv'ia ta drykazky: pryroda. hosoodars'ka diial'nist'. liuqyna. kyiv, 1989, p. 384. 5. penniakov. g. l. of po'lovorki do skazki. zametki po obshchei teotii kilshe. moscow, 1970, pp. 85-86. 6. penniakov, g.l. osnovy strukturnoi paremiologii. p. 47. 7. hrinchenko, b.d. etnowqficheskie matetialy sobr. v chemicovskoi i sosednei s nei gubemiialch. vyp. 2. chemigov, 1896, p. 6. 8. prysliv'ia ta prykazky. p. 35. 9. gtynblat, m. ia prykazki i drymauki u dvukh knvhakh. book i, minsk, 1976, pp. 5-48. 10. prysliv'ia ta prykazky. kyiv, 1989, p. 387. ii. agapkina, t. a "neskazochnaia proza iparemia," slavianskoe i balkanskoe i~koznanie: struktura malvkh fol'ldomykh tekstov. moscow, 1993, p. 157. 12. agapkina, p. 157. 13. agapkina, p. 158. seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 30 survey of the series folklore monuments of the peoples of siberia and the far east richard dauenhauer. juneau, alaska the russian academy of sciences series pamiatniki fo/'ldora narodov sibiri i dal'nego vostoka [folklore monuments of1he peoples of siberia and the far east] has survived the fiscal and reorganizational ambiguities of the post-soviet era, and is progressing well with sixteen volumes now in print. this survey covers volumes 9-16, published 1995-97. for volumes 1-8, published 1990-1994, please see dauenhauer 1995a, 1995b, 1996a, 1996b for review articles which contain essentially the same information, but have been edited for different readerships. the series is a project of the russian academy of sciences, siberian branch, institute of philology, and is being published by nanka in novosibirsk. we should appreciate at the outset that the success of the series in these difficult times is due in no small degree to the administrative skills (above and beyond their outstanding achievement as folklorists) of the general series editors and foldlders,a p. derevianko (editor-in-chief), v. m. gatsak and a b. soktoev (assistant editors), and the other members of the editorial board it is with great sadness that i report the passing last year of our friend and colleague, the buriat folklorist and assistant series editor, aleksandr badmaevich soktoev, director of the folklore department and corresponding member of the academy of sciences. for many of us, the pamiatniki series will not only provide lasting textual monuments and documentation of the folklore genres of siberia and the far east, but will also serve as monuments to all the tradition bearers and folklorists whose lives and won helped make it a success. also to be commended are the series editorial board and all those who contributed to the individual volumes; for reasons of space, i have noted only the managing editors and compilers here. other important contributors are identified at the front of each volume, as are the many local and regional organizations and funding sources which rallied to support the series. my reviews treat the series as two sets of eight volumes each. this is the way that the volumes published so far have appeared and been distributed. editorial remarks in the most recent volumes make it appear that the new organization of the series will be in two cycles of ten volumes each. as an overview, i will list all twenty volumes in abbreviated english translation; then make some general statistical and descriptive observations; and then turn to brief: but more detailed discussion of volumes 9-16. cycle one. 1) evenk heroic narratives (1990), 2) burial heroic epic ofyoldlg alamzbi mergen (1991),3) russian epic poetry of siberia and the far east (1991),4) yakut heroic epic of seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 31 kmdebeiiie (1993), 5) buriat magic tales (1993), 6) russian tales of siberia and the far east: magic and animal tales (1993), 7) russian tales of siberia and the far east: legendaiy and domestic (1993),8) tuvan folk tales (1994), 9) traditions. legends. and myths of the sakha (yakuts) (1995), 10) the yakut heroic epic of mighty er sogotokh (1996). i note here that my reviews of volumes 1-8 have a different order for volumes 4-7, all published in 1993 and without volume numbers assigned. actual volume numbers printed on the spine and series title page begin only in 1996 with volume 10. i am sure that all librarians and bibliographers will join me in welcoming this tiny but important feature of volume numbering as a favorable change in the series design. cycle two. 11) nanai folklore: ninf:1luhl. siokhor. telunp (1996), 12) tuvan heroic narratives ofkhunan-kara. and boktug-kirish. bora-shelei (1997), 13) russian calendar and ritual folklore of siberia and the far east: songs. charms. and s,pells (1997), 14) russian lyric songs of siberia and the far east (1997), 15) the altaic heroic narratives of ochy bala and khan-al~ (1997), 16) the khakass heroic epic of ai-khuuchin (1997). as of this survey, four volumes of the second cycle are still forthcoming: udegei folklore. shor heroic narratives. russian family and ritual folklore. and dol~an folklore. it is no exaggeration to say that each volume in the series is a gem. each is different and exciting in its own unique way, with appeal to different readers; not all volumes will equally interest all readers. eventually the projected sixty volumes will cover all languages and folklore genres of the people of siberia and the far east, both indigenous and colonial volumes published and projected to date are certainly representative. the breakdown by language is: russian 5, yakut 3, buriat 2, tuva 2, and 1 each for evenk, nanai, altai, and khakass. the breakdown by genre is: epic 8, tales 4, lyric songs 1, miscellaneous songs, charms, spells 1, and 2 volumes featuring more than one genre. more russian genres are forthcoming. of the sixteen volumes, half present epic and a quarter publish folk tales of all categories or specifically magic tales. the vast majority of the material in each volume was previously unpublished. as some of the languages other than russian may be un:furniliar, some background might be helpful besides russian, the languages published and projected in the two cycles to date belong to the extensive altaic family, and the indigenous languages represent all three branches: mongolian, tungusic, and turkic. buriat, one of the major languages of siberia, with 240,000 speakers, is closely related to mongolian, so close, in fact, that the two dialects of siberian buriat are as distant from each seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 32 other as either is from standard mongolian. the tungusic branch of altaic consists of many small languages spread over russia., china., and mongolia evenk, formerly called tungusic, is the largest of these, with about 30,000 speakers. nanai, spoken around khabarovsk and formerly called gol'd, is the largest southern tungusic ethnic group in russia., with about 2,000 speakers. dersu uzala., subject of the japanese-soviet film by that name based on the writings ofv1adimir arsenyev, was a nanai hunter. udegei, the subject of one of the forthcoming volumes, is a southern tungusic language spoken on the ainur river by perhaps no more than 100 people and is one of the many endangered languages of the circompolar north. thus, the series represents not only the major ethnic populations of the region such as russians, buriats, yakuts, tuvans, and others, but also the smaller groups, those desigp"ted in the soviet period as "northern peoples," including the evenk, nanai, and udegei. the most widespread of the altaic languages is the tmkic family with seven languages in siberia these include yakut (the new ethnonym of which is sakba) with 230,000 speakers, tuvan (99,000), altai (39,000), khakass. volumes of the lore ofall of these people have already been published shor and dolgan are part of the tmkic family and volumes of their folklore are forthcoming while the volume for tofa., another tmkic language, is projected. dolgan, with about 5,000 speakers on the taymyr peninsula on the arctic ocean, is the northern-most and one of the smallest tmkic languages. it is virtually in opposition to turkish both geographically and in terms of number of speakers since tmkish is spoken by some 50 million people and its homeland is located on the mediterranean.. in between, of course, are the major tmkic languages of central asia., with their rich epic traditions. the complete projected series also includes at least one volume each of the uralic languages of western siberia., the paleo-siberian languages, and asiatic eskimo. the series projects one volume each for twenty three etlmic groups (including the shor, udegei, and dolgan in press) and two to seven volumes each for ten other ethnic groups, all of which have made their first appearance, except for nivkh and even. we look forward to the completion of the second cycle and to the launching of the third with the exception of the russian volumes, each is bilingual, with the indigenous language on the left page and a facing russian translation on the right the russian volumes have a facing title page in english. each book features an elaborate scholarly apparatus including detailed introductol}' essays on histmy of scholarship, folklore tradition, cultural context, musical style, life and time of the performers, annotations to the texts and variants, a bibliography, maps, ethnographic, and historical and biographical photographs. attractively hardbound in blue and white, each book comes as part of seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 33 a boxed set that includes a small 33 1/3 record, except for the nanai volume, which has a cd. the sound recordings are ama:t.ingand fascinating. for those of us who have worked for years with "oral literature" but are still more comfortable with the transcribed texts, it can be an instructive (not to mention humbling) experience to follow the text as the singer performs. volumes 9 and 10 of the first cycle have summaries in both russian and english, but the second cycle has summaries only in english, most of which are 4 pages long. the english summaries are helpful and generally well done, but can be puzzling in places, so it would also be nice to keep the russian summaries, as they are useful for checking items that do not translate well into english. the copyright page of each volume features a useful, one-paragraph abstract in fine print. the volumes are all academy editions published by the siberian branch of the russian academy of sciences through its publishing house, nauka, which is described in several different ways on the title pages as the series progresses: sibirskaia izdatel'skaia jirma ran (vols. 9-11), then sibirskoe predpriiatie ran (vols. 12-16), but with the fuller sibirskoe izdatel'sko-poligraficheskoe i knigotorgovoe predpriiatie ran on the copyright page ofvols. 15 and 16. vol. 9. 1995. n. v. emel'ianov, managing editor, n. a. alekseev, n. v. emel'ianov, v. t. petrov, compilers. predaniia. le~en4y. i mify salcha (jakutov) [traditions, legends, and myths of the sakha (yakuts)]. 400 pp. isbn 502-030901-x volume 9 is devoted to the non-magie-tale prose of the sakha (yakut) people. of the 56 myths and traditions present, forty-one are published for the first time. these historical traditions, legends, stories, and myths are grouped into three cycles. the oldest treat the heroes omogoy baari and elley bootur (er sogotokh elley), who are the forefathers and ancestors of the later kin and clan groups. events deal with the migration of this far north turkic group from the south to the lena river and with the institution of major cultural traditions such as kumys offerings. these describe the sakha cosmology: a universe consisting of three worlds, with humans in the middle, good spirits above, and evil below. the myths and stories are about totemic animal~ and birds, and about shamans and their spirits. this information is codified and survives in the epics (olongkho) and in the rituals and songs of the ysyakh, the kumys festival the second cycle treats the historical figure tygyn toyon and other fathers of the more recent lineages who lived at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the time of the arrival of the russians. the third cycle is associated with the robin hood-like vasily manchaary, a folk hero and fighter against oppression. the four-page english and russian summaries give plot outlines. vol. 10. 1996. n. a alekseev and n. v. emel'ianov, eds. iakutskii geroicheskii epos seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 34 mopchii er so~otokh [the yakut heroic epic of mighty er sogotokh). 440 pp. isbn 502-030900-1. volume 10 features the 6,300-plus line epic (oilongkho) "mighty er sogotokh" (or"er sogotokh the brave") as performed by v. o. karataev (1926-1990). (the version appearing here is the 1986 recording; karataev's performance of this epic was also recorded in 1972 and 1982). the epic is extremely popular among the yakut (sakha) and neighboring dolgans, and thirteen complete and fragmentary recorded variants are extant, of which karataev's is considered the most complete and artistically perfect. an interesting point is that the hero's horse not only speaks and gives the sage advice one expects of horses in epics from this region, but the singer reserves a special melody or leitmotif for the songs of the horse. there are many similarities between this epic (and yakut epic in general) and neighboring traditions of siberia and central asia. for example, there are similarities to the altai song maodai khara, the buriat alamzhi mergen, and the kirgbiz manas. there are magical episodes of shape shifting by the hero, as well as more standard epic themes of weapons and arming, recitation of names, saddling the horse, the journey, battles and tests along the way, winning the bride, retmning home, victory over rivals, and a happy life in the motherland one of the introductory essays is by noted etlmomusicologist e. e. alekseev. the book is well illustrated with etlmographic and biographical photos, and the sound recording features the performer from whom the published text was recorded the style varies from song to recitative, with alliteration and parallel structure and lines usually seven or eight syllables long. unlike the epic tradition of other tmkic and mongol peoples, the yakut epics are performed without ins1rumental accompaniment. vol. ii. 1996. e. p. lebedeva, l. e. fetishova, managing editors; n. b. kile, compiler. nanoiskii fol'klor: ningman. siokhor. telunp [nanai folldore: epics, legends, and tales). 478 pp. isbn 5-02-029761-5. volwne 11 is the first collection of nanai folldore prose genres ever published. recorded in ten villages in the khabarovsk region, sixty-five of the sixty-eight texts in the book are published for the first time. nanai, spoken around khabarovsk and in the amur river basin, and called gol'd until 1930, is the largest southern tungusic ethnic group in russia, with about 2,000 speakers. the ethnonym nanai means "people of this land" the three featured genres do not have strict boundaries, and seem to be distinguished by style as much as by content. ningman are the epics and related narratives. they are not metrical, but are told in a stylized, chanted language, with much use of hyperbole, simile, and parallel structure. they often include elements of totemism, shape shifting, and the primordial kinship ofhwnans and animals. telungu are myth and legend; the style is closer to seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 35 normal spoken language, without hyperbole and simile. the term implies something that happened in the past in these there may be vestiges of totemism, animism, and shamanism. siokhor are borrowed tales. all stories are performed to bring luck. telungu and songs are performed by day, and ningman in the evening, when evil spirits are most active. stories often deal with hunting or fishing and luck comes from the kinship between animals and spirits. a common motif of the ningman is the blood feud. the hero is often an abandoned or orphaned child who gradually achieves manhood, avenges his parents who had been killed or taken captive, and restores order. many of the ningmans feature warrior women (also found in the epic traditions of the yakut, burial, altai, tuvan, and khakass). these women are often the sister or bride of the male hero, who is in killed or incapacitated some way. the texts in the book include eighteen by one woman tradition bearer who specializes in women warrior stories. the epic khalaton mokhon is published for the :first time, with excerpts on the enclosed cd. vol. 12. 1997. v. m. gatsak, managing editor. c. m. orus-ool, compiler. tuvinskie feroicheskie skazaniia "khunan-kara. n "boktuf-kirish. " "bora-sheler [tuvan heroic narratives of "khunan-kara" and "boktug-kirish, borashelei"] 584 pp. isbn 5-02-030899-4. volume 12 is a scholarly edition of the two best tuvan heroic narratives performed by the foremost storytellers o. mannaia and o. chanchy-khoo. the first, "khunan-kard," was transcribed in 1959 from a tape-recorded live performance. the second, "boktug-kirish, bora-shelei," 6,060 lines, named after the brother and sister heroes, is widely known and exists in seventeen variants. the notes in the volume compare the version selected to the archival variants, and the introductory essays address the linguistic, literary, and musical style oftuvan epic, as well as the histoly of scholarship. the heroic narratives have a wealth of ancient beliefs, sayings, charms, proverbs, and other folk wisdom and traditions woven into the main plot. there are two types of perfonnance: recitative (without singing), and vocal, but performed without musical accompaniment. tuvan epic is interesting because of the long history of documentation both by outsiders and indigenous scholars, beginning with radlov in the nineteenth century. as a type, tuvan oral epic patterns generally coincide with those of the neighboring turlric groups of southern siberia: the khakass, altai, and shor. subjects typically involve the marriage of the hero (bogatyr) and his fight with foreign khans. also common are three plot types combining different generations: grandfather-grandson, father-son, and the bogatyr himself an effort was made to include widely differing examples in the tuvan volumes of the series. "khunan-kara" is more ancient and mythological. "boktug-kirish, bora-shelei" is the only tuvan epic with a woman warrior as hero; the seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 36 plot is that she saves her brother. it shares much with the style of mongol and other turkic epic of siberia: repeated formulas and themes, color epithets, hyperbole, alliteration, parallel construction, shape shifting. and battles with evil. lines are usually of six to eight syllables long. it is interesting to note that tuva is famous for throat singing, and tuvan travelling groups and cds have recently become popular in the west, but the sample record with volume 12 does not include throat singing, which is presmnably not used in epic singing, or at least in the three performance styles demonstrated the book is well-illustrated with photos of collectors, performers, and ethnographic objects. vol. 13. 1997. t. g. leonova, managing editor. f. f. bolonev, m. n. mel'nikov, n. v. leonova, compilers. russkii kajendarruhjbriadoyyi fork/of'sibiri i dal'nego vostoka: pesni. zagovory [the russian calendar and ritual folklore of siberia and the far east: songs, charms and spells]. 605 pp.isbn 5-02-030895-1. volume 13 is the fullest collection ever published of russian calendar and ritual folklore of siberia, featuring texts gathered in the field, from archives, and from old and rare publications. the work of many collectors from the 1830s to the 19905, this volume is a gold mine for slavic folklorists and will probably be of greater professioj;l3linterest to seefa members than the non-russian volumes. the book includes songs of all cycles of the folk calendar. there are 354 texts of calendar ritual, and over 370 spells, most published for the first time, and others for the first time since 1917. the folk calendar is a product of the syncretism of old agrarian cycles and the orthodox liturgical year. the book includes texts from christmas. new year's, maslenitsa (cheese-fare sunday) planting and pentecost, midsummer and john the baptist, and harvest many of the orthodox traditions are unfamiliar to western christianity, and some of the folk traditions are not even "mainstream" orthodox, but local and regional. christmas folklore includes "starring," or house to house caroling following a star, singing hymns and carols called "koliadki" or "koliady." as a reviewer's note: the siberian "starring" tradition was carried onward to alaska, where it is alive and well in most orthodox communities. the carpathian tradition was taken to pennsylvania. there is also a central european starring tradition called "quempas" singing. also worthy of folklore and ethnomusicology research are the ala~1canorthodox hymn melodies that are not mainstream moscow chant, but seem linked with siberia and the carpathians. maslenitsa (cheese-fare sunday, the last day for eating daily products before lent) has no counterpart in western tradition, but meat-fare sunday parallels mardi-gras and carnival as the last binge before lent. ivan kupala parallels the scandinavian midsummer celebrations associated with the feast of the birth ofst john the baptist, june 24. the charms and spells are arranged by seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 37 subject such as good luck in hunting and farming, and warding off a toothache. each genre has an introductory article, and the volume is well-annotated, indexed, and cross referenced to other collections. there are musical notations, and notes on style, photos of the singers, and, of course, the accompanying record. vol 14. 1997. iu. i smimov, managing editor. s. i krasnoshtanov, v. s. levashov, v. m. shchurov, compilers. iwsskie lirieheskie pesni sibiri i da!'neeo vostoka [russian lyric songs of siberia and the far east]. 524 pp. isbn 5-02-030896-x. volume 14 is another gem and gold mine for slavic folldorists. this is the largest, most complete, scholarly collection of non-ritual lyric songs from russian settlements in siberia and the far east, from the irtysh to sakhalin, compiled by generations offolldorists from the 18305 to 19905. it features 520 song texts arranged by type: peasant songs; choral, dance and play; cossack and soldier; convict, deportee, and prison songs; workers and miners, and wanderers. there are essays and notes on style, variations, and a history of scholarship. the volume is well indexed and cross referenced to other collections. the chaiacteristics of siberian songs are discussed, comparing them to those of european russia, noting where the tradition is innovative and where conservative. the selection is designed to capture and convey the spirit of russian life in siberia as reflected in the lyric songs. this is a kind of lyric song encyclope~ with representative musical transcriptions published for the first time. there are interesting historical and ethnographic photos, and the record featmes representative local styles. vol 15. v. m. gatsak, managing editor. altaiskie lleroieheskie skazaniia "oem-bola. " "kan-altyn" [the a1taic heroic narratives of"ochi bala" and "khan-altyn"]. 668 pp. isbn 5-02-030897-8. volume 15 is the longest in the series. it is significant in that it features two monumental epic songs performed by contemporary masters of a living and healthy oral tradition: "achy baja," 3,497 lines, sung by a1eksei kalkin, and "kan-altyn," 4,275 lines, by tabar chachiiakov. i must confess as reviewer that i am more personally attached to this volume than the others, because i had the privilege of meeting the singer a. kalkin and hearing him perform during the course of a meeting of the series editorial board to which i was invited in gomo-a1taisk in 1991. i subsequently translated the conclusion of one ofhis fragments of "achy bala." a1eksei kalkin (b. 1925) is one of the best known epic singers, called "kaiehi" in altai, after the term "kai," meaning'throat singing. kalkin performs in this ancient style, accompanying himself on the topshuur, a stringed instrument. he begins his epic with an appeal to his instrument, and to the seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 38 muse. "ochy bala" [younger sister] is the best and most impressive example of the woman warrior figure in altai epic. she defends her land and people from an evil invading khan and his son. she does battle with them and various monsters along the way. meanwhile, her horse battles a mythological son of a bull from the underworld "kan-altyn," perfomed by t. chachiiakov (b. 1923) involves stmggles with enemy warriors and mythological creatures over possession of a magical copper and gold flute that bestows immortality. the plot is outlined in the english summary of the volume: it includes winning a bride for the son; spirits and deities of the upper and lower world are involved, as well as the hero's monumental horse. a fragment of the same epic by another singer, s. savdin (1916-1985), is included for comparative purposes in both the printed text and on the record there are four archived versions of "ochy baja" by kalkin recorded over a period of 36 years. likewise, there are four versions of chachiiakov's "kan-altyn. " ranging over 22 years. the main texts selected are supplemented with material from other performances, and all of this is noted additional fragments from other performances from the same and other singers are included as appendixes, and there is a detailed and careful study of variants by the same and other singers. the introduction and notes review the long history of scholarship, begjnning with radlov in the nineteenth centmy and continuing with the woik of indigenous folklorists such as the late s. s. surazakov and others. the notes include surazalcov's biography ofkalkin. the introduction discusses the poetics and etlmomusicology of altaic epic, characterized by alliteration and parallelism, and performed in a eight-syllable line. the exceipts on the record are marlced in the text, making them exceptionally easy to find. vol. 16. 1997. kh. g. korogly, manl\f)ng editor. transcribed, translated, and with introduction, notes, and commentary by v. e. mainogasheva. khakasskii geroicheskii epos "ai-khuuchin" [the khakass heroic epic of" ai-khuuchin"]. 479 pp. isbn 5-02-030906-0. "ai-khuuchin" is the:first scholarly publication of one of the most important and vivid khakass narratives featuring a woman warrior. this version is transcribed from a performance by p. v. kurbizbekov (1910-1966) recorded in 1964. the complex plot is outlined in the four-page english summary: the heroine defends her people from foreign enemies, challenges divinities, and establishes justice for the world the epic incorporates a range of episodes of ancient origin. the mythology of horses is central to the epic. ai-khuuchin is the child of a skewbald colt and a mare, with relatives in both the human and equine worlds. the action of the epic involves three generations, with focus on the middle generation of ai-khuuchin. as with all volumes in the series, this one features a full scholarly apparatus, with introduction and notes dealing with k.hakass oral literature in the wider seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 39 context oftmkic and central asian traditions, the study of variants, ethnographic photos, and a sound recording. the performance alternates prose narrative, singing, and throat singing, accompanied by a seven-stringed instrument called ehatkhan, similar to a dulcimer, which is plucked and strummed. the series is available in the united states through the russian press service, inc., 1805 crain st., evanston, il 60602; tel. (708) 491-9851; fax (708) 491-1440. prices vary per volume, but each is arolmd $30.00. references richard dauenhauer 1995a. "folldore and literature in all the languages of siberia". american anthropologist. vol. 97, no.4, december 1995: 807-11. __ 1995b. "the unveiling of siberian folldore". slavic and east european journal. vol. 39, no.4, wmter 1995: 601-05. __ i996a [review]. canadian-american slavic studies. vol. 30, no. i, spring 1996: 81-130. 1996b. [review of "folldore monuments"]. arctic anthropolo&}'. vol. 33, no. i, 1996: 143-48. seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 report from the lectern: reflections on over twenty years of teaching folklore courses. stories for the young and old natalie kononenko. university of virginia. i have been asked to write about our success teaching folklore. our courses are very large. we draw one hundred students, one hundred and fifty; when larger lecture rooms are available, we draw more. recently, one hundred and seventy students enrolled in our class. had a larger lecture room beenavailable earlier in the semester, the number would have been higher still. with pressure to produce high enrollments coming from deans and other administrators, faculty in slavic departments and slavic faculty in modern language departments across the nation are looking to folklore as the way to counter that pressure. the metafolklore of the situation is that folklore courses are magic and that anyone teaching such courses will easily attract many students. as with all folklore, there is truth to this belief-and also a great many things going on beneath the surface. our folklore courses are attractive to students because they have the same traits that characterize all well-taught courses. there is nothing inherently magic about them. as folklore restates the truth in ever-varying and situation-relevant ways, it is perhaps appropriate to restate the traits of good teaching in terms of folklore courses. in keeping with the folklore theme, i have selected three traits to discuss here: i) a good teacher loves the subject and likes the subject; a good teacher of folklore loves the lore and likes the folk 2) a good teacher knows the subject 3) a good teacher loves the students and is seriously interested in their learning something from the course i will go through these points first addressing an audience that is new to folklore and folklore teaching. then i will offer a few reflections that might be useful to folklore veterans. i) love of the subject. i cannot overemphasize the importance of this trait of good teaching. in fact, as i will show below, it is this that has made folklore seem magical. because folklore has not been mainstream in the past, it was selected by those people who truly loved it, who wanted to devote their lives to it even though it was not fashionable, did not offer the prospect of a good job, or any of the usual perquisites. for us, folklore is a passion, a love pursued against all odds. the passion shows and it infects students. any good teacher loves his or her subject, whatever that subject may be. for me personally, folklore meets my deep spiritual longings and brings me joy and wonder. i have a very strong drive toward the aesthetic and folk art, both verbal and material, satisfies that drive. folklore is important on many levels for me. to give some more mundane examples, examining the contrasts between american and east slavic culture through folklore page 3\ fall \998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 helped me understand why my parents practiced the child-rearing techniques which they did, techniques that were at odds with those of our american neighbors. exploring military conflict through epic has helped me deal with the legacy of war into which i was born. my earliest memories are of mutilated people, of bombed-out buildings, the reality of my physical surroundings in germany immediately after the second world war. epic has offered the means to express the horrors my very young eyes beheld. only after i devoted about ten years to studying blind ukrainian minstrels and their poetry did i realize that my desire to explore the role of the handicapped in society and the function that art played in their lives might have had something to do with growing up with a handicapped brother. i could go on, but the above is probably sufficient to make my point: a person who is going to teach folklore and teach it well should find deep meaning in the subject. for that person, folklore should elicit an emotional response. the reason for the response may become apparent only later, but the passion must be there. frankly, a person enthralled by the beauty and the intricacy of linguistic phenomena is better off being a linguist and a person whose imagination is sparked by written literature is better off pursuing that field. enthusiasm for the subject infects students and is vital to good teaching. ia) liking the subject. this is an integral part of the first point and a transition to point 2. a successful folklorist who teaches folklore well likes the folk and likes talking to people. love ukrainian villages and i love talking to the little old women and the little old men. i do not care that there is no plumbing, that the electricity may not work or be turned off for hours at a stretch, that, frequently, there is no gas and you have to use wood or coal. the beauty of the ukrainian countryside is one of those things that gives me the intense spiritual experience i mentioned earlier. someone selecting folklore as a field does not have to love ukrainian villages and ukrainian peasants. that person can be interested russian village life, or polish or bulgarian village life for that matter. that person can chose the folk of the city and study urban folklore. the key is genuine interest in the people the scholar works with, respect for them, faith that these people will offer valuable information, great insight. many people are not comfortable talking to toothless grannies and unwilling to put up with the hardship of the village. they do not want to observe children for hours in order to collect children's lore. there is nothing wrong with that and those people who want to sit in archives and marvel at the work of pushkin should chose that as their field. my choice is to marvel at the ingenuity of a folk loom and, because it does thrill me, conveying my delight to my students is an easy task. 2) knowledge of the subject. this is a given in all disciplines. training in medicine, in mathematics, in literature, in linguistics is considered essential before venturing into the classroom to teach the subject to others. this given is sometimes overlooked when it comes to folklore. although folklore is a recognized discipline with a long history in europe, it is a relatively new field here. this seef a journal page 32 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 sometimes leads people to forget that, like all disciplines, folklore requires training in and knowledge of the extensive body of both primary and secondary sources. the other reason that people new to folklore may not realize the need for training, in that folklore, at first glance. can appear simple. the applicable metafolklore here is that the folk are simple and, therefore, anyone can be like the folk, can know folklore. it is true that we are all the folk. but there are many folk groups. our own is that of the american academic. each of us belongs to many other folk groups at the same time. few of us, however, qualify for membership in the folk groups that produced the famous collections of slavic folklore that we use in teaching our students. even if we did. folkgroup membership is hardly sufficient qualification for teaching a course. it would be like saying that a diabetic with no medical training is qualified to teach a course on diabetes. teaching a course on folklore, if it is going to be done well, requires years of studying the folklore, reading primary and secondary sources, going to the field to do one's own collecting. only then does understanding come and only then does one have a body of knowledge worth conveying to students. students, a folkgroup themselves, are not stupid. they can tell when a faculty member really knows the subject. neither the folk nor their lore is simple. folklore has developed over millennia. it is extremely complex and hence its power. any tale, song, ritual has so many meanings that it impossible to even estimate their number. tales vary and mutate; genres blur; descriptions of rituals become stories; stories told as true become fabulous and are then retold as real happenings that befell a neighbor or a friend. teaching folklore requires knowing the field. only then can the teacher convey its richness, its dynamism, its power. the vastness of the field is intimidating. i have been working in the field for a quarter of a century and am constantly reminded of how much more there is for me to learn. by the same token, the enormity of the field offers great possibilities. this is the other "magic" aspect of folklore. because the field is so large, there is a high probability that there will be something in it for just about everyone, both every scholar and every student. also, because folklore has not been a mainstream discipline in the united states, it offers a fresh approach to all sorts of areas, be it the phenomenon of language, the power of narrative, group dynamics, or expressions of spirituality. the fresh approach which folklore provides is one of the things that is making it so appealing now. i think that contemporary american society is especially hungry for new means of spiritual expression and folklore offers these and offers them in a variety of forms: narrative, ritual, sacred objects. but to draw on the possibilities of folklore for fresh expression, especially in the realm of the sacred, it is essential not to trivialize the field. 3) caring for the students and helping them learn our students take our courses because they know they will learn something, not because they want an easy "a" or because they think they will improve their transcripts in some other way. we are not easy graders and no one in his right mind takes a course in slavic folktale or slavic page 33 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 ritual and family life because it looks good to potential employers. they take our courses because we know the subject. they take them because we are good lecturers. i would be a fool to spend years on performance studies and not learn from the performers whom i have taped. interviewed. followed for years and years. i have learned what makes a good performer and i do my best to be one. perhaps most importantly. we work hard to take teach our students skills that will be useful no matter where they go. folklore, with its fluidity. is an excellent venue for developing critical thinking skills. we have students compare and contrast variants. we have them discuss critical interpretations of·variants. we ask them to do cultural contrast. we have them discuss the questions at hand in sections (about 20 students per section) and in small groups (the sections are broken up into groups of 3-4 people so that the shy students get a better chance to talk and to contribute). we send students out on collection projects. we teach students writing skills. our course can be taken for what is here called the second writing requirement and we take this option very seriously. students write a first draft of some 10-12 pages. this draft is then extensively critiqued and the student writes a final draft of 20 pages. even those students who do not chose the second writing requirement write essay exams and small papers of 2-3 pages every couple of weeks. these, too, are extensively critiqued to help students improve writing skills. yes, this is all very labor-intensive and i have been blessed with excellent teaching assistants who have worked with the students on all of these skills. but everyone is willing to put in the effort because what we are doing is valuable. the students see that they are learning the things they need and the teaching assistants see that they are providing a truly worthwhile service, while learning a great deal themselves, and not just about teaching and grading, but also about writing. we have even provided a safety net for students. because we work with them so closely, we soon see who the problem students are. when we spot a student who seems to be struggling more than he or she should, we call the dean or the appropriate university official. in short, we do all of the things that faculty are supposed to do. the part above is perhaps useful to veteran folklorists as well as those new to the field. what may be of special interest to veterans, perhaps as a reminder, is that we have adapted our folklore courses and our teaching techniques over time so that they fit the sort of student we have in any given class. we did not do small group work some five or six years ago. however, this is something that students now do on the high school level and in other college courses. they are comfortable with this type of instruction, enjoy it, and profit from it and so we use it in our courses. similarly, we have adjusted our writing assignments over time and changed the nature of the writing help we give because student needs have changed. one thing i have tried to do all along is to make sure that every course teaches a few theoretical points that apply beyond slavic and folklore. just a couple of examples are showing students that human beings have a need for order, whatever that order might be. i have tried to show students that cultures are systems, that these systems differ one from the other, that every cultural system has an element of the chaotic or unsystematic. i like to work on showing the seef a journal page 34 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 power of the word. both oral and written, how narratives exert a centripetal force of sorts. how narrating an event gives it validity. encouraging people to believe something to be true. i like to show students that whatever theoretical point we are working with applies not just to our slavic folklore data. but also to some aspect of their lives, usually something from american popular culture. i think this is especially important. it makes the course appealing to students. more important. it performs the invaluable service of teaching students to link the classroom to the real world. too many of today's students view a co liege education as a test rather than an opportunity to gain skills and information. they think universities certify them rather than teaching them. if in one course they can be shown how to take the material learned and apply it. not just on an exam or a paper, but throughout life, this wili make their whole college experience more meaningful and rewarding. the magic of our courses is that we really and truly do a good job. we love folklore and teach it well. and folklore is an easy thing to love. folklore is extremely old and extremely complex. over the years, it has developed something for just about everyone. i may respond most strongly to stories of war and the poetry of the handicapped, but there is childlore, and funerals, and stories about the return of the dead, and various students have selected these as topics for dissertations, theses, papers. other students have been attracted to gender issues as expressed in folktales or material culture, to memorates, true stories about setting up a community, to folklore themes that have enriched contemporary popular song, or modern literature. in that sense. there is a magic to folklore and, because of its complexity, students can easily find in folklore something that does touch their hearts. faculty, too. might well find profound meaning. but, to yield its wealth, folklore must be approached with deference. so many tales and legends teii of gold turning to dung when the protagonist fails to treat the wealth he has been give with respect. yes, this is the end of a millennium and everyone wants a quick fix and success without effort. but milienarian expectations work no better in folklore than in any other discipline. students may come if they are attracted to a title, but if there is nothing behind that title, they wiii not stay. students may come because they think a course is a gut, but does any of us really want to teach that kind of student? but folklore loved and respected is rich beyond anyone's imagination. it can inspire both the faculty member and the student. it can serve as the vehicle for teaching critical thinking and writing skills that will benefit a student his or her entire life. it can provide data for countless fascinating articles and books. it leads to adventure. discovery, and as so many tales teii us, you can drink and drink from its goblet and the goblet never runs dry. there is always so much more to drink, to experience. natalie kononenko for: anne ingram jann lacoss philippa rappoport and those many other teaching assistants who contributed to her folklore courses but did not have a chance to review this article. page 35 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 editorial satement 89 reviews bronislava kerbelyte, tipy narodnykh skazanii. strukturno-semantycheskaia klassifikacia etiologicheskikh, mifologicheskikh i istoricheskikh skazanii i predanii [folk legend types. the structural-semantic classification of lithuanian etiological, mythological and historical legends]. st petersburg: evropeiskii dom, 2001, 606 pp. isbn 5-8015-0114-2 a new catalogue of lithuanian etiological, mythological and historical legends, written in russian and english, has recently been published in st petersburg. compiled by bronislava kerbelyte of the institute of lithuanian literature and folklore in vilnius, it is based on a card index, which systematizes more than 85,000 variants of lithuanian folk narratives. included in this number are approximately 3,000 etiological, 24,000 mythological and 4,000 historical legends. in the card index folk legends are classified according to the recommendations of the international commission as published in fabula [1960: 3, 299]. however, these classificatory principles cause serious problems, given that different mythical characters in mythological legends may figure in the same plot, or else in etiological legends the origin of different objects may be explained by means of what is essentially one and the same plot. in her search for more objective criteria for classification, bronislava kerbelyte has come to develop an innovatory structural and semantic analysis of folk texts, based on the distinctive features of their structure and the underlying semantic features of folk narratives. what she demonstrates is that complex plots are made up out of elementary plots, transformed into a hierarchical system. an elementary plot is one in which two characters or two groups of characters collide in the course of the hero�s progress towards his goal. what results from this collision depends on how the hero behaves. kerbelyte defines 152 different types of elementary plot in lithuanian folk tales, legends and anecdotes, each of which has several versions. she has worked out a special semantic language for describing these elementary plots on three levels. the organization of folk legends in the catalogue is also based on this structural-semantic classification system, the main principles of which are thoroughly explained in the book�s introduction. most folk legends consist of a single elementary plot. however, a proportion of legends possess a more complex structure. if we compare legends with differing levels of complexity, it is seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 90 possible to study the evolution of a given narrative. this kind of analysis also makes finding semantically similar narratives in different genres easier and more precise. on the other hand, it shows that outwardly similar elementary plots may in fact possess semantic differences. what is more, the principles of structural-semantic analysis help us to reconstruct the probable original forms of folk narratives. bronislava kerbelyte�s research reveals that the hero of the mythological legend is not the mythological figure itself but the human protagonist. this being so, the internationally accepted classification of legends according to the mythological characters that feature in them is inadequate. consequent upon her discovery, she has grouped texts of this genre in the catalogue according to the hero�s behavior, which can be of three kinds: correct, incorrect, and neutral. this method of grouping mythological narratives, irrespective of which mythological characters they depict, helps reveal the general rules of conduct for dealing with the mythological world. it could be said that avoiding various mythological beings would normally be considered the correct course of action. however, maintaining good relations with the mythological world may also be considered the right way to behave. when neutral conduct is depicted, the hero by chance observes strange happenings and draws conclusions about their origin. it is evident that it is those elementary plots that present examples of neutral behavior, which preserve and furnish the most stable and reliable information about the world of mythological beings. time and place in mythological legends are concrete. time refers either to specific moments within a twenty four-hour period, or to the life cycle of an individual or to calendar festivities. space is associated with the specific places where important rites are performed or terrifying locations where various mythological beings may appear. this permits comparisons between legends and folk customs or beliefs. some legends aim to encourage the preservation of a given tradition, while others cast doubt upon antiquated beliefs. elucidating a protagonist�s behavior and the consequences of that behavior brings out the distinctive features of the popular worldview and its evolution, as well as of the legends themselves. these propositions lead to the conclusion that the main function of mythological legends is pragmatic; they not only regulate relationships with the mythological in the surrounding environment, but also promote traditionally accepted interpersonal relationships among members of the community. it is to be hoped that the innovatory principles underlying the structural-semantic classification of folk narratives in the catalogue will attract the attention of scholars more widely, and that folk legend types will, in its turn, both provide valuable information about the 91 lithuanian world outlook and contribute to the comparative study of the folklore of different nations. radvile racenaite vytautas magnus university, kaunas seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 2 microsoft word contentsqsoft.doc 152 мария еленевская и лариса фиалкова. русская улица в еврейской стране. исследование фольклора эмигрантов 1990-х в израиле. (maria elenevskaia and larisa fialkova. russian street in a jewish country). investigation of the folklore of emigrees of the 1990s in israel). 2 vols. moscow: academy of sciences, 2005. 352 pp. (vol. 1). 242 pp. (vol. 2). isbn 5-201-00887-9. $26.95 (paper) elenevskaia and fialkova’s research is based primarily on a series of interviews with russian-speaking immigrants to israel on their experiences. the authors emphasize that they are attempting to broaden the scope of folklore studies in various ways both through the inclusion of non-traditional data and theoretical approaches from other disciplines. their data are augmented by material from the internet, from mass media, and from consumer culture (advertisements, store signs) (p. 157, vol. 2). their interdisciplinary analysis relies on not only folklore theory, but also on research on sociology, political science, geography, social psychology, linguistics, and anthropology related to immigration (p. 10, vol. 1). the end result is a fascinating study of the folklore of these immigrants and the three broad sources of this material: traditional russian culture, traditional jewish culture, and soviet culture (with minor influences from islamic culture as well). the introduction and chapter one of the first volume present a description of the rationale for considering the personal narrative to be a form of folklore and the field work. the second chapter details the informant pool, not all of which were jewish, and who immigrated from a wide geographic area of the former soviet union, from the central asian and caucasus and the european region (primarily moscow, kiev and saint petersburg) (p. 28, vol. 1). this huge wave of immigrants (the largest in israeli history) has caused some significant disruption within the local populace about the expectations for immigrants to israel. not only did nearly 900,000 russian speakers immigrate to the country between 1989 and 1999, but they also did not join with the local population as previous immigrants had done (pp. 11-13, vol. 1). rather, they have kept their language and cultural practices intact for the most part and have maintained frequent contact with their “homeland.” as a result, this group of people provides an opportunity to examine the motivations for this decision and how/whether folk culture is used to adapt to the new society in which they find themselves. chapter two examines narratives about three main topics: reasons for immigration; the attitude toward jewishness in the former soviet folklorica 2007, vol. xii 153 union; remnants of jewish tradition practiced before immigration. the goal of this chapter is to establish issues surrounding self-identity in a folk group and its role in immigrant folklore (p. 45, vol. 1). the authors note that the two waves of immigration from the (former) ussr, in the 70s and in the 90s, were motivated by significantly different purposes. the first group often immigrated for ideological reasons, while those twenty years later for economic reasons (p. 52, vol. 1). as a result, their attitudes toward israel and israeli culture are strikingly different, since the second wave did not feel affection for israel in the same way that the first group did, which is a major factor in the preservation of their “native” culture. chapters three and four, the last in the first volume, incorporate material on three broad folkloric themes: feeling like a stranger within israeli society (as contrasted to the same feeling in the former soviet union) and the notions of space and time. traditional folklore reflects all three of these constructs and also serves as a means to cope with instability after immigration (p. 121, vol. 1). chapter three, which focuses on the notion of svoi/chuzhoi illustrates the complexity of this issue in this immigrant group. they apply traditional mythology (such that russian speakers are “people,” while others are not) (p. 122, vol. 1), but also resist the trend among native israelis to lump them all together into a uniform group (p. 126, vol. 1). that is to say, these immigrants bring with them soviet (russian) attitudes about the center and periphery, so that urban dwellers are “more prestigious” than jews from the mountain (or rural) regions (p. 127, vol. 1). while they retain some identity as “russians,” they also respond to the concept of svoi/chuzhoi (one’s own / other) within the israeli context, so that they view themselves as “better” than jews from africa or than arabs (pp. 145149, pp.186-196, vol. 1). the concepts of space and time are also heavily influenced by the soviet experience. ielenevskaia and fialkova argue that these concepts are cultural constructs that are heavily influenced by traditional belief systems. immigrants overwhelmingly celebrate “traditional” soviet holidays, such as victory day in may, women’s day in march and new year’s in december. despite the fact that their informants scorned soviet ideology, they believe the holidays were distinct from communism and merited preservation (p. 259, vol. 1). they also typically reacted negatively to the differences in workdays and times and calendrical holidays in israel (p. 256, vol. 1). space also played a significant role in immigrants’ stories, since they have been strongly influenced by folklorica 2007, vol. xii 154 traditional concepts about the danger of border crossing (pp. 261-262, vol. 1). in addition, they often described a feeling of claustrophobia after moving from the largest country on earth (a fact that figured prominently in soviet propaganda) to one of the smallest (p. 267, vol. 1). in addition, within the soviet union, jews were associated with the east, while most of the informants from the european part of russia believe that they are westerners, i.e., representatives of more civilized societies than the cultures of the east (p. 315, p. 332, vol. 1). volume two consists of three chapters plus a conclusion and includes a bibliography, a list of informants and a brief glossary. chapter five deals with the concept of miracles and fate in immigrants’ stories. since most of the people interviewed are not particularly religious, most of them do not attribute such events to divine intervention. however, that does not change the fact that the stories about prophetic dreams and fate do conform to the structure of these stories in traditional lore. throughout the book the authors describe how their informants’ stories contain motifs from oral literature, particularly tales and legends, making reference to aarne and thompson’s motif index. while not all of their assertions were convincing or bolstered by a large amount of data, those in this chapter are especially interesting and do support their conclusion that individual narratives borrow from folk narrative structure (p. 33, vol. 2). chapter six examines how traditional and soviet “folk” elements are reinterpreted within the israeli context. informants incorporated familiar characters, including the heroes of soviet-era jokes (chapaev, lenin, pet'ka) as well as those from films, fairy tales (baba iaga, sleeping beauty), “folk” characters (ded moroz and snegurochka) and children’s literature (buratino), into jokes and humorous stories about their life in israel and back in the former soviet union (such as the man who told a russian bank clerk that his home address in israel was on lenin street, rather than on weitzman (the first president of israel) street; she wrote it down without batting an eye) (p. 84, vol. 2). the authors also discuss how russian proverbs, memorates and legends, chastushki and sadistskie stishki (sadistic verses) help to cope with and give voice to the social difference russian speakers experience after they have immigrated. the last chapter in this volume is dedicated to the study of language attitudes, an important issue for immigrants. the authors examine their informants’ reactions to russian, the regional languages of the ussr (e.g., ukrainian, belarusian, uzbek, etc.) and of jews (e.g. yiddish, folklorica 2007, vol. xii 155 tatskii), and hebrew. the role of language in identity and society is often overlooked in folk material and it is a welcome addition to this study. they provide an interesting description of language policy in israel and examine how russian has managed to retain its strength within this context (pp. 105-108, vol. 2). israelis are particularly disturbed that the russian-speaking populace, unlike other immigrants to the country, has not adopted hebrew or evince interest in israeli culture (p. 143, vol. 2). this chapter also examines linguistic awareness and humorous narratives created by learning a second language (p. 144, vol. 2). one particularly interesting topic is an examination of cross-linguistic strategies employed by israelis who use russian and hebrew phrases in their narratives, conversations and advertisements and in cross-linguistic word play as well (pp. 150-153, vol. 2). the breadth of the study alone makes it a worthwhile read. the authors have provided a plethora of material on the immigrant experience that is valuable in and of itself. i only wish that each interview were available for further exploration in an archive (ideally on-line). in addition, the authors have applied a wide array of theoretical material that illustrates the interdisciplinary nature of folk studies and its relevance to social sciences in the contemporary world. this book is of use not only to folklorists, but to social scientists studying the former soviet union or immigration. folklorists who study material culture (particularly food and clothing), ritual, and oral literature will find data that are of interest and that raise pertinent questions and make insightful conclusions about folk material within the context of the soviet society. an abridged english version of this book has been accepted by wayne state university press. portions of the russian version are available online at http://www.intersol.co.il/ ispr/index.php?page=802. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby university of kentucky folklorica 2007, vol. xii untitled reports 145 reports practical methods of folklore and ethnographic research in ukraine maryna hrymych kyiv taras shevchenko university kyiv, ukraine ukraine is a country with well-developed ethnographic traditions. sometimes it appears that ukrainian traditional culture is well preserved because of its active ethnographers, professional and non-professional. it may also be said that ethnographers flourished in ukraine because they had a rich traditional culture to work with. this makes ukraine an excellent model for ethnographic and folklore fieldwork methods. this paper is based primarily on the fieldwork experience of the department of ethnology and the study of local lore at kyiv taras shevchenko university. it is important to define terminology and to provide some background information. ukrainian scholarship, like scholarship in the rest of the post-soviet world, makes a distinction between theoretical methodology and practical methodology. the two main practical methods (прикладні методи) are: a) methods of collecting information, primarily fieldwork and the so-called “armchair method,” and b) methods of classifying and compiling information, namely cataloguing, tabulating, building databases, creating charts, mapping, and so forth. scholars of the post-soviet era use two terms: методика and методологія. these two words correspond to what, in north america, is termed research, methodology, analysis, theory, approach, and they can even apply to research tools, and information management. the term методологія has two meanings. the first applies to a set of theoretical or analytical methods. the second meaning of методологія corresponds to the terms approach and theory. a. methods of collecting information a.1. fieldwork fieldwork, in the minds of both scholars and the general public alike, refers to all aspects of observing and collecting ethnographic data. these include interviewing (опитування), observation (спостереfolklorica 2008, vol. xiii 146 ження) and experimentation or the induced natural context method (експеримент). a.1.1. the interview interviewing can be done either by asking questions directly of the interviewee (безпосереднє опитування) or by using a questionnaire (анкетування). one way of labeling these two types of interviewing is to call them oral and written, respectively. a.1.1.1. the questionnaire (анкетування) collecting ethnographic and cultural information by using questionnaires is a very old and trusted method. we can trace its origins to katherine the great and to the eighteenth century. upon taking power, katherine realized that she had no idea how different peoples in her country lived. she felt that she did not understand her country or its cultural diversity. furthermore, she believed that she could not govern her own state without this knowledge. this prompted her to issue a decree ordering her advisors to compose questionnaires and to collect specific information of interest to her. scholars and other pedagogical staff participated in carrying out this project throughout the different regions of her domain. a network of interviewees or respondents was created for information gathering. these respondents were mainly the secretaries of village communities (писарі), priests, teachers, even military personnel. the result of this effort was the so called topographical description (топографические описания) of the chernihiv, kharkiv and kherson regions.(1) the descriptions of these regions contain important ethnographic data from the eighteenth century and continue to be a major resource to this day. they allow contemporary researchers to understand a piece of history and a part of culture that would otherwise be inaccessible, and they offer a level of knowledge that is truly exceptional. another good example of the effective use of questionnaires dates to almost two centuries later, specifically to the early years of the soviet state. the all-ukrainian academy of sciences (вуан) initiated what they called the ethnographic commission. several members of the “eтнографічна комісія вуан” wrote questionnaires on various topics and mailed them to almost every village and district (округа). thousands of people responded to this soviet government initiative. as a result, the responses yield a unique ethnographic perspective.(2) they provide reports 147 information about archaic cultural customs, beliefs, and rituals that were still practiced at the beginning of the twentieth century. today, the questionnaire method of fieldwork is used for collecting information at the initial stages of research. such information can then be easily classified by statistical or quantitative methods. this is sufficient for defining the geographical and cultural boundaries of customs or beliefs. for example, data obtained from questionnaires show that the winter solstice mumming ritual called “koza” is widespread in the northern region of ukraine. in the southern part of ukraine, from podillia to odeshchyna, the winter solstice is typically marked by the malanka rite.(3) both the malanka and koza rituals do not exist at all in the western regions of ukraine, namely halychyna (opillia) and boikivshchyna. these regions have a well developed tradition of “vertep” (puppet theatre) and “shopka” performances. questionnaires allow us to draw the borders of these cultural traditions on the map of ukraine. since we are not able to visit all villages and regions for indepth investigation of cultural traditions, we must rely on constructing questionnaires and on sending them to as many villages on both sides of the ethnographic zone as possible to get the most accurate available perspective on ukrainian culture. after this is accomplished, we are able to focus on the specific regions that should be targeted for an expedition. a.1.1.2. interviewing interviewing can be done either individually, by one person (експедиційне відрядження) or by a group of researchers (експедиція). expedition here is used to mean the initial first-hand exploration of a subject. there are academic or scientific (наукові) expeditions and also educational or student (навчальні, студентські) expeditions. the structure of the expedition depends on the goals or objectives being pursued. the in-depth exploration of a single region, for example the chornobyl’ zone, differs from studying a single specific topic, such as children’s subculture, in several districts. in the first case, when we need to produce a regional survey, specialists in different fields of ethnography explore their own special topic in the given geographical area. in this situation, each interviewer has his or her own questionnaire. in the second case, when we need information about a specific topic from different parts of ukraine, each fieldworker works with the same questionnaire. this produces more accurate and more consistent data. ethnographic workers study interview procedures before they go out into the field. very good reference materials on ethnographic folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 148 research are available (4) and they present many cases that show how interviews can be handled correctly or incorrectly. theoretically we know how to interview successfully, and barriers to completing a project are not discussed here. what has been covered and will be presented here are the main problems in doing recorded interviews. wasting time during an interview is a major issue. if we ask ourselves: “what is the most expensive part of an expedition?”, the answer, without a doubt, is time. wasting time during an interview could be construed as an ethnographic “crime” because we sacrifice a valuable opportunity that could be used for gathering information. but students are not guilty when something as precious as time is lost; the fault lies with the instructors. attention to detail in the questionnaire is crucial. questionnaires can be long, but this does not mean that each and every possible question needs to be included. at the same time, it is good to make sure that each student has a stock of questions for special situations, such as when he or she is lucky enough to meet the extraordinary interviewee. let us imagine a situation when a student-interviewer comes across a special opportunity to interview a respondent on a specific topic and that he does not have a questionnaire properly tailored to that topic. for example, let us say that the student encounters an old man who is a leading authority on local sacred places in the folk culture of crimean tatars. what happens if the interviewer has not prepared for this opportunity and does not have the appropriate questionnaire? what is he to do? one solution is for the student to implement a method referred to as empathy, a technique described by k.malinowski. the student-interviewer should then imagine him or herself in a specific ritual or non-ritual situation or context. simple or primary questions like: why, what, or when can prove very effective. another technique that helps keep the dialogue flowing is to turn the interview into a conversation and to contribute comments. phrases that can help this flow of ideas are: “sorry, i didn’t catch what you meant,” “could you please repeat that,” “could you please spell that,” “could you please show me how it’s done,” “let me try it,” “let’s try it together,” “please take me to this place,” and so on. all questions and requests of this type are very helpful and can enrich the information provided in an interview. sometimes students are the only recorders of an interview. with this possibility in mind, students must learn how to lead the conversation. the model of cooperation between interviewer and interviewee should be like the model of the proverbial ukrainian family. in the proverb, it is said that the husband believes that he is the head of the family. in reports 149 reality, it is the woman who is the real decision-maker. metaphorically, the man is the head and the woman is the neck; where the neck turns, the head follows. the same should be true in ethnographic interviews: the interviewer should be the neck that turns and leads while, at the same time, the interviewee should be convinced that he or she is the leader or the head of the conversation. this approach is essential because much, if not most, of the information gathered is not made public but placed in what we call memory storages or archives. in addition, good story-tellers or talented narrators are not always good informants or interviewees. we, as researchers, have to control them. that is why we need to know little secrets or subtle tricks so that we can interrupt without embarrassing the interviewee. this subtle art must be taught to students. the simplest way to interrupt an interviewee is to compliment him or her or to express amazement, to produce the “wow” moment. and while the interviewee enjoys the compliment, the researcher can gently put them back on the right track. of course care must be exercised and all fieldwork must be ethical. establishing and maintaining good fieldwork relations and not embarrassing the person being interviewed is essential. a delicate balance between good relations and the imperative to extract information must be achieved. the objectives of research must not be forgotten. facilitating the interview is an important consideration. the most effective interviews are those conducted by at least two people. one keeps the personal conversation flowing as the interview is being conducted, extracting the desired information, while the second person takes care of the technical side by taking notes, making records, and running whatever audio or video equipment is being used. it is a given that all preparations should be handled well in advance of the interview. the researcher should check the sound quality of the recorder. he or she should make sure that the camera lens cap is off. he or she should review the questionnaire and make sure that it is relevant and accurate. other details should be handled as appropriate. the secondary interviewer should take notes and is considered a key silent partner in the interview. after the interview is complete, a detailed report should be written. it should be noted that in north-america the term “fieldwork methods” includes note taking, field diaries, questionnaires, audio recording, video recording, and photography. in ukrainian scholarly tradition these are considered research tools which help in collecting the information. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 150 a.1.2. observation the next method that should be focused on is observation. i recommend it to my students when an interview does not seem safe. an example of this is collecting information from beggars or homeless people and other marginal groups. in this case an interviewer has a list of variables that they must pay attention to. for example, what types of clothing are the subjects wearing? what speech formulas do they use? what is their “business success,” in other words, how successful are they at gathering alms? does the beggar under observation have his own place or not? does he have a bodyguard and so on? observation as a technique is helpful in the ritual context of weddings, funerals and the baptism of a child. a.1.3. experiment this method usually is not used in ukrainian ethnographic research practice. a.2. armchair methods when the opportunity to conduct fieldwork does not exist because of time constraints, or the distance to the desire site, or because of personality and psychological reasons, we can use the armchair method of collecting the information. this approach includes research in archives, museums, libraries, private collections, and so on. research based on existing collections can be very effective and is popular in contemporary ukrainian scholarship because ukraine has an enormous quantity of archive materials which have still not been examined and otherwise researched. b. methods of classifying information after fieldwork is complete, it is time to compile and classify the collected information (систематизація, упорядкування, класифікація). the main methods of classification are: transcribing, cataloguing, building databases, composing tables, drawing charts, and making maps. in many senses the process of classification begins before data is even recorded and a well-constructed questionnaire is the first step to subsequent successful classifying. reports 151 b.1. composing the questionnaire the principles of composing questionnaires are as follows. the questionnaire should be built as a hierarchical system. questions are arranged in categories. the main question is put on the head of the category. if the respondent does not know the answer to this question, then the interviewer proceeds to the next category. if the respondent does remember something, then the researcher proceeds to ask all the questions from that category. for example, a questionnaire about weddings is divided into multiple categories. one such category would be “гільце” or wedding tree. the first question would typically be: “at weddings in your area, did you have the гільце, вільце, деревце, квітка, йолка, etc.” if the answer is “no,” then the researcher proceeds to the next category. if the answer is “yes,” then the student is supposed to have a set of questions that might be typified by the following: what is the local term for this item? when it is prepared and by whom? what are the materials that are used and why? who cuts the tree and who decorates the tree? does an older age group (beyond marriageable age) participate in this custom? what is done with the wedding tree on saturday, on sunday? what is done with it after the wedding? how long is it kept and where and so on? b.2. transcription transcription in ukraine is done by the interviewer or his assistant. it is important to verify the data file of the interview (паспортичка) which contains information about the informant, the time and place of the interview, the definition of the main topic, and the key words of the interview or survey. transcription principles were established in soviet times and are still effective. b.3. cataloguing and storing the information all activities involved in storing and retrieving information fall under the north-american rubric of information management. in ukraine we feel that archive and museum workers are not only information managers, but also active co-workers in the process of classifying, compiling, and describing the data collected through fieldwork. thus, they are our partners in research. they do the archiving, ethnographic and audio-visual archiving, and they produce museum exhibits. it may also be informative to arrange the information into tables, charts, and diagrams. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 152 b.4. description of the information the last step is for the researcher to describe his or her information, to write the report, survey, commentary, and so forth (опис, передмова, післямова, наукові примітки, покажчики, коментарi). the term науковий апарат is sometimes used in ukrainian scholarship to refer to this activity. practical methods, therefore, are the primary research tools which help folklorists and ethnographers collect their data and prepare it, through classification, for further study. the next step of research is the theoretical one. this involves analysis based on different theories and approaches. notes 1 shafonskii, a. 1786. шафонский а. черниговского наместничества топографи-ческое описание [topographic description of the chernihiv region]; атлас харьковского наместничества 1787 г. с топографическим описаним [atlas of the khar’kiv region of 1787, with a topographic description]. kharkiv, 1902; карта херсонской губернии [a map of the kherson province]. st. petersburg, 1880; pokhylevych, l., ed. 1887. уезды киевский и радомысльский: стат. и ист. заметки о всех насел. местностях в этих уездах и с подроб. картами их [the kyiv and radomysl’ provinces: statistical and historical notes on all the inhabited locales in these provinces along with detailed maps]. kиїв. 2 see: hurii, o. i. and parakhina, m. b. 2004. гурій о.і., парахіна м.б. eтнологічні осередки україни в 20-х на початку 30х рр.. хх ст. нарис діяльності [ethnographic societies of ukraine in the 20s – beginning of the 30s of the xx century. description of their activities]. київ. 3 see: kurochkin, o. 1995. курочкін о. українські новорічні обряди “коза” і “маланка” [ukrainian new year rituals “goat” and “malanka”]. oпішнє. 4 see recent publications on this topic: iuriichuk, m.i. and kostyk, v. v. 1997. юрійчук м.і., костик в.в. фольклорна практика: методичний збірник [folklore practice: a methodological collection]. чернівці; kravchenko, a. i. 2003. кравченко а.и. социальная антропология [social anthropology]. moсква; ivanyts’kyi, a. i. 1997. іваницький а.і. українська музична фольклористика [ukrainian musical folkloristics]. kyiv; skotnykova, t. v. and rizun, v. v. 2006. скотникова т.в., різун в.в. методи наукових досліджень у reports 153 журналістикознавстві: навчальний посібник [research methods in journalism: a textbook]. kиїв. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii microsoft word contentsqsoft.doc 129 reviews олександра бріцина. українська усна традиційна проза: питання текстології та виконавства (o. britsyna. ukrainian traditional oral prose: questions of textology and performance). kyiv: natsional'na academiia nauk ukrainy, institut mystetstvoznavstva, fol'klorystyky ta etnolohii im. ryl's'koho (rylsky institute for art studies, folkloristics and ethnology at the ukrainian academy of sciences), 2006. 395 pp. 20 hryvna. isbn 966-02-3371-x o. britsyna’s book ukrains'ka usna tradytsiina proza: pytannia tekstolohii ta vykonavstva is an important contribution to ukrainian folklore scholarship. the importance of this study to the further development of folklore theory in ukraine is best appreciated in the context of the development of contemporary folklore studies world wide. as a scholarly discipline, folkloristics seems to have allowed itself a very brief existence. it became a scholarly discipline relatively late in the nineteenth century, flourished from the 1920s through the 1970s, and then suddenly dissolved into the field of interdisciplinary studies toward the end of the twentieth century. the main, and unfortunate, characteristic of world folkloristics at the border of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can be described as scholarly indifference to the search for answers to its principal theoretical and methodological issues. this is compounded by the related tendency to ignore traditional folklore and to concentrate on the search for folk elements in other phenomena of life. it seems that contemporary folklorists happily announced that traditional folklore is dead, and that there no longer exists the need for a general theoretical understanding of issues such as who constitutes the folk, what the genres of folklore are, and the nature of the folk text. textology has become unpopular. nevertheless, traditional folklore functions actively in village and urban communities; its elements are most influential in the spiritual and everyday life of our contemporaries. the absence of general agreement among scholars as to what we are studying, and where the borders between folkloristics and other disciplines lie, makes the object of study appear very amorphous indeed. a common approach among folklorists today is that one should not seek to demonstrate that a particular phenomenon is folklore, but rather should search for folklore elements within it. this creates a situation in which scholars seem to be lost, and to be returning in their work to the folklorica 2007, vol. xii 130 concepts developed from the 1930s through the 1970s. at folklore congresses and conferences, scholars either delve into interdisciplinary studies or else concentrate on the topic of why general folkloristic theory is not needed. this leads to underdeveloped terminology, to the absence of a common understanding of the discipline’s scope, and to an ignorance of the importance of further development of fieldwork methodology and practice. traditional folklore is not being recorded, new techniques for collecting materials are underutilized, and ways in which tradition develops and integrates into the modern world are left unexamined. at a time when world folklore conferences are examining wedding invitations and internet chat rooms, and when bodybuilding culture occupies an entire session, contemporary ukrainian folkloristics goes to the other extreme by denying that any non-traditional subcultures could possibly produce folklore. a soviet, literature-oriented approach to folklore still dominates the works of ukrainian scholars, and the folk nature of phenomena is not conceded unless they belong to a traditional genre system developed by twentieth-century folkloristic schools. thus, the statement "soon we will call the dirt on the walls folklore" reflects the common understanding of folklore as being only tales, legends, songs and narrative (itself understood to be only fixed-plot, oral text). it is almost painful for contemporary ukrainian folklorists to broaden their outlook on the scope of folklore, and to admit new subjects into the realm of folkloristic analysis. as a result, many artifacts and traditions are left unrecorded and under-studied. these two current tendencies, the american and the ukrainian, are distractions that stunt the development of folklore studies and fieldwork. in the american tendency, the absence of any commonly-acknowledged methodology and theory of folklore genre and textology makes folkloristics hard to distinguish from anthropology, cultural studies, and ethnology. traditional folklore is under-collected; and in theoretical discussions, traditional texts and plots are buried under a mass of material which is of dubious nature. in the ukrainian tendency, folkloristics becomes strongly dependent on literary theory, almost as an attachment to literary criticism and linguistics. new phenomena of urban subcultures are ignored by ukrainian folklorists, who concentrate on village folklore and see it as a source of national pride. thus, among the main problems that folkloristics faces today include an absence of common ground in theory and terminology. lack of emphasis on fieldwork and especially the opportunities that new 131 technologies provide is also an issue. also crucial is the fact that folkloristics is regarded as an undifferentiated tradition where no attempt is made to distinguish traditional from modern, or to maintain folklore studies as an integrated but distinct field. questions on the nature of the folk text, the importance of the context and the transcription of recorded materials remain unaddressed. folklorists have come to the twenty-first century with little theory on how folklore texts should be understood, recorded and transcribed. fieldworkers and scholars have no common rules for transcribing intonations, contextual elements, and gestures as part of the recorded narrative; this is especially noticeable when we work with prose texts. this criticism of current tendencies in folkloristics is intended to underline the importance of britsyna’s book, which combines the results of experimental fieldwork with theoretical concepts of the folk prosaic text. this is the first ukrainian folklore study in many decades to address general theoretical issues and to seek to build a better understanding of the essence of the folklore text. this study brings ukrainian folkloristics to a new level by investigating issues practically ignored by ukrainian scholarship since the 1930s. the author not only brings together existing theories of the folk text, but, more importantly, suggests her own theory of the oral text’s nature. she supports her ideas with extensive experimental work conducted in traditional village communities over the last few decades. the author’s experimental work includes recordings of the same prosaic plot from different performers, and the same performer, over periods of time varying from a few hours to a few years. it also includes texts recorded in their natural context versus contexts created at the researcher’s request. the techniques of this experimental work are described in detail, and their goals are stated very clearly by the author. another very important aspect of britsyna’s study is the fact that it is based primarily on traditional demonology collected by the author in central ukraine. while demonology (e.g. stories of house demons, hobgoblins, witches, dead souls and mermaids) has always been very popular in ukrainian villages, ukrainian folklorists of the mid-to-late twentieth century practically ignored such texts, both in their fieldwork and their analyses. demonological legends were actively collected by ukrainian folklorists only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. hnatiuk, hrynchenko, malynka, lesevych and others collected demonological folk beliefs, but did not consider them to be a serious folk genre. analysis of them was made only in the context of the folk pagan beliefs of old slavs. (hnatiuk, nechui-levitskyi and myloradovich built folklorica 2007, vol. xii 132 a mythological concept of pagan spiritual life.) neither the performers of demonological prose nor the texts themselves received special attention. later, soviet ukrainian folklorists concentrated on lyrics, folk rituals, and especially fairy tales and their tellers. this book is evidence of the active life of traditional folklore in modern ukrainian communities. ukrains'ka usna tradytsiina proza: pytannia tekstolohii ta vykonavstva consists of four theoretical chapters, and an appendix listing all the repeated recordings made by the author (of her informants) at different times in various contexts. the first chapter, "usna pryroda fol'kloru ta spetsifika tekstolohii prozovykh zhanriv" (the oral nature of folklore, and specifics of the prosaic genre’s textology), is theoretical and historiographic. it surveys topics related to folklore and "genetic textology". the author gives a very clear explanation of the different understandings of the terms oral text and written text. special attention is paid not only to folkloristic concepts of the folk text and its elements (romantic school, oral-formulaic theory, performance approach, contextual approach), but also to linguistic and structuralsemiotic textological concepts. the history of recording methodologies is also presented, starting with the nineteenth century (e.g. writing from memory) and going up to the present. the author shows the importance of conducting experimental fieldwork at an intensive level, and shows that the absence of commonly-acknowledged terminology can be caused partly by the absence of data. the second chapter, "problemy tekstolohii v istorii fol'klorystyky" (problems of textology in the history of folkloristics), is devoted to the history of ukrainian editorial practice in the area of folklore publishing from the nineteenth century through the present, and to folkloristic concepts of the recording and transcription of oral texts. this chapter shows how and why the concept of the text, in ukrainian folkloristics, was adapted from literary studies, with twentieth-century ukrainian folklorists following the literary model of the text in their fieldwork and theoretical analysis. another aspect addressed in this chapter is the classification of folk prose, and the issue of genre theory in the context of published folk anthologies. the author discusses the tendency to publish folk texts organized by performer or village rather than by genre. the third chapter, "tekstolohichni aspekty metodyky fiksatsii narodnoi prozy" (textological aspects of folk prose recording methodology), is the most theoretical part of the book, and oriented toward the experimental approach. any folklorist doing fieldwork and collecting folk prose faces the problem that there are too few 133 bibliographical sources in which fieldwork experience has been generalized. fieldwork guides were published in the early twentieth century, but later folklorists concentrated their attention on other issues, with fieldwork left for each person to plan on his or her own. in this chapter, the author underlines the benefits of stationary fieldwork (in which the folklorist either lives in the community for a period, or travels there frequently) and of the vacuum-cleaner method of collecting data, which helps to reveal the dynamics of living folklore in the community over a lengthy period of time. britsyna also shows why repeated recordings from the same, and different, performers in various contexts is the best way to understand the nature of the folk oral text. the author characterizes, in detail, different recording techniques and examines written text creation (or script creation) methods: what parts of the recorded performance event should be moved into written form? how can one avoid presenting absurdly lengthy texts, given all the context elements? what is the correct way to treat recorded materials? britsyna argues that a simple, traditional annotation accompanying the folklore text is not enough. every folklorist should collect as much information about context as possible, and texts should be transcribed soon after the recording process with as much detail as possible: "the more sensitive the fieldworker is to all the nuances transmitted by the performer through the non-verbal means, the more accurately will his script show the real meaning of the oral text and the performer’s intentions" (163-164). only this approach can guarantee a high quality transcript of a performance. an important part of this chapter is the author’s proposed system of signs for presenting an oral text in written form with as little loss as possible. considering the polyphonic nature of folk narratives, it is not easy to present them while preserving the meaning of the plot. incorporating the insights of linguists and folklorists, britsyna has produced her own suggestion for presenting intonations, voice volumes, missing parts, pauses, logical stresses, etc. (179). the main insight of britsyna’s theory of the script of an oral text is that the script should fully reflect all the verbal and non-verbal elements of the oral text, and only then can the interpretation of the text’s meaning be accurate. the last chapter is "prozovyi tekst u svitli riznochasovykh ta eksperymental'nykh zapysiv" (prosaic text in the light of varyingtime experimental recordings). it presents the results of experimental work with performers, and the analysis of texts recorded from the same performer over different performing events. this analysis allows the folklorica 2007, vol. xii 134 author to delve into the transmission and memorization of folk prose by its carriers and thus to characterize the folk prosaic text. generations of folklorists have tried to understand how folk texts are reproduced, created, and memorized. what exactly is transmitted -traditional knowledge, a plot, an entire text, or an idea? to what extent is the performer a creator of tradition, and to what extent simply its transmitter? these are essential questions of folklore theory, and extensive experimental work can help to resolve them. based on numerous samples, and using comparative analysis of repeated recordings, britsyna develops a theory of oral text transmission: as the listener "receives" a new text, it condenses and the text is memorized as a "conceptual clot." this is later developed into an oral text during each performance. a varying, textual mutuality expresses itself at the level of the verbal text (ground words and formulaic expressions) as well as at the non-verbal level (repetition of gestures, mimics, intonation) (326327). the author proves that the performer’s memory is not the only influential factor in the transmission of the oral text. rather, the performer’s artistry, as well as contextual specifics, play great roles in text development. thus, ukrains'ka usna tradytsiina proza: pytannia tekstolohii ta vykonavstva constitutes fundamental theoretical research as well as an excellent source of fieldwork methodology for scholars interested in the nature of the folk text, performance, experimental fieldwork, and oral transmission. this is an all-too-rare example of humane, scholarly work in which theoretical concepts are based on a deep analysis of the collected data, and are supported by the results of intensive field and experimental work. it addresses the fundamental issues of modern folklore scholarship through textological and experimental approaches. inna golovakha-hicks rylsky institute for art studies folkloristics and ethnology at the ukrainian academy of sciences magic tales that end badly e. a. kostiukhin, institute of russian literature, st. petersburg our conceptions about magic tales have been formed mainly by vladimir propp's ideas -magic tales are works that correspond to his compositional formula. however, both "the types of the folktale" by aarne and thompson, and the "comparative index of types" in east-slavic tales contain quite a few types that are listed among magic tales but do not fit propp's formula. there is an orientation to the magic tale as a narrative, but the scheme has short-comings so that a tale may fall outside a customary category. we are used to the fact that a magic tale always ends happily, but some sad tales exist: the hero or heroine, and sometimes both of them depart this life or do not attain happiness. let us take a close look at these tales.(1) the happy ending seems obligatory for a magic tale. this can be considered a required test of a magic tale; if it ends badly it is not a magic tale. it is supposed that the happy ending of a tale once had a magic basis, but in time it came to express people's belief in the triumph of justice.(2) this is the meaning of a magic tale. logically the appearance of a bad ending should deprive the magic tale of its meaning. this, of course, does not happen -the tale simply acquires a different tone. a sad ending can be accidental and "not programmed"; for example, most variants of a tale end happily, but in one variant the hero comes to a bad end. thus in the tale about two brothers (at 303) magic twins invariably achieve success. one of them is turned into a stone by a witch (or is torn to pieces), the other overcomes the witch and brings his brother back to life. but in a magic tale from the collection of a. n. afanasiev (no. 155) the sister of a defeated dragon turns into a lioness and devours one brother, but later she gains mercy from the second brother after disgorging the first. then the crafty female dragon turns into a baby and goes begging in the open field; next she turns into a lion and tears one brother and then the other to pieces. "thus perished the all-powerful epic heroes who were destroyed by their dragon sister." evil triumphs and its power has been validated by the magic tale; it is not easy to overcome evil. nevertheless, this is an exception from the rule -the witch is usually defeated. however, there are some types in which a sad ending is not accidental. but expected. and since such endings do not coincide with the traditional optimistic ending of a magic tale, this compels us to relate such types to other genres of folklore prose such as memorates, legends, and historical narratives. nevertheless, they are magic tales because they, for the most part, do not pretend to authenticity, and because in their general features they fit propp's "morphology of the folktale," but only if one does not take into consideration its last, or thirty-first, function: "the hero marries and ascends the throne." however, propp noted such untraditional endings as "unclear elements" and has conceded that they could have come from "other categories of magic tales. "(3) russian folklorists used to regard the influence of memorates on magic tales with seef a journal page 8 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 skepticism. memorates are prose narratives about ordinary life and everyday demonology -they develop in a completely different way than magic tales. e. v. pomerantseva(4) was firmly convinced of this and i. a. razumova in her recent investigation(5) has not shaken the positions of russian folklorists in this respect. i. a. razumova, having shown the obvious echoes between the magic tale and the memorate. has also come to the conclusion that the same personages fulfill different functions; they are determined by the generic nature of the magic tale and the memorate. however, some personages, which are typically found in memorates, have been assimilated into magic tales. first of all this concerns the dead. the vampire is the most terrible of the dead people. in the magic tale about the vampire bridegroom, he devours corpses in a church (or cemetery), then, having assumed the form of her father or mother, he comes to his bride and eats her (at 363). russian variants of this magic tale have been published twice (afanasiev no. 363, balashov no. 69). in both variants the girl dies, but in afanasiev's variant even though the devil kills his bride, she comes back to life and takes revenge on her killer so that everything ends happily -"as in a magic tale." in balashov's version "the devil" has lived with his young wife for a while, but then he decides to find out whether she knows that he eats dead people. he comes to his wife in the guise of her father, hears her confess that she knows everything about her husband, "and finally gobbles her up." the magic tale about the vampire bridegroom is known in europe and turkey; in most variants the heroine becomes the victim of the corpse devourer. only turkish magic tales about a terrible dervish end, as they should, with the triumph of the heroine who manages to save herself from her terrible husband. in other variants the situation is more complicated. in the russian tale the bridegroom's "devilish" appearance is not clear. in general, the russian version of this international type has never fully taken shape. afanasiev's variant is closer to the ukrainian and west-slavic versions. as the czech folklorist i. polivka has mentioned, a version has emerged in those slavic areas where the vampire bridegroom type is joined to the tale about a flower-girl just as occurs in afanasiev's version. the tale from balashov's collection is close to scandinavian and baltic tales in which the bride is partly guilty herself. she wants her bridegroom to be out of the ordinary -with a brass beard or with a gold nose. her wish is granted and the bridegroom appears, but he is the devil. in the russian tale the bride, a priest's daughter, also chooses the bridegroom with a gold nose and she pays for her choice. thus in the south, tales about a dead bridegroom are included among genuine magic tales, while in the north they are close to memorates and fabulates. here the bridegroom is not dead, but he eats the dead because he is the devil and can assume any form. contact with evil powers in memorates is always terrifying. the devil is even more terrifying in this tale because the devil is a vampire at the same time. and though some moralistic accents characteristic of a magic tale appear here (the bride is punished because of her exaggerated demands as to her future bridegroom), the main point probably lies elsewhere. the beginning of the tale from balashov's collection is terrifying. the priest's daughter is sitting alone at the window drinking tea and page 9 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 outside is someone sitting on a stack of firewood who asks her to drink to his health. then he starts gnawing the wall. the atmosphere of horror intensifies and as a result a peculiar kind of thriller develops in the magic tale genre. in general. the desire to terrify is typical of magic tales. the hut of the witch baba yaga in russian tales is surrounded by a paling decorated with skulls, some of which have gleaming eyes. the very image of the dweller of the hut, who is not against treating herself to a visitor and who, as yaga the cannibal, sticks little children in an oven, is connected with much that is terrifying. but there also are special "thriller tales." most of them are intended for children since in children's folklore the tradition of "scary" songs and stories is persistent right up to contemporary "scary stories." these scary stories are usually told by children for children. one of them is a scary russian tale about a cat with silver earrings (vss 332n*), that in succession lures a girl, a young fellow, an old man, and an old woman into the hands of a cannibal. one such tale from the collection of d. k. zelenin, a collector from the turn of the twentieth century, ends with a catastrophe. "no one was left at home, the dough-trough has disappeared, and the hut has burned" (zelenin, perm tales, no. 74). the collector states that this tale was "told by children." another well known variant recorded forty years later in the yaroslavl region north of moscow was told by a seven-year old girl. when he was systematizing the themes and variants of russian tales, s. m. smirnov recognized "the cat with gold earrings" as a tale strange to the highest degree. it indeed is strange if we examine it in the context of the traditional magic tale. but it is completely ordinary among other "scary texts," for example, the tale about a wolf that with his song lures the inhabitants of a house outside and then devours them (vss 163). s. m. smirnov justifiably has pointed out the similarity of tales about a cat or wolf who sing alluring songs. one of these is a tale about a little goat that pesters everyone it meets in the forest with a question-song: "you animal, you big wild animal, tell me your name. aren't you my death, won't you eat me?" this lasts until the wolf satisfies the goat's curiosity and eats it (vss-20i5**). and the tale about the bear with a wooden leg belongs to the same kind of tale. these animals sing songs that are terrifying and also alluring. there are not many thriller tales but they exist and are scattered throughout the aarnethompson index. "the bear with a wooden leg" is classified as an animal tale, "the cat with gold earrings" has fallen into the category of magic tales, and "the goat and encountered animals" found a place near cumulative tales. nevertheless, in all these types cited there is a fundamental magic tale presentation of two worlds. the cat and the bear come from the other world; a goat wanders into a magic tale forest and pays for it with its life. the other world becomes selfsufficient in scary stories, a terrible creature comes from there, and a hero has nothing special to accomplish there. there are variants of these tales where the cat and the bear act together. the bear eats girls who have become his wives because they looked into a forbidden room. it is the cat that brings the girls to the bear's house in this type known throughout the world (at 311) seef a journal page 10 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 thus on the one hand, the magic tale about a bridegroom corpse-eater borders on the tradition of the memorates and fabulates; on the other hand, this tale borders on the thriller tales that are more characteristic of children's folklore.(6) however, such tales are not alien even to the folklore of grownups. thus the dead bridegroom tale for grownups has been celebrated in ballads from g. d. buerger's "leonore" to p. a. katenin's "olga" (at 365). thompson describes this type as follows: "the dead bridegroom carries off his bride (leonore). he carries her behind him on his horse. he says, 'the moon shines bright, the dead ride fast,' and so forth. she is pulled into the grave." in the beginning of the nineteenth century the russian poets v. a. zhukovskii and katenin wrote literary ballads on the leonore theme. these ballads would scarcely have penetrated into the folk milieu -russian tales of this type are free from literary influences. the verse fragments in the russian variants of this widely known type do not belong to poets, but to the folk tradition. once again, these are scary tales with questions about whether the supposed victim is afraid or not. father frost wants to know whether his beautiful bride is warm or cold. the dead bridegroom carrying his bride to the cemetery sings, "the moon shines, the wind howls, my girl, my girl, are you afraid of me?" (karnaukhova no, 29). as thompson has pointed out, the same question occurs in german tales, "der mond scheint hell, der tote reitet schnell! fuerchtest du dich?" with a similar question the groom turns to his deathly terrified bride in a tale from the collection of n. onchukov: "the moon is shining outside, who would think where the fellow is riding, where he is carrying the girl, are you afraid of me?" in karnaukhova's variant the dead person gnaws the doors, but the girl is saved by the crowing of a cock. although she has endured terror just as the listeners have also probably experienced it, everything ends well. but even worse things happen. the girl may be found dead on the grave of her bridegroom (onchukov no. 39). one can say that fabulates about the dead have become favorable soil for the emergence of this type which is known to almost all european peoples. folk ballads about dead people have been composed on this basis, but in different genres the same type may have a different meaning. what happens to the girl in a ballad is the result of the irrational coincidence of circumstances and of the elemental play of life. in the tale everything that happens is much simpler and results from the violation of certain "rules." the girl falls in love with a young man and meets him despite her relatives' wishes. the bride cries too much about her dead bridegroom even though this is forbidden. therefore, if she were not smart enough to escape, she would become a victim of the deceased. the heroine in a ballad is an uncomplaining victim of circumstances, but in the tale she is a smart girl who knows how to trick the groom who turns out to be a terrifying opponent. the scary tales, as is apparent, can also end well. on the other hand, these tales inevitably end sadly when the heroine falls victim t6 her relatives' envy, usually that of her sisters. there are few such tales but they especially stand out. for example, thompson thus describes "the magic flute" (at 780): "the brother kills his brother (sister) and buries him (her) in the earth. from the bones a shepherd makes a flute which brings the secret to light." (in page ii fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 slavic tales it is always a sister who is killed by her sisters.) "the snow maiden" (at 703) is summarized as follows: "an aged childless couple rears a crayfish instead of a child. carves themselves a child from wood. makes one from snow. and the like." the "grass snake's bride" receives these remarks: "bathing girl's garments are kept until promise of marriage. husband usually serpent or water-being. after reunion, visit home after performing tasks set by husband. formula for calling on him learned by others who kill him." the tragic finale gives these tales a distinctly ballad-like tone because in ballads girls or young women easily become victims even though the motivations for this are not obligatory. properly speaking. these are not magic tales although the magical is present in them. these are prose ballads or novellas in which a fatal event stands in the middle of the narrative. thus in the "grass snake's bride," a popular east-european tale that is most wide-spread in the baltic, there are a supernatural husband and envious sisters. these are all motifs that are familiar in tales about a supernatural spouse. they occur in "the scarlet flower" and in "finist the bright falcon." but in these tales the lovers are reunited whereas the husband-serpent is killed. from grief his wife is transformed into a cuckoo and her children into swans -other transformations are possible. such metamorphosis in the spirit of ovid is not characteristic of magic tales. this is rather a ballad motif derived from myths about supernatural transformation that were reevaluated and aesthetically reinterpreted long ago. it is to be expected that this type would assume a sung form among the south slavs. this strange metamorphosis required motivations and they appear, again in the style of memorates. the young man, it turns out, has been touched by the "evil eye"; in the daytime he lives in the river and in the evening he takes on a human shape (karnaukhova no. 59). in passing. it should be pointed out that this tale from karnaukhova's collection was told by a little girl and that here again one senses the breath of children's "scary folklore" with its horrors and amazement before the wonders of our world. the tale about the magic flute offers a different version of the transformation. a multitude of variants are scattered over the whole world so that this original tale has often become the subject of special study. frequently it ends happily: the murdered sister is returned to life and marries. the reason for the murder is the rivalry of the sisters; one of them expects to be married but the other does not. however. a happy ending is not at all obligatory and more often the very mechanism of the murder's revelation attracts the tellers. the flute, which is made out of reed. sings about what has happened -this little song is repeated numerous times. three sisters set out to pick berries, the older sisters kill the younger one, and they bury her. the type is compressed so that a typical balladic situation emerges in the foreground with a monstrous crime and miraculous transformation of the murdered girl's soul into a simple song sung by the flute. and, as this has already happened with similar magic tale types, it acquires the form of a ballad which has been sung in england, scotland, the scandinavian countries, america, and canada. investigators have not come to a single conclusion about the homeland of this type. seefa journal page 12 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 l.mackensen has supposed that it was belgium and p. bruester has indicated poland, but this is not essential here. it is important to state that the magic tale does not simply interact with ballads, but conveys a "ballad-like philosophy." the question whether "the magic flute" belongs to classical magic tales has provoked legitimate doubts. in the aarnethompson index this type has not been placed among magic tales, but among legendary tales, that is, tales with a religious content. in the index of east slavic tales l. g. barag has suggested that this was done without sufficient justification.(7) the story with the magic flute can be, of course, one of the links of a magic tale narrative leading to the concluding marriage of the resurrected girl with the tsar or with another noble bridegroom. but the balladic accent brings this tale closer to the category of legends; truth in a miraculous way comes to light. higher justice triumphs and evil is exposed. we will say more about the "ideas of legends" later but for the time being will remark that in the "magic flute" there is no distinct emphasis on religion. the idea of divine retribution is only potentially present. among the east slavs the tale about the magic flute is often combined with the tale about the snow maiden (vss 703*); in both types the girl perishes after setting out with her friends (or sisters) for the forest. but the theme of envy and unconcealed villainy in the tale about the snow maiden is usually dampened; the girls have not planned to kill their friend who is made out of snow. there is a different meaning here. the snow maiden is pretty, but she has been made artificially and there is no place under the sun for this artificial creation. it could be said that in this type it is clearly shown how fruitless it is to try to rise above the laws of nature if these laws were not violated at every step in magic tales. on the contrary, here we have an unusual case in the denouement of a magic tale with a sad ending. but, as in the "magic flute," the ending varies; the snow maiden does not perish but simply loses her way. perhaps only the mythologists have failed to see anything sad in this tale. the snow maiden is a beautiful ephemeral maid who has returned to her native heavenly element.(8) the dramatic outcome in "untypical" magic tales is so unusual against the customary background of "happy endings" that it prompts one to interpret what happens. why does the girl become (or almost becomes) the victim of a dead bridegroom? why does the snow maiden perish? classic magic tales do not arouse questions because everything in them takes place "as it should" according to a once and for all established scenario. "untypical" tales have to do with events far out of the ordinary, thus opening the way for moralizing and philosophizing. thus magic tales with a dramatic ending can become close to legends. the dead person, who appears to the bride, hides his fatal threat. but the dead person can be invited to the wedding and can "thank" the friend who invites him, in turn asking him to come for a visit. the festive occasion is dragged out; in the other world time passes differently so that the person having returned home finds none of his relatives and friends alive -many, many years have passed (at 470). contact with a dead person, so typical for memorates, is treated differently in magic tales. either he terrifies (asin a memorate) or he amazes. the type about a person who has set page 13 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 out for a visit to the other world is little known among russian tales, the only variant appearing in afanasev's collection (no. 358). however, the type is known everywhere in the world, even in china and japan. along the way the living person becomes a witness of many strange events and acts which his dead friend interprets for him -a wide spread legendary motif. the living person returns after several centuries have passed. the tale from afanasev's collection is simpler: its hero does not travel but simply descends into a grave where he and his dead friend drink three glasses of sweet wine. with each glass one hundred years pass. l. g. barag, the specialist for russian tales, has noted the connection of this tale with memorates and also with legends. it is true that afanasev's tale bears little resemblance to a legend, but it is close to a fabulate. nevertheless in it exists one of the main ideas of the legend genre -the relative approximation of everyday ideas about reality. any gesture and act coming in contact with the miraculous receives a different meaning and the customary structure of the world changes sharply. in the world of the legend smoldering pieces of wood become green trees, sausage is changed into a snake and coals into gold, and apparent piety turns out to be hidden sin. the same thing takes place with time, which flows differently. properly speaking, it passes only for the living while the dead remain in eternity. the tale from afanasev's collection is precisely about this: outwardly it is a memorate but by its meaning it is a legend. an obvious legendary meaning appears in the "tale about the fisherman and the fish" by the russian poet a. s. pushkin (at 555). pushkin followed version of the brothers grimm rather than of the russian folk tale.(9) the typical personage of the magic tale, the donor, here appears before old people for whom it would be better to think about the hour of death, and not about material and social happiness. therefore the function of the donor is shifted; he does not so much donate gifts as he tests the old man and old woman. they do not withstand these tests and punishment ensues. when the old man and woman wish to become gods, they are transformed into bears or, in some variants, into dogs (afanasev no. 76, khudiakov no. 99). it is significant that various animals (a fish, cat, or fox) may appear as donors and test givers in russian tales; a saint may appear as a miraculous tree in which a holy spirit resides. punishment comes from above by the will of god, so that we depart from the world of the magic tale for the world of the legend. in the tale about the old man and woman, their excessive desires are not only condemned, but are also ridiculed. the source of the comic situation lies in the disparity between the real position of the old people and the magnitude of their wishes. the ending of the tale is highly ironic, once again revealing the disparity between what is being desired and what is real. such irony often appears in tales with nonstandard denouements. one of these types again returns us to the unclean power, that is, to dead people and ghosts. this is a tale about a youth who wants to learn what fear is (at 326), a type that is wide spread in europe with a few exceptions. it includes a multitude of pranks and tricks that are met in animal tales and in anecdotal tales. for instance, rams frighten wolves by showing them a dead seef a journal page 14 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 wolfs head and a youth acts in the same way with robbers. properly speaking, this is a picaresque novella which has accidentally fallen in the category of magic tales. the dead people do not resemble the unclean power of the fabulates, but the hero easily escapes from them because he fools and deceives the robbers as well as the ghosts that are taking part in this clown-like circle dance. and there where terror disappears, laughter appears. the irony is directed not only at the lowered miraculous adversaries, but also at the hero himself. this is all child's play for the youth. but he nevertheless experiences terror when they slip a live fish under his shirt while he is sleeping (afanasev no. 348). irony also appears in one highly strange type about deception (vvs 664 a*, 664 b*). unlike the majority of tales under discussion, the tale about deception is purely russian.( i0) the soldier (hauler) deceives an innkeeper from whom he has begged permission to spend the night, or he deceives the tsar himself, compelling him to experience many adventures. the innkeeper is not only deceived, but he also flies off his sleeping bench, having beaten himself on both sides. the humor of this tale is gloomy because the innkeeper has suffered. n. p. andreev placed this tale in the category of types about miraculous talent. actually the hero of the tale possesses such a talent but it brings him no benefits. "the innkeeper drove him out of the house. ivan the hauler roamed and roamed, and left for another kingdom" (afanasev, no. 377). the laws of the classical magic tale narrative once again have been violated and once again this has not come off without the influence of memorates. it is no accident that afanasev, commenting on this tale, recalls sorcerers. "to deceive or to pull the wool over someone's eyes means to compel everyone present to see what actually does not exist. this wizardly art is attributed to sorcerers and to witches. "( ii) here we are dealing not so much with the power of magic as with the power of the unclean. but this power does not bring serious evil (if we do not consider that the innkeeper has been left with coals instead of gold), and hence the humorous tone of the narrative, although this is rather black humor. a survey of non-standard tales, which, for the most part, are located in the section on magic tales in the aarne thompson index, shows that they all border on other types of folklore prose, but not only prose. in general, the simplest solution is to exclude them from magic tales on the basis that they do not fit the "standard." however, as becomes clear, the majority of them have maintained firm points in common with propp's "morphology of the folktale." a second solution is to acknowledge the instability of inter-generic boundaries and to declare such tales as marginal. these could be magic tales that have resulted from the expansion of memorates. hence their real, although to be sure half real, character. other solutions do not need to be sought, but one has to acknowledge that the artistic potential of magic tales is broader than the customarily stated phrase "as in a magic tale." not everything here ends well but sometimes also turns out badly. the charm of a happy denouement, nevertheless, is very great. therefore tales with a dramatic ending are often met in two versions -happy and unhappy. the snow maiden melts, page 15 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 the magic flute sings about the death of the girl, and the dead person drags his promised after him into the grave -these are tragic endings. but the snow maiden can be saved, the murdered girl can be revived and can be happily given in marriage, and the bride can outwit her deceased bridegroom and be saved. in these tales the action returns to the traditional magic tale ending. this charm, however, does not affect tales containing the ideas of legends because here retribution is inevitable and the truth revealed does not lend itself to an ambiguous interpretation. most often it turns out that the themes of memorates are utilized in tales with a dramatic ending; it is a question of contacts with deceased people, sorcerers, or the "unclean" in general. but their functions in tales are different than in memorates. not a manifestation and assertion of some belief, but amazement before the unpredictability of chance is what lies at the basis of a tale which apparently resembles a memorate. but tales about fate and about the play of chance already belong to the sphere of the folklore novella into which the nontraditional magic tale enters. on the other hand, a "balladic tone" is clear in such tales -that is why some magic tale types so easi iy pass into ballads. and if they do not make the transition, then the most tense situations appear in tales with song texts. song "inserts" not only emphasize individual situations, but they repeatedly compel us to experience a feeling of terror when the hero falls into a possibly fatal situation. this again leads us beyond the bounds of magic tales into children's folklore with its aesthetic of the terrifying. tales that end badly present evidence of the fact that tales have a greater possibility than initially apparent. they can frighten and they can turn to a dramatic play of life's circumstances. they can compel one to think about how wonderfully the world has been created and how relative human ideas about time and fate are. they can also provoke a smile at the limitation of these ideas when accidental elevation is instantly replaced by a fall, and conviction in the stability of the world collapses into dust. in a word, such tales significantly expand the artistic dimension of magic tales and save them from dull schematism or oversimplification. abbrev iations at the types of the folktale. a classification and bibliography. antti aarne's verzeichnis del' maerchentypen. translated and enlarged by stith thompson. helsinki, 1964. vss sravnitelnyi ukazatel siuzhetov: vostochnoslavianskaia skazka [comparative index of types: the east-slavic tale]. compilers l. g. barag et al. leningrad, 1979. afanasev narodnye russkie skazki a. n. afanaseva [folk russian tales of a. n. afanasev]. vols. 1-3. moscow, 1984-85. balashov skazki terskogo berega belogo moria [tales of the tersk shore of the white sea]. ed. d. 1. balashov. leningrad, 1970. zelenin velikorusskie skazki permskoi gubernii. sbornik d. k. zelenina [great-russian tales of the perm province. the collection of d. k. zalenin]. st. petersburg, 1914. karnaukhova n skazki i predania severnogo kraia [tales and legends of the northern region]. ed. i. v. karnaukhova. leningrad, 1934. onchukhov severnye skazki. sbornik n. e. onchukova [northern tales. the collection of n. e. onchukov]. st. petersburg, 1908. khudiakov velikorusskie skazki v zapisiakh i. a. khudiakova [great-russian tales in the seefa journal page 16 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 recordings of i. a. khudiakov]. moscow, leningrad, ]964. notes i. the russian version of this article appeared in the journal "zhivaia starina," no. 4 (1997). pp. ] 5-] 8. 2. d. k. zelenin has written about the religious and magic function of fo]klore tales and has created a completely fantastic picture of the development of the tale. see his article in the collection "sergeiiu fedorovichu oldenburgu: k 50-letiiu nauchno-obshchestvennoi deiatelnosti." leningrad, 1934. also see: e. m. meletinskii. "geroi volshebnoi skazki: proiskhozhdenie obraza" [the hero of the magic tale: the origin of an image). moscow. ]958. p. 14. 3. v _]a. propp. "mo,:lologiia skazki" [morphologiia of the tale). 2nd ed. leningrad, 1969. p. 59. 4. "mythological images in russian oral prose, going back to a common source -folk belief, at the same time are deeply different both qualitatively and functionally not only in tale and non-tale prose, and not only in different prose" genres, but even in different kinds of tales -in magic, legendary, and everyday tales. this is explained by the fact that they are included into different systems of images and into the most varied structures." e. v. pomerantseva. "mifologicheskie personazhi v russkom fol'klore" [mythological personages in russian folklore]. moscow, ]970. p. ] 50. 5. i. a. razumova. "skazka i bylichka: mifologicheskii personazh v sisteme zhanra" [tale and memorate: the mythological personage in the genre system]. petrozavodsk, 1993. 6. for a monograph about scary children's tales see: w. scherf. "die herausforderung des daemons. form und wesen grausiger kindermaerchen. eine volkskundliche und tiefenpsychologische darstellung der struktur, motivik und rezepzion von 27 untereinander verwandten erzaehltypen. munich, 1987. 7. see his commentary for type 780 in the book "siuzhety i motivy belorusskikh narodnykh skazok" [types and motifs of the belorussian folk tales]. minsk, ]978. 8. "an echo of the legend about the origin of cloud spirits from melting ice and snow in the spring are still heard in our folk narrative about the snow maiden." a. n. afanasev. "poeticheskie vozzreniia slavian na prirodu" [the slavs' poetic views of nature]. vol. 2. moscow, ] 868. p. 639. 9. m. azadovskii. "literatura ifolklor" [literature and folklore]. leningrad, 1938. pp. 66-75. 10. in the notes to item no. 375 in the academy of sciences edition of the tales of a. n. afanasev it is mistakenly indicated that s. thompson considers the european versions of this type whereas thompson actually refers only to russian variants. ] ]. "narodnye russkie skazki a. n afanaseva" [the folk russian tales of a. n. afanasev). vol. 3. moscow, ]985. p. 384. (translated by james bailey) page 17 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 microsoft word folk2006[3] sheryl format3.doc nineteenth-century collectors of ukrainian folk legends 1 articles nineteenth-century collectors of ukrainian folk legends: their views, objectives, methods and their informants roman i. shiyan university of alberta, canadian institute of ukrainian studies in this article i shall attempt to answer the following questions: 1) is it possible to reconstruct the views and objectives of the first collectors of folk legends about the ukrainian cossacks as well as to recreate their “method?,” and if the answer is yes, then to what extent?; 2) how do the personal attitudes of collectors of folklore and their informants affect the folklore texts? this article features an abridged and modified version of a discussion, presented in my doctoral dissertation “cossack motifs in ukrainian folk legends.”(1) the article mainly focuses on panteleimon kulish, iakiv novyts’ky and dmytro iavornyts’ky, whose views, methods and contributions can be established with a considerable degree of certainty. panteleimon kulish (1819-1897) was a prominent ukrainian writer, historian, ethnographer and folklorist. born into a family with cossack antecedents, kulish grew up in an atmosphere of respect for folk tradition. in the 1840s, while a student at kyiv university, kulish began collecting folklore. in 1845, he published the first chapters of his novel chorna rada (the rebels’ council), so establishing himself as a writer. a year later, he published his first historical work, povest’ ob ukrainskom narode (the story of the ukrainian people) [doroshenko 1996: 110-11]. he subsequently taught literature at theuniversity of st petersburg. in 1847, kulish conducted more ethnographic and folklore research in the “western provinces of the russian empire,” or in other words, in ukraine. fascinated by the ukrainian past, kulish was particularly interested in the ukrainian cossacks. his view of them varied considerably over time, ranging from fascination to disapproval, and eventually to harsh criticism. he began his historical studies by delving into the cossack chronicles as well as folk poetry and prose glorifying the cossacks. however, kulish’s later acquaintance with certain archival documents and works by polish authors made him critical of the cossacks. kulish condemned their frequent squabbles, their shifts in loyalty and their unruliness, thus blaming the cossacks for their “destructive role” in the folklorica 2006, vol. xi 2 quest for ukrainian statehood. the first signs of his negative stance towards the cossacks were evident even in chorna rada, which was first published as a whole in 1857. his historical works of the 1870s, especially materialy dlia istorii vossoedineniia ukrainy s rossiei (sources for the history of the unification of ukraine with russia) (187778), were markedly anti-cossack in tone [doroshenko 1923: 171-81]. the folklore material garnered by panteleimon kulish during his expeditions in the 1840s was published in 1855-56 as zapiski o iuzhnoi rusi (notes on southern rus’). in this work kulish included folk tales, songs, dumy (2) and legends that related to both pre-cossack and cossack times. legends represented only one area of his interests, though an important one. they were collected in what is now central ukraine, primarily in the kyiv and poltava regions. kulish recorded legends about the origin of the cossacks, the initiation of a novice prior to his acceptance into the cossack brotherhood, reminiscences about cossack ways and customs, cossack chastity, their fancy appearance, their trickery, and life at cossack fishing enterprises, as well as legends about certain cossack individuals, such as the zaporozhian cossack vasiurynsky, hetman bohdan khmelnyts’ky, khmelnyts’ky’s son yurii, colonel semen palii and hetman ivan mazepa. zapiski provides some insight into kulish’s approaches to and his philosophy as a folklorist. in the “introduction” he indicates that, like many of his contemporaries, he has “…always been fascinated by stories told by the common people” [kulish 1856: 1]. as his own testimony shows, it took kulish some time to realize the importance of taking notes during the actual performance: i long ago began to value those stories; however, for a long time i was mistaken, considering that [my] memory alone is sufficient for their preservation. my experience proved to me that memory retains only the spirit and the contents of the story, but the original form of the stories gives way to general forms of everyday speech…finally, i became convinced that i should not rely upon memory, but record every unique pattern of speech in the story and every transition from one thought to another [kulish: 1]. kulish made observations about the relationship between informants and the events they described which may be considered groundbreaking for the time. in his opinion, the number of intermediaries involved in passing on a particular story did affect its content. on one occasion the collector noted that he was told two very similar stories about brigands hiding in the reeds (komyshnyky). оne of the informants, iurchenko, told his story as an “echo”― a very vague memory of an actual event, passed on to him via several intermediaries. in contrast, another interviewee, klym belik, actually knew the participants of the nineteenth-century collectors of ukrainian folk legends 3 particular event he narrated (his father and his father’s friend), and his account thus represented a re-telling of a first-person experience [kulish: 159]. in his work, panteleimon kulish often demonstrates what can be called “educated skepticism,” mostly questioning the reliability of some of his informants and their stories from the standpoint of a historian. on one occasion he writes, “i do not completely trust the account of kindrat taranukha” about the cossack company commander kharko [kulish: 98]. to kulish, the “fantasies” of his informants undermined the credibility of certain accounts. for instance, while presenting a narrative about the tsar leaving his will engraved on a stone, in which he forbade the taking of lands from the cossacks, kulish indicated his view that the content of the inscription had been made up: it would be curious to find out what guided vasyl’ kutsenko, while he was reading a non-existent inscription on that stone. the narrator’s father traveled to the don region at a time when the zaporozhian cossacks were quarreling over their lands with serbian settlers. vasyl’ kutsenko could have visited the cossacks’ fishing enterprises looking for employment … there learning stories about the imaginary rights of the cossacks… [kulish: 155] hence, because no such inscription existed, the collector most likely viewed this episode as “fantasy” with no historical value. at the same time, kulish asks himself a correct question about the informant, klym belik’s motivation for telling that particular story, though his explanation appears only partially satisfactory. he explains it by saying that the cossacks influenced the informant with their stories, which seems plausible. however, the collector does not provide enough information about belik, his views and contacts to further substantiate that explanation. in general, kulish made notes conveying his thoughts about the connection between a particular narrative and “actual” history in other passages as well [kulish: 75, 96,155]. according to the contemporary ukrainian folklorist, vasyl’ sokil, panteleimon kulish was in the forefront of collecting ukrainian folk legends and was employing certain standard techniques and approaches. kulish recorded folk texts using stenography during the actual performance, preserving every single pattern of original speech. such an approach make those texts priceless to philologists as well as to folklorists [sokil: 7]. at the same time, kulish often lacked consistency in providing information on many of his informants and the circumstances, under which the performance or collection took place. from the available sources it becomes obvious that kulish’s primary interest in oral tradition was its relevance to history. therefore, to him folklore was just another historical source, though not always an folklorica 2006, vol. xi 4 accurate one. such an attitude might have influenced kulish to record folklore selectively, ignoring texts of “low” historical value. at the same time, the scholar did try to record texts precisely, sometimes asking an informant to repeat his story several times. though critical of some of his collected texts because of their “fantastic” elements, he nonetheless found certain of them valuable enough to warrant publication. panteleimon kulish must have viewed those texts as significant because they provided an insight into the mentality of the ukrainian folk. this mentality fascinated kulish, along with many of his contemporaries, though did not turn him into a romantic about folklore. since the mid-1800s, collectors of ukrainian folklore have gradually made advances in their approach to collecting and recording folklore and information about its bearers. in particular, they have developed programs, methodological principles and approaches, aimed at improving the quality of the material collected. in 1854, mykola bilozers’ky developed and published the first manual of requirements for collecting ukrainian folklore [sokil: 7]. in 1873, a south-western branch of the russian geographical society was founded in kyiv, thanks to the efforts of ukrainian scholars and cultural activists such as volodymyr antonovych, mykhailo drahomanov and pavlo chubyns’ky [sokil: 7]. in 1876, the society published a collection of ukrainian folk prose (mykhailo drahomanov’s malorusskie narodnye predaniia i razskazy (folk legends and stories of little rus’)), which was among the bestorganized and fullest collections of folk prose of that time. it included recordings by leading ukrainian folklorists: iakiv novyts’ky, volodymyr menchits, stepan rudans’ky and andriy demins’ky. drahomanov in particular was interested in the authenticity of texts as well as in providing detailed information about informants and the geographical distribution of their texts [sokil: 7]. during the 1880s-1890s, the collection and publication of folklore in south-eastern ukraine boomed under the auspices of the historicalphilological society of kharkiv. among the society’s most active members were iakiv novyts’ky and dmytro iavornyts’ky, who authored the most extensive and interesting collections of folk legends about the ukrainian cossacks [sokil: 7-8]. though not a trained scholar, iakiv novyts’ky (1847-1925) emerged as an important researcher of the cossack past and a celebrated author of some forty works in the fields of history, ethnography, folklore, statistics, and nature studies. in spite of the fact that he divided his time between teaching, supervising public schools and scholarship, novyts’ky nineteenth-century collectors of ukrainian folk legends 5 assembled rich collections of folklore [novitskii 1885, 1894]. novyts’ky was specifically interested in folk memory about the past of southern ukraine, with the cossacks representing a large part of it. most legends about the cossacks were collected by novyts’ky between 1874 and 1885 and came from the former cossack lands in the lower dnipro region (contemporary zaporizhzhia and dnipropetrovs’k regions). they deal with the origin of the cossacks and the foundation of their order, their supernatural characteristics, their land, liberties, wars against the turks and their disbandment by empress catherine ii. novyts’ky also collected many legends about cossacks and their enchanted buried treasure. some of novyts’ky’s recordings were first published in mykhailo drahomanov’s malorusskie narodnye predaniia i rasskazy (1876). however, many of the narratives about the cossacks remained unpublished during novyts’ky’s lifetime. some of those texts became available to the general public only at the end of the twentieth century in lehendy ta perekazy (legends and stories) (1985), narodna pam’iat’ pro kozatstvo (cossacks in the folk memory) (1991) and ostrov khortitsa na dnepre, ego priroda, istoriia, drevnosti (the island of khortytsia on the river dnipro, its nature, history, antiquities) (1997).(3) novyts’ky wrote that he spent more than thirty years surrounded by the bearers of historical tradition, in a circle of naturally talented singers, men who cooked, sniffed and smoked tobacco while telling their stories [novyts’ky 1997 (early 1900s): 4]. “by now, those old men lie in their graves, but their memory is still fresh, and many poetic pictures were preserved by that memory!” [novyts’ky: 4]. it is likely that novyts’ky’s romantic perception of the past and of cossacks in particular affected the choice of folklore material he collected and published. iakiv novyts’ky had a permanent country house (kurin’) on the island of khortytsia in the river dnipro― the heartland of the old cossack land ― where he spent many days and nights talking to people and taking notes [novyts’ky: 4]. he himself described the typical recording situation: “by day, beneath the shadows of cliffs and pussywillows, at night under a sky full of stars, around the burning bonfire, surrounded by gray-haired old men with tanned faces― those were the circumstances under which our conversations took place” [novyts’ky: 4]. dmytro iavornyts’ky, whose views and contribution will be discussed shortly, describes how novyts’ky was recognized by one of his old informants during one of their joint expeditions near the town of oleksandrivsk and khortytsia: “you are iakiv pavlovych, aren’t you? i didn’t recognize you right away:an old man’s memory, you see. you folklorica 2006, vol. xi 6 would like to ask me about the old times, wouldn’t you?” [evarnitskii 1995 (1888): 139]. iakiv novyts’ky had been collecting folklore material in that specific area for a long time, so that he had become well-known for his interest in antiquity. the scholar was particularly interested in talking to elderly people because they remembered the cossack past. most likely, he had a group of favorite informants, including dmytro bykovs’ky, osyp shut’ and the “old man” buhaida, who supplied him with the majority of his narratives. his collecting technique involved informal conversations, which probably helped him to relax with his informants and win their trust. the collector seems to have consciously created romantic settings for his conversations with informants, doing this in part for his own self-image and satisfaction. in at least some cases, novyts’ky tried to identify the initial source of the story that he heard. one of his informants, the 87-year old buhaida, often referred to “his grandfather, who himself was a cossack” [novyts’ky: 38].this reference demonstrates that novyts’ky was to some degree concerned with the authenticity of the narratives. his main concern in collecting and publishing folklore, however, was the preservation of memory about ancient times. dmytro iavornyts’ky (1855-1940) was a prominent historian, archeologist, ethnographer and folklorist, and author of over 200 scholarly works. he entered the historical-philological department of kharkiv university in 1877, graduating in 1881. in 1881-1882, he published his first historical work on the zaporozhian cossacks, entitling it vozniknovenie i ustroistvo zaporozhskogo kosha (the foundation and structure of the organization of the zaporozhian cossacks). the young scholar was reprimanded by his superiors for choosing this topic over the one proposed by the university (it should be borne in mind that the “cossack theme” was seen by the russian authorities as displaying separatist tendencies), and his scholarship was taken away [oliinykshubravs’ka: 6-7]. in 1883, dmytro iavornyts’ky published one of his first historical-ethnographic works, zhizn’ zaporozhtsev po rasskazu sovremennika-ochevidtsa (the life of the zaporozhian cossacks, as narrated by a contemporary) [oliinyk-shubravs’ka: 8]. the same year, iavornyts’ky was elected a member of the historical-philological society of kharkiv, where he worked with other prominent figures in ukrainian studies: oleksandr potebnia, mykhailo sumtsov, dmytro bahalii and petro efymenko. iavornyts’ky was considered for a postgraduate position at the university, but it never came through because of his “separatist” views. after this, iavornyts’ky traveled throughout the nineteenth-century collectors of ukrainian folk legends 7 former cossack lands, collecting folklore and ethnographic material, and publishing it in various newspapers and journals, particularly kievskaia starina (kievan antiquity) [oliinyk-shubravs’ka: 8]. between 1883 and 1888 iavornyts’ky was engaged in correspondence with iakiv novyts’ky. in one of his letters from 1883, iavornyts’ky announced his intention of conducting expeditions throughout the old cossack lands. he made these trips in 1884 and 1886, publishing his findings, which included folk legends about the cossacks, in zaporozh’e v ostatkakh stariny i predaniiakh naroda (zaporozh’e in antiquities and folk legend) (1888) [oliinyk-shubravs’ka: 9-10]. within a few years after his zaporozh’e book, iavornyts’ky had published several more historical works containing additional folklore and ethnographic materials: ocherki po istorii zaporozhskikh kazakov i novorossiiskogo kraia (sketches from the history of the zaporozhian cossacks and the “new russian” land) (1889), vol’nosti zaporozhskikh kazakov (the autonomy of the zaporozhian cossacks) (1890), ivan dmitrievich sirko― slavnyi koshevoi ataman voiska zaporozhskikh nizovykh kazakov (ivan dmitrievich sirko― the glorious chieftain of the host of the cossacks of the lower dnipro) (1894), and his key historical work on the zaporozhian cossacks istoriia zaporozhskikh kazakov (the history of the zaporozhian cossacks) (1892-1897). dmytro iavornyts’ky’s scholarly interests lay specifically with the zaporozhian cossacks. like novyts’ky, iavornyts’ky collected material in the former cossack lands in the lower dnipro region. however, unlike novyts’ky, who merely wanted to preserve the memory of ancient times, iavornyts’ky’s incentive for studying folklore was to expand his primary source base for reconstructing cossack history. he was primarily interested in first-hand accounts (opovidannia): iavornyts’ky: well, old man, you descend from the real zaporozhians, do you not? rossoloda: i descend from the real zaporozhians and am a zaporozhian cossack myself to a certain extent, because when i was baptized, my father poured some gunpowder in the tub; you see,that was done to ensure [a future cossack’s] powers of endurance from early childhood, ― there used to be such a custom among the cossacks [evarnitskii, pt 2: 246-47]. in iavornyts’ky’s opinion, those accounts contained truthful information about the cossacks and their organization in the last period of their existence. however, he also collected legends, particularly those about the cossack chieftain ivan sirko, and about the cossacks as invincible warriors-sorcerers (kharakternyky) [lehendy ta perekazy: 189]. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 8 as mentioned, most of iavornyts’ky’s folk legends about cossacks were published in his zaporozh’e v ostatkakh stariny i predaniiakh naroda (1888). this work, composed in the form of a travel diary in the first person, was sometimes criticized by iavornyts’ky’s contemporaries for its “lyricism” and interest in “folk tales” (that is, fiction or nonhistorical information). other scholars, including ukrainian and russian literary historians and the ethnographers mykhailo sumtsov and aleksandr pypin, praised zaporozh’e as a brilliant work. it features many narratives about the zaporozhian cossacks, their supernatural abilities, and about colonel semen palii and hetman ivan mazepa, as well as legends about the origin of various local topographical features (such as cliffs, ravines and groves) [oliinyk-shubravs’ka: 24-25]. this work also provides its readers with an insight into iavornyts’ky’s approach to collecting folklore material, his objectives and the personalities of his informants. on the whole, thanks to his professional training, expertise in various fields and his fascination with the topic, dmytro iavornyts’ky can be considered the most authoritative cossack specialist in nineteenth-century ukraine. in his studies iavornyts’ky makes reference to archival material, historical works, archeological artifacts and folklore. his main objective in collecting and analyzing these texts was the illumination of the cossack past by expanding the source base for his research. interested in finding new facts, iavornyts’ky actively interviewed older people who were related to the cossacks or might have remembered them. the scholar corroborated his findings by testing them against other sources such as written chronicles, government documents and personal diaries. his critical approach was balanced by his romantic view of the cossacks and their role in ukrainian history. it becomes clear that the personalities of folklore collectors and their informants profoundly affected the texts they collected. kulish, novyts’ky and iavornyts’ky each underwent different professional training, had somewhat different philosophies, and pursued somewhat different goals. panteleimon kulish was interested in collecting folklore about ukraine’s past rather than specifically about the ukrainian cossacks. to him, the main value of the folk texts was their relationship to history. he was less interested in non-historical folklore. kulish tended to perceive folklore texts as examples of faulty historical memory, and sometimes appears dissatisfied with his informants’ “fantasizing.” nineteenth-century collectors of ukrainian folk legends 9 by contrast, novyts’ky’s main focus was specifically the collecting and publishing of folklore itself. novyts’ky viewed folklore as a way of preserving memories about the cossacks. iavornyts’ky’s main goal overlapped with that of the other two men, though his objectives were focused on reconstructing cossack history. he used folk narratives as one of his valuable sources. all three of these researchers attempted to underpin their findings in folklore with supporting evidence from other fields. at this point, i should like to concentrate on the relations between collectors and their informants, as well as to assess to what degree the informants influenced the texts they relayed. the informants’ memory and personal experiences also shaped the texts they told. mainly old people, they were selected for their age and for their knowledge of a specific matter― life in the past and the cossacks. in some cases, their repertoire, attitudes, motivation and willingness to speak to collectors can be established with considerable accuracy. among the informants were peasants, cossacks, priests, wandering merchants, fishermen and watchmen. kulish’s impression of the bearers of oral tradition in his own time was not favorable. he believed that only those who try to collect folklore are capable of appreciating the difficulties inherent in this activity. “you enter the hut and ask the people there to sing a popular song. and their answer will be: are we so drunk that we have to sing?” [kulish: 100].the author wrote that a singer begging on the road is more likely to perform church school psalms for a romantically-motivated traveler (such as kulish himself), but reserve the performance of more valuable cossack (kozats’ki) and captives’ (nevil’nyts’ki) songs (4) for their close friends. he will not understand what the researcher finds important. when asked about antiquity, the beggar replies: “sir! how am i supposed to know about antiquity? i am a young person” [kulish: 100]. kulish expressed the view that in order to succeed a collector “must have enough time to let people get to know and like you” [kulish: 100]. while acknowledging the existence in the past of highly-gifted “blind singers,” kulish viewed their contemporary descendants as “shallow” (izmel’chali): “…the blind singers have long ago become shallow and as time passed, the people have lost interest in their songs and dumy… my kyivan beggar did not know a single historical song, nor a single military or moralistic duma… the beggars of old attracted attention not by emphasizing their pitiful condition, but by the sound and folklorica 2006, vol. xi 10 content of their songs… contemporary beggars secure their income by monotonous begging…” [kulish: 2-3]. nonetheless, kulish recorded his first folk legend (narodnoe predanie) from that blind beggar in kyiv. despite his earlier disparaging comments, he admitted that some performers had excellent memories, and were “capable of retaining many songs and stories” [kulish: 1-2]. the repertoire of his kyivan informant did not initially impress the collector. however, he eventually recorded from him a very interesting legend “about mykhailyk and the golden gates” and another “about the tatars’ captives.”(5) kulish does not provide any detailed information about his first informant in his publications, calling him simply “my kyivan beggar.” semen iurchenko, kindrat taranukha and klym belik, who told kulish legends about the cossacks, are identified by name, but little else [kulish: 75, 96, 155]. at the same time, kulish is much more specific about the blind singers, such as arkhyp nykonenko and andriy shut, from whom he recorded several dumy and songs [kulish: 7-14, 43-51]. novyts’ky and iavornyts’ky were both primarily interested in interviewing elderly men (didy), who supposedly had first-hand knowledge of the ancient cossacks. one of iavornyts’ky’s informants was iakiv lytvyn, aged 108, “one of the oldest men among the elderly in all the lands of former zaporozhzha…” [evarnitskii: 42]. another informant, ivan rossoloda, aged 116, had been a cossack himself [evarnitskii: 244]. iavornyts’ky provides an insight into the collecting situation and the reasons why some of his informants were motivated to tell their stories. for instance, he describes lytvyn as follows: “in the village of plakhtiivka there lives an ancient (drevnii) man, iakov lytvyn[ov], who loves to tell stories about the zaporozhian cossacks during his leisure hours…” [evarnitskii: 41]. lytvyn must have been flattered by iavornyts’ky’s attention and interest in his narratives. “unfortunately,” iavornyts’ky notes, “he is an outsider in this area (zakhozhii chelovek),” that is to say, he has no blood ties and/or close relationships with the cossacks. “if not for this, with his memory, inquisitive nature and old age he would have provided a great deal of truthful and accurate [information] about the life of the zaporozhian cossacks…” [evarnitskii: 42]. this passage clearly indicates the collector’s interest in “credible” accounts as well as his preconceptions about who could be considered “truthful,” “accurate” and the “most valuable” source of folklore about the cossacks. nineteenth-century collectors of ukrainian folk legends 11 unlike the “outsider” iakov lytvyn, another of iavornyts’ky’s exceptionally old informants was identified as “the only [living] representative of the fallen cossack host of zaporozhzha” [evarnitskii: 244]. ivan rossoloda was reportedly 116 years old at the time of his interview. he was born into a cossack family in the town of nikopol’, but spent his youth on a cossack farm (zymivnyk) after his father left the sich [evarnitskii: 244-245]. ivan rossoloda married the daughter of a nobleman from the poltava region. his first wife died six years later, leaving him with their daughter, iryna. at the time of this interview, iryna was reportedly 80 years old, with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of her own, and now living in the kuban’ region, the land of the black sea cossacks [evarnitskii: 245]. rossoloda’s second marriage was to a peasant girl, by whom he fathered four sons and two daughters. the informant maintained that he remembered the reign of the empress catherine who had died in 1796 [evarnitskii: 245]. “it was sunday,” iavornyts’ky writes in his book, “when i came to see ivan rossoloda. the weather was great. i crossed the yard and went into the garden, where i saw a small hut… i greeted rossoloda and we exchanged two or three phrases about the weather, after which i began my inquiries into the life of the zaporozhian cossacks. rossoloda, being forewarned about the coming of the “zaporozhian lord” (such was my name in the village), was happy to answer my questions. i recorded his entire story accurately over several sessions…” [evarnitskii: 245-246]. the interview took the form of a somewhat informal exchange: rossoloda: what are you interested in? iavornyts’ky: i need to ask you some questions about the zaporozhian cossacks; what kind of people they were, how they lived and where they went, and what memories they left behind? rossoloda: that is to say, you are interested in the truth, the true facts? iavornyts’ky: yes, yes, my dear old man, i want to learn the true facts from you. do you know anything about them? rossoloda: of course, i know about them, because my father was a zaporozhian cossack himself. iavornyts’ky: really?! rossoloda: indeed. initially, he was deputy to the [cossack] chieftain perebiinis… iavornyts’ky: now, tell me, my dear old man, where did the zaporozhian cossacks come from? rossoloda: where did they come from? they came from everywhere. this one [came] from here, another ― from there. from ten to twenty, from twenty to thirty ― till they became a mighty force… [evarnitskii: 246]. after these initial questions, iavornyts’ky inquired about the number of warriors in the cossack host, about their appearance, their skills, behavior during war and peacetime, their lands and about the end of the folklorica 2006, vol. xi 12 cossack host during the reign of catherine ii of russia [evarnitskii: 247271]. in zaporozh’e, iavornyts’ky describes a joint interview conducted by novyts’ky and himself with the “old man but.” their informant was telling a story about a cossack sorcerer escaping the poles by diving into a pail of water and emerging in the river many miles away. at one point the old man became offended. perhaps, he thought the interviewer had withheld some information from him, or perhaps he suspected that the interviewer had learned this story from other source. as iavornyts’ky writes, this situation changed the informant’s demeanor quite drastically. only after iavornyts’ky told the old man that he did not trust books, except for the holy scriptures, “trust was restored and we continued talking about the zaporozhian cossacks” [evarnitskii: 141]. the issue of “trust” was considered important by all collectors of folklore: its absence could jeopardize the interview and the content of the recorded material. when dealing with informants interviewed in the nineteenth century, it is sometimes possible to learn about their views and reasons for telling a particular story, but sometimes we have to make an educated guess. several examples illustrate this point clearly. between 1828 and 1831, archbishop gabriel (rosanov) interviewed an old zaporozhian cossack, mykyta korzh (d. 1835, aged 104). from him he learned a great deal about the cossacks’ organization, way of life and their past. mykyta korzh was interviewed on a number of occasions and was most likely motivated to talk out of reverence for the cleric and respect for the archbishop’s interest in his knowledge. he provided many first-hand details about cossack laws, justice and the capture of the sich by the russians in 1775. it seems that korzh was quite careful in telling his stories, not wanting to misinform. when he was speaking about the origin of the cossacks, he pointed out that “i cannot positively establish when exactly and at what period the zaporozhian host came into being…according to an oral account, passed from my great-grandfather, grandfather and father, i was informed that the zaporozhian cossacks in the times of old were known as khozary” [rozanov: 1-10]. the fisherman stephan shtepa (age 67) was interviewed by iakiv novyts’ky in the village of voznesenka on december 28, 1877. shtepa told four legends about the hidden treasure of the cossacks [novyts’ky 1997: 47-48]. little is known about shtepa, except for his profession, age and place of residence. perhaps he was more willing to talk and share his knowledge because he was being interviewed during the christmas holidays, and was therefore not being taken away from his fishing nineteenth-century collectors of ukrainian folk legends 13 business. another of novyts’ky’s informants, the old man vasyl nahyrnii (age 95), was interviewed in the town of oleksandrivsk on december 1, 1884. he spoke about enchanted treasure buried on the island of khortytsia. being ninety five years old himself at the time, nahyrnii nonetheless referred to the authority of “old men” to establish the story’s authority and probably to impress the interviewer who had expressed interest in the past [novyts’ky: 49]. summarizing this discussion, the following conclusions can be drawn. the comparison of the lives and professional activity of kulish, novyts’ky and iavornyts’ky shows that these scholars became involved in folklore at different stages in the development of the discipline, and this circumstance certainly affected their careers and views. they possessed different social and educational backgrounds and pursued somewhat different objectives. at the same time, they were all interested in ukrainian folk prose, particularly folk legends about the ukrainian cossacks. they collected many original texts, thereby influencing the collection of folklore in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. they also left some notes and hints about their approach to research and their techniques, which supply priceless data to contemporary scholars. in general, their activities provide an invaluable insight into the development of folklore studies in ukraine during the second half of the nineteenth century. all things considered, despite the frequent paucity of data about the first collectors of ukrainian folk legends, it is still possible to reconstruct their views, objectives and method with a considerable degree of accuracy. most of the information comes from the description of their “method” by the collectors themselves and from an analysis of their views, including their prejudices, and a general familiarity with their life histories. as our findings indicate, the personalities of the collectors affected the folklore they recorded. this had to do not only with their views and approaches, but also the ways in which they influenced their informants. as for the latter, each of the informants had a different life experience, motivation and stories to tell. this can be similarly deduced from the texts they told as well as from the notes of the collectors. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 14 notes 1 roman i. shiyan, “cossack motifs in ukrainian folk legends” (ph.d. diss., university of alberta, 2006), 6-18. 2 dumy can be described as folk epic recitations. they represent a genre of “cossack epics which evolved on the basis of cossack military life.” [kolessa 1983: 118]. 3 unfortunately, some of his notes, containing folklore, were confiscated by the authorities in 1878, and have never been recovered. 4 cossack (kozats’ki) and captives’ (nevil’nyts’ki) refer to specific song cycles within the larger body of ukrainian folk song. cossack songs deal with the life of the ukrainian cossacks in war and peacetime, while captives’ songs portray the suffering of imprisoned ukrainians (cossacks and others) in turkish and tatar captivity. 5 panteleimon kulish calls him the “representative of a new generation [of professional beggars]”, that is, a person unworthy of his glorious and prolific predecessors [kulish: 2]. works cited dei, o. i et al. (eds). 1985. lehendy ta perekazy [legends and stories]. vol. l. kyiv: naukova dumka. doroshenko, dmytro. 1996. ohliad ukrains’koi istoriohrafii. derzhavna shkola: istoriia, politolohiia, pravo [a survey of ukrainian historiography. the statist school: history, political science, jurisprudence]. kyiv: ukrainoznavstvo. ――. 1923. panteleimon kulish. literaturni kharakterystyky ukrajins’kykh pys’mennykiv [panteleimon kulish. the literary characteristics of ukrainian writers]. vol. 4. leipzig: ukrains’ka nakladnia. evarnitskii, dmitrii. 1888. zaporozh’e v ostatkakh stariny i predaniiakh naroda [zaporozh’e in antiquities and folk legend]. pts 1, 2. st petersburg: l. f. panteleev. kolessa, filiaret. 1983. ukrajins’ka usna slovesnist’ [ukrainian oral literature]. intro. mikuláš mušinka. edmonton: canadian institute of ukrainian studies; university of alberta. kulish, panteleimon. 1856. zapiski o iuzhnoi rusi [notes about southern rus’]. vol. 1. st petersburg: v tip. aleksandra iakobsona. novitskii, iakov. 1885. “iz narodnykh predanii o zaporozhtsakh” [from the folk stories about the zaporozhian cossacks]. kievskaia starina 10: 350-53. ――. 1894. “malorusskiia pesni, preimushchestvenno istoricheskie, sobranye ia. p. novitskim v ekaterinoslavskoi gubernii v 1874-1894 godakh” [the songs of little rus’, mostly historical, collected by ia. p. novitskii in ekaterinoslav province, 1874-1894]. sbornik kharkovskogo istoriko-filologicheskogo obshchestva. vol. 6. kharkov: tip gub. pravleniia. ――. 1997. ostrov khortitsa na dnepre, ego priroda, istoriia, drevnosti [the island of khortytsia on the dnipro]. zaporizhzhia: tandem-u. oliinyk-shubravs’ka, mariia (ed.). 1995. “rannia naukova diial’nist’ d. i. iavornyts’koho ta ioho persha istoryko-narodoznavcha monohrafiia pro zaporozhzha” [the early scholarly activity of d.i. iavornyts’ky and his first historical-ethnographic nineteenth-century collectors of ukrainian folk legends 15 monograph about zaporozhzha]. zaporozh’e v ostatkakh stariny i predaniiakh naroda. kyiv: veselka. rozanov (archbishop gabriel). 1842. ustnoe povestvovanie byvshago zaporozhtsa, zhitelia ekaterinoslavskoi gubernii i uezda, seleniia mikhailovki, nikity leontievicha korzha [an oral account by the former cossack mykyta korzh]. odessa: v gorodskoi tipografii. sokil, vasyl’. 2003. istorychni perekazy ukraintsiv [historical narratives of the ukrainian people]. l’viv: vyd. m. kots’. folklorica 2006, vol. xi contributors who are used to bibliographical reference systems operating in the various countries of central and eastern europ 3 articles culture-specific meaning in personal narratives larisa fialkova, university of haifa, israel maria yelenevskaya, technion-israel institute of technology, haifa homo sapiens has been defined as the creature who �makes sense,�and social sciences and humanities are all preoccupied with different aspects of meaning. the anthropologist ulf hannerz emphasizes the importance of sense-making, which occurs constantly through experience, interpretation, contemplation and imagination. the study of culture for anthropologists, therefore, is above all the study of meanings which people create, and which create people as members of society [hannerz 1992:3]. linguists, studying meaning and sense in natural language, are also increasingly concerned with cultural aspects of meaning. the study of semantic phenomena is shifting its focus from the abstract analysis of meaning and sense-making to cultural facts that exist in people and for people [frumkina 1999:4]. cultural psychologists are engaged in determining the role of culture for people, viewing it as a vehicle shaping human capacities. they believe that humans build their understanding of the world through active engagement with it in specific contexts carrying a history in the particular culture [smith 2001:133]. our ability to interpret the meaning of particular contexts and situations would be impossible without a reliance on a wider system of cultural formations (discourse, genres, activity types, institutions, modes of representation) that are not wholly contained in the immediate situation itself [lemke 1997:49]. the quest for meaning has long preoccupied folklorists; indeed it became a central topic of discussion in the 1980s. the eighth congress of the international society for folk narrative research, held in 1984, was dedicated to meaning in both traditional and contemporary folklore. according to lauri honko, the current interest in meaning was triggered by new approaches to fieldwork, which had developed from �routine collecting into an exciting enterprise in problem-defining and problem-solving � personal contacts with informants and culturally rich contexts of performance are likely to raise questions concerning meaning in the observing scholar, especially in cases where the answers seem to hide in the extra-textual sphere� [honko 1986:38]. the interpersonal nature of meaning in folklore stems from the interpersonal nature of culture itself. it is impossible to participate in a culture without sharing its signs, and members of a given society interpret signs according to their cultural patterns [voigt 1999:118]. folklorists perceive meaning not as a frozen construct, but as a dynamic process and a relationship between a situation (the folklore product) and a person (the listener or analyst), who experiences it [e.g. brown 1986:92-93; dégh 1983:147-48; honko 1986a:40-41; honko 1986b:99]. the degree of variation in meaning depends upon genre and context. mary-ellen brown points out that less formal genres, performed and communicated in secular, informal contexts, are more likely to have multiple interpretations than more formal genres [brown 1986:92]. this statement applies to the genre of personal narratives discussed in this essay. as a genre, personal narratives combine the features of communal folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 4 and private folklore [dolby-stahl 1985]. on the one hand they give listeners a glimpse of the storyteller�s �inner life� and give access to his or her private thoughts and feelings; on the other hand they reflect systems of knowledge and meanings, symbolic templates and sets of values and beliefs which are culture-specific and shared by a given community. the aim of this essay is to show both the process and the outcome of changes in meaning in the personal narratives of former soviet citizens in israel. these are a popular sub-genre of immigrant folklore. the source material for the essay came from face-to-face interviews conducted in 1999-2002 with immigrants to israel from the former soviet union (fsu). the total sample comprised 119 interviews with 138 immigrants from the 1990s, amounting to approximately eighty hours of recording, transcribed in full.(1) in several cases family members and friends preferred group interviews to individual ones, and this accounts for the mismatch in the numbers. the interviews were conducted in russian, the mother tongue of both interviewees and interviewers. all the participants in this study, as well as the authors, emigrated to israel in the 1990s. the subjects were found in �snow-ball� fashion. the contexts of the interviews varied; some conversations were held in the homes of interviewers or interviewees, others in offices, still others in public places, such as parks or beaches. in general, the interviews present personal narratives that included such subgenres as memorates, novellas, and supernatural tales (bylichki). additionally, they incorporate traditional and contemporary folklore genres such as jokes, proverbs, and sadistic verses (a popular genre of soviet urban folklore) [belousov 1998:545-57]. besides narratives proper, that is to say, complete and structured stories [labov and waletzky 1966; labov, 1972], the interviews contain reflective monologues and dialogue exchanges. seventy one stories told in the course of the interviews have been selected for preservation in the israeli dov noy folktale archive (ifa). the folklore of immigration is one of the central themes in the ifa holdings. among the main criteria used for selecting personal narratives for ifa is their structural and thematic proximity to traditional and contemporary folklore as well as the use of images derived from it. most of the texts are in hebrew, but in the last two decades stories have tended to be recorded in the language of the original. if a narrative is in yiddish, arabic, russian and so on, it is preserved in that language as well as in hebrew or english translation. to date, approximately 500 texts have been recorded in russian. additional sources used in the analysis are the authors� own diaries containing ethnographic observations, material drawn from the russian mass media, russian-language newspapers in israel, and russian-language internet discussion groups. scholars interested in culture are often reproached for over-theorizing, their remoteness from life and concrete cases, as well as an excessive emphasis on artifacts, such as magazines, films or academic books [billig 1997:205]. our approach is different: we concentrate on our subjects� life experiences, their feelings and thoughts, and turn to cultural artifacts to explain how shared meanings and views evolve. today, when the communicative channels of folklore have changed and become less dependent on oral transmission, storytellers often reproduce or allude to the media and various products of popular culture [kvideland 1990:17]. 5 the understanding of culture in all its complex forms is inseparable from the study of communication. this is why the concepts and models developed by communication theorists have been transferred and applied to culturology [see berry and epstein, 1999: 18-22, on the parallels and differences between culturology and cultural studies]. one of the better known communication models is that proposed by roman jakobson in the article �linguistics and poetics� [jakobson 1960:353]. context message addresser ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― addressee contact code the prominent soviet culturologist and semiotician, iurii lotman, warned researchers against simplifications in the application of this model to culturological research. he regarded autocommunication, or �internal speech� (the term introduced by lev vygotskii) as an independent communication model. in the process of external communication, or in the �i-he� system, a text is introduced, encoded in the code�s system, transmitted and decoded. given that communication seldom occurs without any interference, we frequently observe a decrease in information. in the process of internal communication, given a text that is encoded in a certain system, another code is introduced and the text is transformed. as a result of interaction with the new code an increase in information occurs. while in external communication the code constitutes the constant and the text is the variable, in internal communication the code constitutes the variable, and the texts differ at entrance and exit [lotman 1977]. the scheme of communication in this case looks more complicated: context contextual displacement i ─ → message 1 ─ → ─ ─ message 2 ─ → i code 1 message 1 lotman discussed the two communication systems in their application to fiction, while we are concerned with intercultural research into personal narratives. semi-structured in-depth interviews are akin to diaries, which belong to the internal communication model �i-i.� in telling the interviewer the story of his/her immigration, an informant is trying to make sense of the past, to re-think and re-interpret it in light of experience acquired in the new country. little wonder that many of the interviewees expressed gratitude for the opportunity of sorting out their experiences during an eventful and difficult period in their lives. on the other hand an interview is an external communication of the �i-he� type, or in this case, �i-she,� as both interviewees are women. if we take into account that each of the two types of communication includes its own constants and variables, in our interviews the number of variables increases: informants try to make sense of their past for folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 6 themselves; in this way a new code is introduced and at the same time the message is transmitted to another person, the interviewer. the constants are the language of communication, russian, and a background knowledge of the realities of life in the fsu, israel and the immigrant community. as scollon and scollon maintain, language is inherently ambiguous. in order to communicate we must always leap to conclusions about the speaker�s meaning. we draw inferences from two main sources: the language used and our knowledge of the world. furthermore, an essential element of this knowledge is our expectations of what people normally say in such circumstances [scollon, scollon 1995:10]. a degree of background knowledge is essential in formulating interview questions as well as for understanding and interpreting the answers. ignoring interviewees� past experience can lead to misunderstandings and even a breakdown in communication. moreover, in scholarly research it can lead to ambiguous results. a case in point are some of the sociological studies of immigrants from the fsu conducted in israel. questions about their education are based on the israeli system and take twelve years� schooling as one of the basic categories. in inquiring into religious practices, the categories proposed are also those consistent with the israeli situation: very religious, religious, traditional, non-religious [ben-rafael 1997:368]. the language of the question notwithstanding (russian, hebrew, english), the sense of these questions varies widely for addressers and addressees, as their different background knowledge functions here as the code. for an israeli addressee, in this example the researcher, twelve years� education means that a respondent graduated from high school. for the addresser, the respondent from the fsu conscientiously answering the question about his/her educational level, the meaning of the category is obscure, because the length of study in various institutions of secondary and higher education was eight, ten, five or four years, but never twelve. as a result, to a former soviet citizen twelve years� education could mean any one of the following: (i) secondary school (ten years) plus two years at university (ii) secondary school plus a two-year technical college (tekhnikum) training, e.g. a machine-building or teacher-training college (iii) �incomplete� secondary school (eight years) plus four years at technical college (iv) secondary school followed by vocational school, giving training for a variety of occupations (as turners, woodworkers, cooks, seamstresses, etc.) to illustrate how misunderstandings caused by the different interpretation of concepts may arise, we quote a story told by anatolii p.(2) interpretation is understood here as the ability to extract appropriate meanings from signs and/or texts, and which involves familiarity with the meanings of signs in specific contexts, with the type of code to which they belong , and with the nature of their referents [danesi 1999:26]. anatolii believes that he was mistreated by a clerk in the ministry of education. the basis of the conflict was the discrepancy between the tenand twelve-year school systems and the difference in the grading system for knowledge, percentages in israel and a five-point system in the ussr. anatolii p., 26, emigrated from leningrad in 1990, now living in haifa and working as a sound operator (ifa 22054): and then there was school, on the first of september. oh, yeah, and we go to misrad 7 hachinuch (hebrew for ministry of education) �. and they say to me something like, �well, well, fellow, you are� you are a sort of down (anatolii refers to down syndrome.) yeah, that is, this � well, and where was it? what building was it in? in shekem? there was some misrad (hebrew for office) in the building, and this old fart was sitting there. he had been sitting there for at least 150 years. and he says to my parents something like, �well, well, he can�t go into the eleventh grade, he�ll hardly cope in the tenth.� interviewer: what made him think that? anatolii: well, he was looking at my grades: �yes, the grades are bad.� and i had 5 in english and 5 in sports. the rest were also sort of okay; that is 4 in geometry, well, 3 in algebra, 4 in russian, 3 in chemistry, 3 in physics, 4 in biology, and a good behavior report. and yet he�and i see that my mum is looking at me like she was ready to bury me alive on the spot. that is, the situation is such that the best thing would have been to spit on his bald patch, but my mother is looking at me as though it�s all my fault. and what�s my fault? that he thinks that�and he automatically signs me up for the tenth grade! interviewer: that is, you� anatolii: that is nobody asked me. he immediately said, �you won�t be able to study.� interviewer: and age-wise were you going to be in the 11th grade? anatolii: yes, i was going to be in the eleventh grade. because in russia i, sort of, had finished the tenth grade. in terms of a 12-year system i had finished the tenth grade. although i had been studying for nine years, i had finished the tenth grade, and according to my age, i ought to be in the eleventh grade. interviewer: but he didn�t let you ... anatolii: no, he didn�t. and he was such a� but his eyes were so kind, so kind� like in the joke about grandpa lenin. he (lenin) is walking along the street with a loaf of bread in his hands. and there are hungry �children there, they�re hungry and they say: �grandpa, give us �grandpa lenin, give us some bread.� �get lost, kids, get lost.� but his eyes were so kind, so kind. anatolii�s integration into israeli society was long and painful. he had resented the idea of immigration, and his first encounters with bureaucracy reinforced his rejection of israel. the clerk may have acted with the best intentions and tried to prevent the new immigrant from falling behind his new classmates. he acted in terms of the twelve-year system, not thinking that nine-years� education with grades that were mostly good or fair were equivalent to ten-years� schooling in israel. but the decision to �demote� anatolii and put him into a class with younger students had the opposite effect. both the interviewee and his mother said that it had demotivated him, and for a while he lost interest even in his favorite courses. nine years after the incident, anatolii was as upset as if he had suffered the unfairness the day before. it pained him that he was helpless vis a vis the clerk and that his mother chose not to support him. he compensated for his feeling of helplessness by using violent language in the narrative. this passage is a good example of how the laws of oral narration formulated by olrik function in personal narratives [olrik 1965]. firstly, it follows the law of opening and closing: anatolii divides up his story with an introduction and ends it with a joke summing up his experience. secondly, the law of two to a folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 8 scene leaves anatolii's mother silent in the background. the active participants are the narrator and the official, and anatolii uses direct speech to render the conversation. this enriches his performance as he imitates the clerk's body language and intonation. and thirdly, we see here multiple manifestations of the law of contrast: one is old, the other is young; the clerk has long tenure in israel and knows how to pull the strings, while the family of newcomers has no experience or understanding of how things work in the new country, and finally, the bureacrat is powerful and the immigrant is powerless. in this passage we also see several features characteristic of the speech behavior of contemporary russian speakers. the russian linguist, t. m. nikolaeva, classifies them as a tendency to enlarge facts and events; a dislike of single concrete facts; and a dislike of precise information [nikolaeva 2000:123]. firstly, we note anatolii�s tendency to hyperbolize, something typical of folk narrative: the clerk had been in that job for over 150 years, his mother was so angry that she was ready to bury her son alive, and the narrator was �diagnosed� an imbecile.(3) typically, embellishment and exaggeration are used in describing unpleasant experiences, bad expectations, unfair treatment; hence the persistence of litany in the repertoire of speech genres among contemporary russian speakers [nikolaeva 2000, reis 1997]. at the beginning of the story anatolii repeatedly uses impersonal constructions. although a characteristic feature of russian syntax, in the context of this passage it has an additional feature presenting the narrator as confronting a multitude of anonymous subversive �they� figures. the multitude of hedge words, such as �well,� �like,� �sort of,� �something of the sort,� the repetition of the hypothetical form �as if� and false starts make anatolii�s statements imprecise and uncertain. instead of directly evaluating the situation, anatolii cracks a joke about lenin which functions as a commentary to his own story. as lutz röhrich observes, the joke seems to be the most important and vivid genre of folklore narrative in modern society, encompassing all sides of life, and which is determined socially as well as culturally and individually [röhrich 1990:127, 135]. this genre was particularly important for a politically suppressed society such as the soviet union, where many themes were taboo in any other type of discourse. the most successful jokes were so often told, that like proverbs they acquired semiotic power. many of our interviewees allude to them to describe situations and evaluate people and events. the pervasiveness of allusions to jokes is characteristic not only of informal discourse. strikingly, many social scientists writing today about the soviet and post-soviet periods allude to the jokes in the same fashion as our informants [e.g. brym 1994:21; gitelman 1997:22; remennick 1998:256; rotenberg 2000:214; ryvkina 1996:43, 44].(4) a joke about lenin cited by anatolii was from a popular series of celebrity jokes. official soviet propaganda strove to create an idealized image of a wise, kind, strict but fair leader. the duality of the image has roots in the christian tradition. analyzing the evolution of lenin�s image in soviet literature and propaganda, mikhail vaiskopf has shown that some of the leader�s features emphasizing his power over the world were modeled on jahweh, while his humanity imitated christ�s. his dual personality was frequently reflected in the description of his eyes, both kind and strict [vaiskopf 2001:342]. the image of �the most humane of all humans� (maiakovskii�s oft-quoted phrase), however, was in sharp contrast with the folk image 9 of lenin. party leaders, as well as famous writers, artists, and prominent scientists, were also mythologized. their biographies in school books were generally reduced to a listing of their moral virues. in reaction to official ideology, a vast repertoire of jokes demythologizing the iconic figures of lenin, pushkin, turgenev, tolstoi, and so on circulated widely in the country. according to muriel saville-troike, the use of metaphors, proverbs and jokes is a time-honored communication strategy for depersonalizing criticism [saville-troike 1984:36]. our other informants, as well as participants in internet discussion groups, also use jokes and sayings widely, not just in order to express a criticism but also to prove a point, generalize a situation, or classify a particular experience. in many cases instead of telling the whole joke, narrators give only the punchline, which shows that the joke is used as a sign familiar to the addressee. in the nineteenth century the russian philologist alexander potebnia was already analyzing the way folklore and literary texts such as fables are abbreviated in everyday communication [potebnia 1976:509-29]. the modern-day russian folklorist k. a. bogdanov has expanded potebnia�s ideas, showing that the genres found in communication today have been expanded by allusions to phrases from popular songs and movies, as well as political slogans. he points out that �mutual understanding in a group is inconceivable without a silent presupposition that these texts are well known� [bogdanov 2001:48]. as we have noted, the religiosity of our informants is also difficult to discuss through concepts appropriate for the veteran population of israel. a high percentage of immigrants from the fsu to israel are secular. in the perestroika years, when anti-religious propaganda in the ussr ceased, the population began to show an interest in religion. jews started attending synagogues, to participate in hanukkah and seder night �parties,� while russians, ukrainians and others were no longer afraid of baptizing their children or going to church on major christian holidays. this, however, did not affect the everyday life of large sectors of the urban population. at the same time there was an explosion of interest in extra-sensory phenomena, healing, and ufos. eclecticism of beliefs is characteristic of the post-soviet period. as r. ryvkina remarks, their concepts often do not reflect a religious worldview, but a general philosophical belief that �there is something somewhere guiding our life� [ryvkina 1996:59]. in our sample this applied to jews and non-jews alike. here we quote from the interview with an ethnic russian, inna p. inna p., 48, emigrated from cheliabinsk, russia, in 1992, now living in haifa, an economist now employed as a cleaning woman (ifa 22053) interviewer: how do you feel in a country in which religion, well, is so closely connected to the state? inna: i feel good about it, because (pause) in some sense, i am a believer myself. i, i was baptized. and so my attitude is reasonable, even good. yes, not simply reasonable, but good. well, probably, with those orthodox jews � they sort of, but i don�t really, they don�t have much to do with me. but religion, i, because i believe, i believe all of this. well, not everything. but in any case, i think god created man; that is, he sent us. and we, with all our, with all our baayotami (russified hebrew for problems), with all the problems and well� no, my attitude is very positive. interviewer: do you know that there is an orthodox church in haifa, a russian orthodox church? folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 10 inna: oh, oh, i was there once. and i didn�t like it. in what sense? they simply didn�t let me in. i learned� interviewer: but why? inna: yes, i learned, the church is in carmel (a district in haifa), well ... interviewer: on shderot hanassi and � inna: yes, boris and i went there together, er, because, er, i don�t remember why. probably, when keren (inna�s granddaughter) was born, and then again when she was five, and something was not right. someone had put the evil eye on her, and we had (pause) to go to church and light a candle, or something of the sort. and, ha, excuse me, but i think the guy who came to the gate was a kgb officer. i rang, the gate was locked, i rang and he snubbed me completely, and that�s all. and it was very � so now, if i want to talk to god, and sometimes i do, if i want to do it, then i go to stella maris (a catholic church in haifa), and light a candle there. i apologize if it is not the right thing, because it is, well it�s not orthodox, it�s catholic. well, god is one, and i light a candle there, i sit there for a while, i pray in my own way, because i don�t know (any prayers) by heart. i don�t know how to pray, but, but i sort of, talk to him in my own way, i tell him whatever there is to tell, and i walk around a bit. in the past, i don�t know, whether it is because of the arabs, or because of our people, but in the past there was a big, long lane near stella maris, and there were all those religious statues on it, well, you know those religious statues. and now, because they began roasting shashlyks there and all sorts of things, the alley is closed. i used to go for walks there. and the most important thing is that you walk there without being afraid that someone might jump out at you or something. well, but the orthodox church, i did, you know, after they gave me such a welcome, i didn�t even try to go back. as we can judge from the passage, inna�s notion of christianity is vague and mixed up with folk belief, such as the power of the evil eye.(5) she is not familiar with dogma, nor does it matter to her which church she goes to, so long as she is well treated, can perform the few rites she knows, and spend some time in peace and quiet. she is apologetic about her non-standard approach to church-going and ignorance of prayers. she admits she is a believer �in some sense.� what matters for her is her hope of receiving protection and help in coping with her problems. such an attitude to religion is characteristic of many ex-soviets, both inside russia and out. soviet ideology always presented the state as the protector of its citizens and guarantor of their future. although in the last decades of soviet power such propaganda was derided, it still impacts on psychology. disappointed in its promises and exposed to new realities of insecurity and the necessity of making choices, people turned to religion for protection and comfort. as we see from this passage, church premises can also be perceived as the only place where the immigrant feels physically safe, even if this feeling is illusory. referring to the hostile behavior of the official of the russian orthodox church, inna likens him to a kgb officer. many stories circulated in the ussr about the involvement of the kgb in the affairs of the church. our narrator transfers this mythology to the israeli soil, and makes sense of the new realities in terms of symbols related to her pre-immigration experience. 11 one further observation relating to attitudes to religion among the immigrants is based on several interviews with religious christians. these interviewees are much more tolerant of judaism than secular jews. although few subjects expressed militantly atheistic ideas, lack of respect for religion and the religious was not uncommon. and this brings us to the next topic, that is, what constitutes jewishness for our informants? in the soviet union jews were viewed as an ethnic group with shared genetic characteristics. the systematic destruction of jewish cultural institutions, the persecution of teachers of hebrew and discrimination against religious believers made several generations of soviet people, including the jews themselves, forget the religious culture that defines and unites jews wherever they live [garfinkle 1997:5]. arkadii t., 57, emigrated from kharkov, an engineer now working as a home attendant arkadii: i thought, well, it might have been a primitive idea � i thought that jewishness is just blood. let�s compare, say christians. say he is a catholic. say, in england, poland, former russia or, say, africa or australia. but this african guy, from, say, mozambique, doesn�t become english, french or a pole. it�s just his faith. well, with us, as we see, it doesn�t really matter where you come from. a black ethiopian or a taimanets�in fact, how do you call a taimanets? interviewer: a yemeni. taimanim are people from yemen. arkadii: yemeni? well, so this is what matters. the main thing is your faith. interviewer: and have you accepted that? arkadii: yes. absolutely, and without any �well, after all, why not? if this is what matters � then may it be as long as he is, as they say, a true ben-adam, a proper human being. it remains difficult for many immigrants to grapple with the concept of the jew. in the soviet union the concepts of nationality and citizenship were separated, hence arkadii�s inability to understand that an african from a former french colony can be a french citizen. this misconception is not an idiosyncratic one, but was reported by other informants. apart from genetic features, our informants mentioned language, and yiddish in particular, as the determining factor in defining the jews. this is how it was put by tamara z., a fifty one-year-old engineer, from zhitomir in ukraine, now living in haifa and working as a home attendant: �i still think that jewishness, it must unite all jews. culture and everything should be united. and i think that if someone is jewish, he must know yiddish. and if he doesn�t know yiddish, he is not really a jew.� a number of other interviews reveal that the definition of a jew is based on an idealized image and includes such features as intellect, a sense of responsibility and humane character. thus arkadii is ready to come to terms with the fact that dark-skinned yemenis and ethiopians are jewish if they are �proper human beings;� one other informant, albert r. goes so far as to imply that malice cannot and should not be expressed in the �jewish language.� equally mythical is the image of the jew presented in the following excerpt from an interview with anastasia n., 61, a biochemist who emigrated in 1990 from kharkov, ukraine, and now lives in haifa: �the only thing which really upsets me here is that � i had always thought that en masse jews were very folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 12 intelligent. intelligent and sensible; that is like prometheus, seeing things ahead of time. and they turned out to be epimetheus, every one, i think. well, with few exceptions, just like everywhere else.� the idealization of jews as a group, which may have been a way of compensating for social inequality in the ussr, existed side by side with the desire of many soviet jews to distance themselves from everything jewish. in some sense the soviet legal system even encouraged jews to give up their official ethnic identity. in the ussr children of mixed marriages could choose their mother�s or father�s ethnicity when they received their id at the age of 16. always prepared for a deterioration of the political situation and new surges of antisemitism, most parents instructed their children to register as non-jewish. according to ethno-sociological research in the late 1980s, 90-95% of children from mixed marriages were registered as non-jews [dymerskayatsigelman 2000:39]. the desire to undo all ties with jewry was derided by jews and non-jews alike, and triggered the emergence of numerous jokes and sayings. many of them were related to physical features, family names and patronymics. let us compare two examples. in the first a teacher comes to class and says, �children, tomorrow we are to host an arab delegation. rabinowitz, haimovitz and you, ivanov on your mother�s side, stay at home tomorrow.� the other example is the jocular phrase �ivanov, a jew on his mother�s side.� the two phrases look almost identical, but refer to two different situations. in the joke, �ivanov on his mother�s side� has a jewish father so he is not a halachic jew (i.e. not a jew according to jewish law). nevertheless, he, too, is subject to anti-semitic abuse. as a rule, children bore their father�s name, although they could choose their mother�s family name instead. but, as emerges from the joke, the mere change of name would not deceive a vigilant antisemite. in the second example, the father is russian and the name has not been changed. paradoxically, having a jewish father made a person more of a jew in soviet terms. although any person with a jewish mother is a halachic jew, in the soviet mind the name ivanov was only for russians, and it was as much of a symbol of russianness as rabinowitz was a symbol of jewishness; so a jew bearing the prototypical russian name, ivanov, is a hilarious absurdity. at the same time both phrases could be used by jews to indicate that these �ethnic marginals� belonged to the in-group and so were not rejected. boastfully calling itself �the family of brotherly nations,� the soviet union bred interethnic intolerance and xenophobia, which was frequently reflected in the language. it is from the soviet union that russia inherited an underdeveloped culture of interethnic relations, in which citizens of a country are treated not as citizens but as �bioids,� species with different blood and facial features [ryvkina 1996:137]. soviet social realities triggered the appearance of the concepts of �half� and a �quarter� with reference to ethnicity. in addition, the expression �jew on her mother�s/father�s side� were often used in earnest. our sample provided the following example, recorded from boris n., 59-year-old retired engineer, who emigrated from tashkent, uzbekistan in 1999, and now lives in afula. he remarked: �my daughter [pause] went to university. her friends seemed a peculiar bunch of people; that is, well, there were all sorts there, uzbeks and jews, and you know � and then she goes and marries a jew, well, a jew on his father�s side, yeah, a jew on his father�s side.� during the interview boris, an ethnic russian, boasted that all his life he had jewish friends, who 13 always considered him �one of ours.� yet, describing his daughter�s multi-ethnic environment he refers to its denizens as a �peculiar bunch of people� and people of �all sorts,� both phrases with slightly pejorative connotations. the outcome of such friendships, marriage to a �jew on his father�s side� did not enthuse boris, because it increased the possibility that his daughter, a �jew on her mother�s side,� would emigrate, a possibility other family members were not considering at that time. the concepts of �halves� outlived the soviet system and is still widely used in the immigrant community. recently one of the authors overheard the following conversation between two workers in a supermarket. one of them explained to her colleague how to make uzbek dishes such as plov, shurpa, hamsa, and so on. the latter asked in surprise: �how do you know all this?� �because i am half muslim; after all, my father comes from central asia.� [cited from the authors� ethnographic diaries.] the far more intense exposure to jewish culture in israel than in the fsu, and even the knowledge acquired in the process of studying in israel, have still proved powerless to expel the distorted soviet concepts of ethnicity, ethnic identity, nationality and religion. here are some more examples from our sample: leonid b., 36: �according to my id i�m belarusian.� ekaterina r., 24: �my father�s classmate � and incidentally, if you are interested in nationality, he was a muslim.� iakov k., 80, speaking to his colleagues on his retirement, said that in the soviet union he had never concealed his nationality and added, �i have never been religious, i have never been a zionist, but i have always been a jew!� [the latter example is cited from the authors� ethnographic diaries.] a student from the university of haifa submitted a course project, in which she interviewed immigrants from the fsu and then analyzed their narratives. on the form providing personal data about her interviewees she described one of them as �half jewish, half christian.� just as the new meaning of �halves� has gradually spread from the description of jews to other ethnicities and even religions, another cliché of the soviet era used in talking about jews has become one element in the xenophobic vocabulary of the post-soviet period. in the soviet press and public discourse the word �jew� was carefully avoided, as if it were pejorative. instead, soviet propaganda coined the phrase �persons of the jewish nationality.� in his collection of words and expressions characteristic of soviet newspeak, benedict sarnov refers to this absurd combination as a euphemism, a manifestation of the soviet hypocrisy. the word �jew� disappeared from public discourse in the ussr as if mentioned it was something shameful. but all its replacements, �rootless cosmopolitan� a �zionists,� and a �person of jewish nationality� were political labels and were continuously used to unmask �enemies of the people�. sarnov remarks they were no more than calques of �kike's snout� [sarnov 2002:221-27]. in the 1990s, the same �euphemism� was applied to people from the caucasus. whether they were chechens, ossetians or circassians, they all came to be called folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 14 �persons of caucasian nationality,� or �persons from the southern nationalities.� needless to say, these are mythological constructs. it is typical of an ethnocentric worldview to see various �others� as a uniform group, for example aziaty, chornye, churki, uzbeki (asians, blacks, lumps, uzbeks), all of them referring to people of non-european appearance. such a usage not only expands the meaning of the words, it makes its connotational components prevail over denotational. members of various ethnic minorities are sensitive to the contempt expressed in such labels, and this is reflected in folklore. alexandra l., a pensioner from moscow, told us a joke, the essence of which is a pun: the russian word litso has several meanings, among them �face� and �person.� the joke runs as follows: �advertisement: i would like to exchange the face of a caucasian national for a kike�s snout. additional payment guaranteed.� since the beginning of the unrest in the caucasus (ethnic conflicts in nagornyi karabakh and abkhazia, and above all the chechen war), xenophobic attitudes towards people from the caucasus have become more marked than towards jews. the joke implies that the social status of the jew has greatly improved thanks to the possibility of emigration from russia. we have assembled an entire collection of texts containing the original cliché and its paraphrases. these range from academic essays to newspaper articles, published in both russia and israel. for example, when analyzing various waves of emigration from russia, the linguist e. a. zemskaia writes, �the third wave, to a large extent, consists of dissidents, persons of the jewish nationality, and representatives of various creative and intellectual professions, who had to leave or were expelled from the ussr� [zemskaia 2001:41]. the statement seems peculiar, not only because a linguist uses in earnest a cliché that has become notorious for its xenophobic connotations, but also because it implicitly includes jews in the groups opposing soviet power. as a hint at the special status enjoyed by the residents of moscow, a journalist from the popular weekly argumenty i fakty (arguments and facts) referred to them as �persons of moscow nationality,� and in an article on islamic terrorism the same paper expressed concern about the the rapid growth of the arab population: �today, sixty out of every hundred people in the world are �persons of the arab-asian nationality� [argumenty i fakty 2001:no. 42]. increasing xenophobia in russia mostly targets non-whites and are supported by the actions of the authorities. as alaina lemon has observed, in the post-soviet years those termed �blacks� and �southerners� are routinely rounded up and driven out of moscow for document violations [lemon 1998:46]. in a growing number of texts allusions to the cliché are used to criticize and mock xenophobia. the russian historian v. diatlov entitled a chapter of his book on ethnic relations in siberia: �persons of geographic nationality: migrants from the caucasus in the socio-economic life of irkutsk.� he points out that the gradually evolving notion of a kavkazets (a caucasian) now frequently includes people from central asia [diatlov 2000:91]. here too, we can see the meaning of the word expanding. in an article about the various difficulties confronting non-jews in israel, the israeli journalist v. martynova writes that �persons of a �mistaken nationality� still cannot get married in israel or invite members of their family to visit them� [martynova 2002]. the most curious example of all is the title of an article by the literary critic iu. barabash, ��persons of the basurman nationality� in the writing of gogol� and schevchenko� [barabash 1999]. basurman is an archaic word used to denote someone alien, a person of a different faith, 15 primarily muslims. in contemporary speech it is used pejoratively to refer to people from central asia, muslim clergy and even drug traffickers from central asia [mokienko, nikitina 2001:53]. thus the soviet stereotype can even be applied to the analysis of pre-soviet literature, where it requires the addressees to make complex transformations, and interpret historically distant texts within the framework of the same social code [hodge, kress 1988:162-68]. importantly, the greater the semantic disparity between the attribute and the noun �nationality� in these examples, the more complex the transformations, the more intense the ironic power of the allusion. lauri honko points to the importance of such linguistic phenomena as implications, allusion and ellipses for folkloristic research. they �fill� sentences with meaning via the context; it is impossible to read the meaning only from the wording of the sentences, because they act as signals carrying the transformal meaning to the addressee [honko 1986a:41]. returning to the self-perception of the soviet jews, it would be an exaggeration to say that their jewishness was reduced merely to a stamp in their id. many spoke about some elements of the jewish tradition that had been preserved in families despite all the obstacles. but the meaning of the tradition had undergone significant changes, often remaining obscure even to those who tried to observe it: arkadii t., 57, an engineer by training, works as a home attendant, while iulia t., 50, an engineer by training, washes dishes in a hospital interviewer: was your family interested in its jewish roots? arkadii: yes, yes, we �we were forced to � because beginning with our id, from the �fifth paragraph�� and very often �they wouldn�t hit your id, but would hit you in the mug.� yulia: no, arkadii, the question was, whether your family had observed any jewish traditions. arkadii: i believe the jewish traditions were observed in many intelligentsia families. we tried to observe such holidays as pesach. we would try to get matza, tried to make a meal. of course, we kept all these memories, and had some idea of what pesach is all about. and the same was true about rosh hashanah in the fall. and, of course, we knew that festivals like purim and hanukkah exist. and we even enjoyed being different, particularly with our friends. we liked it because when we were students, we mostly mixed with jewish kids. and those who knew at least something would even show off their knowledge of jewish traditions and the jewish way of life. arkadii�s misunderstanding of the interviewer�s question is not accidental. he habitually interprets everything jewish in terms of nationality, rather than as culture and a distinctive way of life. moreover, unwittingly, he reveals that he perceived his jewishness as an act of coercion on the part of the state, and not as an internalized and consciously chosen identity. arkadii mentions the notorious �fifth entry,� the fifth line on the soviet identity card, which indicated the bearer�s nationality. although it was to be found on all ids, it came to connote jewishness, and was used in such expressions as �he has the fifth entry,� �he didn�t get this job because of the fifth entry,� �he/she is an invalid of the fifth group/entry.� martynova�s definition of non-jews in israel as �persons of a mistaken nationality,� which we quoted earlier, is a milder version of �invalids of the fifth entry,� and implies that their situation mirrors that of the jews in the soviet union. the connotative folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 16 meaning of the �fifth entry� was ultimately fixed in the language after the anti-semitic practices of the soviet authorities were derided in a song by the prominent poet and cult figure of the 1960s and 1970s, vladimir vysotskii. the song is about two drunkards, a russian and a jew, who decide to immigrate to israel. the russian is granted permission to emigrate, while the jew is not, because of the �fifth entry.� arkadii implies that jews, including �halves,� were always ready to confront anti-semitism. he alludes to the soviet joke built on the antithesis of official documents and physical features; russianness as expressed by the prototypical name ivanov versus disguised jewishness: �ivanov, don�t go to lenin street.� �what�s up?� �they beat jews up there.� �but what does it have to do with me? it says in my id that i am russian.� �you don�t understand. they won�t hit your id, they�ll hit your bloody mug.� when arkadii�s wife clarifies the interviewer�s question about his interest in his jewish roots, he does not give a direct answer about his family, but prefers to generalize. it is not clear from his enumeration of the jewish holidays whether he was familiar just with their names, or really knew their history and meaning. the only exception is passover, which is consistent with what we heard from other subjects: even secular and assimilated jews knew about that holiday, and tried to get or even make their own matza. arkadii�s answer is another example of russian speakers� dislike of concrete facts and precise information that we mentioned earlier. the other interesting motif in this extract is that arkadii links the observance of tradition to social class. in claiming that it was the prerogative of the intelligentsia he turns tradition into an elitist practice. moreover, even meager knowledge of it would elevate someone in the eyes of his or her peers. judging from other interviews, arkadii is wrong in his assumptions about the role of the intelligentsia in the preservation of jewish tradition. our observations are confirmed by sociological data: there is an inverse relationship between the level of education and involvement in jewish cultural life. the higher the level of education, the less intense is the involvement [ryvkina 1996:54]. as is the case in many cultures, it was the older generation who will not let a persecuted culture die; moreover, very often it was barely literate old folk, who still remembered and tried to observe at least some elements of the tradition, although in a manner that deviated from mainstream judaism. it was less important to observe the tradition correctly, than to refer to it in some way. that is why our informants� interpretation of the concepts relating to tradition is loose, and allows for deviations which would be unacceptable for true observers as the next two excerpts illustrate: dana l., 23, from rostov-on-don, now living in haifa, and studying at the university there dana: in principle, almost everybody in our family is jewish. that is, both my parents are jews with roots. it is very � that is, i have known that i am jewish since childhood. 17 interviewer: did you celebrate, did you celebrate any holidays? you observed some traditions; you have roots, haven�t you? that�s why i�m asking. dana: you know what? we didn�t. but my mum intuitively separated� but here we began to observe � now we light candles � interviewer: on the sabbath? dana: yes. and on yom kippur we try to � we do try. for example, i�ve been observing the fast days since we arrived here. well, my mum, she is not very well, but she tries to do whatever she can. we observe whatever we can. interviewer: do you drive on the sabbath? dana: we don�t have a car, so we don�t drive. that�s how things are. but i do things. if i have something i need to do, i do it, schoolwork, for example. but in russia, say, my mum intuitively separated meat and dairy products. she simply thought it wasn�t hygienic, it was unpleasant. so she separated dishes, although she didn�t know why. and (pause) we used to eat matza. and there was a funny incident. an acquaintance of ours, a russian, invited my parents, he invited them over to his place to watch movies. he had a video. and it was considered really something! but he didn�t know what matza was. he thought it was some sort of biscuit. so he put the treat on the table. and the treat was matza with lard. it really does taste good. in answering the interviewer�s questions, dana is re-considering her family�s way of life. in terms of lotman�s model of internal communication, dana codes her experience anew, when she tries to classify her behavior in the framework of her new knowledge of jewish tradition acquired in israel. after some hesitation she admits that, in spite of trying to be traditional, the family still fails to behave consistently, and follows only those rules which do not interfere with their habits. an interesting detail is dana�s explanation of her mother�s habit of separating dishes. in their house this was viewed as a hygienic norm, rather than a religious commandment. dana�s distorted understanding of the concept of kashrut became clear in an informal conversation with the interviewer, two years after her interview. interviewer: what can i offer you? i can give you white cheese with sour cream, that�s the only kosher dish i can make. dana: oh, are you kosher? interviewer: i�m not, but i understand that you are. dana: well, when i said that mum used separate dishes for meat and dairy foods, i didn�t mean they had to be separated in the stomach as well. [cited from the authors� ethnographic diaries] confusion of this kind is quite common, and appears in several interviews. a case in point is elvira a., a mountain jew from dagestan or azerbaijan (see note 3), who defines her family as traditional. she told us that her grandmother had kept a kosher house. yet she would make pork steaks for the children, because she believed it was important for growing youngsters. significantly, on such occasions she sat them at a different table from the rest of the family. folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 18 the incident involving eating matza with lard mentioned by dana was not unique to her family, as is clear from an interview, recorded in 1996, with sergei s., 42, an electrician now living in the haifa bay area, who emigrated from odessa in 1990: my mother sometimes brought matza from the synagogue. as a rule it took a long time it to eat it up, because my family is not religious. so i would take it when i was off hiking. it is very convenient to have on a trip: it�s light, easy to pack, and an excellent substitute for bread. so i told my companians, those who didn�t know what matza was � i explained � it was fun for me, but i did it with an earnest expression on my face � i used to tell them that these were special biscuits for paratroopers. and they accepted my story at face value. it�s a bit of a blasphemy, but a matza sandwich with properly salted thin slices of lard makes an excellent snack. both dana and sergei obviously enjoy their stories, although sergei qualifies his behavior as blasphemy. playing jokes amuses them for several reasons. first, they feel they possess secret knowledge, which gives them some sense of the superiority of the initiated. second, although they are not afraid of the consequences of violating the rules of kashrut, forbidden fruit is sweet. in addition, sergei enjoys telling his non-jewish friends tall stories and tricking them into eating jewish food. as we have tried to show, immigrants� personal narratives, a subgenre of modern folklore, demonstrate serious changes in meaning. this occurs as a result of double change which the text and the code undergo (see lotman�s terminology cited earlier). in personal narratives some of the concepts brought from the old country and acquired in the new may have connotations greatly deviating from the denotational meaning. the process of immigration always involves intercultural contacts, and consequently the differing assumptions of specific cultural groups are always being challenged in the process of communication. knowledge of each other�s past, habits and customs, particularly if such knowledge has been acquired in childhood and adolescence, can be an asset for society as a whole, since it will contribute to more effective negotiation of social meanings, and, hopefully, more effective intercultural communication. the qualitative analysis of personal narratives provide folklorists and anthropologists with rich data about the culture-related meanings shared by studied groups. they can also influence relations between folkloristics and social studies. while so far folkloristics has benefited from sociological methodolgy, social studies seldom use the results of folklore research. the situation is gradually changing, and the attention that social scientist pay to jokes may be the first sign of this change. interdisciplinary interaction should, however, move from the application of folkloric data in preparing questionnaires to consultations in which folklorists could assist social workers, psychologists and other professionals responsible for immigrants� integration. notes 1 twenty of the interviews were conducted by students from the university of haifa: hanna shmulian, 19 svetlana berenshtein, alina sanina, marina el-kayam and laura abramov. they then placed these at our disposal. the rest of the interviews were conducted by the authors. 2 we have translated excerpts from the interviews without editing in order to preserve the specific features of oral narration and the individual style of each storyteller. we have also preserved instances of code switching. hebrew insertions in the excerpts are italicized. some of the interviewees were apprehensive about disclosing their identity. we have respected their views and changed all the names. the informants� age, professions, place of origin and occupation remain unaltered. 3 the speech of other informants also abounds in hyperbole. for example, describing the exodus of soviet jews in the 1990s, inna kh. says, �� everyone took off, just everyone who wasn�t lazy �� this phraseological unit is used to emphasize the multitude of participants in an event or activity. while talking about the loss of social status among immigrants she amplifies the phenomenon by calling them �25th-rate people.� referring to a repair job she and her husband attempted to complete on their own, anastasia n. evaluates this modest ambition as �impudence and despair.� recounting her son�s conflict with the soviet customs, gaiane a. refers to the episode as �tragic circumstances� and so on. in most cases informants hyperbolize negativity, be it unpleasant states and feelings, unfavorable impressions or failures. all the researchers quoted allude to soviet-jewish jokes. brym, for example reminds his readers that a well-known russian quip defines a jewish wife as a means of transportation. in a slightly different form the same joke appears in ryvkina: jewishness is not a luxury but a means of conveyance. she also quotes another joke: a man applies for a job. he is asked, �what�s your nationality?� he answers, �well, you got it right�� gitelman alludes to soviet jews as �invalids of the fifth category� and so on. eclecticism in religious beliefs is characteristic of jews and non-jews alike. we would like to cite two further examples from interviews with younger informants, both from muslim republics of the fsu. one of them, a mountain jew (also called tats, living in dagestan or azerbaijan and speaking judea-tat, a dialect of judea persian (farsi) [wigoder 1989: 385]), rasul o., 24 from makhachkala in dagestan, claimed that �strange as it may sound, the elementary customs of the torah, of the jewish bible have been transferred to the laws of the shariah. that�s why the people of dagestan, their laws are a combination of the laws of the mountain people (the jews) and the shariah, i.e. islam.� another subject, ekaterina r., 24, from tashkent, considers herself christian. her mother is russian and orthodox christian, her father jewish. in tashkent the family was wellintegrated into the muslim and local uzbek cultures. ekaterina remembers that both of her grandmothers �purified� the house, one with jewish prayers, the other with christian ones. ekaterina is seeking an integral religion, and she told us about her encounter with a member of a sect claiming a symbiosis of the great religions: �three religions are combined in this movement. the sign of this religion, and this is what she showed me, is magen david (hebrew for the �star of david�) inside it is a cross and below is a crescent. have you heard about it? and a person (a follower of the movement), according to what she told me, should be a muslim by education, while the basis of law is the torah, and the road of faith is christian experience.� folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 20 bibliography ben-rafael, eliezer et al. 1997. �identity and language: the social insertion of soviet jews in israel.� in noah lewin-epstein et al. (eds.), russian jews on three continents: migration and resettlement. london: frank cass, pp. 364-88 barabash, iu. 1999. ��litsa basurmanskoi natsional�nosti� u gogolia i shevchenko.� ['persons of the moslem nationality' in the writing of gogol� and shevchenko]. voprosy literatury, no. 6, pp. 204-35. belousov, a.f. 1998. �sadistskie stishki� (sadistic verses). compiled by a.f. belousov russkii shkol�nyi fol�klor: ot �vyzyvanii� pikovoi damy do semeinykh rasskazov [russian school folklore: from the �calling up� of the queen of spades to family tales]. moscow: ladomir �ast�, pp. 545-57. berry, ellen e. and mikhail n. epstein 1999. transcultural experiments. new york: st. martin�s. billig, michael 1997. �from codes to utterances: cultural studies, discourse and psychology.� in marjorie ferguson and peter golding (eds.), cultural studies in question. london-thousand oaks-new delhi: sage, pp. 205-26. bogdanov, k. a. 2001. povsednevnost� i mifologiia: issledovaniia po semiotike fol�klornoi deistvitel�nosti [daily life and mythology: semiotic research into folklore reality] st petersburg: iskusstvospb. brown, mary ellen 1986. "pot of gold: rainbow�s end. meaning: tale". in bengt r. johnsson (ed.), arv scandinavian yearbook of folklore: 1984. uppsala: almqvist and wiksell, pp. 89-94. brym, robert j. with rozalina ryvkina 1994. the jews of moscow, kiev and minsk: identity, antisemitism, emigration. new york: new york university press. danesi, marcel 1999. of cigarettes, high heels and other interesting things: an introduction to semiotics. new york: st. martin�s. dégh, linda 1983. �foreword: a quest for meaning.� journal of folklore research, 20 (2/3), pp. 14550. diatlov, v. i. 2000. sovremennye torgovye men�shinstva: faktor stabil�nosti ili konflikta? (kitaitsy i kavkaztsy v irkutske) [contemporary commercial minorities: the stability or conflict factor? (the chinese and caucasian peoples in irkutsk)]. moscow: natalis. dolby-stahl, sandra k. 1985. �a literary folkloristic methodology for the study of meaning in personal narrative.� journal of folklore research, 22 (1): pp. 46-76. dymerskaya-tsigelman, ludmila 2000. "evrei byvshego sssr v izraile i v sng: zametki redaktora k materialam sbornika� [jews from the former ussr in israel and the cis: the editor�s notes on the material in the collection of articles]. in ludmila dymerskaya-tsigelman (ed.), the jews of the soviet union in transition, 4(19). jerusalem: publications on soviet jewry, pp. 17-49. 21 frumkina, r.m. 1999. �kul�turologicheskaia semantika v rakurse epistemologii� [culturological semantics from the epistemological perspective]. izvestia an. seriia literatury i iazyka [academy of science news. literature and language series], 58 (1), pp. 3-10. garfinkle, adam 1997. politics and society in modern israel: myths and realities. new york, london: m.e. sharpe. gitelman, zvi 1997. �choosing jewish identities, constructing jewish communities.� jews of the former soviet union yesterday, today, and tomorrow, conference proceedings. new york: the american jewish committee, pp. 17-24. hannerz, ulf 1992. cultural complexity: studies in the social organization of meaning. new york: columbia university press. hodge, robert and gunther kress 1988. social semiotics. oxford: polity press. honko, lauri 1986a. �folkloristic studies on meaning. an introduction.� in bengt r. johnsson (ed.), arv scandinavian yearbook of folklore: 1984. uppsala: almqvist and wiksell, pp. 35-56. honko, lauri 1986b. �empty texts, full meanings. on transformal meaning in folklore.� in bengt r. johnsson (ed.), arv scandinavian yearbook of folklore: 1984. uppsala: almqvist and wiksell, pp. 95-126. jakobson, roman 1960. �closing statement: linguistics and poetics.� in thomas a. sebeok (ed.), style and language. cambridge, mass.: m.i.t. press, pp. 350-77. kvideland, reimund 1990. �storytelling in modern society.� in lutz rohrich and sabine wienkerpepho (eds.), storytelling in modern society. tubingen: gunter narr verlag, pp. 15-22. labov, william 1972. language in the inner city. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. labov, william and joshua waletzky 1966. �narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience.� in j. helm (ed.), essays on the verbal and visual arts. seattle: university of washington press, pp. 12-44. lemke, jay l. 1997. �cognition, context and learning: a social semiotic perspective.� in david kirshner and james a. whitson (eds.), situated cognition: social, semiotic and psychological perspectives. mahwan: lawrence erlbaum, pp. 27-55. lemon, alaina 1998. ��your eyes are green like dollars�: counterfeit cash, national substance, and currency apartheid in 1990s russia.� cultural anthropology, 13(1), pp. 22-55. lotman, iu. m. 1977. �two models of communication.� in daniel p. lucid (ed.), soviet semiotics: an anthology. baltimore, london: johns hopkins university press, pp. 99-101. martynova, victoria 2002. ��piataia grafa� otmenaietsia? nu i chto?� [has the fifth paragraph been abolished? so what?]. vesti, 06.06.2002, p. 13. mokienko, v.m. and t.g. nikitina 2001. bol�shoi slovar� russkogo zhargona. [a large dictionary of russian slang]. st petersburg: norint. nikolaeva, t. m. 2000. �rechevye, kommunikativnye i mental�nye stereotipy: sotsiolingvisticheskaia distributsia.� in m.b. eshich (ed.), iazyk kak sredstvo translatsii kul�tury [language as a means of cultural translation]. moscow: nauka, pp. 112-31. folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 22 olrik, axel 1965. �epic laws of folk narrative.� in alan dundes (ed.), the study of folklore. englewood cliffs, n.j.: prentice-hall, inc./university of california at berkeley, pp. 129-41. potebnia, alexander 1976. �lektsii po teorii slovesnosti� [lectures in the theory of philology]. in alexander potebnia, estetika i poetika.[esthetics and poetics]. moscow: iskusstvo, pp. 464-560. remennick, larissa 1998. �identity quest among russian jews of the 1990s: before and after immigration.� in ernest krausz and gitta tulea (eds.), jewish survival: the identity problem at the close of the twentieth century. new brunswick and london: transaction publishers, pp. 241-58. ries, nancy 1997. russian talk: culture and conversation during perestroika. ithaca and london: cornell university press. röhrich, lutz 1990. �joke and modern society.� in lutz röhrich and sabine wienker-piepho (eds.), storytelling in contemporary society. tübingen: günter narr verlag, pp. 127-36. rotenberg, vadim 2000. �on the self-definition of jews from the former soviet union now living in israel�. in ludmila tsigelman-dymerskaia (ed.), the jews of the soviet union in transition, 4(19). jerusalem: publications on soviet jewry, pp. 213-20. ryvkina, rozalina 1996. evrei v postsovetskoi rossii � kto oni? sotsiologicheskii analiz problem rossiiskogo evreistva. [jews in post-soviet russia: who are they? a sociological analysis of russian jewry]. moscow: izdatel�stvo urss. sarnov, benedict 2002. nash sovetskii novoiaz. malen�kaia entsiklopediia real�nogo sotsializma. [our soviet newspeak. a small encyclopedia of real socialism]. moscow: materik. saville-troike, muriel 1984. the ethnography of communication: an introduction. oxford: blackwell. scollon, ron and susan wong scollon 1995. intercultural communication: a discourse approach. oxford and cambridge, ma: blackwell. smith, howard a. 2001. psychosemiotics. new york: peter lang. vaiskopf, mikhail 2001. �krasnyi chudotvorets: lenin v evreiskoi i khristianskoi traditsiiakh� [the red miracle man: lenin in jewish and christian traditions]. in ol�ga belova (ed.), the concept of miracle in slavic and jewish cultural traditions. collection of articles, akademicheskaia seriia, 7. moscow: sefer, pp. 336-66. voigt, vilmos 1999. �semantics and meaning in folktales.� in vilmos voigt, suggestions towards a theory of folklore. budapest: mundus hungarian university press, pp. 114-21. wigoder, geoffrey et al. (ed.) 1989. the encyclopedia of judaism. jerusalem: jerusalem publishing house. zemskaia, e. a. 2001. iazyk russkogo zarubezhia: obschie protsessy i rechevye portrety [the russian language abroad: general processes and speech portraits]. moscow-vienna: iazyki slavianskoi kul�tury, weiner slawistischer almanach, sonderband 53. contributors who are used to bibliographical reference systems operating in the various countries of central and eastern europ 23 de-toxing the nation. icon worship � a sobering experience? bettina weichert school of slavonic and east european studies, university college london in june 2001 the russian tabloid newspaper, megapolis-express, reported that the country�s famous magician, iurii longo, had performed a new �miracle:� he had turned a glass of water into vodka. �why?!?,� exclaims the magician, when asked what gave him the idea. �very rarely do i meet people and believe me, i travel a lot who fail to ask me when magic is finally going to reveal the secret of turning water into vodka� [megapolis-express 2001]. longo is still in the process of perfecting his skills; meantime, people are eagerly awaiting the day. for centuries alcohol has been as much part of russian cultural history and folklore as icon worship, miracles, and sorcery. an entertaining connection to longo�s task for the future can be found in the past, when in pre-revolutionary russia �sorcerers were commonly paid in wine or vodka� [ivanits 1992:118]. in the light of this and factors such as the traditional association between traditional festivals and alcohol consumption, the orthodox church was firm in its condemnation of the sin of drunkenness, and to this day defines alcohol as the devil�s brew. the aim of this paper is to examine the processes of continuity and change in russian culture (revival and survival) with reference to one of the ways in which alcoholism is purportedly overcome in russia today, namely by veneration of a particular icon, which, it is claimed, since 1878 has been helping many russians to rid themselves of the evil that possesses them. i shall not dwell on statistics, nor discuss the problem of alcoholism as such. suffice to say that, according to a reuters� news report in may 2001, two thirds of russian men die from alcohol abuse. a three-year study conducted in moscow and udmurtiia revealed that heart disease, accidents and suicides account for nearly 75% of all male deaths, most of them alcohol induced. �men are seldom sober when they die� [http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/dailynews/russia000519 .html].(1) yet drink as a central part of the male cultural environment in russia is not a recent phenomenon. throughout history, the russian male identity, cultural and national, has been linked to alcohol consumption. drinking seems always to have comprised an essential part of men�s culture, and often acts as an assertion of their identity. thus, the heroes (bogatyry) of the folk epic byliny embody men with a prodigious capacity for alcohol. alcohol has also always occupied a central role in male bonding ceremonies; it has afforded men the necessary moral and physical boost in warfare and is invariably part of the consolidation process of patron-client relationships, as a rule a very male environment.(2) it was not untypical in russia for favors to be performed and help offered quickly, if alcohol was offered as a reward. thus dostoevskii recounts in his diary of a writer (dnevnik pisatelia) the story of a fire wreaking havoc in a village. as the flames threatened to destroy the church, the villagers hurried to its rescue. however, their attention was soon directed away from the house of god to the local inn: the innkeeper had appeared on the scene to plead with the volunteers that, if they saved his pot-house instead of the church, �he folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/dailynews/russia000519 .html http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/dailynews/russia000519 .html 24 would give them a barrel of liquor. the church burned down, but the pot-house was saved� [dostoevskii 187381:187]. there are numerous tales and fabulates based round vodka: for example, recounting how the devil was the first to set up a distillery, how he taught the peasant to make spirits and how as a result of demonic assistance, the peasant opened a tavern and got rich [ivanits 1992:42]. thus, dostoevskii�s diary entry, in effect, describes a double-victory for the devil: the church burnt down after being ignored in favour of the pot-house, or rather the liquid he allegedly invented, which provided the raison d�etre for the establishment of taverns in the first place. the consumption of alcohol, however, by no means excluded the priesthood. male members of the peasant mir regarded the invitation of the village priest as central, especially on the occasion of major holy days, particularly easter. the priest was to make the rounds and join every villager for food and, more importantly, drink (by definition alcoholic). a peasant would take mortal offence if a cleric rejected his hospitality. rejection was rare, however, as invariably the priest�s livelihood would depend on his participation in such rituals. that said, the poverty-stricken village priest as, for example, described by donald w. treadgold, was often �notorious for drunkenness and loose living� in any case [treadgold 1968:100-01]. during the soviet period, at least in the city, alcohol consumption especially abuse of and addiction to alcohol, joined criminality, prostitution and suicide as one of four behavioral patterns regarded as deviant. yet while alcoholism was perceived as a negative characteristic of general human values, alcohol commonly played, and continues to play, a part in the rites and rituals of everyday life, whether secular (e.g. birthdays, a new job or remembrance days) or religious (e.g. communion or the end of a fast). up until the 1980s, soviet historians regularly attributed the above-mentioned �anomalies� to the survival of capitalism in people�s consciousness [lebina 1999:19-20]. equally, it could be argued that in post-soviet russia, too, capitalism might be blamed for the continuing existence of criminality, prostitution, alcoholism and suicide. in the case of the first three they are mainly forms of survival, in the case of the latter often an act of desperation at the inability to find a way in which to survive. yet alcohol has also always been a marker of (russian) national identity, and the soviet authorities had also to contend with a deep rooted cultural attachment to drink, reflected in sources as early as the tale of bygone years (povest� vremennykh let), s. a. 986, a written account of an oral legend, telling how vladimir i rejected the muslim religion because it would not allow the rus� to drink: �drinking is the joy of the russes. we cannot exist without that pleasure� [cross, sherbowitz-westor 1973:97].(3) the veneration of the icon in question here, the �mother of god the never-draining cup,� commenced in 1878, when a peasant and retired soldier of the tula region, who had fallen victim to the bottle, was drinking himself into poverty (losing his entire pension to the devilish liquid) and physical ruin (his legs had become paralysed). one night he dreamt of a monk, who told him to go to the monastery of our lady in serpukhov, for there was the icon of the �mother of god the never-draining cup� (неупиваемая чаша). it was before this icon that the monk asked him to pray in order to regain his physical and mental health. the retired soldier, however, preferred to carry on drinking than crawl all the way to venerate the icon. in classic folk narrative manner, the dream repeated itself a second and third time, until the monk, now issuing stern commands, put the fear of god into him sufficiently for him to decide to make his way to the monastery, though he had to travel on 25 all fours. as he approached his destination he began to feel better, and even managed to walk the last part of his journey, supported by a walking stick. upon arrival at the monastery, he told the monks of his visions and asked to see the icon of the �never-draining cup.� no one had heard of such an icon, until someone wondered whether it was not the image hanging in the stairwell between the church and the vestry. and, indeed, that is where the icon was found. it was taken into the church, prayers were said and the retired soldier healed. word spread fast, so that soon people from all over russia were making their way to the miracle-working icon to pray, be it for themselves, their fathers, husbands or sons.(4) during the soviet period the monastery was closed and the church housing the miracle-working icon demolished. only one church in the whole province remained open. it was to this place that the �never-draining cup� was moved, but pilgrims were few and far between until the 1980s, when their number began to rise steadily. the monastery in serpukhov was re-opened in 1990, and ever since has been inundated with streams of people, eager to express their desperation before the mother of mothers, in the hope of intercession and a miraculous cure. it is of interest that a large percentage of miracle-working icons in russia are images of the mother of god. indeed, fedotov, in his description and analysis of the dukhovnye stikhi (spiritual verses), asserts that �all of humanity�s anguish, all tenderness before divinity, which people dare not express before christ for fear of god, they will pour out freely and lovingly to the mother of god� [fedotov 1991:49].(5) one may thus choose to argue the case of the psychoanalyst, who would relay to us the concept of the �inner mother,� a residue of early mother-child interaction, which according to one commentator exists �within the normal adult psyche of the orthodox venerator of the mother of god� [rancour-lafferriere 2001:11]. the helpless and despairing child turns to the mother, in this case the mother of god, asking for assistance and willingly letting him or herself be helped. whatever the reason, religious legends, popular miracle accounts and, in particular, the hugely popular dream of the mother of god (son bogoroditsy) and pilgrimage of the mother of god among the torments (khozhdenie borogroditsy po mukam) all testify to her importance as caring intercessor for those in need. vera shevzov notes that veneration of miracle-working icons has often �crossed both gender and socioeconomic lines� [shevzov 1999:27]. what we see here, however, especially in terms of gender, is that worship the icon of the mother of god the neverdraining cup folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 26 is perhaps better described as gender focussed than crossing the line. thus, although the person through whom the icon in question was �discovered� was a man, it is safe to say that a large number of those making their journey to the monastery in serpukhov are women. while the accompanying video, produced by the russian orthodox church, depicts street life in russia in which the �alcoholics� shown are all men, the majority of worshippers at the monastery�s church are women: women, who pray for their sons, brothers, husbands and fathers. this also finds confirmation in church-published literature on the matter, which shows that the majority of the stories of salvation (often of husbands and sons) are told by women. furthermore, some writing is even explicitly aimed at women attempting to save their loved ones. a leaflet about alcoholism obtained at the monastery reads: �what are we to do if the alcoholic won�t pray? in this case it is necessary for others to pray for him: his mother, wife or children� [�o p'ianstve� 2000]. equally, a booklet entitled how to help those suffering from alcoholism and drug addiction is subtitled spiritual advice and prayers for mothers, wives and children. accounts of people being cured of the evils of alcoholism through prayer before the �never-draining cup� are widely available, be they in the form of little booklets, video or cd rom, all on sale at the monastery, as well as at the numerous church stalls on russia�s streets and in churches. talking about �revelatory� experiences has always been important in the history of the orthodox church and its icons, and consequently, therefore, among its flock. miracles were never regarded as private affairs, but as something of direct relevance to believers generally. however, while in the past it was believed that the �concealment of something sacred lays a mortal sin on the soul� [shevzov 1999:30], i suspect that today�s appeal by the priests to people to recount their stories may also have something to do with providing the church with useful material for advertising its services. naturally, the church is interested in saving as many souls as possible. but at a time when the russian orthodox church is still rebuilding itself and has many competitors, whether other confessions, sects or mere faith-healers, hope and help that can be provided through the testimony of ordinary believers about miracle-working icons can offer valuable assistance in the struggle for souls. that said, miracle-working icons are deeply rooted in both official and popular orthodoxy, orthodox theological, liturgical and devotional heritage. and, as in the past, people today are being woven into the narrative that makes an icon special. their individual sins, in this case alcoholism, bring them together. thus what the icon might �do� for the individual could somehow be linked to the fate of the russian people as a whole. the nation becomes an imagined community, alcoholism the common denominator: individual tragedies suffered by many. and while the rituals of daily life see many united by, for want of a better word, the �common enemy� (the demon drink) the miracle-working icon sees them united in the face of it (the mother of god). small copies of the icon, as we are told by one of the monks on the video about the monastery and its miracle-working icon, have become features in most households, since almost every family contains at least one member who drinks [neupivaemaia chasha 1998]. as already mentioned above, large numbers of russians are killed or their health and lives seriously harmed by what is, paradoxically, the nation�s favourite pastime. indeed, alcoholism has become a major 27 contributor to the country�s demographic crisis [moscow times, 01/22/2001:8].(10) eternal torment in the afterlife, something that has permeated popular orthodoxy, past and present, and is reflected both in folk religious legends (legendy),(11) as well as the literature disseminated by the church today, does not appear, however, to act as a deterrent, let alone help root out the problem. what we observe in contemporary russia is that, while alcoholism is widespread and the admission of �being orthodox� an even commoner feature of life, churches are still largely empty. how then can we explain the long queues in front of miracle-working icons and shrines? as already mentioned, life after communism brought with itself many uncertainties and lack of guidance. this, coupled with the revival of old traditions such as the veneration of miracle-working icons, explains well enough the increasingly large numbers of pilgrims and miracle-seekers. one gets the sense that the majority of those in the queues, however, have little knowledge of orthodox theology and liturgy, and give the impression of an occult-consuming mass, awaiting miracles as if by magic [see also liubomudrov 2000:45]. in this they are conforming to the popular tradition of folk healing via magic charms (zagovory), which in many instances were given a prayer-like format and also appealed to the mother of god (see below). what the church might like to see, namely the conversion or return to orthodoxy of the russian people, uniting them into a body of the faithful, can so far be observed only on a very superficial level. often the veneration of an icon or shrine takes on the characteristics of a mass cult: people flocking to church in the hope of a miracle, and not, as would be expected of orthodox christians, for a blessing and the forgiveness of sins. indeed, this mass appeal of miracles is not only rooted in russia�s traditions but has been described to me as �orthodox magic� (pravoslavnyi magizm), denoting the way in which contemporary orthodoxy is approached and �consumed� by the majority of russians today.(8) the church at the monastery, housing the image of the �never-draining cup,� is busy all year round, especially on sundays, and almost inaccessible thanks to the many hundreds, if not thousands, of pilgrims on 18th may, the icon�s feast-day. many of those healed, having received hope and the possibility of a new start, in gratitude leave behind pieces of jewellery, some of which are displayed in front of the icon.(9) father kirill, the superior at the monastery, told me that they have already received so much jewellery that �you wouldn�t be able to see the icon if we hung it all in front of it. we could fill whole corridors with all those golden gifts.� he refrained, however, from commenting on what happens to the trinkets, if they are not gracing the icon, nor, indeed, the monastery�s corridors. here, as at so many other moments in contemporary orthodox practice, we are witnessing a new and evolving popular religious tradition. the pragmatism that underlines past and present popular orthodoxy is strongly linked to the survival of traditional rituals and the customary belief in miracles (and more specifically, the solution to problems resulting from them). the more theoretical, canonical aspects of orthodoxy do not attract many ordinary people in russia today [cf. fedotov 1991:92]. an altogether different mass-cultural aspect of miracles is that they make for very attractive features in newspapers. it should be no surprise that the tabloids are quick to report on �intriguing� miraculous events. thus the �never-draining cup� found its way into the papers in march 2001, for example, when we read in the newspaper chas pik (rush hour) that an alcoholic prayed before a copy of the icon (at home) and coughed up a folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 28 little devil (mixed in with his usual portion of phlegm). the creature measured about two centimetres, and resembled a slimy grey worm with two small horns attached to a minuscule head. events unfurled as follows: the alcoholic�s wife put the creature into a bottle containing home-made wine (!), and then his mother, who had brought back a copy of the icon of the �never-draining cup� from her previous visit to serpukhov, decided to take the creature in the bottle to the monks. the bottle remained at the monastery, as a result of which many of the monks fell ill and became depressed. time passed, and the alcohol evaporated. and so, after a while, now that the wine in the bottle had vanished, the monks decided to pour vodka into it (no reason for this is given in the article), but the smell from the bottle was so gross that they opted for a scientific approach. the scientist consulted, however, had never come across anything like it, while those within the department of military mutation claimed that the worm was just a simple parasite. not satisfied with this statement, the scientist they had approached initially decided to take on the case himself, but fell ill and died. his colleague, continuing his work after his untimely demise, also fell ill. the monks agreed to take back the bottle and burn the devilish creature. the drunk has not touched alcohol since, and has become a very pious man [�p�ianitsa pomolilsia� 2001].(10) the old russian proverb �to drink wine is to put oneself in the hands of the devil� (vina napit�sia � besu predat�sia) [vlasova 1998:41] serves as a poignant accompaniment to the story, for not only would it prove its point literally, but it would equally support the church�s argument that alcohol is a �devilish liquid.� three things are noteworthy: the structure of the narrative, for one, suggests an oral legend (legenda), recorded by the journalist. it ought to be borne in mind, however, that the article was published in a secular tabloid typical of post-soviet russia. yet the fact that such papers report instances of this kind at all appears to reflect not merely the obvious sensationalist stance that papers of this kind adopt on the supernatural, but also the conviction that such stories will appeal to the readership because of their miraculous subject and �unbelievable� outcome. besides, the contents refer to the longstanding russian orthodox preoccupation, at both official and popular level, with the devil and with exorcism [ivanits 1989:38-50, 84 ff.]. slightly incongruous, however, is the �scientific approach� taken by the monks, undone only by their decision in the end to take the bottled creature back to the monastery and burn it. second, and convenient for the church, is the implication of the clear inadequacy of modern science to deal with the supernatural, which, it is suggested, obviously exists, but no laboratory is able to solve the puzzle behind it. the third aspect of the story worth mentioning refers back to the gender focus; the alcoholic here has three female characters at hand to help: the mother of god, his wife and his mother. the concluding sentence of the leader in moskovskii komsomolets of 18 june 2001 on alcoholism in serpukhov and the icon of the �never-draining cup� appears to underline the mass or everyday, rather than the religious, aspect of the veneration of the icon. here we read, that �just as in his time the smith vakula went to the empress to ask for a pair of boots for his oksana, today people from all over great russia are drawn to the miracle-working icon [�sviatykh � zanosi!� 2001]. it is curious to see the cure of a debilitating disease (if alcoholism, at least by those affected by it, is in any way recognised as such) set on a par with the magic receipt of a pair of boots, as described in gogol��s story �christmas eve� (noch� pered rozhdestvom). what this 29 sentence underlines, however, is the general perception that people flock to the icon in order to receive something (healing), for a miracle. gogol��s story is frankly about magic, while miracle-working icons, at least in the eyes of the church, are not. yet, for the majority of those who flock to venerate the icon, the magic aspect so characteristic of popular orthodoxy prevails. besides, this article was published in the second most popular russian daily (tabloid), and thus will have reached a wide readership. vakula�s gift to oksana will not only be known to many of its members, but in addition to equating religious miracles with magic, creates an air of familiarity, which perhaps facilitates identification with and understanding of the miraculous at work here. it is to be assumed that the report is written in all seriousness. far be it from me to believe that the author wrote this with tongue in cheek. if they did, however, it is still likely that a reasonably large number of readers would not have noticed, while those who were sceptical would laugh at the story in any case.(11) not only the subject of newspaper articles, the icon itself is also used in the advertisements of faithhealers proclaiming to rid people of the evils of alcoholism. those offering their services, invariably women going by the title of �orthodox healer� or �orthodox woman� (pravoslavnaia istselitel�nitsa/ baba), are usually depicted next to the text listing their abilities and boasting about their rate of success, dressed in orthodox fashion, a head-scarf covering their head, and holding candle and cross, while the icon of the never-draining cup stands on a table in front of them. they thus uphold a long-standing custom of their trade, for historically magic healers in russia would, �along with herbs and grasses [make] use of the cross, holy water, incense, and church candles� [ivanits 1992:114]. the accompanying charm was called �prayer,� and quite frequently was directed at the mother of god [ivanits 1992:115]. while alcoholics are reported to have been �cured� by people ordering prayers on their behalf at the monastery, the tradition of healing by magic, if advertising is anything to go by, continues to this day; and the advancement of technology has allowed contemporary faith-healers to offer healing without the subject being present by magical prayers performed over their photographs. needless to say, the church disapproves of these �magicians, psychics, psychotherapists or faith-healers (many of whom are charlatans),� who in fact are servants of the devil. this �being possessed by evil devilish spirit,� just like mere medical (i.e. physical) treatment of alcoholism, according to the church, means that the sufferer remains a slave to his addiction, his soul far from free and his spirit far from pure. such spiritual purity and independence can only be achieved through a belief in god and a life with him [akafist 2000:20]. can it then be argued that the church is de-toxing the nation with the support of the miracle-working icon? the popularity of the veneration of the icon of the mother of god the never-draining cup and the widespread belief in, and accounts of the icon�s healing powers reflects a tradition revived, continued and evolving. official and popular orthodoxy meet here and provide the context within which two key moments in contemporary russia are played out: the struggle with, and desperate search for a solution to the problem of alcoholism and the problem of reviving the country�s traditional religion. orthodoxy is struggling in a competitive role in the post-soviet spiritual marketplace, symbolized by the cult revolving around the icon. the few statistics mentioned above testify to the seriousness of russia�s drink problem. this goes hand in hand with the central role alcohol consumption has played in russia�s history, a habit that, like the seemingly magic folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 30 subtext of icon-worship, appears embedded in the russians� sense of identity and understanding of their culture. it appears that the solution to the problem of alcoholism is not just purveyed by the church, but also by its socalled �heretic rivals,� such as faith healers, equally part of russian tradition. while the church agrees that the medical profession has some stake in the matter, they nonetheless believe that alcoholism is a spiritual illness, and curing your body but not your soul will have you falling for the bottle over and over again [neupivaemaia chasha 1998]. for some icon worship has undoubtedly been a sobering experience. however, to conquer the problem of alcoholism on a national scale with the help of the never-draining cup, must surely be wishful thinking. the church may deem the never-draining cup a tool for curing the nation, yet the world health organization regards alcoholism as a national disease, one in need of medical attention from the point of view of the medical profession. alcoholism and icon-worship are not merely intrinsic parts of russian culture, but, in present-day russia, a society whose life is dominated by uncertainty and lack of guidance, both are inevitable signs of the times. and both, in their own ways, may thus be interpreted as comfort-inducing mechanisms to help cope with the hardship of everyday life. while drinking may not be followed by a sobering experience, icon worship, if not sobering, is at least a traditional comforting experience, a means of taking control of one�s life by way of handing it over into the hands of god, or at least those of his mother. notes 1 this report, incidentally, was lifted straight onto the angelfire web-page, where it was presented as evangelising christians out to rescue the russian people from their spiritual decline [www.angelfire.com/oh2/raicc/]. 2 a fitting, and perhaps somewhat ironic, example here is the head of sofrino, russia�s most prolific producer of religious artefacts and churchware, who, i was told, has his own brand of vodka: the bottles are labelled with his portrait, to be seen and devoured only by his most esteemed clients. 3 this also underlines the post-soviet equation of �being orthodox� with �being russian,� in which drink is a historic feature of national character and reason for choosing orthodoxy over islam on the grounds of the latter�s prohibition against drinking: �liking a drink is part of being russian, which in turn is part of being orthodox.� 4 this is the story as it is related in all the pamphlets about the icon, as well as on the accompanying video [neupivaemaia chasha 1998] and cd rom [vysotskii obitel� 2000]. 5 translation my own. 6 an editorial article. according to another article in the february/march issue of novaia gazeta in 2001, during the mid-nineties russia lost up to 43,000 of its citizens to fake vodka. it asks by how much this number would have to be multiplied in order to reach the real total of alcohol-related www.angelfire.com/oh2/raicc/ 31 deaths. by the end of the nineties, when �honest� alcohol production had climbed its way up to 54.6% of the market, the number of those dying of drink had declined, only to rise again. consequently, in 2001, for example, it eliminated a number equivalent to the inhabitants of an average town. 7 as, for example, in the well-known folk legend about the drunkard condemned to act as the devil�s dray-horse in hell. 8 interview with fr. georgii (chistiakov), moscow, 2001. 9 my guess, though i have not been able to confirm this, is that most of the jewellery comprises gifts given by grateful women, i.e. those thankful that their prayers have been heard. 10 less sensational, yet somewhat similar in content, is the account of one woman on the video [neupivaemaia chasha 1998]. not only are we told about her success in overcoming her drinking problem, but are also enlightened about the way in which she came to give up smoking. one day she went to church � her happiness about her newly found trust in god made her want to sing along with the choir. but all she managed to produce was a very coarse sound, before she began to cough. and out she spat a little black worm, the creature evidently representing the last remaining devil residing within her, the one that had tempted her to smoke. she has not touched a cigarette since. 11 this newspaper is, however, less likely to be read by well-educated sections of the population. bibliography akafist presviatei bogoroditse radi chudotvornoi eia ikony �neupivaemaia chasha� [acathistos to the most holy mother of god for her miracle-working icon �the never-draining cup�] 2000. booklet to vysotskii obitel�. istoricheskaia entsiklopediia [vysotskii monastery�. an historical encyclopedia]. cd rom. serpukhov: vysotskii monastery cross, samuel hazzard and olgerd. p. sherbowitz-wetzor 1953. the russian primary chronicle. laurentian text. cambridge, mass.: medieval academy of america dostoevskii, f. m. 1873-81. diary of a writer, trans. b. brasol. new york: g. braziller. fedotov, g. 1991. stikhi dukhovnye (russkaia narodnaia vera po dukhovnym stikham) [spiritual verses (russian folk belief according to the spiritual verses)]. moscow: gnosis. ivanits, l. j. 1989. russian folk belief. armonk, ny, london: m. e. sharpe. lebina, n. b. 1999. povsednevnaia zhizn� sovetskogo goroda: normy i anomalii. 1920/1930 gody [the everyday life of a soviet town: norms and anomalies. the 1920s and 1930s]. st petersburg: letnii sad. liubomudrov, a.m. 2000. �chudotvorenie ot ikon v sovremennoi rossii� [miracles from icons in contemporary russia]. in t. a. voronina and k. v. tsekhanskaia, (eds.), pravoslavie i kul�tura etnosa [orthodoxy and the culture of ethos]. moscow: staryi sad. folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 32 megapolis-express 2001. no. 23, june, p. 5. neupivaemaia chasha. vysotskii muzhskoi monastyr� 1998, video film. serpukhov: vysotskii monastery. �o p'ianstve�[on drunkenness] 2000 sviatogorskii listok, n.pl: no publisher. �p�ianitsa pomolilsia i� izrygnul besa� [the drunkard prayed � and vomited forth a devil] 2000. chas pik [rush hour]. no.12, 14 march, p. 13. rancour-laferriere, d. 2001. �russian nationalism and orthodox religious icons: a continuing partnership� (paper presented at the sixth annual world convention of the association for the study of nationalities, new york, 7 april 2001). shevzov, v. 1999. �miracle-working icons, laity and authority in the russian orthodox church, 1861-1917.� russian review. vol. 58 (1), pp. 26-48. �sviatykh � zanosi!� 2001. moskovskii komsomolets, 18 june, p. 3. treadgold, d. w. 1968. �the peasant and religion.� in wayne s. vucinich (ed.), the peasant in nineteenth-century russia. stanford: stanford university press. vysotskii monastery, serpukhov and iu. v. and m. iu. solomatin 2000. vysotskii obitel�. istoricheskaia entsiklopediia [vysotskii monastery�. an historical encyclopedia]. cd rom. serpukhov: vysotskii monastery. vlasova, m. 1998. russkie sueveriia. entsiklopedicheskii slovar� [russian superstitions. encyclopedic dictionary]. st. petersburg: azbuka. �vodka, not beer, is the real issue.� moscow times, 12 june 2001, p. 8. web-pages: www.abcnews.go.com/sections/world/dailynews/russia000519.html www.angelfire.com/oh2/raicc/ www.abcnews.go.com/sections/world/dailynews/russia000519.html www.angelfire.com/oh2/raicc/ microsoft word seefaf01c.doc 5 oral and traditional culture in the former soviet union today t h e o l d b e l i e v e r s: o r i g i n s a n d s u r v i v a l (1) a r t i c l e s the old believers: the survival of a religious and cultural heritage richard a. morris. russian and east european studies center, university of oregon, eugene. historical accounts have well described the russian orthodox church reforms of the seventeenth century and the consequential opposition of large sectors of the russian orthodox population. those adhering to the old rite and refusing to acknowledge the tsarist-mandated church reforms became known as old believers or old ritualists. often, persecution followed. old believers, independently intent on preserving the old rite, sought refuge in remote and isolated areas. old ritualism, however, is not a cohesive movement. groups and communities often exist out of contact with one another. some groups, called the priestless (bezpopovtsy) declared that the priesthood had been lost forever. others lost their priests through attrition (those priestless known as chapel-goers (chasovennye)). without priests in isolated communities, doctrine was subject to modification according to the understanding of the elders and the charisma of the particular leader. therefore, within the overall world of old ritualism, there arose a number of ‘agreements’ or concords (tolk, tolkovanie or soglasie). known communities with doctrinal differences between them often considered each other ‘out of union,’ and required acts of ritual cleanliness to be able to re-enter and participate with the other. seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 6 some communities, known as beglopopovtsy, accepted ‘run-away’ priests from the reformed church. (2) this priestly hierarchy, now with bishops, exists to the present day, although many other old believers do not recognize them. and in the 1840’s, old believer leaders from the large community in austria-hungary petitioned to establish a priesthood hierarchy through a bishop of the syrian rite, essentially similar to the russian old rite. while many joined the so-called belokrinitskii agreement or concord, other ‘agreements’ refused to accept it. (3) generally, a majority of old believers were without priests and sought isolated settlements where they could preserve their religion and practice their faith as best they understood it. nevertheless, old believers, when discovered, were subject to various levels of restrictions, taxes and/or persecution. this adverse treatment by the state authorities increased significantly in the soviet period during official anti-religious drives, which were only relaxed during the period of the second world war for the official patriarchal orthodox church. it should be pointed out that the latter, often referred to as the ‘dominant’ church, soon after the reforms of the midseventeenth century objected to the presence of another orthodox church which did not accept the reforms, choosing to remain a separate entity. until the 1970’s, the ‘dominant’ church maintained an anathema on the conduct of services by the old rite. later, the soviet-dedicated drive to abolish religion intensified the persecution and obstacles put in the way of the old believers and the patriarchal orthodox church alike. yet, the basic question remains: “why does old believerism still exist?” in partial answer to this question, i suggest several obvious factors that have had a favorable influence on the preservation of elements of old believerism. among them are: inconspicuous observance of the old rite old believers, well schooled in the art of inconspicuous existence during tsarist times, have reported how they resorted to a number of measures, designed to allow them to continue their way of life in accordance with the old rite. the most radical measures involved moving to remote and pristine areas to build a village and conduct self-sufficient endeavors in agriculture, raising animals, hunting, fishing, and collecting the god-given fruits of the earth (honey, berries, grains, mushrooms, etc.). those unable to achieve isolation sought to bring their icons and books out of hiding for clandestine services. men would carefully roll and stow their prayer robes under their jackets to walk unnoticed to secret services. in the more obvious areas, as for example, the 7 cathedral of rogozhskoe cemetery (kladbishche) in moscow, men and women would risk open attendance only after retiring on pension. nonetheless, the services continued. in the case of rogozhskoe kladbishche, the parishioners conducted continuous prayers in the cathedral when they heard that the authorities were ready to confiscate the building “as soon as the service was over.” miraculously, the authorities abandoned the effort after several months. the efforts of soviet and russian scholars another factor in the preservation of the old rite was the attentive work of interested scholars, who persevered in recording among its living representatives and studying its ancient literature to discover the meaning and ways of old believers in centuries past to the present day. while not emphasizing the religious aspects of what they studied, these scholars penetrated deep into the traditional way of life of various ethnic peoples, especially the russians themselves. the traditional ways of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they studied were referred to, typically in the first and last paragraphs of a published treatise, as the “remnants of previous stages of existence” in conformity with marxist evolutionary views. nonetheless, this research did document an inter-related way of life with its intrinsic calendar of religious rituals and natural seasons in rural russia. titles of scholarly works had to be coded in soviet times to read as studies of traditions in the previous centuries ‘up until the beginning of the twentieth century.’ specialists from the institute of religion and atheism also conducted expeditions to collect information, although their purpose was, by contrast, to dispense information about newly developed soviet rituals and to dissuade people from their allegiance to religious ritual. it was said of one particular specialist that any village he visited would be “ruined for further field work for at least ten years thereafter,” that is to say, the villagers would not cooperate with other outside field workers. nevertheless, soviet scholars for the most part can be reassured that the attention they gave to detailing traditional ways and deep meanings among the old believers certainly provided a conscious opportunity to remember, recognize, review and re-commit to the ways of old. the recordings, publications and collections made by field workers provided a continuity of conscious reinforcement of beliefs and ways. seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 8 indeed, the work of soviet scholars and their students, visiting numerous remote villages each year, and establishing a favorable rapport with the “old inhabitants” (starozhily), surely had a beneficial influence on these clandestine believers. regular conferences in the soviet union during an extended period, religious words and expressions were excluded from works published in the soviet union. nonetheless, a considerable amount of expeditionary work was devoted to the old believers, but presented in publications under the heading of different topics. scholars of various regions regularly met at conferences to deliver papers and exchange views on topics that often used source material gained in contact with old believers, while not alluding to them as old believers. however, within the field, this material was appreciated for its genuine value as a reflection of the traditional old believer cultural way of life. communities of old believers outside russia another factor favoring preservation was contributed by the families who emigrated, legally and illegally, to areas outside russia beyond the reach of the russian authorities. initially, whole communities sprang up in poland, rumania and turkey. in all but the last, turkey, old believer communities continue to exist to this day. later, after the communist revolution of 1917, communities that had fled and settled in siberia and the far east “escaped” to china. here they built typical traditional villages: a main village road with houses on both sides, and a prayer hall near the middle.(4) however, the principal communities in china, in harbin and sinkiang provinces, found it difficult to preserve their religious rite after the chinese communist revolution of 1949. they were also threatened by official representatives of the soviet union, intent on coaxing or coercing the members of the old believer communities back into the soviet union. following the intervention of the world council of churches, the old believers once again moved, making their way to hong kong. here they made arrangements to travel to and settle in australia and south america (mainly brazil). within four years, many of these had immigrated to the us, settling chiefly in oregon and alaska, with some moving on into canada. these communities have preserved many of the traits of their seventeenth-century ethic, while selectively incorporating twentieth-century economic and political standards. 9 for the most part, communities outside of russia have maintained their traditional ways. they, therefore, present empirical models of open practice of the old rite. their importance and significance is obvious, once contact with old believers in russia became possible.(5) the communities outside of russia, roughly in the order of settlement, are as follows: romania (then the austrian-hungarian empire); turkey; poland (then partially russia); china; mongolia; usa (erie, pa); australia; south america (brazil, argentina, bolivia and uruguay); usa (oregon and alaska); canada. the lifting of restrictions in the soviet union the advent of ‘glasnost’ in 1985-7 was followed by the lifting of restrictions against foreign contacts and against religious expression. the government instituted a program to return church property to the patriarchal orthodox and the old believer churches respectively. this authorized access to religious services. moreover, the removal of restrictions on travel allowed western specialists to participate in expeditions and western old believers to visit their relatives. the interchange served as a healthy inspiration and re-vitalization for many. international conferences and symposia on a more rarefied level, foreign scholars have made their contribution at international conferences where they reported on their research. since 1985 a whole series of international conferences with russian and eastern and western scholars have been held in places as diverse as washington dc, heidelberg, zagreb, novosibirsk, ciechanowiec (poland), tulchea (romania), northfield, minnesota, imatra (finland), erie, pennsylvania and moscow (two). collections of papers for several of the conferences have subsequently been published. conclusion this paper must be considered incomplete, as indeed is the documentation of the rich history, folklore, experience and literature of old ritualism that continues in the present day. there is more. but thanks to the devotion and conviction of the old believers; to the interest, perseverance and erudition of scholars from both east and west; to the occasional understanding and sympathy of government authorities; to the significance of the issue in academic studies of the culture and religion of traditional communities; and to other genuinely interested parties; seefa journal 2001, vol. vi no. 2 10 russian old ritualism is now a topic of considerable importance as the following contributions show. notes 1 this article was originally given as a contextual paper for the conference on “old believers in traditional russian culture”, erie, pennsylvania, october 15-18, 1998 under the title “the issue of old believers as a growing topic of world literature.” 2 centers in russia are in novozipkova, briansk oblast’ and in northern perm’ oblast’. 3 the founding location was in bela krinitsa on the border of romania and ukraine. the agreement is now located with its metropolitan in braila, romania. 4 since these chasovennye old believers had no priests of their own, the prayer hall could not receive a blessing on elevation to the status of a church, with altar and relics. 5 it would be interesting to consider the relative merits of domestic and foreign old believer communities in terms of their “standard and authentic” preservation of old believer ways. microsoft word folk2006[3] sheryl format3.doc 16 coexistence or conflict? the problem of dual belief in polish folklore anna brzozowska-krajka m. curie-skłodowska university, lublin in her work on the evolution of slavic religion and mythology and in drawing up a stratigraphy, marija gimbutas was able to show that it was arranged on the following three levels: “1) old european, rooted in a local neolithic culture; 2) indo-european, derived from the pastoral, patriarchal culture of the eurasian steppes; and 3) christian, in which pagan prototypes fused with christian figures, producing a ‘double faith.’ (christianity was introduced into moravia in 863, bulgaria in 885, poland in 966, and russia in 988)” [gimbutas 1987: 354]. thus the category of dual belief constitutes the third and final stage in the formation of slavic religion, and as such is one of the invariant features of a pan-slavic folk world view. we may find the effects of the confrontation between these two religious systems in various forms and genres of polish folklore, especially magical folklore (such as charms/spells/incantations, private prayers of a magico-religious kind or complex magic acts). magical folklore is undoubtedly the deepest layer and the oldest factor in shaping a way of life, one human being’s relationship with another, with his or her community and with nature [hernas 1976: 7]. in the broadest sense dual belief mean the intertwining, mutual influence, cooperation, and sometimes the combination (syncretism) of two different cultural models: paganism (pre-christianity) and christianity [see tolstaia 1995: 38; cf. also levin 1991: 31-52]. in contrast to east slavic christianity, which was subject to byzantine influence, the nature of dual belief as it applies specifically to poland is determined by western christianity (roman catholicism) and the catholic church’s long struggle with pagan beliefs and practices. permanent traces may be found in the high degree of christianization characteristic of polish folklore and in its shift from a magic-based world view, specific to the period before the coming of christianity, to a magico-religious world view, relics of which persist even today. dual belief is thus “a double game” – a double consciousness which may be detected in most magical practices, for example those of ritual folklore, such as that relating to funerals or weddings. joanna tokarska-bakir considers the nature of this duality in a hermeneutic reading of polish ethnographic sources from the perspective of religious folkways folklorica 2006, vol. xi coexistence or conflict? 17 [tokarska-bakir 2000]. duality, she suggests, is “changing one’s loyalty” to a god or gods for a loyalty subordinated to what is more actual. it is the sacrum [eliade 1997: 5 ff], the sacred, that is the domain of what is real. however, the reality of the sacrum is also a matter of degree; the old gods do not cease to be real with the coming of a new religion, whose holy sites replicate an already existing sacred geography. the old sacrum is transformed into its countersign, but at the same time it continues to conceal power in itself, surviving as a hidden force within that countersign [freedberg 1989, passim, cited in tokarska-bakir 2000: 83-84]. i would like to portray this relationship between the slavic (that is, pre-christian) and the christian sacrum from four perspectives: the historical, generic, structural-symbolic and functional. obviously this is just a preliminary discussion, suggesting the direction that future research into the problem of whether dual belief is a question of coexistence or conflict might take. this topic is still terra incognita in polish folklore studies. it should be emphasized that polish folklorists, in contrast to russian, ukrainian, belarusian, bulgarian and others, face a difficult task in researching the magical aspects of folklore because sources are so scanty. there are various reasons for this situation, in particular the religious intolerance of folklore collectors in the nineteenth century and beyond, for whom the basis for recording local materials was their degree of proximity to the recognized religious canon or moral canon (the latter concerns collections of obscene material). noncanonical prayers, charms, as well as obscene texts (all texts that “scandalized the people and the holy catholic faith”) were regarded as “heresies spread by the calvinists,” since those who disagreed with official catholic dogma and practices, even in trifles, were generally known as “calvinists” or “lutherans.” by contrast, the actual peasants were very tolerant in this respect, and would declare: “let everyone pray as he wishes, the lord god will understand” [kotula 1976: 464]. in making this declaration they were in effect demanding the complete freedom to decide what went into their ritual dialogues with god (transcendence) and what form these ritual dialogues should take. the magical nature of such texts, belonging to the category of socalled secret texts and termed kryjaki by czernik [czernik 1971: 72], was another reason for the meager amount of data in polish folklore. disclosing them meant the loss of their magic power. jan witowt, who studied these problems, noted that “the peasants keep their conjuring strictly secret, maintaining that ‘they would lose all their medicinal folklorica 2006, vol. xi 18 power through idle chatter and lack of belief’ in their efficacy” [witowt 1905: 558]. as late as 1967 in the region of rzeszów (south-eastern poland) there was an incident in which an elderly informant was asked about the transmission of non-canonical prayers, specifically the socalled mikołajki (addressed to st. nicholas), and categorically refused, convinced that he owed his health and strength to a private prayer he had said since childhood. if revealed during his lifetime it would lose its power, and his death would surely follow. as a guarantee of long life, it could only be passed on when he was on his deathbed, and then only to his family [kotula 1976: 208-09]. other observations about the texts of spells, which could not be passed on or revealed in any way, are along the same lines. there were sanctions connected to the ban. if the ban was violated, the verbal spell not only became invalid, but was transformed into a harmful force, and both disclosure and hearing it could have negative consequences [czernik 1971: 51]. thus it was not only observers who were conscious of the inherent “otherness” of these texts, but peasants too were aware of their non-canonical nature, and knew that the catholic church condemned them as sinful, even though they themselves might still go on using them. for christian philosophy offered a qualitatively different concept of the world, god and people, another way of making mutual contacts and connections, as well as the fact that christianity differed from the prechristian image of the world from the point of view of the theories of cognition (gnoseology) and of values (axiology) [novikova 1993: 291]. in contrast, however, to eastern orthodoxy, which while reaching the faithful, did not control them to the same extent, the paternalistic authority of the roman church rested upon the supervision of the thoughts of the faithful, directing their steps, and giving them detailed instructions about every moral and intellectual issue in life [zernov 1967: 201]. this judicial authority was vested in the roman catholic clergy. the oldest polish sources pointing to a conflict between these two systems are to be found in penitential literature, the so-called books of penance. one example of this type of literature is the latin codex summa de confessionis discretione from silesia, a mid-thirteenth century confessional text which is an ethnographic document written in latin (translated into polish and published by karwot in 1955 as katalog magii rudolfa (rudolf’s catalogue of magic). sections eight, nine and ten in part two of this catalog give quite extensive lists of various customs, beliefs and magical folk practices, such as methods of bringing happiness, good health, and love, while presenting them as sins against coexistence or conflict? 19 faith in god. in so doing, what was an instructional guide to good confessions turns into a utilitarian work, which aims to combat what the church saw as paganism. in the opinion of the medieval historian aaron gurevich, these beliefs, inherited from the earliest times, on the one hand, and the christian religion on the other, which “simultaneously had a permanent effect on each other and were in a state of antagonism, constituted two synchronic aspects of medieval social awareness, creating a specific construction which may be called folk christianity” [guriewicz 1987: 132]. traditional consciousness could be deprived neither of the old gods (albeit that to all appearances they could be eliminated from reality) nor of a whole complex of practices designed to influence the world through the medium of magic. this consciousness remained unchanged or virtually unchanged over the course of many centuries. over the centuries the clergy found it hard to cope with the vast range of superstitions and customs, and it is no coincidence that the same questions about the pagan practices of penitents were constantly being passed from one textbook of good confessions to another. we may deduce this from an example, written in 1776, found by jan stecki in a private library in the lublin region. parts were published in wisła in 1901. it is entitled zbiór generalny wszystkich grzechów z przykazań boskich kościelnych z siedmiu głównych grzechów śmiertelnych tudziesz podług stanu y kondycyi każdego człowieka do porachunku y roztrząśnienia summnienia idąc spowiadać się podany 1776 roku (general catalogue of all sins from the divine church commandments from the seven deadly sins; likewise according to the condition and status of every man regarding the self-examination and meditation prior to going to confession, issued in 1776). the catalogue of sins notes that: ieżeliś się leczył albo kogo przez gusła z przydatkiem słów zabobonnych uroki odczyniając rosty (pewnie krosty) zażegnywając modlitewki zabobonne odmawiając albo się obmywając wodę na głowę lejąc z modlitewkami wymyślnemi suchoty odczyniając .... (if you treated or healed yourself or anyone else by means of witchcraft, with the addition of words of superstition, breaking evil enchantments, conjuring pimples away, reciting superstitious non-canonical prayers, or washing yourself by pouring water over your head, or banishing tuberculosis with secret prayers ... and: ieżeli modlitewek zabonbonnych nieumiesz y iezliś ie mawiał y innych nauczał; ieżeliś niezazywał modlitewek które w skutki iakie obiecują mowiąc ie pewnych dni lub czasow a zwłaszcza wrzeczach nieprzystoynych. (if you did not know superstitious private prayers and if you neither repeated them nor taught others; if you did not recite the private prayers, which in folklorica 2006, vol. xi 20 essence promise results by being said on certain days or times, especially where indecent matters are concerned.) [zbiór generalny 1901, 15: 653-54] as karwot remarked in his comments on the confessional text by brother rudolf cited above, you may “look for pagan customs in areas of everyday life wherever there is sin” [1955: 189]. much of the material assembled by nineteenth-century collectors also reveals a clear discrepancy between folk religion and the established catholic religion. for example, when father władysław siarkowski was recording ethnographic and folklore materials from the kielce area in central poland, he wrote that “the peasants are distinguished by their strong religious feeling, but this feeling (with some exceptions) is based on external signs. their faith stems not from ‘the pure source of the christian spirit,’ but from surface forms; hence the many superstitions and prejudices among the people” [siarkowski 1880: 111]. józef kibort, a collector from the wilno area (formerly in north-eastern poland, now vilnius in lithuania), maintains a similar tone in his comments. he defines folk religion as a “mixture of idolatrous remnants with an outward veneer of christianity, mainly characterized by different sorts of non-canonical prayers, prejudices, superstitions and witchcraft” [kibort 1897: 324]. the suggestion contained in these observations points directly to the main forms of survival of pre-christian beliefs and practices, those magic folklore genres that are of particular interest to us: what are called private, non-canonical prayers said along with morning and evening canonical prayers and complex magic acts (that is, magic words combined with ritual actions and objects) within a framework of so-called white magic (magic rituals causing good) and black magic (magic rituals causing evil). the active coexistence of two world models (two cultures, prechristian and christian) may be spotted both in the structure of ideas and symbols and in the functions performed by genres of magical folklore. magical texts preserved in collections from the nineteenth century on are modeled by the polish variant of slavic folk mythology which is based on the principle of cosmic order, typical of a dualistic folk world view. in private prayers said along with daily prayers, this dualism is determined by the positive sacrum – god, and the negative – the devil, as the two antithetical demiurges found in the slavic cosmogonic myth. this dualism does not therefore clash with church teaching, especially as the former accepts the ethical valorization of god as the embodiment of good, and the devil of evil. let us recall that, according to magical thinking, various supernatural beings were not identified as unequivocally evil; rather they were ambivalent figures, whose positive coexistence or conflict? 21 powers could be tapped through regular contact between the “living” (human beings) and the “non-living” (deities, non-humans) in a cosmic dialogue. the essence of this contact was determined by etiquette, that is the use of numerous spells and contact formulae understood as ritualized folkways appropriate in particular circumstances. this was especially relevant in the etiquette surrounding situations of change. thus, when change was in the offing, or when some significant change needed to be made, that change could be made effective by using the magic that could ensure a good beginning to the event. magic would be employed to establish the right time for change to begin, according to the rule that, if you determine the beginning, you can determine the end [brzozowskakrajka 1998: 73-114]. the activities of the catholic church over many centuries did a great deal to “purify” this dialogue, offering believers canonical prayers for every occasion,(1) addressed exclusively to the christian god and the whole christian pantheon. the principles according to which this pantheon functioned in the folk consciousness are exemplified by those texts of magical folklore, that is to say, charms and complex magic acts that have been preserved. they are not contemplative in nature, for folk catholicism was devoid of the mystic, philosophical element of religion, but they do represent a source of power, understood from a utilitarian point of view, as well as a way to reinforce magical acts designed to achieve a particular result. anthroponyms of christian origin the figures of god, the mother of god, and the saints appear in such texts of magical folklore “without their haloes.” their “authority” is understood as an instrument which might assist people to obtain some specific concrete benefit, such as recovery from illness. a closing formula that often appears in complex magic acts runs as follows [kotula 1976: 286]: nie moją mocą – boską mocą! not by my strength, but the lord’s! pana jezusa, and that of jesus christ, wszystkich świętych, and of all the saints, aniołów, and the angels, apostołów dopomocą! with the assistance of the apostles! svetlana tolstaia defines this as a distance formula (involving the recognition of god’s authority), specific to sacred texts [tolstaia 2001: 22]. sacred objects, such as the gospels, especially the cross, which fulfils an apotropaic function protecting humans from harmful forces, appear in the structure of private prayers as symbols of power. the same apotropaic function was often ascribed to angels, that is, the heavenly host [brzozowska-krajka 2004: 419-26]. the precedents of sacred history, key elements in the christian myth, served, too, as a guarantee folklorica 2006, vol. xi 22 that a given complex magic act would be effective, such as in the complex magic act designed to conjure away the illness known as the “rose” (erysipelas). in this the motif of christ’s tomb appears at the beginning, implying a paradigmatic resurrection situation involving rebirth for the patient [biegeleisen 1929: 136]: pan bóg leży w grobie, the lord god lies in his tomb, ma dziewięć róż w sobie. he has nine pieces of erysilepas. od dziewiątej do ósmej, od ósmej do siódmej, the nine are reduced to eight, the eight are reduced to seven, od siódmej ... aż do jednej, the seven are reduced ... down to one, od jednej do żadnej! and one is reduced to none! od tego mi pomagaj najpierw bóg ojciec, with this i supplicate the help of our father, po wtóre bóg syn, po trzecie duch św. the son of god, and the holy spirit. in his discussion of the oldest documented “poetry, spells, and evil charms,” czernik quotes two variants of a text illustrating how a spell may be transformed into a prayer [1962: 240]. the first is a magical text containing the motif of the pagan cult of the goddess of the dawn, to whom young girls addressed their spell-prayer for a husband. the original variant reads: zorze, zorzeczeńki! oh morning star and evening star! wszystkieśta moje siostruczeńki! you are my sisters! siadajta na konia wronego please mount a black horse i jedźta po towarzysza mojego. and ride off to bring my comrade. żeby on nie mógł beze mnie ni spać, so that without me he can neither sleep, ni jeść, ni siadać, ni gadać. nor eat, nor sit, nor talk. żeby ja mu się spodobała we stanie (stojąc), so that i look attractive to him when standing w robocie, w ochocie. at work, and am desired. the new formulation which takes its place drops the motif of the morning star and the evening star (zorze) substituting them with ecclesiastical motifs, such that the spell takes on the form of a prayer: żeby ja była wdzięczna i przyjemna may i be grateful and pleasing bogu i ludziom, i temu to god and people, and to towarzyszkowi swojemu, my companion nie moją myślą, nie moją mową, nie moją mocą not by my thought, not by my words, not by my power ino pana jezusa i najświętszej panny dopomocą only with the assistance of jesus christ and the most holy virgin abyż mi ta najświętsza dopomogła, pobłogosławiła may the most holy lady help me and bless me i dobrymi ludźmi opatrzyła. and put me in the company of good people. coexistence or conflict? 23 belief in the power of a heavenly deity to intervene, something appearing not just in aphrodisiac magic, was supplanted by christian deities, especially by the virgin mary, who becomes mary, the morning star, apostrophized in a distinctly christian way as stella matutina, a term taken from the popular litany of loretto [forstner 1990: 104]. this belief was also subordinated to the christian god, for example, the morning star and the evening star come to be described as christ’s servants. this symbolic parallelism also supports the idea that prayer structures and magical structures are in essence identical [see further brzozowska-krajka 1998: 92, passim]. we may obtain a more complete view of this identity in the structural pattern of morning and evening prayers, which were usually made up of exactly the same ingredients as the complex magic acts in magic medicine; in polish folklore an introductory prayer was said in the first, preparatory stage of complex magic acts. this would be a canonical prayer, the lord’s prayer, the hail mary or the creed (wierzę w boga), which would then be followed by a magic formula. it is precisely in the case of morning and evening prayers, in which the magic formula was replaced by a certain private (individual) prayer depending on the time of day, that we may observe a similar pattern. in folk material collected in the rzeszów region we find the comment that the family intoned this private prayer along with saying a canonical morning prayer (the reason for intoning the prayer was to ensure that a blessing followed) [kotula 1976: 318]. thus the time and the method of recital suggest that what we have here is a case of magical incantation with its special power already transposed to the language of religion with the aim of obtaining god’s grace [kowalewski 1920: 31]. this identity may be also perceived very clearly in objects used for enchantment, for example in aphrodisiac magic (the so-called carowidełka). these objects included “church items” – tassels from banners, stoles, altar towels or pieces of church candle [kolberg 1963: 207]. magic and religion thus served a common cause – the practical goal of conjuring happiness. the dominant theme of the coexistence among the peasants of two religious models, albeit unremarked by them, is most clearly revealed in the preventive and protective functions of verbal texts and the magical and magical-religious actions that accompanied them. it is also to be seen, as already noted, in white magic, that is in positive, constructive ritual actions which are designed to bring good fortune, such as in the complex magic acts of folk medicine, aphrodisiacs, and so on. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 24 examples of so-called black magic, very rare in polish ethnographic and folklore sources, transfer this coexistence to the area of negative, destructive rituals, such as that of “singing to death,” something known mainly in recordings from mazuria in northern poland. according to biegeleisen, this type of maleficium is an indo-european method of enchantment, well-known among the germans and the romance peoples [1929: 56]. it was believed that “if someone is so angry at someone else as to wish him or her dead, he/she can achieve this by singing a religious song in the morning and in the evening, and the target of the hatred will then surely die.” this general conception had its own performance scenario with precise directions: sing a whole psalm (evidently psalm 94) three times backwards for a whole year ... at 6 am and 6 pm in the same place and in the same posture, each time adding the lord’s prayer, said twice without the “amen,” and the third time with the “amen.” as soon as the person at prayer deviates from the exact hour or changes his location or posture, or makes a mistake during the prayer, he will be struck by the death … he had wished upon another. death shall come on the last day the prayer is said, after a year has lapsed.... in wielbark these prayers are usually said in a cellar, and singing to death is also wellknown and very widespread in szczytno. [toeppen 1892: 397] negative rituals are the most powerful attestation of the pragmatic understanding of religion, but also reveal conflict of an axiological nature, since the protection of life was at the summit of both the folk hierarchy of values and religious ideology, which viewed life as a gift from god. in making generalizations it should be stated that a certain type of magicalized religiosity is characteristic of polish folk piety in its traditional dimension and that it illustrates the co-existence of the two religious models discussed. this may be metaphorically and literally defined by the maxim, “a candle for the lord god, and a stub for the devil,” or its variant, “serve god and do not anger the devil” [krzyżanowski 1994: 82-84]. in the adagia polonica of 1632 the jesuit chronicler grzegorz cnapius defined this proverb as a “dictum plebeium,” a peasant saying, noting at the same time that christians should not use it in its literal sense, but should understand it allegorically (sensu allegorico) [quoted in krzyżanowski 1994: 82]. polish ethnographic and folklore sources from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, suggest that the first tendency (understanding literally) is dominant and that the folk devil is not always the christian hypostasis of evil in them. in these sources the folk devil is still a figure from folk demonology, that is, lower mythology). he is an ambivalent character, able both to cause damage and bring benefits (for coexistence or conflict? 25 example, by making a deal with man). hence communication between man and mythological characters was such an important part of folk knowledge. this is why the proverbs mentioned above (“a candle for the lord god, and a stub for the devil,” or “serve god but anger not the devil”) illustrate the essence of the problem of dual belief. it defines the relationship between christian mythology and folk mythology as loyalty to two “gods,” thereby testifying to the co-existence of these two kinds of outlook in polish folklore. trans. by r. a. orr notes 1 compare, for example, the following prayer-books: zbiór wybornego i gruntownego nabożeństwa na codzienne, tygodniowe, miesięczne, w czasy przygodne, w dni święte, roczne i około świętych sakramentów podzielonego (catalogue of splendid and serious worship assigned to daily, weekly, monthly, and annual holy days, as well as for occasions and around the holy sacraments), 3rd edition, warsaw: druk xx missyonarzy, 1807; złoty ołtarzyk wonnego kadzenia przed stolicą bożą to jest modlitwy rozmaite, które duch gorący na wonność panu bogu słodkości chwały jego ofiarować może. z przydatkiem niektórych nabożnych pieśni (the golden altar of fragrant adoration before the throne of god, i.e., varied prayers, which a fervent spirit may offer up to the sweet glory of the lord god. with the addition of some hymns), place of publication and publisher unknown, 1821; and many other nineteenthand twentieth-century prayer books. works cited biegeleisen, h. 1929. lecznictwo ludu polskiego [polish folk medicine], cracow: polska akademia umiejętności. brzozowska-krajka, a. 1998. „the magic of a good beginning – the mediating structure of daybreak.” in a. brzozowska-krajka, polish traditional folklore: the magic of time, boulder: east european monographs; lublin: maria curie-skłodowska university; new york: columbia university press, 73-114. ___________ 2004. “’chroń i prowadź do nieba....’ mediacyjna struktura aniołów w folklorze polskim” [protect and lead to heaven ... the mediatory framework of angels in polish folklore]. in j. ługowska, j. skawiński (eds), anioł w literaturze i kulturze polskiej [the angel in polish literature and culture]. wrocław: oficyna wydawnicza „atut,” 419-26. czernik, s. 1962. „poezja zaklęć i uroków” [the poetry of incantations and charms]. in s. czernik, stare złoto. o polskiej pieśni ludowej [old gold: on polish folksong]. warsaw: państwowy instytut wydawniczy, 237-46. ________ 1971. „polska poezja magiczna” [polish magical poetry]. in s. czernik (comp.), sny i widma [dreams and phantoms]. warsaw: ludowa spółdzielnia wydawnicza, 47-80. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 26 eliade, m. 1997. w poszukiwaniu historii i znaczenia religii [in search of the history and symbolism of religion], trans. a. grzybek. warsaw: wydawnictwo kr. freedberg, d. 1989. power of images. studies in the history and theory of response. chicago: university of chicago. forstner, d. 1990. świat symboliki chrześcijańskiej [the world of christian symbolism], tr. w. zakrzewska et al. warsaw: instytut wydawniczy pax. gimbutas, m. 1987. “slavic religion.” in m. eliade (ed.), the encyclopedia of religion. vol. 13. new york: macmillan, 353-61. guriewicz (gurevich), a. 1987. problemy średniowiecznej kultury ludowej [issues of medieval folk culture], trans. z. dobrzyniecki. warsaw: państwowy instytut wydawniczy. hernas, c. 1976. „wstęp” [introduction]. in f. kotula. znaki przeszłości. odchodzące ślady zatrzymać w pamięci [signs of the past. keeping alive the memory of receding traces]. warsaw: ludowa spółdzielnia wydawnicza, 5-22. karwot, e. 1955. katalog magii rudolfa. źródło etnograficzne z xiii w. [rudolf’s magic catalogue: an ethnographic source from the xiii century]. wstęp [introduction] j. gajek. wrocław: ossolineum. kibort, j. 1897. „wierzenia ludowe w okolicach krzywicz w pow. wilejskim” [folk beliefs around krzywicze in vilno district], wisła, 11: 321-36. kolberg. o. 1963. dzieła wszystkie [collected works]. vol. 19. kieleckie. part 2. wrocław poznań: państwowe wydawnictwo muzyczne ludowa spółdzielnia wydawnicza. kotula,. f. 1976. znaki przeszłości. odchodzące ślady zatrzymać w pamięci [signs of the past. keeping alive the memory of receding traces]. warsaw: ludowa spółdzielnia wydawnicza. kowalewski, father t. 1920. liturgika czyli wykład obrzędów kościoła katolickiego podług dzieła ks. innocentego frenkla [liturgy, that is, the presentation of catholic rites according to the work of father innocenty frenkel]. płock: druk braci detrychów. krzyżanowski, j. 1994. mądrej głowie dość dwie słowie. pięć centuryj przysłów polskich i diabelski tuzin z hakiem [two words are enough for the wise. five centuries of polish proverbs and the devil’s dozen and more]. vol. 1. warsaw: państwowy instytut wydawniczy. levin, e. 1991. “dvoeverie and popular religion.” in s. k. batalden (ed.), seeking god: the recovery of religious identity in orthodox russia, ukraine and georgia. de kalb: northern illinois university press, 31-52. novikova, m. o. 1993. “khristianski elementi v zamovlianniakh” [christian elements in healing charms]. in m. n. moskalenko (comp.), m. o. novikova (intro. and commentary), ukrainski zamovliannia [ukrainian healing charms]. kyiv: vydavnytstvo khudozhnoi literatury “dnipro,” 291-300. siarkowski, w. 1880. “materiały do etnografii ludu polskiego z okolic kielc” [sources for polish folk ethnography from the kielce area]. part 3. zbiór wiadomości do antropologii krajowej, 4: 83-185. toeppen, m. 1892. „wierzenia mazurskie” [beliefs in masuria], trans. from german by e. piltzówna. wisła, 6: 391-420. tokarska-bakir, j. 2000. obraz osobliwy. wielkie opowieści. hermeneutyczna lektura źródeł etnograficznych [distinctive image. great stories. a hermeneutic reading of ethnographic sources]. kraków: universitas. coexistence or conflict? 27 tolstaia, s. m. 1995. “sakralnoe i magicheskoe v narodnom kulte sviatykh” [the sacred and the magical in the folk cult of the saints]. in j. bartmiński, m. jasińskawojtkowska (eds.), folklor. sacrum. religia [folklore. the sacred. religion]. lublin: instytut europy środkowo-wschodniej, 38-46. ___________ 2001. “magiczne funkcje negacji w tekstach sakralnych” [magical functions of negation in sacral texts], trans. r. lewicki. etnolingwistyka, 13: 117-25. witowt, j. 1905. „przyczynki do zamawiań” [contributions to casting spells] wisła,19: 556-63. “zbiór generalny wszystkich grzechów z przykazań boskich....” [general catalogue of all sins from the divine commandments....], z rękopisu podał j. stecki [copied from the manuscript by j. stecki]. 1901. wisła, 15: 653-55. zernov, n. 1967. wschodnie chrześcijaństwo [eastern christianity], trans. j. s. łoś. warsaw: instytut wydawniczy pax. folklorica 2006, vol. xi microsoft word folkxiv_author.doc 198 ben-amos, dan. (ed.), leonard j. schramm, (trans.) folktales of the jews. volume 2. tales from eastern europe. philadelphia: the jewish publication society, 2007. notes. bibliography. indexes. xlii+624. $75.00 (cloth). isbn 978-0-8276-0830-6. the editors of the folktales of the jews collection, dr. dov noy (bar ilan university) and dr. dan ben-amos (pennsylvania university), are now presenting readers and experts with the second volume of the collection, tales from eastern europe. this ongoing project was launched in 1992 by the jewish publication society and by the israel folklore archive, and the current volume sets a standard in the anthologization and interpretation of old or contemporary folk tales. this large collection gathered over 20,000 tales, about 70 of which are included in the published volumes. gathered from an extremely generous area and from a large number of people, the legends included in this volume cover all types of folk narratives which were present in jewish communities from this region. there are tales with fantasy and supernatural motifs, but also rabbinic, moralizing, anecdotic ones, and last but not least, historic tales or tales dealing with jewish local population interactions. there are also comic tales, which are well represented in this anthology. one of the great merits of the volume is, beyond the representative nature of the items selected, its highly scientific approach. the introduction is extremely useful (pages xv-xxxix), as it includes a short presentation of the researched territory and of the population characteristics from the area where materials were gathered. the jewish migration to eastern europe is discussed: the spoken language, the existing ethnological materials, which are presented in a historical manner, as well as the methods used to explore this large body of material belonging to individuals or associations. the structure of the volume includes, according to the editors, the presentation of the tale proper, with an indication of the performer’s name, the date and place of recording, followed by its systematic analysis. it also presents the cultural, historic and literary background of the tale, together with its classification according to a wider typological system of the motifs. the tale is compared to other types of tales from the israel folk archives or the international index, specifically thompson’s motif index. thus the large majority of the tales is accompanied by an ample scholarly apparatus, which is extremely useful to researchers. a synthesis of the motifs included in these tales is attached at the end of the volume (589folklorica 2009, vol. xiv reviews folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 199 617). thus, the 71 tales included in the present volume occupy 488 pages, to which another 180 pages of general criticism is added. the short biographies of the tellers and those of the collectors/editors of these tales are also well described (most of them live in poland). the general bibliography of the volume is impressive, it occupies 76 pages, which makes the book extremely useful for those interested in gathering and summarizing classical or contemporary jewish folklore. the editors are to be congratulated on the structure of this volume. it is also worth noting that the first volume of this series, folktale of jews. i. tales from the sephardic dispersion, received the national jewish book award. we can all look forward to the following announced volumes: folktales of arabia, folktales of the orient and folktales of other lands. antoaneta olteanu bucharest university bucharest, romania untitled 194 fodchuk, roman paul. zhorna: material culture of the ukrainian pioneers. calgary: university of calgary press, 2006. $34.95. isbn 155238-197-8. this recent publication on ukrainian material culture in canada has been causing waves of interest and enthusiasm, both within the ukrainian community and outside. the book’s author, roman paul fodchuk (currently of cochrane, alberta), is not a stranger to the story of ukrainian immigration in canada, and specifically the settlement of these pioneers in east-central alberta. an insider to this community, fodchuk grew up near the hamlet of hairy hill in the immediate postworld war ii era. not only were his own family members among the very people he was trying to document and write about in this book, but fodchuk, himself, had even further direct experience with many (if not most) of these processes, techniques and materials. in the 1950s fodchuk worked as a district agriculturalist in east-central alberta, the hotbed of ukrainian bloc settlement in the province. part of his job as district agriculturalist was to photograph the old homesteads in the areas of shandro, myrnam, hairy hill, two hills and willingdon, and it is many of these stunning photographs that grace the pages of zhorna. in his preface, fodchuk very clearly states his motivation for writing the book: “to arrest the time that i’d experienced 50 years ago…to bring together a lifetime’s accumulation of photographs, illustrations and knowledge regarding a widely dispersed and disappearing material culture; to document symbols expressed by folk architecture that summon boyhood memories” (ix). drawing largely on familial memories and elaborating upon them, fodchuk capitalized on his knowledge of and ties to the history and work of peter svarich (one of the first ukrainian agriculturalists in the area and notable figure in the story of ukrainian settlement in alberta) and included several excerpts and sketches from svarich’s memoirs in this book. fodchuk’s unique approach of coupling his nostalgic and relevant professional experiences in material culture have taken the research in and presentation of the topic to a new level. the publication is organized into six chapters, beginning with a two-part introduction by notable scholars in the field, dr. robert klymasz (a leading authority on ukrainian canadian folklore and immigrant folk culture) and dr. john lehr (professor of geography at the university of winnipeg). each chapter is illustrated with photographs from fodchuk’s collection, as well as superb illustrations of the pioneer tools and utensils (drawn by daughter kathryn fodchuk dobbin and jean folklorica 2008, vol. xiii reviews 195 paul rioux, during their time as students at the alberta college of art). the first chapter, entitled “the journey,” deals with the topics of “leaving the homeland,” “the voyage,” and “arrival and settlement.” providing a concise yet informative background to the complicated and often times lengthy story of immigration, fodchuk focuses his attention on the memoirs of the aforementioned peter svarich, who led a group of such immigrants across the ocean and across the country to settle in alberta. in particular, the author includes a detailed map and chart of the core of the ukrainian bloc settlement in the early period, showing early trails, schools, post offices, churches, and other aspects of rural community development. chapter two, entitled “surviving,” continues with the story of settlement and touches on the limited material items with which the immigrants arrived and survived in the beginning. fodchuk discusses the construction of the chests that contained the priceless possessions of the settlers, the carpenter’s and cooper’s tools they arrived with and began to work with immediately (including various clamps and planes), and of course, the zhorna – quern mill. this chapter, more so than any other, makes use of svarich’s early construction sketches – for everything from a wagon, to a house and accompanying farm buildings, to a skein winder. chapter three, “building the little house on the prairies,” focuses on the steps the early ukrainian pioneers took to lay down permanent roots in the new land. beginning with temporary housing, fodchuk describes the burdei (dug-out), zemlianka (sod house), and khatyna (oneroom house) that were commonly built upon immigration, providing drawings and photographs of the interiors of such temporary dwellings. he goes on to describe that once the pioneers were settled, they focused their attention on building a permanent house or khata. it is in this portion of the chapter that fodchuk’s penchant for architecture and photography take centre stage, depicting various types of regional folk architecture that were transplanted in alberta, thatching crews and detailed roof construction, various oil presses used, and the pich (clay oven) in the interior. the fourth chapter, “one hundred and sixty acres,” continues the description to other parts of the traditional homestead and accompanying daily responsibilities, including haying, threshing, gardening and livestock. fodchuk pays particular attention to the process of haying and the tools required therein. the photos included in this chapter highlight how much of a community effort such agricultural processes were, and how neighbors banded together to assist one another in the farm work. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 196 chapter five takes a closer look at the construction of fences (woven, in many cases), pressing oil (often hempseed oil) and the tools needed for this process, textile production (the sewing/spinning/weaving of hemp, wool and flax), and the building of roads, bridges and other municipal services. fodchuk highlights a unique oil press at the shandro museum and the loom brought to canada in pieces by his grandmother. the sixth and final chapter discusses the topics of food and celebrations in the pioneer communities. organizing his discussion seasonally, fodchuk highlights the importance of a toloka (community cooperation, work bee) in building socio-cultural bonds in the new land. here, the author focuses more on the traditions brought from the old country by the early ukrainian immigrants, and their maintenance up until the second world war. the photographs of various celebrations and rituals (many taken from fodchuk’s family archive) are ideal in conveying the color and spirit of these early communities. perhaps nowhere are the author’s true motivations for putting together this publication more clear than in his epilogue – a letter to his grandchildren. here, fodchuk beautifully ties together the old and the young, the relevance of the hardships of the past with the hope and progress of the future. even though the reader may forget these nostalgic reasons throughout the chapters, in the epilogue fodchuk reminds us all to learn from the past and that through hard work and integrity, even the impossible becomes possible. a well-rounded, reader-friendly publication, zhorna is appropriate for scholars, students and enthusiasts alike, providing those interested with a beautiful, professional, engaging and informative resource on ukrainian material culture. nadya foty university of alberta edmonton alberta canada editorial satement 22 folk religion in the balkans and the qur’anic account of abraham florentina badalanova ssees, university college london/royal anthropological institute london dedicated to riccardo picchio on the occasion of his 80th birthday this essay scrutinizes a key religious myth in biblical (jewish and christian)(1) and qur’anic (islamic) traditions,(2) the myth of abraham and his willingness to sacrifice his most beloved son as god has commanded, a sacrifice not needed when god sends a ram or lamb from heaven as a substitute offering. it analyses the ways in which this myth encapsulates the ethnic and/or religious identity of muslim communities in the balkans, bulgaria in particular. in so doing, it examines the correspondence between belief systems in both slavia orthodoxa(3) and slavia islamica,(4) and focuses upon the correlation between the written canon of the sacred scriptures, the bible and/or the qur’an, and the oral convention of folk religion.(5) indeed, as fieldwork amongst rural communities in south-eastern europe indicates, the abrahamic sacrifice is regarded by both christians [petkanova-toteva 1978: 189-201]; stojčevska-antić 1987: 159-61; popova 1995 i/1: 14570; badalanova and miltenova 1996] and muslims [djordjević 1984: 205]; blagoev 1996: 70-83; 1999: 312-340] as the basic building block of their sacred kurban ritual ceremonies, a theologeme, while the image (and/or name of) abraham/ibrahim functions as the epitome of sanctity and a symbol of unconditional faith.(6) the epistemological principles of the present essay are relatively simple and straightforward. my approach to the 'religions of the book', a term used for the religions based on the bible and/or the qur’an, is anthropological;(7) but unlike many anthropologists who begin from theoretical presuppositions and then impose them upon the actual material, i build my arguments in the opposite way, empirically from the texts. in this i focus upon the oral hermeneutics of the holy scriptures, with special regard to their vernacular vocabulary; my work rests upon a corpus of folklore material collected over the last century and a half, which either refer to the biblical account of the filial sacrifice, or seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 23 its qur’anic counterpart, thereby spelling out the vernacular paradigm of the encounter between christianity and islam. while it is accepted that there has been explicit interaction between, on the one hand, the jewish and christian religions and the jewish and muslim on the other, an analysis of this material provides evidence that in the balkans, there was also an implicit interplay between these two culture-religious encounters. a similar approach was taken by the ukrainian scholar mikhail dragomanov in 1892, in his, “notes on slavic legends of a religious and ethical nature”, in which he compares jewish, muslim and christian versions of some common themes and characters (moses, elijah, etc.) and analyses their appearance in biblical (jewish and christian) and qur’anic texts, referring, also, to some talmudic accounts. dragomanov maintains that muslim storytellers, "the very first editors of the qur’an," preserved mohammed's account in the form it was given to the prophet by his jewish contemporaries (then living in arabia); more than this, he argues that, as early as the seventh century, some of these stories were also transmitted orally amongst the first communities of christian hermits in egypt [dragomanov 1892: 263]. the ukrainian scholar suggests that jewish storytellers, "the pivotal systematizers of monotheistic teaching," were the first to compile the earliest version of many stories that later became part of the qur’an [dragomanov 1892: 253-65; 275-82]. particularly significant in this respect is the fact that some of the folk interpretations of the legend of abraham, as recorded among muslim communities in south-eastern europe, contain narrative components which are to be found neither in the qur’an, nor in the bible, but in rabbinic (and/or midrashic) texts. and vice versa: among the eastern orthodox slavs in the balkans there exists a corpus of traditional folklore narratives and songs about abraham's sacrifice that very clearly relate more to rabbinic and midrashic texts and the qur’anic tradition than to biblical accounts. in a sense, these materials can be looked upon as "living antiquities" reconciling the three abrahamic religions; in other words, they do not merely represent theological divergence, but also furnish evidence of a common origin [badalanova 2001]. in this way empirical folklore facts become the means of elucidating the hidden background of a given cultural phenomenon. further, these folklore accounts can confirm or deny numerous academic hypotheses, even the most sophisticated. a theoretical postulate is no more than an elegant assumption unless it fits into the framework of the seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 24 empirical material. more than that, it should transform it from amorphous data into a systematized entity. "good" theory gives empirical data a structure, while an accurate and authentic database can approve or disprove theoretical presumptions. a number of theoretical attempts to define the vernacular vocabulary of folk religion have been made in eastern europe. one of them, traces of which can be perceived in this essay, is based on the semasiological strategies of an analytical approach to the popular faith. it is represented by the ethnolinguistic school of the study of religion, founded in the early sixties by a leading russian scholar, nikita tolstoi [1996: 145-160]. tolstoi was concerned with the description of the "grammar of the ritual text" [tolstoi 1982: 57-71], and with the "conventional vocabulary" of popular faith in particular. in contrast to accepted soviet practice, in his writing culture was perceived within the framework of religion; thus the term "folk spiritual culture" (narodnaia dukhovnaia kul’tura) [tolstoi 1998: 35] came to denote religion at the popular level. at the same time, he used the terms "folk faith" (narodnaia vera), "folk orthodoxy" (narodnoe pravoslavie) and "customary christianity" (bytovoe khristianstvo) [tolstoi 1996: 146-148; 1998: 146] to signify folk religious narratives, songs and rituals.(8) a parallel anthropological approach to the phenomenon of popular faith in other slavic countries has developed over the last two decades. thus in bulgaria, a large body of work on the folk parameters of christianity and/or islam has been published [zhivkov 1981: 23, 1987: 139, 173; mikhailova 1988, 1998, 1999; nedin 1991; kovachevakostadinova 1998: 44-58, etc.]. likewise, polish scholars have coined a series of terms denoting the folk parameters of religious life: "folk religiosity" (religijność ludowa), "popular faith" (pobożność ludowa), "folk catholicism" (katolicyzm ludowy), etc. [ciupak, 1973; kwaśniewicz, 1983: 25-39; kasprzak, 1999: 37-61; tomicki 1981: 29-70], which are primarily, though not exclusively, applied to a synchronic approach to religious phenomena. at the same time, in twentieth-century eastern europe a parallel interest in the diachronic analysis of religious stereotypes may be observed. in 1914 anichkov, a professor at petersburg university, defined the system of popular belief as a distinctive confessional paradigm, seeing it as a cultural phenomenon representing both pre-christian and christian traditions. he used the term dvoeverie [dual faith] to denote it [anichkov 25 1914: 286-307; tolstaia 1987: 154-68; levin 1993: 31-52; ryan 1999: 14, 26; mikhailova 2000: 3-4]. in the early 1980s, boris uspenskii developed a related idea [1982, 1983]. instead of dvoeverie, he prefers to use the term diglossia, applying it not only to linguistic but also to cultural phenomena. in his view, diglossia (when two or more varieties of a language(s) are used by the same speaker in different cultural contexts) is characteristic, for example, of the period of conversion in kievan russia. it was in these turbulent times of change that the new religious canon of christianity encountered the old belief system of pagan faith, thus creating new cultural and confessional patterns which still survive; correspondingly, old church slavic began to function as the high form of the language, acting as the basic vehicle for the "transplantation of byzantine culture to russian soil" [uspenskii 1983: 9-10] not only in strictly linguistic terms, but in a much broader, cultural sense. meantime, russian was used as its low vernacular counterpart. in this way uspenskii combined both a syntagmatic and a paradigmatic approach to religious phenomena, where the linguistic model served, in a manner typical of the moscow-tartu semiotic school, as a universal paradigm of culture. hence, culture was studied as a language. this approach has strongly influenced my own. over the last twenty years, certain east european scholars of balkan religion, as well as some from western europe and the usa, have started using the term "cryptochristianity" to denote specific facets of the encounter between christianity and islam in asia minor and the balkans (especially bosnia and albania). according to stavro skendi, "in crypto-christianity the two religions, christian and moslem, coexisted." he emphasizes that during ottoman rule crypto-christianity meant "the appearance of individuals in a group who, while publicly professing islam, satisfied their conscience by practising christianity — orthodox or catholic — in private" [1980: 233]. crypto-christianity is one of very few terms common to both eastern and western specialists in the study of religion. although i do not use this term, the concept has proved valuable to me. this essay does not only take into account established academic ideas and hypotheses, but also provides new data on the popular dimensions of the religions of the book, the bible and/or the qur’an, derived from fieldwork conducted in both christian and muslim seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 26 communities by myself and by colleagues at the bulgarian academy institute of folklore.(9) the accounts provided by the latter, and in particular the folklore materials recorded over the last twenty years from the pomaks in the area of mount pirin,(10) and from turkish minorities in north-eastern bulgaria, are significant in that they reveal the correlation between, and interdependence of, two creative processes: the popular adaptation of islam on the one hand, and the islamization of local oral tradition. they also epitomize the tendencies in popular faith in the balkans to act as a bridge between different religious traditions, both orthodox and heterodox. the qur’an in the making: islamic folk narratives about abraham the folk narratives about the prophet abraham and his son recorded among the muslim pomaks and turks in bulgaria function as texts which are regarded by both tellers and audience alike as oral counterparts of the qur’an, with the storytellers considered transmitters of the prophetic revelation. it is appropriate to note here that the actual term "qur’an" refers to the concept of recitation [peters 1994: 158], while allah is considered “the speaker” [rasmussen 2001: 30-57; more generally, bedford 2001: 1-14]. with respect to this, muslim tradition reflects unease at any challenge to the qur’an as the ultimate manifestation of divine power. indeed, “it is a book and it persists as a book, highly synchronous and interlinked, with a mosaic rather than a linear structure, and with much cross-stitching of phrase and motif. but it is more than a book: it is also an event and it persists as an event in the form of its proper recitation” [bedford 2001: 11-12]. how is the oral performance of the qur’anic text conceptualized by believers in bulgaria? fieldwork in muslim communities indicates that, from the point of view of ordinary folk, telling stories from the qur’an is considered a sacred undertaking; as informants often point out, the word of god should not be uttered incorrectly; such an action is considered sinful. only the chosen (gifted speakers and talented story-tellers) may relate qur’anic stories. in traditional societies "story-telling" means charisma. it embodies spiritual and prophetic power. story-tellers are also the memory-keepers of their communities, and as such they know not only its past, but also its future. obviously, in such a context a story-teller acts as mediator between the word of god and "those who have 27 submitted" (muslimuna), and he is therefore believed to be the ultimate spiritual leader of his group. his position in the local community is both important and prestigious. this phenomenon is characteristic of the culture of story-telling in the islamic world, and the balkans in particular. on the other hand, the folkloric aspects of the qur’anic saga of abraham, as we shall see, possess a sizeable ethno-religious dimension. in balkan muslim communities the prophet who intends to sacrifice his son is known as azreti ibrahim [djordjević 1984: 205], ibrahim (and/or ibraim) peigamber (appendix, text 1), ibriam (text 3), and even ismail (text 2). in some tales, he is even called issa pengamberin, i.e. issa the prophet (text 4),(11) and these islamic accounts encompass, apparently, not only the qur’anic text of the filial sacrifice, but also its christian and/or jewish (that is, its biblical) counterpart. thus the name of the character who has to slaughter his son (issa) echoes, in a specific way, the name of one who in the genesis account is to be sacrificed (isaac). muslim accounts recorded in the balkans indicate that the name of the victim son varies too; he may be called both isaac and/or ismael. unlike high jewish/christian and/or muslim theological tradition, low islamic folk tradition is less concerned with specifying the name of "the one and only son." this is, in fact, the same with the qur’anic text, although islamic scholars are reluctant to acknowledge it. nowhere in mohammed’s account is abraham’s son’s name mentioned; indeed, the name of "the one who was considered by the prophet to be his only son "has always been the subject of heated speculation among jewish and christian scholars on the one hand and muslim on the other. islamic tradition, however, holds (and this is regarded both as a conventional rule and/or a theological principle) that the victim’s name is ismael, whereas christian tradition settles on isaac [doughan 1995, 169-71; kunin 1995, 49-51; yunis 1995: 150-53, 163-64, noujaim 1995, 159-61]. as will be seen, this becomes one of the most significant distinctions between the jewish and christian dogmatic tradition and the muslim, if not a distinction islamic oral tradition views as important. an analysis of islamic folk legends of filial sacrifice from the balkans, bulgaria in particular, indicates that these texts relate primarily, but not exclusively, to the classical account in the qur’an. however, mohammed's account is simply the major contributor to the process of shaping the plot. story-tellers, needless to say, regard the qur’an as the seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 28 essence of their religious identity, but their retelling of the abraham story relates not only to the qur’an-based teachings of mohammed, but also to the traditional patterns of folk islam. (12) their narratives, as we shall see, also have other, at first sight surprising, links with other religious traditions. although each story-teller is convinced that his tale is true, and springs "from the holy qur’an itself," repeating mohammed’s sacred utterances word for word, as edward leach once remarked, “that is how mythologies are presented. they do not exist as single stories but as clusters of stories which are variations around a theme” [leach 1983: 25]. it was also leach who developed the methodology employed in the present essay, that of the functionalist social anthropologist who believes: that sacred texts contain a religious message which is other than that which can be immediately inferred from the manifest sense of the narrative. religious texts contain a mystery; the mystery is somehow encoded in the text; it is decodable. the code, as in all forms of communication, depends upon the permutation of patterned structures. the method of decoding is to show what persists throughout in a sequence of transformations [leach 1983: 2]. the folk renderings of the qur’anic narrative of abraham's sacrifice recorded amongst balkan muslims also contain this "encoded mystery". when deciphered, they may elucidate, both syntagmatically and paradigmatically, the patterned structures that have undergone a series of hidden processes of permutation, passing in the balkans over time through various socio-political and cultural transformations. the functional parameters of these legends, however, remain constant, with the story of abraham serving to justify the chief custom of muslim communities, the annual ritual sacrifice of a lamb or ram at the end of the ramadan fast, on the feast popularly called kurban-bairam, or koch-bairam [blagoev 1996: 70-83; 1999: 70-83; djordjević 1984: 204-05]. thus in 1987, during field research conducted by members of the bulgarian institute of folklore amongst muslim communities in the north-east of the country, evgenia mitseva recorded a fascinating folk interpretation of the qur’anic text about ibraim (see appendix, text 1). it was narrated by mehmed ibraimov iusek, aged sixty seven, who explained to her the origin of the feast day of ram-bairam (known as koch-bairam, where the word koch 29 means “ram” in the local dialect). according to his story, the ritual slaughtering of the ram on that day went back to the son of peigamberi (the prophets). the narrative structure of the text consists of a string of episodes, each a self-contained entity, which are analyzed below. the textological analysis serves as the starting-point for further anthropological exploration of the folkloric dimensions of the qur’anic text about ibraim. thus the process of mutual interaction between islam and christianity may be illuminated more comprehensively. indeed, as schwarzbaum notes, anyone who dips into the qur’an will immediately learn that its whole fabric is interwoven with numerous biblical narrative hints and cryptic allusions, as well as with full-fledged biblical and extra-biblical legends and folktales. frequently mohammed employs old testament stories in the way a preacher does, who usually illustrates his ideas and teachings by means of a fascinating story, picking out a few incidents or one single detail out of the complete tale in order to point the desired moral [schwarzbaum 1982: 10]. the textological examination of bulgarian muslims’ oral qur’anic accounts corroborates these theoretical observations. i shall begin my analysis be examining each segment in turn. segment 1: one of the prophets, whose name was ibraim, had been childless for many years this episode functions as the introduction (proem) and correlates not only with the qur’an [sura 11.75] but with the bible too.(13) at the same time it explores a motif typical in asian and european epic tradition, that of the miraculous conception (and/or birth) of the hero (either the protagonist or the antagonist) [propp 1976: 205-40]. the legend starts with the announcement of a miracle: the childless old couple is given a wondrous child. segment 2: ibraim had been married twice this detail shows how muslim oral tradition transforms the biblical motif of the opposition between sarah and hagar, so giving the mother of ismail a status equal to that given by jewish and christian tradition to the mother of isaac. thus the first step towards seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 30 the justification of the idea that it was ishmael who was “the only son” of abraham, "the one he loved most", is made. mehmed iusek’s text strictly follows qur’anic tradition as far as the name of the boy/sacrificial victim is concerned. in his story, in contrast to the biblical text (as rendered by jewish and christian storytellers), the boy is called ishmael, not isaac. as we can see, according to this version, ishmael becomes the ancestor of all muslims, and the turks in particular. there are several ethnonyms in bulgarian for them: agariani, because their ancestors were born of agara (hagar), and ismailtiani, because their forefather was ismail (ishmael) [tŭpkova-zaimova and miltenova 1996: 94, 155-6, 159, 176, 180 285, 305-08]. the ethnonym agariani can also be traced back to apocryphal biblical sources [nachov 1894: 146-47; tŭpkova-zaimova and miltenova 1996; badalanova and miltenova, 1996: 209-11, 230] as well as to christian oral tradition; similarly, the ethnonym ismailtiani goes back to either the canonical biblical text [gen. 25: 16-18] and its apocryphal interpretations (such as the "erotapokriseis razumnik-ukaz" texts [tŭpkova and miltenova 1996: 293-308]), as well as being found in both christian and muslim folk narratives. the fact that the ethnonym ismailtiani is interchangeable with agariani emphasizes the importance of both matrilineal and patrilineal kinship among balkan muslim communities. segment 3: it is his second wife (whose name was hazhder) who prays to god for a boy. she promises him that if he answers her prayer, the child will be sacrificed as a kurban to the lord this detail corresponds neither to qur’anic nor biblical themes, but instead to folk motifs functioning as the semantic kernels of songs and/or narratives about filial sacrifice in slavia orthodoxa [nachov 1894: 149-50],(14) as, for example, in the ritual song from the village of momina bania, near hisar in southern bulgaria. the song was performed by christian women on st george's day after their husbands had sacrificed a lamb. the text of the song along with an explanation of the ritual it accompanies, was described by one of the local singers of tales as follows: when the lamb is slaughtered, we go to the spring, where the water flows down the ravine, to pour the blood in there... so that it may flow down the ravine — for a good 31 harvest, for everything [to be born]. we [offer this sacrifice] to god and/or saint george sincerely, so that he may help us all. and they [the men] make the sign of the cross on the forehead [of each child] with the blood of the lamb for we are already offering the lamb and making the sign of the cross on ourselves. we present it all wholeheartedly. and then [we sing] the song, the song that is sung about the lambs... let me see... a mother gave birth to a single son, stoian; and she should not have had him! and so she brought him up to adulthood, and the mother betrothed him and the mother settled on his marriage but they did not have a child from their heart... yet his bride petranka, petranka, a beautiful bride, was walking along the yard, holding golden censers, gaining favor with them before god, and praying to the lord: "oh god! oh almighty god! please, give me god, please give me, one single male child, to bring him up for three years then i shall slaughter him as a sacrificial offering!" (15) as nachov shows, songs about filial sacrifice in which the mother prays to god for a son are widespread amongst the bulgarians [nachov 1894:149-50]. often they have a particular proem portraying abraham's future as a mysterious riddle “in the stars,”(16) thus resembling not only the bulgarian folk conceit of parenthood (which in christian oral tradition is represented as the ultimate manifestation of prosperity),(17) but also the implicit, or perhaps one should say “coded”, biblical designation of the “father of multitudes” as the progenitor of offspring as numerous as the stars in heaven [gen 15:5]. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 32 these songs start with a formulaic dialogue between the morning star [zvezda zornitsa] and the praying mother and/or father [bogdanova et al. 1993-4: 364-73 esp. 485, 486, 489]. they promise the star that if god gives them a son, his name will be the “one who belongs to god” [bogoumcho] and he will be offered as a sacrifice to him [nachov 1894:150]. the star topic is a significant element in the abraham story in islamic tradition; in the qur’anic text there is a direct indication that, after saying to his father azar, “takest thou idols for gods? i see thee, and thy people in manifest error” [qur’an 6: 73-74], abraham was shown by allah “the kingdom of the heavens and earth, that he might be of those having sure faith” [qur’an 6: 75]. (18) in fact, according to the sacred book of “those who have submitted,” the divine revelation took place “when night outspread over him,” and the prophet “saw a star and said, ‘this is my lord’.” [qur’an 6: 75-80]. on the other hand, in the story “how abraham learns to worship god" [el-shamy 1995: ii, 5, type z 452.2], there are striking parallels between slavic apocryphal tradition,(19) the midrashic tradition,(20) and the qur’anic text. thus, according to mohammed's account, after observing the heavenly bodies rising and setting, abraham rejects astrology, declaring: “i have turned my face to him who originated the heavens and the earth, a man of pure faith; i am not of the idolaters” [qur’an 6: 79]; at the same time, slavic apocrypha and midrashic texts also contain a concise version of this episode. indeed, the star topic serves as key characteristic of the abraham cycle in these three traditions. more than that, as the results of fieldwork in south-eastern europe indicate (see above), the dialogue between the prophet and the stars has survived in bulgarian folk interpretations of the saga of filial sacrifice even today. returning to the image of the mother as found in the bulgarian muslim versions of the abraham saga, it appears that these accounts differ significantly from orally transmitted stories of filial sacrifice, told in some areas formerly part of the islamic caliphate. thus, according to some specialists in islamic studies, combs-schilling, for instance, the stories of ibrahim, circulating in morocco, completely ignore the image and/or the function of the mother. he claims that: hajar, the natural mother, is absent from islamic cosmic trial, so absent that she does not even appear in the qur’anic text. the qur’an's tale of ultimate sacrifice is a purely 33 male story, involving a male-imaged god, a father, a son, and a male domestic animal. the qur’an mentions the mother in connection with ismail's natural birth, but not in connection with the transcendent birth which the father, together with god, gives. the mother plays no part, has no say... so distant is the mother in awareness, understanding, and space that she cannot possibly participate in the play with death that brings about eternal life. hajar is down on the plains — probably baking bread or washing clothes — while the fate of her son and the fate of the cosmos are being decided [combs-schilling 1989:240].(21) it must be emphasized, however, that as far as the function of the mother in the cosmic trial is concerned, bulgarian folk materials indicate that the situation is much more complicated than combs-schilling suggests, and as such is a topic for future research. in fact, bulgarian folk songs and narratives, recorded among both christian and muslim communities, reveal that the image of the mother in the vernacular biblical and/or qur’anic saga of filial sacrifice is of crucial importance. segment 4: and so the boy ismail is born as a blessing from god although, as already mentioned, the boy’s name is never mentioned, muslim tradition identifies him with ishmael [yunis 1995: 150-53], rather than isaac as in the jewish and christian religions. segment 5: but by the time the child reaches the age of six, his father ibraim has forgotten the promise his wife had made. apparently, hazhder has also forgotten, although this is not mentioned explicitly in the text. the folk motif of the parent who, desperate for a child, pledges him to a deity, supernatural being or animal who can grant their wish, and who then forget about their pledge is widespread in the balkans as elsewhere. it is found predominantly in the thematic kernel of certain wonder tales (type at 310). bulgarian folktale experts have also detected specific local interpretations of the motif of the forgotten pledge, classifying the tales in which they appear separately as types 313a, 313c, *315a, *316* [daskalova-perkovska et al. 1994: 109-12, 117-19]. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 34 if we look at the age of the son, mehmed iusek’s story tells us that he was six when the time for the great trial had come [see also appendix, text 2]. he was, therefore, on the threshold of boyhood, no longer an infant. this detail suggests that the tale recorded by mitseva reflects, to a degree, the conventional setting of ceremonial practices akin to initiation rites among balkan muslim communities. in the classical qur’anic text, however, we are simply told that, after being given the good tidings, the prophet is asked to sacrifice his offspring when he reaches “the age of running with him” [qur’an 37: 99-101]. an indirect reflection of this detail is to be found, surprisingly enough, in some folkloric versions of the abraham saga among christians in some parts of bulgaria. these songs are sung by women during the kurban ritual, on gergiovden [st george’s day], when the priest blesses the ritual loaves and censes the roasted lamb. according to the text of a song i recorded in 1977 in the village of glavan, in the southern bulgarian area of the thracian lowland, the childless abraham (avram) prays: “give me, my lord, give me an offspring from my heart, to walk around the courtyard, to say ‘mother!’ and ‘father!’ to go then to the field, to go to the field and plough it, to fetch a cart full of firewood, of firewood and flour! i vow to slaughter him then as a sacrifice to the lord god and to saint georgi!” god stood there listening, and they had an offspring from the heart, and they gave him a christian name, a christian name, after the name of saint georgi. and the little boy named georgi grew up and became a fifteen-year-old youngster. and they sent him to the field, 35 to the field, to plough it, to fetch a cart full of firewood, of firewood and flour. when he came back home, his mother was baking bread, baking bread and weeping. his father was whetting knives, whetting them and weeping.(22) it is essential to note that the canonical account of abraham's sacrifice in the book of genesis does not refer to the age of his most beloved son either. this song, which is entirely typical of bulgarian folk tradition [petkanova-toteva 1978: 191-92], together with the stories recorded by mitseva in eastern bulgaria [see appendix, texts 1 and 2], thus appear to represent an earlier version of abraham's saga that preceded the holy scriptures in the written form that we have them. it may be assumed that it was only transmitted orally amongst the people of the book (jews, christians and muslims). it is highly significant that the detail about the age of the son was included neither in the qur’an, nor in the bible, but yet has survived in the folk tradition of balkan muslims and christians an enduring memory of the oral hypostases of the holy scriptures. segment 6: one night ibraim has a dream in which he is reminded that he must slaughter ismail as a kurban offering this passage partly corresponds to the qur’anic text from the rangers (surah 37); while revealing his vision to his son intended as an offering to god, the prophet says: “my son, i see in a dream that i shall sacrifice thee; consider, what thinkest thou?” [qur’an 37: 102-3]. mohammed's account, however, does not contain a precise description of the dream; nor is anything said about the way god utters this command. abraham merely discloses god's will to his son. according to muslim neoplatonists of the tenth and eleventh centuries, however, the dream topic is regarded as an important component of islamic tradition. as ian netton points out, “the projected sacrifice of ismail, who replaced the old testament isaac in many seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 36 islamic versions of the story, is invoked by the ikhwan to make a point about the truth and reliability of dreams. abraham knew that dreams must contain some truth or he would not have submitted to such a sacrifice” [netton 1982: 85]. on the other hand, as the analysis of the morphology of the plot of mehmed iusek's tale shows, the dream topic serves to link the various units of the text, integrating them into a larger whole.(23) at the same time, abraham's vision is emphasized and amplified: “hey, ibrahim, don't you have to offer ismail as a sacrifice? haven't you promised to slaughter ismail? ismail is supposed to be offered as a sacrifice!” whereas in the qur’an abraham’s dream represents a condensed scenario of the actual great trial (the test of his faith in god) in mehmed iusek’s tale the detail has a predominantly stylistic function, in which ibrahim's vision is portrayed as a clear call from above, but not as a revelation. it is no more than a reminder from allah, albeit a powerful one, that ismael is to be given as a kurban offering.(28) in other words, while in the qur’anic text the motif of the prophetic dream encapsulates the entire plot of abraham's sacrifice, in the folk narrative it serves merely as a linking component in the plot of the great trial. segment 7: the father sacrifices one hundred oxen and one thousand sheep, but still the dream repeats itself over and over again, seventy times, until finally he understands that there is nothing to be done but to fulfill his vow the theme of the attempt to revoke a pledge of this nature by sacrificing domestic animals belongs to classic folk narrative. here “one hundred” and “one thousand” symbolize multitude. it is, however, relevant, that the dream is repeated seventy times; this detail fits into the register of traditional christian oral epic, where seventy and seventy seven are considered the numbers of completion. segment 8: the prophet keeps his decision from his wife this detail correlates with both biblical and qur’anic interpretations of the story of the great trial, in which the mother is unaware of what is about to happen to her son. some versions of the abraham saga in christian oral tradition, follow the same pattern. furthermore, the theme of filial sacrifice, as interpreted in some legends about the 37 experiences of grandpa lord (diado bozhe or diado gospod) wandering around the land of the bulgarian christians [dragomanov 1889: 65-97], often involves the detail of the mother unaware too. in some of them, god appears to a righteous man as a poor old man. after being invited to enter the house, he is told he may ask for anything the lord gave his host. then the old man asks for a special meal: the father is to slaughter his little son and roast him in the oven. the father fulfills the old man’s wish, while keeping his action secret from the mother [petkanova-toteva 1978:199-201].(25) on the other hand, it appears that in mehmed iusek’s text the mother’s function undergoes a process of transformation. while at the beginning she is the most active personage, towards the end of the text her parental presence becomes almost invisible. it is hazhder, not her husband, who initially encounters the celestial world through her prayers, acquiring a child whom she promises to sacrifice. in the later stages of the plot, however, she is gradually replaced by the father; eventually the stage is reached where he acts for her. in terms of the plot, this shift is expressed overtly; the mother will not be even told of the forthcoming sacrifice. this turning-point in the logic of the text may be regarded as a contradiction by readers of the bible and/or the qur’an, but certainly not for oral tellers of the holy scriptures, for whom the religion of the book exists merely in oral performance, as a divine text in the making. segment 9: hazhder is told by ibrahim that he would take the boy to the forest to collect wood this part of mehmed iusek's story has no counterpart in the classical qur’anic text; instead, the detail of abraham's going to collect wood for the burnt offering comes from the bible: “and abraham rose up early in the morning... and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which god had told him” [gen. 22: 3]. the ritual songs about abraham sung by christians also generally mention the wood topic; it has been already noted that the texts performed during the kurban ritual explicitly say that the boy is to be sacrificed when he is old enough to collect wood (see above). numerous analogous ritual texts exist. for example, in another st george’s day song, the boy called georgi who is to be a kurban sacrifice is sent for the first time: seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 38 to go to the hill to collect a cartload of wood... when he was back from the hill, his mother was baking bread, and crying as she did so. his father was honing sharp knives and crying as he did so.(26) this text demonstrates how oral tradition creates local versions of the story of abraham's sacrifice in which different cultural and/or confessional patterns are often interwoven. it is particularly significant, however, that not only christians, but also muslims refer persistently to the wood topic. whereas in the christian tradition this can be explained easily, the roots of this phenomenon in muslim tradition are not so evident. since it is not mentioned in mohammed's account at all, it obviously does not come from qur’anic tradition. how then, it may be asked, does the wood mytheme survive in muslim oral tradition? the text recorded by mitseva in eastern bulgaria indicates that story-tellers somehow know that they ought to preserve this detail. elucidating the source of this knowledge is the subject of the following analysis. in mehmed iusek’s tale, the wood motif appears to bear traces of the latent stages in the evolution of the abraham saga, thus exemplifying yet again the encounter between christianity and islam at the popular level: this text literally embodies the interaction between the oral hypostases of the religions of the book, the qur’an and the bible, so casting light on their common roots. it also illustrates how the muslim religion at a popular level draws on sources beyond the classical islamic tradition. but it is not only the oral tradition, whether christian or muslim, that considers the wood topic of particular importance for the internal logic of the saga of filial sacrifice. early patristic tradition also acknowledges it: christological exegesis interprets the figure of abraham's son carrying the wood on his shoulders as he climbs the hill where he is to be sacrificed as a foretype of jesus carrying his cross to calvary [cignelli 1995: 123-26; paczkowski 1995: 101-21]. this typology was extensively developed by the church fathers, and by irenaeus, tertullian and origen in particular [doughan 1995: 167]. hence, 39 in christian tradition the figure of isaac carrying wood on his shoulders was connected with the crucifixion. of course, the way popular faith spells out this typology out is quite distinctive, but it is nonetheless evident that the folkloric renderings of either the biblical or the qur’anic versions of the abraham saga constantly consider the wood topic of great importance. analysis of the mehmed iusek tale indicates that a series of semantic transformations have occurred to it in the particular textual context. the oral tradition, both christian and muslim, seems to have considerably changed the emphasis put on it various components. what is regarded as the most important component of the fragment is not that the father and the son go to collect wood, but the fact that they go to the forest (see also appendix, text 2). in this way, the forest becomes the emblematic setting for the filial sacrifice. at the same time, it recalls the folk concept of the forest as a classical locus for initiation rites. thus, via the reference to wood topic, the forest is apparently recognized by storytellers not only as the obvious setting, but also, because it is mythologically transparent, the ultimate setting for the drama of the great trial. segment 10: hazhder is asked by ibrahim to put henna on ismail's hands and feet. this episode would seem to reveal that the ritual dyeing of the boy's hands and feet with henna is considered an important component of the muslim rituals which performed as part of the sacrificial offering. in this, the function of the mother is quite transparent; she is to prepare her son for his encounter with the world beyond her territory. on the other hand, it is intriguing that the henna topic is also encoded in the ritual vocabulary of the kurbanbairam feast [blagoev 1996: 76, 83], as well as in phraseology related to sheep-breeding. thus, the descriptive epithet that traditionally applies to the noun denoting a particular breed of ram, “the one who has black round the eyes,” is kanŭlia, which literally means “with eyes decorated with henna.” according to local muslim popular belief, the divine ram that descended on allah's behalf during the great trial as a substitute sacrifice was one of these (see also appendix, text 3). that is why, the saying goes, a kanŭlia ram is the preferred choice for a kurban offering. it is also the most highly valued breed of sheep. undoubtedly, the ramifications of the use and distribution of this noun-epithet unit are seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 40 complex, but despite this, it does indicate that the great trial mytheme still functions as the underlying code in the tradition of balkan muslim communities. segment 11: when the father sets off with his son to collect wood in the forest, sheytan [satan] comes to hazhder and tells her that her son is going to be sacrificed by his father. she does not believe him. it is particularly intriguing that, as far as the relationship between hazhder and satan is concerned, there is a striking correspondence between the folk interpretations of the abraham among bulgarian muslims today, and islamic oral tradition in the holy land recorded almost a century ago by j. e. hanauer. thus, according to the account given to him by "one of the sheykhs of the great mosque at hebron," ibrahim el-khalil, after escaping from nimrud: was commanded to go to mecca and build the maram(27) or sanctuary there. on reaching his destination, he received instruction first to offer up his dear son ismain (ishmael) as a sacrifice upon jebel 'arafat, the mountain where adam had recognised hawa. iblis, hoping to make trouble between the patriarch and his friend, went to our lady hagar, on whom be peace, and implored her to dissuade her husband from the cruel deed. she snatched up a stone and hurled it at the tempter. the missile did him no harm, but the pillar against which the stone dashed is still shown to pilgrims. from this incident he has the name “ash sheytan er rajim”, meaning “satan, the stoned one”, or “he who is to be stoned” [hanauer 1996: 27]. on the other hand, this tale and that of mehmed iusek both bear some relationship to midrashic texts. thus, according to the story to be found in pirqe rabbi eliezer, "after satan found that he could not convince abraham and isaac to be unfaithful to god he went to sarah" [kunin 1995: 53]. in the midrashic tradition, however, the fragment about the encounter between satan and the mother, whose name there is, naturally, sarah, evolves differently. when told that her husband has killed their son, the mother dies of grief. this detail, in turn, is seen as serving as "part of the logical structure in which the natural parents are progressively denied, leaving only the divine parent as the agent of the rebirth" [kunin 1995: 53]. 41 yet this is, generally speaking, the logic inherent in any birth-rebirth mystery, and initiation rites in particular. the separation of the boy from the world of the mother is the first step in achieving his acceptance into the realm of men. in this, the temporal opposition, before/after, acquires additional, spatial dimensions. these, of course, require relocation, or, in other words, the son leaves his mother's territory. this is, however, how the situation appears from the outside, to the observer rather than the participants. this is also how it may be presented from an objective point of view, and how external observers, including the storytellers themselves, may describe it. but what if one considers how it looks from the boy’s standpoint? from the stance of the individual involved in the actual performance of the ritual, everything is seen reversed. the participant's perspective is, therefore, opposite to the storyteller’s. the world is seen from the inside looking out rather than from the outside looking in. so the boy undergoing the initiation ceremony experiences the act of leaving the house as the exclusion of his mother from his circle. in terms of the ritual, this step is seen as a further elimination and even denial of her function as parent. in terms of the narrative, she stays at home while her boy goes away. she is static, while her child and husband’s state is dynamic. in other words, in the story of filial sacrifice, when the boy crosses the boundaries of the domestic world, the mother has to be detached from him. that is also why father and son in mehmed iusek’s narrative set off to the forest to collect wood, while hazhder stays at home; though the subtext of the birth-rebirth mysteries is evidently taken for granted by the story-teller. the mother is still the first to encounter sheytan. more than that, according to mehmed iusek, she is also the first to resist him, being the initial obstacle to his efforts to stop abraham fulfilling her vow. it is also the last time hazhder appears in the great trial. segment 12: then the devil goes to ismail and tells him that his mother has heard his father is going to sacrifice him and therefore she wants him to return home. the child picks up a stone and hits the devil in the eye. that is why sheytan only has one eye. if, in the story hanauer recorded from "one of the sheykhs of the great mosque of hebron," it was the mother who hurled a stone at the devil (see above), in mehmed iusek’s seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 42 story, it is the son who hits him. this detail about the encounter between satan and the boy is another that corresponds with midrashic accounts; in the midrash tanchuma, the devil, after unsuccessfully approaching abraham, attempts to talk to his son who also refuses to listen [rappoport 1995: 292-93]. according to muslim convention, "the ta‘awwudh formula of 'taking refuge in god from satan the stoned one' is spoken before reciting the koran, and before the basmalah or consecration through the divine name, 'in the name of god', when undertaking ritual action" [glassé 1989: 166]. at the same time, the image of the satan as “the stoned one” or “he who is to be stoned,” in the story of mehmed iusek, corresponds to etiological legends found among bulgarian christians. thus, according to one of the stories i recorded in 1981 among bulgarian settlers in bessarabia, after creating the world god decides to take a nap, during which the devil tries to destroy it; the lord wakes up and, throwing a stone at him, declares: "may you be the one who is stoned!" as he spoke, so it goes, god hit the devil in the eye, since when he only has one eye. in colloquial bulgarian there even exists a stock epithet attached to the appellations satan and/or devil: "the one-eyed one" [ednookiiat]. this detail indicates that the correlation between christian and muslim oral tradition was quite profound, clearly encompassing various aspects of folk culture and vernacular language, including phraseology. segment 13: when they get to the place where the boy is to be sacrificed, his father tells him that he will slaughter him, for the lord has told him to do so. ismail answers that if that is what god wanted, then that is the death he wants but he does not want to be tied up. although in the qur’anic rendering of the abraham saga there is nothing about whether the victim is to be bound, this motif is considered important by storytellers; none of the folk texts from bulgarian muslim communities omits it. this motif is apparently also considered of theological significance in jewish and christian ritual tradition, since in the bible it reads: "and they [abraham and his son] came to the place which god had told him of; and abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. and abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son [gen. 22: 9-10]. 43 this fragment, in turn, is considered the kernel of the ritual akedah (the tying-up of the sacrificial lamb). as j. doughan emphasizes, the memory of the akedah lies close to the heart of three religions: judaism, christianity and islam. it is reflected in the liturgy of the jew at rosh-ha-shanan, of the christians at the mass (catholic) or holy communion (orthodox and protestant), and of the muslims at the great sacrificial feast (‘id-al-kabir). the same sacred story is remembered in these three traditions as an important element of their religious identity, yet the commemoration takes place at different times and represents variant meanings. in a sense, the akedah can be looked upon as standing at the crossroad of these three traditions as one significant sign of their common origin and also of their theological divergence [doughan 1995: 165]. as far as christian typological interpretation is concerned, the motif of abraham's bound son prefigure the crucifixion; as melito of sardis (second century) declares in his homily on the pasch: "if therefore you wish to contemplate the mystery of the lord, look at abel who is similarly murdered [gen. 4: 8], and isaac who is similarly bound [gen. 22:9]... he [christ the god-man] is the passover of our salvation. it is he who endured many things: it is he that was in abel murdered, and isaac bound [cignelli 1995: 124]. this pattern seems to be followed by christian oral tradition too. it is significant that recently recorded bulgarian folk interpretations of the abraham saga still retain this detail. in the text of the kurban ritual song from the village of glavan (to which i have already referred), the boy victim asks his father: "father, my dearest father, tie my hands securely, my hands, father, and my legs lest i could reach with my hands, lest i could move with my legs!" his father tied his hands, his hands, as well as, his legs. it should be noted, however, that mehmed iusek’s muslim text emphasizes that the boy ought to be untied (see also appendix, text 4). that is why nowadays, the story goes, when seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 44 muslims give a kurban offering, they are supposed to leave one of the ram’s legs untied. hence, the narrative provides mythological justification for the ritual setting of the kurbanbairam feast. in contrast to these accounts, however, some other texts recorded from bulgarian muslims, as we shall see later, have closer links with the bible, suggesting that in the balkans a plurality of versions reflecting original differences between the confessional patterns of the religions of the book existed. segment 14: seventy times ibraim passes the knife over his son's throat but it does not cut it. it is noteworthy that there is numerical symmetry between the description of the fragment portraying ibrahim's attempt to avoid fulfilling his vow (he has one and the same dream seventy times over) and the actual attempt to carry it out (the knife is passed seventy times over his son's throat). this detail functions as a prelude to the miracle which forms the climax of the story. segment 15: then a ram descends from the sky. this detail does not have its counterpart in the canonical qur’anic rendering of the abraham saga, and it is generally accepted that it originates from some complementary extra-qur’anic sources, and from the hadith, one of the chief compendiums of islamic law, in particular. the hadith (account or speech), it is agreed, contains stories about the prophet and early muslim communities which were initially transmitted orally, and later, in the ninth and tenth centuries, systematically collected and written down to create an extension to islamic tradition. on the other hand the motif of the ram descending from heaven corresponds to some midrashic and/or rabbinical interpretations. in these, after taking a rope and a knife and going to the mountain, "ibrahim directed the knife against the throat of his son but three times it slipped and glanced aside. then a voice called to him... then a ram appeared which... had hitherto been in paradise; it was offered as a sacrifice” [houtsma 1927: 2: 532]. 45 finally, it should be noted that the detail from mehmed iusek’s story about the ram descending from heaven as a sign of divine intervention, corresponds, of course, to the biblical account as well: "and abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns" [gen. 22: 13]. thus muslim oral tradition appears to "remember" not only the story from the hadith, but also, evidently, the canonical biblical account of the saga of abraham. segment 16: it was delivered by dzhebrail, the emissary of the prophets. it is significant that the archangel gabriel, the stock mediator for christians has a similar function in muslim tradition in fact, within the context of classical islam, his appearance recalls mohammed's call and revelation. segment 17: this ram was slain and from then on the kurban-bairam ritual remained a tradition for the muslims. at the end of the story mehmed iusek provides a lengthy explanation of why muslims celebrate the kurban ritual and what the sacred meaning of this mystery is, thus emphasizing the righteousness of his fellow villagers. again seven, the number of completion and perfection, serves as a structuring device both in the narrative and the ritual: those performing the kurban ritual should give some meat from the sacrificed animal to seven of their neighbors' households. at the same time, as it is performed by "those who have submitted", this sacred ritual connects the history of every single family with the family of ibraim the prophet and, thus, with the sacred time of the prophets. as shown above, the narrative structure of mehmed iusek’s text consists of a series of episodes framing the actions of the protagonists on two hierarchically different levels, the terrestrial (represented by ibraim, hazhder and ismail) and the celestial (god, his messenger dzhebrail and the ram that descends from above). there is also an antagonist involved in the story about the origin of the ritual of kurban-bairam, sheitan. a significant point is his appearance to ismail in a marginal place at a liminal time; the encounter takes place on the road, during the boy’s journey to the forest where the sacrificial offering is to seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 46 take place. thus the story of mehmed iusek implicitly recalls the classical ritual pattern of initiation within the universal cultural paradigm of the rites of passage (and/or birth/rebirth ceremonies). moreover, it is a sui generis example of how the mytheme of filial sacrifice is realized in the acting-out of the folk narrative. furthermore, as the story of mehmed iusek indicates, interaction between the two levels of the universe, the terrestrial and the celestial worlds may be accomplished either by prayer (an invocation from below) or by the ritual of kurban-bairam (god's response from above). at the same time, the actions of the terrestrial subjects involved in the narrative take place mainly at a horizontal spatial level, with apparently a single exception, at the culmination of the story, when ismail is replaced by the ram. otherwise, the plot strictly follows a horizontal line, progressing from the centre of ibrahim's world prior to the great trial, from inside of his house outwards to the forest, and back to the village. yet neither ibraim nor his village remains the same, for he brings back the new law of the sacred ritual, revealed to him in the great trial. and last but not least, the period after the great trial marks the final stage of the spiritual metamorphosis of ibrahim and his village. thanks to the law of kurban-bairam, his world is a newly reborn and rearranged universe. qur’anic tradition recognizes in him the very first muslim. on the other hand, the deeds of the celestial characters are accomplished in a vertically framed perspective, with god's heavenly throne on top, the place beneath where dzhebrail functions as a mediator, and still further down, where the ram, being betwixt and between, emerges. at the base stands the earth. thus the place where ibraim stops to slay ismail may be considered the earthly counterpart to god's heavenly throne, since this is where the ram and ismail meet, though now as two equal and therefore interchangeable participants in one cosmological drama. the first descends from above, the second ascends from below. thus they represent not only the terrestrial but the celestial world too, and more importantly, the encounter between them. more than that, they also create a precedent for the kurbanbairam ritual as a strategy for making the world of muslims the earthly counterpart of god's heavenly throne. in this way, every village, via the ritual, can be transformed into mecca. 47 along with the explanation of the origin of the ram-bairam feast as a sacred precedent established by the prophet ibrahim, the text contains one more significant detail: in mehmed iusek’s oral interpretation of the qur’anic version of abraham's sacrifice, ishmael is the personification of a sacred genealogy, the ancestor of the islamic community. mitseva recorded another version of the story of the great trial in venets, a village near mehmed iusek's own (appendix, text 2). it was recounted by a sixty-two year old muslim man, marin angelov. on the whole, the narrative pattern coincides with mehmed iusek’s variant, as one would expect, but though generally typical of regional folk culture, it possesses local features. thus, details such as the mother’s prayer and/or pledge, the episode about collecting wood or the appearance of god's messenger, gabriel that were considered important by mehmed iusek, are not in marin angelov’s account. the storyteller spins his own yarn by inserting a series of new threads and so transforming certain traditional fragments. these, as fieldwork amongst storytellers in the balkans indicates, consist, often but not always, of a number of textual units that constantly reemerge from a dormant but potent community cultural memory. these patterns also spell out the vernacular vocabulary of local narrative tradition, by revealing its store of conventional words and expressions, together with the general paradigmatical rules of its transformational grammar. these text-units are repeated en bloc in the actual performance of the story (the parry-lord thesis), thus creating in a genuinely original manner the next (though never the ultimate) variant. the absence of certain components shows that a change in the substructure of the given narrative is inevitable. often the law underlying the process of textual transmission in a traditional oral environment demands the insertion of a new fragment, or a transformation of the old. or, to put it more precisely, these patterned textunits determine the configuration of the motifs which shape the metatext of any traditional narrative. thus, in contrast to the story of mehmed iusek, in the account given by marin angelov, the wood topic appears absent: father and son go not to collect wood, but to pick crocuses. yet in this way the forest topic becomes even more palpable; whereas in mehmed iusek's narrative the passage about ibrahim and his son going to collect wood appears seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 48 initially to conceal the real task of sacrificing the boy there, in marin angelov's variant the text-unit about picking crocuses frames the forest as the ultimate locus for the filial sacrifice even more directly. at the same time, through the name of the crocus in local turkish dialect (navruz) the symbolic dimensions of pre-islamic concepts of the new year (nawruz, navruz, nayruz, nau roz) festivities in zoroastrianism are evoked.(28) from the structural point of view, this story is held together as a narrative entity by blocks of direct speech inserted into self-contained units. more than that, as far as allah's presence is concerned, in marin angelov's narrative there is only a voice from above. the first piece of direct speech comes immediately after the introduction when god declares: "you will have a son!" it marks not only the father’s first vision in this text, but also the biblical and/or qur’anic motif of the divine promise. there then follows the second vision in which allah calls upon abraham again, now speaking in the imperative mood: "you must slaughter this boy! you must slaughter the boy!" this second call from above functions also as a test of faith for god’s bosom friend.(29) for the third time god speaks. then the father submits. since islam means "submission," so the muslim interpretation of the saga of abraham from venets portrays him as the first among the men "who had submitted", whilst the kurban-bairam ritual re-enacts what happened to him on the sacred threshold of a new beginning. such is myth, "a sacred tale about past events which is used to justify social action in the present" [leach 1983: 8]. thus too, the proem of marin angelov’s story declares that the saga of filial sacrifice is simply an account of what "remains from muslim times", and what "has been left to us from our grandfathers, and the saints." later, when the voice of god demands the sacrifice of his only son, we hear the echo of this in the father’s order to the mother: "woman! give the boy his coat; we are going for flowers, for crocuses!" once again direct speech marks the next step in the marin angelov’s account. at the same time, the opposition of heaven and earth is further developed. in terms of the gender dimensions of the universe in which the prophet and his offspring act, it may be presented as an interaction of the type, father equals high while mother equals low, or in other words, allah gives orders to the father which he passes on to his wife. 49 the climax of the drama is indicated by the next insertion of direct speech, the dialogue between slayer and victim: "father! what are you going to do?" "i am going to slaughter you!" subsequently, the story is presented by the narrator as third-person narrative, a silent drama about the divine test of the first among those "who submitted." it ends though with direct speech signifying allah's intervention: “finally, on allah's behalf, on behalf of god, a ram descended to him from above! at that very moment a male ram came and replaced the boy! ‘slay this ram!’” thus allah's final appearance in the great trial in marin angelov’s tale, is heard rather than seen. it is also the voice that returns the son to his father to live and replaces the boy with the sacrificial ram, thus encoding the mystery of transcendent birth. in other words, according to the story from venets, eternal life is created by the ceremony of kurban-bairam. a few further details in marin angelov’s story require elucidation. the narrator emphasizes that the father takes "a big knife and a rope" with him to the forest, a detail which serves to introduce the most dramatic part of the scenario. it follows the canonical biblical account of the saga of abraham, thus presenting a version different from mehmed iusek’s. this contradiction is important, since it indicates that, whether the boy is actually bound or not in the story, this motif is regarded as a crucial element in the justification of the ritual behavior of the main participants in the kurban-bairam rites. finally, in the venets story, the prophet who is prepared to sacrifice his son is ismail, not ibrahim. thus the character in folklore, who epitomizes the muslims’ ancestral roots, combines the image of the father in the biblical and/or qur’anic versions of the abraham saga with the name of the son. as far as slavic and balkan oral tradition is concerned, this reversal of the characters’ names is not unusual (see appendix, text 4), and shows that folk convention has its own ways of interpreting biblical and/or qur’anic themes, often remembering types labeled by particular names rather than the actual names themselves. another version of the saga of ibriam was recorded on 28 november 1986 in northeastern bulgaria, in the village of malŭk porovets (razgrad district) by milena benovska. the storyteller had previously been a hodja-helper, and at the time of the recording had just been appointed a hodja (priest). he was quite reluctant to tell the ibrahim saga and refused seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 50 pointblank to relate "the handsome iusuf (joseph)," because "they are from the qur’an, and it is wrong to recount them incorrectly." in his view, these stories should either be read from the qur’an or recited by an afuz(30) (professional storyteller of spiritual texts), who knows them by heart. the plot of the legend recorded by benovska generally adheres to patterns dominant among bulgarian muslims, though it includes the akedah topic; the father binds ismail’s arms and legs. particularly significant here, though, is the fact that the divine ram that replaces the son is a kanŭlia, a detail implicitly relating to the ritual of henna-dying in the mystery of initiation (see above). it also has silver horns, a detail signifying its divine origin. one final characteristic of the traditional culture of slavia islamica: according to the legend, "issa peigamber who sacrifices his son", recorded in 1982 by stoianka boiadzhieva from bulgarian pomaks in ribnovo village, (gotse delchev district between the rhodopes and pirin mountains), the father’s name is issa, and the interrupted sacrifice of the son is regarded as usual as the divine event that gave rise to the kurban-bairam ritual.(31) what is important in this variant, however, is that, according to the storyteller, the great trial is believed to have taken place in his own village, "on that hill over there." biblical or qur’anic toponymy has here been replaced by bulgarian geographical landscape, with the result that the abraham saga not only acquires a familiar setting, but also transforms the storyteller's neighborhood into a blessed land. so bulgarian space, and therefore bulgarian toponymy, acquires sacral status, and bulgaria becomes the holy land. in this way, the hill where the great trial is believed to have taken place turns into the heavenly altar, with the folklore text revealing in ethnopoetic terms the symbolic dimensions of the altar concept. the latin word altare derives from altus, (high), and hence means “that which is higher than the rest of the temple” [fasmer 1986: i, 72]. thus, in the pomak version of the legend of filial sacrifice the world of the storyteller encompasses the entire universe, becoming its sacred centre, its "altar." it is obvious from the folkloric versions of the qur’an, recently recorded in bulgaria, that ibrahim, (ibraim, ibriam) personifies obedience to allah, just as in christian folk 51 tradition avram epitomizes obedience to god. thus both muslims and christians use the character of abraham to spell out the paradigm of the "true faith." i cannot but share haim schwarzbaum's conviction that "there is no doubt that a folkloric approach to the qur’an's extremely interesting stories does more to advance our knowledge of the holy book of islam than many a theoretical treatise ignoring the intricate process of oral narration" [schwarzbaum, 1982: 12]. the folk interpretations of the abraham saga found among balkan muslims strongly corroborate his statement. conclusion the results of my fieldwork amongst rural communities in eastern europe, the balkans in particular, indicate that the oral tradition of non-literate story-tellers of slavia orthodoxa and/or islamica is an intriguing cultural phenomenon, in which the three religions of the children of abraham are often interwoven. analysis of these folklore materials can, therefore, play a crucial role in an anthropological approach to the oral dimensions of the religions of the book. it offers a starting point for the further critical evaluation of the vernacular scope of the holy scriptures, for it shows explicitly how the biblical and/or qur’anic account of abraham goes through various transformations, facilitating the comprehension of these processes within the context of comparative religious studies. moreover, analysis of folklore at the syntagmatic level explains how the storyteller puts together a structure, which has links with various cultural and confessional paradigms seen from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective, into a single linear text which is performed in accordance with the canons of local tradition. this analysis illumines a forgotten stage in the oral evolution of the biblical and/or qur’anic account of abraham, revealing also how the oral hypostases of the sacred books came about. on the other hand, it also shows how the cycles of islamic folk narratives about abraham emerge and coexist in a given local tradition; that is, by scrutinizing these folklore materials at the syntagmatic level we can explain the correlation between the jewish, christian and muslim traditions at the paradigmatic level. in fact, a study of the morphology of the abraham legend can also reveal the underlying rules of the "transformational grammar" that generated the basic cultural and confessional patterns of the three monotheistic religions. in other words, these seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 52 rules shaped an initial paradigm from which judaism, christianity and islam eventually sprang. it is in the light of these points that the significance of folk tradition can be appreciated. however, as schwarzbaum emphasizes, some classical scholastic approaches to the qur’an are reluctant to recognize that "mohammed's deviations from the biblical pattern or from the biblical text would seem quite natural and even reasonable" if one is acquainted "with the basic laws of oral storytelling, as well as of oral transmission and diffusion of tales" [schwarzbaum, 1982:11-12]. while contemplating the relationship between the qur’anic stories and their biblical counterparts, schwarzbaum also points out that: mohammed's dependence upon his jewish and christian informants is well known. anyone studying the qur’an at once perceives that its main narrative fibre has been spun from hearsay. it is by no means derived from literary, written sources. undoubtedly mohammed obtained his biblical tales from oral channels, or from scraps of oral information assiduously gathered by him during several years (both in his meccan and medinah periods), from both learned and ignorant jews and christians, i.e. both from persons well-versed in the so-called "asatir al-awwalin" = "ancient stories", and from persons who were not well versed in the biblical stories [schwarzbaum 1982: 11-12]. furthermore, the folkloric versions of the story of abraham's sacrifice, as told by muslims, contain certain motifs foreign to the canonical qur’anic text. these can be traced back either to the old testament account (in its canonical and apocryphal forms), or to the hebrew narratives of rabbinic and midrashic tradition. last but not least, this essay presents evidence of the survival of folk religion in eastern europe despite decades of "aggressive totalitarian atheism" [sedakova 2001: 13136], offering survival strategies not only to those who did not share the communist creed, but also those who did. it may be hoped that it will provide answers not just as to how, but also as to why today folk religion remains such a vibrant force in the region. 53 notes 1 the biblical saga of abraham is found in gen. 11: 26-35: 10; some new testament references to the old testament patriarch may be found in acts 7: 2-19 and hebrews 11: 8-22. 2 the qur’anic account of abraham's (ibrahim's) life is scattered through the text of suras 2, 4, 6, 21, 29, 37, 51. 3 the term "slavia orthodoxa," together with its counterpart "slavia romana," were coined by riccardo picchio. he stresses "the impact of ethno-linguistic factors on the formation of slavic cultural systems in central and eastern europe" [picchio 1984: 1], taking his point of departure from "the division of historical slavdom into two main areas, belonging to the jurisdiction of the eastern orthodox churches (slavia orthodoxa) and to that of the roman church (slavia romana) respectively." at the same time, he points out that "the boundary lines between the two cultural areas of orthodox slavdom and roman slavdom were never fixed in a definite way... this means that the concepts of slavia orthodoxa and of slavia romana apply to cultural traditions rather than to territorial or administrative units. within each of these two main areas of civilization, the self-identification of the slavs with certain cultural and linguistic systems was directly affected by the ideological and linguistic models that the ecclesiastical organizations introduced into their spiritual patrimony" [picchio 1984: 3; also tolstoi 1998: 30-42]. 4 picchio’s term allows for further expansion to embrace non-christian religious communities as well. thus, in order to clarify the ethno-confessional framework of muslim slavdom as a counterpart to slavia orthodoxa and slavia romana, it may be useful to employ the term, slavia islamica (or musulmana), so making it possible to place muslim communities, where the slav language is the mother tongue (such as the muslims of bosnia, hercegovina and sandžak, and the pomaks of southern bulgaria and northern greece) in a separate socio-cultural category. in this way not only is pax christiana taken into consideration, but also the realm of islam. thus, instead of the traditional division of the slavs into western, eastern and southern, based on formal seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 54 geographical principles and the linguistic differences, i have proposed, and will use here, a new approach to the division of the slavic world based predominantly on religious faith. this new paradigm has regard not only for traditional cultural patterns in slavic communities, but for their current transformations; thus the division of the slavic domain into: slavia orthodoxa, slavia catholica, slavia evangelica, slavia islamica, and slavia judaica. in this not only formal geographical location, but also socio-cultural (including linguistic and religious) parameters of the communities concerned are regarded as determinants in the shaping of their ethnic, national and religious identities [badalanova 1994; also zhivkov 1994: 5; karagiozov 1996: 80]. 5 on the epistemological status of folk religion as a field of research, see gustavsson [2000: 97-117; 2001: 5-8], barna [2001: 9-21]. 6 on the sacred dimensions of the celebration of the great sacrifice amongst other muslim communities, see combs-schilling [1989: 233-244, 320-321], who also offers an analysis of the islamic myth of ibrahim as a counterpoint to the jewish and christian myth of abraham [1989: 262-271]; for the blood sacrifice ritual in the framework of the heterodox muslim alevi and bektashi belief systems, see erginer [1998: 471-478]. on muslim legends about abraham, with special regard to extracanonical biblical tradition, and to "further midrashic expansion among the arabs" in particular, see the entry on abraham in singer [1901: 83-96]. 7 see in this connection andersen [1991: 17-58], aune [1991: 59-106], damrosch [1987: 10, 155, 233-241], kelber [1983], kirpatrick [1988], lang [1985], niditch [1993], petkanova-toteva [1978], rogerson [1978], ruger [1991: 107-120], schwarzbaum [1982: 10-60], soards [1991: 334-350], stojčevska-antić [1987]. on the theological interpretation of the abraham saga, see herbert [1962] and janzen [1993]; on the textual interpretation of the biblical story about isaac’s ordeal, see greenwood [1985: 123-129]. 8 in the preface to the special issue of bŭlgarski folklor on popular religion as a cultural phenomenon, mikhailova offers an excellent analysis of the content and range of meanings of the two terms, "folk orthodoxy" and "customary christianity" in slavic folklore studies [vol. 26: 3, 2000: 3-15]. 55 9 especially evgenia mitseva, stoianka boiadzhieva and milena benovska (now at the ethnographic institute), to whom i express my sincere gratitude. these texts have been published in bulgarian in the essay written with anisava miltenova on the representation of apocryphal texts about abraham in balkan folklore and medieval literature [badalanova and miltenova 1996: 246-49]. 10 on the life and customs of the bulgarian pomaks [bŭlgaro-mokhamedani] in the rhodope mountains, see nikola a. kŭrdzhiev's letters/travel notes in the newspaper, napred 06.12.-11.27.1888 or vasileva et al. [1999: 63-67]. according to the preliminary results of the census of 1885 in eastern rumelia (iztochna rumeliia), bulgarian pomaks [bŭlgari mokhamedantsi] and turks, who comprised the muslim population of the region, numbered 200,498, with christians 681,734 and jews 3982 out of a total population of 975,030. the term, eastern rumelia, denoted bulgarian territory between the rhodope and balkan ranges that, after the treaty of berlin, 1878, was regarded as an autonomous province of the ottoman empire. on the numbers and location of bulgarian pomaks and ethnic turks nowadays, see poulton [1994: esp. chs 9-12], and the bibliography in blagoev [1996: 70-82], as well as venedikova [1996: 4-20] and lozanova's [1996: 21-37]. on the political discourse of pomak ethnic and/or confessional identity, see brunnbauer [1999: 35-50] and balikci [1999: 51-57]. 11 the appellation peigamber (messenger) traditionally appears en bloc with the name of muhammed. hence, in the folk narratives of bulgarian muslims, the image of the father is related to that of "muhammed the seal of the prophets". on the other hand, the name isa also underscores the arabic version of name of jesus christ: isa, the son of mary, also recognized by qur’anic tradition as a prophet. on the image of isa (jesus christ) in the traditional belief system of bulgarian muslims, see lozanova [2000: 63-71]. 12 a term used by todor ivanov zhivkov, liubomir mikov, vania mateeva, tsvetana georgieva and others to define the popular dimensions of religious phenomena in muslim cultural traditions [georgieva 1999: 76-78]. 13 the motif of the barren matriarch who conceives in her old age is a biblical locus seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 56 classicus; see gen. 16: 1-21: 2; on its interpretation in bulgarian folk tradition, see petkanova-toteva [1978: 190-91]. 14 the motif of "barrenness removed by prayer" is also found in arab folk tradition (type d 1925.3 in el-shamy [1995]). 15 recorded by me in february 1994 from the best singer of tales in the village of momina bania, a seventy-year-old christian woman stana todorova kasŭrova, who was born and married in the same village. she did not attend the local school (“because i was a girl, but not a boy, and thus not expected to go to study, but to stay at home and take care of my smaller brothers instead,” she said). however, she was a gifted woman with a quick mind, sharp memory and a beautiful voice which enabled her to become the ultimate leader of the village, recognized not only by the women but by the men too. square brackets in oral texts indicate insertions to make the meaning clear. 16 in midrashic tradition even the birth of abraham, very much like that of christ in christian tradition, is associated with the appearance of a bright new star [vermes 1961: 68-69]. 17 the blessing "may this household be blessed with children as many as the stars in heaven" is a verbal component of many magic rituals accompanying marriage ceremonies; it also functions as substructure to several christmas carols which are traditionally sung to the head of the household [kaufman 1982, nos 713, 718, 720, 727, 820, 821]. 18 quotations from the qur’an are taken from arberry [1982] 19 intriguingly, the star motif also features strongly in apocryphal versions of the abraham legend; for example in the “sermon of abraham the just” [slovo o pravednago avraama], ms of 1628 [badalanova and miltenova 1996: 228-33]. 20 on abraham's interest in stars, see also gen. 15: 3. on the star topic in the abraham cycle in midrashic tradition, see genesis rabbah 14: 10 and exodus rabbah 36: 6 [vermes 1961: 81-82]. 21 as combs-schilling argues, “popular understanding of the textually absent hajar is that she would have missed the point... and hence would have lost for all of humanity 57 the hope of divine connection" [combs-schilling 1989: 241]. further he asserts that such “is the nature of women as codified in basic cultural understandings, understandings upon which the founding myth depends, understandings that the ritual powerfully reproduces through time” [combs-schilling 1989: 241]. bulgarian muslim folklore materials do not support such misogynistic conclusions. moreover, “the framing of the female” (in combs-schilling's terminology) in mediterranean monotheistic religion (in this case islam) “as natural and by consequence inherently limited in terms of cosmic and collective things” [combs-schilling 1989: 241] is not compatible with recent findings based on fieldwork among rural communities in bulgaria. 22 recorded from stana bozhkova vlaeva, age 66, born and married in the same village, no schooling, a peasant farmer. 23 the prophetic dream motif is characteristic of arab folk tradition: type d 1812.3.3.5); see also types d 1810.8, m 209.1, v 511, v 512, v 513, v 515, v 517 [el-shamy 1995] where supernatural knowledge is associated with prophetic dreams and/or visions. in muslim tradition the dreams of prophets and/or saints are regarded as commands from god [el-shamy 1995: 542]. 24 the islamic folk motif of the dream as a reminder of an unfulfilled vow is type m 209.1 [el-shamy 1995, i: 274]; also types m 201.0.1, m 202, m. 205.5 and m 183. 25 the story of grandpa lord visiting the bulgarian land is the first bulgarian folktale to appear in print. collected in vidin in 1817, it was published in 1826 [nicoloff 1979: xviii-xix]. 26 recorded by me in july 1976 from an elderly christian woman, neda miteva miteva from rogozinovo village, the sakar mountain area, southern bulgaria. 27 perhaps an erratum; one may suppose that the word used by the storyteller was haram [sacred territory]. 28 in islamic tradition (and in arabic literature in particular), the word nawrūz (often spelled nayrūz) denotes new years day, the first day of the persian solar year, either the spring vernal equinox or, more popularly, the midsummer solstice [bosworth et al. 1993: 1047]. for further information on the nawrūz celebration as a "fossil-text" in seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 58 which traces of pre-islamic new year celebrations survive, see hughes [1895: 431] and esposito [1995: 243-44]. ivan miglev has shown that the nawrūz ritual is still alive among the muslim communities in bulgaria, though his work is based predominantly on materials recorded among crimean tatar communities [1997: 152-56]. the ritual crocus picking occurs when the pubescent boys of the village go to the nearby forest; for further information [miglev 1997: 153-56]. 29 the concept of abraham as god's bosom friend is classified by el-shamy as type v213. 30 apparently, from the arabic hafiz. 31 the storyteller, iliia lakov, b. 1925 in ribnovo, was a local farmer with four years schooling. bibliography andersen, ø. 1991. 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"tretata slavia" [the third slavia], duma, 1994. appendix text 1 there is a feast day called ram-bairam there exists a feast day called ram-bairam. where did this feast of ram-bairam come from? it came from the offspring of the peigamberi [prophets]. there was a certain peigamber called ibrahim, who was childless. his second wife, for he had married twice, called upon god: "give me a boy, a child! when he reaches six years of age, he will be offered to you as a kurban sacrifice!" so the unborn boy was promised by her to be slaughtered as a sacrifice. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 68 they were given a child, and they called him ismail. he turned six, but his father ibrahim forgot the pledge his wife had made. one night, while he was sleeping, he had a dream in which he was told: "hey, ibrahim, don’t you have to offer ismail as a sacrifice? didn't you promise to slaughter ismail? ismail is supposed to be offered up as a sacrifice!" then the father sacrifices a hundred rams, a thousand sheep and other creatures. yet every night he has the same dream. it happens seventy times. seventy times he has the same dream: "no, you did not keep your word!" after that he understood that he really must slaughter ismail. they didn't tell his mother. her name was hazhder. ibra[h]im said to hazhder, "hazhder, put henna on ismail's hands and feet. he is to come with me to get wood. we are going to the forest!" the mother took the boy into the house and did what she was told. ibra[h]im took his child by the hand and said: "come on, let's go!" then the devil, sheitan went to the mother and told her: "ismail is gone! his father ibra[h]im is going to slaughter him!" she answered: "why would he slay him? whoever heard of a child being sacrificed!" when the devil saw that there was no point trying to convince hazhder, he went to ismail, who was on the way to the forest with his father, and told the boy: "your mother", he said, "heard that your father is going to slaughter you and she wants you to come back." ismail took a stone and hurled it at the devil, sheitan. that is why now the devil only has one eye. he was hit and now he does not have one of his eyes! they reached the place, ibra[h]im took a knife and said: "my boy, i shall kill you! god told me to do it!" ismail replied: "if god said so, then i want to die just as i am! don't tie me up! slaughter me without tying me up!" 69 that is why today when we sacrifice an animal, we leave one leg untied. seventy times ibra[h]im tried to kill his son by cutting his throat, but still he didn't succeed, for the knife would not cut. finally, there appeared a ram from above with the messenger, whose name was dzhebrail [gabriel], he was the postman, he was the postman of the peigamberi! then the ram was slain and god said: "ibra[h]im, you did what you had to!" after that they returned home. since then that day has been named the feast of rambairam. ram-bairam is kurban-bairam, the day we offer a sacrifice. we give pieces from the sacrificial animal to our neighbors. i give some and say: "here, neighbor! this is for you!" and he gives me back some of his own food in return. one has to give meat to seven houses. the meat has to be from the right side of the animal. the left side we eat at home. 06. iii. 1987 story told by: chernoglavtsi village mehmed ibriamov iusek, (shumen district) born 1920 recorded by: evgenia mitseva text 2 you must slaughter your boy! this has survived from muslim times; it has come down to us from our grandfathers, from the saints. once there was a man called ismail who was going to sacrifice his boy. before that he had been childless. before his son was born he had a dream in which he was told: "you will have a boy!" so the boy was born; he grew and reached an age between five and six. from god he was sent another dream in which he was told: "you have to slaughter this boy! you have to slaughter the boy!" seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 70 this voice was sent from above by allah. what could he do after that, but take the boy. he dressed him in his best outfit. three times allah called upon him: "you have to slaughter the boy!" he had appeared to him. he took the boy in his best clothes and said to his wife: "woman! give the boy his coat; we are going to get some flowers, some crocuses!" so they set off with the boy. he [the father] took a big knife and a rope with him. he went to the forest and tied up the boy. he tied his hands, and he tied his feet so that the boy could not move. his son asked: "father! what are you going to do?" "i am going to slaughter you!" thereupon he began to do what he had to. he was going to slaughter the boy. he tried to cut with his knife, but the knife could not cut. it would not cut the boy! he hit a rock with it — and the rock split in two! finally, on allah's behalf, on god’s behalf,* a ram descended to him from above! at that very moment a ram appeared to replace the boy! "slay the ram!" that is why we now observe this celebration — it is called koch-bairam. that is why we commemorate it every year at this time by sacrificing a ram [koch]! the feast of koch-bairam changes its date every year; it can take place in the summer or the winter! it always changes, by ten days! every year it comes ten days earlier than the previous year! these deeds survived from muslim times! what i say is true. he was going to slaughter his son, but instead he slaughtered a ram, a male lamb. 04. iii. 1987 story told by: venets village marin iosifov angelov (shumen district) born 1925 recorded by: evgenia mitseva 71 * sometimes informants use the arabic word allah, and bog [the slavic word for god] side by side. text 3 a ram has to be sacrificed as the kurban offering this is an old story. it’s an old story about how ibriam was about to sacrifice his son ismail as a kurban offering, as a seliam [a sign of acknowledgement], and how he tied his hands. he took a knife, but just as he was about to kill him, there appeared a fat kanŭlia ram [a breed of sheep with eyes as though painted with henna] with silver horns, descending from above on god's behalf. it was sent by god. then the father was told: "you are supposed to kill this one instead!" since then it has been the tradition to sacrifice a ram, from that time it is. then a book* descended [in which this was written down], so they decided that a ram must be slaughtered for the kurban offering! the lamb must not be blind, and it has to be at least a year old. it should be as big as its mother and it can’t be lame; it has to be healthy. otherwise even if you slaughter five lambs, your sacrifice will not be acknowledged! 28. xi. 1986 story told by: malŭk porovets village atanas savov ivanov (isperikh area born 1920 razgrad district) recorded by: milena benovska * according to canonical muslim tradition, the month of ramadan was the time when the qur'an was revealed by allah (sura 2, col. 185). seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 72 text 4 who was issa issa was a pengamberin [a prophet]. when he married, his wife gave birth and issa gave god his word that he would slaughter his offspring as a kurban sacrifice to him. time passed and the day came. he was to see it in a dream! there was something above azreti issa — well, allah on high, i suppose, who said: "o, azreti issa, when will you fulfil your promise? when will you give it to me?" issa wondered what promise he had to fulfil. he didn't have anything that had to be given back to anybody, nor could he remember what he was supposed to offer. suddenly he remembered his promise and it occurred to him that it was time to sacrifice his child. he got up and told his wife, i cannot remember whether her name was azreti fatma,* or aishe,** to get the boy ready to go to the market, because he wanted to buy him some clothes. he told her: "get up and get the child ready. make him look smart, sew him an outfit — for i am taking him to the market!" as if they were going somewhere... as if they were going to buy clothes... he did not tell his wife that he was going to sacrifice him as a kurban offering! she got up, washed the child, combed his hair and dressed him smartly in beautiful clothes... his father took him to the top of that hill over there! he took the boy to that hill over there! then he took a knife, a special knife used for slaughtering... when they reached the hill, he started sharpening the knife. the child, who was old enough to talk, asked issa: "father, what are you doing?" "when you were born i gave god my promise to sacrifice you as a kurban offering", issa answered. "i saw in a dream that they want me to fulfil my promise!" "well, fine. i don't have anything against that, but i ask you not to tie my hands or feet!" begged the boy, for his father was preparing a rope to tie the hands of his child, so that he wouldn’t struggle. again he pleaded: 73 "father, do not tie my hands or feet; i shan’t struggle, but try to kill me in one go! i don’t want you to make me suffer!" the boy lay on the ground and the father began cutting the child's throat, or rather trying to cut it, for no matter how hard he tried, or however hard he pressed on the knife, there wasn't a scratch to be seen on the child’s neck. once, twice, still nothing. next to the boy there lay a rock. it said: "hey, fellow, why on earth are you trying to kill your child?" the father swung his knife in anger and split the rock into two. but still the knife did not cut the child's neck. suddenly, issa heard a ram bleating. it was allah who had sent the ram. he didn't really want the child as a sacrifice; he was just testing issa to see if he was ready to give his child to god as he had promised! so, allah sent a ram; issa heard its cry and a voice came from above: "hey," he said, "azreti issa, you fulfilled your promise," he said, "but don't kill the child," he said, "slaughter the ram instead!" so he killed the ram as a kurban [sacrifice] and let the child live... that's it. that's all i know; i don't know any more than that. i heard it like that, from the old folk, from the hodja [muslim priest]. 21. x. 1982 story told by: village of ribnovo ilia lako (gotse delchev area) born 1925 recorded by: stoianka boiadzhieva * according to muslim tradition, fatima was the favorite daughter of the prophet mohammed. ** ayesha was the prophet mohammed’s most beloved wife; he married her when she was still a child and died in her arms seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 29 review of the memory of the earth: lithuanian lqends edita korzonaire, vytautas magnus university, kaunas, lithuania this past year bas seen the publication of the memmy of the earth: lithuanian legends. prepared by b. kerbelyre and published by the institute of lithuanian literature and folklore. this is a book which bas the unique intent of stimulating ecological and historical preservation efforts through folk narratives, specifically legends. the target readership is folklorists and others interested in folklore and in conservation. there are three parts to this book: a foreword, the texts themselves, nwnbering 490, and explanatoiy notes. most of the texts were selected from the manuscript archive of the institute of lithuanian literature and folklore. the institute bas a repositoiy of over 4000 legend texts and the cataloguer of this body of narrative was b. kerbelyre, the compiler of the book under review. the memmy of the earth includes some texts from printed somces. already published texts were used in those few cases where the narratives were unique. the presentation of all materials is faithful to the original and thus, in most cases, the texts are transcriptions of recordings from authentic folk narrators. the element common to all of the texts is that they deal with nature. the narratives selected for inclusion are grouped into eleven chapters and organized by geographical region: "in the neighboihood of vilnius, " "the districts of kaunas, " "papareiai, trakai, and kemave," "the earth of iemaiciai," "central lithuania, " "eastern lithuania, " "from raigardas to simnas, " " panemune," "the land of lietuvininkai," "siiduva," and "from lithuania as a whole." the legends themselves tell about living stones which were brought by mythological beings. there are stories oflakes which move and rivers which compete with one another. some narratives tell about mansions, churches, and treasures inside of mountains. photographs of the geological and archeological monuments in question accompany the texts and provide useful and interesting illustrations. they were taken from the archeology section of the institute of the histoty of lithuania, from the visual and sound archives of lithuania, the center for cultmal heritage, and the center for documentation and prepared for publication by the archeologist v. vaitkevicius. the third part of the book, the explanatoty material, gives background information on each of the texts and lists the sources of all of the photographs. a table of the abbreviations used is provided and information on the cataloguing of lithuanian texts and on the relationships between them is included. the memmy of the earth is an attractive and aesthetically pleasing publication with useful information for everyone. seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 2 microsoft word folks05.doc 57 aleksandr kondratiev. on the banks of the yaryn (middlebury studies in russian language and literature 28). trans. valentina g. brougher. new york: peter lang, 2004. 226 pp. bibliography. $66.95 (cloth). isbn 08204-6746-4. valentina brougher's translation of on the banks of the yaryn by aleksandr kondrat�ev' (here transliterated as kondratiev) , should be required reading for students of russian literature, culture and folklore. based on kondrat�ev's 1930 original, brougher's insightful translation includes a list of characters, helpful notes to the reader, an introduction with detailed information on kondrat�ev's life and oeuvre, an appendix with descriptions of demonic spirits (spirits of water, forest and field) and practitioners of magic (�knowing man,� magic healer, sorceress, witch) and a short bibliography. the introduction provides the reader with a brief personal and literary biography of the author, a quick survey of russian and western criticism on his work and extensive information on the background of the novel as well as insight into kondratiev's unique artistic vision behind the novel. indeed, as brougher points out, this novel truly offers the reader an �encyclopedia of russian/ukrainian folk belief.� she continues, �the work portrays all the major unclean spirits of water, marsh, field, and forest that inhabit the folk imagination; various magical and religious rituals as well as practices and traditions dating back to pagan times; celebrations connected to the agricultural calendar that regulated people's lives; and folk stories and legends that have arisen out of the people's need to understand the world around them� (p. xx). aleksandr alekseevich kondrat�ev (1876-1967) was relatively unknown, even in his native russia, until 1993 when a volume of his prose entitled sny (dreams) was published in st. petersburg. the volume included the novel on the banks of the yaryn, first published in 1930 by mednyi vsadnik, a russian émigré press in berlin (p. xi). as brougher mentions, it is not surprising that kondrat�ev's novel was overlooked by soviet critics as the work did not fit �stalin's call for fiction to model the achievements of the first five-year plan� (p. xii). while brougher discusses vladimir toporov's 1990 seminal study on the novel (published in italy), further information on the circumstances leading to the publication of the novel in russia in 1993 is lacking. a brief mention of the political and literary context under which the novel was published would have been helpful for students. brougher�s statement that on the banks of the yaryn is �one of the finest examples of the interest in slavic folklore that profoundly influenced russian literature in the first decades of the twentieth century,� is an assertion may very well be true. a short overview of the more recent reemergence of interest in slavic folklore would, however, offer further understanding of how the novel came to be published in russia in 1993. brougher's introduction offers an insightful analysis of on the banks of the yaryn. kondrat�ev's narrative consists of two parallel worlds, the demonic and the real, where lust for vengeance and power, and a longing for love (sometimes of a rather nontraditional sort) reign. the novel abounds with creatures of the water, forest and fields. death is the inevitable fate of those who seek vengeance (the leshii), as well as for those upon whom vengeance is sought (pull-by-the-leg and maksim). the struggle for power manifests itself on several levels of the narrative. just as the vodianoi clearly controls the river by exerting power over the ancient idol perun, the master holds witches� balls in order to exert his power over his folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 58 subjects and in the parallel world, aniska uses witchcraft to ensnare and control maksim. kondrat�ev�s sexually charged narrative blurs the line between lust and love among demons and mortals. in his world, natural elements such as fire and water ultimately prove deadly for demons and mortals alike. this engaging translation contains a few misprints (pp. 51, 70, 125, 183 and 190). while the notes to the reader are extensive and extremely well researched, identification of the use of poppy seeds (pp. 24-26, 147) and the drawing of a circle around oneself (p. 79) to ward off evil and the cutting off, and then backward placement of a dead person's head, hands and feet in the grave to disorient him (p. 173) would benefit the reader. brougher's work is a fine example of outstanding translation. her words are carefully chosen; her sentences are thoughtfully constructed. while she praises the original for creating for the reader a �visually rich, concrete and palpable reality,� her translation is to be commended for doing the same (p. xix). clearly an experienced translator, brougher has also co-translated fertility and other stories, an anthology of vsevolod ivanov's prose. brougher's own writing is infused with a special kondrat�evian quality that is most apparent in the conclusion to her introduction of the novel, which is both eloquently written and beautifully poetic. brougher's translation of on the banks of the yaryn offers a wealth of observations and will prove informative to scholars and students alike. kristin peterson-bidoshi union college microsoft word folkxiv_author.doc reports folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 155 reports folklore research resources in east european studies: the library and archives of the american hungarian foundation judit hajnal ward rutgers university new jersey, u.s.a. sylvia csűrös clark st. john’s university new york, u.s.a. resources for researching the folklore of immigrant groups vary from culture to culture. hungarian americans constitute several generations of immigrants who arrived in different waves. their history of immigration shows strong similarities to that of many other ethnic groups from east europe and their reasons for leaving can be attributed to the turmoil in the region in the late nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries. folklore parallels to other ethnic groups have yet to be defined by scholars. a unique source for research in the area of folklore is the library and archives of the american hungarian foundation and it is a resource that can be used by folklorists and other scholars in many fields, not just by those interested in hungarian studies. effects of the revolution in information access on research the rapid changes in information access and communication created new paths for research, publication, and scholarly communication. subject guides on the homepages of academic libraries offer detailed descriptions of the collections themselves and of access policy. they have been created to assist scholars in deciding whether to access a resource electronically from a remote research location or to plan a trip and conduct research on site. researchers increasingly need collection descriptions, guides, and finding aids to keep focused, to map out new directions for their research, and to be able to find and retrieve all relevant data. browsing or searching large aggregated vendors’ databases on any topic helps in locating full-text articles, bibliographic records, or just new research ideas. popular search engines geared toward the academic community, such as google scholar among others, provide 156 access to an incredible amount of material in all research fields, affording more visibility to traditional library and archive collections. library collections related to hungarian studies in the united states initiatives to preserve hungarian heritage in the united states by fostering hungarian ethnic collections in libraries, archives, museums, cultural and folklore centers have been successful to such an extent that it would be a heroic task to compile an organized list with detailed information about all hungarian holdings. in the past decades, numerous electronic resources of differing value were added to serve the information needs of the research community. in addition to the noteworthy collection at the library of congress, a number of large academic libraries feature hungarian collections. these include columbia, yale, harvard, and indiana universities. significant hungarian collections at public libraries should also be noted and include the new york public library and the cleveland public library. their collections have played a considerable role in the process of assimilation as well as in the construction and preservation of hungarian identity [kovács 1987: 248-260]. comprehensive data on hungarian collections in the united states have not been assembled to date and no exhaustive study of the vast resources that hungarian collections contribute to research and scholarship has been published. in the 1990s, the national széchényi library (budapest, hungary) launched a survey to inventory hungarian collections outside hungary and managed to publish its inventories of canada, australia, and several western european countries [kovács and faragó 1994]. data on collections in the united states, however, were not published. the best data come from worldcat, the global catalog covering libraries throughout the world as well as previous individual research studies, and these indicate that about 165 libraries in the united states have hungarian collections. a recent study resulted in the compilation of a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to slavic and east european collections in north america. it surveyed the libraries of nearly 90 institutions, and includes references to academic libraries with hungarian collections [urbanic and feinberg 2004: 1-193]. hungarian ethnic collections in the united states hungarian american libraries and holdings are considered an important type of ethnic resource outside the home country.(1) generally reports folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 157 speaking, ethnic collections evolve in response to a community’s need for reading material in the mother tongue. establishing and maintaining ethnic collections also reflects the efforts of the community to preserve cultural heritage and pass it on to future generations. another important factor is the need in the community and the host society for materials to use in the teaching of the minority culture. the host community may also be motivated by a desire to conduct research on a particular community and its culture. as a result of these different needs, a variety of ethnic collections have been produced by the hungarian american community and these complement those resources developed and maintained in american public and academic libraries. although the two types of collections have their similarities, hungarian ethnic libraries, those maintained by communities and individuals from the hungarian american communities, do differ from collections maintained by large institutions. community collections depend on individual initiative and partnerships within the community rather than on the american library system. the relationship between the community and the home country also plays a significant political and professional role. finally, technical advancements, including access, communication, and transportation are also decisive [kovács 2008]. throughout history, wherever hungarian communities have formed, library collections have evolved as one of the indicators of national identity. the earliest collections, those comprised of a couple hundred books, were established by hungarian organizations. societies, associations, religious communities, hungarian houses and cultural centers were interested in serving the popular demand for reading material, and their number is estimated to roughly equal the number of organizations [kovács 2008: 25-36]. dependent on support from the members of the community and hungarian resources, community collections suffered the attrition that was inevitable as the generation of hungarian americans they served advanced in age. fragments of collections of this type were identified by hungarian visiting fulbright scholar ilona kovács from the ownership stamps in the library collection of the bethlen home, ligonier, pa. this is a reference library which aims to document and preserve hungarian heritage and came to house many of the early collections. hungarian americans and ethnic identity hungarian americans represent an immigrant group that has a history of cherishing and preserving its ethnic and cultural heritage. this 158 phenomenon can be partly explained by the traditions established by a major wave of immigrants that arrived in the united states at the turn of the previous century. first-generation east-european immigrants who hoped to return had hardly any option other than to maintain their ethnic identification; for them it was an inescapable part of what they were [gellén 1985: 25-35]. these immigrants, often classified more precisely as migrant workers, crossed the atlantic ocean with the sole purpose of making a decent income; they never intended to stay in the united states. many of them returned to the home country permanently after a few years, while others traveled back and forth between the two countries several times. a significant proportion, however, never had the chance to return to their homeland. political events and the economic situation in the twentieth century precluded any possibility of going back. many of these immigrants, mostly peasants from rural hungary, never relinquished their mother tongue, their national identity, or their desire to establish their own ethnic community [degh 1966: 551-556]. further hindered from returning by immigration laws and quotas in the united states and in hungary, this first wave of hungarian americans found themselves in a situation that favored preservation of the inherited hungarian culture. new groups of carriers of traditional culture evolved both from the descendants of the first wave of immigrants and from new waves of arrivals from hungary. obviously, the american-born sons and daughters of hungarian immigrants could not completely ignore the surrounding culture and quickly assimilated into american society. many of them, however, became just as concerned with preserving and perpetuating their cultural heritage. despite differences in their background, the drive to establish and promote hungarian american communities, with or without the hungarian language, has turned out to be a major part of their identity in the united states. various local and transnational networks developed by ethnic institutions include churches, mutual aid societies, schools, and youth organizations.(2) religion was one significant factor in maintaining hungarian heritage and identity. hungarian churches were built at the beginning of the twentieth century and vibrant hungarian communities bloomed around them, providing an opportunity to practice religion and cherish hungarian culture. churches also served as repositories of tradition and familiar ways of being [tamas 1997: 615-634], while their publications, including bibles, song and prayer books, newspapers, bulletins and newsletters, documents on organizational and controversial religious reports folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 159 topics, as well as more secular calendars and anniversary publications, played an important role in linking disconnected and geographicallyscattered imagined communities [kovács 1998: 1868–1884]. hungarian americans: diversity and image the hungarian american population of about 1.5 million is diverse and composed of immigrants and several generations of their descendants with various social, political, economic, and educational backgrounds.(3) hungarians made their nation known in the united states as early as the time of the revolution of 1848-1849, when the fight for independence and the declaration of hungary’s autonomy within the habsburg empire resonated well with the american revolution. the first wave of immigrants at the end of 1849, called the forty-eighters, as well as hungarian political leader lajos kossuth, were welcomed as exiles to the united states. their presence contributed greatly to the favorable image that americans have of hungarians. similar enthusiasm for hungarian immigrants did not come again until a century later when hungarians fleeing the failed anti-soviet and anticommunist uprising of 1956 were given a hearty welcome. at that time about 40,000 so-called fifty-sixers, or freedom-fighters, settled in the united states. greatly influenced by these two important waves of immigrants, the hungarian american community has become a diverse and polarized group. as a result, the image and self-image of hungarians has shifted back and forth between that of the “noble hungarian” and the “hunky” [vardy 2001: 309-342]. migrant workers, mainly impoverished and underprivileged hungarian citizens who arrived in large numbers at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century only to face the unknown, meaning the life of the industrial worker, were generally classed in the “hunky” category, while those who fled repression in their homeland were considered noble. for both ends of the spectrum, preserving what they considered their cultural heritage, folklore, and language, as well as building ethnic communities to do so, served as a point of reference, a powerful tie to the homeland.(4) dps (displaced persons) and various other interwar and postwar refugees, including famous scientists, were another important wave of immigrants. some had difficulties assimilating; others did not, but all persistently conserved their hungarian image. this overview of hungarian immigration serves to indicate some of the controversies within the hungarian american community and points to the heroic efforts an organization must make to document various 160 perspectives. the american hungarian foundation in new brunswick, new jersey has been successfully working to fulfill this mission for over 50 years, while also serving the academic research community interested in hungarian and east european topics. the hungarian community in new jersey in addition to large hungarian communities in ohio, louisiana, and california, new jersey has traditionally had one of the largest hungarian populations. a quick google search on current hungarian organizations in central jersey yields an assortment of organizations, such as the hungarian historical society, american hungarian folklore centrum, the hungarian folklore museum in passaic, the american hungarian museum in teaneck, the hungarian boy scouts association in garfield, and the hungarian american athletic club in new brunswick. hungarian events in churches in perth amboy, woodbridge, and new brunswick also indicate efforts to preserve hungarian culture. a hungarian festival with a rich folklore program is held in new brunswick on the first saturday of every june. new brunswick, which attracted hungarians by offering them employment around the turn of the last century at johnson & johnson factories, has always been considered the center of the hungarian community.(5) this role was further strengthened when, after the tragically-failed 1956 hungarian revolution, camp kilmer in edison housed refugees from hungary. at that point, the american hungarian community proved its generosity and rushed to help the new arrivals. rutgers, the state university of new jersey, is one of the three north american institutions of higher education with a hungarian degree program, supported in part by the hungarian government since 1991. in this environment, the american hungarian foundation maintains the most significant hungarian library collection in the united states. the library and archive of the american hungarian foundation (6) the american hungarian foundation was established in 1955 at elmhurst college in illinois as the american hungarian studies foundation. elmhurst college had a program of hungarian studies. as august j. molnar, president of the foundation remembers: “the ideas that started the foundation were not new, everybody was talking about doing all of those things and anybody who has any vision of the american-hungarian community can see that this kind of effort has to be reports folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 161 accomplished somehow if it’s at all possible but simply how is it going to be done? we tried to do it.” [hajnal ward and csűrös clark 2009]. modest as always, professor august j. molnar, a first generation american, drew upon the inspiration of his professor at elmhurst, barnabás dienes, to mastermind what became one of the most influential organizations in the hungarian community.(7) an ordained minister of the united church of christ (calvin conference), son of a well-respected hungarian builder, professor of history at elmhurst college and rutgers, professor molnar has played a leading role in several research projects and was instrumental in establishing the hungarian studies program at rutgers university. his credibility and integrity have worked for the benefit of this non-profit organization “devoted to furthering the understanding and appreciation of the hungarian cultural and historical heritage in the united states” [american hungarian foundation website] and internationally. from its inception, the ambitious goals of the foundation extended far beyond establishing an academic program and included plans for a new building to house research facilities and to serve as a repository for american hungarian treasures. the history of the library and museum collection also goes back to elmhurst college. in the early 1940s, the collection of the hungarian department was maintained by the college’s library, and donations and purchases soon increased the number of titles. when the franklin and marshall college donated its entire hungarian collection to elmhurst, the library’s holdings came to total approximately 3,000 volumes. the newly-established american hungarian studies foundation put the library and museum program at the top of its priority list [kovács 2007: 116]. when the foundation relocated to new brunswick in 1959, the collection moved to rutgers university. in 1965, when the foundation found a new home at 177 somerset street, part of the collection was moved to this new location. the collection can now be found in the impressive building of the hungarian heritage center at 300 somerset street, which also houses the archives, museum, and gift shop. designed by architect lászló papp, a hungarian american 56-er, the hungarian heritage center in new brunswick is a hungarian american dream come true. since 1989, the building has been the home of a library containing more than 60,000 volumes. average yearly growth is 1,750 titles written in hungarian. the subjects covered are diverse, though the primary focus is on hungarian immigration history. complementing this collection is an extensive and diverse archival collection of rare books, manuscripts, and other documents of historical 162 significance. the library functions as an affiliate library of rutgers university libraries. its holdings are integrated into the university library’s online public access catalog (opac), which feeds data into national catalogs, such as oclc worldcat. this makes the collection accessible to the academic research community worldwide. the scope of the collection is best described by the stated purpose of the foundation, namely to preserve and document contributions to hungarian culture and american hungarian life. covering academic disciplines such as history, literature, sociology, linguistics, european studies, hungarian studies, the library constitutes the major research and reference resource in hungarian studies in the united states. a 7.5 by 11 centimeter bookplate is applied to each volume in the collection. the bookplate is a facsimile of the george washington award, presented each year by the american hungarian foundation in recognition of outstanding contributions to hungarian culture or the hungarian community by a person of hungarian background or a non-hungarian. the print collection serves scholars and students from any area of humanities conducting research on hungarian or comparative eastern and central european subjects (e.g., art, history, literature, linguistics, sociology). in addition to the scholarly audience, the foundation attracts a broader community of users, ranging from recent immigrants to secondor third-generation hungarians of all ages. they are interested in a variety of topics, such as genealogy, hungarian embroidery, immigration to the united states, american hungarian organizations in a given geographical location, or even recipes and sources of authentic hungarian food. library users work on dissertations, scholarly publications, term papers, books, or articles not only on hungarian topics, but also on related subjects such as folklore in the carpathian basin, genres of east european poetry, the history of radio free europe, or emerging economies, to name but a few topics. the archive of the american hungarian foundation has a unique document collection of hungarian and american hungarian materials. it is comprised mostly of bequests of individuals and organizations with hungarian background and can be considered a collection of exceptional historical value, providing primary data pertinent to a broad range of scholars. examples of research resources on contemporary history include the documents from camp kilmer and the united nations and newspaper clippings on the 1956 revolution. access to the archives is limited to scholars. the archive hosts the bethlen collection, a major collection of hungarian documents of the past two centuries (8) reports folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 163 the library and archives of the american hungarian foundation has diverse resources, while its subject scope defined by its collection development policies and its main source of acquisitions: donations by individuals and organizations. the collection features an enormous variety of materials with one common characteristic: every title in the library and the archive is associated with hungary or hungarians. the contributors to the collection vary. they include famous writers, poets, and scholars, clergy, craftsmen, businessmen, common people, and technicians. contributors also include amateur media creators who recorded audio and other media. there are submissions from painters and other artists, whose artwork was exhibited and then preserved on video tapes or in catalogs. the collection is not limited to a particular domain, style, format, or genre. it covers well-known literary works, collected works of one particular author, individual pieces, yearbooks and calendars, dictionaries, art books, reference books, small print, songbooks, scores, maps, memoirs, diaries, and guide books. also included are such official and personal documents as letters, postcards, notes, manuscripts, photos, and sound and video recordings. two noteworthy examples are handwritten letters by 19th-century hungarian political leader lajos kossuth and documents related to classical composer zoltán kodály. both are highly cherished assets of the collection. dates of publication or creation range from the 15th century to the present. most items were published in or originate from one of two countries: the united states and hungary, although there are titles from the many other countries in the world where hungarians live. as for display medium, the majority of the library collection is printed material, such as books, journals, and newspapers. in terms of periodicity, monographs are predominant. periodicals tend to be represented by individual issues, since the foundation does not have subscriptions or standing orders. other formats can also be found, namely video tapes in both ntsc and pal format, dvds, vinyl records, audio tapes, audio cds, microforms, photographic and painted material, handwritten manuscripts, maps, and scores. some materials can be found in electronic format and is also available online. a sample of recent publications based on research conducted in the ahf library and archives indicates the scope, depth, and caliber of research.(9) john matthews wrote a comprehensive monograph on the hungarian revolution of 1956 [matthews 2007]. a tribute to the 164 monuments of 1956 was written by beverly james [james 2008]. the library also helped with creative works, namely pat valdata’s novel [valdata 2008], and film director péter forgács brand new documentary entitled hunky blues. hungarian resources for folklore research at ahf library and archive the interest in folklore research on the part of hungarian americans goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when the hungarian american folk song was described as follows: in the hungarian-american folk-song, we find traces of the keen disappointment which the immigrant feels on his arrival in the castle garden immigration bureau. the strange language, unheard-of customs, callous treatment and ever-present uncertainty are expressed in sad stanzas. of all his sentiments, his longing for the old country and his fireside seem to furnish most of the themes for his new songs [ware 1916: 434-441]. folklore as a means of constructing and maintaining national identity among hungarian americans was also studied [degh 1984: 187-200]. as a result of hungarians migrating and re-migrating, hungarian folk traditions in the homeland were also influenced by new, american customs, as the migrant workers brought back and implanted new ideas, concepts, and techniques. hungarian folk songs with american elements were collected in the northeast regions of hungary which produced the largest numbers of immigrants. these songs obviously had their roots in “america,” and were composed and sung during the sojourn in america [gunda 1970: 406-416]. nowadays the internet, the best carrier of contemporary urban legends, also easily crosses the borders of the two countries and the so-called “hungarian suicide song” has gained a life of its own in both environments. according to this legend, the 1933 song by rezső seress called gloomy sunday has inspired people to commit suicide for decades [e.g., coleman 2004: 182]. in addition to the various recent renditions available on youtube, it is the topic of chat rooms and message boards all over the internet. in addition to its impressive music collection including recordings of folk and dance music, as well as sheet music and handwritten copies of folk music, the library offers a wide variety of traditional resources for folklore researchers in terms of topics, formats, and geographical locations. photos, letters, soundtracks, vinyl records, video tapes, and microfilms are just a few of the formats that complement the periodical collection, monographs, memoirs, and reference books. researchers will find ample material here on folk customs, voice and instrumental folk reports folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 165 music, dance, and even dolls depicting folk costumes from different hungarian-speaking regions of the carpathian basin such as transylvania, vojvodina, and the sub-carpathians. the library and archives is probably the best repository for original resources on hungarian american immigrants and should be the research destination of both linguists and folklorists. the present exhibit of hungarian folk art collection (magyar népművészet), on display through february 28, 2010, features furniture, pottery, homespun textiles, and embroidery. the exhibit debuts the museum’s folk art collection, including three recent major gifts and promised gifts. the strong ties that hungarian americans feel to religion and religious community make the bethlen collection a particular prize of the archive. the bethlen home was founded in ligonier, pennsylvania in 1895 by the hungarian reformed church. it served as a home for orphans and later became a retirement home. its entire document collection was deposited in the archives. archival processing has been completed and a finding aid is also available in ead (encoded archival description). with its 113 cubic foot content, the collection contains administrative records of the bethlen home, as well as official documents donated by protestant churches and various religious, fraternal, political and cultural organizations. these materials include registers, ledgers, budgets, administrative files, annual reports, minutes, correspondence, circulars, official programs of festive occasions, conventions, and other events, orders of worship, official publications, project plans, documents on public relations and lobbying activities, constitutions, by-laws and photographs. the annual bethlen calendar is a treasure of hungarian folk traditions. beyond culture the library and archives of the american hungarian foundation also documents the foundation’s history, activities, and significance in hungarian american culture. as a cultural organization, it sets an excellent example of success, including fundraising experience and best practices. it should be especially noted for its inclusivity: it does not exclude any groups. with its historical ties to the rutgers university community, it also contributes to the development of a college program in a minority language and culture, which draws heavily on local resources. reaching out to the community at large, it aims to serve researchers from the academic community, as well as independent scholars and k-12 students, including new jersey ethnic groups. with 166 the president of the ahf serving on boards and advisory committees, the history of the foundation proves that “there is a way to communicate to the community and to strengthen ties both ways” [hajnal ward and csűrös clark 2009]. because of the work of the american hungarian foundation, a global community interested in hungarian matters can benefit from an outstanding set of resources. notes 1 as noted by the most accomplished expert on hungarian libraries in the united states, ilona kovács of the national széchényi library, who was instrumental in establishing the hungarica www, among others. for more, see references. 2 for more, see tamas [tamas 1997: 615-634], who, based on the new brunswick area hungarians, describes hungarian organizations by types throughout the history of hungarian immigration). 3 there have been numerous studies examining the various waves of immigration. for the most comprehensive history of the topic, please cf. puskás 2000. 4 many of the 56-ers made a significant difference in hungarian culture and politics by their voluntary mission in the new country to preserve the hungarian heritage. an organization made up of rutgers alumni must be noted for its contributions. for more, see nagy 2000. 5 a case study of 120 years of hungarians in new brunswick analyzes the life of hungarian immigrants in the area from a sociological perspective in hungarian (smik 2004: 65-88). the role of new jersey hungarians in a more global, transnational ethnic network is presented also using new brunswick as an example (tamás 1997). 6 the preferred term is “american hungarian” over the more typical “hungarian american”. by putting american first, the goal is to put the emphasis on the hungarian, with american serving as an adjective [woznick 1995: 462] 7 the history of the american hungarian foundation is well documented by their 50th anniversary publication, including short biographies of their leaders [kovács 2007]. 8 the bethlen collection was cataloged and processed for preservation recently by a visiting fulbright scholar, dr. ilona kovács, retired head of the national széchényi library of hungary. a search aid is soon to be available online. the cooperation between the ahf library reports folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 167 and the national széchényi library is also exemplary in the preservation of cultural heritage. 9 the library operates as a single-librarian facility. our research was also assisted by the librarian-archivist, margaret papai. bibliography coleman, loren. 2004. the copycat effect: how the media and popular culture trigger the mayhem in tomorrow’s headlines. new york: paraview pocket books. degh, linda. 1984. “uses of folklore as expressions of identity by hungarians in the old and new country,” journal of folklore research 21(2-3): 187-200. degh, linda. 1966. “approaches to folklore research among immigrant groups,” the journal of american folklore 79(314) (oct. dec.): 551-556. gellén, józsef. 1985. “acceptance and rejection: proto-ethnicity in some hungarian-american writings,” melus 12(4): 25-35. gunda, bela. 1970. “america in hungarian folk tradition,” the journal of american folklore 83(330): 406-416. hajnal ward, judit and sylvia csűrös clark. 2009. unpublished interview with august j. molnar on the history of the american hungarian foundation. home page of the american hungarian foundation: http://ahfoundation.org. (consulted 14 may, 2009). james, beverly a. 2008. monuments to the revolution: hungarianamerican tributes to 1956. author’s publication. [s.l.] kovács, ilona. 1987. “problems and patterns in the development of library services for ethnic hungarians in the united states in the first decades of the 20th century,” hungarian studies 3(1-2): 248260. kovács, ilona and faragó lászlóné, (eds.). 1994. külföldi hungarikaanyagot őrző magyar könyvtárak címjegyzéke. [foreign hungarica to be found in hungarian libraries]. budapest: oszk. kovács ilona. 1998. “az amerikai egyházi kiadványok” [american religious publications] in a magyar művelődés és a kereszténység. a iv. nemzetközi hungarológiai kongresszus előadásai. róma– nápoly, 1996. szeptember 9–14. iii. [proceedings of the 4th international congress on hungarian studies, rome – naples, 9-14 september, 1996] szerk. jankovics józsef, monok istván, nyerges 168 judit. budapest–szeged: nemzetközi magyar filológiai társaság – scriptum rt. 1868–1884. kovács, ilona, (ed.). 2007. the hungarian legacy in america: the history of the american hungarian foundation, the first fifty years, 1955-2005. new brunswick, nj: american hungarian foundation. kovács, ilona. 2008. “az amerikai magyar könyvtári gyűjtemények, mint az etnikai könyvtári gyűjtemények típusai” [american hungarian library collections as types of ethnic library collections], nyelvünk és kultúránk 3: 25-36. matthews, john p. c. 2007. explosion: the hungarian revolution of 1956. new york, ny: hippocrene books. nagy károly 2000. emigránsok küldetésben – a magyar öregdiák szövetség–bessenyei györgy kör, hungarian alumni association, 1960–2000 [emigrants in a mission – hungarian alumni association-bessenyei györgy circle]. new brunswick, nj, debrecen: csokonai. puskás, julianna. 2000. ties that bind, ties that divide: 100 years of hungarian experience in the united states. ellis island series. new york: holmes & meir. smik, csaba ferenc. 2004. “valahol otthon lenni. tanulmány az amerikai magyar emigránsok százhúsz évérõl – new brunswick példáján keresztül” [to be at home. study of 120 years of hungarian life in america: the case of new brunswick], regio (1): 65-88. tamas, tamas. 1997. “evolution of a global community: new jersey hungarians in a trans-national ethnic network,” international journal of politics, culture & society 10(4): 615-634. urbanic, alan and beth feinberg. 2004. “a guide to slavic collections in the united states and canada,” slavic and east european information resources 5(3/4): 1-193. valdata, pat. 2008. the other sister. austin, tx: plain view press. várdy, steven béla. 2001. “image and self-image among hungarianamericans since the mid-nineteenth century,” east european quarterly 35(3): 309-342. ware, helen. 1916. “the american-hungarian folk-song,” the musical quarterly 2(3): 434-441. woznick, l. a. 2004. “the cover” libraries & culture, 39(4), 461-466. untitled reports 173 challenges in collecting data from family sources monica kindraka-jensen indiana university bloomington, indiana, usa in folklore research, data collection and its interpretation are ever a challenge. the actual experience of drawing someone out with the tape recorder on the table and notebook in hand, noting every word and grunt for posterity can prove daunting. for example: how does one don the mantle of an objective scholar to interview relatives? how best to account for the fact that interview comfort or discomfort reflects personal issues the interviewee may have had with one or the other of one’s own parents? the issue of relatives comes up because they were core elements of my 2005 research, “personal narratives and ritual observance: how personal narratives based on ritual observances shaped the family identities of two groups of second generation ukrainian-canadian sisters.” the “sisters” in this case happened to be my aunts—one set from my mother’s side (the r sisters) and the other from my father’s side (the k sisters). the challenges of collecting data from them, once i began to approach the project seriously, were many and complex. assuming the mien of a scholar obligated me to completely overhaul my interview approach. i had been taping relatives’ personal histories, but the burden of gathering academically sustainable, professionally conducted interviews that would prove integral to the success of my research was formidable. the methodology that allowed me to achieve this was the use of personal narratives. however, as a niece for the two groups of sisters, i was both an insider and an outsider, and as an academic researcher, i was definitely an outsider. on top of this, all my “aunts” were either my mother’s sisters or her sisters-in-law. for example, among the r sisters, katherine, who had nurtured a warm relationship with my mother, was more than delighted to talk freely with me about her experiences growing up in a homesteading ukrainian-canadian pioneer family. the eldest, nancy, somewhat estranged from my mother, was initially wary of being interviewed. she gradually warmed to the interview process when she saw that the questions clearly moved beyond family “gossip” and that she could be helpful. ann, who like nancy had distanced herself from folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 174 my mother and who, as an adult, was nearly a stranger to me, agreed reluctantly to be interviewed. she said very little during our time together. what is one to do, if in the case of ann, her scholar-niece simply wants to know how ann celebrated easter as a child, but ann cannot move past what sister vera did that hurt her feelings in 1958, or vice versa? alice, a younger sister and my mother’s closest ally in the family, was eager to be interviewed but concerned that her memories were not as whole or entire as those of her elder sisters and thus, not “correct.” at the farthest end of the spectrum, margaret, the youngest of the r sisters, simply refused to be interviewed. because my father rarely spoke about his family, particularly his sisters, and because geographical distance had prevented familiarity, i had little or no contact with the extended k family. nevertheless, kay, who over the years had maintained a warm relationship with my parents through the mails, enjoyed getting to know me and personally gloried in recalling k family stories. she gladly introduced me as someone who could be trusted to her sisters annie and pauline, for whom i had previously been known only as a distant relative who happened to share a family surname. thus, my interviews with all three k sisters, although different in length and substance became fulsome events in both content and tone. throughout, i was consistently aware of the reflexive quality inherent in my interviews. some interviews felt as if i were performing brain surgery on myself. interviewing my r and k aunts, i repeatedly found myself in circumstances almost identical to those described by barbara myerhoff in the context of her ground-breaking ethnographic study, number our days: required by…circumstances to work…among my own people, i found myself doing a complex enterprise that involved ceaseless evaluation of the effects of membership on my conclusions….it was soon evident that i knew more than i needed to, or sometimes wanted to, about the people i was studying, that at every juncture, i was looking at my own grandmother, which was to say a variation of myself-as-her, and as i would be in the future. we even looked alike. i responded with embarrassing fullness to my subjects’ uses of personal mechanisms of control and interpersonal manipulation…acknowledging over and over that indeed we were one. in time i began to realize that identification and projection were enormously rich sources of information but often painful and often misleading, requiring my constant monitoring.(1) in the course of all of the twenty-four r and k interviews, i was consistently engaged in a battle with myself to remain a dispassionate reports 175 listener and researcher. on several occasions, under a barrage of dissonant and off-topic discussions, i found myself clinging, like a hermit crab, to the list of points i had hoped to cover. in truth, every interview was its own entity. the dynamics of each interview were unlike those of the next interview, save for the questions i asked. how does one retain scholarly objectivity when one’s family is involved? my gradually adopted solution was to work from a short list of basic questions; to ask each person the same list of questions, though not necessarily in the same order; and then to try to respect the process of the interview, to let each speaker simply speak; and to distance myself emotionally whenever a potentially painful comment was made. i refused to be used as a conduit for settling old scores, particularly among the r sisters. and this perhaps helped me to maintain a semblance of objectivity and to open my mind to the rich texture of each interview. the “narrative ecology” of the r and k families, that is, the history of each family’s attitude towards sharing family information through narratives, became another interesting challenge encountered in collecting data.(2) what if one family values detailed analytical description and the other does not? what if the group that favors analytical description is not gregarious, that is, not prone to story telling in collective situations; whereas the other family relishes social situations in which to unwind with storytelling? these are variables that affect the reception of personal narratives. in the process of writing, i discovered a flaw in my methodology, for taped interviews alone do not capture the richness of the k sisters’ experience or what they communicate about the k family. because they took ritual activity for granted, the k sisters were reluctant to give detailed descriptions of their family’s ritual observation. if i were to follow each k sister for several months using a tape recorder and a video recorder, all the while taking detailed notes to track her activity, i would be able to draw a portrait of a family in which ukrainian-canadian ritual observation, albeit of a more contemporary form, still carries spiritual and magical power. the k sisters do not articulate their attitude. again and again in their narratives, they do not speak of all the activity that involved them and the k family, for example around christmas— preparation and contents of the twelve meatless dishes, watching for the first star on christmas eve, reverential feeding of the livestock and other ritual activities. these activities were second-nature to early k family life, part of an accepted and completely absorbed rhythm of ritual observance. it was unremarkable because it was simply what one did. at folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 176 present, surviving k siblings continue to practice ukrainian-canadian rituals, modified to fit the 21st century. they have not rekindled their ritual practice in order to embrace a newly fashionable ethnic-chic ukrainianism. they have continued to observe and conduct ritual events with the thread unbroken from their family’s emigration from galicia in western ukraine. furthermore, they are active and reverent church-goers and members, a line that goes back to their parents and grandparents. thus, knowing something to be true even when the subject is unwilling to acknowledge the point of fact as a point of fact, for example that the k sisters had the capacity to describe their family’s ritual observances in sparkling and faceted detail, i had to document it. but how does one document a vacancy? it is perplexing insofar as one must assiduously avoid trying to influence and thereby corrupt the material. by way of contrast, the r sisters value a certain quality of analytical observation and description. in the taped interviews, the r sisters, for their part, can articulate what their family did and how. they clearly describe ritual observation in their family and at the same time maintain that ukrainian-canadian ritual held no interest for them or their family. thus, they attempt to make it clear that early on they held themselves apart from ukrainian-canadian ritual practice and gradually dismissed it as old-world superstitions. this is communicated in their narratives. thus there is a difference between the two families in their narrative stance. the k family tends to perpetuate a tradition of telling stories. they speak easily by way of illustrating a point or generating humor with an anecdote or a narrative that is related to family events. for the most part, k family members are practiced in the art of narration and storytelling. indeed, they welcome opportunities to speak in the rhythms of telling a story; whereas, the r family as a group is less attached to story telling as a means of expression. unless asked pointedly, the rs do not speak in terms of narratives related to family events. many of the narratives on the r side in my study were stories that i had never heard before and i have been an integral part of the r family all of my life. in order to balance the discrepancies of descriptive detail and levels of affability (extroversion), i had to first understand that these differences existed and then to write about the differences clearly, lest the two families portray themselves as compass opposites, which they were not and which would lead the reader to form conclusions that the interview material did not support. in conclusion, the strategies i developed to answer some of the challenges i faced can be summarized as guidelines for field research in a reports 177 complex and sometimes confusing environment. the guidelines i adopted for myself are as follows: standardize as much as possible—it helps to keep the field level, try to stay out of the way, if need be tell yourself you are someone else in order to maintain objectivity, and above all try to write clearly and descriptively about what you perceive. the goal, as always, is to gather data and to draw conclusions from it as truthfully and honestly as can be achieved using a recognized and viable methodology. notes 1 myerhoff and ruby 1992: 340 2 mcadams 2004: 247 bibliography mcadams, dan p. 2004. generativity and the narrative ecology of family life. in family stories and the life course: across time and generations, michael w. pratt and barbara h. fiese, eds., pp. 235-257. mahwah, new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates, publishers. myerhoff, barbara and jay ruby. 1992. a crack in the mirror: reflexive perspectives in anthropology. in remembered lives: the work of ritual, storytelling, and growing older, mark kaminsky, (ed.) 307-340. ann arbor: university of michigan press. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 microsoft word folkxiv_author.doc reports folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 181 “zhivaia starina” (“living tradition”): an academic journal dmitry nikolaev centre for typological and semiotic folklore studies russian state university for the humanities moscow, russia zhivaia starina (living tradition) is an academic journal published by the state republican center of russian folklore [http://www.centrfolk.ru].(1) its primary focus is russian folklore and traditional culture, but it also publishes articles on folklore and ethnography of other (mostly slavic) peoples, as well as comparative and theoretical papers. all the articles are in russian. the magazine is distributed through subscription in russia and other countries. each issue is divided into sections, of which some are regular features (field materials, book and conference reviews, lists of new publications on folklore and ethnography) and some are specific to the volume in question, reflecting its particular themes. volume 1 (57), 2008, is dedicated largely to theoretical issues. the first section is “theoretical questions” and it includes “voice and echo of myth” by s. iu. nekliudov, this is a paper on the problem of myth as a worldview and literary category. k. procházková’s article is about the atu 650a “strong john” motif in russian folktales. the author argues that this motif forms a transition from myth to classical folktale. s. niebrzegowska-bartmińska explores some models of the structure of oral texts using the “complex”-oriented approach found in the works of l. s. vygotskii. the final article in section one is “principles of cyclization in chastushkas” by e. m. afans’eva. the second section is “epic traditions.” it includes an article on the principles of the ethno-geographical distribution of oral epics entitled “another epic universal?” by i. i. zemtsovsky. n. v. drannikova and iu. a. novikov offer information on new recordings of byliny. k. rangočev gives a review of the history and of the current state of the bulgarian heroic epic (“junaški”) tradition. problems of the ethics of fieldwork and the difficulties arising in the process of communication between fieldworker and informant, as well as general methodological issues concerned with collecting folkloristic data are dealt with in the third section. examples are drawn from different ethnic environments. northern russia is covered in articles by a. b. moroz and k. a. balobanova. estonians in siberia (2) are dealt with by 182 a. korb. spain is discussed by n. v. voziakova. mongolia is discussed by s. iu. nekliudov, who also gives a survey of the modern state of the mongolian popular tradition. some mongolian field recordings, new and archival, are published in issue 3, 2008 (see below). volume 2 (58), 2008, is devoted to slavic folklore. the first section, “days of the week in popular culture,” includes an overview paper by s. m. tolstaia entitled “days of the week in popular magic.”(3) there are a series of case studies with an analysis of the symbolism of the “semidionnaia nedeliushka” (“week of seven days”) in slavic wedding songs by n. v. kurguzova. there is an article on beliefs about the particular characteristics of tuesdays and saturdays among eastern slavs by s. n. amosova and one on the particular characteristics of thursday in the vladimir oblast’ by v. e. dobrovol'skaia. the two remaining articles in this section treat local holidays: “the cycle of local fridayholidays in the north-east of moscow oblast’” by o. n. glazunova and “‘shirokie subboty’ [‘lavish saturdays’] in the calendar of the kama region russians” by a. v. chernykh. papers on aspects of popular culture are collected in the section “slavic patchwork” and include an article entitled “the motif of invitation to a wedding in slavic spells” by t. a. agapkina, an article by k. v. p'iankova on the food (or just empty plates) served to mark the end of a feast, and a survey of the functions of the eucharist (prosphora) in bulgarian popular culture by i. miškova. this section also has a survey of the celebration of the octave of easter in polesie by o. v. belova and a note on a special church bread called artos and its role in easter services by i. r. kilachitskaia. the last thematic section in this issue is entitled “the interaction of ethnic traditions.” in this section a. a. plotnikova treats the popular traditions of slavic enclaves in romania and austria (small groups of russian old believers and croats respectively).(4) d. iu. doronin writes about the supposed traces of the ancient paganism of the mari people in the contemporary popular cult centered on the chapel of basil of caesarea in odnoshur, nizhnii novgorod oblast’. buriat legends in the folklore repertoire of russians living in the baikal region are the subject of e. l. tikhonova’s contribution. finally there are interview excerpts published by v. v. vinogradova which present the recollections of villagers in western and north-western russia about their relationships with gypsies prior to the 1956 decree which prohibited nomadic itinerancy. volume 3 (59), 2008, has two main subject sections: “popular art” and “folklore of peoples from around the world: mongolian peoples.” the first section contains several articles on the techniques of russian reports folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 183 popular art and on problems of collecting and preserving such art. it features “icons painted by the peasants of karelia” by v. p. ershov which includes a number of reproductions from the author’s private collection. “icons from berezaika,” a report on contemporary icons painted by a non-professional couple from tver oblast’, is contributed by a. g. kuleshov. “embroidery, birchbark, and wood: the family craft and its meaning” is the title of an article written by m. d. alekseevskii. t. i. ignat’eva and i. r. kilachitskaia write on traditional gold, silver, and pearl embroidery on russian church attire. v. g. smolitskii contributes a survey of the first collections of popular art assembled by regional museums in the second half of the nineteenth century. mongolian materials include an analysis of new field recordings made in central and northern mongolia during the recent expeditions of the center for the typology and semiotics of folklore at the russian state university for the humanities. this section includes a paper by a. v. kozmin on the role of the constellation of ursa major in contemporary mongolian tradition. there is a report on supposedly recent legends about evil sorcerers [haraalči] by a. s. arkhipova and a survey of contemporary mongolian demonological creatures by a. a. soloviova. there are also archival materials and new translations such as that of the tales about čutgur demons taken from the recordings made by ts. damdinsuren. these are translated, and prefaced by a. d. tsendina. short mongolian myths and legends from different sources were prepared and published by l. g. skorodumova, ia. d. leman, and e. o. chernyshova. also in this section are the following papers: “fieldwork observations on the religious/mythological traditions of the buriats and kalmyks” by a. i. kuznetsova and “sexual/erotic motifs in the shamanic incantations of buriats” by l. s. dampilova. volume 4 (60), 2008, is again mostly slavic in content. the first three articles are grouped under the title “oral text, literary text”. they include an analysis by j. bartmiński of the polish/ukrainian popular game “zelman” as a paratext. there is a study on the sources of the eastern slavic dream interpretation tradition by a. v. chernetsov and a survey of versions of the popular ballad “woman of samaria” in old believer and molokan traditions by s. e. nikitina. the second section, called “mythological elements in slavic tradition,” includes papers on diverse subjects. among them is an article on the symbolism of the vine by l. radenkovič and a piece about the motif of “a witch who rides a man” by l. n. vinogradova. there are reports on witch beliefs among the old believers of romania by a. a. plotnikova and about the 184 circumstances for entering the other world as reflected in the retellings of dreams and visions by e. v. safronov. m. a. andronina writes about the spatial characteristics of calendar memorial rites. the third section, “ritual and magical practices”, begins with a report on the function of the wreath in the wedding rites of smolensk oblast’ by m. a. engovatova. it is followed by a cartographical analysis of the terminology used for the last sheaf (most commonly called baroda, “the beard”) in belarus by n. p. antropov. s. niebrzegowska-bartmińska presents a survey of modern survivals of belief in the magical power of the word as they are attested in advertisements and political campaigns in poland. o. a. pashina contributes a paper about the non-official and nonorthodox religious practices of russian villagers during the soviet period. she describes devout women “saints” who organized churches in their homes and replaced priests who were prohibited from celebrating the divine liturgy. the last three articles form the section “food in traditional culture.” a paper by e. l. berezovich and k. v. p’iankova treats the characteristics russians traditionally ascribe to lenten/weak soups and weak tea. these are treated as deviating from the strongflavored norm. a. v. gura gives a survey of the uses of wedding porridge among the slavic peoples, and g. i. kabakova analyses the popular notion of feeding one’s “dusha” (mind/soul) which is envisaged in popular anthropology as an internal bodily organ. notes 1 zhivaia starina was first published in russia between 1890– 1917. it was then edited by v. i. lamanskii. the publication of the journal was recommenced in 1994, with a different structure but with the same periodicity (four times a year) and volume (72 pp. per issue). the first editor-in-chief of the new zhivaia starina was n. i. tolstoi; after his death in 1996, s. iu. nekliudov assumed editorship of the journal. 2 see the english version of this paper: korb a., on factors affecting folkloristic fieldwork: on the example of estonians in siberia, folklore, vol. 27, october 2004, 101–132. available online at [http://www.folklore.ee/folklore]. 3 see the review of her book polesskii narodnyi kalendar’ (popular calendar of polesie) in issue 1, 2008, and a jubilee overview of her scientific activities in issue 4, 2008. 4 on romanian old believers’ demonological views see the paper by the same author in issue 4, 2008. see below. notes from the workshop on field work in the former ussr, aatseel conference, 1997 (these informal notes, provided thanks to natalie kononenko, outline the issues discussed at the workshop in toronto in december.) practical considerations come at 2 levels: 1) it is different 2) what you need may not exist equipment you are likely to need for fieldwork: > voltage plugs, phone jack > tapes — expense may determine whether you buy there or here > film, video tape (european and american systems) > your own computer, printer (and paper), scanner, e-mail access — it is sometimes possible to buy email access for a limited period > consider comfort — the weight of your computer, etc. and carrying it about to villages, on buses and other transportation > shoes — standing waiting for bus, standing on the bus > other clothes and necessities of comfort flexibility — lots of things don't work > buses, trains may not run, or may be too full > many people have not been paid * may show up at archives and may not > this uncertainty necessitates flexibility or alternative research plans * or the ability to be on the look-out for good data working with your colleagues: > be aware of different understandings of the field: what it is; what the important questions are h seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 folklore examples of such an issue: > viewing folklore as necessarily old (archaic, and a province of old people) and rural > therefore i t s hard to get data on contemporary practices — they try to get you old people who will tell you about the past > they steer you away from urban sources there are nationalist considerations * especially outside russia, in the republics of the russian federation, and in former republics of the ussr: > here, as well as in russian russia, you may be directed not to straight data, but to data that will give you the impression they want you to have > often they will try to make their country appear more advanced than it is, or more like the west, or more nationalistic, independent, anti-communist. > this is in fact a relic of the communist mentality (folklore viewed as evidence to prove one thesis or another, people can't be trusted to produce folklore properly by themselves). anti-soviet driver > many folklorists tend to want to do away with all soviet folklore, unless it's a folklore of camps and repression, not realizing that they're using almost soviet cultural engineering practices to do so. they see it as a bad practice when the soviets did it, but not when they themselves do it: soviet influence must be undone! > it is therefore very difficult to collect soviet data (unless it demonstrates some fault with the soviet system), even though this is legitimate data too and needs to be collected asap. > there is a strong drive to do away with soviet things in russia, too; not just in the former republics 45as they reinstate national language, culture, whatever, outside russia. > an example: the orthographic debates in ukraine. working on-site — as in the village: > culture and courtesy — how to behave > dress — what to wear where and when (men as well as women) — be aware of different ideas of decency: sleeping with 3 guys in a train compart­ ment is okay (there are techiques for changing clothes without being an exhibitionist), but showing up in shorts in a village is not > recall the comfort question from before, but also considerations of age, gender — how can you find out what is considered appropriate? > it's a delicate balance — do it their way and still admit that you are, after all, different > being different is not disadvantageous; it can create a context where you get very good material. the question of payment also raises gender issues: > paying informants, paying colleagues who accompany you or provide contacts > there are various systems of alternate pay > gifts, esp. for someone other than the informant, a helpful colleague > providing work opportunities for colleagues or their students > pay for their trip, for equipment, for wanted books; buy needed supplies > help with publishing opportunities practical issues to consider as you are planning: > food, lodging > daily life (like hygiene) > choose clothing from the practical point of view — washing and drying ib seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 photography — what you can and cannot photograph: > different restrictions than in us > the use and the etiquette of still camera, of a video camera ethical issues: > telling the truth can become much more thorny than you are used to — never lie; but in some cases explaining exactly how it is in the us may create more confusion than it is worth > intimacy — the kinds of questions you can ask your informants > what kinds of questions they are likely to ask you > continuing the relationship after you leave the country 17 contributors who are used to bibliographical reference systems operating in the various countries of central and eastern europ 54 the ethical values of narodnoe pravoslavie: traditional near-death experiences and fedotov (1) faith wigzell school of slavonic and east european studies, university college london in 1935 the emigré scholar g. p. fedotov published an analysis of the ethical values of popular russian orthodoxy, basing his conclusions on the genre of dukhovnye stikhi (lit. spiritual verses). these religious songs were performed before the revolution by the blind itinerant singers known as the kaleki or kaliki perekhozhie [fedotov 1935/1991].(2) for fedotov the key features of folk orthodoxy (narodnoe pravoslavie) were the emphasis on life as suffering, the profound sinfulness of man, the belief in the power of christian love and the attachment to mother earth (mat� syra zemlia) and maternal values in general, with their supreme embodiment in the mother of god. his view has proved highly influential outside russia, largely through its distillation in the opening chapter of volume one of the russian religious mind [fedotov 1946]. fedotov�s influence has perhaps been reinforced by the coincidences between his own concept of folk orthodoxy and key aspects of dostoevskii�s view of the people (narod), itself based to a considerable extent on the writer�s reading of the dukhovnye stikhi [ivanits 2002; wigzell 2002b:28-31].(3) in russia where fedotov�s work began to appear only in 1989, his views have had less impact, while, among folklorists, there is a new interest in and awareness of the complexities of folk ethics [belova 2002]. in this essay i question the validity of fedotov�s analysis for popular orthodoxy as a whole by examinng another of the genres of religious folklore, the type of vision known as the obmiranie. so unfamiliar is the obmiranie, except to some folklorists and traditional orthodox believers, that a definition would seem in order. the term obmirat�, self-evidently linked to umirat� (to die), refers both to the state of falling into/being in a coma as well as to the narrative account of what is seen during a coma, that is, essentially a near-death experience. to this day among traditional believers (official orthodox or old believers) in rural russia as in other orthodox slavic countries, the near-death experience is generally believed to consist of a journey to the world beyond the grave.(4) here the subject most commonly meets relatives, sees the torments of hell and learns the date of his or her own death. obviously these narratives represent a continuation of early and medieval christian tradition (dante�s divine comedy is the supreme literary example.) visits to the world beyond the grave were traditionally experienced not only during coma but also as dreams, or, when awake, as visions, but in orthodox slavic countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such visions are linked primarily with a coma or unusually prolonged and deep sleep. indeed, it is traditionally assumed that anyone in this state will visit the afterlife, and in particular hell. during the vision, even when heaven is mentioned, the specific virtues of the blessed are not. consequently, the ethical emphases of the obmiranie have to be judged largely from the sins mentioned, whether those of categories of sinners, or specific people known to the visionary, including his or her own moral failings. within the byzantino-slavic orthodox tradition considerable differences exist between accounts of visits to heaven and hell, allowing the visionary to select folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 55 from a wide range of possible choices those sins and values he or she deems most significant. here religious affiliation, social background, gender and regional traditions may, it will be argued, also play a role. given that fedotov wrote about russian rather than east slav folk orthodoxy as a whole, i have drawn most of my examples from russian material, but have included poles�e on the borders between russia, ukraine and belarus, where the linguistic dividing line between the various east slavic languages is not always clear. at times i shall refer to ukrainian material, because the differences between russian and ukrainian tradition in this respect are no greater than those between local russian traditions.(5) of the contemporary texts, around thirty are oral narratives, almost all recorded since 1974, though the event described may have occurred much earlier. a further four are written texts, composed since 1950, but undergoing oral or printed transmission in subsequent years. i shall compare these with oral and written narratives from between 1830 and the revolution (a further sixteen).(6) fedotov notes that the popular ethical values of the dukhovnye stikhi differ in various respects from those of the official church. the three main categories he discerns are interrelated. the first, the sin of offending mother damp earth has links with the gens religion of the ancient slavs, and thus includes sins against parents (especially mothers) and relatives. clearly connected to folk attitudes about mother earth is the veneration of the mother of god, the supreme embodiment of maternal love and caring intercession for those who suffer. reverence for the mother of god is matched by an intense sense of sinfulness and sorrow at offences against christian love and the innocent suffering caused by man�s cruelty and injustice to man. one of the primary emphases in the dukhovnye stikhi concerns the unjust treatment of the poor by the greedy and heartless rich, a theme found in other oral genres such as the tales of everyday life (bytovaia skazka) and folk religious legends (legenda) [ivanits 2002]. the category of sins against the christian law of love includes for fedotov not only the lack of charity towards others, but also the sin of scandal mongering. perhaps the most conventional group involves sins resulting from the non-observance of church laws and prohibitions (such as neglecting prayers, church attendance, ignoring major festivals, fasts or ritual actions associated with wednesdays and fridays.) other sins are mentioned sporadically: breaches of moral purity as well as theft or lies (scandal mongering apart) seldom appear, though fedotov does cite a variant of the song about the last judgement in which the damned include drunkards, adulterers, pimps and those involved in laughter culture (smekhovaia kul�tura [likhachev, panchenko, ponyrko 1984]) [fedotov 1935/1991:89]. as can be seen, the various transgressions he highlights embrace both the sin of the individual before god, the evil that man does to his fellows (social sins), and sins against the church�s teaching and prescriptions. turning to obmiranie narratives, it is clear that there are considerable differences of emphasis. much of the reason for this lies in the social situation and gender of visionaries. whereas, judging from the nineteenthcentury ethnographer s. v. maksimov�s observations, the kaleki perekhozhie were predominantly if not exclusively male [maksimov 1877/1989], visionaries, at least after 1830, are almost exclusively women [wigzell 2003]. what is more, most are wives, mothers and ordinary laywomen, though there are a small number who belong to a monastic community. by contrast, the kaleki perekhozhie had neither home nor family, folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 56 and, though not formally attached to the church, led a life devoted to orthodoxy; they would be found singing their mournful songs beside church doorways and at monastery gates on feast days. since their material was drawn from the bible, apocrypha and hagiography, they were, though illiterate, much better informed about orthodoxy than most peasants (to whom, we may assume, most village obmiravshie belonged). in fedotov�s view, kaleki perekhozhie represented the summit of religious knowledge and understanding among the folk (in contradistinction to the most unenlightened sectors of the population (samaia temnaia � sreda) [fedotov 1935/1991:15]. today, after decades of official hostility and repression, the general level of religious knowledge in the village is considerably lower than before the revolution, although religious belief remains a given. the situation is in many respects worse in urban areas. if we compare the respective amounts of detail in preand post-revolutionary obmiraniia, it becomes clear how much less familiar lay visionaries are nowadays with the christian visionary tradition and the teachings of the church more generally [tolstaia 2002: 215]. there is another important difference: kaleki perekhozhie formed a specific social group, whereas visionaries come from more varied backgrounds. most are peasants, but those who feature in written texts tend to come from a more educated or urban environment, and to be better versed in church teaching and traditions. a few come from a monastic or ecclesiastical milieu. while narratives reflect the different environments, periods and origins (oral/written), their shared features permit us to generalize about a broader popular orthodox view of morality than in the spiritual songs. on the other hand, how do circumstance and gender factors affect moral emphases, and hence how can any one genre provide an accurate snapshot of folk ethical values? in view of the differing social and gender context of the obmiranie, a shift in the moral emphasis towards matters affecting women in their everyday lives seems inevitable, especially when it concerns their traditional role of ensuring the wellbeing of family and friends. narratives that emerge from a rural environment (the majority) can be expected to reflect the moral concerns of the wider village community. if we begin with the maternal element, which for fedotov lies at the core of his conception of folk orthodoxy [nikitina 1991: 141], we see that maternal concerns (including the broader concept of caring for friends and neighbors) are also extremely important in the obmiranie, but in ways that differ from those in the religious songs. hardly surprisingly, the cult of mother earth is absent from narratives, though evident in traditional funeral ritual. on the other hand, both narratives and songs share the sense of the sinfulness of life on earth. more surprising is the virtual absence of the mother of god in the role of intercessor or guide round the other world. her connection with the afterlife was widely known thanks to the popularity of the apocryphal pilgrimage of the mother of god among the torments (khozhdenie bogoroditsy po mukam) among old believers, and, via the dukhovnye stikhi, with official orthodox believers. in it the mother of god begs her son to alleviate the suffering of sinners observed on her tour of hell. if we bear in mind her association with a guided tour round hell, the deep reverence in which she was held and the capacity for variation in the oral visionary tradition, it might be expected that she would sometimes act as an otherworldly guide in the obmiranie, even though in the pilgrimage she, like the visionary, is led not leading. however, normally the guide is either a close relative (male or female) or an old man/saint (this last conforming to tradition). the only 57 text to name her directly as a guide is the written vision of klavdiia ustiuzhanina (1964), where the subject is shown the torments by the mother of god [gubanov 2000:11-14]. there are, however, two oral narratives that refer to �a woman like a nun� and �a woman in a cloak,� both of whom possibly represent the mother of god [lur�e and tarabukina 1994:23]. otherwise it is only klavdiia�s vision that makes any reference to her role as intercessor, though not in the same way as in the pilgrimage. though grieved by what she sees, the mother of god declares herself unable to change the fate of those in hell. in its message that only the prayers of those on earth can save souls in torment, the text reflects church teaching about the importance of prayers for the dead, and of repentance and moral reform by the living (the key message of the obmiranie genre) [gubanov 2000:14].(7) apart from this, mary�s function in the vision of klavdiia and four other written narratives is more distantly connected to the caring maternal virtues mentioned by fedotov and the intercessionary role she plays in the pilgrimage. all five texts come from a monastic environment or circles of active believers, both official orthodox and old believer: the visions of klavdiia ustiuzhanina (1964) [gubanov 2000], of the novices, fekla (1902) [panteleimon 1996] and an anonymous young man [nazidatel�nyi rasskaz 1915], as well as of the old believer agniia (1956-57) [pokrovskii 1997] and an anonymous laywoman [panteleimon 1996:126]. in these texts the mother of god�s role is to decide that the visionary can return to earth to continue living, or convey a message of that nature. thus in the vision of agniia, a siberian old believer text written after 1953, the mother of god intercedes with christ to grant the visionary three more days of life [pokrovskii 1997:40]. in the visions of both novices the mother of god descends from above and decides that it is too early for them to die [panteleimon 1996:50; nazidatel�nyi rasskaz 1915:14-15], and in the vision of klavdiia she helps the visionary return to earth after christ has decided it is not yet time for her to die [gubanov 2000:14-15].(8) for the most part, the vision relies on the bleaker depictions found in apocryphal texts and on the iconography of the last judgment [mil�kov 1999; rovinskii 1881:391-402; goldfrank 1995], both of which warn of the need for repentance and change. the image of the mother of god as successful intercessor for souls in torment seems not to have featured in oral visions, judging by the extant texts, including a large number from poles�e analysed by bilyi [1930:64-65]. with the exception of the two narratives mentioned above, and the occasions when a female relative takes on the role, the otherworldly guide is always male. it would be preposterous to suggest that the reason for the absence is that village visionaries are more familiar with orthodox tradition than those from circles close to the church, where the pilgrimage has had greater influence. the reason may well lie instead in the attitude of the visionary to the main traditional function of the obmiranie, the moral warning. in village narratives, as will be seen, the caring maternal element finds its outlet in consoling meetings with relatives. this leaves the visionary free to focus (albeit while unconscious in a coma) on the sins that she most deplores, whether general categories, such as drunkenness, abortion, sorcery, or specific people guilty of such sins. the guilty can be located in the fires of hell without the need for intercession. this opposition between love and condemnation is not absolute. oral narratives where a visionary seeks remission for a sinner who is a family member exist, but they are rare [e.g. dobrovol�skaia 1999:no. 6]. folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 58 it might be assumed that, given the traditional respect for the older generation, the maternal theme in obmiranie narratives would take the form of the sins of children against their mothers or parents, but in fact it does not. offences against fathers almost never feature; just a single example in the written vision of vera (1962), where a little girl, encountered in the other world, turns out to have sinned by uttering four offensive words to her father. she sends back a message: �tell my little brother pavlik not to be rude to his mother and father, because it�s an unforgivable sin� (a bratu pavliku skazhite, tetia vera, pust� ne oskorbliaet ottsa i mat�, a to neprostitel�nyi grekh) [cherednikova 2001:244]. a more common paternal image is the reverse scenario, where the father (never the mother), though not directly guilty of an offence against his children, is condemned for his moral failings; for example, in one dream narrative the subject�s father languishes in hell because of his lack of charity [lur�e, tarabukina 1994:no. 4]. if fathers are sometimes seen in hell, mothers are more often in heaven. the best example is a narrative from sudogda region, vladimir oblast�, where the subject, this time a man, sees his father suffering because he was a drunkard, while his long-suffering pious mother is in a place of flowers and heavenly birds [dobrovol�skaia 1999:no. 6].(9) this last account bears a strong moral message, but very often in highly folklorized obmiraniia the main function of the journey to the other world is a consoling encounter rather than a moral lesson. the visionary is reunited with her parents [lur�e and tarabukina 1994:24], or family members. for example, a. n. redova from kargopol�e, who recorded her own dreams, described how she was reunited with her beloved sister, nast�ia, who had died in 1947 [pigin 1997a:45; semenova: ii, 4]. the visionary may also meet villagers and friends.(10) such meetings provide personal consolation, or allow it to be offered to friends and neighbors, who learn about their own dear departed. occasionally an element of reassurance is involved, when the visionary is able to dispel the fear that the person who has died has gone to hell. the consoling meeting with the dead reflects not only the female authorship of the overwhelming majority of narratives but also the gens religion, with its concern for the dead seen in the traditional funeral rite. it is simply a different manifestation of ancestor worship from that found in the dukhovnye stikhi. among female obmiravshie the commonest maternal worries concern their own or their friends� dead children. at one level this may result in a comforting meeting in the other world with a daughter [lur�e, tarabukina1994:no. 1], or with a son who had died in the second world war [tolstaia 1999:no.2]. sometimes the concern with dead children is more general, simply wanting to know they are happy, as in a narrative recorded in 1994 in kargopol�e where the visionary reassures her neighbor that her dead son is now walking behind the priest carrying the processional candle in church [folklore laboratory: from a. m. popova, verkhov�e vill., tikhman�ga]. a more common occurrence, certainly in times past, was the death of a baby. when infant mortality was very high, and every mother might have lost at least one child, concern with their fate in the other world was natural when the church and with it the laity held that unbaptized children would go to hell [vlasova 2001]. as far as baptized children are concerned, judging by material recorded in the prerevolutionary period, it would appear peasant women, however distressed by the death of a baptized infant, were better able to resign themselves to their loss than women from urban and educated circles with their 59 modern sensibilities and higher expectations of life. grief and concern about deceased children is the dominant theme in narratives from this environment. one particularly interesting written narrative tells of a woman from baku whose newborn child was, she is led to believe, baptized before his death. in a vision she sees the child suffering. it then transpires that the godparents who had secretly had an affair, something which ruled them out as godparents. they had then lied about having the child baptized [panteleimon 1996:124-32]. as child mortality decreased during the soviet period, concern with dead children and whether they were baptised becomes less apparent, although the anxiety that this aspect of orthodox teaching must induce doubtless contributes to its endurance. for example, in a narrative recorded in tver� oblast� in 1988 the visionary sees baptised children eating, while those who were not baptized are starving and immersed in water [lur�e, tarabukina 1994:no. 3]. in general, the concern for children has in recent times shifted mainly to abortion. always regarded as a serious sin by church and laity alike [gromyko 2001: 221], abortion is nonetheless not mentioned in prerevolutionary narratives as often as suicide, lack of charity or sorcery. nor is abortion a sin mentioned by the predominantly male kaleki perekhozhie, and hence by fedotov. by contrast, in modern narratives the fate of those who have had abortions is described frequently, often in graphic detail [e.g lur�e, tarabukina 1994:no. 1; semenova 2000:iii, 8; gubanov 2000:9; dobrovol�skaia 1999:no. 2; tolstaia 1999:nos 7, 8; tolstaia 2001:22526; paunova 2001:194].(11) this increased emphasis appears to result from a situation, in which abortion, long condemned by the church, became the officially sanctioned method of contraception [moroz 2000:202]. what we have here is either the moral disapproval of those who had not had abortions, or the conscious or subconscious guilt of those who had disobeyed the church and had abortions. it is particularly women who express their abhorrence of abortion; male visionaries do not mention it. both dukhovnye stikhi and obmiraniia therefore reflect a concern with maternal values, but in this area gender as well as time and social circumstances affect both focus and emphasis. there are other parallels between the ethical values of the spiritual songs as seen by fedotov and those of the obmiranie. one such is the disapproval of laughter culture. in its narrowest sense, it has been linked to the mocking, even lewd humor of the professional entertainers (skomorokhi) of the pre-petrine period [likhachev, panchenko, ponyrko 1984], and later to fairground humor, but is easily extended, especially by the pious, to include all manner of frivolity (sueta) and secular entertainment. it is hardly surprising that in the prerevolutionary period this motif survived best in communities that felt themselves besieged by the secular world, such as the monastery or the old believers. for example, the vision of pelageia (videnie devitsy pelagei), probably originally from an old believer environment in the 1850s-1860s, condemns singing, dancing, joining in yuletide rituals and even listening to songs [gritsevskaia, pigin 1993:55, 60-62]. similar sentiments may appear in twentieth-century lay obmiraniia, because the communities from which visionaries come faced the same difficult task of defending a christian way of life from the secular world, as well as modernisation and the new socialist religion. some old believer narratives continue the condemnation of laughter culture, but this feature is not unique to them: the written vision of klavdiia ustiuzhanina (1964) depicts theatre and folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 60 cinemagoers as servants of the devil. other visionaries criticize dressing up and going out [tolstaia 1999:no. 7 from gomel� obl. in poles�e], singing, dancing and attending weddings [shevarenkova 1998:no. 158 from nizhnii novgorod obl.], or even the wearing of earrings [semenova 2000:iii, 8 from kargopol�e]. fedotov assigned laughter culture to the category involving sins of christian non-observance, since it could include blasphemy and irreligious behaviour, an important theme in the spiritual songs. he also noted the emphasis in the religious songs on external expressions of piety, such as non-attendance at church and failure to observe church fasts, rules and prohibitions, including those relating to fridays. judging by the numerous complaints in the journal rukovodstvo dlia sel�skikh pastyrei (guidance for rural priests) in the decades before the revolution, the church certainly disapproved of the peasants� irregular church attendance, but, far from insisting on the special nature of fridays, it campaigned against what it saw as pagan beliefs surrounding activities on that day [rozov 2001]. predictably, the obmiraniia of those who come from religious environments (monastery, church or religious community) contain the same canonical emphasis on pious observance [nazidatel�nyi rasskaz 1915:7-8; panteleimon 1996:46; gubanov 2000:10, 13]. pre-revolutionary peasant visions, on the other hand, barely mention churchgoing, though they encounter in hell those who ignored the ritual prescriptions relating to church festivals and fridays [selivanov 1886:70-71 on voronezh province; c.f. bilyi 1930:78]. in written visions from lay environments, which were often recorded by priests the position is much closer to that of the church. oral visions go one stage further and condemn aspects of ritual observance with no connection to christianity. the confusion between ritual proscriptions relating to the mythological worldview and christian rules is characteristic of the ethical views of all orthodox slavic peoples. in fact, for them the concept of sin (grekh) embraces not only sins in the eyes of the church and neglect of ritual convention, but even breaches of ritual and social conventions more generally [tolstoi 1995; tolstaia 2000; gromyko 2001: 218-23; belova 2002: 179-82; moroz 2000: 202]. this confusion has affected the contemporary obmiranie. generally speaking, only narratives such as klavdiia ustiuzhanina�s (1964), which was publicized by the church, or those from isolated religious communities such as the old believer lipovans, continue to focus on the neglect of prayers, fasting and religious festivals [gubanov 2000; paunova 2001:195].(12) in oral texts there often appears to be no distinction between religious norms, social conventions, or ritual prescriptions connected with the mythological world view. in some narratives from kargopol�e, where this process seems to have developed the furthest, what worries visionaries most are offences against the rules of everyday household existence such as not washing tablecloths and underwear together [moroz 2000:200]. the explanation for this change seems obvious: seventy plus years of socialist rule, the closure of churches and absence of priests. the decline in the church�s influence has allowed the broader folk concept of sin to penetrate the oral religious genre of the obmiranie. the result in the narratives from kargopol�e is an emphasis on sins related to doing the laundry, or loaning a neighbour the broom used in baking bread (pomelo), as well as those from other areas expressing dislike of modern ways, such as of women who do not cover their heads [dobrovol�skaia 1999:no. 5]. all of these at the same time reflect the role of gender in the genre [wigzell 2003]. 61 drunkenness is a sin that is extremely important to the moral world of visionaries. the well-known legend about the drunkard who had to act as the devil�s carthorse may have encouraged its appearance in the obmiranie, but slavic orthodox tradition had long held that drinking led to perdition, and indeed was a form of suicide [vlasova 2001:129-30]. long a social problem, efforts to combat the love of the bottle were hampered by obligatory ritual drinking at church festivals involving the village priest and adult male villagers, together with the general russian perception that a capacity for hard liquor is a part of national identity, at least for men [kormina 2001: 234-38]. the drunkenness of husbands is an acute problem for women and their families; hence it is not surprising that female visionaries, both before the revolution and since, should mention the fate that befalls alcoholics [zheleznov 1910/1992:346; paunova 2001:195; dobrovol�skaia 1999:nos 6, 10; vinogradov 1923:313; panteleimon 1996:46]. fedotov also incorporates what he calls this �russian sin� into his picture of folk orthodoxy, citing a song in which the mother of god condemns drinking for its impact on society [fedotov 1935/1991:90], and noting that it is also among the sins listed in the song about the last judgement. in this respect the two genres agree. a key element of folk piety for fedotov concerns an emphasis on social injustice, especially the mean and heartless treatment of the poor and innocent by the rich and powerful. the strong sense of social justice and sympathy for the suffering are common to many folk genres, and in pre-revolutionary russia at least were viewed as a facet of the national character. obmiraniia from that period are no different: cruelty and uncharitable behaviour land the guilty in hell, and, conversely, acts of charity bring salvation. thus the novice fekla learns in her vision that the scarf she once gave a poor woman outweighs her sins [panteleimon 1996:45; see also gritsevskaia, pigin 1993:60; shevchenko 1999:28; bilyi 1930:70]. nonetheless, with the exception of the ukrainian text published by kulish [kulish 1856], this motif is generally much less prominent in visions than in the dukhovnye stikhi, for the obvious reason that the kaleki perekhozhie were dependent for survival on alms. in the soviet and post-soviet periods lack of charity only features in visions emanating from pious old believer and orthodox milieux, notably those of klavdiia [gubanov 2000:12] and agniia [pokrovskii 1997:40]. elsewhere, however, lack of charity has faded from view. today it is proving hard to reintroduce russians to the concept of charity, which for decades was replaced by state responsibility for welfare; such attitudes have evidently also impacted on the countryside. just one narrative refers to the meanness of a woman�s father towards those in need [lur�e, tarabukina 1994:no. 4], while another even condemns begging [lur�e, tarabukina 1994:no. 2]. scandal mongering (kleveta), as fedotov indicates, is related to lack of charity because it offends against the christian injunction to love thy neighbor [fedotov 1935/1991:89]. he also observes that this is the only kind of lying condemned in the songs, just as it was deplored in visions of the afterlife in the byzantinoslavic orthodox tradition. spiritual songs and visions are alike in virtually ignoring the sin of lying. in the prerevolutionary period they also both highlighted scandal mongering, though in visions it is mainly a feature of those recorded from active churchgoers, monks or old believers who are closer to the written tradition [e.g. vinogradov 1923:313; nazidatel�nyi rasskaz 1915:5; panteleimon 1996:44; shevchenko 1999:28]. however, in folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 62 the modern period scandal mongering seems to have ceased to bother visionaries. it would be absurd to assume that the reason is that life in villages since 1917 has become more harmonious. if we take into consideration the paucity of reference to scandal mongering in lay visions from the pre-revolutionary period, it would be more sensible to conclude that this is a traditional orthodox sin not seen as a major problem among the laity. the theme of scandal mongering in dukhovnye stikhi and also in fedotov�s analysis of folk orthodoxy would then appear to result from the singers� greater familiarity with the teachings of the orthodox church. apart from differences of emphasis, there are sins frequently mentioned in oral visions that do not appear in the religious verses. in modern obmiraniia, especially but not exclusively those recorded in poles�e, visionaries observe the fate of sorcerers, in particular those who have caused cows to become dry or made a twist [zalom] in a plant to spoil the crops, [tolstaia 1999:nos 4, 5, 7 and 8; zinov�ev 1987:no. 437; dobrovol�skaia 1999:no. 5; c.f. six examples in bilyi 1930:79]. as a social sin, sorcery is akin to scandal mongering, since it is perceived as being based on envy or anger. those phenomena attributed to sorcery, whether the economic importance of the fully functioning cow, some other misfortune, or the illness of persons, crops or animals can cause real distress. the genuine fear of being �spoiled� (hexed), which is still alive in poles�e and elsewhere today, is understandable in the context of both the traditional worldview and the harshness of life in rural russia. one may speculate on the reasons why sorcery does not appear in the dukhovnye stikhi. this may perhaps reflect the perception on the part of the kaleki perekhozhie that they were godly christian folk; one of their songs suggests that christ himself approved their profession. as such, they were protected by their lifestyle and their prayers from attack by sorcerers, and simply did not take the problem seriously. what is more, since they did not have families or possessions and relied on alms, they possessed nothing that could easily be �spoiled.� suicide is also commonly mentioned in the obmiranie, albeit slightly less frequently than drunkenness [pokrovskii 1997:40; paunova 2002:194; shevarenkova 1998:no. 157; dobrovol�skaia 1999:no. 10]. killing oneself has traditionally been regarded with particular horror by orthodox believers; there is plenty of evidence to show how seriously church and laity in imperial russia regarded suicide [paperno 1997]. furthermore it also features among the most frequently mentioned sins in research carried out in kargopol�e [moroz 2000], though it is ranked after such sins as swearing or quarrelling. a. b. moroz suggests that the reason for its high profile is that suicide is no longer a civil crime [moroz 2000:202], but, while this fact may have contributed to its elevated ranking in the list of deadly sins, the strength of tradition should not be ignored. so deeply held were beliefs about suicide that its absence in the spiritual songs, and so in fedotov�s folk moral code, demonstrates very effectively the incompleteness of the picture. it is more than likely that the kaleki perekhozhie, had they been asked how they regarded suicide, would have expressed strong disapproval. the relative unimportance of sexual sins in the orthodox tradition (outside monastic culture), at least by comparison with the catholic tradition, means that they are not a major theme in either the spiritual songs or contemporary visions, although they do feature more in pre-revolutionary obmiraniia. fedotov notes that the various references to breaches of moral purity are insufficient to argue for an ascetic moral law in folk 63 orthodoxy, although there is room in hell for fornicators, adulterers and pimps according to the songs about the last judgement [fedotov 1935/1991:89]. in obmiraniia from both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries adultery and fornication are gendered sins, applying almost exclusively to women [vinogradov 1923: 313; panteleimon 1996:45, with an oral retelling in lur�e, tarabukina 1994:no. 2; paunova 2002:194]. for example, a visionary from vokhomskii region in kostroma oblast� learned that women who run after other people�s husbands will end up tied to a column of fire [dobrovol�skaia 1999:no. 10]. the gendering of this theme fits conventional views about male and female sexual morality, which need not be discussed here. only two prerevolutionary monastic obmiraniia condemn male sexual sins: masturbation and male infidelity [nazidatel�nyi rasskaz 1915:6, 8], and sodomy [panteleimon 1996:46; nazidatel�nyi rasskaz 1915:6, 8]. overall, however, it is not infidelity and fornication that are the most commonly mentioned sins against moral purity in the visionary tradition, but sexual relations between godparents, and between godparents and godchildren. this theme appears in pre-revolutionary texts, both oral and those written, where the subject comes from an urban environment [panteleimon 1996: 47; vinogradov 1923: 313; bilyi 1930: 80]. it accords with folk orthodoxy as a whole, where, as ol�ga belova points out [2002: 173], the sexual transgressions of those whose relationship is not a blood one are viewed as being at least as serious as incest. the sins of godparents are not mentioned by fedotov, and incest only in the context of those who cause the death of family members [fedotov 1935/1991: 82]. the reason may well be that kaleki perekhozhie were not themselves family men. the above is not an exhaustive survey of the sins mentioned in the obmiranie, but covers the commonest and most distinctive ones. it is clear that the ethical values of the dukhovnye stikhi and the obmiranie have much in common, but also differ in important ways. to be fair to fedotov, he made it clear in stikhi dukhovnye that the kaleki perekhozhie were a distinctive group, more knowledgeable about orthodoxy than the average peasant. although aware that these songs are not entirely typical of folk orthodoxy (citing the image of christ as a severe judge in the songs, as opposed to the loving intercessor of folk religious legend (legenda)), fedotov does not pursue the differences much further [fedotov 1935/1991: 123]. he admits that the singers� social ideals reflect their position as itinerant professionals surviving on alms, but restricts their significance to one ethical area: �the high value placed on begging and poverty is characteristic, of course, of the people as a whole and of christianity in general, but the emphasis, particularly the loving treatment of this theme in the songs, is to be explained, perhaps, by the social origins of the singers� [fedotov 1935/1991: 15].(13) as has been seen, charity is rarely mentioned nowadays by visionaries, further underlining the significance of social factors. despite these caveats and the recognition that poetic licence may mean that the songs should not be taken as a completely accurate reflection of singers� views, he nonetheless regards the spiritual songs as �expressions of the deepest subconscious element in the religious soul of the russian people,� a somewhat romantic view [fedotov 1935/1991: 16, 123-24]. reality is more complex, as the contributors to the volume on the concept of sin in slavic and jewish traditions have shown recently [belova 2000]. though some of the areas of moral concern shared by dukhovnye stikhi and visions are typical of folk orthodoxy, each genre has its own focus. for example, folk religious folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 64 legends which include popular accounts of the fall emphasize sins such as disobedience or incest [belova 2002]. particularly interesting in this respect is the analysis of the use of the word �sin� in data collected on expeditions to kargopol�e, 1993-1999, by folklorists from the russian state university for the humanities, together with the results of a questionnaire asking villagers directly what for them constitutes a sin. such a conclusion cannot pretend to be valid for russia as a whole, or even exhaustive for kargopol�e, but offers a corrective to the analysis of moral emphasis in both the spiritual songs and the obmiranie [moroz 2000]. examining the ways in which the word was used in everyday speech resulted in the following ranking of the deadliest sins in descending order of frequency: envy, swearing, scandal mongering, quarrelling, passing judgment, sexual license, abortion and suicide. the list does not entirely coincide with another compiled after informants had been asked directly to name the deadliest sins. here in descending order of gravity we find cursing, quarrelling, lying, abortion, sexual license and suicide [moroz 2000:20]. ritual sins, which are prominent in the obmiraniia of the area, appear in a comprehensive list of sins, but do not have the same importance that they have in local visionary tradition, demonstrating yet again the difficulties of presenting a picture of folk religious ethics from any one source. the ethical values embedded in the contemporary and pre-revolutionary obmiranie, as in the spiritual songs, should not be seen as an authoritative expression of the ethical values of narodnoe pravoslavie. as a predominantly feminine genre, the obmiranie reflects the moral perspective of women rather than of men. narratives about male visionaries (monks apart) have differences of emphasis that demonstrate this point: male visionaries tend to focus on their own fate [strannik 1865, 1866], describe the punishments but not the reasons for them, or focus on the failings of friends and family [esp. strannik 1862]. when men mention specific sins, it is sorcery in particular that they highlight [wigzell 2003]. in any case, what values are omitted or deemphasized change not only according to gender, but also over time and place (in both geographic and social terms). furthermore, most informants are elderly, often very elderly, and so are not necessarily representative of the moral worldview of the majority of russian peasants today. what gives the obmiranie some additional authority is the fact that it directly reflects the experience of individuals and is therefore subject to considerable personal variation.(14) this is in contrast to creation legends which are an inherited religious narrative with limited opportunities for an individual narrator�s own preferences. fedotov�s essay is a superb evocation of the moral world of the kaleki perekhozhie, but its wider relevance is highly dubious. question marks have to be raised over its applicability to popular orthodoxy as a whole in the pre-revolutionary period, and even more to russian popular orthodoxy today. a full picture of folk morality in russia requires much more research. as russian scholars begin at last to study folk and vernacular religion more widely, we may be able to form a more accurate understanding, at least of the contemporary situation notes 1 my thanks to the leverhulme trust for their support in facilitating the research for this article. 65 2 dukhovnye stikhi were also sung by old believers, as well as by some epic singers (many of whom were old believers), and in certain orthodox villages. fedotov based his conclusions on bessonov�s edition [bessonov 1861-64/1970], choosing those songs that were, in his view, part of the repertoire of the blind singers. whether he was always correct in his selection or not is irrelevant to the points being made in this essay. 3 fedotov himself saw stikhi dukhovnye as a preliminary to the russian religious mind [fedotov 1935/1991:156]. 4 although the otherworldly journey is the conventional conception of what happens in an obmiranie, other visions are possible, as, for example, in v. i. dal��s story �obmiranie,� where the subject sees his own house and his relatives. 5 it is clear from bilyi�s analysis of 69 ukrainian obmiranie narratives [bilyi 1930] that differences are minor. local russian traditions also vary; for example, in kargopol�e in the north of russia, social and ritual prohibitions are the commonest moral failings mentioned, while in poles�e it is the practice of sorcery. 6 while oral texts are those recorded directly from an informant, written texts are of various kinds: a written record made by the visionary, a friend or relative, or a report by a local priest, and may have been recorded for private reading or for publication. most oral narratives were recorded in the last thirty years, while written narratives are more common for the pre-revolutionary period, where they appeared in religious journals or as pamphlets. i have included vinogradov�s texts from 1923 in the category of pre-revolutionary obmiraniia. it should also be noted that a few �texts� are retellings by ethnographers and folklorists. i have not included the recent publication of a fictional obmiranie written in france by a russian émigré [voznesenskaia 2002]. 7 just occasionally in oral visions is it suggested that the severity of the punishment can be altered, whether by the actions of those on earth in praying for the dead, or in the case of an unbaptized child by getting a newborn infant to wear the dead child�s cross [e.g. cherednikova 2001:234; see also wigzell 2002a]. the question of whether an unbaptized baby would inevitably go to hell was a troubling one, and the motif of altering the fate of this category of sinners has precedents. 8 the instruction to return, often to repent of one�s sins, is a traditional motif, found also in a number of written obmiraniia from the nineteenth century. so far, however, i know of only one earlier text, where it is the mother of god who despatches a sinner back to earth. in the seventeenth-century �skazanie o chudesakh ot ikony tikhvinskoi bogomateri� [account of the miracles associated with the icon of the tikhvin mother of god], one tale recounts how a monk was sent back to this world by a voice saying that the mother of god had interceded for him, and he was being returned to earth for several more years]. the ms from which this is taken is sob. titova, no. 3373, l. 118 in the russian national library. my thanks are due to dr a. pigin of petrozavodsk state university for this information. folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 66 9 mothers are not always angels, at least in religious legends; witness the tale, recounted by grushen�ka in dostoevskii�s brothers karamazov, of the mother who fails to be pulled out of hell by her son because she is too mean. 10 bilyi [1930:68] notes in his survey of ukrainian obmiraniia that visionaries may see parents, siblings, in-laws, children or acquaintances, but most commonly acquaintance and then parents. he does not, however, distinguish between reunions and images of torment, in which fellow villagers and other acquaintances, for obvious reasons, appear more often than relatives. communication with dead relatives is characteristic of russian oral oneiromantic tradition as a whole, as well as of folk beliefs surrounding death [tolstaia 2001: 205-11]. many of a. n. redova�s dreams, in which there are only glimpses of the visionary tradition, concern her meetings with her family and others she has known [semenova 2000:ii]. 11 this was an extremely common motif in ukraine according to bilyi [1930: 80], who lists seven texts mentioning abortion, the majority contemporary with his study. 12 an exception is the male visionary from sudogda region in vladimir oblast�, who learned his father�s sins included non-attendance at church and not crossing himself [dobrovol�skaia 1999: no. 6], or the woman from iaroslavl� oblast� who criticized women who went to church without washing [dobrovol�skaia 1999: no.5]. 13 translations of quotations from fedotov�s text are my own. 14 of course it is not just possible, but even likely, that some narratives contain elements of fiction. since the popular expectation is that anyone in a coma will have an experience of this kind, it may be assumed that those to whom it does not happen often fall back on the strategy of saying that they were forbidden to relate the details of their visit (a common motif). in kargopol�e it is apparently a common assumption that those who come out of a coma have been forbidden to say anything at all about their experience (see the obmiranie texts in the folklore laboratory database). alternatively, visionaries may be tempted by the fame and respect attendant upon the obmiravshii/aia to fulfil an audience�s expectations with details drawn from their cultural stock. the absence of these among the kargopol�e texts referred to above may indicate less familiarity with the visionary tradition. bibliography belova, ol�ga. 2002. �etiologiia grekha: narodnaia moral� v fol�klornykh legendakh� [the etiology of sin: folk morality in folklore legends]. rossiia xxi. no. 2, pp. 166-87. bessonov, p. 1861-64/1970. kaleki perekhozhie [the blind itinerants]. reprinted from the moscow ed. 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(polnoe sobranie sochinenii [complete works]). vol. 3. st. petersburg. microsoft word folks05.doc 39 romani (gypsy) music-making at weddings in post-communist romania: political transitions and cultural adaptations margaret h. beissinger university of wisconsin-madison anyone attending a traditional wedding in romania during the communist period, such as in the 1970s or �80s, and returning to such a celebration during the 1990s or early 2000s would immediately notice that, although structurally the wedding ritual proceeds more or less the same now as before, the non-ritual music and dance that currently form part of the festivities are significantly different. amplified instruments in many cases have replaced acoustic ones, and electronic instruments have joined and often supplanted traditional ones. moreover, the songs now widely heard are more frequently �balkan pop� and �gypsy� music rather than romanian traditional repertoire, and �gypsy� as opposed to romanian dance forms dominate. this article examines how and why these changes have taken place, and provides a description of a typical contemporary village wedding. i explore, in particular, how the political and cultural developments in post-communist romania have affected music-making by romani (gypsy) performers at traditional weddings. my primary questions concern how romanian wedding music and dance repertoire have changed since the communist period and why. i suggest that the developments in traditional dance since 1989 reflect, in cultural terms, romania�s transition from forty-five years of communism to the post-communism of the present and future, envisioned as a democratic market economy in which anticipated membership in the european union looms on a moderately distant horizon. i argue the following three points: first, the changes that have occurred in the wedding dance repertoire over the past fifteen years have generally represented a shift from romanian traditional dance genres to genres that are or are coded as romani. second, these changes are a result of the more open political and social climate that followed the fall of communism, especially the freedom of speech and contacts with the outside world that were permitted. and third, issues of cultural, ethnic, and gender identity in transition in postcommunist romanian society are mirrored in the dances now performed at weddings. my findings are based on fieldwork in southern romania, where i have interviewed many romani musicians and attended numerous weddings at which they performed.(1) my observations are also informed by cultural developments elsewhere in the post-communist balkan world.(2) brief introductory remarks on politics in twentieth-century romania, romani musicians, traditional weddings, and communist-period repertoire precede my main discussion of post-communist wedding music and dance genres, including a detailed treatment of two principal forms (the �manea� and �lăutar horă�). i also include a summary ethnographic account of a village wedding that i attended in 2002 that illustrates, in particular, post-communist celebratory music and dance. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 40 politics and culture in romania: 1944 to the present the communist period in romania lasted from august 1944 to december 1989, at which time the romanian revolution, an anti-communist popular uprising, took place. as elsewhere in eastern europe that year, the communist government collapsed. the dictator nicolae ceauşescu (who had ruled since 1965) and his wife elena were assassinated on december 25, 1989, after which a post-communist political system was put in place. the most coveted civil liberties that had been denied over the preceding forty-five years freedom of speech and the right to travel abroad were reinstated. these changes profoundly affected the cultural developments that occurred after the revolution. indeed, freedom of speech since 1990 has clearly been part of the democratic process in romania, as well as throughout post-communist eastern europe. but it has also promoted public expression of xenophobia, including increased hatred and discrimination against romania�s romani minority. romani musicians in romania: lăutari romania�s romani population numbers somewhere around two million in a total population of about twenty three million.(3) romani musicians, called lăutari (sg. lăutar) in romanian, are members of this minority ethnic community (i will utilize the term lăutar here since there is no simple english term to replace it). they are male romani professional musicians who perform in small traditional ensembles usually for nonromani (mainly ethnic romanian) society. lăutari are the primary performers of live music at traditional weddings.(4) their occupation was and still is hereditary, passed along the male kinship line within families. from at least the late fifteenth century in the south of what is now romania and by the latter sixteenth century elsewhere, lăutari were household slaves who made music for the romanian nobility and clergy. not only lăutari but virtually all roma in romania were enslaved over a period of five hundred years, from the late fourteenth to the nineteenth century. following their emancipation in 1864, they continued to make music professionally for romanian audiences at weddings and celebrations, a monopoly they have maintained up to the present time. romanian traditional weddings weddings represent the most commemorated ritual event of the life cycle in romanian society. traditional weddings long, festive celebrations also are the most significant occasions at which people gather to socialize, dance, eat, and drink. music, performed by lăutari, plays a central role at weddings. after various ritual events at the bride's and groom's homes and a ceremony at the church, the wedding banquet takes place: a lengthy, elaborate, allor late-night feast, accompanied by virtually non-stop music and dancing. i refer here to traditional weddings, by which i mean primarily village weddings that extend over at least two days and include rituals, customs, and specific music. but it should be noted that urban weddings also can be traditional in the same ways. many of the age-old nuptial customs and ritual songs are still performed at weddings.(5) these include the shaving of the bridegroom, with its specific song; the veiling and unveiling of the bride, which frame the wedding and are accompanied by ritual songs; and bradul, �the fir tree,� a suggestively symbolic icon of fertility around which people dance. in light of the many other changes that are now occurring in the wedding lore, these persistent rituals and songs exhibit a striking tenacity, due, needless to say, to their underlying 41 significance as metaphors of separation and fertility within the wedding rite of passage. they are certainly deserving of much attention and discussion in their own right. i am interested here, however, mainly in the nonritual, that is, social dance genres that, by contrast, have evolved radically since the romanian revolution took place. wedding repertoire in the communist period before we turn to the post-1989 changes in dance repertoire, let us consider what preceded them. throughout most of the twentieth century, lăutari played traditional romanian music in public. their instruments included the violin (vioară), accordion (acordeon), string bass (bas), and cimbalom (ţambal).(6) several key dance forms were typical at weddings. the most common among them was the generic romanian group dance or hora (horă), often called the romanian national dance. it is in duple meter and is danced by both men and women who take diagonal steps forward and back in a closed circle with hands held. the other chief dance in the south is the sîrbă, a circle (or semi-circle) dance in duple meter with a shoulder hold.(7) between 1944 and 1989, but especially during ceauşescu�s rule, the wedding music and dance repertoire was dictated and monitored by the communist government. lăutari were instructed to perform exclusively �native� genres, conforming to the official attempts to control cultural expression by permitting only �pure, traditional� romanian music.(8) the constraints placed on music played in public by lăutari became progressively more severe during ceauşescu�s reign in the 1980s. wedding music and dance in post-communist romania within the context of strictly regulated dance music at weddings, the romanian revolution in december 1989 represented a real threshold, since within a relatively short time, years of cultural restrictions were overturned. by january 1990, new sounds as well as innovative genres and styles were beginning to supplant older ones. electronic, as opposed to traditional and acoustic instruments became more widespread, gender and ethnic markers of earlier dance styles began to break down, and �non-native� dance genres and styles in many cases superseded �native� ones. romani music, which had been officially viewed as representing culture that undermined romania�s purported social homogeneity, surfaced and in fact became the craze. in order to understand where this suddenly popular romani music came from in the 1990s, we must shift our gaze from the domain of official public romanian culture to the unofficial private romani arena. in addition to the traditional mainstream romanian repertoire that lăutari played widely during the communist period at weddings and other celebrations for romanian society, they also performed another, romani, repertoire, at romani, not romanian, weddings where romani in-group songs and dances were heard. indeed, this romani repertoire formed a type of underground musical culture, one that was increasingly embraced by ethnic romanians after 1989. romani musical styles that figured in romanian public events after 1989 included what are termed �oriental music� (muzică orientală) and �lăutar music� (muzică lăutărească ) both songs and dances. the manea (pl. manele), a term i will adopt since there is no english equivalent, is a dance performed to oriental music (mainly songs), while the lăutar hora (hora lăutărească) is danced to lăutăr music, both instrumental and vocal. it is to these two dance forms, the manea and lăutăr hora, that i now turn. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 42 the manea (oriental music) the manea, a twentieth-century urban-based vocal-dance genre, is an immensely popular form that dominates at weddings in romania. it represents a blend of native, romani, balkan, oriental, and occidental effects.(9) similar �folk-pop fusion� [silverman 2003: 129] styles are to be found elsewhere in the balkans, such as in bulgaria, where it is called chalga, and where, like in romania, post-communist freedoms allowed for the public performance of previously-banned music.(10) the manea reflects a distinctly middle-eastern sound (hence its name as �oriental� music), particularly in rhythm, melody, and instrumentation. the oriental music that provides for the dancing of the manea departs significantly from romanian traditional music. it is recognized by its signature syncopated �middle eastern� rhythmic pattern in duple meter, often called chiftitelli, which contrasts with the more even duple meters of romanian traditional dance.(11) oriental music melodies contain intervals that are stereotypically coded as middle eastern (especially chromaticisms and augmented seconds) as well as heavily ornamental figures, again a departure from the more uniform diatonic patterns in romanian genres. moreover, many of the instruments now played for oriental music are electronic; all are amplified. they include synthesizers (which create characteristically middle-eastern timbres), keyboards, electric guitars and violins, and drum sets, as well as accordions, clarinets, and saxophones ensembles that differ notably from earlier formations of acoustic, traditional instruments. the manea as dance contrasts sharply with romanian traditional dances. it is a solo (individual) improvisatory form typified by subtle, sensual movements of the dancer�s outstretched hands and arms as well as small steps in which the feet step forward and back. the effect is more or less suggestively sexual. because the manea is so different from conventional romanian wedding dances, it has engendered a new cultural identity, one that plainly appeals to many. indeed, i have attended numerous weddings in post-communist southern romania, and they reveal an unambiguous picture in terms of preferred dance genres: the manea is by far the most popular social dance among romanians.(12) romanian fans of the manea include mainly rural, rural urbanite, working-class, and, above all, young people. despite its appeal, however, the manea also alienates many listeners (primarily members of the romanian urban elite), specifically due to what is perceived as its �foreign� music and �vulgar� lyrics, a topic of considerable interest that i do not explore here.(13) although the earlier, pre-1990 romani-performed manea as dance was bounded by gender and ethnic lines, these divisions have broken down in post-communist romania due to a loosening of traditional social conventions and the increased influence of western media. while the earlier manea was a female genre, this gender division collapsed during the 1990s, and although women still dance the manea more frequently than men, it is now a mixed-gender form. moreover, while the manea was formerly performed solely at romani events, it was also adopted by ethnic romanians at their weddings, especially after 1989. paradoxically, the manea, which was suppressed particularly in the late communist period because of its romani associations, has by now become standard in the wedding dance repertoire of romanians. the manea dance form finds analogues elsewhere in the balkans: in the chochek, a macedonian solo female romani dance, termed çoçek in albanian and kiuchek in bulgarian. in these last two countries it is also now danced by both men and women as well as by the ethnically dominant (non-romani) members of 43 society.(14) this dissolution of gender and ethnic distinctions speaks to a new, far more western, and indeed global sense of identity that has permeated the post-communist balkans. throughout romania, and all of eastern europe, musical culture changed conspicuously after 1989: borders dissolved and previous restrictions were eliminated or loosened. as i have suggested, these openings were exploited; traditional and popular music, now freely entering from both east and west, were keenly embraced and assimilated by romani musicians and their romanian patrons. freedom of expression in the post-1989 world allowed for the bold adoption of musical style and effects from romani, south slavic, turkish, and other middle eastern sources, as well as from the cultures of european and american rock, disco, jazz, hiphop, and rap. moreover, by the 1990s, much of this music was danced and performed in a more provocative, �sexy� style than had ever been permitted in public in communist romania. the lăutar hora (lăutar music) let us turn our attention now to the traditional lăutar hora, a romani dance form that, like the manea, has circulated since the early twentieth century among roma and until more recently did not figure prominently in the romanian wedding repertoire. also like the manea, the lăutar hora reflects an urban style that evolved in southern romania for romani in-group events. it is a traditional dance in duple meter and is performed on �classic� lăutar instruments (especially the accordion, string bass, and cimbalom); moreover, it is danced to both instrumental music and songs. the conspicuous rhythmic bass line that the cimbalom provides is particularly distinctive to this music. the lăutar hora is danced individually (solo), a distinct contrast to the romanian hora, which is executed in a group circle. also unlike the romanian hora, the lăutar hora is marked by improvisation, sudden changes in direction, active arm movements and finger-snapping, rhythmic foot-stamping, and in general an engaged, energetic style.(15) in other words, the lăutar hora is performed in a manner that differs significantly from the romanian hora. while the romanian hora was traditionally a favorite social dance at weddings, in today�s world, the lăutar hora is replacing it, something i have noticed more and more frequently even during the past several years. the growing popularity of the lăutar hora is representative of a larger phenomenon akin to the appeal of the manea namely, a fascination with romani culture and expression.(16) just as the manea, coded as romani, has been adopted by romanians especially since 1989, so the lăutar hora is supplanting the romanian hora, at least at weddings in southern romania. dancing the lăutar hora provides an expressive means by which romanians can articulate an inverted identity; this is effected through empathy and mimicry of what is perceived as romani. through the experience of the lăutar hora, romanians are enabled, albeit fleetingly, to assume an exotic persona. while dancing �like a gypsy� to �gypsy music,� romanians can briefly espouse a romanticized romani identity, momentarily becoming like idealized images of roma: passionate, intense, and free-spirited. and yet, there is always a tension embedded in this fascination for romani culture because of the implicit hostility felt by the dominant ethnic group for roma, even musicians. perhaps it is precisely this tension that makes performing the lăutar hora as well as the manea, for that matter exciting for romanians, especially in today�s world of increased public xenophobia. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 44 village wedding in giurgiu county: august 2002 in august 2002 i attended a traditional romanian (orthodox) wedding that took place over the course of three days in the village of milcovăţu, located southwest of bucharest in giurgiu county. my abbreviated account of that wedding presented here focuses primarily on the music, songs and dances, that formed part of the wedding as a public celebration. the wedding festivities began on a saturday evening and lasted until midnight. they resumed the next morning (sunday) and continued uninterrupted until early monday morning. i accompanied the performing ensemble of romani musicians, most of them members of an extended family from a village in the vicinity. they included a female vocalist and seven male instrumentalists: three accordionists (one of whom was the senior and thus head lăutar of the ensemble), a violinist, guitarist, string bass player, and cimbalom player; a guest musician from bucharest who played the synthesizer also joined them. the background events for the music-making consisted of three main arenas: the traditional nuptial rituals, the village processions, and the non-ritual activities�eating, dancing, and socializing. saturday evening the festivities began on saturday evening at eight o�clock at the home of the groom and his parents in milcovăţu; the bride was also present. the music started right away with lăutar horas and a manea, to which the bride, groom, and a few others danced. then the ritual shaving of the groom took place in the courtyard. it was accompanied by the customary �bridegroom�s song� (cântecul ginerelui), sung by the senior lăutar to traditional instruments. an hour later, the wedding party, including the lăutari, split up: some went to the couple�s godparents� house and some to the home of the bride and her parents. tents and tables had been set up at both the godparents� and bride�s. upon arriving, the various guests were served a meal. the rest of the evening at both places was spent listening to and dancing (in a space under the tent) to the amplified music played by the lăutari. the guests at the bride�s home included the groom and other young people; accordingly, the repertoire was contemporary--almost all manele (pl. of manea). at the godparents�, however, where the guests were a somewhat older crowd, the repertoire was more varied. there were traditional romanian dances (the hora and sîrbă) but also many, if not more, lăutar songs �to listen to� (de ascultare), as well as the lăutar hora and manea, all of which the guests, even older ones, danced with joy and abandon. because there had been an extremely heavy rain earlier in the evening, it was unusually muddy everywhere, including under the tent. this, however, did not keep anyone from dancing. indeed, that evening an ethnic romanian man attracted a good deal of attention since he danced the lăutar hora for long periods of time with extraordinary energy and zeal, seemingly uninterested in the food or drink he was served or even in the company he kept. he was truly a lăutar hora fanatic (a �type� i have noticed at other weddings as well). many of the lăutar horas that evening expressed quintessential romani themes: being proud of one�s children and having sufficient money to live well. �i�m a happy father� (sînt un tată fericit) included the following opening stanza: i�m a happy father; sînt un tată fericit; i�ve worked hard for my children. pentru copii am muncit. i�ve worked both night and day am muncit şi zi şi noapte 45 to do everything i can for my boy [son]. să fac la băiat de toate. the refrain was: i want to be able vreau să am putere to make a fortune ca să fac avere for my boy, la băiatul meu, because he is so precious, că e de valoare, and no one has şi nimeni nu are a boy like mine. băiat c-al meu. �all my life i�ve enjoyed having money� (toată viaţă mi-a plăcut să am bani) also provided brisk music for dancing and began with: all my life i�ve enjoyed toată viaţă mi-a plăcut having money to live well, să am bani, să trăiesc mult, to survive from my wealth, să trăiesc din avuţie, to enjoy what i love. să iubesc ce-mi place mie. all my life i�ve enjoyed mi-a plăcut toată viaţa having everything i need in my home, să am de toate în casa mea, working to make my own money, să muncesc să am banii mei, to do what i want with it. şi să fac ce vreau cu ei. the refrain echoed these sentiments: money, money is my life. banii, banii-s viaţa mea. without money i�m not anybody. fără bani nu-s cineva. when i have money and things go well, când am bani şi-o duc bine, the whole world is on my side. toată lumea e cu mine. all my life i�ve enjoyed toată viaţă mi-a plăcut having money to live well, să am bani, să trăiesc mult, to be happy in my home să fiu fericit în casă with my children and my own dear wife. cu copiii şi-a mea nevastă. sunday to monday the next morning around ten o�clock all assembled again at the groom�s house, where the festivities began with the lăutar hora. then the groom, wedding guests, and five of the lăutari departed to the home of the godparents. the village procession down the unpaved village roads included a good deal of fanfare and was conspicuously festive as the �news� of the wedding was �broadcast�; the lăutari played traditional music as the guests gradually made their way through the streets in circle and line formations of romanian dances. at the godparents�, more dancing took place as several manele were played. in the meantime, the wedding party, folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 46 minus the groom (who would join up again later in the afternoon), headed off to the bride�s home in another joyful procession. once there, the lăutari gathered around the bride and played to her as she �was made ready� (s-a gătit). still and expressionless in her white gown, she sat on a small veranda while her godmother carefully pinned her veil and a crown-like headpiece on her head and then put her make-up on (the bride�s hair had already been �done� at a beauty salon earlier, in fact very early that morning in bucharest). as this took place, the lăutari sang the ritual �bride�s song� (cântecul miresii), known for its improvisation and adding style; it began with: bid, oh bride, farewell, ia-ţi, mireasă, ziua bună, to your father, to your mother, de la tată, de la mumă, to your brothers, to your sisters, de la fraţi, de la surori, to your garden full of flowers . . . de la grădina cu flori . . . as this familiar song continued, the bride broke down and wept�ritually wept, i should say, since her tears are expected to flow at this particular juncture as she ponders the separation she is about to make from her family. following this, the lăutari played the traditional �bride�s hora� (hora miresii), to which all assembled danced. much of the afternoon was taken up by additional village processions, accompanied by lăutari and traditional music, and various rituals of fertility. at the first, termed literally �the wetting� (udatul), the bride, aided by two unmarried young men, ceremonially sprinkled a moistened basil stalk in four directions at three different crossroads (the water for �the wetting� was drawn from wells located at the crossroads). later in the afternoon, back at the bride�s home, a small fir tree (bradul) was decorated with colored crêpe paper and girded at its base with a bright red runner as the lăutari again sang the signature �bride�s song.� the little fir tree was then placed in a central spot in the courtyard where members of the wedding party formed a circle around it, dancing to the traditional �hora of the fir tree� (hora bradului). by mid-afternoon, more food was served to those present, who also danced lăutar horas and manele as the lăutari played. by late afternoon (and several processions later), the bride and her family, godparents, and other wedding guests had arrived at the groom�s home. the bride�s parents brought gifts (table cloths, towels, and pajamas) which were given to the groom�s household, soon to be the home of the bride as well (traditional romanian society is patrilocal). during this ceremonial gift-giving, the lăutari performed the ritual �wedding dance� (nunească). it was seven o�clock when the wedding party finally departed�with music and dance en route once more--to the orthodox church in the village for the religious wedding ceremony. after the church service, which lasted about forty-five minutes, the lăutari, who had waited outside the church, once again accompanied the party of revelers as they made their way back to the groom�s home. a large tent with four long tables and a raised platform with speakers at one end for the musicians had been set up in the courtyard. it provided the setting for the banquet or �great feast� (masa mare), the culmination of the wedding. the lăutari assembled at one end of the tent and hooked up the amplification system that ensured the ear-splitting volume that would persist until dawn on monday morning. the guests, who eventually totaled about two hundred, also arrived at this time and began at once to dance, especially the manea and lăutar hora. 47 the evening meal, consisting of four courses and endless wine, was served in a leisurely manner until about four in the morning. during the entire banquet, the lăutari performed music, mainly manele and lăutar horas, and the guests danced constantly, breaking only periodically to eat and drink. virtually all of the manele expressed themes of sexual attraction and desire (from the male point of view). �you are the woman of my dreams� (tu eşti femeia visurilor mele) was among the most popular manele in 2002; it was performed repeatedly at the wedding and began with: you have entered my soul, tu ai intrat în sufletul meu, and i simply can�t forget you. şi să te uit îmi este tare greu. i love you with a pure heart, eu te iubesc cu inima curată, but what a pity that you�re married. dar ce păcat, eşti măritată. the refrain continued with: you are the woman of my dreams. tu eşti femeia visurilor mele. when i�m with you, you give me strength. când sînt cu tine, parcă prind putere. but what a pity you�re not all mine; dar ce păcat că nu eşti toată a mea; you also have someone else. mai ai pe altcineva. �salome� (salomeea), with its biblical subtext of female treachery, was also a �super hit� that year, though its lyrics were far from subtle. it was heard again and again at the wedding. the refrain began the song and was: saloo, salome saloo, salomeea, what a beautiful woman she is! ce frumoasă e femeia! but as beautiful as she is, atât cât e de frumoasă she�s got you crying at home. te face să plângi în casă. the first verse was: as long as i have money in my pocket, cât am bani în buzunar, i don�t have a care in the world, yeah, yeah! de nimica n-am habar, da, da! everyone�s looking [as us], and i feel good se-uită toată, şi mi-e bine with my love at my side. cu iubita mea lângă mine. in the early hours of the morning after the meal had ended, the wedding gifts from the guests to the bride and groom, called literally �the gift� (darul), were presented in the form of sums of money that were announced by the senior lăutar. next, the bride was solemnly unveiled as she sat on a chair surrounded by the wedding party. the veil and small wedding crown that had been placed on her head some sixteen hours earlier were removed by her godmother to the familiar strains of �the bride�s song,� sung one last time by the lăutari. a spirited romanian hora��the great hora� (hora mare)�followed, as well as a few last manele and lăutar horas. the guests were beginning to leave by then. in the meantime, the bride, groom, and performing lăutari folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 48 accompanied the couple�s godparents to their home, with traditional music en route, even at five o�clock in the morning. the couple then returned to the groom�s, now also the bride�s, home, and the wedding was over. the sun was rising in the early morning sky. in this account of a traditional village wedding in southern romania, i have concentrated on the moments in which music played a role. two types of such �moments� happened over and over from saturday evening to monday morning. the first included the ceremonial events that underscored the ritual meaning of the wedding and marriage. they were invariably accompanied by traditional romanian wedding songs and dances on acoustic instruments and often took place in courtyards and during processions. this repertoire has persisted for generations and provides a fitting testimony to the tenacious nature of the deep structure and traditional significance of the wedding as a rite of passage. the other �moments� comprised the non-ceremonial periods, those that occurred precisely when the nuptial rituals were not taking place. they happened intermittently throughout the wedding, but especially during the saturday and sunday evening banquets when the wedding activities moved under the tents. it is, in particular, this non-ritual social repertoire that has changed so significantly since the early 1990s. whereas the social dancing during earlier and communist-period romanian weddings used to include mostly traditional romanian repertoire, the contemporary �oriental� and �gypsy� songs and dances have, by and large, replaced them. and while (urban elite) romanians decry the secular, crass and sensual themes and style of many of the lăutar horas and manele, these genres relate granted, indecorously to the larger concerns of the wedding. through their bold verses, brazen rhythms and seductive body language, the contemporary social dances speak to a dynamic sexuality that underlies and even exemplifies the wedding. they are, after all, courting rituals, and invoke, however crudely, the powerful sexual meaning implicit in the wedding as a rite of passage that enables the journey from uninitiated childhood to married adulthood. the now-popular music and dances sanction this passage through the sexuality that they celebrate. conclusion following the tightly guarded communist era of culture, dancing the manea and lăutar hora have become celebratory experiences for many romanians. clearly one of the trends in post-communist romania is the appropriation of romani traditional culture, especially music and dance, by romanians. during the communist years, both the manea and lăutar hora were part of a quasi-counter culture. dancing them in public, even in today�s post-communist world, is, though not quite subversive, still immensely engaging and exhilarating, and has come to represent the freedoms and subverting of earlier cultural taboos now possible in the post-1989 world. the music of the manea is powerful and seductive; its vigorous rhythms, exotic melodies, and modern sounds are appreciated as �oriental,� romani, and western, creating a strongly contrasting other as compared to the familiar style of traditional romanian music and dance. to engage in a formerly banned, erotic romani dance is stirring and liberating for many romanians; it combines the allure of the sexy and forbidden with the romance of an imagined �gypsy� culture. the manea as dance is, furthermore, emblematic of the cultural 49 freedoms and sexual imagery now heavily promoted throughout the balkans through western media. it permits, as elsewhere in the balkans, a more ��sexualized� gendered identity� [sugarman 2003: 106], thanks in large part to this western mass culture. the popularity of the lăutar hora likewise has increased significantly over the fifteen years since romania�s revolution took place. it too is, for many, an expressive and sensual experience that differs considerably from the more modest and controlled music and dance figures of the romanian hora. the changes that took place in the traditional romanian wedding dance repertoire after 1989 included shifting genres and styles of music, non-traditional instrumentation, and permutations in the gendered and ethnic character of some of the forms. all of these changes have taken place due to the collapse of a political system, and they all represent alternative ways of dealing with culture, ethnicity and gender in the post-communist world. one wonders how much longer these dance forms will continue to delight romanians, who may find other cultures and worlds in the years ahead permeating their boundaries in new and inspiring ways. in this future romania, it will be intriguing to view how and why, as well as whether, traditional wedding music and dance repertoire will change. notes 1 my observations are based on fieldwork in cities (bucharest, craiova, târgovişte, and piteşti) and villages (blejeişti, mârişa, cartojani, preajbă, milcovăţu, palancă, icoană, roată, and celei) in south-central romania between 1979 and 2004. 2 on changes in traditional and popular music in post-communist eastern europe, see slobin 1996. 3 the number of roma in romania is much disputed; the zamfirs suggest at least one million [1993: 60] while the ethnic federation of roma in romania estimates 2.5 million [pons 1999: 7]. 4 for a fuller discussion of lăutari, see beissinger 1991, 2001, and 2005. 5 on romanian wedding traditions, especially in the northern region of maramureş, see kligman. 6 the cimbalom is a type of hammer dulcimer with between twenty and thirty-five courses of strings that are struck by two wooden mallets; for more on traditional instruments employed by lăutari, see beissinger 1991. 7 other traditional dances at weddings in southern romania include the brîu, brează, and geamparale. 8 on communist-era restrictions on romani music, see rădulescu 1994. 9 for a fuller discussion of the manea, see beissinger 2005; see also bălaşă 2003. 10 on �wedding music� in bulgaria, a genre comparable to romanian oriental music in sociomusical ways, of which chalga forms a part, see buchanan 1996. 11 on the syncopated middle eastern rhythms of the manea form, see garfias 1984 12 on changes in post-communist music-making among romani musicians in transylvania, see buckley 1994 and 2000. 13 for a detailed discussion of the simultaneous fascination and disdain for the manea in romanian society, see beissinger 2005. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 50 14 on the bulgarian and macedonian dance forms (kiuchek and chochek), see silverman 2003; on the albanian çoçek, see sugarman 2003. 15 on the lăutar hora, see giurchescu 2000 16 for an account of this phenomenon in serbia (vojvodina), see van de port 1998. bibliography bălaşă, marin marian 2003. �maneaua, o creaţie al politicilor culturale româneşti� [the manea: a creation of romanian cultural politics] in studii şi materiale de antropologie muzicală [studies and materials in musical anthropology]. bucharest: editura muzicală, pp. 221-54. beissinger, margaret h. 1991. the art of the lăutar: the epic tradition of romania. new york: garland publishing. ------2001. "occupation and ethnicity: constructing identity among romani (gypsy) musicians in romania," slavic review, 60, no. 1, spring 2001: 24-49. ------2005. "'muzică orientală�: identity and popular culture in post-communist romania." in donna buchanan (ed.), balkan popular culture and the ottoman ecumene: music, image, and regional political discourses. lanham, md: scarecrow press, inc. (at press). buchanan, donna a. 1996. �wedding musicians, political transition, and national consciousness in bulgaria.� in mark slobin (ed.), retuning culture: musical changes in central and eastern europe. durham: duke university press, pp. 200-30. buckley, ann 1994. �professional musicians, dancing and patronage: continuity and change in a transylvanian community,� the world of music, 36: 31-48. ------2000. �gypsy musicians in transylvania: changing lifestyles, changing status� in max peter baumann (ed.), music, language and literature of the roma and sinti. berlin: verlag für wissenschaft und bildung, pp. 309-18. garfias, robert 1984. "dance among the urban gypsies of romania." yearbook for traditional music, 16: 84-96. giurchescu, anca 2000. "gypsy dance style as marker of ethnic identity." in max peter baumann (ed.), music, language and literature of the roma and sinti. berlin: verlag für wissenschaft und bildung, pp. 321-29. kligman, gail 1988. the wedding of the dead: ritual, poetics, and popular culture in transylvania. berkeley: university of california press. pons, emmanuelle 1999. ţiganii din românia: o minoritate în tranziţie [gypsies in romania: a minority in transition], trans. gabriela ciubuc. bucharest: compania �altfel.� rădulescu, speranţa 1994. "consequences of the political changes in romanian peasant music." revue roumaine d'histoire de l'art, 31: 27-30. 51 silverman, carol 2003. �the gender of the profession: music, dance, and reputation among balkan muslim rom women.� in tullia magrini (ed.), music and gender: perspectives from the mediterranean. chicago: university of chicago press, pp. 119-45. slobin, mark, ed. 1996. retuning culture: musical changes in central and eastern europe. durham: duke university press. sugarman, jane 2003. �those �other women�: dance and femininity among prespa albanians.� in tullia magrini (ed.), music and gender: perspectives from the mediterranean,. chicago: university of chicago press, pp. 87-118. van de port, mattijs 1998. gypsies, wars and other instances of the wild: civilization and its discontents in a serbian town. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. zamfir, elena and cătălin 1993. ţiganii: între ignorare şi îngrijorare [gypsies: between avoidance and attention]. bucharest: editura alternative. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 microsoft word folkxiv_author.doc the myth of the “russian soul” folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 91 the myth of the “russian soul” through the mirror of language (1) valentina apresjan russian language institute of the russian academy of sciences moscow, russia abstract this paper aims at a linguistic description and evaluation of the myth of the russian soul. this myth is a prominent cultural stereotype centered on mental, emotional, and spiritual concepts. the specific goal of this paper is to project the linguistic “image” of the russian soul, which consists mainly of emotions, onto the corresponding cultural myth which exists in russian literature and philosophy, as well as in russian folk belief. such a superimposition should reveal whether linguistic evidence does in fact support the russian soul myth. to test the linguistic specificity of russian emotions, they are contrasted to their english-language counterparts. the english language material is based on american english since all my informants were american. literary sources and corpora were also used. the task at hand requires a new framework for a cross-linguistic study of emotions and such a framework is proposed. as distinct from traditional word-to-word contrastive analysis, the proposed approach involves comparing entire emotion “clusters,” i.e. all linguistic means of expressing a particular type of emotion in a given language. the paper also touches upon certain related fields of emotion studies, namely neuropsychology and physiology, as they provide valuable insight into the similarities and differences between the linguistic model of emotions and their scientific counterparts. these fields also provide explanations for the similarity and variation in conceptions of emotions as they are attested across different languages and cultures. introduction the current paper deals with certain issues extensively researched in ethnolinguistics. this branch of linguistics is a field that studies the relationship between language and culture. it looks at the way perception and conceptualization influence language and examines variation across cultures. by connecting culture and language, ethnolinguists explain the similarities and differences of mentality inherent in different languages. 92 the analysis presented in this paper is both a continuation of recent studies in ethnolinguistics and a departure from them. it is an attempt to examine russian cultural mythology, stereotyping, and introspection concerning feelings and emotions through their reflection in language. the focus on the conceptualization of emotions is easy to explain: emotions are in many ways the “hub” of the russian linguistic worldview, “the way of conceptualizing reality inherent in a given language” [apresjan 2000: 103]. this is also the core of the myth of the existence of a “mysterious russian soul,” a concept which forms at least as important a part of russian cultural mythology as the myth of moscow as the third rome. the project aspires to accomplish this task from an angle that has not been previously explored. the novel research method here proposed aims to consider related fields of knowledge (such as neuropsychology), as well as to extend the focus of analysis from individual emotion words to entire emotion clusters (please see the precise definition of the “emotion cluster” below). the method questions assumptions about the russian linguistic worldview which have become commonplace in ethnolinguistic studies dealing with the “russian soul”. i will begin with a brief overview of the “russian soul” stereotype as it has emerged and crystallized in culture, concentrating in particular on its emotional components. then i will consider the existing linguistic evidence that supports the belief that the “russian soul” is something special, a part of the russian linguistic worldview, and a reflection of the emotional world of the russian people. finally, i will present my own approach to the study of emotions in the russian language, as well the results of this study. 1. the “russian soul” stereotype for centuries, russians have viewed themselves as having a very special emotional and spiritual world. their perennial introspection, as well as perceptions of russians articulated by outside observers have resulted in what might be called the “russian soul stereotype.” according to this stereotype, russians are “warm-hearted,” “emotional,” “irrational,” “collectivistic,” “fatalistic,” “humble,” “subservient,” “reckless,” “freedom-loving,” “compassionate,” “ruled by longing,” “spiritual,” “mystical,” “passive,” “submissive,” “direct,” “open,” “sensitive,” “lazy,” and so forth.(2) there are natural differences of perception between the famous “russian soul” (russkaia dusha) as the myth of the “russian soul” folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 93 viewed from inside the culture and its image as seen from outside. still, there is a unity of perception. one example is the contrast between the esoteric concept of the russians as humble and the exoteric view of them as subservient. although the concepts differ in terms of positive and negative coloration, the two images are fairly consistent with each other and overlap in their depiction of russian emotionality and mentality. the stereotype of the russian soul has been created, perpetuated, and disseminated by writers, poets, and philosophers, including pushkin, lermontov, gogol, dostoevsky, blok, tsvetaeva, rozanov, berdiaev, fedotov and many others. because of its ubiquity, the myth of the russian soul has frequently come under scholarly scrutiny. allusions to and reflections upon the russian soul in philosophy, culture, literature, folklore, and art, as well as its scholarly descriptions, are too numerous to list in this paper. for a more comprehensive analysis and list of sources see rancour-laferriere [1995], who defines “russian soul” as predominantly masochistic and prone to self-mortification, selfhumiliation and undue sacrifice. this author also provides a plethora of facts from russian history and culture and quotes from literature to support his thesis. to substantiate his view of russians as people who are inherently passive and enjoy suffering, rancour-laferriere refers in particular to the dominance of certain types of characters and leitmotifs in russian art, especially literature and folklore. these include the prevalence of certain practices, rituals, and sects within the russian branch of christianity; the pervasiveness of certain behavior patterns in everyday life; peculiarities of political and historical development; and the prominence of certain words in the russian language, such as sud’ba (fate, destiny). in addition to his own generalizations about russian mentality, the author also quotes various russian and foreign writers, historians, travelers, and philosophers who have come to similar conclusions about the russian soul, namely that: russians like to suffer; russians are compassionate towards suffering; russians are generally passive, accept their fate, and humbly accept suffering. whether one agrees with this view of the russian people or not, it is noteworthy that the myth of the russian soul, unlike other areas of scholarly interest, is still present in the everyday discourse of ordinary russian people. it is as though the stereotype keeps reproducing itself in different historical periods and under varying social conditions. stimulus 94 comes both “from above” in the form of a national ideology, and “from below” as a product of people’s own self-perception. in other words, the myth is alive and thriving, even if the stereotype is often regarded ironically or dismissed as ridiculous. it has become a popular cliché, perpetuated in the everyday discourse of the russian people. “russian soul” is an entry in wikipedia and also the subject of countless sites and blogs, seminars and articles, both serious and ironic. a google search for “russkaia dusha” produces hundreds of thousands of entries. glancing at contemporary russian culture and discourse, one glimpses many facts that fit into this popular model of russian mentality. there are many indications that the stereotype still exists and remains important. without aspiring to provide a comprehensive picture, let us give a few representative quotes from different contemporary sources which illustrate some components of the russian soul stereotype: (a) component “russians like to suffer”; consider the following lines from a prominent russian contemporary poet, olga sedakova: я скажу, а ты не поверишь, как люблю я ночь и дорогу, как люблю я, что меня прогнали и что завтра опять прогонят. (о. седакова, конь). [i will say, and you will not believe me how much i love the night and the road, how much i love to have been chased away, and to be chased away again tomorrow]. (o.sedakova, stallion). on a different note, see the russian joke (anekdot) which explores different national stereotypes and focuses on masochistic suffering [shmeleva and shmelev 2002: 80-81] (i provide an english retelling of the joke, as it is rather long and language seems far less important here than the plot itself – va): “a ship sustained a shipwreck and there were three groups of survivors – french, english, and russian. they ended up on three different uninhabited islands. in each group there were three people, two men and one woman. after several years, the three islands with survivors were discovered. on the first island there were three french survivors. they were happily living in two houses, one man and the woman as a married couple, and the second man as a bachelor. on a tree there was a schedule: january: jean – husband, pierre – lover; february: pierre – the myth of the “russian soul” folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 95 husband, jean – lover, march: jean – husband, etc. on the second island there were three houses. each was inhabited by one british person, sullen and unhappy for lack of communication. they weren’t acquainted with one another because there was nobody to introduce them. on the third island there were russians. there was unhappy olga who married one man, but loved the other man and all three were suffering [muchalis’]”. (b) component “russians possess a mysterious russian soul which it is difficult or impossible to understand, especially for a foreigner”; consider a quote from an article published in “pravda.ru” – the internet heir of the famous soviet newspaper, which brings to mind the well-known slavophile argument about a special “russian path”: часто можно слышать о загадочной русской душе. но что это такое? чем русская душа отличается от других … северная природа приучила русского человека к терпению. терпение и труд всё перетрут. многие иностранцы путают это качество русского человека с бессловесностью, забитостью, рабской покорностью … многие проблемы в россии возникают из-за того, что те, кто приходит к власти в нашей стране, не понимают русской души, не имеют русской идеологии. они стремятся насадить у нас европейские порядки, приглашают к нам иностранных экспертов, которые с умным видом излагают свои теории. (а. падчин, загадочная русская душа, pravda.ru, 01.12. 2004). [one often hears about the mysterious russian soul. but what is that? how is the russian soul different from others? … the northern environment has taught the russian man patience. patience and diligence will wear everything away. many foreigners confuse this property of a russian person with numbness, being cowed, slavish submission … many problems arise in russia because those in power do not understand the russian soul, do not possess russian ideology. they try to introduce european order here, invite foreign specialists who expound their theories with a look of intelligence on their faces]. (a. padchin, mysterious russian soul, pravda.ru, 01.12. 2004, last visited 03.03.2009). the same stereotype is explored, ironically, in another anekdot [shmeleva and shmelev 2002: 129]: что говорят женщины разных национальностей, проведя ночь со своим поклонником? немка: «когда мы поженимся»? француженка: «а пьер был лучше». русская: «а душу мою, федя, ты так и не понял»… [what do women of different nationalities say after having spent the first night with their boyfriend? german: “when will we get married?” french: “pierre was better”. russian: “as for my soul, fedya, you haven’t understood it”]. 96 consider also ironic portrayals of the “russian soul” by ex-patriots in the russian blogosphere [http://www.siberianlight.net/do-you-have-abig-russian-soul] (last visited 03.03.2009): “could such a country, such a history, produce an ordinary soul? the kind of soul that an ordinary country produces? of course, not. such a country could only produce the big russian soul”. (c) component “russians are lazy”; consider the analysis of contemporary russian anecdotes dealing with national stereotypes in [shmeleva and shmelev 2002: 75]: в русских анекдотах образ русского часто включает традиционно приписываемые русским отрицательные черты. русские в русских анекдотах бывают представлены как пьяницы, готовые на все за бутылку; они ленивы, абсолютно равнодушны к работе, к профессиональному успеху, к семье и детям… [in russian jokes the image of the russian often includes negative traits traditionally ascribed to russians. russians in anecdotes are often portrayed as drunkards ready to give up everything for a bottle; they are lazy, absolutely indifferent to their job, their professional success, their family and children…]. (d) component “russians are fatalistic”; consider the ironic reflection of this part of the stereotype in the following anecdote, which imitates a math problem: из пункта а в пункт б выехал поезд. навстречу ему одновременно из пункта б в пункт а выехал другой поезд. дорога одноколейная, но они не встретились. вопрос: почему? ответ: не судьба! [a train leaves from point a to point b. simultaneously another train leaves from point b to point a. there is only one track on the railway but they don’t meet. question: why? answer: it was not fated]. (e) component “russians value the collective over the individual”; consider blog discussions about svetlana bakhmina, former lawyer of the oil company yukos, posted while she was in prison for “economic crimes” and was awaiting court decision on her request for parole (she was freed in may 2009). there had been much online public support for her, mostly generated because she was expecting a child (she gave birth the myth of the “russian soul” folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 97 in prison). however, there were also quite a few voices against her early release, mostly driven by the rhetoric of the collective, namely that it is not worthwhile supporting the cause of one individual person; consider one of the bloggers on the site bakhmina.net: с чего это такая трогательная забота об одной из тысяч преступниц? … ложь это всё, а не милосердие, если только одну бахмину выпускать. [why this touching concern about one of the thousands of female criminals? it’s all lies, and not mercy to release her alone]. examples can be multiplied a thousand fold. some stereotypes pertaining to the traditional view of the russian mentality as it has been portrayed from the xix century onward still play an important role in contemporary society. some continue in their original form and some are parodied. nonetheless, they persist. interestingly, only a few of the above ethnic traits are the subject of jokes about the russians told by non-russians. in estonian jokelore, for example, the russian love of vodka and the homeland are acknowledged as typical national features, while fatalism, “soulfulness”, collectiveness are completely ignored. moreover, in an estonian joke about a russian, a german, and an estonian, it is the estonian who is seen as inherently communal [laineste 2008: 16]. this demonstrates that ethnicities are portrayed differently in their native jokelore, where they are the primary focus of reflection, than in the jokelores of other ethnicities where they have “outsider” status. 2. previous ethnolinguistic research if we examine how the “russian soul” stereotype has been treated in ethnolinguistics, we see that its study has been based on the assumption that languages both reflect and shape their speakers’ mentalities. this idea goes back as far as humboldt’s work and the sapir and whorf hypothesis. in recent decades this notion has been thoroughly explored and substantiated by extensive material from a variety of languages. the breakthrough work of wierzbicka [wierzbicka 1990, 1991, 1992, 1999] has opened up a new avenue of research, both by breaking away from a long-held tendency towards anglo-centricity and by developing a semantic apparatus and terminology for this task. work describing emotion concepts in languages through reference to prototypical scenarios has been especially important [consider also iordanskaia 1972, 1984]. 98 the cognitivist work of lakoff and johnson [1980] and later their followers [kövecses 1990] was another significant contribution to the field. it has shown the importance of the linguistic metaphor (as opposed to literary metaphor) as a tool for gaining insight into how people conceptualize and understand things. examples include the fact that people view “up” as good, “down” as bad, “goals” as journeys, “feelings” as physical processes. this is attested by numerous linguistic expressions (“upper class,” “i’m feeling down” = ‘in a bad mood’, “my goal is in sight,” “he finally exploded” = ‘of anger’), etc. linguistic metaphor plays a particularly important role in the linguistic conceptualization of emotions. since emotion words refer to inner states which are very difficult or impossible to verbalize directly, people often resort to metaphor to speak about their feelings, likening something unknown to a familiar phenomenon. thus feelings are frequently conceptualized through metaphors of physical sensations (e.g. anger is heat, passion is intoxication, etc.). slavic languages (and, in particular, russian) have enjoyed considerable ethnolinguistic attention. in a way, analyzing language from the point of view of its cultureand linguo-specificity has become standard practice for specialists in synchronic semantics, especially in the russian semantic tradition. for instance, in the moscow school of semantics, the study of the so-called “linguistic picture of the world” constitutes a very significant area of research [apresjan 1995, 2000, 2006]. the last decade has seen a burst of interest in ethno-specific key words – “words which are particularly important and revealing in a given culture” [wierzbicka 1997: 15] and key ideas – “a kind of semantic leitmotif, each of which is expressed by many linguistic means of diverse nature: morphological, word-formative, syntactic, lexical and even prosodic [apresjan 2006: 34-36]. 3. russian key-words according to different sources, russian key-words comprise numerous items. these include culturally prominent concepts, presumably telling of the russian mentality and of russian folk selfperception. such concepts are often untranslatable into other languages except by means of analytic explanations. examples include: avos’ (perhaps with luck), dusha (soul), sovest’ (conscience), zhalost’ (pity), toska (feeling sad and hopeless because of yearning for something the myth of the “russian soul” folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 99 unattainable), sud’ba (fate/destiny), istina (the truth, gospel-truth), drug (friend), volia (unrestrained physical freedom) [wierzbicka 1997: 55-84, apresjan 2000: 102-10, 104-127, bulygina and shmelev 1997: 481-495], maiat’sia (to hang about for a long time, yearning), tomit’sia (to yearn, to languish), neprikaiannost’ (the state of not knowing what to do and where to be, and feeling bad because of that) [shmelev 2002: 404-410]. key-words also include function words such as connectives, e.g. the conjunction “a” which means both “and” and “but” [zalizniak and mikaelian 2005: 158-159]. the existing criteria for singling out key-words include such parameters as: frequency of use; e.g., the frequency of the word sud’ba is 83 occurrences per million words (national corpus of russian language) as compared to 28.7 total per million for its two english correlates fate and destiny counted together (british national corpus); prominence in language; e.g., the russian word sovest’, in comparison to its english correlate “conscience”, displays a much greater integration into the overall system of language. unlike english “conscience,” russian sovest’ is conceptualized in a number of linguistic metaphors. in the russian linguistic picture of the world, sovest’ is viewed as “a strict judge” who forbids immoral acts. this is attested by such regular collocations as sovest’ mne ne pozvoliaet etogo sdelat’ (my conscience doesn’t allow me to do it), sovest’ vosstaet protiv etogo (my conscience opposes it). sovest’ as judge also has an inherent moral instinct and can therefore guide people’s behavior. this is seen in expressions such as golos sovesti (the voice of conscience), velenie sovesti (the dictates of conscience). sovest’ can mete out punishment: sovest’ gryzet, muchaet, terzaet, glozhet, ne daet pokoia (conscience gnaws, tortures, torments, eats away, gives no peace). sovest’ can grant pardon: spokojnaia sovest’, chistaia sovest’ (tranquil conscience, clean conscience) [apresjan 1995: 353-354]; untranslatability into other languages by simple means. certain words are absent from many russian-english or english-russian dictionaries. examples include maiat’sia (to feel restless while doing nothing in particular and moving from place to place, often in a closed space) and neprikaiannost’ (the state of unattachedness to any particular occupation or place; lack of the ties and connections that people usually have, such as a job, a family). while some (e.g., oxford’s russianenglish dictionary) do provide translations, none of the suggested words reflects all semantic aspects of a complex concept. suggested translations 100 for maiat’sia such as “suffer,” “languish” reflect only the aspect of feeling bad, while “loaf” reflects only the state of doing nothing, and “loiter about” reflects only doing nothing and staying in a certain place. the only way to truly “translate” such words, therefore, is by means of an analytical semantic definition like those provided at the beginning of the paragraph. words can have different degrees of untranslatability; e.g., the word toska (feeling sad and hopeless because of yearning for something unattainable) can be rendered, depending on the context, by a variety of lexical means, including but not limited to “anguish,” “heartache,” “yearning,” “longing,” “weariness” (these examples come from the english and russian versions of nabokov’s “lolita”). the fact that all these words are legitimate, context-dependent translations means that toska is not entirely untranslatable; english lacks one word that would render all the semantic components that are present in this synthetic russian concept. in a similar vein, words which supposedly define the typical personality traits of the russian people are characterized by a more frequent co-occurrence with the adjective russkii (russian). in the article with the intentionally humorous title “с чисто русской аккуратностью” [with purely russian neatness] plungian and rakhilina [1996] give this and other co-occurrences as examples of impossible collocations. indeed, data from the russian national corpus does seem to substantiate the claim that certain characteristics are viewed as more russian than others; consider russkaia dushevnost’ (russian soulfulness) 2 occurrences, russkaia udal’ (russian gallantry) 16 occurrences, russkaia zhalost’ (russian pity) 5 occurrences,(3) russkaia toska (russian sadness/yearning) 20 occurrences, russkii fatalism (russian fatalism) 3 occurrences, russkoe smirenie (russian humility) 4 occurrences. conversely, there are no collocations such as “russian neatness,” “russian punctuality,” “russian honesty,” “russian love of liberty” (svobodoliubie), etc. 4. russian key ideas as many researchers suggest, typically russian key ideas include the following: “uncontrollability of events by their subject,” “the influence of somebody else’s will on events,” “the impersonal, vague, inscrutable, mysterious character of that will,” “the subject’s passivity in the face of that will” [wierzbicka 1992: 73, 395, 428-435, zalizniak and levontina: 1996: 239, bulygina and shmelev 1997: 491, shmelev 2002: the myth of the “russian soul” folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 101 135]. the linguistic data supporting these claims include a number of lexical items, such as sud’ba (fate/destiny), ne sud’ba (it is not fated), avos’ (perhaps with luck), pust’ (let it be), etc. all these words include a reference to some outside power which influences the outcomes of people’s actions more than the agents themselves. there are also grammatical means, in particular impersonal constructions such as mne ne rabotaetsia (i don’t feel like working, lit.: to-me it doesn’t work), ego ubilo molniei (he was killed by lightning.: lit.: him it-killed by lightning), which also point to belief in an outside power as the agent responsible for what happened or is happening to the subject [babby 1975: 182-185, wierzbicka 1996: 67-68, apresjan 2006: 36-39]. a similar key idea is postulated in zalizniak, levontina, and shmelev [2005], namely that the russian language pictures doing things as inherently difficult. they base their argument on an analysis of the russian verbs sobirat’sia/sobrat’sia (to get around to doing something), russian verbs with the prefix za-, e.g. zanesti (to bring on one’s way), zaiti (to drop in one’s way) and the adverb zaodno (while you are at it). in this context, it is interesting to consider the slavic folklore concept of “fate” as presented in tolstaia [2008: 347-352]. the author interprets the semantic core of slavic “fate” in the light of its grammar and syntax. tolstaia connects the semantic idea of inexorability and unavoidability inherent in the slavic concept of ‘fate’ with the fact that most slavic nouns meaning ‘fate’ derive from corresponding verbs, e.g. sud’ba from sudit’ (to judge), dolia from delit’ (to divide into shares), rok from rech’ (to speak), etc. such verbal derivation explains the “verbal”, “perfective”, “completed” nature of “fate.” wierzbicka also points out the overall emotionality that is typical of russians and is consequently reflected in language [wierzbicka 1996: 38, 50-55]. on the morphological level, emotionality is manifested in the profusion of diminutive and augmentative suffixes which carry different undertones of attitude; compare various possible forms of the russian name ekaterina: katia, katen’ka, katiusha, katiunia, katenok, katenysh, katiukha. lexically, emotionality is displayed in directness of expression of both negative and positive opinion; consider the frequency of the russian words podlets, merzavets, negodiai (bastard, scoundrel), or prekrasnyi (beautiful) in comparison with their english counterparts (75 total occurrences per million for podlets, negodiai, merzavets as opposed to 2 per million for “bastard,” “scoundrel”; 190 for prekrasnyi versus 127 for “beautiful”). in this connection, one can consider also zalizniak, levontina, and shmelev [2005] on exceeding russian 102 emotionality and wideness and generosity of the russian soul as reflected in the use of such lexical items as rodnoi (one’s own), and the ritual usage of kinship terms with regard to strangers, such as sestrenka (little sister), bratok (little brother), babulia (little granny), vnuchka (granddaughter), etc. the russian word dusha (soul) has itself been construed as evidence of russian spirituality and “soulfulness” [wierzbicka 1991]. in this connection, consider also the rich representation of the dusha concept in slavic folklore [tolstaia 1999: 162-167]. russians have also been portrayed as prone to pity. the russian concept of zhalost’ (pity) is assumed to be positively colored and more central in the linguistic worldview than its english correlate, pity [wierzbicka 1990, levontina 2004]. in addition, a russian key idea is the great value attached to vast spaces, physical freedom, and reckless courage [shmelev 2000]. consider the following passage: все названные выше факторы сплелись воедино и определяют причудливую "географию русской души" (выражение н.а. бердяева). … и не удивительно, что эта "широта русской души" интересным образом отражается в русском языке и, в первую очередь, в особенностях его лексического состава. многие из слов, ярко отражающих специфику "русской ментальности" и соответствующих уникальным русским понятиям, … такие, как тоска или удаль, … как бы несут на себе печать "русских пространств" [shmelev 2000: 357-367]. [all the above-mentioned factors have become intermingled and define the intricate “geography of the russian soul” (berdiaev’s term)… this “wideness of the russian soul” is interestingly reflected in the russian language, first of all, in its vocabulary. … many words which strongly reflect the peculiarities of the “russian mentality” … such as toska (indefinable sadness/yearning) and udal’ (reckless courage) – seem to carry an imprint of the “russian spaces”]. ethnolinguists have proposed different explanations of the nature of the “russian soul.” yet all agree that the russian language acts as its mirror and that, by studying the reflection in this mirror, one can get a good idea of the phenomenon itself. perhaps not coincidentally, linguistic research on russian key words has produced what appears to be evidence for most components of the “russian soul” myth. it shows that the russian reliance on fate seems to be substantiated by the salient concepts of sud’ba (fate) and avos’ (perhaps with luck). russian compassionate warm-heartedness is illustrated by the prominence of zhalost’ (pity) while russian slowness in springing into action appears in the apparently untranslatable sobirat’sia (to get around to doing the myth of the “russian soul” folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 103 something). russian sensitivity finds its reflection in the concept of obida (offence, hurt feelings), while russian humbleness appears in the concept of smirenie (humility). in all these instances, russian data are ethnoand linguospecific and thus not translatable into other languages. 5. the proposed approach while the above-described contrastive framework has proven to be extremely effective in dispensing with anglo-centricity and has produced impressive empirical results, i would like to propose a somewhat different approach. its purpose is to create a semantic typology of emotion concepts that would account both for cross-linguistic differences and similarities. there are also some general methodological questions that arise. it is true that all cultures are unique and that their peculiarities are reflected in language. it is not clear, however, to what extent language can serve as an objective mirror of culture. in other words, to what extent it is possible to draw inferences about a cultural or national mentality based on linguistic facts such as the existence of certain untranslatable words. direct untranslatability is a regular phenomenon across languages, yet it in itself cannot serve as an indication that speakers of these languages do indeed view the world differently. the notion of linguistic salience, which is fundamental to the contrastive ethnolinguistic framework, is not entirely transparent either. first of all, the frequency of a word in a language as compared to the frequency of its translation in another language is not necessarily a proof of greater salience. it is often the case that a concept expressed by one polysemous word, or a word with a more general meaning, is expressed by several words in another language. such is the case, for example, with the russian word sud’ba (lit. destiny, fate), which corresponds to english “destiny,” “fate” and sometimes even “life”: chelovek s interesnoi sud’boi (a man with interesting life). other linguistic factors that are often considered an indication of a word’s salience, such as the number of derivatives of a word, are not always reliable criteria either. languages are bound to vary in this respect because of differences in the richness of their grammatical and lexical systems and such variation occurs irrespective of how central or marginal the concept in question might be. thus, while russian obida (offence, hurt feelings) certainly has more derivatives than the english “to feel hurt,” [levontina and zalizniak 2001: 308], this does not prove the greater importance of the respective concept for the russian 104 linguistic worldview. rather, it serves as another illustration of a general difference between russian and english morphological and lexical systems. the russian language has richer morphology while english has a richer vocabulary. this results in the wide range of meanings that are expressed by various derivatives of obida, e.g., obidchik (offender, wrongdoer), obidchivyi (touchy, difficult, stuffy, huffy, easy to take offence, sensitive, vulnerable), obizhat’sia (to be aggrieved, to take offence, to cherish a grudge, to resent, to sulk). english produces the same effect by the abundance and diversity of lexical expression (see also below). another problem with the contrastive line of argument is the fact that english often serves as a universal benchmark. thus, the absence of exact english translations of certain expressions is taken as evidence of a concept’s cross-linguistic uniqueness. additionally, judgments concerning translatability are based mostly on dictionaries. this limits the search for equivalents as dictionaries mostly provide equivalents within the same part of speech only. the use of bilingual speakers and parallel corpora can provide more flexibility. for example, though the proverbial russian avos’ (perhaps with luck) might not be directly translatable into english, there are lexical items in english that express similar unjustifiably optimistic reliance on good fortune instead of striving to achieve one’s goals. examples include “happy-go-lucky,” “counting on a miracle,” “blind faith in divine providence,” “pot-shot,” “hit-or-miss,” etc. thus, one cannot claim that this concept is entirely absent from english. sometimes, the problem with the so-called untranslatability merely boils down to finding an appropriate equivalent in a broader morphological, syntactic, or lexical context. another problem with word-to-word cross-linguistic comparison is the fact that things are viewed in relative isolation and outside the language system. how valid is the statement that russians have conceptualized smirenie (humility) as their primary attitude toward life? one could find as much evidence supporting the claim that russians have conceptualized indifference as their primary attitude to life [consider the discussion of these two concepts in shmelev 2002: 374378]. there are common conversational expressions that express the indifference idea: plevat’ na chto-libo (not to give a damn about something; lit. to spit on something), pofigizm, especially in the collocation russian pofigizm (russian indifference; lit. russian notgiving-a-damnism) 400 occurrences per 140 million in the russian national corpus, etc. there is no objective way to show that the concept the myth of the “russian soul” folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 105 of smirenie is more prominent in the russian language than the concept of pofigizm: the former is frequent in religious texts, while the latter is frequent in the conversational register. and there is no objective way of determining which one is more important or central. even if we do establish objective linguistic and statistical criteria to prove relative salience of concepts, there is a bigger philosophical issue: what does salience prove? specifically, in the much-discussed area of emotions, is it possible, as levontina and zalizniak [2001: 306] suggest, to draw inferences about differences in actual emotional experiences on the basis of different conceptualization? can one establish that “the emotion of obida is specific to the russian language”? it is impossible to give an answer to this philosophical and neuropsychological question in one paper. after all, every individual feels differently and yet all humans are biologically the same. in fact, the discussion of the relationship between language and emotion has been going on for centuries in many domains, not just linguistics. rougemont summarized the dilemma in his well-known book love in the western world. he stated: “‘everything changes except the human heart’, say the old sages but they are wrong. metaphorically speaking, the human heart is strangely sensitive to variations in time and place” [rougemont 1956]. interesting examples from recent work include ekman’s research which suggests cross-cultural universality of feelings and variation in their display [1999: 301-317]. also interesting is psychological research on individual, social, and national differences in aspects of emotional experiences [scherer 1988, scherer, wallbott and summerfield 1987, oatley and jenkins 1996]. the growing use of neuroimaging in the study of emotions is also important. still, differences in feeling and emotion from culture to culture will not be reliably tested any time soon. though not attempting to give a definitive answer to such complicated questions as cross cultural differences in emotion, the current paper aspires to provide some further clues in this direction. the proposed framework incorporates the scenario-based semantic approach in which emotions are broken up into simpler elements, such as feelings, desires, evaluations, circumstances. this approach was originally proposed by iordanskaia [1972, 1984] and wierzbicka [1999]. it was adopted by some psychologists [such as shweder 2004]. it is also a derivative of the conceptual, metaphor-based approach of cognitive semantics [lakoff and johnson 1980, kövecses 1990, emanatian 1995, kövecses 2000]. 106 for linguistic data, i rely not only on dictionaries and literary sources, but on the spoken language and the language of mass discourse. i also use native speakers’ judgments, especially those of bilingual english-russian speakers. parallel literary texts (such as nabokov’s lolita) as well as linguistic corpora (e.g., russian national corpus, british national corpus, american national corpus) are likewise used to elicit the necessary data. the overall linguistic framework of my description is the integral language description (idl), a model which strives to achieve perfect theoretical coordination between lexicon and grammar [ju. d. apresjan 2000]. in practice, idl involves creating descriptions of linguistic items that reflect all their relevant linguistic properties: semantic, pragmatic, syntactic, communicative, combinatorial. to create an idl description of emotion clusters that would produce conceptual maps of emotions that are as complete as possible, i attempt to consider all linguistic means of expression of a particular emotion, or at least their representative majority. for each emotion cluster these include: a) different parts of speech nouns (fear), verbs (to fear), adjectives (fearful), adverbs (fearfully), impersonal predicatives (russian x-u grustno (x is feeling sad; lit. to x it is sad), x-u strashno (x is feeling scared; lit.: to x it is scary); b) linguistic reflection of different aspects of emotion – emotional states themselves (horror), causation of emotion (to horrify, horrible), emotionally-driven behaviors (to get cold feet), physiological manifestations of emotions (to shake with terror, to vomit with disgust), behavioral manifestations of emotions (to run away in fear, to strike in anger), properties associated with proneness to certain emotions and emotional behaviors (cowardly, irascible, touchy), properties associated with inability to experience certain emotions (fearless, pitiless), ethical or other evaluation of emotional states, associated behaviors and properties (cowardly, shameless, compassionate, bleeding-heart), an acceptable or conventional verbal expression of emotion (thank you for gratitude, i’m sorry, i feel bad, i feel for you for “pity”). the methodological novelty of my approach is in its scale: rather than comparing individual parts of the system, such as separate emotion terms, i propose to compare entire systems in the form of “emotion clusters”. each emotion cluster, such as “sadness,” “anger,” “fear” is represented by many “members”, e.g. “sorrow,” “sadness,” “grief,” “blues,” “depression,” etc. for the “sadness” cluster in english, “anger,” “fury,” “wrath,” “irritation,” etc. for the “anger” cluster in english, the myth of the “russian soul” folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 107 “fear,” “terror,” “horror,” “panic,” “afraid,” “scared,” etc. for the “fear” cluster in english. by analyzing clusters instead of individual terms, we are able to reconstruct the system of emotion conceptualization in a particular language, which can later lead to creating a semantic typology of emotion conceptualization. for example, after we have described the types of “anger” in one language, we can use the resulting “thesaurus” as a tool to approach another language and to look for similarities and differences in its conceptual map. for example, both english and russian have explicitly incorporated the following types of anger in their conceptual systems: “justified” anger (indignation, negodovanie), “strong uncontrollable anger” (rage, beshenstvo), “mean anger” (venom, zloba), “nerve-wrecking anger” (irritation, razdrazhenie), but english has also a type of “helpless disappointed anger” (frustration), which russian lacks. these different types of “anger” refer to different situations, different intensities of feelings, different types of experience, different ethical evaluations and other real-life variables. linguistically, each type of “anger” corresponds to a certain semantic structure, a certain arrangement and combination of semantic elements. the fact that different languages have singled out similar combinations of meanings as separate concepts gives credence to the hypothesis that “conceptual mapping” of emotion clusters can be a valid tool in cross-linguistic analysis. by cross-linguistic “superimposing” of conceptual maps, one is able to capture a holistic picture of the emotional universe, where both the universality and the differences displayed across languages can be seen. i have analyzed 11 emotion clusters in english and russian, including the five emotions considered “basic” in most psychological and physiological studies – “fear,” “anger,” “sadness,” “disgust,” “joy” (basic emotions), “shame,” “offence,” “pity,” “pride,” “envy/jealousy,” “gratitude.” 6. findings as it is not possible to give a detailed account of the findings concerning russian emotion concepts made by previous researchers, i will report general conclusions and illustrate the method employed in the current paper by providing a comprehensive analysis of one emotion cluster, namely zhalost’, or “pity” (considered a typically russian emotion). the proposed analysis re-evaluates the linguistic basis for 108 many claims about the “russian soul” and develops general principles for describing emotions. 1) the myth of the russian soul would predict that “moral masochism” should generate an abundance of positively evaluated terms for “unpleasant” emotions and that terms for “pleasant” emotions should be few. however, as cross-linguistic russian-english analysis shows, the prevalence of “unpleasant” emotion terms is not unique to russian; it is a universal linguistic tendency (compare 37 “unpleasant” emotion terms to 3 “pleasant” in german in [mel’čuk and wanner 1996]). this follows a wider linguistic tendency to explicitly mark deviations from the norm rather than the norm itself. this tendency has a biological explanation: unpleasant basic emotions, such as fear, disgust, anger, have an evolutionary survival value and so there is a greater need to label this type of emotion than emotions of the pleasant variety. 2) further, emotion metaphor reveals substantial universality across the two languages. although there are many language-specific metaphors, like “to turn green” for “jealousy” or “to feel blue” for “sadness,” there are a number of emotion metaphors that demonstrate consistency across unrelated languages. these metaphors define entire emotion clusters, rather than their single representatives. the following emotion metaphor patterns appear to have certain cross-linguistic universality: “fear is cold”(to get cold feet); “anger is heat” (to boil); “offence is pain” (hurt feelings, wounded pride); “empathy is pain” (compassion, to feel bad for somebody); “jealousy is pain” (to be torn by jealousy); “remorse is pain” (pangs/pricks of conscience); “love is addiction” (to be addicted to somebody); “love is sweet taste” (to be sweet on somebody); “bad is bitter” (bitter disappointment, to be bitter) as well as some others. neurobiology provides an explanation for this tendency: many emotion metaphors have biological basis. thus, “fear” involves actual lowering of the body temperature, while “anger” is accompanied by a heightened body temperature. feeling “hurt” and feeling “empathy” activate pain centers in the brain. undergoing the emotional effects of the end a love relationship activates the same neural pathways as narcotic withdrawal, etc. [gallese 2001, singer et al. 2004, mcdonald and leary 2005]. this biological universality, corroborated at least partly by language, applies to “pity,” a supposedly culture-specific emotion, and provides support for the theory that certain emotions are indeed present in some form in all cultures and that no language can claim uniqueness in its treatment of emotion terms. this is an argument against the myth of the russian soul. the myth of the “russian soul” folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 109 3) yet there still seems to be extensive cross-linguistic variation of emotion conceptualization, starting with the word dusha (soul) and proceeding through every emotion cluster. indeed, russian dusha is more embracive than the english “soul,” covering meanings found in english both “soul” and “heart;” e.g., dobraia dusha (a kind soul); liubit’ vsei dushoi (to love with all one’s heart), v glubine dushi (deep in one’s heart), etc. however, the case where one word in language a corresponds to two or more words in language b is a regular phenomenon, not limited to the spiritual or emotional sphere. it is often the case with russian and english, english having a more specialized vocabulary and russian having words with more general meanings; e.g., maslo in russian and “butter” and “oil” in english. furthermore, there is no single emotion term in russian that is an exact equivalent to its english counterpart. to give one example, english “happy” is not exactly the same as russian shchastlivyi. “happy” is, in some usages, close in meaning to “pleased:” consider “i’m not happy with this decision.” “happy,” in this phrase, could not be translated as shchastlivyi and would need to be translated as ia nedovol’na etim resheniem. but if we look at the entire field of “joy” in russian and english, we will discover that most meanings can be rendered across languages in some form and do not, therefore, reflect culture-specific emotional experiences. 4) overall, the russian-english comparison of the emotion “clusters” “fear,” “disgust,” “sadness,” “offence,” “shame,” “empathy,” as well as more general emotion “fields”, such as “feeling bad” and “bitterness” reveals a different distribution of russian-to-english discrepancies than was previously thought. traditionally, russian language was considered peculiar as concerns “sadness”, represented by the “uniquely russian” emotion of toska (longing, yearning, depression) and “empathy”, represented by the “uniquely russian” emotion of zhalost’ (pity). however, the “cluster”-to-“cluster” comparative analysis of emotion metaphors and prototypical scenarios in which emotions occur, as well as of neuropsychological data has returned the following results (the comparison of “pity” clusters is presented in detail in the appendix): a) while russian toska cannot be translated into english consistently, english language possesses its own unique “sadness” term, which is equally salient both in language and culture – “blues.” the term “blues” refers to a feeling that can be as painful and occur as unexpectedly and without outside cause as toska, thus undermining the 110 myth of the “russian soul” as being more prone to strong unmotivated sadness. also, the fact that the synthetic term toska involves a complex setting and describes a feeling occurring in a number of different circumstances, such as loss of someone loved, absence of someone loved, depressing surroundings, overall lack of joy, does not yet prove the uniqueness of this emotional experience. each specific manifestation of toska can be translated adequately by such english words as “depression,” “anguish,” “yearning.”(4) moreover, the rest of the “sadness” field is structured very similarly in the two languages: there are stronger and more painful emotions such as gore and “grief,” which are stimulated by heavy losses and tragic events, and “lighter,” “bittersweet” emotions such as “pechal’” and “sorrow” which occur in more “sentimental” circumstances such as parting; b) “fear” and “disgust” clusters, based on basic and biologically rooted emotions, are very similar in russian and english. there is, however, a difference between them which reveals the sources of crosslinguistic discrepancies. namely, in russian, these two emotion clusters are quite distinct, as they are in the brain (the fear area is localized in the amygdala, whereas the site for disgust is in the insula part of the brain). however, in english, there is a “synthetic” term “horror,” which refers to a feeling caused by a stimulus both frightening and repulsive. there is no equivalent for “horror” in russian, and this word is translated either as uzhas (terror) or as otvrashchenie (disgust), depending on the context. again, as in the case of toska (which embraces english “depression,” “anguish,” and “yearning”), we observe two different mappings of linguistic terms onto the same conceptual field rather than a different range of emotional experience; c) the greatest differences in the emotional terminology are found in the “shame” and “offence” clusters. while both these clusters are well represented in the russian language, they are comparatively underrepresented in english both lexically and in terms of relative frequency. the russian language has an abundance of “shame” expressions, some of which have no correlates in english and the russian words which have english correlates are used more frequently and with greater ease than in english. examples include: stydit’sia (to be ashamed), styd (shame), pozor (disgrace), stydno (ashamed), sovestno (untranslatable) ≈ “having qualms,” nelovko (ethically compromised), neudobno (ethically or psychologically uncomfortable). in many contexts where russian language chooses a shame-associated expression, english favors a more general emotion term; consider mne stydno, chto ia vas pobespokoila (i the myth of the “russian soul” folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 111 feel bad to have disturbed you), rather than “i feel ashamed to have disturbed you” or mne stydno smotret’ emu v glaza (i can’t look him in the eyes), rather than “i feel ashamed to look him in the eyes.” this applies to the “offence” cluster to an even greater extent. mne obidno (i feel hurt), ty ne obidelsia? (are you offended?) ne obizhaisia (don’t be offended) are among the most frequent conversational emotion expressions in russian and are used to refer to feelings that arise with a minimum stimulus. the corresponding english expressions: “to be offended,” “to feel hurt/wounded” seem to be prompted by much graver stimuli and occur with much lesser frequency. as with “shame” english favors less specific terms to describe these feelings: “is everything ok?,” “have i upset you?,” “take it easy,” “it’s sad that…,” etc. 5) i suggest the following explanation for the observed discrepancies between russian and english emotion terms: rather than stemming from emotional worlds of a different sort or from different “souls,” the differences are linguistically generated. the first source of english/russian distinctions is different mapping of linguistic terms onto the same conceptual field. this is a phenomenon found in all domains of language, not only in the sphere of emotion terms. it typically occurs when a specific configuration of meanings is expressed by a single word in language x and by two or more words in language y (e.g., the word “horror” embraces the meanings of the words uzhas and otvrashchenie, and the word toska contains some parts of the meanings of the words yearning, depression, and anguish). the second source of distinction is different display rules: american english tends to avoid sending direct negative messages of the kind “i did something bad,” “you made me feel bad,” “you feel bad,” “you are in a bad situation” and replaces them with milder ones, whereas there is no such constraint in russian. this explains the relative higher frequency of russian terms for “pity,” “shame,” and “offence.” overall, the russian cultural situation allows expression of negative feelings in a slightly exaggerated way whereas american english welcomes exaggerated expression of positive feelings (consider the desemanticized use of “happy” as compared to schastlivyi). thus, in the russian cultural situation, it is acceptable to tell a person x that the experiencer feels sorry for x, or to admit that (s)he feels offended by x. it is even polite to exaggerate one’s feeling of shame before x for insignificant inconveniences caused by the speaker. the english language prefers to spare the feelings of both the experiencer and the object of emotion in situations potentially 112 embarrassing for either of the communicants by using generalized terms like “to feel bad.” this tendency in the expression of emotions is a manifestation of a more general tendency to avoid direct negative messages. thus, as compared to russian, english favors sentence negation over constituent negation “i don’t [think he will come]” as opposed to ia dumaiu, chto on ne [pridet]. english also favors implicit negation over explicit negation “it is hardly surprising” as opposed to neudivitel’no, chto... appendix. “pity” cluster in russian and english as mentioned above, russian zhalost’ (pity) is, according to some researchers, a uniquely russian emotion; consider recent work by [levontina and zalizniak 2001: 317-320]. the origin of this view can be traced back to the portrayal of this emotion in russian philosophy and literature, especially religious philosophy. also important is the usage of this term in russian dialects and in xix century russian language. its contemporary usage, however, suggests a different semantic image of zhalost’, one which is closer to english “pity,” especially if viewed in the context of the entire “pity” cluster. although russian zhalost’ and english “pity” are by no means interchangeable and each possesses its own semantic and phraseological peculiarities, their differences have been exaggerated. the conceptual maps of russian and english “pity” are no more distinct from each other than those of “fear” or “anger” and, in the majority of cases, it is possible to convey the general meaning of “pity” words across these two languages, often giving direct word-forword translation. on the whole, the english and russian conceptual maps of “pity” have similar structures. both languages distinguish between what might be called “objective” and “subjective” “pity.” the former occurs when the object of the feeling experiences real hardship of which (s)he is aware and which (s)he experiences as such. “subjective” “pity” occurs when the experiencer thinks that the object of emotion is in a bad situation, but the object of emotion does not share this feeling. the former kind of “pity” forms the semantic core of such expressions as english “compassion,” “sympathy,” “empathy,” “concern,” “to feel for somebody” and the russian sochuvstvie (sympathy), sostradanie (compassion), uchastie (compassionate concern). the latter is found in english “pity” and “sorry” and in russian zhalost’ (pity), zhalko,’ zhal’ (sorry). consider “i pity him – he is such a fool;” mne ego zhalko – on the myth of the “russian soul” folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 113 takoi durak, but not “*i have compassion <sympathy> for him – he’s such a fool,” *ia emu sochuvstvuiu – on takoi durak. this does not mean zhalost’ cannot be felt when the object of emotion does indeed suffer; but suffering is not a prerequisite for such a feeling. in both russian and english, the most neutral and the most frequent term for ‘pity’ is “sorry” or zhalko, zhal’. the words express the idea of regret concerning some person being in a bad situation, semantically explicated as follows: “x feels sorry for y,” x-u zhalko <zhal’> y-a = ‘x thinks y is in a bad situation; x feels bad because of that’. a stronger kind of “subjective” “pity” is expressed by the english “pity” and the russian zhalost’. unlike “sorry” and zhalko (zhal’), “pity” and zhalost’ imply not only a bad feeling concerning someone’s misfortune, but also some good feeling towards the person in distress, potentially implying a desire to do something to amend the situation; consider nezhnaia zhalost’ (tender pity), sdelat’ chto-libo iz zhalosti (to do something out of pity). “pity” and zhalost’ describe, perhaps, the widest range of feelings. these include a tender and somewhat painful emotion, occasionally termed “benevolent pity” in psychology (consider “to melt with pity,” rastaiat’ ot zhalosti; “to cry with pity,” plakat’ ot zhalosti, “painful pity,” zhguchaia zhalost’ (lit. stinging pity), “heart-piercing pity,” pronzitel’naia zhalost’). they range to a cold and contemptuous feeling, unpleasant and denigrating for its object (“contemptuous pity,” “humiliating pity,” “cold pity,” prezritel’naia zhalost’, unizitel’naia zhalost’, kholodnaia zhalost’). while the former kind of “pity” implies a good attitude towards the object prompted by the unfortunate situation in which the object finds him/herself, the latter implies a bad attitude, which the situation may aggravate. in the latter case, the experiencer sees the object as guilty of creating the bad situation through his/her own ineptitude or improper behavior. “pity” and zhalost’ can be caused by observing intense suffering (this is more typical of benevolent pity) or it can occur without stimulus when the experiencer considers the object of emotion to be in a bad situation (this is more typical of contemptuous pity): ispytyvat’ zhalost’ k golodnym detiam (to feel pity for the hungry children); ia ispytyvaju zhalost’ k etomu idiotu (i feel pity for this idiot). “pity” and zhalost’ can also be felt towards the self: “self-pity,” zhalost’ k sebe. overall, this type of feeling can be explicated as follows:‘x thinks that y is in a bad situation; x doesn’t want y to be in a bad situation; x 114 feels bad because of that; x can feel something good toward y; x can want to do something good for y.’ zhalost’ (pity) towards others is conceptualized as a fundamental human ability whose lack is viewed as a serious character flaw. a person who does not feel and show “pity” in appropriate circumstances is considered cruel; consider “pitiless” and bezzhalostnyi. excess of “pity” can also be viewed negatively, though it is not as strongly censured: consider the slightly ironic coloring of “bleeding heart” or serdobol’nyi (soft-hearted; lit. heart-paining), usually in reference to women – serdobol’naia starushka (a soft-hearted old woman). the verbs “to pity” and zhalet’ demonstrate more discrepancy than the corresponding nouns. while both “pity” and zhalost’ can be used in a wide range of contexts, “to pity” and zhalet’ are more specialized, with the former being more frequent in “contemptuous” contexts, and the latter gravitating towards “benevolent” contexts: consider “he pities her” vs. on ee zhaleet. the english phrase describes only a feeling, and not a very kind feeling, whereas the russian phrase refers not only to a kind attitude, but also its behavioral manifestations. russian zhalet’ can mean “to spare,” especially in the perfective aspect: on ee pozhalel i otpustil (he had pity on her and let her go; lit. he pitied her and let her go). however, this difference does not mean that english has no concept of benevolent pity; rather, it is expressed by different means. in russian, both the verb and the noun carry this meaning; in english, it is only the noun. “compassion” and its derivatives, as well as the russian sostradanie and its derivatives, express the idea of co-suffering, feeling good towards the object and doing something in order to help the object. russian sostradanie implies a greater degree of objective suffering on the part of the object than its english correlate. “compassion,” especially in the expression “to have compassion” is used in many contexts where russian sostradanie would have been too strong and a speaker of russian would use zhalost’ or zhalet’ instead: “turn the tv down a bit, have some compassion for me;” sdelai televizor potishe, pozhalei menia, but not sdelai televizor potishe, proiavi ko mne sostradanie (turn the tv down a bit, show me some compassion). thus, english “pity” and “compassion” together roughly equal russian zhalost’, zhalet’ and sostradanie. overall, this type of feeling can be explicated as follows: ‘y is suffering; x feels how y is feeling; x feels bad; x feels something good toward y; x wants to do something good for y.’ the myth of the “russian soul” folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 115 both languages have the concept of co-feeling, understanding another person’s predicament combined with a good attitude towards that person but not necessarily an active involvement or a desire to help. “sympathy” and sochuvstvie can be felt for someone who is in a difficult situation, but are usually manifested only verbally rather than through action aimed at relieving the situation: consider the common expression vyrazit’ sochuvstvie (to express one’s sympathy) and the much rarer expression sdelat’ chto-libo iz sochuvstviia (do something out of sympathy). pity, compassion, and sostradanie and zhalost’, on the other hand, prompt action: it is perfectly normal to do things out of compassion or out of pity, iz sostradaniia or iz zhalosti. overall, this type of feeling can be explicated as follows: ‘y is in a bad situation; x understands how y is feeling; x feels bad; x feels something good toward y’. an even more perfunctory kind of ‘pity’ is expressed by “condolence” and soboleznovanie, a ritual verbal expression of one’s sympathy, usually for someone whose relative has died: primite moi soboleznovaniia (accept my condolences). so far, we have seen that english and russian conceptual maps of “pity” overlap, if not in exact wording, then in the gradations of the feeling. however, there are some areas where they differ. english has the concept of “empathy,” which is quite important and involves any kind of co-feeling, not necessarily co-suffering [consider jabbi, swart and keysers 2007 on the neuropsychology of empathy, which involves the mapping of the negative or positive bodily states of others onto the experiencer’s own]. this is also expressed by the phrase “fellow feeling.” russian lacks this concept: it has been borrowed as a psychological term – empatiia, but has not yet entered conversational russian. although neither “empathy” nor “fellow feeling” technically mean that the object of emotion is in a bad situation, in reality, many contexts in which they are used are identical to those of “sympathy,” cofeeling with someone in distress. a closely related meaning is expressed by the english “to feel for somebody.” again, technically, it does not necessarily point to any suffering on the part of the object, it is mostly likely to be used to express one’s pain over somebody’s misfortune: “i’ve a fellow feeling for their woes;” “i feel for him – he’s had some real troubles;” “i have great empathy for his pain.” while these words can also be used to express co-joy as well as cosuffering, they are the preferred means of expression for “pity”-like emotions, because, unlike other “pity” words, they do not contain an indication that the object of emotion is in a bad situation, thus avoiding 116 the potentially humiliating and unpleasant components of “pity”. english, with its avoidance of direct negative messages, prefers such neutral terms for the expression of “pity”-like feelings. russian lacks one-word terms for the expression of co-feeling, although it can be expressed through phrases: consider ia perezhivaiu za nego (i am concerned about him; lit.: i experience for him). however, russian has another kind of “pity” which is not developed in english, namely, compassion or sympathy-associated behavior. this behavior is manifested in action aimed at relieving the predicament of the object of emotion. it is denoted by the word uchastie (concerned help, doing good things for somebody who is in a bad situation because of compassion for this person; lit. “participation”): consider on proiavil bol’shoe uchastie k okazavshimsia v bede sem’iam (he did a lot for the families in distress; lit. ‘he showed great participation for the families in distress). as we can see from this comparison, english and russian do indeed differ. they differ, however, in ways unlike those ascribed to these languages by previous research. notes 1 this paper was written with the financial support of the following grants: rf president grant for leading scientific schools nsh3205.2008.6, rhsf 07-04-00-202a for “system-forming meanings of russian language,” and the grant of the program for fundamental research of the department of humanities of the russian academy of sciences «genesis and interaction of social, cultural, and linguistic unities», and the grant for senior regional fellows 2007-2008, of the davis center for russian and eurasian studies, harvard. 2 without any attempt to create a comprehensive list of sources for these components of the “russian soul” stereotype, let us merely mention some of the philosophical and scholarly sources which refer to them. these include works by berdiaev 1918, fedotov 1938-1939/1992 and scholarly works by boym 1995, mcdaniel 1996, rancour-laferriere 1995. 3 interestingly, contemporary anthropological research on russian behavioral patterns, table conversations, reactions, etc. highlights the same concepts as central to the “russian dusha”; consider [dale 2000: 150-156]. they emphasize the importance of dushevnost’ (soulfulness), communality, hospitality, giving. in this context, perestroika, which switched russia from the communality of socialism to the individuality the myth of the “russian soul” folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 117 of capitalism is perceived as killing the russian soul: “life and soul were disappearing”. moreover, dusha (soul) is viewed as a predominantly russian attribute. in typical everyday russian discourse, one comes across the collocation “russian soul,” but dusha does usually not appear with the names of other ethnicities [dale 2000: 140]. 4 in “evgeny onegin”, pushkin famously juxtaposed another pair of ‘inexplicable sadness’ words: english spleen and russian khandra; consider the lines недуг, которого причину but there's no need that i dissemble давно бы отыскать пора, his illness name it how you choose подобный английскому сплину, the english spleen it may resemble, короче: русская хандра 'twas in a word the russian blues им овладела понемногу... he spared us, true, one piece of folly... however, in this paper, these two words are not considered among the currently active means of expressing this concept because in both contemporary russian and english they have become obsolete; 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71 reviews caroline humphrey. the unmaking of soviet life: everyday economies after socialism. ithaca and london: cornell university press, 2002. 265pp. index, bibliography. paperback. $18.95. isbn 0-80148773-0. anthropologists and folklorists ask different questions. as the field of folklore changes and moves further away from its early focus on oral literature, it is instructive to contrast our discipline with closely related ones, thus getting a better sense of what it means to be a folklorist. this collection of essays by a prominent anthropologist specializing in the economics of the post-soviet world, especially mongolia, is a good place to start. humphrey writes well and the chapter on �icebergs, barter, and the mafia� brought back vivid memories of scrounging for the necessities of life in kyiv, all the while trying to arrange for transportation to villages so that i could get some fieldwork done. humphrey categorizes the economic arrangements of the early postsoviet days and explains them succinctly and clearly. in the next chapter, the author takes up the problem of exclusion, discussing how the collapse of the soviet union allowed the renegotiating of who was, and who was not, included in newly formed or reorganized collectives and the systems of protection and support that came with them. if a farm ceased being a kolkhoz, for example, and reconstituted itself as a cooperative, certain families that had previously been part of the group could be dispossessed. humphrey constructs a model of those on the inside versus those on the outside and vividly describes the pitiful situation of those unfortunate enough to be excluded. her model of inside/outside is accurate, but, as a folklorist, i felt there was a lack of attention to things predating the soviet era and disregard for the long tradition of border protection and fear of strangers. indeed, the soviet union epitomized boundary fears, surrounding itself with the iron curtain. but drastic inside/outside distinctions are not something that came into being with soviet rule. rather, they are a development of an old cultural imperative that can be seen in everything from vernacular architecture with its care to hide the entrance to the home, to greeting customs which go to great lengths to test visitors and to make sure they are acceptable, to legends that equate tall, dark and handsome strangers with the unquiet dead. a folklorist would likely have a similar reaction to other chapters: while they are interesting, they present one perspective on the current situation, but they suffer from inattention to tradition and to folk belief. the chapter on consumer behavior in moscow, for example, provides a useful and a detailed description of spending patterns. at the same time, it could profit from seeing that current gender roles evolve from traditional family structures; they are not something that began with soviet social engineering. the inside/outside issue comes up a number of times. the chapter on consumerism states that western goods are seen in some way as a sham and that people label them as such to control their own desire for that which is unattainable. a folklorist would likely add that western products are devalued also because they come from outside and are thus viewed as contaminated. in subsequent chapters humphrey looks at minorities who engage in trade, sometimes crossborder trade, and foreign capitalists, describing the problems that today�s merchants face. again a folklorist folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 72 might add that discrimination against non-russians stems from traditional wariness of strangers, not just from soviet legacies. one chapter discusses economies outside the law, namely the society of thieves. it is very interesting, but disregards parallels to subaltern societies of the past, including such legal guilds as the churchaffiliated societies of mendicants, the kaleki or kaliki. the last section of the book contains two chapters that come close to being discussions of folk belief. �avgai khad, theft and social trust in post-communist mongolia� recounts a trip to a stone to which sacred power had come to be attributed and �shamans in the city� describes modern day shamanic séances. while interesting, these chapters, too, might disappoint a folklorist. the chapter about the sacred stone concentrates on people�s fear of abandoning an economically valuable item, the car, in spite of threats to their lives from a severe snowstorm. it does not look for reasons why a stone might come to be considered holy nor does it examine the history of homage to sacred places and objects. the shamanism chapter treats the phenomenon in its urban, new age manifestation, rather than giving the reader the religious history of this belief system. what i found most unsettling about this book is that, by ignoring tradition, it created the appearance that almost everything we observe today is a direct result of soviet rule. this ascribes much more power to soviet culture than is warranted and leaves western readers with an incomplete picture of the countries that came into being with the collapse of the soviet union. while folklorists might find aspects of humphrey�s book frustrating, they will benefit from seeing the perspective of another discipline. humphrey describes contemporary phenomena with sensitivity and skill. she should be given credit for describing rural life in addition to the situation in cities. the soviet union left a legacy of restricting foreigners to urban areas and too many western scholars have made little attempt to shake free of this legacy and look at the lives of the many people living outside the urban centers. humphrey looks at both russia and mongolia, rare in such works. while a folklorist might long for humphrey to apply her talents to an examination of the pre-soviet and traditional component of the phenomena she describes, we must admit that no one person can do everything. furthermore, i could argue that, by focusing exclusively on the present, humphrey provides a needed balance to folklorists in the post-soviet world. certainly in ukraine where i work and amongst the russian folklorists whom i know, attention to the past can often be excessive. their desire to recover traditions that existed prior to soviet attempts at social engineering is understandable. for many, soviet rule was oppressive and thus they are determined to uncover that which preceded the soviet era and is unblemished by it. at the same time, their insistence on interviewing only the oldest village residents, on getting them to describe only their earliest experiences, means that they are overlooking the enormously interesting processes at work today where people are trying to establish a new, post-soviet identity by blending traditional and newly allowed religious elements with those soviet practices that they still find meaningful. humphrey may not look at the traditional elements in the cultures of the post-soviet states, but she does give an astute description of the current situation. if we combine this with the attention that russian, ukrainian, and, presumably, mongolian folklorists are lavishing on the past, we can get a complete picture. it can be our job as folklorists to take the work of anthropologists like 73 humphrey and to point out those elements that are traditional, tracing how tradition was used and modified in soviet times and how it is realized now. anthropologists, economic anthropologists included, should learn from and use the work of folklorists. for example, folk belief, as articulated in legends about sten�ka razin, holds that the accumulation of wealth leads to damnation. briefly stated, keeping anything for one�s self, as sten�ka razin did with that money which he did not give to the poor, turns the person, upon his death, into a klad (treasure) spirit, doomed to guard the money until another person is greedy and foolish enough to take it. in folklore, these powerful anti-capitalism stories have given birth to new legends about curses attached to wealth. it would be most useful for anthropologists to be aware of this tradition. they would then investigate the issue of antipathy toward wealth and they could tell us how it plays out in everyday economies. natalie kononenko university of virginia folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 1 microsoft word fall04w.doc 32 the secret speech of lirnyky and kobzari encoding a life style andrij hornjatkevyč, canadian institute of ukrainian studies university of alberta in ukraine, minstrels have been part of the folk tradition for centuries. there were two types of minstrels: kobzari who played a stringed musical instrument called the kobza, later to develop into the bandura, and lirnyky, who played the crank-driven hurdy-gurdy called the lira. these minstrels were traveling musicians – and much more besides. they were major sources of historical and religious information and, interestingly, most of them were blind. this infirmity made them dependent upon others for their livelihood, but they were not beggars. on the contrary, they were well-respected by the general populace. as with other professional groups, they belonged to guilds and new members, young children, went through an extensive apprenticeship period. minstrels also spoke using a secret language called lebiis’ka mova, henceforth the lebian language (argot) or lebian. it should be pointed out immediately that this was not a full-fledged language with a distinct phonetic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic system. on the contrary, its underlying structure was that of contemporary ukrainian, but crucial standard ukrainian lexemes – nouns, pronouns, adjectives, numerals and verbs – were replaced by others. to an outsider, i.e., one not initiated into the guild, who might chance to hear a conversation in this argot, it might sound like ukrainian, but, except for such ancillary parts of speech such as conjunctions, prepositions, interjections and particles – words that carry only relational information – it would be entirely unintelligible. this was reinforced by the fact that lebian lexemes would be inflected – declined or conjugated – exactly as analogous ukrainian words would be. furthermore, the speaker of the argot did not have to replace every plaintext lexeme by an argotic one. let us examine two brief passages. prayers would always be said in plaintext, but they would be prefaced by the following phrase: о, фез комуніський, до тебе кизітаю. о, боже ласкавий, до тебе молюся. o merciful god, i pray to you. the nominative singular masculine ending –yj of the adjective komunis’k(merciful) is taken from standard ukrainian, just as the first person singular present ending –’u of the verb kyzitaj-. most works quote the humorous song: lebian ukrainian english коби мені кумса сяна, а до кумси ще й тириня і бутельбух вовчаку, каравона чорнобрива. коби мені хлібець святий, а до хліба трошки сира, а до сира склаянка пива і дівчина чорнобрива. if i had some holy bread, and some cheese to go along with the bread, and a glass of beer, [and] a girl with black eyebrows. folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 33 here again readers familiar with ukrainian will see that lebian words are inflected exactly as lexemes in the standard language. all this must be kept in mind hereinafter whenever the word “language” is applied to the lebian argot. novices learned lebian during their apprenticeship and mature minstrels used it amongst themselves, and only when they could not be overheard. while the language was a deep secret, eventually certain minstrels were willing to dictate a dictionary of sorts to scholars such as studyns'ky and malinka. thus, we have a good idea of the lexical items which comprised lebian. what is this language and what was its purpose? what do the lexical items included in the language – and those omitted from it – tell us about minstrel life? scholars interested in minstrel life observed the existence of a secret language early on (hnatiuk: 1-73, khotkevych: 1: 455-518, iemets': 81-2). they also noted that training in the lebian language was part of the learning process. apprentices would learn it from their master along with their growing command of the instrument, its repertoire, and the repertoire of minstrel songs. this fact is reflected in the etymology of the term used for the language itself, since lebii means master minstrel and thus the lebian language is the language of fully-trained professionals. as living speech, lebian had numerous dialects. this applies both to pronunciation and word choice. different lebian words might be used for the same concept in different geographical areas. nevertheless, many lexemes can be found throughout ukraine. furthermore, the phonological features of ukrainian dialects are reflected in the lebian language and the dialect boundaries of lebian and ukrainian are approximately the same. scholars are of different opinions as to the purpose of the lebian language, but two views dominate. one may be called the recognition theory. it maintains that musicians used this language when no strangers were present as a means of mutual recognition. by using the language, musicians let each other know that they had completed the full course of instruction, including the mastery of lebian, and thus were members in good standing of a guild or minstrel brotherhood. a musician who had not completed the full course of instruction would either be ignorant of the lebian language or have an imperfect command of it. thus, lack of language mastery would betray a person who did not have the right to practice the craft of the lirnyk or kobzar. the other explanation may be called the conspiracy theory. it maintains that the kobza and lira players functioned on the periphery of society and were often at odds with the law. according to this theory, lebian was needed, not for relations within the community of minstrels, but to protect this community from the outside world. minstrels needed a secret language, it was thought, to hide their activities from the civil authorities, and even the general populace, because some of what they did might be construed as, or was in fact, outside the law. to support this view, scholars cite the fact that having an argot, or secret language, is a characteristic typical of outlaw groups. for such groups, secret speech permits the planning and execution of illegal acts without the fear of detection. pravdiuk (34-7) actually cites specific and striking examples of the lebian language being used for conspiratorial purposes. this is not the place to give a definitive answer to the question of whether lebian was used for recognition or for conspiratorial purposes. arguments can be made for both points of view. it is generally 34 believed the common people respected the kobzari and lirnyky, so they could hardly have been considered outlaws with a need to conceal their activities. at the same time, it is a fact that tsarist police and other civil authorities often persecuted minstrels, viewing their singing as subversive and thus, illegal. minstrels have often had to hide from the powers that be, a fact that lends credence to the conspiracy theory. (kononenko, 30-32) conspiracy theory and recognition theory aside, however, lebian can give us a great deal of information about ukrainian minstrels, how they lived, and what was important to them. while working on the lexicon (over a thousand lexemes), it became apparent that this argot gives a remarkable picture of the life style of the kobzari and lirnyky. it shows us what they talked about, the conditions under which they lived and worked, and the people with whom they had to deal. the most complete dictionary of the lebian language was prepared on the basis of the materials collected and compiled by horbach (7-44). it is limited by the fact that the data in it was collected primarily from lirnyky in galicia; less material has been collected from kobzari in the eastern half of ukraine. still, there is enough commonality between horbach’s work and the information that we do have directly from kobzari to assume, as stated earlier, that lebian is a single entity, reflecting both kobzar and lirnyk life. it should also be noted that kononenko has demonstrated that kobzari and lirnyky were one unit, belonging to the same guilds and often learning from each other, both during apprenticeship and subsequently. thus, using horbach’s dictionary, supplemented by other materials as available, we can attempt an analysis of the life style of all ukrainian minstrels as reflected in their secret language. we will group the lexemes of the language into categories, and then examine these categories, discussing both what is in them and what is omitted and what this shows us about minstrel life. it should be noted that horbach's work lists some thousand lexemes, and, in the opinion of some linguists, a speaker must know a minimum of two thousand words to communicate effectively in any language. if this is true, then the corpus presented by horbach satisfied half of that need. what minstrels must have done, then, is use lebian to encode only the most important words; they said the rest of what they needed to communicate in plain ukrainian, without encryption. this makes lebian even more effective as a key to minstrel life. if this secret language contains the most crucial concepts only, then it points us to the most important aspects of minstrelsy. looking at grammatical categories first, we find that the overwhelming majority of the lexemes are nouns, adjectives and verbs; pronouns, numerals and adverbs are far fewer. the corpus contains no prepositions, conjunctions, interjections or particles, which is hardly surprising because ancillary words have little or no content that would require encoding. it is the nouns and verbs that bear the primary meanings and need to be disguised by a secret argot. examining the data by grammatical category, we find that nouns can be divided into several semantic groups. first are the words that name and describe human beings: lebian ukrainian english мóздір людина human мех чоловік man рáха жінка woman folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 35 свирит, хведня дитина child лобзюк, отеплюх, отерплюшóк хлопець boy каравóна, карига, раклí, каравíнча дівч(ин)а girl йоруха, йóра киврíйка старуха, стара пані old woman херáне, хирáни люди people next are parts of the body, namely the head: глáда, главдá, лавдá голова head and its parts чимéрсьи [чимéрся] волосся hair слухóмка, слихтó вухо ear зікрó око eye зікрá очі eyes нóскотинь ніс nose хвéйло, фéйло рот mouth лизинь язик tongue кусьмóрники, мóскутні зуби teeth other body parts include: херута, хирута, рутáвка рука arm, hand нахирник палець finger ходуха, хóдня нога leg, foot пліхтí, стипрá плечі shoulders комрíй, химрó живіт belly кузад зад behind стиз, стил, стига задниця anus псил пеніс penis туха вульва vulva internal anatomy is poorly represented and, if belly is discounted, we have only кохтáвка кість bone крáсінка, красíмка кров blood there are names for various human ailments, for example, кáліпний сліпий blind man трóняшний хворий sick person шмурáк дурак fool as well as nouns for such diseases as трясóмниця, трахóмниця, трихóмниця гарячка, лихорадка, пропасниця fever трунька тиф typhus тругнячка холера cholera last in the category of words dealing with people we should include хáля смерть, труп, мерлець death, corpse and, perhaps also such words as кирдимня життя life кóзум розум intellect кíманя спання sleep йóристь старість old age kinship terms are well represented and include the following terms for people and for actions that create kin relationships: 36 кирдимний кревний, свояк blood relative, in-law яничиня сватання wooing ставéр(а), штавéра шлюб, подружжя marriage яник, янига, юнико весілля wedding лебíй, липетень, швед, шкред дід(о) grandfather штуба, цуба, цюба баба grandmother батíй батько father маниця, омáниця мати mother курдиміль дядько uncle курдимілька тітка aunt мех чоловік husband рáха жінка wife áндрус, яндрус брат brother áндруска, яндруска сестра sister іóнус, юнець, юньчик, нюньчик син son іóнуска, юньчиця, нюньчичка дочка daughter бахтíй тесть wife’s father ставрóчник кум godfather ставрóчниця кума godmother отерплюшóк, отеплюх, терпелюк, трепелюк парубок unmarried young man рáха, трепелиця молодиця young married woman поставрóчник похресник godson поставрóчниця похресниця goddaughter as well as скульбáнка коханка lover (female) кульбáнок коханець lover (male) шлягун ловелас lothario нюнька пестій(ка) spoiled child перекривóшниця, покривóшниця покритка unmarried mother inasmuch as only men could be professional minstrels in the nineteenth century, it should come as no surprise that the words for husband's father or mother are missing from the linguistic corpus. society and its classes are reflected in words such as киврíй, ґаврíй, каврíй пан mister каврíйка, киврíйка, ґаврíїха пані missis трепéла киврíйка панна miss похáзник господар master похáзниця господиня mistress острочинець гість guest шóсті, острочинці гості guests мугир хлоп peasant накачитель начальник boss наюхник наймит hireling (мале) наюхниця, наймичка, hireling (female) слугóнниця служанка maid стóтень, стóдонь багач rich man порутник бідак poor man порутниця бідачка poor woman шуя бідний impoverished man шуйство біднота the poor кубрáк, липетень прошак beggar folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 37 буций, укираний п’яний drunk укирáчка жінка п’яниця drunkard (female) кирáка, укирáґа п’яниця drunkard (male) накирвання п’яничення drinking ряха чепурня fastidious woman неряха нехлюйна жінка slovenly woman кóльба повія whore клімута, клімутник злодій thief розкульник розбійник brigand кирхушник карник criminal human relationships and conflicts can be seen in such words as ошáр, ошáрник торг, ярмарок trade, market гавлиста товар goods лубуненя сварка quarrel кóпсаня бійка, драка fight клімута крадіж theft the argot also has a lexicon for civil authority: тирлик цар tsar тирлиця цариця tsaritsa накачур бурмістр, війт mayor, reeve ґóрґуль жандарм gendarme накатóрський соцький country policeman йóриста, іóруста староста elder гальóмний накачитель становий пристав assistant bailiff яршинá, йоршинá старшина officer бецáк салдат soldier матлáнник фінансер financier зíтник, скерéтник урядник official clearly, the musicians had to deal with the guardians of the law, because we have the words бікуцель, ґóрґуль поліцай policeman стерегóмник сторож guard дíкончик, дíкунчик десятник constable бікуцéльники, шулíція поліція police стерегóмка, шпарута варта guardhouse бікуция, лямос в’язниця prison the musicians dealt with people of various professions, for example: курáшник, кудрипник музика(нт) musician кугрáчник, либіщáк, липкó лірник lirnyk кугрáчник скрипник violinist повандзóрник, провандзирник проводир guide (of the blind) вкóрник, наукóрник учитель teacher лíкорник лікар physician рéпсаник писар scribe бецáк, ґóрґуль вояк soldier кулáшник стрілець rifleman возмóнник візник teamster жуклíйник, ковíзник коваль smith махлишник, махличник косар reaper вошáрник купець merchant лопóтник молотник thresher лопстирник, таткó, явлидник, авлидник пастух herder 38 махлишник, махличник різник butcher опукáр, лопухáр швець cobbler гертишник шинкар tavernkeeper накéвричник, махирник рукавичник glove maker the lexicon dealing with clothing is rather limited. we have the clothing that would be worn by both sexes: сип’яг(а) свитка coat махирниця, накéвниця, рутáвниця рукавиця glove нахирник перстень ring шуманчá опанча overcoat бучмаки черевики shoes óпук(и), лóпух(и), óбоки чобіт, чоботи boot кравáтка повивач swaddling band clothing worn exclusively by women includes филистка, хвелюстка хустина kerchief застіжмóрник стяжка ribbon патéри коралі coral beads чухниця спідниця skirt фартíйка, фортійóк запаска apron while that worn typically by men lists мислюжник, вислюжник капелюх hat камéха, камуха шапка cap сип’яг(а) сіряк grey coat нáсти, нáсики, настíги, настíжники штани trousers звертíй пояс belt nature is reflected in such words as свíтомка світ world сянко сонце sun накачíй, макохтíй, сянник місяць moon рахтій дощ rain рáхта сльота rainy weather сíвер сніг snow терига, тирига, трига земля soil отропíль, стропíля, митропíльи поле field ямóшниця яма pit свігрá гора mountain дéлька, дéйка, сугá вода water дильмá ріка river дéльман, стичинь став pond шалóто, шолóто болото mud шмура бруд dirt дуляс, дулясник вогонь fire flora is represented primarily by edible plants: сухéчка, суячка, сéв’ячка гречка buckwheat ризавка, сапсаї кукурудза maize буравíнь, чухлíй овес oats цесó просо, пшоно millet яшпурка, яшкурниця пшениця wheat бурвíнь, бурбíль ячмінь barley букшíй, гавришник біб lima bean folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 39 гавриш горох pea гавришниця, букшійка фасоля bean ботняк, кремéд буряк beet тирíжник, терижник картопля potato білюга редька radish морзуля, мерзуля цибуля onion кремíз, крéмез, морзник часник garlic орнóсноп мак poppy оксютина садовина fruit стеблюшниця вишня sour cherry рутáвка, стáвка, хтáвка, хрустáвка грушка pear степлига сливка plum тернáвка слива plum tree крáсінка, красíмка черешня cherry веслюко, віслюко яблуко apple віслюжниця, веслюшниця яблуня apple tree лóскотні горіхи nuts дулíби гарбузи pumpkins баглáйка, балáйка гриб mushroom баглаї гриби mushrooms лепуха, лопуха капуста cabbage крáсінка, красíмка, стéблюк ягода berry there are some words for non-edible plants and plant products and these include óксим, вошут ліс forest конóпалки, кадрó коноплі hemp óбрутки дрова lumber дуляс паливо fuel патéр папір paper лоскотира, лоскотирó полотно linen віхрó, вяхрó сіно hay цвáхта, махлярка січка chopped hay (fodder) веслюя, вислюга, мислюга солома straw a similar situation can be seen in the words for fauna. there are many words for animals that serve as food and also a relatively high number of terms for creatures found in everyday life. the groups include aquatic animals: лéшень, лéшні рак(и) crayfish псáлка, пцáлка риба fish алюшник оселедець herring and also amphibians: парнáта жаба frog звертíй гадюка, вуж snake there are words for birds: óбрутень, фíявень, фіянь, фíян голуб dove тарандíй горобець sparrow гáрбат гусак gander гарбут, арбутка, гарбатка гуска goose гарбатя гуся gosling плавутень індик turkey ворнáчка, сáпавка качка duck ворнáчка, варнáга, арнáчка курка hen арнáк півень rooster and for mammals: 40 мерхлíй баран ram мéрхля вівця sheep (singular) мерхлí, мéхлі вівці sheep (plural) швахт цап goat керх, кирха свиня pig кирхуня порося piglet вáлот, вáлта кінь horse волотиха, волотиця кобила mare волóт осел donkey гавлид, явлид бик, віл bull, ох гавлидка, авлида, гавлита корова cow гавлидя, явлидиня теля calf household animals that do not serve as food can be isolated as a category which includes: мóтень, мóскотень кіт cat (male) мотниха кітка, кішка cat (female) мотня котя kitten скел, скіл, скіць, скіцяка пес dog скóлиха, скелиха, скилиця сука bitch скиля песя, щенюк puppy пáсінка миша mouse words for wild animals are limited and only the set of words лиха, лиґа вовк wolf (male) лиджиха вовчиця wolf (female) is widely attested. the insects included in the lexicon are: цвіхлí бджоли bees цвіхлí муха fly циза, сиза воша louse кáлута блоха flea here one can place substances of animal origin, namely мерхлячка вовна wool кидрó прядиво yarn сип’яженя сукно broadcloth animal “products” such as балюжник, гнойóшник, осняк гній dung халó кал, лайно feces might be considered part of this category also. food terminology, besides the aforementioned flora and fauna, includes the following: трíйка обід dinner кучéря, трíйка вечеря supper бóтень борщ borshch [beet soup] ставрéники вареники varenyky [stuffed dumplings] фíявні голибці holubtsi [cabbage rolls] букша кваша sour mash [a dish made from fermented rye flour and buckwheat grain] крихти крупи grits лéкша, ликша каша porridge шутня кулеша corn meal крíсó м’ясо meat folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 41 степурка печеня roast киршутина солонина fatback сíводне крíсо, сíверець студенець headcheese кíта, кита, кітó яйце egg ламáхи печиво baked goods бухтáвка, яшпурка булка roll мілясник медяник honey cake скрутинь обарінок pretzel пундíй, кондíй пиріг pie пундії курляні варені пироги boiled pies пундії стипурені печені пироги baked pies сухмóрники, сухмаї сухарі biscuits сумáк, сунéта, кумса, кунсо хліб bread трусьня, трузна мука flour ковíсто тісто dough свíсло, весло масло butter альмо, галíмо, гаїмо молоко milk тирин(ь), тириня сир cheese ковирхинá сметана sour cream муляс, мáляс, (г)омиляс мед honey лобзій олій oil гáлусть сіль salt гомиляс, омелясник, омиляс, солудкемне цукор sugar there are several words designating drinks, such as головчáк, вовчáк пиво beer бушнó вино wine (г)артиха, гериха горілка whiskey красімник арак arrack, raki баклун, матлáн тютюн tobacco мутлáха нюхальна табака snuff бéнник, матлíйка папіроска cigarette which can be placed in this category also. the mineral lexicon is limited to such substances as кувíзо залізо iron курíбло срібло silver пíтрус, пéтрос, кетряк камінь stone physical surroundings are reflected in such words as шусто місто city хóро, хори село village and then хазá хата house шім, шом дім home along with such architectural details as пóхазь, світлоха, острокой кімната, покій room пóхазь світлиця parlor кутига комора chamber кувирх дах roof степур, стéпир, остепíр піч stove острокóмин, свистак комин chimney зікрó вікно window 42 ставéрка кватирка ventilator скрипотá, фíрта двері door закаплóнниця клямка doorknob other household and farmstead structures and features include пóхазь господа homestead обрутяч пліт fence перелíскальник перелаз passage in a hedge брамóшниця брама gate скрипотá ворота gate хвірт, фíрта, похвíтря двір, подвр’я yard дéйниця, сужник, криниця spring сíвраниця, сíвирка колодязь well кулуйка, лопóтня стодола barn кирхушник, кулуйник, хлівóшник хлів stable обрутниця дривітня wood shed лопóтня, лопóтник тік threshing floor лопстирка толока common pasture land сíвгород, свіврóд горóд garden оксют сад orchard бзика, мілясниця пасіка apiary бзичник, мілясник вулик beehive кóтниця возівня coach house кирхушник свинюшник pigsty words for village buildings, objects, and features outside the farmstead include: ковíзниця, жуклíйниця кузня smithy дергун, дергунниця млин mill лобзíйня олійниця oil press каня, капíлія, капéля, пóхазь корчма, шинок tavern as well as (в)óстрóка, востóрка, дорóга road рівóшник рів ditch дéлюшник, перевандзирник пором ferry the lexicon of personal objects is understandably fairly rich. here we have, first of all, кугрá, курга, кудóнка ліра lira кугрáчка скрипка violin such personal items as чихмóрник гребінь comb матлíйка люлька pipe бікутá, біштур(á), обрутóк, бікостур палиця, патик stick, staff маскóрник щітка brush шíнка, шéнька, захарбéла, захарбáник торба bag захарбут клунок sack seem to be important, as are eating utensils: кóвтур горщок pot кубанок дзбанок jar ковтúрниця кувшин ladle карабéлька, карáбля ложка spoon мéхир, нéхер, махлич ніж knife скáтéля, скітéльня миска, тарілка bowl, plate жуклíйка, шуфлíйка пляшка bottle folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 43 сáбасний курля самовар samovar жуклíйка, шуфлíйка, бутéльбух склянка tumbler жоклія, бутéльбух чарка glass there is a fairly large assortment of words for furniture and household items such as бурвéта верета coarse cover хвильник годинник clock пóклюжка, поклюжниця постіль bed linens закатлóха, закáтлонка, закаплóнниця скриня, сундук chest кулиґа лавка bench трéпез, трéбух стіл table household implements seem to be important and are represented by words for: зіврó, токáрка, токáрник відро pail будáвка голка needle закаплóнник замóк lock закаплóнниця, матлóха колодка padlock капóшник, закаплóнник ключ key кулóпата лопата shovel замíнниця, маскóрник мітла broom захарбéля, захарбаник, захарбут, шінка, шенька мішок sack барлшиджник плуг plow троховило, трусник решето sieve махлишник, махличник різак cutter розкульниця, кулáшниця рушниця rifle кóтинь санки sled возмóнник, кóтинь віз wagon котило, крутилó колесо wheel махличка січкарня straw cutter маймура, товпига сокира axе лопóтник ціп flail лекшунниця ступа stamper свíсло весло oar сянка свічка candle сянко світло light батузник мотузка rope обрутник ремінь leather strap кудуні дзвіночки jingle bells стичник стіжок stack (of sheaves of grain) триховило, трусник сито sieve religious terminology is fairly abundant and includes words for: охвéс, фез, хвесь бог god ставéр христос christ охвéсова маниця богомати theotokos сяний святий saint клюса церква church (orthodox) шандáл костел church (catholic) клюснáрка каплиця chapel клюснáр цвинтар cemetery слугóмка служба service хáля похорон funeral рéпсальник парастас parastasis шумовина домовина coffin 44 духóмка душа soul крім гріх sin шáтер, шáтар, шатéрниця молитва prayer ставрóчини, ставрóшини молитвини над новородком purification prayer service of a newborn рéпсник акафіст akathistos ставрóхи, ставрóки христини christening кувестіяне християни christians клюсник, ставéр хрест cross вопарáт ризи vestments вопарáт, óбрут фелон phelonion фез, охвéс, хвесь ікона icon рéпсаня книга book кудóн(ник), кудóвник дзвін bell корх піп priest корхилиця, корхиня попадя priest's wife корхиля, корхиня, корхиник попович priest's son пíдпсальний піддячий percentor псáльник, пцáйник дяк cantor лáбор збирач (пожертв на направу церков) collector (for church repairs) патерик свяхтá свято свята holy day holy days шатéрник проща, відпуст pilgrimage рéпсане кітó, рéпсанка писанка easter egg спин, термих, хверть чорт devil (male) спиниця чортиця devil (female) nouns and adverbs that convey temporal concepts have been recorded and can be considered a special category. they include the words for time: кучас, кузач час time киндик рік year снóпка весна spring снóпко літо summer сíвениця, сíверка зима winter кудень, кудинь день day кучéрба вчора yesterday куднісь сьогодні today кузавтра завтра tomorrow п’янджатка п’ятниця friday сáбатка субота saturday мéргуля неділя sunday мéргульник понеділок monday кувечер вечір evening кéміть, киміть ніч night хвильниця, хвильня година hour quantitative-spatial nouns include: стáврá, ставéрка кварта quart кумáт кумáточок, куматок кусень, шмат кусок, шматочок piece лоптовина, шоловина половина half пікотá ріг corner here one can add the word money and the names of various currencies: folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 45 хóбень хóбні, хóмні, ховби гріш гроші money (sg.), coin money (pl.), coins галíнéць, курíбник, скітéльник, скітельнин карбованець karbovanets клімтур ґульден (ринський) gulden двеня хобні копійка kopeck хóбень крейцар kreuzer плíнка, шандрáчка, шмурка шістка piece-of-six охційóс сотка hundred besides the aforementioned, there are nouns for such artistic concepts as псáльня пісня song скакóмка, скакóмник танець dance рéпсаня письмо writing the lexicon of emotions is limited to досадóмка досада chagrin пошутка лихо misfortune while the list of defects consists of дермóнка, дерóмка діра hole шмура пляма spot the list of nouns concludes with toponyms including: дильман дністер dnister шайлов браїлів braïliv бучпіль бучач buchach леґушани оківці okivtsi дельмошник птік potik пітрусянка скала skala швахтинці цапівці tsapivtsi калутинці чернівці chernivtsi будавниця ягольниця yahol'nytsia and ethnonyms ґуд(лáй), гудзь, гец ґудлáйка, ґéциха, гудзівка ґудлáйик, гудзеня ґудзик єврей єврейка єврейченя єврейчик jew (male) (female) (child) (endearing) шулінцí росіяни russians бáтуз москаль muscovite клімтур німець german лáнюс, мáґлит попляк pole куган, шандрáк циган roma cardinal numerals go from one to forty and then jump to one hundred. numerals from fifty to ninety can be reconstructed and might have been in use, but are not recorded in the dictionary. of the ordinal numerals, only first through fourth, and seventh, eight and tenth are attested, although the others could be reconstructed (*) as well. № cardinal ordinal 1 іóн йóний, ютний 2 двіна, двеня, двіня двíний, двенéшний 3 шкірá, скерá, скирá шкíрий, скерéтній, скирáтний 4 цíсара, сíсара цíсарий 5 п’янджа, п’янтжа, пéнтза *п’янджий 6 шáндра *шáндрий 46 7 сéмптіна, сімптина, тíмара сéптіний 8 вісімптиня, вохкíмира, вітíмара, отíмера отíмерий 9 дíвера, дíвора *дíверий, *дíворий 10 дíкуна, дíкона дíконий 11 дíкона й іóн дíкона і йóний 12 дíкона й двéня *дíкона й двíний 13 дíкона й скерá *дíкона й шкíрий 14 дíкона й сíсара *дíкона й цíсарий 15 дíкона й пéнтза *дíкона й п’янджий 16 дíкона й шáндра *дíкона й шáндрий 17 дíкона й тíмара *дíкона й сéптіний 18 дíкона й вітíмара *дíкона й отíмерий 19 дíкона й дíвора *дíкона й дíворий 20 двеня дíкон, двіня дíкуна, двíна рáза дíкона *двеня дíконий 21 дíкона двеня й іóн *дíконя двеня й іóний 30 скерá дíкон, шкірá рáза дíкона 40 сíсара дíкон 50 *п’янджа дíкон 60 *шáндра дíкон 70 *тíмара дíкон 80 *вітíмара дíкон 90 *дíвора дíкон 100 дíкона рáза дíкона personal pronouns are attested only in the nominative case and in the singular. the third person plural is the one exception to number. as for case, the first and third persons singular can also found in the dative case. 1st pers. 2nd pers. 3rd pers. masc. 3rd pers. fem. nom. sing. манькó бíти, тапкó бíвін бíвона dat. sing. манькóві not attested бíєму not attested nom. plur. бíми, маньки тапки not attested not attested possessive pronouns are given only in the first and second person singular, кумунíський, манéйський мій my бíтвій твій your and there are several lexemes for the interrogative pronoun: кóнто(ль), сконд, бішó що what бíяк як how the demonstrative pronoun is бíцей цей this the most common adjectives are the ones used to describe physical condition, for example: гальóмий, вéлий великий large гальóмий високий tall мéкрий, махій малий small мекрéнький маленький tiny духмóрний сильний strong трóняшний слабий weak сухмóрний сухий dry дулений, дулясний, загрівóшний теплий warm ціхморний тихий quiet folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 47 сíводний холодний cold цілíтний цілий whole кудоровий, нетрóняшний здоровий healthy кáліпний сліпий blind троняшний хворий sick буций, укираний п’яний drunk (though the last three words could possibly be viewed as nouns). then we have: трепéлий молодий young йóрий, іóрий старий old новіний, новімний, новівний новий new цілíтний увесь all, whole босивний, босівний босий barefoot we have adjectives designating professions such as: лебíйський, лобурський лірницький lirnyk шуліцéйський, бікуцéльський поліцейський police and adjectives for social state: нестóдний убогий destitute another adjective group might be the one for characteristics such as: клéвий, трепеéлий добрий good неклéвий злий, недобрий bad кливéнський ласкавий gracious сурáзний, сурáський, сяйний гарний beautiful козумний розумний smart укóрений учений learned шмурний дурний stupid крімíшний, крімовáтий грішний sinful чужівний, чужамóрний чужий alien сáбасний, сабаснíй сам alone other types of adjectives include those describing taste, namely: (о)мілясний солодкий sweet гиркимний гіркий bitter буквасний квасний sour and those for colors: плíний білий white ґáлбин жовтий yellow красімний червоний red verbs can be divided into several semantic fields. perhaps the largest category is the one with verbs referring to various forms of work such as: клевóтити працювати work (с)клéвити (з)робити make правóшити поправляти repair, fix куграти, кургати грати play псáлити співати sing кумси зітáти жебрати beg кубрати, кумси зітáти прошакувати request alms слугóмити, слугóнити служити serve замíнчити, маскóрити замести, замітати sweep клéвити порядкувати tidy up будáвчити шити sew 48 курляти, круляти варити cook степурити пекти bake (п)лíнчити прати launder з’япéрувати збирати gather копуиити, махлувáти копати dig дергóмити молоти mill лопóтити молотити thresh барлýджити орати plough лопстирити, пасóрити пасти (худобу) herd cattle дулити, дулясити палити burn махличити, махлувáти, макувáти рубати chop сухмóрити сушити dry лікóрити, лíтрити, ліхтóрити лікувати heal another important category of verbs concerns the body and clothing and what is done with them. this category includes verbs meaning: трóїти їсти eat кучéрити вечеряти sup покусьмóрити покушати taste, sample кус(ь)мóрити, кучмóрити кусати bite бен(н)ити, банити курити smoke хéзити плювати spit лохáтись, люфтáтися сміятися laugh чихмóритися чесатися comb (п)лíнчити мити wash (п)лíнчитися купатися bathe хизити, вхéзитися піти на сторону urinate/defecate застіжмóрити застібнути button, fasten зрутити скинути take off вклéвити, в’япéрити взути put footwear on роз’япéрити роззути take footwear off a group of verbs describes physical states, in the sense that they are actions performed by a human. these include: бéтляти єпіть, єпить бути є be is нéміть немає is not зітóмити, кирдимити жити live окирдинитися ожити revive встичувати вставати arise пандікáти (на ходухи) ставати на коліна kneel поклюжитись покластися lie down (по)клюжити(сь), кімáрити лежати lie, recline кимати, кíмати, кімáрити спати sleep кимати, кíмати, кемітáти ночувати spend the night стичити, стóчити стояти stand кáчити сидіти sit слихтити чути hear слухáнити, слихтити слухати listen кéрити, кирити п’яничити carouse сíвернути, сівиріти мерзнути suffer cold трунути боліти ache (с)халíти, схаляти вмерти die folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 49 сянитися світитися shine дулясити, дулити горіти burn some verbs describe changes of state: (на)чáнити, (з)чáнити, зчáнювати зли(ва)ти, (на)лити pour прокулати пробити pierce відкáпчити, відкап(л)óнити, одскрипотáти відімкнути open закáпчити, закаплóнити замкнути shut виюхтити вийняти take out одчипóрити відчепити detach грівóшити, дулити гріти heat сíверити студити chill дермóнити дерти tear забатузити зав’язати tie задулити запалити light ламусáти ламати break маскóрити мастити grease дермóнити рвати rip махличити, махлувáти, макувáти різати cut клюжити стелити spread трасóмити, тряхóмити, трихóмити трясти shake маскóрити чистити clean кéміти смеркати turn dark рахтить падає дощ rain verbs of motion are well represented: бігурáти бігти run льиксáти лазити creep виляксати вилізти creep out пнáти (пнáю) йти go попнáти піти depart хандирити, ханджувáти ходити walk ханджувáти похожати walk about ярдувáти, гардувáти їхати ride скакóмити скакати jump скíтити, вскичувати тікати flee когóнити, кургóнити гонити drive викогóнити вигнати drive out докогóнити догнати catch up злобуськáти зловити catch пандíчити, пандікáти падати fall вандзóрити, вандзирити возити, нести, водити cart, carry, lead (ви/пере)вандзóрити, (ви/пере)вандзирити, (ви/пере)вандзирувати (ви/пере)везти transport (out) тагнити, тагáнити, тáнити нести carry клюжити класти put мáньчити минати pass there are verbs that refer to communicative acts: зітáти, кантити говорити speak (с)кантити, (с)казати tell зітáти мовити utter кльиксати, криксати кричати shout рáпсаня клéвити, рéпсати писати write рáпсати читати read 50 шмурити дурити fool авридити брехати lie a large group of verbs describes various relationships: приюхтити прийняти receive шлягáти зводити докупи bring together юничити, яничитись сватати(ся) woo юничитися женитися marry порутити покинути abandon (по)зікóрити (по)зичити borrow пулити, опулити, опульовати купувати buy пропулити, пропульовати продавати sell дякнути, дяхнити, дякáти, горáти, угурáти дати, давати give віддóнити, оддяхнити, віддякнути віддати return відóймити, (від’/на)япéрити, з’япéрити, в’япéрити (віді/на)брати, взяти take платóшити платити pay борщу запарити, козу звеселять фундувати випивку buy a round (of drinks) ханджоляти виводити гагілки dance hahilky кугратись гратися play a large number of these verbs refer to immoral or censured behavior and its consequences: лубунитися сваритися quarrel клíмати красти steal (по)кулати, кóпсати (по)бити beat кéрити, кирити пити, п’яничити drink (to excess) позвíнчувати позивати до суду sue утухмóрити, задухóмити задушити throttle закулати вбити kill вснопити втопити drown вдéльчитись втопитися drown oneself забатузитись, повіхтóмитися повіситися hang oneself verbs that describe intellectual activities are relatively few: (на)вкóритись (на)вчитися learn сюрати, сíврати знати, розуміти know, understand скумáти уміти know how to лíтрити, ліхтóрити числити count помíнчити поминути recall забетляти(ся) забути(ся) forget likewise, there are few verbs that express emotions: (ви)зітáти (ви)просити request волíти, вóлити, вóїти хотіти want кизітáти благати entreat кульбáти любити love халісáти цілувати kiss нюньчити пестити fondle пликсити, киксати плакати weep кльиксати, криксати плакати з криклом wail зшмурíти здуріти go mad хéзитись, скититися сказитися, встектися rage a verb that might be included in this category is стекляти, слякати, пастикляти ждати,підождати wait дослякатись діждатися wait to a conclusion folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 51 there remains a small group of abstract verbs: назікóритись називатися be called єпіти коштувати cost мáньчити мати have (об)нáхтити, шукморити (об)шукати search (з)нáхтити (з)найти find as with nouns, there is a significant number of verbs dealing with religion: ставрóчитися христитися cross one’s self правóшити правити (службу) conduct a service кудóнити дзвонити ring bells кизітáти молитися pray шáтер зітáти мовити молитву recite a prayer the verbs kneel, read and ring might be included here for a second time because of their possible use in religious contexts. many adverbs are derived from adjectives, but their number is limited: пóсо багато much мургóм, пургóм бігом on the run близімно, кублизько близько nearby кувíзно важко with difficulty бíвже вже already всéньки, всяцки все everything снóпно гаряче hot(ly) шалéко далеко far клéве, клéво добре well сíверно, сíводно холодно, зимно cold(ly) неклéво недобре badly снóпно парно steamy мéхенький помéклєнько помаленьку slowly сяно свято solemnly, holy пóсо чимало much мургóм, пургóм швидко rapidly as mentioned above, no prepositions, conjunctions, interjections or particles are attested in the corpus. whether the purpose of the lebian language was to hide secret activities or to serve as a way for minstrels to recognize one another, we can be assured that it was used only to discuss matters important in the lives of minstrels. this being the case, we see that the language mirrored minstrel life, the work that they did, and the surroundings in which they lived and worked. the language confirms that the center of minstrel life was the village. this is where most minstrel personal and professional activity took place and most lebian words are those associated with village life. minstrels, we know, did travel to towns and cities. their activities there were similar to those in villages except for their interaction with civil authorities. the language shows us this by the fact that the only vocabulary specifically tied to urban areas is that for city and town officials and offices. minstrels apparently ate reasonably well, or were at least familiar with quite a variety of dishes. the language shows us this in the fact that the list of dishes, especially if one includes edible plants and animals, is quite extensive. again, this is the food of the ukrainian village, but this is not everyday food and one can well 52 imagine that this was not the musicians' typical meal. we know that minstrels were asked to perform at various feasts, especially christenings and weddings, a fact that is again reflected in lebian vocabulary. during a festival, especially a family event such as a wedding or a baptism, even a poor peasant would do his utmost to receive his guests, including the musicians, as best as he could. thus, the food terminology includes or even privileges, dishes served as part of celebrations; it is not quotidian food vocabulary. the list of clothing is not remarkable in any way and we will not comment on it here except to point out that it, too, reflects village life in that it includes men’s and women’s garments typically found in a rural setting. the verbs attested in lebian confirm the centrality of village life and give us some interesting additional information. the verbs that describe work are those that refer to the typical activities of peasants and village craftsmen. the number of verbs related to work might support kononenko’s supposition that work was central to village life and that the blind minstrel’s inability to do the sort of work that defined a peasant weighed heavily on his conscience (3-15). the large number of verbs dealing with immoral or illicit behavior is quite striking. on the one hand, this might suggest that the conspiracy theory is correct and that minstrels did engage in activities that needed to be kept secret from others. on the other hand, it is just as likely musicians were the victims of illegal and immoral acts, not the perpetrators of them. verbs also confirm that the church was an important institution in minstrel life. we know that the life of the musicians was often connected to the church and that their guilds were church-affiliated. christenings, weddings, and funerals, of course, took place in the church and various churches and monasteries were the sites of festivals dedicated to their patron saints. at the times of such festivals, churches and monasteries were the sites of pilgrimages, attracting both minstrels and potential minstrel audiences (kononenko, 133-52). if one adds to this the fact that kobzari and lirnyky, along with other members of the brotherhoods of the poor, often found refuge in church hospitals, then the large ecclesiastical vocabulary in lebian should hardly be surprising. our analysis of the lebian language should also consider what it lacks. one interesting fact is that, while this language was an argot, a code which allowed free conversation on such otherwise taboo subjects as sex, it did not include a verb for sexual intercourse. perhaps there was such a verb, but it has not been recorded. there is a rather rich vocabulary of ethnonyms, showing that minstrels dealt with many groups. still, certain ethnic terms are lacking. the absence of words for slovak, hungarian, czech, romanian or belarusian is not surprising because the musicians might not have had much to do with these peoples. but it is interesting that the word ukrainian or even rusyn are lacking. the reason for this may be that national consciousness was poorly developed in those times. the musicians seemed to know who they were not, but they did not know who they were. only the most important items of clothing are named in lebian, but there is no word for shirt. perhaps the word for shirt is missing because this garment appears frequently in minstrel songs where, of course, it is named using the normal ukrainian terminology. while a shirt was an everyday garment, it apparently had special meaning for minstrels. a number of begging songs sought to arouse the pity of listeners by referring to the minstrel’s nakedness and making a specific request for a shirt. (kononenko 17-19) this would imply, and lebian confirms, that shirt had a significance for minstrels beyond its function as a garment. thus the special folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 53 meaning that a shirt held for minstrels would argue for its encoding. the fact that the incentive to encode seems outweighed by the appearance of “shirt” in songs might support the argument that lebian was used to hide minstrel activities from ordinary folk. the lack of terms for internal organs may be surprising. by the same token, discussions of these parts of the body were probably more appropriate to a minstrel’s relationship with a healer or a physician, not to a conversation with other kobzari and lirnyky. likewise, only two serious illnesses are named typhus and cholera. perhaps at the time the language was recorded these diseases posed a serious threat whereas others were less important. also it is interesting that aside from blindness, no physical handicaps are named. there is no word for autumn in lebian. was this a season when nothing happened in the lives of the musicians? very likely so: during this season the peasants who constituted a minstrel’s primary audience were too busy to have the time to listen to a performance (kononenko 11). there are no words for morning, nor for the days from tuesday to thursday. this probably reflects the days that minstrels worked and the time of day that they did their begging. it has already been noted that church festivals constituted important occasions for minstrels. these likely occurred on weekends, not in the middle of the week. similarly, a big secular occasion for minstrel activity, the village or town fair, was more commonly a weekend affair (kononenko 13-14). as for the time of day, it either reflects begging times or the times that minstrels interacted with each other. in addition to fairs and festivals, minstrels also worked by going from house to house. when they did so, they likely waited until morning chores were done before approaching. and it is in the afternoon or evening, after a days work, that they were likely to gather amongst themselves, either for support and comfort on the road or to conduct guild activities. the system of numerals can be reconstructed up to one hundred. this may well indicate that the musicians' earnings were so meager that small numerals sufficed. since minstrels were blind musicians they probably did not need words for color to discuss items and objects in their surroundings. still, three color terms: white, yellow, and red have been recorded. these might well come from minstrel songs, specifically historical songs and epics (dumy) which depict fallen heroes, dying on the battle field, and speak of their white flesh, yellow bone, and red blood. but if colors appear in songs, like the word for shirt, why not omit encoding them, as the word for shirt is not encoded? perhaps the three encoded colors had meanings beyond denoting hue. perhaps they were designations of quality of which we are no longer aware. and does the existence of color terminology mean that minstrel poetry was composed by sighted bards? this question has been a topic of much scholarly debate and will not be addressed here. this analysis of the lebian language shows that it is a powerful source of information about the lives of ukrainian minstrels. minstrels were an important part of ukrainian culture, but information about them is scant. there are many reasons for this. as already noted, minstrels belonged to guilds which required apprenticeship and thus a certain degree of exclusion of those who had not be properly initiated. but even when minstrels were willing to talk to outsiders such as scholars, many would not listen, considering information about folk performers unimportant. now that we know about oral composition and the role of minstrels as tradition bearers, gathering information about them is too late because the old system of guilds for the blind is gone. we 54 must draw on already collected sources and many of these are descriptions provided by scholars; they are not the words of the minstrels themselves. the dictionaries of the lebian language compiled by horbach and others are actual minstrel words. as such, they give us a more intimate glimpse of minstrel life, and it is reassuring that this glimpse confirms the descriptions that we do have available. our look at the secret lexicon of minstrels confirms that their world revolved around the village and that the church and religious events were important. we even learn something about what they ate, if not on a regular basis, then on holidays. we see the days of the week that they probably worked and we can extrapolate information about their view of the body and clothing, including clothing items that might have carried a symbolic value. lebian provides us a much more direct view into the lives of minstrels than we might hope to get through any other source. bibliography hnatiuk, volodymyr. “lirnyky. lirnyts'ki pisni, molytvy, slova, zvistky i t. p. pro lirnykiv povitu buchats'koho. zibrav u veresni 1895 r. volodymyr hnatiuk” etnografichnyi zbirnyk, 2 (1896): 1-73. horbach, oleksa. “argo ukraïns'kykh lirnykiv.” naukovi zapysky ukraïns'koho vil'noho universytetu, 1 (1957): 7-44. iemets', vasyl'. kobza i kobzari. berlin: “ukraïns'ke slovo,” 1923. khotkevych, hnat. “vospominaniia o moikh vstrechakh so slepymi.” tvory v dvokh tomakh. kyïv: “dnipro,” 1966. 1: 455-518. kononenko, natalie. ukrainian minstrels: and the blind shall sing. armonk, ny: m. e. sharpe, 1998. malinka, aleksandr. kobzari i lirniki terentii parkhomenko, nikifor dudka i aleksei pobegailo. chernihiv: “zemskii sbornik chernigovskoi gubernii,” 1903. pravdiuk, oleksandr. romens'kyi kobzar ievhen adamtsevych. kyïv: “muzychna ukraïna,” 1971: 347. studyns'kyi, kyrylo. “lirnyky. studiia …” zoria, 11: 257-61, 12: 284-6, 14: 324-6, 15: 345, 16: 365-6, 17: 385-7, 18: 425-6 (1894) and separate offprint. folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 articles polish folklore studies at the end of the twentieth century anna brzozowska-krajka, maria curie-sklodowska university. lublin, poland contemporary polish folklore studies scarcely resemble their original fonn of almost 200 years ago. amateur collector-enthusiasts have been replaced by experienced scholars (mainly scholars of language and literature) who are supported by universities and other scholarly institutions. besides old and strong academic centers, such as warsaw, wroclaw, or cracow, there are also new ones where folklore studies have become a university discipline (e.g., in lublin, silesia, lodz, and opole). above all, the scope of the discipline and the concept of "folklore" have changed so that its research methods have become quite different. as czeslaw hernas has rightly observed, the definition of folklore is changeable and is determined by both research experience and cultural developments. the invariant international core of the definition and the variables reflecting ethnic differences among cultures are equally important in the form which the definition of folklore assumes. finally, two trends have appeared in postwar polish studies of folklore they tend either to broaden or to narrow the subject of research. the first trend involves the philological approach to folklore as a verbal art (synonymous with the concepts of oral literature or traditional folk literature as opposed to the so-called new folk literature, i.e. peasant writing, amateur writing, or the so-called peasant movement in belles-lettres). until the 1980s, in most countries, including those of the fonner soviet bloc, this approach was represented by folklorists educated in linguistics and the history or theory of literature. the other trend was the anthropological approach to folklore studies. it began to grow in popularity at about the same time as the philological school. while both had a "textocentric" approach, focused on the analysis of verbal acts, the anthropological school tended to broaden the scope of inquiry to include non-verbal phenomena connected to the activities of the peasant social group. this school wanted to see the entire range of peasant activity as "lore." this approach had earlier been ascribed to anglo-saxon folklorists for whom "folklore" was synonymous with "folklife." the broadest, colloquial meaning of the tend "folklore" as a synonym of rusticity popularized by the mass media remained outside the sphere of scholarly study. the change in polish folklore studies was also connected with a broadening of the term "folk," whit:h. in traditional polish studies of folklore, was associated only with peasants. this broadening of the field of research was accomplished by the first journal for the study of polish folklore literatura 7 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 ludowa which was originally published from 1957 to 1968 and resmned publication in 1972. the journal's editors proposed to investigate not only the folklore of rural environments, but also that of various groups of townspeople, both traditional and modern. the scope of study also included borderline topics such as the relationships between verbal text and nonverbal fonns of expression. i.e., the social fonns of a text's "life" and functions. the journal continues its forward-looking approach today, reflecting the transfonnations of polish society. in this journal, topics such as orality, once regarded as an obligatory feature offolldore, have more and more often been replaced by literacy. fonns of expression are frequently authorial (not anonymous), although they are still governed by traditional roles. the broad field of research includes community folklore (e.g., of children, students, or prisoners), and occupational folklore (e.g., of potters or sailors). today, these kinds offolklore occur on the level of symbolic culture or of life in a technological society, rather than on the level of social institutions and organizations. traditional folklore with its fonns of psycho-social expression (traditional folklore vs.literary genre studies or literary fonns offolklore), has been replaced by new fonns of textual activity that are viable in modem times: e.g., urban legends, sensational stories, various fonns of humor, different kinds of epigrams, as well as children's ~ks of wise sayings, albums, votive books, and graffiti. considering the specific endeavors and scholarly accomplishments of contemporary polish folklore that is philologically or anthropologically oriented, we can follow sulima and point out four main approaches. the first approach has developed out of historical-philological studies. it deals with the systematization offolklore, the history offolklore studies, and literary-folklore comparative studies. it has been developing in poland since the second half of the nineteenth century. the preeminent achievement of this approach is the comparative studies conducted by julian krzyzanowski, who is recognized as the father of modem polish folkloristics. the so-called ''warsaw school" now consists mainly of krzyzanowski's disciples. the second approach, represented primarily by the "opole school" associated with dorota simonides, is connected with the study of folklore as a kind of social diagnosis and originates from anthropological assumptions. it also focuses on collecting regional materials and editing texts, on issues of cultural borderlands, on small local communities, on orality and literacy in the context of mass culture, and on folklorism. its activities have done much to popularize folklore. the third approach treats folklore as part of culture and studies it from the viewpoint of the theory of culture: it emphasizes problems in the historical semantics of culture and recognizes that historical, sociological, and philological procedures and sources are complementary in nature. this 8 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 approach is inspired by cultural anthropology. it is associated with the "wroclaw school" created by czesmw hemas with the journal literatura ludowa which he edits. the "wrocmw school" exerts a strong influence on other polish academic centers. the fourth approach is devoted exclusively to the oral character of folklore. it considers problems of language stereotypes, the poetics of the oral text, and the linguistic image of the world. this approach is represented by the "lublin school," created by jerzy ba.rtmidski, and it focuses on ethnolinguistics. since 1989, this center has published the periodical etnolinfwistyka which has been a forum for the exchange of scholarly ideas. the present day study of polish folklore is still seeking an identity. is it a branch of ethnography, of the theory of literature, or of the theory of culture? its interdiscipiinary character is emphasized more and more often in relation to its research techniques. this also results from an awareness of the heterogeneous nature of folkloric texts which have to be considered in all of their communicative components. therefore, we need to decode the layers of tradition through complex analysis and to deal, not only with verbal factors, as advocated by the philological approach, but also with the complete folklore message, as in the anthropological tendency. (cf. anna brzozowska-krajka: polish traditional folklore: the magjc oftim~). through an interpretation of deep structure, we arrive at the kinds of synthetic formulations that every field of knowledge requires. thus crossing boundaries between disciplines is becoming a common practice and the subject of folklore, anthropologically understood, integrates various domains, methods, add theories of the humanities. among the research postulates and prognoses for the future, one thing is especially important: the need for developing comparative studies which would apply various proced~s and would go .b~ond simple juxtapositions of similarities with complementary lists of differences. we need work that deals with surface fluctuations and gradually shifts emphasis towards deep structures. recently, many central and east european folklorists have been recognizing the necessity of conducting this kitn ;)f study within slavic culture. development of new comparative structures opens up vast and attractive research perspectives, which, however, require reliable syntheses and detailed investigations of materials. analytic procedures of this kind would bring polish folklore studies into the mainstream of european and world humanist thought th~ would also enable delineation of the general mechanisms governing the development of culture, as well as of national versions and variants that develop in various culturo-religious zones, e.g., the spheres of western vs. eastern slavic christianity or the nature of acculturation processes. 9 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 shifting the focus from the "archaeology" offolklore to contemporary forms of its existence is related to the notion of the "diagnostic study offolklore," that is, to sulima's idea about a new outlook on contemporaiy culture viewed in tenns of orality and secondary orality. investigation of such folklore-creating situations as strikes, pilgrimages, parliamentary elections, propaganda campaigns, socia-political scandals, sports events, fashion, tourism, or advertising, promises new interpretative possibilities for a folklorist. as in the case of comparative studies, such possibilities may also reveal universal mental structures and common patterns of living in the modem world, where, despite powerful unification processes, there are still many ethno-cultural differences. this presentation of the polish study of folklore is merely an outline of the discipline. its broad scope and complexity can be grasped only by looking at individual research and at the achievements of polish folklorists, who are open to scholarly communication with both eastern and western europe, as well as with folklorists world-wide. finally, it should be emphasized that polish folklore studies have always been free from ideological distortions. although they constitute a part of slavic studies, they have their own distinct features and unique material, as well as their own theoretical and methodological character. (translated by agnieszka monies-mizera) 10 seefa journal 1999, vol. iv no. 1 microsoft word contentsqsoft.doc narratives on the rescue of the infant jesus 89 narratives on the rescue of the infant jesus in the russian folk “bible” (siberian russian texts) v. s. kuznetsova institute of philology, siberian branch of the russian academy of sciences, novosibirsk, russia stories about the miraculous rescue of the infant jesus are common among folk narratives related to events in the gospels. in the rescue stories, the virgin mary and her infant are pursued by hostile forces. the virgin mary then asks a woman to throw her own child into the stove, to take christ into her arms and to pass him off as her own. the child in the stove remains miraculously unharmed. in other versions it is jesus christ himself who does the asking. similar stories appear in nineteenth-century manuscripts as well. one example is the following from the smolensk guberniia: [dobrovol'skii 243-244] [1] гаспоть ат акаянных жидоў ускачiў у горницу, а там жэнщина кормить грудью дитёнка. гаспоть крикнул на жэнщину: дитенка брось у печь, а мяне вазьми! божжа мой, да iон згарить! нябось! ничога нябудить твайму дитёнку, толька тоя делай, што я скажу. баба бросила свайго дитёнку у печь, а христа узяла к сабе на руки. // жиды тоя видють, щто баба укинула дитёнка у в агонь, а тога ня видють, што христос на руках, а дитёнык тэй на тую пару-ўремичка бутца крикнуў у печи. забили жиды у ладони: христа спалили, спалили, спалили! дитёнык пириставiўся весь у твитах и стал у святых, а христос пашоў с двинацытью апосталами. the lord ran from the cursed jews into a hut, and a woman is breastfeeding her child in there. the lord yelled at the woman: -throw the child into the stove and take me! -my god, but he will burn up! -do not fear! nothing will happen to your child. only do what i say. the woman threw her own child into the stove and took christ into her arms. the jews saw that the woman had thrown the child into the fire, but did not see that christ is in her arms, but the other child at that moment was crying in the stove. the jews began to clap their hands: christ has been burned up, burned up, burned up! folklorica 2007, vol. xii 90 the child turned out to be covered in flowers and became a saint, and christ went with his twelve apostles. we find the same plot in a story recorded a hundred years later in the gomel' oblast'. there the motif of the miraculous rescue from the stove is conflated here with the motif of the miraculous growth of vegetation: [belova 2004: 316-317] [2] по ўсим сельсоветам приказали хлопчикам отсекать головы. а матерь божья с иисусом узнала и убежала от властей. [одна женщина приютила ее, спрятала иисуса в печку и закрыла заслонку. преследователи его не нашли. пошла матерь божия с иисусом дальше. видит – сеет мужик пшеницу.] сеете пшеницу? сею. заўтра жать будете. // што это там за ўопросы, заўтра жать? [удивился, пошел домой. а назавтра выходит – пшеница поспела. едут стражники, спрашивают, не видал ли тут проходящую женщину с ребенком маленьким? отвечает – видал.] а коли она шла? да кады пшаницу сеял. [стражники думают: э, как давно! – и повернули обратно.] етым слóвам йих атвернýла. приходит янá к речке з хлопчиком з éтым. [а на берегу играют дети у лодки. она просит их перевезти на тот берег, а они отвечают: «у нас лодка поломана». – «ничео, все будет хорошо». и верно, лодка оказалась в порядке, и хлопчики благополучно перевезли богоматерь с младенцем.] in every village they ordered that every boy should be beheaded. and the mother of god discovered this and ran away from the authorities with her son. [one woman sheltered her, and hid christ in the stove and closed the stove-door. the pursuers did not find him. the mother of god and jesus went on farther. she sees that a peasant is sowing wheat.] -are you sowing wheat? -i am. tomorrow you will harvest it. // what kind of questions are these, harvest tomorrow? [he was amazed and went home. but in the morning he comes out and the wheat had matured. some constables are riding by and they ask, have you seen a woman going by with a boy child? he answers, i have.] -and how long ago did she pass by? -when i was sowing wheat. [the police think, “oh, that was so long ago!” and they turned back.] with these words she turned them back. she comes to a little river with the boy. [and on the shore children are playing in a boat. she asks them to take them to the other shore, but they narratives on the rescue of the infant jesus 91 answer: “our boat is broken.” -”don’t worry, everything will be fine.” and truly, the boat turned out to be fine, and the boys successfully took the virgin mary and her child across.](1) similar stories are also common in siberian russian manuscripts. we will examine two instances of this plot in publications dated to the second half of the nineteenth century. one of them was collected on the territory of western siberia in tomsk guberniia and the other in eastern siberia in irkutsk guberniia, tukin valley: [potanin 121] [3] маленький христос, преследуемый, просил улиту спрятать его. улита своего собственного сына бросила в топившуюся печь и христа положила в зыбку: преследователи не нашли христа и только вышли вон, мать подошла к печке, а там кирик стоит “иставленный” (целый). the christ-child, who was being followed, asked ulita to hide him. ulita threw her own son into the lit stove and put christ into the cradle: the pursuers did not find christ and as soon as they had left, the mother went to the stove, and there kirik was standing “in one piece” (whole).(2) [4] … как только жиды узнали о рождении христа, то бросились его искать, чтобы убить, но никак не могли найти. тогда стали жечь всех ребят; одного парнишку бросили в печь, когда матери его не было дома: мать вернулась, посмотрела в печь, а там в огне сидит парнишка и играет угольками! … as soon as the jews found out about the birth of christ, they set about searching for him to kill him, but they couldn’t find him. then they began to burn all the children; they threw one little boy into the stove, when his mother was not home; his mother returned, looked into the stove, and there in the fire the little boy was sitting playing with the coals! [astyrev 39] later manuscripts of such stories from the 1950s and 1970s also exist, as in this text from the tomsk oblast': [5] … и, значит, напали на ево [христа] жиды и хотели ево сжечь в огне. он от их убежал, вбежал в избушечку, а там сидит женщина и кормит младенчика. старичок он был и говорит: «женщина, бросьте сваво младенца в печь, пускай он сгорит». она сначала не хотела, а он сказал, что ему смерть. женщина бросила младенца в печь. младенец перевертываца и начал там играть свиточками. он говорит: «возьмите меня на руки и прижмите меня к своей груди». она взяла старика на руки и прижала его к своей груди. а он и сделался маленьким мальчиком в пеленочках. жиды забежали, его не нашли. … and, that means, the jews attacked him and wanted to burn him in the fire. he ran away from them, ran into a little hut, and there a woman is sitting folklorica 2007, vol. xii 92 feeding her little child. he was in the form of a little old man and says: “woman, throw your child into the stove, let him burn.” at first she didn’t want to, but he said that he would die otherwise. the woman threw the child into the stove. the child turned around and began playing with the coals. he says: “take me into your arms and hold me to your breast.” she took the old man into her arms and held him to her breast. and he turned himself into a small boy in swaddling clothes. the jews ran in, but didn’t find him. [fa omgpu 1951, no. 60] (3) [6] искали иисуса христа. спрятала его цыганка у себя в печке. когда пришли в дом, она стала подкладывать мелкие щепочки в печку, делая вид, что зажигает, а сама отодвигала их дальше. так и не нашли иисуса. поэтому нельзя винить цыганку, что она крестится: она иисуса спасла, they were searching for jesus christ. a gypsy woman hid him in her stove. when they came into the home, she began to throw small threads into the stove, giving the impression that she was burning them up, but actually she was moving them farther away. so they didn’t find jesus. therefore, you cannot blame the gypsy woman for taking the lord’s name in vain; she saved jesus. [fa omgpu 1973, no. 31] (4) a similar narrative about the rescue of the infant jesus also exists in verse. the religious song about the almswife, miloserdnaia (lit. merciful) was, according to g.p. fedotov, widespread and known “under the title of allilueva’s wife.” [fedotov 39] we will examine a variant of this religious verse from the p. bessonov collection, no. 321, vallaiskii uezd, village of bor…recorded from the blind peasant larion: [bezsonov 118-121] милостивая жена милосердная топила во граде свою келью, держала своего чада на ручах. к милостивой к жены милосердныя иде сама дева пресвятая, несе самого христа бога на руцах: «милостива жена милосердная! бросай ты свое чадо в огонь и пламя, ты бери самого христа бога на руци: бегут жиды-супостаты с оружьям и с вострыим копiям, хотят христа бога убити». милостива жена милосердная бросила свое чадо в огонь и пламя, брала самого христа бога на руци. жиды-супостаты набежали с оружьями, с вострыими копiям, жену милосердную жиды да спрошали: «милостива жена милосердная! narratives on the rescue of the infant jesus 93 давно ль ты христа бога видала?» милостива жена им отвечала: ой же, жиды-супостаты! я теперь христа бога поймала, я в огонь во пламень его вогнала. жиды к огненной печи приходили: во печи младенец стрепехнулся, показал жидам он руци и ноги. жиды-супостаты срадовались: «мы теперь христа поймали, мы в огонь во пламя его загнали, медным заслоням заслоняли, зелезныим подпорам подпирали!» жиды прочь от печи отходили. милостивая жена милосердняя не могла христа бога содéржать, на его на светлость наглядеться: не стало христа у ей на ручах. милостива жена милосерная к огненной ко печи приходила: ужо ль там сгорело мое чадо? зелезныи подпоры отпирала, медныи заслони отслоняла: во печи трава выростала, на травы цветы разцветали, во цветах младенец играет, на нем риза солнцем возсiяет, евангельскую книгу сам читает, небесную силу прославляет, и со ангелами, с херувимы и со всею с небесною силой. милостива жена милосердная она первая в раю пребывает. аллилуя, аллилуя, аллилуя, мы славим тебе, христа и бога! the almswife miloserdnaia was heating her cell in the city, while holding her child in her arms. to the almswife miloserdnaia came the holy virgin herself, carrying the god christ himself in her arms: “almswife miloserdnaia! throw your child into the fire and flame, take the god christ himself into your arms: the jews, the foes are coming with weapons and with sharp spears, they want to kill the god christ.” miloserdnaia the almswife threw her child into the fire and flame, folklorica 2007, vol. xii 94 she took the god christ into her arms. the jews, the foes came running in with weapons, with sharp spears, and the jews asked miloserdnaia the almswife: “almswife miloserdnaia! have you seen the god christ recently?” the almswife answered them: -oh, the jews, the foes! have just caught the god christ, i drove him into the fire, into the flame. the jews came to the fiery stove: the child was whimpering in the stove, he showed the jews his arms and legs. the jews, the foes were overjoyed: “now we have caught christ, we drove him into the fire, into the flame, we have closed him in behind the bronze stove-door, we have locked him in with iron bars!” the jews went away from the stove. miloserdnaia the almswife could not hold the god christ, could not bear to look upon his brightness; christ did not remain in her arms. miloserdnaia the almswife went to the fiery stove; -has my child really been burned? she slid back the iron bars, she opened the bronze stove-door; grass was growing in the stove, on the grass flowers had bloomed, in the flowers the little child is playing, upon him a ray of sun is shining, he is reading the gospels by himself, he is praising heaven’s power, and with the angels, and the cherubim, and with all of heaven’s forces. miloserdnaia the almswife she will be first in heaven. alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, we give praise to you, christ and god! there are two versions of this religious song. in the first, the virgin mary turns to the almswife with her request. this version is represented in the variant translated above. we also find it in one of two variants of the religious song about the almswife miloserdnaia found in the varentsov collection (nos. 55-56, obtained “from the sreznevskii acathistus”). [varentsov 177-178] narratives on the rescue of the infant jesus 95 according to the other version of this religious song, it is not the mother of god that makes a request of the wife, but the savior himself: [bezsonov no. 323, p. 124] из граду молоденец утекает, на путь на дорогу нападает. на пути ли на дороге жила жéна милосéрдная: перед нею горит огонь-пламень, на рýцах держала младенца; истинный бог возвещает: жéна милостивая милосéрдная! брось ты свою чаду в огонь-пламень, прими ты христа бога на руцы the boy escapes from the city, he is attacked on the path, on the road. on the path, on the road lived miloserdnaia the almswife: before her a fire, a flame is burning, she was holding a child in her arms; the true god proclaims: miloserdnaia the almswife! throw your child into the fire, into the flame, take christ the god into your arms. (5) christ himself reassures the almswife and prompts her to open the stove to find her own son unharmed: [bezsonov no. 325, pp. 129-130] истинный христос, сын божий, невведим прорéчил: «милостива жена милосердна! твоё чадо не согрело, твоё милое ни в чем невредимо: твоё чадо по печи гуляет, святое евангелье читает, ангелы младенца утешают». милостива жена не поверила, во огненну печь заглянула: по божьему суду-изволенью, во пламе трава выростала, лазоревы цветы расцветали. милостива жена перекрестилась: премудр господь, сыне божий, премудра твоя небесная сила! the true christ, god’s son, unharmed said: folklorica 2007, vol. xii 96 “miloserdnaia the almswife! your child did not burn, your dear one has not been harmed: your child is walking around in the stove, he is reading the holy gospels, the angels are comforting the child.” the almswife did not believe him, she glanced into the fiery stove; in accord with god’s will and judgement, grass had grown up in the flame, azure flowers had bloomed, the almswife crossed herself; oh, most wise lord, son of god, your heavenly forces are the most wise! we also find this version in a siberian russian text recorded by p a. gordnov on the 15th of june 1907 in the tobol guberniia from the peasant dmitrii nikiforovich plekhanov: [rgali, file 1366, list 1, unified collection 177, sheets 5-6, no. 3] еще жúды христа потеряли, и христос бог из града убегает, он на путь на дорожку поступает и до села до деревни добегает. и приходит христос бог во селенье к жене милостивой милосердной. жена милостивая милосердная, она держит младенца на руцах ей христос бог возрещает: жена милостивая милосердная. брось ты свое милое чадо в огонь-пламень, возьми ты христа бога на руци! жена милостивая милосердная бросила милое чадо в огонь-пламя и взяла христа бога на руци. набежали жиды жидовины к жене милостивой милосердной: жена милостивая милосердная, ты куда христа бога сподевала? я бросила христа бога в огонь-пламя. и в огне-пламе младенец стрепескался. и оказал жидовинам руци-нозии. ишшо в тóпоры жиды зрадовалися, заскакали жиды, заплясали, в щелчки жидовоё защелкали.// жена милостивая милосердная. она плачет об чаде милом. ей христос бог возрещает: narratives on the rescue of the infant jesus 97 жена милостивая милосердная! ты не плачь, не тужи об чаде об милом твое милое чадо не сгорело. не сгорело чадо милое, не изотлело. он во церкви по печке [?] гуляет и евангельскую книгу читает, он сам себе имя нарекает. он нарекает себе имя: аллилуйа, аллилуйа, слава боже, аллилуйа. the jews had lost christ, and the god christ is running from the city, and sets out on the way, on the road and he runs to a town, to a village, and the god christ comes into the village to the miloserdnaia the almswife. miloserdnaia the almswife, she is holding a child in her arms the god christ exclaims to her: miloserdnaia the almswife, throw your dear child into the fire, into the flame, take the god christ into your arms! miloserdnaia the almswife threw her dear child into the fire, into the flames, and took the god christ into her arms. the jewish jews came running to miloserdnaia the almswife: miloserdnaia the almswife, what have you done with the god christ? i threw the god christ into the fire, into the flames. and in the fire, in the flames a boy was whimpering and he showed the jews his hands and legs. the jews already at that time began to rejoice, the jews began to jump, to dance, the jews began to snap their fingers.// miloserdnaia the almswife, she is crying about her dear child. the god christ exclaims to her: miloserdnaia the almswife! do not cry, do not grieve for your dear child your dear child has not been burned. the dear child has not been burned, has not been turned to ash. he is walked around the stove in the church and reading the gospels, he himself is speaking a word to himself. he is saying to himself the word: alleluia, alleluia, glory to god, alleluia. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 98 the content of the verse about miloserdnaia the almswife indicates that folkloric legends about the rescue of the child in the stove represent essentially a prose retelling of the plot of this religious song. it appears that a religious song was the direct source for the folk legends examined here. furthermore, the distinction between the two versions of the legends corresponds directly to the two versions of this verse that we have cited. thus we find the first version, in which the virgin mary asks for help, is the antecedent of one of the legends (see 2 above); while the others are associated with the second version, in which christ himself asks for help. it is noteworthy that the variants of the second version of the song are also more numerous. it should be noted that another motif, namely the miraculous growth of vegetation, also exists in one variant (see 2 above) of the legend and may also be inspired by a religious song, specifically a song about the flight to egypt: [bezsonov no. 319, pp. 116-117] шла божiя матерь полем и встретила селянина, сеет пшеницу; сказала ему пречистая: помогай биг, убогiй седлячку! будуть ту ити жиды й жидивки, жиды й жидивки й жидивськи дивки, поведай же ты, же я тады йшла, коли ты ту орав, пшеничейку сеяв». только что ушла святая дева за гору, набежали жиды, и жидовки, и жидовски девки, и видят – селянин жнет пшеницу. спрашивают они о той (белоголовой ) женщине, не шла ли мимо его? шла, говорит селянин, тогда шла, коли я ту орав, пшеничейку сеяв: а теперь уже пшеничейку зажав. говорят жиды: коли ж то було, коли вин ту орав, а теперь вин пшеничейку зажав! the mother of god was going along the fields and she met a peasant, he is sowing wheat; and the most pure said to him: god help you, poor peasant! jews and jewesses will come to you, jews and jewesses and jewish girls, you tell them that i have gone that way, when you had ploughed and were sowing the wheat. as soon as the holy virgin had disappeared behind the mountain, the jews and jewesses and jewish girls ran up and they see that the farmer is harvesting wheat. they ask him about this (blonde) woman, has she come by, by any chance? she came by, -the peasant says, and then went, when i had ploughed and was sowing the wheat: narratives on the rescue of the infant jesus 99 and now i have already harvested the wheat. the jews say: -it was then when he had ploughed, and now he has harvested the wheat! it is significant that the text cited here has a note: “in christmas songs of the carpathian mountain dwellers; compare kostomarov “on the historical meaning of russian folk poetry,” pp. 18-19”. this would indicate that the motif of the miraculous growth of vegetation presented in the song and in the legend (2 above) stems from a single locale. [cited in bezsonov 117] in prose folk narratives the so-called merciful woman (see 1, 2, 5 above) is not the christ child’s only savior. in some texts of this song we also find a gypsy woman (see 6 above) or saint ulita and her child kirik. the motif associated with the gypsy who, as a reward for her actions, can deceive people and take god’s name in vain is well attested in folklore. see, for example, sus 790*–aa *847–k 790 (the golden stirrup). here saint george teaches a poor man (nesterka, savvochka, a gypsy), how to live if he wants to get rich, to steal and lie. the poor man steals a golden stirrup (a golden saddle, a golden goblet) from the saint and denies it. there is another explanation for the fact that the gypsy (man or woman) can deceive others and take the lord’s name in vain without punishment. this is found in folk narratives associated with events in the gospels, such as the crucifixion of christ. here a gypsy man (or woman) was not afraid to lie to save christ. when his torturers wanted to kill the savior with a nail to his forehead or his heart, the gypsy passes off a fly (or a bee) as a nail and saves christ. (7) how then did the plot about the rescue in the stove come to be associated with the names of kirik and ulita? in the canonical version, the life and martyrdom of these saints has never been associated with the stove or fire. in the version of the life of these saints presented in religious song, however, we do find such a motif. (8) it is associated with that episode when the pagan emperor maximilian orders that his wife ulita and the child kirik be thrown into a cauldron burning with fire and flame because they ‘believed in the faith of the lord’ and refused to pray to false idols. (9) in the intital portion of the song we also find the motif of the flight of the chrisitan ulita from the city, where the pagan emperor rules: [varentsov 77-86] во славном было в городе в домостеев, жил-был неверный царь максимиан; у него была честная жена улита; folklorica 2007, vol. xii 100 она веру веровала ко господу; избежала из-под городу из домостеева во тот во евсеев город. неверный царь максимиан он посланников за нею посылывает, за честною женою улитою, в тот во евссев город. еще взяли – возвратили в домосеев город // ко неверному царю максимиану. неверный царь максимиан он честной жене обрадовался; <…> «честная жена улита, будешь ли ты мою веру веровать? будешь ли моим идолам молитися?» [улита и сын ее – младенец кирик отвечают отказом, тогда] неверный царь максимиан на святого младенца на кирика он пуще на него озлобился, приказал он его на мученье взять, на мученье взять на великое. <…> приказал он наносить в котел свинцу, смолы и олова, разжигать жаром-огнем-пламенем. наносили в котел свинцу, смолы, олова, разжигали жаром-огнем-пламенем, заревел-закипел котел, ровно гром загремел, слышно было на тридцать верст. устрашилась его родимая мати, честная жена улита: она злую думу задумала, отстает она от спаса от пречистаго, от матери пресвятыя богородицы. она хочет неверному царю максимиану прилеститися; она хочет его веру веровать, она хочет его идолам молитися. святой младенец кирик, трех лет без трех месяцев жалко вопиюще гласит ко царю ко небесному: «господи, отец, сын, святой дух! услышьте молитву святаго младенца кирика, не отдайте на великое мучение со родимою со матерью ко царю ко неверному, уймите мою родимую матерь! она злую думу задумала: отстает она от спаса от пречистаго, от матери пресвятыя богородицы». услышал господи мотиву святаго младенца кирика. <…> narratives on the rescue of the infant jesus 101 оградил господи котел животворящим крестом, выросла в котле трава-мурава, розцвели цветы лазоревые, святой младенец кирик жалко вопиюще глаголет ко царю ко неверному: «неверный царь максимиан! погляди-ко у нас в котле трава-мурава, и розцвели цветы лазоревые. велика наша вера крещеная,// велик наш христианский бог!» еще славен бог прославися, прославился святой младенец кирик, трех лет без трех месяцев, со родимою со матерью, с честной женой со улитою, пошла эта слава по всей земле, по всей земле, по святой русе. от нынешняго житья-бытья и дó веку. аминь. it was in the glorious, in the city in domosteev, there lived, there was a pagan emperor maximilian; he had an honorable wife ulita; she believed in the faith of the lord; she ran way from the city, from domosteev into that, into evseev city. the pagan emperor maximilian he sends pursuers after her, after his honorable wife ulita, into that, into evseev city. they have caught her and returned to domosteev city// to the pagan emperor maximilian. the pagan emperor maximilian he rejoiced to his honorable wife; <…> “honorable wife ulita, are you going to believe in my faith? are you going to pray to my idols?” [ulita and her son, the child kirik, refuse, then] the pagan emperor maximilian at the holy child, at kirik he got most angry at him, he ordered him to undergo torture, to undergo great torture. <…> he ordered that they carry in a cauldron with lead, tar and tin, light it with heat, fire and flame. they carried in a cauldron with lead, tar, tin, and they lit it with heat, fire and flame, the cauldron roared and boiled, just like thunder, folklorica 2007, vol. xii 102 you could hear it for thirty versts. his dear mother was frightened, the honorable wife ulita; she began to think evil thoughts, would she remain apart from the most holy savior, apart from the most holy mother, mother of god. she wants to submit to the pagan emperor maximilian; she wants to accept his faith, she wants to pray to his idols. the holy child kirik, three years old less three months pitifully cries out to the heavenly ruler: “lord, father, son, holy spirit! hear the prayer of the holy child kirik, do not allow him to be subject to great suffering with his dear mother to the pagan emperor, take my dear mother! she has begun to think evil thoughts: would she remain apart from the most holy savior, apart from the most holy mother, the mother of god.” the lord heard the prayer of the holy child kirik. <…> the lord protected the cauldron with a life-giving cross, grass grew in the cauldron, azure flowers bloomed, the holy child kirik cries out piteously to the pagan one, to the emperor: “pagan emperor maximilian! see, we have grass in the cauldron, and azure flowers have bloomed. great is our christian faith,// great is our christian god!” god has become even more glorious, the holy child kirik gave glory three years old less three months with his dear mother, with the honorable wife, with ulita, that glory went around the whole world, around the whole world, around holy rus'. from nowadays and for all time. amen. it is entirely possible that the occurrence of this version of the life of these holy martyrs in the folk tradition served as the basis for the convergence of the motif about the rescue of the christ child by a woman narratives on the rescue of the infant jesus 103 who throws her own child into a stove with the name of the christian martyrs ulita and her child kirik. several facts about the folk calendar support the claim that these saints were associated with fire in the folk imagination. the day of kirik and ulita –july 28 (july 15 old style) – is a holiday related to thunderstorms. it is possible that this conception about the day of kirik and ulita as a thunder holiday in the folk calendar is supported by its proximity in time to the other traditional holiday associated with thunder and storms, namely st. elijah, august 2 (july 20 old style). even though classical collections of information on the folk calendar by v. i. dal', i. p. kalinsky, a. a. makarenko do not contain similar data, we can support the belief that kirik and ulita’s day was a holiday associated with thunderstorms. take, for example, the following narratives: [shidlovskii 1890: no. 3, p. 235] у крестьян курской губ. тимского уез. за все лето чуть ли не самый страшный и самый чтимый день – это 15 июля, память мчч. кирика, иулиты и авудита и св. равноапостольного князя владимира. муч. авудита и св. владимира крестьяне не знают, знают и боятся только «кирикия и уликия»; это, по их словам, «вздорные святые», которые строго следят, чтобы в их праздники не работали. вот недавно не послушались стариков – пошли на работу, и что ж? у одного двух сыновей громом хватило, насилу отошли, у другого корова пала, третий вилами пропоролся. нет, это вздорные святые, строго следят и долго не терпят. хоть на пасху готовы работать, а на кирикия и уликия нет. такой ответ дали крестьяне на предложение заняться в этот день работой хоть после обеда. among peasants of the kursk guberniia, timsk uezd almost the most frightening and most commemorated day is the 15 of june, which commemorates the martyrs kirik, iulita and avudit and holy prince vladimir, who is ranked with the apostles. the peasants do not know the martyr avudit and saint vladimir and fear only “kirik and ulikia.” in their words, these are “quarrelsome saints”, who assiduously watch people to make sure that they do not work on their holiday. recently, an old couple did not obey; they went to work, and then what? one of their two sons was taken by thunder, he lost his strength, a cow gored the other, the third was stabbed by a pitchfork. no, they are quarrelsome saints, they watch closely and are not very patient. even though they (the peasants) may be willing to work on easter, they won’t on kirik and ulikia. the peasants reacted this way to a suggestion to work on that day even if only after dinner. we find similar evidence in siberian russian materials: июль, 15. кирика и иулитты. в этот день крестьяне не убирают сена, так как день этот называют грозным; если в этот день убирают сено, то folklorica 2007, vol. xii 104 оно непременно сгорит огнем, потому что кирика самого на огне мучили. (19) july 15. kirik and iulita. on this day peasants do not gather hay, because the day is called a thunderstorm day; if they gather hay on this day, then it is will soon be burned by fire, because kirik himself was tormented by fire. [skalozubov 1901: no, 19, p. 117] (10) 28 июля – праздник кирики-улиты. это страшный праздник. делать ничего нельзя, а то все загорится. вот я помню, работала на тракторе, как раз в ентот день. поехали мы на закрут. а тут вдруг пошла тучка черная, и только мы уехали с этого места, гроза как даст! и заполыхало все пламенем the 28th of july is the holiday of kirik and ulita. this is a terrifying holiday. you can do nothing or everything will burn up. i remember, i was working on a tractor, on that very day. we had gone to the lumber camp. and suddenly a black cloud came along and as soon as we had driven away from there, there was a terrible thunderstorm! and everything was burned up in a fire. [gano 173] (11) кирики–улиты – праздники сердиты, ой, сердиты. тут вот мужчина был когда-то. тучи собираются, а него не домётаны копны. он и говорит жене: “пойдём, домечем”. вот они, да ещё один сосед их, поехали, сметали (тогда единолично ещё жили). едут домой, а тучи… черно – черно, прямо гроза. легли отдохнуть. а тут ударила гроза. загорелось что-то в полях. поехали туда, а там копна этого мужчины горит. тут ветром сноп вырвало из этой копны и через другие копна бросило в копну соседа. людское сено стоит, а рядом горит. ладно, приехали домой. тут гроза хоп – и на крышу, а крыша соломенная. пук соломы оторвало да хлоп – к другому на тесовую крышу. теперь, конечно, колхоз, не скажешь же там, что в праздник работать нельзя, но дома ничего не делаю. kirik-ulita are angry holidays, oh angry. there was this man once. the clouds are gathering together, but he had not yet stacked his hay. and he says to his wife: “let’s go and stack the hay.” and they and one of their neighbors went and stacked hay (then they still lived as single families). they are going home and clouds, black, black, there is a thunderstorm ahead. they laid down to rest. and then the thunderstorm hit. something in the fields caught on fire. they went over there and this man’s haystacks are burning. just then the wind tore a sheaf out of the haystack and threw it through the other haystacks into the neighbor’s haystack. other people’s hay is not burning, but those nearby are burning. okay, so they came home. then pow, there is a thunderstorm and on the roof, the roof is straw. a piece of straw was torn off and zap, was over onto the plank roof. now of course there is a collective farm and you don’t say that you can’t work on a holiday, but i don’t do anything at home. [fa omgpu ek-3/1975, no. 12 (v)] (12) narratives on the rescue of the infant jesus 105 и кирики-улиты, праздники сердиты. да, девки, был такой праздник. это летом бывает. и вот рассказывают, что если поробить на этот день, так бог-то обязательно накажет. вот было как-то: поработали мужики, сено метали, покос ведь как раз, вот только кончили, а сено-то и загорелось. да и зачем в праздники-то работать, когда буден хватает and kirik and ulita are angry holidays. yes, girls, there was such a holiday. it happens in the summer. and they say that if you work on that day, then god will surely punish you. and it has happened: some men were out working, they were stacking hay, the haycutting had just ended, and the hay burned up. and why should you work on holidays anyway, when there are enough work days anyway.” [fa omgpu ek-5/1975, no. 13(b)] (13) кирик мальчик, улита мать его, они страдали. отец с сыном (просто легенда шла, это не у нас было) сыну надо было метать сено. отец говорит: «да сегодня кирики». сын: “а, кирики,пропорет дырики!” отец наверху стоял, сено принимал. вот сын как-то неопытно пропорол ему вилами, ткнул его. вот отец и говорит: «ты же так сказал: “кирики пропорет дырики!”». так и боялись кирики: если в дуброве [лесостепь, где косили сено]: “о, завтра кирики, давайте хоть до обеда не работать, пока идет служба.” kirik is a boy, ulita is his mother, they suffered. a father and son (a legend was going around, it wasn’t here), the son had to stack hay. the father says: “but today is kirik’s day.” the son: “oh, kirik-schmirik (lit. is nothing but ripping holes-trans.note)!” the father was standing up above, taking the hay. then the son somehow carelessly stabbed him with the pitchfork, poked him. and the father says: “just as you said: “kirik is nothing but (a joke)!” ” so they were scared of kirik’s day; if they were in the dubrova [the forest steppe, where they cut hay]: “o, tomorrow is kirik’s day, at least let’s not work before dinner, while mass is going on.” [fa omgpu ek-15/1975, no. 51] (14) it is important that one of the legend variants we presented was recorded by the collector g. n. potanin specifically as an example clarifiying and illustrating beliefs about the folk calendar. (15) it appears then that the folk ‘biblical’ legends about the miraculous rescue of christ and the child in the stove resulted from shared components in their history. both are prose parallels to the religious song about the almswife, miloserdnaia. in two of its attestations the folk version of the life of kirik and ulita mixed with folk conceptions about the holiday of saints kirik and ulita as a ‘thunderstorm day’ and served as the stimulus for associating this plot with the names of the martyred saints kirik and ulita also. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 106 drawing from a siberian illuminated manuscript. the burning of kyrik and ulita. second half of the 19th century. narratives on the rescue of the infant jesus 107 notes 1 recorded by e.v trosnikov from e.f belaia, d.o.b. 1908, zolotukha kalinkovichskii region, gomel' oblast', 1983. 2 the story occurs in the section on the folk calendar “15 june. kirik and ulita. it is a sin to work,” the text given here follows. 3 recorded by ovsiannikova, nazarova in the village pospelovo of the bol'shekovskii region of the omsk oblast' from a. s. karshina. 4 recorded by t. g. leonova, v. evsiukova, n. matveeva in the village taiga of the znamenskii region of the omsk oblast' from e. k. shalunina. 5 this text has the note “orlov guberniia, volhovskii uezd, village rudnevo…from the blindman aleksei platonovich telenko 6 fedotov notes that in one variant, where the mother of god is absent, she herself is called maria [bezsonov 4, 137], and in another iona [139]. see g. fedotov, religious songs, p. 40. 7 for similar folk texts see: belova 2003: 172-186; belova 2004: numbers 130-132; kuznetsova 2006. 8 see the lives of the saints for saint dimitrii of rostov. fifteenth day (28 july). 9 see varentsov 1860: 77-86: “on the holy child kirik, about his torment, how the tsar tortures him, his former father, on the basis of their mohammedan law,” with the note: “recorded in nolinsk, viatsk guberniia.” the text given here is that version. 10 told by m.m. sadovnikov, bol'shaia tava, slovodchikovsk oblast', tarsk uezd. 11 recorded by n. iu. golubkova in 1984 in the village kadnikovo of the mamontov region of the altai region from r. m. potapova, d.o.b. 1937 (parents from the voronezh guberniia). 12 recorded by n. brazhenko, n. tkachenko in the village chernozer'e of the sargat region of the omsk oblast' from o. i. fediaeva. 13 recorded by g. izvekova, l shevchenko in the village ivanovka of the sargat region of the omsk oblast' from d. m. kabakov and m.g. kabakova. 14 recorded by l. v. novoselova in the village kachesovo of the muromtsev region of the omsk oblast' from a. s. kutuzova. 15 see note 2. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 108 bibliography астырев н. на таежных прогалинах. очерки жизни населения восточной сибири. москва, 1891. белова о. кто есть кто? происхождение и судьба народов в свете “фольклорной этнологии” // россия – xxi век. 2003. № 4. с. 172-186; белова, о. в.“народная библия”: восточнославянские этиологическое легенды /сост. и коммент. о.в. беловой. м., 2004. безсонов п. калеки перехожие. собрание стихов и исследование. москва., 1863. вып. 4. варенцов, в. сборник русских духовных стихов, составленный в. варенцовым. спб., 1860. добровольский в.н. смоленский этнографический сборник. ч. 1. спб., 1891. кузнецова в.с. пчела и муха в легендах и поверьях фольклорной библии (русские сибирские записи). кирпичник. зборник статей в честь 65 летия с. ю. неклюдова. (в печати). потанин г.н. юго-западная часть томской губернии в этнографическом отношении этнографический сборник, издаваемый имп. русским географическим обществом. вып. 6. спб., 1864. скалозубов н. народный календарь// ежегодник тобольского губернского музея тобольск, 1901. вып. 12. федотов г. стихи духовные (русская народная вера по духовным стихам) м., 1991. шидловский, г.р. кирик и улита. сообщение// этнографическое обозрение. 1890, № 3 (кн. 6). archival sources fa omgpu (фа омгпу) – фольклорный архив омского государстенного педагогического университета gano (гано) – государственный архив новосибирской обл. ф. м.н. мельникова rgali (ргали) – российский государственный архив литературы и искусства microsoft word folks05.doc 52 obituary felix j. oinas felix j. oinas was born march 6, 1911 in tartu, estonia, and died september 25, 2004 in bloomington, indiana, at the age of 93. he had a rich, varied, and rewarding professional life and career.(1) he was a student at tartu university where he received an ma in 1937. in 1935-1936 he studied at budapest university and in 1942-1944 was a fellow at tartu university. after the second world war he studied at the university of heidelberg in 1946-1948, emigrating to the united states in 1949. in 1950 he became an instructor at indiana university. after completing his ph.d. in 1952, he remained at indiana university, where he held a joint position in the department of slavic languages and literatures and in uralic-altaic studies. he also was named a fellow of the folklore institute. he retired as professor emeritus in 1981. felix oinas was a remarkable scholar and teacher. the designation of his scholarly specialties as slavic and finno-ugric linguistics and folklore only hints at the breadth and diversity of his contributions to these fields. he was a member of many scholarly organizations, received numerous grants for research, travel, or teaching, attended international conferences on various subjects, was often invited to speak as a guest lecturer, was elected a fellow in the scholarly societies of several european countries, and was presented with many awards for his services and scholarship. the volume folklorica: festschrift for felix j. oinas (1982) represents a testimony on the part of twenty-six participating scholars. although he focused much of his scholarly efforts on his native estonian folklore and on related finnish folklore, felix oinas also maintained a continuing interest in russian folklore. we will limit our comments to his activities in the russian area. a survey of his publications on russian folklore suggests that he devoted most of his attention to the epic (bylina) and to mythology. in regard to the bylina he wrote articles about the disputed aristocratic origin of the bylina, hunting in the bylina, and the song �vavilo and the skomorokhs� which had been collected only from the north russian singer krivopolenova. scholars suspected that this song might have been an individual creation and thus did not belong to traditional folklore. however, in a comparative study felix pointed out parallels with a finnish song, thus showing that krivopolenova�s work was indeed traditional in origin. together with stephen soudakoff he translated a collection of articles about russian folklore (the study of russian folklore, 1975), a volume which contributed much toward acquainting english readers with the research of russian folklorists during the soviet era. felix�s interest in epics is also reflected in the collection heroic epic and saga (1978), which he edited. here specialists provided introductions to fifteen different epic traditions; felix contributed sections on the russian bylina and on balto-finnic epics. the volume essays on russian folklore and mythology (1985) reflected several topics that attracted his attention in russian folk mythology or beliefs. a few examples are: �the russian golubec �grave marker,�� �historical reality and russian supernatural beings,� �the devil in russian folklore,� �russian poludnica �midday spirit,�� and �heretics as vampires and demons in russia.� folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 53 we have touched upon only the russian aspect of felix oinas� wide and varied contributions to the study of folklore in several traditions. one could only wish that many of these scattered works would be published in a collection that would make them accessible to folklorists in many countries. and one can only be grateful to have had an opportunity to know him as a teacher, a scholar, a colleague, or a friend over many years. felix oinas was a generous person who was always willing to give help and advice to others who were involved in the study of folklore. succinctly stated, he was a traditional philologist who acquired an international standing among folklorists. james bailey university of wisconsin, madison. notes 1 thanks are expressed to the following people for their help in preparing this obituary: j. thomas shaw who for several years was a colleague of felix oinas at indiana university, and ronald feldstein, the present chair of the department of slavic languages and literatures at indiana university. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 folk humor of post-soviet russia: asurvey emil a. draitser, hunter college of the city university of new york for most of communist history, political jokes that russians avidly exchanged with each other played an important part in russian private life and became widely known outside of the country through western press reports. they reflected the true nature of the soviet system. externally, they often served as a cold war weapon in public speeches of the american president ronald reagan. a question most often raised today by students of things russian (and by the russians themselves) is why this everpopular joke-telling has almost disappeared from everyday speech. i will attempt to answer this question by analyzing the nature of joke-telling as it was practiced in the former soviet union. first of all, telling anti-soviet jokes served more than the purpose of venting frustration over lack of freedom: after all, russia had little of it under the tsars. as sergey averintsev, points out, russian laughter has always possessed a peculiar quality: in order to function, it almost asks to be tabooed. in averintsev's view, as he discusses the russian notion that "it is funny, and yet it is sinful to laugh at [something) (и смех и грех), russian laughter, unlike its western variety, tends to take place not at the time when social or religious license permits it, but when it is inappropriate, not so much by external societal or religious prohibitions, but by the laughing individual's own sense of such inappropriateness. (in connection with this notion, a contemporary russian proverb comes to mind: "if its forbidden, but you want it badly— then it's ok [to do it|" (если нельзя, но очень хочется—то можно). the russians are aware of this trait of their national character and laugh at their "strange," from the western point of view, inclination to act contrary to what is expected of them: british sociologists are conducting an experiment: "what will it take to make an american, a frenchman, and a russian jump off the bridge into the thames river?" they tell the american that the company he owns has gone bankrupt. splash! 5 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 they tell the frenchman that his lover was killed in an automobile accident. splash! then, they approach the russian, who has neither a business, nor a lover. they tell him: "comrade! it's illegal to jump off bridges in our country" "oh, yeah? well, here is what i think about your frigging laws!" splash! thus, one of the factors that has contributed to the demise of joke-telling in russia lies in the fact that, with the end of the state communist ideology, the threat of repression for telling political jokes vanished. the forbidden fruit became permitted, thus losing its lure. the following item of the time of perestroika reflects the change in attitude toward political joke-telling: a man walks up to a russian militia man. "like to hear a political joke?" he asks. you must be out of your mind. don't you realize i'm a militia man?" "i know that. so i'm going to tell you the joke twice... and very slowly." the demise of the genre of oral political humor in today's russia can also be explained by the active participation of the practically uncensored russian press in current political discourse, and its open criticism of those in power. under these circumstances, as in other countries with active media (the us, for example), political humor has become much less common in the private life of russians than it was in the former soviet union. another important factor of the decline in russian political joke-telling has to do with the condition of cohesiveness between a joke and its social references as a prerequisite of its perception, as the anthropologist mary douglas observed: "the joke works only when it mirrors social form; it exists by virtue of its congruence with social structure." in other words, for a joke to "fly" there should be a clear picture of "who is who" in the minds of both the teller and the hearer. in brezhnev's time, known as the period of stagnation, in addition to the total disillusionment with the system that the jokes implied, oral political folk humor flourished because all social stereotypes were easily and immediately recognizable. the demarcation line between the oppressed masses ('us') and a small, but privileged. communist party elite ('them') was crystal clear in people's mind, thus making oral political satire right on target. with the collapse of the soviet system and the ensuing political power struggle at the top. the targets of folkloric satirical attacks became rather blurred. this fuzziness of the political picture, the lack of clarity about who is who in the country is a background against which in the following bit of russian oral humor a fictitious situation is perceived by the listeners as at least marginally plausible. under circumstances of total confusion and disorientation of the russian population with its everchanging political situation no development seems too bizarre and strange anymore: returning from one of his state visits, yeltsin was hurrying to a cabinet session. in his opinion, the driver was going too slow. yeltsin pushed him to the back seat and took his place behind the wheel. a few minutes later, a traffic cop stopped him for speeding. after a moment he reported over his radio phone: "i cant give him' a ticket. he's too big a big shot." "who is he?" asked police headquarters. "i don't know, but yeltsin works for him as a chauffeur." after about a five year hiatus, when the russian political situation became clearer, if not happier, new russian humorous tales began to be spun. they portrayed the new, rather grim, reality. as would be expected, pessimistic and cynical jokes began to make the rounds among russians. the following items refer to the harsh predicament of a large group of people, the russian senior citizens, who have suffered the most during the on-going transition of the country to a market economy, resulting in quickly-rising prices for food and other necessities: they asked a pensioner about his life. "it's so-so. i don't eat breakfast. for dinner, i have a cup of tea with a piece of bread. and for supper i eat something lighter." "did you hear? they've introduced new benefits for retired people." 'you don't say!. what?" "things like being able to stand under a crane, to lean on automatic elevator doors, to cross the street on red..." this unhappiness on the part of a rather large portion of russian population is mostly responsible for the introduction of the theme of nostalgia for soviet times: 7 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 lenin got resurrected. he looked about him, read the new newspapers press and new books and disappeared. they found him at a railroad station with a little suitcase. they asked him, 'where are you heading, vladimir il'ich?" "into exile, my little father, into exile. everything has to be done all over again..." the following item refers to a set phrase of official announcements about lowering government prices for "items of first necessity," a measure undertaken by communist propaganda during the late stalin and early post-stalin years. meager in real worth for the population, these widely publicized discounts were designed to give some hope to the soviet people whose standard of living, never very high, was totally devastated by world war ii: "why has life become so much more expensive?" "because life stopped being an item of first necessity." with the increased stabilization of the political picture in the post-soviet period, russian jokes about the country's leaders reappeared. looking at several yeltsin jokes, one can notice a rather drastic change from the all-out support of the first years of his ascendance to power to a rather denigrating attitude toward him in most recent times. for example, the following joke, collected in 1990, made the rounds under gorbachev when yeltsin stood out as the only man who cared about the well-being of the russian people. one can feel on the part of the russian folk an almost a loving attitude towards a man who seemed to almost single-handedly to be fighting for a better life for his people: during one of the supreme soviet sessions, a group of soldiers with automatic rifles in hand, ready to dispose of enemies in the soviet quasi-parliament, bursts into the hall: "who is yeltsin?" everyone pointed to him. "boris nikolaevich, please get out of the way!" compare this with an item of more recent times, which reflects the people's disappointment with yeltsin's government, which despite many failures (high inflation rate, the unpopular war with chechnia, pauperization of the general population — to name a few) refused to admit its own faults: 9 three mothers chat while taking a stroll with their babies. tm stye my boy is going to be a doctor. look how carefully he examines his pinkie!?" "and mine will be an engineer," says another woman. "look how swiftly he handles the shiny bar on his stroller." "and mine is going to be this country's president. he's in shit all over, but still he carries his little head proudly." to the same end, even folk humor with its flight of satirical fancy finds it hard to compete with the zany real life escapades of the notorious and scandalous member of the russian parliament, vladimir zhirinovsky. it is enough to recall his campaign's promise to give every russian woman a husband and every russian man a bottle of vodka, or his announcement about his readiness to father a child in each of the fifteen former soviet republics. some of his pronouncements sound like joke punch­ lines. attempting to hide his half-jewish origin from inquisitive journalists, he answered their question about his nationality: "my mother is an ethnic russian and my father is a lawyer." very few jokes about zhirinovsky can rival his own antics as reported in the press. here is ofte such joke that is hard to distinguish from his real-life escapades: a bbc correspondent wants to ask zhirinovsky one question. his secretary replied that vladimir vol'fovich will answer for 3,000 dollars. the correspondent pays and asks: "the whole world is interested to know who finances your election campaign." zhirinovsky: "they brought me money in a briefcase." "who did it?" "that's already the second question." in recent years, a gradual coagulation of new social types provided contemporary russian joke-tellers new targets. due to the appearance of these types, russian folk humor slowly acquired a much more pronounced presence than it had in the preceding years of social destabilization. perhaps the most biting satire of recent times is directed at the newly-born social type nicknamed "the new russians." in contemporary jokes, they are stereotyped as spendthrifts, bragging about their wealth and buying power. their thoroughly materialistic approach to life, their acquisitiveness and greed, their love for anything big, 9 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 expensive, or fashionable independent of aesthetic value, their smugness, and feeling of invincibility due to their material status are laughed at in the following samples: two russian businessmen meet in paris on the champs elysees and show off their newly bought clothes. "look at my new tie!" says one. "i bought it at pierre cardin for $500." "big deal, i bought one just like that for $1,500 just around the corner." a new russian is standing on the beach. a golden fish swam up to him. and the new russian says to it: "so, what's your wish?" as with other envied groups in the past, such as the communist party elite, the new russians are portrayed as stupid, crude, and boorish, having low cultural awareness: a new russian comes to a museum and points to a chagall miniature picture. "i want to buy it," he says to the attendant. "are you crazy? it belongs to the museum!" "how much?" "it's not for sale." "is twenty thousand dollars enough?" "how dare you!" "forty thousand. call your director." the attendant calls the director, then says: "he said, for sixty thousand dollars you can have it." the new russian pays and gets into his car. his wife calls him on cellular phone: "where are you? we'll be late to the birthday party." "it's ok, dear, don't worry. i'll buy a present on my way home. i just picked up a greeting card." a new russian walks with his son, passing a painter who is painting a street view. the father says to his son: "if you won't listen to me and become a person of means, you may wind up doing this instead of clicking a polaroid." they are also shown as morally corrupt and absolutely unscrupulous. the implication of such jokes is that the new 10 russians do not deserve their wealth, that their success is a matter of either dumb luck or thuggery, but certainly not of competence and hard work: , one new russian tells another: "i have a problem, what to do for my vacation." "fly around the world." tve done that twice. boring." "why don't you go snorkeling?" "i've done it. it's boring after a while." "why don't you do a safari?" "what's that?" "you sit in a four-wheel-drive car, go through a terrain and shoot whatever you feel like shooting." "what's the thrill? isn't that the same thing i do on the job?" a new russian gets an offer from the devil. *you want my soul? and in return i get $1 million?" the business man says, dumbfounded. 'what's the catch?" a new russian comes home in the morning and says to his wife: "i'm very sorry, dear, but you'll have to move to another man. i lost you to him in a card game." 'you lost me?! oh god, how could you!!!" "how, how! very simple: i didn't notice his king of spades." the social tension between the joke-tellers and the new russians is often relieved by laughter targeted at the new class' pretension at refinement which does not exist in fact: two new russians are riding in a taxi and talking. "can you imagine, vassily, yesterday i was at a party at the ivanovs and they used the same spoon for salad and soup." "that's nothing," says the other one. "last week. i was a party at the petrovs, and they offered the same little fork for lemon and for sardines." the taxi driver chimes in: "i'm sorry, gentlemen, is it ok that i'm turning my back to you while i'm driving?" 11 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 as is known from news reports from russia, organized crime occupies a considerable amount of public attention. current russian jokes reflect this: a client approaches a co-operative of hit men. "how much would you pay for a hit?" they ask. "five thousand bucks." "what's the address?" "25 tverskoi boulevard, apartment number..." "that's enough! for that kind of money you don't need to tell us which apartment." another joke implies the russians' lack of professionalism in the newly-acquired trade of contract killings: it's 6 pm, and two hired killers are waiting for their victim at the entrance to a luxurious apartment building. ten minutes pass, and the two are still waiting. one looks at his watch anxiously and says: "something terrible must have happened. i'm really worried about him." (this joke is an altered version of a jewish joke of the nazi period about an attempt on hitler's life by two brave, but soft-hearted, jews.) some current jokes reflect the growing popularity of bodybuilding among russian youth and their tendency to show off their physical prowess. this type of youth is nicknamed "kachki" from the russian verb "kachaf" — to pump |in this case, muscles). jokes about them imply that such preoccupation with the physical often is at the expense of intellectual development. on a city bus, an old woman asks a bodybuilder in front of her: "are you getting out at the next stop?" •yes." 'what about these five people in front of you, are they also getting out?" "they are. they just don't know it yet." as the unclear political picture became a hindrance for satirizing in an upward direction, the new russian folk humor began to shift its attention downward, to the lower social stratum. many russian jokes of the post-soviet era show a tendency to resort to the ancient aesopian type of tales in which 11 the downtrodden and utterly powerless behave as winners over the powerful in real life. these jokes are double-edged. on one hand, they satirize the pretense of the impotent to appear on equal terms with the mighty of the world. by pitting insects against huge mammals, they underscore the hopelessness of the underdog's position, its mission impossible. on the other hand, these tales demonstrate an undying will to preserve the dignity of the weak even under the most adverse situations. ants and elephants were playing soccer. the elephants trampled and crushed half of the ants. those that survived the game were sitting in the locker room, wiping oft their sweat and fanning themselves. an elephant paid them a visit: "please guys, forgive us! we didn't want it to be that way." "it's ok," the ants said. "we also played tough today." two fleas come out of a restaurant. "so," one of them asks another, "should we walk or should we wait for a dog?" a little worm is crying and asks his mother: "mommy, mommy, and where's my daddy ?" "be quiet! your daddy went fishing with some men." as we can see, russian folk humor is still alive and well. its revival gives hope that common sense will eventually prevail and russia will become a truly democratic country. we may then see those wonderful jokes disappear. but, then, this loss can be considered a small price to pay for a life of social peace and prosperity. emil a. draitser is the author of forbidden laughter: soviet underground jokes. techniques of satire: the case of saltvkovschhedrin. and the forthcoming taking penguins to the movies: ethnic humor in russia (wayne state up, july 1998). currently, he is finishing a book-length manuscript on gender and sexuality in russian humor. 15 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 microsoft word contentsqsoft.doc animal magic 53 animal magic: contemporary beliefs and practices in ukrainian villages svitlana p. kukharenko university of alberta гей, дай же, боже, і в домі щастя, і в домі щастя для челядочки! гей, дай же, боже, і на двір щастя, і на двір щастя для худобочки, для худобочки, для рогової! щедрівка (1) ukraine is predominantly an agrarian country with livestock production being the second most important occupation of the villagers. the repetitive upheavals of the 20th century – civil and world wars, revolution, the mass collectivization of 1928-1933, the artificial great famine that took the lives of about seven million ukrainians, village uprisings, and mass resettlements introduced major changes to the traditional peasant world outlook.(2) the collectivization and dekulakization (eliminating the rich peasantry) campaigns, through expropriation of private arable lands and forceful imposition of soviet collective farms, or kolhospy, was aimed at destroying the institution of private ownership. they were accompanied with arrests, exiles, and executions of many villagers. village churches were mostly destroyed or turned into either kluby, entertainment centers, or storage places, while priests were imprisoned after being convicted of being enemies of the people. most traditional village rituals were publicly ridiculed as superstitions alien to the new, soviet people. all that, as wanner pointed out, “effectively destroyed the essence of a peasant-based, rural ukrainian culture.”[wanner 41] it certainly was expected that villagers would turn into a new, enlightened, and advanced stratum of society. indeed, some advancement took place in village life: many kinds of traditional, back-breaking labor were mechanized, agricultural operations were accelerated, and secondary education became compulsory, to name but a few changes. but even though soviet ideology affected visible “landmarks" of village life, it had little influence on the invisible, peasant worldview, which remained magical. for people who see the world magically, no accidental events exist. the magical worldview has its own strict logic or system for folklorica 2007, vol. xii 54 explanations for success and failure: people who are successful possess power while those who fail lack it. power can be either benevolent or malevolent, and can vary in its distribution among people so that some people possess one variety of power and others, another.[wax and wax 183](3) within the magical worldview, power is perceived as something physical: a “thing freely given, sold, extorted, stolen, or exchanged.”[wax and wax 185] gaining power then to protect oneself from hostile superior powers becomes a vital concern which is essential for survival. there are various explanations why ukrainian villagers continued believing and practicing magic and, particularly, animal magic. one possibility is that magic used for protection and enhancement of one’s private animal husbandry was a means of securing one’s current survival and future financial independence from others, no matter who those ‘others’ were – fellow villagers or the state. to propose that magic was consciously practiced as a form of resistance to the oppressive intrusion of the state is a dubious speculation that is impossible to verify. what i argue in this article instead is that magic was directly and exclusively linked to the villagers’ sense of private ownership and thus did not extend to animals owned collectively in kolhospy. during soviet times, and fourteen years after the collapse of the ussr, ukrainian villagers believed in and practiced magic for the sake of their animals. protecting what they personally owned and were responsible for gave them hope for economic stability or even prosperity, and it invariably led to a sense of relative safety and independence. hard-working villagers who possessed nothing and had no individual rights were essentially slaves. not only were they helpless before natural forces but were also unprotected before the power of the state. magic was the means of protection. it did not contest religion. it paralleled religion. it was just another way to deal with otherwise unruly powers. evidently, for this reason, ukrainian peasants have never made a clear-cut distinction between magic and religion. there are sparse data on contemporary magic beliefs and practices in ukrainians regarding their livestock. in his monograph, zhuravliov using primarily snippets of information from archival collections and ethnographic publications of the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries summarizes information about belarusian, russian, and ukrainian folk practices on reproductive, commercial, and prophylactic animal magic. [zhuravliov 254] animal magic 55 the present paper, based on 23 personal interviews with contemporary villagers from different regions of ukraine (central, eastern, and western ones)(4), is a description of villagers’ practices and beliefs in the same three major areas. the questionnaire used for these interviews (see appendix), is partially adopted from zhuravliov’s data [p. 146]. i follow frazer’s distinction between contagious and imitative magic based on two main laws of magic – those of contact and similarity [frazer 1963]. i also share bogatyrev’s point of view that “both kinds of magic… can be found in the same magical action.”[bogatyrev] i also use the subdivision of magic into positive (prescription) and negative (proscription/taboo). positive magic is present in actions aimed at achieving some desirable effect, while negative magic consists in nonperforming, avoiding actions, which would otherwise cause some undesirable (negative, detrimental) effect. additionally, i borrow bogatyrev’s notions of motivated and unmotivated magical actions. if the person performing the action can explain the reasons why the action produces a desirable result, then this would be an example of motivated magical action. if the person does not know the reason why the action causes a desirable effect, but still believes in the result, then this is an example of unmotivated magical action. not only magical actions but also spontaneously appearing omens have the ability to foretell the future, and their interpretations are usually denoted as either “good” or “bad.” my study population was formed mostly through my personal contacts or those of the interviewees, and included people who agreed to provide information about their livestock. there were six male informants and seventeen females. ten of them were from western ukraine, nine from eastern, and three from central ukraine. most of my informants were people of middle age or older; the oldest was a 91 year old female from the eastern region. the general tone expressed by my informants was cautious. none of them attributed success with animals to themselves. on the contrary, they all gave numerous examples of their own bad luck with their animals. there was a general fear of praising one’s own good fortune before strangers because of the belief in the evil eye. to talk about success was dangerous for the villagers. thus, their ‘shields’ of bad luck were probably used to deflect my envy and thus evil eye from their important business. the psychological sensitivity of the topic was substantial, and that might be concluded from the fact that i got many refusals to my folklorica 2007, vol. xii 56 requests for interviews, and that most of my informants were not willing to provide their names. reproductive magic animal reproduction is a very important sphere for peasants. thus, reproductive magic has a central meaning and includes rituals, beliefs, taboos, omens, and incantations aimed at increasing the general fertility of the animals and improving aspects of animal mating, pregnancy, labor, and the post partum period. it also includes magical actions of protection and omens that enable one to predict the sex of future offspring and the time when they will be delivered. the moment when a cow will come into heat is watched carefully by everyone and becomes a public matter if the cow is in a herd. the herdsmen then typically send a messenger to the owners. usually there are several bulls in a village, and whoever needs to inseminate a cow walks with her to the house of a bull-owner. it is believed that this walk should be made in silence to be successful. the primary reason is obviously to conceal the real purpose of the trip from people who could wish bad luck because “there are different people and different eyes!” (5) the cow-owner will not even say hello to a relative in the street. the villagers will not be offended: they understand the reason of such behavior and practice it themselves. halyna o-a (52 y.o., er) said that it is advisable to utter “god bless” before leaving ones’ own yard with the cow. this, according to her, is a protective formula for starting any kind of business. the price for insemination is neither too high nor too low (25-30 hryven' in local currency, an equivalent of $5-6). if a cow is not impregnated after the first try, the bull-owner allows the second and third attempts for free. however, money is a must. valentyna z-y (52 y.o., er) explained her cow’s recent premature delivery and postpartum health problems to the fact that the bull-owner refused to take money because he was a relative. according to her, in wishing to help his not so-rich relatives, the bull-owner involuntary violated this strict rule and created even worse financial hardships for valentyna’s family. orysia k-n (45 y.o., wr) provided the details of the ritual of cow insemination that was never articulated by interviewees from other regions. upon arriving at the bull-owner’s place, the owner of a cow must put the nalyhach (the rope with which she is tied) on the ground, the owner of the bull picks it up and leads the cow to the bull. when he returns the cow to the owner, they do the same thing again. all this, according to orysia, is to prevent the loss of good luck with one’s own animal magic 57 animals. she stated that before leaving the yard, the cow should get some alcohol with sugar. it is supposed to calm her down and thus keep the semen inside. others, on the other hand, stated that a cow gets sugar upon returning back home (vasyl' v-k, 75 y.o., wr; mariia o-k, 74 y.o., wr). however, as artificial insemination is being used more and more in villages, the above ritual is observed less and less. artificial insemination creates greater likelihood of success and requires less caution. therefore, magic becomes unnecessary. a cow’s pregnancy is very desirable for her owners. during the whole pregnancy, the cow should be kept away from human eyes so that as few people as possible see the cow and know about her condition. the main reason for this is, again, fear of the evil eye. all informants unanimously stated that the sex of the future offspring could not be predicted. then the same informants provided noticeable patterns of animal behavior which might serve as indicators. for example, cows usually deliver female calves exactly 280 days after insemination, and if they are late by 10-14 days, then this is an indication that the calf will be male. valentyna z-y stated that if, during pregnancy, a cow prefers to lay on her left side in a barn, this is an indication she is carrying a female calf, while if she lies on her right side, the calf is male. liudmyla s-k (48 y.o., cr) added that a cow usually washes herself towards her back when carrying a female calf, and towards her front legs when carrying a male calf. it is possible to influence the sex of future offspring, but only with chickens. sofiia (72 y.o., cr) insisted that, in order to have female chicks, one should put the eggs under a brood hen on “female days,” i.e. the days of the week which are of feminine gender in ukrainian – sereda, p'iatnytsia (wednesday, friday). “male days” like vivtorok, chetver (tuesday, thursday) will result in roosters. saturday and sunday, it was explained, are usually skipped as inappropriate for the start of any business. the masters of the house assist in their animals’ deliveries. the ritual of animal birth is quite similar to the human one. the informants stated there was no specific prayer for animal delivery and thus “our father” was used widely. those who know special incantations usually use them first. only if there are complications will the villagers send for a veterinarian. peasants use various methods to speed up a cow’s (or goat’s) placenta coming out. some give her hot water to drink during delivery (antonina o-k, 66 y.o., er). others give a bucket of sweetened folklorica 2007, vol. xii 58 water (mariia sh-o, 84 y.o., cr), or sweetened water with millet (liudmyla s-k,). still others give her the newborn calf to lick (oleksandra k-o, 63 y.o., er). the placenta of the cow (or of any large species) should be properly buried. many informants stated that it should be put in dung, and that it is a taboo to simply throw it away or to let the cow herself eat it. the explanation was that the cow would then become sick, and that her milk would decrease in volume, become bitter, or stop altogether. only antonina z-y (91 y.o., er) insisted that, if the placenta is fed to a female dog, it will increase the milk of the cow who delivered it. in addition to a wide-spread taboo on lending anything from a household after sunset, the informants emphasized that on the day when there is some “live income” (meaning a newborn animal) in a household, the taboo on lending extends to the whole day. three informants, however, insisted on a three day taboo period, and one (liudmyla s-k) extended it up to nine days. violation of this taboo is widely believed to result in the death of animals or some other major loss, according to the law of similarity. the interviewees provided numerous examples to support their beliefs in the taboo. the taboo itself is common knowledge in villages, but if a potential borrower still persists, such behavior would be symptomatic of evil intentions: “if he persists, it means he is the enemy! he consciously wants to harm your cow!” (mykola u-k, 75 y.o., wr) (6) post partum magic goes hand in hand with prophylactic magic and mostly includes protection of domestic animals from the evil eye, which is especially dangerous to weak, small, or beautiful creatures. orysia k-n stated that the masters should keep poppy seeds in a barn long before a cow’s delivery.(7) as soon as the cow has delivered, the owner should make a clockwise circle around the cow and the calf pouring those poppy seeds. it guarantees that nobody will evileye either the cow or the new calf. petro v-k (76 y.o., wr) suggested a far more radical method, which, however, can only be used at the very first delivery of a cow: “in order for no one being able to evileye your cow, wait for that cow’s delivery, then take the placenta in your teeth and run naked three times around the barn at night; then bury the placenta.” (8) he then provided an “easier” variant of this performance where the owner puts the cow’s placenta in a bucket and carries it in three circles, first around the cow and then the barn. like a woman, a cow is considered “unclean” for some time after delivery and her milk is not consumed by humans. but the very first animal magic 59 milk, which often contains blood, is considered beneficial for both humans and calves. so, some families feed it all to the calves, while others cook a part of it in a special dish, called molozyvo (in central and eastern regions) or kulaĭster (in western region), for themselves. eggs and milk are very important foods in the village and much magic is directed at increasing their production. to ensure maximal hatching of eggs one should put them under a brood hen in the evening when the herd of cows returns home from the pasture in order “to have as many chickens as there are cows in the herd” (antonina z-y). halyna o-a emphasized that a woman should carry the eggs in a man’s fur hat to the hen if she wants them all to hatch. the brood hen is well cared for and usually sits in a quiet, isolated place, often inside the house, where neither humans nor animals can disturb her. there is a belief that the eggs will not hatch if they are carried over moving water, like a stream, a brook, or a river. (sofiia). finally, there must be an uneven number of eggs. one would never put an even number under a hen and expect good results. (9) as far as the number 13 is concerned the informants stated that it would just be impractical to put that few eggs under a hen, but did not see any indication of bad luck in the number per se. as a rule, there should be 17-19-21 eggs so that the brood hen would be able to cover them all. often, out of 19-21 eggs there would only be 10-15 chickens, or even less. but, if after all the precautions and “correct” actions there are still no chickens, that would be a bad omen foretelling an unhappy year for the household or even the whole village, according to antonina o-k. orysia k-n told about a ritual widely performed on christmas in western ukraine. during the holy supper, when all the family is at the table, some member of it, one who is very calm and kind, sits under the table for some time making hen clucking sounds. this is supposed to ensure there will be many chickens next spring. the cow is generally a villager’s most important possession and the milk she produces their most important food. even though my informants liked to repeat that milk was “on a cow’s tongue,” meaning that milk quantity and quality depended on good feeding, they nevertheless actively tried to influence both. little was prescribed for magically increasing milk quantity. valentyna z-y confessed that there were special prayers for improving milk quality – unfortunately unknown to her – and that some good owners “pray every time they milk.” at the same time, proscriptions, i.e., how to avoid a decrease in milk production, were numerous. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 60 a decrease in milk production is believed to be due to, among other reasons, either the deliberate casting of the evil eye or to accidental jealousy. to prevent both, there is a well-known prescription of putting salt in any jar of milk which is to be sold. a tiny amount of salt is believed to neutralize any evil thoughts or wishes as well as preventing any involuntary casting of the evil eye.(10) at the same time, salting milk late in the evening (that time is strongly associated with the evil forces) is done to reverse “giving away” of household prosperity and milk in particular. villagers avoid spilling milk while pouring it (nelia d-ts', 69 y.o., er). it is also taboo to drip milk onto the stove. according to the law of similarity, a cow’s milk will evaporate from her udder like it evaporates from the hot stove. if milk is spilt on the stove, a possible antidote is to salt the spots of dried milk as quickly as possible. there is also a taboo against showing the full amount of milk obtained after milking to non-family members or to say openly how many liters a cow gives (petro v-k; orysia k-n). in addition one should not drink milk directly from the container one milks into (petro v-k). sofiia stated that a person returning an empty milk container to the owner has to put a stale piece of bread and a bit of salt inside. the owner then feeds that bread and salt to the cow. another way to protect the cow is to be cautious with milk products. my informants said that one should not put sharp objects like a knife or a fork in sour cream, whipped cream, cottage cheese, or milk. according to the law of similarity one would “cut off” milk given by a particular animal. treatment or prophylactic magic treatment of sick animals involves a number of magical cures and natural, home-made medicines. the variety of cures depends upon people’s experience and degree of competence. natural cures are used by peasants if the cause of the sickness is known and if the causes are natural: canned cucumbers with yeast for a sick stomach (valentyna zy); a mixture of yeast, milk, and blessed water (ievdokiia h-k, 77 y.o., wr), a mixture of vodka with sunflower oil and cucumber juice, for same reason (antonina o-k); lard with sunflower oil and vinegar as a warming ointment for a swollen udder (antonina o-k); red wine for scabs in dogs (halyna o-a). sofiia stated that a broth from koniachyĭ shchavel' (rumex confertus, lat.), zvirobiĭ (hypericum perforatum, lat.), and dereviĭ (achillea millefolium, lat.) is used for curing diarrhea, while krushyna (frangula alnus, lat.) cures constipation in animals. only if those cures fail to produce the desired effect will the villagers call for a doctor. if the animal magic 61 cause of sickness is unknown or beyond the competence of veterinary doctors, then the owners will go to a baba, a folk healer, who knows specific incantations or prayers. reproductive magic and prophylactic magic are closely interconnected. the owners always wish good for their animals and share magic remedies with them to ensure their good health and well-being: they give blessed paska (easter bread) to animals, kutia on christmas eve, and they sprinkle everything and everyone in the household and in the barn on theophany with blessed water. herbs and fumigation with blessed (usually on transfiguration day) herbs are utilized. peasants wish human-like happiness and well-being to their animals at the beginning of new year as described in a shchedrivka (an epigraph to this article) sung on january 13 (the eve of the julian new year). they wish it to other villagers as well, since human well-being in the village is tightly interrelated with animal husbandry. hence, wishing happiness to animals means wishing the same to humans through their animals. by the same token, it is possible to give bad luck to a human by wishing evil to her or his animals. my informants assured me that the most frequent reason for the sickness of an animal, usually a cow, was the evil eye. this part of the interview was usually the longest and most emotional, full of details from their own experience and those of others. the interviews were replete with dozens of ways for diagnosing and treating the evil eye. ukrainian villagers are very concerned about the evil eye and about people who are able to cast it. the power of the latter seems to be enormous and some interviewees tried to convince me that the negative consequences of the evil eye had no limits. even mass epidemics were attributed to it (oleksandra k-o; hanna f-k, 62 y.o., wr). people with the evil eye, according to my informants, were always around and quick to harm: “you merely take <the cow> to the pasture and her milk disappears, because <people> watch the udder, <they> watch everything!”(11) (antonina o-k); “it is necessary to hide everything from neighbors who have the evil eyes, and it is better not to argue with such folk”(12) (antonina o-k); “<people> can evileye terribly!” (13) (valentyna z-y); “what evil can a domovyk do?! these are humans who can evileye for real with real eyes!!!”(14) (varvara m-k, 79 y.o., wr). orysia k-n even stated that anyone can cast the evil eye on cattle or humans if they openly express sincere admiration which contains a hidden jealousy: “yes, even you (me, sk) can cast the evil eye on my cow if you look at her and exclaim “wow!!!” instead you should first folklorica 2007, vol. xii 62 spit three times and say “no evil eye!” (“nivroku!”). only after that can you exclaim “wow!!!” then it will not affect my cow any longer.” villagers distinguished between vid'my (witches) and people who simply possessed the evil eye. the former do deliberate damage secretly to animals and humans causing severe illness or even death. they can take milk away from cows completely. the latter, however, may cause unintentional harm resulting in much less severe consequences. some people are believed to have jealous or wishful eyes against their will, or they may simply look at an animal at the wrong moment. my interviewees frequently used the phrase “bad eyes” instead of the “evil eye.” bad eyes that unintentionally cast evil upon animals are generally tolerated: people view this as an excuse and do not feel fear or hatred towards such fellow-villagers. in cases where there is accidental casting of the evil eye, and if villagers think they know who did it, they go to the person and ask her or him to come and spit three times on the cow to relieve her from the consequences of their unintentional jealousy: “there are people with bad eyes” (nelia d-ts'); “there are such people whose eyes are not good” (mariia o-k); “there are different people and different eyes… <some> can cast the evil eye. maybe a person does not know <that she possesses the evil eye>, but she just looks at аn animal and the animal becomes sick, or can even perish” (sofiia); “<someone> can cast the evil eye involuntarily; she just looks at the wrong moment” (varvara м-k); “some person could just have a look <at an animal> and feel jealous, but there are people who can evileye deliberately” (valentyna z-y); “if someone casts the evil eye deliberately, then call that person to spit on your cow” (ievdokiia h-k); “usually you have an idea about who could have cast the evil eye” (oleksandra k-o). just as only the most successful people are evileyed, so it is the best, most productive animals which are targeted. all of my interviewees knew the classic behavior patterns of an evileyed animal, and the symptoms are similar to those of an evileyed human. the cow typically twists, yawns, is slack, refuses to eat; does not stand still or urinates while the mistress milks her. she becomes aggressive towards a person milking her; looks sick, does not produce much milk; and there can be blood in the milk. in any case, there are multiple remedies for curing evileyed animals as well as preventing them from being evileyed. the first and the most widely used remedy is to sprinkle an animal with blessed water and utter the lord’s prayer over it. inviting a third party – a baba who is present in virtually any village – to help is also very popular: “you have to call folk healers” (ievdokiia d-n, 60 y.o., animal magic 63 wr); “i led my cow to a wizard. he whispered something over corn flour. i fed it to the cow 12 times and after that it <the evil eye> was gone” (mykola u-k); “here lived a baba called borovychka. she knew incantations and healed animals” (pavlo k-o, 65 y.o., er); “…a baba will whisper a prayer over <an animal>” (mariia sh-o); “there is a prayer against the evil eye” (oleksandra k-o); “you have to call people who know<how to cure>” (antonina z-y); “you need to pray over the evil eye… there are lots of prayers against it” (sofiia); “you have to go to the healers. they can overturn the casting of the evil eye” (nelia dts'); “say prayers over water that has not been used: “our father,” “mother of god,” “living help,” and “may god arise.” then wash your cow with that water, from her head towards the tail, wash her udder and give <that water> to her to drink” (vira b-o, 82 y.o., er). sometimes villagers use “secret curative” means without inviting a baba. valentyna z-y compiled a list of people suspected of casting the evil eye on her cow, and prayed the lord’s prayer walking three circles clockwise around the sick cow. then she burnt the list and fed the ashes to the cow to help her recover. hanna f-k provided a method called skydaty vohniu, “to shed fire,” which serves two functions at the same time: diagnostic and curative. the owner takes bread and water directly from a well. she utters three times a special formula “neither 9 (15), nor 8, neither 7, nor 6, neither 5, nor 4, neither 3, nor 2, neither 1” and throws crumbs of bread into the water. if they sink, it means that the cow was evileyed. the details in this ceremony matter a great deal; therefore it is important that water would be the first drawn in the morning (i.e., nobody drank it before). this water must be taken from a stream by drawing it against the flow. others use pieces of hot coal for the same ceremony. petro v-k provided a unique variant of this method called hasyty vohon', “to extinguish fire.” according to the method, twelve metal objects (a knife, spoon, and latch among them) together with a milk filtering cloth are put in a bucket with water. after the countdown ceremony, the cow gets water from the bucket to drink. on the other hand, the cow can be protected from the evil eye by having a red thread tied to her neck, tail, or horns, along with giving her blessed salt to lick, and sprinkling her with holy water. when animals are taken to the pasture for the first time in spring, they are “beaten” with blessed pussy-willow branches, fumigated with incense, with dried fungus that grow on trees, or with greenery. they are sprinkled with holy water, and the lord’s prayer is read over them. on regular days when cows leave the household for the pasture, holy water and prayers are folklorica 2007, vol. xii 64 used along with quite exotic procedures. one such is sprinkling the owner’s urine on a cow (mariia o-k). other acts involve a little bag with church incense hung on a cow’s horns to guard against all the evil forces (vira b-o). other means are sealing mercury in a cow’s horn (mykola uk), and disposing water used for washing a milk bucket in a toilet (orysia k-n). it is also possible to create “permanent sites” of protection by burying blessed pussy-willow branches under the threshold of a barn (liudmyla s-k); painting a cross on a barn wall on both the outside and inside on easter, as well as inserting thorns inside a barn and on the gates of the yard on st. george day (may 6) (ievdokiia d-n). in the latter case, the action is believed to prevent witches from entering since “<thorns> prick their eyes,” according to the law of similarity. all of my informants stated that a decrease of milk production is due to either accidental (or deliberate) casting of the evil eye or is the result of witchcraft. according to my informants, every village has a witch, sometimes more than one: “a half of our village – they are witches!” (maria sh-o); “there are such <people>. they are not uncommon” (ievdokiia h-k); “the priest told <me> there are 18 witches in this village” (vira b-o). therefore, the concept of witchcraft as associated with cattle and milk production is taken seriously in ukraine. people believe that witches or wizards are regular villagers “who are not afraid of sinning” (varvara m-k) and who take cows’ milk away or milk cows at night and do harm in other ways to permanently ruin good masters. there can be either born witches or learnt witches, and people think it is better not to quarrel with them openly, but to hide everything from their gaze instead. knowing for sure that a witch is involved in an animal’s sickness is very important because it then offers a way of curing the animal. often, it is enough to counteract the witch’s misdeeds to provide a cure. different methods were given by the informants for learning the identity of the witch who harmed a cow. all of them contained at least two elements: extremely hot iron and any of a cow’s liquids. typically, milk is poured on a red-hot horseshoe or an oven. only in one instance did it involve the boiling of the cow’s urine (antonina z-y). in any case, according to the law of similarity, the witch will feel burning in her chest and will come to the house asking to borrow some trifle. the owner’s task is to refuse and not let her take anything away like she took the milk away. ievdokiia h-k narrated that, when she was a little girl, her mother had to perform such a procedure to restart a cow’s milk. a neighbor animal magic 65 came to borrow some little thing and was irritated by her mother’s refusal. the neighbor then grabbed ievdokiia’s shoes and ran off with them. because of this occurrence, the cow never produced milk again, and the owners had to dispose of the animal. petro v-k provided a memorate about a neighbor who had harmed his cow years ago. petro sought protection by consulting a local wizard who then made a fire from thorny wood and read some incantations over it. after a while the wizard exclaimed: “a strong <witch> did it but i will win her over!” several days later the suspected neighbor’s two cows perished thus indicating the reversal of her own witchcraft. antonina o-k narrated that her cow was regularly milked by a grass-snake, who, according to her, was definitely a representative of evil forces. a big frog jumping near the barn is believed to be a sign of witchcraft done to a cow. liudmyla s-k described such an account that happened several weeks prior to the interview. she believed that the frog was not guilty, that it was “sent over” against its own will, and yet she was advised to catch it and put it into a fire alive. reversed witchcraft will then fall upon the witch and she herself will come to the victim to beg forgiveness. commercial or trading magic magic is invoked in commerce or trade just as intensely and frequently in contemporary ukrainian villages as it was at the end of the nineteenth or beginning of the twentieth century, the period described in zhuravliov’s book. buying a cow is a very serious step. a cow is very expensive: it typically costs $300-400, while the average monthly wage of an employed villager seldom reaches $100. therefore, the choice of the cow should be made after careful consideration. commercial magic somewhat coincides with heightening of general fertility since peasants know some specific traits of “good” animals. i was provided with a number of signs to help choose a good cow, i.e. one who not only gives plenty of milk (about 20-30 liters daily) but will give good progeny as well. among the characteristics to look for were: special “milk veins” or “milk wells” located on the belly, thin and soft skin, thin legs, nice body form, long yellow-pointed tail (an indicator of rich cream), nicely shaped horns, bangs on the forehead, hairy ears with lots of ear-wax inside (also an indicator of rich cream), extra (i.e., rudimentary) nipples on her udder, a tender udder, and region-specific color (a cow certainly should not stand out in the pasture). it was also pointed out that gadflies usually bite a cow giving rich cream, thus gadflies near a cow are a good sign. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 66 ievdokiia h-k warned that there were cows whose seventh rib was significantly shorter than the rest. according to her, it is a very dangerous sign, and if one should buy such a cow and then that cow perishes, one would lose seven more head of cattle from the household. very often my interviewees used an opposition of “good” and “bad” referring not only to the eyes of people, but to milk as well. bad milk is not only milk from an evileyed cow, or from a cow after delivery; it is also non-fat milk or milk with an unpleasant odor. this happens often with goat milk. to make sure milk will smell good one has to rub a goat on the space between her horns: if there is no smell on the palm then the milk of the goat will not have an unpleasant smell either. a very powerful magical object while buying an animal, according to the informants, is the nalyhach, or rope, with which the animal is tied to a post. this rope is something that belongs to the household of a seller and should go with the cow. buyers believe that if a seller is a good person she or he will sell an animal with a nalyhach; if a seller does not live up to the buyer’s expectations, he should use his own nalyhach and utter a prayer. otherwise the cow’s milk (and the luck associated with owning that animal) will stay in the household of a seller. sellers, on the contrary, believe that giving away a nalyhach will cause then to lose the magic touch with their own cattle. even if, as orysia k-n pointed out, the seller keeps a used nalyhach for himself and gives a new one to the buyer, he still should not place it directly in the buyer’s hands. he should put it on the ground and then the buyer should pick it up. orysia k-n explained this as a way of not “passing one’s own luck with the cow over to the buyer.” the seller also should look carefully so that the buyer will not take anything from the yard. it might be something as trivial as a small branch from a tree. according to the law of similarity, taking anything from a successful household will transfer that success to the buyer. at the same time, as mariia o-k stated, a seller can leave an old nalyhach on a cow but pull out some fur from between her horns. doing this will cause the cow’s milk to remain in the seller’s household. there is obviously some competition between the buyer and the seller to retain or obtain good luck, and the responses of the interviewees on this matter depended upon which side of the commercial transaction they were in the recent past. an analogous case of transferring one’s own luck with animals to others was given by pavlo k-o. according to him, several years ago a neighbor came to him in the spring and, on behalf of his elderly mother, asked for some straw from pavlo’s hay stack to make a nest for a brood animal magic 67 hen. pavlo gave it without a thought, but later on discovered through his relative that one should never give away straw from one’s own hay stack to anyone because that will result in not having brood hens yourself. coincidentally or not, pavlo did not have brood hens for about five years after that occasion and he was sure that the neighbor’s elderly mother did it to him on purpose: “she knew about this rule, for sure!” one major and important taboo involves not feeling regret over selling an animal. if a seller does feel regret, the animal will produce less milk, become sick, physically unruly, and be poorly adjusted to its new home if at all. orysia k-n stated that she knew a magic formula to reverse this state but most people did not. as far as money is concerned, liudmyla s-k stated that the price for a cow should not be “wholesome” or an even number: “it should be like 999 but never 1000.” my interviewees from the western region unanimously stated that the person selling a cow must give some money back to the buyer “for luck.” but money should not be placed directly into the hands; instead it should be thrown on the ground. the buyer should not spend that particular money on himself; instead he should buy something for little children or give it to the church as an offering. this will ensure good luck with the new cow. in central and eastern regions the buyer and seller usually just celebrate the event together with a simple dinner toasting each other and wishing each other luck. finally, not only are animal signs considered during the purchase, but the personality of the seller is as well. villagers are so psychologically attuned to possible misfortune, the evil eye, magical spells and so forth, that they prefer not to buy a good looking animal if they do not like the appearance of a seller. the same is also true when a seller does not like a buyer: he or she can refuse to sell an animal if something in a buyer makes him or her feel uncomfortable. folk magic and religion there is an extremely interesting relationship between the folk beliefs that i recorded and the religious faith of the people. the most religious among my informants from eastern ukraine, vira b-o, who was an energetic orthodox propagator, was also a healer. she started her career in her early fifties by reading incantations over a cow whose milk was taken away. “and it really helped,” she exclaimed, “but the priest said i should not do it under any circumstances.” now she uses only prayers from the church prayer book. even so she seems to mix up christian symbols with pre-christian ones: she stated that a piece of folklorica 2007, vol. xii 68 church incense hung on a cow’s horn would protect the animal from the evil eye. another informant from central ukraine, sofiia, also a regular churchgoer, when explaining why it was prohibited to lend anything from a household the day when a new animal is born, answered simply: “why? according to god’s directive, this is not supposed to be.” she told me how important it was to say the lord’s prayer before going to bed and at the same time she addressed the domovyk, a pagan house spirit, and said how it was important to be nice to him since “he is the guardian!” in the small village of n. in western ukraine people tell legends about a powerful local male healer, named goĭ, who died in 2002. i tried to find out about the attitude of a local priest towards him. all people admitted that goĭ was a very religious man and the priest respected him deeply. goĭ healed both humans and animals and it was unanimously believed the power he possessed was given him from above. when a sixteen year old orphan, he could not help his cow which was in labor and he went to the priest and asked for help. the priest suggested that goĭ make an oath on his cow, i.e. to promise to god that if the cow delivers successfully he will be fasting every monday (that happened on monday) or not eating that day at all. the vow helped, and goĭ kept his promise faithfully ever since. orysia k-n is goĭ’s granddaughter. as a bearer of secret knowledge obtained from her grandfather she is highly respected in the village and people ask for her help all the time. she refused to tell me the incantations she knew: “i will lose my power and you will not gain it either.” when i asked her what the words used in her magic formulae were and if they started with “in the name of father, and son, and holy spirit” orysia answered: “no, but they <the words> all are to god.” petro v-k believed that sorcery had a tremendous power and hence “a wizard is more powerful than a priest is. that <priest> can read a prayer but it does not help with anything.” (16) in the church of the assumption of the blessed mother of pyrohoshcha, in the middle of kyiv, a list of saints is posted to whom people can pray in case they have a particular problem. among others, like praying for career advancement or a successful thesis defense, there were prayers “for domestic animals” to martyr blase, modest, cosmas and damian, and martyr anastasia; “to prevent cattle from being eaten by wild animals” to st. george; “against sorcery” to st. tryphon, st. cyprian, and st. justina; “from evil spirits and mean people, against witchcraft and the healing from it” to st. cyprian, st. justina, st. niphont of cyprus, st. maruthas, and st. nicetas the stylite. some interviewees animal magic 69 openly admitted giving money to the local churches or alms to the beggars to pray for their animals’ health (orysia k-n; sofiia) and praying to the patron saints of animals. among the latter there are st. george, st. gregory, st. basil, st. barbara, and all the saints. some saints’ days are believed to be “cattle” days and peasants avoid working on those days so as not to offend these saints and harm their own cattle. orysia k-n who knew different magic formulae for animals said she was able to help any animal except for the pig and the horse, so that those should be treated only by doctors. when explaining why those were the exceptions she referred to the biblical legend about the birth of jesus: when jesus was born and was in a barn, the horse started eating the straw on which he lay, and the pig dug a hole under him. so they became cursed animals. sofiia added the dog and the cat to the list of the “non-blessed” animals but could not explain why. generally, villagers respect people who have a magic touch with animals and are even jealous of them. they assume there is some secret knowledge circulating around in the air, and often my informants replied with a sort of wistfulness if asked about some omens or special rituals or prayers used for the sake of animals: “oh, i do not know that. others probably know but i do not.” and they always told me to check with a baba if anything goes wrong with animals or humans. even if there is no baba in a village there are always some nearby and it is quite easy to find one who can cure your problem. when a baba is not easily available villagers can try to replace her magic. for example valentyna z-y performed the ritual of burning a list of people suspected of casting the evil eye on her cow. in it she combined christian with obviously pre-christian curing symbols. interestingly enough, the prayers specific to the curing of the evil eye can be found, according to valentyna, in special literature, and there is indeed an abundance of such literature for sale everywhere in cities.(17) private vs. collective ownership all rituals involving animals known to previous generations are passed on as part of the family tradition, and create a separate, more intimate world. i tried to explore the difference in attitudes towards animals that were privately owned by villagers and those belonging to kolhospy, large collective farms, during the soviet times. the imposition of a new way of farming led to a strict demarcation between privately owned and collective property in ukraine. collective property was not anybody’s in particular, yet the kolhosp workers were supposed to feel folklorica 2007, vol. xii 70 personal responsibility for it. on top of that, ukrainian peasants were not free to either make personal decisions concerning a kolhosp’s life (there were directives “from above” on what, when, and how to do things) or leave for a city. till the 1960s, peasants were ‘village-ridden’ because local authorities would not issue the internal passports – the main document enabling employment, study, or housing outside of a village. (18) the absurdity of such a slavery-like “new way” resulted in alienation from the land and the rejection of work as valuable, as well as many traditions, which ukrainian peasants used to have before soviet times. as oleksandra k-o, now a retired specialist in animal husbandry, explained, each milkmaid in a kolhosp used to have, and was responsible for, a large group of cows (about 30-40). although kolhosp cows used to have numbered tags inserted in their ears they had names as well. and the milkmaids knew all their cows’ names. however, there was never the same feeling of private ownership in a kolhosp as there was in a private household. sick cows were inspected by doctors and usually either treated with medicines or immediately labeled as rejected. the average life span of a cow in a kolhosp was only half that of a private owned cow, about 7-8 years. in the kolhosp a high level of milk production was the primary consideration and my interviewees often told me that they felt pity for their own cows and kept them far beyond their optimal milk productivity. they patiently cured and cared equally for both big and small animals in their own household. when i asked why, oleksandra ko exclaimed with astonishment: “because it is mine!” villagers were very clear in their division of “mine” and “not mine.” animals in the collective farms belonged to the latter category and that was the reason for viewing them as belonging to “others”, for secretly stealing food from them for one’s own animals, for emotional detachment. with their own animals, on the contrary, villagers were emotionally engaged and if they had to sell a cow for butchering they often had a hard times doing that. they told me heartbreaking stories about separation: “<you> lead her <the cow> from the yard, and she has a foreboding: there are tears dropping from her eyes. but what can you do?! <you> just say ‘forgive me’ to her” (valentyna z-y). however, noone seemed to be sentimental about cows in a collective farm or be willing to sacrifice their own time and emotions for the animal’s sake: “you have no time at work <to be patient>. you just grab her <a cow> and drag…” (halyna o-a). animals were simply objectified and regarded as property belonging to a kolhosp but not to the animal magic 71 workers personally. therefore, there was no feeling of personal responsibility for animals and no personal involvement or desire to care for them. orysia k-n stated that it was impossible to cast the evil eye on the kolhosp cows since they did not belong to a single owner: “there <in a kolhosp>everything is communal <there is no single owner, sk>, your eyes cannot concentrate. and when you go to <someone’s> barn – there is but one cow…” (19) according to orysia, to knock the kolhosp down by casting the evil eye on all its cows was impossible and an unnecessary waste of energy: kolhospy would always have some way of restoring any losses. but halyna o-a, by contrast, stated that collective ownership still implied a certain degree of personal profit. everyone knew how much milk each cow gave, and the milkmaids often got prizes for the highest yields. if the milkmaids knew somebody else’s cow gave more milk, they could be jealous and cast the evil eye on it as one giving more dividends or “belonging” to another milkmaid. in any case, the evil eye would not affect the milkmaid, her wages, or the family budget, and her problems with the kolhosp cows would always be only temporary and minor. hence, nobody used prophylactic or reproductive magic for the sake of collective farm animals. for all of my informants, their animals’ unusual behavior served as a natural method of forecasting weather or as a harbinger of something about to happen. it is widely believed that cows and goats produce less milk when rain or cold weather are in the offing; horses roll around before rain; bees start sealing themselves with propolis early in the fall when a severe winter is coming; dogs howl when someone in the village is about to die; pigs fight violently inside their pen before bad weather; cats cleanse themselves when guests are imminent; cats vigorously sharpen their claws before wind. roosters crow during the day when there will be good weather; and if they drink water from a puddle on the day of the “meeting of lord” (february 15) there will be problems with the next season’s crops. hens also act as predictors: if they pull their feathers out or nest down for too long in the evening, this means rain is coming; if they “bathe” in dirt, then good weather is ahead; hens screaming for no apparent reason predict misfortune in the house; and a hen that suddenly crows like a rooster predicts a major misfortune for humans. in the latter case the owners are to slaughter such a hen immediately. my interviewees spoke about their homestead animals as if they feel and understand the same way as humans. the relationship between folklorica 2007, vol. xii 72 animals and humans seems to be almost magical with humans projecting human traits onto the animals: if a person regrets selling an animal it will long, be sad, cry, miss the old owner and so forth. once an animal is given a name, it is not to be changed because this upsets and confuses the animal, since it got used to its original name. the majority of the informants expressed the opinion that human names should not be given to the animals but rather ones indicating the time of the day it was born like zoriana and vecheriana (literally, one born in the dawn and one born in the evening), or month like marta and travka (the stem mart comes from the russian word for march, while travis the stem of the ukrainian word for may, traven'), or color like chervona and chornukha (literally, the red one and black one), or starting with the same letter as the name of the cow’s mother (e.g., marta, maika, mimozka), or a self-explanatory name derived from some distinctive feature about the animal’s appearance like lysa (the bald one), zirka (one with a star on the forehead), p'iatnukha (one with spots), etc. given that the ultimate goal of animal breeding in villages is consumption of those animals or getting profit through selling them, this psychological bond between humans and animals is striking. it is obvious that such a bond could not exist in kolhospy where human interactions with animals were limited to strictly defined professional responsibilities, which were controlled through a chain of authority. conclusion my informants were educated: all had at least secondary education and some had university degrees. they used contemporary technologies and believed in their efficacy. yet they had respect for people with magic hands with animals. they used magical means (from either specific literature or inherited knowledge) for defending and curing their animals. they did this not only without being ashamed of it, but with some sense of pride. they did not really differentiate pre-christian vs. christian symbols or think about them as incompatible. anything that could help the peasants cure their animals was considered good. my informants were eager to pick up any magical remedies or advice from others and believed in their usefulness. the uncertainty and insecurity of peasant life, which depends mostly on nature’s will and thus may fluctuate from year to year, makes villagers seek and rely on any means to ensure successes and to fight failures in their private households by all means possible. animal magic serves this purpose very effectively. that means traditional magical rites associated with animals remain an integral part animal magic 73 of the lives of peasants in contemporary villages in ukraine. this traditional belief complex survived through the decades of soviet rule and is currently alive, motivated, and widespread. the soviet kolhospy have not changed peasants’ attitudes towards animals: privately owned animals were the only ones who were connected to humans through magical actions. thus their protection from other humans is still carried using magical counteractions. ukrainian villagers still tend to be quite conservative in the domestic breeding of animals and try not to make innovations. community demand for sameness, which is hardwired into the peasants’ minds, is displayed, for example, in the fact that villagers buy cows with a region-specific color.[kononenko 1998: 67-90] the same demand is responsible for the somewhat cold or even negative attitude towards “unjustifiably” successful villagers, and often reveals itself through a wish that the cow of such neighbors perish. villagers’ magic behavior with their animals is subjugated to strict unwritten rules which must not be violated by the community members in order to keep peace and ensure order in an otherwise chaotic life. magic rites collected by ethnographers at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries are still meaningful for the peasantry of today in different regions of ukraine, despite different political preferences or degrees of visibly attested religiosity. my research shows that there is no qualitative difference between the geographical regions of rural ukraine in terms of animal magic beliefs and practices. these beliefs and practices are mostly passed down within the families and generally shared among the rural population. interestingly, liudmyla s-k’s married daughter in her middle twenties, now an urban-dweller, “helped” her mother answer my questions. this demonstrates that those beliefs, which are still so dominant in ukrainian villages, continue to be transmitted and that city dwellers, through having contact with the village, become bearers of this tradition and magical world-view. appendix a questionnaire used for the research on animal magic 1. are there any omens connected with your animals having offspring? 2. what are the predictors of the sex of the future offspring? which sex is more preferable? 3. does one need to behave in a special way during the animal’s pregnancy? folklorica 2007, vol. xii 74 4. who assists in delivery? how can you help if the delivery is complicated? where do you dispose of the placenta? 5. what do you usually do with the first milk produced after the delivery? 6. how do you choose a bull for mating? what can an owner do to ensure a successful mating? are there any omens for such a day? 7. how do you usually buy an animal? how do you choose the animal to buy? is there anything special you should or should not do while buying? will you buy if you do not like a seller? 8. when do you let the animals go to the pasture after the winter? are there any special actions or words for doing that? 9. are there any omens about your animals’ behavior? 10. what names do you usually give to your animals? how do you choose them? can you change an animal’s name? 11. how would you treat your sick animals? would you call for a doctor? 12. are there any saints protecting the domestic animals? 13. is it true that milk and milk products should be treated in a special way? 14. do you feed christmas or easter food to your animals? do you usually sprinkle them with water blessed on theophany? 15. can witches or the evil eye harm domestic animals? what can you do to protect your animals from them? 16. was there a kolhosp in your village? how were the animals treated there? how were the sick animals cured? notes 1 oh, god, give fortune in the house, in the house, to its dwellers! oh, god, give fortune in the yard, in the yard, to the cattle, to the cattle, to the horned ones! shchedrivka (ukrainian new year carol) 2 william noll et al. revealed the why’s and how’s of the process of peasant culture transformation that took place in ukraine during 1920s – 1930s of the last century. 3 for discussion about the connection between magic and power see wax, rosalie and wax, murray [1962]. “the magical world view.” journal for the scientific study of religion, spring, vol.1, no.2, p.183 animal magic 75 4 from now on the abbreviations will be used in the text to indicate an interviewee’s region of dwelling: “cr” stands for the central region, “er” for the eastern region, and “wr” for the western region. 5 sofiia (72 y.o., cr): “vsiaki ie liudy i vsiaki ie ochi!” 6 “iak duzhe prosyt', to vin vorih! vin spetsial'no khoche korovu zbavyty!” 7 important detail accented by her: poppy must be samosiĭnyĭ, i.e., not planted by humans but naturally grown from the seeds that sprinkled around from a ripe poppy seed pod. 8 “shchob korovu nikhto ne zurochyv, treba dizhdatysia polohiv korovy, vziaty mistse v zuby i holym obbihty staĭniu trychi vnochi, a potim mistse zakopaty.” 9 even numbers bear strong association with death. people would bring 2-4 flowers only to a cemetary or give 2-4 candies to another person only in commemoration of a deceased person. 10 salt is believed to serve as a means against evil eye or mean people. for that reason my hostess in kyiv, a young successful professor of history, always carries with her a little bit of table salt blessed on easter. my male acquaintance from kyiv, a respectable museum worker, gave me advice as for how to prevent an unwanted person from coming to my place with the help of, again, table salt. there also exists a wellknown curse: “salt into your eyes!” addressed to a person with jealous eyes. 11 “a til'ky vyvedy na pashu – moloka nema, bo dyvliat'sia na vym'ia, dyvliat'sia na vse!” 12 “vid hlazlkyvykh susidiv vse treba khovaty i krashche z nymy ne sperechatysia” 13 “zurochyty mozhut' dobriache!” 14 “ta shcho tam domovyk mozhe zloho zrobyty?! ot liudy zurochyty – tse mozhut'!!!” 15 while some interviewees started the count-down from 10, others started from 9. it seems, however, that 9 would be more justifiable: it is more magically powerful being non-finalized, non-static. number 9 itself stands for triplication of another magical number, 3. 16 “mol'far syl'nishyĭ za sviashchennyka. toĭ prochytaie molytvu, ale vono nichoho ne daie.” 17 for example, a very popular book by aleksandr aksenov [1995]. ia ne koldun, ia – znakhar' (i am not a wizard, i am a healer). donetsk: donechchyna. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 76 18 oleksandra k-o got her passport and left her village in 1959, at the age of 17, only after submitting to the village officials a document proving that she was admitted to an agricultural tekhnikum (a postsecondary educational institution focused on training staff for the collective farms). it was, therefore, guaranteed she would return back to a village (not necessarily her own). oleksandra wanted to continue her education, but had no passion for becoming an animal husbandry specialist. according to her, the only way to deceive the authorities was to transfer to another educational institution after at least a year spent at the tekhnikum. many people in fact did so, but oleksandra was not brave enough. 19 “tam vse zahal'ne, ochi rozbihaiut'sia. a iak ĭdete do khaty – tam odna korova……” bibliography bogatyrev, petr (1998). vampires in the carpathians: magical acts, rites, and beliefs in subarpathian rus'. trans. stephen reynolds, patricia a. krafcik. new york: columbia university press. frazer, james g., sir (1963). the golden bough: a study in magic and religion. new york: macmillan company. kononenko, natalie (1998). “strike now and ask questions later: witchcraft stories in ukraine.” ethnologies, vol. 20(1), pp. 67-90. wanner, catherine (1998). the burden of dreams: history and identity in post-soviet ukraine. university park, pa: the pennsylvania state university press wax, rosalie and wax, murray (1962). “the magical world view.” journal for the scientific study of religion, spring, vol.1(2), pp.179-188. zhuravliov, a. f. (1994). domashniĭ skot v poveriiakh i magii vostochnykh slavian. moskva: indrik. microsoft word folk2006[3] sheryl format3.doc 50 rural stories about parental malediction (based on field materials from novgorod and vologda regions) anna kushkova dept. of ethnology, european university at st. petersburg the narrative repertoire of many folk traditions features stories of children cursed by their parents. these stories can be divided into several groups with adjacent but independent plots: 1) “the substituted child:” here an unclean spirit steals a human child, replacing it with a log, a broom, or a changeling; 2) “the careless promise:” parents make a thoughtless pledge in time of crisis to give their child to the devil, who claims it when the time comes; 3) “redemption through marriage:” a child who has been cursed lives under the floorboards, in the bath house and so on until the time comes to marry. this article will concentrate on the fourth type of story, the child, who as a result of a parental curse disappears into the forest. i will be analyzing its constituent motifs and discussing the popular ideas that inspire them. the discussion is based primarily on field recordings of about seventy texts, as well as printed and archival sources. this group of stories may be defined in two different ways. according to a literal reading, these are narratives where a curse prompts the ensuing narrative, even if the maledictory formula actually appears at the end of the story, causally connecting the motifs in the tale. the second, broader interpretation encompasses all stories about children who wander or are led into the forest, even though an actual malediction may not be mentioned. these expanded subject parameters are possible because informants often tell stories about those who have been cursed in reply to questions about children lost in the forest [e.g. belozer.-01:14. lmp],(1) or confirm that such children were described as “cursed” [khvoin.-99:2]. i will examine the theme of children who have been cursed as a collection of related motifs, the quantity and hierarchy of which can vary from one tradition to another and be conditioned by the peculiarities of the performer’s individual narrative repertoire. let us examine motifs of primary importance before those of secondary significance. the inciting incident: the formula of the curse the first important motif is the presence of the actual malediction addressed by one communicative partner to another. interestingly, folklorica 2006, vol. xi rural stories about parental malediction 51 maledictory utterances such as “damn [you]!” or “may you be damned!” have never been attested. instead, the equivalent of a direct curse occurs: a) sending the communicative partner to the devil or naming him/her “a devil,” as for example, “да схвати тебя черти!” (may the devils take you!) [khvoin.-99:24], “убирайся к чёрту!” (go to the devil!) [khvoin.-97:35. tda], “да тебе покоя-то, чёрту, нет!” (can’t you be still, you devil?!) [khvoin.-99:8]. in every case, the addressee of the utterance is clear and specific. b) sending the communicative partner to the “master of the forest” or leshii (the forest spirit), such as “пошел ты к лешему!” (go to the leshii!) [belozer.-01:7], or “хватил бы тебя леший!” (may the leshii take you away!) [belozer.-01:4]. this type of malediction can be regarded as a variant of the preceding one, although, as i will show later, it is more directly connected with the rural mythology of the forest. c) “(bad) swearing” (russ. (xудая) брань), implying the presence of the most obscene swearwords in the formula of the curse what is known in russian as mat, that is, coital invective mentioning the human genitals, both male and female. while mat is used in a number of ritual situations (mostly for apotropaic reasons, such as to ward off a revenant, chase off thunder clouds, and so on (for more examples, see sannikova [1995: 250-53]), the use of mat expressions in everyday speech is socially prohibited, especially for women, for it is believed that the very act of enunciating them causes the realities they refer to be be “exposed.”(2) however, references to the devil and the master of the forest in the formula of the curse may not just be equated to “bad swearing,” but may even go further as far as the level of taboo is concerned, although structurally expressions using the word “devil” are counted as “nonobscene equivalents of expressions with mat proper” [levin 1996: 111]: “вот я… говорю, что... лучше ты... ну... матом пусти! но таким[и] словам[и] [чёртом, бранёным] – никогда не ругай!” (i always say… it’s better if you… swear using a mat word! but never swear using a word like that!” [i.e. “devil” – a.k.] [khvoin.-99:28; also khvoin.99:40], or: “лучше выматюгать сто раз человека, даже своего, чем вот это слово сказать” (it is better to swear at someone a hundred times than say that word [leshii – a.k.] to him!” [belozer.-01:7]. as can be seen from these two examples, people often try not to utter the words “devil” and “leshii” even when answering ethnographers’ questions, and/or ask for the house door to be closed before they do so [e.g., belozer.-01:4]. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 52 d) in the final category, the story begins when a certain verbal phrase is not uttered and/or a certain action is not performed. this case can be termed “the lack of a blessing,” in which upon leaving the house, a person forgets to say a prayer, make the sign of the cross, or utter a blessing [e.g., batets.-99:34]. while swearing, and particularly mat, may be “functionally equivalent to prayer” [uspenskii 1996: 19] in its impact, the lack of the latter seems to lead to the same consequences as the utterance of the invective (one informant saw these two cases as virtually synonymous: “…я немножко в это верю. в это проклятье, неблагословенье” (…i tend to believe in this; in this curse, this nonblessing) [batets.-99:36].(3) thus there is no clear dividing line between the principal types of incitement in malediction stories as described above. however, there is one common feature that unites all curse formulas, whether sending a person to the devil, or the master of the forest, or swearing at him/her using mat, or omitting the blessing in whatever form: it always happens accidentally, and the consequences turn out to be undesirable for the one who brought them about. herein lies the essential paradox of the malediction story: it occurs without the intention of the speaker, and is beyond his or her volition.(4) occasionally the malediction occurs in the context of a family quarrel [e.g., khvoin.-99:24], yet even in such cases the consequences are not commensurate with the causes that provoked them.(5) malediction as performative action: conditions of felicity what happens to a person who happens to become the target of a curse? “the semantic nucleus” of such phrases being the “alienation (of the addressee from the sender)” [levin 1996: 111], their utterance brings about the corresponding “reality”: a person who has been cursed “goes straight to the devil” (к чёрту и пойдёшь...) [khvoin.-99:8]; “the master of the forest carried them away” (их и понесло леший) [belozer.-01:7]; “demons will carry [them] away to the forest – and that’s it” (вот черти унесут в лес – и всё) [khvoin.-99:28]. here the causal-consecutive logic is based on a belief in the performative power of the malediction. even pronounced “accidentally” it is non-reversible: the maledicted person vanishes.(6) usually this happens immediately. when occasionally, there is a short delay, this may somewhat paradoxically be termed “postponed performativity.” rural stories about parental malediction 53 any performative action requires certain “conditions of felicity.” in order for the malediction to succeed, the initial power relationships between the communicative partners must be unequal, that is to say, one exercises control over the other. a pair of mutually defined statuses that best meets this requirement is that of parent and child.(7) the mechanism of execration may be described as the alienation of power and control from the real parent to the false one,(8) usually an unclean spirit [russ. nechistaia sila], whom folk imagination sees in loci parentis, and is most often the supernatural being mentioned in the malediction. in the overwhelming majority of cases, it is the mother who curses her child, whether a son or a daughter. a mother’s power over her children has always been seen as exceptional in the folk tradition: “people recognize her greater power over children as compared to that of the father’s… people strongly believe in the power of a mother’s malediction and blessing. as for the father, they think that he cannot utter a curse at all; and that his blessing is not nearly as important as the mother’s” [vesin 1891: 52; also dobroliubov 1915: 800 ff.]. there is, of course, a parallel type of story about a father’s curse, based on conflict between generations, involving grown-up children, mostly sons, and their fathers, to whom they are close in terms of status. the son usually expresses his desire to live separately and/or wants to get married against his father’s will, which ends in an open quarrel followed by the father uttering a curse and disinheriting the son [see kushkova 2004]. it is not my intention to compare these two types of stories, although occasionally some parallels may be relevant. these two types of malediction stories both feature similar ideas about fate or one’s lot in life (russ. dolia), with its principal distributor being in the position to utter a malediction.(9) this explains why the child cursed by his/her mother in our stories is not normally assigned a specific age, often merely being described as small. it is likely that the smaller the child the greater the chance that his/her fate can be subject to revision, his/her “lot” changed.(10) as long as the child is small, he or she belongs to the world of the mother. the biological connection between the subject and the object of the curse is very important; usually it is thought impossible to place a curse on someone else’s child, for, as one informant said, “this is not your own blood” and the curse “won’t stick” (не пристанет) [belozer.-01:7].(11) not only is this one of the conditions necessary for success in popular healing magic [“same blood” vs. “alien blood”, russ. po krovi vs. ne po krovi), but also the concept of “blood” contains a veiled indication as to folklorica 2006, vol. xi 54 who is performing the act: “power is the attribute precisely of professional, and typically male, healing practice. in female practice the same role was performed … by the notion of ‘blood’” [shchepanskaia 2001: 72]. there is a second condition of performative felicity tied to power relationships, one not, however, as strict as the first: the temporal. it is believed that a maledicted person will disappear into the forest only if the malediction was untimely (russ. ne v chas), for example: “мать может проклянуть, только смотря в какой час … это есть такой час недобрый” (a mother can utter a curse, though it depends on the time of day ... there is such a thing as a bad hour) [batets.-99:36], or: “это проклинали их. мать на дочь или на сына. чтобы тебе черты взяли отсюда. понесет... но в какой час! есть часы вообще-то в природе” (this put a curse on them. a mother [can do this] to her son or a daughter: “may the devils take you away from here!” and [they] will be whisked away... but it depends on the time of day! there are such times in the natural world) [khvoin.-98:29], and so on.(12) in some texts the “bad hour” motif can appear together with the malediction. in others it can be sufficient by itself to incite subsequent events in the story. it may be determined that a person left home “at a bad hour” only retrospectively, judging by what has happened. hence, this motif becomes a conventional formula used to explain anything that has gone wrong, or is against one’s plans and desires. this is why the motif of “a bad hour” is sometimes equivalent to a malediction as the central moment of the plot: “он чого-нибудь ругнулся там, матюгнулся аль поматился, что – вот и не в час называется” (he uttered some curse, like mat – it is what is called “at a bad hour”) [khvoin.-98:31; also: khvoin.-98:29].(13) wanderings in the forest a maledicted child’s journey from home into the forest is the essential motif of all stories about execrated children. put more succinctly, the maledicted are those who “have run away from home” (убегали из дома) [khvoin.-98:1]. a symbolically important motif of the narrative at this point is overcoming a watery boundary. the maledicted child either crosses a river him/herself, or is “carried over” it. in both cases, it is clear that this crossing is beyond the power of humans: “ведут меня... и так – только начну тонуть… и только, гыт, – ох! и сразу оказываюсь на этом самом – на другом берегу, понимаешь...” (they were leading me, and... rural stories about parental malediction 55 as soon as i began to drown – hop! i straightaway found myself on the other bank) [khvoin.-97:14]; “реки там – переносил меня дядька” (a man was carrying me over rivers) [belozer.-01:14. ffp; also khvoin.97:37. vpv; khvoin.-97:35. tda and others]. a river is the crucial topological boundary beyond which lies a qualitatively different space, one ruled by non-human agents.(14) movement in the forest is usually described as non-human movement; the child who has been cursed “wanders” (скитается) [khvoin.-99:8] or “roams around”(путается) [mosh.-99:32], cannot stop moving [levkievskaia 103: 104]. alternatively, he or she is “carried over tree stumps” (носят по пням) [khvoin.-99: 28], or “over the tree tops” (по лесу, по верхушкам) [zinov’ev 1987: 37].(15) from the linguistic point of view, it is very telling that this movement is often expressed through multiple verbs of motion, as in: “...and he went, and he went, and he went...” (и пошёл, и пошёл, и пошёл...) [khvoin.-97:37. aik; also khvoin.-97:37. vpv]. this creates an image of mechanical movement with no particular purpose, as if the person is being transported by some external and irresistible force. frequently an impersonal verb vodit (from vodit’, “to lead,” with no subject implied) is used, or else personal verbal forms with no indication as to the performer of the action: “иду, гыт, думаю: вот, гыт, канава. как мне перейтить? ей грят: не горюй. перейдёшь... перенесут ” (so i’m walking along and thinking: here is a ditch. how can i cross it? then she’s told: “cheer up. you’ll do it... you’ll be carried across”) [khvoin.-99:12], or “...в лес пойдешь, как-[то] не в час, куда-то тебя могут затащить, что и не вытить...” (if you walk in the forest... at a bad hour, they may drag you away, so that you’ll never get out) [khvoin.-98:16]. most probably, what we have here is an expression of the idea that a maledicted person is deprived of his/her will or subjugated to the will of whoever controls him/her at the moment. visual perception is another very important aspect of crossing the borderline between worlds; “two of the most important semantic knots of the borderline zone are connected with it: mythological blindness and invisibility” [nekliudov 1979: 136]. the motif of blindness, frequent in stories about children who have been cursed, stresses the ontological dissimilarity between the world of the humans and the world of the forest. this motif may be realized in two principal ways. first, maledicted children do not see and/or recognize a road in a forest they know well, or they fail to find a path which, as is turns out later, was nearby, within sight , for example: “...и у самой тропинки была, да не folklorica 2006, vol. xi 56 видала...” (she was right by the path, but didn’t see it) [khvoin.-99:24]. inability to see the road, one of the principal realities signifying civilized, “humanized” space, may be described as a kind of blindness. second, the people who are looking for the child lost in the forest do not see him/her, although he/she may be standing a mere couple of yards away and trying to establish contact: “и она их видела, она к ним выходила, а они её не видели!”(and she saw them, she came out to them, but they didn’t see her!) [khvoin.-97:37. aik; also: belozer.-01:6; belozer.-01:14. lmp].(16) interestingly, in some traditions both those who have been cursed and the spirits of the forest are called “invisible ones”(невидимые) [e.g. nekrylova 2001: 319, 322]. in a broader sense, this “blindness” can be understood as the impossibility of contact between the two worlds, that of ordinary folk and those who have been cursed, so long as the latter inhabit that particular, non-human world. correspondingly, the restoration of sight is possible only once the maledicted person leaves the forest world and returns to the human realm. in this case, the first thing that he/she discovers is “the human trace... the road” (человеческий след... дорогу) [khvoin.-97:35. aap].(17) “the other parent” many informants tell stories of maledicted children in response to questions about evil spirits in general [e.g., belozer.-01:7; belozer.01:14. ffp; khvoin.-99:2; khvoin.-98:16]. in other words, malediction as such may be directly associated with the notion of “being taken around the forest by unclean powers.” to whom is the maledicted child given and who fully controls him or her on the territory of the forest? who acts as the child’s “new parent”? most often, informants mention “devils,” or “scrawny ones” (khuden’kie, in novgorod tradition the term for creatures equivalent to devils), or, more generally, “the unclean force” (nechistaia sila). the malediction is understood literally: “иди к чертям – черти и захватывают” (go to the devils – and devils will grab you) [khvoin.98:29]. yet cases where “evil powers” take on various anthropomorphic forms are much more interesting, for an encounter with such “would-be human beings” introduces the motif of recognition into the story: “the belief that spirits may assume the guise of normal people creates conditions whereby... a human being has to divine whether he is dealing with the same being as himself... or he is seeing a creature of a different nature” [vinogradova 1995: 18]. in our material, with the exception of rural stories about parental malediction 57 one case when a “stranger” was recognized by his extreme height (“высокий-высокий какой-то мужик”, a very, very tall man, khvoin.97:14), non-human nature is expressed through clothing codes. evil spirits may appear as “people in green suits” (люди в зеленых костюмах) or, more generally, in non-village clothes – for instance, the master of the forest comes as a man in white shoes with red laces [khvoin.-99:1].(18) moreover, the difference between the human world and the world of the forest may be expressed through the opposition “living vs dead,” which is very important for the typology of the plot. it turns out, for instance, that not only “evil spirits,” but deceased relatives, including parents, may gain control over the maledicted child in the forest. in one story, a dead father comes to take his daughter away: “пойдем, дочка”, – говорит. и увел в лес” (“let’s go, daughter”, says he. and took her to the forest) [zinov’ev 1987: 32]. in another case a boy cursed by his mother-in-law walks around the forest with his real mother who had already passed away [zinov’ev 1987: 37]. in yet another story a boy is taken away by his dead grandparents [cherepanova 1996: 33]. deceased relatives may possess either deathlike or demonic features, for example: “в квартире все простынями белыми затянуто” (in his house everything was covered with white sheets – white is the color of death in russia); “когда молебен отслужили, я увидел, что у нее [у умершей матери] конские ноги” (when the prayer service was over, i saw that she [the deceased mother] had horse’s hooves) [zinov’ev 1987: 32, 37]. demonism and death also converge in stories of revenants (who in particular may have hooves instead of feet), although, compared to stories about malediction, the vector of movement here is different. whereas the ghost of a dead relative enters the human space, a child who has been cursed is sent into the realm of non-humans. yet this convergence may support the assumption that malediction stories feature “an overlap of two mythological strata – the cult of ancestors, the motif of traveling to the world beyond, and beliefs about the master of the forest” [cherepanova 1996: 126]. this idea, among other things, supports the interpretation that being maledicted is equivalent to being “condemned to death.”(19) forest life in most cases, descriptions of forest life are minimal. primarily this is because forest spirits prohibit their “visitors” from talking about what has happened in the forest (see below). yet there are occasional folklorica 2006, vol. xi 58 references to what the maledicted child did there and how he/she was treated. for instance, he/she had to work for his new masters [belozer.03:1.2. eap; viatka folklore 1996: 44]; he/she was almost thrown into fire and water [viatka folklore 1996: 31]; he/she was forbidden to sleep under any tree other than an aspen: “а под осиной… меня под ёлку не пускают” ([i slept] under the aspen… i was not allowed to choose a fir) [khvoin.-97:35. нем], “ложусь под это самое... под ёлку, под сосну всё время. а просыпаюсь, горит, всё время под осиной лежу!” (i would go to sleep beneath a fir or a pine, but every time wake up under an aspen) [khvoin.-97:14]. this motif is connected with the belief that the aspen is an “impure” and “accursed” tree itself [see usacheva 1998: 149, 150]. the forest figures not only as a “dreadful place,” but also as a mythological world of pleasure and luxury: “хорошо, хорошо я жила. холода не видела. голода тоже” (i lived well. felt neither cold nor hunger) [belozer.-01:4]; “плясала, и гуляла, и всё там делала...” (i danced and enjoyed myself, and did all kinds of things there) [khvoin.99: 8]; “постельные принадлежности всё, грыт, как в шелках!” (the bed clothes and everything... were all like silk!) [belozer.-01:6]. in such descriptions, the features of paradise are perceptible, and this further supports the idea of a conceptual proximity between malediction and death. one story describes a visit to a certain “city,” but without giving any particular details [afanas’ev 1995: 157]. arguably, the idea of the city is also connected with the notion of paradise as well, because in rural culture the city usually enjoys a much higher status than the village. a very important motif related to forest life is forest food. on the one hand, its description may support the notion of the forest as a place of abundance, for example: “дедушка всего нанесет, лучше домашнего я там питался” (the old man would bring me all kinds of food, i ate better there than at home) [viatka folklore 1996: 30]; “меня всё время пряником кормили” (i was constantly being given honeycakes) [khvoin.-98:18], and so on. on the other hand, later on this mostly proves a delusion, when the forest food turns out to be excrement [mosh.-99:31; also khvoin.-98:18; zinov’ev 1987: 37; viatka folklore 1996: 30-31]. while wandering in the forest, a human being loses the ability to tell food from non-food, from its complete opposite according to human norms. inclination towards “anti-food,” particularly towards excrement, is indicative of the demonic nature of the forest world [nekliudov 1979: 134], as well as of the maledicted child’s deformed perception.(20) rural stories about parental malediction 59 in some stories, the motif of forest food is particularly stressed: a maledicted person can come back only if he/she never partakes of what was on offer there: “хоть ягодку съешь, дак не вернешься домой” (if you eat even a small berry, you won’t get back home) [cherepanova 1996: 38; also krinichnaia 1993: 40; afanas’ev 1995: 156]. food determines the nature of whoever consumes it; by rejecting forest food a human being may escape being assimilated to the spirits who rule there and escape from their control. those who have been cursed, together with their new “masters,” may visit the human world and eat any food they find there that has not been blessed (neblagoslovennaia) [belozer.-01:4]. or they can steal food from those who failed to say a prayer before eating [nilus 1992: 291]. any food may, consequently, turn into non-food, become “inedible,” if certain acts, including those of a symbolic nature, are not performed before its consumption. the utmost expression of the inedibility of forest food is again associated with digestion: spirits may defecate on the dinner table of those who do not say a special prayer before eating: “а где, – говорить, – пьяныи, так за стол садятца, не бывает ни службы, ни молитвы, вот мы там прибяжим, все съядим (...) а туды насерим, нассым в чашки” (where… people sit down to table drunk, and no service is performed, no prayer is said – that’s when we come quickly, eat everything... and defecate there, pissing in their cups) [nekrylova 2001: 323]. returning home in the majority of our texts, the time spent in the forest is temporary and varies from seven days to nine years. as soon as the child who has been cursed disappears into the forest, the village community initiates a search. people go into the forest trying to make as much noise as possible, for example by playing the concertina [khvoin.-97:37. aik]). alternatively, they resort to magical means of retrieval, for instance, casting zherebeiki, small sticks cut lengthwise, received from a ritual specialist, or offer up prayers, and so on. this process may be described as an intensive dialogue, enacted both in magical and everyday languages, between the two worlds, in order to re-establish their balance disturbed by the act of malediction. when this dialogue is successful, maledicted children return home. as a rule, he/she is discovered in some marginal locus like a bathhouse [belozer.-03.1.2. ake], or on the edge of the forest [khvoin.-97:37. aik]. their appearance at this moment features residual traits of folklorica 2006, vol. xi 60 demonism: their clothes are often torn [khvoin.-99:2; khvoin.-97:37. aik], or they are wearing a type of quasi-clothes (for example, such a person may be covered with moss and sacking, cherepanova 1996: 33; 34).(21) other small details about their appearance may also indicate that they have become “of the forest” (obleseli [belozer.-01:14. lmp]); for instance, in one story, such a person had a small basket overgrown with moss [khvoin-99: 2с]. their behavior is described as “uncultivated/untamed” (dikii) [zinov’ev 1987: 36], something particularly apparent in their bestial manner of eating: “.. мальчик там ходит по это... по траве и не руками, а ртом… собирает и ест” (a boy… is walking in the grass.. he doesn’t pick [it] with his hands, but uses his mouth… he gathers it and eats) [khvoin.-97:14; also: khvoin.97:35. tda]. often such people seem unwilling to return to the human world; they will not allow anyone to “put a hand on them” (она в руки никому не давалася) [khvoin.-97:37. aik]. they try to escape [belozer.-01:14. lmp; khvoin.-97:14; khvoin.-97:35. tda], or behave aggressively even towards their relatives; for example, on return from the forest, a girl tries to bite her mother [cherepanova 1996: 34]. those who return from the forest are “balancing on the border between the human and the non-human” [nekliudov 1998: 131]. in connection with this, it is no accident that stories about curses have been included in a “large corpus of popular legends about metamorphosis” [p.i. 1889: 50].(22) because the human world is defined by its christian nature, the reintegration or taming of someone who has returned from the forest usually requires either hanging a cross around the person’s neck, and/or placing such a person beneath the icons: “...с крестом обошли ... успели на ее крест накинуть. дак токо ее и взяли”(they succeeded in hanging a cross on her. only in this way they could get hold of her) [belozer.-01:4; also khvoin.-97:35. tda; khvoin.-97:36], or “значит, привезли в деревню, положили под образа... вот под иконы. и там около неё всё время сторожили” (they took her to the village, put her beneath the icons, and watched her constantly) [khvoin.-97:37].(23) back in the human world the effects of wandering in the forest are not eliminated immediately the person who was cursed returns home; resistance offered by him or her when found is another manifestation of the general unwillingness of the forest world to let him or her go. this unwillingness is sometimes expressed instantaneously in the form of an unanticipated rural stories about parental malediction 61 gale that may begin blowing at this point [for example, khvoin.-97:14]. this is an “unmistakable sign of the arrival of a non-human creature” [vinogradova 1995: 22].(24) some stories mention open warnings from forest spirits not to return to the human world [see morozov 2001: 69]. the forest’s control over those who once were in its power continues for a long time after as well. often the forest sends its emissaries to get these people back: “мужчины… в зелёных костюмах стоят около окошка … “за мной, говорит, пришли” (“men,” she says, “in green suits are standing at the window. they have come for me”) [khvoin.-97:35. nem]. again, the motif of blindness may appear at this point; other people may not see these creatures: “а мать посмотрит – никого нет” (and the mother looked, but no one was there) [khvoin.-97:35. nem]. this residual ability to see what is invisible to others is another sign of the intermediary status of those who had been cursed. interestingly enough, sometimes this may be seen particularly by their eyes: “глаза у девок вострые, как не наши глаза, нелюдские, как невидимки” (the girls’ eyes are sharp, not like ours, not like human eyes, as if they were invisible) [aksc. coll. 149, № 78, l. 97]. yet the most telling aspect related to the motif of forest control is the prohibiton on talking about what has happened in the forest: “…не велел, говорит, хозяин сказал, что ‘никому не рассказывай – где был, кого видел. ... а если, – говорит, – расскажешь, тебе, – говорит, – будет плохо ... ежели расскажешь, недолго сам наживешь’” (the master.. didn’t let [me] … “don’t tell anybody – where you’ve been, who you saw… and if you do talk about it, just blame yourself… you won’t live long”) [belozer.-01:6; also: khvoin.-99:8; khvoin.-97:35. aap; khvoin.-97:37. aik,etc]. failure to abide by this prohibition may be presented as an explanation of the person’s death: upon return “...а пожил он всего денька три, все рассказал, как черти его мучили ... а, может, нельзя было ему рассказывать, оттого и помер” (…he only lived for three days, talked about everything, how he was tortured by devils ... maybe he wasn’t allowed to tell, and that’s why he died) [cherepanova 1996: 34]. sometimes speech of any kind is prohibited [cherepanova 1996: 34], or the punishment fits the crime: for divulging forest secrets, one individual is struck dumb [morozov 2001: 68]. the ban on talking about what happened in the forest belongs in the same category as the above mentioned peculiarities of appearance, behavior, and eating habits of those who return from the forest, because food, clothes and speech play “a very crucial role in the opposition folklorica 2006, vol. xi 62 between human and non-human” [nekliudov 1998: 131]. a total or partial ban on talking about what happened in the forest is very important for the logic of the malediction story. its essence is the interaction between two worlds differing in nature, structure and typography. their immediate contact is short; and once the person who had been cursed returns, the border between them closes. the ban on revealing information about the forest is necessary to sustain the original balance between the two worlds – an important condition for the ordering of their interaction in the future. it would seem that by relating details of his/her wanderings in the forest, a person is apt to put both of these worlds in danger.(25) in a few texts, we come across the motif of unusual abilities acquired after wandering in the forest, in particular the ability to distinguish “blessed” from “non-blessed” food [e.g., morozov 2001: 69], and other kinds of magical capabilities [see viatka folklore 1996: 31].(26) their obvious non-human origin confirms that the maledicted person maintains some kind of communication with the forest world that helps him/her in everyday life. to sum up, the return to civilization of someone who has been cursed, including his/her re-adaptation to human life, takes much longer than the “departure” into the forest. what happens when a human being disappears in the forest may be seen as a momentary rupture of the borderline between the human world and the world of the forest, an example of “mythology bursting into everyday life ... a precipitous change, transition into a different state, the transfiguration of reality” [tsyv’ian 1995: 135]. bridging this gap is a much lengthier as well as a much more gradual process. elaborating ways of establishing a proper borderline between “us” and “them” [see baiburin 1993: 185-86] proves much more difficult. unnatural death children who have cursed, even if they do not die shortly after returning, may not live long. in such cases, their death happens accidentally or is due to some mysterious circumstance. in one story, for instance, a child who had been cursed died young in a tractor accident, and another hanged himself [belozer.-01:14. lmp]. in another story, a girl died young and for no obvious physical reason [khvoin.-97:35. aap]. another character in a malediction story lived for seven years after his return from the forest, but finally died “without having taken communion” (умер-то без прицестя) [аrem fund 7. inv. 1. file 266. rural stories about parental malediction 63 l. 3; cf: cherepanova 1996: 33; zinov’ev 1987: 36, nekrylova 2001: 321 ff.]. in a number of older sources one comes across several additional motifs related to unnatural death as a consequence of a parental curse: 1) the earth does not accept those who have been cursed after their deaths [russ. zemlia ne prinimaet], something usually discovered accidentally; while digging for construction, people come across an uncorrupted corpse [e.g. аrem. fund 7. inv. 1. file 1374. l. 75; arem. fund 7. inv. 1. file 1379. l. 34, etc.]. such people usually die young, not having “consummated” their life (russ. ne izbyvajut svoi vek); the normal distribution of one’s lot in life has been violated, so that the further life course, including death, is bound to be wrong. until a parent removes the curse (russ. poka ne snimut prokliatie), the conflict remains unresolved; as soon as it is lifted, the corpse immediately turns to ashes [nilus 1991: 131; p.i. 1889: 45-46].(27) before this happens, though, the maledicted are believed to be very restless; they shout loudly and scare people, and even rise from the grave and wander around [zelenin 1994: 86, 266-67]. this behavior is highly reminiscent of revenants, who, as we saw above, may appear in a story about a curse in the context of wandering in the forest. both maledicted children while lost in the forest and revenants are positioned somewhere in between, or, as one author put it, in the “semi-underworld” [zavoiko 1914: 86]. 2) a number of texts mention the reciprocal consequences of malediction, or its “reverse power.” by cursing their children, parents damn themselves: “в бане с бабы, которая бранила и посылала своих детей к чорту, байнушко сорвал кожу с ног до головы” (a woman who used to curse her children and send them to the devil was flayed from head to toe by the master of the bath-house) [efimenko 1887: 194], or after uttering a curse parents “начинают тосковать…, чахнуть и вскоре умирают” (parents get sick at heart…, decline and soon die) [sumtsov 1897: 201; cf. p. i. 1889: 42-43]. sometimes sources mention mutual execrations whereby maledicted children put a curse on their parents [maksimov 1995: 259-60]. the most interesting case of mutual deprivation, however, is found in the story where the person who has been cursed is not accepted by the earth, while at the same time death does not come to his/her mother, although her time has long passed and she has reached an unnaturally great age. in one story, for instance, the mother is “almost 150 years old” (почти полтораста лет), but only after she lifts the curse does her folklorica 2006, vol. xi 64 daughter’s corpse disintegrate, and she can expire [аrem fund 7. inv. 1. file 1374. l. 74-75; cf. nilus 1991: 131]. this is a case of reverse parallelism: the person who has been cursed dies without having fulfilled his/her proper life span, while the mother “usurps somebody else’s life time” (russ. zaedaet chuzhoi vek). both cases are examples of the abnormal development of the life course.(28) conclusion the nucleus of stories about children who have been cursed discussed in this article is the interaction between the human and nonhuman worlds (the forest, the world of the dead, etc.).(29) failure to abide by the rules of magic etiquette in the social space disturbs the normal balance and exchange between these two realms. the moment when a curse is uttered marks a rupture in the border between these two worlds, while the restoration of the original balance occurs only gradually and takes much longer. the complete restoration of the premalediction status quo appears impossible. malediction stories should also be seen as a variant of stories about an individual’s “lot in life,” whereby their logic may be described as a (partial) deprivation of the proper human “lot” with its possible substitution by the lot of an animal (in cases of metamorphosis into some kind of an animal or bird). focusing on the communicative situations where such stories are narrated suggests that their principal function is “to explicate the rules codifying everyday life” [tsyv’ian 1995: 133], in particular, speech taboos and proper ways of dealing with food (the need to bless it before consumption and when putting it away for the night time). notes 1 in citations within the main text the following information is given: the district where the interview was recorded, the year of the recording (the last two digits), and the number. in cases where the same recording number refers to several informants, their initials are also given in the main text. more detailed information, including the date and place of the recording, the informant’s initials and year of birth as well as interviewers’ names are given at the end of the article. 2 in the popular religious culture of the russian north, a woman’s use of mat is associated with the eschatological belief of “the rural stories about parental malediction 65 most holy theotokos falling down from her throne” [levkievskaia 2000: 106]. 3 the “lack of a blessing” on the non-verbal level may take particularly curious forms; in one story, a boy fails to return from the forest because he is wearing boots rather than the usual bast-shoes. the bark fibers of the bast-shoes provided protection, it was thought, thanks to the crosses formed in their making. their absence spelt doom for the boy [aksc. fund. 1, inv. 6. file 493]. sometimes the idea of a “blessing” is broadly associated with christian baptism as such – hence the association between the maledicted and the non-baptized, that is, those who did not receive the chief form of human “blessing” [nekrylova 2001: 319]. 4 see the work of e. kagarov, who pointed out the distinction between two types of malediction: “intentional (german: berufen) and accidental (german: verrufen), something like a black eye, inappropriate praise, untimely pronounced name, etc.” [kagarov 1918: 9]. 5 by reverse association, informants also sometimes call naughty children “accursed” [e.g., khvoin.-99: 19]. 6 the only exception may be found in the story of a child who had been cursed and started to sink into the earth after his mother’s phrase “get off me, you cursed boy” (да отвяжись ты от меня, проклятый). however, his mother and the priest succeeded in getting him back through sustained prayer [see аrem fund 7. inv. 1. file 1379. l. 21]. 7 another such pair would be cattle and their owners. indeed, stories of cattle who have been cursed are almost as frequent as those of children with a curse upon them (note that historically, a child’s status was as low as that of domestic animals) [see morozov 2001: 60]. 8 in some texts this belief is fully explicated: the master of the forest says to the boy with a curse upon him: “твоя родная мать прокляла тебя, и это материнское проклятие дало мне полную власть над тобой...”(your own mother cursed you, and this maternal malediction gave me complete power over you) [nilus 1992: 290, also: аrem fund 7. inv. 1. file 856. l. 20b, morozov 2001: 68; chubinskii 1872: 89, etc.]. 9 food being one of the most tangible expressions of one’s “lot,” it is entirely natural as well as significant that malediction may take place at meal times. for instance, in one story, a mother who did not have enough food for all three of her children wished that “the master of the forest would take one of them away” (хоть-бы одного… леший унес), a folklorica 2006, vol. xi 66 wish that was immediately granted [arem. fund 7. inv. 1. file 266. l. 3]. 10 compared to the ancient understanding of malediction as a sacrificial offering of the maledicted to the gods of the nether world [see, for example, pomialovskii 1883: 8, 9, 11]. the semantics of “innocence” and “defenselessness” are equally characteristic of the archetypal sacrificial victim and the image of a small child. 11 words can be virtually endowed with a material nature. compare also a developed example of this in ordin [1895: 61-62], where a “foul word” (russ. poganoe slovo), here also the name of the master of the forest, was accidentally uttered. one of the characters immediately recited a counter-spell, wishing that this word might “turn ito ashes” and “be dispersed by the wind.” (ты прахом распадись… ты ветром разнесись!). 12 the motif of a “bad hour,” that is a specific time then various troubles may beset someone, occurs frequently in ethnographic material. this “hour” may be either indefinite (“в часу... есть одна минута... как сбраненая, некрестовая” (there is... one minute in an hour... an accursed minute, a non-christian minute)) [khvoin.-97:43, also cherepanova 1996: 34], or associated with particular points in astronomical time, such as seven and nine am [khvoin.-99: 40], noon and midnight [kamyshev 1928: 16-17], “especially noon” (особенно часы в 12 дня) [belozer.01:6], and one informant believed that prayers as well as curses would come true at this particular time [khvoin.-98:29]. a detailed list of “good” and “bad” hours, with explanations of what not do in the latter case, may be found in rybnikov [1910: 207-08]. one should note as well the expression ne roven chas, meaning the time is not right (lit. the hour is not even) but is also often equivalent to “watch out!” associated with the belief that the nature of time is not homogenous. it is used in warnings and prohibitions, including those against cursing someone, lest something should happen to him/her. to turn off the bad luck and to draw down success it is customary to pronounce the formula “at a good hour,” for example, “may you go at a good hour” (иди в добрый час!). 13 the “bad hour” is similar to the motif of the “bad trace/footprint” (russ. khudoi sled) – a virtual path or trace usually left by the master of the forest. if you tread on it, you may never return home [e.g. belozer.-01:6; batets.-99: 34]. these two motifs, which express notions about the non-isomorphic quality of time and space, perform an auxiliary role in presenting certain events in a mythological light. rural stories about parental malediction 67 14 lost people and cattle can be described as “beyond the forest” (russ. za lesom), that is, not just “very far away,” but “beyond reach” [belozer.-03; 1.4; belozer.-01:14. lpm; cherepanova 1996: 32]. 15 some stories demonstrate a combination of two opposite modes of movement: hyperactivity vs. immobility. for example, on returning home the child who was cursed says: “вот от пришел и говорит, что в риге сидел, а вы песни пели, а меня, говорит, всё гоняли: туда иди, туда иди – я, говорит, устал, ходивши” (i was sitting in the barn, and you were... chasing me around: go over here, go over there – i got tired walking around) [khvoin.-97:29]. in closely related malediction stories, particularly those concerning “substituted children,” this opposition may be expressed to an even greater degree: it usually turns out that while a changeling [russ. podmenennyi, obmen] was lying still in the cradle, his/her “forest double,” the real human child, was running around non-stop [mosh.-99:22]. it is noteworthy that apart from movement, maledicted children in substitution stories may embody other extremes as well. this is especially true of growing up and aging: such a child usually overeats, yet never grows; he/she remains a small child, though his/her voice may sound “like that of an old man” (голос его звучит как у старика) [afanas’ev 1995: 153]. 16 in the substitution story we also encounter the “failure of normal sight,” a loss of the ability to see things as they are: for a long time parents believe that it is their baby lying in the cradle, whereas it later turns out to be a broom or log. 17 in rare cases, malediction stories describe how invisible children visit people’s houses [e.g. belozer.-01:4; zinov’ev 1987: 40; nilus 1992: 291]. sometimes they can be seen by neighbors [cherepanova 1996: 32], but never by their parents. in one instance, a mother who had cursed her daughter came to a village tavern, but instead of drinking her vodka she “angrily splashes it over her shoulder, right into the eyes of her daughter, who was present unseen in the tavern along with the master of the forest. her daughter immediately became visible” (с сердца выплескивает водку через плечо – прямо в глаза своей дочери, которая невидимо была в кабаке и терлась вместе с лешим подле своих родителей. тотчас-же дочь перестала быть невидимкой ) [dobrovol’skii 1908: 6]. most probably, by unwittingly splashing the drink into her child’s eyes (note, not her “face” in general!), the mother, as it were, repeated the act of malediction. both acts were accidental occurring when the mother felt annoyed. possibly this is a case of sofolklorica 2006, vol. xi 68 called “repeated action,” where consequences of the first action are neutralized/eliminated by the second (on the semantics of repeated actions, see baiburin [2001: 4-5]). 18 other sources offer further clues about ways of distinguishing “forest people” from normal folk. these include communicative prohibitions (such as not to mention the name of the divinity: “...when mishka uttered the word god, the man knocked him against the pine tree” (когда мишка вспомнил бога – дядька ударил мишку о сосну) nilus 1992: 290], or some symbolic details revealing the wrong nature of the action: the old man took him “by the left hand – as is done [there]” (за левую руку, так положено) [cherepanova 1996: 35]. 19 compare also the following semantic similarities: on the one hand, “dead children... may be associated with zalozhnye pokoiniki” (those who have died the “wrong” death and/or have been wrongly buried) and, at the same time, be designated with various words meaning the “lost one” (potercha, poterchatko, poterchuk) [morozov 2001: 60. on the connection between those cursed by their parents and zalozhnye pokoiniki see also zelenin 1994: 251 and levkievskaia 1998: 103]. on the other hand, children cursed by their parents are often also called the “lost ones”. what happens to them while they are in the forest, may therefore be described as a temporary death, “non-existing” in the world of living as living beings. this sense seems to be particularly strong when the child is taken away by deceased relatives. 20 by way of further comparison between representatives of the “forest world” and the dead, it is noteworthy that animal excrement may serve as food for revenants as well, as in the story where at night a dead husband brings his wife candies, which by morning have turned into ram’s droppings [zinov’ev 1987: 276]). 21 this may parallel the “weird” clothes worn by anthropomorphic forest beings, or alternatively suggest “animal nakedness.” 22 the motif of metamorphosis may become dominant in other types of malediction stories. it is here that a large number of etiological plots about the origin of various animals and birds occur; maledicted children may variously turn into a frog [balov 1901: 110], a nightingale and a cuckoo [dobrovol’skii 1894: 89], dogs [viatka folklore 1996: 44], or rusalki [iushin 1901: 165]. in one story a son who had cursed his own parents turned into a dog and disappeared into the forest. after his parents had prayed for seven years, he returned home, “obedient and a teetotaler” (покорен и не пьющ) [balov 1897: 5]. it is noteworthy that rural stories about parental malediction 69 here barking occurs as a “translation” into animal language of the son’s swearing (frequently the word “barking” [lai, laia] denotes swearing, especially mat). 23 the proper human world is the one blessed by god. this notion becomes especially important when malediction occurs through the lack of a blessing. the story where a maledicted child is returned to his god-mother rather than to his biological parents is particularly telling in this respect [cherepanova 1996: 36]. 24 for example, the motif of a strong wind is closely associated with the coming of devils: “…the birch trees, fifteen meters high, they bent down to the earth, such was the strength of the wind” (березы метров по пятнадцать высотой были – они к земле пригибались, сила ветра такая) [khvoin.-99:7]. 25 compare this to the belief that one should not retell one’s dreams: “некоторые сны, говорят, не расскажешь – так это лучше будет, а расскажешь, дак хуже будет...” (they say it’s better not to talk about some dreams, if you do – things will be worse) [belozer.01:4], or prohibitions against relating what happened during visits to the other world (obmiraniia) [see tolstaia 1999: 22-23]. 26 this motif occurs in typologically similar stories about obmiraniia, especially “south slavic, in particular, bulgarian, [where] the emphasis is put on acquiring, over the course of the dream, superior knowledge and unusual abilities” [tolstaia 1999: 22]. belief in the unnatural capacities of people possessed by the devil also occurs in popular church literature, where it is the “loss of will” that is emphasized (for example, the story of the boy while possessed could play any musical instrument, jump from one bank of the river to another (sic!) and speak all kinds of unknown languages [nilus 1992: 288]. 27 an interesting detail occurs in a number of these stories: the hands of this kind of corpse are discovered bound with a plait of women’s hair, usually belonging either to the maledicting mother [p.i. 1889: 45-46; nilus 1991: 129-30] or the daughter who was cursed [arem. fund 7. inv. 1. file 1374. l. 75]. as is well known, a cut-off plait is one of the most common indicators of shame in traditional peasant culture. in this context, it relates to the wrongness of the whole situation of the malediction, as well as to the improper, un-christian behavior of its participants. moreover, removing the curse implies, in this case, “untying the hands” (razviazat’ ruki), which in russian means “to allow someone freedom to act.” hence, the dead person finally folklorica 2006, vol. xi 70 escapes from the controlling power of the curse and dies a second, “natural” death. in connection with the binding of hands, note kagarov’s work on ancient maledictions where he argues that semantics of binding express the essence of malediction as such [kagarov 1918: 24, 26]. binding as the deprivation of mobility might also be related to the inability of the person who has been cursed to get into either hell or paradise. 28 swearing at children is considered one of the worst sins in popular religious culture: “...не надо ребенка своего ни чертом не называть, ни как... это грех неотмоленный” (…you should not call your child a devil or anything like that… this is a non-expiable sin”) [batets.-99:32, also p.i. 1998: 42]. in popular eschatological legends, cursing a child condemns one’s soul to perdition: “родители, проклинающие своих детей, идут и сами в ад и ведут туда же проклятых детей...” (parents who curse their children go to hell and draw the cursed children there as well) [miloradovich 1897: 172, also аrem. fund 7. inv. 1. file 856. l. 20b, etc.]. in a verse about judgment day, a person repents her sins to christ: “малёхонького дитя своёго проклинала...” (i used to curse my little child…). the soul has prepared a place for itself in hell and that is where it goes [markov, maslov, bogoslovskii 1905: 26-27]. in official orthodoxy, malediction is also seen as incompatible with a true christian life, death and salvation. among the sins mentioned in the absolution prayer is the following: “…if you brought upon yourself your father’s or mother’s curse…” [аще клятву отца своего или матере своея наведе на ся…]. 29 this list may be expanded through typologically similar examples; for instance, one of our informants saw the story of maledicted children in terms of contacts with extraterrestrial civilizations: “…космоно... детей... в космос-то увозят. нло-то. вот. увозят. … а это леший у нас” (astronauts… they take children to space… a ufo, you know. they take them away … and with us, it is the master of the forest) [belozer.-01:14. ffp]. works cited afanas’ev, a. n. 1995. поэтические воззрения славян на природу [the slavs’ poetic understanding of nature]. vol. 3. мw: sovremennyi pisatel’. rural stories about parental malediction 71 baiburin, а. к. 1993. ритуал в традиционной культуре [ritual in traditional culture]. st p.: nauka. baiburin, а. к. 2001. ““нельзя... но если очень нужно...” (к интерпретации способов нарушения правил и запретов)” [“it’s forbidden… but if you really need to…” (on the interpretation of the ways of breaking rules and prohibitions)] труды ф-та этнологии европейского у-та в санкт-петербурге. issue 1. st p.: european university at st. petersburg, 4-12. balov, a. 1897. “очерки пошехонья” [essays on poshekhon’e]. этнографическое обозрение, 4: 57-77. cherepanova, o. a. 1996. мифологические рассказы и легенды русского севера [mythological stories and legends of the russian north]. st p: st. petersburg university. chubinskii, p. p. 1872. труды этнографическо-статистической экспедиции в западно-русский край [proceedings of the ethnographicstatistical expedition to southern russian territories]. vol. 1. issue 1. st p: bezobrazova and co. dobrovol’skii, v. n. 1894. “звукоподражания в народном языке и народной поэзии” [onomatopoeia in popular language and poetry]. этнографическое обозрение, 3: 81-97. dobrovol’skii, v. n. 1908. “нечистая сила в народных верованиях (по данным смоленской губ.)” [evil spirits in popular belief (based on material from smolensk province)]. живая старина, 1: 1-16. dobroliubov, m. a. 1915. “васильевский уезд. (1860-ые гг.)” [vasil’evskii district (1860s)]. in d.k. zelenin, описание рукописей ученого архива императорского русского географического общества. issue 2. petrograd, 800. efimenko, p. s. 1877. “материалы по этнографии русского населения архангельской губернии, собранные п. с. ефименком” [sources for the ethnography of the russian population of archangel p province, collected by p. s. efimenko]. материалы по этнографии русского населения архангельской губернии, собранные п.с. ефименком. book 5, pt 1, ch. 7, 160-96. kagarov, e. g. 1918. греческие таблички с проклятиями. (defixionum tabellae). [greek tablets with maledictions (defixionum tabellae)]. khar’kov: tipo-lipografiia of g.p. radovil’skii. kamyshev, c. c. 1928. “краеведческие сведения о селе лихунине, касимовского у. (1923 г.)” [local history sources about the village of likhunino, kasimov district (1923)]. in a. a. mansurov, folklorica 2006, vol. xi 72 описание рукописей этнологического архива общества исследователей рязанского края. issue 1 (1-100). riaza’: riazgostip. krinichnaia, n. a. (comp.) 1989. легенды, предания, бывальщины. [legends, tales and fabulates]. mw: sovremennik. kushkova, a. n. 2004. “конфликт отцов и сыновей: лишение наследства и отцовское проклятие (по материалам крестьянской культуры второй половины xix в.)” [conflict between fathers and sons: disinheritance and a father’s curse (based on material about peasant culture, in the second half of the nineteenth c.)]. in i. a. morozov (comp.), мужской сборник. мужское» в традиционном и современном обществе: константы маскулинности. диалектика пола. инкарнации «мужского». мужской фольклор. issue 2. mw: labyrinth, 178-86. levin, iu. i. 1996. “об обсценных выражениях русского языка” [obscene expressions in the russian language]. антимир русской культуры. мw: ladomir, 108-21. levkievskaia, e. e. 1998. “православие глазами современного севернорусского крестьянина” [orthodoxy through the eyes of a contemporary northern russian peasant]. ученые записки. issue 4. мw: russian orthodox university of apostle john the theologian, 90-111. maksimov, s. v. 1995. нечистая, неведомая и крестная сила. [the evil, dark force and the power of the cross]. smolensk: rusich. markov a. v., maslov a. l., bogoslovskii b. a. 1905. материалы, собранные в архангельской губернии летом 1901 года [materials collected in archangel province in the summer of 1901]. part i. mw: k. l. menshov. miloradovich, v. p. 1897. “народные обряды и песни лубенского у., полтавской губ., записанные в 1888-1895 гг.” [popular customs and songs of lubenskii district, poltava province, collected in 1888-1895]. сборник харьковского историкофилологического общества. vol. 16. morozov, i. a. 2001. “отрок и сиротинушка (возрастные обряды в контексте сюжета о “похищенных детях”)” [the male adolescent and the orphan (age-related customs in the context of plos about “stolen children”)]. мужской сборник. мужчина в традиционной культуре. issue 1. мw: labirint, 58-71. nekliudov, s. iu. 1979. “о кривом оборотне (к исследованию мифологической семантики фольклорного мотива)” [on the one-eyed werewolf (on the study of the mythological semantics of a folklore rural stories about parental malediction 73 motif)]. проблемы славянской этнографии. [k 100-летию со дня рождения д. к. зеленина]. ld: nauka, 133-41. nekliudov, s. iu. 1998. “зоодемонизм” [animal demonism]. слово и культура. сборник памяти н. и. толстого. vol. 2. мw: indrik, 126-38. nekrylova, a. f. (ed.) 2001. традиционный фольклор новгородской области [the traditional folklore of novgorod region]. st p: aleteia. nilus, s. 1991. на берегу божьей реки. записки православного [on the bank of the sacred river. notes of an orthodox believer]. part 1. zagorsk: holy trinity lavra publishers. nilus, s. 1992. сила божия и немощь человеческая [god’s power and human weakness]. zagorsk: holy trinity lavra publishers. ordin, n. g. 1896. “свадьба в подгородных волостях сольвычегодского уезда” [marriage ritual in villages in the rural-urban nexus, sol’vychegodsk district]. живая старина. issue 1: 51-121. p. i. 1889. “сила родительского проклятия” [the power of the parental curse]. этнографическое обозрение, 3: 41-54. pomialovskii, i. v. 1873. эпиграфические этюды. 1) древние наговоры (tabulae defixionum) 2) римские колумбарии [epigraphic essays. 1) ancient charms (tabulae defixionum). 2) roman columbaria]. st p: tip akademii nauk. rybnikov, p. n. 1910. песни, собранные п. н. рыбниковым [songs collected by p. n. rybnikov] 2nd ed., ed. a. e. gruzinskii. 3 vols. vol. 3. mw: sotrudnik shkol. sannikova, o. v. 1995. “брань” [swearing]. in n. i. tolstoi (ed.), славянские древности. этнолингвистический словарь. vol. 1. mw: mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 250-53. shchepanskaia, t. b. 2001. “сила (коммуникативные и репродуктивные аспекты мужской магии)” [power (communicative and reproductive aspects of male magic)]. мужской сборник. мужчина в традиционной культуре. issue 1. мw: labirint, 71-95. sumtsov, n. f. 1897. “пожелания и проклятия” [wishes and curses]. сборник харьковского историко-филологического общества, vol. 9: 183-208. tolstaia, s. v. 1999. “полесские “обмирания”” [“visits to the other world” in poles’e]. живая старина, 2: 22-23. tsyv’ian, t. v. 1995. “оппозиция мифологическое/реальное в поздних мифопоэтических текстах” [the opposing pair folklorica 2006, vol. xi 74 mythological/real in late mythopoetic texts]. малые формы фольклора. сборник памяти г.л. пермякова. мw: vostochnaia literature, 130-44. usacheva, v. v. 1998. “растения-апотропеи в славянской традиционной культуре” [apotropaic plants in slavonic traditional culture] ученые записки. issue 4. мw: russian orthodox university of apostle john the theologian, 144-53. uspenskii, b. a. 1996. “мифологический аспект русской экспрессивной фразеологии” [the mythological aspect of russian expressive phraseology]. антимир русской культуры. мw: ladomir, 9-108. vesin, l. 1891. “современный великорусс в его свадебных обычаях и семейной жизни” [the contemporary great russian in his marriage customs and family life]. pt 2. русская мысль, 10: 37-66. vinogradov, l. n. 1995. “человек/нечеловек в народных представлениях” [human/non-human in popular understanding]. человек в контексте культуры. славянский мир. мw: indrik, 17-27. viatka fol’klor 1996. вятский фольклор. мифология [viatka fol’klor. mythology]. kotel’nich: viatka regional center of russian culture. iushin, p. 1901. “верования русского народа в ливенском у. орловской губ.” [beliefs of the russian people of livenskii district in orel province]. этнографическое обозрение, 1: 164-66. zavoiko, k. 1914. “верования, обряды и обычаи великороссов владимирской губернии” [the beliefs, rituals and customs of russians in vladimir province]. этнографическое обозрение, 3-4: 81-179. zelenin, d. k. 1994. “к вопросу о русалках (культ покойников, умерших неестественной смертью, у русских и финнов)” [on the question of rusalki among the russians and finns (the cult of the dead who met an unnatural death)]. избранные статьи по духовной культуре. мw: indrik, 230-301. zinov’ev, v. p. 1987. мифологические рассказы русского населения восточной сибири [mythological stories of the russian population of eastern siberia]. novosibirsk: nauka. archival materials: aksc: archival of karelian scholarly center. fund 1, inv. 6, file 493. loginov k.k. village iukkoguba, padanskii village council, medvezh’egorsk district, 1996-1997; collection 149. № 78. inf.: a.i. rural stories about parental malediction 75 bazhenova, b. 1904. coll.: o. zaitseva, o. bloshchitsyna, g. trukan. june 1979. village central konchezero. аrem: archive of the russian ethnography museum архив. fund 7 [v.n. tenishev]. inv. 1. file 266 [vologda province, kadnikov district, 1899. coll.: n. preobrazhenskii]; file 856 [novgorod province, cherepovetskii district. 1900. coll.: a. vlasov]; file 1374 [penza province, penza district. 1899. coll.: n. araviiskii], file 1379 [penza province, penza district. 1900. coll.: v. kvachevskii]. field materials belozerskii district, vologda region belozer.-01:4. 2.07.01. zubovo. inf.: eap, b.1926. coll.: s. zhavoronok, a. kushkova belozer.-01:6. 3.07.01. verkhov’e. inf.: hак, b.1924. coll.: a. kushkova belozer.-01:7. 6.07.01. zubovo. inf.: lpb, b.1927. coll.: s. zhavoronok, a. kushkova belozer.-01:14. 6.07.01. zubovo. inf.: ffp, b.1925.. coll.: a. kushkova belozer.-01:14. 6.07.01. zubovo. inf.: lmp, b.1926. coll.: a. kushkova belozer.-03:1.2. 8.07.03. zubovo. inf.: eap, b.1926. coll. a. kushkova. belozer.-03:1.2. 8.07.03. zubovo. inf.: ake, b.1921. coll. a. kushkova. belozer.-03: 1.4. 9.07.03. zubovo. inf.: efp, b.1919. coll. a. kushkova. khvoininskii district, novgorod region khvoin.-97:14. 27.06.97. antsiferovo. inf.: vmg, b.1932. coll.: a. selin, s. shtyrkov. khvoin.-97:29. 2.07.97. zubovo. inf.: pnp, b.1929. coll.: m. iushkova, e. mel’nikova. khvoin.-97:35. 3.07.97. antsiferovo. inf.: aap, b.1929. coll.: a. panchenko, a. selin, s. shtyrkov. khvoin.-97:35. 3.07.97. antsiferovo. inf.: nem, b.1938. coll.: a. panchenko, a. selin, s. shtyrkov. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 76 khvoin.-97:35. 3.07.97. antsiferovo. inf.: tda, b.1913. coll.: a. panchenko, a. selin, s. shtyrkov. khvoin.-97:36. 3.07.97. antsiferovo. inf.: vvs, b.1931. coll.: a. panchenko, a. selin, s. shtyrkov. khvoin.-97:37. 4.07.97. nazar’ino. inf.: vpv, b.1922. coll.: s. shtyrkov, m. iushkova. khvoin.-97:37. 4.07.97. antsiferovo. inf.: aik, b.1933. coll.: s. shtyrkov, m. iushkova. khvoin.-97:43. 7.07.97. spasovo. inf.: nee, b.1925. coll.: a. panchenko, s. shtyrkov. khvoin.-98:1. 27.06.98. borovskoe. inf.: vpt, b.1928. coll.: a. panchenko, s. shtyrkov, v. iashkina. khvoin.-98:16. 5.07.98. zadel’e. inf.: nml, b.1939. coll.: a. panchenko, s. shtyrkov khvoin.-98:18. 5.07.98. zadel’e. inf.: eii, b.1933. coll.: zh. kormina, v. iashkina. khvoin.-98:29. 10.07.98. zadel’e. inf.: vns, b.1927. coll.: a. panchenko, s. shtyrkov, a. svirnovskaia. khvoin.-98:31. 11.07.98. zadel’e.inf.: msa, b.1917. coll.: zh. kormina, a. svirnovskaia. khvoin.-99:1. 3.07.99. maklakovo. inf.: enl, b.1914. coll.: zh. kormina, a. kushkova khvoin.-99:2. 4.07.99. shilovo. inf.: аак, b.1914. coll.: a. panchenko, s. shtyrkov khvoin.-99:7. 4.07.99. zadel’e. inf.: vns, b.1927. coll.: a. kushkova, a. l’vov khvoin.-99:8. 5.07.99. maklakovo. inf.: pfv, b.1933. coll.: zh. kormina, a. kushkova khvoin.-99: 12. 7.07.99. zadel’e. inf.: agr, b.1940. coll.: zh. kormina, v. panchenko. khvoin.-99: 19. 10.07.99. mikheevo. inf.: nse, b.1931. coll.: zh. kormina, a. panchenko, s. shtyrkov khvoin.-99:24. 14.07.99. zadel’e. inf.: eii, b.1930. coll.: a. kushkova, a. l’vov khvoin.-99:28. 14.07.99. lezgino. inf.: aem, b.1924. coll.: a. kushkova, a. l’vov khvoin.-99:40. 12.07.99. zadel’e. inf.: nml, b.1939. coll.: a. kushkova, m. hakkarainen. rural stories about parental malediction 77 batetskii district, novgorod region batets.-99:32. 4.08.99. melkovishi. inf.: vis, b.1928., coll.: m. vadeisha, a. l’vov batets.-99:34. 15.06.99. ustreka. inf.: nvm, b.1908. coll.: a. panchenko, v. panchenko. batets.-99:36. 4.08.99. voinovo. inf.: aish, b.1910. coll.: e. migunova, m. hakkarainen. moshenskoi district, novgorod region mosh.-99:22. 11.07.99. mikheevo. inf.: lmg, b.1926. coll.: e. migunova, s. shtyrkov mosh.-99:31. 14.07.99. ustreka. inf.: aat, b.1926. coll.: a. panchenko, v. panchenko, s. shtyrkov mosh.-99:32. 15.07.99. l’vovo. inf.: vve, b.1917. coll.: zh. kormina, s. shtyrkov abbreviations: inf. – informant inv. – inventory coll. – collector belozer. – belozerskii district batets. – batetskii district khvoin. – khvoininskii district mosh. – moshenskoi district folklorica 2006, vol. xi a collection about erotic folklore dejan ajdacic belgrade this fall the collection erotsko u folkloru slovena (the erotic in the folklore of the slavs) will be published by the belgrade publisher "stubovi kulture." although the collection was prepared in i995, the first two authors unfortunately did not live to see its publication. nikita tolstoi writes about the appearance of a naked woman on walls during a siege in the context of the serbian ritual of driving out demons. phallic figures and ritual acts of defense and healing with the phallus among balkan peoples are examined by tatomir vukanovic the symbolic and magical function of the male sexual organ is reconstructed in ljubinko radenkovic's text through links with the devil, stone and conception as an arrival from the other world. nikos chausidis demonstrates the interconnection of human and agrarian fertility in the use of the rhombus as a vulvic or fertility symbol on woven artifacts and in sculpture. naum celakovski treats a christmas carnival game from one region of macedonia that imitates coitus. ana plotnikova reveals the erotic elements of south slavic mummers' rounds. the orgiastic elements in the magical "tipping" (disrobing) of the moon in balkan slavic sources and archival records of macedonian authors are the topic of ljupc risteski's article. liudmila vinogradova examines the erotic relationships of demons and human beings. olga belova points out the male, female and erotic symbolism of mushrooms. lidija stojanovic links the dragon as a kidnapper of maidens with folk beliefs and rituals. anco kalojanov interprets erotic motifs in a drawing on the walls of the ninth-century preslav fortress as traces of old shamanic rites. jan chesnoc speaks about the characteristics of the space in which newlyweds acquire their first sexual experiences. ta(jana agapkina, in a long contribution, treats terms for menstruation, beliefs and magical acts connected with the female cycle. andjelka elijana grujic places a description of the procuring and erotic songs performed in a ukrainian ritual in a broader slavic context and moves beyond the rituals themselves. the symbolism of virginity (the color red, whole or broken crockery) and acts surrounding announcement of whether the bride is a virgin are the topic of svetlana tolstaia's study. ermis lafazanovski devotes attention to traces of hierogamy in folktales of the balkan slavs. biljana sikimic and djordje otasevic offer linguistic and folkloristic analysis of erotic tongue-twisters. mihailo scepanovic links the hercegovinian surname "piceta" not with its obscene folk etymological interpretation, but with a transformation of the name pilip -pidzha. peter grzybek calculates the frequency of use of 200 erotic proverbs in a. mitrovic's list from the beginning of the century and from his own field research. bone velichkovski (writing on macedonian songs), eva krekovicov (slovak songs) and dobroslawa wezowicz-ziolkowska (polish songs) consider erotic themes and motifs. seef a journal page 36 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 zoja karanovic examines brother-sister incest and its significance, while mirjana detelic queries the place of the erotic in the serbian oral epic. marta bjeletic analyzes polish linguistic and folkloric material from karus's journal "antropophyteia" from the beginning of the century. plamen bockov reads the story of the establishment of relations between the male and female sexual organs, under the title naida, as an educational text. boris uspenskii writes about the famous collection of russian "zavetnyi" erotic folktales. evgenia miceva indicates the typical generational differences between individual erotic jokes. dejan ajdacic inquires into types and distinctions of humor in erotic stories, along with their (im)moralism. stanoy stanoev discusses bulgarian sexual jokes, while rosen ma\cooev examines bulgarian projects of investigation into vita sexual is. dagmar burkhart brings pusookin's story in verse, "tsar' nikita and his forty daughters," into the context of folklore genres, particularly that of the riddle. georgii levinton investigates obscene expressions and allusions in the novels of dostoevsky. as another result of the collection's delayed publication, some of the texts are given in their original languages, while a few have been specially translated into serbian. (translated by sibelan forrestor) page 37 fall 1998 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 2 microsoft word folkf05f.doc 62 using digital technology in the field: report on folklore research in ukraine. peter w. holloway and natalie kononenko university of alberta since our last report on digital techniques (“living in the virtual material world, seefa journal, 9, no. 2) we have had the opportunity, and pleasure, of taking another research trip to ukraine. two major changes have taken place since our last research experience: the weight of computers with cd-write capability has decreased and electricity in ukrainian villages has become much more reliable. this has made the film camera quite obsolete. film is always at risk of bad processing. it does not travel well if undeveloped. per exposure it is more expensive than digitally stored images made at reasonable resolution. the “digital age” does, however, have one very severe limitation – permanence. the rosetta stone was written in three languages and is still readable after 2000 years. computer files stored on 5 1/4 inch floppy disks formatted with one of the early operating systems (cp/m, trsdos, etc.) or sound recordings made on wirerecorders are not readable after twenty to fifty years. the permanence of digital data of any type is a major dilemma for archives. those interested in this complex topic can search the web. incidentally, web-links are one of the most transitory of storage media. for us, the types of information which we would want to record on a folklore expedition include: twodimensional artifacts such as pieces of paper or ritual towels (rushnyky), sound recordings, and threedimensional objects from decorated eggs (pysanky) to village houses and other examples of vernacular architecture. on our trip to ukraine in july 2005, the following was packed into a small backpack (this is not meant as an endorsement, but to show what can be taken): a dell inspiron 700m computer, a sony pc350 handycam, a nikon coolpix 8700 camera, a canon powershot 330 camera, an olympus ds2200 digital sound recorder, and a 0-360 panorama mirror. all of these had their own accessories: batteries, card-memories, and power converters. because the various pieces of equipment had different card memory storage types we also took a “multi-format” card-reader which allows all data to be downloaded to the computer. in addition we had, packed elsewhere, a tripod, cd and dvd disks, and dv tapes. recording manuscripts and other two-dimensional objects. to the folklorist or scholar, making copies of two-dimensional information has always been possible. even medieval monks were adept at this, although, with handwritten copies, one always worried about errors in transcription. the advent of film made reproduction more reliable, with the caveat of permanence. the invention of the xerographic recorder (xerox et al.), made the copying of manuscripts much easier, provided one had access to such a machine. when kononenko went to kyiv in 1998, 99 and 2000, she would buy toner cartridges for the unused copiers in the archive of the academy of sciences folklore institute in exchange for the ability to copy needed manuscripts. of course, when one is in a small village, there are no copiers. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 63 fortunately, we discovered on this trip that quite readable copies of notebooks can be made with a digital camera. (figure 1). the original color image of the notebook, when viewed on a computer screen, is much easier to read than the small, printed, black and white reproduction shown here. on the computer screen, colors can be easily reproduced and the blue writing stands out against the grayish background with its black horizontal and vertical lines. using a digital camera is also gentler on the original manuscript than using a copy machine. the digital camera has a greater depth of field so that text on the curved portion of the page near the binding can still be read. for this section to be reproduced on a copy machine, the book would have to be pressed down, with possible damage to the binding. of course large colored items such as rushnyky can only be reproduced with the digital camera; xeroxing a rushnyk is out of the question. the quality of a photographic copy of a ritual object such as a rushnyk, even one produced in a hurry and under less-than-ideal circumstances is excellent. on the original image of the rushnyk shown in figure 2, it is possible to see the individual stitches. these types of results are very important to us as they taught us what can be achieved when images have to be made quickly. we had no time to set up special lighting or copy-stands. villagers are busy people. we were grateful to them for sharing their time with us. thus, when they allowed us to make copies, we did this as quickly and as unobtrusively as possible. notebooks were photographed near a window or with the camera flash and the rushnyky were placed on the floor and the photographer stood on a chair, if need be. on this expedition, we photographed over two hundred rushnyky and costume pieces and over sixty pages of villager's notebooks, not including items photographed in houses and churches for panorama movie production discussed below. if the researcher does know in advance that large numbers of manuscripts need to be copied, a simple wire stand could be taken to hold the camera in a copying position. if reasonable care is taken in the photography, the resultant photograph can even be subjected to optical character recognition (ocr) to produce text that can be edited. figure 3 shows part of a page photographed from a book and figure 4 is the output from an ocr program which was run on the photographed text, not the original in the book. the only error is in the last word. 64 . , . " " . . :r , figure 1 figure 2 figure 3 figure 4 folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 65 recording sound from the very early days, sound recordings have been particularly important to the folklorist. a variety of media have been used in the past: wax cylinders, wire, or tape. portable battery-powered cassette tape recorders have been used extensively in the recent past. these have several disadvantages: the tapes are quite large and therefore difficult to carry in the field. it is difficult to transcribe from tapes and cassettes. it is possible to overwrite the tape or cassette in error. a few years ago, mini-disc recorders appeared on the market. we used one on our previous trip to ukraine and took one with us this time. mini-disk recorders are indeed smaller and much lighter than tape or cassette recorders, but in our opinion, it is even easier to overwrite a recording, as we discovered to our chagrin. the mini-disc, like the cassette tape, is also difficult to work from when transcribing a text. a very simple and inexpensive improvement to both of these tools is the addition of a cable which connects from the “earphone output” of the recorder to the “line-in” plug of a computer sound card. commercial software of various types allows a tape or mini-disc to be saved on the computer. wavepad is a free program which allows the recording to be saved as a compact mp3 file. such a file will occupy approximately 1 mega byte per minute so that a cd would hold almost 12 hours of recordings. such mp3 files have the advantage that the recording can be moved forward, or backward, instantaneously with the computer mouse and the precise location of a section of interest can be identified on the computer to a fraction of a second. in this way the researcher, or another person using a different computer, can return to this location of the sound file immediately. a program such as wavepad also allows the researcher to copy sections of interest to a new file if needed. such sound samples are useful in lectures and in classroom presentation when a sample or other illustration is needed. although this markedly improves the usability of the sound recordings, it is quite laborious to digitize a tape or mini-disc. the sound file must be entered into the computer at the same speed as that at which it was recorded. thus, a forty-five minute tape takes forty-five minutes to digitize. on our recent research trip, for the first time, we took a digital sound recorder. on the recommendation of the technical staff at the university of alberta, we chose an olympus ds2200. this tiny recorder has none of the problems of tape and disc recorders. it measures: 4 cm x 1.5 cm x 11 cm. it records thirty five hours on a 512 mega byte xd-picture card and will record for 12 hours on two rechargeable aa batteries. each time the record button is pressed, a new sound file is recorded. it is impossible to record over a file and it takes a conscious effort to erase a file. the recorder connects to a computer with the supplied usb cable and then appears as another drive to the computer. the computer then “sees” it as another drive. this means that a sixty minute sound file can be moved to the computer in seconds. the files are saved in a proprietary format but a free program called “switch” will convert them to mp3 files. the upper range of the frequency response is only 8,000 hz, but this is quite adequate for speech and low fidelity music. the recorder will accept external microphones and will record in stereo. we recommend this technology highly. once a sound recording is obtained, it is only useful if items of interest can be located within it. the classic solution to this is to transcribe the recording and to work from this transcription. even with the digital age and with the possibility of doing word searches, we still need to transcribe and turn sound into text before this is possible. full transcriptions have been done as part of large group projects, for example the british 66 national corpus (bnc). the bnc is a 100 million word, searchable, collection of samples of written and spoken current british english. such an endeavor is impossible for individual researchers. also, unless the transcription is extensively annotated, speech nuances or emphases are lost. this type of annotation was in fact done in the book prose folklore of ploske, a village in chernihivshchyna, reviewed in this issue of folklorica. a less labor-intensive, and perhaps better, approach is to index the original sound file and to indicate where certain topics or keywords occur. as noted above, digital recordings have precise timing associated with them and so the section of interest in the recording can be located immediately. this process can be automated and made into a computer-searchable library of sound recordings. at the university of alberta, thanks to the text-analysis portal for research (tapor), we are working on indexing our sound files and we will make available recordings which have been annotated by searchable keywords. on the tapor web site it will soon be possible to enter a keyword and retrieve a series of short sound files which contain that keyword. clicking on a selected short sound file will make the full sound file available for listening. the ukrainian component of this project is currently being undertaken by svitlana kucherenko and natalie kononenko, with the assistance of the local director of tapor, terry butler. what is not available yet in the area of sound recordings, and may never be, is a universal “sound to text” transcription program, that, is a program that will take any sound file and render it as text. for an idea of the possibilities here, check out www.speechbot.com. this commercial site has digitized over fifteen thousand hours of united states radio programs and converted them to text files with a “speech recognition” program. these text files can, of course, then be searched for a “keyword” very quickly. the web-site then goes back to the location in the original sound file and plays back the original sound file. speechbot is nowhere near one hundred percent accurate, but does give a tantalizing view of what is possible. recording three-dimensional objects the web-site which grew out of our last trip to ukraine, www.arts.ualberta.ca/uvp/, has a number of examples of three-dimensional objects: pysanky, clothing, houses. we feel that three-dimensional computer representation of such objects is mandatory for a full appreciation of them. a pysanka has a design written on a curved surface that flows around the whole egg. it cannot be appreciated from a single “face-on” view. ideally, it should be held in the hand and examined from all sides. a person wearing a village costume is never looked at in a stationary “face-on” view. as the person approaches the viewer, subtle changes in angle show slightly different aspects. perhaps the costume is meant to accentuate a particular part of the body, say the hips, which may not be obvious from the chosen angle. if only the view could be changed slightly by the viewer moving to one side. a room in a house is never looked at with a fixed gaze, one wall, then the next, then the next. you look around, seeing how the light from a window illuminates a picture on a wall, or how an icon corner is always opposite from the door. this can now be done on the computer. the term is virtual reality (vr). a simple, free, program: apple quicktime viewer, can open a vr movie and let the observer do exactly what we just described. the movies are not “movies” in the classical sense. they do not “move” in a linear fashion when viewed. instead, they allow the viewer to “move” their eyes where they want them to. when a vr movie folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 67 is opened, the viewer sees a stationary scene: front view of a pysanka, or person, or a wall of a room. when the computer “mouse” is “clicked” and moved the egg or person rotates or another wall slowly becomes visible. the viewer has complete control of the scene; they can move the object, or their view, back and forth at will. three-dimensional objects can be conveniently divided into two categories: small and large. when a small object, such as a pysanka, is examined, it is held in the hand and rotated: you are looking in at it. when a large object, such as a room, is examined, one stands in the centre of the room and turns around: you are looking out at it. small objects are rendered on a computer by placing them on a turntable and taking a series of separate photographs as the turntable and object are rotated by small amounts. usually, thirty six photographs are taken, one every ten degrees as the object is turned a complete revolution. software, such as vrworx, can then generate a quicktime object movie out of these images. in our previous report, we showed how a person wearing a costume can be captured as an object movie which can be viewed with the free program quicktime. two of these costume movies are shown on our web-site, together with object movies of fifteen pysanky. in the past, we used a home-made turntable which was rotated in ten degree steps by hand. we have now obtained a motorized turntable from kaidan corporation. this turntable rotates slowly while a digital video is made in the space of twenty to thirty seconds. software then extracts images from this video and generates an object movie again. we are currently using this system to make object movies of several hundred pysanky in edmonton. a graduate student, mariya lesiv, has been assigned to this task. data will be saved at each step of the process. the original digital videos, continuous thirty second movies of pysanka after pysanka, will be archived. individual high resolution movies of each egg (with written documentation shown at the start of each small movie) will be saved. the final (lower resolution) rotatable object movies will be placed on a web site. the motorized turntable can hold objects up to nine kilograms. the included software, however, limits its usefulness. it will work only on sixty cycle ac power (north america). other software can be purchased for fifty cycle ac power, the kind available in ukraine and russia. we did not take this equipment to ukraine. large objects, such as rooms, are made into panorama movies. these have tremendous potential for accurately reproducing the room as photographs, movies, or sound recordings can be embedded in the original panorama. when viewers “enter” the "virtual room," they can look around, look at enlarged pictures, turn objects, or listen to sound commentaries. our web-site has two of these movies. they are of ukrainian village houses and can, again, be viewed with quicktime. these two houses were made by an extremely laborious technique. the houses were generated on a computer using a computer assisted design (cad) program (strata). the bare items: walls, furniture, hanging pictures and so forth generated in strata were then “covered” on the computer with actual photographs taken in the houses. with practice, a simple house can be generated in approximately one hundred hours. another technique for generating panorama movies involves taking eight to ten digital photographs in the room, with the camera being rotated approximately forty-five degrees between photographs. the overlapping images are then “sewn” together, either manually or with software. the software subsequently generates the panorama movie. vrworx will perform both these operations. for our research expedition this year we used a newer technique. this technique is much faster than either of the previous two 68 techniques and utilizes a parabolic mirror mounted on top of a digital camera. we used the mirror from the company “0-360.” the set-up is shown in figure 5. when a single digital photograph is taken, it records 360 degrees horizontally and 115 degrees vertically. in a room, all walls are captured, as is most of the floor and ceiling. the image is very much distorted, but free software generates a panorama, which can be made into a panorama movie. figures 6 and 7 show the original image generated with the parabolic mirror and the resultant panorama. with an 8-megapixel digital camera, this panorama is 2959x868 pixels. an idea of the detail which can be captured is shown in figures 8-10. here the top, central and bottom 15% of a section taken from figure 7 are shown. again, enlarged images and so forth can be embedded in the panorama movie. we used this equipment extensively this summer and took the necessary photographs to make panorama movies of four village churches, four village house types, and a kyiv apartment. first drafts of these nine panorama movies have just been placed on our web site. interestingly, panorama movies made using parabolic mirrors are used extensively by realtors for selling houses on-line. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 69 figure 5 figure 6 figure 7 figure 8 figure 9 figure 10 70 there are a few caveats in using the panorama mirror: the digital camera must be one of the newer, larger types (eight mega pixels is ideal). a sturdy tripod is required and this can add weight to the equipment carried into the field. focusing on a parabolic mirror requires some practice – preferably not in the field! with a camera recommended by the company which supplied the mirror, focusing is done on a small portion of the whole scene and, from bitter experience, we know that this zone must be well lit and have some texture or detail in it. we had great difficulty photographing an upper floor of an old village church, until the sun shone through a broken window and made a very bright pattern on the floor. manual focusing could probably be done, but this was not the time to learn how to do this. when conditions are good and lighting is not a problem, panorama photography is not time-consuming. one beautiful village church in dobranychivka, iahotyn region, kyiv province was photographed in approximately one hour. eleven panorama photographs in four rooms, and outside, were taken, together with sixty-three photographs of icons and rushnyky. this has now been converted into a, first draft, panorama movie with: five individual panoramas and thirty-five embedded detail photographs. even with the new panorama mirror, the generation of the final product on the computer is still quite laborintensive. if a detail of an icon draped in a rushnyk is required, for example, the digital photograph of the icon and rushnyk must be cropped to the desired area. this is then copied-pasted onto a pre-generated white rectangle (1280x960 pixels), shrunk to fit in the rectangle, and saved. this “picture in a white rectangle” (screen proportions, or the image will be distorted) is imported into the worksheet of vrworx and linked to the desired room-panorama-movie. the “room-panorama” must then be pre-viewed on the computer to place the “clickable hot spot” over the correct icon. when the icon in the room is then clicked, an enlarged image appears. when this image is clicked in turn, the observer returns to the original room looking at the correct wall where the icon hangs. for each “icon” or other imbedded image, the production process takes approximately three minutes. this report is definitely a “work in progress.” the digital sound recordings have yet to be listened to systematically and indexed. some of the one thousand general digital photographs, those not related to a specific house or church, will be used in university of alberta courses this fall. the first drafts of the panorama movies of the four churches, four houses, and the apartment will also be used in teaching, and these movies have been placed on our web-site. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 microsoft word folkf05f.doc 71 reviews laura j. olson. performing russia: folk revival and russian identity (basees/routledge curzon series on russian and east european studies 7). new york and london: routledge curzon, 2004. notes. bibliography. index. viii + 286 pp. $114.95 (cloth). isbn 0-415-32614-1. laura olson’s book, performing russia: folk revival and russian identity, is primarily about folk music, particularly folk vocal music, but the book’s implications may be as broad as its title suggests. olson combines traditional scholarly research and citation with the results of extensive fieldwork, mainly attendance at concerts and interviews with folk revivalists in russia today. some sections reflect her conversations with village singers, whose role in the folk revival movement is as complex as the trends and approaches in the movement’s philosophy. from the first lines of the book, olson creates her persona as a scholar who is first and foremost a participant-observer. this predetermines her relationship to informants and to the whole topic, allowing her a fortunate access to the material. as a singer concerned with her own repertoire and performance, she herself can request comments, correction and encouragement. given the cultural distance many russian folk revivalists must traverse to learn and perform traditional music, olson is more like them than set apart by foreignness. her implicated position in the research causes her distance from the material and her authorial presence to vary, moving between description, citation, and abstraction. as summaries, comments, or critical remarks interweave with information from interviews, it is not always clear who is talking and from what point of view. the book ranges from the status and performance of folk music before the revolution, through soviet definition and manipulation of folklore, to the nascent folk revival movement of the later soviet period and the flourishing schools, ensembles and collecting projects of the soviet period, nearly up to the present. olson outlines currents of thought and musical practice that parallel issues in many other cultural spheres – the status of peasants vis-à-vis urban intellectuals; ongoing echoes of the soviet “folk chorus” approach versus revivalist demands for greater authenticity and autonomy for performers; ways of imagining or appropriating russian culture as it is recreated in particular kinds of performance or “discovered” in research; focused cultivation of local styles versus selection of styles and songs from all over the country; and some continuing censorship of folk material, as with the song “porushka parania” (135). she addresses the particular popularity of cossack songs and culture, which tend to engage more boys and men in performance ensembles than other stylistic definitions, and the gender-specific songs and crafts taught in some programs for young people. olson can be refreshingly critical of the assumptions and behavior of some revivalists when they actually interact with villagers; she notes that village women may refer to the old traditional songs as “fol’klor” (‘folklore,’ a foreign word, learned from educated visitors) but call the soviet-era songs they really love “narodnye pesni” (folk songs). the book is valuably grounded in a variety of disciplines, including ethnographic or musicological fieldwork and literary history and analysis, and situated by rich footnotes and bibliography. in places, it is the folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 72 footnotes that offer larger synthesizing observations, in order not to interrupt the flow in chapters on more specific topics. read as a whole, the book begins slowly and becomes much more engaging once olson turns to the folk revival movement; the final chapter offers a few lively and thickly-described scenes in which genuinely creative encounters take place among members of current ensembles precisely backstage, for an optimistic vision of ongoing musical evolution. the difference in tone between sections may be hard to avoid: collectivization was a tragedy from many points of view, maintenance of folk tradition not least among them, and much of the soviet material may simply be inherently turgid. a reader may regret that olson’s critical reactions do not kick in during the first section, or at least the second, devoted mainly to the “fakelore” of the soviet-era folk choruses. if she can describe with such non-judgmental sympathy the point of view of village people who really love best to sing cruel romances or the soviet popular songs of their youth, perhaps she could also have sought more space for potential resistance in the actual experience of the folk choruses. her view of the “fakelore” period seems to be adopted rather uncritically from the revivalists she interviews – perhaps because of her identification with the work and perspective of the revivalists, or her caution as an “outsider” who avoids imposing her own western musical background (and “western” definitions of “folk music!”) on the material she learns and studies. as the book points out, there is also an additional cd available – though it is in fact not a cd, but a web site providing information and the possibility of listening to snippets of the recordings she describes; the entire recordings can be downloaded if the reader obtains a password from olson. while this somewhat cumbersome arrangement costs the reader some effort and defers the possibility of listening to the tracks in sequence or for pleasure, it reflects olson’s concern for the integrity of the performances and for copyright protection. the wish to provide protection is entirely reasonable, given how western or world music have appropriated and devoured fragments of “mysterious” traditional slavic music for the past few decades. some of the audio tracks are technically quite rough, with minimal editing and processing. overall, it is a teaching tool rather than a recording for entertainment. it is a great shame that performing russia is so expensive: the hard-cover edition seems aimed only at libraries or specialists with research budgets. but it would make a great text for a class: it is clearly written, full of engaging details, and suggestive of ways a north american could engage in an authentic, productive and sophisticated way with “someone else’s” traditional culture – something we all hope our students will want to do. sibelan forrester swarthmore college folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 microsoft word folkxiv_author.doc reviews folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 191 heretz, leonid. russia on the eve of modernity: popular religion and traditional culture under the last tsars. cambridge: cambridge university press. 2008. notes. bibliography. index. ix + 265 pp. $99 (cloth). isbn 978-0-521-88177-7 more than thirty years ago, when this reviewer was developing an interest in traditional russian culture, only one of the half dozen historians of russia in her home institution was interested in peasants. he was regarded as an oddball, just as folk culture was covertly, and sometimes overtly, regarded as quaint and irrelevant. fortunately, times have changed, and nowadays historians have become much more interested in the russian peasants, and more specifically in their cultural attitudes. professor heretz takes this trend further by arguing convincingly that the traditional peasant world view continued to survive in a world of change, and hence any assessment of peasant reactions to various crises in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century russia must bear this in mind. while alive to the impact of modernization and social change, he emphasizes continuities, something entirely familiar to ethnographers and folklorists. for them the most interesting aspects of this book will be the elucidation of aspects of the peasant response to specific historical and social circumstances in the period 1880-1916. as heretz argues, “the vitality and intricacy of the empire’s civilization arose from the interaction of the dynamic principle of modernization with the more passive yet extremely resilient force of tradition” (1). the book divides naturally into two. the first part presents a concise survey of the peasant worldview and discussions of eschatological attitudes among the old believers, sectarians and the peasantry as a whole. these furnish the context for the subsequent studies of peasant reaction to specific events: the assassination of alexander ii in 1881 (chapter 5), the famine and cholera outbreak of 1891-92 (chapter 6), the russo-japanese war of 1904-05 (chapter 7), the 1905 revolution (chapter 8) and the first world war (chapter 9). chapter 5 establishes the key dualistic elements in peasant thinking: folk monarchism (the view of the tsar as benign father and deliverer), and the demonization of the “lord” (barin). as subsequent chapters show, the “lords” included not just the landowners, but also any educated group whose attitudes conflicted with their own. attempts to bring “progress” to the peasants were therefore doomed, since those introducing the changes were seen as apostates and hence of the devil’s camp. 192 in chapter 1 on the traditional worldview the author rightly points out that our view of the peasants is often based on the writings of the liberal intelligentsia who had little sympathy and understanding for a religious worldview. he takes the peasants as they saw themselves, as true orthodox. in this way he rolls up official and popular orthodoxy into a seamless entity, at the same time viewing the peasant worldview as essentially religious. there is much to be said for this approach in the context of the topic and period under discussion, particularly in this chapter which looks at various manifestations of apocalyptic thinking, such as chain letters, omens, portents, memorates and fabulates (here termed “contemporary legends”), as well as mistrustful reactions to facets of modernization like the railroad, science and technology. peasants’ belief in themselves as true bearers of orthodoxy extended to a conviction in the rightness of their worldview. in this context the maintenance of ritual observance and adherence to social and religious norms became crucial. beyond the bounds of the book, however, the designation of their world view as religious is somewhat limiting as a tool for discussion; for example, peasant views of what constitutes a sin include offences against hygiene or social convention that have nothing to do with religion. orthodoxy is similarly sometimes a less useful means than the reference to a magico-religious view for explaining the dichotomies in the peasant world view, whether spatial, temporal or social (for example, them/us, this world/the other world, local/outside world, peasants/masters), even if the peasants themselves made no distinction. the following two chapters look at minority religious groups, the old believers and sectarians respectively. the approach here is not to look at the attitudes of these groups in the target period (1880-1917), but to present a concise survey focusing on the evolution of key beliefs and attitudes. professor heretz argues convincingly that the old believers “act as a typology for russian anti-modernism” (75), and that the various sectarian groups display in exaggerated form some of the deep-rooted pessimistic attitudes and ideas of the peasantry as a whole. gloomy views of the present and the future are still characteristic of russian peasants, as margaret paxson has shown in solovyovo. the story of memory in a russian village [1997]. chapter 4 on folk eschatology largely ignores beliefs about the afterlife, although the multitudinous folklore texts (religious songs, tales and obmiraniia, for example) on this topic show how crucial these were to the peasants in reflecting and defining moral norms and social reviews folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 193 attitudes. instead, the chapter focuses particularly on ideas about the end of the world as found in apocryphal texts such as the revelations of pseudo-methodius of patara (wrongly titled here), and the lord’s disputation with the devil. these may not have had such wide currency as texts about the afterlife, but they relate much more clearly to broader social and political developments. modernization, it is convincingly argued, triggered fears of the end of the world. the book is based on wide and careful, if not exhaustive, reading of published ethnographic data and commentary relating to the period and the events chosen. this breadth is not matched by reading of contemporary publications, except in history. for example, the only folklorists to receive a pat on the back are a. a. panchenko for his 2002 study of sectarians, христовщина и скопчество: фольклор и традиционная культура русских мистических сект [the sects of flagellants and castrators: the folklore and traditional culture of russian mystical sects. moscow: ob’edinennaia gumanitarnoe izdatel’stvo], and m. m. gromyko’s мир русской деревни [the world of the russian village. moscow: molodaia gvardiia. 1991], a book that promotes the pro-orthodox line of the moscow institute of ethnography (23). the charitable explanation would be that much of the book was written several years ago, as may be concluded from the discussion of the flagellants (khlysty) and castrates (skoptsy). here the author’s argument concentrates on deriding now outdated approaches that focused on the possible pagan origins of their beliefs or their bizarre sexual practices. although he footnotes aleksandr panchenko’s key study from 2002, it does not form the basis for discussion as would be expected. of course, professor heretz makes no claim to be a folklorist, but the stumbling block may be his conviction, expressed in chapter 1, that russian folklorists are obsessed with winkling out pagan survivals from orthodox christian and secular elements in the traditional world view (17-19). to illustrate his point he refers to b. a. rybakov’s two works of 1981 and 1987, and briefly, and somewhat more sympathetically, to n. i. tolstoi. it is certainly the case that in the late soviet period the dominant school in the study of russian folklore led by tolstoi was fascinated by pre-christian elements in folk language, belief and ritual, but in the last decade and a half folklorists have increasingly taken into account the socio-historical context of the data. apocalypticism has been a popular subject. one example, highly relevant to the topic of professor heretz’s book, will suffice to make the point: e. a. mel’nikova’s article of 2004 “эсхатологические ожидания рубежа xix–xx веков: конца света не 194 будет?” [eschatological expectations at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries: isn’t the end of the world nigh?] [антропологический форум 1: 250-66; translated into english as “eschatological expectations at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the end of the world is [not] nigh?” forum for anthropology and culture 1: 253-70]. not only does this article contain many useful references, both to recent publications and to ethnographic sources and commentary, but also a careful discussion of the impact on the peasants of the craze for astronomy and science among urban groups in the late nineteenth century. the author shows that while some bolder spirits became interested in astronomy and the explanation for comets, others interpreted comets according to traditional eschatological thinking. if professor heretz succeeds in persuading his historical colleagues that they must take traditional cultural attitudes seriously when making their judgments, he deserves very considerable gratitude. folklorists, whether studying russians or another slavic group will find the analysis of traditional attitudes in relation to specific events extremely enlightening and revealing, but may not enjoy being misrepresented. faith wigzell school of slavonic and east european studies university college london london, uk seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal 2000, vol. v, no. 1 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 editorial satement 3 a r t i c l e s “major pavlutskii”: from history to folklore from the materials collected by the american north-pacific expedition t. s. shentalinskaia russian union of composers (moscow) by the summer of the year 2000 a hundred years had passed since an expedition set out for north-eastern siberia. organized by the american museum of natural history, and subsidized by the president of the museum, the banker morris jesup, the jesup north pacific expedition took its name from him. two russian scholars, v. i. iokhel’son and v. g. bogoraz, received invitations to join the expedition. both were well prepared for such an undertaking by their years in kolyma, where they had been exiled in the 1890s for participating in the radical political movement, “the people’s will.” both had acquired field work experience during the iakutsk expedition led by sibiriakov (189597), and they were already known to the western scholarly world as researchers into the life, folklore and languages of the ancient northern tribes. both were ready to devote themselves completely to the study of these “primitive, half-exterminated, and almost completely unknown” peoples, regarding this activity as one of the “social tasks of the epoch.”[bogoraz 1934: xiii] the work of these scholars found fruition in ethnographic, archeological, and zoological collections, hundreds of photographs, anthropological and linguistic studies, recordings of folklore, and general monographs, by iokhel’son on the yukaghirs and koryaks, and by bogoraz on the chukchi. for many decades these have been rare and invaluable source material for the study of the peoples of northern asia. the phonograph recordings made by iokhel’son and bogoraz have been utilized the least. they contain the folklore, including folk music, of both the original inhabitants and the old russian population of kolyma and the region of the anadyr river. it was only recently, after i had acquired copies of recordings of russian folklore from the archive seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 4 of traditional music at indiana university (bloomington), that the task of identifying and deciphering these phonograms could begin. there are a number of difficulties here. with rare exceptions, the sound quality is poor, often the result of damage to the wax cylinders, plus, in most cases, the recordings have not been “passportized,” i.e. attributed, and the materials accompanying the recordings have been dispersed into various archives. thus the records of the expedition and the correspondence, basically in english but partly in german, are kept in the american museum of natural history in new york. the wax cylinders themselves, used for making a phonograph recording, as well as the cardboard carrying cases on which cursory notes were made during recording sessions and apparently while packing the collection for shipment, are located in the archive of traditional music in bloomington. finally, some of the field notebooks and diaries of the expedition’s participants are kept in archives in st petersburg. it is difficult to overestimate the significance of these unique hundred-year-old sound recordings from the outlying regions of siberia.(1) as often happens, even a seemingly insignificant piece of data collected in the “field” can draw in a chain of other pieces of information, leading then to further research which may result in interesting observations and conclusions. one such begins with a fragmentary recording of a song containing six lines of melody and verse found among the phonograms (archive number: 432.12 а-s. 58. 4584). the recording was made in markovo, a russian village on the anadyr river, and forms part of bogoraz’s collection, since it was he who was in charge of the anadyr section of the expedition. i was able to elucidate the name of the woman singer, even though it is missing in the archival inventory. the song was recorded on the same cylinder as a historical song about the death of lopukhin, where at the beginning the performer calls herself “ul’iana, known as nikit’evna ...” the following inscription written in ink appears on the cardboard case of cylinder no. 58 in the archive of traditional music: “the peasant’s son and the major.” then the following has been added in pencil: “lopukhin – major pavutskii – sazychikha – mitinka danil’evich.”(2) the nickname 5 “sazychikha” is obviously derived from the old markovo family name “sozykin” from which it may be inferred that the singer was ul’iana nikitichna sozykina. i have been aware of the markovo song about the peasant’s son and the major since the late 1960s through a tape recording made by a native of markovo, e. v. gunchenko, who at that time was working in the scientific research institute of the north-eastern complex in magadan. it was recorded in 1965 from kseniia andrianovna sozykina (!), who, according to the collector, was over sixty at the time. this text is also fragmentary and has no plot development, but, according to gunchenko, is considered by markovo villagers to be about major pavlutskii. in the inscription on the case of the cylinder mentioned above, the song, along with its formal “written” title “the peasant’s son and the major” which has been added, is marked by a name with obvious local associations but in local variant form: major pavutskii. this indicates its connection with the historical figure of major pavlutskii as he has been preserved in the memory of the markovo villagers. this connection is confirmed by another document which refers to the jesup expedition. a field notebook with texts supplementary to the phonogram is preserved in st. petersburg in the archive of the academy of sciences. the notebook is entitled: “phonograph. texts of recordings, made markovo, 1901.”(3) in it the full text of the song is presented with the highlighted title “major pavlutskii.” major pavlutskii was the last military conqueror of siberia. in the 1730s and 1740s he was ordered to effect the final subjugation of all the local tribes to the russian crown. he commanded the cossacks in the last russian-chukchi battles, in which his allies were the yukaghirs, chuvants and koryaks who had themselves suffered from raids by the chukchi. pavlutskii’s battles were fought all over the area from kolyma to kamchatka. his fame grew and became fixed in the memory of people from kolyma to kamchatka. for some his was the bloody fame of a man “who killed without mercy,” while for others his reputation was that of all-powerful commander, fearless fighter and trusty defender. the major left behind several toponyms in the iakutsk-chukchi “land.” his name became legendary, legends about him circulated and songs were composed. “see how the black bear walks through the pine forest, see how the tree trunks all bend before him and seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 6 topple over. the earth shakes, wolves and wolverines fall dead from his breath. here comes pavlutskii! here comes the russky! ...” so sang an old yukaghir man in kolyma. his song was transcribed by fedor matiushkin, a participant in f. vrangel’’s expedition of 1821-24 [vrangel’ 1948: 385-86]. according to matiushkin, the song began with a command to pavlutskii from the “daughter of the sun,” the empress elizaveta, to move against the chukchi. “it continued with his farewell to his wife and children; his journey to nizhne-kolymsk; the recruiting of his detachment of troops; and finally, his campaign, battle and death” [vrangel’ 1948: 385]. pavlutskii died in march 1747.(4) the people of anadyr have also preserved some details about pavlutskii’s campaigns and his death. what is more, a century and a half later afanasii ermilovich d’iachkov, a resident of the village of markovo, could still speak about events as though he were alive at the time: pavlutskii met the chukchi by a lake which is now called “maiorskii.” as soon as the battle started, some traitors in the ranks took flight . . . meantime, the major and a number of loyal cossacks put up stiff resistance against the countless hordes of chukchi . . . . even after the traitors had fled, the chukchi were unable to kill pavlutskii for a long time because he was wearing armor. they just kept shooting at him with their bows and arrows and stabbing at him with their spears, but they still could not wound him. finally they surrounded him, like wolves round a deer, got him tangled up in long straps, threw him to the ground, and found a place under his chin where they could stab him. the lake got its name of ‘maiorskii’ from what happened there [diachkov 1893: 38-39]. the residents of markovo also ascribe the origin of several other toponyms to the period of pavlutskii’s campaigns. stories about these events can be heard even nowadays.(5) bogoraz heard and recorded several “tales about iakunin,” as major pavlutskii is known in chukchi folklore).(6) he published some of the tales and legends, which the chukchi classify as “information about the time of discord,” in his academic writings [bogoraz 1900: no. 15, 27-129], but also included them in his chukchi stories. some of the details in these legends, as he observed, “also coincide to a degree with russian 7 yukaghir legends” [bogoraz 1900: 93]. bogoraz recorded one such on the omolon river from an old russianized man innokentii iuglovskii (the surname is virtually illegible). this text i discovered in a notebook kept in the archives of the academy institute of oriental studies in st. petersburg: and there was in olden times the russian bogatyr’ pikhlutskii. he also fought against the chukchi and he wore armor. he was alone and there were great crowds of chukchi. then the chukchi surrounded him. he’d grab hold of one of them and keep swinging him round in all directions. well, despite this, they overcame him in the end, but they couldn’t run him through. they crowded round, knocked him down, and all lay on top of him. while he was still alive, they pulled out his eyes, cut his face, and started stabbing at him, but their knives broke. so in the end, because he was in great agony he undid his armor himself and exposed his chest. and when they looked at the armor later, it weighed, oh so many poods.(7) pavlutskii’s iron armor, which glistened in the sun and made him invincible, produced an indelible and terrifying impression on the chukchi. “dressed in iron, killing without mercy,” or “dressed in armor as white as a gull, with a long spear in his hands” is how pavlutskii is depicted in legends [tan 1962: 324-25]. v. v. antropova, who made a thorough study of the armaments of the peoples of the north east, particularly with reference to folklore sources, noted that in chukchi folklore warriors, who wore sealskin armor, are always contrasted to the russians who clothed themselves in iron [antropova 1957: 220]. the history of pavlutskii’s legendary chainmail continued to grow after the major’s death. simultaneously with the dissemination of folk legends the chainmail continued its real existence by being handed down from generation to generation within the toion clan of the chukchi, who had defeated the russian commander. the chainmail was then handed over to the kolyma police chief, baron maidel’ by the last of its inheritors, as described in maidel’’s journey through the north-eastern part of the iakutsk district: i was very touched when i said farewell to the old man amvraorgin . . . . as a parting gift he brought me pavlutskii’s chainmail which had been in his family, as far as he could remember, since his grandfather’s time. either he seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 8 couldn’t tell me anything about pavlutskii’s death, or else, for reasons known to him alone, he didn’t want to. however, he did assert that the chainmail belonged to a major. in all probability the information is accurate… i presented it to the irkutsk museum where it was destroyed in a fire in 1879 [maidel’ 1894: 264]. this incident recounted by maidel’ finds its reflection in one of the legends: “iakunin fell and immediately gave up the ghost. two of us came running. chymkyl took off the white armor and put it on, iron attire as white as a gull” [bogoraz 1900: no. 15, p. 93]. according to documents dating from the eighteenth century it was known by then that russian iron armor had become a trophy object for warriors from local ethnic groups [antropova 1957: 219]. it is hardly surprising that old amvraorgin did not feel like telling the russian police chief about the demise of the major. the death of pavlutskii, which for the chukchi symbolized the cessation of war with the russians,(8) came to be viewed in their legends as the culminating point of their history. his death is depicted variously in accounts which compete in the degree of their cruelty. even the way the russian commander was “killed without mercy” is described in horrifying detail in the legends: “they held him by the legs, split him in two with an ax from top to bottom between his legs so that his innards fell out” [bogoraz 1900: no. 129, 333]. there are more than a few documentary testimonies to the punitive reprisals carried out during the major’s campaigns. that is why the chukchi so “feared him that they could not pronounce his name without a shudder” [maidel’ 1894: 64]. facts are interwoven with fiction in the memories of local people and have evolved in many different directions. the exclusively oral diffusion of information was a significant factor in their folklorization. furthermore, many facts fused with motifs traditional in local folk narrative traditions. thus, in many of the legends about pavlutskii the outcome of the battle is decided by single combat between heroes, something characteristic of the folklore of many peoples in the extreme north east of siberia: “in the morning they went out to fight: 9 iakunin, clothed in iron, and nankachgat, dressed in seal skin” [bogoraz 1900: no. 127, p. 331]. names are changed in the legends, with the major losing his real name. for the chukchi pavlutskii was not a “name with meaning,” being difficult to pronounce and having no obvious significance.(9) those he fought against are given the names of various bogatyri, the leaders or ermechyps, some of whom were known in much earlier legends about the chukchi-koryak wars, such as, for example, lawtylywalyn (nodding his head) and others too [bogoraz 1900: 93, note 2]. actions and phenomena are hyperbolized. the major’s armor weighs “oh so many poods” (see above). on encountering his enemies, iakunin jumps “as high as a larch” [bogoraz 1900: no. 15, p. 92]. (leaps are one of the methods of defense from flying arrows, something learned in childhood and regarded as typical of the conduct of local epic heroes [antropova 1957: 242-44]). the battle of the two continues while the sun circles the heavens, spears are worn down to the handle [bogoraz 1900: no. 127, p. 331]. iakunin’s assistant, an adopted child from one of the nomadic peoples, is so strong and agile that he can overtake a wild deer and, after killing it, he then tosses it over his shoulders by its hind legs and carries it home [bogoraz 1900: no. 127, p. 331]. the bogatyr’, iakunin’s opponent, can lie down across a river and stop floating ice, so that nomadic carts can cross over him as if across terra firma [bogoraz 1900: no. 127, p. 331]. another bogatyr’ in a yukaghir song (see above), “rips out leafy trees by the roots,” a motif typical of russian byliny, familiar from examples recorded in indigirka, and also encountered in the folklore of the koryaks and itelmens [smirnov and shentalinskaia 1991: no. 50-54; antropova 1957: 240]. also typical of local traditions is the action of the hero, who, seeing no possibility of further resistance, does not ask for mercy, but instead presses his enemy to kill him, preferring death to capture or further torture. iakunin’s assistant acts in this way by pronouncing the voluntary death formula: “if i have become booty for you, (kill me)!” [bogoraz 1900: no. 127, 331]. pavlutskii too acts in this way: “he undid his armor and exposed his chest” (see above). in her research, antropova concludes that “the custom of seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 10 preferring death to capture is evidently of very ancient provenance” [antropova 1957: 235]. leaving some of those present alive to act as witnesses is also typical: “(we took – t. sh.) two more russkies alive ... you will be witnesses to what we are about to do, to the fact that the merciless killing of our people has now ceased” [bogoraz 1900: no. 129, 333]. there follows the description of the russian “commander’s” long, cruel and painful death with instructions to witnesses of the event: “now tell your people to stop the merciless killing of our people.” a similar motif may be met in other legends, such as the one about the attack of nomads on coastal peoples, where witnesses are left alive specially to remind their own people about the need to observe specific rules for conducting war, notably by declaring it in advance [menovshchikov 1950: 21]. antropova connects this with military tactics dating back to an early period in the development of society when the conduct of war was based on the norms of tribal revenge [antropova 1957: 233]. taking this into consideration, we may clearly relate the motifs which legends about pavlutskii have absorbed to an early stratum of military narratives. all this demonstrates how major pavlutski has turned into a “well rounded” character, acquiring a generalized image in narrative folk genres. the songs and legends about him are full of typical folk motifs, which were themselves absorbed from the current of epic consciousness among the original inhabitants of the region. what is more, this process takes place over a relatively short period of time. if one looks at the date of pavlutskii’s death and the earliest recording (that of the yukaghir song by matiushkin), the gap is approximately seventy years, so that it is even possible for the performer’s father to have been alive when the events occurred. the activities of major dmitrii ivanovich pavlutskii were of such importance and so highly visible, that his name inevitably receives frequent mention in the various accounts, journeys and descriptions written by geographers, historians, and investigators of north-eastern siberia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. apart from military matters, he also served as commander of the anadyr stockade and governor of iakutsk. his campaign along the shores of the pacific ocean demonstrated the possibility of 11 traveling along a land route from the shelag cape to the chukchi peninsula. thanks to pavlutskii’s initiative, the shores and islands in the bering strait were explored, thereby laying the foundations for the discovery of america from siberia [dikov 1974: 91]. in this context, the omission of the name of pavlutskii in russian encyclopedias cannot be regarded as accidental. there is nothing about him in the great soviet encyclopedia or even in the special siberian encyclopedia . there is, it is true, an article in brokgauz and efron’s encyclopedia [1897, 44: 575]. in it pavlutskii is given a minimal, discreet mention as major and traveler, after which there follows a list of some of his campaigns. the article concludes with the information: “he died as governor of iakutsk.” what do we have here; a simple mistake or deliberate misinformation? as early as 1869 a. sgibnev had published his materials for the history of kamchatka: the expedition of shestakov, in which the author, on the basis of documents extracted from siberian archives, reports that pavlutskii “was killed march 21, 1747 not far from the anadyr stockade.”(10) he also highlights the erroneous views of pavlutskii’s death which had variously appeared in print: “they wrongly state that dmitrii pavlutskii died while governor of iakutsk. we have actually had in our hands the correct source of information about pavlutskii’s death. while it is true that in 1759 pavlutskii was governor of iakutsk, this was not dmitrii, but andrei, a man with the same surname [sgibnev 1869: 34]. in the index to f. vrangel’’s journeys . . .” (1948), pavlutskii is named no less briefly and discreetly as an “explorer of north-east asia.” all of this constitutes “mythmaking,” in this instance of an official and ideological nature. surely a contradictory personage from the period of the russian colonization of siberia cannot really cast a shadow on a renowned official who was carrying out national policy, whether in tsarist or soviet times. but let us return to the russian song from markovo, whose verbal text in its fullest form was written down in a notebook on the same day or days as the sound recording was made: маеr pavlutskoi major pavlutskii zhil khrest’ianushko v sele bogatom, lived a peasant in a rich village, u nego-to buli tri syna. he had three sons. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 12 tut priezzhal k nemu maer-polkovnichek then a major-colonel came to him 5 ot samogo littsa gosudareva. from the very person of the sovereign. on chitat ukaz neradostnoi, he read an unpleasant edict, iz troikh brat’ev prosit vo nekruty. from three brothers he asks for one recruit. sprogovoril khrest’ianushka bogatyi: the rich peasant spoke: “mne bol’shego to syna nel’zia dat, “i can’t give up my oldest son, 10 a sredniago mne ne khochetsia, and i don’t want to give up the middle one, a men’shemu to gospod’ velit.” and the lord forbids giving up the youngest one.” tut khrest’ianskii syn zadumalsia then the peasant’s son fell thoughtful i zapechalilsia, i rasplakalsia. and he was saddened and he wept. “akh, ty moi batiushka rodimyi, “oh you, my own father, 15 te-to tebe detushki, vidno, rodimye, these obviously are your own children, a ia-to vidno pasynok.” but i obviously am a stepson.” tut khrest’ianushka zapechalilsia then the peasant was saddened i uzhalilsia, i rasplakalsia. and he was sorry and he wept. “vse vy moi detushki rodimye “all of you, my own children, 20 i podite v novu kuznicu, go to the new blacksmith shop, a vy skuite vse po nozhechku, and each of you forge a knife, kak po nozhechku, po bulatnenomu each a knife, a tempered one, i podite v chisto pole, and go to the open field, i nakhodite vy rakitovyi kust, and you find a willow bush, 25 i sresh’te vse po prutiku, and all of you cut off a branch each, vy dospeite vse po zherebu, and all of you get a lot each, vy brosaite vo sine moria. you cast it in the blue sea.” 13 starshago-to syna poverkh plavat. the oldest son’s lot floats on top. srednego brata pod potret vody, the middle son’s lot is a third under water, 30 a men’shego brat<a> zhereb (11) and the youngest son’s lot sinks kak kliuch ko dnu. to the bottom like a rock. tut khrest’ianskii brat rasplaka<lsia>. then the peasant brother wept. “akh vy brat’ia vse rodimye, “oh you, all my own brothers, a vy podte k ottsu, matere you go to our father and mother i k molodym zhenam. and to your young wives. 35 ottsu, matere – blagoslovenie, give my blessing to my father and mother, i rodu plemiani – chelobitetsa, and to our clan and tribe a petition, a mne-to uzh kak bog velit. as god has ordered me. konets the end (12) this song, which is part of the cycle of recruiting songs, is well-known and was at one time widespread. it has been published many times and recorded in various regions of russia [see the publication list in gippius and eval’d 1937: 480-81 (commentary to no. 107); azbelev and meshcherskii 1968: 323 (commentary to no. 135)]. scholars believe that recruiting songs arose in response to the levies made at the beginning of the eighteenth century conscripting peasants into the army for twenty-five years. the song has nothing to do with the fate of major pavlutskii. how then may we explain how the major, who is mentioned only at the beginning of the recruiting song, came to be linked in the minds of the markovo villagers with pavlutskii? according to baron maidel’, a positive opinion of pavlutskii had long existed among the residents of anadyr [maidel’ 1894: 248]. russianized chuvans and yukaghirs form the basis of the markovo population. they are descendants of those tribute-paying peoples who at the end of the seventeenth century and during the eighteenth became allies of the cossacks against the non-tribute paying chukchi. in one of the chukchi legends an assistant of iakunin (pavlutskii) is called “his adopted son from the chuvan seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 14 people” [bogoraz 1900: no. 15, 92]. as we know, the yukaghirs and chuvans “furnished the main contingent of assistants to the cossacks” [maidel’ 1894: 62]. the memories of the people of markovo about pavlutskii seem to have revived by an act of commemoration: the raising in 1900 of a cross at the place he was assumed to have died, major’s hill, which rises above the lake of the same name.(13) a medallion with the following inscription was attached to the cross: “in 1747, on this spot, while carrying out our sovereign’s commands, major pavlutskii fell in honorable battle; together with him, members of his military detachment and their loyal allies, the chuvans, also laid down their lives, dying the glorious death of the brave. let us pray to the lord for the orthodox fighters and all who were killed in battle for their faith and fatherland! july 20, 1900.”(14) it must have been the magical connotations of the military rank of “major” which evoked concrete associations among the markovo people, together with old folks’ stories and, perhaps, the memory of pavlutskii’s levies for his militia among the local inhabitants that firmly connected the major in the recruiting song with the real major pavlutskii. it is interesting that, although the two markovo melodies, which were recorded at an interval of sixty five years, differ noticeably one from the other, at the same time they share a series of features which bear certain similarities with variants of this song from the banks of the rivers pinega, mezen’, and pechora in north european russia [abramskii 1959: no. 50; gippius and eval’d 1937: no. 107, 107a; kolpakova 1963: no. 2, 196; kolpakova 1967: no. 52-53]. given the different rhythmical interpretation of the tonic nine-syllable verse, the common picture of intonational-modal development cannot be doubted: notably, the correlation of the basic tones, sometimes the almost literal coincidence of the same steps with the verse accents, and the coincidence of whole melodic turns (short melodic phrases). the greatest similarity appears in one of the mezen’ [kolpakova 1967: no. 53] and one of the lower pechora variants [kolpakova 1963: no. 196]. along with a notable closeness in the intonation (despite a different final basic tone in the lower pechora melody), the same one-line structure of the melody emerges. however, the composition of the songs from the mezen’ and lower pechora is distinguished by the 15 presence of the chain-like zapev, a melodic phrase which segments and repeats the last half-line. such a song stanza of one and a half lines in one of the markovo variants (recorded in 1965) is transformed into an analogous stanza where the “third” half-line does not fulfill a zapev function, but a cadential one. it is noteworthy that the mezen’ singers often omit the zachin in performance (as pointed out in the commentary); as a result, there appears a purely one-line musical form analogous to the markovo variant of a hundred years ago. it is possible that the one-line form was an original feature of the song. such patterns have been recorded in the north russian region of pomor’e, where the song existed as a recruit lament [kolpakova 1971: no. 17; kondrat’eva 1966: no. 82]. the compositional and rhythmical difference of the markovo melodies together with their specific intonational relationship can be explained either by the existence here of two versions of the song: an epic version (the early twentieth-century recording) and a lyro-epic version (the 1965 recording), or by the fact that this song was not generally widely known in anadyr and had been changed, subjected to an individual performer’s artistic preferences. the 1965 recording offers a clear demonstration of a soloimprovisatory manner of singing, evident in the rhythmic and metrical instability of the melody and verse structure. the verbal text of the markovo songs is also close to the recordings from the archangel region of northern russia that have already been mentioned. a close textual variant of the same song has also been recorded in indigirka [azbelev and meshcherskii 1968: no. 135, 253]. the shared origin of the anadyr and indigir songs from a source, most likely, in the eastern part of the russian north, is absolutely clear. there is no known connection between the indigir song and pavlutskii, although in indigirka they undoubtedly knew about him. on the shore of the river of that name there once stood a road marker, a cross called “maiorskii.” vrangel’ stated that this cross was “raised by pavlutskii before his campaign in the chukchi land and his death” [vrangel’ 1948: 376]. instead of the word “major,” which disappears from the indigyr variant, and turns out not to be obligatory, we here have: “a young colonel came . . .” thus the linking of the songs with the real pavlutskii occurred in anadyr because it was here that the most significant events of the major’s military biography were played out. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 16 thus a clear picture of how the image of a real historical character is transformed in folklore emerges; on the one hand, we have the mythologization of a historical hero in the folklore of the original inhabitants of siberia; on the other, in the russian song from markovo we see the linking of the name of a historical personage to a character from folklore. 17 notes 1 in the first instance, i chose to prepare rare folk material (epics and historical songs) for publication [shentalinskaia 1999; 200_]. 2 dashes are used here to indicate separate inscriptions randomly scattered over the cardboard surface of the case. the sound recording of the bylina “mitinka (mishenka – t. sh.) danilevich” has been noticeably distorted by mechanical damage and is virtually impossible to decipher. 3 v. g. bogoraz. fond 250, op. 1, ed. khr. 118а. 4 in the “dispatch” to the empress elizaveta petrovna and the “report” to the irkutsk provincial office written by witnesses to pavlutskii’s death the date is given as march 14, 1747 [al’kor and drezen 1945: 169, 173]. however, in some writing on the subject other dates are also given [for example: dioneo 1895: 236; iokhel’son 1997: 216]. 5 i made recordings of these in the city of anadyr in may, 2000. 6 bogoraz suggested that, in accordance with the tradition of russians in kolyma and anadyr, pavlutskii had his own special popular name, and that his additional name could have been “iakunia” [bogoraz 1934:172]. it is also possible, however, that “iakunin” came from the russian mishearing of a chukchi word of the nounparticiple type, formed from the adjective iaaken meaning “originating from afar” [bogoraz 1937]. it cannot be pure coincidence that dioneo (i. v. shklovskii) cites a remarkably similar transcription of a chukchi expression, whose meaning may also have direct links with the russian major: iaukunia kaul’, that is, people from afar, as they christened us (the newly arrived russians [t. sh.])” [dioneo 1895:66]. 7 source: v. i. iokhel’son. fond 23, op. 1, ed. khr. 10(3), l. 212 ob. the notebook undoubtedly belonged to v. g. bogoraz, since it is about his participation in sibiriakov’s expedition, something confirmed by the handwriting, contents of the recordings and date. see also the discovery by l. n. skrybykina [1889]. a pood is an old russian measure of weight equalling approximately 36 lb. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 18 8 the failure of pavlutskii’s campaigns to turn the chukchi into russian citizens, and his defeat and death in his final battle convinced the tsarist government to change its tactics and to start seeking a peaceful relationship with the chukchi based on trade [dikov 1989:83-87]. 9 see note 7 10 see note 5 11 fragments in < > indicate authorial reconstruction of the text which has here not been fully written out in contrast to round brackets, used when the text that has been deciphered and restored. 12 the notebook concerned is in the archives of the academy of sciences in st. petersburg, 2. 11-11 ob. the orthography of the original has been preserved and apparently reflects local pronunciation. punctuation has been added where necessary. 13 with regard to the date as well as the place of pavlutskii’s death different publications give different versions. nevertheless, according to historical documents compiled by participants in the event, the battle which was fatal for pavlutskii took place on a mountain “at the mouth of the orlov river near the anadyr stockade” [al’kor and drezen 1945: 169, 171-72]. 14 the inscription has been deciphered from a photograph taken in 1975 and presented to the author by viktor nikolaevich peryshkin, then a student at the school in markovo. bibliography abramskii, a. 1959. pesni russkogo severa [songs of the russian north]. moscow. al’kor, ia. p., and a. k. drezen, eds 1945. kolonial’naia politika tsarizma na kamchatke i chukotke v xviii v. [tsarist colonial policy in kamchatka and chukotka in the eighteenth century]. sbornik arkhivnykh materialov. leningrad. antropova, v. v. 1957. “voprosy voennoi organizatsii i voennogo dela u narodov krainego severo-vostoka sibiri” [questions of military organization and military affairs 19 among the peoples of extreme north-eastern siberia]. sibirskii etnograficheskii sbornik. vyp. 11 (trudy instituta etnografii im. n. n. miklukho-maklaia, novaia seria, vol. 35). moscow-leningrad. 99-245. azbelev, s. n., and n. a. meshcherskii, eds 1968. fol’klor russkogo ust’ia [folklore of the russian ust’ie region]. leningrad. bogoraz, v. g. 1900. materialy po izucheniiu chukotskogo iazyka i fol’klora, sobrannye v kolymskom okruge v. g. bogorazom [materials for the study of the chukchi language and folklore collected in the kolyma region by v. g. bogoraz]. pt 1: obraztsy narodnoi slovesnosti chukoch [examples of the folk literature of the chukchi]. st. petersburg. bogoraz ,v. g. (tan). 1934. chukchi [the chukchi]. pt 1. leningrad. bogoraz, v. g. 1937. luorovetlansko-russkii slovar’ [luorovetlan-russian dictionary]. moscow-leningrad. brokgauz, f. a., and i. a. efron. 1897. entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ [encyclopedic dictionary]. vol. 44. st. petersburg. dikov, n. n., ed. 1974. ocherki istorii chukotki s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei [essays on the history of chukotka from the earliest times to the present day]. novosibirsk. d’iachkov, a. e. 1893. “anadyrskii krai: rukopis’ zhitelia sela markova g. d’iachkova” [the anadyr region: the manuscript belonging to a resident of the village of markovo, mr d’iachkov], zapiski obshchestva izucheniia amurskogo kraia. vol. 2. vladivostok. dikov, n. n., ed. 1989. istoriia chukotki s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei [the history of chukotka from the earliest times to the present day]. moscow. dioneo. 1895. na krainem severo-vostoke sibiri [in far north-eastern siberia]. st. petersburg. gippius, e. v., and z. v. eval’d. 1937. pesni pinezh’ia [songs of pinezh’ia]. moscow. iokhel’son, v. i. 1997. koriaki [the koryaks]. st. petersburg. seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 20 kolpakova, n. p. et al. 1963. pesni pechory [the songs of the pechora area]. moscow-leningrad. kolpakova, n. p. et al. 1967. pesennyi fol’klor mezeni [the sung folklore from the mezen’]. leningrad. kolpakova, n. p., ed. 1971. russkie narodnye pesni karel’skogo pomor’ia [russian folk songs from karelian pomor’e]. leningrad. kondrat’eva, s. n. 1966. russkie narodnye pesni pomor’ia [russian folk songs of pomor’e]. moscow. maidel’, gergard. 1894. puteshestvie po severo-vostochnoi chasti iakutskoi oblasti v 1868-1870 godakh barona gergarda maidel’ia [baron gergard maidel’’s journey through the north-eastern part of the iakutsk district in 1868-1870]. st. petersburg. menovshchikov, g. a. 1950. chukotskie, eskimosskie, koriakskie skazki [chukchi, eskimo, and koryak tales]. khabarovsk. sgibnev, a. 1869. “materialy dlia istorii kamchatki: ekspeditsiia shestakova” [materials for the history of kamchatka: the expedition of shestakov]. morskoi sbornik. no. 2. 1-34. shentalinskaia, t. s. 1999. “ne proshlo i sta let . . . .” [not even one hundred years have passed . . . .]. zhivaia starina. no. 2. 31-34. shentalinskaia, t. s. 200_. “fonozapisi sibirskogo fol’klora iz amerikanskikh arkhivov” [sound recordings of siberian folklore from american archives]. fol’klor: kompleksnaia tekstologiia. moscow. (forthcoming) skrybykina, l. p. 1989. “zapisi bylin v. g. bogoraza, obnaruzhennye v sobranii v. i. iokhel’sona” [v. g. bogoraz’s recordings of byliny, discovered in the collection of v. i. iokhel’son]. russkii fol’klor. vol. 25. 153-58. smirnov, iu. i. and t. s. shentalinskaia. 1991. russkaia epicheskaia poeziia sibiri i dal’nego vostoka [russian epic poetry from siberia and the far east]. novosibirsk. tan (v. g. bogoraz). 1962. vosem’ plemen. chukotskie rasskazy [eight tribes. chukchi stories]. moscow. 21 vrangel’, f. p. 1948. puteshestvie po severnym beregam sibiri i po ledovitomu moriu [a journey along the northern shores of siberia and through the arctic ocean]. moscow. (translated by james bailey and faith wigzell) seefa journal 2002, vol. vii no. 1 microsoft word folkxiv_author.doc reports folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 169 the russian folk religious imagination: web-based digital archive and critical edition jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby university of kentucky the “folk” (russian: narod) and intellectual conceptions of them play a profound, though misunderstood and underappreciated, role in russian cultural history. the russian concept of the folk has evolved over time, yet aspects of earlier, historical views persist to the present day.(1) in the muscovy period, narod referred to all of the people in the state. when peter i took power and began the europeanization of russia, the folk were identified as those who spoke russian, not french, and maintained oral tradition. however, by the nineteenth century, russian thinkers, like the german romantics, idealized the folk, by then seen as simple peasants, arguing that the folk preserved the true essence of a nation's identity. russian slavophiles adopted this stance as well. the works of authors such as gogol and pushkin show that folk beliefs interacted with high culture in a profound way. this trend recurred in the twentieth century with the derevenshchiki movement exemplified by solzhenitsyn and rasputin. during the soviet period emphasis shifted from country to city and to the proletariat as the symbol for revolutionary russia. as a result, a shift away from the folk occurred and the folk (and their practices) came to represent beliefs that the soviet union was trying to eliminate. only after the mid-1930s did the concept of the folk as possible role models for the socialist state gain some currency. in the post-soviet period we have seen a resurgence of the idealization of the folk as a symbol of the true russia.(2) in essence, in order to understand russia, one must study both the folk and elite conception of them and their belief systems. it is here that the intersection and also the disjunction between “high” and “low” culture is profound. study of the relationship between folk and elite is hampered by the fact that, during the soviet period, the official state policy of atheism discouraged work on religious texts. as a result, there is a wealth of unstudied material in all folk genres related to religion. while folklorists certainly collected material pertaining to religion throughout the soviet period, they were often prevented from publishing their data. such records languished in archives and private collections. soviet theorists, working from nineteenth century positivist arguments, often contended that folk religion was based on dvoeverie ('dual faith'), meaning christianity 170 combined with an older, agrarian religion. the soviet government, to perpetuate the official view that the folk never truly believed in christianity, was willing to preserve folk tradition, but not its religious expression. to study russian religious belief without a consideration of folk conceptions is to overlook one of the most important sources of russian religious ideas. even during the soviet period, folk religious beliefs played an important role in daily life. for example, people continued to perform those acts inherited from folk religion that insured the proper transition of the soul of the deceased to the afterlife. typically, they held commemorative meals on the third, ninth, and fortieth days after death. within the context of an officially atheistic society, this is striking, and it is only through an understanding of folk ritual and belief that we can explain why practices such as this existed in the soviet context. the russian folk religious imagination (rfri), funded by a national endowment for the humanities digital start-up grant and by funds from the university of kentucky, combines the skills of folklorists and linguists in an international collaborative project. participants include: jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby (university of kentucky), vera kuznetsova (institute of philology, novosibirsk), yelena minyonok (institute of world literature, moscow), mark lauersdorf (university of kentucky), alexei lavrentiev (institute of philology, novosibirsk), sergey minyonok (institute of world literature, moscow) and doug reside (university of maryland). this research group unites specialists in prose narrative, ritual, and song, along with historical linguists, dialectologists, and computer programmers. our goal is to explore folk religion in all its aspects, using a web-based format. our focus is the language of the texts. the russian folk religious imagination (rfri) is a dual-language (russian and english) multimedia critical edition designed to provide open access to audio, video, image, and textual materials. the centerpiece of the prototype site [www.rch.uky.edu/rfri] is an audio recording of a siberian variant of the legend about christ’s betrayal by judas in gethsemane. it is accompanied by a russian transcript and english translation as well as by linguistic and folkloric commentaries (by kuznetsova and rouhier-willoughby). in addition, we feature video of an easter celebration from the cossack region of russia (with commentaries by y. minyonok and rouhier-willoughby) as well as folk icons of christ. we have chosen to begin our work with christ, the central figure of christian faith, and legends and rituals related to his life. reports folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 171 focusing initially on christ will allow us to foreground the most important holiday of the orthodox faith, easter, and its surrounding cycle. had we chosen a saint, then the options for ritual study would be much less central to the belief system. during the next phase of our project we plan to prepare additional folk legends about christ. after centering the foundational work of the project around the essential figure of christian doctrine, we will expand to a larger conception of religion within the folk community and in the broader world of folk orthodoxy (e.g., the role of mary, the saints, old testament figures, etc.). featuring texts related to one central figure allows us to demonstrate the range of existing variants. examining variants is essential for studying the range of folk beliefs and the religious mind, since to base conclusions on a single text necessarily limits the scope of understanding of the issues. in addition to providing multiple variants, our website will allow scholars to easily ascertain the sources of the material in question, e.g., non-christian siberian myths or local pre-christian beliefs. this will be done through direct, side-by-side searching and comparison of texts from different regions and time periods. therefore, our project will ultimately incorporate a full range of variants for each text presented. ours is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the russian religious mind because it combines materials that are more often studied separately. thus it features legends and religious songs, ritual practices, and icons. each genre informs the other and contributes to a better grasp of the complex system of narratives, artifacts, and practices that constitute folk (and individual) belief. legends and religious songs in russian folklore scholarship, the legend is, roughly speaking, a prose genre that includes biblical figures. sometimes these stories are retellings of biblical material, for example: how judas betrayed christ; how god created the world; how adam and eve were expelled from the garden of eden. in other cases, legends involve biblical personages, or other religious figures such as saints, in plots that are clearly apocryphal. examples include christ traveling russia with saint peter or saint nicholas; the mother of god visiting a russian peasant, etc. one of the most exciting elements of our collection is a series of legends that were composed during the soviet period or in the post-soviet period about how christ punished people who destroyed their churches at the behest of soviet authorities. as a result, we can establish not only the dynamism of this genre, but also how it functioned throughout (soviet) russian 172 history. religious songs or verses are the poetic equivalent of this genre. as selivanov [2004: 11, 26] discusses in his history of the genre, these songs include pre-christian elements as well as revisions of the bible itself. an example is the song in which saint egor [george], not god, creates the world. legends and religious songs are particularly interesting for several reasons. first, they reflect an intricate and fascinating combination of canonical religion with local beliefs, meaning siberian native influences. second, they illustrate folk conceptions of christianity. for example, they explain why thirteen is an unlucky number: there were twelve apostles and christ was the thirteenth and he was betrayed and killed. another story explains that the aspen tree is cursed because judas hung himself from that tree. third, they show how legends incorporated a soviet-era understanding of reality. for example, the legend on our project site makes use of contemporary soviet social relations to explain the relationship between christ and his apostles and christ is called the “boss” [nachal’nik] of the apostles. in addition, it explains the use of two common proverbial expressions relating to judas that are based on a folk understanding of the events in the bible. fourth, they serve to illuminate the interaction among various folk genres. in the case of our first legend, we can trace certain formulaic expressions in the legend to a religious song about the mother of god where she dreams of her son’s fate. the teller clearly relied on the phraseology in this song to construct the prose narrative. folk iconography folk icons are a distinct branch of russian iconography. while churches were filled with icons painted by “officially sanctioned” artists, folk icons were produced by local painters for family homes and for some smaller churches. these icons reflect folk conceptions of christianity. they portray christ, for example, in the folk dress of the period. they depict events that are described in folk legends such as popular versions of saints’ martyrdoms or miraculous events. thus, while they are not canonical, they provide valuable insights into the local versions of christian belief and what was relevant to the average person. folk religious ritual practices while ritual practices did not prompt the telling of legends, they are an essential component of folk religion. they provide valuable information on regional variants of belief and practice. they show how regional native traditions and pre-christian russian religion intermingled reports folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 173 with canonical christianity. borrowed ritual acts were reinterpreted within the christian system and became an integral part of the folk understanding of christianity. for example, our project site provides video of various practices from the cossack region of russia related to easter. an essential element in cossack easter celebrations, and indeed in celebrations across most of russia, is a visit to the graveyard. the grave serves as the locus of the relationship between the ancestors and the living. for this reason, people clean and decorate graves as part of the easter cycle and have a meal there, leaving some food behind for the dead. this practice is related to a pre-christian ancestor cult, but has been reinterpreted within the christian system. according to this interpretation, just as christ died and rose from the dead at easter, so too do the ancestors. ancestors do not return to the earth, as christ did (although that belief is expressed by some), but live another life in the afterworld. such beliefs coalesce into a single system that provides a more complete picture of folk christianity in russia and illustrates its complexity. commentaries all the material outlined above will be accompanied by commentaries provided by the collaborators and will include: references to related texts/rituals and their variants; discussion of the belief system surrounding the legend/ritual (e.g., why the aspen is a cursed tree); comments on the extent of dvoeverie (including borrowings from nonorthodox religious systems); discussion of the relationship between folk material and canonical belief; description of the social functions of the texts/rituals; and discussion of how they reflect the teller’s/participants’ worldview. initially, commentaries will focus on each individual text/ritual and the interrelations between them and other extant texts or documented rituals. as we amass more material, however, we will also provide thematic commentaries on particular issues such as dvoeverie or the image of christ. our materials will span the vast geographic area of russia. we intend to examine the following questions: 1) is “dual faith” an actual characteristic of russian orthodoxy? this issue has been hotly debated by scholars. arguments have revolved around the official soviet position on this issue and its subsequent influence on the approach to this material in the twentieth century. there are questions about the extent and universality of dual belief and even its very existence. levin [2004] has argued that what scholars of orthodoxy call “dual faith” is present in all types of christianity and has 174 been erroneously considered to be something distinctly russian. our data will provide fodder for this debate by illustrating the extent to which non-christian material forms a part of popular orthodoxy and the role that it plays in the orthodox context; 2) what are the various influences on the folk understanding of religion? preliminary research shows many possible sources including: non-christian siberian mythic systems, pre-christian russian beliefs, non-orthodox christian beliefs, soviet-era conceptions of daily life, and the folk tradition more broadly conceived. for example, some siberian orthodox christians tell a legend about how god created the world that is clearly not biblical, but borrowed from native siberian religion. in this legend, satan brings up dirt from the bottom of the ocean, which god (or christ) uses to create the earth. the influence of local flora and fauna can be seen in a simple and elegant example of substitution in the biblical story of noah and the flood. here it is a teal and not a dove that brings back to the ark evidence that the flood has ended. equally illustrative is the story of adam and eve, where the first man and woman fall from god’s favor not because of an appetite for apples, but for berries. 3) what is the nature of folk orthodoxy, how and where does it differ from canonical orthodoxy, and how does it interact with formal institutions? while most “folk” believers did not doubt that they were orthodox, their interpretations of religious doctrine could often differ from those of the mainstream church and, in fact, directly conflict with it. for example, it was traditional to have a sorcerer at nineteenth-century weddings to protect the couple, a practice to which priests strongly objected. nevertheless, orthodox peasants continued to invite them, despite the church’s disapproval, and did not consider themselves “less” christian as a result. this study will contribute to research on “lived orthodoxy” and how heterogeneity of belief and historical change shape practice and faith over time.(3) 4) what functions did these legends serve within the group that produced them? the role of a given folk genre is an intricate and complex issue. certainly, a major function of the legends was to transmit orthodox belief and proper behavior. however, they also may serve to unite or divide the community, expressing issues that cannot be openly expressed in other types of discourse. an example would be a legend discussing how christ determined women’s role in society and its use to express dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in daily life. 5) how do the various aspects of folk christianity interact? we consider a wide variety of genres and practices to examine their reports folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 175 interactions and evolution, rather than as stand-alone expressions of folk belief. 6) what is the image and role of christ in folk religious belief? while there are legends centered on a vast array of biblical and other religious figures, we have chosen to focus on christ at this stage. we will address the issue of how folk conceptions of the central figure of christianity interact with and deviate from orthodox doctrine. 7) what are the range and extent of variation in these texts/practices over time? for example, we have access to multiple variants of legends about christ punishing those who destroyed churches during the soviet period. these clearly could not have existed in the nineteenth century. however, the motif of christ doling out punishment was found in that period. we must examine whether and how these texts are related to one another, whether they existed in both european and asian russia, and whether they are based on established folk narrative patterns. thus, changes in folk orthodoxy as reflected in various ritual practices and narratives will form a core portion of our study. our long-term goals are to create a site that will allow comparison of a broad set of oral literature texts (songs/legends), folk iconography, and ritual descriptions in a single media-rich environment. this multimedia critical edition, combining these elements into a cohesive, integrated package, will be our first step in a new approach to folk material, one that brings together specialists in various fields to produce a sensory-rich analysis of folk religion as a coherent, integrated system. we will enable users to access and navigate the contents by creating coarseand fine-grained linking between individual materials and pieces of those materials. the construction of this framework will rely on opensource tools to ensure maximum accessibility. there has been almost no work done in slavic folklore that takes advantage of the digital technologies currently available. there are a reasonable number of scholarly websites devoted to the study of folklore in russia and elsewhere.(4) except for one project at the university of alberta and a website to accompany laura olson’s book performing russia,(5) there has been little development in the use of digital media to provide access to authentic materials for use by students and scholars. as the materials are collected, we will digitize them, encode them using tei-xml and annotate them with appropriate metadata. a key focus of technological development in the project will be experimentation with fine-grained linking not only between individual media elements, but also between internal segments of those elements. a 176 simple example of this type of internal linking between media files is the bidirectional keying of an audio file to its accompanying textual transcription, such that the text “scrolls” to follow the progress of audio playback, and a given segment of audio can be activated from the corresponding location within the textual transcription. similarly, an embedded folk reference in a legend text will be linked to its pictorial representation in a corresponding folk icon, locating, if necessary, a specific quadrant of the total image; in the reverse direction, activation of that same “hotspot” within the icon image will call up the specific portion of text in which it is referenced. current development work on our prototype infrastructure (as a template for the full-scale multimedia critical edition) has allowed us to address issues specific to the preparation of the media elements for their presentation in the way we envisioned. we have settled on using the ajax xml encoder (axe), a multimedia annotation tool being developed at the university of maryland, for much of the development of our project. axe is a web-based tool for “tagging” text, image, audio and video files with xml metadata, a process that is now a necessary first step in the production of digital material. we plan to develop axe to move beyond its current tagging functionality and to build in the linking functionality significant to our edition. axe as it is being developed will enable the searching of tags across various multimedia, but we will need a system where the results of such searches are automatically activated. for example, when the user is watching a video of a ritual and arrives at a point where there is a tag that links to a tag in the commentary, or in an edited text, that link needs to “pop up” automatically giving the user the option to move from the video to the text. the primary russian texts collected for this digital edition will be encoded in xml and subjected to structural markup according to the most recent version (p5) of the internationally recognized text encoding initiative (tei).(6) initial encoding would include a tei header (containing metadata about the text and its electronic version) and basic structural markup including textual divisions. the edition will also include markup describing many different aspects of the texts, and we will extend the tei (adding elements and attributes) where necessary. the scholarly apparatus of this project includes linguistic markup, enabling us to tag irregular forms and dialect features, and allowing us to identify features such as words borrowed from older russian usage or old church slavonic. we cite references and, when possible, links to reports folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 177 other related texts, including both primary sources (christian sermons, biblical citations, other legend texts) and secondary sources (scholarly books and articles). we describe sources of borrowings from other cultures and contexts, usually localized aspects from native siberian legends that are transferred into the russian biblical legends (consider the aforementioned examples where a teal, not a dove, informs noah that the floodwaters are receding). we also include identification and explanatory discussion of realia (that is, textual references to real-world people, places, and events) that appear in the legends. finally, we will incorporate into our text encoding inter-media links between the legend texts and the ritual videos, folk iconography images, and song and legend audio files. the english translations of the primary russian texts and all other textual elements of the project (commentary, analysis, transcription of audio and video text) will undergo similar tei-xml markup. a complete understanding of folk religion involves understanding the relationships among multiple aspects of traditional lore, many of which are most richly and accurately captured in image and sound. to truly understand the folk religious imagination, one must examine how various genres and practices interact. for this reason, the ideal scholarly product investigating folk religion would include not just materials collected together, but materials connected together. the technical preparation of the materials will allow for their use in research and teaching at any level, from the simple reading of texts and viewing of media, to detailed intertextual comparisons and thematic studies across genres and practices. the publication of the materials in an open-access on-line environment will allow for delivery of materials to a wider audience than could be reached by a scholarly print edition. digital media give us the opportunity to make the rich results of this valuable research available to a wide audience for use in research and classroom teaching. notes 1 see olson 2003 and kononenko 2007 for a discussion of russian conceptions of the folk in the 20th and 21st centuries. 2 see rouhier-willoughby 2008 for a discussion of the post-soviet attitude toward folklore and folk identity among the urban populace. 3 see freeze 1990, 1996, 1998, 2004; worobec 2001; chulos 2003; kivelson and greene 2003; robson 2004; smilianskaia 2003; and shevzov 2004 for recent studies on lived orthodoxy and the interaction of vernacular faith with doctrine and the church hierarchy. 178 4 see: http://www.ruthenia.ru/folklore/publications.htm, http://www.ruthenia.ru/folklore/links.html, and http://www.crees.ku.edu/seefa/ 5 see: http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/uvp/ and http://www.colorado.edu/germslav/department/r-olson.htm 6 tei p5: guidelines for electronic text encoding and interchange, edited by c. m. sperberg-mcqueen and lou burnard, 2007 http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/html/ bibliography chulos, chris. 2003. converging worlds: religion and community in peasant russia, 1861-1917. dekalb: northern illinois university press. freeze, gregory l. 1990. “the rechristianization of russia: the church and popular religion, 1750-1850.” studia slavica finlandensia 7: 101-136. freeze, gregory l. 1996. “subversive piety: religion and the political crisis in late imperial russia.” journal of modern history 68:2, 308-350. freeze, gregory l. 1998 “institutionalizing piety: the church and popular religion, 1750-1850,” in imperial russia: new histories for the empire. jane burbank and david l. ransel eds. bloomington: indiana university press. freeze, gregory l. 2004 “a pious folk? religious observance in vladimir diocese, 1900-1914,” jahrbücher für geschichte osteuropas 52(3): 323-340. kivelson, valeria and robert greene, (eds.). 2003. orthodox russia: belief and practice under the tsars. university park: pennsylvania state university press. kononenko, natalie. 2007. slavic folklore. westport, ct: greenwood. levin, eve. 2004. левин, ив. двоеверие и народная религия в истории россии. [dual faith and folk religion in the history of russia]. москва: индрик. olson, laura. 2004. performing russia: folk revival and russian identity. new york: routledge, robson, roy. 2004. solovki: the story of russia told through its most remarkable islands. new haven: yale university press. rouhier-willoughby, jeanmarie. 2008. village values: negotiating identity, gender, and resistance in urban russian life-cycle reports folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 179 rituals. bloomington, in: slavica. selivanov, f. m. 2004. селиванов, ф. м. народные духовные стихи. [folk religious songs]. москва: русская книга. shevzov, vera. 2004. russian orthodoxy on the eve of revolution. new york: oxford university press. smilianskaia, elena b. 2003. смилянская, елена б. волшебники, богохульники, eретики: народная религиозность и «духовные преступления» в россии xviii в. [sorcerers, blasphemers and heretics: folk religiosity and “spiritual crimes” in russia of the 18th century]. москва: индрик worobec, christine. 2001. possessed: women, witches, and demons in imperial russia. dekalb: northern illinois university press. microsoft word folk2006[3] sheryl format3.doc reviews 129 jack v. haney. the complete russian folktale, vol. 6: russian tales of love and life. armonk, new york: m. e. sharpe, 2006. glossary. bibliography. 416pp. $89.95 (cloth). isbn 1-56324-495-0. jack v. haney. the complete russian folktale, vol. 7: russian tales of clever fools. armonk, new york: m. e. sharpe, 2006. glossary. bibliography. 216pp. $68.95 (cloth). isbn 0-7656-1719-6. these two volumes of russian folktales are the capstone of a remarkable achievement. jack v. haney, professor of slavic languages and literatures at the university of washington, seattle, a specialist in medieval literature and folklore, has for many years taken on the laborious task of selecting, translating and annotating a unique compendium of russian folktales. this seven-volume set, with the welldeserved title the complete russian folktale, comprising a staggering 738 tales, is now finished. (volumes 1–5 have been reviewed in previous issues of folklorica). what makes this collection uniquely complete is that it includes examples from the russian tradition of virtually every extant folktale type, according to the internationally recognized aarnethompson (at) system of classification, used by slavic folklorists as well. (cf. the index of east slavic tale types, sravnitel’nyi ukazatel’ siuzhetov: vostochnoslavianskaia skazka, compiled by l. g. barag et al., leningrad 1979). for each text, professor haney has included an annotation indicating sources for the tale when they are known, relative distribution, and other information. for scholars interested in comparative folktale studies who do not read russian, this will be an essential resource. most of the tales in the collection are appearing in translation for the first time; many are taken from archives or obscure collections found in few libraries. i know of no other translation that presents a folktale tradition in this “complete” fashion. volumes 1-5 include animal tales, fairy tales, and religious legends, as well as an introductory survey of the russian folktale (history, characters, themes). volume 6 presents tale types at 850-999, what professor haney calls “tales of love and life.” stith thompson refers to these tales as belonging to the category of the novella or romantic tale, while for russian scholarship they are novelistic tales, tales of everyday life (bytovye skazki), or satirical tales. none of these designations is entirely satisfactory. the events in these tales are improbable or impossible, but not fantastic as in the fairy tale or wondertale proper (found in volumes 3 and 4). the setting of the tales is not a thrice-tenth realm, but a russian village or city. we are still in the realm of fantasy, folklorica 2006, vol. xi 130 but not the fantasy of the fairy tale. there are difficult tasks for the protagonist to overcome, many episodes are repeated three times, but structurally these tales are simpler than fairy tales, without the complex morphology elucidated by vladimir propp. one obvious difference appears in tales lacking the obligatory happy ending: in one tale the protagonist is a poor man who tries but fails to conceal his poverty from a prospective bride (no. 513). nevertheless, there are happier tales about courtship, and the protagonist, frequently a peasant or soldier, usually overcomes his antagonist (a wealthy merchant or landlord). a clever hero avoids being punished by a general, after sleeping with the general’s wife and taking his money (no. 520). a soldier beats a general at cards and eventually marries the general’s daughter. the tsar appoints him head of a division (no. 531). the class conflict in these tales is obvious, but many readers may be struck instead by a kind of popular monarchism, found here as well, when the tsar is portrayed positively, sympathetic to the peasant or commoner. in one tale peter the great enjoys peasant food while on the road and asks his cook to prepare it for him at home (no. 589). a soldier saves the tsar’s life from bandits (no. 620). the tsar shows himself to be wiser than a priest and a landowner, and he rewards the clever hero, a potter who manages to humiliate a prominent boyar (no. 583). ivan the terrible, on the other hand, tries to cheat a peasant who has helped him. the peasant, who turns out to be a divine manifestation, warns him that he has now brought treachery to russia (no. 592). riddles or riddling speech play a role in many tales. the clever peasant hero teaches peter the great riddles which his generals and officers then cannot answer (no. 578). ivan the terrible also learns riddles from a peasant (no. 592). the hero is rewarded for answering the landlord’s riddles, while an envious rich peasant then fails (no. 587). the hero’s riddles or riddling speech win a princess (nos 508 and 510). a soldier uses riddles to outwit a rich merchant in a tale that also exposes bad living conditions in the army (no. 512). several tales feature a clever girl or young woman who presents or guesses riddles. a peasant’s wise daughter answers the riddles posed by a military governor (no. 525). a poor man’s daughter answers a judge’s riddles (no. 529). tsar peter i is outwitted by a clever woman who speaks in riddles and manages to avoid the traps he sets for her (no. 526). these clever women recall other folktale traditions, and figures from medieval russian literature like princess olga and fevronia of murom. reviews 131 ill-tempered wives are the focus of another group of tales. a man tricks his wicked, contrarian wife into falling into a ravine. later, when he tries to pull her out, he pulls out a devil instead. the devil complains of how the man’s wife had tormented him and then helps the man marry a gentleman’s daughter (no. 514). other tales concern a man who frightens his obstinate wife into submission (no. 559), disciplines both his wife and his mother-in-law (no. 560) or his lazy wife (no. 561). it is fascinating to see how the russian folk tradition has treated the oedipus theme (nos 603 and 604). volume 7 includes tale types at 1000-1199, what the at index calls “tales of the stupid ogre.” these tales are characterized by an earthy humor, and several include erotic or scatological elements. they celebrate the triumph of the hero (a peasant, laborer, soldier, or ivan the fool) over his adversaries (a priest, merchant, or devil). most are structurally and thematically simple—the hero uses a trick or a series of tricks or practical jokes to outwit his greedy and deceitful opponent—but readers will surely not resist their charm. hired by a priest, the hero agrees to a contract forcing the first one who gets angry to forfeit money. of course the priest always gets angry first. told to watch the door of a granary, the hero removes the door and takes it with him. he foils the priest’s attempts to drown him. often sent to devils to recover money, he fools them into giving up all their gold. when the hero confronts a devil or imp, they compete in running, wrestling, whistling, or squeezing milk from a stone. when a lion is angry at the hero, he gets the lion drunk (no. 714). figures from russian folk belief occasionally appear: the forest spirit (no. 733), the rusalka (no. 711), baba iaga (nos 708 and 730). christ himself appears as a donor in a tale where a soldier outwits a mischievous spirit (kikimora), but christ reproaches the soldier because he has prevented death from killing people for a whole three years (no. 720). a soldier exchanges his violin for a magic book from the devil, outwits the devil many times, but finally succumbs to him. music lovers will recognize this tale as a source for igor stravinsky’s l’histoire du soldat (no. 722). some tales include the blinding of a one-eyed devil or bogatyr’ and recall the episode of polyphemus from the odyssey (nos 711, 713, 714). in the very last tale in the collection, really a legendary narrative about the supernatural (no. 738), a threshing barn saves girls from devils by singing a song about the growing and processing of flax until dawn, when the devils run away. it recalls slavic folk beliefs about a female spirit, the noon woman (poludnitsa in russian), who folklorica 2006, vol. xi 132 sometimes must be kept at bay by talking about the preparation of flax for an hour. the at and east slavic indices continue with tale types 1200-2400, which are jokes and anecdotes, not folktales proper, and therefore outside the scope of professor haney’s translation, as he points out in his postscript, which includes some personal observations on the folktales. at a time when the study of russian and other slavic languages regrettably appears to be in decline, it is all the more important that upto-date, scholarly, annotated translations of slavic folklore be available in english and other western languages. the complete russian folktale is a very timely contribution in this respect, and the arrangement by tale type will facilitate comparison, showing what is both unique and international in the russian tradition. like other forms of folklore, folktales are a rich source of cultural information, and readers will gain a special insight into the life of the people who told and enjoyed the tales, a particularly russian experience. yet these tales are part of a common human cultural heritage that can and should be enjoyed by a wider audience. thanks to professor haney’s many years of patient dedication, for the first time, english-language readers have access to a truly representative compendium of this important oral tradition. folklorists, slavists, medievalists, literary historians, and interested readers of all backgrounds can now enjoy these wonderful tales, and together we can thank professor haney for this extraordinary, unprecedented effort and achievement. andreas johns, university of california untitled reviews 179 reviews arvidsson, stefan. aryan idols: indo-european mythology as ideology and science. translated by sonia wichmann. chicago: university of chicago press, 2006. bibliography. index. 354 pp. $55.00 (cloth). isbn 978-0-226-02860-6. aryan idols, stefan arvidsson’s impressive historiography of the “indo-european discourse,” seeks to de-mythologize that discourse. “myth transforms history into fate,” he writes; “historiography reveals - in the best case -fate as the result of decisions made” (322). arvidsson traces the “decisions made” over the 200-plus years that stretch between the discovery of the indo-european language family by sir william “oriental” jones in 1786 and the ideological and academic turf wars of today. he speculates provocatively about the underlying motives and long-term consequences of those decisions. his project is ambitious, and his summary is useful and often thought-provoking. arvidsson’s study begins with an epigraph from friedrich nietzsche’s die götzen-dämmerung: “there are more idols than realities in the world.” the particular idols arvidsson pursues are the intellectual constructions of “indo-european” in the service of both modern “science” and modern “idol-ology.” in the course of five detailed chapters, arvidsson unpacks two centuries of what he calls the “indo-european discourse” and addresses the fundamental issue: while positing prehistoric peoples such as the indo-europeans is, “to use the words of claude lévi-strauss, ‘good to think with’” (arvidsson writes), we must still admit to certain critical facts: the indo-europeans “have not left behind any texts, no objects can be definitely tied to them, nor do we know any ‘indo-european’ by name” (xi). what, then, besides the temptations of imagination encouraged by a paucity of concrete documentation, explains the evolution, influence, and longevity of the “idols” created by the indo-european discourse? arvidsson responds to the question by methodically analyzing the academic dialogue of ideas and agendas that contributed to the discourse from the end of the 18th century to the present day. arvidsson chronologically traces the various indo-european “models” and their advocates through their historical transmutations: 1) the early linguistic and cultural models of william jones and thomas young, which introduced indo-european as a superior language type with a shadow cultural model; this view was supported by the romantic folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 180 ideal and the notion of the volksseele; 2) friedrich max müller’s comparative religion and “nature mythology” model, which viewed the indo-europeans as spiritually sophisticated and linguistically superior; 3) jules michelet’s and ernest renan’s model of the indo-european as europe’s indigenous answer to the outdated moral and cultural ideals of judeo-christianity, whose roots lay in the middle east; 4) the racial anthropology model, which promoted the indo-europeans as an evolved master race with superior physical characteristics -a point of view ostensibly supported by materialism, positivism, and physiological research; darwinism later added its own spin to an evolutionist model of the indo-european discourse, while the development of ethnology and folklore as disciplinary fields added a new dimension to the modern european understanding of nationalism and identity; 5) the nazis’ vitalist model, which emphasized the indo-european’s superior stamina, vitality, love of this life, and acceptance of the world -a counterbalance to perceived social “degeneration,” the jenseits focus of judeochristianity, and the “inferiority” of other races; 6) the speculative postwar models of georges dumézil and marija gimbutas, and the ideological struggles among more recent scholars who strive to retain or take control of the discourse. here arvidsson commends the work of bruce lincoln as a counterbalance to prevailing indo-european scholarship. lincoln’s historicism, re-examination of terms, and disciplinary critique have, in arvidsson’s view, “tried to once and for all topple all indo-european, indo-german, and aryan idols” (308). arvidsson locates the indo-european discourse within the history of national, religious, ideological, class, and political beliefs held by educated, middle-class, european males over the course of two centuries: “the epic about the aryan has in many ways been an epic about bourgeois ideals, and it has also gone hand in hand with the ideological changes of this class” (318). by “bourgeois ideals” arvidsson means the ideals of the “educated bourgeoisie,” the middle-class professors in their germanic-style universities. so “indo-european research has, in many ways, been an attempt to write the origin narrative of the [educated] bourgeois class -a narrative that, by talking about how things originally were, has sanctioned a certain kind of behavior, idealized a certain type of persona, and affirmed certain feelings” (319-320). arvidsson reminds the reader that the academy has lived with the indo-european discourse long enough for some scholars to assume that it must be based on scientific fact. in spite of the limitations of factual knowledge of indo-europeans, for many scholars “‘the indo-europeans’ reviews 181 exist in the same way that birches or houses do, and not in the same way as, for example, ‘the orient,’ ‘atoms,’ or ‘paleolithicum’ [i.e., the paleolithic]; that is to say, [for many scholars the indo-europeans exist] not as objects that have been named and created by and for research, and whose right to existence is dependent on a number of (in the best case scenario) clearly formulated criteria and questions,” but as a physical and historical entity in their own right (252-53). scholars have come to assume that there actually was an identifiable group of people who shared “indo-european” language and thereby shared culture, religion, and even racial characteristics; that their “indo-european-ness” was crucial to understanding their values and belief system; that these values and beliefs differed significantly from jewish/semitic or judeo-christian paradigms. arvidsson’s summary of ideas and polemics dispels such assumptions and reveals the manner in which the indo-european discourse was a construct, worked on by different ideologies over modern time and across european space. arvidsson’s point is precisely that the indo-european discourse is not a proven constellation of facts, but an artificial discourse created by scholars to provide a platform for, among other things, intellectual speculation about origins, identity, selfesteem, knowledge, belonging, and class. it is a scholarly “tool,” not a scientific “fact.” at the start of his historiography arvidsson (who does not fear the i-word) asked “whether there is something in the nature of research about indo-europeans that makes it especially prone to ideological abuse” (3); by the end of his study, he has presented a convincing argument that there must be. he explains, in considerable detail, the manner in which the indo-european discourse began with idealist, humanist, liberal, and progressive ideas, but became increasingly materialist, positivist, traditional, and finally reactionary. the indoeuropean discourse was the creation of an “aryan myth,” a scientific, erudite myth that required the collaboration of linguistics, mythology, comparative religions, anthropology, folklore, archaeology, and cultural history. the lines between myth and ideology and science and ideology are not clearly drawn: ideology shapes even “scientific” scholarship. arvidsson's study reveals how fuzzy the lines are in the indo-european case -and his work serves to remind all scholars of the limitations imposed on interpretation and understanding by history, individual and collective beliefs, and human desire. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 182 this brief review cannot do justice to the many issues that arvidsson raises -not only about our understanding of what the indoeuropean discourse is, but also about why it exists and in what terms and contexts. he is aware that, as a scholar, he is as much molded by his own age and its philosophies and rivalries as max müller was molded by liberal protestantism, or renan by french anti-clericalism, or mircea eliade by early nazi sympathies, or dumézil by french fascist theory, or gimbutas by her feminism and anti-sovietism. “of course, the closer we come to our own time the harder it is to see how ideologies -in which we ourselves swim around -affect the truth seeking that strives for objectivity and persuasive evidence” (292). arvidsson himself swims to some degree in marxism (albeit not in any dogmatic way). his study is a useful contribution to the “house-cleaning” of the discourse first proposed by bruce lincoln. part of the growing critique of indoeuropean scholarship, his work exposes prevailing assumptions, documents and summarizes the discourse, and opens provocative new perspectives on the troublesome but perpetually fascinating concept of the indo-european. two final comments: first, arvidsson makes assumptions about his readers’ knowledge base. this is not a book for general readers who want to know what the indo-european discourse is, but for readers who think that they already know. it is dense, but it rewards effort. second, readers should be alert to occasional infelicities of translation, especially from german, and the odd typo. these do not detract from an otherwise competent translation, although the reader should pay particular attention to the use of “modern,” “modernism,” “modernist,” and “modernity” - these are not identical concepts (in spite of their sharing an indoeuropean root). maria carlson, university of kansas lawrence kansas usa microsoft word contentsqsoft.doc k. v. kvitka’s correspondence 77 k. v. kvitka’s correspondence with the academicians of petrograd-leningrad m. a. lobanov the russian institute of art history, saint petersburg, russia based on unpublished material from the 1920s if one were to list the modern era scholars in the field of musical folklore who are outstanding for their ideas and for their scholarly methodology, then one of the foremost among them would be klement vasyl'evych kvitka (1880-1953). in the scholarly world he is known as a scholar of ukrainian folk music and, more broadly, as someone who did research in slavic, especially east slavic, music, russian music included. his rhythmic analysis of russian folksong melodies has remained the basis for further scholarship for over half a century and there is not a single russian ethnomusicologist who does not study kvitka’s research methodology. naturally, kvitka is an important figure in the literary life of ukraine at the beginning of the xxth century since he was married to lesia ukrainka and shared many interests with her. k. v. kvitka’s letters—17 in all— are preserved in several archives in saint petersburg. the letters are detailed and present a panoramic view of scholarly life of the 1920s in ukraine. they provide a glimpse into certain aspects of the life of this scholar, aspects that were not included in his autobiographical sketches or in other materials about him. his letters are written in russian; furthermore, they are written in such a style that they seem to have been composed yesterday, not over 80 years ago. their style is the same as the style of our contemporary, highly intellectualized academic discourse: filled not with folkloric images and expressions, but rather with contemporary language, including items such as to test the soil or vertical in the same sense this word often has in contemporary russia: the vertical of power. looking over the archival documents, at times i found several occurrences of the name v. g. ivanenko, the author of biographical articles about k. v. kvitka, in the archive’s borrowing records. his articles only list several of kvitka’s addressees, but the contents of the letters are not revealed. in this article i would like to fill in the gaps. the letters in question were written in the period of 1922–1928, that is, beginning in the year of the founding of the musico-ethnological department of the ukrainian academy of sciences, when kvitka’s folklorica 2007, vol. xii 78 project was granted the status of an official organization. the academician was already over 40 years old, and it was only then that he decided to devote himself fully to the field of musicology. he was still completely unknown in petrograd-leningrad although these were the years when his best research articles were published one after another in kyiv. among k. v. kvitka’s addressees in petrograd-leningrad were: the famous linguist/slavist e. f. karskii; the publisher of the russian music gazette n. f. findeizen, whose name then spoke volumes to every musician; the music historian a. n. rimskii-korsakov, one of the publishers (along with p. suvchinskii) of another music periodical—the journal the musical contemporary (both of these publications had ceased to exist by that time); and n. i. privalov, in those years the leading specialist in the field of folk musical instruments and at one time pro-rector of the odesa conservatory. among kvitka’s addressees was the academician v. n. peretts, who was exiled from leningrad to saratov in 1933. kvitka’s letters to him have probably not been preserved, but a correspondence with him is mentioned in letters to other individuals published here. the occasion upon which the correspondence began is typical for academic correspondence. specifically, it was a request for help, when it is necessary to procure a vital book or article or to ask the advice of a specialist. at the same time, this is an opportunity for a young scholar to present an edition of his/her work, thereby declaring him/herself to a more authoritative colleague. further on, more specific and usually more interesting issues naturally arise in the correspondence. “engaged in the same work to which you have dedicated your life,” kvitka begins a letter to privalov, “i have decided to turn to you with a request to send me your research, using the enclosed payment.”(1) “please do not refuse to inform me where and how (if it is possible by means of exchange) to obtain volume iii of your belarusians,”(2) he asks karskii in his first letter to the academician.(3) kvitka addresses findeizen with a request to send him, using the enclosed payment, a separate off-print of a. l. maslov’s work “wandering minstrels in russia and their melodies” published in a well-known music journal.(4) kvitka’s works of the 1920s, which we know by their publication, demonstrate what an incredibly wide range of sources was accessible to him. and with what effort these sources were obtained! “in kyiv there is not a single musical library that deserves that title,” he informs findeizen, “nor is there a general library exhaustive enough for me to k. v. kvitka’s correspondence 79 perform research in the field of musicology; i am forced to run to different corners of the city, which is hard on my health, in the hope of finding, by chance, books about music and to constantly disturb russian and foreign music scholars and practitioners with requests, similar to the one that you so kindly fulfilled.”(5) his request to karskii concerning the belarusians sounds surprisingly sincere: “even if there are very few copies remaining, i have decided to stake a claim on one of them, as it is possible that there is no other person who needs this book more than i do.”(6) kvitka requested that the addressee send the book from petrograd for kvitka to borrow in order to copy it, if the addressee could not send it for kvitka to keep. apparently, a typist working in the musicoethnographic department copied privalov’s extensive work on tambourtype instruments, as described in one of kvitka’s letters to privalov. however, at times the typist worked erratically, and kvitka had to ask the author’s pardon for the delay in returning his work. one can sense from the letters that kvitka found this humiliating. kvitka intended to copy e. m. hornbostel’s german article about the transcription of exotic melodies himself, but fate had mercy on him. at that time someone in berlin obtained a copy of a book containing that article in an antiquarian book store, and he no longer needed to copy it.(7) when he criticized the bibliographic situation in kyiv, there was much that kvitka failed to appreciate. many years later, in his autobiographical sketch “a look at my folkloric journey” (1942–…), he admitted that “the kyiv university library was richer in books on slavic studies than were the libraries in moscow.”(8) what is especially touching is that kvitka also tried to help his colleagues obtain books—especially a. khibyns'kyi, who was at that time a professor at the university of l'viv and head of that university’s musicological institute. kvitka asked privalov about obtaining, if possible, a copy of his work on russian wind instruments for khibyns'kyi as well. he asked findeizen about sending khibyns'kyi a copy of j. b. thibault’s histoire de la notation published in saint petersburg in 1912.(9) the polish scholar, it seems, did not know that kvitka passed his request on to findeizen. however, somehow, findeizen did manage to help the polish musicologist. moreover, khibyns'kyi collaborated with the russian music gazette.(10) kvitka tried to interest findeizen in the works of another resident of l'viv—f. m. kolessa—and sent off-prints of his works. however, it seems that this scholar left findeizen completely indifferent. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 80 the bibliographic aid was not unilateral. in addition to his receiving collections of songs and article off-prints, kvitka also sent them to others. kvitka, on findeizen’s request, sent him works about ukrainian art—specifically, n. a. hrinchenko’s history of ukrainian music. kvitka’s attitude towards this work was very critical: “in the section on folk music there are more positions (the ones that are traditionally repeated) with which i [k. v. kvitka—m. l.] disagree, than positions with which i agree,”(11). kvitka also commented on the works of d. shcherbakovskii, (12) and gave privalov competent accounts of the works of kurt sachs, which were completely unknown in leningrad at that time.(13) kvitka sought out people who would interest him; he sent books and received the books he wanted through his acquaintances. apparently he was wary of relying entirely on the postal system: “forgive me for writing to you with such delay,” he excuses himself to karskii after his almost year-long silence about the belarusians that he had desired so much, “but difficult circumstances compelled me to wait for a courier, and i have only now found somebody.”(14) kvitka’s messenger to karskii was the academician peretts’s son. his messenger to findeizen was karskii’s colleague on the ethnographic commission of the ukrainian academy of sciences, the renowned ethnographic specialist v. p. petrov,(15) who was a nephew of a. v. preobrazhenskii, the author of the book cult music in russia (leningrad 1924) and findeizen’s colleague petrov at the russian music gazette. findeizen introduced kvitka to privalov. thus, these letters make it possible to account for almost the entire group of people to whom kvitka was closest in his work, and in those years his entire life was comprised of his work in the musicoethnological department. we must add the dialectician e. b. kurylo (mentioned, by the way, in ivanenko’s biographical sketch)(16) and the art historian f. ernst to this list. this name occurs several times in kvitka’s letters—sometimes as a person who has kindly agreed to convey something from kvitka to kvitka’s leningrad acquaintances, at other times as the author of the work serf a-capella choirs in ukraine.(17) hrinchenko, who was mentioned above, also worked for a time in the musico-ethnological department. he was well-known in those years as a music historian and the director of the n. v. lysenko institute of music and drama, where kvitka was also a lecturer. one can understand, based on kvitka’s judgement of hrinchenko quoted above, why his time in the department was not very long. k. v. kvitka’s correspondence 81 the letters to his petrograd-leningrad addressees make little mention of kvitka’s expeditionary work to collect material, such as his trip to khorobrichi village, chernihiv province (1923); the mohylevs'ko-dnistrov administrative region (1927–28?); and novgorod-severskii to study the folk songs of trinity sunday and rusal'e (1928).(18) he does not describe his impressions. however, the fact that he informs karskii about his plans suggests that kvitka developed an interest in the subject matter of karskii’s work on the areas of dissemination of several types of belarusian calendar and wedding songs quite early. as he writes: “i have dreamed for a long time of dedicating a year, or even more, of my life to researching belarusian folk music, applying the methods that i developed in ukraine, which, i am certain, would result in collecting material that is even more original and archaic.”(19) kvitka also informs karskii about his collecting work in kyiv, which somewhat calls to mind p. lakh’s collection of songs of russian prisoners of war: “at present i am occupied with recording the songs of hrodna province from refugees currently residing in kyiv, and i hope to publish a special anthology.”(20) kvitka wrote much more about his publishing and academic organizational activities. considering himself to be in frail health, he rationed every exertion while he was preparing his work for print: “the technical aspects of publication demand a great deal of hard work from the author;” he informs findeizen, “not only did i dictate the work to the typist myself, but i also cleaned, corrected and touched up the transfer on the lithographic stone, which consumed 140 hours and, nevertheless, did not guarantee the complete accuracy of the publication, because, as it turns out, the workers in the printing office changed back, according to their guesses, the errors that i had crossed out on the lithographic stone. apparently, i failed to scratch the lithographic stone deeply enough. the majority of kyivan academics don’t print anything these days, not because it is entirely impossible, but because it requires almost superhuman strength, primarily in order to ensure the physical production of the publication.”(21) on more than one occasion books and articles that kvitka needed as sources for his scholarly work arrived only when the work was already being printed. however, he related in letters how he had been able to convince the printing office workers to stop the presses and squeeze in the last minute additions. if one were to look, through kvitka’s eyes at the activities of a contemporary researcher engaged in writing a book or article, one could folklorica 2007, vol. xii 82 see that the contemporary scholar’s efforts are probably not much different from the efforts of a scholar engaged in a similar task at the beginning of the 1920s. nowadays, we type our work ourselves on the computer, format it, and so forth. not long ago, however, the final draft of the handwritten manuscript was typed by a typist, at the expense, moreover, of the institution where the work was done. kvitka ascribed a great deal of significance to the organizational aspects of scholarship, because it was necessary for music ethnography in ukraine to expand and strengthen itself both materially and in terms of faculty. here he had the idea of surrounding his undertakings with the strongest faculty members, those who stayed or appeared in the country of the soviets in the 1920s; not only in ukraine, but in russia as well. in one letter of his to privalov he invited privalov to publish a small article or short piece in issue 7 of the ethnographic courier, which at that time was still in the middle of the publication/printing process. in the following letter kvitka reminded privalov that the addressee was a member of the ethnographic commission in kyiv.(22) in ukraine, he attempted to publish an anthology of privalov’s works applicable to ukraine, including his observations on the kobzars. he finds sympathy for this project with f. m. sobol, the head of the music section of the ukrainian state publishing house in kharkiv, the ukrainian capital at that time. unfortunately, the author’s sudden death precluded the realization of this project.(23) however, it was the especially radical projects, along with their very warm friendship, that bound k. v. kvitka with n. f. findeizen. kvitka saw in him “a scholar and activist,” (henceforth i provide quotations in the first person, as they appear in the letter—m. l.), “whom i infinitely respect and to whom i am much obliged, as are all who came of age reading your unforgettable gazette with its noble, honest momentum.”(24) in the 1920s findeizen gave lectures on music paleography at the leningrad archaeological institute, in connection with which kvitka makes the following statement in the same letter: “unfortunately, the current character of your activities will not bear noticeable fruit in ukraine, at least, i know of no instance in which one of your students found work in a ukrainian archive or even thought of settling here, so here the matter of paleography is quite hopeless.”(25) attracting specialists in musical archaeology from leningrad to ukraine was kvitka’s dream, as his letters demonstrate. he worked to procure findeizen’s invitation (and privalov’s) to the first ukrainian archaeological conference in odesa, which was supposed to take place k. v. kvitka’s correspondence 83 in 1925, but was rescheduled for the following year.(26) “i petitioned for this because musical paleography isn’t represented by anyone,” the author of the idea explained his position to findeizen, “and at the conference it is essential to bring up this question with your most competent cooperation and advice. the same goes for instrumentology: neither i nor anyone else in ukraine has investigated this to any great depth, and to hear n. i. privalov…would be most useful.”(27) here i allow myself a small digression. findeizen as a creative figure was not regarded unambiguously in petersburg musical circles. thanks to his great talent and energy, he became a visible musical activist with world-wide authority.(28) he had to hurry his entire life in order to manage to encompass such a great volume of work, but “serving the muses does not allow for noisy distractions.” at home he was acknowledged as a collector of musical source materials, as a social activist able to unite everything and everybody around his journal, and to avoid pushing his views on other people. he was not, however, considered an original thinker in the field of musicology. his outstanding work, sketches on music history in russia, which compelled people to view him differently, was published posthumously. it seems strange now, but in the 1920s findeizen’s name was seen neither among the instructors of the conservatory nor among the faculty of the music department of the zubovskii institute of art history. this may be due to the fact that he did not graduate from any specialized academic institution, only from the school of commerce, and studied music only on a private basis with n. f. sokolov. in the 1920s findeizen was in charge of the museum of the philharmonic orchestra, conducted courses on music appreciation at united trade school no 25, and was offered a professorship to teach musical paleography at the archaeological institute. it is not known who comprised his audience: future historians or musicians. in humanist circles he was highly regarded, as demonstrated by an invitation in 1925 to be the chair of the musico-ethnographic department of the geographic society. it is unlikely that findeizen was satisfied with his situation in leningrad. his health was seriously undermined by the frantic pace of his work and the difficulties of the first decade after the revolution—it is not surprising that he died at the age of 60 in 1928. at the beginning of 1925, two of kvitka’s colleagues from the ukrainian academy visited kvitka at his behest. these were v. p. petrov, mentioned above, and d. n. revuts'kyi. findeizen told them that he would like to come to kyiv. having learned of this conversation, folklorica 2007, vol. xii 84 kvitka alluded to it with intense feeling when writing to findeizen: “i was enraptured, having learned of your desire to come to kyiv, although my joy was coupled with annoyance due to the fact that your primary motivation is your poor health. i also have problems with my lungs; in my youth they caused a great deal of difficulty. two years in crimea and eight years in the caucuses strengthened me though, in the caucuses i felt morally oppressed, because i was compelled to occupy myself with affairs that were not to my liking. only the position that i occupy in kyiv keeps me here. if the opportunity arose to move to the caucuses under conditions equal to those i enjoy here, i wouldn’t hesitate. if you have a serious defect of the lungs, i would caution you against kyiv, as the climate here is changeable to the highest degree and influenza often rages through the city. if you only feel the need for a greater quantity of warmth and light than you have in leningrad, then kyiv, perhaps, would satisfy you. you have much to offer ukraine—especially with your tremendous knowledge and taste, judgments and ideas and, furthermore, with your valuable collections. you could have immediately formed a cultural-musicological center in kyiv. i fervently agitated for the creation of a base for you in kyiv in the spring. i even petitioned the academy so that, in the course of the planned expansion of the musico-ethnographic department and its transformation into an institute, to invite you to take the post of director of the institute. however, my project did not come to pass. it is uncertain how the kharkiv leadership would have regarded it, as the permanent secretary of the academy himself put the brakes on it at the very beginning, having taken a hostile stance towards my project. his hostility does not extend to you personally, of course, but rather to the very principle of expanding musicology within the academy. such a stance isn’t surprising if one takes into account the fact that the model for the leaders of the ukrainian academy is the russian academy, and the latter does not grant music studies even the modest place that it occupies here. my agitation in other ‘verticals’ also did not meet with success. what i had hoped for in the spring has not come to pass. my hopes lead me to ask colleagues to test the ground in leningrad for people who might be able come here in the event of the fulfillment of the plans that you know well. the fact that my hopes deceived me has so affected my health and psychic state that, for several months, i was deprived of the ability to take any action.”(29) without a doubt, kvitka had an unbiased understanding of findeizen’s potential as a scholarly authority and organizer of scholarly k. v. kvitka’s correspondence 85 activities, and for him it was a bitter disappointment that he could attain nothing. k. v. kvitka’s letters to petrograd-leningrad scholars highlight the the curious arc of his scholarly biography. this arc is founded upon the great openness, tolerance and breadth of outlook and relationships where the advancement of scholarship is concerned. in the 1920s the scholar strove to focus the scholarly potential of the country around kyiv, although he did not succeed. in the 1930s–1940s, regardless of all the dangerous upheavals of fate, that very openness allowed him to successfully enter the milieu of music folklore in moscow and to found a school to study russian folk music that continues to develop the scholarly methods that he formulated in the period of his activity in ukraine. however, the first acknowledgement came to k. v. kvitka, not in moscow, but in leningrad. it was privalov who turned out to be the author of the first account in russia on kvitka’s scholarly activities.(30) kvitka himself was forced into a 10 year long period of silence. he was arrested in kyiv in 1933, rapidly transferred to moscow and charged in connection with the “slavists affair” in 1934. he was in a prison camp in karaganda and was freed from that camp, but not allowed to live in major cities until his conviction was reversed in 1941. when finally allowed to publish, his first article was his research about the dissemination of types of belarusian ritual songs, included in the anthology prepared by the leningrad researcher z. v. eval'd. notes 1 russian national library, collection 615, item 511, sheet 1. 2 here kvitka apparently refers to one of the parts of e. f. karskii’s belarusians published separately: volume 3, moscow, 1916, part 1: folk poetry; petrograd 1921, part 2: old west-russian literature. 3 archive of the russian academy of sciences (saint petersburg), collection 292, folder 2, item 210, sheet 2 (verso). the item in question is karskii’s work. 4 see the russian music gazette, 1904, issue 2, 3; 8, 33–36. 5 russian national library, manuscript department, collection 816, item 1458, sheet 3. 6 archive of the russian academy of sciences (saint petersburg), collection 292, folder 2, item 210, sheet 3 (recto and verso). 7 see also: ibid., sheet 6 (verso), sheet 8. the article in question folklorica 2007, vol. xii 86 is: abraham, o., von hornbostel, e. m., “vorschläge für die transcription exotischer melodien” in sammelbände der internationalen musikgesellschaft, 1910–1911, band xi. 8 kvitka, k. selected works in two volumes. moscow: 1971. volume 1, page 30. 9 russian national library, manuscript department, collection 615, item 511, sheet 1 (back); collection 816, item 1458, sheet 3 (verso). k. v. kvitka informs a. khibyns'kii that jean-batiste thibault’s book, which he is in great need of, is known neither to him, nor to his leningrad colleague a. b. preobrazhenskii, a specialist in the field of musical paleography. this is entirely understandable, as the work that khibyns'kii names is thibault’s presentation at a conference in saint petersburg, published separately in a luxurious edition with a small production run—apparently for a small circle of specialists. 10 in the russian music gazette, 1912, issue 36–37, a. khibyns'kii published a series of sketches of the polish composers who were his contemporaries: m. karlovich, l. ruzhitskii, k. shimanovskii. 11 russian national library, manuscript department, collection 816, item 1458, sheet 3 (verso). 12 shcherbakivskii, d. orchestras, choruses and a-capella groups in ukraine at the time of serfdom. music 1924, issue 7–12. 13 russian national library, manuscript department, collection 615, item 511, sheet 3. 14 archive of the russian academy of sciences (saint petersburg), collection 292, folder 2, item, 210, sheet 3. 15 viktor platonovich petrov (1894–1969); archaeologist, ethnographer, literary researcher. in the 1920s he worked in the ethnographic commission at the institute for the history of material culture of the ukrainian academy of sciences. 16 ivanenko, v. materials for a biography of k. v. kvitka. selected works in two volumes. moscow: 1973. volume 2, page 353. 17 ernst theodor (fyodor) liudvigovich (1891–?)—archaeologist and art historian, author of works on the history of kyivan architecture, the ukrainian portrait, et cetera. in the 1920s, director of the art division of the all-ukrainian historical museum in kyiv, full member of the archaeological society of the pan-ukrainian academy of sciences. in 1934 he was exiled. in 1939 he was repressed a second time, after which his fate is unknown (i would like to thank e. i. murzina for informing me of this). see also f. ernst’s article mentioned above in music 1924, issues 1–3. k. v. kvitka’s correspondence 87 18 russian national library, manuscript department, collection 615, item 511, sheet 4. 19 archive of the russian academy of sciences (saint petersburg), collection 292, folder 2, item 210, sheet 3 (back). the article that kvitka names appeared in print in the anthology belarusian folk songs (edited by z. v. evald. moscow; leningrad 1941, pages 123–129), almost twenty years after the letter cited. 20 archive of the russian academy of sciences (saint petersburg), collection 292, folder 2, item 210, sheet 4. 21 russian national library, manuscript department, collection 816, item 1458, sheet 3. 22 russian national library, manuscript department, collection 615, item 511, sheets 6 and 7. in issue 7 (1928) of the ethnographic courier n. i. privalov’s materials are not present. 23 ibid., sheet 4 (verso), sheet 5. n. i. privalov’s archives contain an agreement to publish a part of the manuscript of this book (i wish to thank v. a. bruntsev for informing me of this fact). a recent article about privalov’s letters to kvitka brought to light another reason for the latter to be an advocate for the authoritative investigator of ethnic musical instruments. this reason is the poverty in which privalov eked out his existence in the 1920s in leningrad. see: korableva k. n. i. privalov’s leningrad years from the letters of his latter years. publications of the m. i. glinka central state museum of music culture. an almanach. supervisory editor: m. rakhmanova. moscow: 1999. issue 1. 24 russian national library, manuscript department, collection 816, item 1458, sheet 6. 25 ibid. 26 it has not been possible to determine whether the conference took place or not. 27 ibid., sheet 6 (recto and verso). 28 see: kosmovskaia, m. l. the legacy of n. f. findeizen. kursk, 1997. page 62. 29 russian national library, manuscript department, collection 816, item 1458, sheet 8 (front and back). 30 privalov, n. i. klimentiy kvitka’s works on music ethnography. music ethnography. edited by n. f. findeizen. leningrad: 1926. pp. 45– 47. folklorica 2007, vol. xii microsoft word folk03fdw.doc 7 articles the structure and function of funeral rituals and customs in ukraine natalia havryl’iuk institute of ethnomusicology, folklore and ethnography of the ukrainian academy of sciences traditional funeral rituals and customs in ukraine reflect a complex system of religious and magic beliefs. psychological considerations play an important role, as does the desire to behave in a proper and moral fashion. thus, ukrainian funerals exhibit a combination of efforts on behalf of the deceased and actions intended to relieve the emotional and psychological tension of the living. symbolic acts, such as the need to honor a deceased family or community member, are combined with very practical behaviors, those based on considerations of hygiene. in essence, in funerals we see ancient, pre-christian beliefs in the interrelatedness of the living and the dead, beliefs that the connection between this world and the world beyond the grave is real and permanent, and that ancestors must be honored and remembered into eternity. folk beliefs of ancient origin have, of course, now been combined with the christian outlook on life after death and a layer of orthodox christianity superimposed on the folk stratum. ukrainian funerary rituals have a distinct structure composed of the following components: omens foretelling death, the death itself, the funeral, the burial, and the wake. neither the ukrainian funeral ritual as a whole nor its various components have been the subject of any significant and sustained research. this fact was noted by several scholars at the beginning of the 20th century [kuzelia 1912: 136, 165-66]. there were individual studies, notably kuzelia’s own and the contemporaneous work by hnat’iuk [1912], but there was little follow-up on the publications of the early twentieth century during the soviet period. thus, while field data was systematically gathered for birth customs and wedding rites [shubravs’ka and pravdiuk 1970; havryl’iuk 1981], funerary ritual was neglected. in the west little attention has been paid to ukrainian funerals, and what has appeared is based on written sources [worobec 1994]. because there has not been a great deal of systematic attention to the ukrainian funeral, this article does not claim to be a definitive treatment. rather, it seeks to be a first step toward filling the gap in our knowledge of ukrainian funerary customs and beliefs. it attempts to be a synthesis of previously published data, much of it from the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth [hnat’iuk 1912; shukhevych 1902; iaschurzhinskii 1893], data published more recently [ivanov, nevskaia 1990; surkhasko 1985; gracheva 1983] and the author’s own field work, some of it published, [havryl’iuk 1985a, 1985b], but much of it available only in archival form. data on ukrainian funerals was collected by the author in the 1980s and the 1990s in the villages of the polissia, dnieper, transcarpathia, and podillia regions. it is housed in her private archive. beliefs and rituals related to death and preparation for burial an integral part of the folk worldview is the belief that death is always presaged by omens (pryznaky na smert’, na vmerushche). typical omens include unusual behavior on the part of animals, birds, or insects. if household utensils are found arranged in a certain way, this can be seen as an indication that death will soon folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 8 visit the home in question. certain sounds and tactile sensations are said to be portents of death, as are certain types of dreams. for example, an omen that indicates that a family member, usually the male head of the household, is about to die is the howling of a dog, especially at the feet of the person in question (pes vyie na lapy). a dog digging at the earth near the house foreshadows death, as does a cow escaping into a neighbor’s yard. other omens include a shrew continuously digging dirt in the yard (krit krute) or a toad finding its way into the house proper. insect omens include the ceaseless chirping of house crickets and the sudden appearance of a great number of houseflies or bees. certain signs are deemed to bode ill in general, but, when there is a sick or an elderly individual in the household, the evil omen can be considered a portent of death. such bad signs include imaginary tapping (a tapping sound with no apparent source), strange noises in the attic, the unexplained falling and especially breaking of household utensils or icons, and the unexplained creaking of a table or a door. of these, an icon falling is probably the most feared omen. nocturnal birds of prey, such the various species of owl common in ukraine, are among the best-known messengers of death. according to folk legends, when death is near, owls have a special death-heralding call. they perform this call while sitting on a chimney, a tree, or another tall object in the yard of the house where a death will occur. the call sounds like: “pokhovav-pokhovav” which means “someone has been buried” in ukrainian. the hoopoe also has a cry that sounds like ukrainian. it goes “khudo-tut, khudo-tut” (trouble’s here) and this, too is considered a bad omen meaning that death is near. other bird omens include a turtle dove making a peculiar cry that sounds like the call of an owl, a blue tit hitting a window pane, a sparrow fluttering at the window in the afternoon, and a cuckoo flying into the yard. another negative sign is hearing knocking or calls in a yard empty of people or animals, whereas an itching on one’s nose, either at the bridge or at the tip, is said to indicate that there would soon be a dead person in the household (na mertsia). many dreams are believed to herald trouble. in one of the most common of such dreams, a person known to be dead calls the living, asking the dreamer to join the deceased. should the dreamer accept the invitation, this is considered a particularly bad omen. dreaming of the following items is perceived as an indication that the funeral of a family member is immanent: an icon, a bloody lost tooth, the collapse of a part of the home, such as the chimney, roof, or wall, gates knocked off their hinges, smoke blowing from the gate into the house, a piece of smoldering coal in the oven, a bird flying away from the yard, a herd of cattle, a flock of sheep or a hen with her young, the theft of a pig or horse, attempts to drive away large houseflies. dreaming of all of these items can also indicate that a death has already occurred, only the dreamer is not aware that someone close to him or her has died. this would be the case if the deceased is a family member living apart from the dreamer. dreams foretelling death can also contain the following: a ploughed field or vegetable garden, the dreamer herself digging or turning garden beds, strewn manure, or dry grass. dreaming about a living tree, especially an apple tree in bloom, being uprooted is bad and even more so if the tree is uprooted by an old man whom the dreamer knows to be deceased. dreaming about certain vegetables can be a portent of death and the vegetables include cabbage, potatoes, and ripe watermelons. dreams about certain actions are bad omens, 9 signifying that one’s own death is near; these include dreams about felling trees, gathering firewood, and looking into a well. certain dreams indicate where the next death in a village will occur, specifically dreams of a rising flood and a certain point on the shore toward which a boat is moving. if the dreamer sees a wedding party and that wedding party bypasses a house, then that house will be the place where a death will soon occur. preparing for death preparing for death is considered extremely important. a central folk belief, supported by orthodox christianity, holds that existence on earth is but a transient state. according to this belief, “we are guests” in this world and “live in sin,” whereas our permanent abode is in the world beyond. one informant stated: “we said goodbye [to the dying], and he is now in the place of truth, while we remain but guests here, living in sin.”(1) with such a worldview, it is considered extremely important to follow the steps traditionally believed to ensure or simplify one’s passage to the other world. one important item is the clothing that will be used for the deceased. this is made ready well in advance. clothing can either be specially bought for the occasion or, as was more common in earlier times, festive or wedding clothes can be washed, prepared, and set aside to be used for the funeral. according to at least one report, any clothing is acceptable, even used clothing, as long as it is clean. according to a folk saying, the belief is that “death will find a shirt (for itself).”(2) imminent death creates an atmosphere of concentrated attention around the dying person. in the room, actions are executed quietly and conversations are subdued, for it is believed that a silence broken makes dying more difficult. according to one informant, “shouting interrupts death, and [the dying person] will suffer more.”(3) in order to ease the agony of death, a dying person can be laid out on the ground. making a hole in the roof is also thought to help ease a prolonged death agony. this is done mainly for people deemed to be wizards and witches, since their “demonic affiliation” reportedly makes their death especially protracted and painful. in order to enable a dying person to clearly recollect all of his or her sins and thus to confess them, he or she is given a candle (hromnytsia), that has been blessed on the day of the meeting of the lord (jan 19/feb. 6). holding the candle is also said to illuminate the future path of the soul [kravchenko 1920: 106]. the dying are supposed to ask god, their relatives and friends for forgiveness, repeating the request three times: “dear lord, forgive me my sins, the first time, the second time and the third time.” a typical dialogue goes as follows: “forgive me if i ever said or did anything wrong”, says the dying person, to which each of those present replies: “god will forgive, and i forgive.” forgiveness is supposed to be mutual and those who arrive too late to ask for forgiveness while a person is still alive, make their request of the dead body. while a person is dying, his calling, in a state of delirium, persons known to be deceased, especially his own parents, is considered a certain sign of imminent death. under such circumstances, the dying person is thought to be so close to the edge of this world as to be able to see into the next and to speak with the dead. folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 10 actual death and the ensuing preparation of the body for the burial triggers a set of customs and rituals based on beliefs about what happened to the body and the soul in the first hours and days after death. to a large extent, these are mystic religious acts of a purifying, protective and sacrificial nature. the bereaved are not allowed to weep in the house before death actually comes, but, when it does, it is the loud lamentation in the yard of one of the deceased’s relatives that announces to the village what has happened. in addition, church bells are rung to mark a death. the ringing of church bells later marks each of the different stages of the funeral. it is commonly believed that the corpse cannot be left alone or in the dark once the church bells have rung. the reason given is that the soul, which has left the body, stands beside it, near the head and may be captured by evil spirits. in the mountain villages of the carpathians, a death is announced by drawn-out sounds of the trembitas (long horns). open gates, with kerchiefs and embroidered towels tied on them, are also a way of informing the rest of the village that a death has occurred at a particular household. one of the most widespread beliefs is that the deceased’s body cannot be bathed and dressed by the members of his household. doing so washes away connections between them and might prevent their future meeting in heaven. thus, two or three elderly neighbors, usually those living alone and having considerable experience with the practice of preparing the dead, are asked to perform the task. the customs of the western regions of ukraine dictate that the body be bathed by the persons of the same sex, whereas in the rest of the country women tend to do the bathing for both sexes. in certain areas of polissia it is customary to ask the village midwife to prepare the body of the deceased, probably an ancient custom indicating parallels between entry into this world and departure from it. the water used to bathe the body, commonly called either “dead water” (mertva voda) or “water from the deceased” (voda z mertsia), is variably ascribed harmful and healing properties and is used accordingly. in particular, it is widely believed that no man or animal should come in contact with the ground where this water has been discarded. therefore, it is thrown out in a remote place, one where no one will tread, such as a corner of the garden or the yard, right next to the fence, near a barn, or onto manure. in the carpathian region, it is common to pour the water away outside the boundaries of one’s property, for example on the road or by a river. in these regions, the water is also used to exterminate domestic insect pests, such as cockroaches and fleas, and as a magic tool for casting spells. those experienced in folk medicine use it for healing, treating such conditions as eye diseases and a condition called “dead bone,” meaning a hard lump like a calcification somewhere on the body. the clothes and bedclothes that had been used by the deceased are most commonly burned, and the ashes are discarded in the same place as the water used for bathing the body. the burial clothes are chosen according to the deceased’s age and social status. as a measure of protection, a multicolored silk belt is usually fastened over the shirt. for an older person, the belt is usually black and white and for a younger person it is green or red. a man’s head is covered with a hat, whereas women wear kerchiefs (kaptur, khustka, namitka). in keeping with an old custom, each foot of the deceased is wrapped in a white cloth (in polissia, a kerchief or namitka is used instead) and then shod in light, soft footwear, such as straw or canvas shoes. the reason given for this practice is the fact that, in the world beyond the grave, the dead have to walk long distances. if the deceased’s fingernails and toenails are trimmed during bathing, the 11 clippings are hidden inside his shirt. according to folk belief, the deceased can then use them on judgment day if he or she needs to build a bridge to cross a river. in the areas of podillia along the dniester river, it is commonly believed that everyone must have a mate in the other world, and both married and single dead receive a wax ring made from the candle that had illuminated their passing away. young unmarried people are dressed as if for their weddings and wear periwinkle, sweet basil (vasyl’ok) or artificial flower wreaths. the hair of unmarried girls who died is left loose and decorated with ribbons, as it would be for their wedding. a larger wreath, similar to the one placed on the head, is placed over the body and later hung on the grave cross. bathed and dressed, the body is laid out on a bench beneath the icons. the head of the deceased is supposed to be pointed towards the icon corner of the room and the feet towards the door. in the western regions, two benches placed side-by-side (katafeliok) are used instead of the bench built into the wall, characteristic of central and eastern region. hutsuls, on the other hand, use a plank bed (tabla), which is often placed in the middle of the main room (khata). children up to seven years of age are considered angels and, should they die, their bodies are always dressed up in festive clothes and laid out on a table. the bed on which the deceased lay is made of hay, straw or conifer branches, covered with white sheets. two towels, lain crosswise with their ends turned up over the body, are also typically used. a candle, a cross, and some money are placed in the hands of the deceased. in accordance with another custom, a towel is placed under a man’s arms, whereas the hands of a woman are wrapped in a towel or covered with a handkerchief. lest the deceased “chose a living person to take away with him” a coin is placed on each of his eyelids to make sure that his eyes stay shut. his chin is tied up with a kerchief or cloth to keep the mouth closed and a copper coin is placed on the mouth. all of the coins used for the deceased are later buried together with the body and are supposed to give the dead person the means to pay for crossing into the other world. a needle called a “tsyhanka” is put on the lips of those who died suddenly (syra liudyna). the arms and legs of the dead are tightly secured with ropes or cords. these, however, have to be undone before the body is buried so that the deceased can leave this world unbound and have no problems moving about the other world. for the same reason, all the knots in the deceased’s clothing are undone and removed. there is evidence that the ropes or cords used to tie the limbs of the deceased during rigor mortis are items eagerly sought by witches and sorcerers. some attested uses include the following: in western podillia, for example, the cords taken off the deceased’s hands are sewn into the sleeves of a man’s shirt to prevent him from beating his wife. in the same region, ropes used to tie the legs of the deceased are used to tie the legs of a cow. this is supposed to prevent it from kicking while it was being milked. all across ukraine, items taken off the bodies are used in folk medicine for magical healing rituals, such as curing headaches and alleviating muscle and back pain. the body of the deceased is covered up to the chin by a linen sheet, a woman’s headdress (namitka) or, occasionally, an altar cloth. in the carpathian mountains a wedding rantukh can be used. this is the white sheet-like piece of a woman’s wedding outfit, which covered her head and was draped around her face and over her neck and shoulder. another traditional covering is a white plakhta, the rectangular piece of woven fabric, which is wrapped around the waist and serves as a skirt. a paper wreath (vinchyk) with an inscribed prayer (prokhidna) is placed on the deceased’s forehead, and a small icon wrapped in an embroidered towel on his or folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 12 her chest. a burning candle stands at the head of the deceased and an icon-lamp hanging under the icons in the corner is lit. on the table, people traditionally set a burning candle inserted in a grain or flour-filled bowl. it is also obligatory to set out bread, honey and a special funerary dish called kolyvo on the right bank of ukraine, to the east of the dneiper river, and kanun on the left bank, to the west. in the carpathians, the special funerary dish is called pshenytsia or kitia. while the body is being prepared for laying out, one of the deceased’s relatives is supposed to invite two or three local artisans to make a coffin (domovyna, derevyshche, dubovyna), a coffin lid (viko), and a cross for the grave. all three items are made of oak or pine. old people often purchase the requisite wood in advance and store it, as they do with their funeral clothes. to protect themselves from death, the coffin-makers (trunachi) begin their work with an incantation. “in order to stop evil from entering” fifteen crosses are engraved on the completed coffin, three on the bottom and three on each side. chips and shavings produced in the process of making the coffin cannot be burned in the stove. to do so would make “the house turn cold” like death. instead, some shavings are spread in the coffin as a kind of mattress and the rest are burned beyond the boundaries of the property where the coffin makers worked and the ashes are either buried in the ground or strewn into running water. the coffin and the cross are commonly made for free, but it was customary to feed the workers and treat them to some horilka during their work breaks. the deceased is usually left in the house for two nights before being buried. during this time, the doors in the house and all ancillary buildings are kept open. this is supposed to help shorten the time the soul must spend in this world redeeming itself. it is also supposed to allow “the dead person to take all that he needs,” “so that he does not have to return.” during this period also, no work can be done in the house or out in the field. if a member of the deceased’s household works while the body lies in the house his hands “will become weak and will continue to go numb repeatedly for one year.” in addition, avoiding work in the presence of the corpse is supposed to assure peace for the soul of the deceased and comfort for his body. everything living and fertile has to be protected from the touch of death. to that end, all seeds are removed from the house. containers holding grain are regularly opened and the grain stirred. if there is standing grain, in other words, if fields of oats, or wheat, or rye have already started to form ears, these plants have to be touched at least briefly so that all of the plants move. the same is done to potato plants and to garden vegetables. there is a prohibition on speaking about the dead near a laying hen because it is believed that this will make her eggs infertile and keep them from hatching. concern for the living is expressed through the custom of covering all mirrors. it is said that glancing into a mirror right after looking at the body of the deceased will cause jaundice. the same belief accounts for the prohibition against children playing with mirrors at any time. those who are about to pay their last respects to the dead are supposed to avoid looking into a mirror or else “a young person in the family will die.” according to another explanation, mirrors are dangerous because the glitter of the mirror’s surface intensifies the suffering of the dying and so all mirrors must be covered during the last minutes of life. it is also thought that the mirror itself will be affected (become murky or grow pale) if it is not turned toward the wall when someone dies. 13 during the ceremonial dressing of the corpse, close female relatives commence their crying and their lamentations for the deceased. laments have a formal and traditional character and are considered obligatory at certain ritual points after death. these points are the visitation of friends and relatives and their viewing of the body, the carrying the coffin into the house, the transfer of the corpse from its bed to the coffin, the removal of the body from the house, and the lowering the coffin into the grave. while laments are characteristic of most of ukraine, some areas have different customs. carpathian lemkos, for example, accompany their funerals with quiet tears. in sub-carpathian ukraine it is believed that tears extinguish the fires of hell, and thus there are accounts of hiring weepers, at least in the past, to make sure that there would be plenty of tears at a funeral [hnat’iuk 1912: 207-08]. there are other components to the mourning ritual. girls mourning their parents, for example, do not braid their hair until after the funeral. leaving hair loose is supposed to “keep the path to the other world straight.” men from the deceased’s household do not shave or comb their hair for two weeks after the death and do not wear hats until after the funeral. in fact, all men are supposed to remove their hats in the presence of the body. widows cannot marry sooner than six months after their husband’s death and parents mourn their children for a minimum of six weeks. finally, for a full year after the death, members of the deceased’s family are supposed to dress plainly. for that same period of time, no weddings can be held in the home, and children are not allowed to play merry games, dance, or attend parties in the homes of others. funeral and burial rites the rituals and customs that constituted the funeral itself reflect beliefs in the afterlife and in the persistence of a special, intense communication bond between the living and the dead. parting rituals are a central element in funeral rites. they take place in the home, in the yard, on the streets of the village, and in the cemetery. parting rituals are bi-directional in nature. all are performing by the living, but some rites are performed by the living on their own behalf, while others are performed on behalf of the deceased. parting rituals begin before the actual funeral and internment. the first such ritual is a very important one. it is the practice of “visiting” with the dead and sitting near the corpse for a certain period of time. someone is supposed to attend to the corpse both during the day and at night and leaving the corpse alone is considered a sin. it is also said that the body has to be “guarded” to prevent its being overtaken by evil spirits. for example, it is believed that if a cat jumps over the body, the deceased will turn into a vampire. relatives in general and household members in particular are expected to be present near the body continuously. in addition to the relatives, a few elderly women (at least two or three), who are themselves nearing death and make a practice of regularly attending the funerals in their village, are also “on duty.” those who come to pay their last respects are to look at the icon, cross themselves, and say “the lord’s prayer” on behalf of the deceased, all while remaining on the threshold. only after performing these ritual acts can they enter the home and look upon the body. after approaching the body, visitors are supposed to light a candle for the deceased. formulaic expressions are used to console the grieving family and visitors say something like “may he rest in god” and “may god forgive (forget) his sins.” the visitor is expected to sit near folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 14 the body for some time. then, upon exiting, the visitor is supposed to pause at the door and, while standing in the doorway, make the sign of the cross in the direction of the deceased and say his goodbyes to those remaining. unlike other visitors, close relatives and neighbors, are expected not just to visit, but to help. one way they do so is by bringing provisions for the funeral. those close to the deceased and his or her family might bring bread, grain or flour, eggs, honey or sugar, money and so on. most of the food is consumed right after burial as part of the meal that constitutes the wake. some of the food goes to other uses such as gift-giving. food gifts are distributed by the family of the deceased to their fellow villagers so that they will remember the departed person and think kindly of him. the tradition of parting gifts is especially well developed in rightbank ukraine. some food items, especially so called hostyntsi (treats) such as cookies, candy and nuts, are later given out at the cemetery and at the post-internment supper in remembrance of the soul. they also become part of the memorial gifts known in left-bank ukraine as panykhyda and, in right-bank ukraine, as myska, sluzhba, and parastas. in the zhytomyr and kyiv regions, myska refers to a plate with three buns bound together and a candle inserted in the middle, supported by a small amount of grain. the myska can also contain some candies and a few apples and nuts. in the carpathian part of the dniester lowland, parastas is composed of kutia, meaning a porridge of whole wheat, berries, some bread and honey, a cross and candle. these dishes are of a ritual and sacrificial nature; they are not intended as delicacies. a prayer of thanks is said over them on the day of the burial, and they are given to the priest and other church officials on behalf of the deceased. spending the night near the body is an important part of the visitation ritual. this custom is variably called ity nochuvaty (to go for a sleep-over), vecheria (supper), and sydity nad kolyvom (nad tilom) (to sit by the kolyvo or by the body). in the western areas of ukraine the terms used are posyzhyny, pryvid, svichennia, among others. according to folk belief, one’s nighttime vigil will be reciprocated after one’s own death. thus nightfall brings the greatest number of visitors to the home of the deceased. the room is continuously lit by a taper or a small oil lamp (kahanec’); alternatively a church lamp (svitylo, stavnyk) or icon lamp can be rented from the church. the deacon reads the psalter for the expiation of sins and sings death-hymns (psalmy). often, only women-singers (pevchi, spivushky) are invited. the nighttime visitors hold quiet conversations, reminisce about the life and virtues of the deceased, or talk about their own daily routine. from time to time they cross themselves and pray. at midnight the family invites their guests to a meal consisting of hors d’oeuvres, wine, horilka, and other small treats. in south-western ukraine, the night gatherings have certain features peculiar to that region alone. thus, in the dniester lowland, young people are allowed to have fun and play games after supper, especially if the deceased is a young man or woman. the names of the most popular games, such as lubok, hrushka and lopatky are applied to the nighttime visitation itself. this tradition is most developed in the carpathians. here “the games by the dead” are accompanied by raucous, loud behavior, which has some of the elements of a mock-fight and is erotically charged. according to folk interpretation, lubok-style gatherings are supposed to alleviate the family’s sorrow (shchob domashnim zhuru umenshyty) [hnat’iuk 1912: 311]. nevertheless, the roots of the funeral games, which persisted in the carpathian regions of ukraine in modified form until the mid 15 1900s, reach as far back as pagan funeral banquets, where ritual laughter and ritual jousting in honor of the deceased are attested. the funeral ceremony and burial usually take place on the third day after death and have to be done in the morning, with the wake coinciding with the mid-day meal. it is during this time that laments reach their peak, making the psychologically difficult final farewell to the deceased especially emotional. a religious ceremony, usually conducted by a priest, always accompanies the many folk rituals. it is considered prestigious to have a church official participate in all stages of the funeral, the ones that take place in the home, the yard, during the funeral procession, in the church, and at the cemetery. however, this entails a considerable expense and only the well-to-do can afford to hire a clergyman for all of the funeral stages. in the majority of funerals, a priest is present only at the service in the home and at the cemetery and sometimes he officiates at just the latter. it was considered highly desirable to bring the body into the church and to conduct one of the services there, but the feasibility of so doing depends to a large extent on the location of the church. on the day of the funeral, often before the arrival of the priest, the coffin is brought into the house and prepared to receive the body. the bottom of the coffin is filled with the shavings left over from the construction of the coffin, covered by a blanket. wood shavings and some hay serve as the pillow. the clothes worn by the deceased at the time of death can also be put inside the coffin, along with any items believed to be needed by the dead in the world beyond. the exact nature of these depends on the deceased’s age and his or her occupation and tastes. thus, money is always placed in the coffin so that the deceased can “buy himself a place” in the other world or pay “to redeem his sins.” more person-specific items might include a walking cane for old folks so that they could get around more easily. men always “receive” a hat and are given tobacco, a smoking pipe (kuryvo, liul’ka z kalytkoiu) or a bottle of horilka. for women, tools associated with the fiber arts are commonly placed in the coffin. thus, weaving implements, drop spindles, a distaff (kuzhil), a needle and thread, some wool or a plaited straw band (pereveslo) are items routinely placed in a woman’s coffin. to deceased children people give a small wax bowl “to eat from,” an egg, an apple, and a braided bread (kalach). it is common to give the deceased some extra clothing “as a spare” or so that he can “change his clothing” in the afterlife. the custom of placing a change of clothing in the coffin is still practiced in right-bank polissia. the final arrangements made for the deceased reflect the belief that the dead will meet and communicate with each other in the other world. it is believed, for example, that children will find the midwife who had delivered them and pester her. a well-known ukrainian custom, designed to protect a woman who has served as a midwife, is to place a small bag with poppy seeds in her coffin so that she can “give these out as ransom to her “grandchildren” in the world beyond.” in the coffin of a parent, who has survived one of his or her children people place five braided breads and some money. these are designated as “treats for the children.”(4) it is common to use the deceased as messengers and the practice of sending greetings and request for forgiveness to those who died earlier through someone who is about to be interned is very widespread. items can be sent to the other world also. for example, if a person dreams about a relative who died a while ago and that relative reproaches him, complaining that he does not have the extra clothes, or the cane, or candle that he needs in the folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 16 afterlife, the dreamer can “send” the requested items through the newly deceased by placing them in his or her coffin. the funeral proper begins with the arrival of the priest who conducts a service (in folk terminology: “pravyv pokhoron, panykhydu, oprovid”). the consecration and blessing of the previously mentioned memorial gift plates is part of the ritual. in the carpathians, where a large number of such plates are assembled from a variety of foods with a lit candle in each plate, this is called pravyty parastas (to celebrate a parastas) and resembles a religious rite in honor of the deceased and ancestors. special terms exist for the other components of the service as well. for example, kazannie refers to the part of the priest’s speech where he lists the deceased’s virtues whereas proshcha signifies the priest’s request for the deceased’s sins to be forgiven by those present at the service. the priest uses incense to scent the coffin and then sprinkles it with holy water. when the service is over, the body is lifted using the two towels and placed inside the coffin, which is then taken out of the house. carrying the coffin with the body out of the house is a central part of the funeral. as such, it is characterized by a large number of ritual acts with a variety of functions. prior to the actual removal of the coffin there are acts that symbolized a union of the living around their dead family member. through these, they collectively say farewell as their relative leaves his home and native land for the last time. the form that this ritual takes in the chernihiv and sumy regions is for the relatives of the deceased to stand in a circle around the coffin after the memorial service. as they do so, they light and exchange nine or twelve candles (providnychok) “so that we can meet in the other world.”(5) a variant of this ritual practiced in pokuttia has the family carry lit candles and circle the deceased three times, all the while saying prayers (prypovidaly). afterwards they stop to kiss the deceased. in many ethnographic zones of ukraine, excluding polissia, it is traditional to lower the coffin to the doorstep and to knock it against the door jam three times [havryl’iuk 1985: 35]. this allows the deceased to say goodbye to his or her home (rozproshchuiet’sia) and it is believed that, having bid the house farewell, the dead person has no reason to return again (vidkloniuiet’sia, shchob bil’she ne vertatysia). it is also said that the dead can hear everything that is going on in the house until the coffin is knocked against the doorstep [hnat’iuk 1912: 206]. certain of the rules of behavior practiced at the time that the body is carried out have a protective function and are supposed to guard the well-being of the deceased’s family’s and to protect the life and health of the living. they counteract death as personified by the deceased and alleviate the natural dread of mortality. among the rules intended “to drive away death” are the dictate that the body always has to be carried out feet first and never by the family closest to the deceased. to protect himself, each pallbearer is supposed to carry a metal object in his pocket. finally, rye and wheat are thrown at the coffin and at the people carrying it just as they leave the house (na vykhid). once the coffin is out in the yard, the house door is promptly closed and the place where the body had just lain (the table or bench) is strewn with whole grain. to protect the family’s well-being, oats are thrown under the threshold. many other protective and preventative measures are employed. these include: turning the table upside-down, turning over the bread trough and not using it for a week, sprinkling holy water or placing 17 some bread or an axe on the “death” bench, the one on which the deceased had laid in state, and driving a nail in the underside of this same bench. there are also more complex rites. in bukovyna and hutsulshchyna, for example, after the coffin has been carried out, the family sits on a bench and everyone holds on to the same kalach so as “to have no more death in the house.” alternatively, they take turns holding a kalach in their laps while looking through the window at the coffin “so that the deceased will not return to us in our dreams” (shchob ne vvyzhavsia). after the coffin with the body has been carried out of the house, it is either taken immediately to the cemetery or left standing on a bier in the yard, watched over by two or three men. at this point everyone else goes back inside the house for a funeral supper. such a sequence of events is characteristic of some areas of right-bank polissia and the carpathians. according to a more widespread tradition, the ritual mourning continues in the yard. at the request of the family, the gospel is read and funeral hymns are sung. hutsuls often conduct a parastas. it is here that those who cannot follow the funeral procession to the cemetery say goodbye to the deceased. some examples of people who are forbidden from participating in the funeral procession are pregnant or menstruating women. it is widely held that the mother should not go to the cemetery for the burial of her first child. if people want to ask the deceased to pass along greetings to those who had died earlier, it is appropriate to make this request while the coffin stands in the yard. it is also in the yard that people put bread in the coffin (shchos’ iz khlibnoho) so that it can be “sent” to those who had passed away previously. farewells spoken in the yard typically include a ritualistic dialogue about the forgiveness of sins. if a priest is not present to call for forgiveness, a family member can speak on behalf of the deceased and address all those present. funerary objects are typically arranged in the yard. the cross that is going to be set on the grave of the deceased is tied with a rushnyk. a rushnyk called the “pokryvets” is placed on the lid of the coffin and a bread is placed on top of that. a rushnyk or kerchief is tied around one of the arms of each pallbearer. in the dniester lowland and the carpathians, a rushnyk is strung through a kalach and tied to each of the four handles of the bier, in this area called a nosha. if the funeral is for a child or youth, then a cherry or fir tree is strung with colored ribbons, used as a decoration during the funeral, and later planted on the grave. someone in the procession takes it upon himself to carry ritual food as well as sacrificial and memorial gifts to the cemetery. these are given out in commemoration of the deceased (na spomyn dushi, or among the hutsuls, na prostybih). in bukovyna, these gifts are called pomany and are especially numerous. they always include a kalach and candle, as well as a household item, such as rushnyk, kerchief, rug (nalavnyk or lizhnyk) and sometimes even a chicken or a sheep. different pomany, generous or modest, are prepared with the specific recipient in mind. thus, the gifts for the clergyman or the sexton will be more generous than those for the churchwarden or the people who dress the body and dig the grave, and so on. as the coffin is carried out of the yard, three handfuls of freshly-cut grass (pashnia) are thrown after it and, once the coffin is outside the gates, the gates themselves and the doors of the cattle-shed, stable, and pig pen are promptly closed. in the dnieper lowland and podillia, a red ribbon or belt is tied to the gate as a magical protective talisman [kuzelia 1912: 153.] (6) folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 18 the coffin is transported to the cemetery (called tsvyntar, mohylky, hrobovyshche or, by the hutsuls, temety) in one of a number of ways. it can be carried on the pallbearers’ shoulders or on a special bier (noshi, mary). the coffin can ride on a horse or ox-drawn cart or sled. the coffin of a small child is usually carried on rushnyky by young people of the same sex as the deceased. the coffin can be transported with its lid (viko) either open or closed, depending on the local tradition and other circumstances. the funeral procession is led by the person carrying the cross, followed by people carrying the church banners (khoruhvy). then comes the coffin itself. if the coffin is open, it is customary for the coffin lid bearers to precede the coffin. after the coffin walk the members of the deceased’s family and then the rest of the villagers. if the priest takes part in the procession, either walks in the procession or he rides on a horse in front of the coffin. the funeral processions of the hutsuls are traditionally accompanied by two or three trembita players, who walk approximately 100 meters ahead of everyone else. the procession stops at all road crossings, which in folk belief and ritual represent loci with special magical and sacral potency. in some localities in polissia and the carpathians, twelve stops are required, including before a crucifix (fihura), at a bridge, at a well that is located at the crossroads, and at a bend in the road. when the funeral procession comes to a halt at one of these stopping places, the people in the procession cross themselves, family members weep, and someone says a short prayer. in bukovyna it is believed that the coffin also has to be carried over a kerchief with a pomana, which has just been laid on the ground. the pomana bundle is then immediately given as a gift to someone in the procession. if a bridge is crossed, the pomana is placed on a rushnyk, which symbolizes the last trip of the departed and reflects the belief that this trip includes a ferry crossing into the other world. in chernihiv region, the funeral path is customarily strewn with periwinkle, “so that the soul can find its way and fly back home.”(7) those witnessing a passing funeral procession exercise caution: they close and lock the gates of their properties. they close and lock the doors to their homes. if anyone in the house is asleep, that person needs to be awakened. if an infant is asleep in the house, a knife is placed under him or her. people scrupulously avoid looking at the body through the window for fear of illness. crossing the road in front of a funeral procession is similarly avoided, as it is believed to cause mertva kistka (bone deterioration). the procession always stops in front of the church. the coffin is carried inside, if at all possible, and the priest says the departure prayer (prokhidna molytva). provided the family has arranged it and is able to pay, a mass (obidnia) is also conducted. once at the cemetery, the open coffin is placed near the grave. the grave has to be freshly dug, for it is said that the grave should not remain open overnight (iama ne povynna nochuvaty). the priest recites the office for the dead (panakhyda or litia) and blesses the grave. the family weeps, laments for the last time, and kisses the deceased goodbye. the grave-diggers nail the lid shut and the coffin is lowered into the grave on special ropes or belts called patel’ky, ochkury, shnury, vazhky or pasy. in polissia, it is customary to use rushnyky and to leave them in the grave, burying them along with the deceased. finally, the priest “seals” the grave by using the shovel to draw a cross in the soil at each of its corners. he then throws the first handful of earth into the grave, on top of the coffin. everyone then throws three handfuls of dirt into the grave saying “may the soil be like down [for you]” (shchob zemlia bula pukhom), and “may you rest easily in 19 the earth and may the earth keep you” (shchob lehko lezhav i zemliu trymav). the ritual of throwing handfuls of soil is not performed by everyone. only cousins and more distant family members are supposed to participate in this ritual. it is considered a symbol of parting “for (it allows) the dead to know who has come to the funeral and who has not.” throwing dirt on the coffin is also viewed as a protective measure: “so that the dead wouldn’t come to us in our dreams.” the dead here are understood to mean both the person who has just died and those who had passed away earlier. in folk belief, the dead are seen as ancestors who do not sever their ties with their family and are able to either help them or punish them as they deserve. living descendents can be punished by the dead for failing to honor and preserve their memory, for example. because of the close and continuing relationship that families maintained with their ancestors, rituals of caring for the deceased do not end at internment. the latter is but one step in the funeral process, leading to the rituals of the wake, performed immediately after burial, and to commemorative meals held on certain days of the calendar year. the customs and rituals of wake and commemoration legends and beliefs about the fate of the dead play an important role in the system of post-burial customs. according to these legends, the soul of the dead may appear as a bird or a flying insect such as butterfly, bee, fly, or beetle. it may take the shape of a spider or manifest itself as the shadow of a human being. it may also announce its presence with certain sounds, such as a knocking or rustling noise. the soul is believed to return to the house on the ninth, twelfth and fortieth day after death. common expressions of this belief are to state that “the soul is in the house,” “it flies back for a drink of water,” “it comes back for dinner.” the soul’s favorite resting place is purported to be in a corner on the stove, by the threshold, and in the icon corner (pokut’). to avoid harming the soul, the house is never painted or even swept on the days when it is believed to return. the soul is also supposed to come back to earth one year after the date of death. according to actual statements recorded from informants: “the soul stays in the house for forty days, then it flies around the property until one year has passed (since the date of death), then takes its leave, cries, and goes to its place.” (8) beliefs about the presence of the soul on earth are reinforced by rituals honoring the deceased through commemoration and feasting. immediately after death, namely right after the body is carried out of the house or right upon the return from the cemetery, people set out, “water for the soul,” a glass of water which the deceased can use for drinking and for washing. in some areas, a rushnyk along with bread and salt are placed either on a windowsill, on the table or in the icon corner (pokut’). people check for changes in the water level and say: “what has evaporated is how much the soul has drunk.” the water set out for the deceased is also viewed as a cleansing medium, something that the dead person can use to purify his soul, washing away his sins. the events in the commemoration cycle occur in approximately this sequence: immediately after burial, the family invites the priest and the villagers into their home for a funeral meal. some of the terminology used for this meal includes: in right-bank polissia, obid (dinner), pomynky (wake) or zhalobnyj obid (dinner of mourning); in the carpathians, pomershoho hostyna (feast of the dead), parastas, horiachyna (hot meal), komashnia. folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 20 before sitting down to the meal, everyone who had just been to the cemetery performs certain purifying and protective actions. everyone is supposed to wash his or her hands three times. this is done in a yard, before entering the house, and the water used for washing is supposed to run down onto the shovel used to dig the grave. once inside the house, each person is supposed to touch the chimney or glance into the stove. these actions help the living “to forget about the dead” (shchob zabutysia mertvoho), “lest [the dead] appear in a dream” (shchob ne maryvsia). occasionally small coins are thrown from the doorstep towards the stove. the coins are regarded as a token of purification and sacrifice. the dinner begins with the guests crossing themselves, saying “the lord’s prayer.” they then have to each eat three spoonfuls of kolyvo (also called kanun), a dish of wheat, honey and raisins specially prepared for the wake and blessed in the church after the funeral mass. next, the guests drink horilka or wine and eat borshch (red-beet soup) or kapusniak (cabbage soup), which has to be steaming hot (z paroiu). the idea that steam has to be rising from all dishes served at the wake comes from the belief that the soul of the dead attends the dinner and feeds on the steam. a common saying in the dnieper lowland goes as follows: “the steam [is] for you, the meal [is] for me; where the soul goes, there the steam follows.” the rest of the meal depends on the local traditions and current fasting requirements, if any. it can include pastries, porridge, varenyky, kholodets’ (meat in aspic), cabbage rolls and fried fish, among other dishes. the last dish is always compote or a fruit pudding (uzvar or kysil’). after the dinner, each guest receives a gift of either a small kalach with a candle or filled pastries (pyrizhky), scones (korzhyky), honey-cakes (prianyky) or some other treat. guests thank their hosts for the dinner and wish them good health. for the deceased, they wish repose in the “heavenly kingdom” (tsarstvo nebesne). on the night after the funeral, the adults do not sleep. rather, they keep the candles lit and leave the supper on the table. in right-bank ukraine, staying up all night after the funeral is called “seeing the soul off” (provodzhaty dushu). in the cherkasy region, around midnight, a candle is lit in complete silence and placed on the table or in the icon corner. while this is being done, everyone should “look out for the arriving soul.” the residents of this region firmly believe that the soul is “drawn to the hot candle” and flies toward it, but it can only be seen by the righteous and those with the fewest sins. some legends tell of all deceased family members coming home during this nighttime vigil. they speak of small, human-like shadows appearing at midnight and moving along the wall, from the stove to the icon corner. others describe a procession of doll-like shadows (ide dekil’ka tinej-kukolok), the dead family, marching up the wall and disappearing in the icon corner. (9) a commemorative dinner is customarily held on the ninth and fortieth days after death, as well as on the one-year anniversary. the dinner on the ninth day (dev’iatyny) is attended mainly by the close family. the other two meals are considered important, large-scale events, with everyone who had attended the funeral invited. for the family, major commemorative days begin with a trip to the church to deliver sacrificial gifts of remembrance and to request a memorial mass. afterwards, the family visits the cemetery and holds the dinner itself, a meal similar in structure to the ritual dinner served immediately after internment. in addition to the above-mentioned dates, small wakes are occasionally organized for the immediate and extended family on the sixth, twelfth and twentieth days and six months after the date of death. 21 ritual feasts are not the only way to remember the deceased and to honor him. other commemorative acts include having the family drink “water for the soul.” alternatively, water for the soul can be poured on the grave. families often prepare individual commemorative gifts such as bread, clothes made out of the deceased’s wardrobe, and give away objects that had been used during the funeral. it is common to leave a “supper for the soul” out in the house overnight and to take ritual food and drink to the cemetery and place it on the grave. at least one and usual some combination of these commemorative actions are performed either on the fixed remembrance dates, as stated above, or continuously throughout the period of forty days that follow death. all of the memorial ceremonies listed above are tied to a specific dead individual. but the folk also attribute special importance to remembering dead relatives in general. days for commemorating ancestors as a group coincide with certain dates and holidays of the calendar year and are dictated by the belief that the souls of the dead visit their families and former homes from time to time. foremost among the ceremonies commemorating ancestors as a group are provody (seeing-off), also known as hrobky, mohylky, radul’nytsia, a holiday that takes place on the first sunday after easter. a priest is supposed to officiate at this commemorative event. in right-bank polissia, provody takes place on the first thursday after easter, also known as mertvykh velykden’ (the easter of the dead) and navs’kyj velykden’ or mavs’kyj velykden’ (the easter of the nymphs or mermaids). prior to this day people visit the graves of their relatives, tidy them up and decorate them with new rushnyky and kerchiefs. on provody itself, graves are covered with a table-cloth and food and drink, including easter bread, painted eggs (krashanky , pysanky) are set out. the dead are greeted with the customary easter greeting (christ has risen!), and everyone eats, exchanges presents with neighbors and gives alms to the poor and elderly. when the family goes home, they leave behind a glass of water or horilka, a few eggs and some other food. an alternative to the family-arranged commemorative meal is a communal meal of remembrance. if a village holds such a meal at its cemetery, it is customary to install a few very long tables where everyone can sit. the dead, especially those who died an unnatural death, are especially remembered on the eve before trinity sunday, called zelena subota (green saturday) or klechal’na subota. the latter term comes from the custom of adorning houses with green boughs (klechanniam) on that day. four additional remembrance dates (pomynal’nytsi) are the saturdays before the feasts of st. demetrius, sts. cosmas and damian, and st. michael in the fall, and the first saturday of lent, in the spring. the old names for these dates, didy (grandfathers) and rodychi (relatives), typically used in the kyiv and chernihiv regions of polissia, bear witness to the fact that these dates are associated with the commemoration of ancestors. all of the remembrance holidays have a relatively stable and consistent structure. on the eve of the holiday the house is cleaned and everyone bathes and puts on fresh clothes. afterwards, food is put on the table and left there. traditional foods include borshch, porridge and kanun. meat, however, is to be avoided. once the food is set out, the living call their dead relatives by name and invite them to come to supper. not only the food, but also spoons and other utensils are left out overnight so that they can be used by the dead. the next day is a holiday and no work is to be done in the house or in the field. rather, commemorative gifts are to be taken folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 22 to church for a memorial service. another well known custom is to invite one’s dead relatives for kutia on christmas eve. although this study is a preliminary one and focuses primarily on description, it shows that the funeral is an extremely important event in the life of the ukrainian peasantry. furthermore, there was and continues to be a strong belief in an on-going relationship between the living and the generations that have preceded them. beliefs about the close ties between the living and the dead are reflected in both funerary practices and in commemorative rituals. notes 1 the author’s fieldwork data (afd). kyiv oblast’, tetiiv region, v. koshiv. 1987. notebook #3, p. 7; cherkasy oblast’, korsun’-shevchenkivs’kyi region , v. drabivka, p. 3. 2 afd, vinnytsia obladst’, koziatyn region, v. shyroka hreblia. 1989. #3, p. 106. 3 afd. kirovohrad oblast’, oleksandriia region, v. divoche pole. 1990. #3, p. 8 4 afd, chernivtsi oblast’, putyl’ region, v. dykhtynets’. 1981. #5, p. 2. 5 afd, sumy oblast’, romny region, v. perekopivka. 1985. #10, p. 22 6 afd, khmel’nyts’k oblast’, krasyliv region, v. antonino. 1986. #4, p. 9. 7 afd, chernihiv oblast’, pryluki region, v. okhyn’ky. 1987. #15, p. 11. 8 afd, kyiv oblast’, tetiiv region, v. koshiv. 1987. #3, p. 19. 9 afd, cherkasy oblast’, korsun’-shevchenkovs’kyj region, v. drabivka. 1987. #3, p. 10. bibliography gracheva, g. n. 1983. traditsionnoe mirovozzrenie okhotnikov taimyra: na materialakh nganasan xix-nachala xx v. [the traditional outlook of the hunters of taimyr]. leningrad: nauka. havryl’iuk, n. k. 1981. kartografirovanie iavlenii dukhovnoi kul’tury (po materialam rodil’noi obriadnosti ukraintsev) [mapping spiritual culture using ukrainian birth customs]. kiev: naukov dumka. havryl’iuk, n. k. 1985a. “karta-skhema: areal’ni spivvidnoshennia stiiko povtoriuvanykh elementiv obriadovykh iavysch” [the schematic map: correlations between repeated ritual phenomena and geographic area]. in the article: “kyivs'ko-polis'kyi variant tradytsiinoi simeinoi obriadovosti na foni sumizhnykh terytorii” [the kyiv-polissia variant of traditional family rituals, as compared to neighboring territories]. in zhelezniak i. (ed.), kyivs'ke polissia (etnolinhvistychne doslidzhennia) [kievan polissia (ethnolinguistic research)]. kyiv: naukova dumka, pp. 24-40. havryl’iuk, n. k. 1985b. “traditsionnaia pohrebal’naia obriadnost’ polesia v sravnenii s karpatobukovinskoi zonoi” [the traditional funeral rites of the polissia region in comparison with carpathianbukovynian zone]. in v. v. ivanov (ed.), balto-slav’ianskie etnokul’turnye i arkheologicheskie drevnosti. pogrebal’nyi obriad. tezisy dokladov [balto-slavic ethno-cultural and archeological antiquity. abstracts]. moscow: nauka, pp.28-30. 23 hnat’iuk, v. 1912. “pokhoronni zvychai i obriady” [funeral customs and rites]. etnohrafichnyi zbirnyk. vols. 31-32, pp. 203-424. huziy, roman 2002. pokhoronni zvychai ta obriady ukraintsiv karpat (19-20 st.) [funeral rites and customs of the ukrainian population of the carpathian region (19th-20th centuries)]. unpublished candidate dissertation, lviv: institut ukrainiznavstva im. i. kryp'iakevycha. natsional'noi akademii nauk. iaschurzhinskii, kh. 1893. “ostatky iazychestva v pogrebal’nykh obriadakh malorossii” [remains of paganism in the funeral rites of little russia]. etnograficheskoe obozrenie [ethnographic review]. moscow, vols. 11-13, pp. 93-95. ivanov, v. v., nevskaia l. g. (eds) 1990. issledovania v oblasti balto-slavianskoi dukhovnoi kul’tury. pogrebal’nyi obriad. [studies in the field of balto-slavic culture]. moscow: nauka. kravchenko, v. 1920. zvychai v seli zabriddi zhytomyrs’koho povitu na volyni. etnohrafichni materialy [rites in the village zabriddia zhytomyr region in the volyn area]. zhytomyr: vydaie volyns'ke naukove tovarystvo. kutel'makh k. 1994. “pomynal'ni motyvy v kalendarnii obriadovosti polischukiv” [funeral motifs in the calendar rituals of the people of polissia]. in stepan pavliuk (ed.): polissia ukrainy: materialy istorykoetnohrafichnoho doslidzhennia [the polissia of ukraine: historico-ethnografic data]. vyp. 1: kyivs'ke polissia [kievan polissia]. l'viv: instytut narodoznavstva nan, pp. 172-203. kuzelia, zenon, 1912. “ukrains’ki pokhoronni zvychai i obriady v etnohrafichnii literaturi. ohliad studii i bibliohrafia” [ukrainian funeral customs and rites in ethnographic literature. a review of the scholarship and a bibliography]. etnohrafichnyi zbirnyk. vols. 31-32, pp. 131-202. republished as pokhoronni zvychai ta obriady. zibrav volodymyr hnatjuk [funeral customs and rites]. collected by volodymyr hnat’iuk]. lviv. maierchyk m. 1996. “the ornithomorphic notions of the soul (genesis and semiotics).” thanatos. studies of integral culture, l'viv: instytut narodoznavstva, no. 1, pp. 92-105. shubravs’ka, m. m. and o. a. pravdiuk (eds) 1970. vesillia (u dvokh tomakh) [the wedding (in two volumes)]. kiev: naukova dumka. shukhevych, v. 1902. “hutsul’schyna”. materialy do ukrains’ko-rus’koi etnolohii [materials on ukrainian-russian ethnology]. lviv: vydaie naukove tovarystvo im. shevchenka, vol. 3. surkhasko, iu. iu. 1985. semeinye obriady i verovaniia karel: konets xix-nachalo xx v. [family rites and beliefs of the karelians: the end of the 19th-early 20th centuries]. leningrad: nauka. worobec, christine. “death ritual among russian and ukrainian peasants: linkages between the living and the dead.” in stephen p. frank and mark d. steinberg (eds), cultures in flux: lower-class values, practices, and resistance in late imperial russia. princeton: princeton university press, 1994, pp. 11-33. translated by bohdana badzio. assistance with content and bibliography from natalie kononenko and olena boriak. folklorica 2003, vol. viii no. 2 untitled the kobza and the bandura 129 the kobza and the bandura a study in similarities and contrasts andrij hornjatkevyč university of alberta edmonton, alberta, canada by introduction in march 1992, the rural artist levko voiedylo exhibited in kyiv a series of his works entitled “гомери україни [homers of ukraine].” these were paintings of bandura and kobza players from the past, based both on real portraits and on the artist’s own imagination. by referring to his subjects as ukrainian homers voiedylo intimated that they were both poets and carriers of an oral epic tradition. much earlier in the century, in 1900 to be exact, the scholar ilarion ohonovskyi published in l’viv his словар до гомерової одиссеї і ілїяди [dictionary to homer’s odyssey and iliad]. in this work, he translated φόρµιγξ as кобза, бандура, лїра, китара [kobza, bandura, lyre, cithara] [418]. he also translated φορµίζω as граю на кобзї [i play the kobza]. it is quite safe to assume that neither the kobza nor bandura were known in homeric times, neither in their present nor even in their earlier forms. thus ohonovskyi’s translation must be taken as poetic licence. indeed, chordophones with a pear shaped body and long neck were not known in ancient greece. what makes ohonovskyi’s gloss even more unusual is the fact that, at the turn of the twentieth century, neither instrument was in popular use in western ukraine. to be sure, the words themselves may have been known for at least a century, but no one played either the bandura or the kobza in those regions. it is also telling that the words kobza and bandura are treated as synonyms but there is ample evidence that, popular usage notwithstanding, these were two distinct, albeit related, instruments. today, the former is known in at least two forms while the latter has at least three major incarnations. in his history of king sigismund iii (reigned 1587-1632), franciszek siarczyński enumerated the musical instruments used in the seventeenth century polish kingdom, which at that time included extensive parts of ukraine. he listed the bandura, among urban instruments, adding that commoners played the kobza. in his detailed description of ukraine, aleksandr rigel’man explicitly stated that they are two related but different instruments: folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 130 “many of them are fine musicians. they play primarily on violins, the double bass, hammer dulcimer, psalteries, bandura and on the lute, as well as on trumpets. villagers in hamlets also play the violin, the kobza (a type of bandura) and on pipes, while the inhabitants of polissya also play the bagpipe…[book 6, ch. 38, 4: 87]. [emphasis supplied throughout – ah] what did these instruments look like and how did they come to be played in ukraine? were they imports or local inventions? before discussing the differences between the kobza and bandura, one can state at the outset that they are plucked chordophones with a neck and a pear shaped body. instruments of this type can be found throughout eurasia (and beyond) from the japanese biwa, the chinese p’i p’a, through the sitar and tambura of the indian subcontinent, to the ūd of mesopotamia and far beyond, and to various lutes, theorbos and mandolins of central and southern europe [diagram group 178-189]. what distinguishes the kobza and bandura from all those instruments is the presence of treble strings on the bellies of both, at least in their recent form. origins the earliest documentation in ukraine of an instrument from which the kobza and bandura could have evolved is an eleventh century fresco in the northwest staircase of st. sophia cathedral in kyiv. minstrels. st. sophia cathedral in kyiv, 11th c. the kobza and the bandura 131 it depicts a group of minstrels playing various instruments and dancing. among them we see a musician playing an instrument with a pear shaped body and long neck. he stops the strings (their exact number is extremely difficult to ascertain) with his left hand and plucks them with his right. even this evidence is ambiguous because we cannot be certain whether the minstrels are those of the kyivan or byzantine court. after all, the mosaics and frescos of the cathedral were done either by greek artists or under their direct supervision. furthermore, we do not know the name of this instrument with any certainty [khotkevych 66]. in a chart prepared by the author of this paper in the mid 1970s the instrument was called the “protokobza.” a possible earlier reference can be found in theophilactus simocatta (early seventh century). under the year 592 he wrote about slavs who played a musical instrument that he called a lyre: “on the following day three men, sclavenes by race, who were not wearing any iron or military equipment, were captured by the emperor’s [maurice, 582-602] bodyguards. lyres were their baggage, and they were not carrying anything else at all. … they carried lyres since it was not their practice to gird weapons on their bodies, because their country was ignorant of iron and thereby provided them with a peaceful and troublefree life; they made music on lyres because they did not know how to sound forth on trumpets.” [vi.2.10 … 15; 160] it must be noted, however, that the event described occurred in thrace, immediately north of the sea of marmara, and although the author calls this trio “slavs” there is no evidence that they had come from ukrainian lands. closer to ukraine and from more recent times is the testimony of the arab chronicler ibn fad·lān. he describes the funerary rites of a rus’ trading expedition that had set up camp on the lower volga. “when they came to his grave, they removed the earth from the timbers and raised the timbers, drew him [the deceased] in the same garment in which he had died, and i saw how he had turned black from the cold earth. i also noted that they had put in his grave mead, fruits, and a kind of mandolin. they now took all of these out of the grave.” [68] while the english translator r. n. frye uses the expression “kind of mandolin,” an earlier russian translation by a. harkavy uses the glosses “lute (or balalaika).” one could go along with the word “lute” since it is of arabic origin – al-’ūd – except that ibn fad· lān used the word t·anbūr. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 132 ibn fad·lān’s narrative must be taken with some reservation. harkavy [114-116] cautioned that arabic travelers were not the best ethnologists and could confuse nationalities. in this instance it is not clear whether ibn fad·lān was talking about khazars, (volga) bulgars, slavs, finnic people or even scandinavian varangians. indeed, merchant caravans of those times could be composed of any or even all of the above. thus, again, we are sure of neither the nature of the instrument nor the ethnicity of the people described. therefore, lacking any other reliable information about putative ancestors of the kobza and bandura, we must accept the st. sophia fresco as the earliest record of an instrument in ukraine from which the kobza and bandura could have evolved. ukrainian bandurist chorus program notes from the 1950s stated that the word “kobza” is of turkic origin, suggesting that instrument came to ukraine from asia and was brought by the innumerable nomads that appeared in the ukrainian steppes. on the other hand, the word “bandura” has european roots. this would imply that this instrument came from central europe. although studying the etymology of an instrument name can be tempting, it says little about the artefact that carries that name. let us examine the word used in different slavic languages that can be traced to a reconstructed common slavic verb *gǫdǫ, *gǫsti – “to sound.” it gives ukrainian “husli,” czech “housle,” and bosnian “gusle.” we know that the ukrainian “husli” is a kind of psaltery, the czech “housle” is a violin, and the bosnian “gusle” is a bowed monochord. similarly, it can be shown that the words “guitar” and “zither” are derived from the greek κίθαρις. the only common element of these three instruments is that they are plucked chordophones. there is no denying that the word “kobza” comes from asia. numerous turkic languages have the words kobyz, kopuz, kobuz, kobas, qobuz, qobyz, and many others. the etymology of the word “bandura” is equally transparent. it probably came into ukrainian from polish because western and southern europe know many instruments with a similar name; one need only mention the english bandore (more about it later), the spanish bandurria or the italian pandura or pandora. these can be traced to the greek πανδώρα, which in turn can be connected to the old persian t·anbūr – the very word used by ibn fad·lān. this word, in turn, is related to sumerian pantur/pant·ur which means little bow. ukrainian scholars often cited aleksandr famintsyn’s quotation of the english historian john stowe who wrote: “in the fourth yere of queen elizabeth [1558 + 4 = 1562], john rose, dwelling in bridewell, the kobza and the bandura 133 devised and made an instrument, with wyer strings, commonly called the bandora, and left a son, far excelling himselfe in making bandoraes, voyall de gamboes and other instruments.” [italics mine – ah] on this basis famintsyn claimed that this instrument made its way through poland into ukraine where it became very popular. we know exactly what rose’s bandora looked like and it is obvious that it bears little resemblance to either the kobza or bandura. the english instrument was a cittern, i.e., it had a flat back while the ukrainian instruments have curved backs. the edges of the former are scalloped while the latter, as a rule, have smooth edges. the bandora had fourteen paired strings over a fretted fingerboard while the strings of the ukrainian instruments are single. the bandora could be tuned either g1 c d g b e a or c d g c f a c΄, while ostap veresai tuned the bass strings of his kobza g c d g΄ a΄ d˝. finally, and this may be the salient difference, the english bandora had no treble strings. therefore, the only thing the english and ukrainian instruments have in common is that they are plucked chordophones. in his work on ukrainian folk musical instruments andrii humeniuk [153] reproduces an illustration of an instrumental ensemble from karion istomin’s 1691 bukvar’ [primer]. here one can see musicians that play a viol, psaltery, recorder and an unfretted instrument with a round body that has some resemblance to the kobza, but is called a bandura by humeniuk. since karion istomin’s life and work was totally the english bandora. woodcut from a manual, london, 1596 folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 134 connected with muscovy, this illustration does not warrant much attention in the discussion here. at some point, it is difficult to ascertain exactly when, treble strings began to appear on the belly of the kobza and bandura that differentiate these instruments from all others in the lute family. while strings along the neck of a violin or guitar can be stopped to produce the desired pitch, strings on the belly of the ukrainian instruments can be played only open. from the standpoint of a lute, treble strings are superfluous. one can obtain ever-higher notes simply by stopping the strings ever lower on the neck or soundboard. additional strings were added sometimes in the bass range, and thus one obtained the archlute, chitarrone or theorbo. these additional bass strings were attached to an additional pegbox, and they would be played open. to be sure, we have a fantastic harp-cittern built ca. 1590 by vendelin tieffenbruker in padua that has a harp-like attachment in the bass range, and treble strings on the belly [buchner 102]. in the early seventeenth century, similar instruments, called poliphant, were built in england but they had become rarities by 1661 (“poliphant”). these instruments did not gain widespread popularity either in england or in italy, and today they are beautiful curiosities in musical instrument museums, while the kobza and bandura thrive in ukraine. musicians from karion istomin’s bukvar’ the kobza and the bandura 135 in soviet times scholars in ukraine had to quote famintsyn whose views on the history of the kobza and bandura were thoroughly debunked by hnat khotkevych (1930). the tragedy lay in the fact that khotkevych had been shot by soviet authorities and his works were proscribed for decades, while famintsyn became a mandatory source. the kobza since we seem to lack firm evidence when treble strings first appeared on plucked chordophones in ukraine, let us allow that the idea did come from western or southern europe in the sixteenth century. of course, there is nothing to prevent us from assuming that the idea also could have come independently to a ukrainian instrument maker. indeed, khotkevych [101] unequivocally stated that the treble strings were a ukrainian invention. the old style instrument without treble strings would continue to be used well into the eighteenth and possibly even nineteenth century. this is amply attested by numerous late-eighteenth and nineteenth century folk paintings of “kozak mamai,” which show a harp-cittern. vendelin tieffenbruker, padua, 1590 (from winternitz). tymofii kalyns’kyi, cossack playing a kobza. fragment of the gravure “cossacks at leisure” in rigel’man folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 136 cossack sitting on the ground with all his gear, usually playing a kobza. (if he is not shown playing it, the instrument is nearby.) there is great variety in the size and shape of these instruments; some have treble strings although a larger number do not, and a small number have frets on the fingerboard. the number of bass strings varies considerably but their number does not seem to exceed seven. where treble strings are depicted, their number is not greater than that of the bass strings. here, this instrument will be called kobza. the bandura even before the nineteenth century, the number of treble strings increased and a different instrument had evolved – the bandura. here the melody was no longer obtained by stopping the bass strings of the kobza but on the open diatonically tuned treble strings. the number of bass strings on the traditional (starosvits’ka) bandura varied from four to six, usually there were five. the number of treble strings (prystrunky) also varied from thirteen to eighteen, and they were tuned to suit the performer’s voice and the character of the piece performed [kushpet 2007: 40-60]. in the nineteenth century, the bandura continued to evolve adding ever more treble strings. traditional bandura, 1740 the kobza and the bandura 137 the problem in his enumeration of ukrainian musical instruments rigel’man stated that the kobza is a type of bandura [book. 6, ch. 38; 4: 87]. the matter was further complicated when, by the nineteenth century, both in folk parlance and scholarly discourse the words kobza and bandura were treated as synonyms, cf., e.g., ohonovskyi s.v. φόρµιγξ. furthermore, in the course of the nineteenth century the number of treble strings on the bandura continued to expand while those on the kobza remained constant and the instrument itself was losing popularity and, for all practical purposes, died out with the demise of ostap veresai (1803-1890). one could think that the matter would be closed; the bandura could simply acquire an alternate name – kobza. but his was not to be. many folk instrument orchestras appeared in the ukrainian ssr, although, in many of them, the instruments used were not quite the ones that actually were or had been used by the folk. such non-ukrainian instruments as the dom(b)ra were incorporated into these ensembles. this instrument could have either three strings tuned, depending on the size, b e a or e a d, or four tuned to g d a e. eventually, these instruments were seen as something of an embarrassment because obviously they were not ukrainian and ostap veresai and his kobza folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 138 something had to be done with them. without changing the tuning, thus requiring no retraining of the performers, the body of these reconstructed kobzas was modified to reflect the shape of instruments that were depicted on the aforementioned folk pictures of kozak mamai. in his website (http://kobza.ukrbiz.net/) the manufacturer clearly states: to the degree possible, i shall try to tell everything that i know about this instrument inasmuch as i myself created it some ten years ago when i was working in the enterprise “zoloti ruky.” this firm has produced a complete series of instruments designed by professor [mykola antonovych] prokopenko, and then approved and curated by the ministry of culture of ukraine. the instrument got a name full of pathos – kobza. what does this instrument have in common with legendary kobza, the kobzar [kobza players] instrument of yore? i think only the name and ambitions. regardless, this is an attempt to replace the dombra as the fundamental orchestral string folk instrument in ukrainian folk collectives. and so, prima, alto, tenor, bass and contrabass instruments have been made with this name, as well as a six-string kobza with guitar tuning. [my translation from the russian – ah] indeed, these instruments have found a place even in the national bandurists cappella of ukraine, but not as equals. they were in back rows, and when bandura players would turn their instruments toward the audience during applause, the kobza players lowered their instruments, as if they were ashamed of them. at least that was the picture during the cappella’s canadian tour in 1988. six-string kobza used in the national bandurists cappella of ukraine four string modern kobza the kobza and the bandura 139 the modern bandura there was a degree of asymmetry in the traditional bandura, but as more and more treble strings were added this started posing a problem. finally, young khotkevych had a bandura constructed in 1894 with the neck strongly shifted to the performer’s right thus allowing much more room for treble strings. khotkevych claimed that this was “the first change in the folk instrument” [129]. in reality, however, some asymmetrical banduras had been constructed earlier in the nineteenth century [kushpet 2007 unpaginated illustrations]. this allowed for an ever-larger number of strings. at first, the tuning remained diatonic but within a few decades attempts were made to allow the performer to play in a greater number of keys. in one system, this was achieved with a mechanism of a system of ditals mounted on the bridge that allowed each string to be retuned up or down by exactly one semitone. in the majority of cases, this allowed the bandurist to play in all the keys between e-flat major (c minor) and e major (c-sharp minor). another system used additional strings placed between the diatonic ones for all the intervening semitones. these would be mounted on a plane that intersected the diatonic range, so that the diatonic range would be on top near the bridge, but the semitones would be at the top of the instrument’s belly. finally, both systems were combined but now the retuning mechanism is placed at the top of the belly. the mechanism is ganged, and the movement of one lever sharps both the fundamental string and its semitone. this system allows the performer to play in all keys between c-flat major (a-flat minor) and csharp major (a-sharp minor). conservatory-trained performers favour this concert type of instrument. some bandurists, however, felt that this evolution distorted the instrument and detached it from its roots. they yearned for a more authentic bandura on which the ancient repertoire – proscribed under the soviets – could be performed. although the form of the instrument was well know, the playing technique would have been lost had it not been for the architect heorhii tkachenko who had mastered it in his youth, and in the late twentieth century was able to teach young enthusiasts to build and play this instrument. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 140 the kobza reborn fortunately for posterity, the composer and ethnomusicologist mykola lysenko (1842-1912) made an accurate record of ostap veresai’s kobza, playing technique and repertoire. although none of the latter’s instruments have survived to our day, lysenko’s publication (1955) on the subject allowed the reconstruction of the instrument. beginning with the 1980s, several enthusiasts, volodymyr kushpet, mykhailo khai and mykola budnyk among them, have reconstructed veresai’s kobza and his repertoire. they also composed new material using this instrument for accompaniment [cherkas’kyi 108]. soon thereafter, kushpet published an instruction manual for the kobza, old style bandura, and torban (1997). far from being a one-man operation, the reborn kobza has a number of disciples who continue and develop this tradition. pavlo suprun playing a concert type bandura. tkachenko playing a traditional bandura. the kobza and the bandura 141 conclusions as a concert instrument taught in the kyiv and l’viv conservatories, the bandura has become standardised. unlike in the nineteenth century, when every performer would tune the instrument to suit the tessitura of a song to his voice range, the modern instrument has a set tuning. likewise, the number of strings is fixed, although there are different size instruments with fewer strings constructed especially for children. in diatonic instruments, the number of strings is around 32, in chromatic instruments around 55, and in concert instruments it is around 65. of those, the number of bass strings varies from eight (diatonic instrument) to fifteen (l’viv concert bandura). (we say “around” because there are subtle differences between instruments made in the chernihiv and l’viv musical factories.) obviously, the number of treble strings in each case is much larger than the bass strings. all strings on the bandura, whatever the model, are played open, i.e., they are not stopped to alter the pitch. as a general rule, the melody is played on the treble strings. taras kompanichenko playing on a veresai type kobza. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 142 the modern kobza has an equal number of bass and treble strings. (the term “modern kobza” may be a misnomer because contemporary instruments are faithful reconstructions of veresai’s instrument.) the melody is played primarily on the six bass strings (tuned g c d g a d΄) that are stopped on the unfretted fingerboard to produce the desired note. the treble strings are tuned diatonically g΄ a΄ b΄ c˝ d˝ e˝, and can be used in bandura style [kushpet 1997: 7-80). will the re-emergence of the traditional kobza put an end to the onomastic confusion between the kobza and bandura that has obtained through the twentieth century? only time will tell. bibliography buchner, alexander 1980. colour encyclopedia of musical instruments. london: hamlyn. cherkas’kyi, leonid 2003. черкаський, леонід. українські народні музичні інструменти [ukrainian folk musical instruments]. київ: техніка. diagram group 1978. musical instruments of the world. new york: bantam books. famintsyn, aleksandr 1891. фаминцин, алексарндр. домрá и сродные ей музыкальные инструменты русского народа: балалайка – кобза – бандура – торбан – гитара [the domra and similar musical instruments of the russian people: balalaika – kobza – bandura – torban – guitar]. санкт-петербург: тип. э. арнольда. harkavy (aka garkavi), al’bert [avraam] iakovlevich 1870. гаркави, альберт (авраам) яковлевич. сказания мусульманских писателей о славянах и русских (с половины ѵіі века до конца х века по р. хр.) [narratives about the slavs and rus’ians [as presented] by muslim writers (from the middle of vii century through the end of the x century a.d.). санкт-петербург: императорская академия наук. humeniuk, andrii 1967. гуменюк, андрій. українські народні музичні інструменти [ukrainian folk musical instruments]. київ: наукова думка. ibn fad·lān, ah. mad 2005. ibn fadlan’s journey to russia: a tenth century traveler from baghdad to the volga river. translated with commentary by richard n frye. princeton: markus wiener publishers. the kobza and the bandura 143 khotkevych, hnat 1930. хоткевич, гнат. музичні інструменти українського народу [musical instruments of the ukrainian people]. харків: дву. http://kobza.ukrbiz.net/ kushpet, volodymyr 1997. кушпет, володимир. самовчитель гри на старосвітських інструментах. кобза о. вересая, бандура г. ткаченка, торбан ф. відорта [self-instruction manual for playing ancient instruments. o. veresai’s kobza, h. tkachenko’s bandura, f. vidort’s torban]. київ: litsoft. kushpet, volodymyr 2007. старцівство: мандрівні співці-музиканти в україні (хіх – поч. хх ст.) [minstrelsy: travelling singers-musicians in ukraine (xix – beginning of the xx centuries]. київ: tempora. lysenko, mykola 1955. лисенко, микола. характеристика музичних особливостей українських дум і пісень виконуваних кобзарем вересаєм [the characteristic musical features of ukrainian epics and songs as performed by the minstrel veresai]. київ: мистецтво. ohonovskyi, ilarion 1900. огоновський, іларіон. словар до гомерової одиссеї і ілїяди [the vocabulary of homer’s “odyssey” and “iliad”]. львів: наукове товариство імени шевченка. “poliphant.” the new grove dictionary of music and musicians. 2d edition. new york: grove’s dictionaries, 2001. rigel’man, aleksandr 1847. ригельман, александр. летописное повествование о малой россии и ее народе и козаках вообще ... [chronicle about little russia and its people, and about the cossacks in general…] москва: императорское общество истории и древностей российских. siarczyński, franciszek 1843-58. obraz wieku panowania zygmunta iii, króla polskiego i szwedskiego … [description of the reign of zygmunt iii, king of poland and sweden]. poznań: nowa księga. simocatta, theophylactus 1986. the history of theophylact simocatta. an english translation with introduction and notes [by] michael and mary whitby. oxford: clarendon press. stow, john 1615. the annals, or, general chronicle of england / begun first by maister john stow; and after him continued and augmented with matters forreyne and domestique, auncient and moderne vnto the ende of the present yeere 1614 by edmond howes … london: thomas adams. winternitz, emanuel 1967. musical instruments of the western world. photographs by lilly stunzi. new york toronto: mcgraw-hill book company. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii microsoft word contentsqsoft.doc 146 александр б. страхов. ночь перед рождеством: народное христианство и рождественская обрядность на западе и у славян. (a. b. strakhov. christmas eve: folk christianity and christmas rituals in the west and in slavic cultures.) (palaeoslavica xi. supplementum 1). cambridge: 2003. 380 pp. issn – 1070-5465. for almost two centuries the concept of dvoeverie (double belief) has been used by scholars to characterize popular religion in russia. it was widely believed that from its origins until well into the nineteenth century, russian christianity, in contrast to religious practice in western europe, was never fully accepted among the folk, but existed side-byside with pagan beliefs. much scholarly energy was expended on identifying pagan elements in russian culture and religion, and in the soviet period, continuing pagan practice under the tsarist regime was often interpreted as opposition on the part of the lower classes to the power of the state. in the last fifteen years, however, some scholars have begun to question the pervasive presence of paganism throughout the history of russian christianity. in the book under review, aleksandr b. strakhov has made a very significant contribution to this process. strakhov has compiled a vast amount of material on popular christian beliefs associated with christmas, not only among the east slavs, but also throughout europe and even north america. as a result, strakhov directly challenges what might be called the two guiding principles of traditional dvoeverie based scholarship: the uniqueness of russia’s popular religion, and the pagan origin of its religious practice among the folk. he convincingly demonstrates, by citing beliefs and ceremonies in orthodox as well as catholic countries, that russian practice is neither unique nor pagan in origin, but, like popular christian religion practiced throughout europe, was the product of a folk interpretation of christian belief that is best understood within the context of a shared christian heritage developed in socially similar conditions, rather than a common indo-european past. noch' pered rozhdestvom consists of a short foreword by the author, eight chapters and an extensive bibliography. there is no index, but the table of contents identifies the main topics within each chapter and provides page numbers. the chapters, despite the book’s title, all deal with the nativity broadly construed, that is, from the end of november to the middle of january. the discussion is wide ranging, however, and often addresses christian celebrations practiced at other times in the liturgical calendar. chapter themes include: miraculous folklorica 2007, vol. xii 147 blooming and fruit-bearing plants, the transformation of water into wine, the birth of christ in a cattle shed, the symbolism and magic of fertility and birth, as well as the dark side of yuletide, which derives from its nature as the period when christ was yet unbaptized and the spirits of the dead were liberated each year for a short time to roam about the world. by limiting the scope of his study to the christmas period, strakhov provides it with a clear focus, but, at the same time, is able to discuss those topics most closely associated with pagan beliefs, namely, veneration of the clan and ancestors, and commemorations connected to the yearly agricultural cycle. strakhov’s typical method in this study is to begin with a chapter theme and provide several examples from a range of countries and traditions. as new thematic threads emerge in the course of the discussion he examines each and moves forward to additional related themes. for example, in chapter iii “the birth of christ in a cattle shed,” the basic premise is that the presence and correct behavior of certain animals at christ’s birth and during the holy family’s escape from king herod have obtained for them certain privileges. in contrast, the absence of other animals during these events brings negative consequences. pork, for example became the traditional new year’s day meal rather than beef. in the course of the chapter the discussion ranges from the speech and prophetic powers of favored animals such as cattle, to the wolf as a symbol of herod, who persecutes the “lamb” of god. at various points in the chapter, strakhov challenges the views of scholars who affirm the pagan origins of popular religion. thus he promotes the explanation that peasants fed their domestic animals high quality feed or ceremonial fare at christmas as a sign of their respect for the role they played in christ’s birth, and rather contemptuously rejects the notion that the practice should be viewed as a means of giving their dead ancestors ritual food, as some scholars maintain. strakhov’s knowledge of popular religion and his command of source materials in close to a dozen languages are quite remarkable. as a compendium of folk beliefs related to the nativity it is hard to imagine that this study could be surpassed. the only significant problem i see in the work is a failure to engage meaningfully with the “pagan” school. strakhov makes the case for the christian origin of most popular religion very well, but his insistence on only one system to the exclusion of the other does not allow for any overlap between the two. the discussion is frequently polarized and only the more extreme examples of pagan-based theory are given, generally as objects of ridicule. in the brief foreword, folklorica 2007, vol. xii 148 he mentions the origin of the pagan tradition in romanticism, but says nothing about its rather complex development in the soviet period, including among such semioticians as boris uspensky and yury lotman, as well as its embrace by western feminists like joanna hubbs, who sees an opposition between a patriarchal christianity and a more feminine paganism. the influence of paganism has certainly been exaggerated in many of these approaches, but they are still able to shed some light on the nature of the syncretism that did occur. as eve levin has pointed out, one must recognize in some cases the possibility of beliefs that draw on pagan as well as christian concepts. curious in this regard also is the absence in the lengthy bibliography of levin’s excellent article or those of other scholars, such as stella rock, who have questioned the predominance of pagan beliefs in the formation of russian popular religion (eve levin, dvoeverie and popular belief,” in seeking god: the recovery of religious identity in orthodox russia, ukraine and georgia, ed. by stephen k. batalden, northern illinois university press, 1993, 31-52; stella rock, “what’s in a word: a historical study of the concept of dvoeverie,” canadian-american slavic studies, 35 1 (2001):19-28). despite this caveat, strakhov’s strong contribution should not be underestimated. he is no doubt correct when he declares that popular christian culture is much more complex than we have been accustomed to think. it has evolved over centuries in a spiritual milieu where miracles, magic and the correct performance of rituals and recitation of prayers were much more important than orthodox theology. as we seek to understand the nature of russian popular religion, highly creative, comparative studies like strakhov’s are an essential part of the process. david k prestel michigan state university microsoft word folk04se.doc 13 waxing like the moon: women folk healers in rural western ukraine (1) sarah d. phillips university of indiana once a woman came to see me…she says to me, “i can’t sleep, and i’m so weak.” i asked her, “did something frighten you?” “no,” she said—she didn’t want to tell me. i began to pour the wax, i said, “something has frightened you—either a man, or a dead person.” she remained silent. i began to pour the wax a second time, and it splattered all over the house! she says, “i’m feeling better.” i said, “why didn’t you tell me? you really were frightened by the dead. now you’ll feel better.” splattered all over the house. stepania, 68, village horykhliady, ternopil� region introduction stepania is a ukrainian folk healer, known to her fellow villagers as a babka, or babka-sheptukha (�granny,� or �granny-whisperer�).(2) babky are elderly women who perform magico-religious rituals such as �the pouring forth of wax� (vylyvaty visk sometimes called strakh vylyvaty, �to pour fear�) to treat a variety of maladies.(3) they are usually respected figures in their communities, and are seen by many to possess a valuable form of wisdom that cannot be learned in books. though some babky are rumored to be witches who practice both �white� and �black� magic, and their practices are derided by some as �superstitions,� their fellow villagers usually respect them, seeing them as god�s chosen healers.(4) the babky see themselves (and are seen by most villagers) in terms of what faith wigzell has described as the role of the russian znakharki (knowing ones). historically, she writes, znakharki were folk healers who (in contrast to witches and sorcerers), �did not embody supernatural powers, but acted as mediators with the unclean force� [1998:49].(5) this article will detail ethnographic data gathered among babky in ternopil� and ivano-frankivs�k regions of ukraine in 1998 and 1999.(6) to carry out this research i participated twice in an annual summer fieldwork expedition undertaken by researchers and students.(7) the annual dnister expedition was initiated in 1988 by the lion society in l�viv to facilitate ecological research on various aspects of the dnister river and the villages dotting its banks.(8) during the summers of 1998 and 1999, the expedition included hiking and canoeing phases, and lasted from one to two months. researchers (including ethnographers, linguists, botanists, chemists, and others) camped near villages along the riverbank, spending from one to three days at each campsite. from mid-july until mid-august 1998, i gathered data on health and healing practices in fourteen villages. during july 1999 i visited seven villages. additional research for this article was carried out in zhytomyr region in november 1999. for this project, i interviewed eleven folk practitioners, ten women and one man (see appendix 1 for a list of babky interviewed). the eldest healer interviewed was born in 1914, and the youngest in 1939. all babky save one, eva from sloboda, zhytomyr region, were interviewed during the dnister expeditions. all interviews were audiotaped, and seven were videotaped. folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 14 the villages in which the research and interviews took place (included in appendix 1) were small, ranging in size from fifty to 200 households. the only formalized industries in the villages were small-scale agricultural and livestock-based endeavors, basically vestiges of soviet-era collective farms. the inhabitants comprised primarily elderly people who grew their own vegetables and raised farm animals (cows, pigs, chicken, ducks, geese and rabbits) for subsistence. as many consultants told me, the villages �grew younger� on weekends, when urban-based children and grandchildren arrived to help their parents with this laborintensive work. most households were impoverished, and some villagers reported that they had not seen paper money in several years. common institutions in the villages included general stores, schools, �houses of culture,� and libraries. most villages had an ambulatory, called a medpunkt, rather than a full-fledged polyclinic, where basic health services were provided. some villages had a pharmacy or a kiosk that sold pharmaceuticals. the crisis in postsoviet health care was evident in all of the villages, where medical personnel did the best they could to provide care despite a dire lack of financing. when i asked the local midwife in the village of shypivtsi whether the medpunkt had a pharmacy, she pulled a shoebox out of her desk drawer. �this is our pharmacy,� she sighed, �people donate their leftover medicine for me to give to other patients.� in this context, it is not surprising that villagers sought strategies for healing outside the sphere of official medicine, turning to local �wise women� such as babky for treatment of a variety of maladies. in the villages i visited, people frequently utilized the services of babky. most babky indicated that they had patients every day, and people came from distant villages and cities to seek the services of several of the better-known babky. in addition to performing the wax ritual, many babky were also skilled in administering herbal remedies, conducting rituals to remove the evil eye, �throwing� (reading) cards, and performing healing massage. while babky treated people of any age, they indicated that frequently their patients were young children suffering from �fear sickness,� stuttering, irritability, difficulty sleeping, and similar ailments. for their services the babky usually received a small amount of money (2-5 hryvni) the ukrainian currency (singular hryvnia, (uah)) (9) or barter in the form of eggs, sugar, flour, butter, hrechka (buckwheat groats) or moonshine. in cultures all over the world, there are physical and mental illnesses whose etiology and treatment falls outside the official categories of disease recognized by standard allopathic medicine. many ukrainians also recognize maladies that are usually considered untreatable by standard western medical practice. these illnesses are the special domain of the folk healers known as babky. the afflictions most commonly treated by the babky i interviewed were �fear� (liak, or prystrit), and the evil eye, sometimes glossed as �curses� or �spoiling� (uroky, porcha).(10) a belief in the potential ill effects of being the recipient of a certain kind of glance is widespread across cultures [dundes 1992; migliore 1983]. in ukraine as in many other cultures, it is believed that the evil eye (uroky, porcha) can be cast either intentionally or unintentionally. fear sickness is common to many folk medical systems, the best-known example probably being susto in many latin american cultures. fear sickness (liak) in ukrainian villages is usually caused by a scare, such as an accident or the death of a loved one. children are said to get liak, which seems to manifest itself sometimes as panic attacks, when scared by a dog, 15 when an elder yells at them, when other children taunt them, and so on. liak also referred to phobias about water, dogs, the dark et cetera. the physical symptoms of uroky and liak are similar, and include �nerves,� depression, weakness, headaches, incessant crying, insomnia, loss of appetite, depression, bed-wetting, speech impediments, mental illness and infertility. the wax ritual the wax ritual usually took place in the babka�s kitchen. in summer, it was frequently performed in the summer kitchen, a room for cooking and food preparation separate from the main house. paraskovia ii, from the village khmeleva, however, indicated that she always conducted the ritual outside, implying that treating a patient indoors could be dangerous.(11) before beginning the ritual, the babka discussed the patient�s health complaints with him or her (the patient was usually female). then she stood either behind or in front of the patient, who was seated in a chair. frequently the babka said comforting words to the patient, such as �don�t be scared,� or, �don�t worry, it won�t hurt.� the babka then held an enamel bowl of cold water over the patient�s head, and began an incantation. she usually made the sign of the cross on the bowl with a knife. melted wax was poured into the bowl. the wax quickly hardened, forming a sort of pancake. some babky then loosened the hardened wax from the bowl with the knife, turned it over, and interpreted the shapes they saw in the wax. the wax was usually re-melted and the ritual performed twice more. some babky held the bowl over the patient�s head for all three pourings; others held it over the shoulders for the second pouring, and over the knees and hands for the third. then the babky usually had the patient sip water from the bowl, or wash her face with the water. the water was then discarded in a specific place. the most important elements of the ritual included water, wax, incantations, and a knife. most babky got the water for the ritual from their well, oftentimes adding a few drops of �holy water.� a priest had blessed this holy water, usually on the eve of the epiphany. paraskovia moroz had asked a priest to bless her well. as a consequence she considered the well water holy, and used it in her healing rituals. stepania kuryliak took water from her well, but said that she could only use it if no one had touched the water. orysia popovs�ka reported that she took water from a well located beside a local kaplychka (small chapel or shrine for prayer), and was careful to do so before sunrise. she crossed herself and said a prayer before collecting the water. if anyone witnessed her taking the water or walking back home, she would discard because it would have lost its �power.� paraskovia ii said that water for the wax ritual should be taken from three different sources early in the morning before sunrise. most babky emphasized that the water should be �fresh,� meaning it should be the first water collected from a source (i.e. a stream, a well) on a given morning. after the wax had been poured for the last time, the patient was usually told to take three sips of water from three different spots on the bowl. then the patient was �washed� with the water, for which the babka usually used the backs of her hands. stepania kuryliak washed her patients� forehead, chest, hands, and back of the neck while reciting �in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit.� she then sprinkled the patient with the water, repeating this phrase. anna novakivs�ka washed her patient�s forehead, cheeks, front of neck, chest, waist, hands, and legs. folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 16 the water used in the wax ritual was often discarded by the babka in a very specific place, often a location where no human would ever tread. some indicated that the water should be poured out around a tree. anna novakivs�ka said that the water must be poured down the doorframe (�a safe place�) after the ritual. the symbolic significance of thresholds such as doors in ritual practice has been noted by van gennep [1960:20], turner [1967] and others. anna novakivs�ka said that the water could also be poured out away beneath a tree, something with which most of the babky concurred. she told us that women/girls should pour the water out around apple, pear, and cherry trees (all �female� trees), and men/boys should pour it out around oak or ash trees (�male� trees). paraskovia ii said that one should not look at the water while pouring it out, and that the words �let it return from whence it came� (nekhai ide tudy, zvidky pryshlo) should be uttered as the water was discarded. several babky had a special place, such as an obscure ditch, where they frequently discarded the water. some babky, it was reported, gave patients a small jar of water from the bowl to take home and drink by the spoonful from time to time. the wax was usually originally in the form of church candles that had been blessed by a priest. paraskovia moroz emphasized the importance of candles for healing, particularly church candles. she pointed out connections between candles and rituals used to mark the stages of the life cycle (birth, marriage, and death). she also lauded the curative power of smoke from church candles, saying that this smoke �over one�s head� and �over one�s shoulders� had the power to �disperse all evil.� paraskovia moroz indicated that a local priest brought her the blessed candles, but other babky said they took candles from the church secretly, since the priests forbade them to use blessed church candles in the wax ritual. some healers indicated that they frequently got their �blessed� wax by collecting the melted wax from used candles from the local church. mykola fedorts�o acquired candles from a female acquaintance that worked in the local church. pavlina zolota�s brother acquired church candles from the village priest and gave them to her. some babky reported that their patients brought them the wax for the ritual, either in the form of church candles or beeswax from a domestic beehive. tetiana havron made her own wax candles for the ritual. in general, the babky seemed to agree that blessed candle wax was preferable, but that any type of natural beeswax would suffice. pavlina oleksyna reported that she sometimes, though rarely, poured molten lead for patients, a practice more popular in the past. traditionally, molten lead was considered a more �powerful� medium for the pouring ritual than wax. earlier, i was told, many villagers would initially ask a babka to pour wax, and if they felt no relief from their maladies, they would request that molten lead be poured. villagers used to acquire lead, a substance in short supply, from various sources such as bullets. most, but not all of the babky interpreted the shapes formed in the wax (see appendix 2 for the text of a session with orysia). a big bump was usually interpreted as �fear,� and a wad of squiggly shapes was interpreted as �nerves.� a �hole� (iama) warned of death, and the shapes of �many people� in the wax foretold an imminent wedding. during one pouring, maria orobchuk pointed out that the wax pancake had taken the shape of a bird, with a head, beak and feet. she thus believed that a bird had scared the patient. typical interpretations had to do with traumas the patient had experienced in the past (a fistfight, death of a loved one, being bitten by a dog, scolded or falling into water), and struggles the patient was currently facing (problems 17 with documents, health problems, marital troubles). some babky predicted the patient�s future. pavlina zolota purported to see the patient�s �planets� in the wax, and therefore could predict whether or not the patient would live a long life. by the third pouring, the wax pancake was usually nearly smooth, which the babky cited as an indication that the patient�s maladies had been cured. incantations and prayers were central to the wax ritual. the babky began the wax ritual by making the sign of the cross over the water-filled bowl and saying �in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit, amen,� usually three times. most of the babky recited the lord�s prayer (otche nash) and the hail mary (bohoroditse diva) or variants of them in the ritual. paraskovia ii used the lord�s prayer and the fiftieth psalm. as is common in slav tradition some of the incantations were not official church prayers, and combined christian motifs with non-christian and quasi-christian elements [hanchuk 1999: 78] (see appendix 3 for texts and translations of several incantations). incantations, also called charms or spells, and in ukrainian zahovory, were not so termed by the babky themselves, as they eschewed the negative connotations associated with �casting spells� and �bewitching.�(12) common quasior non-christian elements in the incantations included references to water, certain elements of nature (the moon, water, winds, clouds, rocks, cliffs), particular colors (red, black, white, yellow), and personae such as a �black� simple-haired woman, a woman with three daughters, and a wolf. in contrast to hanchuk�s ukrainian informants who performed the wax ritual in alberta, canada, most of the babky i interviewed did not use �secret� incantations, and they did not purposely mutter them inaudibly during the interviews [hanchuk 1999:13]. only one practitioner, mykola fedorts�o, declined to recite the secret incantation he used in the wax ritual, which had been passed to him by his mother. mykola also declined to perform the ritual for us. paraskovia ii also had a secret incantation, given to her by her mother on her deathbed, that she used to cure poisonous snake (hadiuka) bites. paraskovia ii feared that the incantation would lose its power if she told it to anyone. the babky all used a kitchen knife in the ritual, crossing the enamel bowl with the knife, sometimes laying the knife over the bowl as they prayed, and using the knife to handle the wax pancake. though none of them articulated the specific significance of the knife, i suspect it was thought to �sever the fear from the patient,� as described by hanchuk�s consultants in alberta [hanchuk 1999: 25]. this cutting or severing motif was also manifest in one practice that was unique to paraskovia ii; she required her patients to sit on the handle of an axe during the ritual. variations on the wax ritual, and other healing methods while there were recognizable patterns in the performance of the wax ritual, we also found several variations. paraskovia moroz, for example, used methods of diagnosis and treatment that differed significantly from those of the other babky. paraskovia, who had been told by priests that it was wrong to melt church candles in the wax ceremony, instead lit a candle while reciting a prayer (see appendix 3, no. 2), and let the wax drip into the bowl of cold �blessed� water. she then asked the patient to �think something� to himself or herself while she (paraskovia) snuffed out the candle with her fingers. she watched the resulting smoke, and folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 18 said that if the smoke went straight up, the patient would �be helped by god.� if the smoke went in the direction of the doorway, however, paraskovia said, �tse ko vrachu� (you must go to the doctor). paraskovia then had the patient kiss the cross she wore around her neck, and used the water from the bowl to lightly wash the patient�s hands and feet. she then asked the patient to go pour the water away in a place where no human would tread (for example, in a ditch) while saying, �let all the evil go to the forest and to the water.� this, said paraskovia, was so that �the evil would not go to anyone else.� anna novakivs�ka�s methods of wax pouring also diverged from those of most other babky in the study. she used only a small amount of heated wax, pouring the wax from a spoon into a little enamel cup filled with cold water. after the wax had hardened, she tore off three small pieces from three different areas on the edge of the flattened wax �pancake.� then she took one of the patient�s hairs and wrapped it in one of the pieces. she placed the wax with the hair under the enamel cup. anna then took the wax with the hair, wrapped it in a paper, and set it on fire. she had the patient �smoke� (inhale) it, and made sure the smoke enveloped the patient�s body. across cultures and medical systems, it is common that some folk healers boast a wide expertise, while others possess a more narrow specialization. this was certainly true amongst the babky i encountered. paraskovia moroz, for example, was skilled in a range of practices, including the wax ritual, herbal remedies, massage, therapeutic touch and even controlling the rains. her expertise was so impressive that friends of mine from l�viv who accompanied me to her home and participated in the interviews began to refer to her afterwards as the �super-babka.� many of the other babky specialized in one or two areas, usually the wax ritual and herbal remedies. paraskovia ii indicated that her skills centered primarily on curing snakebites. because the babky often treated with herbs and words, they blurred the boundaries between the roles traditionally assigned to different categories of folk specialists, in this case the znakhar/znakharka, whose domain in western ukraine has historically been associated with herbal remedies, and the prymivnyk, traditionally a specialist in incantations [hoshko 1987: 273]. paraskovia moroz was the most skilled in administering herbal and other natural remedies to patients. we were very surprised to find that she had learned many of her herbal remedies from an 1823 book entitled green pharmacy (zelena apteka), not from her elders in the village. this book, which her grandmother had given to her, had been lost (paraskovia loaned it to a client who never returned it), but paraskovia said she knew all the recipes she needed, and stored them in her head. paraskovia always used herbs that she had braided into wreaths to be blessed by the local greek catholic priest on the festival of the �ninth thursday,� the ninth thursday after easter (corpus christi among roman catholics). while i heard stories from villagers about babky who were skilled in various types of massage, �manual therapy,� (manual’na terapiia, a form of deep muscle massage) and bone setting, only one of the babky i met, paraskovia moroz, practiced massage. she often used light massage to manipulate the spine to correct pinched nerves and other problems, but her primary specialty was ailments of the stomach. paraskovia also practiced therapeutic touch, a procedure during which she used prayers and energy to treat the patient without touching him or her. 19 almost all of the babky had methods for removing the evil eye. like the pouring of wax, this ritual was usually simultaneously diagnostic and curative. pavlina zolota used the following method to diagnose and cure the evil eye. she placed two empty glasses on the table. she first poured some water (from her well) into the first glass. then she took three spoonfuls of water from the first glass and transferred them to the second, empty glass, while saying �ne odyn, ne dva, ne try� (not one, not two, not three). she poured out the water from the first glass. she took three spoonfuls of water from the second glass, transferring the water back to the first (now empty) glass, again saying �ne odyn, ne dva, ne try.� if after this procedure there was still water in the second glass, said pavlina, this was an indication that someone had cast the evil eye on the patient. orysia popovs�ka used another method to diagnose and cure the evil eye. she poured �holy water� into a cup, and made the sign of the cross over the cup with a knife while saying �in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit.� she then said the lord�s prayer. then orysia broke off nine pieces of bread crust and threw them in the water, saying �ne dev’iat’, ne visim, ne sim�� (not nine, not eight, not seven) and so on as she threw in each piece. matches, she said, could also be used. if using matches, the practitioner should light each match, let it burn, and throw it in the cup when the match was almost burned out. if the crusts or matches sank to the bottom of the cup, orysia said, the person�s problems had indeed been caused by the evil eye. if, alternatively, the bread or matches floated, some other cause was to blame. if the evil eye was indicated, orysia used the backs of her hands to �cleanse� the patient with the water from the cup. she used both hands, making a large stroke on the front of the body, top to bottom, and repeating this on the patient�s back. she then discarded the water from the cup in a place where no human would ever tread. eva used specific incantations to remove the evil eye, and she gave us two versions of this incantation (nos 3, 4). other healing methods used by the babky included �fumigation� of the ears by means of an ear candle to release wax and infection. eva also �rolled eggs� to diagnose and cure �fear� (liak), a practice common in central ukraine that is in many ways analogous to the wax ritual in the western regions.(13) she crossed herself and recited an incantation (no. 5), as she rolled the egg over various parts of the patient�s body � the forehead, chest and arms. she then broke the egg into a glass of water. if the egg exhibited palochki (hairs, or little branches/sticks) in an upward direction, and especially if the palochki had little �heads� on them, said eva, the person had been suffering from �fear.� if there were many palochki (five or six), she said, this indicated that the person had been scared long ago. if there was only one, the frightening event had happened recently. like many of the other rituals, the diagnosis was also the cure in the egg ritual. eva also used incantations to treat maladies such as hernias (no. 6). in one incantation eva called the hernia a �little gold one,� thus personalizing the malady. she also used kind words to encourage the hernia to �sit on a golden chair, sit down in your place.� the practice of assigning a kind name to a particularly painful or irritating malady is an ancient slavic practice [hoshko et al. 1987: 276]. the symbolic significance of the rituals while it is difficult to pinpoint the exact origins of the wax ritual and other rituals performed by ukrainian babky, it is likely that many of the underlying beliefs and symbols upon which they are based have a folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 20 pre-christian origin. while we cannot know the precise sources of the beliefs and values of the rural population of the east slavs [bushkovitch 1992: 212-13], it has been proposed that ukrainian folk beliefs probably have indo-european origins and include very little that is specifically ukrainian [vovk 1995: 131]. in particular, the idea that physical maladies may be caused by supernatural forces is a common indo-european belief [hoshko et al. 1987: 274]. it is widely accepted that �christian� ideals, rituals, and holidays in ukraine (as in many cultures) exhibit the influence of pre-christian beliefs [voropai 1993: 10]. religious holidays, it is widely thought, are infused with meanings and motifs originating in pre-christian beliefs. indeed, it is possible that in some regards the introduction of christianity merely resulted in the �christianization� of ukrainian folklore, or the substitution of christian figures for pre-christian ones [ryan 1999: 11-12; tovstukha 1994: 48]. as indicated by hanchuk, the practice of pouring wax represents a syncretic healing ritual that often fuses christian and prechristian imagery [hanchuk 1999: 1]. the syncretism of christian and pre-christian motifs was evident in many aspects of the babky�s practices. in particular, beliefs about the nechysta syla (unclean force) and uroky (the evil eye) exhibit the influence of pre-christian beliefs on christian ideology [naulko et al. 1993: 243]. references to wells, shores, roots, stones, and the moon in some of the incantations (e.g. no. 1) are likely to be pre-christian elements in the wax ritual [vovk 1995: 172-73].(14) some babky mentioned forests, water, animals, ashes and so on in their incantations. one of paraskovia moroz�s incantations (no. 2) referred to a �black lady� to whom paraskovia gave several �tasks,� presumably to keep her busy so she could not cause the patient harm. paraskovia also called this �lady� skusa, a euphemism for chort (devil), an all-encompassing representation of the unclean force in many slavic cultures [hoshko et al. 1987:250-251].(15) another incantation (no. 4) referred to a mother and her three daughters, one of whom �turned around� the evil eye. such references in what otherwise approximated to standard religious prayers would seem to indicate the integration of pre-christian beliefs into contemporary healing rituals. the moon held special significance in the beliefs and practices of several babky, and some prayers involved invocations to the new moon. eva told me, for example, that one must follow this procedure to cure a toothache: �when the molodyk appears, that is the new (literally, �young�) moon, when you can see just a tiny sliver of the moon, then you must stand on a rock and say, �molodyk, molodyk, have you been to the other world?� �i have.� �do people die there?� �they do.� �do teeth hurt there?� �they don�t.� �then don�t let ours hurt either.�� similarly, paraskovia moroz told me the following prayer: �clear moon, young prince, don�t let anyone have them [dry patches from eczema or psoriasis] not oksana. take it away, you are young, you see everything at night on the earth.� babky often told patients to time their rituals and prayers to the appearance of the new moon. in some cases, the new moon was seen to have powers to renew a spell, if a particular incantation was repeated with each new moon. it is common in many cultures, including among the slavs, for the days of the week to be associated with symbolic significance. most of the babky i interviewed in western ukraine designated certain days for treating males or females, and all preferred to pour wax before noon. the designation of days as �male� or �female� and the association of certain times of day with magical powers are probably pre-christian elements of 21 the wax ritual. almost no one performed the wax ceremony on sundays or church holidays. taboos against performing rituals and incantations on holidays are found in many cultures. amongst the babky, a reluctance to perform the wax ritual on sundays and church holidays reflects explicitly christian influence [hanchuk 1999: 77]. in some villages, babky did not practice on friday, the day of christ�s death,(16) or on sunday, the day of his resurrection. several babky wore amulets to enhance their healing powers, to protect them from the �unclean force� and to prevent transference of the patients� maladies. these amulets were christian symbols, most often crosses. a greek catholic, paraskovia moroz wore a rosary around her neck on which were a cross and a small icon of the virgin mary. one of paraskovia�s icons included an image of the ukrainian trident on the reverse side. she also wore a cross-shaped ring pinned to her undergarment, directly over her heart. the number three and multiples of three, especially nine, were integral elements of the wax ritual. the ritual was usually performed three times. one babka performed the wax ritual for patients a total of nine times: three pourings on three different days. patients were often instructed to take three sips of water from three different spots on the bowl. many of the incantations, especially �in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit,� were repeated three times, as was the sign of the cross. several of the incantations (nos. 2, 4) made references to three events, three people and so on. three is an extremely important number in christian ideology (the trinity), and was traditionally considered holy, being called one of the �signs, given by god� [boltarovych 1980: 112]. as noted by ryan [1999: 314], �three and threefold repetition are universal in folklore and are very common in russian divination and magic spells.� in the babky�s rituals, the number three took on a magical significance. the most important colors in the rituals were red, yellow, and white. black also figured into some incantations (e.g. no. 2). several of the incantations referred to �red blood,� a �white body,� and �yellow bones� (e.g. nos. 2, 5). as described by turner [1967: 59-92], red, white, and black form the core of symbolic color systems in many cultures, with red frequently symbolizing blood, white being a symbol of purity, and black having negative connotations. additionally, in many cultures, red is considered the most powerful color, and is thought to be especially noxious to evil spirits [hanchuk 1999: 75]. red cloth was manipulated by several of the babky in their rituals. the color white holds both christian and pre-christian significance as a symbol of purity, and as an indication of strength. it is therefore fitting that the color white should be associated with the body in a healing ritual. hanchuk has indicated that, while yellow does not appear to be a significant color in healing rituals in other cultures, it is referred to frequently in ukrainian healing incantations, being associated with bones in particular [hanchuk 1999: 75]. motifs of reversal, using the backs of the hands instead of the palms, counting backwards, and negating numbers,(17) are examples of the use of �sympathetic magic.� in these rituals, reversing numbers and body parts is expected to cause a similar reversal of the patient�s maladies. the severing of the patient from her fear or illness through the symbolism of the knife (and more rarely, the axe) operates in a similar fashion. there was a pervasive belief among the babky that uroky and �fear� could be �caught� (by the healer, especially), and they were thus very careful to manipulate the elements of the rituals in a �safe� manner. the folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 22 practice of designating that water be poured out �where no human would tread� is an example. the use of protective amulets also indicates the belief that spoiling is �contagious.� the exorcism of �all fear, nerves, illnesses, unhappiness and insomnia� to the �mountains and cliffs� in one wax ritual incantation (no. 1) is also indicative of this belief. other babky told the evil to go �back from whence it came� (paraskovia ii) or to the �forests and the water� (paraskovia moroz).(18) the babka�s acquisition and dissemination of healing knowledge across ukraine and russia, it has historically been believed by many that folk healers and other �nonsimple� or �special� (neprosti) persons are born with exceptional spiritual and physical powers [ivanits 1989: 116]. traditionally, those deemed �special� have also believed in their own powers. regional variations also exist; the hutsuls have traditionally believed that these powers manifest themselves by the time the znakhar or other �specialist� is seven years old [hoshko et al. 1987: 250]. amongst the babky i interviewed, there was little consensus about the origins of their own knowledge and power, or the requisite �qualifications� for becoming a babka.(19) some consultants believed that babky had to be �gifted� in healing, thus affirming the view that one must be born with special powers. orysia popovs�ka, for example, characterized the ability to heal using the wax ritual as a �gift from god.� orysia believed that none of her daughters or granddaughters possessed this gift, and planned to pass on her knowledge to her great-granddaughter, whom she believed would �be capable.� stepania kuryliak, in contrast, emphasized that fear was �taken off� by the wax, not by her. this would imply that she did not believe she possessed special healing powers. in a related vein, several of the babky declared that anyone could learn to pour wax. anna novakivs�ka said that the ritual would be effective when performed by anyone who believed in god. indeed, we learned that villagers who were not considered babky sometimes performed the wax ritual for their children, relatives and neighbors. while they did not believe that healers were �born� as such, some babky did point to specific characteristics that a babka must possess. maria orobchuk and tetiana havron, for example, stated that a potential babka must be a �calm� person who is very religious. most babky indicated that they had learned the wax ritual from an elderly female relative, most often a mother or grandmother. the idea that healing knowledge and power is passed down in families through the generations (often from father to son or from mother to daughter) is a common one across cultures. amongst the babky i interviewed, this transference of knowledge was oftentimes not entirely intentional; stepania kuryliak reported that she simply learned by watching her mother and grandmother perform the ritual, thereby �inheriting� both the knowledge and the power to heal. her deceased mother came to her in a dream in 1996, said stepania, and chastised her for not pouring wax for her fellow villagers. she then took up the practice, so that she could �help people� (initially, for her own granddaughter, who had fear sickness) as suggested by her mother. tetiana havron learned the ritual from her elderly female neighbor, and maria orobchuk learned it from a fellow villager who had poured wax for maria when she was ill. similarly, pavlina oleksyna learned the wax ritual from a woman who had poured molten lead for her daughter. while paraskovia moroz believed that 23 she had been born with the power to heal, she also said that, when she was young, she had performed a procedure recommended by her grandmother to give her healing powers. this included biting several balls of hail in two. this stopped the hail, said paraskovia, and gave her to power to �heal man and beast.� the babky reported that they obtained their incantations from different sources. most had been taught incantations by other practitioners. pavlina zolota said that incantations came to her in her dreams, and paraskovia moroz claimed to hear prayers in the rain. paraskovia moroz used prayers from the bible and other religious texts, and when i asked her to recite a prayer, she sometimes read straight from a book, in order to �make sure she got it right.� in general, the babky said they felt freer to practice their craft since the fall of soviet rule in ukraine. paraskovia moroz, who was born in 1930, had wanted to study to become a doctor or veterinarian. her parents, who warned her that all students were forced into the komsomol (communist youth league), dissuaded her. komsomol members during the turbulent war years in western ukraine were oftentimes �tossed into the river,� she reported. paraskovia said that when she began to heal people in 1964 (she was then thirty four years old) she had to practice in secret. folk healing was actively repressed by the soviet regime, and anyone practicing it could have been arrested, she said. when i asked paraskovia about her experiences under the soviets, she responded with the following narrative: i�ve known it since 1964. i was a janitoress in a school. the school director�s wife fell ill with her stomach. it was forbidden then, they�d put you in jail. �moroza,� he said, �come, my wife�s ill.� i went and massaged her gently, made a compress, over and over, behind curtains. the director kept it secret; we were hidden behind the curtains. now he�s retired, he lives in town now, not here in the village. but he comes here to see me, the janitoress! he remembers that i knew all this�and back then it was forbidden to do it openly. thank god our current school director wasn�t the director then�he [the current director] used to be a doctor [and would not have approved]. but my director said, �go ahead and do it�� my old granny, she lived to be ninety four. she taught our mother how to treat the stomach. there were four of us sisters. i was born in 1930, the others in �32, �38, and �40. they didn�t care about healing, but i wanted to know everything. they said, �you should study to be a doctor; your hands will help everyone, people and animals. you were born to do it.� i said, �wasn�t i born like everyone else?� granny said, �i�m going to die, but you will be useful.� earlier paraskovia had always pleaded with patients to keep her healing a secret, but now she felt free to heal and everyone knew of her abilities. the fact that women like paraskovia moroz had protected knowledge of these prayers, rituals, and folk remedies is evidence both of their strong character, and the tenacity of these beliefs and practices. there was general agreement among the babky that the knowledge of the wax ritual should be passed on when the practitioner is dying or no longer intends to practice, and that a babka should never go to her grave folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 24 without have passed on this knowledge. several also believed that a babka who has passed on her knowledge either no longer has the power to heal, or her powers are weakened [hanchuk 1999: 9-10]. the perceived necessity of guarding one�s secret knowledge, lest the power to heal and help others is lost, is common to many cultures. though it is reportedly believed by many that a ukrainian babka who reveals her secrets may die soon afterwards [olena boriak, personal communication; hanchuk 1999: 10], none of the babky in my study expressed such a belief. paraskovia moroz believed that she could �hand over� (peredaty) the prayers at any time, but that they would not be effective in another practitioner�s hands until after her death. most babky indicated a willingness to teach the wax ritual and other healing practices openly, and used their participation in this study as proof. i asked each of the babky whether or not they intended to teach the wax ritual, prayers and other healing practices to younger people, and most indicated that they did. most of the babky said that they hoped to pass on their knowledge to a female relative, usually a daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter or niece. tetiana havron was the only babka who indicated that it would be acceptable to teach a boy or man (in this case, her grandson) to perform the wax ritual. some babky had a hierarchical list of possible apprentices, which indicates that they had thought about how and to whom to disseminate these practices. if her daughter declined to learn the wax ritual, stepania kuryliak told us, she would, for example, teach her neighbor. during the interviews, curious grandchildren and children of neighbors often observed the babky�s rituals and participated in them, usually by fetching instruments and materials. some babky expressed concern that the younger generation did not seem interested in learning folk medical practices, and that perhaps the tradition of wax pouring would soon die out. this contrasts with reports from ukrainian scholars who point to a revival of interest in ukrainian folk traditions amongst the younger generation (ol�ha filippova, personal communication). fearful lest their knowledge die with them, many of the babky were happy to be interviewed and most were very willing to be videotaped performing various rituals. this was in marked contrast to hanchuk�s informants in alberta, who were reticent about being audiotaped or videotaped, very reluctantly shared their incantations, requested that their names not be disclosed, and feared ridicule by educated people who might read about their practices [hanchuk 1999: 4, 9-10]. attitudes towards babky my investigations showed that villagers often held a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards babky and their practices. many villagers distinguished between folk practitioners who performed �white� (or good) magic and those who performed �black� (or evil) magic. white magic, they told me, was performed with the use of church prayers. black magic was characterized by its lack of prayer use, and men were often accused of performing black magic and having made a pact with the devil.(20) as noted by wigzell [1998], hoshko et al. [1987: 248-249] and ivanits [1989], the distinction between practitioners of beneficial and harmful magic is historically a fragile one that often breaks down in practice. an aura of awe, and, frequently, suspicion, thus surrounded the babky, as has been reported for hutsul communities in western ukraine by hoshko et al. [1987:250]. like the hutsuls described by these ethnographers, in some cases the villagers i met �respected the 25 znakhary�approached them and other �non-simple� persons with trepidation, tried not to offend them, not to turn them against oneself, and remembered that one must live with them �in peace�� [hoshko et al. 1987:250]. similarly, many of the babky said they were frightened of associating with other babky, whom they feared might use black magic. there was accordingly very little communication among babky within and between villages. all the babky in my study firmly denied using black magic. almost all were very religious women, and their homes were decorated with pictures of the virgin mary, jesus christ, and other religious symbols. they stressed that they received help from god in their healing practices, and that therefore there was �nothing wrong� with what they were doing. they pointed out that, by reciting �in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit,� and using a variety of prayers, they were evoking god�s help in their rituals. despite the babky�s recognized devotion to god and the church, the village clergy (specifically, the priests) had mixed reactions to the babky and their practices.(21) many babky reported that they kept their healing practices secret from priests, but it is unlikely that they were successful, considering the rapidity with which news traveled around the village. some priests had suggested to the babky that they modify their practices; paraskovia moroz, for example, was advised by several local priests not to melt church candles, and she complied by lighting church candles in the ritual instead. tetiana havron had been taught by a neighbor to read the cards, but did not practice it after a priest told her that the church forbade card reading. interestingly, paraskovia moroz indicated that she often treated priests (both greek catholic and orthodox) and their families, which would indicate church acceptance of her practice, at least at the local level. priests, she said, sought all of her services, including massage, herbal remedies and prayers. i recently learned that paraskovia has been given the blessing of church officials in ivano-frankivs�k region to conduct her healing practices. the babka�s role the contradictory and ambivalent reactions towards babky and their healing practices manifested by their fellow villagers, ukrainian urban dwellers and representatives of the orthodox and greek catholic churches indicate that there is no uniform role that the babky play in contemporary ukrainian village society. as noted above, the range of special (sometimes secret) knowledge possessed by the babky, and their perceived level of expertise, varied widely. nevertheless, some conclusions may be drawn as to the multiple roles babky may fill, and the myriad functions their healing practices serve. anthropologists who have studied ritual and shamanism note that, across cultures, ritual practice becomes more prevalent in times of social upheaval [turner 1967, 1969, 1974]. in the context of a significant decline in living standards, widespread impoverishment, and uncertainty about the future in ukraine, it is not surprising that villagers (and frequently, urban dwellers) would seek the services of a diviner-healer. as wigzell [1998: 191] notes for contemporary russia, fortune-telling (in our case, represented by divinatory practices associated with the wax ritual) �has an important role to play in helping individuals cope with their lives.� this insight, i think, can be extended to the entire range of healing practices espoused by babky in ukrainian villages. coping mechanisms, and, especially, attempts to restore and maintain harmony, are encoded in all the roles fulfilled by the babky. in today�s trying times, i would argue, ukrainian babky carry out folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 26 gendered performances that accord them a measure of prestige and power; complement and replace the system of state medicine; act as psychotherapists; and specialize in psychosocial ailments to simultaneously heal persons and communities. i will consider each of these roles in turn, though it should be noted that, in practice, they are usually simultaneous and inseparable. this study confirms the observation that in the cultures of the east slavs, women have tended to dominate in the various domains of �special� people such as healers and fortune-tellers. this is a trend that continues today in these regions [fishman 1994, cited in wigzell 1998]. wigzell [1998: 111] notes the historical association between women and the domestic sphere (where, it should be noted, the healing practices of the babky take place), and reminds us that women in east slavic cultures have traditionally been responsible for kin and community work. additionally, historically it is also women who have been associated with �intuitive knowledge� [wigzell 1998: 126]. these are all domains that correlate with folk healing practices in ukraine, russia, and elsewhere. in many countries, including ukraine, knowledge of the uses of various herbs and the techniques of gathering, preserving, preparing and administering herbal remedies has also historically been the special field of women [hoshko 1987: 273]. it is significant that babky are always elderly women, those past the menopause who can no longer bear children. they are revered as �wise women� in their communities, and it is widely thought that �you must wait until you acquire enough wisdom in order to become a babka� (ol�ha filippova, personal communication). in this they mirror the elderly women curers (�conjurers�) in serbia studied by barbara kerewsky-halpern [1989]. she notes how �females past reproductive age are seen as asexual,� which gives them an elevation in status and more freedom of movement in a patriarchal society [1989: 115-16]. kerewsky-halpern [1989: 132] argues that, in the �person of the kerchiefed village bajalica [curer],� we find a �nourishing mothering model.� her findings correlate with those of other researchers who note that women�s participation in healing, spirit possession and �cults of affliction� provides compensation for their structural subordination to men in patriarchal societies [lewis 1986, kendall 1989]. though the argument should not be overdone, i believe that the important roles filled by the ukrainian babka reflect a source of women�s hidden power in a historically patriarchal society. babky, especially those whose practices are well-known and widely sought out, benefit from their healing roles in multiple ways. as previously stated, babky are generally held in high esteem as �wise women.� they are believed to have special knowledge of prayers and ritual practices, and to possess a unique connection to god, jesus christ, the virgin mary and the saints. the concomitant suspicion that babky may also dabble in �black magic� may diminish the esteem with which some villagers regard these women, but also garners them additional respect (out of fear). in general, however, most villagers associate babky very positively with pious religious belief and practice. for many, they embody the �nurturing mother figure� described by kerewsky-halpern [1989]. in the village of sloboda, in zhytomyr region, one young man, serhii, narrated his experiences with the local babka, eva, in a way that indexed the high esteem in which he held her: �sometimes it�s so bad for me that my legs just give out, and when babushka whispers and prays, i feel better. maybe that is god helping me?� clearly, serhii believed that eva healed people with god�s approval and help. as hanchuk [1999: 88] writes of 27 the ukrainian diaspora in canada, �there is no doubt that healers who practice the wax ceremony enjoy a very privileged status within the ukrainian community.� this symbolic capital that babky possess becomes a source for economic capital as well [bourdieu 1986]. as mentioned above, though none of the babky i interviewed had an official �charge� for their services, it was customary for patients to give them a few hryvni or to pay in barter. this transaction took place without either party acknowledging the �payment:� the patient left behind the money or goods discreetly, usually placing them on a table where the babka would be sure to find them. the most well-known healers (especially paraskovia moroz) had clients every day, and likely received larger payments. while none of the healers were getting rich from their practice, they did appreciate the extra eggs, flour and small bills. some of the babky indicated that they put all the money they received from their healing into the donation box in the church. this reflects a belief found in many cultures that healing powers are a gift from which one should not make a profit. while there were clear economic incentives for babky to practice their craft, these considerations were not primary. the babky i interviewed felt they had a calling to assist their relatives, neighbors, fellow villagers and travelers. in most folk medical systems, health is defined in terms of harmony or balance [o�connor and hufford 2001: 19]. in ukrainian villages, a wise person, and a person uniquely able to restore health in others, is one who can live in harmony with oneself, with nature and the community. the babka�s ability to do so, and her willingness to assist others achieve this harmony as well, positions them as important mediators in village communities. as hanchuk [1999: 88) notes, �they are needed by the community as healers, psychologists and confidants,� and they �propagate a sense of community and social interdependence.� in an historically patriarchal society the role of the babka is one that affords women considerable power and prestige. through techniques designed to restore balance to bruised selves, ailing bodies and troubled socialities, they strive to give their neighbors healing, comfort and hope in the face of a difficult present and an uncertain future. indeed, the real and complex healing work that babky do should not be discounted. in the context of a collapsed system of soviet socialized medicine and more than a decade of widespread and often desperate poverty, self-treatment and traditional medicine have become particularly important in ukraine, especially for rural residents [phillips n.d.]. babky, whose expertise includes an array of rituals and various herbal treatments, massage, bone-setting and more, are taking up the slack of a failing system of state health care. while many babky specialize in treating ailments not recognized by biomedicine (fear, curses and spoiling, for example), many are also skilled in treating problems of the spine, stomach, headaches and others. these are chronic ailments that biomedicine, especially in its current impoverished state in ukraine, has historically been unable to treat very successfully. many of the babky i interviewed insisted that they did not wish to compete with the village doctors, feldshery (22) and midwives. they usually deferred to local doctors, saying that the doctors �knew much more� about illnesses and healing. correspondingly, many villagers indicated that they sought the services of the babky only after conventional medical treatment had proved unsuccessful. at the same time, some babky were proud to report that they had healed individuals whom medical doctors had treated unsuccessfully. paraskovia moroz mentioned several doctors who had asked her to teach them her craft of light healing massage, but they folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 28 �didn�t have the gift.� doctors had written down her recipes for herbal medicines, she said, and prescribed them for their patients. in ukraine, i would argue, babky fill a medical niche alternative to, but not necessarily in competition with, official, allopathic, �western� medicine. much of the babky�s success is likely due that the fact that these folk medical practitioners employ an holistic healing approach that addresses both physical and emotional symptoms of illness. as noted above, the wax ritual was used primarily to treat maladies that had no analogy in �official,� biomedical (allopathic) understandings of health and illness, and those that were unresponsive to conventional medical treatment. the physical manifestations of fear or uroky, nervousness, depression, weakness and others, it was believed, would be alleviated only when rituals were performed to �remove� the fear or curse. the babky spent a significant amount of time with their patients, and engaged them in a dialogue about their health complaints. they tried to elicit the patient�s explanations and offered their own suggestions as well. along with the magico-religious components of the ritual, therefore, babky conducted a sort of informal session of psychotherapy. patients were given the opportunity to discuss their mental and physical state, to talk about family and community relations and problems, and to express their emotions [hanchuk 1999: 87]. ievhen tovstukha, a well-known ukrainian herbalist, has proposed that the incantations (he calls them �meditative magic words�) uttered by babky have the effect of �repairing the central nervous system� [1994: 18]. indeed, several patients told me that the wax ritual soothed them, and after the ritual they felt sensations of warmth and calm (i experienced this feeling of calmness myself.) the wax ritual included a multitude of cleansing metaphors. often holy water was used, and the babky cleansed the faces (and often other body parts, such as hands, arms and neck) of their patients with this water. some of the incantations referred to cleansing, as when pavlina zolota told the �well of water� (krynytsia) to wash and cleanse her patient, or when parasoviia moroz asked the saints to make her patient as �pure as the day her mother bore her� (zdoroven’ku, chysten’ku lyshy,iak ii maty na svit porodyla). many babky used the first wax pouring to look into the patient�s past, the second to inquire about the present, and the third to predict the future. others incorporated all three aspects into one pouring [see appendix 2]. the wax ritual thus allowed the patient to confront his or her past, reflect on the present and obtain some (usually positive) predictions for the future. such reflections and revelations involve a type of psychotherapy that may allow the patient to re-connect with disturbing or traumatic events from the past, and to reflect on the possible causes for his or her physical or emotional ailments. patients were often sent away with a positive message for the future, or with clear directions on procedures to be carried out for further treatment (�take this jar of water and drink three spoonful a day�). additionally, because the etiology of the patient�s misfortunes and ailments were always attributed to forces outside the ill person, jealous neighbors, curses, unclean forces, the patient was absolved of guilt for his or her own suffering. the social origins of the ailments treated by babky point to another important function of the wax ritual and the babky in general: like shamans in many cultures, babky conduct healing rituals that ultimately serve to repair social rifts and maintain harmony in the community [hanchuk 1999, myerhoff 1976]. 29 as galina lindquist [2001: 21] has noted, ��folk medicine� so defined has been called to treat not primarily biomedically defined diseases but a much broader range of social, psychological, and existential afflictions, of which physical ailments [are] only a small part.� as previously discussed, many of the ailments treated by babky (nerves, fear sickness, depression) index a troubled sociality. these problems were often linked by patients, babky, and their co-villagers to troubled relations; they were caused by intentional and unintentional �curses,� envy, and so on. fights within families or the community could also produce fear sickness and other maladies. during our interview, for example, stepania kuryliak poured wax for a teenager from kyiv. when interpreting the shapes in the wax after the second pouring she asked him, �do you have a mother and father? either your mother has scolded you, or your father; there�s some fear here.� she remarked after the third pouring, �it is showing a dog, and some people. maybe he was in a fight with some kids. his mother yelled at him.� similarly, after paraskovia moroz treated khrystyna, a university student from l�viv, with therapeutic touch, she (paraskovia) told us what she had felt: i take this hand, and on this side [your front] i feel that you are gentle, towards people, god, your colleagues. but on this side [your back], people envy you, there�s a cold thread all the way down. maybe they have good intentions, maybe your relatives say, �our little daughter, how good she is.� maybe that�s what they think. i can feel who you are from this side, and�from the other side [what people think about you]. clearly, the babky address not only personal ailments (in their various emotional and physical manifestations), but also strive to restore bruised socialities. by encouraging patients to ponder possible spoiled relations (with parents, friends, relatives, and others), the babky, like shamans all over the world, do important psychosocial work in their communities. because these are small communities where news travels very quickly, villagers often know which persons have visited a babka recently, and for what purpose. through this form of folk healing (as in forms practiced in other cultures), private problems are submitted to public scrutiny [farmer 1988]. while, on the one hand, this type of public scrutiny can serve as a mechanism of social control [foucault 1980], it can also facilitate healing at the level of the individual body and the social body [scheper-hughes and lock 1987]. this is especially true in societies such as ukraine, where conceptions of personhood are very sociocentric [taylor 1985]. in a very real sense, ukrainian babky fill a role as healers, not only of bodies and psyches, but of troubled communities in a time of social upheaval. notes 1 a previous version of this article appeared as �voskovi formy: babky-sheptukhy, ikhne remeslo ta rol� v ukrains�kii sil�s�kii hromadi� (shapes in the wax: babky-sheptukhy, their craft and role in ukrainian village society), in valentyn stetsiuk (ed.), kulturni hrona dnistra (cultural chronicles of the dnister). ivanofolklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 30 frankivs�k: lileia, 2001, pp. 55-69. an ethnographic video based on this research, shapes in the wax: tradition and faith among folk medicine practitioners in rural ukraine (producers sarah d. phillips and timothy d. miller) is in production and is scheduled for release in april 2004. i am grateful to faith wigzell and anonymous readers at folklorica whose insightful comments helped me reorganize this paper and strengthen many of the arguments. i am indebted to michael naydan for his generous assistance in transliterating and translating the ukrainian. 2 babky are also frequently referred to as vorozhky (fortunetellers), or znakharky (knowing ones), terms used widely throughout russia and ukraine. 3 men also practice this type of folk medicine, though rarely. my study included only one male healer. 4 see kononenko [1998] for a detailed treatment of witchcraft beliefs and stories in early nineteenthcentury and modern ukraine. vovk discusses beliefs connected with witches in earlier times, and postulates that these beliefs may have come to ukraine and poland from germany [1995: 179-80]. 5 wigzell [1998: 49] notes the parallels between this role of the znakharka and that of the �cunning folk� of england or the counter-sorcerers of france. ivanits [1989: 122] has suggested that in russia (and, presumably, amongst the east slavs in general) �magic healing and sorcery represent two lines going back to the ancient volkhv, whose function, evidently, was both to cure and to make contact with the supernatural for purposes of ensuring a good harvest and predicting the future�by the nineteenth [century], folk notions tended to separate the two categories into good versus evil practitioners, though at times these distinctions broke down. the basis of separation was largely the role of the devil: peasants often claimed that sorcerers and witches received their special powers from the devil and functioned with the assistance of the unclean force, whereas magic healers supposedly functioned with the aid of god and the saints.� 6 research for this article was supported in part by a grant from the international research & exchanges board (irex), with funds provided by the national endowment for the humanities, the us department of state and the us information agency. none of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed. research in ukraine was also supported by a us department of education fulbright-hays doctoral dissertation research abroad fellowship. 7 my research on folk healing was one of three major research projects i undertook in ukraine over two years, 1998 and 1999. the other projects focused on post-chernobyl health and alternative healing therapies in ukraine [phillips 2002b] and women�s roles in post-soviet civil society building [phillips 2000, 2002a]. 8 i am grateful to the ukrainian colleagues and friends who assisted me in my dnister research, especially ol�ha alekseeva, volodymyr bakus, khrystyna hnatyshak, ihor kokotyn�, marianna podoliak, sviatoslav poteenko, oleksandr savytskyi and valentyn stetsiuk. during 1998 and 1999, i was the only foreigner participating in the dnister expedition. in previous years, researchers from poland and germany had also taken part. several publications have resulted from the annual dnister expeditions, including volumes edited by valentyn stetsiuk [1996, 2001] and mykola zharkykh [1998]. 9 at the time of the research, five hryvni was roughly equivalent to $1. 31 10 ryan notes that, while porcha is often the effect of the evil eye, it �can also be the result of any kind of malefic magic� [1999: 33]. 11 as discussed by kononenko [1998: 76-77], in ukrainian folk cosmology, paraskovia, �a patron saint of women and women�s work, particularly spinning and weaving�is likely an evolution from a pagan goddess.� moreover, paraskovia was a saint considered by ukrainians as �unclean� and connected to supernatural powers. i heard of no such discussions in connection to the two paraskovias in my study, and i only learned of these historic folk beliefs after i had completed the research. 12 see ryan 1999, especially chapter 7, for a detailed consideration of incantations. 13 see ivanits [1989: 115-16] for a detailed description of an egg ritual performed in 1926 in the nizhnii novgorod district of russia for the soviet ethnographer n. a. nikitina. 14 the historical significance of the moon and other celestial bodies in ukrainian folklore is explored in vovk [1995: 172-73]. 15 hoshko et al. [1987: 251] note that words such as skusa, pekun and others, have historically been used by hutsuls (and presumably, other ukrainian and slavic peoples) to avoid pronouncing the taboo word chort. vovk [1995: 182] notes that in ukrainian folklore devils (chorta) are frequently described as being �black� and �hairy,� like paraskovia�s �black lady with long hair.� 16 wigzell [1998: 56-57] notes that friday appears to have been considered an inauspicious day in prechristian times as well. 17 see ryan [1999] for a detailed analysis of the significance of particular numbers in russian magic and divination beliefs. 18 hoshko et al. [1987: 248-49] describe the hradivnyky, people who, among hutsuls, �possessed the power to turn back hail, stop the storm clouds, or to direct them to a safe place�the water, or the forests.� hradivnyky were categorized as �exceptional� people whose expertise was used for good. 19 see tovstukha [1994: 47] for descriptions of the ideal babky’ vorozhbytky-sheptukhi. 20 i was unable to locate any of these so-called �grandfathers� (dedushki) in the villages. it is possible that these �warlocks� are a kind of mythological foil against which the babky are contrasted as good healers who work �with god.� 21 unfortunately, i was unable to interview any members of the clergy. the information concerning priests� attitudes towards babky comes from the babky themselves. 22 a feldsher is a medical worker with a mid-level education, whose expertise falls roughly between that of a nurse and a physician. bibliography boltarovych, z. ie. 1980. narodne likuvannia ukraintsiv karpat kintsia xix � pochatku xx stolittia [folk medicine of the carpathian ukrainians in the late nneteenth and early twentieth centuries]. kyiv: naukova dumka. folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 32 boriak, olena 2004. personal communication. bourdieu, pierre 1986. �forms of capital.� in john g. richardson (ed.), handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education.westport, ct: greenwood press, pp. 241-58. bushkovitch, paul 1992. religion and society in russia: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. new york: oxford university press. dundes, alan 1992. the evil eye: a casebook. madison: university of wisconsin press. farmer, paul 1988. �bad blood, spoiled milk: body fluids as moral barometers in rural haiti.� american ethnologist, 15 (1): 62-83. filippova, ol�ha 2003 personal communication. fishman, o. f. 1994. �sotsiokul�turnyi status i ritual�noe povedenie �znaiushchikh� v tikhvinskom krae� [the socio-cultural status and ritual behavior of �knowing ones� in the tikhvin area]. zhivaia starina [living antiquity], 4: 24-25. foucault, michel 1980. in colin gordon (ed.), power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977. new york: pantheon. hanchuk, rena jeanne 1999. the word and wax: a medical folk ritual among ukrainians in alberta. edmonton and toronto: huculak chair of ukrainian culture and ethnography and canadian institute of ukrainian studies press. hoshko, iu. h. et al. (eds.) 1987. hutsul�shchyna: istoryko-etnohrafichne doslidzhennia [hutsul�shchyna: historical-ethnographic research]. kyiv: naukova dumka. ivanits, linda 1989. russian folk belief. armonk, ny and london: m. e. sharpe, inc. kendall, laurel 1989. �old ghosts and ungrateful children: a korean shaman�s story.� in carol shepherd mcclain (ed.), women as healers: cross-cultural perspectives. new brunswick and london: rutgers university press, pp. 138-56. kerewsky-halpern, barbara 1989. �healing with mother metaphors: serbian conjurers� word magic.� in carol shepherd mcclain (ed.), women as healers: cross-cultural perspectives. new brunswick and london: rutgers university press, pp. 115-33. kononenko, natalie 1998. �strike now and ask questions later: witchcraft stories in ukraine.� ethnologies, 20 (1): 67-89. lewis, i. m.1986. religion in context: cults and charisma. cambridge: cambridge university press. lindquist, galina 2001. �wizards, gurus, and energy-information fields: wielding legitimacy in contemporary russian healing.� the anthropology of east europe review, 19 (1): 16-28. migliore, sam 1983. �evil eye or delusions: on the �consistency� of folk models.� medical anthropology quarterly, 14 (2): 4-9. myerhoff, barbara 1976. �shamanic equilibrium: balance and mediation in known and unknown worlds.� in wayland d. hand (ed.), american folk medicine: a symposium. berkeley: university of california press, pp. 99-108. 33 naulko, v. i. et al.1993. kul�tura i pobut naselennia ukrainy [the culture and way of life of the people of ukraine]. kyiv: lybid�. o�connor, bonnie b. and david j. hufford 2001. �understanding folk medicine.� in erika brady (ed.), healing logics: culture and medicine in modern health belief systems. logan, utah: utah state university press, pp. 13-35. phillips, sarah 2000. �ngos in ukraine: the makings of a �women�s space?�� anthropology of east europe review, 18 (2): 23-29. _______. 2001. �voskovi formy: babky-sheptukhy, ikhne remeslo ta rol� v ukrains�kii sil�s�kii hromadi� [shapes in the wax: babky-sheptukhi, their craft, and their role in ukrainian village society]. in valentyn stetsiuk (ed.), kulturni hrona dnistra [cultural chronicles of the dnister]. ivano-frankivs�k: lileia, pp. 55-69. _______ 2002a. �civil� societies and �evil� states: ambiguities of women�s ngo organizing and paternalism in post-soviet ukraine. ph.d. dissertation, department of anthropology, university of illinois at urbana-champaign. _______ 2002b. �half-lives and healthy bodies: discourses on �contaminated� foods and healing in postchernobyl ukraine.� food and foodways, 10 (1-2): 27-53. _______ n.d. �losing ground: health and health care in ukrainian villages.� unpublished paper. phillips, sarah and tim miller 2004. shapes in the wax: tradition and faith among folk medicine practitioners in rural ukraine. ethnographic video (dvd), ukrainian with english subtitles. ryan, w. f. 1999. the bathhouse at midnight: an historical survey of magic and divination in russia. university park: pennsylvania state university press. scheper-hughes, nancy and margaret lock 1987. �the mindful body: a prolegomenon to future work in medical anthropology.� medical anthropology quarterly, 1: 6-41. stetsiuk, valentyn (ed.) 1996. na varti dnistra [on the defense of the dnister]. lviv: tovarystvo leva. _______ (ed.) 2001. kulturni hrona dnistra [cultural chronicles of the dnister]. ivano-frankivs�k: lileia. taylor, charles 1985. �the person.� in michael carrither, steven collins, and steven lukes (eds), the category of the person: anthropology, philosophy, and history. new york: cambridge university press, pp. 257-81. tovstukha, ievhen 1994. ukrains�ka narodna medytsyna [ukrainian folk medicine]. kyiv: ros�. turner, victor 1967. the forest of symbols: aspects of ndembu ritual. ithaca: cornell university press. _______ 1969. the ritual process: structure and anti-structure. new york: aldine de gruyter. _______ 1974. dramas, fields, and metaphors: symbolic action in human society. ithaca: cornell university press. van gennep, arnold 1960. the rites of passage. london: routledge & kegan paul. folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 34 voropai, oleksa 1993. zvychai nashoho narodu: etnohrafichnyi narys [customs of our people: an ethnographic survey]. kyiv: oberih. vovk, khevdir 1995. studii z ukrains�koi etnohrafii ta antropolohii [studies in ukrainian ethnography and anthropology]. kyiv: mystetstvo. wigzell, faith 1998. reading russian fortunes: print culture, gender and divination in russia from 1765. cambridge: cambridge university press. zharkykh, mykola (ed.) 1998. doslidzhennia dnistra [dnister research]. l�viv and kyiv: politychna dumka. appendix 1: list of babky interviewed eva [surname unknown] (b. 1928); sloboda, ovruts�kyi raion, zhytomyr oblast� (interviewed 10/15/98) mykola fedorts�o (b. 1914); dolyna, tlumats�kyi raion, ivano-frankivs�k oblast� (7/20/99) tetiana havron (b. 1922); berem�iany, buchats�kyi raion, ternopil� oblast� (7/27/99) stepania kuryliak (b. 1931); horyhliady, monastyrs�kyi raion, ternopil� oblast� (7/20/99) paraskovia moroz (b. 1930); rakovets�, horodenkivs�kyi raion, ternopil� oblast� (8/8/98) anna novakivs�ka (b. 1924); isakiv, tlumats�kyi raion, ivano-frankivs�k oblast� (7/23/99) pavlina oleksyna (b. 1920); odaiv, tlumats�kyi raion, ivano-frankivs�k oblast� (7/19/99) maria orobchuk (b. 1939); berem�iany, buchats�kyi raion, ternopil� oblast� (7/28/99) paraskovia [surname unknown; referred to here as paraskovia ii] (b. 1919); khmeleva, zalishchyts�kyi raion, ternopil� oblast� (8/11/98) orysia popovs�ka (b. 1936); uhryn, chortkivs�kyi raion, ternopil� oblast� (7/20/98) pavlina zolota (b. 1926); shypivtsi, chortkivs�kyi raion, ternopil� oblast� (7/27/98) appendix 2: a healing session with orysia popovs’ka personae orysia popovs�ka: folk healer, born 1936. sarah phillips: ethnographer and patient. ol�ha alekseeva: expedition participant, chemist from kyiv. setting: july 29, 1998, orysia�s summer kitchen in the village of uhryn, chortkivs�kyi raion, ternopil� oblast�. 35 sarah: what are you going to do? orysia: i�m heating the wax, so i can pour it [into the bowl] over your head. your nervous system has been upset. you�ve been upset very recently. ol�ha: her mother died. orysia: was that long ago? sarah: seven years ago. orysia: and no one poured wax for you? sarah: no, never. orysia: don�t you worry. [prepares to pour wax.] it won�t hurt, everything will be fine. in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit, amen (repeats three times). [recites the entire lord�s prayer]: our father, which art in heaven�deliver us from evil, amen. [recites the first half of the hail mary]: hail mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. for you bore the savior of our souls. guardian angel! help! in the early morning, in the evening, in the day, and at night. keep [her] from evil and fear and from all misfortune. mother, holy virgin mary! hear my request; grant her health and many, many years of life. in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit, amen (repeats three times). that�s it, i didn�t do anything [painful]. sarah: yes, i heard everything, but i couldn�t see it. was that a prayer? orysia: yes, it is the lord�s prayer (otche nash) and the hail mary (bohoroditse diva). i saw it in the wax, that you were �nervous� (perenervuvalasia) recently. sarah: and what will you do now? orysia:�i want to let it [the wax pancake] cool a bit. now we�ll see what�s on the other side. sarah: can you tell the future? orysia: yes, if it is in the wax. i�ll tell you everything�i�ll read your fate. now, look at what you�ve been carrying around. you�ve got fear (liak). and you were frightened by water. where were you frightened by water so? try to remember. where were you frightened by water? sarah: maybe in my childhood? orysia: did a dog frighten you? did a dog bite you? sarah: yes, once it did. orysia: your partner, your [marriage] fate will not come soon. you won�t marry soon. sarah: too bad! orysia: you want to marry soon? no, it won�t happen soon. your fate will be good. you�ll have a family of three persons. and what are you thinking about a road? where are you planning to travel? sarah: home, i suppose. orysia: the road will be fine. and someone is waiting for you. who is waiting for you? sam, john? and you are worried about some papers. are you waiting for documents, or a letter? what is with those documents? some problems? folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 36 sarah: yes, yes. orysia: there were some losses, big losses. what did you have? mama? but there was something else. what did you lose? was anything stolen? something like that. you don�t recall? sarah: no. ol�ha: maybe something unimportant? orysia: no, something valuable, or it [the wax] wouldn�t show me. there was something, you try to remember. it might have been long ago, but it happened�you lost something. i see some kind of road, there and back. ol�ha: maybe from kyiv, and back to kyiv? orysia: your fate? your fate is good (faina). your heart is a bit damaged. sarah: my heart? orysia: does it jab you? does something jab you near your heart? sarah: no. orysia: well, that�s good. you can get it checked. your liver is a bit enlarged on the right side. just a little, not much. it�s like that with everyone, don�t worry. sarah: what should i do? orysia: what can you do? weren�t you ill with something? hepatitis? did you have any rash? sarah: a rash? orysia: like the chicken pox. there are many illnesses that can cause a rash. sarah: no. orysia: maybe radiation caused it to enlarge a bit. or you ate something that damaged it a little. but you don�t feel it yet, because it doesn�t reveal itself quickly. your heart could have suffered when your mother died, from grief. but it doesn�t hurt, and thank god it doesn�t. but it has a little bit of a problem. that is a weak spot, you must remember that� appendix 3: incantations: transliterated texts and translations* incantation 1: wax ritual incantation (pavlina zolota) 1 vo imia ottsia i syna, i sviatoho dukha, amin’. 2 isuse, synu nebesnyi, maten’ko nebesna, sviatyi otche mykolaiu, 1 1 1 in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit, amen. 2 jesus, heavenly son, heavenly mother, saint nicholas, *the babky i consulted spoke in local dialects that varied from region to region, and village to village (e.g. the usual prystrit becomes prestret in eva�s usage). i have transliterated the ukrainian following their actual speech. michael naydan generously assisted me with the transliterations and translations. 37 3 sviatyi mykhaile, sviatyi antoniiu, sviatyi ivane,velykyi khrestyteliu, voda tvoia pomohaie. 4 zroby tak, shchob [slavyk] buv zdorovyi i chystyi, iak voda tvoia… 5 [vsia molytva “otche nash”.] 6 bohorodytse-divo, raduisia, 7 obradovanna ty, mariie, 8 hospod’ z toboiu, 9 blahoslovenna ty, plot’ i chrevo tvoie, 10 iak isusa rodyla izbavytelia, 11 vo imia ottsia i syna, i sviatoho dukha, amin’. 12 krynytsia, berehy, korinnia, kaminnia, 13 omyi [slavyka] od vsiakoho shchastia, i neshchastia, i terpinnia. 14 misiatsiu novyi, 15 sriblo-zlotyi, dorohyi, 16 pomahai, ochyshchui vse, 17 zmyvai, obchyst’, obmyi, osviaty, 18 shchob buv zdorovyi, iasnyi, chystyi, iak ty, 19 z holovy vykhody, z mozky, z cherepa, z chola, z broviv, 20 z klipok, z ochei, z nosa, z pysku, z ushiv, 21 z iazyka, z leheniv, z horla, z pechinky, z lezhynky, 22 z nyrok, z sertsia, z-pid sertsia, z zheludka, z podzheludka, 23 z rebriv, z-pid rebriv, 2 2 3 saint michael, saint anton, saint john the great baptist, your water helps. 4 make it so that [slavyk] will be healthy and pure as your water. 5 [recites the entire lord�s prayer]: our father, who art in heaven�amen. 6 hail mary, 7 full of grace, 8 the lord is with thee, 9 blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. 10 for you bore the savior. 11 in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit, amen. 12 well [of water], shore, roots, and rocks, 13 cleanse [slavyk] of all manner of happiness and unhappiness, and suffering. 14 new moon, 15 silver-gold moon, dear, 16 help, cleanse all, 17 wash, cleanse, wash, bless, 18 so he will be as healthy, as bright, and pure as you, 19 go out from the head, from the brain, the skull, the forehead, the brows, 20 the eyelids, the eyes, the nose, the face, the ears, 21 the tongue, the lungs, the throat, the liver, illness, 22 the kidneys, the heart, from under the heart, from the stomach, from under the stomach, 23 the ribs, from under the ribs, folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 38 24 z pal’tsiv, z sustaviv, z liktiv, z kolin, z pazuriv vykhody 25 na hory, na skeli idy, 26 vsi strakhy, vsi nervy, vsiu khvorobu, vsi neshchastia, vse bezsonnia posylaiu, 27 maten’ko nebesna, ty vsim pomahaesh, 28 mozhe, i [slavyku] pomozhesh, shchob vin buv zdorovyi i chystyi, 29 iak voda tvoia zdorova, 30 vo imia ottsia i syna, i sviatoho dukha, amin’.3 incantation 2: incantation used by paraskovia moroz to treat any illness or problem 1 vo imia ottsia i syna, i sviatoho dukha, amin’ (3 razy). 2 dozvol’te, prechysta divo mariie, 3 moiemu sertsiu s vamy hovoryty 4 i [sari] zdorov’iachka uprosyty, 5 shchob ii bile tilo, zhovti kosti, 6 chervona krov, syni zhyly 7 tsila ii budova 8 buly zdorovymy vid vsiakoi boli, 9 vsiakoi nemochi, 10 vsiakykh strakhiv, vsiakykh klopotiv, 11 vid vs’oho zloho sokhranyty, 12 na mnoha lita poblahoslovyty. 4 3 24 from the fingers, the joints, the elbows, the knees, go out from the nails 25 go to the mountains, the cliffs, 26 all the fears, all the nerves, all the illnesses, all the unhappiness, i send all the sleeplessness, 27 heavenly mother, you help everyone, 28 maybe you will help [slavyk], so he will be healthy and clean 29 like your healthy water, 30 in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit, amen. 41 in the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit, amen (repeats three times). 2 allow, immaculate virgin mary 3 my heart to speak with you 4 and to beseech [sarah�s] health, 5 that her white body, yellow bones, 6 red blood, blue veins, 7 her entire body 8 would be healthy from all pain, 9 all infirmity, 10 all fear, all troubles, 11 from all evil protect her, 12 bless her for many years. 39 13 isuse, synu bozhyi, 14 dozvol’te moiemu sertsiu z vamy hovoryty 15 i [sari] zdorov’iachka uprosyty, 16 shchob ii bile tilo, zhovti kosti, 17 chervona krov, syni zhyly, 18 tsila ii budova 19 buly zdorovymy vid vsiakoi boli, 20 vsiakoi nemochi, 21 vsiakykh strakhiv, vsiakykh klopotiv, 22 vid vs’oho zloho sokhranyty, 23 na mnoha lita poblahoslovyty. 24 nad khmaramy sydila chorna pani prostovolosa. 25 de ty, skusa, vzialasia, 26 chy ty z vitru, 27 chy ty z pohanoho snu, 28 chy ty z navchannia, 5 5 13 jesus, son of god, 14 allow my heart to speak with you 15 and to beseech [sarah�s] health, 16 that her white body, yellow bones, 17 red blood and blue veins, 18 her entire being 19 would be healthy from all pain, 20 all infirmity, 21 all fear, all troubles, 22 from all evil protect her, 23 bless her for many years.* 24 on the clouds sat a black lady, bareheaded.** 25 where have you, good-for-nothing, come from? 26 from the wind, 27 or from bad dreams,*** 28 or from learning, * in another version of this prayer, paraskovia repeated this section a third time, evoking aid from saint john the baptist, all twelve apostles, saints nicholas and elijah, and the martyrs dmytro, ol�ha, elizaveta and barbara. ** in ukrainian villages, it is customary for a woman to have her hair under a scarf or in a braid, wrapped around her head. here, the fact that the �black lady� is bareheaded probably indicates that she is a witch. later paraskovia calls her �skusa,� a term used to avoid pronouncing the word �chort� (devil). *** in another version of this incantation, paraskovia added here, �or from a bad man, or a bad woman, or from bad creatures?� she also added, �or from work, or colds?� folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 40 29 chy ty z zavisty, 30 chy ty z strakhy? 31 tut tobi ne buvaty, 32 tut tobi ne prezentuvaty, 33 tut tobi ne v’ialyty, 34 tut tobi ne sushyty. 35 ia tobi, skusa, dam try roboty: 36 odnu robotu—vodu perelyvai, 37 druhu robotu—kaminniam hudy, 38 tretiu robotu—vitramy shumy, 39 ia tobi, skuso, dam vodytsiu—vmyisia, 40 rushnychok—vtrysia, 41 trostovu palochku—pidoprysia—zvidsy vyberysia. 42 idy sobi, de psy ne havkaiut’, 43 de kury ne spivaiut’, 44 de vrazhi vitry huliaiut’, 45 [sarochku] zdoroven’ku, chysten’ku lyshy, 46 iak ii maty na svit porodyla. 47 popid nebesa ikhav svoim konem illia, 48 ishla bozhaia maty, 49 kuda ty, choloviche, idesh? 6 6 29 or from envy, 30 or from fear? 31 here you mustn�t show yourself, 32 here you mustn�t dwell, 33 here you mustn�t dry it, 34 here you musn�t dry it out. 35 you good-for-nothing, i�ll give you three tasks: 36 one task�pour water, 37 the second task�make the rocks hum, 38 the third task�rustle the wind, 39 you good-for-nothing, i�ll give you water�wash with it, 40 a towel�dry off with it, 41 a cane walking stick�lean on it�get out of here. 42 go where dogs don�t bark, 43 where chickens don�t sing, 44 where enemy winds dance, 45 let [sarah] be healthy, pure 46 as when her mother bore her. 47 beneath the heavens ilia rode his horse, 48 the virgin mary was walking, 49 where are you , young man, going? 41 50 id’ na im’ia [sarochku] ozdorovliaty 51 vid nei vs’o zlo vidibraty, 52 na ii ne pustyty, 53 a ii ozdorovyty, 54 na mnohii lita poblahoslovyty, 55 roztrykhnysia ielei na vsi 3 chasti, 56 roztrykhnysia strakh i vs’o zlo na vsi 3 chasti, 57 a [sarochka] ozdorovlena na mnohi i mnohi lita 58 proslavyty ii i zhyty, i zhyty. 59 [vo imia ottsia i syna, i sviatoho dukha, amin’. 60 boh-otets’, boh-syn, boh-dukh sviatyi (3 razy), 61 neporochne sertse marii, 62 otche nykolaiu, 63 dopomozhy [sarochtsi] v sim’i ii, 64 v navchanniu, v dorozi, vdoma, 65 khai shchaslyva bude mnohiie lita] (3 razy).7 incantation 3: to remove fear (eva) 1 hospodu bohu pomoliusia, 2 prechystoi bozhoi materi pokloniusia. 3 prishla prechysta bozha maty do [parasky] 8 7 50 go to make [sarah�s] name healthy, 51 take all evil away from her, 52 don�t release it upon her, 53 and make her healthy, 54 for many years bless her, 55 shake/shatter fir trees (?) into all three parts, 56 shake/shatter fear and all evil into all three parts, 57 and healthy [sarah] for many, many years 58 bless her to live, and live. 59 [in the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit, amen. 60 god the father, god the son, god the holy spirit (3 times), 61 sacred heart of mary, 62 father nicholas, 63 help [sarah] in her family, 64 in study, in travel, at home, 65 may she be happy for many years] (3 times). 8 1 to the lord god i pray, 2 to the heavenly mother of god i bow. 3 the heavenly mother of god came to [paraska] folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 42 4 prestret sheptat’. 5 prestret-prestrashchyshche, 6 uroky vrochyshche, 7 behlo vovchyshche cherez pans’ke olenyshche, 8 selo na popelyshche. 9 kudy vy idete, pannochky, 10 kudy vy idete? 11 idem do [parasky] rozhd’onoi, khreshchonoi 12 prestret uroky vyhovoriat’. 13 a vy, pannochky, vernit’sia, 14 prestret uroky mynet’sia.9 incantation 4: to remove fear (eva) 1 hospodu bohu pomoliusia, 2 prechystoi bozhoi materi pokloniusia. 3 prishla prechysta bozha maty 4 do [nadi] khreshchenoi, rozhd’onoi 5 prestret sheptat’. 6 prestret-prestrashchyshche, 7 uroky vrochyshche, 8 behlo vovchyshche cherez pans’ke olenyshche, 10 9 4 to whisper away the fear. 5 fear, great fear, 6 evil eye, great evil eye, 7 a little wolf ran across the master�s deer-filled land, 8 and sat on the ashes. 9 where are you going, girls, 10 where are you going? 11 we�re going to [paraska] the born, the christened, 12 to speak away the evil eye. 13 and you, girls, return, 14 the fear and the evil eye will pass. 10 1 to the lord god i pray, 2 to the heavenly mother of god i bow. 3 the heavenly mother of god came 4 to [nadia] the christened, the born 5 to whisper [away] the fear. 6 fear, big fear, 7 evil eye, big evil eye, 8 a little wolf ran across the master�s deer-filled land, 43 9 silo na popelyshche. 10 a vy, pannochky, vernit’sia, 11 prestret uroky mynit’sia. 12 ie v materi try dochky— 13 odna lozhku myie, 14 druha plattia kachaie, 15 tretia prestret odvertaie.11 incantation 5: said while “spinning” an egg to remove “fear” (liak) (eva) 1 hospodu bohu pomoliusia, 2 prechystoi bozhoi materi pokloniusia. 3 prishla prechysta bozha maty 4 do [nadi] liaku sheptaty. 5 sobachyi, kotiachyi, 6 tovariachyi, khlobochyi, perebochyi, 7 koly ia tebe ne znala 8 i ne vyhovarala, 9 teper ia tebe znaiu 10 i vyhovoraiu, 11 z chervonoi krovy, z zhovtoho tila, 12 z zhovtoi kosti, z rumianoho lytsia. 12 119 and sat on the ashes. 10 and you, girls, return, 11 the fear and the evil eye will pass. 12 the mother has three daughters� 13 one is washing a spoon 14 the second is washing a dress, 15 the third is turning away the evil eye. 12 1 to the lord god i pray, 2 to the heavenly mother of god i bow. 3 the heavenly mother of god came 4 to [nadia] to whisper [away] fear. 5 canine, feline, 6 bovine, ???, ???, 7 when i did not know you 8 i did not speak you away, 9 now i know you 10 and speak you away, 11 from the red blood, from the yellow body, 12 from the yellow bones, from the rosy face. folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 44 incantation 6: to treat a hernia (eva) 1 zolotnychku, zolotnychku, 2 dobryi cholovechku, 3 koly ia tebe ne znala 4 i ne vyhovorala, 5 teper ia tebe znaiu 6 i vyhovoraiu, 7 na zolotyi stul’chyk siad’, 8 na svoe mestechko siad’. 13 13 1 hernia [little gold one], hernia [little gold one], 2 dear man, 3 when i did not know you 4 i did not speak you away, 5 now i know you 6 and speak you away, 7 sit on a golden chair, 8 sit down in your place. 45 paraskovia moroz in her home, with folk icons and her herbal and other natural remedies wreaths of dried herbs, blessed by a priest, and used for herbal teas and medicines orysia popovs�ka preparing to interpret the shapes in the wax folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 1 microsoft word folk2006[3] sheryl format3.doc reviews 133 the snow maiden and other russian tales (world folklore series). translated and retold by bonnie c. marshall; alla kulagina, advisor. westport, conn.: libraries unlimited, 2004. 154 pp. $35.00 (cloth). isbn 1-56308-999-8. the tales in this volume were translated and retold by bonnie c. marshall, adjunct professor and curriculum coordinator for the russian program at johnson c. smith university in charlotte, north carolina. her other publications of folktales include baba yaga's geese and other russian stories and grasshopper to the rescue: a georgian story. marshall wrote tales from the heart of the balkans, another title in the world folklore series, with vasa d. mihailovich. alla kulagina, a kandidat in the department of folklore at moscow state university, acted as consultant on the snow maiden. her work includes various study guides, and research on lyric songs, ballad, and chastushki (russian limericks). the snow maiden and other russian tales belongs to the world folklore series published by libraries unlimited, a division of the greenwood publishing group. according to the greenwood website, these “colorful story collections combine impeccable scholarship with entertaining reading. in addition to the stories, each title provides cultural and historical background information; photographs, maps, and drawings; discussion and activity ideas; glossaries; and ‘extras’ including traditional recipes, games, and more.” the present text is faithful to this model. in addition to the tales, marshall presents an introduction with sections on the geography and history of russia, and a description of russian life today. marshall's presentation of russian history illustrates and augments the narrative effectively with the inclusion, beginning with the revolution, of several political anekdoty (jokes). there is an overview of the history of russian folklore and folktale collecting. the book also includes a number of activities to accompany the stories, a bibliography of russian sources, an english reading list, two maps, and eight pages of color photographs. marshall organizes her folktale translations into four sections. first are the ten animal tales, including “kolobok,” russia’s version of the gingerbread man story. there are nine fairy tales, such as “snow maiden,” “teryoshechka,” and “at the pike's command.” the best tale in this section, and indeed the entire book, in the opinion of my sevenyear-old, is “the puff monster,” which marshall heard from “twelveyear-old aleksandra pozniakova”(21). there follow ten tales of folklorica 2006, vol. xi 134 everyday life where social satire, according to marshall, is prominent. some tales included in this section are “the fool and the birch tree,” “magic water,” and “the devil loans money.” finally come tales of spirits and the supernatural. here are five bylichki (memorates) that tell of encounters with a supernatural being supposed to have been experienced by the narrator or someone known to the narrator. their inclusion is important because folklorists have traditionally put bylichki in a different genre from skazki (folk tales proper). here they appear for the first time, according to marshall, in a non-scholarly english collection. two of the three brief stories contained here under the title of “spirits of the bathhouse” are rather grisly, in keeping with macabre reputation of banniki (bathhouse spirits). elsewhere, though, marshall often avoids fatal dénouements such as in the fairy tale “the sun, the moon, and raven voronovich.” in afanas’ev’s telling, the old man and the raven fall to their deaths from the roost at the end of the tale. as marshall tells it, the old man merely gets a bump on the head and some torn clothes. this collection is targeted at grades k through twelve. the tales are appropriate listening for small children and should be interesting independent reading from about second grade. teachers of upper elementary grades should find the supplementary materials as well as the tales helpful in planning and conducting special sections in social studies such as a “russia unit,” as part of a cultures week, or an in an exploration of folklore, for instance. junior high and high school students should be able to use the entire book themselves, both the cultural background and the tales, and may even feel motivated to pursue further reading based on the “recommended readings in english.” this reading list will certainly be of interest to educators. the “activities to accompany the stories” include three recipes. the first is for “runaway buns,” actually olad’i or griddle cakes, from “kolobok.” next are bliny, or thin russian pancakes; and finally there is a recipe for shchi, cabbage soup. in this section are also a number of craft ideas ranging from making lubki, or chapbooks, to a birch bark headband, and even creating the snow maiden out of snow (weather permitting). there are a few simple line drawings to accompany some of the activities. such a presentation makes this section seem more appropriate for adults planning craft or cooking activities for kids rather than something that will appeal to children themselves, in most cases. i recall from my own childhood that those books of ideas for craft reviews 135 activities with the most pictures, photographs, or detailed drawings best captured the imagination and made me want to try the projects myself. i am always somewhat saddened to see a collection of russian folktales for children without illustrations. some kind of artistic graphic material—drawings, paintings or even photos of folk art—can be helpful in sparking young imaginations as they contemplate the tales. the inclusion of only photographs seems to be a common feature of the entire world folklore series, although a sister volume, the enchanted wood and other tales from finland, does include three of akseli gallenkallela's paintings for the kalevala. therefore, a few of ivan bilibin's russian folktale illustrations, for example, could have been included here. or perhaps a list of illustrated english and russian editions might have been added to the bibliographic section. in any case, those interested in exploring the iconography of russian folktales can, for a start, consult the present volume’s list of folktale collections in english, several of which do include illustrations. the photographs present in the snow maiden are mostly helpful. they included shots of various folklore performances, a samovar, a stove (pech’), bast shoes, and so on. however, artwork is generally far more evocative than most of the amateur photos included here. by far the most charming picture is the cover photograph, a beautiful outside shot of a window from a traditional dwelling: podzornaia rez'ba (carved framing details), shutters, and frame painted white, a tulle curtain, and pots of geraniums on the sill. the snow maiden and other russian tales can be recommended for schools, public libraries, and families with or without russian roots. it cannot compare with some other collections, such as guterman's translations of afanas'ev's folktales (pantheon books), in terms of sheer number of tales, let alone the recently completed comprehensive collection by jack haney (the complete russian folktale, 7 vols), but marshall's selection gives a decent overview of the variety of russian folktales. furthermore, her introductions to the country, the culture, and the stories, plus the activities section put the snow maiden and other russian tales in a class by itself. john hill the university of michigan folklorica 2006, vol. xi microsoft word contentsqsoft.doc contemporary urban russian funerals 109 contemporary urban russian funerals: continuity and change jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby university of kentucky про похороны интереснее рассказывать, потому что в похоронном обряде сохранились традиции глубже всего. потому что тут, какими бы ни были люди далекими от всего, образованными, страшными консерваторами, тут надо все соблюсти. it is more interesting to talk about funerals because, in the funerary ritual, traditions have been preserved best of all. because here, no matter how far people were from everything, whether educated, whether frightfully conservative, here everything has to be observed. so said ekaterina z., an informant from novosibirsk, born in 1978. while ekaterina’s opinion has some merit, as we will see, the urban russian funeral has not been a stable ritual throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. in fact, it reflects attitudes from both the soviet period and the post-soviet period, attitudes which demonstrate how social values have changed over these periods. this paper is based on thirty interviews about funerals with residents of novosibirsk and vladimir, russia (or with emigres to america). the informants ranged in age from 26 to 73 years of age and included 25 women and 5 men. 27 were russian; the remaining three identified themselves as tatar, bashkir or mordvin. they are representatives of the urban working and middle classes; most attended vuzy (institutions of higher education). 17 were from novosibirsk and 13 from vladimir. most of the funerals they described took place in those locations between 1966 and 2003, although one funeral took place in chita. in order to evaluate the validity of ekaterina’s statement, we must first examine the traditional 19th century village funeral. funerals were of four types: for a man (the most elaborate); for a married woman (least elaborate); for an unmarried woman (essentially a wedding ceremony) and for children [mahler 1935]. below we will discuss the funeral for married adults, as this ritual provides the full range of ritual acts that will be essential to an understanding of the russian funeral in the contemporary period. elderly people generally prepared their burial clothing before they died [kremleva 2003: 520; sedakova 242]. burial clothing included a typical folk costume, but was easily distinguished from what was worn in life by color and in some folklorica 2007, vol. xii 110 cases, design. it was important that the clothing be new and unworn or freshly washed (if not new) [baiburin 108; ananicheva and samodelova 189]. when a person died, candles were lit and all the mirrors in the house were covered, and all water was thrown out, since it was believed that water and mirrors (symbolically similar to water due to their reflective nature) might trap the soul on this earth, which would result in unquiet or restless dead [baiburin 105; kabakova 261; zelenin 349]. typically married women (not relatives) washed and dressed the body and wrapped it in a white shroud, leaving only the head and hands uncovered; they were paid with cloth or with items of clothing that belonged to the deceased [nosova 104; sedakova 242; kremleva 1993: 13; kabakova 258]. as part of the process of preparing the body, they closed the deceased’s eyes and covered them with coins and often tied the feet and hands [baiburin 106, 108; sedakova 248]. the materials used to wash the body were thrown away; the water was poured where no one would walk [nosova 104; zelenin 346; sedakova 249; kremleva 1993: 14]. the deceased remained in the house for three days, lying on the table under the icon corner, with the feet facing the door and head beneath the icons [zelenin 347; kremleva 2003: 521; baiburin 110; ananicheva and samodelova 189; firsov and kiseleva 287]. during the vigil, nothing was taken out of the house and no cleaning was performed [nosova 111]. relatives and friends visited to say farewell, typically bringing a candle along [kremleva 2003: 521]. a glass of water or vodka covered with bread or a blin were placed near the icons; in some regions, a saucer of water was also located there for the soul to “wash” [kremleva 2003: 521; zelenin 345; sedakova 244; firsov and kiseleva 288]. the deceased’s female relatives (or invited “sitters”) maintained a vigil over the body and ensured that the lamp at the head of the deceased remained lit during the entire vigil; no one was allowed to sleep with a corpse in the house [sedakova 243; kremleva 2003: 522]. the coffin was not made by family members. typically the family asked a priest or deacon to come and bless the coffin with holy water and incense before they placed the deceased into it [kremleva 2003: 522]. the deceased was put in the coffin on the day of burial, and items placed in the coffin for the deceased to use in the land of the dead included a cross and/or icon, candles, a ceremonial axe (received by boys at birth), pipe, tobacco, money, food (and vodka for men), extra clothing, venik ‘birch besom’ (for use in the bathhouse), and work implements associated with the deceased’s trade [nosova 113; kremleva 2003: 522; sedakova 81; contemporary urban russian funerals 111 baiburin 111; firsov and kiseleva 287]. the candle lit his way to the land of the dead; the money could buy his passage, while the food sustained him on the journey; the clothing and work implements were necessary to live in the otherworld. the folk perceived existence in the land of the dead to be just like life on earth. to function in this world, the deceased would need things similar to those required on earth, such as a pipe and axe [kabakova 256]. during the vigil, older female relatives would sing laments and read prayers [kremleva 2003: 521, 522; baiburin 110]. families also hired “readers” and professional lamenters for this purpose [kremleva 1993: 12; zelenin 355]. the lamenters, generally widows, guided the ritual and led the singing, since they were familiar with the ritual songs required to ensure that the soul made the proper passage to the land of the dead. in fact, older women generally fulfilled many roles in the funeral, from sitters, to lamenters, to those who prepared the body [sedakova 108]. laments often included information about the man’s life and death, an attack on him for leaving his family, and a laudatory section about his qualities as a father, son, husband, worker, etc. [kremleva 1993: 13]. when the corpse was removed from the house for burial on the third day, those attending the funeral first carried out the lid, then the priest exited, followed by the coffin itself. people usually removed the coffin via the back door or a window [moyle 229-230; nosova 117]. this practice not only helped to prevent the threshold from being tainted by the corpse, but also helped to prevent the corpse from returning to the house. the tracks of the funeral train were swept away, again to help prevent the deceased’s return. the coffin was placed on benches outside the house so that those not going to the funeral could say farewell [firsov and kiseleva 288]. generally a few neighbors (older, married women) stayed behind to clean the house and remove the “traces” of death the corpse left behind. they swept and washed the floor, and the table and benches where the deceased had been placed; all the materials used for this purpose were destroyed or thrown away [ananicheva and samodelova 190; sedakova 244, 250; kremleva 2003: 524; kabakova 260; firsov and kiseleva 288]. these women typically inverted the tables and benches before washing them, so that death would enter the soil [tolstoi 120]. the priest also said a prayer of purification after the deceased had been carried out [ananicheva and samodelova 190]. these same women prepared for the funeral feast that took place after burial. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 112 the women lamented as the funeral procession proceeded to the church for the otpevanie ‘funeral mass’ [kremleva 1993: 18]. in some regions, the path was strewn with fir branches [surkhasko 93]. at the church, the priest sang the funeral mass; an additional service at graveside was optional [kabakova 264; kremleva 1993: 19; 2003: 523]. at the graveside, attendees kissed the deceased farewell, and the coffin was nailed shut; either at the graveside or before removal from the house, the deceased’s hands and feet were untied [baiburin 111]. funerals usually occurred around noon, when the sun was high in the sky [nosova 123; kremleva 2003: 522]. as was the case with preparing the body for burial and making the coffin, non-family members dug the grave [sedakova 244, 250]. limitations also existed on who lowered the body into the grave. zelenin [350] notes that parents did not lower the coffins of their children; nor did children lower their parents. the coffin was lowered on towels or ropes; the towels were sometimes distributed to pallbearers and gravediggers [kremleva 2003: 523]. those present typically threw coins into the grave (to buy a space for the deceased in the graveyard or in the other world) and each threw some dirt onto the coffin as the grave was being filled [baiburin 114; nosova 124; kabakova 265; sedakova 250; kremleva 2003: 523]. everyone waited until the grave was filled and, in certain regions, a commemorative meal at the graveside was held [kremleva 1993: 20]. elsewhere this meal (with food left for the deceased) occurred on the second day after burial [sedakova 244]. after the burial, the pominki ‘wake’ for all those present at the funeral (and often for the entire village) was held at the deceased’s home, often in shifts to accommodate all the attendees [baiburin 117; nosova 126; kabakova 266; firsov and kiseleva 288]. the meal had to include the following items: bliny, kisel' ‘a fruit drink made of cranberries or oats’, kut'ia ‘grain and raisins sweetened with honey’ and kasha ‘cooked grain’ [zelenin 356; kremleva 1993: 23; 2003: 525]. the dead took part in the meal, so that a place was set for him or her [baiburin 117; zelenin 356; nosova 131; kremleva 1993: 23]. typically people did not eat with forks at the wake, since sharp objects “pricked” the soul and discouraged its presence at the feast [kabakova 266; nosova 94]. baiburin [118] notes that the burial ritual was designed to remove the remains of the dead, while the pominki were designed to ensure that the soul returned to the home. mourners began the meal by taking a piece of a blin and, after filling it with kut'ia, wishing tsarstviia nebesnogo (lit. ‘heavenly realm’) ‘may (s)he be in heaven’ to the deceased [ananicheva and samodelova contemporary urban russian funerals 113 190]. the meal usually ended with kisel' [kremleva 1993: 24]. the mirrors were uncovered after the departure of the body, but the icon lamp remained lit for forty days after death [kabakova 267]. in some areas, the bathhouse was heated for the deceased to bathe [chistiakov 112]. in addition, a glass of water or vodka covered with bread stayed next to the icons for this period [sedakova 244; kabakova 268]. there was a tradition of giving food and items to the poor (both openly and secretly) in honor of the deceased for forty days [nosova 127; kremleva 1993: 2021]. the most important events after the burial included additional pominki on the ninth, twentieth, and fortieth days after death, and again at six and nine months, after one year, and every year thereafter [kabakova 268; sedakova 244; kremleva 1993: 24-25; firsov and kiseleva 287]. for these rituals, relatives went to the graves for another funeral meal, women lamented, and there was often another funeral mass [kabakova 268; ananicheva and samodelova 190; zabylin 111]. relatives left food and drink (and grain for the birds, which represent the souls of the dead in russian lore) on the grave and then returned home for another funeral meal [zelenin 357]. at all pominki, passersby were asked to share in the meal and to remember the deceased [ananicheva and samodelova 190; kremleva 1993: 21]. the most important and largest of the commemorations were on the fortieth day and after one year, when once again the entire community gathered to commemorate the deceased at another meal. on the other days, only the family joined in the pominki. the fortieth day was particularly important since on that day the soul left the earth [zelenin 356]. over the course of these forty days people often visited the grave daily with food and vodka for the dead [kabakova 268]. kremleva [1993: 21] describes the tradition of giving away the deceased’s belongings on the fortieth day. additional commemorations occurred as part of the yearly cycle on parents’ days, such as during maslenitsa ‘butter week’ (the carnival period before lent begins), during lent itself, during passion week, on the tuesday of saint thomas’ week (called radonitsa ‘resurrection day’, the second week after easter), the saturday before pentecost (called sviataia troitsa ‘holy trinity’, seven weeks after easter), and on saint dmitry’s day (november 8) [ananicheva and samodelova 191; nosova 135; zelenin 356-357; baiburin 119; sedakova 245, 252; zabylin 110; nosova 135].(1) throughout the soviet period, the funeral ritual typically included the following basic elements, both in vladimir and in novosibirsk, many folklorica 2007, vol. xii 114 of which were clearly preserved from the folk and religious traditions described above: a person died at home and was kept there for three days (in rare cases a person died in a hospital, but was usually brought home for the funeral for at least one night; there were exceptions if the person died a violent death, in which case he/she was generally buried from the morgue, that is the final visitation and transport for burial occurred there). a doctor came to sign the death certificate, so that the family could proceed with arrangements. when a person died, the family covered all the shiny surfaces in the home (from mirrors, to glass-fronted cabinets, to televisions). an older neighbor woman came to wash and dress the deceased. the deceased, especially women, usually had picked their funeral clothing and had it prepared in a small bundle; in the case of men, wives or children usually picked the clothing. the dress or suit could be old, that is previously worn, but the underclothing and foot wear had to be new and unworn. once the body was prepared, it was placed in a coffin in the main room on a table. a photograph of the deceased was placed at the head of the coffin and next to it were a candle and a shot glass of vodka covered with a slice of black bread. the door remained unlocked, so that all who wished to enter and pay their respects could do so. visitors generally brought an even number of flowers which they placed in the coffin. people maintained a vigil over the deceased for the entire time he/she was in the home. on the day of the burial, the coffin was carried out by non-blood relatives, friends or coworkers (it was considered a bad omen for blood relatives to prepare the body for burial or carry the coffin). the coffin was preceded by a procession of people carrying the coffin lid and throwing organic matter. the coffin was placed on saw horses in front of the house, so that mourners who were not attending the funeral could say farewell (in some cases it was also taken to the person’s work place for the same purpose). mourners and the coffin were transported to the graveyard in busses obtained from work or through a worker’s union. at the grave site (which was already dug), there was typically a brass ensemble that played a funeral march and/or military airs and the soviet national anthem, if the person was a veteran. coworkers (rarely relatives) gave a eulogy and relatives kissed the person goodbye. all flowers were removed from the coffin (although artificial ones might have been left there), it was closed and lowered into the grave by cemetery workers either on ropes or on long, waffle weave towels. each person, closest relatives first, threw a lump of dirt into the grave and everyone then waited until the grave mound was formed. wreaths and flowers were arranged on the grave, possibly around a contemporary urban russian funerals 115 photograph of the deceased. the first ritual partaking of food occurred at the grave site and some of the food was left there for the birds. in the case of men, a shot of vodka was often left on the grave as well. the food and drink was shared with those who dug the grave as well as with mourners. the mourners returned to the family apartment, which had undergone a ritual purification. generally a few female neighbors stayed behind to prepare for the funeral feast and also to perform this cleaning. they turned the table where the coffin had stood upside down and washed it, they mopped the path the coffin had taken, including the pod”ezd, ‘entry way’, opened the windows and uncovered all the mirrors. the funeral meal, pominki, included the following items: bliny, kisel' from berries or kompot from dried fruits, a grain, typically buckwheat, a main meat dish and often a soup, especially borshch or shchi; and candies. most drank vodka, although wine was also drunk at these feasts. toasts were offered to the deceased and stories about him/her were told, ending with the ritual words, пусть земля будет пухом “may the earth be as down”, but those present did not clink glasses. additional pominki with visitations to the grave and the same type of meals occurred on the nineth and fortieth day, (sometimes 6 month) and 1 year anniversary after death, and for every year thereafter. in some families, an empty plate and/or glass was placed on the table for the deceased. when guests left, they were usually given candy and/or bliny to take with them to share with others, especially children, to remember the deceased. the vodka covered by black bread stayed next to the photograph for 40 days, at which point the vodka had generally evaporated, while the black bread was fed to birds. the regional differences between novosibirsk and vladimir include the following: the point at which in the ritual kut'ia was eaten; the things placed/thrown before the coffin as it was carried out; distribution of goods at the burial site; rules about toasting; and limitations on the type of utensils on the table during the funeral meal. in vladimir, kut'ia is limited to the burial site. that is, each person who attends the burial takes a spoonful of kut'ia (and perhaps a blin) at the burial site and eats it. the kut'ia is then left there on the grave. in novosibirsk, kut'ia is served at the meal, and each person first takes a spoonful of it and a blin in memory of the deceased before eating or drinking anything else. residents of both cities believe that organic matter should be thrown or placed before the coffin as it is carried out of the house. in novosibirsk, flowers are thrown (often by young girls or women) before the procession. in vladimir, fir branches are placed along the path. in folklorica 2007, vol. xii 116 vladimir, it is rare to distribute items at the grave site, but in novosibirsk, both food and objects, namely pieces of the towels used to lower the coffin and/or kerchiefs, are distributed. in novosibirsk, informants reported that one should drink all of the first two toasts in one gulp, but that the third is sipped, since no more than three glasses should be drunk at a funeral. novosibirskans also believe that sharp objects should not be used for the funeral meal; thus everything is eaten by hand or with spoons, which is not the case in vladimir. while the soviet government espoused atheism, the funeral retained many elements that are derived from the orthodox faith. for example, elvira a., a retired engineer from vladimir, described soviet era funerals as follows: поэтому когда лежат дома, мы обращаемся в церковь, ищем какуюнибудь женщину чтобы почитала молитвы. она сидит всю ночь, читает молитвы. в 1984 тоже приходили, просили чтобы почитали. мама умерла, тоже женщина приходила читала молитвы. мы могли немного подремать, а она сидела всю ночь, читала при свечах. therefore when they are at home, we turn to the church, we seek out some woman to read prayers. in 1984 they came also, we asked them to read. my mother died, a woman also came and read prayers. we could sleep a little, but she sat all night and read by candlelight. merridale’s [264] data on funerals support this claim; while official religious figures usually did not attend a funeral (due, she claims, to the shortage of priests, not due to lack of desire for their participation), people would rely on those who remembered prayers to read or recite them. in addition, merridale [265] also found evidence of retention of the orthodox practice of sprinkling earth (blessed by a priest) in the shape of a cross on the coffin or the deceased’s chest. soviet russians maintained other orthodox practices as well: pominki at various intervals after death; inclusion of kut'ia and other traditional funerary foods in the meal, lighting candles, placing bread and vodka/water near the body and keeping it for forty days near a picture of the deceased (in lieu of an icon), and burial on the third day that included everyone throwing a handful of dirt into the grave and leaving food behind for the deceased. while it may be the case that some of these practices derived from an older, pre-christian belief system, by the nineteenth century they had been reinterpreted as part of the orthodox funeral service. as a result, i would argue, that people believed they were performing an ‘orthodox’ rite. the association between the church and the funeral rite perservered contemporary urban russian funerals 117 throughout the soviet period, as olga s. noted: в советские времена, если люди ходили в церковь, это как раз было связано с похоронами. in the soviet times if people went to church, it was associated precisely with funerals. while orthodox traditions may have been performed in the home, the soviet policy of atheism meant that the public ceremony grew less religious over the years. in the early soviet era, the government pushed for civil ceremonies, but a priest could still perform an otpevanie. by the 30s however, as kremleva [2003: 530] observes, religious figures could no longer be invited to say the funeral mass; funerals were civil celebrations (at least publicly). nevertheless, music was still considered to be a part of the ceremony, as noted above. the music itself also conveyed soviet ideology, particularly in the case of veterans’ funerals, since music dedicated to soviet military might was played. similarly, the concept of a eulogy at the grave site was retained. however, the performers of this practice during the soviet period were from the work place, not from the church. in fact, much of the public ceremony, as noted, was handled by co-workers or the workers’ union. one informant mentioned that her husband had the responsibility of arranging funerals for his factory colleagues. thus, the funeral conveyed the soviet concept of the person’s contribution to society primarily as a worker, not in his/her other social roles. another significant issue surrounding the soviet ceremony was the role of the community. that is, the funeral truly brought to the fore the importance of the connectedness of society. pesman [127, 278] notes that this connectedness (the sense of svoi ‘one’s own’) helped people to survive in the face of a difficult social system. as boym [11, 29, 88] discusses, byt ‘daily life’ became the enemy of private life in the soviet union; it contrasted with one’s spiritual being or ‘real’ life. obtaining a single-family apartment, after living in a communal one, encouraged people to take refuge within the family group and to forge a sense of independence. because the soviet state deemphasized individualism, the family space became a place where citizens could express themselves openly. shlapentokh [25] argues that a stable family is important to a totalitarian state, which the government recognized and thereby tried to foster through its family policies and propaganda. however, because the family can become a refuge from the state and espouse a set of values that may not correspond to state ideology, it is potentially a dangerous folklorica 2007, vol. xii 118 entity. the soviet government recognized both aspects of the family and attempted to mold it as much as possible to avoid such conflicts. verdery [61ff.] discusses how the state tried to usurp family power by taking on traditional family roles. it functioned as a “father” by doling out good to its citizens like an allowance and bestowing rewards; it functioned as a “mother” by providing services to nurture and protect the family. the government also attempted to achieve this goal by controlling ritual itself. ultimately, as both verdery [66] and shlapentokh [165-166] conclude, the state could not control the family (or, i would argue, its rituals) completely, especially given the post-stalinist trend for the family to be viewed as a refuge from state/public demands. while a similar support system was surely found in village funerals in the 19th century, which necessarily involved the entire community, the soviet system reinforced the dependence of people upon one another to work the system, and not just to mourn their loss. it was not possible, for example, for the family to produce the amount of food required to feed the guests on their own. thus, neighbor women would be asked, sometimes even before the death by the deceased, to provide the bliny or the kompot. or, as one of my informants noted, it was often not possible to get the food required for a ritual meal during times of shortages; thus the system of blat ‘connections’ played an important role in ensuring that the funeral would be performed properly. people would rely on those who had the connections necessary to get meat, for example. in this way, the burden on the family was reduced, and social ties were reinforced. natalia t., a professor of english from novosibirsk, noted, в россии до 90-х годов, до коммерциализации, все держалось на родственниках и друзьях со знакомыми, абсолютно все. кто мог, договаривался с кем-то и люди помогали….если у тебя есть деньги, ты покупаешь все, но это больше, чем деньги. у большинства населения таких денег нет, и все равно у нас все держится на хороших отношениях, на хороших людях, друзьях и знакомых. before in russia, before the 90s, before commercialization, everything is supported by relatives and friends and acquaintances, absolutely everything. if a person could, he agreed with someone, and people helped. if you have money, you buy everything, but it is more than money. the majority of the population doesn’t have that kind of money and all the same, everything is supported by good relations, by good people, by friends and acquaintances. she also noted that for her mother and father’s funerals, coworkers (not just friends) were essential to the funeral ritual for support, help, and the organization of the events. contemporary urban russian funerals 119 while the funeral had been the most conservative life cycle ritual throughout the soviet period, even it has been altered over the last decade in the post-soviet period. the most prominent change has been the introduction of funeral service businesses. those who arranged funerals over the last five years typically called in one of these companies to prepare the body, order the casket, and make the necessary funeral arrangements.(2) natalia s. compared the situation in soviet times to the current day: приглашают специальных бабушек из своего двора или откуда-то из церкви. они приходят, обмывают, одевают его. сейчас, конечно, службы ритуальные есть, приглашaют их, и они все делают. they invite special older women from their courtyard or from some church; they come, wash and dress it [the body]. now of course there are ritual services; they ask them and they do everything. the service may remove the body from the home to the morgue or they may perform these tasks at home. for example, tatiana u. described the latter situation: отец умер дома. мы заказывали службу. они приезжали на дом, одели его, и так далее. и он две ночи был дома. my dad died at home. we hired a service. they came to the house, dressed him, et cetera. and he was at home for two nights. in more and more cases, the services take the body to the morgue. at this point, the person may be buried directly from the morgue or may be brought home for one night, as was done in the soviet period if someone died in the hospital. liudmila b. explained: когда он в морге, там замораживание происходит, выполняют там все процедуры и хоронят от морга. в морг приходят все провожающие. иногда машина с покойником подъезжает к дому, где он жил, гроб выносят для того, чтобы соседи могли проститься с ним. и после этого везут на кладбище. when it [the body] is in the morgue, the embalming happens there, they perform all the procedures and bury from the morgue. all the mourners come to the morgue. sometimes the car with the deceased comes to the house where he lived, they carry out the coffin so that neighbors can say farewell to him. and then they take it to the cemetery. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 120 other informants said that it is important for the deceased to spend at least one night at home, even if s/he was taken to the morgue by the funeral service or died in a hospital. marina k. reported: принято, что когда покойного забирают из морга, надо чтобы ночь он был дома. гроб ставят дома головой к окну, ногами к дверям. ставят свечки, наливают воду, на стакан с водой кладут кусочек хлеба. считается, что душа его где-то здесь витает. или водку наливают. кто как – кто воду, кто водку. it is the norm that when they collect the deceased from the morgue, it is necessary for him to be home one night. they set the coffin up at home with the head toward the window, legs toward the doors. they place candles, pour water, on the glass with the water they put a piece of bread. it is thought that the soul is hovering around somewhere. or they pour vodka. either way, some water, some vodka. however, it is clear that there has been a shift, so that death is more removed from the family circle. while there are many factors involved, (including the age of the deceased, family tradition and financial concerns) funeral businesses have become the norm, rather than the exception, over the last decade. another common change is shifting the funeral meal to outside the home. for example, aleksandr u. said that “сейчас очень редко делают дома” (now they don’t do them [pominki] at home). his wife added that while the pominki on the ninth and the fortieth days might still be at home, those on the day of the funeral are often at a stolovaia ‘cafeteria’. elena p. expressed similar sentiments: мы заказывали. у мамы было в столовой…как по деньгам. у кого сколько денег, кто как может, тот так и делает. если есть кому готовить, это же много народу приходит, надо готовить заранее. неудобно готовить, если в комнате рядом покойник лежит, и тут же готовят…лучше, чтобы этого не было. we ordered [the meal]. we had mom’s in a cafeteria...it depends on money. how much money someone has, however much one can manage, that’s what one does. if there is someone to cook, after all lots of people come; you have to cook in advance. it is uncomfortable to cook if the deceased is lying in the next room…it is better not to have it that way. while this change does make it easier for people, since they do not have to prepare a meal for large numbers of mourners, it also is a significant alteration in the attitude toward the funeral. as elena’s comment shows, money is now a primary concern in the funeral; it has become associated contemporary urban russian funerals 121 with the consumer economy. in some ways these developments make things easier for the family, as these informants have noted, but in other ways the role of finances in the funeral complicates matters, both for the individual and for the society at large. the economic situation has caused some concern among my informants, particularly older ones. with inflation and the economic crises in recent years, those who had saved for their funerals, to help their children, now think they will not be able to afford a proper burial. klara k., for example, said that she had a good savings account for that purpose, but the currency revaluation and inflation had reduced her life savings to nothing. she was concerned that this would place an undue burden on her family when she died. many people made reference to the expense surrounding a funeral (a factor also in the soviet period certainly); merridale [341] also discusses how her informants were worried about the expense of a funeral. as a result, contributing to the funeral fund has become a important role for mourners. while people always helped financially in soviet russia, more informants in the postsoviet period reported that they gave money (and not other kinds of help, such as cooking or making arrangements) to the relatives of the deceased. funerals certainly cost money in the soviet period as well. one did not have had to pay for a burial plot, but one did have to pay for the funeral meals, the coffin, give items or cash to people who prepared the body and dug the grave and so forth. however, there now seems to be a different attitude toward funeral expenses. a two-tiered system has been created in the post-soviet world. families who can pay more have an easier time, since the funeral service and the cafeterias provide support for them that families of more modest means cannot afford. as a result they still have to rely on friends and family to have a proper burial. aleksandr u. expressed his opinion of the current situation succinctly: а сейчас если платишь, то все приедут, даже целый автопарк. and now, if you pay, everyone will come, even a whole automobile lot. people can no longer rely on employers and the state to help with funeral expenses;(3) in the post-soviet world the situation has become one that emphasizes the divide between people, between those who have thrived in the consumer economy and those who have not. one change that indicates the greater social flexibility is the reintroduction of religion in the funeral rite. most of my informants folklorica 2007, vol. xii 122 mentioned post-soviet changes in connection to religion. while, as i have discussed, there were often some religious components to funerals during the soviet period, they were often hidden within the home. certainly a funeral mass at the graveside was generally not an option. nor were openly religious items buried with the corpse. however, the religious practices in the funeral were better preserved than in other life cycle rituals. since the fall of the soviet union, funerals have become more and more religious, not surprisingly, given these traditional attitudes. in fact, it does not seem to matter (unlike with baptism and marriage) whether people were themselves religious or not; the funeral is often orthodox regardless. tatiana d. described just such a situation: когда тетю хоронили, она никогда не верила в бога, ее подруги сказали, что нужно священника пригласить. и мы приглашали священника домой. это интересно, я сама в первый раз видела как отпевают, именно здесь, перед тем как похоронить. when we buried my aunt, she never believed in god, yet her friends said that we had to invite a priest. and we invited a priest to the house. it is interesting. i myself saw how they peform the funeral mass, right here, before they bury [someone]. religious funeral rites may occur, as in this case, at the home, or people might take the deceased to the church before burial. in rare instances, the priest may come to the graveside. aleksandr u. noted that the priest may say the mass at home and also go to the cemetery. nina s. described one funeral that she had recently attended that had a full religious service: у евгения павловича мы пришли домой, лежит много цветов, пять венков. в руке он держит иконку, и у изголовья горят две свечи. и лампадка горит. его повезли из дома в тот дом, который он строил собственными руками недалеко от владимира….там его снова выгрузили из машины, на которой везли, положили на табуретки и работник культа, то ли священник, то ли поп, начал заупокойную молитву. он что-то читал, потом вместе с другим мужчиной, они что-то пели. потом ходили с кадилом вокруг гроба. это было минут сорок. потом снова его в машину, в катафалк, и поехали в церковь. в церкви поставили гроб на определенное место, где отпевают покойника, опять заупокойная служба по умершему. for evgeny pavlovich we went to the home, there are many flowers, five wreaths. in his hand he is holding a small icon and at his head two candles are burning. and a lamp is lit. they took him from his house to the house which he built with his own hands near vladimir…there they unloaded him from the car in which they were transporting him, put him on stools, and a religious worker, either a catholic priest or an orthodox one, began the contemporary urban russian funerals 123 prayer for the dead. he read something, then together with another man, they sang something. then they walked around the coffin with a censer. that took about forty minutes. then once again they put him into the car, into the hearse, and we went to the church. at the church they put the coffin in the designated place where they say the mass for the dead, once again a funeral service for the dead. some aspects of the otpevanie ritual were preserved in families during the soviet period, such as sprinkling a cross of dirt on the deceased’s chest. however, now the priest openly performs all these rituals, as ekaterina z. related: батюшка читает молитвы, кадит. хор ему подпевает. потом он говорит напутственное слово обязательно. это уже зависит от того, кто умер, кто присутствует. обычно это утешительно действует на людей. я знаю, что батюшка вкладывает грамoтку такую, разрешительную молитву…там батюшка освящает землю и этой землей посыпает крестообразно. the father [here a religious title] reads, prays, censes. the choir sings in response to him. then he obligatorily says parting words. this depends on who died and who is present. usually it has a comforting effect on people. i know that the father puts in a type of note, a prayer of absolution…the father blesses earth and then sprinkles it in the shape of a cross. other religious markers that informants named include a religious text in the coffin (bible, prayers, psalter), a band with a prayer on the deceased’s forehead and a lit candle in his/her hands. liudmila b., who was born in 1932, said that the resurgence in religious ritual causes some concern for people of her age: вообще в последнее время больше следуют нашим традициям православным, больше стараются им следовать, потому что мы где-то что-то мы потеряли…сейчас стараются восстановиться. это трудно. люди нашего круга, мы тоже не все знаем, не все умеем, иногда делаем не так наверное, как это нужно сделать. хотя мы хотим сделать так, чтобы отвечало традициям, верованиям нашего народа. сами мы воcпитанные вне этих традиций. мы не воинствующие безбожники, но мы воспитаны так, что нет. мы стараемся познать, узнать…мы столько лет прожили без этого всего, и как трудно к этому прийти. in general recently they follow our orthodox traditions more; they try to observe them more, because we lost something somewhere…now they are trying to revive them. it is hard. people of our circle, we also don’t know everything, can’t do everything, sometimes probably do things not how they should be done. but we want to observe tradition, the faith of our people. we ourselves were raised outside of these traditions. we are not fervent atheists, folklorica 2007, vol. xii 124 but we were raised that there was no god. we try to know, to learn…we lived for so many years without all that, and it is so hard to come to it. given that it is important for both the repose of the soul and for the living to have a proper burial, these concerns are serious; if one performs the ritual improperly, then it fails to achieve the goals of the ritual. even if people do not know why they perform these rites, they continue to do them anyway, liuba s. explained: за много лет советской власти вытравлено как себя вести, но какие-то передаются, и в критические моменты люди старались выполнить так, как положено, как было завещано раньше. может быть это не совсем понятно, но так принято и все, так делают. over many years of soviet rule proper behavior was destroyed, but some things are passed on and in critical moments people tried to perform as they should, as was once bequeathed. maybe it is not really understood, but that is the way it is done and that’s it, they do it that way. the return of religious aspects of the ritual is both a comfort and a source of anxiety. in addition to such concerns, people also expressed dismay that the return of orthodoxy actually adds to the expense of the funeral. aleksandr k., for example, said they did not have a mass, because they did not have the money to pay for a priest. in this sense, the return of the church is connected not only to lost tradition, but also to the consumer economy. for the church to survive, of course, it must have funds, funds provided by donations for funeral masses and prayers among them. the changes in the funeral practices throughout the 20th and 21st centuries reflect the social norms of the period. while certain traditional elements were considered to be essential for the soul of the deceased and the family to be at peace after death, other messages are also conveyed by the funerary behaviors. during the soviet period, the focus on the deceased as a worker before all else was a major component of the funeral. this concept endures to some extent even now, since most postsoviet funerals involve a eulogy by coworkers. however, that public message was balanced by the private ceremonies that focused on the social networks soviet russians built to survive in their society; on the sense of interdependence that they shared in order to endure both personal grief and social trials. thus the official message was less strong than the social unity promoted by a funeral. in the post-soviet world, the importance of monetary concerns and distancing oneself from the soviet world view are both seen in the funeral. as a result, people have rejected behaviors particularly associated with the soviet union, e.g., the brass contemporary urban russian funerals 125 band at the funeral, to distance themselves from soviet ideology; nevertheless they are not yet fully comfortable with the expenses necessitated by the contemporary funeral. it remains to be seen what the long-term effects of these changes will bring and whether the promotion of social unity and interdependence endure as a major component of the post-soviet funeral ritual. notes 1 people did welcome the return of the dead, both in dreams and for pominki, particularly when they gave advice to the living, and at yearly cycle rituals [nosova 139-140; baiburin 119; chistiakov 112; kremleva 1993: 24-25; kabakova 272]. however, there was always a danger that the dead were unhappy if they returned, because the burial had not been done properly [sedakova 245; razumova 108]. if this were the case, then the living could try to appease the dead either by digging a hole at the grave and putting objects the deceased requested in 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[1880] moscow: kniga printshop. zelenin, d. k. 1991 (1927). vostochnoslavianskaia etnografiia. ( k. v. chistov, ed. k. d. tsivina, trans. moscow: nauka. interviews cited aleksandr k., engineer-inspector, dob 1945, native of archangelsk, interviewed 6/12/03 in novosibirsk. aleksandr u., engineer, dob 1948, native of kaliningrad, interviewed 6/9/04 in vladimir. ekaterina z., musician, dob 1978, native of novosibirsk, interviewed 6/2/04 in novosibirsk. elena p., kindergarten teacher, dob 1971, native of vladimir, interviewed 6/30/03 in vladimir. el'vira a., engineer, dob 1938, native of vladimir, interviewed 7/7/03 in vladimir. klara k., insurance agent, dob 1935, native of ufa, interviewed 3/14/01 in novosibirsk. lidia c., english teacher, dob 1956, native of novosibirsk, inteviewed 4/20/01 and 6/18/03 in novosibirsk. liuba s., art teacher, dob 1954, native of petrovskii zavod, interviewed 5/11/01 and 6/25/03 in novosibirsk. liudmila b., teacher, dob 1932, native of kovrov, interviewed 7/10/03 in vladimir. marina k., secretary, dob 1974, native of novosibirsk, interviewed 4/21/01 and 6/11/03 in novosibirsk. natalia s., engineer, dob 1954, native of vladimir, interviewed 6/9/04 in vladimir. natalia t., university professor, dob 1954, native of novosibirsk, interviewed 5/28/01 and 6/23/03 in novosibirsk. nina s., engineer, dob 1930, native of vladimir, interviewed 7/10/03 in vladimir. olga s., graduate student (statistics), dob 1976, native of folklorica 2007, vol. xii 128 voronezh, interviewed 7/14/04 in lexington, ky. tatiana d., private school teacher, dob 1953, native of vladimir, interviewed 6/30/97 and 6/2/03 in vladimir. tatiana u., accountant, dob 1948, native of vladivostok, interviewed 6/9/04 in vladimir. microsoft word folk2006[3] sheryl format3.doc 120 robert elsie and janice mathie-heck, eds. and trans. songs of the frontier warriors, këngë kreshnikësh. wauconda, il.: bolchazycarducci publishers, 2004. glossary. sources. bibliography. xviii + 414 pp. $41.00. isbn 0-86516-412-6. robert elsie offers the reader “a selection of songs from the bestknown cycle of albanian epic verse.” he adds: “as the product of a little-known culture and a difficult, rarely studied language, the albanian epic has tended to remain in the shadow of bosnian epic, with which it has undeniable affinities. this translation may thus be regarded as an initial attempt to rectify the imbalance and to give scholars and the reading public in general an opportunity to delve into the exotic world of the northern albanian tribes” (xi). this volume does just that. noting that the collecting and publishing of muslim traditional songs in bosnia and herzegovina was facilitated by austria’s occupation of those territories in 1878, elsie rightfully points out that conditions under which muslim and roman catholic clans lived in north albania in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, and under enver hoxha between 1944 and 1985, made it all but impossible for serious scholars in albania – to say nothing of kosova in the 1990s – to pay much attention to epic songs in the highlands which indeed seemed to echo those of their muslim slav neighbors. he identifies early albanian scholars and poets, particularly the franciscans who were trained in bosnia and austria, who collected songs in the north albanian highlands of the muslim heroes from utbina, an ottoman enclave on the border of the seven kingdoms (christian europe). the earliest among them was killed by a bosnian serb, the others jailed or executed by a communist regime in tirana dominated by southerners, or tosks. northerners (gegs) in kosova fared no better under serbian military occupation following two world wars and under milosevic. it was in 1937 that the final, 15,613-line version of father gjergj fishta’s literary epic lahuta e malcis (the highland lute) was published. its cantos glorified defenders of clan honor after the austrian border reached north albanian territories. in the same year, edited songs of the heroes of utbina were published in tirana in volume two of the series visaret e kombit (treasures of the nation). in the mid 1930s the homeric scholar milman parry of harvard university recorded on aluminum discs songs of the ottoman borderlands from bilingual albanian singers in novi pazar, and in 1937 his former graduate assistant folklorica 2006, vol. xi reviews 121 albert lord collected dictated epics of the frontier warriors from singers in the north albanian highlands. efforts to collect and publish albanian oral traditional epics were made in kosova and the neighboring highlands under increasingly adverse conditions in the 1980s and 1990s. despite current hardships, scholars at the albanological institute in prishtina continue at the present time to dedicate themselves to that project. elsie describes the connection between bosnian and north albanian songs that revolve around the brothers mujo and halili and their constant companions, the thirty agas, as follows: “it is understandable… that they have a common origin and, in essence, reflect a common culture. after transmission, however, the albanian epic evolved in a solely albanian milieu and took on many purely albanian characteristics, values, extralinguistic forms of expression, and it is this that makes it fascinating. though the toponyms remained, the background conflict in the narrative shifted from warfare between muslims and the christians to warfare between the albanians and shkjas, that is, the slavs” (xvii). not surprisingly, i might add, the vaguely recollected northern bosnianhungarian frontier, along which albanians, including singers, had indeed fought, was all but replaced in the songs by a much closer, and equally hostile borderland off the dalmatian-montenegrin coast, one that was home to a host of semi-human and animal mythological creatures found in albanian narrative songs and magical tales. the excellent reworking by the translators of irregular octosyllabic and decasyllabic lines into “more standard verse patterns and more common metres” (xvii) definitely succeeds in drawing the reader into the often fantastic world of traditional epics still being recreated and recorded in the highlands of north albania. the songs selected, which range in length between eighty and 674 lines, begin with young mujo’s drinking the milk of zanas, or mountain nymphs, never again to be bullied by playmates, and follow his later exploits and those of his younger brother halili as they assemble hunting and raiding parties, cross into enemy territory, duel and defeat their enemies, steal christian brides, or recover their own from them. the cycle presented ends with an account of mujo’s death in the mountains and his resurrection by zanas seven years later even as a baloz (a sea serpent) is attempting to break into his coffin. the sea serpent is slain by halili, who then helps mujo climb out of his grave. the brothers return to utbina to resume their legendary exploits along the frontier. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 122 from the first formulaic, or traditional opening invocation (lum e lum për t’lumin zot/nu’ jem’ kanë e zoti na ka dhanë! “blessed we are, thanks to the almighty!/for nothing we were until god did create us.”) and sometimes elaborated closing invocations (njishtu thonë se na atje kurr s’jem’ kanë./njishtu thonë se ka kanë motit/ndimën paçim na prej zotit! (so we are told, for we could not be present,/ so we are told, for much time has gone by now./ and so may the grace of our god be upon us). or, se atje un nuk jam kenë,/ si kam ndie e si m’kanë thanë;/ se kto janë prralla prej motit,/ ndimen paçim na prej zotit (although myself i was not present,/ so i heard it, so they told me,/ very ancient stories these are,/may the grace of god be with us!)) elsie and mathie-heck draw the reader into the still active oral traditional world of the north albanian highlands, the rhythm of their lines indeed matched by the fidelity shown the original prralla. elsie provides a glossary of epithets, personal and place names, and figures in albanian mythology. he lists the narrators and published sources of the songs and adds a selected bibliography of albanian, south slavic, and balkan epic verse, and of heroic epic verse in general (367414). his scholarly studies and translation efforts continue to widen the audience of albanian literary poets and, in this remarkable volume, north albania’s singers of oral traditional tales. john kolsti the university of texas microsoft word folklorica_2011g.doc 191 reviews folklorica 2011, vol. xvi христофорова, ольга. колдуны и жертвы: антропология колдовства в современной россии [khristoforova, ol’ga. sorcerers and victims: the anthropology of sorcery in contemporary russia] (in russian). moscow: обьединенное гуманитарное издательство; российский государственный гуманитарный университет, 2010. 432 pp. bibliography. black/white photographs. hard cover. isbn 978-594282-617-8. because she is writing on the sensitive topic of contemporary mythological thinking, the author starts with the disclaimer that she does not believe in sorcery, omens, the evil eye, or curses. while she herself may not believe, the author tries to stay unbiased towards her informants and to accept at face value the beliefs of the people whose lives revolve around magical phenomena. khristoforova’s monograph is based on her extensive fieldwork conducted between 1998 and 2009 and her informants are mainly rural russians from the upper kama, kaluga, kirov, and moscow regions, as well as from the city of moscow. she researches beliefs in sorcery/witchcraft as a socio-cultural phenomenon and, in her book, she presents the reader with an enormous number of narratives about sglaz [the evil eye, or unintentional harming] and porcha [intentional harming through magic]. in the first chapter, aнтропология и колдовство [anthropology and witchcraft], the author discusses approaches to studying witchcraft/ sorcery in russian and world scholarship. she pays special attention to the six main models for interpreting sorcery: as a way to explain misfortune; as a social institution; as a political instrument; as a way to release negative emotions; as a phenomenon immanent to peasant societies; and as a way of thinking that is prevalent in developing countries. we learn that, while soviet era folklore scholarship ignored the topic, witchcraft and sorcery were extensively researched both before and after the soviet period. furthermore, the phenomenon was examined from a variety of perspectives. the second chapter, kолдовство, несчастья и репутация [sorcery, misfortunes, and reputation] provides explanatory models used by tradition bearers in russian villages. the explanations include fate, god’s punishment, or the revenge of a sorcerer. these are all used interchangeably, yet the last of these dominates the narratives of religious people and is their preferred way of explaining mundane misfortunes. they consider themselves victims of sorcerers and it is they who shape the sorcery discourse through rumors and the dissemination of 192 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi suspicions and fears. yet people who acquire a reputation as sorcerers not only deny being such, they actually position themselves as victims of other people’s magical powers. one can get a reputation as a sorcerer as the result of interpersonal conflicts and also on the basis of some character traits, certain physical qualities (either disability or perfect health), certain professions like being a stovemaker, or anything else that makes a person different from others. the third chapter, власть, гендер и агрессия [power, gender, and aggression] analyzes the power ascribed to sorcerers. it also examines pairs of oppositions such as socially marginal vs. socially powerful figures and males vs. females. all of these can become a sufficient reason for demonizing a person and demonstrating oppressed aggression against her/him. khristoforova presents behavior strategies which villagers use to “weaken” or even “neutralize” the power of a suspected sorcerer. while physical aggression against such a person is prohibited, other types of aggression are accepted and even encouraged. the fourth chapter, “знать” и “делать” [to “know” and to “do”] is a discussion of how knowledge, according to informants, is material in nature. khristoforova analyzes two russian verbs that acquire special, negative meanings within the sorcery discourse and also looks at their synonyms. the one who knows is the one who does evil, while ladit’ (to fix) is used for actions that counteract the harm that was done. the fifth chapter, “свои” и “чужие” [“one's own people” and “strangers”] reveals categories of people that are most likely to be accused of being sorcerers. people whose ethnicity, place of birth or place of residence, and religion differ from those of their fellows are excluded from svoi and are suspected of harmful magic. the same attitude applied to wanderers, beggars, and members of certain professions. the line between svoi and chuzhie is extremely flexible, however. the sixth chapter, kолдовство и воровство [witchcraft and thievery] describes how sorcerers – and they are always thieves in people’s eyes – are said to use witchcraft to steal. it also discusses how victims of sorcery themselves use magical aids to identify and punish the perpetrators of thievery. the author presents numerous examples of the latter in everyday situations. in chapter seven, бред колдовства: фольклор или психопатология? [the sorcery delirium: folklore or psychopathology?] khristoforova tries to differentiate the healthy from the pathological in terms of people’s perception of reality and their belief in sorcery/ 193 reviews folklorica 2011, vol. xvi witchcraft. the chapter presents two case studies of elderly villagers who state that their psychosomatic symptoms are proof of the sorcery used against them, yet both seem to mix up the real and the imagined in their accounts. chapter eight, tрадиционные модели в городской культуре [traditional models within urban culture] examines how the village way of thinking about sorcery adapts well to urban settings. khristoforova states that, although urban sorcery beliefs have acquired new elements such as new characters and motifs, modern terminology, the reduction of traditional ideas about sorcerers, and the dispersion of the sorcery discourse in multiple social contexts, city dwellers still use traditional behavior strategies in situations of danger and uncertainty. khristoforova’s monograph is an in-depth examination of the sorcery/witchcraft phenomenon in contemporary russia as seen through the eyes of the culture bearers themselves. the author does a good job of comparing rural and urban settings. she presents the psychological mechanisms behind sorcery beliefs and behind the folkloric image of a sorcerer. she also pays close attention to linguistic nuances. the author uses “anthropology” in her title, although her research is heavily folkloric and psychological. in the seventh chapter it even veers toward psychiatry. yet this chapter seems to be the most debatable: it is unclear if the mental health of the informants was generally impaired or otherwise normal elders became disturbed only when speaking on the topic of sorcery. the monograph will be exciting and useful reading for folklorists, ethnologists, linguists, as well as for the wider audience interested in cultural studies and contemporary russia. svitlana kukharenko 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/hrv (za stvaranje adobe pdf dokumenata najpogodnijih za visokokvalitetni ispis prije tiskanja koristite ove postavke. stvoreni pdf dokumenti mogu se otvoriti acrobat i adobe reader 5.0 i kasnijim verzijama.) /hun 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can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader 5.0 and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 untitled reviews 203 белова, о. в. этнокультурные стереотипы в славянской народной традиции. [belova, o.v. ethnocultural stereotypes in the slavic folk tradition]. moscow: indrik, 2005. 287 pp. isbn 5-85759-343-3 ethnic stereotypes in the language and culture have been investigated by numerous scholars, yet this theme remains fascinating for researchers due to the diversity of local traditions, each forming a unique constellation of perceptions of and attitudes to the other. the universal semantic opposition of “my own people—the other” has a multitude of manifestations in different situations and contexts and research into its lingua-cultural antecedents and functional peculiarities is relevant for various disciplines in humanities and social sciences. this deeply researched, well-structured and engagingly written monograph is a result of the author’s long-term study of slavic folk attitudes to members of other ethnicities and faiths. in a short but incisive introduction, belova points out that every ethnicity reflects about the collective self and seeks to determine its place in history and culture. to create such a “self-portrait” people do not only rely on written sources and historical facts, but also on century-long traditions and beliefs. the image of the other, be it a neighbor, an alien, or an adherent of a different creed contributes to the understanding of the self, and specific features and uniqueness of one’s own ethnic group. taking into account the interdisciplinary interest in ethnocultural stereotypes, the author built her study relying on theoretical sources in folkloristics, linguistics, psychology, and history. the empirical part of the project is based on a systematic analysis of her own and her colleagues’ extensive fieldwork in polesie, podolia, carpathians, and western byelorussia, as well as folkloric and ethnographic investigations of these areas conducted in the late 19th early 20th centuries. moreover, she refers to the traditional folklore of southern, western and eastern slavs to demonstrate the universals of folklore themes, images and concepts. the choice of the regions whose folklore forms the core of material scrutinized in the book is not accidental: while boasting rich culture that still preserves many archaic elements, each of these regions borders on the western world and has created its own “myth of europe.” the others that appear on the pages of this book are those with whom the slavs have had close contacts for centuries, such as jews, gypsies, tatars, turks, germans, etc., and also those with whom they had only brief historical encounters, for example, the swedes and the french. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 204 in analyzing a vast body of material belova makes use of a complex methodology, combining comparative-historic and ethnolinguistic approaches. although the primary attention in the monograph is given to the interaction between the slavs and the jews, the study goes beyond a binary opposition of cultures, but creates a general slavic typology of the image of the other, which includes folk ethnology (chapter 1), folk interpretation of religion and faith (chapter 2), religious rituals (chapter 3), holidays and rites (chapter 4), and demonic motifs in the perception of the other (chapter 5). the special merit of the resulting portrait is a combination of descriptions and value judgments, mythologized concepts and subtle observations, and above all the dialectics of learning about the self through learning about others. throughout the book the author discloses the ambivalence of the mythical image of the other which is constantly evolving between the two poles, that of alienation and tolerance. particularly strong this theme emerges in the “mythology of neighborhood” based on stories about jews. although today the areas where fieldwork was conducted have become virtually monoethnic (first, the holocaust and later mass immigration to israel wiped out the jewish presence from the shtetl), memories about the culture of the lost neighbors are still strong. side by side with stories that imply common ancestry of jews and pigs, and attempts to explain nazi persecution of jews as a punishment for torturing and crucifying jesus, there are narratives praising jews as skillful and hardworking people. as a confirmation of a controversial attitude to the jews belova analyzes the “myth of the lost abundance”, recorded in numerous narratives showing compassion for the tragic fate of the european jews in the 20th century and linking the deterioration of living standards in the area to the absence of jews. in these and other analyses belova masterfully shows how traditional plots intermingle with folk interpretation of history, be it tartar incursions, the napoleonic war, or more recent events, such as the holocaust or stalin’s purges. looking into the folk ethnology of the slavs belova presents the opposition of “my own people” vs. “the other” on all levels, from the perception of space to mythologized physical characteristics, such as body size, type and color of hair, and specific body smells. this opposition is also manifested in numerous aspects of everyday life, such as food and peculiarities of the household, traditional occupations, patterns of behavior, and even in “typical” diseases. step by step belova shows that the underlying principle of “popular ethnology” is ethnocentricity. whether attempting to explain the origin of ethnicities in reviews 205 contact, or deliberating on their way of life, slavic legends and folk narratives concentrate on their difference from what is accepted to be the norm. the abnormalities are sometimes conceptualized as common ancestry with animals or as relatedness to demons. with great subtlety the author treats the concepts of “alien” faith, beliefs and rituals in the traditional slavic culture. legends, novellas and narratives of our contemporaries all confirm that every folk group postulates the priority of its own religion over religions of the neighbors. belonging to the same faith is inherently connected to the perception of ethnicity, and so tribesmen professing another faith are marginalized. numerous examples quoted in the text prove that although convinced that their faith is the only “correct” one, peasants had only a vague impression of the religions of their neighbors and they relied on a minimal number of attributes to recognize an adherent of a different creed. as a result jews, tatars and turks were identified on the basis of dietary rules, and the prohibition to eat pork was viewed in some areas as the main principle of judaism and islam. the “jewish” faith was seen as archetypically alien and even baptists and adventists were classified as jews for having sacral symbols different from those of the slavs. belova shows that being different is conceptualized as jewishness, so the jew is a generic other having little to do with judaism. excessive generalization and crude categorization of others typical of ethnocentricity is visible in the folk perception of their religions. the chapter devoted to religion contains rich material on the slavic folk legends about miracles and the “jewish messiah.” miracles are represented in folk paraphrases of the holy scripture and in legends about the origin of religious rites, practices and symbols. besides, they are the key element in stories about conversion to christianity. messianic motifs appear not only in such “serious” genres of folklore prose as etiological and eschatological legends but also in humorous narratives which are akin to trickster stories. they do not only serve to expose the jewish messiah as the antichrist, but also to let the slavic protagonist outsmart the jewish “opponent” and prove the advantages of his own faith. this folk version of the inter-confessional dialogue emerges as a counterpart of the polemic treatises about the true and false messiahs and is based on the stereotypical image of the demonized other. analysis of the folklore interpreting the faith and rituals of the other would be incomplete without dissecting the etiology and evolution of the slavic folk versions of the blood libel. born out of fear and insecurity in the face of poorly understood practices and customs, this mythologized folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 206 plot became an indispensable part of the portrait demonizing jew, and it is an essential element of the prejudiced image of the other as a whole. the most striking feature of the myth, aptly shown in the book, is the ingenuity used by storytellers in modernizing the means of acquiring blood for evil purposes. while the deep structure of the narrative remains stable overtime, its details keep changing, thus proving once more that state-of-the-art technologies entering everyday life of our contemporaries coexist with the mythologized worldview of the lay people. in the sections of the book devoted to the perception of rituals and holidays of the neighbors, belova consistently shows the combination of alienation and tolerance in the attitude to the other. fearing the evil nature of foreign rites, peasants are curious about them and are not averse to benefiting from their “magic power”. so besides material testifying to the interference with the rites of the other, the book provides interesting examples of slavic culture integrating into them. throughout the book belova makes subtle observations about linguistic aspects of the folklore texts. lexico-semantic patterns constituting the image of the other are essential components of the slavic linguistic map of the world. while linguo-cultural scripts of the concepts “friendship”, “destiny”, “truth”, and “soul” are thoroughly developed, the scripts “my own people” – “the other” have remained on the periphery. linguo-cultural configurations of otherness marked as ambivalent, abnormal and dehumanized, as well as analysis of instrumental and symbolic approaches of the slavs to the language of their neighbors presented in the book fill a serious gap in the scholarship. globalization has paved the way for an increasing openness of the borders, and consequently, for the growth of migrations. on the other hand, in many cases it results in isolation of some ethnic and religious groups, and triggers ethnic conflicts, discourse about transfer of some ethnic groups and even local wars. mythologems of the other are widespread not only in the everyday talk of the lay people but are also used by politicians and journalists to manipulate public opinion and at times penetrate into the professional discourse of sociologists, psychologists, and educators. the knowledge of the structural peculiarities of these mythologems investigated and brought to light by belova makes them recognizable in any context. this knowledge is essential for the neutralization of xenophobia when it masks as freedom of speech or professional terminology. given the wealth of subjects and names appearing in the text, the monograph would be more reader-friendly if it were supplied with reviews 207 subject and name indices. this criticism notwithstanding, olga belova’s book will find interested audiences among experts in various fields of humanities and social sciences. maria yelenevskaya technion-israel institute of technology larisa fialkova university of haifa haifa israel folklorica 2008, vol. xiii microsoft word folk2006[3] sheryl format3.doc 28 from "walled-up wife" to a "room of one's own:" gender and migration among macedonians in germany lidija stojanović institute of folklore “marko cepenkov,” skopje, macedonia it is the transfiguring light that distinguishes one experience from another, happening from experience; it is life itself before thought has shaped it. the "feminine" is universal and yet transitory, and it can be expressed only by brittle halfphrases, symbols, poetry. virginia woolf introduction when people undertake that enormous and decisive step in their lives that constitutes migration, what happens to the habitus?(1) for bourdieu, habitus indicates a cultural structure existing in the body and mind of each individual. the individual develops a system of dispositions in response to the objective conditions he/she encounters. this system comprises lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought and action. crucially, habitus is not a static or mechanical status quo, but is established through continuous changes causing transformations to the habitus in the course of a lifetime. the habitus is modifying and transformational within the borders of its own structure. in the context of habitus, then, what happens to gender when people move to another country, that is to say, in what manner do they construct or reconstruct traditional gender relations in the process of international migration, and how does gender shape and reshape migration? the small-scale piece of fieldwork that is discussed below will focus on one aspect of the complex investigation of migration: the relationship between migration, space and gender. it is based on a threemonth period of fieldwork conducted in hamburg in 2003, in which the method of qualitative narrative interview was employed, one in which the informant is left to interpret his/her own life story with as little interruption and intervention as possible, in order to conceive and analyze the internal rules between experience and narration. it was followed by participant observation in households, families, and religious celebrations in the macedonian church of st. georgi kratovski. thirtyeight qualitative interviews were recorded,(2) and ten records made of folklorica 2006, vol. xi from "walled-up wife" to a "room of one's own 29 participant observation of various events and celebrations, such as religious festivals in church or people’s homes, birthday parties, picnics, two concerts in a musikhochschule and a number of unofficial personal visits. in order to place my data in context and analyze it, i will first consider the nature of macedonian emigration to germany. i shall then turn to a discussion of the defining characteristics of my field of research, and consideration of the relationship between migration and gender in the light of bourdieu's theory of habitus. the periodization and categorization of macedonian migration to germany my research covers a certain period and specific categories of migrant. the period begins in the late 1960’s and goes up to the present day. the first macedonian migrants in germany were organized groups of workers who left their homeland (then the sfr of yugoslavia) following an intergovernmental agreement. their motives for emigrating may be regarded as traditional: they went abroad to seek employment. the process of emigration is still continuing, though it now affects those who are part of what is often termed the brain-drain. the following list reflects the categories and timescale of macedonian migration to the german industrial city of hamburg. it may usefully serve as a matrix for considering the data and for determining inter-gender relations, both as far as the individual and the group, collective habitus is concerned. • gastarbeitergruppe (groups of guest workers) who arrived 19691973. • nurses, who arrived in hamburg in 1990 and 1991 (and who were employed at the universitätsklinikum in eppendorf). • asylum seekers, who came to germany during the balkan crisis of 1991-1994 • the highly educated, a category of migrants who comprise the brain-drain, and are characteristic of the decade from 1993-2003. these are graduates who come to undertake further study at one of the three local universities, the technische universität hamburg, the musikhochschule in hamburg and the fakultät für slawistik. here they study for an ma or phd in science and then use these higher educational qualifications to remain and make a life in hamburg. two further categories of interviewees should be mentioned: those who have contracted cross-cultural marriages, marrying germans. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 30 second generation migrants, a group of crucial importance in the study of changing gender relations. how does gender shape and reshape migration for the various categories of migrants? these last two groups are particularly interesting. spouses from cross-cultural marriages evinced a number of fascinating differences in their world view in comparison with couples where both were macedonian. such differences are particularly interesting not only as far as research into gender relations is concerned, but generally for the study of intercultural communication and especially of cultural misunderstandings. the other group, second-, or in some cases thirdgeneration migrants, reveal most clearly the changes in the traditional macedonian collective habitus. more precisely, this refers to children who were born, brought up and educated in hamburg. in their case, the process of upbringing or formation (bildung), both within the family and in the wider social arena, is of particular interest. the formation process must take into account “social controls,” the rules imposed by the social environment on one hand and the cultural origin of the parents on the other. this is especially noticeable with working-class interviewees and their children, where the gap between them in the way they conceptualize gender and inter-gender relations is striking. it is interesting to observe the way in which certain family habits are transformed, or are in the process of transformation, and new structures and dispositions of habitus are incorporated as a result of education. it is clear from my informants that conventional notions about the differences in upbringing according to the sex of the child are, consciously or unconsciously, being reinforced in the home in various ways. they directly reflect the age-old tradition of the division of labor according to sex. it is generally recognized that in earlier times, or among families originating from a rural environment, the division of labor according to these criteria was socially justified given the typical household economy and even necessary for survival. very many of my informants saw the traditional upbringing of male children as inculcating values and characteristics such as orientation towards the outer world, initiative, activity, decisiveness, independence and dominance, while the traditional upbringing of girls represents the opposite: orientation towards the inner world, passivity, obedience, dependence, need for protection and so on.(3) however, since secondor third-generation migrants undertake daily activities such as learning to play the piano, taking ballet lessons, from "walled-up wife" to a "room of one's own 31 learning foreign languages or participating in sport (football, tennis, judo, fitness), as well as attending elementary school, opportunities for traditional divisions to be broken down are considerable. this phenomenon is connected with the process of “formation,” understood in the broadest sense, as in the german bildung. formation in this sense refers not only to a given organization (such as the school), but also implies the broad processes through which "worldand selfreference points become qualitatively changed." in the context of modern life, therefore, formation must be understood as a "search" fuelled by a "play with uncertainties" [marotzki 1990: 152, 154; cf. bohnsack and nohl, 2005: 374]. initially, in discussing the relationship between migration, space and gender, it is necessary to pay close attention to periodization. more specifically, in the 1960's and 1970's more than 95% of macedonian migrants who were the main players in the emigration process were male. they then brought their wives over from macedonia and built family life and households in germany. by contrast, the last fifteen years have witnessed a great change in the traditional patriarchal paradigm of gender relations, since this was when the first organized group of nurses arrived. the resulting role reversal was experienced as a subversion of traditional balkan masculinity, or even as a subversion of traditional power relations. these young women now became the main players. apart from the stimulus of a new career, they experienced the new space as an obligation upon themselves to take charge of family life and the domestic finances. they began by bringing their husbands over from macedonia. the husbands were then forced into being at the receiving end of the wife’s emancipation, though, as we shall see, this was not a permanent reversal. the situation was connected with the changed political situation in germany in the 1990's, which unfortunately coincided with the impossibility of finding any employment in the first five years of residence. instead they became house-husbands, responsible for the housework and children, while their wives went out to work. this period dealt a painful and crushing blow to their patriarchal vanity, though the pain may be expressed in various ways: with humor or anger, explicitly or implicitly. an analogous situation arises with another group, the “boys from macedonia,” that is to say, those young men who marry secondgeneration working-class female migrants. they too are forced into taking on the traditional female caring role. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 32 on the other hand, highly educated and qualified migrants (part of the brain drain) do not undergo any essential qualitative change in their gender relations after leaving their homeland. this is quite understandable, given that education, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, is the key factor in the creation of new cultural horizons, allowing traditional patriarchy to become history. thus the time taken for such people to adapt to a new environment and accept a foreign culture is shorter, and comparison between the two countries here functions as two cultural grammars. in this context, i would like to discuss the significance of the brain-drain. macedonian economists and sociologists mistakenly view the brain-drain as a matter of concern, but i would suggest that the process itself brings considerable social benefits. attention should be drawn instead to the real problems that induce people to go abroad. the major argument in favor of the emigration of local expertise is well known: the expectation that sooner or later migrants will repay their homeland through knowledge transfer, by bringing in capital and facilitating business relations. my fieldwork data suggests, however, that there is another important advantage of the brain drain. when graduates contemplate the kind of reward they will get in macedonia for their efforts in getting a degree, they inevitably consider going abroad. despite their high grades and the receipt of a pen so generously awarded to the best students in the electro-engineering faculty at the university of sts cyril and methodius in skopje, my informants could only get work selling computers and training keyboard operators in the early 1990's, a time when computer technology was beginning to develop in macedonia.(4) it was abundantly clear that the only thing that high grades did for these young professionals was open the door to graduate study in hamburg. this situation therefore encourages them to invest even more energy on their educational qualifications. the result can be summarized as leaving one’s homeland in the form of a broken habitus, where the basic concordance between habitus and field has been abolished. the habitus tends to create the field in the form of an important meaningful world based on values, in which the investment of energy is worthwhile. the field structures the habitus, and the habitus represents a product of that field. this means that discordance between the two may lead to the habitus being broken [bourdieu 1996:161]. as a consequence, it can be argued that macedonian society benefits from the emigration of the chronically unemployed. we can speak bluntly. the long-term unemployed are, de facto, a burden on society. that many smart and hardworking people in from "walled-up wife" to a "room of one's own 33 macedonia are, through no fault of their own, part of that burden reveals the dysfunction of that society, but does not change the painful truth that they are a burden. thus, the resignation these young educated people with potential feel towards a homeland that allowed them to leave it as a broken habitus is fully justified. nevertheless, each individual life trajectory, out of the multitude of life stories i recorded, represents nothing more than a variation in a collective habitus: since the history of the individual is not anything other than a certain specification of the collective history of its group or class, each individual system of dispositions may be seen as a structural variant of all the other group or class habituses, expressing the difference between trajectories and positions inside or outside the class. the “personal” style, the particular stamp marking all the products of the same habitus, whether practices or works, is never more than a deviation in relation to the style of a period or class so that it relates back to the common style not only by its conformity like phidias, who, according to hegel, had no "manner" but also by the difference which makes the whole "manner" (bourdieu 1999a:86). how the space of life-styles reveals the two symbolisms of the “walledup wife” and “a room of one’s own” the matrix of inter-gender relations in a new environment corresponds remarkably to two contrasting metaphors ranging from the "walled-up wife," a balkan metaphor for marriage, to a "room of one's own" at the other extreme. the image of the walled-up wife comes from that most famous of balkan folk ballads, “the ballad of the walled-upwife.” the plot tells of a group of men who seek to construct a castle, monastery or bridge. through supernatural means, whatever is constructed by day is undone at night. a dream revelation or some other extraordinary means of communication informs the would-be builders that the only way to break the negative magic spell is to sacrifice the first woman to come to the building site the next day. when the chief architect's own young wife arrives, she is duly immured [dundes 1995:39]. “a room of one’s own” refers to an essay by virginia woolf, to which i would like to give a symbolic dimension.(5) for woolf a room of one's own offered a place where she could write. a natural symbol of detachment and calm, it stands as well for the material minimum of freedom, means and opportunity essential not only to a writer, but to women as a whole [woolf 1959; maumdar and mclaurin 1975: 255-56]. woolf’s “sign” was thus conceived and felt as a rebellion against male-dominated society, and heralded a new cultural horizon. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 34 not in all cases, but still in a significant percentage of working-class families and to a certain degree among high-school graduates, the traditional macedonian patriarchal family is alive and well, judging by the traditional upbringing of boys and girls, the position of the wife in the same family, the inward orientation of women and girls, with passivity, obedience, subordinate position and reticence seen as virtues, and the boys brought up to be privileged, extrovert and so on. at this point i would like to cite a case that clearly reveals the discrepancy between habitus (in the form of a tender-hearted traditional mother fearful for her daughter, who has become an underground train driver), and field (in this case, germany as a country that imposes quite different existential and social parameters). the story, it should be noted, is not concerned with emotional reciprocity. on the contrary, the daughter, raised and educated in germany, is not fearful or inhibited about public space and the experience that it offers.(6) it is only the mother who is upset. леле, тој прв работен ден на клаудија како “zugfahrer”…и баш тој ден многу врнеше, м`лскаше, и јас цела ноќ не сум спала. цели перници мокри ми беа. много сум се тресела. а георги воопшто и не знаеше дека клаудија тој ден почнуваше со работа и дека треба да вози. е па не мора се мажот да знае!!! како викаат мажите: “не треба се жената да знае, така и мажот има некои работи што не мора да ги знае.” така ли е? (сите присутни се смеат). (oh, that first day when claudia started working as a train driver. i didn't sleep all night. my pillows were wet with tears and worrying about how she was going to manage driving all day round hamburg. and just imagine; the whole day the weather was bad; there was thunder and lightning, and i couldn't sleep. i was afraid and trembled for claudia. and do you know, gjoko (her husband) didn't even know that she was going to start her job that day. well, men usually say "women don't need to know everything," so i guess there are things men don't need to know. isn't that right?” (everybody laughs)).(7) here i should mention another instance involving first-generation working-class migrants originally from a rural area in macedonia. after many years the couple has a son, who is the fourth child in the family. after his birth the family starts celebrating his name day, mitrovden (the feast of st dmitri, nov 7th) as the main religious festival in the family. every year they mark the day in great style (see front cover).(8) the paradigm of traditional patriarchal order can be observed functioning in this family in a number of ways, including what has been called the centrifugal and centripetal orientation in interviews, here in relation to the family photo collection. while the husband presented photos of their summer holidays in france, spain and portugal, or the construction of from "walled-up wife" to a "room of one's own 35 the first macedonian church in malmǿ in sweden, and experiences from the macedonian club and the macedonian church in hamburg all typically male activities connected with the public sphere -, his wife chose photos connected with the typically female sphere, centered round the space of the home: family and religious customs, birthday parties and certain new german customs and rituals such as: abc schütze (a bag of candies given to children on their first day at school), nicolausfest (the feast of st nicholas, dec. 6th), german christmas and especially weihnachtmann (father christmas). all these are primarily focused on child rearing. this type of mental disposition was evident in almost all the working-class migrants interviewed.(9) another example in the same category further emphasizes the point: “сосем е нормално жената да чисти, да готви и да се грижи за децата, затоа што мажот е тој што треба да заработува за семејството и за дома!” (it is quite normal for the wife to have to clean the house, cook and raise the children, because the husband has to earn enough money for the family and the household).(10) from the ethnological point of view, what we have here is a manifestation of the opposition between a centrifugal, male orientation and a centripetal, female one, and as such, it is typical of traditional balkan society, where this is seen as the correct way to organize domestic space. this phenomenon is doubtless also the basis of the relationship of each of the sexes to their "psyche,” that is, as bourdieu has argued, to their bodies and more precisely to their sexuality [bourdieu 1999a: 92]. on the other side of the scale of values is virginia woolf's model, which in my data is reflected in a number of individual life stories in which balkan masculinity is criticized. we should now return to the first type of collective habitus, whose paradigm is the walled-up wife. the poet goethe was appalled by what he considered the heathen barbarity of the ballad [dundes 1995: 40], but later scholars have opened it up to a great variety of interpretations. one of the most interesting and insightful decodes the prison as a metaphor for married life, suggesting that the walling-up may express "the inevitability of a woman's fate: to be transformed into the foundations of a new construction, a new world, a new family that is not always very pleasant" [parpulova 1984: 433]. by entering marriage, the woman is figuratively immured. she is kept behind walls to protect her virtue and to keep her confined. furthermore, the fact that the man is willing to sacrifice his wife in order to build a bigger and better castle or bridge reflects the second-class status of women in such societies. in that male chauvinist world, the women's role is to stay protected from the outside folklorica 2006, vol. xi 36 world and to concentrate upon nurturing her infants (who should preferably be sons)! the ideal wife nurtures males, whether by bringing food to her husband as he works on a construction site or by breastfeeding her newborn son [dundes 1995: 48]. thus the feminist reading cogently argues that from india to the balkans the plot is a death-laden metaphor for a marriage, in which the wife is forced to sacrifice her freedom of movement because of the demands of her husband and his family. what might this suggest in terms of the balkan collective habitus, conceived metaphorically through the symbolism of being "walled up"? here there is of course another possible perspective, that of the builder. it is obviously a matter of opinion whose story the ballad tells: the woman’s tragic fate or the widower’s tragic grief. we have discussed the feminine perspective. seen from the builder's point of view, the metaphor can be called in dundes' phrase, "a male edifice complex" [1995: 50]. in terms of my informants, men may try to express their masculinity by denying any dependence on women, but traditional ideology collapses when their wives (the young nurses we have already mentioned) take charge of family life and the household finances in the first five years of migration, while their husbands sit at home and learn german off the television. one should also bear in mind the ambiguity of the role of a "nurse." both in her profession and her family her obligation is to care for others, especially her husband (the builder in a traditional male-dominated world). the work of the nurse, therefore, is paradoxically a reflection of the role of the ideal wife, whose highest virtue is to nurture the males in the family. for this category of husband it is unpleasant to acquire the status of a "duldung,” a kept man, and from a gender perspective it is a painful blow to the male ego. however, after this initial period, all being well, integration into the new society in accordance with his personal capabilities and skills then follows. very often our migrants in this category, however, get a job requiring lower qualifications than the one they had at home. this situation may well trigger the kind of painful guilt feelings that are traditional in women. as one nurse pointed out, despite her incredible good fortune and success in making a go of life in germany, she suffered terrible pangs of conscience for having sacrificed her husband's career.(11) it appears that it is almost impossible to escape some aspects of the traditional gender relationship in this type of collective habitus, where the woman has been conditioned into possessing the qualities of reticence, obedience, over-developed conscience and even a sense of guilt. from "walled-up wife" to a "room of one's own 37 in this type of family the conventional male sense of shame appears as hubris (overweening anger and insolence), while female feelings emerge as reticence, which is seen as the sublime virtue; de facto, this pair of contrasting attitudes reveals deeply rooted structures and dispositions which have not changed, or have only slightly diminished in some macedonian migrants despite long years of living in another society with a quite different culture. family relations and family traditions of this kind which seem to reproduce a symbolic violence in gender relationships are demonstrably part of a cultural lag inherited from the country of origin that is characteristic of preor early modern times. by cultural lag i refer to mentalities, notions, attitudes, habits and ways of behavior observed during my research and which can be connected with bourdieu’s phenomenon of hysteresis of habitus. he argued that when people change positions, their habitus is sometimes no longer appropriate, calling this condition hysteresis. hence it seems entirely to be expected that a revolutionary transformation of the deeply rooted structures of a habitus, which has been transmitted down the generations, is impossible. the relation between sex, gender and culture can be defined by seeing it in terms of the contrasting ideas of nature and culture, or by bourdieu’s precisely defined notion about the incorporation of the dispositions of a habitus, or simply the relation between the positions and the dispositions of a habitus. one must bear in mind braudel’s “la longue durée,” the notion that any changes in mentalité and the individual worldview occur extremely slowly [braudel, 1977: 47-85]. and according to bourdieu, the body represents a social product which is the only tangible manifestation of the “person,” and which is commonly perceived as the most natural expression of the individual’s innermost nature [1999b: 192]. in discussing the division of labor according to gender, i am here focusing on the division of domestic labor, traditionally part of woman’s sphere in the pre-industrial era. it is interesting to note that for almost all the german sons-in-law, by which is meant macedonian men who marry macedonian girls resident in germany, or for the macedonian husbands of the nurses, who have no right to work for five years after arrival in germany, having to do the housework, a typically female activity, represents defeat and shame. however, this first period may be considered one of initiation, since as is clear from the later stages of their life stories, male patriarchal dignity does make a return. in the typical family where the women are the main providers, and the men have had the luck "thanks to a concurrence of events" to end up as their chosen folklorica 2006, vol. xi 38 ones,(12) the shame of having to do "female duties" in the household during this phase of their liminal status is often seen as to a certain degree legitimate. the feeling is not so overwhelming as to stop these husbands from taking on these duties, especially when they remember that the basic reason for migration was to escape from an unstable environment, particularly during the horrors of the balkan crisis in the 1990's. thanks to the actions of their wives, they have acquired a more secure existence. without exception, every interviewee agreed that the decision for the kind of break in their life history (biographieeinschnitt) caused by migration was conditioned by the need to provide a more secure existence and a better future for their children. on the other side of the scales is the virginia woolf model, according to which criticism of male-dominated societies is made public. only a small number of female informants showed any real impetus in this direction, not only in the narrative of their life histories, but also in terms of their inner urbanization, a cognitive map expressing the space of the new lifestyle in a new society. here i am thinking in particular of these migrant women’s freedom of movement around the city and the creation of new social relations (friendships and activities) outside the home possible thanks only to migration. one of my female informants, a young nurse, conformed closely to the woolf model (13). she was vocal in her protests about the subordinate position of women all around the world, and especially in macedonian families. she was similarly outspoken in her criticism of the inequality in the upbringing of boys and girls, bitterly condemning the privileged position of males. her criticism was marked by her highly positive evaluation of inter-gender relations in germany. her views had their roots in her own childhood and adolescent experiences at home with her parents in a small village near ohrid, a very traditional upbringing which she felt had been highly disadvantageous for her. in her account of the more recent events in her life, she brought out the dynamism of her daily extracurricular activities; she would attend piano recitals or the dress rehearsal of il trovatore in the hamburg opera house, go regularly on outings, visit the louvre and the historical museum in hamburg, and attend fitness classes and other such cultural activities. another female informant, an educated woman, talked of the changes she had made to her life: не можам да разберам, како таа може да живее во такви услови, едноставно да биде сопственост на мажот; да живее во дом во кој машката доминација е толку очигледна. еве, на пример, во мојов случај, пред две години решив да се разведам. from "walled-up wife" to a "room of one's own 39 зошто? -па едноставно, нашиот живот стана многу здодевен и решивме да се разделиме. и така јас започнав еден сосем нов, поинаков живот во однос на тој претходниот. да, навистина ми е сега многу интересно. (“i can't understand how she (one of the working-class informants, l.s.) can live in such conditions, still the property of a man, and in a house where male dominance is so evident. for instance, in my case, i decided before two years were up to get a divorce.” “why?” “our life got very boring, and so we decided to get divorced. now i've begun a life quite different from the one i had before. it really is very interesting.)(14) we should not forget bourdieu’s comment when considering woman as passive victim or rebel against stereotyped gender relations: all of these above mentioned situations are very understandable, considering the fact that, springing from the encounter in an integrative organism of relatively independent causal series, such as biological and social determinisms, the habitus makes coherence and necessity out of accident and contingency. for example, the equivalences it establishes between positions in the division of labor and positions in the division between the sexes coincide almost perfectly [bourdieu 1999a: 87]. for most of my women informants such attitudes were alien. one such woman recounted her life history at a party on a religious holiday, presenting her marriage as the epitome of continuing harmony. then shyly in a magnificent soprano voice she broke into the well-known macedonian folk song “зошто друга љубиш ти?” (why do you love another). in so doing she revealed the true state of affairs, something she was not brave enough to admit openly.(15) this informant represents the victim heroine, who is confined within the walls of her home and who has given her loyalty to her husband by virtue of marriage to him. of course, the sexual division of labor corresponds exactly to the traditional pattern. part of this type of mental schema is her pride in her husband and son, and many other things that make up her own view of her married life as profoundly harmonious. this kind of example perfectly coincides with the group's deepest values, and its most fundamental beliefs. if we bear in mind that western european countries are themselves open to criticism from feminist rebels against the patriarchal order noted by virginia woolf, the yawning gap between the two cultures (macedonian as a typical balkan culture, and german a west european) indicates the nature of the situation.(16) nonetheless, for all my informants (regardless of sex) germany represents the model of correct inter-gender relations. they all emphasized the respect and the equality folklorica 2006, vol. xi 40 that women have in this society. however, it was far from uncommon for this model to be presented as a statement, rather than as the result of personal experience.(17) as a rule, the experience of equality in the division of housework is rare, but there do exist households where equality is rapidly achieved, and operates smoothly: -божана /жена ми/ и јас секогаш заедно ги изврууваме домашните активности. не треба да претст6авува никаков срам ако ма`от ги пере садовите, ја чисти куќата или пак готви. кога сум јас на работа таа е одговорна за домаѓинството, а кога е таа надвор тогаш сум јас одговорен за готвењето. (božana (my wife) and i always do all the housework together. there is no shame in the husband washing the dishes, cleaning the house and cooking. when i am at work, she is responsible for the housework, and when she is out, i am responsible for the cooking.) (18) on the other hand, changes in mentality are not always genuine. this relates in particular to working-class men, those who came as gastarbeiter in the years between 1969 and 1973. in their early days in germany in particular, they would declare that their aim was “to earn some money for two or three years so as then to go back to macedonia.” almost all their wives were employed, and this situation engendered a temporary, false change in the mental structure of the typical balkan patriarchal organization. while the women were at work, the men did all the housework, and vice versa, but this was seen as strictly temporary, changing when temporary migration became permanent. i have come upon many cases where social inertia or the cultural lag mentioned above were very obvious. here i am thinking of the typical hysteresis of habitus, where a social lag of this nature can flourish with ease; male domination and female passivity, self-indulgence and obedience all contribute to ensuring that this hysteresis of habitus fails to disappear among firstgeneration working-class migrants. more particularly, we cannot ignore the fact that a percentage of working-class women who, after regulating their status and deciding to stay in germany, nonetheless choose to revert to their traditional commitments by giving up work and taking on the activities associated with home, family and child-rearing. here we can bring in durkheim’s classic concept of the social division of labor (separating the work place from the home) as a crucial modifier for changing mental structures and creating a new morality [durkheim 1998].(19) more specifically, though it may not be immediately apparent, macedonian migrants (especially those from backward rural areas) manifest a deep-rooted male jealousy on one hand, and female shame and reticence on the other, resulting in strong feelings about female fidelity expressed in the insistence that from "walled-up wife" to a "room of one's own 41 women are confined to the home. this attitude, though not overt, can be discerned on several planes, such as in the unequal distribution of household duties as well as in the mental maps of migrants that is to say movement around the city, and especially the notion of an inner urbanization, meaning adaptation to and familiarization with an urban lifestyle. in other words, the process of urbanization should involve a change of mentality, because an urban lifestyle offers and requires qualitative new spatial, temporal and, above all, social organization. however, despite the plethora of opportunities offered by a large industrial city like hamburg, many of the women experience an inner reduction in their possibilities for experience. they hardly ever go out alone for a walk or for a drink in a café. their situation represents hysteresis that is fully justified and understandable in the context of their collective habitus. the most typical forms of entertainment and “movement in the city” in their case are visits to family, lively weekend barbecues in their country cottages outside hamburg, as well as the celebration of orthodox customs under the auspices of the macedonian church of st.georgi kratovski. these activities may all be defined as part of a working-class leisure strategy, the situation representing an almost perfect coincidence between physical and social space. so, "through the habitus, the structure which has produced it governs practice, not by the processes of a mechanical determinism, but through the mediation of the orientations and the limits it assigns to the operations of invention of the habitus. as an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in which it is constituted, the habitus engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions, and all the actions consistent with those conditions, and no others. this paradoxical product is very difficult to conceive, only so long as one remains locked in the dilemma of determinism and freedom, conditioning and creativity. because the habitus is an endless capacity to engender products thoughts, perceptions, expressions, actions whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it secures is as remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from a simple mechanical reproduction of the initial conditionings” [bourdieu 1999a: 95]. the deep roots of patriarchy are revealed in a number of instances in my informants’ life histories, often of a somewhat depressing nature. adjusting to modernity in the form of the new conditions prevailing in a big city can be a very pleasant process, but unfortunately it hovers on the folklorica 2006, vol. xi 42 boundary of the impossible and the prohibited in the functioning of the collective habitus. thus, while these women become accustomed to the city style of life and the new opportunities that present themselves, they themselves experience a terrible ambivalence. a number of autobiographical sequences were described by these female interviewees with ambivalent feelings of happiness, shame and pangs of conscience, though one should expect nothing else, given that we know how durable and transportable the dispositions of habitus are. one instance related to a workplace christmas party, for which invitations were issued by the boss of the company where one of my informants worked. her comments reflected her ambivalence: леле каква чест беше тоа; тоа беше најубавиот момент во мојот живот. знаеш ли каква почит е тоа кога директорот ќе те покани на дочек. .... ама, не, сепак, не е фер жената сама да искача во град додека мажот седи дома и гледа телевизија. (wow, what an honor that was; that was the most wonderful moment in my life. you know what an honor it is when the boss invites you to a party…but still, it isn’t right for a woman to go out alone while her husband stays at home watching tv).(20) other accounts are along the same lines: толку е убаво овде у германија, секој маж и помага на жената; секоја сабота јас гледам карши во зградата како мажите ги перат прозорците!!! -дали твојот маж ти помага дома? (пауза),... хм, (пауза), да, помага...., знаеш, зет ми многу и помага на ќерка ми, тие сè работат заедно. (“it is so nice here in germany, all the husbands help their wives; every saturday i can see husbands washing the windows!!!” “does your husband help you in the house? “..(a pause), oh, (pause)…well yes, he does, … but you know, my son-in-law helps my daughter a lot; they do everything together!”) (21) another significant example that relates to traditional patriarchal culture concerns a pleasant couple, a cohabiting divorced man and a widow, a fact not mentioned in the recorded version of their life histories. not surprisingly, the idea of cohabitation is not just inconceivable but also banned in traditional macedonian morality. in german society such relationships are accepted. in this case, the ambivalence was also the essential feeling marking the tearing of the habitus and this has emerged from the discrepancy between the habitus and the field (germany), which qualitatively imposes somewhat different existential and civilized values compared to traditional macedonian peasant culture.(22) at this point i would like to cite a couple of nice examples where the ambivalence resulting from the hysteresis of the habitus was a source of humor: from "walled-up wife" to a "room of one's own 43 овде во германија заедно и мажот и жената ги делат обврските. тука не постои само женска работа; мажот треба да и помага на својата жена. (...) јас се чувствувам како германец. мојата сопруга (германка) е веќе две години на породилно боледување. еве, за два месеца таа треба да се породи со второто бебе, и автоматски таа ќе остане дома уште три години (под социјално) и без работа. за целото тоа време јас морам да заработувам пари како заботехничар. (here in germany both husband and wife should divide the duties. there is no such thing as purely female work; the husband should help his wife.... i feel like a german. my wife (a german) has been on maternity leave with our son for two years. in two months the second baby is due, so automatically she will be at home for another three years (on public welfare) and without work. in that time as a dental technician i’m going to have to earn a lot of money.)(23) further on in his life history, he jokingly mentioned that he loved children and that it would be no surprise if his wife got pregnant again (everybody laughed). to my question as to whether he helped his wife with the household chores and the baby, he answered: “тоа е точно; секој маж мора да и помага на својата жена и да се грижи за бебето, но сепак, ти знаеш дека сум јас многу зафатен. јас морам да работанм по цели денови во мојата ординација за да заработам пари за семјствот.” (сите се смеат). (that's true; every man should help his wife and look after the baby, but, you know, i am too busy. i have to work in an office all day, earning money for my family. (everybody laughs)) (24) the following story about the combination of macedonian and german customs at the wedding of a macedonian man and a german woman in 1994 in štip as a dental technician (a small town in eastern macedonia), offers another interesting perspective on gender attitudes. as was customary in macedonia, the bride was taken from her home, and there then followed the marriage ceremony at an orthodox church in štip, and the giving of the dowry. the customs were performed with great gusto and an element of humor and parody. there was one point at which it looked like a good moment to insert a german wedding custom into the proceedings: тони: ние сакавме да вклучиме еден германски обичај кога бевме во ресторанот. имено, невестатљ става една плава манжетна високо на ногата, на бутината. таа ја подига таа нога и ја става на столче. потоа , таа ја подига венчаницата високо до бутината. за тоа време сите играат , а неколку ергени, млади неженети момчиња ( ) се такмичат на тој начин, што кој ќе даде повеќе пари, тој ќе биде победникот. s: и кој беше победникот во вашиот случај? тони: никој. јас не дозволив. јас не дадов да се изведе овој обичај на нашата свадба. (сите се смеат). s: ти не дозволи? ах тони, тони!!! (сите се смеат). folklorica 2006, vol. xi 44 биргит: (со допадлива интонација): беше многу жешко, знаеш. тоа беше 3ти септември и во штип беше околу 41 степен, така што не можев да носам најлон чорапи за време на свадбата (сите се смеат). (tony we thought about including a german custom when we were in the restaurant. in particular, the one where the bride wears a blue garter round the top of her thigh. she lifts her leg and places it on a chair. then, she lifts her dress up as far as the garter. while everybody else is dancing, a few young single men compete to be the person who gives the most money, and so wins the right to remove the garter. s. so, who was the winner in your case? tony nobody. i wasn’t having it. this didn’t happen at our wedding. (everybody laughs). s. you wouldn't allow it? oh, tony, tony!!! (everybody laughs). birgit (jokingly) it was very hot, you know. it was the third of september, and the temperature in štip was about 41⁰ c, and i couldn't face wearing stockings at the wedding. (everybody laughs).) (25) * * * * * * as we can see, all these life experiences and descriptions that are a product of traditional ideologies function as hysteresis of habitus (26) whereas the effort to preserve such a structure is already on a downward path historically. the structure cannot be functionally justified, but is actually only abolished in the second or the third generation. the weakening of patriarchy in the area of male and female participation in the organization of the family and economic life can be felt in many personal testimonies from informants, particularly those from the younger generation of migrants, where the following notion is expressed, albeit with slight variations: тони: биргит и јас сè сами постигнавме во во животот. ние сами, јас и биргит. знаеш, тоа е малку проблематично, затоа што доколку сакаш нешто да постигнеш во животот мораш за сé сам да се избориш, затоа ние двојцата мораме да работиме, посебно во последно време. знаеш, порано имaше случаи кога можеше мажот да работи, а сопругата да седи дома и да ги чува децата. ама ситуацијата во нашето семејство е малку поинаква. и не е само во нашето семејство, еве исто е и кај лиле. таков е случајот во многу семејства – двојцата сопружници мораат да работат. (birgit and i have achieved everything in life on our own. the two of us, by ourselves, just me and birgit. well, it's a bit problematic, in the sense that if you want to have things in life, if you, say, want to indulge yourself in some way, then both of you have to work, especially nowadays. not that the past was any better; there were some situations where one of the spouses had to work and the other to stay home with the children. but the situation in our family is a bit different and difficult too. not just in our family, but in lile's too. it’s what happens in most families both spouses have to work.) (27) here i should note that the macedonian club and church enable working-class migrants (and to a certain extent people from other from "walled-up wife" to a "room of one's own 45 categories) not only to socialize but also to see themselves as part of a big happy family. this sense of unity can be seen not only in their shared traditional attitudes to inter-gender relations, but also more generally in their experience of migration as a biographieeinschnitt (a biographical break), because the life history means subjective self interpretation and evaluation of one's whole life, not the statistical evidences in the life course. on the other hand, we have the individualists (the highly educated) whose dynamic trajectories in life make it logical for them to accept the gender relations associated with this sort of path, assisted by daily encounters that determine their life-style, leading to gender relations veering towards equality between the sexes such as are conventional in highly industrialized societies. all these practices and habituses may be summarized in bourdieu's statement about the orchestration of the habitus: “one of the fundamental effects of the orchestration of the habitus is the production of a commonsense world endowed with the objectivity secured by a consensus of the meaning (sense) of practices and the world, in other words, the harmonization of the agents' experiences and the continuous reinforcement that each of them receives from the expression, individual or collective improvised or programmed (commonplaces, sayings), of similar or identical experiences” [1999a: 80]. conclusion in the light of the empirical analysis of the two culture-specific conventions embodied in the two symbols i have employed, i can conclude this short piece of research by saying that the passage from a subordinate to an equal position clearly depends on educational level. i would like to re-emphasize the relation between the dispositions and positions of the habitus, following bourdieu's view that “the habitus is modifying and transformational within the borders of its own structure” in the sense that man's spirit is socially limited, socially structured, and this is the product of his education and formation [1996:160]. the data from my fieldwork very clearly links the symbolism of the "walled-up wife" and "the room of one's own" to the ongoing traumatic relations prevailing in the battle of the sexes, which would help to explain why they continue to be a painful and poignant reminder of the difficulties of balancing a career and marriage for men, and achieving freedom of movement and opportunity for women. the future of traditional gender relations is certainly in doubt among secondor thirdgeneration macedonian migrants in hamburg. as i had reason to observe in my fieldwork, the very word “liberation” in the phrase “women’s liberation” is linked to the basic complex of ideas that generated the folklorica 2006, vol. xi 46 “walled-up wife” metaphor in the first place, a complex that insisted that women were not free, not liberated. in time, the liberation of women may make traditional gender relationships obsolete and inconceivable. i am thinking in particular about the children educated in germany and also the younger generation of macedonian intellectuals (the so-called brain drain). relatively little time has passed since change got under way, but dundes' hypothesis may be becoming reality: “as more and more women become builders of bridges, castles, and dams, perhaps, it will be the men who will be forced to become the ‘victims’ of their wives' ambitions” [1995: 51]. notes 1 bourdieu's defines habitus as: "the structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, a system of durable, transposable dispositions, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practice and representations which can be objectively “regulated" and "regular" without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them, and being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor (bourdieu, 1999a:72). 2 held in the archive of the institute of folklore “marko cepenkov,” in skopje (tapes nos 3994-4021). my thanks are due to the institut für volkskunde in hamburg, and especially to prof. albrecht lehmann, who acted as mentor during my postdoctoral research. 3 b. g. (f), 58, arrived 1972; d.g. (m), 58, arrived 1969; t. g. (m.), 28, arrived 1990; a. n. (m.), 57, arrived 1970; r. n. (f.), 55, arrived 1972; a. n. (m), 40, arrived 1992; l. n. (f.), 39, arrived 1991; r. i. (f.), 58, arrived 1972; g. i. (m.), 58, arrived 1970; j. s. (f.), 23, arrived 1991; v. š. (m.), 39, arrived 1993; g. k. (m), 58, arrived 1971; v. b., (f.), 62, arrived 1971; p. s. (m.), 58, arrived 1971; a. s. (f.), 56, born in hamburg; z. g. i. (f.), 36, arrived 1991; m. i. (f.), 51, arrived 1980; s. š. (f.), 33, arrived 1995. 4 s. š. (f.) and n. š. (m.) both b. skopje, 1973, arrived 1995. 5 "a room of one's own" is based on two papers read to the arts society of newnham college, cambridge and the one-damned-thing-after another society at girton college, cambridge in 1928. 6 k. g. (f), (b. hamburg, 1978). this woman, who is typical of my secondgeneration migrant informants is the chief player in her new family. she is in charge of household finances and family life as a whole, while her macedonian husband is responsible for the house (t. g., b. strumica 1978, arrived 1990). 7 r. i. (f.), b. 1948 in veljusa, strumica area, arrived 1972. 8 r. n. (f.), b. kavadarci, 1951, arrived 1972. 9 almost all of the twenty interviews conducted with this category of migrants reveal a traditional patriarchal orientation in the self-transformational process of the individual’s biography. for example, almost all the husbands laid emphasis on the outside world as it related to family life (the world of the workplace; politics; the from "walled-up wife" to a "room of one's own 47 macedonian club and church). all the female life histories focused on house, family and in particular the rituals connected with child rearing [aif, tapes no 3994; 3997; 4001, 4006, 4010, 4011, 4018, 4020, 4021]. those activities, characteristic of the pre-modern era, might be defined as the collective unconsciousness, these migrants’ lack of awareness of another epoch. however, i found one instance of a cross-cultural marriage among working-class migrants, where the stereotypical patriarchal order had been abolished. the typically german wife was very forceful character, and her life history reflected a lifestyle in a highly industrialized society, where the qualities of mobility, disassociation, subjectivity and accentuated individualism are emphasized (p. s. (m.), b. volče a village near makedonski brod, 1948, arrived 1971, and a. s. (f.), b. hamburg 1950 [aif, tapes no 3999-4000]. such an outlook is still alien to the typical macedonian wife and mother. 10 r. n. (f.), b. kavadarci, 1951, arrived 1972. 11 an amusing situation arose when i asked them why they did not go back to macedonia, where the husband would be able to follow his own profession. their answer was: ”па не сме будали. едвај успеавме да се спасиме од една несигурна земја ...(пауза), така да....” (well, we’re not fools. we only just managed to get out of that unstable country, (pause) … so now…) (l. n., (f), b. prilep 1966, arrived 1991, and a. n. (m), b. strumica, 1965, arrived 1992 [aif, tape no.3996]). 12 we should not ignore the fact that, in a number of cases, the system of arranged marriages is evidently still operating. examples from my data come from štip (t. g. (m.), b. 1963, and b. g. s. (f.), b. 1963 [aif, tape no. 3998]; strumica (c. g (f.), b. 1978, and t. g. (m.), b. 1978 [aif, tape no. 4012]; j. š. (f.), b. 1973 and v. š. (m.), b. 1966 [aif, tape no. 4008-09]. 13 ž. g. i. (f.), b. konjsko, in the ohrid area, 1969, arrived 1991 [aif, tape no.4002-03]. 14 m. i., b. skopje 1955, arrived hamburg, 1980. 15 r. i. (f.), b. veljusa, strumica area, 1948, arrived 1972. 16 as bourdieu has demonstrated, some forms of cooking symbolize a certain state of female existence and the sexual division of labor (a woman entirely devoted to housework is known in france as a "pot-au-feu"), just as putting on one’s slippers before dinner symbolizes the complementary male role. so, the particularly high consumption of carpet slippers by french working-class women (both urban and rural) no doubt reflects their relation to the body and to self-presentation entailed by confinement to the home and to domestic life (bourdieu, 1999b:187). in other words, as woolf insightfully noticed long ago, the feminine is universal and yet transitory, and can be expressed only by brittle half-phrases, symbols, poetry [woolf 1959]. another of bourdieu's statements is relevant here: as in every society dominated by male values and european societies, which assign men to politics, history or war and women to the hearth, the novel and psychology, are no exception the specifically male relationship to sexuality is that of sublimation, the symbolism of honor tending to reject immediately any direct expression of sexuality in favor of encouraging its transfigured manifestation on the form of manly prowess [1999a: 92]. in this context i would like to mention another example of this kind of cultural lag, a theme which is very much to the fore in the gender-oriented nordic folkloristics headed by satu apo, ali nenola and sinnika vakimo. the existence of patriarchy or male dominance, which is not admitted by many today in finland or indeed other nordic countries, has been strongly criticized. as they point out, complaints about the obviously illusory equal paradise for women are met with remarks such as: “but think how good your situation is compared to other parts of the world” and “you are complaining about trivialities.” and, of course, that is how it looks if we compare our folklorica 2006, vol. xi 48 situation to that in countries or societies where women are still the property of men, or if we compare the present situation to finnish or nordic society in preor early modern times when patriarchy and male dominance in the family and society were recognized as natural or divinely ordered [nenola, 2004: 3-6]. 17 i found some cases, even in cross-cultural marriages, where this ideal model did not operate. for example, take v. b. (f.), who was born in a village, whose name ironically is german, in the kriva palanka area in 1944. she came to hamburg in 1971, where she married a german, but remains the person who does most of the household chores. there is also t. g. (m.), born in štip, arrived germany 1991, who now has a german wife. in the early years, he did all the housework, but after he was allowed to remain in his new country, traditional male dignity reared its head, and he handed over the running of the household to his young german spouse, the mother of their children. i recorded approximately twenty interviews with macedonian couples where the women were responsible for the almost all the household chores. 18 d. g. (m), b. skopje, 1948, arrived 1969. 19 a significant number of informants i met had found the change from the former domestic arrangements to the new urban style of life (which they saw as paid labor in a highly industrialized society) a very painful one. 20 r. i. (f), b. veljusa, strumica area, 1948, arrived 1972. 21 r. i. (f), b. veljusa, strumica area, 1948, arrived 1972. 22 g. k. (m.), 58, arrived 1970, and v. n, (f.), 55, arrived 1971 [aif, tape no. 4006] 23 i. s. (m.), b. hamburg 1978 [aif, tape no 4017] 24 i. s. (m.), b. hamburg 1978 [aif, tape no 4017] 25 t. g. (m), b. 1963 in štip, arrived 1991, and b.g.s. (f), b. 1963 in hamburg. 26 here i am thinking of first-generation working-class migrants, or instances where their children were raised and educated in small rural areas and provincial towns in macedonia, only returning to germany during puberty. 27 t. g. (m.), born 1963 in štip, arrived 1991 [aif, tape no 3998]. list of informants quoted in the article t. g. (m), born 1963 in štip, arrived in hamburg in 1991. b. g. s. (f), born 1963 in hamburg. b. g. (f), born 1948 in the village of drdanje, rosoman area, arrived in hamburg in 1972. d. g. (m), born 1948 in skopje, arrived in hamburg in 1969. t. g. (m.), born 1978 in strumica, arrived in hamburg in 1990. k. g. (f), born 1978 in hamburg. a. n. (m.), born 1949 in the village of drenovo, kavadarci, arrived in hamburg in 1970. r. n. (f.), born 1951 in kavadarci, arrived in hamburg in 1972. a. n. (m), born 1965 in strumica, arrived in hamburg in 1992. l. n. (f.), born 1966 in prilep, arrived in hamburg in 1991. r. i. (f.), born 1948 in veljusa in the strumica area, arrived in hamburg in 1972. g. i. (m.), born 1948 in strumica, arrived in hamburg in 1970. j. š. (f.), born 1973 in strumica, arrived in hamburg in 1991. v. š. (m.), born 1966 in strumica, arrived in hamburg in 1993. from "walled-up wife" to a "room of one's own 49 gj. k. (m), born 1948 in kavadarci, arrived in hamburg in 1971. v. b. (f.), born 1944 in the village of german in the kriva palanka area, arrived in hamburg in 1971. p. s. (m.), born 1948 in volče, a village near makedonski brod, arrived in hamburg in 1971. a. s. (f.), born 1950 in hamburg. ž. g.i. (f.), born 1969 in konjsko, in the ohrid area, arrived in hamburg in 1991. m. i. (f.), born 1955 in skopje, arrived in hamburg in 1980. s. š. (f.), born 1973 in skopje, arrived in hamburg in 1995, n. š. (m.), born 1973 in skopje, arrived in hamburg in 1995. i. s. (m.), born 1978 in hamburg. works cited braudel, fernand 1977. geschichte und sozialwissenschaften. die „longe durée“. in: honegger claudia (hg.): schrift und materie der geschichte. vorschläge zur systematischen aneignung historischer prozesse. frankfurt am main: s. fischer, 47-85. bohnsack, ralf and arnd-michael nohl 2005. “youth culture as practical innovation. turkish german youth, ‘time-out’ and the actionisms of break-dance.” european journal of cultural studies, 6 (3): 367-86. bourdieu, pierre 1999a [1972]. outline of a theory of practice. cambridge: cambridge university press. ________ 1999b [1979]. distinction. a social critique of the judgment of taste. london: routledge. bourdieu, pierre and loïc j. d. wacquant 1996 [1992]. reflexive anthropologie. frankfurt am main: suhrkamp. dundes, alan 1995. “how indic parallels to the ballad of the "walled-up wife" reveal the pitfalls of parochial nationalistic folkloristics.” journal of american folklore 108 (427): 38-53. durkheim, emile 1998 [1930]. de la division du travail social. paris: quadrige/puf. majumdar, robin and allen mclaurin (eds) 1975. virginia woolf: the critical heritage. london and boston: routledge & kegan paul. marotzki, winfried 1990. entwurf einer strukturalen bildungstheorie. biographietheoretische auslegung von bildungsprozessen in hochkomplexen gesellschaften. weinheim: deutscher studienverlag. nenola, ali 2004. “on power and violence in patriarchal households.” ff network, 27: 3-6. parpulova, lyubomira 1984. “the ballad of the walled-up wife: notes about its structure and semantics.” balkan studies, 25: 425-39. woolf, virginia 1959. a room of one's own. london: hogarth press. folklorica 2006, vol. xi new publication on slovak family and folk customs patricia krafcik. evergreen state college. over the past several decades slovak ethnographers have worked diligently to collect and publish their research in a number of areas. one such area has been family life from the point of view of traditions, customs, and special celebratory moments. between the two world wars, the subject of family structure and the elements of everyday life were also treated. only now, in a recent publication, tradicie slovenskej rodiny [slovak family traditions] (published by the slovak academy of sciences, bratislava, 1997; 242 p.), have the two areas been brought together, each enriching the other and providing a bounty of information for folklorists. "slovak family traditions" was compiled by the slovak ethnographer marta botikova of comenius university in bratislava. it consists of twelve chapters contributed by botikova and two additional scholars, son'a svecova, formerly of charles univers­ ity in prague, and komelia jakubikova, also of com­ enius university. the volume deals with traditional family structures in slovakia, the extended family and kinship terms, the relationship of the family to the village, the architecture of the peasant house­ hold, the distribution of family property, birth control, and family customs. a 33-page summary (large format pages) in english which follows the narrative chapter by chapter allows a quick perusal of the contents and can help a researcher decide where to place her/his focus, making the book a user-friendly source. the 13-page bibliography is a researcher's dream for its clear presentation of 31 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 further reading in any number of individual topics covered in the larger chapters. the chapter most relevant to the work and interest of many of american folklorists is one of the last and concerns family customs. here, jakubikova discusses in detail folklore customs and rituals connected with the significant moments in family life — birth, betrothal, wedding, and death, among others. we read about the meanings of certain cere­ monial clothes and foods, the functions of midwives, the proper way for the young bride to enter her new abode, and so on. because jakubiikova's research is presented in the context of a treasure trove of infor­ mation on the interrelationship of families, family structures, and the workings of the patrilinear and matrilinear lines, all presented in several exceptio­ nal chapters by svecova and botikova, that chapter's own meaning is heightened. we are thus given a well-researched and solidly scholarly background for a revitalized understanding of traditional folk customs. most astonishing, perhaps, are the 133 photo­ graphs meticulously selected to illustrate material in the chapters. labeled by date and region, the photos depict a variety of daily activities in slovak villages. family members are shown plucking geese, baking bread, washing clothes, slaughtering a pig and processing its parts (the famous zabijacka). plowing and haying, and participating at weddings and funerals. the family poses in a variety of regional folk dress, photos of household utensils, enormous down pillows, grave crosses embellished with ancient sun signs, and the interiors of traditional peasant homes fill almost every page of the book. these photos, along with illustrations of homestead structures, taken together with the informative 37 texts, result in a volume that presents a holistic picture of the slovak village, family, and customs. as american folklore scholars working in the slavic and east european region seek to expand their horizons, they are invited to become acquain­ ted with the slovak world through such high quality studies as slovak family traditions. for information about procuring the large format volume for personal use or for your library, contact dr. marta botikova. she may be reached in english or slovak by e-mail at this address: <martajbotikova@fphil.uniba.sk>. 38 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 mailto:martajbotikova@fphil.uniba.sk 157 reviews folklorica 2013, vol. xvii corona, annette ogrodnik. the new ukrainian cookbook. new york, ny. hippocrene books, inc. 2012. index. illustrations by laurette kovary. xvii+270 pp. $29.95 (hardcover) isbn 978-07818-1287-0. why is a cookbook being reviewed in a folklore journal? the answer is simple. this book presents more than recipes; it tries to provide cultural information about ukrainian foodways and about the use of food in custom and ritual. as ogrodnik corona tells us, her earliest and fondest food memories were of her grandmother’s kitchen where food nourished soul as well as body, where it linked family members with each other and with the surrounding social and natural world. the author tries to capture the pleasure of her own ukrainian food experiences by providing numerous recipes and by supplementing them with extensive and varied background information. the book begins with maps and information about ukraine and its foodways and the importance of food in ukrainian culture. next come the recipes. these are given roughly in the order in which they would be served during a fancy, multi-course meal: first the appetizers, then the soups and salads, then the various components of a main course such as vegetables and grains, meat and fish, breads and pasta. the main course section is followed by one on eggs and omelets. the book concludes with a section on desserts and various flavored alcoholic beverages. each chapter begins with a discussion of how a particular food category is served and consumed. we learn about the appearance of various dishes, typical accompaniments to them, the etiquette that goes with the presentation and consumption of the foods discussed. for example, we are given five different ways of serving kulesha, a cornmeal mush typical of hutsul cuisine, and, of course, we are told that horilka, the ukrainian word for vodka, should not be sipped but downed in one gulp and followed immediately by some sort of salty or savory zakuska – food which might also be an appetizer. in addition to the information on the various dishes themselves, there is general cultural information about such village events as potato-digging parties, where villagers take turns helping 158 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii each other bring in the potato crop and then are treated to a special meal. we learn what kinds of flowers to bring on which occasion and we are told never to bring an even number of flowers as a hostess gift since even numbers of flowers are appropriate only for funerals. there is a brief note on kozaks and kozak food, the sorts of dishes that men on a campaign might prepare. the rynok or farmer’s market, a wide-spread institution in ukraine, is described. we learn about the crimean tatars, ethnically different from ukrainians but now citizens of ukraine, and how their cuisine was adopted by the ukrainian mainstream. some tatar foods have been accepted as is and are now considered ukrainian; others have been altered slightly, producing crimean-ukrainian fusion. the book tells us about fishing and hunting as ukrainian pastimes. and we learn how to make a proper easter basket to take to church before easter and how to prepare and present a christmas eve lenten meal. all dishes are given a descriptive name in english with their ukrainian name in transliteration underneath. all in all, the book provides a treasure trove of information about ukrainian foods, their preparation, and their ritual and customary uses. the book is largely accurate in its presentation of ukrainian material. the transliterations use a modified library of congress system. the vowels я and ю are rendered as ya and yu instead of ia and iu, but this is probably an easier transliteration for the non-academic reader to understand. all other aspects of the transliteration would keep a purist happy. the background information is largely accurate. the author seems to have traveled to ukraine and, although her observations, with a few exceptions, describe city rather than rural life, they do reflect ukraine as it is today. her ukraine is a real one and not the imagined and romanticized ukraine of many in the diaspora. i disagree with some of the depictions of ritual practices, such as the description of the appearance and use of the wedding bread or korovai and the behavior during easter and christmas celebrations – but then again ukraine is a large country with much regional variation. the author, while privileging information from western ukraine, the region that most ukrainians residing in the united states and 159 reviews folklorica 2013, vol. xvii canada come from, is aware of variation and does give variants of a number of dishes. in the case of borshch, for example, she gives 8 different types. i do not agree with all of the information that corona provides. for example, i object to certain statements about ancient ukrainians and their practices. such statements are in vogue in both ukraine and the diaspora, but without proper documentation, we cannot know what ancient peoples did or thought. a cookbook review, even one for a folklore journal, would not be complete without a discussion of the recipes themselves. the ones in this book are not likely to promote heart health. ogrodnik corona routinely calls for extra-large eggs and heavy cream. fats are used in large quantities and they include, not just butter and vegetable oils, but also goose fat, chicken fat, lard, and bacon drippings, among other fats. there are even instructions for extracting goose and other fats and for making one’s own pork cracklings and goose cracklings. corona is a farm girl and her maiden name, ogrodnik, actually means farmer or gardener. this is seen in recipes that call for chicken feet, whole sucking pig, pork heart, beef tongue, and other ingredients not typically found at the neighborhood supermarket. tracking down all of these ingredients would probably require a foodie’s dedication, as would pitting one’s own sour cherries and making noodles from scratch. many of the recipes given are not for the casual cook and require a significant time commitment. i personally am not about to go shopping for chicken feet or pig’s feet and, although i have pitted many cherries, this is not something i am willing to do routinely. this does not mean that i did not find many useful and easy recipes in this book. in fact, i felt that corona took the mystery out of some dishes for me and i learned a lot in terms of technique and in terms of regional variation. besides, one does not need to use the exact ingredients listed. more conventional fats can be substituted for the ones the author recommends, and one does not need to use the full amount of shortening. with most cookbooks, i cut the amount of fat and salt considerably and the same can be done here. corona herself provides variations to her recipes and lists possible substitutions. one thing that i find lacking in this 160 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii book is photographs. there are drawn illustrations and these are indeed charming, as the book jacket claims; but if one does not already know what a particular item should look like, the illustrations are not always helpful. similarly, if one does not know a technique such a pyrohy-pinching or cabbage leaf rolling, the author’s descriptions, as thorough as they are, can be inadequate. better and more numerous illustrations, even drawn ones, would have helped. in sum, this is a book that is both interesting and useful. as already noted, foodies should find some very exciting culinary adventures in this book. for people of ukrainian heritage, this book should be a godsend. food is often associated with heritage and, because it is taken into the body, that association is of the most intimate kind; it is literally visceral. many heritage ukrainians want to make dishes that they feel should be part of their identity, but do not know how. this book will tell them how and it will give them both practical information and cultural information. it will, as said at the beginning of this review, feed both body and soul. natalie kononenko university of alberta edmonton, alberta, canada folklorica_7f o.v. belova and g.i. kabakova, ed. u istokov mira: russkie etiologicheskie skazki i legendy (at the origins of the world: russian etiological tales and legends). moscow: russian academy of sciences, institute for slavic studies, 2013. commentary. archival sources. bibliography. index. 530 pages. this book has its origin in the volume of russian etiological tales (contes et légéndes de russie, flies france, paris 2005) that one of the authors, the french ethnologist galina kabakova, published in french within the flies series aux origines du monde. the series aims to fill a gap both for specialists and for general public, by presenting a vast and largely unknown realm: etiological tales and legends. begun in 1998, the series, which today includes more than 30 titles, covers a great number of geographical areas, nearly the entire world, from japan to latin america, and thus offers a vast encyclopedia of different popular traditions. the present volume of russian etiological tales (in russian) is the result of collaboration between kabakova and her russian colleague olga belova, a leading moscow ethnologist and a specialist on etiological folklore. the texts are organized thematically; cosmogonic stories (creation of the world, origin of the seas, mountains, rivers, climate, etc.) are followed by stories explaining the origin of supernatural beings, animals, birds, insects and plants. this section culminates with the most important event, the creation of man, a plot basically derived from genesis in these stories. then follow tales related to the origins of races, languages, and religions. the last section presents stories about social organization, professions, everyday life, behavior and customs. the book is more than twice as long as the french edition and it contains a number of important new texts, some of them never before published. however, the main difference is the book’s outstanding scholarly commentary that features a significant number of variants for each given story, sources, bibliography, international atu-index classification, and an index of themes and motifs. last but not least, the book boasts an excellent introduction, essentially a comprehensive essay on the nature, structure and function of etiological tales. a number of etiological stories may seem amazingly similar in different popular traditions, even those geographically remote from each other. the number of themes and motifs is relatively restricted. many of them go back to the bible as well or to various apocryphal gospels, while still others can be traced back to non-christian beliefs. one can argue that their value resides mainly in small variations in details in the stories and that even the absence of some of these features in a given tradition may be of significance to the scholar. by comparing russian etiological tales with tales from other geographical regions, the authors demonstrate that the stories share a universal fascination with the origin of the cosmos (the sun, the moon, the earth and its form and composition) as well as of geographical entities. other topics of interest to human life, namely the relations between the sexes and woman’s physiology, social function and familial roles, feature prominently in the stories as well. animals, including birds and insects, constitute another favorite topic. one can also see the importance of the calendar, which provides the means for comprehending and organizing time. a detailed index at the end of the book allows the scholar to compare the roles of these different elements to each other. it goes without saying that elements of christian belief are omnipresent in these russian stories and even dominate the worldview reflected in these tales. as in many other traditions, it is basically a manichean view: god and the devil share the world and fight for the right to control it, a struggle that is usually presented as endless. this edition of russian etiological texts brings a rigorous scholarly approach to the question of these stories. in addition, it is an attractive volume, thanks to fine illustrations at the beginning of each new section. it offers delightful reading for general public and will be an invaluable source for ethnologists and folklore specialists. elena balzamo swedish collegium for advanced study uppsala sweden untitled reviews 189 buchanan, donna a. (ed.). balkan popular culture and the ottoman ecumene: music, image, and regional political discourse. the scarecrow press, inc. $85.00 (hardcover). isbn-10: 081086021x isbn-13: 978-0810860216 with the fall of the iron curtain, the balkans reentered the world’s political and cultural arena. the balkans are a multifaceted region with a complex history. for a long time, this region was the core of the ottoman empire. afterwards, the area lived through social reconstruction that fostered nationalism and the building of nation-states. while the ottoman empire was based on a multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual society, the idea of nation presumes a historicized single national unit with a distinctive culture and a separate language, enclosed by non-porous boundaries. the book under review sets out to comprehend the intraregional migration of styles of music, song, and dance in the era of nationalism and does so in the context of balkanism, post socialism, and eu-topianism. the contributors contextualize their work by examining the role of the ottoman past and its cultural heritage in the process of identity and state construction. they also look at the communist past, gender, the effect of post-communist attempts to introduce a market economy, and domestic discourses on nationalism. in the introductory article “‘oh, those turks!’ music, politics, and interculturality in the balkans and beyond,” donna a. buchanan examines the ottoman turkish song “üsküdara gider iken,” which circulated widely in the balkans from the nineteenth century onwards. while earlier scholars sought to trace the geographic spread of this song, buchanan seeks to determine the reasons behind its continuing popularity. she also tries to see how it functions in constructing identity on the local and transnational levels. comparing the circulation of different versions of the song in turkey, greece, the jewish diaspora, the arabic middle east, macedonia, bulgaria, albania, bosnia, croatia, and serbia, the author shows how ottoman culture has continued to exert a creative influence right into the present. the creative impact of ottoman culture persists, she says, even as post-ottoman nationalism seeks to downplay its role. the first article in part i is jerk vedic rasmussen’s “bosnian and serbian popular music in the 1990s: divergent paths, conflicting meanings, and shared sentiments.” rasmussen focuses on yugoslavia and explains how the political changes of the late 1980s impacted musical trends. according to the author, these changes led to the folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 190 emergence of solidarity songs which, in turn, encouraged battles for independence or self-defense in the fragmented geography of yugoslavia. the author concludes that the function played by music and musicians in the war period continued to define and produce cultural capital in the successor states. to provide a concrete example, the author chooses the “turbo folk.” his analysis displays the complex interplay of changing social dynamics, political challenges, and the effects of various regional and extra-regional musical styles on the platform of turbo folk and their construction of serbian culture. turbo folk, the author observes, is emblematic of the musical nationalization process in yugoslav successor states. margaret h. beissinger contributes “muzica orientala: identity and popular culture in post communist romania.” in her article, she presents a detailed study of the music and dance style muzica orientala which, she argues, is a reflection of contending constructions of romanian identity. the author observes that post-communist romania, like most other eastern bloc countries, is trying to reassume its place in europe by downplaying any historical cultural ties to the “orient.” to beissinger, the rising popularity of muzica orientala is a reaction against efforts to present romanian culture as inherently european. while the elite may press for acceptance of the western model of romania, people in other social strata prefer the mix of romany, turkish, serbian, bulgarian and traditional music that muzica orientala represents. beissinger contends that muzica orientala acts as a negotiating tool in a polarized romanian society. she also gives a detailed account of the historical development of muzica orientala and its relationship to class and gender, as well as to ethnicity. vesa kurkela contributes “bulgarian chalga on video: oriental stereotypes, mafia exotism, and politics.” her article focuses on the most popular music genre in post-communist bulgaria. chalga is based on various regional, local, and international musical traditions and has distinct oriental belly dance rhythms. for her study, kurkela examines commercial music video recordings that were released between 1995 and 2000. she seeks to determine how the “oriental” is produced: the music, the lyrics, and the visuals. the author also tries to draw conclusions about the models used for the oriental elements and the methods employed by musicians, actors and video directors. kurkela observes that “the political” is central to chalga for it functions as a tool of social criticism, challenging social values, especially those that emerged after the fall of the iron curtain. in her opinion, chalga with its inherent reviews 191 mockery, irony and carnivalistic attitude, acts as a counterweight to serious political problems such as corruption and the prevalence of the nouveaux riches, the mafia, machismo, and westernization. kevin dawe’s contribution is an examination of contemporary music and dance in greece. he focuses on the negotiation between the regional and the global. certain regions had connections beyond greek borders and brought global musical styles and genres into greece. the author praises the fact that periphery music, such as the folk revival of the 1980s, assumed a central place in greek musical life. while explaining the factors that created this phenomenon, the author also explains how prioritized regional sounds and images function on the regional, national, and international levels. by doing so, the author tries to see how “local” and “global” meet in greek popular music. “ottoman echoes, byzantine frescoes, and musical instruments in the balkans” by gabriela ilnitchi discusses frescoes in balkan churches, many of which date back to the ottoman period. she sees them as stimuli to the spread of various ottoman and pre-ottoman musical instruments. she underlines the importance of including socio-historical and cultural factors in the interpretation of the frescoes, an approach that has been missing from most contemporary scholarship. such a methodology, she asserts, would challenge the monocultural, monoethnic and ahistorical constructs of balkan historiography in general and musiciconographic studies in particular. although a wide range of potential material is available for the period extending from the 14th to the end of the 17th century, the author limits herself to iconographic representations of the double-headed drum and the zurna. in “bulgarian ethnopop along the old via militaris: ottomanism, orientalism, or balkan cosmopolitanism” donna a. buchanan argues that the balkans were and continue to be historically interconnected in various, but changing, ways. she examines the contribution that music makes to the bulgarian construction of balkan identity. she assumes that the sources of the music were transregional and then studies how music functions in the construction of bulgarian identity in the 1990s and first years of the 2000s. the author focuses on bulgarian ethnopop (pop-folk), specifically chalga and professional women’s choirs (e.g. le mystére de voix bulgares) and the contribution these make to bulgarian musical culture. she also gives a detailed account of the oriental elements in the music. jane c. sugarman’s “the criminals of albanian music: albanian commercial folk music and issues of identity since 1990” looks at the folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 192 evolution of folk-pop music within the changing social climate of the post-1990 period. societal confrontations and ongoing negotiations of identity produce commercial albanian folk music that is characterized by a mix of high technology with the music of the ottoman realm. this music represents a counter discourse to the modernist/westernist position of the albanian elite. sugerman’s study sheds light on the evolution of this music, its sources, style, and repertoire. in his piece “shedding light on the balkans: sezen aksu’s anatolian pop” martin stokes draws attention to the rise of musical cosmopolitanism in the balkan region. he takes sezen aksu, a turkish vocalist and song writer. stokes locates the influences on sezen aksu’s music in the cultures of bulgaria, the former yugoslavia, and the republic of macedonia. he also stresses the importance of the end of the cold war and turkish imaginary both of turkey itself and its balkan neighbors. giving detailed personal and professional background information on sezen aksu, the author explains his attempts to link turkish music to balkan folk expression. he also looks at the changing domestic, social, economic and political factors that influenced this musician’s work. in “trafficking in the exotic with ‘gypsy’ music: balkan roma, cosmopolitanism and ‘world’ music festivals” carol silverman explores the marketing and consumption of gypsy music. the author’s main aim is to determine how the roma construct their own imagery and re-shape commercial representations of themselves. after locating the roma within the discourses of modernity and cosmopolitanism, silverman looks at gypsy festivals as places where images of the roma are constructed. she discusses the concept of “authenticity” as a marketing tool and examines how it is understood by the audience, the promoter and especially the roma musician. in “balkan boundaries and how to cross them: a postlude” svanibor pettan deals with the question of boundaries in the balkan northwest, namely croatia. croatia’s historical past and its life under two empires, the author argues, determines current musical domains. the author looks at the contending discourses of alaturka and alafranga to explain sociocultural relations within this region. the movement of music and musicians beyond national borders, even when travel was severely restricted, such as during the cold war and the war within the former yugoslav territories, brought in international influences. recent market strategies, the author observes, have also encouraged musical interaction across borders. reviews 193 the articles included in the book provide valuable insights which show how the ottoman imperial past continues to exist as a social variable in the balkans, working within a complex interplay of cultural issues and political contexts. providing detailed studies at local, national, regional and international levels, the book successfully displays contending and overlapping negotiations of identities, values, meanings, and interests. this is an important collection depicting the continuous process of constructing images of the self and the other. huseyin oylupinar university of alberta edmonton alberta canada folklorica 2008, vol. xiii новое прочтение русской фольклористической классики татьяна г. иванова русской фольклористике свойственно периодически осмыслять научное наследие прошлого с позиций современности. что находит подтверждение в недавно вышедшей в издательстве «индрик» книге а. л. топоркова «теория мифа в русской филологической науке xix века» (москва. 1977). монография состоит из введения, четырех глав, заключения, указателя имен и библиографии. во введении автор четко обозначил предмет своего исследования — «не мифологическая школа в россии, а взгляд на мифоло­ гию в русской науке» (с. 20). в связи с этим существенно значимым становится выбор имен для исследования — не только «мифологи», но и ученые, которые причисляются к другим направлениям русской филологии. в четырех главах монографии («разыскания ф. и. буслаева о мифе: от философии языка к сравнительной этнографии»; «миф и славянская мифология в творческом наследии а. н. афанасьева»; «а. а. потебня: лингвистическая теория мифа»; «а. н. веселовский о мифе: комплексная программа филологических исследований») сквозь призму творческих биографий корифеев русской филологии xix в. на фоне сменяющих и сосуществующих рядом друг с другом научных школ рассматривается эволюция взгля­ дов на миф и мифологию в российской науке прошлого столетия. однако значение рецензируемой книги состоит не в том, что труды о мифологии выдающихся филологов xix в. рассматриваются в диахронии (это вполне естест­ венно), а в том. что они прочитаны параллельно, в сопря­ жении друг с другом. принципиальную роль в моногра­ фии а. л. топоркова играют такие разделы, как «ф. и. буслаев о ранних работах а. н. веселовского», «влияние ф. и. буслаева на а. н. афанасьева». «а. н. афанасьев и ф. и. буслаев: творческий диалог». «а. н. афанасьев и ранний а. а. потебня», «а. а. потебня и ф. и. буслаев». «а. а. потебня в полемике с а. н. веселовским», «а. а. seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 потебня об а. н. афанаесьеве», «а. н. веселовский и ф. и. буслаев: творческий диалог». обозначенный метод прочтения фольклористической классики дает автору монографии возможность избежать характерной ошибки, которая подстерегает любого исследователя, занима­ ющегося научным наследием того или иного крупного ученого: приписывание своему герою приоритетов там, где их не было. без сомнения, важным методологическим досто­ инством анализируемого труда является то, что мифо­ логические теории прошлого столетия здесь рассматри­ ваются в тесной связи с философией и теоретическим языкознанием того времени. имена шеллинга, гумболь­ дта не случайны на страницах монографии и. л. топор­ кова. обращает на себя внимание еще одна сторона его исследования — соположенность научной мысли и художественного творчества в русской культуре xix — начала xx вв. многие исследователи до а. л. топоркова уже обращали внимание на то, что «поэтические воззре­ ния славян на природу» явились источником для вдохно­ вения и для построения эстетических концепций у таких выдающихся мастеров слова, как а. а. блок, в. хлебников. с. а. есенин, а. м. ремизов и др. основной аспект, кото­ рый обычно затрагивается в данной проблеме, — источни­ коведческий. а. л. топорков же указывает на типологи­ ческую однородность во взглядах на природу как объект мифологизации у а. н. афанасьева, с одной стороны, и ф. и. тютчева (с. 202­203) и е. а. баратынского (с. 206­207), с другой. типологическая общность в русской философ­ ской лирике xix в. и в научных разысканиях а. н. афана­ сьева автором монографии подмечена чрезвычайно верно и тонко. внимательный читатель обнаружит в рецензируемой книге множество выходов на разные частные проблемы, играющие не последнюю роль в русской фольклористике. укажен на одну из них — установлить источники, на ко­ торые опирался а. н. афанасьев в своей работе «поэти­ ческие воззрения славян на природу». а. л. топорков бесспорно доказывает, что труды а. а. потебня были во многом основополагающим для а. н. афанасьева и в смысле материала, и в концептуальном плане. исследо­ ватель приводит в своей книге многочисленные примеры текстуальной переклички между а. н. афанасьевым и работами а. а. потебни «о некоторых символах в славянской народной поэзии» ( i860), «о мифическом значении некоторых обрядов и поверий» и «о связи некоторых представлений в языке» (1864) (с. 226­230). параллельное прочтение трудов ф. и. буслаева и а. н. афанасьева, предложенное а. л. топорковым, выявлает столь же большой удельный вес в «поэтических воззрени­ ях славян на природу» и скрытых цитат из исследований первого из ученых (с. 186­188). есть у а. н. афанасьева и явные переклички с сочинением м. мюллера «сравнитель­ ная мифология» (с. 201). безусловно, монография а. л. топоркова не закрывает ту проблему, которой она посвящена. в свете рецензируемого труда становится ясно, что для более полного осмысления путей развития «мифологической школы» в россии xix в. (а точнее, эволюции теории мифа в отечественной науке) необходимо вписать в круг иссле­ дователей, рассмотренных а. л. топорковым, равновели­ кие им имена а. а. котляревского и ореста миллера. научное наследие названных ученых достойно такого же тщательного и скрупулезного (и главное, не автономного, а сопряженного с трудами других фольклористов) анализа, как это сделано по отношению к ф. и. буслаеву. а. н. афанасьеву, а. а. потебне и а. н. веселовскому. а. л. топорков в своей монографии полностью об­ ходит стороной имена эпигонов «мифологической школы» — таких, как а. с. фаминцын («божества древних славян», спб. 1884). м. е. соколов (старо­русские солнечные боги и богини». симбирск. 1887). и др. безусловно, это исследо­ вательское право автора. но тем не менее осмысление эпигонства в науке, как и в искусстве, порой может быть небесполезным и плодотворным. как всякое серьезное исследование, монография а. л. топоркова носит принципиально открытый характер. после знакомства с этой книгой читатель не только получает ответы, но и задается вопросами, начинает более четко видеть дальнейшие перспективы изучения той seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 или иной проблемы. в этом мы видим главное достоинство этого издания. microsoft word fall04w.doc 63 valerie a. kivelson and robert h. greene (eds). orthodox russia: belief and practice under the tsars. university park pa: pennsylvania state university press. 2003. ix + 291 pp. illustrations. bibliography. index. isbn 0-271-02349-x, $49.95 (cloth); 0-271-02350-3, $22.95 (paper). orthodox russia is a collection of essays by leading us specialists in the history of russian orthodoxy in the pre-revolutionary period. the volume grew out of two workshops held at the university of michigan, but escapes the diffuseness of some collected volumes by linking the papers through approach as much as by subject matter. this approach can be summed up as a refusal to be pigeonholed by conventional ways of thinking about orthodoxy. what, it might be asked, does this have to do with the study of folklore? the answer is a great deal in fact, and if not always in the specifics, then certainly conceptually. this is a volume about “lived” religion, that is, what religion meant in the experience of various groups at various periods. as such, it comes close to the study of what is variously called popular, vernacular or folk religion (depending on focus and conception) and at times to the study of folk belief more widely. it has a particular interest in the spirituality of women. by focussing on lived religion it aims to tackle common assumptions/prejudices about russian orthodoxy and more broadly russianness as a whole. is orthodoxy is the key to the supposedly mournful russian soul? how distinctive a brand of christianity is russian orthodoxy? underlying the approach is the current position in anglo-american scholarship that the concept of binaries is intellectually restricting, whether these are between elite and popular religion, sacred and profane, or official church and laity. these are problems faced also by folklorists interested in russian folk orthodoxy and folk belief more generally. an essay that tackles the division of orthodoxy into official and popular religion is vera shevzov’s discussion of her preferred term tserkovnost’ (lit. “churchness”) in relation to the nineteenth century (pp. 59-77). the term avoids the dichotomy inherent in popular/official because it envelops ordinary believers of all kinds and hints at the diversity of orthodoxy as well as the ongoing dynamics of the relationship between church and laity. a number of the essays concern the muscovite period. since sources are written and visual rather than oral, these might appear less relevant for folklorists than those on imperial russia, but in fact the type of problems discussed are quite similar to those surrounding narodnoe pravoslavie (folk orthodoxy) in later periods. daniel rowland (pp. 33-57) considers the content of the (now lost) frescoes of the sixteenth century in the golden hall of the kremlin, seeing them as reflecting political concerns of the time. the fusion of orthodox and secular messages in them must have been “read” by the boiars who thronged the halls (how exactly we cannot know). scrutiny of the frescoes undermines the suggestion (made by keenan) that there was little knowledge of orthodoxy outside the church hierarchy. rowland’s argumentation can assist folklorists considering the difficult questions of how nineteenth-century peasants read icons and frescoes and how orthodox the narod was. michael flier (pp. 127-58) tackles apocalypticism in early russia. distinguishing a general sense of living at the end of time (psychological imminence) from predictive imminence featuring belief in a specific date for the end, he dates the birth of apocalypticism in russia to the late fifteenth century. he suggests that at this time folk views of the resurrection of ancestors in the context of cyclical time fused with folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 64 christian concepts of the resurrection. there seems to have been no general millennial panic in 1492, the year 7000, but instead an optimistic millenarian view developed about the role of orthodox muscovy in the last millennium. flier’s discussion is useful for folklorists considering the features of folk apocalypticism in russia in more recent times. many of the specific beliefs are similar (coming as they do mainly from revelation), but flier’s work shows how they can be distinguished and located in their period. dan kaiser’s essay on quotidian orthodoxy in muscovy (pp. 179-92) carefully shows how by the sixteenth century orthodoxy had penetrated the calendar, naming and rites of passage. for example, it can be deduced from birth dates that muscovites observed the bans on sexual activity during fast times, just as in catholic western europe. as he remarks: “orthodox christianity provided the primary lens through which to make sense of life, no matter how badly muscovites may have understood what they saw through that lens” (p. 188). the same questions occur about the relative balance between orthodox and non-christian beliefs among the peasants in more modern times. isolde thyret uses muscovite vitae and other sources to argue cogently for a specific women’s spirituality (pp. 159-75). though some of the aspects of that spirituality obviously stem from the specifics of the period and women’s social situation, others demonstrate striking parallels with folk orthodoxy at a later period. one objection can, however, be made to her specific argument that, since women were more inclined than men to seek out the help of miracle-working saints, it is wrong to assume that “medieval russian females were the major perpetuators of pagan russian practices” (p. 167). though it is impossible to prove either way, given the relative dearth of information about non-christian practices, the fact of muscovite women seeking miracles from saints could be said to demonstrate the opposite: these were the pious few, exceptions to the rule that women still consulted magic practitioners. alternatively, and in my view more likely, the information reveals nothing about women and non-christian practices in muscovite times, but is simply expressive of women’s general spiritual concerns and needs. in following this argument, we must assume that women also visited magic practitioners of various kinds for much the same purposes, just as they did and still do in the russian countryside. whether these were ever the same women is impossible to say. eve levin’s essay (pp. 81-104) considers aspects of the popular cults of saints and the interrelationship with the official church during the muscovite period, but it too focuses on women’s spirituality, examining the role of women in the creation of saints out of anonymous corpses disinterred and deemed to work miracles. her essay forms a pair with nadiezsda kizenko’s on the construction of sainthood in post-petrine russia (pp. 10524), specifically the holy fool kseniia of petersburg and father ioann of kronshtadt. in her discussion of kseniia’s cult kizenko demonstrates the importance of lay testimony and how it was predominantly lower-class women who appropriated her in the nineteenth century. they helped place the emphasis on the saint’s healing skills and her help with finding work. both of these remain to this day features of her cult and that of as well as of other more recent female saints. the studies of specific aspects of lived orthodoxy conclude with essays from gary marker on female upper-class religiosity in late eighteenth-century russia (pp. 193–209), william g. wagner on the nizhegorod convent of the exaltation of the cross (pp. 211–38), and paul w. werth on orthodoxy among non-russian christian groups (pp. 239-51). the volume is rounded off by comments from thomas a. tentler, writing as a folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 65 historian of west european religion in the medieval and early modern periods (pp. 253-75). though interesting in their own right, these are all of less direct relevance for folklorists. the same cannot be said of the introduction and the essay that opens the volume, which pose the basic problems of preconceptions about russian orthodoxy and the limitations of using binaries. laura engelstein (pp. 23-32) notes that the conceptual split between official and folk in relation to orthodoxy stems from nineteenth-century self-conscious exponents of tradition, of whom the best known (on the side of idealization of the peasants and their religiosity) are the slavophiles. she concurs that “the common folk may have favored a more ritualised style of worship than educated believers” (pp. 16), but emphasizes the variety of ways orthodoxy was absorbed and worshipped by different social groups. the stimulating essays in this book should give folklorists food for thought. slavic folklore study often privileges the peasants and preservers of tradition and tends to ignore the differences within that social group or the less colourful beliefs of other social groups. folklorists too must juggle with views about innate peasant piety or pagan superstitiousness/ignorance. they also need to question the usefulness of the divisions made between official orthodoxy and folk orthodoxy. such divisions can obscure the differences within the peasant version of russian orthodoxy, privilege peasant over townsfolk as well as minimize the similarities between priest and laity. of course it is hard to avoid making comparisons when seeking to bring out the distinctive features of any religious phenomenon, but as the book indicates, working round the binaries produces a more nuanced reading. this is not to suggest that the priorities of folklorists and historians are the same. folklorists wish to position themselves between the a-historical approach of anthropologists and the emphasis on change and period specificity among historians. nonetheless they can draw on the approaches taken in this excellent volume, whether to binary oppositions, women’s spirituality or even the role of “lived” orthodoxy in the creation of national identity. faith wigzell school of slavonic and east european studies university college london microsoft word folkxiv_author.doc historical poetics and pragmatics of slavic charms folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 1 articles aspects of historical poetics and pragmatics of slavic charms pieter plas and aleksey v. yudin ghent university ghent, belgium abstract although traditional verbal charms and incantation rituals have received extensive attention in slavic ethnolinguistics and folklore studies, the need still exists for a more in-depth poetic and contextual (re)analysis of ritual texts, especially of the interrelation between their stylistic, compositional, referential and functional properties. in this context, the article points towards the possible benefits of an integrated pragmatic and (ethno)poetic text analysis that centers on the semiotic concepts of iconicity and indexicality. through an examination of a number of south and east slavic samples the authors discuss the various ways in which poetic and figurative stylization and structuring in verbal charms correlates (indexically and iconically) with their meanings and functions within the performative (actional-ritual) and broader sociocultural context. in doing so, they attempt to demonstrate how an analysis along poetic-pragmatic lines may prove fruitful for the revalorization of the poetic, performative, social, and cultural efficacy of charms and incantations as verbal rituals, and hence for a recovery of the sociocultural “memory” of these ritual texts. traditional verbal charms and incantation rituals have received extensive attention in slavic ethnolinguistics and folklore studies as regards their typological, morphological, structural, semantic, and pragmatic aspects.(1) at the same time, the need still exists for a more in-depth poetic and contextual (re)analysis of ritual folk texts, in particular of the interrelation between their stylistic, compositional, referential, and functional properties. commenting on a renewed interest in the poetics of magical folk texts, folklorist viktor gusev, for example, has pleaded for the collaborative folkloristic, linguistic, and anthropological study of the “aesthetic essence” of folklore forms in connection with their functions [gusev 1998: 365-366; see also ajdačić 1994]. slavic ethnolinguists, for their part, have long acknowledged the 2 fundamental importance of context, function, and (linguistic/cultural) motivation in the interpretation of ritual texts and actions; in particular, ethnolinguistic research in recent years has shown a noticeable rise of interest in the application of insights from linguistic pragmatics in the analysis of verbal (ritual, magic) texts as speech acts or “performatives” [e.g. tolstaia 1992; yudin 2001; levkievskaia 2002]. in cognate poetics-oriented approaches to language and cultural meaning in anglo-american anthropology, elaborations of (among others) roman jakobson’s work on linguistics and poetics, in combination with peircean semiotics, have led to an intensified study of the diverse processes and contextual anchorings of social and cultural meaning. most notable have been studies of the verbal “performance” and (re)production of cultural concepts and ideologies through the analysis of texts and speech events in their ethnographic-communicative settings. ritual and magic folk genres have always formed a privileged focus of these investigations.(2) the present article intends to point out some of the possible benefits of this poetic and semiotic-anthropological framework for a historical and pragmatic revaluation of verbal charms in slavic folk traditions. in particular, it will investigate the uses of an ethnopoetic text analysis that centers on the semiotic concepts of iconicity and indexicality. our discussion will be based on a number of relevant bosnian/croatian/serbian, as well as russian, text samples drawn from “classical” ethnographic and folkloristic literature. the question that will interest us, then, is this: how can the texts of magical charms (including the descriptions of their performance) be reassessed or revaluated with respect to, on the one hand, their iconicity and, on the other, their indexicality? iconicity, as we use this term, bears broadly upon the ways in which analogies between described situation and intended effect (of the magical text/action) are established with poetic means. indexicality is used to mean the way in which texts “pragmatically” imply (presuppose, entail) the situational, social, cultural, historical context(s) of their performance. as will be clear from the start, these two main aspects are closely intertwined. indexical and iconic properties in magic charms are in constant interaction with each other. many features of poetic/iconic design have a pragmatic/ indexical function and vice versa. the ultimate question is: how do “poetics” and “pragmatics” constitute each other in the “indexical iconicity” of verbal charms? historical poetics and pragmatics of slavic charms folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 3 1. preamble: poetics, pragmatics and the anthropological analysis of verbal-ritual performance.(3) in a historicaland philological-anthropological revaluation of slavic charms that builds upon existing ethnolinguistic and folkloristic research on slavic traditional culture, the tight interconnection between poetics and pragmatics (defined as the study of functional and motivated meaning in context) may be accepted as a basic premise [cf. friedrich 1986, 1991]. in charms and incantation rituals,(4) perhaps more than in other verbal folk genres, “saying something” in a particular way and in a particular setting equals “doing something” to a particular end. here, the tenet of jakobson that “any significant poetic composition implies a goaloriented choice of verbal material” [1981d] applies in full force. in verbal-ritual texts such as magical charms one may observe poetic expressions of semantic and pragmatic models/motifs which make up magic “strategies” consisting in goal-oriented “movements of selves and others in the space of cultural values” [fernandez 1986]. these include “distancing,” “expulsion,” “appropriation,” “familiarization,” “propitiation,” “demonization,” etc.(5) in many cases, moreover, the verbal realization of these motifs refers to, complements, and runs parallel to their expression in actional, objectival and other modes within ritual as a multicodal text [in slavic ethnolinguistics, see tolstoi and tolstaia 1978, 1994; vinogradova 1993]. a textual analysis that meaningfully addresses most aspects of this poetics-pragmatics interface may be based on the principles of ethnopoetics as stated and applied by dell hymes [e.g. 1981, 2003]. in essence, these principles involve the consideration of form (stylistic and structural properties), content (referential meaning), and (pragmatic, indexical) functions in terms of each other (covariation). previous applications of this approach have demonstrated that stylistic and structural devices (e.g. rhyme, parallelism, chiasmus), as seen in combination with figurative language use, referential functions, and performative context, establish metaphorical-associative and metonymical-causative relations, eliciting (magical) strategies and effectively accomplishing “movements.” thus, certain montenegrin proclamation formulae at birth effectuate the movement of newborn male children towards “health” by metaphorically identifying them with wolves [plas 1998; see also below], while serbian and croatian vučari songs (performed during processions with a dead wolf) verbally bring about the gradual “expulsion” of wolves, as dangerous “others,” along 4 spatially and socially marked semantic continua [plas 1999]. paraphrasing and summarizing michael silverstein’s adaptation of peircean semiotic terminology on this point we may state that such verbal-ritual texts are culturally relevant and ritually performative because they indexically (contiguously, metonymically) as well as iconically (analogously, metaphorically) represent and entail their performative contexts (including, by extension, the normative social and cultural value system that feeds into these contexts) and the effects intended by their performance respectively [cf. silverstein 2003: 203ff.; 2004: 627-633]. thorough textual analysis in this sense becomes particularly important in cases where elements of situational and performative context that should accompany texts in ethnographic or folkloristic description have not been recorded, or were recorded only partially. the “cultural-pragmatic” information contained in, and elicited from, these texts may moreover form a further critical evaluation of the ethnographic and ethnological discourse surrounding their attestations [hymes 1981; bauman 1992; parmentier 1993; silverstein 1996, 2003]. ethnopoetic analyses in which due attention is paid to the covariation of content, form, and function may reveal the articulations of this “indexical iconicity” at any level of the ritual-magic text-in-context. the following interrelated aspects of content, form, and context may then be studied as to their “functional meaning:” figurative language use: metaphoric and metonymic predications [the “play of tropes” in the verbal-ritual text: fernandez 1986]; stylistic devices in the service of semantic relations: sound likeness, rhyme, parallelism, chiasmus, emphatic processes, figurae etymologicae, iconicity, etc. [jakobson 1981a-c; cf. sikimić 1994]; composition, verse structure, rhythm/meter [hymes 1981, 2003]; explicit pragmatic/indexical text markers: deixis, performatives, imperatives, optatives, prohibitives etc. [silverstein 1976, 1996, 2003; hanks 1992; tolstaia 1992; yudin 2001; levkievskaia 2002]; situational and performative context, in particular the interaction of the verbal text with actional, objectival and other components of ritual [in slavic ethnolinguistics, see esp. vinogradova 1993; tolstoi and tolstaia 1994; tolstoi 1995: 63-65]; metapragmatic discourse: folk interpretations of ritual texts and actions, as well as ethnographers’ interpretations of recorded texts [where attested; see vinogradova 1993, 1995; tolstaia 2002; cf. silverstein 1993, hanks 1993]; generic intertextuality: elements of implicit or explicit historical poetics and pragmatics of slavic charms folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 5 “dialogue” between (ritual) folk genres [cf. bauman 1992]; and the broader folk cultural context: larger ritual or customary complexes and folk discourses or domains of knowledge, which indicate further interand metatextual relations. in the remainder of this article, through an examination of a number of south and east slavic samples, we attempt to demonstrate how an analysis along these lines may prove fruitful for the revalorization of the poetic, performative, social, and cultural efficacy of charms and incantations as verbal rituals, and hence for a recovery of the sociocultural “memory” of these ritual texts. our ethnopoetic comments will elaborate on the various ways in which the poetic and figurative stylization and structuring of the verbal text correlates (indexically and iconically) with its meanings and functions within the performative (actional-ritual) and broader sociocultural context. 2. iconicity and the imposition of likeness the “iconic” aspect of indexical iconicity broadly concerns the ways in which poetic and discursive means establish and express analogies or parallelisms between “described situation” and “intended effect.” metaphoric and figurative language use is of special significance here, as are stylistic devices, composition, verse structure, and rhythm/meter (see above). pragmatic markers or text elements, however, also come into play. thus, for example, in a ritual-magic text from montenegro which is shouted out by the midwife when a male child is born, we have observed how various poetic devices operate to articulate the cultural association of “wolves” with “health,” and simultaneously to act out the metaphorical (and magical) association of the male newborn child with a wolf: čuj, puče i narode! hear, folk and people! rodi vučica vuka, the she-wolf has borne a wolf, svemu svijetu na znanje, to the knowledge of the whole world [or: all the people], a đetetu na zdravlje! and to the health of the child! [karadžić 1965 [1849]: 311] ethnopoetic analysis in this case started off with the recognition that a formula which had been attested in prosaic linear form (and included as a paremical item in vuk karadžić’s collection of proverbs), was in fact a 6 ritual-poetic text consisting of four heptasyllabic verses, grouped into two distichs. the intended magical effect of “lending health to the child by means of its association with a wolf” is expressed and actualized through parallelistic constructions, chiastic composition and rhyme that link up “wolf,” “child” and “health” in a triangular relation, with the wolf as a mediating factor. the intentional verbal performance of this relation is enhanced by many other direct and indirect poetic and textual means, one of which is the metaphorical association of the mother with a shewolf. this type of “proclamation ritual” was performed to ensure children’s lasting health in cases where previous children had died shortly after birth, and in general historical circumstances of high infant mortality in rural areas [for the full analysis, and on how it challenges earlier mythological interpretations, see plas 1998]. similar factors motivated the ritual act of pulling newborn children through the so-called “wolf’s mouth” (the skin cut from around a wolf’s jaws), which has been widely attested in the southern west south slavic (i.e. štokavian bosnian/croatian/serbian) area. in eastern bosnia, this ritual act was accompanied by the exclamation of the following formula: kako se kurjak lako othranio, as the wolf has nurtured itself with ease, onako se i dijete lako othranilo! so may this child be nurtured with ease! [dragičević 1907: 491](6) the charm is built upon complete syntactic parallelism which places “wolf” and “child” on the same level, while the semantics of “nurturing” (othraniti “raise,” lit. “feed off”) in the verbal code correlates with the passage through the “mouth” in the object-actional code of ritual. poetic modeling makes this text into an iconic (figurative) sign and blueprint of the intended magical (perlocutionary) effect of the verbal ritual which, at the same time, elicits the indexical (metonymical-causal) link between the two members/verses of the magical distich. the use of correlatives in combination with syntactic parallelism (kako … kurjak → onako … dijete), it seems, is a widespread device for achieving such pragmatic effect. in fact, the poetic structure of this formula itself illustrates (i.e. iconically represents!) the double semiotic operation of “indexical iconicity.” within the text, parallelism, analogy, and metaphor constitute the iconic relation between the two parts of the formula, while the contiguity between the two parts (as they follow each other directly in the “linear” sequence of verbal performance) iconically articulates the indexical – namely, metonymic-causal – relation between the performance of the text and its intended magical outcome. historical poetics and pragmatics of slavic charms folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 7 longer medicinal-magic incantations also illustrate the workings of iconicity in various ways. an interesting east slavic example in this respect is a russian incantation against impotence (ot plotskoi nemoshchi) from a 17th century juridical book: встану яз, раб божий (имя рек) благословясь и пойду перекрестясь в чистое поле под красное солнце, под млад светел месец, под частыя звезды, мимо волотовы кости могила. как волотовы кости ни тропнут, не гнутся, не ломятся, так бы и у меня, раба божия (имя рек), … фирс не гнулся, не ломился против женския плоти и хоти и против памятныя кости. и возьму яз, раб божий (имя рек), свой черленой вяз и пойду я в чистое поле, ажно идет в чистом поле встречу бык третьяк, заломя голову, смотрится на небесную высоту, на луну и на колесницу. и подойду яз, раб божий (имя рек), с своим черленым вязом и ударю яз быка третьяка по рогу своим черленым вязом, и как тот рог ни гнется, ни ломится от моего вязу, так бы и у меня, раба божия (имя рек), … фирс не гнулся, не ломился против женския плоти и хоти и против памятныя кости отныне и до веку. [maikov 1994: 56, nr. 130] [i, god’s servant x will stand up, and asking blessings and crossing myself i will go into the open field under the fair sun, under the bright young moon, under the numerous stars, passing the grave-mound of [the giant] volot’s bones. just as volot’s bones do not soften, do not bend, do not break, may my, god’s servant x’s [member] not bend, not break against the woman’s flesh and lust and against her [lit.] memory bone. and i, god’s servant x, will take my red bough [lit. elm wood] and go into the open field; suddenly a three-year old bull in the open field comes towards me, throws back its head, looks into the heavenly heights, at the moon and at the wagon [big dipper]. and i, god’s servant x, will walk up to him with my red [elm] bough, and with my red [elm] bough i will hit the three-year old bull on its horn, and just as that horn does not bend, does not break from my [elm] bough, may my, god’s servant x’s [member] not bend, not break against the woman’s flesh and lust and against her [lit.] memory bone, now and for eternity.] the text displays a whole series of iconic elements that are pragmatically relevant. first there is the epical introduction,(7) which contains a description of the actions of the speaking subject. this description may, but need not necessarily, correspond to operations in the “actional code”: the actual performance of the actions referred to was not obligatory; their enunciation was sufficient in itself. in other words, the magical text acts as a “performative” utterance (in the austinian sense) in which the words that describe the action may entirely replace the action as its functional equivalent. moreover, descriptions of actions taking place in the “real” world in these texts often fluidly merge with actions in the “other,” magical world. in descriptions of the latter, principles of so-called contagious and imitative magic can be seen to 8 operate. in this case, the text recounts how the subject beats a bull on the horn with his (metaphorically designated) phallus; obviously, physical contact with the bull’s horn must ensure that qualities of hardness and steadfastness are conferred to the male member. these qualities are further enhanced through the simultaneous use of the metaphorical appellation “bough” (viaz) and the corresponding association of the male member with a wooden stick. finally, the text contains the standard formula of magical parallelism как... так..., which enables the transfer of properties from one object to the other and whose description of the desired state of the world performs and creates that very state. this is much like the kako… onako… construction in our previous text sample. it is important to stress that such correlative-comparative formulae allow for direct reference to the extratextual object (in this last case, a fantastical bull) and, in this sense, also function indexically. the use of person deixis – pronouns referring to speaker and addressee – also fulfills and further underscores this function [deictics are, after all, referential indexes: silverstein 1976; hanks 1992]. in another russian example, the verbal text addresses actual ants used in the performance of the charm, comparing them to sheep: чтоб овцы не дохли, ты сходи в лес да муравьища принеси. да берешь как муравьища-то, говори: царь муравей, царица муравьица, как вы водитеся да копитеся, да добрых людей не стыдитеся, так же бы мои рыжанюшки, беланюшки, чернанюшки копились, плодились, добрых людей не стыдились. [rzz: 180, nr. 993] [to keep sheep from dying, go to the woods and bring back a bunch of ants. collect the ants saying: tsar ant, tsarina she-ant, as you multiply and assemble, without feeling ashamed in front of good people, so may you, my little red ones, white ones, black ones assemble, multiply, without feeling ashamed in front of good people.] as has become clear, the typical procedure consists in the juxtaposition and rapprochement of descriptions of two actions, the structures of two situations, or the properties of two phenomena, one of which serves as a model for the other. similar devices of “comparison and correlation” also serve as a blueprint for numerous shorter russian formulae, e.g. стань кровь в ране, как вода в иордане “stand still, blood in the wound, like the water in the jordan” [pz: 176]. as seen perhaps most clearly in the bosnian example treated above, it serves as a hands-on tool for iconic (and indexical) articulation of the intended pragmatic effect of magical texts. in general, however, any charm or incantation formula can be seen to operate iconically to the extent that it historical poetics and pragmatics of slavic charms folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 9 describes, in one or other way, a desired state of the world surrounding the speaking subject. 3. indexicality: textual waymarks to extratextual reality when the analytical emphasis shifts to the “indexical” side of indexical iconicity, various contextual, intertextual, and metatextual aspects come into view. three main aspects will be touched upon in this section: the interaction between verbal and other codes in the (situational) context of ritual performance; “metapragmatics” and folk motivations for the text and its performance; and intergeneric dialogue, i.e. meaningful mutual reference between ritual texts and other genres of folklore. we will then look at the ways in which charms may index broader sociocultural and historical contexts. 3.1. text and action in context: indexical iconicity first, there is the question of the interaction of the verbal text with the non-verbal components and codes of ritual, a topic already broached several times in our discussion. the verbal components of charms may parallel or complement the ritual act (including manipulations of objects, by persons) to various degrees, ranging from non-correspondence to complete “synonymy”. thus, the plot or situation of the verbal text may poetically be constructed as a metaphor or icon of the ritual act (i.e. the actional co-text), or the verbal text may form a partial or complete description or “glossing” of the ritual act [a point investigated on several occasions by slavic ethnolinguists, e.g. vinogradova 1993; tolstoi and tolstaia 1994]. also, the connection between the verbal text and its actional co-text (and situational context) may be signaled by the use of deictics. the “iconic” text samples discussed above are also “indexical” in this sense because their intratextual parallelisms (comparisons, correlations stated in the text) simultaneously form icons and indexes of the parallelism between text and extratextual reality, thus setting up a direct link with the text’s performative context. closely related to previously cited “correlative” bipartite formulas of the type “as x, so y” are formulas of the type “not x, but y,” which usually consist in the description of an actual action and its subsequent purposeful magical reorientation or reconceptualization by the speaking subject. the following, for example, is a highly poetical text, the function of which is to ensure love and happiness for women in their marital life. the text 10 sample also includes the introductory (metatextual) instructions for the charm’s practical use: как спать с мужем ляжете, да как начнет он -, говори потихоньку, чтоб он не слышал: не похоть отдаешь, а сам свое тело мне, рабе божьей (имя). предаешь тело в тело, кровь в кровь, сердце в сердце, любовь в любовь. аминь. [rzz, nr. 818, 156] [when you and your husband lie down to sleep, and when he begins to […], then say quietly, without him hearing you: not your lust, but your own body you give to me, god’s servant x. you surrender body into body, blood into blood, heart into heart, love into love. amen.] parallelism between text and extratextual reality, however, is not necessarily expressed through the use of particular formulaic syntactic constructions. this is illustrated by the following charm from the kirov region aimed at ensuring the fertility of cattle. its record also contains fragments of metatextual/metapragmatic (8) commentary as attested by the informant: мужики стайку обкладывали: давай, павловна, неси всяких щепочек на оклад. чтоб скотина велась, чтоб каждая коровушка мастью велась и черная, и красная, и всякая. чтоб какую ни привела, каждая велась. для этого щепки кладут сосновые, еловые и разные. [rzz, nr. 994, 180]. [the men would lay [wood chips] around the stable: come on, pavlovna, bring all kinds of wood chips to lay in a circle. so that the cattle may multiply, so that cows of every color may calve the black one, the red one, and every one. so that whichever color she calves, may thrive [and multiply]. therefore they lay chips of pine wood, fir wood, and various other wood.] 3.2. metatext, motivation, and metapragmatics: indexes of normative stance the last two text samples direct our attention to the problem of folk motivations and the metapragmatic discourse of charms and to the question of the relationship between the magical text and its “metatexts.” due analytical attention to indexical relations in charm performance may shed further light on the ethnographic conditions in which magical texts have been recorded [as well as on the “folk worldview” itself that frames the attestation of such texts: cf. vinogradova 1995; tolstaia 2002]. in the last example, the rendition of discourse by the ethnographer-folklorist and/or editor of the charm collection constructs the second sentence (italicized) as the verbal charm “proper” and the surrounding discourse as a descriptive, metatextual, and metapragmatic “frame” for the charm. at the same time it unites the two as co-texts in a higher-order text of the historical poetics and pragmatics of slavic charms folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 11 genre “written folkloric record.” while it is questionable whether this editorial rendition accurately conveys the boundaries between the original charm text and its metatextual environment, it is clear that the described ritual-magic act as a whole consists in the verbal and objectactional equation of wood chips (of various kinds) with cows and calves (of various colors). a closer look at the structure and composition of descriptive discourse in its entirety (i.e. the published folkloric record that unites the text and metatext of the charm) discloses several orders of communicative and interactive interpersonal relations, indexed by that very structure and composition, each of which entails corresponding metapragmatic frames or stances with respect to the verbal charm “proper”: the communicative relation between the woman informant (named as “pavlovna”) and the ethnographer-folklorist to whom she addresses a description as well as a motivation of ritual practice (i.e. a metapragmatic commentary in the last sentence); the act of “reporting,” in which the reporter may or may not have modeled her narrative to the perceived needs of the addressee – in this case, the folklorist as a passive non-participant in the ritual described; the “present” metatextual stance of the informant towards past ritual action and discourse in which she was a participant (i.e. a relation between a self in the present and a self in the past), a fact which grants authority to her status as informant and lends reliability to the direct quotation provided (of discourse addressed to her by others, as well as of the magic formula in question) as well as to the “folk motivation” offered (at the moment of attestation); the interactive relation between two types of participants in the described ritual performance, which forms the direct co-textual (within the reporting discourse) and contextual (in the related performative situation) frame of the verbal charm proper; here, the quoted verbal instructions of the men to the woman in itself metapragmatically frame and motivate the ensuing magical formula (performed also by the men), while the sentence immediately following the charm may be regarded either as an extension of the original formula (misread in that respect by the folklorist/editor) or as an explicating paraphrase by the informant; ultimately, the interpretive metatextual relation between the editor and the published folkloric record and its particular visual rendition. verbal instructions on how to perform charms or incantations represent a particular genre of folkloric metatexts. usually they consist 12 of short recommendations such as “repeat three times and spit after each time” or “speak over the potion, then let the person drink.” complex magical procedures have also been attested, e.g. with instructions to catch a frog, leave it in an ants’ nest to be eaten away, and retain from its carcass certain bones that will serve as ingredients in love magic. such descriptions usually pertain to actions that are not represented in the verbal texts of the charms themselves. these highly interesting and informative metapragmatic texts of east slavic and south slavic folk magic, it seems, have not yet been the object of special study. one of the main problems with such enterprise is that it is hard, especially in older folkloric collections, to distinguish between “original” folk discourse as recorded from informants and the folklorist’s own descriptions and explications of the verbal ritual in question as they appear in metatextual commentaries. more often than not, collectors of folklore materials have omitted indications as to the exact provenance of the metapragmatic instructions and recommendations included with verbal charms. in the case of texts of charms and incantations from old notebooks written by the “bearers of folklore” themselves, however, it is reasonable to assume that the instructions are provided directly by the performers of the charms and that they describe – and thus also transmit – the actional part of the charm or incantation ritual. even then, these performers may have omitted parts of the verbal performance that they themselves considered obvious, such as customary introductory prayers. as our discussion above of the folkloric record from the kirov region demonstrates, one should be careful to at least take into account the different possible communicative and interactional layers indexed by the texts or text records. acknowledging the inevitable formative influence of folklorists and editors on informants’ performances or reproductions of the magical text, and including their commentaries and metatextual monitorings in an evaluation of the integral textual “space” of the resulting folkloric record, may certainly hold more interpretive value than preemptively excluding such “second-order” interlocutors and co-participants from analysis. taking the latter course would yield nothing more than the delusion of dealing with an “original and undiluted verbal expression of traditional folk culture.” apart from this, there are other, formally distinct types of “metapragmatic formulae” which have the verbal charm itself as their object, framing and articulating its performance on the metalevel while at the same time forming a further constituent part of the ritual text. these are, as it were, “charm enhancing charms.” the following type of historical poetics and pragmatics of slavic charms folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 13 confirmative formula, for example, is frequently found in the final part of russian charms: словам моим ключ и замок; что переговорила или недоговорила, что мастер переучил или недоучил, слова мои будь наперед поставлены. [e.g. rzz, nr. 557] [my words be under lock and key; should i have said aught too much or too little, should my teacher have taught me [to speak] too much or too little, then let my words take precedence [lit. be put forward].] interestingly, written charms and incantations that contain such final formulae are not infrequently found at the end of charm notebooks or collections [a. l. toporkov, oral communication]. the formulae may thus function as “closures” not only for individual texts of charms, but for entire corpuses as well. finally, referring back to the range of iconic-indexical relations between verbal text and non-verbal components in charm and incantation rituals, we may take note of the peculiar metapragmatic potential of charm texts themselves to incorporate the rules and the actional context of their performance. this is best illustrated by those types of ritualmagic procedures in which the text runs parallel to the action, progressively describing it and stating its magical aims by explicating its metaphorical meaning. thus, many slavic incantation rituals involve acts of tying or knotting that are “glossed” by the verbal charms accompanying them. serbian incantations used by women to gain control over their husband’s or lover’s sexual potency present a salient example. one such spell from northeastern serbia requires spinning a thread of about 15 centimeters from hemp unto which the woman has previously transferred some of her partner’s semen after sexual intercourse. the woman then progressively ties nine knots in the thread while declaiming the following charm: zavezujem konac. [i am tying the thread. ne vezujem konac već vezujem x; i am not tying the thread, i am tying x; vezujem mu pamet, vezujem mu misli, i am tying his mind, tying his thoughts, vezujem mu ruke, vezujem mu vene, i am tying his hands, tying his veins, vezujem mu k[urac] i m[uda]. i am tying his c..k and his b...s. kada drugoj bude iš‘o when he goes to another woman k[urac] nek mu splasne! may his c..k droop!] [divac 1989: 88] 14 from the perspective of historical-pragmatic text analysis, what is important to note here is that information and instructions concerning the accompanying actional components of ritual performance (apart from the actional prelude to the charm) are encoded largely by the verbal text itself. it describes the concrete manipulation of the thread and measures its verses or verse parts (syntagmata of [za]vezujem + object) by the tying of individual knots in the actional code, the number of knots corresponding to the number of object-accusatives mentioned in the text. apart from this, the text obviously contains the necessary thematic and motivational reference to sexual activity, male sexual (im)potency and (the prevention of) adultery, which conveys the aim of the entire incantation. in this coding of performative rules by the verbal text, two orders of indexical iconicity can be seen to operate. the text does not merely connect to its performative context by describing, translating, and co-constructing the deployment of the “actional text” (of which it forms a structural metaphor); most importantly, it does so both on the “token” level – i.e. for this particular instance of its performance, as recorded by the ethnographer-folklorist – and on the “type” or generic level, indexing the performative rules for the ritual genre in question. the latter sign function is distinctly metapragmatic and normative: the text in this capacity holds a blueprint for its future performances, in which the corresponding object-actional components and surroundings – the performative (as well as social) context in which it is to be embedded – can at least partially be (re)constructed and generated from the formulaic expression in the verbal code.(9) 3.3. intertexts: indexing cultural values through the dialogue of genres apart from metatextuality, there are also intertextual relations to be taken into account. dialogical relations between verbal charms and other genres of verbal folk culture represent a further aspect of indexicality. this aspect is interesting in itself, but also informative with respect to the broader “social universe” in which these texts originate and operate. to illustrate this we turn to the realm of protective magical measures against wolves in bosnian / croatian / serbian folk tradition. a widely attested traditional protective measure against wolves and other wild animals in the western balkans is the periodical prohibition of domestic textile works, notably operations with wool (as a metonymic sign of sheep), often accompanied by the ritual shutting or closing of objects that are associated with mouths and teeth. carding boards figure most historical poetics and pragmatics of slavic charms folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 15 prominently among these ritualized objects. these are the pairs of wooden blades set with iron or copper “teeth” between which wool is combed to disentangle it for spinning – and which are hooked up together after work. in this context, consider the variants of an imperative charm formula in heptasyllabic verse form, attested in southwest serbia and eastern montenegro. it is traditionally shouted by herdsmen on christmas eve as they or the mistress of the house hook up the cards after the cattle have been driven through between them: sklopi baba grebeni! [shut your cards, woman! [vlahović 1933: 51] sklopi baba grebeni, shut your cards, woman, zubi su ti medeni! your teeth are made of copper!] [kostić 1988-89: 76]; the attestation of the first variant from montenegro is accompanied by the ethnographer’s note that the ritual is performed “so that likewise the wolf would shut its jaws when he comes among the sheep,” which elucidates the figurative and pragmatic meaning of the text – i.e., its indexical-iconic function – in unequivocal terms. the second “verse” in the extended second variant represents a description of the (“woman’s”) cards as “toothed” objects. the metaphoric association “cards – jaws” is additionally emphasized through the contiguity of grebeni “cards” and zubi “teeth” in the text’s linear sequence, while the intended effect of the verbal ritual (“shutting the wolf”s mouth”) is underscored by a parallelistic linking of sklopi and zubi in the two heptasyllabic lines that make up the distich. as part of the broader ritual context of its performance, the formula contains obvious reference to carding as a traditional female domestic activity and to the ban on carding as one of the most frequent calendrical prohibitions observed against wolves. indeed, in the causal-logic and denotational sense, the “shutting of the wolf’s mouth” here is effectuated through a literal command to shut the cards (i.e. to let them rest, not to work with them), directed by herdsmen (it is they who perform the text) to women. so far, nothing much is new. the sociocultural meaning of this ritual-magic formula, however, acquires an extra dimension through its intertextual connections with the variants of an otherwise rather opaque proverb about female laziness, namely: otpor babi grebeni da su joj zupci mjedeni [the copper teeth are the woman’s [pej.] reason not to card] [karadžić 1965 [1849]: 230],(10) and uzrok babi grebeni [the cards are the woman’s [pej.] reason] (followed by the clarification da ne 16 može ići na grebenanje [for not being able to go out to card]; ibid.: 296). here we have a clear instance of intergeneric dialogue, in which the ritual-magic and the paremical text (intertextually) “model” and (metatextually) “comment upon” each other. the two share the motif of “not working with the cards” as an instantiation of “inactivity.” this “inactivity” is played out in its neutral sense of “exemption from work” in the protective magic charm and in the pejorative sense of “laziness” in the proverb. considered in its intertextual and metatextual ramifications, the ritual-magic text under discussion encodes sociocultural information that reaches beyond the direct (situational) context of ritual as goaloriented, multi-modal (verbal, object-actional, personal etc.), semiotic action. thus, apart from serving as a poetically optimized magical speech act for protection against wolves, the formula ultimately represents an index of the cultural value attached to female domestic work and the ritual responsibility that is correspondingly assigned to women. it also conveys the idea of a double normative (and “gendered”) sociocultural valuation of “inactivity” as “authorized exemption from work” vs. “unwarranted laziness.”(11) 3.4. magic charms and/in history: social hierarchies and symbolic geographies charm and incantation texts, as has become increasingly clear, contain an abundance of pointers to the situational, social, cultural, and historical contexts of their performance. as a further aspect of sociohistorical context, charms also provide materials for the description and, from the performer’s point of view, construction of social hierarchies. one way in which social hierarchies can be presented in charm texts is as parallels to hierarchies in the animal world. a typical example is the following russian text, which was pronounced before entering court or before confronting the authorities: вставайте, волки и медведи, и все мелкие звери, лев-зверь сам к вам идет [stand up, wolves and bears, and all small wild animals, the lion-beast himself is coming to you] [maikov 1994: 154, nr. 348]. evidently, by comparing himself to the “king of animals” (the lion), the utterer of the charm placed himself at the top of the social ladder, thus hoping to bend the authorities to his will. another formula pronounced in similar contexts involves the comparison of the performer to a wolf: я волк, ты овца; съем я тебя; проглочу я тебя, бойся меня! [i am wolf, you are sheep; i will eat you; i will swallow you down, fear me!] [maikov 1994: 155, nr. 353]. no less interesting and indicative are enumerations of categories of “dangerous” historical poetics and pragmatics of slavic charms folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 17 people, encounters with whom are considered to be unfavorable on account of the evil eye and other afflictions. these most frequently included are priests and monks, dissipated (“loose-haired”) girls and women, witches, and persons with peculiar (anomalous) physical characteristics. in essence, these lists inventory the people that were “alien,” “strange,” or “suspect” from the perspective of traditional peasant society in a given period of history. a case in point is the following text, in which the archangel shoots at wasting disease and illnesses: […] напущенныя от мужика, от волхуна, от кария, от чорныя, от черешныя, от бабы самокрутки, от девки простоволоски, от еретников, от клеветников, от еретниц, от клеветниц, от чистых и нечистых, от женатых и неженатых, от глухих, от слепых, от красных, от черных, от всякаго роду русских и не русских, от семидесяти языков. [maikov 1994: 82, nr. 211] [[…] inflicted by man, by a sorcerer, by brown eyes, by black eyes, by cherry eyes, by the licentious woman, by the dissipated girl, by evil wizards, by slanderers, by sorceresses, by slanderers [f.], by clean and unclean folk, by the married and unmarried, by the deaf, by the blind, by the red, by the black, by any kind or race, russian and non-russian, of the seventy nations [of the earth].] finally, as indexes of historical context in their own right, one may consider references to monarchs and other rulers (such as ivan the terrible and the pope of rome) in incantation texts. from the same texts, it is easy to reconstruct lists of historically important towns and cities (for the east slavs: moscow, kiev, novgorod, murom, kazan’, astrakhan, etc.), as well as the sacral geography of (orthodox) christian world view, viz. palestine, jerusalem, zion, sinai, tabor, golgotha, kiev as the religious center of rus’, etc. [see yudin 1997]. conclusions indexical iconicity has been recognized by michael silverstein and others as the semiotic mode of ritual par excellence, a mode of signification which accounts for most of the performative efficacy of verbal-ritual activity and traditional oratory [silverstein 2003: 203, 2004: 627-633; cf. tambiah 1985: 155-157; parmentier 1993: 281-284]. in technical poetic-performative terms, indexical iconicity consists in the intended figurative (iconic, metaphoric) and implicative (indexical, metonymic) relation between the poetic structuring and stylization of the denotational verbal-ritual text on the one hand and, on the other, the 18 “interactional text-in-context” and the strategy of ritual performance. by extension indexical iconicity includes the cultural concepts, valorizations, ideologies and world views that inform the ritual text [cf. silverstein 2003: 203ff.; 2004: 627-633]. rather than merely adding terminological sophistication to a discussion on the poetics-pragmatics interface and form-meaning-function covariation in ritual text/ performance [cf. bauman & briggs 1990: 79], “indexical iconicity” can usefully serve as an overarching concept for the various ways in which poetically stylized language in ritual performance – in further covariation and interaction with other semiotic modes of expression – purposefully articulates socio-cultural values and strategies, or represents “discursive cultural action.” as such, it may incorporate ethnolinguistic and ethnosemiotic analyses, as well as broader poeticand symbolicanthropological views on ritual as the (poetic) acting out of culturally relevant metaphoric predications. these, in turn, are seen to function as plans for meaningful ritual behavior [fernandez 1986; cf. the notion of “performative blueprints” proposed by tambiah [1985: 2-4]].(12) one of the original objectives of this paper was to show how ethnopoetic “indexical-iconic” analyses and revaluations of verbal charms may prove fruitful for the recovery or reconstruction of elements of (situational, performative, social, cultural) context which have not been recorded alongside texts in ethnographic description. does a poeticpragmatic reanalysis of these texts help to bring hidden aspects of the context to light, or does it enable us to further critically evaluate folk motivations and existing ethnographic descriptions of verbal charms? even with our cursory discussion of less than a fraction of the available empirical material, we hope to have shown that such revaluations may indeed help to qualify and reassess the attested contexts and metatexts of verbal charms, depending on the degree of their (in)congruence with the poetics and pragmatics of the magical text itself. in many cases, it may remain unclear whether the available contextual and metatextual information was provided by the original performer or a “folk” informant (in which case, in fact, it also becomes co-text), or whether it constitutes the ethnographer’s or folklorist’s objectifying explanation. due sensitivity to mechanisms of indexical iconicity and to metapragmatic indexicality in particular may unveil aspects and dimensions of sociocultural and historical context which are encoded in the style and structure of formulaic discourse itself, and which thus form part of the sociocultural memory of these magical texts. attentive poetic-pragmatic readings of charm and incantation records may also disclose various historical poetics and pragmatics of slavic charms folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 19 layers and orders of communicative and interactive relations that help to widen our discourse-analytic and sociohistorical perspective on the folkloric and folkloristic (co)construction of the “traditional ritual-magic text”. in light of this, slavic charms and incantations represent a challenging and rewarding corpus for further in-depth investigation into the value of ritual-magic texts as poetic artifacts and as documents of social history. if nothing else, the material presented in this paper has provided us with the opportunity to stress and reiterate the importance of studying the poetics and pragmatics (i.e. the pragmatic poetics) of texts for an apt understanding of their performative and sociocultural contexts. because of their obvious practical and goal-oriented nature, magical charms represent a privileged site for the observation of the functional interplay of poetic form and content as situated in, and connected to, contexts. moreover, this manner of analysis of magical texts may ultimately provide insights into the pragmatic workings of verbal discourse that are applicable to the study of other speech and literary genres.(13) notes 1 see e.g. toporov 1993; radenković 1996a-b; yudin 1997, 2001; tolstaia 1999a-b, 2005; vel’mezova 2004; toporkov 2005; agapkina 2005; niebrzegowska-bartmińska 2007. in anglo-american scholarship, see conrad 1991, 1999; ryan 1999. 2 among others, see hymes 1972, 1981, 2003; bauman 1977, 1992; tambiah 1985; fernandez 1986; bauman & briggs 1990; silverstein 1976, 1996, 2003; duranti & goodwin 1992; silverstein & urban 1996. 3 the theoretical-methodological framework described here is largely similar to the one provided in a previous article on south slavic ritual folklore, see plas 2006: 249-253. 4 we will make no special analytical distinction here between “charms” and “incantations”, loosely reserving the term “incantation” for more elaborate ritual-magic texts, or procedures that may contain several shorter “charm” texts. 5 for an ethnolinguistic treatment of slavic apotropaic texts which employs a somewhat different terminological apparatus but basically adopts a similar pragmatic perspective, see levkievskaia 2002. 20 6 this and the previous text sample are drawn from the empirical corpus of a larger research project on wolf symbolism in western balkan ritual folklore, an outline of which is given in plas [2003]. 7 the introduction is usually of the type “стану я, раб божий, благословясь, пойду перекрестясь…” 8 the terms “metatextual” and “metapragmatic” will be used as interchangeable synonyms here, metatextual discourse being also metapragmatic insofar as it concerns aspects of the use or performance of verbal text – by speakers/performers – in actional contexts, rather than just being “text about text”. 9 to be clear, it is not our intent here to downplay the meaningful role of other object-actional components of the incantation ritual which the verbal text does not describe or index, and which, in this case, were conscientiously recorded by the ethnographer. thus, in a second phase of the ritual, the woman pulls the knotted thread through a tube she has crafted from elderwood for the purpose. she then stops both ends of the tube with sheep’s dung while uttering the formula “zatvorila sam povez,/ i seme/ ovčijom balegom/ kurac nek mu smekša!” [“i have closed what has been tied up,/ and the semen/ with sheep’s dung/ may his cock become slack!”]. the tube is eventually hidden and left to be forgotten above the front doorpost of the house [divac 1989: 88]. note that our commentaries as to the first verbal part of the ritual apply just as well to the formula performed in this second part. 10 literally, “to the woman [pej.] the cards are the impediment [to carding, the reason being] that her teeth [i.e. the teeth of her cards] are made of copper” – or, in other words, “the woman [pej.] claims she cannot card because her [cards’] teeth are made of copper”. 11 for additional (technical) commentary on the mechanism of mutual intertextual borrowing between these two text types, see plas 2006: 259-261. 12 incidentally, it is in indexical iconicity as well that the “illocutionary force” of ritual texts as “speech acts” can be taken to reside [compare bauman & briggs 1990: 63-64; for linguistic-pragmatic “speech act” approaches to ritual-magic folklore in slavic ethnolinguistics, see e.g. tolstaia 1992, yudin 2001, levkievskaia 2002]. as silverstein [1979: 208-216] as well as bourdieu [1982: 25n4, 69-73] have reminded us, “illocutionary force” is not intrinsic to the words of the performative utterance as such. this performative quality consists in the utterance effectively indexing situational and sociocultural context, in particular: 1) the framework that organizes the relations between the historical poetics and pragmatics of slavic charms folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 21 participants in communicative/discursive interaction and gives authority to the performer to use texts authoritatively; and 2) the set of poetic/pragmatic (and linguistic) rules by which the text can be judged to be a fitting ritual-magic tool for the given situation. 13 thus, similar pragmatic goal-oriented uses of poetic and rhetoric devices may be observed in political-ideological speeches or pamphlets, to name just one productive genre in the slavic world. on indexical iconicity in political rhetoric, see especially parmentier [1993] references 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[charms in russian manuscript tradition, 15th-19th centuries] москва: индрик. 26 toporov, vladimir n. 1993. топоров в.н. “об индоевропейской заговорной традиции (избранные главы)” [on the indo-european charm tradition (selected chapters)] в исследования в области балто-славянской духовной культуры. заговор [studies in baltoslavic spiritual culture: charms] москва: наука, 3–103. vel’mezova e. v. 2004. вельмезова е.в. чешские заговоры. исследования и тексты [czech charms: studies and texts]. москва: индрик. vinogradova, liudmila n. 1993. виноградова л.н. “семантика фольклорного текста и ритуала: типы взаимодействий” [the semantics of folklore text and ritual: types of interaction] в история, культура, этнография и фольклор славянских народов: xi международный съезд славистов. москва: наука, 210-220. vinogradova, liudmila n. 1995. виноградова л.н. “мотивировки обрядовых действий: стереотипы религиозного и магического мышления” [verbal motivations of ritual actions: stereotypes of religious and magical thought] in folklor, sacrum, religia. j. bartmiński j. and m. jasińska-wojtkowska, eds. lublin: instytut europy środkowo-wschodniej, 52-58. vlahović m. 1933. lov u kolašinu [hunting in kolašin]. beograd: izdanja etnografskog muzeja. yudin a. v. 1997. юдин a. v. ономастикон русских заговров: имена собственные в русском магическом фольклоре [an onomasticon of russian charms: proper names in russian magical folklore]. москва: монф. yudin a. v. 2001. юдин a. v. “магические перформативы в заговорах и календарно-обрядовых песнях восточных славян” [magical performatives in charmes and calendaric ritual songs of the east slavs] etnolingwistyka 13: 139-148. yudin a. v. 2004. юдин a. v. “о роли прагматики в разграничении фольклорных жанров” [on the role of pragmatics in the demarcation of folklore genres], in dzieło literackie jako dzieło literackie. a. majmieskułow, ed. bygdoszcz: wyd. akademii bydgoskiej, 125-136. microsoft word fall04w.doc 14 the priest in the village wedding (ethnographic notes) m. a. lobanov the russian institute for the history of arts, st petersburg the participation of the clergy in domestic wedding rituals, primarily in village celebrations, is less well known than the church marriage ceremony, which is conducted in accord with a rite that has been worked out in detail. contemporary research on the wedding ritual completely ignores domestic ceremonies at which a priest is present;(1) questionnaires designed for folklore expeditions do not contain questions aimed at collecting such data. in 1978-1980, however, while gathering ethnographic materials on ritual traditions in the nizhnii novgorod province, i discovered to my surprise that it was in fact possible to study this topic. informants in their seventies interviewed during that period had been born between 1905 and 1908. as children they had witnessed pre-revolutionary weddings and had themselves married in the 1920's before collectivization took place. at that time traditional peasant life as a whole was still somehow being maintained. though we had drawn up an extremely detailed questionnaire on wedding customs, like others it did not include any questions about the participation of the priest in domestic rituals. intrigued by the depth of the questionnaire, local residents began wracking their brains and recounting much that was not included in the questionnaire itself. as a result, it was necessary to add new questions. and so in the southernmost part of nizhnii novgorod province, in the village of saldamanov maidan in lukoianov district, local women provided t. a. novichkova and myself (who were working as a team in the village) with the following account: on the day of the religious marriage ceremony,(2) as soon as the bride was dressed in her wedding clothes, two strong men went off to the church to fetch the icon of the virgin mary. they had to carry the large, heavy icon on towels. one end of the towel was tied to the fastening below the icon, while the other was thrown over the shoulder. before the icon walked a boy with a torch. the bells were also ringing, since that was the norm when the virgin mary icon was carried out of the church. as the same time, gathered at the home of the groom, the members of his wedding party (in russian: poezzhane, druzhina etc.) waited, while the godfather (in the local wedding ritual the godfather acted as a best man of sorts) went to get the priest. in his presence the groom's parents blessed their son. at the front of the wedding train (3) rode a man on horseback carrying a rifle; behind in the first cart was the priest, while the groom rode in the next cart with his godfather. when they led the bride to the groom (once he had arrived at the bride's home) and stood them side by side, the priest conducted a special service (moleben). that was the reason for bringing the icon of the virgin mary from the church. the icon was placed on a bench. tables, which were positioned close together, were moved apart, so that everyone had a clear view of it. after the service, the bride's parents blessed the future spouses before then icon, and once this had been done, it was returned to the church. one of the men present carried it back; according to our informants, specifically who did this was not fixed in the ritual. the tables were once again moved together, and the participants in the wedding walked behind the tables and seated themselves. refreshments were served. members of the wedding procession received just folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 15 some wine, but no food. a light appetizer was served to the priest and the deacon (who seemingly had arrived specifically for the service; our informants made no further mention of him). refreshments now over, they all rose and set off for the wedding train. the priest went first and once again sat in the first cart. if there were only two carts, then he rode together with the groom and his godfather. if there were three, then he went separately in the first wagon, while behind him were the groom and the godfather and in the next, the bride with the matchmaker, one of the women who had arrived with the groom. upon the completion of the marriage ceremony in the church, the priest went to the groom's father's home with the newlyweds. here, in southern nizhnii novgorod province, it was the norm after the ceremony either to conduct the newlyweds to the neighbors' house (v shabry: to the neighbors, dial.), or to the bathhouse, where the bride was given the hairstyle of a married woman (bab’ia pricheska). the priest accompanied them, walking in front while performing a "water blessing", that is sprinkling holy water. after that he returned home without staying for the wedding feast.(4) those who have followed published research on the wedding ritual in the last decades will realize the rarity of the wedding traditions preserved by the residents of saldamanov maidan. it raises the question as to whether domestic wedding rituals involving the participation of the priest disappeared from traditional life and memory as a result of the anti-religious campaigns of the 1920's, the ousting of the clergy and their repression and the destruction of churches in the 1930's. but if we recall data about the wedding ritual published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then we find the same picture; on the whole the participation of religious figures in domestic wedding ritual acts was uncharacteristic even then; witness the following clear example; between 1850 and 1852 the "moscow province gazette" published descriptions of weddings from practically every region of this central russian province. these descriptions were recently reissued in book form [ananicheva, samodelova 1997: 37-136], but not a single reference to a priest appears in any of the descriptions, other than in the church ceremony. nevertheless in nineteenth-century wedding descriptions, fragments of the material that interests me are there to be discovered. but they are definitely fragments. thus, in the new series of the collected songs of p.v. kireevskii, which includes recordings from 1830 to 1840, the priest as a participant in domestic ritual acts of the wedding features in only one of the fourteen weddings described [kireevskii 1911]. in p. v. shein's the great russians (the earliest materials on the wedding in this work were recorded in the 1850's) the priest plays a similar role in four of the twenty-six weddings described [shein 1900]. in the second part of tereshchenko's everyday life of the russian folk, which evidently contains even earlier material including a description of a don cossack wedding reprinted from kornilovich's russian antiquity [“svadebnye obriady” 1824: 298–335], there are three such mentions of a priest [tereshchenko 1848]. a complete picture of publications on the wedding ritual in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cannot be given in this article, but there is no sense in this mass of material that the priest is one of the typical participants in pre-marital rites at the bride's home, on an equal with the best man or the godfather acting as master of ceremonies.(5) as a whole, the general tendency is for figures of a religious calling to be omitted from the domestic wedding rituals of the common 16 people: the peasants and petty bourgeois (meshchane). and this is not so much the result of anti-religious campaigns of the soviet period, but a consequence of much earlier processes. thus it appeared that i had at my disposal a few descriptions of wedding ritual featuring a priest participating in domestic ceremonies. the most detailed recordings were made in the central volga region (the iur'ev-pol'skii district of vladimir province, the sergach and lukoianov districts in the south of nizhnii novgorod province, and the elabuga district in tatarstan), as well as in perm’ province. in these two regions data on priests authenticating ritual acts occurring in the bride’s home has been recorded three or four times. there are also isolated instances of this type from novgorod province [zimnev, 1865], including the coachman's village of mshaga [lapin, 1995: 171-72] as well as from the district town of pinega and the don cossacks. it would appear that the rituals of interest to us did not just possess a regional character, which might be explained not only by the historical circumstances of the colonization of russia, but were also prompted by demographic factors, which are no less important, and possibly even more so. the participation of the priest in domestic wedding rituals is reflected in records made in large parish villages, in district cities and possibly in small villages contiguous to them. both the novgorod village of mshaga, located on a major ancient highway, and the district city of pinega belong to this category of fairly populous centers. for example, v. a.lapin’s designation of the village of mshaga as having not a rural but a "suburban" (slobodskii) or semi-urban, semivillage culture is telling [lapin 1995: 171-72]. in villages far from churches it would be difficult to conduct weddings according to such a rite. it is also possible, judging from the material on northern russia, where great distances separate parish centers and villages attached to them (the olonets, archangel and volodga provinces), that this is why the priest was not customarily present in village homes for wedding ritual procedures. there is likely to be an additional explanation for this fact; inviting the priest might have come into fashion later in the russian north, with the fashion only catching on in populous locations, parish centers and villages close to them; meantime the ritual of distant villages remained true to older traditions [zelenin 1991: 341]. although this tradition has been found somewhat more frequently in the volga region and the urals, the number of instances, however, also does allow it to be seen as characteristic of wedding ritual tradition in one region or another as a whole. therefore, the question of the development of the tradition, as it would normally be resolved by ethnographic science, turns out to be fairly complicated; it is not possible to add much here to the calculation of its territorial diffusion and frequency. it turned out that i had at my disposal data that fairly definitively outlines two wedding episodes where a priest was required. first, the priest witnessed the betrothal. when the agreement was concluded, then "they invited a priest, who authenticates the handshake(6) by reading from the bible over them (the future spouses m. l.)" [tereshchenko 1848: 267]. in the sloboda district of viatka province a most impressive banquet then ensues: "when all the guests are have been seated, the groom comes out with the bride, who carries trays laden with cookies and nuts, offers them to the guests as the priest gives his blessing ... after dinner the priest reads the couple the betrothal prayer, and the guests leave for their homes" [shein 1900: 472]. prugavin, describing a wedding in the district center of pinega in 1850, notes that in the groom’s house, before those would folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 17 accompanying him set off for the engagement ceremony, they all sat at the table in a pre-determined order, most likely to receive a blessing. they then sat in the same order at the bride's home to observe as her father inquired of the groom: "is it this bride that you love?" his future father-in-law thus asks the same questions at his home during the engagement that the priest asks later during the church ceremony. the domestic ritual of betrothal seems very close to the church ritual, although according to the author of this ethnographic description, the priest was not present at the former [shein 1900: 392]. secondly, the priest was at the head of the wedding procession formed by members of the groom's party on the day of the ceremony, beginning when the wedding train set off from the groom's home and ending with the rites at his father-in-law's home, which symbolize the transition of the girl into "a woman's state" or the anticipated union of the spouses. this all followed more or less the same plan as in the ritual in saldamanov maidan, but there were also a few small differences. for example, in the wedding customs of shel'bovo village (iur'ev district in vladimir province) the procession was headed not by a rider with a rifle, but by the best man's carriage, behind which came a second carriage where the priest and the groom sat. in this ritual the transfer of the bride to the wedding train was preceded by gifts from her, first to the priest, then to members of the wedding procession and only then "is the candle lit, dostoino est’'(7) sung and the prayer of dismissal pronounced by the priest" [shein 1900: 667]. after the ceremony they all "go to the groom's house on foot: the priest wears the epitrakhil’ (a type of ribbon worn during divine service m. l.), and bears a cross (behind him the newlyweds follow wearing bridal wreaths).(8) throughout the procession they sing religious songs (evidently, the church choir accompanied the procession m. l.)" [shein 1900: 667]. upon return to the home of the groom's father's the priest blesses the woman's headdress, which is then placed upon the bride's head, and thereafter the couple is given some food before the priest takes them to the storeroom (klet’), where they can be with each other. it is in his presence, as can be seen from the description above, that the purchase of the wedding bed, which has been occupied by the wedding party, takes place [shein 1900: 667-68]. in the saldamanov maidan ritual, despite the similarities with the shel'bovo ritual, the bearing of gifts to the priest, the procession on foot wearing bridal wreaths to the groom's home and the blessing of the married woman's headdress the so-called magpie-hat (shapochka-soroka) are all absent. the newlyweds in this village in the nizhnii novgorod region did not go to the house of the groom's father straight from the marriage ceremony, but first visited the neighbors (v shabry). nonetheless, the sanctification of the place where the newlyweds would unite occurred in both villages. in most of the data, there is no mention of a wedding ritual in which the priest is present for a number of different domestic rites, such as the handshake (or engagement) and the accompanying of the couple to the ceremony at the church and then to the groom's father's; either just one or the other occurs. it is only in the wedding ritual from the district city of cherdyn’ [predtechenskii, 1860] that both occur, and here even a third rite is presented in full. here the groom's side visits the bride's home three times in exactly the same order: on the day of the engagement, on the day before the actual wedding (devichnik) and on the day of the ceremony itself. 18 three times the celebrants gather at the groom's home before they go to the bride's. once assembled, they send for the priest. when he arrives, the priest reads a prayer; and then there follows the ritual of kissing the cross and departure for the bride's home. once the priest reaches her house, he goes to the anterior corner and places the cross there, while the other guests remain standing at the door and wait for the bride to come out. when she appears, she first goes to the priest for a blessing. then she stands next to the groom, and gift-giving ensues. at the betrothal the bride gives gifts to the groom and his guests; at the devichnik the groom brings his gift to the bride; while on the wedding day an exchange of gifts is not customary. at the handshake the priest also gets a gift; from rich families he would receive a cloth for a new cassock, from poor families he received at least a handkerchief. however, at all three of the groom and his party’s visits the girls laud the guests with songs, in fact one of the songs is dedicated to the priest: you foot, foot of the church, you, the candle on the altarpiece, you, holy father of ours… dear … (laudatory invocation using the priest’s name and patronymic followed) ty stopa, stopa tserkovnaia, ty svecha prestol’naia, ty sviashchennyi nash batiushka svet … [kireevskii 1911: no. 69] at the devichnik as conducted in cherdyn’, the groom's future mother-in-law was supposed to give the guests pancakes, with the priest receiving the first. in this district city it was the norm on the morning of the wedding day for the groom and bride to go to church for confession and then to their respective homes for the gathering before the ceremony. the transfer of the bride to the wedding train followed the order mentioned above. after dinner at the groom's father's, the priest takes the newlyweds to the storeroom as he sings prayers, makes the sign of the cross over them, drinks the expected glass of red wine and departs for home. meantime the guests continue feasting, awaiting the proclamation of the results of the wedding night. the cherdyn’ traditions described above, the presentation of gifts to the priest during the betrothal and his accompanying of the newlyweds to the storeroom, are also to be observed in the wedding rituals of pinega, the village of shel'bovo in vladimir and the village of saldamanov maidan in nizhnii novgorod province. but they never all occur together in any of these, but just singly in one or the other. wedding songs associated with the priest, including songs of honor, like the one cited above, satirical or "bride's" farewell songs, have never attracted much attention. (9) created in a style in keeping with the ancient poetic traditions of the russian wedding ritual, they, with their traditional character, provide fairly solid evidence that the priest had long participated in domestic wedding, at least in the places where such songs existed. folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 19 in one of the songs, twice recorded in novgorod province, the transfer of the newlywed couple from one house to another, possibly from the home of the bride's father to the home of the groom's father, is described in detail. all the clergy participating in the process are enumerated: that from a house, sir, to another house the rugs are spread, the velvet rugs are spread; that on these rugs, on these velvet rugs priests are walking, and deacons are walking, young singers are walking; after them the young hero is walking, behind him he leads a beautiful maid ... chto ot terema, sudar’, do terema, stlany kovry, stlany barkhatny; chto po tem kovram, po tem barkhatnym idut popy, da idut d’iakony, idut malen’ki, idut pevchiki; po-za nim-to idet dobryi molodets, za soboi on vedet krasny devitsu … [zimnev 1865: 291](10) in another variant of this song, also recorded in the novgorod area, we once again find the transfer from one house to another, but in this instance the bride is alone, accompanied by priests and deacons. judging by this variant, the tradition required that the bride was accompanied to the church for the ceremony by her brother [rimskii-korsakov 1977: no. 73]. but in any case, this song definitely attests to the obligatory participation of the priest in ceremonies held outside the church. in general we should note that the motif of the transfer of the bride from her parents' house is widely developed in wedding songs; however, in the majority of the songs recorded, the groom (as well as his party) or most frequently the matchmaker, rather than a priest, accompany her. this can be seen even in the earliest recordings, for example in the song, "oh a candle burns hot in the house" (akh zharko v tereme svecha gorit), which includes the following lines: ...do not cry, do not cry, my child! i am after all not giving you up to captivity, i am not giving you into captivity, i don't want you to be a captive; after all i am giving you in marriage to a smart, to an intelligent, to a white-skinned, to a red-cheeked (man); after all, i am not releasing you alone, i am not releasing you alone, i am sending a wedding party, 20 i am sending a wedding party, i am providing a matchmaker ... ne plach’, ne plach’ moe ditiatko! uzh ia tebe v polon ne daiu, ne v polon daiu, ne polonit’ khochu; uzh ia tebia zamuzh otdaiu za umnova, za razumnova, za belova, za rumianova; ved’ ia tebia ne odnu pushchu, ne odnu pushchu, poezzhan poshliu, poezzhan poshliu, svakhu snaruzhu … [l’vov-prach, 1955: no. 117] thus it follows that if traditional wedding songs allow us to consider the priest a long-standing participant in wedding procedures taking place outside the church, then these were narrowly localized traditions. however, the following satirical minstrel song about the priest emel’ia attests to a broader diffusion of such rituals involving a priest: the new-fallen snow sank down upon the thawed earth; along this very new snow a wedding was passing, yes, a wedding was passing in seven sleighs, and in the seven sleighs, in the sleighs there were seven each. in the first sleigh sits the priest emel’ia, the priest emel’ia sits, a cross on his belt, a cross on his belt, a sazhen’ and a half (11) long, the string of sleighs drives by, protected by the cross; protecting him who jerks his legs (that is, will die — m. l.) they met this wedding in mar'inskii grove, in mar'inskii grove, at the beautiful pine. this wedding was performed in goat swamp, in goat swamp, at chicken knee. and the best man and the matchmaker are an axe and a sword … zapadala porosha na taluiu zemliu; po toi po poroshe da ekhala svad’ba, da ekhala svad’ba i v semerykh saniakh, i v semerykh saniakh po semeru v saniakh. vo pervykh vo saniakh sidit pop emelia, sidit pop emelia, a krest na remeni, a krest na remeni, v poltory sazheni, folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 21 oboz ob”ezzhaet, krestom ograzhdaet; kogo ograzhdaet, tot nogami driagaet. vstrechali tu svad’bu vo mar’inskoi roshche, vo mar’inskoi roshche, u krasnoi sosne. venchali tu svad’bu na koz’em bolote, na koz’em bolote, na kur’em kolentse. a druzhka da svashka – toporik da shashka … [“rukopisnyi sbornik” 1897] the sleighs set out for mar’inskii grove, a suburb of old moscow and place of ill repute, where the wedding train might well expect to be ambushed. this audacious allegorical song goes on to cover topics other than the wedding;(12) nevertheless, the variant given here from a manuscript miscellany of the first half of the eighteenth century describes in exact detail the composition of the wedding train, which corresponds to that of the wedding party in saldamanov maidan. since, in one of the variants of the song it is noted that “grishka and marinka” were in the wedding train, the song has been dated to the beginning of the seventeenth century [alekseeva, emel’ianov, lozanova 1966; 342]. it may have been composed during the time of troubles (15981613) or in its wake. the wedding and wedding procedures are not included in all nine variants of the song about the priest emelia that have been preserved in print. five of them make mention of a string of sledges, with the priest riding in the last, more often than not in the seventh; but in one case he rides in the fourth. in the remaining variants, though a wedding is described, the priest is found in the wedding train in only two, the one given above and another, which has been poorly preserved and is barely comprehensible. in another two variants "the priest emel’ia was walking to meet the wedding train," meeting a procession with horses. this meeting of the train, when the priest came out onto the church porch to greet the newcomers, might have taken place when important guests arrived at the church. from these variants it is not clear whether it was the wedding train that arrived at the church or whether important persons visited the train for other reasons. nevertheless, the fact remains that in urban daily life in the eighteenth century the memory of the priest as the head of a wedding train was alive: the text from the manuscript miscellany bears this out this fact, forcing us to conclude that it was definitely not a purely local tradition for the priest to participate in wedding rituals conducted outside the church. if we descend the chronological ladder even further, then we see that in the seventeenth century the participation of the priest in domestic wedding rites was obligatory in royal weddings, whose rite served as a model for others to imitate. one must assume, however, that particulars of the tsar's wedding, such as the arrival of the bride at the palace chambers allotted to her some time before the beginning of the ceremonial ritual, did not exist in the russian peasant wedding; in the latter case the bride stayed in her parents' home until she left for the church. according to grigorii kotoshikhin, who attempted a general account of the accepted traditions in the tsar's court in muscovy in the mid-seventeenth century, the archpriest-confessor was present in the tsar's palace 22 during the "evening celebration" (that is, the reception of guests, corresponding to the devichnik, which was held not at the bride's, but in the ruler's chambers); before dinner he blessed the newlyweds with the cross and bade them kiss each other. on the morning of the wedding day the tsar went to the cathedral, received the blessing of the patriarch on the marriage, and then went to the cathedral church where his deceased forebears lay. there he ordered prayers for the dead, asked for forgiveness at the graves of his ancestors before returning to the palace. at this point they installed the bride in a chamber, to which her parents and others were invited – this evidently stood for the girl’s house, to which the groom would come. before he left his chambers and went to the part of the palace where his bride was waiting for him, the tsar summoned the priest (an archpriest and his confessor), for prayer and a blessing. when the priest had read the prayers and given his blessing, he did not leave, but led the procession to fetch the bride. he was not at the very head of the procession; preceding him were servants carrying bread; behind him walked the remaining members of the wedding procession and, last of all, the royal bridegroom. before the doors of the room where the bride was, the archpriest blessed the wedding party and the groom and then entered the bride's chambers first. during the meal the priest sat at the table, reading the lord’s prayer. he and the wedding party received a light appetizer, "not so that they would eat their fill, but for ritual purposes" [kotoshikhin 1989: 258]. while the guests ate, women from the groom’s party began to undo the bride's braid. the girl, with her hair styled in an unaccustomed manner, presented gifts of embroidered towels. the archpriest was the first to receive a gift. upon the completion of the meal he read a prayer, and before the wedding procession left for the church he blessed all the celebrants going to the ceremony with the couple. he led the procession to the cathedral; before entering the church, he blessed them all with the cross and left, since he had to prepare for the wedding ceremony. after the church ceremony the priest takes off his solemn vestments and heads the wedding procession as it returns to the tsar's palace. at the entrance hall near the doors, he blesses all the guests with the sign of the cross. kotoshikhin does not mention anything more about him, except to note that the archpriest was not present at the announcement of the consummation of the marriage [kotoshikhin 1989: 261]. the royal wedding, which includes the invitation of the priest to the devichnik, the bride's gift-giving to him as well as to other guests, multiple blessings according to the prescribed ritual, this is all very similar to the way weddings in the district city of cherdyn’ were celebrated in the nineteenth century. the splendid royal procession, of course, had many more participants than the wedding train in the “song about the priest emel’ia” (pesnia o pope emel’e) or in the other wedding song cited above. the priest in these songs is at the head of the procession, but then, as in the royal wedding, servants carrying bread or other members are ahead of him. but he precedes the newlyweds and leads them; that tradition is retained. if, in the second half of the seventeenth century, the role of the priest in wedding procedures outside the church in the moscow court had reached a fairly impressive level, then in the preceding period, judging by the “tale of the marriage of ivan the terrible to maria temriukovna” (povest’ o zhenit’be ivana groznogo na marii temriukovne) [rosovetskii 1976], it was apparently more modest. although this story is thought to have been written in the second half of the seventeenth century, nevertheless it is possible that the wedding description was composed by an anonymous author on the basis of older material. folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 23 according this last source, on the day of the wedding metropolitan filipp was summoned to ivan the terrible’s chamber to grant permission for the royal marriage and to take the confession of the tsar's chosen bride. when he had conducted the marriage service in the cathedral and read the final prayer, the metropolitan conducted the newlyweds to the tsar's palace, where he conducted a special service and left, after receiving gifts for himself and for all the cathedral clergy. the story does not record whether he led the bride and groom to the cathedral. whether it was intentional or an oversight that such an important part of the priest's ritual role was omitted is unclear, but one suspects that most likely it was intentional, given that the ritual canon was truly maintained in all other respects. however, even earlier in the sixteenth century the domostroi (book of household management) prescribed the constant presence of the priest throughout the entire wedding. in this respect the rules for a ceremony at home went further than those for royal wedding rituals in muscovy. the regulations for this kind of wedding are described in the earliest manuscript of the second redaction of domostroi (1560), attributed to silvestr, a priest at the cathedral of the annunciation in the kremlin. according to the domostroi, the priest should be present during the engagement, address the future spouses with admonitions and bless them. the day of the ceremony began with the transfer of the bride's bedding to her father-in-law's. in the place where the bed was laid out, the granary (usually situated on the ground floor of the house with living quarters above), the priest sprinkled with holy water the corners of the room and the place the bed was to be put. since the wedding ritual in domostroi proposes the participation of two priests, one from each family, one may conclude that it was the groom's priest who was present at the time. with the news that the groom's wedding party was ready to fetch the bride, the matchmaker arrived at the bride's father's house and remained there until they had dressed the girl in ceremonial attire. the priest present in her home proclaims “dostoino,” blesses the bride and sprinkles with holy water the area where she is to sit, while waiting for the wedding party. thereafter he prepares two candles for the ritual ceremony of the betrothal. as he does, the best man is dispatched to the groom to say that the wedding train can leave. the groom's priest rides in the wedding train, and when the party goes up into the house, he blesses them with the cross. he also gives a blessing to the groom on his own, when he sits down next to the bride. both priests, "the one that has arrived and the one from here" [kolesov, pogozhnikova 1991, 1: 146], order the candles to be lit at the wedding location, so that they can begin to undo the bride's braid. although the ensuing ritual procedures with the participation of a priest are omitted from domostroi, it is possible to conclude, based on what has been described above, that the role of the priest (or priests) was highly detailed. priests are further recommended to act in accord with the canonical rule. in this case the priest not only performs the betrothal and the ceremony in the church, but also "says vespers" in the granary. it is also suggested that "in the morning, when the groom leaves the bathhouse, (he should) say a prayer, prime, a special service and the hours" [kolesov, rogozhnikova 1991, 1: 152]. neither the ancient noble wedding rite nor the more traditional peasant wedding includes anything of the kind. how and why the role of the priest in the russian wedding ritual was reduced, we will see below, but for now we must note that his behavior in the domestic celebration was strictly regimented by ecclesiastical 24 regulations; after all, at a wedding a servant of the christian church would run across other, non-christian traditions and norms of etiquette for guests. early christian councils addressed this problem. as early as a.d. 364, a resolution of the laodicean council (canon 54) announced that "priests or spiritual figures of any calling should not look upon (events taking place – m. l.) at weddings or feasts, but should stand and leave before the musicians arrive" [gertsman 1996: 196]. rule 24 of the sixth ecumenical council (a.d. 680) commands that "holy servants, summoned to a marriage, should leave immediately upon the appearance of games that serve to seduce or excite the senses" [bogdanov 1864: 119]. in the course of centuries this conception of appropriate behavior for the clergyman when he encountered ancient holiday traditions did not alter much. explaining the prohibitions connected with this, in 1860 the journal, guidance for village pastors (rukovodstvo dlia sel’skikh pastyrei), recommended the following, "and one need not without cause excuse oneself from wedding meals, for even our lord jesus christ favored the wedding in cana in galilee with his presence. it is only necessary for the priest to behave with dignity at the wedding meal, setting an example for others through his restraint in food and especially in drink ...there is a custom among some priests to bless a parishioner’s wedding table and then to leave; this tradition is unfounded" [eremich 1860: 444–45]. the description of peasant weddings from saldamanov maidan or shel'bovo, however, shows that priests actually preferred not to subject themselves to temptation by leaving the feast immediately after performing their protective duties. but it was not this way everywhere. the comment of, evidently, a drunken priest noted by pushkin, when he offered gifts in return to the girls who had sung a marriage song in his honor at a wedding feast ("here you go, bitches, take this, do not revile the priest" (na te, suki, voz’mite v ruki, ne korite popa)), attests, of course, to the crudeness of mores [pushkin 1968, no. 55]. wedding songs of honor and satirical songs, addressed to the priest and recorded in the countryside, best illustrate the fact that a priestly presence was the norm at wedding feasts, so to speak, on an equal footing with everyone else. these songs were not in any way permeated with religious feeling. just as they did to other celebrants, they sang of the priest's beautiful clothing and luxuriant hair (his thick beard); everything that might bring their guest health and good fortune: the priest has a beard, the priest has a red beard. the tsar loves this beard, the tsar strokes this beard ... do you hear, father, how we are singing songs to you, how we are doing honor to you, etc. u batiushki borodka, u batoushki rusaia. vot etu borodushku tsar’ liubit, po borodushke tsar’ gladit … slyshish’ li batiushka, folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 25 tebe pesni poem, tebe chest’ vozdaem, i.t.d. [shein 1900: 467](13) * * * * * the wedding ritual is certainly a conglomeration, components arise at various times and duplicate each other fairly frequently, while some ultimately supplant others. the role of the priest is no exception in relation to the roles of other participants of this ritual that has formed over centuries. but what led to the priest being ousted from domestic wedding rituals? it is well known that the sanctification of the marriage in church is a later addition; it came into a russian wedding ritual that had already taken shape. in the church marriage ceremony now established in russia the priest certifies the marriage, after establishing that the ages of the couple or their parents' relationship do not offer an impediment to the marriage. in weddings, where the priest participated in domestic rituals, he fulfilled additional functions; he placed the bride and groom under the protection of god’s powers during the whole of their journey from departure from the parental home to the ceremony and their return to the place of marital consummation. similar prophylactic measures, among them especially apotropeic magic for warding-off evil, were generally well developed in wedding ritual. the godfather, usually in the role of master of ceremonies or matchmaker, as well as the godmother (in the north, the bozhatka), or the best man could serve as guide, conductor and protector of the newlyweds. the role of the best man, as established in our conception of the role, is always understood in the same way; he is as good a protector of the bride and groom as the priest. there is an abundance of textual material on the role of the best man, including prayers and incantations (prigovor). but it turns out that this type of best man exists in far from every ritual. quite often this role was not developed, but was taken by a number of members of the wedding party (that is by the groom's relatives), and not by a talented person hired to take on the role. in such instances it was said that the groom had "best men," who ascertained whether the bride was ready and whether the wedding train could set out and so on. the best men drove the sleighs of the wedding train and filled other minor roles in the wedding. vlasova remarks that "regions existed where the role of the best man was retained, but also places where this participant in the ritual did not utter any incantations" (unfortunately, the author of this work does not cite the regions where this curious tradition existed) [vlasova 2001: 84]. one may observe that in those few weddings, where we know the priest participated in domestic rituals, the best man was relegated to minor status. collectors have not made special efforts to record the text uttered by this kind of best man, more than likely because it was not well developed and did not draw attention to itself. the task of the best man in this case was primarily to purchase the places later occupied by the priest, groom and other wedding party members. the result was that it is difficult to say whether the inclusion of the priest in domestic rituals required that the best man reduce his role, or whether the exclusion of the village priest forced 26 the best man to increase his role and expand his speech into a huge monologue. but it does not do to omit from consideration a possible third solution. i am unwilling to assert this possibility categorically, but it seems to me that the more developed incantations uttered by the best man was recorded on lands formerly associated with rostov-suzdal' (an important medieval principality located north east of moscow), which are not far from the locations where the wedding ritual in which the priest takes part have come to light (shel'bovo, saldamanov maidan), but nevertheless in another region from a historic and ethnographic point of view, where a somewhat different tradition was established. in domestic wedding rituals there were also, however, roles that the priest could not avoid taking into account, even though church regulations had, from time immemorial, forbidden clergymen from making peace with them, for example, musicians. thus stoglav (14) notes that, when people go to church to get married, "jesters and musicians... shouting with all manner of devilish games” are at the head of the wedding train. for this reason the stoglav commands that "priests should forbid this" [kolesov, rogozhnikova 1991, 2: 194]. one must admit that the church in muscovy seemed to have coped with the problem of instrumental music in various wedding rites. nonetheless, the most striking point here relates to the attitude of the clergyman to the other sacred personage participating in domestic wedding ceremonies. the priest had to come to terms with the presence of yet another protector of the young couple on their journey, that is, the sorcerer. strangely enough, the priest did not drive this functionary away. tradition required him to be diplomatic. "in the prime place there sits the priest," prugavin noted, describing a pinega wedding in 1850, "next to him is the vezhlivoi (local name for the sorcerer – m. l.), then the father of the groom, the master of ceremonies and the groom" [shein 1900: 392]. a similar situation existed among the don cossacks in the 1820's: "the groom, after being blessed, went to the bride's; before him walked the priest with a cross, then boys carried the blessed icons enshrouded with towels; behind them walked the groom between the best men and matchmakers ... beside the groom for his protection there walked the ‘knowing one,’ whom the best man had sought out in advance" [tereshchenko 1848: 612–13]. at the beginning and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century folk tradition, as we see, stubbornly clung to the sorcerer, and the priest was required to share with him the role of warding off evil forces from the newlyweds without complaining. this situation is consequently at odds with the way it seemed to d.k. zelenin, who considered that the sorcerer had supplanted the priest in the ritual as a result of the difficulty and the expense of inviting the clergy to villages far removed from parish centers [zelenin 1991: 341]. all the same, what could be the reason for the priest to be supplanted in domestic wedding rituals if it was not through the actions of the sorcerer? as the material examined here shows, the protection of the newlyweds by the priest on the day of the ceremony is generally a uniform and integrated ritual. in the strength of its persistence it closely resembles ecclesiastical rituals established from above and supported by religious writings and rules formulated by the hierarchy. however, in fact, the participation of the priest in domestic ritual procedures at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not regulated by the church. thus, the witnessing of the engagement nowadays is allocated in its entirety to secular participants in the wedding ritual. but formerly, as is well known, the engagement was seen as the only point in the whole folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 27 procedure when the marriage was agreed. in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was during the engagement that the riadnaia zapis’ (formal agreement) was written, in other words, the wedding contract was drawn up. the presence of the priest here ceased not through the logic of evolving folk or church tradition, but from purely legal concerns. the church marriage ceremony, which was a later addition to russian wedding ritual, could in the sixteenth century take place as much as several months after the betrothal. it was quite possible for the intentions of the young couple to change in that time, such that the groom then “went under the crown” (a key part of the church wedding ceremony) with a different bride, not the one to whom he had been betrothed. such a marriage was not recognized even if a church marriage ceremony had taken place. the resulting legal proceedings were frequent and tangled. in 1702, peter the great issued an edict stripping the engagement and handfasting at the time of the engagement ceremony of their legal significance [polnoe sobranie zakonov, 4 1830: no. 1907]. in the same edict he also abolished marriage contracts. now only moral significance was attached to these actions, and documents ceased being drawn up at all. thus "peter the great decreed that the betrothed were given complete freedom to separate" [bogdanov 1864: 112]. this freedom went too far, evolving into a new tradition, and in 1744 during the reign of the empress elizabeth betrothed people were permitted to marry someone else only with the permission of the ruler [polnoe sobranie zakonov, 12 1838: no. 9087]. this then turned out to be excessively restrictive. in close harmony with the spirit of the ancient traditions of the christian church the holy synod in 1775 decreed that handfasting and the marriage ceremony should take place at the same time; this was then enshrined in the laws of the state [polnoe sobranie zakonov, 20 1830: no. 14356]. thus the idea that a preliminary promise to marry could not be revoked was finally overcome at a legal level; hence the priest for all practical purposes was not needed at the engagement ceremony. as a result, traces of the tradition in question survived less fully in the peasant wedding than the tradition of accompanying the newlyweds to the church. in domestic wedding procedures the priest kept to a tradition that had become over time a completely folk custom, not fostered by the church authorities, and strictly localized. the events that had led to the reduction of his role in the ritual took place in the eighteenth century. as the ethnographic materials examined here have shown, the tradition of inviting the priest to the betrothal continued to exist until the middle of the nineteenth century, that is, despite everything, lasted another 150 years or so after the petrine edict. the tradition of the priest leading the newlyweds survived much longer, right to the first decade after the revolution. it is surprising how quickly russian wedding ritual tradition adapted to these changes; the edges were evened out, and the lacunae were filled with something else. thus the song from the l'vov-prach collection cited above, which described the wedding process without the priest was published as little as fifteen years after the edict about combining the betrothal with exchange of rings and the religious wedding ceremony into a simple sequence of actions performed in church. nowadays we think of this song as an example of hoary antiquity, like a series of other "archaisms" in the wedding, which are simply not what they seem. 28 n o t e s 1 allusion here is to articles and collective volumes such as chistov, bernshtam, 1978; balashov, krasovskaia, 1969; efimenkova, 1973; slavianina, 1982; balashov, marchenko, kalmykova, 1985; kulagina, ivanov, 2000, 2003]. 2 in russian ethnographic practice the "wedding" is conceived of as an event occurring on a series of days including the day of the matchmaking (at the bride's home); the day of the engagement (at the bride's home); the eve of the wedding (at the bride's home); the day of the marriage ceremony (at the bride's home, the church and the groom's home); the following morning (at the groom's home); and the visit of the newlyweds to the in-laws on yet another day. all of this is spread over a period of at least two weeks. 3 the wedding train in the russian village wedding was horse drawn and consisted of several carts or sledges, depending on the time of year. the groom organized the wedding train. members of his wedding party (poezhane) rode in it, and it also incorporated the bride and took the couple to the ceremony. 4 taken from the detailed description of the wedding ritual in the village of saldamanov maidan [lobanov et al.1998: 48-69]. 5 in russian wedding tradition the term used is tysiatskii (from the word tysiacha, a thousand). in ancient rus' the tysiatskii was a powerful warlord who commanded a thousand warriors. in the wedding ritual the term was given a new meaning, the tysiatskii becoming the person who controls the treasury, has a thousand rubles in cash used to pay the singers for their song and the girls for the groom's place next to the bride etc. 6 in various religious traditions of the russian wedding, the pomolvka has several regional names, depending on what action is considered most important, either the fact of agreement between the sides (sgovor), the handshake (rukobit'e) or the drinking of wine (sapoi, propoi) as an indication of the conclusion of the agreement, or public prayers (bogomolenie), or the actions above the hands of the couple (zaruchenie). during the rukobit'e men exchanged handshakes either through cloth (the skirts of a kaftan or fur coat, etc. could serve as the fabric) or after donning mittens. 7 “dostoino est’” are the opening words of a prayer addressed to the virgin mary. 8 in the material examined no other instances were found in which the "wreaths" left the church. 9 a typical feature of the last song group is its sadness. such songs are sometimes connected with bridal laments and evoke them. an example of the farewell song was published in james bailey's monograph on russian folk-song meters [1993: 147] 10 a variant of the same song with a description of wedding processes with the same range of participants was recorded in 1937 in the region of lake kubenskîå (vologda province) [kolpakova, 1973: no. 244]. 11 a sazhen’ ranges from 1.52 to 1.76 meters according to the russian system of measures in the seventeenth century (translator's note) 12 this song has a long been studied as one of the pieces of evidence about the time of troubles, especially since one of the variants mentions "grishka and marinka", the names of real historical personages, the first false dmitrii (real name grigorii otrep’ev) and his wife marina. recently this song was analyzed in its folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 29 original sense [vlasova, 2001: 368–75]; the ritual-ceremonial aspects of this oral-poetic work were, however, beyond the purview of the author's study. 13 after this ceremony the priest reads the lord’s prayer, blesses the table, leads the guest to their seats and only then does the feast begin. but the priest remains in the area at least until the newlyweds are led to the marriage bed, because it is he who, together with the matchmaker and the best man, conducts them there [shein, 1900: 468-69]. 14 stoglav (one hundred chapters), a manuscript work compiled in 1551, contains the resolutions of the synods of the russian orthodox church. since these resolutions are laid out in a hundred chapters, both the book and the synod itself are always known as stoglav. the first printed edition of stoglav was published in london in 1860. bibliography alekseeva, o. b. et al. 1966. istoricheskie pesni xvii veka [historical songs of the seventeenth century]. leningrad: nauka. bailey, james 1993. three russian lyric folk song meters. columbus, ohio: slavica. balashov, d. m. and iu. e. krasovskaia 1969. russkie svadebnye pesni terskogo berega belogo moria [russian wedding songs from the terskii coast of the white sea]. leningrad: muzyka. balashov, d. m. et al. 1985. russkaia svad’ba. svadebnyi obriad na verkhnei i srednei kokshen’ge i na uftiuge [the russian wedding. the wedding rite in upper and middle kokshen’ga and in uftiug]. moscow: sovremennik. bogdanov, m. 1864. zamechaniia o sovershenii tainstva braka [notes on conducting the sacrament of marriage] rukovodstvo dlia sel’skikh pastyrei [guidance for village priests]. kiev: izdatel’stvo pri kiievskoi dukhovnoi seminarii, no. 39. chistov, k. v. and t. a. bernshtam (eds) 1978. russkii narodnyi svadebnyi obriad [the russian folk wedding ceremony]. leningrad: nauka. efimenkova, b. b. 1973. “dramaturgiia svadebnoi igry mezhdurech’a sukhony i iuga i verkhov’ev kokshen’gi” [dramatic elements in the wedding games of the area between the sukhona and iug rivers and the upper reaches of the river kokshen’ga]. in g.a. orlov et al. (eds), problemy musykal’noi nauki [problems of musicology]. issue no. 2. moscow: sovetskii kompozitor, pp. 198–242. eremich, i. 1860. “zametka kasatel’no obkhozhdeniia sviashchennika s prikhozhanami” [notes concerning the priest’s visits to his parishioners]. rukovodstvo dlia sel’skikh pastyrei [guidance for village priests]. kiev: izdatel’stvo pri kievskoi dukhovnoi seminarii, no. 51. gertsman, e. v. 1996. gimn u istokov novogo zaveta [the hymn at its new testament sources]. moscow: muzyka. 30 kolesov v. v. and t. p. rogozhnikova (eds) 1991. “chin svadebnyi” [order of the wedding]; “stoglav” [one hundred chapters], in domostroi [household management]. moscow: khudozhestvennaia literatura. kolpakova, n. p. 1973. lirika russkoi svad’by [the lyric poetry of the russian wedding]. leningrad: nauka. kotoshikhin g., 1989. “o moskovskom gosudarstve v seredine xvii stoletiia” [on the moscow state in the mid seventeenth century]. in l. a. dmitriev and d. s. likhachev (eds), pamiatniki literatury drevnei rusi. xvii vek. kniga vtoraia [literary monuments of old russia. the seventeenth century vol. 2]. moscow: khudozhestvennaia literatura, or pennington, a. e. 1980. grigorii kotošikhin: o rossii v carstvovanie alekseja mixajlovića. oxford: clarendon press. kulagina, a. v. and a. n. ivanov 2000, 2003 russkaia svad’ba. [russian wedding]. vols 1-2. moscow: gosrespublikanskii tsentr russkogo fol’klora. lapin, v. a. 1995. russkii musykal’nyi fol’klor i istoriia [russian musical folklore and history]. moscow: russkaia pesnia. lobanov, m. a., korepova k. e. and a. f. nekrylova 1998. nizhegorodskaia svad’ba. pushkinskie mesta, nizhegorodskoe povolzh’e, vetluzhskii krai : obriady, prichitaniia, pesni, prigovory [the wedding in the nizhnii novgorod region. the areas known to pushkin: nizhegorodskoe povol'zhe, vetluzhskii region: rites, laments, songs, speeches]. st petersburg: kultinformpress. l’vov-prach, i. 1955. sobranie narodnykh russkikh pesen s ikh golosami. na musyku polozhil i.prach [a collection of russian folk songs with their melodies. put to music by i. prach]. moscow: gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo. miller, v. f. and m. n. speranskii (eds) 1911. pesni, sobrannye p.v.kireevskim. novaia seriia. [collected songs of p. v. kireevskii. new series]. issue 1. moscow: obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti pri imp. moskovskom universitete. polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii [the complete collection of the laws of the russian empire]. vols 4, 20, 1830; vol. 12, 1838. st petersburg: tipographii ii otdeleniia sobstvennoi ego imperatorskogo velichestva kantselarii. predtechenskii, ia. 1860. “o svadebnykh obriadakh goroda cherdyni” [on wedding rituals in the town of cherdyn’]. in d. smyshliaev (ed.), permskii sbornik. kn. 2 [perm’ collection. vol. 2]. moscow: no publisher given. pushkin, a. s. 1968. (zapisi russkikh narodnykh pesen) [(written recordings of russian folk songs)] in a. d. soimonov (ed.), pesni, sobrannye pisateliami. novye materialy iz arkhiva p. v. kireevskogo [songs collected by writers. new material from p. v.kireevskii’s archive]. (literaturnoe nasledstvo [literary heritage]). vol. 79. moscow: nauka. rimskii-korsakov, n. a. 1977. 100 russkikh narodnykh pesen [a hundred russian folk songs]. 4th edition. moscow: muzyka. folklorica 2004, vol. ix no. 2 31 rosovetskii, s. k. 1976. “povest’ o zhenit’be ivana groznogo na marii temriukovne” [the tale of the marriage of ivan terrible and maria temriukovna]. pamiatniki kul’tury. novye otkrytiia. ezhegodnik 1975 [cultural monuments. new discoveries for 1975]. moscow: nauka. “rukopisnyi sbornik xviii v.,” 1897 [manuscript miscellany of the eighteenth century]. in: kostromskie gubernskie vedomosti. chast’ neoffitsial’naia [kostroma province gazette. the unofficial section]. no. 18. kostroma: no publisher given. samodelova, e. a. (ed.) 1997. “obriady v opisaniiakh kontsa xv – nachala xx vekov [rites recorded from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries].” in t. m. ananicheva and e. a. samodelova, obriady i obriadovyj fol’klor [rituals and ritual folklore]. moscow: nasledie. shein, p. v. 1900. velikoruss v svoikh pesniakh, obriadakh, obychaiakh, verovaniiakh, skazkakh, legendakh i t. d. [the great russian in his songs, rituals, customs, beliefs, tales, legends and the like]. vol.1. issue no. 2. st petersburg: tip. imp. akademii nauk. slavianina, o. a. 1982. starinnaia sevskaia svad’ba [the old sevsk wedding]. moscow: izd-vo mgu. “svadebnye obriady donskikh kazakov, 1824” [the wedding rituals of the don cossacks]. in a. kornilovich (ed.), russkaia starina. karmanaia knizhka dlia liubitelei otechestvenogo na 1825 god. [russian old times. a pocketbook for lovers of the fatherland for 1825]. st petersburg: tipografiia ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia. tereshchenko, a. v. 1848. byt russkogo naroda. chast’ 2: svad’by [the daily life of the russian folk. part 2: weddings]. st petersburg: tipografiia ministerstva vnutrennikh del. vlasova, z. i. 2001. skomorokhi i fol’klor [minstrels and folklore]. st petersburg: aleteia. zelenin, d. k. 1991. vostochnoslavianskaia etnografiia [east slavic ethnography], trans. k. d. tsivina, ed. k. v. chistov et al. moscow: nauka. zimnev, i. 1865. “svadebnye obychai v korotskom prikhode valdaiskogo uezda” [wedding customs in korotskii parish in valdai uezd]. in n. bogoslovskii (ed.), novgorodskii sbornik [novgorod collection]. vol. 2. novgorod: no publisher given. translated by j. rouhier-willoughby university of kentucky microsoft word contentsqsoft.doc 140 michael d. bailey. magic and superstition in europe: a concise history from antiquity to the present (classical issues in history). new york: rowman & littlefield publishers, inc., 2007. bibliography. index. x+274. $75.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). isbn-10: 0-7425-3386-7. isbn10: 0-7425-3387-5. magic intrigues and fascinates not only folklorists but scholars from other disciplines. as a broadly defined phenomenon, magic allows numerous approaches and various interpretations. in his new book, michael d. bailey presents a comprehensive historical overview of magic. magic’s shifting definition is quite problematic, and bailey looks at both magic and superstition as overlapping, but not identical, categories. he presents magic as an integral part of european history, a “serious subject for serious men,” (p. 1) rather than an exotic issue. this subject is covered through seven chapters and conveniently unfolded before the reader in chronological order. although bailey stresses the permanent fidelity of the laity to various magical practices, his main method is the analysis of the archival records, “of what authorities approved or condemned” (p. 74). magic and superstition, therefore, appear in the book as they were seen or interpreted by the society’s elites; there are few subaltern voices presented. due to this, the book is rather an investigation into the dynamics of the european power structure, i.e. how secular and religious authorities (those at the center of power) defined magic and treated magic practitioners (people they saw as being in the margins of power). bailey traces these dynamics, from the ancient world up to the modern period. he defines familiar facts about magic clearly and challenges popular myths about their moral and legal condemnation. thus, we learn that there was no major distinction between religious and magical practices in the pre-christian times: concerns over magic started growing only after the establishment of christendom, when “the apostles of christ or other early christians competed with practitioners of magic to win believers by demonstrating superiority of their power” (p. 48). although magic was a threshold demarcating christian and pagan worlds until the year 1000, christianity was concerned mainly with expansion and converting pagans in the european territories. magic was tolerated because it was seen as a remnant of pagan beliefs and practices, foolish but not threatening. not until the high and late middle ages when christianity defined the satan figure did the dramatic shift occur, and an idea of folklorica 2007, vol. xii 141 magic as a learned diabolical craft emerged. bailey reveals how natural and man-made disasters occurring in medieval europe contributed to concerns about magic as a deliberate heretical deviance and thus to the zeal of the emergent inquisition. magic became a field of serious study, and various theorists of witchcraft attempted to explain how it functioned. many rare pictures in bailey’s book reveal the misogyny of those theorists. in the early modern period, witchcraft was feared and began to be seen as a group crime, not an individual occupation. using available statistics, bailey demonstrates that the intensity and spread of witch hunting varied across different regions of europe. he confirms that the major period of witch hunting corresponded to the reformation, but challenges the widespread myth about the nine million executions in europe. according to bailey, skepticism replaced the zeal of witch hunting, and this tendency was strengthened from the renaissance to the enlightenment when magic faded from the intellectual discourse of the period and stopped being perceived as real. bailey presents in detail how magic was overtaken by occultism and natural philosophy thanks to the humanists who revived interest in ancient thought. figures like paracelsus, nostradamus, giordano bruno, or campanella held that magic was natural, not demonic, that it was experiential and rather experimental. some of their explanations of nature and the spirit world challenged church doctrine. the magical practices of previous centuries were changed and adapted into hermetic, kabbalistic, astral, or alchemical magic, and thus continued to survive. generally, bailey stresses the continuity of european magical traditions. they survived the scientific revolution whose representatives like copernicus, kepler, bacon, newton, etc. regarded superstition as scientific error and magic as superstition. later, enlightenment thinkers fought to eradicate both superstitions and institutionalized religion. despite all attempts, magic has not been replaced by technology, even in modern times. on the contrary, states bailey, protest against the scientific view of the world has led to a new interest in magic. the occult revival in the nineteenth century engulfed first of all educated people. they became fascinated with esoteric systems of knowledge that various societies such as the theosophical society, or golden dawn, and various schools of magic provided. in the twentieth century, magical movements like neopaganism and wicca continued to flourish, and bailey provides very interesting facts about “europe’s first and only “pro-witch” folklorica 2007, vol. xii 142 government, the nazi regime” (p. 236). ultimately, modern witchcraft shifted from europe to the united states and became feminist in nature. bailey’s style of writing is captivating and the results of his archival research are impressive, yet there are a few weak points in his book. the word “europe” in the title is misleading for those who would like to know more about eastern european magic: bailey warns at the beginning that “europe itself will be defined largely as western christendom, the boundaries of which fluctuated but generally centered on western europe” (p. 6). it is, however, not clear why bailey chose religious criterion for division (catholicism and protestantism vs. byzantine orthodoxy) but then applied contemporary geographical division and excluded poland and hungary calling them eastern europe. a brief mentioning of the war “between sweden and russia” (p. 169) (where in fact russia was a secondary participant) makes the picture of polish witch hunting very difficult to grasp. bailey then attempts, for the sake of comparison, to cast a brief light on orthodox muscovy of the seventeenth century (he calls it russia) in one paragraph on pp. 169-170. it is not clear why the author chooses russia, for it certainly was neither the only orthodox state nor the first one to accept orthodoxy on european territory. unfortunately, bailey provides no references for those interested in this particular matter. at the same time, bailey seems to be fascinated with the magical tradition of the past so that he completely rejects politics and presents the magical worldview of the nineteenth-century peasants as the main reason for the birth of folklore as a discipline: “so strange and foreign did the great majority of europe’s people now seem to the educated classes that intellectuals began to engage in ethnographic studies of various social groups, and especially of rural populations, within european lands” (p. 215). as bailey himself suggests, his study can become a basis for further research. his book would certainly be useful for a wide audience and for any folklorists dealing with the topic of magic and superstition in cultural context. svitlana p. kukharenko university of alberta 161 reviews folklorica 2013, vol. xvii alison hilton. russian folk art. bloomington and indianapolis: indiana university press, 2011. list of illustrations, note on transliteration, bibliography, index. xxiii+357. $24.95 (paper). isbn 978-0-253-22335-7. the world of the senses, the look, feel, smell, taste, and sound of things, is getting more and more attention in contemporary scholarship as we realize that, to understand a people and their culture, it is important to appreciate their sensory world. this being the case, the reissue of hilton’s 1995 russian folk art in paperback and in slightly modified form is most welcome. the book begins with a brief history of the study of folk art. this is followed by a description of village life with an emphasis on the house. we learn what houses looked like inside and out, where ornamentation was located, and how it changed over time. houses were not the only things decorated and the section on tasks and tools tells us about spindles, distaffs, dippers, saltcellars, breadboxes, yokes and other items that were used in daily life and highly ornamented. distaffs receive particular attention and a picture of one graces the cover. hilton next writes about folk specialists, artists who were semi-professionals and made items for sale such as highly decorated distaffs, spice cakes stamped with images, and carved birdhouses in the shape of human figures. sometimes whole families specialized and a craft would be passed on from one generation to the next. we learn that villages were not as isolated from urban areas as was once supposed and that the sale of village crafts in cities occurred alongside and in addition to commerce within and between villages. the next unit of the book is devoted to materials. peasant life determined what was made and how, but so did available materials and available markets. in the russian north, forests dominated the landscape and wood was widely used for folk crafts. wood was carved using various techniques and it was also painted and encrusted. wood was used to make printing blocks which, in turn, were used to stamp fabrics with a pattern or to print lubki 162 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii (sing. lubok), broadsides with a combination of a text and a striking image. wood was painted with designs that ranged from the ornamental to the representational. birch bark was carved into patterns that looked like lace and sold to urban dwellers. wood was lacquered for both local consumption and for sale. in addition to the several chapters discussing woodwork in all its forms, this section also has a chapter on clothing and one on folk toys, which could be made of wood, but were also often made of clay. the section “designs and their meanings” talks about the symbolism found in russian folk art. it discusses important mythic figures such as the rusalka, the sirin, and the alkonost and gives a brief overview of the calendar cycle, noting the ritual use of particular objects of material culture. indigenous images and symbols were influenced by external forces and religious and other urban ornament found its way into the countryside so that grapes, which never grew in the russian north, came to be a regular embellishment of the iconostasis. zoomorphic motifs like the horse and the bird and theriomorphic figures such as the halfbird/half-woman sirin were important, as were stylized human figures, and were painted on distaffs and embroidered on ritual towels. scenes from everyday life which ranged from pictures of wedding parties riding on a horse-drawn carriage or sled to portrayals of tea-drinking were also used for decoration. as times changed and peasants became serfs on the estates of the nobility, the artistic abilities of gifted peasants became a commodity, not only for the folk themselves, but also for their masters. serfs with special skills were valuable and some were trained in arts needed by the gentry. some produced fine wares. some were trained as painters and we have a number of paintings depicting scenes from the lives of the folk such as weddings, lacemaking, and even the sale of a female serf. certain nobles such as aleksei venetsianov, elizaveta mamontova, and elena polenova started schools and workshops on their estates in an effort to foster folk artistry and to keep russian art from falling under the influence of foreign styles and trends and losing its distinctive features. at the same time, professionally trained artists such as ivan bilibin and viktor vasnetsov fell in love with folk art and 163 reviews folklorica 2013, vol. xvii started using folk images and adaptations of folk style in their work. in the soviet period folk content and folk style were promoted as a means of showing that the soviet system was indeed a political organ of the people. at the same time soviet subject matter was introduced into traditional scenes such as tea-drinking, which now had an obligatory portrait of lenin. soviet politics also encouraged paintings which showed villagers enjoying the benefits brought by the soviet system such as schooling and the electrification of the village. hilton concludes by saying that folk art will continue to evolve now that the soviet union is no more. russian folk art provides a good overview of its subject matter and can serve as a useful introduction to anyone new to the field. as the content summary given above shows, the book provides both a description of various art forms and a history of folk creativity. its main shortcoming is a lack of color illustrations. there was a color insert in the hardback version of this book and the table of contents even refers to a color insert – but there is none. all images are in black and white, presumably to keep the cost of the paperback low. color was very much a part of the aesthetic experience of folk art and hilton constantly mentions color: red, black, and gold on distaffs, utensils, and so forth. it would be good to actually see what she is talking about and one of the first complaints voiced by others who have seen the paperback is the lack of color images. perhaps indiana university press can provide free online access to some color images of russian folk art to supplement this book. for someone who is familiar with the field, there are other disappointments. hilton did no field work and relied on museum exhibits and museum personnel for her folk art descriptions. as a result, she repeats the views expressed in russian books on the subject and reproduces many of the illustrations found in russian and soviet publications. perhaps because she is retelling the thoughts of others rather than describing her own experiences, the descriptive part of the book has a somewhat wooden feel to it, if the reader of this review will pardon the pun. to hilton’s credit is the fact that she does not construct an imagined past and claim to know the symbolic meanings of folk images the way many russian 164 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii and other post-soviet writers do; her interpretations of symbols are in keeping with contemporary western scholarship and quite nuanced. also, the second section of the book, which talks about the interaction between the village and the city and the efforts of nobles to preserve folk art and help it adapt to changing circumstances, is much livelier reading. perhaps it reads better because this is closer to hilton’s own archival research or perhaps because this was the section that contained information that was new for me. in sum, russian folk art is a most useful book that will help those who do not have access to the art books produced in russia and the soviet union get a sense of the visual world of the russian north. it would make a good textbook for use in a variety of classes, both those dealing with russian subject matter and those dealing with art. presumably it was this fact that prompted indiana university press to issue a paperback edition. natalie kononenko university of alberta edmonton, alberta, canada iii editor’s note-folklorica 2013 folklorica returns after a year-long hiatus during the transition from the former editor, natalie konenenko at the university of alberta to its new home at the university of kentucky. we had hoped to complete the shift between editors and publish an issue last year, but there were complications beyond our control with the material in the pipeline. we hope that the offerings in this volume help to compensate for the delay. this edition features articles drawing on a range of folk traditions from material culture (franklin sciacca’s analysis of ukrainian embroidery from the 19th century to the present and its connection to identity in many social, temporal, regional and national contexts) to vernacular religion (tatiana filosofova’s study of conceptions of the apocalypse as reflected among old believers in latvia), from personal narrative (adrienne harris’ examination of the folk elements within the oral histories of women fighter pilots in world war ii) to neo-folk ritual (ana stefanova’s fascinating treatment of the invented tradition of nestinarstvo in one bulgarian village). the various approaches and topics of these articles demonstrate the scope of our discipline and also its relevance in the contemporary societies of the regions to which seefa is dedicated. while this claim seems obvious to those of us who are specialists in folklore and ethnography, we release this issue during a time in which continued research in the field is in jeopardy within the countries our membership studies. the academies of science across the region have been facing severe budget cuts throughout the post-socialist period. the most recent and most well-publicized development in this unfortunate trend has occurred in russia over the last year. while i was in russia and belarus this summer, it was the major topic of conversation among my folklore colleagues at the institute of philology in novosobirsk as well as among specialists at the international congress of slavists in minsk. while each of north american who has a connection to the venerable scholarly tradition of folklore in the slavic, east iv european and eurasian countries has a similar story to tell about our concerns over the threat to the excellent work done by our colleagues there, i want to take this opportunity to address one particular instance of particular concern to seefa. the folklore sector of the institute of philology in novosibirsk has been awarded the state prize for science and technology of the russian federation (2002) for its series pamiatniki fol’klora narodov sibiri i dal’nego vostoka (monuments of the folklore of the peoples of siberia and the far east). this 60-volume series (31 have been released, 3 are in press) represents one of the finest collections of folk material (including poetic genres, prose genres and ritual) in the much neglected region of asian portion of russia. in addition, the folklore collective has been dedicated to gathering material from native peoples across the region, a rarity in and of itself in much of the country, material which is being lost due to the rapid process of language death in these communities. this dedicated folklore collective (like many others in russian now) is faced with the potential loss of its institute (and certainly of the series) because the humanities are said out of place within the scientific-technological tradition of akademgorodok according to the head of the siberian division of the russian academy of sciences. this institute, of course, is not an exception; for instance, the distinguished state institute for the history of art in saint petersburg with its excellent ethnomusicology department has already been dissolved. the discipline of folklore and ethnography faces an uncertain future. the articles in this volume are evidence of how seefa has managed to connect a broader range of specialists from north america and the countries of eurasia since its inception. these authors, two north americans, relying on the research by and connections with eurasian specialists, and two europeans, trained in the system under threat, share a common concern. we are beholden to the eurasian tradition of folklore studies in fundamental ways and should provide support as we are able if the ties and exchange of ideas seefa has achieved are to be sustained. v since the last issue of folklorica was released, the organization has changed its name to the slavic, east european and eurasian folklore society. this shift was prompted by a desire to clarify what has long been confusion over the range of articles suitable for publication in the journal. in addition, it reflects a parallel change in the american association for slavic, east european and eurasian studies, with which we have been affiliated since our inception. i am pleased to say that this shift has indeed resulted in submissions from specialists studying central asia. although none of those submissions was ready for this issue of the journal, we hope that some will be published in the next volume. we are still waiting for submissions from those studying the folk life of the caucasus and we will attempt to get the word out on our interest in material on that region. in closing, allow me also to express our deepest gratitude to natalie kononenko, a founding member of seefa, who fostered the development of folklorica in her role as editor. she did yeoman’s work to publicize the journal in the countries of eurasia and is greatly responsible for its reputation as an international peerreviewed journal. thanks also go to the authors for their patience during the transition and in their willingness to respond to the reviewers’ comments with great care. the reviewers also deserve credit for their thoughtful readings of the submissions; without the seefa membership’s willingness to take on much of the reviewing, the quality of the journal would suffer immeasurably. finally, thanks to my editorial assistants, jason grant, melinda kelley and benjamin vogelpohl for all their support. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby, folklorica editor untitled secret knowledge of folk healers 25 the secret knowledge of folk healers in macedonian traditional culture vesna petreska institute of folklore “marko cepenkov” skopje, r. macedonia in macedonian traditional culture the concept of “witchcraft”, is on the one hand connected to the supernatural world, i.e. with supernatural beings, but on the other hand, it is connected to the ordinary people of this world. the witchcraft which is connected to the supernatural world usually occurs at night or at the borders between night and day. in terms of space, it most often takes place near boundaries, that is at the edge of or outside the village, in the forest, near water. thus, people who find themselves in a forbidden place at the wrong time of day can be punished by these supernatural beings. the following are demonic beings in macedonian traditional culture that occupy liminal places: самовили in people’s beliefs they are imagined as invisible, very beautiful women, with long hair and dressed in long white shirts, demons of fate (наречници, нави), vampires (вампири), ghosts (караконџул/ караконџула), and demonic personifications of illnesses (чума, колера/ кулера, треска, etc.). the second category of witchcraft is connected to the ordinary people of this world, i.e. “social” beings. in traditional culture, all aspects of people’s lives, their illnesses, unexpected deaths, and their successes and failures were believed to be the result of the work of magic. accordingly, there are entire sets of terms to distinguish those people who are able to cast “spells”, and they are known as witches маѓешници, маѓосници, мамници, презимачки, вештерки and those who are able to “break” them, known as healers, spell-chasers, fortunetellers, conjurers бајачи/ки, народни исцелители, кушачки, etc. on the territory of macedonia, the greatest condemnation was reserved for spells put on people’s health and life, which were the most important values in traditional culture. the next level of condemnation fell upon the magical appropriation of corn or milk, the two most profitable branches of traditional economy. in macedonia, the people who “perform” magic were believed to be exclusively women. there are no folk narratives about men doing magic, though such are known in many parts of the world. also, in macedonian lexicology, the terms reserved for those who cast spells are always feminine: маѓешница/и, маѓосница/и, мамница/и, презимачка/и, вештера/ки etc. the folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 26 following outcomes have been attributed to spells: terrible diseases, unexpected death, especially of those who were known to be of good health, the death of newborns, male impotency, female infertility, marital disputes that lead to indifference and hatred, poor harvest, bad cow’s or sheep’s milk, or unsuccessful farming, and disputes in the life of a family that had suffered failure in several of their undertakings or transactions. this shows that, in macedonia, not only are many diseases attributed to the influence of the supernatural, but, in the mind-set of the community, supernatural forces directed by social enemies are believed to be responsible for a whole series of negative outcomes [mencej 64]. the “madjosnica” witches do not possess demonic or mythical qualities. they are women from the village or surrounding areas who are envious or malicious simply because the community perceives them to be that way. they are believed to cast spells and perform magic and it is said that they will go to hell after they die. these are women who personify social tension among families and neighboring villages and are considered by e. pócs to be “neighbouring witches” or “social witches” [pócs 1999: 10]. in contrast, people who break spells and heal people are known as бајачка/и, баснарка/и, народни исцелители, кушачка/и (spell-chasers, healers, fortune-tellers, conjurers, and charmers).these fall into the category of those who will go to heaven after they die. the focus of this essay will be on this latter category, the charmers, healers or spell-chasers (баснарки, баснарици, бајач/ка, кушачка). ways of achieving the position of a folk-healer, spell-chaser, charmer those who are capable of “breaking” spells, and casting out disease possess qualities opposite to those who cast spells and cause disease. while those who cast spells are always women, the spell breaker could be of either gender. it was important that the person be in touch with the other side. most women folk-healers were not of childbearing age. the research of polish anthropologist jozef obrembski in 1930’s in macedonia points to this same generalization. his work took him to the macedonian village of volche in the poreche region where he found out that “a true basnarica” could only be a woman who had ceased bearing children and knows how to use charms and incantations for various maladies. even at the time of his field research, obrembski found that the real healers and spell-chasers in volche were scarce and that those who did exist were quite old [obrembski 2001, i: 185; ii: 55). recent collecting conducted in the same region shows that the local population secret knowledge of folk healers 27 of this region is still familiar with the concept of “real healers” or “real charmers” and that some claim to know the names of such persons who lived in the past. none of the living residents, however, have actually met such a person, or seen them. some informants were familiar with tools used by charmers and healers, such as deer horns, wolf’s claws, wolf’s teeth, horseshoes, etc., but that was the extent of their knowledge [risteski 2002: 111-112; risteski 2005a: 134]. a healer, it was said, could acquire her knowledge through her mother who was “her faith and her blood” [obrembski 2001, i: 185; ii: 55; vražinovski 1989: 86; domazetovski 132; zlatanović 65; radenković 1982: 12]. the transfer of power and knowledge was performed by magical actions. one such action was associated with water and the female apprentice was supposed to repeat the text of the charm on three bridges.(1) my own field research also confirms that an elderly folk healer should transfer her knowledge to a girl or a young woman who has not yet had a child of her own.(2) by comparison, in some south slavic countries, such as serbia, the healer transfers her knowledge to her grandchildren while they are still under the age of 10 [zlatanović 65]. the services of the healers, spell-chasers or charmers, were paid for symbolically. however, their real reward is the prominent social positions that they achieve.(3) as with all liminal figures, the opposite can also be true and healers and charmers can be subject to censure. this is especially clear from archival materials where physical defects seem to play a determining role. thus, people with such a defect, which was often the reason for their becoming healers in the first place, could be mocked by others in the community for doing “that”, meaning practicing their healing. their defense invariably was that god commanded them to do “it”. one of the informants in the archival data divorced her husband for doing “that”.(4) according to another informant, a woman changed when a female spirit (самовила) entered her body.(5) data found from other south slavic countries, notably serbia, confirms the belief that a person with a physical defect is especially prone to becoming a healer. one such example is the serbian healer called borko who was small, thin and had a voice as high as a child’s so that people routinely made fun of him [cvetanovska 118].(6) the hungarians who live in vojvodina, believed that “wise women”, a term denoting women gifted with special abilities, were in close contact with supernatural forces. these women were supposed to be short, tiny and wrinkled. their hunched backs and other physical disabilities distinguished them from ordinary people. many of these women had folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 28 warts on their faces or other distinctive markings. they had piercing eyes that could see through everything and were believed to be able to read people’s thoughts. many of them used canes when walking. real “wise women” did not take anything for their services [penavin 77]. in some of the most recent field research the distinction between a witch “magjeshnica” and a healer or spell-chaser (бајачка, исцелителка, кушачка), no longer exists because one and the same person can cast a spell and break it. some informants even claim that “they cast spells, and then you have to see them to break that same spell”.(7) further evidence of their double nature is the belief that healers, spell-chasers, and charmers can become vampires (вампири). according to this belief, healers are said to have had contact with impure supernatural forces during the course of their natural lives [vražinovski 1998, i: 223]. such is the case in slovenia, for example, where a woman acquires the reputation of being a witch if she has been involved in healing, knows the uses of herbs, etc. according to mencej, this is an example of the re-interpretation of white magic as an activity of witches that came about after the period of witch hunting that swept across europe [mencej 42]. indeed, there is ample evidence of the attribution of opposing qualities or dual nature in the research on medieval and early modern mystics. this research shows that women’s abnormal behavior can be seen as a sign of either divine or demonic possession. furthermore, contemporary research on people in southeast europe today, who claim a connection to the divine or the supernatural, shows that society’s attitude toward them is characterized by opposites and extremes [pócs 2005: 127]. on the one hand they inspire respect, while on the other they provoke fear and disdain. fear is sometimes caused by claims made by the healers themselves that the sick person must seek their services or else he will die.(8) thus the attitude of the community towards the healer often depends on the healer him or herself and on the way that they behave towards those who turn to them for help. typically a collective opinion is formed for each healer and, whether she will be accepted and respected or feared and disdained depends on whether that opinion is positive or negative [vražinovski 1989: 88]. research regarding the period following the second world war shows that the attitude of authorities towards healers or charmers was not always understanding or sympathetic. at various times the attitudes ranged from persecution to tolerance [vražinovski 1989: 88; knežević 73]. another way of attaining the position of folk-healer was by communicating with saints through dreams and visions. this path is well secret knowledge of folk healers 29 known to researchers working in other countries in europe [see for example: pócs 1999: 151; pócs 2005: 126-127; radenković 1982: 1213]. the first dream or vision typically comes when the future healer is going through a serious and intensively experienced corporal and/or spiritual crisis that leaves him or her either physically or psychologically on the brink of death or in a condition between life and death. the most frequent crises include: a long-lasting illness that persists even after all known cures had been exhausted, a coma (a condition where no life signs are evident), and deep depression that usually follows a long period of self-torture provoked by feelings of guilt and/or rejection by the community. researchers in macedonia have documented several life stories of healers or charmers who gained their power when they were hopelessly ill.(9) saint selvija from the village of sveta in the vicinity of demir hisar offers an interesting example. despite being married for ten years, selvija was not able to give birth. according to her story, that period was “a great burden” for her. the traditional notion that a woman must fulfill her role as mother and is complete only when she gives birth is clearly shown in the reproaches she was subjected to: “што дека си лична, што дека си убава, кога деца немаш!” [your beauty is in vain, when you are childless!]. the story continues to state that because she was not able to have a child her husband stopped loving her, and started trying to force her to leave. she refused to do so as she had no other place to go. in the last four years of her “childless experience”, selvija stopped eating everything, even bread. in this period of self-starvation, she often prayed to god to give her a child, vowing that she would be his servant. one day when, in an extremely weak and depressed condition, she sat down to rest, st. john appeared at her door and instructed her to go to a certain monastery where there was healing water that would make her healthy and able to have children: “и деца ќе имаш и слуга ќе ми бидиш и првното моје ќе бидит” [and you shall have children and you shall be my servant and the first one shall be mine].(10) and so it happened: “и јас на тоа додржив. кај што рече тој ојдов, се измив на водата и господ ми даде здравје. четири години дванаесет кошули искинав од мака и така имав чупе првин. три… две години го гледав, од врата ми го зеде капано, сторено сè…” [and i believed. i went where he had told me to go; i washed myself with the water and god gave me health. in my misery i had torn twelve shirts over the course of four years and finally i had a girl. i have looked after her for three . . . two years; he took her from me, bathed, tidied...](11) after having her folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 30 children, selvija became “weak” again until one day she fell into a coma. she was “like dead” for three days and three nights. that was the first time she visited both heaven and hell. after coming back, she started to heal and continued to heal until the end of her life [cvetanovska 118]. the dreams and visions of folk healers follow traditional models and show a high degree of correspondence to folk beliefs about the other world and the ways one may enter it. the healer’s soul is said to visit “the other world”. according to macedonian folk beliefs, the soul leaves the body and travels to “that world” at the actual moment of death. at death the soul leaves the body for good and cannot return. by contrast, when the healer’s soul leaves the body, such as when he or she is in a coma or when the healer is asleep and dreaming, the soul is able to return to the body. the healer’s soul retrieves knowledge from the other world and returns to complete its mission in this one. people believe that the state of dreaming and death are very similar. death is often referred to as “the big dream”, and dreaming is called “small death” [cvetanovska 118]. in the mythical three partitioned structure of the world, beings from the other side are connected with the land above where divine beings dwell and the land below, the realm of the demonic and the eternal home of dead beings. the analogous christian mythical picture includes heaven and hell. access to these worlds involves climbing (stairs, trees, mountains) and descending (through a cave, hole). all of these are frequent motifs in the dreams and visions of folk healers. many healers describe climbing to heaven. according to folk belief, the other world, especially the world of the dead, is separated from the human world by a large body of water. above the water is a bridge between the reality of this side and the reality of the other side [vražinovski 2000: 108, s.v. water]. both natural and supernatural worlds are typically connected by a narrow bridge as “thin as a hair” over which only the righteous can pass [risteski 1999: 123]. the life stories of folk healers frequently mention the crossing of bridges. the connection or the separation of worlds by water is a motif frequently found in dreams of a meeting with a deceased relative.(12) in some dreams the healer’s soul is met by an angel, usually archangel michael, known among the folk as “the soul taker”. according to the transcripts of m. cepenkov, for example, when a man dies... “ангелот ја шетат душата докрај небото и докрај земјата…” [the angel takes the soul to heaven and to the heart of the earth...] [cepenkov 1980, 9: 50]. the visions of healers or charmers who have had a near-death experience typically include an angel who shows secret knowledge of folk healers 31 the soul the bliss of heaven and the suffering of hell. the healer’s depictions of heaven as a place with gardens, flowers, cheerful children, righteous people living close to god and of hell as a place with devils, cauldrons where the sinful boil eternally, dragons that eat them, are identical to folk beliefs about the other world. in the other world which, according to folk belief is the eternal dwelling place of the dead, healers are greeted by their dead relatives, an experience that serves as proof of their having accessed the other side [cvetanovska 120]. a key scene in the narrative about the acquisition of “secret knowledge” is a meeting with a supernatural creature who orders the future healer to return to the world of the living and to start performing the task that is now his mission. such beliefs are wide spread among all balkan peoples [pócs 1989: 47-48]. the supernatural beings that appear in such narratives are those to whom folk tradition, both pagan and christian, assigns healing qualities. they are samovili, st. petka, the mother of god, jesus christ or god himself.(13) if the person selected to receive secret knowledge rejects the mission assigned to him, he or she is punished. according to a certain informant whose wife was recently deceased, the woman died because he was a communist and did not believe in any religion. the samovila who had appeared to him supposedly inquired: “ал ќе гршаваш појќе против бога”, [are you still going to sin against god].(14) in another story, a woman claimed that her four children had died because she did not want to work as a healer. finally her own life was threatened: “ако работиш сега ова јас што ти наредувам, по оваа сламка ќе поминеме, ако не работиш, да откажиш за ова, ќе те пуштиме удолу по сламката, ќе пропаднеш удолу и појќе нема да бидиш, а јас ќе летнам” [if you do what i [god] order you to do, we shall hold onto this straw, if you do not, and if you refuse we shall push you off this straw, you shall fall down, and you shall be no more, while i shall fly away].(15) the woman accepted the mission thrust upon her, recovered from her illness, and became a healer. as a reward for the healing she did, she bore several sons.(16) in each of these cases one notices the archaic belief that certain people can be spirited away by the supernatural world. in this archaic dual system, those who go to the supernatural world, the place of death, when they are not dead themselves nevertheless belong there and so the samovila who represents death acts as their guiding spirit. these are people believed to be destined for death, or already very close to death; they are people “without status.” thus it is the quasi-dead who are initiated into the other world [pócs 1989: 39-41]. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 32 one woman from the region of poreche, village of rechane near makedonski brod, was attested in j.obrembski’s research and described as “god fearing,” “a holy seer.” she communicated with the saints through dreams and visions. she was said to have been contacted by saints who appeared to her to express their pleasure or displeasure with the village in which she lived, with her fellow villagers and their activities and relations. her dreams helped her to diagnose people’s illnesses. she was also able to tell her clients what they had to do to get well. her usual advice was to go to church with gifts and prayers or to seek the help of a healer. she did not charge for the services, but those who visited her left money and gifts near a little church-like structure she had built in the yard for meditation. that also was the place where she went to receive her visions [obrembski 2001, ii: 56]. also, in more contemporary research, the healer-dreamer achieves success with the help of supernatural beings (samovili, saints) who point out the ways that the patient can be cured. these include such remedies as going to places with healing water, or using incantations, charms and amulets, visiting a doctor, etc.(17) in many cases, the healer gets information about the necessary remedy not only through consultations with supernatural beings, but also through conversations with icons. icons seem to be used regardless of the religious affiliation of the healer [mencej 57]. holy seers, as they were called, were known everywhere in europe. they were frequently described as “white witches” and, as such, were the enemies of “black witches.” “white witches” worked with the help of christian spirits and the existence of “holy healers” can be seen as the result of the increasing influence of christianity and the resulting polarization of the supernatural world. during the middle ages, healers and seers became the enemies of witches. witches, in turn, became increasingly associated with demonic forces. in this process, christian protectors (the virgin mary, various christian saints) were assigned the roles previously ascribed to ancestral guardian spirits. the importance of death, however, remained unchanged. [pócs 1999: 153-154]. another process was simultaneously at work. only those people who were effective in the secular world and capable of healing a wide range of maladies were recognized as holy and ascribed the position of holy seer or living saint [pócs 1999: 153-154]. this is clearly documented in field materials. normal healers and charmers, as well as holy healers, are mediators and their healing capabilities are closely connected with their ability to “see” the source or cause of the afflicted person’s ailment secret knowledge of folk healers 33 whether with their own eyes or through divine insight, [pócs 1999: 153154]. the ability to see comes from supernatural forces or through the healer’s close contact with the world of the dead, in other words, the other world [pócs 1999: 156]. in our research, dreams typically indicate contact with the other world. this is especially so when the souls of the healers had to return to life by successfully navigating a narrow line such as a bridge the size of a hair or piece of straw. this condition, as mentioned above, is one where the healer comes dangerously close to death before his/her eventual recovery. when the ability to cure is conferred upon the future healer by a relative, the importance of the other world is seen in the requirement that the initiate be a woman past child bearing age. the connection to the spirit world can also be seen in the fact that the transfer of powers is often performed on a bridge over a river, the river and the bridge being symbols of passage into the world of the spirits. living saint-healers who were once wide-spread throughout europe and could identify and heal evil share many of the characteristics of shamans [pócs 1999: 155]. links to shamanism can be seen in the more recent past in macedonia. here some healers fall into a trance when talking to saints or dreaming. typically, when such a healer comes out of the dream or trance that gives her information about the ailment she is seeking to cure, she suffers a terrible headache. charms and incantations folk healers worked with charms and incantations which, according to traditional culture, were a unique and exceptional way of healing. in the mythical and ritual perception of the folk, incantations and charms are ritual threats used to drive disease from the human body and to help the person revive and return safely to life. the actual work of healing through charms contains complementary verbal and non-verbal elements. the incantations and charms themselves can be understood as communication composed of actions and multivalent messages. participants in the secrecy of the healing can include: a) the passive witness, i.e. the sick person, or the person who seeks help b) the transmitter/mediator, i.e. the healer or charmer who is at once the receiver of the message and a mediator between the patient and supernatural forces; c) the supernatural forces that receive the message requesting healing [radenković 1982: 8; vražinovski 1989: 83]. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 34 in the verbal rituals used by the healer or charmer, who can be either male or female, efficacy is attributed to the strength of the word. faith in the strength of the word was characteristic of the majority of indoeuropean peoples [dmitrieva 119] and the power of speech was used to expel disease to spaces which were believed to be alien to man. they were spaces that were not culturally conquered and thus outside the village community. space that is on the border of the social and sacred is considered to be deserted and dead. in fact, the expelling of the impure forces, meaning disease, through incantations and charms is based on the notion of disrupting the border between the social (human) and inhuman worlds [radenković 1982: 26; radenković 1996: 49]. for this reason, the healer tries to send the disease into spaces that are connected firstly with roads, and then into places that denote the other world, the world of the demonic beings. the power of borders explains why charms or incantations are recited mostly at crossroads, a place where demonic beings are generally believed to gather. the verbal declarations clearly show that the disease is cast off into a world where humans are not present. most frequently these unhealthy, lifeless communities are described as villages without roosters, where no dogs bark, no cats meow, literarily, villages which have been abandoned. “до сега беше заградено, [until now you were fenced, сега т’одградујеме. now we release you to go до сега беше заорано, until now you were ploughed, сега т’одорујеме… now we let you go… ојси преко девет планини, go away over nine mountains, преко девет конаци…” over nine inns…] [obrembski 2001, i: 206] “да си појдиш високи планиње, [you go to high mountains, кај што деца не се крштеваат, where children are not baptized, кај што невести не се венчаваат, where brides are not wed, кај што луѓе не се миросуваат, where people are not anointed, тамо имат трева зелена, the grass is green there, тамо имат вода студена, the water is cold there, тамо имат мека постела…” the bed is soft…] [cepenkov 1972, 9: 408]. “поможи му господи, [help him god и си светци небесни, and you heavenly saints, и вие мои бестсребреници, and you my silverless да ја испратам болеста, to see the illness go away од ова мачна душа, from this darkened soul, со колак и со бардаче, with a bread “ kolak” and a drinking vessel и со голем бакшиш кошула, and with a shirt as a gift secret knowledge of folk healers 35 да си оди на туѓа туѓина, to make it go away преку девет мориња, across the nine seas и преку деведесет и девет планиње” and across ninety-nine mountains..] [cepenkov 1972, 9: 289]. “бегајте надворштиње, [go away you, apparition, од оваа мачна душа, from this darkened soul, оти секогаш ќе ве чадам, because i will always put smoke into you, со оваа лоша миризба, with this foul smell, да појдите во гора зелена, you go to the green woods кај ѓурѓа самовила, go to the samovila gjurgja, под таа сенка ладовна, under that cool shadow, до таа вода студена, near that cold water, смилени китки да китите, you decorate nice bouquets, венци на ѓурѓа да праите. and make wreaths for gjurga. ако неќите тамо да појдите, if you do not want to go there, појдите во некоја куќа богата. go to a rich house. тамо пола да праите, and there you do your thing, и в душеци од пердув да лежите.” and on feathery mattresses you lay.] [cepenkov 1972, 9: 300]. “оди у лелек гора, у неврат поле, каде петел не пејет, каде говеда не рикаат, каде пес не лајет, каде мачка не маукат, каде овци не блекат, каде црква немат, каде камбана се не слушат… ти изгорев децата, ти изгорев вујка ти баба ти, ти изгорев вујна ти татко ти, ти изгореф кумот ти мајка ти, ти изгорев кумата стрика ти, ти изгореф брата ти стрина ти, ти изгорев снаа ти тетина ти, ти изгорев зета ти тетка ти, ти изгореф сестра ти. те изгореф, те испржив, ти изгорев сва твој род. за тебе немаш корен, траг ти се не видел, семе ти се сотрело, до века и увек. помози ми господе, сине божји, душа свети и поможи ми мајко,богородице”! [go to the moan forest, to the never land, where no roosters crow, where no cattle bellow, where no dogs bark, where no cats meow, where no sheep bleat, where there is no church, where no bells toll... i burned your children, i burned your uncle your grandmother, i burned your aunt your father, i burned your godfather folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 36 your mother, i burned your godmother your uncle, i burned your brother your aunt, i burned your sister-in-law… i burned your whole family. you have no roots no trace of you will be left your seed be damned for eternity. help me lord, son of god. the souls of the saints and help me mother of god!] [obrembski 2001, i: 207]. (18) from the above examples it is clear that the verbal formulae send diseases to places that were seen as far away. these places were associated with the other world. they were places where no one could travel and from which there was no return. places such as moan forest and neverland, for example, are locations where there are no attributes of human culture or symbols of a healthy community bustling with life. as above, they are villages without roosters, where dogs do not bark, cats do not meow, where there is no church and bells do not toll, where children are not baptized, where brides are not wed. (19) in one charm, a healer addresses the moon to cure a sick child. she holds the child in her hands and says: “на ти што ни даде месечино, дај ни што ни зеде!” [moon, i take what you have given us; give us what you have taken from us].[cepenkov 1972, 9: 278]. using metaphors of open and closed borders to create systematic models of disease and the human body is a widely known practice [kamppinen 11, 50]. on occasion, the other world is described as better than the one the ill person occupies and the illness is urged to go to this more attractive realm. another attribute of the mythical realm is silence, meaning that the other world is seen as a deserted place.(20) the magical power of silence and death can be seen in an albanian example. a sick child was taken to the grave of an unknown person and left there. it was believed that if the child started to cry he would survive and, if he did not, he would die.(21) unknown graves as magic places are widely attested among macedonians who practice throwing objects on them or simply adding the magic formula “as i do not know who lies in this grave” to their charms [cepenkov 1972, 9: 284-285; vražinovski 1998, i: 219]. there are traces of charming among the eastern slavs who practice whispering followed by a shaman-like trance [radenković 1996: 31]. in cultures where people use magic analogies, where every subject, appearance and object in the environment is considered to be alive, the secret knowledge of folk healers 37 disease itself is often burned to kill the root of the evil. [risteski 2002: 115; risteski 2005a: 137]. research on slavic, balkan, and some indoeuropean peoples which documents the expulsion of impure forces shows that these forces are sent to forests, mountains, waters, seas, distant lands, rocky areas, heights, certain unpopulated places, and so forth. all of these are wild and strange places. the models, then, are built on the binary oppositions: near/far, one's own / other's, to which the oppositions below/above, shallow/deep, narrow/wide can be added [radenković 1996: 53, 75; fabijanović 1989: 71-73]. the non-verbal component of charming includes actions, objects, and movements. these function to reinforce the mythical ideas of threatening and expelling. once a disease has been expelled, the healer or charmer offers the breath of new life. here the primary concern is the human body. both the body of the healer or charmer and that of the ill person are involved. in magic and religious texts, and also in healing practice, the body is understood as a spatially organized whole whose parts hold symbolic meaning. thus, certain parts of the body become signs which reveal mythical content [radenković 1996: 9]. here i refer to the expulsion of the illness from the head to the hands, the stomach, and finally to the legs and the feet. this ritual activity is a clear sign of the spatial definition of the human body in traditional cultures, where the head is the highest and peripheral point, and this is why the process of curing should start from there. in this sense, the legs and especially the feet have a contrary meaning: they are the lowest peripheral parts but, since they are closer to the ground, they connote a higher degree of contamination and provide the possibility of expelling the disease through them. once illness is expelled, rituals of blowing, tying, boiling water, passing the patient through an opening are often used to signify the rebirth of the patient. cures which expel illness from the body by directing it through proper channels and helping it exit the patient are known almost everywhere in modern europe. the formal characteristics of these cures and the verbal formulas used may indicate a relationship with past beliefs in demons [pócs 2005: 105-106]. thus, in the macedonian region of zeleznik, people who experienced a nervous breakdown or were frightened by something were said to “get the fright” or have fear sickness. to cure this condition, healers put some flour and salt in their hands, placed them on the head of the ill person, and blew into the salt and flour, saying: folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 38 “пречиста на глава, [the immaculate on the head, ристос на гради, christ on the chest, богородица на срце, mother of god on the heart, уплав под нозе!… the fright under the feet! .. ќе одврзам веторштина i shall ward off the winds, во гора зелена into a green wood, кај што петел не пее where no rooster crows, кај што секира не сечит, where no axe cuts, тамо има чешма шарена there is a dappled well, ем да пиет, ем да спиет”. to drink from and to sleep by]. others healed by using nine hot horse and donkey shoes, found along the road. they would hold a shoe near the inflicted person’s forehead, then his chest, his knees and so forth. they would then cool the hot shoe by dipping it into water in a vessel placed at the feet of the patient. as they did so they would say: “ристос на чело,/ богородица на гради, /уплав под нозе!” [christ on the forehead,/ mother of god on the chest,/ the fright under the feet!] the healer or charmer gave the ill person a drink from the water in the vessel and then poured the rest in a place where no other person could tread. this precaution prevented others from contracting the illness. [krsteva 126-127].(22) in this kind of incantation or charm, the binary opposition of above/below is prominent. besides this opposition, another distinction can also be noted, namely the one which divides the body horizontally into right and left. the right side is associated with good and is connected to the male side, while the left side is associated with the bad, evil, or female side. this dichotomy means that healing is usually done with the left hand because of the need to communicate with impure forces [radenović 1996: 23; krsteva 111]. the right/left dichotomy also means that, when healing is done near a windmill, it must be a mill where the stone turns to the left or counterclockwise. similarly, the magic objects found in the house are thrown into a whirlpool in a river and it must be a whirlpool that spins to the left. [radenović 1996: 70; cepenkov 1972, 9: 292; marinov 151; arnaudov 41]. a very efficient healing technique, one that involves discovering the woman who had cast a spell or performed malevolent magic, was to use the ligaments taken from the front paw of a wolf.(23) the wolf is important in healing practices because of his symbolic status among animals. he is considered the guardian of the border with the wild and, as such, he is the fiercest enemy of impure forces and various maladies. he must guard the border because impure forces constantly cross it, violating the division that, according to myth, was determined at secret knowledge of folk healers 39 creation. his protective role is also evident in beliefs held by macedonians and some other south-slavs. according to these beliefs, “vampires” and some other “demonic creatures” can be destroyed by summoning the wolf. the wolf’s place in macedonian charms and incantations is important. parts of the wolf’s body were given to pregnant women as protection from evil forces. they were also given to fearful children, meaning those suffering fear sickness. often the curing of such a child involved threatening the illness afflicting him or her by calling on an angel or a wolf. afterwards, the child was passed through the mouth of a wolf skull.(24) this latter practice is analogous to other types of passing through openings attested among other south slavic peoples [radenković 1996: 91-97]. to sum up, the cultural code requires that the act of curing contain a ritual threat, expulsion of the disease from the body, the destruction of the disease, and then the consolidation of the body, the revival of the patient and his return to life. this is the starting point for understanding the following, namely that studies of the ritual behavior of healers and charmers during conjuring and expelling diseases have shown that several used the techniques of blowing, tying, and drawing or passing the patient through an opening. blowing can be connected to the archaic motif of the breath of life. it can be seen as revival, expressed through the motif of the soul as the essence of living beings.(25) thus, the ritual of blowing towards or into the ill person, or expelling disease through protracted and intensive ritual yawning and shouting can mark the process of breathing life into the patient. after the charmer or healer expels the disease, he/she blows three times in the area of the ill person’s mouth or head or on the painful part of the body. this is clearly analogous to the primordial act of god breathing life into man; it is literally the same as breathing a new soul into a person to give him life, health, and mobility. therefore, the act of ritual healing brings the charmer close to exceptional holiness. when she or he assumes the position of a creator of life, the giver of a new soul, she or he is similar to the divine; his or her action is akin to one when god created man [risteski 2002: 118; risteski 2005: 86]. the technique of tying the disease [schubert 143-146; radenković 1982: 266; 419) is wide spread in ritual. by using the analogous action of tying knots in woolen yarn, the healer can tie or bind the disease and make it ineffective. “ја ќе те врза света лошотија,/ тује да останет, тује врзана да седит,/ тује да пијет, тује да јадет…” [i will tie you, you holy evil,/ to stay here, to stay tied,/ to drink here, to eat folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 40 here...]. [obrembski 2001, i: 170]. this type of ritual and magical act is performed after the healer transfers the disease to the ill person's garment. the garment with the disease is then bound to a special place designated for that purpose which is usually the sweetbrier. this frees the sick person from his illness. sometimes knots were tied into the cord used to tie down the body during rigor mortis. this was accompanied by the formula: “како што го врзав јазолов на конецот од пустите ништи, така да се врзат сите болести што ќе му идат оваа година на стариот” [as i have tied the knot in the cord from the damned so let all diseases that will come to the old one tie themselves up...]. afterwards, the cord was buried under the doorstep of the house. [cepenkov 1972, 9: 287]. another wide-spread technique is drawing or passing the patient through an opening; this is a symbolic death and rebirth. frequently, a rock or tree is used as the object through which the afflicted is passed. the rock, typically with a hole in it, or a tree such as one that has been split or one where there is a hole under the roots that a person can pass through, signifies the border between two worlds. there are documented instances of healers pulling sick children through rocks or tree roots,(26) or passing them through the mouth of a wolf's skull. also, in macedonia, this type of healing is used for women who cannot have children.(27) when expelling the problem, the charmer or healer uses certain tools to mythically or symbolically threaten and expel what troubles the patient. these include herbs whose characteristics represent power against demonic forces.(28) among such herbs and other plant substances are basil, various thorns, and assorted seeds. often, sharp metal objects such as knifes, axes, and sickles which have the power to cut and destroy impure forces are used. fire and the tools connected with it are also employed [radenković 1982: 9]. conclusion based on the above observations, one can deduce that the secret knowledge of experts in magic, notably their charms, incantations and the actions that accompany them, are an archaic remnant of folk magic medicine [kulišić, petrović & pantelić 16, 77]. in certain communities, these practices persist today. due to the fact that charming represented a unique and an extraordinary form of healing, the folk healers and charmers were mostly highly respected in their communities. healers and charmers had their own, special place in society. they enjoyed a special secret knowledge of folk healers 41 status and formed a special subculture [risteski 2002: 120]. but sometimes they were seen in a contrary light and people who could heal were also accused of causing illness. mostly, however, people who had dreams and visions and were able to communicate with supernatural beings were seen as saviors who could solve the existential crises of individuals and the community. the dreams and visions were also retold by people with open excitement and used to enrich the folk perception of and beliefs about the other world. such perceptions can be found in legends and magical stories about heroes who descend to the land below or climb up to heaven and gain insight into another reality [šapkarev 156; cepenkov 1980, 4: 48]. beliefs connected to the visions of healers and charmers can also be found in apocrypha which, according to scholars such as stojčevska-antić, were wide spread and had an important influence on macedonian folk creativity [stojčevska-antić 17, 81,185]. finally folk healers offer the people of the community personal insight into the other world, especially the world of the dead. as such, they provide “evidence” for the continuity of life. they confirm and strengthen faith in immortality which is fundamental to any religion [cvetanovska 121]. the secret knowledge of spell experts and healers can be connected with death or the being owned by death [pócs 2005: 93]. this deeply archaic belief is evident in how knowledge is acquired, namely that it is passed on from mother to daughter or granddaughter/grandson in a place that suggests connection to the other world (water, bridge). it is also evident in the fact that the women performing charms must be postmenopausal. also important is the fact that, when knowledge is acquired through dreams and visions, the soul of the initiate or the initiate himor herself must be in touch with the other world and then return to life by passing over a thin line: a bridge as wide as a hair or a straw. this is a condition akin to death followed by eventual recuperation. part of the archaic structure is the time and the spatial symbolism used in charms. evidence here includes the idea of the illness being sent out of the human body, from the head on down to the feet. it includes the places that designate the other world (neverland, moan forest, places where no roosters crow, where no dogs bark, etc.). the time when charms are performed is also important: it is an “other worldly time,” while the place is typically liminal: a symbolic circle on the doorstep, on a grave, or an opening through which the patient can pass enacting a symbolic death and rebirth [see more about the time and space in charms and incantations in: radenković 1982: 8-9]. an important principle is for the folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 42 healer to have a relationship with death, one that is gained from supernatural beings (samovili) or christian saints, angels, or even god himself. illnesses are expelled to wild and deserted places and this model is based on the binary opposition of near/far, one’s own/someone else’s, to which the additional oppositions of below/ above, shallow /deep, narrow/wide can be added. usually the second member of the binary opposition holds negative connotations. notes 1 thus for example, the old woman would take the young one to a river or to a place near water. over the water, the young woman would take the braids of the old charmer in her hands and would listen to the words the latter said. after that, the young woman had to silently repeat the learned text three times on three bridges and three times while at a church mass [krsteva 106]. 2 archıve of the institute of folklore “marko cepenkov,” in skopje (hereafter: aif), tape no. 3870, informant d. m.(f), born 1925 in village mozdivnjak (kriva palanka), lives in v. psacha (kriva palanka). recorded by: vesna petreska in v. psacha in 2000. (further: aif, t. no. 3870, inf. d. m. (f) b.1935 in v. mozdivnjak (kriva palanka), lives in v. psacha (kriva palanka). 3 j.obrembski’s research in macedonia, in the village of volche, shows that the woman-healer received privileges that belonged only to men. she did not have to stand up while greeting men. at public meetings, like weddings, she could freely mingle with men, sit at their table, drink brandy with them, and talk with them as their equal, and if she wanted, she could even use foul language, which was restricted to the male domain [obrembski 2001, ii: 56]. 4 aif, t. no. 2885, inf. m. t. (f) from v. kanatlarci, area of prilep, b.1934 in v. pashino rufci (area of prilep). recorded by: tanas vražinovski. 5 aif t. no.2885, inf. s. d. (m). recorded by: tanas vražinovski in 1982. this woman was the informant's sister. before that time she interacted with people, she was cheerful, ate everything, but since the spirit (“самовила”) entered her body, she became restricted in communication with people, did not go to festivities, did not share jokes, did not eat everything. it is believed that such women do not live long. this woman with “the samovila inside her body” lived for five more years. according to the informant, after death, the samovila goes to secret knowledge of folk healers 43 heaven, while the woman follows as her servant. also other field research confirms that the people who had samovili enter their bodies became good people and did only good deeds. they received healthy power and were capable of “breaking” spells and conjuring. according to belief these people did not live long, usually 5-6 years. after death both the people and samovili go to heaven, but the people become servants of the samovili. (vražinovski, 1998, i: 169, 174). 6 cited according to: j. tucakov, psychosuggestive elements in folk's medicine of svrljiski timok, belgrade, 1965, 10-13. the news that this healer was selected to heal the people was announced to him by st. petka, after six months of torture (he could not eat, sleep, or perform his marital duties; he only sat on a chair in a constant trance). immediately after the experienced vision, borko bathed himself in water in which there was basil and he recovered. 7 my own field research. 8 my own field research. 9 aif t. no. 2885, inf. m. t.(f); s. d.(m); gj. b. (m). recorded by: tanas vražinovski in 1982 y.; aif t. no. 2935, inf. s. o. t. (f) b. 1900. recorded by: tanas vražinovski in v. sveta demir hisar in 1981; [cvetanovska 117-122; vražinovski 1989: 86; domazetovski 132]. 10 aif t. no. 2935, inf. s. o. t. (f); b. 1900. recorded by: tanasvražinovski in v. sveta demir hisar in 1981. 11 aif t. no. 2935, inf. s. o. t. 12 my own field research. 13 in archive materials we find data that a certain woman, a sister of the informant, managed to fulfill her healing tasks with an icon. according to the informant, a samovila had entered his sister's body. when she, as a healer, would place an icon on the afficted body part of the man / woman believed to be the victim of magic, the samovila would tell her the way to cure the problem. in this case we can clearly see the syncretism of pre-christian and christian beliefs (it is a samovila that is inside the body, while the healing is done with an icon). the informant told of another case involving a man from the village of izvor, area of prilep, who “saw” with the help of a saint. the man fell into a kind of “trance” and he appeared to be sleeping when he communicated with the saint who told him how to heal. aif t. no. 2885, inf. s. d.(m). charms using icons were also found by m. cepenkov [cepenkov 1972, 9: 404407]. this type of healing is well known in macedonian healing practices. an example is the healer (“бајач”) vasilko, in the macedonian region of poreche, from the village of krapa. he obtained his knowledge folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 44 when he supposedly lived for six weeks in a liminal state, suspended between life and death, in the hills and forest. when he awoke from this state, he became a seer. he responded to people’s questions and supplied them with solutions after speaking with icons [mencej 57]. 14 aif t. no. 2885, inf. gj. b. (m); b. 1927 in v. jablanica area of struga. lives in v. kanatlarci area of bitola. recorded by: tanas vrazinovski in 1982. 15 aif t. no. 2885, inf. m. t.(f) 16 aif t. no. 2885, inf. m. t.(f) 17 aif t. no. 2885, inf. m. t. (f) 18 similar examples, see: radenković 1982: 70-71; 75-76; incantation no. 94; 102. 19 for similar examples from the southern slavs see: [radenković 1982]. 20 note the ritual dances with masks which in macedonia were performed for the period of the winter solstice, from christmas eve until gjurgjovden (st. george) and spasovden. the intensity of these dances was greatest in the period of the so called unbaptized days from kolede (january 5) until twelfth night (january 18). the dances were performed on the eve of vasilica (january 13), and that period was believed to be rife with impure powers. protection from impure powers required making a terrible noise (drama games, bells, singing songs with erotic content, etc.). 21 my own field research. 22 for the expulsion of the illness from the head to the legs, see: [cepenov 1972, 9: 286]. 23 the procedure was performed at night; a fire was set up on a crossroad and a clay pot was left over the fire to get hot. after that the wolves’ ligaments were put inside. the heat caused the ligaments to expand until they burst. when throwing the ligaments inside the pot, the names of women suspected of doing magic were recited. the sorceress was rendered ineffective when the ligament burst as this was considered to be the annulment of the magic [obrembski 2001, i, ii: 168-169; 72-73; cepenkov, 1972, 9: 289]. according to j.obrembski's research in the macedonian area of poreche, in the village of volche, this conjuring practice was not performed often because there was danger for the performer and his family if the charm was not recited properly. according to a folk saying “it was a great sin then to burst ligaments”, and the women always pointed to other ethnic groups that did this, for example, gypsies. secret knowledge of folk healers 45 obrembski, however, learned the real significance of this practice when the man of the house where he was staying caught a wolf. the man was very proud of the catch and ligaments he possessed, and he did not even hide the fact. he said: “let some of them dare and try to make magic; i will burst their veins”. he was triumphant because he expected financial benefit from the sale of the wolf's body parts (the jaws, eyes, claws, rump, ligaments) [obrembski 2001, ii: 95-99]. it appears that bursting wolves’ ligaments was used more as a means of prevention, as a sanction that threatened sorceresses, and not as a way to solve problems. consider, for example, that the charmer had to know the whole technique in order to perform the ritual, otherwise she would put herself and her family in great danger. furthermore building a fire in the dead of night on a crossroad opens the possibility that she may be seen, and the rule says that she must not be seen. finally, it is believed that this blowing/ bursting was performed by women from a different ethnic group, namely gypsies. by the same token, when obrembski was doing his research in the area of poreche, he did not meet any gypsies. this makes it clear that this procedure was not used. 24 we find examples that belief in the power of the wolves’ organs was wide spread and documented in the works of macedonian scholars working at the beginning of the 19th century. their work show that such acts were condemned: “i see some put garlic on their heads, some have taken a tooth from the wolf, the others have taken its heart, and they carry it as a light.... what is this disbelief in you? what is this polytheism in you? what is this madness at old age? if the wolf could have taken care of the man, everyone would have kept a live one at home.” [krčovski-pejčinović 75-76]. 25 this is the universal cosmogenious motif, namely that the creation of man is the result of the battle between god and the devil. in macedonian folk belief god and the devil were once brothers. according to legend, each made a man of dirt, only god managed to breathe a soul into him, to bring the man to life by blowing three times into his mouth. the man made by the devil, however, remained a piece of dirt. see: [vražinovski folk mythology of macedonians, 1998, i, p.15; lafazanovski 31-32]. 26 in the area of zeleznik, children suffering from hernias were passed through a tree whose root was split into two parts but joined again to form an opening. the women pulled the children through the opening three times and on the tree they left a dirty diaper from the sick child. a very frequent practice was to pull a child through the roots of an oak or a folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 46 walnut tree. usually the child was taken there by a woman who had stopped bearing children. the old woman dug beneath the root of the tree and pulled the child through three times. a shirt, a scarf or some other cloth item was left behind [krsteva 107]. 27 in the same area of zeleznik, women who could not have children went to pass through rocks in the village of koshino, in the vicinity of krushevo. there was a huge rock with two openings called the “male rock” and the “female rock”. the woman entered through “the female rock” and exited through “the male rock”. she did this three times [krsteva 130]. “govedar kamen” a place near the town sveti nikole, where women who could not have children go to pass under the rocks is also famous. [see: petreska 2005: 128-129; petreska 2006:171-172; karadzoski 85-86]. 28 the use of plants in magical practices and healing has been extensively discussed. see [kolosova 47-64; čajkanović, 1985; the journal: kodovi slovenskih kultura, and the journal: “plants”, number 1, beograd, 1996]; for plants among albanians, see: peterson-bidoshi 78116. list of informants cited in the article gj. b. (m) born 1927 in v. jablanica area of struga, lives in v. kanatlarci, area of bitola. s. d.(m) lives in v. kanatlarcu area of prilep d. m. (f) born 1935 in v. modzdivnjak area of kriva palanka, lives in v. psacha area of kriva palanka. s. o. t. (f) born 1900 in v. sveta area of demir hisar. m. t. (f) born 1934 in v. pashino rufci area of prilep, lives in s. kanatlarci area of prilep. bibliography arnaudov, mihail. 1930. арнаудов, михаил. “фолклорни приноси от родопско” [folklore materials from rodopies], сборник за народни умотворения и народопис, xxxviii, софия. cepenkov, marko. 1972. цепенков, марко. македонски народни умотворби [macedonian folk works], book 9, skopje. cepenkov, marko. 1980. македонски народни умотворби [macedonian folk works], book 4; book 9, skopje. secret knowledge of folk healers 47 cvetanovska, jelena. 2001/2002. цветановска, јелена. “искуство блиску до смртта како влез во натприродното” [near-death experience as the entrance to the supernatural]. етнокултуролошки зборник vii(svrljig): 117-122. čajkanović, veselin. 1985. чајкановић, веселин. речник српских народних веровања о биљкама [dictionary of serbian popular beliefs about plants]. belgrade: srpska kniževna zadruga. dmitrieva, i.s. 1984. дмитриева, и.с. “народные представления о болезня и отражение 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jovanovska (соња јовановска), vladimir karadzoski (владимир караџоски). skopje-prilep: institute for old slavic culture – prilep: matica makedonska. penavin, olga. 1985. “narodno lečenje kod mađara u jugoslaviji” [folk cures among hungarians in yugoslavia], македонски фолклор 36: 75-82. peterson-bidoshi, k. 2006: “qazim shemaj’s' ‘veronica’s dream”: a contemporary albanian fairytale,” folklorica: journal of the slavic and east european folklore association xi: 78-116. petreska, vesna. 2005. петреска, весна. систем на сродство кај македонците [system of kinship among macedonians].skopje: institute of folklore “marko cepenkov”, special editions, vol. 69. petreska, vesna. 2006. “духовното сродство во современите општествени процеси” [spiritual kinship in contemporary social processes], македонски фолклор 63: 163-179. secret knowledge of folk healers 49 pocs, éva. 1989. “fairies and witches at the boundary of south-eastern and central europe,” ff communications: 243. pocs, éva. 1999. between the living and the dead. a perspective on witches and seers in the early modern age. budapest: ceu press. pocs, éva. 2005. “possession phenomena, possession systems. some east-central european examples,” in communicating with the spirits. demons, spirits, witches, ed. by gábor klaniczay and éva pócs, in collaboration with eszter csonka-takáa, vol. i. budapestnew york: ceu press, 84-151. radenković, ljubinko. 1982. раденковић, љубинко. народне басме и бајања [folk incantations and sorcery]. niš-priština-kragujevac. radenković, ljubinko. 1996. раденковић, љубинко. симболика света у народној магији јужних словена [world symbolics in southern slavic folk sorcery]. niš-beograd: prosveta niš, balkanološki institut sanu, beograd, special editions, book 67. risteski, ljupčo. 1999. ристески, љупчо. посмртниот обреден комплекс во традициската култура на мариово [posthumous ritual complex in the traditional culture of mariovo]. prilep. risteski, ljupčo. 2002. “народните исцелителки во порече од времето на јозеф обрембски до денес” [the folk healers in poreche from the time of joseph obrembsky up to the present], international scientific assembly samokov, 14-16 september 2001, 70-years from the research of joseph obrembsky in poreche, r. macedonia. institute for old slavic culture prilep, 111-120. risteski, ljupčo. 2005. категориите простор и време во народната култура на македонците [the categories of space and time in the folk culture of the macedonians]. skopje: matica makedonska. risteski, ljupčo. 2005a. “traditional healers in poreče from the time of jozef obrembski to the present day,” post-yugoslav lifeworlds. between traditions and modernity. ljubljana. 133-141. schubert, gabriella. 1984. “konac, vrpce i tkanina kao magisjka sredstva narodne medicine u jugoistočnoj evropi” [yarn, laces and textile as a magical means in the folk medicine in south-eastern europe], македонски фолклор 33: 135-151. stojčevska-antić, vera. 1996. стојчевска-антиќ, вера. апокрифи, предговор, избор, белешки и редакција [apocrypha, preface, selection, notes and editor]. skopje. šapkarev, kuzman. 1976. шапкарев, кузман. избрани дела [selected works], book 5, ed. tome sazdov. skopje: misla. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 50 tucakov, j. 1965. туцаков, ј. психосугестивни елементи у народној медицини сврљишког тимока [psychosuggestive elements in the folk medicine of svrljiski timok]. beograd. vražinovski, tanas. 1989. вражиновски, танас “за некои ликови на бајачки и нивниот раскажувачки репертоар” [about some charmers and their story repertoire], македонски фолклор 44: 83-88. vražinovski, tanas. 1998. народна митологија на македонците [folk mythology of macedonian]. assistants ljupčo s. risteski (љупчо с. ристески), vladimir karadzoski (владимир караџоски), lola simoska (лола симоска). skopje-prilep: institute for ancient slavic culture – prilep: matica makedonska. vražinovski, tanas. 2000. речник на народната митологија на македонците [folk mythology of the macedonian people], ed. tanas vražinovski (танас вражиновски), prepared by: tanas vražinovski (танас вражиновски), sonja zogović (соња зоговиќ), vladimir karadzoski (владимир караџоски), sonja jovanovska (соња јовановска), biljana ristovska-josifovska (биљана ристовска-јосифовска). prilep-skopje. zlatanović, momčilo. 1989. “basma i bajanje danas” [charms and charming today], македонски фолклор 44: 65-68. report on the conference held in kiev, ukraine, september 8­14, 1997 natalie kononenko, university of virginia a conference entitled "oral epic: ethnic traditions and performance" was held in kiev, ukraine, sept. 8­14, 1997. the conference was dedicated to the memory of filaret kolessa and albert lord and was attended by scholars from a number of countries, including ukraine, the united states, poland, hungary, georgia, latvia, russia proper and the tuvan and sakha republics of the russian federation. the american participants were linda degh, elizabeth fine, natalie kononenko, hari rorlich. walter stevenson, and jeffrey wills. in addition, john miles foley, john kolsti, and helene turkewicz­sanko, who were unable to attend, sent papers that were published in the conference proceedings. the genres covered were epic poetry, ritual poetry, ballad, lament, tales, legends, jokes, and dance. speakers discussed problems of collecting data. they reported on the work of previous schol­ ars, especially lord and kolessa, but also others, such lavornyts'kyi and martynovych. they described material available in archives and discussed its con­ servation and use. one session dealt with the special problems of the data collected on wax cylinders at the turn of the century, and current efforts to con­ serve the cylinders and transfer the data into form­ ats that would make it readily accessible to scholars. reports on collecting experiences and opportunities for collecting proved extremely valuable. interesting papers included attempts to apply oral formulaic theory to prose genres. following the work of koles­ sa and lord, many papers focused on the performer гц seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 pnd the performance situation, including performeraudience interaction. kiril chistov talked about the collecting situation and the problems of recording the sort of performance that would occur if no outsider, such as the collector, were present. a special event was an evening during which modern minstrels, including pavlo surpun and mykola budnyk, performed for the conference participants. the evening included explanatory commentary by sophia hiytsa and field video tapes collected by graduate students of the kiev folklore institute. other events outside the conference included a special tour of the st. sophia cathedral led by irma totska that provided access to parts of the structure not normally open to the public. in addition, a lively discussion of the famous "minstrel" figure frescos on the cathedral walls took place. there was also a tour of the lavra, the kiev cave monastery. the author of this report was treated to a tour of the folk instrument collection of the lavra by raisa husak and leonid cherkaskyi. two volumes of conference abstracts were published. if the mail system works, copies may be obtained from: olesia britsyna, assistant to the director institute of folklore, art, and ethnomusicology 4 hrushevsky st. kiev 225001 ukraine fax: 380-44-229-4522 if you have trouble getting through to ukraine, contact: natalie kononenko university of virginia slavic dept., cabell hall 109 5t charlottesville, va 22903 phone: 804­924­3548 (w) and 978­1942 (h) e­mail: <nkm@virginia.edu> the folklore institute in kiev has an e­mail address. it is <imfemail@gilan.uar.net>, but it has not worked in a long time. the people at the various folklore institutes in ukraine are anxious to have american partners in their various field work expeditions and can custom­ ize field expeditions for you. anne ingram, whose report on her field work appears elsewhere in this issue of the seefa newsletter, had collecting trips arranged with the help of the kiev and kherson folklore institutes. a call for a conference and field work opportunity in cherkasy also appears else­ where in this newsletter. the members of the various folklore institutes would also be happy to work with american colleagues in finding grants and constructing applications for support. again, if you have trouble contacting ukraine, contact natalie kononenko and she will help with mail or other contact. бч seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 mailto:nkm@virginia.edu mailto:imfemail@gilan.uar.net microsoft word contentsqsoft.doc 135 катя михайлова. странстващият сляп певец просяк във фолклорната култура на славяните. (katya mihailova. the wandering blind singer-beggar in slavic folk culture). sofia: ab publishing house, 2006. notes. illustrations. appendix. 527 pp. isbn 954-737615-2 [in bulgarian, with an abstract in english]. two main facts emerge from a quick glance over the literature on the art and role of folk singers in slavic folk culture: most of it is centered upon single ethnic groups, or upon a particular type of singer. attention to heroic epics and heroic epic singers far outweighs that given to other folk genres and their performers. yet, ironically, as the author argues, not many published texts of epics were collected from blind mendicant singers, their core repertoire consisting rather of religious and legendary epics. katya mihailova’s impressive monograph, a result of long term effort, focuses on the blind itinerant professional mendicant singer as a phenomenon common to all slavic cultures. she distinguishes him from several other types of itinerant professional singers and from nonprofessional epic singers found all across europe from the middle ages to the early 20th century. she then proceeds to an in-depth cross-cultural analysis of his semantics (ascribed cultural meanings), functions and repertoire across all major slavic groups. a daunting task such as this has not been undertaken before. katya mihailova is well suited to the task by training as a slavist and her experience as a folklorist and field worker at the bulgarian academy of sciences’ institute of folklore. the material on which this study is based is enormous. primary sources are drawn from all major slavic groups, especially bulgarian, serbian, croatian, macedonian, russian, ukrainian, belarusian, polish, slovak, czech. they include: (1) songs, tales, legends from the repertoire of mendicant singers, begging prayers, blessings and curses, secret signs, beggars’ secret languages; (2) songs, tales, legends, rituals, in which the beggar features as a character, proverbs and sayings; (3) interviews with informants, eyewitnesses to the phenomenon; (4) travelogues, essays, memoirs, regional and area studies, etc., providing data on the biographies, lifestyle, customs and organization of mendicant singers; (5) church murals and other types of ecclesiastical art depicting singers and song themes; (6) material collected by the author through fieldwork in 1987-88 and 1999 (mostly bulgarian, but also some polish, slovak and ukrainian) – some texts, but also recollections of older people (the phenomenon ceased to exist in most slavic countries, except poland and folklorica 2007, vol. xii 136 ukraine, about 60 years ago); (7) material from numerous archives and museums in all slavic countries among the more rare and valuable are the manuscript collections of the ukrainian national academy of sciences’ institute of arts, folkloristics and ethnology in kiev (especially the archives of porfirii martynovych and kliment kvitka); and the musical manuscripts collection of matica slovenska in martin, slovakia, from the 1970’s and 1980’s (the only comprehensive regional study of this kind in slovakia); (8) published material on beggars in general and on mendicant singers in particular. discussing the main types of itinerant professional epic singers among the slavs in the context of other european traditions from the middle ages and early renaissance, mihailova takes into account the way in which each slavic group through time has experienced varying degrees of cultural and historical influence on the part of the two major branches of european culture – byzantine-slavic and western european. four main types of singer are outlined, which meet the two main criteria itinerant way of living and the practice of epic singing as a craft or profession. they are then distinguished based on the oppositions of ‘high’ vs. ‘low’ and secular vs. religious culture. comparison of historical records about their existence reveals that the institution of professional mendicant singing has survived the longest among the slavs and the south slavs in particular as a result of the retention of a rural patriarchal way of life in the context of foreign domination. the main object of this study is thus differentiated from a wide range of other itinerant professional performers (troubadours, trouvères, minnesingers, jongleurs, spielleute, minstrels, skomorokhi, vagantes, goliardowie, dijaci, pivorezi, etc.) as representing “low” religious art. it is also distinguished from non-professional epic singers, who remain rooted in their community, engage in farming like everyone else and have no special status. the case for this distinction is reinforced by the claim that only the itinerant blind mendicant singers maintain a vast obligatory repertoire of religious epics and enjoy special societal attitudes toward them. among the slavs, some representatives of this type of singer are the dziady, zˇebráci, kaliki perehozˇie, nisˇtie starcy, starci, lirniki, kobzari, bandurysty, slepi guslari, bozˇeci, pitacˇi. the author compares the common beggar and the mendicant singer in terms of the kinds of cultural meanings socially ascribed to them. she concludes that they share the same traits – a sacred nature (an incarnation of a deity, a link with the world of the dead); poverty; physical disability precluding the option of normal labor and invoking special attitudes; 137 mobility (undertaking physical/spatial and symbolic transitions). however, the mendicant singer is additionally characterized by blindness (ordinary beggars may be sighted), possession of a home and family, even a wife and children, yet still earning a living by receiving alms for his art. he is also marked by different clothing and attributes, and, above all, by his stringed musical instrument, essential for his craft. the most important aspect of the two, mihailova argues, is their conceptualization as mediators on a vertical as well as horizontal plane, between the world of the sacred and that of the profane (heaven and earth), between the relatively closed village community and the outside world. the core repertoire of the mendicant epic singers, the author argues, is in direct relationship with the above characteristics, i.e. it is religious and legendary epics, and not heroic epics as is often assumed. religious songs and begging prayers were a mandatory part of the training these singers underwent, without knowledge of which they could not practice their craft. this, however, is not a totally new revelation – natalie kononenko, for one, has argued the same for the ukrainian minstrels. still, the detailed analysis of most common themes and motifs and their symbolic meanings across all slavic groups validates the argument for slavic folk culture in general. it concludes that most songs are folkloric versions of three major genres of the official christian literature – gospel parables, exempla, and vitae of martyrs and hermits. the ideas of sin and retribution, charity, and norms of a righteous life on earth, as well as the fate of souls after death in the world beyond dominate in these songs. the eschatological theme of the last judgement, with its two sub-themes (individual punishment and punishment of entire peoples or humankind as a whole), is given particular attention. its treatment in songs and church pictorial art are found to reveal an interesting dynamic between christian norms and folk norms in the context of rural life. in the absence of an autonomous church in bulgaria under the ottomans, for example, the author contends, there was no rigid distinction between official and unofficial christian culture, thus resulting in a form of christianity referred to as popular or folk christianity. in such contexts, painters of village churches have tended to incorporate local lifestyles and traditions in their depictions of scenes from the last judgement, whereas these forms of pictorial art have also influenced verbal folklore. this, however, assumes perhaps too active and direct a role for the village folk, let alone blind mendicant musicians, to play as keen “observers” and discussants of religious pictorial art. the symbolic analysis of conceptualizations of heaven and hell, the soul’s journey after death, the bridge to the other folklorica 2007, vol. xii 138 world, is subtle and convincing – pointing out similarities and differences between pre-christian and christian notions. the semantic analysis of this repertoire is complemented by a functional one tracing the kinds of use to which societies put mendicant singing as an institution. time and place, of course, determine each performance and its dominant function, but, the author contends, all functions are usually intertwined and present to a greater or lesser extent. the liminality of the singers corresponds with the liminality of the times and places of their performances – during important religious holidays and festivals, periods of fasting (for christmas and easter), at life cycle rituals, etc. (i.e., during times of transition from a cosmic and societal perspective), and in front of churches, at the thresholds of homes, on roads, bridges, windows. the parallels and distinctions drawn by mihailova between the actions, repertoire and conceptualization of mendicant singers and those of young adult men and women engaged in group seasonal rites found in all slavic cultures (e.g., the bulgarian koledari and lazarki, the serbian lazarice, the russian v'iunoshniki, the polish dziady smigustne, etc.), are original and revealing. the following functions that mendicant singing performs are discussed: ethical and morally assertive, normative, socially integrative, ethno-consolidating, educative and patriotic (especially among the south slavs under ottoman rule, but also among the ukrainians). mendicant singers often functioned also as prophets, healers, advisers, mediators between the clergy and the laity, and even as a kind of church preacher. the author also briefly outlines the gradual changes in the repertoire and functions of slavic mendicant singers that have occurred since the late 1800’s. most of these changes mark a trend toward blending with another popular group of performers, the country fair singers. societal attitudes toward them have also changed and have become more ambivalent. mihailova’s study makes a number of significant contributions. it is the first comprehensive cross-cultural study on blind mendicant singers in slavic folk culture. continuous and well-founded parallels are drawn between the east, west and south slavs. it introduces a great deal of new, unpublished material, both collected in the field by the author herself and derived from rare archival sources. plausible evidence is presented for the existence in (southwest) bulgaria of blind mendicant singers contrary to many assumptions that south slavic singers were sighted or merely the stuff of legend (kononenko, ukrainian minstrels: and the blind shall sing, ix, xi; lord, the singer of tales: 18-20). 139 evidence is also provided for the existence of the institution of mendicant singers in medieval bulgaria. yet, the author rejects the existence of schools for training such singers. indeed, available data on the issue is inconclusive and the issue is still open for debate. some of the other observations made in the study have already been made by others with regard to a single slavic group, or to non-slavic cultures, or other types of folk singers (cross-cultural variation is significant, but recurring patterns are common, see, e.g., finnegan: oral poetry: its nature, significance and social context, 170-213; kononenko). however, the detailed and comprehensive analysis of the main issues across all slavic cultures in the context of byzantine and western european influences, makes this book a valuable tool for all slavists. the study certainly is of general interest, too, but readers with no knowledge of any slavic language, as well as many bulgarian readers, will find it difficult to navigate through texts and quotes for which no translation is available. all texts are given in the original language. one would probably wish that, when medieval western europe is discussed, there were less heavy a reliance on a few soviet-era authors, reputable as they may be. it is unfortunate that the work does not include an index. worse, there is no complete bibliography – references and notes are combined and placed at the end of each chapter making it difficult to grasp the scope of the consulted works. also, in the absence of a general list of references, the way of citation is confusing at times, when, e.g., a reference is given as ‘op. cit.’ and the previous full quote is several pages back (e.g., chapters 2 and 4, pp. 109 and 111; 229 and 231). these shortcomings, however, are, more or less, compensated for by an impressive appendix, which provides valuable additional primary material: 35 pages of mostly color photos of blind singers, beggars, musical instruments, church murals and icons; 30 pages of secret signs and vocabulary used by beggars; about 30 pages of begging prayers, blessings and curses; close to 60 pages of begging songs (including some archival recordings from the poles'e region); beggars’ religious tales and legends. katya mihailova’s monograph marks a milestone in the area of slavic folklore studies. liliana perkowski university of virginia folklorica 2007, vol. xii microsoft word folks05.doc 3 articles the folklore of the orange revolution (1) o. britsyna and i. golovakha. ryl�s�kyi institute for art, folklore and ethnology, ukrainian academy of sciences, kyiv the orange revolution, which took place in kyiv between november and december of 2004, shows clearly that folklore is alive and well. the folk tradition is as vital today as it was a century ago, and the bearers of folk tradition react to important social and political events promptly and creatively by producing new folklore. the tumult following the second round of the 2004 ukrainian presidential election revealed not only a mass political movement but also the enormous creative potential of the folk. oral folklore is immune to censorship and thus accurately reflects the moods, sympathies and antipathies that the bearers of folk tradition experienced during the orange revolution. the rich ukrainian folk tradition was stimulated by the fact that events of great significance were taking place and responded with a flowering of new folk items. the new folklore of the orange revolution took a number of forms. in many cases, traditional texts were revived and some were given new meanings in the revival process. time will tell whether these newly revived texts survive to become part of oral tradition. the essence of the functioning of folk tradition is the close connection between teller and audience. texts which do not receive a response from listeners will be forgotten quickly, while adjustments to suit the audiences� interests and mood can change a particular folk community's repertoire. for this reason, studying the folklore created in response to the orange revolution and tracking the fate of the various newly-produced items will permit us to make generalizations about folk process: how folklore is born and how it lives, grows, and develops � or dies. folklore forms played an important role in the artistic consciousness of the people participating in the orange revolution. because the participants in the orange revolution sought to put down the regime in power, the genres they most commonly produced were satirical ones. ukrainian researchers in a variety of fields immediately noted the carnival nature of the orange revolution and historians, folklorists and ethnographers commented to this effect in newspaper articles and conference reports soon after the events took place. a carnivalesque worldview commonly follows social revolution. at such times people become aware of the possibility of freedom from official power, and participate in the temporary illusion of complete liberty and celebration, equality and brotherhood. the lower part of the human body the sexual organs and the organs of excretion play a special role in the carnival worldview and receives, in folk texts, the symbolic meaning of an old power's death and a new world's birth [bakhtin 1990: 5-31]. understanding the symbolism of carnival culture is necessary to interpret correctly the most brutal and grotesque verbal texts and images associated with orange folklore. the awakening of a folk spirit, and its accompanying strong emotions, strengthened folklore's function, while political street life enhanced folk fantasies, which found their reflection in short folklore texts. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 4 texts inspired by political events are organic to a revolutionary folk's everyday communication. we can observe this in the cases of the civil war after the soviet socialist revolution, the second world war, and ukrainian independence movements, both contemporary and historical. the folk genres that are most closely linked to revolutionary communication are anecdotes, short satirical poems, slogans and graffiti. narrative genres can also become quite popular, especially those which express hopes for a better future. for example, the authors recorded and photographed many lyric and epic poems with a positive outlook. in these, motifs envisioning a better ukraine to come were more numerous than motifs expressing sarcasm towards the status quo. small genres naturally took a leading place among the genres of the orange revolution; slogans and anecdotes were engendered by almost every political event. most ukrainians heard various anecdotes, poems and slogans about the "strong egg" that felled presidential candidate yanukovych. these appeared in reaction to the incident in ivano-frankivsk, when viktor yanukovych went to the hospital after an egg was thrown at him by a protestor. there were also numerous jokes to the effect that geese saved rome while chickens saved ukraine. an example of a poem based on the egg incident is the following: книга гін[н]еса чекає the guinness book is waiting ім�я такого прикарпатця, for the carpathian man's name хто довів, що в нашім краї the one who proved that найміцніші в світі яйця. ukrainian eggs are the strongest in the world хай кричать ворожі круки let enemies scream най завидує європа. let europe be envious ми простим яйцем із курки because we are the ones who, with the chicken egg збили з ніг пів тонни хлопа. put down half a ton of silliness (2) the orange revolution became a moment in ukrainian life when folklore existed not just within a particular folk group, but became an organic and important part of everyday communication for all politically active people. political events were immediately reflected and appraised in folk texts. as so often happens when a tradition bearer leaves his community and joins a temporary community united on the basis of common political and social attitudes and goals for the future, something that victor turner might term a communitas group, the creative potential of that tradition bearer blossoms, producing both new forms and new adaptations of the traditional knowledge inherited from previous generations. the texts that the authors of this article (along with other folklorists and ethnologists) collected in kyiv during the orange revolution, primarily from the followers of viktor yushchenko, constitute a strong argument against predictions of the decline and death of traditional folklore in the contemporary world. ukrainian folklore flowered in response to the orange revolution. as in the past, people used folklore to fight social injustice. as in the past, folklore can be a deadly weapon in the struggle. most of the texts which we collected on maidan (independence square) in kyiv during november and december 2004 show this quite clearly. for folklorists, it is also a unique opportunity to see folklore being born in response to political events. 5 just as viktor yanukovych's trip to the hospital after being hit by an egg inspired the poem reproduced above, so yanukovych�s wife�s speech in donetsk also gave rise to folklore. mrs. yanukovych blamed "drugged oranges" for the behavior of the crowd in kyiv. the immediate folk response was as follows: �наши патроны � апельсины и лимоны�(our bullets are oranges and lemons).(3) in these texts, traditional form provides the template for an immediate response to new political events. the creative resources of folk tradition include not only plot structures, but also images, symbols, and other artistic means. as a result, folk forms are easily recognized and accepted by the audience. in order to see traditional elements in a contemporary text, one must be familiar with its historical folklore antecedent. the orange revolution gave us the opportunity to see how anecdotes which had lost currency and become part of passive traditional knowledge can be reactivated through the substitution of names associated with contemporary politics. old anecdotes seem to attract listener attention and when new historical events prompt the insertion of new content into old forms, the traditional text comes back to life and starts on a new active phase of existence. for example, a well-known anecdote about a barber acquired new details during the orange revolution: приходить янукович до парихмахера стричися. сідає в крісло, а той бере стриже і каже: �віктор федорович, ви чули, ющенко вже президент� а той каже: �не чув.� ну, так проходить ще два рази, питє, а четвертий раз каже: �віктор федорович, ви чули, ющенко вже президент?� �займайся своєю справою, ти ж парихмахер!� �вікторе федоровичу, коли я вам це нагадую, вам волосся піднімається, легше стричи.� (yanukovych goes to a barber, gets into the chair, and the barber tells him, �did you hear that yushchenko was declared president?� yanukovych says �no.� the barber repeats again and again: �did you hear that yushchenko was declared president?� �please mind your own business, aren't you a barber?� �but viktor fedorovych, whenever i tell you this news, your hair stands on end and it becomes easier for me to cut it.�) (4) this is a clear case where an old, traditional joke is conducive to the introduction of new political figures and thus becomes interesting and meaningful to contemporary listeners. well-known plots (part of listeners' traditional knowledge) are frequently reused in imaginative ways during periods of dramatic social change. thus the slogan, "the smart vote is for yushchenko," evokes memories of the traditional joke which states that everyone complains about a lack of money, but no one complains about a lack of intelligence. while most of the texts related to the orange revolution that we collected are clearly folklore and their folk antecedents can be readily identified, there are some genres and texts which are of more dubious provenance. questions which arose during our field work and later while we were analysing our materials include the role of the author and the question of origins. also, not all of the materials that we collected were transmitted orally. it soon became clear that certain anecdotes originated on the internet or in other mass media. although such texts do not meet all of the standard definitions of folklore, we believe that they should be folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 6 considered folk and traditional nonetheless. is the origin of a text a crucial factor in its definition as a folk form? we would say not. ivan franko, the nineteenth-century ukrainian writer and folklorist, for example, argued that folk songs can be authored by a single individual [franko 1980: 57�65]. following franko, we would argue that what is more important is acceptance of a text by the folk so that it begins to live in oral tradition, to be transmitted orally, and to be subject to variation. thus, mass appeal, oral transmission, and variation are the decisive factors which define a particular text as folklore. folklore is a spontaneous manifestation of folk interests, wishes and dreams. as such, it is a sphere which cannot be controlled by official censorship or by other legal means. if we leave the question of authorship and the origins of these materials aside, we can concentrate on transmission, the ways in which the texts in question spread among the folk. what is important, in our opinion, is whether or not a particular text appeals to its listeners, whether they are interested in it and eager to disseminate it to others, be it in oral form or by other means such as the internet. if a new variant of a text is created and performers and their audience, the senders and the recipients of a text, feel that their version is the most interesting variant, then that item is surely part of the folk tradition. throughout the orange revolution, we observed numerous instances where an anecdote or joke, or even a play on a surname, would immediately catch on and create a strong reaction among the public. we then observed that this would prompt additional versions of the text or new texts devoted to the same topic. thus, the "egg" incident was reflected in a large assortment of folklore forms from poems and anecdotes to slogans: яйце то велика сила, що зека завалила (an egg has power so great that it can fell a prisoner), януковичу, ховайся, бо ми привезли яйця (yanukovych � hide, because we have brought eggs with us).(5) even the name of the candidate was changed in jokes from yanukovych to iaitsekhovych because, in ukrainian, "iaitse" means an egg. this situation was further developed in an unexpected way. texts about "eggs" acquired strong erotic connotations. group thinking can be powerful and it can change and develop rapidly. thus, folk creativity soon picked up on the fact that iaitse (egg) is a euphemism for testes. a further association was between eggs and chickens and roosters, at which point the fact that �rooster� (petukh) is the term that refers to gay men used as sex objects in prison came into play. we can see this meaning in the following item: ющенко � друг, янукович � петух (yushchenko is a friend; yanukovych is a rooster). as certain biographical details of the candidates� lives became known, the prison topic took on a special meaning. yanukovych had been arrested and had served a term in prison and his prison record appeared in a number of folk texts of various genres. thus, graffiti in which homosexual and criminal themes were expressed openly and sometimes with unexpected brutality appeared and we were able to photograph such texts (figure 1). this topic was used frequently in slogans as well: янукович голубой, будет путину женой (yanukovych is gay; he will become putin's wife). since the russian president putin supported yanukovych in the election, he was the target of many jibes created by yushchenko supporters. the above is a clear example of the satirizing of events through ridicule and it is a typical feature of carnival culture. humor and sarcasm are widely used to influence listeners. obscene folklore becomes especially popular. these texts are attractive precisely because they do enter prohibited territory. in obscene folklore, everything is allowed and everything is comical. in this "world of laughter," all norms are inverted and 7 everything, from content to rhythm to form, focuses on the goal of charting the peculiarities of this world [likhachev et al.1984: 51]. while some bearers of tradition refuse to repeat out loud the obscene texts created by others, they nonetheless take pleasure in them. we have ample evidence of the pleasure of the off-color world in ukraine�s past, including a very popular example from written literature, i. kotliarevskyi�s play �oneida.� this play, too, achieves much of its effect by using folk language, folk images, and a folk mindset. why was obscene folklore such a popular weapon during the orange revolution? the most archaic pagan rituals and their verbal components: wedding songs and dances, spring songs (vesnianky), kupalo songs, children�s lullabies, all have obscene elements and make extensive use of ridiculing jokes. gustave le bon suggested that the instincts and feelings of the crowd have much in common with primitive thought. [le bon 1999: 152]. bakhtin argued that the essence of folk humorous texts is in the organic unity of the cosmic, the social, and the material found therein [bakhtin 1990: 25]. thus, the samples of obscene folklore collected during the orange revolution are spontaneous and have archaic elements similar to those found in ancient folklore texts and rituals. the obscene element can be considered an organic part of the traditional method of ridiculing an opponent. as we mentioned before, carnival culture draws imagery from the lower part of the body and this is what is indeed found in the ridiculing texts produced by the orange revolution. lower body imagery is an excellent way of bringing everything down and closer to the ground. sarcasm is also a feature typical of the carnival atmosphere. it is a primitive and vibrant expressive form. bakhtin argued that, for the crowd, the carnival provided temporary liberation from official power and an escape from existing social norms. as such, it celebrated change and renewal [baktin 1990: 15]. even if we ignore the political meaning of the orange revolution completely, we cannot ignore the carnival elements in its formal existence and carnival-like behavior of its participants. even the material objects associated with the orange revolution, the orange christmas decorations, orange articles of clothing, orange garments for dogs and cats, orange automobile decorations, all smack of the carnivalesque. this is not to mention the songs and dances that spontaneously followed any political action and the rituals of barring all representatives of the old political power from the scene. such celebratory protest behavior is closely tied to laughter in traditional culture. if we consider the decorative elements used in the orange revolution, we will again notice that they were based on traditional folk material culture. thus, the orange wreaths worn by many of the girls participating in the tent city spawned by the orange revolution look a great deal like traditional wedding wreaths (figures 2 and 3). the orange stars carried by children walking along the kreshchatyk look much like the stars people in villages use for christmas carolling (figure 4). folk material culture mixes freely with elements of the popular culture of today and this was true of the orange revolution as well. to wit, a rabbit character from children's cartoons was also seen among the orange revolution crowd (figure 2). folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 8 figure 1 figure 2 figure 3 figure 4 9 one of the important characteristics of the orange folklore is grotesque realism. bakhtin coined this term and used it to refer to the process of making abstract spiritual ideals concrete so that they can be ridiculed. this process often uses body imagery [baktin 1990: 26]. grotesque realism can be considered one of the main characteristics of the folklore texts of the orange revolution. examples include the following: через мінськ і астану поведу я вас в європу. ось лиш штані підтягну, щоб не видно було ж� (through minsk and astana i am going to lead you into europe; let me just pull up my pants that no one can see my arse);(6) мы помчимся в заоблачную даль, перед всей изумленною европой, к нам в ладони опустится звезда, а кидалов cидит в глубокой ж� (we will soar up into the cloudless skies; we will leave all of europe in awe; stars will fall right into our lap, while kivalov will sit deep inside a (homosexual) ass);(7) голосуєш ти за ю � будеш жити, як в раю; голосуєш ти за я � не будеш мати ні х.. (if you vote for iu you will live as if you were in paradise, if you vote for ia you won�t get dick-all.)(8) as is well known, the carnival atmosphere traditionally requires the use of obscene language so as to more easily create the feeling of complete freedom. the concept of individualization does not exist in folklore. we do not have characters who are individuals with their own particular traits; we only have types. the polarization of the characters is immediately apparent in folk texts, and they are immediately grouped into the bad and the good. modern literature, for example, favors characters who are very complicated and difficult to understand. literature paints characters in multiple shades of grey and this is in stark contrast to the black and white picture typical of folklore. folklore characters, even if they have names, represent certain general tendencies. this situation holds true for orange folklore as well. all the characters of orange folklore are grouped into opposites and extremes. people in authority are juxtaposed to the folk as the top is contrasted to the bottom. tradition is very stable and it changes very slowly. at the same time, it can respond instantaneously to any changes in the life of society. the form can remain unchanged for centuries while new names and new events fill the traditional plot. it is impossible to stop or even slow down the spread of folk texts among their bearers; it is impossible to control or regulate oral transmission. censorship is impossible in the case of oral texts, which are always the most reliable way of disseminating information in a situation of upheaval and unrest, like the orange revolution. it should be taken into consideration that the information passed from one bearer of tradition to another might well have nothing in common with actual facts. rumors and legends typically originate in a real event. but they live and grow to conform to the expectations of tradition. or they change to become artistically more pleasing or emotionally more effective. tradition and aesthetic criteria often take precedence over fact. and, for the folk, a good text that corresponds to their expectations is often more important than a factual one. le bon argued that the more witnesses there are to an event, the less truth there will be in its retelling. legends have a variable and unstable nature [le bon 1999: 147]. some folklore texts look nonsensical; they may seem illogical and bear little semblance to reality. but their function is not to reproduce external reality. rather, they folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 10 convey moral truths. they support good over evil, and ridicule and seek to humiliate the opponents of the good and the true. this can be seen in texts like the following: ющенко � князь, янукович � карась (yushchenko is a prince and yanukovych is a fish). this slogan makes no sense, but it has good rhythm and rhyme and it is perfectly suited for screaming out loud in public demonstrations. this text uses the logic of children�s taunts, where the humiliation comes not from any sort of logic or any real insult. rather, the simple fact that a rhyme can be found to a child�s name or physical characteristic (red hair being a favourite) is perceived as humiliating. many of the slogans used during recent political campaigns link the last name of the candidate in question to a rhyme, and not necessarily a logical one, or to an obscene lexeme. the fact that the techniques of children�s insults are frequently found in political slogans offers an interesting commentary on the mindset of participants in the political realm. folklore texts function in a very specific way. they live as long as they remain of interest to their audience and they disappear when particular events and ideas stop being interesting to the public. during important changes in society, when events and life in general move at a rapid pace, folklore texts are born and die with special speed. their genesis, then, is especially noticeable. their dissemination under such circumstances is unusually rapid as well. we, as folklorists, had a unique opportunity to observe folklore being born as an immediate reaction to a particular set of political events. the power of folklore which plays on the names of political figures can be seen in the fact that one joke claimed that yanukovych issued a proclamation prohibiting any newborn girls from being named julia. his sensitivity to this name supposedly stemmed from the fact that julia is the name of the current prime-minister of ukraine, julia tymoshenko, and that, during the orange revolution, she was one of the most active and vocal leaders of the opposition. the maidan, or independence square, produced a very specific type of folklore. the community where orange folklore was functioning was not stable. it was a temporary, non-traditional, mobile community which came into being during the political crisis, and was composed of people from all walks of life and a whole range of backgrounds, who came together on the basis of common political interests. such a community contrasts in many respects with traditional ukrainian agricultural communities, which can be characterized as stable, isolated, and culturally and ethnically closed. linda degh characterized agricultural communities in preindustrial america as self-contained and isolated from urban life, with a high level of member closeness [degh 1995: 216]. the language, cultural traditions, and customs of traditional agricultural communities develop over centuries and are reflected in folk life. the community we examined during the events of the orange revolution was dynamic, open, and flexible and much closer in its nature to contemporary urban communities. in urban communities, a member of one folk group can often also be a member of several others. he or she can be a bearer of various traditions, those associated with his or her profession, those of his or her family, age group, regional group, and so forth. the contemporary russian folklorist sergei nekliudov described urban communities and their folklore as polycentric and fragmentary. he stated that folklore with these characteristics corresponds to the cultural and social variability of urban life [nekliudov 1995: 2]. each of us, under certain circumstances, may become a member of a small group within a larger, perhaps city-wide, group, the bearer of a particular folk tradition. during the orange revolution we had an organic mixture of traditional agrarian 11 folklore and various types of urban traditional cultures and subcultures. this combination made orange revolution folklore unusual and especially interesting for further analysis. among the texts that we collected, the most productive genres were anecdotes, slogans, graffiti, ballads, and folk poems. this indicates that orange folklore is most closely related to urban folklore in its structure and its artistic features. the genres we observed are most active during social movements, revolutions, and protests. for example, more political anecdotes were born during the orange revolution than during the entire period of ukrainian independence. prior to the orange revolution, you could even hear people express concern that the political anecdote was dead as a genre once the brezhnev era drew to a close. but during the two months of the orange revolution, political anecdotes returned in full vigor, proving that previous fears about the death of political humor were groundless. an example of political humor that was resurrected during the orange revolution is the following: b одесі мойша приходить до ізі: �ізя, ти бачив, що в харкові написано на біг-бордах� �що?� �захистіть свої інтереси.� ізя: �в одессе мудрый сказал бы: �cами украли, сами защищайте.�� (in odessa moshe comes to isia: �did you see what�s written in kharkiv on billboards?'� �what?� �protect your interests.� �in odessa smart folks would respond: 'you stole it; you protect it'");(9) 40 років водив ющенко народ вулицями києва в пошуках корумпованої влади. (for forty years yushchenko dragged people through the streets of kyiv in search of corrupted power);(10) or: радник приходить до януковича і каже: �маю для вас 2 новини. добру і погану. з якої почати?� �давай погану.� �ющенко набрав 55 %.� �а яка ж тоді може бути добра?� �але ви перемогли.� (yanukovych's adviser comes to him and says: �i have good news and bad news. which do you want first?� �what�s the bad news?� �yushchenko got 55 % of the vote.� �what can be the good news, then?� �you�re the winner�;(11) or: на вулиці 2010 рік. проходить 46-й раунд виборів, бо на 45-ому знов переміг янукович. (it is the year 2010. the 46th round of the ukrainian elections is about to begin because yanukovych won the 45th) (12) folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 12 the samples given here are limited to texts which we recorded from performers in face-to-face situations. if we were to include the huge level of internet and mobile phone (text messaging) activity, our sample would be many times its size. computers and mobile phones have become channels for the transmission of folk prose that rival face-to-face narration. in fact, text messaging is often favored over face-to-face communication even when the performer and his audience are within reachable distance from each other. some items are texted because of their obscene character. some are too long to memorize under certain circumstances and thus circulate more actively through electronic text messaging. in such cases, mobile phones proved a handy tool for the transmission of oral folk texts. orange folklore showed that bearers of tradition used contemporary technology freely in their artistic communication. often, when we requested that someone tell us a particular anecdote or joke, the performer would send a text because it was convenient for both sides. the mobile phone helped overcome the problems of doing field work in a constantly moving crowd, under the open sky, with the snow coming down on everybody�s heads. urban graffiti was an especially interesting feature of the orange revolution. the pictures and inscriptions on the walls that were part of orange folklore have a very different nature from the everyday kyiv graffiti that we photographed over the three years preceding the recent set of events. orange graffiti was distinctive not only in appearance, but also in content. orange graffiti actually had more in common with the very old wall writing that has been found on the ancient city walls of kyiv and on the walls of the thirteenthcentury st. sophia church. during the last decade, kyiv graffiti writers adopted the balloon convention of the north american continent and texts on walls appeared as part of pictures with complex illustrations where a character�s speech was enclosed in a balloon. orange graffiti are more traditional in form. they look like simple tags or inscriptions. they are executed in a very simple manner, using pen or pencil and mostly one color. the political content of orange graffiti is, of course, a new element as well. over the last three or four years we had collected a very limited amount of political graffiti on walls (e.g. "vote for hladchuk;" "bush is a silly head;" "ukraine go ahead" and a few others). but in the last two weeks, ninety eight percent of the graffiti written on the walls of central kyiv were political in content. another important distinctive feature of orange political graffiti is their public nature and the mixture of politics with the obscene within the picture or text. the places where we photographed them were as open to the public as possible. earlier, obscene graffiti were written in more discreet places, such as classrooms, public restrooms, and behind garages. since carnival-type behavior is not considered normal in contemporary society, people no longer feel free to repeat all the texts which appeared during the orange revolution. they may still find the texts funny, but they are now ashamed of the off-color content. under such circumstances, graffiti become the most appropriate and common way of passing on satirical folklore which is also obscene. material that people will not voice in public thus appears on city walls. many of the short poems, anecdotes, slogans with obscene content which we collected were recorded as photographs of graffiti found near the maidan in kyiv. graffiti became a popular genre precisely because it gave performers the chance to express their emotions in a traditional manner without feeling ashamed. internal censorship prevented some bearers of tradition from retelling texts they heard and liked. for them, the wall became the vehicle for transmission as it helped people 13 communicate those sentiments that they could not voice otherwise. the wall even allowed people to engage in dialogs, using materials that were inappropriate to a direct exchange of traditional knowledge (figures 5-8). figure 6 figure 7 figure 8 figure 5 folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 14 we have already noted that, traditionally, obscene graffiti texts and pictures, especially in ukrainian settings, are found in places not open to public, places where only a limited number of readers have access. among the examples of such graffiti recorded by a student of the kyiv mohyla academy inside a classroom in the year 2000 is the following: на селе переполох, вася красит глазки, к нам ведут войска оон � голубые каски. "the village is all aflutter; vasia (a male) is putting on makeup, because everybody is expecting un soldiers in blue uniforms" (blue is a gay color in ukrainian traditional culture) цвет «реала» стал голубым, «динамо» и киев смеется над ним. (�real� took blue as their team color; �dynamo-kyiv� is laughing at them (real and dynamo are the names of two soccer teams in ukraine)) figure 9 figure 10 figure 11 15 these are just a few samples of the obscene graffiti to be found a year ago in secluded places. during the orange revolution, graffiti achieved new status and new forms of existence. they also spread to new territories and became visible to a very wide audience. a mixture of erotic motifs and politics became their main characteristic. another interesting aspect is that graffiti appeared not only in traditional locales, that is, walls, but also on cars, flags, and clothing. this made them mobile and observable by an even bigger audience (figures 911). it would be a mistake to think that sarcastic, obscene texts were the only ones actively produced by the orange revolution. touching lyrical ballads and epics were very popular as well. since the word "hero" was frequently used by the leaders of the revolution and the crowd, heroic motifs were very common in folk poetry. just as in fairy tales a hero fights evil to secure a better future, so the hero created by the orange revolution, the whole nation, was shown as fighting for its choice of freedom and a better life. the happy-ever-after future of the fairytale imagination was pictured in many recorded texts: голос з кожної хати, годі знущання терпіти, народ буде стояти! злодії будуть сидіти! (voices come from all the houses, telling us stop tolerating terror. the people will rise up. criminals will go to prisons); наш бідний бердичів, моєї держави обличчя. не всунеш його в болото. не буде на троні сволота (my poor berdychev, you are the face of my country. no one will drag you into the mud. the bastards will not sit on the throne); владу на нари � народ на канари. (let�s put the people in power behind bars, and then we�ll go to the canary islands.) here, we see an absolutely mythical image of the future, and a fairy tale happy ending. among other folklore genres especially popular at the time were hand-written letter-poems which you could find all over the tent-city on khreshchatyk. people were constantly passing them around. the motifs of most of them correspond to traditional heroic-romantic ballads or satirical songs. here are just a few samples of such poems, collected during the orange revolution: згинь ти темна вража сила, die you dark opposing force не твоя тут воля you have no sway here буде радість, буде щастя we will have joy and happiness і в нас добра буде доля... and our destiny will be good рідна моя, нене україно, my dear mother ukraine я твоє дитя, i am your child ти така прекрасна і невинна, you are so beautiful and innocent що сказати? ти � свята... what can i say? you are a saint. (13) folklore is distinguished among other forms of spiritual life by its tight connection between performer and listener. as a result, the functioning of folklore is highly dependent upon the context in which it is folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 16 performed. one cannot imagine a folk teller who would rather perform for himself than before an interested audience. the folklore repertoire, therefore, not only depends upon the circumstances of a particular historical moment, it is also subject to the ravages of time, from which it has no protection. literature, by contrast, is protected by the mere fact of being fixed on paper. folklore is not. thus, folklore serves as an indicator of the times; it reflects the moods and wishes of its bearers. folklore is not created out of nothing; it uses traditional forms to represent new events. this permits recognition of well known forms and makes the contact between the performer and the audience easy and pleasant. it aids in the establishment of a dialog and thus prolongs the life of a new text. in orange revolution folklore, we observed that performers drew on traditional genres (children taunts, anecdotes and ballads) in order to express thoughts and emotions about current political events. the use of traditional form helped people formulate an immediate reaction to a particular event and, at the same time, to separate out those events which were otherwise attractive and interesting, but would not elicit a reaction from the audience. the information and observations in this article concern only a very specific area and cannot be applied to other regions with their own specific political preferences and moods. the few texts that we received from outside kyiv demonstrated that laughter and ridicule were more active on the maidan than elsewhere. in other parts of ukraine, these elements played a much smaller role. if we consider laughter a trait of folk culture and seriousness the trademark of those in power, then, following bakhtin, we can assert that the folklore of the maidan shares much with the tradition of the carnival. in those parts of ukraine where the orange revolution did not receive full support, the mood of the population was more serious and the folk genres that reflected this mood, rumors, for example, were more serious also. the carnival features of orange revolution corresponded well to the mood of its participants and the folklore produced was a good indicator of the carefree mood of its participants. notes 1 most of the texts recorded during the orange revolution in kyiv in december 2004 were collected by members of ryl�s�kii institute, o.britsyna, i.golovakha and m.maierchyk. they were recorded from yushchenko supporters on maidan (independence square) and near the tent-city. �maidan,� meaning �square� is the shortened form by which independence square came to be known during the orange revolution. it is located in the center of kyiv, just off khreshchatyk, the main street, and right in front of the main post office. this square, which became the site of the tent city set up by yushchenko supporters, became a symbol of the orange revolution. the tent city grew and eventually spilled out onto and occupied khreshchatyk itself. most of the texts were recorded and photographed on or near maidan, in the tent city of khreshchatyk, or in the underground passages near this area. throughout the entire area, people painted graffiti, wrote poems, and screamed slogans. 2 this poem was printed on a piece of paper, and submitted by an informant from sevastopol' in the crimea. he collected it while travelling by train. all the other folklore texts given in this article were collected 17 in kyiv during the events of the orange revolution. the transcription and translation of the texts is by the authors of this article. 3 a slogan posted on a tent in the protesters� tent city on khreshchatyk. 4 this text was recorded in the house of labor and submitted by an informant from ivano-frankivsk through the mail. 5 recorded from a protester, age 40, from the l�viv area. 6 part of a poem from the tent-city on khreshchatyk. 7 part of a poem from the tent-city on khreshchatyk. 8 graffiti photographed in underground near khreshchatyk. 9 this text was recorded inside a minibus from a male informant who was a yushchenko supporter. 10 text recorded from a female informant, aged around 50, from kyiv. 11 recorded from a male informant from the ivano-frankivs�k area. 12 recorded from a highly educated male informant, age 60, from kyiv. 13 materials received from t shevchuk. 14 fragments of two poems, which we received in hand-written form from the residents of the tent-city. bibliography bakhtin, m. 1990. fransua rable i narodnaia kul�tura srednevekovia i renessansa. moscow: khudozhestvennaia literatura. franko, i. 1980. �iak vynykaiut� narodni pisni� in zibrann�a tvoriv u 50 t. [collected works in 50 vols.] vol. 27. kyiv: naukova dumka. lebon (le bon), g. 1999. psykhologiia tolp. kyiv: ksp. likhachev, d., a. panchenko and n. ponyrko 1984. smekh v drevnei rusi. leningrad: nauka. degh, l. 1995. narratives in society: a performer-centered study of narration. helsinki: academia scientarum fennica. nekliudov, s. 1995. �posle fol�klora.� zhivaia starina, 1: 2-5. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 microsoft word contentsqsoft.doc 143 deborah cahalen schneider, being goral: identity politics and globalization in postsocialist poland (suny series in national identities). albany, ny: state university of new york press, 2006. 211 pp. bibliography. index. $60.00 (cloth). isbn 0791466558. zywiec, a town in the goral region of poland, is the location of a large annual folk festival that showcases goral music and dance, as well as goral crafts. it attracts tourists and folk performers from europe and beyond. but the folklore of this region is not what interests schneider and she does not cite the work of cooley on goral music (making music in the polish tatras: tourists, ethnographers, and mountain musicians. indiana university press, 2005). rather, the author focuses on politics. she seeks to show how the major players in post-socialist zywiec use folklore, which she subsumes under the category of “traditionalism,” to advance their political and economic agendas. the author makes a number of cogent observations. nationalism is not as important a factor as once thought, she argues. certainly in zywiec, the polish government has become a minor player and town residents see themselves as goral rather than polish. this is partially due to historical circumstances: the goral region has been dominated by a succession of powers and the concept of nation-state is not central to the identity of its residents. the collapse of the soviet-era centralized government has contributed to this outlook. it has meant the loss of guaranteed jobs and many social perquisites such as free daycare, medical clinics, and sports and social facilities. to fill this void, zywiecers have either turned inward and relied on local networks to provide needed services, or gone global, seeking to attract outside capital and to make their businesses part of international corporations. the conflict between the two approaches to the post-socialism dilemma is also a class conflict, the author contends. soviet rule did not eliminate classes. the pre-war elite maintained their status in the soviet era, not on the basis of financial power, but as arbiters of culture and, to a certain extent, as a force in opposition to socialism. with privatization, the prewar elite have reacquired their property, usually small local businesses, and thus gained economic clout. they are community leaders who favor a local solution to zywiec needs because that is the one from which they would profit the most. their opposition is what the author calls the neocapitalists, people who favor an international approach: attracting outside investment that would make zywiec businesses part of large corporations, creating jobs and bringing in new capital. neo-capitalists folklorica 2007, vol. xii 144 present themselves to the community as those best able to represent zywiec on the global arena and try to build their power on this basis. in trying to advance their respective positions, both groups use traditionalism. the pre-war elite use goral costumes, songs, dances, crafts to show that zywiec is part of a unique regional culture. in their view, folklore shows that the goral region is a unit which should remain insular and solve its problems internally. for neo-capitalists, folklore is a commodity, something to be sold, whether to attract tourists or as a corporate logo; it is a way for zywiec to market itself. non-elites also play a role in politics, albeit a small one. they exercise agency by supporting the vision of either the pre-war elite or the neo-capitalists. in addition to showing that nationalism is not an important factor in all adjustments to post-soviet life, this book makes a number of other contributions. schneider looks at a rural area. she does not follow other scholars to urban centers, the seats of wealth and power, and she is able to show that the shock therapy that has worked well in cities does not facilitate a transition to a market economy in rural areas. she thus expands our understanding of the struggles of east europe. the author offers case studies. she looks at two families adjusting to post-soviet life and two businesses, the brewery in zywiec, which was bought by heineken and a metal factory that was also privatized and internationalized, but managed to retain pre-capitalist ideals. she thus offers a valuable glimpse into the lives of real people. there are annoying features to this book also. it is quite repetitive. schneider tells us what she is about to do, then she does it, then she tells us what she has done. additional case studies would have served this study better than such repetition. all in all, the book does a good job at expanding our understanding of post-soviet life and of the processes of social change. still a study such as this should give folklorists pause. are people concerned with money and power only? is folklore but a tool in the struggle to improve one’s lot in life? do people not sing songs for the sheer pleasure of singing? is goral style furniture a tourist gimmick only? can it not be used because it is aesthetically pleasing? we would all agree that the aesthetic dimension is an essential part of being human, yet there has been precious little attention to it, especially when looking at life in the post-socialist world. this is understandable. the soviet union was the political antagonist in the imagination of the western world. it is difficult not see its remnants in terms of power relations. but we diminish all humans by showing them as primarily concerned with power and money. people do strive for beauty. folklorists, who 145 used to study the artistic creations of the common man, what oring calls lore, should lead the way in refocusing on art and its aesthetic function (“folk or lore: the stake in dichotomies,” journal of folklore research, vol. 43, no. 3, 2006, pp. 205-218). they should show that folklore is not sung or told, drawn or carved, danced or acted solely to negotiate one’s position vis-à-vis one’s neighbor. attention to the spiritual dimension needs to be brought back to folklore scholarship and post-soviet studies. natalie kononenko university of alberta folklorica 2007, vol. xii recent books: romanian folklore margaret beissinger, u w madison the following is a selected bibliography of recent works on folklore published in romania and the republic of moldova. it includes books published since 1990. an overriding constraint on the printing of any scholarly works in romania at the present is the dire shortage of paper. despite this, however, books do periodically continue to be published. several monographs have appeared since 1989 — both new and reprints of earlier editions (some of which have undergone a purging of communist ideo­ logical passages in their post-1989 publication). a significant number of collections have also come out (including materials that have been recorded recently or earlier in the century as well as reprints of "classics"). pop, mihai & pavel ruxandoiu. folclor literar romanesc. bucharest: editura didactica §i pedagogica, 1990. a reprint of a classic work from 1976 which covers the basic premises and genres of romanian oral literature; this edition is significantly revised, including the removal of several chapters and all excerpts from the writings of nicolae ceau^ecsu (the longstanding romanian dictator, executed in december 1989). radulescu, speranta. ctntecul: tipologie muzicala i. transilvania meridionals, bucharest: editura muzicala, 1990. fourteen essays on folk song and nearly seventy transcriptions of lyric song texts and melodies collected by radulescu and others, including cross references to variants. sevantos, elena d. o. literature populara. 2 vols. ed. loan ili?iu. bucharest: editura minerva, 1990. a reprint of previously published collections of oral lit­ erature by sevastos as well as her best-known work, a monograph on traditional wedding practices (all 24 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 originally from between 1888 and 1893); it also includes an incomplete unpublished monograph, "birth among romanians," from 1892. a chapter treating religious practices from sevastos' original monograph on traditional wedding, which had been removed by the pre­1990 editors, was fortunately reinserted just in time for the post­communist publication date. ghinoiu, ion. vtrstele timpului. chipinau: $шп{а, 1994. enlaraged second edition of a work previously published in bucharest in 1988, it treats rituals, myths, and beliefs surrounding traditional concepts of the yearly calendar and time. marian, simion florea. sarbatorile la romžini. 2 vols. ed. iordan datcu. bucharest: editijra fundafiei culturale rom&ne, 1994. a reprint of an early ethnographic study of romanian calendrical­cycle folklore, originally published 1898 :1901. §euleanu, ion. dincoace de sacru. dincolo de profan. targu­mure?: editura "tipomir," 1994. a series of essays in which §euleanu, one of the most outstand­ ing folklorists in romania today (from the university of cluj), attempts to familiarize the romanian readership with international — especially american — folklore scholarship, pleading in particular for a systematic approach to fieldwork and collection of folklore, as well as for viewing folklore in context. amzalescu, alexandru i. csntecul popular din muscel. bucharest: editura academiei, 1995. amzalescu, a leading specialist on romanian oral poetry and an emeritus scholar formerly employed at the institute of ethnography and folklore in bucharest, presents a monograph on the generic "song proper" as collected in muscel between 1954 and 1962; he argues for the recognition of singers г individuals in the creative process and sensitively explores their roles and repertoires within the larger tradition. ispas, sabina. cantecul epic­eroic rom&nesc tn contextul sud­est european: cžntecele pejlrii. bucharest: editura minerva, 1995. an exploration ancient patterns of courtship and marriage ritual in romanian heroic epic by a prominent senior researcher at the institute of ethnography and folklore in bucharest. voevidca, alexandru. ctntecele populare din bucovina. bucharest: editura muzicals, 1990. publication of a virtually unknown corpus of 275 lyri songs (texts and music) collected in the early 20th century in bucovina; includes a listing of the informants, their villagues, and the year of the recordings. ^tefanescu, calin­bogdan. 10 ani de umor negru rom&nesc: jurnal de bancuri politice. bucharest: metropol­paideia, 1991. over 900 political jokes (collected from january 1979 up through december 1989), including a foreword by the distinguished "grandfather" of romanian folklore, mihai pop, and a conclusion by the author. breazul, george. colinde. bucharest: editura fundable! culturale romane, 1993. a reprint of a volume published in 1938, it includes texts and melodies to 300 calendrical ritual songs collected bj breazul — a well­known ethnomusicologist from earlier in the century. titus moisescu provides an analytical conclusion to this edition. z3 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 florea, virgiliu. poezii populare din cample. bistri^a: editura cadran, 1993. this previously unpublished collection of oral poetry from transylvania includes primarily lyric and ritual songs, notes on the context of performance, and references to variant texts. botezatu, grigore. fat-frumos ^i soarele: pove^ti populare din basarabia. bucharest: editura minerva, 1995. in this anthology of twenty folktales collected in specified villages in bessarabia (with no mention of informants, however), botezatu has a tendency to "edit" the narratives somewhat; but the volume reflects the growing cultural and academic rapports between romania and the former soviet republic of moldova. robea, mihail. basme pi legende populare romane^ti. bucharest: casa editoriala muntenia, 1995. the volume includes not only folktales and legends collected by robea in muntenia during the last several decades, but also discussions on the context and perpetuators of these oral narratives. i t microsoft word folklorica_2011g.doc 187 reviews folklorica 2011, vol. xvi боряк, олена. баба-повитуха в культурно-історичній традиції українців: між профанним і сакральним. [boriak, olena. the midwife in the cultural and historical traditions of the ukrainians: between the ordinary and the sacred.]. kyiv: інститут мистецтвознавства, фольклористики та етнології ім. рильського, 2009. 400 pp. bibliography. list of respondents. illustrations. index. summery in english. paper. isbn: 978-966-02-5480-0. olena boriak is the one of those few scholars, whether in ukraine or elsewhere, who seek to make a significant contribution to the study of those ukrainian rituals, customs, and traditions related to childbirth. the midwife and her practice were described in detail by the so-called “fathers” of ukrainian ethnography, the scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. childbirth customs and rituals also received substantial attention at that time. however, in recent ukrainian scholarship these have not been popular topics, unlike in the west. although giving birth was and is considered an essential part of the life of a ukrainian woman, researchers do not explore childbirth as extensively as other life and family cycle events. there were many reasons for this, including the fact that childbirth is not a social occasion like a wedding or a funeral; birth takes place in more private circumstances and might be considered more a matter of biology than of ritual. but lack of scholarly attention should not imply that childbirth is unimportant and it should not conceal the significance of the midwife to ukrainian society. the midwife was not just the recognized expert on the subject of birth but, as boriak states, she was also the mediator between the living and dead, between this life and the afterlife, between the sacred and the profane. to give the midwife her due, boriak draws on an exhaustive reading of published ethnographic material, complemented with more recent works on midwifery and childbirth. she summarizes previous studies and extends them by adding her own findings and interpretations. she draws not only on published sources but also on an impressive amount of fieldwork. interviews were conducted in more than one hundred forty villages in eleven of the main ethnographic regions of ukraine. the field data was collected by boriak and by other researchers including n. havryliuk, l. artiukh, a. artiukh, t. zubryts’ka, and m. mayerchyk. the author emphasizes the significance of fieldwork for her research, stating that, between the years 2000 and 2009 she interviewed approximately 330 respondents, most 80 years old and older. boriak also 188 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi uses previously unpublished archival materials, including manuscripts from the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. these are field materials assembled by liudmyla shevchenko, serhii verkhrats’kyi, vasyl’ kravchenko, and others. the author’s knowledge of western ethnographic and anthropological literature enriches her work. structurally, the book is divided into four blocks. the first chapter, historiography and resources, is a survey of the scholarship related to midwifery in ukraine. it includes ethnographic, anthropological, folkloric, and medical data. the second part, midwifery in the history of medicine and culture, presents the history of the development of midwifery in ukrainian culture and medicine and also in the broader context of european data and occasionally data from other parts of the world. the third unit, called the midwife's place and role in obstetric care and ritual practice, describes the roles, both medical and ritualistic, which the midwife performed during her practice. in the last chapter, symbolism and semantics of the image of the midwife in folk belief, the author endeavors to interpret the image of the midwife as it appears in ukrainian folklore. the book contains an extensive bibliography (pp.295-341), a list of the interviewees, explanations to the illustrations, and an index. it ends with a two-page summary in english. all of these are useful tools, and the illustrations are very interesting, although their relevance to the subject matter of the book is not always apparent. the focus of boriak’s book is, of course, ukrainian midwifery, but she explores it in the context of world history apparently because there are no early ukrainian sources for her to draw on. thus, boriak refers to the bible and the talmud, to the papyri of ancient egypt and to the ayurveda and she uses the philosophers of ancient greece and rome. discussing midwifery in the middle ages, boriak notes that, unlike other female healers, the midwife was not systematically persecuted, even though she was connected with magic and therefore evoked fear. she finds that, on the contrary, the midwife often acted as an expert in court: she could be called as a witness in cases of rape, adultery, and the suspected killing of the child. she was credited with the ability to detect “witch signs” on the skin of the suspect, to be able to determine parenthood, and so forth (115). even though the midwife was vulnerable due to her special knowledge and skills, she managed to coexist not only with civil, but also with religious, authorities. in fact, the christian church recognized the midwife and her profession and collaborated with 189 reviews folklorica 2011, vol. xvi her. the midwife became an instrument of god’s will, as it was her responsibility to baptize a newborn when there was any danger that the baby might die. at the same time, the church tried to exercise control over the midwife, thus avoiding undesirable competition. among other topics, boriak focuses on an interesting phenomenon characteristic of ukraine, namely the fact that folk midwifery coexisted with official medical obstetric practice until as late as the 1970s. the author explains this phenomenon by ukrainian history. ukraine covers a large territory and many villages are isolated. this country has suffered poverty and starvation brought on by war and the miseries of the first years of soviet rule. it has lived through the famine called the holodomor and it was plagued by a constant lack of professional obstetricians (125). the determined expansion of biomedicine into the countryside that occurred under soviet rule did not eliminate folk midwifery till 1960-70s. from the folk perspective, birth was not just a physiological act but also consisted of meaningful rituals. thus, as the author points out, when soviet authorities made a concerted effort to replace folk midwives with trained obstetricians, a new personage appeared and assumed a ritual role in birth. she was an elderly woman, like the midwife, a baba, whose responsibilities included bathing the baby, naming it, organizing the rodyny, the ritual welcoming the newborn, and performing other birth-related acts. in other words, she provided the family with the ritual component of birth which was missing in hospital delivery, but was deemed essential for the proper life of any individual. describing the roles, both practical and magical, which the midwife performed during her practice, boriak illustrates them with multiple examples, ukrainian, russian, and those drawn from other slavic peoples. during her “performance” the midwife was literally on the threshold: her job was to receive the baby from the other world and, at the same time, to prevent the new mother from slipping into the otherworldly realm. boriak sees birth as the moment of radical change: from having no child, to the existence of a child; from there being one person, the woman, to the existence of two persons, the mother and the child; from the birth of the baby to the birth of its ‘twin,’ meaning the placenta. although the author describes both the medical and the ritual activities of the midwife, she pays greatest attention to those rituals which occur after actual delivery: rituals connected with the afterbirth, celebrations for the newborn, and ritual visits to the midwife. 190 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi exploring folk beliefs, boriak analyses the terminology applied to the midwife. the names used for her include baba, meaning elderly woman, baba puporizna, meaning the one who cuts the umbilical cord, baba-povytukha, the one who swaddles, baba-branka, the one who takes and also who defends (from the verb boronyty), and so forth. as the author argues, these names not only illustrate the functions of the midwife, they also convey the beliefs and traditional worldview of the people. predicting the newborn’s future is among the midwife’s functions and this suggests that she has connections to the other world. a midwife could foretell the gender of the baby, its physical health, the length of its life, the circumstances of the baby’s death, and so on. she based these predictions on the time of the birth, the way the baby looked and behaved, and other signs. she could also literally see the baby’s future if she looked into the house where the delivery was about to take place through the window. the fate predicted by the midwife could not be changed. the polysemantic nature of the terms used for the midwife, her “secret knowledge”, and her connection to the other world lead the author to conclude that the midwife was a mythological persona. boriak then draws parallels between the midwife and pagan goddesses and finds remnants of their divine features in her. boriak's book is a comprehensive study of the traditional midwife and of ukrainian midwifery up until the end of the twentieth century. it is a much needed contribution and fills the gaps in ukrainian scholarship on this topic. it is highly recommended to those interested in ritual, in folk belief, and in women’s roles in traditional culture. student midwives who are able to read ukrainian would also benefit from this book. maryna chernyavska university of alberta edmonton, alberta canada << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain 20%) 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/pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice microsoft word folk2006[3] sheryl format3.doc 136 in memory of evgenii alekseevich kostiukhin evgenii kostiukhin passed away on january 4th, 2006 in st. petersburg. every russian folklorist knew and admired his many publications, reports at conferences, and especially his conversations between sessions. he was born february 23, 1938 in the city of verkhniaia salda in sverdlov oblast’. in 1955 he entered moscow university to study in the philological faculty. his time at the university (1955-1960) coincided with the “khrushchev thaw,” when the study of russian folklore slowly began to return to methodological pluralism, thereby allowing the investigation of folk culture from as variety of standpoints. kostiukhin belonged to the new generation of folklorists emerging at this time, who revived and broadened the study of folklore in russia. like many of his colleagues, kostiukhin took part in field expeditions. in the years 1956-1957 the folklore department at moscow university organized field trips to selected areas in the russian north “in the steps of the sokolov brothers.” a number of students who participated in these field trips subsequently became outstanding folklorists. 1958 witnessed kostiukhin’s first appearance in print in the form of a report on an expedition, which was published in the vestnik of moscow university. the most important teacher of this generation of moscow folklorists was e. v. pomerantseva, a remarkable connoisseur of the russian folk tale. it is from her that kostiukhin acquired his interest in the genre. in 1959, while still a student, he published an article in the journal russkii fol’klor about recording tales during his expeditions to karelia. after graduating from moscow university, kostiukhin became a graduate student at the kazakh pedagogical institute (1960-1963). when he finished his graduate work there, he taught in various pedagogical institutes in kazakhstan and then spent 1977-1980 teaching in the polish city of bydgoszcz. kostiukhin’s dissertation, which he defended in 1969, was devoted to works about alexander the great in folklore and literature. he brought out his first book, aleksandr makedonskii v literaturnoi i fol’klornoi traditsii (alexander the great in literary and folklore tradition) in 1972. his work provided a many-sided and insightful reading of a popular subject about the life and deeds of this military leader as they appear in the literature of various peoples in the east and west. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 137 the twenty-two years kostiukhin spent in central asia are reflected in his scholarship. in 1979 he participated in publication of a collection entitled kazakhskie skazki o zhivotnykh (kazakh animal tales). later he prepared the commentary for collections of kurdish and tajik tales, legends, and traditions, and offered a historical-topological analysis of the plots. he analyzed the interaction of russian and kazakh tales in several articles. his prime interest lay in the typology of folklore contacts in prose tales. in 1983 kostiukhin moved to leningrad and began teaching in the herzen institute, first as a docent and then as a professor. he gave courses not only on folklore, but also on eighteenth-century russian literature and literary theory. these interests were reflected in the anthology entitled prikliucheniia slavianskikh vitiazei: iz russkoi belletristiki xviii veka (the adventures of slavic knights: an aspect of eighteenth-century russian belles-lettres) (moscow, 1988). in 1988 kostiukhin defended his doctoral dissertation tipy i formy zhivotnogo eposa (the types and forms of the animal tale), which had been published the year before. this book is an outstanding example of the application of the historical-typological method to research in folklore. animal tales of all types and from various peoples are examined in the spirit of the russian comparativist a. n. veselovskii. kostiukhin has also devoted a number of articles to the heritage of this exceptional scholar, who was often officially reviled in the soviet period. in june 1989 kostiukhin became a member of the institute of russian literature (pushkin house), russian academy of sciences. “perestroika” and the ensuing post-soviet period opened the study of russian folklore to new topics previously forbidden to scholars. in 1997, together with colleagues in pushkin house, kostiukhin published narodnye russkie skazki ne dlia pechati, zavetnye poslovitsy i pogovorki, sobrannye i obrabotannye a. f. afanas’evym (russian folk tales not for publication, secret proverbs and sayings, collected and edited by a.n.afanas’ev) (1857-1862). here kostiukhin contributed the introduction and a commentary, each concise and lucid. the “cruel romance,” which folklorists had despised, also formed the subject of an article published in the journal russkaia literatura, as well as in the volume of collected papers, sovremennyi gorodskoi fol’klor (contemporary urban folklore) (moscow, 2003). the article “khristianskie motivy v vostochnoslavianskom detskom fol’klore” (christian motifs in east-slavic children’s folklore), which came out in the almanac kanun in 1998, was influenced by the contemporary study folklorica 2006, vol. xi 138 of folklore in popular orthodoxy. several other works are devoted to children’s folklore, a subject which for many decades had escaped the attention of scholars. in the last few years of his life kostiukhin edited and republished several classics of russian folklore. among them are i. m. snegirev’s russkie narodnye poslovitsy i pritchi (russian folk proverbs and parables) (moscow, 1999), i. a. khudiakov’s two collections, velikorusskie skazki (great russian tales) and velikorusskie zagadki (great russian riddles) (st petersburg, 2001), and d. n. sadovnikov’s skazki i predaniia samarskogo kraia (tales and legends of the samara region) (st petersburg, 2003). in 2004 he came out with yet another book, kodga zveri govorili: trista sem’desiat piat’ mifov, skazok, basen, anekdotov, legend i predanii o zhivotnykh (when animals used to speak: three hundred and seventy five myths, tales, fables, anecdotes, legends, and traditions about animals). kostiukhin was well-known abroad through his participation in international conferences, membership of editorial boards (enzyklopädie des märchens), and his publications. for his book, lektsii po russkomu fol’kloru (lectures on russian folklore) (мoscow, 2004) he was awarded the pitere-solomone marino international prize (palermo). evgenii kostiukhin’s death came as a shock to those who were close to him even though they knew the medical prognosis. our memory of him will endure and his scholarly works will surely be a resource for succeeding generations of folklorists. tatyana ivanova. institute of russian literature, ran. translated by james bailey and faith wigzell. selected bibliography of materials on russian folklore james bailey, u w madison as everyone who has tried to follow and perhaps to purchase recent books about russian folklore knows, there no longer is any certain way of finding out what is actually published in russia. the whole system has changed, old publishing houses have vanished, new ones have appeared, many items appear in provincial cities, and there is no central listing of current or planned publications. short bibliographies appear in the somewhat popular journal zhivaia starina which is coming out for the third year. the present bibliography contains a selection of books that have appeared since 1990 and surveys trends that may be taking place. while a rather broad interest exists in publishing items concerned with russian nationality, ethnography, ethnomusicology, folklore, customs, and beliefs, there also are many books that have a popular appeal, are of questionable scholarly quality, and reflect an interest in astrology, the occult, or the supernatu­ ral. one disturbing sign is that very few collections of russian folklore itself are coming out, perhaps because private publishers see little demand for jt, but this may also reflect the fact that institutions have few funds to finance expeditions to collect folklore in the field. thanks to a new system of grants, russian scholars may compete for funds from several organizations to publish their manuscripts. because of publishing costs, plans for bringing out the long, desired compendium of russian epics, for instance, have been again postponed even though the first few volumes are ready for publication. at the same time there are several positive signs for the study of russian folklore today because a number of new fine scholarly works are appearing, many older "classics" are being republished, basic reference works are coming out, and neglected genres such as incantations, memorates tbylichkil. and spiritual verses fdukhovnve stiklii) are being published either separately or in anthologies. it seems that only occasional efforts are being made to adapt the study of russian folklore to american "dorsonism," although s. iu. nekliudov in his article "posle fol'klora." zhivaia starina (1995, no. 1: 2-4), makes a plea for such an approach to collect and study contemporary folklore. seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 the items have been divided into several general groups. comments, suggestions, additions, and corrections would be appreciated. email: <jobailey: facstaff.wisc.fedu>. reference works. several bring together compendia of russian folk beliefs or address slavic mythology. narodnye znaniia. folklor. narodnoe iskusstvo: svod etnograficheskikh poniatii i terminov. eds. b. n. putilov and g. shtrobakh. moscow: nauka, 1991. novichkova, t. a. russkii demonologicheskii slovar'. spb.: petersburgskii pisatel, 1995. (contains many memorates and draws on archival materials.) radford, e. and m. a., e. minenok. entsiklopediia sueverii. m.: lokid and mif, 1995. (contains translations from the compilation of english beliefs by the radfords and parallel russian beliefs.) rossiiskie folkloristy: spravochnik. ćomp. l. v. rybakova. m.: indrik, 1994. (a "who's who" of russian folklorists.) russkii folklor: bibliograficheskii ukazatel 19811985. t. g. ivanova, сотр. st. petersburg: biblioteka rossiikoi akademii nauk, 1993. russkii folklor: bibliograficheskii ukazatel 18001855. t. g. ivanova, сотр. st. petersburg: institut russkoj literatury, 1996. (the latest two volumes in this indispensable series of bibliographies on russian folklore.) slavianskaia mifologiia. v. ia. petrukhin, et al., ed. m.: ellis lak, 1995. slavianskie drevnosti. vol. 1, a-g. ed. n. i. tolstoi. m.: mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1995. (the first volume of an encyclopedia being prepared by the institut slavianovedeniia i balkanistiki.) http://facstaff.wisc.fedu vostochno­slavianskil folklor: slovar' nauchnoi i narodnoi termlnologil. k. p. kabashnikov, et al. f eds. minsk: navuka i tekhnika, 1993. vlasova, m. novala abevega russkikh sueverli. spb.: severo­zapad, 1995. (a well­prepared illustrated dictionary of folk beliefs.) various works on folklore. many are con­ cerned with rituals, reconstruction of archaic beliefs, or with everyday conduct (povedenie). astafeva, l. a. siuzhet i stil russkikh bylin. m.: nauka, 1993. baiburin, a. k. ritual v traditsionnoi kulture. spb.: nauka, 1993. ekspeditsionnye otkrytiia poslednikh let. сотр. and ed. m. a. lobanov. spb: rossiiskii institut istorii iskusstv, 1996. folklor i etnograficheskaia deistvitelnost. ed. a. k. baiburin. st. petersburg: nauka, 1992. (a collection of articles about mythological texts and rituals, reconstrution of archaic concepts, and analysis of folklore texts.) froianov, i. ia. f and iu. i. iudin. bvlinnaja istorija. spb.: sankt­peterburgskij universitet, 199?. (a collection of articles by the historian froianov and iu. iudin. they in particular are seeking to trace elements of pre­kievan society in russian epics.) ivanova, t. g. russkaia folkloristika v biografiche­ skikh ocherkakh. studiorum slavicorum monum­ enta, vol. 1. spb.: ran, 1993. (a study of nine russian folklorists around the turn of the twentieth century.) ivleva, larisa. riazhene v russkoi traditsionnoi kulture. spb.: rossiiskii institut istorii iskusstv, 1994. (a fascinating study of mummery and what many would term the grotesque.) 2л seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 jazyk russkogo fol'klora. ed. z. k. tarlanov. petrozavodsk: petrozavodskij gosudarstvennyj universi{et, 1996. (the most recent volume of an irregular series edited by tarlanov.) koshelev, v. v. skomorokhi: annotirovannyi bibliograficheskii ukazatel 1790­1994 gg. spb.: liki rossii, 1994. kuznetsova, v. p. prichitaniia v severno­russkom svadebnom obriade. petrozavodsk: ran, 1993. lapin, v. russkii muzykalnyi folklor i istoriia. m.: moskovskii gosudarstvennyi folklornyi tsentr "russkaia pesnia," 1995. (three essays that challenge widely held ideas about "pan­russian folklore" and stimulate a new approach toward the study of local traditions.) malve formy folklora: sbomik statei pamiati g. l. permiakova. m.: vostochnaia literatura, 1995. meletinskij, e. m. poetika mifa. 2nd ed. moscow: vostochnaia literatura, 1995. (a reissue of one of the main russian studies about myth.) nasledie aleksandra veselovskogo: issledovaniia i materialy. p. r. zaborov, et al., eds. spb.: nauka, 1992. (a collection of articles reflecting the con­ tinuing revival of a. veselovskii) novikov, iu. a. bylina i kniga. vilnius: ran, 1995. (traces how some epic singers learned their songs from printed sources.) pesennaia lirika ustnoi traditsii. сотр . and ed. i. i. zemtsovskii. spb.: rossiiskii institut istorii iskusstv. (a recent volume in the excellent series "folklor i folkloristika" put out by this institut now under its older name.) putilov, b. n. folklor i narodnaia kultura. spb.: ran, 1994. . epicheskoe skazitel'stvo. m.: vostochnaia literatura, 1997. (the last book by the "dean" of russian epic studies. a study of the epic singer that 18 expands the approach of albert lord to the russian tradition as well as to those of various peoples in the former soviet union.) rudneva, a. v. russkoe narodnoe tvorchestvo. m.: kompozitor, 1994. (collection of articles by an ethnomusicologist.) russkaia narodnaia pesnia: neizvestnye stranitsy muzvkalnoi istorii. ed. amd сотр . i. i. zemtsovskii. spb.: rossiiskii institut istorii iskusstv, 1995. ("folklor i folkloristika") russkie. ed. v. a. aleksandrov et al. m.: nauka, 1997. (a huge collection of articles about many aspects of russian ethnicity, material culture, life, customs, beliefs, and rituals.) russkii folklor: epicheskie traditsii. vol. 28. spb.: nauka, 1995. russkii folklor: materialv i issledovaniia. vol. 29. spb.: nauka, 1996. (the latest volumes of the main scholarly series on russian folklore.) selivanov, f. m. russkie narodnye dukhovnye stikhi." m.: mariinskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1995. (an anthology with an introduction and detailed bib­ liography of a long­neglected genre.) skomorokhi: problemy i perspektiw izucheniia. ed. v. v. koshelev. spb.: rossiiskii institut istorii iskusstv. (collection of papers given at a conference november 22­26, 1994 and organized by koshelev, who has revitalized study of the skomorokhs.) sokolov, в. m. bolshoi stikh о egorii khrabrom. m.: nasledie, 1995. (written long ago by one of the finest russian folklorists in the twentieth century, boris sokolov, 1889­1930, it was published only recently. folklorist v. a. bakhtin edited the text and includes an introduction and commentary.) toporkov, a. l. teorija mifa v russkoi fllologicheskoi nauke xix veka. moscow: indrik, 1997. (a long­ needed study of the contributions of all the main seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 members of the "mythological school" in russian folklore in the njiddle of the 19th centuiy: buslaev, afanasev, potebnia, and a, n. veselovskii. the author points out how much was derived from the brothers grimm and several german philosophers, but also shows how many original ideas the russian scholars contributed themselves and how their work has led to present day studies of the associations among myth, word, and poetry.) trubetskoi, e. n. izbrannoe. m.: kanon, 1995. (includes his fine study about the magic tale, "inoe tsars tvo.") zakharova, о. v. byliny: poetika siuzheta. petroza­ vodsk: petrozavodskii universitet, 1997. (compar­ ative analysis of the "themes" or "scenes" in some of the epics of the riabinin family.) collections of russian folklore. few volumes of russian folklore itself seem to have been published in recent years. one important collection of all russian epics collected in siberia has been compiled by smirnov and shentalinskaia and appears in the new series "pamiatniki folklora narodov sibiri i dalnego vostoka," which includes excellent collections of the tales and epics of various peoples living in siberia. a small plastic recording is enclosed with each volume. azbelev, s. n., сотр. narodnaia proza. m.: sovetskaia rossiia, 1992. (a fine anthology of prose genres including legends of all types and memorates but excluding tales in the series "biblioteka russkogo folklora.") cherepanova, o. a. mifologicheskie rasskazv i legendy russkogo severa. spb.: sankt­peterburgskij gos. universitet, 1996. 30 gatsak, v. k. t et al. f eds. obriadv i obriadovyi folklor. m.: nasledie, 1997. (a collection of works recorded during the last two centuries in the moscow area.) kruglov, iu. g. f с о т р . obriadovaia poeziia. kn. 1. m.: russkaia kniga, 1997. (an anthology of calendar folklore in the series "biblioteka russkogo folklora.") kulagina, a. v. russkoe ustnoe narodnoe tvorchestvo. m.: universitet rossiiskoi akademii obrazovaniia, 1996. (an anthology of russian folklore for students that includes genres such as dukhovnye stikhi and bvlichki.) maslennikova, r. a. otletala lebedushka: russkii svadebnyi obriad. orel: pros tor, 1992. (a collection of wedding songs and detailed description of the wedding ceremony in a region where the subject has previously been little investigated.) nekrylova, a. f., and n. i. savushkina, сотр . narodnyj teatr. m.: sovetskaia rossiia, 1991. (probably the best and most complete anthology of folk plays, petrushka. vertep. and urban folklore including the "гаëk." in the series "biblioteka russkogo folklora.") onchukov, n. e. zavetnye skazki. ed. e. eremina and v. zhekulina. m.: ladomir, 1996. smirnov, iu. i., and t. s. shentalinskaia, ed. and сотр . russkaia epicheskaia poeziia sibiri i dal'nego vostoka. novosibirsk:, nauka, 1991. tatarintseva, m. p. russkie narodnve pesni v tuve. kyzyl: tuvinskii nauchno­issledovatelskii institut iazyka, literatury i istorii, 1993. (various genres collected over the last decade, includes some melodies.) toporkov, a. russkii eroticheskii folklor. m.: ladomir, 1995. zimin, v. i. and a. s. spirin, сотр. poslovicv i pogovorki russkogo naroda. m.: siuita, 1996. 31 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 institut slavianovedeniia i balkanisteki. the group of folklorists at this institute of ran con­ tinues to publish interesting collections of studies on a wide range of subjects and cultural topics. only a few items are cited from the main series coming out. obraz mira v slove i rituale. balkanskie chteniia i. m.: ran, 1992. simvolicheskii iazvk traditsionnoi kultury. balkan­ skie chteniia ii. m.: ran, 1993. lingvo­etnokulturnaia istoriia balkan i vostochnoi evropv. balkanskie chteniia iii. m.: ran, 1994. issledovaniia v oblasti balto­slavianskoi kultury: zagovor. m.: nauka, 1993. issledovaniia v oblasti balto­slavianskoi kulturv: zagadka как tekst i. m.: nauka, 1994. studies of the language of russian folklore. a. t. khrolenko and his group in kursk have in particular focused attention on what he terms "lingvofolkloristika." he is now bringing out two series on the subject. byt velikorusskikh krest'ian­zemlepashtsev: opisa­ nie materialov etnograficheskogo biuro kniazia v. n. tenisheva. comps. в. m. firsov and i. g. kiseleva. spb.: evropeiskii dom, 1993. (selections from the immensely rich tenishev archives. unfortunately all examples of folklore texts have been excluded.) forklor 1994: problemv tezaurusa. ed. v. m. gatsak. m.: nasledie, 1994. (yet another volume in the valuable series whose title varies by "folklore" and the year.) forklornaia leksikografiia. vols. 1­4. ed. a. t. khro­ lenko. kursk: kurskii gos. ped. institut, 1994­95. issledovanlia po linffvofolkloristike. vols. 1­2. ed. a. t. khrolenko. kursk: kurskii gos. ped. institut, 1994. khrolenko, a. t. semantika forklornogo slova. voronezh: voronezhskii universitet, 1992. nevskaia, l. g. balto­slavianskoe prichitanie: rekon­ struktsiia semanticheskoi struktuiy. m.: nauka, 1993. nikitina, s. e. ustnaia narodnaia kultura i iazvkovoe soznanie. m.: nauka, 1993. (a linguist and special­ ist on old believers writes about the differences between the written and spoken word in folklore.) razumova, i. a. stilisticheskaia obriadnost russkoi volshebnoi skazki. petrozavodsk: kareliia, 1991. tolstoi, n. i. iazyk i narodnaia kultura: ocherki po slavianskoi mifologii i etnolingvistike. m.: indrik, 1995. (a collection of articles by another "dean" of russian and slavic folklore.) a few republications of older studies or collections. afanasev, a. n. narodnye russkie skazki ne dlia pechati. zavetnye poslovitsy i pogovorki. о. b. alekseeva et al., eds. m.: ladomir, 1997. (a collection of previously unpublished "erotika.") — . poeticheskie vozzreniia slavian na prirodu. 3 vols. m.: indrik, 1994. . proisxozhdenie mifa. m.: indrik, 1996. — zavetnve skazki. spb.: boianych, 1994. (liberally illustrated in lurid lubok style.) dal, v. i. о poveriakh. sueveriiakh i predrassudkakh russkogo naroda: materialy po russkoi demonologii. spb.: litera, 1994. eleonskaia e. n. skazka. zagovor i koldovstvo v rossii: sbornik trudov. ed. l. n. vinogradova. m.: indrik, 1994. 53 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 famintsyn, a. s. bozhestva drevnikh slavian. spb.: aletei, 1995. famintsyn, a. s. skomorokhi na rusi. spb.: aletei, 1995. kostomarov, n. i. domashniaia zhizn' i nravy velikorusskogo naroda. ml: ekonomika, 1993. maikov, l. n. velikorusskie zaklinaniia. spb.: evropeiskii dom, 1994. makarenko, a. a. sibirskii narodnyi kalendar'. novosibirsk: bo nauka, 1993. maksimov, s. v. nechistaia. nevedomaia i krestnaia sila. spb.: poliset, 1994. onchukov, n. e. zavetnye skazki iz sobranija n. e. onchukova. m.: ladomir, 1996. poznanskii, n. zagovory: opyt issledovaniia proiskhozhdeniia i razvitiia zagovornykh formul. m.: indrik, 1995. propp, v. ia. russkie agrarnye prazdniki. spb.: azbuka, 1995. russkoe koldovstvo. vedovstvo, znakharstvo. ed. m. sterligov. spb.: litera, 1994. sadovnikov, d. n. skazki i predaniia samarskogo kraia. 2 vols. samara: samarskii oblastnoi tsentr narodnogo tvorchestva, 1993. sadovnikov, d. n. zagadki russkogo naroda. m.: sovremennyi pisatel, 1995. skaftymov, a. poetika i genezis bylin. saratov: saratovskij universitet, 1994. (a reprint of one of the classic studies of the russian epic) sumtsov, n. f. simbolika slavianskikh obriadov. m.: vostochnaia literatura ran, 1995. varentsov, v. g. sbornik pesen samarskogo kraia. samara: oblastnoi tsentr narodnogo tvorchestva, 1994. zelenin, d. k. izbrannye trudy. ocherki russkoi mifologii: umershie neestestvennoiu smert'iu i rusalki. m.: indrik, 1995. 34 . izbrannye trudv: staff po dukhovnol kul'ture 1901-1913. m.: indrik, 1994. • velikorusskie skazki permskoi gubernii. ed. t. g. ivanova. spb: ran, 1997. (has extremely thorough commentary to the tales.) vostochnoslavianskala etnografiia. m.: nauka, 1991. an example of an anthology of urban folklore. sindalovskii, n. peterburgskii fol'klor. spb: maksima, 1994. (contains an introduction by b. n. putilov and a selection of various genres originating from the eighteenth century to the present day.) three other volumes of general interest deserve to be mentioned. foley, john miles. the singer of tales in performance. bloomington: indiana up, 1995. hilton, alison. russian folk art. bloomington: indiana up, 1995. (gorgeously illustrated.) lord, a. b. skazitel'. trans. yu. a. kleiner and g. a. levinton. m.: vostochnaia literatura, 1994. (with an afterword by b. n. putilov and articles by yu. a. kleiner and a. i. zaitsev.) seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 untitled pilgrimage, mourning, and tradition 51 pilgrimage, mourning, and tradition: commemorative rituals and material responses to the death of john paul ii in poland michal mlynarz university of alberta edmonton, alberta, canada the death of john paul ii in his vatican residence on april 2, 2005 was a date that had an immense impact upon the world and the polish nation in particular, as a level of strength and collective unity was put on display that had rarely been seen. it resulted in the pilgrimage of over one million poles to the eternal city and the organization of ceremonies of mourning across the country that saw the participation of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people. in the days following the death, poles flocked around their hero in an unprecedented way, showing a powerful collective manifestation of modern polish identity. in the homeland of karol wojtyła, the event marked not only that one of the most charismatic and influential men of the twentieth century and the head of the world’s largest church had just died – for millions of poles, a spiritual and national father had died, seen as a saint in the making and as the man who had led his people from the tribulations of centuries of dark history, leading them towards the forging of a new destiny and identity. millions wept, lit candles, and organized marches and masses that saw attendance rise to the millions, many of them preparing for the long journey to rome to pay their final respects to their hero. according to piotr wyrobiec, director of the cultural centre in wadowice, ‘for poles, his death was a time of quiet vigil, recollection, inconsolable grief, and spirituality which spread all over the country. few remained indifferent. this collective experience made us a united community. during that week, “dying” gained a new, deep meaning. the world came to a halt, and the old rules governing our lives were no longer valid.’(1) these days were indeed marked by a collective period of remembrance, grief and commemoration. poles of every social and political leaning worked together as a strong sense of unity and community was created throughout the country. as britons had marked the death of diana several years before, poles engaged in a flurry of ‘obsessive’ mourning activity, including the signing of condolence books, the leaving of personalized notes, and the placing of flowers at makeshift shrines, thus marking the period with a spirit of communal social action [johnson 1821]. the days leading up to one of the most important funerals in history folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 52 also provided many poles with the chance to collectively express their solidarity and national pride in a new manifestation of an old form – the pilgrimage. although a part of religious culture for millennia, this pilgrimage differed in that it truly was a national one, where millions of poles descended upon the holy see not only to pay respects to their greatest hero and someone who was already widely being considered a saint, but also to express a united sense of identity, the strength of which was noted only a few times before in history, the last being in october 1978, when john paul was elected to the papal throne. the death of john paul led to the organization of collective movements millions strong, breaching social divides that until that point, and since it, have continued to linger. the aftermath of this day reverberated through every echelon of polish society. it not only led to a thoroughly impressive and unprecedented united community of poles from every corner of the nation, it also worked to permanently re-draw the lines of belonging, identity, and memory in the new poland. every social and cultural group, every settlement, every form of popular culture, and every period of history was, in some way, connected or re-connected with the image of john paul ii. this paper, largely based upon original fieldwork conducted in poland and rome in the summer of 2006, will examine this mass pilgrimage and the mourning practices that were held en masse throughout the country following the death of john paul, and will look at artifacts of mourning, in particular, ‘spontaneous shrines’ and other material responses to death that were produced in its aftermath, analyzing them as modern, primarily urban manifestations of folklore. throughout its history, the eternal city of rome has undergone many periods of turmoil, destruction, and change. the rome of 2005 was much like any other major european metropolis of the time, bustling with the activity of locals, crowded motorways, and hordes of tourists seeking to view the glories of its bygone past. the death of the first polish pope in the heart of the city, however, brought on yet another radical phase of change, as millions of pilgrims from around the world flocked to the city and the heads of state of many of the world’s nations made bids to be represented at the funeral of this ‘man of the century.’ vatican officials estimated that some three million people entered the city during the week following john paul’s death [walsh 17]. several days after his death, his body was displayed in state in the clementine hall of the apostolic palace, from where it was moved into st. peter’s basilica for public viewing. by april 6, there were about 1.2 million people lined up to see the body. this line stretched for two kilometers, pilgrimage, mourning, and tradition 53 with people having to wait an average of sixteen hours to see it.(2) the representatives of over 140 nations were present, including us president george bush, prince charles and tony blair of britain, ukrainian president viktor yushchenko and robert mugabe, president of zimbabwe [walsh 22-23]. the city had become a microcosm of the world, with nato warplanes regularly circling the city as millions of world citizens slept in its streets.(3) so many poles had descended upon rome that many italians had felt that the city had become ‘a second poland’.(4) it was his death and the placement of his body into state in the largest catholic shrine in the world and the subsequent period of collective mourning, massive influx into rome, and material reminders of these days entrenched within polish collective memory that have all served to transform john paul into a polish ‘national totem’ (5), also serving as a unique opportunity for poles to display a large level of both collective and individual response to the event. across the world, sudden or unexpected death has been marked not only by the private mourning rituals of friends and family members, but also through a collective air. this has been particularly the case in the material phenomenon referred to by folklorists as the ‘spontaneous shrine’ [santino 1-17]. these shrines are an amalgamation of diverse elements, including flowers, candles, photographs, poems, written prayers, and other personal mementos [greenhalgh 43, santino]. they share many common attributes, incorporating diverse multi-cultural, religious, and political sources [greenhalgh 43]. jack santino claims that an element of ‘performativety’ can be found in each of these shrines, through which social issues can be examined and questioned, people can be rallied to action, and political issues surrounding the death questioned [santino 1]. many such shrines were erected in poland following the death of john paul. they, and related artifacts (including books of condolence, grieving cards, photographs, and news clippings) have become one of the most prevalent material markers of the death in poland and abroad. they were created by people from around the world and from different social and cultural classes, and were left in streets, museums, church and apartment windows, and on the sides of roads. the pilgrimage is an activity fundamentally connected to the history and life of religious movements the world over. through it, traveling pilgrims are able to make a personal and emotional connection with their faith, enriching their own sense of spirituality as well as embarking on one of the more significant journeys of their lives. pilgrimage has regularly been a fundamental component of the roman catholic faith. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 54 many of the earliest catholic pilgrimages were often directed at shrines, usually containing the body or other relics of a saint, which were then revered and used as a spiritual focus. this practice has carried on into the present; with modern pilgrimages frequently focusing upon the bodies of famous people. visits to their tombs are often seen to be personal visits with that individual [maniura 6-7]. during his funeral, the world media broadcast into millions of homes worldwide the calls of the assembled crowd of santo subito – ‘a saint quickly!’ since that time, calls to make him a saint have been common the world over. since the thirteenth century, pilgrimage as a popular form of religious movement has been common in poland. it was at this time when a cult of native polish saints, beginning with the canonization of st. stanislaus in 1253, began. since this time, pilgrimage in poland has become a strong aspect of its religious culture [kłoczowski 44-46]. the pilgrimage to rome, which saw millions of people visit the city in the time span of less than a week, marked a milestone in the history of the roman catholic and christian church. it also marked a milestone in polish history. although political, economic, and national movements, in particular over the past few turbulent centuries, were frequent in the annals of the polish nation, 2005 marked the first time that so many poles had joined and traveled in unison to one specific goal in such a short period of time. in contrast to many of these previous movements, this pilgrimage was actively encouraged by the state, now working in unison with the church. despite the influence of these official structures, ewa klekot argues that, in poland, activities organized by the church were always seen as ‘spontaneous’ and natural, often feeding off of what people had already been planning to do, thus giving these activities further impetus [klekot 5]. periods of national calamity can often lead to the ‘spontaneous’ organization of movements and protests the world over, lending themselves to rich ethnological and folkloric study. for example, the 2004 commuter train bombings in madrid led to a process of ‘civil sacralization,’ wherein millions of people aggregated in places affected by the bombings, organizing themselves via popular mediums of communication, including sms text messages and emails. folklorists studying this phenomenon later catalogued and examined the many shrines and testimonies of participants [sánchez-carretero]. in a similar fashion, mourners throughout poland and rome used modern technology to organize their activities, oftentimes bypassing the authority of the state to do so.(6) pilgrimage, mourning, and tradition 55 in the hours and days leading up to the passing of john paul, and in particular after his death on april 2, poles throughout the country took to the streets in record numbers. churches and cathedrals were filled to capacity at all hours of the day and night, candles and wreaths were left on streets and beneath monuments, and marches and services were organized that numbered in the tens of thousands. in larger cities like warsaw and krakow, they reached over a million participants. i argue that these rituals were for poles ‘dramatic social enactments’, wherein participants could take part in a public display containing an agency of transformational power [santino 6-7]. the placement of flowers, cards, and other personal mementos in what are otherwise ‘secular’ areas of public space can serve to turn the daily spaces of life into a temporary community [greenhalgh 52]. this period of mourning, held between april 1 to 8, was widely known as a ‘second easter’ and a ‘week of vigil’ [klekot 3]. entire streets in many cities were converted into temporary ‘spontaneous shrines’, often combining elements of an ‘official’ period or level of organization with that of a true sense of spontaneity, friends following friends and family members into the streets. this event was not only one where people were able to express grief, it also functioned as a time for society to collectively manifest and express shared feelings, in the process asserting a certain level of autonomy from the government [klekot 3-6]. in this sense, poles used the performance of ritual, ‘spontaneity,’ the erection of shrines and collective moments of prayer and reflection to ‘sacralize’ public space throughout the country. the streets of the capital, including the entire four-kilometer length of john paul ii street, were lit up with countless candles and lanterns.(7) particularly on this street, many ‘shrines’ were created, left especially by street signs [klekot 5]. shrines were left throughout public space as ‘offerings,’ intended as ‘his individual property,’ in the form of flowers, candles, flags (both national and papal), handwritten messages, cards and letters, and portraits or ‘homage boards’ [klekot 3-6], with entire streets being turned into sacral ground and one extended ‘spontaneous shrine.’ by late april, when the flowers, candles, and lamps had begun to be cleared out, several tons had to be removed daily. twenty-five tons of lamps were removed from the church of st. anne alone.(8) in piłsudski square, over 300,000 mourners, a group that included many professional workers leaving their offices for the occasion, congregated in order to attend a celebratory mass.(9) in warsaw, polish journalists had their own mass in honor of john paul on april 10.(10) similarly large gatherings were held folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 56 throughout the country. in krakow on april 4, over 150,000 people marched together through the streets of the city in a ‘memorial march’.(11) shortly after the announcement of his death, thousands of people marched to the błonia fields, where during his last visit to poland, john paul had held a service for 2.5 million people.(12) similar marches were organized throughout the city.(13) on april 7, over a million people participated in a ‘white march’ through the streets of the city, dressed in white and carrying candles. similar marches had been held during each of john paul’s pilgrimages to the country, as well as in the aftermath of the assassination attempt in 1981.(14) cities regularly saw the ‘spontaneous’ organization of large memorial marches and the lighting of candles and lanterns. on april 4 in tarnów, several thousand inhabitants of the city congregated on john paul ii street in order to leave candles and lanterns there.(15) on april 6, 20,000 mourners gathered in the town square to attend a service.(16) public areas throughout poland were, during this time, given a certain ‘van-gannepian’ sense of liminality. in warsaw, klekot’s informants claimed that a number of ‘moral miracles’ had taken place, ranging from a general (and uncommon) feeling of safety in the streets of the capital at night, a lack of rowdy and drunken behavior, and the return of stolen cars by thieves [klekot 5]. in virtually every urban settlement and in every house of worship, from the ornate cathedrals of large urban centers to the smaller churches and basilicas, some sort of service was held to honor john paul, and many shrines were created, with thousands, tens of thousands, and occasionally hundreds of thousands or even millions of people taking part. at this time, in a process mirrored throughout the country, residents of the town of swidnia placed pictures of john paul in their windows and hung polish flags, tied with black ribbons, to trees.(17) mourning also took on a more ‘traditional’ and rural nature. for example, on april 4 in wał-ruda, a small village with a population of about 600 people, a group of 3000 embarked on a procession of the way of the cross, following the route of the blessed martyr karolina kózkówna and reciting john paul’s teachings along the way.(18) in the northern baltic port of kołobrzeg, sailors lowered the flag to half-mast in memoriam.(19) the leaving of temporal ribbons and related items also speaks of ‘performativety,’ allowing individual members of society to memorialize the event and place, using different materials and colors in order to both commemorate the loss as well as to engage with the current political and social climate [santino 8-10]. people drew upon diverse elements of their cultural tradition in order to pilgrimage, mourning, and tradition 57 express their grief and to negotiate their identity as poles. on april 3, tv polonia featured footage of mourning from throughout the country, including in the culturally-distinctive area in the north of poland, kashubia, where prayer sessions were held at the kashub shrine in the town of sianów.(20) three thousand tatra highlanders from the podhale region came to zakopane in order to attend a commemorative service for the pope in the church of the fatima, famous for its unique architectural style.(21) amongst the forms of remembrance that they followed was the playing of violins and the singing of traditional songs from the region.(22) the death also created a sense of unity between poles worldwide. amongst the large polish diasporas in western europe, a march of 12,000 was organized through the streets of london, with smaller ceremonies being held in oxford, as well as in dublin’s phoenix park.(23) the death of john paul sparked an unprecedented period of mourning that saw millions of poles grieve in the streets. it also saw people from every walk of life making the decision to travel to rome and to the funeral of john paul in person. since he would not be buried in poland nor would his heart be interned there, the funeral for one of the greatest poles in history would be held in the vatican, and it would follow the rigors and rituals of the holy see’s centuries-old tradition, with journalists, citizens and heads of state the world over being present for the event. such an atmosphere created a strong sense of a united community amongst the poles temporarily resident in the city. in a gazeta wyborcza report, one correspondent relates how there were so many poles in the area and so many polish voices, that they felt right at home. the number of polish flags and people led the italian police patrolling the area to comment that ‘everything is polish’.(24) the concept of a ‘second poland’ amongst italians was regularly echoed and noted.(25) certain individuals personified this sense of ‘spontaneous’ cultural, religious, and patriotic expression. one man profiled on polish media had camped out in st. peter’s square with a large polish flag, on which he was collecting messages and signatures. by april 4, he had already collected over 100,000, and was planning to take it to jasna góra, a shrine housing the famous icon of the black madonna and a place that, although engrained in a deep tradition of pilgrimage and reverence, has taken on strong cultural and patriotic connotations over the past few centuries.(26-27) the pages of catholic journals produced at the time frequently chronicled the experiences of individual groups of people from different parts of poland and how they interpreted their folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 58 experiences. the catholic periodical, sunday guest, produced reports from each of its dioceses, many of which can be viewed online at http://goscniedzielny.wiara.pl. from a general reading of samples of different diocese reports, there frequently appears to have been a ‘spontaneous’ initiative amongst groups of family, friends, or school and church groups to journey to rome soon after they heard of the death. this ‘spontaneity’ characterizes many of the accounts.(28) also common was a strong sense of unity and national feeling amongst the different groups of poles during their time spent in rome, taking comfort from and gathering amongst others speaking their language, singing their songs and waving their flag. during the pilgrimage, the halls of the polish home were packed to capacity. ten people slept side by side on the veranda, and sleeping mattresses had been laid out even in the laundry room.(29-30) in museums like the polish home and in the streets of cities, the parallel processes of how different ‘vectors’ of collective memory play out and interact with each other can be observed. the pilgrimage led to the temporary union of millions of poles, but it also led to the permanent production of tangible reminders of that fact. material responses to grief can be analyzed by the folklorist for modern cultural information and beliefs, much as grave goods or other artifacts can be examined by an archeologist in their study of the past [grider 215-229, thoms]. the polish home maintains a large collection of materials produced during and after april 2005. these largely consist of written works such as letters or books of condolence, expressing sorrow and personal feelings following the event. the largest such book is located inside the entrance of the home, and, at the time of my visit, contained 236 pages of signatures. many of the entries are written by young poles and are couched especially in religious language and in terms of thanks. there are many elaborate entries, including poems, prayers, and illustrations, many of them employing religious imagery, photographs and newspaper clipped images and stories of the pontiff, demonstrating a great range of creativity by young and old alike. there are various non-polish entries, as well, including several written in english, italian, german, and spanish. there are entries from members of the polish diaspora in north america and europe, and other entries from places as diverse as los angeles, cologne, colombia, texas, mexico, and saudi arabia, thus illustrating the global connection of poles around the image of john paul, as well as the more general feeling of worldwide mourning and response. one of the more interesting entries to take on a religious and patriotic pilgrimage, mourning, and tradition 59 tone was contributed by a pole from london, who pasted in a picture of the lady of częstochowa.(31-32) there are several other condolence books in the archives of the home. one of the most significant is a collection of 1.2 million signatures from the popular polish internet site onet.(33) there are several other books of condolence at the home, including one from the children of bielsko-biała, a volume from błonia, a volume from a polish parish in st. louis, usa (demonstrating how polonia organizations around the world rallied around his image as a personification of polish identity and culture), and one from san antonio, chile. several other books were sent in from parishes and organizations throughout poland, including one from a union of combatants and former political prisoners, as well as a letter exchange between błonia and its sister city in italy, coreno.(34) i also found a number of condolence books in krakow’s archdiocesan museum.(35) stanislaus dziwisz, former aide to john paul and sponsor of many photographic exhibits throughout the country, also contributed several of these post-death documents following the funeral.(36) in this fashion, the pilgrimage will be permanently marked and remembered within the halls of the polish home and for the many poles and non-poles who have, and who will continue to, visit its halls. it will be remembered long after the ‘polish city on the tiber’ is gone and when the english of british and american tourists once again becomes the second most commonly heard tongue on the streets of rome. in terms of reminders of the pilgrimage, likely the most numerous and detailed would be the many photographs, videos, and memories of the event in the homes and minds of its participants.(37) the internet and its many mediums of communication likewise revolutionized the ways through which a pilgrimage could be conducted. personal ‘blogs’, reminiscences, and personal websites can be found all over the polish internet, offering a powerful channel for participants to express their personal sense of grief and interpretations of the ‘week of vigil’.(38) the streets and squares surrounding st. peter’s bear no material reminders of the millions of people who once slept there, of the many flags and lighted candles, lanterns and photographs that were left in every niche and corner of the ancient city. much as in warsaw, there were many personal tributes left all over the city during this period, but they have all since been cleaned up. although shrines may only be temporary, they are able to visually mark a place with a more permanent sense of collective and emotional meaning and a sense of memory for people not present during its creation [hartley 297]. in the realm of folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 60 ‘tangible memory,’ the best collection can be found in the polish home. however, i wandered through the streets of rome in an attempt to find any material reminders of this time, to see whether any makeshift shrines or memorials still stood. the only memorial that remained was john paul’s tomb itself in the grottoes of st. peter’s.(39) from my observations, it appears that the most representative artifacts of this time in rome are clichéd photographs, designed for the mass consumption of tourists. the market stalls of the city were filled with magazines, calendars, postcards, and photographs of giovanni paulo. many of them displayed continuity between john paul and his successor, benedict xvi. one stand sold trading cards, postcards and photographs of the late bishop of rome next to tacky gladiator toys, rome pencils and buttons.(40) the tourist image of john paul conflicts sharply with that of the roman and italian people, who hold a much more reverent attitude.(41) there are a number of polish churches and organizations in the city of rome representing the small polish communities living in the city and country. i visited these churches in order to inquire into and examine any mementos or artifacts produced during the ‘week of vigil’ that may have found their way into the parishes or their archives. the first church that i visited was the chiesa di santo spirito in sassia, or the church of the holy spirit, located on 12 via dei penitenzieri, vatican. this church is not officially polish, but maintains a strong association with john paul and with rome’s polish community because it was the place that saw the beatification of faustina kowalska by john paul, and serves as headquarters for the divine mercy movement. there is at least one polish nun resident at the church, and at the time of my visit, there was a polish family standing outside its door. in exploring the church and speaking to the polish nun, however, i found no material traces from the pilgrimage.(42) another church in rome, which is much more prominent and well known to the polish community, is st. stanislaus church, located by the via dei polacchi (road of the poles.) this church plays a strong role in the life of the polish-italian community, both in its connections with john paul and with the pilgrimage and polish identity itself.(43-44) as is common throughout the world, the great men and women of east-central europe are remembered and regarded in many different mediums. the popular habsburg emperor, franz josef ii, had his likeness fashioned into candy in 1908 by a lwów candy maker, and a marzipan image of him could be found in vienna shops in 1997 pilgrimage, mourning, and tradition 61 [unowsky 1-3]. for his jubilee, admirers could purchase everything from knives and carpets to ashtrays and bread-crumb-grinders with the emperor’s visage [unowsky 125]. throughout the world, leading social and political figures are frequently portrayed in the popular, ‘folk’ context (for example, ‘marushka’ dolls created in the image of soviet leaders, or the graffiti ‘portraits’ of honecker and gorbachev painted on the berlin wall). shortly after the death, the institute of john paul ii in krakow received a large donation of items, including books of condolence, drawings, polish and regional flags, and football ‘supporter’ scarves. the institute, founded in 1995, seeks to document especially the krakow period of his life, and has organized over 20 exhibits connected to his life.(45) in the town of radom, a local artist constructed what he hoped would be the largest book of condolence in the country, weighing over 250 kilograms and measuring two meters high by one and a half meters wide, intended for donation to the family home museum in wadowice after it had been filled up.(46) towns and communities throughout the country also frequently preserve their physical memories in museums and displays, thus creating local versions of collective memory of the death and pilgrimage for generations. in the town of bochnia, close to krakow, a large banner was put on display at the museum with the inscription ‘meeting with john paul’, a place where these mementos were aggregated. there was a ‘spontaneous’ march of about 20,000 people in the town’s square after the death, where a large papal flag was put on display for people to sign. it has now found its way into the collections of the museum.(47) similar observations can be made for larger cities.(48) one year after his death, buildings and windows throughout poland had all sorts of reminders of john paul on prominent display.(49) photographs are regularly employed as relics, often standing in for the essence of the dead [senie 44]. in krakow, i saw a photo of the pope in apartment windows,(50) photos, medallions and papal flags with his image amongst votive offerings in the łagiewnik sanctuary,(51) and newspaper clippings tacked onto trees outside the franciscan church. as might be expected, the entire town of wadowice, john paul’s town of birth, is filled with such visual and ‘folk’ reminders. shops and windows throughout the city were also covered with john paul imagery, including blue and yellow handcut papal insignias in residence windows.(52) the town basilica featured a most interesting tribute from the podhale highlanders, a ‘nativity scene’ that included a mannequin dressed in traditional highlander clothes, surrounded by lambs and the motto ‘faithful shepherd’, illustrating yet again how folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 62 different groups in modern societies can draw upon folk motifs in the expression of modern political sentiments.(53) in the tatra mountain town of zakopane, i found numerous local tributes, including photographs from john paul’s funeral on the walls of the church of the fatima,(54) a small statuette in the niche of the cemetery walls,(55) and a symbolic ‘tomb’ located outside the church of the fatima. although i am unaware of the circumstances or history behind the creation of this ‘tomb,’ it is possible that it could constitute a ‘symbolic heart,’ perhaps being used as a center of pilgrimage for people unable to travel to rome.(56) even if it had been erected by church authorities, as klekot describes, such actions would still retain a large measure of ‘spontaneity’ and individual creativity [klekot 3-6]. it also stands as an excellent example of a more permanent variation on the spontaneous shrine, and incorporates many folk elements, including traditional highland architectural motifs, folk art (the statuette found inside the shrine is reminiscent of many polish and slavic wood folk carvings), as well as religious emphasis (including the latin tomb inscription and miniature copy of the vatican grave). not far from the church, i found a most interesting roadside shrine. in traditional polish religious culture, these shrines usually demarcated the limits of a village, often being established at their crossroads, additionally serving to facilitate social interaction and veneration [benet 181]. what distinguishes this shrine from many others, however, is that rather than the image of a saint, christ or the virgin, it has a photograph of john paul, looking contemplatively at the viewer, surrounded by candles, flowers, and a polish flag. the relatively recent phenomenon of building statues as markers of national identity has its origin within religious tradition, with many of the same activities being conducted at each, including the lighting of candles and the laying of wreaths; the national shrine (or monument) thus acts as a secular form of the worship of national ideals [paces and wingfield 122-123]. in the aftermath of princess diana’s death, a more permanent shrine was created for her by a multitude of mourners on a paris freeway [banks thomas 22]. she had become a symbolic figurehead, her image available to a large and diverse public, functioning as a strong symbol of ‘british-ness’ around which the nation could consider itself more of a homogenous whole [johnson 24-40]. material remnants left behind at these shrines, such as poems accompanied by british flags, made their ‘english-ness’ evident [johnson 48-49]. sylvia grider considers the artifacts left behind at spontaneous shrines to be manifestations of both the social background of the people who had left them there, as well as pilgrimage, mourning, and tradition 63 excellent sources of cultural information, being drawn upon by folklorists much like a present-day archeologist, studying it in order to better understand modern cultural significance [grider 215-230]. different artistic sentiments can be analyzed in the study of these shrines (for example, the choice of photographs and poems left behind), as well as senses of patriotic obligation (such as the selection of flags) [sánchezcarretero 333-343]. in a similar fashion, the death of john paul led to a wide recognition amongst poles of his image as one to unite around, where they were able to express a collective sense of solidarity and creativity in their selection of visual markers and artifacts. as was done throughout madrid, certain elements of shrines can be employed to express one’s regional or national identity, negotiating through creative channels one’s own perception of national identity [sánchez-carretero 339-347]. this shrine, then, perhaps best personifies the many ways in which the people of poland marked this transformational period in their history. the establishment of it marks both an awareness of and appreciation of custom and tradition. it also marks an expression of religious and patriotic feeling, found both in the image and in the flag. the lines between faith, tradition, patriotism, and national identity are thus blurred and made into inseparable elements, whereby they can all be simultaneously expressed at a single place and time, centering them on the image of the polish pontiff. this has been made evident throughout poland, but it is perhaps even more poignant around a roadside shrine, taking, and manipulating, an ancient symbol of folk culture and religion, and using it in order to express a strong sense of national identity and pride. ‘god, honor, and fatherland’ – this is a phrase that can be regularly found in the pages of polish nationalist writings. is this shrine then a way for the people of poland to express their own understanding of this concept, of their faith, culture, and of their devotion to the nation and its heroes? following the death of the first slavic pontiff to occupy the throne of saint peter, an entire nation rallied around his image. in this time of mourning for their national hero and father, poles expressed a strong collective sense of identity, one that was largely articulated through the mediums of pilgrimage, group mourning, and prayer, the leaving of material tributes and the construction of makeshifts shrines. although they became the subject of intensive public debate and media coverage, these collective actions and material tributes have helped demonstrate how the death of a national figure functions on the ‘ground level’ of the people, giving millions the chance to express their own sense and folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 64 understanding of their society and culture. the death of john paul ii has given scholars the unique opportunity to study politics and national sentiments and to observe a culture and belief system in transition. such scholarly work shows how traditional culture can be used to express a new sense of identity on both a local and an international scale. the image of the world’s first polish pope served as a focal point for the poles. we can use it also to help illuminate contemporary polish culture. from a book of condolences sent to the polish home in rome. may 10, 2006. an entry in a book in the polish home. may 10, 2006. pilgrimage, mourning, and tradition 65 newspaper clippings outside the franciscan church in krakow. may 23, 2006. a portrait of john paul on an outdoor kiosk in wadowice. may 22, 2006. a residential window in wadowice. the ‘m’s are handmade representations of john paul’s papal insignia. may 22, 2006. text (which reads ‘faithful shepherd’) in wadowice’s minor basilica, where john paul was baptized and received his first sacraments. may 22, 2006. photographs of the funeral in rome, on the walls of the church of the fatima, zakopane, poland, may 28, 2006. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 66 notes 1 i looked for you, now you have come to me: john paul ii at the end of his way, exhibition of the photographs agence france-presse, wadowice, town museum, 4 kościelna street, at the first anniversary of his death (the cultural center of wadowice in the name of m. wadowit: wadowice, poland, 2005), 6-7. the john paul ‘wayside shrine’, found in the town of zakopane. the shrine is built in a ‘traditional’ highland fashion. the ‘santo subito’ –‘a saint quickly’ shrine, zakopane, poland, may 28, 2006. pilgrimage, mourning, and tradition 67 2 tv polonia news release, telewizja polska sa, warsaw, april 6, 2005. 3 tv polonia news release, telewizja polska sa, warsaw, april 7, 2005. 4 tv polonia news release, telewizja polska sa, warsaw, april 8, 2005. 5 as described by katherine verdery, the bodies of national heroes in east-central europe were frequently utilized by advocates of nationalist movements, connecting their image and often elaborate funerals to a nationally inspired cause, thus turning the dead hero into a symbol of the nation (verdery 1999). 6 for example, various sunday guest (a popular catholic periodical, which contained many reports on the commemorative activities of poles during this period) reports related how people used email and text messaging to organize carpools to rome, to turn off all their lights at a particular moment, or to come down to a town square, church, or street in order to collectively mourn. 7 “lampy czuwających,” gość warszawski 16(329) (april 17, 2005). 8 “tony wypalonych zniczy,” gość warszawski 17(330) (april 24, 2005). 9 gołąb, tomasz. 2005. “narodowa msza św. na placu piłsudskiego: naród żegnał ojca,” gość warszawski 17(330) (april 24). 10 “ ks. niewęgłowski podziękował mediom,” gość warszawski 17(330) (april 24, 2005). 11 “marsz jedności w krakowie,” gość krakowski 16(583) (april 17, 2005). 12 “drogowskazy z błoń,” gość krakowski 16(583) (april 17, 2005). 13 wojciech pelowski, “kraków po śmierci papieża – smutny i dobrze zorganizowany,” http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/jp2/1,72542,2655001.html. 14 “ponad milion ludzi w białym marszu w krakowie,” http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/jp2/1,72542,2642113.html. 15 “aleja światła,” gość tarnowski 16(604) (april 17, 2005). 16 “na sądeckim rynku,” gość tarnowski 16(604) (april 17, 2005). 17 “gesty przywiązania,” gość świdnicki 16(50) (april 17, 2005). 18 “wał ruda”, gość świdnicki 16(50) (april 17, 2005). folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 68 19 “pomorze żegna ojca świętego: usłyszeliśmy go,” gość koszalińsko-kołobrzeski 16(682) (april 17, 2005). 20 tv polonia news release, telewizja polska sa, warsaw, april 3, 2005, and april 7, 2005. 21 “górale modlili się za gazdę świata,” gość krakowski 16(583) (april 17, 2005). 22 tv polonia news release, telewizja polska sa, warsaw, april 2, 2005. 23 dominika pszczółkowska, “ogromny marsz polaków w londynie,” http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/jp2/1,72542,2645360.html. 24 “polskie miasto nad tybrem – korespondencja,” http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/jp2/1,72542,2644118.html. 25 an interesting piece of research would be to examine the italian reaction to, and understandings of, poles entering the city during the pilgrimage. father jan główczyk, of the polish home in rome, stated that the italian perception of poles is a very positive one, with both nations taking part in a ‘spontaneity of life’ and holding a shared understanding of the power of the catholic faith in daily life. 26 tv polonia news release, telewizja polska sa, warsaw, april 4, 2005. 27 this individual demonstrates how pilgrims were able to produce unique expressions of their collective solidarity and grief during this ‘second easter,’ manifesting it through a creative and cultural channel. the icon of our lady of częstochowa is often used as a symbol of polish identity, both in a more traditional context (for example, as an icon frequently appearing in peasant homes, rural roadside shrines and chapels,) as well as in the modern sense (such as in polish diaspora (or polonia) churches worldwide. 28 although i attempted to get in touch with pilgrims during the course of my research, i was unable to obtain any personal accounts. i sent out a number of surveys to polish parishes in rome and to various student and catholic websites in poland, but unfortunately received no replies. however, a number of publications have since been produced in poland chronicling the events that, likely, contain personal accounts. in her article on mourning processes in warsaw, klekot, who did interview individual pilgrims, likewise notes that there was a strong sense of ‘spontaneity’ and of ‘unofficial’ organization amongst the mourners and pilgrims [klekot 4-6]. 29 the polish home in the name of pope john paul ii was established in rome in 1981, and has since served both as a home for pilgrimage, mourning, and tradition 69 polish pilgrims visiting the city, as well as a vast archive and museum of john-paul-related artifacts and other material markers of polish identity. 30 personal communication from helena kupiszewska, rome, italy, may 11, 2005. 31 personal observations, rome, italy, may 10, 2006. 32 it is interesting to note that, amongst the many contributions to condolence books, many of which expressed personal feelings of loss and mourning, can be found an image that has been significant to the polish national narrative (and to polish traditional culture) for centuries. a link can be made between this image and the man collecting signatures on a polish flag during the pilgrimage. in this fashion, it is demonstrated how both poles living abroad, as well as in poland, used this tragic event as an opportunity to express their own sense of cultural and religious identity. 33 the signatures are collected in a 16-volume work of 805 pages, released in three copies, one of which is at the home. father jan emphasized the sheer magnitude of the number of signatures. he stated that although few people in poland have regular access to or know how to effectively use the internet, the fact that over a million people signed it shows an event without precedence. 34 personal observations, rome, italy, may 10, 2006. 35 personal observations, krakow, poland, may 22, 2006. this museum, although primarily devoted to displaying artifacts relating to john paul’s time spent in krakow as archbishop of the city, likewise contained several books of condolence, and was the site for numerous rituals of mourning, including moments of collective prayer and the construction of many ‘spontaneous shrines’ during the ‘week of vigil’. 36 personal communication from helena kupiszewska, rome, italy, may 11, 2005. 37 during the course of my fieldwork, i maintained a particular focus upon the activities and events of organized institutions, such as museum and photo exhibits. i did have the chance, however, to examine and photograph many permanent reminders of the event, also created in a more ‘spontaneous’ fashion, such as the collections of the polish home. a promising future line of research would be to conduct interviews with individual pilgrims throughout the country, in the process taking note of their photographs, home videos, and other documents and memories of the event. 38 for example, at the time of writing, the popular video-sharing website, youtube, contains a number of user-produced clips of their folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 70 time spent in rome. for the most part, they relate personal experiences from the city in addition to news clippings and related images from the time, and, much like private home videos of cultural events such as family weddings or funerals, function as an excellent source for understanding the ‘folk’ perspective on such events. 39 although the tomb was closed during my visit, in the immediate aftermath of his death, many ‘folk’ tributes, such as flowers and photos, were left on it, a practice that is likely continuing on a regular basis. a ‘folk’ reproduction of this grave, described in this paper, can be found in the popular tatra mountain resort town of zakopane. 40 personal observations, rome, italy, may 9, 2006. 41 in many catholic countries, it is a traditional practice for people to hang religious images in a variety of settings, such as in one’s home and on car rear view mirrors. for example, ‘ordinary’ romans would hang images of john paul in their homes, businesses, and cars, much as would many poles; i saw one such image in my small, two star hotel in the roman suburb of ostia. they also regularly call upon and support polish organizations in the city to conduct more memory work and have organized their own museum exhibits connecting john paul to the life of the city. a november 2006 news headline stated how a man in the town of salerno, near naples, claimed to have been cured of lung cancer after his wife had prayed to john paul and seen him in a dream (‘un giovane guarito da papa wojtyla: l’arcivescovo pierro rivela il prodiga durante l’omelia alla messa di ognissanti’, il mattino, november 2, 2006), demonstrating that for italians, he is being treated as a saint, but not particularly as a national hero. 42 the church was opened only a few minutes before the mass began. i quickly walked through and took a look around, but did not find any icons, cards, items or any related materials of john paul, such as votive offerings, in the church. i quietly inquired of the nun as to any such remnants but was told there were none. 43 much like santo spirito, i did not find any artifacts or physical mementos of john paul or of the pilgrimage inside this church, excluding a portrait of him in the sanctuary. although there was a nun resident in the church at the time, she was not aware of any tangible elements that i could potentially examine. it would appear that the best places to find tangible elements of this pilgrimage would be in museums, people’s homes, and in other places of national significance, such as jasna góra, where ‘folk’ tributes are often left. following the 2004 terrorist attacks on commuter trains in madrid, a great number of the shrines and tributes pilgrimage, mourning, and tradition 71 that had been created in the aftermath were photographed, digitized, and made available on various online archives [sánchez-carretero]. like the madrid tributes, numerous ‘online shrines’ can be found, where people can light virtual candles for the pope, leave messages, and engage in other mourning and commemoration practices. 44 “gdzie modlą się rzymscy polacy,” http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/jp2/1,72542,2636119.html. 45 “papieskie pamiątki: do instytutu jana pawła ii,” gość krakowski 17(584) (april 24, 2005). 46 “największa księga kondolencyjna w polsce,” http://goscniedzielny.wiara.pl/index.php?grupa=6&art=1114557335&dzi =1104746391&idnumeru=1114031450. 47 personal communication from jan flasza, bochnia, poland, may 21, 2006. 48 personal observations, krakow, poland, may 23, 2006. 49 “kubek z papieżem,” http://goscniedzielny.wiara.pl/index.php?grupa=6&art=1114576253&dzi =1104746391&idnumeru=1114031450. 50 personal observations, krakow, poland, may 22, 2006. 51 personal observations, krakow, poland, may 22, 2006. 52 personal observations, wadowice, poland, may 22, 2006. 53 personal observations, wadowice, poland, may 22, 2006. 54 personal observations, zakopane, poland, may 27, 2006. 55 personal observations, zakopane, poland, may 27, 2006. 56 personal observations, zakopane, poland, may 27, 2006. bibliography banks thomas, jeannie. 2006. “communicative commemoration and graveside shrines: princess diana, jim morrison, my “bro” max, and boogs the cat,” in spontaneous shrines and the public memorialization of death. jack santino, ed. new york, n.y: palgrave macmillan, 17-40. benet, sula. 1951. song, dance, and customs of peasant poland. london: dennis dobson. greenhalgh, susanne. 1999. “our lady of flowers: the ambiguous politics of diana’s floral revolution,” in mourning diana: nation, culture, and the performance of grief. adrian kear and deborah lynn steinberg, eds. london and new york: routledge, 40-59. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 72 grider, sylvia. 2006. “twelve aggie angels: content analysis of the spontaneous shrines following the 1999 bonfire collapse,” in spontaneous shrines and the public memorialization of death. jack santino, ed. new york, n.y: palgrave macmillan, 215-232. hartley, ralph. 2006. “signifying places of atrocity,” in spontaneous shrines and the public memorialization of death. jack santino, ed. new york, n.y: palgrave macmillan, 285-303. johnson, richard. 1999. “exemplary differences: mourning (and not mourning) a princess,” in mourning diana: nation, culture, and the performance of grief. adrian kear and deborah lynn steinberg, eds. london and new york: routledge, 15-39. klekot, ewa. 2007. “mourning john paul ii in the streets of warsaw,” anthropology today 23(4) august. kłoczowski, jerzy. 2000. a history of polish christianity. cambridge: cambridge university press. maniura, robert. 2004. pilgrimages to images in the fifteenth century: the origins of the cult of our lady of częstochowa. woodbridge, uk: boydell press. paces, cynthia, and nancy m. wingfield. 2005. “the sacred and the profane: religion and nationalism in the bohemian lands, 18801920,” in constructing nationalities in east central europe. paces, cynthia, and nancy m. wingfield, eds. new york: berghahn books, 107-125. sánchez-carretero, cristina. 2006. “trains of workers, trains of death: some reflections after the march 11 attacks in madrid,” in spontaneous shrines and the public memorialization of death. jack santino, ed. new york, n.y: palgrave macmillan, 333-347. santino, jack. 2006. “introduction,” spontaneous shrines and the public memorialization of death. jack santino, ed. new york, n.y: palgrave macmillan, 1-3. santino, jack. 2006. “performative commemoratives: spontaneous shrines and the public memorialization of death,” in spontaneous shrines and the public memorialization of death. jack santino, ed. new york, n.y: palgrave macmillan, 5-15. senie, harriet f. 2006. “mourning in protest: spontaneous memorials and the sacralization of public space,” in spontaneous shrines and the public memorialization of death. jack santino, ed. new york, n.y: palgrave macmillan, 41-56. the cultural center of wadowice in the name of m. wadowit. 2005. i looked for you, now you have come to me: john paul ii at the end pilgrimage, mourning, and tradition 73 of his way, exhibition of the photographs agence france-presse, wadowice, town museum, 4 kościelna street, at the first anniversary of his death.wadowice, poland. thoms, alston. 2000. the emotion enigma: “today’s grief may help explain ancient funeral offerings,” discovering archaeology 2(3) july/august. unowsky, daniel. 2005. the pomp and politics of patriotism: imperial celebrations in habsburg austria, 1848-1916. west lafayette, indiana: purdue university press. verdery, katherine. 1999. the political lives of dead bodies: reburial and postsocialist change. new york: columbia university press. walsh, sister mary ann, rsm, with reporting by catholic news services. 2005. from pope john paul ii to benedict xvi: an inside look at the end of an era, the beginning of a new one, and the future of the church. lanham, maryland: rowman & littlefield publishers, inc. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii microsoft word folkf05f.doc 44 name – text – ritual: the role of plant characteristics in slavic folk medicine v. b. kolosova european university at st petersburg “…while trying to use remedies of every available kind empirically to treat various afflictions, but being at the same time incapable of making an informed choice, the commoner tries instead to find a guiding thread and a departure point for his domestic remedies at any rate in analogy, compassion or the similarities between certain characteristics of plants and other objects and the symptoms of the disease” [v. f. demich. essays on russian folk medicine. folk midwifery and gynecology] the aim of this article is to show how among the slavs a given objective feature of a plant becomes one of the most important factors in the selection of plants for use in folk medicine. at the same time i shall reveal the remarkably close ties between the feature, the plant name and the folk beliefs surrounding it. color in the nineteenth century the well-known researcher into folk medicine, v. f. demich remarked that “often in the countryside people use red plants, ones with red flowers and berries, to treat menstrual disorders, or else they may administer a tinctured infusion” [1889: 7]. according the same logic, leucorrhoea (a white vaginal discharge) was treated with white plants [demich 1889: 31-33]. modern field studies show that the same principle is still in force: for example, in the chernivtsi region of ukraine women use a plant known locally as bilyi kamenets (which has small white flowers) to cure leucorrhoea [eu-chernovtsy 2000]. the opposition of white and red can be observed in a charm for regulating menstruation: “red rose, give me your redness, and take my whiteness” [ ajkanovi 1985: 209]. slavic materials on folk botany furnish us with a great deal of data supporting the suggestion that the principle of using a plant with a distinctive feature for treating a disease that has the same feature is not limited either to color or gynecological ailments. thus yellow plants were used to treat jaundice: “jaundice in children is successfully cured with a decoction made from yellow everlasting flowers (bessmertniki), in which the baby is bathed and a small portion then given to him to drink” [nikiforovskii 1897: 45, no. 290]. in bulgaria jaundice is cured by bathing with the flowers of zh lti fundi [pirinski krai 1980: 484] or zh lti turti (marigolds or tagetes) [sofiiski krai 1993: 192].(1) furthermore, while giving a new-born baby his or her first bath, the midwife would put yellow flowers into the water as a preventative measure against jaundice [strandzha 1996: 265]. in kratov in macedonia the treatment employed yellow roses [radenkovi 1996: 316], in serbia the common sunflower, folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 45 helianthus annuus (suntsokret) [ ajkanovi 1985: 224], while in ukraine it was mouse-ear hawkweed (hieracium pilosella) [nosal’, nosal’ 1960: 144] and spring adonis (adonis vernalis) both of which also have yellow flowers [toren 1996: 62]. the sandy everlasting flower, helichrysum arenarium, was supposed to be the most effective remedy for jaundice in ukrainian folk medicine, because the color of its flowers “resembled the face of someone with jaundice” [nosal’, nosal’ 1960: 61]. zolotaia trava, zolotukha (lit. golden herb), i.e. greater meadow rue (thalictrum majus) acquired its name “because when water is poured on the leaves of the plant, they acquire a golden hue.” it was a remedy for scrofula [potanin 1899: 233]. the scrofula herb, zolotushnik, that is, goldenrod (solidago virgaurea), was “believed to be a good remedy against scrofula (zolotukha) and was said to possess diuretic properties.” it was given in the form of a decoction [avgustinovich 1853: 66]. it should be noted that a given feature of a plant not only often influences its use but also the choice of name; a feature can be referred to either directly as in zhlti fundi where zhlti means “yellow” in bulgarian, or indirectly, through a name of a thing/substance with the same feature: zolotukha (meadow rue) c.f. rus. zoloto = gold; ukr. krownik (st john's wort ) c.f. krov’ = blood. plants resembling the color of blood often had the root krovin their names and were supposed to be able to stop bleeding. the considerable number of names for st john's wort (hypericum perforatum) (rus. krovavnik, ivanova krov’, semibratnaia krov’; ukr. krivtsa, bozha krivtsa, hristova krivtsa, krov sv. ivana, molodetska krov; belorus. zaiacha krow, siamionova krow, kryvawnik, kryvavets, cz. krevni ek, krvavník; lusatian. konjaca krej) (lit. blood herb, st. john’s blood, hare blood etc.) results from the red spots that the leaves of some species have, while the sap is red in color, just like the petals when they are crushed. so, in transcarpathia it was used for stopping hemorrhages and bloody flux, while in the kuban’ part of southern russia it was prescribed for someone spitting blood, or with blood in the urine and for wounds [toren 1996: 67], and in bulgaria for diseases of the blood [sofiiski krai 1993: 178-79, 187, 180]. other plants with red flowers were also associated with blood. for example, the serbs treated bloodspitting with sweetbriar [ ajkanovi 1985: 209]. great burnet, sanguisorba officinalis, was used to heal haemorrhoidal bleeding in tobol’sk province, in tomsk the bloody flux (dysentery) [toren 1996: 70], and in saratov exceptionally heavy periods [annenkov 1876: 315]. in south slav lands women who were not menstruating drank red clover tea (trifolium pratense). in bosnia and herzegovina a woman who did not want to have her period, should wash herself and then pour the water over a rose bush. she would not then menstruate until the following year when the rose bloomed anew [ ajkanovi 1985: 87, 209]. in barnaul women with problem periods used european madder, rubia tinctorum [demich 1889: 8], while red clover, trifolium pratense, was used in tver’, vladimir and riazan’ provinces [annenkov 1876: 360; srng 15: 271].(2) furthermore, charms for stemming the flow of blood also mention red plants, especially the red rose [chubinskii 1872, i, 1: 127; efimenko 1874: 13]. the enumeration of red objects is also present in serbian charms against erysipelas (serb. crveni vetar (red wind)) [radenkovi 1973]. an incantation could be pronounced either together with the healing practice or instead of it. another folklore genre, the etiological legend, may explain not only the genesis of a plant but also its usage in folk medicine, and sometimes its name. one of the legends about st. john’s wort says that while the 46 executioner was carrying the head of john the baptist to herod’s palace, several drops of blood fell on the ground. on that spot there grew a plant that had absorbed the blood – st. john’s wort [kuznetsova, reznikova 1992: 86]. another legend says that it grew beneath the cross on which christ was crucified, and received its healing powers from his blood [mandel’shtam 1882: 316]. it may be that legends about the genesis of st john’s wort from st. john’s or jesus’ blood are connected with the styptic properties of this plant [usacheva 1991: 93]. in serbian tradition the distinctive feature of st john’s wort the red spots on its leaves is explained in this way: these come from the blood of our lady, which dripped onto the leaves when she was menstruating. hence it bears the name bogorodichina trava, or bogoroditsa, bogorodichitsa, gospino tsveche, gospina trava, gospino zelje (lit. our lady’s herb) [ ajkanovi 1985: 259; sofri 1990: 13]. the most interesting is the case when a plant looks somewhat unusual: so, local names for common eyebright, euphrasia officinalis, (rus. glaznitsa, glaznaia trava, ochanka, ochnaia trava, svet ochei; ukr. ochanka; serb. o anica, vidac, vidica, zornica) show it was used to cure diseases of the eye, because “in the corolla of its flower there is a mark like an eye” [toren 1996: 74, 232; annenkov 1876: 141; dal’, 2: 664, 4: 159; gornitskii 1887: 73]. using eyebright mostly for curing eye afflictions is also mentioned by machek [1954: 215] and nosal’, nosal’ [1960: 48]. one very unusual feature, the combination of two colors of petals in the same flower, formed the basis for the emergence of names like brat-sestra (lit. brother-sister), ivan-da-mar’ia (ivan-and-mar’ia), for blue cow wheat, melampyrum nemorosum, as well as numerous etiological legends about a brother and a sister turned into a flower as a punishment for incest, and prompted its use in magic: village healers (znakhari) used it “for establishing harmony between spouses” [annenkov 1876: 211]. individual specimens of a plant could vary in color, in which case they were used in different ways. mugwort (artemisia vulgaris) with green stems, it was believed, stopped heavy periods, while those with red stems started an overdue period (tver’ province); milfoil, achillea millefolium with pink flowers was a remedy for uterine bleeding, but when it had white flowers, it was used for leucorrhoea, the disorders themselves being called red rupture and white rupture respectively (perm’ province) [annenkov 1876: 387, 390; demich 1889: 89]. similarly in vologda province women used specimens with white flowers for leucorrhoea; but those with red flowers were used “to initiate menstruation” [ivanitskii 1890: 150]. form form can influence the usage of plants too. hound’s tongue cynoglossum officinale (a plant with long leaves) was called in vologda province pesii iazyk (lit. dog’s tongue), and its roots cut and baked in bread were considered a good antidote to the bite of a rabid animal [ivanitskii 1890: 152]. herbs with leaves in a form of a paw or hand and with corresponding names were often used to heal a rash between the fingers, as reflected in the russian name mezhperstitsa, mezheparshchitsa (lit. between-thefingers plant) for lady’s-mantle (alchimilla vulgaris): “if there is swelling between the fingers, it is covered with the dried leaves of the mezheparshchitsa,” smolensk region, 1890 (see also: mezheparshchitsa = a rash on the hands, itch or scab, smolensk, 1914) [srng 18: 85, 90]; it was also used for itchy feet [dobrovol’skii 1914: folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 47 407]. lapchatka (white tormentil, potentilla alba) was used for the same purpose under the names mezhperstnitsa (tambov), mezhiperstnik (chernigov) and rasperstnaia (orel) [annenkov 1876: 269]. plants whose roots resembled genitalia had corresponding names and were used in fertility magic, whether as love potions, to increase sexual potency [nosal’, nosal’ 1960: 84], or cure infertility [krylov 1882: 35-36]. for example, the bog orchid, orchis palustris was known in ukraine as krasnye sultanchki (red plumes); “its roots are collected here when it is in flower… they supposedly stimulate the genitals” [avgustinovich 1853: 50]. it is thought that the russian name for this plant (iatryshnik) is derived “from iatro (belly, testicles, balls) after the knob-shaped roots” [annenkov 1876: 232]. the root of kukushkiny dary, the broad-leaved fen orchid, orchis latifolia, also known as orchis impudica, was used as a remedy for “a spoilt wedding” (when a sorcerer was thought to have put a curse on it). this property may have been attributed to the plant because its tubers resembled testicles. the root of another orchid, orchis maculata (the spotted orchid) was also used in love magic: “fortune-tellers give the root to peasant women to carry with them so that they will be loved, and especially to married women who are not getting along with their husbands” [annenkov 1876: 233; potanin 1899: 233]. orchis palustris, “in popular conception, is a plant able to evoke love and increase sexual potency. like other plants of this kind, the bog orchid was used by the slavs as a love potion; the hutsuls (south western ukraine) used it as a treatment for impotence” [zelenin 1995: 343]. women tried to guess the sex of their unborn baby from the shape of the root: long for a boy, round for a girl [kedrina 1912: 102, 108], or two-pronged root for a girl and three-pronged for a boy [afanas’ev 1994, 3: 227]. the ukrainian name for this plant is liubka (derived from the root liub= love). “certain peculiarities of the shape of its root prompted its use as a means of making people fall in love with each other. the root can have two forms: divided like fingers (male) and a simple heart shape without protuberances (female). you had to dig up these roots, dry them, make an extract in vodka and give it to a youth and a maiden to drink, saying: ‘these flowers loved each other in the forest meadows; now you, children, in your homes love each other like these flowers in the fields’” [khatemkin 1900: 8-9]. in volhyn’ its roots were used as a “medicine for impotence and for exciting sexual desire.” the young used it as a love potion [nosal’, nosal’ 1960: 84]. similar qualities were assigned to members of the orchid family in czech folk culture [machek 1954: 299]. in the province of kazan’ the fragrant orchid, gymnadenia conopsea, bore the names liub-trava, or liubovny ruchki (lit. love herb, love hands). when making a love potion a specimen with “hands” (i.e. tubers) pointing towards each other was used; if the “hands” pointed away from each other, the plant was used for the opposite purpose. it was also given to barren women to help them conceive [ rylov 1882: 35-36]. it is very likely that the belief in the archangel region about what is locally called a kukusha (lit. cuckoo plant) also refers to a member of the orchis family: “the root is double: representing the husband and wife. if a husband does not love his wife, he should give it to his wife to drink, and if a wife does not love her husband, she should give it to her husband to drink, and then his wife will love him” [kharitonov 1848: 15]. in kaluga province the common storksbill, erodium cicutarium, was drunk as a medicine for convulsions, “because the petioles of this herb are drawn together like elbows, as if in convulsions” [annenkov 1876: 136]. 48 names with the component golova (head) are generally used for plants that have some spherical parts (flower heads, seeds etc.): in russia sobach’ia golova (lit. dog’s head) is a name for meadow knapweed (centaurea jacea) in vladimir; in siberia it is called adamova golova (lit. adam’s head). in kursk krasnogolovki (lit. red heads) is the term for greater knapweed, centaurea scabiosa, while ivanova golova (lit. ivan’s head) is a name for the peach-leaved campanula, campanula persicifolia. in ukraine, on the other hand, adamova golova (adam’s head) is the name given to field eryngo, eryngium campestre [annenkov 1876: 9091; bulashev 1909: 349; beilina 1968: 422]. but the equation between roundness and medical application is also true of the plants used for curing headaches. sometimes the two groups overlap: “tall and slender, it has two or three white heads, adamova golova helps with a headache, here, look, on the slope, blue, prickly round heads”(3) [rodionova 2002: 38]. or in ukrainian it is said of bolygolov (hemlock, conium maculatum) that “when the head aches, moisten [the forehead?] with an infusion of this herb” [markovich 1891: 425]. a number of names are based on the special shape of stem or root, for example trubnik lugovyi (lit. meadow tube herb), that is the meadow pasqueflower, pulsatilla pratensis [beilina 1968: 433]. a legend says that prostrel-trava (lit. the shot-through herb) was once whole, but the archangel michael shot it with a thunderbolt while pursuing the evil force which had hidden in it [iakushkin 1844: 42; annenkov 1876: 6]. the usage of plants with hollow stems is based on the same idea. so, hunters in vologda province put prostrel borovoi or strelinaia trava (the finger anemone, pulsatilla patens) into the barrel of a rifle, believing it would give the rifle special force [ivanitskii 1890: 147]. here the formal similarity of hollow stem and rifle-barrel is supported by parallels between plant name, strel’naia trava, (lit. shoot-herb] and the verb streliat’ (to shoot). it is logical to assume that the name based on the plant’s distinctive feature merged into the subsequent link with words of the same root, thus causing the next wave of associations. for instance, in the following situation the effect of the herb prostrel (pulsatilla patens) is thought to be equal to the effect of a small piece of coal, “shot out” from the stove: “a woman in labor drinks … water with a piece of coal that has jumped out of the stove in it. the coals are collected in advance and kept ready to help her give birth to her baby as quickly as the coal leapt from the stove. with the same thing in mind, people drink an infusion of the herb known as prostrel” [ivanitskii 1890: 108-09]. mouse-ear hawkweed, hieracium pilosella, is known in ukrainian as nechui viter (lit. not feeling the wind), as the leaves of this low-growing plant do not move in the wind. this then explains its use as a cure for fever [rogovich 1874: 16] – the essential quality of the plant is to be passed to the sick person. the appearance of a flower may evoke associations with a particular emotion, and that association may then serve as the basis for its medicinal use. thus in perm’ province the nodding catchfly silene nutans is known as potoskuika (lit. wistful herb) because its flower heads bend sadly to the ground. this plant was believed capable of curing grief, sadness and similar afflictions [krylov 1876: 81]. the special role of thorny plants has been remarked upon by others [see e.g., sd 2: 566-68]. their thorny nature is reflected not only in their names (koliukha (lit. prickly plant) for species of thistle (carduus and cirsium); volchets (lit. wolf herb) also for carduus and cirsium; chertopolokh (lit. devil-scarer) for burdock (arctium), as well as carduus and cirsium), but also in their application in magic (they could scare off the folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 49 “unclean force”). and in folk medicine, they were believed to cure perepolokh (acute anxiety), or rid cattle of worms. the effect of the plants was likened to the illness itself, which is why thorny plants were often also used to get rid of a stitch/stomach gripes; what was recommended was “to give the sick person a drink made from nine thorny plants – gooseberry, rose, thistle, etc. – and to wash the patient’s chest, sides and back with this decoction” [nikiforovskii 1897: 270, no. 2106]. in kazan’ province perepoloshnaia trava (lit. fear herb), that is, eryngo, eryngium planum, was used for healing acute anxiety [krylov 1882: 44, 47]. the situation was the same with plant names like egor’evo (egor’evskoe, georgievo) kop’e (st. george’s spear), such names being given to plants with elongated or sharp parts, with thorns, and they are used “for colic,” i.e. abdominal pain. for example, in the urals the name of egor’evo kop’e is given to the maiden pink with serrate petals (dianthus deltoides) or to meadow cranesbill, geranium pratense, which has narrow pointed ends to the seed heads “is drunk for colic in the belly” [konovalova 2000: 61, 80]. delphinium was used for stitch in siberia because of its arrow-like flowers and could also serve as an amulet [toren 1996: 234, 412]. the sap of goose-foot (chenopodium), a plant with a spiny splinter-like outer covering, was supposedly the best way of getting rid of a splinter [popov 1996: 390]. in ukraine sickleweed, also known as the longleaf or falcaria vulgaris because of its sharp sickle-shaped leaves, was called rizak trava (lit. cutting herb) and drunk for abdominal pain [markovich 1891: 425]. another species, falcaria rivini, was used for the same purpose in ekaterinburg [annenkov 1876: 143]. in ukraine the water soldier, stratiotes aloides, (ukr. rezak) was drunk for bloody flux (dysentery) and colic, and in tobol’sk province for colic, as it has thorny leaves with sharp edges [annenkov 1876: 344; toren 1996: 233]. sometimes the appearance of a plant is only connected with its usage in folk medicine indirectly: in vologda province aconite (rus. ukryt, khranitel’, khristoprodavka, khristovo kop’e, ukrop khristov (lit. covering herb, christ’s spear)) was prescribed for a sharp pain in the side and chest, because according to legend its leaves were pierced by the spear with which the jews stabbed jesus who had hidden among its leaves [annenkov 1876: 7]. the dominant feature of the stinging nettle is obviously its ability to sting; hence it is often used for illnesses associated with colds such as fevers, coughs and rheumatism. for example, in vologda province an infusion of the leaves of the common nettle (urtica dioica) was used for a fever, and of the seeds as cough medicine, while rheumatic patients were beaten with fresh plants on their joints [ivanitskii 1890: 153]. in ukraine people who suffered rheumatic pain would take steam baths and use switches made of nettles, or drink the flower heads infused in vodka, while juvenile patients were beaten with the fresh stems [gornitskii 1887: 174]. the plant also had prophylactic functions: “dig up some nettle roots, dry them, pound and sieve them, then rub them on your face, hands and feet, and they won’t be cold” [zabylin 1996: 424, 430]. in kazan’ province a nettle root decoction was drunk for fever [krylov 1882: 32]. in novgorod province nettle decoction was a medicine for a cough with catarrh [toren 1996: 161]. in tobol’sk province nettle tea was taken for colds [skalozubov 1913: 74]. in siberia the roots of urtica cannabina were popularly used for colds and chills [vinogradov 1915: 405]. according to a herbal compendium, nettle seeds pounded and mixed with honey and 50 wine helped a cough [toa f.1409.op. 1, d.590, l.144-5]. in novgorod province nettle flower tea was drunk for rheumatism, while in the kuban’ it was made from the roots [toren 1996: 158]. the second most important folk remedy for fever was artemisia.(4) all three of the best known kinds (abrotanum, absinthium, vulgaris) were employed in folk medicine, though mugwort (artemisia vulgaris) was the most widely used. it was mainly taken in the form of a drink, but stanislav gazhtovt’s herbal, translated into russian from polish around the seventeenth century, for example, recommends massaging the patient with it “while he is shivering from a feverish cold” [zubov 1887: 13]; apart from this, it could be drunk as juice or infused in vodka. the use of artemisia for fever is very widely attested: in the provinces of vologda, voronezh and tobol’sk [toren 1996: 76-77], kazan’ [krylov 1882: 51-52, 57-58] and perm’ [krylov 1876: 80]; in ukraine [arandarenko 1849: 232; avgustinovich 1853: 17; minkh 1890: 54; markovich 1891: 427; ivanov 1898: 6, 189, 603, 929]; in poland [zubov 1887: 6, 13] and serbia [ ajkanovi 1985: 190]. artemisia was also helpful in treating associated disorders: in kazan’ province it was used in baths “for rheumatic pain resulting from a chill” [krylov 1882: 68]. it was also believed effective against a high temperature [chubinskii 1872, i, 1: 83; franko 1898: 206; niebrzegowska 2000: 157], and in kostroma province it was drunk for fevers [toren 1996: 82]. since nettle can leave a rash on the body, to it was attributed the power to clear a rash. in kazan’ province nettle rash (urticaria) was treated with the seeds of the nettle [krylov 1882: 32]; in tobol’sk province people rubbed nettles over themselves in the bathhouse as a remedy [skalozubov 1913: 74]. in tomsk province it was much the same [prikhod’ko 1927: 116]. perhaps, in these cases, as often happens in folk medicine, “like cures like,” as the symptoms of urticaria do indeed look like the rash caused by stinging nettles. nettle could treat other skin diseases as well. thus, in bukovina in the north eastern carpathians people who had a rash drank nettle broth or washed in it. women and girls used nettle as a peculiar form of cosmetics; “a broth made from dried leaves was drunk in winter ‘so the skin wouldn’t fade and the waist not expand too far,’” while fresh sap was rubbed into the scalp as a remedy for dandruff [makovii 1993: 45, 52]. in siberia urtica cannabina (known in english as kentucky hemp), was dried and ground then mixed with cream and used as an ointment for scrofulous sores [toren 1996: 69-70]. old herbal compendiums recommend “nettle dried and crushed to sprinkle on sores” [toa f.1409. op. 1, d. 470, 37], and to apply it “to old suppurating ulcers.” a scab would be moistened with nettle that had been boiled in water or stewed in lamp-oil (an inferior olive oil) [toa f.1409.op. 1, d. 590, 144-5]. milk dandelion sap, which has a milky appearance, prompted not only a number of its folk names – rus. molochai, molochnik (vologda province), molokanka, molokovnik, molokoed; belarus. malachai (minsk province); ukr. moloch’; serb. mlje njak, mljeka a; czech mlé [annenkov 1876: 349; ivanitskii 1890: 151; gancharyk 1927: 6; ajkanovi 1985: 172; dubrovina 1999: 62] – but also its medical usage. in arzamas in the nizhnii novgorod area, dandelion, known locally as molochai, was used by women shortly after childbirth to help with lactation [demich 1889: 38]. similar characteristics were attributed to other plants with milky sap, so, folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 51 in kazan’ province women drank a decoction of spurge (euphorbia virgata) “when their breast milk was ‘spoiling’” [krylov 1882: 40]. taste bitter-tasting plants, as a rule, were a remedy for digestive illnesses. for example, the name glistnik (worm-herb; rus. glist = worm) for wormwood (artemisia absinthium) bears witness to its vermifugal powers [dal’, 3: 267]. this particular species was most often used for this purpose, for example, in the ukrainian province of poltava [avgustinovich 1853: 17] and in belarus [chubinskii 1872 i, 1: 112; krachkovskii 1874: 192]. in kazan’ province people used artemisia cina [krylov 1882: 70]; in the pirinskii region of bulgaria children were given boiled or fresh leaves of the plant known here as glistavo bilje (lit. worm plant) [pirinski krai 1980: 484]. and in poland it was used in the same way [zubov 1887: 13]. apart from this, other problems of the alimentary canal could be treated: an infusion of artemisia in khlebnoe vino (alcoholic drink made from wheat) was drunk for stomach diseases [arandarenko 1848: 38; 1849: 232]. in novgorod province it was an appetite stimulant [toren 1996: 82] and in serbia taken both for poor appetite and stomach problems [ ajkanovi 1985: 190]. in bulgaria it was also prescribed for stomach disease, abdominal pain and for stimulating the appetite [pirinski krai 1980: 481; sofiiski krai 1993: 179-180]. in eastern poland it was children with these problems who were given it [niebrzegowska 2000: 157]. according to m. a. nosal’, in this sphere “in its use of artemisia absinthium folk medicine does not differ from academic medicine and uses all its methods,” as it “strengthens the stomach, drives out round worms, stops diarrhea and strengthens intestinal peristalsis.” artemisia vulgaris and artemisia abrotanum were used in the same way but only in ukrainian folk medicine [nosal’, nosal’ 1960: 32, 35, 193].(5) time frequently the time a plant appeared, bloomed or was picked also had an influence on its usage. the magic associations of “the first” played a considerable role here: thus, in serbia when you saw the first violet (viola odorata) in the spring you should “tear off its corolla and eat it so as to be young and healthy the whole year through” [ ajkanovi 1985: 169-170]; in bulgaria st vlasii’s day (11th feb.) or gerg’ovden (st george’s day) is the day of the first ritual consumption of nettles: people would boil young nettles before sunrise and then eat a spoonful as a tonic for the blood. when women collect nettles for the first time that year, they lash themselves with the nettles “to protect themselves from illness” [stoinev 1994: 27-28]. healing properties were attributed to plants picked on a particular holiday, most often st. john’s day. these properties could be reinforced by consecrating the herb in church, putting it into holy water, and so on. the czechs, for example, picked st john’s wort and other herbs and left them for two days under the table, believing that they would miraculously acquire healing powers. in the jablonec area (southern czech lands) people put st john’s wort on the bed on st. john’s eve, hoping that at night st. john would come and lay his head on the bed made for him. if the mark of his head was visible on the herbs they were held to have acquired curative powers [sobotka 1879: 294-295]. 52 space the plantain (rus. podorozhnik) (plantago), which grows along the verges of roads, was believed to possess magical powers to help exhausted travelers: “rub your feet with plantain and you will never get tired while walking” [tereshchenko 1848: 93], and even any illness contracted on the journey: “whoever sets out should take it with him; if illness strikes on the journey, imbibe it with water – it will help; that is why it is called poputnik” [samolechenie 1884: 441]. here, the plant name also shows where it grows (rus. put’, doroga = way, road). sometimes the distance between the human domain (the village) and the territory of the wild (where herbs were picked) was important as well; in chernigov province herbs “which do not hear the cockerel’s voice,” that is, grow in the places where the cockcrow is not heard, were supposed more effective [grinchenko 1895: 36]. special features the ability of some plants to affect the human psyche prompted their usage in the sphere of mental illness – hysteria, falling sickness (epilepsy, rus. chernaia nemoch’, literally black sickness), as well as cramps and convulsions [dal’, 4: 595; nosal’, nosal’ 1960: 34]. the word chernobyl’ itself (common slavic * rnobyl ) is known in many slavic languages: ukr. ornobyl, belorus. charnabyl’, charnabul’, charnabyl’nik, czech ernobýl, serb. crnobil, crnobilnik, slovene rna bil. it is possible that the name itself results from the plant’s use in the treatment for falling sickness; compare: “black sickness, falling sickness; paralysis” [dal’, 4: 594], and: “the herb chernobylets … is good for black sickness” [florinskii 1879-1880: 10]. in the vinnitsa district of ukraine the following story has been recorded; after seeing a tatar sorcerer eating snake meat, his captive, a cossack, did the same and began to understand the language of the plants. amongst other herbs he heard the voice of artemisia saying: “i am for the black sickness” [chubinskii 1872 i, 1: 210]. in priargunie and tomsk regions artemisia was “used for this disease … even by many doctors” [toren 1996: 82]. epilepsy was treated with artemisia in perm’ [krylov 1876: 93] and vologda provinces [ivanitskii 1890: 151]. in mogilev province “mugwort root powder, artemisia vulgaris, three times a day” was the prescription for falling sickness and hysteria [demich 1889: 37]. similarly in poltava province we learn that “since olden times artemisia has been known for healing hysteria and other nervous disorders… the roots are ascribed the power to stop attacks of the falling sickness…” [avgustinovich 1853: 18]. artemisia baths “for curing the sufferings of hysterics” were known [arandarenko 1848: 38; 1849: 232]. however, folk medicine also knew the negative effects of one kind of artemisia, wormwood or artemisia absinthium: “use over a prolonged period is avoided as it causes nervous disorders” [ivanitskii 1890: 151]. overdoses could “cause cramps and convulsions, hallucinations, and madness” [nosal’, nosal’ 1960: 32]. * * * * * it seems clear that traditional ideas about the magical or healing properties of the plants mentioned in this article are based on objective features reflected in the plants’ names, medicinal uses and legends about them. furthermore, the same plant may be given different names and used for different purposes in one or another folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 53 local tradition, depending on which particular feature has been observed and picked out. and vice versa, different plants that have identical features may be used in similar ways. but sometimes the same function may be assigned to plants with different features. this has occurred with a whole group of plants considered to act as amulets – it may include both stinging and thorny plants, as well as those with a sharp smell and taste. the group might also include other protective objects: for example, in belarus, to defend themselves from witches on st john’s eve “peasants pour poppy seed on the cattle sheds, or hang on the windows and gates prickly thistles, the accursed aspen tree,(6) nettles, a thunder candle (a candle consecrated on holy thursday and lit as a defense against thunder) or herbs, which had been blessed on whitsunday, or else they might put a covered bench with bread and salt near the gates or draw crosses on the door-posts with tar, so that witches do not erase them, etc.” [romanov 1912: 207-08]. another example of similar roles in folk ideas for plants with different features is a serbian magic “wish” (addressed to a vampire): “na putu mu bro i glogovo trnje!” (let him meet european madder and the thorns of the hawthorn on his way!) [karadži 1965: 190, no. 3239]. here the red color of european madder (rubia tinctorum) and thorns of the hawthorn (crataegus) are taken as functionally equal. perhaps because some plants were linked together because of their protective functions, they came to be equated for other purposes as well. so, on st john’s eve, instead of jumping over a bonfire, people might instead leap over nettles, thistles or artemisia (a single bush or a heap). it was a similar group of plants that the south slavs would put in a new-born baby’s bathwater to protect the child: basil, nettle, garlic, hawthorn and sweetbriar [vinogradova 2002: 48]. in spite of a wide variety of roles and functions for each plant, when one compares the range of plants, it is clear that roles and functions are duplicated. duplication is conditioned by the fact that the choice of plant for this or that purpose is based on a finite number of objective features and properties – taste, smell, color – which inevitably repeat and hence may serve as a basis for grouping the plants. in the “relations” between man and plants two models are possible: man tries either to take the properties he needs from a plant or rid himself of a property/symptom with the help of a plant that has the same property. for example, fever in one local tradition (in ukraine) was treated with mouse-ear hawkweed, which does not sway in the wind, in another the belarusians “gave” the fever to an aspen tree, which, by contrast, is distinguished buy the constant trembling of its leaves. side by side with the general practice of treating jaundice with yellow plants, in serbia, for example, a patient with jaundice took a yellow silk thread and twined it round his or her neck, while another thread, a red one, was hung on a red rose in the garden. in the morning the yellow thread was removed and hung on the rose, while the red one was put on the patient’s neck with the following words: “ružice, bogom sestrice, daj mi tvoje rumenilo, a uzmi moje žutilo!” (oh rose, my sister-in-god, give me your red, and take my yellow!) [mili evi 1894: 271]. stepping outside the frame of folk botany we can see that very often not only plants but also other objects with the same feature may be used for the same purpose; that is to say, the same principle is applied to medicines of non-floral genesis, thereby demonstrating the systematic character of traditional ideas. thus, not only yellow flowers but also other yellow objects were used for treating jaundice; the slovenes covered the cradle of a sick baby with a yellow silk shawl and sewed a gold ring on his/her shirt [radenkovi 1996: 31154 312]. in charms for stopping bleeding red objects are often enumerated: “there on the mountain aurochses were ploughing, sowing red roses; the red roses didn’t grow; a girl was standing there; near the blue sea a ribless sheep was standing; near the red sea a red stone lies. where the sun goes, there the blood stops; where the sun sets, there the blood clots” [efimenko 1874: 13], as well as in serbian charms against crveni vetar (erysipelas, lit. “red wind”). etiological legends about the genesis of plants (or, even more often, their features) from other objects also point to the “opportunity to shift to another code,” as t. v. tsiv’ian notes [1990: 45]. but a feature is not the only basis for a possible shifting of codes. the role of another mediator – natural language – is no less important for connections between different codes in traditional culture [baiburin, levinton 1983: 28-29]. a plant name becomes linked to words and objects, thereby acquiring secondary associations. we have already discussed one whole set of actions and motivations associated with the root strel(= shoot). let us analyze a further example. some plants are so thorny that cattle other than donkeys find them inedible. this is reflected in some dialectal plant names: in voevodina (jugoslavija) the scottish thistle onopordon acanthium is called magare iji trn, magare a boda, magare a boca (lit. donkey’s thorn; serb. magarac = donkey): “we were guarding the sheep, and a donkey passed by; nothing eats it, but it takes a bite, and that is why it is called donkey’s thorn.” it is said of someone who is curious: “why did you open you mouth like a donkey for thistles!” [špisulum 1995: 413, 464]. see also bulg. magareshki tr ni (the welted thistle or carduus acanthoides) which means donkey’s thorns. then, south slavs associate the braying of a donkey with a heavy cough, which is why whooping-cough is known in bulgarian as magareshka kashlitsa, serbian as magare i kašalj, magarica, and slovene as oslovski kašelj (lit. donkey’s cough). associating a donkey on the one hand with an illness, and on the other hand with some plants, prompted the use of some medicines; thus, the bulgarians give children with whooping-cough a broth made from carduus acanthoides [sofiiski krai 1993: 192]; the serbs and bulgarians give sick children donkey milk to drink [sd 3: 567-568]; for example, in kratov they would make a flat cake of flour, ashes, tar, nettle and black she-ass’s milk for the patient, because another name for this illness is crna kašlica, lit. black cough [radenkovi 1996: 129]. connections like these confirm the importance of objective, real plant features in the creation of its symbolic image. to interpret them one must consider lexical and folkloric information that allows us to clarify the ties of a given plant with mythological ideas, which cannot be revealed simply by analyzing the ethnographic data. hence, the features of plants play a decisive role in forming notions about them and therefore in their usage in ritual and everyday life, in particular in folk medicine. notes 1 throughout, the slavic name for a plant is given in transliterated form, with its meaning in brackets, if relevant, its english name (where possible) and its botanical name in latin. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 55 2 among the various species of artemisia it is mugwort (artemisia vulgaris) that almost exclusively is used for curing different female disorders. it differs from the other kinds by having reddish inflorescences. there exists an opinion that mugwort bears the name chernobyl’nik (black grass), in contrast to common wormwood, artemisia absinthium, because of the reddish (rather than white) color of its panicles [merkulova 1967: 122]. it may be taken as corroboration of the hypothesis about the influence of plant color on usage. it cannot be excluded that first mugwort was used in healing menstrual disorders and hemorrhage, then later applied more widely in folk gynecology as a whole: “in poltava province problems with the womb are cured by bathing in mugwort (artemisia vulgaris) which plays an important role in midwifery and gynecology” [demich 1889: 19]; the root of mugwort “in folk medicine is a remedy for all female diseases, caused by menstrual disorders”; a tea or infusion of breckland wormwood, artemisia campestris, “for female ailments…” [annenkov 1876: 48, 50]. generally speaking, practically all over the slav territory artemisia was used very widely in the female sphere to treat a difficult birth, weak contractions, uterine and menstrual disorders, painful periods, induced miscarriage, barrenness or hemorrhage. the medicine took various forms: a decoction made from leaves, roots and/or flower heads, or a herbal bath [avgustinovich 1853: 18; morawski 1884: 14; zubov 1887: 13; nikiforovskii 1897: 9; nosal’, nosal’ 1960: 34-35; ajkanovi 1985: 190]. 3 the plant in question is probably eryngium planum. 4 in this case the connection between use and appearance is not self-evident. it is known, however, firstly, that plants with a strong, sharp taste and smell were used first of all as defense from evil forces, and that fever in folk conception could be envisaged as an actual mythological personage, the personification of the illness. for example, belarusians in poles’e prescribed a mugwort drink for fever, which was imagined as “angry, ugly old woman” who appears from under the ground in spring and attacks someone sleeping out in the open [dovnarzapol’skii 1909: 284]. secondly, in the opinion of some etymologists, the slavic name for artemisia reflects one of its features – its bitter burning taste as the word is cognate to the verb palit’ (to burn): old rus. pel n , pel n , rus. polyn’, ukr. polyn, bel. palyn, palynka, bulg., sloven., serb. and croat. pelin, czech pelyn, pelyn k, pol. pio un, upper lusatian po n, lower lusatian poly , polu [potebnia 2000: 16; mladenov 1941: 417; brückner 1970: 414; fasmer 1996 (3): 320]. 5 wormwood medicines are applied “to stimulate the appetite, improve the digestion and strengthen the digestive juices. both common wormwood and mugwort are included in almost all stomach and liver herbal compounds, and doctors prescribe them for colitis, gastritis, meteorism, and as a light soporific… wormwood is contra-indicated for pregnant women” [valiagina-maliutina 1996: 139]. 6 the east and some west slavs believe the aspen tree is cursed for letting judas hang himself on it, providing the wood for the cross, and betraying mary when she was trying to escape to egypt, etc. works cited afanas’ev, a.n. 1994. : 3. 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[the everyday life of the west russian peasant]. oscow: oidr pri moskovskom universitete. krylov, p. 1876. , [on the folk medical plants used in perm’ province]. ( , 5, issue 2). kazan’: tip. imperatorskogo universiteta. krylov, p. 1882. , [some information about the folk remedies used in kazan’ province]. ( , 11, issue 4). kazan’: tip. imperatorskogo universiteta. kuznetsova, m. a., reznikova, a. s. 1992. [tales about medicinal plants]. moscow: vysshaia shkola. machek, v. 1954. eská a slovenská iména rostlin [czech and slovak plant names]. prague: nakladatelství eskoslovenské akademie v d. makovii, g. p. 1993. i : i i [the trampled flower: local lore notes]. kiev: ukrains’kii pis’mennik. mandel’shtam, i. 1882. ( ) [an attempt at an explanation of the customs (of the indoeuropean peoples) created through myth]. st petersburg: tipo-litografiia a. e. landau, pt 1. markovich, v. v. 1891. “ ” [a new type of magic healer]. , 35 (december): 413-29. merkulova, v. a. 1967. 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[etymological and orthographical dictionary of the bulgarian literary language]. sofia: knigoizdatelstvo khristo g. danov. . d-vo. morawski, z. 1884. myt ro linny w polsce i na rusi [floral myth in poland and russia]. tarnów: w drukarni józefa styrny. niebrzegowska, s. 2000. przestrach od przestrachu: ro liny v ludowych przekazach ustnych [thistle for fright: plants in oral folk stories]. lublin: wydawnictwo universytetu marii curie-sk odowskiej. nikiforovskii, n. ia. 1897. , , [folk omens and beliefs, superstitious rites and customs, legends about persons and places]. vitebsk: gub. tipo-lit. nosal’, m. a., nosal’, i. m. 1960. i i i ï i [medicinal herbs and their folk uses]. kiev: derzhavne medichne vidavnitstvo ursr. pirinski krai 1980. . , [pirinski region. ethnographic, folkloric and linguistic studies]. sofia: izdatelstvo na b lgarskata akademiia na naukite. popov, g. i. 1996. “ : . . ” [russian folk medicine. from material in the tenishev archive] in m. d. toren, [russian folk medicine and psychotherapy]. st petersburg: “litera,” 277-477. potanin, g. 1899. “ . . ” [ethnographic jottings on the road from nikol’sk to tot’ma]. , 1: 23-60; 2: 167-239. potebnia, a. a. 2000. [symbol and myth in folk culture]. moscow: labirint. prikhod’ko, p. t. 1927. “ ” [on methods used in folk medicine in villages in the tomsk region]. [publications of the tomsk local museum], 1: 110-24. radenkovi , lj. 1973. . j [spoiling goes past the fields. folk incantations]. niš: “gradina.” radenkovi , lj. 1996. [the symbolism of the flower in the folk magic of the south slavs]. niš: “prosveta”. rogovich, a. s. 1874. , [an attempt at a dictionary of the plants of south west russia, with various beliefs and associated narratives]. kiev: v universitetskoi tip. rodionova, i. v. 2002. “ ” [biblical motifs in the folk names for plants]. , 2 (34): 38-39. romanov, e. r. 1912. . . 8. . [belarusian miscellany. issue 8. the way of life of the belarus’ian]. vilnius: tip. a. g. syrkina. 60 samolechenie 1884. “ ” [folk self-medication using herbals] 1884. , 46: 441-42. tolstoi, n. i. et al. (eds) 1999, 2004. : 5 . [slavic antiquities: ethnolinguistic dictionary in 5 vols]. oscow: “mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia,” vols 2, 3. skalozubov, n. l. 1913. “ . ” [botanical dictionary. folk names of plants in tobol’sk province]. ( , issue 21, year 19). tobol’sk: tip. eparkhial’nogo bratstva, 1-87. sobotka, p. 1879. rostlinstvo a jeho význam v národních písních, pov stech, bájích, ob adech a pov rách slovanských. p ísp vek k slovanské symbolice [plants and their meaning in slavic folk songs, stories, tales, rites and beliefs. adding to the knowledge of slavic symbols]. (novo eská bibliothéka, 12). prague: nákladem matice eské. sofiiski krai, 1993. . [the sofia area. ethnographic and linguistic research]. sofia: izdatelstvo na b lgarskata akademiia na naukite. sofri , p. 1990. j [the main plants in folk belief and legend among the serbs]. belgrade: bigz. srng, 1965. [russian dialectal dictionary]. moscow-leningrad: nauka. stoinev, anani (comp.) 1994. . . [bulgarian mythology. encyclopaedian dictionary] sofia: izdatelska grupa 7 +logis. strandzha, 1996. . [strandzha. material and spiritual culture]. sofia: akademichno izdatelstvo “prof. marin drinov.” tereshchenko, a. i. 1848. [the everyday life of the russian people]. 7 pts. st petersburg: v tipografii voenno-uchebnyh zavedenii, pt 5. [ . f. 1409. op. 1. d. 470.] [tver’ regional archive]. a book of home cures (2nd half of the 18thc). [ . f. 1409. op. 1. d. 590.] [tver’ regional archive]. old ms book of home cures. toren, m. d. 1996. [russian folk medicine and psychotherapy]. st petersburg: litera. tsiv’ian, t. v. 1990. [the linguistic basis of the balkan world model]. moscow: nauka. usacheva, v. v. “ : ocimum basilicum l.” [an ethno-botanical study: the sweet basil]. in r. v. bulatova (ed.), studia slavica/ . . . . 80. . . moscow: inst. slavianovedeniia i balkanistiki ran, 92-99. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 61 valiagina-malioutina, e. t. 1996. [medicinal plants]. st petersburg: spetsial’naia literatura. vinogradov, g. s. 1915. “ ” [medical self-help and cattle healing among the russian native population of siberia]. , 24 (4): 325-432. vinogradova, l. n. 2002. “ , … ( , )” [the water, which… (features, defining the magical properties of water)]. in s. m. tolstaia (ed.), [the indicative space of culture]. moscow: indrik, 32-60. zabylin, m. 1996. , , , , [the russian people, its customs, rites, legends, superstitions and poetry]. rostov-on-don: feniks. zelenin, d. k. 1995. . : [selected works. essays on russian mythology: the unnatural dead and the rusalki]. oscow: indrik. zubov, a. 1887. [an observation on the herbal of stanislav gazhtovt, the military governor of trotsk]. moscow: univ. tip. (m. katkova). microsoft word folk2010e.doc reviews 169 folklorica 2010, vol. xv douglas rogers. the old faith and the russian land: a historical ethnography of ethics in the urals (culture and society after socialism series). ithaca and london: cornell university press, 2009. bibliography. index. xvii +338 pp. $69.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). isbn 978-0-8014-7520-7 in the late 17th century priestless old believers settled in and around sepych in the upper kama area of perm’ region, aiming to preserve “a spark of true piety” from the corrupting influence of the world. though the community survives still, many changes have occurred since those early days. in 2000-01 douglas rogers spent a year living among them, following this up with a number of shorter visits. his book focuses on the ways in which the people of sepych have adapted to the conditions of life over the centuries. appropriately for a community founded on religious principles, the prism through which he examines this history is that of ethics. rogers interprets ethics as signifying “a field of socially located and culturally informed practices that are undertaken with at least somewhat conscious orientations towards conceptions of what is good, proper, or virtuous” (11). the book thus scrutinizes the choices, decisions and actions that have determined the lives of sepych inhabitants over the centuries, and not just those that relate to the religious domain. he shows that the old belief was more subject to change in periods when money and marketization were to the fore (in the post-emancipation and post-socialist periods). in depicting and evaluating these changes the author deploys the key concept of “moral communities,” indicating efforts to align ethical practices among groups of people, partly through shared aspirations, but also through interconnectedness. the author is insistent that sepych neither stands for russia as a whole nor for any smaller group within it. he eschews generalization, though readers will note many parallels like the response to post-socialist instability, funeral ritual, or contemporary old believer elders’ emphasis on запреты (taboos) rather than theology or texts. the book has a chronological structure, though the emphasis is always on the dilemmas faced in the creation and maintenance of moral communities. the first chapter covers the period before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. with no hierarchy the old believers of the upper kama located religious authority in collective decision-making, each community selecting its own pastors. these were respected middle-aged men expected to withdraw from the world and observe rigorous ascetic folklorica 2010, vol. xv 170 practices. by the mid-nineteenth century the community formed two separated groups, younger members who lived in the world, only attending services as observers, and elders who prepared for salvation through observance of traditional ascetic practices, including sexual abstinence and food and drink taboos. the increasing separation of the generations was probably accentuated in the 1830s and 40s by the state campaign against civil marriages, as well as pressure from their stroganov landlords. elders, who regarded marriages as a necessary evil did not attend the ceremonies, which had little religious content, and could even under pressure from the authorities include an orthodox service. elders were, however, in charge of social reproduction, instructing children in the tenets and practices of their religious beliefs. chapter 2 shows changes brought by the emancipation of the serfs in 1861: less interference from landlords, but increased burdens in the form of redemption payments. as the new conditions gave the inhabitants of sepych greater access to cash through trade and small-time industry, inequalities developed because neighboring communities remained largely agricultural. modernization, which obliged the inhabitants of sepych to face a number of dilemmas, seems to have been an important factor in the major schism between two groups that emerged in 1866. gender may also have played a role, with the growing authority of women in spiritual affairs in this period leading to events being interpreted in terms of women exceeding their authority in a religious tradition in which male authority was dominant. chapters 3 and 4 examine the changes of the soviet period, focussing respectively on younger adults and elders. resettlement as a consequence of collectivization, urbanization and industrialization resulted in the number of communities declining, and particularly affected the young. chapter 3 examines the interaction between socialist attitudes to labor, both material and moral, and local conditions in sepych. generational differences intensified, but also made the adoption of socialist practices somewhat easier, since people of working age lived in the world, and the community emphasis in socialism could dovetail with traditional ideas of communal action and responsibility. given elders’ traditional disdain of weddings, the adapted folk wedding ritual favored by the authorities could be adopted without friction. in the next chapter rogers looks at the ways in which the elders adapted to socialism, demonstrating that, far from conventional discourses about resistance to the state or survival of tradition, old believer elders in the upper kama were involved in socialist society, its features and changes, reviews 171 folklorica 2010, vol. xv even though the generational divide widened over time. social change – resettlement, migration, collectivization and shortages – impacted more strongly than anti-religious campaigns, the limited success of which stemmed from ignorance of local differences. there were no churches to be closed; it was the presence of elders that created a sacred space. and since religious authority was diffuse, the usual targeting and regulation of religious authority figures was less effective. deferred ritual practice and few material manifestations of religious practice meant the avoidance of many dilemmas during a working life. indeed the separation of the generations, rogers argues convincingly, intensified the sense of the path of old age and so helped old believer faith to survive. one further result was the geriatricization and feminization of elders; whereas in the pre-revolutionary period middle-aged elders acted as mediators between the two types of community member, now elders were not only increasingly old but normally women. chapters 5-7 look at post-socialist sepych. here we see the complex ways in which the changes resulting from the collapse of socialism, the resulting inequalities and economic instability intersected with the socialist past, religious concerns and the contemporary search for national identity. chapter 5 mainly focuses on the role in the moral community played by moonshine in the economy (mainly as substitute wages), money (including dollars) and moonlighting. whereas rural socialism had helped to incubate traditional asceticism, post-socialist transformations largely undermined it, leaving the population searching for and trying to create new moral communities. chapters 6 and 7 looks at the complex ways in which the desire for a moral community interacts with religious revival and a search for national identity. the new priestly old believer church in the town, for example, is regarded as more authoritative than the old women elders of the priestless tradition, partly because it is led by men, and secondly because it has a wider network of connections so important for the moral community of sepych. these last two chapters are the most fascinating in the book in their exposure of the dilemmas and contradictions in sepych today. supporters of the new church may well evince views that relate to their priestless old believer background or to their soviet experience. the historical background of the first few chapters makes these contradictions clear and understandable. the book is described as a historical ethnography. rogers barely uses the term “folk,” and regretfully appears to equate folklore study with the collecting and preservation of ancient traditions as in soviet and folklorica 2010, vol. xv 172 much post-soviet scholarly activity. nonetheless the book holds considerable interest for folklorists. oral testimony is key to the book, and the way it is treated constitutes one of its strengths. rogers is not only sensitive to interpreting the meaning such oral narratives have for the people and communities in which these circulate, but also carefully examines the historical truth of these through careful contextual analysis of economic, social and other factors. his refusal to accept conventional interpretations of phenomena is also salutary. though folklorists of the modern kind would certainly have tackled this subject differently, there is much in this well written, researched and argued study to 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setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice microsoft word folklorica_2011g.doc history of the journal 1 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi memories about the beginning of seefa james bailey perhaps i should begin by mentioning how i became interested in russian folklore. when i was working for an ma in slavic studies at indiana university 1957 to 1958 i took a course on russian folklore in translation from felix oinas. we kept in contact for many years. during the following year on the first graduate student exchange with mgu in moscow and then four years in graduate studies at harvard from 1959 to 1963 i kept a modest interest in russian folklore. the fact that i bought hundreds of books, including those on russian folklore, demonstrates how deeply i had been infected by a russian scholars’ disease — to buy books on every subject that you have even a vague interest in. once i settled at the university of wisconsin in madison in 1967 i decided to offer a course on russian folklore which had to be taught in the original since otherwise it would not have qualified as a course in the slavic department. sometime around 1992 four of us from african, scandinavian, south asian, and slavic met many times during the summer to talk about starting a program in folklore at the uw. we eventually wrote a proposal which the dean for letters and science at the time approved but would not let us cross-list courses “because this would enlarge the time table too much.” (sometimes you just hate deans, right?) the succeeding dean finally agreed so i started giving my course on russian folklore in translation. in order to include a variety of genres i translated many things myself. the following remarks are based mainly on files about seefa that i saved on my computer or that appeared in the “president’s message” in early newsletters. thanks to the customary nature of memoirs and a “folk mentality” there probably will be some “lapses of memory.” i will try to trace the gradual establishment of seefa to about 1999. during the spring in 1994 an international conference on epics was held in madison at the uw. during the conference several of us in slavic languages talked about the need to establish a national group for people with an interest in slavic folklore. we decided to invite several people to meet during the aaass conference in philadelphia in november, 1994. since we were not affiliated with aaass we had to meet in my room, a viable tradition which we observed for several years. some ten people managed to cram together in my room. we discussed which national organization we should try to be associated with and thought that 2 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi aaass would be best because it involves a variety of fields which in different ways concern folklore of the slavic peoples. we decided that the name would be “slavic and east european folklore association” (seefa). we selected a steering committee: ronnelle alexander, james bailey (chair), jan perkowski, and snejana tempest. election of officers should take place at the october 1995 meeting of aaass in washington d. c. jan perkowski and natalie kononenko agreed to write the by-laws required by aaass. patricia arant and natalie kononenko said they would organize panels. another problem concerned how we would inform everyone having an interest in folklore about our new organization. and of course we succumbed to the inevitable notion of compiling and mailing a newsletter. natalie kononenko had several graduate students who were active and helpful during the first years of seefa. becoming affiliated with aaass is a complicated process. you have to submit laws and bylaws, names of officers, a list of all members and their addresses, and become a non-profit organization. you obviously need to establish a bank account but to do this you have to become incorporated in one state. only then can you apply to the irs for non-profit status. many people helped to resolve this hassle which lasted several years but we are most indebted to jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby for her patience and persistence. we sent a plea for people to donate $45 to pay lawyer fees for incorporation. we had a warm response from the “founding contributors.” (i’m not sure whether seefa has ever published lawyer jokes.) even after you have become affiliated with aaass every year you have to update everything. one thing which apparently has now been cancelled is that each such organization was entitled to a meeting room. i don’t know whether our tradition of meeting in someone’s room has been resurrected. in order to deal with the problem of notifying people about our new group, i (or maybe a graduate student working for me) went through two aaass directories picking out all those who had noted an interest in folklore. some 150 names turned up. email wasn’t common then so i used some research funds to mail a letter to all possible future members. i bought an old dos program to print address labels and printed them out several years for seefa. some sixty odd people responded to the letter. in a sense this reflects the strong interest that seefa aroused, but it also shows how many people contributed to the future organization. the next meeting was held at the aaass convention in washington, d. c. in october, 1995. for the first time we had two history of the journal 3 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi sessions of our own. we again met in my room where we continued talking about the problems involved in becoming affiliated with aaass. we had a productive meeting which some twenty people attended. jan perkowski presented a draft of bylaws which we accepted. ronelle alexander nominated people for several positions and we held elections: president — james bailey, vice-president — jan perkowski, member at large — ronelle alexander, and secretary-treasurer — jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby. bruce mcclelland, then a graduate student at the university of virginia, agreed to edit the newsletter and to set up a web page. all these items show how many people took part in organizing seefa and realizing the complicated connections with aaass. the most difficult remaining problem was the preparation and publication of a newsletter. that is a complicated activity which has been carried out by several people over the years. the first two newsletters appeared in 1996. thanks to margaret beissinger and tom butler during the aaass convention in november 1996 in boston arrangements were made to visit the parry lord collection in widener library at harvard university. mrs. lord not only attended the session “homage to lord” at the conference, but she also spoke to the gathering at the parry lord collection. tom butler also spoke about the collection which he evidently did much to preserve. for folklorists nothing could have been more pleasant and memorable. we had three panels at the boston convention. at our meeting we talked about expanding the newslettter and including other slavic and east european traditions besides russian. jeanmarie opened a bank account, finished incorporation in kentucky, and applied for non-profit status. so we were able to ask $15 a year for dues, deposit them, and pay for printing and mailing the newsletter. in september 1996 i sent a letter to aaass requesting affiliation which was eventually approved. this meant that beginning in 1997 we would have one “free” panel and a meeting room. bruce macclelland resigned from editing the newsletter and handling the web page. jonathan perkins, a graduate student at the university of kansas, agreed to assume the editorship and establish a new web page. one of the things i may have started was to invite russian folklorists to contribute to our newsletter. this of course brought up several problems. should their works be published in russian or translated? we decided that they should be translated which meant a lot of work for someone each time — i don’t know how many i translated. unfortunately the names of the translators have not always been included in the newsletters. a few items were eventually published in cyrillic 4 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi along with an english translation. and another problem concerned which transliteration system we should use in the newsletter. to simplify matters we stuck with the trusted library of congress system. we agreed that any foreign scholar who contributed to an issue of the newsletter should receive a copy of that issue. for several years i paid the annual dues for four russian folklorists so that a larger group of people would learn about seefa, would present a talk at an aaass convention and would contribute to our newsletter. at the aaass convention in seattle in november 1997 we had six panels or round tables, a high for our early years. since according to our aaass inspired by-laws we had to hold elections of officers every two years, we held an election. the following people were chosen: president — james bailey, vice-president — snejana tempest, member at large — patricia arant, and secretary-treasurer — jeanmarie rouhierwilloughby. jonathan perkins resigned as editor and sibelan forrester at swarthmore college agreed to become editor and to manage the web page. our newsletter began to include works by foreign folklorists including several from eastern europe. the 1998 convention of aaass took place in boca raton, florida where we had five sessions. i had never heard of the place with such a strange name but even so made my second trip to the seemingly attractive place called florida. i probably was prejudiced since i had grown up in sunny california. a russian friend of mine, zhenja kostyukhin, an expert on the tale at pushkin house in st. petersburg and now deceased, agreed to contribute with a talk he gave in russian. the translated title was “magic tales that end badly.” i gave him the wrong date about the conference so that he came a day early. at the airport in fort lauderdale who should he run into but one of the economic bigwigs of the yeltsin era! he was waiting for a limousine. since zhenja and i were sharing a room i made up for my mistake by paying everything for him. at our annual meeting we decided to establish an editorial board to evaluate contributions and to turn the “newsletter” into a refereed journal. sibelan forrester asked for assistance in editing the journal and was happy that anne ingram agreed to assist her. the 1999 aaass convention occurred in st. louis where we had five sessions again. one was entitled “russian confessional groups in america: linguistic problems.” leonid and rozaliia kasatkin as well as s. e. nikitina took part. at one time the kasatkins evidently visited the old believer community in oregon. as dialectologists they were especially interested in the language of this distinguished group in history of the journal 5 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi russian history. at our meeting we held the third election of officers: president — natalie kononenko, vice-president — snejana tempest, member at larger — james bailey, secretary-treasurer — jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby, and editor — anne ingram. aaass informed us that we would no longer have a “free” session. without too many “folkloric repetitions” i have tried to present a survey of events during the early years of seefa. i once again will say that it was a great joy to have worked with so many energetic people who were deeply interested in the folklore of various peoples and languages in eastern europe. during these early years of seefa i was especially indebted to tatiana ivanova at pushkin house for her numerous contributions to the newsletter most of which i translated. i stayed at her apartment in st. petersburg several times. once she gave me the keys to the two doors but i never figured out how to open “russian locks.” in 1999 we published our translation “an anthology of russian folk epics” which gives us royalties to this day from m. e. sharpe. boris putilov, a connoisseur of slavic epics, read the introduction and commentaries in manuscript while lying on his deathbed in a hospital in st. petersburg. i have been retired some sixteen years now so i gave up going to aaass conventions some time ago. from talking to various people seefa seems to be prospering. this is evident from the beautifully formed journal now called “folklorica” which natalie kononenko and her husband, peter holloway, have edited and posted on a revised web page. i give my thanks and appreciation to the many people who helped create and continue seefa over the years. please forgive me for my numerous “epic digressions.” << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain 20%) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \050swop\051 v2) /srgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel 1.4 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/hrv (za stvaranje adobe pdf dokumenata najpogodnijih za visokokvalitetni ispis prije tiskanja koristite ove postavke. stvoreni pdf dokumenti mogu se otvoriti acrobat i adobe reader 5.0 i kasnijim verzijama.) /hun 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can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader 5.0 and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice microsoft word folk2010e.doc reviews 173 folklorica 2010, vol. xv rouhier-willoughby, jeanmarie. village values: negotiating identity, gender, and resistance in contemporary russian life-cycle rituals. bloomington, in: slavica publishers, 2008. 320 pp. $29.95 (paper). isbn 978-0893573539. village values: negotiating identity, gender, and resistance in contemporary russian life-cycle rituals is jeanmarie rouhierwilloughby’s project to conceptualize modern russian urban life-cycle rites and explore how participants negotiated various identities as members of families and communities and as citizens of the soviet union and post-communist russia. provoked by a young male doctor’s remark that obstetrics were “women’s work,” the author “began to wonder if there might not be a connection between the role of woman as healer and midwife in the nineteenth-century village to the contemporary urban attitude that ‘women were better suited to gynecology and obstetrics’.” was this attitude, rouhier-willoughby pondered, “inherited from the ninetiethcentury village?” (1). exploring the possibility of this connection required rejecting inherited notions about folklore being the exclusive domain of rural communities, commonly seen in the equation of folklore with “traditional culture.” instead, rouhier-willoughby opted for a definition of folklore that includes both “traditional culture” as well as the informal, unofficial practices and notions of urban communities and subgroups defined by various limiting factors like age, religion, region, occupation, class, and so on. in her statement of theoretical position, rouhier-willoughby rejects approaches to ritual as exclusively a maintainer of social relationships, structure and control, opting instead for a model whereby life-cycle rituals allow participants the opportunity to learn about, adjust psychologically to, and, indeed, to create new social roles afforded by the rites and to experience public acknowledgement of their new statuses (23). thus afforded a kind of continuum of popular beliefs and practices (never stable and always subject to renegotiation and adaptation) stretching from 19th century village traditions, through the soviet experience, and up to and including contemporary post-soviet life, the author traces continuities, ruptures, revivals, and restorations in birthing, wedding, and mourning rites. chapter one presents the concept, fundamental to the author’s argument, of the soviet ritual complex as a dynamic synthesis of “nineteenth century folk behaviors,” “soviet practices,” and “ideas and behaviors from western europe and america” (3). by exploring and folklorica 2010, vol. xv 174 tracing the changes, conflicts, and accommodations achieved between these forces, rouhier-willoughby aims to chart the social experience of soviet and russian citizens as expressed in life-cycle rituals from the 50s to today. in chapter two the author surveys “nineteenth century lifecycle rituals.” chapter three presents childbirth practices in soviet russia 1950-1990. in chapter four, rouhier-willoughby considers soviet weddings. chapter five is about the soviet russian funeral. in chapter six, “life cycle rituals during late perestroika and in the post-soviet world,” rouhier-willoughby’s focus becomes the conflict between russian and soviet traditions and “recently introduced western democratic and capitalist models” (231). the book concludes with a final chapter, a summary of “the soviet ritual complex.” rouhier-willoughby’s theoretical position is that soviet era lifecycle rituals “exhibit both acceptance of certain soviet-era values, and a stubborn retention of material that contradicted state ideology, material that was necessary for the negotiation of identity independent of the state’s values” (226). this formulation has both advantages and disadvantages. its strength is that it affords the author a consistent and coherent theoretical approach to organizing and generalizing about her data: eighty-six interviews and a variety of secondary literature about soviet and post-soviet social realities. the tension between private and public, the individual and the state forms a productive methodological leitmotif and is developed with a great deal of sensitivity and finesse. nonetheless, this approach is based on binaries, and here and there in the development of her argument, certain stark, and, in my view, overstated, oppositions appear. rouhier-willoughby sometimes conceives and presents actions and justifications on both sides—both private citizens and the state apparatus—so as to maximize the polemical effect. the author sometimes presents ritual practice and motivation too much in terms of the collision between the state’s official program for how its citizens should live and think and the way that ordinary people used ritual to push back against the state. individuals, in this narrative, accept parts of the state’s program for life-cycle practices when they already are in agreement with those specific components. other ideas and practices, such as cremation, are resisted. this approach recognizes the agency exercised by individuals vis-à-vis a controlling state bureaucracy. yet i find that the author too often presents both sides at the top of their game. there is little recognition of compromise. the state is always either succeeding or failing. individuals either accept the state’s meddling or resent and undermine it wherever they cannot openly change or reviews 175 folklorica 2010, vol. xv challenge it. rouhier-willoughby is keen to see conflict—“a direct rebuttal” (226), “a form of resistance” (227). this stance is effective polemically but may miss opportunities to trace synthesis and accommodation on both sides, especially the kind of accommodation that arises from acquiescence. an example is the soviet practice of controlling the allotment of cemetery plots so as to make it difficult or impossible for family members to be buried next to one another. the purpose here, according to rouhier-willoughby, was to disrupt traditional mourning practices of survivors to visit the graves of relatives, especially on special days. this move is presented as the action of the state to reconfigure mourning practices along more ideologically favorable lines and the reactions of private citizens as resentful. this is certainly part of the story. ideology may well have been the original impetus behind the state’s action. however, since it was possible to overcome these difficulties through blat (connections) and, most certainly, bribes, the question arises: was the continuation of this policy of making difficult the adjacent burial of members of the same family entirely a product of ideology? perhaps the advantages it afforded to cogs in the machine, i.e., mid-level bureaucrats, quickly became as or more important than a tool for top-down social engineering. also, what were the results of this policy upon reaching the inevitable modus vivendi? how did soviet citizens adapt themselves and their mourning rites to these new circumstances? what did they do beyond resenting the government? not exploring this aspect is, i think, at least partially due to the author’s tendency to treat life-cycle rituals as one-time events. of course they are singular occurrences, to a large extent, unlike calendar rituals, which repeat every year. nonetheless, these rituals, not just as general practices but also as discrete events, continue to develop over time. birthdays, wedding and funeral anniversaries are observed. attitudes and indeed memories about what happened and what rituals meant change and transform. i did not detect that the author made significant allowance for the chronological gap between her interviews (recorded over the last ten years) and the objects of her interviewers’ recollections: soviet era life-cycle rites. from the perspective of post-perestroika russia, subjects’ current remembrances of events twenty, thirty and more years ago, and what those experiences meant, have been inevitably shaped by both the passage of time and the new intellectual and spiritual landscape of today’s russia. religion and spirituality clearly are much more in the public’s consciousness now than folklorica 2010, vol. xv 176 they were thirty years ago. can the recollection and retelling of how these rites were executed and what they meant to their actors at the time be accurately recovered? what about the author’s status as an outsider, as a russian-speaking american ethnographer and social scientist? was she prone to solicit certain kinds of answers from her respondents at the expense of others? these, of course, are perennial issues all across the human sciences. i raise the question not to diminish the author’s achievement, but rather to complicate her conclusions and raise issues for further research. there are other places where rouhier-willoughby’s methodological approach is problematic, such as her basic categories of classification for components of ritual beliefs and practices. “folk” proves fairly easy to define and maintain, but the soviet versus “western” dichotomy is trickier. rouhier-willoughby attempts to address the problem of a reductive, simplified “west” in the russian imagination (yurchak’s “imaginary west: tam, u nikh) by defining it as “rituals adopted or rejected from this mythical “west”, “as viewed through the lens of the soviet russians themselves during the period under consideration” (6). while this move allows the author to maintain neat, distinct categories to manipulate for her thesis, it is not unproblematic: the danger exists of allowing the scholar’s subjects to define terms and categories for her, especially given respondents’ chronological distance from their ritual experiences of yesteryear. since “western” scientific and social ideas and practices largely passed through various filtering layers of government and culture in russia, especially during soviet times, it becomes difficult to separate what was soviet from what was “western.” the classification depends on the situated, biased perspective of the respondent and, it must be admitted, the scholar. generally, in the author’s presentation, any idea or approach also practiced or having originated in the west, such as the application of modern medical techniques to the childbirth process, gets classified as “western.” policies and ideologies that support the notion of the state exerting violence, coercion, and other means of control over the populace are classified and reacted to as “soviet.” rouhier-willoughby acknowledges complications to this dichotomy primarily in her discussion of postsoviet practices, where nostalgia for the stability and (relative) equality of soviet life has caused many respondents to reflect more favorably, or at least with less one-sidedness, on their soviet experiences and what they meant. reviews 177 folklorica 2010, vol. xv the overview of nineteenth-century russian life-cycle rituals presented in chapter two is characterized by a reliance on the ethnographic and social data regarding these one-hundred-plus-year-old rites as presented during the last several decades (the oldest entry in her bibliography is sokolov’s russian folklore from 1950). rather than explore descriptions of nineteenth-century village rituals coeval with the practices themselves from nineteenth century ethnographic publications and archival holdings—however ideologically and theoretically biased they might be—the author has preferred to cite her data as digested and interpreted by recent scholars. on the one hand, it is not essential to go back to primary sources since this material has largely been presented in modern academic editions and is much easier to find and work with than the original publications and documents. on the other hand, this approach carries the risk of inheriting current biases and ideological stances. the author selects material to present as a description of the folk background exploited, adapted, and challenged by contemporary urban life-cycle practices based on data already culled and filtered. perhaps i overstate the pitfalls inherent in this approach. the author, indeed, is generally careful to avoid much interpretation of any sort in this chapter, avoiding structuralist and other interpretative methodologies and instead offering a concise, generalized account of the key features of the “traditional” versions of the three rites. very rarely does she include details like baiburin’s ideas “that life-cycle rituals were associated with dolia” (48), and that “the [newly-married] couple was still generally in transition until the birth of their first child” (49). the second chapter ends with a discussion of the “early soviet period.” rouhier-willoughby, who states elsewhere that her focus is on life-cycle rites from 1950 to the present day, needs to say something about the period up to the death of stalin, but her real concentration is both before (in the form of traditional village rites) and after the pre-1950 soviet period. this chronological restriction obviously made the author’s job easier. there are live informants to interview for this period, there was much more stability following world war ii as opposed to during and preceding it, which allowed for a more institutionalized and regular set of practices to systemize and generalize about, and, finally, the poststalin-era saw the emergence of “ritual specialists,” academically trained and ideologically motivated soviet social engineers who theorized and wrote about how to shape the ritual life of the soviet people to better conform to and reflect the state’s values and goals. it is therefore understandable why the author would choose to concentrate on the post folklorica 2010, vol. xv 178 1950 period. it does however leave a gap between the village and the urban setting of the middle and late soviet eras. what happened to lifecycle rituals and the social dynamics that such practices both shaped and were shaped by in the 20s, 30s and 40s? certainly there were many false starts and contradictory phenomena. the author implies that traditional practices were taken, preserved, or reconstituted from the villages by city dwellers. what happened in the countryside during the early soviet period and how did that shape what happened later in the cities? there was more going on than the wholesale destruction and repudiation of traditional practices by soviet authorities. if nothing else, then an instructive dress-rehearsal for what would come later took place in the 20s, 30s and 40s. i mention this less as criticism of the author’s work here than as an area for further research, something for future scholars to consider. rouhier-willoughby’s most effective and interesting chapter is her treatment of funeral rituality. she maintains, convincingly, that the government was less successful here than with births and weddings in co-opting ritual expression to further official atheist ideology. funeral customs were the most conservative to begin with and the look into eternity afforded by a funeral prompted existential speculation to a much greater degree than in other ceremonies. the state, rouhier-willoughby declares, was not able to justify convincingly a dead person’s life to his or her survivors by removing the supernatural element (life after death) and replacing it with a focus on the departed’s deeds in this world (contributions to the collective and the state) except in cases of the country’s “heroes”: its war dead, cultural, scientific, and government elites. the more conservative nature of funeral rituality leads rouhierwilloughby in now more, now less satisfying directions than in the case of birth and wedding rituality. i like her discussion of eating sweet food at funerals, a traditional custom maintained in soviet times as a practice that, “allowed people to remember and mourn in yet another public way,” but which, “also brought a small bit of pleasure along with it” (197). here is a case of tracing connections between past and present, the continuity of the living and the dead, based on connecting beliefs and practices with sensual bodies. i find this appeal to the visceral a welcome change from the emphasis on “resistance” elsewhere. elsewhere, however, i find the author too eager to ascribe spiritual motives to ritual actors: practices observed because the dead, according to traditional belief systems, required certain actions by the living. what individuals reviews 179 folklorica 2010, vol. xv and groups may or may not have “believed,” especially as reported decades after the fact, seems to me to be difficult to determine conclusively. rouhier-willoughby is more convincing where she, frequently, alludes to how practices executed ostensibly for the benefit of the dead helped the living cope, adapt, and renew ties of mutual support and obligation. and yet, the tendency of survivors to come together and mourn as a collective is presented as, “a reaction against a society that did not provide adequately for its members. it emerged not from a desire to unite with the socialist collective for ideological reasons, but rather given the limitations on provisions and the monetary outlay required for such ceremonies, the ritual could not be properly performed without the help of friends and family” (217). i agree that ideology can hardly be as persuasive as tradition during the stress of a family member’s funeral. however, the notion of the proper observance of ritual being contingent upon to the availability of material good is, i believe, much more important in retrospect—post-perestroika—than it would have been at the time. time, and upheavals in economic systems, leads to changes in perspective and priorities. rather, i believe that people come together always to mourn, to display a “communal ethos” because this act is comforting at the most fundamental level of shared humanity. it is, if you will “hard-wired” for humans. collective action like this is rooted deeply in traditional practices, the very folkways that rouhier-willoughby so convincingly argues form an important component in modern urban folk practices. in addition to the possibility that it may have sometimes been a response of “resistance” to a government that did not provide essentials, the contributions of friends, co-workers and relatives with money, participation, and in kind should be seen as acts motivated by the desire to maintain this ancient custom through direct involvement in the process at every level possible: emotionally, physically, and materially. there are a few troublesome statements, interpretations of data, and conclusions, such as where the author contends that difficulties associated with giving birth under soviet conditions resulted in a mother developing strong bonds with their children (113). this could be true, but so could the opposite, and must surely depend of the personalities of the individuals involved. certainly not all soviet mothers developed strong bonds with their children. rouhier-willoughby states in several places that the unofficial, private aspects of the wedding ceremony—the reception with friends and family—was much more important that the official component at the folklorica 2010, vol. xv 180 bureau of records (zags marriage palace), that the reception was the “core of the celebration” (165, 248). perhaps, so, but the one could certainly not have taken place without the other. it would be perhaps fairer to say that the reception, with its acknowledgement of the new couple’s status change by friends, family, and neighbors was more important to rouhier-willoughby’s focus on the purpose and function of the wedding ritual complex as a way to negotiate identities and resist the state’s incursions into private life. the reception could certainly be perceived as being “more important” vis-à-vis the official ceremony based solely on the number of people involved in each—the couple, two witnesses, and a celebrant at zags versus the much greater number attending the reception. however, i think it would be a mistake to attribute any relative degree of importance of the private part of the ceremony entirely to factors of “resistance.” the church ceremony in the pre-soviet russian village, as rouhier-willoughby herself observes, was also fairly “low-key” relative to the reception: parents, at any rate, did not generally go to church with the couple, but instead stayed home and prepared to receive the newlyweds. and speaking of the wedding complex and pre-soviet village practices, rouhier-willoughby does not explore an important component of coupling, one that has been extensively studied in traditional culture: courtship. again, i do not mean that i find anything lacking in the present study but rather have in mind a direction for further research, perhaps based on the very same methodological approach as used here. where and how did soviet youths meet each other and fall in love? how were village customs of yearly-cycle celebrations like fall-winter work bees, yuletide parties, and spring-summer outdoor festival observances transformed in the soviet context? finally, i occasionally take issue with the author’s approach to translating russian and soviet words, concepts, and speech patterns. rouhier-willoughby sometimes goes too far, in my view, to preserve the syntax of her respondents. the results are awkwardly unidiomatic, even for colloquial usage. speakers of russian will smile at the author’s preservation of the syntax of tania k’s speech: they try, of course, when she is pregnant, then they try to go beyond the norm somehow, so that, well, they can create certain conditions for her, distinct from the conditions for other members of the family, they try then to buy her… to limit yourself then in something, but then to buy her farmer’s cheese, then to buy cheese, to buy fruits, which are very expensive for us, very with our salaries, well, they try, try to provide the woman with some kind of nutrition that is more or lessvaluable. (84) reviews 181 folklorica 2010, vol. xv but this is not quite idiomatic english, even for colloquial speech. elsewhere the author refers to oktiabriny celebrations without any explanatory gloss for the non-russian-speaking reader. finally, i believe that “the grapevine” is a more idiomatic rendering of vera s’s term than “sarafan radio,” especially for interested folklorists and students of the social sciences without a background in russian-soviet issues (235). the copy editing of this book, whether thanks to the author and her readers or the editor’s proofers, is outstanding. i saw no typos or misprints: would that all academic books these days were this well edited. village values succeeds as an overview of midto late-soviet and contemporary russian urban life-cycle rituals. raw data, in the form of interviews and the author’s personal observations are well synthesized with current ideas about identity, gender and resistance in a clearlypresented theoretical structure. i especially salute the work rouhierwilloughby has done to rehabilitate urban folklore in the context of contemporary social science. both folklorists and social scientists should take notice. perhaps the most important and remarkable conclusion to be drawn from the book is the observation that “a strengthening of the folk system generally,” is taking place currently in russia (241). john w. hill ann arbor, mi usa << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain 20%) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \050swop\051 v2) /srgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel 1.4 /compressobjects /tags /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages true /createjdffile false /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /colorconversionstrategy /leavecolorunchanged /dothumbnails false 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setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice untitled reports 167 using digital techniques with interviews natalie kononenko university of alberta edmonton, alberta. canada digital technologies permit many advances in folklore research. here we describe how sound files can be indexed and the index then used to find material in the actual sound recording. this technique requires programming that takes the user to the appropriate point in a sound file. the programming was developed at the university of alberta through the support of tapor, the text analysis portal for research. a similar commercial program is available through greenstone. although this technique was applied to ukrainian recordings, it can be used with recordings in any language. the use of digital technology is but the latest step in a long line of advances in the collecting and processing of folklore data. folklore scholarship began as the collection and study of texts. at first, collectors were not scholars, but amateur lovers of folklore. they would hear a story and, becoming enchanted with it, seek to reconstruct it at home and on paper. they essentially retold in written form what they had heard in an oral setting. with time, the artistry of the folk performer came to be recognized more and more. folklore became a scholarly pursuit and collectors tried to record the oral performance as accurately as possible. this was very difficult when the performer was speaking or singing and the collector had to try and write down the folk text by hand. various techniques were used to increase fidelity to the oral text. sound recording, first on wax cylinders, then on tape, then cassettes, and now digitally has been the standard way of recording a folk performance for a long time. video recordings, both tape and digital, are now also widely done. most texts are collected as sound files. yet, sound recordings present many challenges. how does one work with the large volume of material that it is now possible to record? one obvious answer is to take a recording and to transcribe it, thus producing a text on paper which can be read, annotated, and so forth. but transcription is extremely time-consuming and laborious. estimates range from three to four hours of transcription to one hour of sound recording, up to seven hours for one hour. if one has 150 hours of interviews, transcription is virtually out of the question. the second solution is to note where a particular topic is discussed, folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 168 either at the time of collection or on listening to the tapes back home. one can then go to the appropriate tape and fast forward, rewind, and otherwise search until the appropriate point in the text or interview is found. digitization makes this process easier in the sense that fastforwarding and rewinding are not necessary. the tape is a physical object and must be moved through the recorder heads. the digital recording is a virtual object and going to the desired point in a recording, once that point is known, requires merely dragging the cursor to the correct position. sound files that are on cassette tapes can easily be digitized as wav or mp3 files. for most purposes, mp3 files, which are much smaller in size, provide sufficient sound fidelity. while going to a particular position is easy in a digitized sound file, how can one know what the correct position is and how can one be sure if the field notes directing the researcher to the appropriate tape are accurate? if there is a transcription of the sound file and if that transcription is in digital form, a simple word search yields the desired results. but, as already noted, transcription is extremely labor intensive. the current technique is indexing. indexing requires a template. once the template is in place, and templates can be modified as one works, indexing is relatively quick. one does not need to go back and forth and listen several times as with transcription. indexing can generally be done on a single, almost real time, pass through the material, especially once the indexer is familiar with the template. for each sound file, indexing produces a list of the template categories that are present on that recording plus the times in the recording when the topics are discussed. the list of categories in the index becomes a set of keywords. the keywords can be searched or the user can scroll down the keyword set. when the user finds the material of interest, he clicks on the keyword. this takes him to a list of the files in which the topic appears. the next step is to select the file, click, and play. the ukrainian audio database, which is available on the internet at: http://projects.tapor.ualberta.ca/ukraineaudio takes the user to the recording. being able to go directly to a sound file instead of relying on a transcription has many virtues in addition to saving time. when one can hear the actual recording, one can get nuances of intonation, volume, and speed which are difficult to reproduce on paper. this permits better understanding of the material. what follows is a brief description of the whole process. researchers who would like to use this technology can obtain all of the computer programs cited and have their questions answered by reports 169 contacting me (nataliek@ualberta.ca). let us take a specific interview recorded in kopachiv in 1994 where several people talked about wedding customs. the original tape recording was made into an mp3. a “master interview index form” had been previously generated where the many steps involved in traditional weddings, baptisms, and funerals were listed. under the category “wedding” there would be sub-categories or keywords such as: “invitation”, “making the wedding bread”, “church service”, “civil ceremony”, “thank you for the daughter”, “post-wedding carnival” etc. when the kopachiv recording is processed pertinent information about the interview is entered at the top of the form: interviewer, interviewees, place, date, etc. the mp3 is then listened to and the times when a particular topic is discussed are noted down. at the end of the interview, topics which were not discussed are deleted from the form. part of the resulting interview index form is shown in figure 1. the first three topics shown were on the original master form (invitation, thank you for the daughter, post-wedding carnival) but then the interviewees talked about something not normally associated with weddings “б’ють кашу” [breaking the kasha] so this item was added. with practice, the person indexing the mp3 can do this almost in real time as all that has to be noted are the start and stop times of a topic. if something unusual is discussed, like “б’ють кашу”, the mp3 can be stopped and re-started. once the sound recordings have been indexed the mp3 were uploaded onto a server and all the data entered into the forms was processed by two computer programs. one program merely inserted “tags” into the document. the resultant file, when processed by software on the server, reproduces the original index form so it can be viewed on line (see the top part of figure 2). the other program generates a more complicated output. it “scans” the interview forms and generates the metadata which associates each “category” and “keyword” with a recording which contains them both, together with the time point in that recording when they are referred to. a section of this xml file is shown in figure 3. it was useful to have this xml file generated by a computer program as the file encoding the 200 hours of interviews contained over 25,000 lines. in passing it should be noted that several other simple programs had to be written to check this xml file. with there being both latin and cyrillic letters present, it had to be checked that no latin letters had crept into the cyrillic sections and vice versa. although the letters: a, c, e, o, p etc. look the same in both languages the computer recognizes that they are ascii in latin and folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 170 unicode in cyrillic. none of this is seen by the person searching the database. when the site is entered, a list of major categories is seen: весілля, вечорниці/ досвітки, дитина, домовик, домовини etc. (again, some of these were not expected and were added when the mp3 were indexed). if “весілля” is “clicked” the keywords are seen: весілля б’ють кашу, весілля батьків вішають, весілля батько кличе на весілля, весілля биття молодих etc. in our present example, if “весілля б’ють кашу” is “clicked” the viewer sees just one recording: kopachiv984.mp3. when this item is “clicked” the screen shown in figure 2 is seen. when the time point shown in the lower right of the figure: “00:07:11” is “clicked” the mp3 starts to play from that time point. there are two major advantages to using the whole mp3, rather than cutting out the relevant section: “00:07:11 00:12:11”. first it requires no judgment call by the person indexing the recording. second, the person using the database may wish to hear what was said just before or even under some other keyword. this can readily be done by moving the “scroll bar” shown to the left of the “00:07:11” until the appropriate time is shown on the right end of the scroll bar. we consider that this method of processing interviews is far superior to transcription, and requires less time to implement. tape/disc #/name: kopachiv984 interviewer: prof. natalie kononenko, nataliia kostiantynivna hnatiuk project title: rites of passage/central ukraine date: november 15, 1998 medium: cd (digitized copy, originally recorded on cassette) overall interview time: 47.15 place/village name: selo kopachiv, obukhivs’kyi raion, kyivs’ka oblast’ interviewee (last name, first name): a folk singing (samodiial’ nyi) group lidiia mykolaiivna vdovenko, dob 1950 halyna afanasivna chubata, dob 1950 halyna makarivna pylypchynko, dob 1948 tetiana davydivna skyrnyk, dob 1951 mykhailo mykhailovych solonyi, dob 1938 time (min:sec) subject • 00.30 02.00 весілля запрошення o 23.54 24.15; 25.01 32.00 весілля чоботи дякують за дочку • 02.10 07.11 весілля циганщина • 07.11 12.11 весілля б’ють кашу • figure 1 (part of the original interview index form) reports 171 figure 2 (the screen from the web site) <category> <categoryname>весілля</categoryname> <keyword> <keywordname>весілля б’ють кашу</keywordname> <audiofiles> <file> <filename>kopachiv984.mp3</filename> <location>00:07:11</location> </file> </audiofiles> </keyword> figure 3 (part of the xml file) folklorica 2008, vol. xiii microsoft word contentsqsoft.doc buried treasures 33 buried treasures: narratives of an immigrant from ukraine in israel(1) larisa fialkova, university of haifa, israel the folklore of buried treasure is prevalent in odessa in part because of the city’s extensive catacombs and the spelunking culture that has developed around them. as odessa’s population moved across the world, its stories of buried treasure emigrated also. this paper comparatively analyzes three stories of buried treasure in odessa and other parts of ukraine, as recounted by an émigré to israel. in none of them was a treasure actually found (for a discussion on stories of unfound treasures in mexican as opposed to american folklore see arora 1987 and dundes 1971). the context of the fieldwork in the academic world, any work must be carefully designed and executed. yet sometimes things happen by chance, without planning; or it may take years to analyze material collected with no specific aim and hardly any effort. the beginnings of this study go back to 1996, and it may be called “a typical woman’s story.” my electric oven broke down and i called in the electrician to fix it. he came, started working and asked if he could smoke. i brought him an ashtray shaped like mephistopheles and jokingly asking if he wasn’t afraid of it. the repairman shook his head, and said that he was used to strange and supernatural things. hardly pausing to draw breath, he started telling stories. it was absolutely clear that aleksandr stanovskii was one of the best storytellers i have ever met. i told him that i was a folklorist, and asked if i could record him. so my kitchen, the so-called “woman’s private space” was transformed into a place of academic activity. not all the stories could be told at one session. a fortnight later, accompanied by my seven-year-old daughter, i visited stanovskii at his apartment. i took her with me not by chance but after reflecting on “the self” in the fieldwork [stoeltje et al. 1999]. stanovskii and i were of similar age, i thought it would be better to take lilia with me so as not to be perceived as a woman out for adventure. this time his wife was present and their daughter would go in and out of the room. our conversation was in russian, a native language of both of us.(2) the stories flowed in rapid folklorica 2007, vol. xii 34 succession with hardly any interval or change of language (hebraisms were used twice and once stanovskii used a ukrainian word, bude).(3) altogether stanovskii told me twenty eight stories, of which twenty four were connected with ukraine, three with moldova, and one with russia. the audio recording of both interviews is stored in the dov noy israeli folktales archives (ifa) at the university of haifa. some of the stories were added into the archive collection and given archive numbers (ifa 20890-20906). at the time of the interview aleksandr stanovskii, a former odessa dweller, was forty-three years old. he had immigrated to israel in 1991 and continued working in his profession. it is important to note that his social environment was ethnically heterogeneous and consisted mainly of russians and ukrainians. he was raised in a secular jewish family where jewish dietary laws as well as other rituals were not observed. as a result, he was acquainted not with jewish culture, but rather with local slavic culture. for many years, stanovskii took part in the activities of odessa’s spelunking society and was active in expeditions to odessa’s catacombs, as well as to caves in other parts of ukraine, for example, in the khmel'nyts'kyi and podillia regions. he related that, in the evenings at the campsite, the weary spelunkers would sit around the fire singing songs and telling stories about the caves and their mysteries. narrators and listeners believed them, at least partially, which is typical for legends and memorates.(4) stanovskii’s repertoire had two main themes: stories about buried treasures and ghost stories. he said that in odessa he would tell stories among the spelunkers, but also to impress young girls. after immigrating to israel he did not keep up spelunking and he did not have a suitable audience for his stories. still, being an excellent storyteller he was constantly on the lookout. any occasion could serve for telling stories, and that is exactly what happened in my kitchen. stanovskii took his stories very seriously. he looked for rational explanations of strange events, but these contradicted his own and other’s experiences. this ambivalence influenced his manner and his storytelling alike. he told me that, in six cases, he tried to arrange experiments or to check the rumors, in four cases he approached specialists (physicians, experts in narcology, ichthyologists), and in three more cases went to the kgb or was called in there. it was very important for him to provide as many details as possible about the spatial and temporal features of the recounted events as well as the names of the people involved. sometimes he mentioned a will of an anonymous plutocrat which allegedly had been seen by various people in the odessa buried treasures 35 archives, or he mentioned information published in a book about odessa’s streets whose title he could not recall and which i failed to identify.(5) but, above all, this narrator perceived photographs as the main proof of his stories’ veracity. some pictures showed his friends who were eyewitnesses to the events he recounted. the pictures were generally of low quality, most of the eyewitnesses are now dead or mentally ill. the very fact of their tragic fate stands as proof of the credibility of their weird, if not supernatural, experiences. stanovskii’s use of low quality photographs to convince others fits into a pattern registered by folklorists studying contemporary legends in various countries [weisman, mendelson-maoz 2007: 353-357; wojcik 1996]. the tale of a ship made of gold and its versions(6) one of stanovskii’s tales was about a lost miniature ship of gold hidden in odessa’s catacombs. here is his version: stanovskii: folklore based on some actual facts has a tale of a ship of gold that is popular among odessa spelunkers (podzemshchiki). here it is. a patron of the arts of the last century exchanged all his vast assets for gold and jewelry, which for some unknown reasons he hid in the catacombs. a blessing that at that time there were lots of entrances there, a few hundred. why is this rumor so persistent? the thing is that there were eyewitnesses who left some evidence of it, for example, there is his will in the archives which several people have seen. this is well known. interviewer: in what archive? stanovskii: in the odessa archive. interviewer: in the odessa archive? stanovskii: i assume so as i don’t know of any other archive. the thing is that i’ve already mentioned that i read about it in a book, something like the streets tell or something of the sort, maybe odessa’s streets, in a kind of guide book. this booklet was popular in odessa in the fifties. i don’t have it. i saw it as a bibliographic rarity in the collection of an enthusiast of odessa’s culture, an odessa fan. the fact is that many generations of odessa’s cavers (katakombisty) would go in search of this ship and some traces of it generally. unfortunately it has remained folklore. interviewer: don’t you remember the name of this person? stanovskii: the one who hid it? interviewer: the one, who hid it. stanovskii: unfortunately i don’t, i didn’t pay attention to it. the mark was mentioned, the mark drawn where he hid it. and every single odessa’s catacomb searcher has gone through a stage of looking for it. the mark was something like an octagon which resembled a compass rose. and there was an inscription: salve, hello. interviewer: salve? stanovskii: yes, salve. it’s in latin, “hello” in latin. and it’s a brand of odessa cigarettes (papirosy). this is a part of folklore. anyone who visited folklorica 2007, vol. xii 36 odessa’s catacombs even once or twice would hear about it and be inspired by the wish to find it. that’s all about that for now. for many years i sought in vain for information on this story as well as parallels to this and stanovskii’s other stories in publications on regional folklore [see atlas 1911; de ribas 1995 reprint edition of 1913, markevich 1888]. recently, however, i have been rewarded. my luck appeared through the internet, where i managed to find six versions of the same local legend. legends can be found quite naturally on the internet as this has become an important way to propagate folklore. the time when oral transmission was perceived as a principal characteristic of folk literature has passed. now, folk texts of various genres are distributed in written form also, particularly through the internet, fax, mobile phone, and so on. these texts reflect features of oral and written communication alike [bar-itzhak, fialkova 1996; fialkova, yelenevskaya 2001, rukomoinikova 2004, weisman, mendelson-maoz 2007]. absence of intonation and mimicry is partly compensated by emoticons or the graphic smiley symbols [rozhanskii, no date], one of which is present in the text below. it is “:^)” meaning “embarrassment, astonishment”. often, the stories, though open to all, are directed at members of a certain group (a forum). such is the case with the sergei mavrin’s forum or the odessa forum quoted below. forum members can browse through the stories, but they often respond with their own versions. folklore on the internet, as in the real world, is thus part of the communicative process. the internet does not exclude the existence of different versions, although it may reduce them through the use of a “forward”, whereby a story can be distributed without any personal intervention [weisman, mendelson-maoz 2007: 350]. one could complain that the internet is too transient; material posted there may disappear. this actually makes it even more similar to classic oral folklore. in sum, use of the internet complements the nature of folklore and has become the domain for a new type of fieldwork by folklorists. the versions from the internet, all translated from the russian original, follow here. the ship made of gold, version one. this was contained in the information posted by masha on the 27 march 2005 in sergei mavrin’s independent forum “puteshestvie po stranam, kontinentam, gorodam i vesiam” (a trip across countries, continents, cities and villages). buried treasures 37 well.… in general there are many legends about the catacombs, some of them frightening, others not. i’ve heard a titanic made of gold. it is said that an odessa man of independent means who survived the titanic disaster wanted to commemorate this event. he commissioned a gold model of the ship about 20 cm. long. during the war he hid it somewhere in the catacombs. people would go looking for it, but they found nothing. and i’ve also heard about jews who were killed there and thrown down into the mines in huge piles. their ghosts still wander through the catacombs ”. (http://www.s-k-mavrin.ru/phpbb2/topic102-15.html 30.10.2006)(7). the ship made of gold, version two(8) this material is taken from the thematic forum katakomby (the catacombs), which is a part of the odessa forum. deniska: has anybody ever heard a legend about odessa’s stone pits and about the titanic made of gold? clodia tzimisce: deniska, i haven’t. what is it about? deniska: it’s a long one; i’ll try to make it shorter. a regular millionaire and aristocrat from odessa was among many other rich and important people who were on board the doomed titanic. i shan’t repeat that story, but i’ll tell you that our guy didn’t perish in the ocean. he survived although it was touch and go. perceiving his rescue as a miracle, he asked a european goldsmith to make a gold model of that ill-fated ship for him. odessa’s narrators will never agree about the size of the ship, but all of them are convinced that it was very, very expensive. otherwise its owner wouldn’t have hidden it in one of his own stone pits in 1917. the millionaire fled from the new regime to europe and never returned to his motherland. many years passed. the stone pits were turned in to catacombs during the war. and the gold titanic is still there, found by no one (http://forum.od.ua/archive/index.php/t-4646.html 30 oct. 2006). the ship made of gold, version three catamaran-tour. excursions and tours (katamaran-tur. ekskursii i tury) sure, many legends are connected to the catacombs. here is one of them, for example. an odessa magnate managed to be rescued from the ill-fated titanic. to commemorate his miraculous salvation he ordered an exact model of the ship from the best goldsmiths. the 15 cm. gold titanic made of the best quality gold was hidden in the catacombs during the civil war. this legend was very popular in the end of the last century. anyone who wasn’t too lazy tried to find it. yet the model of the sunken ship still hasn’t been found (http://www.katamarantour.com/?p=exctours&lang=rus&pp=8 31oct. 2006). folklorica 2007, vol. xii 38 the ship made of gold, versions four and five the “black sea riviera” information center for tourists (turistskoinformatsionnyi holding “chernomorskaia riviera”) our catacombs have their own folklore. one of these legends tells of a model of a ship made of pure gold and then hidden by an odessa sea-captain in the catacombs. he had to go to a war and decided to hide his wealth till better times. but the seafarer never came back. and his ship hasn’t been found by anyone. the second story resembles the first. it happened that a sea-captain from odessa took part in the rescue of the titanic’s passengers. as a mark of gratitude he was given a present—a small titanic made of gold. and this captain hid it in the catacombs before going to war. the rest you know. he never came back and his titanic of gold hasn’t been found yet by anyone. it is said that there are spelunkers who have been looking for the captain’s buried treasure for a long time. those who go underground have a belief that you mustn’t take things you find in the catacombs. according to them, everything found in the catacombs belongs to the god of rubble (boot).(9) and if you do decide to take something you should leave something in its place. otherwise the god of the catacombs will take revenge. now many grown-up and reasonable people know lots of stories about the troubles that befell people who took trophies from the catacombs. the moment they returned them their life went back to normal. interesting—what will be left in the exchange for the model of the ship of gold, if it is found? the exchange with the gods is risky because it’s unpredictable. even more when it’s with the god of such a trap-like labyrinth as odessa’s catacombs (http://www.ta-odessa.com/dostop/digger/index.shtml 31 oct. 2006). the ship made of gold, version six two versions are presented in the research article published by pronin and obukhov (no date). the first is identical to the version three above; here is the second. “according to another version, the model was presented to a crewman of a russian ship, who rescued a foreigner in the time of disaster. it is a known fact that among the ships that approached the titanic was a russian vessel tzar (tsar') out of odessa. the written sources of this legend were not found. it was very popular in the 1960-1970s. anyone who was not too lazy would go down into the catacombs under school no 56. one of the authors of this paper tried to find an element of truth in this legend… the legend about the “gold titanic” originated approximately in 1965. according to leonid, a member of the “search” (poisk) club, an elderly man came to the militia where leonid’s brother was serving and told the story set out above. he took with him a catacomb map done on a peace of shabby cloth. it was difficult to make out anything on the map as it had been drawn by amateurs. nobody knows what happened to the map afterwards. the militiaman told this story to his brother who was an investigator of the catacombs. then the word of a buried treasures 39 gold model of a ship got out to the people round about. a secret known by more than one person is no longer a secret [pronin, obukhov, no date]. in sum, including the tale told by stanovskii, we have seven versions of the same local legend and are able to build its ecotype (oicotype) [sydow 1977; honko 1981: 32] as shown by aarne and thompson [1964]. a ship made of gold in odessa’s catacombs 1. somebody a) a patron of the arts; b) a man of independent means; c) a millionaire and aristocrat; d) a sea-captain e) other 2. many years ago a) in the 19th century; b) in 1917; c) in wartime; d) during the civil war; e) other 3. hid in the catacombs a) treasure; b) a gold model of titanic; c) other 4. which he got a) by selling all his assets for unknown reasons; b) through commissioning it to commemorate his miraculous rescue from the titanic; c) as a gift in gratitude for his role in saving the titanic’s passengers; d) other 5. he did not take it with him because a) he fled to europe; b) did not return from a war; c) of unspecified reasons; d) other 6. this legend was documented: a) in a will preserved in the archives; b) in a book; c) on a map drawn on a fragment of cloth; d) other 7. the treasure has still not been found. a story of a jewish tomb the next story was partly destroyed due to problems with the recording. regarded as corrupted, it was not accepted by the ifa. nevertheless, to my mind it is worth publishing and relates to the stories of a buried golden ship. stanovskii told this story as he showed me his old pictures. stanovskii: here me and my friend are in the cemetery. it was an old jewish cemetery in odessa. again we were looking for some legendary entrance to a legendary tomb which was connected to the catacombs. and it had to contain something like… unfortunately we found nothing. interviewer: near which tomb was it? is there any story connected to a certain tomb? stanovskii: we were given a picture of a man from whose tomb there was supposed to be an entrance [to the catacombs – l.f.]. interviewer: do you remember his name? stanovskii: unfortunately i don’t anymore. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 40 when i had paid attention to the problem with the recording and solved it we returned to the story. interviewer: i hope the story about that entrance to the catacombs from the jewish cemetery is intact on the cassette. stanovskii: i hope so.... i must add that we didn’t destroy graves, didn’t desecrate them. the only thing which we did was to lift off the tombstone, have a look inside and then put it back in place. unfortunately that cemetery doesn’t exist anymore. it was destroyed a year or two after our trips there. a park has been laid out in its place. the theme of treasures buried in cemeteries (and not only jewish ones) is very popular in both traditional and contemporary folklore. the newspaper novaia kama (new kama) recently published information about the desecration of elabuga’s christian cemetery, where many city magnates were buried. to stop the desecration, the staff of the city museum resorted to an old legend stating that desecrators would be punished [kozyreva 2006]. yet, the mentioning of a jewish tomb is rather typical. one can imagine why these stories grew up in the slavic context. compared with russian or slavic villagers generally, who had no money and practiced mainly a barter economy, many nineteenth-century jews were traders or craftsmen. both of these pursuits were connected with the use of money [bogdanov 1995: 69]. in poland, the typical money box was a pot figure of a jew, whose purpose was to bring financial success to its owner [cała 1995: 163]. a personal narrative of a belarusian villager about a tunnel connecting a jewish cemetery to an old slaughterhouse was published by belova [2005: 145-146]. the tutankhamen story: ifa 20890 while stanovskii’s narratives have an abundance of motifs from slavic folklore, the story below makes the comparative perspective even broader, bridging contemporary personal narrative and a legend about tutankhamen’s grave. let’s begin from far off. let’s begin with the curse of tutankhamen’s grave. you know about it, you’ve heard about it. there are a lot of stories, a lot of speculations and enigmas about it. why do all of those who disturbed the peace of the grave die? and as far as i remember, those who were involved in the expedition and with the transportation they died too and more and more and more. i’ve personally read five different hypotheses on this topic. the one which is quoted most often speaks about the microbes and fungus, which remained there from ancient times and causes all the damage. but this in no buried treasures 41 way explains numerous catastrophes, accidents etc., etc. this is an introduction (predystoriia). and here is the story. well, there is a lake near chernigov. i’m racking my brains to remember its name, but i can’t. it has a local name and a different official name, which is used on the maps and guidebooks. there is a small river and a lakelet. according to a well known legend, napoleon or someone else sank his treasure-chests there. it was either at the time of an attack or at the time of a retreat. i had never heard about this lakelet. i simply joined an organized tour trip to that district, which was not so typical for me. that’s how i heard about it. so there we were at this lake. it wasn’t my group. we were invited by another group of tourists, hikers and water tourists (turistypeshekhodniki i vodniki). not that it matters. one of the main attractions for the tourists was usually a hike to the nearby village, naturally to find wine and to seek adventure. so in that village i, along with my friend kolia timofeev, who sadly died later, and my friend volodia pitel', who is or rather was being treated in odessa’s mental hospital, got acquainted with an old man. all this is very significant as these circumstances have to do with the events which i’m telling you about. so we got acquainted with this old…. we bought some wine from him. and as he invited us to taste the wine before paying for it, we stayed there for a good while. i think that we “tasted” something like five-six liters of that wine. i was younger then and was getting drunk rather slowly. this old guy was drinking on a par with us and yet remained absolutely sober, at least as far as i could tell. well, we got onto that legend about buried or sunken treasure. he chuckled and said: “you’re not the first and won’t be the last to look for it”. then he added: “the treasure is certainly in the district, but not in this lake. and wasn’t hidden or sunken by napoleon. i know about these things: i am the guardian”. i don’t really know whether he was serious or not, or whether he was sober or not. the old guy (dedok) was in fact strange, very nimble and agile. he would make certain barely discernable gestures. what i’m saying, as i can recollect it today, is that sometimes he didn’t behave like an old man at all. to make it clear i’ll try to define everything in brief. i mentioned pharaoh’s curse because this curse, pharaoh’s curse, has only one theory that can really explain everything. the priests of ancient egypt knew of a rather primitive hypnosis technique which is in use still today in that very same mental hospital. i pricked up my ears when this old guy (dedok) gave a clue. it’s always possible to produce a child or to kidnap a child or to find a child so as to pass your own function to him/her. that is, when an old man or an old woman, the sex doesn’t really matter here, feels that he/she is too old and weak and is unable to accomplish his/her function, he/she simply transfers it to the new generation. this generation gets used to the altered situation and continues to live in the same district fulfilling the same function. i can imagine fairly well that a person who disturbed the peace of pharaoh’s grave was condemned by such guardians. in the daytime they can work at a factory while at night they can execute the sentence. well, this old fellow (dedok) hinted at this during our long talk around the table.… he didn’t say it explicitly like i am now, but just hinted. unfortunately, the next day we quarreled with him a bit and he said: “guys, yesterday i told you more than i should have. if you don’t want to have any folklorica 2007, vol. xii 42 regrets, then better keep quiet”. and we did keep silent. now both of my friends are unlikely to talk about it, while i’m too far away from there to be afraid of anything. that’s all on this point. stanovskii’s story is a personal narrative (a memorate in both the narrow and broad sense of this term) which includes many popular folklore motifs, such as death as a punishment for breaking the silence about the buried treasure [bogdanov 1995: 19]. many books, papers and films have been produced about the curse of tutankhamun’s grave, and stanovskii himself was acquainted with some of them. information from written sources likewise enriched his repertoire of stories. this feature has been defined by the russian folklorist sergei shtyrkov as “secondary folklorization” [shtyrkov 1999: 27](10). the narrator explicitly mentions some of the theories that demystify the events following the discovery of the grave and its treasures, but did not perceive them as believable. at the time of our meeting in 1996, neither hoving’s nor nelson’s research had yet been published, so stanovskii could obviously not have been aware of these studies. according to hoving, the legend about the curse (including all the hieroglyphics threatening intruders) was fabricated by the mass-media, which included in the list of victims any member of the expedition who had died – even many years later [hoving 2002: 226-230]. nelson analyzed the biographies of forty four western foreigners who, according to the archeologist howard carter, were in egypt at the time of the opening of tutankhamun’s burial chamber. twenty-five of them were present at the opening and could have been “cursed”. hypothesizing that the so-called “curse” was bound to be due to physical rather than metaphysical factors, nelson meticulously examined the biographies of those who were present during at least at one of four events: the opening of the third door to the chamber on the 17 february 1923, the opening of the sarcophagus on 3 february 1926, the opening of the tomb on 10 october 1926, and the examination of the mummy on 11 november 1926. nelson compared the longevity of all the “cursed” people with that of those who had not approached the tomb. he took into account several factors, among them their gender and age, as well as the average life term for men and women of that period. he discovered that the deaths were entirely natural, leaving no room for a curse [nelson, 2002, 325: 1482-1484]. the second legend referred to in stanovskii’s story is about napoleon’s trophies. napoleon, on his flight from moscow gave orders buried treasures 43 to sink the trunks with the trophies in semelin lake [scott, 2000: 553], known in russian as semlevskoe ozero. this knowledge impressed many generations of people, who have been looking for this treasure for more than two centuries [nizovskii 2001: 213-244]. considerable material describing this ongoing quest, both in the semelin lake and in belarus, can be found on the internet [glazkov 2003; ulanenkoff no date]. according to nizovskii, while the semelin version is entirely makebelieve, the belarusian one is more credible [nizovskii 2001: 222-227; 232]. these searches have also been reflected in russian fiction [bukchin 2004; bulychev 1992]. i would also mention one more version, according to which the trunks were never buried. it holds that napoleon divided the treasure among his solders with the obligation to return everything to him on their arrival to paris (no author, no date http://ostmetal.info/arta2e71fff.phtml 3 nov. 2006). i have not come across any version which connects napoleon’s treasures with ukraine. the only thing known to me in this regard is that both ukrainians and russians have hunted for it on the way to smolensk [scott 2000: 546]. nevertheless, ukraine is sometimes called “a country of buried treasures” and among the most famous relevant legends is the one about hetman mazepa’s trunks [grinchenko 1900: 179-180; nizovskii 2001: 153, 189-196](11). having reviewed the legends from stanovskii’s introduction, i move on to the central episode, namely the narrator’s meeting with the old man (dedok) near chernigov. this story also has its versions, one of which i found on the internet. it is also connected to ukraine, although another region. here is a story from the internet. an elderly “consultant” can be found in almost every village. he can describe the buried treasure and the ways of getting it in detail and in a business-like manner. one such consultant, who lives approximately sixty kilometers from zhitomir, agreed to my request to tell about looking for treasure. here is what old anton (ded anton) told me: “buried treasure it is no joke. many people have perished because of this damn gold (zolotishka prokliatogo)! and here it can indeed be found. buried treasure – not just gold and stones. from the moment it is buried, it is guarded by unseen forces. usually the owner of the gold pronounces the oath (zarok) before hiding it. this oath has information about the person who can get the treasure and the time when he can find it. sometimes he is said to be a ‘lucky man’ or the ‘next man’. yet there are cases when the treasure may be destined ‘for a human’s head’ or even for several ‘heads’. this means that to get the treasure you have to kill someone. a treasure is buried till a certain date. nobody can get it before that date. how do you look for a treasure? being buried, it manifests itself with smoke, fire, ‘red roosters’. where a passerby sees a glow, he must start looking for it. in the swamps, a treasure folklorica 2007, vol. xii 44 sometimes rises up above the groundwater to dry out. but all these are old women’s lies. but there are other things which are true. my grandfather told me how a clever robber (vakhlak) would bury a treasure in a highly sophisticated way. hide it in such a way that no one would see it, and finding out about it was difficult, and the time for doing so was usually short. that’s why the possessors of treasure would dig pits as if for slaughtered horses. at the bottom they would place the trophies, which they couldn’t take with them. they tossed the horses’ carcasses down on top of them, sometimes even human bodies. such pits were quickly covered up and a simple cross was stuck in. even in our day it’s done in the same fashion. stones and gold (kameshki i zolotishko) were hidden in the graves. it was done during the civil war as well as during the great patriotic war. who would contemplate digging up a grave?” “a buried treasure can be ‘met with’ in the daytime as well”, old anton went on seriously. “if you see a pig or a foal in the forest in daytime it means that silver is somewhere nearby. and if you manage to see a cock in the forest, keep calm: you’re standing over the gold. my grandfather taught me: if you’re agile and can hit this animal or this bird, you’ll get a load of money. all buried treasure is guarded. there are various locks and spirits of animals and people that serve as guardians. the old people used to say that treasure was buried together with a person who had to guard it until somebody could replace him. the treasure seekers tell about stallions that neighed in the graves, about wolves that pounced on diggers and about merry cossacks sitting on barrels full of money. the cossack offered any passerby vodka or money. whoever chose the money had to replace him in guarding the treasure” [koval'chuk, no date]. both versions of this story, the first narrated by stanovskii and the second posted by koval'chuk, tell of a personal meeting with an old interlocutor in a ukrainian village and of the mysterious guardians who can transfer their mission to someone else, as well as about numerous deaths among the treasure seekers. the motif of the grave as a treasure locus reminds us of stanovskii’s previous story about the jewish cemetery and of the legend about elabuga’s christian cemetery. comparative folklore often emphasizes the link between the dead and treasure. quite evidently, the guardians of zhitomir’s treasure are “relatives” of the dragon in beowulf , as are the keepers of the treasure in germany, scotland, france, sweden, mexico, and, of course, ukraine [arora 1987: 83; bogdanov 1995: 64; lindow 1982: 260; schryer 1976: 710; skunts' 1972: 186-189; yekelchuk 1998: 322]. such resemblance is caused by the fact that buried treasures form a stable image in pagan mythology [nizovskii 2001: 5]. in this sense chernigov’s and zhitomir’s treasure guardians may be deemed relatives of those who “guarded” tutankhamun’s grave – where, incidentally, small model ships were actually found. they were made of wood, not buried treasures 45 gold, but they were gilded. according to ancient egyptian, beliefs these ships were to serve the dead pharaoh in the other world [jones 1990: 17]. a question arises: did these models, together with the titanic, perhaps influence the “tale of the ship of gold” that made its way into odessa’s catacombs from the world of the dead? contemporary legends develop from traditional folk motifs, according to which money and treasure are connected 1) with the world of the dead and its representatives (devils, ghosts etc.) 2) with socially marginal people (soldiers, robbers, sailors) and 3) with ethnic and/or religious minorities such as jews, gypsies, and tatars [bogdanov 1995: 75; nizovskii 2001: 9]. returning to the odessa region, i would like to stress that the information about buried treasure here is fairly widely known [see e.g. nizovskii 2001: 157-158, 293-294] and is sometimes real: ancient coins were found in 1963 in the village of orlovka [bondar' and bulatovich, 1992].(12) it is absolutely clear that such findings stimulate both treasure-seeking and the legends about it. scholars have even created a special term – supernatural economy – to define the widespread phenomenon of treasure-seeking [taylor 1986]. serhy yekelchuk even supposed that a legend about hetman polubotok’s treasure, popular in ukraine in 1990-1991, had a real influence on the nationalist movement in that country [1998: 315]. i find his idea to be an exaggeration. this legend, as often happens in folklore, was popular in certain groups while entirely absent from others. neither i nor my relatives and friends ever heard of it in the early 1990s.(13) but i do agree with yekelchuk’s other conclusion, namely that support of ukrainian independence by many representatives of various strata, including those who were not nationalist at all, was inspired by unrealistic dreams of instant economic success. the same may be said about many immigrants from ukraine who hoped that border-crossing would automatically grant them prosperity. at the beginning of the twentieth century, de ribas stated that old odessa, which had been the city of folk ghosts, fears and superstition, no longer existed [1995, reprint edition of 1913: 167]. as stanovskii’s stories clearly show, he was mistaken. stories about various supernatural events in the catacombs as well as stories about house spirits (domovoi), the evil eye and sometimes even witches are recorded in ukraine as well as in israel from immigrants from the former soviet union [belova 2005; cavaglion and sela-shayovitz 2005: 258-259; fialkova and yelenevskaya 2007: 278-283; golovakha-hicks 2006; tartakovsky 2001]. i believe that all these recordings should be studied from a folklorica 2007, vol. xii 46 comparative perspective. this will help us to understand the relationship between ukrainian and other folklore traditions, while also giving us the opportunity to analyze new methods of transmission and variation as people and ideas migrate across the world. notes 1 parts of this paper were previously published in russian and in ukrainian: «катакомбный фольклор украины», живая старина, 1998, 2: 35-37; «сучасні легенди з україни в ізраїлі» у зб.: г. аронов (ред.) єврейська історія та культура в україні: матеріали конференції 2-5 вересня 1997. київ, 1997, 213-218; «підземна україна в особистих оповідях». у зб.: етнологія, фольклористика. четвертий міжнародний конгрес україністів. одеса, 1999, кн.. 1, с. 459-467. http://mau-nau.org.ua/kong/odesa/book1/art55.htm nevertheless, this paper is original as it contains more than 30% of new material. the information about the narrator and stanovskii’s stories were published earlier while all the comparative analyses of the versions are new. 2 stanovskii speaks a rather standard colloquial russian and not its odessa subtype [see rothstein, 2001: 782-787]. 3 the stanovskiis speak russian as well, although aleksander's wife oksana is an ethnic ukrainian. in my presence oksana communicated with their seven-year-old daughter in hebrew. 4 the length of the paper does not allow me to discuss the problem of terminology, but i do discuss it in my forthcoming book “when mountains meet: essays in ukrainian-israeli comparative folklore”. in general, i prefer such terms as personal narratives and legends and i don’t use the term fabulate at all. i rarely use sydow’s term memorate, introduced in 1934 [sydow 1977a] as its meaning is understood differently by various researchers. some colleagues perceive it as meaning any personal narrative presented as credible, while others treat it as a personal narrative about supernatural experiences. sometimes only first-hand accounts are understood by the folklorists as eligible for this term while in other papers secondand third-hand accounts also qualify. in any case, most of stanovskii’s narratives can be called memorates: first, all of them were presented as credible, and, second, most of them tend towards mysterious accounts. a few stories were perceived by the narrator himself as legends. buried treasures 47 5 of course, it may be found later. thus i. golovakha and o. britsyna finally were able to find a rare book about the village of ploske which was not registered anywhere and which they were already inclined to perceive as the fruit of folk imagination [golovakha, 2004: 14]. 6 the original name is skazochka o zolotom korablike. in this context the word skazochka means a legend rather than a fairy tale. this story is registered in ifa, number 20900. 7 i give the date when i checked sites for the last time as materials can disappear from the internet (of course, i print them out and preserve them in my own archives). the legend about the ghosts of the killed jews has no parallels in stanovskii’s repertoire although it does contain ghosts’ stories. this legend can be found at the same sites as the versions of the legend of the ship of gold. 8 the use of nicknames instead of real names is typical of the communication process on the web. in the original the nicknames were typed in latin. 9 the god of rubble (boot) is a personified building material which is extracted from the catacombs. among spirits guarding buried treasures, ukrainian folklore knows those such as blood, mara, khovala [nizovskii, 2001: 159-160]. 10 the same phenomenon but without reference to shtyrkov was registered by golovakha-hicks [2006]. the use of printed sources for oral narratives was demonstrated much earlier by mullen on non-slavic material [1971: 410]. 11 according to ukrainian folklore, a treasure can disappear down the drain with a treasure-seeker in it and come out again in jerusalem [grinchenko, 1900: 178-179]. 12 israeli archeologists recently announced the find of an old grave from the roman period at beit-shean. it was a chance discovery made during the renewal of the town’s sewerage. it contained a weapon, ceramics, gold and jewelry, as people were buried together with their property. the exact place of the grave is kept secret in order not to attract treasure seekers. (http://www.mignews.com/news/travel/world/311006_105023_50519.ht ml 31 oct. 2006). 13 at that time i was still a kyiv dweller. i immigrated to israel in april 1991 folklorica 2007, vol. xii 48 bibliography aarne, antti, and thompson, stith (1964) the types of the folktale: a classification and bibliography. helsinki: ffc no. 3. arora, shirley l. (1987) memorate as metaphor: some mexican treasure narratives and their narrators. in: gillian bennett, paul smith and j.d.a. widdowson (eds). perspectives on contemporary legend, vol. ii. sheffield: sheffield academic press, 79-92. atlas атлас д. (1911) старая одесса, ее друзья и недруги. одесса, 93-108. bar-itzhak, fialkova бар ицхак, хая, фиалкова лариса (1996) фольклор и компьютер: к постановке проблемы. язык и культура. четвертая международная конференция. материалы. киев, 143-152. belova белова о. (2005) этнокультурные стереотипы в славянской народной традиции. москва: индрик. bogdanov богданов к. (1995) деньги в фольклоре. санктпетербург: ран (пушкинский дом). bondar', bulatovich бондарь р.д., булатович с.а. (1992) нумизматические памятники нижнего подунавья. в сб.: историческое краеведение одесщины. одесса. вып.1, 21-23. bukchin букчин с. (2004) клад наполеона. москва: мфцп. bulychev булычев к. (1992) клад наполеона. в кн. к. булычев. приключения алисы. в 6-ти книгах. кн.5 москва: культура, 43-49 (http://www.rusf.ru/kb/stories/klad_napoleona/text01.htm 3.11.2006). cała, anita (1995) the image of the jew in polish folk culture. jerusalem: the magnes press, the hebrew university. cavaglion, gabriel, and sela-shayovitz revital (2005) the cultural construction of contemporary satanic legends in israel. folklore 116(3): 255-271. de ribas де рибас, александр (1995, репринтное здание 1913). старая одесса. москва: dimoff & co. dundes, allan (1971) folk ideas as units of worldview. journal of american folklore, 84(331): 93-103. fialkova – фіалкова, лариса (без дати) коли гори зустрічаються (нариси з українсько-ізраїльських фольклорних взаємин). київ: інститут мистецтвознавства, фольклористики та етнології ім.. м.т. рильського (у друку). fialkova l., yelenevskaya m. (2001) ghosts in the cyber world: analysis of the folklore sites on the internet. fabula, 1-2: 64-89. buried treasures 49 fialkova, larisa and yelenevskaya, maria (2007) ex-soviets in israel: from personal narratives to a group portrait. detroit: wayne state university press. glazkov глазков (2003) тайна кладов наполеона. российская земля (аграрная партия россии), вып. 15. 18.07. (http://www.agroparty.ru/smi/154/). golovakha – головаха, інна (2004) село плоске: його традиції та виконавці. у кн..: о. бріцина, і. головаха. прозовий фольклор села плоске на чернігівщині. київ: інститут мистецтвознавства, фольклористики та етнології ім. м.т. рильського, 7-37. golovakha-hicks, inna (2006) demonology in contemporary ukraine: folklore or “postfolklore”? journal of folklore research, 43(3): 219-223. grinchenko – гринченко б.д. (1900) из уст народа. чернигов. honko, lauri (1981) four forms of adaptation of tradition. studia fennica, 26. helsinki: 19-33. hoving, thomas (2002) tutankhamun: the untold story. new york: cooper square press. jones, d. (1990) model boats from the tomb of tutankhamun. oxford: griffith institute. koval'chuk ковальчук в. (без року) клады и подземелья житомира.. были и легенды. (http://cathedral.net.ua/articles_preview_1_36_print.htm 3 nov. 2006). kozyreva козырева л. (2006) легенда о троицкой церкви. новая кама: елабужская общественно-политическая газета, 31 октября (http://newkama.elabugae.ru/news_full.php?id=22 2.11.2006). lindow, john (1982) swedish legends of buried treasure. journal of american folklore, 95(377): 257-279. markevich маркевич а.и. (1888) одесса в народной поэзии. труды vi археологического съезда в одессе (1884). т.2., одесса, 398-418. mullen, patrick b. (1971) the relationship of legend and folk belief. journal of american folklore, 84(334): 406-413. nelson, marc (2002) the mummy’s curse: historical cohort study. british medical journal, 325: 1482-1484 (21 december). nizovskii низовский а. (2001) зачарованные клады россии. москва: наука. pronin, obukhov пронин к.к., обухов а.в. (без року). в катакомбах 56-ой школы. (http://uzm.spb.ru/archive/56_school_catacombs.htm 31.10.2006). folklorica 2007, vol. xii 50 rothstein, robert (2001) how it was sung in odessa: at the intersection of russian and yiddish folk culture. slavic review, 60(4): 781-801. rozhanskii, no date рожанский ф.и. (без року) точка, точка, запятая (эмотиконы как живая семиотическая система). (http://www.belb.net/obmen/rozhanski.htm 30 oct. 2006). rukomoinikova рукомойникова вера (2004) «виртуальный» фольклор в контексте народной смеховой культуры: автореферат диссертации на соискание ученой степени кандидата филологических наук. ижевск. scott, w. (2000) the life of napoleon buonaparte, emperor of the french. ann arbor: mich. schryer, frans j. (1976) a reinterpretation of treasure tales and the image of limited good. current anthropology, 17: 708-710. shtyrkov – штырков, сергей (1999) исторические предания и перспективы изучения традиционных нарративных практик. мифология и повседневность, вып. 2. материалы научной конференции 24-26 февраля 1999. санкт-петербург: алитея, 25-34. skunts' скунць п.м., упор. (1972) легенди нашого краю. ужгород: карпати. stoeltje, beverly j., fox christie l. and olbrys stephen (1999) the self in “fieldwork”: a methodological concern. journal of american folklore, 112(444): 158-182. sydow, carl wilhelm von (1977) geography and folktale oicotypes. in c.w. von sydow selected papers of folklore. new york: arno press, 44-59. sydow, carl wilhelm von (1977a) the categories of prose tradition. in c.w. von sydow. selected papers of folklore. new york: arno press, 86-88. tartakovsky, eugene (2001) group psychodynamics of witchcraft and witch-hunting: immigrant adolelescents from the former soviet union in israel. group analysis, 34(1): 129-142. taylor, a. (1986) the early republic’s supernatural economy: treasure seeking in the american northeast, 1780-1830. american quarterly, 38: 6-34. ulanenkoff s. семлевский клад: вокруг да около. (http://usveter.narod.ru/semlevo.html 3 nov. 2006). weisman, limor, mendelson-maoz, adaya (2007) “please, forward the story”: sipurim amamiim – mikikar ha-shuk el ha-merhav ha-virtuali (“please, forward the story”: folktales from a market buried treasures 51 square to the virtual space, in hebrew). in: eli yassif (ed.) sadan: studies in hebrew literature. studies in jewish folklore in a changing world. tel-aviv: tel aviv university, 343-375. wojcik, d. (1996) polaroids from heaven: miraculous image tradition at a marian apparition site. journal of american folklore, 109(432): 129-148. yekelchuk, serhy (1998) cossack gold: history, myth, and the dream of prosperity in the age of post-soviet transition. canadian slavonic papers, xl(3-4): 313-325. folklorica 2007, vol. xii untitled traditional customs of russian old believers 97 traditional customs of russian old believers in woodburn, oregon elena razumovskaya rimsky-korsakov musical college, st. petersburg, russia old-believers led a traditional mode of life for centuries with the aim of preserving the purity of their faith. however, due to their forced dispersion, their preservation efforts resulted in their disseminating traditional russian culture around the world. v.s. bakhtin woodburn, oregon is the home of a sizable community of old believers. most of those who settled in woodburn in the early 1960s came from turkey. their ancestors were among the original old believers who chose not to accept the 1656 church reforms of patriarch nikon and were persecuted as a result. they left russia almost three centuries ago, first appearing in the trans-danube territories (present day romania) at the end of the 17 – beginning of the 18th century, and later migrating to turkey. this group call themselves turchane. another important old believer group reached woodburn by a more complicated route: from china via hong-kong and brazil. their ancestors were exiled after the 1656 reforms to the banks of the angara river in the far east of russia. in the 1920s, they fled to northern china to escape the “red plague.” they had to move again in 1949, however, when mao came to power. they arrived in oregon in the 1960s. this group call themselves harbintsy (from harbin, china). their separation from the homeland is three times shorter than that of the turchane group. when the old believers arrived in oregon, the state administration apportioned land for them, allocating about 5-8 hectares per family. they also provided interest-free loans and excused the newcomers from taxes for ten years.(1) folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 98 by the 1990s the old believers had paid off their debts and lived in prosperity as economic equals to the average american farmer. they cultivated strawberries and blackberries and christmas trees, all crops that thrive in oregon soil. in the mid-1990s, the russian old believer community of woodburn numbered approximately five thousand persons belonging to five parishes. these include groups who do not acknowledge the role of the clergy in the service (bespopovtsy), and those who choose to be led by a priest (popovtsy). united by strict laws of faith and in spite of their different routes, both the ‘turkish’ and the ‘harbin’ branches of old believers have preserved their religion, rituals and everyday life as it was practiced in old russia before the church schism of 1656. they are typical representatives of the so called ‘island culture,’ having preserved inside their enclosed space the main features of the ‘mainland culture’ from which they were torn away a long time back. old believers who came to north america brought with them ancient icons, old printed books, and handwritten notebooks with texts of spiritual poetry (stikharniki). first pages, a and b, of the hand-written book “family history” (er) traditional customs of russian old believers 99 they also brought traditional garments. to this day, the women of the community craft shirts, skirts and dresses according to old patterns and embellish them with ancient embroidered designs. they also make their own hand-woven or hand-knit belts. the women wear their hair long and cover it with traditional headgear, meaning that married women wear a cloth cap under their kerchiefs: turchane call it kichka, and harbintsy call it shashmura. old women normally tie their kerchiefs in the front, while young and middle-age married women use triangleshaped kerchiefs (kosiachki) and tie them at the back. men do not cut their hair and do not shave. their traditional embroidered shirts are worn outside their jeans. children are dressed in the same manner as adults. for easter and for wedding celebrations, new festive attire is usually sewn for all family members, both the adults and the children. the first and the last pages of the handwritten notebook “spiritual poems” (er). folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 100 in their prayer houses, old believers still sing ancient chants using the old system of kryuki notation. they also gather in their homes in small groups to sing spiritual poetry (psal’my is the term used by the turchane; stikhi is used by the harbintsy) while they are doing their crafts and handiwork. the semeriakov family, 46 persons (photo made in woodburn in 1992). “the lament of israel” traditional customs of russian old believers 101 outside of lenten periods, middle-aged old believers sing secular songs. the secular music brought to the new world by turchane differs from that brought by the harbintsy. the songs imported by the turchane are predominantly long and quiet songs, while the songs that the harbintsy brought with them are mainly love lyrics which are sung in a style where the leader begins by singing in a high or low voice while the rest of the singers enter later with supporting voices. over the years, the repertoires of the two groups have naturally blended into one. “sit dunia, look dunia”folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 102 oregon old believers do not have television sets or tape-recorders, which they consider the work of satan.(2) instead they continue the custom of spending evenings in groups talking, making handicrafts and singing. as one oregon old believer noted, “when a person sings, he develops his thoughts and voice, while tape-recorders and television stultify the mind.”(3) neighbors from both groups routinely gather at each other’s homes in the evening. at first they work on their handicrafts. then, after work, they share tea and pastry. turchane and harbintsy call such gatherings differently, though. the terms used are posidenki and vechorki respectively. the old believers love of singing becomes apparent in a variety of contexts. one member noted, “whenever i sit and knit, i hum songs all the time.”(4) another stated, “if i and my wife go somewhere, we always sing, because man must have moments of joy and sadness”.(5) needless to say, all celebrations and religious events and even everyday occurrences are accompanied with songs. the contemporary wedding ceremony celebrated by oregon old believers has preserved all the main episodes of russian ritual as it was practiced in the distant past, the so called “ritual minimum,”(6) consisting of the following elements: ‘drinking away the bride’, preparing the dowry, the girls’ party, ritual bathing, the visit of the groom to the bride to ‘purchase’ her plait, parental blessing, the wedding ceremony, the game of redeeming the dowry from ‘robbers’, the wedding feast under a tent, and presenting gifts to the young couple. the wedding takes place on a sunday, just as in the past. one week before the day of the wedding, the groom’s family comes to visit the bride’s family and brings alcoholic beverages. this is called drinking away the bride (harbintsy call it propoi and turchane use the term zapoi). on friday there is a traditional devishnik, an all-female party where the bride bids farewell to her single status. on saturday morning the bride goes to wash herself in the sauna (bania), a symbolic purification before the beginning of her new life. saturday night into sunday the groom and his young relatives come to fetch the bride. they “purchase” (vykupaiut) her from her parents and the parents then bless the bride and groom. afterwards, the young couple goes to the prayer house or church for the morning service. the presence of the bride and groom at morning prayer is required for sacred purification before the wedding rite. after the wedding ceremony, the party moves to the groom’s house. there a large tent is erected in the yard for the marriage feast. the floor inside the tent is covered with straw. this is supposed to traditional customs of russian old believers 103 ensure the future health, wealth, and fertility of the young family. the first meal, where the head of the community is present, is called the cold or spiritual meal (kholodnyi or dukhovnyi obed). during it, only water, juices and snacks are served. after the head of the community leaves, the hot meal (goriachii obed) is served. this is the point when hot dishes are brought in and alcohol is allowed. between the two meals, a ritual game called redeeming the dowry from robbers (vykupaiut pridanoie u razboinikov) is played. young men from the bride’s family, dressed as pirates (wearing sailors’ striped smocks, turbans and wooden swords), bring traditional wooden chests (sunduki) with the bedding and other gifts that the bride has prepared for the groom’s family. they then “auction” them off in a humorous and jesting manner. another traditional ritual is the presentation of gifts to the young couple. this occurs during the hot meal. as the bride and groom receive each gift, they acknowledge it by getting on their knees and executing a low bow. this ceremony is called making bows (bit’ poklony). traditional wedding songs sung prior to the church ceremony are called maiden songs (devishnye pesni) and those sung after the ceremony are called wedding songs (svad’bishnye pesni). during the wedding ceremony and the cold meal people sing prayers and spiritual poems. after the hot meal, the guests dance to the songs. turchane call these songs khorovodnitskie, while harbintsy use the term krugovye. the dancing may be accompanied by a harmonica, the only musical instrument allowed at old believer weddings. it was brought to oregon by the turchane.(7) kirill kutsev, singer of spiritual and non-religious songs. (er)folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 104 the wedding in woodburn (8) in woodburn, during the week that precedes the wedding, the bridesmaids equip the bride (snariazhaiut nevestu). they help her to assemble the dowry. in the united states this is an easy task as all the bedding, kitchen appliances, tableware and so forth, ‘all things needed for the new life ahead,’ can be purchased in attractive packages in supermarkets. formerly, tablecloths and curtains for icons, which the bride had to decorate with embroidery, were sewn specifically as part of the dowry. embroidery for the home continues today, but the items which women who are skilled in needlework now produce are sentimental pictures executed in satin-stitch and put in wooden frames. as for clothing items, the bride and bridesmaids embroider shirts, plait belts, and make decorative edgings on kerchiefs. these will be used as gifts to the groom’s kinsfolk. this work must be completed by the friday. friday is the day of the girls’ party. according to the custom of the turchane, this party should last one day. the harbintsy, however, often extend the girls’ party and draw it out so that it runs the entire week. newlyweds in the wedding tent. they listen to the instructional speech from parents who sit in front of them. (er) traditional customs of russian old believers 105 friday, then, is the culmination of this part of the ritual. on friday morning, bridesmaids knit the bride’s flower cap, her “maiden’s beauty” (div’ia krosota). this cap must be decorated with crocheted pastelcolored flowers. white and pink ribbons and bows are attached to the cap at the back. in the evening, the groom and groomsmen come and join the girls. they are met by the bridesmaids dressed in new identical gowns. the color of the gowns is chosen by the bride. the bridesmaids then present the bride who is by this point wearing her white gown and flower cap, to the groom and his party. the bride kneels and bows before the groom three times (b’iet poklony zhenikhu), thus showing her respect and obedience to the future husband. each time she bows, the groom helps the bride to her feet. he then kisses her and leads her to the table. at the table, the bridesmaids congratulate the groom and the bride by singing special songs. in these songs, they link the names of various groomsmen and the names of the bridesmaids thus suggesting potential new couples. this is followed by the game of selling white bows. the young man who buys a bow, say for the price of twenty dollars, puts it around his neck and orders a song. during the course of the sale, the bride leaves the room and returns three times. each time she comes back in she is wearing new and different garments. this is supposed to display her beauty and wealth to the guests. the girls’ party ends with the ceremony of seeing off the groom. accompanied by groomsmen and bridesmaids, the groom walks arm-in-arm with the bride to his home. during this procession the bride wears her flower cap and the groomsmen and bridesmaids sing special songs of parting (raskhozhye songs). when the groom parts with his bride, he kisses her. “planks aren’t hewed”folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 106 the last evening of the prenuptials falls on saturday. the first step is ritual bathing. on saturday morning the bride and the groom each bathe at home. then the groom’s kinsfolk deliver the wedding wreath made of white fabric and knitted flowers to the bride. the bride, wearing her flower cap, comes out to greet the guests and bows to the ground thanking them for their gift. in the wee hours of sunday morning, typically 1 am to 2 am, the bridesmaids come and awaken the bride. they plait her hair into a braid and dress her in her wedding garments (venchal’naia odezhda): a white shirt, white sarafan, white belt, white apron, white shoes and the flower cap. at two o’clock in the morning, a knock comes at the door. the bride is seated at the table, covered with a white kerchief with a pale-color pattern. her younger brother, with scissors in hand, stands behind her. some of the bridesmaids encircle the bride; others go to open the door. the groomsman, the groom and two young girls (svashki) from the groom’s family enter the room in single file. they bring a “chain” made of white kerchiefs tied tightly together and each person holds on to it a foot or so apart. this chain is a symbol of the conjugal unit. they also bring in a large bottle of homemade brew and boxes with pasties (pirozhki). the groom wears a blue embroidered shirt and white jeans. the groomsman (harbintsy call him tysiatskii) walks up to the table, peeks under the bride’s kerchief and asks the groom if this is the right woman.(9) upon getting a positive answer, the groomsman lowers the edge of the kerchief. a joyful ransom game begins. this consists of “buying” the bride from the bridesmaids and “buying” her braid from her younger brother, the one with the scissors. he jokingly threatens to cut off his sister’s hair if the ransom is not paid. the “purchase” has the character of a facetious auction and it is accompanied by mutual teasing and mocking between bridesmaids and groomsmen. the game ends in a party with drinks and snacks. after the game, the younger brother removes the kerchief covering his sister, takes her hand, and leads her to the guests. the bride bows before the groom. she then also takes hold of the chain of white kerchiefs, and stands to the left of the groom. the groom receives traditional wedding gifts from the bride, a white shirt embroidered with flowers and a white woven belt. a groomsman leads the groom out of the room so that he can change into the shirt that he has just received. while he is changing, the bridesmaids replace the bride’s flower cap with the wedding wreath given to her by the groom. traditional customs of russian old believers 107 the next step is the parental blessing of the couple. the bride’s parents bless their daughter and the groom with bread-and-salt and an icon. then all guests pray to the icons in the icon corner. the bride and groom bid farewell to her parents, bowing twice, first individually and then together. the groomsmen and bridesmaids then all exit the house and all hold on to the “chain” of tied kerchiefs. the bride and groom get into a white car and go to the church (10) while the parents remain at home. the morning service during which the bride and groom pray (this ritual action is called molenie molodykh) lasts from 3 am to 7 am and the common prayer service follows. this service takes place in the presence of the entire congregation, with the men standing in front, closer to the iconostasis, and the women standing behind them. the wedding ceremony begins at 8 am and lasts for two hours. it is accompanied by the singing of prayers, spiritual poems and canons. the bride and groom repeatedly bow. throughout the ceremony, the bride and groom stand on a white cloth placed in front of the altar stand (analoi). the white cap of a married woman lies on the altar stand. the community leader (nastavnik)(11) reads a sermon to the newlyweds and asks the questions required by religious canon. examples of required questions include: iosif and evdokia postnikov after the wedding ceremony (photo made in woodburn in 1975). evdokia is one of the leading singers of the women’s vocal group that was formed in woodburn in the early 1990s. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 108 “are you taking this woman of your own free will?” “are you marrying this man of your own free will?” candles are lit in front of the altar stand. the community leader picks up the wedding rings, then crosses his hands, presenting the rings to the newlyweds. the couple responds by repeating the wedding vows three times: “i take you as my wife. – i take you as my husband” (“az tia posiagaiu, zhenu moiu – az tia posiagaiu, muzha moego”). this, according to kiril kutsev, “is where the sixth secret is performed when the holy spirit comes down.” after the formal vows, the bride changes her status (beriet chin): the young girls from the groom’s family lead the bride to the women’s side of the church. they undo her single braid and replait her hair into two braids instead of one to show that she is now married. they then place the married woman’s cap on her head. this cap is something “which she will wear till her grave.”(12) the groom’s relatives then lead the bride over to the groom. the bride bows to him three times. the bride and groom then kiss each other three times. the head of the community presents the groom’s father with the icon of the savior, and the newlyweds bow to him, saying: father, forgive us for the sake of christ. god will forgive!, replies the father. father, bless us! god bless you. i bless you, my children. live together in friendship, do not quarrel. love and respect each other. my blessing be with you! christ will save you. the same dialogue is repeated with the bride’s father. he is given the icon of the mother of god and he holds this during the ritual dialogue. this final episode of the ceremony is called releasing the newlyweds (otpusk molodym). the head of the community then leads the newlyweds from the church to the groom’s home. they all walk in single file with the groom’s young relatives and friends, holding on to the chain of white kerchiefs. the rest of the guests, all of the relatives and friends invited to the wedding, follow the couple and the bridal party. the next step is the cold meal and during it the newlyweds retire and rest. they reappear at the high point of the hot meal, wearing their new festive attire. they are accompanied by the head groomsman and two girls from the groom’s family. traditional customs of russian old believers 109 this group does not join the common table but, holding on to the “chain” of tied white kerchiefs, approach the tent pole where there is a shelf with an icon and a lamp placed on it. the groomsman (druzhka) invites the newlyweds’ relatives to approach the icon one by one for presentation of gifts and the ceremony called sitting for the bows (sadit’sia na poklony). first the parents of the bride and groom approach and then other relatives come forward. each married couple that takes part in the ceremony expresses good wishes to the newlyweds and gives them expensive gifts and money. at the wedding recorded by the author, for example, the groom’s parents presented the newlyweds with the key to a new house while the bride’s parents gave the couple the key to a new mercedes car. the groomsman offers a glass of home-brewed beer to every guest who gives presents. the guest empties the glass and covers it with banknotes. the wedding feast continues on throughout the night and into the next day, that is monday. during the course of the entire banquet, the newlyweds continue executing deep bows to thank the guests for their gifts. when a new dinner course is brought, the couple leaves for a short while to rest. they then return having donned new attire. when the bride returns, she is always wearing her wedding wreath atop a new kerchief. a traditional wedding chest containing the bride’s dowry: hand-woven belts and embroidered shirts prepared to be given to the groom’s family. (er) folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 110 the final episode of the wedding ritual is the supper in the newlyweds’ home on tuesday. the bride does not wear the wreath during this meal. the guests dine at the newlyweds’ expense, and in this manner are symbolically compensated for their wedding gifts. “we go to the newlyweds to return our treasury.”(13) the old believers hire cooks (striapukhi) and pay them with traditional gifts: each cook receives a kerchief and a pretty apron. relatives of the newlyweds help the cooks: they set the tables, serve the food, fill the glasses with homemade spirits, and wash the dishes. volunteers designate themselves with ribbons or kerchiefs tied across their shoulders. the groom’s kinfolk wear blue kerchiefs and ribbons, and the bride’s, pink. the wedding celebration i documented had forty-three cooks, twenty-four tables, and more than three hundred guests. the wedding expenses came to $18,000. the newlyweds received $10,000 in cash, apart from the presents that they were given. all adults, including the women in gowns, came to the wedding in their own vehicles. many of the guests had video cameras. during the four festive days, while i observed this particular wedding, i did not hear any swear words, nor did i see even one inebriated person. there were no quarrels or fights.(14) the color white, which dominates in old believers’ wedding ceremonies, can be linked to the traditional white dress clothing worn during burials and funeral ceremonies.(15) old believers say, “we live for life, not for death … for our future life.” the white color is seen as a symbol of eternal life. it is a vivid metaphor for the purity of old believer faith and it represents their good intentions and their decent human behavior. “nikon persecuted us. peter (16) persecuted us. the reds persecuted us…. for our sufferings the lord gave us a good life in america. no one mistreats us. they only respect us here. americans do not accept us as sectarians. they say, ‘you are our ancestors. your christian faith is older than ours.’ it is a pity that we live in a strange land. we would come back if yeltsin gave the land back to the peasants. (…). but here we live as in eden.”(17) a complex variety of historical events drove old believer peasants out of russia and into the new world. thanks to their spiritual strength, invincible will, and their determination to work and live honestly, they have earned their “american eden.” my research has afforded me a chance to look at their life and to compare it with the life of present-day traditional customs of russian old believers 111 russian peasants. i understand now that i have seen the russian conception of a peasant eden. in woodburn, oregon this peasant eden is absolutely earthly and real for the old believers who live there. for peasants living in russia, however, it is but utopian and unattainable, like heaven. the first page of the letter from vassa kraskova to elena razumovskaya. the letter was written on 25 june 1996 upon the return from st. petersburg where the group of women from oregon sang at a folk concert. vassa kraskova was born in turkey and went to school in oregon, she can read and write in english. like all children in old believers families, she learned to read old slavonic at home and taught herself how to write in russian ‘by ear.’ (er) folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 112 list of informants 1. olga gavrilovna valikhova (1942), harbin group, resident of woodburn since 1968. 2. uliana vassilievna zharkova (1951), harbin group, resident of woodburn since 1971. 3. makar afanasievich zaniukhin (1938), harbin group, resident of woodburn since 1971. 4. matriona ulianovna kalugina (1935), turkish group, resident of woodburn since 1962. 5. vassa vassilievna kraskova (1957), turkish group, resident of woodburn since 1963. 6. kirill petrovich kutsev (1942), harbin group, resident of woodburn since 1968. 7. evdokia vassilievna postnikova (1951), turkish group, resident of woodburn since 1963. 8. elena levontievna semerikoa (1954), harbin group, resident of woodburn since 1967. notes 1 similar privileges were provided to the peasants moving to siberia by p.a. stolypin in the beginning of the 20th century. 2 the taboo does not apply to photo or video cameras or computers. 3 comment by makar afanasievich zaniukhin, 1938, harbin group, resident of woodburn. 4 comment by olga gavrilovna velikhova, 1942, harbin group, resident of woodburn. 5 comment by kirill petrovich kutsev, 1942, harbin group, resident of woodburn. 6 the term suggested by the russian folklorist kirill chistov. 7 the information on the history and ethnography was provided by informants 3, 4, 6 and 8. the details of folk culture and traditional clothes were given by informants 1, 2, 5 and 7 (see the list of informants at the end of the article). 8 recorded on 17 – 20 november 1995 in woodburn, oregon. all comments on the wedding ritual were made by kirill kutsev, resident of woodburn, on 20 november 1995. 9 at this moment of the ritual game the bride can be replaced. in the woodburn wedding the replacement was not performed. traditional customs of russian old believers 113 10 the church, or prayer house, of the bespopovtsy group of old believers does not have a dome, unlike a russian orthodox church. it looks like a big house with a flat roof and a cross mounted on top. 11 the wedding ritual in woodburn was held in the version of turchane bespopovtsy; the role of the priest was performed by the community leader. 12 comment by kirill kutsev. 13 ibid. 14 by way of comparison, at all of the twenty-seven weddings, recorded by me and my students in the russian-belarusian border area, we saw many drunken guests, both men and women. there, wedding feasts often ended with fights. the speeches of matchmakers and the texts of songs during the second part of the wedding party abounded in obscene words. 15 in western russia, old women peasants come to the funerals wearing white kerchiefs as “the old tradition requires it”. it is known that traditionally, the color white was a sign of mourning in ancient egypt; and still is in india and in china. 16 peter the great. 17 from the conversation with makar zaniukhin and kirill kutsev. translated by hanna chuchvaha folklorica 2008, vol. xiii folklorica_7f olson, laura and svetlana adonyeva. the worlds of russian village women: tradition, transgression, compromise. madison: university of wisconsin press, 2012. notes. bibliography. index. 368. $39.95 (paper). isbn 978-0-299-29034-4. in their well-researched and thoroughly insightful monograph, the worlds of russian village women: tradition, transgression, compromise, laura olson and svetlana adonyeva investigate how three generations of russian rural women relate to tradition. olson and adonyeva draw from many years of personal fieldwork as well as from a vast archive of interviews conducted by faculty and students of saint petersburg university. the subjects of their study are three soviet generations of women born between 1899 and 1950; olson and adonyeva classify them as follows: those born before the october revolution (1899-1916), those born from the revolution through total collectivization of the village (1917-29) and those who came into their youth during the postwar years, but were born between 1930-50 (77). olson and adonyeva’s critical approach is informed in part by pierre bourdieu and michel foucault’s studies on power relations. focusing on the ways people exercise agency in negotiating their relationship to culture, olson and adonyeva’s work illustrates that life-cycle rituals do not simply represent one-sided situations of subjugation, but in fact, when “faced with structures of social control, people react in complex ways, including obedience, transgression, and compromise.” (5) the fundamental questions motivating the study are many. the central question, “how do russian rural women relate to tradition?” is deceptively simple; the answers to that question remain extremely complex. in their interpretations of how women “perform folklore” during life-cycle and calendar rituals for example, olson and adonyeva reflect on the “nature of subjectivity and history, agency and tradition” as they seek to further illuminate the continually shifting relationships russian rural women have with tradition (23). indeed much of the focus of this monograph is on the theoretical connections between “performing folklore” and the construction of social identity. in performing folklore, olson and adonyeva assert, one is able to use “preexisting, shared, symbolic structures (verbal, visual, intonational, gestural, etc.) to construct his or her relationship to a group—that is, to create and re-create his or her own identity” (11). the book consists of an introduction, nine chapters including: (1) traditions of patriarchy and the missing female voice in russian folklore scholarship; (2) age and gender status and identity: structure and history; (3) subjectivity and the relational self in russian village women’s stories of courtship and marriage; (4) the pleasure, power, and nostalgia of melodrama: twentieth century singing traditions and women’s identity construction; (5) transgression as communicative act: rural women’s chastushki; (6) magical forces and the symbolic resources of motherhood; (7) magic, control, and social roles; (8) constructing identity in stories of the other world; (9) death, the dead, and memory-keepers, and a conclusion. the introduction provides the reader with brief personal and professional biographies of the authors, outlining their theoretical backgrounds and motivations for focusing on women’s (hi)stories; it also sheds light on their use of the three terms in the subtitle of the manuscript: tradition, transgression, and compromise. in their study, olson and adonyeva defined tradition as “any cultural product that is handed down from past to present” (8) and “a habit of saying, doing, and thinking in a certain way” (307). drawing examples from their own interviews, olson and adonyeva discuss how “the transmission, interpretation, and changing of tradition involve choice.” (8) olson and adonyeva apply the terms “plot and script to describe, respectively, the culturally instilled ways of thinking that help people construct and describe the past, and those that interpret the present and postulate future behavior… plots are standard formulations of past action… scripts, on the other hand, are conventional projections of actions to come” (13). in chapter one, the authors highlight the story of women’s contributions to folk tradition through a survey of the four genres of folklore (the folktale, epic, lament, and folk song) that late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century collectors deemed central to the russian canon. olson’s and adonyeva’s alternate interpretations of women’s contribution to these genres challenge contemporary scholarship; in the section on bylina, for example, the authors assert that “although there are known taboos about when epics could be sung, there are no known taboos about who could sing them” (32). demonstrating how “ethnography has misread women’s contributions to the corpus of russian folklore,” their own fieldwork shows that “the masculine tradition of singing epics in public was paralleled by a feminine tradition of singing epics within the home” (32, 306). chapter two begins with a delineation of age and gender status in the twentieth century russian village and moves to a discussion of the socialization of girls and women, and boys and men through an examination of rituals performed during rites of passage. the section on “the cow as symbol of bol’shukha status” offers a fascinating example of how age and gender “organize the social hierarchy..., define the distribution of economic and social functions and power… and offer life scripts to men and women” (77). subsequent chapters break down thematically as olson and adonyeva examine specific traditional practices that were generally opposed by soviet authorities, but nevertheless remained integral to village life. chapter three, for example, examines women’s stories of courtship and marriage through the lens of changing subjectivities and conceptions of selfhood. olson and adonyeva’s discussion of the contradiction in the construction of soviet selfhood is an excellent illustration of this; they explain that the soviet rituals, created to replace traditional rituals, had the end goal of fostering a spirit of the collective, but that the actual “means to achieve collectivism implied cultivating agency and self-fashioning, which are at the foundations of individualism” (129). chapter four examines how romance songs provide a basis upon which to construct community (155). borrowing from ann kaplan’s work on the mother figure in melodrama, the authors categorize the songs into complicit texts and resisting texts; complicit texts, they explain, depict women as victims of men while resisting texts depict women’s resistance to socially constructed power relations (156). they argue that the “melodramatic discourses serve to articulate the changing cultural paradigms of late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries” (21). olson and adonyeva also take on, less successfully, an analysis of the melodramatic genres of soap opera and gossip in village life. chapter five examines three types of chastushki: those focused on politics, on everyday life and on erotic topics. ripe with ritual laughter, chastushki provided women with a means to dispute the established hierarchy and express publically that which was otherwise forbidden. olson and adonyeva’s engaging examples illustrate how the “chastushka provides a temporary fissure in the village social hierarchy: younger people can address their elders critically, girls can make romantic approaches to young men, a young woman can speak ill of her in-laws, a rank and file kolkhoz [collective farm] worker can speak up against the president” (172). chapter six focuses on the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge of magical skills during motherhood. according to olson and adonyeva’s informants, knowledge of magic was necessary to assist the mother (so that she could understand what was happening to her during birthing) and to help the newborn get through sudden illnesses and avert the evil eye. based on information gleaned from field reports from the vologda and arkhangel’sk regions and the authors’ own fieldwork in a village in the riazan’ oblast’, chapter seven examines the means by which porcha [witchcraft/sorcery] is able to shift the balance of power in a community and perform “an action of social leveling” (238). chapter eight discusses the relationship between bylichki [memorates/fabulates] and tradition. communicative by nature, bylichki are most often also didactic, but more importantly, as olson and adonyeva assert, they are also used to construct, negotiate, and shape the social networks of the living and the dead (276). chapter nine examines women’s roles as guides and mentors in practices relating to death and the caring for and honoring of the dead. specifically, olson and adonyeva discuss death as practice, the practice of honoring the dead, and the role of the lamenter as mediator. as their informants’ stories illustrate, memorialization is motivated by social duty as well as the individual’s need to express loss. the authors find that while children and men can certainly be “bearers of tradition” in the russian village, “only elder women are in charge of memory, which is central to the spiritual life of the russian village community” (305). russian village women created their own life scripts against the backdrop of tradition; as olson and adonyeva conclude, those scripts did not exactly follow the script defined by the cultural imperative but tradition was “capacious enough, generous enough, and flexible enough to accommodate variations, creativity, individual agency, compromise, and even transgressions” (314). this book contains an extensive bibliography and notes section and a short glossary. while the notes for the most part point the reader to further reading, or engage her with interesting commentary from the authors that are beyond the scope of their book, some of the notes deserve a place in the body of the work. that the authors created pseudonyms for the participants and the village names in order to protect the privacy of their informants, for instance, is certainly understandable and even commendable, but burying this in note seven of chapter one (found at the end of the book on page 322) creates some confusion. if one misses the note, the following revelations in chapter seven seem out of place: “the first part of this chapter is largely based upon the lore of one village, which we will call krasnoe, in riazan’ oblast” (223) and “when she talked about these sorcerers with me, she became very fearful that i would somehow leak to them what she told me. for this reason, the names of the participants in these stories and the name of the village have been changed” (240). the discussion on the evil eye and social leveling in chapters six and seven and on folk religion in the subsection on sorcery and religion in chapter seven is fascinating, but feels incomplete. the authors’ skillful analysis throughout the rest of the manuscript leaves the reader wanting more here. although the authors concede in the conclusion that the “greatest gap in their text is about men” (307), olson and adonyeva’s readers would have benefited greatly from their insight into why, for instance, in songs like “oh, sailor, sailor, sailor” and “the soldiers rode home” it was the sons, and not the daughters, who were left behind (148-55). interdisciplinary in nature, olson and adonyeva’s study draws on scholarship from a wide variety of disciplines including cultural anthropology, ethnomusicology, folklore studies, gender studies, genre studies, russian history, russian literature, soviet studies and women’s studies. the worlds of russian village women is a valuable addition to scholarship on oral histories of russian rural women and will prove informative to scholars and students alike. by closely examining the choices russian village women make to follow or break a rule or tradition, olson and adonyeva depict the clash between the public and the private, transgression and compromise, and between the traditional moral code of patriarchy and strong female will in order to illustrate and unpack just how and why russian village women exercise agency within their community (194). kristin bidoshi union college schenectady, ny united states microsoft word folkxiv_author.doc the human body and the plant world folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 123 the human body and the plant world: mutual relations of the codes (1) valeria b. kolosova institute for linguistics st. petersburg, russia abstract the article analyses reflections of the anthropomorphic code in the plant code of traditional slavonic culture. there exist: 1) the language level (using body parts names in phytonyms); 2) the folklore level (aetiological stories about the genesis of plants from the human body); and 3) the level of ritual (using body parts to influence the plants, rules and taboos concerning planting). plants are also used to influence the human body (usually in folk medicine) on the basis of similarity of their parts. a common principle stands behind this “anthropomorphization” on all three levels—it semioticizes the objective features of a plant. in the “ideal” case, there is a phytonym using a body part in the naming of a plant, an aetiological story about the plant, and rules for using it. anthropomorphization structures and regulates the sum of knowledge about the plant world. however, this is not just a question of the mutual relations between the two codes, but a part of the system, where sustainability is maintained in at least two ways: the “vertical” (the possibility of expressing the same sense in a text, a word, and a ritual), and the “horizontal” (the possibility of expressing the same sense in different codes). that demonstrates the systematic character of the mythological world model. never plant a birch or a fir tree near your house, peasants in east slav areas would advise, because it will drive the women from the house. both were seen as female trees. in serbia the red of peonies came, it was believed, from blood shed at the crucial battle of kosovo field in 1389. both these examples reveal links between the plant and the human worlds. in this article i seek to demonstrate the relationship between the two codes in traditional slavic culture that relate to the human body and plants, and more specifically, reflections of the human body code in the plant code. the data is amenable to structuring in a variety of ways. it would be feasible, for example, to concentrate on levels, first that of 124 lexis, then folklore, and lastly ritual, or alternatively select a given feature as a unit of description. i have, however, chosen to take individual body parts as building blocks. in this way i can avoid repetition, as the correlation of a plant with a part of the body on the basis of a feature results (in the most developed instances) in a phytonym (plant name), in folklore texts, recommendations on how to use the plant in folk medicine and in a ritual. in my discussion below i give the common name in english where the given plant has one, as well as the latin name. 1. body parts the head phytonyms with the component golova (head) are generally used for plants that possess spherical parts (such as flower clusters or fruits): in vladimir province in russia sobach’ia golova [dog’s head] is the term for meadow knapweed, centaurea jacea l., while in kursk centaurea scabiosa l., greater knapweed, is called krasnogolovki [red heads], and in siberia adamova golova [adam’s head]. in ukraine adamova golova [adam’s head] refers instead to meadow eryngo, eryngium campestre l., [annenkov 1876: 90-91; bulashev 1909: 349]. the conventional reaction to the effects of hemlock, conium maculatum l., is reflected in the names given to it: rus. boligolov, golovolom, ukr. bolyholov, srb. glavobolno zelje, boleglav, boliglav [the headache herb] [avgustinovich 1853: 26; machek 1954: 76; čajkanović 1985: 151], while water hemlock, cicuta virosa l., is known similarly as boligolov, golovolom [annenkov 1876: 98]. hellebore, helleborus niger, has a similar reputation, reflected in the serbian glavobolka, or glavobolčica [headache herb], and the belief that you should not bring it into the house for fear of getting a headache [čajkanović 1985: 75]. in riddles too it is supposed that plants can have a head, for example, one russian riddle about the thistle declares: “стоить колихаеться, красною головою величаеться, лежачи бодаеться” [it sways as it stands, haughty with its red head, stabs you when it’s lying down] [chubinskii 1877: (i, 2) 305]. there are numerous occasions when a plant name exists alongside a legend, explaining the name; these can be understood as variants of the same text, but with differing degrees of elaboration. thus, in smolensk province speedwell, veronica latifolia l., was known as ivan bezgolovyi [ivan the headless], because the flower cluster is higher than the stem, the human body and the plant world folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 125 which looks like it has been bitten off. an etiological legend explains this feature in the following way: “девка отрубила некоему ивану голову, а тот пошел жаловаться боородице, неся свою голову на копье. богородица превратила ивана в цветок вероники” [a girl cut off а certain ivan’s head, so he went to the virgin to complain, carrying his head on a spear. the virgin turned him into a speedwell plant] [demich 1899: 1169]. as we have seen already, phytonyms with the component golova [head] include both plants with spherical parts and those believed to cause a headache. but the same is true for plants used to cure a headache. sometimes the two groups overlap: “высока, тоненька, две-три головки беленьки у нее, адамова голова от больной головы помогает, вон, гляди, по угору шарики голубые, колючие” [tall and slender, two or three white heads it has, adamova golova helps with a headache; there, look, on the slope, blue prickly round heads] (2) [rodionova 2002: 38]. or in ukrainian of bolyholov [hemlock] it is said “при головной боли мочат настоем этой травы” [when the head aches, moisten [the forehead?] with an infusion of this herb] [markovich 1891: 425]. it was further supposed that the name of a feast day may influence the formation and growth of vegetables. for example, in ukraine cabbages planted on 25 may/7 june, the feast of saint john, which was known as ivan holovatyi [ivan the big head day], are believed to have large heads. at the level of ritual actions, women would touch their heads with both hands, so that the cabbage would grow large and firm [moroz 2000: 134]. the hair rock-cress, arabis arenosa, is called in polish panieńczyne włosy [maiden's hair], because after blooming its pericarps (the outer cover of the seed) turn wavy like a girl’s hair [usacheva 2000: 263]. there are similar names in ukraine for various different plants: bogorodishna kosa [the plait of the theotokos] for astragalus cicer l.; bogomaterina kosa [the plait of the mother of god] for creeping st john’s wort, hypericum humifusum l.; boroda chortova [devil’s beard] for white dogbane, vincetoxicum officinale l. [bulashev 1909: 349]. east slavic dialectal phytonyms of the kind voloshka, voloshki are etymologically connected with hair (rus. volos) and generally denote plants that have different parts covered with hair-like fibers, such as haresfoot clover, trifolium arvense l. (a hairy calyx) devil’s bit 126 scabious, scabiosa arvensis (a hairy stalk and leaves), the corn cockle, lychnis githago scop. (a grey and hairy herb), or marsh cudweed, gnaphalium uliginosum l. (covered with matted whitish hairs) [zalesova, petrovskaia 1899-1901: (2-4), 472, 513, 540, 949]. the face the bright spot, the “eye”, in the centre of the dark flower of the violet, viola tricolor l., was commonly reflected in its name. examples include the following: in russia in volodga they are known as vesiolye glazki [jolly eyes] but aniutiny glazki [anna’s eyes] in moscow and kursk provinces, while in serbian they are dikino oko [wild eye], and in bulgarian dialect divi ocheta [wild eyes] [annenkov 1876: 382; čajkanović 1985: 84]. in one ukrainian legend a rusalka (a mythological creature in the form of a beautiful girl) turns a handsome youth into a cornflower; the flower is the same bright blue as his eyes [markevich 1860: 86-87]. the dialectal names for eyebright, euphrasia officinale l., glaznitsa, glaznaia trava, ochanka, ochnaia trava in russian, ochanka in ukrainian, and očanica in serbian, reflect the fact that it was used to treat eye problems. this usage was probably inspired by the fact that in the corolla of its flower there is a spot resembling an eye [annenkov 1876: 141]. the predominant use of eyebright for eye problems is also mentioned by machek [1954: 215]. the dialectal names for coral root, dentaria bulbifera l., are all linked with teeth; hence rus. bab’i zuby, zubnitsa, pol. babie zęby, zubowa bylina, srb. zubatka, lusatian zubica, all meaning woman’s teeth, or tooth herb. according to ukrainian legend, garlic grew out of the teeth of a witch, which is why it is a sin to eat it [bulashev 1909: 379], while in eastern poles’e on the borders of russia, ukraine, and belarus, the root of an orchid resembling a tooth was believed to help ease toothache [sa 3: 596]. the hands and arms common names for the primrose, primula veris l., come from the shape of its floscules (flower clusters): ukr. bozha ruchka, bozhi ruchki [god's hand(s)] [annenkov 1876: 272]. in serbian, knot-grass, illecebrum, is called nokatac [the fingernail herb], because its tough grooved leaves are shaped like narrow finger nails [machek 1954: 76]. in poland a legend was recorded about the plant known as dalonka, meaning palm of the hand, to the effect that it grew from a mitten lost by the virgin [usacheva 2000: 281]. herbs with leaves in a form of a paw the human body and the plant world folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 127 or hand were often used to heal a rash between the fingers, as in the russian name mezhperstitsa, mezheparshchitsa [lit. between-the-fingers plant] for lady's-mantle, alchemilla vulgaris l.. in smolensk province it was said that if there is swelling between the fingers, cover it with the dried leaves of the lady’s-mantle; and it may be noted that in the local dialect mezheparshchitsa also means a rash on the hands, an itch or a scab. fresh or dry leaves were also used to treat itching feet [dobrovol’skii 1914: 407]. the forked and double roots of orchids led to different superstitions in various local traditions. according to bulgarian and belarusian beliefs, the root of the orchid looks like the palm of a hand with five fingers, something reflected in its names: bulg. rъchitsa [hand]; bel. dalonka [palm]. the root was used by the belarusians as a contraceptive [sa 2: 596], while among the south slavs a woman in childbirth would drink an infusion of the herb ruka fatimy [fatima's hand] or bogoroditsyna ruchka [the hand of the mother of god], because this herb, shaped like an open hand, will help her body open up in the same way [sa 3: 596]. (3) in the province of kazan’ in russia, the fragrant orchid, gymnadenia conopsea r. br., bore the names liub-trava or liubovny ruchki [love herb, love hands]. when making a love potion a specimen with “hands” (i.e. tubers) pointing towards each other was used; if the “hands” pointed away from each other, the plant would be used for the opposite effect, namely to repel love [krylov 1882: 35-36]. by contrast, there are fewer beliefs relating to the arms as opposed to the hands, but in the russian province of kaluga, common storks-bill, erodium cicutarium l., was drunk as a medicine for convulsions, because the petioles (where the leaf stalk joins the main stem) are drawn together like elbows, as if in convulsions [annenkov 1876: 136]. the torso it is perhaps unsurprising that adam’s rib comes to be associated with a plant in ukrainian, specifically adamove rebro, thysellinum palustre l., but more surprising when the ribs of other biblical personages are involved. thus, also in ukraine, we find a kind of valerian, valeriana dubia bung., being called chortove rebro [devil’s rib] [bulashev 1909: 349], while in perm’ province greater knapweed, centaurea scabiosa l. was known as khristosovy riobra [christ's ribs] and was used for back pain [annenkov 1876: 91]. a russian legend 128 recounts the story that the potato grew from a sorcerer's grave, out of his rib [usacheva 2000: 273]. the common name for snakeweed, polygonum bistorta l., which is widely used to treat stomach disorders, reflects its use in folk medicine. it is called zaviaznyi koren’ [tying root] in moscow and archangel provinces; in viatka province it is zhivotnyi koren’ [belly root] or zholunichnyi koren’ [stomach root], and in serbian zheludniak [stomach root] [annenkov 1876: 264]. at the same time the ukrainian term zaviaznyk [tying herb] refers to common tormentil, tormentilla erecta l., with the plant being used to treat diarrhea or vaginal bleeding [avgustinovich 1853: 73-74]. here similar names are given to different plants because of the similarity or identity of their medicinal use. children who were suffering from sukhotka, a wasting disease, were bathed in a solution of a plant known as tolstushka [literally fatty plant], ledum acre l. the medicinal use was clearly based on its morphological features; “листья растения толстые, сочные. отсюда и дети должны ‘потолстеть’” [the leaves of the plant are fat and juicy. hence the children were expected to “get fat” as well] [markovich 1891: 426] the genitalia the lexis relating to genitalia may also be reflected in plant names, as, for example, in russia, where rebiach’i miudushki [children’s testicles] is the term for satyrium l. meantime in serbian popova muda [priest's testicles] denotes the spindle tree, euonymus europaeus l., while bulgarian dialect has mominski sram, mŭzhko sramniche, and serbian sramak [all meaning penis] for the wild carrot [annenkov 1876: 142, 316; sa 3: 301]. a whole series of plants is included in a group of riddle texts with erotic connotations. these plants may be perceived as either male or female and include grapes, and maize, the cucumber which is paired with the fig, haricot, and pumpkin. some plant names are ambiguous and can refer to either gender. these include pepper, cabbage, and the walnut [sikimić 1996]. common names of plants with parts in the shape of genitalia reflected that resemblance and were used in love and fertility magic. of these the chief was the orchid family, in russian iatryshnik, the word supposedly deriving from iatro [belly, testicles, balls], because of its knob-shaped roots [annenkov 1876: 232]. it has different names in various dialects, but its use is virtually identical everywhere. for example, orchis latifolia l., the broad-leaved fen orchid “по народным the human body and the plant world folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 129 представлениям, является растением, возбуждающим любовь и способствующим увеличению половой силы… у гуцулов с помощью ятрышника лечили от мужской слабости” [in popular conception is thought capable of evoking love and increasing sexual potency … the hutsuls in south western ukraine used it as a treatment for impotence] [potanin 1899: 233], while elsewhere women tried to guess the sex of their unborn child from the shape of its root: elongated for a boy, and round for a girl [kedrina 1912: 102, 108]. afanas’ev quotes another variant of this type of divination: a two-pronged root meant a girl and a three-pronged root – a boy [afanas’ev 1994: (3), 227]. in ukraine, orchis palustris jacq., was called krasnye sultanchiki [red plumes]; “им приписывают свойство возбуждения половых органов” [their roots were believed to stimulate the sexual organs] [avgustinovich 1853: 50]. another name for this plant is liubka (derived from the root liub-, “love”): “некоторые особенности в устройстве корня этого растения дали повод употреблять его как средство заставить полюбить друг друга. корень бывает двоякий: оканчивающийся отростками наподобие пальцев (мужской пол) и просто в виде сердца, без отростков (женский). нужно накопать таких корней, высушить, настоять на водке и дать выпить “парубкови й дивчыни” поровну, приговаривая: ‘любылыся въ лисныхъ лугахъ цiи цвиточкы, и вы, диточкы, въ своихъ хатахъ любиться, якъ цiи цвиточкы въ лугах’” [certain features of its root prompted its use as a means of making people fall in love. the root is double: with branches looking like fingers (male) and a simple heart shape without protuberances (female). you had to dig up these roots, dry them, make an infusion in vodka with them and give the drink to a young man and woman, saying: “these flowers loved each other in the forest meadows; now you, children, in your homes love each other like these flowers in the fields”] [khatemkin 1900: 8-9]. similar properties were ascribed to the members of the orchid family in czech folk culture [machek 1954: 299]. in kaluga province “если где-нибудь жена с мужем живут не в ладу, мужа поят настоем этого корня” [if a husband and wife аre not getting on, an extract of orchid root will be given to the husband]; here the black root represented the husband, and the white root the wife [kedrina 1912: 107-08].(4) using orchis maculata l. in love magic is also mentioned by annenkov: “крестьянки ворожеи дают корень носить с собою, дабы другие любили, и особенно замужним женщинам при несогласии с мужьями” [fortune-tellers give the root to 130 peasant women to carry around with them so that they will be loved, and especially to married women who are not getting on with their husbands] [annenkov 1876: 233]. it is very likely that the belief in the archangel region about the herb known locally as kukusha [cuckoo plant] also relates to a plant from the orchidaceae family: “корень на двое: один муж, а другой жена. когда муж жену не любит, дай пить жёночке, а жена мужа не любит, дай пить мужичку, станет любить женочка” [the root is divided in two, this representing a husband and his wife. if a husband doesn’t love his wife, then the wife should be given this (herb) to drink, and if a wife doesn’t love her husband, it (the herb) should given to him to drink, and then his wife will love him] [kharitonov 1848: 15]. lastly, erotic motifs are also found in magic relating to garden vegetables; if the cucumbers are not growing well and producing large numbers of sterile flowers, in the homel’ area in belarus a man with no trousers had to wave a scythe over the cucumber beds [sa 3: 498]. in the homel’ area wives asked their husbands to lie down in the furrow to ensure a good crop of large cucumbers [sa 3: 498]. the pelvis prevalent among all the slavs was the practice, used when vegetables were being planted, of women sitting naked on the vegetable beds so that the vegetables would turn out as big as their pelvis. the skin in vologda province the greater celandine, chelidonium majus l., was known as chistotel (lit. the clean body herb) because it was used to get rid of warts [ivanitskii 1890: 148]. in kazan’ province it was used in the bathhouse to scrub a rash [krylov 1882: 69]. it was also known as borodavnik, borodavochnik [wart herb]. in kursk province children who had a skin disease were bathed in its extract [annenkov 1876: 94], while in the perm’ region it was the yellow (or woodland) whitlow grass, draba nemorosa l., known locally as chistotel detskii [children’s clean body herb], that was taken internally for skin diseases in children [annenkov 1876: 94, 398]. 2. bodily fluids in phytonyms bodily fluids are generally represented by tears and blood. the human body and the plant world folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 131 tears the similarity of a plant to one body part or another gives the plant its characteristic semantics and typical connotations; for example, the resemblance of peas to teardrops caused them to be strongly associated with future misfortune or disaster. according to an etiological legend, the pea grew from adam’s tears as he wept while ploughing the land for the first time after expulsion from the garden of eden [bulashev 1909: 378], while according to a belarusian legend, the mountain ash grew from eve’s bloody tears after the fall [nikiforovskii 1897: 129]. blood in many slavic areas great burnet, sanguisorba officinalis l. (rus. krovokhliobka, krovososka [blood-sucker], srb. krvara, czech krvavec, krvavník [blood herb]) is so called because of its blood-red flowers. the many local plant names for perforate st. john's wort, hypericum perforatum l. [rus. krovavnik, ivanova krov’, semibratniaia krov’, ukr. krivtsa, bozha krivtsa, khristova krivtsa, bel. siamionava krow, kryvawnik, cz. krevniček, krvavník], all relate to the leaves which, in some species, have red spots, as well as to the sap which is red, as are the petals when they are crushed. in serbian tradition, the red spots on the leaves are explained as our lady’s blood, which dripped onto the leaves of this plant when she was menstruating – hence its name of bogorodichina trava, or bogoroditsa, bogorodichitsa, gospino tsveche, gospina tarva, gospino zelie [the herb of the theotokos] [čajkanović 1985: 259]. in serbia peonies are believed to take their color from blood shed at the battle of kosovo field in 1389, while in dobrich in northeastern bulgaria the different colors of peonies are explained thus: the black ones grew out of the blood of gypsies, the blue from the blood of turks, and the red from the blood of the serbs [radenković 1996: 36-37]. another plant, lady’s thumb or redshank, polygonum persicaria l. also has dark red spots on its leaves. it is believed that the leaves were used by the blessed virgin when she was menstruating, which is why in one local serbian tradition the plant is known as trava majke božje [the herb of the mother of god]. the herb can also be called golgotska trava or hristova krv [calvary herb, christ's blood] because it allegedly grew on calvary, where the blood of the crucified christ blood dripped onto it, resulting in its spotted leaves [shpis-ćulum 1995: 425 (29)]. in one serbian song pavle’s young wife, who is jealous of his sister and her closeness to her husband, kills his steed, his falcon, and her own 132 child in that order, and then blames her sister-in-law. pavle then kills his sister, whereupon sweet-smelling flowers – immortelle and basil – grow out of her blood. by contrast, the blood of the wicked wife gives birth to nettles and thorns [sofrić 1990: 202]. 3. the human body in general the etiological legend about a brother and a sister turned into a flower because of their incestuous relations is well known among the east slavs. this motif served as the basis for plant names like the russian bratki [brothers], brat-sestra [brother-sister], ivan-da-mar’ia [ivan and maria] which refer usually to two kinds of flowers: the blue cow-wheat, melampyrum nemorosum l., and the violet, viola tricolor l., which possesses the unusual feature of combining two colors in one flower [chubinskii 1872: (i, 1), 82; pa: xxi 10 е.]. there are also texts where there is no connection with incest: in a belarusian variant from the homel’ region a father abandons his son and daughter in the forest. grief then makes them turn into the flower bratki [usacheva 2000: 282]. in a croatian song wormwood grows from the body of a woman who slandered her daughter-in-law whom the earth would not accept [usacheva 2000: 273]. elsewhere it is believed that tobacco grew from the dust of the devil’s corpse or from the body of the woman who cut off the head of john the baptist [bulashev 1909: 380, 38]. the putrid smell of elder, according to ukrainian and polish legend, came about because this was the tree on which judas hanged himself [sa 1: 268]. chicory often grows on roadsides as though it was awaiting someone, leading to it being named in czech čekanka, from čekat ‘to wait’. the name is connected with a legend about a girl named chekanka, who killed herself on her sweetheart’s grave and turned into a chicory plant; cichorium sativum, which then received her name [sofrić 1990: 41]. belief that an individual may have a double in the natural world is widespread, with the associated idea that you must never harm these natural doubles for fear of harming the person himself. in leskovats (serbia) people believed that certain trees act as an individual’s double and hence, as soon as the tree falls, the person will immediately die. in montenegro, when twins plant fruit trees at the same time, the one whose tree is the first to wither will be the first to die. for the hutsuls an uprooted apple-tree was an omen of the death of the master or mistress of the house. and conversely, in poles’e after the death of the master or the human body and the plant world folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 133 mistress an apple or pear-tree would be felled. pregnant women were not allowed to participate in the grafting of fruit trees, as it was believed that the baby would die if the graft failed to take or the tree was felled [agapkina 1994: 85, 87]. the custom of planting a tree after a child is born is widely known. usually it was a fruit tree or a tree with positive symbolic associations such as an oak or a birch. if one of these trees died, it was believed, the person to whom it belonged would also shortly die. aspen, a tree with negative connotations was seldom used as a human double, and then only in an inverted relationship, such as in the russian rite of planting a young aspen near the house when a child was ill: if the tree died, the child was supposed to survive, and vice versa [sa 3: 570]. in some rituals plants were used as a complete substitute for the individual, especially in communication with the other world. for example, in western serbia, in the rite of “ransoming” a twin brother or jednomesechić [a person born in the same month], the brother who was doing the redeeming would place a large white or yellow flower on the dead brother’s chest, saying: “jа теби бели цвет, – ти мени бели свет!” [i [give to] you a white flower, – you [give me] the great wide world!] [tolstoi 1988: 86-87]. (5) finally, in northwestern bulgaria, in the montana district, there existed a death-wedding rite for young people who died before they could marry. in this rite a dead youth was “married” to a stone with a woman’s headscarf tied round it, and a dead maiden to a bramble branch [vinogradova 2000: 325]. male/female it was widely believed that a tree could have a “gender”, as, for example, in the folk images of the birch as a female symbol, and the oak and the sycamore as male. among the east slavs planting a fir or a birch near a house was banned because they would “drive the women out” of the house, while it was a serbian custom to take the chemise of a woman who had recently been confined and place it under a male or female tree, depending on whether she wanted her next child to be a boy or a girl [sa 2: 62]. furthermore, trees of different “sexes” were thought capable of having relationships with each other and of passing these capacities on to humans, as can be seen from the use in love magic of bark taken from a site where a “male” and a “female” tree (a birch and an oak, for example) grew together [sa 2: 63]. finally, bulgarians in the pirin region in southwest bulgaria believed that the ash and mulberry are brother and 134 sister, and so would never rub twigs from these two trees together when making a fire. barrenness and children the arrival of children in this world was very often connected with plants (especially in euphemistic explanations about their genesis).(6) children were told that they had been found among the cabbages, potatoes, cucumbers, onions or pumpkins, or else in flowers, nettle, thistle, on a pussy-willow, birch, oak, pine, apple-tree etc. [vinogradova 2000: 353-54]. the floral code is also dominant in expressions denoting an illegitimate child; typical of this are kapustnichek and krapivnik in russian, kopřivník in czech and polish pokrzywnik, all meaning a cabbage or nettle child [machek 1971: 275]. a woman who was menstruating was able to pass her ability to “blossom” on to a tree, if it was not bearing any fruit. conversely, it was thought that a woman who was barren would deprive a tree of its fertility by her touch or glance. to escape her infertility she had to eat particular parts of a fruit tree; for example, the three first buds or flowers, the first fruits (though this was detrimental to the tree) or the fruit of the second harvest in the same year. another way of escaping infertility was to hang your shirt on a fruit tree upside down for a night and then the next morning to eat any living creature (such as an ant or a beetle), that had become trapped in it [sa 1: 167; agapkina 1994: 85-86]. even today the belief that giving birth to twins is the result of eating double fruits, for example apples that have grown together, persists in a number of areas. all these data demonstrate the close mutual influence between the human and plant worlds. they may exchange fertility, but the process should be balanced. the excessive accumulation of vital energies on one side destroys the natural balance, and the situation can only be corrected at the expense of victims from the other side. an example is the belief, familiar to all the slavs, that if fruit trees blossom twice in the same year then this is a sign of an impending disaster (high mortality or famine in the village, death or a bastard in the family) [nikiforovskii 1897: 127 nos 925, 926; demich 1899: 1262]. here an excessive concentration of vital energies in one part of the whole formed by nature and culture must be compensated at the expense of the other. disease passing on an illness is a common form of healing among the slavs, and a disease could be passed to a person, to cattle, or to an object, as the human body and the plant world folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 135 well as to plants; thus the belarusians “passed on” a fever to the aspen, while the east slavs as a whole promised the mountain ash that they would not break its branches nor eat its berries in exchange for its curing their toothache. a tree might also be threatened and such threats would be accompanied by bending the top of a tree to the ground. mouse bloodwort, hieracium pilosella l., is known in ukrainian as nechui viter [the not-feeling-the-wind herb], as the leaves of this lowgrowing plant do not move in the wind. this explains its use as a treatment for fever [annenkov 1876: 167] – the essential quality of not feeling or not reacting found in the plant is to be passed to the sick person. character plant names can also be used for delineating character; thus, in wedding songs, the new relatives of a young married woman (her mother-in-law or sisters-in-law) are often compared with stinging nettles or the thorny dog-rose. in a ukrainian folk tale from the kharkiv region the children, whose father was a grass snake, turned into plants after their father's death. the treacherous daughter, who had betrayed the secret of her father’s identity, became a nettle after her mother uttered a curse over her: “и будешь ты всегда причинять людям жгучую боль, как теперь ты причинила ее мне!” [for ever shall you cause others fiery pain, just as you did to me!]. by contrast her brother vasia, who had kept the secret, turned into sweet basil (ukr. vasil’ki). before this happened, his mother said to him: “люди будут наслаждаться твоим запахом и будут всегда держать тебя в своих хатах и в своих церквах!” [people will enjoy your scent and keep you always in their houses and churches!] [p. i. 1891: 125-28]. 4. emotions and states grief the appearance of a given flower may evoke an association with a particular emotion. thus the water (or purple) avens, geum rivale l., acquired the name of paniknitsa [the limp herb] in belarusian dialect because of its drooping flowers [gancharyk 1927: 194]. an association of this kind may serve as a basis for a plant’s use, as in perm’ province where the nodding catchfly, silene nutans l., is known as potoskuika [the wistful herb], because its flower heads bent down to the ground as 136 though in grief. as a result, this plant was thought to be able to cure grief, sadness, and similar afflictions [krylov 1876: 81]. fear some texts explain not the origin of the plant itself, but its distinctive feature, for example the trembling of the aspen. in one bulgarian legend a serpent marries a girl and they have a daughter called treperushka, who betrays her father’s secret to her relatives on her mother’s side. they then kill him. on his deathbed he changes his daughter into a tree, which will shake day and night, and curses her: “тизе, треперико, дрво да станеш и ден’ и ношк’а мирка да немаш, зиме и лете се да трепереш!” [treperika, become a tree, know no rest day and night, and shake in winter and in summer!] [sa 3: 570]. similarly, it was believed that the trunk of the birch turned white with fear, when judas wanted to hang himself on it. shame bur-parsley, caucalis grandiflora, is known in serbian as stidak, sramak, meaning shame. the flower is white with a red spot in the middle, and the serbs explain the name by saying that in days of yore the flower had more red on it, but nowadays it has less and less because shame in people is disappearing [čajkanović 1985: 223; sofrić 1990: 207]. sleep the meadow pasqueflower, pulsatilla pratensis and pulsatilla latifolia, are known in russian as son-trava, and belarusian as son lugavy, son-trava [the sleeping herb] because of the limp form of the plant, whose flower almost touches the ground. conclusion it has been possible to see the dependence of the symbolic aspects of a plant on its features, with several semantic models for likening a plant and a body part: color, form, smell, the ability to sting and so on. these features are reflected in phytonyms, phraseology, folklore (above all in etiological legends), and, lastly, in the way plants are used in folk magic and medicine.(7) the three levels of language, folklore and ritual are connected, though it is not always possible to find all three for one specific motif. the most important feature here, it may be assumed, is the shape of a plant – that is, the similarity in form with a human body the human body and the plant world folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 137 part. when a phytonym is based on its usage, the deeper reason is form again (as, for example, in healing headaches). size becomes important in actions involving plants only in the case of vegetables. the anthropomorphization revealed in the data discussed in this article works as a structuring force, regulating folk knowledge about the world of plants. however, what we find is not just mutual relations between two codes, but a complex system, where sustainability is maintained in at least two ways. the system works “vertically” in the possibility of expressing the same meaning using a word – the name of a plant – or a folklore text and in the use of plant symbolism in the enactment of ritual. the system also works “horizontally” in the possibility of expressing the same meaning through different codes. for example, the motif of the “grass-snake’s wife” seen in the floral code (here floral includes both trees and herbs) also exists in teriomorphic code: the daughter turns into a frog, or the son into a nightingale [sa 3: 39]. such an example demonstrates the systematic character of the mythological model of the world. notes 1 this article was first published in a slightly altered form in slovene in človeško telo in “rastline. medsebojni odnosi med dvema sistemoma poimenovanja”, etnolog. glasnik slovenskega etnografskega muzeja, 2005, 15: 137-50. 2 this may refer to eryngium planum l. 3 this may refer to anastatica hierochuntica l. 4 the orchid family, orchidaceae, has tuber-like roots, with the strong new root adjoining the previous year's dying root. 5 such people were supposedly so closely connected that the death of one led inevitably to the death of the other. to prevent the second death, the rite of “ransoming” was necessary. 6 children may also be “brought” by animals and birds (a hare, stork, raven, goose, hawk, swan, cuckoo or sea-gull), or by other humans (an old woman, gypsies or travelers sent by god). they can also be “purchased” [vinogradova 2000: 349]. 7 in manuscript herbals, the form and color of plant roots also played a main role in love magic. the features and functions of the herbs can therefore be used to help identify the plants described in early herbals. 138 bibliography afanas’ev, аleksandr. 1994 [1865-69]. афанасьев, александр. поэтические воззрения славян на природу: в 3-х т. 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[complete illustrated dictionary – herbal book, collected from the newest botanic and medical works by drs e. n. zalesova and o. v. petrovskaia]. санкт-петербург: а. а. каспари. microsoft word folk2006[3] sheryl format3.doc reviews 117 reviews elizabeth ann warner (e. e. uorner). vladimir iakovlevich propp i russkaia fol'kloristika. filologicheskii fakul'tet sankt-peterburgskogo gos. universiteta: spb, 2005. 143 pp. 165 rubles (paper). isbn 5-84650092-7. elizabeth warner’s new book, vladimir iakovlevich propp i russkaia fol’kloristika (vladimir iakovlevich propp and russian folkloristics) is an important work that no specialist interested in russian folklore or ethnography can afford to ignore. in this compact study of propp (1895-1970), arguably the most influential russian folklorist of the twentieth century, warner demonstrates the influences on his thinking, both in the formative years as a student and young lecturer, of the great russian philologists of pre-revolutionary russia, and of his colleagues in the early years of the soviet state. warner’s study proves the essential unity of propp’s four most important books and many of his other works as well. the first two chapters deal with morphology of the folktale (morfologiia skazki). included under this rubric are sections dealing with propp’s biography, although this is a topic to which she frequently returns as the book progresses. mainly though, her interest is in the reception of morphology in the west, and here she provides some telling blows to the translations of the two english editions that led western scholars so far astray in their understanding of propp’s work, and the fascinating question of whether propp was a formalist in the 1920s. a section is devoted to the famous dispute between propp and claude levi-strauss. in it warner establishes that much of the problem was directly related to the fact that levistrauss had no access to propp’s russian text and therefore followed the mistranslations of the american editions. on the other hand, she points out that propp did not have a clear understanding of the french scholar’s objections either. by and large, propp’s morphology disappeared from the russian public’s view in the long period from circa 1930 until not long before the second edition appeared in 1969, but as warner establishes, the book never disappeared from the consciousness of russian folklorists. it was also bound to attract the attention of soviet critics in their campaign against formalism, but propp never altered his views, insisting that his was a preliminary study to establish the nature of the wondertale and not the final product of his scholarship on that topic. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 118 it is a great pity that in the western world propp’s morfologiia skazki is the only one of his books to be widely known. this is especially true of his second work, the historical roots of the wondertale (istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki), which appeared in 1946. providing the flesh to the skeleton of morphology, historical roots soon got propp into hot water in the dangerous years immediately following world war ii. warner carefully follows the vicissitudes of propp and his work, wondering how he managed to escape the harsh treatment meted out to his colleagues in leningrad university. the thesis of historical roots is that the wondertale’s origins are to be sought in ancient myth and ritual. however, given the paucity of direct evidence for either of these in russian tradition, propp makes wide use of evidence from other traditions. in warner’s opinion the work laid the foundation for a new methodological approach to folklore as a whole. she terms it “interethnic, comparative, and historical,” what would later be called the “historical-typological method.” certainly he was publicly denounced for this and accused of being a marxist in the west, while in the soviet union he was called a “pseudo-marxist.” one question i found myself asking is whether warner thinks propp was in fact a marxist. there seems to be evidence on both sides of an answer to this point and it would have been interesting had she put the question to propp’s former colleagues or students. one of the fascinating things about this book is the use professor warner makes of her extensive contacts among russian folklorists to answer many similar questions. an example: was propp ever imprisoned during the leningrad purges? her answer based on the direct knowledge of his colleagues and friends is that it is most unlikely. in the third of his great studies, the russian heroic epic (russkii geroicheskii epos), published in 1955, propp tackled the problem of the historical basis of the russian byliny (folk epics). as warner points out, his theory that the various byliny were created at various stages in russian history but that they did not necessarily reflect particular historical events set him at odds with some of the most influential soviet historians including b. a. rybakov and d. s. likhachev. all this was part of a larger discussion about the historical basis of folklore, touching on such perennial questions as the genesis of the various genres, especially the byliny. the question of the aristocratic origins of these poetic songs, mostly collected from peasants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not just an academic one: the communist party weighed in with its own arguments against the historical school and reviews 119 propp found himself once more on the defensive. as a result of the campaigns against n. ia. marr and his followers, instigated by stalin, and the continuing battle against structuralism, propp saw his heroic epic emasculated by the authorities and turned into a work more or less acceptable to doctrinaire marxists. in fact, however, the question of the genesis and historicity of the epic songs remains a thorny one fifty years on. propp’s fourth study, russian agrarian celebrations (russkie agrarnye prazdniki), published in 1963, represents, according to warner, the first attempt of a russian scholar to examine elements which various rural celebrations or festivals have in common rather than looking at the particular event as if it were unconnected to others. as warner herself is not only a folklorist but also an ethnographer, her comments are particularly noteworthy. it is here that she establishes how propp sought throughout all his works to show how folkloric texts are directly tied to the everyday life of the people who created and/or transmitted them, whether wondertales, historical byliny, or the rituals connected to life’s celebrations. the studies his students and followers have published over the years prove the correctness of his conception. professor warner finds fault with propp’s various works on many accounts, and she argues her objections with fairness and erudition. that is one of the pleasures of reading this book. another is the way she shows his evolution from the folklorist of morphology to ethnographer who uses structural methods combined with the historical data and ethnographic evidence to create a fundamentally new approach to the study of folklore taken as a whole. in the end she agrees with kirill vasil’evich chistov’s clever characterization of propp as “a cat who went his own way.” a twelve-page bibliography concludes this fascinating book that deserves a wide readership. jack v. haney seattle folklorica 2006, vol. xi editor's note folklorica 2016, vol. xx iii editor’s note this issue of folklorica illustrates the flexibility and fluidity of the vernacular tradition. it features articles that discuss the intersection of popular culture, in the forms of norshtein’s iconic cartoon hedgehog in the fog and the more recent mel’nitsa production ilya muromets and solovei the robber, and the folk tradition. nataliya bezborodova’s article examines the connection between the beloved character of the hedgehog and ukrainian protest lore during the maidan events of 2013-14. kate koppy’s work also explores the political, in this case in russia, and the subtext of the retelling of the bogatyr ilya’s story in the 2007 animated feature. two other pieces examine the interrelationship of differing traditions as well, this time with an emphasis on turkic material. nadezhda oinotnikova discusses how biblical stories about noah’s ark and the great flood were adapted into the legend cycles of the siberian turkic peoples. el’mira kayumova provides an overview of data of the folk musical forms collected in 2013 among the kriashen tatars in her field report. she details what musical forms persist and how they have adapted to changing circumstances and the influence of popular culture. finally, jelena koreleva and tatiana filosofova study how the literary and folk traditions merge in a short story produced by the latvian old believer and folk artist maria blokhina. at a time when we are faced with rising nationalist sentiments across the world, these works elucidate not only the resilience of vernacular practices, but also the importance of the folkloric approach to these question. our work reveals how folk tradition overcomes cultural barriers between peoples of different cultures by adopting material from “opposing” societies and making it their own. at the same time, the articles in this issue also demonstrate how folklore may support agendas that are divisive and draw those very boundaries between cultural groups and their nations. in this climate, the folklorist and the ethnographer are voices that must be heard loudly and clearly. we grapple with the beautiful and the ugly messages in the material we study on a daily basis. we are able to contextualize the power of belief and tradition in ways that most folklorica 2016, vol. xx iv would simply write off as the product of faulty logic or a poor education. as editor of folklorica, i am proud that the slavic, east european and eurasian folklore association continues to provide a space to hear the voices of folklorists from across the world on critical topics so central to our future. i hope we will continue to do so for many years to come. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby, editor microsoft word folkxiv_author.doc reviews folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 191 heretz, leonid. russia on the eve of modernity: popular religion and traditional culture under the last tsars. cambridge: cambridge university press. 2008. notes. bibliography. index. ix + 265 pp. $99 (cloth). isbn 978-0-521-88177-7 more than thirty years ago, when this reviewer was developing an interest in traditional russian culture, only one of the half dozen historians of russia in her home institution was interested in peasants. he was regarded as an oddball, just as folk culture was covertly, and sometimes overtly, regarded as quaint and irrelevant. fortunately, times have changed, and nowadays historians have become much more interested in the russian peasants, and more specifically in their cultural attitudes. professor heretz takes this trend further by arguing convincingly that the traditional peasant world view continued to survive in a world of change, and hence any assessment of peasant reactions to various crises in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century russia must bear this in mind. while alive to the impact of modernization and social change, he emphasizes continuities, something entirely familiar to ethnographers and folklorists. for them the most interesting aspects of this book will be the elucidation of aspects of the peasant response to specific historical and social circumstances in the period 1880-1916. as heretz argues, “the vitality and intricacy of the empire’s civilization arose from the interaction of the dynamic principle of modernization with the more passive yet extremely resilient force of tradition” (1). the book divides naturally into two. the first part presents a concise survey of the peasant worldview and discussions of eschatological attitudes among the old believers, sectarians and the peasantry as a whole. these furnish the context for the subsequent studies of peasant reaction to specific events: the assassination of alexander ii in 1881 (chapter 5), the famine and cholera outbreak of 1891-92 (chapter 6), the russo-japanese war of 1904-05 (chapter 7), the 1905 revolution (chapter 8) and the first world war (chapter 9). chapter 5 establishes the key dualistic elements in peasant thinking: folk monarchism (the view of the tsar as benign father and deliverer), and the demonization of the “lord” (barin). as subsequent chapters show, the “lords” included not just the landowners, but also any educated group whose attitudes conflicted with their own. attempts to bring “progress” to the peasants were therefore doomed, since those introducing the changes were seen as apostates and hence of the devil’s camp. 192 in chapter 1 on the traditional worldview the author rightly points out that our view of the peasants is often based on the writings of the liberal intelligentsia who had little sympathy and understanding for a religious worldview. he takes the peasants as they saw themselves, as true orthodox. in this way he rolls up official and popular orthodoxy into a seamless entity, at the same time viewing the peasant worldview as essentially religious. there is much to be said for this approach in the context of the topic and period under discussion, particularly in this chapter which looks at various manifestations of apocalyptic thinking, such as chain letters, omens, portents, memorates and fabulates (here termed “contemporary legends”), as well as mistrustful reactions to facets of modernization like the railroad, science and technology. peasants’ belief in themselves as true bearers of orthodoxy extended to a conviction in the rightness of their worldview. in this context the maintenance of ritual observance and adherence to social and religious norms became crucial. beyond the bounds of the book, however, the designation of their world view as religious is somewhat limiting as a tool for discussion; for example, peasant views of what constitutes a sin include offences against hygiene or social convention that have nothing to do with religion. orthodoxy is similarly sometimes a less useful means than the reference to a magico-religious view for explaining the dichotomies in the peasant world view, whether spatial, temporal or social (for example, them/us, this world/the other world, local/outside world, peasants/masters), even if the peasants themselves made no distinction. the following two chapters look at minority religious groups, the old believers and sectarians respectively. the approach here is not to look at the attitudes of these groups in the target period (1880-1917), but to present a concise survey focusing on the evolution of key beliefs and attitudes. professor heretz argues convincingly that the old believers “act as a typology for russian anti-modernism” (75), and that the various sectarian groups display in exaggerated form some of the deep-rooted pessimistic attitudes and ideas of the peasantry as a whole. gloomy views of the present and the future are still characteristic of russian peasants, as margaret paxson has shown in solovyovo. the story of memory in a russian village [1997]. chapter 4 on folk eschatology largely ignores beliefs about the afterlife, although the multitudinous folklore texts (religious songs, tales and obmiraniia, for example) on this topic show how crucial these were to the peasants in reflecting and defining moral norms and social reviews folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 193 attitudes. instead, the chapter focuses particularly on ideas about the end of the world as found in apocryphal texts such as the revelations of pseudo-methodius of patara (wrongly titled here), and the lord’s disputation with the devil. these may not have had such wide currency as texts about the afterlife, but they relate much more clearly to broader social and political developments. modernization, it is convincingly argued, triggered fears of the end of the world. the book is based on wide and careful, if not exhaustive, reading of published ethnographic data and commentary relating to the period and the events chosen. this breadth is not matched by reading of contemporary publications, except in history. for example, the only folklorists to receive a pat on the back are a. a. panchenko for his 2002 study of sectarians, христовщина и скопчество: фольклор и традиционная культура русских мистических сект [the sects of flagellants and castrators: the folklore and traditional culture of russian mystical sects. moscow: ob’edinennaia gumanitarnoe izdatel’stvo], and m. m. gromyko’s мир русской деревни [the world of the russian village. moscow: molodaia gvardiia. 1991], a book that promotes the pro-orthodox line of the moscow institute of ethnography (23). the charitable explanation would be that much of the book was written several years ago, as may be concluded from the discussion of the flagellants (khlysty) and castrates (skoptsy). here the author’s argument concentrates on deriding now outdated approaches that focused on the possible pagan origins of their beliefs or their bizarre sexual practices. although he footnotes aleksandr panchenko’s key study from 2002, it does not form the basis for discussion as would be expected. of course, professor heretz makes no claim to be a folklorist, but the stumbling block may be his conviction, expressed in chapter 1, that russian folklorists are obsessed with winkling out pagan survivals from orthodox christian and secular elements in the traditional world view (17-19). to illustrate his point he refers to b. a. rybakov’s two works of 1981 and 1987, and briefly, and somewhat more sympathetically, to n. i. tolstoi. it is certainly the case that in the late soviet period the dominant school in the study of russian folklore led by tolstoi was fascinated by pre-christian elements in folk language, belief and ritual, but in the last decade and a half folklorists have increasingly taken into account the socio-historical context of the data. apocalypticism has been a popular subject. one example, highly relevant to the topic of professor heretz’s book, will suffice to make the point: e. a. mel’nikova’s article of 2004 “эсхатологические ожидания рубежа xix–xx веков: конца света не 194 будет?” [eschatological expectations at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries: isn’t the end of the world nigh?] [антропологический форум 1: 250-66; translated into english as “eschatological expectations at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the end of the world is [not] nigh?” forum for anthropology and culture 1: 253-70]. not only does this article contain many useful references, both to recent publications and to ethnographic sources and commentary, but also a careful discussion of the impact on the peasants of the craze for astronomy and science among urban groups in the late nineteenth century. the author shows that while some bolder spirits became interested in astronomy and the explanation for comets, others interpreted comets according to traditional eschatological thinking. if professor heretz succeeds in persuading his historical colleagues that they must take traditional cultural attitudes seriously when making their judgments, he deserves very considerable gratitude. folklorists, whether studying russians or another slavic group will find the analysis of traditional attitudes in relation to specific events extremely enlightening and revealing, but may not enjoy being misrepresented. faith wigzell school of slavonic and east european studies university college london london, uk microsoft word folkf05f.doc 76 priscilla carrasco. praise old believers. portland, or: burdock/burn art resource, inc., 2003. limited edition of 250 copies. black/white and color photographs. 335 pages. $100.00 (cloth). isbn 0-9720964-1-8. praise old believers is aptly named. a coffee-table sized volume with excellent photographic reproduction and art-book design, it weaves together text and photographs (some in color) of old believers in oregon and alaska from 1966-1987. throughout, praise old believers takes a loving and largely uncritical look at the families who moved to the usa in the mid-1960s, bringing with them an old believer folk tradition that had found its way through russia, ukraine, china, romania, turkey, and brazil before settling in woodburn, or and nikolaevsk, alaska. praise old believers has a rather elegiac feeling. it is a respectful depiction of old believer life as the author saw it, representations of tradition in the midst of rapid change. no less importantly, the book chronicles a way of viewing the old believers. i began researching old believers during the period when some photos for this book were taken, also traveling to oregon and alaska in the mid 1980s. somehow, the old believers conjured a yearning for a past that did not exist in america, stirring up an awe for people who had withstood travel around the globe in order to fulfill their lives according to old believer custom and faith. to my mind, a sense of quiet sadness permeates priscilla carrasco’s work, even when describing the joyful wedding celebrations that take up a large section of the book. for many scholars and observers of old believer communities, this sadness—for a culture long-tended but soon to be lost to american life—plays a remarkable role in coloring our scholarly perceptions of time, place, and custom. the book focuses on three old believer groups that moved to america in the early-mid 1960s. each of these communities had traveled thousands of miles. two of them—the harbintsy and sintsiantsy—came from china. their stories, told in anecdotal form throughout the book, are harrowing tales of flight from soviet and communist chinese authorities. their folk life was made unique by their environment—not only did they live in mainland china, but they also spent time in hong kong, brazil, and new jersey on their way to permanent homes in oregon and alaska. the turchani, products of nekrasov and kuban old believers who had moved to turkey, joined the two “chinese” groups in the united states. (there had been an earlier old believer migration to the usa in the early twentieth century but there was little interaction between them and the newcomers.) from a folklore perspective, these groups are fascinating—coming from a shared religious and cultural tradition, they were forced together after long and harrowing separate journeys. yet all three maintained folk traditions as a crucial part of their identity. the book is devoted to photographs of old believers in their homes, at work, and during important ritual occasions. nearly all the pictures are of women and children, with a few younger men and a smattering of old men. most pictures are of-the-moment, chronicling a particular movement or interaction between mother and child, siblings, or friends. in the posed pictures (like the portrait on the book’s cover), old believer subjects gaze directly at the lens. this produces a frank and guileless portrait. place, subject, and date accompany the photographs, making them useful for comparative studies. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 77 on facing pages, carrasco has written accompanying text, more evocative than scholarly. interestingly, she tends toward poetic language in her own narrative. thus, on page eighty-two she writes “they are married in the church before dawn, / the angels are here to listen.” when, however, she reports on old believer descriptions of their own lives, carrasco leans toward traditional prose. here is a description of old believers in china: “‘i was eleven years old,’” said agafia, ‘before i ever saw the city. i had heard about it, but i did not know what it was. once a truck came to our village. everyone came out to see it… and to follow it. the man, the driver, spoke russian. he took us for a ride. we rode in the back of it. this was the first time i ever saw a truck’” [193]. if domestic life and weddings are leitmotifs for the book, they are woven together by carrasco’s fascination with old believer embroidery, which she has carefully reproduced. in fact, the eight color photographs in the book show particularly important examples: on page 148, for instance, is a color detail photograph of needlework from sinkiang province about 1920. carrasco takes care to let the women embroiderers describe their craft. not only does the text describe the changes in embroidery style and material, but each picture also has provenance information. these are sensitively made and carefully selected photographs, meant to show the transformation of traditional craft across time and geography. the book is completed by brief but thoughtful additions—a preface by robert whitmore and a short history of the old belief by margaret mckibben. these, along with a glossary of terms used in the book, help turn this handsome art volume into a useful scholarly tool. roy r. robson university of the sciences in philadelphia seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 untitled 200 фьялкова, лариса коли гори сходяться: нарис українськоізраїлських фольклорних взаємин [fialkova, larisa. when mountains meet: a study of ukrainian-israeli folklore connections]. kyiv: imfe (institute of folk art, folklore, and ethnology, ukrainian academy of sciences), 2007. 175 pp. isbn: 978-966-02-4631-7 what happens when a group of people leave a homeland that has been theirs for generations and move to a new home? does their folklore change or does it merely die out as people adapt to the new environment? does folklore help prepare people for the trauma of relocation? does it help them adjust to their new home? these and other questions are the subject of the growing field of diaspora studies, one to which fialkova has made a number of contributions. her latest work, published in ukrainian, focuses on the many people from ukraine who moved to israel when such relocation became possible. after a brief introduction which tells about the study of ukrainianjewish folklore in israel, fialkova turns to the folklore itself. the first section deals with the image of jerusalem in ukrainian folklore. using classic nineteenthand early twentieth-century sources such as kolessa, hnatiuk, and chubyns’kyi, fialkova shows that a positive image of jerusalem has existed in ukrainian folklore for a long time. jerusalem is “a sacred place in a sacred time,” a model of sanctity, so that even kyiv is referred to a “jerusalem on earth.” did the positive image of jerusalem beckon ukrainian jews to israel? did it make the adjustment easier? fialkova does not really answer these questions, though her placing the jerusalem chapter at the beginning of her book implies that the answer would be affirmative. additionally, her thorough examination of the ukrainian material gives a solid foundation for further research. there are three chapters in the next section and, in the first, fialkova takes a ukrainian folk hero, a robin hood figure named oleksa dovbush and examines jewish versions of legends about him. in many senses, the ukrainian jews have made dovbush their own. legends about dovbush’s infancy show how his family was cared for by a rabbi and reinterpret his name in terms of hebrew etymology to mean “hairy one,” a bear’s son type of hero. most important are stories about the adult dovbush and his relationship to a jewish religious figure and folk hero bal-shem-tov. in the legends, the two recognize each other’s powers, bal-shem-tov acknowledging the strength and courage of the ukrainian and dovbush perceiving the jew’s spiritual might. it is bal-shem-tov’s folklorica 2008, vol. xiii reviews 201 ability to make mountains come together so that he can walk across them which yields the title of this book. legends about treasure hidden in the catacombs under odessa are the subject matter of the next chapter. fialkova was fortunate to accidentally encounter a spelunker who was an excellent story teller. she recorded his stories about the catacombs beneath odessa and many other stories about caving in ukraine. the stories themselves are wonderful. an especially intriguing narrative claims that one of the treasures hidden under odessa was a miniature solid gold replica of the titanic, given to one of the residents in gratitude for his help. fialkova fleshes out the oral versions she collected by giving parallel narratives from other sources and analyzing the material. one is tempted to expand on her analysis and to say that the narratives are expressions of nostalgia for a homeland that is now buried by distance. this homeland, like the treasures sighted in caves, is something that one hopes to find again, but cannot. while the catacombs chapter may picture ukraine as a very attractive land, the chornobyl one does the opposite. fialkova gives us an abundance of dark chornobyl humor, some rhymed and some in prose, much of it from oral sources. interestingly, many of the fears expressed in chornobyl jokes have to do with male reproductive capacity. it is as if the chornobyl jokes mark ukraine as a land without a future, one that must be left behind if future generations are to live and prosper, or even be created in the first place. the last section of the book, called “the formation of a new ukrainian diaspora in israel,” pays a great deal of attention to language issues and does not have that much to do with folklore. the ukrainian language is not surviving well in israel. a ukrainian diaspora thrives, however. in this diaspora, expressions of ukrainian heritage take the form of material culture, including dolls and embroidered towels, some with combined jewish-ukrainian motifs and some with strictly ukrainian ones. all of these are illustrated with pictures. ukrainian heritage is expressed in social and cultural activities and fialkova details all of these. while this section may not focus on folklore, it helps us understand identity issues among the ukrainians now living in israel. as such, it also helps us make sense of the folklore. fialkova’s work offers both the folklore itself and the tools for analysis. her greatest virtue, i believe, is her familiarity with both east european and north american approaches to folklore. this allows her to focus on genres that most east european scholars would ignore, such as folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 202 personal narratives and jokes. and it also prompts her to collect and publish a number of folklore texts, something that tends not to be done in the politicsand theory-preoccupied west. fialkova’s book is a fun read, recommended to anyone with a knowledge of ukrainian and russian. natalie kononenko university of alberta edmonton allberta canada microsoft word folkxiv_author.doc reviews folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 195 haney, jack v. an anthology of russian folktales. armonk, n.y: m. e. sharpe, 2009. map, glossary, bibliographies, index of tale types and motifs. xxxvi+340. $84.95 (hardcover). isbn 978-0-7656-2305-8. it would be difficult to find a scholar today working in the field of slavic folklore who is unfamiliar with the name jack v. haney. his compendium, the complete russian folktale, represents one of the loftiest goals ever undertaken in this field – a collection of folktales containing at least one of every tale type in the aarne thompson (at) classification system. an anthology of russian folktales is a smaller edition which seeks to give a more casual overview of the material by drawing a small sample of texts, which haney has selected, from each of the books in the collection. the anthology is comprised of nine sections – a 34 page introduction, six chapters which each reflect one of the books in the complete series, a chapter of anecdotes (which haney has not yet compiled for the complete series), and a final chapter of newly edited долгие сказки [long poems], which haney has titled serial tales from the far north. the book also contains a useful map of the russian provinces ca. 1900, a glossary of foreign terms, and an index outlining all the at tale types contained in the book and the stories in which they occur. nicely bound in an appealing textbook style format, the book would be well-suited to a first or second year university classroom setting, possibly a companion piece to haney’s an introduction to the russian folktale, or equally fitting for private libraries and for casual readers who do not wish to own all seven books of the larger set. this accessibility does not mean, however, that the book would not appeal to scholars. the introduction to this book is one of the few i know which competently bridges the gap between the lay reader’s and the scholar’s interests. the collection, classification, genres and common motifs of the russian folktale are all covered, as well as a discussion of the narrators and the art of tale telling, yet none of this material is explored in enough depth to dissuade the common reader, only to enlighten and enrich the reading of the tales. each tale in the volume is prefaced with a short introduction, outlining where the story is from, who the narrator was, what significant tale types are employed and any other small facts that haney has deemed important about the tale. these preambles are new to the anthology and do not appear in the original collection. the selection within the book is competent and erudite. there are enough of the ‘old standards’ which make their way into every russian 196 collection – the soldier and death, ivan tsarevich, the gray wolf, and elena the most beautiful or the fox as confessor – to ensure that new readers are accommodated, but there are also a number of interesting, rare and unique tales – the mushrooms, baba yaga and the nimble youth and the forest spirit come to mind – for those who are well read in the russian corpus and revel in the rarer and more unusual material. there are a few odd omissions (a collection of this scope should include the cat who became head forester and the variant of vasilisa prekrasnaya where she is sent to obtain fire from baba yaga), though the exclusion of these tales is hardly a detriment to the book. altogether, the number of tales selected provides a surprising breadth of motifs and the amount of content continuity ensures that the average reader, upon completion, should be familiar with the regular cast of characters and able to solve any riddle a russian storyteller could pose. the distribution is also well judged, with the weight placed upon the tales of heroes and villains and tales of love and life chapters (18 and 28 tales respectively), while the animal tales, tales of magic, legends, tales of clever fools and anecdotes chapters receive slightly less attention (approximately 13 tales in each); the serial tales only number three due to their length. the inclusion of the serial tales from the far north is a unique pleasure and deserves special attention. these longer tales, which are a product of the working conditions of the northern narrators (274) and intended to be told over a series of nights (xxvii), combine numerous motifs and exhibit traces of literary influence due to their historically late recording. these stories have beautiful length, richness and ornamentation that make them exceptionally entertaining and a treat to read. they are a lovely addition to the book and one can only hope that haney will publish a larger collection of these tales in the near future. there is, however, one minor problem with the anthology, and that is the footnotes and annotations. because the majority of the tales in the collection have been taken directly from the books in the complete russian folktale, the footnotes have not been amended and pose numerous anachronisms and confusions. tale number 38 in the anthology (which is tale number 305 in the original collection) uses the diminutives vania, mitia and kolia (110) without explaining to the reader that these names reflect ivan, dmitrii and nikolai. later when the narrative shifts to calling the protagonist ivan, the average reader could be easily confounded. conversely, both tale 48 and tale 83 (each from different books in the complete collection) contain introductions that reviews folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 197 repetitively explain that the aspen tree is connected to judas’ suicide in russian folk-culture. these oversights are understandable given the nature of the book, but a careful edit could have proved immensely beneficial in perfecting the book and aiding the target audience. that being said, this book is a welcome addition to the assortment of russian folktale anthologies that have been printed in english. although the author’s discretion has framed the selection of the tales, the vast scope of the source material and the competent framework through which haney has approached the subject matter has produced perhaps the broadest and most representative anthology available to the english language reader. for those who cannot or do not wish to own the complete russian folktale, this book is an affordable alternative that provides a broad array of criterion pieces as well as a fine selection of rare, new and exciting tales. dorian jurić mcmaster university hamilton ontario, canada microsoft word folkxiv_author.doc cunningly lingual wives in hungarian ballad tradition folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 143 “a megcsalt férj” or cunningly lingual wives in hungarian ballad tradition louise o. vasvári stony brook university new york, usa abstract in this report i shall study one widely circulating european ballad tradition concerning wifely infidelity, to illustrate that although details among versions are temporally and culturally variable, they all belong to one narrative deep structure having to do with “cunningly lingual” wives and cuckolded husbands. these adulterous wives are a subcategory of the persistent antifeminist stereotype of the “unruly woman,” whose too active mouth, whether its voraciousness, garrulousness, or verbal cunning, implies bodily misrule, a topsy-turvy displacement of a woman’s even more fearful orifice, the vagina. i will mention noteworthy highlights from several ballad traditions, but i will concentrate on the hungarian corpus. through a gender-conscious reading, i will show that these retold tales that pretend to be about conjugal relations are merely another variant of misogynist male discourse on women, where the “misogyny reveals far more about masculinity and male views of the feminine than about real women” [gaunt 1995: 71]. in addition, hegemonic masculinist interpretations, including by scholars, have been complicit in a directed reading away from the misogyny. the earliest known variants of the ballad i shall discuss survive in two traditional medieval spanish ballads, known also in hundreds of modern oral variants. beyond hispanic tradition, versions also appear in many other languages, including french, italian, in south slavic languages, and even in yiddish, with the most widespread variants in anglo-american tradition [for a detailed analysis of these traditions, see vasvári 2008]. all the ballads in the tradition narrate how a husband returns home unexpectedly and surprises his wife with her lover. the lover’s presence is gradually revealed through a series of tell-tale clues–typically a horse, a sword, a hat, and perhaps physical evidence, such as his clothes, or, finally, even the sight of his moustache in the bed. the narrative core of 144 the ballad is a reiterative “testing dialogue,” in which the husband questions his wife about all the signs of her infidelity and through a smokescreen of cunning semiotic ruses she attempts to manipulate all the signs of her guilt by relocating them in a new context created by her women’s speech. she might claim, for example, that the saddled horse standing outside is a gift from her father for the husband, or, more ludicrously, that it is the cow that the maid left there; that the lover’s blue dolman on the bed is actually a mildewed bedspread; or, in an obscene variant, even that the lover’s genitalia are parsnips or perhaps beets! while the structure (but not the details) of the dramatic testing dialogue occur in almost all versions of the ballad, there are a variety of possible endings, ranging from the sadistic to the merely punitive, to the ambiguous and the comic, with the latter ending with the wife’s linguistic and sexual victory–a carnivalesque temporary suspension or reversal of normal rules of patriarchal culture. it is the hispanic variants of the adulterous wife that have been most widely studied, with some earlier critics claiming that since the common origin of the plot is from a medieval comic fabliau, the originality of the spanish version resides in having given the theme a morally superior tragic orientation, where the wife gets her deserved punishment. in fact, however, although the two extant oldest versions end with the wife’s death, among the hundreds of modern versions there are also many humorous ones. and, as we shall see, hungarian tradition contains far more violently sadistic versions than any known even in earlier hispanic tradition. although ballad collection in hungary started very late, with the first printed collections dating, not coincidentally, from the period of the war of independence in 1846-48, it is likely that some of the earliest themes (such as that of the building sacrifice) go back to ancient traditions [balassa and ortutay 1984: 515, dundes 1996]. vargyas conjectures, probably without adequate justification, that the hungarian version of the cunningly lingual wives ballad was a late addition to the tradition, based on a german ballad which circulated in the eighteenth century. however, armistead [2000: 70-71] has cogently argued for the importance in the hungarian repertoire of the region’s interaction with neighboring traditions, which suggests that the ballad could have just as well reached hungary through oral means. the hungarian ballad called “bárcsai”– after the lover’s name, is known only in transylvania, in five versions and one fragment [english versions in leader 232-39; vargyas 1983:11-14; balassa and ortutáy cunningly lingual wives in hungarian ballad tradition folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 145 1984: 531-32]. the fifty-line bárcsai begins in direct dialogue, with the deceitful wife urging the husband to go to kolozsvár to bring her back some batiste from her father’s house, when their son interrupts to warn the father not to leave because the mother loves bárcsai: ne menj apám, ne menj, aj ne menj házrol ki: anyámasszony bizony bárcsait szereti [do not go, father, do not go, aye, do not leave the house, / for mother is in love with barcsai]. this beginning is unusual in that the wife does not merely use the opportunity of her husband’s absence but actively plots his departure, and even more unusual is the active voice of the son because normally the mention of children in adultery stories is avoided, probably as their presence would be too suggestive that that child may not be the father’s, either. heeding his son’s words, the husband decides to turn back halfway. on his return he asks his wife to open the door, and there ensues a ritual series of requests and delaying tactics where she asks him, in turn, to wait until she puts on her skirt, her apron, her newly-soled boots, and her scarf. here the ritual questions are not a testing dialogue about the signs of the other man, as in most of the variants, but rather a catalogue of the (presumably undressed) wife’s reverse striptease. vargyas claims that there are no known analogues to this ballad, but this scene actually illustrates a clear interaction with other traditions, as, for example a catalan version, where another adulterous wife who hears a knock says she is ready to open for her lover but needs time to put on her clothes and shoes if it is her husband [vasvári 1999: 77, n. 4]. losing patience, the husband finally breaks down the door and demands the key to the chest in which the lover is hiding. the wife claims to have lost the key in the garden, but he kicks the chest open, finds the lover, and cuts off his head. the scene is familiar from fabliau tradition with the sexual suggestiveness of a phallic key, a folk symbol for the male organ (as, for example, in the jazz lyric, you’ve got the right key but the wrong keyhole), and the lover hiding in the chest, in turn, an image suggestive of the woman’s sexual organ. nevertheless, here it is really the lengthy dénouement with the husband’s sadistic verbal and physical revenge that is most important. he offers his wife three choices of death: to cut off her head, to sweep the house with her hair, or to let her sit up till morning bearing candles to entertain seven guests: három halál közül melyiket választod: vaj föbe löjjelek, vaj fejedet veghem, vaj hét asztal vendégnek vigon gyertyát tartasz” 146 [do you hear, wife, do you hear, wife, do you hear? which one will you choose of the three deaths?” have your choice now: shall i take your head? or shall i sweep the house with your silk hair? or would you prefer to sit up till morn, and bear candles to the entertainment of seven boards of guests?] (the english translation in leader 1967 i follow takes six lines to reproduce the three of the hungarian.) the wife naturally falls into the trap of choosing the third option, which is in actuality the most sadistic one. the husband then orders the servants to roll her up head to toe in oilcloth covered in pitch and the batiste that was “given free” by his father-in-law (an illogical detail, since having turned back halfway, he would not have been able to bring home the cloth), in effect making a candle out of her. in another version he has this done not by the servant but twelve young men, who are then to feast all night, with gypsy music playing, as she burns to death. this very sadistic version shows that the husband’s performance of heterosexual masculinity–here the salvaging of his honor–has to be acted out in a disciplinary program, whereby men need to show that they can master their wives in front of other men in a homosocial bonding situation, in this case specifically with young unmarried men, who are to learn from it how to deal with insubordinate women [for a similar case see my analysis of dec 9.9, 2004: 313-336]. alongside this sadistic bárcsai, there exist comic adultery ballads in hungarian, where it is less the craftiness of the woman that is emphasized than the stupidity of the henpecked and cuckolded husband. in a one-hundred-verse ballad collected by béla bartók from a twentysix-year-old woman in 1918, a megcsalt férj [the deceived husband] [vargyas 1976: 936-38], the husband is so aware of his plight that as he goes deeper and deeper into the house, from the barn, to the kitchen, hall, the main room, and the bedroom, he keeps on repeating: elhagyatott, megcsalhatott / férj vagyok mindég [am i not the silliest, most deceived husband that ever was?]. the couple exchange incongruously endearing vocatives during their interchange, he beginning each question with the ironic [kérdem] édes kedves feleségem ‘[[i ask you] my dear sweet wife]’ and she, in turn, replying mi baj van, angyalom [what’s wrong my angel], a detail probably influenced by a german version, which has herzliches weibchen and mein schätzchen, respectively. although f. w. meyer translated from english in l790 what he called “the tenant farmer’s return” that he called a bänkersängerlied ‘street ballad’ in german, the hungarian version has enough difference cunningly lingual wives in hungarian ballad tradition folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 147 from that german translation to show that it has clearly entered oral tradition and has been influenced by other variants. for example, in the german version the boots are beer tankards, the swords are spits to roast larks, and the jackets are tablecloths. as in the english predecessor of the ballad, the husband sees the following as he goes deeper and deeper into his house, from barn to kitchen, to hall, to room, to bedroom: three horses, which his wife calls milk cows her mother sent, three boots, which she calls beer tankards, three swords which she calls spits for larks (lerchenspitze), and three jackets which she calls tablecloths, until he gets to the bedroom, and in bed he sees three knights, whom his wife calls milkmaids and then comes the punch line, uttered by the husband: “i’ve never seen milkmaids with moustaches (zwickelbarte).” in the hungarian version the testing dialogue proceeds in five parts. the husband asks, in turn, whose are the boots, the swords (in the plural), the pair of soldiers’ hats, the coats, and he gets the replies that they are milk jugs, swords, kitchen knives, milk pots, and the servant girl’s mildewed dress. the wife’s replies are not merely lies but transparently ludicrous reinterpretations of language, attempting to deceive the husband both verbally and visually in order to convince him, literally, not to believe his eyes. finally, he asks, who are the pair of soldiers on his bed, and she replies it is her grandmother’s maid sweeping the room, to which he snaps back with what should be the punch line: szolgálonak pörge bajszát ‘ aj, ki látott már [whoever saw maids with red moustaches]. at this point, the comical version should end, or at best continue with an appropriate revenge, as in the german version, where the husband beats his wife, claiming that the blows were caresses sent by her mother, which vargyas deemed to be a very “felicitous ending,” but which i have called elsewhere “bawdy battering,” that is, where a wife’s beating is considered the height of humor because it is embedded in a comic text [vasvári 2004: 313-336]. however, here the ending suddenly turns brutal, with the husband declaring that he will hold a ball and behind the door there awaits a knotted rope and a big cudgel, an ending that is clearly a contamination from bárcsai. the knotted rope also recalls the hungarian proverb: a kötél ásztatva, az asszony verve jó [a rope is good when wet and a woman when beaten]. nor can this sadistic ending be simply a confused version recounted by one person because it appears elsewhere, as well. this is a clear indication that even if this comic version is a translation from the german, the deep structure adultery plot is so primary that it is possible to fuse such disparate treatments. 148 in living twentieth-century hungarian and romani tradition there are a number of comic songs about adulterous wives which are reduced only to the bare-bones testing dialogue, that i offer here in translation. the first is translated from the romani [csikó 1977; csenki and csenki 1980] and the second was collected by bartók and kodály [1979: 454]. we should not be surprised by the image of puss in boots in the first verse if we consider its potential erotic suggestiveness: az ablaknál ki járt éppen? mondd meg nekem, feleségem! ablakom alatt ki járt ma? csak a szomszédok macskája, szomszédunké ottan hátra, szomszédunké ottan hátra. de macskának nincs kalapja, a macskának nincs kalapja, se a lábán nincsen csizma, se a lábán nincsen csizma. ej, dehogy a macska volt az, a szeretőd maga volt az. [who just walked by under the window? / tell me, my wife! / who walked under the window today? / just the neighbor’s cat, / our neighbor’s back there, / our neighbor’s back there. // but cats don’t wear a hat, / cats don’t wear a hat, / and they don’t wear boots either,’ and don’t wear boots either. / no, it certainly wasn’t the cat but it was your lover himself. ] sári lányom, ki járt itt, ki járt itt,/ kinek a nagy pipaszára maradt itt? gépész, uram, jára itt, jára itt. / annak a nagy pipaszára maradt itt. hát az ágyat mi lölte, mi lölte,/ mért van ugy összegyürve, de gyürve? cica fogott egeret, egeret, / jatszott vele eleget, eleget. hát a hasad mi lölte, mi lölte, / miert van igy megpüffedve, püffedve? túrot ettem fikhagymát, fikhagymát, / attol püffedt ekkorát, ekkorát. [my dear sarah, who was here, who was here, / whose big pipe stem got left behind? / a mechanic was here, my husband, / it was his big pipe stem that got left behind. // and the bed, who poked at it, who poked at it? / why is it wrinkled, all wrinkled?/ the kitten caught a mouse, a mouse / and played with it a lot, a lot./ and what poked at your stomach, what poked it? / why is it so puffed up, puffed up? / i ate farm cheese with garlic, / and that’s why it puffed up so much, so much.] in the nineteenth century there were also a number of songs collected in french and italian dialects that had comic dénouements. however, by far the most widespread comic versions are in anglophone cunningly lingual wives in hungarian ballad tradition folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 149 tradition in two main variants, our goodman and the merry cuckold, where the song is a folk classic, perhaps the most popular ballad in oral tradition. over four hundred versions have been collected in british and american tradition, including many from hillbilly recordings, and as far away as new zealand and even india. because of its erotic nature francis james child only exceptionally allowed it into his magnum collection [child 1965: v. 274]. our goodman is better classified as a joke ballad, a narration of a humorous event working toward the surprise punch line, so that if the punch line is omitted or ruined the story is ruined, which explains why some spanish and hungarian versions with the violent endings grafted on cannot work except for those who find the wife battering hilarious. in a broader sense our goodman belongs to jokelore, a liminal popular oral discourse, the vast majority of whose manifestations are male-to-male, commenting on gender relations and aimed at relieving unfulfilled or failed sexual desire, with blame always placed on the woman as, alternately, promiscuous or frigid [dreitser 1999]. in our goodman the husband comes home drunk every night, a detail omitted in the the merry cuckold, where, on the other hand, the extra ludicrousness is provided by the husband coming home and finding not one but three men in his bed. both proceed with versions of the expected testing dialogue, where the wife gives absurd replies, claiming that the horse is a pig, or that the three horses are milking cows, the sword[s] are a porridge-spurtle or roasting spits, the wig is a hen, or, alternately, that the three cloaks are bedspreads, the boots, pudding bags, the three pairs of breeches, petticoats, the three hats, skimming dishes, the head of the lover in bed, a mush melon, or the three lovers in bed, milk-maids. punch lines include: godzounds! milking maids with beards on! the like was never known! or, in another version, but whiskers on a baby’s face / i never saw before, or the somewhat snappier i’ve traveled this wide world over, a hundred miles or more, / but whiskers on a mush melon i never did see before (with the yiddish variant, but whiskers on a cabbage head i never saw before). in fact, in many cases informants were handicapped by modesty and would not reveal much more obscene versions they knew, and in other cases collectors would not write down such versions [on the bowdlerization and expurgation of sexual folklore, see goldstein 1967: 374-386]. fortunately we have a few of these collected in eugene vance’s collection of “unprintable folk songs,” which give a flavor of some of those bowdlerized punch lines, as in the 150 following [53-57; see also goldstein 1967: 376]: but a pecker on a hired girl/ i never seen before; but ballyx on a rolling pin/ i never seen before, or to the question: whose prick is in the cunt where mine had ought to be? and the following answer: you old fool, you blind fool, an’ can’t you plainly see it’s nothin’ but a parsnip my granny sent to me?— well, it’s miles i have traveled, this wide world all o’er, but ballyx on a parsnip i never saw before. in the tamer versions the lover is metonymically represented by his beard of whiskers, which is, along with face, forehead, eyes, and mouth, the public part of his face which concentrates social identity, in the obscene versions he is metonymically reduced to his private parts, which normally are concealed. worse, these sex organs are described as parsnips, or in another version, pickled beets, what i have elsewhere dubbed “vegetal-genital onomastics.” as i was preparing this study i happened to receive an e-mail version of jokelore in hungarian that in its deep structure clearly belonged to this same tradition, but with a difference, for here for the first time we get a husband who gives more than ample cause for his wife’s adultery, and it is she who gets the appropriate punch line, as well. could this finally be a subversive version in oral jokelore of our tired retold tale? i offer here a translation of the hungarian version i heard, but i assume that english versions circulate, as well: a wife says to her husband in a dissatisfied voice: -géza! the light isn’t working. -what am i, an electrician? the next day she says again. -géza, the faucet is leaking. -what am i, a plumber? the third day. -géza! the shelf fell off. -what am i, a carpenter? the next day the husband steps into the house, and the lights are lit, the faucet doesn’t drip, even the shelf is in its place. cunningly lingual wives in hungarian ballad tradition folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 151 -who fixed these? -the neighbor came over and he said he’d fix everything if i bake him a cake or i go to bed with him. -and what did you do? -what am i, a baker? in a continuation of the spirit of the medieval discourse on women, where the earliest versions of these tales originated, some scholars today are still capable of misreading misogynist texts as if they were guidebooks for morality. wolfgang spiewok [1994: xii] raises the question why might it be that so many german novelle ridicule cuckolds, and why in a society where a husband would have had the legal right to kill both the wife and lover, they escape without punishment. he concludes that these stories were a warning to married men, and that, after all, these “cheerful and amusing” stories can be useful to the modern leser ‘[male] reader’ who, if he finds himself in the role of the husband, will be able to learn some lessons, which today are still full of life and worthy of being read. in contrast to such masculinist misreading, in a perceptive study rüdiger schnell [1998: 776-82] discusses how the most important boundary in discourses on the sexes is not between positive and negative representations of women, as both are the result of the same androcentric perspective aimed at the domestication and repression of women. what is more important is the distinction between the discourse on woman and the discourse on marriage, where in the former, images of women are constructed without any critical reflection about men, as in all but the very last jokelore example of my study. in contrast, the discourse on marriage discusses the difficulties of married life and presents a more differentiated view of women. bibliography armistead, samuel. g. 2000. “ballad” and “hungary” in medieval folklore. an encyclopedia of myths, legends, tales, beliefs and customs. c. lindahl et al eds. santa barbara, ca. abc-clio, 612, 70-1. balassa, iván and zoltán ortutáy. 1984. hungarian ethnography and folklore. budapest: korvina kiadó. bartók, béla. l979 [1931]. hungarian folk music. trans. m. d. calvocorressi. westport, ct: hyperion press. 152 bartók, béla and zoltan kodály, (eds.). 1973. a magyar népzene tára [collection of hungarian folkmusic]. i.1. budapest: akadémiai kiadó,. child, frances james, (ed.). 1965 [1882-98]. the english and scottish popular ballads. new york, ny: cooper square publishers. csenki, imre and sándor csenki. 1980. cigány népballadák és keservesek [gypsy folk ballads and laments]. budapest: európa könyvkiadó. csikó, z. 1977. magyarországi cigány népköltészet [hungarian gypsy folk poetry]. budapest: europa könyvkiadó. dundes, alan. 1996. the walled-up wife: a casebook. madison: university of wisconsin press. dreitser, emil a. 1999. making war; not love. gender and sexuality in russian humor. new york, ny: st. martin’s press. gaunt, simon. 1995. gender and genre in medieval french literature. cambridge: cambridge university press. goldstein, kenneth s. 1967. “bowdlerization and expurgation: academic or folk,” journal of american folklore 80: 374-386. leader, ninon. 1967. hungarian classical ballads and their folklore. cambridge: cambridge university press. schnell, rüdiger. 1998. “the discourse on marriage in the middle ages.” speculum 73(7): 771-86. spiewok, wolfgang. 1994. deutsche novellen des mittelalters, i. griefswald: reineke verlag. randolph, vance. 1992. roll me in your arm: unprintable ozark folksongs and folklore. i. fayeteville: university of arkansas press. vargyas, lajos (ed.) 1976. a magyar népballáda és europa [the hungarian folk ballad and europe] ii. budapest: zenekiadó. vargyas, lajos, (ed.). 1979. balládas könyv [the book of ballads]. budapest: zeneműkiadó. vargyas, lajos, (ed.). 1983. hungarian ballads and the european ballad tradition. 2 vols. budapest: akadémiai kiadó. vasvári, louise o. 1988. “vegetal-genital onomastics in the libro de buen amor.” romance philology 42: 1-29. vasvári, louise o. l999. the heterotextual body of the mora morilla. london: queen mary and westfield college. vasvári, louise o. 2004. “buon cavallo e mal cavallo vuole sprone, e buona femina e mala femina vuol bastone’: medieval cultural fictions of wife battering.” in love, marriage, and transgression cunningly lingual wives in hungarian ballad tradition folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 153 in medieval and early modern literature. albrecht classen, ed. tempe, az: arizona center for medieval and renaissance studies, 313-336. vasvári, louise o. 2008. “cunningly lingual wives in european ballad tradition.” in spain’s multicultural legacies. adrienne martin and cristina martinez carazo, eds. juan de la cuesta, 297-314. microsoft word folk2010e.doc “an invincible czech horde”: milan kundera’s the joke 65 folklorica 2010, vol. xv “an invincible czech horde”: political and social implications of moravian folklore in milan kundera’s the joke. edwige tamalet talbayev department of french yale university new haven, ct, usa abstract this article studies the treatment of moravian folk music in milan kundera´s 1967 first novel, the joke (žert). reconstructed as the performative practice through which timeless collective memory is enacted, folklore appears as a vector of resistance to state-sponsored communism in the post-utopian context of the novel. by probing the limitations and potentialities of this vision, this argument sheds light on the complex intersections of folklore, tradition, and collective identity in communist czechoslovakia and paves the way for a critical consideration of identitarian discourses based on a mythical reconstruction of the past. “communism was modernity in its most determined mood and most decisive posture; modernity streamlined, purified of the last shred of the chaotic, the irrational, the spontaneous, the unpredictable.” [zygmunt bauman 1992: 167] milan kundera’s first novel, žert (the joke), originally appeared in prague in 1967 under the auspices of the publishing house of the union of czechoslovak writers, československ ý spisovatel.(1) set in 1965 during a period of relative apathy, the novel recounts the misfortunes of the hero, ludvík jahn, in the wake of an innocuous joke. in order to impress a girl, the young student, an ardent communist at heart, sends her an insolent note deriding state-sponsored ideology and purporting to reject it in favor of discredited trotskyist views. unfortunately, the note is not treated as a joke. ludvík is judged by a tribunal of his peers and, despite his vehement protestations of innocence, he is expelled from the university and sent to a penal army unit. the severity of the sanction imposed on ludvík owes much to the intervention of one of his classmates, pavel zemánek, a man who plays in the same folk music folklorica 2010, vol. xv 66 band as he. while most of the novel depicts ludvík’s ordeals following the unfortunate episode, the narrative is framed by his calculated liaison with helena, zemánek’s wife, whom he resolves to seduce in retaliation. however, their short-lived affair ends on a bitter note when ludvík realizes that by seducing helena he helped zemánek put an end to their loveless marriage.(2) his carefully crafted revenge backfires, making this failure the last development in a series of ironic twists plaguing the hero’s life (osud, fate, in his own words). ludvík eventually comes to the bitter realization that man, the subject of kundera’s humanistic paradigm, holds no sway over the course of his life, a realization that goes a long way towards questioning the dominant enlightenmentinspired communist ideals of the day [čulík 2000]. this, michael berman asserts, is the true joke in the novel: history’s facetious reminder that its course is inevitable and that man has no control over “destiny” (osud), either individual or collective. it is a fallacy to which ludvík had fallen prey, for he believed that “[communism was] inaugurating a human era in which man (all men) would be neither outside history [dějiny], nor under the heel of history, but would create and direct it” [kundera 1992: 71; 1967: 71; author’s emphasis].(3) in addition to ludvík, three narrators guide the plot, each embodying an archetypical position on the most pressing issues of 1965 czechoslovakia: helena the romantic party hard-liner, jaroslav the folklorist, and kostka the christian. this multiple focus allows for digressions into the private lives of each of the protagonists and the aspects of social life most central to their preoccupations. through narrative polyphony, kundera derides the hubristic pretense to know and be able to master reality. the novel thus hints at a world of possibilities beyond the univocal nature of the sign or, in this case, the necessary interpretation of any sequence of events as the unfolding of the great narrative of communist history. peter steiner has convincingly ascribed to each narrator a distinct perspective on time which underpins his or her approach to social life. drawing from karl mannheim’s study of ideology and utopia, steiner recognizes in kostka a chiliastic utopian living outside time in a world suffused with god’s presence. in contrast, ludvík and helena both embody socialist-communist utopia, while jaroslav finds in the scholarly study of folklore a means of communion with the timeless spirit of the community. each character values one specific temporal dimension (jaroslav the past, kostka the present, and ludvík and helena the future) and this configuration of time determines “an invincible czech horde”: milan kundera’s the joke 67 folklorica 2010, vol. xv their respective engagements with the past and tradition on both the individual and the collective levels. for all four narrators, the joke is a narrative of disillusionment, of post-utopian irony. yet, ludvík is the only protagonist to embark on a thorough questioning of his original ideals; he is also the only one to attempt to adjust to evolving circumstances, although his unsuccessful efforts eventually doom him to “vertigo” and oblivion [steiner 2000: 204]. through their attempt to perpetuate their anachronistic monolithic ideals, the other narrators witness the collapse of their respective belief systems, only to be symbolically removed one by one from the forefront of the novel—kostka through a sin that excludes him from the perpetuation of his christian ideal, helena through her attempted suicide and jaroslav by a debilitating heart attack. by the end of the book, all that is left is bitter disillusion and the inability to project oneself into the future. communist ideology, which arrogated to itself a monopoly on historicity and teleological development, goes bankrupt, as do the alternative utopian systems presented in the novel. the characters are thus abandoned to a disenchanted, futureless world. universal oblivion for all deeds and wrongs prevails, as does universal irresponsibility: “everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed,” concludes ludvík as he pauses one last time to consider his inconsequential destiny [kundera 1992: 294; 1967: 279]. forsaken by their respective ideologies, the protagonists suffer symbolic death and succumb to oblivion. but if helena, kostka, and, to a lesser extent, jaroslav seem incapable of defeating the irresistible logic of annihilation, ludvík at least endeavors to survive the collapse of his belief system. as utter devastation threatens to be the inescapable outcome of the narrative, the novel presents one last twist in the plot, an epiphany of sorts. here ludvík comes to realize the cause of his alienation – his disinterest in the world and his taking refuge in impersonal abstraction: “because we did not know how to commiserate with the devastated things, we turned away from them and so injured them, and ourselves as well” [kundera 1992: 313; 1967: 298]. this realization comes in the last scene when ludvík rejoins the folkloric band of his youth to participate in a performance under the direction of jaroslav. thus, as ludvík abjures his former aloofness from the world, it is through this rekindled musical connection to the past of his community that he attempts to reach salvation one last time: “i loved that ancient world [of folklore and tradition] and begged it to offer me sanctuary and to save me” [kundera 1992: 311; 1967: 296]. this resort to folklore as folklorica 2010, vol. xv 68 the last panacea against an all-pervading feeling of despair is intriguing and this essay seeks to investigate the modalities of kundera’s refashioning of the motif of moravian folk music in the post-ideological context of the novel. so central is the trope of folk music to the novel that the joke has often been considered a crucial text in understanding the ways in which folklore intersects with conceptions of history and collective identity in communist czechoslovakia [see, for instance, beckerman 1996: 38]. kundera’s treatment of the question through the subjective perceptions of four stock characters provides unique insight into the ramifications of the official manipulation of folklore. in jaroslav’s perspective, which ludvík belatedly endorses, moravian folk music offers a form of popular resistance to the eroding promises of communism as the end product of the grand narrative of marxist history. to him, it is an unadulterated repository of collective memory, both selfsustaining and free from any contact with successive regimes: “a tunnel beneath history, a tunnel that preserves much of what wars, revolutions, civilizations have long since destroyed aboveground” [kundera 1992: 133; 1967: 133]. such a postulate, however, is problematically oblivious to the long-standing history of the appropriation of folklore for political purposes, both in post-1948 communist czechoslovakia and in the earlier period of czech “bourgeois ethnography” [scheffel and kandert 1994: 16]. i contend that the construction of memory and collective identity ensuing from jaroslav’s configuration bears the mark of distortion. his continuous efforts to mobilize this mythical memory as a basis for a collective identity, enacted historically, are doomed to failure. more fruitful is the novel’s vision of subjective interaction as a dynamic producing moral responsibility and individual freedom. thus, kundera’s dealings with folklore illuminate the potentialities and limits of an identitarian discourse based on a mythical reconstruction of the past. they pave the way for a general consideration of the value of folklore and tradition in the construction of identity. for historian pierre nora, the advent of modernity coincides with the eradication of traditional forms of memory. the “acceleration of history” breaches the continuum represented by the collective heritage of tradition. with the process of nation-formation emerges a new vision of historiography, which would be conceived as a perfected version of memory and which would keep the reconstruction of the past free of subjective interpretation and forgetting. history is henceforth reconfigured as scientific in its purpose, a “true” (i.e., definitive) version “an invincible czech horde”: milan kundera’s the joke 69 folklorica 2010, vol. xv of collective memory.(4) in the context of nation formation (or regime consolidation), the construction of an official collective memory legitimizes one normative vision of the past, construing alternate perceptions as particular and incomplete. the lived memory of tradition is therefore removed from the foreground and enshrined in hollow memorials, where its rich and sedimented nature is effectively obliterated. following the dynamic described by nora, communist modernity endeavored to incorporate traditional culture into the new socio-political order. folklore was to play a crucial role in the definition of the new state’s cultural politics. channeled into pro-communist rhetoric, folk art became an object of official enthusiasm. it allowed communist ideology to put on the unobtrusive garb of tradition in its fight against bourgeois ideals. after the 1948 coup, czechoslovakian artists and ethnographers, performers and scholars of folklore, were forced to participate in the elaboration of new ideological processes. president gottwald’s speech at the 1948 congress of national culture delineated a few of these new directions [gottwald 1950]. the president declared the end of artistic “bourgeois formalism,” which was an unacceptable relic of a past of servitude to élitist groups. in its place, a popular or folk culture was to be promoted, which would serve a national purpose by embracing any means necessary to effect the triumph of the people [gottwald 1950]. social realist artistic output would be judged according to several criteria mostly derived from gorki’s principles—realism, optimism, partiality, effectiveness (political and ethical), intelligibility, nationalism (but not chauvinism), incorporation of the popular (lidovost), collectivism, heroism, and sensitivity to contemporary needs [viney 1953: 487-490]. in the field of ethnography, journals such as český lid [czech folk] marked a sharp turn towards marxist scientific paradigms, which also permeated fieldwork [see, for instance, skalníková 1951; for an overview of the main marxist advocates of people’s ethnography, see scheffel and kandert 1994: 16].(5) these doctrines were in alignment with the principles inaugurated in the soviet union less than twenty years earlier [miller 1990: 4]. they effectively transformed folklore, the “grassroot expressive practices of any group of people who share at least one common factor,” into folklorism, “the conscious use of folklore in popular, elite or officially sponsored culture” [olson 2004: 6]. folklore was reinvented to allow the masses to direct the creative process so as to promote the advancement of socialist values at all levels of society. following gorki’s definition of folklorica 2010, vol. xv 70 folklore as the creative expression of the toiling masses, it became “people’s creation” (narodnoe tvorchestvo). in czechoslovakia, viney reports that “[t]rue lidové umění is… no longer folk-art in the old sense, but art created for, and appealing to, the workers, peasants and working intelligentsia” [viney 1953: 488]. this new form of folklore emphasized personal interpretation and creation over the transmission of longstanding tradition. creative intervention was used to promote class consciousness in an effort to displace other forms of social relationships. folklore thus evolved into a conscious and deliberate act of representation, a performance of new identifications. accordingly, new forms of folklore came into being. in the 1930s, the soviet union had taken advantage of the pedagogical potentialities of folklore to develop class consciousness in the rural masses and to create powerful myths of model rural workers, myths which all arts would incorporate and disseminate. as the image of the peasant was endowed with positive significance, folk music was redefined as narodnaia muzyka, “the music of the people,” thus obliterating any distinction between rural and urban workers [olson 2004: 39]. the new folklore applied traditional motifs and structures to contemporary subjects and political figures and has often been dubbed “pseudofolklore” by those outside the soviet sphere.(6) in czechoslovakia, urban workers’ culture garnered much attention, especially in the (coal) mining community, which was one of the key sectors of the national economy [scheffel and kandert 1994: 17]. in keeping with the new definition of folklore as the production of any group of workers, urban folk ensembles formed by factory workers blossomed, fostering class awareness in the process. as festivals and performances were facilitated by a politics of decentralization, provincial musical life was revitalized and, at its onset, the regime’s enthusiasm for folklore was embraced by large segments of society and academia [viney 1953: 491; scheffel and kandert 1994: 17]. this is not to say, however, that new communist folklore completely replaced older forms. a traditional repertoire subsisted in parallel with new production and continued to exert great attraction. jaroslav’s attempt to re-enact a traditional peasant wedding (albeit in a purged, communist-sanctioned form) illustrates how deeply attached both scholars and amateurs were to old forms of folklore. by the 1960s, however, disenchantment had replaced initial fervor and folklore was increasingly perceived as an exhausted form of expression, one crippled by years of state-sponsored deformation. “an invincible czech horde”: milan kundera’s the joke 71 folklorica 2010, vol. xv interestingly, marxist propaganda did not radically transform the czechoslovakian ethnographic tradition. the fact that the transition from “bourgeois ethnography” to “people’s ethnography” took place so smoothly testifies to the continuities between the two. although communist sponsorship inaugurated new attitudes towards the process of folkloric production, its approach to folklore as an object of study perpetuated some of the methods of “bourgeois ethnography.” from its inception in the nineteenth century as an attempt to revive awareness of czech identity in the partly germanized middle-classes, ethnography subordinated its methods to the pursuit of a distinctly political agenda. conceived as a slavic response to german domination, czech identity was sought in the peasant communities of the countryside and had the explicitly patriotic aim of establishing the purely czech origin of national culture. “bourgeois ethnography” thus constructed an image of typical czech identity that scholarship was expected to corroborate [scheffel and kandert 1994: 19]. although the discipline was far from homogeneous, its development followed two main directions: preserving a “disappearing” czech peasant culture from the influence of germanized urban culture and proving that original czech culture as intrinsically pure and free from any german inflection [grill 2004: 28]. interpreting scientific data to advance a political agenda was therefore not a practice introduced by communism. as well, ethnographic methods remained similar: repeated, short visits rather than long periods of fieldwork, use of questionnaires rather than in-depth interviews [grill 2004: 54]. this essentializing approach to czech identity (“native studies,” in scheffel and kandert’s terms) made differentiation from the german other its priority. in this respect, it neglected to engage in a critical consideration of national culture as a multi-layered construct where processes of identity formation intersect with a variety of factors (gender, social status, religion, ethnic origin). identity was constructed as an objectively defined, historically stable, and homogeneous object. for that reason, these essentialist representations were marked by the seal of mendacity and distortion, just as ethnographic representation during the communist period would be. more evidence of continuity can be found in the similar origin myths elaborated by both ethnographic traditions. the imaginary invoked here is that of pan-slavism, itself a main topic of interest in prerevolutionary ethnographic practice. the cultural bonds between the czechs and other slavs intersected with anti-german sentiment from the days of the national revival to anti-nazi resistance during the folklorica 2010, vol. xv 72 occupation. when the soviet union came to liberate the czech lands, most of which had been a german protectorate during the war, it seemed that slavic solidarity was finally prevailing. as scheffel and kandert report, “manifest destiny was at work” [1994: 20]. the reclaiming of the pan-slavic myth legitimized communist rule as an authentic, natural outgrowth of past history. official rhetoric was thus able to reproduce a simulacrum of continuity that obscured its destructive impact on intersubjective relations. the joke actively resists this dynamic of distortion. the novel presents state-sponsored propaganda as a force wreaking havoc on the subject’s interaction with the world. intersubjective relations of affection, loyalty, and feeling within society are displaced by official collective ideals, a process which is so utterly successful in the novel that lonesome helena comes to consider the party as her one and only friend [kundera 1992: 20; 1967: 20]. an alternative form of social relations is necessary; ludvík and jaroslav set out to effect it through the performance of traditional folk music. while both protagonists formerly embraced the new state-sponsored directives regarding folklore (although for different reasons), they both eventually come to regard moravian folk music as a pristine repository of folk memory and traditional values (in nora’s words, “memory entwined in the intimacy of a collective heritage”). in their eyes, it constitutes an alternative source of identification, which reinstates morality and places it at the heart of social relations. the quest for a continuous, moral identity that would not suffer from the depersonalization of the process of history underlies kundera’s critical engagement with communist modernity. in his essay “sixtythree words,” kundera associates individualism and subjectivity, two concepts essential to the emergence of european creativity and artistic originality, with the advent of seventeenth-century european modernity: “the coming of les temps modernes… european individualism is born, and with it a new situation for art, for culture, for science… in europe, we are living the end of the modern era: the end of individualism; the end of art conceived as an irreplaceable expression of personal originality; the end that heralds an era of unparalleled uniformity” [kundera 1986: 149-50]. for kundera, european modernity is two-faced or, to borrow his celebrated formula about the history of the novel, divided into two “half-times.” on the one hand, in its earlier form, it is valued for bringing about the development of european art and culture, along with the modern values of cultural unity and identity [kundera “an invincible czech horde”: milan kundera’s the joke 73 folklorica 2010, vol. xv 1986: 127-8]. on the other, as kundera shows, european modernity also contains the seeds of its own obliteration (in “notes inspired by ‘the sleepwalkers’” [kundera 1986: 49-50]). whereas the early embodiments of modernity promoted the advancement of the european enlightenment (in kundera’s paradigm, the “supreme values” inherent in that stage of culture), its later developments seem to have progressively moved away from the primacy of the subject and obliterated the “supreme values” of individuality and communal coexistence on which european identity rests [kundera 1986: 128]. the end product of this dynamic is the dehumanizing totalitarian order depicted in the novel.(7) kundera’s implicit contention in his depiction of folkloric tradition as a “fictitious world of stable principles and fixed order” is that the obliteration of the values of individuality and responsibility is untenable [karfík 1969: 332]. the dual structure of his concept of history highlights a dynamic whereby each stage depends on its corollary, making a complete rejection of the past impossible. the concept supposes a transhistoric reading of events which associates cause and effect across time. the moral corollary of this supposition is that the memory of past wrongs will outlive them and allow justice to be rendered. the rupture of the continuum between the deed and its consequence does not simply prevent the rectification of moral wrongs;(8) it also excludes the community from history. kundera’s bipartite concept illustrates the necessity of restoring awareness of the first half of history, on both the individual and collective levels, to allow a critical reading of the second half in terms of compensation and correction. if such awareness cannot be gained within the paradigm of communist history, then an alternative form of historicity must be elaborated. although many episodes in the novel illustrate the effects of tradition at the individual level, i am interested in assessing jaroslav’s concept of musical folklore as a basis for collective identity. in this respect, his discussion of the origins of moravian folk music in part iv is crucial. his first step is to disassociate moravian music from its bohemian counterpart, which he links to baroque european music or “art music.” his analysis emphasizes the non-derivative character of moravian musical culture: “the songs we sing in southern moravia can’t be explained away by art music” [heim 1972: 49; kundera 1967: 129].(9) the songs possess idiosyncratic features which, in his eyes, prove their originality. folk music becomes the expression of local responses to western-inspired high culture, here bohemian music folklorica 2010, vol. xv 74 described as “serenad[ing] the barons and assorted landowners with the latest minuets or sarabands from italy” [literally, “the italian school,” heim 1972, 51; kundera 1967: 132]. jaroslav sees moravian folklore as a vector of peasant resistance to corruption by exogenous models. his view is reminiscent of the early ethnographic interest in peasant culture as a repository of cultural authenticity. moreover, he associates moravian music with archaic antiintellectualism and sensory gratification, a model which he holds in sharp contrast to the over-codification of scripted high music [heim 1972: 50-51; kundera 1967: 130-131]. for instance, moravian folk music does not respect rules of rhythmic equivalence based on symmetry (one note is divided into two halves, etc.) and the instability it generates explains its excessive, mysterious feel: “what do you do with a measure that has two beats of unequal length? our biggest problem today is getting the original rhythm of a moravian song down on paper” [heim 1972: 51; kundera 1967: 131]. moravian music therefore exceeds ethnographic attempts to capture and appropriate its “essence.” its spirit (“its own mysterious laws”) cannot easily be rendered through hollow formal adaptations. it thus remains unscathed by official transcriptions, preserving its inner quality throughout the vicissitudes of history. this untainted locus of identity nevertheless bears the mark of various cultural influences. in reverse chronological order, jaroslav records four of them: western european folk music, which came through contact with bohemian folklore, hungarian folklore brought by “gypsy” migrations, slovakian seventeenth and eighteenth century musical forms, and fourteenth century wallachian songs [heim 1972: 51-52; kundera 1967: 132-133]. but beyond this intricate history of migratory influences, the mystical past to which jaroslav ultimately refers is the great moravian empire, “the first great ninth-century slavic dominion… [when i] look far into our past… i see the ancient slavic world.” the mysterious, undecipherable nature of moravian music is a product of its distant origin; these songs pertain to a bygone golden age and the performers’ inability to comprehend their exact rhythmical nature and lexical meaning testifies to the music's resilience to any appropriation or corruption. it is not surprising therefore that jaroslav should end the survey with an evocation of ancient greek scales: “the structure of our oldest folk songs was in fact analogous to that of ancient greek music…they pass on to us a bit of antiquity” [heim 1972: 5253; kundera 1967: 134]. for jaroslav, moravian folklore rests on a mythical eternal present of tradition undisturbed by the course of modern history. “an invincible czech horde”: milan kundera’s the joke 75 folklorica 2010, vol. xv whereas western european powers underwent modernization, his narrative presents the czech lands as lying outside the march of progress (and germanization): “during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the czech nation almost ceased to exist. in the nineteenth century it was virtually reborn. among the old european nations it was a child… a modest culture… the only narrow footbridge across the two-hundredyear gap” [kundera 1992: 128; 1967: 127]. the only cultural influences acknowledged are the ones linked to the geography of the moravian empire, as if the music’s evolution were circumscribed by its history: “even though its borders were scattered a thousand years ago, they remain firm on the oldest level of folk music” [heim 1972: 52; kundera 1967: 133]. if jaroslav deems the intrinsic qualities of traditional culture to be impervious to the passing of time, he nevertheless endeavors to associate folklore with the development of communist history. jaroslav’s early opportunistic attempts to adapt folklore to “life as we live it now” aim to further his own folklorist agenda, namely bridging the gap between mythical tradition and the contemporary world [kundera 1992: 155; 1967: 155]. in the days following the 1948 takeover, official support gave folklore a legitimate place in national culture and the unfolding of communist history: “[these] ideas corresponded to our innermost dreams. they elevated us to a historic greatness” [in the original czech: “it tied the fate of our band with the fate of the communist party;” kundera 1992: 139; 1967: 138-139]. thus, jaroslav’s participation in the great state-sponsored effort to adapt folklore to contemporary realities is not portrayed as an attempt to alter the intrinsic nature of folk music, but rather as a mere “concession,” an effort to stimulate a folk revival [kundera 1992: 155; 1967: 155]. it does not call into question his avowed loyalty to pure, unadulterated folklore. his purpose is rather to use this repository of traditional values to correct the imbalances plaguing contemporary life, to restore history’s two-fold structure. in his eyes, his concessions constitute a temporary compromise which does not affect the wholesomeness of his project: “i protested. we were barely getting started. we wanted folk music to be as popular as possible. that was why we had to make concessions to popular taste. the most important thing was that we’d created our own contemporary folklore, new folk songs with something to say about life as we live it now” [kundera 1992: 155; 1967: 155; author’s emphasis]. through these efforts, folklore becomes a historical force used to excavate history’s forgotten first half: “it would be so simple to find peace in the world of folklorica 2010, vol. xv 76 fantasy. but i’ve always tried to live in the two worlds at the same time without giving up one for the other. i must not give up the real world even though i am losing everything in it” [kundera 1992: 159; 1967: 159]. however, his attempts to reconcile the timelessness of folklore with the imperatives of history never come to fruition. in the narrative, his efforts come undone in the last chapters of the novel (set in the 1960s) when jaroslav realizes that his son vladimír, whom he has envisioned as his successor, refuses to lead the ride of kings, a traditional pentecostal procession. jaroslav’s disappointment finds no echo in his family, who consider the procession to be a worthless relic of the past: “[vlasta said that] i was living in another world. i was a dreamer. they didn’t want to take my ideals from me, but vladimír was different […] he’s more interested in motorcycles than in horses in streamers. what of it? vladimír is a modern person” [kundera 1992: 306; 1967: 291]. in this respect, jaroslav’s family is no exception. the novel recounts several episodes where folklore is depicted as an object of ridicule [see for instance, kundera 1992: 126; 1967: 125-126]. integrating tradition with contemporary social life seems impossible. newly-discredited moravian culture stands marginalized and its sphere of influence seems to be restricted to a few devotees. due to its incommensurability to the time in which it is mobilized, its potential as a vector of active resistance is limited and it is on a pessimistic note that the book ends: “i [jaroslav] could not imagine any continuation. i had always lived in two worlds at once. i believed in their mutual harmony. it had been a delusion. now i had been ousted from one of those worlds. from the real world. only the other one, the imaginary world, is left to me now. but i can’t live only in the imaginary world” [kundera 1992: 308; 1967: 293]. the friends’ experience at the last concert only reinforces jaroslav’s feeling of estrangement. the musical encounter, which should be one of communion with the audience, the performance of a collective memory, becomes an alienating moment for the performers: “the more melancholy we felt, the more we turned in towards one another, playing for ourselves rather than for the audience, forgiving the audience, so that we managed to create through the music a protective enclosure in the midst of the rowdy drunks” [kundera 1992: 315; 1967: 300]. the recollection of the great moravian past becomes an individual affair: jaroslav’s heart-attack in the middle of the concert definitively excludes him from the world. as the narrative ends, the reader is left with only “an invincible czech horde”: milan kundera’s the joke 77 folklorica 2010, vol. xv one certainty: whatever role folk music will play in the revival of a collective identity in the future, now is not its time.(10) the failure of jaroslav’s efforts results from a fundamental confusion, the ramifications of which illuminate the intersections of folklore, memory, and subjectivity beyond the scope of the novel. pierre nora’s concept of lieu de mémoire provides a compelling framework for investigating the nature of this dynamic. for nora, the term lieu de mémoire designates a site of memory “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself …, certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists” [nora 1989: 7]. nora’s term thus applies to jaroslav’s imaginative, alternative construction of collective identity around timeless folk music. yet, the concept of lieux de mémoire assumes added significance in that it also marks the end of the subject’s immediate relation to his or her culture and history: “there are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory,” explains nora [nora 1989: 7]. because lieux de mémoire are imagined as loci of continuity in the face of radical estrangement from one’s environment, they do not exist on the same level as the subject who mobilizes them. in lieux de mémoire memory is reconstructed, not lived. through them, the subject maintains only a tenuous tie to the imagined past; the static form of tradition they preserve is removed from the present with which it has become incommensurate. the strong emphasis on jaroslav’s reflexive reconstruction of folklore from handbooks presents ample evidence that, in his case, tradition is a true lieu de mémoire, an ideal viewed from a distance: “jaroslav was a dyed-in-the-wool moravian patriot and a folklore expert, and he availed himself of his own wedding to satisfy his ethnographic passions [“pro své národopisné vášně”] by arranging the festivities around a structure of old popular customs… all reconstructed more from textbooks of ethnography than from living memory” [kundera 1992: 47; 1967: 44].(11) the authenticity of these reconfigurations of tradition remains questionable since they are elaborated from a subject position located within the modern historical paradigm: “jaroslav…presumably mindful of his career…gave the church a wide berth, even though a traditional wedding was unthinkable without a priest…he had the “patriarch” give all the ritual speeches, but purged them all of biblical motifs, even though it was precisely on these motifs that the imagery of the old nuptial speeches was based” [kundera 1992: 47; 1967: 44-45]. by incorporating the timelessness of tradition into the present of history, jaroslav only corrupts tradition; his avowed “concession” reaps no folklorica 2010, vol. xv 78 reward. his goal of restoring the integrity of history’s bipartite structure proves impossible to achieve. the memory resorted to does not constitute the first half of communist history; its reconstructed, imaginary nature precludes its inclusion into the narrative of history altogether. it remains confined to the realm of the mythical and thus cannot steer historical forces towards an awareness of the past. jaroslav’s fundamental confusion of lieu de mémoire and milieu de mémoire, or reconstructed and lived tradition, impedes any actual historical valence since the memory mobilized is but one more example of false consciousness in the novel. however, if reconstructed folklore cannot restore the integrity of communist history on the collective or institutional levels, its performance can certainly reinstate the notions of subjectivity and moral responsibility emblematic of the first half of kundera’s history of modernity. in reference to folklore in the soviet union, laura olson concludes, “it is possible to speculate that the actions of the performers formed a kind of tacit resistance—or at least enacted self-assertion in the context of a regime that aimed to remove such possibilities” [olson 2004: 50]. this “tacit resistance” takes the shape of a renewed awareness of one’s subjectivity. this dynamic aligns with nora’s conclusions on the failure of collective memory: “the atomization of a general memory into a private one… gives everyone the necessity to remember and to protect the trappings of identity… the less memory is experienced collectively, the more it will require individuals to undertake to become themselves memory-individuals. ” [nora 1989: 16]. in this respect, the choice of a musical medium is very appropriate for the enactment of an individual memory congruent with nora’s precepts.(12) ludvík’s recourse to folklore during the last concert follows the same logic— through folk music, he performs his subjectivity, anchoring individual memory in his performance. yet, while individual, this process is not a solitary experience: “the more melancholy [the performers] felt, the more [they] turned in towards one another” [kundera 1992: 315; 1967: 300]. although the enactment of a collective memory with which the audience can identify is impossible, a collective performance of subjectivity does take place for the musicians. restoring social interaction between subjects, the collective performance of folklore thus participates in the reconstruction of an order of moral obligation, which is the basis for any process of socialization and which alone can guarantee the realization of individual freedom through history. this acknowledgement of a moral imperative is the limited form in which kundera’s two-fold concept of “an invincible czech horde”: milan kundera’s the joke 79 folklorica 2010, vol. xv history comes to be realized in the post-utopian context of the novel. through it, the subject gains access to a non-totalitarian narrative of history, one which has not yet reached its end-point. kundera’s insertion of a parallel, independent model of social relations undermines the monolithic vision imposed by communist ideology. in this independent model the mythical “invincible czech horde” of moravian folklore, a group made up of countless individual voices interacting with each other, joins more orthodox symbols of national identity. in later writings, milan kundera expressed his belief in the future of a culturally-independent czechoslovakia. in his essay “the czech lot”, he attributes the destruction of czechoslovakian culture to soviet hegemony and emphasizes the importance of constructing nations distinct from the two great cold war powers [kundera 1968]. through their resistance to processes of global homogenization and their struggle to assert their own identity, these countries, he believes, will foster individualism and uniqueness in the face of uniformity. in a word, they will restore modern european values. this, to kundera, is their historical mission. through his defense of moravian traditional musical forms and of the performance of subjectivity inherent in them, it is at this mission that kundera hints twenty five years before the czech republic and slovakia could aspire to fulfill their role. notes an earlier version of this essay won the euro pop award for best graduate essay on european popular culture at the 2008 southwest/texas popular culture association/american culture association convention in albuquerque, nm. i wish to thank ken dvorak, phil heldrich, jack hutchens, and chunhui peng for their support of this project. 1 completed in december 1965, the novel was not released until april 1967 due to kundera’s reluctance to make the various changes requested by communist censors. when the book finally came out in its unrevised form, only one year prior to the prague spring of 1968, critics received it with enthusiasm and the union awarded it its 1968 literary prize. no less than three editions of the text were sold in a matter of days for a total of 120,000 copies [kundera 1985: 457]. however, this popularity was to be short-lived. in the wake of the “normalization” following the prague spring, a press campaign attacked the novel for folklorica 2010, vol. xv 80 being a counter-revolutionary piece; the text was subsequently banned and withdrawn from libraries throughout the country. around the same time, gallimard released the french translation of the book. the warm reception of the book in france effectively launched the novel on the international scene, making it one of the most lucid analyses of the enduring political situation in the eastern bloc, of which the prague spring was but the most visible and recent symptom. 2 for an analysis of the sexual politics of the novel, see frances l. restuccia 1990. 3 the first number in parentheses refers to 1992 english translation by the author; the second corresponds to the original 1967 czech text. 4 the discourse on collective memory, nora’s reconfigurations included, finds its source in the writings of french sociologist maurice halbwachs in the 1930s (on collective memory). i have adopted the definition of collective memory recorded by k.l. klein’s as “a set of recollections attributable to some overarching group mind that could recall past events in the (admittedly poorly understood) ways in which we believe that individuals recall the past” [klein 2000: 135]. in contrast, the tendency to replace it with an official memory can be defined as “the interaction between institutional and individual memory… as a top-down process: elite constructions of memory shape the memories of groups and individuals” [lebow 2006: 10]. 5. for theoretical discussions of the appropriateness and implications of the concept of ethnography in a czechoslovakian context, see grill 2004: 18-20; scheffer and kandert 1994: 15-16. 6 this dynamic is described in the novel: “the communist party went all out to create a new way of life. it based its efforts on stalin’s famous definition of the new art: socialist content in national form. and national form in music, dance, and poetry could come from nowhere but folk art” [kundera 1992: 141; 1967:142]; “and we didn’t sing only the traditional lays about brigands slitting their beloveds’ throats, we wrote new pieces all our own, songs about stalin or about the plowed fields or the harvest or cooperative farms. no longer was our song just a memory of the past. it was alive. it was part of contemporary history. it accompanied it” [kundera 1992: 141-2; 1967: 142; my emphasis]. 7 kundera associates this “twilight” of european culture with the political shift in central europe towards authoritarian forms of government, here assimilated to a form of “political nonexistence” for these countries [kundera 1986: 125]. “an invincible czech horde”: milan kundera’s the joke 81 folklorica 2010, vol. xv 8 as his quest ends in absolute failure against the force of endless irony governing history, ludvík concludes, “…eternal memory (of people, things, deeds, nations) and … redressibility (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs) [are] both… false faiths… everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed. the task of obtaining redress (by vengeance or by forgiveness) will be taken over by forgetting” [kundera 1992: 294; 1967: 279]. 9 for the reasons behind the choice of moravian regional identity as opposed to other regions of the czech lands, see beckerman 1996: 39. beckerman argues that moravia stood as a pause between czech and slovak identities, as a “mythical and forgotten land.” due to the lacunae present in the 1992 author’s translation of the text, i resort to michael heim’s translation of the chapter in his 1972 article. the second set of page numbers still refers to the czech original. 10 i am referring to mark slobin’s illuminating discussion of the role the persecution of the czech rock band plastic people of the universe played in the genesis of the charter 77 group, one of the actors of the velvet revolution [slobin 1996: 6]. 11 národopis, “nationography” was used before world war ii as a synonym for lidopis or “folklography” [grill 2004: 18]. jaroslav’s choice of the former in lieu of the communist sanctioned etnografie mobilizes an earlier tradition of folkloristics and constitutes an implicit critique of marxist paradigms of ethnographic research. 12 in his introduction to retuning culture, mark slobin discusses music’s “mutab[ility], flexib[ility], and volat[ility]” in relation to group identity and memory, which makes music the optimal medium for “anchor[ing] individual memory and group consciousness, placing them out of the reach of the state” [slobin 1996: 3-4]. olson makes a similar argument as she argues that “[b]esides embodying the participants’ goals, performance [of music] also helps to constitute identities and social groups. it is a medium in which cultural identity can be not only expressed but enacted” [olson 2004: 12]. bibliography baumann, zygmunt. 1992. intimations of postmodernity. london: routledge. beckerman, michael. 1996. “kundera’s musical joke and ‘folk’ music in czechoslovakia, 1948-?,” in retuning culture: musical folklorica 2010, vol. xv 82 changes in central and eastern europe. mark slobin, ed. durham and london: duke university press, 37-53. berman, michael. 1970. “to ludvík, optimism was the opium of the people.” rev. of the joke, by milan kundera. new york times on the web. 11 january 1970. cited by: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/kunderajoke2.htlm. consulted 23 october 2007. čulík, jan. 2000. “milan kundera.” department home page. university of glasgow school of modern languages and cultures slavonic studies. cited by: http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/slavonic/kundera.htm. consulted 10 october 2007. gottwald, klement. 1950. “projev klementa gottwalda na sjezdu národní kultury 1948” [klement gottwald’s address to the congress of national culture 1948]. výtvarné umění [fine arts] 1.1: 3-7. grill, jan. 2004. “re-conceptualizing the folk: politics of culture in czech and slovak ethnography.” ma thesis, central european university. halbwachs, maurice. 1992. on collective memory. trans. lewis a. coser. chicago: university of chicago press. heim, michael. 1972. “moravian folk music: a czechoslovak novelist’s view.” journal of the folklore institute 9.1: 45-53. karfík, vladimír. 1969. “recent czech prose.” books abroad 43.3: 324333. klein, kerwin lee. 2000. “on the emergence of memory in historical discourse.” representations 69: 127-50. kundera, milan. 1967. žert. praha: československ ý spisovatel. kundera, milan. 1968. “český úděl” [the czech lot]. listy, 19 dec. 1968. kundera, milan. 1985. la plaisanterie. trans. marcel aymonin, claude courtot, and milan kundera. paris: gallimard. kundera, milan. 1986. the art of the novel. trans. linda asher. new york: grove press. kundera, milan. 1992. the joke. trans. milan kundera. new york: harpercollins. lebow, richard ned. 2006. “the memory of politics in postwar europe,” in the politics of memory in postwar europe. richard ned lebow, wulf kansteiner, and claudio fogu, eds. durham: duke university press, 1-39. “an invincible czech horde”: milan kundera’s the joke 83 folklorica 2010, vol. xv miller, frank j. 1990. folklore for stalin: russian folklore and pseudofolklore of the stalin era. armonk and london: m. e. sharpe. nora, pierre. 1989. “between memory and history: les lieux de mémoire.” representations 26: 7-24. olson, laura j. 2004. performing russia: folk revival and russian identity. new york and london: routledge. restuccia, frances l. 1990. “homo homini lupus: milan kundera’s the joke.” contemporary literature 31.3: 281-99. scheffel, david and josef kandert. 1994. “politics and culture in czech ethnography.” anthropological quarterly 67.1: 15-23. skalníková, olga. 1951. “za nový český lid” [for a new czech folk]. český lid 38: 1. slobin, mark, ed. 1996. retuning culture: musical changes in central and eastern europe. durham and london: duke university press. steiner, peter. 2000. the deserts of bohemia: czech fiction and its social context. ithaca and london: cornell university press. viney, d. e. 1953. “czech culture and the ‘new spirit,’ 1948-1952.” the slavonic and east european review 31. 77: 466-494. << 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setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice microsoft word folk2010e.doc folklorica 2010, vol. xv 182 красиков, михайло (ред.), м.ф. сумцов: дослідження з етнографії та історії слобідської україни. вибрані праці. [mykhailo krasykov (ed.) m. f. sumtsov: research in ethnography and history of the sloboda ukraine. selected writings]. kharkiv, ukraine: vydavnytstvo “atos,” 2008. 557 pp. photographs, notes, bibliography. paper. isbn 978-966-1500-11-1. mykola sumtsov (1854-1922) was a prominent scholar with virtually boundless interests who covered an extremely broad spectrum of problems in his works: he has been known as a folklorist, ethnographer, literary critic, art critic, historian and culture historian, museum specialist, pedagogue, bibliographer, and public servant. the bibliography of his (known) works contains 1544 entries, yet many of his writings vanished in the chaos of the 20th century. this collection is dedicated to the 155th anniversary of this outstanding person whose works are widely used nowadays by slavic folklorists and ethnographers. in his introductory article, вдячний син слобожанщини [the grateful son of the sloboda region] krasykov presents the details of sumtsov’s biography: his family, education, and his becoming a scholar deeply interested in what he studied. krasykov underscores that although sumtsov belonged to the cosmopolitan intelligentsia of his time he remained a patriot who looked with loving eyes at his own countrymen. sumtsov did not idealize the folk, but knew their way of life very well, and was critical of certain folk customs he viewed as cruel and senseless. a person of action, sumtsov did a lot to advance scholarship. also, trying to make the knowledge accessible to the simple people he advocated education for villagers. the first chapter is a reprint of sumtsov’s entire book слобожане [dwellers of the sloboda region], which was initially published in 1918. it contains 20 subchapters and elaborates on such topics as history of the region, agriculture and manufacturing, commerce, everyday life, housing, clothes, cuisine, people’s psychology, worldview, alcoholism, folk medicine, arts and science, theatre life, local folklorists, the church and ethnography museums in kharkiv, and so on. this piece of sumtsov’s work is widely acknowledged as an encyclopedia of the sloboda ukraine. the second chapter, повір’я, звичаї та побут слобожан [beliefs, customs, and everyday life of dwellers of the sloboda region] presents a collection of sumtsov’s essays that was initially published in 1914 and based on his fieldwork of 1901. here the reader finds reviews 183 folklorica 2010, vol. xv ethnographic descriptions of people’s ways of life and family relations, existing crafts and trades, bazaars and folk entertainments. there is also information about a church hospice, chumak trades, description of certain towns, and villages and village intelligentsia. chapter three, слобідське кобзарство [minstrelsy of the sloboda region] includes reprints of three essays from 1880, 1905, and 1907. those present a general overview of the blind minstrels in the kharkiv governorate (kharkivs’ka huberniia), scholarly research, and a biography of kucherenko, a bandura player. chapter four, письменники-слобожани – фольклористи та етнографи [writers from the sloboda region folklorists and ethnographers] is a collection of essays (initially published on various occasions and different years) about six ukrainian writers and poets who based their works on local ukrainian folklore: kvitka-osnov’ianenko, metlyns’kyi, manzhura, shchoholiv, hrinchenko, and evarnyts’kyi. sumtsov provided biographies of all six, and analyzed folk motifs in their works of prose or poetry. chapter five, дослідники народної культури слобідської україни [researchers of the folk culture of the sloboda ukraine] presents sumtsov’s essays on local ethnographers and folklorists. it familiarizes readers with kalynovs’kyi who wrote on ukrainian wedding rituals back in 1777; petro ivanov and his research on peasants’ worldview, children’s games, and legends; and olena radakova, a historian who promoted local ethnography studies. chapter six, просвіта і наука [enlightenment and education] is a collection of six essays by sumtsov on cultural life and educational institutions in the sloboda region. here readers learn about the popov academy established by palitsyn; the 12th archeological congress held in kharkiv in 1902 and its cultural influences; the kharkiv art museum; students of the kharkiv university who did ethnographic research; and oleksandr potebnia, a professor of the same university and a renowned linguist. the closing article by mykhailo krasykov, м. сумцов і ми [m. sumtsov and us] presents a detailed picture of what happened to sumtsov’s writings and reputation in the 20th century. despite the soviet authorities’ attempts to deny him a place in history, sumtsov’s devoted students and followers struggled to memorialize him and popularize his scholarly heritage. krasykov’s book is yet another important step in that direction. folklorica 2010, vol. xv 184 krasykov provides both his articles and the entire book with an enormous amount of detailed footand endnotes. those serve to present important historical and bibliographical references, clarify information, help the contemporary reader to understand the context and contents of the book, and transform the book itself into almost an encyclopedia. rare photographs and illustrations from sumtsov’s books, as well as the original orthography and syntax allow for better approximation of sumtsov’s times and the heroes of his writings. the book will be of great value and interest to any folklorist or folklore student but especially those who deal with slavic (or specifically ukrainian) materials. in addition it should appeal to all interested readers who appreciate good reading combined with quality work and meticulous analysis done by both sumtsov and krasykov. svitlana kukharenko university of alberta edmonton, alberta canada << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot 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setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice folklore fieldwork and research in ukraine anne ingram, u of virginia i am a ph.d. candidate in slavic folklore at the university of virginia. i recently went to ukraine for four months to do research for my dissertation on ukrainian funerals and beliefs about the dead in ukraine. as a graduate student, i needed to collect as much material on my topic as possible at as low a cost as possible. in order to do this, i made arrangements with the kherson branch of the institut mystetsvoznavstva. fprklora ta etnohrafii (institute of art, folklore and ethnography, or imfe) to do archival and field work in ukraine, working with native scholars. kherson imfe helped me access archival material and set up my fieldwork. i spent a month at kiev imfe, where i examined archival material on funerals and beliefs about the dead. kiev imfe has a large repository of folklore sources and some excellent scholars. kherson imfe also chose locations for my fieldwork, with the goal of giving me a survey of as many areas of ukraine as possible. i did fieldwork in cherkas'ka obi., khersons'ka obi., and l'vivs'ka and ivano-frankiv'ska obi. fieldwork in western ukraine is difficult, due in large part to problems with transportation. it is now possible to do fieldwork in ukraine, although a high degree of flexibility is necessary, due to the current economic situation and transportation problems. salaries and fieldwork funding for native scholars are irregular, and bus and train routes have been cut. public transportation, primarily intraoblast* buses, is the primary means of traveling to villages, unless one has access to a private car. travel on intra-oblast buses is particularly difficult, ib seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 due to discontinuation of some routes, problems in getting tickets, and mechanical failures. as a result, the buses are extremely crowded and it is not always possible to board a bus to a desired destination. however, these obstacles are not insurmountable. i was able to collect a great deal of material during my recent trip to ukraine. in cherkas'ka obi., i worked with mykola and halina kornienko of the cherkas'ka oblast' ethnographic museum, the oblastnyi kraeznavchvi muzei-cherkasv. the museum has a very good collection of material culture, including an impressive number of examples of rushnyks from the oblast'. the kornienkos have done a great deal of collecting in the oblast' and are very knowledgeable about that region's folklore. their specialties are material culture and wedding rituals, respectively, although their knowledge extends considerably beyond the boundaries of their specialties. there are a number of very old grave markers in this oblast' and excavation of old burial sites has been done in there. this is a very rich area for collecting. in khersons'ka obi., i worked with hanna chumachenko, the director of kherson imfe, and her graduate students. the branch, in conjunction with the kherson pedagogical institute, held a very successful international conference in june on multiculturalism in southern ukraine. hanna chumachenko has experience collecting in the oblast', is very knowledgeable about the various ethnic groups residing in the region, and her research interests include performance and ritual. this oblast' presents very interesting research possibilities, due to the mix of ethnic groups, including western ukrainians, ukrainian germans, and tatars. through my association with kherson imfe, i was able to cojlect a great deal of material in a short period of time. i returned with copious interviews, old photographs, information from archives, and recent publications related to my topic. i witnessed contemporary funerals, became familiar with village life in modern day ukraine, and photographed cemeteries and grave markers in central, southern, and western ukraine. the kherson branch of imfe is willing to work with scholars and has developed a program to do so. scholars can start in kiev at the main branch of imfe, exploring its rich resources, then do fieldwork in cherkas'ka oblast' with the komienkos, and finally work in kherson'ska oblast', with trips to odessa, nikolaev, or crimea as possibilities. although my fieldwork focused on funerals and beliefs about the dead, the kherson branch of imfe will work with scholars to create an individual plan. anyone interested in doing research in ukraine through kherson imfe can contact me at <ami2f©virginia.edu> for further information. seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 microsoft word folkf05f.doc 26 the russian bathhouse: the old russian pert’ and the christian bania in traditional culture masha vadeysha european university at st petersburg the russian bathhouse is a highly distinctive feature of russian traditional culture. as i intend to show in this article, in the semantics of this phenomenon, both christian and non-christian features are conjoined. since time immemorial the bathhouse has played a significant role in popular life in north-western and central russia, the volga region and siberia. its hygienic, prophylactic and therapeutic functions are broadly well known but, over and beyond these functions, the russian bania is directly connected with many other spheres of life. the bania was firmly embedded in everyday life, playing an essential part in the most significant life events. despite this, it was considered a dangerous, unclean, even life-threatening place. that the russian bathhouse features extensively in every folklore genre indicates the depth of its roots in the culture. all these factors allow us to assume that it occupies a special place in the north russian world picture and the contradictory aspects of its image deserve explanation and elucidation. it is, therefore, appropriate to begin with a survey of the form and functions of the bathhouse before looking at the ritual meaning of bathhouse practices. in its most archaic version, the bania is a low, one-roomed log building with a flat roof [efimenko 1877: 38; condee 1994: 3]. in the corner near the entrance stands a stove constructed out of large round stones (kamenka) with smaller ones placed on top [ivanitskii 1898: 23]. to heat the water, red-hot stones were taken with fire irons and put into a wooden tub [sokolovs 1915: xii].(1) since the stove had no chimney, smoke was expelled through the door or a small window [blomkvist 1956: 342]. it did not take long before all the walls and the ceiling would be covered in soot, resulting in this kind of bathhouse being called “black” (chernaia) [sinozerskii 1899: 432]. steam is the most important characteristic of the russian bania. it is generated when water is poured on the heated stones of the stove [adrianova-peretts 1996: 9]. usually it is a small quantity of water but in special cases beer, kvass, honey or an extract of medical herbs may be added [tereshchenko 1848: 159, 172]. when the steam fills the bathhouse evenly, beating with a broom begins [kostomarov 1860: 98-99]. after bathing comes dousing, either with water from the well, or by jumping in a river or lake, or rolling in the snow [shkoldin 1863: 37]. the bathhouse was visited for hygienic purposes, that is, conventional bathing, every week and on the eve of festivals [kostomarov 1960: 99], as well as during occasional and calendar rites and family rituals. it was also the locus for healing, witchcraft, divination and the transfer of a sorcerer’s occult knowledge [ryan 1999: 73; stepanova 1994: 295]. in certain cases, it could be lived in; for example, a woman after childbirth spent several days (or, in some local traditions, even weeks) there together with her baby [zelenin 1915: 823]. a family rendered homeless after a fire could find shelter in the bathhouse [chelishchev 1886: 144]. but it was not considered an appropriate place to live permanently; even spending a night there was deemed undesirable folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 27 [kharuzin 1889: 137]. at the same time, it was often the location of meetings between young country folk: the girls busy spinning, embroidering or knitting and the lads coming to court them [zelenin 1914: 774]. the bania was the only place where christian symbols could not be brought. icons were never hung in the bathhouse [karnaukhova 1928: 84], and it was necessary on entering to remove one’s belt and cross, something inadmissible in any other circumstances [efimenko 1877: 165].(2) bathing was surrounded by numerous rules and prohibitions regardless of whether we are referring to a special ceremony or to ordinary washing. bathing on your own is prohibited [neklepaev 1903: 43]. in most places where the bathhouse is found it is forbidden to bathe after three groups have steamed themselves already [loginov 1993: 96], the “fourth” steaming usually being left for the bath spirit, the bannik (or baennik). warm water and a broom are left in the bathhouse especially for him [zavoiko 1917: 38]. in order not to anger the bannik it was not permitted to make any noise, speak loudly, chivvy others along, swear, let alone to put a curse on anyone [efimenko 1878: 165]. a word uttered in the bathhouse was held to possess magical power. as a consequence, the bania was considered the appropriate place for witchcraft [neklepaev 1903: 187; razumova 1992: 102], for uttering charms against illness [loginov 1993: 20; 120] and “spoiling,” or the transfer of special occult knowledge [maksimov 1996: 60-61; mazalova 1994: 26; ryan 1999: 50]. the times when the bathhouse could be got ready are strictly regulated, with the usual day for ordinary bathing being saturday [khudiakov 1864: 43; arme, f.7, no. 338]. the hour is also fixed: after lunch, towards evening but not at night, since midnight is the time for magic practices [tseitlin 1912: 159]. otherwise, the bania was heated on the eve of holidays, of which the most crucial was holy thursday (the thursday before easter), that is chistyi chetverg (lit. clean thursday) [magnitsky 1883: 16]. it was customary also to take a bath after shrovetide on the first day of lent, known as clean monday (chistyi ponedel’nik) [makarenko 1913: 152]. in some places, people went to the bania before st. john’s day (june 24/july 7) [loginov 1996: 446-47]. the bathhouse was also heated for travelers before departure [avdeeva 1842: 116] or on their return [vereshchagin 1849: 222] as well as for guests from afar, and this custom might be enacted at any time of day or night.(3) in karelia before fishermen and hunters left for the season they also would take a bath [loginov 1993: 41]. on the night before major holidays, in particular at christmas, new year, and epiphany (known in the orthodox tradition as baptism (kreshchenie) (jan. 6/19)), the bathhouse was used for fortune-telling [uspensky, lotman 1996: 346)]. taking a steam bath possessed considerable importance in life cycle rites [peterson 1994: 201]. the bania was heated for a woman after childbirth [ryan 1999: 176]; even in cases when the actual birth took place in the house or cattle-shed a bath was arranged for the same day [kofyrin 1900: 56]. brides went to the bath before their wedding day [arsen’ev 1879: 64], which, since weddings were usually celebrated on sundays, would thus be on a saturday [gippius 1928: 152]. in some areas, it was also customary for the groom to bathe [tereshchenko 1848: 172], as it was for recruits before they set off for the army [ul’ianov 1914: 236]. newlyweds were expected to take a steam bath immediately they awoke after the wedding night [vertepov 1903: 97]; indeed there is testimony that in some provinces it was usual to heat the bania after every sexual contact [loginov 1993: 123; zelenin 1991: 281; peterson 1994: 201]. furthermore, the participants in a burial 28 procession visited the bathhouse in order to “wash their grief away,” and it was necessary to go after a funeral repast [avdeeva 1842: 122]. a bath for the dead was an essential component of rites of commemoration, known since ancient times and mentioned in early christian sermons [vladimirov 1897: 238; gal’kovskii 1916: 202, 203]. heating the bathhouse on sundays and holy days was banned [ivanitskii 1898: 70; condee 1994: 5], and those who did would be punished by the bath spirit: “the baennik has iron arms. he is very spiteful, and he tortures and torments to death those who come for a bath without a blessing or around midnight, especially on holy days and at yuletide” [zelenin 1914: 263]. according to popular belief, the water prepared for a bath possessed extraordinary qualities. it was only to be used for bathing, and not for drinking or washing clothes [efimenko 1877: 165], while its qualities could be intensified (especially in rites of healing) by uttering a special incantation [ianovich 1903: 149). in life-cycle rites (birth and wedding) the origin of the water played a significant role. it had to be taken from several springs [zorin 1981: 93], from further up or down stream [loginov 1993: 52; ianovich 1903: 71], and it might be diluted with holy water, gold, salt, grain or alcohol. sometimes in healing rituals it was molchanaia voda (that is, water brought in silence) that was used [loginov 1993: 51-52]. in special cases great attention was paid to the firewood, which was carefully selected according to its appearance and quality [loginov 1993: 52; kolpakova 1962: 260]; wedding laments describe the choice of wood and water for the bride’s bath in some detail [barsov 1885: 102]. the chief “tool” in the bathhouse was the broom which also had to be made with utmost care. the time and the rules for making brooms were very strict [leskov 1894: 515]. in some cases they were made from herbs [loginov 1996: 447; makarenko 1913: 84], but in other cases herbs/flowers were just added to birch twigs gathered on st. john’s day [kolosova 2000: 295; annenkov 1876: 289; zelenin 1914: 36]. the broom also played an important role in the bride’s bath, when the girls took it from the groom, decorated with flowers and ribbons, and then used it for predicting the course of the marriage [lipinskaia, saf’ianova 1978: 191]. magic powers were ascribed to the broom with which a new-born baby was given his/her first steam bath; it was later used in charms to cure childhood illnesses [loginov 1993: 54] while the butt quite often served as a talisman [avdeeva 1842: 148). preparing the bath was entrusted to a special person. for ordinary bathing this would be a woman, who would then invite the other members of the household, but it was the girls who were bridesmaids who were responsible for the bride’s bath [bernshtam 1983: 124; ryan 1999: 75]. in places where the groom went to the bathhouse, it was the druzhka (the best man) who did it [kireevskii 1911: 48-49], while the matchmaker was in charge of the bath for the newly-weds [guliaev 1852: 23]. when the bath was heated for medical or magic purposes it was the magic healer or sorcerer who did it. these were generally, but not exclusively, the same people who were in charge of the actual steaming (i.e. beating with a broom). thus, though a magic healer gave a sick person his or her steam bath [demich 1889: 11; 25], the bride might be given hers by a sorcerer or the matchmaker instead of her girlfriends [balashov, marchenko, kalmykova 1985: 104; guliaev 1852: 23] the folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 29 groom by relatives as well as the druzhka [tereshchenko 1848: 111; 159; 171-172], and the midwife assisted a woman after childbirth.(4) participants in the usual saturday visit to the bathhouse steamed each other in turn. the bathhouse is always situated at some distance from the living quarters [kostomarov 1860: 48]. in reality the distance might not be that great, but it is always interpreted as considerable. the bania is considered to be outside the christian world: “however near the bania is to the house, it is believed to be seven versts away, and so you are not supposed to go there saying a prayer… if you go to the bathhouse alone, devils may tear you apart. that is why we never steam ourselves on our own” [zavoiko 1917: 35 – 36]. hence, for conventional saturday washing, peasants would go to the bathhouse in pary, partii or vatagi – small groups of two or more people. the bride was brought to the bath by her girlfriends or a sorcerer [kozyrev 1912: 80; ryan 1999: 75], the groom – by the druzhka or some of relatives, while newly-weds were accompanied by the druzhka, matchmakers and guests. it was the midwife (povitukha) who accompanied the new mother. at the entrance, you were supposed to utter a special formula: “bannyi khoziain, pusti menia v baniu poparit’sia!”(master of the bathhouse, let me in to steam myself) [adon’eva, ovchinnikova 1993: 30]. it was also crucial to ask the bath spirit for permission when it was necessary to spend a night in the bathhouse [zavoiko 1917: 39]. after bathing you should thank either the bania or the bannik for the steam: “spasibo na paru, na ban’ke, khoziain, khoziaiushka” (kind host, kind hostess, thank you for the steam bath) [adon’eva, ovchinnikova 1993: 31]. attention to clothing formed an important part of bathing ritual, whether it was what was worn on arrival or put on afterwards; usually people came to the bathhouse in the clothes they had worn all week. in lifecycle rites this is very noticeable; in some places after childbirth a woman had to go to the bania wearing torn clothing, carrying a big crutch or shovel (skovorodnik, a tool for putting pans into the oven) [magnitskii 1883: 19].(5) there are parallels here with the bride’s bath: the bride removed all her finery (earrings, beads, etc.) and put on a very poor, plain dress [arsen’ev 1879/64: 2].(6) after bathing, clean clothes had to be put on,(7) and a special charm against “spoiling” uttered [anikin 1998: 314]. often the ritual demanded not just clean but new clothes [balashov et al. 1985: 104]. certainly newly-weds put on new garments, the clothes for the bridegroom having been made by the bride [gippius 1928: 158]. charms and magical manipulations appropriate to the situation were uttered during bathing. when washing a baby the mother or midwife would repeat: “voda by knizu, a sam by kverkhu” (water go down, baby go up) [dal’ 1994: 75]; “s gogolia voda, s rebenkom khudoba” (like water off the golden-eye duck, so leanness off the baby) [anikin 1998: 43). texts uttered during the washing of the bride or newly-weds also bore an imperative character [kargin 2001: 300]. the bath-time steaming was believed to have a transforming effect imparting a new quality to life. after a bathhouse visit one feels revitalised even after the usual saturday bath, as the proverb has it: “posle parnoi budto vnov’ na svet rodilsia” (after a steam bath you feel born again) [zimin, spirin 1996: 176], or “bania vtoriaia mat’ nasha” (the bania is our second mother) [snegirev 1996: no. 503]. at the same time, a proverb compares steaming to the greatest pleasures in life, commensurate with sexual delight: “kabak da tabak, bania da baba – odna zabava” (the inn and tobacco, the bania and a woman – that’s all pleasure” [dal’ 1996: 255].(8) 30 in a folk riddle, steaming with the broom is likened to coitus, with the broom playing the male role: “ , , , : , ” (remember, vania my dear, how i got steamed: both standing and lying i got a hot place between my legs) [minenok 1995: no. 31]; or “ , ; , . – ” (a small thing came to me, grabbed me under the arms; i gave in to him, raised my legs in the air. mm, really nice, i want more) [sadovnikov 1876: no. 1063].(9) it is notable that the riddle also uses the reverse imagery, presenting the sexual act in “bathing” terms: “bania kozhana, dveri sileny, odin paritsia, dvoe nabivaiutsia” (a leather/skin bath, a hair door, one is steaming, two impose themselves) [podiukov 1995: 372]. the bathhouse was believed the place where a newborn baby’s fate could be determined [sadovnikov 1884: 295-97]. after being bathed, the baby acquired the status of a human being; his limbs were “corrected,” and he acquired the appearance of a “real” human being; as she smoothed his head, the midwife would say: “raspravlen, teper’ uzh urodtsem ne budesh’” (straightened, you won’t be a freak now) [krivoshapkin 1865: 2]. special manipulation “created” his sex, and then his future talents and skills were determined. for example, a boy’s umbilical cord should be cut on an axe, the girl’s on a spindle, so that they became skillful workers [baiburin 1993: 42-44]. after her bath the bride ceased to be seen as a girl and joined the category of married women [zyrianov 1970: 65]. after childbirth women, who were considered unclean for seven weeks, were expected to visit the bathhouse a set number of times (3-9) before being allowed to return to their usual duties, that is, “working, sleeping with her husband, eating meat, going visiting, dining with the family, milking the cow, kneading dough, touching the icons or visiting the church and cemetery” [loginov 1993: 48]. in this way, they restored their status. it may be assumed that taking a bath after a funeral helped people to return to the world of the living [avdeeva 1842: 122]. a guest from somewhere far away, from alien space, would wash away his alien character while bathing and could then be invited to dinner with the household [vereshchagin 1849: 222]. charms and rituals involving newly-weds were designed to create a healthy, safe, rich future [kireevskii 1911: 48 – 49];(10) and charms were also the most significant component of healing rituals [loginov 1993: 24, 37, 45, 87, 89]. the return from the bathhouse is usually marked by, for example, the ceremony of meeting the bride [kolpakova 1937: 65], in which large numbers of people participate, or by the greeting “s legkim parom” (with a light steaming), usually said when family members come back into the house. even today the end of bathing must be marked with food and drink. the name of the ritual bread, bannik, indicates the connection between bath and meal. in the north of russia this bread was baked for different occasions, such as weddings, births or the start of work in the fields [drfd 1966: 56]. female neighbors brought pies and other food for the new mother [babarykin 1853: 23], and after the bride’s bath a girls’ party took place in which the bride entertained her friends for the last time before the wedding [tereshchenko 1848: 171-72]. when the groom visited the bathhouse, he too invited his friends to refreshments (known as the mal’chishnik [lipinskaia, saf’ianova 1978: 192]. after the newly-weds had bathed, the “kniazhoi stol” (prince’s feast) was set out for them [kireevskii 1911: 44], while the funeral bath was followed by a special dinner for the dead [sobolevskii 1891: 229].(11) folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 31 in many cases gift giving took place after bathing. after childbirth the mother prepared gifts for the visiting neighbors, and for the midwife linen, flax or money [zelenin 1914: 744; 1915: 820; 1916: 1146]. the bride received presents from her parents after bathing and gave her girlfriends ribbons and earrings [balashov, marchenko, kalmykova 1985: 105]. before the wedding during his ritual bath, the groom gave a present to the best man who was in charge of the steaming [tereshchenko 1848: 172). very often gifts of clothes and linen were given by the bride to the groom’s family after the newly-weds’ bath [zelenin 1915: 6].(12) analysis of the ethnographic data leads to the conclusion that taking a steam bath is always an independent rite in itself, even when ordinary washing is involved. first of all, bathing (both ritual and conventional) is clearly localized in space and time. the bathhouse occupies a liminal site, on the edge of the village or yard, between one’s “own” and “alien” space; time too is liminal a moment of cardinal change in the life of the community (saturday evening) or the individual (life-cycle or occasional rites). apart from this, bath ritual has a clearly marked beginning and end with corresponding formulas and prescribed ways of “entering” and exiting from the situation of washing. in any case, there exists a fixed order in bathing ritual events develop according the same structure: the person responsible for the arrangement of the bath performs the same actions, whether he/she utters any texts or not. one of the characteristic features of taking a steam bath is the presence of a pair of participants, one active (the subject) and the other passive (the object), who accepts the actions of the former. events develop according to the structure of rites of passage: separation from the group, a move to a marginal space, symbolic death and rebirth in a new state (occurring through the medium of a certain person (the subject) who directs the process of metamorphosis), return, and reincorporation into the community [van gennep 1977]. as a result, the object acquires a new status. if we take into account the time and location of the bania this does not seem strange. the bathing process is always fixed to a moment when the ties and bounds of cosmos are destroyed and the future uncertain. this damaged world threatened by total collapse is always being reconstituted in one and the same way: the elements (that is, fire, water, stone, wood and a special, thick tangible kind of air – steam) are brought together in a sacred place, and the new reality, status or knowledge is being created by a special procedure which mimics coition. the new reality may just maintain the normal flow of life for the week to come or define life over the many years of a marriage. in this new reality the individual is healthy and successful, and world is right. the verbal and action codes of the ritual coincide or enrich each other, that is to say, this new reality is being created by both word and deed. in any situation the bathhouse remains a place where both manipulation and word possess great magical force. the significance of expressing good wishes and uttering incantations is evident, just as the danger of accidental damnation is very great. that is why one must be extracautious in the bania to guard one’s behavior and especially words. it is important to emphasize that metamorphosis is enacted while the person concerned is naked. “ablution and its attendant nudity, as well as the absence of any signs that indicate a connection with sphere of “culture” all apparently symbolized the “natural,” “initial” state of man [baiburin 1993: 43]. his previous state is being washed from his naked body. this washing is the last action that finally neutralizes the object. naked, the person is deprived of all human characteristics, but washed, he becomes the raw material for the creation of a 32 new man with new qualities. the manipulations of a specialist who conducts this change confirm the new status, and the subsequent dressing in new, clean, special, or at least different garments lends social meaning to this change. even the clean clothes put on after ordinary washing indicates renewal. the meal and the exchange of gifts which also very often accompanies the end of the bath is a further indication of the ritual meaning of washing in the bathhouse. thus, the bath can be viewed as a universal place of creation. every week (and at every critical moment in the life of the individual or community) the normal currents of life were being maintained here, and the “right” future fashioned. in situations of danger, an earlier, safe state of existence was being regained. all these were achieved through the simplest of procedures. it would appear that straightforward washing of the body is in reality a secondary function of the bania, although its importance for a healthy daily existence cannot be overestimated. in this sense, the bania is a unique phenomenon. it is usual to nominate its hygienic function as the primary function of the bath, but it may be a conjectured that the desire for cleanliness did not originally cause its appearance. analysis of proverbs and riddles about cleanliness and the bathhouse reveals that these themes do not intersect. in fact, some proverbs indicate the ability of bath to wash away, but they do not have in mind physical dirt but rather an individual’s previous condition or status; the bath can wash away grief, illness, “spoiling,” love, the bride’s “freedom” and so on. * * * * * having scrutinized the roles, functions and meaning of the bania using ethnographic sources, in which its symbolic and actual connections with rites of passage and the restoration of individual and community harmony have been revealed, i shall now turn to a consideration of christian and non-christian elements in this tradition. these can be seen to correspond to the two words that exist in early russian sources, bania and pert’, of which, as vahros [1963, 1966] has cogently argued, the latter relates to the original bathhouse system of the area..(13) the ability of the pert’ to “wash away” was taken by the orthodox church and adapted for a new symbolic function. purification by means of ablution plays an important role in both jewish and greek traditions. considering the deep roots of the bathhouse in early russian culture, we may assume that the church was able to reinterpret it as an orthodox rite new to the east slavs. accordingly, it would appear that the christian concept of christening, in which the individual washes away original sin and appears before god innocent as a child, was attached to the old russian idea of washing away the previous state of existence and acquiring a new one.(14) the purification of the soul by prayer is likened to the purification of the body through bathing, and as such it is one of the most significant christian symbols. baptism itself is in the slavonic bible actually termed “bania;”(15) the purifying significance of god’s word is compared with the power of love: “as christ loved the church, and gave himself for it, that he might sanctify it and cleanse it with the washing of water [baneiu vodnoiu] by the word” [ephes., 5; 25-26]. but it is necessary to point out that the slavonic text refers to a “water bath,” not a “steam bath.” the steam bath is mentioned in the chronicle as well as in charms and laments widely believed to be ancient in origin, whereas bathing in water is mentioned by christian sources because greek baths did not use steam. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 33 it would appear that orthodox tradition strictly divided the old russian, pre-christian pert’ (and ablution, “movenie,” connected with it) from the bania that came to russia from byzantium together with orthodoxy. there seems little doubt that pert’ was associated with pagan rites. the church both attached a new symbolism to the former ritual and replaced the old russian word pert’ with a new, loan word. this substitution happened very quickly: pert’ had disappeared from the language (in the records at least) within 200 years of the conversion of rus’. in a twelfth-century document, the homily of luka-ioann, archbishop of novgorod, the bathing habits of the novgorodians are regarded as a pagan anti-christian practice, incompatible with divine service. clerics who go to church after bathing are criticized: “having washed, they still celebrate the mass; you brethren, are not to do this” [vladimirov 1897: 145]. here this rule is addressed to clerics but evidently was later extended to lay folk. in the sixteenth-century the church banned from communion anyone who was fasting but who had accidentally let water get into his/her mouth while bathing [drl: 105]. the idea that drinking water in the bathhouse was prohibited appears in mid-nineteenth-century ethnographic sources [efimenko 1877: 165] and still exists today. the christian tradition by contrast was connected with a different type of bath, used as a baptismal font and erected by churches themselves. in particular, the eleventh-century bishop of pereiaslavl’, efrem was famous for building both churches and stone bath structures [golubinskii 1880: 566]. so, pert’ as an attribute of pagan practice was contrasted to the bania as part of a church. conceptually, bath and church service are opposites. thus the sorcerer could be recognized because on sundays (or church festivals) when all good christians were in church, sorcerers retreated to the bathhouse. as can be seen from the plot of a folk historical song about the false dmitrii, the pretender was unmasked when he went to the bathhouse during a church service on a festival [kireevskii 1911: 67-72; 75-76; kirsha danilov 1958: 79-81; gil’ferding 1948: no. 236; ryan 1999: 50]. the song accuses him of sorcery, that is, adherence to a pagan cult. the same contrast is evident in the homily mentioned above – bathing and then conducting mass is not permitted. in the light of the discussion above, it should be fruitful to reexamine the very first mention of the bathhouse in russian literature, the legend of st. andrew’s visit to rus’. the legend appears in the opening section of the primary chronicle, the tale of bygone years (povest’ vremennykh let) depicting the pre-history of the kievan state. the procedure of steaming in baths allegedly observed by the apostle in the area where novgorod was later founded is described in remarkable detail, something generally untypical of the laconic style and subject matter which eschews everyday life. andrew tells his story in rome where he has come after visiting the russian lands. the apostle says nothing about land of the poliane (one of the east slavic tribes) where he raised a cross and prophesied god’s mercy and glory to the future city of kiev. instead, the apostle was “surprised” by the custom of steaming in baths, and his amazement seemed to the chronicler worthy of mention in the world centre of christianity. in the scholarly writing devoted to an analysis of the legend, the episode has traditionally been interpreted as the kievans ridiculing the strange habits of the novgorodian slavs. but this interpretation is seriously open to question for two reasons. firstly, the legend is inserted in the solemn and significant part of the chronicle about the origins of the russian state. it seems hardly credible that everyday jokes about the customs of another slav tribe (which subsequently became part of kievan rus’) would be 34 appropriate in this part of the chronicle. secondly, the kievans had been acquainted with the institution of the bathhouse since at least 882 when prince oleg moved to kiev with his retinue.(16) for these reasons i would suggest that there was another reason for including the legend in the chronicle. the passage about the novgorodian slavs and their baths precedes a description of the pagan wedding and funeral customs of the other slav tribes, the krivichi, viatichi and drevliane. in contrast to the other slav tribes the poliane are presented as a relatively civilized, if pagan, people, and this line is in keeping with the general orientation of the chronicle which was compiled in kiev, the area occupied by the poliane. the chronicler’s aim was to show that the poliane were more ready to accept christianity than other slav tribes. if we look at the legend from this point of view, the story about novgorodian slav bathing habits acquires a different meaning. the kievan chronicler’s irony is aimed not at a bizarre custom but at the pagan practice of ablution bound up with the novgorod bathhouse. by contrast, baths in kiev possessed only a hygienic function (we cannot assert with any certainty that prince oleg’s warriors, mainly scandinavian varangians, who while adopting the custom of the steam bath in novgorod, had also taken on the ritual practices of the slavs; in any case, as the legend makes clear, baths in kiev only had a hygienic function.(17) in the legend the novgorod slav custom of steam baths is ranked with the “savage” customs of other slavs, and the poliane whose habits were, according to the legend, “mild and peaceful,” thereby look more deserving of god’s mercy and their future glory.(18) thus, the supposition about two semantic complexes in the concept of bathing is confirmed by the totality of the data about the bathhouse in its historical perspective. given that every ritual can be regarded in the words of levinton as an “utterance” about something [1995: 261], it seems important to try to ascertain to what bath ritual is referring (at any rate, in its original form). lexical data emerge as the most valuable in this process. in different indo-european languages the root *perhas a series of specific meanings. for instance, the names of the thunder god can be traced back to it (east slav perun, latvian perkons, lithuanian perkunas), as well as numerous verbs with the meaning “to beat,” “whip,” “lash,” “beat with a broom,” as well as “to argue,” “fight,” “struggle” or “oppose.” the word for “sweat”, “perspire” – pret’, vzopret’ is also connected with this root [vasil’kov 1999: 357-58; vasmer 1996/3: 355, 662]. it seems truly remarkable that one of the meanings of the root *per-, “beat with a broom,” “sweat out with broom in the bath” along with the name of the bathhouse (old russian pert’, latvian pertis, lithuanian pirtis) is connected to those slav and baltic peoples (latvians, lithuanians and north russians) in whose culture the bathhouse plays an important role.(19) thus, in the word pert’ we find a condensed plot about a battle, struggle or quarrel during which one of the participants “beats,” “whips,” “lashes” the other (maybe with a broom) and this causes sweating. if we take into consideration the sexual connotations of the verb “to beat,” as well as the life-giving activity of sweat,(20) we can find confirmation of the idea of the bania as a symbolic “cosmic marriage” (or “cosmic duel”) which emerges clearly from the analysis of proverbs and riddles. it then becomes clear that the old russian pert’ has close connections with perun, the pagan slav god of thunderstorms – something that looks extremely interesting. according to the lexical data, pert’ is thus the place for beating, and perun the one who does the folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 35 beating and it depends on the context whether the beating is literal (with twigs, arrows, lightning, etc) or symbolic coition (that is, creation, transformation). but we do not have the data that would allow us to agree with boris uspenskii that in a more or less visible past the bathhouse was a “temple of volos,” the pagan god of fertility.(21) furthermore, although there are some indications that the activities involved in steaming are “perunian” in essence, there are inadequate grounds to suggest that the bathhouse was once directly connected to the cult of perun. the available folklore materials of all genres attribute the changes that take place in the bathhouse to the actual process of steaming. neither a god nor his representatives are involved.(22) as far as we can judge from early russian christian sources, during the period before the adoption of christianity, the pagan religious function of the bathhouse seems not to have been really important. the church did not oppose the bathhouse as such, merely some of the rites and customs, mainly those connected with funerals. with its hostility, the bathhouse acquired the reputation of an unclean place; it was physically removed from consecrated space, its name replaced and prohibitions in connection with church services introduced. all these factors indicate that the generally “pagan” nature of the bathhouse was quite clear to the church. thanks to the influence of the church, it was the purifying function of the bania that emerged supreme, while bathing procedures acquired a distinct christian meaning. all the traditional rites which incorporated a visit to the bathhouse were reinterpreted as purificatory. this concerned the post-natal bath, the newly-weds bath (as well as the post-coital), bathing for guests and, in general, all bathing before or after an important occasion. this “official” meaning of the bathhouse, together with its cleansing hygienic qualities, have always been so self-evident that it is no wonder that the ancient semantics of transformation, which are not so clear in the ethnographic sources, have lain undetected for so long. thus, the russian bania emerges as a phenomenon with very complicated, multi-layered semantics. on the surface, we see a thousand-year-old hygienic custom, an ideal way of maintaining health or regaining strength, as well as a source of fun and pleasure, and which plays a huge role in the everyday life of the people. thanks to these factors the bathhouse has maintained its attractiveness to this day. beneath this important surface layer, we can discern the deep christian concept of washing away sins, a purification essential before taking the sacraments, in its effect to be compared with the word of god. and, finally, deep within lies the concept of the constant renewing of the world, universal transformation, as well as the maintenance of cosmic balance and the regulation of the complete life of the community. notes 1 this method was used not only in the bathhouse but also in ritual brewing and for making funeral kisel’ (special ritual starch-based drink). in novgorod province beer for patronal festivals was made in wooden tubs (very often in bathhouses) right up to the 1950’s. 2 removing one’s cross was also prescribed prior to coition [ryan 1999: 230] 36 3 arranging a bath for visitors was evidently customary even as long ago as 945, judging by the story of princess ol’ga’s revenge on the drevliane in the tale of bygone years. inviting them to kiev she offers the unsuspecting guests a bath on arrival and then locks them in the heated bathhouse and sets fire to it. 4 it is crucial to emphasize her that the total passivity of the chief participant in certain instances is strictly prescribed, for example, in the bride’s bath the girls wash each other and the bride while the latter “touches nothing” [strakhov 1836: 240]. 5 in traditional culture the crutch was believed to be an attribute of representatives of the “other world.” 6 it might be the other way round: “she was dressed smartly, in a fur coat, with a beautiful crown, holding embroidered towels in her hands” [bernshtam 1983: 125]. in both instances special accent is being placed on the clothes. 7 compare this with the proverb: na vdove zhenit’sia – vse ravno chto griaznoe bel’e posle bani nadet’ (to marry a widow is the same as to put on dirty clothes after the bath). 8 according to nadia peterson, bath and woman are compared (female body and pagan space produce same sensual pleasure [peterson 1996: 190]. to my mind, however, bania in this context means the “process of washing,” not the building, and baba has to mean “sex,” not the “body.” i can, however, agree with that idea of smoking, drinking, sex and steaming in the bath can be placed together on equal terms what ranks the bath in the list of main male sins. 9 nancy condee points to sayings describing the broom: “within the bath, the broom is the lord” (v bane – venik gospodin); “the broom in the bath is senior even to the tsar’” (venik v bane i tsaria starshe), suggestting that the broom plays the role of patriarch here [condee 1994: 11]. 10 certainly, the bathhouse was not the only place where the future was determined. all life-cycle rites aim to ensure a new and happy life. 11 the custom of organizing a bath and a feast for the dead still exists today in karelia. 12 this custom was also enacted at royal weddings [kotoshikhin 1859: 10]. 13 the chroniclers of the tale of bygone years, who were kievan monks, evidently avoided using the word pert’, probably owing to its strong pagan connotations, preferring the loan word bania known to them from greek/latin or neutral terms like movnitsa or myl’nia (place for washing) mov’ and movenie, as well as mytva, indicate a process, not a building, and, more importantly, the process of washing, not steaming. as a consequence, the term pert’ does not feature in the chronicle at all, and there are practically no early russian documents containing this word. zelenin, for instance, did not know it, and his conjectures about the name centre around izba, istobka, bania [zelenin 1991: 283]. nor is the term pert’ mentioned in the thorough recent collective monograph by a group of moscow ethnographers on the bath and stove in traditional russian culture [lipinskaia et al. 2003], most surprisingly given that vahros’ linguistic study in which he describes the substitution of pert’ by bania, appeared as long ago as 1966 [1966: 54; 321-22; 1963]). one document that does mention pert’ is a 16th-century homily: “concerning christening a child… when you are called to the pert’, make a prayer over the defiled vessel … and do not mention his/her name at that point” [drl 1989: 15; also folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 37 sreznevskii 1989, 2: col. 1772]. the root survives in the word papert’, “church-porch,” “outer entrance hall of church,” interestingly a built space connected with a sacred building. 14 the function of the old russian bath is not only the washing away of the previous state, but also the washing in of a new quality; still found, for example, when the bride goes to the bath: “smyt’ dev’iu krasotu i namyt’ bab’iu krasotu” (to wash away her maidenly beauty and wash in her womanly beauty) [zyrianov 1970: 65]. in the case of church ablution, the bania washes away sins, making the individual ready for future rebirth through baptism or the eucharist. 15 according to fasmer, the word bania comes from greek or latin [1986, 2: 121], while vakhros [1966: 69-70] derives it from the popular latin baneum (balnea), a view that concurs with that of zelenin [1991: 283]. 16 the right of the russian merchants in constantinople to take baths was mentioned in oleg’s first treaty with the byzantines in 907: “when guests come they can have provisions for six months, bread, and wine, meat, fish, and fruits. baths shall be prepared for them in any volume they prefer” [pvl 1996: 17]. the fact that the kievans insisted on including free washing in the document along with free food demonstrates how well this custom was entrenched. 17 there is only indirect evidence about this: for example, in rural ukraine bathhouses did not exist in the past and still do not (ukrainian peasants washed in tubs), but urban public baths have been known for a very long time. it has been assumed that the spread of bathhouses was associated with princes’ officials and their retinues: bathhouses seem always to have existed in the main administrative centres. ritual bath practices were evidently a custom with great princes but they were not usual for ordinary folk in ukraine and southern russia. 18 i base this on the view that the finnish peoples adopted the bathhouse from their neighbors, the russians or the balts, together with the name [see vahros 1966: 77]. 19 the russian primary chronicle, s.a. 1071, includes a creation legend: “god washed in the bath and after perspiring, wiped himself with straw, and threw it out of heaven to the earth. and satan quarreled with god as to which of them would create man. and the devil made man, and god put a soul in him. so, when man dies, his body goes to the earth and his soul to god” [pvl 1996: 76; ryan 1999: 50]. the chronicler put this legend in the mouth of a pagan wizard, thus attributing belief in the vivifying quality of god’s sweat to him. 20 according to nancy condee, the future churches of kiev and the baths of the novgorod slavs mark two contrasting features of russian culture: holy faith and pagan practice [condee 1994: 3, 6] 21 uspenskii 1982: 154. nancy condee 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[works of old russian ecclesiastical didactic writing], 3. st petersburg: izdatel’stvo zhurnala “strannik”. zavoiko, g. k. 1917. “ ” [in the kostroma forests by the river vetluga]. , 8: 3-40 . zelenin, d. k. 1914-1916. [description of manuscripts in the academic archives of the imperial russian geographic society]. petrograd: rgo. zimin, v. i., spirin, a. s. 1996. [proverbs and sayings of the russian people]. moscow: siuita. zorin, n. v. 1981. [the russian wedding in the middlevolga region]. kazan’: izd-vo kazanskogo universiteta. zyrianov, i. v. 1970. . . . [the cherdyn’ wedding. recorded and compiled by i. v. zyrianov]. perm’: permskoe knizhnoe izd-vo. microsoft word folkf05f.doc 73 oleksandra britsyna and inna golovakha. prozovyi fol’klor sela ploske na chernigivschiny (teksti ta rozvidki) (prose folklore of ploske, a village in chernihivshchyna (texts and analysis)) (in ukrainian). kyiv: institut mistetstvoznavstva, fol’kloristiki ta etnologii im ril’s’kogo (m. ryl’s’kyi institute of arts, folklore, and ethnology), 2004. 584 pp. 35 hryvna. isbn 966-02-3370-1. imagine going to a ukrainian village to collect traditional narratives. then imagine returning to record them again and again, sometimes several hours after the original recording, sometimes a few days, a few months, a few years. then imagine collecting narratives a whole century after the initial recording. the authors of this book, scholars from the kyivan institute of arts, folklore, and ethnology, did just that. their goal was an in-depth study of the development of oral tradition within a single community. they sought to understand the connection between contemporary narrative and narratives of the past. they tried to grasp the functions that narratives currently serve and to examine how stories are transmitted. ultimately, they hoped to gain insight into traditional memory, the preservation of a text and its mutation over time. britsyna and golovakha have been conducting fieldwork in the village of ploske for an extensive period of time. they began their research in 1994 and they have been going back to ploske on a regular basis ever since. they chose ploske so that they could compare the texts that they collected against the materials recorded in the same village between 1886 and 1900 by oleksandr malynka, a prominent early ukrainian folklorist. their work was part of a project aimed at rerecording the narratives collected by nineteenth-century folklorists, which was begun by the institute of arts, folklore, and ethnology in the 1970s. over the years that britsyna and golovakha worked in ploske, they were joined by other scholars and students who made parallel recordings, including scholars from the united states and canada. the authors recorded about 300 prose narratives of different genres, including fairy tales, memorates, fabulates, dreams and dream interpretations, anecdotes, demonological stories, apocrypha, legends, and other prose narrative forms. fifty ploske villagers provided the material. the collectors recorded their texts under different communicative situations to see how narrative context would affect the story. the texts constitute the main body of the book. each narrative is meticulously documented. the collectors provide information about the performer and the date and place of performance and also describe the circumstances of performance. they note the name of the person who did the transcription of the sound file and give archival information, telling us where the collected material has been deposited. all tales are indexed according to the aarne-tompson classification system with parallel references to the east-slavic tale type index. non-tale texts, such as memorates, fabulates, dreams, and personal narratives, are indexed according to the classification of mythological narrative. as the extensive documentation implies, this is a scholarly and not a popular tale collection. the texts have not been edited to make them more readable and as many oral features as possible have been retained. the collectors do their best to convey the atmosphere of a live performance. they provide notes on intonation and pitch. they note pauses, gestures, mimicry, imitation of character voices, and so forth. but linguistic features are not the primary concern of the collectors. they are interested in performance. here, too, it is not so much folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 74 the virtuosity of a particular narrator that is their concern, but the role that he or she plays in the development of the tradition. they consider factors such as personality and worldview. they look at the upbringing of their narrators and the cultural setting in which they grew up. they examine relations between the narrator and the community: the audience and the circumstances of performance and the role that a particular narrator plays in the transmission of traditional prose. they look at the narrator and his or her relationship to his own texts: changes in repertoire and in attitude towards one’s own story-telling. they examine polyphonic relationships: how narratives within a single person’s repertoire play off of and influence one another. the authors discuss these topics in depth, approaching oral prose as a complex phenomenon best understood when approached from a variety of angles. there are two introductory theoretical chapters: inna golovakha’s “the village of ploske, its traditions and performers” and oleksandra britsyna’s “textological study of prose narrative in a folk community.” these are followed by the main body of the book, the texts, which are arranged in four parts by performer; detailed information about each performer is provided. part five gives twenty-eight traditional prose texts performed by ploske villagers other than the four main narrators. part six is a set of appendices divided into seven subchapters: 1) the fifty-one narratives recorded by malynka in the nineteenth century, 2) malynka’s obituary, 3) tales recorded at different times and by other collectors from m. trush, the best male tale performer in ploske, 4) tales and other prose texts recorded at different times from m. perepechai, a female performer, 5) tales recorded at different times from the performers’ “pupils,” 6) a list of the main prose texts forming the narrative tradition of ploske, and 7) concluding commentaries, consisting of two theoretical paragraphs: britsyna’s “peculiarities of repeated performances and the problem of folk memory” and golovakha’s “some notes on the history of performance studies in ukrainian and world folkloristics.” there is an alphabetical index of the texts, an index of tales types and of non-tale plot types. a name index and abstracts in russian and english are also provided. the authors include numerous pictures of ploske and its performers in the book. as already noted, the authors’ collection method was one of repetitive recording (making recordings of the same story from one and the same performer over time and varying the time intervals). they also recorded “imperfect” texts: narrative fragments and texts that were only partially remembered. the texts were performed spontaneously or in response to the collector’s request. the collectors also conducted interviews and discussions with their performers. they performed transmission experiments and they made observations outside the performance context. the recordings were made on video and audio tape and accompanied by still photographs. finally, the authors compared contemporary texts from the same performer with each other and with the corresponding texts from the nineteenth century. they used synoptic comparisons and compared textual fragments, searching for similar narrative segments. the authors conclude that tradition is, in fact, well preserved. the repertoires of contemporary performers in ploske bear a striking resemblance to the material collected a century earlier. in spite of the enormous impact that the mass media has had in the twentieth century, oral prose is still alive in ukraine and very important to its tellers. what has happened, the authors observe, is not so much a change in tradition as a reduction in its size. starting with the middle of the twentieth century, magic tales became an exclusively folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 75 children’s genre. as a result, the people who tell magic tales today are exclusively women of middle age or older with an elementary or a secondary education. the traditional circumstances of performance have also changed and written sources are used more and more. however, even though some narrators owned published collections of tales and read from them, their own telling of the tales tended to be stable over time, both in content and form. this is to say that their performance seemed unaffected by their use of printed sources and their texts were more like the oral traditions of their village than like the texts they had read in books. on the other hand, non-tale narratives, the fabulates, memorates and personal narratives, texts that are close to spontaneous everyday speech, demonstrate vivid improvisation and a broad spectrum of variation. as stated by the authors, non-tale genres dominate in the repertoires of contemporary performers. the extensive discussion of non-tale genres and the presentation of the corresponding texts add value to this book since legends, fabulates, memorates and their performers have not been extensively recorded or studied by ukrainian folklorists. using the ploske village community as their model, the authors have produced a successful study of how oral tradition functions. they have shown how the dynamics of oral tradition works. their findings indicate that folk prose is affected by its connection to the audience, by intergenerational transmission, and even community demographics. oral transmission takes place through the teacher-pupil relationship. pupils inherit not only the semantic, compositional, and verbal aspects characteristic of their teacher’s narratives, they also acquire their mentor’s performance traits. they achieve all the hallmarks that their community equates with narrative competence. this inherited knowledge, along with audience interest and encouragement, enable the tradition’s continued existence. the prose folklore of ploske is a book that will prove essential to a variety of folklore specialists. it provides a combination of good and reliably recorded texts with important theoretical work. it will be essential reading for specialists interested in contemporary folklore, for students of oral tradition and its development and conservation. people interested in the performer will find this to be a basic study. they will find information about folk memory and about the creativity of the individual narrator. those who are interested specifically in ukrainian folklore and in the dissemination of certain tale plots across ukraine will find this a useful study, as will those interested in international tale types and how they adapt to regional specifications. svitlana kukharenko university of alberta folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 2 microsoft word folklorica_2011g.doc wedding rituals in the belarusian palesse folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 43 wedding rituals on the territory of belarusian palesse iryna charniakevich department of humanities hrodna state medical university grodno, belarus abstract the article traces the local peculiarities of historical and ethnographic distribution of wedding rites in belarusian palesse. it is based on the analysis of a wide range of published sources, archival materials, and unpublished ethnographic field studies. this work was conducted in the context of belarusian regional studies and concerns only the belarusian part of palesse, the territory which was subject to belarusian ethnic processes in the early twentieth century and, in the second half of the twentieth century, was included in belarusian territory; it does not apply to the entire region, that is russian poles’e, ukrainian polisse, and polish polesie. the analyzed rituals include all three stages of an east slavic wedding ceremony: before the wedding, the wedding itself, and after the wedding. the common features and local differences of west and east palesse weddings are discussed. this article is a part of my research entitled “historical and ethnographic distribution of wedding rites in belarusian palesse.” it is based on the analysis of a wide range of published sources, archival materials, and unpublished ethnographic field studies, including my own. most of the sources used in this paper are from the first half of the twentieth century. however, taking into account the relative stability of traditional culture (at least prior to recent modernization) the use of published sources from the second half of the xix century seems possible in a study like this. it should be noted that this work was conducted in the context of belarusian regional studies and concerns only the belarusian part of palesse, the territory which was subject to belarusian ethnic processes in the early twentieth century and, in the second half of the twentieth century, was included in belarusian territory; it does not apply to the entire region, that is russian poles’e, ukrainian polisse, and polish polesie. in academic literature the term belarusian palesse is now 44 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi common. researchers of traditional culture identify two historicalethnographic regions in belarusian palesse, namely east and west. eastern palesse occupies most of the palesse lowland and, on the east, borders the upper dnieper region (the lower right bank of the berezina river and dnieper). its northern border runs to the north from the town of hantsevichy and along parychy-l’uban’-starobin-chudzin line. according to v.s. tsitou, the border between east and west palesse runs from lake vyhanauskae and between the rivers iasel’da and bobryk toward the towns of lahva, luninets and further along the prypiats’ river and the rivers haryn’ and stsviha. west palesse occupies the upper basin of the prypiats’ river and its tributaries pina and iasel’da. in the west it includes the right bank of the western bug river, and in the north it borders the upper neman at the head water of the narava and iasel’da. [tsitou 1994: 279, 286; shamiakin 1989: 208, 507]. the east slavic wedding ritual is divided into three stages: before the wedding, the wedding itself, and after the wedding. the palesse variants of the first stage include two, three or even four meetings between representatives of the two families. the first meeting is called piarepyty (also perevid, zapytyny, dopyty); this is followed by matchmaking, called svatanne (also svaty, persha, zapoiny); then comes the viewing or ahledziny (also called rozhliady, obhodyny, merku zdymats’, nastylnyky meraty); and last is the betrothal or zarychyny (also called zaruchenne, maharych, zmoviny, zapoiny). the stages piarepyty and ahledziny can vary according to region and are optional, while matchmaking and betrothal are obligatory and practiced in all regions; the two stages need not be separate events and can happen during one evening. the actual wedding begins with the baking of a loaf, the main ceremonial bread korovai. the other initial stage of the wedding is the evening for unmarried girls called vinky, vinochky, kvetki, byrachki, izbory, veliona shyts’, or razbornaia kasha. the baking of the wedding bread can occur in both houses, meaning that of the bride and that of the groom, or it can be done in the groom’s house only; in a few regions bread baking is absent. the evening for unmarried girls can be combined with baking a wedding bread in a bride’s house; it is also possible not to hold an evening for unmarried girls at all. one of the most important moments in palesse marriage is the pasad, or seating, of the bride. this is done before the arrival of the groom’s friends (druzhyny) and it is sometimes combined with the baking of the wedding bread at the bride’s house [dovnar-zapol’skii 1909: 97-106, 121-146; baiburin 1993: 7074]. a variation of the pasad involves the friends of both the bride and wedding rituals in the belarusian palesse folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 45 groom, but takes place at the home of the bride’s parents. replacing the headdress that the bride wore as a girl with one which signifies married status is also an extremely important part of the wedding, but, in palesse, does not occur at a specific point in the wedding. it could happen in the house of the bride’s parents or it could take place after the wedding party moves to the house of the bridegroom. the next step is a ceremonial visit to the bride by members or representatives of her family which takes place at her husband’s home on the morning after the wedding. this is called prydanyia, perazou, or perazva. sometimes the bridegroom visits the in-laws (pa tsioshchu). this is followed by ritual masquerading which, in the palesse wedding, has many variations. the final phase of the wedding is the first after-wedding visit by the bride to her parents’ house. this is called hostyna, pirohi, or pyrohy [bondarchik et al 1987: 167-172; pashkova 1978; shamiakin 1989: 126-131; tsvirka 2004: 1529 and elsewhere]. according to palesse tradition, the bride and groom at the wedding are called molodyi (molody) and molodia (moloda), all of which mean “the young”. the name zhanikh (groom) is quite common in the contemporary recordings. this term has entered the lexicon as the result of the influence of the russian language. the word niavesta (bride) in palesse dialects meant “daughter-in-law” and it is rarely used to indicate the transitional state of a girl, meaning her status as a bride. palesse wedding rituals are characterized by a great deal of variation. this peculiarity has been identified by all investigators of palesse culture and it causes difficulties when it comes to identifying the regional characteristics of traditional marriage. because there is no stable structure to palesse wedding rites, we find substantial differences in even the most important components and many of them are not fixed to a certain stage of the ritual [gura 1981: 277]. local traditions form a mosaic which is difficult to classify. however, some components of the wedding rite are typical for entire groups of variants. upon determining the areas of distribution of these components, we can establish certain regularities. this leads us to assert that palesse wedding ritual ceremonies do in fact have fairly stable complexes common to entire groups of local variants and that these complexes are distributed over a large territory. analysis of local variants of marriage rituals in belarusian palesse shows that there are two stable complexes: the eastern and the western. 46 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi east palesse complex. traditionally, in this wedding complex, matchmaking took place without prior visits to the bride’s family. as in other eastern slavic cultures, a palesse girl had the nominal right to make the final decision and to agree or refuse to marry a particular man. however, she rarely exercised her right and she did not follow her personal desires if they did not coincide with the will of her parents and with public opinion. [jeleńska 1891: 326]. east palesse shows evidence of matrilocal marriages [aimef: fond 6, folder 3, unit 10, p. 10; pashkova 1978: 30]. in such cases, the girl herself actively participated in the matchmaking. the girl’s aunt or mother led the conversation with the mother of the groom-to-be. such practices were observed in some stolin region villages after world war ii [pashkova 1978: 84]. in other east palesse weddings, a relative of the bridegroom performs the role of chief matchmaker; the groom’s father is never allowed to act as matchmaker although his presence at this stage of the ritual is considered mandatory. as elsewhere in palesse, the matchmakers speak in metaphors and absence of metaphorical speech is rare. upon reaching an agreement between the families of the two young people, the girl’s parents or she herself will invite all her kin to a celebration of the engagement that is called zapoiny or maharych. such a celebration takes place one or two days after the agreement is made. the final verbal agreement, sealed by tying the relatives of the groom with a piece of linen or by the presentation of gifts, is concluded at the ceremony of betrothal. in the east palesse wedding complex, the stages of matchmaking and engagement are quite flexible, and the terminology to describe these rites is completely different from that found in west palesse. one of the typical characteristics of the east palesse wedding ceremony is the ritual of separation. the most common form of this ceremony is the making of a wedding tree (elka, velets, vilets, hil’tse) for one of the couple, usually for the bride. wedding trees can be made for both the bride and the groom, in which case they are made separately. the making of the wedding tree for the bride usually happens at her home during the evening for unmarried girls, but it could also happen at the home of a relative. what is always true is that it needs to happen on the eve of the main wedding ceremony. the girl’s wedding tree is then purchased or “ransomed” by representatives of the groom. in some areas, such as the village kruki, brahin district, the wedding tree is “ransomed” wedding rituals in the belarusian palesse folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 47 by the master of the house, meaning the father [aimef: fond 8, folder 81, unit 184, fieldnotes l, p. 9]. a description of the making of the wedding tree as practiced in the second half of xix century in the village dubrouka of homel district, mahileu huberniia written by e.r. ramanau follows: “у той жа дзень [у дзень вянчання – і.ч.] надвячоркам маладыя дзяўчаты клічуць адна адну: “хадзіце елца віць!” прыйшоўшы ў дом жаніха або нявесты, яны знаходзяць там кучаравую галінку вішні ці чарэшні або елку, утыкваюць у булку хлеба, які ставяць на стол. старшая дзяўчына просіць благаславення, кажучы: “ці ёсць тут ацец і маці?” старыя адказваюць: “маем быць!” – “благаславіце маладому івану елца завіць!” – “божа благаславі!” тады пачынаюць віць елку – убіраць кветкамі. <…> калі ўбяруць елку, дружок дае дзяўчатам за працу па чарцы гарэлкі”. [on the same evening, [the eve of the wedding i.ch.] young girls called to each other: “come to make a tree!” walking to the groom or bride’s house, they would find a branch of a cherry tree or a fir tree, stick it into a loaf of bread, and put it on the table. the oldest girl would ask for blessing, saying: “are the father and mother present?” the parents reply: “we are here!” – “bless young ivan to curl the tree!” [the parents reply] “god bless!” after that they begin to “curl” the tree, that is to adorn it with flowers. <...> when the tree is ready, the best man gives each girl a glass of vodka to thank for her for a job well done.] [tsvirka 2004: 406-407]. making the wedding tree for the bride is associated with a change in a woman’s status and the end of her participation in ritual groups comprised of unmarried girls. the ransoming of the tree together with the symbolic purchases made after the meal and the pasad are the regular features of east palesse weddings. the pasad as an indication of new status is important in both the east and west palesse. evidence of the existence of a pasad ceremony for a bridegroom in east palesse at the turn of the century is recorded by a.s. fiadosik in the materials based on folk traditions in the loeu district. he states that “usually after the ceremony of bread baking, the groom, along with his best men, would go to the bride’s home. in some villages, the groom went through the following ritual: he sat on a barrel of rye, while his godmother trimmed his hair and set it on fire with a wax candle. this indicated transition from youth to full manhood.” [fiadosik 2000: 556]. accounts about the bridegroom’s pasad on a barrel were also recorded in the village of krasnaia dubrova, rechitsa district [shteiner and novak 2002: 179]. usually, however, the groom did not go through a pasad and the ritual actions associated with him were limited to his being blessed by his parents “to go on a long journey.” 48 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi m. dovnar-zapol’ski identified three steps to the pasad ritual of the bride: cutting off or unplaiting her braids (pastryhanne or raspliatanne kasy), seating her on a sheepskin coat turned inside out, and the covering of her head. [dovnar-zapol’ski 1909: 121]. these ceremonies existed until almost the middle of the twentieth century and all three major structural components of this ritual were typically present. ritual actions that placed restrictions on both participants in the wedding or rituals that required behaviors that were difficult to achieve, such as maintaining the chastity of both the bride and the groom, tended to disappear. what typifies east palesse is that all three of components of the pasad survived into the present. moreover, in the east, all the parts of the ritual were performed in the home of the bride’s parents, including dressing the bride in the headdress of a married woman. this last ceremony was called “curling” (zavivanne) and was performed by specially designated female participants of the wedding called zavival’nitsy (zavival’nitsa – sing.). the persons who assumed the role of zavival’nitsy were the female matchmakers (svakhi; svakha – sing.) from both sides, the bride’s and the groom’s, and they had to be happily married women. [ritual folklore 1998: 18 19, 30, 68, 76, 83, 90, 96; aimef: fond 7, folder 1, unit 879, p. 36a; fond 8, folder 81, unit 182: 1, p. 44: 3, p. 39; kryvitski et al 1987: 398]. the description of “curling” from e.r. ramanau’s records follows: “…дзве маладзіцы становяцца на ўслон: адна трымае ў руцэ грабянец, другая – чапец, намітку і вялікі кавалак белага палатна. каля іх ставяць хлопчыка – брата нявесты, які гаворыць: “ці ёсць тут ацец і маці? благаславіце маладой касу расплесці!” хлопчык расплятае касу, бярэ сабе шнурок у паўтара аршына, а дружок дае яму некалькі капеек. потым маладыя жанчыны пачынаюць завіваць маладой валасы пажаночаму: надзяваюць на галаву чапец і накрываюць наміткай. маладая ўсё гэта скідвае з галавы некалькі разоў, пакуль ёй не прыгрозіць бацька. завіўшы маладую, маладзіцы спяваюць: “шчо мы і схацелі, // тое і зрабілі: // з цеста паляніцу, // з дзеўкі маладзіцу”. [... two girls stand together, one holding a comb, the other a cap (chapets), a head wrap (namitka) and a large piece of white linen. a young boy, typically the bride’s brother, stands with them. he says: “are father and mother present? bless the bride so that we may unplait her braid!” the boy then unplaits the braid and, as his reward, he takes a string about a half a yard in length and the best man gives him a few pennies. then the zavival’nitsy begin to “curl” (zavivats’) the bride’ hair in a new way suitable for her new status. they put the cap on her head and cover it with the headwrap. the bride takes the new headdress off of her head several times, until her father threatens her. after the curling, the zavival’nitsy sing: “we did what we wanted to do, / we made bread out of dough / we made a woman out of a girl] [tsvirka 2004: 411]. wedding rituals in the belarusian palesse folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 49 the wedding ceremonies associated with bread (karavainyia abrady) are relatively poorly attested in east palesse as indicated by the well-known scholar of the folklore of the homel’ district v.s. novak [novak 1998: 355]. however, there are distinctive features associated with the baking of the karavai. these include the decoration of the wedding bread (karavai) and, occasionally of the wedding tree, made by bridesmaids [aimef: fond 8, folder 81, unit 182: 1, p. 39; shteiner and novak 2002: 160-161]. there are no records that indicate that decorations made of tree branches and used exclusively for the karavai were made in conjunction with east palesse weddings. rather, a distinctive feature associated with the karavai is its distribution among the wedding guests as part of the gift-giving ceremony. [ritual folklore 1998: 20-21, 76, 93, 96; aimef: fond 8, folder 81, unit 184: 3, p. 43, folder 83, unit 210: 3, p. 87; tsvirka 2004: 550; shteiner and novak 2002: 162, 207]. a common feature of the east palesse wedding is the presence of games with erotic content called khvasty (tails) or zaiats (rabbit). a variant of the erotic games is the mock wedding. all variants occur in the final stages of the wedding and include the act of eating chicken or other meat cooked in a special way. the latter action could be included as a part of the mock wedding but is often a separate rite and could occasionally take up the entire day. [ritual folklore 1998, 31; 78; 8384]. a description by one of the informants from the village slabazhanka, khoiniki district follows: “пасля заканчэння вяселля ў маладой (з рукі маладога), і ў маладога (з рукі маладой) гуляюць у “зайца”. за маладую адзяваюць “шутлівую” жанчыну і мужчыну – за маладога. надзяваюць вянок, зроблены з палявых красак, прышываюць замест кветкі розгу з веніка, замест свечкі – дзяркач дзіравы. садзяць іх на куце, зводзяць іх і цалавацца, як і маладых, у сажу вымазваюць. даруць: гарбузы выражуць, падмазку, што скавараду мажуць гэта пудраніца, засланку гэта люстра. скруцяць ляльку з трапак гэта ты бярэш жонку з прыданым байбуком. выходзяць на вуліцу і крычаць: “паймаем зайца, паймаем”. адзін бярэ стрэльбу і страляе, заяц падае: ці “малады”, ці “маладая”. а тады ўжо прыходзяць да лупяць таго зайца. ужо ложаць на стол ратаваць зайца. стараюцца падвесці мужчыну, які не ведае гэтага звычаю. а зайцу даюць гарэлкі ў рот, ён дзяржыць. як толькі падыходзіць хто “ратаваць”, то заяц прысне яму ў твар, вочы гэтаю гарэлкаю. потым зноў ідуць у хату гэта ж убілі зайца, трэба замачыць. у панядзелак, пасля заканчэння вяселля адны свахі гатуюць ежу, прадукты к гэтаму зайцу, а другія пераапранаюцца ў цыганскае адзенне, бяруць маскі (капронавыя шкарпэткі, каб не пазналі), сумкі, кашы 50 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi бяруць, ідуць па хатах. людзі дараць, кур ловяць. усё гэта сцягаецца на вясельны двор”. [after the wedding the game called “rabbit” is played at the home of the bride and also the groom. a young girl is dressed as a false or mock bride and a young man is dressed as a mock bridegroom. the girl wears a wreath made of weeds and the man wears broom bristles instead of the groom’s flower; a rusty oven spade serves as a candle. the fake couple sits in the corner while the villagers make them kiss each other as if they were newlyweds and smear them with soot. the fake newlyweds receive humorous gifts such as a broken oven door or cover, a rag used to smear a pan with fat, and so forth. the presenters of the gifts claim that the rag is makeup and that the oven door that they present to the couple is a mirror. the villagers also make a rag-doll and claim that the groom is taking a wife with a “dowry,” meaning one who is already pregnant. also they go out on the street and yell: “we are going to catch a rabbit!” one of them then takes a gun and shoots; the “rabbit,” and either the fake bride or the fake groom falls down. after that they start to prepare the “rabbit” and then put it on the table. then they say they want to save the “rabbit”. people try to find a man who does not know this custom. meanwhile the “rabbit” is given vodka to hold in his (or her) mouth. as soon as the man chosen to “save” the “rabbit” approaches, the “rabbit” squirts vodka into his face and eyes. then everyone goes into the house; the “rabbit” is “killed” and everyone is obliged to drink vodka (zamachyts’). on monday, after the wedding, some of the wedding party cook food for this “rabbit”; while others dress in gypsy costume, put on the masks, usually nylon stockings pulled over the head so that they will not be recognized. they take bags and baskets and go around the village from house to house. the villagers give them presents; they even catch chickens. all this food is brought to the wedding house and consumed] [aimef, fond 8, folder 81, unit 184: 2, pp. 79-81]. as far as the official part of the wedding or civil registration of marriage is concerned, the population treats it mostly as a mandatory procedure. they do not, however, include it in the wedding ritual. official registrations are performed before the traditional folk wedding and sometimes could occur after it [aimef: fond 6, folder. 3, unit 10, p. 25, fond 7, folder 1, unit 879, p. 36, fond 8, folder 83, unit 211: 3, p. 14, unit 210: 3, p. 18; tsvirka 2004: 540; shein 1902: 400-401; moszyński 1928: 183, 195, 200-201]. this is not the case with the religious or church part of the wedding. this is included in the wedding rite and typically occurs prior to the “curling” of the wedding tree. [ritual folklore 1998: 68; aimef, fond 8, folder 81, unit 184: 2, p. 23; tsvirka 2004: 406]. the distinctive feature of the east palesse wedding is the invitation of guests who include the groom’s closest kin and the groom’s new relatives, meaning the bride’s kin, to feasts at the groom’s house. these feasts are called biasedy, peravodziny, perazovy or piarezvy [ritual wedding rituals in the belarusian palesse folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 51 folklore 1998: 21; aimef: fond 7, folder 1, unit 879, pp. 25, 36, fond 8, folder 81, unit 182: 1, p. 46, folder 83, unit 211: 3, p. 54; unit. 210: 3, p. 87; tsvirka 2004: 549; pashkova 1978: 76; shteiner and novak 2002: 179]. in addition to helping distribute the expense of the wedding between the two families, such feasts serve as additional means of rapprochement between the new relatives-in-law. on the morning of the nuptial night, the groom thanks his in-laws, and especially the bride’s mother, who comes to visit her daughter in her new home. at this stage, the representatives of the bride are called prydannyia [ritual folklore 1998: 60, 76; aimef, fond 7, folder 1, unit 879, p. 25, fond 8, folder 83, unit 211: 3, p. 16, unit 210: 3, p. 85; tsvirka 2004: 548; mpaa, zhytkavichy expedition 1999, notes 1, p. 27; kryvitski et al 1987: 402]. this ritual serves to mark them as in-laws and relatives. after a while they change their clothes and start bridal games, which are a contest of sorts between the two families. in the east palesse wedding such games typically have a clearly expressed erotic element. the most widespread games of such type are again mock weddings and include cross-dressing and various disguises such as donning gypsy dress; dressing as other characters and personages is also common [ritual folklore 1998: 8, 22, 29, 92; kabashnikau 1998: 411; shteiner and novak 2002: 183, 201]. west palesse complex. this particular wedding complex can be further subdivided into central and western variants or subtypes. the basis for this division rests on cultural and economic relations, as well as on the pace with which traditional rural culture has been transformed. in the villages of the pinsk, stolin, and kobrin districts we find extensive attestation of a custom where, before matchmaking, the mother of the groom or another member of his female kin went to the perevid or perevidki at the home of the bride [mpaa, records by v.r. shvaiko, 2000, pinsk and stolin regions, fieldnotes 1, pp. 1, 7, 17, 26; mpazh, records from village aniskavichy, kobrin district, 1996, fieldnotes 1, p. 17, 4, p. 2; zakharava 1984: 21; pashkova 1978: 29, 84]. the purpose of this custom was to ascertain the intentions of the prospective bride’s family. in the twentieth century this custom tended to lose its importance and disappear due to an increase in the number of marriages where the couple had reached a decision to marry on their own. 52 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi after the exchange of breads which typically concluded the prematchmaking or perevid, matchmakers could be sent. the role of chief matchmaker was usually performed by the godfather of the groom, although the father also sometimes acted as matchmaker [bandarchyk 1988: 17; pashkova 1978: 31]. in the first half of the twentieth century, matchmaking was often held together with the zapoiny, although the rituals could also be performed separately. apparently material circumstances and the presence or absence of a preliminary agreement between the families determined whether there would be a single ritual or two separate ones. local tradition also determined whether the rituals were held together or separately. thus, all respondents from of one of the villages where the author conducted fieldwork answered that matchmaking and zapoiny could happen on the same evening, as well as separately [mbrdu, ivanava-pinsk expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 15, 22, 37; mpaa, zhytkavichy expedition 1999, fieldnotes 1, p. 1; drahichyn expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 7, 9, 42]. in west palesse we also find the custom of ahledziny during which the bride’s parents examine the household and economic standing of the groom’s parents [aimef, fond 7, folder 1, unit 879, p. 32; mbrdu, ivanava-pinsk expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 6, 22; stolin expedition 1997, fieldnotes 8, p. 1; mpaa, zhytkavichy expedition 1999, fieldnotes 1, p. 1; drahichyn expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, p. 1; recordings by v.r. shvaiko from 2000; fieldnotes 1, p. 2; mpazh, recordings in the village aniskavichy, kobrin district from 1996, fieldnotes 4, p. 2]. the results of this examination could affect all stages of the upcoming wedding from start to finish and could even cause the cancellation of the wedding if the impression created during the ahledziny was negative (villages vul’ka antopalskaia, drahichyn district; kazhan-haradok, luninets district) [aimef, fond 7, folder 1, unit 879, p. 32; mpaa, drahichyn expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, p. 1]. an important feature of the west palesse wedding is the form taken by the rites of separation which occur as part of the evening for unmarried girls and the pasad. the bride’s passage from unmarried status to womanhood takes the form of the purchase or ransom (vykup) of the wedding wreath, the purchase of the bride’s dress, the purchase of bride herself, or the purchase of a place next to the bride so that the groom could sit with her at the wedding banquet. in west palesse, the evening for unmarried girls is celebrated on a much grander scale than in the east. it is called vianki, vinky, or vinochny (wreaths). [aimef, fond 7, folder 1, units 879, p. 20; mbrdu, zhabinka wedding rituals in the belarusian palesse folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 53 expedition 1996, fieldnotes 2, pp. 6, 15, 19; brest expedition 1997, fieldnotes 1, pp. 13, 31; mpaa, records from 2003, fieldnotes p. 1; mpazh, recording from the village of aniskavichy, kobrin district in 1996, fieldnotes 4, pp. 2-5]. normally it takes place on saturday, on the eve of the wedding. the bride, together with her bridesmaid, gathers all the girls who would attend the wedding in one place. the atmosphere of the evening is festive and the girls sing special songs and prepare flowers for the matchmakers to wear on their lapels; they also make a wedding headdress for the bride. the headdress is purchased by the bride or by her father on the same evening. sometimes this is done by the groom, in which case he attends the ritual of vianki. the festivities continue late into the night and musicians are often invited. the ceremony of vianki in west belarusian palesse has survived into the present and the author herself has participated in such rituals in the early 1990s in brest and the village of hershony, brest district. in the central area of west palesse, the rites of separation do not have a uniform character. the night for unmarried girls, which is called the vianki or vianochki is not celebrated in all villages [aimef, fond 7, folder 1, unit 879: pp. 31a, 49; mbrdu, ivanava expedition 1996, fieldnotes 4, pp. 3, 22, 31; mpaa, drahichyn expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 10, 15, 40a; klimchuk 1985: 270-274; zakharava 1984: 256]. for kvetki (flowers) see [mbrdu, ivanava expedition 1996, fieldnotes 4, pp. 3, 22]. for veliona shyts’ (the imperative to sew) see [mbrdu, ivanava-pinsk expedition 2000, fieldnotes pp. 7, 23; mpaa, drahichyn expedition 2000, fieldnotes, 1, p. 36]. for zbornaia subota (communal saturday) see [aimef, fond 7, folder 1, unit 879: p. 31a]. for vyrachki (ransoming) see [mpaa, drahichyn expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, p. 32]. respondents stated that the evening for unmarried girls is combined with baking of the karavai in the bride's home [mpaa, zhytkavichy expedition 1999, fieldnotes 1, pp. 3, 6, 13, 24, 43; records from 2003, fieldnotes 2, p. 4]. sometimes this ritual is not performed at all, especially in those villages where the preparation of the karavai is not part of the wedding ceremony. however, even in such cases, people still prepare a special headdress for the bride. this headdress is made by the bridesmaid on the night before the marriage or on the wedding day itself [aimef, fond 6, folder3, unit 10, p. 35; mpaa, records of v.r. shvaiko from 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 3, 9, 18; kryvitski et al 1984: 306]. baking the karavai in the west palesse wedding is a solemn event with an elaborate structure. the emphasis is the preparation of a karavai for the groom. in some locals, the karavai is baked only in the house of 54 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi the groom [aimef, fond 8, folder 85, unit 230: 1, pp. 18-24; mbrdu, stolin expedition 2001, fieldnotes 1, p. 12, stolin expedition 1997, fieldnotes 8, p. 1; ivanava expedition 1996, fieldnotes 4, pp. 3, 31; mpazh, records from the village aniskavichy of kobrin district from 1996, fieldnotes 1, p. 17; zakharava 1984: 53]. there are also local traditions where no karavai is baked. the absence of the ritual of the baking wedding bread is attested in several villages on the border of the kobrin and drahichyn districts (the village of pavitstste, kobrin district and the village of radastava, drahichyn district) [pashkova 1978: 45]. the second group of villages where there are no ceremonies associated with the baking of a wedding bread are located on the border of the pinsk and stolin districts of brest province (the villages of kalavuravichy of the pinsk district and hal’tsy, sitsitsk, plotnitsa of the stolin district) [mpaa, records by v.r. shvaiko from 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 3, 9, 18, 26]. interestingly, the local explanation for the lack of rites associated with the baking of the karavai is that it is not part of ukrainian culture [mpaa, records by v.r. shvaiko from 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 3, 9, 18, 26]. one of the distinctive features of the karavai ritual in the central area of west palesse is the practice of decorating the wedding loaf with a “garden” (sad) and “pine cones” (shyshki). the karavai is decorated with tree branches, usually those taken from a fruit tree. these are cleaned and covered with dough. t.v. tsiv’ian believes that palesse folkloric material indicates a connection between the karavai and a garden. he concludes that an “imitation or symbolic garden” represents fertility and is thus connected with the wedding. the karavai in and of itself works as both a literal and a figurative representation of a garden and the conditions for its successful growth [tsiv’ian 1983: 98]. in the same paper, this scholar links another wedding custom to the decoration of the karavai, or kviachennia: after the karavainitsy, the women who bake the ritual bread, have finished their task they wash their hands and pour the water out into the garden [aimef, fond 8, folder 83, unit 210, fieldnotes 32, p. 12; mbrdu, ivanava-pinsk expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 2, 6; mpaa, zhytkavichy expedition 1999, fieldnotes 1, pp. 1, 3, 13, 14, 34; drahichyn expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, p. 2; zakharava 1984: 259; kryvitski et al 1984: 309]. in the areas that are next to east palesse, as well as in the western areas of west palesse, the karavai is decorated more simply. the decorations are made out of the same dough as the karavai itself and applied before baking. the decorations added after the karavai is baked wedding rituals in the belarusian palesse folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 55 are limited to flowers; tree branches are not used. [gura et al 1985: 5253; mpaa, zhytkavichy expedition 1999, fieldnotes 1, pp. 26, 40, 51, 54]. up until the point when the wedding bread is “purchased” from the women who had baked it, meaning the karavainitsy, and given to the father or senior matchmaker, young men who are participating in the wedding can steal it. they can also steal the shovel that was used to put the ritual bread into the oven. if they succeed in doing this, the money intended for women who made the bread is used to pay off the young men and ransom the karavai. this happens rarely, however, and there is a special song that is used to tease the men who might try to steal the bread: / / наші хлопцы сморкачі, //коровай наш вжэ в пэчі (our lads are losers, // the bread is already in the oven). in the central regions of belarusian palesse it is common to dress the bride in her wedding clothes while she is seated on the trough (dziazha) used to mix the karavai. if the bride is a virgin, the dziazha is covered with a sheepskin coat and she sits on top of this while the female members of the wedding help her dress [aimef, fond 7 folder 1, unit 879, pp. 33-34, 45; tsvirka 2004: 541; mbrdu, ivanava-pinsk expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 7, 23, 30; ivanava expedition 1996, fieldnotes 5, p. 12; 91, pp. 37, 40; mpaa, drahichyn expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 7, 15, 19, 16, 24, 36, 47; zakharava 1984: 264]. bringing the bride and groom together for the ceremony of the pasad occurs first in the bride’s house and is then repeated in the groom’s home just after the arrival of the newlyweds. in the western parts, the pasad as a ritual marking the new status of the newlyweds lost many of its features relatively early. accordingly, respondents focus only on the fact that the bride and groom must sit together at the bride’s home right after the church wedding. thus the moment of bringing the future couple together is the most important component of the wedding for them; they do not describe an actual pasad ceremony. in cases with a limited pasad ceremony, there was no ritual of the putting on the headdress which signifies the married status of the bride, a ritual that normally happens in the groom’s house and could be an independent rite [aimef, fond 6, folder 3, unit 10, p. 35, p. 7, folder 1, unit 879, pp. 20, 45, 50; mbrdu, stolin expedition 2001, fieldnotes 1, pp. 2, 3, 9, 14, 17, 25, 32, 37; ivanava expedition 1996, fieldnotes 4, pp. 5, 35; fieldnotes 5, p. 13; fieldnotes 7, p. 9; zhabinka expedition 1996, fieldnotes 2, p. 8; mpaa, zhytkavichy expedition 1999, fieldnotes 1, pp. 56 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 4, 9, 13, 21, 23, 32, 34, 42, 49; drahichyn expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 5, 18, 21, 24, 34, 40; records from 2003, fieldnotes 2, p. 2; fieldnotes 1, p. 6, records by v.r. shvaiko from 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 14, 22; mpazh, records from 1996, village of aniskavichy, kobrin district, fieldnotes 4, p. 14; zakharava 1984: 276; pashkova 1978: 61]. in the west palesse wedding there is a colorful contest between the wedding participants from the groom’s side (called svatstse, baiary) and the wedding participants who are the bride’s kin or come from her side. the conflict which takes place occurs when the bride is taken from her house of birth, and is much more pronounced than anything comparable in east palesse weddings. this peculiarity can be attributed to the fact that, in this area, moving the wedding party to the home of the groom occurs early in the wedding ceremony and that the greater part of wedding ritual still remains to be performed. correspondingly, placing the new headdress, the one that marks married status, on the bride’s head (akruchvannia) takes place at the home of the groom. the custom of “covering” the bride with a piece of fabric before she leaves to go to the home of her groom is also significantly elaborated and sometimes the bride’s mother would cover both newlyweds with one namitka [head wrap] before they left. this namitka is later removed at the groom’s home by his mother, his father, the best man (druzhko, halouny svat), or his godfather. this ceremony is called uskryvats’ maladuiu, literally “to uncover the bride.” giving presents to the newlyweds during the wedding happens at several stages. the newly wedded bride and groom are given the presents separately, that is the bride’s kin offer gifts on their territory, meaning at the brides’ home, and the groom’s kin offer presents at his house. of course exceptions are also possible [mbrdu, stolin expedition 1997, fieldnotes 1, p. 3; mpaa, zhytkavichy expedition 1999, fieldnotes 1, pp. 12, 35; kryvitski et al 1985: 360]. at the time when research for this project was conducted, there were no instances in west palesse where the giving of gifts was combined with the rite of dividing the karavai. in some variants common to western areas of belarusian palesse, the so-called syrny abrad or cheese ceremony, is attested. the ukrainian researchers v. davydiuk and z. davydiuk give special attention to this rite [davydiuk v. 1997: 7; davydiuk z. 1997: 239-241]. as recorded in the brest region, the godmother of the bridegroom brings cheese as a treat for the pastaronniia baby (outside women), neighbors who do not participate at the wedding. in descriptions of this ceremony, special wedding rituals in the belarusian palesse folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 57 syrnyia (cheese) songs that accompany the rite are mentioned. [mbrdu, brest expedition 1997, fieldnotes 1, pp. 3-4, 24]. an important stage of the wedding is the visit of the bride’s relatives to the groom’s house. in western regions (the villages of brest, zhabinka, and kobrin districts), this step is usually called piarezvy [aimef, fond 7, folder 1, unit 879, p. 26; mbrdu, zhabinka expedition 1996, fieldnotes 2, p. 8; brest expedition 1997, fieldnotes 1, pp. 3, 16; mpaa, recordings from 2003, fieldnotes 1, p. 2; mpazh, recordings from the village of aniskavichy, kobrin district made in 1996, fieldnotes 4, p. 12]. in eastern areas the name used for this rite is piarezv (see the villages of the drahichyn and ivanava districts, also some villages of the pinsk and zhytkavichy districts) [aimef, fond 7, folder 1, unit 879, pp. 35, 46, 50; mbrdu, ivanava-pinsk expedition 2000 fieldnotes 1, pp. 2, 10, 13, 15; ivanava expedition 1996, fieldnotes 4, pp. 5, 16, 36, fieldnotes 5, pp. 14, 20, fieldnotes 7, p. 3; mpaa, zhytkavichy expedition 1999, fieldnotes 1, p. 50, 54, drahichyn expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 8, 14, 17, 31, 40, 41; zakharava 1984: 278-280]. in several villages of the pinsk, stolin, and zhytkovichy districts and on the outskirts of the starobin and salihorsk districts the name prydanyiia is also attested [mbrdu, stolin expedition 2001, fieldnotes 1, p. 12; stolin expedition 1997, fieldnotes 1, p. 8, fieldnotes 8, p. 1; mpaa, zhytkavichy expedition 1999, fieldnotes 1, pp. 8, 13, 15, 23, 29, 38; recordings from 2003, fieldnotes 2, p. 8; recordings by v.r shvaiko from 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 15, 21, 26; kryvitski et al 1987: 403]. in the village kazhan-haradok, respondents call this stage “breakfast for the newlyweds,” (snedanne u maladoha) and the female participants of this breakfast are called snedal’nitsy [mbrdu, luninets expedition 2004, fieldnotes 1, pp. 7, 13; mpaa, drahichyn expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, p. 5]. in in many villages of the zhytkavichy and stolin districts, there is a custom of bringing out the dough trough (dziazha) when the groom’s parents come out to meet the bride. if she is a virgin, she is supposed to step on the trough. this custom existed till recently [aimef, fond 6, folder 3, unit 10, p. 35; mpaa, zhytkavichy expedition 1999, fieldnotes 1, pp. 4, 8, 15, 25, 26, 30, 35, 44, 50; recordings by v.r. shvaiko from 2000, fieldnotes 1, p. 6; pashkova 1978: 71]. in the villages of the pinsk and stolin districts, respondents mention a special song (“kalina” or “bόbra”), which is performed by the bride after the first wedding night, but only if she had preserved her chastity until marriage [mbrdu, stolin expedition 2001, fieldnotes 1, pp. 26-27; stolin expedition 1997, 58 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi fieldnotes 8, p. 5, mpaa, recordings by v.r .shvaiko, from 2000, fieldnotes 5-6, 14, 28]. in these villages people still remember the punishments that were formerly doled out to the bride’s relatives, especially her parents, if the bride had lost her virginity before the wedding. the punishments included putting yokes around their necks and putting food into bowls with holes, among other practices [aimef, fond 7, folder 1, unit 879, pp. 32, 35a; mbrdu, stolin expedition 1997, fieldnotes 8, p. 6; mpaa, drahichyn expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, p. 21, recordings by v.r. shvaiko from 2000, fieldnotes 1, p. 6]. another important stage of the wedding is the first visit of the young couple to the bride’s parents and the reciprocal visit of the latter to the house of the newlyweds. this ritual is called hastsina or pirahi. a distinctive feature in the western areas, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, was the bride’s parents’ visit hastsina to the groom’s parents’ home. this took place on the sunday following the visit of the newlyweds to the parents of the bride. such a visit was considered mandatory. [aimef, fond 7, folder 1, unit 879, pp. 21a, 26; mpazh, recordings in the village of aniskavichy, kobrin district, fieldnotes 4, p. 14]. one of the features of the western area is the absence of the custom of cross-dressing and also the absence of mock weddings and erotic games such as the game of rabbit described above. in the eastern part of belarusian palesse cross-dressing at the wedding is more extreme in nature [aimef, fond 7, folder 1, unit 879, p. 34, fond 8, folder 83, unit 211, note 1, pp. 17, 84; mbrdu, ivanava-pinsk expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 4, 31, 36, 40; stolin expedition 1997, fieldnotes 8, p. 5; ivanava expedition 1996, fieldnotes 4, p. 36, fieldnotes 5, p. 20; mpaa, zhytkavichy expedition 1999, fieldnotes l, pp. 4, 12; drahichyn expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 5, 8, 15, 17, 25, 38, 41, 46; records from 2003, fieldnotes 1, p. 7; zakharava 1984: 278-279]. a distinctive feature of the west palesse wedding is the gradual incorporation of the church ceremony into the structure of traditional rites. respondents indicated that the church wedding was mandatory and had to take place on the first day of the wedding festivities. this is true in spite of the fact that church ritual was incorporated into the wedding only recently and that there is local variation in the incorporation of the church wedding into wedding rites. thus, in some places the newlyweds arrive at the ceremony separately and meet only when they get to the church (village of hrushava, kobryn district. some areas claim that this is especially true if the newlyweds were from different villages. this wedding rituals in the belarusian palesse folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 59 occurs in the villages of matsiasy and nalezniki of the zhabinka district, the village of bezdezh, drahichyn district, the village of dvorets, zhytkavichy district, and the village of haradnaia, stolin district) [aimef, fond 8, folder 83, unit 210, fieldnotes 2, p. 29; mbrdu, zhabinka expedition 1996, fieldnotes 2, p. 7, mpaa, drahichyn expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, p. 32; iatskevich 2002: 483]. in most villages the groom picks the bride up before the wedding, and they go to church in the same “wedding train”, but in separate cars. in this case, before the wedding the groom “bought” the bride from her bridesmaids (see the villages of semuradtsy, lenina, liudzenevichy, zhytkavichy district, the outskirts of starobin, salighorsk district, the villages of svaryn’ and lipniki, drahichyn district, and mahro and druzhilavichiy, ivanava district) [mbrdu, ivanava expedition 1996, fieldnotes 4, p. 4, fieldnotes 7, p. 8; mpaa, zhytkavichy expedition 1999, fieldnotes 1, pp. 14, 38, 43, 45, 54; zakharava 1984: 263]. according to another tradition, the payoff takes place after the wedding, when the groom returns to the bride’s house after church for the purpose of taking her to his home (the village of aniskavichy, kobrin district, the village of matsiasy, zhabinka district, the villages of vul’ka simanavitskaia, perkavichy, khomsk, and bezdzezh, drahichyn district, the villages of motal’, busa, dastoeva, vul’ka dastoeuskaia, klimentsinava, ivanava district, kazhan-haradok, luninets district, the villages of plotnitsa, hal’tsy, berazhnoe, stolin district, and pahost, zhytkavichy district) [aimef, fond 7, folder 1, unit 879, pp. 45, 49; mbrdu, ivanava-pinsk expedition 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 6, 22; zhabinka expedition 1996, fieldnotes 2, p. 6; mpaa, drahichyn expedition 2000, fieldnotes pp. 2, 16, 23, 36; recordings by v.r. shvaiko from 2000, fieldnotes 1, pp. 3, 10; kryvitski et al 1985: 354]. in sum, the east palesse wedding complex is characterized by distinctive rites of separation. one of these is the “curling the tree” (vitstsie elki), a ritual where a special tree branch is decorated for the wedding festivities. a variant is the “curling” of the bride in her parents’ house. this involves the ritual changing of the bride’s headdress and is performed by special women called zavival’nitsy. the distinctive feature of east palesse weddings is the mock wedding which follows the wedding proper, with its cross-dressing and its pronounced erotic element. in this area also the practice of eating chickens, sometimes “stolen” from wedding participants, is also characteristic and it has been well preserved into the present. in west palesse the rites of separation take place during the evening for unmarried girls and also through the 60 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi ritual of the pasad. the pasad in this area does not feature the act of putting on the married woman’s headdress as a separate element in the ritual. it is also characteristic that, in this area, the pasad is performed in the home of the groom. another feature found in west palesse is the contest between the members of the groom’s wedding party and the wedding party that comes from the side of the bride. the conflict between the two sides is most apparent at the point in the wedding when the bride is taken from her parents’ home for the trip to the home of the groom. the opposition between the bride’s side and that of the groom is far less pronounced in east palesse. the territory known as west palesse in belarusian ethnographic literature [titov, 1983: 286-294; tsitou: 145-149; shamiakin 1989: 208], does in fact correspond with the area in which the west palesse wedding complex is attested. the east palesse wedding complex, however, does not fully coincide with certain geographical borders typically assigned to east palesse [titov, 1983: 279; tsitou: 136-144; shamiakin 1989: 507508]. at the time of this study, the local variants that were present on the territory of modern petrykau, lel’chytsy, and part of the zhytkavichy district of homel’ region, exhibit mixed characteristics in which features of both east and west palesse wedding complexes are combined. list of abbreviations 1. aimef. аімэф (архіў інстытута мастацтвазнаўства, этнаграфіі і фальклору імя к.крапівы нацыянальнай акадэміі навук беларусі) – the archive of the institute of study of art, ethnography and folklore named after k. krapiva. 2 mbrdu. мбрду (матэрыялы этнаграфічных экспедыцый выкладчыкаў і студэнтаў гістарычнага факультэта брэсцкага дзяржаўнага універсітэта, беларусь) – the materials of ethnographic expeditions of professors and students of the department of history at the brest state university, belarus. 3 mpaa. мпаа (матэрыялы з прыватнага архіву аўтаркі) – the materials from the private archive of the author. 4 мпаж. mpazh (матэрыялы з прыватнага архіву с.п. жлобы, выкладчыка этналогіі брэсцкага дзяржаўнага універсітэта, беларусь) – the materials from the private archive of s.p. zhloba, the lecturer of ethnology at the brest state university, belarus. wedding rituals in the belarusian palesse folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 61 bibliography baiburin, a. k. 1993. байбурин, а. к. ритуал в традиционной культуре: структурно-семантический анализ восточнославянских обрядов. 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/hrv (za stvaranje adobe pdf dokumenata najpogodnijih za visokokvalitetni ispis prije tiskanja koristite ove postavke. stvoreni pdf dokumenti mogu se otvoriti acrobat i adobe reader 5.0 i kasnijim verzijama.) /hun 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can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader 5.0 and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice microsoft word folklorica_2011g.doc history of the journal 7 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi from seefa journal to folklorica (2001-06) faith wigzell in the spring of 2001, the president of seefa, natalie kononenko wrote: “seefa continues to struggle along. our biggest problem is the journal.” she was making an urgent plea for a member to step forward and assume the editor’s mantle. i read this at a time when i had stepped down as chair of the russian department at ssees, and, with parental commitments diminishing, i was at greater liberty to reconnect with the wider academic world and to travel abroad to conferences and for research. although i had begun as a literary scholar working on medieval russian hagiography, i had developed an interest in russian folklore, which over time moved from the wings to centre stage. for some fifteen years i had taught a course on russian folklore and folk belief, while researching aspects of the relationship between russian literature and folklore (the writer nikolai leskov in particular). over the previous decade i had also become increasingly interested in aspects of popular belief (dream interpretation, divination and near-death experiences). by 1998 when i joined seefa, i thought of myself as a folklorist, though some traditionalist colleagues in russia did not regard my interest in a dream tradition based on popular books as “real” folklore. i felt the need to strengthen links with folklorists outside russia, in particular in north america. in the uk the british folklorist liza warner had retired and there were few others with a serious interest in russian and slavic and east european folklore more broadly (florentina badalanova and will ryan were obvious exceptions). and so with experience of book editing under my belt, i decided to volunteer. i could almost hear the sigh of relief across the ocean. i would edit while natalie kononenko and peter holloway functioned as publishers. natalie had made it clear that the founding principles of the journal remained the same: “making articles written by russian and other east european colleagues available to the american audience is a worthwhile service and it has been a big part of seefa’s mission.” i was entirely happy with that, especially as the 1990s and 2000s in russia and the former soviet union were producing an exciting diversification in the field. this applied both to research areas like popular religion, so long downplayed, or urban culture, much of it previously regarded as unimportant, but also to interpretive approaches. new private universities in moscow and petersburg made it their mission to stock their libraries 8 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi with key texts and journals from north america and western europe. young scholars were emerging who seized on anthropological, cultural and other theories and approaches to take a fresh look at familiar topics or tackle new ones. i was also aware that there were similar developments in other countries in our area. my aspiration for the journal, apart from following its guiding principles, was greater professionalization, with the aim of enhancing its reputation. the system of two readers assessing anonymized typescripts was formalized. with experience of the cavalier attitude of some east european colleagues towards house rules, more precise guidelines were issued and, in my role of fire-breathing dragon, i would return accepted submissions, which, say, used the wrong referencing or transliteration systems to the author to make the changes him or herself (often with mixed results). natalie had not pulled her punches about the time involved in “englishing” or translating articles. i decided that i personally would not translate, restricting my efforts to turning articles into readable english prose. this decision had the effect of lowering the number of submissions, but did reduce the workload somewhat. some translations continued to be done by noble seefa members like jim bailey and jeanmarie willoughby. i cannot thank them enough. putting the journal together twice a year was a challenge. particularly in the first couple of years of my editorship, there was a scarcity of quality submissions, meaning that sometimes i had to lean on close colleagues to offer something. i also accepted very long articles, and spread the net as widely as possible in terms of discipline and approach. the workload was nonetheless considerable, and by the time i had edited three issues it was clear that i needed more support. i tried and failed to find a member of the editorial board of seefa willing to take on the promotion of the journal (persuading libraries and individuals to subscribe), or more people to help “english” articles, but a plea for a book review editor was answered by jason merrill. he took over in 2003 and quietly but efficiently has brought this section up to international standards. i remain extremely grateful. jason and i have never met. all our communication has been done by email. indeed email was crucial to the functioning of the journal, both when working with authors on articles or sending text to peter holloway for formatting. it was not without its problems; odd letters, diacritics and bits of formatting and even an important review disappeared in transmission. i faced another challenge in the differences between british and american english and the conventions each use in academic history of the journal 9 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi publishing. my view was simple; seefa journal was an american publication and, as has been observed, the english language should be regarded as a joint stock company where the americans own most of the shares! i bought a copy of webster, and did my best to americanize (note the “z” rather than “s”) my orthography. i did not entirely succeed, and natalie and peter had to remove insidious “britishisms.” in 2003 the journal finally left behind its early years as a newsletter when it changed its name to folklorica. from 2005 it was published from the peter and doris kule centre for ukrainian and canadian folklore in alberta, which provided some welcome secretarial assistance in dealing with submissions, as well as a valuable ukrainian input (i was always worried that, with me at the helm, the journal might become too russocentric). as submissions improved in number and quality, the main problem shifted onto the printing costs, and it was decided that from 2006 folklorica would come out annually. at the same time i felt that five years was a good stint as editor and it was time to devote more time to other things. my final issue in the fall of 2006 was the first to be published in the new small format, in which folklorica matches the appearance of the majority of academic journals. looking back i am struck even more forcibly than at the time that i could not have managed without the permanent support of natalie kononenko. whenever i had concerns and problems, she was always there. but the unsung hero of the past years is the unflappable peter holloway (if he flaps, all i can say is that he was never grumpy with me). peter helped me with all manner of technical problems such as how to put a macedonian keyboard on my computer, and did wonders with format and presentation. it has been a pleasure to see the journal continue to grow in quality and reputation, especially when i look at the lamentable state of slavic folklore studies in britain; there are now no courses in the subject and hence no young scholars emerging. by contrast, the situation in russia is much more optimistic; there is much greater diversity in approach which in a country with strong inclinations towards the enforcing of uniformity is encouraging. life is not easy for scholars, many of whom have to take two or more jobs to survive and learn how get grant money to allow them decent amounts of time for research. nationalism and exceptionalism still rear their heads, insisting on the uniqueness of russian culture and ignoring parallels, but the best scholars, many from the younger generation, mingle happily with colleagues in related areas who live abroad. may these trends continue. << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain 20%) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \050swop\051 v2) /srgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel 1.4 /compressobjects /tags /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages true /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /detectcurves 0.0000 /colorconversionstrategy 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/hrv (za stvaranje adobe pdf dokumenata najpogodnijih za visokokvalitetni ispis prije tiskanja koristite ove postavke. stvoreni pdf dokumenti mogu se otvoriti acrobat i adobe reader 5.0 i kasnijim verzijama.) /hun 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/pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice татьяна ивановна калужникова. традиционный русский музыкальный календарь среднего урала* екатеринбург­челябинск­. банк културной информации, издательство дома учителя, 1997. (серия «библиотека уральского фольклора», том 1). 208 стр. с нотами. тираж: 6000 экземпляров. изалий земцовскии, ernest bloch professor, u с berkeley книга открывает собой новую серию и представляет собой в известном смысле сенсацию. календарные обряды и фольклор, традиционно связываемые с запад­ ными и юго­западными русскими регионами, практически не были представлены этномузыкологами урала. в насто­ ящий сборник включено 83 песни, приуроченные к кален­ дарным праздникам и широко известные русским старожи­ лам среднего урала до советском власти. запись публи­ куемых обрядов и песен осушествлена в 1970­1980 годах автором, известным уральским музыковедом и фолькло­ ристом, при участии студентов уральской государствен­ ной консерватории имени м. п. мусоргского и сотрудни­ ков свердловского областного дома фольклора. наибо­ лее известные на урале святочные, масленичные, троице­ семицкие обряды, хороводы и основной круг сопровожда­ ющих их песен восстановлены автором по воспоминаниям деревенских исполнителей и архивным материалам. описание календарных праздников даны как в авторском изложении, так и в форме рассказов жителей уральских сёл и деревень. почти весь материал побликуется впервые, причём с сохранением основных особенностей уральского диалекта. внутри календарных разделов песни сгруппированы по ритмическим структурам. в ком­ ментариях показаны параллели с календарным фолькло­ ром других регионов россии, и в первую очередь с близкими уралу традициями русского севера, поволжья, камы. зауралья и сибири. вступительная статья и научный аппарат т. и. калужниковой отмечены высоким научным уровнем, без тени «провинциализма». ею подробно охарактеризован f0 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 фольклорно­этнографический цикл среднеуральской календарной традиции (с. 7­2>5) и музыка как один из «субкодов» в календарных обрядах среднего урала (с. 25­ 48). отмечена неоднородность местного населения, роль межэтнических контактов с нерусскими народами урала, предложена типология песенных структур и их ритмики, выявлены моно­ и политекстовые напевы, раскрыта их половозрастная дифференциация. в книге есть уникальные варианты вообще редких по публикациям подблюдных песен («ходит по полю илья пророк»), песен проводов весны («кострома»), хоровод­ ных, а также целый раздел духовных стихов и песен, исполнявшихся в периоды постов (№№ 77­83). отмечена стилистическая связь последних с русскими и украин­ скими кантами хуш века — с жанром, глубоко исследо­ ванным автором в её диссертационных публикациях конца 1970­х годов. среди поэтических текстов есть шедевры редкой красоты м сохранности. в целом введение уральских материалов в обще­ славянский научный обиход представляется знаменатель­ ным фактом в современном процессе выявления локаль­ ных фольклорных традиций. на очереди подготовка следующего тома начатой уральской серии, посящённого традиционной свадьбе среднего урала. над уникальным богатством её песен и причитаний т. и. калужникова и работает в настоящее время. 5г1 folklorica_7f sibelan forrester, helena goscilo, martin skoro, and jack zipes. baba yaga: the wild witch of the east in russian fairy tales. jackson, ms: university press of mississippi, 2013. brief bibliography for further reading. notes. index. vii+202. $45.00 (cloth). isbn 978-1-61703596-8. $25.99 (ebook). isbn 978-1-61703-778-8. baba yaga: the wild witch of the east in russian fairy tales is, as it acknowledges in the introductory pages, a book for several audiences: those of russian heritage, specialists in russian culture and folklore, students, and general readers. the book generally finds a good balance in accommodating these various readers, though it sometimes reflects the tension involved in making choices among the needs of these audiences. the book is a beautiful hardcover volume of more than two hundred pages (an e-book version is also available), with a variety of color illustrations and photos of visual interpretations of baba yaga (more than 70 are included, based on a collection by martin skoro). this collection of images is one of the things that makes this book unique and appealing. the images include traditional illustrations by benois, bilibin, and vasnetsov, as well as well-known lubki [popular print publications of 17th-19th century russia]. there are also contemporary illustrations of baba yaga with styles as diverse as comic and steampunk. some of the most striking and unusual visuals, however, are photos, including some of performances that include baba yaga as a character, actual houses that resemble her hut, and objects like lacquer boxes, nesting dolls, and playing cards, but even ranging as far as shoes with bilibin’s illustration printed on them. the foreword, written by renowned scholar of fairy tales jack zipes, discusses some of the essential features of baba yaga and her relationship to western witches as well as character and thematic traditions from other cultures. he also mentions some of the most important scholarly works about baba yaga and outlines the two major collections from which the tales were taken for this volume (afanas’ev and khudiakov). the piece establishes the tone for the rest of the volume, being at once conversational and scholarly. the preface, acknowledgments, and translator’s note further set the stage for the book to come: explicating the source materials of the volume and delineating the ritual context of the genre. the translator also prepares readers for the plot overlap that can be observed in some of the tales and explains her approach to translation of the tales and inclusions in the notes. the lengthy introduction provides a good context for the reading of the tales and attempts to answer questions that might arise in the reading. forrester discusses a variety of topics, including the names of baba yaga and other characters, the objects that typically surround baba yaga, the possible deeper meanings of the witch and her surroundings, and the role she plays in pop culture today. she also gives an overview of the scholarly work done on baba yaga that might be of interest to students or readers. the brief bibliography notably includes a listing of films with baba yaga as a character as well as works of scholarship and translated editions. the tales themselves take up the bulk of the book, numbering 29 in all, with some tales overlapping in plot but differing in style or details. finally, the notes and index take up the last part of the volume. the notes include useful bibliographical references, language, cultural, and historical notes, as well as some variants of the tales as given in the original source material. the content of the book seems most appropriate for students in courses about russian fairy tales or folklore: the bibliographical information, the detailed notes, and the textual variants all seem catered to analytical or comparative work. the form of the book, however, seems more appropriate for a general audience; the way the images are scattered throughout the text does not necessarily lend itself to any kind of unified analysis. to make the volume more useful to students, the authors might have instead decided to group the images together or in a more organized order. the captions, while interesting, do somewhat interrupt the flow of the reading of the tales, and a welcome inclusion might have been a scholarly essay analyzing the images in more depth. the general reader who is more interested in the tales for the narrative might wonder why stories with such similar plots are included, or might not tolerate the detail included in the introduction or the notes. in some ways these read more as the transcript of a university lecture than they do a book, with conversational elements, ellipses, and tangential information alike. it is, however, an interesting and thorough lecture, and readers who work through it will be rewarded with interesting nuggets of subtleties of language and culture. while a book intended for only one type of reader might have benefited from a slightly different set of choices, baba yaga does a reasonably good job of balancing between the needs of students or specialists on the one hand, and general readers on the other. perhaps the ideal scenario is a person who comes first for the tales and returns for the details, allowing baba yaga, as the translator says, to be brought back to life. shannon spasova michigan state university east lansing, michigan united states seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 reviews: kalmre reviews folklorica 2016, vol. xx 191 kalmre, eda. the human sausage factory: a study of post-war rumour in tartu (on the boundary of two worlds: identity, freedom, and moral imagination in the baltics, 34). amsterdamnew york, ny: rodopi, 2013. notes. bibliography. index. 180 pp. price $65.00 (paper). isbn 978-90-420-3717-5. the author discusses the cultural and mental landscape of estonia after world war ii – a small country which experienced war, three occupations (by ussr, nazis, and again ussr), national humiliation, purges and social division. the 1947 case of persisting rumors about a small sausage factory in tartu processing human flesh and selling it on the market tells us how grand narratives of catastrophe develops in a particular cultural and colonial perspective. as the author posits: “the aim of this study is not to reconstruct the historical truth of the attempt to find out whether this atrocious blood crime indeed took place in tartu” (24), but to study the tradition as a process. anxiety, frustration, humiliation, post-traumatic syndrome, everyday violence found symbolic outlet in popular legend that in conditions of a lack of information (which mark bloc saw as a trigger of all rumors) released emotions and helped ordinary people, whom james scott called “subaltern” and “weak” to have a feeling of gaining control over the situation. the narrative of cannibalism embodied in the rumor eda kalmre placed in a global and temporal context of many regions’ lore and estonian lore from past centuries. in this important point of correlation between many folkloric narratives, the study could benefit from the classical work by sir james george frazer the golden bough, but, alas, it is not used in this book. the study really profits from comparison of an estonian tale about a sausage factory with plenty of different rumors that circulated both in europe and the soviet union, for example talks of cannibalism in besieged leningrad. the book approaches the legend from the ethnocentric, gender, and anthropological perspectives. beside these fruitful elaborations, as a historian, i was especially interested in the political component of many horror rumors centered on the soviet security police (misnamed kgb by the author, though it was called mgb in 1947), folklorica 2016, vol. xx 192 which expanded its operations to tartu first in 1940 and then in 1944 with the occupation of the country by the soviet union. several popular interpretations hold kgb (sic) directly responsible for the imagined sausage factory crimes. the horror of the time was expressed in legends about a black car kidnapping people from the streets, a meat grinder (or centrifuge???) in the cellar of the building occupied by this organization processing the corpses of the shot people (pp. 45-56) – all resonating to similar themes in leningrad lore of the 1930s. the image of the enemy: a man in a leather coat, or kgb officer, replaces the image of a german baron typical for old estonian rumors, and became an embodiment of evil, together with other characters—the jews and russian immigrants. the sources used in this study were letters, memoirs, eyewitness interviews conducted in tartu in 2001-2007, the post war diaries (especially of jaan roos), newspapers and materials collected by the estonian folklore and estonian historical archives (not in the list of the sources, but mentioned in the text) since 1990. the copy of the mgb report pertaining the rumors and arrests in this connection from february 1947 illustrates the story brilliantly, but raises the question of if estonian kgb archives were available for the study. historically, cases of cannibalism are associated with periods of terrible famines and mass death, but the author informs us that in february 1947, (12) “life [in tartu] began to return to normal, food rationing stopped at the end 1947, although the continuing shortage of food caused endless queues. employed people received sufficient bread rations.” however, eda kalmre does not discuss this disassociation though provides good historical and social background of post-war tartu. the book shows many photographs of contemporary tartu and caricatures from the newspapers. unfortunately the publication does not tell us a word about the author and her background. composition of the book is a bit chaotic but the translation into english is professional and good. olga velikanova university of north texas, denton, tx, usa untitled reviews 183 кузнецова, в.с., о.н. лагута и а.м. лаврентьев (ред.). русские простонародные легенды и рассказы. сборник 1861 г. [kuznetsova, v. s., o. n. laguta, and a. m. lavrent’ev (eds.). russian folk legends and stories. a collection of 1861]. новосибирск: наука. 320 pp. isbn 5-02-032364-0. in 1861 an anonymous collection of russian folk narratives was published in st. petersburg, entitled легенды русского народа [legends of the russian people] (consisting of two series, русские простонародные легенды [legends of the russian common people] and дополнение к русским простонародным легендам и рассказам [supplement to legends and stories of the russian common people]). due to its anonymity and appearance soon after a. n. afanas’ev’s collection (народные русские легенды [russian folk legends], moscow 1859), a few critics at the time considered it a falsification or forgery. the book become a bibliographic rarity and is now appearing in print again for the first time. the editors of this new edition (linguists and a folklorist affiliated with the institute of philology, siberian branch of the russian academy of sciences) have carried out a very detailed linguistic analysis to establish the authenticity of the texts and provide a profile of their compiler/narrator. one of the editorial team is v. s. kuznetsova, the author of an excellent book on the earth diver myth in east slavic tradition (дуалистические легенды о сотворении мира в восточнославянской фольклорной традиции [dualistic legends about the creation of the world in the east slavic folklore tradition], novosibirsk 1998). the collection contains twenty-four texts. most are recognizable international folktale types listed in the aarne-thompson index. they include “religious tales” (at 750-849, legendarnye skazki [legendary folktales] in the east slavic tale-type index) such as no. 18, a unique subtype of at 750, in which a traveling wise man appears to do harm to the people encountered during his travels with a companion, and then explains his actions at the end. others are “novelle” or “romantic tales” (at 850-999), such as no. 10, a version of the oedipus tale (at 931). there are a few fairy tales proper (volshebnye skazki, wondertales). no. 21 is a version of at 555 (the fisher and his wife) in which a man’s wishes are granted by a tree. when he finally wishes to become tsar, he is turned into a bear. finally, there are a few texts the at index categorizes as “jokes and anecdotes” or “tales of the stupid ogre.” folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 184 some of the texts are legendary narratives about encounters with supernatural beings (bylichka and byval’shchina in russian folklore scholarship, memorate or fabulate in the west). of these fabulates or bylichki, a few appear to be anomalous or unique recordings, not published anywhere else in quite the same form: a man is frustrated by his inability to learn to play the violin. he makes a bargain with a mysterious old man who provides him with a magic violin, but the old man disappears and the protagonist ends up lame in one leg (no. 7). a drunken tailor is deceived and led astray in the forest by the forest spirit (leshii) and finds he has cut his own coat to pieces (no. 8). a poor man goes to a sorcerer for help and becomes wealthy through gambling. he takes advantage of what appears to be an opportunity to cheat another man at cards, but is taken off by two devils instead (no. 12). a man asks a swarm of gnats to sing for him (no. 16). one text (no. 14) is a brief description of russian folk beliefs about various animals, the aspen tree and the house spirit (domovoi). there are extensive notes to the texts, often providing other versions of the same tale type (from the afanas’ev collection and other sources), and references to relevant articles on specific tale types, legends, and motifs. the bulk of the book is made up of folkloristic and linguistic appendices. there are listings of tale types and motifs, names of characters in this collection and in the afanas’ev legend collection, and a listing of the collectors of the afanas’ev legends and the places where the afanas’ev legends were recorded. the linguistic appendices are based on a computer-aided study. there is a frequency listing of lexical items and an alphabetical glossary comparing the frequency of lexical items in this and the afanas’ev collections. referring to these data, the editors discuss the appearances of verbs, animate and inanimate nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. these sections of the book will be of interest to linguists and specialists studying the language of russian folklore; readers with a more general interest in folklore may still wish to note the discussion of the description and attributes of the devil, heavenly beings, and the clergy. for the editors, this painstaking analysis serves to demonstrate the authenticity of this anonymous collection. while the texts certainly have been edited and “smoothed” by their compiler, they exhibit the characteristics of russian oral literature, are clearly aligned with the afanas’ev legends, and distinct from russian epic and lyric genres. citing linguistic features as well as certain motifs in the texts, they conclude that the narratives probably originated in northern or northwestern russia. they surmise that the narrator/compiler was a reviews 185 resident of petersburg, a semi-educated man who might have attended a seminary or been a member of the lower clergy. he may have presented his own versions of these narratives, or recorded and edited them. in the final two appendices they analyze the narrator/compiler’s own idiolect and the language of the nineteenth-century russian legend in general, providing dictionary-style entries for 62 especially relevant lexical items. like other folk narratives, the tales and legends in this collection offer insight into the mentality, worldview and values of the communities from which they came. cleverness is often valued above honesty. the hero repeatedly lies to his traveling companion, a saint-like old man, and only tells the truth at the end, when he can gain material advantage from doing so (no. 1). a peasant learns to cheat from a wealthy warrior and then steals the latter’s golden stirrup (no. 19). but genuine kindness is also rewarded. when the hero pays a return visit to two old men he had welcomed, he is given charge of their house and the keys to three rooms. in the first two rooms he sees the punishments that await his stingy, unkind brothers, while in the third forbidden room he sees the reward for his kind and virtuous wife (no. 3). the recovery of this anonymous collection is a valuable addition to the available literature on russian folktales and legendary narratives, enhanced by an outstanding scholarly commentary. the editors of this new edition have given us a book that is both instructive and entertaining. andreas johns university of california, berkeley berkeley california usa folklorica 2008, vol. xiii untitled knowledge, science, and the scientist 1 articles knowledge, science, and the scientist in contemporary mythology: a study of quasi-scientific narratives collected from people involved in russian religious organizations maria akhmetova state republican center of russian folklore deputy editor-in-chief zhivaia starina moscow, russia when a researcher turns to contemporary mythology she or he probably encounters the problem of whether it is legitimate to describe any contemporary cultural phenomena as mythological. we can talk about this concept only if we first transcend the strict boundaries of the term “mythology.” this term means a system of beliefs predating the rational and logic worldview, one that was characteristic of an archaic society. if this system has managed to survive until the present time, it can be found either in non-literary cultures or in the form of fragmented “survivals” in a traditional culture. on the other hand, it is easy to understand myth too broadly, as any text (in a semiotic sense) behind which there is some hidden sense, or using roland bart’s formulation of myth as “everything that is covered by discourse” [bart 1996: 233]. in this latter sense the term “mythology” is often used in everyday life and publicity, e.g., in talking about “mass media myths” or “political myths.” here myth is understood as distorted reality, as something deliberate, while references to archaic beliefs, i.e., myth in its primordial meaning, may be missing. i will use the term “mythology” here as a way of describing and interpreting reality, as a socially meaningful belief that conveys notions about norms and values as well as prescribing certain behaviors [lezov 1996; nekliudov 2005]. mythology often interprets basic philosophical categories like space and time, chaos and cosmos, etc. through concepts that are almost identical for both archaic and contemporary times. therefore, mythological notions do not disappear in contemporary culture but transform themselves while adapting to new cultural and historical situations. contemporary mythology in this sense is truly a mythology. the term contemporary, however, is more problematic. we are forced to keep in mind that the phrase “contemporary mythology” is folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 2 conventional and contains a methodological trap. one can rightly ask: at what stage does a “regular” mythology become “contemporary”? over the last decade? in the twentieth century? or, maybe, in the nineteenth century, in the epoch of industrialization, which many researchers consider to be the source of cultural models that are still prevalent in our day? but what is contemporary about the nineteenth century? when we talk about contemporariness itself, in today’s russia for example, villagers still believe in local spirit-masters and in casting the evil eye. such beliefs are not much different from those recorded several centuries ago. how contemporary is that? the contradictions disappear at least in part if we agree that contemporary mythology means the contemporary state of mythology or mythology in contemporary culture. thus we can single out mythological symbols and images in contemporary cultural texts that are familiar from ancient sources. we can trace their transformations and function in our time. naturally, contemporary mythology does not occupy a separate cultural sphere. on the contrary, mythological views pop up in our mundane speech as well as in literary fiction. mythology can comprise a considerable part of an ideological concept, whether religious or secular. new myths often appear without any influence from ancient tradition, or at least cannot be linked to it. there is certainly a difference between how mythology functioned in the past as we have reconstructed it and how it functions today. first of all, myth today does not regulate human life entirely and totally. we may believe in ufos, but this belief will affect our behavior to a far lesser degree than beliefs in demonological characters would affect a person from a traditional culture. such a person would explain her or his own misfortunes through the interference of those characters, and she or he would use special amulets for protection from them. but there are spheres where mythological components look most natural and play quite a significant role. an example would be in religion, where many mythological notions have acquired canonical status: any religious system contains components of creation myths, eschatological myths, and the like. in this article i will look at one aspect of contemporary mythology, namely the adaptation of scientific discourse by russian religious communities in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. it would be a mistake to think of the coalescence of religious and scientific views as immanent to the present day situation only. this phenomenon was characteristic of the industrial era as well. furthermore, it was present in knowledge, science, and the scientist 3 the discourse of different social groups of that time, from the educated upper class, enchanted with mesmerism and later theosophy, to the wider urban and rural circles reading popular brochures about the end of the world that portrayed doomsday as a catastrophe caused by a meteor or a collision of the earth with another planet [mel’nikova 2004]. the more deeply we look into history the more apparent the syncretism (or undividedness) of scientific, religious, and mythological worldviews becomes. take the example of medieval alchemy or the scientific philosophy of ancient times. what then is so special about the contemporary situation? contemporary society is secular, with a more or less strict division between science and religion. this division is probably most vivid in russia, with its decades-long history of state-promoted atheism, which stigmatized religion for its “anti-scientific” nature (ironically, only atheism was “scientific” in the ussr). during the soviet period, statepromoted atheism used the achievements of science as a counterweight to religion. perhaps the quintessential expression of this was the popular phrase “gagarin flew into outer space, but he didn’t see god.” at the end of the twentieth century, the situation of political and cultural crisis created distrust of traditional soviet values and people turned to religion, or at least to mysticism. this new religiosity often acquired a quasiscientific flavor.(1) at the same time, publications of a religious or mystical nature began to arrive from the west. the interest of late-soviet and post-soviet society in religion, more precisely in orthodoxy, combined with later, more or less successful government attempts to use orthodoxy as the foundation for a new national identity. this state of affairs has created the phenomenon of the “orthodox scientist.” the purpose of such a specialist is not only (or, not primarily) to solve scientific problems but to confirm religious ideas. this holds true, even if the scientist positions himself as a representative of academic rather than theological circles. at the same time, some scientists have turned into theologians, explaining religious ideas with the help of scientific terminology, and analyzing scientific problems from the religious point of view.(2) for example, the head of the antidrug center named for st. john of kronshtadt, hieromonk anatolii (berestov), who is a doctor of medicine, considers altered states of consciousness a “delusion or lure,” meaning a devilish temptation [anatolii 2000]. in contemporary culture, the high status of rational knowledge has left its imprint on the worldview of religious communities, many of folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 4 which utilize scientific terminology as a language of communication. for example, regular meetings of the followers of esotericism are called “lectures” and “seminars.” in them, there is repeated reference to scientific discoveries [ozhiganova 2000: 206]. both ideologists and followers and these are mainly city dwellers of many new religious movements have a postsecondary education. for example, 65.22% of the followers of vissarion and 46.4% of the moscow community of the mother of god center had either begun or completed higher education as of 1998 [baklanova 1999: 90-91]. and one of the founders of the white brotherhood (aka the iusmalians), iurii krivonogov (aka iuoann svami) has a ph.d. in engineering sciences. widening of the informational field does not necessarily lead to rejection of religious doctrine. a.i. klibanov describes a female baptist who listened to the radio and read a variety of publications in the 1960s: “all the incoming information is processed. but only bits of it, those relevant to her religious outlook are absorbed; the rest is discarded” [klibanov 1969: 141]. in the same manner, representatives of contemporary religious groups can read many publications, attend scientific conferences, etc. they then borrow a “foreign” language and adapt it to their own worldview. this happens first of all because the arguments of faith are not sufficient to explain moral norms, so that a spiritual accounting for the universe and rational confirmation is required. for example, “church people” give a “scientific” explanation for lechery by referring to the theory of telegony, holding that offspring can inherit characteristics from the previous mate of the female parent (not the biological father). this idea was popular among neo-darwinists at the end of the nineteenth century, though it was later discredited. orthodox believers describe defloration as an act that has far-reaching, even eschatological consequences: there is a purposefully hidden phenomenon, telegony. i want to say that it is extremely important for young people. why does god want us to keep faith and purity? this is proven by science (sic!) <…> kinologists, specialists who breed dogs, know that if <…> the best dog couples with a non pure-bred bitch <…> he has to be dismissed. because from now on, this pedigreed dog will produce non-pedigreed offspring <…> the same is true with people <…> look, they preach free love nowadays, “making love” <…> and what if those relationships are just occasional, random, a sort of romantic fling; and what if (the partner) is a scoundrel? and then you marry a nice man, but your child inherits the traits of that scoundrel <…> and if a person has more than one such relationship <…> a girl has sex with one guy, another one, and yet another one; and when all these lines converge it will result in a beast’s muzzle <…> a billy-goats’ <muzzle>. you see, a person, the sort of knowledge, science, and the scientist 5 person who engages in (recreational) sex, serves the antichrist, the devil you know [a female from murmansk, about 50 years old; recorded in 2002 in the diveevo monastery].(3) representatives of confessional groups make free use of scientific terminology in their arguments in an attempt to make those arguments sound more “scientific.” as a result, religious and mythological concepts acquire scientific confirmation, while scientific notions become mythologized. the high status of rational knowledge allows representatives of religious groups to juxtapose science and righteousness. the followers of vissarion speak about their religion as a “school of life.” “correct” education is considered a way to learn about god. an orthodox female pilgrim stated that at a theologian institute one learns not only about “correct history,” ancient languages, and how to study god, but also about whom to marry, whether to marry at all, about child-rearing, and so forth. on the other hand, she described learning about god as a process similar to learning to read: say, <you> visit [a sacred place] that you have studied – then it’s like …, yes, it’s just as if you’ve opened an abc book. you open the book, but someone has to tell you that this is the letter a, and this is the letter b, and these are syllables. well, (someone needs to show you) how to put the <letters> together. see what i mean? this is how god reveals himself [a female from langepas, about 70 years old; recorded in the diveevo monastery in 2003]. the teaching of maria devi khristos is precisely a “science of the world.” the early iusmalian texts call god’s plan to create an earthly heaven an experiment, while maria devi khristos’s mission is called the iusmalos program [uchenie marii devi khristos 1993]. on the main web page of the white brotherhood, founded in 2000, its founders declare their intention to reveal god’s science to people who would accept their faith. they oppose this kind of science to the obscurantism of the clergy, who brand any such knowledge as witchcraft.(4) the texts of religious communities reflect beliefs about various fields of knowledge, both those belonging to the hard sciences and to the humanities. knowledge of the technical sciences and physics is mainly reduced to the idea of “codifying” or ”zombifying” radiation that comes from electronics, especially from television sets and computers. representatives of various movements refer to scientific discoveries and state that electric radiation negatively influences the human subconscious folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 6 and that its effect is detrimental to dna and so forth. interestingly, the description of “codifying” radiation often resembles descriptions of the effects of the evil eye or witchcraft that appear in traditional folklore. just as a person affected by the evil eye or a person possessed has to carry out the will of the witch who bewitched him/her, or the demon inside him/her, so the user of a television or computer is hypnotized through a special code. home electronics are often imbued with eschatological meaning. certain groups associated with the orthodox church believe in a gigantic super-computer called “the beast” through which the antichrist imposes his will on anyone using a personal computer or getting a personal identification code or a new passport. technically speaking, the enemies of mankind do this through informational technologies, since the number of the antichrist, 666, forms the basis of computer calculations. the “mingling” of two terminologies is important in the texts of one orthodox writer, a. iakovlev-kozyrev. he writes about the use of new technologies by the satanic west, which wants to destroy russia. his writings are replete with phrases like “technogenic-occult invasion,” “informational-occult blows,” and “electronic antimagic defense” [elektronnoe zhalo 1999: 32, 35]. in the texts of the iusmalians and vissarionians, terminology from physics is used to convey the mechanisms of “fine energies” flooding the universe. fokhat is the magnetized energy of god that springs from a single well, a single maternal heart, and spreads throughout the whole universe [a male, about 35 years old, an iusmalian; recorded in moscow in 2003]. all the energy constellations now in effect used to have a common conditional positive quality as their fundamental principle. and only at a certain stage of the self-development of the active fundamental principle into the integral whole essence did an energy environment, which can be conditionally called an environment with a negative quality, start to form.(5) biology and genetic engineering in particular acquire special meaning. authors of orthodox literature ascribe consciousness and supernatural power, often of a demonic sort, to a cell, to dna, to viruses and so on.(6) this, for instance, is how the “demonic” essence of a virus is proven: “he <the virus> is a liar; he deceives both the membrane and the ribosome. he is a complete murderer of humans (in the bible, “murderer of humans” means the devil – m.a.), even more, he is a killer of everything that is alive <…> a virus is a frenzied crystal” [vorob’evskii 2000: 423-424]. knowledge, science, and the scientist 7 according to a passage from the book of genesis that was adopted by the christian tradition, god punishes ancestral sins down through several generations. “church people” understand this idea from an almost medical point of view: sins are transmitted in a manner similar to hereditary diseases; they can even be sexually transmitted: there is a line of kinship, and if a man sleeps with a woman he takes on her sins, her genealogical traits. she sleeps with a man – she takes on his sins and genealogical traits <…> because the sins of relatives and genealogical traits stick to each other [a female from langepas, about 70 years old; recorded in the diveevo monastery in 2003].(7) a similar concept of “family sins,” which are simultaneously a “genetic code” and are “sealed in the subconscious” [ioann 1991: prilozheniie [appendix]], is found in the early texts of the head of the mother of god center, archpriest ioann. the only difference is that, in his texts, the “sinful chalice of a family” is inherited exclusively through the female line and contains mainly the sins of female relatives. representatives of religious communities are very much interested in history. this is understandable, since one can comprehend both the present and future by making sense of past events. history is viewed through the prism of conspiracy and all events are seen as a diabolical plot. as m. khagemeister says, “the conspiracy theory promises to determine the connection between <…> a hidden reality and the world in which we live; it gives us an opportunity to ‘look behind the scenes,’ and explains who ‘pulls the ropes’” [khagemeister 2000: 102]. to break devilish spells, one must consider history anew, overthrow false idols, and rehabilitate the honor of slandered heroes. this precept goes along with the social aspirations of the end of the twentieth century. the post-perestroika epoch in russia was a time when new notions appeared, new values were introduced. a.a. chernyshov writes of the “soviet mythology” of the early 1990s, “the most natural spontaneous reaction of society towards a crisis situation is to play with the symbols that represent cultural values. this implies changing established pluses into minuses and vice versa” [chernyshov 1992]. it is no coincidence that in russia at the end of the twentieth century, people reflect on the symbols of the new epoch, and simultaneously they reinterpret symbols of the soviet epoch. in the field of history, the most active process is the process of reinterpretation, “the changing of signs.” the need to reinterpret history is explained by the belief that enemies deliberately distorted it.(8) i heard from the orthodox faithful about “fake” history that was produced by the folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 8 masons. as a male iusmalian follower explained, “the jews” appropriated the merits of the slavs and thus “have left them without their culture,” since “the zionist protocol prescribes giving false ideas about history” [a male, about 35 years old; recorded in moscow in 2003]. in church circles the images of historical characters are being reinterpreted. this process began with the “rehabilitation” of tsar nicholas ii and, starting in the second half of the 1990s, spread to other historical characters who were once considered odious. thus ivan the terrible is now seen as a good ruler who fought against the jews; gregory rasputin has become a perspicacious man, a friend of the tsar’s family; paul i has been reconsidered, and so forth. the mendacious masons are accused of having defamed and slandered all russian sovereigns. and the historical truth can be found only in “orthodox,” not “masonic,” books: and in reality, according to the orthodox book it goes like this: ivan the terrible would not eat a bowl of porridge without bowing to the ground in prayer a thousand times. only then would he eat. his son was a believer as well; he died on a pilgrimage. he was sick. and here they went and ordered a canvas (entitled) “ivan the terrible kills his son.” he did not kill him. why was he “terrible”? <he> conquered the city of kazan’. and <…> catherine ii – how is she <presented>: as a so-and-so, a debauched woman <…>. and in reality – even though she was a sovereign of german origin – she brought a renaissance; she ruled for 34 years [a male from vladivostok, 45 years old; recorded in the diveevo monastery in 2003]. at the same time, other historical characters, from both secular and sacred history, have changed their polarity from “plus” to “minus.” this is true not only with respect to lenin and the revolutionaries. at the mother of god center, for example, the personage of the reverend josef volotskii was reinterpreted and he became the “father of the russian inquisition.” the iusmalians have a negative view of the apostle paul the persecutor because they feel that god revealed his identity to him only to defend the christians, “so that he would not annihilate the remaining ones.” paul, they argue, did not know christ personally and replaced the image of the gracious savior with the formidable yahweh from the old testament in his epistles [an iusmalian female, about 35 years old; recorded in moscow in 2003]. the attitude towards peter i is ambiguous: some circles close to the church view him most positively. the mother of god center views him negatively and the white brotherhood is indifferent (“he cared about the empire, but he was not ecclesiastical”). as might be expected, the knowledge, science, and the scientist 9 representatives of the orthodox brotherhood named for tsar-expiator nicholas ii closely affiliated with the almanac zhizn’ vechnaia [the eternal life] reiterate the views of its chief editor, v.p. kuznetsov. he treats the image of the tsar-reformer positively. this group emphasizes that kuznetsov has restored the truth about the slandered monarch, and thus discredited the conventional stereotype: as for peter i – he (kuznetsov) studied him for about twenty years and totally discredited the image of peter as a destroyer of the church. in fact, the opposite is true. all the saints honored peter as a sacred tsar, even more – as the most pious tsar <…> [the collector: “did he have a special education?”]. well, he was his own education. because in the seminary – they don’t specifically; there is a program there <…> (just think) who the professors are. [a male from moscow, about 50 years old; recorded in the diveevo monastery in 2003]. attitudes towards hitler and stalin are equivocal as well. in the context of the condemnation of totalitarianism, these historical figures are viewed as precursors of the antichrist. but in the context of antisemitism they are treated with some empathy, though cautiously: stalin is a different matter. all the masons … he fought the jews. [he was of the christian faith. – interlocutor’s remark]. he was a christian. first, he was georgian, and second – it is interesting that he was… well, of course he was the worst of all criminals, that is he ruled brutally, but as for the jews… there is a lot of blood on his hands, but he fought the masonry. i do not want to really revile him. there is a powerful campaign against him right now… [an orthodox female from murmansk; recorded in the diveevo monastery in 2002]. hitler did not realize that violence was not the way to purify the aryan race. he was not a spiritual man. he did a very stupid thing, but he meant to do better [an iusmalian male, about 35 years old; recorded in moscow in 2003]. the followers of vissarion reevaluate the very concept of teaching history. in order for the young generation not to “fall for the bait of the kingdom of power, which happens through history textbooks” [zemlia obetovannaia [the promised land], 1996, nos. 11-12: 22-23], the teacher must leave aside accounts of wars and other manifestations of violence and pay more attention to what the arts were like during the historical time period being studied. philology attracts attention as well. the search for the etymology of concepts with either pronounced positive or strongly negative connotations that are related to either an actual historical period (i.e., the soviet era) or the contemporary situation helps to reveal the true meaning of events. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 10 circles closely affiliated with the church produce “translations,” a kind of folk etymology of words such as democracy (the power of the demons), a democrat (a demon divisible), and demonstration (a procession of demons from “demon,” a greek word for “devil,” and “stratio” the latin word for a procession). similarly, revolution becomes a zionist coup (from revolu-tion [in russian, there can be confusion between the initial letter of the syllable –tion and the sound of the first letter in the russian word for zion – sion trans.]) and so on. some interesting etymologies are based on abbreviations. for example, the phrase “passport sssr” [a ussr passport] is deciphered as “pechat’ antikhrista sam poluchaiu, sam soediniaius’ s satanoi” [i receive the stamp of the antichrist, uniting myself with satan]. the catacomb church of the eastern heavenly apocalyptic church of the revelation of st. john the theologian (ioann bogoslov), in its periodical publications, treats the word ваучер [voucher] as an abbreviation that stands for “vozvrat adskogo ugneteniia chelovechestva, egipetskogo rabstva” [return of the hellish oppression of humankind, of egyptian slavery] [nebesnyi grad [the heavenly city], 1993, no. 6, p. 4]. other artificial etymologies are also created. for example, members of the white brotherhood derive the word proletarii [proletarian] from the imagined word letarii, which they connect to spiritual death. letarii is a soulless “astral mutant,” whose consciousness does not develop, and these are the kind of creatures that lenin gathered to create the ussr [cited from http://www.usmalos.com/teoeons/html.htm]. words and symbols of the contemporary epoch also acquire new etymological explanations. the church-related circles translate the word president “from latin” as “initiated’ (meaning into masonry) or “from church language” (sic!) as an “impostor, a political thief.” by pronouncing these words, a person unconsciously renounces god and denigrates his or her own russian and orthodox dignity: “these are all word-fetters; they (the masons – m.a.) imposed them on us secretly so that a person would pronounce them. and when a person does pronounce them, he commits blasphemy” [an orthodox male, about 35 year old; recorded in the diveevo monastery in 2003]. words with negative connotations are viewed as purposefully ciphered by our enemies for the profanation of the russian people. this is similar to the notion that “mat” (a russian obscene language based on the root of the word for “mother”) is a “jewish” or “tatar” language and thus devilish in origin. knowledge, science, and the scientist 11 the search for the etymology of toponyms, the names of cities and rivers, serves a different purpose. first of all, such etymology proves the slavic origin of those names and thus serves to glorify a chosen people. this practice is especially characteristic of neopagan groups. the iusmalians find russian roots primarily in holy land sites: this city, ierihon is really iarkhon, a purely russian city. and the jordan river is iardon: “don” is a river in russian, and “iar” – well, it is a bright river. the fire river <…> of estrus – the language here is clearly russian; here are the words. if you read them (carefully) you will understand everything <…> but the whole world says this is an old, ancient language impossible to decipher. they would say anything to denigrate the russian man <…> the russian man gave culture to everyone. and always gave it. but recent times are like godless times, a time when all values are defiled. he (the russian man) is denigrated, even in a biblical way. everything the russians have done is ascribed to the jews [an iusmalian male, about 35 years old; recorded in moscow in 2003]. simultaneously, the names of russian locations are interpreted via other languages in order to prove their sacredness and special mission. for example, activists of the orthodox brotherhood named after tsarexpiator nicholas ii foretold that the last righteous tsar would be revealed in sarov. according to their reasoning, the root “sar” of the word sarov is genetically related to the word “tsar” in many ancient languages. finally, there is the notion of a special spiritual language. thus, maria devi khristos speaks about samskryt, the “most ancient language in the world, which the proto-slavs, the ancient rus’ians, the children of beautiful hyperborea, spoke” [cited from http://www.usmalos.com/teo/slovar.shtml]. no doubt the idea for this language arose under the influence of the neopagan concepts. the primordial language samskryt (from russian сам скрыт ‘selfhidden’) is said to convey only notions imbued with sacred meaning. at the same time there supposedly exists a satanic language, which will supplant both divine and human languages in the time of the antichrist. this language is numerical: the names of streets, regions, and countries will have their numerical sign, a string of numbers. there will be a unified international language of satan, a numerical one. for example, “a human” is number 6; “to drink” is number 1; “to eat” is number 2 and so on. in the course of several months humans will unlearn how to speak, love, and feel, and will turn into the dead slaves of satan, into zombies [uchenie marii devi khristos 1993: 8]. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 12 therefore, the language of the written mysteries of the world has a dual origin. on the one hand, the creator of this language is the devil himself, along with his closest allies, the jews. on the other hand, it might originate in the upper world and be connected to the language of the god-bearing russian people. it is noteworthy that the interpretation of words that have positive connotations is revealed through the russian language, while the number of russian roots in words that have negative connotations is minimal.(9) people who interpret words in this way are not concerned with the language from which some notion is drawn. in this respect, it is significant how the word computer, a symbolical word in the mythology of church circles, is etymologized: when i was praying – that was in 1997 – “the lord, let me know what the apocalyptical beast is” <…> and god revealed that it was a computer. and then i began searching and found out that “compu” stands for computation in english. and “ter” stands for a “devouring beast” in ancient greek. therefore, you have “computation of a beast.” [some] derive this word in another way. “com” stands for commissar, communist, comsomol member, computer, i.e., they all have the root “com,” which … they all are a false prophecy. that is, they all are false prophets. then “pu” stands for a “dragon” in japanese <…> [they] draw little pictures, little dragons, and there is a word “pu” beneath. and “ter” stands for a “devouring beast” in ancient greek. and here you have the apocalyptic (triad), here, there is written in the apocalypse: three unclean spirits will come out from the mouth of a false prophet, a dragon, and a beast. and according to the revelation – i have not found this yet – but according to the revelation “com,” “pu,” and “ter” are numbers in ancient languages, numbers 6 <…> (interlocutor: “what would “com” be?) “com” – well, i do not know myself; it is probably a spirit, the spirit itself. of the antichrist, “com” [an orthodox male, about 35 years old; recorded in diveevo monastery in 2003]. the narrative above demonstrates nicely how the logic of eschatological interpretation works. those who apply this interpretation imagine the apocalypse as a book where the mysteries of both future and present are encoded. they think that these mysteries can be grasped by humans, but only through god’s revelation. words are translated from real or hypothetical “ancient languages,” and different parts of a word can be translated from different languages. lack of linguistic logic does not bother the interpreters since, for them, the essence of the message is more important than logic. despite their quasi-scientific nature, these interpretations bear a strong resemblance to folk etymology: knowledge, science, and the scientist 13 do you know how to translate “revolution”? it is from english, but just translated into russian: “revolu-tion.” and in latin it is “revolu-tion.” did you know? “revol” means “revolt.” the word “revolver” means “barrel,” yes. and “tion” means “zion.” the zionist revolt. “revolution.” (interlocutor: “in latin”?) no. one word is in latin and the other in the aramaic language. because, for example, a letter “t” is absent in aramaic. and the letter “s” is present [an orthodox male from moscow, about 35 years old; recorded in the diveevo monastery in 2002]. this interpretative narrative is structured as if to imitate an entry in an etymological dictionary, only presented orally. it contains references to various translations, graphic images of the interpreted word, and a discussion of the relationship of its parts to various words. behind these claims to scientific rigor, however, is the principle of folk etymology: a formal exercise singling out the significant element in the interpreted word (in this case, zion) [gridina 1989: 24]. finally, contemporary iusmalians revise the laws of astronomy. the idea that the earth revolves around the sun, while the moon revolves around the earth, is seen as the greatest lie created to denigrate the divine principle of the unity of the male essence (the sun) and the female essence (the moon), as manifested on the earth: then, since the time of copernicus, the dark forces have been making huge inroads <…> they have destroyed it; [they] said that the earth is, well, god knows where, on the edge of the galaxy. our system and the earth are revolving around the sun. [copernicus] belittled, denigrated this most sacred planet in the universe that is in the center of this universe … where all the mature souls from around the universe come to get spiritual experience <…> it is really – the very nucleus of the sun – if we do not count the halo of luminescence, which is very powerful, it is the same as the moon’s disk. in terms of size. and the earth is two times larger than either of them. in relation to them, she is both mother and daughter. they guard her like a father and mother. [they guard] the earth. and [they] feed [the earth]. the moon feeds the waters, and the sun – fire. but the earth is chronologically older. she appeared first in the material world. the sun and the moon appeared after her. and then [appeared] the rest of the comets and planets [an iusmalian male, about 35 years old; recorded in moscow in 2003]. the white brotherhood probably derive their reformulation of astronomy not from archaic cosmology, when the earth was indeed thought to appear before the sun and moon. rather, the motivation for their views is the idea that standard astronomy is a conspiracy against the truth. interestingly, representatives of religious communities manifest their rejection of rational knowledge by extensive use of scientific folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 14 discourse. they equate secular educations with godless upbringing. a person serves the demons by studying at a secular university: the fact that you were admitted [to the historical department], [to study] secular history – this is from the devil. you serve satan. [you serve] the unclean forces, do you understand? [you serve] the masons. they create a history of their own, that is mendacious history [an orthodox female from langepas, about 70 years old; recorded in the diveevo monastery in 2003]. a complete taboo on rational knowledge is characteristic of the writings of the mother of god center. archpriest ioann speaks about rationalism, along with lechery and deceit, as manifestations of the satanic spirit. people infected with this spirit will, according to him, contract diseases of the brain [bogorodichnoe lono 1992: 76]. the more humankind develops rational knowledge and secular culture, the further it distances itself from the truth: the appearance of writing [caused] a loss of the capacity for oral ingenious communication with god <…> the appearance of book-printing [caused] a total degeneration of the word, its “interception” by servants of the prince of darkness [ioann 1994: 13]. one early writing of the white brotherhood includes a poem by iuoann svami with a characteristic title “the scientific atheists-demons.” in the endnotes, the author expresses his regret that he had written a scholarly dissertation instead of devoting that time to “spiritual questions” [poema 1993: 3]. sometimes science is even juxtaposed with witchcraft. it is perceived as the work of the enemy, who want to bring the antichrist into power. beliefs about medicine, especially psychology and biology, best illustrate this. orthodox literature and narratives of the “church people” frequently assert that biology in the form of cloning, artificial insemination, organ transplants and so on is used by our enemies to breed a new type of person who will carry out the will of the antichrist. in addition, by propagating mixed marriages and sexual licentiousness, the enemies obliterate nationality in order to rob a man of his roots, i.e. the information contained in his genes. such people would gladly accept the antichrist. medical advances are often compared to witchcraft: orthodox writer iu. vorob’evskii calls fetal therapy the “the witch use of embryos” [vorob’evskii 2000: 174]. the advances of medicine are said to cause intentional harm. as the aforementioned author states, enemies cause genetic mutations in people, especially slavic people, by importing knowledge, science, and the scientist 15 foods with added “agents that are harmful for a certain ethnicity” [vorob’evskii 2000: 88]. deadly injections are given instead of shots in order to rid the world of russians: the hepatitis b and c viruses, along with the aids virus, were generated by genetic engineering as a bacteriological weapon. this is the opinion of many world scientists <…> and the creators of those infections will have to wait a long time before we contract the infections and die out. and in order to facilitate this process [they] vaccinate all our infants, children, teenagers, and adults – the latter still voluntarily – (giving them) the plausible excuse of thus protecting them against hepatitis b and c, but (in reality) dooming them to death. and the posthumous diagnoses will vary. and we will bury each other and thus free our lands for “the fortunate of the golden billion,” for whom we are just sub-humans, or goys!(10) the shots [vaccinations] are also interpreted as a brand of the antichrist: and [they] will be making cuts on arms and veins on the pretext of giving shots. there will be three consecutive cuts. and each will be called “i, the son of the antichrist,” since it will be incest. [they] will infuse the antichrist’s blood into the blood of orthodox christians [dukhovnoe 2003]. the antichrist himself is viewed as a product of biological experiments. for example, it is said that an artificial human “from a test-tube” will turn into the antichrist. according to a less popular view, lenin, revived by geneticists, will become the antichrist. genetic engineering itself is thought to exist only to “revive some ‘great historical character,’ who will possess unrestricted power over the living on earth due to the accepted supernatural force of universal worship after death” [oprichnyi listok , no. 16]. psychology conceals a demonic potential as well. circles near the church perceive hypnosis, coding (a method of treating alcoholism and smoking dependency), and hypnotic suggestion as intrusions into the human soul with the help of demonic forces that will ultimately lead to a state of possession. “church people” often reduce the whole science of psychology to the technique of hypnotic suggestion. an orthodox pilgrim said about her acquaintance, a professional psychologist: i read her books, this psychology, [and] said: “enough, i understand nothing here, but even with all your knowledge you won’t get me. i will pray (the influence) away. [interlocutor: “does it mean that a psychologist can harm you?”] of course. they become [psychologists] and start treating people with hypnosis. this is the way they write – through hypnosis. where do they get it from? this is the same thing, this biofield, human energy [a female from folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 16 khabarovsk, about 55 years old; recorded in the diveevo monastery in 2002]. quite often demonic functions are ascribed to scientists. for example, this is how orthodox writer iu. vorob’evskii comments on research into super high frequencies at the institute of biophysics and their impact on humans. claiming that the experiments cause humans to hear voices, he writes: therefore, science is mimicking what infernal agents do. what we are talking about is nothing other than creating a state of possession through technetronic means. scientists who have lost their spiritual axis are voluntarily taking over the job of demons. and the latter can just rub their paws and laugh. [vorob’evskii 2000: 41]. traditional culture, and quite often mass consciousness as well, is typically wary of conventional medicine, which is perceived as something alien and related to harmful or unclean forces. a negative attitude towards genetics, which was presumably inspired by the antichrist, and towards cybernetics [see oprichnyi listok, no. 28; vorob’evskii 2000], has certain historical foundations. this attitude is linked to a negative view of foreigners and jews and is reflected in a number of texts in russian culture. these range from parodic recipes from the seventeenth century, when foreign pharmacists were portrayed as prescribing medication that “cured” one of life [russkaia satira, 1977: 218](11) to the ideologies of the 1930-50s that claimed harm was perpetrated on the pretext of curing by “doctor-saboteurs” and “killers in white robes.” urban legends like those from the 1980s continue this trend and tell of vengeful doctors who “turned” a child into a dog through surgery [novichkova 2001: 221].(12) this image of the doctorsaboteur is frequent in contemporary mass culture where a number of popular pseudo-detective and “yellow journalism” publications portray criminal doctors who trade in human organs and aborted fetuses and who turn healthy people into cripples. the negative mythology about science and scientists in the concepts of the white brotherhood, both the current and the earlier one, closely parallels scientific advances. as one iusmalian [a male, about 35 years old; recorded in moscow in 2002] states, humans are created from a testtube because such humans are easy to control, while experiments in the area of cloning are directed toward the eschatological future: knowledge, science, and the scientist 17 they are making lopsided advances in this science so that it would develop this way. look, they’ve started cloning. because experiments on other planets have proven that a human with implanted microchips loses the ability to procreate. yes, the emotional sphere is inhibited to such an extent that a human cannot procreate while under computer supervision. hence, the need to clone. and they start cloning not when a human loses the ability to procreate, but now that there is no such threat. in this way he will be in full armor, so to speak, by the time (that he is needed). in its writings, the mother of god center ascribes eschatological meaning to clones and “test-tube babies.” in one of the revelations, an angel tells ioann (bereslavskii) about the “madmen who will come into the world with the idea of improving the human race,” a presumed reference to geneticists: then those servants of the satan will invent preposterous experiments on brains, hearts, and bodies, as well as various awful interbreeding programs and organ transplants from one human to another. the whole earth will turn into the most loathsome laboratory of the devil [otkroveniia, 1991: 23]. and ioann warns on his own behalf: do you reject the prophecy of the kingdom of the saints? then you will involuntarily summon and bless the devil-civilization of the test-tube homunculus. upon maturation, they will turn into beasts of prey and devour everyone around them, including you <…> these children [born from artificial insemination] are an awful apocalyptic harbinger of the last of days. the more of them that appear the closer approaches what humankind fears the most, but what will inevitably come <…> [ioann 2000: 8]. peasants in old russia ascribed a satanic and even eschatological meaning to medicine. for example, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the dwellers of several provinces refused to be vaccinated against smallpox because they thought it was the brand of the antichrist [rovinskii 2002: 263]. contemporary believers in the apocalypse speak about doctor-masons who kill slavic women and their newborn babies in hospitals [a female from belarus’, about 25 years old; recorded in the diveevo monastery in 2002]. religious publications of various communities contain reports about the deliberate poisoning of the slavs by medications prepared by the jews [gordeev]. they tell about doctorvampires who appear before the end of the world to suck donors’ blood [poema, 1993: 54, 81] etc. these images, however, are now in line, not with folk culture, but with contemporary urban culture. part of the sinister image of doctors and, more broadly scientists, as allies of the folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 18 antichrist, comes from soviet punitive psychiatry, from doctors experimenting on prisoners in nazi concentration camps, and from scientists discovering the atomic bomb, which really could destroy the world. thus scientists running experiments appear potentially destructive of the cosmos. the latter idea is very popular among contemporary villagers, whose worldview is influenced by urban culture to a large degree. here is an indicative excerpt from a dialogue: 1: these birds – why they are able to fly so far: that’s what scientists have taught them <…> 2: they did say that those scientists would ruin the world [cited by maslinskii 2000: 99]. suspicion directed at science results in an ambivalent attitude towards education and knowledge per se. for example, the contemporary orthodox writer g. emel’ianenko, doctor of philosophy has written the article “the genetic corruption of the russian eve by foreign languages.” in it he argues that females should not learn foreign languages because these languages will change their thinking and make them adopt the values of other cultures. he cites the advances of psycholinguistics, which “have proven that any newly acquired-learned language totally controls the brain, the thinking, and the will of the person who has learned it”: those foreign languages that a female student would learn in the godless circumstances of a university education plague her, poor creature, throughout her life <…> in a young contemporary neopagan girl <…> a foreign language immediately bonds <…> to original sin (i.e., a false word), and a nuclear reaction of body-flesh corruption begins. in our country, for example, it is common knowledge, both public and private, that the prestigious universities of foreign languages used to be the main suppliers of the most expensive foreign-currency prostitutes. nowadays they produce just universal international ladies, who are absolutely attuned to western hell <…> scientists themselves have discovered that female thinking is governed solely by the right hemisphere <…> and any institute of foreign languages is a purely numerical, discrete system requiring use of the left hemisphere… therefore, female anthropology and brain structure are not suitable for studying or perceiving a foreign language. neopagan pop-mechanics completely ruins both (a woman’s) psyche and her morality. and yet she must care for menfolk and for children… [emel’ianenko 2000: 311-312]. representatives of religious communities accept information even from completely secular sources if that information supports their worldviews. here is an example of iusmalian reasoning: knowledge, science, and the scientist 19 there is the academician, bestuzhev-lada from the academy of sciences. he says <…> that the crossbreeding of a human with a computer is planned for around the 2030s. this is a state program. it is not some religious or mystical field; this is the field of futurology. it is a science of societal dynamics, yes. and he is not at all a religious man, this bestuzhev-lada. he couldn’t care less about all these religions, all the confessions; he just gives talks and says to people that there is now, well, he does not call it a threat, because he is not a religious man, so he can’t know whether that is a threat or not [a male, about 35 years old; recorded in moscow in 2003]. there is even direct borrowing, or plagiarism, from scientific texts by confessional circles. below is a comparison of excerpts from two texts. on the right is a well-known article by boris a. uspenskii about obscene language. on the left is an article from the ecumenical newspaper delo very [the work of faith] published in the city of izhevsk. its author was certainly familiar with uspenskii’s article, as the highlighted quotes prove. after presenting some of uspenskii’s ideas, however, the christian author changes the conclusions. uspenskii presents his conclusions about obscenities directed against the parents of a person who uses them as a hypothesis, while the christian author presents them as absolute truth. “mat v tri khoda” [a three move checkmate](13) delo very, 2004, no. 2(82), march – april b.a. uspenskii, “a mythological aspect of russian expressive phraseology” the antiworld of russian culture. moscow, 1996, pp. 9-107 obscenity has a distinctive worshiping function in slavic paganism. it is widely presented in rituals of a pagan origin, and it bears a ritual character. at the same time obscenity has a distinctively expressed anti-christian character. in the ancient russian manuscripts, harsh language is viewed as a trait of demonic behavior. indeed, obscene language is widely presented in various rituals of clearly pagan origin like weddings, agricultural rituals and the like, i.e. in rituals, which in one or the other way are connected to fertility. obscene language is a necessary component of such rituals and it undoubtedly bears a ritual character <…> at the same time obscene language has a distinctively expressed anti-christian character that is related to its pagan origin. accordingly, in the ancient russian hieroglyphics – in circumstances of christian-pagan dual belief obscenity is viewed as a trait of demonic behavior (p. 14). among the slavs, obscenity performs the function of a curse. for example, in this respect, i should note that among the slavs obscenity can perform the function of folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 20 one obscene word that starts with the letter “e” and has a slavic origin, can be translated as “to curse.” a curse <…> accordingly, a verb derived from the slavic *jebati, can acquire the meaning ‘to curse’ … (pp. 20, 21) by pronouncing it [an obscene word] a human curses himself and those around him <…> the one who pronounces such words automatically summons demons upon himself, his children, and his kin. <…> thus obscenity, by insulting the parents of a person who pronounces it, insults him as a representative and successor of his kin… (p. 35) thus, it is not enough for representatives of contemporary religious communities to explain the moral norms and the spiritual cornerstones of the universe solely through arguments of faith. instead, they strive for rational, scientific confirmation. while borrowing scientific discourse, however, they adapt it to their mythical worldview. do representatives of such communities themselves differentiate ‘scientific’ and ‘mythological’ ideas? i think that such a differentiation exists only in the minds of researchers; it is not foremost in the minds of the confessional congregations. when representatives of religious communities describe the world using a quasi-scientific language and reveal the secrets of the universe with the help of “scientific” methods, the standard mode of the secular discourse, they do so to demonstrate that, for them, science belongs to god’s providence, just like other spheres of life. differentiation between science and religion occurs only when it is necessary to juxtapose god’s truth and the sinful contemporary world. that is when the negative image of science and the scientist appears. here we notice the influence of traditional culture where ‘to know’ means, among other things, ‘to possess a magical gift,’ which makes a scientist or a doctor akin to a wizard. notes 1 the fate of the journal science and religion is significant in this respect. it was founded in 1959 as a mouthpiece for the ideas of scientific atheism. during perestroika, it started publishing quite amicable articles about traditional religions as well as about yoga, chiromancy, astrology, unconventional healing, parapsychology, the mystical implications of world history, and the like. nowadays, there is almost nothing “scientific” left in that journal. 2 borrowing of contextual elements from scientific discourse is typical for theological discourse as well. in such cases these elements acquire new qualities [lezov 1996: 16]. knowledge, science, and the scientist 21 3 this considerably reduced narrative is a free retelling of the leaflet “telegonic science about virginity” whose author is nikolai goloikin, an archpriest. this leaflet became widely known due to numerous reprintings by several publishing houses and through online distribution. 4 citing from http://www.usmalos.com/ (consulted 2003) 5 vissarion. время поворотa [the time of the turn]. cited by: http://www.vissarion.ru/rus/turntime/turntime01_r_w.html. (consulted 2003) 6 compare this to the esoteric healing practice of talking to every organ, every cell, which are presumably alive and understand the commands to get well. 7 compare this to the taboo on blood transfusion, derived from the idea that something of the human soul is contained in the blood. 8 compare this to a.t. fomenko’s idea of a “conspiracy against history.” according to fomenko, russian history was distorted by the romanov dynasty in order to conceal the origin of the previous dynasty (see fomenko 1993: 183-84). 9 circles near the church view the russian, and especially the church-slavonic, language as sacred. it is not surprising that their representatives perceive the grammar reform as another denigration of the russian people. note the popular interpretation of the replacement of a letter “z” by “s” in prefix “bes” as summoning the demons [tarabukina 2000]. 10 “herods of the 21st century: on the hepatitis shots” pervyi i poslednii, 2003, no. 3(7). cited by: http://www.zaistinu.ru/skrest/sk/88_irods21.shtml. 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[a critique on traditional chronology of antiquity and middle ages (which century is it now?)]. реферат. москва. gordeev, k. 2003. гордеев, к. цель революции в россии [the aim of revolution in russia]. an online resource: http://www.kongord.ru/ index/ ch_vs_ss/zion/ioannplamenny/revolution.htm. consulted 2003. gridina, t.a. 1989. гридина, т.а. проблемы изучения народной этимологии: пособие к спецкурсу [problems in the study of folk etymology: textbook for an elective course]. свердловск. ioann [archbishop ioann (bereslavskii)]. 1994. иоанн (архиепископ иоанн (береславский)). огонь покаянный. путь святых отцов [a penitential fire. the way of the holy fathers]. книга 4, москва. knowledge, science, and the scientist 23 ioann [archbishop ioann (bereslavskii)]. 2000. иоанн (архиепископ иоанн (береславский)). время всероссийского покаяния [the time of all-russian atonement]. москва. ioann [bishop ioann (bereslavskii)]. 1991. иоанн (архиепископ иоанн (береславский)). исповедь раненного сердца [confession of a wounded heart]. москва. khagemeister, m. 2000. хагемейстер, м. “миф о заговоре против россии” [the myth of the conspiracy against russia], мифы и мифология в современной россии [myths and mythology in contemporary russia]. москва. 92-111. klibanov, a.i. 1969. клибанов, а.и. религиозное сектантство и современность [religious sectarianism and contemporaneity]. москва. lezov, s.v. 1996. лёзов, с.в. история и герменевтика в изучении нового завета [history and hermeneutics in the study of the new testament]. москва. maslinskii, k.a. 2000. маслинский, к.а. “эсхатологические рассуждения современных крестьян” [the eschatological reasoning of contemporary peasants], традиция в фольклоре и литературе [tradition in folklore and literature]. санкт петербург. 91-104. mel’nikova, e.a. 2004. мельникова, е.а. “эсхатологические ожидания рубежа xix-xx веков: конца света не будет?” [eschatological expectations on the border of the xix-xx centuries: will there be no end of the world?], антропологический форум, № 1: 250-266. nekliudov, s.iu. 2005. неклюдов, с.ю. “структура и функции мифа” [the structure and function of myth], современная российская мифология [contemporary russian mythology]. москва. 9-26. novichkova, t.a. 2001. новичкова, т.а. эпос и миф [epos and myth]. санкт -петербург. ozhiganova, a.v. 2000. ожиганова, а.в. восточные философскорелигиозные учения и духовные практики в современной россии (на примере г. москвы) [oriental philosophical-religious teachings and spiritual practices in contemporary russia (the example of the city of moscow]. дисс… канд. ист. наук. москва. reutin, m.iu. 1996. реутин, м.ю. народная культура германии [folk culture in germany]. москва. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 24 tarabukina, a.v. 2000. тарабукина, а.в. фольклор и культура прицерковного круга [church circle folklore and culture]. дисс. … канд. филол. наук. с.-петербург, глава 2. http://www.ruthenia.ru/folktee/cyberstol/books/tarabukina/gla va_2.html. consulted 2003. vorob’evskii, iu. 2000. воробьевский, ю. падут знамена aда [the banners of hell will fall]. москва. no author. 1977. русская демократическая сатира xvii века [russian democratic satire of the xvii century]. москва. _________. 1991. откровения божией матери в россии (19841991). дни святых благословений [the revelations of the mother of god in russia. the days of sacred benedictions]. москва. _________. 1992. богородичное лоно [the mother of god’s bosom]. кемерово. _________. 1993. поэма величальная или отверженные за слово божие [a poem of praise, or the outcasts for the sake of the god’s word]. санкт петербург, чч. 1-2. _________. 1993. учение марии деви христос. наука о свете и его трансформации. основные формы [the teaching of maria devi khristos. a science about the world and its transformation. the fundamental forms]. москва. _________. 1999. электронное жало антихриста [the electronic sting of the antichrist]. москва. _________. 2003. духовное завещание старца иеронима. [a spiritual will of the elder, ieronim]. this leaflet was distributed by representatives of the orthodox brotherhood named after the tsarexpiator nicholas ii on the territory of the diveevo monastery in the summer of 2003. translated by svitlana p. kukharenko 66 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii mythological thinking and archetypes in the contemporary bulgarian nestinarski ritual complex ana stefanova institute of ethnology and folklore studies and ethnographic museum (iefsem) bulgaria, sofia photographer: svetlan stefanov, bulgaria abstract the paper examines mythological thinking in the contemporary performance of the ancient ritual complex of nestinarstvo in bulgaria. as the folk tradition is transformed into freshly “invented” forms in the village of stomanevo, it has been influenced by “external” factors such as individual cultural elements as well as by globalization, in particular easy access to information and the flow of esoteric literature into bulgaria in the aftermath of communism. the rite is further molded by distinct psychological factors that constitute fundamental and dynamic conditions necessary for the tradition to be preserved and to evolve. this ritual is a living example of a community phenomenon with roots in the collective unconscious and based on archetypal structure. while its “outer” traits may vary, the “core” remains the same, representing a mosaic of universal values anchored in space and time. the paper examines mythological thinking in a contemporary performance of the ancient ritual complex of nestinarstvo in bulgaria. (1) as the old tradition has been transformed into newly “invented” forms (2), it has been influenced by “external” factors such as individual cultural elements and globalization, represented by easy access to information and the flow of esoteric literature into bulgaria in the aftermath of the fall of communism. these trends are further molded by distinct internal psychological determinants, which make up basic dynamic conditions required for a tradition to persist and to evolve. ritual is a living example of bulgarian nestinarvski ritual complex 67 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii a community phenomenon with roots in the collective unconscious based on archetypal structure; while its “outer” traits may vary, the “core” remains the same: a mosaic of universal values anchored in space and time. the jungian approach has its roots in the work of many authors including marcel mauss (1990), emile durkheim (1998), adolf bastian (1860) (namely elementargedanken “elementary ideas,” leo frobenius (1904) (e.g., his concept “cultural monads”) as well as in jung’s own work on archetypes and völkergedanken “ideas of the folk” (campbell 1960:112). after 1989, when the socialist system in bulgaria collapsed, many cultural and subcultural trends that had not been widespread were introduced. literature about the occult and “exotic” philosophies as well as practices of the new age movement such as chiromancy, fortunetelling, astrology, tarot, and yoga sprang up in the marketplace and in the public sphere. many “practitioners” of healing, clairvoyance and extrasensory perception and training centers and workshops appeared as well. over a relatively short period of time, a “natural” process of fusion of the traditional bulgarian material with these new concepts and forms of expression has occured. the words “energies”, “magnetic/torsion fields”, “kundalini”, “aura”, “karma”, etc., derived from science and religion, have become common in daily conversation, in the media, and even in traditional (folk) rituals. they have influenced performers, observers and practices alike. while globalization has brought different traditional and subcultural forms from abroad, it is no more than a “layer’ in the phenomenology of the sacred; the need for sacred experience had not disappeared. the jungian analytical approach deals with the sacred experience by distinguishing a universal core, as both a foundational structure and a dynamic, in spite of variable details in a given communal (folk) phenomena. his theoretical concepts are clearly obvious when one compares a particular ritual in space and time. they also provide explanation about the meaning of ritual activities and objects in them, which, according to his theory, express universal and compulsive structures and dynamics in the psyche. we will explore this approach to a neo-folk nestinarstvo rite as practiced in one region of bulgaria. before we begin this analysis, some 68 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii background on the history and current practices of this ritual tradition is in order. nestinarstvo the scholar michail arnaudov (vol. 1 1996: 380) describes the nestinarstvo ritual as characteristic of the strandja mountain region and it is performed in nearly twenty bulgarian and greek villages in the regions of bunarhisar, midia, and ahtopol on the black sea coast and nowhere else in europe. arnaudov proposed that the ritual originated in asia minor. slaveikov (1866), who was the first to document the ritual, states that it was also performed in the villages of kosti, brodilovo, blaca, madjura, pergoplovo, rezovo, murzevo and agio-stephano (arnaudov vol.2. 1996: 384). as he describes it, nestinarstvo is a ritual complex composed of several different stages. the aim of the ritual is to bring prosperity, ensure health, and to bring an end to war. in the annual agricultural cycle it occurs at the beginning of the summer on the fourth of june, the feast day of st. konstantin and st. elena; it takes place throughout the day and into the evening. these facts connect to the solar-chthonic origins of the ritual. the event begins with the gathering of people in the morning in front of the konak (a holy building where the icons and the holy drum are stored yearround). the icons portray the images of st. konstantin and st. elena. in folk christianity this ritual is dedicated to this holy couple. (3) the next stage is a visitation of a holy spring (aiasmo), where the icons of the saints are washed to musical accompaniment (a drum and bagpipes). participants then walk across the village at the completion this stage to begin another: the sacrifice of a ram, bull or other animal. a wrestling contest ensues between volunteers. when a winner has been declared, finally a feast in the konak for the community at one table and for the main ritual participants at another begins. an icon procession goes from door to door to all the homes in the village. the ritual culminates with fire dancing which is performed outside the village proper, in a place called the gumno (field, place). the ritual complex also includes deciding where the ritual would be performed the next bulgarian nestinarvski ritual complex 69 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii year. the location is determined by “arranging a meeting” between the two patron-icons of two villages, the icon of the “old” and the “young” st. kostadin (konstantin) (4), and by knocking them “across.” “across” in this context denotes touching the two icons horizontally, then vertically, so that they form a cross. the firedancers are said to “catch” st. konstantin, experiencing “heavenly obsession.” the term “catch” means to enter into a trance (in this particular case with the help of st. konstantin’s will). arnaudov mentions the connection with the ancient mysteries and shamanism in his consideration of the ritual. according to eliade, entering into ecstastic trance is the most important trait of the shamanic experience. another important characteristic is control over “magic warmth” (eliade 2000:17). both of these traits are well represented in the nestinarstvo rite. other shamanic characteristics include the ability to heal and tell fortunes, abilities which the nestinari ‘fire dancers’ also gain. note that they do not heal directly, but give advice on how one may find a remedy for a particular illness. during the communist period the process of secularization and desacralization affected most aspects of life, including traditions. the nestinarstvo was limited to only one component, dancing in fire, and was presented in restaurants and hotels on the black sea coast as a “trick” in the form of entertainment. these kinds of performances still exist today (see image 1). the focus in these performances was less on the group and on the benefits of the ritual for them, but rather on individual prowess. people in various locales (camps, barracks, gatherings) entertained themselves by trying to walk in the fire. in most of those cases, the experience of fire dancing is distinct from the sacral characteristics of the traditional ritual form as described in prior centuries. 70 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii image 1: a street poster announcing a folklore program including fire dances at a restaurant at the resort “st. konstantin and st. elena” near varna on the black sea coast over the last dozen or so years, the nestinarski ritual complex has migrated from its traditional location on stranja mountain. now it is performed in a location on the rodopa mountain in the village of stomanevo, where it was not previously attested. fieldwork performed in this region in 2011 informs us about how the rite and its innovations have been adapted to the contemporary world. i will argue that they cannot be explained unless one considers the universal and compulsive nature of the unconscious and the resultant impetus for mythological thinking. the population of stomanevo is about 150 people, largely bulgarian muslims. there is also a small minority of pomaci, bulgarian citizens of the islamic confession, who speak bulgarian natively. they call the ceremony the “nestinarski feast” or “a pagan ritual”. the organizer and main performer in this village is ivailo aianski, a 41-year-old native of plovdiv (see images 2 and 3). ivailo aianski claims that the ritual he performs is “authentic”, with its origins in ancient thrace 6000 years ago. he once studied ethnology at the university in plovdiv, but he did not complete his studies. ivailo is a farmer and stock-breeder; he tends flocks and, bulgarian nestinarvski ritual complex 71 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii according to one account, his annual harvest of potatoes is nearly 60 tons. he also produces cheese, milk, honey and other organic products. image 2: ivailo aianski and his wife (next to him) image 3: nestinarsko horo. ivailo in light blue t-shirt, third from left to right 72 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii one informant who attends the event every year (z.v., born 1956, ivailo’s close friend, a journalist and poet and organizer of a visiting group from varna) attested to ivailo’s power and to the authenticity of the rite: “it was raining the whole time 2 years ago, from the morning on. but he is a wizard; he threw some ashes into the sky, while mumbling some words, and the rains stopped. but at 1 p.m. it started to rain again. it rains on the fire, a smoke rises, but the coals are alive and he dances in the fire. this is his feast; from the beginning to the end he does it as the ancient thracians had.” the description offers a stark contrast to the strandja ritual, which he called “commercial, only a show.” z.v. went on to describe the benefits of participating in the ritual: a chain dance (horo) is a dance that is danced all day long. you’ll see. it is called“the horo of life”. and it is good for you to dance, not only to watch. around the fire. all the chakras are cleansed, and you ensure that the upcoming year will be good for you. it is an amazing experience; you do not need to sleep on your way back. very “energizing.” but in places that have a great deal of energy a person must be very knowledgeable and know how long to stay. there is a movement from plus to minus. your own body hints how long to stay, in order for plus and minus to become equal. if you are very “minus,” after that to become very “plus,” why do you need this? you will feel bad again … the dancing starts after sunset, when the sun disappears. once he started earlier, he said he has permission from “up above.” z.v. asserted that ivailo’s power is not only due to his own abilities, but is part of his heritage. he noted that: “a long time ago he visited strandja, at the time when granny zlata (5) had been dancing. and when she first saw him, she told him he is good at that and should dance. st. konstantin is a demagogue in history. his mother elena was a cunning politician. he also talked about ivailo’s grandmother as a priestess.” her bulgarian name was rosana, but she was of turkish origins and really was named rufie (see image 4). ivailo had told z.v. that his grandmother rosana was like a goddess to him. she is said to have been the source of the famous phrase of the character from the movie (based on the novel by the bulgarian author nikolay haitov) men’s times: “first bulgarian nestinarvski ritual complex 73 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii is to want, second is be able to, third and fourth is to do.” rosana served as a consultant for the film a time apart (based on the novel by anton donchev, about the turkish slavery on rodopa mountain, her native region). (6) image 4: portrait of granny rosana by the painter nikolay roussev. sometimes ivailo dances with it in the fire. image 5: ivailo’s house: the beginning point of the riual complex 74 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii according to z.v., some days before the ritual ivailo feels bad, his “soul flies away” and prepares for the trance. z.v. explains that by performing the rite: “ivailo wipes away all the stupid things we have done” and that “the sky opens and energies come down.” he helps the sick as well, as z.v. describes: usually he calls the worst cases first, sitting under a tree, talking to them. once he called an old man whose son was killed in a forest. and he told him that another one (7) will have revenge. but he should go to a tree and dig on his left side and he would find an icon, nearly 40 cm under the ground’s surface. ‘and your heart will calm down,’ ivailo said. it is notable that this fits the description of “shamanic disease” described by eliade (2000). z.v. said that in the last several years ivailo has slaughtered a sacrificial animal under a large tree in the presence of the visitors and the entire community. the slaughter was not part of the ritual previously in this version of the rite. only the eating of the kurban (‘sacrifice’, a sacred meal of meat soup cooked from the sacrificed animal) was characteristic earlier. he explains that first ivailo talks to the animal, getting in contact with its spirit, asking for permission from the one who will die for the community and then hypnotizes it. it is believed that the next incarnation of the animal will be human and, because of the sacrificial act, ivailo will be obliged to care for this person. the group with whom i travelled to the nestinarski feast from varna contained about 25 people, mostly women. most of them are “pilgrims,” not “tourists.” they were non-smokers and typically practiced yoga. their conversations in the bus were about healthy lifestyles, chakras, energies, holistic massages, chinese acupuncture and similar new age topics. one of the women noted that it was good not to eat before reaching the stomanovo, which is high in the mountains. another one explained that her turquoise medallion was not hanging exactly in the “hollow of her neck” by chance, but because it protects her. at the outset, the village did not appreciate or accept this new ritual tradition, but now most of the villagers participate with bulgarian nestinarvski ritual complex 75 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii pleasure, at least it so appears. this feast starts not from the konak (as it does in strandja), but from ivailo’s own house (see image 5), which he inherited from his grandmother. on the day i attended in 2011, the feast started at 9 in the morning in front of ivailo’s house. several drummers (8) and bagpipers were playing loudly. his house is the most luxurious one in the village and had been recently reconstructed. some of the locals stood and watched, while others helped actively in different ways by cooking for the common feast, or by protecting ivailo, so that he did not fall during his trance. it was apparent that the trance was not deep. he saw everything, he danced, and at the same time he gave different commands, directing the musicians, the people around him and his relatives, who were next to him the entire time. the atmosphere of the event was numinous. at the 2011 event there were more than 200 attendees, most of whom arrived in their own cars. most of the people who attended knew ivailo and were his personal guests. people displayed real delight when they met him and some seemed to worship him (see images 6-7). image 6: ivailo greeting attendees 76 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii image 7: ivailo fire dances by a wall on the village square upon emerging from the house, ivailo asked “are the parents of dimitar from petrich here?” no one answered at first, but then a female helper replied that they had not yet arrived. after a while, these very people, whom ivailo had expected in his visions, arrived and he invited them into his home for “healing” (by giving advice to them; see image 8). at that point, he changed his clothes and dressed in a traditional costume. his “manna personality” (9) started preaching (see image 9). a bagpipe quietly accompanied his speech. sometimes between different topics in his preaching, ivailo sang traditional (10) songs. he spoke about the roots of the rite, about the happiness of the ancient thracians when they buried their dead and about the cleansing role of tears. the goal of any person, he bulgarian nestinarvski ritual complex 77 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii image 8: ivailo in a trance, at the entryway of his home, inviting people for healing and fortunetelling. the icons of st. konstantin and st. elena are on the wall. image 9: ivailo preaches says, is to gather himself in unity. he speaks fluidly, almost in rhymes, and some listeners were moved to tears. on the opposite side of the street preparations for the kurban began (see image 10). 78 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii image 10: preparing the kurban before the ritual slaughter of the animal, an example for syncretical unity, an example of wholeness, the “tertium non datur” in jung’s terms; the kurban is neither dead nor alive since the animal is still alive, but the stew is cooking. (11) at 11.30 a.m. ivailo was in the house, inviting people in one by one. he declined help to none, and, for that reason, this part of the feast continued until the last person had left his house. he does not accept money. z.v. said that this year the people in need were much more than they had been in the years before. ivailo, as nestinar, gives advice on how to solve a particular problem, e.g., by visiting a particular doctor or lawyer who lives in particular town, on a particular street, next to a certain building or location, explaining how exactly to get there. z.v. said that ivailo sees things by clairvoyant visions and has never physically visited these places or heard about these experts before. he also said: “there are karma-, geneticand physiological illnesses.” the first two are the most difficult to heal, because they demand a kurban be done. the “physiological ones” can be healed relatively easily, and ivailo tells them where and how to do this. the next stage of the ritual complex was the visitation of the holy spring, the aiasmo. the bagpipes started playing again, and the procession exited the house, with ivailo, his wife, daughter and assistants at the head (see image 11). bulgarian nestinarvski ritual complex 79 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii image 11: procession to the aiasmo the spring is roughly 5-7 minutes away from ivailo’s house. it is a stone fountain with three pipes with stone plaque, on which is written: “placed in 1985 as a present to the village stomanevo from the municipality and in honor of bulgarian-soviet friendship” (see image 12). the contrast shows the ability of a compelling archetypal form to “fit” well in any kind of content, even one that is not inherently sacred. because of the dialectics of the sacred and the secular (socialist) object, hierophany paradoxically results, but that does not prevent the object from participating as a sacred item in this context (eliade 1998:70). the pipers continued to play throughout this portion of the ritual, as ivailo wet his hair with water from the spring. kneeling and bowing, he walked backwards using small steps while pouring water over his forehead. he put pieces of bread broken off a traditional round loaf held by one of his assistants into a trough. then he dipped a bouquet of yellow forest flowers into a pot of holy water and, with it, sprinkled first his assistants and then the rest of the people around him. he took the wet bread, squeezed it and put it into a hollow of a big yoke elm tree behind the fountain. 80 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii image 12: the water ritual ivailo put a morsel of bread into the mouths of each one of his helpers. they then kissed his hand. after that he did the same to every person in the group. each person, after eating his/her morsel and kissing ivailo’s hand, stepped aside and washed his/her face in the spring. ivailo smiled kindly at each person. when the last person in line took part in this stage of the ritual, the procession continued to the glade, where the final stage would occur. some of the people did not go on foot, but rather in their cars. taking into account the vehicles, clothing and the accessories of the visitors, i concluded that the persons were of average or higher social and economic status. another marker of this status was the conversations during this transition. they used this period between bulgarian nestinarvski ritual complex 81 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii two ritual acts (12) to make calls on their cell phones. it was a work day, so that there were many attempting to check in to the office at a distance. the conversations contained phrases about the “budget of the miniature model,” “marketing research,” “functioning of a station relay,” “problems on the server,” etc. it was clear that they were of different professions, but, in general, were highly qualified professionals. other conversations among participants were similar to those on the bus, e.g., about how to clean chakras, communication between auras and energy manipulation, all topics characteristic of “new age” movements. the final stop of the procession was a glade outside the boundaries of the village at approximately 3:30 in the afternoon. bagpipers and drummers started to play, and people jumped into a horo. ivailo sat under an old wild pear tree. at one side of the glade were the cauldrons with the boiling kurban. near them, the sacrificial ram, a beautiful, dark brown animal, was tied to a pine tree. various local foods such as yogurt and cheeses were available for sale in the glade. the visitors, most of them from big cities, showed great interest and soon the organic food was sold out. image 13: the kurban – both alive and cooking ivailo was meditating, pressing his palms together in prayer as his gaze wandered. one of the helpers dug a pit in front of him under the tree. ivailo’s wife sat next to him. young women in traditional clothing were standing behind him, holding the same exact round loaf of bread that was featured in the water ritual. spices, cooking oil, pieces of cloth, the cauldron and the bouquet 82 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii of flowers were placed next to the tree (see images 13-14). the drums beat faster. the butchers, who also did the cooking, brought the ram and laid him on edge of the pit. the crowd was very thick; many whispered: “he is hypnotizing him.” the two men slaughtered the ram. ivailo held a cloth to the wound and brought the cauldron closer to fill it with some of the flowing blood. most of the blood ran into the earth of the pit. the nestinar sprinkled the dead ram with the flower bouquet that had been dipped in holy water. at that moment the drums stopped, and a total silence fell. ivailo stood with dull eyes and leaned his back against the tree. the butchers and some assistants untied the ropes binding the animal’s legs and used them to hang it with its head downwards from a big tree branch, preparing it for skinning. everyone watched the sacrifice; no one turned away. during the skinning of the animal on the other side of the tree, ivailo stayed at his place and preached. “every illness comes from fear and the envy…you should take more humility from life, because you should pay back for what you have taken.” he also divined “on clothes,” a divination practice for a person who was not present, but whose relatives had brought a piece of clothing (see image 15). the clairvoyant uses it when a person it belongs to is not present to tell that person’s future. he also gave instructions for healing. for example, he gave advice to one person that pinecones and pine branches would be suitable for his illness. hearing that, another person, an old man, started to shake and knock down the pinecones from the nearest tree, even though the “recipe” had not been directed at him. many people arrived for the ritual at this final stage, including the winners of the last two seasons of the television show clairvoyants, ivelina hristova and mariana stefanova. as television stars who represent contemporary “mystical” beliefs, they were seeking both popularity and validation by participating in this rite. they also wanted to establish a connection between traditional and innovative ritual forms on the basis of a common archetypal form in two different contexts. there seemed to be a bulgarian nestinarvski ritual complex 83 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii image 14: the sacrifice image 15: divination hierarchy; ivailo preached to ivelina and not to the other woman. she was there with a crew to shoot a movie about her abilities and personality. her participation in the “feast” was a part of the production. the details of the event as an entire complex created by the performers, the “scenario” and the observers, undergo changes over time in each of these ritual components. the ritual occasion attracted people with particular interests, even if they were 84 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii eclectic. however, the archetypal symbols are largely the same as those in the traditional ritual, because the dynamics of the psyche demand to be “filled” at a particular time and space. the need for the sacred is most important in our consideration of this innovative tradition. the details in this ritual adapt to these peoples’ changing needs and the particular needs of the performer at the same time. strandja’s villages are visited by other people, who are attracted by the details of the strandja ritual and it meshes with their needs. at 5 p.m. people were dancing the horo. some were sitting on the ground, watching and talking. the butchers were cutting the meat of the ram into portions on a table. nearly two cubic meters of wooden stakes brought by truck were arranged in the center of the glade. they were lit without any accelerant (see image 16). image 16: the fire the helpers quickly set up a tent, into which the women placed colorful traditional carpets and carried in provisions, vessels and supplies to prepare the dishes before serving them at the ritual table. other helpers marked a ring around the fire by forming a 15 meter circle of meter-long stakes. these stakes marked the boundary for the audience. only ivailo, his assistants, and the musicians had access to the center of the glade where the bonfire was located. another group of musicians, in this case roma, with a drum and two zournas (a kind of clarinet) arrived and started bulgarian nestinarvski ritual complex 85 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii playing. ivailo was still preaching under the tree as the wood in the bonfire collapsed little by little. first ivailo danced alone, performing the kuchek, a cheerful, emotive, asian-style dance. he was not in a trance as of yet. ivelina hristova (the winner from the first season of the television show clairvoyants) spontaneously joined in as his dance partner. at the same time the helpers were covering the ground between the playground (gumno) and the holy tree (the wild pear) with a white cloth nearly 12 meters long. this served as the ritual table. they placed many cut flowers, particularly lilac and peonies, on it. the women served up round bread, potato pie (a dish specific to rodopa mountain, a region famous for its potatoes), onion pie, biscuits, fried dough, etc. no alcohol consumption occurred at any point in the day or at the feast itself. eventually they served the meat. image 17: horo around the fire it started to rain, as it had many times during the day, but it was heavier at this point. the assistants covered the table with a large piece of nylon to protect the food. the music stopped, and the people hid under trees and umbrellas, but did not leave the feast. the visitors threw pieces of paper, on which they have written their wishes in a kind of “e-mail to god” into the live coals of the fire. ivailo started talking about peace and prosperity, sending thanks to his grandmother, who, as he said, taught him everything. he uncovered the table and invited the people to accept his gift. 86 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii at 8.30 in the evening, the rain became heavier, but ivailo strode into the burning coals, dancing to the accompaniment of the bagpipes and drums. the musicians and people were covered with pieces of nylon or sheltered under umbrellas. image 18: firedancing he alternated his dance with the horo, which was performed outside of the fire by his helpers (see images 17-18). he marked the shift in dance by giving the musicians a sign to change the music. the “nestinar” music is specific to the fire dance and features the rhythm of the drum alone. one of the visitors must have shown some doubt about the dancing in the fire, because ivailo raised his leg high before the person to prove that his foot was intact. the “unbeliever” made a gesture of “protection,” nodded his head assent, and clapped his hands as a sign of approval. these acts, it seemed to me, signified an apology of sorts for doubt. some people took “new” coals from the fire and returned “old” ones taken from it the previous year. in this way they renewed the fire, initiating a new cycle. a similar ritual exists in other cultures; there is also a traditional bulgarian folk practice called “renewing the fire” (not connected to nestinarstvo). (13) the rain became increasingly heavy and, by 9, people were leaving the feast quickly. bulgarian nestinarvski ritual complex 87 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii mythological thinking, the psyche and universality in general, we can conclude that this ritual has a structure common to other rituals as expressed in its archetypal traits. easily recognizable are traits of mythological thinking in general, for example in the worship of natural elements (water, fire, earth). (14) contemporary elements and commercial traits, however, are “entangled” with the tradition. (15) in the traditional form of the ritual complex, the main stages of the initiatory process are easily observed. the regression of the conscious comes with the anticipation of the saints’ day. in strandja it is customary for the entire region to visit the “big aiasma,” a place outside the villages, in the forest, near a holy spring, a week before the saints’ day. there they name new nestinars, prepare the icons for the feast, putting them on special “thrones,” chairs on which they put the icon among four rods on the seat. three of these rods they call male while one of them is female. from the point of view of analytical psychology, this quaternity expresses wholeness, the self and the hieros gammos. as pre-ritual actions, these could be considered as the upcoming wholeness that emerges from participation in the rite. according to jung, wholeness is primordial and, at the same time, it is an aim of existence. the hierogamy, representing the self, appears also in the presentation of the water, the holy spring, and of fire in the form of bonfires lit in front of the icon “thrones.” other factors helping the regression of the consciousness are the music (especially the drums), the timing (at night), and the contemplation of the icons and the fire. another representation of the hierogamy includes the male and female images of the saints in the traditional form of the ritual; the integration of the dichotomies of fire and water, which, in the traditional form, “become one” in space and time on the way from the konak to the gumno; the integration of the saints (the icons) and the multitude; the gathering at the table; the process of the “catching,” e.g., the unity of the nestinar and the saint. the daytime period of the traditional ritual also presents an integration of dichotomies between the day and night. the moment containing the freewill sacrifice integrates the kurban, the nestinar’s fire 88 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii dance, the burning wood in the fire. progression is expressed in the final stages by the festive mood; the dances; the table; “nonburning” in the fire; and the expectations for prosperity and fertility. the universal pattern of the initiation, as an archetype of transformation, appears in this new form of the nestinarski ritual as it does in other traditional rituals. in the jungian approach, it presents and shapes psychological dynamics that appeared in the activities. in the nestinarski ritual complex we see similar traits to those in meletinsky’s study of myth, which is not surprising as ritual can be viewed as a living form of myth. this ritual demonstrates, in syncretic unity (1995: 5) meletinsky’s three main mythic characteristics: (pre-) science, religion (serving as nuclei of philosophical and religious concepts), and aesthetics. the first two characteristics are represented by the worship of saints konstantin and elena; the concepts of karma; metempsychosis; the connections among the elements, the spiritualization of nature (animism) and the microand macrocosm (the individual and the world (nature, cosmos); the concept of manna; the power of the ancestors, etc. aesthetic traits (unconscious poetic creation) are recognizable, too. according to jung (samuels, shorter, plaut 1995: 162-163), a symbol should not necessarily possess aesthetic meaning; as a part of the sacred context of its own cultural background people experience it isolated from this particular value. however, for the outside observer, who is from another time and culture, different details of the ritual might bring aesthetic experience to the fore, e.g., the music and dances, the traditional costumes, the images of the icons, the portrait of granny rosana, the decoration of the table, the meals and the dishes, the colorful carpets, etc. the symbolic act of putting the wet bread into the tree-hollow in the water ritual stage could be considered as homological to the aim of the ritual provision of wellness and fertility. the hands of a person and the person himself could be viewed as a source of fertility and the bread as a fruit in the hollow of the tree as a hypostasis of the womb of nature. from this moment “the womb of nature” is no longer empty; it is fertile, giving bread and life. the symbolic meaning of the sprinkling with bulgarian nestinarvski ritual complex 89 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii the bunch of the forest flowers could be viewed in a similar way as an act of fertility. the putting of the morsel of bread into the mouths of each one from the multitude may be considered symbolically identical to the previous action of putting the bread into the hollow of the tree: hence the person and the tree (of life) become one, the person is involved in the life-death-life cycle, in the unity of the micro-, mezoand macrocosms. the table as a stage of the ritual performs the element of the earth. the “table” is also a symbol of the cosmos, the unity, the connection between “our” and the “other” world; the eater and the eaten; the man, the higher power, the animal, the plants; the status of liminality, the whole “concept of the gift.” as a symbol, its meaning cannot be “brought out” fully in one’s consciousness; according to jung a symbol is endless. the symbolic aspects of fire, based in mythological ideas, could be separated provisionally into several groups of dichotomies: fire is a mediator between the worlds, ensuring a rapid connection and is apotropaic, a border between them as well; eyewitness and judge, destroyer and fertilizer. the ritual may thus be characterized as one of intiation within the cycle of life-death-life. the tree next to the gumno could be seen as a symbol of the axis mundi, the world tree. this tree and the ritual site together could be viewed as a representation of the vertical and horizontal structure of the world. note that initiation as used here is derived from concepts in analytic psychology. in this context, initiation denotes a universal psychological process that finds expression in communal phenomena. it can be (only provisionally) separated into stages that appear as “steps” in a ritual. initiation is realized when a person dares to act against his/her natural instincts and allows him/herself to move into consciousness. in general, in this rite, these steps include: 1. regression of the conscious mind (the “catching” in the nestinarstvo); 2. sacrifice of one’s own free will (dancing in the fire, kurban); 3. integration of dichotomies (the male and female saints; the integration of water and fire; the man, the animal, the trees, the water, the fire and the saints; the table as a form of introjection and integration); 4. transformation (to tertioun non datur); 5. progression of the conscious (end of the 90 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii ritual, returning to the profane world); 6. establishing a new, higher level of existence (expectations for wellness and fertility). initiation is related to archetypes of transformation, which jung defines as non-personalized constructs about situations, modes, means for transformation, ensuring development and change; they are “expressed in many of the situations, places, objects and events reflected in our dreams and lead to corresponding motifs in folklore” (corsini1998:81). following eliade, campbell and others, we can see space has been conceived as a tripartite entity, represented here as the pit in the ground, the people and the tree and the “higher power” that “catches” the firedancer. these three spaces parallel the three dimensions of the cosmos: under-, middle and higher worlds. the ritual renews the multilayered connection among them and integrates the micro(the person), meso(the community) and macrocosms. the idea of metempsychosis and karma, and the unity in the cosmos (an idea that expresses the universal process of initiation, the cycle of lifedeath-life) in this rite. common symbols of initiation and transformation are easily recognizable in the practices characteristic of the rite, including: the visitation of the aiasmo (the holy spring); the sacrifice of an animal, the primordial source of life (16); the horo, a circle representing life and transition; the movement between the different stages of the ritual accompanied by certain types of music and instruments (drum and pipes); the common table which expresses a means to integrate the microand the macro-levels and which represents transformation; divination and healing; and trance, ecstasy, and fire dancing itself. this neo-folk tradition also contains aspects of an ancestor cult. the konak has been replaced by the house of the grandmother and the icon of the saints by her portrait. the women’s images (granny rosana, granny zlata, vanga, mother teresa, st. elena) are aspects of one archetype, namely the anima of ivailo aianski. the anima is the archetype that makes the connection between the i (ego) and the unconscious mind; she is a psychopomp. in this context, she helps him enter the trance. the relationship with these famous legendary women increases the importance and the sacredness of ivailo himself as a manna personality. note that only bulgarian nestinarvski ritual complex 91 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii ivailo dances in the fire. this is “his” feast. not even his daughter participates in the firedancing, while in the traditional ritual in strandja, everyone who wants to, even visitors, are welcome to dance. the rite thus has an established hierarchy: the highest is the manna person, ivailo, after whom come the helpers, believers and close friends, essentially his “apostles.” this represents a type of cult to a particular person who has inherited his power. this contrasts to the traditional hierarchy in of the rite strandja, where the saints have more importance than the performers, since it is their feast, and is indicative of how the contemporary rite in this village has evolved from the original. the present preserves the past the compulsive nature of the psyche guarantees the universality of “ritual behavior” based on common traits of mythological thinking and ritual models. the physical presence of facts about any culture in historical documents is not enough justification for their preservation into the contemporary world. a tradition lives on, with its roots in the unconscious, but it is dependent on the creator, the product and the observer (17), three factors that vary in time and space. each ritual presentation is a reproduction of the tradition, an “original,” created again during each performance. like biological entities, rituals are hereditary and mutable. even in conservative contexts there exists “dissent,” which increases as time passes. in contemporary bulgarian culture (and other such contexts), these processes of change are rapid and multidimensional, and invented traditions may arise. in spite of the variety of the “inventions,” there exists a continuity in the structures of these new rites when compared to older traditions. i contend that they are the result of the unconscious mind and the dynamics of symbol creation derived from the relatively constant physical and temporal environment as humans experience it, e.g., as humans, we are all aware of the presence of certain celestial bodies, of the four elements, of the structure of the calendar as connected with the (agricultural) cycle and its important “high” points (solstices, equinoxes, etc.) as well as of the dichotomies 92 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii (universal in their existence and manifested in many cultures) of male-female, day-night, etc. while the pre-conditions of the ritual are found in the psyche, environment and the cultural background certainly contribute to its shape as well, providing a context for its expression. specific information about ancient ritual practices is not often available, but we can hypothesize that new ritual forms, structures or traditions may appear on the basis of “survivals” (18) or de novo. what is essential in the latter case is not conscious thought or study, but spontaneous action without any necessary analogy to previous practices. the universality appears not in the details, which can vary, but in the essential structure of the ritual, which is presented and experienced by the participants as sacred. none of the main structural components that trace the archetypal structure and ritual dynamics disappear during the migration of a ritual form through space and time. groups such as those described here, who practice rituals and create traditions, should be distinguished from those which have the aim of performing the past literally according to a “template.” the latter are created as a result of education and study of folklore and are preserving a tradition authentically to the fullest extent possible. i contend that their goals and those who create a neo-folk rite spontaneously are different even though, in both cases, a ritual is performed. the difference between them is analogous to that between the documentation of and creation of history. it is the case that the system and the observer and the performance and its perception are inextricably bound. even a so-called “absolutely authentic” tradition (as practiced at one time in the past), wellpreserved and performed exactly, is nevertheless now received and interpreted by contemporary people. this fact alone seriously alters the performance and its meaning; the same action in another social context must be interpreted differently. for an observer of a rite such as the one described here, interpretations of culture are primarily aesthetic. they may be seen as an art form, a dramtic role, or a cultural inheritance, but not as an “authentic” part of life. with the inevitable alteration of the components in the system that result from this attitude, a tradition may thus be termed “invented.” bulgarian nestinarvski ritual complex 93 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii notes 1 nestinarstvo is a ritual complex, because it has a compound structure: stages with various parts integrated into a whole. 2 the concept “invented tradition” is taken from eric hobsbawm (1992). 3 the locals view them as mother and son, brother and sister and/or husband and wife; in psychological terms this union of the male and female principle in in every aspect and at once (because the unconscious reconciles the contradictions between them) represents the concept of hieros gamos. (greek, ‘sacred marriage’). 4 in the language of the common people. 5 a famous bulgarian nestinar, a fire dancer from strandja mountain. 6 “she raised him. this grandmother was a very close friend of the prophetess vanga”. z.v. also mentions that granny rosana had albanian ancestry from the line of mother teresa. rosana could control the weather, if she was angry at someone from the village or if someone had done bad things, she had been able to raise a storm and punish the village. in these cases the villagers run home and shut the windows. her “personal tree” was the fir-tree and sometimes when she was walking through the forest, the fir-trees would bow to her. “ivailo doesn’t dance with an icon, but with his grandmother’s portrait, the ones that nikolay painted”, z.v. continued. z.v. had recommended that the artist nikolay roussev come to stomanevo to paint a portrait of ivailo. 7 he did not specify if this expression refers to god; in the author’s opinion it seems to refer to, a primal universal force. 8 in contrast, in stranja there is only one holy drum, which is kept in the konak year round, and people use it only on the day of the feast. some say that sometimes at night they hear it to beat by itself in the konak. it has the power to heal. the rhythm helps entering into the trance, for “catching,” along with the contemplation of the icons and bodily movements, as with typical 94 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii shamanic experiences. there are no data on using any other means or substances to enhance “catching”. 9 manna is a melanesian word for supernatural force possessed by some individuals, objects, actions or events. its contemporary equivalent is “charisma.” this person is a mediator between the worlds of the sacred and profane and communicates with “higher powers” (samuels, shorter, plaut 1995: 94-95). 10 the content of the performed songs is not connected with the nestinarstvo. as it is in strandja, the music and the songs are not specifically on one topic or for this rite alone, except that they have appropriate rhythm and the melody for entering the fire. 11 this practice is not a contradiction, but is loaded with symbolic value and is well-integrated in mythological concepts (and in rituals). it represents the mythological motive for the “magical cauldron,” which renews the “victim” in the neverending cycle of life-death-life, beyond time and space at any singular instance. from the jungian point of view this could be seen as an expression of mysterium coniunctionis, e.g., reaching the self by integration of dichotomies. life-death-life is a cycle among “poles,” not initiational acts. 12 in the past, this passage had not been “free” of ritual meaning. the “way” has its own symbolic aspects and brings specific experience; at the same time it expresses particular psychological dynamics – status of liminality, transformation and integration as steps to the aim of the ritual. “the classical folklore” is a concept about the village community in the middle ages. with the disintegration of the patriarchal relationships (from the enlightenment till now), its wholeness and relative reticence as a system suffers desintegration” (georgieva 1990: 10). according to jung, as the conscious mind evolves, “our times differ from any other time” (2002: 179). he discusses the interactions between the individual and the collective psyche and the process of individuation (2004). the psyche finds objectivation in the actions; it means that the culture is a form of expression of it. the combination of “folklore” and the “post-folklore” culture could find explanation from a depth-psychology point of view, in which bulgarian nestinarvski ritual complex 95 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii the evolution of the conscious and the way it communicates with the unconscious remains intact. 13 for example, the chinese po-sing-tai-te, “the great god, the protector of life” (arnaudov vol.2 1996: 386). 14 “for the earliest greek philosophers, the άρχα were, for instance, water, fire, or what they called άπειρον, the “boundless”. they were not “causes,” therefore, but rather primary substances or primary states that never age, can never be surpassed, and produce everything in the world. they function the same way in mythology. they form the ground or foundation of the world, since everything rests on them. they are the άρχαί to which every individual thing returns and out of which it is made, while they remain ageless, inexhaustible, invincible in timeless primordality, in a past that proves imperishable because of its eternally repeated rebirths (jung & kerényi 2002: 8). 15 there is an english saying: “where there is a pilgrimage – there is a market.” the traditional entanglement of the profane and the sacred and the coexistence of sacred event and market in same time and place have been the subject of interest by scholars such as anna wessman (2009:16). 16 according to jung, the symbol is not a sign. this means, that it presents much more than the “obvious”. the culture gives only “outer” traits for the universal core, of the archetype. the unconscious component of the symbol is the reason it to be experienced universally in space and time. franz cumont (1999; 136), for example, describes that the sacrifice in mithraism is an obligation of the priest and the blood of the victim is collected in a pit in the ground. the sacrifices of living creatures, according to the author, are about daemons. the tavrobolia is connected with the ideas of purification and immortality, and rejuvenation in all aspects of life. the basic concept is that the blood contains “living energy” that may be transferred. examples can be found in many different cultures. in this particular case, in nestinarstvo, they outline the solar-chthonic nature of the cult and the aim for integration of the opposites, transformation and rejuvenation or the stages of the initiation. 96 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii 17 this topic merits more consideration, but is beyond the scope of this analysis. 18 a concept based on edward taylor (1873). bibliography arnaudov, mikhail. 1996. арнаудов, михаил. очерци по българския фолклор. [essays on the bulgarian folklore]. т.1. софия. академично издателство “проф. марин дринов”. arnaudov, mikhail. 1996. арнаудов, михаил. очерци по българския фолклор. [vol. 2 essays on the bulgarian folklore]. т.2. софия. академично издателство “проф. марин дринов”. bastian, adilf 1860. der mensch in der geschichte. 3 vols. leipzig. campbell, jozeph. 1960. the masks of god: primitive mythology. london. secker & warburg. corsini, r. 1998 (1987). корсини, реймънд 1998: енциклопедия психология. софия: наука и изкуство. [encyclopedia of psychology], 1987: wiley: interscience. cumont, franz. 1999 (1913). кюмон, франц. мистериите на митра. [the mysteries of mithra], софия. издателство “шамбала”. durkheim, emile. 1998 (1915). дюркем, емил. елементарни форми на религиозния живот. [the elementary forms of religious life ], софия. eliade, mircea. 1998 (1952, 1991). елиаде, мирча. образи и символи. размисли върху магическо-религиозната символика. [images and symbols], софия: прозорец. eliade, mircea. 1999 (1976). елиаде, мирча. митове, сънища, тайнства. [myths, rites and symbols], софия: прозорец. eliade, mircea. 2000 (1955). shamanstvo (shamanism). елиаде, мирча. шаманизмът и архаичните техники на bulgarian nestinarvski ritual complex 97 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii екстаза. [the shamanism and the archaic thechnics of the extase], софия. издателство лик. eliade, mircea. 2000 (1969, 1984) елиаде, мирча. търсенето. история и смисъл в религията. [the quest: history and meaning in religion], софия. издателство лик. frobenius, leo 1904. das zeitalter des sonnengottes. berlin. georgieva, albena 1990 георгиева, албена. етиологичните легенди в българския фолклор. [the etiological legends in the bulgarian folklore], софия. университетско издателство “климент охридски”. hobsbawm, eric, terence ranger, 1992. the invention of tradition. cambridge university press. jung, c.g. 1999 (1981). юнг, карл густав. архетипите и колективното несъзнавано. [the archetypes and the collective unconscious], плевен: еа. jung, c.g. 2002 (1933, 2001, 2005). юнг, карл густав. съвременният човек в търсене на душата. [modern man in search of a soul], плевен: еа. jung, c. g., c. kerényi 2002: the science of mythology. abingdon: oxon. routledge classics. jung, c.g. 2004 (1953). юнг, карл густав. две студии по аналитична психология. [two essays on analytical psychology], плевен: еа. mauss, mauss. 1990 (1922). the gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. london: routledge. meletinski, ieleazar. 1995 мелетински, елеазар. поетика на мита. [poetry of the myth], софия: ик “христо ботев”. samuels, andrew. shorter, bani. plaut, fred. 1995 (1986). самюелз, aндрю. шортър, бани. плаут, фред. критически речник на аналитичната психология. [a critical dictionary of jungian analysis], плевен: еа. tylor, edward. 1873. primitive culture. london. wessman, anna 2009. “iron age cemeteries and hiisi sites: is there a connection?” folklore electronic journal of folklore, vol. 42, department of folkloristics at the estonian literary museum. 98 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii z.v., dob 1956, journalist/poet, native of varna, interviewed june 2011 in stomanevo. a report on the oral traditions of the north pacific rim, a performance workshop (held at fort ross, california, 4-10 november 1997) ronelle alexander, university of california, berkeley this workshop, the inaugural event of the newly formed society of living traditions (a california not for profit corporation) and the program on tradition and community (based at uc berkeley), was intend­ ed as a pilot experiment. workshop participants came not only from different geographic regions (russia, siberia, alaska, california, scotland and holland), but also from different strata of life experience. they comprised scholars (each with experience in both field research and academic writing), traditional performers (singers, dancers, storytellers), media artists (film-makers, audio specialists, photographers), educators in local schools, and students (from high school to university level). approximately thirty participants met over six days; audio, video and photographic records were made of most of the events. the central locus of the workshop was stillwater cove ranch on the northem california coast, where most participants also lived and took their meals. the village-like setting, with outdoor grounds, separate cottages, and the large central lodge with stone fireplace, created a communal atmosphere highly conducive to creative work and intense discussion. three shorter sessions of the workshop took place in the museum audito­ rium of the fort ross state historical park. at two of these, visiting russian scholars gave multi-media presentations about their field work with siberian st7 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 native communities, and at the third, participants watched the film porno shaman. made by a local film-maker*, this 20-minute documentary recorded a re-enactment of a healing session conducted by essie parrish, the late spiritual leader of the local qashaya porno native settlement. the intense cross-cultural discussion which took place during all these meetings, between natives representing the different traditions, and the scholars who study these traditions (themselves representing different countries and disciplinary training), allowed each to reach a new and better understanding of the other's work and viewpoint. students who took part in these discussions, one of whom aided in translation for the siberian partici­ pants, and another of whom is of mixed native/ western parentage, gained valuable experience and direction for future work. additional workshop events took place at the fort ross school, the hopkiln winery in neighboring healdsburg, and in the outdoor stockade area of the fort ross state historical park. the latter event, which was open to the general public, began with a traditional blessing offered by three of the children of essie parrish, the late spiritual leader of the qashaya porno tribe which originated on the land now occupied by the fort. these representatives remained in the place of honor throughout the afternoon, during which workshop participants representing the different but related native traditions presented their art. in this outdoor setting representing their historical background, members of the fort ross community were able both to interact with russians, siberians, alaskans and other native californians, and to pay respect to the native californians whose land this originally was. members of the local community were invited to stillwater cove that evening for an informal gather­ ing with workshop participants, at which point the creative energy of the week was at a high pitch. the several events of the workshop created new bonds of respect and understanding among the many different strata represented by its participants. scholars from different countries and different disciplines developed new ways to work together in the future. both natives and community people interacted with scholars (and watched them interact with each other), and gained a better understanding of how scholars think and how they approach their work. native peoples began to realize that their own points of view were respected, both by scholars and by foreigners. scholars and foreigners realized that the community within which they were temporary guests supported not only their presence but also the goals and means of their work. natives from different, isolated communities saw that although each tradition was unique, the experience of main­ taining traditional heritage in the face of a dominant culture was the same. finally, all saw the creative results of good field research — the lasting bond of respect between academic researcher and native informant, when each realizes that s/he has something of value to give the other. on the final day of the workshop, participants discussed plans for future activities to be sponsored by the society and the program. г5 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 untitled reports 155 the “local culture and diversity on the prairies” project (1) nadya foty and andriy nahachewsky university of alberta edmonton, alberta, canada introduction the peter and doris kule centre for ukrainian and canadian folklore at the university of alberta is in the process of concluding a project with several partners to record some 900 hours involving 2,000 interviews with people who remember life on the canadian prairies prior to 1939. the project is called “local culture and diversity on the prairies” at the time of this writing, most of the interviews have been conducted but the compilation, coding, analysis and description of findings are still underway. for this reason, this essay takes the form of a personal perspective of the project, description of issues influencing project design, and a statement of aspirations rather than an authoritative reporting of its results. the aim of the project has been to document everyday life, ethnic identity and regional variation among people of ukrainian, french, german and english heritage.(2) how did people from diverse backgrounds interact, adapt and become “prairie canadians” in the first half of the twentieth century? what was the relationship between cultural inheritance and local community participation? how did they express their various identities on the local community level? what factors affected regional variation in these communities? the project is designed to generate a great deal of documentary information and primary archival resources for further research in many aspects of these people’s lives. ethnographic research about ethnicity, integration and canadianization as social processes in a given period is perhaps best conducted indirectly. in this project, these topics are studied as embedded in the sphere of informal cultural life in the local context. local informal culture, often referred to as “vernacular culture,” includes family life, personal relations, customs, traditions, expressive culture, occupational lore and recreation. vernacular culture operates on a level that is usually less explicitly ideological than official organizational activity. studying this cultural sphere allows for a discussion of people’s cultural experiences and interethnic relations from a more neutral, elastic and holistic perspective. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 156 since vernacular culture in itself is a very broad sphere, the project’s focus is further narrowed to four categories: ritual expressions, material culture, verbal traditions and performance arts. these categories of activity are recognized as key markers of ethnic communities. at the same time they are very flexible and responsive to contextual factors. interethnic relations (maintenance of cultural boundaries, borrowing, integration) often manifest themselves actively here. these four categories are also pervasive enough that they are researchable in every local community and likely with every interviewee. challenges research on ethnicity through vernacular culture facilitates the inclusion of a wide range of individuals, including those who had strong identification with their ethnic inheritance, people with multiple heritages, and others whose ethnic background impacted their lives minimally. whereas many studies of ethic culture deal with connections between the diaspora communities and culture in the land of origin, emphasis in this project will be on variation by location in canada. it is expected that a complex relationship will be demonstrated between ethnic identification and canadianization; the two are not always inversely related. people who remember the first half of the twentieth century are now 70-80 years old or older. when they retell their parents’ or grandparents’ stories, vivid descriptions of personal experiences are sometimes passed on orally from 1900 or earlier. nevertheless, challenges have been raised that oral sources “… do not necessarily conform to western measures of reliability and accuracy.” this criticism is most often and most importantly raised to oral history projects that claim to make generalizations about broader cultural processes, rather than those that focus on qualitative descriptions of their particular case studies. in this instance, the local culture project attempts to link the thick description of specific cases with ventures into the “dangerous waters” of exploring sociological patterns. because of these dual perspectives, we think the local culture project may be of some value to scholars critiquing ethnographic methodology. two challenges are dealt with here.(3) on the one hand, questions of reliability can refer to general claims about cultural processes made on the basis of oral histories. this challenge may most characteristically be voiced by sociologists, who have developed elaborate methodological tools to evaluate reliability of reports 157 certain types of research claims. other questions about our type of project may refer to the accuracy of the interviewee’s memory, considering the filtering influences of memory, the desire to please the interviewer, and other factors. this challenge may be called “the historian’s challenge,” since historians have established disciplinary expertise in evaluating the veracity of their sources. in response to these issues, we isolated four groups of factors that might bias the stories told during an interview. the first group of factors relates to the identity of the interviewee, and includes gender, economic status, personality and mood. health and memory are extremely influential factors in interviews.(4) telling a story about oneself can be an active means of projecting one’s contemporary self-image. a second group of factors is connected with the identity of the interviewer.(5) the interviewee may choose to present her narratives differently to a person she knows well, and differently to a stranger. the gender of the interviewer may also be significant; different combinations may encourage different stories. likewise, events described to an interviewer the same age as the interviewee may well differ from those that are thought appropriate for a younger audience. a talkative interviewer might elicit different memories and reactions than one who listens quietly. he may help the interviewee feel comfortable to reciprocate and express herself flowingly. on the other hand, he may also set a precedent in topic or style that the interviewee then emulates. an interviewee may well be affected by what she thinks the interviewer wants to hear.(6) further, it may prove significant if the interviewer and interviewee share the same ethnicity or not. silent or not-so-silent audience members during the interview may include spouses, children or friends of the interviewee. sometimes stories may be told specifically with these people in mind. a third group of factors that might influence interview content relates to the interview procedure itself. if the interview is a conversation between two trusted friends, it will be very different than a dialogue between two new acquaintances. certainly, the interview format affects the information that is collected in a variety of ways (structured questionnaire, semi-structured interview, unstructured conversation, etc).(7) the location of the interview might also affect the interchange and the comfort level for both parties. unexpected factors may influence the mood and tone of the day. the language used during the interview also has the potential to affect the experiences that are remembered and the strategies used in their description. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 158 a fourth group of factors that can affect the interview content significantly are those experiences that have taken place during the intervening years. if the interviewee has moved out of the locality that is being described, it is likely that her memory of it is more abstracted; she can more easily hyperbolize the negative or the idyllic character of her earlier community life, depending on her mood. on the other hand, she is less likely to commingle events from earlier and more recent times. traumatic experiences such as the death of a spouse may color the memories of the period under study. changes in economic and social status might move the interviewee to remember circumstances in the early period as richer or poorer, happier or sadder than they might have been remembered otherwise. other factors may also come into play. it is not likely that all significant factors can be identified, and certainly they cannot be controlled. perhaps in time we can observe the influence of certain biasing factors and take them into consideration when interpreting the interviewees’ narratives. coda questions of reliability and accuracy are legitimately asked of oral history projects, and interview-based ethnographic researchers do well to consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of their approach. strengths of oral histories include the directness and potential power of the case studies explored. they can foreground the perceptions of the participants in a holistic context. projects have the best potential if they strive for specific descriptions of situations and events directly experienced by the narrator. generalizations by the interviewee, on the other hand, can perhaps best be used to understand emic perceptions. if these projects include goals that go beyond specific case studies and try to shed light on more general social processes, they benefit greatly from a large quantity of information and reinforcement through interconnections with related sources. as ethnographers, we benefit when we recognize the exploratory nature of our chosen research method. we can rarely make claims to prove larger social processes outright, but our greatest contribution is typically to suggest lines of thought that can open doors to further ideas, and follow up research if desired. besides providing insights into the vernacular culture of people who lived on the prairies in the past, the project “local culture and diversity on the prairies,” involving hundreds reports 159 of related case studies, can hopefully shed some light on methodological differences between ethnographic practice and other social science traditions. methods used for collecting oral histories three main approaches were used for interviews for the local culture project. the first approach was to ask a standard list of questions. interview themes included material culture, ritual activities, songs and stories, performing arts, language use, social life and pastimes (see appendix). questions tended to be open rather than closed, to stimulate personal memories and narratives. interviewers could ask supplementary questions to flesh out answers, and to allow for interviewee-initiated flexibility as required. the questionnaire was typically completed in 40-90 minutes. responses provided a baseline of information that could be compared across localities, across ethic groups, and across other variables. the second approach was to collect more in-depth “life stories” from approximately 40% of the interviewees. these interview sessions varied from 2-15 hours in length (perhaps over several days), documenting the general lived and remembered experience of the person in question. interviewers strove to record a free-flowing monologue or conversation, starting with a request for the interviewee to tell her life story. the interviewer attempted to be attentive to themes that the interviewee was particularly interested in and knowledgeable about. topics and their connections were selected by the interviewee. the third approach was an exploration of the family photograph collection. historical photographs were a striking and rich medium for researchers of vernacular culture. interviewees who were willing to share their photograph collections were encouraged to show them to the researcher, identify their contents and to reminisce about the subject matter. this approach focused on visual and material documents that might complement the verbal images communicated through the first two approaches. both during and following the collection phase of the project, fieldworkers were required to process the interviews according to a series of standard tasks: first, pertinent administrative and biographical information would be recorded in an interview report, including a range of 52 fields such as when the informant’s parents were born, locales in which they lived prior to 1939 and since, and if anyone else was present folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 160 during the interview. these interview reports would then be inputted into a master log of interviews. the fieldworker was also responsible for supplying an interview index, where a time code would be ascribed to each question asked during the interview, thus giving a virtual roadmap of the session itself. most of the interviews were recorded on cassette and minidisk, therefore digitization and conversion of the interview to digital format was necessary. this would be uploaded to computer, along with any photographs that had been taken. next, each fieldworker was expected to keep a fieldwork journal, recording any additional thoughts, reflections and/or information relevant to the project. finally, the fieldworker had the organizational task of numbering each photo, sound file, index, and any other corresponding documents. near the conclusion of the collection phase, project management had to administer the depositing of all associated media and text files into a central repository, namely the bohdan medwidsky ukrainian folklore archives at the kule centre for ukrainian and canadian folklore most recently, there has been the relatively large task of creating an organizational system for the data collected. this has been possible thanks to the hosting capabilities and support of tapor – the text analysis portal for research at the university of alberta. the eventual local culture infrastructure within tapor will resemble the following: a series of organizational folders containing all of the raw data collected for the project, any relevant administrative information, and a search engine which powers the on-line database. in the spring of 2006, the kule centre for ukrainian and canadian folklore was approached by the canadian centre for ethnomusicology at the university of alberta and asked to participate in a project entitled the virtual museum of canadian traditional music. the intention was to create an on-line experience, based on musical information collected in the local culture project, as one of many “storylines” representing canadian traditional music. this presented the perfect opportunity to mine the raw data of the local culture project, with a specific focus. what resulted was a geographical narrative about music, which is a virtual drive through the local culture soundscape. the first step was to search the local culture project indexes for questions relating to music. this process was facilitated by a basic search tool for the method 1 interviews developed by dr. peter holloway, a member of the centre. the theory behind this search tool was to take the index as a starting point, use the questions and corresponding time codes, and essentially break up the interview into small bits. keywords, used as reports 161 search criteria, were then identified and connected to the relevant sound segments. however, method 2 and 3 interviews had to be searched more or less manually, identifying the time codes related to topics on music within the index, choosing those that were longer than a minute (assuming those would be fuller answers) and listening to the corresponding sound files one by one. thankfully, by using windows media player, it was possible to simply scroll to the desired starting time code without having to listen from the beginning of the interview. furthermore, as this was intended to be an interactive and visual on-line presentation, suitable accompanying historical photos were chosen by printing out contact sheets of all the photo folders and doing a manual scan for appropriate images. a database of this information was created, including relevant biographical information from the local culture master log. the end result of this mini-project can be observed at: http://www.fwalive.ualberta.ca/vmctm/en/html/narratives.php?id=5) in the near future, people from around the world will be able to visit the local culture website and have access to hours of interviews on canadian history and folklore topics. the interview indexes for the more than a thousand method 1 interviews provide basic search capabilities, and when coupled with an eventual keyword searching option, the researcher will be able to simply click on a keyword, then click on a related recording, and the sound file will begin to play from the desired topic. notes 1 we express our gratitude to the department of canadian heritage; multiculturalism program, the community initiatives programme of the government of alberta, the institut pour le patrimoine de la francophonie de l’ouest canadien, faculté saint-jean at the university of alberta, fédération des ainé(e)s francophones de l’alberta, department of women’s studies at the university of winnipeg, chair of german-canadian studies at the university of winnipeg, ukrainian canadian foundation of taras shevchenko, ukrainian pioneers’ association of alberta, the chair for canadian ethnic studies at the university of calgary and the tapor project of the university of alberta for their support of the project “local culture and diversity on the prairies.” project participants include andriy nahachewsky as principal investigator, pauline atwood, radomir bilash, andriy chernevych, phillis dalley, michelle daveluy, nadya folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 162 foty, michel fournier, alexander freund, pauline greenhill, jen haddad, leslie hall, madeleine kalbach, christine kampen, serhiy kozakov, anna kuranicheva, doris lachance, genia mcleod, frank mcmahon, mike mikulak, meredith pilling, ryan rosler, matt scalena, simon tessier, angela thiessen, theresa warenycia, volodymyr yahnyshchak and some 800 interviewees from across the prairie provinces. thanks also to the society of friends of the ukrainian folklore centre for their support and management of the project. 2 each of these four groups shares a significant presence in the canadian prairies, with large populations established prior to the first world war and substantial secondary immigration in the interwar period. “ethic identity” is defined very broadly for this project to include affiliation with any particular ethno-cultural sub-group within the larger prairie population. the term “ethnic group” is more often ascribed to germans and ukrainians than to english or french communities in canada. significant for us however, is that (im)migrants with all of these heritages were certainly conscious of cultural differences between their place of origin and their current community on the canadian prairies. they all experienced many moments of identity negotiation and options for integration and community building. 3 many other challenges have been raised. see lummis 1998 for a related discussion. 4 a multitude of interpersonal factors affecting interviews have been raised by feminist ethnographers, cf. tower hollis, pershing and young 1993; and many others. 5 see, for example, agar 1980: 41-62; spradley 1979: 45-55; as well as numerous more recent discussions of “reflexivity.” 6 this may be particularly significant in ethnic research, where an interviewee may emphasize ethnic traditions or symbols for an interviewer who is assumed to be searching for ethnicity. researchers in the ukrainian folklore centre are quite familiar with potential interviewees suggesting “i’m not ukrainian enough for you.” nobody declined “because i’m too ukrainian for you.” this suggests that interviewees had pre-conceived notions about our interest in preservation of ukrainian culture right from the moment of introduction. in the “local culture” project however, we are just as eager to hear from people with little engagement with ethnicity as those with a lot. 7 bernard 1995: 136-359: bernard 1998: 259-546 reports 163 bibliography agar, michael. 1980. the professional stranger: an informal introduction to ethnography. orlando: academic press. lummis, trevor. 1998. “structure and validity in oral evidence.” in the oral history reader, 273-283. edited by robert perks and alistair thomson. london: routledge. bernard, h. russell. 1995. research methods in anthropology: qualitative and quantitative approaches. walnut creek, ca: altamira press. bernard, h. russell. editor. 1998. handbook of methods in cultural anthropology. walnut creek, ca: altamira press. spradley, james p. 1979. the ethnographic interview. fort worth: holt, rinehart and winston. tower hollis, susan, linda pershing and m. jane young, (editors). 1993. feminist theory and the study of folklore. urbana and chicago: university of illinois press. appendix 1: interview questionnaire part 1. respondent what is your name? when and where were you born? where did you grow up? (places and dates) when did your family come to canada? when did your family move to [locality]? where was your father born? (village/town, province, country) where was your mother born? (village/town, province, country) where was your spouse born? (village/town, province, country) what other places have you lived? when? what kind of schooling did you have? what kinds of work have you done? who did you live with when you were growing up? what is your ancestry? at this point, you should determine the time frame that you want the interviewee focus on: e.g., if the person was born in the early twenties, ask him/her to recall the childhood and early teen years. part 2. material culture what did you eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner? what special meals did you have on christmas? what food did your family purchase at the store? what food did your family produce on their own? what kind of clothing did you wear? folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 164 what chores were you responsible for as a child? what did your father do on work days? what did your mother do on work days? how was your house decorated? did anybody in your family do crafts? what were they? part 3. ritual activities was your family religious? did you belong to a church? how often did you attend? describe christmas in your family. when did you celebrate it? describe easter in your family. u did anyone in your family make easter eggs? f – did your family decorate christmas trees? e – did your family have afternoon tea? g – can you identify ritual activities that only germans practiced? did you celebrate/observe the following: 3a. birthdays 3b. dominion (canada) day 3c. thanksgiving 3d. halloween 3e. new year’s 3f. parish feast day 3g. other holy days 3h. other holidays tied to specific cultural identity or specific locality 3i. other holidays tied to canadian identity part 4: songs and stories did anyone in your family sing songs? on what occasions? in what languages? did you sing? what kind of stories did you hear or tell? when were they told? how often? part 5: performing arts did people in your family go to dances? where were dances held? how often? name the dances. name the musical instruments played. what kinds of music did your hear? what kinds of music did you make? did anyone in the community put on plays? who? what kind of plays? did you ever participate? part 6: language what was your first language or languages? what languages did you speak at home? what language or languages did the teacher use in school? and the students? did you ever take lessons in any other language? when? part 7: social life and pastimes who were your nearest neighbours? who were your best friends? what activities did you do together? who were your parents’ friends? did you play sports? what kinds of sports? reports 165 what did you and your family do for entertainment? what nationalities were there in your community? part 8: closure has anyone in your family collected information on family history? have they produced a written history? do you have old photographs that show people and life in your community before the 1940s? do you know other people who can remember their life experiences in this community before the 1940s and who i might interview? folklorica 2008, vol. xiii women veterans and folkloric self-representations 99 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii no nastas’ias on the volga: soviet women veterans and folkloric self-representations adrienne marie harris baylor university waco, texas, usa abstract “no nastas’ias on the volga: soviet women veterans and folkloric self-representations” investigates how the soviet women pilots of the 46th guards regiment who served in world war ii employed folkloric imagery to represent themselves in wartime poetry and in memoirs published between 1960 and 2002. the article argues that the women’s employment of this imagery gives insight into how they constructed their collective identity, how they negotiated shifting expectations for gender, and how, in the twentieth century, they interpreted folkloric images they inherited from the past. the author’s approach bridges disparate bodies of scholarship in the fields of folkloristics, gender studies, and history. the author analyzes the meanings of both the images which the pilots appropriated—the bogatyr’ [the male knight], witch, and to a lesser extent, the eagle and swallow—as well as a key folkloric personage whom memoirists ignored: the polianitsa [woman knight]. in a broader context, this article elucidates how a marginalized, silenced cohort used its cultural heritage to create a unified identity, carve a place for itself in a larger collective memory, and how its utilization of cultural tools evolved with the passage of time. скажет дунаюшка иванович: --ай же ты, настасья королевична! поедем, настасьюка, в чисто поле, стрелять стрелочки каленыя. и выехали во чисто поле: dunai ivanovich then spoke: “hail to you, nastas’ia the princess! let’s ride, nastas’ia, to the open field, to shoot some tempered arrows.” and they rode out to the open 100 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii и стреляла ёна стрелочку каленую, и попадала стрелкой в ножечной острей, рассекала стрелочку на две половиночки, обе половинки ровны пришли, на взгляд ровнаки и весом ровны и стрелил дунаюшка иванович; так раз стрелил, перестрелил, другой раз стрелил, не дострелил, и третий раз стрелил, попасть не мог. [gil’ferding 1938: 168] field. and she shot a tempered arrow and with the arrow she hit the edge of a knife, she cleaved the arrow into two halves, both halves came out equal, equal to the eye and even in weight. and dunai ivanovich shot, he shot a first time and overshot, he shot a second time and undershot, he shot a third time and missed. [bailey and ivanova 1998: 198] (1) images and stories of fighting women like the polianitsa [female knight] nastas’ia pervade russian folklore, literature, and history. dating back to the pre-christian period, they appear with increasing frequency in modern history. well-known examples include alena arzamasskaia (temnikovskaia) in stenka razin’s uprising, nadezhda durova during the napoleonic wars, the women’s death battalion in world war i, the fictional anka pulemechitsa and her countless historical counterparts in the civil war, and most recently, the 800,000 women who fought in world war ii, both on the front and in the resistance as partisans. (2) like nadezhda durova, women world war ii veterans wrote about themselves after their service (1960s-2000s), carefully crafting narratives that demonstrate their successes as soldiers and their equality and occasionally, their superiority to men on the battlefield. many women veterans who employed folkloric imagery to represent themselves inserted themselves into epic narratives and into national mythology. surprisingly, the most unified and prolific writers, the veterans of the 46th guards women’s aviation regiment, women veterans and folkloric self-representations 101 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii embraced both the seemingly contradictory images of the bogatyr’ [the male knight] and ved’ma [the witch]. meanwhile, they ignored the polianitsa, the female counterpart to the bogatyr’. in “dunai,” as well as in other byliny, she often out-performs bogatyri in traditionally masculine activities. a close reading of these women veterans’ postwar autobiographical works (1968-2002) reveals that these authors wrote, in part, to correct misconceptions and to clarify misunderstandings about their capabilities and feats in world war ii and their absolute equality or superiority to men in air combat. why, then, did they ignore the image of the polianitsa while representing themselves using other folkloric personages? what do the women veterans’ choices to appropriate certain folkloric images and to ignore others when representing themselves reveal about the complex relationships between folklore, identity, gender, and collective memory? what do these preferences tell us about both the historical situation in which these women wrote first personal narratives and certain folkloric personages in russian culture? (3) natalie kononenko has pointed out that “since folk belief affected all strata of russian society, folklore helps us understand not only peasant women and their songs and tales, but also beliefs encountered by upper-class women who chose to write,” [kononenko 1994: 17]. in a broader context, elaine showalter has advocated the position that literature not only documents, but constructs human sexuality and gender identity [showalter 1992: 15], leading one to ask how the identities that these veterans assumed, the role models they acknowledged, and those they ignored or rejected reflect wartime and postwar culture and collective memory. this article commences with a brief discussion of the historical situation and cultural context that prompted these veterans to pen self-referential texts; it examines women veterans’ appropriation of folkloric terminology when depicting themselves and their comrades, both during the war in songs and poetry and after the war, in memoirs and film. the article subsequently analyzes two figures from the east slavic epic tradition, the bogatyr’ embraced by the pilots and the neglected polianitsa, before turning to a discussion of the witch. since the pilots’ witch 102 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii identity originated as a nazi insult, i discuss the witch in both the german and slavic cultural contexts. an analysis of these women’s literary choices sheds light on both twentieth-century interpretations of folkloric images the memoirists inherited from the past and women veterans’ selfrepresentations. i argue that when the pilots of the 46th guards aviation regiment began referring to themselves as ved’my in the 1960s, rather than bogatyri, the term they had used during world war ii, they transitioned from a general symbol embraced by aviators to a feminine identifier that was specific to their particular regiment. during the war, their choice of the masculine bogatyr’ gives evidence that they wanted primarily to be treated as equals to men in combat, without drawing attention to their gender. when they began employing the feminine ved’ma in memoirs, they began promoting a more specific identity, juxtaposing themselves with the male veterans after the commencement of the state-sanctioned cult of world war ii, as defined by nina tumarkin in the living and the dead and lisa kirshchenbaum in the legacy of the siege of leningrad, 1941-1995. (4) during the roughly two decades that separated these pilots’ utilization of the bogatyr’ identity and the time when they identified as “night witches,” gender and women’s roles in the military were revised. in a broader context, this article elucidates how a marginalized, silenced cohort used its cultural heritage to create a unified identity and to carve a place for itself in a larger collective memory. it outlines how their utilization of their folkloric heritage evolves with the passage of time. “letat' v nebe—razve eto zhenskoe delo?” [“flying in the sky—is that really a woman’s business?”]: the historical context zuleikha seidmamedova, (5) an azerbaijani navigator, begins her 1969 zapiski letchitsy with an epigraph that challenges the woman’s place in aviation: “летать в небе—разве это женское дело?” [“flying in the sky---is that really a woman’s business?”] [seidmamedova 1969: 5]. she, in turn, responds to the challenge by portraying herself and her comrades as skilled pilots and heroic fighters. seidmamedova and the soviet women women veterans and folkloric self-representations 103 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii pilots who fought in world war ii faced this challenge three times. in the late 1930s, encouraged by famous examples and images of armed women in the media, they flocked to air clubs and, in spite of discrimination, they fought for the right to fly. (6) they became pilots and flight instructors who maintained that women should be allowed to join the militarization movement, even if they were not allowed to attend state military academies. (7) after the nazi invasion of the soviet union on 22 june 1941, these aviators demanded to serve at the front, only to be told that the war was not women’s business and were sent home, or directed to nursing school as an alternative. after the famous aviator and hero of the soviet union marina raskova received permission in october 1941 to form three women’s aviation regiments, (8) the women recruits performed heroically as combat pilots, exceeding expectations, and proved definitively, they thought, that women had the right to wage war in the skies. however, after the war, upon their collective demobilization, the nation fell virtually silent about these women’s heroic deeds. in a 1945 speech, mikhail kalinin explicitly urged women to not be boastful of their feats and service [kalinin 1953: 428]. postwar state needs and policies resulted in representations of women soldiers that corresponded to strictly-defined gender roles. reina pennington notes that “even in fiction, there was an increasing tendency to minimize the role of the women participants in the postwar years” and barbara alpern engel points out “gender stereotyping” and the postwar emphasis on pro-natalism [pennington 2001: 155; engel 1999: 149]. as a result, during the 1950s, women pilots, and women veterans in general, found themselves on the periphery of collective memory. (9) as the cult of world war ii began to take shape in the 1960s [tumarkin 1994], it became clear that armed women combatants and skilled aviators had been forgotten, rather than celebrated, as they had been during the pre-war mass militarization campaign of the 1930s. after fifteen years of silence, these women began fighting back, actively engaging in another battle: a battle for cultural heritage, for a place in the nation’s cultural memory, and for the metaphorical resurrection of lost comrades in arms. 104 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii in her in her discussion of autobiography, shari benstock argues that female autobiographers craft responses from the position of “the other” [benstock 1997: 1143]. women pilots’ memoirs indicate that as a whole they were and had always been aware of their marked otherness in relation to male pilots and that they wanted to be remembered by future generations precisely as women who confronted and challenged boundaries to become skilled aviators and defenders of their nation in its most dire hour. they believed that they had proved themselves in combat and in their memoirs, they attempted to push themselves out of the periphery, into a more central space in collective memory. “vpered, orly, vpered, bogatyri!” [“forward, eagles, forward, knights!”]: war-time self-representations of the three women’s regiments formed by marina raskova, the women of the 46th guards night-bomber regiment, the only regiment of the three to remain solely female throughout the war, wrote most prolifically about their individual and collective experiences. two specific veterans of this regiment dedicated many of their later years to penning memoirs and biographies of former comrades-in-arms: veterans’ advocate marina chechneva and author of youth literature, natalia (meklin) kravtsova. these collective-minded veterans authored more books about their comrades than about themselves. not surprisingly, chechneva chose kravtsova’s words, an excerpt from the regimental march composed in 1943, as the epigraph for her 1968 biography letali devchata v gvardeiskom [girls flew in a guards regiment]. her choice points to the representative function of this march in the regiment’s collective identity during service as well as the women’s memory of the war. the march captures how the women pictured themselves during the war, at the precise moment they were fighting the enemy: на фронте стать в ряды передовые была для нас задача нелегка. [to stand on the front in the advancing ranks was not an easy task for us. women veterans and folkloric self-representations 105 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii боритесь, девушки, подруги боевые, за славу женского гвардейского полка! припев: мы слово гвардия, прославленное слово, на крыльях соколов отважных пронесем, за землю русскую, за сталина родного, вперед, за родину, гвардейский женский полк! никто из нас усталости не знает, мы бьем врага с заката до зари. гвардейцы-девушки в бою не подкачают вперед, орлы, вперед, богатыри! [chechneva 1968b: epigraph] young women, girlfriends-inarms, fight for the glory of the women’s guards regiment! refrain: on the wings of courageous falcons, we will carry the word of the guard, the glorified word for the russian land, for our native stalin forward, for the motherland, women’s guards regiment! none of us know exhaustion, we beat the enemy from sundown to sunrise. guards-young women won’t let you down in battle forward, eagles, forward, (male) knights!] the march, written in celebration of the conference of the “guards” honorific in 1943, references the aviators’ feminine gender explicitly four times, and in keeping with wartime cultural documents, describes their bravery and relentless aggression against the enemy and identifies their patriotic motivations to wage war. (10) while the march is specific to world war ii and the stalinist period, several key words root this twentieth-century march in the east slavic folkloric tradition: the bird imagery and the aviators’ concluding self-identification as bogatyri, the russian knights of byliny, epic poems, most of which were originally composed between the tenth and fourteenth centuries [bailey 1998: xvii]. in their memoirs, the pilots of the 46th frequently note with pride that their regiment acquired the distinction of being a guards unit; this distinction remained one of the unifying sources of pride for these pilots. as such, it served a key role in the regiments’ 106 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii collective identity. through the performance of kravtsova’s march, the women pilots collectively celebrated their aviator identities and challenged gender norms by referring to themselves as bogatyri long after demobilization and the implementation of policies that prohibited women from combat had pushed them into the domestic sphere [pennington 1996: 143]. the tendency of soviet women soldiers to represent themselves and their comrades-in-arms by employing terms and motifs appropriated from russian folklore is hardly surprising within the context of wartime culture. frank miller has referred to the years between 1937 and 1941 as a “renaissance for russian folkloristics” and during the period just prior to the war, numerous exhaustive anthologies of folklore saw light. [miller 1990: 10]. pilot raisa aronova explicitly places pilots within the culture of heroism in her memoir nochnye ved’my [night witches] when she remembers how in the 1930s she conceived of aviators as some type of magical-bogatyri [aronova 1969: 7-8]. the very nature of aviation led to the application of metaphoric avian references, previously reserved for bogatyri and heroes in folk tales, to pilots. the soviet press incorporated these references into headlines, strengthening the connection between the folklorist past and the stalinist militarization campaign, contributing to the glorification of early soviet aviators. this continued after the outbreak of war, when poster artists iraklii toidze and mikhail mel’tsev superimposed images of contemporary red army soldiers on backgrounds depicting bogatyri [snopkov 2005: 119, 121], reinforcing the relationship between the past and russia’s latest battle in the epic struggle against foreign invaders. in keeping with propagandistic depictions of red army soldiers as heroes from the epic past, the women of the 46th guards regiment also chose to represent themselves as “bogatyri” or male knights, emphasizing their communality with pilots and demonstrating that women could be defenders of their homeland, regardless of gender. (11) this wartime appropriation of the bogatyr’ self-image demonstrates on a grass-roots level the renewed relevance of folklore during the stalinist period, which laura olson has argued was promoted in order to cultivate women veterans and folkloric self-representations 107 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii patriotism [olson 2004: 39]. although red army soldiers who served in various capacities were cast as bogatyri because of their roles as defenders of the motherland, the figure of the bogatyr’ best symbolized the pilot. the pilot/plane serves as a logical analogy to the knight/horse pair. in prewar propaganda, journalists christened pilots “stalinskie sokoly” [stalin’s falcons], as the falcon was both a widely recognizable symbol for the bogatyr’ [bailey and ivanova 1998: 8, 62] and a universal symbol for the aviator. of the women memoirists, chechneva and kravtsova, the two most prolific veteran-authors and conservators of the memory of women pilots, were the most attracted to images from the byliny. in letali devchata v gvardeiskom, chechneva cites a wartime poem written by a fallen comrade-in-arms, evgeniia rudneva. in this poem, rudneva also employs the image of the grammatically-masculine eagle, always a male character in russian folklore: мы будем драться, как орлы, не уступая, как соколы, крылаты и тверды́. [we will fight, like eagles, not giving in, like falcons, winged and resolute.] [chechneva 1968b: 51] here rudneva and, through her citation, chechneva ignore traditional gender paradigms in the lexicon inherited from the folk tradition by employing images of aggressive male, birds of prey to represent her comrades, rather than birds typically associated with women. since the eagle is traditionally a symbol of bravery, strength and invincibility [ivanova-kazas 2006: 15] and the falcon, a universal symbol of the aviator, rudneva and (meklin) kravtsova, in her march, represented themselves and their fellow pilots with those birds during the war regardless of their comrades’ gender. during the war, urgency prevented the soviet citizens from questioning the “naturalness” and femininity of women soldiers as they would in the postwar period. as the female pilots initially embraced their identities as bogatyri, they assumed the bogatyr’s symbol: the falcon. 108 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii in the russian tradition, the grammatically-feminine lastochka [swallow] serves as a symbol of kindness, happiness, peace, family contentment, and otherworldliness [ivanova-kazas 2006: 102-103]. these traits contrast dramatically with those associated with grammatically-masculine birds of prey. in light of the traits of the swallow, the title of chechneva’s 1984 memoir “lastochki” nad frontom [swallows over the front], signifies a noteworthy shift in cultural expectations for men and women. the title underscores traditionally feminine traits before the reader ever read about the women’s wartime contribution; it sends a message of domestication and may point to a surprising incongruity between swallows and the front. (12) the choice conforms to postwar expectations for women, as evidenced in larisa shepitko’s 1966 film kryl'ia [wings]. immediately after the war, the soviet union saw what reina pennington has described as a “retrenchment” in gender attitudes and societal structures [pennington 1996: 141]. in addition to the negotiation of gender through folkloric imagery, the pilots’ re-situation of themselves and their comradesin-arms within a folkloric context seemingly accomplished a significant objective in the crafting of the nation’s historical narrative: by representing themselves as specifically bogatyri, the pilots represent themselves as part of an epic, a narrative that deals with a heroic figure or figures and a historical event, such as a war or some other achievement central to the establishment of traditions, the identity of an ethnic group or a nation and its cultural values [preminger and brogan, eds. 1993: 361]. through their self-representation as part of an ancient tradition of fighters defending the nation, the memoirists connect themselves to the deep past. in their guards’ oath, the poetic voice situates even the enemy within the discourse of folklore, pledging to shoot the “fashistskikh razboinikov” [the fascist robbers/brigards]; certain folkloric genres, including the byliny, feature razboiniki as enemies. by casting the enemy as a razboinik, the detested villain in the bylina “il’ia muromets and the nightingale-robber,” the women veterans incorporate themselves into a centuries-old narrative in which brave knights defend the motherland from women veterans and folkloric self-representations 109 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii invaders in a larger, national struggle. through the collective, wartime performance of kravtsova’s march, the pilots were already contextualizing themselves in epic time, preparing for the future in which their service would be part of their nation’s past. mikhail bakhtin has claimed that the epic narrator speaks about a past which is inaccessible to him or her, in which the “represented world of the heroes stands in an utterly different inaccessible timeand –value plane, separated by epic distance” from the singer and listener [bakhtin 1981: 13-14]. this inaccessible distance would become increasingly powerful as the years passed and the women pilots realized that in addition to being demobilized from the military, women pilots and other combatants had been largely forgotten in the nation’s collective memory and marginalized in a postwar culture that responded suspiciously to women combatants [alexiyevich 1988: 189-191]. the incorporation of texts referencing the bogatyri into memoirs published during the sixties, seventies, and eighties gives evidence that the women veteranmemoirists were writing, in part, to challenge the dominant versions of history that ignored their contributions and focused instead, as anna krylova points out, on the victimization of women who fought in the war [krylova 2010b : 87-91]. “vpered, bogartyri”…a ne polianitsy? [“forward, male knights”…but not female knights?] while the female pilots’ employment of a figure from epic poetry complements the objectives of writing oneself into the narrative of world war ii and highlighting one’s role in a national struggle, why would they choose to represent themselves as male bogatyri, rather than the female polianitsy? adele marie barker has noted that the byliny are composed largely around the theme of mother-son relationships; thus, she argues that a psychological plot in which the ego frees itself from the mother figure is embedded within stories of bogatyri who fight foreign enemies or set out on quests [barker 1986: 24]. yet, in spite of barker’s findings, the women pilots’ utilization of the bogatyr’ figure to represent themselves does not fit into this paradigm, especially as the women 110 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii pilots never denied their femininity but stressed it in their memoirs. by professing a love for traditionally feminine interests such as flowers and needlework, the memoirists clearly specify that they did not want to be men, in spite of their identity as soldiers. while the veterans combined traditionally feminine qualities with warrior traits, constructing what anna krylova has described as non-oppositional, yet still binary gender identity [krylova 2010a: 13-14], the women veterans represent themselves so that, like the polianitsy, they appeared every bit as skilled in warfare as their male peers, if not more. in fact, the women veterans of the 46th sometimes argued that their gender made them better pilots, as they would not drink or smoke before flying, or because of their strength of will [aronova 1969: 193-194]. members of the other women’s regiments agreed: dive bomber evgeniia guruleva-smirnova, a dive bomber claims, “we had fewer casualties in our regiment than the men did flying the same type of aircraft; i think we were more exact in our flying” [noggle 1994: 111]. they understood their role in history and the need to prove their prowess. they kept diaries during the war, as if they were conscious of the fact that they were changing history and needed to document it [krylova 2010a: 12-13]. marina chechneva worked to the end of her life to prove that women were equal to men in aviation, both in civil service and through the publication of numerous books about her comrades-in-arms and herself [volkov 1972: 40]. the pilots’ memoirs show that they were familiar with other women fighters: nadezhda durova, anka pulemechitsa, marina raskova, zoia kosmodemianskaia. anna krylova argues that they aimed to “redraw gendered identities of combat by proving women’s ability at modern war” [krylova 2010a, 12]. with their familiarity with cultural and historical precedents, and with the demonstrated objective of representing themselves as fighters equal to men on the battlefield, yet very much not men, their complete absence of identification with the polianitsa, the woman knight, even in the postwar period when they were reflecting on their self-images in order to craft narratives, points to a potential unsuitability of the polianitsa. in her discussion of women veterans and folkloric self-representations 111 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii greek female warriors, elizabeth constantinides advances the position that “jungian analytical psychology might consider the warrior maiden as a manifestation of one of the great archetypes of the unconscious, the image of the other sex, in this case the animus or male element of the female psyche” [constantinides 1983: 71]. the example of nastas’ia cited in the introduction gives russian evidence of such an archetype, but as johanna hubbs notes, earlier examples of polianitsy are more aggressive than later ones [hubbs 1988: 149]. this trend seems to indicate that for whatever reason, russians suppressed the polianitsy and the woman warrior archetype, even though they embraced strong women in other contexts. why are polianitsy absent in these women’s memoirs? the women pilots might not have known about the polianitsa, but considering their educational levels and cultural knowledge, this gap in knowledge seems unlikely. the russian academy of science published numerous collections of byliny during the 1930s and 1950s. although curriculum varied from school to school, byliny, related themes and related characters were taught in some soviet schools. (13) the nationality of the polianitsy might provide another clue: polianitsy were always foreign, neither russian nor orthodox. their foreignness might have precluded the pilots-memoirists from identifying with them: in memoirs, consistent with the war cult and women’s explanations for their fighting, the women pilots claimed to fight primarily out of patriotic love for their country. in the byliny, the male bogatyri, rather than the female polianitsy, defended the russian land from invaders and infidels. a close reading of the byliny points to another potential explanation of why the veterans ignored the polianitsy: they may not have appreciated the conclusions of the byliny—what happens after the polianitsa marries the knight. as kononenko has pointed out, the byliny are peppered with tragic elements and the death of a hero’s wife, a polianitsa in many cases, occurs nearly as frequently as the death of the hero [kononenko 1994: 19]. the bylina was the one east slavic folk genre performed exclusively by men prior to the twentieth century [kononenko 1994: 18]. kononenko argues that “russian epics also express the hope that marriage will subdue 112 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii a woman” and cites an example in which the polianitsa nastas’ia becomes a perfect wife after marriage to dobrynia. as a single woman, the polianitsa had been monumental in size, yet after marriage, she shrinks to an average size [kononenko 1994, 26]. the message is clear: matrimony tames this bold, brave creature and transforms her into an ordinary and non-threatening woman. according to kononenko, natas’ia’s transformation seems like the fulfillment of male wishes, rather than female desires. in the twentieth-century context, soviet pro-natalist policies and a postwar cultural bias against women soldiers disarmed the veterans; (14) they were expected to marry and help rebuild the population, and most did. perhaps they resented the character’s discouraging fate in the byliny which represented a male point of view and because they had no intentions of masquerading or passing as men after demobilization, they could not identify with the polianitsa. a comparison of the folkloric imagery in postwar texts with the imagery composed during the war points to an evolution of the authors’ gender identity, complicating krylova’s assertion that the pilots constructed a “non-oppositional binary.” during the war, the pilots attempted to prove equality to men and chose traditionally male images. by ignoring the polianitsa and embracing the bogatyr’, they identified with a masculine, unmarked, universal image, just as they chose to represent themselves using grammatically-masculine birds during the war. in the postwar period, while they were trying to reclaim a place in the nation’s collective memory, their balance of traditionally feminine and soldierly traits shifted and they employed more traditional feminine images: the switch from the eagle to the swallow in the title of chechneva’s“lastochki” nad frontom [swallows over the front] in 1984, accompanies the abandonment of the bogatyr’ for a more traditionally-feminine, albeit marginal and marked, folkloric personage. the folkloric imagery shows a dynamism in the pilots’ gender identity for which krylova does not account. women veterans and folkloric self-representations 113 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii “tochno exo dalekoi pesni” [“precisely the echo of a distant song]: the epic past in postwar poetry after the war, pilot veterans composed no new texts in which they identified themselves as bogatyri, even if they did cite kravtsova’s march, perhaps because of the historical situation: the women stopped trying to prove themselves equal to men in combat. after the war, they transformed themselves from uniformed soldiers into civilian veterans. as veterans penning their own narratives, they focused on their superiority in war, rather than their equality, and the image of the powerful witch eclipsed that of the bogatyr’. one might argue that the women’s postwar lack of engagement with the image of the bogatyr’ corresponds to the cultural context: after the war, the organs of propaganda stopped representing red army soldiers as bogatyri— there was no need. but a brief foray into the poetry of iuliia drunina shows that into the 1970s some women veterans represented themselves as fighters in the epic history of their nation. since the war, iuliia drunina’s work has been frequently published, read, and cited. she remains by far the most wellknown world war ii woman veteran writer. while drunina served in a radically different capacity from the pilots because she was a medic, and was not part of a cohort of women, the women pilots themselves use her words to convey their experiences: galina markova even referenced one of drunina’s poems in the title of her memoir iunost’ v ogne [youth on fire]. (15) in her poem “drunia”, written in 1972, contemporaneous with the deluge of pilot-penned memoirs, poet iuliia drunina reflects upon her military experience, linking herself to russia’s military past and identifying herself as a warrior amongst warriors. through her name “drunina” and her diminutive form “drunia,” she connects herself to the folkloric druzhína [retinue], the retinues of bogatyri in byliny. (16) she describes her experience in a metaphorical druzhina, using the word “kol’chuga” [chain mail or armor] to transport the reader into the distant medieval past: 114 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii пахло гарью в ночах июня, кровь и слезы несла река, и смешливо и нежно «друня» звали парни сестру полка. точно эхо далекой песни, как видения, словно сны, в этом прозвище вновь воскресли вдруг предания старины. в этом прозвище—звон кольчуги, в этом прозвище—храп коня, в этом прозвище слышно: --други! я вас вынесу из огня! [drunina 1989: i-406-7] [it reeked of burning in the june nights. the river bore blood and tears, and amusingly and sweetly, the young men called the regimental nurse “drunia.” precisely the echo of a distant song like of a vision, or as if of a dream, the legends of antiquity suddenly resurrected anew in this nickname. in this nickname, there’s a clank of chainmail in this nickname, a horse’s snort. in this nickname, one hears ‘friends! i’ll carry you out under enemy fire!’] against the background of the medieval past, she foregrounds the camaraderie she shared with her brothers-in-arms during world war ii. she identifies herself as a sister among brothers, and her role as a nurse does not diminish her status among the other warriors. she protects her brothers, saves them by carrying them from danger and even sees her role as russia’s protector imbedded in her name. in fact, her name resurrects the byliny and casts her military service in wwii as merely the most recent of such episodes in russia’s history. the drunina example shows that some women did not stop envisioning themselves as warriors, but specifically these women, the pilots of the 46th guards, did, and chose instead to represent themselves with another folkloric image, an image specific to their women veterans and folkloric self-representations 115 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii regimental identity. as time went on, women veterans increasingly emphasized their identity as “night witches.” “nas nazvali nochnymi ved’mami” [“they called us night witches”] the only film directed by a woman veteran pilot and at least two memoirs reference the term “night witches” in titles and thus, the figure acts as the introductory image that draws the viewer and reader into collective narratives. the germans initially started calling the women pilots “night witches” early in the war, after discovering that the pilots who had been gliding in on stealth missions were not men, but women. recent interdisciplinary research on witchcraft has confirmed that the image of the witch varies greatly from culture to culture, dependent upon social contexts, ideologies, and belief systems [klaniczay and pocs 2008: 1]. in light of these facts, what did the nazi soldiers’ insult “witch” convey within the context of german culture? as in russian, german beliefs about witches stretch back into the deep indo-european past. however, through the passage of centuries, the nations’ folkloric beliefs about witches and witchcraft developed into distinct traditions. sigrid brauner has shown that the german image of the witch underwent a transformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as humanist and protestant thinkers reinterpreted women’s roles in the family and in society [brauner 1995]. prior to the late 1400s, men were as likely as women to be accused of witchcraft, but by 1500, the sexspecificity of witches as female was so widely accepted that it was assumed in texts [brauner 1995: 13-15]. brauner outlines the characteristics of the witch in the modern folk imagination: she is female, uses magic to harm others, attends secret “sabbath meetings,” flies through the air at night, and seals a pact with the devil by copulating with him [brauner 1995: 7]. the germans’ nickname for the pilots, “nachthexen,” references the witches’ inherent destructive nature, in this case, the tremendous damage caused by the women when they dropped their bombs during the night, silently, as if through supernatural means, 116 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii and caused tremendous destruction. journalist svetlana alexiyevich reports that the nazi press further vilified these women and alluded to their “unnaturalness” by claiming that these women pilots were “female bandits released from prison” [alexiyevich 1988: 153], pointing to the danger these pilots represented. furthermore, like witches in the german tradition, these women subverted traditional gender roles. johannes nider, the author of the 1435 treatise on witches, formicarious, stresses women’s powers of deception in their transgression of gendered norms, which reverses the divine order [brauner 1995: 39]. many of those who wrote about witches, such as heinrich kramer and jakob sprenger, the authors of the definitive malleus maleficarum [the hammer of witchcraft] (1487), attributed lust to witches, among other negative emotions [brauner 1995: 61]. women witches are sexually depraved in the german tradition, so that labeling a woman with such a name insults her very existence. in the german conceptualization, the nachthexen were not pilots or fighters; by virtue of their female sex, they were much more base creatures. the participation of these soviet women pilots in combat directly contradicted the woman’s maternal role in nazi culture. the russians appropriated nachthexen and translated the insult as nochnye ved’my. what, then, does the witch, specifically the ved’ma, mean in the russian context and why did russian women proudly re-appropriate this insult and use it to represent themselves? in the russian context, the ved’ma differed from the modern witch in the german context, sharing much more with premodern notions of sorceresses and sorcerers. the root of the word ved’ma connotes “knowing” or “knowledge.” practitioners of magic, both male and female, are known in russian from the earliest of records [ryan 1999: 78-79]. while members of both genders could practice sorcery, this particular term was gendered as feminine. (17) as in german folklore, the witches of russian legends were believed to be capable of flight and were seen as primarily negative characters who associated with dark forces and cursed, spoiled, and gave the evil eye. one could be born a witch or acquire powers, either through active cooperation with the devil women veterans and folkloric self-representations 117 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii or through transference of power from a dying witch, although ivanits has noted that the vast majority of instances of witchcraft mentioned in kievan and muscovite documents do not mention the devil [ivanits 1989: 93]. beliefs in witchcraft and witches were deeply ingrained in the popular imagination [ivanits 1989: 84-85]. although memoirists were highly educated, they were almost all only one generation removed from the countryside and the world view of older relatives would have certainly shaped their conceptions of witches and witchcraft. in her 1969 memoir nochnye ved'my [night witches], raisa aronova presents the insult as part of a gendered binary, rooted in folklore, relayed by the male division commissar borbunov to evdokiia bershanskaia, the commander of the 46th guards regiment. after noting the women pilots’ habits of sleeping in their cabins so that they would be ready for combat at a moment’s notice, he began complimenting bershanskaia on the regiment’s early successes, flying in the first ranks of the division after only three months and being written up in the news. he states that the most significant or telling success is the fact that the enemy both knows and hates them. a captured german had described how the night bombers had brought misery to the germans, not allowing them to sleep and both exhausting them physically and lowering their morale. the nazis claimed that “the night witches” must have been responsible for the recent destruction of a bathhouse. the commissar continues, “so that means that only for me are you sleeping beauties, but for the enemy, you’ve turned out to be witches!” [aronova 1969: 46]. in the second half of her narrative, a travelogue, aronova describes her own experiences together with her former comrade-in-arms rufina gasheva’s and husband leonid pliats’s as they retrace the women’s wartime route. after listing the talents of individual pilots, aronova reflects on the regiment’s collective identity and at one point struggles to describe her comrades: --«житие»--у святых,--а мы… --«ночные ведьмы», ввернул муж. руфа покосилась на него: 118 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii --мы не были ведьмами, конечно… --но и не ангелы!—поддразнивает леша. [“saints have “saints’ lives, but we…” “are night witches!”—interjected her husband. rufa looked askance at him: “we were not witches, of course…” “but you weren’t angels, either! --teased lesha] [aronova 1969, 246]. by relaying this conversation, aronova again reproduces a binary that places the women in an ambiguous position. in both instances, male speakers insist on contrasting the witches with unquestionably “good” figures. in her own memoir, aronova, thus captures the complexity of the “night witch” identity in the context of both folklore and the war. evgeniia zhigulenko portrays the multiplicity of the women pilots while highlighting their destructive power in v nebe nochnye ved'my [night witches in the sky], the one film about these women pilots to be directed by a woman pilot veteran. (18) evgeniia zhigulenko’s 1981 film begins with a shot of a po-2 plane bombing german tanks at night and showcases the pilots’ appropriation of their “night witch” identity. the solitary plane wrecks havoc on the germans below, destroying tanks as search lights seek the plane in vain. the germans on the ground proclaim “nachthexen! nachthexen!” the little plane flies off, and the viewer then sees that a woman commands the plane just before the film’s title appears. through this introduction, the film conveys the destruction that the women brought upon the enemy and demonstrates their skills in battle. in the next scene, an exhausted commander and commissar provide details for the viewer: the night of the featured bombing marks the one year anniversary of their time on the front, the longest and scariest year of their lives. during the course of the film, the director addresses themes common in women pilots’ memoirs and, through the introduction of a child adopted by the regiment, addresses russian misconceptions about the “naturalness” of the pilots as “real” women: one character makes plans to bring up a child informally women veterans and folkloric self-representations 119 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii adopted by the regiment while another character carries on a chaste romance with a male pilot. shortly after the women successfully bomb a german train, the narrator proudly notes the women’s thousands of sorties and elaborates upon the meaning of the germans’ insult: such an insult means that the women fly well and harm the enemy. the film conclusion parallels the introductory scene: a biplane flies off over enemy territory, sending the message that the “night witches” will continue to wage war on the enemy intruders indefinitely. in their discussion of collective identity and selfrepresentation, psychologists marilynn brewer and wendi gardner point out that “when collective identities are salient, in-group-outgroup categorizations become the most important basis for evaluating others.” [brewer 1996: 91]. the “night witch” identity conveys a special exclusivity—specific to the women of the 46th guards regiment and sets them apart from all of the other bogatyri who defended their nation in world war ii: soldiers, pilots, even other women pilots. the most recent biography published incorporates the term into the title: nas nazyvali nochnymi ved'mami [they called us night witches], showing that the women’s identification with the term persists into the post-soviet period. the increasing identification with the witch marks a cultural turn in the memory of the war that corresponds to shifting attitudes relating to traditionally defined notions of femininity. sergeant klara semenovna tikhonovch, an anti-aircraft gunner describes her evolving gender identity in svetlana alexyevich’s collection of interviews, war’s unwomanly face: “did those of us at the front want to be like men? at first we did, very much so; we cut our hair short and even changed the way we walked. but later?—hell, no! later we so much wanted to dye our hair, we didn’t eat sugar, but kept it to starch our fringes” [alexyevich 1988: 156]. private klara vailevna goncharova, another antiaircraft gunner expresses similar sentiments: “before the war i loved everything military and wrote to flying school to find out how to be accepted. military uniform suited me and i loved discipline, order, the curt words of command. […] but after the 120 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii war i no longer wanted to follow any military calling. somehow i couldn’t. i wanted to take everything khaki-coloured off as soon as i could and put on something ordinary and feminine. i still have a feeling of revulsion towards trousers” [alexyevich 1988: 157]. when the march was written, in 1943, the women were very interested in proving themselves equal to men and delighted when they learned that others had been surprised or confused by their gender. by the time they wrote their memoirs, women soldiers had been officially and culturally silenced. widespread rumors questioning their sexual, morality, and naturalness as women had led numerous veterans to go to great lengths to prove their womanliness. for a variety of reasons, they stopped wanting to be mistaken for men and began representing themselves through a powerful female image, one existing on the edges of society, set apart by occult knowledge. in terms of archetypes, they chose the crone over the woman warrior. while the warrior is typically a masculine figure, the crone is both an undeniably feminine figure and a rebellious, potentially dangerous, and strong one. ultimately, these women identified with a legendary rather than epic personage. in the last book published by the women of the 46th guards’ regiment, the authors solidified a collective “night witch” identity. two narratives by two individual authors-rakobol’skaia’s drugogo takogo polka ne bylo [there has never been such another unit] and kravtsova’s (meklin’s) tri goda pod zenimnym ognem [three years above anti-aircraft fire]-comprise this book, nas nazyvali nochnymi ved'mami [they called us night witches], published in 2002. the title “they called us night witches” references the past, the collective identity, and the collective nature of the regiment. even the picture conveys this message: a modest po-2 (u-2) biplane flies above a black and white photograph depicting ten pilots, in skirts, marching forward in unison. rakobol’skaia locates her text in a mythological space by alluding to the pilots’ legendary nature before she begins narrating their stories. she cites a poem written by (meklin) kravtsova: women veterans and folkloric self-representations 121 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii пусть это тихие и скромные у2 не из металла грудь и не из стали крылья, но сложатся легенды, и в словах переплетется сказочное с былью… --н. меклин. just as the quiet and modest u-2 planes, their chests made not from metal nor wings from steel, will make legends, so in our words, let that which is magical interweave with the facts. outside of the title, rakobol’skaia’s narrative ignores the “night witch” identity until a telling passage on the last page, when she includes a song about fallen pilots written by renowned poet evgenii evtushenko, which was featured in zhigulenko’s film. immediately after crediting the song to evtushenko and noting that it was featured in zhigulenko’s film, she begins her concluding paragraph with the affirmation, “yes, i know, that a woman can do anything!”[rakobol’skaia 2002: 140] and a plea for peace so that their children and grandchildren would not see their friends burn in planes and tanks. she concludes by stating that in order to have peace, one must never forget what has happened in the past. the book, compiled long after the war, appeared after the silence that followed demobilization, the deluge of memoirs during the war cult, and the years of silence that followed after the fall of the soviet union. clues throughout the text give evidence that the narrator’s and compilers intended that the “night witches” be viewed not only as historical, but also as legendary. the women pilots always intended that the memory of their service and of their feats in battle would outlast them and be remembered for forever. upon the realization that they had been excluded from the soviet collective memory of the war, they took matters into their own hands and narrated their war stories in such a manner that they would become timeless, rivaling other narratives associated with this particular epic event in russian history. 122 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii conclusion lisa kirschenbaum has noted that “the negotiations involved in melding personal and official memory are particularly pronounced where the gendered dimensions of memory are at stake” [kirschenbaum 2000: 552]. men and women pilots construct narratives about their wartime service in radically different ways. while both genders describe missions and planes, the women of the 46th guards regiment were much more likely to interweave cultural references, literature, and myth into their narratives in an attempt to situate their experiences into a larger narrative. their brief forays into the realm of myth might be attributed to their otherness: as pilots, then soldiers, and finally veterans. their incorporation of certain folkloric figures into their memoirs points to an evolution in their collective identity as women fighters and in their specific group identity as the 46th guards regiment. chechneva, kravtsova, aronova and rakobol’skaia tell stories of veterans living on the margins of the soviet collective memory of the war. their voices, belonging to woman soldiers and then veterans, filled what suanne conze and beate fieseler have called “a blind spot in the history of the war” [conze and fieseler 2000: 209-234]. the appropriation of folkloric terminology in their first-person narratives illuminates the cultural and historical specificity of their experiences, both wartime and postwar; this approach is applicable far beyond the russian context. in these veterans’ self-representative works, we see an evolution from folkloric images drawn from the propagandistic militarization campaign to a radically different type of mythological figure. initially, while endeavoring to prove their equality on the battlefield, these women, like polianitsy, donned uniforms and demanded to be treated as the peers of their brothersin-arms. their appropriation of the witch identity points to both a resolution of tension between traditional femininity promoted during the postwar period and the women’s pride in their role as destroyers of the enemy. as “night witches,” they carved out a special, unique place in the soviet collective memory of world women veterans and folkloric self-representations 123 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii war ii. on the other hand, the women’s rejection of the polianitsa in all of the reflective first-person narratives points to a fundamental conflict of essentialist archetypes and constructedness of gender roles. nastas’ia and the other polianitsy, while representing an ancient archetype, disconcertingly challenged gender roles and waged war only until they were forced to tame themselves upon marriage. as “night-witches,” the women of the 46th guards regiment continued to reassert their regimental identity as destructive, powerful, female pilots who had defended their homeland. thus, there was no room for nastas’ia—not on the volga, where the women pilots learned to wage war in 1942, nor in their memoirs. notes 1 all translations are the author’s, unless noted, as in this case. this passage is taken from the bylina [east slavic, medieval, epic, folk poem], “dunai,” which collector a. f. gilferding recorded in 1871 in the olonets province from the singer k. i. romanov [bailey 1998, 198]. 2 see adrienne marie harris (2008) phd dissertation the myth of the woman warrior and world war ii in soviet culture, the university of kansas: introduction; natalia pushkareva, (1997), women in russian history, trans. and ed. eve levin (armonk: m. e. sharpe), 82-83 for information on temnikovskaia; nadezhda durova (1997) the cavalry maiden: journals of a russian officer in the napoleonic wars. trans. and ed. mary fleming zirin: introduction; laurie stoff (2006) they fought for the motherland: russia’s woman soldiers in world war i and the civil war. lawrence: university press of kansas; anna krylova’s (2010) soviet women in combat, cited in the bibliography. 3 for comparison’s sake, one may wish to look to memoirs penned by male pilots. see igor kaberov’s (1983) v pritsele— svastika: vospominaniia letchika-istrebitelia; evgeniy mariinskiy’s (2006) red star airacobra: memoirs of a soviet fighter ace 1941-45, edited by artem drabkin, translated by 124 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii vladimir krupnik; vasily b. emelianenko’s (2005) red star against the swastika, edited by sergei anisimov and translated by elena markus; vasiliy restnikov’s (2008) bomber pilot on the eastern front: 307 missions behind enemy lines, translated by vladimir kroupnik and john armstrong, edited by serguey anisimov. 4 nina tumarkin, the living and the dead: the rise and fall of the cult of world war ii in russia (new york: basic books, 1994) and lisa a. kirschenbaum, the legacy of the siege of leningrad, 1941-1995: myths, memories, and monuments (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2006), 12-3. although one might claim that the cult of the war officially began in 1965, when victory day was made a state holiday, but already in 1960, the piskarevskoe cemetery was dedicated. the early 1960s saw the publication of books related to the war in a wide variety of genres: memoirs, elite literature (konstantin simonov began writing the living and the dead in 1959 and vasil’ bykov began publishing in 1961), and even in propagandistic literature intended for youth (e.g.,viacheslav kovalevskii ‘s 1960 brat i sestra about zoia and aleksandr kosmodemianskie). 5 seidmamedova served in the 586th fighter aviation regiment—not the 46th guards night-bomber unit. while my discussion of folkloric imagery does not relate to the 586th unit, seidmamedova’s epigraph and challenges apply to the vast majority of women who flew in combat during world war ii. 6 see reina pennington, wings, women, & war: soviet airwomen in world war ii combat lawrence, ks: university press of kansas, 2010 and anna krylova, soviet women in combat cambridge: cambridge university, 2010 for background on the 1930s militarization movement and the cohort of women pilots who fought in world war ii. 7 as david stone explains in hammer and rifle: the militarization of the soviet union, 1926-1933, the mobilization of soviet citizens as part of the militarization campaign began in july 1926 after commissar for military affairs kliment voroshilov and chief of staff mikhail tukhachevskii began pressing for a stronger, better funded soviet army, one that was prepared for war women veterans and folkloric self-representations 125 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii [stone 2000, 21-22]. propagandistic images and slogans urged soviet men and women to master military technology and arm themselves. civil defense organizations and the komsomol promoted study in marksmanship and aviation. the russian word for the process of “militarization” is “voenizatsiia.” 8 these three units included: the 46th guards night-bomber regiment (originally the 588th), the 586th fighter regiment, in which seidmamedova served , and the 587th (later 125th guards) bomber aviation regiment. 9 see iuliia drunina’s poem “dva vechera” [“two evenings”] in which drunina captures some of the frustration women veterans felt less than a decade after the war when they realized that their wartime contributions had been largely forgotten in the collective memory of world war ii and how repressed the idea of a woman soldier had become in soviet society [drunina, 1989: 141, 142]. 10 for a discussion of wartime cultural documents, propaganda, and rhetoric, see richard stites, ed., culture and entertainment in wartime russia. (bloomington, in: indiana university press, 1995). 11 during the war, male pilots, too, appropriated avian imagery and responded to the propagandists’ strategy of representing nazi germany as a dragon to be slayed [kaberov 1999, 21, 120-121]. 12 unfortunately, chechneva died suddenly in 1984, and this memoir was published posthumously, so that although i found no evidence in chechneva’s file held by rgaspi (the russian state archive of socio-political history), it is possible that a publisher or editor rather than a woman aviator chose this unlikely image. 13 for instance, zoia kosmodem’ianskaia wrote a paper on il’ia muromets. 14 reina pennington, wings, women and war: soviet airwomen in world war ii combat (lawrence, ks: university press of kansas, 2001), 155 and barbara alpern engel, “the womanly face of war,” in women and war in the twentieth century: enlisted with or without consent, ed. nicole ann 126 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii dombrowski (new york and london: garland publishing, inc., 1999), 149. for a thorough discussion of pro-natalist policies, see mie nakachi’s chapter “population, politics and reproduction: late stalinism and its legacy” in late stalinist russia: society between reconstruction and reinvention, ed. juliane furst (london and new york: routledge, 2006), 23-45. 15 veteran galina markova, a pilot, titled her 1971 memoir iunost’ v ogne [youth on fire], an allusion to drunina’s famous “kachaets’ia rozh’ neszhataia” [“the unharvested rye sways”]. see galina markova (1971). she chose the poem as her epigraph for that book and her 1983 rasskazhi bereza…dokumental’nye povesti. ekaterina polunina, another pilot, commences her memoirs devchonki, podruzhki, letchitsy with drunina’s “v semnadtsat’ sovsem uzhe byli my vzroslye ved’ nam podrastat’ na voine dovelos’” [“at 17, we were already grown as you know it happened that we grew up during the war”] [polunina 2004, 3]. 16 the byliny include numerous examples of women assuming male identities to don armor and wage war on the battlefield. 17 ryan argues that the female ved’ma rather than the male koldun whose image was most influenced by western witch hysteria in the modern period. he posits that greater contact with westernized belorussians and ukrainians turned the russian concept of witchcraft in a new direction [ryan 1999, 81]. 18 evgeniia andreevna zhigulenko served as a zveno [smallest aviation unit] commander for the 46th guards regiment. at the age of 54, she entered the state institute of cinematography at the age of 54 and began making the film about the regiment upon her graduation. [alexyevich 188, 155] bibliography alexiyevich, s. 1988. war’s unwomanly face. keith hammond and lyudmila lezhneva, trans. moscow: progress publishers. women veterans and folkloric self-representations 127 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii aronova, r. e. 1969. аронова, р. е. ночные ведьмы [night witches]. москва: советская россия. bailey, james and tatyana ivanova. 1998. an anthology of russian folk epics. armonk, new york: m. e. sharpe. bakhtin, m. m. 1981. “epic and novel,” in the dialogic imagination. austin: the university of texas press. barker, adele marie. 1986. the mother syndrome in the russian folk imagination. columbus, ohio: slavica publishers. benstock, shari. 1997. “authorizing the autobiographical” in feminisms: an anthology of literary theory and criticism. robyn r. warhol and diane price herndl, eds. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, 1138-1154. brauner, sigrid. 1995. fearless wives and frightened shrews: the construction of the witch in early modern germany. amhearst: university of massachusetts press. brewer, marilynn b. and wendi gardner. 1996. “who is this ‘we?’ levels of collective identity and self representations,” journal of personality and social psychology 71 (1): 83-93. cassirer, ernst. 1966. mythical thought. new haven and london: yale university press. chechneva, m. 1968a. чечнева, м. самолеты уходят в ночь [airplanes leave into the night]. москва: военное издательство министерства обороны союза сср. chechneva, m. 1968b. чечнева, м. летали девчата в гвардейском… [girls flew in a guards regiment] чувашское книжное издательство чебоксары. chechneva, m. 1984. чечнева, м. “ласточки” над фронтом [sparrows over the front]. москва: издательство досааф ссср. constantinides, elizabeth. 1983. “the female warrior in greek folk songs,” journal of modern greek studies 1 (1): 6372. conze, susanne and beate fieseler. 2000. soviet women as comrades-in-arms: a blind spot in the history of the war, ed. robert w. thurston and bernd bonwetsch. urbana, illinois: university of illinois press, 209-234. 128 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii drunina, iuliia. 1989. друнина, юлия. избранное в двух томах [selected works in two volumes]. москва: художественная литература. engel, barbara alpern, “the womanly face of war,” in women and war in the twentieth century: enlisted with or without consent, ed. nicole ann dombrowski. new york and london: garland publishing, inc., 1999. gil’ferding, a. f. 1938. гильфердинг, а. ф. онежские былины [onezhskie epic poetry]. vol 2. москва и ленинград: издательство академии наук ссср. hubbs, joanna. 1993. mother russia: the feminine myth in russian culture. bloomington: indiana university. ivanits, linda. 1989. russian folk belief. armonk, ny: m.e. sharpe. ivanova-kazas, o. m. 2006. иванова-казас, о. м. птицы в мифологии, фольклоре и искусстве [birds in mythology, folklore and art]. санкт-петербург: нестор история. jung, carl. 1964. man and his symbols. garden city, ny: doubleday and company. kaberov, igor. 1999. swastika in the gunsight: memoirs of a russian fighter pilot 1941-45. peter rule, trans. gloucestershire, uk: sutton publishing. kirschenbaum, lisa. 2000. “gender, memory, and national myths: ol’ga berggol’ts and the siege of leningrad,” nationalities papers 28 (3): 551-564. kalinin, m. i. 1953. on communist education; selected speeches and writings. moscow: foreign language publishing house. klaniczay, gábor and éva pócs, (eds.). 2008. witchcraft mythologies and persecutions. budapest: central european university press. kononenko, natalie. 1994. "women as performers of oral literature: a re-examination of epic and lament," in women writers in russian literature. toby w. clyman and diana greene, eds. westport, connecticut and london: greenwood press, 17-33. women veterans and folkloric self-representations 129 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii krylova, anna. 2010a. soviet women in combat: a history of violence on the eastern front. cambridge: cambridge university press. krylova, anna. 2010b. “neither erased nor remembered: soviet women combatants and cultural strategies of forgetting in soviet russia.” frank biess and robert g. moeller, eds. histories of the aftermath: the legacies of the second world war in europe. oxford: berghahn books, 83-101. leonov, l. m. (ed.). 1988. леонов, л, м. ред. библиотека русского фольклора: сказки книга 1 [the library of russian folklore: tales book i]. москва: советская россия. likhachev, d. s. 1967. лихачев, д. с. поэтика древнерусской литературы. ленинград: наука. miller, frank j. 1990. folklore for stalin: russian folklore and pseudofolklore of the stalin era. armonk, new york: m. e. sharpe. nakachi, mie. “population, politics and reproduction: late stalinism and its legacy.” juliane furst, ed. late stalinist russia: society between reconstruction and reinvention. london and new york: routledge, 2006, 23-45. noggle, anne. 1994. a dance with death: soviet airwomen in world war ii. college station, texas: texas a&m. olson, laura j. 2004. performing russia: folk revival and russian identity. new york: routledgecurzon. pennington, reina. 1996. “‘do not speak of the serves you rendered’: women veterans of aviation in the soviet union,” journal of slavic military studies 9 (1): 120-151. pennington, reina. 2000. wings, women, & war: soviet airwomen in world war ii combat. lawrence, ks: university press of kansas. preminger, alex and t. v. f. brogan, (eds.). 1993. the new princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics. new york: mjf books. rakobol’skaia, i. and n. kravtsova. 2002. ракобольская, и. и н. кравцова. нас называли ночными ведьмами: как воевал женский 46-й гвардейский полк ночных 130 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii бомбардировщиков [they called us night witches: how the woman’s 46th guards regiment of night bombers fought]. москва: издательство мгу. ryan, w. f. 1999. the bathhouse at midnight: an historical survey of magic and divination in russia. thrupp: sutton publishing. stone, david r. 2000. hammer and rifle: the militarization of the soviet union, 1926-1933. lawrence, ks: university of kansas. seidmamedova, zuleika. 1969. сеидмамедова, зулейка. записки летчицы [a female pilot’s notes]. баку: гянджлик. showalter, elaine. 1992. sexual anarchy: gender and culture at the fin de siècle. london: virago. snopkov, p. a., a. e. snopkov, and a. f. shkliaruk. 2005. plakaty voiny i pobedy. 1941-1945. moskva: kontaktkul’tura. tumarkin, nina. 1994. the living and the dead: the rise and fall of the cult of world war ii in russia. new york: basicbooks. volkov, iakov. 1972. “всегда в строю” [“forever in the ranks”], in след на земле великой [a trace on the great earth]. волков, яков. тула: приобское книжное издательство. warner, elizabeth. 2002. russian myths. austin: university of texas press. zhigulenko, evgeniia andreevna, director. 1981. евгения андреевна жигуленко. в небе ночные ведьмы. москва: киностудия имени м. гор. 131 reviews folklorica 2013, vol. xvii inna golovakha and larysa vakhnina, eds. 35th international ballad conference sief papers and materials (2005, july 6-11, kyiv, ukraine). kyiv: national academy of science of ukraine, rylsky institute for art studies, folklore and ethnology, 2009. 311 pp. introductory notes. notes. isbn 978-966-02-5300-1. in 2005, the international society for ethnology and folklore (sief) met for its 35th international ballad conference. the annual meeting was hosted by the national academy of science of ukraine in conjunction with the rylsky institute for art studies, folklore and ethnology. the present collection is the publication resulting from that conference: 27 papers of various lengths (between 3 and 30 pages) dealing with ballad research in folkloristics. some scholars who participated in this collective project propose a historical approach to songs. for example, in “a country goes to war, singing: denmark in 1848,” hans kuhn examines the production of songs during the first schleswig war; in “the ballad of the heartless mother: the origins of the ballad and its variation in eurasia,” elod kovacs shows different international parallels in this song’s motifs. in “ballads and the bible: inquiry,” william mccarthy discusses the song of moses (exodus 15) and the song of deborah (judges 5) as possible sources for preceding prose narratives. lastly, alexandre moroz and tatyana moroza (“mental characteristics of belarusian folk ballads”) present a historical background of ballad research in relation to nationalistic ideology. other researchers refer to the form of the text itself as a mean for analysis. for example in “crossing genre boundaries (examples from bulgarian ballads),” svetla petkova examines intergenre relationships by analyzing two ballad types: ‘the robber’s wife’ and the ‘man harnesses wife for ploughing’. “the orpheus myth and the slovenian folk ballad ‘godec pred peklom’” [‘the musician at hell’s gate’] by marjetka goležkaučič discusses the continuation and transformation of the myth of orpheus and eurydice through the analysis of thirty-one different slovenian ballads. in “some mythological elements in 132 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii turkish folk songs,” f. gülay mirzaoğlu-sivaci proposes an analysis of the symbolism of the song’s myths; while in “roland’s journey to faroe: the chanson de roland as a faroese ballad,” frances j. fisher looks at the diffusion and transformation of the chanson de roland from france to denmark. olysia britsyna, inna golovakha and lyudmyla yefremova’s article “the dead fiancé returns: a traditional plot in the ukrainian oral prose and ballad traditions” deals with the motif of the return of the deceased. according to the authors, this plot is popular in ukrainian ballads, but is also prominent in prose, beliefs and superstition. researcher oksana mykytenko analyzes the motif of the sister-the-poisoner as representative of serbian foreigners in ukrainian culture in “the ethnic stranger in ukrainian ballads of the sister-the poisoner motif.” some scholars equally integrate the historical approach and textual study in their research. in “la ballade portugaise et ses prolongements au brésil,” anna caufriez explores the modifications of form of contemporary portuguese ballads and their transmission through the littérature de cordd; while in “ukrainian ballads about the loss of virginity and out-ofwedlock pregnancy,” natalie kononenko presents ukrainian ballads about pre-marital lovemaking in regards to historical data of the same period, to understand how the songs functioned in ukrainian traditional society. in “peasant and noble, peasant and urban: the interweaving of popular and elite cultures in the plot of the mediterranean ballad about the noble shepherdess,” simona delič examines female social status in mediterranean ballad plots. broné stundžiené (“folk songs as ritual innovation of the funeral ceremony”) analyzes the transformation of lithuanian song-romance as a new form of contemporary laments, and on a similar topic, sabina ispas researches the possible connection between heroic ballads and funerary songs in romania in “trois soeurs parties pour cueillir des fleurs et le prêtre de piatra.” several articles of this collective treat the role of the researcher, transcriber or translator in relation to folklore studies. in “what did the people all say? ballad editing and the problem 133 reviews folklorica 2013, vol. xvii of punctuation,” david atkinson examines the complex role of editing when transcribing oral texts. maria vengrenivska discusses the intricacy of ukrainian and french ballads when it comes to translating the texts in “particularités de la traductions des ballades françaises et ukrainiennes.” lastly, larry syndergaard examines certain cultural agendas such as spiritual, nationalism, homophobia and sexual property that are produced when rewriting songs in “from song, to print, to translation and pictures: rewritings of three scandinavian traditional ballads.” this publication presents a large variety of topics. however, it is difficult to connect the papers since they are not grouped under common themes or chapters; such an organization would certainly have been beneficial for research purposes. scholars published their articles in english, french or german, which could make reading difficult for some as no translation is provided. finally, some articles are in need of editing and show numerous typographic errors. nevertheless, this book presents rich material for any researcher studying songs and ballads. it demonstrates a strong tendency in eastern european scholarship in researching ballads form, motifs and plots. from these texts, one can assume western scholarship is more interested in the social purpose of the songs and the role of the researcher. in both eastern and western scholarship, the historical approach seems to be less present or at least to be simply a means of research to support another theory. this collection of conference papers represents an attempt to reconnect different schools of ballad criticism – a long awaited discussion. genia boivin university of alberta edmonton, alberta, canada microsoft word folklorica_2011g.doc 139 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi “zhivaia starina” in the year 2010 dmitry nikolaev centre for typological and semiotic folklore studies russian state university for the humanities moscow, russia in the year 2010 “zhivaya starina” continued to focus on slavic folklore and also made occasional forays into folklore traditions of different areas of the world. it also published articles dealing with theoretical problems. all of the articles were in russian. volume 1 (65) 2010 opens with a large section on what can be called “naive” folkloristics, that is folklore collecting by amateurs. the first article in this section is by o. r. nikolaev and is entitled “naive folkloristics: types, forms, functions.” it provides a definition of the phenomenon and distinguishes several types of naive folkloristic discourse. according to o. r. nikolaev, naive folkloristics is characterized by the array of texts produced by the bearers of a traditional worldview who try to preserve and systematize the lore of their community. the stimulus for such an activity may come from outside. one example is the questionnaires distributed by some official scientific body. such a situation is typified by instances of nonprofessional field work. when outside stimulus is lacking we are dealing with more authentic forms of popular folkloristic discourse. the most important instances of the latter kind are text collections, such as those which include songs, aphorisms, recipes, charms, and so forth, and autobiographies, which often contain minute descriptions of various rituals and may include other traditional lore. the remaining articles of this section present several examples of naive folkloristic work. folklore materials published in olonets province newspapers from the 19th to the beginning of the 20th centuries are reviewed by s. v. fedorova. a collection of chastushkas (a rough equivalent of limericks) assembled by i. i. timin in the 1920s-30s is presented by k. e. korepova. a review of the work of the naive ethnographer and folklorist t. v. azhgibkov by a. n. vlasov and m. v. akhmetova is followed by some excerpts from his archive. the section ends with a naive dictionary of the local dialect compiled by a. a. d’iachenko who lived in kargopol oblast. it was prepared for publication by a. b. moroz. there is also a small collection of scary stories recorded in different summer camps by a schoolgirl named v. rostova. it was prepared for publication by t. g. vaulina and 140 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi n. m. iakubova. the second section of volume 1 bears the title “the cemetery in traditional culture”. it contains articles on modern burial practices. these include “modern cemeteries in the ulianovsk oblast” by a. m. carvalheiro and m. g. matlin and an article on behavior codes connected with cemeteries contributed by v. e. dobrovol’skaia. there is an article on inscriptions on modern tomb-stones by d. v. gromov, as well as an archaeological description of the burial of archbishop nikifor, the prior of danilov monastery in moscow who died in 1800. the latter was written by l. a. beliaev. the section concludes with an overview of the history and modern manifestations of the cult of the sepulchre of victor noir in the père-lachaise cemetry in paris by m. a. griva. the last thematic section of the volume is devoted to old believers, their traditions and the process of their adaptation to modern realities. the articles in this section include a contribution on old believers of samodurovka in saratov oblast by n. v. sveshnikova and t. n. medvedeva. there are articles on russian old believers in alaska by r. morris and t. b. morris and on the old believers of the belgorod oblast by l. v. khir’ianova. o. b. khristoforova contributes an article on perm oblast and udmurtia old believers and their views of illnesses. volume 2 (66) begins with an overview of the activities of the state republican center for russian folklore (http://www.centrfolk.ru), the organization which publishes “zhivaia starina” the year 2010 marked its 20th anniversary. this overview is followed by responses to the questionnaire distributed by “zhivaia starina” to the participants of the second all-russian folklore congress held outside moscow in 2010. the questions asked included: “what did you gain by participating in the congress?” and “which discussions seemed the most interesting and memorable to you?” this section is followed by recommendations formulated during one of the plenary meetings of the congress. the thematic sections in volume 2 are “the great patriotic war in folklore” and “numbers in folklore”. the first section includes a sample of world war ii period chastushkas from tver oblast written by e. m. beletskaia. there is an overview of narratives covering the pre-war period when, according to a popular belief, various signs presaging a war appeared. there is a survey of popular beliefs concerning prohibitions and injunctions that were supposed to help a man return from the war alive written by v. e. dobrovolskaia. three folk songs of the war period are published by v. v. zaporozhets. there is a sample of war-time narratives from the kaluga oblast containing popular folkloric motifs 141 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi presented by l. f. mironikhina. an excerpt from the autobiography of n. d. dorzhiev covering his participation in the war is published by n. n. vokhman and s. iu. nekliudov. an example of naive poetry, a ballad in praise of the armoured train “il’ia muromets” composed in 1965 by the railroad worker g. shugaev is published by m. v. akhmetova. the second section features analytical contributions: “numbers in the popular magic of southern slavs” by l. radenković, “‘odin’ [‘one’] and ‘pervyj’ [‘first’] in the traditional culture of vladimir oblast” by v. e. dobrovolskaia, and “three sixes, or ‘solomon the wise’s number’” by o. v. belova. the volume also includes an overview of the journal “art” published in the komi republic and covering local folklore and ethnography. several articles from “art’s” archive are reproduced. these include: “legends about stephen of perm in komi folklore” by p. f. limerov, “the rektas’yöm ritual in the komi magic” by a. v. paniukov, and “the sorcerer-eretnik in the magic connected with maundy thursday among the komi” by l. s. lobanova. volume 3 (67) contains a sample of contributions to the second all-russian folkloristic congress presented in the form of articles. these are “on the reconstruction of russian [musical instrument] trenzel’” by o. v. gordienko, a paper on the interaction of russian and ukrainian song traditions in siberia by n. n. vokhman. “youth subcultures and their mythologization in contemporary society” is d. v. gromov’s contribution. an analysis of humorous adjacency pairs in russian popular discourse is written by o. iu. boitsova. the next section of the volume is devoted to kazakh folklore. it contains the following articles: “kazakh legends recorded in russian” by a. d. tsvetkova. “the tradition of blessings among the kazakhs” is written g. a. meirmanova. “lullabies of the chats of the ob’ region” is by n. s. kapitsyna. a paper on the problem of classification of traditional musical instruments of the turkic peoples of siberia is by n. m. kondrat’eva and “contemporary folklore of northern bashkirs” is by g. r. khushianova. the subsequent section bears the title “the house in traditional culture”. it includes “the chimney in the beliefs and rituals of polesie” by m. a. andriunina. “adobe buildings in verkhnekhavskii region of voronezh oblast” is by t. f. pukhova. an article on the so called “aleshka’s house”—an old peasant house in arkhangelsk oblast adorned with rich naive murals is by iu. g. terekhova. a description of the celebration of the 30th anniversary of a house in mohyliv-podilskyi 142 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi by m. v. akhmetova concludes the section. the last thematic section in the volume deals with the folklore tradition of kostroma oblast. it includes an article on the role of beer in various calendar festivities in vetluga region by t. v. kiriushina and a series of ethnolinguistic notes on the dialect of pavinsii region. among these are a piece on demonological vocabulary n. a. sinitsa, and an article on the terms dvoezuby (two-teethed), dvoeglazyi (two eyed) and similiar terms by e. v. shabalina. also included is an article on the terms merzloglaz (cold-eyed) and merzloguz (cold-bottomed) as these two terms are related to frost. this piece is by o. v. atroshenko. an article on lexemes and phraseological units connected with various family rites is by o. m. gareeva and l. a. feoktistova. volume 4 (68) begins with a section on legends and etiological tales in various traditions. a. a. panchenko traces the history of the at 2401 tale type (children play at hog-killing, type 1343 in atu). o. v. belova and a. b. moroz analyse legends connected with the st nicholas cathedral in chernivtsi. iu. v. klochkova describes the mythology surrounding the so called kharitonov house in ekaterinburg. some new and archival field recordings are published. these include contemporary tales about the relics of seraphim of sarov written by iu. m. shevarenkova. there are excerpts from the 19th-century manuscript collection “fairy tales, legends and so forth of orlov county, viatka province recorded by n. dobrotvorskii”. these are published by v. a. pozdeev. a sample of etiological tales recorded at the end of the 20th the beginning of the 21st century in moscow and krasnodar region is presented by v. v. zaporozhets. the next section is devoted to the popular culture of belarus. it includes the following articles: “belorussian ethnolinguistic atlas: history, archive, results, and perspectives” by n. p. antropov. “even or odd?” by s. m. tolstaia. a paper on magical formulas used to steal milk is by l. n. vinogradova. “folk prose in the contemporary belorussian countryside” is by e. m. boganeva. “holy springs in belarus dvina region” is contributed v. a. lobach. “on men’s and women’s horns” is by t. v. volodina. g. i lopatin contributes “legends of the cat’s and dog’s share”. the last thematic section in this issue bears the title “beliefs and customs”. it includes contributions on offerings to the dead among the romanians by a. olteanu. there is an article on the veneration of icons placed on the krivankovo well in tiumen oblast by e. e. ermakova. mardi gras festivities in belgorod oblast are describe by n. v. 143 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi solodovnikova. the volume also includes an overview of the journal “antropologicheskii forum” (“anthropological forum”) published by peter the great museum of anthropology and ethnography (the kunstkamera) and an article from its archive: “laundry rinsing: symbolical order of daily practice” by s. b. adon’eva. articles from “zhivaia starina” can be purchased in pdf format at: http://elibrary.ru/issues.asp?id=8670&selid=535233 << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true 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can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader 5.0 and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice microsoft word folks05.doc 18 the cult of lenin and �soviet folklore� alexander a. panchenko, institute of russian literature, ran, st petersburg in discussing the folktale, we should remember the words of v. i. lenin: �every folktale includes some elements of reality�� even a very brief survey of the folktale convinces us that this statement is true. vladimir propp as a rule, when historians of culture, students of literature, and folklorists discuss the problem of falsification and mystification, they do so either from an exclusively �technical� point of view (i.e. in the light of historical and textual authenticity, or lack of authenticity, of a specific literary work) or in a broader historical and social context (looking at the personal motives of the falsifier and the social functions of the falsification, its role in the history of literature and ideology and so on). however, the problem has another aspect, since the question of the authenticity of a text studied by this or that discipline is related not only to the text itself but to the specifics of the discipline as well. in the following essay i shall try to use all three approaches in discussing what is termed �soviet folklore� and its relationship to the cult of lenin. both subjects require some preliminary comment, but, first of all, it is necessary to say a couple of words about the social and ideological functions of folklore study as discipline and cultural praxis. from a phenomenological point of view, right from the birth of the term �folklore� (and, particularly, in empires and totalitarian states) there have existed �two folklores.� the first, which i shall term �folklore 1� (f1) is oral popular culture that is not controlled or sanctioned by the cultural elite. �folklore 2� (f2), on the other hand, consists of texts approved by society, officially and/or conventionally designated as folklore, and recorded in or on special data media, such as wax cylinders, cds, academic and popular publications of folksongs and folktales, scholarly essays and books etc. the irony is, however, that the postulated �folkloric nature� of f1 stems from the latter�s freedom from control exerted on it by an individual or social group, while the actual nature of f2 is related to the controls imposed on it by professional communities of scholars, writers and musicians, as well as politicians and cultural workers (and this is the reason why many folklorists in russia argue bitterly over whether a text or a group of texts can be considered �folklore�).(1) at first glance, it would appear that f2 is directly related to f1, since f2 takes shape and is amplified by fragments of f1 that have been expropriated or �collected.� however, the situation is in fact more complicated. on the one hand, f2 also influences f1: s. a. shtyrkov has suggested calling this process �secondary folklorization� [shtyrkov 1999: 27]. on the other, f2 is expanded not merely by the addition of f1 fragments but folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 19 also with falsified texts, deemed �authentic.� such texts are especially interesting to the researcher, because they reflect in the purest form those social and ideological tendencies and expectations which ensure the existence of f2 as a functional cultural phenomenon. from this point of view, it is particularly interesting to discuss the efforts to construct what was called �soviet folklore� (late 1920s to the 1950s). what was created then was symptomatic not just of the imperial culture of the stalin period, but also of mainstream russian folklore study as a whole from its emergence to the end of the twentieth century. in fact, these falsified texts, which are, one might say, those least �spoiled� by the influence of peasant culture, permit us to see what generic, thematic, and ideological modes, tendencies, and priorities were ascribed to f2 by its publishers, researchers and consumers. obviously, the officially declared ideological need for a soviet folklore and the high social status of folklore study in the stalin era were both grounded in cultural models and values formed in the russian empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. on the other hand, political suppression and near total isolation from international scholarship forced post-stalin and even post-soviet russian folklorists into using and combining, for the most part, both �soviet� and �pre-soviet� conceptions of what �a folklore text� should look like, and what its social significance and aesthetic value were. paradoxically enough, one could say that this soviet fakelore is a distillation of �authentic russian folklore� (in the f2 sense). beyond paradox, however, we should bear in mind the immediate cultural context of �soviet folklore,� that is the formation of a �soviet mythology,� �soviet rituals,� �soviet cults� and other elements of �soviet metanarrative� in the 1920s and 1930s. although this problem has been widely discussed in recent decades, its anthropological aspects have been less studied. in my view, the cult of lenin, which was one of the first specific manifestations of �soviet mythology,� proffers a key to the understanding of cultural processes in soviet russia in the first decades after the revolution. at the same time, the appearance of fakelore about lenin was the first stage in the emergence of �soviet folklore.� * * * �soviet folklore� became a matter of public interest in the mid-1920s and faded away soon after stalin�s death. the end results of this �creative work by the liberated narod (folk)� were discussed in the collective volume, ocherki russkogo narodnopoeticheskogo tvorchestva sovetskoi epokhi (studies in the russian folk poetry of the soviet epoch), published by the academy institute of russian literature (pushkin house) in 1952 [astakhova et al. 1952]. it stimulated a lively but none too sensible discussion of what should be considered contemporary folk creative work, what features were characteristic of the �artistic culture of the soviet people� and so on.(2) the arguments continued in the 1960s, but by the end of the decade both discussions about �soviet folklore� and publications or republications of examples of it had stopped. however, a number of texts of this nature were republished in readers up to the 1980s [miller 1990: 105�06]. in recent years �soviet folklore� has once more begun attracting the attention of researchers, although the number of publications on the topic remains comparatively small. in 1990 frank miller published a monograph on the pseudo-folklore of the stalin era [miller 1990]. although miller�s work provides a full and unbiased picture of �folklore for stalin,� it mainly deals with the historical facet of the problem, and does not folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 20 consider its anthropological aspects. four years later, the russian state folklore center issued fol'klor rossii v dokumentakh sovetskogo perioda (russian folklore in documents of the soviet era), a useful collection, if haphazardly compiled and with inadequate commentary [efanova et al. 1994]. the contents include verbatim reports of meetings in the n. k. krupskaia union house of folk creation, in the course of which scholars, writers and publicists discussed the �organizational integration� of literature and folklore, �methods of mass work with narrators,� �directions in the development of soviet folklore,� and so on. most recently, in 2002, the russian folklorist t. g. ivanova assembled a representative selection of �soviet folklore,� adding detailed commentaries and a large introductory article [ivanova 2002: 403�968]. the article by ivanova warrants detailed discussion. although the author provides a number of interesting observations about some particular issues (e.g. the immediate cultural context of the �pokoinishnyi voi po leninu� (funeral lament for lenin), recorded in irkutsk in 1924, her theoretical position is somewhat contradictory and her interpretation of certain texts very controversial. on the one hand, ivanova is all too aware that for the most part �soviet folklore� of the 1930s saw light of day thanks to the efforts of professional or amateur folklorists, who by various means forced �folk singers and narrators� to create or �make their own� �soviet tales� (skazy), �soviet laments,� �new epics� (noviny), and so on. at the same time, ivanova argues that �epic folk narratives developed in pro-soviet social groups did exist� [ivanova 2002: 404], and claims that �russian folktales about lenin and the civil war� are �authentic specimens of russian folklore,� although even the clearly pro-soviet folklorist m. k. azadovskii stated in his essay �lenin v fol�klore� (lenin in folklore), written in 1934, that �these texts were nothing but forgery, making dishonest use of lenin�s name� [azadovskii 1934: 884]. i shall return to these texts below, but at this point it is essential to remark that even primary textual criticism leads to the conclusion that they were falsified. nor are the additional arguments produced by ivanova any more convincing. she insists that �attempts to adapt the folktale form to accommodate a new, openly political content took place long before the soviet folklore directives of the 1930s� [ivanova 2002: 427]. of course, in both medieval and modern historical periods russian peasant culture often reacted to political events and processes, and, obviously, the existence of �pro-soviet folklore� in the 1920s and 30s cannot be denied. however, the form and subject matter of the folktale are particularly unsuitable for conveying political ideas and constructing social meaning; this role was played by other types of oral and written folklore well known to students of popular culture of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.(3) i have discussed the article by ivanova in such detail because she touches upon the problem of the mutual relations between the communist fakelore of the late 1920s and the cult of lenin. one must emphasize that the victorious expansion of �soviet folklore� began with the publication of falsified folktales about lenin. therefore a few words about contemporary studies of russian �mythological leniniana� are a necessary preliminary to the analysis of particular texts. the best known and probably the most serious treatment of this topic is to be found in nina tumarkin�s monograph of 1983 [tumarkin 1983). undoubtedly, the american scholar produces a thorough and competent analysis of both the genetic components of the soviet cult of lenin and the main stages in its historical evolution. however, i am not convinced that the basic idea of comprehensively reconstructing the lenin cult as a total cultural phenomenon is in essence a promising one. the 21 problem is related not only to the fact that the range of data to be considered and analyzed in such a reconstruction is simply immense, but also that the cultural forms themselves, ranging from rhetoric to rituals and representing the distinctive character of the veneration of lenin in the soviet union are not as homogeneous, simple and transparent as, for example, in the stalin cult. in particular, it is not easy to work out the extent to which traditional religious motifs, quasi-scientific expectations of the resurrection of the dead, and literary rhetoric influenced the topos of lenin�s �life eternal� and the mummification of his body [panchenko 1996: 166�202, adonieva 2001: 135�37]. in other words, the cult of lenin should be considered not only as a set of banal religious and mythological archetype, as has been done by another scholar of �mythological leniniana,� mikhail vaiskopf [vaiskopf 2001: 336�66], but also as an area of confrontation and interaction between different discourses and rhetorical systems. strangely enough, the notion of the universal mythological character of the soviet cult of lenin (which stems in fact directly from bolshevik rhetoric of the 1920s) was so attractive even to non-soviet scholars that they have willingly supported the idea of the �folk veneration of the leader,� that, allegedly, was reflected in peasant tales about lenin. both tumarkin and vaiskopf are convinced that falsified �folktales about lenin� are authentic folklore texts, representing the bolshevik leader in habitual mythological forms. the �mythological� and �folkloric� features of these texts will be discussed below, but first, another question needs airing: what did the peasants themselves actually say about lenin? it is natural to assume that lenin could not fail to figure in the rural and urban folklore of the first soviet decades. it is easy to find examples of authentic (both anti-soviet and pro-soviet) folklore texts in old and new publications. i am not sure in which social group the rhyme about �il�ich�s red arse� (krasnaia zhopa il�icha) circulated [azbelev 1998: 279]; i suspect this is an instance of �intelligentsia folklore.� however, chastushki about lenin and trotskii published in the same collection undoubtedly came from popular oral culture, both urban and rural.(4) it is clear also that peasant folk culture gave birth to �the legends about the false lenin� which, according to azadovskii, �often bore an openly anti-semitic character� [azadovskii 1935: 114]. the motif of the �tsar pretender� was very popular in russian �political folklore,� especially in relation to peter the great [chistov 1967: 91�112]. it seems that the revival of this motif in legends about lenin could be, in addition, related to the hero�s long sojourn abroad. in the stories about the false peter, it was foreigners (either germans from the nemetskaia sloboda in moscow or swedes in stockholm) who took on the role of pretender. azadovskii�s remark leads one to assume that in the legends about lenin this role was given to the jews. perhaps, trotskii featured there as lenin�s antagonist. �the author of this essay,� writes azadovskii, �heard this legend in the summer of 1918. he was in siberia, traveling by steamer from barnaul to biisk. an elderly peasant recounted the life of lenin, ending with his murder. the person who then arrived in moscow and presented himself as lenin was not really him. circumstances did not allow me make a recording this tale. however, i heard from other field researchers that it circulated among the peasants� [azadovskii 1935: 114�15]. an interesting example of authentic �pro-soviet� folklore about lenin is presented by the �voronezh tale about lenin,� recorded by n. p. grinkova [grinkova 1936: 319�25]. in fact, from a formal point of view, folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 22 this is not a tale but a rhyming verse text, very similar to russian historical folksongs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. moreover, the beginning (zachin) of the �voronezh tale� seems to be directly related textologically to the soldiers� song about the crimean war recorded by v. n. dobrovol�skii in orel province [domanovskii et al. 1973: 210]. the �voronezh tale� was recorded by grinkova in mastiugino village (uryvskii region in voronezh oblast�) from an elderly tailor d. i. trukhachev whose �tales� (skazki, the term used by the performer himself) about �topical events� in the life of the village and contemporary history were always popular with his fellow villagers. it is hard to decide whether trukhachev composed his �tale about lenin� himself, or learnt it from somebody else. however, there is no doubt that the text is related to the events of the civil war and composed according to the model of traditional soldiers� folksongs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. the whites are here confused with both the �germans� and caucasian fighters, and the image of lenin is far from possessing historical exactitude and ideological accuracy. for illustrative purposes, i quote the final part of the �tale� [grinkova 1936: 322]: krasnyi vidia belykh gusta, on i kroshit kak kapustu vostrym mechom. grom griamit', ziamlia triasetsia, vot i lenin nash niasetsia, s antilerii palit' u vysokii temnai les. on i zhostka pad'ezzhal i gromka krichal: �polna, polna vam, iarmantsy, kavkazskie abarvantsy s krasnym vaiavat'. my vam mesta atvedem za uralam, za riakoi� the red sees a lot of whites, he chops them like cabbage with his sharp sword. thunder resounds, the earth shakes, here comes our lenin running, he fires from the artillery by a lofty dark forest. he drove up hard, shouted loudly: �better stop you �ermans, caucasian ragamuffins waging war agin the reds. we shall find you a place to go beyond the ural river. last but not least, i cannot avoid mentioning the so-called �pokoinishnyi voi po leninu� (funeral lament for lenin) recorded by a student, n. khandzinskii, in november 1924 in irkutsk [khandzinskii 1925: 53�64]. it is obvious that this text was at the very least a point of departure for numerous subsequent �laments� for lenin, kirov, gor�kii, krupskaia, and others, recorded by soviet folklorists in the russian north in the late 1930s [ivanova 2002: 438�510]. the history of this �first soviet lament� is a curious one. khandzinskii recorded his �funeral lament� from a sixteen-year-old peasant girl, katia peretolchina, who was a maid in irkutsk. however, the lament had been composed earlier: in katia�s native village kimil�tei in january 1924 at winter gatherings (pasidenki) in the village. according to the informant, the lament was created at the suggestion of local 23 komsomol members who had learned about the death of lenin and told their fellow villagers who the dead �leader of the proletariat� was. katia told khandzinskii: we created it at the pasidenki; there are pasidenki after the harvest, between pokrov and new years day� komsomol members attend the pasidenki. they said to us: �look, girls, lenin is dead�� and everyone began saying: �lenin, lenin!� �let�s compose a lament.,� they said. �we walked around and wailed over him, and someone (evidently, a local komsomol leader, � a. p.) recorded the words. then the komsomol members met and we went to zima by cart. there they made a kind of funeral, a small coffin was put together, and we wailed over him and put on black clothes [khandzinskii 1925: 57]. �this �lament�, writes khandzinskii, was created by young people, and its audience consisted of the regular participants of pasidenki. when i asked katia whether there were any older people there, she replied: �well, if there were, they wouldn�t have let us go. when they found out about it, they said: �what devilish stuff are you dreaming up there!� [khandzinskii 1925: 57]. it is easy to guess (and in this case ivanova�s hypothesis is well-founded [ivanova 2002: 416�17]) that the direct prototype of wailing over lenin in the siberian villages of kimil�tei and zima was the yuletide �dead-man game� (igra v pokoinika) which profanes the orthodox burial service. this detail seems especially interesting, when we take into account the historical and cultural features of the peasant komsomol movement in the 1920s. albeit few in number, peasant komsomol�tsy appeared to be the only rural social group consistently oriented towards the communist authorities after the end of the civil war. isabel tirado�s social analysis of the komsomol movement in the 1920s reveals that this rural youth movement consisted mainly of marginalized men and operated as a sort of mediator between the peasants and the new authorities. one of the main functions of the rural komsomol was to interpret and popularize communist discourse [tirado 2001]. roughly speaking, the russian peasant komsomol can be compared to popular religious movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially those oriented towards various interpretations of holy writ. certainly, the object of �komsomol hermeneutics� was not the pentateuch or the new testament, but the writings of lenin and trotskii, soviet decrees, articles in communist newspapers and so on. however, their strategies for everyday behavior (in particular, the open rejection of orthodox rituals and traditional religious festivals) were very similar to the �cultural demonstrations� by russian sectarians like the dukhobortsy, molokane and subbotniki. even the description of komsomol members given by katia peretolchina in her interview with khandzinskii resembles the characterizations of local sectarians by nineteenth-century russian peasants. they live in friendship, they live joyfully. they walk around the village calmly; they don�t drink samogon (moonshine). others are not so decent. when you come along, they shove you and you fall down. they get dead drunk, and the komsomols heap shame upon them (khandzinskii 1925: 58). thus, peasant komsomol members behaved like members of a religious sect opposed to church rituals and, more broadly, to large areas of traditional rural culture such as festive drunkenness, and were viewed by their fellow villagers in this light. however, the very existence of a sacred communist discourse did not solve the problem of how to look for and choose forms of everyday behavior that would support komsomol identity folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 24 and demonstrate that identity to the other peasants. obviously, these forms had to be borrowed from the traditional ritual and etiquette scenarios characteristic of rural culture. it would appear that, besides open sacrilege (iconoclasm above all), various facets of peasant youth subculture were used in the construction of this new �komsomol behavior.� in this context, it is possible to explain the siberian �funeral lament for lenin� which thus combined the yuletide �dead-man game� with elements of a nascent soviet cult. we are therefore able to discuss the image of lenin in rural folklore, but this �folk leniniana� appears rather banal. it is not based on ancient mythological archetypes whatever they might be, but proceeds from ordinary narrative and artistic forms characteristic of russian peasant culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. the situation is slightly different, however with the falsified �tales about lenin.� * * * the texts that are discussed below appear to be the earliest examples of �soviet folklore.� they were all published (and probably fabricated) between 1924 and 1930. we can say that they represent the first �lenin� period in the history of soviet folklore. in this period the themes for �creative work by the liberated folk� were restricted to the figure of lenin and the history of the red victory over the whites. the dominant genre form was prose narrative, and the texts were called �folktales� or �legends.� it is significant that, even then, what was being published included not only falsifications of russian folklore but some texts allegedly borrowed from other cultural traditions. for example, the collection, lenin in russian folktale and oriental legend, compiled by the historian n. piaskovskii [piaskovskii 1930], includes a part entitled �oriental legends about lenin,� in which readers will discover three �uzbek� texts, as well as a �chinese,� a �kirghiz,� an �african� and a �chukchi� text. evidently, in talking about �soviet folklore,� we must take into account not only the texts labeled russian folklore, but also numerous songs, folktales and so on ascribed to other peoples of the ussr and the world, since they were being fabricated and published within that same discourse. however, i shall limit my discussion of soviet folklore to an analysis of four �folktales,� published by piaskovskii in the section entitled �russian folktales about il�ich.�(5) two of them had been published earlier, and two others appeared for the first time. the first, entitled �muzhitskii skaz o lenine� (a rustic tale about lenin), had been published by the writer lidiia seifullina in the first issue of krasnaia nov� for 1924 in the obituary section dedicated to the death of lenin [seifullina 1924: 162�69].(6) seifullina claimed to have heard this tale in the winter of 1918 in a hamlet in orenburg province. the second text was also fabricated by a writer of the �rural� school, rodion akul�shin, a member of the �pereval� literary group.(7) akul�shin published his folktale �khitryi lenin� (sly lenin) in 1925 in novyi mir along with two other allegedly authentic folktales about the civil war [akul�shin 1925: 120�28]. finally, �a siberian folktale,� �lenin na kamennom stolbe� (lenin on the stone pillar) and �a folktale from ivanovo-voznesensk province,� �lenin ne umer � on zhiv� (lenin did not die; he is alive) were first published by piaskovskii, who alleged that both had been recorded in 1925 and 1926 in novonikolaevsk and ivanovo-voznesensk provinces [piaskovskii 1930: 33�35, 37�39]. it is not possible here to offer a detailed textual analysis of these �folktales.� it is probable that both �muzhitskii skaz� by seifullina and �khitryi lenin� by akul�shin contain specific folklore motifs (see below), although in general both texts are obviously forgeries. the other two �folktales,� were, in my opinion, 25 completely falsified by those who wanted to present them as authentic folklore specimens. the best example here is the tale, �lenin ne umer � on zhiv,� published by piaskovskii. it opens with a prose narrative full of varied features of �quasi-folk� style: attributes in post-positive position, verbal endings in �-ti,� and so on. then, however, the text gradually becomes rhythmic in an obvious attempt to imitate folk poetry. the final part of the �folktale� is written in a well-known �quasi-folk� meter often used in nineteenth-century russian poetry. this is the so-called �kol�tsov pentasyllabic� (also known as �double amphibrach�), although with certain metric deviations: (8) luchevaia volna promakhnulasia. golovy ego ne zatronula. tol'ko s nozhenek prignela k zemle da i dykhanie prizamedlila. lenin zhiv lezhit na moskve-reke, pod kremlevskoi stenoi belokamennoi. i kogda na zavode vintik sportitsia ali, skazhem, u nas zemlia sushitsia, podnimaet on svoiu golovu i idet na zavod, vintik klepaet, a k poliam sukhim gonit oblako. the ray wave missed it did not harm his head it bent him down to the ground and slowed his breath. lenin lies alive near the moscow river under the kremlin white-stone wall. and when an engine part at a factory breaks or, let�s say, a drought sets in, lenin lifts up his head goes to the factory, repairs the engine and drives clouds to the thirsty fields. nevertheless, my objective is not so much the disclosure of these forgeries as an analysis of the meanings ascribed by their authors to the virtual �popular cult of lenin.� the official ideological basis for these texts was, it is clear, an article by e. khlebtsevich entitled �the collection of folk poetry about lenin, created by workers, peasants, and red army men,� and published in kommunisticheskoe prosveschenie (communist enlightenment), the official journal of the central committee for political enlightenment. this article contains an appeal for the recording of �stories, legends, rumors, folktales, songs, and chastushki� about the deceased soviet leader as well as detailed methodological instructions for folklore research of this kind. it includes the statement: �if every epoch is reflected in works by certain writers and in oral folk poetry, the october revolution, which, for the masses, was personified by lenin, must be reflected in folklore all the more vividly it is necessary to begin collecting folk poetry about lenin immediately, and especially now, when the death of the leader has been taken so hard by the masses of workers and peasants� [khlebtsevich 1924: 117]. the response of �collectors� to this appeal was both active and appropriate. thus, in his publication of �folktales about lenin and the civil war,� akul�shin remarks: �the folk always have their favorite heroes, whose life and deeds amaze them. there used to be folktales about peter the great, sten�ka razin and pugachev; and the folktales were inspired largely by fear and amazement at the tsar�s cruelty or the brigands� courage. in our time, folk poetry (of which we have numerous examples) has chosen that most beloved of persons, lenin, with his mind �lucid like the sun,� and made him the hero of tales� [akul�shin 1925: 124]. this idea was repeated by folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 26 piaskovskii: �as we know, historical folksongs, folktales and legends praised either �dark� personages, such as ivan the terrible, tamerlane or alexander the great, or bright, pure characters such as sten�ka razin and pugachev. undoubtedly, lenin was a person of the second kind: he was bright and serene; he has rapidly come to be venerated by millions of oppressed and indigent people� it is not for nothing that the oriental legends and songs all deify lenin, and even a siberian folktale stresses his �especial grace�� [piaskovskii 1930: 13]. what particularly did �the masses of workers and peasants� have to say about the life and death of their �most beloved person�? the analysis of the four texts under consideration allows for some general conclusions. first of all, each of the texts represents a specific social, political or economic idea or program. thus, �a rustic tale� by seifullina more or less consistently expounds one of the first decrees of the soviet government, lenin�s �report on the land� (or, more precisely, its third part entitled �the peasant mandate on the land�) which had been delivered at the second all-russia congress of soviets of workers' and soldiers' deputies on the twenty sixth of october (8 november) 1917 [lenin 1962: 23]. it is clear why this document, which incidentally was drawn up not by the bolsheviks but by the socialist revolutionaries, would be chosen by seifullina as a basis for the �rustic tale.� from the moment it saw light of day, �the peasant mandate on the land� was without doubt put forward as an expression of the vox populi, or, as lenin put it, �as expressing the absolute will of the vast majority of class-conscious peasants in all of russia� [lenin 1962: 26]. it was, therefore, natural for seifullina to use the �peasant mandate� as an ideological basis for the �rustic tale.� it may even be assumed that the writer had genuinely heard peasant rumors about the soviet decree on the land in the winter of 1918. it may perhaps also be significant that seifullina herself was a member of the socialist revolutionary party from 1917�19. it is interesting, however, that in order to make her text �folkloric,� seifullina chose not a heroic or a magic (volshebnyi) plot but a novelistic one. in fact, the story about the division of the kingdom between �the tsar mikolashka� and lenin is a specific variant of at tale type 1030, �the crop division�(sus 1030 �vershki i koreshki� (the tops and the roots [of the crops])), where a peasant tricks a bear by palming him off with the �useless� part of the harvest. thus, in seifullina�s tale lenin acquires the features of a cheat or a trickster: he defeats the �exploiting classes� not in an open fight or even by means of a �secret word� known to him alone, but through a trick. of course, it is impossible to compare this image with that of the trickster in archaic myths. however, this �picaresque� constituent of the image of lenin seems important, since both fiction and memoirs about lenin often use the topos of his �slyness� as the main indicator of his �folk character.�(9) thus, from seifullina�s point of view, rural folklore, in emphasizing lenin�s �peasant slyness,� would certainly be considering him �one of its own.(10) the same topos is used in akul�shin�s tale, but here the motif of �lenin�s slyness� coexists with another theme dominant in the �siberian� and �ivanovo-voznesensk� tales from piaskovskii�s collection, and related more to the leader�s posthumous image than the one he had when alive. in this instance lenin is depicted as �a being not entirely dead.� he rises from the grave and miraculously helps the soviet people in various crisis situations. obviously, this change of accent in the pseudo-folkloric reception of lenin (the hero turns from living trickster into helpful �dear departed�) is directly related to soviet propaganda and ideological discussions about the mummification of lenin�s body and the plans for a mausoleum 27 (discussions were concluded in 1930, the same year that piaskovskii�s collection came out). it is symptomatic that the akul�shin tale �sly lenin� was republished by piaskovskii under another title, �skoro prosnetsia il�ich� (soon il�ich will awaken). it is possible that the plot of �sly lenin� was to a certain degree based upon rumors actually circulating among the peasants immediately after lenin�s death. for example, i. iu. komov, a sel�kor (�rural correspondent�), reported from morozovskaia, a stanitsa (cossack settlement) in the northern caucasus: it is hard to put into words the feelings and sentiments of peasants and working people in general. � adults were crying like babies. there was blank despair. people were afraid that after the leader�s death all the gains of the october revolution would be lost. many people did not believe that the sad news was true. even now, there exists a legend among the peasants, and they hold strongly to it, that lenin is alive and walking the earth incognito, observing the work of the soviet authorities so as to to check for defects, take note of all the problems and create the conditions for the prompt and total emancipation of the workers [pis�ma krest�ian 1968: 123]. if we are to believe the sel�kor komov, we can state that in the mid 1920s in the northern caucasus, there existed a version of �the legend of the deliverer� (motif d2, according to k. v. chistov [chistov 1967]), with lenin as the principal hero. however, in his �sly lenin� tale, akul�shin used just one motif out of the �deliverer legend,� and gave the �folktale� a very different poetic and ideological tinge. at the same time, it is also possible that komov�s report was influenced by akul�shin�s text, since �sly lenin� was published in november 1925 and komov�s letter to krest�ianskaia gazeta is dated january 1, 1926. akul�shin�s tale can also be labeled novelistic (novelisticheskaia or bytovaia). it lacks �magic� (volshebnye) motifs, and the secret of lenin�s incomplete death is explained here in a �quasi-scientific� way. it occurs because of the activities of the �chief soviet physician,� who can make a person die �not completely, but just for appearances.� the reasons for this last trick performed by the leader are altogether pragmatic: lenin wants to prove to the soviet people that the principal role in every society is played by not a charismatic leader (in this case himself), but the combined will of the ruling class. and this is true: in spite of the absence of the leader, the communist party, the workers and the peasants achieve remarkable success in both internal and foreign policy. however, the awakening of lenin is still something to be hoped for; obviously, the soviet people has a need for him not only as a dead man who leaves his glass coffin in the night and controls the execution of his great plan, but as a living ruler. i do not think that in this case akul�shin proceeded from motifs of the resurrection and second coming of christ in the gospels or from peasant religious folklore. it is more likely that �sly lenin� was influenced by tale type at 410 (�sleeping beauty�), hugely popular in nineteenthand twentieth-century russian culture thanks to pushkin�s verse rendering, the translation of perrault�s fairy tales, tchaikovsky�s ballet and so on. documents from the 1920s, emanating from the political police, furnish evidence that contemporaries did indeed associate the leader�s grave with this particular tale. �referring to the construction of the mausoleum on the lenin�s grave, the clerk antipov joked that lenin would lie in his coffin like a �sleeping beauty�� [velikanova 1994: 180]. it is evident that what we have here is the literary reception and transformation of a folktale. in fact, akul�shin�s tale can be interpreted as a parodic inversion of �sleeping folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 28 beauty,� where the persecuted princess is replaced by the actual ruler who voluntarily lies in his crystal coffin, the role of the evil stepmother is played by �the chief soviet physician,� and the role of the dwarfs/epic heroes/robbers living in the �men�s house� in the woods should theoretically be taken by members of the politburo, who decided not to commit the body of the �beloved leader� to the earth. certainly, this version of tale type 410 does not require a hero who rescues the victim from enchanted sleep. two other �russian folktales� in piaskovskii�s collection differ from seifullina�s and akul�shin�s texts. neither includes comic or novelistic motifs and both are generally oriented towards magical and heroic themes. the �siberian folktale,� �lenin on the stone pillar,� is a kind of religious and mythological thematization of the leader�s �eternal life.� lenin �finds the truth� on a stone pillar in moscow and is granted immortality. the topos of �eternal life� is represented here by means of a �lunar code:� the hero grows older and younger as the moon waxes and wanes.(11) in the �ivanovo-voznesensk folktale� the mythological motifs are connected with political and technological imagery and notions: british �capitalists� try to do away with lenin by means of a �ray wave,� but the killer misses and the hero, now only partly dead, is still able to help his people: when needed, he repairs factory engines and �drives clouds to the drought-affected fields� (see above). in an article published in 1996, a. m. panchenko and i suggested that the mummification of lenin�s body and creation of the mausoleum were principally related to archetypes in russian religious culture, in particular to ideas about the uncorrupted bodies of saints and those who died an unnatural death (known as �zalozhnye pokoiniki�) [panchenko 1996]. although i do not reject this hypothesis as a whole, i am no longer sure that the cultural and ideological context of mummification of lenin�s body was so homogeneous. it is likely that the soviet ruling clique�s decision to preserve the body of the �beloved leader� was equally influenced by traditional religious belief in uncorrupted relics, utopian expectations of the �scientific� resurrection of the dead, the custom of temporarily embalming deceased emperors in nineteenth-century russia, and the discovery of tutankhamen�s tomb in 1922 [see tumarkin 1983; panchenko 1996]. on the other hand, it is also likely that the party leaders themselves did not know exactly what their reasons were for mummifying lenin�s body and then displaying the corpse for all to see. according to n. valentinov-vol�skii, the politburo members had already begun discussing the mummification of lenin in the autumn of 1923, and the leitmotif of the discussion was expressed in kalinin�s comment: �if we are to bury il�ich, then the funeral should be more magnificent than the world has ever seen before� [valentinov 1991: 147]. they were thinking, then, not about reproducing ritual patterns but rather, the creation of a new funeral ritual that had never been seen before. all the official explanations that followed the mummification of lenin, both the statements by party leaders and �letters from working people� published in the newspapers, emphasized the same idea; �the body of the man who made world revolution a reality� was to be preserved for future generations. �let him remain for us an inexhaustible source of the idea of leninism for the good of the workers of the whole world� [panchenko 1996: 181]; �we believed and believe still that it is extremely important to preserve this remarkable leader as he really looked, for those who are growing up, for future generations and for those hundreds of thousands or probably millions of people who will be profoundly happy to see him as he was in life� [otchet 1925: 47].(12) 29 beyond rhetoric, beyond any possible mystical meanings and the emotional nuances, sincere or insincere, of these declarations, an interesting picture emerges. in fact, the mummified corpse of lenin was to be preserved as a visual aid, if not for the study of marxism-leninism, then for the history of the world revolutionary movement. in this sense, the leader�s body is similar to the monsters in peter the great�s cabinet of curiosities, or exhibits in a waxworks museum. other passages from enukidze�s speech also give the impression that he is speaking about a rare stuffed animal with special educational significance. it is not easy to say whether the authors of such texts realized what logical conclusions might be drawn from their declarations. i think, however, that many members of the new soviet elite, including seifullina, akul�shin and piaskovskii, were more embarrassed than happy with the unusual burial arrangements for lenin and official explanations of the ritual. it is possible that the rhetoric of the cult of lenin, which had already taken shape by the mid 1920s and presented the leader as an immortal and omnipresent being, an �inexhaustible generator of power and energy� [tumarkin 1983], did not seem, to many people, consonant with the material presence of the �eternally alive� leader�s mummified corpse on display in a glass coffin beneath the kremlin wall. i might even go so far as to suggest that it was this logical or psychological difficulty that was the actual reason for the appearance of the �russian folktales� depicting lenin as not completely dead or as an immortal being who rises from his grave and helps the soviet people in the hard work of creating the new socialist society. drawing conclusions about the propagators and addressees of this mythological image ascribed to �soviet folk poetry� is more complicated. on the one hand, it is possible that the authors of the tales were expressing their own utopian hopes for the physical resurrection of �the leader of the working class,� or were trying to explain to themselves why stalin, krasin, enukidze and others had decided to mummify lenin. on the other, it is also possible that both akul�shin and piaskovskii were anxious about the possible reaction of the common folk to lenin�s unusual funeral,(13) and, in the final analysis, wrote their �folktales� not for the intelligentsia but for the �folk,� that is, peasants and workers. at any rate, these texts provide that political and mythological explanation of the mummification of lenin, which, according to akul�shin and his associates, the representatives of �the russian folk� would have thought up or ought to think up for themselves. there is an important chronological factor that should be mentioned at this point. in fact, the �lenin� and �stalin periods� in the history of �soviet folklore� differ greatly. i have already noted that, in the late 1920s�early 1930s, �soviet folklore� was full of prose narratives called �folktales�, �tales� (skazy) or �legends.� the issues analyzed above revealed that these narratives did include certain folktale plot elements. if, however, we were to follow the conception of relations between myths and folktales in terms of stages (in russian folklore studies a view advanced by e. m. meletinskii in particular [meletinskii 1976: 262�76; 1982: 441�44; 1998: 11�32, 284�96], we would then assume that the �folktales about lenin� have more in common with archaic myth than the european folktale. i want to stress that i am not intending to look for parallels between �soviet folklore� and archaic mythology. moreover, in my opinion, the very idea of a linear evolution from myth to folktale does not seem to hold water. for convenience, however, it may be convenient to label the �lenin period� in the history of �soviet folklore� �mythological.� folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 30 the situation changes radically in the mid-1930s in �soviet folklore,� when prose narratives give way to epic or lyric verse.(14) now the dominant form is the long epic, constructed on the basis of the traditional oral version, the bylina. labeled �soviet byliny,� �noviny� (i.e. �new byliny�), �bylina-folktales� or �poem-tales� (poemy-skazy), these works glorified stalin, lenin, kirov, chapaev, the development of collective farms, the heroes of polar expeditions, the eighteenth party congress and so on. beyond this, a considerable proportion of the �soviet folklore� of the late 1930s consists of funeral laments for soviet officials and celebrities. although, as i have said before, the first �soviet lament� was the �pokoinishnyi voi po leninu� published by khandzinskii, laments only became fashionable among creators and consumers of �soviet folklore� considerably later; the next �soviet laments� (including the famous text �kamenna moskva vsya proplakala� (stone moscow is all lamenting) by marfa kriukova) were only �recorded� and published in 1937. undoubtedly, this �folklore for stalin� was redolent with heroic motifs and plots, while adventure motifs and novelistic elements were completely excluded from what was called �soviet folk poetry.� the techniques involved in creating �soviet folklore� also changed. co-authorship between professional singers (skaziteli) and their �supervisors,� folklorists or writers, replaced forgeries by specific authors using disparate elements of peasant narrative tradition in an eclectic manner. what factors determined such a notable change in the dominant ideas about the form and the content of the �oral folk poetry of the soviet epoch�? it is evident that the development of �soviet folklore� was a part of the much broader process of creating stalinist imperial culture [papernyi 1996]. it may be worthwhile here to continue with the analogy with meletinskii�s model of evolutionary stages, according to which myths are contrasted to classic forms of the epic, the latter being the result of the �desacralization� of myth texts during a �distinct period of the political consolidation of nationalities.� �the mythic struggle for cosmos against chaos is transformed into the defense of a related group of tribes, a state, one�s own �belief� against �invaders,� �aggressors,� or �heathens,� who sometimes possess mythic and magical features. the aura of the shaman vanishes completely from the epic hero, to be replaced exclusively by martial ethics and esthetics� [meletinskii 1976: 276]. in this sense, the �fairytale� image of lenin, who tricks �tsar mikolashka,� knows the �secret word,.� grows older and younger as the moon waxes and wanes might be directly set against the �epic� stalin shouting at denikin �sovetskim golosom bogatyrskiim� (with the voice of a soviet bogatyr�), felling the whites with �a sharp saber,� or instructing and rewarding the �russian soviet bogatyri� [ivanova 2002: 645, 639, 749]. nevertheless, this analogy too seems rather relative. of course, both stalinist and post-stalinist imperial ideology was based upon heroic and epic themes that were used for the construction and maintenance of national and political identity. at the same time, we should assume that the transition from the �mythological� to the �heroic� period in the history of soviet folklore was determined by specific social and historical reasons. it is important to remember that these changes took place just after collectivization � a new enslavement of the russian peasantry, which furnished the urban elite (writers and folklorists included) with an effective means for the economic and ideological exploitation of the rural population. i think that �co-authorship� between folklorists and folk singers, mentioned above, became possible thanks to the administrative mechanisms directly affecting the peasants that the elite rediscovered in the early 1930s. it is not incidental that soviet folklorists 31 themselves took part in the collectivization; for example, b. m. sokolov was sent to kaluga district to help to organize collective farms in 1930 [ivanova 1993: 81]. on the other hand, the �folktales about lenin� could not appear out of nowhere. it seems that in the period when the russian peasant enjoyed maximum social and economic freedom, that is, from stolypin�s agrarian reform up to collectivization, the folktale was the most popular folklore genre among professional scholars and indeed the educated classes in general. the reasons for this are probably related not only to the qualities of the folktale as material for the formal study of the folktale (whether work by the �geographic school� in folklore study or proppian morphological analysis), but also to the special attention paid to folktale by russian writers and philosophers of the early twentieth century. it would appear that in the 1910s�20s the russian intelligentsia considered the folktale, along with various forms of religious folklore, to be the expression of both the mystical �national spirit� and the social ideals of the peasants. in this sense, it is worth mentioning a short book by e. n. trubetskoi, �inoe tsarstvo� i ego iskateli v russkoi narodnoi skazke (the �other realm� and its seekers in the russian folktale, 1922). trubetskoi tried to find in the folktale a �reflection of the russian soul� and a �national interpretation of the universal revelation of the �other realm�� [trubetskoi 2000: 268]. the conclusion drawn by trubetskoi was typical of early twentieth-century russian religious philosophy; russian folktales were declared the reflection of a mystical �feminine world view.� �in the russian folktale we observe a vivid example of the mystic passive feelings of the human soul� [trubetskoi 2000: 268]. at the same time, we should not forget another ideological use of russian folktales characteristic of the mid 1910s: the various stylizations and falsifications of �military� or �soldiers�� �folktales� and �legends,� often published in russian periodicals in world war i [e.g. kozyrev 1915; krivoshchekov 1915: 198�215; fedorchenko 1920: 36� 48; zhelanskii 1928: 94�95]. it is not easy to say whether there existed any relationship between such texts and the �folktales about lenin.� however, both phenomena seem very similar. in conclusion, i would like to return to the general discussion, with which i opened this article. when richard m. dorson published his essay �folklore and fake lore� in 1950, he only wished to draw a clear distinction between commercial pseudo-folklore and that �authentic� cultural reality allegedly observed by professional field researchers in folklore [dorson 1950: 335�43].(15) however, fifty years on, the distinction no longer seems so self-evident or clear. contemporary studies in the �poetics and politics of culture� show that both �folklore� and �fakelore� often play very similar ideological roles, and the very notion of authenticity is not in fact relevant to the study of folklore [bendix 1997: 7�11; bogdanov 2001: 19�20]. the analysis of �soviet folklore� provides similar conclusions. as i remarked earlier, the development of the phenomenon could be compared with the theory of developmental stages, from myth to folktale to oral epic. of course this similarity might be interpreted in a different way: under certain conditions, ideologically inspired fakelore obeys the universal laws of �the evolution of folklore.� however, it is possible to suggest another hypothesis: both the history of �soviet folklore� and the evolutionistic tendencies in russian ethnology and folklore research were related to the same discourse, which was determined not by the �authentic reality� of archaic, non-literate agrarian societies, but by the cultural and ideological specificity of the urban elite of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. in fact, the problem of authenticity allows us to talk not about �folklore 1� and �folklore 2,� folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 32 but instead about more complex gradations in the virtual �reality of folklore.� from a genetic point of view, a text in the ownership of a given folk group can be labeled a part of its authentic cultural heritage, while another is seen as a stylization by a certain author or a borrowing or as gesunkenes kulturgut. from a functional point of view, both texts are equally authentic. finally, in the ideological sense, both can be designated as not belonging to �folklore 2� and, consequently, non-authentic. i do not think that these contradictions in the concept of what is folklore indicate a general failure on the part of folklore study. however, it is clear that specialists studying �folk culture� should long ago have begun to think about the social and ideological factors that determine their irrational thirst for authenticity, this �obscure object of desire'� for traditional folkloristics. appendix summaries of the �folktales� about lenin published in the 1920s 1 �muzhitskii skaz o lenine� (a rustic tale about lenin) [seifullina 1924: 162�69] tsar mikolashka (mikolai) hears about lenin. lenin knows a secret word; he wants to take away all the tsar�s soldiers and kill his generals, officers, officials and the tsar himself. the tsar writes a letter to lenin offering him half his kingdom. lenin agrees and suggests to the tsar that the latter keeps all the �blue bloods� and the treasure. lenin takes the peasants, soldiers, factory workers, pedigree cattle, pastures, and arable land. the tsar likes the division of spoils, thinking he will be able to take on other workers. the peasants, by contrast, do not like the division. they ask lenin why he let the tsar take all the treasure and riches. lenin replies that the treasure would not be enough to go around, and that it is sufficient for the economy to possess land and cattle. he knows a secret word that means the �blue bloods� will not find any new workers or soldiers.(16) the common people all obey lenin. the tsar and the �blue bloods� spend all the treasure, and cannot find any new workers. they want the common people back and declare war on lenin. thus begins the civil war, but the �blue bloods� will soon be defeated, because they are not used to the slog of fighting. 2 �khitryi lenin� (sly lenin) [akul�shin 1925: 120�28] lenin reads the newspapers and discovers that everyone in the ussr relies on him and, therefore, is not afraid of the entente and america. lenin decides to check how things would continue without him. he asks �the chief soviet physician� to render him dead �not completely, but just for appearances.� this is a secret; only the physician and nadezhda konstantinovna (krupskaia) know about it. it is announced that lenin is dead. the people are in torment, cry, fear a british and french intervention. kalinin asks the people to calm down and get on with work. lenin is placed in the marzolei (a distortion of mavzolei, mausoleum). after a month, lenin is bored of lying under glass. for three nights in a row he leaves the marzolei and visits the kremlin, a factory and a peasant�s hut. he knows that the number of communists in russia has doubled, that the policy of the entente 33 towards the ussr is now peaceful, that manufacturing is growing and villages are full of izby-chtal�ni (rural reading rooms) and �lenin corners,� and that the smychka goroda i derevni (�the city-village alliance�) is in progress. lenin returns to the marzolei calmly. he lies down and falls asleep. perhaps he will wake up soon. 3 �lenin na kamennom stolbe� (lenin on the stone pillar) [piaskovskii 1930: 33�35] there is a stone pillar in moscow. from the top you can se not only the whole of russia but also the entire world. many learned people and intellectuals tried to climb the pillar, but they were not clever enough. then lenin and his comrades come to the pillar. he decides to climb it to find the truth. from the pillar lenin looks around and takes charge of the life of russia and the whole world. thus, lenin receives the grace of god. during the civil war, there was a thunderclap over moscow, the heavens opened, and a voice was heard prophesying success for lenin in his cause and promising him immortality. since that time, lenin �grows young and old� every month. when the moon is new, lenin is a young man. as the moon becomes full, lenin ages and turns into an old grandad. 4 �lenin ne umer � on zhiv� (lenin did not die; he is alive) [piaskovskii 1930: 37�39] in 1921, �the english sovereign� calls together his �lackeys, ministers and factory owners.� he tells them about �a sly and seductive enemy� who lives overseas and hinders the sovereign from ruling by sending his �couriers� to the english people �in order to start dissension.� the lackeys, the ministers and the factory owners suggest waging war on the enemy. the sovereign replies that this is impossible. the enemy, �called lenin the infidel,� he rules the land of the soviets. english warships can not reach this country; they just sink. if you fire at it with your cannon, the cannon just disintegrates. if soldiers are dispatched there, they rebel. nor can you send an assassin, because the people�s guard protects lenin. �the oldest lackey� asks for money to be released from the treasury: he has invented an invisible weapon, which is called a �ray wave�. the wave can be turned on lenin, and then he will die. the ray wave is turned on lenin; he falls sick and dies. it appears, however, that his death is not total. the ray wave misses and does not harm lenin�s head. lenin lives, and he helps his people in crisis situations. nobody can see him, because he is hidden from the people by the ray wave. notes 1 for a more detailed discussion of the �colonial aspects� of folkloristics see panchenko 2002: 44�51. 2 for an overview of the discussion and a bibliography, see vykhodtsev 1960: 266�92, miller 1990: 97� 100. see also: mel�ts 1961: 154�57. 3 see, for example, chistov 1967. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 34 4 cf. similar texts recorded in the 1920s in tver� province [bol�shakov 1927: 381]: sidit lenin na bereze, derzhit serp i molotok, a ego tovarisch, trotsky, gonit rotu bez portok lenin is sitting on a birch-tree, hammer and sickle in his hands. and his dear comrade trotskii is leading soldiers who have no pants khodit lenin po derevne s krasnoi sumkoi na boku. "vy podaite, radi boga, proletarskomu polku". lenin is walking along the village with a red bag on his back: �oh, for the lord�s sake, give alms for our proletarian regiment�. lenin trotskomu skazal: poidem, trotsky, na bazar, kupim kobylu kareiu nakormim proletariiu lenin said to trotsky: �let�s go to the market. we�ll buy a chestnut mare, and feed the proletariat�. 5 see the summaries of these texts in the appendix. the texts were republished by ivanova [ivanova 2002: 817�25]. 6 on the biography and writings of seifullina (1889�1954), the author of the first �soviet bestsellers� about rural life in the 1920s, see: nikitina 1926: 392�93; chalmaev 1998: 323�24. 7 on akul�shin, who emigrated to the usa after world war ii and died in 1988, see: nikitina 1926: 253� 54; el�zon 1998: 33�34. 8 piaskovskii 1930: 39. of course, the original text was published without division into lines. 9 later, in urban jokes from the 1970s�80s, the theme of �lenin�s slyness� was carried to absurdity: �i tell my mistress that i go to my wife; i tell my wife that i go to my mistress; and actually i go to the loft, and there i just work and work and work.� �this is a conspiracy, old fellow, just a conspiracy: you�re pissing in a litter-bin and i�m pissing in your pocket,� and so on. 10 after i had completed this article, the opportunity arose to read l. abrahamian�s article, �lenin as a trickster� [abrahamian 1999]. the author argues that �lenin, in general, is surprisingly similar to the mythological trickster.� however, i find it difficult to agree with the armenian scholar. first of all, he, like tumarkin and vaiskopf, is interested in the construction of universal mythological features allegedly characteristic of the soviet cult of lenin, rather than its genesis and actual historical evolution. secondly, the material used by abrahamian was mainly drawn from russian periodicals of the 1990s and, hence, is not adequate for discussing the history of the �sly lenin� image. it also seems that he was unaware of seifullina�s and akul�shin�s tales. 11 it would appear that the author of this text possessed at least a superficial knowledge of pre-revolutionary research and publications on east slavic folklore. thus, the motif of the stone pillar climbed by lenin in his search for the truth was evidently borrowed from russian versions of tale type at 530 (�the princess on the glass mountain�/sus 35 530 (�sivko-burko�), while the �lunar� imagery of lenin�s immortality was, most likely, inspired by a. n. afanas�ev�s poeticheskie vozzreniya slavyan na prirodu (the slavs� poetic conceptions of nature) [afanas�ev 1865: 189]. 12 from a speech by a. s. enukidze, july 26, 1924. 13 the evidence that there were expectations that lenin�s funeral would provoke a somewhat peculiar religious reaction among the peasants is provided by walter duranty of the new york times, who wrote in 1924: �many foreigners here� believe it will be only a question of a short time before there will be �miracles,� or at least temporary cures of hysterical disorder so common in russia, at lenin�s �shrine.� they have begun to speculate on the possible effects this may have on the peasant masses whose formal religion has suffered heavy blows from bolshevist hostility and the sequestration of church property and by the subsequent schism in the orthodox church, but whose superstitious instincts are stronger than ever� [tumarkin 1983: 197]. 14 i do not touch upon the issue of �soviet chastushki� and �soviet proverbs,� which had begun appearing in newspapers and magazines in the late 1920s and became very popular in the mid 1930s. although these texts were also widely discussed, their role seems secondary by comparison with the folktale, heroic epic, etc. 15 on the discussion surrounding dorson�s essay see: bendix 1997: 189�194; bronner 1998: 363�82. 16 it was widely believed that kolduny (sorcerers) possessed a �secret word� which could be used for magical purposes. the �secret word� in seifullina�s text is evidently marxism. abbreviations at � aarne a, 1961. the types of folktale: a classification and bibliography: antti aarne�s verzeichnis der märchentypen. trans. and enlarged by s. thompson. 2nd ed. helsinki: academia scientarum fennica. sus � l. g. barag et al. 1977. sravnitel'nyi ukazatel' siuzhetov. vostochnoslavianskaia skazka. leningrad: nauka. bibliography abrahamian, l. 1999. �lenin as a trickster.� anthropology & archeology of eurasia, 38 (2): 7�26 adon'eva, s. b. 2001. kategoria nenastoiaschego vremeni (antropologicheskie ocherki) [the category of non-present time. anthropological essays]. st. petersburg: peterburgskoe vostokovedenie. afanas'ev, a. n. 1865. poeticheskie vozzreniia slavian na prirodu [the slavs� poetic conceptions of nature]. vol. i. moscow: k. soldatenkov. akul'shin, r. 1925. �tri skazki. grazhdanskaia voina i lenin v narodnom tvorchestve� [three folktales. the civil war and lenin in folk poetry]. novyi mir, (11): 120�28 astakhova, a. m. et al. (eds) 1952. ocherki russkogo narodnopoeticheskogo tvorchestva sovetskoi epokhi [essays on russian folk poetry of the soviet period]. moscow and leningrad: irl, an sssr. azadovskii, m. k. 1935. �legendy o lenine� [legends about lenin]. molodaia gvardiia, (1): 113�17 folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 36 azadovskii, m. k. 1934. �lenin v fol'klore� [lenin in folklore]. in pamiati v. i. lenina. sbornik statei k desiatiletiiu so dnia smerti. 1924�1934 [to the memory of v. i. lenin. a collection of articles on the tenth anniversary of his death]. moscow and leningrad: an sssr, pp. 881�97 azbelev, s. n. 1998. �ideologemy fol'kloristicheskogo soznaniia� [ideological stereotypes in the study of folklore]. in k. a. bogdanov and a. a. panchenko (eds), mifologiia i povsednevnost'. materialy nauchnoi konferentsii 18-20 fevralia 1998 goda [mythology and the everyday. proceedings of an academic conference, held 18-20 february 1998]. st. petersburg: russkii khristianskii gumanitarnyi institut, pp. 272�80. bendix, r. 1997. in search of authenticity: the formation of folklore studies. madison, wi: university of wisconsin press. bogdanov, k. a. 2001. povsednevnost' i mifologiia: issledovaniia po semiotike fol'klornoi deistvitel'nosti [the everyday and mythology. investigations into the semiotics of folkloric reality]. st. petersburg: iskusstvo spb. bol'shakov, a. m. 1927. derevnia. 1917�1927 [the village. 1917-1927]. moscow: rabotnik prosveshcheniia. bronner, s. j. 1998. following tradition: folklore in the discourse of american culture. logan, utah: utah state u. p. chalmaev, v. a. 1998. �seifullina, l. m.� in russkie pisateli. xx vek. biobibliograficheskii slovar' [russian writers of the twentieth century. a biographical-bibliographical dictionary]. part 2. moscow: prosveshchenie, pp. 323�24. chistov, k. v. 1967. russkie narodnye social'no-utopicheskie legendy 17�19 v. [russian folk socialutopian legends of the 17th-19th centuries]. moscow: nauka. domanovskii, l. v. et al. (eds). 1973. istoricheskie pesni xix veka [historical songs of the nineteenth century]. leningrad: nauka. dorson, r. m. 1950. �folklore and fake lore�. american mercury, 70: 335�43 efanova, l. e. et al., eds. 1994. fol'klor rossii v dokumentakh sovetskogo perioda [the folklore of russia in documents of the soviet period]. moscow: gosudartsvennyi respublikanskii tsentr russkogo fol�klora. el'zon, m. d. 1998. �akul'shin (berezov) rodion mikhailovich.� in russkie pisateli. xx vek. biobibliograficheskii slovar' [russian writers of the twentieth century. a biographical-bibliographical dictionary]. part 1. moscow: prosveshchenie, pp. 33�34. fedorchenko, s. 1920. �skazki� [tales]. in sovremennye zapiski, 1: 34�68. grinkova, n. p. 1936. �voronezhskaia skazka o lenine� [a voronezh tale about lenin]. uchenye zapiski gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta im. a.i. gertsena i gosudarstvennogo nauchnoissledovatel'skogo instituta nauchnoi pedagogiki. vol.ii. fakul'tet iazyka i literatury. leningrad, issue 1: 319� 25. ivanova, t. g. 2002. �sovetskii epos 1930-kh � 1940-kh godov� [the soviet epos of the 1930s-40s]. in a. l. toporkov et al. (eds), rukopisi, kotorykh ne bylo: poddelki v oblasti slavianskogo fol'klora [manuscripts that never existed: forgeries in the field of slavic folklore]. moscow: ladomir, pp. 403�968. 37 ivanova, t. g. 1993. russkaia fol'kloristika nachala xx veka v biograficheskikh ocherkakh [russian folklore studies in the early twentieth century in biographical sketches]. st. petersburg: d. bulanin. khandzinskii, n. 1925. ��pokoinishnyi voi� po lenine� [a funeral lament for lenin] sibirskaia zhivaia starina, (3-4): 53�64. khlebtsevich, e. 1924. �sobiranie proizvedenii ustnogo tvorchestva rabochikh, krest'ian i krasnoarmeitsev o lenine� [the collection of folk poetry about lenin, created by workers, peasants, and red army men]. kommunisticheskoe prosveshchenie, (1): 117�20. kozyrev, n. g. 1915. soldatskie skazki [soldiers� tales]. petrograd: b. a. suvorin. krivoshchekov, a. i. 1915. �legendy o voine� [legends about the war]. istoricheskii vestnik, (10): 198�215. lenin, v. i. 1962. polnoe sobranie sochinenii (collected works). vol. 35. moscow: izd. politcheskoi literatury. meletinskii, e. m. 1976. poetika mifa (the poetics of myth). moscow: nauka. meletinskii, e. m. 1982. �skazki i mify�(tales and myths). in s. a. tokarev et al. (eds), mify narodov mira (myths of the people of the world). vol. ii. moscow: sovetskaia entsiklopediia, pp. 441�44. meletinskii, e. m. 1998. izbrannye stat'i. vospominaniia [selected articles. recollections]. moscow: rggu. mel'ts, m. ia. 1961. russkii fol'klor. bibliograficheskii ukazatel'. 1945-1959 [russian folklore. a bibliography. 1945-59]. leningrad: irl/ban, an sssr. miller, f. j. 1990. folklore for stalin: russian folklore and pseudofolklore of the stalin era. armonk, ny and london: m. e. sharpe. nikitina, e. f. 1926. russkaia literatura ot simvolizma do nashikh dnei [russian literature from symbolism to the present day]. moscow: nikitinskie subbotniki. otchet komissii cik sssr po uvekovecheniiu pamiati v.i. ul'ianova (lenina) [report of the commission of the central executive committee of the ussr on the perpetuation of the memory of v. i. ul�ianova (lenin)]. 1925. moscow: no publisher indicated. panchenko, a. a. 2002. khristovshchina i skopchestvo: fol�klor i traditsionnaia kul�tura russkikh misticheskikh sect [the skoptsy and the khlysty: the folklore and traditional culture of russian mystical sects]. moscow: ogi. panchenko, a. a., panchenko a. m. 1996. �os'moe chudo sveta� (the eighth wonder of the world). in v. e. bagno and t. a. novichkova (eds), poliarnost' v kul'ture [polarity in culture]. st petersburg: almanakh �kanun�, pp. 166�202. papernyi, v. 1996. kul�tura �dva�. moscow: novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. �pis'ma krest'ian v sviazi s konchinoi v. i. lenina� 1968. voprosy istorii, (7): 118-24. piaskovskii, a. v. 1930. lenin v russkoi narodnoi skazke i vostochnoi legende [lenin in the russian folktale and oriental legend]. leningrad: molodaia gvardiia. folklorica 2005, vol. x no. 1 38 seifullina, l. 1924. �muzhitskii skaz o lenine� [a rustic tale about lenin]. krasnaia nov'. 1 (18): 162� 69. shtyrkov, s. a. 1999. �istoricheskie predaniia i perspektivy izucheniia traditsionnykh narrativnykh praktik� [historical legends and the prospects for the study of traditional narrative practices]. in k. a. bogdanov and a. a. panchenko (eds), mifologiia i povsednevnost'. materialy nauchnoi konferentsii 24-26 fevralia 1999 goda [mythology and the everyday. proceedings of an academic conference, held 24-26 february 1999]. st. petersburg: irl, ran, pp. 22-35 tirado, isabel. 2001. �peasants into soviets: reconstructing komsomol identity in the russian countryside of the 1920s.� acta slavica iaponica, 18: 42�63. trubetskoi, e. n. 2000. tri ocherka o russkoi ikone. �inoe tsarstvo� i ego iskateli v russkoi narodnoi skazke [three essays on the russian icon. �the other realm� and its seekers in the russian folktale]. moscow: lepta. tumarkin, n. 1983. lenin lives! the lenin cult in soviet russia. cambridge, ma. and london: harvard u. p. vaiskopf, m. 2001. �krasnyi chudotvorets: lenin v evreiskoi i khristianskoi traditsiiakh� [the red wonderworker: lenin in jewish and christian tradition]. in o. v. belova et al. (eds). kontsept chuda v slavianskoi i evreiskoi kul'turnoi traditsii [the concept of the miracle in slavic and jewish cultural tradition]. moscow: institut slavianovedeniia, ran, tsentr �sefer�, pp. 336�66 valentinov, n. (n. vol'skii). 1991. novaia ekonomicheskaia politika i krizis partii posle smerti lenina: gody raboty v vsnkh vo vremia nep. vospominaniia [nep and the crisis in the party after the death of lenin]. moscow: sovremennik. velikanova, o. v. 1994. �obraz lenina v massovom soznanii� [the image of lenin in the consciousness of the masses]. otechestvennaia istoriia, (2): 175-86. vyhodtsev, p. s. 1960. �literatura ili fol'klor? (k voprosu o sovremennom narodnom tvorchestve)� [literature or folklore? (on the question of contemporary folk poetry). russkii fol'klor, 5: 265-92. zhelanskii, a. 1928. �mnimaia skazka bloka� [blok�s sham folktale]. pechat' i revoliutsiia, 2 (march): 94�95. folklore conference in ukraine natalie kononenko, university of virginia the kyiv based center for the study of oral history and culture, the journal rodovid, and the cherkasy ethnographic museum invite you to take part in an international conference in cherkasy, ukraine as well as to conduct fieldwork (if you so wish) in central ukraine in august 1998. the conference is "problems in oral history research on east european villages of the 1920's1940's." it will take place august 4-7, 1998 in the cherkasy ethnographic museum. an optional additional activity is to conduct fieldwork in villages under the guidance of local ethnographers of the center and the museum. field trips begin august 8, the duration of the fieldwork is up to the scholar and can continue for as many days as you wish. both the conference and the fieldwork opportunity are geared to be of interest to ethnographers of all stripes (anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, sociologists) as well as to folklorists and historians. one of the most serious lacunae in soviet era ethnography is oral history: not only its collection but its interpretation as well. what few oral history projects were undertaken were seriously flawed by the ideological distortions of the time. this was particularly true during the time period in question when stalinism made any but the blandest research project impossible. from the 1950's to the 1980's little of lasting interest was accomplished in this area, and only in the last few years has competent research been undertaken. thousands of now elder­ ly victims/participants still live in village ukraine who can speak to the specifics of this time period. whatever your area of specialization, if you have an seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 interest in the collection and interpretation of oral history, or if you have experience in oral history/ ethnography that touches on the problems of this time period, we hope that you will consider joining us in august. this includes those who have conduct­ ed research in other parts of eastern europe and can offer a comparative view to research undertaken in ukraine. this is, among other things, an oppor­ tunity for you to conduct comparative research in village ukraine. conference schedule the conference languages are ukrainian and english. papers should be no more than twenty (20) minutes in length, with ten minutes for questions and answers immediately after each presentation. interpreters will be available at the conference and you may read your paper in english. in such a case we request your english text in advance (by july 1) in order to assist the interpreter. such papers will be allowed up to fifteen minutes extra (i.e., thirty-five minutes for your paper with ten minutes for questions). you should send a one page double-spaced abstract of your paper (either english or ukrainian) to us along with your application and registration payment. please send to the usa rodovid address shown below. the abstracts will be published in the conference program and will be available before the conference begins. selected papers will later be published in ukrainian in the journal rodovid. the general conference schedule follows below. a more detailed schedule will be available by july 1. august 4 tuesday arrival in kyiv; transportation by car to cherkasy free of charge august 5 wednesdayplenaiy sessions, morning and afternoon august 6 thursday separate sessions, panels on: a) changes in social structure and civil society of the time b) transformations in expressive culture c) repression of ethnographers and cultural activists august 7 friday plenary session (morning) and excursion (afternoon) august 8 saturday transportation from cherkasy to kyiv (free of charge) or begin fieldwork project if you wish to remain in kyiv a longer time, we can assist you in finding accommodations. accommodations in cherkasy hotel accommodations cost from $45 to $90 per night (the former for a double, the latter for a single room). alternatively we can place you in a private apartment for $20 a night (one or two persons to an apartment: most apartments have only one bed). one other option is to live with an english speaking family for $20 a night per person. for no additional fee we will pick you up at the boryspil' airport in kyiv and transport you to cherkasy, and later back to the airport. fieldwork option for those wishing to stay on arid conduct fieldwork, this option can begin the day after the conference — saturday august 8 — and last as many seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 days as you wish. it costs $30 per day, inclusive of iju transportation, all meals, housing, and an accom­ panying ethnographer from the center or from the museum, if you require an interpreter the cost is an additional $10 per day. the accompanying ethno­ grapher will take you to representative villages in cherkasy oblast1. those intending to conduct fieldwork should contact us with details as to your research interests at least by july 1 (but the earlier the better) in order for us to plan an itinerary for you. we have a wide range of specialists who work in either or both the center and the museum and we can accommodate most research requests. application: registration fee and registration form registration fee is $90 (usd only please). please complete a registration form and mail it with your one page abstract and your registration fee of $90 to the usa address immediately below. we need to receive your application no later than july 10, 1998 in order to process it in due time. please make checks or money orders payable to "rodovid," and send to: rodovid 18200 5. mullen road belton, mo 64012 usa other fees and payments all other fees and charges for accommoda­ tions, etc. should be paid in cash on-site in ukraine (preferably either ukrainian hryvnia, us or canadian dollars, or dm). we cannot accept in ukraine travelers checks, money orders, personal checks, or credit cards. visa requirements (,4 citizens of all states outside of eastern europe are required to have a visa to enter ukraine. we can furnish you with a letter of invitation which you will need to acquire a visa. because visas can take up to two weeks to be processed, we must have your re­ quest for the visa and your payment of the registra­ tion fee no later than july 10, 1998. upon payment we will send you a letter of invitation. please contact the ukrainian embassy in your country for details on visa applications. if you have any questions, please contact either william noll of the center or lidia lykhach of rodovid in kyiv at tel.ifax (+380-44) 295-4064 during normal office hours, or send a fax at any time. or you may contact us by e-mail: pito@gonchar.freenet.kiev.ua we look forward to hearing from you soon, and seeing you in kyiv and cherkasy in august. sincerely, william noll, director, center for the study of oral history and culture lidia lykhach, director, rodovid mykola komienko, research director, cherkasy ethnographic museum (the registration form is not included in this message. please contact natalie kononenko at nkm@virginia.edu, or rodovid at the belton, mo address.) seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 mailto:pito@gonchar.freenet.kiev.ua mailto:nkm@virginia.edu 147 reviews folklorica 2013, vol. xvii crummey, robert o. old believers in a changing world. dekalb, il: northern illinois university press, 2011. notes, bibliography, index, 270 pp. $45.00. isbn 978-0-87580-650-1 robert o. crummey, a leading scholar of the russian old believers and a distinguished historian of muscovite russia, has gathered together in this volume a number of his published studies dating back to 1988 and two works not published before. several of them will be of particular interest to the folklorist interested in the russian north or in the historical background to much russian folklore collected over the past two hundred years. as crummey points out in his preface, his interest in the old belief is somewhat curious: he is a canadian, (and therefore had not the access to soviet archives afforded us scholars as a result of the various academic exchange programs, especially irex), and a christian in the western tradition, with no background in russian orthodoxy or russian history. but as he points out, he did have a certain amount of luck in addition to his excellent training, and he soon became a scholar of renown with the publication of his the old believers and the world of antichrist (1970). the book opens with an informative historiographic essay that sets the stage for the eleven articles to follow. the second essay in the book, “old belief as popular religion,” was published in 1993 during the heyday of, especially, european studies of popular religious movements, particularly in the roman catholic parts of western europe. soviet-era contributions to the discussion, one has in mind here the outstanding contributions of bakhtin and gurevich, by and large avoided any serious study of possible homegrown popular religion in the russian church, largely for ideological reasons. crummey’s essay was then a welcome addition to the subject, however tentative it may have been. he points out that the old belief originated not among the laity but among the middle ranks of the clergy and that it certainly was not originally a mass movement at all. in time it came to be supported across the social spectrum but it remained a highly 148 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii conservative phenomenon that soon fractured into several distinct groups. in time, the old belief did become a popular religious presence at the village level but it remained at its heart broadly based, often highly literate, and with considerable support not so much among the laity as among the clergy. it was always highly orthodox, in its understanding of the term. crummey calls for more research from across the academic community, mentioning only the dukhovnye stikhi as an area where folklorists might make a contribution. there are certainly others. in a subsection of the book devoted to the origins of the old belief in the seventeenth century crummey again touches on the topic of popular belief (chapter three). here crummey is particularly concerned with “the interaction between the leaders of russian orthodoxy and ordinary parishioners” (31), from the earliest manifestations of the schism into the eighteenth century. the author treats his subject broadly: the various strands of religious heterodoxy in all of russia. noting the rapid spread of ideas associated with the old belief due to the impact of exiles, both political and ecclesiastical, and of agitators, whose itinerant lifestyle spread the new ideas (or were they old ideas?) quickly throughout that vast land, crummey brings to the attention of the english-reading public research that has uncovered much new evidence in recent years. (this essay was first published in 2004). he points to the prevalence in the seventeenth century of manifestations of what can only be called the original “old belief.” for the most part pre-christian in origin, these observances had worried the official church since the reception of christianity. it is often assumed that with vladimir i’s decision to adopt christianity in the tenth century the east slavs willingly abandoned the old ways and became uniformly christian. folklorists and historians of the russian church know that this is far from the case. either covertly or overtly or by a process of synthesizing (the so-called dvoeverie) much of the old faith and numerous old practices survived into our own times. today the russian church has apparently given up hope that these survivals from a distant past will disappear and it continues the ancient 149 reviews folklorica 2013, vol. xvii practice of co-opting the festivals and customs of its predecessors, while fighting contemporary social beliefs and practices with which it finds fault. crummey rightly points out that there likely never was a common pre-christian religion as such. efforts to reconstruct the old belief have most proved elusive, despite vigorous attempts by many distinguished authorities over many decades. the historian suggests that efforts to reform the russian church taken in the seventeenth century, efforts that led to the schism and the phenomenon of the old ritualists/old believers, bear marks of a centrally-directed campaign and thus much of the evidence that the folklorist might glean from documents of the era must be treated with caution. the author is on most solid ground in discussing the actual attempts at reform and the reaction of what was to become an opposition to them. many of these “reforms” were part of an effort led by the patriarch nikon and with the connivance of tsar alexei mikhailovich to bring practices of the russian orthodox church into line with those of the greek church, which was thought to have preserved orthodoxy where the russian church had permitted alterations to creep in. it soon becomes obvious, both from crummey’s well-documented study and from other works, that the real interest in the official church ceased to be in stamping out remnants of the pre-christian practices and instead a heavyhanded attempt to impose the greek practices on the russian church throughout the empire. all this makes for fascinating reading in this, crummey’s third selection. of considerable interest to the folklorist is the chapter entitled “the origins of the old believer cultural systems,” number five in the collection. clifford geertz’s formulation of a cultural system becomes crummey’s cultural systems: “cultural systems …are clusters of symbolic expressions, including religious rituals, that help men and women explain and give meaning to their lives” (68). crummey’s use of the plural “systems” is central to his notion that the old believers developed a number of distinct cultural systems, beginning in the last third of the seventeenth century and extending into our own era. true, the author is 150 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii primarily concerned with the creation of a written canon that was used to support them in their long struggle with the official church but the picture crummey presents of old believer writings does much to bolster the view that the old believers possessed powerful polemicists who did indeed challenge their opponents in the official church on solid intellectual grounds. subsequent chapters of crummey’s work further develop his interests in his subject and here and there the folklorist will again find suggestions for thought about aspects of russian folk life that bear on the study of russian folklore. scrupulously researched, eloquently presented and persuasive, this collection of essays is a lasting contribution to a much studied but often misunderstood aspect of russian cultural history. jack v. haney seattle, washington, usa folklorica_7f zubryts’kyi, mykhailo. zibrani tvory i materialy u tr’okh tomakh. tom 1: naukovi pratsi. titlepage in english: collected works and materials. volume 1: scholarly works. l’viv: litopys, 2013. biographical essay by frank sysyn (in separate ukrainian and english versions), name and place indexes. maps. tables. illustrations. 609 pp. isbn 978-966-8853-29-6 (cloth). mykhailo zubryts’kyi (1856-1919) was one of many village clerics attached to the ukrainian catholic church in the old galicia of western ukraine. but while he catered to the spiritual needs of his parishioners, this priest also recognized their socio-political aspirations. lending his support to the surge of ukrainianism that characterized his era, the pastor tapped into his love of the written word to access and salvage an array of nuggets hidden in the musty papers of church archives; moreover, with equal respect for the living word, he turned himself into an oral historian and recorded the lifestyle, traditions, lore and material culture of the villagers he served. with remarkable results the enthusiastic reverend father sidestepped the authoritarianism and backwardness that marked his milieu to uncover the extraordinary wealth of socio-historical material that lay before him, – material that gave expression to his people’s search for recognition – material to justify and hopefully dignify their growing sense of ethnocultural distinctiveness. zubryts’kyi’s campaign to salvage his heritage led him to publish his findings in a variety of ukrainian-language newspapers and journals. in the volume under review here, many of these scattered pieces are brought together for the first time. the selection features forty-one items that span a period of twenty-six years. together they present a remarkable entry into the world of concerns and attitudes that dominated the life and times of a singular clergyman. arranged chronologically these pieces begin with a historical anecdote published in 1886 about a ukrainian priest stationed in vienna whose superior talents attracted the attention of none other than the visiting tsar of russia himself (alexander i); the latter’s attempt to lure the priest to russia was rebuffed by the austrian emperor (franz i) who declared his own need to retain individuals of such high caliber. this initial piece is followed by a string of forays into village culture. these constitute an impressive ethnography composed of a dizzying gamut of subject matter ranging from peasant architecture (including windmills), to non-agrarian occupations (such as shepherds, clerics, military conscripts, and millers), apparel traditions (with special attention to footwear and hair styles), domestic crafts (zubryts’kyi’s typology of coffin-making is possibly unique), alimentation, tobacco usage and trafficking, land ownership, myths and beliefs, dialectical language, folksong and folk narrative, seasonal practices, calendar holidays, customs, rituals and much more. on rare occasion, zubryts’kyi departs from objective reportage and reveals a true concern for the welfare of his flock. for example, in his piece on the evils of tobacco, the reverend father mentions how, from his position of privilege, he “often spoke against chewing tobacco when hearing confessions and delivering homilies” (268). unfortunately, more insights of this nature are missing from the writings that are contained in this first volume. the final piece in this collection (dated 1912) presents a statistical tabulation of grassroots economics in father zubryts’kyi’s beloved village of mshanets’. the introductory notes are especially meaty if only for his attention to the role of such marginal groups as jews, roma, and emigrants (generally headed for america). unfortunately, this encyclopedic compendium has no subject index to access directly the goldmine of information collected by father zubryts’kyi. to fully appreciate this work, a reading knowledge of ukrainian and other languages (especially latin, german, and polish) are mandatory: this priest was an accomplished polyglot. robert b. klymasz university of manitoba winnipeg, manitoba canada untitled cossack treasure in ukrainian folk legends 75 cossack treasure in ukrainian folk legends roman i. shiyan university of alberta, edmonton, alberta, canada introduction ukrainian cossacks were a military people who lived and functioned in territories that are now ukrainian lands. at the time that the cossacks existed as a group, however, these lands were within the kingdom of poland, the grand duchy of lithuania (after 1569 the polish-lithuanian commonwealth) and russian-controlled territories of the lower dnipro region (zaporizhzhia) and central ukraine. the peak of cossack strength and influence came during the mid-17th century, when the zaporozhian cossack host began a rebellion against the polishlithuanian government on ukrainian lands, which resulted in the creation of an early-modern ukrainian state, the hetmanate (1648-1764) [okinshevych; zhukovsky 1988: 145-147]. the establishment of russian control over the zaporoz’ka sich(1) and the hetmanate by the end of the 17th century coincided with the decline of the polish-lithuanian commonwealth. this control grew considerably stronger over the next century, resulting in the eventual liquidation of the cossack state (1764) and the sich (1775). cossacks, especially those of the zaporozhian cossack host, had a reputation as fierce warriors. it was also believed that they possessed vast treasure: the proceeds of their military raids. historical texts and documents often supply specific figures,(2) thus providing verifiable information on cossack riches. however, little attention has been paid to how the topic of cossack treasure is presented in ukrainian folklore, particularly legends. this article is meant to at least partially fill that gap. how did the people of southern ukraine, particularly those living on former cossack lands, view cossacks and their treasure? this article looks at common tale types and motifs, found in some ukrainian and russian “treasure” legends, identifying those plots and motifs that are original to cossack “treasure” lore. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 76 sources at this point, a few words must be said about the publication of folkloric prose texts, particularly those which deal with the topic of cossack treasure and, therefore, were considered in preparing this work. the first recognized collector and publisher of folk legends and stories (1840s-1850s) was the writer and ethnographer panteleimon kulish [kolessa 1940s (?): 98]. he researched, collected, and published folklore materials [pypin 1891: 192-194]. his major collection of folklore materials contains a significant number of prose texts about the ukrainian cossacks, including legends about cossack treasure [kulish 1994 (1856-57)]. from the 19th to the early 20th century, dozens of folk prose texts about the cossacks were collected and published by mykhailo drahomanov [dragomanov 1876], pavlo chubyns’kyi [chubinskii 1878], petro efymenko [efimenko 1882: 582-593], ivan manzhura [manzhura 1890], iakiv novyts’kyi [novitskii 1885: 350353], dmytro iavornyts’kyi [evarnitskii 1883: 497-519; 1886: 520-536] and porfyrii martynovych [martynovych 1906]. since the early 1990s, a number of older manuscripts containing folkloric texts about ukrainian cossacks have been newly published. for instance, two important collections of texts by iakiv novyts’kyi were published in 1991 and 1997 respectively. in addition, some important folklore collections have been reprinted, among which are, panteleimon kulish’s famous zapiski o iuzhnoi rusi in 1994, and dmytro iavornyts’kyi’s zaporozh’e v ostatkakh stariny i predaniiakh naroda [zaporozh’e as it is pictured in survivals of antiquity and folk narrative] in 1995. some folkloric accounts of cossack treasure can be found in all of these collections. however, most of the texts are found in the collections of iakiv novyts’kyi, with a somewhat smaller number in the work of panteleimon kulish and dmytro iavornyts’kyi. in fact, the majority of the “treasure” texts discussed in this article was recorded between 1874 and 1885 by iakiv novyts’kyi (1847-1925) and came from the heartland of the former zaporozhian cossack host such as the island of khortytsia. some of novyts’kyi’s recordings were first published in mykhailo drahomanov’s malorusskie narodnye predaniia i razskazy (1876). however, many of the narratives about the cossacks remained unpublished during novyts’kyi’s lifetime. some of those texts became available to the general public only at the end of the 20th century with lehendy ta perekazy [legends and stories] (1985), narodna pam’iat’ pro kozatstvo [cossacks in folk memory] (1991) and cossack treasure in ukrainian folk legends 77 ostrov khortitsa na dnepre, ego priroda, istoriia, drevnosti [the island of khortytsia on the dnipro, its nature, history, and antiquities] (1997) [shiyan 2006b: 5]. these latter texts give us insight into how the informants and their audience must have viewed cossacks and reveal the various issues associated with cossacks a century after the demise of their organization. approach and terminology the cossacks themselves must have composed narratives on various topics, including “cossack treasure,” and these accounts were later utilized by members of other groups interested in the cossacks. in fact, the bulk of folklore about cossacks was recorded in the 19th century, at the time that the last members of this once powerful and numerous military community were dying out or being assimilated into the civilian community. therefore, these latter accounts about the cossacks largely reflect the views held by an audience other than cossacks of what cossack life must have been like. this is particularly true of the “cossack treasure” legends [shiyan 2006a: 35]. a legend, as defined in this paper, is a short oral prose narrative with an emphasis on supernatural topics, which is nevertheless perceived as a generally credible account of the past by its original community. though they may employ certain migratory motifs, legends are local in origin, that is, they relate to events that supposedly happened in a particular locale. in legends, fantasy is frequently present. at the same time, it does not define the plot of a particular narrative, but rather serves as an auxiliary element. despite the presence of certain fantastic elements, the audience traditionally receives the legend as a somewhat reliable account of days gone by [shiyan 2006a: 55]. in legends, one can find a combination of “historicity” and “fantasy” in which the two do not contradict, but rather complement each other. one of the legend’s important functions is its role in establishing connections between the events and people of old and the storyteller’s generation [shiyan 2006a: 56]. because legends involve the historical experience of people so centrally, they are particularly valuable for studying the representation of cossacks in ukrainian folklore [dégh 1997: 485-493]. legends can be grouped into one or more tale types. a “tale type” is a “narrative plot identified by a name and a concise description of its contents” [apo 1997b: 785]. for example, there is a tale type “birth of a child from eating an apple” (675*) [aarne; thompson 1961: 237].types folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 78 are abstract constructions, and are normally identified “based on several concrete text variants or versions of the plot” [apo 1997b: 785]. each plot contains one or more motifs.(3) stith thompson’s definition of a “motif” is “a unit of content found in prose narratives or in poems,” a detail, “of which full-fledged narratives are composed” [aarne; thompson 1955a: 10; apo 1997a: 563]. using the previous example, a tale type such as “birth of a child from eating an apple” (675*), may consist of a sequence of related motifs, such as the “supernatural origin of hero, magic conception” (z 216) and the “hero born out of wedlock” (z 255) [aarne; thompson 1955b: 564-565]. this standard definition of “motif” has been discussed and critiqued by more recent scholars of folklore; however, it serves our general purposes here [apo 1997a: 563]. tale types and motifs of cossack treasure legends the topic of cossack treasure in ukrainian folklore is more complex than it might first appear. to begin with, these legends comprise several related types and motifs: “treasure” as such, hidden or buried treasure, and abandoned treasure. the topic “cossacks and their treasure” is not limited to the popular motif of cossacks hiding their valuables (gold, silver and so forth) in the ground. despite the popularity of this motif, “cossack treasure” goes far beyond the notion of monetary “treasure” and includes the various advantages of having cossack status, which was considered to be a “treasure” in its own right. in her study of the genesis of structure in russian historical folk prose, neonila krinichnaia discerns four major structural-chronological categories of stories about treasure, found in russian folklore: category 1 includes stories about “enchanted treasures”; category 2, comprises stories spawned by the social-utopian illusions of peasants, for whom the acquisition of hidden treasure represented a possible way towards economic improvement; category 3 consists of stories about treasure as customary burial donations; and category 4 talks about “treasure” as such [krinichnaia 1987: 109]. i have used this typology developed for another east slavic culture because it provides a practical point of reference. novyts’kyi’s collections of legends are mostly krinichnaia category 1: “enchanted treasure” legends. they typically provide a description of the place, where the “treasure” had been hidden, as well as explain why it had never been found or retrieved. the following is an example: записано від степана штепи (28 грудня 1877 р.): низче острова хортівського, над старим дніпром, есть урочище лазні, там поверх cossack treasure in ukrainian folk legends 79 скелі ― клад. приміта така: лежить камень, а на іому мова ‘есть и како, хто візьме, ― буде кай.’ годів тридцять тому назад слова були замітні, а тепер камень заріс мохом. кажуть, клад заклятий. recorded from stepan shtepa (december 28, 1877): [below the island of khortytsia, over the old course of the dnipro, there is a grove called lazni, and there, above the cliff is a treasure. the mark (of the treasure) is as follows: [above the treasure] there lies a stone with an inscription on it: “it is [and will be], ― and the one who takes it will be cursed.” some thirty years ago those words could still be read, but now the stone is covered with moss. people say that this treasure is enchanted] [novitskii 1997: 47]. among the most interesting motifs found in cossack treasure legends, are those about “guardian spirits.” these motifs are quite diverse. in the following text we find the motif about the hidden treasure being revealed to a select few by a spirit-guardian, a mounted cossack: записано від степана власенка (15 червня 1884 р.): в голові острова хортица, то вид кічкаса есть величенька могилка, вся обкладена камінням. літ тридцять тому назад там, темної ночі було часто показуеться клад: еще вискоче на могилу козак з шаблею, та так огнем і засяє. козак золотий, а під нім кінь срібний. то, кажуть, золоті і срібні гроші. ті гроші або взято, або показуються та не всякому. recorded from stepan vlasenko (june 15, 1884): [at the head of the island of khortytsia, close to [the colony of] kichkas, there is a big mound, fully covered with stones. some thirty years ago, treasures used to be revealed, often during starless nights: a cossack, armed with a saber, would ride up onto the mound and glow as bright as fire. the cossack is made of gold and his horse is of silver. as [people] say, those are golden and silver coins. that money is either taken or is revealed to a select few] [novitskii 1997: 46]. in the legends about ukrainian cossacks, the guardian spirits are almost exclusively anthropomorphic. they often represent the old or original masters of the hidden treasure: записано від степана штепи (28 грудня 1877 р.): на острові хортицькім, супротів дубового островка, шо під вознесенським берегом, есть два вибалочка; між ними запорожці сховали полкову козну ― дванадцять бочонків, в льоху і казначей козацький сидить замурований. recorded from stepan shtepa (december 28, 1877): [on the island of khortytsia, straight across the island of dubovyi (oak), which is near the bank of voznesenka [village], there are two small ravines; between those ravines the zaporozhian cossacks hid the regimental treasures of their host folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 80 ― twelve barrels with treasure. in that hole also sits the immured cossack treasurer, guarding that treasure ][novitskii 1997: 48]. as this text suggests, treasures hidden by cossacks were entrusted in perpetuity to their guardian who served as a treasurer and a sentry. even though the fate of the guardians may be perceived as a sort of a punishment (reference to a guardian being “immured”), it is just as likely that these immortal figures are simply fulfilling a duty rather than being punished. other legends about “cossack treasure” specifically feature immortal cossacks destined to guard the treasure for a number of years. if the occasion presented itself, they could pass their duty on to an unwary passerby, committing the latter to the burial mound for generations to come: записано від старого чоловіка бугайди (7 вересня 1878 р.): багато кладів сховано по скелях та балках, під дубами, а найбільш у висчій голові та по могилах; будуть вони лежать, поки світ сонця. стережуть їх, кажуть, запорожці, замуровані в льохах, і виходять на світ божий в сорок год раз. але вийде тай заклика встрічнього чоловіка в льохах, як той піде, ― він зачине за ним залізні двері и був такий... давно, дуже давно діялось ― з могили вийшов запорожець з шаблею і став ходить по острові. довго ходив і побачив чоловіка. він до його, а той злякався та від його. запорожець догнав і каже: не бійся, чоловік ти бачу убогий, а я можу запомогти грішми: ходім до могили, я там живу. чоловікові і страшно, і охота достать грошей. не довго думавши пішов. той открив льох і каже: бачиш барило з червонцями ― бери стілько тобі треба. чоловік за гроші, а запорожець за двері ― грякнув і загорнув ход землею. зробив своє діло і пішов ходить по світу. таких людей, кажуть, і смерть не бере. recorded from “old man” buhaida (september 7, 1878): [there are many treasures hidden in the cliffs, ravines, under the oak-trees, with most of them being on the “hanging head” and in the burial mounds; and those treasures will lie there as long as the sun shines. people say that those treasures are guarded by zaporozhian cossacks immured in the pits who are allowed to come out only once in forty years. and when such a guardian meets a passerby, then he invites the latter into the pit, and if the passer-by follows, ― then the zaporozhian cossack will lock the iron gates behind that passer-by and that will be it… a long time ago it happened ― a zaporozhian cossack, armed with a saber left his crypt and began wandering throughout the island. he was wandering for a long time and met a man. that man got scared and was trying to escape the approaching zaporozhian. the cossack caught up with that man and said: do not worry, oh man, i see that you are poor, and i can help you with money: follow me to the burial mound. that man was frightened, but he was also tempted by the money. finally, he went without any further thought. the zaporozhian opened the pit and said: do you see that barrel with the golden coins ― go and grab as much as you need. that man cossack treasure in ukrainian folk legends 81 went for the money and the cossack closed the doors and covered the entrance with earth. after he did that he went on wandering the earth. they say that people like that cossack never succumb to death](4) [novitskii 1997: 49-50]. записано від степана штепи (22 грудня 1877 р.): год тридцять тому назад зійшовся я з стареньким чоловіком і розбалакався про клади. чув, каже він, людям случались гроші, та не всякий брав їх, ― і почав розсказувати. раз, каже, в спасівку, один дід рибальчив в дніпрі. ніч була дуже місячною. повернув він каюк до островського берега, вибрав сітки і став дрімать. коли чує ― шось шелестить чагарем, а далі виходить чоловік, голова лиса, вуси довгі і одежа на йому козацька. став і дивиться на діда. зляку у діда мороз пішов поза шкурою. не втерпів він і обізвався: шо ти за чоловік і чого тобі треба? ― я, каже, запорожець, сто год стеріг клад, а тепер времья вийшло, іди і забери. дід і отказує: як же ти мене знаєш, коли я тебе вперве бачу. у нас, каже, була така умова с козаками, шо через сто год кого першого побачу, тому суд і гроші: ходим з мною. знаєш шо, чоловіче, ― відмовив йому дід, ― іди собі з богом, відкіля взявся, ― грошей твоїх мені не треба. повернувся козак і пішов собі на гору. діда взяв ще більший острах, перехрестився тричі і повернув каюка на вознесенський берег. через тиждень дід почув, що на старому дніпрі рибальчив чоловік з розумовки і тієї ночі його не стало. він, кажуть, був падкий до грошей, послухав запорожця і буде сидіти в льоху до служного часу. recorded from stepan shtepa (december 22, 1877): [some thirty years ago, i met an elderly man with whom i had a chat about hidden treasures. according to him, some people found this money, but not everybody dared to take it, and he went on to tell the story. on the holy day of transfiguration, an old man was fishing on the river dnipro. the night was lit with moonlight. he rowed towards the bank [of khortytsia], drew the nets from the water, and began napping. suddenly, he heard a rustling in the reeds, and soon afterwards a man came out of those reeds, his head shaved, with long moustache and dressed in cossack-style clothes. that stranger began looking at the old man. and the old man felt a shiver pass down his neck. the old fisherman lost his patience and asked: what sort of man are you and what do you want from me? ― i am a zaporozhian cossack and i have been guarding the treasures for a hundred years and now the time of my duty is done and you may go and take that treasure. the old man replied: and how do you know me, because i have never met you before in my life. the cossack said that we, the cossacks, had reached an agreement that in a hundred years, i would pass the money to the first person, whom i would meet: follow me. you know what, man, the old man replied, go to where you have come from, and may the lord guide you, i don’t need your money. the cossack turned around and went up the hill. the old man experienced an even a more dreadful fright; he protected himself with the sign of the holy cross thrice, and rowed towards the bank near the village of voznesenka. a week later, that old man heard a rumor that a man from rozumovka had been fishing on the old dnipro and vanished that very night [when the old fisherman met folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 82 with the cossack]. that man from rozumovka, who had vanished, had been known for his love of money, so he must have listened to that zaporozhian cossack and now will be sitting in that crypt till his term is over](5) [novitskii 1997: 50]. legends about cossacks guarding “hidden treasure,” constitute a separate type that i will call category 5 “immortal cossacks: remarkable longevity of culture heroes.” this type of legend is comprised of various motifs of immortal cossack-guardians who watch over hidden treasures. in the available ukrainian variants, a cossack-guardian is not buried in the burial mound, but rather is confined in it and fulfills his duty by guarding the hidden treasure for a specified term (from forty to a hundred years). after that, the guardian is awarded the opportunity to pass his duty on to another person. this plot is quite different from other “treasure tales,” particularly russian ones in which the treasure is left in the mound with a sacrificed dead body of an animal or a human [dashkevych 1991: 534-536]. in treasure legends about ukrainian cossacks, in contrast, a guardian is entrusted with the treasure by his brethren and is practically never sacrificed. in the aforementioned texts it is interesting to note how the informants refer to the sources of their information: “people say…,” and “some thirty years ago i met an elderly man who told me…” it appears that at least some of the informants were preoccupied with establishing the “truthfulness” of their accounts by referring to another “authority.” by doing this, the informants most likely meant to dissuade audiences’ skepticism towards the story and its specific motifs. legends “spawned by the social-utopian illusion of the peasants, for whom the acquisition of hidden treasure represented a possible way to economic recovery” (krinichnaia, category 2), are also found in the corpus of legends analyzed in this article [krinichnaia 1987: 109]. this type comprises a number of specific motifs, for instance, “cossacks as masters of hidden treasures” and “cossacks as affluent people”: записано від чоловіка на ім’я кравець (?) [текст вперше надруковано у збірці драгоманова]: клады більш клали запорозьці: як зганяли їх відцілі ― то вони думали, шо назад вернуться ― та поклали і позаклинали. вони не як і заклинали, тікі давали обчеству присягу, шо один ніхто не може взять, а через нестільки год, на стіки той клад клався, можно кому сторонему сказать. от, кажуть, ішов запорожець та казав, шо там, де тепер нехвороща построїлась, вони повен колодязь золота самого насипали. cossack treasure in ukrainian folk legends 83 recorded from kravets (?) [first published in drahomanov’s collection]: [the treasures were mostly hidden by the zaporozhian cossacks, when the cossacks were driven from these lands. anticipating their return, the cossacks buried the treasure and put spells on it. well, they did not actually cast spells, but rather swore before their cossack brethren than no one man alone was to take it, and only in so many years could a sworn cossack be permitted to reveal the secret about the treasure to a stranger. people say that once upon a time, a cossack was passing through our village saying that where today’s nekhvoroshcha is located [probably a village located near the old cossack monastery ― r. s.], the cossacks had filled a well with gold] [dragomanov 1876: 78]. legends about cossack hidden treasure often contain a mixture of facts and rumors about cossack life. for instance, legends feature the motif of cossacks kidnapping children in ukraine in order to fill their ranks, later subjecting them to a harsh treatment, often meant to teach them a lesson of some sort. there are also stories about cossacks leaving their lands after the disbandment of their organization: записано новицьким від невідомого оповідача [текст вперше надруковано у збірці драгоманова]: за стрільчий острівок давно між людьми балачка є, що там закопані гроші. запорожці, кажуть, викопали на острівку яму, поклали туда свій скарб: талирі золоті та срібні, залізо, ружжя и де що инше; тоді взяли й засипали піском; потім взяли хлопця, літ 12, котрого украли на вкраїні, положили на тім місті, де скарб, і давай его бить лозинням. вибили добре, тай питають: ‘а що, знаєш за що бъемо?’ ― ‘не знаю,’ каже хлопья, а само плаче сердешне. запорозьці давай упъять бить хлопця. перестали і упъять питають: а що знаєш за що бъемо? ― ‘ой, татусенькі, рідненькі, їй богу не знаю,’ каже хлопець. вони его в третє давай пиріщить. кричало, кричало бідне хлопья, а далі аж охрипло. ‘годі, кажуть запорозьці,’ і давай упъять питать: ‘скажи, сучий сину, за що бъемо? як не скажеш, упъять одрепіжемо.’ ― ‘знаю,’ каже хлопья: це б то за те, щоб знав де клад заховали.’ ― ‘ну,’ кажуть запорозьці, ‘подивися ж кругом, та й іди собі з богом, може найдуться добрі люди.’ вирвалось хлопья та між людьми давай роспитувати шляху на вкраїну. чи вже довго йшло, чи не довго, а до батька допиталось. це було, кажуть, зараз після того, як січ зруйнували. годів через десятків там стіко, с киевської губернії гнав по дніпрі плоти старий дід; став він біля нашої слободи, пішов на стрільчий острівок і давай кладу шукать; шукав, шукав, нічого не знайшов, бо те місто тепер загорнуто каміннями; а дали прийшов у слободу і давай роспитувать: ‘чи ніхто грошей не відкопував.’ в слободі ніхто й не знав про гроші. давай тоді дід росказувать всю сторію, бо він був сами той, котрого запорозьці били. дід ще розказував і за приміту, де гроші. на тім боці дніпра, каже, як раз супротів острівка стрільчого, стояв колись старий, старий та товстий дуб; на дубові була гилка товста, котра як раз показувала на острівок саме на те місто, де клад. де які старі люди ще зазнають того дуба, а міні, признаться, і не взамитку; folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 84 тепер, оно бачите (указываетъ пальцомъ) як раз на тім місті виросла груша. collected by novyts’kyi from an anonymous informant [first published in drahomanov’s collection]: [there has been a lot of talk among the people that there is money hidden on the island of strilchyi. it is said that the zaporozhian cossacks dug a pit on that island and filled it with their treasure: gold and silver talers, iron [slabs?], weapons and some other items. then they had it covered with the sand. then taking a lad of some 12 years of age, whom those cossacks had kidnapped in ukraine, they put him in the very place where the treasures were hidden, and began to beat him with the tree branches. they beat him hard and then asked: “do you know, why we are beating you?” ― “no, i do not,” was the lad’s reply and the poor boy started crying. the zaporozhians gave him another beating. when they stopped beating him they asked that lad again: do you know why we are beating you? ― “no, my most benevolent loving masters, i swear to god that i do not know why,” that lad replied. the cossacks gave him yet another beating. that poor lad screamed so hard that he lost his voice. “enough is enough,” the zaporozhians said, and asked him again: “tell us, you son of a bitch, why are we beating you? tell us or we shall beat you again!” ― “i know why you are beating me,” the lad finally replied. “you are beating me so that i would remember where you hid the treasures.” ― “all right then,” the zaporozhians said, “take a look around, and go with the lord and maybe you will find some good people [to take care of you].” that lad ran away and began asking among the people for the road to ukraine. we are not sure how long he was wandering, but he found his way to his father’s place. people say that this story happened soon after the sich had been demolished. dozens of years later, an old man was taking rafts from the kyiv guberniia down the river dnipro; he stopped at our village, went to strilcha and began looking for the treasures; he was looking and looking and found nothing, because that place was covered with stones; later on he came to the village and began asking: “has anyone dug up any money?” no one in our village had any knowledge about the money. afterwards, the old man began telling the entire story, because he was that very lad whom the zaporozhians had been beating. also, that old man told us about the signs which were to help find that treasure. on the other bank of the dnipro, he said, directly opposite that island of strilchyi, used to grow a very thick and old oak-tree; it had a thick branch, which pointed at the very place where the treasures had been hidden on that island. some old people still remember where that oak-tree used to be, but, frankly speaking, i have no recollection of it; you see (he is pointing at that place with his finger) a pear-tree grew on that very spot] [dragomanov 1876: 229-230]. another motif found in the category 2 legends is the motif about the “location of a hidden treasure.” legends about the cossack treasures often include the motif of a treasure either hidden under a tree or indicated by a tree’s branches pointing to it. in the previous text collected by novyts’kyi, as well as in some other variants, this is an old oak tree(6) [dragomanov 1876: 230]. yet another popular motif, found in category 2 cossack treasure in ukrainian folk legends 85 texts and in ukrainian cossack legends, is “a treasure is hidden under a stone door (or under a boulder), pillar, etc.,” sometimes accompanied by an inscription (e.g., “dig here”)(7): записано новицьким від невідомого оповідача [текст вперше надруковано у збірці драгоманова]: …як поїли розбійники куліш, повставали, помолились богу, подякували і кажуть чабанам: отут, хлопці, шукайте гроший; тут, кажуть, на всхід сонця, біля могили, закопано грошей дуже багато: один лех з золотом, а другий з ломом. приміти, кажуть на леху, що з грішми, лежать чотирі каміня, на дверях як раз, зверх землі; на леху, де лом, нема приміти… collected by novyts’kyi from an anonymous informant [first published in drahomanov’s collection]: […after the brigands had eaten, they rose and praised the lord, expressing gratitude to the shepherds and then told them: you lads, start digging here for the money; here, on the eastern edge of the burial mound, much money was hidden: one pit is full of gold, and the other one is full of pieces of disassembled golden jewelry. the signs revealing the treasure are four big rocks above the doors, which cover a pit filled with coins; and there is no sign above the pit with the pieces of broken jewelry…] [dragomanov 1876: 228-229]. krinichnaia category 3 stories about a “treasure” which is a funerary donation to the deceased have no equivalents in cossack treasure legends. there are three possible reasons for this. first, it is possible that such texts existed, but were not found by folklore collectors or the author of this article. another reason that at least partially contradicts the previous one might be the belief, shared by christians, that the afterlife does not require placing materials, such as valuables, weapons and tools, into the grave. though actual cossacks could have been ― and some, indeed, were ― buried with valuables (e.g., crosses, rings, weapons), ukrainian storytellers might have not known about this cossack practice or might have not taken it into account, thus omitting this motif in their narratives. the third possible reason is that texts about burial donations could have merged with texts about cossacks as guardians of hidden treasures and have lost their distinctiveness. these possible reasons require further research. as for krinichnaia category 4 legends, in which the treasure is portrayed as “real,” the corpus of cossack treasure legends contains one fragment featuring memories of a person, who actually found some money. it is preceded by a legend about cossack treasures, featuring the “remarkable longevity of culture heroes” motif: folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 86 записано від якова руденького (8 серпня 1881 р.): клади ховали запорожці, ляхи і турки; тут находили гроші всяких царів. у запорожців був такий звичай. аще викопают льох, сховають гроші і питають: а хто ж їх буде стерегти? як тіко який охочий обізвався ― упхнут його в льох і замурують. і сидить козак 40 літ не пивші, не ївші, поки строк не вийде. добре ж, як пойде кому передать гроші, а як ні, то оп’ять іде в льох на 40 год. колись було страшно і ночувать на хортиці: приходе запорожець і будить: ‘ходім до мене, візьмешь гроші, вони судились тобі.’ хто послуха ― піде і останеться замурованним 40 літ, а запорожець іде собі по миру... тіко мало було охотників до таких грошей. ховали гроші і запорожці ― сидні без закляття; цих брать не страшно, і хто находив ― робився хазаіном і богатів... в вознесенці були люди, шо гляди, ні з сього, ні з того розбагатів... найбільше находили гроші в урочищі сагайдачнім і на хортиці, тіко попадались між нашими талярами турецькі і лядські, їх збували шинкарам. на своєму віку я найшов п’яні золоті, та нікому і не сказав. recorded from iakiv ruden’kyi (august 8, 1881): [treasures were hidden by the zaporozhian cossacks, the poles and the turks; people here found the money of various rulers. the zaporozhians had the following custom. when they dug a pit and hid money in there, they would ask: and who will be guarding it? as soon as a volunteer came up ― other cossacks would throw him in the pit and cover the entrance. and that cossack would spend 40 years without food or drink until his term was over. it would be great if he found somebody to pass his duty on to, and if not, then he would go back for another forty years in that crypt. there was a time when it was frightening to spend a night on the island of khortytsia: a zaporozhian cossack used to come to people and wake them up saying: “follow me and i shall give you money. this money is destined for you.” those who accepted [that offer] would go― and stay immured for forty years and the zaporozhian would wander the land… however, there were a few people who were eager for money. some money was hidden by the zaporozhians without any spells, so it was not frightening to take it. people who found that money became rich landowners… in the village of voznesenka, there were people who became rich rather unexpectedly… most of the money was found in the sahaidachnyi ravine and on the island of khortytsia, but among our thalers were coins from poland and turkey, and people were getting rid of those at the inns. long ago i found such coins, but told nobody about them] [novitskii 1997: 51]. the first part of this account deals with the “cossacks as affluent people,” “enchanted treasures” and the “remarkable longevity of culture heroes” motifs.(8) it might have been composed as a separate legend which was later combined with ruden’kyi’s personal memories of finding treasure (krinichnaia, category 2). cossack treasure in ukrainian folk legends 87 international motifs and motifs unique to cossack legends thus, we have seen that among the texts dedicated to “cossack treasures” one can find three of the four categories identified by krinichnaia and her colleagues [krinichnaia 1987: 117]. the study of cossack treasure legends also shows that they incorporate many fantastic motifs from the international repertoire. for example, the motif of a cossack as the guardian of hidden treasure echoes the following motifs: “remarkable longevity of culture heroes” (a 570), “treasure pointed out by supernatural creature” (n 538), and “captivity in the mound” (r 45) [aarne; thompson 1955a: 124; 1955b: 273], “fearless person and his friends play cards in the church” (326 e), and “the dead person worries about his treasure” (326 j). these are found in ukrainian, russian and belarusian texts [chistov 1979: 119]. on the other hand, the “remarkable longevity of culture heroes” motif found in legends about cossack treasures, is a motif unique to the development of the cossack theme in ukrainian folklore. a comparison of “cossack” folktale types and motifs with their international counterparts offers us a better picture of the application of those types/motifs as well as showing how typical or original that application might be. nevertheless, there is more to be learned from cossack legends. in fact, the composers of legends about “cossack treasures” reached a different and higher level of conceptualization regarding the very notion of “treasure,” even though this conceptualization is not always well articulated. what most likely occurred in the folk legends about ukrainian cossacks was the fusion of the idea of cossack “material treasure” with the idea of cossack “treasure of another kind.” these texts thus give rise to another original category called “cossack lifestyle as treasure” or category 6. cossacks and their descendants viewed gold, silver, land and weapons not only as a material treasure, but also as symbols of their achievements and an attribute of their lifestyle. it is projected that the same applied to the privileges which came with the cossack lifestyle, such as personal freedom and other liberties. at the time legends about cossack treasure were being collected, this concept was yet to be fully developed in folk legends. however, there is ample evidence that, by the 19th century, all of this concept’s important elements were already in place. first of all, in ukrainian folk legends about cossack treasure, this “treasure” is conceptualized as more than just precious metals. such a folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 88 conceptualization represents the first step towards this new and broader notion of “treasure”: записано від степана штепи (28 грудня 1877 р.): низче скелі вошивоі, де німецький вітряк, есть вербова балочка, вона на гору вийшла вилками, а посередені шпилик, на цьому шпиліку, кажуть, закопане запорозьке добро: золото, срібло, лом всякий, рушниці і пушки. тут, кажуть, запорожці сховали скарб тоді, як москаль такував січ. recorded from stepan shtepa (december 28, 1877): [below the vshyva cliff, where the german windmill now stands, there is the verbova ravine, which in some places creeps onto that cliff, and there is an apex on that cliff, and in the middle of that apex, people say, zaporozhian cossacks hid their treasures: gold, silver, pieces of jewelry, guns and cannons. people also say that the cossacks hid their treasures there when the russians were attacking the zaporozhian sich] [novitskii 1997: 48]. it is important to note that in this account, the treasure hidden by cossacks is described as including “guns and cannons,” the weapons of the cossacks and symbols of their special military status. these symbols, or “occupational tools,” are coupled with gold, silver and jewelry, the proceeds of raids and, perhaps, rewards received from various rulers for services provided by the cossacks. all this “material treasure” is hidden by the cossacks to deprive their enemies of a chance to acquire it. in yet another account both the hidden treasure and the land which holds it are portrayed as synonyms of “cossack treasure.” in this text cossacks first buried their treasure in their land, later returning to it to die and be buried close to their hidden treasure: записано від кузьми лупая (19 лютого 1885 р.): на хортицьким острові, біля савутіної балки, есть високий майдан: там гайдамаки сховали клад. давно, бог его зна і коли, моєму деже, під уманью на четверо коней грошей і всякого добра і стали тікать; коли ось і погоня за ними біжить. з ними був дід колдовник. шо ще стануть ляхи добігать, дід махне хусткою ― і перед ними зробиться річка. їдуть вони та й їдуть, коли опять погоня. дід вдруге махне хусткою і стане ліс, шо й голови не просунути. ляхи наткнуться ― тай назад. доїхали ті гайдамаки до дніпра ― і перевезлись на хортицю. чи довго вони жили тут, чи ні ― сховали в майдані гроші і затоптали кіньми. після зруйнування січи запорожці подалися під турка, а за ними посунули і гайдамаки. стіко, кажуть, не жило їх там, а під старість умирать сюда вертались; так вернувся і той запорожець, що оце я вам розсказую. гайдамацьких грошей, кажуть, страшно брать: вони нечисті. recorded from kuzma lupai (february 19, 1885): [on the island of khortytsia, near the ravine of savuta, there is a high clearing: the cossack treasure in ukrainian folk legends 89 haidamaky(9) hid their treasures there. long ago, god knows when, [?] they took booty near the town of uman and put money and other valuables on four horses and began to flee; and a pursuit party was closing in on them. among those brigands was an old man― a sorcerer. as soon as the poles were closing in, the old man waved his kerchief― and a river appeared before the poles. the brigands were riding and riding, again the pursuers drew near. the old man waved his kerchief again and a dense forest emerged, so dense that one could not stick his head between the trees. the poles came upon it and fell back. the haidamaky rode towards the river dnipro and crossed over to the island of khortytsia. there is no telling how long they lived there, but they hid money in the clearing and rode horses over to that site. after the demolition of the sich, the zaporozhians went under turkish protection, and the haidamaky followed them. they returned in their old age to die in their native land; and the zaporozhian cossack that i have been telling you about, returned as well. people do not dare take the haidamaky’s money: it is unclean] [novitskii 1997: 47]. in the account by klym belik, the concept of “native” land is expanded to mean cossack land and is portrayed also as christian and “sacred”: записано від клима белика [вперше надруковано кулішем у 1856-57 рр.]: козаки підъ мазепою змінили та й пішли підъ турка. турокъ давъ імъ землю и все. коли жъ умеръ козакъ, а земля й викинула; умеръ другий ― и другого викинула, третій ― викинула й // третего. такъ вони тоді: ‘эй, братці сердечниі! вернімось, бо насъ тутъ и земля не приймає.’ а царь петро вже зазиває. ‘вернітця,’ каже, ‘не буде вамъ ніякоі кари, ні упоминку.’ такъ вони й вернулись. то іхавъ разъ батько поузъ савуръ-могилу, а тамъ великі шляхи йдуть: одинъ у московщину, а другий у нашу сторону. то міжъ тими шляхами, коло тиі савуръ-могили камінь великий лежить. а зъ нимъ ходивъ тоді на дінъ василь куценко, письменний. такъ батько каже: ‘иди, лишъ, василю, прочитай, що на тімъ камені написано.’ а той пішовъ та й прочитавъ: ‘проклятъ, проклятъ, проклятъ, хто буде одъ запорозцівъ одбірать землю, поки світъ сонця!’ государь таке закляттє положивъ. recorded from klym belik [first published by kulish in 1856-57]: [during the reign of hetman ivan mazepa the cossacks betrayed the russian tsar and took refuge under turkish rule. the turks allotted them land and everything needed to settle in a new land. when a cossack died, the land would not take him; when a second one died― the land would not take him, too, and the third one as well. so, the cossacks said: “o, dear brethren! let us return to christian land for here the pagan land does not accept us in peace.” and peter the tsar started calling them: “come back,” he said, “and you will suffer neither punishment nor mention of your guilt.” so, they returned. once my father was riding near the tomb of savur and over there great highways folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 90 stretch before you: one leads to the muscovite land, and the other one leads to our land. so, between those highways lies a huge piece of rock. and in his trip to the don [cossack land,] my father had a companion who could read, vasyl kutsenko. so, my father told him: “vasyl, go and read to me what is written on that rock.” vasyl did as he was told and read the following: “damned, damned, damned will be the one, who plots to take the land from the cossacks as long as the sun shines there!” a sovereign placed this spell [on the cossack land]…] [kulish 1994 (1856-57): 156-157]. motifs such as “land as treasure” and “cossack privileges as treasure” are widespread in ukrainian folk legends about cossacks. this fact supports the notion of “cossack treasure” in folklore as more complex than references to “hidden material treasure” in international folklore, as illustrated by krinichnaia’s typology. indeed, legends about cossacks include references to cossack lands, cossack liberties, and other privileges, portraying these as “treasure” in their own right. for example, in an account by dmytro bykovs’kyi there are references regarding cossacks living on formerly desolate lands and then reclaiming land from the turks by military force: записано від дмитра биковського (12 червня 1894 р.): ...стала ходити чутка, що живуть десь запорожці ― таке військо, що й не приступиш. орудував ними кошовий-характерник. земля тоді була дикою, кишів звір, гад та птиця. жили так запорожці, поки одвоювали у турка землю: од орілі та до моря шириною, од бога-річки та до “горілого пня” довжиною… recorded from dmytro bykovs’kyi (june 12, 1894): […the rumors spread that somewhere there lived zaporozhians ― an army that could not be overwhelmed. they were led by a chieftain, who himself was a kharakternyk.(10) back then the land was unattended, abundant in beasts, serpents and birds. the zaporozhians had been living over there before they reclaimed the following lands from the turks: from the river of oril down to the sea in width, and from the river of boh to the “burnt trunk” in length…] [novitskii 1991: 87-88]. what i find very important in this text is that the oral tradition preserved the exact borders of the old cossack lands, long annexed by the russian imperial government. in yet another account by bykovs’kyi, the informant described how once upon a time the humbled tsar had issued the document which proved land ownership by the cossacks: “…he (the tsar ― r. s.) gave the requested document to the cossacks which defined the boundaries of the cossack land as one hundred miles cossack treasure in ukrainian folk legends 91 above and one hundred miles below the rapids…”[novitskii 1991: 8889]. the next account comes from osyp shut’ who establishes a connection between “land” and “freedom”: записано від йосипа шутя (14 вересня 1888 р.): …спершу запорожці звалися киями, і не тут жили, а десь у лісах, під києвом. киями звалися від того, що ходили на розбій з кийками. якийсь, кажуть, князь амлин чи що, став забирати їх в своє військо і сказав: ‘як поможете мені перемогти турка ― дам вам степи, балки, байраки і весь низ дніпра: будете жити вільно.’ зібралися вони всі, скільки було, і звоювали турка. амлин тоді дав їм дніпро і степ нижче порогів, і стали вони запорожцями. було в них сорок куренів і сорок тисяч війська, та катерина зігнала і віддала землю німцям... recorded from osyp shut’ (september 14, 1888): […from the outset, zaporozhians had been known as kyyi and did not live here, but somewhere in the woods near kyiv. they were called kyyi because they committed acts of robbery armed with wooden poles (kyi). people say that some prince amlin, or something, began to call them to join his army and told them: “if you assist me in overcoming the turks ― then i shall give you the steppes, ravines and woods and the entire land in the low waters of the dnipro: you will live as free men over there.” so, they assembled everybody they could and overwhelmed the turks on the battlefield. upon this victory, amlin gave them dnipro and steppe below the rapids and they became known as zaporozhians. they had forty regiments and a forty thousand-strong army, but tsarina kateryna chased them away and gave away their lands to the germans…] [novitskii 1991: 89-90]. it is likely that this account establishes parity between the notions of landownership and personal freedom and proves that the informants may indeed have viewed it as a significant element in the cossack system of values. similar to material treasure of another kind (gold, silver and the like), land and personal freedom could be achieved in battle, but could also be lost under various precarious circumstances, e.g., war and betrayal. it is interesting that this account makes reference to a historical precedent, the liquidation of the cossack host during the reign of catherine ii of russia. it is possible to affirm with a great degree of certainty that, besides the classic types and “treasure” motifs found in international folklore, folk prose about ukrainian cossacks introduces an original “lifestyle as a treasure” motif category. there is considerable scholarly potential for studying this topic further since it occupies an important place in ukrainian folklore and potentially holds a key to the people’s mentality and their value system. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 92 in conclusion, informants and their audience who lived on old cossack lands continued taking an interest in the cossacks. they perceived them as brave, freedom-loving, rich, enigmatic people and even sorcerers. these views took the form, in part, of treasure legends. even though certain types and motifs found in these ukrainian treasure legends are similar to the types and motifs in international folk legends, there are also original plots and ideas, related to how ukrainians must have perceived cossack life. particularly notable are the original “remarkable longevity of culture heroes” and “treasure of another kind” tale types and motifs. these appear to be unique to the “cossack treasure” legends. the cossacks’ supernatural powers are underscored by motifs of enchantment and immortality, introduced in the legends. the question of whether those cossack features were held to be true remains open. however, those features were likely not perceived as absolutely improbable. the fact that “historical” cossacks were entitled to various privileges for their service finds its reflection in ukrainian folk legends as well. the ideas of cossack service to the honorable cause of defending the land from enemies or service to a ruler and reward for their service merge into an important theme, frequently overshadowing other topics. as for the cossack “treasure of other kind” motif, it goes far beyond the notion of treasure in its simple sense, meaning something material and with monetary value. according to the idea conveyed by folk legends, the notion of “cossack treasure” includes not only proceeds from their raids and rewards from rulers (money, weapons and even land ownership), but also the privilege of free living and honorable service. in my opinion, this is representative of how people in 19th century ukraine tended to view cossacks and their treasure. notes 1 the zaporozhian cossack host (військо запорозьке низове) was the original base of this rebellion. its main encampment and administrative center was known as “zaporoz’ka sich” (запорозька січ). see subtelny, orest and vytanovych, ivan. 1984. “cossacks,” encyclopedia of ukraine, ed. by volodymyr kubijovyč. toronto/buffalo/london: university of toronto press. v. 1, pp. 593-594. cossack treasure in ukrainian folk legends 93 2 for example, in 1753 cossacks received 4,660 silver rubles as an allowance for military service from moscow; in 1773 cossacks received 7,415 silver rubles worth in copper coins from the same source. see evarnitskii, 1990[1892]. история запорожских казаков [the history of zaporozhian cossacks]. спб: тип. скороходова; перевид. київ: наукова думка. t. 1, pp. 446-447. considerable amounts of money were also obtained through military raids (however, the number of those raids dropped significantly during the last decades of the cossack host’s existence), and trade and taxation of non-cossack subjects of the host. see дмитрий эварницкий, история запорожских казаков, t. 1, pp. 391-393, 411-427. 3 in some cases, i identify a “tale type” by its central motif, indicating that this particular motif also gives the “tale type” its name. for instance, “remarkable longevity of culture heroes” can be a folklore motif; however, once it is found in a number of texts with a similar plot, i assign those texts to a “remarkable longevity of culture heroes” tale type. 4 regarding the motif “culture hero still lives” (a 570) see aarnethompson, motif-index, v. 1, p. 124. 5 also, see the motifs “captivity in the mound” (r 45) and “treasure pointed out by supernatural creature” (n 538) in aarnethompson, motif-index, v. 5, pp. 113, 273. 6 for instance, in yet another variant collected by iakiv novyts’kyi and published in drahomanov’s collection (1876), the following description of a hiding place is given: “on [the island of] khortytsia, near the ravine of shantseva, there is a red oak which is tall and has many branches; it is by far the oldest and the thickest [oak tree around]… [people] say that there are zaporozhian [cossacks’] treasures hidden beneath this oak tree.” 7 for this motif’s use in international folklore see the motif n 535 in aarne-thompson, motif-index, v. 5, 115. also see неонила криничная, русская народная историческаз проза, pp. 111-112. 8 see the types 650-699 “supernatural power or knowledge” in the types of folktale. a classification and bibliography. antti aarne’s verzeichnis der märchentypen (ff communications № 3), trans. and enlarged by stith thompson, 2nd ed. helsinki: suomalainen tiedakatemia academia scientiarum fennica, 1961, pp. 225-239. for the “remarkable longevity of culture heroes” see the motif a 564 in aarnethompson, motif-index, v. 1, p. 124. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 94 9 haidamaky were brigands and freedom-fighters in the 18thcentury central and southern ukraine, persecuted by both polish and russian authorities. haidamaky were often associated with cossacks both in history and folklore. 10 kharakternyk (характерник) is sometimes translated as “sorcerer” (чаклун, чарівник). see “характерник,” словник української мови [a dictionary of ukrainian language], ред. с. головащук. київ: наукова думка, 1980. in this work i expand the meaning of this term to the “invincible warrior-sorcerer,” considering other roles/actions performed typically by kharakternyk in ukrainian legends. bibliography aarne, antii and thompson, stith. 1955a. motif-index of folkliterature. a classification of narrative elements in folklore ballads, myths, fables, mediaeval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books and local legends. revised and enlarged, ed. stith thompson. bloomington: indiana up. vol. 1. aarne, antii and thompson, stith. 1955b. motif-index of folkliterature. a classification of narrative elements in folklore ballads, myths, fables, mediaeval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books and local legends. revised and enlarged, ed. stith thompson. bloomington: indiana up. vol. 5. apo, satu. 1997a. “motif,” folklore: an encyclopedia of beliefs, customs, tales, music, and art, ed. thomas a. green. santa barbara: abc-clio, 2: 563-564. apo, satu. 1997b. “tale type,” folklore: an encyclopedia of beliefs, customs, tales, music, and art, ed. by thomas a. green. santa barbara: abc-clio, 2: 785-787. chistov, k.v. 1979. чистов, к.в. (ред.). сравнительный указатель сюжетов. восточнославянская сказка [the comparative index of types of east-slavic tale]. ленинград: ан ссср. chubinskii, pavel. 1878. чубинский, павел. труды этнографическостатистической экспедиции в западно-русский край. материалы и исследования [the records of ethnographic expedition to western russia]. санкт-петербург t. 2. dashkevych, volodymyr. 1991. дашкевич, володимир. до питання про заложних тварин в уявленнях українського народу [on the cossack treasure in ukrainian folk legends 95 issue of guardian animals in the beliefs of ukrainian people], українці: народні вірування, повір’я, демонологія [ukrainians: [their] folk beliefs, popular beliefs, demonology]. київ: либідь. dégh, linda. 1997. “legend,” folklore. an encyclopedia of beliefs, customs, tales, music, and art, ed. thomas a. green. santa barbara, denver, oxford: abc-clio, 2: 485-493. dragomanov, mikhail. 1876. драгоманов, михаил. малороссийские народные предания и рассказы [folk legends and stories of little rus’]. кіев: изд.-во юго-западного отдела імператорского русского географического общества. efimenko, petr. 1882. ефименко, петр. “откуда взялись запорожцы” [the origins of zaporozhian cossacks], киевская старина 12: 582-593. evarnitskii, dmitrii. 1883. эварницкий, дмитрий. “жизнь запорожских казаков по рассказу очевидца” [the life of zaporozhian cossacks according to an eyewitness], киевская старина 11: 497-519. evarnitskii, dmitrii. 1886. “жизнь запорожских казаков по рассказу очевидца” [the life of zaporozhian cossacks according to an eyewitness], киевская старина 7: 520-536. evarnitskii, dmitrii. 1995[1888]. запорожье в остатках старины и преданиях народа [remaining antiquities and folk memory related to zaporozh’e]. санкт-петербург: изд.-е л.ф. пантелеева; перевид. київ: веселка. чч. i, ii. evarnitskii, dmitrii. 1990[1892]. история запорожских казаков [the history of zaporozhian cossacks]. санкт-петербург: тип. скороходова; перевид. київ: наукова думка. t. 1. holovashchuk, s. 1980. головащук, с. (ред.). словник української мови [a dictionary of ukrainian language]. київ: наукова думка. kolessa, filiaret. 1940. колесса, філярет. історія української етнографії [the history of ukrainian ethnography]. [manuscript], bohdan medwidsky folklore archive: 2002.061, university of alberta (edmonton). krinichnaia, neonila. 1987. криничная, неонила. русская народная историческая проза: вопросы генезиса и структуры [russian historical folk prose: issues of its genesis and structure]. ленинград: наука. kulish, panteleimon. 1994[1856-57]. кулиш, пантелеймон. записки о южной руси [notes about southern rus’]. санкт-петербург: в тип. александра якобсона; перевид. київ: дніпро. в 2 томах. folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 96 manzhura, i. i. 1890. манжура, и. и. “сказки, пословицы и т.п., записанные в екатеринославской губернии и.и. манжурою” [tales, proverbs and other texts recorded in ekaterinoslav guberniia by i. i. manzhura], сборник харьковского филологического общества. материалы для истории колонизации и быта харьковской и отчасти курской и воронежской губернии. харьков: тип. к.п. счасни. martynovych, porfirii. 1906. мартинович, порфирій. українські записи [ukrainian records]. киев: тип. императорского университета св. владимира. novitskii, iakov. 1885. новицкий, яков. “из народных преданий о запорожцах ” [from folk stories about zaporozhian cossacks], киевская старина 10: 350-353. novitskii, iakov. 1991. народна пам’ять про козацтво [cossacks in folk memory]. zaporizhzhia: інтербук. novitskii, iakov. 1997. остров хортица на днепре, его природа, история, древности [the island of khortytsia on the dnipro: its nature, history and antiquities]. запоріжжя: тандем-у. okinshevych, lev and zhukovsky, alexander. 1988. “hetman state or hetmanate (hetmanshchyna),” encyclopedia of ukraine, ed. by volodymyr kubijovyč. toronto/buffalo/london: university of toronto press, 2: 145 147. pypin, aleksandr. 1891. пыпин, александр. история русской этнографии [the history of russian ethnography]. санктпетербург t. 3. shiyan, roman i. 2006a. cossack motifs in ukrainian folk legends. ph.d. diss., university of alberta. shiyan, roman i. 2006b. “nineteenth-century collectors of ukrainian folk legends: their views, objectives, methods and their informants,” folklorica. journal of the slavic and east european folklore association xi: 1-15. subtelny, orest and vytanovych, ivan. 1984. “cossacks,” encyclopedia of ukraine, ed. by volodymyr kubijovyč. toronto/buffalo/london: university of toronto press, 1: 593-594. thompson, stith. 1961. the types of folktale. a classification and bibliography. antti aarne’s verzeichnis der märchentypen (ff communications № 3). helsinki: suomalainen tiedakatemia academia scientiarum fennica. anthology of russian oral epics james bailey sometime in the spring of 1998 the anthology of russian oral epics translated by james bailey and tatyana ivanova will be published by m. e. sharpe as part of the series "folklores and folk cultures of eastern europe." the anthology consists of a general introduction to the russian epic, translations of thirty songs, a glossary, and a bibliography of select­ ed studies in english and russian. an introduction to each song surveys interpretations, summarizes the details of the plot as it appears in different variants, and explains references and allusions. for the most part songs not translated previously have been included so as to add to the variants available to an english reader. examples of all subgenres of russian epics have been selected: heroic epics, bylina. nov­ ella, dukhovnye stikhi. fabliaux, and skomoroshina or satirical songs such as the nebylitsa. two historical songs and one ballad have also been translated so as to contrast these genres with the epics and also to show the breadth of the singers' repertory. the texts have been taken from most major collections and chronologically cover the recording of russian epics from the middle of the eighteenth century (kirsha danilov) to the 1950s and 1960s when the tradition was dying out. what v. m. gatsak calls a "folklorizing translation" has been provided, that is, an effort has been made to maintain the repetitions so characteristic of oral poetry as far as possible in english. the identity of the lines has also been preserved so as to convey a sense of poetry and of parallelism. no attempt has been made to duplicate the rhythm of the original but the translations have 41 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 been made rhythmical in english without any metrical regularity. the anthology is intended for courses on russian folklore, for folklore courses on epics, and as an introduction to the russian epic for folklorists in other traditions. review: zivjeti s nadnaravnim bieima reviews folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 53 šešo, luka. živjeti s nadnaravnim bićima: vukodlaci, vile i vještice hrvatskih tradicijskih vjerovanja. [living with supernatural beings: the vampires, vilas and witches of traditional croatian belief]. zagreb: jesenski i turk, 2016. bibliography. 295 pp. 129 kn [$18.73] (paper). isbn: 978-953-222-777-2. the last two decades have seen a striking number of competent, provocative and erudite publications produced by the cadre of croatian scholars connected to the institute for ethnology and folklore and the department of ethnology at the croatian academy of arts and sciences. this wealth of material speaks to a renaissance of public interest in local traditions and folklore as well as the attention being paid by these scholars to updating the models used to explore them. a former member of both institutions, dr. luka šešo has recently expanded upon and reworked his doctoral dissertation into a strong monograph. based on periodic field research conducted in multiple regions of interior dalmatia between 2003 and 2009, šešo’s research is a much-needed return to the question of the role of supernatural beings in society. though much of the tale-telling traditions in the region are moribund, šešo has connected with a number of informants and taletellers who recollect a wide range of materials as well as varying degrees of believers who still actively engage with the traditions. not only is the book an important update on the status of extant tales and the ways in which they have been remodeled in the 21st century, but the argument also follows a clean functionalist approach that presents solid results. in short, the author seeks to illuminate the role that belief in supernatural beings holds for individuals and wider groups (10, 134-5), especially with regard to the seeming dissonance of such beliefs being held by citizens of a modern nation and member state of the european union (89). most importantly, šešo takes a note from anthropologists and folklorists such as julie cruikshank, charles briggs, willem de blécourt and others, in foregrounding the interaction between scholar and informant and drawing his correspondents into the work itself. thus the book is well laden with the author’s interlocutors and their opinions and insights on why they or others (past and present) believe in the existence of supernatural beings. while some of these insights stem from modern interpretation (particularly the responses of one crucial informant who draws his conclusions from the insights he gained reading carlos castaneda and erich von däniken [158]), šešo and his interlocutors provide interpretations that suggest continuities with the past and the longue durée cultural functions of belief in supernatural beings that obtained in the memorates, fabulates, and tales documented in the earliest folklore collections from the regions. their discussion about the connection between supernatural beings and large-scale trauma (22330) and the use of supernatural scares as covers for thievery (230-6) hearken back to similar comments made by veselin čajkanović in the 1920s, while the narrative of an informant who claims to have been abducted by vile as a child (238-43) is highly informative and enlightening of older materials. folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 54 šešo begins his book with a general overview of the most common supernatural beings in local dalmatian traditions: vila, vukodlak, mòra, and vještica, as well as a brief explanation of some lesser known beings: vrimenjaci, višćaci, negromanti, orko, and macić. the material here is drawn from a range of scholarly works (maja bošković-stulli is, of course, ever present) but primarily from the zbornik za narodni život i običaje južnih slavena [review on folk life and customs of the south slavs] as well as the archives for the journal housed in the croatian academy of arts and sciences. having worked at the archive for years, šešo is well acquainted with the material and has gathered a strong collection of examples to illustrate the general understanding of these beings and the forms that their traditions took 100 to 150 years ago. chapter 2 presents an overview of theoretical paradigms used widely in europe for the analysis of supernatural beings, starting with grimm and working its way through frazer, evans pritchard, eliade (who has held a more lasting sway in the folkloristics and mythology of bcms regions than in america), and carlo ginzburg, and ending on the work of hungarian scholars éva pócs and gábor klaniczay. the chapter concludes by running a similar tour through the specific context of croatian scholars, from antun radić and his project with the zbnžo through to bošković-stulli. the material and theories presented focus heavily on research into witchcraft, to the detriment of the other beings in šešo’s research, but the overview is competent and theoretically inclusive despite this. moreover, this lacuna speaks to the scarcity of studies such as this that explore the anthropological implications of supernatural beings beyond the easy and oft-tread territory of witchcraft. this overview carries into the third chapter which outlines some contemporary research into the role of supernatural beings as well as the circumstances that prompted the author’s foray into the dalmatian hinterland. chapter 4 presents classificatory types of interlocutor responses as a method of analysis. responses are categorized as: those unfamiliar with traditional beliefs (148); potential interlocutors reserved due to skepticism (150); responses with strong auto-censure and rationalization stemming from ethno-political problems (153); ‘traditionalists’ (those who give thorough descriptions and accounts of supernatural beings, their doings and encounters with them, but add caveats of disbelief, doubt or suspicion onto their accounts) (159); and responses of personal belief in supernatural beings (161). chapter 5 suggests a number of insightful theories regarding the functional roles of tale telling about and belief in supernatural beings. these sections are the bulk of the study and are well presented, clear, concise and replete with anecdotal material and reported speech from informants that provide useful data to the analysis as well as being a joy to read. the author’s strength here is his ability to weave his interpretations through those of his interlocutors, providing competent conclusions through coproduction and dialogue. the final chapter offers some thoughts on the shifting role of and responses to supernatural tales in the region as well as some rumination on the complex connection between and interwoven nature of religious belief and belief in the supernatural among informants. reviews folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 55 dr. šešo’s book is an indispensable study that directly tackles a question which is so often skirted, avoided or half-answered in other, similar works. the methods by which the author groups and analyzes types of response and levels of engagement with oral traditions and beliefs could well serve scholars dealing with similar materials in other regions. the book is never heady, but reads clearly and the seamless blending of theory and material, of author and interlocutor, keeps the work engaging throughout. the book itself is a nicely bound and well-sized edition. the soft back pressing by jesenski i turk follows a tradition of publishers in the region in their dedication to producing affordable prints of academic works. it is a commendable effort and a credit to them. dorian jurić mcmaster university hamilton, canada untitled reviews 197 worobec, christine d. possessed: women, witches, and demons in imperial russia. dekalb, il.: northern illinois university press, 2003. notes. bibliography. index. xv+288. paper. isbn 0-87580-598-1. $38.00 (cloth) $23.00 (paper). several years after its appearance in 2001, worobec’s monograph still remains a solid multidisciplinary study on a problem that russian authorities, both church and secular, have struggled with for centuries. klikushi, or shriekers, were mostly women who believed they were victims of black magic, possessed by evil beings who made them convulse, shriek in non-human voices, and do other abnormal things in the presence of holy objects. klikushestvo was a widespread phenomenon and at times mass epidemics occurred. the author study is wide-ranging. she looks at the perception of the phenomenon of klikushestvo among various strata of russian society, as well as the culture of klikushestvo itself over the span of several centuries, from the 16-17th centuries when it became commonplace till the 1930s when it was repressed – but not rooted out – by soviet policies. worobec builds her arguments on 260 individual cases of klikushi and 80 published cases of witchcraft in the countryside. these are drawn from religious, psychiatric, legal, and ethnographic sources. a captivating picture emerges of the russian peasantry, the orthodox church, and civil authorities and the interrelations between all three. chapter one, state and church perspectives, describes how the church and the state joined forces against all forms of superstitions for the sake of the state's advancement. in the 18th century this impacted klikushestvo in the form of imperial decrees and senate decisions. klikushestvo was, on the one hand, persecuted by civil authorities as a crime while, on the other, the church defended it as a true spiritual illness, as real as miraculous healings. although secular commissions helped to investigate both miraculous healings and epidemics of possession, the church could not accept their materialistic view of the impossibility of such phenomena and emphasized the devil’s dangerous role in a secular society. while initially men as well as women were known to become klikushi, demon possession was gradually feminized and sexualized. chapter two, peasant views, presents how the mostly uneducated peasant masses in the empire subscribed to the idea of klikushi and believed in hexing by witches and in the contagious nature of possession. the author portrays the liminal status of those who were possessed and folklorica 2008, vol. xiii 198 explains why klikushi were almost not known in the ukrainian setting. the author also investigates the close relationship between klikushestvo and witchcraft beliefs and practices, arguing that a possessed was the “counterimage to the rural witch and sorcerer” (p. 66). in this chapter the reader also learns how klikushi tried to rid themselves of possession by traveling to holy places and by submitting to exorcism rituals. chapter three, literary and ethnographic portrayals, is an analysis of how intellectuals perceived klikushestvo and witchcraft beliefs. russian writers and composers like dostoevsky, gogol, leskov, tolstoy, and mussorgskii and ethnographers like pryzhov, and many others formed the public attitude towards the phenomenon through their artistic and scholarly works. despite holding varying attitudes towards orthodoxy and institutionalized religion, these men were very sympathetic to the possessed and blamed serfdom and the patriarchal brutality of the village for its existence. the romanticized images they produced elevated peasant women in the eyes of educated society and presented klikushi as a metaphor of sorts for suffering mother russia. chapter four, psychiatric diagnosis, provides a complicated picture of how russian psychiatrists, from the middle of the 19th century onwards, tried to solve the problem of klikushestvo. armed with positivism and medical knowledge, they viewed klikushestvo as a symbol of russian backwardness and they vigorously sought to civilize the peasantry. their goal was to first explain etiology of the phenomenon and then to root it out. linking klikushestvo first to mental illness, then to somnambulism, hysteria, and sexual pathology, russian psychiatrists like bekhterev, iakobii, krainskii, suponev and others supported or rejected various medical theories. while their medical opinions differed, they invariably contested the church’s claim to klikushestvo as its privileged field of expertise. chapter five, sorting through multiple realities, is a conclusion showing how the history of views on the phenomenon of klikushestvo finally led to seeing it as a sociocultural drama with its own actors and audience. each party in this drama gained something from its enactment and thus contributed to its persistence. the author explains why certain contemporary diagnoses would not fit the phenomenon, which existed in a specific cultural and religious context, and which remains an enigma for the rational mind. in her book, worobec beautifully describes the history of klikushestvo viewing it as a battlefield where different agents – the church, state courts, and medical specialists – sought to gain power over reviews 199 (chiefly) peasant female bodies and minds and to make them ‘normal’ and obedient. the author’s feministic approach is understandable but misogyny seems to be a too strong contemporary notion applied to the context where church itself preached subordinate position of women and where any deviant person would be feared and punished by both men and women. despite the fascinating analysis and wealth of data in the possessed, the reader unfortunately does not hear the subaltern voices of the klikushi themselves: the author mostly makes assumptions and conclusions on their behalf. worobec points out that klikushestvo was a russian phenomenon unknown in ukraine. she suggests though that it was not absent in ukraine. rather, nationalistically oriented ukrainian ethnographers kept silent about such cases in an attempt to perpetuate a myth of spiritual health of the ukrainians, contrasting it to russian ill health (p. 68). she then draws her examples of witchcraft beliefs and practices from rich ukrainian ethnographic sources. my own research on ukrainian beliefs about death and the afterlife shows that ethnographers did not whitewash their data. ukrainian ethnographic sources contain numerous case studies of adultery, homicide, infanticide, and incest. while clearly separating ukrainian and russian contexts, the author, however, provides russian transliteration of ukrainian personal and place names: khar’kov (p.89), vladimir hnatiuk (p. 93); kievan churches (p. 131). finally, the author mentions that klikushestvo is by no means a phenomenon of the past: it still exists in today’s russia. that being the case, it is not clear then why the author stops at the 1930s. yet maybe linking the past to the present of this captivating phenomenon is just a matter of time… svitlana p. kukharenko university of alberta edmonton alberta canada folklorica 2008, vol. xiii folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii editor's note folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii iii editor’s note 2019 5e 2019 edition of folklorica marks our transition to an all-online format. we are pleased to offer greater access to the journal across the globe, as befits seefa’s mission. jim bailey, the first president of seefa, exemplified this trait. 5e tributes that followed his passing this year highlighted his collaborations with folklorists during the cold war and beyond it. in his honor, seefa has established the james o. bailey travel award to support student travel to the aseees annual conference. 5is journal is the result of jim’s vision, and we are grateful for his support of our discipline and for his profound contributions on russian folk poetry. 5is volume is being produced in the context of a global pandemic and protests for justice across the world in response to the black lives matter movement in the united states and the disputed belarusian elections, to name just two examples. 5ese timely articles reveal the role that folklorists can play in elucidating the view of the “other,” namely minorities within a state. dorian juric explores historical texts by croatian ethnographers studying the coffee culture of fellow muslim citizens. while the authors had a genuine affection for the foodways under consideration, they approached the question from their own nationalist lens. jake zawlacki considers the adaptation of a traditional kazakh folktale into a seminal animated film during the soviet period. 5is film, he argues, helped to establish an idealized version of historical kazakh ethnic identity that persists today, decades after the fall of the soviet union. 5e power of the kazakh and croatian examples to define and yet to restrict the conception of ethnic identity reveals the importance of folklore scholarship. 5ese remind us of our obligation to the folk in a fraught cultural moment across the globe: to convey the world through their eyes, not our own. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby, editor folklorica_7f vashchenko, alexander and claude clayton smith, editor and translator, with a foreword by n. scott momaday. the way of kinship: an anthology of native siberian literature (first peoples, new directions in indigenous studies). minneapolis and london: university of minnesota press, 2010. map. suggestions for further reading. xxiii + 250. $19.95 (paper). ibsn 978-0-81667081-9. this anthology of native siberian literature is the result of twenty years of cooperative planning by the people involved in its creation. they are alexander vashchenko, who chairs the department of comparative literature and culture at moscow state university; claude clayton smith, professor emeritus at ohio northern university; and n. scott momaday, the well-known native american writer and 1969 pulitzer prize winner for his novel, house made of dawn. the reader is taken on a journey through uncharted territory that both broadens his/her knowledge of indigenous peoples and preserves in print information concerning their disappearing traditions. in his “foreword,” momaday argues that indigenous peoples everywhere are being robbed of their traditions (xi). the “introduction” by alexander vaschenko gives a brief sketch of tsarist and soviet influences on the native peoples of siberia. history is fraught with a clash of worldviews and the resultant abuses perpetrated on indigenous siberians. underlying the poetry, art, and prose of the native writers and artists represented in the anthology is the idea, even the ideal, of familial, tribal, and universal kinship. the editors offer the way of kinship for use in courses in crosscultural and ethnic studies (xxiii). the volume is framed by an “evenk invocation for good fortune.” “to nature when the earth turns green,” in which the evenk request nourishment, is placed at the beginning of the volume, and “to nature, when the green recedes,” in which the evenk thank mother nature for the autumn bounty, closes the anthology. writers represented come from hunting, fishing, and reindeer tending cultures. the destruction of native livelihood and the native way of life through the industrial rape of the land, which is driven by greed, is a major theme. at times the theme has political overtones, as it does in the works of khanty yeremei apin, who has supported khanty interests in the writer’s union, of which he is a member. in “the earth’s pain,” a mother teaches her son that if he hurts the earth, he must heal her wound immediately because without earth there is no life. khanty poet and storyteller maria vagatova echoes apin’s complaint in a poem titled “dirge for the land of the khanty,” in which mother earth wails and there is nowhere for the khanty to go. in apin’s “selections from morning twilight: a novel of the khanty,” the author laments the destruction of villages, deer, and the food supply by oilmen who exploit the land and leave it in ruins. apin’s bleak picture is softened by the humor of taiga nenets yuri vaella, who relates the story of two old men, a nenets and a khanty, who are so absorbed in their storytelling that they loop around a river several times in their boat, making no progress. in his poetry, however, vaella ruminates over his “lost people” (83). in “news from vatyegan camp,” he tells about an old man who fell through the ice into an oil spill with his reindeer. the reindeer died, and the old man went blind. the persecution of shamans, native religious leaders, and well-to-do native people is chronicled by apin in a fragment from morning twilight. a government official nicknamed bloody eye, believing that a local shaman is hoarding gold, threatens his family until the shaman commits suicide. evenk galina keptuke illustrates the cleverness of a persecuted shaman in “a discovery” from her novella, on the banks of the jeltula. the shaman sodorchan is imprisoned by the official whose life he once saved. in addition, even after his drum is taken away several times in a sack, mysteriously the sack always is empty when it reaches headquarters. tundra nenets anna nerkagi, collector of yamal peninsula folklore, is represented by a fragment from her apocalyptic novel, the horde. she paints a picture of a bleak future for indigenous siberians, whose souls have “begun to rot inside” because they have abandoned tradition for greed (202). negatives are the loss of what she refers to as deer brother, imprisonment in houses she calls coffins, a life of slavery, and the death of nature. she foresees the final debacle. the damage done by the outside world is recorded in galina keptuke’s story, “little america,” the saga of a woman who married a ukrainian man and returns home after he abandons her for another woman to a village of drunken people who have no work or purpose in life. in a letter of appeal to the government, titled “and so dies my clan,” apin writes of tribal lands decimated by oilmen who have polluted, stolen, and even plundered graves. he writes of alcoholism, domestic violence, and drugs that now plague the native people. he complains that their children have forgotten traditions and are without training to cope with the modern world. in a desperate cry for the preservation of their identity, he asks that the native lands be designated national parks. other selections illustrate the traditions and rituals of native peoples and chronicle the challenges to those traditions and rituals. in morning twilight apin’s character, demyan, explains the ritual of the sacred dance and bear feast. khanty poet and folklorist leonty taragupta is restoring the bear feast epic, fragments of which are included in the anthology. the khanty artists, nadezhda taligina and gennady raishev, display their traditions in a favorable light, taligina through her transparent figures that portray spiritual ideals and raishev through his prints in praise of khanty traditions. yukaghir gennady dyachkov highlights generational conflict in his play “the hunter’s son.” nivkh vladimir sangi addresses a boy’s pride in shooting his first duck for his starving family in “my first shot.” the famous pioneering chukchee writer yuri rytkheu is represented by his short story titled “kakot’s numbers” (1970), in which kakot, a native cook taken on by roald amundsen, becomes so obsessed and befuddled by numbers and their philosophical implications that he finally gives up contemplating them to return to his simple native ways. both udegeh jansi kimoko and evenk galina keptuke make attempts to explain the meaning of their traditions to readers. kimoko’s fragment from the unfinished novel where the sukpai rushes along praises the beauty of the sukpai river and surroundings. kimoko never finished his novel because he was killed by a bear. galina keptuke undertakes a recounting of the procedure for accepting one’s destiny to become a storyteller in “the unexpected guest.” the family in question is guided by nature in this and in all matters. the narrator’s father is visited by a goose, the father’s spirit helper. the man’s search for the path to his destiny results in behavior seen as irrational by western standards and referred to as “the circling illness” (118). when he returns from his spiritual odyssey, the narrator’s father accepts his destiny and becomes a storyteller. at the end of the volume, claude clayton smith offers “a note on translation.” “acknowledgments” and “suggestions for further reading” also are found here. the knowledge obtained within the pages of this anthology is much more than academic. the collection features a universal appeal for maintenance of innocence and for the preservation of tried and true values and traditions. it also sounds a warning with regard to the dire consequences of ignoring and/or destroying native traditions and beliefs. bonnie marshall retired professor of russian new hampshire historical society concord, new hampshire united states microsoft word folklorica_2011g.doc storozhenko’s tale about the devil in love folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 117 folklorism in ukrainian gotho-romantic prose: oleksa storozhenko’s tale about the devil in love (1861) (1) svitlana krys modern languages and cultural studies university of alberta edmonton, alberta, canada abstract oleksa storozhenko’s (1806-1874) long story “закоханий чорт” [devil in love] (1861) reveals close parallels to the eponymous novella of the french gothic author, jacques cazotte (1719-1792; le diable amoureux [the devil in love, 1772]). however, literary criticism left this connection uncommented on and emphasized only the folklore of storozhenko’s work. this article aims to examine whether storozhenko was indeed inspired by folklore alone, which would make his connection to cazotte’s narrative coincidental. i will subject the folkloric stratum in his tale to in-depth analysis, utilizing a combination of motif (thompson), tale type (aarne, thompson, and uther), and structural (propp) methods for the assessment and classification of oral narrative. while my study shows that storozhenko’s tale does invoke the universal folkloric motif of love between a mortal and the devil and adheres to propp’s structure of a typical folktale, the application of the atu index does not return any folktale type that could serve as a model for the ‘devil in love’ narrative. moreover, a few collections of ukrainian folktales that i consulted also do not have a specific tale that would at least remotely remind us of storozhenko. thus, my findings show that storozhenko’s tale merely exudes a folkloric allure, which must have prevented the scholars from searching for its antecedents beyond strictly oral tradition. but the fact that storozhenko selected folktale motifs that resemble cazotte’s and stylized them in a similar manner, proves my hypothesis that the two are intertextually linked. this also shows that storozhenko produced a peculiar mode of the gothic that followed his french predecessor’s practice in utilizing metafolkloric allusions, but instead of exotic elements he turned to local ukrainian legendary and historical tradition to fill its framework. 118 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi i. introduction two prominent gotho-romantic authors, the frenchman jacques cazotte (1719-1792) and the ukrainian oleksa storozhenko (18061874), have each written a tale about the devil in love (le diable amoureux [1772] and “закоханий чорт” [1861]) that are very similar in terms of plot and style, not to mention the identical title. both tales exhibit the following parallels (i will limit myself to just a few examples): a military protagonist comes in contact with the supernatural realm; he makes a contract with the devil, which puts the devil in a position of servitude to him; the protagonist falls in love with a demonized female character; he attempts to rescue her from the grips of evil; a holy man mediates; and there is a successful/unsuccessful marriage at the end of the protagonist’s adventure. the narrative technique, utilized in both stories, is in the form of the skaz (i.e., it imitates an oral narrative) and the style is frenetic. i have already addressed the tales’ intertextual relations in a previous article, which showed a high probability that storozhenko based his story on cazotte [pavlunik (krys) 2006: 27-34]. however, one persistent issue that stems from my previous research and still dogs storozhenko’s tale is its purported connection to folklore, i.e., the possibility that he might have been inspired, independently of cazotte, by some ukrainian oral narrative that has its origins in the european myth of ‘the devil in love’. this universal ur-myth could have served as background for cazotte as well, and this, therefore, would account for plot and title similarities between their works. this is especially interesting, given the fact that critics in the past assumed that storozhenko drew on folklore alone. this article proposes to move beyond suppositions and investigate the folkloric stratum in storozhenko’s tale, utilizing a combination of motif (thompson), tale type (aarne, thompson, and uther), and structural (propp) methods for the assessment and classification of oral narrative. i will start by examining the reasons why scholars assumed only ethnographic origins for storozhenko’s tale. primarily, i will compare and contrast his tale to the folk narratives about the devil, featured in several collections of ukrainian folktales from the 19th and 20th centuries. subsequently, i will draw on thompson’s motif index and propp’s proposed universal structure of a folktale to highlight the mechanisms and features that make storozhenko’s tale exhibit a distinct folkloric allure. finally, i will bring in aarne-thompson-uther’s universal tale types’ index, in order to analyze whether the ur-narrative storozhenko’s tale about the devil in love folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 119 about the devil in love (as presented in storozhenko’s and, before him, cazotte’s tales) exists. based on my findings, i will refute the idea that storozhenko grounded his tale on some folkloric plot, by showing that there is no such universal tale type as ‘the devil in love’ among the tale types present in aarne-thompson-uther’s index, and that the folktale motifs he selected for his tale and the manner in which he stylized them closely follow cazotte. this will allow me to state with certainty that the textual parallels, which storozhenko’s tale exhibits to cazotte’s, are not a folkloric coincidence, and that it does find its antecedent in literature— namely, in the occult gothic novella of his french predecessor. at the end, i will offer generalized conclusions as to the place of storozhenko’s tale within the ukrainian gothic canon and the peculiar mode of the gothic he constructed that followed the model of his french predecessor in utilizing metafolkloric allusions to fill its framework but instead of exotic elements turned to local ukrainian legendary and historical tradition. but before i proceed, a brief summary of each tale is in order to review the intertextual parallels between the two. ii. tales’ synopsis cazotte’s main protagonist, don alvaro maravillas, is a military man who leads a debauched life and is interested in all things mysterious. he believes that they will give him access to higher knowledge and supernatural powers. his military colleague, soberano, takes alvaro to a forlorn cave in the woods one night where, owing to his courage and ability to conquer fear, he conjures the devil himself who first scares alvaro by appearing before him in the dreadful image of a camel’s head, which later turns into a dog, and then into the spirit of the air, sylphide, and becomes alvaro’s servant, a page. alvaro sees the latter in both male and female hypostases (biondetto and biondetta), and is torn between a female and a male image of the devil. clearly understanding the constraints of social conventions, alvaro attempts to turn away from the male, that is, his homosexual side, and falls in love with the feminine image of the servant, biondetta. having devoted himself to the page, alvaro forgets about his military duties and leads a social life. his devotion to biondetta and abandonment of his military duties is his first misstep on the path to becoming the devil’s prey. fortunately, his mind is still trying to follow societal norms: he understands that for his union with biondetta to succeed, he needs to introduce her to his mother (who 120 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi is described in the novella as a saint incarnate) and to obtain her holy blessing. by doing so he wants to remove any bonds biondetta might still have to the supernatural realm—to purify her, so to speak. on their way to alvaro’s mother, he avoids any physical contact with biondetta. he is afraid to give in to his feelings without societal, i.e., church and parental approval, and suspects that such an action might bring to the surface something dark and demonic. alvaro’s apprehensions indeed become true. when he finally gives in to biondetta’s sexual demands, she no longer comes to him in the image of a woman. what appears instead is the devil, a male symbol, the threatening beelzebub. at the end, only a conversation with his righteous mother and a priest saves alvaro’s sanity. these two remind him of societal norms as well as his duty to marry a respectable lady and hence, try to remove the image of the beelzebub from his mind but the reader never learns if they succeed. storozhenko’s “devil in love” weaves together several stories by different narrators. the first speaks about himself, his military service and his rare visits home. during one such visit to ukraine, he meets— while resting at a forlorn wayside inn—an old bandura player who narrates to him the story about a devil in love. the events in the story, it turns out, happened to the bandura player’s grandfather, kyrylo kelep, approximately one hundred years ago. kyrylo kelep was then a young zaporozhian cossack and a kharakternyk (i.e., a sorcerer). thus, like alvaro, kyrylo is a military man, possessing some sort of supernatural powers. one night he too happens to be in the woods, in a disconcerting unfamiliar location, where he falls asleep. in his dream he suddenly sees demonic forces, anthropomorphized in the persona of a devil, named trutyk, and a witch, named odarka, to whom the former declares his love. like alvaro who falls in love with the demonic being, kyrylo also develops feelings for the witch. but storozhenko’s protagonist is not torn between the desire for the male and the female image of the supernatural. he is rather torn between his societal obligations, which prevent any contact with women while the cossack serves at the sich, and his budding desire for odarka (it is for this reason that odarka is seen by kyrylo as a witch (2)). these feelings for odarka, which are prohibited by the military code of the cossacks, become demonized in kyrylo’s subconscious and appear before him in his dream in the image of the devil. kyrylo learns that odarka was forced into demonic service and decides to assist her quest to save her soul and free herself from the devil’s bond. while cazotte’s alvaro plans to take biondetta to his virtuous mother to bless their union and, by extension, remove her storozhenko’s tale about the devil in love folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 121 supernatural fetters, i.e., make her “human,” kyrylo persuades the devil to take odarka to a holy hermit for the same purpose. to do so, the devil metamorphoses into a horse, which offers yet another parallel to cazotte’s narrative, where the devil also took the form of an animal—a camel’s head and later a dog. (3) unlike alvaro whose debauchery in the army has corrupted him and made him vulnerable to the dark forces that almost overpowered him at the end of his journey, kyrylo is able to take the right path from the very beginning and withstand evil temptation. he follows the hermit’s advice to the letter and, therefore, manages to subdue his “inner” devil and assist odarka in saving her soul. after five years of performing his societal obligations and military duties, kyrylo returns to the hermit and marries odarka, at which time the devil is torn apart by ravens in a particularly unnerving gothic scene. iii. metafolkloric references storozhenko’s literary activity was nurtured by ukrainian folklore. he himself speaks of it in his letters [1989b: 561-586], and a number of scholars (such as mykola zerov [2003: 750-752], bohdan lepkyi [1954: 6-7], arsen ishchuk [1957: 15], petro khropko [1989: 12-13], uliana baziuk [2003: 172], and v. pohriebennyk [2008: 2-7]) attested to this fact. to give just one example: khropko notes that “о. стороженко майстерно вибудовує оригінальні сюжети на каркасі прислів’я чи приказки, за мотивами переказу, легенди, повір’я” [storozhenko artfully creates original plots, basing himself on the outline of a proverb, or following an oral narrative, a legend, or a folk belief] [1989: 12]. in terms of storozhenko’s tale “devil in love,” khropko states that it is based on a legend about the amour between the devil and a witch, as well as on a number of folk narratives about resourcefulness and the quick wit of zaporozhian cossacks [1989: 13]. (4) unfortunately, khropko does not cite any specific folkloric sources to prove his statement. it is easy to agree with him as to the second, more general part of his statement regarding the folklore about zaporozhian cossacks because there are many folkloric elements in “devil in love.” (5) however, the absence of any bibliographic references to a specific legend, on which khropko thinks storozhenko built his tale, is surprising and raises doubt about his assertion. i examined several collections of ukrainian folktales and legends, collected and published during the 19th and 20th centuries [mikhail dragomanov 1876; boris grinchenko 1901; volodymyr hnatiuk 1912; mykola levchenko 1928; anatolii ioanidi 122 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 1985; mykola zinchuk 2003], and not one features a story, similar to storozhenko’s. here are a few examples of the themes of the tales in these collections. some deal with how the devil can befuddle a person, turning, what appears to be a valuable gift, into nothing but a heap of dust or coal; others show the devil as a rich man (pan) or as an animal who vanishes with the rooster’s crowing. (6) still others tell us about the devil’s attempts to capture human souls, or narrate how people met with the devil and what came of it. (7) there are also stories that focus on the process of conjuring the devil and turning him into a servant. (8) while there are some that end tragically in human death, especially the ones from hnatiuk’s collection (1912), the majority of the tales have a happy ending where the devil fails to lure human souls either with riches or false promises, and is often outwitted by clever and pious peasants. (9) as this summary shows, there is very little about love in these stories, and in all the collections i considered only a few tales focus actually on the devil and a woman. (10) almost all of the tales are about a man’s (and not a woman’s) encounter with the devil. the women, appearing in these stories, play mostly an auxiliary role of wife to the man who comes into contact with the devil. (11) as for the witch part of storozhenko’s narrative, there is some overlap with tales about witches, collected by hnatiuk, but it appears in minor details only, related to the description of a witch—e.g., a tail that witches typically have or a witch’s ability to transform herself into an animal, specifically a hound [hnatiuk 1912: 99, 118], as odarka does in “devil in love”—but not in the overall plot structure. hence, khropko’s statement about the existence of a specific legend of love between the devil and the witch may be regarded as an example of meta-folklore (i.e., folklore about folklore)—in other words, an assumption about the existence of folkloric sources for the text, which resembles a folkloric narrative both thematically and structurally. a similar allusion occurs in the tale “вій” [vii] (1835) by nikolai gogol’/mykola hohol’ (1809–1852). as natalie moyle [kononenko] shows, the scholars who assumed that “vii” was based on a specific folkloric source/tale and attempted to pinpoint it, failed in their efforts, since “vii” is obviously a literary text. what “vii” does contain is not so much exact individual motifs as deeper folkloric structures, patterns and folkloric logic [moyle (kononenko) 1979: 665-667]. likewise, storozhenko’s text too follows oral tradition in many ways, but remains a distinct literary creation rather than an adaptation from folklore. let me point to some of these elements, which may account for khropko’s storozhenko’s tale about the devil in love folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 123 statement. first and foremost, his story is close to the genre of legend (maybe, a subgenre of demonic legend) because it takes place in the realistic mode within the frames of historical time and space (e.g., zaporozhian sich, and saint mountains, which can be found in eastern ukraine) and has clear connections with christian forces (the hermit, the cross, the prayer). (12) secondly, storozhenko’s plot reflects a universal folkloric motif of love between a mortal and a supernatural figure (here, the devil) [thompson 2000]. (13) within the framework of this broader motif, storozhenko introduced other, minor folktale elements into his story, such as a contract with the devil, servitude to achieve redemption, riding a devil [kononenko 2007: 166], and a devil’s transformation into an animal [thompson 2000: volume 2: d-e, see d102 and d102.1]. also, if we search under the broader category of “demon” rather than “devil,” we will find additional motifs in thompson’s motif-index, such as “demon as familiar spirit,” “demon lover,” and “saint wrests soul from demons,” which surface in storozhenko’s tale as well [2000: volume 2: d-e, and volume 3: f-h]. on a formal level, he also closely adhered to the skaz-narrative technique and utilizes a structure, typical for oral narrative. for example, we find some of the functions vladimir propp [1968] lists as necessary attributes of a magic folktale. storozhenko does not have all of them since his tale is a literary creation after all and somewhat closer to the genre of the legend than the folktale, but there is enough to help create an allusion. the events in “devil in love” unfold in an episode where kyrylo finds himself in need of a horse, because his old one has been killed in battle. this corresponds to a function, which propp designates as “lack” (designation: a) and lists as a requirement for a folktale, because it sets a hero on a journey (the so-called “departure” function [designation: ↑])—hence, kyrylo travels to find a new horse. in the midst of his journey, while in a state of semi-sleep, he meets the devil and the witch, and manages to outwit the devil so that the latter transforms himself into a horse and becomes his servant (this function is called “provision or receipt of a magical agent” [designation: f]). the devil transports him and odarka to the hermit who advises the hero and his beloved on how to save their souls (function: “spatial transference between two kingdoms, guidance” [designation: g]). what makes storozhenko’s story different from a folktale is a lack of explicit direct combat between the hero and the adversary (function: “struggle” [designation: h]). however, the devil does disappear after kyrylo completes his military service (function: “victory” [designation: i]). given my presupposition that the devil in this tale is the “inner” 124 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi adversary of kyrylo, the one that is located inside his mind, we have instead a literary take on the folkloric function of a combat or struggle. here, it is an inverted, psychological struggle between the two, rather than an external battle. in summary, this folkloric framework, in which storozhenko’s tale is set, is one of the chief reasons why ukrainian scholars assumed that storozhenko drew on folklore alone and did not go in their investigations beyond strictly folkloric or ukrainian romantic tradition. the only other author to whose oeuvre storozhenko’s tale was compared is his predecessor gogol’. khropko, for instance, finds many similarities between storozhenko’s “devil in love” and gogol’’s ukrainian tales from вечера на хуторе близ диканьки [evenings on a farm near dikanka, 1831 and 1832], but even then he keeps his comparison within the folkloric context, noting that storozhenko follows oral tradition more closely than gogol’. (14) no attempts have been made to search for other literary antecedents behind storozhenko’s tale. iv. storozhenko and the gothic it is very possible that storozhenko knew cazotte’s gothic novella, either in a russian translation or the original. (15) cazotte’s romance was immensely popular in europe, and his name and oeuvre received frequent mention in the literature of the russian empire. (16) as rostislav schulz notes, an anonymous translation of cazotte’s novella and the four volumes of his collected works were in the library of alexander pushkin (1799-1837), who even attempted to write his own version of cazotte’s notorious love-stricken devil, “влюблённый бес” (ca 1821-1823) [1987: 7, 10; 91-98]. as an officer in the russian imperial army and a holder of various responsible bureaucratic posts later in his life [khropko 1989: 7-8], storozhenko must have been acquainted to some extent with the literary world of the capital and could have also read cazotte. we know for certain that storozhenko was familiar with other texts of the european gotho-frenetic tradition, to which cazotte belongs, whose plots he also adapted and reworked within a ukrainian cultural setting. i draw this conclusion on the basis of his letter from 13 december 1873 to his publisher and friend vasilii belyi, in which storozhenko mentions his other work, the novel марко проклятий [marko the cursed, 1870-1879] and its sources: storozhenko’s tale about the devil in love folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 125 cуществует у нас поговорка: ‘товчеться, як марко по пеклу’. стало быть, в изустном предании народа должна существовать и легенда похождений марка, и вот 30 лет отыскивал я и собирал куски раздробленной легенды и кое-что собрал. каждый народ имеет своего скитальца: французы—вечного жида сантенера, испанцы—мельмота, у немцев и англичан так их много, что не перечтешь, у русских—кащей бессмертный, а у нас—марко. и, кажется, наш-то марко заткнет за пояс всех скитальцев [storozhenko 1989b: 563]. [we have a (ukrainian or local—sk) saying: “he gads about as marko did in hell.” therefore, our folklore should have a legend of some sort about marko’s wanderings. i searched for it for 30 years, putting pieces of this scattered legend together, and have gathered some material. each nation has its own wanderer: the french have the centenarian, the spanish have melmoth, the germans and the english have so many of them that it is impossible to count them all, the russians have kashchei the deathless, and we have marko. and it seems that our marko can outdo them all] [italics are mine—sk]. in this letter, storozhenko names three major prototypes for the construction of his own, ukrainian version of the eternal wanderer, marko: the french santener, the spanish mel’mot and the russian kashchei bessmertnyi. as we can gather from the quote, he seems to either consider all three of them as folkloric personages or uses their names without naming the authors with the understanding that in his milieu everyone would know exactly who they were. in any case, the russian kashchei is an evil creature from folklore. but the two other “wanderers” have no prototypes in folklore, save for the universal legend of the wandering jew. in fact, they come from two major gotho-frenetic literary texts: balzac’s novel le centenaire [the centenarian or the two beringhelds] (1822) and maturin’s melmoth the wanderer (1820). this offers us indirect proof that storozhenko was indeed familiar with the gothic literary tradition, be it either through the originals or some anonymous and, most probably, abridged russian translations of gothic novels, which might have identified them as simply west european folktales (and the first russian translations of cazotte’s tale did associate it with folklore (17)). whether or not storozhenko knew who the author of the devil in love was, he must have liked cazotte’s original plot about the lovestricken devil and decided to adapt it to ukrainian realia, endowing it with the mythologized setting of the ukrainian romanticized steppe and selecting the main characters from ukrainian historical, legendary and folkloric traditions: a cossack instead of an imperial military person; a witch instead of a sylphid; and a hermit instead of a family confessor. 126 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi this would explain both the folkloric allure of storozhenko’s tale and its close textual proximity to cazotte, along with the identical title. however, before i am able to affirm with certainty the intertextual ties between storozhenko and cazotte and before i can elaborate upon the peculiarities of the gothic mode that storozhenko constructs, following the french gothic novella, i still need to consider the possibility of a coincidence. is there in fact some european ur-myth or ur-tale about the ‘devil in love’, which incorporates many of the same folk motifs that reappear in cazotte and storozhenko and which, in its respective french and ukrainian variations, could have served as an independent source of inspiration for both authors? v. the folkloric origins of the narrative ‘devil in love’ in search for the origins of the ‘devil in love’ narrative, i turn to antti aarne’s the types of the folktale: a classification and bibliography. written in 1910, enlarged by stith thompson in 1961 and updated by hans-jörg uther in 2004, the aarne–thompson–uther classification system groups folktales by motifs, be they a character, an important item or object in a tale, an action, etc. having identified similar motifs in a number of tales, aarne (and later, thompson and uther) classified related tales and assigned a number to them, which led to the establishment of a catalogue of universal tale types, known now as aarne–thompson–uther types (atu types). a detailed look at the index, however, does not reveal a specific type and/or subtype upon which the ‘devil in love’ could be based. in fact, the atu types pertaining specifically to the devil have very little in common with the plot of ‘the love-stricken devil’. they focus instead on the image of the devil as an evildoer or the devil as a trickster (and an unlucky one at that), whose attempts to capture human souls are more often than not overturned either by god, saints, or a witty protagonist. (18) in fact, many tales from the collections of ukrainian folklore that i considered above when searching for a legend about the love between the devil and the witch, identified by khropko as the base for storozhenko’s tale, follow these tale types closely. this once again points to the fact that storozhenko’s tale may have a folkloric allure, but no real folkloric ground. on the level of the tale type title, the closest to storozhenko (and cazotte) could be the tale types 1476b (devil as husband) and 311 (devil as suitor), which invoke the motif of the devil acting as a storozhenko’s tale about the devil in love folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 127 paramour but their plots develop differently. my previous psychoanalytical reading showed that the devil in storozhenko’s and cazotte’s tales acts as a symbol of the repressed dark sexual desire of the main protagonist [pavlunik (krys) 2006: 27-34]. in cazotte, the devil represents the latent homosexual urge of his main character, alvaro. this is seen through the ambiguous gender identity of the sylphid, with whom the protagonist falls in love and the final scene, where alvaro’s beloved comes to him in the threatening image of beelzebub (the masculine symbol). in storozhenko, the devil who literally mirrors the cossack kyrylo kelep’s actions and appearance anthropomorphizes his suppressed sexual desire for a woman whom he had left at home when he went to serve at the sich. on the other hand, the plot of the tale type about the devil as husband, which the atu index offers, is an example of an anecdote about old maids who cannot find husbands and are so desperate that they would even agree to marry the devil himself. (19) the focus here is shifted toward the female protagonist, rather than resting on the male protagonists and the devil, as it does in the two written works under analysis. moreover, this tale type features no masculine protagonist who could serve as the devil’s adversary and the rescuer of the heroine. the plot of tale type 311 (devil as suitor) is also quite different. it belongs to the tales of magic and narrates the fate of three sisters who are taken by a demon and how the youngest sister tricks the demon and manages to escape and sometimes also rescue her siblings. (20) as we see, the focus here again is on the female protagonists and the ordeal they must overcome. thus, neither of the two could serve as an ur-tale for the stories under analysis. since the search for ‘the devil in love’ narrative returned no results, i expanded the query criteria to a wider category. first, i considered the “love” category but it did not contain any type, related to the tales under analysis [uther, 2004, 3: 215]; therefore, i broadened the search parameters to ‘the devil’ per se, basing myself on the first part of the narrative’s theme. the broader category that includes ‘the devil’ theme—“supernatural adversaries”—offers us some parallels with the following tales of magic where the devil or his various hypostases (e.g., the ogre, giant, dragon, cobold, magician, cannibal, etc.) are defeated. (21) the devil is indeed overcome in both storozhenko and cazotte, owing to the hero’s adherence to the advice of a holy man. however, the devil paradigm in cazotte and storozhenko does not symbolize simply an encounter with evil and a victory over it or the fulfillment of a quest, as it would in a folktale; it possesses a complex psychological meaning. 128 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi in this it differs from the abovementioned atu tale types’ cluster. the psychological dimension surfaces in each narrative thanks to a special emphasis on the dream state of the protagonists, in which they first come in contact with the supernatural realm. thus, unlike a typical fairy-tale where the supernatural is an integral part of the fictional universe, “devil in love” by storozhenko and the devil in love by cazotte both betray an element of doubt as to whether the hero indeed experienced the encounter or he simply dreamt it. the narrator of cazotte’s novella mentions the possibility of a dream or a nightmare, when speaking about alvaro’s analysis of his relationship with the devil. according to tzvetan todorov, “[…] alvaro hesitates, wonders (and the reader with him) whether what is happening to him is real, if what surrounds him is indeed reality (in which case sylphides exist), or whether it is no more than an illusion, which here assumes the form of a dream” [1975: 24]. in fact, alvaro himself suggests such possibilities. he states, she [biondetta, the devil—sk] took hold of my senses and offered me the most pleasant of dreams, the sort best fit to rest my soul from the frightful, outlandish ideas that had so wearied it. it was, moreover, a very long sleep, and my mother, reflecting one day on my adventures, would later claim that it was not a natural slumber [cazotte 1993: 25]. a similar situation obtains in storozhenko’s work. the main character of its inner story, kyrylo kelep “сів […] собі під кущем підождати, поки зійде місяць, та й задрімав. аж чує крізь сон—наче хто його тягне [...]” [sat (…) under the bush to wait for the moon to rise, and fell into slumber. when suddenly, through his dream, he feels, as if someone is dragging him (...)” [1989: 72]. the emphasis on the dream state of each protagonist strengthens the hypothesis that the devil presents a symbolic visualization of something inside the protagonist’s mind, which breaks through his defense mechanisms during his sleep. hence, in cazotte and storozhenko the focus moves from the idea of a quest by the protagonist, which is realized in the defeat of a supernatural adversary and a marriage of a princess, to the psychology of the protagonist and his behavior at the time when he is split between his societal duties and sexual desires that need to be subdued. he does fight the external adversary, but this adversary is the one that is inside his own mind. the second broader category we can consider in relationship to the development of the plot of both works is the “supernatural or enchanted wife” (atu 400-424 [uther 2004, 1: 231-247]), where the devil also appears. (22) the elements of the tale types from this category are storozhenko’s tale about the devil in love folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 129 present in cazotte’s and storozhenko’s narratives, but to a much lesser degree, since the focus of both works is on the protagonist and his “inner” adversary (i.e., the devil)—hence, the name both authors gave to their tale is ‘the devil in love’, and not ‘the devil and x’ (e.g., the princess). this tale type cluster finds its equivalent in a witch (“enchanted princess”) whom kyrylo kelep rescues from the grips of the devil. storozhenko seems to adhere to this category more closely, in a sense that he presents the witch odarka as an innocent girl possessed by evil with whom his protagonist falls in love and whom he tried to rescue from the devil. in this he differs from cazotte, who modifies this tale type heavily. the bewitched biondetta who captures alvaro’s heart turns out to be evil itself. thus, the “enchanted princess” type finds a negative interpretation in the french text. here it is a villainous and treacherous “succubus” or even “incubus” if we remember that this being takes on both feminine and masculine forms (biondetta and biondetto), and, moreover, that behind its human façade lurks the devil himself. in fact, it is the male who becomes the victim of the evil being’s advances in cazotte’s tale, which offers an interesting literary take on, and even a reverse of, traditional folktale gender roles. while both texts do show elements of a few atu folktale types, there is not a single specific type, which could serve as an archetype for the ‘devil in love’ narrative. moreover, we see that both authors similarly complicate and modify the elements of the tale types they use, adding psychological dimensions and artistic twists to them. while one would expect that from an artistic work, we would not normally find similar developments and points of emphasis, let alone identical titles, in two stories by different authors unless there is a significant literary borrowing and intertextual connection that the later text projects onto the one that was written before. while the presentation of a demonized female character differs in storozhenko and cazotte (23), the main protagonists seem to be very similar to each other. in fact, in the persona of kyrylo kelep who is fighting with his inner devil we have almost a mirror image of don alvaro who is going through the same ordeal. vi. conclusions to conclude, besides the absence of a clearly identifiable folktale type on which storozhenko’s tale could be based, i.e., independently from cazotte, the ukrainian text contains a number of features that, despite its overall folkloric allure, make it a specific literary creation and 130 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi draw it closer to cazotte’s text. one such feature is a certain skepticism and doubt toward the existence of the supernatural, which comes about due to the perspective of a contemporary, rational narrator, who sees an encounter with the supernatural as a form of psychological distortion and madness, as errors of perception or even as a lie. to such blurring of subjective and objective realities we can add another feature, namely, the complicated treatment of good vs. evil. like cazotte, storozhenko depicts evil, which at times assumes distinctly positive qualities. in cazotte, biondetta(-o) is simultaneously an embodiment of the darkest evil and a faithful servant to don alvaro; in storozhenko’s narrative, the devil is at once an evil seducer and usurper of the witch’s freedom, but also a loyal servant to kyrylo kelep; his death even induces tears from the audience and the protagonist himself. this shows that cazotte and storozhenko both evoked the ‘demon lover’ literary trope (that was embraced, modified, and metaphorized by the writers of the gothic, schauerromantik and far beyond), where evil was portrayed simultaneously as appalling and causing feelings of compassion. these factors together with the already mentioned psychologization of his narrative testify to the fact that storozhenko offered a literary stylization and a romantic reworking of some general folktale types and motifs but did not follow one specific fairy-tale or legend. thus, the close textual and symbolic proximity to cazotte in storozhenko’s tale, which i proved on the level of narrative development and latent content in my previous article, is now strengthened by the absence of a universal prototype of ‘the love-stricken devil’ plot, which reaffirms that storozhenko was following a particular example of the frenetic gothic tradition. like cazotte, whose vision of the gothic stemmed from his fascination with fairy stories and oriental tales (along with the occult) (24), storozhenko also united the frenetic gothic framework and the oral tradition into a tight bundle. however, unlike his french predecessor, who, for the most part, utilized exotic folkloric element and location (e.g., spain) in his novella, storozhenko turned to local lore and constructed a specifically ukrainian literary world of horrors. in this world, the ukrainian cossacks took the place of aristocratic protagonists, an itinerant bard instead of a gothic manuscript assumed the role of conductor to the mysterious past, the ukrainian steppe served for the disconcerting unfamiliar realm, and the pantheon of ukrainian mythological daemons substituted the world of sylphides and other spirits. this “imagined” folklorism that we see in “devil in love” not only became a distinct feature of storozhenko’s gothic prose on the storozhenko’s tale about the devil in love folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 131 whole, appearing most prominently in his longer novel marko the cursed, but also became a highlight of the ukrainian gothic canon in general. notes 1 i would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, prof. oleh s. ilnytzkyj (university of alberta), for his useful comments, many of which i incorporated into my text, and for editing a draft version of this work. i am also indebted to the two anonymous readers of folklorica and, especially, to the editor, prof. natalie kononenko, for their constructive insights, comments, and suggestions for revisions, which were very helpful in shaping the present version of this article. 2 for an example of ukrainian witchcraft beliefs and the “demonization” of spouses/girl-friends as “witches” (to justify, among other things, unruly and antisocial behavior towards them) see kononenko 1998: 67-90. kononenko’s article analyzes folktales about witches (presented as fabulates) that were collected by volodymyr hnatiuk at the beginning of the twentieth century. 3 i should note that while both the horse and camel are good for riding, and storozhenko indeed employs the motif of kyrylo riding the devil, this option is not actualized in cazotte’s novella. i thank the anonymous reviewer for this observation. 4 “[…] оповідання ‘закоханий чорт’, основане на повір’ї про кохання між чортом і відьмою та переказах про кмітливість запорожців.” 5 for an analysis of ukrainian legends about cossacks and magic, see shiyan 2006: 109-124. 6 see “чортъ въ видѣ клубка” [the devil as a ball of wool], “чортъ въ видѣ борзой собаки” [the devil as a hound], “чортъ въ видѣ пана” [the devil as a nobleman] [dragomanov 1876: 44-46, 47]; “чортъ конемъ” [the devil as a horse], “чортъ панычемъ на пасици” [the devil as a young nobleman at the apiary] [grinchenko 1901: 90-91]; “безпятий панич” [a young nobleman without heels], “чорт когутом” [the devil as a rooster], “чорт у видї чорного песика зникає з комори” [the devil disappears from the storage in a shape of a small black dog], “чорт у видї вояка” [the devil as a soldier], etc. [hnatiuk 1912: 6, 13-15]; “чорт-баранчик” [the devil as a lamb], “як чоловік із чортом гуслі міняв” [how a man traded his 132 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi psaltery with the devil], “чорти-мірошники” [the devils-mill workers] [ioanidi 1985: 55-56]. 7 “чортъ заводитъ человѣка съ дороги” [the devil leads a man astray], “чортъ топитъ извощика” [the devil drowns a cart driver] [dragomanov 1876: 54]; “кого бере ся чорт” [whom does the devil take?], “через чорта божевільний” [how a man lost his mind because of the devil], “чорт топить чоловіка” [the devil drowns a man] [hnatiuk 1912: 15-16, 27]; “як чоловік в чортовім палаці був” [how the man visited the devil’s palace], “біс фурманом” [the devil as a cart driver] [levchenko 1928: 22-23]; “зустріч з чортом” [meeting with the devil] [zinchuk 2003: 344-345]. 8 “какъ вызывать чертей” [how to conjure the devils], “какъ добыть чорта-слугу” [how to turn the devil into one’s servant] [dragomanov 1876: 56-57]; “як дістати біса на послуги” [how to get the devil to serve you] [levchenko 1928: 18]. 9 “як хлопець дїтька змудрував” [how a lad outwitted the devil], “чоловік ловить чортів у торбину” [a man catches the devils in a bag], “салдат і чорти” [a soldier and the devils] [hnatiuk 1912: 58-64]; “старець визволяє запродану чортам душу” [a hermit saves a soul, pawned to the devils], “як дядько чорта дурив і діжку грошей від нього здобув” [how a man fooled the devil and got a pot of money from him] [levchenko 1928: 31, 35-36]. 10 see “чорт мордує дївку” [the devil kills a girl], “чорт роздирає жінку” [the devil tears a woman apart], “біс у молодици” [a woman possessed by the devil] [hnatiuk 1912: 48-53]; “біс ходить до жінки, хортом перекидаючися” [the devil comes to a woman in a guise of a greyhound], “як біс-домовик задушив дівку (сказка, що чорт дідову дівку задусив)” [how the house spirit suffocated a girl (a tale about the devil suffocating the old man’s daughter)] [levchenko 1928: 20, 24-25]. 11 one important exception is a tale in levchenko’s collection where the old woman managed to save the human soul, which was pawned to the devils. see “як розумна баба запродану чортам душу вратувала” [how a clever old woman saved a soul, pawned to the devils] [1928: 33-34]. 12 i thank the anonymous reviewer for this information. 13 see “t91.2. love of mortal and devil,” “t91.2.1. devil would be maid’s paramour,” “t91.3. love of mortal and supernatural person” [thompson 2000: volume 5: l-z]. storozhenko’s tale about the devil in love folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 133 14 “легендарно-фантастичне оповідання ‘закоханий чорт’ позначене певним наслідуванням романтичної манери молодого м. гоголя. типологічна схожість цього твору з оповіданнями із ‘вечорів на хуторі біля диканьки’ виявляється в тому, що сюжет побудований на демонологічному матеріалі, реальне химерно переплітається із фантастичним, щедро використані образи народної сміхової культури […] звичайно, письменники різнилися художнім обдарованням. до того ж о. стороженко, на відміну від м. гоголя, міцно тримається легенди чи повір’я і не надає ширшого польоту своїй уяві” [khropko 1989: 14]. [in his legendary-fantastic tale “devil in love,” storozhenko follows to a certain extent the romantic style of young gogol'. the typological similarity of his story with the tales from gogol’’s evenings on a farm near dikanka can be seen in the fact that their plots are constructed on folk mythology and demonology, the real world there is tightly interwoven with the fantastic, both authors fully use images from folk humor (…) (but) of course, both authors were different in terms of their artistic style. moreover, as opposed to gogol’, storozhenko closely follows a legend or a folk belief and does not allow his imagination to fully take over.] 15 khropko notes that storozhenko studied french in the kharkiv gymnasium [khropko 1989: 7]. 16 there was also a french ballet based on cazotte’s romance; it was staged at the imperial theatre (большой каменный) in st. petersburg in 1848 under the title “сатанилла” [“satanilla,” n.d.]. i thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me. 17 cazotte’s novella was initially translated into russian as “a love-stricken spirit or adventures of don alvaro” and appeared in print in moscow in 1794 as part of collected folkloric texts, titled “the same tune in a new setting or complete collection of old folk tales.” [“‘влюблённый дух, или приключение дона альвара’. старая погудка на новый лад, или полное собрание древних простонародных сказок (москва, 1795 [sic])” (schulz 1987: 10).] schulz mistakenly offers 1795 as a date of the publication. the collection the same tune in a new setting [старая погудка на новый лад] where cazotte’s novella was reprinted indeed appeared in a few volumes between 1794-1795, but cazotte’s novella was published in a volume that came out in 1794. see v. m. zhirmunskii and n. a. sigal for correct date [1967]. 18 the list in the atu index pertaining to the “devil” is rather long. here is a representative selection of several tale types, where he 134 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi appears: “devil abducts princess 301, abducts princesses 301, abducts rich man 832, abducts several brothers 327g, advises woman to procure abortion by using magic 755, already dead (cannot collect money) 822*, always blamed 846, and animal 1131, and farmer 1059*, and farmhand 1132, 1153, and girl 1180, and god 1030, 1184, and god dispute 773**, and god frighten one another 1145, and god have contest of creation 773, and helper 1048, and lawyer 1186, and man 1000-1190*, and old woman 1353, and servant 475, and smith 330, and thunder-god 1148b, and woman 1169, 1172, 1176, 1180, 1183, 1187, 1188, 1192, 1199, 1199a, annoyed by crossed straps on soldier’s knapsack 1168, as creditor cheated 822*, as god’s greatest enemy 1425, as helper 832, 1187, 1191, as host at dinner 821b*, as husband 1476b, as master builder 810a*, 1191, as mower 752c, 820b, as mythical creditor 822*, as suitor 311, as unfaithful companion forces change of roles 531, asks shoemaker to make shoes for him (shoe his horse) 815*, at confession 818*, at grindstone 1178**, called by carelessly spoken word (curse) 813a, cancels contract 756b, cannot accomplish impossible task 1171— 1180, cannot endure cross 1166*, cannot endure quarrelsome wife 1164, cannot overcome magic tool 811a*, cannot solve riddles 1178, carries off lawyer 1186, carries off man 813b, carries off old maid 1476b, carries weaver in a sack 1177, demands compensation 1184, claims first being to cross bridge 1191, claims soul 1188, defeated in fight with man 305, demands to spend first night with bride 1165, devours corpses 407, escapes 1188, 1199a, expelled 1147*, 1164, 1168c, expels solomon (other person) from hell 804b, fears crucifix 1168, fears magic circle 1168, fears shoemaker 1168, fears thunder and lightning 1165, fears virgin mary 1168c, forged to chain 803, freed by hunter 1164, frightened by wolves 1150, frightens false ghost 1676, fulfills labor contract 810a, gives magic stone to man 593, gives up trying to guard unmanageable wife 1352, has to do penance 810a, helpless against strong man 650a, helps slandered man 571b, helps with haying (mowing) 820b, ignorant of object 1650, in bottle 862, in disguise 815*, 839a*, 921b,” etc. [uther 2004, 3: 168-169]. these tale types belong to a variety of genres, such as tales of magic, religious tales, and anecdotes. i offer them here to show that not one type, dealing specifically with the devil, has anything in common with the plot of ‘the love-stricken devil’. 19 “1476b old maid married to a devil’ (previously girl married to a devil). […] an old maid who is tired of living alone cries out in despair, ‘i would even marry the devil, if he would have me!’ the devil storozhenko’s tale about the devil in love folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 135 comes and carries her off (marries her). [g303.12.5]” [uther 2004, 2: 236]. 20 “311 rescue by the sister. two sisters, one after the other, fall into the power of a demonic suitor (cannibal, dragon, magician, devil) and are taken into his (subterranean) castle [r11.1, t721.5]. there the sisters open a forbidden room full of dead bodies, in the course of which the key (a magic egg, apple) becomes bloody, or they refuse to eat human flesh [c611, c227, c913]. the demon kills them for their disobedience [c920]. using a trick, the third (youngest) sister escapes from the same fate. she finds her sisters and resuscitates them by putting their bones together [r157.1]. she hides them beneath some gold in baskets (bags) and persuades the demon to carry the baskets home without looking into them [g561]. cf. type 1132. the youngest sister pretends to marry the demon and leaves a skull (straw dummy) dressed as a bride to deceive him. unwittingly the demon carries this sister home in the third basket. or she smears herself with honey and feathers and escapes as a ‘strange bird’ [k525, k521.1]. cf. types 1383, 1681. the demon is burned in his own house or is killed in another way [q211]. cf. type 312” [uther 2004, 1: 191]. 21 atu 300-399, see especially the category “dragon-slayer” (atu 300, 303, 305, 314, 315, 317, 321, 328a*) [uther 2004, 1: 174]. 22 there is also a broader category of “supernatural or enchanted husband” (atu 425-449 [uther 2004, 1: 247-265]) that includes a subcategory “animal husband.” given the fact that the devil in both stories, and especially storozhenko’s, takes a form of an animal, i have also considered the tale types from this subcategory but they turned out to be quite different. again, the focus was shifted toward a female personage who wronged her animal husband by exposing his secret/burning his animal skin and had to set out on a difficult quest to redeem her actions and reunite with her husband. consider, for example, atu 425a “the animal as bridegroom” [uther 2004, 1: 248-249]. 23 such a difference between cazotte and storozhenko could be explained by the fact that in depicting biondetta/biondetto as succubus/incubus cazotte draws heavily on christian demonology and written sources (such as the writings of the famous alchemist and occultist, paracelsus [1493-1541], see v. m. zhirmunskii and n. a. sigal [1967]). 24 cazotte’s fascination with fairy-tales and folklore resulted from the eighteenth-century french vogue for fairy stories and especially 136 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi oriental narratives. cazotte himself published a story very early in his career as a writer, which imitated the contemporary vogue for oriental tales, la patte du chat, conte zinzimois (ca 1740-1741). also, in 1788 he published in geneva suite des mille et une nuits—“a collection of oriental tales adapted from an arab manuscript translated by dom chavis and recast by cazotte” [sieburth and gordon 1993: 161, 165; see also v. m. zhirmunskii and n. a. sigal (1967)]. bibliography baziuk, 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/hrv (za stvaranje adobe pdf dokumenata najpogodnijih za visokokvalitetni ispis prije tiskanja koristite ove postavke. stvoreni pdf dokumenti mogu se otvoriti acrobat i adobe reader 5.0 i kasnijim verzijama.) /hun 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/pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice summer seminar ш cossack folk music at moscow state conservatory laura olson, university of colorado, boulder the folk music department of the moscow state conservatory announces its second summer seminar, the singing and instrumental traditions of the don cossacks, to take place august 5­19, 1998. the seminar will include 6 days of workshops and courses at the moscow conservatory, and a 7­day field expedition to cossack villages in the volgograd region of russia. participants will live in home­stay situations: in moscow, they will be housed with members of the moscow state conservatory folklore ensemble, and in the volgograd area, in cossack homes. natalia giliarova, the chair of the folklore department of the conservatory and director of the folklore ensemble, will conduct the seminar. the specific hours of study included in the moscow portion of the trip are: ­basic genres of russian folklore (4 hours) ­singing traditions of the don cossacks (4 hours) ­the wedding ritual (2 hours) ­instrumental traditions of the don cossacks (2 hours) ­workshops in singing, instruments, and tradi­ tional dances and games, together with the moscow conservatory folklore ensemble. includes group field trips to museums and parks in moscow area (12 hours) lectures, classes, and all songs taught will be translated into english for those who do not know russian. in living situations, every effort will be seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 made to match non-russian speakers with englishspeaking hosts and/or roommates. in volgograd, participants will acquaint them­ selves with the traditions of the don cossacks dir­ ectly from members of local amateur ensembles, and will have a chance to observe firsthand how tradi­ tions are carried out today. the don cossacks are russian-speaking people who settled in the border­ lands of russia during the 16th century. they evol­ ved particular traditions drawn from their unusual lifestyles and proximity to non-russian peoples; their music has been made popular in russia through the efforts of numerous revivalist groups, such as the dmitri pokrovsky ensemble, which has extensively toured the u.s. both in moscow and in volgograd, participants will have ample opportunity to learn and practice songs and dances outside of scheduled classes. the seminar will be conducted informally with plenty of individual attention, so that students with particular interests can pursue them within the context of the seminar. all skill levels are welcome. cost of the entire seminar, including all living expenses, transportation within russia, and classes, will be $1340 if there is a total of 7-10 participants, and $1200 if there are 10-15 participants. supple­ mentary cultural programs such as visits to specific museums or monuments in moscow can be organ­ ized at the wish of the participants for modest extra cost. those who wish to take part in the seminar should send a letter to the conservatory by may 1, 1998, with the following information, which is necessary for the issuance of the visa: full name, date of birth, address, place of work or study, number of passport, its expiration date and date and place of issuance, and the desired dates for entry and exit of russia. the letter should be sent by fax to: (7) (095) 229-9659 (write dlia giliarovoi on cover sheet) or by post to: natalia giliarova, kabinet narodnoi muzyki, moskovskaia konservatoria, b. nikitskaia 13, moscow, russia 103871. you may wish to call to make sure your fax or letter has been received; the home phone number of the seminar's organizer, oksana levko, is (7) (095) 138-1569. for more information about the seminar, contact the co-organizer of the 1996 seminar: prof. laura olson, dept. of germanic and slavic, university of colorado at boulder, by e-mail at lolson@colorado.edu or phone (303) 492-7729. 67 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 mailto:lolson@colorado.edu a new reading of the classics of russian folkloristics tatyana g. ivanova russian folkloristics, characteristically, interprets from time to time the scholarly inheritance of the past from contemporary positions. this is confirmed by a. l. toporkov's book. the theory of mvth in russian philological scholarship of the nine­ teenth century (teoriia mifa v russkoi filologicheskoi nauke xix veka), which was recently published by indrik (moscow, 1997. 456 pp., boards). the monograph consists of an introduction, four chap­ ters, a conclusion, an index of narftes, and a bibliography. in the introduction the author clearly states the subject of his research — "not the mythological school in russia, but the interpretation of mythology in russian scholarship" (p. 20). in connection with the selection of names for the study becomes especially signifi­ cant — not only "mythologists," but also scholars from other trends in russian philology. the four chapters are entitled: "f. 1. buslaev's research on myth: from a philosophy of language to comparative ethnography": "myth and slavic mythology in the creative legacy of a. n. afanas'ev"; "a. a. potebnia: the linguis­ tic theory of myth"; "a. n. veselovskii on myth: a complex program for philological investigations." the evolution of inter­ pretations of myth and mythology in russian scholarship of the last centuiy are examined through the prism of the creative biographies of the most prominent representatives of russian philology in the nineteenth century .against a background of competing and coexisting schools. however, the significance of the book under review is not that the works of outstanding philologists about myth in the nineteenth century are examined diachronically (this is to be expected), but that they have been read in parallel and in conjunction with each other. section titles such as the following play a basic role in toporkov's monograph: "buslaev on the early works of veselovskii," 'the influence of buslaev on afanas'ev," "afanas'ev and buslaev: a creative dialogue," "afanas'ev and the early potebnia," "potebia and buslaev," "potebnia on afanas'ev," and "veselovskii and buslaev: a creative dialogue." this method of reading the clas­ sics of folkloritstics enables the author of the monograph to avoid the characteristic mistakes that lie in wait for any invest!47 seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 gator who is studying the scholarly inheritance of this or that major scholar — ascribing priorities to one's hero where they do not exist. f f without a doubt the most important methodological merit of theis work is that the mythological theory of the last century is examined in close connection with the philosophy and theoret­ ical linguistics of the time. the names of scheiling and hum­ boldt are not accidental on the pages of toporkov's monograph. one other side of his investigation attracts attention — the conti­ guous treatment of scholarly thought and artistic creation in russian culture from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. many investigators before toporkov have already drawn attention to the fact that afanas'ev's the slavs' poetic views of nature (poeticheskie vozzreniia slavian na prirodu) was a source of inspiration and the formation of aesthetic concept­ ions for such prominent verbal masters as aleksandr blok, velimir xlebnikov, sergei esenin, and aleksei remizov. the study of sources is usually the central point in examinations of this question. toporkov points out the typological uniformity in the views of nature as an object of mythologization with afana­ s'ev on the one hand, and with fedor tiutchev (pp. 202­203) and evgenii baratynskii (pp. 206­207) on the other. the typological identity in russian philosophical lyrics of the nineteenth century and in afanas'ev's scholarly research are noted with great accuracy and subtlety by the author of the monograph. an attentive reader will discover in this book a multitude of approaches to various individual questions that play far from the least important role in russian folkloristics. we will point out one of them — establishing the sources on which afanas'ev based his work, the slavs' poetic views of nature. toporkov indisputably proves that the works of potebnia were to a large extent fundamental to afanas'ev, both for material and for conception. the book cites numerous examples of textual echoes between afanas'ev and potebnia's works on several symbols in slavic folk poetry ю nekotoryx simvolakh v slavianskoi narodnoi poezii, 1860), on the mythological meaning of several rituals and beliefs (o mificheskom znachenii nekotoryx obriadov i poverii), and on the connection of several concept­ ions in language (o sviazi nekotorykh predstavlenii v iazyke, 1864) (pp. 226­230). the parallel reading of buslaev and afana­ s'ev, as proposed by toporkov, discloses just as large a relative weight of hidden citations from the studies of the former in afanas'ev's the slavs' poetic views of nature (pp. 186­188). ц8 afanas'ev even has clear echoes with max muller's comparative mythology (p. 201). toporkov's monograph without doubt does not completely cover the question it addresses. in light of this work, it becomes clear that in order to carry out a fuller interpration of the paths of development of the "mythological school" in russia in the nineteenth century (more precisely, of the evolution of the theory of myth), it is necessary to include the equally important names of a. a. kotliarevskii and orest miller in the circle of scholars examined by toporkov. the scholarly legacy of these researchers deserves just as diligent and scrupulous an analysis astoporkov's treatment of buslaev, afanas'ev, potebnia and veselovskii. moreover, this analysis should not be carried out on the folklorist's work in isolation, but connected with the work of other folklorists. in his monograph toporkov completely bypasses the names of the epigones of the mythological school, such as a. s. famintsyn (the gods of the ancient slavs (bozhestva drevnix slavianj, spb, 1884) and m. e. sokolov (old russian sun gods and goddesses istaro-russkie solnechnye bogi i bogini], simbirsk, 1887|. undoubtedly the author has the right to make such a choice in his research. nevertheless, interpretation of the epigones in scholarship, just as in art, can at times be useful and fruitful. like any serious research, toporkov's monograph has in principal an open character. after becoming acquainted with this book, a reader not only receives answers, but also is given questions and begins to see more clearly further perspectives for the study of other problems. we see this as the main merit of this publication. translated by james o. bailey seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 microsoft word folkxiv_author.doc incantational magic of the northern russians folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 27 charms and incantational magic of the northern russians (in records of the early twenty-first century) iulia krasheninnikova institution of language, literature and history of the komi scientific center ural division of the russian academy of science (ras) syktyvkar, russia abstract the folklore tradition found in the village of loima and other settlements belonging to the loima rural administration of the priluzskii region of the komi republic took shape in an environment that was in close contact with the komi population. this factor promoted the maintenance of traditional russian forms of folk culture. researchers have observed that the inherited folklore of such traditions as loima’s preserve genres and elements of folk belief from their historical motherland. these elements are manifest in ritual folklore, in tales, and in mythological personages, among other folklore forms. the object of the present study is incantation-conjuration texts as they were recorded in the early twenty-first century (2004, 2006). these texts include charms (zagovory i prigovory), incantations (zaklinaniia), well-wishing (blagopozhelaniia), and ritual dialogues that accompany healing, lifecycle, calendrical, animal-husbandry, and other rituals. on the “folklore map” of the komi republic, we can identify several compact, localized russian traditions that were formed in an alien ethnic environment. one of these is the folklore tradition found in the village of loima and other settlements belonging to the loima rural administration of the priluzskii region [raion] – a region which is predominantly komi. the village of loima, first mentioned in 1620 in the patrol book of the sol’vychegodsk district [uezd], belonged variously to sol’vychegodsk, lal’sk and ust’-sysol’sk districts of vologda province [guberniia] [zherebtsov 1994: 139]; it was annexed by the komi republic in 1921. the loima tradition emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when russian migrants moving from northern and north-eastern russian provinces along the merchant passage to viatka and siberia settled in the loima area [vlasov and kaneva 2006: 25]. 28 loima’s folk culture thus took shape in an environment that was in close contact with the komi population. this factor promoted the maintenance of “traditional forms of folk culture as a means of reinforcing ‘otherness’ amidst the indigenous [komi] population” [vlasov and kaneva 2006: 24-25] and this phenomenon occurred within the historical memory of the loima russians. researchers have observed that the inherited folklore of such traditions as loima’s preserve genres and elements of folk belief from their historical motherland. these elements are manifest in ritual folklore, in tales, and in mythological personages, among other folklore forms [vlasov and kaneva 2006: 25].(1) the object of the present study is incantation-conjuration texts as they were recorded in the early twenty-first century (2004, 2006).(2) these texts include charms (zagovory i prigovory), incantations (zaklinaniia), well-wishing (blagopozhelaniia), and ritual dialogues that accompany healing, life-cycle, calendrical, animal-husbandry, and other rituals. the loima tradition is characterized by a considerable body of thematically varied incantation-conjuration texts. the most representative texts are associated with the treatment of physical and mental diseases and animal husbandry rituals. texts dealing with love, social life (promoting family welfare, preventing fire, traveling, business and trading, separation of spouses, etc.), and texts associated with specific agricultural tasks and calendrical dates are less frequently encountered. the content of this article is dictated by available texts. today loima villagers do not actively use incantation-conjuration texts in animal husbandry.(3) still, analysis of material devoted to the theme of magical interdictions and prescriptions reveals that a complete system of safeguards, interdictions, and prescriptions associated with the buying and selling of animals and with leading the newly-acquired animal into the cow-barn, or cattle-shed existed among northern russian rural populations until very recently. this system was intended to preserve the animal’s health, fertility, and the quality and quantity of food stuffs and wool/hide produced by the animal. recorded evidence applies mainly to large, horned livestock. data on other domestic animals are scanty and sporadic. similar incantations are still used, notably in some districts of the russian north and in parts of ukraine [adon’eva and ovchinnikova 1993: 32-42; kukharenko 2007: 53-76]. among the poetic texts proper, the incantations most widely disseminated were those for the first pasture, for the first entry of animals into the cattle-shed, for unlocking milk, for calving, and for preventing incantational magic of the northern russians folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 29 the loss of a cow. the characteristic features of the majority of the texts are their “simplicity of content and brevity of narration” [eleonskaia 1917: 7]. thus, when leading a new animal into the cattle-shed, the villagers uttered charms composed of several structural elements. the opening (zachin) contains an address to the house spirit (domovoi) as “grandpa-neighbor” (dedushko-sosedushko) or “neighbor-bear” (sosedushka-medvedushka). the body is laconic and consists of an imperative expressing the wish that the animal be well-cared for: дедушко-суседушко, пусти коровушку на подворье, пой, корми и гладь! [ияли: вф 1513-27]; [grandpa-neighbor, let the little cow into the yard, water, feed, and stroke her!] дедушко-суседушко, люби мою коровушку. пой да корми, по шерстке гладь! [ияли: вф 1515-20]; [grandpa-neighbor, love my little cow. water and feed her, and stroke her hide!] дедушко-суседушко, храни моего скота, пой да корми, да люби! [ияли: вф 1515-38]; [grandpa-neighbor, keep my cattle safe, water and feed them, and love them!] дедушко-суседушко, пусти на подворье, пой, корми, и рости [ияли: вф 1518-33]; [grandpa-neighbor, let [my animal] into the yard, water, feed and help it grow] дедушко-суседушко, пусти нашу коровушку, пой, корми, ухаживай, по глотке поглаживай [ияли: вф 1526-11]. [grandpa-neighbor, let our little cow in, water, feed, take care of her, stroke her on the throat] the invariable element in the conjuration wish is the three-part formula: “let in, water, feed”; this formula may be amplified by additional, optional components (love, stroke, grow, keep, take care, and others).(4) the ritual of the first pasture was accompanied mostly by incantations using comparative formulas. for example, a belt was removed from the body and placed on the threshold. after the cow had passed over the threshold, the belt was replaced with following words: как пояс меня держится, так и коровушка держись дому [ияли: вф 1513-28]; 30 [as the belt holds to me, so, little cow, hold to the home] also: как вербочка дома держится, так и . . . как камень лежит, не шелохнется, так и . . . [as a pussy-willow holds to the house, so . . . as a stone lies, without stirring, so . . .] etc. at the first pasture the villagers uttered brief, protective texts with incantational elements: спаси и сохрани мою коровушку . . . солнышко на закат и коровушка домой быстрехонько бежи! . . . [save and keep my little cow . . . the sun is setting, and little cow, run home fast as fast can be! . . .] at calving time, laconic incantations expressed the wish that “a new soul be allowed to enter this world”: распускай мою коровушку! душу спасай, другую выпускай на белый свет! господь боже! чернушеньку мою спасай, а теленочка на свет выпускай!) [ияли: вф 1515-22, 23]. [loosen my little cow! [referring here to dilation] save her soul, let the other [soul] enter the wide world! lord god! save my chernushen’ka, and let the calf come into the world!] the notion that a cow’s lack of milk is caused by the evil eye is persistent, which explains the dissemination of rituals and incantations intended for the “unlocking” (otpiranie) of milk.(5) uttering the incantation, the villager would stroke the cow from head to udder and say: из жилочки в вымечко, из вымечка в титечки, из титечек в подоенку, стой да бухай, дой да слухай, как я тебя люблю, так и ты меня люби, сейчас же молоко отпускай быстрехонько. будьте мои слова крепки, лепки навеки. аминь [аа 2006]. [from vein to udder, from udder to teats, from teats to milk pail, stand and pour, give milk and hear how much i love you, and so must you love me; now let the milk pour fast as fast can be. let my words be strong and sticky forever. amen] incantational magic of the northern russians folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 31 then they began the milking. the informant indicates that the stroking must start from the head (the action represents a distinctive form of massage), because “there is a connecting vein the size of a fist” in the animal’s throat. perhaps the incantation to the house spirit: дедушко-суседушко, пусти нашу коровушку, пой, корми, ухаживай, по глотке поглаживай [ияли: вф 1526-11], [grandpa-neighbor, let our little cow in, water, feed, take care of her, stroke her on the throat] reflects this idea that a vein in the throat of the cow affects the quantity and quality of milk. another incantation for “unlocking milk” is characterized by the presence of traditional structural elements and the classic poetics of the incantation (an opening passage, a description of the chief personage’s initial movement toward the important sacral object, a catalog of magic helpers and a description of their actions, and the use of traditional epithets): я, раба божья александра, пойду, перекрестясь, пойду, благословясь, из избы в двери, из дверей на улицу, с улицы в чистое поле. в чистом поле на высоком холме стоит храм. в храме стоит престол, на престоле стоит белое блюдо, в белом блюде лежат ключи. я, раба божья александра, брошу ключи в океан-море. сходят за этими ключами в океан-море рабы божьи мария, параскева и клавдия. принесут золотые ключи. я этими ключами открою все молочные колодчики, все молочные жилочки. потечет молочко по молочным колодчикам, потечет молочко по молочным жилочкам в вымечко, из вымечка в титечки, из титечек в ведерышко для рабы божьей александры. будьте слова крепки, лепки, тверды и правильны к вымени моей коровушки [ияли: аф 1536-36]. [i, the handmaiden of god, aleksandra, will go crossing myself, will go blessing myself, from the house to the door, from the door to the road, from the road to the open field. in the open field is a temple on a high hill. in the temple is an altar, on the altar is a white plate, on the white plate are keys. i, the handmaiden of god, aleksandra, will throw the keys into the ocean-sea. the handmaidens of god mariia, paraskeva, and klavdiia will go to the ocean-sea for these keys. they will bring back golden keys. with these keys i will open all the milk wells, all the milk veins. the milk will run into milk wells, the milk will run through milk veins to the udder, from the udder to the teats, from the teats to the milk pail for the handmaiden of god, aleksandra. be my words strong, sticky, firm and right for my cow’s udder.] the image of an all-devouring pike (shchuka-kalyga) with iron teeth and tin eyes appears in an incantation to promote good appetite in animals: 32 как щука-калыга, железные зубы, оловянные глаза, ест-поедает, так же чтоб мои поросятки, телятки ели-пили, сопели, в посудинке ничего не оставляли. горькое, кислое, соленое пусть им кажется медом, сладкой патокой. ешьте, сопите, жрите, в посудинке ничего не оставляйте. как сиги, караси в синем море гладки, чисты, здоровы, также чтоб мои поросятки были чисты, гладки, здоровы. во имя отца и сына, и святого духа. аминь [ияли: вф 1531-33]. [as the iron-toothed, tin-eyed pike gobbles up everything, so let my piglets and calves gobble up everything, grunting, leaving not a drop in the food trough. let the bitter, the sour, and the salty seem as honey, as sweet syrup, to them. eat, grunt, gorge, and leave nothing in the food trough. as whitefish and carp in the blue sea are smooth, clean, healthy, so let my piglets be clean, smooth, healthy. in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit. amen.] the incongruous use of the “pike” image here may be explained by the content of another incantation from this informant’s repertoire, specifically in an incantation to ward off diseases, where the “pike” eats up “unfortunate accidents, evil eyes” (see below). materials about animal husbandry rituals are numerous. the first pasturing of cattle fell on st. george’s day.(6) if the weather was cold and grass was sparse, the ritual of first pasture was performed symbolically, and the animal was led out of the cattle-shed for only a short period of time. pussy-willow, salt, bread, and an icon were used in the ritual. branches of pussy-willow (in local terminology, mas’ki) were kept on the icon shelf (bozhnitsa) from palm sunday (verbnoe voskresen’e).(7) the willow branches were used to stroke and lightly strike the animal from head to tail. after the animal returned from pasture, the mistress would affix the pussy-willow branch above the door of the cattle-shed or in the house under the tie beam and utter incantations in which she mentioned the items used in the ritual: как вот эта вербочка домой пришла и дома будёт спать, так же мой скотичек ходил домой. как эта иконка дому держалася, вербочки дому держалися, дак так чтобы у нас коровушка дому держалася. солнышко на закат, и коровушка бежи быстрехонько домой. [аа, 2006]. [just as this pussy-willow came home and will sleep at home, so let my cattle come home. just as this icon has held to home, and the pussy-willows have held to home, so let our little cow hold to home. the sun is setting, so run home, little cow, fast as fast can be.] at first pasture, a piece of salted bread and some salt were given to each animal on the farm. the bread and salt used for this ritual was incantational magic of the northern russians folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 33 placed before the icons on holy thursday (8). the villagers considered that, once they performed this action, their animals would not walk past their home and would be guarded from the evil eye or spoiling. faith in the active power of salt that had been placed near icons on holy thursday (also “velikodennaia,” “chetvergovaia” salt) must be emphasized. salt which “overnighted” near the icons and which was kept for the entire year, until the following holy thursday, was given to ailing cattle and used at calving. to keep the animals safe from the evil eye, the salt was sprinkled around the cattle-shed. salt that had been kept for three years was thrown into the footsteps of any person thought capable of causing spoiling. villagers also washed dishes that had been tainted [by mice, cockroaches – ияли: вф 1544-28] with this salt. на великий четверг соль под божницу поставишь, тут она заночует, под иконой. «как соль не портится, так чтоб скот не портился» – это вот скажешь. солью-то посыплешь потом на их. я тебе скажу: корова отелится, берешь соли вот так немного, горсть, посыплешь на корову, посыплешь на теленочка. она лижет, чтобы не портился. бывает, людито всякие глаза-то. четверговая соль, она весь год должная быть. ее приберешь. потом мало ли че со скотиной, вот так на кусочек возьмешь этой соли и дашь [ияли: аф 1544-12]. [on great thursday, they place the salt under the icon shelf, here it will spend the night, beneath the icon. “as salt does not spoil, so should the cattle not spoil” – this you will say. then you will sprinkle them [the animals – iu.k.] with this salt. i’m telling you: when a cow calves, you will take a little salt, just a small handful, sprinkle it on the cow, sprinkle it on the calf. she will lick the calf and so it will not be spoiled. it happens that people have different kinds of eyes. (9) thursday salt should be available all year. keep it safe. who knows what might happen to the cattle, and then you can take some of this salt and give it to them.] if new animals did not become readily accustomed to the cattleshed, they were led out of the shed on holy thursday with an incantation, for example: великий четверг, соверши силу великую над коровушками, чтоб не гибли, не падали, чтоб жили, были здоровыми на великий четверг отвожу все неприятности, все невзгоды, чтоб коровушки не гибли, не дохли, не сохли, чтоб были здоровы и плодливы [ияли: аф 1538-10, 11]. [holy thursday, exercise your great power over the little cows, so that they do not perish, do not fall, so that they live and be healthy. on holy thursday i ward off all troubles, all misfortunes, so that the little cows do not perish, do not die, do not dry up, so that they become healthy and fertile] 34 rituals that accompany the relocation of a newly-purchased animal into its new cattle-shed are also widely disseminated. the purpose of these rituals is to ensure the animal’s successful “transfer” to its new home (“so that it would not pine for its old home”) and the preservation of its productivity. one of our informants described such a rite, which consists of several interconnected mini-rites, each of which could be performed independently. a small stone, some hay, or moss taken from the seller’s yard was placed under the crib or manger, accompanied by the following words: гостья, тут погостили, теперь пойдем к нам погостить [guest, you visited here (meaning the cow’s previous home), now let’s go visit our place] in the milking shed, the new owners placed a large pail full of water (the informant mentions a 15-liter pail). leading the animal into the shed, they first addressed the house-spirit: суседушко-медведушко, пусти мою коровушку на подворьицё, гладь да добрей, гладь да добрей. и привела, и принесла с собой молочко густое, сметану густую, желтоё маслицё. [neighbor-bear, let my cow into the yard, stroke her and stroke most kindly, stroke her and stroke most kindly. that, as she is led in, she may bring with her rich milk, thick cream, yellow butter] then the cow was sprinkled with salt from head to tail while these words accompanied the action: как эта соль дому держалася, не портилася, так чтобы у меня скотинушка не портилась, держалась бы дому. будьте мои слова крепки, лепки навеки. аминь. [as this salt held to the home and did not spoil, so may my cow not be spoiled and hold to home. let my words be strong and sticky forever. amen] after that, the large pail was placed next to the cow with the words, как та коровушка доила, так щтёбы моя коровушка доила больше – по пятнадцатилитровому ведру, и все я с собой принесла домой. [just as that cow gave milk, so let my cow give still more milk – 15 liters at a time, and all of it i will take home] each action and incantation was performed and recited three times [аа 2006]. incantational magic of the northern russians folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 35 the purchase and sale of an animal were accompanied by a set of ritual actions and ritual dialogue. during the transfer of the animal, the buyer was supposed to ask the seller if he was selling the cattle “sprósta” or “nesprósta” [approximately “willing” or “with reservation”].(10) the seller’s answer, which the question was specifically intended to provoke, determined whether the purchase or sale of the animal was legitimized and would proceed. if the answer was “sprósta,” then the animal could be taken without fear. the animal was considered to be “unspoiled” and would recognize its new cattle-shed and new owner. if the seller had to think about the answer, then this was a sign that the animal was being offered “nesprósta.” in this case the purchaser was advised to decline the transaction, since the seller might be “keeping” for himself certain qualities of the animal, such as its fertility, milking capacity, and good health. after the animal was brought to the new farmyard and the former owner had departed, the purchaser would strew some grain around the yard, uttering the words: сам собой пошел, а скотину у нас не задевай [аа 2006).(11)] [you yourself have gone, so leave our cattle alone] there was a prohibition against giving away anything from the household for three days after a new animal first entered the cattle-shed. people believe that milk or other dairy products that are given away from the household or sold can spoil an animal by taking away its capacity to give milk, thus affecting the animal’s health and lowering milk quality. for this reason, when the dairy products are transferred to someone else, the mistress says: густое молоко, густую сметану, маслицо желтое густое – все оставлею дома [аа 2006]. [rich milk, thick cream, thick yellow butter – i keep it all at home] to prevent spoiling, it was enough to put a grain of salt in the milk while saying these words: как эта соль не урочится, также и коровушка не урочилась бы [ияли: вф 1523-18]. [as this salt is not spoiled, so my little cow is not spoiled] an animal’s restless behavior was viewed as an obvious symptom of the evil eye. in such cases, the person who cast the evil eye on the animal was given a ladle with water in which he could see his reflection. then 36 this water was splashed on the animal three times: twice on the head, and a third time so that water went down its sides. if the cow shook its muzzle and body, this was a sign that the evil eye had been removed [ияли: аф 1537-4].(12) an entire system of protective spells focused on the animal’s movement. to prevent a cow from leaving the pasture and going into the forest, villagers would walk clockwise around the animal three times reciting a charm (“churkali”): чур, моя ни с места. чур, моя ни с места. как я стою, не трепенуся ничем, дак так и моя коровушка не трепенулася ни хвостиком, ни рожкима, ни ножкима. будьте мои слова крепки, лепки навеки. аминь коровушке [аа 2006]. [chur, my own, do not move. chur, my own, do not move. as i am standing, without stirring, so my little cow does not stir, not with her tail, not with her horns, not with her legs. be my words strong and sticky forever. amen to the little cow] many actions were performed to help an animal “know” its shed, that is to ensure that it would return home from pasture. after the first pasture in springtime, a cow was led over the shed’s threshold on which an axe had been placed sharp edge upward. alternatively, a belt that had been removed was placed across the threshold. once the animal passed over the threshold, the belt was put back on with the words: как пояс меня держится, так и коровушка держись дому! [ияли: вф 1513-28]. [as the belt holds to me, so, my little cow, hold to home!] three crosses (made of matches, woodchips, or straw taken from the farmstead or shed) might be placed beneath the threshold of the cattle shed in such a way that two crosses were covered by the third. then the villagers would say three times, “bless us, lord, christ” (господи баслови [благослови], христос), followed by the incantation, or spell, the purpose of which was to provoke a desirable outcome [tolstoi 1999: 259]: как эти крестики лежат, восплеменутся, дак так чтобы раба божия у нас коровушка домой восплеменулася. будьте мои слова крепки, лепки навеки. аминь коровушке. иди домой, ждем с нетерпеньём. все ворота, все кресты, все дороги открыты!. after that, the cow was led from the shed [аа, 2006]. [as these little crosses lie in proximity [the idea is aggregation], so should the handmaiden of god, our little cow, return to the proximity of home. may my incantational magic of the northern russians folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 37 words be strong and sticky forever. amen to the cow. come home, we wait impatiently. all gates, all crosses, all roads are open!] the text immediately above could also be used in a ritual that was performed if an animal was lost. at dawn, villagers took nine pegs or posts from the fence of their own garden, planed them at one end, and put them into the stove with the pointed ends outside. these were then set afire, while the following incantation was uttered over the smoke that rose (“ukhali v trubku”): дым ты, дым кудрявый, развались, раскатись на восемь дорожек, на девяту кудрявенькую. как дымок выходит по заре, по всем облакам, по всем речкам, по всем озерам, так и ждем коровушку с нетерпеньём. иди быстрехонько домой. аминь, аминь, аминь [аа 2006]; [you smoke, curly smoke, disperse; go off along eight paths, along the ninth curly one. as the smoke goes out at dawn, to all the clouds, to all the small rivers, to all the lakes, so we wait for the little cow impatiently. come home as fast as fast can be. amen, amen, amen] дым, вейся, кружися, развевайся, скажи нам, где коровушка наша (variant: сыщи нашу коровушку [ияли: аф 1546-98]. [smoke, twist, whirl, disperse, tell us where our little cow is (variant: find our little cow] if the logs caught fire immediately, then the cow would come home at once; if not, then they anticipated the return of the animal on the ninth day. no less substantial or representative is the body of healing incantations, dominated by “specialized” texts that the loima villagers used to treat concrete physical or mental illnesses. illnesses included boils, hernia, lower back pain, epilepsy, insomnia, burns, angina, toothache, bleeding, joint pain, anxiety, and so forth. as far as their content is concerned, the texts of healing incantations are based on mythological concepts of illness and healing, that is they are derived from folk understandings of the body part afflicted by the illness, its form, its visual appearance, possible influences of the illness on the organism, and so forth. thus boils and throat inflammations needed to be “dried up,” while “navel, groin, and other hernias (gryzha) are “gnawed” (zagryzhat’) until they are: ни в руках, ни в ногах, ни в устах, ни в легких, ни в печени, ни в крови горячей, ни в буйной голове [neither in the hands, nor the legs, nor the lips, nor the lungs, nor the liver, nor in the hot blood, nor in the turbulent head] 38 a burn was “put out” like a fire by pouring three buckets of water over it. insomnia (bessonitsa) was treated by addressing a request to the dawn or dusk (zaria-zarianitsa) to “give sleep (sonnitsa).” convulsions and epilepsy (rodimets) were “chopped off”: a child suffering such ailments would be covered by a tub. branches would then be placed on the tub (the informant mentions birch). then the following words would be uttered four times: “i chop off all the pains-illnesses” (все боли-хвори отрубаю); meanwhile, an axe was used to imitate the action of chopping from all four sides of the tub [ияли: аф 1536-53]. these texts are entirely traditional in form and style. we can identify several optional constituent elements of the incantation: a section which contains the characteristics of the illness and a description of the treatment, an operational message, stating the desired outcome, a ratification, and the final “amen.” the distinctive characteristics of attested healing incantations are conciseness, brevity, and frequent syntactic parallelism, for example: как огонек горит, так и боляток пусть сгорит у раба божьего [ияли: аф 1536-35]; [as the flame burns, so let the carbuncle [on the body] of the servant of god [name] burn itself out] как эта матница в избе сохнет, так же бы сырая жаба у рабы божьей сохла. аминь, аминь, аминь [ияли: аф 1540-16] [as the tie-beam in the hut dries out, so may the inflammation of the handmaiden of god [name] dry out. amen, amen, amen”] как сучок засох, так и у раба божьего ивана пусть засохнет чириек [ияли: аф 1536-40]. [as the knot [in the wood] dried up, so should the servant of god ivan’s boil dry up] hardly any so-called “universal” charms intended to cure any and all illnesses are attested, but one text of considerable complexity was recorded. this text consists of an exposition containing the description of the speaker’s movements to the place where a magic helper is met; a narrative portion with a list of illnesses and those who caused them; a ratification; and the final “amen”: если человек болеет и считает, что кто-то его заколдовал, молитва тоже есть: «я, раба божья александра, пойду, перекрестясь, пойду, благословлясь, из двери, из дверей на улицу, с улицы в чистое поле. в чистом поле щука-калыга железные зубы, оловянные глаза, ела бы поедала притчи, уроки от двенадцати болей, от двенадцати хворобей, от incantational magic of the northern russians folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 39 щипоты, ломоты, хворобы, от грудной боли, от ушной, головной, ручной, спинной, горла, носа, глаза, рук, рта, языка, спины, коленей, от бабы-простоволоски, от бабы-пустоголоски, от врага и злодея, от колдуна и колдуньи, от всякого негодяя. будьте слова крепки, лепки, тверды и правильны. во имя отца и сына, святого духа. аминь» [ияли: аф 1536-37]. [if a person is ill and thinks that someone has bewitched him, there is a prayer for this: “i, the handmaiden of god alexandra, will go, crossing myself, i will go, blessing myself, out of the door, out from the door to the road, from the road to the open field. in the open field an iron-toothed, tineyed pike fish (щука-калыга) with metal teeth nibbled at and ate up unfortunate accidents [pritchi], evil eyes [uroki](13) caused by twelve pains, twelve illnesses, bleeding, rheumatism, diseases, chest pain, ear and head pains [informant’s commentary: the speaker lists everything that ails him or her], hand, back, throat, nose, eye, mouth, tongue, and knee pain, that come from the loose woman, from the rumor-monger, from the enemy and evildoer, from the sorcerer and the sorceress, from any villain. may my words be strong, sticky, firm and right. in the name of the father and the son, holy spirit. amen”] treatment of some ailments was performed without verbal accompaniment. if a child had a crying fit, for example, all corners of the table were washed. then the water was used to rinse the loops, or eyes, of the door hooks (the water was “passed” through the door hooks). then the child was washed in this water. if the child was being treated for fright, all the corners of the table were washed and then the child was washed in that water, and the water poured out outside the house “left backhand” (naupokoi). the hair on the child’s head was snipped in three places, placed on hot coals, and the child was made to inhale the smoke. infants born with lanugo hair had their excess body hair removed in the bath-house. after a few minutes in the steam heat, the new-born’s back and shoulders were smeared with a soft dough. the infant was then covered with a diaper and massaged. numerous informant commentaries indicate that there was wide dissemination of love incantations and charms in the loima tradition. long poetic texts intended to inflame passion or to cool ardor are few; the majority of recorded love charms are brief, laconic, and structured on comparison. one example is the following: как эта елочка сохнет, так и мой дружок пусть подсохнет [as this fir tree dries up, so may my dear one yearn [for me]]. love charms (prisushki) include traditional formulas, such as “asking for beauty,” “asking for the object of the love charm to experience yearning 40 (sukhota) and suffering” and “expressing a wish for the love and favor of the object of the love charm.” for example: на воду синиста, на моe лицо белиста, на мое лицо красота, на раба божия сухота. не мог бы он без меня не жить, не быть, ни дни дневать, ни ночи ночевать, все бы на меня зрил, смотрил, очей не сносил. аминь [ияли: аф 1547-46]. [blue for the water, white for my face, beauty for my face, and yearning for him, the servant of god [name]. let him not be able to live without me, not exist, not live a day, not sleep a night; let him see me, look at me, not take his eyes from me. amen] (14). an incantation for beauty, spoken by girls before leaving the house uses the traditional motif of “miraculous garments.” celestial bodies such as the red sun, stars, and the moon are mentioned as space decorations. стою я, раба божья, благословеся, пойду, перекрестеся, и выхожу я из дверей во двери, из ворот в ворота, на красное крылечко. на красном крылечке белым светом я умьюся, красным солнцем снаряжуся, звездочкими обвешуся, месяцем опояшуся. не было бы меня, рабы божей, толще, не было бы тоньше, не было бы складня, не было сгладня, чтобы всех была басяе. все бы на меня глядели-смотрели и завидовали [ияли: аф 1547-43]. [here i stand, the handmaiden of god, blessing myself, i go, crossing myself, i walk out of the door into the door, out of the gate into the gate, onto the beautiful (krasnoe) porch. on the beautiful porch i wash myself in the bright light, i dress myself in the red sun, i hang stars round my neck, i gird myself with the moon. no one would be plumper than i, the handmaiden of god, no one more slender, no one better built, no one smoother, so that i would be more fabulous than anyone. everyone would look and gaze at me and envy me.] we also have data on the various ways and means used to evoke yearning in the beloved. the use of sweat, menstrual blood, the practice of burning the love object’s hair while uttering charms, and the practice of cutting down a small tree are all attested. equally known is the practice of giving the spouse a drink containing canine fecal matter collected on great thursday to encourage the couples’ separation. magic texts that regulate social interaction, protect people from acts of nature, and seek to affect household and agricultural life are all attested and magic texts linked to calendrical and life cycle rituals are represented by a small number of variants. on the holiday of the intercession of the mother of god [pokrov; 14 october n.s./1 october incantational magic of the northern russians folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 41 o.s.), married women uttered incantations using an imperative formula for wealth and prosperity: в каждый угол, первый снежок как пойдет, снежок немножко бросишь: «батюшка покров, покрой землю снежком, а меня, рабу божью (имя рек), добром-животом, скотом». скот чтобы жил ладом [ияли: аф 1545-20].(15) [at the first snow, throw some snow into each corner and say: ‘little father pokrov, cover the land with snow and cover me, the handmaiden of god [name], with goods and cattle’ let the cattle live in harmony] so that the roof might not be blown off the house, on holy thursday the villagers threw onto the roof a log or a small stone on which was written “i put weight on you for the whole year” [ияли: аф 1545-12]. if a person died in the house, a small stone was placed in the holy corner (krasnyi ugol), under the icons. on the fortieth day the relatives recited the following: как камешек лежит, не воротится, не поворачивается, так и душа раба божьего не вернулась домой [as the stone lies, not returning, not turning around, so the soul of the servant of god should not return home] then the stone was thrown out over the left shoulder [ияли: аф 152163]. after the coffin with the deceased was carried out of the house, grain was strewn on the porch with the words: пойди сам собой, а у нас из дома никого не уводи [аа, 2006].(16) [go your own way by yourself and take no one from our house with you] brief incantations uttered at weddings included good wishes for a wealthy and easy life together and incantations directed to the union (or separation) of the young couple. they were built on comparisons. for example, the young couple would be sprinkled with hops (17) while the words “let life be as easy/as light as hops” (пусть жизнь будет легкая как хмель) were uttered. the good wishes verbally express the actual qualities of hops, namely the fluffiness. to separate a couple, one would toss fur from a cat and dog at the couple’s house, saying: как кошка да собака живут худо, грызутся, так же и (имя рек) пусть живут [ияли: аф 1545-9, etc.] [as a cat and a dog live badly together and fight, so may [names] live the same way]. 42 it is interesting to note that cats and dogs appear in a description of wedding practices collected in the viatskii region in the 1850s. before the wedding procession set out for the church, the best man was supposed to demand that “there be no dogs or cats.” the belief was that if the wedding procession encountered a dog or a cat or if a dog or a cat ran between the bride and groom, then the new couple would quickly separate [рго. р. 10. оп. 1. ед.хр. 28. л. 14 об.]. texts associated with agricultural labor contain the following spell said when harvesting grain crops. it is spoken over the last sheaf and has a productive meaning: последний дожинают сноп, вот илье бороду и завертывают, колоски тут завернут, тут и оставят их, не срежут, что это илье борода: «илье – борода, коню – голова, хозяину – в сусек спарина», чтобы хлеб все время [был] [ияли: вф 1529-17]; [when they harvest and get to the last sheaf, they roll up the ears of grain on the stalks for this is the beard (boroda) of il’ia, and they will leave this sheaf, they will not cut it, for this is il’ia’s beard: “il’ia gets the beard, the horse gets the head, the master gets goods in the granary,” so that there will always be bread] последнюю полоску будешь жать, такое кустик оставляёшь маленький, и сверху маленько замотаешь [и приговариваешь]: «коровушка съест, дак теленочка рóдит, лошадка съест, дак жеребеночка рóдит, овечка съест, дак овечку рóдит». потом там скот ходит, кто знает, может, кто и съест [ияли: аф 1549-24]. [when you harvest the last strip, then leave a small clump, tie it up a bit at the top [and say]: “if a cow eats this, it will bear a calf; if a mare eats this, it will bear a foal; if a ewe eats this, it will bear a lamb.” then when the cattle roam there, perhaps one of them will eat it] charms to prevent fire and theft often have motifs such as a stone mountain or iron paling which provides a barrier and end with amen: чур, моя крепость, чур, мой дом. вкруг моего двора камена гора, аминем обнесена [ияли: вф 1532-5, 6]. [chur, my fortress, chur, my house. surrounding my yard is a stone mountain, enclosed by an amen] incantations recited before leaving a journey mention holy helpers who will lead the way: ангел по дороженьке, христос на пути, николай угодничек, дороженьку свети, помоги мне, рабе божьей (имя рек), выбраться на путь истинный [ияли: аф 1540-29]; incantational magic of the northern russians folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 43 [an angel along the road, christ on the way, st. nicholas light my path, help me, the servant of god [name], find the true way] крест-креститель, крест-спаситель, от всех бед оградитель, укажи дороженьку [ияли: аф 1538-15]; [cross-baptizer, cross-savior, keeper from all harm, show me the way] спустился господь с небес, спустил животворящий крест от змей, от зверей и от злых людей, от лютого врага, чтобы спасти меня, рабу божью валентину. аминь, аминь, аминь [ияли: аф 1540-24]. [the lord came down from heaven, he sent down a life-giving cross to protect me, the handmaiden of god valentina, from snakes, from beasts, from evil people, from the vicious enemy. amen, amen, amen] in the repertoires of various informants there are stylized texts, such as this charm recited in the bath-house: березонька пушистая, березонька душистая, дай мне твоей силушки, твоей моготушки, какую ты берешь из земли-матушки, чтоб я не гнулася, не качалася ни в чистом полюшке, ни в дубравушке, ни от ветра могучего, ни от снега сыпучего, ни от дождика частого [ияли: аф 1536-41]. [fluffy birch, fragrant birch, give me some of your strength, the power that you take from mother earth, so that i might not bend, might not sway, in either the open field or the forest grove, from either a mighty wind or falling snow or frequent rain] incantations and non-canonical prayers intended for daily use, that is those recited before retiring and upon awakening, against spoiling, when washing, before a journey, and so forth, are a vivid part of loima tradition. the majority of these texts express the idea of “enclosing the space around the speaker with the aid of holy helpers or a cross”: иду, перекрестясь, иду, благословясь. рядом со мной ангелы-хранители, надо мной господь бог, передо мной пресвятая богородица [ияли: аф 1537-25; uttered before setting out on a journey]; [i go, crossing myself, i go, blessing myself. beside me are guardian angels, above me is the lord god, before me is the most holy mother of god] спать ложусь, крестом крещусь, крестом христа призываю, крестом врага отгоняю. враг-сатана, прочь от меня, нет тебе дела до меня, до рабы божьей валентинушки [ияли: аф 1540-23; uttered before going to sleep]; [i go to bed, i cross myself with the cross, i call on christ with the cross, with the cross i drive the enemy away. enemy-satan, get away from me, you have no business with me, with the handmaiden of god valentinushka] 44 богородица в головах, ангелы в дверях, апостолы по углам, [нрзб] по бокам, святая вода в храме. я, раба божья (имя рек), святой водой окроплюсь, святым духом запрусь, животворящим крестом перекрещусь. аминь, аминь, аминь [ияли: аф 1540-30]; [the mother of god at the head, angels at the doors, apostles in the corners, [unclear] on the sides, holy water in the church. i, the handmaiden of god [name], will sprinkle myself with holy water, will lock myself in with the holy spirit, will cross myself with the life-giving cross. amen, amen, amen] солнышко восходит, сам иисус христос выходит, с крестом, с евангелём, с божьей головой. благослови меня, господи, на раннёе вставаньё, на тихоё дыханьё, благослови меня, господи, по матушкеземле пройти, талант найти. пресвятая богородица, меня веди, иисус христос, иди впереди меня, рабу божью (имя рек) стереги [ияли: аф 1547-23, recited for every day]. [the sun rises, jesus christ himself appears with the cross, the gospel, the god’s head (meaning god’s blessing). bless me, o lord, so that i may rise early, breathe quietly; bless me, o lord, so that i may walk on mother-earth, and find happiness. most holy mother of god, guide me; jesus christ, go before me, preserve the handmaiden of god [name]] the symbolic enclosure of space may also be achieved by multiple repetitions of a key word: крестом крещуся, крестом хранюся, крестом врага отгоняю, крестом христа призываю [ияли: аф 1536-52], etc. [with the cross i cross myself, with the cross i preserve myself, with the cross i drive the enemy away, with the cross i call on christ] incantations against the evil eye and spoiling occupy a lesser place in recorded folklore. in their content, stylistics, and choice of structural elements, they are entirely traditional northern russian texts. in one of the incantations, the central image is that of a river that washes away all aches, all forms of grief, all accidents, spoiling: быстрая ричка, чистая водичка, рвешь ты пенья-коренья, желты песка, круты бережка. сорви и стащи с меня, с рабы божьей зинаиды, все боли, скорби, притчи, уроки, унеси во синеё море. во синём море зеленым мошком подернёт, желтым песком засыплёт, будет годы годовать, веки вековать, замок в море, ключ в небе. во веки веков, аминь [ияли: аф 1547-44]. [fast river, pure water, you tear up stumps and roots, your sand is yellow, and your banks are steep. tear off and pull off from me, from the handmaiden of god zinaida, all aches, all grief, accidents, spoiling, and carry them out to the dark blue sea. in the dark blue sea they will be coated with green moss and covered with yellow sand, they will stay there for years and years, for incantational magic of the northern russians folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 45 centuries and centuries, the lock is in the sea, the key in the sky. forever on to ages. amen.] another text describes the progressive movement of the person toward a sacred center and expresses the wish that the properties of cosmic bodies (inaccessibility, purity) be transferred to the speaker: стою я, раба божья, благословеся, пойду, перекрестеся, из дверей во двери, из ворот в ворота, выхожу я, раба божия, на белой свет, на утреннюю зóрю, на красное солнышко. как белой свет, утреннюю зóрю, красное солнышко никто не может ни запретить, ни испортить, ни мужик-еретик, ни баба-колдовка, ни девка-простоволоска. еретные слова, пойте в поле, в поле стоит столб, из столба в камень, еретнику в ретивое сердцо. аминь [ияли: вф 1530-29] [i stand, the handmaiden of god, blessing myself, i shall go, crossing myself, from doors to doors, from gates to gates. i, the handmaiden of god, emerge into the wide world, into the morning dawn, out to the red sun. no one can interdict or spoil the wide world, the morning dawn, or the red sun, not the heretic, not the sorceress, not the loose woman. heretical words, go into the field, in the field there stands a column, go from the column into a stone, then into the heretic’s zealous heart. amen]. still another text is the result of the contamination of a canonical prayer, namely the lord’s prayer, by an incantation against spoiling:(18) отче наш, да иже еси на небеса, да святится имя твое, да будет царствие твое, да будет воля твоя, да яко же земли хлеб наш насущный дашь нам днесь. и мы долги оставляем нашим должникам. да отче наш, да не введи нас в искушение, избавь нас от всякого от лукавого, от зла. пойду я в чисто-то поле, пробежусь по чистому-то полю, на чистом-то поле серый камень лёжит, на сером-то камне три девицы, три красавицы сидят, все обнимаются, словные наговорные [нрзб.] все слова. будьте мои слова крепки, лепки навеки. аминь. этим девицам, крaсавицам молюсь, унижаюсь, удивляюсь, чтобы все с меня чтобы зло ушло [аа, 2006]. [our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth. give us this day our daily bread. and we forgive our debtors. and, our father, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one, from all evil. i will go to the open field, i will run across the open field, in the open field lies а gray stone, on the gray stone sit three maidens, three beauties, embracing each other, incantational [unclear] all words. may my words be strong, sticky forever. amen. to these maidens, these beauties, i pray, before them i abase myself, by them i am amazed, so that all evil should depart from me] the merging of two different genres in this incantation can be partially explained by the semantics of the key words: thus “the evil one” 46 (lukavyi) has a range of meanings in popular parlance, among which are “clever and scheming, perfidious, secretive and wicked (zloi), and also dangerous, insincere, feigning, double-faced, ill-intentioned. the word can also be used as a noun meaning demon, devil, satan, the unclean one, the evil (zloi) spirit” [dal’, 1995, v. 2, 272] essentially the embodiment of evil. clearly such a perception of the evil one provoked the appearance of the lexeme “evil (zlo)” in conjunction with the phrase “deliver us from the evil one (lukavyi)” found in the first part the text. it also motivated the distinctive post-script with the wish that “evil (zlo) should depart from me” after the amen. this repetition is intended to increase the effectiveness of the magical text. analysis of available audio recordings makes it possible to speculate about the manner in which incantations were uttered. incidentally these speculations confirm what collectors in the last century also discovered, namely that incantations are spoken in a single breath, a feat facilitated by the particular rhythmic and syntactic structure of the texts. in one interview, an informant performed in real time the incantation accompanying the ritual of searching for a lost animal. he used rising intonation drawing out the last word in each clause, a style referred to as a “calling hoot”: . . . иди домо-о-о-ой. ждем с нетерпень-ё-ём. все ворота, все кресты, все дороги открыты-ы-ы-ы [. . . come ho-o-o-ome. we wait impatiently-e-e-e. all gates, all crosses, all roads are ope-e-e-n] a numerical code of triplicates works at different levels of the text. it can appear in the text as a whole, only in the ratification, or in the final prayerful word “amen.” separate lexemes are uttered three (and more rarely, nine) times, and the ritual actions that accompany the magic text are enacted the same number of times. examples of the use of the number four are rare and occur most often in rituals or texts that symbolically enclose the space around the speaker. such uses of the number four can be found in the treatment of epilepsy or convulsions, and in incantations for daily use and those recited before beginning a journey).(19) object and action in healing, animal husbandry, and other rituals remain important. materials collected from contemporary informants show that they preserve strict regulations governing the choice of the place where and the time when rituals should be enacted. the combination of action and verbal components of rituals is also highly incantational magic of the northern russians folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 47 regulated. in addition, different correlations exist between action and text. people typically “talk through” the ritual beforehand, or they use synchronicity of utterance and action, or they alternate action and utterance [about correlation between verbal component and action in incantation, see: tolstoi 1999: 241]. the structural peculiarities of written incantations show that contemporary informants prefer brief incantational phrases or texts structured by the device of syntactic parallelism that use comparative formulas [tolstoi 1999: 243]; there are many such formulas in the repertoires of the loima population. one example is the following: when explaining how to protect the bride from spoiling, the informant includes in his narrative brief incantational texts, the simplicity of which speak for the presupposition that they were composed spontaneously:(20) “sticking a needle into the hem [of the bride’s dress – iu. к.], they wrapped thread around the needle and said: когда эта ниточка сквозь иголочку пройдет, тогда невесту (имя рек) сглазят)[ияли: аф 1542-55]. [when this thread passes through the needle, then the bride [name] will be spoiled] in another: невесте втыкали иголку с ниткой в подол [при этом нитку обертывали вокруг иголки]: “только тогда разлучат рабов божьих ивана и марию, когда эта ниточка пройдет сквозь ушко” [ияли: аф 1537-20], etc. [they stuck a needle with thread into her hem [and wrapped the thread around the needle]: ‘the servants of god ivan and maria will be separated only when this thread passes through the eye of this needle’] while short texts abound, complex texts with a full set of structural elements are rare. such texts include a prayerful initiation, an introduction describing the initial actions of the speaker, a narrative and an operational message in which the mythological situation is recreated and the means of its resolution is proposed, a ratification, and an amen. in subsequent utterings, such complex texts are recreated word for word, without any textual modifications. magic helpers in incantations include saints, both anonymous and named personages, anthropomorphized beings, and other entities. magic helpers each have their own “specialization”: the mother of god, paraskeva, and klavdiia help with the unlocking of milk; people turn to st. nicholas the miracle worker for help when they have lost their way 48 while traveling; a “woman (baba) with three buckets of water” heals burns; “three maidens, three beauties” guard against evil; the one “universal” magic helper is christ. harmful individuals, capable of spoiling or bringing illness, are listed and catalogued in the texts. in the same category as sorcerers and sorceresses (“man-heretic” [muzhikeretik],“woman-sorceress” [baba-koldovka], and “evil-doer” [likhodei]) are “loose women” (baba-prostovoloska; i.e. a woman with loosened hair and uncovered head; cf. loose and uncovered hair as an attribute of demonic females [tolstoi 1995: 423]), “female rumor-mongers” (baba pustogoloska; a foolish, shallow woman who spreads rumors and false gossip), “scoundrels” (негодяй; “a good-for-nothing, bad, stupid, immoral person” [dal’ 1995, v. 2: 509]), “evil doers” (лиходей; “evil, vindictive, crafty” [dal’ 1995, v. 2: 257]), etc. here contemporary records preserve traditional conceptions of the ability of rancorous, talkative, immoral people to spoil and harm through their secretions such saliva and odor [konakov 1999: 362]. such a person can also harm through abuse which, in the popular imagination, is considered a manifestation of unclean forces and serves as a distinctive attribute of representatives of an “other” world [tolstoi 1995: 250-253]. the color palette of loima incantations is limited. only a few references to color have been recorded. these include: “gold keys,” “white dish” (in reference to the “unlocking of milk”), “yellow sand,” “dark blue sea” (in the incantation against spoiling), “gray stone” (a variant of the sacred alatyr’-stone). other imagery traditionally found in incantations and charms that appears regularly includes the following: “iron fencing” (zheleznyi tyn), the adjective “miraculous”, a wish for beauty, a wish for the object of the charm to experience yearning (sukhota), a wish for love and the love object’s favor, and various formulaic lists such as the enumeration of illnesses, parts of the body, and causes of harm. popular terminology applied to magical texts in general and healing charms in particular shows that the inhabitants of loima see them as prayers, passages (stateiki), and words. the subjects of incantational rituals are, as a rule, elderly women. this is reflected in such appellations as “old woman,” “grandmother.” we also encounter references such as “wise woman” (znaiushchaia, znakharka), which imply that these women are seen as having magical knowledge. the term “word-blower” (slovoduika, fem.) which is widely attested in this tradition, reflects how the healer acted upon her patient. incantational magic of the northern russians folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 49 specifically, the woman would recite the incantation, “blowing the words” onto water, salt, or food stuffs such as sweets, eggs, sugar, which were then given to the patient. contemporary fieldwork among the russian enclaves of the loima region reveals an active folklore tradition which uses charms and incantations for a wide variety of purposes. notes 1 for a brief overview of loima folk culture, see vlasov and kaneva 2006: 25-26. the loima tradition has been addressed in works devoted to individual folkloric and ethnographic phenomena of family and life ritual, in particular wedding incantations and rituals [krasheninnikova 2005, 2007] and funerary and commemorative rituals [krasheninnikova 2009]. 2 primary materials introduced in this article were recorded in the village of loima and in adjacent villages in 2004 and 2006. portions of this audio and video archive are held in the folklore collection of the institute of language, literature, and history of komi, a part of the ural section of the russian academy of sciences. other portions are in the author’s private archive. the material on incantations is based on interviews with 28 informants, mostly women, born between 1909-1938. 3 the above applies not only to the loima villages. a decrease in the use of incantations for animal protection can also be explained by the expansion of veterinary medicine and by a sharp reduction in the number of cattle kept by collective (in part by the complete absence of socialized farming) and private enterprises. 4 compare with the records of northern russian incantations containing two parts. see also the invocation of the domovoi and incantation wishes from, for example, pinezhskii, vinogradovskii raiony arkhangelskaia oblast’ [adon’eva and ovchinnikova 1993, 33-34, 37, № 102-108, 119], etc. 5 in northern russian tradition, texts with the motifs “a sorcerer spoils a cow,” or “a sorcerer locks milk” have become widespread. these texts list the attributes of the “spoiled” animal: the cow ceases to give milk, becomes restless, aggressive, does not let the mistress touch her, its udder becomes inflamed. 6 st. george’s day, egor’ev den’. 6 may n.s./23 april o.s. is the feast day of st. george the victory-bearer (georgii pobedonosets), who is also the patron of livestock. traditionally, first pasture takes place on 50 this day. in reality, the pasturing of animals could only begin after sufficient grass had grown in the pasturage, but the mention of egor’ev den’ as the “starting point” of summer pasturage is consistent across interviews with various informants. 7 pussy willow sunday, verbnoe voskresenie is palm sunday in the western church. it is the sixth sunday of lent and the last sunday before easter. it celebrates christ’s entry into jerusalem [matt.: 1-9]. in the russian north, this day was celebrated by bringing branches of pussy-willow to the church to be blessed. the pussy-willow was then taken home and placed before the icons until the following year. it could be used for special rituals, including first pasture. 8 velikii chetverg, strashnyi/strastnoi chetverg, great thursday, holy thursday, maundy thursday (anglican). in the imagination of the inhabitants of the russian north, the thursday of holy week, the day before good friday, is rich in beliefs, interdictions, and signs. it is saturated with ritual practices directed at insuring the well-being, prosperity, and health of the village for the coming year. our expeditionary records concerning this day, made in loima, confirm and supplement known data previously collected in the russian north. in order to promote their own marriage, girls “swept” the road for their bridegrooms on holy thursday. they took a wooden harrow, chopped it up, and scattered the pieces at the crossroads [ияли: аф 1538-9, 1539-29]. on the roof, they shifted the ridgepole (okhlupen’) [ияли: вф 1506-41]. before sunrise, the mistress of the house performed several rituals directed at the well-being of the family, the fertility of cattle, and the strengthening of health. typically, she counted money (“so that money would be present the year round”), she stirred the sour cream, and made butter [ияли: аф 1541-19]. a log, wood chip, or small stone with the charm “i put weight on you for the whole year” would be tossed up onto the roof, so that the wind would not blow the roof off [ияли: аф 1545-12]. villagers washed with river water so that “eyes would see well” [ияли: аф 1544-11]. a tradition of “washing up with silver,” characteristic of the viatka area, has also been recorded [vlasov and kaneva 2006: 25]. in the loima region: a silver or gold coin would be placed in the wash basin and then everyone washed with this water [ияли: вф 1524-26]. ritual dialogues, spoken by the masters of the house on holy thursday, have been recorded. the purpose of these dialogues was to encourage cattle to come home from pasture and to recognize their own cattle-shed. the mistress of the house, standing in the road before an incantational magic of the northern russians folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 51 open window, would ask: “is the cow at home?” the master stood near the window and answered, “at home.” this dialogue was repeated until all of the animals of the farmstead were mentioned. informants explain existing interdictions against giving anything away on this day as mitigating the danger of losing one’s property, suffering damage, or losing happiness. for example, in one of the oral narratives, the informant stated that his giving away a small amount of hay was the reason for the subsequent loss of all the hay and cattle in the household [ияли: вф 1521-55]. men simulated fishing on this day: they climbed on the roof and placed logs in their fishing nets, so that “much fish would be caught (variant: large pikes would be caught)” [ияли: аф 1541-19]. because great thursday is also called “terrible thursday” (strashnyi, strastnoi chetverg), it became linked in the popular imagination with the activity of sorcerers, and thus with the special vulnerability of cattle and people at this time. with the aim of protecting themselves from spoiling and the evil eye, people drew crosses on the doors of the cattle-shed and the house. they typically walked round all the residential and farmyard buildings on this day, reciting prayers or strewing salt blessed on holy thursday, or sprinkling water taken from three streams [ияли: аф 1554-16]. items collected by a sorcerer on holy thursday were considered especially dangerous and animals could be spoiled if hair or wool was cut from their coat, or if their excrement was collected on this day. similarly, spouses could be separated if given a drink containing canine fecal matter collected on holy thursday [ияли: аф 1545-8]. 9 folk tradition includes the notion that the evil eye may be given unintentionally or accidentally and those who are capable of casting the evil eye inadvertently are said to have a “bad eye.” it is also said that their blood does not meet, or “agree with,” the blood of the person spoiled, [ияли: аф 1537-3, 4]. to avert the evil eye, one must stick a pin in one’s hem so that it was visible. other powerful preventative measures included placing chicken droppings in footwear, under the foot [ияли: аф 1537-23, 1542-55], using “thursday” salt, and so forth. spoiling (porcha) by a sorcerer is considered always intentional, never accidental. 10 this ritual has been recorded not only in reference to the buying or selling rituals of cattle; any transfer (of cattle, seed, products) is accompanied by ritual dialogue. 11 see a similar use of grain in a funeral ceremony, below. 52 12 a similar treatment was applied to affected children. the child was positioned under the tie-beam of the house and splashed with water into which the person who had cast the evil eye had earlier been made to look. 13 the use of the words pritcha and urok is noteworthy. pritcha usually means “parable” and urok means “lesson.” the two words can also be used synonymously. here pritcha (var. pritka) means ‘unfortunate accident, sudden illness, hysterics, fainting fits, etc.’ and urok means ‘spoiling, evil eye.’ urok and its verb, urochit’ carry the meaning of casting the evil eye or spoiling someone by means of sorcery, or by sending an illness [dal’ 1995, v. 3: 452; v. 4: 508-509]. the image of a pike with iron teeth biting a hernia or other illness appears consistently [poznanskii 1995: 173 and next]. thus, the iron-toothed pike (the wonderful helper) consumes spells, curses, spoiling, and disease. a variant of the iron-toothed pike image is a bird that scratches the illness out of the patient [ияли: аф 1702-20, 25; vilegodskii raion arkhangelskaia oblast’]. 14 the charm is based on the word play where sukhota means not only “dryness,” but also “melancholy,” “love languor, depression, spleen.” in dictionary definitions sukhoi (dry) can also refer to being deprived of life juices, being dysfunctional, sickly, ailing [ozhegov 1987: 678]. the opposite is fatness, obesity [dal’ 1995, v. 4: 365] and these are considered as signs of health and plenty in traditional folk belief. the verb sushit’ (‘to dry’) is found in the meanings of: ‘to make someone dry,’ that is ‘bad, thin, emaciated’ [ushakov 2004: 1080], ‘to bring to exhaustion, torment, worry’ [efremova 2000]. sukhaia lubov’ means platonic love [ushakov 2004: 1079]. the root (sukh) refers to dryness, hence the association of dryness and pining, on the one hand, and the name of the sub-genres (prisushka, otsushka) on the other. in sympathetic magic, similarity is sufficient to constitute identity [about “dry” and “dryness” in traditional belief, love magic, and charms, see tolstaia 2008: 53-68; toporkov 2005: 158-159]. 15 cf.the productive incantation, widely-disseminated in the russian north, said by maidens on the pokrov holiday: “pokrov little father, cover the ground with snow and me with a bridegroom” (покров батюшка, покрой землю снежком, а меня женишком) [ияли: аф 1701-14, etc.]. here pokrov (intercession, veil, and covering) and pokryt’ (the verb “to cover”) are identified. it should be noted that “pokryvat’” also means to endow, to bestow. incantational magic of the northern russians folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 53 16 cf. the incantation “here is some rye for you, but don’t touch our family!” (на тебе рожь, а нашу семейку не трожь!). this incantation helps explicate the custom of strewing grain at burial [anikin 1998, № 2439; cited in tolstoi 1999: 241]. 17 hops (khmel’) – plant, humulus lupulus l. 18 in this case, we may speak about contamination, but we must also take into consideration the informant’s own comments, which demonstrate that she perceives the text as a single entity, calling it a prayer. in many rituals, prayers were read before the recitation of other sacral texts (incantations, charms) [tolstoi 2004: 278]. 19 the use of the number three is connected with its 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[dictionary of the russian incantational magic of the northern russians folklorica 2009, vol. xiv 55 language, ed. n. iu. shvedova, edition 18]. москва: русский язык. poznanskii, n. f. 1995. познанский, н. ф. заговоры. опыт исследования происхождения и развития заговорных формул. [incantations. exploration of genesis and development of incantational forms]. москва: индрик tolstaia, s. m. 2008. толстая, с. м. “семантический параллелизм *krasи *květ-“. [sematic parallels of “kras-“ and “kvet-“]. в книге: толстая, с. м. пространство слова. лексическая семантика в общеславянской перспективе. [space of the word. lexical semantics in pan-slavic perspective]. москва: индрик. 121-134. tolstoi, n. i., (ed.). 1995-2004. толстой, н. и., ред. славянские древности. этнолингвистический словарь в пяти томах [slavic antiquities. an ethnolinguistic dictionary in five volumes]. т.1-3. москва: имо. toporkov, a. l. 2005. топорков, а. л. заговоры в русской рукописной традиции xv—xix вв.: история, символика, поэтика. [charms in russian manuscript tradition of the fifteenth-nineteenth centuries: history, symbolism, poetics]. москва: индрик. toporov, v. n. 2005. топоров, в. н. “о числовых моделях в архаических текстах” [on numerical models in archaic texts]. в книге: топоров, в. н. исследования по этимологии и семантике. т. 1: теория и некоторые частные ее приложения. москва: языки славянской культуры. 226-273. ushakov, m., (ed.). 2004. ушакова. м. под ред. большой толковый словарь русского языка [large conversational dictionary of the russian language]. д. н.: ооо «издательство аст»: ооо «издательство астрель». vlasov, a. n. and t. s. kaneva. 2006. власов, а. н. и т. с. канева. “к проблеме феноменологии локальных традиций (по результатам исследования фольклорной культуры европейского северовостока россии)” [on the problem of the phenomenology of local traditions (on the basis of the study of the folklore culture of european north-east russia]. народная культура европейского севера россии: региональные аспекты изучения. сыктывкар: сыктывкарский государственный университет. 16-39. zherebtsov, i. l. 1994. жеребцов, и. л. где ты живешь. населенные пункты республики коми: историко-демографический 56 справочник [where you live. populated areas of komi republic: an historical-demographic handbook]. сыктывкар: коми книжное изд-во. abbreviations аа – aрхив автора, записи 2006 г. (author’s personal archive, records of 2006) ияли – фольклорный фонд института языка, литературы и истории коми научного центра уральского отделения ран, сыктывкар (folklore collection of the institute of language, literature, and history of the komi research center, ural section of the russian academy of sciences, syktyvkar) аф – aудиофонд (audio collection) вф – видеофонд (video collection) рго – архив русского географического общества, санктпетербург (the archive of the russian geographical society, spb). microsoft word folk2010e.doc reviews 185 folklorica 2010, vol. xv oldfield, anna c. azerbaijani women poet-minstrels: women ashiqs from the eighteenth century to the present. lewiston, queenston, lampeter: edwin mellen press. 2008. bibliography, archival sources, discography, videography, index. 210 pp. $109.95 (cloth) isbn-13: 9780-7734-4990-9; isbn-10: 0-7734-4990-6. the book under review is old-fashioned in the best sense. based on the author’s fieldwork, on written and archival sources, and on discussion with azeri scholars, it provides background information about the ashiq or minstrel tradition in azerbaijan and a description of contemporary women performers. oldfield begins with a brief description of her encounter with women performers in baku, then heads back in time to look at what we know about the history of minstrelsy in general and women performers in particular. women appear in the book of dede korkut, an epic narrative dating back to the 14th or 15th centuries, yet dating the appearance of professional women performers is difficult. we know for sure that women performed in the 19th century because they are attested in written records; speculation must of necessity be used when it comes to earlier periods. after giving the historical background, oldfield describes the ashiq’s role. the “master” ashiq performs in public and composes his or her own poetry. lesser ashiqs know the cannon of songs and narratives or compose poetry without being able to sing or play the traditional musical instrument of the ashiq, the saz. ashiqs who create verses typically insert their names in their compositions. this disqualifies such compositions as folklore in the eyes of soviet and post-soviet scholars who still insist that the composer of a folksong must not be known. while many scholars have emphasized the primacy of words over music, the ashiqs themselves have a different view. azeri ashiqs told oldfield that words did not take precedence over the ability to play the saz. according to the interviews, musical ability and poetic ability are both important to the tradition. in addition to talking about the ashiqs, the author describes verse types and discusses performance situations. ashiqs play at weddings and, in recent times, have formed guilds of sorts which perform in urban venues and at festivals. being able to tour and to travel is important and this requirement has limited the number of women who can undertake a minstrel’s life. part ii of the book gives the biographies of a number of performers. oldfield has sought to reconstruct the lives of famous performers of the past. she talks about ashiq peri, from whom a contemporary women’s folklorica 2010, vol. xv 186 group in baku takes its name. she chronicles the lives of ashiqs besti, ziuleykha, qendab, nabat, and others. for each performer she gives not only biographical information, but also samples of poetry, provided both in the original and in parallel english translation. more detailed information is given for twentieth century performers than for those from the nineteenth century. some of this information comes from published sources and some comes directly from the author’s field experience. oldfield shows that while many performers married and raised families, a number remained unmarried. this, as she points out, should lead to a more nuanced understanding of traditional female roles and options for defying traditional expectations. between parts ii and iii the author gives a set of photographs, some taken by her and others provided by the women oldfield worked with. part iii takes the ashiq tradition into the present. oldfield gives a brief history of the ashiq assemblies, a local version of the soviet-era writers’ unions that came into being with soviet domination of azerbaijan. by 1984 these meetings had come to emphasize preserving azeri identity over serving the soviet state. it was at this time that women’s ensembles came into being and started performing in major cities. one such ensemble, the ashiq peri meclisi was the one that became the focus of oldfield’s work several decades later. we get a brief history of this ensemble and a look at some of its performers. contemporary ashiqs, the author tells us, act as a bridge between the present and the past. they have succeeded in bringing the tradition through the period of soviet rule and they have maintained azeri cultural identity into the present. again we get brief glimpses of individual performers. the book ends with a bibliography, a list of archival sources, a discography, a videography, and a list of interviews and performances observed or recorded by the author. a very brief index follows. azerbaijani women poet-minstrels is a good introduction to the topic. its shortcomings are that it is brief and very general. the treatment of almost all issues addressed in the book is cursory. there is little engagement with contemporary western scholarship that addresses the issues of post-soviet life. gender issues are also visited only briefly. perhaps the greatest lack is an in-depth description of the lives of contemporary women minstrels and the issues affecting these lives. considering that oldfield was in azerbaijan interacting with the women who are the subject of her work, the reader expects a more detailed, more intimate portrait. perhaps the author chose to keep biographies of reviews 187 folklorica 2010, vol. xv contemporary performers short to allow room for historical information. but information on performers of the past must necessarily be speculative. it would be better if it did not overshadow real and contemporary lives. still, with the historical background, the book provides a good overview of the tradition and offers a nice introduction to turkic minstrelsy for those who are new to the topic. natalie kononenko university of alberta edmonton, alberta canada << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain 20%) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \050swop\051 v2) /srgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel 1.4 /compressobjects /tags /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages true /createjdffile false /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /colorconversionstrategy /leavecolorunchanged 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setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice folklorica_7f fialkova, larisa and maria yelenevskaya. in search of the self: reconciling the past and present in immigrants’ experience. tartu: elm scholarly press. 2013. bibliography. 282 pages. isbn 978-9949-490-80-6 with this book fialkova and yelenevskaya add yet another entry to their continued study of how émigrés from the former soviet union make sense of their lives in new surroundings. as in their other books, the authors use the interviews that they conducted with project participants and online discussion forums where russian-speaking newcomers share experiences and advice. in the last two chapters of the book they add a new dimension and work primarily with published sources. one of these chapters discusses literary works written by émigrés while the other analyzes jokes and cartoons printed in newspapers and circulated online. the authors begin by giving a history of their collaborative efforts, describing how they met and how they became a team. they also speak briefly about their methodology and about studies of the immigrant experience written by other scholars. this introduction is followed by a chapter on place. here we learn the history of immigrant settlement in israel. we read the immigrants’ own accounts of progressively improved living conditions: they describe how they started with very modest quarters and gradually became homeowners and landlords. as in other studies by these two authors, most of the chapter is devoted to quotations. respondents discuss their preferences, with the young typically wanting to live in large cities, while families gravitate toward smaller towns. fialkova and yelenevskaya’s interviewees talk of their perceptions of various types of neighbors, both israeli and arabic. they complain about lack of transportation and jewish restrictions on holy day travel. some cities that might otherwise be attractive are made less so by their proximity to the border and the accompanying potential for missile strikes and the authors’ sources discuss the fears of people living in such cites and their ways of coping. the chapter on legal anthropology is my favorite. fialkova and yelenevskaya do their typical descriptions of people dealing with unfamiliar systems and approaches to life and provide ample quotations where new immigrants describe their experience with israeli courts. but they also add the extra dimension of describing and analyzing ideas of justice that jews arriving from the former soviet union developed in their earlier country of residence. as the authors explain, in the countries that were once part of the soviet union, there was the law, meaning the formal legal system that no one really respected or trusted, and there was also justice, a kind of moral given which all good people were expected to recognize and uphold. it is the desire for justice that drives many of the people whose stories are quoted in this book and they tell of pursuing litigation to achieve justice, even at great personal cost. needless to say, sometimes their efforts are successful and sometimes not. but in many instances their dealings with the israeli legal system are complicated by expectations of certain behaviors from fellow post-soviet immigrants, expectations that are not always met. holidays are the subject of the next chapter. immigrants have mixed feelings. they are delighted that the jewish holidays, which had to be marked surreptitiously in the soviet world, can be celebrated openly in israel. yet many miss holidays that were important in their former homeland but are not part of israeli culture. these include the celebration of new years, the soviet, non-religious version of christmas, and holidays of historical importance, such as victory day, marking the end of the second world war. some newcomers turn to alternative rituals, and this chapter has a section on a new age group that had been popular in russia. called the followers of simoron, this group struggles to attract a following on israeli soil. chapter four deals with a topic that is new to the authors. fialkova, writing alone, looks at literary works written by russian jews who emigrated to germany rather than to israel. if constructing a new identity is difficult for people who move from the former soviet union to israel, it is doubly so for those who chose to move to germany because of the second world war and the holocaust. while it seems that the desire to leave russia or other post-soviet states takes precedence over avoidance of a country with an anti-semitic past, coming to terms with this desire does require artistic exploration. many ex-soviet authors chose to chronicle these explorations by writing in german, thus emphasizing their acceptance of a german identity. chapter five is also a single-author effort. here yelenevskaya looks at the humor of israelis who emigrated from russia. jokes, many dealing with the arab-israeli conflict, draw on anti-arabic sentiment developed prior to immigration to israel. they also often use existing russian jokes or offer a word play on familiar russian phrases. the jokes, like so many other folk expressions, are ambivalent and target israel as well as its enemies. fialkova and yelenevskaya’s book is another worthy contribution to the important work on diasporas that the authors have already published. with the movement of peoples, not just from russia and the other countries of the former soviet union to israel, but across the globe, studies such as this are crucial to understanding the current human situation. while all of the material here is good and important, some chapters are better than others. as already noted, i especially liked the chapter on negotiating one’s way through the legal system and dealing with firmly held concepts of justice. i found the final two chapters the least satisfying. i do not know if i have developed a taste for the style of the two authors when they write jointly and miss that style when each writes alone. perhaps these chapters are less to my liking because they do not have the rich personal data that comes with extensive quotations from persons interviewed by the authors. fialkova argues that using literature lets the author speak for him or herself and avoids the power dynamic that is found when an interviewer guides the course of the discussion. this may be true, but i do miss the voices of the respondents when they speak spontaneously rather than through polished literary works. these slight personal quibbles with the approach of this book aside, i do highly recommend the volume under review. it explores new topics and it provides the reader with an update on the lives of émigrés from the former soviet world. as immigrants change their place of residence over time (the topic of the first chapter in this book), so their attitudes and concerns also change. immigration is not a static phenomenon that can be captured in one study and this book is a welcome update that gives us a glimpse into the current life of russian jews in israel and elsewhere. natalie kononenko university of alberta edmonton, alberta canada microsoft word contentsqsoft.doc from ritual object to art form 1 articles from ritual object to art form: the ukrainian easter egg pysanka in its canadian context (1) mariya lesiv university of alberta “i would like to have a goose that would lay such eggs,” said prince philip, amazed by the spectacular pysanky made of goose eggs, which the royal family received as a gift from mrs. sembaliuk in vegreville, alberta, during their visit in 1978.(2) although i came to canada from ukraine, where the tradition of pysanka writing has been developing (predominantly in rural areas) since at least a century ago, and thus i was quite well acquainted with it, i was also surprised by the specifically ukrainian canadian pysanka.(3) the physical shapes of ukrainian easter eggs and their functions in a canadian environment were both familiar and unexpectedly unfamiliar to me. these objects manifested how dynamic a tradition can become in a different socio-cultural context, so i began further research in order to understand these dynamics better. part of this study is based on the ethnographic research method – fieldwork – including interviews and participant observation.(4) empirical data was collected from ukrainian canadian women’s periodicals that often discussed pysanky on their pages.(5) i also consulted published reports on early large ukrainian canadian women’s organizations that actively incorporated the pysanka into their activities as well as various popular publications (post cards, brochures and books) devoted specifically to ukrainian easter eggs.(6) transferred from the land of its origin to the new country, the pysanka became a potent and creative mode of expression among ukrainian canadians. my research demonstrates that ukrainian easter eggs were deeply incorporated into the historical, political, social, cultural and economic context of ukrainian canadian communities. their evolutionary process in the new country was indeed complex, yielding different sub-traditions. in this article, i will focus on two distinct patterns of pysanka development in canada. i call them the “old country” and the “national/ethnic” paradigms.(7) while discussing each paradigm separately, i will first concentrate predominantly on empirical data, and then provide a more theoretical interpretation of the factual material. at the end, i will focus specifically on the notion of aesthetics as related to the pysanky of both trends. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 2 both emic and etic perspectives will be presented in this work. anthropologist james lett defines the terms usefully for the present study: …emic refers to the native’s viewpoint; etic refers to the scientist’s viewpoint. emic constructs are descriptions and analyses conducted in terms of the conceptual schemes and categories considered meaningful by the participants in the event or situation being described and analyzed. etic constructs are descriptions and analyses conducted in terms of the conceptual schemes and categories considered meaningful by the community of scientific observers. [lett 62] in accordance with these definitions, i consider the emic perspective as the one that reflects the view of people writing pysanky while the etic perspective is my own interpretation and analysis. to illustrate the difference between the old country and the national/ethnic paradigms, i will touch upon the same key concepts related to the pysanky of both patterns: transmission (the process of acquiring knowledge, and passing it on to others), form (the physical shape of the pysanka, which in most cases depends on the kind of egg used) and design (the artistic arrangement on the form), production (the technical methods of writing/making the pysanka), function (refers to various activities for which pysanky are used), and meaning (explains why the activities are undertaken and what they signify for a person or community). this approach is inspired by early ukrainian ethnographers and their studies of the pysanka in ukraine. m. sumtsov [1891], v. shcherbakivs'kyi [1925], s. kul'zhynskii [1899], m. korduba [1899], v. shukhevych [1899], and i. hurhula [1929] approached their discussions of pysanky from the different ethnographic regions in ukraine using either all or some of the key concepts listed above.(8) their ethnographic works on pysanky in ukraine in the late 19th – early 20th century serve as a significant source for the present study due to the rich empirical data they presented. together, they provide a broad picture of this phenomenon as it existed in ukraine before it was brought to canada, forming a basis for tracing continuity and change in the new country. moreover, the works of such scholars as shcherbakivs'kyi, sumtsov and kul'zhyns'kyi deserve separate emphasis since they had a special influence on the development of the ukrainian canadian national/ethnic easter eggs, as discussed below. the analytical approaches of these scholars are greatly influenced by the ideas of the european mythological school of folkloristics and specifically those of solar mythologists of the 19th century, who were interested in the search from ritual object to art form 3 for the origins of folklore materials, and who found these origins in the movements of celestial bodies.(9) researching the pysanka, shcherbakivs'kyi, sumtsov and kul'zhyns'kyi emphasize its pre-christian origins, defining it as an ancient pagan symbol of the rebirth of the sun and nature. moreover, they focus on particular pysanka motifs from all over ukraine and neighboring territories, trying to trace their origins and advancing interpretations of their archaic meanings. only a few scholarly works devoted to ukrainian pysanky were published in canada. s. kylymnyk [1969], similarly to his predecessors sumtsov, kul'zhyns'kii and shcherbakivs'kyi, concentrates on the symbolic meaning of the pysanka presented in its ornamental motifs and functions in the context of old rituals. r. klymasz’s article [1969] deals specifically with the ukrainian canadian pysanka and its stages of development in a new setting: its retention by ukrainian pioneers and its transformation into a symbol of ukrainian ethnicity over time. m. o. jones’ article [1991] includes a brief interpretation of ukrainiancanadian pysanky in terms of their purposes, forms and designs in the context of constructing ukrainian-canadian identity. the old country paradigm at the turn of the 19th century, under the rule of the austrohungarian empire, ukrainian peasants in the areas of galicia and bukovyna in ukraine lived with “no special privileges and an enormous problem: the rapidly diminishing supply of their most precious possession – land” [martynovych 1991: 4-5]. forced by historical, social and economic conditions, they started coming to the canadian prairies in the late 19th century, looking for a way to improve their existence from what it was in the old country.(10) these ukrainian pioneers brought knowledge of the pysanka, as a component of their easter celebration, to the new country. transmission the old country pysanka represents an unself-conscious continuation of the tradition of ukrainian pioneers and their descendents. writing pysanky was mostly a female activity. this skill was taught orally, visually, and informally in the intimate social context (within a family or community) connected with the celebration of easter: the novices listened, watched and copied. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 4 form and design much as in ukraine, old country pysanky were made most often with chicken eggs – the eggs most readily available on a farm. their designs often represented specificities of the ethnographic region in ukraine from which a family emigrated. this situation was also very similar to that in the villages of the old country. although ethnographers who conducted research on pysanky in many areas of ukraine were familiar with a variety of motifs represented by different regions, most participants in the tradition knew only the designs of their own village or vicinity, since peasants did not typically travel often. due to the even greater geographical isolation of early prairie communities, the specific traditions remained very localized. for example, in the area of norquay, saskatchewan, in the 1910s1930s, joanna janis’s mother made pysanky as she remembered them from the village of bortykivtsi in the ternopil' region. the motifs of her pysanky were mostly geometric designs: “chetver” [thursday], “piatnytsia” [friday], “velykden' ” [easter], “pasochka” [small easter bread] “kuriacha lapka” [chicken foot] “sorok klyntsiv” [forty triangles] (figures 1 and 2). they were written in two colors: white elements were situated on a black background. according to i. hurhula, such motifs in terms of design and color palette were typical for the ethnographic territory of podillia, where bortykivtsi is located [hurhula 133; 139]. looking at old country pysanky from the point of view of an “art critic,” one can easily see that one egg includes a relatively small number of motifs, each quite large. applied with the help of a homemade stylus, the lines are fairly thick. the quality of the lines reflects the challenges of drawing on the curved surface of the eggshell. production the pysanky were written with beeswax, a stylus, and dyes using the wax-resist technique.(11) the information gained from participants in this study corroborated klymasz’s findings that the first settlers used easily accessible and homemade materials to make pysanky [klymasz 1969: 3]. the production process was fairly simple. styluses were made out of wooden sticks and metal cans or tabs from the backs of calendars. some respondents remembered their mothers and/or grandmothers making natural dyes, using onion skins for yellow and orange, beetroots for red, short buttercups for yellowish green and some other plants that were boiled, producing different colours. one of the marked innovations from ritual object to art form 5 figure 1. old country pysanky reproduced by j. janis as remembered from her mother, writing in the 1920-1930s (janis’ private collection). unless otherwise indicated, photographs from private collections were taken by m. lesiv. figure 2. pysanky of the old country paradigm. s. porayko-kyforuk’s mother’s initial pysanka designs from the early 1900s, sketched by poraykokyforuk [1969: 21]. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 6 introduced into pysanka writing in the first decades of the 20th century was the use of commercially produced crepe paper in different colors. to make dyes, the crepe paper was soaked in very hot water until the water absorbed the color. with crepe paper, the palette of colors changed in terms of variety and saturation. a larger number of colors in much more intense shades became available. although, like those in the old country, early ukrainian canadian pysanky were most often made with raw eggs, it was not uncommon to write them on boiled eggs, and the latter were eaten on easter. function and meaning on the emic level, the old country pysanka was foremost a ritual object, as in the old country. as in ukrainian villages, the pysanka was connected predominantly with the easter celebration and, in some cases, beliefs in its magical power remained. joanna janis showed the continuity of the old country religious and spiritual worldview within her family. on the farm, they decorated easter eggs on holy thursday, as they used to do in the old country. janis shared a prayer, taught by her mother, to be said each year before starting to write: …we asked god to bless not only our work but the work that we did would be a blessing to us throughout the whole year and would bring good luck, and prosperity and health…at that time… it was sort of ingrained in us that if you didn’t do it, you might have a very bad year... at the time, when i was doing it with my mother, i sincerely believed that…i should learn to do it because it would bring me good things in life. esther mosychuk, describing the area of two hills, alberta, in the 1930s, remembers a magical ritual connected with pysanky that her mother used to perform. easter sunday morning, they would put a dime and a krashanka (or pysanka) into a container of water and then wash their faces with the water.(12) according to earlier ethnographers’ findings, this ritual was known in some areas of ukraine, and was connected with the belief in the pysanka and/or krashanka as a talisman of beauty, strength and health: a face washed with this water will be beautiful and healthy [korduba 180; sumtsov 203]. in families where the old magical meaning behind certain rituals was lost, pysanka writing was still sometimes practiced as part of a traditional lifestyle. in these cases, the focus shifted to a social meaning, which could also be very important. the pysanka was tightly incorporated into social interaction within the family and community. for example, such widespread rituals as blessing pysanky in church and from ritual object to art form 7 then exchanging them as gifts after the easter service were remembered by most participants in this study as a very important part of their easter celebration on canadian farms. undoubtedly it contributed to building a sense of community among the new settlers. in addition, pysanky were the objects of aesthetic appreciation in the context of spring and easter celebrations. in general, according to the majority of the participants in this study, old country pysanky were not preserved for a long time. the old country pysanka: etic interpretations the old country pysanky clearly correspond to the category of “pure” folk art, as defined in scholarship. henry glassie, in his definition, considers folk art to be “more collective than personal” (“more social than individualistic”) and “more sacred than secular” [glassie 1986: 271, 273]. glassie underlines the aptitude of folk art to “center through abstraction upon the spiritual universe,” “carry[ing] the social message” and “hold[ing] to the tradition” [glassie 1986: 271]. in addition, this author emphasizes folk creativity as a result of “amateur inspiration” rather than “professional education” [glassie 1986: 272]. robert klymasz enlarges the list of characteristic features of folk art by identifying such factors as unconscious retention of the tradition and its informal oral transmission, while talking about specifically ukrainian canadian folk creativity in pioneer times [klymasz 1972: 7]. the old country pysanka clearly fits each of these characteristics: it tends to be collective, sacred, amateur, unconsciously retained, and transmitted orally and informally in the context of custom. although the creator considers any work she does her individual creation, from the etic perspective the old country pysanka remains a collective rather than individual form of expression. the origins of particular designs and the functions of the pysanka can be neither precisely determined nor attributed to any particular individual. easter egg activities practiced in the early 20th century were the result of collective experiences brought from the old country and passed on to the subsequent generations in canada, unconsciously “holding to the tradition.” in this respect, the old country pysanka culture was inherited informally: the descendants of ukrainian pioneers received their knowledge of it directly from older family/community members, transmitting it to younger generations within the same family (or community) in the context of their customary lifestyle. as mentioned above, pysanky of the old country paradigm retained certain elements of traditional magical beliefs reflecting the peasants’ old folklorica 2007, vol. xii 8 worldview, “represent[ing] the invisible by means of the visible” [eliade 55]. mircea eliade considers such representation one of the characteristic features of sacred art, which “translate[s] religious experience and metaphysical conception of the world and of human existence into a concrete, representational form” [eliade 55]. within the pysanka tradition, such “religious experience” and “metaphysical conceptions” were accumulated in the form of an egg covered with certain designs, bearing what glassie calls “the social message” and communicating “abstraction upon the spiritual universe.” pysanky of the national/ethnic paradigm in contrast to the old country pattern, the national/ethnic paradigm (with emphasis on its “national” pole) is related to nationalist politics and conscious building of ukrainian national/ethnic identity in canada by a different socio-economic group. a nationalist outlook began actively developing among the ukrainian intelligentsia in the second part of the 19th century. although it started to reach peasant rural communities at the same time, its expansion within the latter was not very rapid.(13) as a result, many peasants arriving in canada with the first wave of immigration were not nationally conscious. political consciousness started rising in western canada after 1905 with the help of some representatives of the ukrainian intelligentsia [martynovych 1991: 244-247].(14) this outlook was reinforced in the interwar period by the “second wave of immigration,” which included many representatives of the intelligentsia escaping from political unrest in europe.(15) in canada, these immigrants, joined by some descendents of the earlier ukrainian settlers, put a concerted effort into building their distinctive national/ethnic identity. many ukrainian institutions were established for this purpose [yuzyk 80-112; martynovych 1991: 265305]. the nationalist outlook in canada was greatly enhanced by ukrainian political refugees, known as the “third wave of immigration,” who arrived in canada after world war ii. soviet totalitarian oppression in ukraine gave an impulse for intensive cultural activity in canada under appeals such as, “let’s always remember what our native land expects from us” [zaiatseva 18]. transmission starting with the first ukrainian canadian women’s organizations in the late 1920s,(16) knowledge about pysanky began to be transmitted formally. it was passed on through numerous popular published sources from ritual object to art form 9 (post cards, brochures and books) as well as through various structured activities such as pysanka workshops and courses in many ukrainian canadian institutions. ukrainian canadian cultural leaders consciously studied the phenomenon of the pysanka in its old context via early ethnographic sources that reached canada from ukraine. some also conducted extensive research on pysanky as practiced by the first ukrainian settlers on the canadian prairies. these individuals studied old rituals connected with this phenomenon, they charted the diversity of designs from various ethnographic territories of ukraine, and they devoted special attention to the symbolism of specific motifs (as hypothetically interpreted by some scholars mentioned above). the example of natalia talanchuk illustrates the teaching experiences of a great majority of the pysanka writers interviewed. she has been an activist with a number of ukrainian organizations “since the minute [she] came to canada” in 1947 and an active pysanka maker since the 1950s: i have been transmitting my knowledge on the pysanka…for example, at the ukrainian youth association (17) i organized different courses…it was in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s…and at hospitals as well, because here the ukrainian canadian congress (18) was helping older people who were in the hospitals, confined to their armchairs…i usually had twenty five or more people who would participate in that… i have taught pysanka making] at schools when i was invited…for example, a few years ago olia m. invited me to a public school…it was a very big classroom full of children, small and big, and mothers…so, it was necessary to tell them everything, to show and to transmit it to them. it was necessary…to show them the literature, to show them the exhibits of pysanky of different kinds with different symbols, to tell them about that… also, i demonstrated [making pysanky] at heritage days…when all the nations of edmonton which exist here (muslims, christians, black and white) have their tents, their exhibits, their culture, as well as ukrainians who have their tent…and they advertise ukrainians, so that people know what we have, what a spiritual treasure we have… interestingly, natalia talanchuk herself (as well as many other active builders of the national/ethnic paradigm) “did not hear about the pysanka until [she] arrived in canada.” she was born in the city of dnipropetrovs'k (eastern ukraine), an urban area where this tradition was not practiced. she arrived in canada as an adult political refugee after world war ii in 1949. natalia talanchuk acquired her rich knowledge of pysanka writing and the symbolic meaning of different motifs formally, mostly through published sources from her large private collection. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 10 form and design in contrast to the old country easter egg, the national/ethnic pysanka became consciously perceived and practiced as an art form. moreover, it is considered “folk” (art) by the participants in the tradition, and this term increases its value, awakening pride in ukrainian cultural heritage. national/ethnic pysanka designs are applied to other forms such as, for example, ostrich eggs that could not have been part of the old country paradigm. national/ethnic easter eggs are often creatively framed for the purposes of decorative artistic display (figures 3 and 4). as an art form, the pysanka has attracted male creators as well. figure 3. national/ethnic “framed pysanky” of different compositional structures displayed at the floral boutique in vegreville, alberta. 2005. from ritual object to art form 11 figure 4. “pysanka wall clock” of the national/ethnic paradigm: nahachewsky’s wedding gift, 1983. as a result of the rapid spread of published materials, a great number of motifs, originally connected with different ethnographic regions in ukraine, were disseminated to form a large composite repertoire. often, different regional designs could be incorporated into one person’s work. a somewhat unique example of this is the titanic pysanka project of myroslav (chester) kuc, a well-known pysanka maker from edmonton. during the last few years, he has reproduced over two and a half thousand easter eggs from all regions of ukraine, on the basis of the photographs from the collection in the l'viv museum of ethnography in ukraine and other sources (figure 5). one of kuc’s goals was to make the public aware of the richness of ukrainian heritage as represented in diverse pysanka designs from various parts of ukraine. in addition, trypillian designs have been adapted for ukrainian canadian pysanky (figure 6). (19) the discovery of the neolithic trypillian culture (3000-2000 bce) on the territory of present-day ukraine aroused great interest in ukrainian canadians. a variety of animal and geometric motifs found on trypillian pottery were applied to pysanky in canada as a source of pleasing designs and as a mark of pride in the great artistic achievements of ukraine’s predecessors. natalia talanchuk illustrates the perception of this phenomenon by many followers of the national/ethnic paradigm: they [the trypillian designs] do not belong to the tradition [of the pysanka], but they have deep roots in our history… thousands of years ago, people painted these symbols on their pottery, so they have lasted for millennia. that is why they are not foreign, they are traditional… folklorica 2007, vol. xii 12 furthermore, creative ukrainian canadians have invented new motifs and produced compositions of their own. some of these pysanky are defined as “suchasni” or “moderni,” signifying “modern” on the emic level. to create such a pysanka, different geometric, floral, animal (including trypillian) motifs tend to be stylized into minute and intricate forms and incorporated into extremely complex compositional structures (figure 6). their intricacy is reinforced by an unlimited number of possible colour combinations, now made possible by commercial synthetic dyes. figure 5. pysanky of the national/ethnic paradigm. chester kuc and his collection of pysanky at his home in edmonton, alberta. each box contains easter eggs representing the designs characteristic for a specific region in ukraine. from ritual object to art form 13 figure 6. box of national/ethnic pysanky: m. baziuk’s wedding gift, 1985. edmonton, alberta. a “trypillian” pysanka is in the bottom left corner. looking at these items, one can easily understand the current emic perspective on the old country easter eggs. most respondents, remembering pysanky writing in their families in the first part of the 20th century, now consider these “simple,” “rough,” “not that elaborate,” as opposed to the “intricate,” “fancy,” and “highly elaborate” eggs that appeared in canada “later on.” (20) however, there are always individuals who cannot be called accomplished pysanka writers. although they formally acquired knowledge about the pysanka within this paradigm, these people write easter eggs for the same purposes as in the old country – once a year prior to the easter celebration. as a result, these pysanky tend to be simpler in design and less technically accomplished than those made by more experienced writers. production national/ethnic pysanky are predominantly made with the waxresist technique as before. however, in the national/ethnic paradigm, the process of making pysanky has changed markedly. the rapid development of technology facilitated the introduction of advanced equipment. for example, the originally home-made stylus has been replaced by the machine-produced one, easily available at many ukrainian stores in north america. moreover, styluses are produced in different sizes to create lines of varying thickness. in addition, invention of an electric stylus has allowed the production of very delicate lines. a new type of pysanka equipment, called the “craft lathe,” holds an egg and lets it be rotated, to help draw straighter lines. commercial synthetic folklorica 2007, vol. xii 14 dyes have completely replaced those based on natural sources and crepe paper. today, one can buy a kit at any ukrainian canadian gift store including all the necessary equipment: wax, styluses, dyes, and different patterns for pysanky. within the national/ethnic paradigm, pysanky continue to be made mostly on raw eggs. boiled eggs often are considered inappropriate, which resonates with the ideas expressed in some early ethnographic publications, i.e. the life potential of the raw egg. according to vadym shcherbakivs'kyi: the pysanka was not boiled in order not to ruin in it a potential life, lifegiving power, in which lies the meaning of the pysanka…when it happened [that pysanky were boiled], it was, apparently, a result of the decline of the tradition” [shcherbakivs'kyi 1925: 7]. in addition, boiled eggs are not used within the national/ethnic paradigm due to new aesthetic priorities, as pointed out by lesia pohoreski: i don’t make mine on boiled eggs…there is a lot of hours spent in writing it as opposed to making a krashanka which is done in a minute. in the national/ethnic paradigm, pysanky are frequently varnished. this makes the eggshell physically stronger and reduces fading. also, varnishing adds a special gloss to the surface of the decorated egg. in contrast to the old country pysanka, the contents of the eggs are often blown out, facilitating more dependable long-term preservation. many individuals use an ordinary syringe for this, but special devices of various shapes have been developed and introduced to the community. however, as one pysanka writer says: i blow out the eggs after i varnish them… but if i have eggs that were not blown out…before they were blessed, i have mixed feelings on this… i have a hard time blowing them out after church because that entire egg was blessed. so, how can i blow out the insides which were blessed? this interviewee’s concerns recall the early ethnographic sources focusing on the life-giving power of the raw egg and the spiritual value of an egg blessed in church. interestingly, adherents of the national/ethnic paradigm commonly accept blowing out eggs. some early ukrainian ethnographers would probably consider that a blown egg had lost its life-creating potential and spiritual power. (on the other from ritual object to art form 15 hand, most raw farm eggs and especially commercially bought ones are infertile in any case). function having abandoned many of the old country magical rituals connected with pysanky, followers of the national/ethnic paradigm use these objects in new contexts, related to new social, political, cultural and economic conditions. although national/ethnic pysanky continue to be incorporated into the easter celebration (they are blessed in church and exchanged as gifts), adherents of this paradigm have extended the artistic tradition far beyond this religious celebration, often creating pysanky throughout the year. pysanky now function as gifts for any occasion. marianne baziuk gives an example: kateryna [my daughter] graduated last year from a high school, and a lot of her gifts for her high school teachers were pysanky that she made last year. so, that was a gift of love, and thanks and appreciation to the teachers. marianne baziuk herself received a box of spectacular pysanky (“modern” and “trypillian”) as a wedding gift (in 1985) from her aunt (figure 6). in contrast to eggs of the old country paradigm, national/ethnic pysanky tend to be preserved for a long time. often, this is connected with sentimental value (e.g., pysanky made by mothers or grandmothers who have since passed away or by one’s children when they were little). in addition to sentimental factors, pysanky displayed in a variety of ways in the home interior serve as artistic decorations pleasing to the eye and a statement of ethnicity. national/ethnic pysanky have also been displayed for much broader audiences, representing ukrainian heritage in the multicultural context in canada. exhibitions can be of a temporary character or permanent museum displays. (21) since the late 1920s, when the pysanka began to be incorporated into a variety of structured activities, it was also connected with economic factors. if old country pysanky could be sold in some cases on the private level, national/ethnic pysanky were actively incorporated into fund-raisers of different kinds and sold to a variety of buyers.(22) some examples include collecting money for the needs of world war ii, for the “pysanka for those in need in europe” (this appeal is based on the ritual of giving pysanky away as a gift), and for the needs of different institutions, such as churches and organizations in canada. (23) often, pysanka fund-raisers combine both economic profit and pleasant folklorica 2007, vol. xii 16 diversion. such an approach is particularly applicable to the so-called “pysanka bingo,” a popular form of pysanka fund-raiser in eastern and central canada (figure 7). (24) playing this game, participants win pysanky instead of money. meaning within the national/ethnic pattern, the pysanka continued to be tightly incorporated into the social and recreational life of ukrainian families and communities. the specific events changed however. organizing pysanka parties, exchanging pysanky as gifts after church service on easter or playing pysanka bingo apparently reinforced the sense of community and tightened the relationship among specific individuals within the community. figure 7. pysanka bingo at st. john’s ukrainian orthodox church’s auditorium in edmonton, alberta, c. 2003. (photograph courtesy l. pohoreski). the magical beliefs connected with old country pysanky were mostly lost in the context of modernization. in most cases, the purposes of pysanky in the national/ethnic paradigm differ markedly from those of the old country tradition. the national/ethnic pysanka has become from ritual object to art form 17 part of ukrainian canadian life, signifying “ukrainianness” in the multicultural canadian environment. pysanka designs have become not only aesthetically but also ideologically attractive. the focus on the “pre-historic” or “ancient” origin and “rich symbolism” of the pysanka and its motifs is a recurrent theme of popular publications. such works often introduce the pysanka with reference to earlier ethnographic scholarship, as in the following passage: our scholars have researched this, our ancient culture, and they explain the meaning of the pysanka and its ornaments to us. they prove that writing pysanky reaches back to a pre-christian era, when the cult of the sun existed in many lands as well as in ukraine, as the provider of life on earth, exactly the thing those ancient signs-ornaments manifest on pysanky. [iuzyk 1975: 4] although the author indicates no sources in her article, there is an obvious influence of earlier ethnographic sources, interpreting the pysanka as a remnant of ancient sun cults as hypothesized by such ethnographers as sumtsov and shcherbakivs'kyi. pysanka publications in the national/ethnic paradigm present an opportunity for further popularization and interpretations of the easter egg and its motifs in canada. for example, maria iuzyk [1975: 5] writes that the “pine-tree” in combination with “sun wheels” means the “awakening of nature” (this is exactly how this motif was interpreted by sumtsov [367]. from the same work, one can also learn that a “triangle” means trinity: fire flame, water and air; sun, thunder and fire; or husband, wife and child. in this case we can trace the influence of s. kylymnyk’s hypothesis. kylymnyk, pointing out the tendency for personal interpretation of motifs among researchers, had previously discussed the motif “trynih” [tripod] (which is different in shape from a triangle) as follows: …the “tripod”… has been known from the time of the trypillian culture, it likely signifies heaven, earth and air, according to some [researchers]; according to others it means air, flame and water; still others consider it a symbol of man’s life: birth, life and death; still others – heaven, earth and hell and so on. of course, to confirm what it means exactly is difficult, especially in our times, in a foreign country. [kylymnyk 193] the quote below clearly exemplifies a tendency to politicize the pysanka in the author’s interpretation of its motifs. in this particular case the phenomenon is meant to show the uniqueness of the ukrainian nation to its potential enemy – the soviet regime: folklorica 2007, vol. xii 18 these symbols, signs on pysanky have been used in all the territories of ukraine, despite the borders that would be imposed [externally]…this is the evidence of our unity and our national identity, discrete from other nations – a fact which is denied by our enemies. this means that they [pysanka motifs] were created at the time when we were one indivisible [independent] people. [koshetz 4] such an interpretation has been influenced by ethnographic publications and the spiritual need for symbols that are meaningful in a profound way. (25) although most contemporary ukrainian canadians no longer associate them with any magical power, they do believe that pysanky reflect such past magical beliefs. this conviction evokes creative imagination. often, consulting published sources, creative individuals embed their own meaning into a pysanka, as lesia pohoreski shows: when… i became a godmother, and it was my godson’s first easter, i wrote him a pysanka… i put some animals on it…i was looking at strength, i was looking at health and luck… then i inscribed on it “pershyi velykden'” [first easter] and a year because i wanted to give him…a memento from khresna [godmother]… for that specific year. a similar example follows: i say… to my grandson: “i am giving you a pysanka with a symbol of an animal, there is a stag here; this is a symbol of happiness and health and wealth.” i say to my granddaughter: “i am giving you this pysanka with cherries; cherries are a symbol of girl’s beauty… i wish you to be not only beautiful, but also wise and happy” and so on. so, i would give something symbolic which can be read on the surface of the egg to everybody [in her family]…” [talanchuk, interview] there is no evidence that such individualized and literal applications of the motifs (symbols) were practiced in villages of ukraine in the 19th century. in terms of meaning, there is a noticeable change in the perception of pysanky by ukrainian canadians themselves. in contrast to the old country paradigm, in which pysanky were part of a customary lifestyle and/or old peasant worldview, in the national/ethnic paradigm they have become consciously accepted as a continuation and preservation of tradition on the emic level. from ritual object to art form 19 the national/ethnic paradigm: etic interpretations in contrast to the old country pysanka, the national/ethnic one is connected with a “formally learned” rather than “informally inherited” culture. in the multiethnic canadian context, the pysanka has become an “external symbol” of ukrainian national/ethnic identity, defined by wsevolod isajiw as: (26) …a socio-psychological process through which individuals subjectively include themselves in a community of alleged ancestors or predecessors who share a distinct culture. what makes the process specifically ethnic is: 1) relationship to an ancestral past and 2) relationship to a distinct culture. [isajiw 119] national/ethnic identity is consciously constructed by a community. builders of the national/ethnic paradigm transferred the easter egg from its old sacred context into a new secular one, and expanded it far beyond its original purposes, consciously “includ[ing] themselves in a community of… ancestors or predecessors,” manifesting their “relationship to an ancestral past” by “sharing a distinct culture.” the pysanka became what richard alba would call one of the “cultural elements seen as a positive heritage worth holding onto” [alba 76]. as mentioned earlier, on the emic level, activities connected with the pysanka are undertaken in the name of “maintaining the tradition.” moreover, from the first days of their existence, many followers of the national/ethnic paradigm struggled for ‘purity’ and ‘truthfulness’ in the pysanka-writing tradition, and against any foreign influences. “let’s cherish the purity of ukrainian folk art…we have wonderful samples of our predecessors from ukraine” [zel's'ka 16], “let’s not change the perfect masterpieces of our people,” “we have the great richness of pysanka designs reflected in symbols” [onyshchuk 20].(27) however, from a comparative perspective we can trace some ideological contradiction in these appeals since we see such innovations in pysanka writing as, for example, reliance on published sources, courses, and “pysanka bingo” as new contexts far from original practices. i argue that the builders and followers of the national/ethnic paradigm re-created the old country tradition, or, in other words, they created and established a tradition of their own, characterized by its own beauty, values, and spiritual power. eric hobsbawm and other scholars define such a cultural phenomenon as “invented tradition” which: …is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate folklorica 2007, vol. xii 20 certain values and norms or behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past… inventing traditions…is essentially a process of formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past. [hobsbawm 1,4] hobsbawm also argues that traditions are invented “not because old ways are no longer available or viable, but because they are deliberately not used or adapted” [hobsbawm 8]. thus, the phenomenon of “invented tradition” is not to be confused with “the strength and adaptability of genuine traditions… where the old ways are alive, traditions need be neither revived nor invented” [hobsbawm 8]. these ideas are relevant to the process of creating the pysanka tradition in canada in the national/ethnic paradigm. the large ukrainian canadian women’s organizations (the first builders of this paradigm in pysanka decoration) were established and run mostly by nationalistically-oriented representatives of the intelligentsia, as well as descendants of ukrainian pioneers brought up and educated in canada. as frances swyripa points out, women’s organizations “rejected ‘peasantness’ as a way of life,” but promoted “ukrainianness,” “drawing on the peasants’ folk art” and further politicizing it [swyripa 1993: 158]. for them “peasantness” was no longer a way of life.(28) these individuals transferred the pysanka from its original rural peasant context into a new urban sphere which better represented their class and social status. these needs “provided the catalysts that accelerated the crucial transition from old to new, rural to urban, and folk to national” [klymasz 1972: 8]. the new social, political and economic conditions influenced the invention of a new pysanka tradition, in which, as hobsbawm emphasizes, “adaptation took place for old uses in new conditions and by using old models for new purposes” [hobsbawm 5]. the “ethnic” pole of the national/ethnic paradigm followed the same pattern of development and shares most of its conceptual characteristics with the “national” one. the parts differ significantly in their politics. younger generations of ukrainian-canadians tended to have a less strongly nationalistic outlook, and these individuals concentrated more on cultural heritage. on the basis of interviews conducted, i agree with frances swyripa that “old-country politics failed to hold the canadian born” and “a cultural ethnic consciousness and not a politicized national consciousness best defines contemporary ukrainian-canadian identity [of the younger generation]” [swyripa 1991: 24, 26]. in contrast to their nationalistically-directed ancestors, these people consider canada their true home, while ukraine is often a from ritual object to art form 21 romantic place from their grandparents’ stories, rich in the wisdom of their ancestors and colorful folk heritage. while many representatives of this sub-paradigm also became accomplished pysanka writers, many still practice this tradition only at easter-time. through the pysanka, followers and representatives of the ethnic pole of the paradigm also manifest their “ukrainianness” and pride of belonging to a distinctive culture and simultaneously contribute a great deal to building ukrainian ethnic identity in canada. the ukrainian canadian pysanka in the context of western aesthetics since one of the most significant changes in pysanka writing in canada is its aesthetization, it is important to discuss this phenomenon in detail. focusing on the notion of aesthetics as related to ukrainian canadian pysanky, i approach the category of aesthetics from richard anderson’s perspective since his definition of western aesthetics is broader than many other scholarly interpretations [anderson]. on the basis of his thorough survey of the literature devoted to this notion, anderson traces four main theories in western aesthetics: mimetic, instrumental, emotionalist, and formalist, to one or another of which artistic activities in western culture tend to aspire: mimetic theories focus on the relationship between the work of art and some material object in the sensible world that the work of art “imitates” either literally or else by capturing it in an idealized form. instrumental [or pragmatic] theories emphasize the functional capacity of art, requiring art to make some sort of positive contribution to the well-being of individual or society. emotionalist theories center on neither the material nor the social but on the psychological realm of inner experience and feelings of the individual… emphasis may be on the artist’s expression of emotions, or cathartic purging of audience members’ feelings, or on the creative art. formalist theories do not deal with material, social, or psychological issues, but rather with aesthetic or technical challenges of the art work itself. under the paradigm of formalism, art is thought to be a unique manifestation of “significant form,” a manipulation of an artistic medium that is capable of producing a unique and arresting response in the aesthetically attuned audience member. [anderson 234] whereas the pysanka of the old country paradigm is clearly well laden with social and spiritual significance, its connection with the narrower western definition of aesthetics is weaker. although they often are called “folk art” from an etic perspective, old country easter eggs were not really considered “works of art” by their writers. from the folklorica 2007, vol. xii 22 pysanka writers’ point of view, the activity was not primarily to make a beautiful object. anderson’s definition of aesthetics includes an instrumental aesthetic perspective, in which expressive activity serves as an instrument to “pave the way to a world that is socially…[and] spiritually better” [anderson 240]. although this aesthetic criterion is relevant to the pysanka discussed (considering the beliefs in its magical power), anderson’s description of western aesthetic theories seems least applicable to the old country tradition, which evolved in a cultural context that was not entirely western. in contrast, as soon as the pysanka was transferred in a western cultural context, it started to reflect western aesthetic criteria. in anderson’s terms, the instrumental (pragmatic) and formalist aesthetic criteria are dominant in the national/ethnic pysanka, with emphasis on its “national” pole. the easter egg came to be an artistic instrument representing “ukrainianness,” satisfying social, spiritual and political goals, and simultaneously making what anderson calls a “positive contribution to the well-being” [anderson 234] of people in the community. the aspect of “ukrainianness” also became clearly associated with physical (formalist) beauty in the minds of both creators and audience. the formalistic beauty of the pysanky became a great concern within the national/ethnic paradigm. with the help of technologically advanced equipment and materials available on the market, well-trained and accomplished pysanka writers converted this phenomenon into a spectacular artistic object, seriously and positively representing the ukrainian nation. though the formalist and instrumental aesthetic values are most important, pysanky often secondarily awake emotional sentiment among ukrainian canadians, relating them to anderson’s emotionalist aesthetic criterion. for example, natalia talanchuk pointed out that people would often ask her the following while buying pysanky: “do you have any eggs with the designs of lemkivshchyna (or bukovyna) on them? (29) my parents came from that region.” for creators of this kind of art, the emotionalist criterion expands beyond cultural factors. all the respondents emphasized the great enjoyment and pleasure they receive on a psychological level while creating pysanky. moreover, sometimes making pysanky has an even deeper psychological effect. sofia poraykokyforuk shares her story of restarting pysanka writing as a means of healing (a break in her creativity was caused by the depression of the 1930s). in this particular case, the emotionalist aesthetic criterion is from ritual object to art form 23 closely interrelated with the instrumental, involved for the purpose of healing: in 1948 i became sick with nervous strain and arthritis (caused by great worries and physical over-work [on the farm], when too many responsibilities fell on [one] pair of shoulders. these diseases of stress were just being postulated then in the research laboratory where i was then studying. since, they have become widely recognized and accepted as being caused by too much stress and strain – o.h.) the doctor advised taking up some hobby to divert one’s attention from daily troubles, problems. first choice were easter eggs. [porayko-kyforuk 1969: 20, 31] (30) the same emotionalist and instrumental aesthetic criteria are clearly applicable in the case of the national/ethnic paradigm with emphasis on its “ethnic” pole. however, the instrumental criterion is connected mostly with bettering the social, spiritual and cultural aspects of life rather than with political issues. the relevance of anderson’s formalist criterion varies among different individuals. while it may be important to some accomplished pysanka writers within the ethnic sub-paradigm, it may not be a high priority for individuals who make pysanky for social entertainment or “to maintain the tradition” once a year during the pre-easter period. as mentioned above, pysanky of these people may be very closely related to those of the old country paradigm – written only once a year for ritual and religious purposes, simple and technically unspectacular. concluding remarks the paradigms discussed above, for the most part, are presented in their “pure” forms. in practice, however, branching out from the same source, they are interrelated and overlap in many ways. pysanky of contrasting paradigms may be incorporated in one person’s work, form a single private or museum collection, or may share similar conceptual issues. those individuals who “informally inherited” knowledge about writing pysanky in the context of the old country paradigm have often further enriched it “formally” in the context of the national/ethnic one. the list of examples can be expanded. my discussion of the ukrainian canadian pysanka phenomenon in terms of two contrasting paradigms is built for heuristic purposes. this is one of many ways to illustrate that traditions change dynamically in different contexts under various influences, developing new vibrant cultural formations. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 24 notes 1 this article is based on my ma thesis “pysanka: the ukrainian easter egg in canada,” defended in 2005 at the university of alberta. an earlier version of this paper was presented at the 29th annual meeting of the folklore studies association of canada in 2005. i wish to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor dr. andriy nahachewsky for his stimulating intellectual support in my research and writing. i am also greatly indebted to dr. natalie kononenko for her encouragement and help with working on this article. 2 m. shewchuk, interview; “pysanky” is the plural of “pysanka.” the noun pysanka is connected with the ukrainian verb pysaty meaning to write. that is why many ukrainian canadians prefer to use the verb to write in relation to pysanky, and they call themselves pysanka writers. 3 the pysanka first started to attract the attention of ethnographers at the end of the 18th century. some major early studies of the phenomenon are mentioned below. 4 part of the fieldwork is related to the project “local culture and diversity on the prairies,” which documents everyday life and its variations in western canada’s rural communities among people of ukrainian, french, german and english backgrounds up to 1939. this project was spearheaded at the ukrainian folklore centre at the university of alberta, and was a collaboration with other universities across western canada. for a detailed description and discussion of the project see <www.arts.ualberta.ca/local_culture/>. i was part of the ukrainian team for this project, conducting interviews and creating indexes for interviews conducted by other fieldworkers. a number of those interviews that touched upon the tradition of the pysanka prior to 1939 are used for this study. i conducted over 30 additional interviews specifically for the present study, predominantly with pysanka makers. the interviewees range in age from their teens to their late 80s. i also attended one pysanka party in edmonton, where i had the chance to observe the process of writing pysanky as practiced by many ukrainian families today. 5 these periodicals are zhinochyi svit [women’s world], the monthly journal of the orhanizatsia ukraïnok kanady [ukrainian women’s organization of canada (uwoc)] (published since 1950); promin [ray] published monthly by the soiuz ukraïnok kanady [ukrainian women’s association of canada (uwac)] (since 1960); and the quarterly magazine nasha doroha [our way], issued by the liha from ritual object to art form 25 ukraïns'kykh katolyts'kykh zhinok kanady [ukrainian catholic women’s league of canada (ucwlc)] (since 1970). 6 one major source of reference is n. kohuska [1951], who focuses specifically on the uwac’s contribution to ukrainian material culture from 1926 to 1951. 7 in my thesis, i discuss the complex evolutionary process of the pysanka in canada in terms of four contrasting paradigms: “old country,” “national/ethnic,” “popular” and “individualistic.” this theoretical approach is partly based on and greatly inspired by robert klymasz’s ideas on the ukrainian cultural experience in canada presented in his introductory article to the catalogue of the exhibition “continuity and change: the ukrainian folk heritage in canada,” held in ottawa in 1972. he defines this experience as “composed of three distinct, yet interrelated parts,” labeling them “pioneer folk,” “national art,” and “ethnic pop.” i was also inspired by andriy nahachewsky’s work on ukrainian canadian dance. in his manuscript “dance across cultures,” nahachewsky deals with different conceptual issues related to dance practices such as “vival,” “revival,” “national,” “ethnic” dances and many others. the labeling of the four “contrasting paradigms” is inspired by the ideas presented in nahachewsky’s article “avramenko and the paradigm of national culture” (2003). my discussion of the pysanka within the national/ethnic paradigm is also inspired by natalie kononenko’s ideas on structured rituals in soviet and post-soviet ukraine (2005). 8 the political map of ukraine has differed considerably from the map of its ethnographic regions. the contemporary political map is divided into 24 regions called oblasti [pl.]. although very fuzzy, the ethnographic boundaries are determined by certain cultural particularities, and one ethnographic region may embrace certain parts of a few oblasti, while one oblast' may include a number of ethnographic regions. for maps of the ethnographic regions created by contemporary ukrainian ethnographers see bilan, stel'mashchuk [209, 222, 255]. 9 for an overview of the ideas and approaches of some major european solar mytholologists see r. dorson [57-83]. 10 for a detailed discussion of conditions in ukraine that caused mass immigration of the ukrainian peasantry to canada as well as early pioneers’ experiences in the new country see o. martynovych [1990 (1985): 7-55]. also see martynovych [1991: 3-55]. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 26 11 detailed descriptions of how to write a ukrainian easter egg are provided in most popular (instructional) sources on the pysanka. for example, see j. luciow, a. kmit and l. luciow [1975]. 12 the krashanka (or halunka), considered a simpler version of the pysanka, was widely practiced along with pysanky in ukraine. these were boiled eggs dyed in one color, most often red. the word krashanka is formed out of the verb krasyty meaning ‘to color’ in some regions. krashanky is its plural form. 13 for a detailed discussion of the national consciousness awaking among peasants in the rural communities of galicia see j.p. himka [59104; 143-215]. 14 most territories of ukraine from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries were colonized by the russian and austro-hungarian empires. colonization enhanced the nationalist outlook significantly. for a detailed discussion of the history of ukraine in this period see o. subtelny [201-20]. 15 the russian empire collapsed under the impact of the first world war. eastern and central ukraine was occupied by the soviet regime, while western territories belonged to poland, romania and czechoslovakia [subtelny 380-452]. 16 for detailed information on the activities of the uwac connected with pysanky see kohuska [61-88]. 17 the ukrainian youth association (spilka ukraïns'koi molodi (sum)) is an émigré youth organization, established in germany in 1946. its statutes presented it as a patriotic institution, whose slogan is “god and ukraine” [vaskovych 445-7]. 18 the ukrainian canadian congress (konhres ukraïntsiv kanady (kuk)) is an umbrella organization of the ukrainian community of canada, formed in 1945 in winnipeg [husar-struk 357-8]. 19 the neolithic trypillian culture was discovered on the territory of contemporary ukraine in the late 19th century. one of its first researchers was archaeologist v.v. khvoiko. archaeological excavations unearthed a great number of clay artifacts of to this culture. numerous publications devoted to trypillian civilization appeared in the soviet union, beginning in the 1930-1940s [zbenovych 18]. many scholars came to consider trypillians as the ancient ancestors of ukraine and the oldest ethnic base of ukrainian people. information on the trypillian culture also reached ukrainian communities in canada. 20 this is a clear example of the complexity of the emic prospective. while remembering the pysanka as practiced in their from ritual object to art form 27 parents’ homes in the first decades of the 20th century, elderly ukrainian canadians discuss it from the perspective of their current life-long experiences with pysanky, including all the changes they have undergone since pioneer times. as a result, we cannot be certain whether these individuals perceive the old country easter egg the same way it was understood in the early 20th century. 21 reportedly, the first exhibitions that included displays of pysanky were arranged in the late 1920s and early 1930s. for example, in 1929 and 1930 the uwac was invited to organize an exhibition of folk embroidery, weaving, wood carving, and easter eggs by the university of saskatchewan [kohus'ka 61-6]. ukrainian women’s periodicals have provided many reports on different exhibitions of ukrainian art including pysanky in the context of events all over canada. one such report describes a display of pysanky from the private collection of chester and luba kuc of edmonton, part of an exhibition they organized in august 1986, in edmonton [cyncar 17-18]. reportedly, the official opening of the first ukrainian museum in canada was held on december 27, 1941 in saskatoon, following years of preparation and collecting items (including pysanky) by active members of the uwac [kohus'ka 71-86]. later, branches of this museum were established in toronto, edmonton (1944) and winnipeg (1950) [kohus'ka 71-86]. 22 for example, in 1933 the uwac developed the project of selling pysanky among english audiences to collect funds for the ukrainian pavilion at the international exhibition in chicago [kohuska 67]. the pre-easter pysanka bazaars have been very popular all over canada since the early 1950s. ukrainian canadian women’s periodicals such as zhinochyi svit, promin', and nasha doroha have included reports on organizing pysanky bazaars within different branches of the organizations all over canada. 23 for instance, the uwoc organized a pysanka bazaar in 1940 in fort william to raise money for the ukrainian golden cross [protsiv 1955: 89]. another example is connected with the activities of the uwac. this organization collected the money “for the pysanka” for valentyn moroz, who was liberated from a concentration camp in europe [chaikovs'ka 29]. 24 frequent reports on pysanka bingo organized by branches of the uwoc have been provided in zhinochyi svit. for example, on march 23, 1979 anna mykhailovs'ka organized a pysanka bingo to collect funds for a building for zhinochyi svit in toronto [o.m. 1979: 28]. on april folklorica 2007, vol. xii 28 8, 1987 a pysanka bingo game was organized by the uwoc branch in saint catherine’s, ontario [domynyk 22]. 25 while conducting interviews, i have not met a single pysanka writer who would question such interpretations or fail to accept them as a self-evident truth. 26 wsevolod isajiw, discussing the symbols of ukrainian canadian identity, distinguishes two types – internal (invisible), embracing such factors as beliefs, values, ideas etc., and external (visible), such as food, language and artistic articles, including pysanky (119-123). 27 such appeals have constantly appeared in periodicals zhinochyi svit, nasha doroha and promin, in articles devoted to the ukrainian cultural heritage, especially the pysanka. 28 in general, the old country peasant way of life was gradually forced out by the transition to mechanized commercial farming by the 1930s [martynovych 1990: 143-161]. 29 lemkivshchyna and bukovyna are ethnographic regions in the western part of ukraine. 30 s. porayko-kyforuk’s memoirs have been translated from ukrainian by her daughter octavia hall. bibliography alba, richard. 1990. ethnic identity: the transformation of white america. new haven: yale university press. anderson, richard. 2004 [1990]. “western aesthetics: a quartet of traditions.” in calliope’s sisters: a comparative study of philosophies of art, pp. 231-252. new jersey: upper saddle river. bilan, maia and halyna stel'mashchuk. 2000. ukraïns'kyi strii [ukrainian costume]. l'viv: feniks. chaikovs'ka, l. 1979. “sviachene – vinnipeg [blessed food winnipeg].” zhinochyi svit july-august, nos. 7-8: 29. cyncar, nadia. 1986. “vystavka narodnoho mystetstva myroslava i liuby kuc” [the exhibition of folk art of myroslav and liuba kuc]. zhinochyi svit april, no. 4: 17-18. domynyk, genia. 1987. “viddil ouk – st. catherins, ont. [uwoc branch in st. catherins, ont.]” zhinochyi svit july-august, nos. 7-8: 22. dorson, richard. 1965. “the eclipse of solar mythology.” in the study of folklore by a. dundes. englewood cliffs: prentice-hall. eliade, mircea. 1986. symbolism, the sacred, and the arts. ed. diane apostols-cappadona. new york: crossroad. from ritual object to art form 29 elyjiw, zenon. 1994. dvadtsiat' kip pysanok: velykyi al'bom ukrains'kykh pysanok [sixty score easter eggs: a comprehensive album of ukrainian easter eggs]. rochester: myron babiuk. glassie, henry. 1968. pattern in the material folk culture of the eastern united states. university of pennsylvania monographs in folklore and folklife, vol. 1. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. glassie, henry. 1986. “the idea of folk art,” afterword to folk art and art worlds, edited by j. m. vlach and s. j. bronner. ann arbor: umi research press. himka, john paul. 1988. galician villagers and the ukrainian national movement in the nineteenth century. edmonton: canadian institute of ukrainian studies. hobsbawm, eric and terence ranger, eds. 2000 [1983]. the invention of tradition. cambridge: cambridge university press. hurhula, iryna. 1929. “pysanky skhidnoi halychyny i bukovyny v zbirtsi natsional'noho muzeiu u l'vovi [pysanky of eastern galicia and bukovyna in the collection of the national museum in l'viv]” materialy do ukraïns'koi etnolohii [materials for ukrainian ethnology], vol. 21-22: 131-155. husar-struk, danylo, ed. 1993. encyclopedia of ukraine. vol. 5: st – z. toronto: university of toronto. isajiw, wsevolod. 1984. “symbols and ukrainian canadian identity: their meaning and significance.” in visible symbols: cultural expression among canada’s ukrainians, edited by m. lupul, pp. 119128. edmonton: canadian institute of ukrainian studies. iuzyk, maria. 1975. “ukraïns'ka pysanka ta ïï znachennia” [the ukrainian pysanka and its meaning] nasha doroha april-june: 4-5. jones, michael owen. 1991. “a folklorist’s viewpoint on ukrainian-canadian art.” in art and ethnicity: the ukrainian tradition in canada, edited by r. klymasz, pp. 47-57 hull: canadian museum of civilisation. klymasz, robert. 1969. “the ukrainian easter egg in canada.” ottawa: folklore division of the national museum of man. klymasz, robert. 1972. introduction to continuity and change: the ukrainian folk heritage in canada, pp. 5-13. ottawa: national museum of man. kohuska, natalka. 1952. chvert' stolittia na hromadskii nyvi (1926 – 1951): istoria soiuzu ukraïnok kanady [twenty five years of the folklorica 2007, vol. xii 30 ukrainian women’s association of canada (19261951)]. winnipeg: trident press. kononenko, natalie. 2005. “soviet ritual/post-soviet ritual: ongoing social engineering.” paper read at the canadian institute of ukrainian studies seminar, 27 january, at the university of alberta, edmonton. korduba, myron. 1899. “pysanky na halytskii volyni” [pysanky of the region of galician volyn']. materialy do ukraïns'koi etnolohii [materials for ukrainian ethnology] 1: 169-209. koshetz, tetiana. 1958. “istoria pysanky ta ïï ornamentu [a history of the pysanka and its design].” zhinochyi svit april, no 4: 2-4. kul'zhynskii, s.k. 1899. lubenskii muzei e. h. skarzhynskoi: opisanie kollektsii narodnykh pysanok [the e. h. skarzhynskaia museum in lubny: the description of the collection of folk pysanky] moscow: a.a. levenson. kylymnyk, stepan. 1962. “pysanky.” in ukraïns'kyi rik v narodnikh zvychaiakh v istorychnomu osvitlenni [calendar year in ukrainian folklore], pp.189-236. vol. 3. winnipeg: trident press. lett, james. 1987. the human enterprise. a critical introduction to anthropological theory. boulder: westview press. luciow, johanna, ann kmit and loretta luciow. 1991 [1975, 1976, 1984, 1987] eggs beautiful: how to make ukrainian easter eggs. minneapolis: ukrainian gift shop. martynovych, orest. 1990 [1985]. the ukrainian block settlement in east central alberta, 1890-1930: a history. historic sites services. occasional paper 10. edmonton: alberta culture and multiculturalism. martynovych, orest. 1991. ukrainians in canada: the formative period, 1891-1924. edmonton: canadian institute of ukrainian studies. nahachewsky, andriy. 2003. “avramenko and the paradigm of national culture.” journal of ukrainian studies 28 (winter): 31-50. nahachewsky, andriy. “dance across cultures: perspectives on folk, ethnic, national and character dance.” manuscript. o.m. 1979. “pysankove ‘bingo’ na fond prymishchennia zhinochoho svitu.” [pysanka bingo to collect funds for a building for zhinochyi svit] zhinochyi svit july-august, no 7-8: 28. onyshchuk, odarka. 1988. “vidkrytyi lyst do zhinok, materei i vsikh, shcho liubliat' nashe mystetstvo” [an open letter to women, mothers and everybody who loves our art] zhinochyi svit april, no 4: 20-21. from ritual object to art form 31 porayko-kyforuk, sofia. 1969. “my beginnings in easter egg enscribing.” compiled and translated by octavia hall. limited edition 5. galveston. porayko-kyforuk, sofia. sophia kyforuk’s easter egg scrapbook ii: 1950s-1980s. 2005.022. bohdan medwidsky ukrainian folklore archives, university of alberta, edmonton. protsiv, sofia. 1955. “ukraïns'kyi zolotyi khrest [ukrainian golden cross].” in na sluzhbi ridnoho narodu: iuvileinyi zbirnyk orhanizatsii ukraïnok kanady im. ol'hy basarab u 25-richchia vid zaisnuvannia (1930-1955) [in service of our motherland: the ukrainian women’s organization of canada – 25th anniversary – (1930-1955)], pp. 81-101. winnipeg: novyi shliakh [new way]. shcherbakivs'kyi, vadym. 1925. osnovni elementy ornamentatsii ukraïns'kykh pysanok ta ikhnie pokhodzhennia: studia [principle elements of the ornamentation of the ukrainian pysanka and their origins: study]. prague: state publishing house. shukhevych, volodymyr. 1904. “pysanky.” in hutsul'shchyna [the hutsul region]. vol. 4. l'viv: ntsh: 220-231. subtelny, orest. 1988. ukraine: a history. toronto: university of toronto press. sumtsov, mykola. 1891. “pysanky.” kievskaia starina: 181-209; 363-383. swyripa, frances. 1991. “from sheepskin coat to blue jeans: a brief history of ukrainians in canada” in art and ethnicity: the ukrainian tradition in canada, edited by r. klymasz, pp. 11-27. hull: canadian museum of civilisation. swyripa, frances. 1993. wedded to the cause: ukrainian-canadian women and ethnic identity. toronto: university of toronto. vaskovych, h. 1993. “ukrainian youth association.” in encyclopaedia of ukraine, edited by d. husar-struk, pp. 455-456. vol. 5: st-z. toronto: university of toronto. yuzyk, paul. 1953. the ukrainians in manitoba: a social history. toronto: university of toronto press. zaiatseva, i. 1957. “pamiataimo choho zhde vid nas ridnyi krai [let’s remember what our native land expects from us].” zhinochyi svit october, no.10: 18. zbenovich, v. g. 1989. rannii ètap tripol'skoi kul'tury na territorii ukrainy [the early period of the trypillian culture on the territory of ukraine]. kyïv: naukova dumka. folklorica 2007, vol. xii 32 zel's'ka, ivanna. 1985. “plekaimo chystotu narodnoho mystetstva [let’s cherish the purity of folk art].” zhinochyi svit september, no 9: 16. microsoft word folk2010e.doc obituary 199 folklorica 2010, vol. xv in memory of alla vasil’evna kulagina folklore scholars and pedagogues are saddened by the loss on october 20, 2009 of alla vasil’evna kulagina, professor in the department of folklore (кафедра устного народного ворчества) of moscow state university’s philological faculty (филологический факультет). alla vasil’evna was born on january 27, 1938 in selo khorol’, primorskii krai of russia’s far east. her only sibling was her brother, felix. from 1972 to the time of her death, professor kulagina studied and taught at moscow state university. she was beloved by colleagues and students alike. professor kulagina specialized in the ballad, chastushka, lyric songs, and folktales. her dissertation topic was “the russian folk ballad as a genre” (русская народная баллада как жанр, 1974), and she wrote a textbook entitled the russian folk ballad (русская народная баллада, 1977). alla vasil’evna was an enthusiastic collector and scholar of the chastushka at a time when the genre in its contemporary form (the urban political and indecent chastushka) was out of favor and politically dangerous to explore. she committed hundreds of chastushki to memory and was accustomed to sing out a chastushka appropriate to the situation. her monograph, the poetic world of the chastushka (поэтический мир частушки, 2000), and her collection, chastushki from nerekhta (нерехтинские частушки, 1993), bear witness to this interest. in addition, chastushki are included in vetluzhskaia land (ветлужская сторона, 1996), a collection of calendar and family ceremonial folklore, spells, ballads, and spiritual verses that she compiled with the participation of her graduate student, vasilii aleksandrovich kovpik. other collections include the well-received urban songs, ballads, and romances (городские песни, баллады и романсы, 1999) and the impressively complete and detailed two-volume russian wedding (русская свадьба, 1999 and 2001), co-authored with a. n. ivanov. the collection includes stories about the wedding ritual, laments, and ritual songs. alla vasil’evna’s most recent collection was orthodox priests as collectors of russian folklore (православные священники – собиратели русского фольклора, 2004), co-authored with v. g. smolitskii. alla vasil’evna authored an impressive quantity of textbooks. a partial list includes the anthologies slavic folklore (славянский фольклор, 1987) and russian oral folklore (русское устное народное folklorica 2010, vol. xv 200 творчество, 1996), as well as a teachers’ aide entitled russian oral folklore (русское устное народное творчество, 1995). her reader, russian oral folklore (русское устное народное творчество: хрестоматия, 1996) has long been used as the basic text for the folklore course at the university of the russian academy of education, where alla vasil’evna also taught. her articles include “the character of the tragic in folk ballads” (характер трагического в народных балладах), izvestiia olia an sssr (известия олия ан ссср, vol. 33 (moscow, 1974) and “parallelism and symbolism in the chastushka” (параллелизм и символика в частушках), fol’klor kak iskusstvo slova, no. 5 (mgu, 1981). she also wrote articles that were included in books, such as “folklore and russian culture” (фольклор и русская культура), in russkaia drevniaia kul’tura (mgu, 1995) (русская древняя культура, мгу) and the introductory article in the bilingual reader, russian folktales (русские сказки, 1984). professor kulagina presented papers at several international conferences in minsk, bulgaria, slovenia, syktyvkar, moscow, archangel, and petrozavodsk. she has written articles regularly for the journals, zhivaia starina (живая старина), narodnoe tvorchestvo (народное творчество), and moscow state university’s vestnik (вестник московского государственного университета). alla vasil’evna will be remembered fondly in the hearts of everyone who knew her. she was daring in her research choices, and she had a magnanimous, appealing personality. from 1969 to 2009 she took her students on folklore collecting expeditions into the heart of russia to kostroma, kaluga, nizhnii novgorod, vologda, and arkhangel’sk oblast’. her good will, kindness, and humor sustained various groups over the years. she worked laboriously archiving the collected materials and putting the material of earlier mgu expeditions into order. in 1975 during the cold war era, alla vasil’evna fearlessly volunteered to teach a seminar for american teachers at mgu for the irex exchange of teachers with the soviet union, despite the fact that at the time americans were referred to as provocateurs. her seminar was the one most popular with the american teachers, and it remained so for many years. the impression that alla vasil’evna kulagina made on colleagues, friends, and students is unforgettable. her death has left an empty place in our hearts, a place that had been previously filled by alla’s larger than life personality. alla vasil’evna was laid to rest on monday, october 26, obituary 201 folklorica 2010, vol. xv 2009 in vostriakovskoe cemetery in moscow. she will be sorely missed. may the earth be gentle to her (земля ей пухом). bonnie marshall new hampshire historical society’s museum museum of russian icons meredith, nh usa << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain 20%) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \050swop\051 v2) /srgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel 1.4 /compressobjects /tags /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages true /createjdffile false /createjobticket false 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setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice 135 reviews folklorica 2013, vol. xvii baer, elizabeth r. the golem redux: from prague to postholocaust fiction. detroit, mi: wayne state university press, 2012. notes, bibliography, index, 229 pp. $27.95 (paper). isbn 978-0-8143-3626-7. the golem is one of the most popular motifs in jewish folklore. the tale of the clay statue given life by a holy man has many permutations in traditional use, ranging from salacious stories (such as when an unmarried rabbi creates a female creature to be his companion) to profound tales where the golem defends jews against cruel pogroms. elizabeth baer’s book is an affectionate analysis of the golem motif in contemporary creative work, with examples ranging from novels to film to comic books. she takes the readers from legends compiled in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through high literature of the postholocaust era into the post-millennial period. baer’s analysis addresses the golem’s increasing prominence in creative works, especially since 1980, and examines the meanings authors have created with this enduring motif. baer’s work is built around the intertextuality of golem literature, especially as it relates to the holocaust. employing concepts from theorists like julia kristeva and geoffrey hartmann, baer interrogates the discursive genealogy of the golem in postholocaust fiction. viewed through an intertextual lens, each new text (or “hypertext”) builds on the “hypotext” preceding it, preserving the meaning of the hypotext while adding new interpretations. baer explicitly places the golem redux in this intertextual paradigm, acknowledging that her study is a hypertext of scholarship by gershom scholem, moshe idel, and especially arnold goldsmith, whose monograph the golem remembered, 1901-1980 was the first scholarly treatment of golem literature in english. baer frames her book as an update to goldsmith’s, examining both new literature and previously inaccessible material. though she does cover some earlier texts, baer’s book complements the earlier surveys; it does not replace them. most twentieth-century golem literature is derived from physician leopold wiesel’s 1841 one-page folktale about the great 136 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii reformation-era prague rabbi judah loew. in wiesel’s telling, loew creates an artificial man as a helper, but lays him to rest in the synagogue attic after he runs amok. in 1909, polish rabbi yudl rosenberg produced an extensive hypertext of wiesel’s story, adding the golem’s defense of the prague ghetto against a pogrom. rosenberg claimed that his version was written in rabbi loew’s time and recovered from long-hidden scrolls. baer asserts convincingly (along with practically every serious golem scholar) that this is a literary fraud; indeed, pogroms were virtually unknown in rabbi loew’s prague. golem enthusiasts may be disheartened to find out that their most beloved tale is more “fakelore” than anything else, but baer redeems rosenberg somewhat by contextualizing his work. 1909 poland fostered growing antisemitism, with blood libel rumors running rampant. loew’s inspirational golem fighting against pogroms served the needs of the teller and his audience, not historical veracity or traditional ideas of authenticity. in this, rosenberg’s tale is an intertext: a hypertext of wiesel’s tale and the discourse of 1900s ethnic tension. general readers will be most interested in baer’s critique of post-holocaust literature by outstanding writers since 1980, including nobel laureates elie wiesel and isaac bashevis singer as well as pulitzer prize-winner michael chabon. baer takes a biographical approach for much of her study, emphasizing wiesel and singer’s holocaust experience and chabon’s more insulated american upbringing nurtured by comic books. from wiesel and singer’s veiled parables of the shoah (both simply titled the golem) to chabon’s smugglers secreting rabbi loew’s golem out of pre-holocaust europe in the amazing adventures of kavalier & clay, baer shows how these authors’ golem works challenge theodor adorno’s assertion that poetry in the wake of auschwitz is barbaric. in wiesel’s words, “it is better if we end [adorno’s] phrase with a question mark: ‘can poetry still be written after auschwitz?” (88). wiesel’s answer is clear, though adorno’s admonition does call for humility. baer reaches beyond these renowned authors to more esoteric texts, including the avant-garde work of cynthia ozick, 137 reviews folklorica 2013, vol. xvii the historical fantasy of frances sherwood, the impassioned prose of thane rosenbaum, the satire of daniel handler, the golem’s xfiles adaptation, and the expanding canon of comics and graphic novels, including works by pete hamill, james sturm, and len wein. baer reads most of these as hypertexts of hypertexts, preserving and transforming the meanings of traditional folklore and its corresponding literary fiction. sturm’s graphic novel, the golem’s mighty swing, is a good example. it depicts a jewish baseball team in 1920s america. a negro league veteran joins the pre-integration club, and they dress him as the eponymous character from paul wegner’s 1920 film der golem. when the team faces an antisemitic riot, the “golem” protects them, much as rabbi loew’s golem protected the prague ghetto. baer demonstrates the intertextuality of history, culture, and the golem canon in all these texts, presenting “an image of these texts as a palimpsest, a layering of legend that is both self-referential and self-renewing” (182). baer treats most golem texts affectionately, but does point out ethical limits on the motif’s use. in her second chapter, “german language appropriations,” baer examines wegner’s der golem and gustav meyrik’s 1915 novel of the same name. baer illustrates these texts’ endemic antisemitism, such as the magical, otherworldly jewish image propagated by wegner’s film, which depicts rabbi loew as a sorcerer beholden to astrology and demonic pacts. meyrik’s indiscriminate blending of jewish tradition with world mysticism is also heavily critiqued, as are commentators who have mitigated what baer sees as antisemitic exploitation. though this may be a bitter pill for admirers of wegner’s cinematic legacy, baer makes a good case that, in the context of nascent nazism, these pieces subvert the golem “into a figure of evil that turns him into an exotic other, a synecdoche for the ‘evil’ of judaism and jews” (68). if anything, baer is too thorough in places. she recounts plot points in great detail, whether they have anything to do with the golem or not. this indicates real love for the texts and helps make a case for their significance, but her style risks moving from solid analysis into less pertinent loquaciousness. likewise, some of 138 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii her author biographies border on the belabored. baer’s desire to bring authors like ozick, sherwood, and rosenbaum to greater awareness is commendable, but at some point the relevance of so much personal information is questionable. conversely, baer has excluded some of the more familiar treatments of the golem, including david wisniewski's 1996 caldecott-winning children's book and isaac lieb peretz's influential yiddish version of the story (though peretz is covered in goldsmith’s precursor work, and is probably omitted for the sake of redundancy). considering that baer does such a painstaking job covering alternative literature, including graphic novels and television, these omissions are curious. these criticisms should not detract from baer’s overall accomplishments. this study provides an excellent survey of the motif, and her theoretical framing of the literature in intertextual perspective is a formidable intellectual achievement. the golem redux is indispensible reading for anyone interested in the golem or any associated topics, and will likely remain so for some time. b. stu burns editor, fine lines literary journal omaha, nebraska, usa 143 reviews folklorica 2013, vol. xvii mucz, michael. baba’s kitchen medicines: folk remedies of ukrainian settlers in western canada. edmonton, ab, canada: the university of alberta press, 2012. illustrations, maps, appendices, selected readings, index. xxv+265 pp. $34.95 (paper). isbn-13: 978-0-88864-514-2. although the folklife of ukrainians in canada has been the topic of a number of valuable studies, some traditions or memories of traditions were passed on only orally until now. michael mucz, a professor of biology with interests in ethnobotany and herbal medicine who teaches in the university of alberta system, offers a well-rounded and fascinating study of the folk healing practices of ukrainian communities in canada in baba’s kitchen medicines: folk remedies of ukrainian settlers in western canada. mucz briefly but effectively outlines the historical context of ukrainian settlements in canada, noting that compact settlements in isolated areas meant both a need for mutual aid and a greater likelihood of preserving traditions, whereas consulting scientific medicine and trained doctors involved both distance (difficulty) and expense. a chapter on ancient healing practices reaches back to classical greece, while another outlines the specialized kinds of healers who could be found in the ukrainian communities: bonesetters, mostly men who had learned the skill while serving in the austrohungarian army; midwives who helped women in childbirth; herbalists, found much less often than the bearers of “kitchen” herbal medicine; and spiritual healers, who would crack eggs into water or use other folk methods to advance psychological wellbeing. mucz’s informants come from a variety of religions and places of origin, but the data is based on extensive interviews with children and grandchildren of the original settlers. (there is also just a glimpse of aboriginal healing practices, as picked up by the ukrainian communities.) the best part of the book offers tables with lists of medicinal preparations, often providing quotations from individual informants and other kinds of context for the healing practices cited. the book is richly illustrated with maps and black-andwhite photographs, which include both historical photographs of 144 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii ukrainian settlers and contemporary pictures of some of the plants mentioned in the text. there are no photographs of actual healing in practice, which underlines the private and domestic, occasionally even secretive, nature of many of the treatments. besides these pictures, mucz offers a treasure trove of data: tables with information about his informants and the lists of remedies reported used for a variety of ailments, mentioned above. one chart conveys almost 4000 “individual healing situations” (38); others break the information down into smaller categories. tables of results indicate the “treatment value” of the home remedies, depending on how many informants reported use of a certain remedy. the text asserts several times that later generations of ukrainian canadians rejected traditional healing practices not because they were ineffective, but because they considered them old-fashioned and embarrassing, a reaction not unusual for assimilating second-generation immigrants (18, 46 and elsewhere). thus the book makes two arguments: first, that these traditional ways of healing are part of the heritage of ukrainian canadians; and second, that these healing practices have many virtues, not least their reported effectiveness. mucz otherwise offers no judgments, which will make this book friendly to anyone who might want to use the information for actual healing practice, as well as for ethnographers and other scholars. the conclusion of the one-page disclaimer that opens the book makes clear that this is intended: “know your limits and recognize that good sense and health not only go together but are also life’s greatest blessings. make your personal health a valued and lifelong task” (vii). the book is interesting for comparative work as well, since many of the healing practices or substances are widely accepted in other cultures as well (a preparation of blueberries for diarrhea; cranberries for urinary problems), as well as possible ancestry for or insight into many alternative therapies today (11). mucz is a somewhat diffident authorial presence but both likable and efficient. many readers will find his clear language and avoidance of jargon appealing. (an understandable exception is 145 reviews folklorica 2013, vol. xvii when he draws on the vocabulary of botany or medicine, as when explaining why weeds may contain useful chemicals (“secondary metabolites” (60-61).) other readers might regret that he has not pursued the fascinating material in this book in theoretical directions, especially since the book’s title makes clear the importance of age and gender in the realm of folk healing. at one point, mucz notes, “women, being generally more sensitive and caring in nature, were typically the family’s health care providers” (15). one might ask whether this is mucz’s own opinion or that of his informants. indeed, an informant is cited shortly thereafter, noting the predominance of woman as healers in a much more neutral way (16). one other possible criticism is that several small sections of the book are repeated verbatim in various places— though that means that a reader who dips in rather than reading through the whole is more likely to see those ideas. elsewhere in the book, mucz is more careful to clarify his sources for statements on gender traits or the gendered nature of certain kinds of healing, and this enhances the book’s value for readers interested in that aspect of history and traditional culture. he notes that some of his data was limited too: “female concerns were seldom openly discussed, because cultural and gender boundaries made it difficult for informants to address such topics comfortably with a man, let alone a stranger” (39). it is regrettable that he could not have invited a female colleague to collaborate on this part of his research. these few objections do not obscure the importance of mucz’s thoughtful work. the book is a tribute both to ukrainian heritage in canada and to michael mucz’s patience and imagination in gathering the information over many years, and baba’s kitchen medicines is recommended to every one of the several audiences to which it will appeal. sibelan forrester swarthmore college swarthmore, pennsylvania, usa folklorica full 2021_edit 6.28.22 reviews folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 88 būgienė, lina, editor. the storytelling human: lithuanian folk tradition today. boston: academic studies press, 2020. bibliography. index. xvii+270 pp. $109.00 (cloth). isbn 978-1-64469-423-7. alan dundes, in his last plenary address to the american folklore society, hailed lithuania, latvia and estonia as “prime movers” and “major players” of twenty-first century international folkloristics (2005: 405-406). the tradition continues strong in this new volume of essays by eight lithuanian folklorists. the storytelling human presents, in english, a new generation’s search for new directions. the authors came of age in the current millennium, with dissertations defended 1999-2017. what they offer is, quoting estonian folklorist ülo valk’s cover blurb, a “manifesto of renewed lithuanian folkloristics... in close dialogue with international scholarship.“ the book is divided into two mutually complementing parts, four chapters each: part one, titled “history and tradition in a changing world,“ assesses lithuanian experiences in the second half of the twentieth century; and part two, “traditional folklore and modernity,” documents twenty-first-century innovations within folklore genres. aelita kensminienė hypothesizes that the recent disappearance of classic riddles in oral tradition signals broader linguistic change. the few people who currently do remember these poetic texts are semi-literate, favoring “auditory” perception of language, whereas literate people’s “visual” (read, not heard) linguistic perception may render the poetic textures and longer texts of oral riddles less memorable. people’s mental landscapes also changed in the mid-twentieth century, argues radvilė racėnaitė, who compares nature descriptions in autobiographical narratives recorded from star folklore informants, with memoirs of acclaimed literary authors. when preindustrial farmers embraced nature’s beauty, they did so through shared traditional genres, differently from images in the individualized life stories and personal memoirs of farmers who were forced off their land by soviet collectivization and deportations. their mental landscapes, like those of later urban poets, were shaped by existential loss. the twentieth century’s violent wars and foreign occupations left deep scars in lithuanian worldviews. healing could begin only when the soviet communist party’s power waned. in 1989, thousands of lithuanians traveled to siberia to exhume the remains of relatives who had been arrested and forcibly deported by the soviets, returning them to lithuania to be reburied in their native land. daiva vaitkevičienė interprets personal experience narratives recounting these journeys, including memorates about supernatural encounters with the dead and descriptions of rituals at gravesites, to document deep ties across generations who finally laid to rest trauma inflicted by the soviet union. unhealed traumatic memories close to home are studied by lina būgienė, in a village that experienced waves of killings from 1939 to 1953, during the second world war and the holocaust, and guerilla warfare under soviet occupation. the region’s history “dramatically disrupts each individual’s personal history, and each individual has his or her own way of experiencing, surviving, reflecting upon and relating that reviews folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 89 history” (110). conflicting memories and narratives nevertheless coalesce around the major historical issues. the book’s anchor, for me, is the first two chapters of part two, which engage the persistent vitality of two classic folklore genres—folktales and proverbs. jūratė šlekonytė studies the repertoires of two narrators encountered during fieldwork in 2006-2010. one, a “traditional” storyteller, well known in his community as an entertainer, told folklorists more than fifty stories, among them variants of twenty classic folktale types that he adapted for current audiences, for example, “these days there are people who like to steal cars – people drive cars, so it’s cars that are stolen. but earlier it used to be horses…” (130). the second, “rational” narrator rejected the fantasy world of folktales but referred to their plots as illustrations of attitudes and opinions, in skillfully crafted stories about local characters (126). such stories were not recorded by earlier folklorists who concentrated on the classic, repeated plots, but it is likely, argues šlekonytė, that similar, highly innovative narrators also existed in the past. dalia zaikauskienė’s magisterial assessment of contemporary lithuanian proverb traditions continues where the great paremiologist kazys grigas (19242002) left off, highlighting both transnational and nationally unique features. lithuanian is continually absorbing international proverbs and proverbial sayings like, “putting the cart before the horse,” which is well known in western europe since the 1700s, but appeared in lithuanian only about two decades ago, quickly spawning variants. other recently documented proverbs such as “time is money,” and “the customer is always right,” indicate shared, transnational worldviews in lithuanian everyday life. but i am at a loss to explain why lithuanian politicians rarely use proverbs in public oratory (165), unlike numerous american presidents whose repertoires were documented by wolfgang mieder. salomėja bandoriūtė is the first lithuanian folklorist to assess 7,842 narrative jokes (lith. anekdotai) preserved in archives and collected online, looking for common characteristics of homo ridens (laughing humans) through time. she focuses on jokes that “mock” or “exclude” specific social groups such as women, ethnic groups and foreigners (jews, roma, chukchi, germans, georgians, armenians, russians), and the powerful (landowners, kings, priests, communist officials, current politicians, doctors, adults); these objects of humorous aggression have remained stable across the past century’s historical epochs. further fieldwork and interpretation are warranted: the author points out that this corpus of jokes was mostly collected from men (189), begging the question, does a lithuanian femina ridens also exist, and what funny stories does she tell? where do puns and other language-based jokes fit in, and humor based on regional stereotypes? incongruity as a possible core of human laughter is mentioned in passing (206), but could be further explored to seek alternative interpretations regarding stories that elicit lithuanian laughter. the book’s last chapter dives into two topics new to lithuanian folkloristics: sports and digital traditions. povilas krikščiūnas compiles online folklore surrounding lithuania’s national pastime, basketball, zeroing in on 400 reviews folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 90 basketball-related “demotivational posters” (a subgenre of memes), shared in an online forum. currently circulating jokes display similar thematic patterns, bolstering the thesis that this is traditional communication adjusting to new online contexts. traditional themes include lithuania’s obsession with basketball, the opposition of “self” and “other” in opposing teams, and the unity of basketball and beer: “basketball without beer is like a birthday without cake.” a picture of a toilet with free-throw markings painted on the floor is particularly interesting in international comparative context: american variants add an obscene joke, “no dribbling allowed,” where lithuanian texts affirm the national obsession, “it doesn’t matter where, as long as it’s basketball” (221). lithuanian folklorists tend to view folklore in a longer time frame than my american colleagues, who typically concentrate on current, “informal traditional culture.” a lithuanian-eye-view of folklore passes through two overlapping portals. first, massive archival collections present a sea of variants for any single text or performance, demanding comparative study. and second is deep fieldwork. from the 1920s on, rigorous methods of long-term research ensured familiarity with the contexts and people who maintained traditions. it is a pleasure to follow lithuanian folklorists on fieldwork expeditions where we meet living people of lithuania in the twenty-first century, for example, when fieldworkers drink coffee with the informant on her birthday (6), or swap stories with a gifted folktale teller (121). the book’s authors center attention on narrative traditions; for equally stimulating treatment of folksongs, look to recent books by austė nakienė and daiva račiūnaitė-vyčinienė (listed in the bibliography). i remain as convinced as alan dundes was, that lithuanians will continue to be major players in global folkloristics in the second quarter of the twenty-first century. guntis šmidchens university of washington seattle, washington, usa guntiss@uw.edu bibliography dundes, alan. (2005). “folkloristics in the twenty-first century” (afs invited presidential plenary address, 2004). the journal of american folklore 118(470): 385-408. nakienė, austė. 2016. “from traditional poliphony to the polyphonic tradition. the evolution of lithuanian music in the 20th and 21st centuries: summary,” in nuo tradicinės polifonijos iki polifoninės tradicijos: lietuvių muzikos kaita xx-xxi a. vilnius, lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 341-351. račiūnaitė-vyčinienė, daiva. 2002. sutartinės: lithuanian polyphonic songs. translated by vijolė arbas. vilnius: vaga. microsoft word folkloricaprotest_ii_full_final_2022 07.27.22.docx author guidelines folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 117 author guidelines folklorica publishes materials in english. authors are encouraged to translate their manuscripts into english prior to submission. folklorica accepts original submissions only. do not send a previously published article, even if it has appeared in another language. manuscripts should be submitted electronically (files in microsoft word (.doc or.docx) or rtf format) as an email attachment). each article must be preceded by a 200-word abstract. manuscripts normally should not exceed 35 pages in length (including end notes). for more detailed information, see the folklorica style sheet (https://journals.ku.edu/folklorica/about/submissions#stylesheet). peer review all manuscripts will be submitted for evaluation to two outside reviewers. reviewers are anonymous. decision on publication normally takes up to three months. all submissions should be addressed to: the editor, dr. jeanmarie rouhier-willough e-mail: j.rouhier@uky.edu transliteration chart available online: https://journals.ku.edu/folklorica/about/submissions#transliteration book reviews length: 800-1200 words. format of entries: author. title in italics (series name, if applicable). place: publisher, year of publication. additional features: notes. bibliography. glossary. index. (if applicable in the order they appear). number of pp. price (cloth). price (paper). isbn number for each. doe, jane. introduction to slavic folklore (world folklore series). boston, ma: slavic publishing, 2006. notes. bibliography. index. xv+314. $45.95 (paper). isbn 0-123-456-789. if the language is other than english, provide a translation of the title. if the author’s name is in cyrillic, provide a transliteration. give the publication information in the original language as it appears in the book, do not transliterate. give the page number for all direct quotes in parentheses (179-81). no bibliography or footnotes; please incorporate into the text of the review. author guidelines folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 118 please end your review with your name, affiliation, city, country and email address left-justified. direct all reviews and inquiries to: laura olson osterman book review editor, folklorica university of colorado, boulder germanic and slavic languages and literatures 276 ucb, mckenna 129 boulder, co 80309-0276 e-mail: lolson@colorado.edu 171 reviews folklorica 2013, vol. xvii greene, robert h. bodies like bright stars: saints and relics in orthodox russia. dekalb, il: northern illinois university press. 2010. xii+299. notes. selected bibliography. index. xii+299. $42.00 (cloth). isbn 978-0-87580-409-5 in this carefully researched, highly readable and remarkably well documented volume, robert greene examines popular devotion to the cult of saints in late imperial and early soviet russia. in the introduction he indicates that three methodological principles inform his approach: 1) religious practice is meaningful; 2) religious practices and rituals are imbedded in theological knowledge; 3) religion is a dynamic and developing process. given these principles, greene seeks in the book to address basic questions such as how russian orthodox believers, through their devotional practices, related to the saints in heaven or as he states: ”why do long-dead saints matter to the living faithful (6),” and, perhaps more fundamentally, how does a study of this nature allow one to challenge what he calls the “longdominant paradigm” that views the russian faithful as semiliterate ritualists, “barely conversant with the most rudimentary doctrines of the faith (6)?” related to this and particularly relevant to the time period, is the flexibility of religious practice and how it can adapt even in times of great change such as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. greene frames the book with consideration of the orthodox notion of bodily incorruptibility as it developed in the late imperial period. he effectively demonstrates that in its mission to improve the religious knowledge of believers and improve their spiritual lives, the orthodox church focused considerable attention on incorruptibility as a sign of god’s grace and salvation, manifest in the bodies of those pleasing to him, and the claimed abundant presence of these bodies in russian orthodoxy as proof of its rightful place as christ’s true church. according to greene, the faithful, however, looked to the saints not so much as models of the exemplary christian life leading to salvation, but as miracle workers who were able to meet a variety of specific needs in their 172 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii lives. greene shows that believers cultivated complex relationships with their saints’ uncorrupted bodies or in many cases bones— incorruptibility was not necessarily the issue—which directly benefitted them or their families, but at the same time obligated them to reciprocate by visiting their graves, interacting physically with the saints by touching or kissing the holy relics, offering prayers, lighting votive candles, pledging donations, etc. although the saints through the holy spirit were believed to see and hear the faithful no matter where they were, greene demonstrates through effective examples that it was their shrines that were considered to be the preferred access point for their intercessory powers. by citing a wide variety of sources, but focusing in depth on a much smaller number of saints, greene is able to effectively present his case. the soviet period, of course, is very different. the authorities focus on incorruptibility and emphasize the exhumation of the bodies of saints in order to debunk the whole notion of uncorrupted bodies. in describing the seizure of the relics of st. aleksandr at the aleksandro-svirski monastery, greene notes that the “authorities were perhaps no less stunned than the clergymen, who watched as the shrouds were pulled back to reveal a wax effigy of the saint in place of an incorruptible body” (125). in order to exploit such findings, and humiliate the clergy, provincial justice administrations charged some orthodox clerics with relic fraud. greene very clearly demonstrates, however, that a basic misunderstanding of the thinking of ordinary believers undermined the bolshevik regime’s position. orthodox believers most relied on the miracle-working power of the saints, whether the relics were incorruptible or not. it was the local presence of the saint and his or her accessibility to devotional practice that was essential. in an essay very pertinent to greene’s study, but likely not available to him, titled “on holy relics,” published posthumously in a private collection in paris in 1992 and translated by boris jakim (relics and miracles, william b. eerdmans, 2011), orthodox theologian, 173 reviews folklorica 2013, vol. xvii sergei bulgakov, writing in 1918, addresses the bolshevik regime’s “desecration” of icons by first providing an answer to the question: “what exactly are holy relics and what are the content and meaning of the dogma of the veneration of holy relics?”(3). bulgakov maintains that since the practice dates from the time of the martyrs when bodies were burned or dismembered, it clearly does not require that the remains be incorruptible. he attributes the latter notion to a popular perception among the people, which was then “hypocritically” reinforced by church officials who in some cases intentionally created “bodies” for the saints when the real bodies no longer existed. rather than incorruptibility, bulgakov writes that the cause of the glorification of a saint consists in his/her holiness and the presence of the holy spirit. this position is also supported, of course, by the biblical reference to the miracle working power of the bones of elisha (2 kings 13:21). it is apposite to note that bulgakov’s notion that in the mortal body of the saint, the seed of incorruptibility is already present but only apparent to the eyes of faith (34), supports greene’s position that orthodox believers in their veneration of holy relics were more theologically astute than is generally recognized. for bulgakov, the mold and corruptibility of the relics is not really in them, but in us: “when we see and offer this spoilage, we are like those servants of antichrist, who in poking around in holy relics, brought to light nothing but the spoilage of their own souls” (35). just the same, greene may give the faithful a bit too much credit in his argument, for though they displayed considerable veneration for holy relics and their location even when not incorruptible, to some extent it is very likely that the emphasis on incorruptibility that led in some cases to the creation of “bodies” made of straw and rags, did not come only from the clergy, but, as bulgakov suggests, was a result of pressure from the faithful in their zeal for extolling the virtues of their local saints (4). the soviet regime’s misunderstanding of the reaction of ordinary believers and the orthodox church in general was clearly a major reason for the ultimate lack of success of the exhumations. they were ineffective and eventually abandoned for a more scientific approach, which sought to demonstrate that if miracles 174 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii are desired, they could be best sought through science. lenin’s preserved body is a prominent example, but ironically, especially in light of the exhumations, after the collapse of the soviet union there have been suggestions, most recently by the historian vladimir lavrov in an interview appearing in “argumenty i fakty evropy,” that the body exhibited in the mausoleum could be a doll (no.50, 1675, p. 50. 12-18 december 2012). the resurgence of the orthodox church in russia since 1991 and its renewed influence in russian society demand our attention and make excellent studies like greene’s essential to our understanding of religious practice in the late imperial period, religious repression in the early soviet period, as well as the role of religion in contemporary russia. david prestel michigan state university east lansing, michigan, usa 2016 folklorica editor's note folklorica 2015, vol. xix iii editor’s note 2015 this year’s volume of folklorica demonstrates the power and creativity of vernacular culture. it features articles that articulate the role folklore plays in our lives in contexts that span the personal and intimate to international mass media and social networks. they represent the range of contemporary approaches to data sources for our scholarship, from the internet to stories told in a family circle. but also demonstrate that folkloristics, a discipline often associated with the past, has an important voice in the analysis and understanding of political events and identity in the globalizing world today. elena boudovskaia brings us an analysis of a storytelling performance by a mother and son in a rusyn family. the role of storytelling by these two generations reinforces the importance of narrative as a factor in the creation and maintenance of identity within social and kin networks. the heart of our field, the story, has not lost its resonance, but remains vibrant and relevant today. it is especially rewarding to present material from the rusyn tradition, one that is rich and yet often overlooked in the context of the “larger” slavic groups that have dominated their homeland. olga lyanda-geller also focuses on story, but in this case turns to the interplay of literary, popular and oral sources in her analysis of “masha and the bear” in the russian tradition. her article represents the rewards of focusing on textual analysis, one of the hallmarks of folklore studies. it also reveals how intertwined orality, popular culture and literature have always been. the willingness to embrace intertextuality in this way represents a contemporary view of the folk tradition that is not bound by the insistence on “original” and “oral,” but takes a broader view of how we draw on a variety of sources to create our folk stories. the articles by natalia lysiuk and by larisa fialkova and maria yelenevskaia take us to the events on the maidan and in ukraine since 2014. lysiuk examines the vernacular expression of these cataclysmic happenings, in particular toward victor yanukovich, in kiev itself. she finds a richness of material that connects to past folk tradition, but also to popular culture and literary sources, like lyanda-geller. her work illustrates the innovation of the folk imagination in the context of political upheaval and protest. fialkova and yelenvskaia focus on the same events, but among russians and ukrainians in the israeli diaspora. their “fieldwork” was not on the ground in the maidan, but in the virtual space of the diaspora community, on social networks including facebook, blogs and discussion boards. their analysis of this “netlore” demonstrates the role that the digital age is having on folklore and its folklorica 2015, vol. xix iv dissemination, but also the persistence of the material in coping with dissent and political and personal upheaval. i wish to express my thanks to the external reviewers of these articles for their thoughtful and timely commentary; to the authors for their fine work and patience with revisions; and to my editorial assistant, rick spencer, for all his diligence and care with this year’s volume. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby, editor microsoft word folk2010e.doc spirit possession in a present-day russian village 27 folklorica 2010, vol. xv spirit possession in a present-day russian village olga khristoforova centre for typological and semiotic folklore studies russian state university for the humanities moscow, russia. abstract the article is based on the data collected in the period from 1999 to 2005 during the author’s field work among the old-believers of the urals and udmurtia (verkhokam’e historical region). the author examines beliefs in spirit possession which have existed in this region since at least the beginning of xviii century. local synonymous terms for spirit possession are ikota and poshibka. in the present-day verkhokam’e one can find not only а large corpus of folkloric memorates about ikota/poshibka, but also actual persons who consider themselves to be possessed by or to have ikota. other persons in their social environment share this diagnosis. the author analyzes a large number of folkloric memorates about ikota as well as interviews with possessed persons. she reviews the semantics, pragmatics, and social functions of ideas about spirit possession in the verkhokam’e. beliefs in the possession of a human being by evil spirits have been attested in russia since at least the eleventh century (pigin 1998; lavrov 2000; mel’nikova 2006). this phenomenon, also called klikushestvo, klikota, or ikota, was widespread and attracted public attention in the 19th century when it appeared in the writings of priests, journalists, historians, doctors, ethnographers, and folklorists (shteinberg 1870; drzhevetskii 1872; efimenko 1864, 1877; krainskii 1900; maksimov 1987[1859]; popov 1903; pryzhov 1996[1865]; beliaev 1905; osipov 1905; novombergskii 1906; golikova 1995). the rich data gathered at that time permit detailed research on this topic (vinogradova 2000; worobec 2001). researchers have not, however, investigated contemporary beliefs and practices related to the possession of a human by a malevolent being.(1) this is the case because the topic was taboo throughout most of the 20th century and because folkloric texts about the phenomenon disappeared or their distribution was substantially reduced.(2) still, there are places like the russian north, the urals, and siberia where the folklorica 2010, vol. xv 28 phenomenon of possession has survived until the present and tradition bearers use a stable set of semantic markers for its description. one of the regions where the phenomenon persists is the verkhokam’e [literally – the upper kama region, transl.] where the old believers–bespopovtsy of the pomor assent (soglasie) live in a compact community. in this article, i will review the semantics, pragmatics, and social functions of ideas about spirit possession in the verkhokam’e. the fieldwork data were gathered during 1999-2003, when i participated in a composite expedition organized by the archeography laboratory of m. v. lomonosov state university in moscow, as well as during 20042005, when i conducted fieldwork on my own. 1. historical references the verkhokam’e is a historical region near the source of the kama river; it lies to the southwest of the perm’ oblast’ and to the northeast of the udmurt territory. its area is 60 square kilometers and comprises the vereshchagin and sivin provinces of the perm’ oblast’ as well as the kezs province of the udmurt territory. the toponym “verkhokam’e” is a generic name which local people applied to this land in the first half of the 18th century. russian settlers appeared in this region in the 16th century and pushed out the aboriginal inhabitants, the udmurts and komi-permiaks. due to the church schism at the end of the 17th century, significant numbers of people from the central and northern provinces of russia migrated to the region. in the second third of the 18th century, the old believers from the vygovsk kinoviia (a commune-monastery) became dominant in the region, thus the verkhokam’e became a stronghold of the pomor division of bespopovstvo (the division of old believers who do not acknowledge a priesthood – trans.). both geographical and cultural isolation and the people’s longing for “the ancient ways of life” contributed to the persistence of archaic features in language and culture. a “secondary archaization” came in the second half of the 19th century when local old believers split into two confessions, the deminskoe and maksimovskoe, because of differences of opinion among church elders and mutual accusations of lack of piety. missionary activities in the verkhokam’e by the orthodox church began in the first half of the 19th century. the belokrinitskaia (popovskaia [meaning the division which does have a clergy – trans.]) church of the old believers began its missionary work in the middle of century. newcomers increased in number at the end of the 19th and at the spirit possession in a present-day russian village 29 folklorica 2010, vol. xv beginning of the 20th centuries when the trans-siberian railway was built through the region. today, the verkhokam’e is both a multiethnic and multiconfessional region: russians and udmurts, orthodox and old believers of various confessions including popovtsy, belokrinitskie bespopovtsy, the pomors, chasovennye, and stranniki live there side by side.(3) ideas about possession, or poshibka, called ikota in the vernacular, are preserved mainly by the aboriginal population, i.e., the pomor old believers. we refer to this group as aboriginals because the very first aboriginal population of the komi-permiaks was either assimilated or pushed out of the verkhokam’e about a century ago. ideas about possession do not exist in isolation but constitute part of a complex system, which includes elements of material culture (exterior construction and interior design of houses, clothing, and cuisine); norms of social interaction (a custom of “assistance [pomoch’]”; codes of everyday and festive behavior); rituals and beliefs related to various beings like sorcerers, the domovoi (a house spirit), or leshii (a forest spirit); a custom of giving a river or bathhouse as a “gift,” and other elements (nikitina 1993; smilianskaia 1998; chagin 1998). this system bears some very archaic traits due to the conservatism of the old believers and their intentional isolation from the outer, “antichrist,” world. 2. terminology in the verkhokam’e, there are three synonymous words used to define possession. these same words are used for the being that causes possession. these are bol’/bolest’, poshibka, and ikota. “bol’/bolest’” is a generic term as it basically means ‘illness’, and it is used to define other illnesses, especially serious ones like typhus. the two other words require further explanation. the words ikota and poshibka are derived from their corresponding verbs. the verb ikat’, as used in the verkhokam’e and in the russian north in general, refers to the actions of a sick person. people consider fits of involuntary hiccupping to be a symptom of possession. the dialectal verb ikat’ also means the same as klikat’, namely “to shriek, exclaim” (merkulova 1988: 311). the second verb, poshibat’, refers to actions by a sorcerer that are used to cast a spell: poshibat’, poshibit’ (somebody) – to beat down, hit, overpower, strike (dal’ 1882 3: 373). folklorica 2010, vol. xv 30 poshibat’ – to mar, disfigure, mutilate (arkhangel’sk region), to knock down, destroy, overpower (olonetsk, smolensk, moscow, and vladimir regions and ff.); poshibennyi – 1) dejected, injured; 2) emaciated, puny, weak (iaroslavl’ region); poshibalka – an object that can be tossed at someone or something (regions of pskov, tver’, tambov) (filin 1977 31: 31-32). the word poshibka has three homonymous meanings: 1) a mistake (onega region), 2a) a fight, skirmish, 2b) a habit (povadka) (olonetsk region); 3a) an infectious disease of domestic animals (regions of perm’ and tobol’sk), 3b) an illness sent or a spell cast by a sorcerer (perm’ region) (filin 1977 31: 32). the last meaning, the most recent in origin and probably a euphemistic one, is attested in the perm’ region only. it is not mentioned in dialect dictionaries of the russian language applying to any other region. the word ikota has two etymologically related meanings. one is hiccups and this is a meaning which is widespread. the other refers to a nervous illness and this meaning is found in dialects only. both meanings are given by vladimir dal’, though he gives a more detailed description of the latter: ikota, ikotka – is a disease or a state of a person who hiccups. in the north, especially in perm’, it is a local, mostly female illness, which is attributed to a spell (porcha, napusk). an afflicted female is then called klikusha, ikotnaia, or ikotnitsa. the disease comes in fits like epileptic ones, accompanied with writhing – especially if [a sick person is] irritated. an ikotnik is a person afflicted by this disease. this word can also refer to a sorcerer who is said to pin or inflict ikota on women (dal’ 1882 2: 40). contemporary dialectical dictionaries give a more detailed definition: ikota a nervous histrionic disease that occurs mainly in females; it manifests itself in the convulsive fits during which sick persons yell and shriek: klikushestvo. the idiom: ikota speaks (ikota govorit) applies to a fit of a nervous histrionic disease; e.g. ikoty-chatter-boxes (ikotygovorukhi) (arkhangel’sk region). to speak with ikota (ikotoi govorit’) means to suffer from a fit of a nervous histrionic disease. ikota-chatterbox (ikota-govorukha) refers to a less intense nervous histrionic disease which manifests itself in the sick person as fits of speaking rather than shrieking; such a person is nevertheless unable to respond to questions (arkhangel’sk region). mute ikota (ikota nemaia) is a histrionic nervous disease characterized by loss of ability to speak, the afflicted person spirit possession in a present-day russian village 31 folklorica 2010, vol. xv producing only inarticulate, abrupt shrieks (arkhangel’sk region). deadly ikota (ikota smertnaia) is a histrionic nervous disease which leads to the afflicted person dying during a fit (arkhangel’sk region). to inflict ikota (napustit’, nasadit’, posadit’ ikotu) means to cause a nervous, histrionic disease by means of black magic or the evil eye. the second definition of ikota is that it is an evil spirit that, according to folk belief, gets inside a human and causes a nervous disease, namely klikushestvo. another definition labels it as a person suffering from klikushestvo, a person possessed by an evil spirit. the final definition states that ikota means being racked by whims of a morbid nature (filin 1977 12: 181). according to v. a. merkulova, the word ikota in the meaning of an illness or a histrionic fit appeared in the xv-xvii centuries in the russian north and was based on a specific local meaning of the verb ikat’. in this context ikat’ was synonymous with the verbs krichat’, svat’ and meant to scream or to call. it was formed on the same semantic model which produced the word klikota (meaning histrionic fit) from klikat’ (1988: 311). according to other scholars, the name ikota derived from the exhausting, nervous hiccupping that typically accompanied a fit (klementovskii 1860: 213, maksimov 1987 2: 111, efimenko 1877: 200; martynov 1905: 220). the word poshibka in the euphemistic meaning of magical spoiling is semantically equivalent to the word ikota in dialectic meanings 1 and 2 above (filin 1977 12:181). in the text i will use the term poshibka for two reasons: first, this word is specific to the verkhokam’e region where the materials used for this article were collected; second, this term is less fluid and refers primarily to an evil spirit that gets inside a human and causes a nervous disease. тhis supernatural being is the primary concern of this article. 3. anthropological interpretations of ikota/poshibka. in contemporary anthropology, the physiological basis of ikota is generally considered to be the startle reflex, a mild form of epilepsy which is a physiological reaction to extreme fright. the reflex manifests itself in outbursts of screaming, convulsions, grimacing, heightened suggestibility and echopraxis and echolalia (the repetition or mimicking of the gestures or words of others). sometimes corpopraxis and corpolalia (the use of indecent gestures and words) also occur. in addition to ikota, the startle reflex is known under the following names: folklorica 2010, vol. xv 32 latah in malaysia, miriachenie in siberia (from the verb miriachit’), pibloktok among the eskimo, and arctic hysteria (simons and hughes 1985: 484, 486). the terms klikushestvo and poshibka are not used for this phenomenon. the condition most like north russian ikota is malaysian latah. this is a disease attested in malaysia and indonesia which affects women, primarily elderly ones who have experienced significant stress. the symptoms of latah are increased excitability, involuntary gestures and crude and obscene exclamations in response to irritants such as a loud sound or a sudden movement. women suffering from latah are an object of interest in the community. their condition is a subject of discussion and youngsters entertain themselves by engaging in behaviours which prompt their fits. the difference between the two conditions is a significant one, however. latah, unlike ikota, is not seen as something which is acquired. thus it is not believed to be caused by magic and cannot be exorcized. the illness does not grant the ability to foretell the future or locate lost objects. furthermore, acquired as opposed to spontaneous illnesses in southeast asia and other regions have physiological symptoms that are markedly different from ikota. (belo 1960; prince 1968; crapanzano 1977; kleinman 1980; danforth 1989; goodman 1996; littlewood 2000; lewis 2003). efforts to liken ikota to turette’s syndrome with its tick-like hyperkinesis which can include impulsive echolalia and coprolalia, have been unsuccessful. turette’s syndrome, unlike ikota, is considered to be an organic, pathological condition of the brain, is found primarily in males, and shows no tendencies to spread in an epidemic-like fashion (blaker and crook, 1995: 205) ikota is sometimes attributed to ergotism, poisoning by mold spores which grow on rye and are common in rainy, cold years (matossian 1989). this explanation is based on concepts popular in the 1970s and 80s which attributed mass epidemics and consequent witch hunts in europe and america to natural causes such as syphilis, calcium deficiency, plant poisoning, all of which could have caused seizures and hallucinations. these might, in turn have led to accusations or confessions of witchcraft (andreski 1989; mappen 1980; harner 1973; camporesi 1989). worobec, who, in a recent monograph on klikushestvo, examines ergotism and calcium deficiency as possible causes, rejects these explanations in favor of a socio-cultural interpretation of this phenomenon (worobec 2001: 192, 195-199)(4). spirit possession in a present-day russian village 33 folklorica 2010, vol. xv 4. the semantics of the poshibka concept during six years of fieldwork, i gathered a large corpus of folkloric texts about poshibka. the texts are mostly bylichki, meaning memorates or stories of personal experience and direct answers to the interviewer’s questions about cultural facts and beliefs. is it doubtful that the last category of expression would exist without prompting by the researcher. fabulates, or stories about the experiences of others seldom occur, and are probably adaptations of written literature, such as published fairytales retold in legend form. the main themes of the memorates include the creation or dispatching of a poshibka by a sorcerer; its implantation into a human; its behavior inside a human, and its expulsion from its human host. although all respondents agreed that a poshibka is nothing other than a demon (devil, unclean spirit, “hellish force”), its appearance, name, and behavior depended on the plot of the narrative. 5. origin and appearance 5.1 the origin of a poshibka a sorcerer/witch creates a poshibka by growing it in a cellar or in a birch-bark vessel (tuesok). in this case, the supernatural being appears as a worm, spider, or an amphibian like a frog. the witch or sorcerer can create a poshibka by whispering over straw or matches. a poshibka in this case would have the appearance of a straw or match. another means of creating a poshibka is by cutting a human figure out of paper. a poshibki then looks like drawn human figures or “dolls.” 5.1.1 broadcasting or spreading the poshibka a sorcerer/witch spreads a poshibka by sending it on the wind. in this case a poshibka appears as a straw or an insect like a fly, a mosquito, or a midge. it can also look like a drawn human figure of unspecified appearance. the witch or sorcerer can place the poshibka under a tree or next to a well or a river. it can be put by the gates or fence of a farmstead. in neither case is the appearance of a poshibka specified. finally, a poshibka, also of unspecified appearance, can be transmitted by bodily contact. examples: folklorica 2010, vol. xv 34 фотинька, пашкина мы ее звали всё. фотинька пашкина… и-от, стали хоронить, у её в подполье нашли туесок, ну бурачок, туесок, берестяный такой, там нашли у её, туесок стоит, это, говорит, открыли – там полно, одни мизгири это всё там у ёй гадость всякая. вот, этот мизгирёк, значит, он, на кого она придумала посадить, и всё [we called her pashkina, fotin’ka.fotin’ka pashkina… and when we were burying her, we found a birch-bark vessel (tuesok) in her cellar; well, a vessel made of a birch bark stood there, and, they say, they opened it and it was full of spiders (mizgiri). and she had all sorts of muck there. so this spider – she was planning on planting it on someone, and that’s it.] (е.е.n., female, born in 1924; siv; 2002, recorded by м. akhmetova and a. koz’min). так один старичок так говорил: я, говорит, нарисую куклы, маленькие куклочки. они, говорит, у меня, рисунки, прямо с бумаги это, выходят, играют-играют на этой бумаге, а потом, значит, я их посылаю – дверь открою, посылаю, и они у меня улетают, и летят, куда он пошлет… или может даже взять из соломинки куклу, послать, и она действует, эта соломинка [here’s what one old man said: i draw dolls, little dolls. my drawings come out of the paper and play on the paper; and then i send them out: i open the door, send them out, and they fly away. they fly where he would send them… or he can even take a piece of straw and send it out, and this straw has its effect] [e.s.т., male, born in 1953; siv.; 2005, recorded by m. guseva, n. sarafanova, and o. khristoforova). вот я пример приведу. был у нас коновал… его привозил тут сосед, кастрировать жеребенка… ну и вот подпоил его, когда уж это... подпоил его, он пьяненькой, тожно видно охота стало ему это, показать фокус-от (смеется)... ехали оне в кошевке… вот он ему говорит: “тебе, говорит, охота фокус увидеть? ну, александр васильевич, охота тебе фокус увидеть? я, говорит, тебе покажу.” “ну-к, покажи, говорит.” он, значить, из-под себя взял там соломинку, этот вертинар-от... счас вертинары, а раньше не вертинары назывались... взял из-под себя соломинку, чё-то пошептал на её, и отпустил по ветру! по снегу мальчик маленькой побежал, дак токо вьет, вьет за ём, маленькой парнишко. вот он налетит, парнишко, на тебя, на меня, и вот и... вот те и пошибка (смеется). иссл.: и как она залетает, как соломинка? да не догадашься вoвсё! [i will give you an example. we had a farrier… a neighour brought him over to castrate a foal… and he made him [the farrier] drunk afterwards… made him drunk, so he was drunk, and he decided to show a magic trick (the informant laughs)… they were riding in a sledge (koshevka)… he [the farrier] said: “would you like to see a trick? well, aleksandr vasil’evich, would you like to see a trick? i will show you.” “well then, show me” he answered. he took a straw from under where he was sitting, this veterinarian… they are called veterinarians now, but back then they were not called veterinarians… took a straw from under where he was sitting, spirit possession in a present-day russian village 35 folklorica 2010, vol. xv whispered something over it, and let it go in the wind! a little boy [suddenly appeared] running after him in the snow, and was just running and running after him, that little boy. if that little boy ran into you or me – then you would have a poshibka (the informant laughs). researcher: and how does it get inside? as a straw? informant: you will never guess!] (n.к.а, female, born in 1919; siv.; june 2000] 5.2. how a poshibka enters the body a poshibka can fly in through the mouth or nose. in this case a poshibka can have the appearance of an insect (fly, mosquito, midge), or a straw, or speck of dust. the poshibka can enter through other bodily orifices like the ear or eye, or through anal or vaginal openings. in this case a poshibka looks like an insect or is invisible. the poshibka can be imbibed in a drink, in which case it looks like a speck of dust or is invisible.(5) a poshibka ingested with a meal is invisible. examples: researcher: and how does it get inside? informant: может комариком залететь, мухой, ну, поперхнулся человек, рот открыл, там муха залетела, особенно без молитвы если вышел утром из дому… рот открыл – раз, бывало ведь, что комар залетит в рот, муха залетит в рот, ладно, если простая муха, так ещё и выплюнешь, а ту уже не выплюнешь. она уже попала внутрь. и там растёт [it can fly in as a mosquito or fly; a person chokes, opens [his or her] mouth, and the fly gets in; especially if [the person] left the house in the morning without saying a prayer… [he or she] opens their mouth… – and there you go. sometimes it happens that a mosquito or fly gets into your mouth; well, if it’s a normal fly – it’s okay, you just spit it out, but you won’t be able to spit out that one (meaning the poshibka fly). it’s gotten inside and it grows there] (z.a.g., female, 63 years old; siv.; 2002, recorded by m. akhmetova and a. koz’min). одна женщина съела ягодку с черемухи. такая хорошая сделалась, черная ягодка, крупная. и взяла ее и съела. и сразу она услышала, у ей закололо. это боль была. потом она через некоторое время стала икать, потом стала говорить, и сказала: “ты вот ягодку съела с черемухи, вот я и была, в тебя и залезла”, – говорит. сказала. [a woman ate a bird-cherry. it was such a nice black and big cherry. and she took it and ate it. and she immediately felt pain somewhere inside. that was a poshibka. then, after some time, she started hiccupping, and then it started speaking, and it said: “you ate the bird-cherry, and that was me, and i got inside you.” that’s what it said] (v.f.n., female, born in 1922; ver.; 1999, recorded by i. kulikova and o. khristoforova). folklorica 2010, vol. xv 36 5.3 symptoms of a poshibka inside the body when a poshibka is inside the body, it causes chest pains; stomachache, headache, limb pain and so on. when it “walks” inside the body it feels like a ball of yarn or a lump. a poshibka can cause fits of hiccupping or yawning. it can prevent people from working, praying, eating certain foods like onions, black radishes, or fish. it can also make a person sleepy or compel a person to eat and drink “what it [the poshibka] needs.” it provokes fainting or nervous fits as a response to some situations such as the mention of unpleasant topics or the speaking of unpleasant words. the same reaction can occur in response to unpleasant actions by others of when someone requests fortune-telling. fainting or nervous fits can occur as a reaction to sudden or threatening situations. a poshibka can talk and tell fortunes. in this case, its appearance is not specified. 5.3.1 diagnosing a poshibka. a poshibka can be detected by a healer or a doctor during a medical exam. it can then appear as a frog or lizard, or, if it is “in the blood,” “everywhere,” it can be invisible. the existence of one poshibka can be revealed by another poshibka. it then looks like a human being of indeterminate appearance. examples: researcher: она [пошибка] вам не мешат? [does it [poshibka] bother you?] informant: она мешала мне шибко и счас мешат хорошо! [it bothered me very much, and it is bothering me quite a lot now!] researcher: а чем? [how exactly?] informant: сном мешат. выпить не дает – ведь как, надо бражку все равно попить. тоже вот, надо утром, надо вот немножко помолиться – всё, кашель, то в горло лезет, лапочкой там царапатся. то сон напустит, то мысли неподобныё). [it makes me sleepy. does not let me drink and you kind of need to drink home brew. also, it is necessary to pray a little bit in the morning – but no, (it makes me) cough, it gets into my throat, scratches there with its paw. or it puts me to sleep, or causes inappropriate thoughts (е.а.ch., female, born in 1932; siv.; 2003; recorded by n. litvina and o. khristoforova). говорящая тоже была. а тут стали исповедь читать – не дает читать. маленько читат-читат – вот не станет давать читать. вот это... захватит горло, не может говорить. а матрена васильевна-то, вот она говорит – spirit possession in a present-day russian village 37 folklorica 2010, vol. xv кукушкин дала ему имя – “кукушкин, дай, болтушке-то продышаться надо, почитать надо, давай!” отпустит! [it was a speaking one [poshibka]. they started the confession – and it wouldn’t let [them]. [someone] would read for a little while – and it would not let them read [further]. it’s as though… it gripped someone by the throat and [they] couldn’t talk. and matrena vasil’evna, who called him [the poshibka] kukushkin, said: “kukushkin, come on, a chatterer needs to recover her breath, and she needs to read, come on!” and then he would loosen his grip! (е.а.ch., female, born in 1932; siv.; may 2000; recorded by n. litvina and o. khristoforova). у сестры у меня была свекровка, у ей пошибка-то посаженна была, шибко уж вино любила пить. дак у-у-у она, начнет ругаться да матькаться дак... “ты, хозяюшка, сама дак пьеш вино, меня дак не поишь, задавлю тебя, задавлю и всё!” (смеется). [my sister had a mother-in-law, who had a poshibka, and she liked to drink wine a lot. and she [the poshibka] used to start cursing and swearing… “you, hostess, drink wine yourself, and do not offer me anything; i will strangle you, strangle you!” (the informant laughs)] (n.k.а, female, born in 1919; siv.; june 2000). а вот ведь она начнет... луку нельзя мне вовсе есть, вовсе не дает. а вот так охота стало, взяла сёдни постряпала. 12 пирогов. один пирог съела, ну она у меня везде заходила-заходила. заходила везде, всё те есть-то, всё. я еще… съела, ну, она мне тогда руки-ноги отняла, и все... ходить не могу и сидеть не могу [and it [the poshibka] would start…i cannot eat onions at all; it would not let me at all. and one day i had a craving, and i cooked twelve pies. i ate one pie, and she [the poshibka] started moving inside, up and down. and once she started moving, it was like [a sign] to stop eating [that food]. i ate… again, and then she [the poshibka] deprived [me of my ability to move] my hands and legs, and that’s it. i can neither sit nor walk (s.f.v., female, born in 1907; ver.; 1999). а которые-то щуку не любят есть, рыбу. у щуки-то крест есть в голове, а она не любит это, с крестом щуку есть. [and some [poshibkas] do not like it when you eat pike. a pike has a cross on its head, and they [the poshibkas] do not like that – eating a pike with a cross (v.f.n., female, born in 1922; ver.; 1999; recorded by i. kulikova and o. khristoforova). researcher: можно ли выгнать пошибку? [and can you chase a poshibka out?] respondent: нет. а я тожно скоко раз ездила, одумалася дак. дескать, поздно, у тебя уже она в крови, эта пошибка. у тебя уже стала в крови, и ее не выгнать, ты умрешь [no. i went many times [to the specialists]; [and then] changed my mind. it is too late, [they said], she [the poshibka] is already in your blood; it is impossible to chase her out, [because] you will die] (а.а.p., female, born in 1927; ver.; june 2000). folklorica 2010, vol. xv 38 5.4 how a poshibka exits the human body a poshibka can be expelled from the body by a sorcerer and by means of a healing ritual. it can be delivered like a child, in which case, it looks like a fish, a piece of meat, or something weird like a rolling-pin, with heads on both sides. it can “have eyes all over” or look like something “silvery.” it can exit through the mouth as a frog; frog or fish caviar, or a crow. it can be cut out during a surgery. in this case its appearance is not clear. a poshibka can be destroyed by burning it in a stove with the oven door shut. the “resurrection [voskresnaia]” prayer must be recited while this is being done. a poshibka exits the body before a person dies. its appearance in such cases is not specified.(6) examples: а вот отец сказывал у меня, кто-то вот тут лечил. их выгоняли в бане и закрывали в туесок. она такая как будто серебристая. и в этой бане ее обмывают и с воскрёсной молитвой так и сжигали ее тут. [my father told me that someone here used to heal [people from the poshibka]. [the poshibkas] were chased out in a bath-house and captured inside a birch-bark vessel (tuesok). she [the poshibka] is sort of silvery. and she is washed and burnt in that bath-house while [someone] recites the resurrection prayer] (p.m.m., female, born in 1921; ver.; june 2000). вот у нас была матрена понифентовна, у ей, видимо, тоже была болезнь. она говорит, лечилася какими-то способами. и она ее родила. родила, говорит, кусочек мяса. взяла его, говорит, завернула в платочек, в тряпочку белую, и положила за печку. утром встала, посмотрела: там ничего нету, только кровяное место. она снова ушла. надо ее сразу было сжечь с воскрёсной молитвой или с какой-то молитвой, чтобы у нее она не была, а она ее оставила. значит, с пошибкой умерла [then there was matrena ponifentovna and she, probably, also had the illness [bolezn’]. she said that she tried to heal herself in various ways. and she gave birth to it. she said she gave birth to a piece of meat. she took it, wrapped it in a handkerchief, a white cloth, and put it behind the stove. in the morning, she got up and looked but there was nothing there, just a bloody spot. [the poshibka] had escaped. she should have burned it immediately, while reciting a resurrection prayer, or some other prayer so that [the poshibka] would leave her. as a result she died with the poshibka] (v.f.n., female, born in 1922; ver.; 1999; recorded by i. kulikova and o. khristoforova). у тетки минихи была пошибка тожо, а полит ее лечил, она, говорит, вылетела, как ворона, захлопала, захлопала за печкой… пошибка. как ворона, говорит, вылетела. это тетка миниха рассказывала сама. я, spirit possession in a present-day russian village 39 folklorica 2010, vol. xv говорит, заухала: “полит, полит, иди-ко сюды, иди-ко сюды!” а он пришел, говорит: “дак зачем ты огаркала-то, не надо было огаркать-то!” а потом она обратно зашла. он ей только заглушил, а не мог выгнать больше [aunt minikha also had a poshibka, and polit cured her; she said she [the poshibka] flew out [of her] as a crow, and flapped and flapped [its wings] behind the stove… it was the poshibka. she flew out as a crow, she said. aunt minikha told me this herself. she said that she moaned: “polit, polit, come here, come here!” and he came and said: “why did you shout; you should not have shouted!” and she [the poshibka] entered [her] again. he only muted it (or quieted it down), but could not exorcize it (t.i.m., female, born in 1932; siv.; june 2000; recorded by e. lopatina and o. khristoforova). вот, вырезают в больницах эти, киста называется. она всяка бывает, разная, вот, может слыхали? и с глазами, и волосата, там страшно, страшно, всякие виды, всякие виды, человеческого образа и всяко-всяко бывает. вырезают. дак вот я считаю, что это и есть, она и есть, пошибка [[they] remove it [surgically] in the hospital, what they call a cyst. it can be of various kinds, different kinds; maybe you’ve heard about it? [it can have] eyes, hair; it is terrible, terrible, all kinds of appearances, [it can have] a human appearance, and comes in all kinds of different forms. [they] remove it. and i think that this [cyst] is it; it is a poshibka (d.o.k., female, born in 1946; siv.; 2002; recorded by m. akhmetova and a. koz’min). у кого-то тоже была пошибка. лечили врачи, пытались даже узнать чтото, ей предложили операцию, женщине. в перми. какой-то профессор за это будто взялся. ну и оказалось, что разрезали, а ничего не нашли. а потом что-то там всё-таки вынули, в спиртовый раствор, там, положили, в это, всё. а потом у профессора изо рта она кричит. да матом ругается. “ах ты, такой-сякой, мать-мать! хотел меня угробить, да я тебя вперёд упеку!” и вот, что-то, видимо, во время операции, что ль, она залетела [someone also had a poshibka. doctors tried to cure it, tried to find something out about it and suggested that the lady have surgery. [it happened] in perm’. some professor, a medical luminary, decided to operate. and it turned out that, when they opened her up, there was nothing inside. but then they took something out after all and put it in formaldehyde. and then she [a poshibka] started shrieking out of the professor’s mouth. and she was using foul language: “you so-and-so, damn it! [you] tried to kill me, but i will finish you first!” something like, it seems that it entered him during the surgery] (r.a.g., 74 years old; siv.; 2002; recorded by m. akhmetova and a. koz’min). at the same time, the above-mentioned motifs are not isolated and can be easily contaminated by others. for example: folklorica 2010, vol. xv 40 хм! колдуны-те черномазию-ту читают-читают, мальчиков-девочек нас наделают, и вот мы оживём, выпустят нас 40 штук, ох, мы и вертúмся, бегам, бегам, бегам, бегам, веселимся, на воздухе-то. а потом в кого надо, в того залезем. или комаром, или воздухом, или мухой, как могут. [hm! the sorcerers read various black magic books and create us, girls and boys; and we become alive; [they] let us go, about 40 of us; and we spin around, and run, run, run, and run and have a jolly time out in the fresh air. and then we enter those whom we are supposed to (possess). [we enter in the form of] a mosquito, air, or a fly; in all possible ways (е.а.ch., born in 1932; siv., june 2000). researcher: don’t poshibkas die? informant: а они чё, бестелесные дак... адская сила [why would they; they have no bodies, therefore… [they are] the power of hell]. researcher: yet they have some physical appearance when they can be exorcized. informant: ну. а их рожают, говорят, как вот пирожник, вон тесто скёшь, и все в глазах кругом. вот рожала женщина, я слышала. родит как ребенка, токо небольшая, как в глазах, говорит, вся. в глазах [well. they are delivered, they say, like a rolling-pin (pirozhnik) when you prepare dough, and there are eyes all over it. i heard that one woman gave birth. it was born like a baby but tiny and [there were] eyes all over it. covered all over with eyes (е.а.ch., born in 1932; siv.; may 2000; recorded by n. litvina and o. khristoforova). all of the above indicates a poshibka has no one specific appearance: essentially it is amorphous, unclear, or it looks like a chthonic animal or an insect. the crow can also be added to this list. the tradition bearers see no contradictions here, since shape-shifting is characteristic of evil spirits. ideas about the appearance of the poshibka, like beliefs in supernatural beings in general, have two different sources. the first is found in christian books like the holy scriptures and orthodox hagiographies where demons are mentioned often but the topoi of their appearance are not articulated. the second source is local mythology, which is, probably, finno-ugric, komi, and komi-permiak in origin. this mythology describes the poshibka in very concrete and detailed terms. another characteristic of local belief is that the poshibka is not seen as purely negative. the question about the source of specifically russian ideas about possession cannot be answered using the material presented here. it is only possible to state that ethnographic data show that similar beliefs are not attested among the south or west slavs or among the ukrainians and belarusans. only if we include all cases of personifications of disease as malicious agents getting inside humans and eating them from inside can we speak of analogous possession beliefs among other slavs. spirit possession in a present-day russian village 41 folklorica 2010, vol. xv klikushestvo a phenomenon widespread among the slavs [murdock 1980: 49; vinogradova 2000: 289-301] is analogous to poshibka. but klikushestvo is a phenomenon separate from other illnesses and one that was heavily influenced by christianity and holy scripture. at the same time, klikushestvo and poshibka are semantically different concepts; they are two independent socio-cultural phenomena; they should be viewed as two “dialects of possession.” poshibka is unique because it likely originated in komi mythology. what points to the possible genesis of the poshibka from komi belief is the similarity between many motifs found in memorates about the poshibka and the features the komi-permiak being called the sheva. the word ‘sheva’ comes from the pra-permian *šo-u-a meaning “something with a voice, sound, message” < šo “voice, sound”, komi-zyrian “shy” meaning “sound”, shyavny – “to sound, produce sounds, speak, to speak up” [napol’skikh 1999: 45-48]. the word “sheva” has two meanings: 1) a spirit that gets inside a human disguised as a lizard, winged insect, worm, larva, hair, speck, or a knot on a thread and causes various pathological reactions; 2) the pathological state itself. the komi people thought that the masters of the sheva were sorcerers who acquired the sheva at the same time as they acquired their knowledge of sorcery. there was also a belief that sorcerers created the sheva from twigs that had come loose from a stove broom, from ashes, from sweepings, or from parts of a lizard dried and ground into a powder. the sheva that was prepared in this fashion was kept in a birch bark basket (kuzovok), in a cellar (podpol’e) or in a barn. the masters of the sheva had to feed it meat and milk every night and to keep it busy, eventually giving it away secretly to other people. it was thought that it was easier to give the sheva to those who violated behavioral norms. for this reason sorcerers put the sheva into a drink or a meal in the hope that a person would forget to make the sign of the cross before eating. they were also said to leave the sheva on the house porch, on the stairs of a barn, at a crossroads, on fence poles, or on an uneven road, that is, in such places where people were likely to curse as the result of stumbling or tripping, or overturning a wagon. people also thought that a sheva in the form of a lizard could creep inside a person sleeping on the ground. it was believed that once the sheva got inside a person’s body, whether by means of a meal, a drink, or through the air, it moved around, gnawed on the tastiest tissues and ultimately became covered with hair. there are cases when a person perceived the sheva as a crow or cock and, during fits, would imitate that bird’s behavior. many chronic folklorica 2010, vol. xv 42 diseases accompanied by suffocation, chest pains, stomachache, or headache were thought to be caused by a sheva. yet the main symptom of the sheva was considered to be periodic histrionic fits, actions and speech that had not been typical of the person prior to affliction; possession, thus, appeared as a split in the individual’s consciousness. those who witnessed sheva fits described how an absolutely healthy woman would suddenly get headaches, lose her appetite, and how some trifling matter would cause her to have the epileptic-like seizures. after the fit, the woman would become euphoric and start prophesying in a curt and shrill voice, speaking on behalf of the sheva inside her. those who were present could ask questions and find out the name of the sheva’s master, as well as answers to their own or their relatives’ questions about the future and about missing objects and animals. the komi-zyrians believed that the speaking sheva originated from a lizard’s head unless a sorcerer, to protect his identity, tied the sheva’s tongue with a horse hair. it was possible to provoke a sheva by an unpleasant scent, with sour or bitter food, by showing the afflicted person a worm, burbot, or something rotten. it was possible to call forth the sheva by gaining its favour with nice conversations, compliments, and promises to satisfy all the sheva’s whims. during world war ii, villagers used the abilities of the possessed to foresee the future. thus they purposefully provoked a fit in a woman in order to get information from a spirit inside her about the fate of the soldiers who had stopped writing home. according to the folk point of view, the sheva stayed inside a person until his or her death, and then it would get inside another person. at the same time, people believed that the most powerful sorcerers were able to exorcize and kill a sheva with the help of special magic rituals and herbs. although the sheva could not be hurt by a knife, it could be sewn inside a small leather sack and cast into a fire where it would burn up, making loud crackling noises (mifologiia 1999: 382-382; sidorov 1997: 106138). despite the similarity of these beliefs to the mythology of the verkhokam’e, the nature of the latter is syncretic, combining indigenous motifs with christian ones. even so, the mythological syncretism of the old believers is not homogeneous: at one extreme, among secular people (mirskiie),(7) we encounter poshibka narratives that have nothing to do with the christian worldview and lack any hint of an evangelical approach to the phenomenon. quoting an informant: “а кто её знат, кто там” [nobody knows what it is]). at the opposite extreme, there are spirit possession in a present-day russian village 43 folklorica 2010, vol. xv pronouncements, especially by sobornye (church women), which clearly link the poshibka to ideas found in the holy scriptures: researcher: and where does a poshibka come from? informant: не знаю, дескать вроде бес там сидит. в человеке. ну, это в писании есть, что беси в человеке сидят… даже господь по земле когда ходил, тогда тоже бесноватые были. господь из одной выгнал семь бесoв. книги надо читать, будешь всё знать [i do not know, it is kind of a demon sitting there. inside a person. according to the scriptures, the demons are inside a human… even when jesus lived on earth, there were possessed people back in those times. jesus cast out seven demons from one [woman]. you should read the books, and then you will know everything] (а.к.b., born in 1921; ver.; june 2000). а в евангелии-то сказано ведь – вот из одного человека выгонят пошибки-те, они летают-летают-летают, она как, человека-то не мучит, дак она… он пуще даже молится, все, чисто, она ходит, летат-летат, невидимо оне дак, а потом не найдет в кого полизти – обратно воротится и уже семь бесов с собой ведет. на человека-то пущено. в евангелии сказано.(8) [it is told in the gospel how the poshibkas are cast out from a man; they fly, fly, and fly; if she [the poshibka] does not torture a man then she… he [a man] even prays more, and she walks, flies and flies invisible, and then, if she can’t find anyone to get inside, and she then returns with seven more demons. they are set loose on a man. this is as it is told in the gospel] (е.а.ch., female, born in 1932; siv.; 2003; recorded by n. litvina and o. khristoforova). therefore, we can conclude that the poshibka concept itself and the detailed semantics of its character come from komi mythology. only the image of a lizard has been lost in the new cultural setting. in the old believers’ context, poshibka ideas have been made consistent with christian literature and with the social-psychological functions that verkhokam’e culture requires. 6. name of the poshibka if a poshibka is a speaking one then it usually has a name and sometimes even a patronymic; and it is believed that the spirit chooses its own name. as a rule, the name is of a masculine gender. attested ones include: vasilii ivanovich, fedor ivanovich, semen ivanovich, vas’ka, ierma (a diminutive from eremei). female names occur as well and the ones attested here include: marina nikolaevna, sima, aksin’ia, etc.: researcher: and who names [a poshibka]? folklorica 2010, vol. xv 44 poshibka: василий иванович, да! [vasilii ivanovich, yes!] researcher: and who gave it this name? female informant: сама, сам! [it itself!] poshibka: василий иванович я! [my name is vasilii ivanovich!] female informant: это не я назвала, она сама называт [i did not give it this name, she [the poshibka] named herself] (u.f.f., female, born in 1931; ver,; 2002; recorded by v. kostyrko, a. rafaeva, and o. khristoforova). researcher: how did you find out his [the poshibka’s] name? poshibka: да вот... [well…] informant: сказыват он [he speaks]. poshibka: да федор иванович я, федор иванович. я федор иванович...[ i am fedor ivanovich, fedor ivanovich. i am fedor ivanovich…] informant: вот видишь, говорит [you see, [he] speaks] (m.i.v., female, born in 1938; siv.; june 2000; recorded by e. lopatina and o. khristoforova). у нас там в деревне была, я еще в ребятах была, старуха... не старуха, она женщина такая могутная была… вот какая-то пошибка у нее стала. «я, – говорит, – семен иванович, вот в чумашке рос [when i was still a child, there was an old woman in my village… not really an old women, she was very robust… and she got a poshibka. i, it said, am semen ivanovich; i grew up in a birch-bark vessel (chumashka) (i.k.g., female, born in 1926; ver.; 1999). the fact that a poshibka has a name prompts some researchers to connect this supernatural being to the so-called zalozhnye (unquiet) dead, i.e. people who died a “bad” death or a death that was “not their own.” such people must live out the rest of their allotted time on earth and their spirits try to assume a bodily form (vinogradova 2000: 298-301). this hypothesis is simple and elegant. it explains why the poshibka names itself and it accounts for the strange monologues that the poshibka is often said to deliver. unfortunately, this explanation is impossible from the point of view of old believer faith and is does not fit with the christian view of the afterlife. for old believers, spirits that get inside humans as well as the “walking dead” (often encountered in verkhokam’e bylichki [memorates]) are nothing other than evil forces. in the case of the walking dead, they are evil spirits who assume the appearance of the dead. evil spirit beliefs are likely of more recent origin since the sheva is connected to neither the cult of the dead nor the afterlife in the pagan mythology of the komi. it appears that the komi perceive the sheva as associated not with the world of spirits, but with the real world of animals, objects, and substances used by a sorcerer. this presupposition is confirmed by contemporary studies of komi mythology. p. f. limerov, for example, does not mention a sheva among spirit possession in a present-day russian village 45 folklorica 2010, vol. xv either evil spirits or beings from the world of the dead, but characterizes it as a mythical being sent out by a sorcerer in the tangible form of a lizard or insect (limerov 1998a: 79; 1998b). a significant sheva monologue was recorded in the komi-perm’ district. in it, a russianspeaking female, about 60 years old, speaks in a high pitch and while breathing in: я вить не человек. меня зовут хоть валерий андреич рубинóв, я вить ящерица. у меня еще и подруга есть, таня, она лягушка. я не мешаю, хозяйку не обижаю. у меня хозяйка очень хорошая. я не хулиганю, табак не курю. когда уснет, удираю к подруге. приду и захожу холодный (проводит правой рукой от горла к животу). у меня подруга-то лягушка. уснет, я иду, хоть пурга, хоть что. однажды чуть не убил меня ветер. я под кусты сел, сидел, холодный пришел, у хозяйки рот открыт, она проснулась – холодный, холодный (снова проводит правой рукой от горла к животу)(9) [i am not a human. even though my name is valerii andreich rubinov, i am in fact a lizard. and i have a friend, tania; she is a frog. i do not bother my hostess, do not hurt her. my hostess is very nice. i do not make a row; do not smoke tobacco. when she falls asleep i sneak to my friend. i return cold and enter [her] (informant shows how by moving her right hand from her throat down to her belly). my friend is a frog. when [the hostess] falls asleep, i go [to my friend] no matter if there is a snow storm or something else. once, the wind almost killed me. i sat down under a bush, and was sitting [waiting]; [i] came back cold; the hostess was sleeping with her mouth open, and she awoke – i was cold, cold (informant does the same movement again, with her right hand going from her throat down to her belly). 7. gender of the poshibka the fact that klikushestvo is primarily a female phenomenon was recognized a long time ago. p.s. efimenko discovered a court case about klikushi in the arkhangel’sk archives dating back to 1785 and the opinion of veniamin, the archbishop of arkhangelsk and kholmogory, was attached to the case. according to this document, the archbishop thought that possession in the pinezh district was caused by the stagnant water, which the peasants used for their needs: “которыми водами люди питаясь, не получают ли в себя семян или зародышей таких червей, которые зародясь в их желудках, болезни те производят?” [… by consuming such water, would not people get the seeds or germs of such worms that, being conceived in their stomachs, would cause those diseases?]. to him, bad water helped explain the gender differences in found in possession, namely that women’s stomachs were weaker, making the onset of disease easier. in men, he thought, “from either folklorica 2010, vol. xv 46 [hard] work or [the consumption of] the strong beverages… [germs of worms] perished straight away” (efimenko 1864: 85). the komi people, though they did not use such explanations, also believed that women (especially those pregnant and immediately post delivery), young girls, and old spinsters were at a much higher risk of contracting the disease than men. at the beginning of the 20th century, in some districts, it was believed that only an exceptional woman could avoid being infested by a sheva, since women got it right after marriage. men, they thought, would die quickly upon contracting a sheva (sidorov 1997: 107). gender differences are preserved in the verkhokam’e: the majority of the poshibka bearers are women. a reverse correlation exists in that the poshibka is typically given a male name. during my fieldwork i encountered only one text about a poshibka in a man. the text differed from those about a poshibka in females and was rather a story about demons tormenting a sorcerer. informants usually either stated that the poshibka did not occur in men or assumed that it was possible, but could not remember any such cases: researcher: and can the poshibkas get into a male? informant: попадают [they can]. researcher: even into males?! informant: но это, по-моему, очень редко, у мужиков. обычно у женщин почему-то, я не знаю [but this, i guess, rarely happens with men. mostly they get into females, i do not know why]. researcher: and do you know of a case when it got into a male? informant: угу. кто же мне рассказывал, что вот мужчине попала... но обычно почему-то всё у женщин [yeah. someone told me that it got inside a man… but usually it mostly happens with women] (l.n., female, born in 1953; siv.; june 2000). i have encountered only one explanation for this: “женщина ее может родить. полечится, она ее родит” [a female can give birth to it. she will get some cure, and will deliver it] (v.f.n., female, born in 1922; ver.; 1999; recorded by i. kulikova and o. khristoforova). this explanation recalls the komi belief that a man dies quickly once infested by a sheva, but it does not explain why a poshibka gets primarily into women in the first place. let us examine the problem further. 8. the pragmatics of the poshibka concept 8.1 the victim spirit possession in a present-day russian village 47 folklorica 2010, vol. xv there is a belief in the verkhokam’e that a poshibka usually gets into women of childbearing age and seldom enters young girls, even though such stories do exist and have been recorded by the author. a poshibka can reveal itself immediately, in which case the afflicated person would feel pain, heaviness and would have fits of nausea or fainting. but sometimes it can reveal itself only much later when, all of a sudden, the poshibka begins to talk. one female informant learnt that she had a poshibka when she was 50, and only when a poshibka of another woman told her: “тебе на семнадцатом году на красном яблочке села и залетела [when you were seventeen, [a poshibka] was sitting on a red apple, and flew inside [you]]” (е.а.ch., female, born in 1932; siv.; 2003; recorded by n. litvina and o. khristoforova). oral tradition provides several reasons why a poshibka gets inside a human. according to the most widespread one, the victim is to blame and such texts have an obvious edifying function. the person may be the victim of a sorcerer, but her own fault is one of two kinds: she can transgress religious norms by swearing or not wearing a cross, by not praying when entering a yard, a house, at a crossroads, or before eating. the other fault is disregard of the norms of social interaction, especially interaction with a sorcerer, and can include behaving imprudently or immorally and angering other people: а была в трошино марья ивановна, вот ей пошибка попала дома в огородце. она потом заговорила у неё! она долго маяла ее, много годов. потом заговорила: “а чё, чё ты меня не любишь, чё ты меня выживашь? а я была на тебя излажена. вот я на тебя была отпущена”. а вот не сказала, кто пустил. не сказала. и как допытывали, и как уж спрашивали, никак не сказала. не созналася, кто ее пустил. “я на огороде сидела,– говорит, – не один год тебя ждала, когда ты пойдешь без молитвы. и вот ты, – говорит,– шла, ругалася, она на ферме тоже работала со мной дояркой, ты шла по огородцу и ругалася. ох, я и с колышка в тебя и заскочила! я сидела на колышке. ты пришла домой, о-ой, захворала. ой, заболела голова! вот ты сутки пролежала, даже на работу не пошла, а потом ты захворала-захворала, и вот ты сколь-то похворала, тебе стало легче, я маленько отступилася от тебя. леготy тебе дала. ты поработала на ферме – опять заболела! ты потому что меня начала мучить в работе.” да-а! вот она маялася [there was mar’ia ivanovna in the troshino [village]; and a poshibka got into her when she was in her garden. and she [the poshibka] later started talking! she [the poshibka] tormented her for a long time, for many years. and then she started talking: “why don’t you like me; why are you trying to drive me out? i was created for you. i was sent to you.” but she did not say who sent her. did not say [that]. and no matter how hard they interrogated her and asked her – she did not say. she did not confess who sent her over. “i was sitting in the garden, she said, waiting for you for several years, folklorica 2010, vol. xv 48 waiting when you would go without a prayer. and here you were, she said, cursing (she was working with me on a farm, as a milkmaid); you were walking around in the garden and cursing. oh, i jumped right into you from a pole! i was sitting on a pole. you came home, oh-h, and got sick. oh, [your] head was aching! you were lying for a day, did not even go to work; and then you became very sick; and after you were sick for so long you felt better [because] i eased up slightly. [i] gave you some relief. you went to work on a farm and then you became sick again! it’s because you started tormenting me by your work.” yes! that’s how she [mar’ia ivanovna] was suffering] (i.f.m., female, born in 1919; ver.; june 2000]. researcher: what was your fault? informant: кто его знат? гуляла шибко уж я, перебирала мужиков. кому-то, может, досадила [how would i know? i used to fool around, flirt with lots of men. maybe one of them was hurt] (m.i.v., female, born in 1938; siv.; june 2000; recorded by e. lopatina and o. khristoforova). it is believed that sorcerers can spread a poshibka in two ways. they can target it at a specific individual, sending it to the person who angered either them or their clients, or they can disperse it in an un-targeted way, “through the air,” since they must spread the demons that compel them. upon the death of its host, a poshibka becomes independent and can decide its own fate. informant: а они ведь, как умрет человек-от, дак они выходят тогды [when a person dies, they [the poshibkas] exit then]. researcher: and what happens then? informant: ну чё, выходят, заходят тому, кого она любила, тому и заходят [well, they exit and then get inside a person she [the deceased] loved; that’s where they go] (а.n.b., female, born in 1912; siv.; may 2000; recorded by n. litvina and o. khristoforova). an example of the edifying function can be found in the following text: пошибка тоже говорящая была: “я, говорит, хозяюшку задавлю, задавлю, задавлю.” “нет, не задавишь.” “нет, задавлю.” “а куда ты пойдешь?” “я пойду на речку, сяду на речку, какая девушка молоденька придет воду черпать, перемáтькатся, я в нее полезу” [there was a poshibka who could speak . “i, – it says, – will finish, finish, finish off my hostess.” – “you will not.” – “yes, i will.” – “and where will you go [after that]?” – “i will go to the river, will sit in the river; when a young girl comes to fetch water; she will curse, and i will get inside her] (е.а.ch., female, born in 1932; siv.; may 2000; recorded by n. litvina and o. khristoforova). spirit possession in a present-day russian village 49 folklorica 2010, vol. xv она залетает, говорят, когда ей вольготно жить в которой будет [they say, she [the poshibka] flies inside a female in whom she find freedom] (r.a.g., female, 74 years old; siv.; 2002; recorded by m. akhmetova and a. koz’min). an interesting text describes a poshibka who chooses the victim itself, against the will of a sorcerer who sent it: “меня зовут марина николаевна, я мариночка. я ведь не в старуху пушшена была, а меня... пушшена была я в оринку.” у ее соседей дочь орина была, у нее тоже пошибка была. вот она: “да чё я в ёй полезу, старик у её, да седой, да с бородой... я мариночка-девочка. а старухато богу молилася, а я ей в ухо полезла” [“my name is marina nikolaevna; i am marinochka. i was not sent into this old woman, but i… i was [initially] sent into orinka.” her neighbours had a daughter, orina; she also had a poshibka. so she [poshibka] said: “why would i get into her [orina]; she has an old man; he is grey-haired and has a beard… i am marinochka the girl. and the old woman was praying to god, and i got inside her through her ear] (е.а.ch., female, born in 1932; siv.; may 2000; recorded by n. lapina and o. khristoforova). the material above indicates a pattern: according to the bylichki (memorates) recorded, if a sorcerer sends a poshibka, then the narrator presents the victim as innocent; but if a poshibka acts as an independent agent, then the victim is somehow at fault. children, adolescents, and females who get a poshibka by mistake, something that can happen if the unintended victim has the same names as the intended one, are described as innocent. in all other cases, the victim is considered to be at fault. this fits the christian understanding of diseases and misfortunes as consequences of a sinful life and it fits the didactic-pragmatic function of poshibka stories. even those stories that assign some degree of blame to the victim, however, tend to treat the person sympathetically based on the belief that you cannot “protect yourself” from a poshibka: researcher: how can a person protect herself? if a person would go around with a prayer, will it [the poshibka] get inside her? informant: так они опять снизу лезут! вот одна старушка была… у её говорящая тоже стала пошибка-та: “дак хозяюшка-то на сарай лезла, ей в рот-от нельзя полизти-то– молитву творит – дак я ей снизу полезла” [they can still get inside from below! there was an old woman… she also had a speaking poshibka: “when the hostess was climbing up in a shed – i could not get inside through her mouth, since she was reciting a prayer, so i got inside her from below”] (е.а.ch., female, born in 1932; siv.; may 2000м; recorded by n. litvina and o. khristoforova). folklorica 2010, vol. xv 50 from my own observations, i can infer that those female narrators who did not have the poshibka themselves were the most critical of victims while those who suffered, especially without cause, tended to be most sympathetic. there is yet another explanation according to which god allows the devil to enter a human in order to test his/her humility or strength of faith. i encountered this opinion, one derived from the old testament (cf. job) only once. therefore i treat it as optional for the oral tradition of the verkhokam’e, where two other reasons for contracting a poshibka dominate. to reiterate: reason one is that demons force sorcerers to inflict this malady and reason two is that humans bring this misfortune upon themselves through their own sins. these two opinions do not contradict each other, as it might seem at first, but rather complement each other. this attitude allows for the coexistence of various interpretations of the same event, an option that is very important for everyday life in the village. multiple or alternative causes of possession are reflected in the poshibka stories themselves, as in the following example: а эта, в чумaнах устинька-та была… дак она (пошибка. – о.х.) полезла в её, сказала: “ты пошла по воду да без молитвы, я не на тебя была сделана дак, вот ты молитву не сотворила, значит, я в тебя и села” [there was ustin’ka in the chumany [village]… and she [the poshibka] got inside her and said: “you went to fetch water without saying a prayer, and although i was not created for you; it was you who did not pray, and i got inside you (instead)] (а.i.s., female, born in 1920; ver.; june 2000). narratives about the failure of a poshibka to get inside a human are extremely rare. there is a literary tale entitled “a thief and death,”(10) where a poshibka appears in a series with death, a devil, and fever (likhoradka). in oral tradition there is only one attested account of a poshibka’s inability to get inside a person and the reason it fails is that person’s proper behavior: она вот рассказывала… рожёнка была, родила она, вроде... говорит, это, пошла на улицу, забор открывает, там раньше ворот не было, тут это такие... жерди... она открывает, говорит, и молитву сотворила. и, говорит, как корчага... такие раньше были корчаги большие, глиняные... вот, говорит, такой грохот раздался, как корчага разорвалась. и вот прихожу домой, говорит, ну сходила она это... в туалет сходила, прихожу, говорит, вот так и так. “ой, хорошо что ты молитву, говорит, сотворила. на тебя, говорит, была пошибка. если бы ты молитву не сотворила, она бы, говорит, в тебя вошла.” [she told… there was a woman who gave birth… she says [that woman] went out; she opens the fence – there used to be no gates [at that time]; there are spirit possession in a present-day russian village 51 folklorica 2010, vol. xv some… poles… she opened, – she said, – and recited a prayer. and [it was] as if a korchaga (a big clay pitcher)… once there used to be such big pitchers made of clay… and so, she said, there was such a rattle as if that korchaga had crashed and broken. and so, she said, i come back into the house well she went to the outhouse, you see – i come back and tell what happened. “oh, it’s good you recited a prayer, [someone] says. there was a poshibka [waiting] for you. if you had not recited a prayer it would get inside you] (а.а.p., female, born in 1931; ver.; 1999). the fact that the narratives of this kind are infrequent can be explained, by the fact that a negative didactic narrative is more powerful in this tradition than a positive one. it is also the case that this situation reflects the often pessimistic view of the poshibka phenomenon that is typical even for present-day inhabitants of verkhokam’e, especially for middled-aged and older women. this pessimism is expressed in the idea that it is impossible to get rid of a poshibka, especially now that “there are almost no powerful sorcerers left.” although there are various opinions about the poshibka and different attitudes towards the possessed in the verkhokam’e, one of the dominant emotions is fear. fear of the poshibka can be so intense that some female informants refuse to discuss this topic: “я не знаю, меня бог миновал пока от этого, слава богу, прожила век” [i do not know, god saved me from this so far, thank god, i have lived my life [without it] (v.f.n., born in 1922; ver.; 1999; recorded by i. kulikova and o. khristoforova). to protect themselves, people use various verbal and non-verbal means. 9. behavioral patterns stories about a poshibka are supported by various behavioral patterns. some of them are widespread and are used in interactions with sorcerers. others are specific to the verkhokam’e region. widely occurring practices include wearing a cross on one’s body, saying prayers before meals, and praying while fetching water, leaving a house, passing through gates, or walking at a crossroads and other liminal places. the most widespread prayer is the jesus prayer (lord jesus christ, the son of god, have mercy on us). the resurrection prayer (may god be resurrected) is also considered powerful, but not many people know it by heart. other widespread behavioral patters include precautions against sorcerers such as greeting them politely in the street. people also practice sorcerer avoidance, such as not crossing their path and avoiding direct eye contact. at the same time people may practice symbolic aggression against sorcerers, making obscene hand gestures in folklorica 2010, vol. xv 52 secret and silently reciting incantations against them. the norms of “symbolic hygiene” are also important. these include actions and gestures that are specific to the poshibka concept such as blowing on the surface of a drink to keep from accidentally swallowing a straw or speck of dust. they also include drinking over one’s finger or from the handle side of a cup to protect the mouth. covering one’s mouth and nose from insects while working in the field is a common prophylactic practice, just in case one of the insects is a poshibka. other protective measures are avoiding things or behaviors that might anger a person who has a poshibka and satisfying all of her or his whims. people are especially cautious when a person known to have a poshibka dies. 10. social functions the poshibka concept fulfills several important socio-psychological functions in the traditional culture of verkhokam’e, and this fact contributes to the persistence of this concept. the concept offers a familiar model for the interpretation of various physiological states and it provides a behavioral scheme to deal with cases of real illness as well as cases of feigned illness motivated by the desire to be relieved of household chores, to gain the attention of others, or to secure financial gain in the form of a payment for divination. pains in various parts of the body such as chest pains, stomachaches, and joint pain can be explained by the poshibka concept, as can fits of hiccuping and yawning, tummyrumbling, drowsiness, and excessive appetite. this is especially true for old women. урчит, по желудку ходит, урчит. а если спать захотела– ложись скорее спать. а если есть захотела– скорее ешь. а вот когда ей надобно [it grumbles, moves around the stomach, and grumbles. and if she [poshibka] wants to sleep you would immediately go to sleep. and if she wants to eat – you eat immediately. just whenever she wants that] (а.n.b., born in 1912; siv.; 1999). researcher: how does a poshibka manifest itself? informant: а чё-нибудь вот не ладится, то есть не ладится, то еще чего. вот они и говорят, что есть в нас тоже [well, if something goes wrong, does not go well. then they say there is [a poshibka] inside us] (m.i.u., born in 1938; siv.; june 2000; recorded by e. lopatina and o. khristoforova). interestingly, the bylichki about how a poshibka gets into a human being differ in the stereotypic nature of their plots and motifs and demonstrate a folkloric origin, while simultaneously reinforcing the spirit possession in a present-day russian village 53 folklorica 2010, vol. xv didactic function of the narrative plot. at the same time stories about how a poshibka reveals itself through the behavior and speech of its victim vary considerably from one individual to the next. such stories can be both informative and entertaining, while also helping to make sense of everyday experience. stories about behavior are less dependent on traditional folk narrative patterns than stories about infestation and are more open to innovative interpretations and verbal creativity: евдокия нефёдовна была. и вот у нее пошибка тожо: “старуха-то легет спать, спи-ит, рот-от распялит, я выгляду, – а это, настенные часы, маятник, – сяду на маятник, покачаюсь-покачаюся, фу-р-р токо, улетю. в москву-то полетю. как они начальники-те тамо ругаются, поматеряют, говорит, я гляжу-гляжу на их, надоест, улетю, домой прилетю,– а чё, они молнией летают дак, – сяду на часы-те, покачаюсьпокачаюсь, хозяйке в рот полезу, она спит опеть, ничё не слышит” [there was evdokiia nefedovna. and she had a poshibka: “the old woman goes to sleep; she sle-e-eps, opens her mo-o-outh, i get outside; there is a wall clock with a pendulum, so i sit on the pendulum, swing back and forth, and fly away. to moscow. i watch how those government officials fight each other and curse; and when i get bored i fly back home – yes, they really fly like lightening – i sit on the pendulum again, swing back and forth, and get into my hostess’ mouth; she sleeps and does not sense anything] (е.а.ch., female, born in 1932; siv.; may 2000; recorded by n. litvina and o. khristoforova). beliefs about the poshibka persist because they fulfill social needs. the community needs possessed people because they serve as a kind of investigator of problems. one of the most common bylichka motifs is divination by means of a poshibka. such divination helps to identify a thief or an arsonist or find a missing person or animal. when problems arise, many local people prefer not to go to the police. their choice is to consult a woman with a speaking poshibka and they typically view the information obtained from such a woman as reliable. people also go to such women when they have more serious problems and when divination of the future is necessary. using possessed women for divination is becoming a money-making, commercial institution in urban areas such as cities and towns. in villages, when there are conflicts between individuals, such as those that arise when objects and people go missing, and people consult a woman with a poshibka, the answers that they get promote social harmony. these answers can confirm what the client thought himself or herself (“на кого думаешь, тот и украл” [“the one you suspect is the thief”]). answers can discourage the person consulting a possessed woman from searching for the guilty person (“найдется” [“it folklorica 2010, vol. xv 54 will turn up by itself”]). yet even in the latter case, divination via a poshibka removes doubts. it eliminates the fear of condemning someone falsely and takes away the responsibility for making an accusation since consulting a possessed person places the responsibility not on an individual, but on an “institution.” this person-“institution” acts on behalf of the community, while personifying that community only partially. due to his or her special status, such a person also personifies the world of the unseen, whose inhabitants typically possess special knowledge. folk culture – including contemporary folk culture – has institutions that are synonymic: soothsayers who use beans, cards, and water to make divinations, for example. yet the poshibka-fortune-teller is considered preferable since it is perceived as an incorruptible institution. in addition, the client and the poshibka-fortune-teller are perceived to have a special bond since they share the role of victim. sorcerers, though they have special means of divination, are not as close to the client because they have the reputation of being znatkie, (11) practicing both healing and the casting of spells. as such, sorcerers prompt a watchfulness on the part of the client. informant: у нас у тетки паши была икота, болтала так! к ей ходили ворожить во время войны. вот она рассказывала. агафья тихоновна ждет сына, купила чекушку, пришла. “хм! это уж пошибка да выпьёт, выпьёт”. (воспроизводя речь пошибки, м.л. говорит громче, чуть медленнее, более интонировано, регистр нормальный.) молчаламолчала, дак: “охо-хо! уж и косточки-то твои сгнили” [our aunt pasha had an ikotka – such a chatterbox! during the (second world) war people came to her for fortune-telling. so she told [us]. agafiia tikhonovna was waiting for her son [to come back]; she bought a small bottle of vodka and came. “hm-m! oh, the poshibka will drink” (while imitating a poshibka’s manner of speaking, m.l. speaks louder, a bit slower, with more intonation, voice register is normal). she [the poshibka] was silent for some time and then said: “oh-oh! your bones have already rotted”] (m.s.l., born in 1914; ver.; june 2000). researcher: has fedor ivanovich (a poshibka of m. i. v.) ever told anything to anyone? informant: ну, говорил вот, ну да... кому правду вот... первого сына в армию отправлять, я ходила там к соседке, и иду, бражкой напилася, бежу домой, и распевает: “иди быстрей дак, сына-то,– говорит,– в армию взяли.” прибежала домой, бегом бражку замешала, и этой бражкой его отправляла. а он был в ленинграде, парень. вот как, правду сказала. [yes, he has… [he told] the truth to some [people]…when my first son was called up for military service, i went to a neighbour, and drank home-brewed beer; and i was running home, and he [the poshibka] was singing: “go faster; spirit possession in a present-day russian village 55 folklorica 2010, vol. xv your son was called up.” i came home, quickly made a home-brew, and i was seeing him [the son] off with that home-brew. and he served in leningrad, my boy. so, she [the poshibka] told the truth] (m.i.v., born in 1938; siv.; june 2000). as research has shown, the third function of the poshibka’s speech is to reveal the name of the sorcerer who sent it, thus potentially advancing his reputation (panchenko 2002: 332-334). according to the verkhokam’e data this is a secondary function of possession with the main emphasis being on social control, namely edification, instilling religious ideas and behaviors, confirming moral norms and social stratification. in short, the poshibka supports traditional behavior as a whole. a fourth function of the poshibka is peculiar to the victims of possession. their state often becomes a means for satisfying sociopsychological needs. the reputation of being a possessed person gives a woman the right to hold an authoritative opinion; it sanctions her words and actions, and gives them a special status. therefore, as paradoxical as it may sound, the social marginality of this role provides social power. it elevates status and even brings financial gain in the form of a payment for a divination ritual. it can be important for lonely older women who currently constitute almost all poshibka victims. finally, the entertainment function of the bylichki is also important. the narratives exist almost as anecdotes in which allow verbal play through the imitation of poshibka speech patterns: informant: а вот в этом, в вяткино-то, я туда ходила за чем-то. с санитаркой идем, зашли к ней, ну, она и рассказывает: “вот обварила грудь, – говорит, – я.” ну, мы спрашиваем: “как обварила-то?” она говорит: “да кипяток взяла, – говорит,– вот чугунку, и, – говорит, – както опрокинулась она мне на грудь.” а вот эта икотка-то у ней и говорит: “косорукая, дак не брала бы!” (смеется). быстрехонько так среагировала: “косорукая, дак не брала бы!” так интересно [i was in the viatkino [village]; i went there for something. i was walking with a nurse: we stopped at her place and she said: “i happened to pour boiling water over my chest.” well, we asked: “how did it happen?” and she said: “i took boiling water, in a cast-iron [vessel?] and somehow managed to pour it over my chest.” and her ikotka said: “[if you are] clumsy, you should not have picked it up!” (informant laughs). and she reacted so quickly: “[if you are] clumsy, you should not have picked it up!” it is so interesting] (а.m.zh., born in 1936; ver.; 1999). for people, especially young people, the very act of communicating with a poshibka provides access to the supernatural that is both a folklorica 2010, vol. xv 56 frightening and attractive. it is a theater of sorts, an arena in which the young can experiment with the other-worldly. yet it is impossible to state that the poshibka concept appeared solely as a response to personal and social needs. the opposite is also true and the poshibka concept reinforces the needs that it satisfies. furthermore, the concept stems not from social and personal needs alone, but also from folk belief in sorcerers, the moral dualism introduced by christianity, and cultural relations and exchange with the aboriginal komi population. 11. conclusion doctors became interested in klikushestvo in the second half of the 19th century when it manifested itself in central russia through fits during mass and in the presence of sacred objects such as icons, crosses, relics, and holy water. doctors defined klikushestvo as a type of hysteria corea magna that resulted from “psychic contamination” and spread in a patterned way. my data permit me to state that klikushestvo is not a disease with defined symptoms. rather, it is a model used to explain pathologies that can be as varied as neuroses, skeletal system disorders, and cardio-vascular diseases. it is also used to account for physiological symptoms like obsessive hiccupping and yawning. when describing symptoms, some of which can be very individualized, narrators resort to familiar folklore patterns. the same is true of their accounts of the onset of the disease, and of its diagnoses and treatment. narrators typically insert new names and details, while reinforcing existing folklore patterns and thus satisfying social and psychological needs. “possession discourse” in old believer circles becomes both a means of explaining various illnesses and a means of manipulating the social environment. it is a “language of power” in a way and a normative institution that confirms the cultural values. every personal “narrative of disease” emphasizes certain aspects of this discourse, aspects determined by the psychological peculiarities and needs of that person, her family dynamics, her relations with neighbors, and even her response to the researcher. narratives about how a poshibka gets inside a human are a way to “externalize” personal suspicions. they can articulate conflicts, even conflicts that occurred long ago. sometimes narratives can serve as a confession where the speaker admits of lack of foresight, if not sinful behavior. in the view of others, the possessed are those “weak links” in spirit possession in a present-day russian village 57 folklorica 2010, vol. xv the social chain who, at some point in the past, disregarded social norms of interaction, or they were people who could not cope with their own anxiety and the burden of everyday problems. this view offers an acceptable and seemingly rational explanation. it holds that those who were unfortunate enough to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time fell victim to merciless fate and internalized evil. in a small village community fate, or dolia, is perceived as a common one, or one shared by all (see foster 1965). thus the misfortune of others partially guarantees one’s own safety. this is precisely why, at times, another’s misfortune evokes unconditional compassion. the possessed who became victims in the most obvious and terrible way, that those with physical disabilities, childless people, alcoholics, and idlers, are seen as people who sacrifice themselves, or are sacrificed, for others. but even this sacrifice is ambiguous for it is both dangerous and contagious. therefore, communication with a poshibka requires caution, though to a lesser degree than communication with a sorcerer. this social distance, however, does not prevent people from using the possessed for divination, or to address more serious concerns like their own security, or even for entertainment. the “discourse of possession” does not allow one to forget either the “dangerous zones” in space, time, and the social environment or the means needed to neutralize danger. in sum, the poshibka phenomenon in the culture of the old believers is a complex phenomenon where social relations intersect with ideas about the world drawn from christianity, folk medicine. it is a phenomenon affected by gender and age demographics, by diet, physiology and neurotic fears. the history of the old believers comes into play as do the individual histories of contemporary women. list of abbreviations siv. – recorded in the sivinsk region of the perm’ district. ver. – recorded in the vereshchagin region of the perm’ district. kezs.– recorded in the kezsk region of the udmurt territory. notes 1 i would recommend a chapter from a monograph [nikitina 1993] and two articles from the journal живая старина [moroz 1996; nikitina 1996]. folklorica 2010, vol. xv 58 2 over the last two decades, religiosity in russia has been growing; and the ideas about possession in the form of klikushestvo have tended to spread, especially in the so-called “near-church circles.” a study of this process, however, is beyond the scope of my article. 3 popovtsy is the term used to designate those old believer confessions that have a clergy. from the end of the 17th century to the beginning of the 20t, there also existed a division or confession called beglopopovtsy. these accepted “escaped” or “fleeing” clergy, priests who had been ordained in the regular church but who had decided, for whatever reason, to become old believers. in 1846, when the bosno-saraevskii metropolitan amvrosii joined the beglopopovtsy, the belokrinitskaia eparchy was created. at present, it is the russian orthodox old believer church. other groups of old believers, those who never accepted a clergy, are the ones to whom the term bespopovtsy is most widely applied. the largest group of bespopovtsy old believers are to be found in pomor’e. belief in the imminence of the kingdom of the antichrist has lead to the creation of a group among the bespopovtsy who are called stranniki (wanderers). this group of old believers consider it necessary to flee the kingdom of the antichrist and to hide from it. stranniki do not hold passports. they refuse military service. they do not pay taxes. some even avoid money altogether. some beglopopovskie groups of old believers who were unable to find priests in the 19th and 20th centuries became de facto bespopovtsi. this is the case with the chasovennii confession. 4 for other explanations of trance and possession current in contemporary anthropology and the psycho-physiological mechanisms that accompany them see (prince 1968; bourguignon 1976; sharp 1993; lewis 2003; ward and beaubrun 1980). 5 there is some correlation between this popular motif and the custom of treating a guest in one’s home, be it a person who is known to the host or a stranger, to home brew or kvass. 6 in the russian north as well as in the komi-permiak tradition, according to the data collected in the 19th –beginning of the 20th centuries, an ikota could have the appearance of a frog, worm, spider, or mouse. 7 sobornye are the members of the praying commune who adhere to very strict everyday taboos. usually this means that they can read and write in church slavonic. mirskie are people of the world, those who do not belong to the commune-sobor. spirit possession in a present-day russian village 59 folklorica 2010, vol. xv 8 this is a paraphrase from the new testament: “now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and does not find it. then it says, i will return to my house from which i came; and when it comes, if it finds that place unoccupied, swept, and put in order. then it goes and brings along seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there, and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first” (мatthew 12: 43-45). 9 the documentary “the blooming of the fern” was created in 1995 at the sverdlovsk cinema studio by n. okorokova, script writer, and a. anchugov, producer. the precise place of filming and the name of the informant are unknown. 10 sus k1 637: a thief who sneaked into a house together with death, the devil or likhoradka (fever), wishes health to the master of the house when he sneezes. in this way he saves the master and gets rewarded for his actions. 11 in the verkhokam’e, the word “znatkoi” which comes from “the one who knows” (знающий, знахарь) is a synonym of the word “sorcerer.” bibliography andreski, s. 1989. syphilis, puritanism and witch-hunts: historical explanations with a forecast about aids. london: macmillan. belo, j. 1960. trance in bali. n.y: columbia university press. beliaev. i. s. 1905. беляев, и. с. “икотники и кликуши. к истории русских суеверий. по архивным источникам” [ikotniki and klikushi. towards a history of russian superstitions. based on archival sources], русская старина 122(4): 144-164. bleikher, v. m. and i v. kruk. 1995. блейхер в.м. и 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setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice microsoft word folklorica_2011g.doc debates of the westernizers and slavophiles folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 87 folklore in the debates of the westernizers and slavophiles linda ivanits russian and comparative literature penn state university university park, pa usa abstract russian folklore played an important role in the debates of the slavophiles and westernizers about national identity. some slavophiles adduced folksongs as evidence of the essential christianity of the russian people, while westernizers, in good part, viewed folklore as a primitive stage in the development of a national literature that reflected the oppression and dejection of the masses. english-language studies of the slavophile-westernizer controversy contain at best passing mention of folklore. my essay hopes to partially remedy this situation by offering an overview of the role of folklore in the skirmishes between the early slavophiles and westernizers. in his history of russian ethnography (1891, история русской этнографии), a.n. pypin sketched a bleak picture of the status of russian folklore during the reign of nicholas i. attempts at interpretation were often naïve or misguided, and the most widely acclaimed collection of the time, i.p. sakharov’s tales of the russian people (1841, сказания русского народа), was subsequently discredited for erroneous information, unaccredited borrowing, and falsification. harsh, erratic censorship, which tended to prohibit songs about bandits and peasant discontent, impeded publication of valuable collections, most notably that of p.v. kireevskii [pypin 1891: vol. 1, 376-89]. (1) even so slavophiles, westernizers, and adherents of the “official” nationality promulgated by the regime energetically gathered and compiled folklore. their materials served as the basis for many of the monumental collections published in the reign of alexander ii, including those of a.n. afanas’ev [1858, 1859], p.v. kireevskii [186074], p.a. bessonov [1861] and v.i. dal’ [1861, 1863, 1880.] in the 1830s and 1840s the word “narodnost’” was so fashionable that v.g. belinskii called it the “alpha and omega of the aesthetics of our time” and rightly noted its lack of fixed definition [1955: vol. 5, 289]. coined 88 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi by prince p.a. viazemskii, the term first expressed the aspiration of the russian romantics of the 1820s to create a national literature on par with the great literatures of western europe [leighton 1987 viii-ix]. by the late 1830s and 1840s the term was closely intertwined with the debate about russian distinctiveness and world significance, which had now reached an acute stage and would set parameters for discussing national identity thereafter [see chizhevskii 1939: 32]. both slavophiles and westernizers adduced folklore in support of their positions and, while many of their contentions seem jejune from today’s perspective, russian scholarship has always acknowledged the important role they played in the debate. english-language studies of the slavophile-westernizer dispute contain at best passing mention of folklore. (2) my essay hopes to partially remedy this situation by offering an overview of the role of folklore in the skirmishes between the early slavophiles and westernizers. though russian folklore as a discipline was in its infancy in the reign of nicholas i, a significant amount of material was in print and it stretched across multiple genres, including epics, historical songs, folktales, calendar songs, wedding songs, and lyrics (precise genre specifications were yet to be determined). kirsha danilov’s ancient russian songs (древние российские стихотворения, собранные киршею даниловым) had been reprinted in 1818 and m.a. maksimovich’s collection of ukrainian folksongs (малороссийские песни) appeared in 1827. not surprisingly, adherents of official nationality were fairly successful in getting their material by the censors and published several important russian collections, including i.m. snegirev’s russian celebrations and superstitious rituals of the simple folk (русские [руские] простонародные праздники и суеверные обряды, 1837), sakharov’s tales of the russian people, and a.v. tereshchenko’s daily life of the russian people (быт русского народа, 1848). (3) the leading journals of the day, including the western-leaning notes of the fatherland (отечественные записки) and contemporary (современник) and especially m.p. pogodin’s conservative monthly the muscovite (москвитянин) included a good deal of folklore on their pages as well as reviews of folklore collections. though not technically a slavophile journal except for the three months in 1845 when ivan kireevskii took over the editorship, the muscovite was generally hospitable to the slavophiles. in addition, literary reworkings and imitations of folklore were in vogue and so widespread that it was often impossible to distinguish between them and actual folk debates of the westernizers and slavophiles folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 89 texts [skaftymov 1936: 139]. in any case, at this time folklore and literature were generally not thought of as separate entities. perhaps the most prolonged and expansive effort at collecting folksongs of all types during the reign of nicholas i was that of petr vasil’evich kireevskii. (4) one of the more curious figures in the history of folkloristics, petr kireevskii nurtured a love of native traditions and orthodoxy as well as an aversion to the reforms of peter the great well before the slavophile-westernizer controversy acquired clear lines of division [brodskii 1910: 22-23; walicki 1975: 122-23]. his work stretched over a quarter of a century, involved over eighty correspondents, among them a.s. pushkin, n.m. iazykov and his family, k.d. kavelin, n.v. gogol’, and p.i. iakushkin, and included material from practically every province of central russia. (5) a.d. soimonov claims that kireevskii’s first informant was his servant rodion, from whom he took down folksongs while still studying in germany [1971: 90-91]. a few years after his return, kireevskii was in effect designated to coordinate a common effort that would bring together the best material in manuscripts and previous publications as well as songs that he and other contemporary collectors would provide. as late as 1832 pushkin was planning to publish his own song collection, but by 1833 he was contemplating combining the efforts of the iazykovs, kireevskii, and others in creating a work of considerable proportion. soimonov suspects that the decision to entrust this endeavor to petr kireevskii was adopted during a meeting which took place on 26 august 1833 in moscow at the house of a.p. elagina, the kireevskiis’ mother and the poet zhukovskii’s niece. kireevskii, pushkin, pushkin’s close friend s.a. sobolevskii, and the literary historian s.p. shevyrev were present [1971: 127-132]. several months later kireevskii informed his close friend the poet n.m. iazykov that pushkin promised to provide the preface to the collection [kireevskii 1935: 50]. from the beginning, then, kireevskii’s project was thought of as a mutual effort and, to a good extent, he accepted the burden, on behalf of his generation, of ensuring that russia’s priceless folk heritage would be gathered and presented to the larger public before it was lost irrevocably. during the 1830s he received a great deal of material from iazykov, whom he consulted on publication plans and in october 1833 offered to make joint editor with his name appearing first on the title page [p.v. kireevskii 1935: 51]. virtually all of educated russia was aware of kireevskii’s work, and many bemoaned his delay in getting his songs into print. hampered by a somewhat lethargic disposition and periods of dejection following the censors’ last minute 90 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi rejection of the volumes that had been prepared, he succeeded in publishing very little during his lifetime [see sokolov 1923: 23-24 and soimonov, 1971: 290-304]. yet, as kavelin affirmed in his obituary of kireevskii, “in spite of the fact that it appeared very rarely in print, his name was one of those known everywhere, both at home and abroad [vol. 2:1219].” kireevskii clearly perceived his task’s historic dimension. from its early stages he viewed his folksong collection as a forceful rebuttal to those who derided russia for lack of culture and tradition. the collection would, he believed, constitute living proof that russians possessed strong historical memories enthroned in poetry and traditions. as he boasted in a letter of october 1833 to iazykov, such a work would stun foreigners, whose own collections paled in comparison [1935: 48]. his letters often referred to p.ia. chaadaev, whom, he wrote, he did not consider russian [1935: 33]. on 17 june 1833 he voiced his reaction to the ideas of chadaaev’s first philosophical letter, not published until 1836, but already well known within moscow circles. kireevskii’s remarks foreshadow the heated debate of the following decade about russian national identity: strongest embraces and thanks for getting me the songs! you have sent me treasures such as i didn’t even expect. we can not only take pride in the richness and greatness of our folk poetry before all other peoples, but perhaps in this matter we shall surpass even spain. [and this is true] despite the fact that there everything facilitated the preservation of folk traditions, while among us a sort of strange fate has struggled to erase them from memory. in the last 150 years especially, no fewer memories may have been destroyed than [during] the tatar invasion. this cursed chaadaevshchina makes me so furious that it often seems as though the entire great life of peter has engendered more evil fruit than good. in its mindless self-adulation it rails over the graves of the fathers and tries to exterminate the entire great store of memories in order to set up in their place momentary wisdom […] this sickly spiritual state has been squeezing and oppressing me for a long time, and the heap of songs that you sent is like a cool river in a stifling desert. with every hour i feel more intensely that the distinguishing, substantive trait of barbarity is absence of memory; that without a lively feeling of worthiness there is no great deed, no harmonious word; that there is no proper feeling of worthiness without national pride, and no national pride without national memory [1935: 42-43]. (6) chaadaev’s articulation of the problem of national identity would agitate thinking russians for the remainder of the century [aizlewood 2000]. he claimed that russians were isolated from the universal development of humankind and had failed to live through a period of debates of the westernizers and slavophiles folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 91 historical adolescence that might have provided them with unifying memories and traditions; they now existed like strangers in their own house, like nomads, without links to other peoples, “in the narrowest of presents, without a past and without a future [edie, scanlan, zeldin 1965: vol. 2, 109-11].” the nature of russia’s past and the direction of her future would constitute the nucleus of slavophile-westernizer debates within a few years: could russians take pride in a history that reached into the distant past and of what did this history consist? or did their feeble attempts at nationhood begin only with peter the great? was the real russia preserved only among the people or did peter’s thrust westward place an insignificant people on the road to true nationhood and greatness? as m.k. azadovskii remarked, both camps viewed folklore as “one of the most important elements of popular life without the analysis and study of which it was inconceivable to completely comprehend the historic fortunes of the country and the people [1958: 420].” as kireevskii’s letters to iazykov indicate, in the late 1830s and 1840s a good deal of the serious discussion about russian national identity occurred in personal correspondence and face to face in moscow literary circles, where the debate was especially heated in the years 18421845 [brodskii 1910: 7]. elagina’s house was one of moscow’s major gathering places, and many members of the intelligentsia, including the moscow westernizers t.n. granovskii, k.d. kavelin, and a.i. herzen, attended her sunday evenings during these years. (7) prior to his move to st. petersburg in 1839 even v.g. belinskii, who would soon become an uncompromising opponent, attended evenings with future slavophiles and formed a close friendship with konstantin aksakov. in 1844, however, the mortally ill iazykov wrote a poetic missive entitled “to those alien to us” (“к ненашим”) insulting the westernizers and rendering the meeting of the two camps under one roof far more difficult [lilly 1972: 802-804; herzen 1968: 546]. p.v.annenkov remarked that discussion between the groups could be quite frank, yet distinguished the atmosphere of elagina’s home as restrained, humane and something of a neutral zone where opposing opinions could be expressed freely and without fear of scorn [1928: 332]. guests included not only westernizers and slavophiles, but the historian m.p. pogodin and literary scholar shevyrev, whom herzen dubbed the “siamese twins of moscow journalism” and the “government party [1968: 544, 543].” (8) herzen’s great opponent during these evenings was a.s. khomiakov, to whom in jest he gave the nickname “il’ia muromets” since he behaved like a great 92 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi “’bogatyr’ who, on the side of orthodoxy and slavophilism, struck down everyone […][h]e cut and thrust, attacked and pursued, pelted with witticisms and quotations, frightened his opponents and drove them into an enchanted forest from which there was no escape without saying a prayer … [1968: 535].” those who knew petr kireevskii from these gatherings recall his gentleness and purity of heart [herzen 1968: 536; kavelin 1897: vol. 2, 1221; turgenev 1961: письма, vol. 2, 130,185], his support of the most desperate slavophile positions [herzen 1968: 539-40], and his near duel with granovskii following iazykov’s unfortunate poem [herzen 1968: 546]. herzen, interestingly, called both petr kireevskii and his more famous older brother ivan “mournful shades” and suspected that their often dejected miens indicated that they had been “consumed by the rust of that terrible time” and “crushed and torn to pieces by the age of nicholas [herzen 1968: 537, 538].” at these evenings the slavophiles were intent on exalting the orthodox church and showing the unnatural and divisive nature of peter the great’s reforms, which they believed had grafted artificial european manners onto the educated classes and erased any true recollection of indigenous russian culture. but, they claimed, old russia had been preserved among the simple people. curiously, khomiakov and konstantin aksakov emerged as the primary folklore theorists among the slavophiles, though neither contributed to kireevskii’s collection [soimonov, 1971: 249-50]. (9) according to soimonov, khomiakov hoped to use kireevskii’s collection, especially the religious songs, as evidence for the russian people’s deep commitment to orthodoxy. at the same time khomiakov dismissed songs about peasant rebels and claimed that they were the result of a retreat from the primal unity between the people and their rulers, while anti-clerical tales, according to him, were due to ignorance [1971: 280-81]. westernizers, who formed a less cohesive group of thinkers, admired peter and western civilization and tended to view the orthodox church as a reactionary institution in league with the oppressive regime. on balance, their attitude toward popular culture was more depreciatory than that of the slavophiles [annenkov 1928: 414-16]. yet both groups had been nourished on german idealism, both abhorred government bureaucracy, and both believed that the system of serfdom needed to be eliminated. nor did they necessarily agree within their own camps on all issues. in the company of a group of fellow westernizers, granovskii admitted that he was closer to the slavophiles than to belinskii in his views on russian nationality [natsional’nost’] and various other literary and moral matters debates of the westernizers and slavophiles folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 93 [annenkov 1928: 409]. ivan kireevskii supposedly told granovskii that, in his heart, he was closer to him but did not share many of his convictions; in religious belief he was nearer to the russian people, but did not share much else with them [herzen 1968: 538]. there is a good deal of truth in herzen’s well-known statement on the death of konstantin aksakov that both camps were possessed by the same powerful love “for the russian people, the russian way of living, the russian cast of mind. and like janus, or the two-headed eagle, they and we looked in different directions while one heart throbbed within us [1968: 549].” m.n. katkov’s assault on slavophile notions about pre-petrine rus’, contained in his review of sakharov’s folklore collection songs of the russian people (песни русского народа, изданные и. сахаровым) for notes of the fatherland in 1839, is generally regarded as the opening sally of the debate in print [pypin 1911:122-27; azadovskii, 1958: 42024]. katkov continued his attack the following year in his review of maksimovich’s history of ancient russian literature (история древней русской словесности), where he denied that old russia had any true written literature and asserted that “the lay of igor’s campaign” («слово о полку игореве») was worthless, without poetic value, and “impossible to accept as a genuine monument [1840: 67].” for katkov the history of old russia constituted a series of purely external events, lacking inner spirit and coherence, but preparing the way for peter the great who, he argued, was called forth by providence. in his review of songs of the russian people he contended that “only since peter have the russian people [narod] become a nation [natsiia], become one of the representatives of humanity […]; only since peter have higher spiritual interests entered its organism […]. but before peter we had neither art in the proper sense of the word, nor science [1839: 8].” thus, katkov, best known as the conservative editor of the russian herald (русский вестник) in the 1860s and 1870s, began his journalistic career in the camp of the westernizers, using his review of a folklore collection as a springboard for a long-winded overview of russian history that exalted the role of peter the great. katkov stressed the need for collecting folksongs, bemoaned the general lack of works like sakharov’s in russia, and reproached petr kireevskii for delaying the publication of his material [1839: 9]. unlike aksakov and khomiakov, katkov treated folklore as an entity completely separate from old russian writings and proposed calling it “folk literature” [narodnaia literatura, 1840: 57, 43]. the slavophiles placed particular reliance on 94 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi the primary chronicle, which konstantin aksakov subsequently termed “the very first and most important foundation and source of information about the lives of the ancient slavs, and especially the russians [1852: 99].” in his review of sakharov, katkov belittled the chronicle as a motley collection of stories containing a good deal of fabrication and derided scholars who scoured dusty archives looking for the meaning of ancient rus’ [1839: 32]. instead, he asserted, they should turn their attention to folksongs; “in them our rus’ is alive; […] in them is reflected the power, the expressive countenance of a great people (narod), with all its natural beauty, (just) as god created it! [7].” katkov described the inner life of the russian soul as a “bitter, melancholy feeling of indefiniteness and a certain vague dissatisfaction [38]” occasioned by a history of extreme suffering. he found reflections of this state in the tendency of russians to both despondency and unbridled debauchery. the plaintive sounds of many lyric songs, especially those concerning the hard lot of women, reflected this dejection, he claimed [76-82]. by contrast, he found the world of the epics open, bright and cheerful [57], and distinguished their main trait as the idealization of physical strength [sila]. but he cautioned against looking for real history in epics, since it is here that “the russian soul fled from the storm of reality to rest and take comfort [65].” interestingly, in distinction from aksakov and khomiakov, who argued that religious songs [stikhi] manifested the fundamental christianity of the russian people, katkov discerned in them an underlying layer of paganism. here he unwittingly repeated a view similar to one that petr kireevskii had voiced in a letter of september 1832 to iazykov: “just as many of the shrines of the ancient world escaped destruction by putting the christian cross on their roofs, so too many of our pagan traditions have been preserved by attaching themselves to songs about saints… [kireevskii 1935: 23].” according to katkov, folk poetry constituted the fullest expression of the inner life of a people at its primitive stage and, as a people developed, newer and higher forms emerged. as a result, what formerly was characteristic of the people as a whole became characteristic only of the “simple people” [to, cho prezhde bylo narodnostiiu, niskhodit na stepen’ prostonarodnosti, 25-26]. here katkov alluded to the split in russian society that occurred since peter the great. contrary to the slavophiles, who lamented the loss of what they felt was most authentic in russian life, he viewed the changes as an infusion of vital new forces and did not exclude the upper classes from the designation “narod.” rather, he regarded the upper layer of society as the vehicle through debates of the westernizers and slavophiles folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 95 which the whole people “accomplishes its purpose, expresses the idea to which it was summoned [26].” the educated classes would now be the bearer of a genuine art that would gain world fame, and the old forms of “natural” poetry belonging to the simple people [prostoi narod] would no longer be sufficient for them [26]. this schema explains in part katkov’s high praise for m.iu. lermontov’s “song of the merchant kalashnikov” (“песня про царя ивана васильевича, молодого опричника и удалого купца калашникова”); in his opinion, the writer elevated the cruder elements of folk fantasy to the level of first-rate literature [75-76]. katkov’s conceptualization of the movement from folk poetry to literature as an evolution from a lower form to a higher one which would take place within the context of national development drew heavily on the hegelian dialectic. as d.i. chizhevskii remarks, the russian hegelians of the 1840s, who included for a time not only katkov, but also belinskii, and konstantin aksakov, tended to “place their particular subject within a broad, primarily philosophicalhistorical context [1939: 171].” katkov in fact provided belinskii with a summary of hegel’s lectures from which the latter, though already acquainted with many of the philosopher’s ideas, familiarized himself with his aesthetics [chizhevskii 1939: 131; terras 1974: 95]. in both katkov’s and belinskii’s assessments, folklore is perceived as the “literature” of an early state of human existence, which, as society develops and becomes more enlightened, becomes increasingly the property of the lower strata and less historically relevant [terras 1974: 95, 59-69 and elsewhere; see also azadovskii, 1958: 440-43]. but though they shared an overall philosophical schema, belinskii’s and katkov’s understandings of particular works of folklore did not always coincide. (10) belinskii is generally considered the first russian critic to provide a genuine theoretical framework for russian folk poetry [terras 1974: 95; azadovskii 1958: 441]. though katkov collaborated with belinskii for a period on notes of the fatherland, he left for germany in late 1840 and abandoned the journal’s liberal bent [see katz 1966: 21-31; sementkovskii 1891: 12-15; and annenkov1928: 266]. belinskii’s most important treatment of folk poetry consisted of a series of essays that appeared in the last four issues of notes of the fatherland for 1841 and purported to review the second edition of kirsha danilov’s ancient russian songs, m. sukhanov’s supplement to kirsha danilov, ancient russian songs (древние русские стихотворения, 1840), the third edition of i. sakharov’s tales of the russian people (1841) and russian folk tales (русские народные сказки, part 1, st. petersburg, 1841). 96 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi to grasp belinskii’s argument, one must understand his critical lexicon, especially the words narodnost’, prostonarodnost’ and natsional’nost’. narodnost’ represents the uniqueness of one’s own people [narod] and, in combination with the human [chelovecheskoe], is a necessary component for great art: “the only literature that is genuinely narodnaia is that which is at the same time common to all mankind (obshchechelovecheskaia); and the only literature that is genuinely human (chelovecheskaia) is that which is simultaneously narodnaia [1955: vol.5, 306].” belinskii insisted that if a people (narod) has become historically significant “its narodnost’ must exist in form only, must be the manifestation of the human idea, but not the idea itself [vol. 5, 306].” prostonarodnost’ implies an attempt to capture the language, customs, or dress of a people without capturing their inner essence. belinskii complained that in recent russian literature “such falsely understood narodnost’ has gushed forth like a huge swamp. peasant men and women, coachmen, bearded merchants have not only received the right of citizenship, […] but have been made the only privileged heroes. a successful imitation of the language of the mob, the jargon of village squares and cook shops has become the sign of narodnost’… [5: 299].” natsional’nost’ is related to the concept of “nation” [natsiia], and belinskii believed that russia started on the path toward nationhood only with peter. according to his understanding, great art must be simultaneously “natsional’noe” and “narodnoe” and only a great nation could produce such art [vol. 5, 301; see also terras 1974: 94 and azadovskii 1958: 445]. for belinskii, folk poetry represented the expression of the adolescent stage of a people who had yet to acquire world significance and become a nation [natsiia]. literary productions, he contended, were far more artistic than those of the folk: “one small poem of a genuine poet-artist is immeasurably greater than all works of folk poetry put together [vol. 5, 309].” in his opinion, the integrity of an artistic work depended on the resolution of the tension between naturalness [estestvennost’] and artificiality [iskustvennost’]; yet, he emphasized, naturalness and narodnost’ are not equivalents [vol. 5, 301]. he distinguished the two great epochs in the life of a nation as the epoch of natural immediacy and the epoch of conscious existence [vol. 5, 308] and claimed that a “people that has not yet awakened from the natural state to one of self-consciousness can have folk [narodnye] poems and songs only; they cannot have poets, and especially great poets [vol. 5, 331].” (11) prior to peter the great, he maintained, russian popular poetry and debates of the westernizers and slavophiles folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 97 daily life displayed an abundance of vitality and was “entirely capable and entirely worthy of becoming a vessel of an immensely great soul, but deprived of this soul could only await it and seek it [vol. 5, 399].” belinskii acknowledged the allure of plaintive folksongs reflecting the inner life and daily hardships of the people [vol. 5, 329], and he strongly encouraged collecting efforts. but he had a low opinion of kievan epics. he used the term “skazki” in reference to them because he felt that they were not true poems. in a real poem, he stated, the poet places the subject higher than himself and evokes admiration for it. epics from the kievan cycle fail to do this and are pure entertainment with a good deal of prosaic expression and prostonarodnost’ [vol. 5, 354]. in distinction to katkov, he found no trace of dual faith in the kievan cycle, which he wrongly dated to the period following the tatar yoke, and he regarded “the lay of igor’s campaign” as far more artistic than oral epics because he discerned in it the stamp of the poetic and human spirit of southern rus’ [vol. 5, 332-33]. his treatment of the poems themselves consisted mostly of retellings interspersed with comments. in his opinion, the kievan epics lacked distinct images and historical significance and their overall emphasis was on physical strength “triumphing over all obstacles, even good sense [5:398].” regarding the supposed heroic quality of the byliny he remarked: “heroism is the first stage of a people’s awakening awareness of life. and savage, animal strength, the strength of an iron fist or pig-iron skull is the first stage of a people’s consciousness of heroism. this is why among all peoples heroes gobble up entire bulls, snack on rams, and drink barrel after barrel [of wine]. but a people in whose life the [notion of the] commonly human (obshchee) develops moves on further, and the second stage of its awareness of heroism is the illumination of the animal force by sense of duty, truth, and valor. our folksong singing stopped on the first stage and did not develop further. therefore our epic heroes (bogatyri) are shades, phantoms, mirages, and not definite images, not characters, not defined ideals. they have no notions of valor and duty, and any form of service is acceptable to them, any act of daring is for them a feat (podvig) be it conquering an entire army and trampling it with their horses or drinking an entire pail of green wine in one gulp … [vol. 5, 398]. while katkov viewed the epics as an escape from reality, belinskii sought in them indications of the historical situation of ancient russia. he saw the kievan cycle as reflecting the dismal status of women, the emphasis on brute strength untempered by reason, and drunkenness and the novgorod cycle as showing faint glimmers of civic awareness. no doubt it was this embryo of civic awareness that caused belinskii to rank 98 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi the novgorod epics far higher in spirit and content than the kievan ones. here, he claimed, one sees in the new and special world of the city of novgorod “a prototype of russian civilization and generally of the forms of social and family life of ancient rus’ [vol. 5, 401].” belinskii’s articles display a condescending attitude toward folklore. (12) in part this can be attributed to his hegelian schema which assigns folklore to a phase of development that would be transcended as a people progressed toward genuine nationhood and true (literary) art. in addition, belinskii was generally known for contemptuous outbursts about peasant life, which he called a “bast shoe and homespun reality [annenkov 1928: 333].” both westernizers of his own time and soviet critics tried to soften his negative attitude by attributing it to his indignation at the extent to which centuries of oppression had demoralized the people [azadovskii 1958: 451, 454; see also terras 1974: 95-96]. there is some merit to this argument. by the time he wrote his essays on folk poetry, belinskii had entered the final stage of his development as a critic: he had become uncompromisingly hostile to the regime of nicholas i and had come to view literature as a weapon in the struggle for social justice. (13) his abhorrence of serfdom and despotism prompted him to assess folk epics, not on the basis of their artistic merit, but according to what he perceived as their underlying social code and he came to prefer the faint glimmers of freedom in the novgorod cycle to the affirmation of a patriarchal and princely hegemony in the kievan songs. belinskii’s derisive attitude toward peasant culture exerted a significant influence on others. in the late 1840s even f.m. dostoevskii echoed the critic’s negative sentiments about folklore, though by the 1860s and 1870s he would, like the slavophiles, speak of the epic hero il’ia muromets as embodying the exalted religious ideas of the people [ivanits 515, 521-22]. among the westernizers, k.d. kavelin constituted an exception to this scornful outlook [annenkov 1928: 416-17]. a liberal with close friends among the moscow slavophiles, kavelin collected folklore and contributed material from various provinces to kireevskii’s collection [see gladkikh 1996: 88-91]. after moving to st. petersburg he continued his folklore work as a member of the russian geographic society where he organized material coming into the archives and worked on the publication of various ethnographic miscellanies. he called for a more rigorous and historically grounded methodology in folklore studies and, in an 1848 review, soundly criticized tereshchenko’s daily life of the russian people for its lack of a scientific approach [see gladkikh 1996: 93-96]. kavelin’s folklore debates of the westernizers and slavophiles folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 99 activities acquainted him with the actual life of the russian peasantry and later served him well in his work toward the emancipation of the serfs. (14) the slavophiles constituted a fairly homogenous group. they came from gentry backgrounds and tended to idealize the russian narod and the ancestral way of life that they sought to maintain on their estates. khomiakov expressed their general attitude toward folklore in his preface to the four songs from kireevskii’s collection included in the moscow miscellany (московский сборник) for 1852. according to him, in the people’s songs and tales “the olden times (starina) live powerfully and freshly [1852: 324].” konstantin aksakov termed the peasant “the best person” in russia [azadovskii 1958: 379]. aksakov was easily the most extreme of the slavophiles [walicki 1975: 238], and pypin was probably right in terming him an “armchair” folklorist who “hovered in the realm of theoretical and poetic constructions where, unconfronted by reality, ideals remote from life are easily created [1891: vol. 2, 204].” though he often dressed in peasant costume, it appears that he seldom actually ventured into the village to collect songs, and was thus different from his younger brother ivan who wrote down a number of songs while on government assignment to investigate sectarians in iaroslavl’ province [see brodskii 1922: 6-9]. for his master’s dissertation, “lomonosov in the history of russian literature and the russian language” («ломоносов в истории русской литературы и русского языка»), which was written in the early 1840s and published in 1846, konstantin aksakov adopted a hegelian framework. he characterized the pre-petrine period of russian history as one of exclusive nationality [natsional’nost’] and one-sidedness, manifested in folksong, which, he claimed, reflected common and national, but not individual emotions and situations: folksong reflects the life of the people, and the people only […]. there is no common human content here […]; there is no individual, personal life […]. [f]or this reason, folksong belongs to all the people equally; that is why the entire people sing folksongs and why all people have equal right to such songs; that is why a folksong does not bear the name of its composer […] the entire substance of the people, with all its depth and richness, with all its many attributes, is reflected in such poetry, but it is limited to national (narodnaia) substance only. the people (narod) appear as a unit, a mass that consumes the individual […] there are no poets here; the poet is the people [narod] […] as the period of exclusive nationality passes, the individual is set free, and the human being in general is set free at the same time. […] in ceasing to be 100 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi exclusive, nationality [natsional’nost’] loses nothing; on the contrary […] it is elevated [1981a: 41-43] aksakov’s text presents peter the great as a pivotal figure who exposed and struck down old russia’s one-sidedness [31]; in literature lomonosov represented the parallel to peter, since he embodied the transition from mass consciousness to individuality [36]. this schema assumed the necessity of forward movement in history, rendering peter a positive figure. of course, within slavophile dogma the notions that old russia needed to change and that peter represented a constructive force constituted heresy, and aksakov subsequently abandoned hegel, most likely under the influence of khomiakov [azadovskii 1958: 385]. yet several pages of his dissertation contain the standard slavophile teaching about il’ia muromets. these pages were inserted in place of a section removed by the censor that was to expound the need for a new turn in the direction of national consciousness, a section that criticized peter’s as turning away from russian history and literature toward that which was foreign [aksakov 1981a: 31; see pypin 1891: vol. 2, 195, footnote 1; azadovskii 1958: 384]. emphasizing il’ia muromets’ christianity and peasant origin and insisting on the interchangeability of the words “christian” [khristianin ] and “peasant” [krest’ianin, 51], aksakov viewed him as a manifestation of the true spirit of the people [narod]: the esteemed assembly of heroes that gathered around the great kievan prince vladimir is great and diverse; they all express the many sides of the russian spirit. but of all of them the most powerful is the chosen one of the russian people il’ia muromets. the russian spirit […] is expressed foremost in him. he alone is old among the young; he alone is free from rivalry. the story of how he was a cripple for thirty years is remarkably well-known to every russian. it points to the essence of the russian spirit, captures the image of the people itself, which also, like il’ia muromets, stored up its strength during the period of exclusive nationality and will rise above other nations just as the bogatyr’ il’ia muromets rose above the other bogatyri. he stored up terrible strength and he arose and assumed its power, but not to insult and destroy others, not for the wanton spilling of blood, but rather for the defense of good and the defeat of evil, for peace and tranquility. let’s look more closely at il’ia muromets, at this image of the russian people. first of all he is a peasant; he arose from the depths of the russian land, from where the pure source of faith and simple life springs. among the other bogatyri, some are well-known heroes of high birth, some are relatives of vladimir, and so forth. il’ia muromets alone is a peasant, and he is greater and stronger than everybody. this constitutes a very important and fundamental trait of his image. in him there is no frenetic boldness and daring, as in the other bogatyri …; he is quiet and tranquil and quietly debates of the westernizers and slavophiles folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 101 powerful. only when necessary does he manifest his insuperable might [1981a: 50-51]. khomiakov echoed the above sentiments about il’ia muromets in his preface to the songs from kireevskii’s collection in the moscow miscellany. he termed the hero’s strength “unconquerable, always in the service of good sense and duty, a noble strength, full of belief in the help of god, alien to passions, and tied to the land from which he emerged with unbreakable bonds. and isn’t it precisely this russian land that russian singers have unconsciously used as inspiration and personified in him? [1852: 331].” shevryev bolstered the slavophile christianization of the folk epic and the exaltation of il’ia muromets in his lectures on russian literature at moscow university in the mid 1840s. he taught that in the epic heroes the russian people [narod] had embodied its two greatest feats: the defeat and eradication of the asiatic hordes and the annihilation of paganism and sorcery [1887: 131]. interestingly, the slavophile notion of il’ia muromets as the model of an unselfish yet mighty hero, representative of the true spirit of the people and devoted to his native land has proved tenacious. it even prevailed in the soviet period, without its extreme christian overtones of course [see astakhova 1958: 393-98 and elsewhere]. in konstantin aksakov’s view, it was possible to bring the prepetrine past into the present. he advocated not a return to what had ceased to be, but turn to what, he alleged, actually existed in the mindset and customs of the simple people [see azadovskii 1958: 378-79]. here he had in mind not only orthodoxy, but also the communal organization of village life [obshchina], which he detected in the arrangement of the heroes of the kievan epics around vladimir’s table. (15) to him, the diverse social composition of the bogatyri (consisting of the peasant il’ia muromets, the aristocrat dobrynia nikitich, the cleric alesha popovich, the merchant’s son ivan, and so forth) and the inclusion of women at the feast was a reflection of the actual social structure of ancient russian life. this, along with the overall balance between personal freedom and willing service to the prince was an ideal that he promoted [“bogatyri” 1981b: 93]. moreover, he contended, “christianity is the main basis of vladimir’s entire world. […] these feasts, this way of life also have an all-russian significance: we see the entire russian land assembled in one place, gathered together by the christian faith into a single unit centered around the grand prince vladimir, the enlightener of the russian land [1981b: 94-95].” 102 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi one must question the extent to which petr kireevskii genuinely agreed with the positions that khomiakov and konstantin aksakov took regarding folklore. mention of kireevskii’s collecting work receives minimal attention in annenkov’s and herzen’s recollections of him, and one suspects that he preferred not to make elaborate speculations about the meaning of folklore during evenings at his mother’s house [kavelin 1898: vol. 2, 1220 gives a good deal more information about kireevskii’s life’s work in his obituary]. soimonov thinks that petr kireevskii suffered inner turmoil because of “the incompatibility of the slavophile doctrine, which he shared, to the materials of his folklore collection [279].” the remarks kireevskii made in his articles, letters, and public statements suggest that we should take soimonov seriously. as noted earlier he glimpsed remnants of pre-christianity behind the images of some saints found in religious songs (stikhi). religious considerations were evidently not the motivation for his urging iazykov, in a letter of 21 april 1837, to collect stikhi as quickly as possible. rather, he feared that these songs would disappear quickly because a new regulation had been issued reclassifying the beggars who sang religious songs and designating them vagrants [1935: 74-75]. on the basis of his materials he surely knew that peasants revered not only il’ia muromets, but also bandits and peasant rebels such as razin; a number of songs about razin appear in his collection [1868: vol. 7, 32-43]. we can also infer that he disagreed with aksakov’s contention that village life and folklore constituted a replication of the olden times in the present. kireevskii, in fact, suspected that many of the best folksongs belonged to an irretrievable past. as he phrased it in a lecture he delivered in 1848 at moscow university: “it is possible to compare russian songs with a magnificent tree still full of strength and beauty, but already cut down. the innumerable branches of this tree are still covered with fresh foliage; its flowers and fruit still exude the fragrance of the fullness of life. but already there are no new offshoots, no new buds that will yield new flowers and fruit [quoted from soimonov 1971: 250].” petr kireevskii, of all his contemporaries, no doubt had the most extensive knowledge of the russian folksong repertoire and its characteristics. yet he seldom theorized about folklore and on occasion seems to have deliberately ceded folklore commentary to others. the third issue of the muscovite for 1845 included two open letters to pogodin protesting his emphasis on the supposed meekness and docility ancient russians manifested in accepting norman rule. the historical argument fell to petr kireevskii, who developed his objections on the debates of the westernizers and slavophiles folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 103 basis of the chronicles, while the task of correcting pogodin’s misconceptions about folk poetry fell to maksimovich. defending the slavophile position that the leadership of riurik represented continuity, not submissiveness and indifference, and was grafted onto an already existing political-social system, kireevskii wrote: “one must admit that […] a people [narod] who submit peacefully to the first invader who comes along, who accept alien rulers without any resistance, whose distinguishing trait is unconditional submissiveness and indifference, who even deny their faith when ordered to do so by alien rulers, could not evoke great sympathy. such a people would be devoid of all spiritual strength, of all human dignity, cast off by god, (they would be a people) from whom nothing great could emerge [1845: 13-14].” kireevskii cites the resistance to foreign invaders that the russians showed during the tatar yoke, the time of troubles, and the war of 1812 as evidence of their lack of docility. the second instance concerned the moscow miscellany in 1852, where, as already noted, khomiakov supplied the preface to the four songs from kireevskii’s collection, approaching them from an ideological rather than aesthetic perspective. he offered the standard slavophile understanding of il’ia muromets; found christian meaning in a song about a bandit who, though belonging to the worst class of criminals, might still repent; but completely ignored wedding poetry. kireevskii’s afterword to the same texts seems totally disconnected from khomiakov’s preface; it makes no mention of christianity and uses a different term for byliny (khomiakov called them “skazki,” while kireevskii included them under “historical songs”). kireevskii contended that conditions for preserving historical songs worsened at the beginning of the eighteenth century and designates peter as the dividing line between the songs of higher artistic value and the newer, less successful ones. at the same time he notes that songs are still being created among the don and volga cossacks. this seems to be an allusion to songs about razin and pugachev. kireevskii mentioned the absence of songs about the tatar yoke from his considerable collection and concluded that the people had preserved only the memory of the bright side of ivan the terrible’s reign [1852: 355-56]. (16) on balance, then, slavophiles sought evidence of the people’s christian and communal essence in folksongs, though this position seems to have enjoyed half-hearted support from petr kireevskii. westernizers looked to songs for signs of the cultural inadequacy and oppressed status of the peasantry. belinskii’s relegation of folklore to a subordinate position in russia’s development complemented his belief that the 104 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi people needed to make the transition from ignorance and crudeness to political consciousness and responsibility and that the educated members of society needed to guide them [see terras 1974: 94, 100]. given the severe censorship of the era, he could only hint at these sentiments in print. but they were clearly stated in his widely-circulated letter to gogol’, where he insisted that russia’s salvation lay not in mysticism or asceticism, but in civilization, enlightenment and the awakening in the people of a sense of human dignity. for him the most pressing national concerns were the abolishment of serfdom and corporal punishment and the strict observance of those laws that were already in existence [1955: 10: 213]. he denied that the people and their folklore were fundamentally christian, remarking: “about whom does the narod tell dirty stories? about the priest, his wife, his daughter, and his worker. […] the russian man utters the name of god while scratching his rear end. he says of the icon: if it’s not good for praying, then it’s good for covering the pot. […] in them [the people] there is a great deal of superstition and not even a trace of religiosity [10: 215].” these general lines of slavophile and westernizer thinking about the people and folklore would, of course, continue throughout the century. in marshaling songs to the support of their ideological agendas, aksakov, khomiakov and belinskii all neglected the artistry of the texts. but this was by no means true of all slavophiles and westernizers. petr kireevskii, kavelin, and a number of other collectors seemed motivated largely by the allure of the songs themselves. kireevskii, despite difficulties in publishing his material, stood at the center of a huge national enterprise which involved many educated russians of his generation and, through his work with students at moscow university, prepared the next generation of collectors and scholars, who would help establish russian folklore as a discipline in its own right. p.i. iakushkin, who worked closely with him during the last decade of his life, was no doubt the most prominent of them (17). under nicholas i lively interactions took place among folklorists and between collectors and writers, a good number of whom also gathered folksongs. kireevskii gave snegirev material relating to popular celebrations and beliefs and received folksongs in return; dal’ gave kireevskii songs, some of which he received from pogodin, in exchange for proverbs, sayings, and folktales, some of which had been transcribed by iakushkin and eventually found their way to afanas’ev’s collection [soimonov 1971: 209-10; 230]. dal’ assisted pushkin and gave him songs when the latter journeyed to orenburg to gather information about debates of the westernizers and slavophiles folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 105 pugachev [blagoi et al. 1968: 443]. pushkin, n.v. gogol’, dal’, and a.v. kol’tsov all contributed to kireevskii’s collection [blagoi et al. 1968]. azadovskii affirms that lermontov was familiar with material from kireevskii’s archive. he visited him in moscow in early 1837 and likely acquainted himself with a song from the simbirsk province about “two kulashnikovs,” from which he derived the name “kalashnikov” used in his own work [azadovskii 1960: 238-39]. turgenev was well acquainted with the aksakovs and seems to have received material regarding sectarians from ivan aksakov, which he used for his work on notes of a hunter (записки охотника, 1852) [brodskii 1922: 6-9]. the writer also became acquainted with kireevskii in the early 1840s through the elagina salon, and they subsequently visited each other’s estates. turgenev was familiar with kireevskii’s work and may have seen some of the latter’s variants of the songs he used in “the singers” («певцы»), one of the most beloved sketches from notes of a hunter [azadovskii 1960: 425; see also soimonov 1971: 275-78]. thus, though publication of folklore material was difficult and a solid methodology and “science” of folklore had yet to be developed, the period’s vast collecting efforts and networks of personal interactions rendered it rich in a different way. it prepared fertile soil for the burst of folklore activity and publications of the 1860s and 1870s. notes 1 the present essay is part of the introductory material for a book in progress on folklore and national identity in russian literature during the reign of nicholas i. v.g. bazanov offers an illustration of the prohibition of bandit folklore in the tula provincial news (тульские губернские ведомости) in 1848. the censorship committee concluded that it would be better to cease publishing legends of the daring deeds and buried treasure of local bandits, especially of kudeiar. their argument was that if such legends were fostered among the people they would work against government interests, and since provincial newspapers were official publications, their purpose must be the dissemination of useful ideas or “at least not harmful, and not of such mindless fables …[1973: 266, footnote 3, quoted from tsgaop, f. 100, op. 1, no 99, l. 4].” but censorship was quite inconsistent, and in the case of the saratov provincial news (саротовские губернские ведомости), bandit songs escaped the attention of the authorities, who focused their attention instead on songs 106 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi about unequal and forced marriages. n.i. kostomarov’s folk song collection, which had been appearing for several years, was forced to cease publication since these songs allegedly presented “the criminal and sorrowful side of peasant life, and in particular the anguish and despair of husbands whose wives had become hateful to them and who sought satisfaction and contentment outside family life [alekseeva 1962: 274, 275].” 2 the term “folklore” was not used in russia until the very end of the nineteenth century. see ryan, 2006: 13, footnote 29. berlin, 1978; bowman, 1954; and riasanovsky, 1965 contain almost nothing on folklore. terras, 1974 summarizes belinskii’s folklore articles, and walicki, 1975 briefly mentions folklore in aksakov’s dissertation on lomonosov. he also notes belinskii’s negative attitude toward folklore reproductions, but does not discuss folklore as a topic of westernizer-slavophile debates. neither the introduction to a selection of critical works from the 1840s and 1850s by kantor and ospovat, 1982, nor the study of belinskii’s argument with the slavophiles by tikhonova, 1999, contains anything on folklore. 3 for more complete bibliographic information see azadovskii 1958: 176-79, 235-37, and elsewhere; for folktales see novikov 1961 and 1971; for folklore in the muscovite see p. bartenev, 1855. “index of articles and materials about folklore published in the muscovite from 1841 to 1855” (указатель статей и материалов по фольклору и этнографии россии, помещаны в «москвитянине» за 1841-1855 годы). 4 one should perhaps mention the inexhaustible efforts of v.i. dal’, who belonged to neither the slavophile nor the westernizer camp. the vast material he gathered entered his dictionary, his collections of proverbs and superstitions, as well as the collections of others, most notably a.n. afanas’ev’s russian folktales (народные русские сказки) and russian folk legends (народные русские легенды). see, e.g., vlasova 1976 and blagoi et al. 1968: 441-448. also beyond the scope of the present paper is the folklore work of other slavic nations, especially ukrainians, and their interactions with the russians. see, e.g., azadovskii 1958: 255-327 and soimonov 1968. 5 for a treatment of the writers who contributed to kireevskii’s archive see blagoi, et al., 1968. 6 translations are my own except for those from herzen. for chadaaev’s take on peter the great, see mcnally, 1964. debates of the westernizers and slavophiles folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 107 7 azadovskii 1960a [“narodnaia pesnia”]: 314, emphasizes that in the 1840s slavophiles and westernizers, including belinskii, who by 1840 lived in st. petersburg, were generally aware of each other’s verbal statements and letters as well as of material that appeared in print. soimonov 1971: 49 indicates that the secret police had placed elagina’s evenings under supervision. regarding the all-encompassing nature of the slavophile-westernizer debate in moscow salons in the early 1840s herzen wrote, “the arguments were renewed at every literary and nonliterary evening at which we met, and that was two or three times a week. on monday we assembled at chaadayev’s, on tuesdays at sverbeyev’s, and on sundays at madame a.p. yelagin’s [1968: 535].” 8 on pogodin and shevyrev as official nationalists rather than slavophiles see, for example, thaden 1964: 23; see also thaden 1999, 90-101. 9 in 1838 khomiakov may have helped draft kireevskii’s public appeal for folksongs (“pesennaia proklamatsiia”), which was published in several provincial newspapers [see soimonov 1971: 169-71]. 10 azadovskii tries to distance belinskii’s position on folklore from that which katkov expressed in his review of sakharov and claims that, even in his early articles, katkov displays a tendency toward archconservatism [1958: 421-24]. 11 both katkov and belinskii considered the greeks an exception to this law of development; true art existed among them from the beginning [see katkov 1839: 23-24 and elsewhere]. 12 azadovskii tries to attribute the impression that belinskii viewed folklore negatively to his harsh criticism of pushkin’s skazki as an example of false narodnost’ [1958: 435 and elsewhere]. interestingly, while rejecting pushkin’s folktales, belinskii, like katkov, enthusiastically welcomed lermontov’s “song of the merchant kalashnikov” [azadovskii 1958: 451]. 13 see chizhevskii 1939: 134-39, terras 1974: 197-98, and bowman 1954: 106-39 for a discussion of belinskii’s middle period (1839-40) of reconciliation to social reality, based on a misinterpretation of hegel’s proposition that “all that is real is rational.” 14 see field 1973: 64-69 for kavelin’s part in preparing for the emancipation and wortman 1962 for the part played by liberal slavophiles including iurii samarin. 15 the notion of the obshchina as the primary organization among the early russians was an idée fixe with aksakov. his chief opponents among the westernizers were d.k. kavelin and s.m. solov’ev, who 108 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi argued for organization on a kinship (clan) model. this subject is outside the scope of the present essay. for more information see offord 1985; thaden 1999; korsakov 1896; and prilenskii 1995. 16 p.i. iakushkin, who served as kireevskii’s close collaborator from the mid 1840s until his death, later found songs presenting a negative image of ivan the terrible in the pskov and novgorod regions [zemlianova 1958: 190]. 17 kireevskii entrusted the task of preparing his material for publication after his death to iakushkin. iakushkin worked on the material according to the plan left by kireevskii for about a year, but was removed from the project in favor of p.a. bessonov. see balandin 1969: 57-95 and, for iakushkin as a political radical, gleason 1980. bibliography afanas’ev, a. n. 1858. афанасьев, а.н. народные русские сказки [russian folktales]. москва: изд. к. солдатенкова и н. щепкина. afanas’ev, a. n. 1859. афанасьев, а.н. народные русские легенды [russian folk legends]. москва: изд. н. щепкина и к. солдатенкова. aizlewood, robin. 2000. “revisiting russian identity in russian thought: from chaadaev to the early twentieth century,” slavonic and east european review, vol. 78, no. 1, pp. 20-43. aksakov, k. s. 1852. аксаков, к.с. «о древнем быте у славян вообще и у русских в особенности (по поводу мнений о родовом быте) » [“on the ancient way of life of the slavs in general and the russians in particular (apropos of kinship customs)”]. московский сборник, москва: семен, 51-139. aksakov, k. s. 1981a [1846]. аксаков, к.с. «ломоносов в истории русской литературы и русского языка» [“lomonosov in the history of russian literature and the russian language”], к.с. и и.с. аксаков, литературная критика, москва: современник, 30-89 aksakov, k. s. 1981b [1856]. аксаков, к.с. «богатыри времен великого князя владимира по русским песням» [“epic heroes of the time of great prince vladimir according to russian songs”], к.с. и и.с. аксаков, литературная критика, москва: современник, 89-139. debates of the westernizers and slavophiles folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 109 alekseeva, o. b. 1962. алексеева, о.б. «из цензурных материалов о народных песнях» [“from censored materials about folk songs”]. русский фольклор (материалы и исследования), т. 7, 374-76. annenkov, p. v. 1928 [1881]. анненков, п.в. «замечательное десятилетие (1838-1848)» [“the remarkable decade”] литературные воспоминания [literary memoirs]. ленинград: «academia», 161-601. astakhova, a. m. 1958. астахова, а.м. «илья муромец в русском эпосе» [“il’ia muromets in the russian epic,”]. илья муромец, москва и ленинград: ан ссср, 393-419. azadovskii, m. k. 1958. азадовский, м.к. история русской фольклористики [the history of russian folkloristics]. москва: учпедгиз. azadovskii, m. k. 1960a [1941]. азадовский, м.к. «фольклоризм лермонтова» [“lermontov’s folklorism”]. статьи о литературе и фольклоре, москва и ленинград: государственное издательство художественной литературы, 212-59. azadovskii, m. k. 1960b [1950]. азадовский, м.к. «народная песня в концепциях русских революционных просвитетелей 40-х годов» [“the folksong in the conceptions of russian revolutionary enlighteners of the 1840s”]. статьи о литературе и фольклоре, москва и ленинград: государственное издательство художественной литературы, 305-40. balandin, a. i. 1969. баландин, а.и. п.и. якушкин: из истории русской фольклористики [p.i. iakushkin: from the history of russian folkloristics], москва: наука. bazanov, v. g. 1973. базанов, в.г. от фольклора к народной книге [from folklore to a popular book]. ленинград: художественная литература. belinskii, v. g. 1955 [1841, 1847]. белинский, в.г. полное собрание сочинений [complete works]. москва: ан ссср, тт. 5, 10. berlin, isiah. 1978. russian thinkers, ed. henry hardy and aileen kelly, london: the hogarth press bessonov, p. a. 1861. бессонов, п.а. калеки перехожие [wandering beggars] москва: семен. blagoi, d. d., a. s. bushmin, v. v. vinogradov, et al. 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can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader 5.0 and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice microsoft word folk2010e.doc folklorica 2010, vol. xv 188 patty wageman, (et al. ed.). russian legends. folk tales and fairy tales. rotterdam, netherlands: groninger museum, nai publishers, 2007. $49.95 (paper). 215 pp. catalogue. summaries of fairy tales and byliny. list of works in the exhibition. photo credits. credits. isbn 97890-5662-608-2. this lavish edition appeared on the occasion of the exhibition “russian legends, folk tales and fairy tales” at the groninger museum, in the netherlands, held from december 15, 2007 to april 6, 2008. the exhibit was an unprecedented thematic exposition of the art works of the foremost russian artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, viktor vasnetsov, ivan bilibin, elena polenova, mikhail vrubel’, nikolai roerikh, and vasily kandinsky. the common theme was the artists’ interest in modern representations of russian folk legends and folktales in art. the book contains a collection of articles that discuss the artwork of the aforementioned artists. the second half of the book is the exhibition catalogue. the edition also presents summaries of the most popular russian folktales and byliny, which provide a good explanatory basis for interpreting the images given in the catalogue and help to connect the visual representations with folkloric narratives. this beautiful publication boasts a superior quality of reproductions and paper and creates a perfect visual encyclopaedia of the russian art of modernity and modernism that was inspired by the slavic revival triggered during the reign of alexander iii and the subsequent flourishing of the style russe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. in his foreword the director of the groninger museum, keen van twist, points out that this exhibition is a first. it is important, he states, because all the works presented are emblematic of their style. thus viktor vasnetsov’s artworks presented in the catalogue are “icons of nineteenth-century russian painting” (8) and elena polenova and ivan bilibin are important because they created the new imaginary realm of russian history and folklore. similarly, nikolai roerikh and vasily kandinsky represent the expressionist treatment of folkloric images. the first article of the collection is “cinderella without her glass slipper; snow white without her dwarves” by sijbolt noorda. it is an attempt to parallel russian and western fairytales. the author states that, while folk stories are now usually told to children, in fact they are about real life. the author compares the beautiful vasilisa from the russian folktale to cinderella (13-15) and snow white to the heroine of “the tale of dead tsarevna and seven bogatyrs”, the story retold by nienke reviews 189 folklorica 2010, vol. xv van hichtum and known in the netherlands as fairytale “olechka” (1516). he looks for the allusions between these different stories that were produced by european and russian folk cultures. the second essay in the book is patty wageman’s “once upon a time… words into pictures”. it discusses the history of skazki and byliny’s transformation from an oral tradition into an illustrative narrative in lubki (pl., lubok – sing.). the author describes examples of mythological personages emerging into lubki and how lubki’s imagery was adopted by the russian artists v. vasnetsov, i. bilibin and n. roerikh. for example, she focuses on the theme of sirin and alkonost, the mythological creatures with female faces and breasts and birds’ bodies. according to slavic mythology, between the two birds of paradise, alkonost personifies the will of god and paradise, while sirin is a bird of sorrow. the author explores how these personages are interpreted in both lubki and vasnetsov’s famous paintings (24-25). the author also interprets russian heroic byliny as a metamorphosis of the legend of st. george and the dragon. the next work, “byliny in russian art” by lidia iovleva, is a survey of the growing attention to folklore that happened during the 19th century. the article is devoted primarily to the various folk motifs in russian art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, describing mostly the works of the peredvizhniki and the abramtsevo artists’ colony. in the context of byliny, the author briefly mentions sadko in il’ia repin’s artistic rendition. the text speaks little of byliny, and it would have been more solid if the author paid more attention to this rich folkloric genre and its versatile visual explorations by russian artists. the essay by david jackson, “out of their minds: the fantasy worlds of viktor vasnetsov and ivan bilibin,” is a detailed approach to the artistic career of these artists. the art historian describes vasnetsov and bilibin’s artistic biographies, focusing on the artists’ concerns with folklore in the framework of the history of russian culture. this work provides a strong contextual analysis of the artworks with folkloric motifs. however, the two artists’ biographies are linked together neither by comparison of artistic means, or approaches to, or interpretations of folklore, nor by any biographical intersections. perhaps if the article had been divided into two separate essays, each devoted to a single artist, the work would been more meaningful. the article written by ellen rutten, “kashchei the immortal versus the people: viktor vasnetsov and the political interpretation of folk tales in russian culture”, discusses the politicization of russian folktales in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. this quite radical interpretation tells us that the images of princesses and folklorica 2010, vol. xv 190 tsarevnas in vasnetsov’s and other’s renditions symbolize russia, while kashchei represents the powers of political darkness. to support her claim, the author brings to the readers’ attention the images of political caricature from the early 20th century where russia is personified as a folkloric maiden (presumably, tsarevna). she relates the folklore-inspired art of the early 20th century with the contemporary russian political interpretation of vasnetsov’s folktale images (57). vladimir kruglov’s “nikolai roerikh’s byliny and fairy tales” is devoted to roerikh and his art on folkloric themes discussed in a biographical context. the author details the artist’s formal language, devoting most of his text to a detailed description of images. the last essay in this collection is the profound and well written art-historical article “vasily kandinsky and folklore: a journey from science to art” by natasha kurchanova. the author explores kandinsky’s “folkloric” artworks putting them into the context of the artist’s “ethnographic quest”. the only artist that is widely represented in the catalogue, but whose folktale illustrations remained unanalysed, is elena polenova. an essay devoted to this artist, one of the foremost russian artists of the abramtsevo colony, who participated in peasant wood-carving workshops and was interested in folklore and folk art and left a wonderful art heritage, would definitely enrich this collection. the book is mostly addressed to the general reader and aims to popularize russian art inspired by folkloric themes. in fact, this is the only thematic compilation of high-quality reproductions of russian art inspired by folklore. as such, it will definitely find its devotees among the lovers of art and folklore. however, almost all the essays in this collection are written by art historians – one is by a theologian – and no works by folklorists are included. this omission results in a number of regrettable errors. for example, there is a confusion of genres. all the authors tend to confuse fairytales and folktales and to use the two terms interchangeably. “fairytales” is a term used to refer to literary creations, the immediate source of which is not necessarily oral and folkloric. and fairies never occur as personages of slavic folklore. all the skazki mentioned and summarized in the book are magic tales, a sub-genre of folktales of oral origin. according to vladimir propp (see his istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki) russian magic folktales do describe magical events, but they refer to rituals of initiation. additionally, due to the exclusion of a specialist in folklore from the production of this book, some articles have disappointing misconceptions that would merely perplex the general (and specialist) reader. for reviews 191 folklorica 2010, vol. xv example, it is hard to agree with the statement that “in the west they [folktales] were primarily intended for children and often contained a moral message” and in russia the folktales “were told only after the children had gone to sleep” (24), when in both russia and europe the original addressees of folktales were mostly adults. as well, it is difficult to accept the identification of the popular personage yeruslan lazarevich, whose storyline came to russian lubok books from middle asia (see lubochnaia kniga / podgotovka teksta, sostavlenie, vstupitel’naia stat’ia, kommentarii a. reitblata. moskva: khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), with russian byliny heroes (27). it is a misinterpretation to assume, based on v. vasnetsov’s the sleeping tsarevna (52-3), that its plot or the plot of the ballet the sleeping beauty (52) is of russian folkloric origin. in fact, this narrative came to russia as the folktale “the sharp rose” from the brothers grimm’s collection. in 1831, during the romanticist enthusiasm for folklore, it was retold by v.a. zhukovskii in verse form, recontextualizing the european folkloric plot into a traditional russian setting. another weakness of this edition are the numerous misprints and misleading details. for example, the 9th endnote to the essay by sijbolt noorda (16-17) does not appear on the page and the reader remains uninformed about the quoted source written by regina bendix. the editing/transliteration of the collection also required more attention. for example, donetsk appears as “donets” (41), the name of viktor zhirmunsky – as zhimunsky (64), etc. moreover, the reader seeking further scholarly detail would not likely be satisfied by references to wikipedia that lurk in the endnotes (14; endnote 4). placing these unfortunate misprints and errors aside, this is a marvellous thematic compilation of artwork and it will undoubtedly find its admirers who would celebrate the appearance of a wonderful source of russian visual culture inspired by folktales and folk epics. by connecting the reader to traditional russian folklore, via the paintings and graphic art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this publication opens new horizons for the interpretation of russian art of modernity and modernism. 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setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice folklorica_7f folklorica 2014, vol. xviii iii editor’s note the past year has been a difficult one for those of us who study the folklore, culture, and ethnography of the countries to which seefa is dedicated. all across the slavic, east european and eurasian world, it seems, there have been socio-political shifts. they have resulted in a fraught atmosphere and a great deal of conflicted emotions for all of us, both here in north america and across the territories we love in europe and asia. seefa’s mission is “an exchange of knowledge among scholars interested in slavic, east european and eurasian folklore. seefa shall seek to promote joint research, scholarly exchanges and conferences, expeditions, and publications with scholars in slavic, east european and eurasian countries.” as scholars, we hope for the best in the political arena, regardless of our personal attitudes toward those developments, and believe that continued exchange will improve understanding among peoples in all our countries. it is particularly fitting then that this issue of folklorica features articles from our sister journal traditional culture [traditsionnaia kul’tura] as well as a report from the editor of another respected journal in our field, living antiquity [zhivaia starina]. our scholarly exchanges persist in the face of violence and nationalism and prejudice and upheaval and testify to the mission of our organization. as vladimir klyaus writes below, traditional culture, like folklorica, is dedicated to the study of folk culture. unraveling the complexities of folk life certainly fosters mutual understanding in ways that few other disciplines can achieve. the scholarly journal traditional culture (see www.folkcentr.ru for more information on the journal or on submissions) is one of the most authoritative periodicals in russian academic folklorica 2014, vol. xviii iv publishing today. it is dedicated to the detailed study of folk culture in all its forms, including prose and poetic genres, music, artifacts, spiritual and religious practices and also socio-cultural issues in folk life, both in the past and in the contemporary period. the journal was established in 2000 by the state center of the republic for russian folklore, one of the academic research institutions of the ministry of culture of the russian federation. it was created at the initiative and with the participation of the center’s general director, professor anatolii kargin (doctor of science). until 2007 the post of the editor was occupied by the doctor of cultural studies nikolai khrenov. vladimir klyaus, head of the folklore division of the gorky institute of world literature of the russian academy of sciences, currently serves as editor. the associate editors, natal’ia kotel’nikova, irina raikova and chief secretary anna nasonova are all professional folklorists and philologists. the editorial board is composed of specialists in various areas and from different regions, which ensures publication of material after rigorous peer evaluation. the journal is cited among the publications on the highest attestation committee of russia, the list of approved, peer-reviewed journals for publication of the work of candidates and doctors of science. all publications in the journal are included in the russian index of academic citations (elibrary.ru/defaultx.asp). over the years journal authors have represented a variety of disciplines, including folklorists, ethnographers, ethnomusicologists, ethnolinguists, cultural and literature specialists, and art historians. contributors represent all the regional, educational and academic centers of russia, from vladivostok and iakutsk in the east, to petrozavodsk and kaliningrad in the northwest and vladikavkaz and astrakhan in the south. the journal also has published the work of international scholars from the countries of abkhazia, armenia, belarus’, china, italy, japan, kazakhstan, lithuania, serbia, tadzhikistan, turkey, ukraine, and the united states. folklorica 2014, vol. xviii v traditional culture is divided into thematic sections based on the theoretical issues in the articles. it includes discussions, field notes, overviews, reviews and commemorative articles. more importantly, each issue features scholarly articles that are organized thematically, e.g., home in language and culture; history of epic; immigrant folklore; contemporary holidays; folklore and the written word; urban magical practice and the like. the articles are illustrated with photos (black and white and color) as well as drawings. the editorial board of traditional culture and folklorica invite submissions from its international colleagues. we hope that this exchange proves worthwhile for our membership and will mark an improvement in the international and domestic situation for all of us. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby, editor, folklorica vladimir klyaus, editor, traditional culture the crisis in ukraine and the split of identity in the russian-speaking world the crisis in ukraine and the split of identity in the russian-speaking world folklorica 2015, vol. xix 101 the crisis in ukraine and the split of identity in the russian-speaking world larisa fialkova university of haifa haifa, israel maria yelenevskaya (1) technion israel institute of technology haifa, israel abstract the events of 2014 in ukraine triggered a wave of discussions and narratives rewriting history and reexamining allegiances and cultural affinities. material for the study was drawn from facebook, blogs and internet discussion forums, folk humor disseminated online, personal correspondence and participant observation. this essay discusses how opinions are formed in the diaspora and how they are affected by different sources of information. the attitude to events in ukraine has turned into a litmus test in personal relations, sometimes leading to a break up of friendships and family relations. our analyses will disclose ambivalences in the perception of ukrainian crisis in the diaspora. those who support ukraine do not necessarily come from that country or have cultural affinities with it and not all ukrainian supporters identify with democratic values. critics of the current ukrainian government do not always support the actions of putin’s russia. among them there are also people from ukraine and able to speak ukrainian. like many political conflicts this one fueled nationalism not only in the participating countries but also in the russian-speaking diaspora. introduction the conflict in ukraine has triggered a clash in the narrative about the history of russian-ukrainian relations, the role of both nations in world war ii, and interethnic relations—all being the heritage of soviet policies. the jewish theme, which is peripheral in the debates in russia and ukraine, is the core in the perception of the crisis in israel. the revision of the historical narrative that evolved in the soviet period has turned into a war of collective memories reflected in the personal narratives. who is the victim? who is the perpetrator and who is the liberator? the roles which are crucially important for identities keep changing from narrative to narrative and are challenged by the narrators and their audiences. on the 23rd of april 2014, a popular israeli russian-language news portal newsru.co.il published the following announcement: в пятницу, 25 апреля, с 9:30 до 13:00 около посольства российской федерации в тель-авиве, расположенного по адресу улица а-яркон, 120, пройдет очередной митинг в поддержку украины, против политики кремля. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 102 [on friday, april 25 a demonstration in support of ukraine and against the kremlin policy will take place from 9:30 to 13:00 in front of the russian embassy in tel aviv, ha-yarkon st. 120.] this demonstration was the fourth since the annexation of the crimea by russia. the organizers mobilized participants through facebook. at the end of the announcement we found the following: отметим, что 25 апреля, примерно в то же время, в тель-авиве будет проходить еще одна демонстрация – около посольства украины под лозунгом 'против хунты и за юго-восток украины' соберутся сторонники россии. [on april 25, approximately at the same time there will be another demonstration in tel aviv near the ukrainian embassy under the slogan 'against the junta and in support of south-eastern ukraine'.] [http://newsru.co.il/israel/23apr2014/meeting_104.html, 31 march 2015]. notably, the address of the ukrainian embassy was not mentioned. was it by chance? the quoted announcement illustrates the rift which has formed between ex-soviets due to the tragic events in ukraine. radical disagreement in the attitude to the conflict not only divided citizens of the two countries but also the multiethnic ex-soviet diaspora whose members live across the world. although almost a quarter of a century has passed since the demise of the soviet union, behavioral traits of the émigrés and their attitudes to host societies and to their country of origin have retained similarities. in addition, transnational ties of ex-soviets remain strong. for these reasons, we will use the term ex-soviets to characterize these groups. the notion of the ex-soviet diaspora has been explored in fialkova and yelenevskaya 2005, markowitz 1995 and remennick 2002. a vivid illustration of the opposing attitudes to the ukrainian conflict is numerous meetings and demonstrations held by immigrants from the former soviet union (fsu) in europe (germany, latvia, spain, italy and greece) and marches in the united states and canada. whether participants support ukraine or russia, anxiety about the fate of relatives and friends who still live in the areas where clashes and military actions took place often arises in speeches and posters. demonstrators are also concerned about ideological differences which split families and destroy long-term friendships. moreover, there are worries about the integrity of memorial places and family graves. finally, political and economic repercussions of the situation are linked to life in the host countries with all the implications for the countries in general and in immigrant communities in particular. all of this makes the diaspora feel personally involved in the ongoing conflict. in this paper we will concentrate on the reaction to events in ukraine among fsu immigrants in israel. there are three reasons for this decision: first, israel contains one of the biggest diasporas of ex-soviets. secondly, the theme of the jewish role in the conflict, intensification of anti-semitism and neo-nazi movements both in russia and ukraine are salient to the way events are the crisis in ukraine and the split of identity in the russian-speaking world folklorica 2015, vol. xix 103 interpreted both by pro-russian and pro-ukrainian russian-speaking israelis. finally, as fsu immigrants ourselves we are directly immersed in the narrative interpreting the situation and have been monitoring events and discussions about them since the end of 2013. immigration from the fsu to israel: from the “big wave” to a mere trickle in order to better understand the involvement of russian-speaking israelis in the ukrainian crisis, it is important to know some demographic data related to the immigrants to israel from the countries of the fsu. residents of russia and ukraine made up the majority of nearly one million immigrants from the countries of the fsu who settled in israel in the 1990s. according to the israeli demographer tolts, in the 1990s, 230,500 came from the russian federation and 342,200 from ukraine, which totals 29.9% and 31.5% respectively of the entire emigration wave from the fsu in this period [2001: 7]. in the first decade of the 21st century immigration from the fsu shifted from a massive wave into a mere trickle. however, the political crisis triggered by the maidan demonstrations at the end of 2013 and violent clashes in january-february 2014, the change of power in ukraine on february 26-27th, the annexation of the crimea by the russian federation in march 2014, and ongoing hostilities in southeastern ukraine caused an increase in emigration from both countries involved in the conflict. according to the jewish agency for israel, in 2014 immigration from the former soviet union rose by 50% reaching 11,430 as compared with 7,610 in 2013. the most notable increase was in immigration from ukraine, which grew by 190% to some 5,840 immigrants. 4,830 immigrants came from russia, belarus, and the baltic states, as compared to 4,640 in 2013, [http://www.jewishagency.org/blog/1/article/31301, 15 june 2015]. (2) the growth of immigration from ukraine continued in the first six months of 2015 and reached 3,583 (57% more than for the same period in 2014) and immigration from russia amounted to 3,146 (a 52% increase as compared to the same months in 2014), [http://www.newsru.co.il/israel/13jul2015/aliya_115.html, 12 september 2015]. (3) it is important to note that many russian-speaking israelis have dual citizenship, enjoy the right to vote in their countries of origin and own property there. (4) as mentioned earlier, some immigrants who come from various fsu countries may have family and friends in russia and ukraine and regularly travel there on business and for vacations. naturally, these people are concerned about events “in the old country.” notably, even among those who emigrated as little children, there are some who closely follow the events and participate in discussions expressing their ideological position and attitudes to events. material and method material for this paper was drawn from various sources. we monitored russian-israeli internet portals and papers, four public discussion groups in facebook (5) as well as personal facebook pages. we chose pages (or “walls”) of those israelis of russian or ukrainian origin who are actively involved in the folklorica 2015, vol. xix 104 discussion of the conflict, known for their scholarly and media publications, and have a large number of facebook friends who disseminate materials by posting their comments, by “liking” and by reposting (“sharing”) articles on their own pages. as has been already shown in folkloric research, by their nature, facebook posts are an “epistolary folklore phenomenon, a sub-form of the internet memes which spreads by one click from wall to wall, forming a human chain from the posters” [voolaid 2013: 74]. notably, in the facebook and livejournal discussions that we monitored, the participants commenting on the posts of russian-speaking israelis included residents of russia and ukraine, belarus, the united states, germany, the czech republic, and other countries, which confirms our view of this discourse as transnational and diasporic. although it becomes clear from discussions that participants belong to various ethnicities of the fsu, the prevailing language is russian, even in the posts of pro-ukrainian supporters. yet some messages are either completely or partially written in ukrainian. some authors alternate languages, depending on the subject and addressees of their posts. moreover, some texts are in english and there are numerous cases of russian-english code mixing. according to the political scientist, volodymyr kulyk, a similar use of languages is typical of ukrainian online resources [2013: 73-74]. the use of language is crucial here, since hostilities in ukraine were preceded and partially triggered by a “linguistic war” and attempts of the ukrainian government that came to power after victor yanukovich was deposed to oust russian from the public sphere. while collecting material online, we also kept ethnographic diaries, recording people’s talk in public places and making notes of the conversations in which our interlocutors expressed their attitudes to the crisis as well as related concerns and emotions. we decided not to use interviews for this study because the topic is so sensitive that we feared the subjects would be reticent. in our study of the online material we were interested to see what topics inspired commentaries, sharing and ““likes””, and what media sources were linked to the discussants’ posts. in facebook, blogs and discussion forums users’ exchange is akin to face-to-face communication in which participants exchange narratives. we wanted to see how the choice of vocabulary and the use of tropes contribute to solidarity of like-minded people and were used for “othering” opponents. besides verbal material, we analyzed visuals, such as posters, photographs, cartoons and youtube videos. we view these resources as visual narratives integrated into the verbal discourse. we noted that, in political debates, discussants often blame their opponents for choosing the “wrong” tv channel as a source of information. we would like to point out that neither of us watches political programs on television, yet some participants in the discussions we followed do and may have been influenced by the ideology of their preferred stations. having conducted content analysis of the posts in the israeli facebook groups, blogs and forums we monitored, we singled out 20 recurrent themes of discussion. however, the content of some themes overlaps, so that we reduced the key themes to 11 primary topics: the crisis in ukraine and the split of identity in the russian-speaking world folklorica 2015, vol. xix 105 1 historic antecedents of the conflict ranging from kievan rus’ to the post-soviet relations between russia and ukraine; 2 who is the aggressor and who is the victim? 3 ethnic intolerance manifested in the conflict 4 taking sides in the conflict and breaking friendships 5 the roles of jews and israelis in the conflict 6 can a country build a democracy while glorifying nazi collaborators at the same time? 7 can nazi collaborators serve as models for emulation for jews? 8 victory day: whose holiday is it? 9 russia vs. ukraine, israel vs. gaza: is there similarity in the two conflicts? 10 europe’s attitude to the russian-ukrainian and arab-israeli conflicts 11 are protests similar to maidan possible in israel? sensitivities of taking sides in the conflict israel found itself in a difficult situation because in the last two decades both russia and ukraine have become its important economic partners. to a large extent, thanks to the contribution of immigrants from these two countries, visas were no longer necessary to come to the country, thereby dramatically increasing tourism in israel. joint ventures with russian and ukrainian partners were established and thrived, sister-city agreements were signed, theater and concert tours were organized, and exhibits were exchanged. until recently, veteran israelis seldom made any ethnic distinction between ex-soviets coming from various countries of the fsu—all were dubbed “russians”. moreover, immigrants themselves lived in symbiosis, speaking russian, doing business and spending leisure time together. while the russian language has become the third most spoken language of israel, the use of ukrainian remains limited. snobbish attitudes to the ukrainian language on the part of russian speakers can be traced to the soviet period when russian was associated with global use, power and high culture, and ukrainian was perceived as a regional and provincial language at best. moreover, for many israeli jews of the older generation, it is still associated with anti-semitic pogroms plaguing shtetls from the period of bohdan khmelnitsky in the 17th century until the civil war of the 1918-1920. in addition, some witnessed atrocities by the ukrainian police and armed units during the nazi occupation during world war ii [see fialkova 2007: 109-11]. it is important to note that the orange revolution of november 2004 january 2005, which did not go beyond demonstrations and strikes, did not trigger disagreements in the israeli immigrant community. the violence that exploded on the maidan in february 2014, the annexation of the crimea, the tragic events in odessa of may 2014, and the escalation of violence in donbass divided the community as well as friends and families. a journalist reflecting on the roots of the divide reported: brothers semion and isaak briman, who fought in world war ii, could not imagine that their grandsons living in israel, shimon briman and folklorica 2015, vol. xix 106 simon tsipis, would find themselves on different sides of the barricades because of ukraine and russia. shimon, that’s me, is a journalist and supports ukraine, while simon, an investigator of cyber terrorism, organizes demos with st. george’s ribbons in tel aviv. what are the roots of this break up? it may come from school years in kharkov, where i was taught the ukrainian language by the wonderful raisa fedoseevna andriushchenko. half of the ukrainians in my class refused to study their mother tongue, so the teacher was preparing young briman for the city olympics in the ukrainian language. unlike me, simon grew up in sevastopol, in the city of “russian seamen,” which left an imprint of soviet patriotism. my cousin, with his affinity with russian culture, was ashamed even of the word “ukraine,” which symbolized everything that was second-rate for him. that’s why he cheered russian annexation of the crimea. and i began to correct israelis: ani lo mi rusia, ani mi ukraina (hebrew for “i am not from russia, i’m from ukraine”) [briman 2014]. this narrative reflects a typical situation as we know it from forum discussions and our participant observation. it clearly shows that ideological differences between the cousins are perceived as a family drama. the hierarchies of ethnicities built by the soviet power were internalized by individuals. the author mentions ironically that although he is jewish, he “likes” the ukrainian language and was more proficient in it than most of his ukrainian classmates. the towns where cousins grew up serve as markers of cultural affinity, because the influence of ukrainian culture and popularity of the ukrainian language differed from region to region. at the same time, as we see today, coming from one town does not guarantee staying on “the same side of the barricades”—the military metaphor often used in russian. in conclusion, the author admits that despite these differences he would still meet his cousin for a mug of beer “although we are only second cousins, after all, we are brothers-israelis.” this concession prioritizes israeliness over family ties, but the fact that a family divide becomes a topic of public discourse reveals that such divisions are a matter of concern for members of the community. even brief encounters among friends who have not seen each other for a long time often end in discussing events in ukraine, which includes complaints that interpersonal relations with people in the home country, in israel and other countries of the russian-speaking diaspora are becoming complicated when there are differences in political views. practices used to cope with the divide differ. we have observed cases when old friends stop seeing each other. when immigrants are not ready to sacrifice old friendships they agree not to mention events in ukraine at all. sometimes a request not to raise the topic of ukraine is announced at the beginning of informal meetings or parties. similarly, contact management can be observed on the internet when bloggers or facebook users declare “red lines” (a halt) to discussing issues related to ukraine. some ban or “de-friend” anyone who supports the other side, others are more tolerant but announce that they won’t stand opposition on specific issues. take, for example, comments by a historian and a pro-ukrainian activist mikhail uritsky and one by the crisis in ukraine and the split of identity in the russian-speaking world folklorica 2015, vol. xix 107 the political left-wing activist alla shainskaia. both follow upon the scandal that emerged after a tv journalist daria nenakhova appeared at a pro-ukrainian demonstration wearing a tee shirt representing a controversial figure from ukrainian history, stepan bandera. journalist daria nenakhova wearing a t-shirt portraying s. bandera surrounded by white fluffy cats. misha uritsky, 31/10/2014 (848 facebook friends) (6) so it’s like this. i have just come across a new disgusting attack targeting daria nenakhova, who was wearing a t-shirt portraying bandera surrounded by kittens at a pro-ukrainian meeting. although this time there were no curses, humiliation or threats, the post was particularly nasty because the author claimed that daria nenakhova had a ukrainian rather than a jewish soul and so israel was the wrong place for her (…) so far i have never removed people from my friend list, either on facebook or in real life, for merely holding views differing from mine, even if i see them as deeply wrong and repulsive. among my friends, including very close friends, there are errant “colorado-beetles” who are defiantly pro-russian. but if i see a single attack against daria nenakhova, the author of the post will be immediate banned. i am also appealing to all my friends, irrespective of whether they are pro-russian folklorica 2015, vol. xix 108 or pro-ukrainian: if you come across something like this in your friendlist, please de-friend them. (7) (this post had 41 “likes” and was followed by 65 comments) alla shainskaia, 31/10/2014 (212 followers) i support both mikhails wholeheartedly. daria, thanks a lot. for your courage! myself, i am used to humiliation and threats, and so i highly appreciate your civil courage. as far as bendera is concerned, he is an ambivalent personality, like bat’ko makhno. i agree with the way mikhail evaluates him. misha uritsky, unfortunately, for the first time since i started using facebook i have banned friends. i can no longer stand their pro-putin propaganda and disgusting lies. i guess it’s due to age. my nerves fail me. i cannot and do not want to remain friends with these people. i have never done this before, even not against people who have different views on our local conflict, naturally, with the exception of clear-cut “nazis”. the ukrainian conflict has built up a red line and unconscious flair which i obey (six “likes”). the public fb group viche.il combines israel’s and ukrainian symbols on its “wall”. the crisis in ukraine and the split of identity in the russian-speaking world folklorica 2015, vol. xix 109 in online communication “de-friending” and banning contacts is similar to refusal to greet and shake hands in face-to-face communication. and an appeal to others to follow suit is reminiscent of ostracism. at the same time, facebook users and bloggers practice appeals to their contacts to disseminate posts and information. for example, a member of the group viche.il posted an appeal to israelis: …a special event: sign to support ukraine! if you are an israeli citizen and support ukraine, open this ad, mark it with “like” and in the comments write two words: glory to ukraine! (407 “likes” and 149 shares) [5, september 2015]. this and other similar posts go beyond friendly communication. we view them as propaganda of a particular position and agitation similar to speeches at demonstrations and meetings. the slogan “glory to ukraine” is contested in exchanges about the post and reflects two clashing narratives. one associates it with ukrainian nazi collaborationists, the other with ukrainians’ struggle against victor yanukovich’s corrupt regime and as a challenge to putin’s policies in ukraine. in the latter case, it becomes a symbol of freedom and affinity with european values. it is in this meaning that the slogan was used by the facebook group viche.il whose appeal to click “likes” and shares we have quoted. both versions of the history of the slogan are widely represented in the electronic media—one tracing it back to the 1920s, the other attributing it to the motto of nazi collaborators, but neither is sufficiently documented, so both constitute part of the mythology. several issues are noteworthy in the passages quoted above. first, the reference to facebook friends who are called kolorady. narratives about the ukrainian conflict abound in pejorative words and expressions used by both sides. the name of a colorado beetle has become a nickname for russians and supporters of russia in this conflict because the orange and brown stripes of st. george ribbon symbolizing russia’s military glory, which has recently become popular in russia and its diaspora, has the same colors as the insect, a symbol of a stealthy and desctructive invader. allusions to insects and animals is a wellknown folkloric and literary device used to dehumanize an opponent or an ethnic “other” [belova 2005: 213-257; fialkova & yelenevskaya 2007: 91-93; hollingsworth 2001: 152-186]. an important motif in the quoted narratives is the claim of daria nenakhova’s detractors that her soul is ukrainian. the belief that aliens have no soul is prominent in russian culture’s perception of the “other.” svetlana boym, for example, observes that in dostoevsky’s world, germans, jews, and poles are deprived of the soul and this makes “a truly monstrous ‘other’ of the russians [1994: 85]. dale pesmen, who conducted ethnographic research in siberia in the 1990s, came to the conclusion that among the many contexts that have woven into the meaning of “soul” nationalism remains strong. the soul is still conceived of such that russian soul makes sense, but a jewish, turkish, tatar, or ukrainian soul does not sound right to russians [pesmen 2000: 14]. clearly, russian folklorica 2015, vol. xix 110 speaking israelis have internalized the perception of the importance of possessing a special soul, but in this narrative, it is jews who are credited for being endowed with it. another clash of mythical and bureaucratic models is that the right to be in israel is determined by blood (having at least one jewish grandparent) or by religion (judaism). the question of soul is not raised in the discourse about citizenship. however, in the post by misha uritsky, the “soul” functions as a synonym of loyalty to one’s people and substitutes for blood. people scandalized by nenakhova’s provocative tee shirt claimed that israel was not the right place for her. ironically, accusations of disloyalty were and are often addressed to jews both in russia and ukraine by anti-semites shouting “clear out! go to your precious country, off to israel!” the tee shirt which triggered indignation about nenakhova’s behavior portrayed stepan bandera surrounded by white kittens. “white and fluffy” is a popular phrase used in contemporary russian to depict someone who presents no danger or threat. stepan bandera (1909-1959) was a ukrainian nationalist, a controversial figure whose activities during world war ii have been heatedly discussed in academic and folk historiography. academic discourse strives for an unbiased evaluation of his struggle for ukrainian independence, in which the end justified any means, including terrorism and collaboration with nazi germany [ishchenko 2014; kulyk 2013; marples 2006; narvselius 2012]. folk historians, on the other hand, draw bits and pieces of bandera’s biography out of context and build up two conflicting narratives—one resembling the genre of hagiography and the other a demonic legend. in 2010, during the regime of president victor yushchenko, bandera was posthumously awarded the title of “hero of ukraine,” a decision which was condemned by the european parliament as well as by russian, polish and jewish organizations. in 2011, under the next president, the deposed victor yanukovich, the act was officially repealed, but a movement for its restoration began and is still ongoing. the popularity of the former or the latter narrative is determined by geography: bandera is glorified in western ukraine and condemned in southeastern regions. during the second maidan protests that took place between november 2013 and february 2014 and in their aftermath, we observed an attempt to transform a regional icon into an all-ukrainian hero, which led to a clash of popular historical narratives constantly manipulated by politicians. in popular parlance, the meaning of a “banderite” has expanded and came to connote anyone who supports the current ukrainian government or ukraine’s european orientation. moreover, pro-ukrainian jews call themselves judeo-banderites. since anti-semitism was an important part of bandera’s ideology, this term is an oxymoron. for pro-russian supporters a “banderite” is equated with a neo-nazi. returning to the nefarious tee shirt representing bandera together with fluffy cats, the photograph of a smiling nenakhova with a tel aviv street in the background was soon manipulated and, in one manipulated version, she appears next to mutilated and murdered infants, implying her support for the atrocities. this image appeared in the blog http://zvezdochettt.livejournal.com/298852.html on 8 may 2014 and was reposted on the same day on facebook by an israeli prothe crisis in ukraine and the split of identity in the russian-speaking world folklorica 2015, vol. xix 111 russian activist evgeny kubantsev, https://www.facebook.com/gondolla.gonny?fref=ts. in the comment by alla shainskaia, bandera is also linked to another controversial figure in ukrainian history, “father makhno,” whose image created in literature and soviet movies is associated with jewish pogroms and violence against civilians. a fearless left-wing activist who consistently works on improving relations between arabs and jews in israel by establishing dialogue, shainskaia admits that she had never banned facebook users insulting her for her views on the arab-israeli conflict. the link between hostilities in eastern ukraine and the arab-israeli clashes in gaza is a recurrent theme and it arises both in the narratives of russian-speaking israelis and in those of their facebook friends from the fsu. another narrative posted by miriam feyga bunimovich, a pro-ukrainian activist and an orthodox jew, reveals how facebook contacts are banned as a result of political disagreements and how political views are confused with ethnic belonging: miriam feyga bunimovich, 22/07/2014, (1397 friends) look where you click, otherwise you’ll have to encounter something like this: today i was on a bus and browsed facebook on a small screen of my mobile. it suggested that i should join the group “israel supports ukraine”. so i pressed a raised finger or a checkmark, i don’t remember which. later i get a message from a lady whose name is natalia belakovsky. “what is your goal in joining the group?” [she asked f & y] i got tense and ask: “remind me which group i wanted to join. support of israel? “ and she answers: “israel for ukraine without banderites”. and i think: shit, here we are. this is what facebook and my small screen concealed. and why wasn’t i smart enough to say as neutrally as possible without going into detail that i had pressed a button by mistake. instead, i wrote something, something i shouldn’t have written. look what happened next. — nope. i am for ukraine with banderites. facebook misinformed me. (i restrained myself and refrained from saying, yeah, to be more precise, i’m a “judeo-banderite”.) — i am simply a moderate person and reasonable too. i am not sure i wish to continue this conversation. our routes diverge. — it wasn’t me who started this conversation. you wanted to join a closed group whose promo states under what circumstances one can apply. if i had found out from your page that you were fit to be a potential member, there wouldn’t have been any questions and you would have been accepted wholeheartedly. i’m not talking to you. i’m just stating facts. for jews, banderites are murderers. they are responsible for killing 1,500,000 jews, from (19)40 to (19) 45. this is a folklorica 2015, vol. xix 112 quarter of all holocaust victims. if you are for banderites, then a jew who is normal would ask how come you, a moderate banderite, happen to be in israel. is your moderation in that you don’t go as far as killing jews but just share banderites’ views? you don’t have to answer. i don’t need your answer. i am just asking myself: how come this banderite trash managed to creep into israel. i hope you will move to this lousy banderite ukraine. yours are already in power there. after this abuse the subj [slang for subject] banned me. i wonder how come people have time and strength for nastiness. i for one, don’t always have enough resources to do good, as to disgusting stuff, it’s a shame to waste the time, but some others let’s go on living and create positive things (smile) (44 “likes” and 13 comments) although miriam feyga’s behavior was not as provocative as daria nenakhova’s, the response was the same. affinity with ukrainian nationalists was interpreted as affiliation with neo-nazis, the current ukrainian government was perceived as banderite, and miriam feyga was rejected as a member of the ingroup, becoming a despised “other” who did not belong and would be better off in ukraine than in israel. the irony is that miriam feyga is not only jewish and religious, but is a zionist convinced that israel is her home. thus far we have quoted only pro-ukrainian activists, but it would be wrong to think that their pro-russian opponents have kept a low profile. they have also founded facebook groups, such as izrail’ za ukrainu bez banderovtsev [israel for ukraine without bandera], [https://www.facebook.com/groups/ukr.bez.banderovcev/, 12 september 2015] and sut’ vremeni , izrail’ (the gist of time, israel), [https://www.facebook.com/groups/816878271675184/, 12 september 2015]. they also demonstrate, protesting against bloodshed in donbass. some of these actions were organized in cooperation with russian and pro-russian ukrainian ngos. for example, the action natsizm: proshloe i nastoiaschee [nazism: the past and the present] commemorating victims of upa (ukrainian insurgent army) during the great patriotic war and in donbass took place during the latest hostilities in donbass. it was initiated by israeli human rights activists in cooperation with the ngo materi donbassa [donbass mothers]. notably, the action took place in jerusalem in front of the holocaust museum, [http://nsn.fm/in-the-world/pamyat-zhertv-natsistov-i-neofashistov-pochtili-vizraile.php, 12 september 2015]. the theme of the neo-nazi revival in ukraine and the role of ukrainian collaborators in the holocaust was the hottest theme in the discourse of pro-russian activists, in particular, in the months leading up to the 70th anniversary of victory day. as the most important and widely celebrated day in the yearly calendar in russia, it has a special meaning for russian-speaking israelis. before the mass immigration from the fsu in the 1990s, this day was ignored in israel. jews had been perceived as passive victims. but immigrants from the fsu saw the role of their fathers and grandfathers who fought on the the crisis in ukraine and the split of identity in the russian-speaking world folklorica 2015, vol. xix 113 fronts, toiled in the rear and won the victory in a different light. thanks to the efforts of the world war ii veteran organizations and some russian-speaking israeli politicians, the attitude of the israeli public gradually changed and in 2005 victory day became an official holiday in israel [yelenevskaya 2009; fialkova, and yelenevskaya 2013: 172-173]. in 2015, the preparation for the annual marches and memorial meetings in honor of the victory was tainted with angry arguments as to whose victory it was: russian or ukrainian. like in the past 10 years, in 2015 we, in haifa, participated in the memorial march devoted to victory day. while the number of veterans wearing their orders and medals dwindled as compared to previous years, their place was taken by “children of war,” who are already in their late 70-s and 80-s. furthermore, in 2015, there were noticeably more young people and parents with children than in past celebrations. but the crowd was no longer united. a lot of participants, including children, were wearing st. george ribbons, mentioned earlier. some carried russian federation flags and the flags of the self-proclaimed republics of donetsk and lugansk. we witnessed people from the crowd who stopped to be photographed with these flags in the background. however, not everybody was pleased by this situation. at the end of the official ceremony an elderly russian-speaking pro-ukrainian activist tried to seize one of these flags shouting: “no politics here!” the ribbons with the colors of the ukrainian flag were few but during the ceremony we noticed a group of young ukrainian speakers standing near us. one of the young men was wearing an embroidered black-and-red ukrainian shirt. although these youngsters chose to attend the event, they talked about it with obvious contempt. victory day in haifa 2015. participants of the march posing in front of four flags soviet, israeli, russian and the self-proclaimed lugansk republic. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 114 nevertheless, the situation is complicated, so that some of the facebook users and bloggers whose sites we monitored do not support either side wholeheartedly. they are less concerned with political goals and ideological positions than with death of civilians and senseless destruction of cities and villages. they criticize the propaganda of hatred and violence, as well as corruption of the elites on both sides. alek epstein, 23 february 2014, (630 facebook friends) here is a question for my friends from kiev, but not only for them: why did almost every extremely samostiinyi deputy (speaker) who defends european values by fighting against the use of the russian language and who insists on the demolition of monuments to lenin start a career as the head of the agitation and propaganda division of the regional komsomol organization? (5 “likes”) note that like in many other posts and informal conversations, the ukrainian insertion samostiiynyi is used by russian speakers ironically. this adjective denotes a country’s independence but is primarily applied in talk about ukraine’s independence and individuals supporting it. stating that many current ukrainian politicians used to serve the soviet power delegitimizes them as reformers and honest ukrainian patriots. a quarter of a century after the demise of the ussr communist functionaries are still disliked and distrusted. even stronger the condemnation of corruption in the ranks of the ukrainian elite is expressed by the journalist and blogger anton nossik. a resident of moscow, he used to live in israel in the 1990s and has double russian-israeli citizenship. he maintains contacts with russian-speaking israelis and occasionally publishes in the russian-language media in israel. anton nossik, 12 february 2015, http://dolboeb.livejournal.com/2771279.html …recently a [ukrainian] journalist was sentenced for treason because he declared that he didn’t want to be sent to the debaltseve pocket without clothes, food and ammunition. but there was no punishment for those who had stolen and sold defense resources of the country. and this is the reason why they cannot arm, dress or feed new recruits. they yell “moskaliaku na giliaku” [ukrainian: send the muscovite to the gallows] but no tycoons or bureaucrat who became filthily rich by stealing army property is to be found on the giliaka (…) p.s. i can well imagine the response i’ll get to this post. how i sold myself to the kremlin and to putin, what a zhidokatsapskii moskal’ [ukrainian/russian: “judeo-russian muscovite] i am, and you will proudly de-friend me. i can’t do anything about it, but i won’t be too upset about it either. i did not write this post either for proud vatniki [russian, cotton-wool jackets] or for ukropy [dill], but for thinking the crisis in ukraine and the split of identity in the russian-speaking world folklorica 2015, vol. xix 115 individuals. judging by the comments, there are quite a few of them among my russian and ukrainian readers. they can’t help realizing that in a deadly skirmish of one sovok [russian: dust-pan] with another, the winner will always be the worst of them. the only effective way of getting rid of a sovok is to squeeze it out of your own system drop by drop. no american weapons can be of any help in this. (1,037 comments) nossik was right in foreseeing a burst of anger among some of his readers. at the same time, others, including ukrainian residents, supported his viewpoint, expressing confidence that arms sold to ukraine would not help the ukrainian army. note that like alek epstein, anton nossik refers to the soviet past, which is still deeply ingrained not only in the elites but in the general public as well. the coinage of the slang word sovok was based on the partial paronymy of “soviet” and “dust-pan.” it is still widely used in the formal and informal discourse and has produced several derivatives, such as sovki and sovkovyi. proposing that everyone should get rid of a soviet-like mentality, nossik alludes to anton chekhov, who admitted that he was squeezing the slave out of his system throughout his life. thus sovok is made synonymous with a slave-like mentality. in his post nossik makes use of pejorative ethnonyms that have become pervasive in the discourse of the russian-ukrainian conflict. while moskal’ and katsap have been used as ethnic slurs for a long time, vatnik and ukrop, standing for pro-russian and pro-ukrainian supporters respectively, are innovations which have gained popularity in the last two or three years. note that zhidokatsapskii moskal’ is a counterpart of the term zhidobanderovets that we mentioned above. both are used as slurs but also as ironic and sometimes proud self-identification markers. the two posts that follow also refer to the soviet past of the readers. their authors are appalled by the propaganda of violence and ethnic intolerance that replaced the utopian friendship among the soviet peoples. alek epstein, 13 july 2014, the ukrainian minister of the interior, comrade avakov, completes the summary of his ideas by saying: “they should be killed like mad dogs: [https://www.facebook.com/arsen.avakov.1/posts/648366948586748]. that comrade avakov is comrade vyshinsky’s loyal disciple is his own problem and only his. even if he doesn’t understand this… but when 1,800 people share this human-hating horror and another 8,100 “like” it, this is real trouble. unfortunately, they failed to “remain human”… [http://www.svoboda.org/content/article/25373012.html] (6 “likes”, 3 shares). the noun “comrade” placed before arsen avakov’s name implies that his speech is grounded in the soviet tradition. these ties are reinforced by comparing him to the ruthless state prosecutor andrei vysinskii, a notorious figure and active participant of stalin’s purges. the author of the post emphasizes that avakov’s folklorica 2015, vol. xix 116 words fell into fertile ground aggravating ethnic hatred. when appeals to kill ethnic “others” are pronounced by politicians, they may be interpreted by some members of the lay public as instructions for action. the persuasive power of the ukrainian politician’s words increases because of the identification of the “others” with “mad dogs,” another instance of dehumanization shown earlier. the russian-ukrainian conflict also has been the source of numerous rhymes, poems, cartoons and video clips. some of these remain anonymous; the authors of others are known and widely discussed on the internet. a case in point is a young ukrainian computer expert, anastasia dmytruk, who writes patriotic verses in russian and ukrainian and whose xenophobic song “we will never ever be brothers” became a youtube and facebook hit. russian-speaking israelis who were supporters of ukraine included her poems in the program of the cultural event “ukraine in poetry and music” held in march 2015 at the russian library of jerusalem, known as an important cultural community center. this event was among actions by immigrants in support of ukraine. [http://www.newswe.com/index.php?go=pages&in=view&id=8001, 15 september 2015] we find dmytruk’s song highly controversial. full of passion and emotions, it seems to be a sincere expression of the author’s feelings, but its overwhelming motifs are adulation of the in-group and unconcealed hatred for russians. adding to the repertoire of zoological metaphors used in the discourse about the conflict, dmytruk refers to russians as rats who will choke on their envy and wash themselves in their own blood. the whole song is based on juxtapositions generalizing the author’s vision of the two nations. some are explicit (huge – great, chained – free, blind – fearless eyes, hidinglooking snipers in the face, ruled by the czar – democracy), while others are implicit. in more subdued portions, russians emerge as lacking spirit and will (hesitant, silent, obedient to directives) while ukrainians are free and rebellious (hot blooded, dangerous even when unarmed, [burning] fires of rebellion). the text of the song and the youtube clip had multiple shares in facebook and were often followed by comments demonstrating the polarizing opinions of the audience. some were praising the author for capturing the mood and feelings of ukrainians and encouraging her to continue writing in the same spirit. others expressed anger at the author for provoking animosities. there were also comments trying to convince dmytruk that her vision of the social victories won by the ukrainian people was erroneous as well as furious remarks rejecting her right to speak for the whole nation. the song gave rise to numerous pastiches. all of them formed a dialogue with the original text and like the comments on posts and blogs demonstrated a diversity of opinions. several of these texts mirrored the xenophobic attitude of the original but demonized ukrainians, not russians; others claimed that brotherhood between the two nations would prevail [see the text of the song and comments at https://www.facebook.com/siadmytruk/posts/605508626186444, 15 september 2015]. among dmytruk’s critics was a popular israeli “political technologist” (8), online journalist, and blogger, david aidelman. david aidelman, 6 april 2014, (3,447 facebook friends) the crisis in ukraine and the split of identity in the russian-speaking world folklorica 2015, vol. xix 117 the russophobic song “we’ll never be brothers” is disseminated on the internet as an “anthem of free peoples”… we will never ever be brothers, not by motherland, not by mothers. your souls aren’t free, they’re crippling – we won’t even become step-siblings. (9) i honestly don’t quite understand what makes ukrainians feel they are freer than residents of russia?! what do they measure? if we look at the extent of contemporary slavery, that is flesh peddling, then ukrainians are ahead of all ex-soviet republics. the majority of prostitutes operating in europe, north america and the middle east are exported from ukraine. if we consider economic freedom, then compared to ukraine, even in russia economy is more liberal. in your home “silence is golden” and we burn molotov cocktails… first, molotov cocktails are not burned. one has to light the fuse and throw the bottle aiming at the target. the glass breaks, flammable liquid pours out and the fuse sets it aflame. in fact, the proverb “silence is golden”, (silentium aurum est) can be traced back to ancient rome. like most proverbs, it is a shortened version of partially forgotten proverbs: [in this case] “speech is silver, but silence is golden” the russian version of “silence is golden” was derived from latin; its japanese counterpart is the proverb “silence is flowers”. then there are proverbs of other peoples [“speech is silver, silence is golden” [authors’ note: portion in quotations originally in english]. finally, it’s the first time that i hear that throwing molotov cocktails could be an indicator of freedom. the next thing would be for them to measure freedom by the level of street rape… (115 “likes” and 39 shares) aidelman questions the author’s understanding of freedom. his skepticism addresses such different aspects of freedom as national economy and civilian order. he implies that ukrainians do not have much to boast about today and undermines the poetic value of the text. unlike many other facebook commentators about the song, the tone of his post is impassionate but ironic. the number of “likes” and shares of his post, as well as the engagement in the discussion on dmytruk’s own facebook page by participants from russia, ukraine, and the nearand far-abroad (over 700 comments) demonstrates that whatever the merits of the text, it did not leave the public indifferent; moreover, the song contributed to the folklorization of the conflict. on the september 16, 2015, passions were again ignited when the ukrainian president petro poroshenko signed a decree banning more than 400 individuals and 90 organizations presenting a “threat to national interests” or that promote “terrorist activities” from entering ukraine for a year [http://urainform.com/ru/politics/2015/09/16/poroshenko-podpisal-ukaz-o-vvedenii folklorica 2015, vol. xix 118 sanktsij-protiv-rossii, 16 september 2015]. among those blacklisted were public figures and journalists from russia and other countries, including six russianspeaking israelis. banning journalists for reporting on and filming events in ukraine or participating as independent observers in the referendum in the crimea and elections in the self-proclaimed republics in donbass resulted in severe criticism for curtailing freedom of speech [e.g. , articles in the guardian http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/16/ukraine-president-bansjournalists-from-country, in the sofia globe http://sofiaglobe.com/2015/09/17/ukraines-ban-of-foreign-journalists-ignitesinternational-ire/, and a statement by the committee to protect journalists, [https://www.cpj.org/2015/09/ukraine-bans-41-international-journalists-andblog.php , 20 september 2015]. some of the journalists who found themselves on the list responded publicly, stating that they saw it as their duty to remain neutral and impartial in their reports. among them were israeli journalists max lurie and alexander ronkin. david aidelman, quoted earlier, also made statements to the press and posted his comments on facebook. because these texts are quite long, we will quote only excerpts from them. david aidelman, 17 september 2015 today poroshenko signed a decree on sanctions against individuals and legal entities. two lists approved by the national security and defence council. (…) i am number 9 there. the reason is that all of us allegedly observed elections in the donetsk people’s republic and lugansk people’s republic. i personally have never been to donetsk or lugansk. it is not only that i wasn’t there during the elections, i have never been there at all (…) among foreign journalists subjected to sanctions are 3 (three !!!) pennames. they have banned pen-names from entering the country! glaziev appears on the list twice. has he been banned twice? the second one is probably ban checking [this is an allusion to “dead checking”, in military slang this expression denotes an additional shot into the head to verify that the victim is dead]. in addition, under number 307 of the list they put mozgovoi, oleksii borisovich. do they fear invasion from the other world?! to be honest, the deceased was not a model banderite. but does he deserve to be banned? (99 “likes”, 35 comments, 5 shares) putting on the list two journalists reported missing, probably kidnapped by islamists in syria, and the careless mistakes noted by aidelman caused major embarrassment for the ukrainian president. he apologized and ordered to removal british journalists from the list, but this step did not prevent angry discussion in the press and on the internet. in facebook comments we see comparisons of ukrainian politics with the soviet politics of lies, references to shtirlits, the legendary protagonist of the cult movie “seventeen moments of spring,” and the crisis in ukraine and the split of identity in the russian-speaking world folklorica 2015, vol. xix 119 conspiracy theories attempting to explain away the carelessness in preparing the list. all of this suggests that publication of the latest ukrainian blacklist is being folklorized as well, like the conflict itself. the jerusalem journalist association condemned the ukrainian government for sanctions against journalists, and the russian-language israeli portal izrus sent an inquiry to poroshenko demanding explanations of what crimes journalists and political “technologists” committed towards the ukrainian state [http://izrus.co.il/obshina/article/2015-09-18/28856.html, 19 september 2015]. in order to draw maximum attention to the censorship and curtailing of freedom of speech by the ukrainian government, david aidelman appealed to his facebook friends to repost the text of the inquiry and launch it as a flash mob. apparently, he failed to attain his goal, because 4 days later this post collected only 31 “likes” and 44 shares. there is no agreement among russian-speaking journalists about the latest ukrainian blacklist. thus one of them, yakov shaus, published an article on the russian-language internet portal zahav.ru, in which he blames his colleagues for serving putin’s regime [http://mnenia.zahav.ru/articles/6617/poroshenko, 24 september 2015]. as expected, the article immediately ignited a new round of discussion about who is “right” and who is “wrong” in the conflict on the portal where it was published as well as on facebook. the jokelore of the conflict during periods of conflicts and hostilities, anger and frustration at the situation are often released by folk humor. jokes, cartoons, rhymes, manipulated photographs, video clips and multi-media ensembles about the ukrainian situation originated in ukraine and russia as well as in the diaspora. these pieces circulated in different media, but like most humor today, they are primarily disseminated digitally and become transnational. some of the facebook and blog posts begin with expressions such as: “i heard this on the radio…”; “read what a friend from gorlovka sent me…”; “i am forwarding what i have just got by email…” and so on. our sample of jokes, rhymes and visuals cannot be simply divided into proor anti-russian/ukrainian; some are anti-corruption; others target business elites in both countries; still others shift the focus from russianukrainian relations to the political dilemmas of the middle east. we will limit our discussion to the jokes related to the topics discussed thus far and outlined as central themes in the internet discourse on the conflict. беня, а шо там такое на украине? россия с америкой воюет. и шо, как там дела? ну россия потеряла таки тысячи солдат, сотни танков. а у американцев шо? таки не поверишь, они вообще на войну не явились. [benia, what’s going on in ukraine? folklorica 2015, vol. xix 120 russia is at war with america. and how are they doing? well, russia has already lost thousands of soldiers and hundreds of tanks. and how about americans? you won’t believe it, but they simply didn’t show up for the war.] [sent by e-mail to maria by a russian immigrant to the u.s.a.] direct russian involvement in the hostilities in ukraine and the deterioration of american relations with russia are a frequent topic of both formal and informal discourse related to the ukrainian situation. while americans are often blamed by lay people in russia for provoking the conflict, this joke shows events in a different perspective. it is left for the addressee to decide whether it is a noble or a shameful position to remain uninvolved. many of the jokes related to the conflict and circulating on the internet are passionately discussed and often result in a completely different interpretation in the posts of russian and ukrainian supporters. punning is highly appreciated by russian-speaking jokers. the effect of the pun is strongest when the minimal modification on the phonological or morphological levels leads to a dramatic change in meaning and captures social and political realities. the best known pun associated with the annexation of the crimea крым наш – нам крыш [the crimea is ours – we are gonna be dead meat] originated in russia, but is well known in israel. one of us overheard another joke devoted to the same event in a shop in haifa. like the previous pun, it presents the annexation of the crimea as a trap for russia: россия сделала себе крымацию. [russia has crimated herself.] (a pun on кремация [cremation]) [https://www.facebook.com/david.aidelman?fref=ts, last accessed 20 september 2015] in jewish jokes self-adulation is often intricately mixed with selfdeprecation. both of these motifs are implied in the following two jokes posted on facebook by david aidelman shortly after the annexation of the crimea: — смотри-ка, рабинович грустный какой-то? — еще бы! полгода назад, послушав януковича о вступлении в европу, он, за немалые деньги, срочно купил украинское гражданство и домик в крыму… а позавчера ему снова радостно вручили российский паспорт!!!! [— look at rabinovich. doesn’t he look sad? — sure he does. half a year ago he heard yanukovich talk about joining europe, so he paid a hefty sum for the ukrainian citizenship and bought a cottage in the crimea…. and the day before yesterday he was ceremoniously handed a russian passport again!!!!] the crisis in ukraine and the split of identity in the russian-speaking world folklorica 2015, vol. xix 121 (58 “likes”, 4 shares) человек обращает к путину и говорит: «владимир владимирович, вы, прежде чем решать вопросы с крымом, советовались с рабиновичем?» — «с каким рабиновичем?» — «да с любым!» [— someone says addressing putin: — vladimir vladimirovich, have you consulted rabinovich before deciding what to do with the crimea? — which rabinovich? — any one will do! (5 “likes”) rabinovich was the protagonist of most of the soviet jewish jokes, whether they were told by jews or by anti-semites (see shturman and tiktin 1987: 485528). attempts to outsmart everyone but falling victim to one’s own slyness is also a well-established motif. the joke asking putin whether he had consulted rabinovichis popular on the internet and can be found on several humor hubs such as http://anekdot.ru, https://anekdot.d3.ru, http://sarcasm.zone/anekdoty/119731. the person credited with launching this joke on the internet is the russian tv journalist vladimir pozner [http://pozneronline.ru/2015/04/10968/, 22 september 2015]. he used it as a gambit for a serious conversation with his audience about political events in russia and ukraine, france and israel. david aidelman linked the program to his post but he also placed the joke as a separate text, thus increasing its visibility. like in many other late soviet and post-soviet jokes, lenin, stalin and other soviet leaders are summoned to judge current political events. the following joke, also posted by david aidelman on facebook, uses the title of an article by joseph stalin to juxtapose it with the punch line deriding failures in ukrainian policies: чертенок в аду видит, что сталин чего-то пишет, опираясь на край котла. — чего пишешь, дядя иосиф? — вторую работу по украинскому вопросу… — как называлась первая? — «головокружение от успехов»… — а эта как будет называться? — охренение от неудач… [a little devil in hell notices that stalin is writing something, leaning on the edge of the cauldron. — what are you writing, uncle joseph? — a second essay on the ukrainian problem… — what was the title of the first one? folklorica 2015, vol. xix 122 — “dizzy with success”… — how will you entitle this one? — “going nuts after failures”…] (36 “likes”, 9 shares) financial problems related to russia’s sale of natural gas to ukraine were often called a “gas war” in the media. jokes related to this topic had been documented before the beginning of the military conflict and became popular again in 2014. for example, larisa fialkova received the following example, in ukrainian and from a ukrainian immigrant to the united states: україна нічогоне винна росії за газ, бо він на території україни просто заблукав… [ukraine doesn’t owe russia anything for gas that simply got lost on ukrainian territory.] an almost identical text, but in russian, and purported to be a quotation from the ukrainian prime minister yatseniuk’s speech, was posted by a ukrainian user of twitter and had 679 “retweets.” some took the joke at face value and praised yatseniuk; others cursed him just as seriously. in many of the retweets there were quips, developing the theme of the quip and attempting to undermine either the russian or the ukrainian side [https://twitter.com/schnaps_ua/status/505428270230540288, 22 september 2015]. as mentioned earlier, deriding a ukrainian accent, intonation and word choice is an old theme of in russian language jokes. as might be expected, the theme again gained popularity at the time of the conflict. — скажите, как будет по-украински синхрофазотрон? — шо? — боже, какой прекрасный лаконичный язык! [— what’s the ukrainian for synchrophasotron? — hwhat? [imitation of a ukrainian and south-russian pronunciation of “what”] — jeez, what a wonderful and laconic language!] (posted on facebook by aidelman, 65 “likes”, 19 comments, 6 shares) the synchrophasotron was a synchrotron particle accelerator designed by the soviet physicist vladimir veksler and operated by soviet researchers from 1957 to 2003. the pride of soviet science, it was not only an extremely sophisticated device, but a difficult word to pronounce even for native russian speakers. as a result, it was used in a variety of “stupidity” jokes, including those deriding underdeveloped language abilities. notably, in some of the comments to the crisis in ukraine and the split of identity in the russian-speaking world folklorica 2015, vol. xix 123 david aidelman’s joke, we find an ethnic slur also formulated as a boomerang question-answer: — а как будет синхрофазотрон по-русски? — хреновина [— and what is the russian for synchrophasotron? — some sort of bullshit stuff.] other pervasive motifs in the humor about ukrainian politics are corruption and squabbles among members of the political elite. this theme was picked up by an online israeli edition «бесэдер? для тех, кому еще смешно» beseder [okay in hebrew]? for those who are still amused. while so far we have cited texts that originated outside israel but were disseminatedby those who live in israel, the humor published in beseder is written by russian-speaking israeli humorists. stylized as a newspaper preoccupied with political reports, beseder amuses readers by its instant response to the latest political news. readers are encouraged to “tweet” and “share” texts and leave comments. some do, posting their own quips in the process. петя и банк после того, как банк игоря коломойского блокировал счета петра порошенко, президенту украины стало не на что купить даже раду икабинет министров…. [petia and the bank after the bank owned by igor kolomoiskii blocked petr poroshenko’s account, the ukrainian president cannot afford even to bribe the rada [parliament] and the cabinet of ministers. [http://beseder.ru/news/entryid/225, 10 september, 2015] the title of this jocular report is an allusion to sergey prokofiev’s symphonic tale “peter and the wolf”. the ukrainian president’s first name petro is peter. president poroshenko emerges in this humorous text as totally dependent on the notorious ukrainian tycoon kolomoiskiy, who is heavily involved in ukrainian politics. in the structure of this text the business man implicitly becomes the wolf, the prototypical folkloric predator. the text derides the president’s weakness and dependence on problematic personalities and also hints at the overwhelming corruption in the upper echelons of power where the parliament and the cabinet of ministers have to be bribed. each time a new round of restrictions was announced, the various sanctions imposed by the participants of the conflict on each other’s nations have been targeted by beseder. for example: как стало известно российскому изданию «вечерняя правда» в ответ на санкции евросоюза, госдума решила внести в черный folklorica 2015, vol. xix 124 список европейские санкции. в ответ европейские парламентарии уже пригрозили наложить санкции на российский черный список. [journalists of the russian newspaper “evening truth” have found out that in response to european union’s sanctions state duma (russian parliament) decided to blacklist european sanctions. in their turn european parliamentarians threaten to sanction the russian blacklist. [http://beseder.ru/right-news/entryid/219, 10 september, 2015] the duel of sanctions is presented as ineffective and pointless, a mere juggling of empty threats. bringing together realities of the immigrants’ native countries and israel is among the favorite techniques of beseder’s authors. the emerging world of the text mixes familiar characters and scripts thus encouraging us to see the familiar in a new perspective. инструкторы из израиля приступили к обучению пограничников из украины. уже в первые дни на российско-украинской границе задержано 175 боевиков хамаса и 12 тысяч суданских нелегалов. [israel’s instructors began training ukrainian border control servicemen. already in the first days 175 hamas militants and 12,000 sudanese illegal immigrants were rounded up on the russian-ukrainian border. [http://beseder.ru/news/entryid/372, 10 september, 2015] israelis were implicated several times as participants in the hostilities in southeastern ukraine by people on both sides of the conflict. but in the quoted text the focus is not really on ukraine but on the everyday practices of israeli border police and their efforts to protect the country from islamic militants and illegal immigrants. their acts are often criticized in other countries for exaggerated vigilance. like other russian-language editions, beseder regularly “covers” events in ukraine and russia. our search of its two-year long archive for the key word “ukraine” yielded 150 relevant results. however, the editors realize the sensitivity of the situation and the possible repercussions of too deep an involvement by israel in the conflict. the text we quote below is self-ironic. its title is an allusion to taras shevchenko’s «реве та стогне дніпр широкий» [the mighty dnieper roars and bellows, http://www.dnipro-ukr.com.ua/scenariy-5864.html, 10 september 2015] and can be interpreted as a warning to the politicized former compatriots in israel: реве та стогне бен-йегуда сегодня в городах израиля пройдут демонстрации в поддержку украины. митингующие подготовили транспоранты «вечно мы лезем не в свое дело!» «почему нам больше всех надо?» и «а потом мы же будем во всем виноваты!» the crisis in ukraine and the split of identity in the russian-speaking world folklorica 2015, vol. xix 125 [mighty ben-yehuda roars and bellows today demonstrations in support of ukraine will be held in the towns of israel. the demonstrators have prepared banners “as ever we can’t mind our own business!”, “why do we always need more than all the others?” and “ultimately, we will be blamed for everything!”] [http://beseder.ru/news/entryid/26, 15 june, 2015] conclusions the material we have collected for this study clearly illustrates the folklorization of the conflict in the perception of the diaspora. while discussing events in ukraine and expressing their attitudes and ideological positions, russian-speaking israelis appeal to russian and ukrainian literature and to traditional and contemporary folklore. a strong motif in discussions of events in ukraine is the dehumanization of the other, be it banderites, militants in donbass or ideological opponents in israel. this dehumanization follows traditional folkloric patterns, transforming the other into animals or insects and demonizing them. the narratives about the conflict on both sides contain similar elements in terms of the topics discussed and arguments raised because they are rooted in the soviet past, even among the members of the post-soviet generation. the terms “fascists” and “nazis” are used indiscriminately about opponents by both sides as the most damning accusation. their meanings have considerably deviated from conventional definitions and they are part of hate language (and demonizing trends) permeating the narratives. they have become the basis for newly coined derivatives, such as naziki, zio-nazis, and nazio. the latter term is directly related to the arab-israeli conflict, which is represented by some discussants as having striking similarities with the russian-ukrainian crisis. indeed, a distinctive feature of the israeli diasporic discourse is that the crisis in ukraine is often compared to the arab-israeli conflict and the problem of illegal immigrants. finding similarities between militants in ukraine and hamas members, participants of the discussion demonstrate their involvement and anxiety about development of events both in the new and in the old country. the jokelore that has emerged around the ukrainian conflict brings together different time periods, historic figures, and distant places. the visuals also emphasize the merging of symbols –russian, ukrainian, israeli– combined in such a way as to show the authors’ affinities. the resulting world is absurd and macabre. facebook posts and the blogs that we monitored confirm that computermediated communication (cmc) is individualized and personalized, even if it is related to public matters and potentially can reach thousands of people worldwide. this mass self-communication [castells 2007] gives users an opportunity not only to express themselves in groups that they choose but also to select content according to their needs [valkenburg et al. 2015: 5]. participation in online discussions shapes internet users’ position on the conflict and appeals to “friends” folklorica 2015, vol. xix 126 to support, “like” and “share” are akin to social actions and may affect the users more strongly than mere facts would. in the 1990s, the narratives of veteran israelis about immigrants from the fsu were often hostile to the newcomers and they served to unify immigrants of the big wave; by contrast, the ukrainian crisis is dividing the community. one has to admit that ukrainian cultural life failed to develop at the level comparable with russian cultural institutions in israel. clearly, immigrants from ukraine were content to use russian-israeli media, educational institutions and community centers created by fellow-immigrants from the fsu. as a result, today their cultural consumption and informal communication are primarily in russian or hebrew, not in ukrainian. while ideological division is sharp, these disagreements do not go beyond intra-community clashes, neither do they lead to the division of ex-soviet diaspora into two—russian and ukrainian. notes 1 the research reported here is a joint project. the authors alternate priority of authorship in their publications. we would like to express our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for careful reading of the previous version of this essay and for helpful suggestions for revisions. 2 dates after internet addresses indicate when the sites were accessed last. 3 emigration from various regions of ukraine, those controlled by the government and by the separatists continued in the second half of 2015. some of the émigrés cannot manage relocation on their own and turn to help to ngos. one of them, an american-based “friendship foundation” organized11 flights and in the period of nine months helped 1,400 families from ukraine to immigrate to israel [http://www.newsru.co.il/israel/21sep2015/ukr_0010.html, 22 september 2015]. 4 although ukraine does not officially accept double citizenship, those who left the country after october 1991 can keep their passports and have the right to participate in the national elections. russia, on the other hand, officially accepts double citizenship and pays old-age pensions to the émigrés, but on the 14th of august 2014 an amendment to the federal law on the citizenship in the russia was adopted requiring all carriers of double passports to declare it when visiting russia [http://www.fmsmoscow.ru/docs/nationality/2nationality2014.html, 1 april 2015]. this controversial change caused by the aggravation in political and economic relations between russia and the west sparked heated discussions in the russian media and in the diaspora. 5 the facebook groups that we monitored were all public and accessible to non-members: izrail’tane za chestnuiu rossiui i svobodnuiu ukrainu [israelis for honest russia and free ukraine], israeli friends of ukraine, вести израиль vesty israel, ukraintsy v izraile (ukrainians in israel). there are also closed groups which do not allow non-members to see discussion or post and comment, e.g., israel help maidan wounded. to remain impartial, we decided not to join the crisis in ukraine and the split of identity in the russian-speaking world folklorica 2015, vol. xix 127 any closed group. personal facebook pages are open only to “friends”. as a rule, they do not concentrate on one topic and may contain personal information. we had access to them as “friends” and obtained permission from all those whose posts we wanted to quote. 6 we indicate a number of facebook friends to show how many users the quoted posts reach. in those cases, when we are not “friends” with the author on facebook we don’t specify this number. 7 we translated excerpts from the posts without editing them in order to preserve the individual style of the internet users. we also preserved such idiosyncrasies of online writing as a lack of capitalization. instances of code switching and hebrew and ukrainian insertions in the russian posts are italicized. 8 the term “political technologist” emerged in russia in the 1990s during yeltsin’s rule. it is rarely used in the west and may be closest but not equivalent with more familiar “political consultant” and “political strategist.” according to the historian and politologist andrew wilson, it involves a high degree of political manipulation [2011]. the term is used not only in the russian language of the metropolis but also in the diaspora. 9 a. dmytruk’s song was translated into english by andrey knellera [https://www.facebook.com/knellera/posts/290782174430944, 18 september 2015] and these four lines quote from this translation. trying to be loyal to the spirit of the original, knellera’s version changes some of the formulations thus allowing for shifts in the interpretation. for the sake of precision, we give our own translation of the contrasted pairs discussed above and in the criticism expressed by aidelman further. bibliography “в ближайшую пятницу около посольства россии в тель-авиве пройдет митинг в поддержку украины” [on friday near the russian embassy in tel aviv will host a rally in support of ukraine]. cited by http://newsru.co.il/israel/23apr2014/meeting_104.html. 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(consulted 8 may 2014) folklorica full 2021_edit 6.28.22 introduction to the special issue folklorica 2021, vol. xxv iii co-editor's introduction to the folklorica special issue “folklore and protest i” while challenge is often an expected part of an academic publication process, it has presented itself in unforeseeable—and traumatic—ways during the production of this special issue. this project, announced in the spring of 2021, is coming to fruition months later than planned. it was the suddenly shifted reality in the region of folklorica’s purview that has caused the delay. on 24 february 2022, the russian federation began an unprovoked and ferocious invasion of the entire country of ukraine. those of us who have close personal and professional ties to the region found ourselves in a state of despair, unable to process our thoughts. the theme of this special issue is folklore and protest. defined as the “[e]xpression of objection or nonacceptance” [ozzimo 2011: 1022], protests come in multiple shapes and forms. they occupy varying positions on political spectrums, and range from individual to collective, from quiet to loud, from subtle to blatant, and from peaceful to violent. depending on the nature and intensity of objection and nonacceptance, as well as on the specific actions undertaken to express these reactions, such related terms like “resistance” and “activism” often circulate alongside “protest.” protest and folklore studies protest, resistance, and activism, including those in eastern europe and eurasia, have historically drawn the attention of many scholars in a variety of disciplines [see slavic review 2021 and khromeichuk 2016]. folklorists share a particular interest with those who focus on the creative dimensions of objection and nonacceptance. although the studies of this diverse group of scholars vary in scope, disciplinary approaches, theoretical frameworks, and thematic prisms, they all explore what sociologist thomas reed identifies as the dialogue between the political and the cultural [2005: 289]. reed focuses on the roles of song, drama, poetry, murals, music, and graphic arts generated by several resistance movements in the united states. in a similar vein, the contributors to the recent multi-disciplinary volume cultural forms of protest in russia explore a variety of artistic media, including creative writing, film, and fashion in the russian political protests of the 2011-2012 [beumers, et al 2017]. political scientist lena jonson studies the same wave of protests through the prism of visual art [2015]. among the most recent anthropological contributions, jeroen stevens addresses architecture as a “site, subject, and agent” of protest connected to housing access and related inequalities in brazil [stevens 2020: 167]. hafsa kanjwal, durdana bhat, and masrat zahra focus on the photographs of two female photojournalists, treating those artifacts as forms of protest to the indian occupation of kashmir [2018]. additionally, mirco göpfert discusses the broad political matrix of iran through cartooning as a form of resistance [2020]. introduction to the special issue folklorica 2021, vol. xxv iv what distinguishes the folkloristic body of literature is its authors’ focus on the role of informal and traditional cultural practices in protest, resistance, and activist initiatives. these include folk songs [e.g., greenway 1953; mackinnon 2008], carnival elements [britsyna and holovakha 2005] or the broader categories of “tradition” [bronner 2005], “social protest folklore” [brenner 2021] and “symbolic resistance” [arkhipova, radchenko, and titkov 2016] in various contexts. in line with their long-standing interest in marginalized voices and nuances on the ground, folklorists are well positioned to recognize individual and community responses to social and political matters even in those settings where such responses are not communicated explicitly. peter narvaez’s look at traditional wakes in newfoundland as subtle critical reactions to hegemonic powers is a representative example [1994]. several contributors to spontaneous shrines and the public memorialization of death [santino 2006], while focusing on public sites of mourning, trace important social messages, including various forms of resistance [e.g., tye and goldstein 2006] and protest [e.g., marchi 2006] at such sites. eastern european examples include jeanmarie rouhierwilloughby’s study of urban russian life-cycle rituals and dorian jurić’s work on guslars [traditional singers] in the balkans [rouhier-willoughby 2008; jurić 2020]. albeit in different ways, both scholars illustrate how creative resistance to power structures is often accompanied by complex negotiation with those very same structures. while the authors cited above embrace the relatively neutral positions of observers and analysts, many folklorists directly engage in various forms of activism. the sub-field of public or applied folklore, especially in the united states, is one of the main platforms for such action. in line with folklorists’ longstanding commitment to social justice, an attempt to bring about positive change and to place marginalized community voices in the forefront often informs public folklore projects. debora kodish refers to these initiatives as “activist ideals” within which folklorists should closely work with individuals and communities to “address inequalities, challenge injustice, and work for the common good” [2011: 31]. similarly, robert baron, while emphasizing the importance of advocacy for the communities with whom public folklorists collaborate, describes a large body of public folklore work as “inherently counterhegemonic” [2019: 170]. the recent issue of journal of american folklore on african american expressive culture and protest, produced in response to the concerns raised by the black lives matter movement, is worthy of special mention. the contributors address not only broader societal structures shaped by systemic racism. they also trace similar problems within the discipline of folklore studies that, in ebony baily’s terms, historically employed a “racialized regime of folk representation” [2021: 389]. additionally, they challenge the “disciplinary structures rooted in colonialism and white supremacy” associated, in turn, with control over what finds its way into scholarship [boucicaut 2021: 375] by introducing black perspectives and expressivity through a variety of disciplines and expressive forms, including poetry, literary nonfiction, and quilting. introduction to the special issue folklorica 2021, vol. xxv v russia’s invasion of ukraine: protest and lack thereof the current issue was prepared and approved for publication prior to russia’s invasion of ukraine. thus, all of the contributors included here focus on resistance and protest events, both historical and more contemporary, that predate the war. writing about this war in the introduction to an issue that is not directly related to it may seem out of place. however, considering the scale of the tragedy, and the new reasons for and forms of protest, resistance, and activism that the war has generated, i believe that some preliminary reflections are in order. presentday communication technologies allow small-scale local acts of objection to and nonacceptance of russia’s aggression not only to be documented but also to be spread globally, to evolve into new forms, and to produce broader meanings. one example is a video of a ukrainian farmer towing away a captured russian tank with his tractor [hindustan times 2022]. while journalists the world over wondered whether the recording was actually authentic, it went viral and inspired a growing number of other actions and videos of a similar kind from war-torn ukraine [see holl-allen 2022]. numerous internet memes and pieces of digital art soon followed. image 1. special operations agricultural division patch [saint javelin. 2022b]. introduction to the special issue folklorica 2021, vol. xxv vi one example is a stylized image of a tractor accompanied by the inscription: “special operations of ukraine: agricultural division” [image 1]. while this phrase appears in english, the words john deere (the name of a common brand of tractor) are translated into ukrainian as іван олень to illicit a humorous effect. below the stylized tractor, the mottos “go fuck yourself” (a well-documented phrase uttered by the soldiers defending ukraine’s snake island in response to an attack by a russian warship) and “glory to ukraine” appear in ukrainian. while this image and other similar ones were informally shared on social media with no specific references, they are part of the commercial project “saint javelin” created by former journalist christian borys, a canadian of ukrainian-polish descent. reportedly, the sales of “saint javelin” merchandise in the form of stickers, pieces of clothing and patches informed by the war themes and imagery have surpassed one million dollars and have been used to support ukrainians affected by the war [saint javelin 2022a]. another example is the story of an elderly woman in kyiv who destroyed a russian drone with a jar of her home-canned vegetables. the story was first tweeted by the ukrainian media expert liubov tsybulska: “in kyiv a woman knocked down a russian drone from a balcony with a jar of cucumbers. how did they expect to occupy this country?” [tsybulska 2022]. while english-language journalists raised questions about the accuracy of the story [see scheerhout 2022], they simultaneously contributed to its wide dissemination. like its tractor counterpart, this story found its way into popular internet memes and pieces of digital art. one of them [image 2] features a stylized image of an elderly woman holding a rifle armed with jars of pickles, while a drone plummets to the ground in the background. the inscription says: “pickles of kyiv.” reportedly, a ukrainian journalist eventually uncovered the heroine of this story, a woman named olena. according to olena, she had never seen a drone before so she was not initially sure what the flying object was. as she watched it approaching, olena grabbed a jar and threw it at the device with her full force: “мабуть, від страху. бо я злякалася. а що як звідти почнуть обстрілювати мене! як же шкода тих помідорів […] не знаю, звідки взялися байки про огірки” [i did it likely out of fear because i was scared. what if they begin to shoot at me from there! what a pity that i lost a jar of tomatoes […] i don’t know where the fable about cucumbers came from” [liga. life 2022]. this discovery resulted in new memes. one of them uses the stylized image described above but it is now accompanied with the inscription in red: “stop fake! it was a jar of canned tomatoes, not cucumbers.” (1) the transformation of these reported daily acts of objection and nonacceptance into electronic imagery and commentary and their subsequent dissemination speak to their broad appeal. ordinary people with traditionally prescribed gender roles—male farmers driving tractors and women associated with domestic food production—perform extraordinary heroic acts. for ukrainians, they provide a necessary moral uplift at a time of devastation. to the international community, they serve as broader symbols of courage, resistance, and defiance. introduction to the special issue folklorica 2021, vol. xxv vii such images and stories enjoy a wide appeal largely because, despite the context of their origin, they convey the aura of positivity via humor. however, in reality, war is an immense tragedy, both collective and personal. thus, unavoidably, it also generates emotions and creative responses that are diametrically opposite to those of a positive nature. anger, hostility, and hatred that come from ukrainians and their close allies toward russians are recurrent themes on social media platforms and in personal communication venues. “росіяни, будьте ви всі прокляті!” [russians, may all of you be cursed!] was a phrase that filled my facebook feed through individual posts, “likes,” and “shares,” immediately following the initial bombings on february 24. the notions of good and evil, enemy and ally appear in both stark contrast and broad generalizations in many comments communicating ukrainian resistance to the russian invasion. for example, the term “orcs,” referring to the aggressive and malevolent monsters in j.r.r. tolkien’s popular trilogy the lord of the rings, has found its way into vernacular ukrainian and russian as a pseudonym for the russian invaders in ukraine. as some outside analysts have observed, much like tolkien’s savage and merciless army of orcs, “[t]oday's image 2. digital image “pickles of kyiv.” author unknown [tsybulska 2022b]. introduction to the special issue folklorica 2021, vol. xxv viii ‘orcs’ wreaking havoc in the towns and villages of ukraine appear to have this in common with their fictional predecessors” [maclachlan 2022]. many ukrainian citizens use the term to denote not only the ruling kremlin elite and the russian armed forces but the majority of, if not all, russians, finding them responsible for the war. unlike the inspirational “special operations of ukraine: agricultural division” and “pickles of kyiv” memes, angry creative references such as “orcs” used in regard to all russian citizens may make outsiders, including folklorists, feel uncomfortable. the discomfort may be reinforced by our discipline’s longstanding commitment to daily complexities, nuances, and the overall grey areas of ethnographic realities, often directly related to the discipline’s problematic relationship with “grand theories” [noyes 2016]. however, as the ukrainian anthropologist tina polek aptly observes, “war is black and white” and leaves no room for grey areas for those who experience it directly [buyskykh and polek 2022]. theoretical frameworks developed to understand daily realities in times of peace, no matter how socially and culturally problematic, may not always be sufficient to explain the situations of war, when people’s lives are at stake. david hufford’s influential research on the role of experiences in the formation of certain clusters of spiritual beliefs can shed light on the ukrainian situation [1989; 1995]. even though hufford focuses exclusively on the spiritual, his findings have broader implications. as i have shown elsewhere, both physical and social experiences, tend to play a significant role not only in the shaping of spiritual beliefs but also in the formation trajectories of political convictions [lesiv 2018; 2019]. folklorists who consider insider voices seriously are equipped to understand why ukrainian objection or nonacceptance is expressed in antagonistic and broadly stereotypical terms. the atrocities of the russian armed forces—including the rape and torture of young children—such as those committed in the town of bucha have been widely reported [see weber 2022 for a discussion]. in addition to such horrifically traumatic and often deadly encounters, there are also numerous personal experience and survivor stories that either remain unheard or circulate within much smaller circles. for example, anthropologist julia buyskykh spent the first several days of the war with her mother and their cat in their kyiv apartment under the sound of seemingly endless air raids and bombing. what were once memories recounted in her grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s bedtime stories about their survival during the nazi occupation of kyiv—candles as the only source of light, tightly closed and insulated widows, and a minimal amount of food— became real-life survival strategies for julia and her mother [buyskykh and polek 2022]. a ukrainian academic and acquaintance whose husband joined the ukrainian armed forces at the beginning of the war, had to leave her native city of kyiv in an effort to protect her two young daughters. their first shelter was a relative’s household in a small village in the kyiv region. the place appeared to be suitable for their needs because there was a well and a wood-burning stove that could allow them to survive without modern amenities such as running water, introduction to the special issue folklorica 2021, vol. xxv ix electricity, or gas. however, a fierce battle soon broke out in a neighboring village, and they had to flee once again. my acquaintance kindly shared a brief self-reflection on her experiences when they reached safety. the piece includes the following: ми постійно чули вибухи, бачили дим від пожеж у [сусідньому] макарові. […] вибухи були настільки сильні, що ми думали, що хтось стукає у двері. над нами досить низько літали літаки й гвинтокрили. 5-6 березня були розбомблені хати в сусідніх селах королівка й кодра. із цих та інших навколишніх сіл почали тікати люди. нам запропонували допомогу в евакуації. we constantly heard explosions, saw smoke from fires in [the neighboring village of] makarіv. […] the explosions were so loud that we thought someone was knocking on the door. planes and helicopters flew quite low above us. on march 5 and 6, houses in the neighboring villages of korolivka and kodra were bombed. people began to flee from these and other surrounding villages. we were offered help to evacuate. [anonymous, n.d.] in order to reach transportation services, my acquaintance and her two daughters had to endure a five kilometer walk under recurrent air raids and shelling. when i reached out to her to ask permission to use her story in this introduction, she added the following remarks: “ще я не описала, як ми сокири і серпи під поріг клали – мали з окупантами боротися. оці серпи і сокири – наш протест, готовність до захисту.” [i forgot to describe how we put ахes and sickles by the threshold [while staying in the village house] to potentially fight the invaders. these sickles and axes symbolized our protest and our readiness to defend ourselves” [personal correspondence, 21 may 2022]. julia’s and my acquaintance’s experiences of survival are but just two examples showing that russia’s invasion has stripped a very large number of ukrainians of their daily normalcy and has forced them to employ the radical agency of survival. to expand on hufford’s theory, it is intense inhumane experiences that may lead, at least partly, to the formation of hostile political views. another contributing factor is the political silence in russia, as viewed by many ukrainian (as well as some western) intellectuals and activists. remarks about the collective russian responsibility for the war recurrently appear in social media discussions and in formal published opinion pieces. the authors argue that war does not appear in a vacuum but rather requires numerous human resources. they often provide references to statistical data showing that, in russia, support for russia’s war on ukraine ranges from 70% to 83%. furthermore, the authors frequently note the paucity of large-scale anti-war protests in russia. the following example comes from the online newspaper ukraїner that, in turn, refers to all russians as the “passive creators of an authoritarian regime:” introduction to the special issue folklorica 2021, vol. xxv x росіян часто жаліють через те, що вони живуть в авторитарному режимі, де з правами людей не рахуються, а всі медіа — підконтрольні владі. однак росіяни 22 роки спостерігали за тим, як цей режим будували на крові їхніх співвітчизників, і не змогли або не захотіли протистояти терору. others often take pity on russians because they live in an authoritarian regime, where human rights are ignored, and all media are under the control of the government. however, for the last 22 years, russians have watched this regime being built on the blood of their compatriots and have been unable or unwilling to resist the terror [ukraїner 2022]. overall, while pointing out that statistics in a dictatorial state cannot be fully trusted, even outside observers admit that, as patrick luciani writes, “support for the war seems intuitively true” in russia [luciani 2022]. there is no doubt that the themes of complicity, protest and the lack thereof in relation to russia’s war on ukraine will constitute the focus of numerous studies, including folkloristic, in the future. folklorica and protest folklorica has historically created dialogues among folklorists and scholars of related disciplines trained in a variety of regional academic traditions. the dialogue has also been enriched by those contributors who study creative expressive culture through the lenses of other disciplines and theoretical frameworks. the journal now offers two concurrent special issues on the theme of folklore and protest that continue this tradition. the volumes add a regional perspective to an understanding of resistance through the prism of creative expressive culture, informed by contextually unique pre-war socio-political complexities. the present special issue i, co-edited by jeanmarie rouhierwilloughby and me, focuses on protest, resistance, and activism in three regions in eastern and central europe. special issue ii, edited by jeanmarie rouhierwilloughby, explores the same themes in the historical and present-day contexts of russia and belarus, currently united by the criminalization of protest by their governments. in the present volume, readers are invited on a two-fold—historical and geographical—journey. our first stop is the czech lands at the time immediately preceding the dissolution of the austro-hungarian empire. in her article “revolutionary kašpárek: the life cycle of the radical puppet,” cheryl stephenson focuses on the 1918 performance of how kašpárek laid austria to rest. through the prism of social history and semiotics, she explores the play’s character, the jester kašpárek, and his significant symbolic role in the defeat of the oppressive regime of the austro-hungarian empire. implicitly, stephenson illustrates that folklore can inform dissent indirectly. kašpárek is not only a introduction to the special issue folklorica 2021, vol. xxv xi theatrical character but also a widely recognized symbol of resistance that embodies the folk imaginaries of czech national identity and freedom. the next destination point is soviet ukraine, albeit as viewed through the prism of recent reflections. in her piece “protesting retrospectively: oral memories and social practices of migrants from the areas of artificial water reservoirs in soviet ukraine,” ukrainian folklorist iryna koval-fuchylo focuses on narratives about the construction of soviet hydroelectric power plants that resulted in the forced resettlement and flooding of numerous villages. the author demonstrates that protests can sometimes form retrospectively and become shaped by changing socio-political realities and complex memory formation paths. the author’s examples include recent social events that retroactively condemn soviet infrastructure projects and personal narratives containing the generalized legend motif of an old couple refusing to leave their house. anthropologist nikolina zenović relocates us to montenegro. in her contribution “sviće “smurf”: intertextual linkages in protests against montenegro’s 2019 freedom of religion law,” zenović focuses on the protests of serbs, both in montenegro and among the american diaspora, against the 2019 montenegrin law on freedom of religion or belief and the legal status of religious communities. the new law required documented proof of ownership for church property. the absence of such documentation allowed for the confiscation of the property by the government. zenović explores the role of traditional folklore (embedded in the song “sviće zora” [dawn breaks] by beogradski sindikat) and popular culture (the cartoon character papa smurf) in the protests through the theoretical framework of intertextuality. the author shows that it is precisely intertextual links, which are dynamic and contextuallyspecific, that create platforms for meaning-making processes during protests and have broader implications for an understanding of protest and expressive creative culture. the next contribution takes readers back to contemporary ukraine. my article “not all quiet on the culinary front: the battle over borshch in ukraine” is devoted to a pre-war dispute between ukraine and russia over the origins of the traditional beet-based soup borshch. this research reveals close connections between traditional family tables, resistance and activism, and international politics, supporting the necessity to treat folklore wholistically. ukrainian cultural activists turned beets into a cultural weapon in the face of the external threat from russia at the time, clearly distinguishing between the enemy and allies. while the article captures a historical situation shortly before russia’s invasion of ukraine, it also includes a preface outlining my understanding of the implication of this research in the context of the present-day war. i am indebted to many individuals whose help, often behind the scenes, has enabled this publication’s appearance in print. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby has been a source of support and wisdom and a pleasure to work with. i thank all our contributors for their stimulating research and patience throughout the review and publication process. the role of the anonymous reviewers cannot be overestimated. thank you for your time, expertise, and service to the profession. introduction to the special issue folklorica 2021, vol. xxv xii i am grateful to our editorial assistant, johnna warkentine, for her diligence and attention to detail. last but not least, a big thank you to brian cherwick for his help with editorial work on several pieces. mariya lesiv, guest co-editor notes 1 this meme can no longer be located on the internet as of publication. bibliography arkhipova, aleksandra, daria radchenko, and aleksei titkov, (eds). 2016. архипова, александра, дария радченко и алексей титков. городские тексты и практики. том і: символическое сопротивление. 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(consulted 19 may 2022). slavic review. 2021. critical discussion forum: the sociology of protest in belarus—social dynamics, ideological shifts, and demand for change 80 (1). stevens, jeroen. 2020. “architecture acts, too! protests and proposals for housing in brazil.” anthropological notebooks 26 (1): 167-181. tsybulska, liubov [@tsybulskaliubov]. 2022a. 5 march 2022. “in kyiv a woman knocked down a russian drone from a balcony with a jar of introduction to the special issue folklorica 2021, vol. xxv xv cucumbers. how did they expect to occupy this country?...” twitter. cited by https://twitter.com/tsybulskaliubov/status/1500075457798189057. (consulted 19 may 2022). tsybulska, liubov [@tsybulskaliubov]. 2022b. 5 march 2022. “pickles of kyiv”… twitter. cited by https://twitter.com/tsybulskaliubov/status/1500166727065350155/photo/ 1. (consulted 5 june 2022). ukraїner. 2022. “чому всі росіяни мають нести відповідальність за війну в україні.” [why all russians should be responsible for the war in ukraine]. ukraїner. 1 may 2022. cited by https://ukrainer.net/vidpovidalnist-rosiyan/. (consulted 30 may 2022). weber, peter. 2022. “russian troops ‘systemically raped’ 25 women, girls as young as 14 in a bucha basement, ukraine says.” the weeks. 12 april 2022. cited by https://theweek.com/russo-ukrainian-war/1012441/russiantroops-systematically-raped-25-women-girls-as-young-as-14-in-a. (consulted 30 may 2022). tatiana ivanovna kaluzhnikova. trndtteinnnyi russkii muzvkalny* kalendar1 srednego urala. ekaterinburgcheliabinsk (serija "biblioteka uralskogo folklora/' vol. 1). 208 pp. with music. izaly zemtsovsky, ernest bloch professor university of california, berkeley this book opens a new series and is in a certain sense a sensation. calendar rituals and folklore, which traditionally have been connected with western and south-western russian regions, have been practically unpresented by ethnomusicologists of the urals. eighty-tliree songs attached to calendar holidays and widely known to the oldtime russian inhabitants of the central urals before soviet power are included in the present collection. the author, a well known musicologist and folklorist in the urals, carried out the recording of these rituals and songs in the 1970s and 1980s with the assistance of students from the ural state conservatory named after m. p. musorgsky and of members of the sverdlovsk district house of folklore. in the urals the most well known yuletide, carnival, trinity, and semik rituals, round dances, and the basic circle of the songs accompanying them have been restored by the author according to recollections of the rural performers.and according to archival materials. description of the calendar holidays has been given both in the author s account and in the stories of the residents of towns and villages in the urals. almost all the material is being published for the first time and preserves the main features of the ural dialect. within the calendar sections songs have been grouped by their rhythmic structures. in the commentary parallels with the calendar folk­ lore of other regions or russia are given, first of all the traditions closest to those of the urals, that is, the russian north, povolzhie, kama, zaurale, and siberia. kaluzhnikova's introductory article and her scholarly apparatus are marked by their high level of scholarship and have no trace of provincialism. she characterizes the folklore-ethno­ graphic cycle of the calendar tradition in the central urals (pp. 725) and the music as one of the "sub codes" in the calendar rituals of the central urals (pp. 2548) in detail. she points out the heterogeneity of the local population and the role of inter-ethnic contacts with the non-russian peoples of the urals, proposes a typology of the song structures and their rhythm, distinguishes si seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 monoand polytextual melodies, and discloses their sexual and age differentiation. ^ the book contains unique variants of platter songs that are generally rarely met in publications ("khodit po poliu ilia prorok1'), of songs for accompanying spring ("kostroma"), and of round dance songs. there also is an entire section of religious verses (dukhovnye stikhi) and songs that were performed during fasts (pp. 77-83). the stylistic connection of the latter songs with ukrainian "kants" of the eighteenth century have also been noted. the author has investigated this genre thoroughly in publications from her dissertation in the late 1970s. master­ pieces of rare beauty and preservation appear among the poetic texts. on the whole the introduction of materials from the urals into the general slavic scholarly fund represents a significant fact in the present day process of elucidating local folklore traditions. next in line is the preparation of the following volume of the undertaken urals series, which will be dedicated to the traditional wedding of the central urals. at the present time kaluzhnikova is working on the unique riches of its songs and laments. translated by james o. bailey !t3 jack v. haney9 the complete russian folktale james o. bailey the first two volumes of jack v. haney's the complete russian folktale will be published this spring. haney, a professor of old russian literature and folklore at the university of washington, has been working on this project for a number of years. volume i, the russian folktale, is intended as an introduction to the tales of russia originally told in the russian language. various chapters in the book deal with the basics: definitions, kinds of tales, structures, classifications, narrators, and the language of the tales; recordings and collections. it also includes extended discussion of the relationship between tales and social customs as derived from myths and rituals of an ancient past. in this section particular emphasis is placed on aspects of the tales that link them specifically to russian tradition and culture. a survey of all the kinds of russian tales concludes the volume. each of the succeeding four volumes is devoted to a different kind of tale, viz., the animal tale (to appear in june), the wonder or fairy tales, the legends, the tales of everyday life and the anecdotes. each volume contains a lengthy introduction, followed by an example of every tale type known in the russian corpus. this is the first time that an example of every tale type has appeared in any language, including russian. the russian revision of |he aarne-thompson index of tale types, sravni1егпу) ukazatel' siuzhetov. vostochnoslavianskaia jfcazka. has been used throughout the entire work. the tales are drawn from a variety of sources, шпе of which have never been published before, ose taken from the collection of a. n. afanasiev seefa journal 1998, vol. iii no. 1 are all newly translated. the appendices contain information about the narrator and source of each tale, to the extent those are known, its classification number, and the frequency of the recording, especially if it is unique. 4o “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 1 articles “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero nataliya bezborodova university of alberta edmonton, alberta, canada abstract norshtein’s “hedgehog in the fog” is a soviet cartoon about a little hedgehog making his way through a scary world of fog. this film has generated its own lore, and there is also a monument to the hedgehog in kyiv. during the maidan events, the hedgehog cartoon acquired a new meaning; the everyman/hedgehog became first a symbol of searching for the right path and then of protest. maidan brought the destruction of soviet monuments, but not of the kyiv hedgehog statue; it was modified to convey these new senses as a part of kyiv’s cultural heritage. this paper explores the hedgehog cartoon as the focus of a new lore. the paper is based on the author’s presentation at the american folklore society annual conference 2014 and her ma thesis, maidan on facebook: sensitive, expressive and interpretative protest lore. conceptual notes this paper explores the role of protest lore in the formulation of new symbols and attitudes, and the re-conceptualization of the soviet heritage in contemporary ukraine based on the example of the soviet cartoon hedgehog in the fog and its characters as discussed in social media, particularly on facebook, during the maidan nezalezhnosti ‘independence square’ protests in kyiv, ukraine in the winter of 2013-2014 (simply called “maidan” or “euromaidan” or in ukrainian: майдан / євромайдан [the square] or [the euro[pean] square]). (1) celebrations and protests located on independence square have usually focused on national issues, rather than municipal affairs. during the protests the word “maidan” gained additional meanings, including the act of public folklorica 2016, vol. xx 2 politics itself. based on my research, western media and researchers outside of ukraine used the name “euromaidan” more often than did ukrainian citizens and participants in the protests; the latter preferred to use the name “maidan.” this difference reveals the varied perceptions of the cause of the protests and makes clear whether a particular author refers to the events as focused on international relations or had an internal locus. i will use “maidan” in this paper, since the focus is on ukrainian attitudes toward the events. the protests started as a rally on the night of november 21, 2013 on the maidan nezalezhnosti. protesters objected to the government’s decision to forego signing an association agreement that had been in preparation for a year and would have paved the way for the possible integration of the country into the european union (eu). instead of signing it, yanukovych arranged for a loan from russia. this drew ukraine closer to the russian sphere of influence. the rally was patterned on the orange revolution of 2004, a protest against electoral fraud. just as protesters then had succeeded in overturning the results of the 2004 election, so too protesters in 2013-14 sought to oust the government. the scope of the protests later expanded, with many calling for the resignation of president viktor yanukovych and his government. ultimately yanukovych fled to russia, although he did not resign the presidency. great upheaval followed his departure, including russia’s annexation of crimea and the conflict in donbass. many additional protestors joined the rally after the violent dispersal of the crowds on the night of november 30, 2013. at this point, the term “maidan” began to refer to a political movement, not only to a location in the capital city. protesters used the term accordingly. (2) a number of posts in my collection discuss the perception of maidan, a term whose original meaning was simply a location, but grew to convey political attitudes even after people had dispersed from the square. protests against authoritarian power rooted in the suppression of freedom of speech and persecution of political dissenters often include symbolic and indirect language transmitted through images and symbols of folk and popular culture. the speech of fictional “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 3 characters allows for indirect and ambivalent humor as a response to suppression of political speech. (3) lev loseff argues that such aesopian language in russian literature emerged against ideological censorship that impeded open critique of higher authorities in the russian empire since the 18th century [loseff, 1984]. hinting and circumlocution in text supplanted straightforward depiction of certain details of real life, and developed into an aesthetic approach in east slavic literature. this phenomenon is common to many writers from countries with totalitarian regimes and is used as a form of implicit critique in the hope of avoiding persecution [onatsky, 1957]. we also see this practice in pop culture and material folklore that may be classified as constructive lore. examples include adapting cartoons, as has been documented in the russian political protests of 2011-2012. during those protests, photographs by vadim lurie and the soviet cartoon adventures of mowgli were used to convey political dissent [akhmetova, 2014]. this article will explore textual and visual representations of informal protest lore in social media through the prism of the characters in ёжик в тумане [hedgehog in the fog]. this soviet-era cartoon by iurii norshtein features an everyman figure (the hedgehog) who struggles to find his way through fog literally and figuratively. in the context of the maidan, this character was appeared in memes that expressed the growing assertiveness of ordinary ukrainian citizens. this paper will focus on the symbols depicting the meanings of the characters embodied by opposing sides in the confrontation. more broadly, topics from known literary works, television programs, and other products of mass culture served as the source for jokes in my collection of facebook posts collected day by day several hours per day from my newsfeed for the period january 19 – february 28, 2014. hedgehog in the fog is only one topic, but is one that reveals a great deal about social and cultural life during the period of political upheaval. many of facebook authors in my collection at the time exhibited the characteristic elements of the “liminal phase” described by victor turner [1969]. this spontaneous group placed participants on an equal footing instead of a typical hierarchy with the privileges, norms and prohibitions intrinsic to social structure. it creatively combined cultural elements folklorica 2016, vol. xx 4 from diverse sources, including instances of high (or official) and popular (or commercial) culture. the newly formed group of protest supporters were in need of discussion of their values and facilitated these liminal-state negotiations with humorous and expressive devices common to this stage of a rite of passage. i consider the texts and visual images on facebook to be examples of contemporary internet folklore or “newslore” as identified by russell frank, citing alan dundes’ and carl pagter’s [1987:7] definition of “xeroxlore” as “folklore from the paperwork empire,” “folklore by facsimile,” “white-collar folklore,” and “folklore of bureaucracy” [frank, 2011]. frank notes that newslore, like xeroxlore, possesses different attributes than folklore texts in the earliest conceptualizations of folklore: its longevity can be measured in presidencies rather than generations, and it circulates remotely rather than face-toface, among people who are likelier to live in an urban apartment or a suburban house than on a family farmstead. [frank, 2011:7] these texts generally retain other attributes of “classic” folklore, including variability, anonymity, communalism, and remain largely intact. in “maidan folklore 2004,” natalia lysiuk [2005:2] defines the material she gathered as a “postfolklore” phenomenon of spontaneous groups and assemblies formed with the free will of the participants and for limited period in time. she notes that no age, social, confessional, regional or ethnic distinctions were inherent to this gathering. i argue that lysiuk’s definition applies to the protest folklore on facebook related to maidan 2013-2014 as well. (4) i use examples from facebook only because this social media was my primary “field” of research for material collected at the time of the protests. because social media settings prevent me from gathering more material from other sources corresponding to the time frame of the facebook research, i have not included other social media in this analysis. (5) “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 5 the plot of the cartoon iurii norshtein’s 1975 cartoon, based on sergei kozlov’s tale [1989], tells the story of a little hedgehog who walks through the forest to visit his friend, a bear cub, to have evening tea together and count the stars. that day, hedgehog got some raspberry jam for evening tea and sets out to meet his friend. he finds himself in a surreal and frightening world inhabited by unknown shapes and various creatures, from predators to friendly animals in silence and sounds, darkness, tall grass and enchanting stars. occasionally an unseen distant voice calls out for him. on his way through the woods, he sees a sinister looking eagle-owl following him, encounters a beautiful white horse standing in a fog, as well as a dog. he is frightened in the fog, nearly gets lost and is rescued from drowning. along the way, he loses and then finds his pot of raspberry jam. finally, hedgehog arrives at the campfire where the bear cub is brewing tea. bear explains that he was calling for hedgehog, worried that he was late. they sit having tea while hedgehog is thinking about the horse. the cartoon producer, iurii norshtein, characterizes the plot as follows: там нет никакой интриги в действии, там нет никакой динамики действия. вполне вероятно, что в “ёжик в тумане” произошёл счастливый случай совпадения всех элементов. [it has no intrigue in the action, no active dynamic in the plot. it is most likely, that “hedgehog in the fog” simply brought together a happy coincidence of all the elements]. [margolina, 2002] while the cartoon actually is not particularly dramatic, it contains important elements typical for folktales as defined by propp [1968]. the hero (hedgehog) has to reach his destination (to visit bear cub). he faces obstacles on his way (fog, falling into the river, the loss of the pot of jam) and an antagonist (the eagle-owl), and sees some positive figures (a white horse, a dog). not surprisingly, these events folklorica 2016, vol. xx 6 represent the basic human existential need to overcome fear of the unknown often encoded in folktales from different nations. the cartoon gained international fame and with it, additional meanings and cultural symbolism. (6) vita iakovlieva in her doctoral research about post-chernobyl childhood in ukraine discusses her informants’ recollections of the “chernobyl hedgehog,” a pejorative directed at children from chernobyl area that implied physical or intellectual incapability, or inability to adjust to new circumstances [iakovlieva, 2015]. (7) she suggests that the hedgehog’s image serves as a metaphor for feeling lost and searching for a right path in complicated circumstances. in addition, marina dmitrievskaia, editor of st. petersburg theatrical journal, refers to how the hedgehog exemplifies the general situation of post-soviet countries: […] наверное, вся наша жизнь тех десятилетий, что с нами ежик, это тоже сплошной туман, в котором мы карабкаемся. нам страшно. мы хотим кого-то обрести — мишку. и мечта обрести мишку и сквозь этот туман как-то пройти […]. наверное, тоже как-то ложится на душу тем зрителям, которые бесконечно “ежика” смотрят и любят. [[…] probably, all our life of those decades that the hedgehog was with us, that’s also the total fog that we have clambered around in. it is horrible for us. we want to find someone – a bear cub. and the dream to find the bear cub and to get through this fog […]. that’s probably also the reason the audience that takes this to heart keeps watching and loves “hedgehog”]. [ivakhnenko, 2009] social media also provides examples of using the cartoon and its characters to discuss daily life. for example, facebook users refer to the cartoon characters when they post personal stories or comments about travel experiences and weather conditions, for example: кирилл говорун, november 27, 2014 “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 7 второй день живём в облаке – ходим как ёжики в тумане. [cyril hovorun, november 27, 2014. we are living in a cloud for the second day in a row, and walk like hedgehogs in the fog.] (author note: cyril’s comment appears beneath photographs of a foggy landscape.) тихон сергій кульбака, april 5, 2016 выхожу рано утром на балкон ... туман... ну и крикнул (никто же не видит): “лошаааааааадка-а-а-аа!!!!!!!!!”.... слышу (в ответ): “ёжиииииииииик!!!!!!!!!” настроение на весь день!!!))) [tykhon serhii kul’baka, april 5, 2016 i went out onto the balcony early in the morning... fog... well (nobody could see me) so i shouted: “hooooooorse .... and i hear (in a response): “hedgehooooooog” it made my whole day!!!))] such usage demonstrates the symbolic meaning attributed to the cartoon characters and their diffusion throughout popular culture. these texts require no additional explanation by the authors, who can safely assume readers feel positively about the cartoon characters and because of their enduring popularity. hedgehog in the fog as non-official city geography the statue of the cartoon’s hero was created and installed in downtown kyiv in 2009 in a small square at the crossroads of zolotovorit’ska and reitarska streets and heorhiivskiy row [image 1]. the designer was kostyantyn skrytutskyi, who created the statue together with volodymyr kolin’ko and heorhy kurovskii. folklorica 2016, vol. xx 8 image 1. a statue to hedgehog in the fog in kyiv. [katja lutska, 2013] the idea for the statue came from kyiv landscape initiative association, whose members have created figures of animals and characters of folktales and popular culture works to adorn tree stumps in the downtown of the city. the hedgehog is mounted on “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 9 old pine stump near the metro station zhytomyrs’ka. vice-president of the kyiv landscape initiative association volodymyr kolin’ko stated that the primary idea of the statue was to make people smile and elevate their mood: “ёжик в тумане”, может быть, один из наиболее удачных таких символов для увековечения. […] вообще говоря, ёжик похож на сегодняшний киев. киев такой же вечный, он такой же “всех времен и народов” и такой же беззащитный, как “ёжик в тумане.” [hedgehog in the fog is probably one of the best symbols of immortality. […] in general, hedgehog is similar to today’s kyiv, kyiv is likewise eternal, it is the same, ‘for all time and all peoples,’ and just as defenseless as hedgehog in the fog]. [ivakhnenko, 2009] kyiv is not the only place with a statue of hedgehog; similar artworks to this cartoon characters may be found in in starobel'sk in the luhansk region, [tripadvisor, 2015], and in several cites russian cities: krasnodar in 2010 [avstryiskaia, 2011], and ivanovo in 2015, [ivanovo novosti, 2015]; a project is being discussed in penza [trk ekspres, 2015]. the statue in kyiv is located in the area of many well-known historical sites and popular tourist attractions and is in the close proximity to two ancient historical landmarks: the golden gates and st. sophia cathedral. (8) the sculpture in kyiv likewise became a popular tourist attraction soon after it was erected. a facebook account under the name of hedgehog (its original name is ежик) was created in august 2013, where texts and pictures about visitors, events related to the statue, or stories related to the hedgehog as a species are posted in the name of the cartoon character. (9) ежик, october 3, 2013 продолжу вас знакомить с моими подружками. вот оля клименко. очень добрая и хорошая девочка! однажды, когда мы болтали, пошел дождик. так оля почти час держала зонтик у меня над головой! а сама промокла до folklorica 2016, vol. xx 10 нитки! я ежик воспитанный и просил олечку не утруждаться... все равно не бросила меня... спасибо! [i will continue to introduce you to my girlfriends. this is olia klimenko. she is a very kind, good girl! once when we were chatting, it started raining. so, olia held an umbrella over my head for nearly an hour! and she was soaked to the bone! as a well-brought up hedgehog, i asked sweet olia not to trouble herself... nevertheless, she did not abandon me... thanks!] the page administrators provide no information about the personnel or about the inspiration for the page, and the images and posts on facebook are ascribed to the cartoon character himself. other facebook users make comments, “like” or share posts from the page. for example, in one post the page administrators provide contextual interpretation of the site where the statue stands. ежик, january 8, 2016 […] сижу, конечно, на стратегическом перекрестке. с одной стороны, пограничникам помогаю, с другой стороны софию прикрываю. и золотые ворота, естественно, на мне. [[…] for sure, i sit on a strategic crossroad. on one hand, i help border guards; on the other hand, i protect sophia. the golden gates are definitely also my responsibility.] the mention of the “border guards” is no coincidence; it is yet another marker illustrating the complex intermixing between popular culture and politics. both in the text above and in the material embodiment on the square, the reference to “border guards” has its connection to the figure of the horse from the cartoon. it is not clear whether its position on this square was chosen with this fact in mind, but there is a monument to a rider on a horse just across the street. the equestrian statue depicts a cossack holding a drawn saber in his right hand. the monument was installed on may 26, 2004 and bears the inscription: “to the guardians of the motherland’s borders of all generations.” this statue was the first “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 11 monument erected in honor of the border protection forces since ukraine’s independence in 1991 in front of the entrance to the administration of the border protection forces of ukraine [kievfoto, 2016]. (10) the architecture of the square allows the hedgehog statue to “see” the horse, but not vice versa. image 2. a statue to hedgehog in the fog facing the monument to the border protection forces of ukraine. photo credit: iryna bezborodova likewise, in the cartoon, hedgehog had no contact with the horse, only viewing it from afar. folklorica 2016, vol. xx 12 image 3. screen capture from the cartoon of hedgehog and horse in the fog.[norshtein, 1975a] to make sure the visitors are aware of the interaction of hedgehog with horse/the border forces monument, the hedgehog’s statue has a plaque with the name horse rather than hedgehog (see image 4). the statue’s visitors are aware of the implication of the plaque, as in the example of this comment from hedgehog’s facebook account: roman zavorotniy, september 2, 2013 кто бы знал, что композиция называется “лошадка” не просто так. еж-то смотрит на лошадку под казаком напротив пограничной службы! [who knows, the composition is not simply called horse. the hedgehog is looking at a horse ridden by a cossack across from the border guard service!] “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 13 image 4. the title of the hedgehog statue. the inscription reads: “’лошадка’ [horse], sculptor skrytutskiy k.v., kyiv landscape initiative.” [mokosii, 2009] as we can see, the historical monument to the border protection forces has acquired a new interpretation from popular culture. whereas the statue of hedgehog has gained political meaning. it is regarded as a victim, or as a witness, of ukrainian protests in kyiv, of the russian-ukrainian war in the east of ukraine, or in internal processes in the political life of ukraine. some of these implications are connected to this virtual interaction between the hedgehog and the border protection forces monument (discussed in more detail below). locals and tourists alike, regardless of their political attitudes, visit the statue often. visitors often leave coins inside the statue, a practice common at many tourist sites worldwide (see image 5). folklorica 2016, vol. xx 14 image 5. coins inside the hedgehog statue. [mokosii, 2009] the statue is also associated with student folk practices; they believe that visiting the hedgehog a day prior to the exam will result in good grades. ежик, october 11, 2013 все время забываю вам рассказать, что студенты из университетов шевченко и карпенко-карого считают меня своим покровителем. я, конечно, стараюсь их не подводить. всетаки коллеги, ведь я тоже артист, снимался в одном великом мультфильме. [i keep forgetting to tell you that students of shevchenko university and karpenko-kary (theatre, cinema and television university) consider me to be their patron. certainly, i do my best not to let them down. after all, we are colleagues, i am an actor too, i acted in one of the great animated films.] так вот, аня мамалига, моя подружка, ни один экзамен без моей помощи не хотела сдавать! а ведь умняшка, каких поискать! почему умные девочки так не уверены в себе? ведь все-все знают, а робеют! [so, ania mamaliga, my girlfriend, refused to take a single exam without my help! she is such smart girl, you can hardly find a smarter one! “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 15 why are these smart girls so lacking in self-confidence? they know everything, but are timid!] в результате, в дни экзаменов, я, как памятник ленину, весь в цветах! перед лошадкой даже неудобно... [as a result, on exam days i got a lot of flowers, like a monument to lenin! it’s embarrassing for the horse...] the popularity of the statue has its downside. from time to time, the statue to hedgehog suffers damage and requires restoration. during these periods, messages on facebook and other media outlets regarding the restoration retain the connection to the cartoon’s plot and images (see images 6 and 7). image 6. screen capture from the cartoon of hedgehog and bear cub counting stars. [norshtein, 1975b] folklorica 2016, vol. xx 16 image 7. the poster near hedgehog’s tree reads: “i went to count stars, will be back may 26.” [наш киев, 2012] the date of the statue’s return mentioned in image 7 carries significance as well; since 1992, may 28 has been the official day of the border protection forces of ukraine. on the anniversary of that day, the statue of the hedgehog receives more visitors than usual. this date keeps the soviet-era cartoon connected to ukrainian national narratives and perpetuates further re-conception of the city’s folk geography. hedgehog’s facebook account also provides additional information about the damage to the statue within the framework of the cartoon’s plot elements. facebook narratives are consistent with the first-person account in hedgehog’s name, and he refers to his designer and sculptor as “dad:” ежик, august 22, 2013 […] тут многие спрашивают, кто на меня напал. не помню. помню только, что под утро кто то начал вырывать у меня из лапок узелок с вареньем. я зашипел и хотел укусить воришку, но получил по мордочке чем -то острым и потерял сознание… я сейчас у папы кости в мастерской, чувствую себя здесь в полной безопасности “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 17 и стараюсь забыть нападение. папа костя обработал мои ранки столярным клеем и они перестали болеть, только немножко ноют. в гости приходил медвежонок. мы попили чай из блюдец. жаль, что без варенья, но у кости в мастерской оказался липовый мед. медвежонок меня ругает, что я до поздней ночи засиживаюсь на пеньке. я привык, ведь по ночам ко мне приходят влюбленные. я немножко стесняюсь порой, что невольно подслушиваю их щебетание, но под него так сладко засыпать! я так люблю киевскую ночь! […] обещаю, что вернусь в свой скверик, как только поправлюсь. [[…] many ask who assaulted me. i don’t remember. the only thing i remember that just before morning someone tried to snatch the pot with raspberry jam out of my paws. i hissed and wanted to bite the pilferer, but felt something sharp stab my muzzle, and i fainted … right now i’m at my dad kostia’s studio; i feel totally safe here and am trying to forget the assault. my dad kostia treated my wounds with carpenter’s glue and they have stopped hurting, they only ache a little bit. bear cub came to see me. we drank tea from saucers. it is a pity that we have no jam, but we found some linden honey in kostia’s workshop. bear cub scolds me for staying up until late at night on the stump. i’ve gotten used to that, because lovers come to visit me at night. i feel a bit embarrassed sometimes, because i inadvertently overhear their chatter, but it is so sweet to fall asleep listening to them! i love kyiv at night so much! […] i promise to come back to my square as soon as i feel better.] the damage to the statue and its restauration are also the subject of publications in ukrainian and russian media outlets [segodnia, 2013; channel 1, 2013]. posts from hedgehog prompt reactions from other facebook users and they appear to be dialogic in nature. messages about damages of the statue usually provoke emotional comments that demonstrate audience concern about the statue remaining in place and being properly preserved. a message about folklorica 2016, vol. xx 18 possible removal or relocation of the statue after yet another attack received the most responses. ежик, march 10, 2015 меня опять обворовали :(. уеду! [i have been robbed again :(. i’m leaving!] tanya tretyakova: не нужно, ежик, ты нам нужен! (8 “likes,” 10 березень 2015 р.) [no need, hedgehog, we need you! (8 “likes,” march 10, 2015)] helen galyabarda: не уезжай...давай найдем и надаем по попе тем негодяям...? хочешь, я принесу тебе варенье? только не уезжай...мы тебя очень любим (3 “likes,” 10 березень 2015 р.) [don’t go... let’s find those scoundrels and give their butts a spanking...? do you want me to bring you jam? just don’t go... we love you very much (3 “likes,” march 10, 2015)] olga yosypchuk: сцукииии, знову любиму кроху образили (2 “likes,” 10 березень 2015 р.) [bitches, they hurt again my beloved baby (2 “likes,” march 10, 2015)] николай вишняков: лайкать рука не подымается (1 “like,” 10 березень 2015 р.) [i cannot “like” this (1 “like,” march 10, 2015)] олексій сухий: да, у меня дети страдали вот, изучали место преступления (10 березень 2015 р.) [yes, my kids suffered and went to investigate the scene of crime (march 10, 2015)] julia nikolskaya: бедняга(( (10 березень 2015 р.) [poor thing (( (march 10, 2015)] andrii cherninskyi: видеокамеры надо ставить (3 “likes,” 10 березень 2015 р.) [surveillance cameras “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 19 should be put up (3 “likes,” march 10, 2015)] татьяна грушко: как так (10 березень 2015 р.) [how come (march 10, 2015)] olga shusta: шкода як ( (10 березень 2015 р.) [so sorry ( (march 10, 2015)] илья харченко: предоставим убежище от вандалов на русановке. тем более, что ёжик для нас больше, чем символ! опёку гарантируем! (3 “likes,” 23 червня 2015 р.) [we will provide a shelter from vandals on rusanovka. (11) especially because hedgehog is more than a symbol for us! we guarantee you protection! (3 “likes,” june 23, 2015)] andriy lontkovsky: ежичек! переезжай к нам на русановку! у нас тут твоих сородичей очень много, ты будешь оберегать их а мы тебя (1 “like,” 23 червня 2015 р.) [sweet hedgehog! move to us in rusanovka! we have many of your tribe here, you will protect them, and we [will take care of] you (1 “like,” june 23, 2015)] салоид лариса: а мы тебя давно ждем! у нас для тебя и природа получше, и все островитяне тебя заждались! (24 червня 2015 р.) [we have been waiting for you for so long! we have a better natural environment, and all island people are tired of waiting for you! (june 24, 2015)] anton vasylevich: [picture of a weeping individual] (30 грудня 2015) [(december 30, 2015)] the last instance demonstrates the level of emotional involvement and significance of the statue to residents of the city. the last case that resulted in the statue’s temporarily relocation also evoked folklorica 2016, vol. xx 20 political implications associated with the events after the protests (discussed in detail below). near the beginning of the protests in 2013, the statue was being restored again. the hedgehog’s facebook account reposted a publication from a participant of a media seminar focused on the anticipated agreement with the european union. the seminar took place at a location close to the hedgehog statue. the author of the publication tagged the sculptor in her text. katja lutska, october 27, 2013 ось вона популярність! неподалік від вул. рейтарська, в перерві, на семінарі “євроінтеграція: шляхи до аудиторії українських медіа” усі учасники говорили не про ці “шляхи”.. а про те, куди ж подівся їжачок в тумані. kostia skrzetuski. [that is fame! not far from reitarska street, during a break in the seminar “european integration: paths toward a ukrainian media audience,” all the participants were not talking about these “paths” … but were wondering about the disappearance of hedgehog in the fog. kostia skrzetuski]. the facebook examples discussed above demonstrate that the statue of hedgehog is closely associated with the character in norshtein’s cartoon. it carries positive emotional connotations and has also acquired symbolism associated with within kyiv’s cultural heritage. it has become an object of the city’s folk geography, familiar and symbolic to the city residents as both a tourist attraction and as a mediator of social construction. hedgehog on the maidan at the beginning of the rally against postponing the agreement with the european union that unfolded on november 21, 2013 on the maidan, the statue of the hedgehog was still absent from its usual location for restoration. the symbolic meaning of the cartoon character i have outlined above influenced internet-memes about the statue (and the character) that spread via social media. (12) its role “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 21 in the protest lore was also influenced by its location in close proximity to the maidan along the path from there to one of the city’s subway stations. as noted above, the figure of hedgehog in russia and ukraine has taken on the role of a searcher through a frightening reality. during the protests, internet users used the hedgehog to evoke this feeling of developing uncertainty that the unsigned agreement represented. a still from the cartoon of hedgehog walking in the fog was used in popular memes to connote this feeling (image 8). image 8. screen capture from the cartoon of hedgehog in the fog. [norshtein, 1975c] internet memes spread in social media applied to this original image and appended with messages representing mediation of the meaning of the protests and their representations in mass media (see images 9, 10). folklorica 2016, vol. xx 22 image 9. internet meme reads, “could you tell me, how to get to hrushevsky street?” novyi region. [lenta.ru, 2014] image 9 refers to a significant location for the protests located across the maidan square from the hedgehog statue and suggests that the hedgehog is on the way to protest against the government. hrushevsky street was the location of the first serious escalation of the conflict between the riot police and protestors occurred. the conflicts there ceased on january 19, 2014, three days after the (procedurally suspect) adoption by the parliament on january 16 of eleven laws that allowed for the imprisonment of any protester for up to fifteen years [parliament of ukraine, 2015; the guardian, snyder, 2014]. victor yanukovych signed the laws on january 17, and they came into force on january 21. protesters called them “dictatorial” [unian, ukrains’ka pravda, 2014] or “black thursday” laws [kyiv-post, 2014]. by january 22 people had been arrested on the basis of these laws, and governmental forces shot several protestors dead. image 10 was published early in march 2014, when protests in kyiv ended after victor yanukovych had fled the country and russia’s invasion of crimea had begun. at that time, many media outlets were pre-occupied with the issue of right-wing groups that had participated in the protests. the poster intimates that the presence of right-wing protesters had actually been greatly “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 23 overestimated and was insignificant at best. image 10. internet meme reads, “hey! did anyone see a banderite?! a banderite is like chupacabra. no one has seen him, but everyone is terribly scared of them!” [ежик, 2014] referring to mysterious “vampire-like” animals of folk beliefs [radford, 2012], the meme points out that the protests evoked symbols of soviet-era narratives about wwii in ukraine. the words “bandera” and “banderite(s)” are among the most frequent words in my collection of facebook narratives during the protests period appearing 86 times. they are examples of a reflected narrative, of “what they say about us.” anti-maidan supporters used the term banderite, derived from stepan bandera’s name, as a rule, to signify the threat they expected from the pro-maidan side. stepan bandera was one of the most well-known figures of the nationalist struggle in western ukraine during wwii. there are many beliefs about the ukrainian insurgent army and the nationalists’ confrontation and cooperation with both the communist and fascist regimes as well as with the military forces of neighboring czechoslovakia and poland. in this context, stepan bandera was one of the most controversial figures, associated with the purported danger and excesses of the nationalist movement of that time [narvselius, 2012; struve, 2014]. folklorica 2016, vol. xx 24 валерій пекар, february 1, 2014 слово “жидобандеровцы” прочно вошло в лексикон титушек. эта обширная группа включает в себя следующие категории “чужих”: 1. все, кто живет западнее востока и поэтому попали под тлетворное влияние европы. 2. все, кто носит украинскую символику и поэтому предали идеалы, за которые деды воевали. 3. все, кто чему-либо учился и тем самым проявил свою чуждую классовую сущность. 4. очкарики. явно сильно умные, а значит, не наши. 5. украиноязычные. очевидно. 6. киевляне. ну не наши они, какие-то не наши, нутром чую. 7. евреи. тут всё понятно. 8. велосипедисты. [valerii pekar, february 1, 2014 the word “jew-banderites” became a part of titushky vocabulary. (13) this broad group includes the following categories of “aliens”: 1. everyone residing west of the east [of ukraine] and due to this fact has been corrupted by europe. 2. everyone wearing ukrainian symbols and betraying all ideals their grandfathers had fought for [in reference to the soviet era narrative about the world war ii-author’s note]. 3. everyone who has studied something and in this way revealed the nature of one’s alien [social] class. 4. the bespectacled. they are evidently too smart, so they are not ours. 5. ukrainian-speaking [people]. obvious. 6. kyivans. well, they are just not ours, somehow not ours, i know that instinctively. 7. jews. it’s all clear. 8. cyclists.] maidan supporters used the same expressions ironically and sarcastically in response, as the example below illustrates: александр бабич, january 26, 2014 я фашист! я всеми возможными способами поддерживаю майдан!!! [[aleksander babich, january 26, 2014 i am a fascist! i support the maidan in all possible ways!!!] “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 25 а ещё я “бандеровец”, “тупой, недоучившийся, дебил”, “американский запроданец, люто ненавидящий всё русское”, “националист и западэнец”, “укуренный малолетка”, “идиот, не понимающий ситуации”, “футбольный ультрас, мстящий ментам”... ведь я поддерживаю майдан!!!! […] [also i am a “banderite,” “a stupid and non-educated moron,” “an american paid agent fiercely hating all things russian,” “a nationalist and someone from the extreme west of ukraine,” “a drugged teen,” “an idiot, not understanding the situation,” “a soccer fanatic who wants to revenge on the cops”... after all i support the maidan!!!! […]] я бандеровец! как историк, я пишу книги об истории советского подполья в катакомбах. все тиражи разобрали ветеранские организации, музеи и школьные библиотеки одессы. но я поддерживаю майдан я бандеровец! […] [i am a banderite! as a historian, i write historical books about the soviet underground in catacombs. all copies are distributed to veterans’ organizations, museums and school libraries of odessa. however, i support the maidan – so, i am a banderite! […]] the narratives and visual images of the time provide many versions of these cartoon characters involved in the protests and were used to mediate and formulate the attitudes of the opposing sides. the memes shown in images 11 and 12, for example, use hedgehog both as an active protestor (image 11) and a person scared by the protests represented through the character of the eagle-owl (image 12). folklorica 2016, vol. xx 26 picture 11. internet meme. the title translates, “hedgehog on the maidan.”[vangenechten287, 2013] image 12. internet meme. the texts of eagle-owl translates, “maidan. revolution. glory to the heroes! get out!” hedgehog: “weirdo…” [тайный муж алюсика, 2014] “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 27 during the protests the figure of hedgehog was represented only virtually, since it was absent from its square for restoration. the statue was re-installed on march 11, 2014, just at the beginning of the russian invasion of crimea. at that point, in addition to his pot of raspberry jam, hedgehog received a toy submachine gun decorated with the stripes of ukrainian national flag and the symbol of the european union (image 13). the same day a message at hedgehog’s facebook account was published that stated: “тепер я озброєний таким автоматом і дуже небезпечний для будь-яких зелених чоловічків. [now i’m armed with this submachine gun and very perilous for any little green man.]” (14) image 13. hedgehog at his regular place with a toy submachine gun. photo credit: unian the return of the hedgehog in the context of political turmoil became a subject of the evening news reported by media outlets and national tv-channels [kiev-tv, 2014; rudiachenko, 2014]. the next day’s disappearance of the toy submachine gun was the topic of messages both in social and official media [obozrevatel’, 2014]. ежик, march 12, 2014 друзья! [friends!] folklorica 2016, vol. xx 28 не волнуйтесь! в скверике все спокойно! все стали переживать, что у меня, якобы, пропал автомат. спешу всех успокоить, это не так. вчера вечером возле меня гулял один соседский мальчишка. он так восхищался моим игрушечным оружием! [don't worry! everything is fine on the square! everybody started worrying that i the submachine gun had supposedly disappeared. i want to reassure everybody, it’s not true. last night a neighbor's boy was walking nearby. he so admired my toy weapon!] мальчишка пожаловался мне, что его бабуля и мамуля смотрят телевизор, читают новости и очень бояться всего, что происходит, а он совершенно не может их защитить. я так расчувствовался, что передал ему свой игрушечный автомат... малыш был счастлив... уверен, что из нынешних мальчиков вырастут настоящие защитники родины! [the boy complained to me that his granny and mommy watch tv, read news and are so afraid of everything that’s happening, but he couldn’t protect them at all. i so was deeply moved that i gave him my toy submachine gun... the kid was happy... i’m sure that our today boys will grow up to be real defenders of our homeland!] хочу вас всех попросить! мне все время несут подарки (даже очки недавно подарили). не могли бы вы, мои взрослые друзья и друзья друзей, приносить к пеньку ваши ненужные игрушечные вооружения? а я буду передаривать ваши подарки! и пусть игры в “войнушки” останутся только играми! [i wish to make a request of all of you! i get gifts all the time (recently i even got glasses). could you, my adult friends and friends of friends, bring your extra toy weapons to my stump? i will pass on your gifts! let these “war playing” games remain only games!] the political interactions with the statue were not limited only to toy weapons. on the may 28, 2014, the holiday of the border protection “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 29 forces of ukraine, the statue of the hedgehog wore an officer’s cap (image 14) and the hedgehog’s facebook page had a post about keeping his connection with border protection officers. by that time, tension in the donbass region had grown, and pro-russian forces seized several state administration buildings in the region. [channel 5, 2014; newsru, 2014]. these events were implied in the post as well. ежик, may 28, 2014 сегодня неплохо “посидели” с пограничниками. поздравил офицеров с их с днем! они ребята смелые, такие же, как и я. но их много. а я один. поэтому не всегда могу за себя постоять. вот, днями, воевал с вандалами. лапку оторвали. сепаратисты бескультурные! а погранцы на праздник мне фуражку подарили! украдет кто то, конечно же... [today we “had a sit down” with border guards. i congratulated the officers on their day! they are courageous guys, the same as me. they are many. and i am alone. therefore, i cannot always stand up for myself. so, for some days, i have been at war with vandals. they tore off my paw. uncouth separatists! (15) and the border guards presented me an officer’s cap for the day! someone will steal it, of course...] folklorica 2016, vol. xx 30 image 14. hedgehog with a border protection forces peak-cap. photo credit: inna bulkina. although hedgehog’s facebook account has had several thematic posts related to the political events in the country, they are not the predominant topic. the site still has a variety of posts focused “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 31 mostly on the image of the cartoon character and about actual hedgehogs, though occasionally comments on the most resonant political events do appear. after the damage to the statue in march 2015, media outlets again commented on the situation, especially because the sculptor announced that the statue would be permanently removed. in stories about this decision, ukrainian media outlets provided resident reaction towards his statement [marushchak, 2015; vyrchenko, 2015; obozrevatel’, 2015], while others (predominantly russian media) provided their own interpretation to the removal. the latter suggested the statue embodied the politics of the soviet era and was thus similar to socialist monuments, and that association was the primary reason authorities had sanctioned its removal [centrasia, 2015; sydorchyk, 2015]. however, these interpretations were roundly ignored by city residents. the statue was relocated to shevchenko park in downtown kyiv [vesti, 2015], but, within several weeks, it was restored to its original location. the following message from hedgehog about the re-installation appeared on its facebook account: ежик, december 28, 2015 дождался снежка! [i waited so long for the snow!] вернулся домой, на любимый пенек. погостил у тараса, уютно у него – много деток и студентов гуляет, а возле меня только и происходит, что пьянки у ларька да кофейбус барыжный ;(. [just came back home, on my beloved stump. i stayed for a while with taras [shevchenko], so lovely at his place – many kids and students around, while i had only boozers at a stall and a fence’s coffee-bus ;(. ] в парке было весело, деток много меня навестило, посмотрел новогодние концерты, познакомился со святым николаем... [i had fun in the park, many kids visited me; i saw some new year's concerts, and met st. nicolas... ] folklorica 2016, vol. xx 32 в общем, всех с наступлением зимы и жду друзей в гости, соскучился! [so, my best wishes for the winter, and i’m waiting for the friends to visit me, i missed you!] during the protests and their aftermath, the figure of norshtein’s hedgehog in the fog became the focus of a new lore as a means to mediate political conflict. because of its physical manifestation as a statue and its embodiment of positive symbolism, despite its soviet heritage, it was able to take on new significance by articulating the meaning of the protests and political transformations in the country. hedgehog, already known for being a symbol of finding the right path in a confusing situation, was adopted as a mediating symbol in this situation and then was further associated with both sides of the protests and the war in the country. facebook posts on the hedgehog’s page illustrate this process. they referred to existing symbols of their own culture and both traditional and contemporary urban folklore. the maidan narratives in virtual communication functioned to convey high expectations for significant changes in the political and social spheres. the examples considered above connect an animated character to the internal affairs and international relations of a nation. these texts and visual images convey indirect and subtle meanings that might harken back to the tradition of ideological censorship, a common phenomenon for authoritarian societies, as a form of implicit critique. a symbol like the hedgehog is characterized by humor and, according to rostyslav semkiv, helps to create a sense of belonging to a particular group or to a community that shares and understands the joke. positive types of humor give rise to the pleasure of selfidentification, a sense of belonging, and relief after a potential threat that did not cause any harm. satire and sarcasm imply opposition that usually include “me vs. others,” “us vs. them,” “nice vs. ugly,” “good vs. evil,” etc., [semkiv, 2014]. my data provide examples of both types of humor as well as posts that include both forms. i suggest that the hedgehog helped the facebook users formulate their self-representations as well as formulate a distinction between proand anti-maidan forces. the cartoon site served as a communicative and interpretative tool that is consistent with “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 33 jennifer dickinson’s [2014] description of the functions of social media during the maidan. the hedgehog transformed from a soviet cartoon symbol into a figure representing both sides in contemporary protest narratives and distinct from its soviet heritage. this transformation exemplifies the concept “cultural complexity” that requires understanding culture as a “collective phenomenon to belong primarily to social relationships and their network and only derivatively and without logical necessity to particular territories” [hannerz, 1992]. in sum, the hedgehog defies its origins within the context of the soviet political and cultural legacies by becoming part of contemporary social networks and a knowable figure in the folklore they created in response to the political protests. acknowledgement i am deeply grateful to my supervisor, dr. andriy nahachewsky, for his engaged and supportive role in my thesis; he is an outstanding and motivating example of how to balance high academic standards with devotion to work. i am very thankful to dr. bohdan medwidsky, the founder of the folklore program at the university of alberta that supported me and gave an opportunity to study and to grow professionally in the last several years. the scholarship of the program, the staff members of the bohdan medwidsky ukrainian folklore archives, and the kule centre for ukrainian and canadian folklore, faculty and students of mlcs and anthropology departments have provided me with great support. i want to express my gratitude to dr. natalie kononenko, the organizer of the folklore of euromaidan panel of the american folklore society annual conference in 2014 in santa fe, new mexico, that served as the basis for this article. notes 1 the ukrainian word maidan is derived from arabic میدان [maydān] meaning “square” or “field.” 2 timothy snider suggests that the word maidan has now gained the meaning of the greek word agora in english, it is not just folklorica 2016, vol. xx 34 a physical place, but also a meeting with a purpose “to deliberate, to speak, and to create a political society.” 3 symbolically written texts with indirect and subtle meanings are used to be called aesopian language, after aesop’s (620–564 bc) fables depicting society and relationships in ancient greece re-set the animal world. fables in russian-speaking countries and former parts of the russian empire arose as a genre after the publication of ivan krylov’s fables (1769-1844) whose works are, to a great extent, based on aesop’s and la fontaine's fables (jean de la fontaine, french fabulist, 1621-1695), often with a satirical bent. 4 consistent with this understanding of folklore, dundes redefined the concept of folk as any group of people “whatsoever who share at least one common factor.” examples of factors that define folk groups include families, localities, religious and ethnic groups, hobbyists, and occupational groups [dundes, 1980:7]. frank speaks of folklore as “a kind of informal or spontaneous or homemade communication in which members of all groups engage at least some of the time” [frank, 2011:8]. the concept of “postfolklore” suggested by sergey nekliudov as a kind of urban folklore prompted discussion among slavic folklore theorists [neklyudov, 1995]. pozdneev characterizes the beginning of the twenty-first century not as “postfolklore,” but rather as “postfolklore culture” in which “all traditional genres are secondary and borrowed from literature.” panchenko suggests: “village culture of the new times is not much more ‘folkloric’ or ‘traditional’ than the mass culture of the modern city [mccormick, 2011:1017]. east european definitions of “postfolklore” presume the contemporary research approach differs from the 19th century concept of folklore as ancient rural oral tradition. the variety of concepts emphasize different nuances in contemporary urban folklore. i will follow dundes’ and frank’s concepts inherited by the north american tradition of folklore that include the possibility of diverse groups. 5 frank [2011:10] argues that internet folklore is important for three reasons: (1) the phenomenon is widespread; (2) the phenomenon reveals widely held attitudes and widely shared preoccupations; and (3) the phenomenon is largely ignored and “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 35 should not be, given (1) and (2). he [2012:12] claims that the function of internet folklore is mainly to highlight social and political problems and to “free [people] from tensions and frustration.” he also suggests that the role of political folklore is “like a sneer, the weapon of the weak,” referring to gregor benton [1988: 35], who wrote: “[…] the political joke will change nothing. […] it is not a form of active resistance. […] it will mobilize no one. […] it is important for keeping society sane and stable.” on the contrary, jennifer dickinson described the internet-activity of the protesters as a means to reinforce their actions on the square [dickinson, 2014: 79]. my research shows that dickinson’s characterization is a more accurate reflection of the maidan lore, but additional consideration of this issue is beyond the scope of this paper. 6 the cartoon was awarded the best animated film award of frunze ussr film festival, 1976; the best animated film award of tehran children's and youth film festival, 1976; outstanding film of the year, london, uk, 1977; winner of the third prize, chicago, usa, 1977; winner of the second prize, sidney, australia, 1978; no.1 animated film of all the time, tokyo, all time animation best 150 in japan and worldwide, 2003. the cartoon legacy includes: a popular soviet-era countingout game, the hedgehog went out the fog [“вышел ежик из тумана | стихи о ежиках” 2016]; production of 7 more animated films based on sergei kozlov’s tales; titles of academic papers referring to confusion or disarray in society [agafonova 2002; rodnianskaia 2001; mil’china 1993]; the reference in the third episode of the eighth season of the animated comedy series family guy, “spies like us,” 2009; russian sitcom-melodrama, the hedgehog went out the fog, 2010, etc. 7 [editor’s note: folklorica privileges spelling of foreign words and places names that are common to english readers. the author prefers the transliteration from the ukrainian чорнобиль [chornobyl]]. 8 the golden gates of kyiv was the main gate in the 12thcentury fortifications of kyiv, then the capital of kyivan rus' and were named after the golden gate of constantinople [tymoshenko, folklorica 2016, vol. xx 36 2010]. st. sophia cathedral in kyiv is an architectural monument dating back to 11th century. the cathedral is one of the city's best known landmarks and the first site in ukraine to be inscribed on the unesco world heritage list (along with the kiev cave monastery complex) [“софія київська – собор і заповідник у києві”]. 9 hedgehog’s facebook account [https://www.facebook.com/ежик-1383608415201387/]. media outlets report about hedgehog’s facebook account and a vandal action against the statue [kraievaia, 2013]. 10 the cossack is a significant symbol of ukrainian national identity, a fact that has been widely discussed in connection to the protests of 2013-2014. according to serhii krymsky, national archetypes are essential components for collective memory and national identity construction, and these symbolic structures may have different interpretations in different epochs. he suggests an ethnos can become a nation when it becomes a subject of history and he considers the ukrainian nation was formed in the 17th century, “when cossacks became the main military power and warriors of europe for defence from the ottoman invasion.” [krymsky 2014]. serhii plokhy argues that the ukrainian cossack depicted in 19th century work, history of rus’, became the most influential source for the historical myth of the ukrainian nation. [plokhy 2012]. some media outlets after the maidan made reference to the nation’s defensive structure having continuity with cossack times [espreso-tv, 2015]. 11 rusanovka is a residential area of kyiv not far from downtown. it is located on an island close to the left bank of dnipro river. 12 a meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture, according to dawkins [dawkins, 1989]. 13 titushky is the collective name of street hooligans whose purpose was to perform illegal acts such as beating, carjacking, and kidnapping; they were under protection of the berkut and authorities. they earned the name after vadym titushko, who, together with two other men, had attacked journalists from the “hedgehog in the fog” as a maidan hero folklorica 2016, vol. xx 37 television channel 5 on may 18, 2013. however, during the protests, vadym titushko declared his anti-government position and supported the maidan. 14 “little green men” is a nickname for officers of russian regular army out of official uniform on the streets of crimea that arose early in march 2014. 15 “separatists” is the folk term for pro-russian supporters. bibliography agafonova a.a. 2002. агафонова а. а. “кто выведет ёжика из тумана?” [who will take hedgehog out of the fog?]. барьер безопасности. no. 2. pp.16-17. akhmetova, maria. 2014. ахметова, мария. “вокруг бандерлогов” [around bandar-logs]. “мы не немы!”: антропология протеста в россии 2011-2012. тарту: научное издательство элм, 165-196. avstryiskaia, zoia. 2011. австрийская зоя. “увидеть скульптуру ежика в тумане” [to see hedgehog in the fog sculpture]. cited by http://turbina.ru/guide/krasnodar-rossiya87390/otzyvy/tchto-delatdostoprimetchatelnosti/arkhitektura-pamyatniki/3/0/ezhik-vtumane-27540/otzyv/uvidet-skulpturu-ezhika-v-tumane48996/. 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(consulted february 13, 2017). rudiachenko, oleksandr. 2015. рудяченко, олександр. “наливайко: прапрадід небесної сотні” [nalyvaiko: great grandfather of the heavenly hundred (nebesna sotnia)]. cited by folklorica 2016, vol. xx 44 http://espreso.tv/article/2015/04/21/nalyvayko_prapradid_nebe snoyi_sotni. (consulted july 16, 2015). secret husband of aliusika [тайный муж алюсика]. 2014. “йожик и майдан.” [hedgehog and maidan]. cited by http://www.yaplakal.com/forum2/topic744427.html. (consulted february 25, 2014). segodnia. “пострадавший киевский ежик ‘рассказал’ как его чинят в мастерской” [injured kyiv’s hedgehog ‘told’ about being repaired in a workshop]. cited by http://kiev.segodnya.ua/kpeople/postradavshiy-kievskiyezhik-rasskazal-kak-ego-chinyat-v-masterskoy-455813.html. (consulted december 5, 2016). semkiv, rostyslav. 2014. семків, ростислав. 2014. “самоусвідомлення, ідентичність та їх співвіднесеність із формами комізму в художній літературі: формулювання гіпотез” [self-comprehension, identity, and their correlation with comic forms in fiction: hypothesis formulation]. tertium non datur: проблема культурної ідентичності в літературно-філософському дискурсі хіх-ххі ст.: колективна монографія. наук. ред. та упоряд. моренець в.п. київ: наукма. pp. 107-120. snyder, timothy d. 2014. “ukraine: the new dictatorship,” the new york review of books. cited by http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/01/18/ukraine-newdictatorship/?insrc=wbll. (consulted may 5, 2015). snyder, timothy. 2014. “fascism, russia and ukraine,” the new york review of books. cited by http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/03/20/fascism-russiaand-ukraine/. 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(consulted october 22, 2016). turner, viktor. 1969. the ritual process: structure and antistructure. new york: aldine de gruyter. tymoshenko, iryna. 2010. тимошенко, ірина. “музей золоті ворота” [zoloti vorota museum]. cited by http://www.primetour.ua/uk/excursions/museum/muzey-zolotyie-vorota-.html. (consulted october 22, 2016). ukrains’ka pravda. “офіційна преса опублікувала ‘диктаторські закони’” [official media outlets published ‘dictatorship laws’]. cited by http://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2014/01/21/7010354/. (consulted may 5, 2015). unian. “рада отменила большинство диктаторских ‘законов folklorica 2016, vol. xx 46 16 января’” [the parliament cancelled the majority of dictatorship “laws of january 16th”]. cited by http://www.unian.net/politics/877486-rada-otmenilabolshinstvo-diktatorskih-zakonov-16-yanvarya.html. 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(consulted november 26, 2016). yakovlyeva, vita. 2015. “recollecting perestroika: notes from the playgrounds of ukraine (1986–1993),” streetnotes: ethnography, poetry and the documentary experience 23: 92100. university of california. cited by http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5x8445tk#page-1. (consulted november 28, 2016). zavorotniy, roman. 2013. “roman zavorotniy” cited by https://www.facebook.com/roman.zavorotniy. (consulted on september 2, 2013.) microsoft word folklorica_2011g.doc 195 reviews folklorica 2011, vol. xvi колосова, валерия борисовна. лексика и символика славянской народной ботаники. [kolosova, valeriia borisovna. the lexicon and the symbolism of slavic folk botany]. moscow: indrik. 2009. 350 pp. bibliography, list of abbreviations, index of phytonyms by language, subject index. isbn 978-5-91674-026-4 the folk are extraordinarily observant. they notice everything about every plant, including the most lowly. and they find uses for just about every growing thing. in the book under review kolosova shows all the intricacies and complexities of folk botany and she does this not just for russian plant names, but for the plant names used by all slavic peoples. kolosova works from plant names and tries to show how they are related to plant properties and to the entire worldview of the folk. because plant names figure so prominently, in the review that follows i give the russian plant name first. this is followed by a literal translation in parentheses and the common english plant name in brackets. in part 1 of the book kolosova shows that terminology for plants can be derived from their color, be it that of the leaves or of the flower. some plant names refer to size, especially when there are two similar plants or two varieties of the same plant and one has larger flower clusters than the other. shape is important and plants with bell-shaped flowers are called kolokol’chik (bellflower) [bluebell], for example. the variety of plant names based on shape is quite large and some of them are derived from inanimate objects, like the example above, while others refer to body parts such as adamova golova (adam’s head) [a type of clover] or serdtseva trava (heart grass) [false lily-of-the-valley, may lily]. surface texture accounts for some names and a plant with leaves that feel cold and smooth on one side and soft and warm on the other is called mat’-i-machekha (mother and mother-in-law) [coltsfoot]. plant behavior yields such names as nedotroga (touch-me-not) and vesnianka or pervotsvet (spring plant, first flower) [snowdrop] for early blooming plants. plants can be named after the places that they grow such as zhabnik (frog plant) [river weed] for a plant that grows in swamps. smell is reflected in names such as voniuchaia trava (stink grass) [bugbane] and even sound appears in plant names such as khlopunchik (popping plant) [milkvetch]. of course it is important to know which plants are poisonous when taken internally and the name dur trava, beshennitsa (stupid plant, wild plant) [henbane, stinking nightshade] provides that warning, as does the name zhalnitsa, zhguchka (stinging plant, burning plant) [nettles] for those plant that are injurious to the touch. among the 196 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi folk, plants are extensively used for medicinal purposes, as names like zhyvotnyi koren’ (root of life) [adderwort] indicate, and they are also used for magic, usually to attract the opposite sex, as seen in the name pryvorot trava (attraction grass) [cornflower]. plants can even be use for getting rid of pests, as seen in the name blokhgonka and bloshnik (fleechaser) [pennyroyal] for a plant to repel flees. various plant names are part of an entire symbolic code and the next section of kolosova’s book shows how plant names and ideas about plants draw on folk ideas about the human body. plants are named for almost every body part. examples include aniutiny glazki (aniuta’s eyes) [viola tricolor or wild pansy] and chortove rebro (devil’s rib) [valerian dubia, heliotrope]. plant names can refer to how a particular item affects the body, as can be seen in chistotel (clean body) [tetterwort, bloodroot] for a plant used for skin imperfections and diseases. this section talks about gender and how gender is applied to plants. if a plant like tysiachelistnik (thousand leaf plant) [yarrow] comes in two colors, then one is considered male and the other female. plants can be used to foretell gender and when iartyshnik, a type of orchid, sends forth two shoots, this predicts the birth of a girl while three shoots means the expectant mother is carrying a boy. eyes, vision, and blindness are important in the folk imagination of the slavs and eye-like appearance can be reflected in plant names, as already mentioned, and plants can be named for their ability to cleanse the eye as in glaznaia trava (eye grass) [eyebright] and their ability to close the eye as in son-trava (sleep-grass, a type of belladonna). names referring to foreigners can be used for newly introduced plants, such as kitaiskie orekhi (chinese nuts) for the english walnut, or plants that are disliked, such as tatarnik (tatar plant) or tatarin koliuchii (tatar’s prickles) for thistles. this section also discusses ideas about clothing and items of adornment such as jewelry (volchi sergi, wolf earrings) [european spindle, spindlewood] as they apply to plants, often talking about appearance as in part one, but also about feel (barkhatnik, aksamit, velvet plant) [marigold]. there is also a lengthy discussion of numbers, with some numbers referring to plant parts (dvoelistnik, two-leaf plant) [coltsfoot], some to time of growth (odnomesiachnik, one month plant) [cutleaf anemone], and high numbers such as deviatisil/deviasil (nine powers) [a type of aster] applying to plants considered especially potent and useful in treating a number of ailments. in addition to discussing plant names and characteristics, kolosova provides wonderful legends throughout. some legends were generated 197 reviews folklorica 2011, vol. xvi from the name of the plant, some from the plants’ characteristics, and some from its uses. thus ivan-da-mar’ia, also called brat i sestra (brother/sister plant) [wild pansy], has a bi-colored flower and is supposedly the result of a brother and sister pair who married without knowing that they were related. when they discovered the horrible secret behind their affinity, they died and became a plant. zveroboi (beast/animal-killer) [st. john’s wort] is also called molodetskaia krov (the blood of youths), isusova krov (the blood of jesus) and bogorodchyna trava (plant of the mother of god). its red spots are variously attributed to the blood of seven brothers killed in battle, drops of blood from the crucified christ, and menstrual blood shed by the mother of god. saints’ legends are particularly numerous in relationship to plants and the sweet smell of vasilek (st. basil’s flower) [cornflower, bachelor’s button] is attributed to its being favored by various saints, st. basil foremost among them. the last section of the book treats plants the way that they are presented in most other books on herbalism or folk botany. that is, it takes twelve widely known and used plants and gives all of their characteristics: the various names applied to them, their various uses, the legends explaining their origin. the plants are vasilek [corn flower], zveroboi [st. john’s wort], ivan-da-mar’ia [wild pansy], krapiva [nettles], liutik [buttercup], oduvanchik [dandelion], pervotsvet [cowslip, snowdrop], podorozhnik [common plantain], polyn’ [wormwood], tsykorii [chicory], chertopolokh [thistle], and iatryshnik [wild orchid]. because plants are examined from every angle, because many plants have multiple names and some plants that are different bear the same name, because there are numerous etiological legends explaining the origins of a plant’s characteristics, there is a great deal of overlap in this book, a fact that kolosova herself admits. thus the ivan-da-mar’ia legend about the marriage of a brother and sister and the legend about the blood of the mother of god dripping on plants both appear multiple times. many plants are used for the same medicinal purposes and this information is given time and again. the high level of repetition makes the publication under review more suitable as a reference book than as something to be read from cover to cover. by the same token, this fact should not detract from the value of kolosova’s contribution. as noted earlier, the material covered includes all slavic languages and cultures, not just russia and russian, and kolosova and the people who helped her with non-russian should be congratulated for this inclusivity. kolosova should also be commended for trying new arrangements of her 198 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi material (the groupings by color, number, shape, gender, etc.) instead of simply following old practices – grouping material by plant rather than by plant trait or characteristic. this book is a major accomplishment. to keep so much information straight and to cross-reference it the way kolosova does is an enormous task. i did find a few mistakes when i was looking up the latin version of plant names in my effort to provide english equivalents. but this is hardly surprising when one is dealing with this amount of information. i should also note that i may have made mistakes in my english equivalents, for which i take sole responsibility. pictures of plants would have been helpful when identifying plants but such an addition would surely have increased publishing costs. the various indexes do make up for lack of pictures to an extent and they are very useful. most important, the novel arrangement of the material does make one think about plants and plant classification in a new way. natalie kononenko university of alberta edmonton, alberta canada << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain 20%) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \050swop\051 v2) /srgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel 1.4 /compressobjects /tags /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages true /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /detectcurves 0.0000 /colorconversionstrategy /cmyk /dothumbnails false /embedallfonts true /embedopentype false /parseiccprofilesincomments true /embedjoboptions 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/hrv (za stvaranje adobe pdf dokumenata najpogodnijih za visokokvalitetni ispis prije tiskanja koristite ove postavke. stvoreni pdf dokumenti mogu se otvoriti acrobat i adobe reader 5.0 i kasnijim verzijama.) /hun 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can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader 5.0 and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 47 a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia jelena koroleva daugavpils state university (latvia) tatiana filosofova university of north texas (usa) abstract the strong and vibrant russian old believer community of eastern latvia (latgalia district) produced many gifted artists, writers, poets and storytellers. some of them went beyond the traditional topical limitations of orthodox christianity and wrote poetry and fiction on non-religious matters, such as love, family relations, history and the like. this research aims to bring to light one particular short story the forced love written by a self-made author of old believer origin, maria pakhomovna blokhina (19262010) to a broader readership. the story has been heavily influenced by russian folk tales and contains valuable insights of the local ethnography and dialect. this study offers an examination of the story's origins, plot, characters and language and aims to demonstrate the literary and folk heritage of the story, to demonstrate the story’s ethnographic relevance of the period and to examine how the deliberate use of the local dialect by the author reveals her creativity in producing a text close to the style of a folk tale. the latgalian district of latvia has been home to a community of 100,000 russian old believers for more than 350 years. today this community serves as an example of the successful preservation and development of the native culture and traditions in an environment dominated by other languages and religions. russian old believers, who sought refuge beyond the muscovite rus’ borders after the church reforms of 1653-1667, began mass resettlement into the territory of contemporary latvia during the second half of the 17th century. the flow of old believers to latvia, mainly from the priestless branch [беспоповцы поморского folklorica 2016, vol. xx 48 согласие], grew especially strong in the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. by the second half of the 19th century, in the territory of contemporary latvia, several large old believer centers developed in riga, jakobstadt (jakabpils), rezhica (rezekne), and dvinsk (daugavpils). a tolerant attitude by the local authorities and locals towards the russian old believers facilitated their successful integration into everyday life and has helped them to preserve their own culture, customs and traditions to the present day. good education, in the best traditions of pre-reform orthodox christianity, played an important role in sustaining the traditional old believer worldview and their way of life. therefore, it is no surprise, that educated and gifted literati were always the most respected members of the communities. many of them produced a large number of theological works as well as religious poetry, songs and narratives. however, some old believer writers and storytellers went beyond these traditional topical limitations and wrote poetry and fiction on non-religious matters, such as love, family relations, history and the like. maria pakhomovna blokhina, from the village of zui, was one of these gifted old believer storytellers, writers and artists, whose writings and art reflect local popular wisdom, morals and values. her life and decorative folk style art drew the attention of the local press and television and made her a celebrity in latvia. one could say that maria pakhomovna’s media exposure challenged stereotypes of cloistered religious conservatives. this made her an epitome of a contemporary russian old believer for the latvian mass media. journalists have written about maria blokhina’s life and her work, especially her artistic talents. she was highly skilled at embroidery, knitting, and making soft toys. she presented her hand-embroidered carpets at numerous exhibitions. in all her works maria blokhina used original designs. while her crafting talents are widely recognized, journalists (and specialists) have, to date, ignored two other of maria blokhina's many talents: her writing skill and her gift as a wonderful storyteller. we believe that her writings in particular deserve serious review by scholars for one important reason: in old believer communities, work by literati like maria pakhomovna blokhina helped establish a social sphere of folk a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 49 creativity where they could express, in an artistic form, their understanding of contemporary history, society, life, morals and values. this current research sets out to introduce to a broader readership one piece of fiction, maria blokhina’s story the forced love. the forced love is set in an idyllic rural location of latvia and tells us a rather lighthearted story of love between the son of a wealthy latvian farmer, valdis, and a poor, but clever and beautiful russian girl, paulina. after a few unsuccessful attempts to attract paulina’s attention, valdis finally manages to overcome paulina’s coldness and persuades her to marry him. this event brings the story to a happy end. the forced love, due to the lighthearted plot, stands out from traditional writing by old believer authors, which typically discuss the morals and values of good christians or theological matters. a close examination of the forced love can provide us valuable insights into the author’s creative use of folk heritage, knowledge of local customs and dialect. our analysis of the plot, characters, genre and the linguistic particularities of the story aims to achieve the following goals: to demonstrate the literary and folk heritage of the forced love, by identifying the influence of fairy tales on the story. this results in the creation of a fictional story in the style of a hybrid folk tale, e.g., a literary folk tale; (1) to demonstrate the story’s ethnographic relevance of the period as the author skillfully uses her first-hand knowledge of the customs and traditions of the local farming community; to examine how the deliberate use of the local dialect reveals the author’s creativity in producing a text close to the style of a folk tale; however, before examining the story, it would be beneficial to have a closer look at maria pakhomovna blokhina’s background. this overview will help us to understand better how the story was conceived, developed and completed. folklorica 2016, vol. xx 50 about the author maria pakhomovna blokhina (1926-2010), née kuznetsova, was born in riga in 1926 but spent her entire life in the village of zui in the rezhica (rezekne) district. (2) her father was a blacksmith in the village and had his own smithy there. maria’s mother worked away from home in saint petersburg and riga. therefore, her father had to care for his own children as well as for his disabled brother and his sister. at the age of 20 she married a local man. being childless, she brought up two nephews from her husband’s side of the family and left them two houses. during the soviet era, blokhina worked at a collective farm doing various sorts of manual labor. she was extremely proud to have received many awards from the local authorities for her farm labor. blokhina did not have the opportunity to receive a formal education apart from three years at a primary school. she was self-taught and started writing and producing decorative art to fulfill her creative imagination. maria pakhomovna was an outgoing woman with many different interests. for example, she organized amateur theater performances and various cultural events at a local club. she was a popular person in the community and took part in charity work. she made it a practice to knit mittens and socks as christmas presents for the children in the orphanage. during the soviet era, several exhibitions of her art in latvia featured her knitted crafts. maria pakhomovna also made many small colored rugs called podruchniki that old believers use during prayer. she donated these to many old believer churches in the country and abroad. she decorated all her podruchniki with an old believer cross, so that users would bow to the cross each time they prayed. professor koroleva became acquainted with maria blokhina for the first time during an expedition in 1996 while recording the dialectal lexicon of the old believers of the rezhica (rezekne) district. it is worth mentioning that professor koroleva excluded maria pakhomovna from the list of her local informers, because her large and sophisticated vocabulary did not include examples of the local dialect lexicon. ten years later, in 2006, professor koroleva met maria pakhomovna again. she observed that blokhina’s a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 51 vocabulary had gone, unexpectedly, through some remarkable changes. maria pakhomovna had started to use much of the local dialect, words and idioms, skillfully inserting them into her speech. while maria pakhomovna did not explain her new linguistic preferences at the interview, she confirmed her clear understanding of the opposition of two versions of russian; “natural village spoken language” (in other words, colloquial and dialectal forms), and “the bookish” or standard literary language. for example, she recalled that in the 1970s when she spoke at one of the conferences on russian old believer studies, she was asked to speak her “natural language” in “the village manner,” and she acquiesced to this request. it is remarkable that maria pakhomovna sounded natural when either speaking in local dialect or in standard russian. she was also happy to explain the meaning and usage of the dialectal vocabulary in depth when asked to do so. moreover, blokhina employed her understanding of different linguistic registers in her literary work. (3) during this second encounter with professor koroleva, maria pakhomovna mentioned for the first time that she had been writing poetry and fiction. she was eager to share her writings with a broader readership and permitted the publication of her work after her death. maria pakhomovna explained that she enjoyed writing, but had felt reticent about sharing her attempts at literary work. for many years blokhina had been keeping a diary in addition to producing fiction. her stories and poems are usually based on her own personal experiences. for example, one of her poems tells the story of a wounded russian soldier rescued by her family during the second world war. (4) maria pakhomovna also wrote witty fables on family relations that made fun of unfaithful husbands. however, as was mentioned above, the dramatic love story the forced love that is presented here stands out from the rest of her writings. the origin of the story the very fact that a meticulous, serious, and conscientious old believer produced a love story makes its origin even more intriguing. the title of the story is an oxymoron, and summarizes the folklorica 2016, vol. xx 52 story’s content. the story focuses on a couple who were forced into a romantic relationship. however, the word “love” suggests an ultimately happy conclusion. the story is told in the first person as if it were maria's personal experience. the narrator appears to be a 15-year-old shepherd girl named masha, who witnessed a love affair between a poor farm worker, paulina (sometimes also called paula or pauline), and valdis, the son of a farm owner. both masha and paulina worked together at his father’s farm. it is notable that the narrator makes some surprisingly dry observations for a naïve 15year-old peasant girl, and we can hear in them the voice of the author. for example, the narrator makes the following remarks as the story is moving along: “вижу спектакль не очень приятный” [i can see the show is turning ugly]; “на этот спектакль обратили все внимание” everybody [was attracted by this show]. it is interesting to note that the narrator persistently uses the word спектакль [show] when describing the behavior of valdis and paulina. this indicates that the narrator perceives the relations between the two leading characters as rather theatrical and exaggerated and uses the word “show” in its figurative ironic meaning. (5) however, in her narration, masha also conveys some of her personal feelings towards the leading characters. her curiosity, envy and fear correspond more closely to a young girl’s feelings. understanding the background of the characters to this story is particularly relevant to its literary importance. in fact, blokhina’s own biography was similar to the background of her fictional characters. jelena koroleva's interviews with maria pakhomovna [2006] confirm that during the second world war, maria worked for wealthy latvians and that she was then 15 years old. her father was sent to germany to perform forced labor, and their family cattle were taken away. there were four children and a disabled uncle in the family. their aunt had died, and they could not make ends meet. these interviews [koroleva: 2006] also help us to distinguish her fictional characters from her real experiences. it is important to note that none of the story’s characters are russian old believers. maria pakhomovna was an extremely devout person who observed all the old believer religious traditions, everyday customs, and the strict a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 53 moral conduct that excludes frivolous behavior. as a devout old believer, the author could not possibly consider creating a lighthearted fictional love story about the old believers. it would be considered inappropriate at best and indecent at worst. therefore, her fictional characters were outsiders who were not obliged to follow the strict rules of old believer communities. blokhina uses different approaches in presenting her real life experiences and a fictional story based on these experiences. for example, both young maria pakhomovna and the narrator masha had to go to work to help their families. however, in interviews [koroleva: 2006] maria pakhomovna described her personal daily struggles surrounding being a poor girl, whereas the story totally lacks this dramatic aspect. in her discussions about the story, the author also insisted that the written story was fictional, though it is presented as if she had been a witness to all the events. thus, this story is a fiction, not a biographical story, but it was certainly influenced by her own experiences. it is also interesting that maria pakhomovna made two attempts to produce this story. she first started working on the story in 1960s, but did not complete it. she then returned to her work five years later. to appreciate this piece fully, we need to take in to consideration the author’s lack of formal education beyond third grade. this fact explains the large number of spelling and grammatical mistakes in her writing. however, relying on her imagination and her gift for storytelling, maria pakhomovna managed to produce a fine story that reflects both an understanding of everyday life values by a regular person from a rural community of her time and the universal dream of a young girl about love and happiness. the genre of the story when presenting her work, blokhina stressed to professor koroleva that she always had wanted to produce a fictional story, and her story the forced love was an attempt to achieve this goal. however, the plot, narrative and linguistic particularities of the story allow us to assert that, although forced love is a fictional story, it folklorica 2016, vol. xx 54 was heavily influenced by folk tales. on the basis of substantial experience of field work within functioning old believer communities, we have seen that influences occur naturally in literary writings by many self-made old believer writers. in addition to a good knowledge of the theological writings by the old believer authorities, a gifted old believer author would typically be familiar with mainstream russian folk legends, tales and poetry. maria pakhomovna fits well to this profile. she knew many mainstream folk religious and epic poems, and could re-tell many folk tales and legends. remarkably, she even extended her knowledge of mainstream russian folklore to contemporary urban folklore. for example, she produced her own version of the popular political folk satire gorbachev’s dream [koroleva 2006]. (6) in the forced love we see influences of folk tales; in particular, in the plot, settings, narrative style and the language of the story. its characters and plot closely resemble one of the universal fairy tale story lines, (a hero’s quest for a princess), in the context of latgalian rural community life of the 1940s. valdis, the main male character, is the equivalent of a fairy tale hero who must fight for his love. paulina, the main female character, could be considered a princess and a prize for the hero. valdis had to make many attempts to win paulina’s love and overcome her coldness. the story takes place in latvia during the second world war. however, blokhina focuses on the timeless universal value of true love that overcomes all difficulties and brings together two young and handsome people. the contemporaneity and location of events in the story give additional flavor to the narrative. for example, valdis’s unsuccessful, farcical attempt to commit suicide or the way that paulina plays with valdis’s feelings resemble the melodrama of a television soap opera. in contrast, the accurate and vivid ethnographic details of life of the rural latvian community, such as the beer-drinking festival, makes the love story similar to an oral folktale. (6) the narration implemented by the author also resembles a folk tale where the narrator prefers to present a sequence of events rather than explain the logic behind the characters’ actions. maria pakhomovna does not explain in detail the motives of her characters’ actions. she leaves us to follow a sequence of events and a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 55 to interpret them as we wish. we will turn to the development in the next section of this article. however, it would be fair to say that blokhina employed her gifts as a storyteller to keep her readers amused. she was at ease turning her story from drama to melodrama, and from melodrama to farce when appropriate, relying on models both literary and folk that she knew well. as mentioned above, the author considered her piece to be a fictional tale, albeit one based on her own life experience. therefore, it would be beneficial to compare how maria pakhomovna presented the facts of her real life during the interviews [koroleva: 2006] and how she built up a tale based on these facts. many aspects of the tale the forced love clearly show the author’s creativity. unlike in her interviews [koroleva: 2006], maria pakhomovna did not convey a sense of hardship of life during the second world war in the tale. it is remarkable that even a harvest scene appears to be a timeless, colorful, and idealistic description of a happy rural life. she intentionally omitted themes of poverty, suffering, and daily struggle for survival as inappropriate to her tale of happy love. we consider how these settings also contribute to making the fictional love story, the forced love, similar to a folk tale. blokhina aims to entertain her readership by creating an amusing sequence of events that culminate in valdis’s rather farcical attempt to commit suicide. the author also skillfully develops the function of the narrator masha. it is notable that masha at first appears to be only a witness of the events. however, in the second part of the story the narrator is transformed into a well-informed commentator on the events as they unfold. plot and characters as mentioned above, maria pakhomovna presents a sequence of events and does not explain either the characters’ psychology or the motivation for their actions. however, two aspects of her writing style attract the reader’s attention. first, the author pays significant attention to the appearances of the leading characters, valdis and paulina. second, through the dialogue we learn information about the characters’ background that helps us to understand and folklorica 2016, vol. xx 56 extrapolate motivations. for example, maria pakhomovna provides a positive description of valdis as a young, handsome, passionate and loving man, (7) prompting sympathy towards him and his many unsuccessful attempts to make paulina love him. similarly, paulina was also a very attractive young woman, prompting valdis to fall in love with her at first sight. in describing pauline’s appearance, the author skillfully relies on an interesting comparison with a painted madonna: паулина очень красивая девушка: глаза чёрные, искристые, волоса тёмные, вьющие, длинные, лицо смуглое с румянцем и статная фигура, между прочим, что разрисованная мадонна. [paulina is a very beautiful girl. her eyes are black and sparkling, hair is dark, curly and long, face is darkcomplexioned with a blush and her figure is stately taking after a painted madonna]. the author’s choice of the participle “painted” and the noun “madonna” are meaningful to the story’s context. this particular comparison suggests that paulina is a catholic. neither russian old believers nor mainstream russian orthodox churches allow the display of sculptures or paintings at home or in their churches. the image of the virgin could only appear on icons within a restricted color range. the canonical image of the virgin must have a veil covering all of her head, leaving only her pale face visible. moreover, in russian literary and folk tradition, the virgin appears rather as a loving and suffering mother figure, and not as an attractive young woman. therefore, the comparison between a beautiful, young girl and a painted madonna likely refers to her catholicism. it becomes clear that valdis’ family were latvian catholics as well. the author also refers to valdis’ family as an ordinary, hard-working family of a similar social class to paulina. therefore, at the very beginning of the story the author creates tension and invites us to solve an intriguing puzzle: why two young very handsome people from the same religious and social a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 57 background cannot be together. a dialogue between masha and paulina hints at the source of paulina’s dislike for valdis. masha enquires about paulina’s coldness towards him, and paulina explains by recounting her past. it seems that as children, valdis teased paulina, pulled her braids and called her “a little gypsy.” during the course of the story, an additional reason for paulina’s strong dislike is revealed. she asserts her hatred towards the “aizsargs.” the word “aizsargs” in latvian describes the local pronazi military collaborators of which valdis was a member. we need to take into consideration that the story was conceived and produced during soviet times when the social perception of “aizsargs” was extremely negative. for this very reason, the author’s desire to make an “aizsarg” a positive leading character seems rather extraordinary. however, the author does not dwell on the motivation for the social or political dissent between the leading characters. rather, she focuses on universal human values, such as love and following one’s heart, personal experience and popular wisdom. it seems that blokhina is determined to achieve two different goals. on one hand, she aims to persuade her readers of the realistic nature of her story by setting it in a precise time (world war ii), providing familiar settings to her readers (latvian farming community) and underlining her protagonist’s political views (valdis was a nazi collaborator). on the other hand, the author did not intend to develop further any of the above mentioned details. this may appear puzzling and even contradictory at the first reading. however, this writing style can often be observed in a literary story that was written in the style of a folk tale, where such realistic details provide background, but are not central to the plot. the first sentence of the love story sets the plot in motion: a group of hunters and their hounds gathered to hunt at the farm. in the afternoon, the hunters returned to the farm with a dead deer. the author’s choice of game has some additional resonance as well. the deer may be associated with a common part of the interior design of the house. in the 1960s, tapestry carpets from germany were popular in the latvian household. they typically depict diverse scenes, but a deer hunt was one of the most common. the use of a defenseless deer chased by hunters as a metaphor for a young, timid folklorica 2016, vol. xx 58 girl chased by men is essential to this tale. the hunt then serves two functions. the figure of the hunted deer acts as a metaphor for valdis’ pursuit of his beloved paulina, as well as sets the scene for the daily life of the village that is central to this story. in the course of the story, valdis makes numerous unsuccessful attempts to court paulina. the reader learns that, valdis’s advances notwithstanding, paulina cannot forget her anger towards her beau. rather, her angry, fierce, and strong dislike towards her unfortunate admirer grows each day. at this point, the author turns from melodrama to farce. after paulina’s final refusal of marriage, valdis becomes furious and makes an unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide. valdis shoots into the ceiling, his mother faints as she hears the shot, and the sound of her fall is so loud that valdis runs up to his mother and tries to bring her to her senses. when she regains consciousness and sees valdis, she believes that he has killed paulina and faints again. valdis then calls paulina to rouse his mother. finally, as a result of their joint efforts, she comes to, sees them together and asks whom he had killed. valdis replies, “a fly on the ceiling.” as we see, the final scene showcases the author’s sense of humor and results in a rather farcical, albeit happy, ending. the couple do eventually marry and the author concludes the story with the lines: до родов оставалось совсем немного времени. валдис уговаривал жену не бояться при родах. он говорил, я сам буду присутствовать при родах и говорил в шутку, ведь я без одной недели хирург. [two months remained until the delivery of the child. valdis persuaded his wife not to be afraid, he told her that he would be present at the delivery himself and said jokingly, remember that i will be a surgeon in one week.] the ethnographic value of the story settings above, we explored the core plot elements that advance blokhina’s story the forced love. however, it would be beneficial for us to examine the story’s settings as well. maria pakhomovna a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 59 was determined to make her story realistic [koroleva: 2006]. she achieved this goal by providing a vivid description of a beer drinking culture and a typical harvest time on a farm in latvia would be familiar to her intended readership. we also consider the detailed description of traditions and everyday customs of a latvian rural community has its own ethnographic value. for example, she produced a very believable description of milling when landowners, together with their workers, grind corn for the entire neighborhood taking the mill from house to house: бривкалнс – хозяин зажиточный, хлеба много, рабочих собрал на две смены, работали по два часа и снова менялись. на обед столы накрывали в большом зале и в первую очередь посадили обедать хозяинов и их сынов и дочек, а работников и работниц во вторую застолицу. [brivkalns is a well-to-do landowner, having much corn; he gathered workers on two shifts, working for two hours and then exchanging shifts. for dinner, tables were laid in the big hall and the first to dine were the landowners with their sons and daughters; the workers dined in the second turn.] from her description of the dinner that follows, we learn more about social tensions between the background characters, the landowners and the workers: “рабочие начали роптать, мол, мы, свиньи, должны обедать после господ” [the workers started grumbling: we pigs must eat after masters]. however, blokhina was not interested in the theme of social inequality and left her readers to interpret the potential tension between landowners and workers as the natural human desire to get an extra glass of beer. thus, she turns the tale setting into a picturesque description of the happy idealistic life of a rural community: на этот раз ужинать в первую очередь пригласили работников, и снова начался ропот, что в первой застолице надо торопиться, чтоб дать место другой, а другая может не торопиться, сидеть, сколько им захочется, торопить никто не станет, работа кончен. folklorica 2016, vol. xx 60 работали больше мужчины, им жаль было упустить лишнюю кружку пива… после ужины разобрали столы, и начались танцы. играть были приглашены два аккордеониста, молодые красивые парни, они играли посменно. [this time workers were invited to eat first and there was grumbling again that those who eat first must hurry in order to make room for the second turn that need not hurry and may sit as long as they like because the work is finished. the workers were mostly men and they were reluctant to miss another jug of beer.…after supper the tables were taken away and people started dancing. two accordionists had been invited to play, they were young handsome guys and played in turns.] in this passage blokhina demonstrates her ability to provide true vivid, ethnographic details that reflect the local color. for example, the beer-drinking culture played a significant role in a latvian rural community. beer was a traditional drink at all family and community rituals, celebrations and holidays. all local communities brewed plenty of beer in preparation for the work done together by the community (such as harvest, which was known as “toloka” in latvia). in addition, an accordion and dancing have always been an essential part of any traditional celebration at latvian holidays. maria pakhomovna creates a smoother narrative, because she knew well all the details of everyday life of that time. it is notable that the author strives to use numerous adjectives that makes her narratives lively and easy to follow. for example, during milling, valdis did not approach the girls; the work was very hard, but paulina continued mocking him: “сегодня на твоих нежных руках появятся кровавые музули” [today the soft hands will get bloody blisters]. in her brief description of the main characters, she also directs her attention to some important details of everyday life, such as a mandatory wash before attending the community dinner, and dressing smart for the community event: a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 61 хозяйки вынесли на двор теплую воду в ведрах и тазах, а также мыло и полотенце. все вымылись, у кого была запасная одежда, переоделись. валдис уехал домой, мы с паулой зашли в работницкую комнату, там лежала наша запасная одежда, переоделись, расчесали свои волоса, поскольку они у нас были длинные, но за день тяжелой работы они растрепались и сбились, заплели косы, уложили аккуратно, переоделись. когда все были уже в порядке и все собрались, хозяйки пригласили на ужин. явился и валдис в голубой рубашке, галифе и начищенных до блеска хромовых сапогах. [the landlady brought out into the yard warm water in pails and bowls as well as soap and towels. everybody washed and changed into fresh clothes. valdis left for home but paulina and i went into the worker’s room; there were our spare clothes, there we brushed our hair as it was long and had got disheveled during the hard working day, we did our hair and changed. when everyone was ready and all had gathered, landladies invited us to supper. valdis came dressed in a blue shirt, riding-breeches and polished shiny boots.] maria pakhomovna reveals her gift as storyteller through a realistic detailed description of customs and traditions of the latvian rural community that reflect important ethnographic information about the period. these vivid descriptions also made her tale believable and relevant to her intended audience. the story’s language the story the forced love is written in the local dialect of russian that is still spoken in latgalia (the southeastern district of contemporary latvia) where maria pahomovna lived all her life. the natural usage of this vocabulary by the author indicates both the folk roots of the story and the peasant origin of the author; a gifted self-made person who lacked a formal education. folklorica 2016, vol. xx 62 regrettably, the absence of data concerning the non-religious fictional writings by old believer authors does not allow us to examine blokhina’s writings in this context. however, it is worth mentioning here a work by another distinguished russian old believer storyteller and writer, d. t. zaitsev. his biographical piece entitled повесть и житие данилы терентьевича зайцева [the tale and the life of daniil terent’evich zaitsev] has been recently published by o. g. rovnova [2015]. although these two pieces represent two different genres, one a narrative fiction and one a biography, they are both written in an “unspoiled russian folk language” [rovnova, 2015: 15]. we believe that further comprehensive studies of narratives on non-religious topics would be beneficial for establishing some linguistic patterns in the nonreligious writings that have been established in the old believer communities. here we will focus on the distinctive local features present in this story. as we mentioned earlier, maria pakhomovna had a comprehensive knowledge of the local latgalian dialect and understood well how to use different linguistic registers to enhance her story. textual analysis of the forced love, in particular, demonstrates interesting particulars of the author’s style. as noted above, maria pakhomovna had only a third-grade education. however, she strived to make her written language rich and expressive. for example, she produced a number of similes and metaphors in the story that merit comment. while many of them are rather common, she used them to make her writing more colorful. they include the following: я была похожа на бесенка, чумазая, вся в пыли, глаза слипались, хотелось спать. [i looked like a little devil, black-faced, covered with dust, i could hardly keep my eyes open, i felt like sleeping.] валдис молчал, он был бледный как лист бумаги [valdis kept silent, he was pale as a sheet of paper]; слезы катились крупные, как горох [the tears were a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 63 rolling down as big as peas]; она лежала, как мертвая [she was lying like a dead person]; мать лепетала как птичка своим нежным голоском [the mother was twittering like a bird with her tender voice]. however, some of the author’s metaphors are more original, as in “она так и разливалась” [her words were flowing like a stream]. in her search for expressivity, maria pakhomovna also modified a well-known proverb “долг платежом красен” [the debt must be honored by the payback]. in her version, it reads as “долг отдачей красен” [the debt must be honored by the return]. blokhina also created her own idioms for example, “скушать смешное” [to eat something funny] – “о чем вы смеетесь, что смешное скушали?” [what are you laughing at, have you eaten something funny?]. the author’s vocabulary included some rare words from the vernacular. for example, she skillfully used the verb “брыснуть” made from the interjection “shoo”: “он снова на нее брыснул” [he shooed her again]. local dialectal lexicon and colloquial forms saturate the story as well, as one would expect for a story that can be classified as a folk tale, as we have argued. the comparative table below demonstrates some examples of the dialect forms that appeared in the story and their standard forms. dialect and colloquial forms standard literary forms беремя (old form/dialect) бремя [burden] застолица (dialect) застолье [feast] братенник (dialect/colloquial) брат [brother] отстебать (dialect) отхлестать [to whip] подграбить (dialect) подгрести [to rake] folklorica 2016, vol. xx 64 перечитывать (dialect) перечислять [to list] работать работу (dialect) выполнять/делать работу [to do a job/to work] со всех сил (colloquial) изо всех сил [to the best of one’s abilities] пасть в обморок (dialect/colloquial) упасть в обморок [to fade] we also see features of dialectal morphology and syntax ; for example, the word “potato” [картофель] is classified as feminine gender instead of masculine and the omission of the subject of the clause of the sentence, the pronoun those [те]: “[те] которые освободились от других работ, обчасывали стог граблями, а солому подпихивали к валидису” [who were free from other work, raked around the stack pushing the straw towards valdis]. disagreement in the gender or number between short forms of participles and the subject of the sentence also commonly occur in the text as in the following examples: работа кончен [the work is done] – the feminine gender of the noun работа does not correspond to the masculine gender of the short participle кончен. лошадь была уж запряжен [the horse was harnessed] the feminine gender of the noun лошадь does not correspond to the masculine gender of the short participle запряжен. срезан горки [the top is cut off] – the singular number of the short participle срезан does not agree with the plural form of the noun горки. глаза его были наполнен слезами [there were tears in his eyes] the singular number of the short participle наполнен a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 65 does not agree with the plural form of the noun глаза. while her dialect features are well attested, another interesting particularity of the author’s style are her attempts to use a “high” literary style that she considered prestigious. the author mixed linguistic registers and replaced selected dialect words with their “bookish” forms. this resulted in some vocabulary (shown in bold) that sound inappropriate in a casual context: хозяйка взялась стряпать и привлекла меня с павлиной [the landlady started cooking and involved me and paulina]; взглянув на него, паула улыбнулась и молвила: “а следки еще остались” [looking at him paulina smiled and said, “but traces still remained”]; все бросили взор на них, даже в зале воцарила тишина. [everybody looked at them, silence ensued even in the hall]; я далеко отстала от ночного финиша [i am lagging long behind the nightly finish]. … обращался он больше к паулине, смеялся, шутил, в отдельных случаях критиковал только себя [… he addressed mostly paulina, laughing and joking, sometimes criticizing only himself] разбирала по категориям и носила в буфет посуду [sorted dishes according to their type and carried them to the sideboard]; хозяйка просила нам ей помочь в приготовлении – и опять монстр – добавочной пищи [the landlady asked us to help her in preparing and another monstrosity additional food]. sometimes the author’s desire to implement a “bookish” style makes the text unintentionally funny. for example, хозяйка folklorica 2016, vol. xx 66 пустила в ход все горло [the landlady put her whole lungs into action]. the appropriate use of the idiom would be: хозяйка закричала во все горло [the landlady started to shout loudly]. occasionally, the author uses prepositions that are grammatically incorrect in the literary standard as in, хозяйка начала звонить по телефону и приглашать всех, кто участвовал на охоте [the landlady started telephoning and inviting all who had taken part in hunting]. the appropriate use of the prepositions на/в in russian in this case as follows: кто участвовал в охоте / кто был на охоте. to conclude our observations of maria pakhomovna’s writing style, we turn once again to her interviews [koroleva: 2006]. in her writings she displays her own understanding of language “correctness” and “suitability”. in her poetry that describes realistic and tragic events of the world war ii she deliberately avoids any dialectal lexicon in her attempt to produce a piece of work in “high” style. however, in the down-to-earth stories, such as the forced love, she attempts to use both forms of russian as she thinks fit. conclusion maria pakhomovna was a multitalented, self-educated and selfmade person. her decorative artwork and her writings represent an area of folk creativity that lies on the border of collective anonymous folk tradition and, literary works produced in a folk style by a person of underprivileged background. the story the forced love, in particular, has many scholarly points of interest. first, this is a rare attempt to produce a fictional love story by an author from an old believer background. this breaks the traditional pattern of literary work by the old believer literati who usually would limit their writings to religious matters. we have argued that the story should be classified as literary fiction influenced by a folk tale. this influence can be seen, in particular, in the story’s theme, its plot development and characters, and in its language. secondly, the language of the forced love is potentially a source for study of a local latgalian dialect. usage of the dialectal form of russian in the story should be considered as an advantage, not a shortcoming of this work. thirdly level of ethnographic detail in the setting of the a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 67 story displays her knowledge of and understanding of everyday life in a latvian village of the 1940s. finally, the author avoids any ideological positions and is an acute observer of human character and behavior. maria pakhomovna blokhina takes up the universal plot of a love story, but develops it in her original way that introduces us to popular wisdom and everyday life values of the period in her village. below follows the entire text, without modifications from the original manuscript, of the forced love. notes 1 literary fairy tales have proved to be a very popular genre in russian and world literature since the beginning of the 19th century. in our case, we deal with a piece of literary work with some elements of folk fairy tales produced by a self-made amateur writer. 2 maria pakhomovna has a solid russian old believer background. she was born into an old believer family and married a man who shared the same religious beliefs. the rezhica (rezekne) district has been and remains in to day one of the largest russian old believer settlements in latvia. 3 see the language section of the article 4 note that all her poetry, including this poem, are written in standard russian without any trace of the local dialect. 5 the word “спектакль” has a figurative meaning of somebody’s extravagant behavior, e. g. to show off 6 more details on ethnographic particularities of the story are provided in the section ethnographic value of the story settings. 7 this appearance also resembles the appearance of a heroic main character in folk or literary tales. bibliography koroleva, e. a. 2006. королева, е. а. unpublished materials and interviews of m.p. blokhina. zaitsev, daniel. 2015. зайцев, данила. повесть и житие данилы терентьевича зайцева [the tale and the life of daniil terent’evich zaitsev]. ровнова олга г. ed. москва: альпина folklorica 2016, vol. xx 68 нон-фикшн. appendix full text of story “принуждённая любовь” охотники собрались на охоту, отвязали своих собак и ушли. после полудня явились к нашему хозяину и на лошади отвезли убитую косулю. все гурьбой весело со смехом потащили косулю в сарай, там её разделали и ушли все по домам. хозяйка взялась стряпать привлекла меня с павлиной. мы ей помогали, мололи мясо, делали котлеты, пекли печенье и помогли накрыть в зале стол. когда было всё готово, хозяйка начала звонить по телефону и приглашать всех, кто участвовал на охоте. явились все со своими жёнами, но из них один был холостяк, парень лет 27-28, белокурый, стройный, с голубыми глазами и с бледным румянцем на щеках. я с павлиной находилась в кухне, так как хозяйка просила нам помочь ей в приготовлении добавочной пищи. мы резали хлеб, хозяйка то и дело выходила на кухню и приказывала нам наложить в тарелки тушёную с мясом картофель, то котлеты или добавить печенье. белокурый блондин часто выходил на кухню и заводил с нами разговор. обращался он больше к паулине, смеялся, шутил, в отдельных случаях критиковал только себя. паулина разговаривать и шутить с ним не хотела, отвечала ему грубо, отрывисто, но он делал вид, что как будто эта грубость к нему не относится. он всё больше впивался в её глаза и пристально рассматривал её. паулина очень красивая девушка: глаза чёрные, искристые, волоса тёмные, вьющие, длинные, лицо смуглое с румянцем и статная фигура, между прочим, что разрисованная мадонна. блондин, наконец, спросил, как вас зовут. первая ответила я, паулина своего имени не назвала, ответила за её я: «паулина по-русски, а по-латышски будет паула, так и будем звать паула, а меня зовут валдис». тут из зала открылась дверь и валдиса позвали, он ушёл. я стала спрашивать у паулы, почему ты так грубишь? – а потому что a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 69 я его хорошо знаю. когда я была маленькая, пасла у рексте александры коров, он был такой длинный верзила и пас своих коров, а земли их граничили, и вдруг моя корова перешла через границу на их землю, я как-то не углядела. он кнутом отстебал корову и меня и заявил: «ну, несчастный цыганёнок, ещё раз пустишь коров в наш хутор, я тебя выстебаю крепче». я в ту же очень пошла в школу в первый класс, а он ходил уже в шестой. я стояла в коридоре, он бежал и дёрнул меня за косу и сказал: «и ты тут, цыганёнок»? и снова валдис появился в кухне, но уже был под хмельком, рассказывал смешные анекдоты, был очень весел, брал из тарелок печенье, которое мы приготовили по приказу хозяйке для гостей, преподносил нам: «угощайтесь, девочки, не стесняйтесь»! – и снова его позвали в зал, он ушел. через несколько минут явился снова, в руках держал стакан с самогоном и на вилке котлета и стал предлагать паулине выпить, она категорически отказалась, он её упрашивал, ну выпей немножечко! та категорически отказалась. «ну выпей хотя каплю, нет! но хотя помочи губы». паула взяла стакан и прильнула губами: «ну вот, спасибо, а теперь закусите». паула немного откусила котлеты и сказала спасибо. затем он сказал, будьте здоровы и выпил самогон, запихнул в рот котлету, улыбнулся – теперь всё в порядке. и снова его позвали. хозяйка вышла, забрала тарелки с картофелем и капустой и сказала : «теперь можете идти спать». сначала гости громко говорили и смеялись, потом начали петь. мы уснули. валдис – единственный сын у родителей, он учился в риге в медицинском институте. когда началась война и немцы оккупировали латвию, началась мобилизация, и чтоб его не взяли на фронт, мать его привезла домой и устроила работать айсаргом, так как айсаргов не брали на фронт, они воевали в тылу, но поскольку он ученый, не воевал, а находился в конторе писарем. отец старый, седой, лет семидесяти с лишком, мать молодая пятидесяти лет, красивая, голубоглазая, румяная женщина. сын очень похож на неё. сама она из работниц, замуж вышла за старика из-за хозяйства, хотя в то время он был не так уж стар: сорок лет, ей двадцать, в то время разница была folklorica 2016, vol. xx 70 небольшая, а вот теперь заметна: он сед и неуклюж, вечно ходит с верёвками и хомутами, выводит и заводит лошадей. мать, наоборот, опрятная, чистая, разговорчивая, приветливая к людям. богатые они не были и держали только одну работницу, и сами работали всю работу. наутро мы проснулись как обычно в четыре часа, первым долгом доили коров, приготовили молоко для отправки на сепараторный пункт, перемыли посуду и стали кормить свиней, в это время всегда хозяйка варит завтрак, завершили полностью утреннюю работу и пошли завтракать. пазавтракав, мы с паулиной начали убирать посуду. на велосипеде приехал валдис, вошёл в кухню, поздоровался, спросил, хозяин дома. «да», ответила хозяйка и показала рукой на дверь в зал. валдис вошёл и быстро вышел, утирая платком губы. «девочки, что вам помочь»? – произнес он весело, паулина резко ответила: «ничего»! но он как бы и не услыхал. елизавета яновна, дайте мне фартук и платок! хозяйка, смеясь, пошла в комнату, принесла ему фартук и платок, он тут же принарядился и весело перекрутился на одной ноге: «правда, девочки, красиво»? мы с паулиной переглянулись и улыбнулись, но ничего не сказали. он был в платке и фартуке похож на девушку. после похмелья румянец разыгрался на щеках, голубые глаза стали ещё голубей, а вот фигура не подходила к женской, слишком широкоплеч. он пошёл в зал, собрал со стола посуду и стал носить в кухню. «куда, девочки, эту ценность»? паулина показала пальцем на котёл с горячей водой. он осторожно опустил в воду стопу грязной посуды и, в шутку выставляя себя за женщину, подался за другой партией. переносив всю посуду, взял полотенце и начал утирать посуду. и так мы мыли посуду. паулина мыла, валдис утирал, я разбирала по категориям и носила в буфет. затем я мыла в зале пол, а паулина ушла ломать листья свеклы для свиней, с ней пошел и валдис. паулина наломала столько листьев и взвалила ему на плечи, что он чуть приволок эту ношу. сбросил в сарае на пол и тут же уселся на листья и стал отдуваться. паулина стояла напротив и громко смеялась. пока они секли листы, я закончила мытьё. настало время в обед кормить свиней, на a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 71 помощь позвали меня. павлина заправляла вёдра кормом, валдис носил вёдра в свинарник, а я разливала по корытам. паулина стала почему-то веселее, смеялась и подмигивала мне. но её ехидство я понять не могла. может, потому что была совсем мала – 15 лет. итак, валдис стал появляться к нам часто. ему очень нравилась паула, как он ее называл. но она к нему была очень колка, выходила из себя, бросала обидные слова. ты хозяйский сынок, неженка, а я работница. ты айсарг, я вас ненавижу. при этом он молчал только заливался краской. обиженный, садился на велосипед и уезжал домой, но наверно, обида отходила быстро, и он появлялся снова. уже начался сентябрь, обмолотили хлеб. в обед коров доить перестали, с утра до вечера они находились в загонах. поравняли в хлеве навоз и пошли в сарай за соломой для постилки. первое беремя навязали мне, валдис приподнял его мне и я понесла в хлев, второе беремя остались вязать валдис и павлина. я своё беремя уже растрясла и пошла опять в сарай, а у них в сарае концерт: валдис сидит на береме и платком вытирает кровавые полосы. паулина стоит в углу и перечитывает, какой он есть. он встал, глаза у него были грустные. он обратился ко мне: «марья, подыми»! я подняла ему на плечи беремя, которое было навязан чуть ли не с лошадиный воз, снёс солому в хлев, сбросил, взял велосипед и уехал, ничего не сказав. я паулине задала вопрос, почему вы подрались? – «как же, стянули беремя, связали, и он меня схватил за руки, прижал к беремю и хотел поцеловать, вот я его и разукрасила, и засмеялась, теперь такой красивый больше не появится. но мне его не жаль. ведь он так ей всегда старался делать доброе, а она как кошка все время его порет, если не словами, то когтями. вот уже и конец сентября. молотилка приезжает от соседа к соседу, мы с паулой ходим отрабатывать за нашу молотьбу. домой приходим поздно вечером усталые и снова подымаемся в четыре утра. хорошо, что вечером хозяйка управляется с хозяйством сама. пришла очередь молотить у бривкална. пошли работать мы втроем: хозяин, я и паула. бривкалнс хозяин зажиточный, хлеба много, рабочих собрал на две смены, folklorica 2016, vol. xx 72 работали по два часа и снова менялись. на обед столы накрывали в большом зале и в первую очередь посадили обедать хозяинов и их сынов и дочек, а работников и работниц во вторую застолицу. рабочие начали роптать, мол, мы, свиньи, должны обедать после господ. валдис подошел к паулине и стал звать ее за стол, она категорически отказалась, заявив, что она работница и обедать пойдёт только с работниками. валдис тоже не сел за стол, а вместе с нами ждал вторую застолицу. отобедав, снова взялись за работу. я и паула отпихивала солому от машины. её брат саша лошадью, запряженной в жердь, оттягивал солому к стогу. на стог подавали валдис и незнакомый мужчина. метали стог шура с мужем, работ много, всех не перечислить. наш хозяин оттягивал и подвешивал мешки под зерно. сам бривкалнс зерно возил в амбар. начало темнеть. старый бривкалнс принес фонари и навешал где можно. молотили при тусклом свете, и работа уже шла к концу. в последнюю очередь начали молотить горох. как раз меня, паулину и сашу заменила наша смена. паулина послала меня за горохом, и я пошла, в мешках уже был горох. я протянула сашину шапку к хозяину и попросила, чтоб он мне насыпал гороху. он взглянул на меня и улыбнулся, я была похожа на бесёнка, чумазая, вся в пыли, глаза слипались, хотелось спать. он спросил, устала, да? тогда он отодвинул мешки, бросил между мешков охапку соломы и сказал, ляг отдохни и больше не ходи туда, без тебя домолотят, и забросал меня пустыми мешками. валдис к нам не подходил, хотя и работал рядом, даже в пересменку ни разу не подошёл, садился под стог и сидел со своим напарником. паула всё время смотрела, как он работает и ехидно высмеивала: «сегодня нежные ручки получат кровавые музули», хотя у неё уже были на своих руках музули. паулина с сашей не дождались меня. саша пошел меня разыскивать, подошел к мешкам, где работал наш хозяин, спросил, где мария, хозяин ответил, не видел, а сам случайно взглянул в то место, ге я лежала. саша, уловил взгляд и полез через мешки в мое гнездо, и стал откидывать пустые мешки. я a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 73 уже спала, спросонья испугалась и уцепилась ему в волоса, я в впотьмах его не узнала, думала, что кто-то чужой, и так его дёрнула, что он закричал. хозяин хохотал от души и подтрунил, так что саша ушёл, и я снова уснула. проснулась тогда, когда брали последние мешки. рабочие всё подграбили, подчистили. которые освободились от других работ, обчасывали стог граблями, а солому подпихивали к валдису, остатки соломы он кидал на стог, один напарник стоял и курил. пришёл старик бривкалнс снял фонари, погасил, один фонарь повесил на улице около дома. хозяйки вынесли на двор теплую воду в ведрах и тазах, а также мыло и полотенце. все вымылись, у кого была запасная одежда, переоделись. валдис уехал домой, мы с паулой зашли в работницкую комнату, там лежала наша запасная одежда, переоделись, расчесали свои волоса, поскольку они у нас были длинные, но за день тяжелой работы они растрепались и сбились, заплели косы, уложили аккуратно, переоделись. когда все были уже в порядке и все собрались, хозяйки пригласили на ужин. явился и валдис в голубой рубашке, галифе и начищенных до блеска хромовых сапогах. царапины на лице еле заметны. взглянув на него, паула улыбнулась и молвила, а следки ещё заметны. на этот раз ужинать в первую очередь пригласили работников, и снова начался ропот, что в первой застолице надо торопиться, чтоб дать место другой, а другая может не торопиться, сидеть, сколько им захочется, торопить никто не станет, работа кончен. работали больше мужчиы, им жаль было упустить лишнюю кружку пива. хозяйки волновались, но молчали. к нам снова подошёл валдис и предложил пауле ужинать во второй застолице, павлина с каким-то юмором отказалась, и мы пошли за стол. валдис тоже сел с нами, но на этот раз сел около меня. молчал, не заводил никаких разговоров, наверно, затаил в душе обиду. молчала и паулина. поужинав, мы пошли в работницкую комнату. валдис с мужчинами пошёл на улицу курить. после ужина разобрали столы и объявили танцы. играть были приглашены два аккордеониста, молодые, красивые парни, они играли посменно. folklorica 2016, vol. xx 74 женщины и девушки сидели вдоль стен на скамейках, мужчины стояли, столпившись у дверей. аккордеонист заиграл первый вальс. пырвыми вышли шура и паулина, они кружились плавно, красиво, несколько минут никто не выходил на круг. все смотрели, как кружатся девчата, русские и кружатся по-русски, у них получалось здорово. затем стали выходить пара за парой, и заполнился весь зал. валдис стоял около порога рядом с нашим хозяином, о чем-то говорил с ним и искоса посматривал на паулину. паулина уловила взгляд валдиса и шепнула шуре, когда валдис нацелится на меня приглашать, тут же ты сразу приглашай меня, чтоб он не успел ко мне подойти. танец кончился, женщины расселись по местам. тут и началась для валдиса нервотрёпка. это паулине и шуре удалось сделать несколько раз. шура её не приглашала тогда, когда ее приглашал какой-нибудь парень или мужчина. паулина прельщала всех своей красотой и стройной фигурой. сколько было на неё взоров! со стороны всё видно, поскольку я в свои 15 лет была пигалицей и не танцевала, потому что не умела. понравилась паулина и аккордеонистам. когда один играл, другой всё время приглашал её на танец, потом заменял другой. а валдису так и не подходила очередь. вдруг объявили отбивной танец: парни хлопали в ладошки и отбивали девушек от парня, с которым она танцует, а тот отбивает другую девушку. тут вышла очередь валдису. павлина как раз танцевала с аккордеонистом. валдис подошёл, улыбнулся и легонько хлопнул в ладошки. паулина сделала вид, что она не заметила, уцепилась крепче в партнёра, крутанулась и хотела скрыться среди танцующих, но не тут-то было! валдис схватил ее за руку и ударил по щеке, выдернул её из круга и посадил рядом со мной и сел рядом с ней сам. её партнер юркнул в танцующий круг и скрылся, как видно, испугался тоже. все бросили взор на них, даже в зале воцарилась тишина. паулина сидела, не шевелясь, глаза ее стали больше и чернее, они не моргали, но слёзы катились крупные как горох. валдис молчал, но был бледный, как лист бумаги. и тут она взглянул в лицо павлине и сразу вздрогнул, увидев её слёзы, вынул из кармана платок и утёр ей слёзы. a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 75 павлина не шевельнулась от страха. тогда он прижал её голову к груди, зажмурил глаза и губами прижался к ее волосам. на этот спектакль обратили все внимание. наш хозяин заметил это тоже, и его задело, что при людях так обидел его работницу. хозяин пальцем поманил валдиса, валдис встал, пожал руку павлине, извинился и подошел к хозяину, хозяин его хлопнул по плечу и стал потихоньку выпихивать из зала. они вышли. павлина шепнула мне, что она должна бежать домой, но как сделать, чтоб никто не заметил? мы взялись за руки и пошли из зала. выйдя из зала мы заметили хозяина и валдиса, они стояли у самых дверей и курили, хозяин что-то строго говорил валдису. мы шмыгнули в работницкую комнату, работник и пастух уже спали. я разбудила пастуха, так как он был мой братенник, он поднялся, открыл окно, павлина одела пальто. и мы вылезли на улицу. я ее довела до большой дороги, и она побежала, а вернулась, влезла через окно и села на своё место. вскоре вошли в зал хозяин и валдис. заметив, что рядом со мной нет паулины, валдис подошёл ко мне, сел и спросил, где паула. не знаю. он меня крепко сжал за руку выше локтя: «говори, где паула»? – а сам глазами шьёт по залу. мне стало больно руке, и я сказала, что она пошла домой. на первый раз он не поверил, потому что стоял у самых дверей и пройти незаметно она никак не могла, сжал руку мне сильнй: «говори, где она»? мне стало больно руки и страшно тоже, ведь он айсарг. я подумала, что она уже далеко, не догонит, и сказала, что она ушла через окно. он бросил мою руку и быстро рванулся на двор. хозяин наблюдал за ним, тоже бросился сзади. валдис схватил велосипед и помчался вдогонку за паулой. паула бежала со всех сил, потому что было очень темно и до дома три километра. и вдруг ей осветилась дорога, она бежала и кого-то благодарила за освещение дороги, не подозревая, что это валдис, у которого на велосипеде динамик. хозяин на своем велосипеде гнался за валдисом, я осталась одна, овладел мною ночной страх и решила бежать за хозяином, но соревноваться с ними мне не удалось, я далеко отстала от ночного финиша. дорога очень ровная, даже срезан горки, по обочинам только folklorica 2016, vol. xx 76 кусты и местами горные срезы. паула бежала, а свет всё ближе и ближе, и вдруг пистолетный выстрел. она пригнула голову, бросилась в сторону, не рассчитав в темноте, сильно ударилась головой в срез, отвалилась назад и потеряла сознание. валдис бросил велосипед на дороге и бросился к ней. она лежала вверх лицом, лицо было в песке, даже во рту был песок. валдис положил ее голову себе на колено и стал утирать лицо платком. и тут подъехал хозяин, он слышал выстрел, набросился ругать валдиса, что он застрелил девушку. валдис отпирался, доказывал, что он выстрелил вверх. тут подбежала я и вижу спектакль не очень приятный, начала плакать, хозяин на меня: «а ну брысь домой»! я со слезами побежала домой. двери открыла мне хозяйка, вот тут я ей оповестила, что валдис застрелил паулину. хозяйка забегала по кухне, закрутила себе руки, начала кричать, ругать валдиса и вместе хозяина, что он не сохранил паулину. пока мы плакали, смотрим, хозяин открывает дверь, валдис на руках вносит паулину. хозяйка пустила в ход своё горло и получила что и я: «а ну брысь»! хозяйка притихла. павлину валдис положил на ее кровать и объяснил хозяйке, как всё произошло, что ей ничего страшного нет, небольшое сотрясение и попросил полотенце. хозяйка вынесла полотенце, он сам смочил его водой, пошёл в комнату и начал обтирать ей лицо, обтёр лицо. она лежала как мёртвая, даже не шевельнулась, а когда он хотел ей на груди расстегнуть пуговицы, она уцепилась ему за руку. хозяин, наблюдая за ними, улыбнулся и ушел в кухню. хозяйка была в ярости, ей так и хотелось броситься на хозяина, но он снова на ней брыснул, и она ушла в свою комнату. я осталась на кухне, боялась войти в комнату, чтоб не помешать валдису ввести паулину в сознание. потом вышла хозяйка и позвала меня к себе, постелила мне на лежанке, я сразу уснула. наутро мы с хозяйкой всё делали сами: доили коров, кормил и завтрак варили, паулина отдыхала. выдоивши коров, я одним глазом заглянула в комнату, павлина не спала и подмигнула мне глазом. валдис сидел на её кровати, облоктивши через её, всё клевал носом ей в грудь. пока мы прибирались, я не видела, как он уехал домой. к обеду паулина a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 77 встала, помогала мне кормить свиней. я спросила: «ну, как здоровье»? она ответила: «немного болит голова». и зашел у нас разговор о долге, я сказала ей пословицу: долг платежом красен. ты его разукрасила, а он тебя, теперь вы в расчете. она засмеялась и сказал, ему это так не пройдёт. я ему ещё чтонибудь подстрою. пообедав, мы пошли в свою комнату отдыхать, и все смеялись случившемуся вчера, расплели свои волоса, чтоб почесать и привести в порядок головы. и вдруг послышались по кухне шаги. я думала, что идёт работник, представила себя ведьмой с распущенными волосами и нацелилась спугнуть его, а в дверях оказался валдис. я отскочила и бросилась на кровать, паулина расхохоталась, валдис не понял, о чем мы так смеёмся, и начал спрашивать то в одной, то в другой и что смешное скушали, осмотрел себя, ему казалось, что смеёмся около него, и покраснел. вскоре пришёл работник, поздоровался с ним, и чтоб не мешать нашей компании, ушел в сарай колоть дрова. я прибрала волоса и тоже пошла на улицу. наступил октябрь. воскресенье, день красивый, солнечный. мы прибрались в обед и решили идти гулять, прибрали себя в порядок и только вышли на крыльцо, тут же на своей рысачке приехал валдис с матерью, соскочил с линейки и подошёл к крыльцу и спросил, куда, девочки, направились? паулина ответила: «гулять! – возьмите меня с собой». пока торговались о прогулке, вышла на крыльцо хозяйка и стала приглашать его и мать в дом. мать привязала лошадь, подошла к валдису, дёрнула его за рукав, что значило – пошли в дом! затем вошли все трое в дом. мы не успели отойти от крыльца, нас окликнула хозяйка позвала в дом. мы вернулись, зашли на кухню. хозяйка стала звать паулину в зал. паулина отказалась, хозяйка сказала: «мария, пошли тоже»! я собралась идти и потащила за собой паулину. по-видимому, хозяйка их ждала, потому что в зале был накрыт стол и стояла бутыль с самогоном. хозяйка пригласила сесть всех за стол. мать валдиса эльза яновна оказалась женщина очень приветливая то ли хитрая: она так и разливалась, расхваливала нас, а сына критиковала, но было видно, что она от сына без ума. казалось, folklorica 2016, vol. xx 78 что бы сын у неё ни потребовал, она бы всё выполнила. хозяйка разлила самогон по маленьким стаканчикам и предложила всем выпить. мы все опустошили свои стаканчики. две хозяйки, две подруги, болтали о разном, а мы чувствовали себя не в своём кресле. как-то было неудобно, говорить было не о чём, валдис поглядывал на паулину. через минуты три я почувствовала что-то невероятное в голове, посмотрела в окно, на улице всё двигалось, и почему-то мне стало смешно. хозяйка заметила, что я опьянела и убрала мой стакан. когда она начала разливать второй раз, я взглянула на свой стакан, а его уже не было, все засмеялись, а я не растерялась, взяла вилку и нож и выбрала самый большой кусок курицы и начала кушать, а паулина получила вторую порцию самогона. когда у паулины заиграл румянец на щеках, её стакан тоже исчез. остальной самогон допивала хозяйка с гостями. когда трапеза шла к концу, эльза яновна предложила проехать на рысачке: «ну, молодёжь, хватит сидеть, покатайтесь, а то лошадь состоялась». мы стали выходить из-за стола. валдис взял паулину за руку и предложил кататься. паулина отказалась, но он так привязался и не выпускал её руку. она что-то чувствовала и сказала, если поедет марья, тогда поеду и я, но я быстро отказалась. на улицу выщли эльза яновна и хозяйка и стали уговаривать паулину, чтоб она ехала с валдисом кататься. эльза яновна скзала: «я вас подожду здесь, мы ещё поговорим с елизаветой яновной». паулина села в линейку, мать отвязала лошадь, подала вожжи валдису. лошадь рванула, свернув на большую дорогу, помчалась в сторону бривкалнов. эльза долго не задержалась у нас, она пошла на перекрёсток, где валдис должен был свернуть в сторону своего дома. я смотрела в окно и ждала, когда они вернутся, но они так больше и не вернулись к нам. мать их встретила на перекрёстке, села к ним в линейку и взяла вожжи в руки, паула нацелилась сойти с линейки, но валдис её не пустил, охватил обоими руками и крепко прижал к себе. мать дёрнула вожжи, повернула лошадь на свою дорогу, и они помчались домой. я тогда поняла, что это был сговор. лошадь у дома встретил отец, взял её под уздцы. валдис соскочил, взял за руку паулину и стал помогать ей сойти с a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 79 линейки, мать, ловко спрыгнув на землю, подхватила паулину под руку: «зайдём к нам в гости, ты ведь ни разу не была у нас». паулина смотрела на них испуганными большими чёрными глазами и не знала, что сказать. мать лепетала, как птичка, своим нежным голоском, но паулина её не слыхала. от волнения у нее прилила кровь к голове, она хотела освободиться от них, но сильные мужские руки крепко ее держали, и она невольно пошла в дом. на кухне чем-то занималась работница, паулине было не до неё. мать начала её знакомить с домом. пройдя кухню, вошли в комнату, мать объяснила, что это комната их с отцом, а следующая валдиса, и пошли в другую комнату. валдис всё время держал её за руку, пока не вошли в его комнату. в комнате стояла кровать, небольшой столик возле окна и одна табуретка. мать быстро развернулась и ушла, принесла вторую табуретку, предложила сесть паулине, пошла заварить чай. паулине сжалось сердце, она почувствовала, что здесь что-то вроде ловушки. её чувство оправдалось. валдис пододвинул свою табуретку, сел рядом и стал объясняться в любви, но паулина подчинялась только своей гордости. она резко отвергала его предложения и просила отпустить её домой. вошла мать, принесла чай, но пить чай никто не стал. валдис был очень расстроен, глаза его были наполнен слезами. мать, заметив его переживания, вступила в сватовство. она даже умоляла паулину остаться, говорила, что она слышит через стенку, что сын не спит, ворочается, вздыхает: «валдис очень любит тебя, тебе не будет у нас плохо, мой сын очень хороший и умный, ему помешала война закончить медицинский институт, когда кончится война, он его закончит, и вы будете счастливы». .осенний день короткий, наступали уже сумерки. паулина сидела, облокотивши на стол и, опустив голову, больше ничего не отвечала валдису. валдиса жгла обида, временам он становился злой и начинал грубить, но ей ничего не помогало, она стояла на своём, изредка заявляла выпустить её, валдис отказывал категорически. открылась дверь, мать с работницей тащили кровать, которая была лишней в работницкой комнате. кровать поставили на противоположной стороне, принесли folklorica 2016, vol. xx 80 матрас, набитый свежей соломой, в комнате запахло свежим воздухом, смешанным с соломой. мать принесла подушку, постелила льняную простынь и застелила кровать самотканым шерстяным одеялом с латышским орнаментом. улыбнулась, сказав: «это тебе, невестушка», и ушла. совсем стемнело, зажгли керосиновые лампы, но валдис в своей комнате лампу не зажёг, лег на кровать во всей одежде, заложил руки за голову и смотрел в долгий потолок. паулина в эту минуту думала, что сейчас думает о ней хозяйка, не подозревая, что её хозяйка продала в жены валдису. в доме было тихо, отрывкам что-то бубнил отец, из-за стены ничего не разобрать. затем тишину нарушил валдис, он поднялся, сел на кровать и сказал: «паула, ложись спать, не бойся, я не зверь, не съем тебя, мне тоже надо спать, завтра рано на работу. так и раздеваясь, повернулся к стене. паулинаа не легла, она сидела и думала над всем, что произошло сегодня, вспоминала прошлое, вспомнила, как она ему оцарапала лицо, зачем ей это надо было делать? в тайне своей души она стала обвинять себя, а зачем сделала ему на танцах перед всеми такую неловкость, значит, получила пощёчину по заслуге. вспомнила, как он нёс домой, прижав её к своей груди, его тяжелое дыхание, как ему было тяжело её нести. ей стало его жаль, в душе его она уже давно любила, но любви не корилась, а корилась своей гордости. утром валдис проснулся рано, зажёг лампу, сел к столу, взял её руку и поцеловал: «почему ты мне не веришь, всё будет по закону, обвенчаемся, сделаем свадьбу». паулина заплакала и сказала: «мою мать тоже сватали, она была красивой, и что получилось? нас у неё трое, и все от разных мужчин. вы, хозяйские сыны, хотите всё с нами играть и за это мы должны нести позорный крест». валдис посмотрел на часы и сказал, мне пора на работу, подошёл к паулине, поцеловал в лоб и сказал, я вернусь скоро. лошадь была уже запряжена. он быстро вышел, что-то сказал матери и уехал. паулина прилегла на кровать и скоро уснула. спала весь день, проснулась, когда услыхала быстрые шаги, вскочила и села на кровать. в комнату вошёл валдис, глаза у него были a love story by a distinguished russian old-believer storyteller from latgalia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 81 злые, лицо бледное, весь раздраженный, быстрым шагом подошёл к паулине. «паула, спрашиваю в последний раз, согласна стать моей женой, да или нет»? паулина не сказала ни да, ни нет, а сказала: «отпусти меня домой! – сейчас ты будешь свободна»! – и вынул пистолет из кобуры. паулина онемела, не могла ничего сказать, только закричала. когда он наставил пистолет себе к виску, она бросилась к нему на шею и громко крикнула: «не надо»! валдис отпустил руку вниз, левой рукой прижал паулину к себе, затем выстрелил в потолок. мать, услышав выстрел, пала в обморок, было слышно, как она громнулась о пол. валдис бросился к матери. она лежала на полу, он зачерпнул стакан воды стал тихонечко трясти мать: «мама-мама, очнись, ничего не произошло»! мать открыла глаза, он преподнёс ей стакан с водой, она глотнула глоток и сказала: «ты жив, а девушку убил»? – и снова пала в обморок. валдис позвал паулину, паулина подошла, валдис попросил помочь положить мать на кровать. мать пришла в себя, увидела, что сын с девушкой стоят рядом, улыбнулась и спросила: «кого же ты застрелил»? валдис в шутку ответил: «муху на потолке». свадьба была скромной. до родов оставалось совсем немного времени, валдис уговаривал жену не бояться при родах. он говорил, я сам буду присутствовать при родах и говорил в шутку, ведь я без одной недели хирург. microsoft word folk2010e.doc an international tale-type: “the city of babylon” 99 folklorica 2010, vol. xv an international tale-type: “the city of babylon” valeriia eremina institute of russian literature (the pushkin house) the russian academy of sciences st. petersburg, russia abstract the oral narrative about a journey to babylon to fetch a princely crown has motifs which are found in different cultures and different historical epochs. variants of this tale are found in the north of russia (arkhangel’sk and olonetsk provinces) samara province, in eastern siberia, the urals, and the white sea coast in karelia, as well as in ukraine, belarus, and several western countries. the plot is extremely stable: the tsar issues a call for a volunteer to travel to babylon and bring back the royal purple robe, a crown, and a scepter so that the tsar can begin his reign. a hero volunteers to get the above mentioned attributes of royal power. the city of babylon is guarded by a huge snake encircling it like a wall. snakes have eaten all the citizens of babylon and they also exist as the lower half of the tsar maiden’s body who governs babylon. but snakes can also be signs of good as nabuchadnezzar uses an asp-snake sword to route his enemies. it is not a snake that kills, but sin. the role of this tale in russian history from the 14th century is examined. this article attempts to use written sources to help analyze the unique plot of an oral narrative about a journey to babylon to fetch a princely crown. individual motifs found in this plot belong to different cultures and different historical epochs. the name given to this tale, which is known as tale type sus 485 = аах 485а [barag et al. 1979] varies and is often different from the title used in this article. the name is typically assigned either according to the purpose of trip as, for example, in “traveling for the royal crown” [barag 1974: 25-27] or according to the point of destination: “babylon-city” [onchukov # 182], “about the state of babylon” [potanin # 26], “babylonian kingdom [razumova et al., # 49]. in a number of instances the tale is named after the main character, the one who travels to the city of babylon to get the royal regalia. examples here are fedor kormakov (burmakov)” [onchukov, # 48, 181]; “kniaz’ borsukov [duke borsukov]” [onchukov, # 282]; folklorica 2010, vol. xv 100 “borma iaryzhka” [sadovnikov, # 3; onchukov, # 259], among others. the geographical distribution of the variants of this tale is quite broad and includes the north of russia (arkhangel’sk and olonetsk provinces). the tale is also attested in the samara province, in eastern siberia, the urals, and the white sea coast in karelia, as well as in ukraine, belarus, and several western countries. in all known versions of the tale about the city of babylon, the plot is extremely stable: the tsar issues a call for a volunteer to travel to babylon and bring back the royal purple robe, a crown, and a scepter so that the tsar can begin his reign. a hero, who is a typically a member of the lower classes, volunteers to get the above mentioned attributes of royal power. after successfully overcoming obstacles, the hero arrives in babylon and sees that the city is guarded by a huge snake encircling it like a wall. when the snake falls asleep, the hero sneaks into the city only to find that it is totally deserted: every living being has been eaten by snakes. a tsar-maiden (tsar’-devitsa) rules the city of babylon singlehandedly and completely. she asks the hero to play chess (in some versions the game is checkers or cards) with her. this episode serves to reveal the maiden’s true identity. something, usually a card, falls and, when the hero bends to pick it up, he notices that the lower half of the maiden’s body is snake-like [sadovnikov, # 3]. in other variants she has the body of a human and the tail of a snake [onchukov, # 127] or a human face but hundreds of intertwined snakes instead of legs [onchukov, # 181]. in other words, she is “ни женщина, ни полженщины” [neither a woman, nor a half-woman] [razumova et al., # 49].(1) the hero invariably overpowers the tsar-maiden and obtains the royal regalia. on his way back to his homeland, he helps the lion defeat the snake. in the end, the tsar acquires the crown, purple robe, and scepter that he had requested. “the city of babylon” tale type appears isolated and there is no evidence of it ever blending with other tale types. the striking stability of this tale is demonstrated by the fact that it retains its main plot elements even in the most recent recordings and even in the face of the addition of numerous magic tale motifs. in one example [onchukov, # 31], the basic structure is retained even though the kingdom of babylon becomes the kingdom “ten kingdoms away” and the tale acquires other magic tale elements such as having the hero wear out three pairs of iron boots, break three cast-iron walking sticks, and eat three communion breads before he arrives at his destination [barag 1974: 25-27]. in the ural version of the tale, a donor figure in the person of an old woman an international tale-type: “the city of babylon” 101 folklorica 2010, vol. xv presents the hero with a ball of yarn, a silk kerchief, and a candle which enable him to find his way and later save him from the snakes.(2) the stability of the tale does not facilitate the understanding of its meaning, however. the allusions to the city of babylon and the royal crown are not clear and neither is the name of tsar to whom the tale refers. the earliest recording of the tale [sadovnikov 1884] identifies the tsar character as ivan the terrible, but he is not a figure who had any connection to babylon. this article proposes an examination of a combination of historical and folkloric materials as a way to help elucidate the tale, its historical roots, and its meaning. the oral version of the tale about the city of babylon parallels old east slavic written sources recounting the same plot. oral and written texts mutually influenced and enriched each other. what is especially intriguing is that folk and literary texts often borrowed trifling details from each other. it is these details that can help us trace the history of the narrative and understand its meaning. buslaev was the first to publish the babylon narrative. his fragments of the “повесть о посольстве в вавилон” [story about an embassy to babylon] first appeared in 1854 [buslaev 1854]. that same year pypin published “сказка о вавилонском царстве” [tale about the babylonian kingdom] using a manuscript from the rumiantsev museum (# 374) [pypin 1854]. later, pypin published “притча о вавилонгороде” [legend about the city of babylon] [pypin 1858]. the early publications were followed by versions printed by kostomarov [1860], tikhonravov [1859 and 1861], veselovskii [1876: 125-40], and zhdanov [1891a], among others. some of the manuscripts used in these publications, such as “послание от улева-царя, во крещении нареченного василья, иже посла в вавилон испытати” [epistle from tsar leo, called basil in baptism, who sent his envoy to babylon to test him], date to the end of the sixteenth century. most of the published texts, however, draw on sources that date to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. old rusian written texts such as the “story about an embassy to babylon,” “legend about the city of babylon,” and others provide details not found in the folk oral versions. especially interesting is the information about the babylonian tsar navukhodonosor (nabuchadnezzar) and his son basil. the texts also speak about a great snake which guards the city of babylon. there is mention of two crowns, a description of how babylon became deserted, and information about how the rusian prince vladimir inherited the babylonian crown. folklorica 2010, vol. xv 102 examining the written sources more closely we can extract the following narrative: artaxerxes, the greatest king of babylon, dies. a newborn boy is found under a pine tree where he is guarded by an owl and a she-goat. the owl is named nosor; the goat is named akha, and the baby is called navkhod.(3) because the city of babylon is without a ruler, a horn is installed above the city gates and it is decreed that, should someone pass through the city gates and cause the horn to sound, said person would become the king of babylon. when the foundling was carried through the city gates the horn blared forth and thus navukhodonosor (a name based on a combination of the child’s name and those of his guardian owl and goat) was pronounced king. he built up the city of babylon and greatly enhanced its beauty, reigning there for a long time. he defeated numerous enemies and the means by which he conquered them was a magic asp-snake sword. before his death, he ordered that the sword to be walled up and kept hidden till the end of the world. his son, leo, called basil in baptism, inherited the kingdom. according to the “сказание о царе василие сыне навуходоносора, царя вавилонского” [story about tsar basil, the son of navukhodonosor, the king of babylon] upon hearing about death of the great king, legions of enemies encircled babylon [veselovskii 1876: 131-32]. realizing that he was impossibly outnumbered, basil broke his father’s taboo and ordered his servants to bring him the sword of navukhodonosor. the sword immediately turned against basil and beheaded both him and all his soldiers. as a result, babylon became a deserted city and what humans were left were eaten by serpents. “а во граде, что было знамя змеи, жен и детей поели и всякий скот; а что был великий змий около града камень, и тот жив стал, свистая и рыкая. от тех же мест и до ныне царствующий вавилон-град новый пуст стал” [and in that city, the emblem of which was a snake, snakes devoured women and children and all the cattle; and there was a huge stone (in the shape of a) snake near the city, and it became alive, and started whistling and roaring. since that time and till the present day the royal city of babylon has been empty] [veselovskii 1876: 132]. the explanation that tells how the city of babylon lost its monarch and became empty is not found in folk versions of the tale. rather, they begin with the episode in which a tsar sends his messenger to the already ruined babylon to retrieve royal regalia. accounts of messengers and ambassadors can be found in old rusian written texts as well. according to these texts, the envoys were sent to babylon by the greek ruler leo an international tale-type: “the city of babylon” 103 folklorica 2010, vol. xv and their mission was to get him those things that belonged to navukhodonosor the king. the chivalric “повесть о богатыре булате” [story about bulat the bogatyr] by levshin belongs to this group of narratives. here vladimir, the prince of the rusian land, inherits from his father lands that were devastated by “rebellious vassals”(4) and an unsuccessful war with the tsar-maiden.(5) upon reaching the age of majority, vladimir decides to be crowned by the crown of his ancestor, rous. the tsar-maiden has taken this crown and the object must be returned in order to restore the “lost purity of life,” its moral principle. only by getting the crown back will prince vladimir be able to revive his state. the narrative then recounts the various adventures of prince vladimir’s ambassador and these resemble the adventures in the old rusian story. in the end, prince vladimir does get the crown and becomes an ideal sovereign, one who upholds the crown’s great legacy. the chivalric tale concludes that, as a result, the “cornelian box” (serdolikova krabitsa), was passed from the babylonian king to the greek one, and from the latter to the rusian prince vladimir. the ancient “crowns” of navukhodonosor, meanwhile, became the crown, purple robe, and scepter of the russian monarchy. in written sources the idea of the autocracy (edinoderzhavie) of moscow was formed only in the sixteenth century. “эта идея есть не только идея московского государства, но в то же время идея русской земли. таким образом, идеология старой киевской руси и новой – московской сближаются, так как с этого времени самодержавная власть является уже национальной властью. внешним образом это выразилось в том, что московский государь принимает титул царя” [this is not simply the concept of the moscovite state, but also the idea of the russian nation. therefore, the ideology of old kievan rus’ merged with the idea of moscovite russia, and from that time on autocratic rule became national rule. this idea found its expression in the fact that the ruler of moscow adopted the title of tsar] [speranskii 1914: 409]. the concept of the russian state developed out of the belief that moscow was the “third rome”, namely, “москва имеет преемственную государственную власть не только от византии (“второго рима”), а через нее и от старого рима, и даже более того, от истинных царей – древних царей востока” [moscow has inherited the power to rule not just from byzantium, which used to be the “second rome,” and not just through old rome via byzantine, but more importantly from the veritable tsars/caesars themselves, that is from the ancient caesars of the east] [ibid.].(6) folklorica 2010, vol. xv 104 the idea of moscow as the third rome was advanced by new literary texts, especially the chronicle compilations (letopisnye svody) called polichrons (a. a. shakhmatov’s term) [shakhmatov 1899; tvorogov 1975; vodolazkin 2000]. examples include the “the vladimir polikhron” (polikhron vladimirskii) which begins its account in 1460 and stops in 1520 and the book of generations (stepennaia kniga) which took up the historical record where the kievan chronicle left off. at the same time older manuscripts such as “книга степенная царскаго родословия” [the book of generations of the imperial line] and the other texts were reinterpreted. созданная в 60-е гг. xvi в. степенная книга представляет собой первую попытку концептуального изложения русской истории. в основу композиционного построения положен образ лестницы с золотыми ступенями, ведущей россию и ее народ от земли на небо, от язычества к богу. каждая ступень этой лестницы – период правления очередного русского “самодержца”. таковыми в степенной книге представлены русские князья от владимира святого до ивана грозного, чье правление составляет последнюю, семнадцатую степень (ступень) золотой “лестницы” русской истории [created in the 1560s, the book of generations is the first attempt to conceptualize russian history. the image of a staircase with golden steps is at the core of its compositional structure. this staircase leads russia and her people from the earth to heaven, from paganism to the <christian> god. each step of the staircase is the period of rule of a single russian “autocrat”. the book of generations lists these, starting with st. vladimir and ending with ivan the terrible, whose reign constituted the last, seventeenth, step of the golden “staircase” of russian history ][sirenov 2007:3].(7) thus the russian chronicle serves as a continuation of history from the fall of constantinople and the transfer of power to moscow (popov 1867). these events are also recounted in the the old rusian “повесть о взятии константинополя” [tale of the conquest of constantinople]. as for the book of generations, it follows a genealogical scheme which views «русского правящего “царского” рода, который в глазах составителя является потомками святого князя владимира и первой христианки св. княгини ольги. отсюда становится ясным отношение составителя степенной книги к источникам, которыми он пользовался: летописные старые источники считались им важными постольку, поскольку подтверждали главенствующую роль предков ныне царствующих князей и царей; но этого одного источника не достаточно, поэтому туда включался ряд новых памятников: легенды, отдельные сказания из других памятников, раз они служили этой заглавной цели, говорили о святых или угодивших богу создателях московской державы». an international tale-type: “the city of babylon” 105 folklorica 2010, vol. xv [… the russian ruling royal dynasty… as heir to both st. vladimir and the first christian female saint, princess ol’ga. the attitude of the compiler of the genealogical book toward his sources is clear: he considered the old manuscripts important only to the degree that they confirm the supremacy of the ancestors of the princes and tsars in power. but a single source was not enough and so new ones were added: legends and stories extracted from other manuscripts, anything that advanced the compiler’s purpose and presented saints or showed the founders of the muscovite state as pleasing to god] [speranskii 1914: 412]. that idea that moscow was the third rome was also presented in narratives of a quasi-historical nature. among them was a story about the city of babylon which was based on international tale-type material and contained magic tale elements.(8) as speranskii suggests, the story originally concluded with the episode where the ambassadors bring the royal regalia to tsar leo. this is the ending found in folktales. in the fifteenth century, however, the story acquired a particularly russian twist: “царь греческий посылает в подарок владимиру мономаху, так как он “от крови царской” символы царской власти. это должно было показать наглядно русским людям того времени, что власть московских царей унаследована с востока [a greek ruler sends the symbols of royal power as a gift to vladimir monomakh, since vladimir is ‘of royal blood.’ this (episode) must have been intended as a message to the russian people that the russian tsars inherited their power from the east]” [speranskii 1914: 416]. the transfer of a crown that appears in the tale is likely symbolic of the transfer of state power and royal might. in other words, a power “символически выраженная в образе венца, перенесена с востока в византию, которая становится средоточием и источником царского достоинства” [that is symbolically represented by the crown, is transferred from the east to byzantine and becomes the focus and source of royal legitimacy] [veselovskii 1876: 163]. the legend thus offers a convenient way of expressing power transfer [ibid.: 164]. as far as the third element of this chain, namely the power transfer from byzantine to rus’, is concerned, it is of a secondary importance. the “повесть о князьях володимерских” [narrative of the princes of the vladimir dynasty] can help answer another important question, namely, to which prince vladimir does the account refer? is it vladimir vsevolodovich monomakh or is it vladimir sviatoslavovich, who also received a royal title from byzantium, conferred by a greek ruler and the appropriate patriarchs? it was vladimir sviatoslavovich folklorica 2010, vol. xv 106 who became the first person to be crowned tsar of rus’. in his history of russia tatishchev wrote: по сказанию о князьях владимирских, царь греческий после поражения его войск посылает владимиру крест, венец, бармы и иные многия дары. греческие епископы венчают владимира, как царя <…> великий князь владимир святославич, как крестился сам и землю русскую крестил, и царь греческий и патриарх венчали его на царство русское [according to the account of the princes of the vladimir dynasty, a greek ruler, after the defeat of his own army, sent a cross, crown, collars, and many other gifts to vladimir. the greek bishops crowned vladimir tsar… the great prince vladimir sviatoslavovich baptized the rusian land when he himself was baptized, and the greek ruler, along with the patriarch crowned him to reign over rus’] [tatishchev 464-65]. it is well-known that the chersonesos (korsun’) campaign ended with the marriage of vladimir and rogneda, a greek princess called anna in baptism. thus, the crowning of the ruler was combined with a wedding ritual.(9) “such mixture of two types of “crowning” will not seem unusual if we keep in mind that a similar analogy can be found in literary texts such as the speech of metropolitan makary addressed to ivan iv and anastasia romanovna after they received their wedding crowns” [zhdanov 1891b: 350]. what we have, then, is a peculiar “historical duplication where two princes both receive crowns and royal titles from byzantine”[ibid.: 328]. this duplication is analogous to the coalescence of wedding “crowning” with the crowning of a ruler. there are other similarities between the two vladimirs. vladimir monomakh went to war against caffa and returned victorious. caffa is also mentioned in the legends about vladimir sviatoslavovich, and it is pictured there as a greek city. this is undoubtedly a contamination of historical data and folk legends where various redactions of the “tale of the babylon city” are combined. as zhdanov states, “in literary texts that predate the sixteenth century there is no information that could be identified as a source of any of the variants of the story in question” [ibid.: 333]. this leads us to infer an oral source for the story about the coronation of prince vladimir and it is notable that oral transmission did not change the story’s narrative essence. nonetheless, the oral legend is ambiguous and it could be both a kin and a folk legend. kin, or dynastic, legends are those related to the sacred objects kept by the princely clan and named after the appropriate dynasty, such as the “monomakh legends (monomakhovy)” or those of an international tale-type: “the city of babylon” 107 folklorica 2010, vol. xv the “vladimir dynasty (vladimirskie)”. folk narratives, on the other hand, exist as epic songs, oral legends, and magic tales. it is easy to determine which of the two types of legend should be considered the source for the story about babylon and treasures gained by prince vladimir. in his article, “об утварях, приписываемых владимиру мономаху” [on the regalia ascribed to vladimir monomakh], prozorovskii, working from the data he “obtained from royal wills and testaments, reached the conclusion that a dynastic or kin legend could not have been the source.”[ibid.]. prozorovskii’s conclusions are so well-grounded that there is no need to discuss them further. thus we are left with the possibility of a folk origin for the stories. zhdanov showed that: за вычетом исторических добавок, внесенных в книжные пересказы народного предания о князе владимире, получается некоторый эпический остаток, общий всем версиям изучаемого сказания. содержание этого остатка представляется на первый взгляд чрезвычайно скудным: какой-то князь владимир вел войну с греками, одолел их, получил от побежденных богатые дары. такой рассказ остался бы загадочным обломком, лишенным исторического и литературного значения, если бы не открывалась возможность указать то эпическое целое, к которому принадлежит этот обломок, если бы не был известен целый круг поэтических сказаний, сосредоточивающихся около имени князя владимира, сказаний, сохранившихся и в памятниках письменности, и в произведениях народной словесности [apart from the historical additions inserted into the written retellings of the folk legend about prince vladimir, there are some epic elements common to all versions of the story in question. these epic elements appear sparse at first sight. they are as follows: a certain prince vladimir fought the greeks; he defeated them, and received generous gifts from those he vanquished. such a story would remain an enigmatic fragment without any historical or literary meaning if it were not readily identifiable as part of a major epic cycle, if there was not an entire set of poetic texts linked to the name of prince vladimir preserved in both written documents and oral folklore] [zhdanov 1891с: 340]. byliny (epic songs) originated in the events of the 10-11th centuries, or rather in the traces of these events which remained in folk imagination. and these events are those related to the deeds of vladimir sviatoslavich. narratives from the kievan chronicles show that the image of the “old vladimir” had become the subject of folk epics as early as the beginning of the 12th century. he is also mentioned later, in the chronographs and the book of generations. folklorica 2010, vol. xv 108 one question remains unanswered: why are the crown and purple robe kept in a church? a folktale [onchukov, # 48] has it that the prince’s ambassador, fedor burmakov goes to a church in deserted babylon to pray. the mother of god reveals to him the location of the royal regalia. according other folktales, there is a chapel or church in a deserted city and that is where the desired crown is located [sadovnikov #3; razumova # 49]. there are many historical instances where priests helped secular authorities through their most trying ordeals. this happened when the rome of the caesars turned into the rome of the medieval popes. it happened in jerusalem when the leaders of israel wanted to console their people, to reward them for all the humiliations they had endured in the material sphere by elevating them to the highest level of spiritual life… such tendencies and ideals added more and more of an ecclesiastical character to civic life; they advanced the interests of the church and placed priests into a position of dominance. the king was replaced by a high priest, who even inherited the purple robes and a golden crown of his predecessor [frazer 1989: 80]. the same tendency occurred in babylon it was destroyed and the church became the institution on which hopes for a renaissance could be placed. in the tale about fedor borma it was the church where tsar ivan vasil’evich sent his messenger to get a scepter and crown. borma meets truth, a personal name in the tale, and she tells him about the fate of the babylonian kingdom. she recounts that there is only one church left in the destroyed city. the royal purple robe, crown, and scepter are located there and they are guarded by st. george the dragon slayer and demetrius of thessalonica. the only survivor is a girl who prays to both st. george and st. demetrius. fedor borma pleads with the girl: “save me from a worthless death and help me to get the royal crown, scepter, and crosiers from the church” [sadovnikov #3: 251]. the girl gives him a magic carpet so that he can send the treasures to the orthodox tsar by sea. borma reaches constantinople but finds there a “terrible shedding of blood,” the orthodox faith is collapsing and the orthodox tsar is dead. meanwhile, ivan the terrible goes to war against kazan: и задумал царь под казань пойти, и казаньскóё царьство мимоходом взять, и казаньскóго царя со престола снять, снять с ёго корону цярьскую. [and the tsar decided to go to kazan’, an international tale-type: “the city of babylon” 109 folklorica 2010, vol. xv and to conquer the kazan’ kingdom on the way, and to drive the kazan’ tsar from the throne, [and] to take off his royal crown] [putilov et al., #220. see also songs ##232, 233]. казанское царство мимоходом взял, царя симеона под мир склонил, снял я с царя порфиру царскую, привёз порфиру в каменну москву, крестил я порфиру в каменной москве, эту порфиру на себя наложил, после этого стал грозный царь! [[i] conquered the kazan’ kingdom along the way, [i] forced tsar simeon to accept peace, [i] took the purple robe off the tsar [i] brought the purple robe to stone moscow, i blessed the purple robe in stone moscow, [i] put that purple robe on myself, after that [i] became the terrible tsar!] [putilov et al., #236; also #255*]. the event of the conquest of kazan’ that is glorified in folk songs was the first conquest of tatar territory and one of the most significant victories in the reign of ivan the terrible. it was the most important event in the history of moscovite rus’. “история взятия казани” [the story of the conquest of kazan’] or “история о казанском царстве” [a story about the kazan’ kingdom] is recorded in the chronicles [kuntsevich 1905] and it was certainly influenced by an earlier historical event: the conquering of constantinople by the turks. a mixing of these two events is evident in folk songs. folk songs state that “the reason ivan the terrible conquered kazan’ was to take over the kingdom, that is to secure his legitimate claim to the title of tsar” [speranskii 1917: 337]: порасхвастался прегрозный царь, наш прегрозный сударь царь иван васильевич: я повывел-то изменушку изó пскова, ай повынес я царенья из царяграда, а царя-то перфила я под меч склонил, а царицы-то елены голову срубил, царскую перфилу на себя одел, царский костыль да себи в руки взял. [our the most terrible tsar boasted, our the most terrible sir, tsar ivan vasil’evich [boasted]: i got rid of the conspiracy in pskov, and i took the sovereignty from constantinople, folklorica 2010, vol. xv 110 i bent tsar perfil’s head under the sword, and [i] beheaded tsarina elena, [i] put on the royal purple robe, [i] took the royal scepter in my hands] [ibid., #211; see also ##206, 208, 223]. the folk song “makes a causal connection between two events: ivan the terrible’s ascension to the throne and his conquering of kazan’” [speranskii 1917: 340]. it also places the origin of ivan’s power in byzantium. this latter fact connects the folk songs about ivan the terrible with the “сказание о вавилонском царстве” [legend about the kingdom of babylon]. the perspective on a historical event “преломленной сквозь призму идейных стремлений московского правительства, причем средством для выражения этого преломления взята народно-поэтическая повесть о вавилонском царстве с той же тенденцией. если здесь мы видим некоторое искажение исторической перспективы, зато довольно точно и верно передана самая мысль, самый смысл события”. […is thus refracted through the prism of the ideological strivings of the moscow government, and a poetic folk narrative about the babylonian kingdom became the means of accomplishing that refraction. although we see some distortion of the historical perspective, the very thought, the very essence of the event is conveyed accurately and precisely] [ibid.]. tales about the city of babylon also exhibit the attribution to the russian tsar ivan the terrible of characteristics which written texts ascribe to byzantine emperor leo. thus the beginning of the tale “occurs on byzantine soil, [while] the end, or the ending, is transferred to rus’ and becomes linked to a known historical event, namely the conquest of kazan’” [zhdanov 1891b: 51]. the impact of analogous “historicoliterary texts that combine borrowed legends about babylon with russian historical events” is also evident [ibid.: 50]. the same facts could engender different narratives. furthermore “each of these narratives was an alloy of folk-poetic legends with assorted details suggested by literary chronicles and historical texts” [zhdanov 1891b: 136]. the question about the origin of the russian narratives about babylon still remains unsolved. the possibility of south slavic influence has been suggested [veselovskii 1876: 141]. such influence is difficult to prove since a greek original of the texts does not exist and the proposition that the name nakhod, which in serbian means “a found person,” indicates south slavic origin is skimpy evidence.(10) all of this indicates that the supposition about a south slavic origin of an international tale-type: “the city of babylon” 111 folklorica 2010, vol. xv russian written texts about the kingdom of babylon is a supposition only. the idea about the uniqueness of the russian kingdom, however, could not have appeared out of nowhere. speranskii proposed that this idea “evolved under south slavic influence which provided not only the material for that formulation but also the very method of its adaptation to literary form” [speranskii 1914: 419]. while elaborating on this idea, speranskii underscored that “in the moscovite literature of the fifteenth century, we encounter new literary and linguistic phenomena that cannot be explained as resulting from either internal evolution or the external influence of western rationalism. these phenomena are typical of the times and they are new, and they betray – in both form and content – their south slavic origins” [ibid.]. both the second south slavic renaissance of the fourteenth century and the literature of the euthemian era (evfim’evskaia epokha) “evoked a response in muscovy only in the fifteenth century and had a significant influence on the political and ideological aspects of moscovite literature in the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries.”(11) new south slavic political influence likely impacted both written texts with a “genealogical” character, including the text about babylon, and the russian chronograph, the first edition of which came out in 1512 [pypin 1881; uspenskii 1879; radchenko 1898; sobolevskii 1903: 1-38]. the south slavs thus became an intermediary between byzantium and the russian state, transmitting to russia the elements of eleventh through thirteenth century byzantine culture, often in inaccurate and truncated form. the “historical” events of both folk narrative and old russian written text about the kingdom of babylon are decorated by fantastic, magic tale motifs. the narratives about the ambassadors travelling to babylon tell that the babylonian king wants a new and marvelous city built with seven walls, each seven versts (12) long. futhermore: и повелел навуходоносор – царь во всем вавилоне-граде знамя учинити на платье и на оружие, и на конях, и на уздах, и на седлах, и на хоромах, на всяком бревне, и на дверях, и на окошках, и на сосудах, на ставцах, и на блюдах, и на ложках, и на всяких сосудах, и на всяком скоту. знамя – все змеи. полюбися царю то знамя и повелел себе сделать меч-самосек аспид-змий и чтили змея как бога [and navuhodonosor-tsar ordered that an insignia be put on everything in babylon-city: on clothes and on armor, and on horses and bridles, and on saddles and houses, on every log, and on doors and windows, and on every vessel, on window shutters, and on plates and spoons, and on all vessels, and folklorica 2010, vol. xv 112 all cattle. the insignia was that of the snake. the tsar liked the insignia and ordered that an asp-snake sword, a sword that would wield its own self, be made for him” and [all] revered the snake as a god].(13) leaving aside the question of whether this motif appears first in written sources or in folktales, we can show how well attested it is in both sources. in folktales we see: “раньше у вавилонского царя было полюблено писать на чашках, на ложках, на всякой вещи змей” [the babylonian king used to like painting snakes on cups, on spoons, and on every thing] [onchukov #282. “duke borsukov”]; “царь вавилонский издал указ, чтобы на всем змеи были вырезаны и написаны: на чашках и на ложках, и на монетах. бог его наказал: все эти змеи ожили” [a babylonian king issued an order that snakes be carved and painted on everything: on cups and spoons, and coins. god punished him: all those snakes came to life] [sadovnikov #3. “borma iaryzhka”; potanin #26]. having the images of snakes on vessels and ceramics, as well as on other objects, is a characteristic trait of early agricultural societies. it is a cult fertility symbol that has been preserved in folk narrative. according to both oral tale and written story, a huge snake encircles babylon city: “хобот свой пригнул и с другой стороны, к тем же вратам, где лежит голова” [[he] bent his snout from the other side, to the gates where [his] head rests] [veselovskii 137].(14) another typical function of the snake is connected with fire and the hearth. the great snake is often called “the fiery one” in russian tales “пошел фёдор бурмаков с товарищами на гору, увидели вавилон-город. подходят ко городу, обтянулся вокруг городу огненный змей, хвос-голова в воротах” [fedor burmakov with [his] companions went to a mountain; they saw the city of babylon. they came to the city, and saw that a fiery snake encircled it, with his both tail and head inside the gates] [onchukov #48]. in the old rusian “повесть о видéнии во владимире” [story about a vision in the city of vladimir], which exists in one redaction, a “woman in bright garments... had a miraculous vision.” according to the vision, unless all the orthodox pray intensely to the “all beneficent creator,” “пожар на три дня, и от того, де, пожара невозможно будет укрыться нигде, и будет на них многое множество гадов ползучих” [a great fire lasting three days would befall the city, and there would be no place to hide from that fire, and there would be a plague of creeping reptiles upon them (the people)], while a huge snake “начнет поедать an international tale-type: “the city of babylon” 113 folklorica 2010, vol. xv людей, и будет срам великий” [will start devouring people, and there would be a great misfortune].(15) the huge fire-breathing snake guarding the city falls asleep for an hour, and that is when the tale hero sneaks into the city [onchukov, #127; potanin #26]. “змеи <…> спали между обедней и заутренней в свято-христово воскресенье” [the snakes… were sleeping from the time of the divine liturgy through the matins on sunday of christ’s holy resurrection] [sadovnikov, #3: 23]. in the middle ages, sunday as a day of rest was observed everywhere. “демоны-чудовища, населяющие вавилон, тоже засыпают в это время и пробуждаются лишь к заходу солнца в воскресенье” [the demons-monsters dwelling in babylon also fall asleep at this time and wake up only at sunset on sunday] [veselovskii 1876: 160]. writing about the “kingdom of babylon” in his review of m. gaster’s book [1887], veselovskii mentions an episode about the great snake from one of the slavic redactions of the lives of saints kiriak and ulita and adds an important element regarding the origin of this story. veselovskii proposes that, if an episode about the babylonian snake was part of the ancient lives of kiriak and ulita and then it belongs to the category of legendary-apocryphal, rather than historical-narrative, motifs. this would imply that, in the “story about the kingdom of babylon” it “appeared at a different, later stage of its development, one where apocryphal elements became tale-like, just as in the talmud where stories about solomon became romantic narratives about the abduction of his wife” [veselovskii 1888: 223, 225]. this implies two possible origins for the image of the babylonian snake, one apocryphal and one narrative. unlike gaster, veselovskii considers the “story about the kingdom of babylon” to be a romantic tale, one which came to the slavs from greece. it was the greeks who often transmitted foreign legends and they are the source of russian tales such as those about akir the most wise, varlaam and joasaph, among others. this does not, however, fully explain the problems of the story of the kingdom of babylon. according to the folktale version, the hero comes to a city that is already dead and where only snakes and snake-like humans live. the tales about babylon reflect different stages in the development of the snake image: here the snakes are no different in appearance than real reptiles and they inhabit the destroyed city. we also find a huge snake encircling the city, an image more like that of the cosmological world snake attested in ancient indian and egyptian mythologies. in different mythological systems the image of the snake acquires the physical folklorica 2010, vol. xv 114 characteristics of animals that are dramatically different from each other. thus we see a snake-bird, a creature that unites the opposites of earth and sky and this becomes a flying snake, a dragon, or a creature with the body of a snake, or snakes instead of legs.(16) the figure of a woman who transforms herself into a snake [potanin #26] or a snake that assumes the appearance of a woman [gorelov 2001: 322-326] is probably the most recent version of this image.(17) in the latter case the snake represents the unclean force [potanin #26; nikiforov #40]. similarly, a snake-girl is connected with the dark, nether world. the image of the snake thus acquires a double meaning: it is both a symbol of fertility and a symbol of evil. the snake who tempts humans appears in the old testament in the story about adam and eve’s fall from grace. the ambiguity of the snake image was immanent in archaic mythological systems with the more negative interpretation predominating in indojewish, sumerian, and, more recently, in ancient german and slavic mythologies [ivanov et al. 1974]. in russian folklore, the snake is invariably dark and destructive. it is pictured as “liutoednaia, sorokopegaia” [a forty-speckled man-eater](18) that kills and devours everything alive [nikiforov #65, potanin #26]. sometimes it is a snakedevil [gorelov 2001: 327-330]. a proverb warns us not to expect anything good from a snake [onchukov #182]. from the historical point of view the snake as a treacherous, destructive creature can be traced to the talmud [even-israel et al. 2001: 114, 177, 178] and expressions such as: it is not a snake that kills, but sin [aggada 1993: 223]. veselovskii analyzed the written “story about the kingdom of babylon” on a number of occasions, always trying to identify its historical roots. he saw two hereditary lines: the iranian-semitic and the biblical-christian. unfortunately the greek original on which slavic scribes likely based their texts has not survived. for this reason the story remains enigmatic. several facts indicate iranian-semitic influence. when babylon and assyria fell to the iranian medians, the babylonian and assyrian cult of the snake as the principle god and symbol of divine wisdom and knowledge merged with the iranian cult of the snake as symbol of dark and evil forces. however, the religious beliefs of the defeated babylonians and assyrians(19) “turned to be the more dominant and the conquerors accepted the folk image of the snake and deified it” [veselovskii 1876: 146]. the snakes of old rusian legend are similarly ambiguous: “they are dark forces and caused the lineage of navukhodonosor to perish and yet they are part of a superstitious cult an international tale-type: “the city of babylon” 115 folklorica 2010, vol. xv that attributes to them a special role in the building of babylon” [veselovskii 1876: 143]. written sources provide many reasons for seeing navukhodonosor and the jewish king nimrod as similar or even identical. both are emblematic of hubris, a “legendary (basnoslovnye) type of haughtiness.” both construct pretentious buildings. nimrod’s hubris is even greater. to him “is ascribed not only the building of the famous tower of babel which was supposed to get him closer to the sky, but also a plan to journey up to the sky in a basket tied to either two eagles or four hawks so that he could fight god” [veselovskii 1876: 144]. navukhodonosor and alexander the great had similar aspirations and their names, along with the names of babylonian rulers in general, “appear in medieval romantic literature as personifications of self-adoration” [ibid.: 149]. the other stratum of the story is the biblical-christian one. babylon held a special place in christian literature which was inspired by apocalyptic ideas and the prophecies of daniel. “great babylon is the mother of whores and earthly abominations”; that is the reason why babylon has fallen [apoc. 17.5]. the image of an empty babylon, inhabited only by reptiles, was common in medieval narrative literature. according to ancient legend, babylon “was destined to become the birthplace of the antichrist… the prophecies of isaiah and ezekiel were applied to this city and the traits of arrogance were ascribed to navukhodonosor …” [ibid]. these biblical-christian ideas explain some of the details in the manuscripts of tales about babylon, namely the sign of the snake on everything inside the city and the death that these snakes ultimately caused. snakes have the same meaning and function in russian oral folktales and in old rusian written literature. the oral tale and the written text about traveling to the city of babylon both end with the motif of a fight between a lion and snake.(20) lion and snake are equally strong, and lion wins only because he has the help of the tale hero. before deciding which creature he should assist, the hero recalls the proverb: “do not expect anything good from a snake” [onchukov #182]. lion and snake are both embodiments of power and strength. the noises that they make are terrifying. “the snake whistled – and the house shook” [nikiforov #65].(21) the roar of the lion makes the walls of hadrian’s capital city fall to the ground and it makes teeth fall out of people’s gums [aggada 1993: 242].(22) the reasons that lion and snake appear in the story of babylon can be traced to their roots in mythology and in chivalric romance. in the folklorica 2010, vol. xv 116 folklore and mythology of many peoples, the lion is the symbol of power, bravery, majesty, pride, and strength. the snake, on the other hand, especially the venomous snake, is symbolic of the dark nether world and of evil [razumova #49]. the lion is the guardian of sanctuaries (23) and its image was carved on early christian sarcophagi as a visual representation of future resurrection.(24) the lion as symbol of stability, strength, and power is the one reflected in the tale under discussion.(25) the battle between lion and snake, therefore, is a symbolical expression of the victory of good over evil traditionally found in tales. if we see the battle between the lion and the snake as a reduplication of the basic story line, then it makes sense and no longer seems extraneous to the plot. in the end, lion, a symbol of good, brings the hero back from darkness; he returns him from the other world to his native land. an almost identical battle between lion and dragon-snake can be found in “the legend of bruntsvik,” a narrative translated in the second half of the sixteenth century. it also appears in medieval germanic poems about a “knight with a lion” which were translated into russian. one example is the following story with a long title: “ис кронника сказание о брунцвике и о его силе, како дабы лва, и прыткости и силе великой сына штылфридова” [from the chronicle narrative about bruntsvik and his strength, how [he] met a lion, and about the speed and great strength of the son of shtilfreed] [biblioteka 2006]. in the second half of the fourteenth century, “in an epoch of growing national and state awareness, when charles university was founded in prague, the then capital of the holy rome empire, the fund of czech literary texts was enriched by a prose diptych. it united the story about shtilfreed, the only surviving copy of which was evidently composed in blank verse or rhymed prose, with a legend about bruntsvik” [panchenko 510-11]. the “legend of bruntsvik” became known across russia in the eighteenth century. the earliest translations of it date to the third quarter of the seventeenth century. currently thirty five variants are attested [panchenko 511]. all the main motifs of the story, including the fight between a lion and dragon, are preserved in the russian version of the “tale about bruntsvik the son of a king” [staraia pogudka #27]. according to the “legend of bruntsvik,” after the victory of lion over snake or dragon, the hero and the lion arrive in an unknown country where a beastly-looking king reigns: “и спереди и сзади были глаза, на руках и на ногах по осьмнадцати острых когтей” [he had eyes front and back, [and] eighteen sharp claws on [his] hands and feet] an international tale-type: “the city of babylon” 117 folklorica 2010, vol. xv [staraia pogudka 227]. the courtiers around him “были собою зверообразны и страшны: иной с рогами, другой о многих головах, у иного собачья голова” [were beastly-looking and frightening: one had horns, another had several heads, and yet another had a dog’s head] [ibid.]. the king asks bruntsvik to bring back his favorite daughter, africa, who was kidnapped by a dragon. bruntsvik and lion go to the city of the dragon and, at its gates, they see guards, “two quite terrible beasts” called menendryses. as soon as they spot the approaching bruntsvik, the guards rush to tear him apart and “от сильного же их движения потрясся весь город” [the city has shaken by their strong movements] [p. 228]. the second set of gates was guarded by the beasts called kgliata: “каждый зверь на себе имеет два рога долга на два локти, а остры яко бритва” [each beast has two horns, each two cubits long and as sharp as a razor] [p. 333]. near the third gates they “узреша еще страшных два зверя, и великих, тем имя липфораве. бѣ же на них шерсть яко на медведех, да роги яко дияволи имели, а зубы черны яко конские, а уста у них велики, иже человека может проглотити” [saw yet two more terrible and big beasts called lipforave. they had fur like bears and horns like devils, teeth as black as horses’ teeth, and mouths so big that they could swallow a human] [p. 334]. bruntsvik and lion found no people in the city, and only the maiden africa was dwelling there, and she “красна бо зело лицем, а руце имея только до пояса, имея два хвоста, сиирѣечь хоботы два вместо ног” [was very beautiful, but had arms reaching only to her waist, and two tails, and two trunks instead of legs] [ibid.] in the kingdom of the maiden africa “there came numerous great serpents and lizards and other poisonous monsters from all sides trying to kill bruntsvik” [p. 335]. bruntsvik fights the serpents, and when he is wounded, lion and africa heal him. after numerous adventures, bruntsvik returns to king ambris his snake-like daughter africa and then marries her. the story ends with a motif that is traditional for this plot, namely the return of the hero from strange lands and bruntsvik and lion return to their native czech kingdom. the czech “legend of bruntsvik” and its translations contain what sipovskii calls “a ‘florid mass’ of magical and chivalric elements, elements probably derived from the magic tale” [staraia pogudka 358]. in his comments to the “legend of bruntsvik,” panchenko stated that, prior to the appearance of this, “there were no russian literary texts which were built exclusively around the adventures of a man travelling in fantastic, imagined lands. while seventeenth century translated folklorica 2010, vol. xv 118 chivalric belles lettres presented relations between humans, and humans were the main characters, this story describes a grandiose and timeless conflict, the conflict between man the nature. the use of names such as europe and africa underscores this idea, as does the fact that the hero travels not only along the earth, but also into the underworld (the onomastics of the story unequivocally point to the unclean force). indeed bruntsvik’s ruminations, his uncertainty and fear, are not typical of chivalric texts” [panchenko 511]. of the many theories (26) of the origin of chivalric romance two stand out. according to the first, the byzantine romance was the intermediary between classic and western european fiction. the second theory proposes the spontaneous generation of the fantastic plot and assumes that it grew out of a dualistic worldview, one that opposes good and evil, light and darkness, and so on. in regards to the plot under discussion, perhaps the most interesting is the so-called “folktale” (27) version of the chivalric romance known in russian printed literature since the 1760s. members of literary circles did not take this “folktale” version seriously. chulkov, writing in пересмешник (the mocker, 1789)(28) called this genre “a bagatelle” (bezdelitsa). the genre of the literary folktale started being taken seriously by the beginning of the nineteenth century, but even then it was valued as a historical source rather than a work of art. a collection of literary “russian tales”(29) by levshin (17801783) display an attitude that differed from chulkov’s. levshin strove to “russify” his material. he introduced epic language, using byliny (epics) as his source and he even drew on bylina plots for his “tales.” in his introduction levshin stated that byliny were indeed the source of some of the items in his collection and that he considered the bogatyri of russian byliny to be on a par with the heroes of western chivalric romance [sipovskii 85]. thematically speaking, levshin’s “russian tales” are closer to the old rusian manuscript romances than they are to oral tales. thus, “the story about bulat the bogatyr” contains the same motifs as the “the story about travel to babylon.” these include prince vladimir’s attempts to secure a crown, the kingdom of a tsar-maiden, a fight with the monsters and snakes, and a fight between a lion and snake, among others. levshin was the first writer to create a “new romantic type” of russian literature: a russified chivalric romance. his attempt to “cross breed folk epic with artistic literature, i.e. to put together those spheres of russian creativity that were separated and even mutually hostile due to a an international tale-type: “the city of babylon” 119 folklorica 2010, vol. xv split in russian society” made his creative work both innovative and distinctive. “the ‘narodnik’ (populist) movement evolved from this gradual blending of literary spheres and, by the reign of katherine the great, engulfed all kinds of literature, including the novel, drama, and lyric poetry” [ibid.: 236]. the literary “story about bulat” by levshin united quasi-historical material with fantastic elements drawn from folktales about babylon. levshin’s work is like the finishing stroke on a painting, only it is a narrative rather than a pictorial work, one created by combining oral, written, and translated sources. research into the historical roots of the “wandering” tale plot about the city of babylon unites two topics that mark azadovskii considered immanent, namely russian folklore and russian literature. examining the complex interplay between oral and written traditions helps us better understand a narrative that may, at first, appear strange. it also yields information about the dynamics through which oral folklore and written literature fed off each other, exerting mutual influence. it teaches us that orality and literacy are not two separate and mutually exclusive spheres. rather, they are parallel phenomena which should be studied in tandem. notes 1 in other variants he discovers the maiden’s nature straight away for she is a maiden with a dog’s head [onchukov # 48]. elsewhere this is a maiden-unclean force [nikiforov, # 40]. in one case and one case only the antagonist is male. here sen’ka barabokin play cards with a snake that has “a man’s face” [onchukov # 182]. 2 obstacles along the hero’s way include a one-eyed old giant (crooked luka-bogatyr, saitan saitanovich) whose one healthy eye the hero “doctors” with either lead or tin. the motif where the hero escapes by dressed in the skin of a goat or by tying himself to the belly of a sheep or by getting his antagonist drunk has mythological roots. examining these is beyond the scope of this article. 3 compare to the legend about a wolf and woodpecker guarding romulus and remus. 4 here the reference is to the revolt of the finnic peoples. 5 in his notes to this story, v. a. levshin explains: “царь-девица не есть собственное имя. древние россы придавали оное вообще всем владеющим монархиням [tsar-maiden is not a personal name. the ancient rus’ians used this title for all the female monarchs]” [see: sipovskii 1910]. folklorica 2010, vol. xv 120 6 see also [malinin 1901]. 7 see also [vasenko 1904]. 8 its original is unknown. 9 (translator’s note) in russian tradition, a wedding ritual involves holding crowns over the head of the bride and groom. they are considered analogous to royalty in the sense that they are taboo to everyone except each other. because crowns were regularly used in wedding rites, “crowning” has come to be used as a term signifying marriage. this is the meaning used here. 10 on the balkan peninsular, beginning in the xi-xiv centuries, the struggle with byzantium was colored by serbian (serbian nemaniči – xi-xii centuries) and bulgarian concepts. 11 i omit here the reasons for such a late echo of this bulgarian movement on russia. 12 a versta, or russian ‘mile’ was about 3,500 ft – translator’s note. 13 see the text (d) of an old rusian story in veselovskii 1876, p. 127. 14 the same can be found in: onchukov #48, potanin #26. the cosmic function of the world snake as a snake encircling the earth is typical for ancient indian, scandinavian, and egyptian mythology. 15 the story is preserved in a single version (риб. эрмитажное собр. № 358. fol. 10-10 verso). it was first published by s. f. platonov (риб. vol. 13. col. 240-242). 16 “в городе остались одна царевна: туловище человечьё, а хвост змеиный; она царствовала на престоле, где была корона” [only a daughter of a tsar was left in the city. she had a human body and a snake’s tail; she reigned on a throne where the crown was] [onchukov #127]. 17 the epic, or bylina “лука, змея и настасья [luka, the snake, and nastas’ia]” contains a mixture of the epic and magic tale motifs. 18 the epic “лука, змея и настасья” is a recent creation as it clearly influenced by magic tales. 19 “с глубокой древности восточные семиты – аккадцы, занимавшие северную часть нижнего двуречья, были соседями шумерцев и находились под сильным шумерским влиянием. во второй пол. 3-его тыс. до н. э. аккидцы утверждаются и на юге двуречья <…> позднее, с возвышением вавилона, эта территория стала называться вавилонией. история двуречья во 2-ом тыс. до н. э. – это история семитских народов” [since the earliest times the an international tale-type: “the city of babylon” 121 folklorica 2010, vol. xv eastern semites, i.e. akkadians inhabiting the northern part of lower mesopotamia, lived next to sumerians and were under strong sumerian influence. in the second half of the third millennium b.c. the akkadians spread to the south of mesopotamia… later, after babylon became prominent, that land was called babylonia. the history of mesopotamia in the second millennium b.c. is the history of the semitic peoples] [tokarev 1980, i: 647]. see also averintsev, sergei. 1971. греческая литература и ближневосточная словесность [greek literature and the lore of the near east]. москва: главная редакция восточной литературы издательства “наука”; averintsev, sergeiю 1989. древние цивилизации [ancient civilizations]. москва: главная редакция восточной литературы издательства “наука”. 20 see also onchukov #48, 182; razumova #49; sadovnikov #3; barag 1974 27; potanin #26. 21 compare to the whistling of nightingale the robber (soloveirazboinik) from a bylina (epic): а засвистел соловьюшко ровно полсвиста – еще старые строеньички посыпались, все богатыри с крыльца свалилисе. [gorelov 2003 341]. 22 compare this to the biblical image of a tsar’s rage pictured as a lion’s roar. 23 compare this to the description of solomon’s throne. on its first step there is a lion sitting. “впоследствии престол этот был взят, вместе с другой добычей, фараоном нехо и отвезен в египет. в ту минуту, когда фараон ступил на первую ступень, поднял лев лапу и так сильно ударил его в бедро, что он на всю жизнь остался хромоногим. <…> из египта престол был увезен нечестивым навуходоносором в вавилон, и при первой попытке взойти на престол лев ударом лапы поверг навуходоносора на землю. после разрушения вавилона престол был взят дарием и увезен в мидию, но садиться на него дарий и не пытался” [later on, pharaoh necho took that throne along with other trophies to egypt. the moment pharaoh stepped on the first step, a lion lifted its paw and hit the pharaoh’s thigh so hard that he remained lame to the end of his days… from egypt, that throne was transferred to babylon by the dishonorable navukhodonosor; at the first attempt to ascend the throne, the lion threw navukhodonosor to the ground by a slap of his paw. after babylon was destroyed, darius took the throne to media, but he never even tried to ascend the throne] [aggada 119]. folklorica 2010, vol. xv 122 24 compare this to the stone images of a lion in the churches of the cities of vladimir and suzdal’ and those of the romanesque churches. 25 in world mythology, the image of the lion is not equivocal: winged lions depicted on babylonian headstones represented demonic forces, evil, and death. the sumerian and babylonian lions-demons ugamu and uridimmu belong to this category. “вплоть до xvii века распространены такие изображения льва в качестве атрибута гордыни, гнева… и неведомой земли вообще. в искусстве нового и новейшего времени лев иногда трактуется как воплощение стихийного буйства природы (“львиные охоты” п. рубенса), но чаще – в традиционном “апотропеическом” значении (“стерегущие львы” в монументально-декоративной пластике” [till the 18th century the image of the lion served as a symbol of vanity, anger... and unknown terrains as a whole. in the arts of the modern and most recent times, a lion is sometimes deciphered as an embodiment of the chaotic raging of the nature like in peter paul rubens’ “lion hunt” but more often it is used in its traditional, ‘apotropeic’ meaning like the “guarding lions” in monumental-decorative carving] [sokolov 1982]. 26 theories of the origin of the chivalric romance include: 1) it was created using magic tale elements taken from northern skalds; 2) it arose under saracens influence, which makes it especially prevalent in spain; 3) it grew out of the cult around oriental fantastic poetry; 4) it was inherited from antiquity heritage, and so on. proof of each of these theories can be found somewhere in the history of world literature. however, the actual life history of the chivalric romance varied from place to place. 27 “примерно до середины xix века термин “сказка” употреблялся во многих значениях. сказками назывались различного рода документы (например, письменные списки населения или “ревизские сказки”, показания на следствии или на суде. статьи о происшествиях и т. п.), некоторые чисто литературные произведения – прозаические и стихотворные, отдельные произведения фольклора (например, былины) и, наконец, то, что действительно является сказкой в современном значении этого слова” [until approximately the middle of the 19th century, the term “tale” was used in many meanings. various documents used to be called tales, including written tallies of the population, or “census lists.” the term was used for testimonies for court, for articles about accidents and so on. it also applied to some purely literary creations, both in prose and verse. it referred to certain folklore items like byliny; and finally it an international tale-type: “the city of babylon” 123 folklorica 2010, vol. xv was used for what is called the folktale in contemporary terminology] [novikov 1971, 3]. 28 see also: славянские древности или приключения славянских князей. соч. м. попова [slavic antiquities, or the adventures of the slavic princes. works of m. popov], ч. i-iii. спб: publisher not indciated. 1770-1771; third edition was called стариние диковинки [ancient wonders]. ст. петербург, 1794 г. 29 prior to the research by shklovskii (1933), the authorship of the “russian tales” was mistakenly ascribed to chulkov. the similarity between levshin’s collection and epic narrative, in terms of both style and subject matter stimulated the publication of russian folktales. bibliography “a story about the vision in the vladimir city in 1611” [повесть о видéнии во владимире в 1611 году] в библиотека литературы древней руси. 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(ed.). 1906. потанина григорий (ред.) записки красноярского подотдела восточно-сибирского отдела имп. рус. географического общества по этнографии. т. i. вып. 2. томск: издательство не указано. putilov, b. n. and b. m. dobrovol’skii, 1960. путилов, б. н., и б. м. добровольский, исторические песни xiii-xvi веков [historical songs of the xiii-xvi centuries]. изд. подгот. б.н.путилов, б.м.добровольский. москва-ленинград: издательство академии наук. pypin a.n. 1854. пыпин, а. н. “сказка о вавилонском царстке по рукописи румянцевского музея (# 374)” [tale about babylonian kingdom according to the manuscript from the rumiantsev museum, #374], известия императорской академии наук по отделению русского языка и словесности, iii: 314-318. pypin, a. n. 1858. пыпин, а. н. “очерки литературной истории старинных повестей и сказок русских” [sketches on literary history of old russian narratives and tales], ученые записки второго отделения академии наук, кн iv. folklorica 2010, vol. xv 126 pypin, a. n. 1881. пыпин а.н. история славянских литератур [history of the slavic literatures]. с.-петербург: издательство не указано. radchenko, k. f. 1898. радченко к.ф. религиозное и литературное движение в болгарии в эпоху перед турецким завоеванием [religious and literary movements in bulgaria prior to the turkish conquest]. киев: издательство не указано. razumova, a. p. and t. i. sen’kina, (compilers). 1974. разумова, а. п. и т. и. сенькина (сост.) русские народные сказки карельского поморья [russian folk tales of the white sea coast in karelia]. петразоводск: издательство не указано. sadovnikov, d. n. 1884. садовников д.н. “сказки и предания самарского края. собраны и записаны д.н. садовниковым” [tales and legends of the samara region. collected and written down by d. n. sadovnikov], записки русского географического общества по отделению этнографии, xii. shakhmatov, a. a. 1899. шахматов, а. а. к вопросу о происхождении хронографа [to the question of the chronograph’s origin]. с.-петербург: издательство не указано. shklovskii, v. b. 1933. шкловский, в. б. чулков и левшин. ленинград: издательство академии наук ссср, 87-89. sipovskii, v. v. 1910. сиповский в. в. очерки из истории русского романа [sketches from the history of russian narrative]. т. i, вып. 2 (xviii в.). с.-петербург: издательство не указано. sirenov, aleksei. 2007. cиренов, алексей. степенная книга: история текста [genealogical book: the text history]. москва: наука. sobolevskii, a. i. 1903. соболевский а. и. переводная литература московской руси [translated literature of the muscovite rus’]. с.петербург: издательство не указано. sokolov, m. n. 1982. соколов м. н. “лев” [lion] in мифы народов мира: энциклопедия [myths of the world’s peoples: encyclopedia]. москва: советская энциклопедия, ii: 43. speranskii, m. n. 1914. сперанский, м. н. история древней русской литературы [history of old russian literature]. москва: издательство не указано. speranskii, m. n. 1917. сперанский, м. н. русская устная словесность [russian oral lore]. москва: издательство не указано. staraia pogudka. 2003. старая погудка на новый лад. русские сказки в изданиях конца xviii в. с.-петербург: тропа троянова. an international tale-type: “the city of babylon” 127 folklorica 2010, vol. xv tatishchev, vasilii. 1768-1848. татищев, василий. история российская [russian history]. кн. ii, 1769. москва: издательство не указано. tikhonravov, n. s. 1859. тихонравов, н. с. “сказание о вавилоне. текст из раскольничьей рукописи нового письма”, [a story about babylon. the text from a schismatic manuscript of a new writing], летописи русской литературы и древности, 1(iii): 161-65. tikhonravov, n. s. 1861. тихонравов, н. с. “сказание о вавилоне. текст из раскольничьей рукописи нового письма”, [a story about babylon. the text from a schismatic manuscript of a new writing], летописи русской литературы и древности, iii(iii): 20-33. tokarev, s. a. 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(ред.) мифы народов мира: энциклопедия [myths of the world’s peoples: encyclopedia], москва: советская энциклопедия. tvorogov, o. v. 1975. творогов, о. в. древнерусские хронографы [old russian chronographs]. ленинград: наука. uspenskii, f. i. 1879. успенский ф. и. образование второго болгарского царства [creation of the second bulgarian kingdom]. одесса: издательство не указано. vasenko, petr. 1904. васенко, петр. книга степенная [the book of genealogies]. с.-петербург: издательство не указано. veselovskii, a. n. 1876. веселовский, а. н. “отрывки византийского эпоса в русском” [fragments of the byzantium epics in the russian one], славянский сборник, ii(1): 125-40. veselovskij, a. n. 1888. веселовский а. н. “рецензия на книгу м. гастера,” журнал министерства народного просвещения, cclvi (march): 223-25. vodolazkin, e. g. 2000. водолазкин, е. г. всемирная история в литературе древней руси (на материале хронографического и палейного повествования хі-хv веков) [world history in the literature of old rus’ (on the materials from the narratives of the chronograph and paleya of the xi-xv centuries)]. мюнхен: sagner. zhdanov, i. 1891a. жданов, и. “сказание о царе аксерксе вавилонграда, како от мору соблюден бысть. из рукописного сборника xvii в.” [story about ataxerxes, the tsar of the babylon city; how [he] was saved from death. from the manuscript collection of the folklorica 2010, vol. xv 128 xvii century,] журнал министерства народного просвещения, 9 (september): 362-68. zhdanov, i. 1891b. жданов, и. “повести о вавилоне и сказание о князьях владимирских” [narratives about the princes of the vladimir dynasty], журнал министерства народного просвещения, 9-10 (сентябрь): 350. zhdanov, i. 1891c. жданов, и. “повести о вавилоне” [stories about babylon], журнал министерства народного просвещения, 10(октябрь): translated by svitlana kukharenko << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left 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setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice folklorica_7f reports 1 zhivaia starina m.v. akhmetova state center for russian folklore moscow, russia the russian journal zhivaia starina [living antiquity] continues the activity of the journal of the same name that had been published by the russian geographical society in 1890—1917. the renewal of its publication was undertaken in 1994 by the state center of the republic for russian folklore. the main concerns of zhivaia starina are the folklore and folk culture of russians and other peoples in the territory of russia and also of other slavic and neighboring peoples. the journal publishes articles on the theory and language of folklore, on the history of folklore studies, on the genres of folklore, on rites and the folk calendar, on folk beliefs, and on folk art and crafts. on the pages of zhivaia starina one can find field research materials and archival materials from fieldwork in various regions of the slavic world as, reviews of books on russian and slavic folklore, and chronicles of conferences on folklore and folk culture. this report provides an overview of the main topics covered and issues addressed in the papers published in zhivaia starina in 2013. volume 1 (2013) opens with a section on the aspects of folk performance traditions: repertoire, the process of performance, performance mastery, and the reception of folklore in art. n.a. krinichnaia considers asides and commentaries of the bylina [epic] singers from zaonezhie (republic of karelia). three other articles deal with the song-performance traditions of the cossacks: n.iu. danchenkova analyzes the activities of the russian choirmaster s.a. zharov and his choir of don cossacks; t.s. rudichenko offers an overview of the history of the cossack choirs from the 18th century to the present day; t.b. dianova published the songs she recorded in a cossack village on the don. the next section comprises articles and publications related to mythological (mainly demonological) characters. a.v. pigin published a handwritten religious poem from the early 20th century about the “repenting” demon zerefer. v.v. vinogradov considers the folkloric motif of putting a pot on one’s head in order to protect oneself from evil forces (the pot acts as a symbolic “double” of the head and crumbles under the blow of the demonological character, while its bearer suffers no harm). s.v. kuchepatova offers an edition of the mythological stories recorded from russian germans of kaliningrad region. other topics in this section include the beliefs about “walking dead” in polessie (e.e. levkevskaia), notions about demonological characters in ivanovo (o.v. gordenko) and yaroslavl regions (v.v. zaporozhec), and the conception of the so-called dobrohozhie, belarusian mythological characters that bestow magical knowledge on people who help them (g.i. lopatin). the section “from the history of scholarship” comprises articles by t.a. titova and m.v. viatchina summarizing ethnographic photographs of everyday life and rituals of the chuvash people taken at the beginning of the 20th century by gurii komissarov. in the “exhibitions” section, s.f. mahrachev introduces readers to the ethnographic museum at the university of tambov. volume 2 (2013) is devoted to folk costume in different traditions: russian (s.v. prosina on the wedding dress in the vladimir province/region in the first half of the 20th century), bulgarian (s.v. dmitrieva and o.v. karpova on the wedding dress of the 19th century and a.p. iakimova on the woman’s prestilka [apron]), and central asian (t.g. emelianenko on the dress of bukharan jews). volume 3 (2013) is divided into two major sections. the first one is devoted to the problems of field research. iu.a. novikov published his recollections of his first expeditions to zaonezhie in the 1950s. l.i. ivanova presents an overview of the field studies of folklore and traditions of liudik karels. zh. i. surkova considers variations of fairy-tale texts recorded from one informant at different times. the second section, “folklore and ethnographic mosaic,” deals with folk legends. i.a. bessonov examines how fictional country belaia arapiia [the white land of the dark people], notions of which date back to the military action of ottoman forces against insurgent egypt in 1833, in which russia took part. he reinterprets the legend as an example of an eschatological enemy in the popular imagination of the mid-20th century, while being represented as a happy utopia and later evolving into an expression for pipe dream in russian literature and journalism. a.r. zudin examines motifs of etiological legends of nekrasov cossacks. n.r. oinotkinova addresses the reception of biblical narratives in the folklore of telengits, an altaic people christianized in the last third of the 19th century. volume 4 (2013) opens with the section “folklore and ethnography in manuscript sources,” which comprises research papers and publication of new material pertaining to the reflection of traditional culture in manuscripts of different genres and styles. two articles deal with the manuscripts from the archive of g.f. beloshitskaia (the village of kandakaksha, murmansk region), who maintains her family archive and collects her relatives’ recollections for a family chronicle. i.a. razumova presents a comprehensive description of the chronicle by beloshitskaia, while o.v. zmeeva published materials on children’s games and pastimes from beloshitskaia’s archive. o.v. buivolova and l.r. kim analyze a manuscript collection of folkloric texts belonging to a woman living in a village on the don and compare the contents of written texts with oral interviews recorded from the author of the manuscript. v.p. ershov presents the interesting personal records of mr. ananin, a cooper, containing data on rural life and traditions of a karelian village in the 1930s. m.s. popova prepared an edition of poetic texts (including folklorized literary works) from young girls’ sketch-books of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. the next section is devoted to the symbolism and functions of objects. o.a. suleimanova considers different types of objects that perform memorial functions in family culture. o.v. gordienko describes a shepherd’s drum that he discovered on an expedition to zavolzhie (nizhny novgorod region). i.iu. vasiliev describes beliefs and magical practices connected with an exhibit of a village museum in kuban, a cuman stone baba [woman]. a.g. kuleshov considers the variation of the motif of the rider-hero in different styles of russian toy pottery. zhivaia starina also acquaints readers with regional varieties of slavic folklore. in 2013, the magazine published materials on the folklore and traditions of the tambov (volume 1), kuban (volume 2), and the kaluga regions (volume 3). the section devoted to the folklore of tambov region deals with aspects of the folk calendar (t.v. makhrachova on rituals associated with the holiday of saints kuzma and demian); popular beliefs about the afterlife (a joint article by d.s. ippolitova and t.v. makhrachova); traditional medicine (d.n. loskutova on images of fever in the folklore of tambov peasants), and folk meteorology (a.a. chemerchova on rites to stop a hailstorm). the section on the folk culture of kuban, prepared by the staff of the kuban cossack choir comprises materials recorded from lipovan old believers (a paper by a.a. zudin on healing reports 3 charms) and articles on the folklore and traditions of the cossacks. o.v. matveev devoted his article to folk toponymy of the kuban cossacks; i.iu. vasilyev presented materials on oral history (narratives of elder kuban cossack villagers about the civil war); s.a. zhiganova focuses on the representation of the ritual space of the kuban wedding in wedding songs; o.iu. skvortsova described folk weaving techniques; v.v. voronin presented materials for the ethnocultural dictionary of kuban relating to such a significant object of the cossack culture as a cap. papers on the folklore of kaluga region deal mainly with calendar festivals: ice-hill sledding and horseback riding on shrovetide (t.v. soboleva); rituals associated with the day of st. peter and paul (a.a. ivanova); yuletide excess, divination and mumming (b.a. gasanov). a joint paper by a.a. ivanova and ia.iu. solovieva analyses recollections of peasants about the life of the folk tradition during the world war ii, when part of the kaluga region was occupied by the nazis. a.f. balashova documented stories about mermaids (rusalki) collected in the region. several sections were devoted to the traditional culture of ethnic diasporas in the postsoviet space. employees of the st. petersburg museum of anthropology and ethnology (kunstkammer) presented materials collected from albanian immigrants residing in budzhak and northern azov (volume 3). the papers were devoted to albanian family rites, including the wedding ceremony and problems of interethnic marriages (a.a. novik), birth rites (a.s. dugushina), and funeral and memorial rites (d.s. ermolin). volume 4 also contains materials of an expedition of the center for typological and semiotic folklore studies (moscow) to ukrainians who settled in the saratov region in the 18th century. saratov ukrainian tradition is represented by yuletide and easter rites (e.e. levkevskaia), folk legends based on the old and new testament narratives (d.i. antonov), demonological beliefs (a.i. sheveleva), and funeral rites (n.v. koptev). in 2013 zhivaia starina also provided coverage of the third all-russian congress of folklorists organized by the state center of the republic for russian folklore in february 2014. volume 2 featured the results of a discussion on the current state of affairs in folkloristics, in which authors of the journal working in academic centers in moscow and saint petersburg (a.s. kargin, s.iu. nekliudov, t.g. ivanova, m.a. lobanov, and a.k. baiburin) took part. researchers discussed the field of contemporary folklore studies as well as less prominent (if not entirely forgotten) folkloristic subdisciplines and the problems of teaching folklore. volume 4 devoted an entire section to the upcoming congress. the papers it comprised were mostly devoted to the problem of minor genres. l.n. vinogradova posed a number of important questions about the criteria for inclusion of various clichés into the category of minor folk genres and analyzed various types of ritual-magical, interpretative, and etiquette formulas in detail. o.e. frolova considered the depiction of the category of time in proverbs, while a.a. gavrylenko described the use of proverbs in the speech of an informant. g.i. lopatin, while focusing on a single belarusian informant, presented folk semantic interpretations of various clichés. g.i. romanii analyzed russian formulaic exclamations accompanying children’s games and their regional variations in the post-soviet space. zhivaia starina also covered the xv international congress of slavic studies (minsk, august 2013). the section entitled “slavic mosaic” (voluyme 2) opened with a review of papers presented at past congresses (s.m. tolstaia and o.v. belova), and included articles on various aspects of folk culture of the slavic world. v.v. napolskikh turned to the local festival bodun (viatka region) and speculated about the connection of its name with the ancient russian word b(“)dyn” found in the life of saint olga; in his opinion, the word originally denoted a prechristian funeral and memorial rite of which the viatka festival is a relic. a.a. plotnikova described legendary and demonological belief narratives recorded from bosnian muslims (the village of umoliani) reflecting an ancient mythological worldview. n.v. serbina analyzed the musical features of later ukrainian lyrical songs and speculated about their origins. the regular “expeditions” section in 2013 acquainted readers with field materials recorded from russians (of the perm region, s.iu. korolieva, e.m. chetina and i.iu. rogotneva on folk funeral prayers; and of the vladimir region, eschatological narratives prepared by a.d. sokolova and i.a. nikolaiev in volume 1; see also texts of various genres from the rostov region by o.v. belova in volume 2) and from ethnic minorities of russian federation, including the komi (materials on folk calendar presented by l.s. lobanova and a.n. rassykhaeva) and altaic people (k.e. rozova on epic songs, folk festivals, and religious beliefs). d.s. nikolaev, translator reports 5 folklorica_7f articles the house of stolypin migrants to eastern siberia (from a pit-house to an estate)(1) yelena minyonok russian academy of sciences moscow, russia abstract this article studies the development of house and homestead design in siberia after the stolypin reforms. it traces the history of the homesteading process, the architectural elements and designs and how they have changed over the years. it is based on fieldwork in the irkutsk oblast’ conducted by the author between 2003 and 2010 in ukrainian, belarusian, chuvash and russian villages. house design from various periods since the settlements began in the early 20th century reflects the socio-cultural patterns of the day. oral narratives about the past and the experience of settlement serve as a window into an understanding of cultural attitudes. it has been posited that the united states of america was created by people of a certain psychological bent: enterprising, infinitely loyal to the idea of personal freedom and the inviolability of personal property, firm in character, hard-working, desirous and capable of “living a new way of life,” who were not willing to repeat the mistakes of the old world in their socioeconomic structure. this idea has, in a certain sense, become a truism. however, in the history of russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, a very similar process to the settling of the united states took place: the mass resettlement of aspiring, skilled individuals who did not want to reconcile themselves to a hopeless reality, and who believed in the capability to change one's own life and the life of one's family through personal, unimpeded labor. this event is referred to as the stolypin agrarian reforms (1906-1914), which, in spite of their inconsistency and not achieving his original vision, had a colossal positive impact not only on russia's economy, but also on the national consciousness of the citizens of the russian empire. figuratively speaking, the settlement of siberia, from 1906 to 1914, could be called the russian “american” experience. as mikhail davydov argues, considering the sense of personal property to be one of the most important natural qualities of man, stolypin wanted a powerful stratum of peasant-landowners to emerge in russia. such a group would, in an agrarian country, become, on the one hand, the main source for the formation of the middle class and, on the other, a sturdy foundation for civil society and rule of law. (davydov, 2010) the resettlement of the peasants in accordance with the stolypin reforms was the largest mass migration in russia of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. nonetheless, only a relatively brief amount of time separates us from this epochal process. we can still see with our own eyes the material results of these reforms today, namely villages and towns built deep in the taiga and steppe by early settlers various regions of the russian empire. we are able to interview their children and grandchildren, who still remember their grandfathers’ from and grandmothers’ stories about how they came “from russia” to “this siberia.” in many respects, oral histories imbue dry statistics with flesh and blood and give life to the historical research on the stolypin reforms. thus, behind data on the growth of the number of agricultural communities, the acquisition of farming equipment, and russia's export of grain stands the concrete fate of the people who decided to risk their current status for a worthwhile future. ultimately, within the foundation of every action lies emotion. we must ask what circumstances, then, engendered emotion of such strength that people left lands that had been obtained over centuries, severed ties with relatives, sold their last ‘crumbs,’ took out loans, and left with infant children in their arms for the far-off and unknown region of siberia. the collection and analysis of oral history on the lives of the first stolypin settlers and, even more so, the presence of descendants who have preserved family stories about the living conditions and photographs of everyday life during the first years on siberian soil, have become an enormous resource for folkloristics and ethnography. this article summarizes the materials collected on six folklore expeditions carried out between 2003 and 2010. during this time, twenty villages in the south of irkutsk oblast’ were comprehensively studied. they include five ukrainian, three belarusian, two chuvash, and ten russian villages. all of the settlements are situated in the region to the west of lake baikal and were founded between 1907 and 1909. (2) at the time of the study, the population of each of the so-called stolypin villages and towns ranged from 600 to 2000 persons. delimitation of one's space, as accomplished by four walls and an upper covering, is one of the fundamental conditions for human sustenance (on the same level as food, water, and warmth). without a home, human life is next to impossible. a dwelling is not only an indicator of development within the society as a whole but also represents a psychological portrait of the individual living therein. we wonder, then, what the habitations of those europeans that left their homes for the sake of a new life in such a distant and unfamiliar place as siberia might have been like. despite the obvious necessity for shelter, construction of homes was not the highest priority for the settlers. every newly arrived family was faced with the challenge of developing arable farmland, sowing the soil, gathering the harvest, and collecting seeds for the coming year. a newly plowed piece of land, reclaimed from the impassable taiga by uprooting larch trees three arm-spans in circumference, became the key to the prosperity of the settlers, and the embodiment of their dreams of a new, free, abundant life. all of the family's resources were thrown into cultivating the land, while construction of a dwelling was a lesser priority. below is a description of one family's arrival in the village of batama (ziminskii district) on may 22nd, 1908, as recorded in the memoirs of stepan vasilievich bondarenko (http://www.tetradimemory.narod.ru/tetrad1_batama.htm): our carts were situated under enormous larch trees near a shelter made of birch branches left behind by the surveyors who had measured the land. that morning, when we were still on the road, the sun shone softly. by evening, however, after we had arrived at the shelter, as we looked through the tree branches at the patches of blue sky, it became overcast and began to rain heavily. where were we to go? piotr and i, along with the bobokalo children, two boys and four daughters, tried to take cover in the shelter, but it leaked like a sieve! we ended up having to climb out of the shelter and under the carts loaded with all sorts of household goods. father and his friend, having released the hobbled and hungry horses to graze, quickly sawed down a big larch and began to strip off the bark and with this bark covered the shelter and carts. by nightfall, we had somehow managed to shield ourselves from the rain. we all had to sleep in the shelter or beneath the carts, hunched together, bundled up in whatever we had. scarcely had daybreak arrived when father and his friend took the axes and shovels and went to the right side of the little ravine to their neighboring pieces of land and started to build more substantial shelters, covered with larch shingles and turf. by midday, they had already cleared a road through the ravine and had crossed over to the right side of it with the carts and all of our household goods, toward the shelter, to their permanent dwelling place, where, as they had dreamed, their long-sought-after happiness awaited them. thus, that first summer, many newcomers contented themselves with simple huts, all the more so because the local climate offered limited time for building. trains with settlers almost always arrived in the middle of spring (between the end of april and may), before easter. in western siberia snow begins to fall in september and does not melt until the end of the following april. thus, settlers had only three or four months for tilling, growing, harvesting, and preparing seeds and the harvest for winter storage, in addition to building their first home. one must take into account three important factors in analyzing the everyday lives of these settlers during their first years in siberia. firstly, these people, having decided on such a step, were aware that they would be living in siberia with all her frosts, snows, and long winters. they recognized the many possible risks. the success of the establishment of a new village depended directly on the role of the so-called khodoki [walkers]. the khodoki were people selected by the future migrants from among their circles; the villagers paid their way to travel to siberia, supplied them with provisions, and sent them off on this distant journey with two goals: to select a good location for the future village and to find out precise details about the locale and living conditions there. as a whole, the khodoki performed their mission well; they chose the most beautiful and convenient places, taking into account the presence of rivers and other bodies of water; they examined the contents of the soil; and established good relationships with the local administration and the local xenoethnic population (predominantly the buriats). in this way, early settlers arrived at a location ready to farm. plots of land had been parceled off, future fields had been delimited, and sources of water were known. however, there were some instances when the early settlers arrived personally, in an effort to save money by not hiring khodoki. such settlers ended up with the least fertile lands, usually in lowlands with long periods of snow-melt and water-logged soil. secondly, new stolypin villages were founded primarily along railroads, far away from the long settled (starozhilcheskie) siberian villages, so that there was no place to stay during the winter. however, this fact also had a positive side: settlers did not compete with long-time residents for natural resources such as water, fish, mushrooms, berries, game and trees. thirdly, europeans came to lands which earlier had belonged to nomads, and in cases where good social ties were established with the buriats, the latter became their main helpers and, in part, teachers in their new natural surroundings. one example is the village of turgenevka, founded in 1909 by people from villages in pruzhany county of the grodno province (in modern-day belarus, berioza district, brest province). the descendants of these settlers recounted that during the first winter they decided not to build, but instead accepted the invitation of the buriats to spend the winter in their yurts. in many variants of family histories, the buriats were characterized extremely positively: they had just arrived, with only what they could carry, but they needed a horse to plow, a cart, a cow: where should they get them? so, they hired themselves to the buriats as workers. and my grandfather said, ‘a buriat will never cheat you!’ so, we made an agreement that in spring, he would receive a horse for his work, that the buriat would give him a horse, and a good one at that (lidiia ivanovna loiko). they also said that there was one belarusian who worked as a hired hand for the buriats. the price should be a horse. so, in the spring, the buriat master gave him a horse. the belarusian brought the horse here, to the village of tolstovka. but that night, the buriat came galloping in, whistled, and the horse ran off at the sound of his whistle, well, and he drove that horse back to baiandai. this worker glanced into the paddock that morning, but the horse was not there. he left and told the others. the belarusians went to baiandai and complained to their buriat higher-up. and what do you think happened? they returned the horse, and also gave a pair of lambs, you know, as a fine (nadezhda petrovna tumanova). in some senses, the village of turgenevka is an exception. it is located within the territory of the ust-ordynskii buriat district, separated from sources of water, in a steppe zone where belarusian settlers lived side by side with buriats. this fact rather paradoxically influenced the building of dwelling places. according to the testimony of descendants, the first homes were raised up on a foundation having the form of a square. as l. i. loiko reported, “like the buriats had, only their homes were round while our first homes were square. that’s so that the home would be warmer. that is what the buriats said.” in actuality, the homes having a square as their foundation were not a rarity in the migrant villages. certainly, they kept in the heat better, and the placement of the stove in the center of the home meant that it was equidistant from all of the walls, preventing the corners of the home from freezing. at the same time, this type of house had its prototype in russia, namely the dugout house (zemlianka). not all of the settlements arose in areas of direct contact with native peoples. for example, the territories of the modern tulunskii, kuitunskii, ziminskii, balabanovskii, and zalarinskii districts of the irkutsk oblast’. there, immigrants from belarus, ukraine, chuvashia, and western russia founded hundreds of villages, and the buriats had stopped using these lands for pasturing their herds of horses a long time before the appearance of the stolypin settlers. accordingly, the first type of home built by the arriving settlers turned out to be the dugout as well. it was shaped from the trunks of newly-felled larches, in five to six rows. the thickness of the trees significantly increased the height of the dugout:. tatyana georgievna simenei said that, “my grandmother said that in the dugout, you walk at your full height; it was warm, and five people usually lived in one.” antonina nikolaievna zhuravlieva told of her grandmother’s experience, i also asked grandma what people's lives were like in a dugout. and she says to me that everyone lived like that the first winter. the dugouts were built along the oka (3), but the door faced the forest, people were afraid that in the spring the river would spill over and flood them all out. they did not know how much it would flood. and it was true – in spring, it flooded them all out, but it had already become warm, and we awaited the spring in huts. only during the second year, and sometimes during the third, was the first permanent home built, using those same trees that the people had cut down when they cleared the land for plowing. in addition, over the winter the logs had “dried up” and were more useful for construction. despite the vast abundance of available building materials, the first cottages were regarded as highly valuable. they could be sold at a high price, and in the case of a change of estate, they were always transported to the new location. to achieve this goal, the frame was taken apart log by log, each having been numbered by the builder, and at the new location they were put together once more. there are known instances where homes were transported 200 kilometers or more. currently, the stolypin villages consist of than 50% (in some villages, up to 85%) of the homes built by settlers a hundred years ago. two methods of preservation for such homes are known. in the first type of preservation, the new home (correspondingly wider and taller than its ‘predecessor’) was built around the original structure. the construction process began with the erection of canopies. later the bedroom, guest room, and then a second bedroom were added on. as a result, the old home ended up being inside the new home. the roof was undoubtedly reconstructed, but the old walls remained. today, under the many layers of plaster and wallpaper, one can still see (and in some homes even touch) the original, masterfully hewn logs. for the second method of preservation, the new home was built onto the old building. the inner yard was lined with boards, as mariia petrovna bukharova recounted, “so that there would not be mud and so that it would not be hard to clean up the animal droppings left when you herded them to the barns.” (4) in this way, a distinctive architectural ensemble was formed; the original small home with its low ceiling was turned into a summer kitchen, while the new building became the primary home. this summer kitchen was closed up in the fall and opened only when warm weather returned. it essentially allowed people to conserve firewood and protect the main home against moisture, since, in the summer, people did not cook food in the main house or, rather, did not heat the stove. the combination of the main home and the summer kitchen into one structure is a typical aspect of building among long-time siberians, who have preserved this tradition from the time of the first cossack settlements of the area. the large-scale expansion of the homes of settlers began in the middle of the 1920s and continued up until the beginning of collectivization (1928-30). immediately before collectivization, communes began to be established in these villages. youths set on revolution from the first generation born in the siberian stolypin villages began to leave their families for communes, taking with them provisions and small livestock. as a rule, the life of siberian communes ended less than a year later. zosiia vladislavovna ivankovich described the situation, “they ate all the provisions, slaughtered the pigs and ate those, too – and the commune ended, everyone went back to their homes.” at the beginning of the 1930s, the dispossession of the kulaks (5), along with the collectivization of settler villages, occurred. only the cossacks experienced the same degree of repression as the siberian peasants during the years of collectivization. spacious, new, bright homes (often with six windows) were confiscated, their owners were chased into the taiga just before autumn, and they were forbidden to take any building materials with them. without axes and saws, the dispossessed kulaks froze to death by october in their tree-branch shelters. exile to camps in the north of the irkutsk region, prison, or execution were the fate of most of the owners of these spacious homes, as well as of carpenter-immigrants, whom the new authority considered too prosperous to retain their current lives. (6) galina petrovna burak reported the following story about her family history, “our uncle, our father's youngest brother, left for siberia. he came to visit us and said: “if i had known that they would give the land away to the peasants, i would not have ever left for any siberia. as it is now, they gave me ten years of exile for that land.” the second phase of home construction occurred in the middle of the 1960s. lidiia ivanovna loiko remarked that “earlier, people were afraid to expand their homes. everyone remembered how the owners of big homes had all been evicted.” it was only in the 1960s that people commonly began replacing their primitive roofs with slate and began adding on verandas. children and grandchildren of immigrant settlers built additions to their homes, significantly increased the height of the buildings and the size of the windows. a tall, spacious home with large windows became the distinctive standard of beauty in these villages. nadezhda petrovna tumanova says of this period, we started to have money, and everyone began to rebuild. it was desirable for there to be a little more light in the home, so people started broadening their windows. and with our winters! we have three frames in our windows. well, they began to redo the frames. whoever had homes with big windows, they were considered a wealthy family. during the same period, from the 1960s on, ornamental lintels began to appear on the windows. windows are viewed as the “eyes” of the home. if the resources of the owner allowed him to step beyond the limits of purely pragmatic building decisions, then, without doubt, embellishment of the windows became the highest priority. the carving of lintels in soviet times was partially an underground business, bringing no small income to carpenters. in addition, it was potentially a dangerous occupation, punishable with prison sentences “for unearned income.” as ivan ivanovich pavlenko recounted, “well, what sort of unearned income was it? i labored three days just to chase down the template, for each shutter they paid me three rubles. i would put it in my pocket and fear that i would be put in prison.” lintels were made according to patterns that in many ways replicated the shutters of older houses of eastern siberia. every carpenter had an entire set of patterns that could number as many as 60. accordingly, the owner of the home was presented with a wide choice, and, as a result, the form of lintels in such villages is distinguished by its variability and rarely repeats. as a rule, carpenters that made lintels were not local workmen. they went from village to village in brigades of two or three. they carved and hung the lintels, while the painting was left to the owner of the home. (7) no matter the variant of the immigrant's farmstead, people put gardens in front yard. often, during the marking of the first rows, directly in front of the future home, people planted “the family tree” in the garden. most often this tree was a rowan or spruce, though a lilac bush or birch tree were possible as well. this tree symbolized the family spirits or, more accurately, the beginning of a new family. in actuality, the immigrant families had not only left their homeland but also forever “tore themselves” from their kin, leaving for such a distant, unknown land. the departure of a father of a family with the older sons was typical, the younger sons and daughters remaining with their mothers in their home village. often the members of the family never saw each other again. a new land, new people, a new home, and new prospects all took away not only physical effort, but also demanded the settler’s complete attention. they did not look toward the past but rather to an alluring future, although it was potentially full of danger and uncertainty. while planting the tree, they were thinking about how their family would live in this new home. even today, a hundred years later, in the front gardens tall spruces grow and rowans are still clustered in the yards. the stove was always the center of the home in peasant homes. characteristically, in belarusian and ukrainian settlements in the irkutsk oblast’, larger stoves were built than in their native villages. thus, two-chimney stoves were replaced by three-chimney versions. villagers began to remove them from homes only in the middle of the 1980s. stoves were assembled in various ways and according to the traditions that the immigrant settlers had brought from their native regions. from the outside, the homes of the settlers from the various areas differed not so much in size as in the form of the logs. for example, the belarusians never built homes from rounded logs, thinking that it was uncultured. logs in the homes of belarusian settlers were always hewn, on both the inner as well as the outer side. the corners of the homes are characteristic markers of the homes belonging to various ethnic groups. in the homes of ukrainian and belarusian settlers, the outer corners were covered by two vertical joined boards. this practice was explained not only by the pragmatics of construction but also by a definite aesthetic standard. as one local resident said, “we cover the corners so that no boards or tow stick out.” (natal’ia dmitrievna pukalo) the placement of corners was the most critical part of a carpenter’s work. thus, if a corner began to freeze solid, rot, or become drafty, it was considered the most serious flaw in construction practices. in the consciousness of the inhabitants of the home, the corner of the home was associated with their homeland. icons were hung there which had been brought over from one's birth village. such family icons were an integral part of the baggage of immigrants. under the icons was placed a table covered with an ornate tablecloth with the obligatory embroidery. the tablecloth was also usually brought from one’s home. as natal’ia dmitrievna pukalo told me, my grandmother told how her mother mourned for her native village. she would stand in the corner and cry aloud: corners, you are my family, corners, you are my warm ones, you were put together the right way, but you were placed in the wrong spot, you were put together in our way, but you do not stand in our land. the entrance to a home always has a special symbolic meaning. it is not only a passage from the cold into the warmth, it is also a physical relocation of a person from the outer world, full of potential threats, to the inner space, which guarantees maximum safety and peace. in the homes of the long-time residents of siberia, the threshold served as a special boundary between these two “worlds.” it sometimes reached 40 centimeters in height. a low door and a raised threshold undoubtedly played an important role in preserving much valued heat. as a rule, the homes of immigrant settlers were not distinguished by large thresholds, but a typical detail of their construction was a porch. the threshold of the entrance of the home occupies a significant place in the general space of the home. in ukrainian villages in siberia, the tradition of building raised porches has been preserved; as one informant said, “you can hear what kind of person is coming into the home. if it is someone with bad thoughts, the porch will without fail creak beneath him.” the porch led onto the veranda, yet another section of the path to the inner world of the home. verandas began to be built in 1960s and were mainly used for storing foodstuffs. zosiia vladislavovna ivankovich described this practice, “that which needs to be saved until spring goes into the cellar, but flour, sugar, grains, it goes on the veranda.” it is noteworthy that, despite the fact that the veranda functioned as an addition to the living quarters, its floor and walls were painted with bright tones, such as yellow, light blue, light green, and even orange. the amiability of the home needed to be felt from the very first step that a person made onto the premises. it is interesting that the increase in the number of porches and verandas was accompanied by an innovative building process that peaked in the 1980s: the decrease in the original size of the stove. in many villages, the russian stove was supplanted by the so-called “dutch stove.” this process may be variously interpreted, but more than likely, only the more prosperous families decided to part with their stoves, once they felt more confident and safe with their status in society. numerous bylichki [memorates] about the domovoi [house spirit] (known by the name “master”) confirm that the stove is the safest place inside the house. in the stories of russian, ukrainian, and belarusian immigrants, this mythological character always lives under the stove or, less frequently, behind the stove. according to many of the accounts of the settlers’ descendants, their parents and the generation of their grandparents recalled siberia with great joy, despite the occasional onset of homesickness for their birth villages. when comparing life in siberia to life to that in the homeland, the settlers and their children always emphasized how much more rich and happy their lives had become in siberia. for example, rozaliia ignatiievna petrushenko said that, “well, mama took me to our homeland in hmelnitsk oblast’, and what was it like? no firewood, no land, and a rainy winter. mama was sick the whole time. we went back to siberia and she immediately got better.” among the stolypin settlers of the villages we studied, there were but a few instances when families returned once more to their homeland. a staggering majority remained to live in the new lands. even today the houses in the immigrant villages are marked by their especially fine upkeep and condition, their multi-colored architectural elements, their original carvings, and a particular elegance of style. they stand as evidence of how an entire region was enhanced by people's individual desire to improve their lot in life. translated by greg bayles. special thanks to dr. erin collopy for reviewing the original english translation. notes 1 the expeditions of 2009 and 2010 were carried out with the framework of the project “the multimedia textology of folklore (an experimental publication of monuments),” part of the department of historical-philological sciences of the russian academy of sciences program “text in interaction with the sociocultural environ: the level of historical literary and linguistic interpretation,” a branch of the program “folklore as a form of existence of a text.” the expeditions of 2008 and 2010 were carried out with a grant from the non-profit organization “american friends of russian folklore” (usa, california) – http://www.russianfolklorefriends.org for the project “dynamics of folk traditions” (2008, 2010). all collected materials are housed in the folklore archive of the a. m. gorky institute of world literature’s folklore department. 2 accordingly, in 2007-2009, the villages celebrated the one-hundred-year anniversary of their founding widely. 3 the oka is the leftmost tributary of the angara river, which begins in the heights of the saian mountains and flows through the ziminskii district of irkutsk oblast’. 4 in all areas, cleanliness was one of the main characteristics in the homes of the immigrant settlers. the home and stove were whitewashed (“smeared”) two times a year, before easter and at the end of september.literally meaning “fist” – a private farmer with at least one horse or one hired worker. 5 victims of the political terror of the ussr (http://lists.memo.ru/index.htm) 6 a final building boom began in the villages established by the stolypin immigrants in the middle of the 1990s. homes once more began to be expanded and decorated with carvings carried out according to sketches from new journals. bibliography bondarenko, s.v. “мемуары степана васильевича бондаренко: эта часть написана в 1973.” тетрадь первая [memoirs of stepan vasilievich bondarenko: this portion written in 1973. notebook one]. http://www.tetradimemory.narod.ru/tetrad1_batama.htm (accessed 1 october, 2010). davydov, m. 2007. “столыпинская аграрная реформа: замысел и реализация” [the stolypin agrarian reforms: conception and realization]. http://www.polit.ru/lectures/2007/02/08/davydov.html (accessed 10 november, 2010). memorial. “жертвы политического террора в ссср” [victims of political terror in the ussr]. http://lists.memo.ru/index.htm (accessed 1 october, 2010). interviews bukharova, mariia petrovna, b. 1927, interviewed in august, 2010, zima, irkutsk region, zima district. burak, galina petrovna, b. 1935, interviewed in august, 2009. gatskovka, ukraine, zhytomyr region, valadar-volin district. ivankovich, zosiia vladislavovna, b. 1930, interviewed in august, 2003, maslianogorsk, irkutsk region, zima district. loiko, lidiia ivanova, b. 1932, interviewed in august, 2010, turgenevka, irkutsk region, baiandaevskii district. pavlenko, ivan ivanovich, b. 1938, interview conducted in august, 2006. tulun, irkutsk region, tulun district. pukalo, natal’ia dmitrievna, b. 1956, interviewed in august, 2010, tugenevka, irkutsk region, baiandaevskii district. semenova, natal’ia ivanovna, b. 1930, interviewed in august, 2010, tolstovka, irkutsk region, baiandaevskii district. simenei, tat’iana georievna, b. 1928, interviewed in july, 2008. batama, irkutsk region, zima district. tumanova, nadezhda petrovna, b. 1930, interviewed in august, 2010, tolstovka, irkutsk region, baiandaevskii district. zhuraleva, antonina nikolaievna, b. 1932, interviewed in august, 2003, novo-letniki, irkutsk region, zima district seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 folklorica_7f the birth and death of the russian house in the priargun’ie three rivers region, people’s republic of china (1) vladimir klyaus institute of world literature moscow, russia abstract this article considers the remnants of russian ritual practices surrounding houses in the priangun’ie region of china. this region was populated by russians from the late 19th century on. a large group of immigrants (russian, tungus and buriat) immigrated there from the transbaikal region of russia after the establishment of soviet rule in the early 20th century. the paper examines what remains of russian traditional practices, how they have been blended with native chinese traditions, and adapted over time to reflect intermarriage between people of chinese or tungus and russian descent. culturological research on the house as a building that reflects in its foundational elements a person's representation of the world and of the self is, in many respects, founded on the ideas of carl jung and oswald spengler, who defined the house as a reflection of the structure of the individual, containing all of its particularities (jung 2003), and as a flexible system, reflecting the nature of a person at a particular period of time (spengler 2009). for the purposes of this research, the latter approach is especially pertinent. “the pro forma house,” wrote spengler, “emerges entirely organically through feelings. knowledge of it is impossible. like a nautilus shell, like a bee hive, like a bird's nest, it is internally something that goes without saying, and all the features of the original customs and the forms of existence, of spousal and family life, and of the organization of a tribe have their precise likeness in the layout of the house and in its foundational premises – the canopies, hall, megaron, atrium, courtyard, women's ‘half’, and gynoecium” (121). the house, like the individual, passes through birth and death, appears in a given space, and even after it loses its original form, it continues to exist after the departure of its creators. there are hundreds if not thousands of such examples. in fact, any archeological excavation consists of extracting the remnants of buildings from beneath the layers of earth and attempts to reconstruct the life of their inhabitants. in this article, i would like to focus on a situation that is closer to us in time – the appearance and disappearance of russian villages and russian houses in the priargun’ie three rivers region. the priargun’ie three rivers region is a river basin formed by the gan, haul, and derbul rivers. they flow into the argun, which is currently administratively included in the hulunbuir aimag of the autonomous district of inner mongolia in the people's republic of china, whose administrative center is the city of ergun (labdarin/labudalin). these lands were well known among the russian cossacks, who had dispersed across priargun’ie beginning in the 17th century. rich in fish, game, and fertile grasslands, three rivers de jure belonged to china, but de facto, from the 17th century on, was settled by transbaikalian cossacks (both russians and tungus people who had received russian citizenship), who, from the 18th century on, guarded the border with china. in the 19th century, russians already had winter hunting cabins, hay fields, and pastures in the three rivers area, and they went there to hunt and fish. after world war i, immigrants from russia actively began to take over the region. the peak of settlement, however, came during the civil war years (1919-1921) and with the establishment of soviet authority in transbaikal, when many people who disagreed with the new regime (not only cossacks, but also priargun’ie peasants, as well as buriats and the tungus people) left for the three rivers area, hoping to find a peaceful life in china. the influx of refugees led to the development of large settlements. the economic activity of russians in the three rivers area led to rapid economic development in the region; in addition to the traditional practice of cultivating grain and raising cattle, the new settlers also engaged in hunting, fishing, and foraging. the three rivers region became the breadbasket of northern manchuria and, in particular, one of the main centers for making butter. this situation continued until the 1950s. the establishment of communist authority in china in 1945 and the founding of the people’s republic of china led to a great change in the lives of russians in the three rivers area. starting in the 1950s, there began a mass exodus of russians back to the ussr and elsewhere. today in the three rivers area, with a few exceptions, there are, as local people say, no “pure russians” left, but russian cultural traditions are preserved among the descendants of the mixed (russian-chinese and russian-tungus) marriages that date from the 1900s to the 1950s. ethnographic and folkloric materials representing this enduring tradition, gathered from interviews with russians in the three rivers area about their lives and those of their ancestors, allow us to examine the concrete historical process of the birth and death of the house in this region (all interviews were conducted between 2007 and 2009). the house does not exist without a master, the agent of its construction, its life, and, in the end, its destruction. in the most general terms, the lifetime of the house can be characterized in the following way: 1) the choice of the construction site; 2) building rituals; 3) moving-in rituals; 4) the presence/absence of a “spirit master” for the house and yard who influences the lives of the inhabitants; 5) departure of the residents from the house, during which, as a rule, they “lead out” the spirit master with them; 6) destruction, i.e., the “death” of the house. the first temporary dwellings of russians in the three rivers area were usually old hunting cabins and dugouts. however, within a year after their arrival, houses began to appear. the choice of a building site and of a settlement as a whole was determined based on a number of conditions: the presence of fertile land as well as proximity to water, to the forest, and to grazing sites for livestock. as with the eastern transbaikal, the origin point of the bulk of settlers, the priargun’ie three rivers region is not uniform in terms of its landscape. in this region one may find forest, forest-steppe, and steppe zones. each of these zones offered distinctive features for settlers selecting a place of residence. the beginning of construction, its separate stages and completion, the moving in of residents, and also, of course, the life of the family are accompanied by a whole series of rituals. however, in relation to the russian house of the three rivers area, unfortunately, we have at our disposal extremely scanty material. the current residents of this region of northern manchuria that identify with russian culture and with the russian world, but that hardly remember anything of the history of the former russian settlements. this gap in their knowledge is even more true of rituals that accompanied the erection of a new house. while i was conducting field research, i heard from only one informant that such rituals had taken place. it is telling that this testimony came from a “pure russian” babushka [lit. grandmother, used to mean elderly woman], taisia nikolaevna petuhkova. she was born in 1931 in china and, having married a chinese man, she never left the region. in answer to my repeated inquiries about russian houses and their construction, she could only tell me that russians “choose a place, look it over, and then, […] so that everything will be all right, so that everything will be peaceful, they raise the beams, and then when the beams are raised, […] they celebrate, […] and set out a meal.” this short account shows that for russian inhabitants of priargun’ie, the selection of the site for a house had an important meaning, so much so that one of the key moments in its construction was the raising of beams which was obligatorily accompanied by a ritual meal, most likely with the participation of not only the future owners and laborers but also neighbors and relatives who came to help, as was generally characteristic in transbaikal (ignatovich 2009: 118; solovieva 2011: 130). i was unable to discover whether russians from the three rivers area traditionally placed money in the foundations of the house or sacrificed a rooster or some other domestic animal at the time of the construction. to this day, in the russian territory of the priargun’ie, people place money under the beam when building a house, garage, or bathhouse, as attested to in records from the towns of nerchinskii zavod and gorbunovka, nerchinskozavodskii district and in the town of zargol, priargunskii district, zabaikalskii region (2). while visiting former russian settlements in the three rivers area, one constantly catches oneself looking for traces of the russians who had once lived there. the first thing that draws one’s attention is the large quantity of log houses in the villages. however, a significant portion of them were built after the russians had already left the three rivers area. their architectural features include the interior floor plan, the number and placement of window openings, the size of the house, and the use of a kan (a traditional chinese stove) in place of an oven. all of these features distinguish modern houses in the three rivers settlement from old russian buildings. they have but one thing in common: the use of logs as the principal building material. based on the comments of the descendants of mixed ethnicities of the russians that i met, the chinese learned how to build with logs from the russians. nevertheless, old russian houses are still found in the three rivers area. in literally every formerly russian settlement, one may discover two or three houses, and sometimes more, that had been built by russians. however, because they are so dilapidated, they are completely abandoned, they are used as farm buildings, or they house very poor chinese people who do not have the resources to build new houses for themselves. i was able to visit some of them and to see the mute witnesses of the vanished russian way of life, including the ring that held the cradle, the inner lintels, and the shelves in the icon corner. the characteristic features of the “real” russian house in the three rivers area include carved lintels on the windows and ornamentation on the facade. in terms of their subject matter, the designs are repetitive. while one could blame the poor preservation of the “russian” house for this impression, in my opinion, the lack of diversity and expression in the ornamentation of the house corresponds to the ornamentation in the russian priargun'ie, which is equally as nonexpressive. (3) it seems that the transbaikal cossacks and russian peasants brought their woodcarving tradition with them from the territory bordering china from the 1920s to the 1930s. another prominent feature of the russian house are the shutters. however, this element is practically never found in the three rivers area now, even in those houses that were built by “pure” russians. during the cultural revolution, people began removing shutters that prevented outsiders from seeing what was happening inside. shutters continue to be used only on public buildings such as stores. of all the rituals connected with the house, the most well-known among the chinese russians (4) of the three rivers area is the custom of “asking permission from the domovoi” [house spirit, spirit master] when moving in. home-owners almost everywhere in this region still preserve the memory of this spirit much more so than other similar characters of folk mythology such as the bannik [bathhouse spirit], leshii [forest spirit], vodianoi [water spirit], and rusalka [forest nymph]. (5) we find the earliest accounts of belief in the domovoi (also called sosedka, busedka) among the inhabitants of eastern transbaikal in konstantin loginovskii's work materials toward an ethnography of the transbaikal cossacks (1903: 4-6). he remarks that the head of the household must maintain good relations with the susedko to keep peace in the home, asking his permission when moving to a new house, and baking him special flat breads once a year. loginovskii also includes a number of bylichki [memorates] about meetings with the domovoi. note that the data recorded from chinese russians of the three rivers area quite often relate to the past, not to the present; as a rule, they have heard about the domovoi and all other spirits, the hosts of house buildings, the yard, and the kitchen garden, from their parents. it seems that only in the single settlement of hulun'buirskii aimak, in karavannaia (chinese name enhe), (6) does belief in the domovoi persist, and rituals to honor it are performed to this day. in connection with the process of moving in, respondents mentioned the domovoi as a rule, implementing a formula when addressing him: to dedushka-sosedushka they say, ‘dedushka-sosedushka let me stay not one night but rather for ages and ages.’ that is pretty much all. lina told me that earlier” (tat’iana vladimirovna fomina). when you move into the izba, into a new house, you ask the domovoi’s permission, ‘let us live there not one day nor two but for ages and ages!’ they say something like that. uh-huh (nina ivanovna gregorieva). domovoi, let me live here. they [placed] bread, threw salt in the four corners. they asked the domovoi’s permission, ‘domovoi-master, allow me to live here.’ well, that's what i say. it used to be that old people all asked permission like that” (galina matveevna pakharukova). but even if you are putting up a new izba, you still have to ask permission to move in. they go and get an icon, they get some bread. then they go and ask his permission, ‘lord master, let us into our house.’ and then the whole family goes in and eats” (mariia aleksandrovna makarova). according to the latter two accounts about entering a new house and addressing the domovoi, the people brought along bread, salt, and icons. this practice was recorded in greater detail in the village of karavannaia, where, as i noted above, the custom exists to this day. anna antonovna mikhaleva, born in 1932, a “pure” russian women who, having married a chinese man and having had children, stayed in china, said that, when moving into a new house, people ask for permission, “lord domovoi, lord, lord, lord master, allow us to move into the house.” she added, “i also went into my izba, brought bread, brought salt, and icons. i went in with icons.” interesting texts about addressing the domovoi were also recorded from marusia dementeva, born in 1941, and from anna baliabina, born in 1947. both are of mixed ethnicity and both apparently have performed the ritual a number of times. according to m. dementeva, we always go into the new izba, we always ask permission. they say the domovoi is the master. my grandmother always used to say, then mama would say, ‘if you are moving in, bake some kind of prianiki [spice cookies] or something and hide them away somewhere. then say, ‘domovoi, well, dedushka. let us in to live here. and watch over all my children so that they will be healthy, and alive and well, and able to work.’ this is how they ask him, and then they put [the cookies] down. that is how we do it as well. anna baliabina described a similar tradition: whenever my children move in somewhere, i always ask permission from the domovoi […] i go in with bread and salt, i ask permission: ‘allow it, domovoi, accept my children, save my children. give them happiness!’ i put out some bread and some salt and carry in the icon. […] you go into the house, then you put the icon up [in the icon corner], then you ask for permission and put bread and salt there. then, when our children move in and they are cooking there for the first time, then they eat the bread and salt. in response to the question of whether people leave special, baked buns for the domovoi and where, she answered, “in the corners, [...] all four corners, [...] on the day when you ask for his permission, on that day! [...] and that's it.” the difference in these local residents’ formulas for addressing the domovoi can be explained, it would seem, by the fact that in their families, no one except them, neither the husbands nor the children nor the grandchildren, still speaks russian. thus, the rest of the family, when requesting the domovoi’s permission, says the words in chinese. in an interview with m. dementeva, she noted, i sometimes say it in chinese, too. i say it in both russian and also in chinese, ‘master (we call him master) […] master, let us in here, well, to live, and give our children goodness and health. may they always be healthy and earn good money. may all live thus. live so all is well. may they be rich.’ […] in chinese we call him zhuren, zhuren. ‘zhuren, rang women de haizi haohao guo rizi, rang tamen shenti jiankang, baoyou tamen. master of the house, let our children live well, may they have good health, god keep them.’ the formula for addressing the domovoi has clearly transformed under the influence of the chinese language. “in chinese, you know, they also ask for permission,” said a.a. mikhaleva, “in chinese they have that rule, too. they call him chuzhen. we call him master, but they say chuzhen.” it is possible that the russian babushka understood chinese in this case to mean both people of mixed ethnicities and native chinese people living in karavannaia. in any case, this “rule” was most likely borrowed from the russians, as m. dementeva reported, “the chinese also, the locals, we tell them [how to address the domovoi when moving into the new house], and they do it in chinese.” however, a respondent from karavannaia who would only identify herself as “anna” (mixed ethnicity, born 1949), reported a slightly different formula for addressing the domovoi in chinese: “qiu shen baoyou, baoyou women lai zheli, zhu changjiu. i ask god to protect us, bless our journey here, i wish it to be forever.” it is characteristic that this formula was pronounced during the chinese ritual of moving into the house. according to the words of the respondent: “now the children, they speak russian poorly and understand little. when they move in, the sons [put] their shoes in first. he’s the master! […] [they leave their shoes] near the bed or under the bed. […] well, that’s what they have in mind, but they don’t speak [russian], that they have come to a new house.” anna here differentiates between the chinese ritual, which she performs when her children, who speak exclusively chinese and in reality already identify as chinese, move into a house, and the ritual that she performed for herself, as a russian, “wherever we move, we ask permission from the domovoi. we ask permission. wait. i forgot the first word. i remembered the end: ‘let us sleep here not one night, nor spend one day, but for ages and ages’ […] and we move in like russians. bread, salt, icons, and then we ask permission from the domovoi. the icons come first.” t.v. fomina, a resident of popirai, also related that she performs this ritual on behalf of her children when they move into a new house, my children got married, the girls left, the boys got married, and i went as well, asked permission from dedusha-sosedushka. if you are russ… [apparently, she wanted to say “russians,” but for some reason she hesitated, author’s note], or half-bloods even, you just have to do it. i went [and did it]. the children just don't understand! of course! and they speak chinese more and more! this ritual apparently remains especially meaningful in karavannaia, which is not surprising, considering the status of the village, which is now developing a tourist industry and as a result, is attempting to preserve its “russian” identity. marusia dementeva, in addition, did not just tell me about the ritual but showed me an offering to the domovoi that was had been made when people moved into a new house-hotel. (7) you saw how we arranged everything there? people are moving in, it is a hotel. i also went and asked permission. there wasn’t space to put [an offering] down. they [the builders] plastered the walls, but i didn’t see it. so that’s why i stuck it there on the shelf. no one can get up there. so, i put it there. […] i bought prianiki, i put them there, no one will get them down. i threw them that far. an additional, interesting detail of the ritual was reported by granny marusia’s sister, nina dementeva (mixed ethnicity, born 1934), “when we move into the izba, you have to put up the icon and bring salt. what next? then kneel facing the stove, bow here. ‘domovoi master, allow us into this house! here let us not stay one night, let us stay for ages and ages! don't touch us or bother us. we won't touch you either.’” chinese russians still remember that if they do not ask permission from the domovoi, then the homeowners or their children will get sick, and their livestock will die out (reported by i.v. vasil'ev, and n. dementeva, village of karavannaia; m.a. makarova, village of ernishnoe;). in addition, they will begin to see into the world of the supernatural, according to ania, village of ernishnoe. it is interesting that comparatively young (30-40 years of age) people of mixed ethnicity do not accept this belief, as ania told me, “we move in and live normally, we do not see anyone. what would we see? someone thought this up, someone with a sick mind thinks like that. it just seems to be the case to him. it’s just, he thinks like that.” in sum, the ritual, which is now known and performed only by a few people of mixed ethnicity in the three rivers area, typically has only one form: people ask permission from the domovoi when they move into a new house. k.d. loginovskii (1903: 5) describes this practice, “when moving to a new house, they pour a shot-glass of vodka and say: ‘dedushka, sosedushka, come live with us.’ as for the glass, first they bring it into the new house and place it in the oven, where they also put a flat bread that they baked just for him.” from the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, the inhabitants of transbaikal, the ancestors of these chinese russians, would first invite the domovoi to come with them from their old house. modern inhabitants of transbaikal who live on the russian side of priargun’ie still know this alternate form of the ritual and do invite the domovoi from the old house and thus bring it to the new residence. the modern inhabitants of priargun’ie, both on the russian and the chinese sides, have forgotten that vodka was offered to the domovoi. in the present form of the rite, they simply invite the domovoi-master to come with them. according to n. dementeva, “and since we're now moving from here, we will invite him along with us. we were living here. […] that is how we moved, the domovoi master moves with us.” along with asking permission from the domovoi, the residents of karavannaia have preserved another tradition: blessing the house with holy water. they bring water and icons up to the mount of ascension on the 40th day following easter, and there they wash the icons in the water, which becomes holy. (8) m. dementeva describes this practice as follows, when i went into the hotel for the first time this year, it had to be blessed. we blessed it too. […] we sprinkle [water with] bird cherry branches, or something else. you just can’t use aspen! aspen, they say, is cursed. we can break branches from a bird cherry or a birch tree, and sprinkle […] the whole house, in the corners, the whole house. the interpenetration of russian and chinese culture in the lives of people of mixed ethnicity in the three rivers region occurs at all levels: material, spiritual, and ritual. the rituals for the erection of a new house are no exception. for example, the chinese ritual for a newly built house, a practice that is still observed by the descendants of russian-chinese marriages. people describe setting off rockets, i.e., fireworks, and also attaching red fabric to the house and to the gate as well. i witnessed this rite in 2010, when the completion of a new “russian” hotel was celebrated in karavannaia. according to t.n. petukhova, yet other “chinese” rituals take place, for example, when raising house beams, “only chinese people attach red fabric [to the beam]. they take candy, and they boil eggs, and they throw them on the ground. […] and the russians do the same, the ones that were here, they raise beams. there you go. the most important thing is the beams.” interactions with the domovoi-master were to be maintained by members of the household as long as they lived in the house. k.d. loginovskii (1903: 4-5) notes that rites of appeasement were performed by the transbaikal cossacks in the 20th century, for peace in the home and the well-being of animals, it was important for the masters to maintain good relations with the susedushka; thus once a year they make him flat bread and leave it in the pechurka [a small recess in the stove], under the floor, or in the stables and the cattle yards. this rite was at one time practiced in the three rivers area as well, judging by the account of m. a. makarova, a woman from the village of ernishnoe. she said, then at epiphany they put that piece of bread in the four corners. they say that the domovoi would eat it. at epiphany our mother would take a piece of bread, go into the cellar, and put it there. and i would say, ‘who are you doing that for?’ she says, ‘let the domovoi eat it.’ she watches out for him. i don’t know if it’s right. but right now we don’t do it for anyone. we just live normally. we don’t do it for anyone. although she did not remember the name of the holiday, t.n. petukhova also described this practice, you know, russians still baked these bublichki [bagels] out of flour. and then they put in them in the cellar for the domovoi. […] yes, yes, yes, they leave them in the basement! that's for the domovoi! […] that is how it always is with the russians, always, and see, however long you're there, maybe a half a year, maybe a year will pass, again they will bake these buns, and they will lay them out again. in the russian territory of priargun’ie, this tradition, it would seem, has also been preserved, although in a modified form. in in an elderly woman’s house in the village of dano in 2008, i was shown candies lying on the cabinet, the weekly gift for the domovoi. (9) speaking with the chinese russians of the three rivers area about the domovoi, i, of course, asked whether anyone had seen him, in which situations, what he looked like, and so forth. an overwhelming majority of those asked answered that he cannot be seen. we collected only two accounts of the appearance of the domovoi. according to g.m. pakharukova from verkh-kuli, her nephew, who currently lives in russia, once saw the domovoi in the form of an old man with big, blue eyes. she said that, he appeared to my nephew, who now lives in ulan-ude. he was laying down, sleeping on the floor, when he opened his eyes he saw someone lying there […] an old man. his eyes, he says, are blue-blue! he says – big eyes, blue! […] he was frightened, he couldn't move, hands and feet were numb, he couldn’t move. but suddenly he disappeared. and he didn't know where he went. then he could move his hands and feet. another account, that of a. mikheleva from karavannaia, is more interesting. she saw the domovoi in the form of an old tungus man who spoke chinese. this event took place in her daughter’s house. her daughter had married a chinese man. mikheleva described the event as follows, i spent the night at my daughter's place in siratui, at my second daughter’s, she is dead now. and i lay down on the bed, i had slept on that bed before, and now i was laying there and i saw in a dream that an old man was standing there. the old man is standing there just like that, like a tungus anyway, with a beard like they have, he stood in front of me and said, […] ‘o, lord, who is that lying in my spot?’ in chinese, he says: ‘o! tin na! shi shei tifan to shila? (10) who is it that took my spot?’ he was speaking chinese! and i jumped up, and then said: ‘o, lordy, oi, i say, lord, lord domovoi master, i say, it’s me, i lay down in your place, i say, i acted wrong, i didn’t ask for permission, i didn’t ask your permission and lay down in this place.’ […] but i answered him in russian. in response to my question about why the domovoi spoke chinese, anna antonovna answered, “so he speaks chinese! she [the daughter] was married to a chinese man! this is his place!” this response indicates that that, since the house was chinese, the domovoi must be as well. in general it would appear that, according to the russians of the three rivers area, life in a chinese house was unsafe. according to t. n. petukhova, “my sister always told me you shouldn’t buy a chinese house, it’s dangerous.” in fact, she had personal experience with this situation, since her older sister taisiia nikolaevna’s house, where a chinese man had lived, was haunted. she told the following story about the house. we lived in chistaia, i was not married yet. but i had an older sister, she's been dead for a long time. i went to visit her. well, i was young, she had a son, stepan, he was also young. we ran, we played, came home and laid down to sleep and didn’t hear anything. one time on new year’s we were running, playing, my sister fell asleep. she was waiting for us and she fell asleep. and i ran in, and i laid down to sleep. then i heard a rattling at the back of the izba. even the dish cupboard was shaking! it was real, i know that. i jumped from my bed onto my sister’s bed! she said: ‘o, it’s nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing!’ she lit the fire right away. ‘don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid! it’s a cat,’ she said, ‘it must have climbed in.’ she didn’t tell us anything. nothing. one time she went out. i forgot where she and my brother-in-law went. she left an old lady with us, to sit with us. but it was already ten at night, and they still hadn’t come back. then a rattling began at the back of the izba. ooo! we jumped out of there with a shriek. and the old lady was right behind us. ‘o, lord!,’ she says. and right away we locked the door and left for her place, for the old lady’s place. then my sister came back. and you know what? under my sister’s fence [they found] a huge chinese braid. they found such a braid! and in it there was a yellow piece of paper folded up like a flower. lots of people were there and they all saw it. and they threw this braid into the oven, burned it up. it even crackled, and the oven door flew off to the side. and then it became calm. they say someone had hidden the braid there. […] and those who bought the house said that a chinese man with a braid had lived there. […] my sister and them were talking among themselves, here, they say, one chinese man lived with a big braid. that’s right, they found the braid. and it became peaceful. it’s not a lie and not a fairy tale, it’s true. i heard it with my own ears. i was shaking with fear on my sister’s bed. o, it was scary! i was young then. and it was scary! i asked, ‘niania, what is it?’ everyone called her niania. i asked, ‘niania, what was the knocking?’ ‘nothing, nothing nothing,’ she said. ‘i’ll light the fire right now.’ and every time i woke up the fire was still burning. my brother-inlaw was sitting near by, and next time my sister was sitting near by. i saw all this and wondered why they were sitting up. but, since i was young, i turned over and went back to sleep. […] they were afraid that we children would find out and be frightened. but in the end we found out anyway. […] they had a little dog! a black one! and it came up to the fence and scratched and scratched. and my sister asked: ‘what’s it scratching for?’ she came closer, and they got up and started pulling out the braid. the dog was so small [and still found the braid]. the braid was the most important element of the traditional male hairstyle among manchurians. having conquered china in the beginning of the 17th century, the manchurians forced all the han chinese men, under penalty of death, to braid their hair, shaving the front part of the head. officially men were no longer required to wear braids after the 1911 sinkhai revolution, but in manchuria itself this tradition was preserved. the chinese man with the big braid mentioned in the bylichka may really have cut off his braid and left it in his old house when he moved. however, to the russians who had found it, this action was interpreted as a clear attempt to spoil the life of the new masters of the home. russian houses in the three rivers area could be haunted for a another reason as well. tais’ia nikolaevna told another bylichka on this topic, the old ladies told me that they lay down to sleep and they heard knocking, and some heard accordion music and dancing. that's what the old ladies said, but i don’t know if it’s true or they are lying. and then, they say, it became impossible to live. and someone taught them. when you hear knocking, you have to draw a circle right away around the place where you hear it. and light a fire right away. when you draw a circle, they can’t get out. so, they lit a fire, and the doll fell [out]. someone had hidden a doll [in the house]. that’s what the doll did! interestingly, to the russians and people of mixed ethnicities in the three rivers area, all the stories about unusual events, magic, demons, and the like, seem to have occurred when primarily russians lived there. as petukhova remarked, “the old women told us it used to happen a lot. but now nothing’s left. now people have become like demons. they aren’t afraid of anything, they’ve overpowered everything, they’ve overcome everything!” while stories about most of the other minor spirits do not occur in stories told by residents of this area, the bannik [bathhouse spirit] was occasionally mentioned in minor ways. people typically mentioned the bannik in connection with the prohibition on washing in the bathhouse after midnight. when asked about the reason for the prohibition, v.i. gromova reported that “they scared people! [people would scare others] so they wouldn’t go to the bathhouse. they scared the girls, scared the young men, ‘don’t go to the bathhouse at night.’ young people went to the bathhouse to flirt and make out. so, people scared them!” m.a. makarova had a similar response, “well, they scared them, too! […] they say, ‘don’t come to the bathhouse late at night.’ they say that a demon lives in the bathhouse. […]” (and what is this demon's name?) “the bannik!” finally, a. a. mikhaleva said that “the bathhouse also has a master – the bathhouse master. they say there is a master in every bathhouse. i don’t know. […] but at midnight you shouldn't go to the bathhouse, they say.” m. dementeva expressed a similar opinion, but now we wash at midnight. earlier it wasn't allowed! they say that at midnight demons are out. […] always at midnight. they are always out. they crawl out. well, they walk and somehow fly around. the souls walk around. midnight is not a good time. that’s what people used to say. the respondent, it seems, had heard a bylichka about a person who went into the bathhouse at midnight. a demon, or as she said ‘unclean soul,’ started to strangle the person, but the rooster crowed and he was saved. she concluded the story by saying that, “they say that the demon, an unclean soul, came. he wanted to do all these bad things, to strangle the man, or something else. the rooster crowed and he [the bannik] ran off.” only one respondent, a. baliabina, reported that when one first uses a new bathhouse, one should ask permission from the “bathhouse domovoi,” “yes, the first time you go into a bathhouse to heat it up, you must ask permission. […] as soon as you go in to steam, say, ‘bathhouse domovoi, let us into the bathhouse. give us happiness, give us health!’” (what you mean by the first time?) “when the bathhouse is used for the first time.” because a single-family bathhouse is rare among chinese russians, it is not surprising that the beliefs about the bannik are less common than those about the domovoi. the history of russians in the three rivers area is tragic in many ways. their flight from soviet russia in the 1920s and 1930s and starting over in a new place from scratch; lack of citizenship, first under the chinese and then under the japanese (who forced practically all the russians near the border to move deeper into china in the early 1930s); the constant threats from the soviet side, expressed in reconnaissance activities and military raids, which killed civilians. the result, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, was a russian exodus from the three rivers area. the russian house, both as a material and symbolic object, endured all these events along with its inhabitants. m. dementeva’s amazing story parallels this tragic and disconnected past. her grandmother and her mother, who was still a young girl, fled from the ussr, apparently from nerchinskii zavod, where the grandmother had been born. in china, the grandmother was married a second time to a chinese man and gave birth to her uncle, mikhail. mikhail, in the words of my informant, was a married man “associated with” the russians, i.e., he gathered intelligence for the soviet authorities. apparently, he then fled to the ussr: first, he got along fine with his father, and then he got drunk once at his father's house and broke the stove apart and ran away, to break any connection with his father. he destroyed everything, and took off on the sleigh. […] but i only heard about this, people used to say our uncle ran off, broke grandfather's stuff, and ran off. harnessed the horse, and he took off with the horse, sleigh, and my aunt […] she's his wife. her name is zina. her uncle’s abandonment of his parents’ house was symbolically expressed in his antisocial behavior, especially the destruction of such a semiotically important element as the stove, the heart of the house. with the departure of the russians, who had left their houses with all of their other farm buildings, as well as mills, stores, schools, hospitals, churches, these settlements were repopulated by dungan muslims from the south by decree of the new chinese authorities. the houses suffered as a result. the russian agricultural way of life was unfamiliar to them. according to stories, “the southerners,” who had never seen house like these, boarded up the doors and went in and out through the windows; they broke up the floors, did not know how to use the stove, and painted on the clean walls. such absurd behavior recalls that of characters in russian fairy tales about a town of fools, and people from the three rivers area tell these stories with good humor: [the settlers] came earlier. in tuluntui there were russian houses that belonged to the kaikov family! they pulled up the floors. they boarded up the doors. they climbed in through the windows. […] in the izba (among the russians), people whitewashed the walls, it’s clean, it's bright. [the chinese say] it’s bad for your eyes. they paint over the walls […] now they’ve learned, they leave the walls white. there was all sorts of stories. (n. dementeva and p. p. smolianskii) houses were whitewashed with lime. they (the settlers) weren’t used to it. and the floor was painted yellow. they weren’t used to that either. it ruins the house, they chopped it up so the floor wouldn’t be so slippery. but now the old people began to talk about this. they laugh at themselves. you might say that it was all a fairy tale, but it was true.” (baliabin konstantin) the contemporary russian house in the three rivers area, a structure combining russian and chinese characteristics, is inhabited by descendants of russian-chinese marriages, who officially number slightly over four thousand. it contains russian objects, including: icons on icon shelves, easter eggs and pussy-willow branches, framed photographs on the walls, benches (which here, as in transbaikal, are called kanapel), tables, chairs, samovars, nesting dolls, and so forth. however, on the doors and walls hang colorful chinese gods and chinese characters made out of paper wishing happiness. in the houses of two familes of mixed ethnicity, i saw talismans acquired in a buddhist monastery to ward off demons (in chinese, fue) above the door. i also saw small mirror attached to the facade in a. baliabina’s house, apparently on the initiative of her chinese daughter-in-law, who believed that “it would be good for the family, so the children would not get sick. she said, ‘the door faces the window, that’s not good, we need to hang a mirror here.’ […] these are chinese fears.” only a few houses in families of mixed ethnicity have russian-style stoves used to bake bread, and the existing ones are only found in outbuildings. now the need for such stoves, in karavannaia, for example, has disappeared since a large bakery opened in the village in 2009, and one can buy russian bread in quantity. in old houses there are traditional chinese stoves (called kan) rather than russian ones, and the new houses feature water-heating systems. with the departure of russians from the three rivers region, the house per se ceased to exist as well. it changed completely and acquired chinese features. chinese rituals are now performed during construction and while moving into a new house. the domovoi has started to look like a tungus and to speak chinese. even the owners of the house may address him in chinese. from inside and out, the house has taken on a chinese aspect, preserving only isolated elements to remind us of its russian roots. to paraphrase spengler, when a type of house disappears it means that a certain “breed of human” has died out as well. in other words, when the people of a particular culture disappear, then the house associated with them, so central to their belief and identity, dies too. we see clear evidence of this phenomenon in the russian house in the priargun’ie three rivers region. translated by greg bayles. special thanks to dr. jessica merrill and dr. gabriella safran for reviewing the original english translation. transliterations and translations from the chinese by dr. liu kuili. notes 1 this article was written with the financial support of the russian humanitarian science foundation. project № 14-04-00449. 2 records of this practice are attested in the field archive of the socialanthropological research center, russian state humanities university 3 in fact, among the houses in the towns of the nerchinsko-zavodskii, priargunskii, and a few other southeastern districts of the transbaikal area, in former cossack settlements (stanitsi) and villages, some of which have two or three-hundred-year-long histories, we almost never see houses with the sort of rich wooden carvings seen in old believer villages (semeiskiie) in the western area of transbaikal (this territory includes the krasnochikoiskii district) and in neighboring buriatiia. this relationship to the outer appearance of the house can be explained by the fact that the history of this region was closely tied to exile and hard labor. for those who were exiled here, life was perceived to be only a temporary phase. it seems to me that this fact explains the reluctance to adorn the house. 4 a term that has been used since 1991 in the chinese document “index of nationalities” to denote an individual who is ethnically part russian and part chinese with chinese citizenship. 5 it should be noted that i happened on a situation where the word itself, domovoi, was understood to mean “relative” by those with whom i was speaking, and they did not know other terms used in the given region for the domovoi, such as susedka [neighbor] or dedushkasusedushka [neighbor-grandfather]. 6 here and henceforth the names of the settlements are given in the form by which they were known from the 1920s to the 1950s. 7 a residence that has been vacated by the owners and rented out to travelers. 8 about this practice, m. dementeva reported that, “easter will pass and in forty days is ascension. we have a hill, there is a cross there, we go there to pray to god. then we carry out the icon out of the house, carry water from the stream, buckets, and we wash these icons. everyone does it in that order. everyone prays, everyone kisses the icons. then we stand in a line. then we divide the water and go home.” 9 n. dementeva also reported that, in a parallel to the rite of moving into a new house, the people also ask permission from the domovoi when they bring cattle into the yard for the first time. if this is not done, then the cattle will not thrive. 10 the narrator’s chinese is poor, so that the version given by her is non-standard as a result. bibliography ignatevich, t. iu. 2009. “русская картина мира: региональные языковые реализации общенародных доминант” [the russian picture of the world: regional linguistic realizations of a pan-ethnic pattern]. ученые записки забайкальского государственного гуманитарнопедагогического университета им. н. г. чернышевского [academic notes of the n. g. chernyshevskii transbaikal state humanities-pedagogical university], no. 3:117-121. jung, c. g. 2003 (1963) воспоминания, сновидения, размышления [memories, dreams, reflections]. minsk: initsiativa, ast. klyaus, v.l. 2010. “административная реконструкция русской деревни в китае” [administrative reconstruction of the russian village in china]. in сибирская деревня [the siberian village], vol. 3. omsk: omsk state university. 234-245. loginovskii, k.d. 1903. “материалы к этнографии забайкальских казаков” [materials towards an ethnography of transbaikal cossacks]. записки общества изучения амурского края владивостокского отделения приамурского отдела рго [notes of the society for the study of the amur region of the vladivlastok section of the priamur division], vol. 9, no. 1: 1135. solovieva, m. r. 2011. “характер отражения традиционных форм крестьянской взаимопомощи в современных устных рассказах русских старожилов приангарья и забайкалья.” [the character of the reflection of traditional forms of peasant mutual assistance in contemporary oral narratives of long-time russian residents of the angara and transbaikal region]. traditsionnaia kul’tura, no. 1: 126-135. spengler, oswald. 2009 (1922) закат европы [the decline of the west], vol. 2. moscow: mysl. interviews anna [last name unknown], b. 1949, mixed ethnicity, interviewed in 2009, karavannaia (en’khe) baliabin, konstantin, b. 1960, mixed ethnicity, interviewed in 2007, karavannaia (en’khe) baliabina, anna, b. 1947, mixed ethnicity, interviewed in 2007, karavannaia (en’khe) dementieva, marusia, b. 1941, mixed ethnicity, interviewed in 2009, karavannaia (en’khe) dementieva, nina, b. 1934, mixed ethnicity, interviewed in 2009, karavannaia (en’khe) fomina, tat’iana vladimirovna, b. 1945, mixed ethnicity, interviewed in 2007, popirai (tian’shi) grigorieva, nina ivanovna, b. 1937, mixed ethnicity, interviewed in 2007, shchuch’e (suchin) gromova, valentina ivanovna, b. 1932, mixed ethnicity, interviewed in 2007 labdarin (erguni) makarova, mariia aleksandrovna, b. 1930, mixed ethnicity, interviewed in 2007, ernichnaia (sap’ian) mikhaleva, anna antonovna, b. 1932, russian, interviewed in 2007, karavannaia (en’khe) pakharukova, galina matveevna, b. 1944, mixed ethnicity, interviewed in 2007, verkh-kuli (shankuli) petukhova, taisiia nikolaevna, b. 1931, mixed ethnicity, interviewed in 2007, karavannaia (en’khe) smolianskii, petr ivanovich, b. 1934, mixed ethnicity, interviewed in 2009, karavannaia (en’khe) in memoriam in memoriam folklorica 2016, vol. xx 185 in memoriam jack v. haney, one of the original members of the slavic, east european and eurasian folklore association, passed away on april 17, 2015. jack haney dedicated his teaching and scholarly career at the university of washington to medieval literature and folklore. he published on the lay of igor’s campaign, saint’s lives and the writing of maxim grek. in the area of slavic folklore, his most significant contribution to the discipline came after he retired, when he produced the seven-volume set the complete russian folktale, published by me sharpe between 1999 and 2006. the translations in these works introduced scholars to the depth and breadth of the russian tale tradition and draw on a plethora of sources, many never before published in english. he followed that tour de force with an anthology of russian tales (2009, me sharpe), with selected texts drawn from the seven volumes of the complete russian folktale as well as a new two-volume translation of the complete folktales of a.n. afanas’ev (2014, 2015 university of mississippi press) and long, long tales from the russian north (2013, university of mississippi press). he is survived by his wife barbara, daughter gillian and son andrew. madhu malik, a professor of russian language, culture, and folklore at bucknell university, died on may 20, 2016. madhu malik earned a ba and ma in russian language and literature from the jawaharlal nehru university and her phd in slavic folklore from the university of virginia in 1982, where she studied under natalie kononenko. she published on russian literature, particularly on nikolai gogol, as well as on folklore. her main contribution to folklore scholarship was her research on the russian poet-bards. she did not limit her scholarship to east slavic material alone, but studied the folklore of her native india as well. in 2015 published a translation of ivan minayev’s clever wives and happy idiots: folktales from the kumaon himalayas. at bucknell she taught russian language and culture, folklore, ritual, women in russian culture, and a course dedicated to her beloved guitar poets. she also was a founding member and co-director of bucknell’s race/gender folklorica 2016, vol. xx 186 resource center. mikhail aleksandrovich lobanov, russian ethnomusicologist, passed away on september 14, 2015 at the age of 71. mikhail aleksandrovich was an irrepressible spirit, dedicated to the improvement of international collaboration between folklorists in russia and the rest of the world. he graduated from the leningrad conservatory in 1962 and worked at the russian institute for the history of the arts for over 30 years and also at the gertsen russian state pedagogical college (since 1990), where he taught courses on folk music and ethnomusicology, music history, including the history of folk music. he was the author of five books, including most recently, the verse of the epic (2008, russian institute for the history of the arts), as well as the editor of six folklore collections, nine textbooks and countless articles in his field, including those that appeared on the pages of this journal. microsoft word folklorica_2011g.doc 185 reviews folklorica 2011, vol. xvi marshall, bonnie c., trans. van deusen, kira, ed. far north tales: stories of the peoples of the arctic circle (world folklore series). santa barbara, ca: libraries unlimited, 2011. notes, glossary, bibliography, index, 290pp. $40 (cloth). isbn 978-1-59158-761-3. far north tales: stories from the peoples of the arctic circle is an impressive collection of folktales from the understudied but culturally vibrant arctic region. the volume contains a wealth of information on the belief systems, daily life, and customs of many of the arctic peoples, with many of these folktales appearing for the first time in english. the folktales themselves are broken up into seven parts, including tales of daily life, creation stories and myths, tricksters and fools, legends and pourquoi tales, stories about animals and marriages with animals, spirits, shamans, and shape shifters, and heroes and heroines. this book is a great resource for teachers of folklore, folklorists interested in learning more about this region of the world, and general lovers of storytelling. the introduction is well-researched and gives the reader an extensive amount of detailed information about many of the peoples whose tales are included in this volume. however, its organization and length make it somewhat unwieldy when searching for particular facts on any given people. despite the fact that it is split into sections, there is no table of contents to find specific topics, and its length (33 pages) compounds the difficulty. since this material is essential to an understanding of the tales, perhaps dividing each section into its own chapter would help one more easily navigate through it. the general reader not thinking of the book as a course text and unaware of the nature of oral folktales might find the introduction a bit tedious, owing to the identical wording and repetitive descriptions for each of the indigenous peoples. footnotes instead of endnotes might also be useful since the 184 notes at the end of the book render searching for and locating the amplifying material somewhat laborious. the tales themselves are expertly translated into english by bonnie marshall. it is helpful that specific terms such as yaranga [a type of arctic dwelling] are always defined the first time they are mentioned in each tale to help the reader better understand them no matter in which order they are read. the tales are written in a style that lends itself to reading aloud, rendering them more authentic and making the book a great resource to storytellers and parents who want to expose their children to folktales of the world. while the phrasing may at times seem 186 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi a bit awkward to those not familiar with the oral folk tradition, the rhythm and repetition of the original is carefully and painstakingly preserved. although the organization of the tales into sections is well done, especially for use in a class, some of the tales would seem to be misplaced. “the creation of fog” seems to be a creation tale but is nevertheless found in the “legends and pourquoi tales” section. many individual tales could in fact be placed in multiple chapters. for example, nearly every tale in the book employs an animal as the main character, so it might be possible to locate all of them in the “animals and people marrying animals” section. the organization is an excellent idea if a teacher wants the class to read an example of a legend or an animal tale, but if one wants to examine how legends are constructed among different peoples or the role a particular animal plays in the life of the arctic people, it falls somewhat short. these minor criticisms should not detract, however, from the great value of this volume; it would be a perfect textbook for a range of culture and folklore courses. if one were to use this book in a folklore class, the introduction would be a good preparatory device for students reading these tales as it provides comprehensive background information on the people who created them. the labeling and organization of the individual tales would also be useful should an instructor plan to separate the folktales by specific ethnic groups, such as the inuit, to examine how each interprets a specific genre. photographs of various groups and artifacts plus a map of the entire arctic add substantial value to the collection. overall, what is most notable about this book is its versatility. it can be used by slavic folklorists as a reference, by teachers of folklore or culture, by parents, or the storyteller who wants fresh inspiration. all in all, it is an impressive volume which is splendidly researched by bonnie marshall and karen van deusen. the effort they expended collecting, collating, and translating these tales is laudable, and the result is a wonderful addition to the library of anyone interested in folklore, culture, or storytelling. meghan murphy-lee university of wisconsin – milwaukee milwaukee, wi usa << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain 20%) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \050swop\051 v2) /srgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel 1.4 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can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader 5.0 and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice masha and bear(s): a russian palimpsest masha and bear(s): a russian palimpsest folklorica 2015, vol. xix 75 masha and bear(s): a russian palimpsest olga lyanda-geller purdue university west lafayette, in, usa abstract when stories are scraped clean and re-written, how much of the original shines through later tales? this paper offers a palimpsest analysis (palímpsestos, “scratched/scraped again”) of the story masha and the bear based on a russian folktale, tolstoy’s tale the three bears, and the transformed folk world in the contemporary cartoon series masha and the bear. a palimpsest analysis of a text reveals different layers of readers’, listeners’, and viewers’ expectations, allowing them to challenge the story. bringing together different versions of a tale with seemingly very similar characters and plot lines, where each subsequent story is regarded as a palimpsest, adds new features to each story’s interpretation. considering the tale of masha and the bear, told differently in russian folklore, literary tradition and modern media, demonstrates juxtaposition of textual layers that produces a variety of effects, from tragic to comic. …а так как мне бумаги не хватило, я на твоем пишу черновике. и вот чужое слово проступает… anna akhmatova, poem without a hero [... and since my paper has run out, i’m using your rough draft for writing. and here a word not mine shows through… transl. nancy k. anderson] introduction due to the scarcity and expense of writing materials in the ancient world, people produced and reproduced different kinds of palimpsests, or texts written over older texts that had been previously erased, scraped away, washed out, or deleted in some other way, with the original purpose of saving parchment or papyrus. during the last two centuries, the term ‘palimpsest’ has been used mostly figuratively, referring to all sorts of texts, documents, places, etc., that contain traces of their predecessors. the focus of this paper is the tale about a little girl, named masha (mashenka) in the russian folk tradition, while nameless in some other versions, who is lost in the woods, where she meets a bear or bears, from whom she is supposed to escape. the story is told quite differently in the russian folk version masha and the bear, leo tolstoy’s fairy tale the three bears (1875), written as a part of his cycle of stories and fairy tales for young children, and the recent folklorica 2015, vol. xix 76 cartoon series masha and the bear (2009 – present). bringing together different versions of a tale with seemingly similar characters and plot lines, where each subsequent story is regarded as a palimpsest with multiple references to the previous traditions, adds new features to each story’s interpretation. considering the tale of masha and the bear, told differently in russian folklore, literary tradition and modern media, reveals various textual layers, which produces a variety of effects, from tragic to comic, on listeners, readers and viewers, allowing them to challenge their expectations and perspectives. a few remarks on palimpsest before starting to read the story about masha and the bears as a palimpsest, let us briefly discuss the concept of palimpsest, and how it can be used methodologically in literary studies. it is difficult to find a discipline where the concept of palimpsest would not be known today. (1) as sarah dillon points out, recently it “has been employed in areas as diverse as architecture, geography, geology, palaeontology, glaciology, astrophysics, biochemistry, genetics, neuroscience, neurobiology, neurocomputing and information technology” [2007: 1]. thomas de quincey, who launched the use of the term in modern literature with his essay the palimpsest [1845], defines it as “a membrane or roll cleansed of its manuscript by reiterated successions” [2003: 145]. the term ‘palimpsest’ (greek παλίµψηστος, from πάλιν, again, and ψάω, i scrape) in its direct meaning refers to a text written on material from which previous writing has been deleted by scraping, erasing, or washing. (2) the process of removing the previous material and substituting it with a later writing could be repeated, resulting in something ‘doubly palimpsest’ [thompson 2013: 64], or a second-order palimpsest. (3) sometimes, the process can be repeated multiple times, thus generating hyper-palimpsests. the term ‘hyper-palimpsest’ (giperpalimpsest) was coined by the russian linguist andrey zaliznyak, referring to the novgorod codex (novgorodskii kodeks, also novgorodskaia psaltyr’), a unique palimpsest found in 2000 in novgorod. it is currently thought to be the oldest extant russian book. zaliznyak suggests calling the novgorod codex a hyper-palimpsest because it contains dozens of layers of texts [2002: 37]. since antiquity, the concept of palimpsest has been used in a number of ways in literary tradition and beyond. (4) in linguistics, robert galisson (1990s) suggests the special terms ‘palimpsestes verbaux’ and ‘palimpsestes verboculturels’ [verbal palimpsests and verbal-cultural palimpsests], referring to words and expressions that play on verbal and cultural stereotypes that conceal in themselves other words and expressions. an example of such a palimpsest is the advertisement paris vaut bien un prix [paris is well worth a prize], about an award for ratp, autonomous operator of parisian transports, as a palimpsest of henri iv’s famous ‘paris vaut bien une messe’ [paris is well worth a mass.] (5) literary criticism and methodology have looked at textual palimpsests from different angles (6), although dillon’s monograph is probably the only attempt at a systematic approach to the palimpsestuous (7) reading. usually ‘deciphering the masha and bear(s): a russian palimpsest folklorica 2015, vol. xix 77 codes,’ or clarifying and interpreting allusions referring to other sources is not the main task of a literary analysis. in most cases, this is part of an integrative approach to a text as a whole. however, in the case of folktales, and of the folk tradition in general, considering them as palimpsests is particularly fruitful. folk wisdom as palimpsest due to the multilayered fabric of narration, many folktales are natural palimpsests. like other examples of folk verbal art, they may go through different stages of transformation, and are rarely left intact. sometimes, their message gets changed, or some contributing elements are altered or replaced by others, including their opposites. to demonstrate the productivity of reading folktales and related cultural and literary materials as palimpsests, let us offer an example of folk wisdom, where the original message is hidden by later changes. consider the proverb zhizn’ prozhit’ – ne pole pereiti [living a life is not like crossing a field/meadow]. it is usually referred to as self-explanatory: crossing a meadow is easy; however, life has never been easy, so living your life is not nearly as simple as crossing a meadow. yet this variant seems to be a later version of the proverb with an opposite message: zhizn’ prozhit’ – chto pole pereiti [living a life is like crossing a field/meadow]. (8) the original message reflected the symbolic idea of the field as a border between the two worlds (own/foreign, life/death, etc.). therefore, living a life was symbolically paralleled with crossing the border between the worlds, which was not to be understood as an easy adventure. later the symbolic meaning faded, and was substituted by a simpler version; hence rewording of the proverb, with the change of the meaning to the opposite. characteristically, in vladimir dal’s dictionary of the proverbs of the russian [1862: 295], the proverb zhizn’ prozhit’, ne pole pereiti is immediately followed by the proverb zhizn’ prozhit’, chto more pereplyt’ [living a life is like swimming/sailing across a sea]. this proverb with its parallel structure makes a positive comparison. the first, transformed, proverb holds a palimpsestuous trace of the original message. generally, the later version of folk wisdom can be taken as self-sufficient, that is, it might be enough to understand just its own meaning, without any other reference. however, our understanding can be enriched if we can trace how this meaning originally appeared, and which cultural connotations it has acquired in the course of history. a palimpsestuous analysis uncovers these layers of meaning. russian folktale masha and the bear the oldest of the three stories about the girl and the bear(s) is the russian folktale masha and the bear (in the oral tradition, sometimes mashen’ka and the bear.) there are a number of versions of the folktale. the variant the russian children most often know is the story told by m. a. bulatov [anikin 1978: 1718]. in this version masha keeps the bear busy following her orders with the folklorica 2015, vol. xix 78 famous line ‘ne sadis’ na penek, ne esh’ pirozhok!’ [‘don’t sit on the stump, don’t eat the pie!’] a synopsis of the folktale includes the following steps: (1) masha asks her grandparents to let her go to the forest to pick berries with her friends. they give her permission to go, but warn her to stay close to her friends; (2) she strays away from her friends and gets lost; (3) she finds a hut, which turns out to be a bear’s hut; (4) the bear does not let her go home; (5) masha bakes pies, and asks the bear to take them to her grandparents; (6) the bear agrees; masha sneaks into the basket, and does not let the bear eat pies or look into the basket; (7) he delivers the pies and runs away because of the dogs in the village; (8) masha is safely reunited with her grandparents. analyzing this folktale and tolstoy’s version of the tale, we will follow the classical formal method suggested by vladimir propp in his seminal works morphology of the folktale [morfologia skazki, 1928] and historical roots of the wonder tale [istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki, 1946]. what matters for a palimpsest analysis here is that masha and the bear is an initiation story. (9) the motive of initiation in folktales is palimpsestuous by nature: for the reader who is informed of the theory that the tales represent survivals of old initiation rites, it symbolically reconstructs the initiation rite as a very early form of social life. at the time of telling the story, the rite itself may or may not be still alive as a social phenomenon, but most likely has already undergone some transformation when narrated. in actual social practice, “[t]he novice whom initiation introduces to the mythological traditions of the tribe is introduced to the sacred history of the world and humanity” [eliade 1965: xv]. in the folk world, the introduction happens symbolically, thus creating the oldest basic motive for folktales of this kind. the different motifs related to initiation unite into the ‘initiation cycle’ [eliade 1965: xv]. this cycle is combined with the ‘death cycle’, or the circle of motifs describing folk ideas about death and the world of the dead, which provides the main constituents of some kinds of the folktale, in particular, of the wondertale. masha and the bear is a very old story that reconstructs a symbolic model of the world, where characters and places must have their symbolic functions. masha, the main character of the tale, behaves in a way that corresponds to her function of a novice passing through initiation. she has to submit to experiences she encounters and to gain new knowledge. initiation rites start with the character’s separation from home or family. masha’s initiation begins when she leaves her grandparents. masha knows that her initiation ritual has begun: she is the only girl to be lost in the forest. masha’s age is not specified, but the group of friends is referred to as ‘devushki’ [young girls], not ‘devochki’ [little girls]. she might be the youngest girl in the group, and her friends could have already completed their initiation. the story does not elaborate on this, and it is not important, since the story is about masha’s initiation. since she belongs to the group, she is considered a ‘devushka,’ one of the young girls, or is close to their age, and therefore is qualified to begin her initiation. masha and bear(s): a russian palimpsest folklorica 2015, vol. xix 79 although masha is warned not to leave her friends, she violates this interdiction, gets lost, and starts to call for her friends when it is too late. the other girls are not looking for her: they also functionally ‘know’ that this is masha’s initiation: she must complete it on her own, without their help. once she realizes that she is lost, masha finds herself in a forest thicket, where she enters a hut. she does not try to escape from the bear’s hut, and this is not because the bear warns her not to—after all, she has already neglected one warning. the girl knows she is not intended to find a way from the forest on her own. she stays with the bear for a while, doing his housework and thinking about the ways to escape. since she cannot do that on her own, masha tricks the bear into helping her, making him her involuntary ally. the place where the rite of initiation occurs is also symbolic. as mark graham [2010: 422] notes, “[p]laces have always been palimpsests.” if this is true of real places, it is even more so with symbolic places, and, more generally, with symbolic chronotopes, or space-time relations in the folk world [uricchio 2012: 45-49]. the bear’s hut, the tiny house right in the middle of the woods, is the timeless, sacred site of the ceremony. the bear, keeper of the hut and of the forest, promises masha will stay with him forever. the bear needs masha to cook for him, which is a task for a woman, not a little girl. masha has to say farewell to her childhood, to “the child’s state of irresponsibility and happiness, of ignorance and asexuality,” [eliade 1965: 8] and to be reborn as an adult. masha’s staying in the forest with the bear represents a modified symbolic death as an element of initiation. the bear himself serves as a master of initiation, which is very common for old tales: from the historico-cultural point of view, it suggests that “this type of initiation is the creation of the archaic hunter culture… the operators… incarnate the divinities in the animal form who in mythical times first performed initiatory murder” [eliade 1965: 23]. the fact that in the end the bear is chased away by the dogs adds to the hypothesis that the symbolic representation of the ritual in the folktale reconstructs an archaic practice from a hunter culture. as often happens, the master of initiation is an ambivalent figure, first representing some evil force that threatens the main hero, and then voluntarily or involuntarily transforming into a helper. for instance, the baba yaga often promises to do terrible things to the hero, but rarely actually does any harm. there is no ritual ‘killing’ per se in the folktale, but there are other elements that unambiguously point to the novice’s symbolic death, with her subsequent rebirth. consider the way masha tricks the bear into helping get her home: she bakes pies, puts them into a basket [korob], hides inside it and makes the bear carry the basket with her inside, the dish with the pies on her head. the basket is masha’s symbolic casket, from which she cannot get out on her own. during the trip, she must not be seen, and the bear hears only her voice. once she is safely delivered to her home, she stays in the basket until her grandparents open it to find her in good health. when grandfather opens the lid, he “cannot believe his eyes” – apparently, masha’s family did not expect to see her alive; they truly consider her adventure in the forest as deadly. the grandparents do not seem to be angry with masha, although she did not follow their advice. on the contrary, they kiss her and praise her for being such a folklorica 2015, vol. xix 80 clever girl. in terms of the initiation ceremony, they congratulate her on having successfully passed the test. this is where the traditional folktale ends. in some other versions, one more sentence is added: “and mashen’ka promised never to go to the forest alone” [masha 2006: 2]. naturally, this sentence is absent in the original, as the tale’s primary message is not about keeping promises and following good advice. this last sentence was added for didactic purposes, and it is an example of palimpsestuous supplement. it is essential for the story that masha has grandparents, not parents. since her family consists of old people, who cannot have children anymore, she must succeed in her endeavor; otherwise the life-death circle will not be complete. the absence of parents and the presence of grandparents are also quite common for archaic folktales. summarizing this part of masha and the bear’s adventures, we can conclude that the russian folktale belongs to the type of the archaic tales where the main conflict of the story and the characteristic functions of the heroes can be interpreted through the prism of the initiation rite. such an interpretation invites us to treat the story as a palimpsest, due to its symbolic representation of a social practice by the means of folklore. the three bears by tolstoy the tale the three bears is often thought to be a russian folktale, while actually it is neither a folktale nor russian by origin. in the version with which most russian readers are familiar, it is not a folk story, for it has an author: leo tolstoy adopted an english story for his cycle of tales and short stories new abc book [novaia azbuka, 1874] to instruct generations of young russian readers. tolstoy considered educating children a very important task and spent quite a few years working and reworking on the abc book and new abc book. (10) in a letter to his daughter alexandra tolstaya, he tells about his dream: по этой «азбуке» только будут учиться два поколения русских всех детей, от царских до мужицких, и первые впечатления поэтические получат из нее и что, написав эту азбуку, мне можно будет спокойно умереть [using only this abc book, two generations of all russian children, from the tsars’ to the peasants’, will learn, and will receive their first poetic impressions from it, and that, having finished this abc book, i will be able to die in peace.] [tolstoy 1978: xii, 56] a synopsis of the three bears includes some steps similar to the first story and some new ones: 1) a little girl is lost in the forest; 2) she finds a house and enters. the house belongs to three bears who are out for a walk; 3) the girl finds three objects of different sizes (bowls, chairs, and beds), and tries them. two of them are unacceptable for her; the third is “just right”; 4) she eats the little bear’s (mishutka’s) food, breaks his chair, and falls asleep in his bed; 5) the bears masha and bear(s): a russian palimpsest folklorica 2015, vol. xix 81 return, get mad, and find masha; 6) masha wakes up and escapes through the window. the bears are not able to catch her. tolstoy retells the english story “the three bears,” also known as the story of the three bears, goldilocks and the three bears, etc., recorded by robert southey, joseph jacobs, et al., which is arguably “one of the most popular fairy tales in the english language” [elms 1977: 257]. it is not my point here to trace how much tolstoy changed in the english original, while adopting the story for russian readers. my main interest is to investigate what makes tolstoy’s fairy tale a palimpsest in the russian tradition. goldilocks and the three bears can be interpreted in many ways. [bettelheim 1976: 215-224; elms 1977: 257-273; tatar 2002: 245-252] similarly to goldilocks, tolstoy’s fairy tale can also be approached from different perspectives. elms believes that the english tale “includes so few of the typical folktale elements identified by propp that a standard morphological analysis of the tale would be virtually meaningless” [elms 1977: 257]. however, such an analysis applied to tolstoy’s story gives quite interesting results. leonid chernov [2006], challenging the claim that the three bears does not contain many standard folktale elements, meticulously applies propp’s suggested sequence of thirty-one functions of dramatis personae characteristic for fairy tales, demonstrating the productivity of such an approach [1998: 23-50]. before turning our attention to a morphological analysis, let us note several elements in tolstoy’s version that are not typical for a russian folktale. first, the main human character does not have a name. nameless boys and girls are quite common for tolstoy’s stories about little children from the the abc book. in the original english version, the main character is a fox or an old woman; later their place is taken by a little girl, goldilocks. tolstoy does not give a name for the girl, although, all the bears have names: father bear is mikhailo ivanych, mother bear is nastas’ia petrovna, and the bear cub’s name is mishutka. these are traditional names from the russian animal epos, especially the father bear’s names; it is quite common for russian folktales not to provide the names of human characters, though other times they do. but it is certainly less common for children in russian folktales not to have names. this is why, when the story is being retold in the oral tradition without reference to tolstoy, the girl is often called masha, or mashen’ka, apparently, by analogy with masha and the bear and many other folktales. although there is no name in tolstoy’s story, the folk mentality reads it as palimpsest, associates it with analogous stories, and names the girl “appropriately”, making the story more ‘personal.’ second, in tolstoy the girl does not have a family; at least, we do not know anything about her parents or grandparents. on the contrary, the bears are a family. they live in a house. we know the girl lives somewhere, for the story tells us, “odna devochka usha iz doma v les.” [a girl left her house/home for the forest.] but this is all we learn about her home. again, not only do the bears have a house, on the contrary, but it is described in detail. their house in the middle of the forest is not just a hut: it is furnished, with individual utensils and furniture for each family member (bowls, chairs, beds). when the girl enters the bears’ house, she uses, or rather, misuses things not intended for her: she eats mishutka’s folklorica 2015, vol. xix 82 porridge, breaks his chair, and sleeps in his bed. when found out, she jumps out of the window, but again, the story does not tell us about a family that she has to return to. the absence of a place/family for the heroine to return to is a significant issue. as we have seen, for the composition of initiation tales it is vital that the hero have a family and home. initiation tales typically start with the hero’s departing in some way (otluchka, ‘absentation,’ in propp’s terms), and end with the happy reunion of the hero, who has successfully overcome the obstacles and solved all puzzles, with his or her family or tribe. however, here there is no family for the girl to return to. she disappears into the forest. so, is this an initiation story at all? seemingly it is, but an odd one. besides the absence of a traditional beginning, the story has a bizarre, suspenseful ending. when discovered by the angry bears, she flees and disappears. does this count as the mandatory ‘happy ending?’ on the one hand, the girl must be happy to escape from the bears: “devochka vyskochila v okno i ubezhala. i medvedi ne dognali ee.” [the girl jumped out the window. and the bears did not manage to catch her.] on the other hand, the story ends where it starts: the little girl is in the forest alone, perhaps lost again and doomed. these considerations raise yet another question: is the story primarily about the girl? strangely, the title suggests, it is not. it is not the little girl and three bears. however, titles can be misleading. as umberto eco notes: [a] title, unfortunately, is in itself a key to interpretation. we cannot escape the notions prompted by the red and the black or war and peace. the titles that show most respect for the reader are those that confine themselves to the name of the hero, such as david copperfield or robinson crusoe; but even this reference to the eponymous character can represent an undue interference of the author… perhaps the best course is to be honestly dishonest, as dumas was: it is clear that the three musketeers is, in reality, the tale of the fourth. but such a luxury is rare, and it may be that the author can allow himself to enjoy it only by mistake [eco 1994: 541-542]. it is not clear whether tolstoy is being ‘honestly dishonest’ and the title the three bears gives us a key to interpretation, or whether the title is given by mistake. looking at tolstoy’s tale as a palimpsest, and using a morphological analysis, let us suggest a positive answer to both questions. although seemingly an odd one, this is indeed an initiation story, and the initiated party is the girl who must be the main hero of the tale, even though the tale’s title does not reflect that. a key to addressing these questions can be found in the fact that the three bears is a literary tale [literaturnaia skazka], a tale that has an author [avtorskaia skazka]. there is no unanimity in literary criticism about the specifics of this kind of genre. there is not even a single view on whether literary tales should be considered a separate genre or sub-genre. (11) there seems to be at least one feature common to literary tales as a genre: they are original, culturally authentic stories. tolstoy’s story is indeed original in this sense. however, the folk basis of masha and bear(s): a russian palimpsest folklorica 2015, vol. xix 83 the tale is very strong. in fact, tolstoy’s referral to some of the most common folk motifs is very deliberate, as is, perhaps, his desire to make the story as close to the folk style one as possible, that this stylization should not be overlooked. the folk layer shows through in the new version of the story. the immanent property of its strikingly powerful ‘folk origin’ ‘showing through’ qualifies the new text as palimpsestous [khomich 2006: 230-231]. and although the three bears is not a folk story, “tolstoy’s talent and the specific soviet historical context have made the story a folktale, which is interesting on its own,” [chernov 2006]. in other words, tolstoy’s tale has acquired some genuinely folk, or in propp’s terms, ‘mythical’ features. (12) since authors usually compose their fairy tale according to a specific idea, not according to the schema required by a folktale, the authors’ strategy may determine the reader’s attitude. sometimes the author’s intention may not be evident to readers. as shown by emilia khomich’s study of literary tales, based on the example of reading evgeny shvarts’ cinderella with high school and college students, the majority of readers do not understand the idea of remaking a folktale [khomich 2006]. (13) however, tolstoy’s case is different. he does not remake a folktale, but creates an original work that he deliberately makes look like a folktale. because his target audience is young children, his position can be defined as an educational one [prosveshchencheskaia pozitsiia] [chernov 2006]. this position explains some of the unusual features of the three bears. let us now take a closer look at some of propp’s thirty-one functions, required by folktale narration. some functions are fully developed in tolstoy’s tale, others are merged together, and a few are absent, reflecting the fact that it is not an authentic folktale, although it should be noted that even genuine folktales usually do not include all of propp’s functions. f1. absentation: “one of the members of the family absents himself from home.” (14) this is where tolstoy’s story starts. however, as was mentioned, there is no family for the girl to be absent from. a formal reason for leaving is also lacking. it is not clear why the girl leaves home. f2. interdiction: “an interdiction is addressed to the hero.” there is no formal interdiction in the story. the girl does not have anyone to give her a good advice; to forewarn her about dangers in the forest. f3. violation: “the interdiction is violated.” this function is logically absent: if there no interdiction, it cannot be violated. f4. reconnaissance: “the villain makes an attempt at reconnaissance.” there is no villain [vreditel’] in the strict sense in the story. indirectly, the forest itself could be represented at this stage as a villain, because it ‘confuses’ the girl, resulting in her getting lost in the woods [chernov 2006]. f5. delivery: “the villain receives information about his victim.” the girl does not have any information to share, so the villain does not receive anything. f6. trickery: “the villain attempts to deceive his victim.” again, indirectly, the forest deceives the girl by trapping her into the woods. f7. complicity: “the victim submits to deception and thereby unwittingly helps his enemy.” incidentally, the appearance of a house in the forest can be taken as deception, because the girl could expect the house to belong to people, whereas it turns out to be the bears’ house. the forest, (which in the absence of other characters fulfills the role of the villain), lures the girl into the ‘wrong’ folklorica 2015, vol. xix 84 house. on the other hand, the house is not unambiguously ‘wrong’: before meeting the bears, the girl finds food and rest there. thus, in confusing her so that the girl finds the house, the forest simultaneously acts as a villain, and as a magic helper or donor. since propp takes functions 1-7 as preparatory for development of folktales, we can make provisional comments at this stage of the analysis. on the one hand, the structure of tolstoy’s story, at least in some elements, seemingly follows the folk structure that propp represents as universal for wondertales. on the other hand, tolstoy’s narration definitely differs from the folk one. as chernov notices, “we see a contradiction between a folktale form, a structure…by which the three bears is similar to classical folktales, and a specific author’s content absolutely different from traditional” [2006]. f8. villainy: “the villain causes harm or injury to a member of a family.” so far there is no obvious harm done to the girl (as the only representative of her family). however, propp explains that there is a vast assortment of forms of villainy, including a special sub-function 8a. ‘lack’: “one member of a family either lacks something or desires to have something.” here the girl is hungry and lacking food. at a glance, there is nothing wrong with the girl’s desire and her subsequent eating of the food she finds in the house. however, the house and everything inside it are alien to the girl. in particular, the food is not intended for the girl. so, potentially there might be danger in tasting the food. f9. mediation: “misfortune or lack is made known.” the girl realizes she is hungry and starts trying different food. then she feels tired, tries different chairs and beds and finally falls asleep. from a child’s perspective, everything seems just right, and logically the events follow one another. from the folktale perspective, the events demonstrate quite a different, ancient logic. the house, with all its ‘help’, is not all that innocent. from what we have seen in our analysis of masha and the bear, the house in the forest is the place for a ceremony of initiation. the girl, who is by now fully introduced as the hero of the story (she is now freely and boldly acting on her own, choosing what she pleases), has to die and be reborn symbolically in the forest. the food she finds in the house, which now acts as her symbolic ‘tomb’, can be seen as analogous to food for the deceased found in graves. f10. beginning counteraction: “the seeker agrees to, or decides upon counteraction.” there is nobody, except the house itself, to guide the girl through her initiation, so she decides to act, or rather, counteract on her own. she does not just do what she needs to do (eating, resting, sleeping). she tries different sizes of all utensils and furniture (spoons, bowls, chairs, beds), until she finds the right one, which, of course, is the smallest item of each kind and belongs to the bear cub mishutka. since she is a little girl, logically it does not make sense for her even to try the other sizes that clearly will not suit her. however, following folktale logic, steps and elements are tripled, so the girl starts with the biggest item, then proceeds with the middle one, and finally uses the smallest. when she finds ‘the right one’, she even laughs, as it feels so good. the girl’s laughter is particularly important. as propp notices, “the early form of the magic of laughter is based on the idea that the dead do not laugh; only the living laugh. the dead masha and bear(s): a russian palimpsest folklorica 2015, vol. xix 85 coming to the realm of the dead cannot laugh; the living must not laugh” [1999: 254]. the girl breaks the rule; therefore, she is not ‘dead’ anymore. f11. departure: “the hero leaves home.” propp specifies that a special transference of the hero might be absent, and the entire action takes place in one location. here the girl does not leave the house. she falls asleep, after having used the bears’ possessions. most of the rest of the story happens while she is asleep. so, although she does not leave the house physically, she is not actively present there until mishutka wakes her up. the girl’s falling asleep in the house can be also treated as a symbolic death. f12. the first function of the donor: “the hero is tested, interrogated, attacked, etc.” this function usually indicates the initiation of the hero, because, depending on how well the hero answers the questions or faces the challenges, that is, how well the hero knows and follows the rules of the initiation rite, he or she either passes or fails the test. however, the girl is fast asleep, (after having freely chosen everything she wanted to try in the house and causing some trouble by moving the bears’ chairs into the wrong places and breaking mishutka’s chair, etc.), and is feeling quite safe there. none of the questions the hero is supposed to answer are addressed to the girl. she is sleeping and could not have heard them in any case. so, whom are the bears addressing with their questions and threats? apparently, the audience. the young readers associate themselves with the little girl, and (while she is asleep) they assume her role. f13. the hero’s reaction to the actions of the future donor and f14., provision or receipt of a magical agent. there is neither a new character in the tale to perform the function of the donor, nor a magical agent in the traditional sense. the girl acts alone, she chooses what she wants in the house, thus combining the functions of both donor and recipient. the act of free choice is significant. in folktales, heroes cannot choose a magical gift. it is namely a ‘gift,’ for it is ‘given,’ not chosen. in general, tolstoy gives the girl much more freedom than is allowed by folktales. tolstoy wants the girl (and the reader, correspondently) to make choices deliberately; this is part of his educational project. f15. spatial transference: the girl is discovered and flees from the bears. f16. struggle: the hero and the villain join in direct combat. f17: branding: the hero is branded (wounded/marked). mishutka wants to bite the girl, but she escapes through the window. the motif of biting is significant there: biting is not exactly what one would expect from a bear, but it would leave a mark (that the initiated hero could demonstrate upon her return home). however, mishutka does not succeed in biting the girl, and she escapes unharmed and unmarked. f18.: victory: the bears chase but do not manage to catch the girl. here the tale ends. if we were to find some of the other thirteen functions, we would have to come back to the same content we just analyzed, and look for them intertwined into the first eighteen. it is not unusual even for genuine folk wondertales to have functions inverted or reversed. instead of going into a detailed analysis of the rest of the functions, (15) let us unite them into two sets. the first set describes events related to a problem and its resolution (f19, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28). these functions are represented by the girl’s facing the forest and the bears, and her escape. an analysis of these functions supports the main points of our folklorica 2015, vol. xix 86 argument made previously: tolstoy offers his readers a text-palimpsest based off an initiation tale. the second set includes the functions that are not explicitly present in the story (f20, 23, 24, 27, 29, 30, 31). their absence is reflected in the unusual beginning and the end of the story, and the amount of freedom, unprecedented for folktales, that tolstoy gives to the girl, thus allowing the young readers, together with the heroine, to challenge the traditional course of events and to make their own choices. at this stage we can conclude that tolstoy’s story is a palimpsestuous initiation tale, where the strangeness of an overall successful initiation can be explained by the three bears being an original literary tale with a very strong folk base. some traditional folktale elements are missing from the story; however, some other key elements are still present, including symbolic death and rebirth of the hero. tolstoy, most likely, did not intend to offer a continuation or variation of the folktale masha and the bear. however, since this is an open-ended story, with no explicit moral at the end, young readers are supposed to draw conclusions themselves (such as, “do not go alone to the forest. do not get into trouble. but if you are in trouble be brave, proactive, and creative.”) since tolstoy intended this tale for reading, not listening, one can infer that he did not target the youngest children, but a slightly more mature audience. by the time his readers are able to read the story themselves, they should be familiar with the russian folk tradition. therefore, tolstoy is counting on his readers to use their knowledge of the oral tradition and their imagination to fill in the gaps in the story, or, in other words, he is counting on his tale working as a palimpsest. masha and the bear(s), soviet and post-soviet animation due to the immense popularity of the folktale about masha and the bear and of tolstoy’s story, it would be natural to expect various adaptations-palimpsests of both stories in soviet and russian animation. however, this was not the case until recently, when a cartoon series masha and the bear appeared and immediately became the subject of wide discussion. before looking at the series, let us outline how masha’s story was treated in soviet and post-soviet animation. in the 20th century there were two adaptations of the folktale: a puppet cartoon mashen’ka i medved’ [mashenka and the bear, 1960], and a musical puppet animation mashen’ka [1992]. (16) there were also two adaptations of tolstoy’s tale, both keeping the original title the three bears: a cartoon about a girl named “varvarushka” [1958], and a cartoon-opera [1984]. (17) in 1937, the studio mosfilm made a black and white cartoon, also entitled the three bears (directors maria benderskaia and mili taut-korso), loosely based on both folk and literary versions, where masha does not take good care of her toys, and a plush teddy-bear mishka runs away from her into the forest. masha has a dream where she transforms into a doll and is caught by the bears. although these cartoons focus on different aspects of the original stories, there is a striking detail common to all of them: they modify the end of the originals, apparently trying to adapt them to contemporary circumstances or providing an explicit moral message absent from the originals. in aida masha and bear(s): a russian palimpsest folklorica 2015, vol. xix 87 ziablikova’s cartoon-opera [1984], although mishutka is very upset (because, as in tolstoy’s tale, masha eats mishutka’s porridge, breaks his chair, and sleeps in his bed), instead of trying to hurt masha, the bear cub helps the girl, giving her a stool so that she could reach the high window through which she escapes. then mishutka keeps chasing her – but only to give the girl her forgotten bast shoes. in the end of landau-kachanov’s tale [1960], mashenka and the bear become friends. the girl promises to teach the bear how to read and write, and the bear agrees to visit on holidays. in the 1992 version by olifirenko, masha behaves contrary to the bear’s expectations, appearing a helpless and awkward child, not the housewife he wanted, so he sends her back home. however, she helps him realize how lonely he is, and the cartoon ends with mashenka’s return and the duet that the girl and the bear sing using a popular folk tune kogda b imel zlatye gory [if i had golden mountains…]. thus, all these adaptations change the original folk message, apparently finding it unclear, not sufficient, not illuminating enough, or simply not appealing to the audience. the initiation rite, if present, is significantly modified. if there is a well-known and loved folktale or literary story, it is a common practice to create multiple adaptations of the story using different media: consider, e.g., adaptations of folktales and stories about snegurochka or kashchei bessmertnyi. however, despite interest in masha’s story and the love of longer movie versions based on folktales, in the soviet times there was no popular movie for children inspired by masha’s adventures in the forest. it is interesting to mention that there is a recent melodrama masha and the bear [2013, director vladimir fat’ianov, starring olga kras’ko and nikita zverev], rated 12+ in russia (roughly corresponding to pg-13), clearly not suitable for younger children. the folktale title is used metaphorically in the movie, to give a clue to interpreting the story of a capricious and quarrelsome businesswoman, marianna, who is stuck in the taiga with a huntsman, yegor. many soviet cartoons can be united by their common main character into a cycle about masha (mashenka) and her adventures. however, most of them, including those focusing specifically on a girl (or girls) lost in the forest and her (or their) meeting with the bear (e.g., chudesnyi kolokol’chik [the wonderful bell], 1949, based on the folktale daughter and stepdaughter, directors valentina and zinaida brumberg), have a different folk or literary background than masha and the bear or the three bears. the absence of a bright and colorful version of the folk story in modern russian cinema and animation may be what inspired the animaccord studio to create a controversial but very moving cartoon with many palimpsestuous features that we shall discuss now. masha and the bear, modern cartoon series (2009 – present) at first sight, what can be more typical for a russian folktale than a story called masha and the bear? indeed, this animation series is based on russian folktales; the story starts where it should start, with a little girl getting lost in the woods where she finds a bear’s hut. other formal folktale elements are also present. however, everything turns out to be upside down in this world. masha, folklorica 2015, vol. xix 88 the main character, is not afraid of the bear and does not try to escape from him. instead, she makes him her best friend, and each series starts with masha visiting the bear. each visit usually turns out to be a catastrophe for him and other forest dwellers. masha is a restless little fidget with vivid imagination and a kind heart. she frequently visits her friend, the bear, and demands much of his attention; her visits make his life unbearable. the bear, whom masha familiarly calls “mishka”, quite contrary to what one might expect from a bear in a folktale, is kind, caring, and endlessly patient with masha. playing on stereotypes depicting russian bears riding a bicycle, the authors portray him as a former circus bear. before meeting masha, the bear apparently enjoyed a calm and peaceful life in the forest. now, after masha has changed his world dramatically, he is always in trouble because of her. but the bear loves masha and forgives her for everything. the animaccord studio makes a few bold claims explaining the project: “masha and the bear is the first russian cartoon series that speaks the same language as children and adults all over the world … it’s a story of friendship. the characters’ relationship reflects the relationship of a child who is learning the world, and an adult who tries to help the child…despite the absence of direct didactics, each series wittily tells us about kindness, curiosity, and spontaneity.” (18) however, not every audience agrees with these claims. the cartoon has provoked a wide range of reactions, varying from great admiration to aggressive criticism. judging by many negative comments and reviews the cartoon has received, many parents and teachers see masha as a malicious character and find the story harmful and dangerous, because, according to them, it features an egoistic child who mistreats those around her. (19) however, many of these commentators seem to identify the cartoon with a folktale, or try to find an explicit moral there, as in a fable, forgetting that even in folktales the message is often quite far from being clear, to say nothing about attempting to apply such standards to a quasi-folktale. masha and the bear is told as a palimpsestuous humorous story that reevaluates and breaks numerous stereotypes. young viewers are usually happy with nothing more than a bright and funny story. for a more mature audience, however, unpacking the hidden message requires adequate common sense, some knowledge of the folk background, and a good sense of humor. although the authors claim that the cartoon is appropriate for children of age 3-9, (20) clearly very young readers will benefit from watching the cartoon together with their parents, because they will need some guidance to get the message of a particular episode, much as masha needs the bear to guide, teach, and even discipline her. the cartoon masha is given much more freedom than the girl in tolstoy’s tale, and incomparably more than mashenka from the folktale. masha is unconditionally free in the cartoon and has to learn how to tame her inner tyrant, for she is a not a true folk character who behaves according to her function. watching the cartoon as a palimpsestuous story helps viewers interpret the story from different perspectives, seeing familiar features in masha without identifying her with the authentic folk characters. she is very vivacious and curious (in folktales, some curiosity is also demonstrated, e.g., when the interdiction is masha and bear(s): a russian palimpsest folklorica 2015, vol. xix 89 violated, but this kind of curiosity is a built-in feature: the hero must violate the interdiction or there is no story). masha’s curiosity often leads her too far, and then the bear is always there to help her. the cartoon, among other things, aims at developing a critical attitude in children. masha is not presented as an exemplary character. she makes a lot of mistakes, but, with the adult’s (the bear’s) help, she is learning to correct them. as the animated series is quite long (52 episodes produced by the end of 2015), let us summarize a few of its palimpsestuous features. on the plot level, viewers typically face a crisis of expectations, for most of the characters’ behavior is opposite to what is expected in the folk world. the cartoon picks up from both folktales (e.g., a little girl alone in the forest with a bear), and literary stories (e.g., tolstoy’s the three bears: the girl damages the bears’ mode of life, and escapes unharmed). in the episodes that are more based on the folk material, masha is usually going through the rite of initiation, with all ceremonial elements present – and with the ceremony itself turning out wildly wrong. for example, in episode 1, how they met (animaccord’s translation, russian version pervaia vstrecha, the first meeting), masha, following tolstoy’s example of the girl who tries the bear’s bed and leaves it messed up, climbs into the bear’s bed and uses it as a trampoline. not only is she not punished for having made such a mess, the bear himself finds this activity fascinating, and the episode ends with him jumping on his bed. in episode 5, prances with wolves (russian version s vokami zhit’… [when in rome…]), the wolves kidnap masha, hoping for a ransom from the bear. using propp’s classification of functions, this is the mandatory function 8 where villains cause harm to the hero or a family member. however, the rest is far from the folk scenario: following o. henry’s the ransom of red chief, rather than obedient folktale victims who patiently wait for someone to come and save them, masha makes the wolves’ life so miserable that they end up paying the bear and pleading with him to take masha back. the palimpsestuous reference to the ransom of red chief helps explain a lot in masha’s behavior, but it requires the viewers’ acquaintance with o. henry’s short story. this is not hard to expect, given o. henry’s popularity in russia, among an older audience, of course. at the language level we find numerous word-palimpsests and palimpsestuous sentences that masha coins at ease. masha is the only character who actually expresses her thoughts verbally. all other characters (the bear, the wolves, the bunny, etc.) understand language but do not speak. in episode 4, traces of unknown animals, masha is particularly productive: after having mixed up different animals tracks and driving her teacher, the bear, mad with her uneducability, masha starts mixing up words. in the song of animal tracks, she suggests meeting with nosobraz, dikorog, krokomot, begedil, popukan, peligai [rhinopine, porcunocerous, crocopotamus, hippodile, parrican, pelirot] and others. (21) masha is not always good with words, but this does not bother her. whenever she does not understand a word or expression, she breaks the word into parts that make more sense to her, or changes parts of speech, simply creates new words, or uses other words by analogy with what she thinks she does know, folklorica 2015, vol. xix 90 following the logic of children’s etymology (22) that help her and all children in the world clarify this strange ‘grown-up’ language: mishka! u menia tut fokus ne udalsia. rasfokusirui menia! [mishka! my magic trick didn’t come out well. unfocus me!] (misused word, formed according to a productive model, raz-/ras[un-], by analogy with, e.g., rasputai (ep. 25, hocus-pocus); ukh, ia takaia fotografichnaia! [oh, i am so photographic!] (instead of fotogenichnaia, photogenic) (ep. 34, 9x12 picture); vo! zalepukha kakaia! [here you are! such glueness!] (forming a new word, from zalepit’, by analogy with zavarit’ → zavarukha (ep. 24, bon appétit); tut u nas stolpotvoren’ie, eto ia stolpotvoriu! [we’ve got turmoil here. i am the one who is turmoiling!] (coining a new verb using the model varen’ie ← variu) (ep. 6, lam day) masha unpacks idioms and misquotes famous sayings as she pleases, producing more verbal cultural palimpsests, in galisson’s terms: ukh, ia takaia skoraia na pomoshch’! [i am so emergenty!], (contamination of skoryi na (ruku, pod’’iom, etc.) and skoraia pomoshch’) (ep. 5, prances with wolves); a ia idu, guliaiu po lune [i am walking on the moon], (palimpsestuous a ia idu, shagaiu po moskve, from a song from the movie walking the streets of moscow (ep. 6, lam day); sladko zhit’ ne zapretish’! [living sweet isn’t against the law!] (palimpsestuous playing with the idiom krasivo zhit’ ne zapretish’! [living well isn’t against the law!] (ep. 33, sweet life). masha’s featured verbal cultural palimpsest is postel’nyi lezhim (playing with bed rest) where lezhim is a noun formed by abbreviated rezhim and lezhat’ (episode 3, one, two, three! light the christmas tree!). in this word play one might hear an echo from sergey dovlatov’s famous saying, “rezhim: naelis’ i lezhim” [1993: 271]. one last element of interest to discuss with regard to the palimpsestuous nature of the cartoon is the spin-off masha’s tales [2012-2013, 26 episodes]. a spin-off is just one of many kinds of replications. spin-offs are different from remakes, updates, adaptations, sequels, prequels, carryovers and other ‘strategic masha and bear(s): a russian palimpsest folklorica 2015, vol. xix 91 reinventions.’ (23) a spin-off “is a narrative work, derived from an existing work, with a particular focus on one aspect – a topic, character, or event – that was not central to the original.” [pfefferman 2013: 3] according to the authors, “masha’s tales is a new project by animaccord studio that characterizes masha from a different perspective. she tells well-known folktales from all over the world in her unique manner to her toys (“doll” and “mishka”): masha mixes up plots and characters and finishes each story with an unexpected and amusing conclusion.” (24) masha does not speak much in the original cartoon, although the viewers are well aware of her vivid imagination; so the spin-off focuses on a new role for masha starring her as a storyteller. masha’s tales can be classified as a double palimpsest, where the (quasi)folk character, which belongs to one level of palimpsest, refers to other folk and literary sources (the other level of palimpsest). masha unleashes her imagination and tells folktales in her own way: she deviates from the original and freely fills in with her own explanations, just to make “more sense”, as in masha’s version red riding hood (ep. 4). according to her, the moral of the fairytale is that you should visit your grandma more often, so that you won’t mix her up with a wolf. in the last episode of the spin-off series, the humpbacked horse (ep. 26), masha brings together at least five different easily identifiable literary sources (pavel ershov’s the little humpbacked horse, lewis carroll’s alice's adventures in wonderland, korney chukovsky’s the stolen sun, leonid filatov’s the tale of soldier fedot, and alexander pushkin’s ruslan and lyudmila), plus countless folk allusions. (25) one of the main characters in masha’s tale is krokomot [crocopotamus, or crocopot], whom we have already met in episode 4 of masha and the bear. put in this new context, crocomot is now recognizable as a palimpsestuous barmaglot, jabberwocky. conclusion a palimpsest analysis of a text reveals different layers of readers’, listeners’, and viewers’ expectations, allowing them to challenge the story. by bringing together different versions of the tale of masha and the bear in russian folklore, literary tradition and modern media, we have shown that the juxtaposition of layers of the text produces a variety of effects, from tragic to comic. are palimpsestuous texts intentionally created as palimpsests? in other words, do authors deliberately create intertextual palimpsestuous parallels, and if this is not the case is it legitimate to read their texts as palimpsests? did tolstoy mean for his story to be regarded as inscribed into the folk tradition, or did the authors of the cartoon masha and the bear have in mind previous versions of the story? perhaps they did not. some ancient authors who erased previously written texts to create their own documents on papyrus had no clue about what they were writing upon and could only guess how much of the original texts would transpire through later writings. in much the same way modern authors may also be unaware of the extent to which their texts actually are palimpsestuous. however, one might want to adopt umberto eco’s point of view on reading texts, especially palimpsestuous texts: folklorica 2015, vol. xix 92 nothing is of greater consolation to the author of a novel than the discovery of readings he had not conceived but which are then prompted by his readers… the large majority of readings reveal effects of sense that one had not thought of. but what does not having thought of them mean? did i know that i was playing with paragrams?.. (26) it is of no importance to reply now: the text is there and produces its own effects of sense [eco 1994: 509]. the further the palimpsest story departs from the original story, though still being based on it, the more sophisticated the structure of the narration. considering such stories as palimpsests, with numerous cross-references to other media, and in particular interpreting certain features (such as the initiation rite) as palimpsest, helps explain ‘strange’ issues. with palimpsest as a method of analysis, which helps to reveal new cultural, historic, sociological, folkloric, literary allusions, our understanding of stories becomes deeper. notes 1 sarah dillon’s the palimpsest [2007] suggests a genealogy of the concept ‘palimpsest’ in literary studies. 2 the practice of re-using parchment and papyrus was known to the ancient greeks, romans, and egyptians [russell: 99]. early uses of the term itself can be found in cicero and catullus. cicero praises his friend trebatius for writing his letters on palimpsest: nam quod in palimpsesto, laudo equidem parsimoniam. sed mirror quid in illa chartula fuerit, quod delere malueris… (ad fam., vii.18) [as to (your letters on) palimpsest, i truly praise you for your thrift. but i wonder what could have been on that piece of parchment that you preferred to delete…] (all translations are mine except where it is stated otherwise.) catullus, in a letter to varius, mocks at suffenus, a prolific but artless poet, who seems to be so pleased with his work that he writes on ‘royal papers’, instead of humbly using palimpsest papers, as his contemporaries would do: … nec sic ut fit in palimpsesto / relata: cartae regiae, novi libri… [… and not written on palimpsest but on the royal papers, new books…] [xxii]. catullus uses words of greek origin very rarely. [184] so, it is noteworthy that he actually uses the term ‘palimpsest’, and rather than just describing the concept as martial does in his epigrams, e.g.: esse puta ceras, licet haec membrane vocetur: / delebis, quotiens scripta novare voles [imagine them of wax, although these tablets are called parchment: you will be able to erase (them) as often as you wish to write anew] [martial: 177]. 3 the concept is treated figuratively as early as in plutarch, when he reports that plato compared dionysius to a palimpsest: ἀλλ’ εὗρε διονύσιον ὥσπερ βιβλίον παλίµψηστον ἤδη µολυσµῶν ἀνάπλεων καὶ τὴν βαφὴν οὐκ ἀνιέντα τῆς τυραννίδος, ἐν πολλῷ χρόνῳ δευσοποιὸν οὖσαν καὶ δυσέκπλυτον· [but he (plato) found dionysius to be like a palimpsest book, already soiled with stains and unable of getting rid of his tyranny, for, with all this time passed, it stained through and is hard to clean out] [779c 1-4]. masha and bear(s): a russian palimpsest folklorica 2015, vol. xix 93 4 this concept used metaphorically is explored in gérard genette’s famous palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré [1982], where the author creates a typology of text relationship, which includes architextuality, intertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality, and hypertextuality [1982: 1-6]. it is worth mentioning that these text relations reveal the specific property of the texts in question to refer to other texts; while the term ‘palimpsest’ refers to a particular text itself. 5 on the history of palimpsests see, in particular: dillon [2007: 11-21]. for more specific uses in different periods, see also josephine mcdonagh [1987], darby lewes [2008], raeleen chai-elsholz [2011] and kim haineseitzen [2011]. 6 among many interesting figurative uses of the term, one may mention: 7 a ‘prison palimpsest’, a term introduced by cesare lombroso [1888] to indicate erased inscriptions in prisons which allegedly could help understand prisoners’ psychology (as mentioned by his daughter, gina lombroso-ferrero, her father cesare lombroso in his book prison palimpsests [1888] “made a collection of all the inscriptions, drawings, and allegories scratched or written by criminals while in prison, on walls, utensils, and books… of lamentations, despair, and repentance, scarcely a trace, but innumerable imprecations, plans of revenge against enemies without, project of future burglaries and murders, and advice for the sound instruction of criminals” [lombroso-ferrero 1911: 155]. 8 an ‘alcoholic palimpsest’, a term introduced by e. morton jellinek in a series of work [1942-1960], to refer to a case of blackout, or acute amnesia, caused by excessive alcohol ingestion. 9 see, e.g., robert galisson [1994, 1995], and svetlana pouchkova [2010: 161-163]. 10 besides the aforementioned works by dillon and mcdonaugh, see also dorothy colmer [1970], david darby [1987], rocco capozzi [1989], michael davidson [1989], mary flowers braswell [1995]. 11 the term ‘palimpsestuous’ is used by genette [1982] in palimpsests. the adjective ‘palimpsestic’ is derived from the same concept. dillon [2007: 45] summarizes the difference between them, explaining that “[w]here ‘palimpsestic’ refers to the process of layering that produces a palimpsest, ‘palimpsestuous’ describes the structure that one is presented with as a result of that process, and the subsequent reappearance of the underlying script.” 12 i owe this interpretation to professor sofia agranovich, who mentioned it during her brilliant lectures on history and theory of folklore at samara state university (samara, russia). a similar interpretation is given by other scholars, e.g., vardan airapetyan [2001: 110]. 13 propp [1998] pays a great deal of attention to the rite of initiation explaining his morphological principle of analysis. for more specific details on the rite of initiation and other rites de passage, see mircea eliade [1965] and bruno bettelheim [bettelheim 1976]. for examples of explaining the rite of initiation in familiar folk and fairy tales, see bill derry [1984]. 14 on history of tolstoy’s creation of the abc book, see eva malenová [2010] and irina petrovitskaia [2013]. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 94 15 russian classical literature is rich with literary tales, and a number of works available in russian discuss various issues of this kind of tales [abramiuk 1991; anatolieva 1998; braude 1979; leonova 1982; lipovetskii 1992; lupanova 1981; ovchinnikova 2001]. 16 here is propp’s terminological clarification: “the stability of construction of fairy tales permits a hypothetical definition of them which may be stated in the following way: a fairy tale is a story built upon the proper alternation of the above-cited functions in various forms, with some of them absent from each story and with others repeated. by such a definition the term “fairy” [volshebnyi] loses its sense, since it is a simple matter for one to imagine a wonderful, fantastic fairy tale constructed in a totally different way… on the other hand, non-fairy tales may also be constructed according to the scheme cited … the term “fairy”, therefore, ought to be replaced by another. finding such a term is very difficult… if tales of this class are defined from a historical point of view, they then merit the antique, now discarded, name of mythical tales” [1968: 99-100]. 17 interpreting remakes has always been a controversial issue [leitch 1990: 138-149; horton 1998: 15-33, 327-334]. opinions on remakes vary widely, from labeling some of them as ‘parasitic’ and potentially at risk of charges of plagiarism [leitch, 138-139], to recognizing them as the only possible means of expression in the era when to “be in history is in a sense to be remade, to be copied. jorge luis borges’s “pierre menard, author of the quixote” is frequently invoked … as a classic of meta-remaking. but it should be remembered that the heart of pierre’s remaking is to recopy don quixote word for word. the language, the chapter divisions, the punctuation, everything is the same. only the historical moment has changed, and that, according to borges, makes the text completely different” [horton 1998: 329]. a particularly interesting aspect in the last example is that the narration in borges’ story represents pierre menard’s don quixote as a palimpsest: “i have reflected that it is legitimate to see the “final” quixote as a kind of palimpsest, in which the traces – faint but not undecipherable – of our friend’s “previous” text must shine through” [1999: 95]. 18 the formulations are taken from the english translation of propp’s morphology [1968: 26-63]. for simplicity, i will use notation f1 (function 1), etc., replacing propp’s roman numbers with arabic. whenever possible, i will group some functions into units, for the sake of convenience, especially when functions are latent or absent. 19 chernov [2006] offers a full analysis of all thirty-one functions. 20 the puppet cartoon mashen’ka i medved’ [mashenka and the bear] was produced in 1960 by director roman kachanov, the scenario is based on georgii landau’s piece; the musical puppet animation mashen’ka was released in 1992, director sergei olifirenko (both by the studio soyuzmultfilm). 21 the three bears [1958], cartoon, director roman davydov, studio soyuzmultfilm, and the three bears [1984], cartoon-opera, director aida ziablikova, studio ekran. 22 for more detail, see http://mashabear.ru/projects/ masha and bear(s): a russian palimpsest folklorica 2015, vol. xix 95 23 see, for example, http://politikus.ru/video/30885-multfilm-masha-imedved-opasen-dlya-detey.html; http://www.bolshoyvopros.ru/questions/173735-vy-soglasny-chto-multikmasha-i-medved-nuzhno-zapretit.html; http://biblepravda.com/page.php?id=885, and many other blogs, websites, and comments that condemn the cartoon as socially and psychologically harmful. 24 see the animaccord studio brochure at: http://www.animaccord.com/ assets/files/broshure_m.pdf. 25 the song of animal tracks, lyrics by vadim zhuk, music by vasily bogatyryov: зверя по следам любого / узнавать умею я! / и жирафа, и корову, / и жука, и воробья! / чьи это следы петляют / около лесных дорог? / это по лесу гуляют / нособраз и дикорог! / нет, не то! постойте, что-тo... / не другой ли зверь ходил? / а! это след от крокомота! / или это бегедил?.. / нет, конечно!.. да, конечно! / будь уверен, не гадай. / по поляне ходят снежной / попукан и пелигай! / зверя по следам любого / узнавать умею я! / и жукафа, и ворову, / и, конечно, коробья! [i can tell any animal/ by its tracks:/ a giraffe and a cow, / a bug and a sparrow!/ whose tracks are making loops here,/ along the forest paths?/ oh, it’s a rhinopine and a porcunocerous/ wandering about./ oh, no, this is not it! hold on, it’s… / isn’t that another animal walking? / ah, it’s a crocopotamus’ track! / or a hippodile’s? / no, of course not! / yes, of course yes! / be sure, don’t guess. / it’s a parrican and pelirot trotting / on the snowy glade. / i can tell any animal/ by its tracks:/ a bugaffe and a sparcow,/ and of course a cowrow!/] 26 on children’s etymology and other kinds of ‘false’, folk, and pseudoetymology, see vvedenskaia and kolesnikov [2003]. 27 the term ‘strategic reinvention’ is suggested by richard pfefferman in his book strategic reinvention in popular culture: the encore impulse [2013] to distinguish a successful “encore” replication that retains the cherished value of the original from a mere formulaic imitation [2013: 2]. 28 cf. http://www.animaccord.com/about/projects.html and http://mashabear.ru/projects/. 29 playing with lewis carroll’s original, masha chooses to reinterpret jabberwocky in dina orlovskaya’s russian translation [carroll 1979: 189] and comes out with an even more nonsensical text: мракалось, тихно корабли прислухли на увал, / лишь опоздалый попукан клухрым накарковал. / вдруг загроохало скверча, молнует тучесвод. / шагачит, злыками щелкча, огрущий крокомот. / зырками бешенски круча, но зверьно закручал / и астервлённо крюкача, морковку дёргать стал. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 96 [tvas drillig, the ships quietyly gont halm, / and only a beelated parrican coarked cluckily. / suddenly, it ruumbled sparklety; the cloudkin is litening. / it’s the hugecreaming crocopotamus is stompching, his evfangs clickening./ rockling firiously his pupals, he beastckly scrumed,/ and, afrenzily hoinking, he started pulling carrots.] 30 more on paragrams, i.e., word plays, or puns, in postmodernism can be found at john lechte: “in her work of the late 1960s…kristeva uses the term ‘paragram’ (also used by saussure)…because she is intent on emphasizing the idea that language is, in its essence, doubly constituted: it has a material base which insists poetically…in the textual message or in the text as a vehicle of communication. ‘paragram’ rather than ‘anagram’, then, because the poet is not only creating poetic language, but is equally created by this language.” [lechte 2013: 78] bibliography “about masha and the bear”, animaccord. http://www.animaccord.com/assets/files/broshure_m.pdf. (consulted 20 march, 2015). akhmatova, anna. 1995. ахматова, анна. поэма без героя [poem without a hero]. санкт-петербург: библиополис. akhmatova, anna. 2004. the word that causes death's defeat: poems of memory. trans. by nancy k. anderson. new heaven: yale university press. anikin, v.p. 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(eds.). 1998. play it again, sam: retakes on remakes. berkeley: university of california press. jellinek, e. morton. 1960. the disease concept of alcoholism. new haven: hillhouse. khomich, e.p. 2006. хомич, э.п. “фольклорный палимпсест литературной сказки (герменевтика смысла)” [a folk palimpsest of the literary tale (hermeneutics of sense)]. anthropotext–1. ed. by l.g. kim. кемеровотомск: томский университет. 229-232. lechte, john. 2013. julia kristeva. new york: routledge library editions. leitch, thomas m. 1990. “twice-told tales: the rhetoric of the remake”, literature film quarterly 18 (3): 138-149. lewes, darby (ed.). 2008. double vision: literary palimpsests of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. lanham, md: lexington books. lombroso-ferrero, gina. 1911. criminal man: according to the classification of cesare lombroso. new york: the knickerbocker press. malenová, eva. 2010. “лев николаевич толстой – детский писатель. к восприятию «азбуки» на чешском языке” [lev nikolayevich tolstoy – children’s writer. on perception of the abc book in the czech language]. opera slavica, xx, 3: 39-43. martial. 1884. extracts from martial. edinburgh: james thin, publisher to the university. masha and bear [маша и медведь]. 2006. москва: зао «росмэн-издат». “маша и медведь — опасный детский мультфильм” [masha and the bear— dangerous children’s cartoon]. христианский взгляд [christian view ]. http://biblepravda.com/page.php?id=885 (consulted 15 march, 2015). mcdonagh, josephine. 1987. “writings on the mind: thomas de quincey and the importance of the palimpsest in nineteenth-century thought”, prose studies, 10, 1. 207-224. “мультфильм «маша и медведь» опасен для детей” [cartoon “masha and the bear” dangerous for children]. politikus.ru http://politikus.ru/video/30885multfilm-masha-i-medved-opasen-dlya-detey.html (consulted 22 march, 2015). perloff, marjorie g. (ed.). 1989. postmodern genres. norman: university of oklahoma press. petrovitskaya, irina. 2013. петровицкая, ирина. лев толстой—публицист и общественный деятель [lev tolstoy—a publicist and a public figure]. москва: икар. masha and bear(s): a russian palimpsest folklorica 2015, vol. xix 99 pfefferman, richard. 2013. strategic reinvention in popular culture: the encore impulse. new york: palgrave macmillan. plutarch. maxime cum principibus philosopho esse disserendum. [thesaurus linguae graecae: a digital library of greek litereature.] pouchkova, svetlana. 2010. vers un dictionnaire des mots à charge culturelle partagée comme voie d’accès à une culture étrangère (fle). (le cas des apprenants immigrés adultes multiculturels). thèse pour obtenir le grade de docteur de l’université de strasbourg. strasbourg, septembre 2010. cited by http://scd-theses.ustrasbg.fr/2052/01/pouchkova_sveltana_2010.pdf. 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(собрание трудов в. я. проппа) [morphology of the ‘fairy’ tale. historical roots of the fairy tale]. москва: лабиринт. russell, charles william. 1867. “palimpsest literature, and its editor, cardinal angelo mai”, the afternoon lectures on literature and art. london: bell and daldy. 96-132. tatar, maria. 2002. the annotated classic fairy tales. new york: w.w. norton & company. thompson, sir edward maunde. 2013. an introduction to greek and latin palaeography. cambridge: cambridge university press. tolstoy, l. n. 1978. толстой, л.н. собрание сочинений в двадцати двух томах [complete works in twenty-two volumes]. москва: художественная литература. uricchio, william. 2012. “a palimpsest of place and past”, performance research: a journal of the performing arts, 17 (3): 45-49. vvedenskaya, l.a., kolesnikov, n.p. 2003. введенская, л.а., колесников, н.п. “приемы осмысления внутренней формы слова (виды ненаучной этимологии)” [ways of interpretation of the inner form of the word], respectus philologicus, 2003 (3), http://filologija.vukhf.lt/3-8/vved.htm. zalizniak, andrey. 2002. зализняк, андрей. “тетралогия «от язычества к христу» из новгородского кодекса xi века” [tetralogy “from paganism to christ” from the novgorod codex of the 11th century], русский язык в научном освещении, 2 (4): 35-56. microsoft word folk2006[3] sheryl format3.doc 78 text publication qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream”: a contemporary albanian fairytale kristin peterson-bidoshi union college “there is a proverb both in montenegro and in north albania: ‘every herb has its disease; every disease has its herb.’” [durham 1923: 131]. introduction: a brief overview of the socio-political factors contributing to the development of contemporary albanian literature until 1991 albania had long been the most rigidly controlled and impenetrable country in europe. ruled by the stalinist leader enver hoxha for over forty years, albania eventually turned away from her communist allies, the soviet union and finally even china, preferring to go it alone. it is not surprising, therefore, that little was known about albania outside of her borders. communist hoxha's death in 1985 and the fall of communism throughout south central europe led to widespread changes within albanian society. in 1991 the albanian government began to seek closer ties with the west in order to improve economic conditions, and initial democratic reforms including multiparty elections were introduced. in 1992, following the sweeping electoral victory of the democratic party, sali berisha became the first democratically elected president of albania. berisha began a deliberate program of democratic reform and launched an ambitious economic reform program meant to transform the country's centrally planned economy into a market economy. his comprehensive package of structural reforms included privatization, enterprise and financial sector reform, and the creation of a legal framework for a market economy. it was during this time that albanian writers and intellectuals experienced a period of relief, joy and apprehension [elsie 2005a: 4]. but freedom came with a great price. as robert elsie writes, “as the country’s socialist economy collapsed like a little matchstick house, so too did the modest institutions of albanian culture: the state publishing companies, the writer’s union and the national theaters. funding for libraries, folklorica 2006, vol. xi qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 79 concert halls, theaters and higher education vanished overnight” [elsie 2005a: 4]. throughout the 1990s private printing houses were set up and a new type of albanian literature was being published. the days of state control and censorship of publishing were finally over; anyone with funds or a sponsor could publish virtually anything. commenting on the current situation of albanian literature, elsie writes, “never in albanian history have there been so many books on the market and never has so much albanian literature, prose, poetry and other genres, been produced and published. never has freedom of thought and creativity reigned throughout the albanian world as it does today. and yet, it is often said that albanian literature still finds itself in an age of profound crisis, of loss of identity and of disintegration” [elsie 2005a: 4]. in my view, the situation is not so bleak, as contemporary albanian writers such as ismail kadare force the world to take notice of their homeland, a country that has endured geographical, cultural, political and ideological isolation throughout its vast history.(1) justifiably albania’s best known author, kadare, who currently lives in france, began his literary career in albania as a poet. his current reputation in albania and on the international scene rests almost entirely upon the strength of his prose works. kadare has been nominated several times for the nobel prize for literature and in june 2005 was named the winner of the man booker international prize. he has also recently published two twelve volume editions of his collected works, one in english, the other in french. like kadare, other contemporary albanian authors (such as dritëro agolli, fatos kongoli, luan starova and qazim shemaj) have recently moved away from writing poetry in favor of prose.(2) “verse collections, until very recently,” writes elsie, “accounted for over fifty percent of literary output in all the major centers of albanian-language publishing: tirana, prishtina, skopje, shkodra and tetova.” [elsie 2005b: 9]. modern albanian literature is for the first time in many decades free to develop in its own unique way. deeply rooted in albanian’s beliefs in medicinal herbs and their folk uses, qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream,” a contemporary albanian literary fairytale, is one of the many works of literature now flowing from the once isolated landscape of albania. shemaj’s beautifully crafted tale is a fine example of what elsie calls “the tender plant of albanian literature, whose stalks and roots have been torn out of the sparse soil so often over the course of history, [but is now] blossoming anew” [elsie 2005c: 14]. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 80 qazim shemaj was born on march 5, 1950 in the village of qesarat in the tepelena region of albania. he graduated from the eqrem çabej pedagogy institute with an undergraduate degree in languages and literatures and received a post graduate degree in literary criticism from the same institution. he worked first as a school teacher and then as an adjunct instructor at eqrem çabej university. since 1986 he has been employed as the editor of the literary journal hosteni and editor of drita, the official newspaper of the writer’s union. shemaj is the founder and editor of the literary journal mjellma (the swan) and kacamici (tom thumb), a magazine for children. in 2002 he founded ag, a literary encyclopedic journal for children. he is also a frequent contributor to the journal cicërima (chirp). shemaj has published numerous books of poetry including: “who taught me the song” and “our troubled night” and has recently published a children’s book entitled “brides and waterfalls”. he has recently submitted “veronica’s dream,” a contemporary albanian literary fairytale, to the albanian publishing house mësonjtorja. shemaj summarizes the tale as follows: the characters, all beautiful medicinal flowers, experience joy, friendship, get married, fight and love each other and with their superior knowledge of medicine, decide to build a great health center together. shemaj began writing tales in the early nineties, a time he asserts “when with the opening of wounds all else was opened—including his own instincts from childhood.” with a gleam in his eye he reminiscences about the special magic fairytales held for him, and why he decided to write tales— “when people get old, they look for magic,” he asserts, and then recalls a well known albanian saying, “the one who doesn’t have knees flies with fantasy.” shemaj’s tales are created for the “sons and daughters of albania;” as he believes that it is only through the “next generations that albania will have a chance to change for the better.” while remaining cautiously optimistic about albania’s future (he remarks that the crossing of such a vital nation with the larger world culture will bring forth positive results for albania), shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” is in fact both a plea for an end to the current corruption in albania’s medical system and a tribute to mother nature’s unique ability to cure a vast number of diseases. specifically, shemaj harnesses folk botany and native plants in this work to show the value of turning to mother nature for healing. hinting in an interview that current medical degrees can be “purchased” and that doctors are no longer necessarily well trained, shemaj reveals his underlying theme of anticorruption and the pureness and superiority of mother nature’s cures. qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 81 shemaj’s remark that, “in my tale all the doctors (flowers) have earned their diplomas from mother nature, they aren’t fake as in present-day albania,” reflects the idea that the best, most inexpensive cures for ailing health can be found only in nature. likewise, the message of shemaj’s tale, “the world can be saved from ugliness and horrific diseases only by following the example of beauty,” is a reflection of shemaj’s belief that only by turning to the simple, yet beautiful plants in nature can one truly be saved (cured). i began this introduction with an epigraph penned by anthropologist edith durham that best summarizes the albanian belief in medicinal herbs and their folk uses. herbs are commonly used throughout albania for medicinal purposes, in the preparation of food and even decoratively. as will become apparent in the notes to the following translation of “veronica’s dream,” there is a remarkably close connection between the characteristics of the flowers/herbs that are used to treat various afflictions and the symptoms of the ailment that the plant is said to cure. it is appropriate in shemaj’s text, therefore, that the thorny red raspberry which in albanian folk belief is able to cure boils and help heal skin abscesses caused by thorns, is the winner of the “miss elegance” award at the flower festival [pieroni, quave 2005: 265]. for a discussion of the relationship of plant appearance to herbal usage among the slavs see valeria kolosova, “name – text – ritual: the role of plant characteristics in slavic folk medicine,” published in the fall 2005 issue of folklorica. the notes that follow my translation of “veronica’s dream” focus on albanian herbal beliefs and the folk medicinal aspects of each of the herbs/flowers mentioned in the text. as the sources for albanian folk botany are somewhat incomplete, at times confirmation of the plants’ usage had to be obtained from sources for the balkan/mediterranean region. in addition, the sources that relate to albanian communities in italy (pieroni’s research) are also somewhat problematical, given that the arberesh (albanians in italy) might not always have the same beliefs as albanians in the balkans. however, sources relating to albania proper confirm that, for the most part, the arberesh do in fact share similar folk botany beliefs with albanians in the balkans. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 82 veronica’s dream(3) aguliçja(4) an april morning, the mist is dripping with a rainbow in its midst; it is a little chilly. frail aguliçja is dressed in green clothes with a little fuzz; over her head is an umbrella with yellow flowers. she flutters her eyelashes, fluffs up her wheat shaft and looks around. there is silence everywhere. “ah,”little aguliçja sighs sadly, “no other flower is awake! with whom am i going to play?” she heard a voice, “good morning, little aguliçja!” “good morning!” she answered, startled, and turned her head to where the voice was coming from, but she didn’t see anything. in the open pasture there were no people, animals, or flowers, only the recently blooming grass. “nobody is talking to me, maybe my ears are playing tricks on me?” aguliçja murmured to herself. “good morning, good morning, little aguliçja, it’s me,” said gishto(5) from behind a small bush. aguliçja’s face lit up as she longingly bent to embrace gishto. “welcome, gishto! i am very happy to see you. i had nobody to play with. you arrived just in time.” “yes, little aguliçe i couldn’t wait to see you, but i can’t stay for too long. i’d like to catch up with you and then head off because i am tired and my head is a little achy.” “why my good gishto, you’re crazy, have you stayed up all night again, have you …?” “ah, no, this time i have waited all night and day for you and violet to blossom. you are the first young women and brides of the spring. without you forests, meadows and pastures seem poor and gloomy, the air lacks that pleasant smell, and the birds and bees disappear when you fall asleep.” “thank you dear gishto, but wait, i’d like to serve you some tea, because it is good for you. you know that my tea soothes not only headaches, and dizziness, but also inflammation of the kidneys and rheumatism. also, you seem to have a cold. drink some tea.” “well now, happy spring little aguliçe! i am very happy to see you like this, on cloud nine, beautiful, and pure like gold. may your hands be blessed; what pleasant tea!(6) your tea has the aroma of your soul.” “don’t indulge me too much; i know you’re also joking.” qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 83 “it’s from my heart, aguliçe.” “drink your tea then, it’s good for you.” “i was only a little tired, i don’t have any health problems. i can’t stay longer, because i need to go see what those sleepyheads, the other flowers, are doing; why aren’t those lazy ones awake… goodbye, aguliçe!” “see you later, gishto.” veronica’s dream(7) miss speedwell, also known by the names medical veronica and forget-me-not, was sleeping very soundly and did not intend to wake up with those first flowers--the blue ones or the rosy white ones--until the beginning of june. in fact she slept, while many of her friends were blossoming and flowering, but, as she would later relate, she was having a very, very beautiful dream about a great white palace. in the main entrance she would sometimes see a red cross and sometimes a red half moon.(8) suddenly she found herself inside the palace and surprisingly she started to serve as a nurse in the emergency room, then in the gynecology department where she met goldhair santolina or valentina as they call her in tirana.(9) valentina was wearing a white shirt and a white hood, under which light was radiated by her golden hair, so thick that the hood couldn’t hold it. oh god, how beautiful doctor valentina was, how courteous and affectionate with the diseased! somewhere, shepherd’s purse(10) was advising a young girl, while periwinkle(11) was running with a syringe in her hand to quickly help somebody with high blood pressure… what was this dream!? was it perhaps miss veronica’s premonition?! at violet’s(12) as soon as he left aguliçja, gishto started to hum a familiar song: you flowers, how many flowers / which is the first in line / the first is aguliçja / the second is violet / then the rose and others… “oooh, i smell violet. violet, you beautiful one, whom are you shying away from, hiding like this among the bushes and fences?” violet was dressed in a bluish-purple suit, with bubbles made of mist and light. she exuded a scent that could revive one’s soul. not only this, if you drink the liquid (juice) from her leaves and flowers you will never have a headache. her tea also serves as a remedy against coughs, folklorica 2006, vol. xi 84 abscesses and epilepsy. it cleanses the blood and kidneys of sand and stones. but gishto did not have time for tea. he was there only to remind violet that the time for the dance of the flowers was approaching. “sweet violet,” he coddled her, “tell me where to go and whom to notify first about the festival of flowers?...” violet gazed with those beautiful eyes of hers and replied: “i don’t know what to say. there are many beautiful and sweet-smelling flowers, all perfect dancers in the spring breeze. you’ll be very tired, little gishto. nevertheless, for now notify lily of the valley,(13) clean nepeta,(14) periwinkle, or bedi as they fondly call her, nigella of damascus,(15) pomegranate flower(16) and … i don’t know, do you know these flowers well?” “lily of the valley is frail, clean and amicable like a teardrop. she is, as they say, a remedy for the heart and does not let you forget her; she is the enemy of memory loss (forgetfulness). in the months of april and may she dresses in bridal white and smells very pleasant. you can find her in thethi valley, tropoja, luma,(17) on dajti mountain(18) and sometimes in other places.” “in the months of may and july nepeta dresses in white, sometimes in pink. you cannot find her everywhere. you find her rarely in tropoja, kukës,(19) tepelena.(20) in other places, it’s very hard…” “almost all year long, except for during the months of may and june, bedi is dressed in green. from march to june she is covered in light blue flowers and has made her home in the region from the mediterranean bushes up to the oaks. if you are tired from the trip and get thirsty, she will serve you a juice that satisfies your thirst. her juice reduces the amount of sugar in urine and lowers high blood pressure.” “nigella has the aroma of a strawberry. from may to june she dresses in blue and green or dark violet and is distinguished among pastures and shrub lands.” “if you need nigella perfume, you can ask her for it. i believe you know the pomegranate flower. and you would recognize the taste of her fruits.” “don’t get weary, violet my dear,” interrupted gishto, who had been listening attentively so far, “i know the flowers well. i am leaving right away.” with churchsteeples agrimony(21) within three days gishto notified more than half of the flowers. all of a sudden, upon his return, he saw churchsteeples agrimony. she was qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 85 wearing a long green thick pleated dress down to her toenails. on her head was a yellow cloth as she had not finished the housework yet, that is the mopping and sweeping. “where have you been gishto, we haven’t seen you at all?! where are you coming from and where are you going?” agrimony spoke with her piercing voice. gishto was short: “i needed to alert some flowers about the upcoming festival.” but churchsteeples didn’t give up: “did you forget me? do you mean to tell me that you couldn’t meet me, that you couldn’t find me?! i’m everywhere in kukës, peshkopi, krujë, tiranë, durrës, elbasan, most often you can see me in “kulla e lumës”(22) where we have our headquarters. tell me what’s in this festival. only dancing? don’t you think i have the body of a dancer? look how lean i am, look at my thin waist. i’m wearing a puffy dress just perfect for dancing, and this yellow head kerchief… have you not heard the song, ‘here goes the yellow kerchief’? it is dedicated to me. but you, gishto, are not taking me into account.” churchsteeples was talking and grabbing at him; she was not going away. from time to time gishto sighed from irritation. “what’s wrong gishto, did i upset you? or is it that you are sick? why are you crouching like that? are your kidneys hurting? you look pale. no, tell me. i can cure your diarrhea, kidney and gallbladder, as well as your jaundice. ah, i wish there were a skill contest at the festival of flowers!” “say something gishto, or are you afraid that you’ll lose your voice? i can cure you, even if you have inflammation of the tonsils or a sore throat. don’t try to spare me, gishto!” and churchsteeples put her arm around him. gishto hunched down even further. “oh, you don’t know this gishto; a few days ago a well known singer who was suffering from a sore throat came to me. i had him do some gargling and immediately he got his voice back. a nightingale voice, as they say.(23) so do not be afraid to talk at length here. you can even sing the whole day and night and still your throat will be as clear as amber.” “you’ll have to excuse me my dear agrimony,” said gishto, “it is getting dark and i need to go. we can talk about the festival another time.” “no, no, today you’ll stay for dinner at my place!” insisted churchsteeples. holding on to gishto’s buttons, she wouldn’t let him go. gishto politely removed her hands from the buttons of his vest and promised that he would come back within a week. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 86 “i barely escaped the churchsteeples’ claws,” he said to himself leaving. “she is really hospitable, but hard to get rid of.” maidenhair of the springs(24) next to a silver spring, on a lime stone, slender adonis or maidenhair of the springs, son of the eminent family of ferns, was sitting and thinking. he noticed as gishto turned to drink some spring water and greeted him kindly. gishto told him that around the middle of the month of may, when most of the flowers have bloomed, they will have a festival and maidenhair should go there because they were thinking to appoint him as part of the judging committee. “thank you, gishto.” “good night young man!”, said gishto smiling as he disappeared into the dark. as is understood from his first and last names, one can find maidenhair of the springs near water, springs and fountains. besides the ability to prepare cough and cold syrups for children, he has another quality, he likes beauty very much, and therefore meditates near springs where beautiful flowers like brides gather, bath and play in the evenings. probably because he can recognize beauty, they thought to elect him to the misses competition committee. they say that for a time maidenhair was seeing malva, mallow of the forest,(25) but she couldn’t stay by the water springs all the time, so they split up. now he is looking for another beauty. rumor has it that he has his eye on the flower shepherd’s purse. some say he’s interested because she has a purse full of gold, some say its because she is beautiful, others say its because she is very capable of curing hemorrhages. the fairytale of aunty burnet(26) even though it was a short spring night and it was late, aunty burnet was reciting a fairytale to pyrethrum,(27) bird's-foot trefoil(28) and lungwort.(29) once upon a time there was a witch dragon.(30) you know, the dragon is our greatest enemy. she burns and dries up the flowers because she is mean-spirited, hideous and cannot stand beauty. she does not like flowers that are admired and sung about by people. the things that this witch dragon had done! what a big mess she had created! poppy flower heard about her deeds.(31) the frail and qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 87 beautiful poppy had heard about those brave men who had cut the witch dragon’s head and decided follow their example. she went to fight the witch dragon. but the witch dragon being a witch dragon defeated the poor thing. if you could have seen the poppy all in blood. poppy has two sisters: iris(32) and valerian.(33) valerian has the ability to put people to sleep. after she soothed her wounded sister, she put on servant’s clothes and went to the witch dragon, pretending to look for a job, because she didn’t have any parents and had no other means to support herself. the witch dragon ordered valerian to bring her a glass of water to see how good a servant the little miss was. valerian secretly mixed in her medicine in the glass and the witch dragon fell dead asleep. as the witch dragon slept valerian ran to call iris. iris arrived in a hurry, just in time to cut the witch dragon’s head. “that is why poppy, valerian and iris are called the ‘three sisters of life,’” aunty burnet explained. “they saved us from the witch dragon.” fairytale in your ear, health wishes from us.(34) the black widow by the beginning of may gishto had notified all of the flowers about the festival. in order to complete this task, he got help from the butterfly machaon swallowtail(35) especially on the long trips: from pashtrik in kosova, to qelqëz in frashër, from tomorri and korabi in theth and lurë, from the sharri mountains to the mountains of bozhur in çamëria, from the valbona in kallama.(36) with swallowtail gishto made many visits and delivered many invitations, but out of the blue there was an unfortunate incident that almost took swallowtail’s life. as soon as she landed on the wings of the slim red raspberry,(37) a spider web thread trembled. the spider, as soon as she got the signal, attacked and wounded swallowtail gravely. she was one of those dangerous spiders called the black widow, because of their dark deeds; they even tear their husbands in pieces. missy [swallowtail] was lucky to escape. miss swallowtail orders drugs machaon, who gives his last name to this creature with “painted wings” (swallowtail), was grandson of apollo, the god of light, poetry and music. the swan, eagle, wolf, snake, bay tree, and olive tree are dedicated to apollo … machaon was the son of asclepius, god of health. how could the swallowtail not be like her predecessors?! folklorica 2006, vol. xi 88 gishto was devastated; he thought that he had lost his precious friend of divine blood, when he took her to the medical center of the foxglove brothers (also known as finger flowers).(38) but she, being a machaon and a great-granddaughter of apollo, did not give up. “go ahead, gishto,” she said, “look for these drugs in pharmacies. look for insect bite medicine at dr. parsley’s(39) and houseleek’s.(40) the venom of the black widow could even surpass that of the venom of a snake, therefore you should look for medicine at lady kingela’s;(41) she is also known as vuzhë, shpëndër, beshtë… get some medicine to prevent hemorrhaging at st-john’s-wort.(42) at comfrey,(43) violet and nepeta get anti-venom medicine, at drug fumitory (44) ask for medicines to stimulate heart beat and appetite, while at lungwort you can find medicine to regenerate lost tissue. also go to blackberry’s pharmacy;(45) her medicine helps slow healing wounds.” gishto immediately complied with her requests and his swallowtail friend felt much better within three days. nevertheless she had to relax a few more days at the medical center of gishto’s friends. the foxglove brothers the foxglove brothers, or “finger flower”, as we like to call them from now on, look very much alike. they have a straight pilose body. grecian foxglove and yellow foxglove grow their body to one meter, as if they are cut to that height. rusty foxglove grows to one meter twenty centimeters. even their tastes and aspirations are more or less similar. all five of them are dedicated to the treatment of heart disease. in the summer they wear each other’s tones. the grecian foxglove differs a little from the others in taste; he wears a grayish white shirt with bell shaped flowers and reddish or purple dots and lines. yellow and rusty foxglove wear shirts with yellow and yellow-torusty flowers. until june, before his flowers come out, the purpler (purple foxglove) wears a suit with bluish gray or grayish green leaves. in the months of june and july he wears a reddish purple shirt. that is why his brothers call him the purpler. we must also add that he is a blazing adorer of miss veronica. the brothers took great care to give miss swallowtail everything she needed because they were close friends of gishto’s. gishto says that they are his steadfast friends, in good and in bad times, now and forever. one can find rusty in valbona valley, korabi field,(46) mirdita, polis mountains, guri i topit and vora; grecian foxglove is found from qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 89 the lowlands of the coast to the beech region: in maja e hekurave, middle albania, libohova, mursi, etc.; yellow foxglove is in luma, qukës, bërzheta mountain, valley of upper devolli, maranaj, prekël of shkodra, vermosh, etc; purpler lives mainly in the sparse mountain and shrub forests, in the sun covered plains and hills; only straw foxglove, as a capital city resident, doesn’t go further than the tirana meadows, but there he serves you with no hesitation or laziness. gishto in the bumble-bee’s trap as soon as swallowtail’s health improved (in three days as we already mentioned), gishto started working on his last few announcements for the festival. as he was hurrying to get some help from a worker bee, he fell in a wasp’s nest and got wounded pretty badly by an angry bumble-bee. gishto had never made a mistake like this, but here you go … he barely escaped using a trick -he pushed a beetle that happened to be close by in front of the bumble-bee and hid behind the purpler. lucky for him… once again he found himself in his friends’ hands. the washerwomen just as people communicate with words, flowers communicate with aromas. the word all over the place was that the purple willow(47) had hooked up with traveler’s joy(48) and they were on the verge of getting married. gishto and miss swallowtail were strolling along the stream. over there, dressed in white, yellow and green they saw churchsteeples agrimony, soapwort,(49) stork’s-bill,(50) winter savory,(51) aunty burnet, little lawn daisy,(52) white wild strawberry,(53) bird's-foot trefoil, chicory,(54) purple deadnettle(55) and bugloss(56) who were bathing themselves in preparation for the wedding. the sweet breeze that was blowing that morning was ruffling their thin dresses. their whispers were mixed with the rustling of the water and were very much muffled. meanwhile stork’s-bill, started to sing jokingly: flow silver water! where is the bride, where is the groom … bugloss, who could not wait to vent, responded: among friends they say many words: folklorica 2006, vol. xi 90 “the groom is a dark man, the bride is as white as an eel” “they are right to say our groom is like a gipsy; you find him along steams and rivers , with gypsies making baskets,” joked stork’s-bill. “leave others alone in their business, why are you gossiping?” grouched aunty burnet. “it’s not fun unless you can gossip about the couple, aunty burnet, what are you talking about?” soapwort said. “washing and rinsing, that’s all we do. they will love each other more this way.” “and she knows how to twirl!” chicory replied and started to sing: as white as the milk, twirling is your specialty. “ha – ha – ha!” laughed churchsteeples agrimony. “if somebody were near her she would jump in his arms and twirl like an adder:” o silver thin thread, something bad fell on you: you jump on everybody’s arms… “look who’s talking!” replied the purple deadnettle, “churchsteeples that clings on you and becomes like a burr. if somebody else said it, maybe…” “mind your own business!” aunty burnet scolded them again. “it is not tasteful to talk like this,” intervened winter savory. the stork’s-bill who couldn’t stop pecking (talking), responded: who is throwing us from bank to bank… be careful of the bumble-bee… little lawn daisy was listening in astonishment to the teasing and jokes of the older ones directed at the couple and at one another. smart purple deadnettle could not take it anymore and interrupted the gossipers: “whoever has the evil in himself, gossips back and forth.” meanwhile, somewhere near, the rustle of the purple willow’s arms was heard and the washerwomen fell silent. the hunchback [black henbane](57) “he’s got it right, he minds his own business and does not mess with others,” said swallowtail about the hunchback. “he even doesn’t let you come near him,” gishto added, stirring the conversation… qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 91 the old man hunchback, known in many places as matërgona or matërgora, is a bent old man, about one meter tall. he usually wears dark green clothes, full of buds. his arms and forearms are also navy green and pilose. he likes to live as a wild man in places that are uncultivated, abandoned, near ruins, like a loner, in the midst of bushes or in between oaks, where it is cool and on lime soil. no other places. he can catch your eye in the months of may, june and july. during these months, to protect himself from the sun, as many ancient old men do, he wears a yellow kerchief with navy stripes on his head. then, slowly, like magic, he pulls some fruits in the shape of eggs, as big as a turtle, only not white, but yellowish green, as if they are full of poison out of his kerchief. if you touch them even slightly they pop in your hands and gray colored seeds burst in your face like pellets. “people who waste their time,” rants old man hunchback, “don’t let you work. and then, they want you to keep them alive with medication. but, it is not their fault, because i also cure fools and trembling creeps.” he doesn’t want you to come near him, because he is busy at the lab, preparing vitamins a, c, essences, oils and substances that are not known yet. the hunchback has real hypnotic qualities. with his medications he can cure shivering, manic and asthmatic people, people that suffer from rheumatism etc., but be careful, ask an experienced physician, because, if the dosage is even a little over, that’s it. the old man magician is as capable as he is mysterious and a trouble maker. a nightingale sings at the door the couple decided not to separate the bride’s from groom’s day; they would celebrate the wedding together, with guests and relatives from both sides.(58) apart from the relatives: wild strawberry of the gardens, white willow,(59) mr. english ivy,(60) the cornflower brothers,(61) honeysuckle,(62) who would treat guests with sweet and good smelling drinks, the tailor that cut the outfits for the bride and groom, mrs. muskscent stork’s bill, calamus,(63) the musician of the party, and the honorary guests: mrs. oleander,(64) mrs. myrtle (65) and mrs. bitter orange,(66) in the beautiful evening of may 12th, under the light of the moon with a slight river breeze, the holy patriarch brothers and the divine sons of the nymph: the white lily(67) and the yellow pond folklorica 2006, vol. xi 92 lily,(68) with its residence in the lakes of shkodra and prespa, as well as the lakes of lura and dumre arrived. and then, carrying royal gifts for the bride and groom, the beautiful centaury(69) of the gentian family of the king of illyrians gent, the victor of the august fever, arrived. it really was a wedding of royal and divine proportions. that night, many sweet songs, as only the flowers in the breeze know how to sing, were sung: the groom’s cousin, purple deadnettle, began to sing your dress buttercup-o-buttercup, why weren’t you made a sun to warm up the world instead you were made a moon, to take my brother(70) after a while, the wild strawberry, a cousin of traveler’s joy, started singing: a nightingale sings at the door, listen to what it is saying: “best wishes to the couple!” also lily of the valley sang a very beautiful song: hey you white cut-waste, why are you so beautiful! along the river banks, the little song of the dove flows. on the wedding night, many aromatic drinks were poured: juices and wines from the red raspberry, bilberry,(71) strawberry, anis flower, and grapevine… a group from the wedding party became very tipsy. the quarrel between black nightshade(72) and bittersweet nightshade(73) a wedding is never without joy, singing and dancing, but it is also hard to get by without a squabble. quarrels do not belong in the world of beautiful and aromatic flowers, but somehow they happen even there. the wedding planners did not pay enough attention; they put black and bittersweet nightshade next to each other. they were probably thinking of the last name sweet. hog-wash, there is no sweet bitter nightshade. a bitter nightshade is a bitter nightshade. if he is black, it is even worse. the black nightshade says to the bittersweet: “i don’t know why they call you nightshade too. while i am so swift, straight bodied and well known in the malësia e madhe and lugu i rjollit,(74) you are a qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 93 bush that crawls in scrublands and near waters. you have become annoying in places from bregu i matit, fushë-kruja, divjaka forest to velipoja and bottom of shkëlzeni.(75) you old thing.” “that’s right,” responds the bittersweet, “and you, poor dwarf, cannot grow taller than sixteen centimeters, while i can grow up to two meters. as far as beauty goes, don’t forget, that you are also known as dog’s grapes, while i am known as snake’s coral. you can’t compare us: me a coral, a precious thing, while you are dog’s grapes. a snake represents bravery and agility. to whom do you belong to, tell me! the dog! he squashes you and then pees on you before he leaves. you are a miserable plant, while i am a bush. have you heard how poets write about shrubs, about flowers that hide in the shrub’s armpits?” “i have heard,” responded the black nightshade enraged, “but listen you bush-o-bush, you cannot even support your flowers for two months, from june to august, while my white flowers and my fruits that look like black diamonds give joy to people even into the fall. no animal could mess with them, because it would be poisoned immediately. and i am so useful for people! in me they find medication for rheumatism, ulcer, tumors, swelling and burn wounds.” “live as much as you want, you are still a dog-grape as long as you live,” interjected bittersweet nightshade. “like i am less capable then you are? don’t i also poison the animals who mess with me? and don’t brag about medications, because i have more than you. with my help, besides what you mentioned, others can be cured, people who suffer from bronchial problems, involuntary trembling and eczema etc.” “you yourself are an eczema, scabies, creeping climber,” unleashed the black nightshade onto the bittersweet one, wanting to whip him with his branches. the affair would have been a lot worse if the holy patriarch brothers had not interfered. it turned into a big mess. also, tansy(76) the mountaineer, who comes from mountain areas of razmi and oroshi, well known as a balsamic soother and determined fighter against the parasites; goat’s rue,(77) who knows how to reduce the amount of sugar in blood like insulin and increase the flow of milk in mothers; houseleek, known everywhere by the names thonja (alb: thonja) or ear drug (alb: bar veshi) got between the nightshades. ear drug was constantly saying to them “listen, listen”, but they were turning a deaf ear. only the critical look of beautiful snowball tree,(78) the one that beautifies the gardens of tirana, korça and shkodra, made the two nightshades, those pompous roosters, stop talking nonsense. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 94 three days of the flowers’ festival next to the rainbow waterfall, three days after the wedding, and the wedding guests had settled down, nightingale valley woke up more beautiful than ever. this was the place where all the beautiful flowers arrived from all over the country: lily of the valley, yellow-hair fenugreek,(79) darling esmerina, as they call rosemary(80) in tirana, slim red raspberry that makes those red fruits like rubies, delicate and quiet dandelion,(81) clary,(82) peony,(83) and mallow of the forest also known as malva sylvestris, aromatic sage(84) and many, many others that cannot be counted. the festival continued for three days and three nights under the sweet sounds of the nightingales, the fluttering of the butterflies, the twinkle of the fireflies and the buzz of the bees. there was a parade so big that “there was no place to drop an apple”; you couldn’t tell the participants from the spectators.(85) the evaluation committee, composed of different personalities with fine tastes and knowledge in the fields of esthetics, music, costumes, choreography and medicine, had difficulty determining the winners. thanks to the temperate spirit of the beautiful and good smelling flowers, there was no quarrel or jealousy. it was said that there was some interference by the black nightshade, but dr. celandine(86) cut him short. there was also some word that the shepherd’s purse flower had paid somebody under the table, but this was not true. nevertheless, the jury decided to give these prizes: miss greatness went to peony, miss aroma went to violet, miss elegance went to red raspberry, miss smile went to aguliçja, who is the first one to smile to the spring. also, three prizes were given for miss intelligence: to dandelion, esmerina and shepherd’s purse flower. while testing for intelligence, it was identified that the most beautiful and aromatic flowers also had the most profound knowledge in the field of medicine. on this occasion dr. celandine proposed that, over there, between the mountain and the sea, a big medical center providing all kinds of services be constructed. the health citadel just as they spread their pleasant smell and provide the nectar for honey, the beautiful and good smelling flowers, straight forwardly, qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 95 without interference and violence, without malice and jealousy, taking into account only their values, elected the board of directors for the different wards: doctor anise(87) who is said to increase the flow of milk in mothers and therefore reduces breast pains, the purple willow, gold-hair valentina, nepeta and shepherd’s purse would constitute the board of directors for the physicians in the gynecology ward. neurology would be directed by the team composed of these doctors: rosemary esmerina, lily of the valley, wild thyme(88) and yellow pond lily. traveler’s joy would lead the ward of the skin diseases; pediatrics – sisters robert geranium(89) and bloody geranium(90) as well as peony and chamomile.(91) during the inauguration of the hepatology ward in which the following doctors were to lead: dr. dandelion, agrimony, soapwort (in the infection section), and horsetail(92) against cirrhosis, dr. dandelion, among other things, said: “the world can be saved from ugliness and horrific diseases only by following the example of beauty”. at the oncology hospital they decided to put dr. celandine, famous for fighting tumors and cuckoo pint,(93) known for fighting nose and breast cancers in charge. other wards were also inaugurated at the health citadel: toxicology with dr. kingela and dr. parsley; cardiology with the foxglove brothers, dr. hawthorn,(94) dr. magnolia(95) and dr. valerian; urology with black spleenwort(96) and bearberry;(97) hematology with centaury and goat’s rue; laryngology with bellflower(98) and sage; gastrology with dr. ricini(99) and thorny cocklebur or “the white eye”;(100) stomatology with marshmallow;(101) surgery with anesthetic asparagus,(102) morphinic black bryony(103) and the lumpy bladder-cherry.(104) the birthing center was going to be directed by ergot(105) and st john’s wort. in the health citadel, there is order and exemplary cleanliness, health care is free of charge, polite and dedicated, because none of the doctors received their diplomas unfairly; their degrees were granted, based on their unique abilities, by mother nature herself. sorry, i almost forgot the emergency room. aguliçja was appointed director. she was greatly moved by the decision of the board folklorica 2006, vol. xi 96 of directors and cried because she only had fifteen days until her vacation started and she could rest, as she had been blooming since the beginning of spring. “don’t worry,” rosemary said to her, “in fifteen days, at the beginning of june, veronica can replace you.” and that’s what happened. waking up, veronica started rubbing her eyes. was this really a dream, or was it like a dream!? “goodbye for now, my sister flowers, until next april,” aguliçja replied, “even in my sleep i will not be able to push from my mind the wise words of dr. dandelion: ‘the world can be saved from ugliness and horrific diseases only by following the example of beauty.’” the end notes 1. albania has traditionally been geographically isolated within its mountain ranges. cultural isolation was most prevalent during the period of the occupation of the ottoman turks. she has just recently emerged from over forty-seven years of political and ideological isolation under communist rule. 2. other contemporary albanian authors worth mentioning include: musa ramadani, beqir musliu, zija çela, jusuf buxhovi, eqrem basha, sabri hamiti, ylljet aliçka, diana çuli, mehmet kraja, visar zhiti, zejnullah rrahmani, bashkim shehu, kim mehmeti, preç zogaj, teodor keko, besnik mustafaj, ridvan dibra, lazër stani, mira meksi, elvira dones, mimoza ahmeti, arian leka, agron tufa, virion graçi, ardian-christian kyçyku [elsie 2002c: 13]. 3. this text is translated from the albanian original, “ëndrra e lulemizës”. i am thankful to faith wigzell, editor of folklorica, for her comments and suggestions and to union college for providing me with a timely grant for in-country research. i remain especially grateful to qazim shemaj for the informative interview he gave me in which he offered valuable insight into the making of a contemporary albanian literary fairytale and information on albanian herbal medicine. i would also like to thank the author for the opportunity to offer his work to an english speaking audience. it is my sincere hope that this translation does justice to the beautifully crafted albanian original. 4. the notes that follow provide the latin, english and albanian botanical names of the flowers. all translations from the albanian are mine. the photos of the flowers that follow are courtesy of wikipedia (www.en.wikipedia.org) and are in the public domain. lat. primula officinalis; eng. cowslip; alb. aguliçe. cowslip is used mainly to treat nervous conditions and headaches [vangjeli et al. 1993: 127]. aguliçe (from agim) means “little dawn” and is the first flower to blossom in spring. the juice from the plant is used to heal insomnia, cough, chest pain, bronchitis, internal organ pain, qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 97 inflammation of the kidney and bladder and rheumatism [sejdiu 1984: 188-89]. 5. gishto is a mythological figure from albanian fairy tales. he is as small as a little finger (gisht: finger) and is similar to tom thumb. despite his size, gishto is always able to outsmart everyone. 6. the albanian expression “të lumshin duart” [may your hands be blessed, i.e. well done!] is typically used as praise for someone’s cooking. 7. lat. veronica officinalis; eng. speedwell; alb. lulemiza (fly flower). the stems, leaves and roots are used as an astringent, expectorant and diuretic to treat coughs, stomach and urinary disorders, rheumatism and as a general tonic [pieroni, quave 2005: 266]. 8. the red cross organization is well known to albanians as one that provides medical assistance. the author has chosen to represent christianity in the image of the cross, and has added the image of the crescent moon to represent islam, the dominant religion of albania. 9. lat. santolina chamaecyparissus; eng. lavender cotton; alb. santolina or valentina. lavender cotton is used as an antitussive to suppress coughing [pieroni, quave 2005: 265] and is said to be effective against snake bites [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 337]. 10. lat. capsella bursa-pastoris; eng. shepherd’s purse; alb. kacimadja or qesja e bariut. shepherd’s purse is a common herb native to albania [pieroni, nebel et al. 2002a: 179], and is believed especially useful in preventing kidney stones and urinary tract diseases. it is also used to cure fever and hemorrhages [sejdiu 1984: 63]. 11. lat. vinca minor; eng. periwinkle; alb. meneksheja vogelueshe. used in folk medicine to ease constipation, stop bleeding and to improve upset stomach [sejdiu 1984: 252].shemaj’s text supports the idea that the periwinkle’s ability to help with high blood pressure is also well known in albanian folk belief. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 98 12. lat. viola odorata l.; eng. violet; north alb. meneksheja; alb. manushaqja. the violet is used as an anti-inflammatory and diuretic and also as a facial skin toner and perfume [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 340]. 13. lat. convallaria majalis; eng. lily of the valley; alb. lotzonja. apart from its use in perfume, in the albanian folk tradition, of lily of the valley is used to regulate the functioning of the heart and other cardiac functions, as well as treating epilepsy and being a diuretic and purgative [sejdiu 1984: 82]. 14. lat.nepeta cataria; eng.catnip; alb.nepeta dliruese. apart from the use of catnip as a strong perfume, it is used in the albanian folk tradition to strengthen the nervous system against headaches, coughs and irregulation of the digestive system [sejdiu 1984: 157]. 15. lat: nigella damascena l.; eng. love-in-a-mist (or devil-in-the-bush); alb. nigelë e damaskut. to date, no known documented source for albanian folk medicinal use. the herb is related to cumin, native to the mediterranean region and is used mostly as a spice and in perfume [van wyk, wink 200: 216]. shemaj’s text supports the idea that devil-in-the-bush is used in albania for its aromatic qualities. 16. lat. punica granatum; eng. pomegranate; alb. luleshege. used as an antidiarrhoeal and regarded as valuable for helping with stomach problems and heart pain [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 389]. qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 99 17. places in the northern albanian alps. 18. near tirana in mid-albania. 19. town in northern albania. 20. town in southern albania. 21. lat. agrimonia eupatoria; eng. church steeples or agrimony; alb. rodhëza. the albanian word for this flower is a diminutive of rodhe which means both a “burr” and a “pest” (human or otherwise). agrimony is believed to help ease swelling, diarrhea, gallstones, appendicitis, and incontinence [pieroni, quave 2005: 264]. 22. the luma tower, a place in north albania. 23. “a voice like a nightingale” is an albanian expression for someone with a good, strong voice. 24. lat. adiantum capillus-veneris; eng. avenca (or maidenhair fern); alb. shapkeziu i krojeve (blackhat of the springs) or fier krojesh (spring fern). although documented albanian sources only mention its use in enhancing uterine contractions during delivery [pieroni, quave 2005: 264], shemaj’s use conforms to general european herbal usage in pulmonary disorders [grieve 1931/2006]. 25. lat. malva sylvestris; eng. mallow; high mallow; alb. mullaga e pyjeve, malva. used as a mild laxative to treat menstrual pains, sore throat and bronchitis and as an intestinal depurative to relieve bloating and reduce flatulence [pieroni, quave 2005: 265], mallow is also believed able to intensify uterine contractions during childbirth [pieroni, nebel et al. 2002a: 179]. 26. lat. pimpinella saxifraga; eng. burnet saxifrage; alb. pimpinelia iriqëz (iriqëz means “little urchin”). juice made from the root is used to cleanse wounds, cure kidney and bladder diseases, free the lungs from phlegm and to help with asthma [sejdiu 1984: 176]. 27. lat. chrysanthemum cinerariifolium; eng. pyrethrum; alb: barpleshti (flea drug). white-flowered pyrethrum is widely used as a natural insecticide [keskitalo 1999: 15]. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 100 28. lat. lotus corniculatus; eng. bird's-foot trefoil; alb. thuapula (chicken’s claws). to date, no documented albanian folk medicinal uses. 29. lat. pulmonaria officinalis; eng. lungwort; alb. lulelepuri (bunny flower) or bar i mushkërisë (medicine of the lungs). while there are no documented albanian folk medicinal uses for lungwort, sejdiu does refer to the flower as “medicine of the lungs” [sejdiu 1984: 191]. 30. popular dragon-like character from albanian fairytales (alb: kuçedër). 31. lat. papaver rhoeas; eng. poppy; alb. lulekuqe (red flower). the poppy is used as a mild sedative for children, mostly to relieve pain from teething [pieroni, quave et al. 2002b: 229] and to help heal sore throats [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 338]. it is also used to induce sleep and is given to infants at night so that they will not cry [durham 1923: 132]. 32. lat. iris germanica; eng. iris; alb. luleshpata (sword flower, because of its leaves). no documented albanian medicinal uses. 33. lat. valeriana officinalis; eng. valerian; alb. valeriana. mainly used in albania to treat insomnia, it is also believed to prevent witches from entering a home if it is stuffed into keyholes [canziani 1928: 213]. qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 101 34. “përralla në vesh, shëndetja prej nesh” is a formulaic expression in the closing of albanian fairytales. 35. lat. papilio machaon; eng. swallowtail; alb. krahëshkruara (painted wings). the name for this butterfly comes from greek mythology. machaon was the son of asclepius, the greek god of health [arieti1983: 125]. 36. albanian lands in albania, kosova and greece. 37. lat. rubus idaeus; eng. red raspberry; alb. mjedra. the red raspberry is used as a diuretic, to cure boils and to help heal skin abscesses caused by thorns [pieroni, quave 2005: 265]. 38. lat. digitalis (species); eng. foxglove; alb. luletogzi or lulegishti (finger flower). there are no documented albanian folk medicinal uses for the foxglove. in the balkans foxglove is a widely used herbal medicine with a recognized stimulatory effect upon the heart [van wyk, wink 2004: 125]. flowers of this species mentioned here as brothers are: 1. lat. digitalis lanata; eng. grecian foxglove; alb. luletogzi leshtak (pilose, furry) 2. lat. digitalis lutea; eng. straw foxglove; alb. luletogzi i verdhë (yellow foxglove) folklorica 2006, vol. xi 102 3. lat. digitalis purpurea; eng. purple foxglove ; alb. luletogzi i purpurtë (purple foxglove) 4. lat. digitalis ferruginea; eng. rusty foxglove; alb. lulendryshku (rusty flower) 5. lat. digitalis grandiflora; eng. yellow foxglove; alb. lulemadhi (big flower). 39. lat. petroselinum crispum; eng. parsley; alb. majdanozi. recorded albanian sources only attest its use to treat insect bites and to induce abortion [pieroni, quave 2005: 265], but shemaj’s text suggests that its use elsewhere to heal skin inflammations [grieve 1931/2006] is known. 40. lat. sempervivum tectorum; eng. houseleek; alb. burgulli i pullazeve. the juice of the houseleek leaf is applied in the ear to treat earache [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 390]. qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 103 41. lat. sambucus ebulus; eng. dwarf elder; alb. kingela. recorded albanian sources only attest its use in external washing for its antirheumatic effect [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 231] and to heal swollen feet and hands and cure burns [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 339], but shemaj’s text suggests that its use elsewhere as a purgative [grieve 1931/2006] is known. 42. lat. hypericum maculatum; eng. st john’s wort; alb. lulebalsami. recorded albanian sources attest to the use of st john’s wort to treat digestive troubles, stomach ache, the flu, sore throat, coughs, bronchitis, and burns, as an anti-diarrhoeal, a tranquillizer, and a diuretic [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 386] and to strengthen the legs of infants [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 336], but shemaj’s text suggests that its use elsewhere to treat hemorrhages [grieve 1931/2006] is also known. 43. lat. symphytum officinale; eng. comfrey; alb. lulevathi i egër (wild earringsflower). comfrey (both the plant and roots) is used to relieve inflammation and to help heal burns [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 339]. 44. lat. fumaria officinalis; eng. drug fumitory; alb. lulepëllumbi (pigeon-flower). a tea made from drug fumitory is used to help heal diseases of the liver, cleanse the blood, as a tonic and diuretic, and to regulate appetite. it is also used in the form of baths and compresses in skin diseases, against eczema and hemorrhoids [sejdiu 1984: 113]. 45. lat. rubus fruticosus; eng. blackberry; alb. manaferrë. used as a diuretic, to cure boils and to help heal skin abscesses caused by thorns [pieroni, quave 2005: 265], the blackberry is also believed effective in treating hemorrhoids [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 339]. 46. highest mountain in albania. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 104 47. lat. salix purpurea; eng. purple willow; alb. shelgu purpurant. no albanian folk medicinal uses given in pieroni [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 390]. 48. lat. clematis vitalba; eng. traveler’s joy; alb. kulpra e bardhë (white kulpra). the fruit is used to heal mouth inflammations [pieroni, quave 2005: 264] and warts [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 335]. 49. lat. saponaria officinalis; eng. soapwort (or bouncing bet); alb. shkumbake (little soapy foam). aside from being used to make soap, soapwort is a diuretic, diaphoretic, depurative, and tonic, and is believed to cure hepatitis, rheumatism, strep throat, eczema and cysts [sejdiu 1984: 216]. 50. lat. erodium cicutarium; eng. stork’s bill; alb. sqepçafka (heron’s beak) or gjilpërëqyqja (cuckoo’s needle). stork’s bill is used as a diuretic, to prevent bleeding, and against tuberculosis and rheumatism [sejdiu 1984: 103]. 51. lat. satureia montana; eng. winter savory; alb. trumza e bletës (bee’s shrub). most often used as a culinary herb [pieroni, dibra et al. 2004: 339]. qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 105 52. lat. bellis perennis; eng. lawn daisy; alb. luleshqerra (luledele). the fresh juice of the leaves is applied to the eyes to treat eye inflammations [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 383]. 53. lat. fragaria vesca; eng. wild strawberry; alb. dredhëza. a tea made from the leaves is used as a treatment for diarrhea, while the fruit is eaten raw or in jams [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 385]. strawberry is also believed to be an excellent remedy against sore throats [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 336]. 54. lat. cichorium intybus; eng. chicory; alb. këmbëdhia (goat foot). chicory leaves are used as a mild laxative and to purify the blood [pieroni, quave 2005: 264]. 55. lat. lamium purpureum; eng. purple dead-nettle; alb. hithra e purpurt (purple nettle). the purple nettle is believed to cure sciatica. edith durham writes that the affected limb must be beaten with the nettle [durham 1923: 132]. 56. lat. anchusa officinalis; eng. bugloss; alb. gjuhëlopa (cow’s tongue). no known documented albanian folk medicinal uses, but the fresh flowers are sucked on as a snack [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 383]. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 106 57. lat. hyoscyamus niger; eng. black henbane; alb. kruspullak (hunchback), matergona. the plant is used in soothing stomach, liver, bladder and gall bladder pain, and to treat kidney stones. juice made from boiling the leaves is used to treat bronchial phlegm, neurological pains, tuberculosis, epilepsy, asthma, paralysis and rheumatism, while the roots are used to heal infected wounds and burns [sejdiu 1984: 126]. shemaj’s text supports the idea that albanians share the general mediterranean belief that black henbane is both useful (as a narcotic) and dangerous [van wyk and wink 2004: 174]. 58. it is customary for the bride and groom to spend the first night of the wedding reception with the bride’s family and friends and the second night with the groom’s family and friends. 59. lat. salix alba; eng. white willow; alb. shelgu i bardhë. albanian folk medicinal uses are listed as unknown in pieroni’s study, but the bark is well-known as the source of salycilin (the basis for aspirin) [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 390]. 60. lat. hedera helix; eng. english ivy; alb. shermashek or urth. there are no documented albanian medical uses for ivy, but an infusion of the leaves is used in external washes to give a gloss or color to white hair [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 336]. 61. lat. centaurea cyanus; eng. cornflower or knapweed; alb. kokoçeli ngjyre qielli. the cornflower is used as an anti-fever remedy and against the evil eye [pieroni, quave 2005: 264], as well as being known for its anti-inflammatory and immunological properties [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 342]. 62. lat. lonicera caprifolium; eng. sweet honeysuckle; alb. dorëzonja e ëmbël. while there are to date no documented albanian folk medicinal uses, in the mediterranean area, the leaves and flowers are believed to be antispasmodic, emollient and expectorant [van wyk, wink 2004: 415]. qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 107 63. lat. acorus calamus; eng. calamus or sweet flag; alb. kashtëfryza or kallem. used to increase appetite and to prevent frequent bowel movement and heartburn [sejdiu 1984: 30]. 64. lat. nerium oleander; eng. oleander; alb. landër or landro. no known documented albanian folk medicinal uses to date. in the mediterranean area, oleander is used to treat functional disorders of the heart, as a substitute for digitalis [van wyk, wink 2004: 215]. 65. lat. myrtus communis; eng. myrtle; alb. mërsinë. an infusion made from boiling the dried leaves of this bush is used against bronchitis, diarrhea and anal fissures. it is also believed to help with diabetes [sejdiu 1984: 155]. 66. lat. citrus aurantium; eng. bitter orange; alb. nerënxë. used to treat sore throats and coughs [pieroni, quave 2005: 264]. 67. lat. lilium candidum; eng. madonna lily; alb. zambaku i bardhë (white lily). the tubers are used to treat liver disease [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 387]. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 108 68. lat. nuphar lutea; eng. yellow pond lily; alb. zambaku i verdhë i ujit (water’s yellow lily). the tubers are used to treat liver disease [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 387]. 69. lat. centaurium pulchellum; eng. centaury; alb. trikë e bukur. believed to reduce fever [pieroni, quave 2005: 264]. 70. each of the following songs rhyme in the albanian original. 71. lat. vaccinium myrtillus; eng. bilberry; alb. boronica. the fruits of the bilberry are dried and used to treat intestinal troubles and as an anti-diarrhoeic. other uses include to strengthen the stomach and the eyes and as a blood cleanser [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 392]. 72. lat. solanum negra; eng. black nightshade; alb. idhanku i zi (black bitter), also solanë e zezë (black solana) or rush qeni (dog’s grapes). in shamaj’s text black nightshade and bittersweet begin arguing beauty versus usefulness, and then the quarrel turns to a battle about each plant’s medicinal uses. slices of the black nightshade (or sunberry, wonderberry) are placed on the forehead to sooth headaches and decrease fever. it is also believed to be helpful in healing wounds caused by burns and curing anal fissures [sejdiu 1984: 226]. 73. lat. solanum dulcamara; eng. bittersweet (bittersweet nightshade, climbing nightshade); alb. idhnaku i ёmbël (sweet bitter) or koralë e gjarpërit (snake’s coral). bittersweet is helpful in curing cough, asthma, leprosy, rheumatism and is used to cleanse the blood [sejdiu 1984: 226]. ground bittersweet is applied topically to help cure skin conditions and dry eyes [pieroni, auave et al. 2002b: 231]. qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 109 74. regions in mountainous northern albania. 75. places in middle, south and northern albania. 76. lat. tanacetum vulgare; eng. tansy; alb. karajpel. tea made from tansy is used to expel parasites, help irregular menstruation, headaches, inflammation of the kidneys and for clearing dandruff, while a dry powder made from the leaves is used against insects. [sejdiu 1984:234] 77. lat galega officinalis; eng. goat’s rue (or professor-weed); alb. querbashballëbreshka. recorded sources for albania only attest its use in treating hemorrhoids and muscular pains and as an anti-diaphoretic [peroni, quave et. al. 2004: 339], but shermaj’s text suggests that its use elsewhere to increase the flow of milk in mothers [grieve 1931/2006] is known. 78. lat. viburnum opulus; eng. guelder rose (or snowball tree); alb. topbora (snowball). the snowball tree is used to prevent hemorrhages, cure diarrhea and treat intestinal pain and anal fissures [sejdiu 1984: 250]. shemaj’s text suggests that along with fenugreek and rosemary and others, it is also valued for its beauty. 79. lat. trigonella corniculata; eng. fenugreek; alb. trëndelinë. the flower is widely used to protect clothes against moths [sejdiu 1984: 242]. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 110 80. lat. rosmarinus officinalis; eng. rosemary; alb. rozmarina or esmerina. recorded albanian sources only attest to its use to heal sore throats and headaches [pieroni, quave 2005: 265], but shemaj’s text suggests that its use elsewhere to heal neurological problems is familiar [grieve 1931/2006]. 81. lat. taraxacum officinale; eng. dandelion; alb. luleshurdha. used to treat diverse skin inflammations and hemorrhoids and to help heal varicose veins [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 339]. 82. lat. salvia sclarea; eng. clary (or clary sage); alb. luleshingjini. the leaves are used as a haemostatic, to stop bleeding [pieroni, quave 2005: 265]. 83. lat. paeonia officinalis; eng. peony; alb. bozhurja. although there are no known documented albanian folk medicinal uses, in southern europe, the peony is believed to help treat epilepsy and to promote menstruation. it has also been used in the treatment of whooping cough and to relieve intestinal spasms [van wyk, wink 2004: 223]. 84. lat. salvia officinalis; eng. common sage (or kitchen sage); alb. shërbelë. believed to help heal sore throats and headaches [pieroni, quave 2005: 265], common sage is also said to heal gingival and mouth inflammations and is used as an antiseptic on wounds [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 339]. qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 111 85. in the phrase “there was no place to drop an apple,” the author is referring to the parade that was so big that there was little room for anything else. 86. lat. chelidonium majus; eng. greater celandine; alb. latrapeci. used to treat hepatitis [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 384], it is also believed to cure warts and calluses [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 335]. 87. lat. pimpinella anisum; eng. anise or aniseed; alb. anisi or anasoni. used in folk medicine to help prevent a mother’s milk from drying up and to flavor sweets and alcoholic drinks such as anisette [sejdiu 1984: 176]. 88. lat. thymus serpyllum; eng. wild thyme; alb. zhumbricë. used as a substitute for oregano, as a diuretic and digestive used to treat coughs [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 391, 387]. 89. lat. geranium robertianum; eng. robert geranium; alb. kamaroshja e robertit. in balkan herbalism, the geranium is used for its antimicrobial effect, to destroy or inhibit the growth of microorganisms [lis-balchin 2002: 132]. it is also used as a remedy for toothache, nosebleeds and dysentery, and for its diuretic and tonic effects [van wyk, wink 2004: 156]. shemaj’s text suggests that its use as an anti-bacterial is especially beneficial for children. 90. lat. geranium sanguineum; eng. bloody geranium; alb. kamaroshja ngjyrëgjaku. used to regulate the intestines, against kidney stones and as an astringent [sejdiu 1984: 117]. see also the previous note on robert geranium’s anti-bacterial effects. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 112 91. lat. matricaria chamomilla; eng. chamomile; alb. kamomili or luleshëngjergji. recorded albanian sources only attest its use as a digestive and a sedative [pieroni, quave et al. 2002b: 228] and in healing sore throats, eye and throat inflammations, and shingles [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 337], but shemaj’s text suggests that its use elsewhere to cure diarrhea and ease night tremors, stomach disorders and convulsions in children [grieve 1931/2006] is known. 92. lat. equisetum arvense; eng. horsetail; alb. këputja e arave. recorded albanian sources only attest its use as a haemostatic to stop bleeding in the nose [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 336], but shemaj’s text suggests that its use elsewhere to heal kidney and bladder trouble, cystic ulceration and ulcers in the urinary tract [grieve 1931/2006] is known. 93. lat. arum maculatum; eng. cuckoo pint; alb. kilikaza. recorded albanian sources only attest its use in treating warts [pieroni, quave 2005: 264], but shemaj’s text suggests that its use elsewhere to heal inflammations of the mucus membranes [grieve 1931/2006] is known. 94. lat. crataegus; eng. hawthorn; alb. murrizi. used as a tranquilizer and to enhance blood circulation [pieroni, quave 2005: 254], hawthorn is also used to heal sore throats [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 336]. 95. lat. magnolia officinalis; eng. magnolia; alb. manjola. there are no documented albanian folk medicinal uses for magnolia, but in general folk belief, it is said to be an antimicrobial, which is also active against malaria and parasites [van wyk, wink 2004: 416]. shemaj’s text qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 113 suggests that its use elsewhere as a mild diaphoretic, tonic and aromatic stimulant [grieve 1931/2006] is known. 96. lat:. asplenium adiantum-nigrum; eng. black spleenwort; alb. fierguri i zi. used to increase urine flow and enhance uterine contractions during delivery [pieroni, quave 2005: 264]. 97. lat. arctostaphylos uva-ursi; eng. bearberry; alb. rushi i arushës (bear’s grapes) or vesëegër (wild mist). the leaves in the form of a tea or powder are used to heal infections and bleeding wounds. the tea is also used for cleansing and disinfection of the urinary tract system [sejdiu 1984: 47]. 98. lat. campanula; eng. bellflower; alb. lulekëmbanë (bellflower). some species of campanula are believed helpful in curing inflammation of the mouth and throat [kovačić 2004: 174]. 99. lat. ricinus communis; eng. castor oil plant (or castor bean plant); alb. ricini. castor oil is used as a purgative and laxative, for ridding the intestines of parasites, and healing wounds and burns [sejdiu 1984: 200]. 100. lat. xanthium; eng. cocklebur; alb. ksanti gjëmbor or sybardhi (the white eye). used as a remedy for intestinal worms [durham 1923: 132]. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 114 101. lat. althaea officinalis; eng. marshmallow; alb. mëllaga e bardhë. the dried root can be used to help soothe aching gums, especially in children who are teething, and as an external wash to prevent hair loss [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 335]. 102. lat. asparagus officinalis; eng. asparagus; alb. shpargulla. asparagus is a diuretic [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 264]. 103. lat. tamus communis; eng. black bryony; alb. rrushgjarpëri (snake grapes). the fruits are compressed and crushed to treat bone pain and toothaches [pieroni, quave et al. 2004: 335]. 104. lat. physalis alkekengi; eng. bladder-cherry (or chinese lantern); alb. fshikakuqi (red bladder). used to treat external wounds [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 388]. 105. lat. claviceps purpurea; eng. ergot, ergonovine; alb. bri thekre (rye horn). used to control postpartum hemorrhage and cause contraction of the uterus [pieroni, dibra et al. 2005: 384]. qazim shemaj’s “veronica’s dream” 115 works cited arieti, james 1983. “achilles’ inquiry about machaon: the critical moment in the ‘iliad’.” classical journal, 79 (2): 125-30. canziani, estella 1928. “abruzzese folklore.” folklore, 39 (3): 209-47. durham, edith 1923. “some balkan remedies for disease.” man, 23: 131-35. elsie, robert 2005a. “freedom and chaos: contemporary albanian literature.” illyria, 1416: 4-7. new york: illyria press. ---. 2005b. “freedom and chaos: contemporary albanian literature.” illyria, 1417: 8-10. new york: illyria press. ---. 2005c. “freedom and chaos: contemporary albanian literature.” illyria, 1418: 11-14. new york: illyria press. grieve, maud 1931. a modern herbal. the medicinal, culinary cosmetic and economic properties, cultivation and folk-lore of herbs, grasses, fungi, shrubs and trees. london: jonathan cape/new york: hafner, accessed on http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/mgmh.html. hoareau, lucy and edgar dasilva 1999. “medicinal plants: a re-emerging health aid.” journal of biotechnology, 2 (2): 56-70. keskitalo, m. 1999. exploring biodiversity to enhance bioactivity in the genus tanacetum through protoplast fusion. academic dissertation: university of helsinki, department of plant production. kovačić, sanja 2004. “the genus campanula in croatia, circum adriatic and west balkan region.” acta bot. croat., 63 (2): 171-202. lis-balchin, maria 2002. geranium and pelargonium. london: taylor and francis. newmark, l. (ed.) 1999. oxford albanian-english dictionary. new york: oxford university press. kathe w., honef s. and a. heym 2003. medicinal and aromatic plants in albania, bosnia-herzegovina, bulgaria, croatia and romania. bonn: general federal agency for natural conservation. bfn/wwf germany/traffic europe-germany. pieroni, a. 2003. “wild food plants and arbëresh women in lucania, southern italy.” in p.l. howard (ed.), women and plants. case studies in gender relations in biodiversity management and conservation. london: zed press, pp. 66-82. pieroni, a., dibra, b., grishaj, g., grishaj, i. and s. maçai 2005. “traditional phytotherapy of the albanians of lepushe, northern albanian alps.” fitoterapia, 76: 379-99. pieroni, a. and c. quave 2005. “traditional pharmacopoeias and medicines among albanians and italians in southern italy: a comparison.” journal of ethnopharmacology, 101: 258-70. pieroni, a., quave c., villanelli m., mangino, p., sabbatini, g., santini, l., boccetti, t., profili, m., ciccioli, t., rampa, l., antonini, g., girolamini, c., cecchi, m. and m. tomasi 2004. “ethnopharmacognostic survey on the natural ingredients used in folk cosmetics, cosmeceuticals and remedies for healing skin diseases in the inland marches, central-eastern italy.” journal of ethnopharmacology, 91: 331-44. pieroni, a., nebel, s., quave, c. münz, h. and m. heinrich 2002a. “ethnopharmacology of liakra: traditional weedy vegetables of the arbëreshë of the vulture area in southern italy.” journal of ethnopharmacology, 81: 165-85. folklorica 2006, vol. xi 116 pieroni, a., nebel, s., quave, c. münz, h. and m. heinrich 2002b. “ethnopharmacology of the ethnic albanians (arbëreshë) of northern basilicata, italy.” fitoterapia, 73: 217-41. quave, c. and a. pieroni 2005. “folk illness and healing in arbëreshë albanian and italian communities of lucania, southern italy.” journal of folklore research, 42: 57-97. sejdiu s. 1984. fjalorth etnobotanik i shqipes [ethnobotanical dictionary of albania]. prishtina: rilindja. vangjeli, j., proko, a., dida, m., and b. ruci 1993. “biological diversity and its impact on the area of vjosa valley.” options méditerranéennes, série a no. 47: 127-35. wyk van, ben-erik and michael wink 2004. medicinal plants of the world. portland: timber press. ukrainian rushnyky 1 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii articles ukrainian rushnyky: binding amulets and magical talismans in the modern period franklin sciacca hamilton college clinton, new york, usa abstract the traditional ritual use of rushnyky among the eastern slavs continued to flourish throughout the soviet period, despite the communist party’s efforts to curtail what was dismissed as superstitious folkloric survivals in village life. the paper briefly examines use of the rushnyk in the traditional ukrainian village setting, followed by close readings of a number of towels from the author’s collection. these include careful analysis of a funeral/memorial rushnyk from the mid-20 th c. that functioned as a mimetic grave for a soldier lost on the front. attention is paid to the curious politicization of the ritual towel in ukraine not only in the soviet period, but subsequently in independent ukraine, particularly in the recent country-wide creation of a "rushnyk of national unity"—the stitching of an oversized towel as a means to symbolize the binding of the disparate (and often combative) regions of the newly independent nation. this and other examples cited demonstrate innovation in the use of ritual towels and how they are being employed in new contexts where they can play a symbolic (if no longer fully understood ritual/magic) role. the conception of the thread of destiny in the classical world and in early eastern christian thought the folkloric and ritual significance of the east slavic ceremonial towel (rushnyk or polotentse) is predicated on ancient 2 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii conceptions that have not only endured and developed over the course of centuries and millennia, but have proven remarkably resilient survivals into the present. based on these tenacious conceptions we will attempt close readings of a sampling of complex designs found on ukrainian towels of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. at the outset it will prove useful to review briefly some of the ancient beliefs relating to spinning and weaving, even though some of this material may be known to many. the spinning and weaving of raw fiber into fabric is one of the earliest complex technologies developed by human beings. as such, it is a perfect paradigm for the conception of the transmutation of unprocessed, chaotic raw material into processed, ordered artifact. the transformation of a tangle into thread reflects a manipulated transition from non-existence into existence, chaos into civilization, nature into culture. it is no wonder that the spindle and the act of spinning have been perceived as sacred since pre-historic times. from the unformed, inchoate mass of fibers, a discrete thread is twisted and pulled. in folk thought the rotating spindle is conceptualized as the axis or spinning center of the world. spinning and weaving were female skills attributed to the “great mother.” under the sobriquet of the “goddess of fate” it is she who was identified as the spinner of “the threads of fate” and weaver of the “web of life.” by analogy woven textiles were regarded with mystical awe and in many circumstances as magical and protective talismans. greek mythology offers an instructive expression of this in conceiving of fate as the spinning of the thread of a life, the creation of a “life-span.” (1) the fates, since they were divine spinners, were identified as female. “human skill and cunning are personified by athena, and the central womanly skill is weaving, [thus] weaving can itself become a metaphor for human resourcefulness. one’s life-span was conceived by the greeks as a thread, formed by the fates at birth, but the act of weaving the thread symbolized what one did with that life, the choices of the individual. (2) ukrainian rushnyky 3 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii “this aspect of the [sacred] feminine as a spinner of fate can be followed down to the late configuration of the christian madonna.” one of the typical occupations for mary (the “mother of god” as she is hailed in the eastern church) is the spinning of purple and scarlet threads intended for the veil of the jerusalem temple (see the infancy gospel of james 10-11). in the typical iconography of the annunciation, mary is depicted holding a spindle and spinning. “the madonna is still the great goddess who spins destiny—though here destiny is the redemption of the world” [neumann 1974: 227, 233]. it should come as no surprise that some of the most sacred relics associated with mary are textiles. the western church, for example, could boast of the robe of the virgin venerated in the cathedral of aix-la-chapelle, but of greater interest to us here is the pokrova (in ukrainian; in church slavonic and russian it takes the masculine form pokrov) of the mother of god and the church feast that is associated with its miraculous intervention in the affairs of the byzantine state. “there is no fixed (or adequate) english translation for the “pokrova” feast. it appears variously as “holy protection of the mother of god,” “the protectress,” “festival of the veil,” “protecting veil,” “intercession,” and the like. as an object, pokrov referred to some type of opaque textile covering. sreznevskii identified uses in medieval east slavic texts in a wide variety of related terms: roof, cover, tent, curtain, and veil (but not, apparently, the transparent kind). one can easily surmise how it came to suggest associatively a figurative and abstracted sense of concealment: protection, defense; and ultimately the defender herself. as a proper noun pokrova also serves metonymically for the act of intercession and the october 1 (old style calendar) feast that celebrates the miraculous apparition of the mother of god to andrew the holy fool in the church at blachernai and the subsequent protection of constantinople from invading troops. in the life of st. andrew, the mother of god removes her “veil” and holds it over the congregation as protection” [sciacca 2003: 511]. “both concrete and metaphorical meanings are intended. tangible reference is to the maphorion (the “veil” or 4 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii garment covering for head and shoulders) of the mother of god preserved as a relic in the blachernai church in constantinople. the application of the term in reference to the mother of god herself predates the feast. the metaphor appears in a list of epithets in ikos 6 of the akathist (the text of which is ascribed to the seventh century): in slavonic, “raduisia, pokrove miru, shirshii oblaka” (rendered in the st. tikhon’s press prayer book: “hail, the veil of the world vaster than the clouds”” [sciacca 2003: 511-2]. with the acceptance of orthodox christianity from the byzantines at the end of the 10th century, the eastern slavs inherited this feast and the conception of mary as the divine feminine protector and intercessor. that the feast became so prominent in russia and ukraine is evidence that it resonated with earlier pre-christian traditions related to the perceived sacred quality of ritual ceremonial cloths—rushnyky. development of the conception of sacred textiles among the eastern slavs the word rushnyk (singular form) derives from ruka, “hand,” and while it can refer to an ordinary towel for use in bathing, the ceremonial rushnyk is distinct in its elaborate ornamentation. these woven or embroidered designs and motifs reinforce the symbolic meaning of the rushnyk itself. that they are considered sacred objects can be easily gleaned from their typical placement over icons and on crosses that are raised over graves and at the site of holy wells. “the belief in the protective strength of textiles, especially rushnyky,… as a magical symbol, a talisman, is extremely archaic” [nykorak 2010: 2]. ukrainian rushnyky 5 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii cross decorated with a rushnyk and icons at the mouth of a fresh-water spring regarded as holy (bazaliya, khmel’nyts’ka oblast’, 2005) an instructive example of the primeval and magical attitude among the eastern slavs towards ritual cloth (including the acts of spinning and weaving) can be observed in a late nineteenth-century ethnographer’s description of ceremonial behavior during time of plague. “on a predetermined day, before sunrise, young girls from the entire village would gather in one home, each bringing a handful of flax. they would spin the flax, set up the loom, and weave in complete silence. when the cloth was woven, they would carry it over their heads and in this way circle the entire village. all the inhabitants of the village would congregate and 6 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii make a bonfire from kindling brought from every home. everyone would pass under the cloth and through the fire, carrying children and the sick, after which the cloth was then and there burned” [lysenko 1992: n.p.]. what we observe here is a mimetic act—the communal weaving of the cloth imitates the process of creation, an activity that involves the entire community and its territory. at the moment of passing under the sacred cloth the community is protected and born anew, disease is banished. the length of linen fabric functions as a portal to the sacred realm. it marks liminal space, the sacred center, the place of ritual communication at the boundary of the supernatural world. once the contact has been made and all inhabitants of the village pass through it and are thus protected, this portal or bridge is destroyed. some years ago my interest in ukrainian and russian ritual towels was kindled by a family legend that was recounted to me in my grandmother’s village of bazaliya in ukraine. i am an american because some 100 years ago my grandmother, olyana onyshchuk, engaged in a binding ritual with a young man. the betrothal ritual [zaruchennia] was a ceremonial step “taken to solidify the promise to marry between the two parties. the hands of the young couple and their parents were bound together with a rushnyk by one of the matchmakers, who then pronounced [an incantation], ‘i’m not tying a knot, i’m tying your word.’” (3) the young couple knelt on a ritual cloth and were blessed by the parents, after which gifts of various textiles were exchanged as a sign of the uniting of the couple and the two families [wolynetz 2010: 25]. the transaction was the equivalent of a marriage vow and solemnized a formal engagement to be married. my grandmother’s subsequent breaking off the engagement led to a scandal not only for herself, but her entire family—which they remember (with both a laugh and a sigh) to this day. the stigma attached to her refusal could only be remedied by her escaping the village, so she decided to come to america, not for religious freedom or out of desperate economic need, but because of the ritual exchange of rushnyky! let us take a look at the construction of a rushnyk. first and foremost, it should be an unseamed length of whole cloth. the ukrainian rushnyky 7 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii length is variable according to use and regional custom, but the width considerably narrower (and usually no wider that about a foot and a half)—typically the width of the loom. the cut ends are hemmed and/or knotted, that is, they are “sealed.” lysenko makes an instructive argument concerning this knotting in a discussion of thread. when a length of thread is cut (and by extension, a length of woven fabric), it functions outside a cultural /socialized/ritualized context, it is an object of nature because it is “raw” or unfinished. “new transformations would be needed to include a cut thread into cultural space.” the simplest way to “transform and transpose thread… into an object of culture” is to fix and mark it at each end [lysenko 1992; n. p.]. this is frequently reinforced by a woven or embroidered border design. as kononenko has observed, the edges of a towel are traditionally marked by what she terms a “dispel.” this can be part of the embroidered design and/or an elaborate web of knotted or crocheted fringe. “[the dispel is] supposed to point down to the ground and take all of the evil out of the household and transfer it into the soil. the earth, it is believed, has the power to absorb evil and dispense it” [kononenko, http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/uvp/ pages/media/rushnyky/index.htm?menu=4-2:1]. since collection of rushnyky and other folk artifacts commenced only in the mid-nineteenth century, we have few extant examples from the eighteenth and earlier centuries. but we observe that all evidence indicates that ceremonial towels were made exclusively of homespun and loomed linen. but by the midtwentieth century, when the tradition of hand spinning and weaving had in most regions disappeared, linen was replaced by manufactured cotton, and more recently by polyester. even this was, by tradition, never seamed, although all the cut edges were hemmed. in modern ukraine one can purchase wedding rushnyky, many of them factory produced and printed rather than embroidered. there is remarkable variety based on age and region, and all production techniques are mutable. it would seem that a length of whole fabric alone functions as minimal ritual requirement. the embroidery thread was traditionally linen dyed with natural plants and berries [see shevchenko 1999 for a study of 8 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii the plant species that were sourced for the dyes, 333-343], almost exclusively in red and black, but early in the twentieth century, imported manufactured cotton thread was introduced, and by midcentury a vibrant array of colors was employed. in some regions the embroidery thread was wool (notably in eastern podillia). the talismanic properties of the rushnyk are most often reinforced by woven or embroidered motifs at each end; these are nearly always identical. there is no top or bottom of a rushnyk. rushnyky are intended to be hung around an icon or frame, tied around a cross, wrapped over the shoulder or around the waist, or held in outstretched hands from the usually unadorned center, with the two side flaps hanging downwards towards the earth. the standing cross in cemetery (bazaliya, ukraine, 2005) decorated ends drape in parallel. the woven or embroidered symbols thus appear in duplicate, side by side. the various motifs typically embroidered or woven into the rushnyky have been well studied by numerous researchers [kelly 1989, labacheuskaia 2002, kytova 2003, kononenko 2005, chumarna 2005, selivachov 2005, wolynetz 2005 and 2010, prychepii 2007, and others]. we will highlight here the most ukrainian rushnyky 9 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii typical motif (actually it is a cluster of interrelated motifs). broadly speaking it is the axis mundi, the spinning spindle of fate itself, that represents not only the center of community, family and village life, but that also generates the life force. the axis-pillar is that liminal space where contact between the worlds (upper, lower, and earth) is made possible and where supernatural communication is perceived to be manifest. it is represented on the rushnyky variously as the goddess (in a number of forms: birth goddess, the protectress berehynia, the goddess of life-giving moisture, the goddess of regeneration) [gimbutas 1989: passim; wolynetz 2005: 58-60], the tree of life (as eliade summarizes, “cosmos was imagined in the form of a gigantic tree, the mode of being of the cosmos and first of all its capacity for endless regeneration” [eliade 1959:148]), in its christian redaction the cross of christ (the “life-giving tree”), and in more recent times a vase or bouquet of flowers. the motifs appear to be varied, yet they all share an underlying message of the life-affirming and generative power of the earth and the promise of resurrection and life. there are several broad uses of rushnyky: protection of family, home and village; invocation of fertility; function as conduit/pathway/magical bridge for transport across sacred time and place—or as an opening to the sacred realm; and in binding rituals. in almost any ukrainian home the family icons, and, more recently, family photographs would be draped in protective rushnyky. when honored guests are greeted, bread and salt are presented on outstretched hands that are covered with a rushnyk. 10 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii a curious late version of an abstracted goddess, surmounted by a cross, and surrounded by her galloping retinue (ukraine, mid-20 th c.; author’s collection) ceremonial towels were integrated into all family-rituals. rushnyky were used to welcome new-born infants, who were wrapped in them. a linen cloth was “one of the main ways of marking the transitional state of a new-born… a piece of linen was the necessary ritual object” to be used when baptizing an infant. the cloth symbolizes “the world of culture in which the child entered from the world of nature.” this cloth would be preserved to make a wedding towel, and wedding towels were preserved for funeral rituals, when they were placed in the coffin or tied to a grave cross [lysenko 1992; n. p.]. ukrainian rushnyky 11 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii an exuberant tree of life in a vase, surrounded by birds (cherkasy region, ukraine, mid-20 th c.; author’s collection) a cross that blossoms with grapes and wheat (central ukraine, mid-20 th c.; author’s collection) 12 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii typical display of icons with a draped rushnyk, villiage of havrylivka school museum (khmel’nyts’ka oblast’, 2007). rushnyky as magic pathways in ancient myth, thread and woven cloths function as a means of guiding journeys, in particular in travel that is conceived of as some initiation or transition rite. “thread and cloth frequently serve as a link between the spirit world and the living [perkowski 1989:121]. the means by which theseus is equipped to find his way out of the minotaur’s labyrinth is by unwinding the thread given to him by ariadne. daedalus (of icarus and daedalus fame) gave the daughter of king minos, ariadne, a “magic ball of thread,” as well as instructions on “how to enter and leave the labyrinth”—that is, how to successfully navigate the maze, confront the minotaur in combat, and successfully reemerge. “this ball ariadne gave to theseus, and instructed him to follow it until he reached the sleeping monster, whom he must seize by the hair and sacrifice to poseidon. he could the find his way back [out of the labyrinth] by rolling up the thread into a ball again” [graves 1996: 314-5]. in middle eastern folktales, the flying carpet figures as a magical means of transport between distant locations. among the finno-ugric votiaks, a shaman wears a ritual towel during ukrainian rushnyky 13 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii trance states when he guides the lost souls of the dead to their rest. in the ukrainian funeral ritual, the use of rushnyky function in a similar way. they create a magical pathway to the world of the dead and thereby help lead the soul of the dead to repose. in some regions of ukraine, the coffin was lowered into the grave on long woven rushnyky, which, according to folk belief, symbolized the road to the “other world.” “the rushnyk was placed not only on the coffin but also inside [it], since people believed that the angels used the ritual cloth to carry the soul of the deceased to heaven” [wolynetz 2005: 32]. funeral rushnyk with flying birds, the symbol of transition to the “other world” (ukraine, mid-20 th c.; author’s collection) often the ritual towels used in wedding ceremonies were preserved for the funeral rites, when they were either placed in the coffin with the corpse or tied on the cross erected over the grave. the sense of the cloths as magic talismans is thus reinforced. the typical motif encountered on a towel made for a person who had died a “natural death” (that is, for a person who lived a full life according to his “due portion”) is a closed wreath. the circle of this life is complete. 14 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii yet another example of the use of rushnyky to magically facilitate transitions is the ritual observed when a new bride is first introduced to her new home, the home of her husband. “the threshold was covered with a ritual cloth specifically for the bride’s passage. according to belief, the spirits of the family’s ancestors reside under the threshold and a stranger entering the home might be harmed by the ancestral spirits. but if the threshold is covered with a ritual cloth—a symbol of protection—the stranger can enter the home without being harmed. on the day after the wedding, it was customary in certain regions of ukraine for the bride to remove her mother-in-law’s ritual cloths and to decorate the house with her own, saying ‘let your rushnyky take a rest while mine go to work’” [wolynetz 2010: 29]. to illustrate the functions of the rushnyky in the ritual sphere, we will examine in greater depth one particular type of funeral cloth, created for a dead soldier whose body was not returned to his village for burial. this is a memorial rushnyk that seems to function as a mimetic grave for a soldier who has died away from the village of his birth. as paul barber notes, “the great majority of things that, if left undone, may cause a body to become a revenant are, not surprisingly, funerary and burial practices.” those who die far from home, particularly common for soldiers who die in battle and are buried hastily (if at all), without the requisite funerary rites, are the subject of familial concern. lack of burial is sufficient reason to believe the dead could become vampires or the unquiet dead. “another common explanation for their transformation is that they have not lived out their allotted span of life,” they have died “before their time” [paul barber 1988: 37-8]. in order to help the soul of the deceased rest in peace a particular type of funeral towel is created. it is no doubt the anxiety that the deceased was not properly interred that led a close female relative (she is identified in the inscription by her initials, “ia. o. p.”) to stitch this towel. ukrainian rushnyky 15 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii rushnyk made to commemorate a dead soldier. (central ukraine, mid-20 th c.; author’s collection) the embroidered design indicates the grave mound itself, over which a cross has been erected and a kalyna (mountain ash or rowan) grows. the rowan represents longing and healing, and is often depicted on towels for soldiers killed in battle and other “unquiet dead”; the berries indicate fertility and thus the possibility of regeneration. all the elements possess specific symbolic meaning: the deer are a motif of resurrection (the steppe peoples also regarded the deer as a conductor of souls) and the butterfly— the departure of the soul. birds are often understood to be agents that can assist the dead in communicating with the living. (4) here 16 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii the sense is that the news concerning the final resting place of the dead soldier will be conveyed to the relatives in ukraine. as the inscription further indicates, in the absence of kin, it is left for eagles to perform the traditional funeral feast over the grave: a cossack ordered that a high funeral mound be raised and at the head a red rowan planted. birds will come to eat the berries and will bring me news from ukraine. he died in a foreign land without sister or brother. the young steppe eagles have gathered for [his] memorial feast. the invocation of eagles would seem to reference the broad conception of them as heavenly messengers, and as kononenko identifies them symbols of “masculine strength and vigor” [kononenko, http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/uvp/pages/media/rushnyy /index.htm?menu=4-2:1]. “[in] western tradition… eagles were believed to carry the souls of the dead upon their wings and return them to god” [chevalier and gheerbrant 1996: 326]. furthermore, in kytova’s analysis of the motif of the eagle in ukrainian embroidery, she concludes with the observation that they function as protective talismans [oberehy] of soldiers [kytova 2003: 118]. politization of the rushnyk: russian imperial and soviet motifs while rushnyky normally functioned as ritual and talismanic objects, they could also be used as canvases to express political allegiance and social commentary. the tsarist doubleheaded eagle is attested as a motif on some of the earliest extant embroidered textiles from those ukrainian territories that were for many centuries gubernii of the russian empire. this is not surprising given the ubiquitous appearance of the imperial insignia on coins and paper currency, official documents, and elsewhere. the motif likewise merged with the traditionally employed images of birds [kytova 2003: 114-132] on wedding and funeral rushnyky. meticulously rendered embroidered double-headed eagles can be found on tablecloths from the family of hetman ivan skoropadsky (probably embroidered by the nuns of the st. ukrainian rushnyky 17 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii charlampius convent in chernihiv region; preserved in the tarnovs’skyy chernihiv historical museum [zaichenko 2010: 6263, 148-151]), which date to 1715-1722. the imperial russian heraldic symbol is fully realized—both heads of the eagle are crowned, and it holds in its talons the imperial regalia, the orb and scepter, clearly marking the cossack hetmans loyalty to the tsar peter i. numerous later examples of fully detailed double-headed eagles with tsarist regalia from central ukrainian provinces can be found on the website of the ivan honchar museum (kyiv). (5) the motif was widely employed in simplified form in the woven rushnyky produced in large numbers in krolevets’ (sumy oblast’) artels in the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries. the crowns are highly stylized, and the orb and scepter are usually omitted. thus the eagle loses some but certainly not all of its russian imperial symbolism. in contemporary ukrainian studies it is rarely acknowledged as a tsarist motif, rather something on the order of the “silhouette of two eagles.” krolovets’ woven rushnyk, (ca. 1900; author’s collection) 18 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii the motif can be attested in the soviet period as late as 1929, in a dated rushnyk from central ukraine in which two peacocks (a common motif on wedding towels that symbolizes beauty and prosperity [kononenko, http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/ uvp/pages/media/rushnyky/index.htm?menu=4-2:1] escort the crowned double-headed eagle in the composition that usually depicts two birds surrounding the tree of life. rushnyk (central ukraine, 1929; author’s collection) but for the most part, after the october revolution the tsarist eagle is replaced by a variety of soviet symbols, even as the traditional compositions are preserved. pro-bolshevik-leninist ukrainian rushnyky 19 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii political messaging was used in a curious adaptation of the rushnyk as agit-propaganda. in this curious design, the floral tree of life is surmounted by the red star, hammer and sickle, and the acronym for the russian soviet republic, with an animal retinue of rabbits and roosters, the former widely symbolic of fertility and rebirth, the latter of “vigor and fertility” [kononenko, http://www.arts. ualberta.ca/uvp/pages/media/rushnyky/index.htm?menu=4-2:1]. the ritual function of such a cloth is unclear, but its propagandistic intent is underlined by the inscriptions, “glory to lenin the liberator” (co-opting the epithet used in reference to tsar alexander ii, emancipator of the serfs) and “who granted freedom to the people in 1917.” (6) it might well have functioned to commemorate lenin’s death in 1924. the soviet period witnessed extensive use of various textiles for propaganda and organizational purposes, such as flags, banners, and pennants. the weaving factories of krolevets’ maintained a high-level of productivity in the soviet period and replaced the typical double-headed eagle with lenin portraits and other pro-soviet texts and imagery. 20 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii krolevets’ woven panno (1964; author’s collection) in this decorative “panno” (the term, no doubt from french panneau, preferred in place of “rushnyk”; unlike traditional rushnyky the design does not repeat at both ends, since this is clearly intended to hang flat on a wall rather than be draped over an icon or photograph) dated 1964, lenin’s head is superimposed on the red sun (a reference to the epithet “krasnoe solntse” introduced in the soviet noviny in reference to the soviet leader, co-opted from the typical bylina epithet for prince vladimir) (7), and surrounded by an electric transmitter, the main kremlin tower, an industrial plant, a rocket ship, the stalin-period skyscraper built to house moscow state university, while in the foreground soviet children play at various games. other krolevets’ rushnyky depict the seal of the ussr, the order of lenin, the head of lenin hovering above a tree of life (with the inscription,”loyal to the precepts of lenin”), and other party motifs [see zhuk 1985; plates 48-50]. the linen canvas, on rare occasions, served to promote ukrainian nationalist or anti-soviet sentiments. an extremely scarce example of such a rushnyk, probably dating to the 1920-30s, ukrainian rushnyky 21 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii is from northern chernihiv region (chernihivske polissia). i purchased this rushnyk with inscription (chernihivske polissia, 1920s-1930s, author's collection) rushnyk recently from an ebay dealer based in kyiv, who noted in his auction description, “to make and to keep the rushnyk with anti-soviet poem was very dangerous during the communist epoch, if nkvd could find it, the owner shortly would be in gulag or executed.” the composition depicts frequently encountered village scenes: a girl at a well, a girl carrying two buckets of water on a yoke perched on her shoulder, a girl with a pail and jug in her hands, and a cow. kytova notes that the scene of the girl with the yoke was very common in the mid-dnipro region and would have been copied from popular prints. it was the subject of one of taras 22 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii shevchenko’s paintings from 1856, “the sarmaritan girl” (kytova 2003: 196; see also zaichenko 2010:169-171). juxtaposed with these traditional and apolitical figural rural renderings is an intriguing verse: їж каровушка саломчік dear cow, eat the straw. не надісе на траву don’t hope for grass. маго милаго забрали на my darling was drafted for саветськую війну the soviet war. this is adapted from common chastushka (a humorous song, usually satirical in nature) themes of sundered relationship and vanished love. the loss is likened to a cow’s memory of fresh grass. two russian variants: ешь, коровушка, соломку, dear cow, eat the straw, не надейся на сенцо. don’t hope for hay. бери, миленький, платочек, my darling, take my kerchief, не надейся на кольцо. don’t hope for a ring. [http://www.pozdravleniya.biz/chastushki/o-lubvi/48.htm] ешь, коровушка, сенцо, dear cow, eat the hay, забывай-ка травушку. forget about grass. отдадут дружка в солдаты, my boyfriend’s being sent into the army, забывай сударушку. forget about your beloved girl. [http://www.pozdravleniya.su/chastooshkas/armeiskie/5.html] the verse clearly reflects the anxiety of a young girl over the loss of her boyfriend or fiance, usually because he had been drafted. the repeated depiction of buckets might well refer to a common superstition among ukrainians and russians that encountering someone with empty buckets is a bad omen. the rushnyk variant takes on political significance in its reference to the “soviet war,” refered to in ukrainian historiography as the “soviet-ukrainian war.” this was the national struggle between soviet russia and the ukrainian people’s republic (ukrayins’ka ukrainian rushnyky 23 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii narodnia respublika ) that was waged between 1917 and 1921 for control of the ukrainian regions of the former russian empire, which included chernihiv. numerous chastushki of the 1920s “offered political commentary... [and expresed] hostil[ity] to the new order.” “peasant resentment of the conscriptions, and the young women’s anguish over drafted and maimed brothers and sweethearts, endured in the chastushka tradition” [tirado 1993; 37-8]. here we have evidence of the migration of chastushka verse onto a ritual towel. we can only hypothesize concerning the inspiration of the embroiderer (who identifies herself as “t”) for the creation of this rushnyk, although it seems likely that it was intended as a commemoration of a lost sweetheart, who may never have returned to this chernihiv village. a boldly nationalist expression of ukrainian independence is to be found on a rushnyk from the l’viv region, dated 1937, from the period between the world wars that witnessed the temporary shift of political control of the region from the austrohungarian empire to poland. this was produced in western ukraine before it had been annexed by the soviets, in a pre-war atmosphere in which the creation of a free and independent ukraine was a much anticipated possibility. the proclamation in defense of ukrainian nationalism is expressed visually and with inscriptions. at one end is the official ukrainian coat of arms depicting a gold tryzub (trident) on blue background (adopted in 1919 by the ukrainian people’s republic), and at the other the coat of arms of the western ukrainian people’s republic (adapted from the symbol of the principality of galicia-volhynia) [katchanovski 2005: 81]. both seals are surrounded by hovering angels holding a crown (no doubt a reference to the galician-volhynian principality) and bouquets of flowers. 24 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii embroidered rushnyk (from sokol’ raion, l’viv oblast’, dated 1937, author’s collection) ukrainian rushnyky 25 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii the four inscriptions repeat the single theme of independence: “struggle, and you will overcome” (from taras shevchenko’s poem “kavkaz,” 1845), “freedom in ukraine,” “god, save ukraine!” and “ukraine has not yet perished” (from the ukrainian national anthem). a recent news item posted on the zik [західна інформаційна корпорація] website reports on a similar rushnyk embroidered in the 1930s from the volyn’ region that had been found by soviet authorities who sentenced the owner to 25 years of prison in a siberian gulag camp. they understood the proukrainian separatist message to reflect anti-soviet rather than the intended anti-polish sentiment. at one end the embroidered scene depicts a girl at a well offering a bucket of water to a horse, on which is seated a cossack rifleman. hovering overhead is a banner emblazoned with the ukrainian nationalist colors, yellow and blue. on the other end of the rushnyk are depicted the tryzub and a seal with the crowned lion, and the inscription, “we beg you, oh god, we beg you to restore freedom to our ukraine now” [http://zik.ua/ua/news/2010/07/21/238032; see also http://svitlycya. com.ua/ukr/page 1277894310/]. the stridently nationalist sentiments, with quotations from shevchenko’s verse and the national anthem, in these ritual cloths of the 1930s from polish-occupied l’viv and volyn’ regions suggest origin in the urban educated milieu, rather than among village peasantry whose “ukrainian” identity was to large degree inchoate [see brown 2004; 40, 249]. again, family evidence confirms this premise. i never heard my grandmother identify herself as ukrainian. if asked where she was from, she’d say “volyn’” (in a region of shifting political boundaries her town of origin was technically in the volynskaia guberniia of the russian empire, although it is within the podillia ethnographic zone). not surprisingly she was identified as “russian” by “race” on the ship manifest when she arrived in new york in 1912, and as an orthodox christian attended the russian church, which in the presoviet period was still a jurisdiction of the imperial synod. she did tacitly acknowledge her regional origin by claiming, always with a smirk, “we speak po-khokhlatski” (referring to the sometimes 26 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii jocular, sometimes pejorative term “khokhol” that referred to ukrainians/“little russians”). she always had a small portrait of tsar nicholas ii hanging on the wall until her death in 1975. familiar symbols are resilient, and old habits die hard. the rushnyk of national unity: binding the new nation since the collapse of the soviet union in 1991 and the establishment of an independent ukraine that includes virtually all the contiguous territories inhabited by ukrainians (east and west; orthodox and eastern-rite catholic; russian-speaking and ukrainian-speaking), a number of projects involving innovative creation of rushnyky have taken on new dimensions and significance. some were regional guinness-style competitions to create the longest rushnyk on record. but others sought to apply the most archaic conceptions of rushnyky as binding amulets to help forge a unified polity among disparate regions that were in conflict with each other over religious, linguistic, and political allegiances. on the heels of the turmoil of the “orange revolution” (2004-5) a number of private enterprises and committees (official governmental input was deliberately excluded) “took joint initiative on conducting, within the period of may through august, 2007, an exclusive ukrainian-wide cultural and artistic sociopolitical action ‘rushnyk of national solidarity’ [рушник національної єдності] to foster the filling of social pride upon the nation and state, and create the air of social concord… constructive dialogue between all country political forces, development of independent ukraine, strengthening of its economy and cultural development, to improve the nation’s well-being and to gain international authority…” [www.ukrsov.kiev.ua/s_ catalog.nsf/d84f0d771f7b78b8c2256f0100714d3a/e310 10ac3ed 5f535c]. the coordinated effort was termed an aktisiia, a sociopolitical action that would take on the tangible form of a rushnyk that would be created from materials from numerous corners of ukraine, with the labor of some 1340 embroiderers from every region of the nation (and émigré communities abroad), “of various ukrainian rushnyky 27 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii nationalities, faiths and political persuasions” and as it was stitched it would physically traverse all the territories of ukrainian habitation [http://rushnyk.ukrsov.kiev.ua/4]. the physical journey and presence of the rushnyk of national unity would symbolically and ritually function to bind the combative regional entities into a united whole. its creation as an act of building community is analogous to the piecing together of the aids quilt in the usa (1985-present) that helped to foster a shared sense of purpose in combating the pandemic. as of 2010, the names project aids memorial quilt was the largest and longest ongoing example of “community folk art” in the world [www.aidsquilt.org]. the rushnyk of national unity quickly achieved similar status. nikolai stepanenko, towel project director, summarized, “[t]his towel is already a national towel. this is our avatar, our relic” [http://74.86.97.24/en/20080125/37854-celebrating-ukrainiannational-unity.html]. the initial design for the rushnyk was conceived by aleksandra telizhenko, “honored artist of ukraine,” who imbued every aspect of the composition with symbolic meaning. rather than an aggregate design that intermingled the traditional regional embroidery patterns, telizhenko sought to interpret the entire scope of ukrainian history using various motifs and symbols that represent three significant stages of the development of the nation and its culture: the pre-historic trypillian culture, kyivan rus’, and the independent “democratic” cossack state. throughout the composition are embedded archaic pre-christian symbols, as well as allusions to auspicious sacred numbers. the three bands that represent these historical periods are repeated at both ends of the rushnyk, and surmounting them are elaborate trees of life. at the center of the trees is a “polysemantic image” of a stylized lyre that morphs into an image of the “goddess” berehynia with raised arms, whose head is rendered like the featureless face of the ritual dolls known as motanky. the figure of berehynia is encountered on some of the most archaic rushnyky of the slavs. (8) at the very center of the rushnyk is the emblem of ukraine, the trident, stitched in gold threads, which is surrounded by an open wreath “of laurel and oak leaves,” motifs of glory and power. 28 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii the woven linen used for the rushnyk of national unity was an authentic village relic, produced entirely by hand between 1952 and 1955 by kateryna andrushchak and her family in the village of s’omaky, khmel’nyts’ka oblast’. the linen was ceremonially washed on the eve of the feast of the holy trinity in may 2007, in kaniv (where taras shevchneko is buried) in the dnipro river. the embroidering of the rushnyk commenced on june 7, 2007, on khortytsia island (zaporiz’ka oblast’)—one of the islands in the dnipro river where the zaporizhian sich was first established in the 16 th century and where the museum of zaporizhian cossacks is located. over the course of the next year and a half, the linen was embroidered in all oblasti of ukraine, as well as in diaspora communities throughout the world. in january 2008, the first lady of ukraine kateryna yushchenko took part in the ceremony of embroidering the finishing stitches on the rushnyk in the st. sophia national preserve in kyiv. she noted, “this is another proof that we are a single country and a single nation. we share a common history and culture, a common past that we are reviving, and a common future we are creating” [http://www.ukraine3000.org.ua/eng/today/todnews/ 6264.html]. because of the divided church jurisdictions in ukraine, the rushnyk was blessed four times—by the ukrainian orthodox church (moscow patriarch), ukrainian orthodox church (kyiv patriarch), the ukrainian autocephalous orthodox church and the ukrainian greek-catholic church, and a fifth time by the spiritual administration of muslims of crimea. by the time of its completion, members of ethnic minorities living in ukraine had also taken part in its creation—poles, belarusians, russians, armenians, germans, tatars and greeks. the rushnyk, while a traditional ukrainian amulet, was to acknowledge the multi-ethnic realities of the new nation. (curiously, there is no mention in any of the news reports that jewish communities participated.) (9) conclusion it is remarkable to note that even after the depredations, dislocations and turmoil of the twentieth and twenty first ukrainian rushnyky 29 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii centuries—confiscation of village land in the collectivization process, the genocidal famine of the 1930s, world war ii, and the soviet attempt to eradicate archaic folk rituals, not to mention the technological development that had the inadvertent effect of destroying folkways (industrialization, migration of village populations to urban centers, and the destructive force of electricity, television and the internet), the use of rushnyky is still an integral part of traditional life-cycle ceremonies in ukraine, and have been inserted into new traditions where they can play a symbolic (if no longer fully understood ritual or magic) role. in june 2007, i was again in my grandmother’s village and i happened to arrive on the day of the high school graduation. after the typical array of speeches and declamations, the graduating class of six students was led off the stage by means of a rushnyk “bridge”—a ritual towel had been laid across the stage as a “road of life” along which the graduates formed a procession behind two people carrying loaves of bread (also held on rushnyky). thus did they transition to the next stage of life. yet again the archaic talisman had been inserted into an entirely modern initiation rite. at the same time, the creation of the rushnyk of national unity was in full gear. the twenty firstcentury reinvention of the rushnyk as a political binding talisman (oberih) is remarkable evidence how it still resonates in the ukrainian popular mentality. notes 1 “span is from the verb spin, which originally meant ‘draw out, stretch long’…both thread and time were linear, both easily and arbitrarily broken,” as barber notes in her essay “behind the myths” [1994: 235, 238]. 2 thus throughout the odyssey athena and ‘the wily odysseus’ (her favorite devotee) are constantly hatching ingenious plots to escape one tight situation or another, rallying with the words ‘come, let us weave a plan’” [barber 1994: 242-3]. athena “represents everything that human skill and know-how (tekne, 30 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii whence our word technology) can accomplish; she is the goddess of ‘civilization’ itself,” and stands in stark opposition to the enemy of odysseus, poseidon, who represents “the untamed forces of nature” [barber 1994: 242]. 3 that ritual of the binding of the hands with a “wedding knot” should be familiar to anyone who has witnessed a typical anglican wedding ceremony--the recent royal wedding in westminster abbey included. the royal couple, on their knees, clasped right hands and the priest wrapped his stole around them while invoking what is essentially an incantation, "those whom god has joined together let no man put asunder." this is the origin of the phrase “tying the knot,” the magic act of binding a union. 4 see natalie kononenko, “glossary of rushnyk symbols,” at the ukrainian traditional folklore website http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/uvp/index.htm?menu=1-0:0 and kytova 2003: 112-158; see also kytova’s discussion of the symbolism of deer on 138-9. 5 http://honchar.org.ua/halereya/rushnyky/. for a russian example from iaroslavl’ province, see the nypl digital gallery, image id: 55294 at http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/ nypldigital/index.cfm. 6 offered for sale on an internet website, http://www.larusse.ru/index.php? task=good&goods_id=372. 7 on the soviet-period adaptation of byliny and stariny in the form of noviny, see miller 1990: 61-3. 8 on the complex image of berehynia in ukrainian folk art, see kononenko’s 2005 article “goddess figures in ukrainian folk art,” 9 the official rushnyk of national unity website is the best source for accessing the documents relating to the conception and creation of the rushnyk, as well as photographs: http://rushnyk.ukrsov.kiev.ua/4; additional sources and news reports at http://soippo.edu.ua/index.php?option=com_content& view=article&id=328%3a2013-02-19-14-01-29&itemid=1; http://www.volyn.com.ua/?rub=11&article=0&arch=692; http://honchar.org.ua/halereya/rushnyky/ http://rushnyk.ukrsov.kiev.ua/4 http://soippo.edu.ua/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=328%3a2013-02-19-14-01-29&itemid=1 http://www.volyn.com.ua/?rub=11&article=0&arch=692 ukrainian rushnyky 31 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii http://shevchenko-museum.com.ua/default/blog/view/216/blog/1/ %c2%abrushnik-nats%d1%96onalnoyi-yednost%d1%96% c2%bb-na-tarasov%d1%96y-gor%d1%96; http://www.vox.com.ua/data/publ/2008/01/23/obiinyatyrushnykom-usyu-ukrainu.html. ukrainian rushnyky from the author’s collection may be viewed on the following site: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a. 210073355695822.45492.140476139322211&type=3. bibliography barber, elizabeth wayland. 1994. women’s work: the first 20,000 years women, cloth, and society in early times. ny: w. w. norton & co. barber, paul. 1988. vampires, burial, and death. folklore and reality. new haven: yale university press. bogdanovich, a. e. 1895. бoгданович, а. е. пережитки древнего миросозерцания у белорусов: этнографический очерк [survivals of an ancient world view among the belarusians: an ethnographic sketch]. гродна: губернская тип. brown, kate. 2004. a biography of no place: from ethnic borderland to soviet heartland. cambridge: harvard univ. press. chevalier, jean and alain gheerbrant. 1996. a dictionary of symbols. london: penguin books. chumarna, mariia. 2005. чумарна, марія. код української вишивки [the code of ukrainian embroidery]. львів: апріорі. eliade, mircea. 1959. the sacred and the profane. ny: harcourt brace. evans, helen and william wixom (eds.). 1997. the glory of byzantium: art and culture of the middle byzantine era a.d. 843-1261. new york: metropolitan museum of art. 32 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii facebook. 2011. “textile history forum 2011.” https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.210073355695 822.45492.140476139322211&type=3. 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(consulted 12, september 2013). 36 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii a president's portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 133 a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate natalia lysiuk taras shevchenko national university of kiev kiev, ukraine abstract the extreme level of tension during the euromaidan in ukraine has caused a real explosion of urban post-folklore creativity. these folklore forms have many distinctive features of traditional folklore, but they are also characterized by their means of transmission. for instance, anonymous inscriptions could appear anywhere. such texts have their own dramaturgy, and they recreate the development of the euromaidan events (from simple appeals to give people an opportunity to determine their own destiny to openly hostile discourse that portrayed the former president of ukraine, victor yanukovich, as the main enemy of the euromaidan). among those attested: distortions of yanukovich’s name; demonstration of contempt for his image; insults; mention of his criminal past and ongoing corruption; and prophecies of his fate. one of the defining features of such texts is the violation of prohibitions on the use of dysphemisms and vulgarity as a verbal weapon against an enemy. we will also discuss the basic functions of protest folklore and hate speech. crowds on the maidan (author’s photo) the euromaidan was the second ukrainian revolution of this century. it was a public protest that took place in the main kiev’s square maidan nezalezhnosti (maidan) from november 2013 until february 2014. it was characterized by an unprecedented rise of patriotism and strengthening of national identity (as reflected in the wide usage of national colors, symbols, and images). its primary symbols illustrated a demonstrative public turn to religion, and, at the same time, collective expression of a sharply negative attitude toward the social and political situation in the country, in particular toward the ukrainian political elite and its leaders. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 134 just as during the events of the orange revolution 2004, there was a burst of political folklore created by so called, ‘mobile’ folk communities (characterized by their temporary, open, and dynamic nature). such communities may be regarded as subculture united solely by ideological principles and political preferences. other features, such as age, social status, religion, etc., are secondary in such communities. ukrainian flags with protest slogans in independence square (author’s photo) the euromaidan folklore cycle was partly similar to folklore documented during the orange revolution [britsyna, golovakha 2005: 3-16; lysiuk 2005: 5063], but there were differences resulting from the context, i.e., euromaidan was a longer period of political action permeated with tragic events. during the initial period, it had carnival nature, but later the mood became embittered and aggressive (the last “carnival like” surge was recorded on 19 january 2014 as a protest against the dictatorial laws of 16 january 2014). comparison of the folklore of the orange revolution with euromaidan texts demonstrates the close link of this folklore with “post-written” culture, i.e., transmission in handwritten, printed, and electronic forms (posts in the social networks and text messages). in particular, the use of photoshop to create these materials was widespread. one of the important features of the euromaidan folklore was intertextuality, i.e., the use of the creative potential of existing texts (well-known phrases, plots, images, symbols, etc.) from many spheres of national a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 135 and world culture. more so than in 2004, a strongly positive self-assessment of the protesting community, and correspondingly low assessment of the opponents of the movement were demonstrated. thus, there were a lot of serious and satirical texts that became increasingly more rude and obscene. this vulgar language was used to delegitimize the authorities. as britsyna and golovakha (2005: 10) documented during the orange revolution, now minor genres dominated among all the material collected as well. however, most of these material centered on language games rather than anecdotes. due to the lack of truthworthy official information, rumors and gossip were widespread. the chant repertoire turned out to be much less common than in 2004. those that did exist were used purely to identify like-minded people and were not reminiscent of children’s taunts. a number of naïve lyric, epic, and short satirical poems were attested as well; reformulations of popular or folk songs (“vіtya, ciao”, “gorіla shyna” [a tire was burning], called “kolomyikas”) and folk theatre “vertep” (static and living nativity scenes based on the bible plots) became common. however, the most frequent form of folk text attested during euromaidan was protest lore in the form of inscriptions and/or drawings (posters, stickers, leaflets, and graffiti). these folk textual and graphic forms are not exclusively ukrainian nor a novelty. they have also been attested during both world wars in canada, the united kingdom, and the united states, as well as during democratic revolutions in the late 1980s and early 1990s in central and eastern europe (as well as other contemporary states ) as a means of popular protest, also in [see hagar 2001 for a discussion]. during euromaidan, various visual forms of anonymous inscriptions and drawings – handwritten, printed, penciled, painted etc. – were placed on all the suitable surfaces that within the space called ‘maidan’s room for freedom of speech.’ they were displayed on the pavement as well as on clothing and accessories, but occurred mainly on kiosks, walls, fences and posters. due to the bilingualism and biculturalism of the euromaidan protesters, both ukrainian and russian languages were used, and a number of english texts were collected as well. we consider these verbal and visual texts to be classified as folklore because they demonstrate its main features, including anonymity, collective creation, a degree of variation together with a wide range of improvisation, functionality, and inclusivity. moreover, another inherent feature of these texts was the combination of verbal, physical, and behavioral codes [tolstoy 1995: 24], so that spoken and written texts, pictures, and sometimes objects, performances and ceremonies all must be interpreted as meaningful symbols. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 136 protest slogans on a maidan barricade (author’s photo) these multi-lingual and multi-code texts had their own evolution, recreating the development of the events and directly reflecting the dynamics of the protest. they strayed from the initial, general appeal to give people the opportunity to determine their own destiny and to associate with the eu and turned into extremely sharp rhetoric and openly hostile discourse directed against particular people in the government. multi-lingual protest posters (author’s photo) a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 137 the most attention was given to the former head of the ukrainian state viktor yanukovych, who became a metonym for the regime. therefore, his image became representative of the main villain in the protests. it dominated public consciousness until march 2014, when he receded into the background (1), and some new themes appeared, namely crimea, vladimir putin, and a forthcoming war with russia. the verbal and visual texts aimed at the former president of ukraine demonstrated contempt for his image, distorted his name, insulted him with all means available, including sacral eschrology (obscene nicknames and damnation). these texts made reference to his criminal past and ongoing corruption and foretold his fate (retirement, getaways, and even violent death). in this paper i will trace the topics of these texts. because my task is to demonstrate how the image of a president can be reflected in mass folk creativity, many comments related to yanukovych (for example, his trips to other countries or his relations with putin ending with the line хутін – пуй, бандюкович – путінський холуй! [dutin (instead of ‘putin’) is a pick (instead of ‘dick’), (2) bandyukovych is putin’s flunky!]) etc. will be omitted from consideration, because they merit special study. folk teasing and bullying one of the striking small folk genres attested at the euromaidan were the expressive titles given to the protestors’ political enemies, primarily dysphemisms, i.e., strong expressions with negative connotations offensive to people or groups. similar expressive titles of the political enemies have been used in ukrainian political life since the 1990s, for example during the orange revolution, where they were an effective political weapon [lysiuk 2005: 62–63]. there were three main types of political dysphemisms: 1) anthroponyms based on proper names; 2) nicknames based on some personal characteristics; and 3) general vulgarities or swear words. insulting names for yanukovich in a protest poster (author’s photo) folklorica 2015, vol. xix 138 the new pejorative anthroponyms were created on the basis of the actual names of well-known politicians. the disregard for these politicians was manifested by using some intimate or purely official forms of addressing them, such as by their first name, or by only their patronymic, or by their surname. we can group them in a following way: a) unceremonious truncating of surnames and their distortion; b) dismissive derivatives; c) paronomasia, i.e., replacement with paronyms or similar words that possess stronger negative senses. for example, desecration of the fourth ukrainian president’s name included: a) unceremonious truncation of his surname: ia. [i, me], ianuk, ianyk, ianik, ianek, ianiek, iandzek etc., also ovoch/ovoshch [vegetable] (from the suffix -ovych ‘being a son of the root word’), b) adding diminutive or augmentative suffixes with negative connotation to his name: vit’ko, vit’ka, vitёk; ianukovyshche, c) and many distorted forms of his surname from innocent anagrammatic and paronymous ones, such as iakunovych, iakubovych, to the more strong “ideological” names, ianukovoch/ianukovoshch [yanukovegetable], ianuchar (a paronym of ianychar [janissary]), yankee (the nickname of americans was used in its original latin spelling), ianuchescu/ianushescu (modeled after the romanian dictator ceauşescu’s surname), ianus (a personification of the roman god of falsehood), later ialynkovych (from ukr. ialynka [fir-tree, christmas-tree]) (3), ianukrovych (from krov [blood]), and finally to much more offensive soubriquets that were much more distant phonetically from his name: bandiukovych [bandit’s son], gan’bovych [shame’s son], swinukovych [pig’s son], gamniukovych [shit’s son]. moreover, a new patronymic was invented: legitymych (because he liked to emphasize that he was a legitimate president). insulting backronym based on the name yanukovich (author’s photo) a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 139 there were also some attempts to find the hidden meaning of the president’s surname, to decipher it by the means of “sacred” linguistics like: a) backronyms: ялинку нашу українську кров’ю облив вигнати чорта [he has flooded our christmas tree with ukrainian blood – expel the devil] (the bolded letters spell out ianukovych), b) anagrammatic riddles: я / 4 рази нюхав нари, / гвалтував дівчат / та крав мільярди, / зараз хочу / весь нарід / поставити на коліна / і за чуба всіх тягати [i have sniffed pallets 4 times, raped girls, and stolen billions, now i want to put all people on their knees and pull them by the forelock], and c) even a cryptogram with “code keys” found in english and russian: yanukович азарoff putin. as a trash bin was located next to this text, we decrypted it as follows: [yanukо (is) hiv (rus. vich), (throw) azar off (and) put in (to the bin)]. anagrammatic riddle based on the name yanukovich (author’s photo) still other nicknames relied on a knowledge of the president’s biography or his physical appearance. for example, the plump yanukovych was nicknamed folklorica 2015, vol. xix 140 shrek, and, due to his unusual walk, he was also called pinguin [penguin]. yanukovich’s ambiguous past resulted in such sobriquets as zlodiy/vor [thief], bandit/bandiuk/bandiugan [bandit], grabizhnyk/razboynik [robber], aferyst/aferist [conman], moshennik [swindler], shuler [rook], napёrstochnik [thimblerigger], nasyl’nyk divchat [rapist of girls], проффесор судимых наук [proffesor of criminal sciences], kaznokrad [embezzler]: схаменулась україна, / cхаменулась і повстала, / що донецького бандита / гетьманом обрала [ukraine has revolted, / revolted and rebelled, / cause it elected a donetsk bandit as the chieftain] (a paraphrase of the historical song “зажурилась україна, що нічим прожити…” [ukraine is grieved since it had nothing to live on…]). the criminal theme was reflected in the use of a corresponding criminal jargon as well. president was called zek [a jailbird], ham [cad, boor] (there was a rumor yanukovych had actually received this nickname while in jail), (4) pahan [godfather], stukach [snitch]: zeka get’! [jailbird away!], zek voniuchyi! [smelly jailbird!], тільки не zek! [just not jailbird!], etc. inscriptions referring to yanukovich’s prison background (author’s photo) another popular group was based on the errors and comments from his public speeches: proffesor, profffesor with 2 or more upper or lowercase letters ff (to remind that yanukovych has personally written this word incorrectly in his autobiography, which is characterized by such mistakes), and even akademik [academician]. his electoral slogan as a presidential candidate tomu shcho… [because…] seemed to people to ring especially false, and it was decoded as tomushcho tiamushche [because it (sic! – n. l.) is sly]. his other election slogan pochuiu kozhnogo [i will hear everyone] also generated a number of texts: янукович та азіров! знайшлися ваші слухові апарати! заберіть і почуйте народ!!! [yanukovych and azirov! your hearing aids have been found! pick them up and hear the people!!!]; a portrait of yanukovych with a bandaged ear was accompanied by the inscription: він дуже багато чув. але скоро буде кричати він і ніхто його не почує. підпис ван гог [he has heard too much. but soon he will scream and nobody will hear him. signed van gogh]. finally, a full performance was presented on the euromaidan during which some students a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 141 brought an enormous model of “yanukovych’s ear” onto the stage while chanting an appeal for him to hear them and promising to bring him a brain as a bonus. finally, the profane expressions collected during euromaidan focused on yanukovych’s qualities and capabilities. at the beginning of euromaidan, his moral, mental capacity and psychic state were described with dysphemisms that did not go beyond typical conversational norms: moral’nyi/prorosiys’kyi urod [moral/pro-russian freak], duren’ [fool], profan [ignoramus], nenormal’nyi [crazy], vyrodok [degenerate], debil [moron], negidnyk [scoundrel], brehun/brehlo/lzhets [liar] etc.; cf. the ukranian-english couplet: я дебіл, в країні срач! i’m happy very much! [i am a moron, there is clutter in the country!]; or a confession attributed to him, президент янукович: я знаю, що я дурний! [president yanukovych: i know i’m stupid!]; or this assessment, дволикий янус ти вітько – огидний всьому світу [vit’ko, you are a two-faced janus disgusting to all the people]. protest poster with spelling errors denigrating yanukovich’s language ability (author’s photo) subsequently, when the degree of resentment of the president had risen dramatically, the nicknames began to drift to more abusive invectives: janyk chmo [yanyk is a schmuck] (the inscription was in the snow in a parking lot), loh [goof], ham [cad], zhlob [dolt], pokyd’ok [scum], podonok [jerk], mraz’ [filth]: нам не страшен витя жлоб [we are not scared of the dolt vіtia]; морда хама і тупе лице і за народ болить яйце! [(he has) the muzzle of a cad and a blocky folklorica 2015, vol. xix 142 face, and (his) testicle suffers for the people!]. at the same time people also used some rude vulgarisms: padlo [crud], padliuka [scoundrel], svoloch’ [riffraff] (in ukrainian, these words are used only as offensive ones): народ має не лише своїх героїв та достойників, але й своїх падлюк та негідників [people had their heroes and dignitaries, but its scoundrels and villains too]; міністр мвс захарченко падлюка, а янукович щось гірше [the interior minister zakharchenko is a scoundrel, and yanukovych is something worse]; яка … тебе породила падло? [what a ... has give birth to you, crud?]. sometimes the heroes of the favorite books assisted in the creation of epithets: тітка секлета просила передати, що ви, пане проффесоре, велика падлюка! [the aunt sekleta asked to tell that you, mr. proffesor, are great scoundrel!]. (5) moreover, the names and rhymes began to include plenty of bawdy words after the attempt at a bloody dispersal of the euromaidan protestors on the night of november 30, 2013. later the scatological content increased and intensified in response to subsequent brutal actions by government officials. every society normally imposes restrictions on the use of profanities, of course. ukrainian society once had extremely strict norms for public verbal behavior (both written and spoken). the public use of swearing and obscenities are prohibited here by this custom. moreover, the ukrainians consider themselves to be opposed to the russians in this regard, claiming that ukrainian language has no native vulgar expressions and that all profanities were borrowed from russia. there are also the written regulations forbidding swearing in public and use of offensive evaluative judgments against any person (see article 173 of the code of ukraine on administrative offences and the article 277 of the civil code of ukraine). in addition, the ukrainian intellectuals who took part in the euromaidan typically do not use such language, observing customary prohibitions on cursing. therefore, breaking of these taboos and the mass use of obscenities during the people’s rebellion was unusual in this context. poster reading “profanity-free zone” (author’s photo) a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 143 the maidaners periodically regarded this behavior with disdain. there were attempts to establish restrictions concerning the use of swearing and obscenities among the protestors. “officially” their individual use had been banned in the maidan, both in spoken and written communication. for example, територія, вільна від матюків [area free from profanity] declared a poster hanging on the monument of independence in the middle of the square. писати можна будьякою мовою, але без використання ненормативної лексики (матюків), хоч і зрозуміло, що це важко! [you can write in every language but without the use of profanity (foul words) though, understandably, it’s really hard!..] was written on the first page of the real maidan notebook/book of comments where participants were invited to write their own remarks on the situation. however, at the same time, the public used profanities (anonymously), and still later the collective (choral) recitation or chanting of obscenities became acceptable. thus, there was an unspoken permission to say or write dysphemisms regarding enemies and the “gang” (though self-appointed “censors” sometimes destroyed or corrected the most shocking inscriptions). while many politicians were attacked, the most cruel remarks and obscenities were aimed at the former ukrainian president. the dirtiest abuses of his regime were linked, of course, to obscene vocabulary primarily referring to “anus-excremental” and “sexual” organs [mokienko 1994: 62–63]. that means that due to the initial biculturalism of the euromaidan both cultural matrices were used: the true ukrainian (and wider, pan-european) type (excremental culture), and the typically russian one focusing on sex-culture rather than on excitement. thus, the insults were created within the frameworks of both cultures. obscenities includes references to excrement, the rear end and the process of defecation, as in янукович – це зеківська базарна баба, (6) яка думає тільки про свій клан та свою жопу! [yanukovych is a criminal vulgar person who thinks only of his clan and his ass!]. remarks about sending yanukovych away relied on this particular type of reference: ми в європу, яник в жопу [we are going to europe, yanyk up the ass]; iди в дупу [go up the ass], яника в ж... [(send) yanyk into an a...]: ви нас підманули, ви нас підвели. / ми ідем в європу, ви ж ідіть туди [you have cheated us, you have tricked us. / we are going to europe, you can go there] (near the sketch of an ass). english was used in these insults as well: янукович [yanukovych], kiss my ass too!!! the creators of the new texts also included references to abnormal defecation: свято наближається / і госпідaр разом з ним. / яник скоро всрається / зробить свято в нас [holiday is coming / and the host along with it. / soon yanyk will crap / and all of us will rejoice]. yanukovych’s legendary golden toilet bowl was exploited as a parallel with this the motif. for example, the following text was placed on one of his photos: шахтер, рабочий, спасибо за золотой унитаз [miner, worker, thank you for my golden toilet bowl]. this golden pan was opposed to a toilet bowl in a prison. the following inscription was applied to a picture with a prisoner sitting on a toilet in a cell: я тут сидів і гірко плакав, бо мало їв і мало какав [i sat here and wept bitterly because i ate a little and pooped only a bit]. in the other half of folklorica 2015, vol. xix 144 this picture the same character sat on the golden toilet-throne with a crown in his hand: тепер сиджу і вже не плачу – бо наглядач і сильно скачу! [now i am sitting and crying no more – because i am an overseer and i can jump up higher!]. a model of the gilded toilet bowl into which everyone could throw empty plastic cups and other trash was installed next to the public toilets in the maidan; the slogan on it stated: янукович мой унитаз свой золотой! [yanukovych, clean your golden toilet bowl yourself!]. such a plea was also included in his testament (7): на могилу поставте – мого унітаза / і на ньому прив’яжіте – з триколору банта / бо народ уже не схоче – / такого гаранта [set my toilet bowl on my tomb / and tie a bow made of the tricolor (a hint at the russian flag) / because people will no longer want / such a guarantor]. finally, in june 2014 portraits of yanukovych and putin appeared on the urinals in one of kiev’s pubs, while in lviv toilet paper with a portrait of smiling yanukovych labeled vidchuiu kozhnogo [i’ll feel everybody] (a paraphrase of his electoral promise i’ll hear everybody) went on sale at a fairly high price. sexual insults include references to genitals and coitus, such as ianiek huilo [yaniek is a shit-dick], посадили кущ калини, а виросла туя, вибирали президента – а вибрали х...! [we planted a guelder rose bush, but an arborvitae has grown, we picked out a president – but a d... was picked out!]; in imitation of a humorous folk song, we found, признаюся, українці: президент я хуїв!!! [ukrainians, i confess: i am a dick of a president], знають старші і малі, що господар у ...ді! [the elderly and toddlers know the ruler is in a c...t!]. sometimes some “esoteric”, i.e., english, expressions were used: f***k off, вітя [vitia] (a picture of a closed fist with the outstretched middle finger accompanied this text). allusions to sodomy and homosexuality were especially frequent and often relied on vernacular forms of the word pederast (pidoras, pidor, pidar): ianukovych pidaras [yanukovych is a faggot], ianyk – pidar [yanyk is a pedo] (]: витя яник – дед мороз, / голова из ваты. / кровь и слезы ты принес, / пидор ты горбатый! [vitia yanik is a ded moroz, (8) / his head is made of cotton. / you brought blood and tears, / you are a humpback faggot!], лиш пробачте, українці, / жителям донбасу, / що довірили країну / мені... підарасу... [ukrainians, forgive / the donbas residents / who entrusted the country / to me... a faggot...], хай буде все пучком, / а яник п’ятачком, / азаров (9) віні пухом, / а путин ослом надутим. / аминь [let everything be perfect, / let yanyk become a piglet, / azarov a winnie the pooh, / and putin the sad donkey. / amen]. (10) some also contained criminal expressions such as яник – питух, беркут – хуеркут [yanyk is a cock/rooster, (11), berkut is a cock-thing]. (12) a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 145 poster with sexual profanities referring to yanukovich and the berkuts (author’s photo) in light of generally accepted standards of decency, softened forms were sometimes used instead of these more offensive expressions in a type of language game. examples were extremely diverse and included primarily a series of euphemisms created to reveal a secret (and potentially sexual) sense of ordinary, inoffensive words to the audience. the games included examples with: backwards words, as in яник іди на йух (the inverse of hui)! [yanyk go to kcoc! (the inverse of cock)], chyvokunya [the inverse of yanukovych]; words-in-words created with internal capital letters: нахіба мені влада яка мене ігнорує! [why should i have a government that ignores me! (the first word in this phrase can be read as nah..., i. e., fuck!)]; omission of certain letters: ink pnh [yanyk, fuck you (or in the direct translation, yanyk, go onto a dick)]; ellipsis: vybraly h… [we elected a d...k], u ...di (in a c...t]; paronomious consonances leading to an indecent reading of a word: lider re-gey-analov! [leader of the re-gay-anuses!]. the popular slogan ia. pidaresht (a play on ‘i’m a fag’ from the original phrase януковича під арешт ‘yanukovych must be arrested’) alongside a picture of the president behind bars was widespread and appeared in hand-written inscriptions, on printed labels and even on home-made girls’ earrings. in mid-december 2013, the members of a flash mob on khreshchatyk built the word pidaresht with their own bodies. one particularly productive example was based on the filthy nickname gandon [condom] used for the president. it formed an original paronymous chain: honduras, then ananas [pineapple], cf. наш проффесор “гондурас” / опозорил весь донбас [our proffesor gonduras / shamed all the donbas], за новий рік без ананаса! [to the new year without the pineapple!]. finally, there was a pearl of cross-linguistic word play combining ukrainian and english: yahoo!єю з нашого президента! [i am wonder-stricken by our fucking president!] [for more details about language games, see lysiuk 2015]. other newly coined ukrainian political obscene expressions appeared at this time as well: ну ты янукович! [what a yanukovych you are!], also: мать твоя йолка! [fuck your christmas-tree!], later – krymtvoiumat’! [fuck your crimea!]. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 146 demonstrators spelling out pidaresht (pederast) (author’s photos) dehumanizing the image people’s hatred of the leader also resulted in a demonstration of contempt for his image and the consequent outrages directed at it: his portraits were inverted; sketched and crossed out; painted and penciled as if in school textbooks and “decorated” with different stickers and insulting inscriptions over his face. leaving aside his “innocent” portraits with a red clown nose, it can be argued that there were attempts to reject his claim on domination or to align him with infamous dictators. it was common to target his humanity by imputing him phyto, zoomorphic and demonic characteristics. because people considered yanukovych unworthy to be president, the politicization of his image served to ridicule his claims to reign. thus, a number of “titles” given to yanukovych’s image removed him out of the frame of universal values and represented him as a dictator and tyrant. in particular, there were the images of yanukovych wearing a crown. the inscription on one of them said: спасибо жителям донбасса от президента пида...аса [thank you, donbas residents, from the president ped... st]. another poster depicted a naked man with horns, clad only in a tie and a very long mantle supported from behind by two naked males with an paronymous inscription: а король-то гопник [a king is a hooligan]. (13) the claims of gore-presydent [woe-president], perzident of urkaine (from urka [hooligan] in russian criminal argot) to be the “father of the nation” seemed absolutely untenable and were reflected in the epithets associated with his image: україна – не росія, янукович – не месія! [ukraine is not russia, yanukovych is not the messiah!]; бандюкович – враг украины [bandiukovich is an enemy of ukraine]; янукович… вы оставили в наследство своим детям и внукам позор, презрение, ненависть и проклятия [yanukovych... you have left shame, contempt, hatred and curses as the inheritance for your children and grandchildren]. the well-known “hit” батя, я стараюсь [dad, i am trying (lit., exerting myself)!] recorded by the first lady liudmila yanukovych, whose name became the synonymous with fool in urban folk texts, was used to ridicule him: батя, ми стараємось [dad, we are trying]; батя, ми старались – втікайте a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 147 птахи, як не заховались! [dad, we are trying – birds, flee if you have not hidden yet!]; (14) батя, хочу стать сиротой – постарайся! [dad, i want to be an orphan so exert yourself!]; яник ты перестарался! [yanyk you overexerted yourself!]. drawing of yanukovich above the name iosyf adolfovych pinochet (author’s photo) he was not presented as respected and caring father but as a ruthless tyrant. he was called a dyktator [dictator] (україні не потрібні диктатори [ukraine does not need any dictators]), uzurpator [usurper], provokator [provocateur], fashyst [fascist], okupant [occupant], iuda [judas], and запроданець моssковії [betrayer to mosskovia]. (15) this trend was exhibited in the christmas verteps as well, where yanukovych and the prime minister azarov appeared as the tyrant herod and as a devil. a related trend in the political folklore of the period was associating the president’s images with characteristic external features or attributes of famous world dictators, e.g., china’s mao zedong (depicting him with asian-style eyes); adolf hitler (in a nazi uniform with a short moustache and penciled swastika in a circle); or augusto pinochet (in the military uniform of the chilean junta). he also appeared in some composite images of a stereotypical tyrant with a thick black beard, a pirate patch over one eye and in a white admiral jacket with epaulets and countless awards and medals (akin to leonid brezhnev). they were accompanied by inscriptions such as іосиф адольфович піночет [iosyph folklorica 2015, vol. xix 148 adolfovych pinochet]. sometimes he was pictured in a company of nicolae ceauşescu, saddam hussein, muammar kaddafi, etc. zoomorphization was another means to cast aspersions on yanukovych and resulted in a complete dehumanization of the president’s image. this process was manifested in the use of general and specific names referring to fauna: ianukovych tvar’! [yanukovych is a creature], tvaryna [animal], zvieriuka!!! [beast], potvora [monster], vovkulaka [werewolf], vovk [wolf], vovtziura [dire wolf], ianyk suka [yanyk is a bitch], bydlo [cattle, beast], kozёl [billy-goat], shchur [rat], klishch [mite], gnida [nit], etc.: бидло – воно і в африці бидло. тільки в україні воно президент [a beast is a beast even in africa. it (sic! – n. l.) is a president only in ukraine]. (16) sometimes he appeared as a predator or cannibal in keeping with the idea that he preyed on the people, as we see in the list above: з’їв м’ясо на людях, тепер до кісток обгризає [he has eaten the meat of humans, now he is gnawing their bones]. despite these predatory masks he wore in the visual and verbal folk texts expressions equating yanukovych with cloven-hoofed animals were most common among the animal references. yanukovych was often called svynia [shepig], kaban [swine], knour [hog], and hriak [castrated boar] (all these “titles” means also a coarse person). a number of his images were “adorned” with a pig’s snout, and he was often depicted in the form of a pig, for example, like a boar dressed in the costume of a christmas tree and accompanied by two policemen with sticks, or like a carcass with a snout leaning on trident next to the inscription: викуримо кабана з межигір’я! [expel the boar by fire from mezhygiria!], cf.: станеться все просто, / ніби два на два. / і лежать на полці, / що висить на йолці / буде надсвиняча суперголова. [it’ll happen simply / as if two multiply by two. / and the overpig’s superhead / will lie on the shelf / hanging on a christmas tree]. this trend persisted at least until the end of february 2014, when a photo of a huge singed boar’s carcass lying on a peasant yard with an inscription ianukovych on its side was published in the press. while animal references were most common, one nickname based on yanukovych’s name, ovoch/ovoshch [a vegetable] was popular as well, cf. euphemistic slogans: вживайте більше овочів та фруктів [eat more vegetables and fruits], овощ созрел – пора убирать [the vegetable is ripe, it’s time to harvest]). a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 149 image of yanukovich as a pig with the inscription “expel the boar by fire from mezhygiria!” (author’s photo) demonization of the president’s image became especially prevalent after the bloody crackdown on the euromaidan. at that point, streams of blood were drawn on his portraits, mostly on the hands, lips, and face. in one caricature, the leader sat next to a christmas tree decorated with red apples and squeezed them into a bucket of blood-like juice. sometimes he was depicted as a vampire with fangs and bloody lips. these images were accompanied by inscriptions like krovosisia [bloodsucker] (17), vit’ka krovavyi [vyt’ka the bloody!], твої руки залляті кров’ю дітей україни! [your hands are stained with the blood of children of ukraine!]. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 150 poster of yanukovich referred to as a hog (author’s photo) a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 151 poster of yanukovich with a christmas tree and bucket of “blood” (author’s photo) poster titled bloodsuckers (author’s photo) folklorica 2015, vol. xix 152 in essence, the president was reviled and depicted as a devil, satan, or an evil spirit, as the following inscriptions affirm: яник, покайся черт, тобі місце в пеклі! [yanyk, heck, repent, your place is in the hell!]; згинь, нечиста сила! [perish, devilry!]; сатанинская власть януковича иди в приисподнюю! [satanic power of yanukovych, go to the hell!]; захистимо нашу україну від сатани та його прихвоснів в кепках із москви! [let’s defend our ukraine from the satan and his henchmen clad in kepis from moscow!]; україну – в єс, а януковича – в пітьму! [let ukraine go to the eu and yanukovych to the darkness!]. we have also a text in style of the well-known (likely fake) letter from the ukrainian cossacks to the turkish sultan: лист українському хаму віктору ялинковичу / ти зрадник, чорт москальський, / проклятого чорта брат і товариш, / путіна підстилка! / який ти в чорта президент, / коли українських дітей під кийки кидаєш, / а сам по світу жебрачиш? франківська січ [to the ukrainian boor viktor yalynkovych: / you are a traitor, moskal (muscovite) devil, / brother and friend to the cursed devil’s, / putin’s litter! / what a devilish president you are / if you toss the ukrainian children under the bludgeons, / and you are begging all around the world? frankivsk sich]. (18) the insults were strengthened by composite amorphous images of the leader, as in a picture of him with a red snout, a sparse beard and horns alongside the words ia smerdiu [i stink], or one with horns, a pig snout, thick fur all over his body, male genitalia and hooves. therefore, the words attributed to the virgin mary seemed apt to the protesters: прокляну до сьомого коліна за невинну кров людини! [i’ll curse to the seventh generation for the innocent human blood spilled!]. i should note that a single antimaidan example opposed these texts and pictures of yanukovych as a demon: нукович!!! ты наш бог и мы вам верим!!! м. ханженково [yanukovych!!! you’re our god and we believe you!!! the city of hanzhenkovo]. despite this evidence of some support, as the euromaidan wore on, more and more people expressed a negative attitude toward the president on posters: ми не любимо я. [we do not like ia.]; не любимо януковича… [(we) dislike yanukovych...]; ми хочемо нормального призедента [we want a normal pryzedent (sic, author’s mistake in the inscription)]; я зневажаю свого президента [i despise my president]; янукович! ми тебе мали на увазі [yanukovych! we do not care for you]; єнакієво его падлу не любит, путин полюбляє [yenakievo (19) does not like him, a crud, but putin does]; ганьба януковичу! борислав сміється, а яник плаче [shame on yanukovych! boryslav laughs and yanyk cries]. (20) a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 153 yanukovich as the devil with pig snout and genitalia exposed (author’s photo) at times people expressed their outrage simply by writing ненавижу [(i) hate (you)] on his portrait. at others, they appealed to well-known book characters to express their disapproval: януческу и азареску, вас никто не любит кроме уголовного розыска, который тоже вас не любит. остап бендер [yanushesku and azaresku, nobody likes you, besides the criminal investigation department, who does not like you either. ostap bender]. (21) sometimes, some special inscriptions appeared: я. ракова пухлина на тілі україни! [ya. is a cancer on the body of ukraine!], якщо янукович обіцяє мир – готуйся до війни (майданна мудрість) [if yanukovych promises peace –prepare for war (maidan wisdom)]. not surprisingly, stickers reading майданемо я. [let’s maidan ya.] (a neologism, to maidan means ‘to throw somebody off the throne’) were also popular. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 154 yanukovich as a clown saying “i stink” (author’s photo) some made direct appeals and requests to the leader as well: яник, дурний, чи шо? [yanyk, you are stupid, are you not?]; вітя, нам не треба такий госпідар! [vitia, we do not need such a riler! (instead of ruler, in azarov’s dialect)]; вітя, зроби подарунок українцям на новий рік! [vitia, make a gift to ukrainians for the new year! (i.e., disappear)]. at times, these appeared in the form of commands or veiled threats: конституція – не шапка, поверни вкрадену владу! [the constitution is not a hat, return our stolen full powers!]; 25 декабря чаушеску не успел понять, что происходит… [on 25 december ceauşescu had no time to understand what had been going on...]; янукович, не підпишеш і не підеш мирно, буде гірше! [yanukovych, if you do not resign and do not go away peacefully, it’ll be worse!]; вітя! їжачок тобі коко знесе! єнакієво [vitia! a hedgehog will carry a small egg for you! (22) yenakievo]. a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 155 poster reading with reference to ostap bender (author’s photo) formulaic categorical labels were commonplace as well: я проти януковича! [i am against yanukovych!], я против я. [i’m against ya.]. these formulas may be considered to be both personal and collective protests in view of the signatures placed alongside them on behalf of real or virtual people or firms and companies, villages, towns, cities, districts, regions and all of ukraine: донбас проти яника [donbas is against yanyk], енакиево против бандюковича [yenakyevo is against bandiukovich], джон траволта проти януковича [john travolta is against yanukovych]. this trend began on 29 december 2013, when many drivers placed the stickers bearing slogans against yanukovych on the license plates of their cars. as a negative character, the ex-president also became an example not to follow in the maidan guidelines themselves: друже! не чини з майданом, як янукович! не плюй у нього! не кидай на нього своїх недопалків! негайно прибирай своє сміття! [friend! do not do to the maidan as yanukovych does! do not spit on it! do not leave your cigarette butts on it! tidy up your garbage folklorica 2015, vol. xix 156 immediately!]. a poster hanging on one of the small fir-trees in the maidan seemed especially lighthearted in this regard: іграшки не красти! ти ж не я.! [do not steal the ornaments! you are not a ya.!]. the creators of maidan folklore also focused on the biography of the president, mythologizing and hyperbolizing his criminal past ever more as time went on. yanukovych was accused of 6 murders for hire (kravchenko, kirpa, etc.); 13 criminal cases from the soviet era (his godfather had purified him or he had bought him off); and 4 prison sentences (he was a boor in prison). there were also suggestions that he participated in massacres, looting, and other violence in yenakyevo in his youth, and that he ordered the heads of cities and district administrations where he had not been elected president to appear before him and knocked their teeth out himself. the criminal episodes of yanukovych’s past came into the spotlight. he was positioned as a liar and con artist and a thief: бум!! кручу, верчу обмануть хочу! [boom!! i am twisting and twirling, since i want to cheat everyone]; все починалося з жуйки в магазині, яку я вкрав... [everything started with the gum i’d stolen in the shop...] (inscription on a smiling yanukovych’s picture). some episodes in his youth, like thefts of passerbys’ winter hats, were also common: вітя! ти вкрав і надів чужу шапку [vitia! you have stolen someone’s hat and put it on yourself]. this theme was developed in simple verses: не йде вітя у європу / ні за які бабки, / бо в європі вже не носять / ондатрові шапки! [vitia does not go to europe / for any money, / cause in europe nobody wears / muskrat hats!]; большой начальник какие страсти / обман и сила и он у власти / захват богатства сбылись надежды / сбивает шапки везде как прежде / украл он деньги всего народа / и как нам снять его урода? [the great boss, what a passion / the fraud and strength, and he has complete power / the capture of wealth, and his hopes have come true / he plucks hats everywhere as before / he has stolen all the people’s money / and how can we remove him, the monster?]. some requested that he return his ill-gotten gains: витя верни деньги [vitia refund money]; яник, верни деньги [yanyk, give money back]; ходка перша не загашена [the previous term has not been not repaid]. many of these inscriptions were expressed ungrammatically with a merciless doublespeak and the use of jargon: енакиево проти зека насильника 4 ходки в зоне… [yenakyevo is against the prisoner and rapist who have [sic] been 4 times in the penal colonies...], янукович – 4х ходок в тюрму – зек [yanukovych – 4 times was in prison/a prisoner], я. пахан ссучился / на зоне стукач [ya. is a godfather, he became a bitch/snitch in the penal colony]. the main purpose of the biographical excurses was to show the “scammer” was unable to change. the left side of one poster was entitled колись золота юність я. [before: ya.’s golden youth] and contained the picture of his figure (with an inscription vitia on the chest) taking off someone’s hat with a hook. the right side read: сьогодні: почерк та нутро не змінились! методи, знаряддя та мрія залишились ті самі! [today: the style and the innermost parts have not changed! the methods, tools and dreams remained the same!]; there a couple of berkuts (23) were catching somebody using the same hooks. the center of the poster bore this inscription: чорне ніколи не стане білим! [black can never a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 157 become white!]. below was a moralistic conclusion: зек при владі – горе для народу, наука для виборців і щастя для клану та сім’ї [the criminal as a ruler is grief for the people, lesson for voters and fortune to the clan and the family]. another poster formulated a similar opinion in verse: каким он был – таким остался. / таких в “элите” не один. / и хоть проффффесором назвался – / паханом будет до седин [he has been the same as he is now. / there are plenty of such persons among the “elite”. / and even though he named himself a proffffesor / he will be a godfather till he turns gray]. poster entitled before: ya.’s golden youth (author’s photo) as noted above, initially the activity of yanukovych as the president was not overly criticized. however, the first violent dispersal of the peaceful euromaidan protest received enormous publicity. these events gave birth to a popular motif christmas tree on the blood (see note 3), the posters decried the violence: спасибо януковичу за палочки и елочку! [thanks to yanukovych for sticks and a christmas tree!]; який президент така і йолка! [what a president so such a christmas tree!]; чому яник робить усе через жйолку? [why does yanyk make everything through the arse/christmas tree?]. (24) one of the posters depicted a three-tiered pyramid crowned by yanukovych; berkuts in helmets armed with batons were situated on each level of this pyramid, and torn posters and a pool of blood were arrayed beneath. a paraphrase of a well-known anti-soviet slogan комуняку на гілляку [(let us hang every) communist on the (tree) branch] generated a new euphemism (to hang a person) on a christmas tree: зека на йолку [(let’s hang) the prisoner on folklorica 2015, vol. xix 158 the christmas tree]; януковыч – на ялынку [(let’s hang) yanukovych on the christmas tree]; я. на криваву йолку [(let’s hang) ya. on the bloody christmas tree (on a child’s drawing done with colored pencils)]; я. на кривавій йолці [ya. (is hanging) on the bloody christmas tree]. sometimes the christmas tree itself joined in the dialogue: вітьок, жду тебе. йолка [vitёk, i am waiting for you. (signed) christmas tree]. thus yanukovych and his henchmen were often depicted at the top of a tree; one inscription read: янукович – наша зірочка [yanukovych is our star], (25) cf. a caricature drawn with colored pencils where azarov and yanukovych sit on the top two branches of the same tree. a similar motif existed in metaphorical form: перетравимо ялинковича на хвойний екстракт [let us digest ialynkovych into conifer extract]. later this motif expanded: ялинковича на йолку, азірову – в піпу морковку! табачника – на смереку [(let’s hang) ianynkovych on a christmas tree, (let’s put) a carrot into azirov’s pussy, (let’s hang) tabachnyk on a spruce]; (26) я. – на йолку, азірова – на колиму, захарченка – у тюрму, уряд – у відставку! [(let’s hang) ya. on a christmas tree, (let’s send) azirov to kolyma, zakharchenko to prison, government into resignation!] (an appended slogan on the side read: а шпонку – в ополонку!!! [and (let’s throw) shponka into an ice hole!!!]); беркут на птахофабрику! [(let’s send) the berkuts to a poultry farm!]. noting that yanukovych was also portrayed as a “worthless” governor: я. україна готова до вступу в єс! це ти не готовий до влади [ya., ukraine is ready to join the eu! it is you who is not ready to rule] the creators of posters also described his misdeeds in more detail to suggest his unfitness: яник, покайся! не по понятіям бити дітей, жінок! [yanyk, repent! it is not decent to beat children, women!], пробачення за вбивство тобі не буде так вирішили на україні люди [you will not be forgiven for killing as ukrainian people decided]; привіз людців за наші гроші щоби сказали ти хороший, а ти є катюга!! [you have brought the scums using our money in order for everybody to say you were good, and you were a butcher!!]. after the first automaidan “visit” to the leader’s house in the village of novi petrivtsi near kiev, the protesters focused on that site. this luxurious manor with a palace known as mezhygiria [this noun exactly means ‘between hills’] was renamed megazhyria [megafatness] or megazhopie [megaass]; the euphemism muzei kaznokrada [the embezzler’s museum] also appeared. there was an inscription janukovychu mezhygiria [mezhygiria to yanukovych] with the syllables giria crossed out and replaced by ochi [eyes]: janukovychu mezhyochi [(beat) yanukovych between his eyes]. the idea of destruction of this property was put forth also: повернем гнів на межигір’я, / пустелю зробимо з подвір’я, / підсмалимо ми хаму пір’я, / бо втратив наше він довір’я (богородчани) [let’s turn our anger at mezhygiria, / make the courtyard a desert / let’s singe the boor’s feathers, / for he has lost our confidence (bogorodchany)]. finally, the problem of the presidential house resulted in searches for a decent home for him. the following inscriptions янукович тут живе. обережно, дуже злий [yanukovych lives here. be careful, he is very wicked] and адміністрація президента яндзека [yandzek presidental administration] a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 159 were placed on the public toilet stalls on the main kiev street khreshchatyk, while ianyka hata [yanyk’s house] was written on a garbage tank. display referring to yanukovich’s future imprisonment (author’s photo) the ultimate fate of the ruler attracted much attention as well. plenty of scenarios were suggested, from the peaceful to bloody, including retirement, silent disappearance, escape, becoming the subject of an international manhunt, imprisonment, and death (from suicide and murder to execution by hanging). in particular, people made reference to his retirement in requests, promises and “vows”: янукович, будь ласка, піди у відставку! [yanukovych, please do resign!]; моя бабуся станцює брейк, коли ця гніда піде у відставку [my grandmother will breakdance if this nit retires]; не буду пити до відставки я. [i will not drink till ya.’s resignation]. the idiom плести лапті [lit. ‘to weave bast shoes’; in this context this phraseologism means ‘to prepare a plot for getting rid of somebody’, ‘to try to send somebody away’] spawned a bunch of figurative expressions. an inscription на третю “ходку” від народу [for the third “trip” (i.e. imprisonment) from people] was placed on a poster next to the picture of prison bars and worn and dirty shoes, with hat and bag had been hanging above them; two boots labeled dlia janukovycha [for yanukovych] hung next to one of the tents with the writing: нам – валянки, януковичу – лапті! [felt boots for us, bast shoes for yanukovych!]; and a big boot with a puppet of yanukovych inside it was placed on the main euromaidan christmas tree. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 160 poster with the slogan “vitia, we repeat for the second time: get ready! we are waiting” more compassionate people expected him to disappear quietly and inconspicuously: янукович, уйди!!! не забирай у мене дитинство! [yanukovych, go away!!! do not take away my childhood!] (this inscription was next to the image of a baby with the state’s two-colored flag); витя, уйди тихо! [vitia, go away quietly!]; витя, мы тебе второй раз повторяем: со-би-райся! мы ждем [vitia, we repeat you for the second time: get ready! we are waiting for it]. people’s expectations were clarified by the slogan я., давай до свидания! [ya., let’s say goodbye!], and the song-remake vitia, chao! with the refrain прощай, гаранте, не повертайся… [goodbye, guarantor, do not come back...]. it is interesting that this request played the role of a christmas wish in modern ritual: я написал “янукович, уходи” на бумажке, поджег этот a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 161 клочок бумаги, а пепел бросил в шампанское и выпил его (константин образцов) [i wrote “yanukovych go away” on a piece of paper, set fire to this piece of paper, added the ashes to my champagne and drank it (constantin obraztsov)]. more impatient individuals demanded that the president leave ukraine: янукович, ідіть геть від нас [yanukovych, go away from us]; йди геть від нас! [go away from us!], get’ ianukrovycha [yanukrovych (go) away]; hama get’! [twerp, (go) away!]; янукович, геть іди і азірова веди! [yanukovych, go away and take azirov with you!]; геть бандюковича і його азіровичів! [bandiukovych and his azirovychs, go away!]; геть дурнів і профанів україни! [fools and profaners out of ukraine!]; злочинну, корумповану владу януковича геть з україни! [criminal, corrupt government of yanukovych, get out of ukraine!]. some inscriptions predicted his extinction, so that no traces of him would remain in the country: янукович, изыди из украины [yanukovych, begone from ukraine]; янукович зникни геть з людських очей! [yanukovych, vanish from people’s eyes!]; окупант бандюкович! згинь, згинь з чужої тобі україни [the invader bandiukovych! vanish, vanish from alien to you ukraine]; янукович, щоб ти щез, / хочеться сказати, / щоб не було вже кому / з “йолкою” вітати! [yanukovych, we would like to say: (we) hope you disappear/ and there will be no one / to ‘greet’ us with a “christmas tree”!]. the prospect of eliminating yanukovych resulted in numerous slogans with the preposition ‘without’: україна без януковича! [ukraine without yanukovych!]; в європу без януковича [into europe without yanukovych], мукачево – без яника [mukachevo without yanyk]; суми, колядинець за україну без зека! [sumy, kolyadynets are for ukraine without the jailbird!]; гадяч – за україну без зека! [gadiach for ukraine without the jailbird!]; єнакієво без хама [yenakievo without the twerp], за новий рік без ананаса! [to new year without the pineapple!]; за різдво без я. [to christmas without ya.]. the authors of these numerous slogans positioned themselves within a particular group (from smaller ones like urban areas or youth subcultures to bigger ones, such as villages, towns, cities, regions, and, at last, the entire country). sometimes posters pointed out particular places for him to flee to: їзжай домой, хряк! [go home, you castrated boar!]; хаме януковичу! збирай чорну беркутню та чимчикуй на рідну донеччину … і тихенько на кладовище – там твоє пристанище… [the boor yanukovych! pick up your black berkuts and walk to your native donetsk region... and quietly to the cemetery – where your shelter is...]; вітя, час додому [vitia, it is time to go home] (prison bars were drawn there). often he was “sent” somewhere even more distant: яник, їдь на безлюдний острів! [yanyk, go to a desert island!]. on the occasion of his visit to china, the preferred direction of emigration was further clarified: нехай їде в китай! [let him go to china!], я., їдь в китай, там і залишайся! [ya., go to china and stay there!]; яник, їдь в китай і там лишись. а краще у північну корею [yanyk, go to china and stay there. better still, go to north korea]. russia was mentioned as well, usually as a place of detention: янукович: чемодан – вокзал – магадан (дружковка) [yanukovych: suitcase – train station – magadan (27) (druzhkovka)], cf. the naive verse: в україні сніг іде і в києві слизько, / folklorica 2015, vol. xix 162 утікай, гад янукович, бо кличко вже близько, <…> / тікай просто в магадан, там будеш ще більший пан, / там будеш ще більший пан, жити будеш як султан… / у братви будеш на зоні старшим підарем в законі… [it is snowing in ukraine and it is slippery in kiev, / flee, bastard yanukovych, because klychko is nearby, <…> / run away to magadan, there you will be a great lord, / there you will be a great lord, you will live as a sultan... / you will be a senior pedo in-law among the criminals in a penal colony...]. he was even directed to another planet: марсонавти! заберіть їх! [marsonauts! take them away!]. as discussed above, the most common place where yanukovych was “sent” was the ass. yanukovych’s flight from the country on 21 february 2014 was anticipated beforehand as well: янукович, беги, беги! [yanukovych, run, run!], вітя! знав би – втік! [vitia! if you knew you would flee!]; витя, шухер! кранты! [vitia, chickie! curtain!] (inscription under the severed head of the libyan dictator saddam hussein). his aides were also warned: прокурори, судді, депутати, / ваш пахан не втримає руля, / крисам треба вже тікати / з тонучого корабля. [prosecutors, judges, mps, / your godfather will not keep the rudder, / so rats have to flee / the sinking ship]. the common desire was to declare yanukovych a fugitive from justice who was blamed for serious crimes: розшукується я. в. ф., відгукується на прізвиська хам, ялинкович, шрек, бандюкович. wanted de ukrainian people [wanted yanukovych viktor fedorovych, responding to the nicknames boor, yalynkovych, shrek, bandiukovych. wanted by the ukrainian people]. the prison prospect would sometimes get a metaphorical embodiment, since these slogans were written next to the drawing of bloody chains: руки прочь от украины! [hands off ukraine!] (at the top), яник, давай руки! [yanyk, give (us) your hands!..] (at the bottom). more often the motive of retribution was clarified in direct demands to punish the ruler: наперсточника к ответу! [the con artist must pay!]; зека на зону [the prisoner – to a penal colony] (alongside a plate in the hand of a dummy in an ushanka ‘fur hat’); на нари голими геть!! [to strip naked and to sit on the bunks!!]; долой бандюка на зону [(let’s send) the bandit down to a penal colony]; яника за грати, на нари – там йому і кінець! [let’s set yanyk behind bars, on the bunks – and there is his end!]; нас не подолати – яника за грати! [we cannot be defeated – yanyk has to be behind bars!]; зека за грати і грати, грати, грати [let’s put the prisoner behind bars and let’s play, play, play]; зеківську потвору під замок в комору! [let’s lock the prison monster in a cellar!]; вітьок іди на третій строк! [vitёk go (into prison) for the third term!]. people who were supposedly more familiar with penal laws clarified their statements with specific details: помни за нары, суши сухари [remember bunks, dry the rusks]; 52-я зона ждет [the 52nd colony is waiting] (the word special was ascribed below); вітя, тебе чекає зона. 52! опасная [vitya, a colony is waiting for you. the 52nd! dangerous]; підараса на нари і в позу! [put maricone on the bunks and in the pose!]. this environment probably generated “пестню о родном городе” [a sonng of the native town] with music by “the great a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 163 ukrainian poet chekhov and lyrics by the odessa folk composor anna akhmetova:” (28) голуби летят над нашей хатой, / голубям давно покою нет, / ждут они проффэсора с мыколой... [the pigeons are flying over our hut, / the pigeons did not rest for a long time, / they are waiting for proffessor and mykola (azarov)...]. the references to prison included scatological elements as well: хама на парашу! [sit the boor on a slop bucket!]; бандюкович вітька я. нари + параша – ось ваше! [bandyukovych vit’ka ya. bunks + slop bucket – that’s yours!]; бандюган вітька янукович і вся твоя братва – нари + параша = оце ваше! [bandit vit’ka yanukovych and all your lads – bunks + slop bucket = these are yours!]. one well-known maidan composition also emphasized this motif: a scarecrow-like yanukovychprisoner, dressed in a striped jumpsuit and with his hand up and tied with chains, was sitting on a golden toilet bowl in a cage. he had a hat-crown on his head and a funeral wreath was nearby. пахану – хана – сказала страна [the godfather is fucked – the country has said] was written on another poster. sometimes the motif of imprisonment acquired an expanded form, covering his inner circle: зека на нари, азірова на переробку, табачника на самокрутку! [(let’s send) the prisoner on the bunks, azirov for processing, tabachnyk for a hand-rolled cigarette!]. this scenario was seen as a gift of fate: свято наближається [holiday is coming] (inscribed on portraits of yanukovych and m. azarov behind bars). on new year’s eve, people expressed wishes to get rid of the hateful leader: залиш непотріб у старому році! [leave garbage in the old year!] (on a picture of yanukovych with a crooked smile); уходящему году – уходящего президента! [the leaving president into the departing year!]; панове! геть старі онучі / і прострочені товари! / азіров – на смітнік вонючий, / а янек – знов на нари! [gentlemen! down the old leg wrappings / and expired products! / azirov go to a stinky dump / and yanek on the bunks again!]. essentially, the maidaners agreed on the general conclusion that yanukovych was finished, because as they said no leader could survive such hatred from the populace. soon the protesters transitioned from mere hints of the political death of yanukovych (on 29 december 2013 the automaidan brought him a coffin to mezhygiria) to direct depiction of his own demise, despite the christian ethos of the euromaidan and its daily collective prayers (cf. the opinion of an internet user, “hmm, what extent of hatred must you bring out of your citizens to result in their everyday hopeful questions of: “is it true that he croaked?” and replies provided with frowns: “no, it is not true.” and this happens in allegedly christian ukraine...” (sergei lazarev). display with yanukovich’s prison cell (author’s photo) folklorica 2015, vol. xix 164 the verbal wishes for his death became common: smert’ ianyku! [death to yanyk]; smert’ ianukovychu [death to yanukovych]; ianyk, umri! [yanyk, die!]; die, fucking politicians! (in english), tyran pomre! [the tyrant will die!]; zroby tsе!!! [do it!!!]; разом – сила – янику могила! [together we are a force and yanyk’s grave!]; вперед ногами у відставку! (ukr.)/вперед ногами в отставку! (rus.) [feet-first into resignation!]. others cursed him to various fates: яничар, будь ты проклят!!! [janissary, be cursed!!!]; шоб ти зкис / щоб ти скис! [so that you will turn sour]; янукович, шоб ти здох! [yanukovych, so that you will kick the bucket!]; здохни падло janik [janik, crud, croak]; янукович, най тя качка копне! [yanukovych, let a duck beat you! (a folk curse)]. the popular rocker slogan was used as a model as well: цой жив, янукович – нет! [tsoi (a rock singer) lives, yanukovych does not!]. some personal appeals to the higher authority in the form a prayer for his death were also observed: любий боже! у минулому році / ти забрав мого улюбленого співака, майкла джексона, / у цьому, мого улюбленого актора патріка суейзі. / дозволь мені нагадати, що мій улюблений політик – віктор янукович [dear god! last year / thou took my favourite singer, michael jackson, / this year thou took my favorite actor patrick swayze. / let me remind thou viktor yanukovych is my favorite politician]. an assassination of the leader was also prophesied. a printed poster depicting him with a red spot on his forehead (from a sniper rifle with laser sight) gained popularity. the president was also reminded: вітя! є вихід! [vitia! here is a way out!] (his face was depicted with a pistol pressed to his temple). they also mentioned death on the gallows: a president’s dummy in a grey suit hanging by the throat with a red ribbon was accompanied by the inscription ianukovycha povisym [we will hang yanukovych]. in preparation for his ultimate fate, yanukovych’s portraits were decorated with mourning ribbons and memorable slogans (both in the maidan and, for example, on the building of the ivano-frankivsk regional council). the epitaphs read: prieziedient ukrainy 1950–2013 [ukrainian president 1950–2013]; viechnaia pamiat’ [in eternal memory]; бо серце згнило, 1950–2013 [because the heart was rotten, 1950–2013]; ой чом, чом, земле моя, / ти носила такого, як я… [oh why, why, my land, / did thou bear such a person as me...]. black plates with the words тут буде спочивати янукович віктор федорович / народився 09 липня 1950 року помер як політик і як людина (в ніч з суботи на неділю) 30.11.2013 р. [here will rest yanukovych viktor fedorovych / who was born 9 july 1950, and died as a politician and as a man (on the night between saturday and sunday) 30/11/2013] were seen everywhere. in view of this perspective, his last will and testament was written: як умру – то поховайте мене в межигір’ї, / закопайте на могилі чучіло у пір’ї, / в гондурасі заховайте партійну окрасу / і спасибо передайте жителям донбасу! [when i will die bury me in mezhygiria, / and bury a jackstraw in feathers on my grave. / hide the party decoration in honduras / and pass my thanks to the residents of donbas!]. (29) as we can see from these texts, the uprising of the masses against the ruler was, in large part, a rejection based on his immorality, as repeat offender and a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 165 criminal and as a head of the state who thought only about his own enrichment. people protested against his erratic policies that contradicted his campaign promises and his reluctance to conclude an agreement with the eu. the final judgment by the people was summarized by the following verse: не будеш більше моїм диригентом, / бо ти за безцінь продав честь мою. / я тебе породив президентом – / я в тобі президента вб’ю! [you will not be my conductor anymore, / cause you sold my honor for nothing. / i have born you as a president – / i shall kill the president in you!]. (30) hate speech serves to insult, denigrate, curse, drive people away and to expressing accusation, death wishes, and the like. it features expressions aimed to attack a person or a group on the basis of gender, ethnic origin, religion, race, disability, or sexual orientation. as we see in this case, the people’s hatred can be directed against rulers they perceive to be tyrannical and expressed in folk texts. however, the use of hate speech in this material leaves us with a paradox. though the means of hate speech are perhaps much more numerous than those with positive or polite connotations, such speech is treated as both a historical and cultural violation of social taboos. this is especially true when hate speech is used in situations where a tangible social distance exists between a speaker and an addressee. in this case, there was a wide gulf between the former president and other representatives of power in ukraine and the common people. what prompted people to break this taboo during the euromaidan? why was teasing and mocking of the president and the authority so widespread? why did it become a special game, a kind of competition, despite all the declarations of commitment to the european values? the answer lies in the nature and in the wide range of functions of this semiotic phenomenon. the breaking of some social taboos becomes especially obvious during periods of social destabilization such as war, revolt, and disasters, when the usual social structures and social order are destroyed. social norms then disintegrate, and the society becomes characterized by unstructured communitas [turner 1983: 177]. during ukrainian maidan 2013-2014, communitas was characterized by a giant crowd, reaching up to a million at times, with an ever-changing contingent, as people came, stood on the square for some time, then left to return to their lives while others came to take their place. similarly, those who slept on the maidan in tents took shifts to preventing the government from occupying the area. this crowd was not homogeneous, but should be characterized as extremely diverse in terms of ethnic, religious, class, gender, age, and educational features. only a single characteristic was shared: full rejection of the state leaders and their course towards lifetime rule. during such periods of social destabilization, primitive instincts, aggression and folk elements, including socially unacceptable lexicon prevail. in crisisridden ukraine, all the aggression was poured into bad words that had actually transformed into quasi-patriotic slogans. moreover, these slogans spread like wildfire across the country and were not limited to the maidan. with regards to the functions of this language, we can distinguish two types: cognitive and communicative. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 166 the cognitive function lies in modeling reality. modeling does not entail mirroring or reflecting reality exactly, but rather its transformation, i.e., deformation, based on certain principles. by means of modeling, any symbolic content can be ascribed to the phenomena we experience. thus, any physical object can be ascribed with additional connotations and be associated with an invented, newly interpreted or distorted piece of history. by these means, maidaners created their own political anti-myth that depicted negative images of their enemies while discrediting and disparaging them. because the enemies of the euromaidan were the former authorities at all levels, including the president, the cabinet of ministers and the supreme council, endowing them with the unflattering titles discredited and dishonored them, demonstrating the degree of rejection and exclusion they had caused among the people. abnegation of the elementary ethical norms and rules of etiquette relative to the most powerful persons in the state became an expression of rejection not only of these individuals, but the state and the order established therein as well. communicative functions include a range of social features (political/ideological, regulative, identifying/demarcating, and socialpsychotherapeutic, etc.) as well as the magical function. the latter provides an appeal to higher powers outside the human society. it is essential that defamation of the politicians on the maidan could serve as a demonstration of people’s political position and their ideological principles. thus, we can recall the traditions of “folk humor” in the medieval world. mikhail bakhtin described it as folk “carnival consciousness” and the language of the hoi polloi, who opposed elite culture and the official language [bakhtin 1990]. by playing with this counter-culture and colloquial language, common people could flip the social construct upside down, and appeal to the “bottom of the material body,” i.e., vulgarity and bawdiness, permitting them to create a counterbalance to the official ideology. in this case, an appeal to curses and to vulgarity – ridiculing everything and everyone – turned out to be a form of resistance against the state system. in these terms, laughter restores social equality, as a challenge to authorities and their social privileges, it protests against their dominant status, and shames them for their gestures and deeds. therefore, the obscenities and cuss words have become a language of superiority people used to derogate the rulers. the identifying and demarcating functions were used to identify with one’s political associates and, at the same time, to separate oneself from opponents. in the circle of the euromaidan, participants violated taboos through the use of foul language, and such usage became almost a norm. what was once considered to be deviant behavior on the part of an individual turned into a kind of valorous feat that allowed open expression of ones’ political position and an expression of disobedience to the norms accepted by the state. ultimately, it was an act of resistance to the existing order. one of the major functions of the obscene and hate-filled may be termed psychotherapeutic, according to claude levi-strauss [1983: 168-182], or anticrisis, according to bronislav malinowski [1998: 38-54], i.e., the function of reliving stress related to the matters of life and death, natural disasters, and social crises such as wars, revolutions, riots, etc.). following freud, this phenomenon a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 167 can be seen as a kind of latent mechanism for the replacement of the aggressive impulses and socially unacceptable instincts of the crowd as well as a tool to abate powerful social and socio-cultural tensions. since the beginning, the protest in ukraine was fundamentally a nonviolent, peaceful action, but all the aggression poured spontaneously into harsh words against persons considered guilty of causing this social and political crisis. as it turns out, harsh expressions have a physiological dimension. they have the hypoalgesic effect allowing people to increase their pain tolerance, to increase heart rate, and to decrease perceived pain [stephens, atkins, kingston 2009: 1059-60]. similarly, some psychologists urge their patients not to subdue their emotions, but let them out. thus, such behavior could be considered to be mentally healthy during the periods of “extreme stress.” the maidaners were overwhelmed with emotion, and their survival instinct prompted them to let it out in symbolic forms. these forms allowed the participants to express their fury and their passions and gave them an emotional release [dewaele 2004: 207-209]. we see a similar analysis in the work of james c. scott, who called both humor and obscenity the “weapons of the weak” [1985]. however, our analysis of the maidan indicates that they did indeed turn into weapons for those who deny the supremacy of force and who choose as their weapons not violence, but talk from а position of superiority. the magic function plays an important role in this context as well. in early culture, swearing was regarded as a highly effective weapon. in mythology, swearing and desecration were considered to be the sacred and secret “language of power,” suitable for communication with the higher supernatural beings, and, moreover, permitting a person to exert actual pressure on those forces [uspensky 1981: 49-53]. in pre-christian ritual, blasphemy, or eschrology, was represented in a number of agricultural and family rites for the stimulation of fertility and promotion of fecundity [baiburin and toporkov 1990: 105-107]. we see a similar use in ukrainian bawdy folk songs. at the same time, however, ritual blasphemy has traditionally been used in a negative sense – to humiliate foes or rivals, ‘to curse them to death.’ in the case of the maidan, blasphemy acquired the status of a new modern eschrology. dirty words became a kind of a ritual, similar to rituals of casting the demons out or to exorcism. thus, contemporary anthropology of protest includes hate speech as a core element, which may be described in two dimensions, social and sacred. the most important feature of maidan hate speech was breaking a taboo on swearing and cursing. it became a public act of non-violent resistance to “evil,” a form of protest against the regime and the political enemies of their homeland. it is also served as a means of self-identification, i.e., designation of belonging to the ukrainian political nation that emerged on the maidan. notes 1 20-21 february 2014 were named “the bloody days of ukraine” because during this period the most violent events took place, and more than 100 folklorica 2015, vol. xix 168 activists were killed by snipers. at night on 21 february, v. yanukovych fled the capital of ukraine for russia. 2 it is built as a spoonerism. 3 the unfinished frame of christmas-tree became one of the main maidan symbols. it was called a bloody fir-tree because of violent dispersal of the protesters on november 30, 2013, under the pretext of its installation. 4 in criminal argot, a boor/cad means a convict who steals things from other convicts. 5 this is a paraphrase from the famous ukrainian comedy chasing two hares by myhailo starytsky. 6 the phraseological unit ‘bazarna baba’ does not mean ‘a bazaar tradeswoman’, but ‘a clamorous, rude, stupid quarrelsome person, brawler’. 7 this is a folk remake of the classic poem by the favorite ukrainian poet taras shevchenko with the same title. 8 a soviet analogue of santa claus. 9 the prime-minister mykola azarov is known in particular as the inventor of ‘azirivka’ the warped russian pretended to be ukrainian. 10 this text contains the references to the well-known soviet anecdote cycle about the personages of the classic book by a. milne imbued with homosexual motives. its structure partly reminds children’s rhymes for distribution of roles in a game. 11 the russian word pietuh usually means ‘a rooster’; and it is used as the name of ‘a passive gay’ in criminal argot. 12 all these texts have evident anti-gay orientation, which indicates on a real gap between pro-european statements and traditional non-tolerant worldview of ukrainians. hence, the first ukrainian gay-parade in kiev in june 2015 named “march of equality” was attacked with stones and smoke bombs. 13 the word gopnik [hooligan] sounds like golyi [naked]; it is an allusion to h. c. andersen’s tale “the emperor’s new clothes.” 14 the last phrase contains the allusion on a child game of hide and seek. 15 in the last case, two upper latin letters in the midst of the cyrillic text referred to the emotionally heavily loaded historical abbreviation ss, i.e. schutzstaffel [defense corps] known for its crimes against humanity during world war ii. 16 a remake of a gambler’s byword ‘an ace is an ace even in africa’. 17 in such a way the russian word for bloodsucker was “translated”, or rather distorted, into ukrainian by azarov. 18 sich was a military and administrative organization of the ukrainian cossacks. 19 it is interesting that the most unrepeatable statements were often signed on the behalf of the yenakieve, yanukovych’s hometown. 20 this pseudo-quotation derives from ivan franko’s novel titled boryslav laughs. 21 this is a paraphrase of one of the favorite sentences of the protagonist of the satirical novel golden calf by the famous odessites ilya ilf and yevgenii petrov. a president’s portrait in domestic protest: the anatomy of hate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 169 22 a hidden allusion to the known case when yanukovych lost his consciousness and fell down to the ground frightened by an egg thrown at him. 23 soldiers of the special police units named golden eagle. 24 the russian word elka [fir tree] is presented in ukrainian transcription here as well as in plenty of other inscriptions due to yanukovich who used this russian word in his official speech pronounced in the state ukrainian language. 25 in soviet new year tradition, every fir tree should be decorated with a five-finger star. 26 vitalii zakharchenko and dmytro tabachnyk were ministers, viktor pshonka (here: shponka) was the prosecutor general of ukraine. 27 at stalin times during 1930s magadan became one of the worst places of exile where many prisoners died. 28 this remark reminds the case when yanukovych confused the surname of the famous russian-ukrainian poet akhmatova with the surname of donetsk oligarch akhmetov in his public speech; here the russian writer and dramaturg chekhov becomes an “ukrainian poet”. 29 one more piece from the folk remake of testament by taras shevchenko. 30 the last two lines refer directly to gogol’s famous historical novella taras bulba where the protagonist kills his son-traitor with the words: i have born you, and i shall kill you! bibliography baiburin, albert and andrei toporkov. 1990. байбурин а. к., топорков а. л. у истоков этикета [at the origin of etiquette]. ленинград, наука. bakhtin, mihail. 1990. бахтин, михаил. творчество франсуа рабле и народная культура средневековья и ренессанса [the oeuvres of francois rabelais and the folk culture of the midle ages and renaissance]. москва, художественная литература. britsyna, o., and i. golovakha. 2005. “the folklore of the orange revolution.” folklorica 10 (1): 3-16. dewaele, jean-marc. 2004. “the emotional force of swearwords and taboo words in the speech of multilinguals.” journal of multilingual and multicultural development 25 (2-3): 204-222. hagar, salamon. 2001. “political bumper stickers in contemporary israel: folklore as an emotional battleground.” journal of american folklore, vol.114(453): 277-308. khomik, alexander (trans). 1998. хомиk, александр, p. “магия, наука и религия” [magic, science, and religion], in магия, наука и религия [magic, science, and religion]. bronislav malinowski. москва; киев. рефл-бук; ваклер, 19-90. levi-strauss, claude. 1983. леви-строс, клод. структурная антропология [structural anthropology], transl. by вяч. вс. иванов. москва, главная редакция восточной литературы. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 170 lysiuk, natalia. 2005. лысюк наталия. “‘майданный’ фольклор: жанровый состав, функции, способы распространения” [the ‘maidan’ folklore: genre structure, functions, distribution methods]. русский язык, литература, культура в школе и вузе 5: 50-63. lysiuk, natalia. 2015. лисюк наталія. “мовні війни 2014 року” [speech wars 2014]. народна творчість на етнологія 1: 23-31. malinowski, bronislav. 1998. малиновский, бронислав. магия, наука и религия [magic, science, and religion]. москва; киев. рефл-бук; ваклер meletinskovo, eleander. 1983. мелетинского, елеазар. “коммунитас: модель и процесс” [communitas: model and process] in символ и ритуал [symbol and ritual]. victor turner. москва, наука, 164-82. mokienko, valerii. 1994. мокиенко, валерий. “русская бранная лексика: цензурное и нецензурное” [russian abusive vocabulary: censorial and obsene] русистика (berlin) 1-2: 50-73. scott, james c. 1985. weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance. yale, yale university press. stephens, richard, john atkins, and andrew kingston. 2009. “swearing as a response to pain.” neuroreport 120: 1056-1060. tolstoy, nikita. 1995. толстой, никита. язык и культура [language and culture] in зык и народная культура [language and folk culture]. никита толстой. москва, индрик, 15-26. tolstoy, nikita. 1995. толстой, никита. язык и народная культура [language and folk culture]. москва, индрик. turner, victor. 1983. тэрнер, виктор. символ и ритуал [symbol and ritual]. москва, наука, uspensky, boris. 1981. успенский, борис. “религиозно-мифологический аспект руссской экспрессивной фразеологии” [religious and mythological aspects of russian expressive phraseology] in структура текста-81. москва, наука, 49-53. author guidelines 112 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii folklorica publishes materials in english. authors are encouraged to translate their manuscripts into english prior to submission. folklorica accepts original 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ucb, mckenna 129 boulder, co 80309-0276 e-mail: lolson@colorado.edu microsoft word folk2010e.doc reports 161 folklorica 2010, vol. xv forays into ukrainian canadian folklore today: a snapshot from winnipeg, manitoba (canada) robert b. klymasz winnipeg, manitoba canada having retired in 2000 from the canadian museum of civilization just outside ottawa in gatineau, quebec, i relocated to the city of winnipeg manitoba -the historic hub of ukrainian life in canada. once again, i found myself in a city where it’s commonly assumed that everybody is either a ukrainian or married to one. this time, however, winnipeg was not just a stopover on the way to promising relic areas further west -towns like dauphin, yorkton, vegreville and all those surrounding rural areas dripping with ukrainian folklore.(1) i was in winnipeg to stay. in retirement my youthful energy and expense account had disappeared and those summer expeditions were now history. winnipeg was to become my permanent home. nonetheless, once a folklorist, always a folklorist. that being the case, it was difficult to ignore ukrainian folklore phenomena seemingly crowding in on me wherever i turned. it became evident that winnipeg’s ukrainian population was as driven by folkloric interests and activities as any community. although the folklore was there, i was poorly prepared to grapple with the dynamics of a novel situation. the old markers i had learned to look for, the onion domed churches and outdoor toilets on the open prairie, were simply not part of winnipeg life. this was an urban setting, and yet it was permeated by the same “real” lore that i had recorded many years earlier in a rural environment. expression not oral; it was through modern media, but there it was, full of the folklore that i knew. my initial resistance to calling this folklore gave way to acceptance and i came to realize that all these new phenomena, including totally non-traditional events like ukrainian flag-raising ceremonies, were modern folklore that both warranted and deserved serious attention and study. it is likely that many of the following findings, though largely the results of my armchair fieldwork, are applicable to the folklore of other ukrainian urban communities across north america. language loss this marks the most dramatic aspect of winnipeg’s ukrainian folklore complex. although ukrainian no longer lives as a viable folklorica 2010, vol. xv 162 medium for everyday verbal intercommunication, the language nonetheless functions as a “heritage language” and, as such, is maintained as a marker of traditional authenticity and quasi-loyalty. canadian ukrainian is frequently garbled and twisted. newspaper obituaries in the local leading english language daily mourn the passing of winnipeg ukrainians and frequently end with three words: “vichnaya pam yat” [instead of vichnaja pamjat’ – eternal memory]. radio commercials for a local meat shop, karpaty meats, tend to sound like “car patty meats”. of course macaroni songs continue to titillate the public and dominate the bulk of zabava radio programming in the region. the d.j. regularly selects “golden oldies” that include a particular sound recording of a traditional ukrainian murder ballad delivered in rollicking fashion by a polka band. everyone seems utterly unaware of the ballad’s sinister storyline in which a maiden is tied to a tree and set on fire by her malicious abductors. surfing obituaries aside from the anomalies cited above, the grass-roots “family notices”, that is obituaries, memorials, and sundry announcements published in the winnipeg free press provide a more interesting source of data and saturday’s weekend issue is especially rich with such material. surfing newspaper obituaries on a daily basis can become a preoccupation for any folklorist. these often constitute narratives with epic overtones. the following extract from a ten-paragraph obituary (published august 21, 2010) constitutes a synopsis of the original version and outlines the life story of a centenarian, william pylypchuk, also known as bill phillips. bill was born in 1909 in east galicia, austria, and arrived in canada with his parents in 1912, settling in manitoba. as a young boy, bill loved to act, sing and dance and thoroughly enjoyed “having adventures” with his buddies in and around the winnipeg area. in 1940, bill joined the canadian army and saw active duty in france and germany. after d-day, he returned to canada where he met and married “an english girl named nelma”. following the birth of a son in ajax, ontario, the family moved to nelma’s homeland and “settled in the quiet, picturesque village of eyethorne, near dover.” in 1983, after the death of his wife, bill returned to winnipeg where he made a home for himself once again. he fulfilled his love of singing by taking an active role in the age and opportunities senior choir until he suffered a stroke… reports 163 folklorica 2010, vol. xv bill’s obituary can only be “appreciated” as a folkloric document when compared to other obituaries (non-ukrainian as well as ukrainian). such comparison reveals dichotomies that govern this corpus and bring it into a relationship with a more archaic version of the ukrainian lament tradition. here bill is remembered as a ‘first-waver,” a man who experienced the initial rush of ukrainian immigrants to canada a century ago. in such obituaries, pastimes are often mentioned and bill’s singing and other musical pursuits appear here. were this the obituary of a woman, the text would likely be different. deceased ukrainian “babas” are invariably revered for their talents as cooks and gardeners. the way the year and place of birth are given here is significant because the lives of ukrainians émigrés arriving in canada after the second world war, the so-called “d.p. third wavers,” are commemorated quite differently (2). religious affiliation, usually revealed by details concerning the last rites and burial site, is also important and given in a formulaic way. an annotated motif index to this commemorative material, should it ever be compiled, would reveal the structural operatives that characterize the nature of these newspaper laments, laments that are part of canadian and diasporic ukrainian folklore in the 21st century. popular onomastics the continuing popularity of ukrainian folkdance has led to a proliferation of “clubs”, “ensembles”, “schools”, and “academies.” the 2010 version of winnipeg’s annual city-wide two-week-long “folklorama” extravaganza featured twenty-five such groups. each performing dance group has a name, and on the basis of a sampling limited to folklorama, one can see the importance of the gender as a principle governing name choice. the majority of dance groups have adopted feminine nouns to serve as their names, and these reflect a pronounced focus on nature (pryroda in ukrainian and also feminine). examples include: “reechka” [little river], “zorya” [star], “fialka” [violet flower], “troyanada” [rose-flower], “vesna” [spring], “zirka” [star], and “zaavarooka” [sic] [whirlwind]. there are some folkloric names such as “rusalka” [mermaid], “slava!” [glory / gloria?], and “sopilka” [flute, reed-pipe]. few groups carry male names. winnipeg examples are “barvinok” [periwinkle], “rozmai” [rosemary], and “romanetz” [chamomile]. only one dance group took on a neuter noun, “selo”, [village] as its name. unfortunately one english daily referred to this group as the “salo” [fatback] ukrainian dancers. as an adjunct to the above naming practices, it is telling that most of these dance ensembles folklorica 2010, vol. xv 164 have dropped “folk” but retained “ukrainian” as their preferred descriptor. i read this as a tacit attempt to distinguish this genre of dance and possibly elevate it to level of other genres such as ballet, contemporary dance, and hip-hop. foodways winnipeg’s supermarkets and assorted grocery outlets carry a constant supply of perogies from near and far. there are typically frozen in packages of a dozen, or its multiples. many church groups, including anglicans, commonly hold public perogy dinners as fund raising events. the perogy season, which runs from fall to spring, is utilized for fund raising purposes by other religious and non-religious groups, both with and without a ukrainian affiliation. the ladies at winnipeg’s holy trinity ukrainian orthodox cathedral are famous for their monthly “all you can eat perogies” day-long marathons. most commercial eateries capitalize on the popularity of perogies. there are even striking culinary experiments like perogy pizzas and perogy sandwiches.(3) having entered the culinary mainstream, the perogy rules triumphantly, and winnipeg’s own orysia tracz, has become the undisputed authority on this phenomenon. calendar shifts according to advertisements published in the continent’s leading english-language ukrainian newspaper the ukrainian weekly, “being ukrainian” can be defined on a month-by-month basis by certain calendar customs and holidays. these range from “malanka” in january to “koliada” [traditional caroling] in december. winnipeg’s variant of “being ukrainian” features two christmases: “english christmas” (on december 25th) and “ukrainian christmas” (on january 7th).(4) the latter is commonly deemed less harried and more “true to the spirit or meaning of christmas.” by far, however, the most significant modification of the canadian calendar is the universal acceptance of malanka, as a riproaring celebration that marks ukrainian new year’s eve (january 13th) and/or new year’s day (january 14th). this holiday, due to its position in the month of january, strategically situated between the month of december and mainstream christmas and the month of february with its mainstream st. valentine’s day celebrations, brings a measure of joy and warmth in the middle of the invariably harsh winnipeg winter. it offers some relief to the post-christmas doldrums that would otherwise permeate the city’s mentality. reports 165 folklorica 2010, vol. xv the “blessing of easter baskets” continues to hold its widespread popularity and some parishes holding basket-blessing rituals “every hour on the hour” in overflowing church basements and auditoriums on the saturday before easter sunday. as for the baskets themselves, they often depart from the old traditions of what an easter basket should look like and what it should contain. many take on the appearance of summery picnic baskets, complete with a bottle of wine. the jollity factor ascribed to ukrainian traditions is most evident in the widespread popularity of “the social”, a celebration that developed out of old ukrainian wedding practices. this event is now traditional in its own right and acknowledged as such by a special entry in the encyclopedia of manitoba (2007). unlike the aforementioned festive events that are calendar-specific, the pre-nuptial “social”, like most weddings and all funerals, can take place any time of the year. the social is usually organized by and/or for a couple engaged to be married. food, music, and drink are the principal attractions. attendees do not necessarily need to know the engaged couple and tickets to the event are sold to anyone who would like to participate and have a good time. ticket sales then serve as a means of providing the couple with giftmoney. the above is but a skeletal outline of the social and there many variations to this practice. in keeping with their established reputation throughout western canada, ukrainian traditions are commonly lauded for a certain joie de vivre. there seems to be a folk belief that ukrainians are characterized by a general fondness for merry-making and that their events are more exuberant than those of other peoples. the exuberance attributed to ukrainian celebrations is seemingly absent from other traditions. unfortunately, folklorists have yet to investigate this particular belief in depth, especially since it departs from established models of folkloristic investigations. especially telling, in this regard, is the function of “malanka” and “the social” as mentioned above. some final observations previous research has shown that language loss within a heritage community is balanced by a heightened emphasis on residual elements. the transition is driven by a process of codification and standardization, along with “search-and-rescue” operations. traditional foodways, for example, are elevated to “cuisine” status and transmitted via written recipes and a plethora of ukrainian cookbooks (invariably written in english). ukrainian folk dance ensembles commonly discard the word folklorica 2010, vol. xv 166 “folk” and market themselves as simply “ukrainian dance” groups in a tacit effort to focus on genre rather than ethnicity, thereby seeking parity with ballet and hip-hop. language loss with its attendant ramifications also provides strong incentive for some to take serious note of their family trees. genealogy is now a flourishing pastime pushing many canadians of ukrainian descent to research their past. many hope to find at least a modicum of noble cossack blood as a part of their pedigree and finding a coat of arms is doubly desirable. many face formidable challenges as they painstakingly track, trace, pinpoint, and hopefully certify the origins. finding records of ancestors who may well have been illiterate poses a special challenge. among the various manifestations of folk tradition, visual signifiers have become specialized pursuits in the hands of dedicated scholars and hobbyists alike. portables like easter eggs are, of course, a prime example of such endeavors. more recently, with the help of technology, ukrainian churches throughout the western provinces are being meticulously documented and placed onto “the web” for universal consumption on demand. traditional attire constitutes a special “problem” since the living human body is the object of all dress and complementary adornment. consequently and quite naturally, most devotees of the ukrainian folk costume see a given costume ensemble (and / or its various parts and accoutrements) as inextricably tied to a human torso. in keeping with this valid perception, institutions and enthusiasts who collect and store items of apparel, prefer to show their costume pieces on mannequins or in an even more dynamic manner. some collectors have parade participants were their costumes. some have staged fashion shows where live, but mute, “models” simply walk down a runway and show off the costumes they wear for onlookers to examine and admire at close-range. a commentary in english generally accompanies such re-enactments of old country ukrainian folk apparel. notes 1 while he worked for the museum of civilization, robert klymasz did extensive fieldwork among the ukrainians on the prairies. his work resulted in: sviéto: celebrating ukrainian-canadian ritual in east central alberta through the generations, the ukrainian folk ballad in canada (musical transcriptions by kenneth peacock), folk narrative among ukrainianreports 167 folklorica 2010, vol. xv canadians in western canada, ukrainian folklore in canada: an immigrant complex in transition, among other publications (ed.). 2 d. p. is a contraction of displaced person. it refers to ukrainians uprooted by the second world war. immigrants to north america who came after the second world war are called third-wavers because the first big wave of ukrainian immigration was the one that came in the late 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s. this group came in response to poor economic conditions in europe (especially the austro-hungarian empire) and promises of economic opportunity in the west. canadian offers of cheap land in the prairies were especially attractive. the second wave came after the first world war. 3 it should be noted that pyrohy are dumplings typically stuffed with a mixture of mashed potatoes and cheese. thus the use of these as a meat substitute in pizzas and sandwiches, especially by meat-loving nonukrainians, is unexpected. 4 the january 7th holiday is christmas according to the julian calendar, the so-called old style calendar used in many ukrainian churches. << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain 20%) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \050swop\051 v2) /srgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel 1.4 /compressobjects /tags /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages true /createjdffile false /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /colorconversionstrategy /leavecolorunchanged /dothumbnails false /embedallfonts true /embedjoboptions true /dscreportinglevel 0 /syntheticboldness 1.00 /emitdscwarnings false /endpage -1 /imagememory 1048576 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setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice folklorica_7f haney, jack v., trans. and ed. long, long tales from the russian north. jackson, ms: university press of mississippi, 2013. glossary. bibliography. a-t-u/sus numbers. xxv + 300 pp. $60 (cloth: alkaline paper). isbn 978-1-61703-6. isbn 978-1-61703-731-3 (e-book). in long, long tales from the russian north, jack v. haney has selected and translated seventeen lengthy epic folktales by five tellers of northern european russia. he refers to his selections as “serial” tales because of their length, the tendency of the tellers to string several tale types together, and the fact that they were told serially over several nights. the five tellers include two pomors, matvei mikhailovich korguev of the now almost abandoned village of keret’ and petr iakovlevich nikonov of sukhoi navolok. the other three tellers are from the pudozh area and include fedor fedorovich kabrenov, mikhail osipovich dmitriev, and his extremely talented but little recorded father, osip ivanovich. haney’s translated versions are true to the russian. he has not doctored them in any way, so that they appear in natural form with all their idiosyncrasies, stumblings, and asides. haney also gives the aarne-thompson type numbers for the tales. for anyone using the older andreev index (указатель сказочных сюжетов [index of tale plots]), known as sus, the numbers will differ occasionally. examples include “dawn lad,” which is 301b in the andreev index but 301 a and b in the a-t-u/sus indexes, and “son of a bitch,” which is 300*b (+303 +513a) in the andreev index but 402 + 400a + 302 in the a-t-u/sus indexes. haney keeps the okan’ie (non-reduction of unstressed o), so characteristic of northern speech, as recorded, so that it is tsar ondron (176) in nikonov’s “the enchanted kingdom” and tsarevna oleksandra (143) in korguev’s “the peasant’s son and the firebird.” nine of the seventeen translated tales are narrated by korguev, who is deserving of the lion’s share of space as the most prolific and well-known of the tellers. korguev was awarded the знак почёта [medal of honor] and was a member of the union of soviet writers. in haney’s faithful rendition of the text, korguev’s personality emerges. korguev’s narrations are peppered with asides, small digressions, explanations, additional information and anachronisms. in “elena the beautiful,” for example, korguev informs his audience that there are two ways to tell the tale (19). after telling the listener that ivan is forbidden to sleep with elena for three years, he declares, “now that’s a misfortune for ivan!” (32). and when elena is given only four hours to visit her parents, korguev adds, “such a time limit he gave!” (36). in “the airplane,” correcting himself in an aside korguev says, “i’ve omitted something here” (133). in addition, the modern world creeps into korguev’s accounts, so that we learn in the tale titled “island of gold” that in his capacity as ship’s cook ivan asks for three rubles to prepare sixteen meals. ivan also requests a letter of recommendation, and in “the airplane,” the plane as a mode of transportation takes the place of the more traditional magic carpet or gigantic bird. in “shkip,” tsarevna maria runs away, buys a home, and rents part of the house out to a widow and her son, named ivan, who becomes maria’s business partner. the other pomor teller, petr iakovlevich nikonov, learned his tales from his father. unfortunately, only four of nikonov’s tales were recorded. haney has translated two of them, “the enchanted tsardom” and “(the rejuvenating apples),” which represents half of nikonov’s surviving repertoire. some of nikonov’s characters have unusual names, not traditionally given. he uses makar, brebius, zakhar, and grigorii, and he refers to the frog tsarevna as “swamp hopper” (177). like korguev, he likes to offer explanations. he informs the listener that mukhomor is “the same as koshchei the deathless” (183). anachronisms are present, too. nikonov refers to the ataman field spirit of “(the rejuvenating apples)” as a “manager” (192). the teller touches on sexual relations with the utmost delicacy. when ivan cannot resist making love to the sleeping ataman field spirit after being told not to, nikonov informs us that ivan “committed his crime” (191). however, occasionally nikonov uses colorful language. when ivan selects the marriage road, nikonov has ivan reasoning, “what the hell, i won’t go home without that” (193). again, when the bird transporting ivan had to eat parts of ivan to survive, the old woman in charge of the bird scolds, “you bitch, you ate his calf muscles and the muscles of his arms. you go vomit up those calves and muscles for him. he’s sitting on the shore there dying!” (203). the two dmitrievs and kabrenov are pudozh tellers. three tales are translations from mikhail osipovich dmitriev. he learned his art from his father, osip ivanovich, who was a professional taleteller. in “about a wife svetlana” and in “bur-khreber,” dmitriev dazzles his audience by stringing together four tale types. he observes the use of formulaic expressions, such as, “soon a tale is told, but by its result is a deed done” (226) and formulaic endings, such as, “i was there, i drank mead-beer. the beer was warm. it flowed over my lips, but nothing got into my mouth” (225). m. o. dmitriev stands out in haney’s selections for his propensity to describe violence, especially as it is used against women. in the svetlana tale, dmitriev has ivan, the hero, “pop” old women in the ear, and bur-khreber, too, is a great bully. dmitriev seems to relish describing how bur-khreber gives maria tsarevna a beating with rods until she hugs and kisses him properly. he depicts baba yaga getting a beating and animals being crippled. mercy and kindness appear as weakness. when ivan ignores an old woman’s advice to choke his wife and instead takes her finger tenderly, dmitriev comments, “and that’s how he became a fool” (218). mikhail osipovich’s language is sometimes crude. in the above-mentioned svetlana tale, after ivan pops the woman sitting on a golden chair in the ear, he informs the audience that she “farts,” knocks over a table, and “farts” again (216). there are anachronisms in his tales. in “bur-khreber,” the tsar and his entourage go down to the sea “either by car or on foot….” (240). in “your friend liubodei,” the false ivan sends a radiogram to the tsar. at the end of the bur-khreber tale, dmitriev claims to have heard the story from his father, osip ivanovich. indeed, the propensity to depict violence is present in the one story by osip ivanovich that haney translated, “about a mighty warrior, tsar peregar, who reeked of drink.” but dmitriev’s father’s depictions are less graphic, less sensational, and seem to fit more naturally into the fabric of the single tale we have by him in this collection. only five of osip ivanovich dmitriev’s tales have been recorded. the tsar peregar tale depicts battles and violence in a manner reminiscent of the bylina [epic]. in addition, in typical bylina superhero fashion, tsarevich dum grows “not by years but by the hours” (258). when dum tosses a boulder fifty versts, tramples armor, and takes off his enemy’s head, osip ivanovich adds colorfully that dum “tossed him off like a buttered blin [crepe]” (259). when dum agrees to give the golden-bristled pig to his brothers-in-law in exchange for a finger each, the brothers-in-law say blithely, “we have good doctors; they’ll manage to heal our hands” (263). even in this one tale, it is apparent that osip ivanovich’s style is more polished than that of his son. pudozh teller fedor fedorovich kabrenov, who worked with wood as a carpenter and logger, has an extensive repertoire represented here by two tales, “about an enchanted mill” and “ivan tsarevich and koshchei the deathless.” kabrenov’s tales keep his audience on the edge of their seats. the combinations are fascinating, and kabrenov adds interesting imagery. in “ivan tsarevich and koshchei the deathless,” for example, he describes raven ravenson/talon talonson (282) as having a brass nose and lead tail. at times he verges on poetic prose. the feathers ivan’s raven brothers-in-law give ivan to indicate that he is in trouble begin to quiver, causing hearts to quake (290). kabrenov is the most artistic of the tellers selected. kabrenov honors old traditions in his use of the introductory formula (zachin): “this is no tale; it is a pre-tale” (268). there are modernisms, too, for example in the drawing up of a contract, instead of an agreement, with the devil (269). at times kabrenov provides explanations and motivation. the devil of the enchanted mill tale, for example, convinces maria to kill her brother, and kabrenov explains that, “the devil filled maria with its spirit, so that she no longer loved her brother” (272). in fact, kabrenov demonstrates christian belief not only in his selection of content, as in “about an enchanted mill,” where the devil’s interests are foiled, but in his telling. in the ivan tsarevich tale, ivan and his parents pray before he sets out on his journey to marry maria tsarevna. in rounding up the mares kept by koshchei’s mother, ivan asks to let his work in corralling the mares be “for christ’s sake” (294). in sensitivity and artistry, kabrenov stands in stark contrast to the coarser dmitrievs. jack haney’s selections and translations demonstrate a strong bylina influence in the repertoires of the northern tellers showcased here. even bylina characters, such as soloveirazboinik (nightingale the robber), appear as well as traditional fairytale characters, such as baba yaga. haney comments in his “introduction” that “none of these seventeen tales has a true heroine….” (xxiii). however, the stories depict heroines who are on different journeys than those of the heroes but who nevertheless are heroic in their own way. (for specific heroine types, see bonnie marshall carey, “typological models of the heroine in the russian fairy tale,” diss. u of north carolina, 1983, in which there is a discussion of three typological models: the herowarrior maiden, the swan maiden, and the passive beauty.). the unique characteristics of the tellers selected are conveyed in jack haney’s selections and translations. he is to be applauded for his faithful renditions of the texts, which make long, long tales invaluable to scholars. bonnie marshall retired russian professor new hampshire historical society concord, new hampshire united states folklorica 2016 transcarpathian werewolf stories: gender attitudes folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 1 articles transcarpathian werewolf stories: gender attitudes elena boudovskaia georgetown university washington, dc, usa kira sadoja german center of slavic studies, düsseldorf, germany abstract �e article examines werewolf stories recorded by authors in the transcarpathian region of ukraine and adjacent territories. we analyze most common plot types of such stories, and found that out of the two main types, one expresses female perspective (and is recorded exclusively from women), while the other, male perspective (and is recorded from speakers of both genders). we also examine stories of deviating or hybrid types to show how speakers’ gender attitudes can lead to changes in the plot. introduction goals, materials used, fieldwork in this article we group werewolf stories from the transcarpathian region of ukraine and adjacent territories (1) into their main types, trace the provenance of these types, and examine their connections with the attitudes of storytellers to traditional gender roles and relations in these stories. (2) �en we analyze variants that combine motifs from different story types in relation to gender attitudes reflected in them. we approach a folk text as a record of performance, co-created in every telling anew by the storyteller and the audience. �e view of the text as recorded performance, and the ensuing respect for the speakers’ exact manner of expression, is not always necessary for grouping of story types. however, it is pivotal for an analysis of the speakers’ worldview and especially their moral values and attitudes, since a transcribed text can further be analyzed using discourse analysis to uncover underlying ideologies, beliefs, attitudes, and power relationships (see, e.g., josserand [2017], boudovskaia [2019]). �e materials analyzed are primarily taken from our recordings in the transcarpathian region of ukraine between 1987 and 2018, with the addition of our recordings from the adjacent districts of the lviv regions of ukraine as well as published folk texts from transcarpathia and adjacent territories. our own recordings were made in various villages in interviews with older people (women more often than men). we asked them about a number of beliefs and folk stories, including werewolf lore. while werewolf stories are not particularly well known in the transcarpathian region (only few of our interlocutors, mostly the very folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 2 elderly, could tell werewolf stories), they provide a fruitful basis for an analysis of gender relations in this context. previous scholarship �ere has been a great deal of scholarship on gender issues in canonical western european fairy tales beginning approximately with lurie [1970] and lieberman’s [1972] debate. �e main topics of this scholarship have been the images of women in tales, how editing practices of (male) collectors and editors shape these images, and the role of these images in children’s gender socialization (e.g., zipes [1983], bottigheimer [1987]; see also the overview in haase [2000]). contemporary scholarship extends this research also into recent literary renditions of fairy tales (e.g., levorato [2003]). �ere have also been multiple studies of noneuropean cultures dedicated to the issues of gender in traditional tales (e.g., mills [1991], gold [1995], mathews [1992, 2005]). werewolf stories from various places, especially in europe, have also been studied, often in connection with european werewolf trials (see lecouteux [1992], de blécourt [2007, 2009], most recently the work of gordon, tuszay, pluskowski, duni, and voltmer in the comprehensive volume edited by de blécourt [2015b]). many researchers remark passim about the gender of characters and storytellers in a specific story type (e.g., de blécourt’s [2007: 35] noticing the “werewolf lover” story widespread in the netherlands being told by women). however, there was no research on the connection between story types and gender attitudes of storytellers or how the gender aspect of these stories can “tell us more about forms of power and how people are caught up in them” [abu-lughod 1990: 42]. traditional tales are especially appropriate for an examination of gender because, paradoxically, they can show a different, personal rather than traditional, views. in transcarpathian life stories female speakers try to comply to the dominant model of gender wishing to present themselves as virtuous women worthy of social respect. however, in traditional tales, while referring to the dominant model, they can contest it without appearing too bold, hiding behind the story’s traditional form [boudovskaia 2019]. (3) moreover, supernatural tales are especially revealing of their tellers’ attitudes. participating in a story-telling about supernatural beings is akin to telling of contemporary legends; in both cases, while talking about an unearthly event that has disrupted the fabric of everyday life, people, in a safe and entertaining environment, negotiate and prioritize their cultural values. while carpathian werewolf stories have been recorded since the end of the 19th century, (4) they have not been the subject of scholarship, especially from the point of view of gender. �is article analyzes the transcarpathian werewolf story types to show how these stories are used differently by the supporters and opponents of patriarchal worldview to promote their gendered values and attitudes. after summarizing traditional gender attitudes in transcarpathia, we will briefly describe the werewolf story types we encountered, and then proceed to an analysis of the ways women and men tell these stories. transcarpathian werewolf stories: gender attitudes folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 3 transcarpathia: brief historical and ethnographical background; traditional gender relations we recorded werewolf stories from people born between 1913 and 1952. since our first speaker was born, the transcarpathian region has changed hands many times, from the austro-hungarian monarchy to czechoslovakia in 1919, and then, after of a short period of independence, to hungary in 1938-9, and to the ukrainian soviet socialist republic in 1946; since 1991 it has remained part of ukraine. economically, this area was rural and poor [magocsi 2015: 201-205]. �e population mainly lives in a subsistence economy on small-size landholdings. �e main economic unit was the house-property complex (ґаздівство). �e main family type was extended patrilineal and patrilocal family. while is not our goal here to describe the transcarpathian model of traditional marriage in detail, it will help to refer to it as we try to determine how it influences people’s attitudes. (5) gender relations in the village were strongly patriarchal. �e transcarpathian area was a typical member of the patriarchal belt [kandiyoti 1988, quinn in print], the part of the old world from japan to britain characterized by classical patriarchy. �e main features listed by [mukhopadhyay 2004: 469] as characterizing “patrifocal family structure and ideology” such as “the merging of individual goals and collective family welfare; [...] the centrality of sons versus daughters; gendered family responsibilities; regulation of female sexuality (to maintain the purity of the patriline) through arranged marriages and restricted male–female interactions; and female standards that emphasize “homely” traits (e.g., obedience and self-sacrifice) conducive to family harmony,” all apply to the transcarpathian area to a large extent. mukhopadhyay is describing india—another part of the patriarchal belt. �e soviet period in the transcarpathian region did not bring much relief to women. at the beginning of the soviet period, after forced collectivization, women’s lives became even more difficult, since women had to work both at the collective farm and at home if the family was to keep their garden plot needed for survival. men often avoided this double toll, taking an outside job (at a factory, as a forester, etc.) �e 1980s are remembered as a time of relative prosperity, and the 1990s, as a time of renewed poverty. �roughout these periods gender relationships in the village did not change significantly. more recently, unemployment has driven many people abroad to seek extra income, for a season or longer. men work as builders, women as caregivers or seasonal farm workers. �at situation gives women more independence, but only outside the village; in the village, the traditional gender norms stay unchanged. even now divorce in a village is considered a shame for a woman and practically never happens. an unmarried woman managing her own household will be cast as easy sexual prey. her reputation, a main source of social capital in the village, will plummet in value. married women willingly endure domestic violence and abuse from an alcoholic husband in order to retain the protective status of marriage. folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 4 kandiyoti [1988: 275] points out that women often can find specific forms of resistance to limiting roles such as those experienced in these villages; moreover, “patriarchal bargains are not timeless or immutable entities, but are susceptible to historical transformations that open up new areas of struggle and renegotiation of the relations between genders.” �roughout our interactions with women in the carpathian villages on various topics, we have always been interested in their view of their position and their attitudes to it: to what extent they agree to the role assigned to them by patriarchy, and whether, and if yes, how exactly they practice the struggle and renegotiation described by kandiyoti. folklore turns out to be a form of understanding one’s position, and possibly a form of resistance. stories of voluntary transformation story type: “piece of cloth” �is story type is very common in the carpathian mountains, where we only recorded it from women. a husband and wife go to the field to stack hay; the husband leaves; a wolf comes and attacks the wife; she chases it away; the husband returns; they eat together, and the wife notices yarns from her dress/apron between his teeth. �e story may end at this point, or the husband may turn back into the wolf and run into the woods. he also might boast to his wife of his magical abilities, and demonstrate the transformation, during which the wife, willingly or not, turns him into a wolf and gets rid of him. �is story type has been attested to on both sides of the carpathian mountains (on the basis of onyshchuk, hnatiuk, shukhevych), and in lithuania [vinogradova and levkievskaia 2010: 548]. to the east of the carpathian territory, e.g. in polissia, the story is practically unattested. similar story types are known in europe, in scandinavia (sweden and norway: kvideland and sehmsdorf [1988: 76-78], and in romania beresford [2013: 116-117]. de blécourt [2007: 28-9] states that, in germany, this type, which he calls “�e werewolf husband,” is one of main types; he found “about thirty-five germanlanguage versions of this story, from the rhineland in the west to east prussia,” recorded in the 19th and 20th centuries. �ere are also a number of dutch legends of this type, with the main difference being that the werewolf is a boyfriend, not a husband and after the incident the engagement is broken [de blécourt 2007: 29]. �ese facts point to a western, possibly german, origin of the story. story type: ‘i mauled a sheep’ we only recorded this story type once, from a woman. it began like the “piece of cloth” type; a man and wife were haymaking; the man left and came back, picking his teeth. �e wife asked why, and he told her he attacked and ate a sheep and that he is a man one week and a wolf the next. �is story is similar to the german type described by de blécourt [2007: 23] under the name “�e hungry transcarpathian werewolf stories: gender attitudes folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 5 farmhand,” where a peasant pretends to sleep and sees his worker turning into a wolf, killing and eating a foal. �is is “one of the most popular werewolf legends in germany,” recorded by the grimm brothers [de blécourt 2007: 23]. interestingly, in the transcarpathian story a gender aspect is present that is missing from the german story, where the people working are all men; the same is true of the danish version [simonsen 2015: 228-30]. a story of the similar type is known in estonia [metsvahi 2015: 217], but here both protagonists are female. �is type also seems to have been a story that migrated from europe. �e recorded carpathian version was likely influenced by the ‘piece of cloth’ type. stories of forcible transformation unlike stories about the voluntary transformation, with one main story-type “�e piece of cloth,” stories about forcible transformation come in many varieties. �e main element in them is that the main character (male) is turned into a wolf by a woman in his family (his wife or, less commonly, by his motherin-law). we will address each subtype of the productive theme in turn. story type: “transformation and return” �is subtype of forcible transformation stories tells how a man was turned into a wolf and later became a man again; the character gives an account about his adventures as a wolf. an example of this subtype is a story collected more than 100 years ago, on the northern side of the carpathian mountains, in kindrativ, in the contemporary turka district of the l’viv region, quite close to the transcarpathian border. �e story was told by a village woman to her learned brother who wrote it down (or summarized) in 1881 and subsequently published it in 1895: how a mother-in-law turned her son-in-law into a wolf a certain woman turned her son-in-law into a wolf, i don’t know for how many years. on christmas eve he ran into the house, sat in the corner near the stove and stretched out a paw pierced by a stick. when they pulled out the stick, he became a person again. as a penance, the motherin-law was dying for more than half a year. she asked the son-in-law to forgive her, but he says: “wolves were eating [biting?] me a lot; as my life was [not] easy, so let your death [not] be easy.’ she could not die until the son-in-law forgave her. people asked him about the cattle: which one a wolf can [=is entitled to] slaughter. and he said that a lamb or a calf that is supposed to be eaten by a wolf appears covered in blood. [zubryc’kyj 1895] a similar, but more detailed story of this type was recorded in novoselycja in 1987 [boudovskaia 2018: 11-15]. a wife turned her husband into a wolf while folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 6 he was looking for a christmas tree in the woods; he tried to come home as a wolf on christmas eve; his children threw bread to him, but his former wife asked a neighbor to shoot him; the shot missed; and the wolf ran away. �e woman lived for many years, but in her old age when she grew ill. she was suffering and could not die. other women told her to confess to a priest; she confessed having turned her husband into a wolf; and the priest said she needed to return her husband home to receive an absolution. she asked her children to get their father’s clothes from under a barrel and to bring them into the woods. in nine days, the husband came back as a man. he described how he was one of the wolves in a pack and that god showed them what cattle to take. once, when god told them to take one lamb each from a certain shed, they disobeyed and slaughtered all the sheep, and god closed their mouths for an entire year, so that they could only eat grass and clay. �e husband forgave the wife for turning him into a wolf and said that he used to beat her and that was wrong. �e wife said that she was also wrong to have turned him into a wolf and wanted to return him but did not dare because she was afraid that he would start beating her again. finally, after her husband forgave her, she could die peacefully. �e story type “transformation and return” also may have a european origin, namely, the migratory legend known in the written form from the 12th century as the story of bisclavret in the lais of marie de france [rotschild 1974]; see also the story of sir marrok in �omas mallory’s le morte d’arthur of 1485 [ransom 2014]. bisclavret, a noble, used to turn into a wolf; he was transformed forever by his wife who hid his clothes; the wolf revealed himself to the king as a sentient creature; the king took the wolf to his castle; the wolf attacked his former wife and her new husband; he was restored to human form by giving him his old clothes; and the wife was punished. in the carpathian tradition, the story has been modified and embellished with other material, e.g., with the elements typically encountered in stories about the master of wolves known throughout europe [mencej 2007]. �e episode of a man (king) saving the wolf is absent. however, the pivotal points (a wife transforming her husband, the clothes necessary for the reverse transformation, and the wolf keeping his human mind) are the same. another version of this subtype recorded by kira sadoja from a female storyteller in dragovo, khust district, transcarpathia, is not a legend or a fabulate like other stories, but a fairy tale (atu 449 the tsar’s dog – sidi numan). in the dragovo version, a husband discovers that his young wife eats dead people at the cemetery at night. a rooster advises him to beat his wife; instead he asks her why she is eating dead people; and she transforms him first into a bird for a number of years, then into a dog. as a dog, the protagonist comes to his kum (“father of his godson”); the kum’s son notices that the dog is unusually smart; the kum himself recognizes the protagonist and helps him to recover his human form and to turn his wife and her new husband into buffalos. it is not clear if this tale is traditional or comes from a book of tales. story subtype “a man helps a wolf” transcarpathian werewolf stories: gender attitudes folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 7 another subtype of the forcible transformation is made up of variants we call “a man helps a wolf.” in these stories, collected from both men and women, a man helps a wolf who is hungry/cold/wounded; long after that, the former wolf, who has turned back into a man, finds his benefactor, helps him in turn, and reveals to him that he was the wolf the man once helped. �e role of a woman who turned the man into a wolf is often not mentioned. in the “stick” variant, a wolf with a paw pierced by a stick approaches a man; the man pulls the stick out; the wolf bites and marks the man; and later, as a human, finds his benefactor by this mark. while we cannot be sure about the origin of the subtype “a man helps a wolf”, “stick” is possibly a motif of literary origin. in the western european tradition, saint hieronymus (jerome), and in the orthodox tradition, saint gerasim, are known to have taken a splinter from a lion’s paw, after which a lion expresses its thankfulness; depictions of this event can be found in the paintings of the 14th-16th centuries by sano di pietro, rogier van der weyden, niccolo antonio colantonio, and an engraving by albrecht dürer. �e motif of removing of a stick from a wolf’s paw is known, though not very widespread, in polissia as well [vinogradova and levkievskaia 2010: 502, 549]. gender attitudes as we have seen, there are two main types of werewolf stories in transcarpathia. stories of voluntary transformation, portraying the werewolf husband as an evil magician, present a woman’s perspective, allowing for criticism of male dominance. not surprisingly, they have been recorded only from women. in contrast, stories of forcible transformation show an innocent man transformed into a wolf by an evil woman, usually his wife. �ere is seemingly no overt disagreement with the dominant patriarchal cultural model. �ese stories are told by both men and women. however, it is worth looking into how exactly women and men tell stories from both categories to express their individual perspectives on gender relations. stories of voluntary transformation in the stories of voluntary transformation, the narrative might end at the moment of recognition or at the werewolf husband turns (or is turned) into a wolf and flees forever. if, at the moment of recognition, the wife finds herself married to an abuser whose dangerous abilities are magical and life-threatening, the narrator may describe how the woman is saved from the situation, whether due to circumstances or to her own efforts. �e question remains whether exiting marriage in the second case is culturally acceptable. in carpathian society, especially among the older generation, divorce is impossible, so that the abuser’s permanent transformation into a wolf seems to be one of few legitimate ways out of an abusive marriage. however, using magic against a person is a serious transgression. in the two stories from novoselycja summarized above, both female narrators absolve their female characters. in one story, the husband turned folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 8 permanently into a wolf himself. in the second story, the wife utters the words ‘let you become a rock’ that her husband had told her not to say. she herself is not a magical person; the magic in words that she repeats belongs to her husband. �us, according to cultural norms. she is innocent of evil magic. in fact, the solution to the problem of being married to a werewolf does not need to be provided by the storyteller herself. in typical carpathian storytelling sessions, there is usually a discussion after the end of the narrative when listeners negotiate the meaning of the story. whenever we recorded a werewolf story within a storytelling session, the story always sparked a discussion about whether the wife character should continue to live with a dangerous shape-shifter and about her alternatives. we will examine two such discussions below. hypothetical ending 1: ‘what if she pierced him with a pitchfork?’ �is version of “�e piece of cloth” recorded in 2017 the village of velykyj bychkiv, rakhiv district of transcarpathia was narrated within a story-telling session by mb, a woman born in 1936 in bychkiv; listeners and participants included mi, a woman born in 1948 in bychkiv and mk, a woman born in 1931 elsewhere, but who lives in bychkiv; the collector, elena boudovskaia, was present, but did not contribute to the conversation below. after mv finished her version (with the variant that it was a dog, not a wolf, who attacked the woman), the session turned into discussion. below is the end of narration and the following discussion: mv: …and when he fell asleep, he started snoring, and she looks, and between his teeth there is… from her dress… mk: a piece mv: yes, yarns. because he only, as he grabbed [?], well… so tell me, what kind of dog was that? mi: and what if she had pierced him with the pitchfork? mv: but it was he who gave her the pitchfork mi: yes, he did and what if she had killed him? mv: well, he gave her the pitchfork and said that she should protect herself, because, she says, maybe a wolf could come or a dog, yes mk: we know in whose [family] it was mv: he knew who… mi: ok... transcarpathian werewolf stories: gender attitudes folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 9 mv’s story ends at the moment of recognition. mv finishes the narrative with “so tell me, what kind of dog was that?” followed by a pause, inviting the audience to discuss the story. a younger woman, mi, asks what would happen if the wife had killed her dog husband with the pitchfork. �e storyteller explains that the husband himself gave his wife the pitchfork, meaning that the husband in his wisdom could not have done anything that might later harm him. but mi insists, asking whether the wife’s self-defense intended by the husband could have gotten out of his control, since the wife has an ability to act independently? mv sternly repeats that the husband gave her the pitchfork himself, and the discussion ends. �ough the narrative itself does not offer any opportunities for the wife to end her marriage to a werewolf, a solution surfaces in the discussion. mi, both horrified and delighted by the possibility of such a gory turn of events, is reconstructing, in the hypothetical mode, the missing ending of the story where a non-magical wife can get rid of her shape-shifter husband. mi’s question puts the situation into an unexpected light; it becomes clear that the victim of the attack has very nearly killed the attacker with the weapon he himself gave her. it suggests that a woman, even when not a bearer of magic, is a dangerous adversary, while a man, even if he can use magic, is not as omniscient as he believes himself to be. hypothetical ending 2: “i would never live with such husband” �is story, a rare subtype “i mauled a sheep,” was told during a one-on-one session between the narrator, hk, born 1927 and elena boudovskaia, in novoselycja in july 2018. �e story initially had no ending. yet after the narrator finished her story, she offered her opinion. hk: ... and then he started telling his wife. well. �at ‘i, it is destined that i...’or how was it... ‘so that i must go there and bite and kill a sheep.’ and he said to her: ‘i – he said – i am half person half wolf, so that... like... one week a person and one week a wolf.’ yes. so... and... �at i heard. and then i don’t know how it... how it was then, after he said that to his wife, what she thought after that, and if she was... if she was afraid or not, i don’t know that. well. it was like this, yes. i have heard that. well. oh god. i would never, never in my life [laughing, words unclear] b: what would you never do? hk: huh? b: what did you say you would never do? hk: i would never stay with this husband, i would be afraid, and i would [laughs] leave him forever (or: right then). how is it possible, to [live with such a husband that is] half person and half wolf. folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 10 hk ends the narrative after the husband’s acknowledgement of being a werewolf and expects interpretations as a matter of course. for hk, just as for the women in bychkiv, what prompts discussion is not the magical, but social and gendered factors, i.e., the subsequent actions of the wife. since the folklorist is silent, hk has to do the discussion on her own. she offers her opinion hypothetically by saying “i don’t know how it... how it was then, after he said that to his wife, what she thought after that, and if she was... if she was afraid or not, i don’t know that.” �en hk again hesitates, uses several hedges, evaluates the truth status of the story, claiming that she heard it. (6) after some more hedges, with laughter intended to soften the force of her opinion, she finally states that she would leave such husband, she would never again live with him. leaving one’s husband is a most radical measure in her culture, the closest analog to a taboo divorce, (7) but safety concerns justify this measure for her. unlike the previous story, here the solution of the problem is not handed over to the character, but is acted out by the narrator who, out of compassion, identifies with her character so much as to become a proxy for her. �us, in voluntary transformation stories, the narrator presents the listeners with the problem of a woman who is married to a magical abuser. at the story’s end, either the narrator or the audience try to provide solutions, ranging from the wolf’s disappearance of his own accord to the wife’s killing the wolf with a pitchfork or leaving her husband. in many of these solutions the female character is presented as active and resourceful, trying to get rid of her werewolf husband while avoiding violation of societal norms. stories of forcible transformation while telling voluntary transformation stories, narrators align with their female characters; in stories of forcible transformation, such sympathy is almost never the case. �e attitudes of storytellers range from indignation to indifference towards the woman. below are some typical examples. woman as the vessel of evil in the magic tale from dragovo summarized above, the male protagonist and his kum are both positive characters. �e main character lacks the abilities to do magic; his extraordinary abilities (he understands the language of animals) are not a sign of communication with evil forces. he is smart (he outwitted his wife to see if she really eats dead people) and not aggressive (when he discovered the truth, he decided to talk it out with instead of, as the rooster advised, beating her). he is honest and hard-working; even while in dog form, he herded sheep for people. his kum is also a positive person, who actively helps the main character. he is canny and was the first to discover that the main character’s wife eats dead people. he also knows how to use the powers of the church-blessed osyka (“branches from a tree similar to aspen”) to undo the spell cast on the main transcarpathian werewolf stories: gender attitudes folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 11 character and to turn his wife and her new husband into draft animals. at the same time kum is not a bearer of supernatural powers, he just knows. лю́де коли́сь зна́ли‘in the olden times, people used to know,’ says the speaker after mentioning the blessed osyka. �ereby, she characterizes the kum as a bearer of knowledge which has been sanctified both by its antiquity and by the tradition of its societal use. �e kum’s son is also described as a positive character whose shrewdness compensates for his lack of experience, since he notices the dog’s unusual intelligence. �e kum’s wife, on the contrary, is described as a person who does not quite understand what is going on when she suggests that the dog is possessed by an unclean spirit. however, this suggestion demonstrates her suspicion towards unclean forces as well as her naiveté in dealing with them and shows how far she is from everything supernatural. �us, the male characters (the main character, his kum, and the kum’s son) are smart, while the kum’s wife is stupid or naive, but vigilant. �e main female character in the narrative, the protagonist’s wife, is, on the contrary, shown as evil as well as beautiful, seductive, and active. (8) she eats dead people, tries to keep it secret, and when her secret is revealed, she turns her husband in various animals. while he is away, she marries for a second time. she combines lechery with magic that demands cannibalism and desecration of graves and harms ordinary people. her evil acts are not in self-defense, but out of selfinterest. in light of this behavior, the storyteller does not express any compassion to her. �e transformation of the female character and her second husband into buffalos, animals intended for hard work in the field, seems to merit retribution. �e fact that the entire village used them for plowing confirms that the group condemns her for her many inappropriate acts. it is noteworthy that her second husband, who is known only by the fact that she married him, has been punished together with her. his destiny confirms the idea that a woman is a vessel of evil only magnified by magic. when she pulls an unsuspecting man into her orbit, she causes his destruction as well. �is tale expresses an androcentric, misogynic, patriarchal worldview, even though it was told by a woman. women as a threat to male status �e attitude of a male narrator to the story of forcible transformation can be even more radical than the subtext indicated by the story above. �e following story, recorded in 2004 in zavadka, (10) is quoted in full since the attitudes of the speakers are revealed throughout the text. jv: yes, people say something like that kz: what do they say? tell me, please jv: well, they say that sometime somewhere… the wife turned her husband into a wolf. �is is not true… this is... kz: but tell me, what they said about it? folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 12 jv: well… they told to people that… there was a wife and a husband, and she somehow hated her husband and… she turned him into a wolf kz: mhm jv: �is is not true. kz: did they tell how she did it? jv: no, no way. kz: well, and what was after that? jv: nothing, he left and that’s it, i haven’t seen that. kz: mhm jv: i haven’t seen that. kz: and what did they say, did he remain a wolf, or what? jv: no, no way. he left and… and who knows where he left. kz: mhm jv: [uncl] kz: mhm ri: but i think they said that somewhere in selyshch... [uncl] when he went to the herd of sheep and jumped across a fence and broke that rope that she put on his neck and became a man again... jv: it’s not true, it’s not true ri: but i heard something like that jv: it is not true, it is... �e main storyteller, an 82-year old man, jv, constantly denies all the facts of the story: that it occurred at all as well as its location in time and space. �e only thing he acknowledges is that the wife turned her husband into a wolf and that she hated her husband. he presents the husband is an innocent victim, while the wife is a dangerous witch who transformed her husband out of unmotivated hatred. remarkably, jv sets the narrated events into indefinitely remote time and place (“well, they say that sometime somewhere...”) and says that people talk about that, but in reality, it was not true. later he mentions twice that he himself transcarpathian werewolf stories: gender attitudes folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 13 had not witnessed the event. he does not give any other details but repeats five times that the story is not true. �us, he maximally distances himself from the events in terms of the time, the place, his personal knowledge, and the truth status of the story. since jv was a talkative and knowledgeable person overall, such distancing produces an impression that this specific topic is especially unpleasant to him. it seems that, as a male in this society, jv does not like the idea that a woman could overpower a man, especially using supernatural means, so that he is denying both the truthfulness of the story and his familiarity with its details. on the contrary, the 24-year old ri 1) volunteers knowledge of the story; 2) puts the story into the context of local geography (in selyshch...) lending it veracity; 3) provides details (that the wolf was running towards the herd of sheep, that it got caught on a fence and tore the rope that his wife had tied on his neck), and 4) though ri retells the story as something heard from people (“but i think they said that...”), after jv declares the story a lie, ri defends it (“but i heard something like that”), and it sounds as if he is referring to collective wisdom. moreover, even his uncertainty (indicated by the word вроді (“maybe”) disappears when he repeats his claim the second time. ri told the folklorist a number of detailed stories that he had learned from his illiterate mother. possibly his interest in storytelling, his good knowledge of stories, or his great enthusiasm for assisting in the collection of folklore did not let him perceive these stories as dangerous or threatening to his prestige. downplaying the role of a woman in transforming her husband �e text below was recorded in stuzhytsia, velykyi bereznyi district, transcarpathia, in 1990. �e village is next to the border with the l’viv region and close to the border with poland. participants: pk, a woman born in 1926 and kz, the collector. in this variant, the storyteller focuses on the events after the wife turned the husband into a wolf, deflecting attention away from the woman who caused the transformation. when, at the end, the folklorist asks if it was the main character’s wife who transformed him, the storyteller expresses doubt about the truth of the story. �e same possibly happens at the beginning of the story; confronted with the necessity to blame the wife for her husband’s transformation, the narrator begins explaining that it is a legend, a fairy tale, who knows what it is. she even uses the non-dialectal word legenda [legend] to make sure that her interlocutor understands this fact. pk: … who knows, it it is… such legends or… or… and … there is… some … wife that turned a husband into… turned [him] into… into… into a wolf kz: mhm pk: well, and… and that wolf went as far as… as they say here, as they used to say, there, to poland, that is, to the other side of the border, and… folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 14 yes, yes … the husband… he went, and he was very cold, and… and… and he came into a house and… and… next to the stove, because long ago it was sometimes that the smoke went to… to… to the house, the fire burned, and right here…. to the house, and everywhere here there was smoke. and he sat there in the corner and was warming himself, that wolf, and this man was cutting bread, and he cut a piece of bread for the wolf, gave it to eat, he didn’t beat it, neither…. it was a wolf, but he didn’t beat it. and then when he already was not a wolf, and that man, people lived very poorly here, no grain gave yield, and they had to go buy bread. and this man recognized him, and gave him some grain, and… gave him grain, and he was surprised, why, for what, to him… grain, and: ‘i want to pay.’ ‘no, he says, i don’t want, do you remember when a wolf came to your house, and you not only did not beat me, you even gave me bread? it was i.’ well. like that. kz: so, it is the woman/wife, the woman/wife who turned him into a wolf? pk: yes, yes, yes. but who knows if it is a fairy tale of some sort? [laughs] as we see from the text, the narrator does not feel at ease blaming the wife; she signals her nervousness with the laughter (11) after the second explanation. she downplays the transformative magic performed by the wife on her husband. however, unlike the previous narrator, this storyteller does not question, or feel bad about, the rest of the tale. she concentrates on the narrative about the man helping the wolf and the former wolf’s gratitude to his helper. she focuses on the details indicating poverty: a chimneyless house and crop failure. �e story becomes a morality tale about the importance of mutual help between poor but kind-hearted people, even though one of them happens to have been temporarily turned into a wolf. �e evil role of a woman is only mentioned by the speaker when prompted, and even then, denied as a fact. by shifting the focus of the story, the female speaker distances herself from its male perspective describing a woman as an evil witch. a similar attitude, prioritizing the story of a man helping a wolf and the subsequent encounter of the two male characters that downplays the role of the wife in the transformation transpires in a “stick” variant told by mc, a man born in 1927 in novoselycja, mižhir’ja district, transcarpathia, in 2012. �e folklorist reminds the speaker of the story he had once told how the wife transformed her husband; the speaker confirms that he recognized the story, but does not mention this transformation in his narrative. he describes how a man was guarding his potatoes, when a wolf came with an injured paw that had been pierced by a stick. �e wolf showed his paw to the man, who pulled out the stick. �e wolf, in pain, bit off the man’s finger. �e man bandaged the wolf’s paw, and the wolf left. later, the former wolf, as a man, went to a certain village to pull brine (used instead of transcarpathian werewolf stories: gender attitudes folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 15 salt), and asked to stay in someone’s house for a night. his host was missing a finger, and when the guest and the host started talking about it, the guest said “i was that wolf that bit your finger off.” like others, this narrator was interested in telling a beautiful, though improbable, story, and in expressing his attitude to its veracity. on the one hand, he traditionalizes the story (in bauman’s terms [1992]), putting it into the context of familiar stories told by respected people, including his parents (“ся́к я чу́в іс свốїх батькі́в за...іс | дру́гых [“i heard that from my parents...[and] from others”]). on the other hand, he positions the narrative into the times long gone, and, after a hesitation, labels it as an untruth (а | а тêпếрь тако́го | тако́го ниє́ ́ | небыли́ць такы́х [“and... and now, there is nothing like that, no such untrue stories”]. �is reflects the typical ambivalent attitude towards a truth status of a legend [dégh and vazsonyi 1976: 119]. �e narrator seeks to impress the listener and to make her think how the world had changed since the time such things could happen. however, the point of the story is the meeting of the former wolf with his helper rather than the transformation or its agent. �at might be why both men and women tell forcible transformation stories. in the two previous stories, the narrators shift the focus of the story, concentrating on something other than a wife turning her husband into a wolf. �is way, they avoid associating themselves with evil witches (women) or weak non-dominant husbands (men). in the first story from zavadka, the male narrator was uncomfortable with the entire story; in the second story from stuzhycja, the female narrator was uncomfortable with the role of the wife in the transformation. in the final story from novoselycja, the narrator seemed comfortable with everything omitted the wife from the narration entirely. female perspective: magic, forgiveness, and the limits of self-defense while these narrators deflect attention from the woman culprit, still other narrators tell the forcible transformation story from a female perspective. one such story was recorded in novoselycja in 1987 from ap and was summarized above. in this story the woman is married to a man who beat her. she uses magic to turn him into a wolf. �e use of magic against a non-magical opponent is a terrible offense, великый гріх [a great sin] that even a priest cannot absolve. at the end of her life the woman faces the punishment prepared to those who used witchcraft, in that she cannot die until she reverses her magic. when she returns her husband home, they both acknowledge that they harmed each other, forgive each other, and then she dies peacefully. �e narrator shows that, for these characters, wife-beating and her magical response, were commensurate. �is attitude counters societal norms. yet for the wife (and the storyteller) magic is a forbidden, but accessible and effective way to withstand abuse. �e storyteller even finds a loophole in the natural law punishing the use of magic. since the punishment happens at the very end of the guilty person’s life (she cannot die), the woman turns her husband back into a person only before her death ensuring herself an entire life without abuse. �is position of both the female character and folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 16 the female narrator is nearly revolutionary and definitely goes against the grain of cultural norms. it is noteworthy that in the story of the same type from kindrativ, told by a woman, but collected by a man, the issue of female self-defense is not even raised; the magic attack of the woman on her son-in-law is presented as unmotivated. hybrid story: status quo maintained lastly, we will examine a hybrid story with the elements of voluntary and forced transformation types recorded in novoselycja, mižhir’ja district, transcarpathia, in 2012 from m., a woman born in 1936, by elena boudovskaia. in this story, a husband and his wife go to the field to stack hay; the husband says he needs to cut a pole and goes to the woods; a wolf with an injured paw comes from the woods (note here elements of the ‘stick’ subtype). it extends its paw to the woman to bandage, but she has no first-aid material. �en it gets angry, bites a piece out of the woman’s skirt and leaves. �en the husband returns, the couple have a meal, and the wife notices threads from her skirt between her husband’s teeth. below is the end of our conversation concerning this story: m:... and she saw that her... from her skirt, between his teeth, that piece of cloth, a red one. �en she realized that her husband was a man with two souls. like this, there were people with two souls. yes, it was like that. b: did she tell him that she had figured it out? m: she didn’t tell him anything, no, didn’t tell him anything because she was afraid. only that, maybe she told her mother or her father, or to someone, and, you know, it all spr... spread, how to say, as i tell you, and you tell someone else, and they tell someone else, and it went around like that. yes, it was like that. m’s story begins as a ‘piece of cloth’ type, but the wolf-husband does not attack the wife for no reason. he, as a husband should, orders the wife to serve him and to bandage his injured paw. �e woman does not, first, because she has nothing to bandage with and also because she did not recognize her husband. �e husband becomes rightfully angry at his disobedient wife and punishes her by tearing a piece out of her skirt. �en the story type ‘piece of cloth’ continues. m portrays the werewolf husband as less dangerous; he is not a wild beast attacking for no reason, but a husband who has the right to punish his wife for disobedience. �e story also has no ending where the wife would be freed from danger. while the collector tries to elicit an ending, m does not provide one. �e werewolf husband does not flee into the forest, but continues living with his wife, who is afraid even to mention that she knows who he is. for m, who, after the death of her husband, has been heading a large and rich patriarchal family for transcarpathian werewolf stories: gender attitudes folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 17 many years (a living illustration of kandiyoti’s [1988] patriarchal bargain), the patriarchal rules are indispensable. �e marriage is unbreakable, and the wife is a servant of her husband whoever he is. m has a reason to support the patriarchal worldview and she supports it wholeheartedly. m’s story hints that the wife can complain to her parents about her husband’s behavior. however, they would have no power in his house. �e fact that the whole village learned about the husband being a werewolf (“it all spread”) can be an instrument of social control protecting the community from evil magic bearers. however, that fact will not restrict the werewolf’s actions in his family, where his wife would be essentially without protection. m upholds male control in the family, and the community’s control over its members, but the wife in her story remains powerless to protect herself. m’s gender attitudes explain why she tells a story with elements from two different story types. м supports the principle of male supremacy and simply cannot tell the story type ‘piece of cloth’ in its classical subversive form, from the female perspective, where the man is an evil attacker and his wife an innocent victim. m’s story seems to conform to this type, but stops short at the werewolf’s wicked and unmotivated attack on the woman. �e attack is depicted as a lawful punishment of a wife who failed to comply with his request. m’s story also lacks an ending, narrated or suggested, of saving the wife from her husband; the wife remains at his side, afraid and silent. conclusion in carpathian werewolf stories, only men transform into a wolf in all story types: 1) voluntary transformation (a husband becomes a wolf and attacks his wife) and 2) forcible transformation (a wife turns her husband into a wolf). from the point of view of ethical values reflected in stories, narrators must balance two pivotal issues: male superiority, and the disapproval of magic used against simple people. as we have shown, their attitude toward these two issues is reflected in the narratives they choose to tell and how they construct them. narrators who share the patriarchal postulate of male superiority (or who do not want to subvert it) prefer to tell stories of forcible transformation where the man is not guilty of using magic (“transformation and return,” “stick”, “a man helps a wolf”). �ose who doubt this postulate tell stories of voluntary transformation where the man is guilty of using magic against his wife (“a piece of cloth,” with the ending (the woman getting rid of her husband) embedded in the narrative or transpiring in the subsequent discussion). �is does not mean that a given narrator only tells one type of story in lockstep fashion. for example, in 1987, anna pyrynec’ from novoselycja told two stories from different types, both “a piece of cloth” and “transformation and return.” however, she gave both stories a female perspective. �e gender aspect of the storyteller’s worldview can influence not only the choice of a story type, but also the ways s/he alters the story in the telling and even the decision to refuse to tell the story altogether. since forcible transformation stories coincide with the traditional carpathian views about the bearers of magic and on gender, they turn out to be more folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 18 widespread. �ey have been recorded from both men and women and they display a broader range of genres (not only fabulates, but also one folk tale). in the renditions of forcible transformation stories by both men and women, the painful subject of the husband being transformed by his wife may be avoided or minimized. on the other hand, some female storytellers tell even forcible transformation stories from the female perspective. �ey offer a reason that made the wife use magic against her husband: domestic abuse. �ey can turn even a story of forcible transformation, originally built on the compassion towards the victim-husband and the disapproval of the aggressor-wife, into a story that makes listener think about ethical contradictions. it offers the opportunity for debate about whether it is good to use magic in self-defense from abuse and about the morality of such abuse itself. for other storytellers who share carpathian rural values about gender, such stories offer no contradictions, and the evil nature of a woman who can attack a man without provocation is a well-known and indisputable fact. it is only reasonable that people’s views vary depending on their own gender and on the degree to which they are vested into patriarchal models of gender norms. it is also logical that their gender attitudes are reflected in the stories they tell. what we did not expect to find was that these attitudes actually defined the plot, the landscape of action, using bruner’s terms [bruner 1986: 34], not only the landscape of conscience. �ere is scholarship showing that narrators’ attitudes may define at least the choice of main characters in folk stories; see, e.g., the findings in �um [1993: 13], expanding on the earlier work of rölleke [1988], on female characters in the grimm fairy tales. �um concludes that, for at least several of the grimms’ informants, gender, age, and social class (apparently via their gender attitudes) have influenced the plots in which female characters act. a man, former soldier, tells stories where only men play leading roles, while women are either "the booty or reward of an active … male protagonist,” or “play an actively and aggressively evil role as the antagonists of their lower-class husbands.” “young, educated and unmarried ‘bourgeoise women” tell stories where female characters “are represented as undergoing trials and suffering in preparation for marriage” [�um 1993: 13]. yet in the tales told by a sixty-year old lower class woman, dorothea viehmann, if women are protagonists, they are mostly “able to survive against very great odds only through their deep inner strength, and through an ability to assert themselves despite the handicap of their gender, and despite numerous adversities” [�um 1993: 15]. women who are not active or smart are described in viehmann’s stories as “pitiable figures” and are eventually “propelled into madness” [�um 1993: 15]. �e influence of speakers’ life experiences and gender views on the way they portray female characters is akin to what we found in our corpus of carpathian werewolf stories. however, we were more concerned with plot elements than with character choices; and our findings show that the plots of carpathian werewolf stories are also defined largely by gender attitudes of speakers. transcarpathian werewolf stories: gender attitudes folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 19 we do not have a definitive answer to the question whether in the bigger picture the werewolf stories told from a female perspective play a meaningful role in subverting patriarchal values, or whether they should “be interpreted as part and parcel of the maintenance of systems of domination in that they provide spaces where subordinates may legitimately ‘let off steam’ and acquire a breathing space” [kandiyoti 1998: 145]. after all, these stories “[do] not normally or necessarily lead to a renegotiation of conjugal or labour contracts but produce […] relief within them,” as kandiyoti [1998: 145] notes about certain other female activities in traditional societies. we can only conclude that, in telling these stories, many female speakers are not afraid to express views on gender that differ from the dominant patriarchal view. carpathian werewolf stories definitely provide a space to debate the gender attitudes of their listeners, but we cannot assert that such discussions can cha(lle)nge the participants’ gender attitudes. notes 1 in this article, we examine stories told by the carpatho-rusyn minority in the transcarpathian region of ukraine together with stories told by ukrainians in the l’viv region of ukraine, although the carpatho-rusyn stories from the transcarpathian region are the primary basis for our study. 2 similar work investigating the reflection of gender values in folklore have been carried out on the material of other cultures (see especially mathews [2005] as well as raby [2007]). �e transcarpathian material has not yet been examined from this point of view. 3 it is known to be a case also in other branches of oral tradition; cf. quinn [2005: 13] about skinner’s nepalese informants talking about painful sides of marriage with collectively composed songs of hardship, and mathews’ oaxacan interviewees, with the help of la llorona morality tale. 4 cf. hnatiuk [1904: 175-7]; also see note 11. 5 i use the term ‘model’, or ‘cultural model’ in the sense of “local models of how the humanly created, natural, supernatural, interpersonal, and wider sociopolitical worlds work” [strauss 2015: 391]; they are “understandings that are so generally accepted that they form the shared presuppositions underlying different opinions about a topic” [strauss 2015: 391-392], though alternative models may exist as well [quinn and holland 1987: 4]. models also serve as culturally accepted patterns for behavior since they have motives embedded into them; they “not only label and describe the world but also set forth goals ... and elicit or include desires” [strauss 1992: 3; d’andrade 1992]. 6 such attribution means that, on the one hand, the story is believable since it is part of tradition, but on the other hand, hk did not observe the events herself, which does not let her testify for the truthfulness of the story. �is is a typical ambivalent stance of a good story-teller towards a legend see above. 7 �ough the divorce after a church marriage was strictly forbidden, in the old time in transcarpathian villages, according to testimonies of our interlocutors, folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 20 there were cases when a wife could not live with her husband (for example, if he beat her more than was considered normal). in this case she could, without a divorce, return to her parents’ house and live there. a similar practice existed up to world war i among the rusyns of yugoslavia, who came to vojvodina from the carpathian mountains in the middle of the 18th c. 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[folk demonology of polissia: publications of texts recorded in the 1980s – 1990s. vol. 1: people with supernatural abilities.] москва: языки славянских культур. zipes, jack. 1983. fairy tales and the art of subversion: the classical genre for children and the process of civilization. new york: wildman. zubryc’kyj, m. зубрицький, м. 1895. про вовкулаків. [about werewolves.] вістник літератури, історії і фольклору. видає ольга франко, том 4. львів. 185. review: hasan-roken reviews folklorica 2016, vol. xx 187 reviews hasan-rokem, galit and ithamar gruenwald (eds.). louis ginzberg’s legends of the jews: ancient jewish folk literature reconsidered (raphael patai series in jewish folklore and anthropology). detroit, mi: wayne state up, 2014. notes, index. 182 pp. price $44.99 (hardback). isbn 978-0-8143-4047-9. price $24.99 (ebook). isbn 978-0-8143-4048-6. louis ginzberg’s early twentieth century monumental opus legends of the jews (1909) is a synthesis of aggadah from classical rabbinic literature and ancient folk legends that find their origin in a variety of cultures. ginzberg’s extensive multi-volume collection helped shape american conservative judaism and to this day counts as one of the landmarks in modern jewish literature and one of the seminal works of jewish folklore. galit hasan-rokem’s and ithamar gruenwald’s edited english volume (following the publication of a hebrew edition) offers a range of reflections on ginzberg’s legends. the major part of the collection of scholarly essays (five of them) comes out of two plenary sessions that met at the 15th congress of the world association of jewish studies held in celebration of the centennial anniversary of legends in israel in 2009. the essays (seven in all) address the legends’ repercussions in contemporary scholarship. the contributors have different backgrounds and are the leading scholars in their respected fields. thus, the essays offer a wide variety of perspectives on ginzberg’s work from historical, philosophical philological to methodological. they hold the work and its author in high esteem, discussing the work’s monumental character, but also its weaknesses and strengths, with an eye towards the folkloristic underpinnings of the work. the book opens with a preface by one of the co-editors hasanrokem and an introduction by rebecca schorsch, both of which highlight the folkloric narrative character of ginzberg’s legends. while the preface explains the purpose of the collection and provides an adequate overview of the included chapters, the introduction discusses in depth why and how ginzberg’s work came about. in addition, schorsch lauds the work’s significance within folklorica 2016, vol. xx 188 jewish literature as a catalyst for an american jewish renaissance, as well as its impact upon american jewry’s cultural and religious struggles. schorsch argues that with his work, ginzberg wanted to demonstrate that the jewish people have a rich cultural history that demanded literary canonization, which is also evidenced by his use of extensive notes. in addition, she points out how ginzberg’s use of folklore demonstrated the broad cultural connections between jews and the people of the middle east and europe. moreover, she emphasizes that this collection of jewish folklore aimed to underline jewish uniqueness yet universality. however, schorsch also concludes that ginzberg, because of the anthological and encyclopedic nature of the work, fails to make jewish readers “feel.” nevertheless, the author lauds ginzberg’s invaluable contributions of preserving the traditions of the jewish past. by pointing to the articles following her introduction, schorsch makes it clear that ginzberg’s work continues to have an influence on contemporary rabbinic and folkloric scholarship, but that the contributors do not hesitate to indicate the work’s limitations. the subsequent chapters thus offer a variety of perspectives and highlight different aspects of the work and its contexts. in the first chapter of the volume, david golinkin focuses on ginzberg’s life and career and reviews the reception of his opus and the author’s own reflections on it. in chapter two, hillel newman introduces ginzberg’s doctoral thesis on aggadic literature in the writings of early christian church fathers as a source for his later project and shows how christian authors borrowed and adapted jewish legends. in the next chapter, daniel boyarin employs theoretical models from folklore research to discuss the broad ideological, theological, philosophical, and intercultural context of the work. referring to ginzberg’s roots in romanticism, boyarin argues that jews have folk literature as do other peoples. jacob elbaum’s essay provides a broad overview over the chronological span of ginzberg’s work, from the time of the second temple to the end of the middle ages. in conjunction, he reviews the tradition of jewish and hebrew anthologies and the characteristics of the genre in general. in addition, elbaum discusses ginzberg’s choices in selecting texts for his anthology (not all of them from the jewish reviews folklorica 2016, vol. xx 189 tradition) as well as editorial decisions and folkloric considerations. in his own essay, the editor hasan-rokem identifies ginzberg as a scholar of folklore as the author of legends himself, as well as his contemporaries and students of his work have done. hasan-rokem points to ginzberg’s use of the narrative genre to explain the author’s choice of the term “legend” and his use of the comparative method so prevalent in folklore studies at the time. on the other hand, ithamar gruenwald, co-editor of the volume, approaches ginzberg’s corpus critically and views the author’s genre category of “legend” as problematic in regards to the concept of the work which, for him, constitutes a disconnect to the belief system and ritual practices of jews. the last essay of the volume by johannes sabel examines the german manuscript of legends, which was only recently discovered in the library of the jewish theological seminary of america in new york. he focuses on ginzberg’s selection of the materials that make up a unified linear narrative and analyzes selected passages from the manuscript. in addition, sabel discusses ginzberg’s mixed usage of english and german, which he explains with ginzberg’s diasporic situation. moreover, sabel discusses the differences between the german and english versions, concluding that the german version is the source for the later english version. as in some of the other essays, sabel also explains ginzberg’s choice of the term “legends,” which he traces back to the grimms’ use and categorization of the term and the similar sacred legend of the jewish midrashim. this book offers the most current scholarship on legends and thus will be a valuable resource and necessary secondary reading for any scholar who researches and teaches ginzberg’s work. anyone who studies legends should consider this collection as a supplement to the primary text. all of the essays laud ginzberg and his monumental work but do not shy away from marking its limitations, and in this lies the value of this collection. moreover, it is the diversity of the discussed contexts of the work by a group of diverse scholars, together with an introductory and summarizing discussion of legends and its author by schorsch, that make this book invaluable. in addition, while this volume offers us insights into contemporary scholarly discourse of ginzberg and his corpus, it also folklorica 2016, vol. xx 190 offers a broader discussion of the role of folklore in judaism in general while addressing “aggadah in a folkloristic perspective” (xviii) in a narrower sense. cindy k. renker university of north texas, denton, tx, usa folklorica 2016 �e hunt for an eternal legacy: putin and the vampire legend in modern russia folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 25 �e hunt for an eternal legacy: putin and the vampire legend in modern russia colleen lucey university of arizona tucson, az, usa melissa miller university of notre dame notre dame, in, usa abstract today’s image of the vampire in russia is a fascinating case study in how people both bring slavic folklore to life in the digital age and how they make use of developing technologies to participate in political protest. for instance, online commentators and political cartoonists portray russia’s current president, vladimir putin, as a modern-day vampire who feeds on the dual policies of expansionism and political repression. on the other hand, his uncanny ability to avoid the signs of aging bolsters his hold on power and further aligns putin with the vampire and the character’s subsequent iterations in popular culture. using the vampire to convey political and social anxieties predates putin’s presidency. given the vampire’s possession of taboo knowledge and its ability to wreak havoc on communities, the figure appears as a simulacrum for a politically savvy, yet heinously unjust, ruler. from the tyrannical vlad dracula (1431-1476) who impaled his advisories, to the display of vladimir lenin’s (1870-1924) embalmed, seemingly “undead” body on moscow’s red square, longevity of the state has paralleled the search for ultimate sovereignty, both in life and in death. �is article examines a variety of folktales, fiction (including stoker's dracula and pelevin's empire v) and media (including film and memes). we argue that the supernatural in modern russia in the form of the vampire legend performs paradoxical functions, in that it both serves to legitimize the autocratic state, while at the same time is weaponized (by journalists, artists, internet users) to critique the putin regime. “unfortunately, he is a vampire.” -liudmila putina describing her husband vladimir putin in the summer of 2008, the russian tabloid tainy zvёzd [secrets of the stars] featured a youthful, smiling vladimir putin on its cover (figure 1). �e issue created a frenzy at kiosks folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 26 figure 1: image reproduced courtesy of bauer media group, russia. around the country, setting a new sales record as the russian public eagerly purchased available copies. what drove citizens from all parts of the country to buy this particular tabloid? certainly, it promised titillating reading material: unpublished photos of the president; provocative details on his past relations with women; and two pin-up posters of a topless putin to share with friends and family. but one cover story likely caught the eye of potential buyers—an exposé from none other than the president’s wife, liudmila putina. according to the tabloid, she had shocking news to share with the public: her husband was a vampire. �e hunt for an eternal legacy: putin and the vampire legend in modern russia folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 27 media outlets in europe and north america found liudmila putina’s description eerily precise. �e accusation seemed oddly appropriate; like the vampires of slavic folklore and popular culture, putin never aged. he seemed undaunted, if not invigorated, by political battles both at home and abroad. putin’s vampirism remained a heated question, as the same russian tabloid revisited the question in 2011, with a photo of putin pointing two fingers by his mouth with an accompanying caption by liudmila, “my husband is a vampire!” (figure 2). figure 2: image reproduced courtesy of bauer media group, russia. conspiracy theorists and comedians alike churned out racy and shocking stories that explained putin’s political prowess as a kind of psychic vampirism that threatened the global community. such charisma allowed him “to bleed” his foes of energy while simultaneously endearing him to russian women who found his virility irresistible [cassiday and johnson 2010]. as liudmila putina put it, “he never beat me, but he sucked the juices right out of me.” �e president’s ex-wife (they divorced in 2013) and subsequent commentators looked to the figure of the vampire to explain putin’s uncanny hold folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 28 on everything from the russian people’s state of mind to hacking the 2016 american presidential election. in fact, the mythologization of putin as 21stcentury blood-sucker registers with audiences both in russia and abroad because it taps into a well-established image of the east european vampire who travels west in his insatiable hunger for power. immortalized in works like bram stoker’s dracula (1897) and f.w. murnau’s silent film classic nosferatu (1922), these many faces of the eastern vampire demonstrate that “our fascination with vampires is undying; their popularity, inexhaustible” [hudson 2017:2]. like these vampires from fiction and film, putin possesses an ability to “hypnotize” the west with his reputation as a strong, autocratic ruler who defeats enemies both on domestic and foreign fronts. as valerie sperling has noted, formulating an image of himself as invincible plays a central role in vladimir putin’s “political legitimation strategy” and the justification of increasing authoritarianism in today’s russia [sperling 2015:29]. in this article, we outline how the vampire has evolved from its roots in slavic folklore to its prominence in contemporary fiction and film. we argue that the supernatural, in the form of the vampire legend, performs paradoxical functions in contemporary russia, in that it both serves to legitimize the autocratic state, while at the same time is weaponized (by journalists, artists, internet users) to critique the putin regime. �e figure of the vampire resonates in today’s russia as a simulacrum for a sovereign ruler who blends cruelty and charisma in ways that confound the west. (1) from the tyrannical vlad dracula (1431-1476) who impaled his adversaries and then reportedly drank their blood, to the display of vladimir lenin’s (1870-1924) embalmed, seemingly “undead” body on moscow’s red square, east european leaders strive for sovereignty both in life and death. within this context, russian artists have turned to stoker’s dracula as a rich source text to explore the image of the vampire in putin’s russia. contemporary russians grasp the otherness of stoker’s eastern count—who audaciously challenges british hegemony—within their own nation’s “outsider” status on the world stage. just as important for the russian cultural imagination is the complex relationship between technology, power, and the occult outlined in stoker’s novel. subsequent iterations in fiction and film explore the rich complexities inherent in the vampire figure, noting the role of supernatural forces in the establishment of a leader’s political power. buckets of blood: mobilizing the folkloric vampire in vernacular settings while contemporary iterations of the vampire in russian culture suggest strong affinity with stoker’s dracula, it would be an oversight not to recognize the importance of slavic folklore as the generative source from which past and present representations of the vampire have evolved. of course, the vampires of popular culture like those in the series twilight, with their sparkly skin and vegetarian impulses, are far removed from the flesh-eating, blood-drinking creatures of slavic folklore. despite their obvious differences, modern conceptualizations of the vampire can be traced to folklore from central and �e hunt for an eternal legacy: putin and the vampire legend in modern russia folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 29 eastern europe [garza 2010: 1-3]. �is deep folkloric past resonates with contemporary depictions of vladimir putin as a vampire. when, for instance, liudmila putina stated that her husband “sucked the juices right out of her,” she may not have consciously known that the characterization of her husband did, in fact, align with descriptions of vampire behavior found in slavic folklore. jan perkowski, one of the first scholars to study slavic conceptualizations of the vampire, defines a vampire as a “being which derives sustenance from a victim, who is weakened by the experience. �e sustenance may be physical or emotional in nature” [perkowski 1976: 136]. in contrast to modern depictions of the vampire, which showcase their willingness to feed off anyone, the creature of slavic folklore prefers the blood of its closest relatives. according to felix oinas, vampires in slavic folklore “always visit relatives first, particularly their marital partners” [oinas 1998: 48]. �us, putin feeding off his wife symbolically links him to the slavic narrative tradition. �ere are additional ways in which contemporary representations of putin draw upon vernacular beliefs to underscore his similarity to a vampire. in some modern conceptualizations, putin is depicted as a magnetic leader with special powers that he can use to bewilder leaders of state and citizens of his country. stories like the 2003 article from komsomol’skaia pravda titled, “does putin defend the power of sorcery?” claim that russia’s political leaders frequently turn to magicians and fortune tellers to protect themselves against the evil eye and other forms of black magic [komsomol’skaia pravda 2003]. indeed, superstition and the power of the occult continue to play an important role in contemporary russian political life as seers, fortune tellers, and astrologers make the line-up on numerous russian tv shows to offer their predictions on domestic and foreign affairs. as mariya lesiv convincingly shows in her study on the role of the supernatural in ukrainian and russian vernacular and media contexts, while it may seem perplexing to outsiders, “the supernatural is incorporated into the highest-level political discourses” in eastern europe [lesiv 2018: 35]. as she explains, in eastern europe, and in ukraine and russia in particular, the supernatural is not in need of defense from the perceived progressive science-based paradigm of thinking. rather, it constitutes part of this very paradigm, having even been incorporated into scientific research. in other words, in ukraine and russia, the supernatural does not stand in opposition to modernity but occupies a position that is often diametrically opposite to ‘backward’. [lesiv 2018: 47] lesiv’s study, which in part focuses on how state institutions incorporate supernatural beliefs to legitimize their political and social platforms, proves useful in our analysis of the vampire legend in contemporary russia. we argue that the supernatural, as represented in the vampire, is mobilized to explain putin’s political prowess, while also utilized to critique autocracy. folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 30 contemporary discourse on the role of supernatural forces in everyday life can be traced back to folkloric texts, where we find the vampire imagined as an entity connected with sorcery, witchcraft and heresy. as oinas explains, in slavic folk traditions “the same person who in his lifetime is called koldun [sorcerer] is called eretik [heretic] after his death if he roams around at night in villages, captures people, and eats them” [oinas 1998: 53]. �e first recorded collection of russian folktales, assembled by the ethnographer aleksandr afanas’ev in the nineteenth century, feature such beings. for example, in the folktale “�e vampire” the heroine, marusia, witnesses her vampire-suitor eat the flesh of a corpse that is housed in a church, presumably for an upcoming burial [afanas’ev 1975: 593-8]. when the vampire confronts marusia, she denies witnessing the crime; as punishment, he uses sorcery to kill her family members one by one. while the contemporary image of vampirism always involves drinking blood, the slavic tradition does not, as this tale demonstrates. �e vampire consumes the flesh of humans and is a sorcerer, as oinas describes. some of the character traits that the vampire displays in this folktale—excessive cruelty, the ability to harness black magic to live post-mortem, torturing a victim through psychological warfare—extend into modern-day iterations of the legend and depictions of putin. in contemporary culture, putin’s dominance in world politics has produced a rich assortment of stories profiling his supposed supernatural capabilities. depending on the source, putin’s talent to bend the will of international leaders is interpreted either as confirmation of his destiny to rule russia or, conversely, proof of a dangerous magnetism that threatens world order. in the west, politicians and comedians alike have pointed to putin’s “psychic hold” over american leaders. while contemporary discussions focus on relations between putin and donald trump, it is worth noting that the russian president’s magnetism was observed as early as 2001 when he first met then us president george h. bush. “i looked the man in the eye,” bush explained, and “i was able to get a sense of his soul.” bush was so enamored by putin’s charming gaze that he invited the russian leader to his texas ranch. “i wouldn’t have invited him to my ranch if i didn’t trust him,” bush touted to reporters. (2) putin’s ability to captivate american presidents has resurfaced in recent years, especially in the controversy surrounding russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential race and trump’s subsequent win of the white house. shortly after the 2016 election, stephen colbert featured a segment where he interviewed the cartoon version of trump, only to have a cartoon putin appear whispering answers into the new president’s ears [�e late show with stephen colbert 2016.]. �e skit, which hinted at hypnosis from the beginning, culminated in trump falling into a putininduced trance. declaring the studio too hot for his liking, putin rips off his shirt to reveal finely chiseled pecs and abs, and turning to trump says, “donald, stare into my hypno-pecs.” trump’s cartoon eyes turn various shades of psychedelic colors as he becomes entranced with putin’s chest and repeats after the russian president: “you are trusting me. we are your allies. you give me alaska. and you will hand over moose and squirrel.” �ey then “seal the deal” with an “openmouth sonnet” and proceed to lock tongues in a slimy exchange. �e hunt for an eternal legacy: putin and the vampire legend in modern russia folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 31 while western comedians have poked fun at his “supernatural” ability to hypnotize trump, russian media outlets have utilized astrologers to confirm the russian president has a divine destiny. �e documentary produced by the russian tv station ren in 2013 focuses on the life and prophecies of the famous bulgarian seer vanga (1911-1996), well-known both in eastern europe and abroad [ren 2013]. her predictions widely circulate online and in the media as confirmation of everything from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to obama’s presidency, and brexit [crouch 2018]. particularly relevant to our discussion of putin are statements vanga made in 1979 to the writer valentin sidorov about the “glory of vladimir.” vanga’s prediction that “everything will melt away like ice—and only one thing will remain untouched—the glory of vladimir, the glory of russia,” has been used as proof in online commentaries, news stories, and sensational documentaries that putin was destined to be president of russia [evlampiev 2018; lesiv 2018: 34; ren 2013]. (3) another connection between modern depictions of putin and the vampire legend of slavic folklore is, of course, the russian president’s ability to defy the signs of aging. �is, too, can be traced back to themes in folklore. tales collected by afanas’ev feature vampires that drink large quantities of blood not only to sustain life beyond the grave but to blend in with the population. in the tale “bucket of blood,” for example, a stranger approaches a peasant asking for a ride into the village. unable to enter any houses where a crucifix is present, the vampire tricks the peasant into stopping at a cottage with no christian insignia. as the peasant waits in the carriage, the vampire accosts an old man and boy, stabs them in the back, drains them of their blood and drinks an entire bucket full [perkowski 1989: 21-2]. �e peasant is saved from being the vampire’s next victim only thanks to the cock’s crow, which vanquishes the evildoer. �is tale, like many others, confirms that the vampire may feed on blood in order to remain appealing to community members. as we discuss below, the consumption of blood will factor into modern perceptions of putin as a vampire. specifically, commentators both in russia and abroad have pointed to rumors that putin bathes in the blood of siberian red deer, famous for their blood’s supposed mystical power to rejuvenate and prevent the signs of aging [pleitgen 2018; filonov 2017]. folkloric texts like “�e vampire” and “bucket of blood” describe the primary methods of repelling vampires (garlic, crucifixes, and holy water) as well as the means of killing them (a stake through the heart, sunrise). �ese apotropaics—some of which draw from christian tradition, others from prechristian beliefs—affirm what scholars widely describe as dvoeverie, a “dual belief” system present in slavic cultures [kononenko 2007: 6]. to be sure, ethnologists and folklorists have complicated the traditional understanding of dvoeverie by expanding the frame of reference and accounting for inherent contradictions in belief practices [levin 1993; worobec 2006]. in the context of this article, we contend that contemporary russian cultural production maintains its postmodern flair through the act of appropriating conflicting discourses, including references to pagan and christian religious beliefs, to create explosive visions of present-day reality through the vampire mythos [lipovetsky 2017]. folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 32 critics of vladimir putin, for example, have turned to medieval history, particularly the reign of vlad the impaler, in their vision of the russian president. a tale of two vlads: vlad the impaler and vlad(imir) putin news outlets and online commentators heighten the perception of putin as a cruel and cunning leader by painting him as a twenty-first century reincarnation of a different vlad, namely the medieval ruler vlad tepes iii, commonly referred to as vlad the impaler or vlad dracula. while these iterations meld the image of vlad dracula, vampirism, and putin, it should be noted that in the east european folklore tradition there are no examples of the historical vlad dracula behaving as a vampire. while one woodcut print from the medieval period shows him feasting in the company of impaled enemies (figure 3), the belief that vlad dracula drank the blood of victims is a modern-day invention originating from western sources. figure 3: 1499 german woodcut depicting vlad dracula dining in the company of recently impaled victims. image source wikipedia commons. �e hunt for an eternal legacy: putin and the vampire legend in modern russia folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 33 �e perception of the historical vlad dracula as a vampire emerged after bram stoker’s iconic depiction in dracula. however, as elizabeth miller convincingly shows, stoker had very limited knowledge of the wallachian leader’s biography. what stoker did know about the medieval ruler he gleaned from a description he read in william wilkinson’s 1820 account of the principalities of wallachia and moldavia that outlined the brief successes of the “voivode” named dracula. “what compelled stoker to use the name ‘dracula,’” explains miller, is wilkinson’s footnote: “dracula in the wallachian language means devil” [miller 2000: 188-190]. (4) while popular culture has pointed to stoker’s dracula as “proof” that the writer used the medieval ruler as inspiration for his vampire character, in fact, various scholars and commentators of the novel proposed this interpretation. �e supposed connection between vlad dracula and stoker’s vampire count has become so pervasive that it has supplanted traditional beliefs in modern slavic and east european contexts. �us, we see that while the vampire legend has its origins in eastern europe, contemporary iterations in slavic and east european culture draw upon stoker’s dracula as referent, not necessarily the traditional beliefs outlined by oinas, afanas’ev, and perkowski. in most instances, western journalists use the reference of vlad the impaler when referencing putin to create a comedic effect, like the 2012 new york post story “vlad the impaler: putin may have had an affair with ex-spy chapman.” in the digital realm, such stories mobilize the image of vladimir putin as an “impaler” (clearly a phallic symbol) to underscore his virility, oftentimes producing raunchy results latent with misogynistic imagery. more nuanced critique can be traced to political cartoons, which likewise play with the association by drawing out the connection between the two “vlads” (figure 4). a 2014 image by the popular cartoonist joe heller juxtaposes “vlad the impaler,” who is dressed in traditional garb and holding a sharpened stick, to “vlad the annexer,” an emotionless vladimir putin grasping a pencil in one hand and holding a map with a large “x” over crimea to signify its status as a new addition to the russian nation. folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 34 figure 4: image reproduced courtesy of joe heller, editorial cartoonist. �ere is more than just the similarity in name that draws the parallel between vlad the impaler and vladimir putin. like his medieval predecessor, putin has acquired a reputation for ousting combatants and squashing dissent. moreover, the russian president seems invincible and impossible to outmaneuver, recalling vlad the impaler’s incredible ability to side-step danger. for example, when the wallachian forces under his leadership led a surprise attack against the ottoman turks in june 1462, it was reported that vlad dracula went under cloak of darkness into the enemy camp to conduct the necessary reconnaissance to locate the tents of sultan mehmed ii’s viziers mahmud and ishak [cazacu and reinert 2017; 148-9]. although the ottoman troops weathered the attack and the wallachians eventually retreated, vlad dracula successfully terrorized his foes and sparked fear among the turkish forces. putin not only conjures up an association with vlad dracula because of his supposed military prowess, but because he seems forever young. tabloids both in russia and abroad point to putin’s remarkably unwrinkled face and sculpted physique as proof the president might very well be vlad the impaler in the flesh. a popular article first published by the daily mail and later re-circulated in russian by the kremlin-funded news outlet russia today, proposed that “putin was born in 1431” and is none other than “the wallachian prince vlad tepes, better known as count dracula” [spargo 2015]. �e references in popular culture connecting putin with vlad the impaler metaphorically link the two because they supposedly share a sadistic love of torture. it is worth explicating vlad the impaler’s legacy in order to better situate �e hunt for an eternal legacy: putin and the vampire legend in modern russia folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 35 this connection. although his ancestry was romanian, not slavic, vlad the impaler and the subsequent lore devoted to his life nevertheless drew from (and subsequently influenced) slavic portrayals of the vampire [garza 2010: 1]. �e epithet “dracula the impaler” comes from the ruler’s proclivity for sadistic means of torture, including (but not limited to): disembowelment, forcing mothers to eat their children, lighting the poor and crippled on fire, and most notably, impalement [cazacu 2017: 200-205]. �is latter form of torture he perfected to ensure the victim “was not immediately killed, but would die of thirst after two or three days, his eyes eaten out by crows, but still in possession of all his senses.” moreover, “dracula had planted a forest of stakes, three kilometers long and one kilometer wide, right before his palace windows so he might comfortable contemplate the convulsions of this victims” [cazacu 2017: xvi]. dracula compounded his cruelty with cynical wit, often testing travelers and ambassadors with questions that would mean a painful and agonizing death if they failed to answer correctly. �e russian account of vlad dracula from 1486, skazanie o drakule voevode [the tale of voievod dracula] likely authored by the russian ambassador, fedor kuritsyn, describes how vlad punished turkish dignitaries who arrived to his castle and forgot to take off their hats; when they explained this was not their custom, vlad responded: “very well, i shall strengthen you in your custom. brace yourselves!” and nailed their turbans to their heads. the tale of voievod dracula proves interesting not only for its detailed account of vlad’s atrocities, but because of its interpretation of the romanian ruler as a fair and just sovereign. not unlike the court of ivan the terrible, vlad dracula had to defend his country against threats and saboteurs, from both within and without. �e text thus justifies vlad’s cruelties as a necessary measure to ensure law and order. vlad’s logic, as interpreted by the text’s author, is that of divine sovereignty; a ruler, in this sense, follows saint peter’s magnate that the emperor “as supreme authority” governs “as commissioned by him to punish criminals and praise good citizenship” [peter 2:13-15]. �is particular form of pragmatism could equally describe putin’s political platform, which has garnered him immense success at home, at least until recently. while no public tortures have accompanied putin’s rise to power, other modes of attack—his popular campaign against the detested oligarchs in the 90s, his treatment of dissidents, allegations that he orchestrated assassinations of political enemies, and his successful outwitting of international leaders—symbolically link him in popular culture to vlad dracula. furthermore, as helena goscilo argues, “several aspects of putin’s persona actually facilitated his construction as a masculine icon incarnating the wise ruler who seamlessly unites the warrior and the thinker” [goscilo 2012: 184]. putin’s mental and physical alertness combined with his expertise in espionage links him not only to vlad the impaler, but to stoker’s iconic depiction in dracula. bram stoker’s dracula—a slick russian from transylvania folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 36 �e vampire legend in slavic culture is a fascinating case study in how people both bring the literary text of bram stoker’s dracula (1897) to life in the digital age and how they make use of developing technologies in order to participate in political protest. �e enduring relevance of stoker’s legacy in the west cannot be denied. along with mary shelley’s frankenstein and robert louis stevenson’s the strange case of dr. jekyll and mr. hyde, stoker is remembered as “the author of one of the three most celebrated horror stories in the history of english literature” [stoker 1996: 410]. moreover, stoker’s novel has spawned countless film, theatrical, and literary adaptations. �e story famously follows a hapless young solicitor named jonathan harker, who has been sent by his employer to transylvania to meet with a venerable and wealthy client by the name of count dracula. harker soon realizes the nefarious nature of the count’s business and tries to escape his forced captivity at the hands of the count. when harker finally succeeds in freeing himself, he discovers that the count has, in the meantime, visited england and infected his fiancé’s friend lucy with vampirism. harker then joins dr. van helsing, three friends, and his wife mina on an international hunt in order to capture dracula and rescue mina, who has also been infected, from the vampire’s hold. despite the novel’s enduring popularity in the english-speaking world, scholars have yet to satisfactorily explore the impact of the dracula legend on modern russian literature and culture. �is lacuna is somewhat surprising, given both that stoker’s work is widely available in russian translation, in both print and digital forms, as well as the particular nature of stoker’s creation itself. we may begin by noting the remarkably russian nature of stoker’s vampire, for in this classic text, the epitome of suave, slick vampiric evil is embodied in the form of a russian slav. as jimmie e. cain, jr. notes in his study bram stoker and russophobia: evidence of the british fear of russia in dracula and the lady of the shroud, “dracula’s heritage suggests clear russian and slavic antecedents” [cain 2006: 120]. while cain cites numerous examples which point to dracula’s russian genealogy, such as the fact that stoker’s vampire calls himself by the hereditary title of boyar, originally the russian term for a landed nobleman, whose usage later migrated to romania, the main focus of his study is to demonstrate how dracula’s slavic features betrayed an english anxiety towards russia as a formidable threat to the territorial integrity of the british empire during the nineteenth century. by contrast, the present study’s goals are twofold: not only are we interested in how stoker uses these russian tropes in order to construct his narrative, but also, we will investigate how russians themselves have been inspired by stoker’s canonical work. in this connection, we show how key russian allusions in stoker’s text propel the plot forward, as well as demonstrate the ways in which stoker’s russian readers and fellow writers have adapted his devices in order to protest the current regime under putin. perhaps the primary reason that the novel’s russian themes remain understudied is that some of the most important russian references occur in a section of the book entitled “dracula’s guest,” which has been considered controversial on textological grounds. it was once commonly assumed that �e hunt for an eternal legacy: putin and the vampire legend in modern russia folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 37 “dracula’s guest” was intended to be part of the book’s second chapter but was excised from the original publication due to the manuscript’s length. �is section was first published at the behest of stoker’s widow florence in 1914, two years after his death, in a volume called dracula’s guest and other weird tales [stoker 1996: xix]. however, dracula scholars elizabeth miller and clive leatherdale have convincingly argued that “dracula’s guest” is not an excised chapter from dracula, but rather, an early sketch or short story stoker wrote as he was developing his novel [miller 2000, 131-135; leatherdale 1998, 138-154]. if we consider this section as having laid important groundwork for the complete text of dracula as it is accepted today, the novel’s russian themes become quite salient. not only does this section’s ties to russian culture encapsulate a major theme of the novel, but it also affords primary importance to the russian language itself, as well as to the massive power it contains. in this section, the narrator, who only in later versions of stoker’s tale officially becomes jonathan harker, is on his journey to the count’s castle, and he wishes to visit a curious village that he has heard about. when his driver refuses to take him to this mysterious place, the narrator sends him away and sets out himself on foot. once he arrives, a formidable storm breaks out, forcing him to seek refuge. �e only structure he can find is a “great massive tomb of marble” [stoker 1996: xxx]. once he enters, a flash of lightning treats him to an arresting sight, that of “a beautiful woman, with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier” [stoker 1996: xxxi]. however, at this moment something forces the narrator out into the storm once again. he loses consciousness, only to be awoken by a terrible wolf attacking his throat. at the last possible moment, he is saved by a band of local cavalry. as cain points out, this scene is replete with allusions to slavic vampire legends, but the most important feature is what the narrator sees inscribed on the tomb: the message “the dead travel fast” which was “graven in great russian letters” [stoker 1996: xxx]. cain, though, does not analyze this inscription further, instead shifting his argumentation towards russian-british military conflict in the crimea and central asia. however, these haunting words are worth further study, not least because they cause the narrator to rethink the prudence of his journey and provide the first indication that all is not what it seems. moreover, the fact that stoker chose to indicate that these words were inscribed on the tomb in russian is quite significant. �e source for this phrase is actually a repeated line in a macabre german poem entitled “lenore” by gottfried august burger [stoker 1996: 375]. carving them on his literary tomb in cyrillic letters, then, is stoker’s own purposeful invention, and it establishes the rapid movement of evil which animates the novel’s plot—the quicksilver speed with which vampires routinely attack their victims, the split-second flight with which dracula is able to leave his mountain fortress to seek his prey—as being quintessentially russian. �is theme is then continued throughout the rest of the completed novel. for example, dracula’s voyage from transylvania to england, where he will resume his sanguine rampage, is also figured as a uniquely russian brand of motion. when the vessel comes into port, conspicuously helmed by a dead man, she is folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 38 recognized by eyewitnesses to be of russian construction. she also boasted a russian crew with authentic names, such as petrofsky and abramoff, who all mysteriously ended up as dead as their captain. �e ship’s doom is inextricably linked to her perilous alacrity: english bystanders report that, when the ship was approaching the shore, she “was rushing with such speed that…she must fetch up somewhere, if it was only in hell” [stoker 1996: 79]. to complete this image of hellish frenzy, as soon as the ship crashes on the shore, dracula himself, now in dog form, “sprang up on deck from below, as if shot up by the concussion [of the sea], and running forward, jumped from the bow onto the sand and...disappeared in the darkness” [stoker 1996: 80]. in sum, stoker drew on two eastern european images, the romanian warlord dracula who was recast, in light of the contemporary dominant power in the crimean conflict, as a russian boyar. curiously, it is not only dracula and his many incarnations that move with lightning speed in the novel. modern technology, too, is described as moving so fast as to be unsettling to the point of losing consciousness. later on in “dracula’s guest” we discover that the narrator was saved by the mounted troops only because of a miracle wrought by the day’s cutting-edge technology, that is, a telegram sent by count dracula to local law enforcement, stressing the danger the narrator presently found himself in and to beg for his safe rescue. upon receipt of this missive, the troops set out at once for the village. as he explains to the reader, “from a distant country had come, in the very nick of time, a message that took me out of the danger of the snow-sleep and the jaws of the wolf” [stoker 1996: xxxvi]. but the very fact that dracula was able to send such a telegram, essentially defying the usual limitations of space and place, is so uncanny and impossibly chilling that the narrator falls into a dead faint and afterwards even claims to have suffered a kind of paralysis. in this way, the text both acknowledges the helpfulness and utility of modern technology, for the telegram saved the narrator’s life, while at the same time portrays the speed at which characters can now share information as fearsome and even supernatural. as we will see, this dual nature of technology will be both explored and exploited by russian artists in their adaptations of the vampire legend in the digital age, as well. russia’s postmodern vampires: body maintenance and global commodification although not nearly as pervasive as in american popular culture, the image of the bloodsucking corpse who feeds on the living emerges in contemporary russian literature, film, and art. a particularly rich source of such imagery has proven to be artistic renderings of russian political leaders. as we will explore in more detail below, depictions of vladimir putin as vampire continue to dominate the media landscape, both at home and abroad. however, in order to understand modern iterations of the vampire legend in russia, we must first examine the country’s soviet past. �is merging of the vampiric imaginary and the political in putin’s russia actually has its roots in the soviet era, owing to the innovative, yet macabre preservation techniques that have allowed the russian state to preserve the body �e hunt for an eternal legacy: putin and the vampire legend in modern russia folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 39 of the father of the bolshevik revolution, vladimir lenin, in an astonishing condition of undead vitality (figure 5). figure 5: vladimir lenin's preserved body on display in the mausoleum on red square. photo credit: wikipedia commons despite ongoing controversy since the fall of the soviet union, lenin’s corpse remains on public display at his mausoleum located at the symbolic center of russian power, red square in moscow. since his death in 1924, scholars estimate that “more than 10 million people have visited his glass tomb, viewing a body that appears as fresh as the day he died” [levy 2015]. according to andrei yurchak, who is currently writing a book on the intersections between soviet and post-soviet politics and the bolshevik leader’s “undead” body, the maintenance of lenin’s remains is unprecedented in the human history of embalming, since past efforts, such as mummification, always focused “on preserving the original matter while the form of the body changes” [hsu 2015]. by contrast, the goal of lenin’s preservation has been the exact opposite, that is, to maintain the original colors of his hair, skin, and lips, as well as the suppleness of his flesh, joints, and limbs [yurchak 2015]. over time, this process has required more and more of lenin’s original human material to be replaced by synthetics, such as plastics and injectables [hsu 2015; yurchak 2015]. �is process gives rise to a richly fascinating paradox, one that has attracted politicians, political commentators, and artists alike. �at is, in order for lenin to keep looking like himself, he must contain less and less of his original body and take on more and more alien matter. �is circumstance suggests another parallel with vampires, who also, in order to maintain their own existence, must imbibe more and more biological material from other human bodies. to support the ongoing work of preserving lenin’s folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 40 corpse, an entire research lab was opened during the soviet period whose sole task was to pioneer new embalming technologies for use on lenin’s body. �ey ensured that the soviet people would never have to come to grips with the fact that their beloved leader was no longer among the living. �e lab, which, according to yurchak [2015], actually consists of several laboratories and scientific research groups, remains functional to the present day. it is due to the unceasing efforts of the scientists who work there that lenin’s body does not openly betray any signs of deterioration, but merely appears to be the bolshevik leader’s sleeping form more than ninety years after his actual death. in fact, the scientists who work on lenin’s undead body do not describe it as preserved at all, preferring instead to emphasize its ultra-lifelike qualities. for example, they view it as a “living sculpture” which is “dynamic, flexible, emergent” [yurchak 2015: 128]. as yurchak explains, this maintenance process itself is “not just scientific but also artistic” [yurchak 2015: 128]. in this connection, it is easy to see how the vampire legend fell on such fertile ground in the russian political context. indeed, modern researchers’ descriptions of lenin’s corpse form an eerie echo of jonathan harker’s original description of the undead vampire. in stoker’s novel, when harker is desperately exploring dracula’s castle in order to find a means of escape, he comes across the coffin which houses dracula’s undead form during the daylight hours. he tells us that “the eyes were open and stony, but without the glassiness of death—and the cheeks had the warmth of life through all their pallor, and the lips were as red as ever. but there was no sign of movement, no pulse, no breath, no beating of the heart” [stoker 1996: 50]. apart from the fact that lenin’s eyes are closed, this description could just as easily fit the corpse of the bolshevik leader. when visitors come to the mausoleum, they are greeted by the sight of lenin’s completely inert form clothed in a dark suit, his hands still pleasantly flesh-colored with pinkish nail beds, and his lips and cheeks plump, full, and pink. moreover, russian state media has both embraced and propagated this interpretation of lenin’s undead body as a constant reminder of authoritarian rule that is specifically vampiric. for example, in 2019 the media outlet russia beyond, an english-language publication that is owned by the russian government state news agency rossiia segodnia, published an article in its “history” section entitled “vladimir dracula: how soviet russia tried to create immortals.” �is article, which features graphic images of lenin, a 1916 book cover of dracula, and red square, where his mausoleum is located, all bespattered with scarlet blood, credits the popularity of stoker’s novel in the early 20th century with the desire to preserve lenin in as life-like a form as possible. as the author daniel chalyan notes, “the idea that a figure of such colossal stature could die was unfathomable” [chalyan 2019]. �ese unique similarities between the embodiment of political power in russia and the vampire have given rise to a modern brand of vernacular belief construction, in which putin both draws on the strength of the vampiric image, while artists and political opponents themselves make use of the vampire in order to critique his regime. �e vampiric image buttresses putin’s political persona and the desire to preserve a strong, centralized government, for it provides a concrete �e hunt for an eternal legacy: putin and the vampire legend in modern russia folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 41 example of how sovereign power may continue in perpetuity, without reference to a physical body that may wither and decay. as yurchak so elegantly phrases it, the practice of preserving lenin’s body constitutes “nothing other than the material cultivation of the immortal, infallible, perpetually renewed body of the sovereign party—the body that transcended individual mortal bodies of its every member and leader” [yurchak 2015: 146-147]. despite the fact that, ever since the collapse of the ussr, there have been calls from both within and without russia to bury lenin in the ground, thus knocking him down from his authoritarian pedestal and moving on from the specter of the soviet past, putin himself continues to insist that lenin’s preservation is relevant and that his otherworldly lifelike form should remain under glass at the mausoleum for all to revere. as yurchak relates, putin and others believe “‘it’s too soon to evaluate lenin’s place in history. let’s not succumb to foreign comments. let’s deal with lenin ourselves” [levy 2015]. in championing this position, putin reaffirms his political stance as a defender of the russian right to self-determination against “bullies” who seek to embarrass russia for her past. as a result, the decision to keep lenin on display takes on a larger significance, for putin is not only staunchly defending strong russian leaders themselves, but also, the right of the russian government itself to ensure the legacy of these leaders will continue to be valued, not only by the present day, but also going forward into the future. such a reaffirmation of the timeless nature of strong russian power dovetails with the refuge of immortality that the vampire mythos offers. indeed, putin himself projects the image of an immortal leader dedicated to physical exercise. putin famously retains a youthful, even ageless appearance, likely owing more to modern medical interventions such as botox injections and facelifts, rather than exercise. �ese physical attributes strengthen his political sovereignty as well, for they allow him to continue to refuse to say when, if ever, he might cease to run for reelection as president of the russian federation. �at is, as long as putin does not appear to get older, it is not incumbent upon him to discuss ceding power to someone else, because the possibility that someday he may age out of the job is never considered. �is connection is bolstered by local russian media, which also reports on the relationship between putin’s sanguine predilections and his youthful bloom of radiant health that is unusually striking for a man in his midsixties. for example, according to a story originally published by the russian news outlet republic in 2017, major russian leaders, such as putin, his prime minister, dmitrii medvedev, the chairman of the state duma, viacheslav volodin, and others, have long favored consuming and bathing in blood from the severed antlers of the siberian red deer, which is thought not only to confer special healing properties and physical and sexual strength on the user, but also to stop the aging process [filonov 2017; pleitgen and ilyushina 2018]. however, there is another, less positive side to the vampire image in modern russia. since putin ascended to the presidency in 2000, contemporary russian artists have weaponized the vampire mythos, harnessing it for their own purposes. in this regard the huge commercial success of timur bekmambetov’s blockbuster nochnoi dozor [night watch, 2004] proves enlightening exactly folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 42 because of its appropriation of the vampire legend to comment on post-soviet political and social life in russia. �e film is based on the science fiction thriller night watch, the first novel in sergei lukianenko’s popular six-part series [lukianenko 1998]. �e film begins in 1992—a year after the fall of the soviet union—before moving to 2004 moscow where a fragile truce exists between the forces of “dark” and “light.” while members of both groups are considered “others” because they have superhuman powers, they are differentiated in that the light ones protect people from the dark ones, who gain their power by feeding off humans. �e detente between the two factions dates back to the middle ages when, locked in battle, the forces realized that their powers were equally balanced; concluding that they would exterminate each other before one side could claim victory, the leader of the dark forces, zavulon, and the leader of the light forces, geser, broker a truce. moving into the current era, this truce is threatened by the appearance of an all-powerful “other,” a boy who is the estranged son of the film’s protagonist, anton gorodetskii. while anton is a member of the light forces, his son, egor, must decide whether to join the “dark” or “light”—a decision that will unsettle the balance between the two factions. �e film—which smashed box-office records and earned $16.3 million in russia—deals directly with the vampire legend as an allegory for the political forces governing russia [goscilo 2007: 223]. �e importance of night watch should not be underestimated. serving as a “reference point to interpret political events, post-socialist identities, and even post-communist philosophical questions” the film’s vampires, in stephen norris’ assessment, “served as more than entertaining characters; they also functioned as a mode of cultural discourse” [norris 2007]. on the one hand, the light forces, which geser leads under the auspices of his position at gorsvet (the moscow light company), occupy a position aligned with the state. not only are they government employees working within the city light company, geser’s office also harkens back to the soviet era with its “oak paneling...allud[ing] to the business style of the brezhnev period” [strukov 308]. in contrast to the legitimate authority of the light forces, members of the dark forces clearly represent the criminal echelon as they are decked out in adidas tracksuits, gold chains, and cruise around moscow driving sports cars— all telling attributes of the post-soviet mafia. viewed in this context, the truce between the “dark” and “light” signifies the balance not only between good and evil, but between the state and the criminal world—a truce that putin himself seems to mediate from the office of the president. in this regard, while the film does not directly reference putin, it finds the vampire motif particularly apt to describe the major forces fighting for dominance in post-soviet russia. similarly, the theme of political power takes a biopolitical turn in victor pelevin’s novel empire v [2006]. �e narrative describes the elite world of vampires and is told through the perspective of 19-year old roman (“rama”), who undergoes the transformation from human to vampire. in pelevin’s narrative, humans provide sustenance for vampires, not only through blood, but through bablos, “a concentrate of the vial energy of homo sapiens expended in their frantic pursuit of bliss” [khagi 2011: 453]. vampires, accordingly, developed the �e hunt for an eternal legacy: putin and the vampire legend in modern russia folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 43 techniques to rear humans to produce an unending fresh supply of food source. as one of his teachers explains, “it is we, rama, who bred people and reared them. for that reason, we must accept them as they are. no one else will ever feel compassion for them” [pelevin 2016: 75]. however, the vampires of empire v are at once crueler and more cynical than stoker’s count dracula. pelevin’s cadre of hyper-sophisticated vampires believe themselves to be compassionate in their exploitation of humanity. �e hunger for material goods that drives post-soviet society becomes the very life-force for pelevin’s vampires; in this regard, the text satirizes, in the assessment of sofya khagi [2011: 439], “russia’s grotesque infantile capitalism,” which pelevin sees as “a raw form of established commodified existence.” as rama’s teacher explains it, the job of the vampire is not to strike fear in the hearts of humans, but to be “an individual of high culture and exceptional refinement, significantly superior in intellectual and physical capacity to the great majority of humankind” [pelevin 2016: 32]. �e vampire accomplishes this through “glamour” and “discourse”—two simulacra of fashion and consumption pelevin employs to describe contemporary russian (and global) consumerism. �e novel criticizes, both directly and indirectly, corruption in russian politics. for one, rama mentions putin’s political party, united russia, while taking a cab ride: “i saw an image of two bears on the wall of a building with the sign ‘united russia’” [pelevin 2016:57]. �e poster prompts him to consider the etymology of the word medved’ [bear]. he reflects that early slavs avoided saying the name “bear” for fear they might inadvertently conjure up the animal; in its place they called the animal medved’, or one who eats honey. rama’s reflection— catalyzed by the insignia of putin’s political party—concludes with a different interpretation of “bear”: а что это за настоящее имя, спрашивал я себя, и тут же вспоминал слово “берлога” –место, где лежит… ну да, бер. почти так же, как говорят менее суеверные англичане и немцы – “bear”, “bär”. память мгновенно увязывала существительное с нужным глаголом: бер – тот, кто берёт… всё происходило так быстро, что в момент, когда истина ослепительно просверкивала сквозь эмблему победившей бюрократии, такси всё ещё приближалось к стене с медведями” [pelevin 2010: 63] [what’s with the actual name, i asked myself, and then remembered the word berloga (bear’s den) – the place where it lays...well right, ber. it’s almost the same as what the less superstitious brits and germans call “bear,” “bär.” i immediately linked the noun with the right verb: ber – one who takes (beret)...it all happened so quickly; the moment of my revelation shown through the emblem of victorious bureaucracy as the taxi kept nearing the wall with the bear on it.] (5) folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 44 pelevin’s wordplay is lost in the english translation, given that rama connects the russian verb brat’, to take, with russia’s largest political party, united russia. what he describes as the “victorious bureaucracy,” references corruption with the country’s major political party and the efforts to silence political dissent in putin’s russia. rama’s transformation from human to vampire gives him new insight into russia’s political and social elite. at a critical juncture in his transformation, rama must prove his worthiness by biting a member of the chaldeans, a secret society that worships (and serves) vampires. to pass the test, rama must reveal the deepest, darkest secret of the chaldean selected to represent the group. rama successfully outmaneuvers his adversary, the powerful businessman ivan grigorievich semniukov, and exposes, to the shock of all chaldeans, that their trusted broker is nothing more than a scam artist. “all he has are a couple of brassplate potemkin firms,” explains rama, and “the truth is that he lives off bribes like any official” [pelevin 2006: 250-1]. driven by greed, semniukov, “cannot keep himself on a level to match the kind of people he consorts with in davos and courchevel” [pelevin 2006: 251]. rama’s revelation shocks the chaldeans in attendance; given that he passes the test, rama is subsequently proven worthy to taste bablos. upon completion of his first degustation, his teacher gives rama a “commemorative badge for the ‘god of money’” with an engraving on the back that reads: “it is not i who must suck it, but all the others. -count dracula” [pelevin 2006: 332]. pelevin thus adopts stoker’s depiction of dracula, but reworks it for the russian context. stoker’s dracula threatens to revenge himself by making british women his vampire slaves: “your girls that you love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine—my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when i want to feed” [stoker 1996: 302]. pelevin, by way of comparison, normalizes the “vampiric nature of money in terms that sound unmistakably marxist” [etkind 2009: 646]. in sum, the vampire legend has proven to be one of the more flexible signifiers in soviet, post-soviet, and contemporary contexts. whether in relation to lenin’s undead body housed on red square, as an allegory for cultural sovereignty, or in reinterpretations of the dracula legend, the image of the vampire has offered russian artists and filmmakers a gateway to interpret the political and social changes taking place around them. digital vampirism in contemporary post-soviet cultural space, the literary text of dracula from the nineteenth century has now crossed the boundary into the digital realm as well. internet memes, which, for the purposes of this study also include digitally manipulated magazine covers and digital illustrations of vladimir putin as vampire that have gone viral through social media, represent the latest iteration of the dracula legend. (6) while some of these images and the accompanying stories and viral videos are clearly made for their shock value or sheer ridiculousness, such as the article and video, complete with an anonymous fan-altered vampire �e hunt for an eternal legacy: putin and the vampire legend in modern russia folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 45 photo on the conspiracy website disclosetv.com, under the heading “is putin a time traveler, or a vampire?” (figure 6), many others leverage the image of dracula in order to condemn the actions of the putin regime. figure 6. altered photo of vladimir putin from online story “is putin a time traveler, or a vampire?” what is particularly striking about this movement of putin vampire images is that it is actually transnational, for it provides slavic cultural stakeholders from all over the world, such as polish journalists and us citizens of ukrainian heritage in chicago, among many others, a way to fight back against putin’s regime. �at is, due to the enduring fame of stoker’s dracula, it offers a supremely recognizable narrative framework within which to criticize putin and his policies that people in many different countries, not just those who specifically read polish or live in chicago’s ukrainian village, can readily access and understand. �e concept of the internet meme here is vital, because it has the ability to democratize political engagement and protest. �at is, anyone with a wireless-capable device, such as a computer, a tablet, or a smartphone, and a basic set of photo editing tools, which are readily available for free on the internet, can create and disseminate their own vampire-putin. an even more user-friendly option is available at the russian meme-generating website “meme-arsenal.” �ere, visitors can use the ready-made template to create a personalized dracula-putin meme in the language of their choice (figure 7). folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 46 figure 7. a personalized dracula-putin meme from the russian memegenerating website meme-arsenal. �is image, with its emphasis on the pointed ears, tapered fingers, and hollowed-out eye sockets, clearly casts putin in the mold of the vampire from �e hunt for an eternal legacy: putin and the vampire legend in modern russia folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 47 f.w. murnau’s unauthorized adaptation of stoker’s dracula into the 1922 expressionist horror film nosferatu (figure 8). figure 8. still shot from f.w. murnau’s nosferatu (1922). image credit: wikipedia commons. news outlets with varying budgets and amounts of resources have made use of these technologies. perhaps even more importantly, any private citizen in possession of the aforementioned devices can access, consume and debate these images of putin as well. a representative example of this type of protest in journalism which went viral is the cover of the polish news magazine uwazam rze historia [uwazam rze history], from 21 march 2014 (figure 9). folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 48 figure 9. 2014 cover of the polish news magazine uwazam rze historia image credit: uwazam rze history. �e cover was published in order to censure the forced russian annexation of crimea earlier that month, as well as the war over this territory that is still raging in the donbas region of ukraine as a result. �e headline says “vladimir the terrible” in polish, but the illustration is clearly meant to evoke dracula, since it features two full-color fangs inserted into the mouth of putin, who is shown in black and white. moreover, the caption underneath putin emphasizes his immortal nature as a vampire, as it reads in the original polish, “with whom and with what russia has fought for a hundred years.” however, perhaps the most fertile image of putin, which countless internet users have co-opted for their own expressive �e hunt for an eternal legacy: putin and the vampire legend in modern russia folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 49 purposes, is the famous photo that time magazine used for the cover of their “person of the year” issue, when they honored the russian president with this award in 2007. �is image, which is constantly replenished with fresh interpretations in the world of online memes, is an ideal image for alteration. not only is it readily available from a plethora of digital sources, owing to the wide readership of time magazine itself, but also, the composition of the photo makes for an excellent canvas, since it boasts a close-up of putin’s face with a neutral expression and boasts a pale and even skin tone, with clearly delineated facial features. indeed, it was this very photo that the polish news magazine polska niepodległa [independent poland], available in both digital and print versions, altered and ran as the cover of their 28 july 2014 issue (figure 10). figure 10. cover of polish news magazine polska niepodległa. photo credit: independent poland from 2014. �is design protested the actions of kremlin-backed separatists in eastern ukraine, who are widely believed to have been responsible for launching the buk surface-to-air missile that shot malaysian airlines flight 17 out of the sky, killing folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 50 all 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board only a few days prior, on 17 july 2014. �e photo itself features the time cover shot of putin but edited so that bright scarlet blood now pools on putin’s lower lip and runs down his chin in a wide rivulet. moreover, above the photo appears the single-word caption “bloodymir” in bright red font, which is a sinister-sounding play on words combining putin’s first name, vladimir, with dracula’s most famous attribute, human blood. �us, the photo of putin as vampire is meant as a condemnation of his entire regime. however, it is not just journalists who have wielded the dracula paradigm against putin. private citizens, too, have co-opted stoker’s narrative in order to convince online audiences of the heinous and unnatural nature of the kremlin’s activities. a representative example of an extended dracula discourse is an article published in the ukrainian magazine chicago, a biweekly print and online journal, by guest contributor rev. myron panchuk, m.a. �e article, which was posted online and also shared through facebook and other types of social media, is a lengthy comparison of putin to dracula [panchuk 2015]. original illustrations by the artist oksana vaskiv-kukul that depict putin as a befanged vampire bat who is silhouetted against a scarlet moon and flies over red square at night, with dozens of bone-bright skulls stacked in place of bricks in the walls of the kremlin, complete the article (figure 11). �e hunt for an eternal legacy: putin and the vampire legend in modern russia folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 51 figure 11. illustration reproduced courtesy of the artist oksana vaskiv-kukul. in his text panchuk draws upon common knowledge of stoker’s tropes, such as the personal advantage that the vampire gains by sucking other creatures’ lifeblood and the inability of the vampire to cast a reflection in a mirror, in order to, quite literally, demonize putin as one who is “bloodthirsty, sinister, and lives outside the boundaries of ethics and morality” [panchuk 2015]. having established putin as the ultimate evil who has sucked the life out of non-russian ethnic groups in the former ussr, panchuk then lays the following crimes at putin’s bloody feet: “the genocide of the chechen people, the terrorist acts in moscow and beslan, the invasion of georgia, the unnatural deaths of 205 journalists, the annexation of crimea and the military invasion of donbas” [panchuk 2015]. panchuk concludes by invoking the familiar instruments, forever folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 52 popularized by stoker’s tale, that are known to fell vampires: holy water, crucifixes, garlic, and a stab wound to the heart. however, there is one key difference: while they may have worked in stoker’s narrative world—dracula famously dies by two simultaneous knife blades, one to the heart, the other, to the throat—according to panchuk, they will not succeed in our post-soviet era. instead, we must remain alert and observant, continuing to speak out against the personification of evil, in order to gather the information necessary to defeat a post-modern vampire in the digital age. vampire revenge: embracing the image both repulsive and seductive, the vampire has attracted russian writers, artists, and filmmakers because of its rich symbolic potential. whether in cinema, contemporary fiction, or online memes, the image of dracula has become a powerful force to comment on putin’s russia. �e different representational possibilities show how contemporary audiences, both in russia and abroad, have used the monster to express desires and fears related to putin’s political hegemony. �is flexibility of the vampire figure to signal different meanings aligns with jeffrey jerome cohen’s description of the monster as a “cultural body” that morphs depending on the given moment: “in vampire stories, the undead returns in slightly different clothing, each time to be read against contemporary social movements or a specific, determining event: la decadence and its new possibilities, homophobia and its hateful imperatives, the acceptance of new subjectivities unfixed by binary gender, a fin de siècle social activism paternalistic in its embrace” [cohen 1996: 5]. �e comparison of putin to a vampire has taken on a multiplicity of meanings that involve a complex reworking of stoker’s dracula rather than of native traditional narratives that stoker relied on, in part, to produce this iconic text. notes 1 for an explication of the vampire as metaphor for serbian nationalism in the post-yugoslavia context, see tomislav longinović’s vampire nation: violence as cultural imaginary (2011). 2 �e clip in which george h. bush discusses his successful first meeting with vladimir putin dates to june 16, 2001 [user-created clip 2018]. 3 predictions made by seers and saints on russian political triumphs likewise factored in the soviet period. st. matrona of moscow reportedly prophesized stalin’s victory in wwii. (see rouhier-willoughby, jeanmarie and tatiana filosofova. 2015. “back to the future: popular belief in russia today.” the changing world religion map, stanley brunn (ed.). new york: springer. 1531-1554. 4 it is worth mentioning that the origin of the surname “dracula” likely comes from vlad’s father (vlad dracul) who was initiated into the order of the dragon (societas draconistarum), a society founded in 1408 by sigismund of �e hunt for an eternal legacy: putin and the vampire legend in modern russia folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 53 luxemburg. other plausible theories for the epithet point to the latin term draco, which is etymologically connected to the romanian drac, meaning “devil”. historian matei cazacu also posits a third possibility that dracul could men “devil of a man” as in highly cunning and courageous. see cazacu and reinert [2017: xiv]. 5 we offer our own translation of this quotation because the segment is omitted from the 2006 english language version of pelevin’s novel. 6 �ough she does not discuss vampires or the dracula myth in particular, alison rowley has a fascinating chapter on the putin meme phenomenon in her recent book putin kitsch in america. see chapter 6, “putin at your fingertips: �e online presence of the russian president.” bibliography afanasev, aleksandr. 1973. russian fairy tales, transl. by norbert guterman. new york: random house. cain, jimmie e., jr. 2006. bram stoker and russophobia: evidence of the british fear of russia in dracula and the lady of the shroud. new york: mcfarland & company, inc. cassiday, julie and emily johnson. 2010. “putin, putiniana and the question of post-soviet cult of personality,” the slavonic and east european review 88(4): 681-707. cazacu, matei. 2017. dracula, transl. by nicole mordarski et. al., stephen w. reinert, ed. boston: brill. chalyan, daniel. 2019. “vladimir dracula: how soviet russia tried to create immortals,” cited by https://www.rbth.com/history/329910-soviet-russialenin-blood-vampires. 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(consulted 2 september 2019). worobec, christine. 2006. “death ritual among russian and ukrainian pagans: linkages between the living and the dead.” letters from heaven: popular religion in russia and ukraine. john-paul himka and andriy zayarnyuk, (eds.). toronto: university of toronto press. 13-45. yurchak, alexei. 2015. “bodies of lenin: �e hidden science of communist sovereignty.” representations 129: 116-157. reviews 102 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii reviews astapova, a., colăcel, o., pintilescu, c., and scheibner, t. (eds.). (2020). conspiracy theories in eastern europe: tropes and trends. abingdon; new york: routledge, 2020. bibliography. index. xv+294. $112 (cloth), $39.16 (paper), and $39.16 (ebook). isbn 9780367344771 (cloth). isbn 9781000214697 (paper). isbn 9780429326073 (ebook). in the current era of post-truth politics and almost universal erosion of trust in institutions, processes, and experts on a global scale, a collection of essays focusing on the historical and contemporary specifics of conspiratorial mythmaking and its consumption in eastern europe is unquestionably timely and relevant. one of the significant advantages of this volume is that it is one of the few contemporary systematic attempts to shift the topical focus away from the west while also providing an ambitious overview of the post-communist eastern european conspiratorial landscape. the volume's scope communicates this goal, consisting of thirteen chapters divided into four sections corresponding to sequential chronological order and national perspectives related to the main drivers of conspiratorial propagation and amalgamation. according to the editors, these drivers include the historical legacies of nationalism and national victimhood, communism, and postcommunism. the book also examines reactions to more contemporary global phenomena as scrutinized through the vantage points of national case studies, including ukraine, russia, bulgaria, north macedonia, romania and hungary, poland, slovakia, moldova, and former yugoslav republics. additional chapters examine stalinist conspiracy theories exported to france and italy. one of the most significant parts of the book is its introduction which contains the framework of analysis for the entire volume. the introduction identifies its primary task “to seek to understand the function that conspiracy theories fulfill in the societies and cultures, both right now and in the long term” (4), indicating a clear preference for a functionalist approach. in turn, this leads the editors “to the conclusion that most [conspiracy theories] focus on four thematic areas: 1) conspiracy theories and their relationship with dictatorships or authoritarian regimes in the region, including the recent authoritarian drift of some east european countries; 2) antisemitic conspiracy theories (this category overlaps with the first one, since the soviet union, but especially nazi germany and its satellite countries, heavily instrumentalized anti-jewish conspiracy theories); 3) conspiracy theories that are strongly entangled with national victimhood narratives, presenting the countries of the region as victims of great powers; 4) new trends or emerging conspiracy tropes in the region framed by the globalization process” (15). in addition to these four focus areas, the editors outline several avenues for investigation. the most interesting one is the modes of conspiratorial circulation during the cold war and post-cold war period and their integration into the global conspiratorial landscape. thus, some of the most interesting chapters deal reviews 103 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii with specific conspiratorial tropes that illustrate how conspiratorial tropes proliferate and circulate at national and international levels. the initial directions outlined in the introduction enable some contributors to tackle their respective case studies with sufficient scope, depth, detail, and adherence to the theoretical framework. however, overall, the volume suffers from a certain degree of heterogeneity. several contributions deviate from the promise of robust design that is elegantly outlined at the beginning of the book. having noted this lack of consistency, it is fair to note that some of the chapters are outstanding and deserve our attention, such as the ones authored by péter csunderlik and tamás scheibner dealing with the myth of judeo-bolshevik conspiracy in hungary, biljana gjoneska, kristijan fidanovski, and andré krouwel’s chapter focused on north macedonia’s eu-related conspiracy theories, and the contribution of m. r. x. dentith on warranted and unwarranted conspiracy theories and their epistemology in the east european context in the closing chapter of the book. regardless of my criticism of the volume's consistency, conspiracy theories in eastern europe: tropes and trends is an excellent example of a comprehensive overview of a fascinating, complex, and essential phenomenon in an understudied context. as a result, this book makes an original and meaningful contribution to the subject and is a good resource for researchers and students. kiril avramov the university of texas at austin austin, united states kiril.avramov@austin.utexas.edu folklorica 2016 folklorica 2018, vol. xxii iii editor’s note 2018 folklorica is dedicated to the study of folklore, past and present. �e discipline of folkloristics is often overlooked in many western phd programs focused on slavic, east european and eurasian culture. nevertheless, it is central to an understanding of culture and how people define themselves as members of social groups, be they family, town or nation. �e articles in this issue illustrate the persistence of folklore, even in a digital world. �ey highlight the centrality and productive nature of legendry in slavic folklore, a genre that has often been underrepresented in scholarship these regions. �e 2018 issue marks the 20th anniversary of our first publication, then titled seefa journal. �e past editors and i have been proud to offer a scholarly exchange among researchers abroad and in north america and to document the folklore of these peoples. in the spirit of this momentous anniversary, seefa marked the contribution of foundational scholars at our panels at this year’s conference of the association for slavic, east european and eurasian studies. adrienne harris organized a panel dedicated to the first president of this organization, james bailey, whose seminal contributions on russian epic have had significant impact here and in russia. we are also honoring robert rothstein’s body of work on slavic and jewish folk song in a second panel in san francisco. �ey have been supportive colleagues over years to many a junior scholar and have always been diligent advocates for this journal and for folkloristics. folklore, as we know, loves a triad. my own mentor, natalie kononenko, retired this year after decades in the field studying slavic and turkic folklore. she has worked tirelessly for the success of seefa since it was founded, serving as its president and journal editor as well. �is issue is dedicated to these excellent scholars, friends and colleagues. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby, editor editor's note folklorica 2017, vol. xxi iii editor’s note 2017 this year marks my fifth as editor of the journal. folklorica, like the field of folkloristics, has been faced with some significant challenges in that time. the journal was created with a view to providing a venue for scholars in our field researching slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore of all kinds. in particular, the organization hoped to bring more attention to the work of folklorists living and researching in these regions of the world who had few opportunities to publish in english. while the broader situation of publishing outlets abroad has not altered significantly, there is a push now for publication in journals listed in web of science and scopus. as a result, interest in publishing in our journal has waned. writing scholarship in one’s non-native language is always an uphill battle, as most of us know. to do so for a journal that does not “count” toward one’s publications in the current ranking system established by academies of sciences across those regions seems counterproductive to many. folklorica then stands at a crossroads. the editorial board is investigating the potential for listing the journal in scopus, but it is a challenge. in the shorter term, we are considering thematic issues as a means to target particular researchers. that would not only ensure more stable contributions for each issue, but also would make the articles more relevant to current conversations in the field and increase citation numbers, a key to inclusion in scopus. we are issuing a call for the first two thematic issues (for 2018 and 2019). 2018 will be dedicated to the topic of “teaching of folklore and teaching with folklore.” folklore courses are some of the biggest draws to our departments. yet many departments have no folklorists. this issue will address the challenges and successes of folklore classes, as well as provide guidance for those seeking to create classes by experts in the field. folklore also plays an important role in language, culture, or literature classroom, and papers addressing its role in those contexts would also be welcome. the deadline for submission to this issue will be october 31, 2018. the theme for 2019 will be “the branding of folklore.” since the 19th century, folklore has been used as tool to build national (or regional) identity. in the post-socialist context, this process has continued apace, but it is taking on a particular flavor connected with tourism as much as with preservation and revival of lost traditions. folklore has become a means to establish a “brand” for towns, regions, and cities. this issue will explore the pros and cons of these developments in the post-socialist space as well as among émigré communities from the slavic, east european and eurasian areas. i want to thank the reviewers who took such care with reviewing the submissions in this issue and to rick spencer for his hard work as editorial assistant for folklorica. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby, editor putting words in their mouths: russian byliny as discursive space putting words in their mouths: russian byliny as discursive space folklorica 2016, vol. xx 83 putting words in their mouths: russian byliny as discursive space kate christine moore koppy marymount university and the university of the district of columbia community college arlington, virginia, united states of america abstract this article follows the melnitsa animation studio into the imagined medieval space of their bogatyr films. with particular focus on melnitsa’s use of the il’ia muromets corpus in илья муромец и соловей разбойник [il’ia and the robber], we consider the complex set of conflicts among characters and ideas that reflect concepts of identity and social issues in contemporary russia. in moments of cultural unrest, adaptations of canonical stories serve as a discursive space for the community to redefine itself. in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, the byliny [western slavic heroic epics] have functioned as tools of cultural cohesion at critical moments of national self-redefinition. most recently, the студия анимационного кино мельница [melnitsa animation studio] (1) has adapted the byliny into animated films for children, in which stories of medieval princes, heroes, and villains become a discursive space for the exploration of social issues in the post-soviet russian federation. melnitsa’s 2007 film il’ia and the robber is the most recent example in a steady stream of adaptation and retelling of byliny from the time they were first printed to the present. along that timeline, there are three moments in which adaptations flourish, and each of these coincides with a crucial moment of redefinition of russian culture. the nineteenth century recording of these heroic epics, which adapts them from dynamic oral epics to written texts (2), was part of the wave of romantic nationalism that drove scholars across europe to gather folkloric material as the feudal city-states of the medieval period coalesced into more stable nations. the mid-twentieth century brought another folklorica 2016, vol. xx 84 surge of adaptation and reproduction as the soviet government used these heroes to depict good citizenship. the twenty-first century has been another time of redefinition for the russian nation as those born since the revolution learn what it means to be not-soviet and those born since perestroika grapple with what it means to be russian. this current grappling is evident in the social unrest that we see on the news: demonstrations about women’s rights, the crackdown on lgbtq rights, and uneasiness over putin’s expansion of presidential powers and national borders. as david gillespie notes, “the literary heritage remains one of the few bastions of certainty and national identity amid chaos and disruption” [gillespie 1999: 116]. in this environment of restless redefinition, the melnitsa animation studio’s adaptations of old stories have been successful at the box office, as television broadcasts, and in merchandising. this article puts particular focus on the changes melnitsa makes in their adaptation of the il’ia muromets (3) corpus to find that il’ia and the robber is a complex narrative featuring multi-layered conflicts among the characters. a significant part of the power of melnitsa’s corpus of films as a discursive space within twenty-first century russian culture is the status of the films as adaptations of bylina texts whose characters and basic plot are familiar to the audience. simply being adapted from another text means that the new text has depth provided by the audience’s prior knowledge, which may be activated by the title of the adaptation, the names of the characters, or visual symbols associated with the source. in homo narrans: the poetics and anthropology of oral literature, john niles observes that a community’s stories transmit current knowledge, celebrate core values, and create a ludic discursive space [niles 1999: 2-4]. these stories also reinforce communal bonds because they are shared by all members of the group. in a theory of adaptation, linda hutcheon argues that adaptation thus enriches the audience’s experience of a text by creating “dialogue with the past, for that is what adaptation means for audiences, creates the doubled pleasure of the palimpsest: more than one text is experienced and knowingly so” [hutcheon 2011: 116]. audience members who are aware of a text’s status as an adaptation engage in an act of collusion with the putting words in their mouths: russian byliny as discursive space folklorica 2016, vol. xx 85 text’s creator and with one another, and awareness of this collusion forms a community among them. these shared stories, however, do not remain static. hutcheon describes the way that shared stories become the building material for new narratives, which allude to, draw from, or rework the material presented by the core group, whether satirically or reverently [hutcheon 2011: 116]. in adaptation and appropriation, julie sanders further points out that “adaptations can also be oppositional, even subversive” [sanders 2006: 9]. sometimes, acts of subversion may be unconscious on the part of the author, and “frequently adaptations and appropriations are impacted upon by movements in, and reading produced by, the theoretical and intellectual arena as much as by their so-called sources” [sanders 2006: 13]. viewing il’ia and the robber and melnitsa’s other films with a scholarly consciousness of the dynamics of adaptation reveals their complexity. the bylina is the slavic world’s heroic epic in verse, and the earliest extant written copies of byliny date to the 19th century, when folklorists began collecting them at the margins of the russian empire--in the north and in the ural mountains where they were still being sung in the oral tradition. (4) like the world’s other heroic epics (la chanson de roland, beowulf, the iliad), byliny contribute to a sense of national identity by reporting the adventures of national heroes grounded in a geographical and historical reality. the content of the two major cycles of byliny places their origins in the cities of novgorod (5) and kiev, each of which was a nexus of geopolitical power in the kievan rus’ period, (roughly the late ninth to the early thirteenth century). during this time, kiev dominated the trade routes between the baltic in the north and byzantium in the south and between western europe and the east, and the city of kiev and its grand prince occupied the central position in a constellation of city-states ruled by princes from the same ruling family. (6) an analogy is often made between the period of the kievan rus’ and the western european middle ages, because of their approximate coincidence and also because of the feudal-like distribution of power within rus’ court society. (7) however, for the slavs this period does not stand between a dark ages and a renaissance as with western europe. rather, it is held up as a sort folklorica 2016, vol. xx 86 of golden age before the advent of the mongol yoke in the thirteenth century, a time when mother rus’ was both powerful and prosperous. the twenty-first century east slavic cultures of the russian federation, the republic of belarus, and ukraine each trace their heritage to this golden age. although, the byliny of the kievan cycle are firmly anchored in the rus’ period by their geographical setting and their social structures, they also transcend this time and place. for most of its history, the grand principality of kiev battled local tribes more than eastern invaders, [bailey and ivanova 1998: 26] and the kievan повесть временных лет [primary chronicle] [likhachev, et. al. 2012] spends pages enumerating the neighboring tribes and the borders of their land, while offering relatively little comment on the more distant mongols. often, however, the villains whom the bogatyri [slavic epic heroes] battle in the byliny represent stereotypes of mongol adversaries, who conquered the rus’ in the 1230’s and held sway over them until moscow gained independence under ivan iii, grand prince of all rus’, in 1480. (8) the byliny set in golden-age kiev but featuring the mongol adversaries of a later historical period are the tale singers doing what, today, might be called medievalism. they placed the adversaries of a later day into the discursive space of an imagined medieval past in which the epic heroes could defeat them. the kievan cycle bogatyri, il’ia muromets, alësha popovich, and dobrynia nikitich are long-standing icons of russian popular culture. each bogatyr has more than one bylina to his name, and these episodic poems circulate independently rather than being knit together into a composite story like the story of odysseus in homeric epic. among these heroes, il’ia muromets has been particularly popular for russian audiences. in their comprehensive anthology of russian folk epics, bailey and ivanova report that the adventure илья муромец и соловей разбойник [ilia and nightingale the robber] appears in 132 versions recorded from oral tellers. they further note that “il’ia muromets is the subject of more songs and has a more complete epic biography than any other bogatyr” [bailey and ivanova 1998: 25]. more recent adaptations condense the many episodic stories of the oral tradition into coherent putting words in their mouths: russian byliny as discursive space folklorica 2016, vol. xx 87 films, each of which makes use of plot sequences from multiple adventures. in addition to drawing on the bylina tradition, melnitsa’s project builds on the strong history of cinematic arts in the soviet union to participate in the international cinema industry of the twenty-first century. in his preface to russia on reels: the russian idea in post-soviet cinema, richard taylor notes that the predominance of cinema as a major twentieth century art form was: nowhere […] more apparent than in the former soviet union, where lenin’s remark that ‘of all the arts for us cinema is the most important’ became a cliché….in the age of mass politics soviet cinema developed from a fragile but effective tool to gain support among the overwhelmingly illiterate peasant masses in the civil war that followed the october 1917 revolution, through a welter of experimentation, into a mass weapon of propaganda through entertainment that shaped the public image of the soviet union. [taylor 1999: vii] this public image was also a domestic image, which function as in niles’s model to cohere a group identity, a communication within the social group that defined the new nation through a new corpus of cinematic stories. (9) where taylor’s model emphasizes a monolithic cinema culture, david macfaden examines a network of interconnected interests that influenced soviet publishing, including cinema: ideology enforced by censorship, the need for efficient use of limited resources, commitment to apolitical professionalism, and the concerns and interests of the public audience [macfaden 2005: xiii-xiv]. (10) in other words, the state-sponsored mass weapon of propaganda described by taylor also becomes a discursive space for creative pursuits within the constraints set out by censors. creators and consumers alike were able to communicate complex messages of support and subversion within these state-sanctioned texts. in the declining soviet union of the 1980s, david gillespie notes “under the new freedoms of glasnost’, directors were able to be bolder and show a gift for innovation in their films” [gillespie folklorica 2016, vol. xx 88 1999: 118]. one form this expression of innovation took was the chernukha [slavic film noir] genre. the films of this genre use stark representations of bleak reality to issue powerful calls to social discourse. (11) at the same time, some sectors of the russian audience rejected the chernukha, “films which offer no positive outlook or spiritual guidance amid the chaos, and [turned] instead to latin american soap operas screened daily on russian television” [beumers 1999: 1]. (12) although these soap operas were lighter and more hopeful than chernukhi, they were decidedly foreign, with unfamiliar settings and often poor audio dubbing. with the 2004 release of алеша поповичь и тугарин змей [alësha popovich and tugarin snake, or alosha], the creative team at the melnitsa animation studio reached into the familiar plots and characters of the russian literary canon to create lighthearted and hopeful films with familiar settings. their adaptations of russian heroic epics and fairy tales feature well-known characters working through contemporary problems in the safe space of the imagined medieval. each of the films in melnitsa’s filmography adapts the corpus of heroic epics to explore social and political issues facing the russian federation today—the power of money to corrupt, intergenerational interaction, definition of self with regard to the other(s), issues of gender, the power of the church, and the relationship between citizen and state. each of these ideas can be seen in all of the movies, but each film foregrounds a subset for closer exploration. alosha uses alësha’s status as the son of a priest as well as visual imagery of religious artifacts and acts of piety to connect the orthodox faith to a sense of the rus’ ethnos. an intergenerational group accompanies alësha on his quest to regain the city of rostov’s treasure from the tugars, a non-orthodox asiatic tribe that had stolen it. although the society depicted in this film privileges youth, the impetuous young hero and his bride are repeatedly saved by the wisdom of a scrawny old man and a woman bowed with age. meanwhile, dobrinya and the dragon focuses on the way money complicates the power dynamics related to gender and ethnicity within a complex network of obligations among the grand prince, his niece, a non-orthodox tribe, a merchant, and a boiarin [boyar]. (13) the four films which feature the three heroes putting words in their mouths: russian byliny as discursive space folklorica 2016, vol. xx 89 together emphasize the heroes’ effort toward equality among themselves. in три богатыря и шамаханская принцесса [how not to rescue a princess] the grand prince has left one of the boiare [boyars] in charge in his absence, and told him to work “с первым богатырем на руси” [with the first of the rus’ heroes]. initially, the three heroes argue, “кто первый? я!” [who is first? me!]. then they each look sheepish, and the narrator says, “нет первого среди равных.” [there is not a first among equals.] [glezin 2010: 15:3516:48]. although melnitsa’s films may be marketed for children who can certainly enjoy them at the surface level of a good story with engaging visuals, they also exist at a more complex level, which can be appreciated by those members of the audience who have previous experience with the bylina stories. (14) for the knowing audience, the pleasure of the palimpsest is augmented by the reassuring comfort of the familiar. in twenty-first century russia, for example, gillespie notes that: in a time of rapid change and the destruction of old values, the classical literary tradition offers almost ready-made screenplays and familiar material. furthermore, the literary heritage remains one of the few bastions of certainty and national identity amid chaos and disruption. both writers and film-makers look into their own culture and history for absolutes in a destabilized world. reinterpretations of literature, especially in the modern russian context, also make a statement about contemporary mores or the sociopolitical environment. [gillespie 1999: 116] gillespie’s evaluation of the mining of the literary tradition in contemporary russian cinema and literature exemplifies hutcheon’s general paradigm of adaptation. even, however, when adaptation is driven by the sort of nostalgic impulses gillespie describes, it modifies the source text to its own ends. when the adaptation somehow violates the audience’s expectations, by contradicting the source text or by moving the characters or plot in a different direction, the mismatch between expectation and folklorica 2016, vol. xx 90 experience engages the audience as they evaluate and criticize the changes. in the hands of talented artists, the adaptation has great power for social commentary in the space between expectation and adaptation. to create the 2007 il’ia and the robber, melnitsa adapts the bylina narratives of илья муромец и соловей разбойник [il’ia and nightingale the robber] and ссора ильи муромца с князем владимиром [the quarrel of il’ia muromets with prince vladimir]. in the byliny, il’ia muromets captures соловей [solovei] and is rewarded by великий князь владимир [grand prince vladimir] with commendations. much of the plot of this story is retained in the film: il’ia and solovei battle one another using strength and cunning, and il’ia emerges victorious. this conflict begins with solovei and a band of thugs attacking a village. il’ia muromets rides to the rescue, and is able to resist the extraordinary wind created by solovei's super-power whistle to capture him and turn him over to the authorities in kiev. ostensibly, solovei occupies the villain space of the narrative in that he breaks the law; preys on the innocent villagers, the grand prince, and the hero; and is vanquished at the end. this black-and-white conflict of the hero and villain story arc is the conflict in the surface level story where young or unsophisticated audiences appreciate the film for entertainment. these events, however, also serve to create discursive space within which the more nuanced conflict between takes place. underneath the hero-villain story arc, melnitsa weaves in the bylina story of il’ia’s quarrel with the grand prince, which undergoes greater changes from its sources. in the film, the despotic grand prince vladimir releases solovei, which becomes a point of contention between hero and prince. solovei is the enemy of both il’ia muromets and grand prince vladimir, and these two men chase the villain all the way to byzantium, but rather than uniting against this common enemy, the hero and the grand prince continue to argue with one another the whole way. once the action moves out of kiev, the social structures that constrained the hero and the grand prince disappear, and their interpersonal conflict becomes the main conflict of the narrative. the conflict between epic hero and grand prince is present in nearly every scene in the film, and this adaptation of the putting words in their mouths: russian byliny as discursive space folklorica 2016, vol. xx 91 il’ia muromets corpus becomes an almost allegorical exploration of the relationship between citizen and state. social conflict and arguments between hero and prince are not themselves new; however, the circumstances in melnitsa’s il’ia and the robber are a change from earlier iterations of the tradition. in the twenty-seven versions of the bylina the quarrel of il’ia muromets with prince vladimir, cataloged by bailey and ivanova, the arguments relate to honor and face. il’ia leaves the court because vladimir does “not seat the hero in an honored place at a feast” or gives him lesser gifts than those he gives to the boyars [bailey and ivanova 1998: 70]. in the 1956 soviet film the sword and the dragon,(15) the argument between prince and hero is orchestrated by the boyars who dislike il’ia for his peasant origins [21:50, 41:00, 44:00]. the tension present in each version contributes strongly to the overall tenor of the narrative, and the differences among them reflect the changes in the social contexts for which they were created. melnitsa’s 2007 adaptation implicates grand prince vladimir’s capricious despotism in the recurring tension between him and il’ia muromets. in contrast, the nineteenth-century version presents a stable hierarchy of bogatyr in service to the court of the grand prince, and the 1956 soviet film creates tension between hero and prince by adding several meddling boyars, members of a noble class out for their own advantage rather than working in service to leader and nation as the peasant (proletarian) il’ia does. thus, the cause of the conflict between grand prince and hero is a highly adaptable moment, which can be made to reflect the concerns of the storytellers and audience. in melnitsa’s adaptations of the kievan bylina cycle, grand prince vladimir is motivated by money and the power it brings to him. he is imperious and despotic; he issues orders rather than makes requests and responds angrily when his authority is challenged. two early scenes in il’ia and the robber work together to establish the relationship of the grand prince to his people in terms of money and of power. the first is a conversation with an unnamed scribe who suggests that there would be more money in the prince’s treasury for social welfare if there were less money for personal expenses. folklorica 2016, vol. xx 92 великий князь (вк): так…это на социальные нужды….это—на вооружение…. а вот это— на прочие расходы. [grand prince (gp): so….this is for social welfare….this is for the military….and this is for sundry expenses.] писарь (п): на прочие много идет... [scribe (s): that’s a lot for sundry expenses…] вк: это да… это верно… а что, ежели налоги повысит? скажем, пущай не десятину, а, этак, четвертину платят! что…что думаешь? [gp: well yes, that’s true…but what if we raise the taxes? let’s say, they’ll pay not a tenth, but a quarter! what…what do you think?] п: а, может, прочее сократить? [s: but, maybe, the sundry expenses could be reduced?] вк: но но! а ты, часом, не демократ?! [gp: what? you are not, perchance, a democrat?] п: чур меня! господь с тобою, князь! [04:30-05:15] [s: keep away from me! god be with you, prince!] (translation mine) this scene presents the exploitative relationship grand prince vladimir has with his people, and the visual ratio here is helpful: putting words in their mouths: russian byliny as discursive space folklorica 2016, vol. xx 93 image 1. the grand prince's treasury. [05:15, toropchin 2007] on the table, to the grand prince’s right is one bag of money for социальные нужды [social welfare], slightly to his left are two bags for вооружение [military], and in his arms an uncountable number for прочие расходы [sundry expenses]. because grand prince vladimir views the people as a source of revenue, he ponders raising the taxes from a tenth to a quarter in order to better supply funds for social welfare. although the prince asks what the scribe thinks, he is appalled at the scribe’s suggestion to reduce the sundry expenses, and accuses him of being a democrat. the scribe, realizing that he has overstepped his role, reacts with horror at the label, offering protective blessings to ward off the danger of the idea of democracy. here the word-democrat-as-insult is wielded in response to a challenge to the prince’s authority to allocate revenue. in the second scene that presents the relationship of grand prince vladimir to his people, the hero il’ia challenges the grand prince’s decision to release solovei whom il’ia had captured. first the grand prince tells il’ia that solovei’s release is state business and not his concern, but when il’ia continues to press him, grand prince vladimir loses his composure, exclaiming, “не суйся не в свое дело! я князь! чего хочу, то и ворочу!” [“don’t intrude in business that is not yours! i’m the prince! i can do whatever i want!”][06:20]. then, sputtering, he realizes what he has said and tries to redeem himself, replacing ворочу (undo) with “действую! в интересах державы!” [“i am acting! in the interests of the state!”] [06:24]. the prince seems to have some idea of the power folklorica 2016, vol. xx 94 and privileges proper for someone of his station, and he expects other people to uphold these norms; however, he does not have a corresponding awareness of the obligations and responsibilities of the ruler toward the people. the grand prince continues to expect to enjoy the privileges of his station as the narrative moves toward byzantium, il’ia, however, has other ideas, and the dynamics of power between the two men quickly begin to shift. first, il’ia refuses to take the entourage of soldiers and support staff grand prince vladimir has gathered, robbing him of the pomp to which he is accustomed [21:12]. il’ia further separates the grand prince from his own expectations by insisting that they send their horses back once they reach the edge of the forest [21:50]. finally, when they stop for the night, il’ia informs grand prince vladimir that they will take turns keeping watch. илья: до полуночи ты стоишь в дозоре! [il’ia: until midnight, you will stand watch!] вк: я?! [gp: i?!?] илья: ну да, ты! а что такого? потом я тебя сменю. здесь все равны, понял? де-мо-кра-ти-я! на-ка, держи! [il’ia: yes you! and so what? then i will spell you. everyone is equal here, got it? de-mo-cra-cy! here, take this!] вк: демократия ваша до смуты доведет! [gp: your democracy will lead to turmoil!] илья: княже! чтоб глаз не смыкал! [25:02-25:26] [il’ia: prince! not a wink!] (translation mine) this series of conversations exhibits several reversals in the expected dynamic of power between grand prince and epic hero. it is il’ia who makes the decisions about who will go on this journey, when they will stop for the night, and who will take the first watch. the visual imagery further supports the new dynamics of power. putting words in their mouths: russian byliny as discursive space folklorica 2016, vol. xx 95 image 2. il'ia sets the watch. [25:18, toropchin 2007] holding a spear as though he were the monarch bestowing a sword, il’ia gives the weapon to grand prince vladimir, tells him the first watch is his, and says, “democracy” slowly and deliberately, “demo-kra-ti-a,” thereby overtly staking his claim to a new dynamic of power. in this scene, the creative team at melnitsa visually highlights the differences between the two men. the grand prince’s face expresses shock at the conversation they are having, and the perspective in the frame above showcases the daintiness of grand prince vladimir’s hands in his white sleeves. in contrast to the hero, the grand prince is practically childlike. it is also il’ia who declares the terms of their relationship to include equal standing and democracy, although, rather than indicating equal partnership in decision making, the word “democracy” here seems to indicate the epic hero’s usurpation of power. where melnitsa’s grand prince vladimir cares more for money and power than for the welfare of his people, they present il’ia muromets as an epic hero, a protector who is intimately connected with the land and the people. this il’ia draws his superlative epic hero strength from the earth of his homeland, and his connection with the land is revealed in his attentiveness to his surroundings, his affinity with animals, and his beliefs in superstitions and omens. one of the more unusual features of il’ia’s nineteenth-century bylina corpus is a prose adventure, which relates how a young il’ia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 96 was struck lame by disease in childhood and spent his days sleeping on top of the oven (a normal place for an invalid in a russian peasant home) until at age thirty-three he was healed by traveling pilgrims, who predicted that he would become an important national hero. (16) melnitsa’s ilya and the robber, elides this sojourn on the oven, instead attributing the hero’s superlative strength to physical contact with his homeland, although the film also problematizes this assertion. when il’ia plans to pursue solovei to tsargrad [byzantium], his mother becomes concerned about his loss of physical contact with the rus’ homeland. il’ia shows no such concern and does not pause to accept the bag of earth she had prepared. although she sends it after him, with the chronicler алёнушка [alënushka] [15:45], a series of misunderstandings and comic moments prevent his receiving it. the hero performs epic feats several times before suffering a failure of his strength when grand prince vladimir points out his separation from his homeland. in that moment of revelation, il’ia is left sapped until he finds some earth clinging to a horseshoe tucked inside his tunic. on one hand, the presence of the horseshoe in his tunic means that il’ia never actually lost contact with his homeland, and his superlative strength should have stayed with him. if this is the case, however, the grand prince’s questioning of il’ia’s strength should not have affected him similarly, melnitsa presents il’ia as a devout adherent to superstitions (17) as guiding principles, but questions the validity of these superstitions with the words and actions of other characters. early scenes of the film present a series of portents: a black cat nearly crosses il’ia’s path [05:29], a fly lands in the milk [13:13], a bird in flight defecates on someone [17:08]. like his epic strength, il’ia’s beliefs separate him from most of the other characters in the film. il’ia’s mother and grand prince vladimir both mock his superstitions, and the prince orchestrates further bird blessings in an attempt to manipulate the hero. the only other character who shows respect for superstitions is a babushka in byzantium [48:10] who scolds solovei for whistling, noting, “не свисти! денег не будет. примета такая.” [“don’t whistle! you’ll lose all your money. there’s a superstition.”] [51:40], and solovei does indeed lose all the riches he had managed to acquire over the course of the film. putting words in their mouths: russian byliny as discursive space folklorica 2016, vol. xx 97 more subtly, and more sincerely, presented than his adherence to superstitions, il’ia’s sympathetic connection to animals is critical to his success. when they quarreled early in the film, the epic hero threw his sword onto the table in front of the grand prince, thereby severing the tie between hero and state, without thinking twice, but paused when vladimir demanded his horse as well. only solovei’s theft of this horse brought il’ia back to cooperation with kiev’s government [14:40]. while a strong friendship with his horse is not unusual for an epic hero, il’ia’s affinity for animals is more broad. as il’ia and grand prince vladimir moved through a forest, the hero is aware of his surroundings and listened to the background noise of the animals for information about what else was going on nearby [22:50]. in contrast, the grand prince was oblivious. later, while in byzantium, grand prince vladimir and il’ia both meet the same elephant but have very different interactions with him. while riding, the grand prince stabbed the elephant with a fork, making him bolt from the handler [52:28]. the elephant knew that he had broken the rules that constrain his life and was frightened when he finally came to a stop [53:50]. while grand prince vladimir continued to act imperiously, il’ia spoke softly and quietly, treating the elephant as a being worthy of respect [54:30]. whereas he had been obedient to the handler because he feared the whip, the elephant was helpful to il’ia because he appreciated the epic hero’s regard. this is not unexpected for an epic hero. indeed, as costlow and nelson note in their introduction to other animals: beyond human in russian culture and history, “a central part of russians’ narratives about national identity has involved professions of a distinctive relationship to the natural world,” a distinctive relationship that sets russians apart from neighboring ethnic groups [2010: 3]. il’ia’s connections with his horse and the animals he hears in the forest, which are part of his native land, are an extension of his connection with the land. his interaction with the elephant, an exotic creature whom he meets in a land where they are both foreigners, portrays the habit for respectful interaction with and regard for elements of the natural world in a positive light. grand prince vladimir and il’ia muromets are not alone on their journey from kiev to tsargrad in il’ia and the robber. with folklorica 2016, vol. xx 98 self-referential humor, melnitsa introduces the character of alënushka, a chronicler, into this bylina film. throughout ilya and the robber, alënushka copies down the events of both the herovillain conflict and the hero-grand prince conflict on her birch bark tablet, implying that the story being told is contemporary with the rus’ chronicles. her goal is a journalistic one: to get il’ia muromets’s story for the primary chronicle. it is clear, however, from the other characters’ reactions to alënushka that they have no idea how to understand her, and she has to explain her chronicle project and show her notebook to grand prince vladimir, il’ia’s mother, and il’ia himself as she meets each of them. as a chronicler, alënushka regards herself as a member of the press, an anachronism in a plot otherwise peopled by epic heroes and nobility, and she uses this status to claim a place in the grand prince's court. grand prince vladimir, however, is uninterested in a free press. he only allowed alënushka into the audience chamber after his boyar reminded him, “не пустишь, князь, а они опять гадость каку нацарапуют” [“if you don’t allow them (to come in), prince, they will again print some kind of bold lies.”] [07:27]. the grand prince nostalgically remembered a time when he would put writers such as these “в кандалы, темницы!” [“in chains, in the dungeon!”], “а теперь, вишь, народ правду желает знать!” [“and now, look, the people want to know the truth!”] [09:02]. it was not, however, only his own people’s thoughts he was concerned about, but also, “что скажут на западе?” [“what will they say in the west?”] [09:03]. with regard to these considerations, the grand prince tolerated alënushka’s presence in the audience chamber briefly, but once messengers brought him news of solovei’s theft of the treasury and il’ia’s horse, he realized that he was no longer in control of the story alënushka was recording. grand prince vladimir then had her hauled out of his audience chamber for asking too many questions, and her shouts of “свобода слова! свобода прессы!” [“freedom of the press! freedom of speech!”] [12:11] fell on deaf ears. once the grand prince, the hero, and the girl leave kiev, the differences in the ways they approach the world are cast in striking relief as they navigate the foreign space. both alënushka and grand putting words in their mouths: russian byliny as discursive space folklorica 2016, vol. xx 99 prince vladimir have difficulty navigating the dangers in the forest and in the city of tsargrad. (18) when she lags behind il’ia and grand prince vladimir in the forest, she is taken captive by solovei’s band of thugs, from whom il’ia frees her. in byzantium, alënushka’s naïve bravado does not protect her from being hoodwinked by a hustler who offers help [50:20], but then sells her to the emperor as a slave [56:10]. the imperious demeanor with which grand prince vladimir interacts with everyone he meets, including the elephant [54:25] and the emperor’s palace guards [59:35], results in his being tossed into prison [01:02:30]. in contrast to alënushka and grand prince vladimir, il’ia is able to navigate all three spaces; the familiar space of kiev, the wild space of the forest, and the foreign space of byzantium; equally well. il’ia’s kindness gains him a powerful new companion in the elephant [01:02:18], and he is able to rescue the grand prince, alënushka, and his horse from captivity at the hands of the byzantine emperor. in the twenty-first century, cinema is simultaneously a carrier of globalization and a battleground for resistance. hollywood exports american culture in its films, and other nations respond by exporting their own nationalist cultural products. [hutchings 2008: 4] in this battleground, adaptations create critical, dynamic space for inter-cultural dialogue as cultural products are replicated in foreignto-them environments. new things first retain their sense of foreignness, then adapt even as they influence, and may later be exported back [hutchings 2008: 6]. melnitsa’s “disneyfication” of the nineteenth-century byliny offers a prime example of this. as they simplify the casts of characters and add romantic story arcs, they make the byliny resemble disney’s animated features while also making them more able to compete with those imported tales. in most eighteenthand nineteenth-century versions of the byliny, the bogatyri, prince vladimir, and even the villain solovei each have wives and children whose participation in the plot varies from backdrop to minor character. the situation of these men as settled adult members of society means that the issues of achieving manhood and finding a romantic partner are null. in melnitsa’s films, however, this is not the case. solovei has a band of thugs folklorica 2016, vol. xx 100 rather than a family, and il’ia finds romance as part of his journey within the film, as does alësha in his film, and the grand prince’s love interest is the topic of the group adventure in how not to rescue a princess. in his review of the literature related to “the epos and the fairy tale in russian literary criticism,” alex alexander affirms the veracity of the model articulated by константин сергеевич аксаков [konstantin sergeevich aksakov] for differentiating epic from fairy tale. in the fairy tale, the magical element “is constantly present and almost all the heroes find support and help from the magical. in songs, on the other hand, although one cannot negate the presence of the supernatural element within, it is always on the side of the adversary.” [alexander 1973: 17] although il’ia’s superstitions and dobrynia’s three-headed meditating dragon approach the magical, melnitsa’s corpus of bogatyr films largely remains on the bylina side of aksakov’s model, preserving the seminal differentiation that while geography on byliny may be less than precise, in tales, “the narrator abandons the boundaries of time and space.” [380] however, the presentation of il’ia muromets as a younger man and the addition of romance and maturation plotlines in these films align them more closely with the genre of fairy tales than with the genre of epic. this alignment with fairy tales puts melnitsa more directly in competition with the commercial hegemon that is the disney animation studio. melnitsa’s corpus of animated bylina and fairy tale films offers a homegrown, nationalist alternative to the disney canon. in part the success of melnitsa’s films is nostalgic. parents and grandparents fondly remember enjoying these stories as children and are happy to be able to share newer versions of them with today’s children, and il’ia and the robber and the others can certainly be enjoyed on this level. if, however, we watch with a critical eye, we can see that the writers and artists at melnitsa have used these medieval settings and characters as a backdrop for telling stories about current social issues like the relationship between the state and the people and the role of women in society. in this 2007 adaptation of the story of il’ia muromets, melnitsa ties the epic hero firmly to the rus’ motherland and then associates putting words in their mouths: russian byliny as discursive space folklorica 2016, vol. xx 101 democratic ideals with him, forming a chain of associations that connects democracy to russianness. the characters the audience is invited to like, il’ia and alënushka, become the bridges that connect modern ideas to the golden age which contemporary russian culture claims as its historical predecessor. by depicting il’ia’s positive interactions and his successful accomplishment of the goal to rescue his horse in contrast with the frustrated struggle that grand prince vladimir experiences and the naïve vulnerability of alënushka, the film ultimately posits that il’ia’s model of interaction with the world is the most successful. at the same time, however, the concept of democracy itself is problematized. il’ia does not invite the grand prince and alënushka to be part of his decision making process. rather, he takes control and insists on his being in charge, creating his own benevolent dictatorship and calling it democracy. later films in melnitsa’s filmography put the three epic heroes (il’ia muromets, alësha popovich, and dobrynia nikitich) on adventures together, again emphasizing democracy as the three men remind each other of their equality and make decisions together. they remain, however, self-appointed leaders of the people, or superhuman hero-leaders, not leaders by virtue of democratic choice among all the members of the populace. this presentation creates the implication that the ideals of democracy, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press can be as inherently russian as love of the motherland and reverence for folk wisdom, but it also includes the need for protection of these ideas with the strength of an epic hero. in il’ia and the robber, melnitsa masterfully blends entertaining comedy with deeper questions about cultural values. as they continue to produce animated bogatyr and fairy tale films, scholars would do well to pay attention to the changes they make in the process of adaptation as a bellwether of socio-cultural trends and identity politics in russia today. notes 1 while a faithful transliteration of the russian word мельница [windmill] in the system i am using would be mel’nitsa, i have chosen to follow the animation studio’s own transliteration of folklorica 2016, vol. xx 102 their name. 2 recording, adaptation, and scholarly interaction have influenced both the presentation and the interpretation of this genre. nineteenth-century scholars regarded the byliny as a natural class distinct from other types of oral texts, but singers and their audiences may not have agreed. indeed, the label ‘bylina’ was introduced by the scholar иван петрович сахаров [ivan petrovich sakharov] in the 1830s [bailey and ivanova 1998: xx]. performers, however, called these starinki or stariny [old songs] and grouped them together with other forms of song, like mythological epics, religious verses, and historical songs [bailey and ivanova 1998: xxvi]. once recorded, the byliny existed in both oral and literary forms, which were mutually influential as a story was recorded and published, then read and retold, then possibly recorded and published again in a slightly altered form until the mid-twentieth century. for the broader context of oral heroic epics, see lord, albert bates the singer of tales. 3 generally, i have followed the paradigm for transliterating russian cyrillic into the latin alphabet mandated by this journal. in the case of quoted text from other scholars, i have silently amended their transliterations to harmonize the presentation of names throughout this chapter. where personal names and titles, such as tsar, already have standard spellings in english, i have followed them. 4 most notably, кирша данилов (fl. 1750) [kirsha danilov], пётр васильевич киреевский (1808-1856) [pëtr vasil’evich kireevskii], павел николаевич рыбников (1831-1885) [pavel nikolaevich rybnikov], and александр фёдорович гильфердинг (1831-1872) [aleksandr fëdorovich gil’ferding]. 5 novgorod the great, a member city of the hanseatic league, dominated river trade between the baltic sea and the caspian sea, while also sending out colonial projects reaching as far as western siberia. this northern power operated with an oligarchy and a citizen assembly. for a general overview of russian history, see nicholas valentine riasanovsky and mark d. steinberg, a history of russia, 6th edition, and for medieval russia, janet martin, medieval russia 980-1584, 2nd ed. and simon franklin and jonathan putting words in their mouths: russian byliny as discursive space folklorica 2016, vol. xx 103 shepherd, the emergence of rus 750-1200. about novgorod’s history, henrik birnbaum, lord novgorod the great: the historical background, vol. 2; charles halperin, “novgorod and the ‘novgorodian land’,” cahiers du monde russe. about the veche and the means of its power see jonas granberg, “veche in the chronicles of medieval rus: a study of functions and terminology.” on the hanseatic league, see donald j. harreld, a companion to the hanseatic league and janet martin, “novgorod: the squirrel fur trade,” treasures of the land of darkness: the fur trade and its significance for medieval russia, 61-85. 6 on kiev’s connection to byzantium, see simon franklin, byzantium-rus-russia: studies in the translation of christian culture. on kiev as a part of europe, see christian raffensperger, reimagining europe: kievan rus’ in the medieval world. on the structure of the principality, see nancy shields kollmann, “collateral succession in kievan rus’,” harvard ukrainian studies. 7 the princes of rus’ city states in the kievan period built households of druzhina, [military retinue] and boiare [members of the court] to control resources and trade. according to bailey and ivanova, among the city states there was “complex system of collateral succession by seniority within generations, the senior member of the princely family became the grand prince in the city of kiev, while other members received ruling positions in other cities” [1998: xviii]. 8 for a more nuanced discussion of this transformation of adversaries, see bailey and ivanova, anthology, xvii-xx. 9 for more on the establishment and consolidation of soviet cinema, see the other selections in russia on reels and stephen hutchings, “introduction,” in russia and its other(s) on film: screening intercultural dialogue, 1-22. for more on national identity, see “nicholas ii and the collapse of the romanov state” in zhand shakibi, revolutions and the collapse of the monarchy: human agency and the making of revolution in france, russia and iran. on the role of folklore in the early soviet union, see felix j. oinas, “folklore activities and scholarship in russia,” essays on russian folklore and mythology. for an extended discussion of the folklorica 2016, vol. xx 104 notion of folklore in a classless society, as the soviet union claimed to be, see felix oinas, “the problem of the notion of soviet folklore,” essays on russian folklore and mythology, 161-79.on the role of fairy tale films, see marina balina and birgit beumers, “to catch up and overtake disney?: soviet and post-soviet fairy tale films,” fairy tale films beyond disney. 10 sergei mikhailovich eisenstein’s 1925 film броненосец потемкин [battleship potemkin] inspires with references to key historical events and figures, while those like yakov aleksandrovich protazanov’s 1925 закройщик из торжка [the tailor from torzhok] celebrate the experiences of the soviet citizen. through the 1930’s both the pattern of looking to historical events and figures for inspiration and the celebration of the experiences of everyday citizens persist. eisenstein’s 1938 александр невский [alexander nevsky] reminds soviet citizens of russia’s historic success against western european aggression at a time of increased tension with nazi germany. meanwhile, stalinist musical comedies like the 1938 волга волга [volga-volga] continue to bring images of an idealized soviet everday life to the screen. 11 seth graham, “chernukha and russian film,” studies in slavic cultures offers an overview of development of the chernukha genre, and its long dominance artistic-cinematic conversation from the mid-1980’s to the late 1990’s. even as some directors begin to create more hopeful films, the visual program of the chernukha genre and the habits of depiction continue to dominate these films. 12 see also graham’s discussion of the chernukha as an artistic inversion of melodrama, both of which express themeselves through excess [graham 2000: 11]. 13 melnitsa’s corpus of bogatyr films is open to criticism regarding the representations of others. in alosha, the adversaries are overtly identified as being both тугары [tugars] [03:35] and басурмане [basurmane, foreigners or people of another faith ][05:00]. the tugars are a fictional people invented as a stand-in for the historical tatars. they first make their appearance in the liveaction film, илья муромец [il’ia muromets, the sword and the dragon] from 1956. in dobrynia and the dragon, the adversaries conform to stereotypes of otherness (facial features, skin tone, putting words in their mouths: russian byliny as discursive space folklorica 2016, vol. xx 105 yurts, demands for tribute) and are overtly identified as part of the crimean khanate [03:57]. further, they are depicted as lacking both cunning and prowess. in addition, rus’ space is presented as more lush than non-russian space as we watch dobrynia ride out along the border, which is green on the rus’ side and brown on the other side [02:06]. 14 for more on collusion with a knowing audience, see linda hutcheon, “knowing and unknowing audiences,” a theory of adaptation, 120-27. see also brian mcfarlane, novel to film: an introduction to the theory of adaptation. for an alternate view, see olga lyanda-geller’s “masha and bear(s): a russian palimpsest.” 15 to avoid ambiguity, the english title of this film will be used. however, it should be noted that the dubbed (and recut) english language release of this film titled the sword and the dragon takes broad liberties with translation. 16 the bogatyr il’ia muromets, however, is not the only figure in russian popular culture to have a story like this. he is sometimes associated with the russian orthodox saint илия печерский [il’ia pechorskii], who died in 1188 and was beatified in 1643, and whose relics reside at the киево-печерская лавра [kievo-pecherskaia lavra, the kiev monestary of the caves]. for evidence of popular association of epic hero and saint, see “ilya muromets” at wikipedia.org and john sanidopoulos’s post “saint elias (ilya) muromets of the kiev near caves” at mystagogy. bailey and ivanova do not support this identification [anthology, 25]. емеля дурачок [emelia durachok, the fool], hero of the eponymous russian fairytale, also sleeps on top of the stove, although he is motivated by sloth rather than illness, and his story is one of a cluster of “lazy boy” tales (atu 675). for more on this point, see bailey and ivanova, anthology, 26 and oinas, “russian byliny,” essays on russian folklore, 9-31. on sloth in lazy boy tales, see bottigheimer’s article “luckless, witless, and filthy-footed: a sociocultural study and publishing history analysis of ‘the lazy boy.’” more broadly, there is a similar phenomenon represented in the norse lygisögur, namely a “kolbítr, literally ‘coal-biter,’ or male-cinderella figure, who appears to be lazy or slow-witted, but eventually proves himself” [matthew driscoll 2005: 200]. the folklorica 2016, vol. xx 106 grettir of grettir’s saga is a slothful and contrary example of the lazy boy. his inactivity is largely motivated by a desire to thwart his father’s directives, and when he can no longer manage to avoid work, grettir works transgressively: killing the geese and goslings in his charge and scratching his father’s back with a wool comb [chapter 14]. the kolbitr tend to be represented as having chosen their sloth and laziness. for more on the prevalence of kolbítrs in icelandic sagas see inger m. boberg’s motif index of early icelandic literature. 17 the russian word that the characters within the film use to label these beliefs is примета, which generally translates as omens or portents. however, belief in the bad luck of black cats and the good luck of bird feces would generally be referred to as superstitions in english, which in russian would be суеверия. because the attitudes of the characters in the film toward the приметы resembles the attitudes i would describe in american english as superstitious or not superstitious, i have chosen to use that word to discuss the beliefs here. 18 costlow, and nelson, eds., “introduction”: “russian culture has been and remains an imperial project where ‘russianness’ is infused with and relies on complex patterns of domination, interaction, and codependence with a myriad of non-russians” [3]. in this film, kiev exists in opposition to both the east and the west. grand prince vladimir would like to dominate the east with the capture of solovei (and demanding of tribute in the dobrynia film) while also moving closer to equality with byzantium. the emperor, however, regards the grand prince as unworthy of attention. bibliography aleksandrov, grigori, dir. 1938. александров, григорий. волга голга [volga volga]. perf. igor ilyinski, vladimir volodin, pavel olenov. moscow: mosfilm. alexander, alex e. 1973. bylina and fairy tale: 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fëdorovich gilferding in the summer of 1871]. санктпетербург: тип. императорской академии наук. gillespie, david. 1999. “new versions of old classics: recent cinematic interpretations of russian literature,” in russia on reels: the russian idea in post-soviet cinema. birgit beumers, ed. new york: i. b. tauris, 114-24. glezin, sergei, dir. 2010. глезин, сергей. три богатыря и шамаханская принцесса [three bogatyr and princess shamakhanskaya or “how not to rescue a princess”]. perf. valeriy solovyov, anna geller, oleg kulikhovich. st. petersburg: melnitsa animation studio. graham, seth. 2000. “chernukha and russian film,” studies in slavic cultures 1: 9-27. granberg, jonas. 2004. “veche in the chronicles of medieval rus: a study of functions and terminology.” diss. university of gothenburg. halperin, charles. 1999. “novgorod and the ‘novgorodian land’,” cahiers du monde russe 40: 345-63. harreld, donald j. 2015. a companion to the hanseatic league. leiden: brill. hutcheon, linda. 2013. a 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“primary chronicle”]. saint petersburg: vita nova. lord, albert bates. 2000. the singer of tales. stephen arthur mitchell and gregory nagy, eds. cambridge: harvard university press. lyanda-geller, olga. 2015. “masha and bear(s): a russian palimpsest,” folklorica 19: 75-99. macfaden, david. 2005. yellow crocodiles and blue oranges: russian animated film since world war ii. montreal: mcgill university press. maksimov, ilya, dir. 2006. максимов, илья. добрыня никитич и змей горыныч [dobrinya and the dragon]. perf. mikhail chernyak, natalya danilova, ekaterina gorokhovskaya. st. petersburg: melnitsa animation studio. martin, janet. 2004. treasures of the land of darkness: the fur trade and its significance for medieval russia. cambridge: cambridge university press, 61-85. martin, janet. 2007. medieval russia 980-1584, 2nd ed. cambridge: cambridge university press. mcfarlane, brian. 1996. novel to film: an introduction to the theory of adaptation. oxford: oxford university press. niles, john d. 1999. homo narrans: the poetics and anthropology folklorica 2016, vol. xx 110 of oral literature. philadelphia: the university of pennsylvania press. oinas, felix j. 1985. essays on russian folklore and mythology. columbus, oh: slavica publishers. protazanov, yakov, dir. 1925. протазанов, яков. закройщик из торжка [the tailor from torzhok]. perf. igor ilyinsky. moscow: mezhrabpom-russ. ptushko, aleksandr, dir.1956. птушко, александр. илья муромец [ilya muromets; or, the sword and the dragon]. perf. boris andreyev, shukur burkhanov, andrei abrikosov. moscow: mosfilm. raffensperger, christian. 2012. reimagining europe: kievan rus’ in the medieval world. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. riasanovsky, nicholas valentine and mark d. steinberg. 2010. a history of russia, 6th edition. oxford: oxford university press. rybnikov, pavel nikolaevich. 1861-1867. рыбников, павел николаевич. пѣсни собранныя п. н. рыбниковым [songs collected by p. n. rybnikov]. москва: типогрпфія а. семена. sanders, julie. adaptation and appropriation. london: routledge, 2006. sanidopoulos, john. 2010. “saint elias (ilya) muromets of the kiev near caves.” mystagogy resource center: an internation orthodox christian ministry. cited by http://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2010/12/saint-elias-ilyamuromets-of-kiev-near.html (consulted october 2015). schmidt, darina, dir. 2007. шмидт, дарина. маленькая василиса [little vasilisa]. perf. kira zamorina, konstantin bronzit, oleg kulikovich. st. petersburg: melnitsa animation studio. shakibi, zhand. 2007. revolutions and the collapse of the monarchy: human agency and the making of revolution in france, russia and iran. london: i. b. tauris. taylor, richard. 1999. “preface,” in russia on reels: the russian idea in post-soviet cinema. birgit beumers, ed. new york: i. b. tauris, vii. toropchin, vladimir, dir. 2007. торопчин, владимир. илья putting words in their mouths: russian byliny as discursive space folklorica 2016, vol. xx 111 муромец и соловей разбойник [il’ia and nightingale the robber]. perf. valeri solovyev, sergey makovetskiy, and oleg tabakov. st. petersburg: melnitsa animation studio. toropchin, vladimir, dir. 2011. торопчин, владимир. иван царевич и серый волк [ivan tsarevich and the grey wolf]. perf. liya alhedzhakova, kristina asmus, mikhail boyarskiy. st. petersburg: melnitsa animation studio. microsoft word folklorica_2011g.doc ukrainian folk beliefs about death and the afterlife folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 65 traditional ukrainian folk beliefs about death and the afterlife (1) svitlana kukharenko modern languages and cultural studies university of alberta edmonton, ab, canada abstract in contemporary ukraine, there exist various memorials that mark places of tragic death. these can be found on any road in large numbers. they can also be found elsewhere, including in city centers. to understand this phenomenon it is necessary to examine ukrainian attitudes towards death. the most complete descriptions of folk beliefs about death date from the late 19th century. in ukrainian culture death was viewed as a natural and integral part of human life and the dead could communicate with the living and vice versa. there were considered to be two types of death. “good death” was something to strive for and, in a way, welcome and the preparation of the body and its burial followed prescribed rituals. a “bad death” was that of a suicide, a murder victim, or a person killed in an accident. such people were not given the normal funerary rites and they were usually buried by road sides, not in the cemetery. their souls were believed to wander the earth and could harm the living. in most cases the site of a “bad death” would be memorialized and this tradition is preserved in present day ukraine. there are also cases of ambiguous death, such as the death of small children or women who die in childbirth. this article surveys traditional death beliefs and practices to provide information useful in understanding ukrainian culture. a monument to a young man, a law student at kyiv state university who died at the young age of twenty-one, stands outside the window of a fancy electronics store in kyiv. the monument has been there a long time: the date of death is 1996. yet no one considers removing this memorial, even though it provides somewhat of a physical impediment to people entering the store. the young man was murdered on the steps of the store and the very visible reminder to that tragedy which the monument provides might well discourage customers from patronizing the establishment. yet when this author asked the store’s manager about the possibility of removing the memorial, he seemed puzzled. how could one contemplate such a thing? the monument was there when he became 66 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi manager and the idea of moving to improve business had never occurred to him. ukrainians have an understanding of death that differs from that found in north america. to comprehend ukrainian culture, whether for economic purposes or for any other reason, it is necessary to examine beliefs about death and the afterlife. death and its manifestations death is not a mere biological fact. it is also a complex of beliefs and activities immanent to a certain culture. furthermore, studying “normal” or natural death and funerary practices related to it without considering abnormal, “bad” (i.e., tragic and unexpected), death and beliefs surrounding such death would be superficial. death provides a context for the expression of cultural values: how people react to death, especially unanticipated death, reveals much about how they view life. in contemporary ukraine, there exist various memorials that mark places of tragic death and can be found on any road in huge numbers. memorials also appear in towns and cities; the monument described at the beginning of this paper is typical rather than unique. in short, memorials mark any and all locations where a person died unexpectedly. what is expressed through these memorials are traditional beliefs about “bad” death, its danger for those who met an untimely end, and for the living. in this article i present a range of traditional beliefs surrounding both types of death that are important to many ukrainians to this day. death was not a taboo topic in ukrainian culture; on the contrary, it was viewed as a natural and integral part of human life. a riddle: од бога менше, а од царя старше [(whose authority is) lower than god’s but higher than the tsar’s?], implied “death” as an answer [manzhura 1890: 174] and pointed to the “democratic” nature of death in people’s eyes: it did not differentiate between the poor and rich, the noble and the peasant. numerous proverbs and sayings about death presented it as a natural event that one had to prepare for: “смерть – неминущая дорога [death is an inescapable path] [nomys 1985[1864]: 158]; “крути-не верти, а не втечеш від смерті [either this way or that, you cannot escape death]” [bin’kovskii 1896: 236]; “думки за горами, а смерть за плечами [one’s] thoughts are over the mountains, and [one’s] death is behind [one’s] shoulders]” [hnatiuk 1912: xxxviii]. nevertheless, there were numerous euphemisms to avoid mention of death and funerals: “не захотів більше хліба їсти [(the person) did not want to eat bread any longer (i.e., the person died)]” [bin’kovskii 1896: ukrainian folk beliefs about death and the afterlife folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 67 238]; “пішов у далеку путь [(the person) has set off on a long journey (i.e., the person died)]” [kotliarevskii 1891: 219]; “посадити калину [to plant a viburnum tree (for someone) (i.e., to bury that person)] [ibid.: 250]; з’їхав з села [he has moved out of the village]” [nomys 1985[1864]: 265]. according to traditional ukrainian folk beliefs, life did not end at death, but continued, with death being just another form of existence. death was often perceived as a long sleep, so people compared one to the other. “[the person] sleeps like the dead” meant that a person slept so soundly, nothing could awake her/him. “[the person] has fallen into an eternal sleep” meant a person had died. generally, images of death and the afterlife were indirectly presented in lore as proverbs, sayings, omens, personal narratives, legends, and even children’s games in which death was a central element or character and in which the folk understanding of a soul and its destiny was expressed. it appears from ethnographic descriptions of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that an animistic concept of death prevailed in ukrainian beliefs. people imagined death to be an anthropomorphic being. they often described it as an ugly, crooked old woman in white or black baggy clothes [manzhura 1890: 63; hnatiuk 1904: 114-115] or a human skeleton with a scythe visiting a house where a death was about to occur [afanas’ev 1868: 336, 361; generozov 1883: 17], standing by the deathbed and visible only to the person about to die [liatskii 1892: 40]. death as an animated being was not believed to take people’s lives randomly, by her own choice; instead, she was to go first to god for instructions [ibid.: 41]. death was thought to be able to speak, so it was possible to negotiate with her. although it was possible to dupe her and allow life to continue for at least several additional years, as in the legend about death and the soldier [manzhura 1890: 61-63], death could not be bribed if a human’s appointed time to die had come. death, however, was also associated with dolia, or a person’s destiny. some legends portrayed death not as a taker of life, but as a helper in life, a being who could become a sworn sister and assist in daily living [i[vanov] 1894: 154] or even help a human become wealthy [grinchenko 1897: 89-91]. death was frequently seen as an unclean spirit, sometimes equated with the devil. people would say, “прийде чорт по його душу [a devil will come to take his soul]” [liatskii 1892: 41]. death was imagined as living in the underworld, more specifically in hell, and her presence near a dying person was felt as extreme cold [afanas’ev 1868: 336]. as an 68 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi agent of the underworld, death was thought to manifest herself through birds associated with evil – usually black or nocturnal ones with unpleasant calls, such as ravens, crows, owls, and magpies that would circle above the house of a dying or newly dead sinner [ibid.: 355]. ukrainian culture surrounded human death with a complex of beliefs and omens – special warnings foretelling upcoming death, both one’s own and someone else’s. it was important to alert a person in time to let her/him prepare for death and it was customary to prepare for one’s own death, not only in a spiritual sense but also in a physical way. for many, death was a comforting, long-awaited event, since they expected to reunite with deceased relatives immediately after death. therefore, knowing the right time was important. people would pay special attention to the warning signs, such as a knock on the window at night or birdcalls [hnatiuk 1904: 115-16], a dog howling with its face down [afanas’ev 1868: 356], a chicken crowing like a rooster [chubinskii 1877: 698], an icon falling off the wall or a mirror breaking [miloradovich 1897: 7]. even the birth of twins or triplets, because of their relative rarity, was thought to foretell the death of one of the parents, depending on the sex of the newborns [manzhura 1890: 154]. certain dreams were believed to predict death. dreams were considered omens if they involved taking something from dead relatives [liatskii 1892: 39], walking in a cemetery, or seeing a church procession [miloradovich 1897: 7]. so, too, were dreams of bees, a monk, a loaf of bread, smoke, teeth falling out, blood [manzhura 1890: 161], drowning in muddy water, a falling ceiling in one’s home, an oven falling apart [bin’kovskii 1896: 230], and so forth. beliefs about different types of death the death of a fellow villager was an event of significance which could affect the welfare of the entire community. therefore, it was paramount to properly interpret not only the predictions of death, but also the type of death, and, accordingly, follow the rules of burial that would protect the rest of the villagers from possible danger. people distinguished between two types of death: a good one and a bad, sudden, or unnatural one. good death was an ideal to strive for: “only that death can be called ‘human-’/ ‘christian-’ like when a man peacefully died in his bed, while having prepared himself through confession and communion beforehand, and having said goodbye to all his relatives” [bin’kovskii 1896: 236]. in addition, “the death must be ‘one’s own’ ukrainian folk beliefs about death and the afterlife folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 69 (i.e., natural, easy, not violent); it must happen at ‘one’s own’ time (i.e., at an appropriate age), in ‘one’s own’ place and among ‘one’s’ relatives. furthermore, all the customs accepted in ‘one’s own’ society should be observed during the burial” [vinogradova 1999: 46]. “bad death” meant the opposite and included both liuta (furious, i.e. violent or prolonged, agonizing death) and nahla (sudden, unnatural death). prolonged and agonizing death was a sign that the person was associated with evil powers and, therefore, a grave sinner and certainly a witch, wizard, or vampire. sudden, unnatural death included a wide range of events, such as death from a lightning strike, drowning, falling from a tree, suicide [fischer 1921: 354], difficult childbirth [ibid.: 364], contagious disease, freezing along a road, and drunkenness [bin’kovskii 1902: 158; zelenin 1995[1916]: 39-40]. folk beliefs, however, were inconsistent and controversial. for example, lightning and thunder were believed caused by saints elijah and gabriel as they hunted demons. if someone was struck by lightning or affected by thunder, two explanations were typically offered: (1) the person was associated with unclean forces and doomed to hell [hnatiuk 1904: 3], or (2) the individual was an accidental victim, for a demon tried to hide inside him. therefore, he died like a martyr and his soul would ascend to heaven [kotliarevskii 1891: 248-49; miloradovich 1897: 171]. babies who were stillborn, murdered by their mothers, or unbaptized at death also belonged in the “bad death” category, as did people of any age who had been doomed to hell by a parental or religious curse [miloradovich 1897: 171]. their passing was believed the result of punishment by god and interference from evil spirits. good dead were buried after a regular church service and assumed to hold a neutral or positive attitude toward the living. their souls left for some distant place, supposedly the land of ancestors or heaven. they never disturbed the living; on the contrary, they guarded and helped their living relatives. good death did not preclude contact with the living. such contact could occur in dreams or by invitation from the living, but only during special occasions. such visits were welcomed and viewed as prophetic. contrary to the good dead, those who died an unnatural death were assumed to be angry or envious. such dead became unquiet or unclean revenants who lived close to the living and could harm them. one of their characteristics was the inability of their souls to proceed to the next world because death occurred before the appointed term allotted to every human by god [zelenin 1995[1916]: 40]. to die a “bad death” meant to 70 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi have neither forgiveness for one’s soul, nor rest for one’s remains in the other world. pious people feared “bad death.” they prayed for themselves and close relatives to avoid such death and did whatever they could to ensure a good death. for example, people believed that fasting on the twelve special fridays of the year would help ensure that they escape both nahla and liuta deaths [ivanov 1907: 16-17]. also, they fasted on mondays, believing that monday was the sacred day on which the world was created and that not eating on such a day would grant one a good, easy death. in the folk views, sacred monday, also called st. monday, was associated with the apostle peter who guarded the doors of heaven and hell and accompanied the souls of those who had near-death visions (завмерли) on the journeys that they experienced as part of their visions [i[vanov] 1894: 143-44]. beliefs related to regular and special funerals upon someone’s good death, the family of the deceased would call relatives and neighbors to help, and those requests were never refused. otherwise, people believed, the dead would not share anything with them in the next world when their time came to die. moreover, it was considered indecent and sinful to charge for such services as coffin making [apollosov 1861: 220; chubinskii 1877: 706; miloradovich 1897: 168]. the clothed body of the deceased was put on a bench, with head toward the icons and legs toward the exit. the legs, hands, and often the jaw of the deceased were fastened with puty, ropes used to prevent involuntary movements during rigor mortis. people put a wax cross in the left hand of the deceased since, according to the folk belief, his right hand would be busy making a sign of the cross when he appeared before god [chubynskii 1877: 698]. people would also place coins in the coffin to pay for the transfer over the river of the dead or to purchase a place in the cemetery [bin’kovskii 1896: 254; miloradovich 1897: 166]. in the coffin of a midwife [повитуха], people would put poppy seeds so that she would have gifts for all the children she helped to deliver when she met them in the next world [ivanov 1909: 249]. when the deceased was taken outside, the pallbearers would stop at the threshold, lower the coffin and knock it on the threshold three times, allowing the deceased to say good-bye to his house [chubinskii 1877: 708; kaminskii 1912: 133-134]. ukrainian folk beliefs about death and the afterlife folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 71 at the cemetery, family members would remove the puty from the deceased, fearing that failure to do so would impair his quality of life in the other world; he would not be able to stand up and respond when the horn summoned him on judgment day [ivanov 1909: 250]. after the coffin was lowered into the grave, a priest would “seal” the grave, i.e., make a sign of a cross over the four sides of the grave with a shovel [moshkov 1902: 22]. folk beliefs held that death stopped all of a dead person’s earthly activities only if the grave was sealed; otherwise, he was able to return to the earth from the afterlife [ivanov 1909: 248]. church and secular authorities initially opposed this practice, but eventually incorporated it into the ritual since villagers considered sealing the essence of a funeral [moshkov 1902: 22]. funerals of those who died in a “bad” way differed dramatically from those of the good dead. some of the bad dead had special funerals. for example, unbaptized or stillborn babies were most often buried under the threshold of the home so that people entering and leaving the house would essentially make the sign of the cross as they stepped over their graves. this would help to free the infants’ souls [vasil’ev 1890: 319; kotliarevskii 1891: 33; ivanov 1909: 247]. sometimes these children were buried in family gardens [vasil’ev 1890: 319] under a fruit or willow tree [miloradovich 1897: 171] or at a crossroads [chubinskii 1877: 713]. parents would put candy and gingerbread [пряники] in the coffin of the child [abramov 1907: 29]. the mother and other relatives were not to cry or lament the death, especially if the baby died unbaptized. if it was the first-born, mothers did not even go to the cemetery to bury the baby for fear that her subsequent children might also die [apollosov 1861: 223; lepkyi 1883: 13]. marriage and procreation were so important for ukrainians that those who died too early to be married were expected to do so in the other world. people used to say that “there is no place in the other world for a man who died unmarried” [svidnyts’kyi 1861: 52]. generally, ukrainians believed that in the other world, as in this world, people would live in couples. those who died young and unmarried were buried after a special ritual called весільний похорон [the wedding of the dead] [sventsits’kyi 1912: 6, 45]. a young person’s funeral typically resembled a marriage ceremony, although wedding songs were not sung [lenchevskii 1899: 75; moshkov 1902: 23]. for both a girl and a boy who died young, relatives baked a wedding bread, korovai, and shared it at the cemetery. people put a wedding band on the ring finger of a dead child, who would leave behind a symbolic spouse considered a 72 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi widow/widower and an in-law to the family of the deceased [kotliarevskii 1891: 237; ivanov 1909: 254]. some of the “bad” dead were denied proper funerals. this was a terrible punishment because only a proper funeral could ensure salvation of the soul. the importance of proper burial and proper commemoration can be seen in beliefs that focused on what happened in their absence. the soul of a person who was not properly buried and lamented was denied god’s protection and the body of such a person could be used for evil purposes. this can be seen in the belief that a special candle capable of helping thieves avoid arrest could be made from the fat of a “sinless child who was not mourned by human tears and whose body was not buried in blessed soil according to proper funeral rites” [lytvyniv 1900: 142-144]. suicides were the most hated. those who committed suicide were believed to go against god’s will as the result of the devil’s seduction and therefore they were sinners who could not be buried as christians in a cemetery. their presence, it was thought, would desecrate the soil and anger other, “clean” dead [zelenin 1995[1916]: 92]. thus suicides were usually buried along roads or at crossroads, [chubinskii 1877: 712; kotliarevskii 1891: 33-34; bin’kovskii 1896: 258], at the spot where they died [zelenin 1995[1916]: 89], or in swamps [bin’kovskii 1896: 258]. tradition prescribed tossing “a bit of straw, a tree branch, or a handful of earth” while passing by the graves of those who died badly and were buried outside of a cemetery [rudchenko 1874: 71; chubinskii 1877: 712; demidovich 1896: 136]. this was believed to bring luck to travellers, or, according to a chumak (barge hauler) saying, “дорога буде щаслива [the road will be fortunate]” [rudchenko 1874: 71]. after a time, the accumulated debris at an “unclean” grave was burnt and the fire seen as a “pacifying old sacrifice to [suicides] orphaned and homeless souls” [kotliarevskii 1891: 34]. moving the bodies of suicides to another place was taboo because that would be additional desecration of the ground. if absolutely necessary, their bodies could be transferred only over a crossroad, but even then the suicides were believed to return to the old spot of their death over the next seven years. people believed that the sites of death and burial of unclean, unquiet dead were places where evil forces concentrated and that those dead were the source of devilish power. ukrainians viewed the spirits of suicides as dangerous, since they turned into vampires and the tragic end of their earthly lives caused their souls to hate the living [sumtsov 1889: 271; fischer 1921: 361]. the funerals of suicides took place late in the evening and they ukrainian folk beliefs about death and the afterlife folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 73 were placed in coffins with their faces down [lepkyi 1883: 14]. those who drowned whether intentionally or accidentally were interred on the banks of rivers [demidovich 1896: 137]. it was believed that the unclean forces guarded their sites of drowning and their spirits might appear there [manzhura 1890: 132]. the “bad” dead had two major reasons for becoming revenants: they lacked proper/complete burials/funerals and they died before their allotted time. ukrainians used numerous apotropaics, or methods against revenants and turning evil away by mutilation of the corpse was the most common. the aspen is probably the only tree not glorified in ukrainian folk songs for it was considered a cursed species, the tree on which judas hanged himself [bessaraba 1904: 44]. since people connected the aspen with devilish creatures like witches and the unquiet dead, it was used as a talisman to protect against them [bin’kovskii 1898: 7]. people would drive an aspen stake through the hearts or heads of such dead to prevent their return. in some regions, people would cut off the head of a suspected witch/wizard and put it in the coffin between the cadaver’s legs [hnatiuk 1904: 165; zelenin 1995[1916]: 89]. to prevent the unquiet dead from returning and harming the living, people would sow poppy seeds in a circle around their graves or along the way from their former home to their graves; the rationale was that the unquiet dead would compulsively count the tiny poppy seeds and be kept busy all night [chubinskii 1877: 712; zelenin 1995[1916]: 53]. ethnographic descriptions show that although burying suicides and other “bad” dead in regular cemeteries became more widespread by the late nineteenth early twentieth centuries, their graves could be sealed only after seven years. at times of cataclysms like droughts or epidemics, people would still open such graves and treat the remains cruelly, viewing them as the cause of natural calamities [bin’kovskii 1898: 8]. numerous taboos and fears surrounded even the proper funerals of the good dead. since a body fell into the category of unclean, contaminated, and thus dangerous, many taboos involved the corpse and objects in contact with it. for example, people disposed of “dead water” (water in which a dead body was washed in preparation for the funeral) at a place where no one would walk. crossing the path of the funeral procession was taboo, for people believed that it would cause inflammation and wounds on the body of that person. once the coffin had reached the street, survivors shut the gates of the yard, believing that this prevented the deceased from returning to his house from the cemetery [apollosov 1861: 221]. to defend the living relatives of the 74 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi deceased and to ensure their long life, ukrainians sprinkled rye inside the house after the deceased was taken outside [ibid.: 221; miloradovich 1897: 169]. the root of the ukrainian word жито [rye] is the same as the root of the word життя [life]. people believed in the purifying function of this grain and its ability to revitalize anything contaminated by death [kotliarevskii 1891: 221]. people believed that the dead had magical power and that physical contact with the body, or coffin, or mere presence at the place of death, would kill developing life, like a fetus or vegetation. therefore, pregnant women were not to attend funerals, while all seeds and plants were removed from the house where a body lay [chubinskii 1877: 706]. at the same time, however, a corpse was believed to have healing power over so-called “dead bones,” or bone outgrowths/spurs [vasil’ev 1889: 636; fischer 1921: 220]. according to the law of imitative magic, materials in contact with a dead body were able to “deaden” pain, feelings, relations, and life itself. for example, washing the mouth with “dead water” supposedly killed a toothache, just as transferring puty from the deceased to the limbs of a sick person would mitigate a toothache or rheumatic pain [ivanov 1909: 250]. similarly, it was believed that a kerchief which had closed the jaws of the deceased could stop fights or physical altercations. this would occur if someone had such a kerchief inside his or her pocket and secretly squeezed it [bin’kovskii 1896: 244]. a rope with which a person committed suicide or a criminal was hanged was highly prized as a way of ensuring good luck or profit and was considered worth stealing and trading [sumtsov 1889: 256-257]. the corpse itself was believed to be a reliable instrument of prediction: if it was soft when transferred to the coffin, there would soon be another death in the family [grinchenko 1897: 24]. the eyes of a dead person were covered with coins to prevent him from looking at the living; his stare, it was thought, would cause another death in the family [chubinskii 1877: 699; moshkov 1902: 15]. beliefs related to mourning and commemoration many post-funerary activities were directed towards avoiding things that would make a soul unhappy and doing things that would make it happy. just as funeral rituals differed depending on the type of death, so there were different ways of memorializing and commemorating the dead. the souls of those who died a good death were prayed for as often as possible. there were twelve special saturdays throughout the year that ukrainian folk beliefs about death and the afterlife folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 75 were variously called поминальні [commemorative], батьківські [parental], or задушні суботи [saturdays designated for praying for the souls of the dead], and prayers for dead relatives were believed to be especially effective on those days. the prayers of blind minstrels were considered even more beneficial for the souls of the deceased; they were especially powerful if pronounced for those who died a “bad death,” since the minstrels were seen as mediators between the world of the living and dead [kononenko 1998: 189-190]. ukrainians mourned during the funeral with laments. sometimes lamenters were professional wailers but most often they were the closest relatives of the deceased. laments were used to express the grief and pain of loss. they often described the journey of the soul to the other world and villagers believed that laments could facilitate the transfer of a soul to that world. in them, the living expressed concerns that the deceased may suffer from the lack of something. the deceased were asked to visit, asked when they would return, and so on. thus, laments testify to the folk belief that the dead return for visitations: “скажи ж мені тепер, коли ж ти до мене в гості прийдеш? коли ж мені столи застеляти, да коли ж мені тебе ждати? коли ж ти, моя вірная дружина, в гостоньки прибудеш? чи на різдво, чи на великдень, а чи на зелену неділю?” “tell me now when you will come to visit me? when should i set tables and when should i wait for you? when will you, my husband, arrive for a visit? whether on christmas or on easter, or during the week before pentecost?” [brailovskii 1884: 183] again, laments make clear that death was not accepted as the ultimate end of life, but as the beginning of a different reality, analogous to earthly life. they also testify to the belief about uninterrupted contacts between the living and the dead, and the cult of the dead as the protectors of the living. loud laments were a sign of a “good funeral” [bin’kovskii 1896: 251], and people believed that a well lamented soul was happier [lenchevskii 1899: 77]. while laments provided the opportunity for voluble grief, the community and the closest relatives of the deceased banned extreme expressions of bereavement. it was believed that such displays would be very unpleasant for that soul, since it would not be able to rest, this could possibly bring unwanted reactions from it [bin’kovskii 1902: 108]. people also believed that too much crying over the deceased would cause her/him to lie in water [grinchenko 1897: 92]. 76 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi if conventional displays of mourning for the good dead included loud cries and laments, “bad death” was surrounded with silence because it was considered shameful. nobody wanted to talk about the “bad” dead, so neither psalms nor laments were performed during the funeral. the death and funeral of a small child was also devoid of cries and laments, although the passing was neither terrible nor shameful [apollosov 1861: 223]. in fact, people believed that small babies and toddlers became angels upon their deaths; they were believed to be taken straight to heaven by their heavenly father [sventsits’kyi 1912: 27]. church officials commemorated a deceased person on the third day after death and also on the ninth, and fortieth days. the next major commemoration came one year after death. a sacrificial meal on the commemoration days was seen as necessary for the soul. if the deceased kept returning at night, he was to be asked what his soul needed. he might complain that his soul was hungry. relatives then were expected to bring commemorative bread to the church for the sake of that soul [kolessa 1902: 250]. after the commemoration marking one year from the date of death, the deceased attained the status of ancestor, that is they became deindividualized spirits commemorated collectively. addressing them as “діди [grandparents]” and “батьки [parents],” ukrainians brought them food, made sacrifices for the sake of their souls (mostly in the form of alms to the poor), asked them for help or advice, and called them out of their graves with prayers and laments [kotliarevskii 1891: 254]. the souls of unbaptized children, stillborn babies, and those who drowned or died accidentally, were commemorated only once a year on pentecost [zelenin 1995[1916]: 234]. there were three special saturdays throughout october and november designated for remembering the dead. the sunday after easter, проводи (hence the etymology – проводжати [to see somebody off]), or st. thomas’s sunday, was the biggest memorial event, but only for those who had died a good death [ivanov 1907:107-108]. in some regions of ukraine, the thursday before easter was called мавський/навський великдень [easter for the deceased] [zelenin 1995[1916]: 204, 235]. this was the time that people left bread in rye fields for creatures variously called mavky, navky and rusalky. these were believed to be the unquiet female spirits whose origins will be discussed later. after the easter church service, close relatives visited their dead at the cemetery, offered holiday greetings, and buried крашанки, or eggs dyed a single color. the next day, they came to check the eggs: if all ukrainian folk beliefs about death and the afterlife folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 77 were intact, it meant the soul of the deceased pleased god; if dogs took any, the soul displeased god and nobody knew how to help it [ivanov 1907: 96]. people believed that the dead were resurrected on easter and came invisibly to the church service at midnight and to the homes of their relatives [hnatiuk 1904: 124]. they were thought to remain in this world until they were commemorated on the sunday after easter. people also believed that souls of those who committed suicide and the souls of witches were lost forever and that there was no way that such souls could be saved. the church forbade relatives from commemorating the suicides for seven years, which coincided with the period of the ban upon the sealing of the grave [fischer 1921: 358]. family ties and pity, however, were often stronger than strict ecclesiastical prohibitions and families of suicides would prepare a “secret easter” [miloradovich 1897: 171] to remember their unfortunate relatives. beliefs about the afterlife: perils and the power of the soul the concerns and fears ukrainians had while dealing with a death were directed toward what would happen to the soul of the deceased and how to please that soul so it would not take revenge on the living. failure to follow the required funeral formalities could lead to negative consequences for both the living and the dead. furthermore, folk beliefs about the soul comprised a whole worldview that influenced many other beliefs and often regulated people’s daily behavior. folk views of the soul were contradictory, probably because it was perceived both as an intangible and as a material entity. ukrainians imagined the soul as something invisible and light like air and wind. people believed that, at the moment of death, the soul left the body with the final exhalation through the mouth and flew away [generozov 1883: 6]. at that moment, the soul of a righteous person would take the form of pale smoke [grinchenko 1897: 66]. someone’s unnatural death, in contrast, was believed to cause atmospheric disturbances such as a strong wind or storm, since the soul of a person who died suddenly or violently had to rush to the other world [generozov 1883: 6; fischer 1921: 355]. the soul was also imagined as zoomorphic – in the shape of a butterfly, fly, or bee [generozov 1883: 10; moshkov 1902: 15]. this vision of the soul was probably the basis for the custom of leaving something sweet like syta, or kanun (honey dissolved in water) for the soul/fly to drink to fortify itself for the long journey to the other world. on the night after the funeral, old women kept a vigil and looked for the 78 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi soul of the deceased. if it appeared as a fly or butterfly and drank kanun, that meant that the soul was pleased by the funeral and had no anger towards the living. people imagined that the soul was also able to transform into plants and animals – usually a bird, most often a dove, eagle, or cuckoo [generozov 1883: 11, 14]. at the same time, people viewed the soul as an anthropomorphic, supernatural entity – a spiritual duplicate of the once living person, one that was able to live its own benevolent or malevolent life. thus, the soul was believed to survive in the other world with its old earthly habits, needs, mood (attitudes), and human appearance [ibid.: 12]. it needed food and drink, felt cold and heat, suffered, and indulged in pleasures; in other words, the soul behaved much as a living person might. the living were to protect, help, and please the soul of a dying person. tolling the church bells was believed both helpful and pleasing to it [chubinskii 1877: 699]. at the moment of death, body and soul separated, hence, expressions like відійшла душа [the soul has departed] or розлучилася душа з тілом [the soul separated from (its) body]. it was thought that a physical body died, but a soul continued its existence. people believed not as much in the eternity of a soul, but that the soul outlived the body. after soul and body parted, the soul was believed to hover over the body, as if looking for it [batiushkov 1891: 163]. no matter how bitter that separation, it was important to liberate the soul, and this was the aim of apotropaics used against the unquiet dead. people believed that a soul could be stolen by evil forces just before the funeral [fischer 1921: 210]. to prevent this, relatives or neighbors guarded the body during the nights before burial and said prayers. they watched so that a cat or dog would not jump over the dead body, for the soul then would enter the animal’s body and not leave the house, making the deceased person into one of the unquiet dead. [bin’kovskii 1896: 246]. people believed that dogs and cats are associated with the devil and in ukrainian folklore there are many legends about witches turning into either cats or dogs [hnatiuk 1912a: 109, 131; ivanov 1891: 218, 220]. the soul stayed in the house until the body was buried, and it was obligatory for the household to put out a glass of water for drinking and/or bathing and to leave bread for feeding the soul during that time [kaminskii 1912: 101]. the forty days after burial are called the days of the mytarstva. these are aerial toll houses or spiritual trials which determine whether the soul is righteous or sinful. during this time the soul was believed to visit home daily, where it ate honey to lessen the ukrainian folk beliefs about death and the afterlife folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 79 bitterness of its suffering, and rested on a special embroidered towel, rushnyk [ivanov 1909: 252]. while the deceased was still in the house before burial (and forty days after the funeral), the living were to make sure not to upset the soul. household tasks like cleaning, washing, whitewashing the walls, or sweeping the floor were taboo, for one could accidentally run into the soul and smear it or cover it with dust. that would make the soul feel unwelcome and cause it to leave the house in anger [bin’kovskii 1896: 246; miloradovich 1897: 166; ivanov 1909: 252]. a human soul after death was believed to be more magically powerful than a living person could ever be. it overcame time and space restrictions, could move about, was able to do things that were beyond human capabilities, acquired different appearances, or took revenge on behalf of a body that was no longer able to act for itself. even those who disregarded christian doctrine were scared of the supernatural powers of the soul and the spiritual beings, usually angels, that guided it on its other-worldy journey. a court record from the 1880s shows that murderers who killed and skinned a child for the sake of black magic did not touch the boy’s right shoulder and arm because they feared that the child’s guardian angel (one is believed to live on each person’s right shoulder) would wreak vengeance on them [lytvyniv 1900: 142]. souls of those who died in a “bad” way were believed to be able to assist the living, but only those with evil intentions. when a sorcerer wanted to cast a mighty curse, he would go to an aspen tree in the forest and, while facing west, “invoke ‘those killed, those who had fallen from trees, those who had gone astray, those who had died without names (meaning those who had not been baptised)’ to get up” and do harm to a particular person [mansikka 1909: 9]. beliefs about the place a soul inhabited were also contradictory. on the one hand, people thought that it stayed in the coffin in the grave, but they also believed it flew away to the other world [generozov 1883: 20]. contradictory interpretations of a soul’s fate conveyed an archaic view about the multiplicity of souls: one returned to where it originated; another went to the grave with the body; and yet another stayed on earth to protect the living [ivanov 1909: 248]. ukrainian laments, burying customs, and commemorative practices are the best testament to folk views on the afterlife. the ideas about the next world were directly related to the nature of death, and people expressed beliefs about this relationship through their rituals. images of the afterlife are fragmentary, inconsistent, and often illogical, which can 80 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi be explained by a mixture of christian and folk beliefs [generozov 1883: 47]. many apocryphal songs contained detailed descriptions of heaven and hell; these were so popular and stable that they found their way into children’s folklore. although mothers forbade their children from imitating funerals or the deceased [vasil’ev 1890: 321], games called “heaven” and “hell” were very common. in them, the players split into two camps – angels and demons. players competed by dragging members of the other group into their own [ivanov 1889: 61-63]. overall, images of the afterlife were expressed in material or concrete terms. people believed that a dead person needed everything there that s/he had required or failed to achieve in her or his earthly life – a family, favorite foods, clothes, and so on. people placed treats into coffins even though the clergy fought this custom as a pre-christian remnant [abramov 1907: 29]. survivors also put the cut nails of the deceased into the coffin so that he could climb a mountain of mytarstva in the other world, pull off worms, or get out of the hellish abyss [ivanov 1909: 249]. since ukrainians attributed to souls relations that replicated those in mortal life, ideas about the other world and the afterlife motivated the attitude of the living towards the dead. people imagined heaven as a place with a table set with everything the soul had earned in this world, donated to other humans, or sacrificed to god [manzhura 1890: 155]. two destinies awaited dead children. in ukrainian folk beliefs, rusalky and mavky/navky were unquiet spirits of females who died unnaturally, they were thus dangerous to the living, but their origin and functions were viewed differently [ivanov 1909: 246]. females who drowned or died during the week preceding pentecost were believed to become rusalky, while unbaptized girls became mavky regardless of the nature of their death (i.e., they could have been killed by their mothers, were stillborn, or died soon after birth) [zelenin 1995[1916]: 147]. mavky were believed to live in forests or mountains, and rusalky in bodies of water. both rusalky and mavky were dangerous for the living, for they tried to kill humans. at the same time, there was a belief that unbaptized babies nonetheless ascended to heaven, although they dwelled separately from baptized children. people also believed that the souls of children had distinctive appearances: the souls of children who were illegitimate, born out of wedlock, or killed upon birth were dirty, while souls of “good” children were white and even had rosy cheeks if a midwife assisted at their deliveries [ivanov 1909: 246]. ukrainian folk beliefs about death and the afterlife folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 81 a different destiny awaited women who died during pregnancy or labor. a pregnant woman who died was to suffer until judgment day, while a woman who died in labor or within six weeks after was “considered a martyr and went [directly] to heaven” [miloradovich 1897: 171]. women who delivered stillborn babies or whose children died did not eat apples till the ascension holiday (august 6 /19). they believed that on that day god gave heavenly apples to children’s souls, but only to those whose mothers did not eat them. otherwise such children were told, “а ваші свині з’їли [and your (apples) have been eaten by pigs]” [ivanov 1907: 173]. people believed that on easter and during the preceding week, the gates of heaven were open to all and mytarstva were eliminated so that souls could ascend directly into heaven [bin’kovskii 1896: 259]. people believed that those who died during the first three days of easter were pure souls, and god granted them his blessing [ivanov 1907: 93]. sinners in hell were thought to sit in craters of boiling tar. apart from sinners, there were several categories of people who could not enter heaven due to “shameful” occurrences in their lives: these were bold (maybe self-righteous or overly confident) men [manzhura 1890: 105], men battered by their wives, and persons attacked by pigs [ibid.: 154]. people believed that the worse a deceased sinner was, the sooner his body would rot. bodies of vampires, however, did not rot, but were believed to leave their graves at night, walk to homes, and suck blood from the living as they slept. unclean dead were generally believed to move around. those who died due to an accident, suicide, or murder were bound to the place of their demise: those who hanged themselves forever returned to the place where they swung, especially during the full moon; those who drowned appeared near that body of water; and those who were murdered went back to the scene of their death [zelenin 1995[1916]: 48]. such souls, or rather the evil spirits of such dead, were believed to roam the roads at nights waiting for passersby to kill. and yet the “bad” dead desperately needed the prayers of the living for the peace and salvation of their souls. conclusion ukrainian folk beliefs about death and the afterlife at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century were a synthesis of popular religion and christian elements. although death was a natural 82 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi and expected event, folk beliefs about death and the afterlife were characterized by magico-religious syncretism, and the funeral ritual was surrounded by magical prescriptions and taboos. in this way, villagers tried to explain phenomena related to death that were otherwise inconceivable to them. the world of the dead was a mirror of this world in the ukrainian folk imagination. it was perceived as a physical reality, with exchanges and transitions between it and the world of the living. ukrainians did not fear death and kept close relations with their dead, whom they saw as ancestors. what they did fear, however, were the “wrong” things like a “bad” death that resulted in “resurrected” dead. that is why “bad death,” unlike good death, was explained by countless beliefs, omens, legends, and tales. the tradition prescribed fear of such unfortunate dead while at the same time a need to pray for the salvation of their souls. traditional beliefs about death persisted into the twentieth century with few, if any, changes. notes 1. this article is a revised version of a chapter from my dissertation. in it, i review folk beliefs prevalent at the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th centuries. that was a period of the most intense fieldwork for collecting materials on the russian empire, of which ukraine was a part. volodymyr hnatiuk (1904) underlined the importance of collecting folk beliefs about death, soul, afterlife, and various spirits by saying: “[t]his sort of data are of special importance for us, not only because they are scarce but also because they contain many elements that are specific for our folk and, unlike, for example, tales they are not borrowed from any common human source of folklore” (p. i). most available ethnographic data from that time are about the ukrainian village beliefs. there is little information about urban beliefs. bibliography abramov, i. 1907. абрамов, ив. “пища покойникам у современных малороссов [food for the deceased in contemporary ukrainians],” живая старина ііі: 29 (смесь). afanas’ev, a. 1868. афанасьев, александр. “народные суеверия и поверья. болезни по словянским преданиям [folk superstitions ukrainian folk beliefs about death and the afterlife 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can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader 5.0 and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice microsoft word folkloricaprotest_ii_full_final_2022 07.27.22.docx “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 49 “listen then, avars, to what i tell you”: the unification of chechen and avar oral culture in tolstoy’s the cossacks and hadji murat svetlana yefimenko university of exeter exeter, england abstract this essay examines the subversive potential of folk song and performance in tolstoy’s first novel, the cossacks [1863] and his final novel, hadji murat [1916]. i trace tolstoy’s ethnographic interest in the dagestani avar song of khochbar back to his pioneering transliteration and translation of chechen uzami in 1852 and examine how avar and chechen folk song traditions influenced these novels. arguing that tolstoy privileged the oral tradition over written text as an instance of ethical cultural expression, i show how this position informed the cossacks in the novel’s presentation of chechen resistance to russian imperialism, and addressed the conflicting identities of russians, terek cossacks, chechens, and dagestani avars. i argue that tolstoy revisited the distinction between oral performance and writing in hadji murat by adapting the song of khochbar to his representation of the historical avar resistance fighter, hadji murat. finally, i discuss how the oral performance characteristic of chechen and avar communities poses a sociopolitical challenge to the russian empire’s colonial hegemony by troubling and resisting the writing culture that represents and legitimizes it. introduction on 30 may 2021, the literary-ethnographic museum dedicated to lev tolstoy in starogladovskaia, a village and former cossack settlement in chechnya, celebrated the 170th anniversary since tolstoy’s arrival in the caucasus with a new exposition: ‘l.n. tolstoi – pisatel’’ [l.n. tolstoy, writer]. presiding over tolstoy’s photographs, manuscripts, and documents, along with swords belonging to sado misirbiev, tolstoy’s chechen companion (kunak, also “guest”), the chechen republic minister of culture, khozh-baudi dasaev, observed, “именно в станице старогладовской при помощи двух друзей садо мисирбиева и балты исаева лев николаевич записал первые две чеченские народные песни с переводом. и именно эти две записи у нас считаются первым письменным памятником чеченского языка и первым опытом записи чеченского фольклора” [it was in this very starogladovskaia village (stanitsa), with the help of his two friends, sado misirbiev and balta isaev, that leo [tolstoy] recorded two chechen folk songs, along with their translations. and it is precisely these two recordings that we regard as the first written artifact of the chechen language and the first attempted recording of chechen folklore] [ministry of culture of the chechen republic 2021]. the twenty-four-year-old “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 50 tolstoy recorded the two songs in his journal in 1852 by means of transliteration using the russian alphabet with diacritics; the songs were accompanied by tolstoy’s own translation into russian. while indicating an important moment in chechen cultural history, the recording also marked the beginning of tolstoy’s lifelong literary engagement with the oral literature and folklore of the caucasus, as evidenced in his early stories, such as “nabeg” [“the raid,” 1853] and “rubka lesa” [“the wood-cutting,” 1855], and his first novel, kazaki [the cossacks, 1863]. more than four decades later, in 1897, tolstoy recorded in his journal his delight in a traditional dagestani avar folk song, pesnia o khochbare [the song of khochbar]; the song was part of the material that comprised tolstoy’s ethnographic study of the north caucasus as he prepared to compose his final significant work of fiction, hadji murat (1912). this paper will examine two scenes of performed resistance to imperialism in tolstoy’s first and final novels, the cossacks and hadji murat, and discuss how they were informed by the oral literatures of chechnya and dagestan. i shall argue that the key passages in the texts draw on and develop the theme of caucasian political resistance by juxtaposing the russian empire, as represented by its writing culture, with the oral performance culture of the caucasus. finally, i examine tolstoy’s use of the narrative elements of irony, quadrangulation of ethnic identity, and framing. these techniques convey how oral performance facilitates the act of bearing witness to colonialism in the caucasus and the mountain communities’ capacity to resist domination by means of, first, tiered metonymic protest in which an avar ballad represents the horror of conquest and, second, by controlling historical narrative through performance. song culture of the chechens and terek cossacks after joining the russian army in 1851, in the final decade of the caucasian war (1817-1864), tolstoy was stationed with the artillery battery in starogladovskaia, a cossack military base on the mountainous southern frontier of the russian empire [wilson 1988: 78-80]. the war was part of the wider effort of imperial expansion into the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and predominantly mountainous caucasus region between asia and europe, and was fought against an alliance of tribes, which included the chechens and dagestani avars, led by imam shamil (1797-1871). the cossacks, self-governing military communities who settled along the empire’s expanding border, fought the mountaineers on behalf of the russian empire. (1) in return for acting as a stabilizing border force between the empire and the diverse ethnic groups of the caucasus, the cossacks were granted a significant degree of land and autonomy. in terms of customs, material culture, and way of life, however, the cossacks were closer to the mountaineers they battled than to the russian empire they battled for. despite religious differences between the two groups—the cossacks were mostly christian, and the mountain communities predominantly muslim—and the raids and counterraids that characterized their relations, it was not uncommon for trade, “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 51 cultural exchange, religious conversion, friendship, and even intermarriage to take place [friedrich 2003: 127]. tolstoy’s novel the cossacks, conceived during his time in starogladovskaia and developed over the next decade, articulates both the affinities and tensions that characterized the cossack and chechen communities in their mutual contempt for imperial domination: терек [отделяет] казаков от горцев [...]. живя между чеченцами, казаки перероднились с ними и усвоили себе обычаи, образ жизни и нравы горцев; но удержали и там, во всей прежней чистоте, русский язык и старую веру. [...] казак, по влечению, менее ненавидит джигита-горца, который убил его брата, чем солдата, который стоит у него, чтобы защищать его станицу, но который закурил табаком его хату. он уважает врага-горца, но презирает чужого для него и угнетателя солдата. [the terek river [separates] the cossacks from the mountaineers […]. living among the chechens, the cossacks intermarried with them and adopted the customs, way of life, and manners of the mountaineers, but maintained, even there, in all its original purity, the russian language and old belief. […] a cossack is less inclined to hate the mountaineer horseman [dzhigit] who killed his brother, than the soldier who is quartered on him to protect his village but who has filled his hut with smoke. he respects his enemy mountaineer but despises the foreign and oppressive soldier] [tolstoy 1936, 6: 15-16]. chechen communities reconciled the religion of islam with the warrior ethos exemplified in their traditions of kinship vengeance, kinship loyalty, and ritualized theft [friedrich 2003: 126]; the terek cossacks admired and sought to emulate these warlike virtues. the cossacks were further united with their chechen neighbors by the prevalence of traditional song performances in their respective aesthetic cultures, in which these songs carried both ethical and sociopolitical import. the terek cossacks among whom tolstoy lived were the oldest of the cossack groups and had a particularly well-developed song culture, with traditional songs acting as repositories of both ethical norms and history [agadzhanova 1974: 13]. their songs were important components of ritual, and expressed heroic, legendary, or lyrical subject matter [agadzhanova 1974: 1718]. the sanctity of song is evident in that, before performing, singers were expected to don fresh clothing, clean their huts, and consume several glasses of chikhir, a traditional wine of the caucasus; crucially, if the audience was inattentive, or failed to show empathy, the song “ne idet” [does not go] and the singer became agitated and sometimes refused to perform altogether [agadzhanova 1974: 14-20]. unsurprisingly, much of the subject matter of the folk songs that crystallized during the 18th and 19th centuries involves war, reflecting how the cossack hosts acted as the vanguard of russian expansionism. “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 52 despite imperial resistance to cross-cultural relations, the cossacks, who were settlers before they were conquerors, struggled to maintain fluid boundaries between themselves and the mountaineers. facing labor shortages and a dearth of fertile land and resources, the terek cossacks were almost entirely dependent on chechen handicrafts and agriculture, obtaining not only essential goods, but also weapons and military accessories from them [barrett 1999: 110-115]. the cossacks’ famed shashka [sword], kinzhal [dagger], and rifle were all made in the native villages, where their production was an ancient craft [barrett 1999: 120]. the liminal space of the frontier was psychologically difficult to occupy, and the songs of terek cossacks conveyed the suffering their warriors endured during expeditions and battles on the chuzhaia storona [foreign side] of the frontier, expressing their longing for home and those who waited for them there [agadzhanova 1974: 25-26]. the neighboring chechens, also known as the vainakh (vaĭn nakh [our people]) people—a term which also includes the related ingush and kist—lived between the terek and sunzha rivers in autonomous clans consolidated into larger tribal associations. these communities were direct descendants of the nakh ethnic group that had occupied the area since at least the fourth century bc [jaimoukha 2005: 24]. they benefitted from frontier trade and cultural exchange with the cossacks and, when contraband trade was not possible, engaged in mutual raids along the frontier [barrett 1999: 115]. the vainakh people’s music and poetry were highly developed and included a vast corpus of legends in which pre-18th century chechen history, culture, and tradition was preserved and transmitted; this helps explain why cultural influence flowed almost entirely in one direction, from the mountaineers to the cossacks [barrett 1999: 148]. native storytellers, who enjoyed a particularly high social standing [jaimoukha 2005: 9], created folkloricpoetic renditions of historical events and conveyed them in melodic verse, no doubt in part because music was thought to have curative qualities [jaimoukha 2005: 182]. in the 19th century, two genres of folk song became particularly significant for the chechen people: the uzam and the illi. the uzam is a lyrical composition expressing sorrow and loss, sometimes focusing on a hero’s unavoidable death; the illi are epic ballads principally focused on praising heroism, freedom, and independence. crucially, in the mid-19th century, both illi and uzami became a prevalent means of expressing and inspiring the chechen struggle for freedom [munaev 2005: 9; jaimoukha 2005: 184]. in 1852, tolstoy jotted down in his journal two such uzami in the first written record of chechen folklore. the recording was consistent with tolstoy’s tendency to make observations in his journal about the language, customs, sayings, and history of the caucasus. these notes have an ethnographic quality, such as the reflection that the russian exonyms for caucasus groups have “nothing in common with the actual name that the narod [people] calls themselves” [tolstoy 1937, 46: 278]; tolstoy follows this remark with a list of russian exonyms for groups such as the circassians and georgians along with their endonyms, which includes the chechen nakh (nokhchi in russian). this shows tolstoy’s sensitivity to the linguistic representation of the highlanders, and some specialists argue that “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 53 he understood the chechen language well [mal’sagova 1989: 140]. it also helps to explain why, when recording the uzami from the words of his chechen friends, tolstoy transliterated instead of simply translating them, presumably to convey as faithfully as possible their acoustic qualities: алалу вададай шилюка шаи-ина баба вай—анни ай аай—ай ай ай! не приятно, родимая матушка, в тёсовой бажелера сёцъ онашле и хунда балейна хаи хунъ молодецкаго коня зачем привели, ты знаешь ли? вай да да дай! ваим берчиръ арджемажеръ и хунде аяй аиай ай, чье крымское ружье висит у нас на стене еина хащ хунъ? хо лахо воучу гюрджи еле еина. зачем его принесли, знаешь ли? пришел тебя сватать грузинский князь, онъ и принес его. са нана сеидегуо теце еуцо ассайна лахна буисинах де денъ кант. — матушка! не лежитъ к нему сердце; я сама себе сыскала такого молодца, который из ночи день делает. [ai aai, ai ai ai! how sad i am, my dear mother. tell me why there is a fine stallion in our stable, aiai aiai ai, why did they mount that crimean carbine on our wall? a georgian prince brought the weapon, he came to be betrothed to you. dear mother, my heart is not with him. i found such a molodets [fine youth] for myself, who makes the night into day.] [tolstoy 1937, 46: 89-90] the significance of tolstoy’s preservation of both uzami is striking given the lack of available material and rarity of such preservation and translation at the time. (1) tolstoy’s ethnographic effort was pioneering and wholly improvisational, inaugurating the ethnographic study of oral culture in the caucasus. paradoxically, however, in the very act of recording songs, tolstoy was also undermining the performance-oriented values of immanence, spontaneity, and authenticity which, as i intend to show, he attributed to the cossack and chechen oral cultures. “stupid as a horse:” tolstoy’s anti-intellectual turn before investigating tolstoy’s representation of caucasian folk songs in the cossacks and hadji murat, it is important to contextualize that representation by considering tolstoy’s attitude to oral culture more generally and what he considered to be its place in intellectual history. tolstoy’s encounter with the caucasus oral culture marked the beginning of his writing career, and some of his earliest literary efforts were inspired by the folk songs he heard and learned. referring in his journal in 1856 to a certain “cossack song,” tolstoy confesses, “i cried while singing a cossack song. i’m beginning to love the epic legendary manner. i’ll try to make a poem out of the cossack song” [tolstoy 47: 82]. in 1852, while resident among the cossacks whose songs he performed, tolstoy began working on his first novel, the cossacks. indeed, the first version of the text was a poem that opened with a songlike call to a young cossack woman: “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 54 эй, марьяна, брось работу! слышишь, палят за горой: верно наши из походу казаки идутъ домой. [hey, mar’iana, leave off work! hear them firing from the mountain? it must be our cossacks returning home from battle.] [tolstoy 1935, 1: 99] early encounters with oral literature shaped tolstoy’s intellectual development. in 1859, after re-reading the notes that he had made in his journal during his stay in the caucasus, tolstoy admits in a letter that it was there that he “began to think in a way that people have the power to think just once in their lives […]. never, neither before, nor since, have i achieved such height of thought” given tolstoy’s transformative experience in starogladovskaia, and subsequent emotion upon rereading the notes he made there – which, we will remember, include the translated chechen uzami and reflections on cossack songs – it is unsurprising that he came to privilege traditional oral culture over its written counterpart. by the decade of 1880, already an established author famous for war and peace (1869) and anna karenina (1878), tolstoy opens one of the chapters of his 1882 autobiographical work, ispoved’ [a confession], with the following admission: “how often i envied the peasants their illiteracy and lack of education” [tolstoy 1927, 23: 52]. this envy is occasioned by tolstoy’s belief that the absence of education and intellectual activity help beget moral wisdom. he recounts in chapter 14 of the same text that he was struck by the spiritual wisdom in the “conversation of an illiterate peasant” [tolstoy 1927, 23: 52]. that tolstoy chooses to mention the peasant’s bezgramotnost’ [illiteracy] after admitting to envying it shows that the wise peasant’s inability to write is not incidental. the relationship between lack of formal education and wisdom is emphasized a few sentences later, when tolstoy adds that he is interested in the stories of peasants whom he describes as “illiterate” and “stupid” [tolstoy 1927, 23: 52]. the adjective tolstoy uses, glupye, which jane kentish’s translation of a confession also renders as “stupid” [kentish 1987: 72] an also be translated as “foolish” or “dumb.” indeed, the absence of formal education and indifference to advanced knowledge was, for tolstoy, a prerequisite for moral insight. if one was not fortunate enough to have remained illiterate, intellectual activity is best renounced: “[t]he life of our class, the rich and learned […] lost all meaning. all our activities, our discussions, our science and our art […] it is not possible to find meaning in it” [tolstoy 1927, 23: 40]. consistent with his rejection of intellectual life, tolstoy observed in a 1908 introduction to a printed catalogue of artworks, titled russkie muzhiki (russian peasants) produced by nikolai orlov (1827-85), an artist who painted scenes of peasant life, that the works conveyed the moral struggle between the western-educated intelligentsia and the “as yet unruined” [tolstoy 1956, 37: 275] russian peasants: “[t]rue religious understanding of life was and still is possessed by the russian illiterate, wise, and holy peasant narod” [tolstoy 1956, 37: 277]. “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 55 sophisticated intellectual activity is contrasted, in tolstoy’s view, with wisdom expressed in folk art that is based on collective knowledge requiring neither formalized education nor technology. this knowledge, as tolstoy recounts in chapter 13 of a confession, is conveyed to the common people by traditions expressed in “legends, sayings and tales” [tolstoy 1927, 23: 47]. given this attitude, tolstoy’s paradoxical (and unsuccessful) efforts to distance himself from intellectual and creative work lead him to both privilege and attempt to imitate “stupid” life. in an 1870 letter to the poet afanasiĭ fet (1820-1892), tolstoy mocked literature and praised straightforward, manual labor: “i am, thank god, as stupid as a horse this summer. i work, chop wood, dig, mow and, thank god, give no thought to nasty lit-t-terature and lit-t-terators” [tolstoy 1953, 61: 36-237]. in referring to himself as “stupid,” tolstoy uses the same word— “glup”—that he had used to refer to the “illiterate and stupid” peasants. tolstoy’s unique definition of stupidity is not the conventional one of ignorance or foolishness but is a sort of vital innocence that is uncorrupted by decadence and intellectualism as represented by written and printed literature. tolstoy found a practical ethics in oral literature, expressed in productions such as homer’s iliad and russian folk tales. despite their distance from one another in terms of not only culture and language, but also millennia, tolstoy regarded such works as fundamentally similar in their reflection of folk values as distinct from that of the educated classes, observing in an 1862 article: “[t]he narod [folk] can live without the society of progressives and somehow satisfy all their human needs: by labor, revelry, love, thought, and creation of artistic productions (iliads, russian folk songs)” [tolstoy 1936, 8: 346]. in other words, for tolstoy, folk productions are legitimized by their independence from institutional support and modern values. tolstoy concluded his argument against alleged social improvements offered by modern technology by appealing specifically to both folk art and religious texts: “i ask the reader to notice that homer, socrates, aristotle, german fairy tales and songs, russian epic, and, finally, the bible and the gospels, had no need of the printing press to remain eternal” [tolstoy 1936, 8: 342]. it is evident from these extracts, found both in published and unpublished materials, that tolstoy found both aesthetic power and moral goodness in oral tradition and culture. scene i: the cossack and the russian it is in the context of tolstoy’ personal involvement with the oral traditions of the caucasus and the strain of anti-intellectualism running through his thought that we must approach the cossacks and its dozens of references to songs and singing. the semi-autobiographical novel follows the young russian aristocrat, olenin, who joins the army and resides in a cossack village during the caucasian war. in search of authenticity, olenin attempts to befriend the cossacks, particularly the old eroshka and the young warrior, luka, and falls in love with mar’iana, a young cossack woman. ultimately unable to reconcile his spiritual “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 56 insights with the violent cossack culture and rejected by mar’iana, olenin returns to moscow. first, note that tolstoy’s cossacks and chechens sing in nearly every imaginable situation: they sing softly to themselves [tolstoy 1936, 6: 23], they sing while working [tolstoy 1936, 6: 26-7; 110], when celebrating an occasion [tolstoy 1936, 6: 58-9], when expressing sorrow [tolstoy 1936, 6: 104-5], when drinking and dancing [tolstoy 1936, 6: 107, 127, 134-136], when at war [tolstoy 1936, 6: 123], when playing as children [tolstoy 1936, 6: 127], when courting [tolstoy 1936, 6: 137], when bidding farewell [tolstoy 1936, 6: 149], and when preparing to die [tolstoy 1936, 6: 144]. the songs, often included in full, are about brave heroes, courtship, and freedom. near the end of the novel, a song is distinguished from the others in the text by the way it is performed, its stated dagestani origin, and its explicitly anti-russian sentiment. as we will see, this song brings together the voices of the terek cossacks, chechens, and dagestani avars in a singular way. examining the chiastic chapter structure and metonymy in the cossacks, paul friedrich has argued that the novel’s attitude to the chechens is ambivalent, ultimately presenting them as simultaneously dehumanized and admirable [friedrich 2003: 138]. however, i argue that performed song, by juxtaposing traditional oral culture and writing culture, transcends the ethnic and political tension between the pro-russian terek cossacks and the chechen and avar mountaineers, uniting the three groups in their resistance to empire. in tolstoy’s narrative, the power of song and performance is shown to subvert the dominant status quo. in chapter 28 of the cossacks, olenin locks himself in his hut to write about the importance of self-sacrifice and love for others. as he is writing, old eroshka enters unexpectedly, dressed in “новом красном бешмете, обшитом галунами” [a new red jacket (beshmet) embroidered with galloons] [tolstoy 1936, 6: 106] and carrying a stringed musical instrument (balalaika) which was obtained “iz-za reki” [beyond the river] [tolstoy 1936, 6: 106]. while the narrator strongly implies that eroshka procured the instrument from the chechens, the cossack’s attire is also salient for our purposes. although the narrator does not say so, eroshka’s outfit is wholly chechen: a beshmet is a traditional chechen tunic, which sometimes included galloons—metallic trims—sewn on for show [jaimoukha 2005: 147]. newly attired, eroshka arrives and is disappointed that olenin is writing. at first, the cossack behaves cautiously, “как будто предполагая, что какой-нибудь дух сидит между им и бумагой” [as though some spirit sat between [olenin] and the paper] [tolstoy 1936, 6: 106], but soon grows restless because he wanted to talk [tolstoy 1936, 6, 106]. olenin makes polite but cool conversation until the determined eroshka offers to perform a song: —я мастер играть; татарскую, казацкую, господскую, солдатскую, какую хошь. оленин еще раз взглянул на него, усмехнулся и продолжал писать. “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 57 —ну, брось, отец ты мой! брось! —сказал он вдруг решительно. […] ну, что́ пишешь, пишешь! что толку? […] что кляузы писать? ерошка […] вскочил с пола и принялся показывать свое искусство в игре на балалайке и петь татарские песни. ‘что писать, добрый человек! ты вот послушай лучше, я тебе спою. сдохнешь, тогда песни не услышишь. гуляй!’ […] [в]ыпив еще стакана три чихиря, он […] запел настоящие казацкие и татарские песни. […] особенно трогательна была […] одна тавлинская песня […] вся прелесть ее заключалась в печальном припеве: «ай! дай, далалай!» ерошка перевел слова песни: «молодец погнал баранту из аула в горы, русские пришли, зажгли аул, всех мужчин перебили, всех баб в плен побрали. молодец пришел из гор: где был аул, там пустое место; матери нет, братьев нет, дома нет; одно дерево осталось. молодец сел под дерево и заплакал. один, как ты, один остался, и запел молодец: ай, дай! далалай!» […] оленин, выйдя за ним на крыльцо, молча глядел в темное звездное небо … в доме у хозяев были огни, слышались голоса. [‘i’m a master at playing any song you want: tatar, cossack, a squire’s, a soldier’s.’ olenin glanced at him one more time, chuckled, and continued to write. […] ‘well, drop it, my lad! drop it!’ [eroshka] said with a sudden firmness. […] ‘so, you write and write! what’s the point? […] why write slanders?’ eroshka […] leaped from the floor and began to demonstrate his art in playing the balalaika and singing tatar songs. ‘why write, good fellow! instead, listen to what i’ll sing for you. when you die, you won’t hear any songs! make merry!’ […] [a]fter drinking about three glasses of chikhir, he […] began to sing authentic cossack and tatar songs. […] particularly poignant […] was one tavlinian song […] all its charm consisted in its melancholy refrain: ‘ai! daĭ, dalalaĭ!’ eroshka translated the song’s words: ‘a molodets [fine youth] herded sheep from the aul [mountain village] to the mountains, the russians came, burnt the aul, killed all the men, took all the women prisoner. the molodets returned from the mountains: where the aul stood, is now an empty space. no mother, no brothers, no home, only the tree remains. the molodets sat beneath the tree and wept. alone, like you, he’s left alone, and the molodets began to sing: aĭ, daĭ! dalalaĭ!’ […] olenin, following [eroshka] out to the porch, gazed silently at the dark starry sky […] “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 58 there were lights in the homeowner’s house, and he could hear voices] [tolstoy 1936, 6: 106-109]. this important passage, which contains not quite a song, but the chorus and summary of a song, has been interpreted variously by critics. friedrich argues that metonymy is exploited here by tolstoy to reference the chechens as victims of ethnic cleansing [friedrich 2003: 136-7]; however, it is important to consider also the performative and wholly deliberate nature of the metonymic protest, which is formally linked to traditional chechen uzami and challenges the interiority of writing. donna tussing orwin contends that eroshka interrupts olenin’s writing because he fails to understand olenin’s ethical cogitations, “civilization brings with it, for better as for worse, a more developed reason [...] eroshka […] has no knowledge of this higher reason […] [and] obviously takes a dim view of writing […] the very moment eroshka is making fun of him olenin is penning an affirmation of his love of others” [orwin 1993: 96]. if we read the passage in light of tolstoy’s privileging of oral tradition and suspicion of intellectual culture as represented by “lit-t-terators,” whose work he mocks for not reflecting the interests of the narod, we see that it draws its rhetorical and political power from the challenge posed to what orwin describes as “civilization.” russia’s superior civilization, represented in tolstoy’s text by the writing process, is shown to be neither civilized nor superior. there is a striking similarity between the melancholy refrain of the song that eroshka performs, consisting solely of the phrase “aĭ, dalalaĭ,” and the phrase in the opening and third lines of the chechen song that tolstoy had translated in 1852: “aĭ aĭ, aĭ aĭ aĭ! […] / vaĭ da da daĭ!” it is not unlikely that the chechen folk song informed the representation of eroshka’s performance, particularly since tolstoy was aware of the cross-cultural nature of the cossack and chechen oral traditions. when we consider that, first, eroshka’s song resonates with the chechen folk song in terms of acoustic similarity, and second, that eroshka obtained his instrument from the chechens and is sporting a traditional chechen outfit, we see that the passage subtly articulates the very collective continuity that tolstoy admired in oral culture. oral performance: irony, quadrangulation, and framed narration let us examine the passage cited above in terms of three separate but related narrative strategies and extradiegetic commentaries, and how they function within the text: irony, quadrangulation, and framed narration. first, the setting in the passage functions as an extension of, and political encounter with, ethnic identity. there is a profound irony in the fact that olenin, a member of the russian military and aristocracy who exists entirely as the beneficiary of empire, is composing affirmations of his love for colonized others while locked away from those others in a private space. when eroshka, a member of the cossack community that is exploited and leveraged by the russian empire, arrives, olenin ignores him. he rejects the simple human connection the visitor seeks and continues jotting his lofty ethical insights. in this reading, it is not eroshka’s superstitious nature and “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 59 insensitivity that prompt him to see a mediating “spirit” between olenin and his paper, or to describe olenin’s writing as “slander,” but rather his heightened sensitivity. in a profound sense, olenin’s writing about love for others is, in fact, “slanderous” because that love is demonstrated by his immediate interaction with eroshka to be false. consistent with this feeling, eroshka recognizes that writing is mediated by an external force that intervenes between writer and writing, rendering both inauthentic. there is also a deeper, and more bitter, multiplicity of historical ironies that informs the symbolic setting in this passage, stemming from the terek cossacks’ internalization of the north caucasus warrior code. olenin’s views of self-sacrifice critique the violence the terek cossacks enact on behalf of imperialism—a violence which takes its form, weapons, and fighting ethos from the very communities the cossacks and russians seek to destroy. second, eroshka offers to sing “any song,” whether it is cossack, chechen, or even a russian soldier’s, indicating the cross-cultural nature of his imminent performance. the ballad that strongly moves olenin is identified as a “tavlinskaia pesnia” [tavlinian song]. this exonym refers to the dagestani avars of the northern caucasus, who posed the most significant military threat to russian hegemony in the 19th century, led by imam shamil and the resistance fighter, hadji murat (1818-1852). the “tavlinian song” functions as a tiered metonymy, used metonymically to stand in for the avar experience of conquest and murder at the hands of russian invaders, which itself stands in for the horror of ethnic cleansing in the caucasus region. including the avars in an analysis of the passage results a quadrangulation between russian, terek cossack, chechen, and avar identities, with the latter group underwriting the anti-russian sentiment of the mountaineers as their ballad is performed in their absence. the passage metonymically unifies the multiplicity of mountaineer identities in their resistance to imperial domination in the singing, dancing, weeping, and commanding body of eroshka; a cossack who crosses the fraught boundary line separating the cossacks and chechens, is dressed in traditional chechen clothing and is accompanied by a chechen-made, russian folk instrument, and who performs a traditional avar ballad for a russian military audience. the presence of the distant chechens both informs and calls into question the terek cossacks in their position as the vanguard of russian imperialism. simultaneously, the absent presence of the avars calls into question the chechens in their association with the prorussian cossacks, also serving to put the cossacks into question in regard to their russian hosts and, crucially, vice versa: olenin’s presence in the village is sharply criticized by the avar song he witnesses. despite its inclusion in the novel of full cossack songs and chechen uzami, in the passage we are considering, the narrator avoids representing the avars’ song. instead of including the full text of the composition, only a cryptic summary of its content is offered; of course, this may be because, since the song was avaric, tolstoy was left to either transliterate or translate. indeed, eroshka translated the words into russian. the ballad’s content is strong evidence that tolstoy did not simply make it up or, if he did, that he drew on traditional avar compositions to do so; dagestani folklore features a genre of lamentation songs that convey the “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 60 suffering of victims of mountain raids [bobrovnikov 2007b: 253]. however, the theme of violence toward ruling tyrants rather than fellow mountaineers was developed and fully crystallized in avar folksong during the 18th-century tsarist incursion [bobrovnikov 2003a: 202], reflecting a rich tradition of ballads in avar folklore that brought together the historical and lyrical genres [adjiev 2018: 594]. unlike the reader, olenin is privy to the avaric form of the song, though he does not understand its content; the song’s content is then translated into russian for both olenin’s and the reader’s benefit. i link the meaning of this positioning— russian listening to the voice of the absent avar mediated through the body of the chechenized cossack—with one that cathy caruth [2016], in her development of trauma theory, identifies with traumatic experience. caruth sees trauma as repeated and unknowing wounding, taking the form of an event, “[t]raumatic experience [is] the enigma of the otherness of a human voice that cries out from the wound, a voice that witnesses a truth that [the hearer] cannot fully know” [caruth 2016: 2-3]. put differently, eroshka is “the wound” because the terek cossacks bear the imperial body’s injury through conquest. they express, through their liminal existence along the frontier, the voice of the highlander “other” whom they are attempting to reduce to nonexistence by compulsion. olenin, as the beneficiary of empire, has a historical imperative to bear witness to a truth that he cannot fully know: the trauma of violence and erasure. the ballad’s facilitation of bearing witness to trauma is realized in one of the final passages of the novel, when olenin participates in a battle between the terek cossacks and the chechens. the chechens, who are surrounded and expect to soon be killed, begin to sing. importantly, the song is identified as a “заунывн[ая] песн[я], похожей на ай-да-ла-лай дяди ерошки. чеченцы знали, что им не уйти, и [...] запели предсмертную песню” [a mournful song, similar to eroshka’s ai-da-la-lai. the chechens knew that they could not escape and […] they began to sing their death song] [tolstoy 1936, 6: 144]. the chechens are singing either the same avaric ballad, or one similar, that eroshka had performed about the destructive violence of the russian conquest. the ventriloquized voice of the absent avars breaks from the frame established earlier and enters the narrative. in hearing the chechens’ song of lament before witnessing their death at the hands of the chechenized cossacks who fight for the tsar, olenin, as the representative of empire, is bearing witness to the historical trauma that empire creates. i endeavored to show above how the narrative elements of irony, quadrangulation, and framing, along with the historical imperative of bearing witness to trauma, combine in the section of the cossacks under discussion here. these three elements directly inform the juxtaposition between literate and nonliterate cultures developed in the passage: olenin’s private subjectivity is challenged by the claims of shared intersubjectivity. eroshka does not merely wish to talk; as noted at the beginning of this paper, a traditional chechen song often requires the singer to don fresh clothing, drink several glasses of chikhir, and command the attention of the audience. the cossack’s new outfit, rapidly “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 61 gulped glasses of chikhir, and demand for olenin’s attention—the imperative to bear witness—are associated with ritual behavior and indicate that he is about to perform a traditional song. since, here, eroshka acts as a stand-in for unified mountaineer identities, it is significant that the ballad he performs belongs to the dagestani folk tradition: it was the avar imamate under shamil that sought to unify the communities of the caucasus and thus led the most successful resistance to the tsar in the 1830s and 1840s. olenin’s thoughts, however admirable, are shown to be asocial. in being set down in an artificially linear way, they also do not have the immanence inherent in song. since a folk song is defined primarily in terms of its being in oral circulation, transmitted from singer to singer and group to group through generations [elbourne 1975: 11], eroshka’s uzami and illi do not merely convey but actively maintain a living tradition. the song’s collective voice possesses a historical continuity that undermines the legitimacy of olenin’s private, intermittent reflections, showing them to be pointless (eroshka observes, ‘“so, you write and write! what’s the point?”’ [tolstoy 1936, 6: 107]). unlike writing, song comes into being in the act of singing and disappears immediately after. as performance theorist peggy phelan remarked, “performance’s only life is in the present. performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance” [phelan 1996: 146]. since performance is an event that can unfold only once in time, it succeeds in recalling olenin into sociality, as evidenced in olenin’s emerging from his hut to see the lights of homes and hear the sound of human voices. the chechenized cossack’s performance of an avar ballad disrupts olenin’s “civilized” composition and thus subverts, by means of oral song, the unequal relationship between colonized highlander and empire. in demanding that the latter bear witness to the former, the traditional folk song, articulating the unified voices of generations of caucasian mountaineers, empowers and invests the singer with a living and embodied agency. the russian’s abandonment of his writing project to listen to the avar ballad and subsequent exit from his solitary hut to stand in responsive muteness—"olenin, following [eroshka] onto the porch, silently gazed at the starry sky” [tolstoy 1936, 6: 108]—is testimony that the voice of empire is not monolithic and has been, albeit momentarily, silenced. avar folk song in hadji murat if traditional avar folklore informed in only distant, subtle ways the tension developed in tolstoy’s first novel between the mountaineers and the russian empire and between nonliterate and literate cultures, it featured prominently in tolstoy’s final novel, hadji murat. set in the caucasus between 1851 and 1852, the novel retells the final months of the historical dagestani avar leader, hadji murat, who fought for shamil against russia. following a political crisis between the two men, murat turns to the russians with the offer to defeat shamil if, in return, the russians help rescue murat’s family, whom shamil is holding hostage. “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 62 realizing that the russians will neither help his family nor give him military command, murat flees from his imperial “hosts” to the mountains in a desperate gamble to save his family; furious at the betrayal, russian forces track and kill murat after a final, bloody battle that concludes the novel. although tolstoy had been thinking about the novel for many years, he began to gather historical material for the novel in earnest at the end of the 1890s. in 1902, he wrote letters to those who had personally known the real murat, requesting detailed information about his hero for the sake of historical accuracy [tolstoy 1954, 73: 353]. in addition to gathering personal testimony, tolstoy consulted archival material sent to him from tbilisi and turned to the multiple editions of the sbornik svedenii of kavkazskikh gortsakh [collection of information about the caucasian mountaineers], the first edition of which was published in 1868, which contained the first academic essays on caucasian history and folklore. tolstoy was aware that the scholarly “discovery” of the poetry of the caucasus in the late 19th century was revolutionary for literary activity, as evidenced in his 1875 letter to fet, where tolstoy recounts his research, “during this time i have been reading books about which nobody has any inkling, but in which i reveled. it is a collection of reports about caucasian mountaineers, published in tiflis (tbilisi). it has mountaineer’s legends and poetry and extraordinary poetic treasures” [tolstoy 1953, 62: 209]. in 1897, displaying the same ethnographic interest that had once prompted him to transliterate chechen songs, tolstoy took notes on multiple editions of the sbornik in preparation for writing hadji murat, compiling information on caucasian wedding and funerary rituals, spiritual beliefs, and practices of blood vengeance. in his notes, tolstoy praised the folk songs of the caucasus recorded in the sbornik, referring to the “песни о мщении и удальстве” [songs of revenge and daring] as “chudnye” [marvelous] [tolstoy 1950, 35: 276]. he was particularly taken with the avar song of khochbar, a composition he described as “udivitel’naia” [astonishing] [tolstoy 1950, 35: 276]. the song of khochbar is the most famous production of dagestani heroic folklore, set down in writing for the first time and then translated from avar into russian by the russian linguist peter von uslar (1816-75). the composition is an epic poem about a legendary avar warrior from the gidatlin tribe, khochbar, who is betrayed by his host, the khan of khunzakh, and sentenced to death by fire. before leaping into the flames, khochbar snatches up the khan’s two infant sons and all three burn to death. although he could not refuse the khan’s invitation for fear of being accused of cowardice, khochbar outwits him; by forcing the khan’s sons to share his cruel and unjust death, khochbar robs the khanate of heirs. thereby, he asserts gidatlin’s independence while punishing the great sin of disobeying guest-friendship etiquette. scholars traditionally date the origin of the epic to sometime between the 16th and 18th centuries. its eponymous hero has passed into oral cultural memory as having fought bravely against the khanate’s raids upon independent avar tribes. khochbar is a complicated figure, initially celebrated as a trickster and thief with a fearsome reputation for violence. he is a “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 63 skilled singer and musician, playing the chagan, a string instrument similar to a violin, as he self-consciously performs an improvised song about his exploits before the khan, or nutsal. although vladimir bobrovnikov has offered an updated translation into russian of the song [bobrovnikov 2003a: 181-83], i include here my translation into english of an excerpt from uslar’s 1868 russian translation because the latter is the version that tolstoy had encountered and is therefore more relevant for our purposes: “слушайте же, аварцы, расскажу вам кое-что, и ты не мешай мне, нуцал, стану и петь. влез я к тебе в окно и унес шелковые шалвары любимой жены твоей; снял я серебряные запястья с белых рук любезных сестер твоих; зарезал я ручного тура твоего. вот, наверху—овчарни; кто угнал из них баранов, отчего они опустели? вот, внизу—конюшни; кто угнал табун, отчего они развалились? вот, на крышах вдовы; кто сделал их вдовами, убив мужей? вокруг нас сироты; кто убил их отцов и сделал их сиротами? не перечесть всех, кого убил я и в поле и в лесу. […] разве не я убил шестьдесят человек из вашего общества? вот, нуцал, какие совершаются подвиги, а то, что за подвиг, обманом зазвать к себе человека и умертвить его! […] остроконечное копье, не раз пробивало ты грудь ханским нукерам!” [listen then, avars, to what i tell you, and don’t you interrupt, nutsal, i’ll rise and sing. i got through your window and carried away your favorite wife’s silk trousers, silver bracelets off your lovely sisters’ wrists; i butchered your pet mountain goat. why these barns there, above, empty! and who took the lambs? who took the herd of horses— look below—and why were the stables destroyed? there are widows sitting on the roofs; who made them widows, who killed their husbands? there are orphans all around, but who killed their fathers? countless are those that i killed in the fields and the forests. wasn’t it i who killed sixty people of your village? that’s how heroes are made. but is it an act of bravery to summon a man and treacherously kill him? there, above, the sheepfold; who drove off the rams from them, why are they empty? there, below, the stables; who drove off the herd, why have they fallen apart? there, on the roofs, are widows; who made them widows, killing their husbands? around us are orphans; who killed their fathers and made them orphans? you cannot count all those i killed in the field and in the forest […]. there, nutsal, what feats are accomplished, but is it a feat to invite a man and kill him? […] my sharp-edged spear, more than once you pierced the breast of the khan’s vassals!’] [uslar 1868/2017 153-54]. what is most relevant for our analysis is that the khochbar figure is an abrek, a term with a politically significant history. it denotes a mountaineer warrior, a figure prominent in caucasian folklore, who is simultaneously an outlaw and a “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 64 hero. in medieval dagestani and nakh languages, the term designated a vagabond and later came to indicate strangers who had fled their communities, fearing blood vengeance because they were guilty of murder, rape, or other significant crimes [bobrovnikov 2007b: 246]. however, during the caucasian war, those who deserted from either side and fled were also called abreks. in 19th-century russia, the term came to indicate any non-peaceful (nemirnie) mountaineers whose very existence became criminalized and synonymous with banditry. in the collective memory of the dagestani avars, the figure of khochbar began to be associated less with the exploits of a wandering trickster who exacts revenge for a violation of hospitality and more with a steadfast courage in the face of the cruel and oppressive enemy [bobrovnikov 2003a: 199]. khochbar’s thefts and murders were transformed into rebellion, and the abrek became a politicized freedom fighter. the adaptation of the song of khochbar to chechen folklore demonstrates aptly the cross-cultural relations between the people of dagestan and chechnya. khochbar became khushpar in the chechen variant of the song [munaev 2005: 340], which preserved the basic storyline and came to participate in chechen folklore as an instance of the heroic illi genre. significantly, scholars have determined that the illi was developed among the vainakh people between the 16th and 19th centuries in a context of both intercommunal conflict and colonial conquest (gould year: 202). illi protagonists were typically drawn from historical events and, as the war in the caucasus wore on, came to celebrate the heroic and solitary abreks who struggled against colonialism but always met with defeat, “having relinquished any prospect of victory, the pathos of their lives is their progress toward death” [gould 2014: 202]. when the chechens joined the avars in the northeast caucasus to battle against the tsarist army, the folklore of both groups shared a nearly identical song genre: the heroic ballad of resistance. i argue that the storyline of hadji murat corresponds with that of the song of khochbar to a marked degree: both narratives follow heroic abreks famed for violence who have challenged the ruling khanate, enter hostile territory, are betrayed by their hosts, and die in a desperate act of defiance. while it is impossible to determine whether tolstoy deliberately imitated the ballad in his text or was simply following the historical narrative, it is my contention that there are multiple resonances between the folk song and the text, not least of which are those of narrative design, character, language, and use of epithets. in addition, it is almost impossible that, having encountered the folk song in preparation for composing hadji murat, tolstoy did not surmise that the historical murat would have invariably been privy to the song of khochbar as both challenge and inspiration. however, i am here interested in the folk song’s representation of the subversive potential of oral performance and how murat’s performance in tolstoy’s text undermines imperial domination. scene ii: the avar and the russian in one of the pivotal scenes of hadji murat, the eponymous hero recounts his personal history to the interpreter mikhail loris-melikov, who is tasked with “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 65 taking notes on murat’s life for administrative purposes. the autobiographical narrative occupies the central chapters of the novel, indicating their privileged position in the text [weir 2011: 118-19]. the section is important for two related reasons: first, it includes historical epistolary extracts from the viceroy of the caucasus, mikhail vorontsov (1782-1856), and the russian general kluke von klugenau (1791-1851), regarding hadji murat’s defection to the russians; second, a significant portion of the direct discourse in the section is conveyed in the voice and from the point of view of murat. this juxtaposes the voice of empire, represented in the medium of writing, with the voice of the dagestani avars, here conveyed exclusively by direct and free indirect discourse. if the distant voice of the avars informed the cossacks despite their total absence from that text, tolstoy makes the avar voice fully present and central to his final novel. chapter eleven opens with loris-melikov, pen in hand, inviting hadji murat to recount his history, “‘ты расскажи мне … а я запишу, переведу потом порусски, и князь пошлет государю’” [tell it to me, and i will write it down and translate it into russian and the prince will send it to the emperor] [tolstoy 1950, 35: 49]. this exchange initiates the juxtaposition between empire and the caucasus as represented by literate and nonliterature expression, with the former seeking to exert sociopolitical control over the latter: the words of murat will be fixed to paper, transformed into the language of empire, and transferred along the administrative military hierarchy to the tsar. seeking to control murat’s narrative indicates that not only this story, but how it is expressed, has power; it is, therefore, important to possess it in writing. agreeing to disclose his past, murat recounts his childhood with avar khans who were later murdered by murids, a muslim coalition engaged in holy war against russia. initially, murat sought to avenge the khans, then joined the holy war, in which his military successes brought him into direct conflict with shamil. note murat’s self-assurance as he takes time to prepare his thoughts before commanding loris-melikov to begin writing: хаджи-мурат опустил голову и долго просидел так; потом взял палочку […] достал из-под кинжала с слоновой ручкой, оправленной золотом, острый […] булатный ножик и начал им резать палочку и в одно и то же время рассказывать: — пиши: родился в цельмесе, аул небольшой, с ослиную голову […] недалеко от нас, выстрела за два, хунзах, где ханы жили.[…] лорис-меликову приходила мысль […] что выход хаджи-мурата и его рассказы о вражде с шамилем был обман […] мюридов было тридцать человек, нас — двое. они убили брата […] а я отбился, выскочил в окно и ушел. […] аварцы […] звали меня управлять ими, — с спокойной, уверенной гордостью сказал хаджи-мурат. — и я согласился. […] но тут случилось то, что у меня спросили, кому быть имамом после шамиля? я сказал, что имамом будет тот, у кого шашка востра. “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 66 [hadji murad lowered his head and sat in that position for a long time. then he took a stick […] drew a little knife with an ivory gold-inlaid handle […] from under his dagger and started whittling the little stick with it and speaking at the same time. “write: born in tselmess, a small aul,” ‘the size of an ass’s head’ […] not far from it, about two cannon-shots, lies khunzakh where the khans lived.” […] it occurred to [loris-melikov] that […] hadji murad’s surrender and his tales of hatred of shamil might be false […] “there were thirty […] and we were only two. they killed my brother […] but i kept them at bay, leapt through the window, and escaped. […] the avars […] called me to rule over them,” he went on, with tranquil, confident pride, “and i agreed.” […] “[i]t happened that i was asked who would be imam after shamil, and i replied, ‘he will be imam whose sword is sharpest!’”] [tolstoy 1950, 35: 49-60]. murat’s narration is interspersed with quotations from general klugenau’s letters, and chapter 14 is dedicated exclusively to vorontsov’s missive, in which the latter calculates the abrek’s usefulness to the russians and observes that imprisoning him would be “nespravedlivo i nepolitichno” [unjust and impolitic] as it would hinder the tsar’s cause in dagestan, adding that murat requests a convoy of “brave” cossacks to help him fight shamil [tolstoy 1950, 35: 61-62]. susan layton has remarked on the opposition between speech and writing in the passage, arguing that “the simple syntax and colloquial diction convey hadji murat’s directness and honesty […]. hadji murat upgrades talk as the more reliable, fully human mode of communication” [layton 1995: 277]. however, the passage conveys opposition not between writing and speech, but between writing and performance, which is a complicated, deliberate, and culturally informed activity. consider, first, that the term “rasskaz” [tale, story] is used several times to refer to murat’s narrative. the verb skazat’ [to speak, tell] is related to the spoken skaz, a narrative that implies a teller, and to skazka, a folktale or fairy tale. importantly, tolstoy used the term rasskazyvat’ [to tell, narrate] to indicate the act of singing a cossack song [tolstoy 1937, 47: 82; see page 8 above]. indeed, this imaginative quality of rasskaz is implicit in loris-melikov’s suspicion that murat is not being forthright. while murat is probably not lying, as an inheritor of the epic song of khochbar, he is controlling his narrative and performing his history, which means that his rasskaz is not naïve and has been both polished and embellished. it is not a folk song, but i suggest that murat’s narration is a performance with a distinct beginning, climax, and suspenseful conclusion. its action is underscored and accompanied by murat’s practiced manipulation of traditional mountaineer weaponry, a sharp knife with an ivory gold-inlaid handle; the tale, like the stick that is being whittled, comes into being as he speaks. second, murat’s narration shares aspects with traditional performance. he begins with silence, indicating not spontaneity but preparation, which resonates with the ritualistic, mnemonic “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 67 aspects of oral storytelling; even murat’s pauses and omissions have rhetorical force. (2) he speaks with lyrical eloquence, using epithets, metaphors, and wellsketched characters: the village of his birth is “the size of an ass’s head” and it is “two cannon-shots” distance from the home of the khans; his companion was “телом сильный, как бык, и храбрый, как лев, а душой слабый, как вода” [as strong in body as a bull and as brave as a lion, but his soul was weak as water] [tolstoy 1937, 35: 51]. the tale communicates colorful, improbable adventures (it is unlikely, for example, that murat could have fought alone, and then escaped from, thirty armed men by leaping through a window). he ends his tale on a boastful note about the “sharpest” sword, which recollects the knife in his hands and reiterates almost verbatim khochbar’s gloating about his “sharp-edged spear”—a symbolic object that each man believes entitles him to power. there is another hint that murat’s narrative is a tale rather than spontaneous speech. two chapters prior, there is a parallel scene of dictation: the illiterate mother of the russian soldier, petia avdeev, is dictating a letter to the local church clerk intended for her son. her speech contains ruptures and mundane news: в письме петрухиной матери было писано, во-первых, благословение, во-вторых, поклоны всех, известие о смерти крестного […]. упоминалось о гостинце, рубле и прибавлялось то, что уже прямо от себя, и слово в слово, пригорюнившаяся старуха, со слезами на глазах, велела написать дьяку: «а еще, милое мое дитятко, голубок ты мой петрушенька, выплакала я свои глазушки, о тебе сокрушаючись. солнушко мое ненаглядное, на кого ты меня оставил? [...]» на этом месте старуха завыла, заплакала и сказала: — так и будет. так и осталось в письме... [in her letter peter’s mother first sent him her blessing, then greetings from everybody, the news of his godfather’s death […]. there was a reference to the present of a ruble, and a message was added which the sorrowing old woman had dictated with tears in her eyes and ordered the church clerk to take down exactly, word for word: “and also, my darling child, my sweet dove peterkin, i have wept my eyes out lamenting for you. the light of my eyes, to whom have you left me? [...]” at this point the old woman wailed, wept, and said: “that will do!” so, the words in the letter remained…] [tolstoy 1937, 35: 39]. the old woman’s speech is very different from murat’s rhetorically powerful narration. it is not a “tale,” yet, like murat’s story, the mother’s message is fossilized in writing “word for word” and “the words in the letter remained” without embellishment. the diminutives and endearments (“peterkin,” “sweet dove”) employed by the grieving mother draw on the genre of lament songs, or plachi, which feature hypocoristic (endearments, or nicknames, such as “peterkin” for “peter”) and fixed expressions [bailey 1995: 475]. natalie kononenko has argued that, while the epic and lament genres resemble one “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 68 another, until the turn of the 20th century in russia, laments were performed solely by women, while epic songs were the domain of men [kononenko 1994: 18]. i suggest that murat’s dictation to loris-melikov is resonant with the epic song of the eponymous protagonist in the song of khochbar, who performed his grandiloquent history. if we link murat and khochbar as avar abreks performing their history before their powerful enemies, the subversive potential of oral song performance in tolstoy’s text becomes apparent. khochbar’s supreme act of resistance is the immolation of the khan’s young sons, which both concludes his performance and yet can also be regarded as part of the performance. in a profound sense, khochbar performs his death, with which he punishes the tyrannical khan and demonstrates the subversive power of oral folk song. murat’s performance also leverages the same narrative elements of irony, quadrangulation of identity, and framing which characterized eroshka’s performance in the cossacks. the irony transcends the boundary of the text insofar as it is the avar abrek and not the russian military administrator, who is controlling the narrative at both the intradiegetic and extradiegetic levels of narration; loris-melikov is privy to murat’s retelling of recent history, as is the reader, and he may be the one taking notes, but it is murat’s performance that the text emphasizes and makes memorable. while the narrative frame for murat’s narration indicates an opposition between avars and russians as represented by murat and loris-melikov, the former’s performance deploys the conflict between four ethnic identities: avar, chechen, cossack, and russian. his narrative centers and unifies avar and chechen voices, recounting how their communities joined the holy war against russia (“чеченцы все перешли […] и аварцы стали переходить” [the chechens all went over […] and the avars all began to go over, too]) [tolstoy 1937, 35: 50]. from vorontsov’s letter, we learn that murat had included the cossacks in his tale in terms of their submission “[мурат] просит отослать его [...] с конвоем из двадцати или тридцати отважных казаков, которые бы служили ему” [tolstoy 1937, 35: 62] [[murat] asks to be sent back […] with a convoy of twenty or thirty brave cossacks who would serve him]. this ironic quadrangulation of identity both within and without the narrative frame has the effect of forcing the imperial administration and the implied russian reader to bear witness not to the horrors the tsarist army has committed in the caucasus, but to the power of the caucasus to unify and resist by articulating its own version of history and the knowledge of that history in the terms of its collective oral tradition. conclusion if political power is maintained in part through the creation and distribution of knowledge, then historical knowledge as performed by eroshka in the cossacks and murat in hadji murat asserts the political power of the caucasus. this knowledge’s status as performance is what maintains its distance from, and subversion of, imperial domination as represented by writing. since oral performance unfolds only once, its assertion of knowledge cannot be recorded or “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 69 preserved. thus, despite his intentions and instructions, loris-melikov is powerless to set down, translate, transfer, or appropriate murat’s narrative; he records not murat’s tale, but its ghost. for the same reason, eroshka’s song about how tsarism exploits and destroys the mountaineers both challenges and implicates olenin, who is forced to set aside his writing and private reflections to witness the song and re-enter sociality. in each case, performance—which, as i have shown, is informed in tolstoy’s texts by the oral folk songs of the cossack, chechen, and avar cultures—acts as resistance and protest. the immanence of performance overflows and transcends the limited boundaries of writing. however, resistance to being recorded and antagonism to writing does not make performed knowledge inherently fragile; because oral performance draws on centuries of tradition, by the time eroshka dances through olenin’s hut and murat enacts a carefully crafted rasskaz for his imperial audience, both have long been established and known in caucasus cultures. notes 1 for a discussion of the constructed nature of cossack identity, see popov 2012: 1739-57. 2 the russian translation of the song was published for the first time in 2005 with the title, uzam samostoiatel’noi devushki [uzam of an independent young woman]; the translator worked directly from tolstoy’s manuscript (munaev 2005: 351). the russian linguist peter von uslar (1816-75) was the first scholar to systematically study the chechen language; his monograph on the subject was published in 1862, a decade after tolstoy’s transliterations and translations, and did not include the uzam. the first standalone collection of chechen folklore, iz chechenskikh pesen [from chechen folk songs] by aslanbek sheripov, appeared in print in 1918, and did not include the uzam, either. 3 for a discussion of how murat deploys silence in conversation, see herman 2005: 1-23. bibliography adjiev, abdulakim magomedovich, et. al. 2018. “daghestan people folklore phenomenon as a unity in diversity,” the turkish online journal of design, art and communication, special edition: 591-597. cited by http://www.tojdac.org/tojdac/volume8mrchspcl_files/tojdac_v080mse170.pdf. (consulted 1 july 2021). agadzhanova, yu. g. 1974. агаджанова, ю.г. “песни гребенских и сунженских казаков” [the songs of the greben and sunzha river cossacks],” в песни терека [the songs of the terek river], грозный: чечено-ингушское книжное издательство. 11-42. “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 70 bailey, james. 1995. “on analyzing the verbal rhythm of a russian folk song,” poetics today 16.3:471-491. barrett, thomas. 1999. at the edge of empire: the terek cossacks and the north caucasus frontier 1700-1860. boulder: westview. bobrovnikov, vladimir. 2003. бобровников, владимир. “насилие и власть в исторической памяти мусульманского пограничья (к новой интерпретации песни о хочбаре)” [violence and power in the historical memory of the muslim borderlands (toward a new interpretation of the song of khochbar)], ab imperio 1: 177-208. bobrovnikov, vladimir. 2007. “bandits and the state: designing a ‘traditional’ culture of violence in the russian caucasus,” in russian empire: space, people, power,1700-1930, jane burbank, mark von hagen, and anatolyi remnev, eds. bloomington and indianapolis, in: indiana university press, 239-267 caruth, cathy. 2016. unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative, and history. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. elbourne, r.p. 1975. “the question of definition,” yearbook of the international folk music council, 7:9-29. friedrich, paul. 2003. “tolstoy and the chechens: problems in literary anthropology,” russian history 30 (1/2):113-143. gould, rebecca. 2014. “the lonely hero and chechen modernity: interpreting the story of gekha the abrek,” journal of folklore research 51(2):199222. herman, david. 2005. “khadzhi-murat’s silence,” slavic review 64(1): 1-23. jaimoukha, amjad. 2005. the chechens: a handbook. london and new york: routledge. kononenko, natalie. 1994. “women as performers of oral literature: a reexamination of epic and lament,” in women writers in russian literature. toby clyman and diana greene, eds. westport, ct and london: greenwood press, 17-33. layton, susan. 1995. “tolstoy’s confessional indictment” in russian literature and empire: conquest of the caucasus from pushkin to tolstoy. susan layton, ed. cambridge: cambridge university press, 263-287. министерство культуры чеченской республики. 2021. “ольга любимова отрыла новую экспозицию литературно-этнографического музея л.н. толстого в чеченской республике” [ol’ga lyubimova opened a new exposition in the literary-ethnographic museum of lev tolstoy in the chechen republic], cited by https://mkchr.ru/index.php?component=public_news&new_id=244310. (consulted 14 july 2021). mal’sagova, a.m. “vostochnaia leksika v povesti l. n. tolstogo ‘khadzhimurat’ [“eastern lexicon in l.n. tolstoy’s hadji murat”] in l.n. tolstoi i checheno-ingushetia, t.f. mal’chevskaia, ed. (grozny: chechenoingushskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1989), 138-151. “listen then, avars, to what i tell you” folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 71 orwin, donna tussing. 1993. tolstoy’s art and thought: 1847-1880. princeton, new jersey: princeton university press. phelan, peggy. 1996. unmarked: the politics of performance. london and new york: routledge. popov, anton. 2012. “re-making a frontier community or defending ethnic boundaries? the caucasus in cossack identity,” europe-asia studies 64(9):1739-57. prelovskii, anatolii and munaev, i.b. 2005. преловский, анатолий и мунаев и.б. чеченская народная поэзия в записях xix-xx вв [chechen folk poetry in recordings of the 19-20th centuries]. москва: новый ключ. thomason, olga. 2006. “uslar, petr karlovich (1816-1875),” in encyclopedia of language & linguistics. keith brown, ed. amsterdam: elsevier, ltd., 281281. tolstoy, lev.1928-1964. лев толстой. полное собрание сочинений [the complete works]. москва: художественная литература. tolstoy, lev. 1987. исповедь [a confession], transl. by jane kentish. london: penguin books. uslar, petr kirrolovich. 1868/2017. услар, п.к. “кое-что о словесных произведениях горцев” [a word about the oral compositions of the highlanders], in сборник сведений о кавказских горцах, избранное: переиздание 19 века [collection of information about the caucasian highlanders, selections: reprint of 19th-century edition]. москва: русайнс, 124-154. weir, justin. 2011. leo tolstoy and the alibi of narrative. new haven and london: yale university press. wilson, a.n. 1988. tolstoy: a biography. new york and london: w.w.norton & company. folklorica about seefa folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 99 the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association (seefa) is devoted to an exchange of knowledge among scholars interested in slavic, east european and eurasian folklore. seefa seeks to promote instruction in slavic, east european and eurasian folklore, organizes panels on the subject at national and international conferences, encourages the preparation of teaching materials and translations, and fosters exchanges. seefa also seeks to promote joint research, scholarly exchanges and conferences, expeditions, and publications with scholars in slavic and other east european and eurasian countries. individual membership in seefa is $35 per year for regular members, $10 for students, and $45 for institutions. send checks to the secretary-treasurer: shannon spasova, department of linguistics and germanic, slavic, asian and african languages, michigan state university, 619 red cedar road, b-331 wells hall, east lansing, mi 48824-3402. email: sdspasova@gmail.com. membership may also be paid in us dollars by using a credit card at: http://www.seefa.org/membership.html. folklorica is published once per year. articles appear on the seefa web site at: http://www.seefa.org/ articles, surveys, reviews, notices of conferences or expeditions, and announcements from scholars in any relevant field are acceptable. contributions will be evaluated by the editorial board or by other specialists. each contribution copyright 2019 by its author. all rights reserved. printed in kentucky, united states. microsoft word folkloricaprotest_ii_full_final_2022 07.27.22.docx folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi i folklorica journal of the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association 2022, vol. xxvi contents editor’s introduction to the folklorica special issue “folklore and protest ii” iii articles activism and patient vulnerability: resistance to medical authority and regulation in russia tatiana l. kuksa 1 hoping against hope? on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales izabela zdun 34 “listen then, avars, to what i tell you”: the unification of chechen and avar oral culture in tolstoy’s the cossacks and hadji murat svetlana yefimenko 49 reports the code of presence: belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns sasha razor reviews 72 gierek, bożena and wojciech kosior, eds. feast as a mirror of social and cultural changes amina gabrielova 99 astapova, anastasiya. humor and rumor in the post-soviet authoritarian state seth graham 102 greenhill, pauline. reality, magic, and other lies: fairy-tale film truths mikel j. koven 105 kivelson, valerie a., and christine d. worobec, eds. witchcraft in russia and ukraine, 1000–1900: a sourcebook eve levin 109 folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi ii warner, elizabeth and svetlana adonyeva. we remember, we love, we grieve: mortuary and memorial practice in contemporary russia sergei mokhov 111 gabovich, mikhail (mischa gabowitsch), editor. pamiatnik i prazdnik: etnografia dnia pobedy (monument and holiday: an ethnography of victory day) karen petrone 113 about seefa 116 author guidelines 117 2016 folklorica review: russian magic tales folklorica 2015, vol. xix 180 robert chandler and elizabeth chandler with sibelan forrester, anna gunin and olga meerson (trans.). russian magic tales from pushkin to platonov. london: penguin books, ltd., 2013. introduction. appendix. xxi+448pp. $14.99 (paper). isbn: 978-0141442235. the tradition of translating russian folktales goes back to the 19th century. today, the number of translations of this genre is quite impressive and includes well-illustrated volumes for children and more thorough works such as haney’s complete russian folktale. the present book differs from other publications due to its original structure. it is a combination of the best examples of the known collections of authentic magic tales with the selected fiction of classical writers of the golden and silver ages, as well as the soviet times. it includes a rich variety of magic tales, ranging from early recorded versions to authors’ reworkings and adaptations. the seven parts of this book are arranged chronologically. the first part contains two of a. pushkin’s tales in verse, the “tale about a priest and his servant balda,” which is based on pskov folklore, and his “tale about a fisherman and a fish” of german origin. the first is challenging for any translator due to its poetic style that imitates the language of the popular print (lubok). the translation is good, though the replacement of the lines from the final version about the priest losing his mind with the draft’s graphic expression “plastering the wall with his brain” is questionable. it is known that in pushkin’s notes the final parts of the authentic tales (5 texts, 1824-25) were more humane than similar records, perhaps due to the storyteller arina rodionovna yakovleva’s style. the second part of the book includes eleven tales from a. afanasiev’s collection and two from i. khudyakov’s. afanasiev’s tales are jewels for any collection, though the presence of a typical animal tale “the crane and the heron” looks accidental in spite of the translator’s justification of this choice due to the quality of the text. in many places the editors did not include certain information in their notes, likely because of limitations placed by the publisher. for example, the notes to “misery” do not take into account the comparative index of tales. the east slavic folktale (1979). the tale is classified as 330d* (“man (solomon) and death”) by r. nazirov, and could also be linked to the a-t 330b, a-t 332f and a-t 331. the tale “wise girl” shows traces of social satire, and the notes could have mentioned its similarity to the “tale of peter and fevronia” from the 16th century. the third section contains publications from “zhivaia starina” and the collections of n. onchukov, o. ozarovskaya, and d. zelenin. the texts present the magic tales tradition from a variety of russian regions. the next part includes fiction by nadezhda teffi. her humorous “when a crawfish whistled: a christmas horror” (1911) differs from a folktale, and plays upon the meaning of the analogous figure of speech “when pigs fly” that is based on an embodied hypertrophied metaphor. the other stories include standard folklore characters. in this part are adaptations of magic tales and the satire on the communist regime. “the dog” is a mystery love story with a shape-shifting motif set in postrevolutionary petrograd. in “a little fairy tale,” the folklore characters have reviews folklorica 2015, vol. xix 181 adjusted to the new regime, e.g. the dragon zmei gorynych worked for the secret police. the note about zmei gorynych mentions that it is the green three-headed dragon, but the number of heads can vary (3, 9, and 12), its color is not specified in folklore, and even i. bilibin depicted it as either red or green. one could disagree with the choice of teffi and the omitting of the magic tales of contemporaries; such as aleksey tolstoy (for example, his “mermaid’s tales”), nikolai gumilev (“the dragon”) or fedor sologub (“the white dog”). those authors’ tales using folk motifs could together make an original separate publication, which could also include the late soviet period, like vasily shukshin’s “before the cockcrow” (do tretikh petukhov), which is close in its parody style to teffi’s. the fifth part contains tales (skazy) by pavel bazhov from the 1930s. they are an alloy of the urals miners’ and indigenous legends, mostly of the bashkirs. the introduction to bazhov’s tales, as well as the note about the artist boris sveshnikov, the gulag victim, stand apart from traditional analysis of the writer’s stories. it takes a social and political approach, following mark lipovetsky’s view of the skazy in their relation to bazhov’s life and his supposed subconscious desire to depict the horrors of stalin’s purges. the notes could have mentioned that the events in “the mistress of the copper mountain” could be dated 1836, when at the mednorudyansky mine a huge malachite boulder was found. in this tale, “gumeshki” is gumeshevsky mine in the city of polevskoi. “the mountain master” could also add the comment that “kolyvan” is kolyvan lapidary factory in the altai region (known for its outstanding decorative stone vases). the sixth part contains tales from the soviet period, including examples from the bashkir republic (by e. pomerantseva), southern urals (a. bardin), the north (i. karnaukhova and d. balashov), and the don cossacks region (f. tumilevich). there are precious examples of the narrative containing mythological motifs and charms, such as “snake-man”. here some of the notes give extensive details on the story-teller, while others only point at the source and classification. the seventh part of the book contains tales by andrei platonov, such as “ivan the wonder,” “magic ring,” and “no-arms.” they are supplied with detailed commentaries, though it is questionable whether in “ivan the wonder” platonov alludes to stalin’s slogan “life has become better, life has become merrier.” it is unlikely because stalin showed a furious reaction to platonov’s stories of 1929-30, and the idea of the author’s being sarcastic seems illogical in that situation, since platonov found himself later being forced to repent. the book includes the appendix “baba yaga: the wild witch of the east” by sibelan forrester. this essay demonstrates that baba yaga’s features are unique among other witch-like characters. the goal of this essay is to explore the character of this female spirit of magic tales by examining her attributes, such as her mortar and pestle. listing their possible symbolic meanings, the author does not discuss their possible erotic connotation (wedding rituals) or use of a pestle as a weapon. forrester also argues that baba yaga’s role as a helper was a reflection of christian moral influence softening a plot. undoubtedly, this can be explained by her function both as a “border guard” between the real and the other world folklorica 2015, vol. xix 182 and a “tester” in initiation rituals. this logically explains baba yaga’s role switching from threatening to helping as a reward for the protagonist’s knowledge of proper behavior. overall, “russian magic tales: from pushkin to platonov” publication leaves a pleasant impression. it compiles nice examples from magic tale collections of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as interesting texts from folklore-based fiction. the translation work is of high quality, the book is logically organized and supplied with detailed notes that provide information about the collector or the author and the peculiarities of the text itself: the a-t classification, a storyteller’s portrait, and recording time and circumstances. some notes could have included more information on toponyms and dialectisms, and some commentaries could have been less politically oriented. at the same time, the idea itself of this mixture of pure folklore tales and writers’ texts can raise doubts about the approach from the point of view of compatibility of such heterogeneous material under the same cover. nevertheless, this collection is a valuable source for studies of russian folklore, culture and literature. yelena francis columbia college, missouri, usa iii editor’s statement – folklorica 2011 the definition of what constitutes folklore is changing in north america, europe, and the countries of the former soviet union and the eastern bloc. americans include almost anything in the category of folklore. scholars in the former soviet union have a much narrower definition of folklore, although their ideas of what constitutes appropriate subject matter for study are expanding as well. one of the missions of folklorica has been to expose each side to the work of the other and to facilitate dialogue. this issue continues in that tradition. jan pohunek’s article on the czech phenomenon called “tramping” is an example of an article from eastern europe which examines a subject area not typically included in the realm of folklore. tramping is a combination of hiking and camping and, true to most definitions of folklore, it was an activity that arose “from the bottom up.” this was not a government sponsored or promoted activity. quite the contrary, it was a way to go outside official life and to engage in something that was more free and spontaneous. pohunek’s is essentially a historical piece that traces how tramping evolved. the next two articles, iryna charniakevych’s piece about weddings in belarus and svitlana kukharenko’s study of ukrainian beliefs and custom associated with death and funerals, are more classic studies. charniakevych looks at the geographic distribution of certain wedding practices and also provides detailed descriptions of what happens in belarusian palesse. kukharenko gives descriptions of beliefs and practices associated with the normal course of life and those performed for people who die unexpectedly and before their time. these are deaths that are not anticipated and often seen as “bad” in some sense. charniakevych and kukharenko provide data that is virtually unavailable in english. it has always been this editor’s policy to include articles that provide difficult-to-find information and these two items fall in that category. the last two articles, linda ivanits’s examination of attitudes toward folklore among russian intellectuals and svitlana krys’s study of the possible influence of folklore on literary works, are in the tradition of the examination of folklore in other intellectual spheres. folklore, like all disciplines, does not exist in isolation. folklore was seen as important to iv nation building and folklore was often used as a source of literary material. ivanits and krys look at these aspects of our discipline. interestingly, krys argues that what may seem to be the influence of folklore on literature is actually the influence of one literary work upon another. more typical studies have tried to identify folklore elements in literary works. krys takes a different perspective. this issue of folklorica also has its usual book reviews and a report about our sister journal, zhivaia starina. what is unusual about this issue is the set of lead-in essays and the two reports at the end. since this is the last issue of folklorica which i will edit, i felt that a set of historical pieces would be appropriate. with that in mind, i asked james bailey and faith wigzell to write reminiscences about their work with the slavic and east european folklore association in general and with the journal in particular. i selected bailey because the slavic and east european folklore association came into being on his initiative. wigzell was the person who was the long-time editor prior to my service in that position. she is also the person who made the journal into what it is today. many short-term editors, me included, preceded wigzell, but it was she who raised the level of the journal up to international standards. she made it the fully peer-reviewed and highly respected publication that it is today. the introductory set of essays concludes with a piece by me. i look back on my work with the association and with folklorica. following the articles and included in the “reports” section are two more unique pieces. one is an autoethnography by james bailey. bailey looks back on his many visits to moscow. he was one of the first americans to spend a long period of time in that city doing academic work and he went back on many occasions. in his report, bailey describes those moments that were particularly startling and revealing. it was these special moments that helped him see the true nature of the ussr and they help us better understand the soviet union also. since we are marking the twentieth anniversary of the end of the soviet union, bailey’s piece is most appropriate as a reminder of what the soviet union was like and what it meant to be an american working on soviet soil. i have also indulged myself by including an account of my recent work in ukrainian villages in the north-eastern corner of kazakhstan. my motivation for doing so is to expand our definition of our organization, v what it does, and what it covers. as the definition of folklore changes, so too should the definition of the scope of this organization. not long ago, folklorists working in central asia made an attempt to organize. my report about kazakhstan is an effort to address these folklorists and to tell them that we have much in common. rather than starting a separate organization, they would do well to join us. as we have learned from our colleagues in the slavic and east european world, so we can learn from our colleagues working in central asia and they can learn from us. i recently attended the meeting of the association for the study of nationalities held in moscow. russian colleagues showed keen awareness of the importance of the various indigenous peoples living within the russian federation and in contiguous nation states. i hope that my piece about kazakhstan helps make folklorists aware of these people and of the importance of including central asia within our scope. as always, i would like to conclude with my sincere thanks to all who have helped me put this issue together. special thanks to hanna chuchvaha who has been my editorial assistant and kept better track of all of our submissions than i could possibly have done on my own. thanks to our book review editor jason merrill. and thanks to our very capable copy editor, katherine bily. as for peter holloway, our steadfast master of the layout, no words could possibly convey the gratitude that i feel. he has been our technical person much, much longer than i have been editor. he was our webmaster prior to jon perkins. he has worked with the printer and mailed out issue after issue. he recruited members to the organization. anything that needed doing, he did. thank you, peter. and best wishes to our incoming editor, jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby. may your term as editor be as rewarding as mine. boudovskaiafinal covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 51 covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village in transcarpathian ukraine elena boudovskaia georgetown university washington dc, usa abstract in a carpathian village whose tradition i have been studying for a number of years, in pre-covid-19 narratives about illness, an unexpected illness— especially a potentially fatal one—was often viewed as a sign from above. depending on the relation between the speaker and the affected person, it might either cast doubt on the person's behavior or indicate an undeserved tragic stroke of fate. uis paper examines whether that has changed during the covid-19 pandemic. i explore how people in this village talk about the pandemic, and how their narratives fit into, and possibly add to, our understanding of traditional values, supernatural beliefs, and the linguistic expression of these values and beliefs in the village. introduction in march 2020, at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, i frequently talked on the phone with my friends and acquaintances in the village of novoselytsia, (1) where i have conducted research for a number of years. i was concerned about their safety and well-being, as they were about mine. during our conversations, i could not help but notice that the stories they told me appeared to be closely related to the narratives i had heard during our interviews in previous years on the topics of health, disease, and cultural values. i then conducted a number of phone interviews in novoselytsia that shed new light on how the speakers’ understanding of disease fed into the perception of one’s place in the world in novoselytsia’s culture. for this article, i have summarized ten interviews conducted between march and december 2020. in this article, i classify and analyze covid-19 related stories told during interviews as well as their functions in conversation. since the speakers do not want to be identified, i can only say that they are locally born women, all between the ages of 40 and 65. ue narratives, including stories about disease, death, and recovery, usually do not have supernatural elements and are not connected with ritual, so some might argue that they should not be considered folklore. however, since they have patterns that repeat from person to person, are widely used, and apparently reflect a traditional worldview, i consider them to be not only speech genres, but also folklore genres. covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 52 narrative in the culture of novoselytsia narrative is the chief manner in which my interviewees perceive and think about the world. asked directly what they think about a certain issue, they will answer with a story. in their spontaneous speech, one story flows into another. uese stories are not always chunks of text remembered and repeated, although in some cases they might be. a story about death, for example, is constructed again for each death and is repeated thereafter, being re-composed each time extemporaneously, but also becoming more and more committed to memory with each repetition. like memorates, a death story describes an event that happened once in the speaker’s surroundings. as the story is told again and again, it is shaped by the expectations and feedback of listeners and by the shared culture of the participants. uus, a death story also functions like a memorate, serving as a window into the traditional worldview of the culture. similarly, recent covid19 stories have been constructed along culture-specific lines and told in accordance with the speaker’s expectations. although not enough time has elapsed for these narratives to solidify into stories transmitted from memory, covid-19 stories, nevertheless, reveal cultural patterns. ue question i address here is if these patterns have been changed by the unprecedented pandemic and if new patterns have emerged. i examine several types of stories told in connection with covid-19, analyzing their features and usage. first, i discuss narratives about people known to the narrators: stories of disease, death, and recovery. i also touch upon stories of covid-19 transmission in the community. uen i briefly analyze stories of political events, which is a much larger topic needing more analysis; however, i outline a number of important points in my examination of political stories as a narrative genre of village discourse connected to, and contrasted with, personal and vicarious experience stories. in addition, i examine linguistic patterns of talking about the supernatural to investigate culturally defined ways to control fate. finally, i summarize my findings about narrative patterns in covid-19 stories. stories about people’s death and disease: structure, features, and usage many covid-19 stories follow established story types and are structured accordingly. in my previous research, i have examined death stories in novoselytsia as a window into the community’s ideas, values, and identity construction in several crucial areas. in the course of my work on this topic, i have identified three main types of death stories: 1) “good death of a good person” or “death of a relative;” 2) “bad death of a good person” or “death of a neighbor;” and 3) “bad death of a bad person” or “death of a witch.” covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 53 in the first type of story, the deceased is described as a good person and her/his death should be considered a “deservedly good” death. ue components of a good death include: 1) one is conscious and aware of one’s dying; 2) one is not suffering; 3) dying happens over a short period of time, but not instantaneously, e.g., from an accident; 4) after death the deceased looks almost the same as in life. (2) it is also a good thing for a person to die at home, not in a hospital, and to have her/his family present. ue death that includes all these elements promotes envy in others and might be granted to a person who has lived a good life. one can pray for such death in order to receive it. a good person goes to the afterlife almost without changes, as s/he was in life. from beyond the grave, these people can communicate to their families in dreams, passing along the message that they are well, or even helping out their families by instructing them about the proper course of action to take regarding certain matters or by revealing the future. ue second type, “bad death of a good person,” includes stories about fatal accidents, murders, and even some suicides, where the deceased was perceived as innocent, but the unfortunate death requires explanation. uese stories are most often told about neighbors whom the speaker perceives as being generally good or about such deaths in the narrator’s family. some common structural features of such stories include: 1) praise for the character and achievements of the deceased; 2) counterfactual constructions in the subjunctive mood: “if it were not for ..., s/he would have lived longer.” uis subjunctive construction invokes a hypothetical normal world order, highlighting that the deceased could have lived longer had something not interfered with the norm. overall, regarding tone and structure, these narratives resemble abbreviated funeral laments. often the untimely death is explained as having been predestined, but not deserved, or else is not explained at all. if the deceased characters from these stories appear in dreams, they ask that various objects or services be provided to poor neighbors. uese charitable acts are believed to ultimately reach the deceased who made the request. ue third type, “bad death of a bad person” or “death of a witch,” is told by people unrelated to the deceased, especially by those who have something bad to say about her/him. such deaths are described by my interlocutors as a retribution for “great sins,” especially witchcraft. ue elements of such stories are the opposite of what we can see in the “good death of a good person” stories: 1) the death is described as prolonged and painful; 2) after death, the body might be distorted and ugly, showing signs of early decomposition. (3) ue covid-19 death stories i heard in 2020 and early 2021 were constructed along similar lines and have the same structural elements as these death and illness stories do. ue main difference is that none of the stories contain any supernatural components, such as communicating with relatives from beyond the grave. uis fact may be due to my interlocutors being members of a younger generation, with relatively high educations (at least some high school), who construct themselves as not superstitious. it may also be that the stories were not covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 54 yet fully developed; they were generally short and bore other markers of nascence. supernatural elements may be introduced later, when more time has passed after the actual deaths. (4) another important difference is that practically all covid19 death stories reported by my interlocutors fall into the second category: “tragic/bad death of a good person.” even if the speakers strongly disapproved of the deceased’s actions (e.g., when talking about a woman who came home sick from italy, and, before becoming bedridden, visited many in their homes and attended a church service, spreading covid-19 all over her village), the speaker did not add any features of the “bad death” story to the narrative. on the contrary, practically all covid-19 death stories contain praise for the deceased and convey the distinct feeling that the death should not have occurred. uat was the case both when a speaker talked about deaths of people whom she knew, at least by hearsay, as well as about deaths she learned of from mass media. below are two excerpts from conversations, one about the deaths of two people the speaker knew, and the other about the deaths of two people unknown to her: 1) b: ... таі лікарі́ | у [...] в [...] два́ чи три́ лікарі́ уме́рли | на кôві́д сьогốдні | сякі́ то спра́вы | author: kі́льки уме́рло? b: mаіже три́ | два́ або три́ лікарі́ | author: бо́же b: hо | тай такі́ шче | бо у фêйсбу́кôви ба́чила такі́ фа́йні чôлôвікы́ пі́т шизьдіся́т рốків шчê й не было шізьдіся́т тай author: бо́же b: tай шчо́ зроби́ти тай чи ви́дите біда́ тốї біды́ є до́ста тай гото́во | [b: ... and doctors ... in [another district center in the region], where mm lives, two or three doctors died of covid, today, that is how it is. author: how many died? b: maybe three, two or three doctors author: my god! b: yes. and they were also...i saw it on fb: such nice men, less than 60 years old, younger than 60. author: oh my god! b: but what’s to be done? do you see, it is a misfortune [bida] (5), there is a lot of this misfortune, and that's how it is] [informant b, 22 december 2020] 2) mно́го хво́рых та́й | а лю́́ди то́ не | не хốтят признава́ти | у ... | позавчо́ра м чита́ла | у чôрнівця́х | і | ре́ктор поме́р від кôві́ду | і | дека́н | тай такі́ шче фа́йні такі́ бо нее́ | шчобы ду́же старі́ | то́т єде́н мо́же дếзь до́ пядêся́т рốків а дру́гый | но піт шêзьдьêся́т такі́ фа́йні люди | у львốві тако́ш | яки́йсь выклада́ч | політехни́чного інститу́ту | на кові́д помер | є́ ́тốї біды́ а ліка́рства ви́дите нема́ тай шчо́ роби́ти | covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 55 [uere are a lot of sick people, and that’s it, and people don’t want to acknowledge it ... i yester ... i read the day before yesterday, in a paper, that in chernivtsi, a dean and a president [of a university] both died of covid. and they were both such healthy people, and not old, that one was less than 50, the other, near 60, such good people. in lviv, too, a professor of a polytechnic university died of covid. uere is a lot of that misfortune [bidy], and there is no cure, so what’s to be done?] [informant a, 1 november 2020]. ue first speaker praises the dead doctors: they were professional, educated city-dwellers, i.e., belonged to the class that peasants call pany [gentlemen] and consider to be above the peasant class. she also calls them “nice” and notes that they were not old, indicating that it was not time for them to die. “misfortune” is mentioned to help the speaker accept their deaths. ue second speaker uses the same rhetoric when talking about the university administration and faculty she read about (upper-class men, healthy, not old), saying that their deaths were unnatural and tragic. in a similar story about the death of a simple rural woman, the victim is also praised, but since she is neither a man nor an accomplished citydweller, the only thing she is praised for is her (relative) youth: 3) o го́ссподи, чу́єте яка́ прийшла́ ка́ра бо́жа тай гото́во | што людêй як | каза́ли шчо та́ шчо | оди́н чôлôві́к | бы́в дêсь у іта́ліі | та ві́н перехвôрі́в | но тай перені́з_ якốсь так і́хав сюды́ в чêрнівця́х ... | а жі́нку надарова́в три́цьцять сім рốків тай поме́рла | но́ та я́ вам ка́жу | тай молода́ | обы́чно ж то старі́ помира́ют а ту́й тôбі́ на | тай біда́ тай біда́ | [my god! see what a disaster it is [o hósspody, chúiete iaká pryishlá kára bózha, lit.: what kind of god’s punishment has come], that people, as...uey said one man was in italy; he had covid-19 and recovered and came here, somewhere in chernivtsi, and gave it to his wife zhínku nadarováw]; she was 37 years old, and she died. i am telling you ... she was young; usually it is the old people who die, but here ... uat is a misfortune, a misfortune [tai bidá tai bidá]] [informant b, 21 march 2020]. “misfortune,” “no cure,” and “what’s to be done?” are invoked as devices used to accept the reality though still pointing out that it should not be so. covid-19 is the apparent embodiment of destiny that cannot be fought. alongside stories about deaths from covid-19, there are also disease and recovery narratives. i did not research disease stories in the pre-covid-19 period, so that there is no basis for exact comparison. (6) however, the covid-19 disease and recovery stories resemble death stories in their structure; specifically, “bad death of a good person” stories. ue absolute majority of disease and recovery covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 56 stories (i have collected over 60 stories of various lengths) are about a good person who tragically got sick and suffered greatly, sharing similar features with the “bad death” stories even if the person recovers. below is such a story: 4) a бра́т | шо в [place name] | шо в на́с еле́ктриком | та ка́же обы́ бы́в им оди́н дếнь запізни́в ся | я́ быв там бы́в де мо́я ка́же сестра́ | і тêпếрь кае́ не ... но о́де ми каза́в | я́ шче ка́же піврốку | не набе́ру ся си́лы яку́ я ма́в | а ві́н такы́й мо́цный такы́й | як сếсь | [describes the man i know] | но | такы́й здоро́вый чуе́те | ду́же шахмати́ст | ві́н ма́є і нагоро́ды бо ві́н бра́в у́часть | но | а са́м він хо́дит | [describes his work] | но́ тốму ... ро́бит | дочка́ його́ перене́сла ле́хко | жі́нка то́ же са́моє | а ві́н ма́ло не пішốв сь_ сьві́та | но | ка́же вы́дав ім до | до ты́сячу дốларів но | тото́ у нас мно́го такі́ | на ліка́рства | но тай шо́ зроби́ти | шо́ зроби́ти коли чи ви́дите така́ біда́ прийшла́ та | [and her [a woman who died of covid-19] brother in [a village nearby], who works as an electrician, he says, “if i had been [taken to the hospital] one day later, i would be in the same place as my sister” [i.e. he would have died]. and now, he said to me, “it will take me half a year to regain my previous strength.” and he is such a stout guy, healthy, as [another man both the speaker and i know]. such a healthy guy, a chess player, he has awards, he took part in ... and for work, he [the speaker describes his work]. his daughter had an easier covid-19, his wife also, but he “almost went away from this world”. he says, “i gave them up to $1000 ... and there is a lot [of people] like this ... for the medicines.” what can one do, if this disaster has come?] [informant d, 17 october 2020]. ue speaker mentions the man’s achievements: the man has a job; he has an intellectual hobby (chess) in which he is accomplished (he has won competitions); he used to be healthy and stout (which are apparently roughly equivalent for the speaker). nevertheless, he got sick with covid-19 and, unlike his female relatives who had a milder case of the disease, he suffered both bodily (it will take him a long time to recover his previous health) and financially ($1000 is a lot of money; for comparison, a teacher’s monthly salary is around $100). again, the feeling is that the man was undeservedly hard hit by fate. ue speaker again blames the misfortune/disaster [bidá], a euphemism for covid-19. uere is an additional wrinkle in the man’s misfortune as well: a long recovery is required for him to be fit enough to do his job. in the culture of novoselytsia, money earned on a job is not something vital (an entire family can live off their land and side earnings, such as gathering and selling berries in the summer), but earnings from one’s job contribute to the family’s welfare; while not earning drains family resources. a man who is not fit to do his job is a disgrace to himself; depleting the family budget and then still not being able to work adds covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 57 insult to injury. uis man then has been dealt an additional blow to his reputation. but, as the narrator says, there is little recourse: “what can one do if this disaster has come?” ue “bad disease of a good person” stories similar to this one that lament people’s undeserved misfortunes constitute an absolute majority of disease narratives. i heard just one story of the type “bad disease of a bad person.” its main character was a man who had divorced the speaker’s cousin after a long marriage and thereafter was considered an enemy of the entire family. he was said to have visited his old mother for christmas, after which they both came down with covid-19. ue speaker summarized: “he must have been running around [vsiúdŷ shástaw], so he brought his mother the infection.” ue verb she chose to use [shástaty] could mean “walk, run, prowl around, skirr” or “be promiscuous.” apparently, the speaker conceives of the man’s promiscuity as an essential trait of his character and sees covid-19 as retribution for his misbehavior. while only one of this type was documented, the stories where a good person suffered undeservedly were ubiquitous. uey were told about relatives, fellow villagers, people living elsewhere in the region about whom the speaker heard from others, and about people from mass media sources. ue pervasiveness of this story type leads to three comments about their social function. ue first is that, by default, when speaking about matters of life and death, a person is considered to be in the “good” (or “our”) group until proven otherwise. even if a narrator holds minor grudges against a fellow villager, if they die or get seriously ill, survivors owe them a eulogy. ue second comment is that the same treatment extends by default to the people the speaker has no personal knowledge of. when talking of people in other contexts, the first thing mentioned is always whether they are “from our village” vs. “not from our village,” with the further distinctions between “our people” and “poles” (i.e., people from the north of the carpathian ridge) or between “from here” and “from ukraine.” however, all these distinctions become irrelevant when talking about death and disease. it is possible that speaking ill of a dead person incurs reputational damage for being hostile to the point of not following societal rules or invites retaliation by the spirits of the deceased, but this hypothesis requires additional research to determine which factor is more likely in this context. uirdly, the only exception attested concerned the person who harmed the speaker’s family. below we will see in more detail how the family is at the center of values in novoselytsia, but this brief story gives us a glimpse of the family-centered worldview. stories of spreading and contracting infection in addition to stories of death, disease, and recovery, there arose a new type of narrative that probably was not in existence before covid-19: stories of spreading and contracting infection. in some of these stories, speakers talk about covid-19 spreading after people came together for church, memorial services at home, weddings, etc. usually, it is not known who the infected person was at the covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 58 gathering. speakers bemoan a number of people getting sick and conclude that it is dangerous to go to gatherings during these times. below is an example: 5) a: ... коли́ пі́сьля кири́л та яко́є нêшча́сьця бы́ло кі́лько тôді́ бы́ло хво́рых | та хто́ дужы́й та | перебôрốв вдо́ма | то гôрячкы́ лікова́ли но а хто́ слабы́й та | та і в у́жгôрôді лежа́ли бага́ті ї́х і в міжгі́рі пốвно бы́ло і на́ші ... author: tі́ шо приі́хали на кири́ла вони́ | хтốсь з ни́х прині́с? a: xто́ | ... хтốсь бы́в такый нôсіє́м́ тай | надарова́в тай всьо́ |... [name] ...| сếї [name] | я́к вам ка́ти | сестры́ дôчка́ | бы́ли сьме на кла́дбышчі бо у на́с сегốдьні дêнь па́мняті | а мы́ пішли́ поза́вчôра | у чêтвếрь та сьме там | диви́ли ся пôря́док тадь мы́ так ча́с від ча́су ідемо́ | та чу́єте та каза́ла за сво́го ба́тька в нếї ба́тько уже́ сімдêся́т пя́ть рốків мае́ | мо́же і бі́льше | тай ка́же | чи йôму́ треа́ бы́ло іти́ тогды́ | на кьири́ла а да́льше пішốв | дô [name] савты́рю чита́ти тай | та до́бре шчо ско́ро | потра́пив в ліка́рню та врятува́ли го | так | мі́х ка́же | уже́ та́м быв бы тай таке́ шчо | як ра́з нам там каза́ла | [a: after st. cyril, (7) there was such a misfortune, so many sick people. ue people who were stronger, they got better at home, cured these fevers, but those who were weaker ... and in uzhhorod, there were a lot of them [in the hospital] and in mizhhir’ia, a lot of them author: among those who came for st. cyril’s, someone brought [the infection]? a: who … there was one carrier, maybe, who infected others, and that was that. uis [name of a woman], how can i tell you, her sister’s daughter, we were together in the cemetery, because today we have a day of remembrance, and we went the day before yesterday, on uursday, cleaning up there, we do it from time to time. and you know, she told us about her father, her father is 75 years old or older, and she said, “did he really need to go to church on st. cyril’s day, and then he went to [name]’s to read the psalter [at a memorial service] and ... it’s good that he was rushed to the hospital soon, so they helped him; otherwise, he could have been there already.” she told us there [in the cemetery]] [informant a, 1 november 2020]. both events, the church service on st. cyril’s day and the memorial service in someone’s home, are important events in everyday life. st. cyril’s day is considered to be the feast day of the church in novoselytsia; strangely, the church is dedicated to st. michael, and michaelmas (8) is also celebrated as the church’s covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 59 feast day, but st. cyril’s is much more important to the congregation. on st. cyril’s, all natives living elsewhere try to come to novoselytsia. uey attend the church service, maybe go to the fair that takes place next to the church, and then visit their relatives, feasting and exchanging gifts. coming to the village for st. cyril’s is a sign of belonging to the community. ue second event mentioned in the narrative, the memorial service where several people read the psalter and have a meal, is a necessary part of death rituals; it is done while the body is still in the house, then several more times at larger and larger intervals (ninth day, fortieth day, and one year after the death). it is important for the family of the deceased and a sign of respect for the readers who are invited to participate. ue old man apparently could not miss any of these important occasions despite the risk. ue story of his getting covid-19 at one of these events is constructed along the lines of the popular “getting into danger/having an accident” story pattern in novoselytsia. uat story type itself is reminiscent of a simplified version of propp’s pattern for the magic tale. ue “accident story” includes: a description of the circumstances; maybe a premonition or a warning, overt or implied; an account of how the person did not heed the warning, perhaps unwittingly; and what happened as a result. pre-pandemic, i recorded a large number of such stories. (9) ue story about the old man getting infected has all the elements of an “accident story:” the explanation of the circumstances and the warning (in his daughter’s words, in hindsight), how he went to both places, and how he narrowly escaped death as a result. other stories about one person, or many people at once, getting infected also contain these elements and are apparently also based on the “accident story” pattern. however, sometimes in the “getting infected” stories, the spreader is known, as in the story below: 6) i у нас | у ірша́ві | жі́нка | захвôрі́ла бы́ла два́ дні́ чи три́ но вы́явили | а вона́ всю́́ды ша́стала | і службы́ | і савтырі́ чита́ла | тай поме́рла сьогôдьні в ра́ньці | а ї сы́н зав пôлікліникôв в ірша́ві це | та то́же го надарова́ла | надарова́ла го чу́єте | но го́ре сяко́є тай гото́во | [here too, in irshava, a woman got sick, [she was sick for] two or three days, and they figured it out; and they said she had gone everywhere, to services, read psalter, and died this morning, and her son is head of the clinic in irshava, so she infected [nadarovа́la] him as well, she infected him. uat is a misfortune, and that is it]. [informant c, 6 april 2020]. another story concerns the speaker’s family: 7) ... там | ті́тка і зя́ть і вну́ка і дочка́ | а ... тако́є | то́ | вона́ | сêсь шчо вôдіе́м | лі́карьку во́зит у [name of the village] | то лі́карька бы́ла хво́ра тай то́же не бессốвісна | она́ на нога́х переноси́ла | указа́ло covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 60 їпозити́вноє | а ôна́ да́ле ходи́ла | ві́н ї вози́в | но тай надарова́ла го | та дару́є вам тото́ | [... there [in the neighboring village] [the speaker’s] aunt, and brother-inlaw, and [his] granddaughter, and daughter, [everybody is sick], and [what happened is that] she ... this guy [the speaker’s brother-in-law] who is a driver, he drives a [female] doctor in [name of the village], this doctor was sick – isn’t she without conscience? she was sick and continued working, her test was positive, and she kept going around, he was driving her, so she infected him, you can get infected this way] [informant a, 13 july 2020]. ue speaker directly blames the doctor who infected her cousin’s family, and, later in the narrative, uses some strong words to describe her. however, other people told similar stories from a different perspective, namely about their relatives going to work when sick or after not checking their status when they had a sick person in the house. “uey would have quarantined her for two weeks,” one person stated in another story, “and who would work in the meantime?” [informant d, midmarch 2021, exact date unknown]. uese stories dovetail with the story of the old man in the village who disregarded the danger and went to church and the psalter service, as well as with another story about a woman in irshava who spread the disease at church and a memorial service. one might wonder why these people would take this risk. as i mentioned above, there are a number of values that are important for identity construction in the village. uese values are intrinsic, and people who comply with them are entitled to feel good about themselves, whatever else happens in their lives. ue main goal in one’s life is to ensure that one’s household—defined as one’s house and the people in it—continues to exist and thrive. if the house remains empty, it is a disgrace and a disaster. uerefore, for example, if a couple has no children, they adopt a child and make sure that, upon becoming an adult, s/he brings a spouse into the house, continues to work on the land, and leaves progeny who will continue to live in the house. taking care of one’s household and family is extremely important. a person who does not contribute, with their work or earnings, becomes a burden on their household, and it is a disgrace for them. money is considered more prestigious than the work of one’s hands, so two weeks in quarantine without salary is insulting, even if the family can afford it. another value that is extremely important for a person’s identity is their reputation in the community. reputation is hard earned in a village where everyone knows each other. being an avid church-goer and a reader at psalter services boost one’s reputation, and one does not reject those opportunities lightly, even in the presence of covid-19. in addition, as the pandemic continued, it became clear that not everyone who contracted covid-19 would die of it. contracting the virus and the severity of the cases are circumstances meted out randomly. even good people get sick covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 61 and die. uere is nothing to be done, as different speakers continually mentioned, so that apparently one should not abandon normal activities that are important for survival and self-esteem, just because chances are higher than usual of getting sick and maybe dying or contracting the disease and passing it on. if someone passes on covid-19 to their brother-in-law, they would be angry; if their old father recklessly goes about his business and gets infected, they might be annoyed as well; but if someone in your family continues working while sick or taking care of a sick family member, it is a normal thing; who would act any differently? in addition, death is not considered bad in and of itself. when life is organized around the survival of the family in its house, not around an individual’s pursuit of happiness, then a person of any age feels good while s/he contributes to the family’s wealth and bad if s/he does not. as a result, the elderly keep cows and pigs and do not listen to their children’s advice to stop working so hard. uey feel that they are providing for the family, because children who live in the city do not have to buy milk and meat, which are expensive. for this reason, an old and disabled person should feel that he depletes the family’s resources and by all rights should be ashamed. death would be a blessing for such a person, because he will not be a burden to his family; old and frail people often express this opinion about themselves, sincerely lamenting that they have been living too long. during the covid-19 pandemic, many speakers have calmly summed up stories of death and disease: “i am old already. it will be okay for me to die; it is my children that i worry about because they need to raise and marry off their children.” uat is, after one’s children are married off, one’s purpose in life is achieved. at that point, death does not seem bleak and may be even attractive and timely when compared to being unable to care for oneself and requiring a lot of work, because that would harm the family’s welfare. on the other hand, a multi-generational house—with children, adults, and grandparents—where everyone, including the old, can contribute to the family’s well-being, is a desirable ideal; people feel deeply troubled when something goes awry and this model cannot be implemented. during my research, i heard one story a number of times about a woman who died after contracting the virus at her son’s wedding. leaving aside the fact that this wedding had been a superspreader event, the fact that apparently fascinated and scared speakers was that a few years earlier, the woman’s husband had died a week or so after their daughter’s wedding. below is one rendition of the story: 8) tа на тốму вêсі́лі всі́ підхопи́ли | молодо́го ма́ти | уме́рла | пі́сьля то́го у у | як | пі́сьля вêсі́ля рі́вно у два́ ты́жні | она́ до́ма | ты́ждêнь бы́ла | півтора́ | ішчи́ походи́ла по чốрні я́годы знае́те у вêрьху́ полно́ | яфи́ны ка́жуть | гôря́чку ма́ла пи́ла які́сь табле́ткы то коло [name] ôна жи́є та́м де | вы́ у [name] бы́ли | а від [name] та́м | чу́ть чу́ть | піти́ | та́м де [name's] та́то | рôзуміе́те | вы́ коли́сь бы́ли там чу́ть чу́ть | а коли́ ї приве́зли | тôді́ коли́ [name] [name] пізні́ше підхопи́ла | та | [name] шче мо́ж было урятува́ти | а ôна́ уже задыха́ла ся два́ дні | чи covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 62 три́ пожи́ла тай поме́рла | пйядêся́т три́ ро́ки | но | та де́ не шко́да го́ссподи | то та́к бốляче | коли́ | дôчку́ віддава́ла дếсь рốків тôму́ три́ чоты́ри | но тать чôлôві́к ї напи́в ся та уме́р | через ты́ждêнь | а ôна́ | сы́на жени́ла то .... | но | і тêпếрь ха́ту замкну́ли | бо сы́н шо жени́в ся сêй | шо у ... сусі́дів брав ді́вчину та | ôни́ у чếхіі роби́ли тай пôі́хали в че́хію | а ха́ту закры́ли | а | шче бы́ла ба́ба | рôзуміе́те | його ма́мы ма́ти | тай забра́ла ї | дру́га дочка́ в [name] райо́н | [... everyone got it [covid-19] at that wedding. ue groom’s mother died after that, after ... exactly two weeks after the wedding. she was home for one and a half weeks. she even went to gather blueberries, there are a lot of them in the mountains, you know, they are called iáfynŷ. she had a fever; she took some pills—she lives (10) not far from tt [at the other end of the village from the narrator], a little towards tt’s father’s place, you have been there. she was taken to the hospital at the same time as tt, but tt got it [covid-19] later, so she could be helped, and this woman was already short of breath. she lived two or three days and died. 53 years old. isn’t it a pity, my god! it’s so painful ... [ta dé ne shkóda hósspody | to ták bốliache]. when she was marrying off her daughter, about three or four years ago, her husband got drunk and died a week later, and [now] she was marrying her son off, and [she died two weeks later]. and [their] house is locked up now. her son married a girl from our neighbors’ house; they worked in the czech republic, so they went back there, and the house is locked. uere was also a grandma, his [the groom’s] mother’s mother; another daughter took her to her house in [name of] district] [informant d, 17 october 2020]. uis is a sad story (“isn’t it a pity ... it is so painful”) not only because the woman died having contracted the disease at her son’s wedding, but because her house, instead of flourishing, stood empty. her daughter’s departure from home after getting married was expected and normal, but right aftewards, the woman’s husband died, initiating a downward spiral for their household. ue son, according to traditional rules, should have brought a daughter-in-law into his mother’s house, but, because she died soon after the wedding, the newlyweds returned to the czech republic. even the old grandmother was taken to another daughter’s house in a different district of transcarpathia. what should have been family victories led rapidly to the household’s destruction: as the narrator comments, ta dé ne shkóda hósspody [isn’t it a pity, my god]. stories about politics besides stories about personal and vicarious experiences with covid-19, speakers frequently and thoroughly discussed government measures directed toward the pandemic. (11) ue main theme in these stories could be summed up covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 63 in the phrase “our country is the worst.” some of these stories were structured as comparisons between the situation and policies in ukraine and those in other countries—information speakers gleaned from friends living in those countries or from the media. uough the objective situation in ukraine might be better than in other countries (“uey say in ukraine there are 42 [cases], seven are suspected, and in italy, it is a disaster [bidá], one friend from dolyna called me and said they had 700 or 800 cases [in italy],” [informant b, 21 march 2020]), ukrainian policies are always portrayed as bad by comparison to other countries. one example of practices that are considered better elsewhere is mask wearing: “a friend in the czech republic said the authorities there were strict about masks, and here in ukraine, people don’t believe in covid-19 and don’t wear masks” [informant a, 13 july 2020]. on other occasions, there was no comparison; the speaker would simply retell what s/he found out about the current situation in ukraine and would vehemently explain why it was so terrible. sometimes speakers would get so emotional that i would rapidly change the topic, frankly scared to see them in such distress. interestingly, when the situation with covid-19 would deteriorate in another country, or when measures taken were less than laudable, speakers would not blame that country’s authorities at all, or not as severely or emotionally as they would blame ukrainian authorities. ue same woman who reported her friend’s words about wearing masks in the czech republic said in an interview a couple of months later: 9) d: ... шчôсь у чếхіі бага́то хво́рых | вчо́ра ми звони́ла | тай ся́к | author: y чếхіі я́ ти́ж чу́ла шо ду́же бага́то тêпếрь [...] d: но тêпếрь | та ка́же та́к ся со ... | вро́де і сокоти́ли ся ка́же чи | куды́ в метро́ чи куды́ всю́́ды в ма́сках но і та́к тото́ ві́ткысь ся рôспôвсюдило тай біда́ | [d: for some reason, there are a lot of cases in the czech republic. she [a friend] called me yesterday. author: i also heard that in the czech republic there is a lot [of cases] now d: yes, now ... she said they apparently took care of themselves; in the subway, and everywhere, everybody was wearing masks, but for some reason it [covid-19] got widespread, and that is a misfortune [tai bidá] [informant d, 17 october 2020]. later, when restaurants were closed in the czech republic, and the woman who told the speaker about obligatory mask wearing lost her job as a result, the speaker covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 64 did not criticize czech authorities; she only described her friend’s job situation in detail [informant c, 18 october 2020]. earlier, in march, when ukrainians were sent home from other european countries, according to the same speaker, she described the actions of these countries’ authorities as brusque and inconsiderate, but did not use accusatory language: 10) ... тото́ ци ви́дите яка́ прийшла́ пôслі́дниця | така́ прийшла́ шо лю́́ди як му́хы мру́т тай всьо́ тай | а дô на́с ї́дуть та всьо́ бы́ло зарôбітьча́ни | іс украї́ны | пốльшча іта́лія іспа́нія | тêпếрь то всьо́ ві́тты | всьо́ позакрыва́ли там каранти́н | і выту́рюют ги дурны́х | здôрốві чи хвốрі | іді́т сôбі́ | та знае́те а у на́с і тêсьтів ниє́ ́| ниє́ ́чи́м тото́ ... [do you see what times have come, the end times [tsy vídyte iaká pryishlá pôslídnytsa]? so that people die like flies. (12) and everyone comes here [back home to ukraine]. uere were a lot of people from ukraine who worked in poland, italy, spain, and now everything is closed there, the quarantine, and they are sent out like stupid ones, whether they are sick or healthy, just, “you go.” and we don’t even have tests, nothing to do that with ...] [informant b, 21 march 2020]. sometimes the situation in another country was used only as a springboard and was not even commented on; the speaker immediately switched focus to ukraine and blamed everything on ukrainian authorities, which sometimes resulted in a series of loosely connected accusations: 11) b: xворо́ба ця не | не пра́вит нико́го се́ така́ хворо́ба | а у ва́с ішчи́ є́ ́в аме́риці то́же? author: y на́с є бага́то | бага́то шчи́ є́ ́ b: я чу́ю по телеві́зорі і стати́стику ка́жут шчо шчи є́ ́| но і в на́с | чи то́ і наспра́вді є́ ́| чи то́т | іс ци́ми вы́борами | они́ | знае́те не дозво́лили | дôнếцькі луга́нські о́бласьці на́віть тоты́ шо не піткôнтрốльні | обы́ не гôлôсува́ли бо та́м не піттри́муют сêсю́́ на́шу | нôву́ вла́ду но | і хто́ іх зна́є чи́ ôни́ шчôсь | шо́сь мудру́ють_ іс си́м | кôві́дом шчо | вели́ка бу́де стати́стика шчо мно́го хво́рых | шчо | дêсь зо́на там | черво́на тай | та́м не бду́дь_ голосова́ти чи шчо́ вони́ хốтят | не мо́жеме зна́ти тай гото́во шчôсь то | до добра́ не́ йде | до добра́ не йде́ а краду́ть краду́ть я́ се ма́й серджу́ на тôму шчо | чôму́ роскрада́ють но чôму́ | та мы́ бага́ті бы́ли | у дêянốстôму рốці дêяно́сто пếршôму на пя́тôму а тêпếрь ісьме чốрт зна́є на якốму мі́сьці уже́ | і то́ всьо́ рôзікра́ли і ко́жный краде́ і ко́жный бере́ | хто́ при вла́ді та нажи́вать_ ся тай | covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 65 [b: uis is a disease that doesn’t make anyone better. is there covid-19 in america? author: yes, still a lot b: i’ve heard on television, and the statistics, that there is still ... and in ukraine too, i don't know if it is true or not, with these elections, you know, they didn’t allow, in donetsk and luhansk oblast’, even the districts that are under ukraine, they weren't allowed to vote, because they don’t support our new authorities. who knows what they are doing there, something fishy with this covid, so that there will be a lot of cases, many sick people, so there will be a red zone there and they won’t vote, or there is something else they [the authorities] want, we cannot know that, and that is it. uere won’t be any good out of it, there won’t. and they [the authorities] steal a lot. uat angers me the most, why are they stealing, why? in 1990 or 1991, we were in the fifth place, that is, we had the fifth largest economy—among the republics of the ussr? in the world? and now devil only knows in which place we are. everything has been stolen, and everyone steals, everyone takes, anyone who has any power, they line their pockets, and that is it] [informant b, 11 september 2020]. such accusations often literally repeat messages from anti-ukrainian and prorussian television channels. many speakers watch these channels, e.g., 1+1 and newsone, whose agenda is shaped by their owners, the oligarchs igor’ kolomoisky (1+1) and viktor medvedchuk (newsone). (13) medvedchuk is known in ukrainian media and blogs as kum putina “the man whose daughter’s godfather is putin.” (14) ue agenda and tone of ukrainian television merit additional research, particularly the prevalence of messages that foster negativity, discriminatory attitudes toward women and minorities, general disrespect for personalities, the rule of law, and the truth in general. uese messages might serve the worst instincts of the population, but they also may be designed to undermine participation in civil society and democratic procedures. (15) uese issues did not arise during covid-19 in particular. similar messages have played on ukrainian television for a number of years. uey fell on the fertile soil of post-soviet nostalgia, a topic that is worthy of further research as well. my previous interviews have revealed that people view the late soviet period of the 1970s–1980s as a time of prosperity that finally came after the poverty and suffering of the pre-war times and collective farm era, that is, their entire lives before that time. as one woman told me with pride about the 1980s, “even mugs and bed sheets could be bought in a store, at times” [personal communication]. collective farms and factories of that time had provided poorly paid, but stable jobs. ue subsequent economic hardship of perestroika and the closing of collective farms and factories affected people’s well-being and their self-image. covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 66 some organized quickly and went abroad to work in construction (men) or as caregivers (women) and sent money home. others, however, did not dare to take this risk and held onto their jobs, especially if the jobs had once been well-paid and prestigious (teachers, doctors, or workers in the remaining factories). as a result, these people eventually became much worse off than people without an education or previous experience who were working abroad and sending plenty of money home, and their pride suffered greatly. nostalgia for the seemingly idyllic soviet times when everyone had a job and was happy (17) was combined with a feeling of learned political helplessness apparently widespread also in the soviet and post-soviet discourses of various other countries. (16) ue attitude, pervasive in my interlocutors’ narratives, is that everyone in a position of authority is a crook and a thief, that this is how the world works, and that they, the people, cannot do anything since they are simple peasants (or worse still, peasant women) who do not understand politics. in the interpretation of numerous postsoviet difficulties, these three components: the feeling of political helplessness, soviet nostalgia, and media presenting contemporary life as a perpetual and unavoidable disaster, came together into a well-established discourse “ukraine is the worst country ever.” (18) uerefore, predictably, a continuation of this discourse during covid-19 was “ukraine is the worst country at fighting covid-19.” in general, there is not much structure in discourse about ukraine being the worst country; its episodes are merely stacked one upon the other but are not arranged in any specific order. ue covid-19 episodes also became incorporated and work as well as complaints about high gas prices or low salaries. uis discourse seems to be self-perpetuating: once a speaker gets into this mode, s/he continues adding new episodes, becoming more and more emotional at each step. i could never listen to it at length because the speakers rapidly grew markedly upset, prompting me to switch the topic. i still do not have a good explanation about the function served by this discourse. however, atlani-duault et al. [2015] offer one possible approach in their study of conspiracy theories on frankophone internet in relation to the h1n1 pandemic. uey state that expressing ideas about global conspiracies online bestows a comforting sense of legitimacy and gives both authors and their readers the impression of being able to transgress certain social taboos and thus escape from their feelings of impotence. in addition, the collective search for guilty parties creates a link among those who might once have nursed their fears and suspicions in isolation. [atlani-duault et al. 2015: 56] since discourse in novoselytsia features similar topics, including the sense of political impotence (“they are in power, and we, what can we do?”) as well as the “search for guilty parties” that usually follows invectives on television, the covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 67 “ukraine is the worst” discourse might provide speakers the desirable feeling of political importance and of “being in the know.” uere is one theme in the “ukraine is the worst” discourse, however, that seems to be more closely connected with the local value system. ue episodes used in this discourse are typically descriptions of policies, past and present, and not stories about specific people. however, there is one mythologeme promoted on television that elicits personal responses: that ukraine’s very existence is endangered because people emigrate. it resonates because many people have younger relatives—children, nephews, nieces, and grandchildren—working abroad. uus, after stating, e.g., that doctors are overworked and underpaid here in ukraine, which is especially unfair during covid-19, and that doctors have emigrated to other countries, speakers usually recall stories of their own relatives who have gone abroad and done well. below is an example that includes and continues excerpt 1: 12) b: ... таі лікарі́ | у [name] в [name of a town] два́ чи три́ лікарі́ уме́рли | на кôві́д сьогốдні | сакі́ то спра́вы | author: kі́лько уме́рло? b: mаіже три́ | два́ або три́ лікарі́ | author: бо́же b: но | тай такі́ шче | бо у фêйсбу́кôви ба́чила такі́ фа́йні чôлôвікы́ пі́т шизьдіся́т рốків шчê й не было шіздіся́т тай author: бо́же b: тай шчо́ зроби́ти тай чи ви́дите біда́ тốї біды́ є до́ста тай гото́во | а ту́йкы чуе́те | пе́рше по р ... телеві́зôру каза́ли та ôни́ і та́к бре́шут шчо сêрếдня зарпла́та лі́каря у на́с у краї́ні | дếвять ты́сяч | тêпếрь по | тêлêві́зôру лиш каза́ли я́ кау́ най не | бре́шут бо о́де у міжгірью у [name] та | ші́сь с полови́нôв сім | та хôть хо́че обы ма́ла бі́льше | та бере́ нічні́ | ро́бит на ты́жню пô дві́ три но́чи | уяви́ть сôбі́ лиша́й діти́ну лиша́й чôлôві́ка | та роби́ | ... | а у ни́х у ты́х слу́гів нарốдів | нарốду шо ка́жут | тай | у усьы́х ішчê ім тêпếрь підня́ли | прôкуро́рам судя́м | ты́м слуга́м всьы́м пôпіднима́ли по над дếсять ты́сяч по над два́цьцять | а і та́к ма́ли по со́рок пядêся́т ты́сяч | а шчê вся́кый бі́знес но тай шчо́ | у на́с ся не ці́нит | рốзум абсôлю́́тно ни | ни ôсві́та ни медици́на | ни наукốві ни́ч на нау́ку то́же не виділя́ют тай | шо́ бдут розрôбля́ти кêть | нема́ іс чи́м за́раз вы́жити | тай сякі́ то спра́вы | цу́раві діла́ | ни́чо зроби́ти як є́ ́та є́ ́| та хто мо́же та ї́де не всі́ мốжут і вы́їхати бо коли́ там | ... коли́ сьте ба́чили мо́же | у вêчếрі | така́ є covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 68 переда́ча | та та́м | оди́н якы́йсь є бізнесме́н охрі́менко такы́й борода́тый | тай ка́же | но | до́бре | ... най си зарôбля́ют | ... до́бре він ма́є бі́знес | мо́ж жи́ти | но а | не ко́жный мо́же пôі́хати | чи діти́на мала́ а як батькі́в нема́ чи батькі́ хвốрі чи шчо́ | но то я́к вы́їхати | но́ тай | не ко́жный мо́же так пôі́хати обы там плати́ли | особли́во пốльшча че́хія слова́кія тêпêрь ду́же мно́го | на́ші іду́т ї́дут | із на́шого села́ уже там | і кварти́ру купи́ли і вы́селили ся ві́дсі тай всьо́ [...]. in [name of a village] ... | [name of a village] [female name] то́же чôлôві́к і ôна́ у слова́кіі | [name] до́чка | купи́ли там ха́ту тай там жи́ют сôбі́ но тай | зарпла́та | ві́н па́ру мі́сяц ... рốків пороби́в два́ чи три́ маши́ну | таку́ | дôрôгу́ | купи́в ... я́ зна́ю яку́ | япốньську чи яку́ | но тай бốгу дя́ковати но або́ | усі́ так не мốжуть пôі́хати | ... хтốсь ся і ту́й мае́ лиши́ти [b: ... and doctors ... in [another district center in the region], where mm lives, two or three doctors died of covid, today, that is how it is. author: how many died? b: maybe three, two or three doctors author: oh my god! b: yes. and they were also ... i saw it on facebook: such nice men, less than 60 years old, younger than 60. author: oh my god! b: but what’s to be done? do you see, it is a misfortune, there is a lot of this misfortune, and that’s how it is. and here, on the r ... on television they said that a mean salary for doctors here was 9k hrn [about $320 per month]. right now, they said it on television. i say, let them not lie, here in mizhhir’ia, [a doctor the speaker knows] has 6.5 or 7k; and if she wants to have more, she works nights, two or three nights a week, just imagine—she should abandon the kid and the husband, and go work ... and these servants of the people [the president’s party], they all raised salaries for themselves: prosecutors, judges, all these “servants”, 10k, 20k, and they did have 40k or 50k before and also owned businesses. smartness is not valued at all here, neither education, nor medicine nor science, no money is given to science, what will they [doctors and scientists] develop if they have nothing to live on? bad things [are happening]. who can go, they go, but not all can leave because if ... maybe you watched a show [on television], one oxrimenko, such a bearded guy, said there “let them go and earn”. it is good for him, he has covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 69 a business, but some have a little child, and they have no parents [to babysit their child] or their parents are sick. how would they go? not everyone can go and earn. poland, the czech republic, slovakia; many people from our village are there, some bought apartments and left permanently from here [...]. in [name of a village], [a niece]’s daughter is in slovakia with her husband; they bought a house and they live there, and the salary...he worked for a couple of mon ... years and bought himself an expensive car, japanese or something, i don’t know exactly. uank god for that [no tai bốhu diákovaty], but not everybody can go; someone needs to stay here] [informant b, 22 december 2020]. just after the story about doctors’ travails, the speaker offers a litany about the corruption of the president’s party and how it disregards the interests of citizens and the state. uen the speaker switches from the state’s perspective to the people’s perspective and quotes a television show that apparently resonates with her personal experience. she does not disagree that going abroad temporarily to earn money is generally a good thing, but not everyone can arrange her/his life to make it happen. uen it turns out that many people from the speaker’s village are working abroad or permanently live there, including her own niece’s daughter and son-in-law. uis shift of perspective, from country to village and then to family also changes the assessment of the fact that people go abroad to work and live. from that perspective, it is constructed not as a disaster for the state, but as a success (“uank god”) for the speaker’s extended family. ue subsequent phrase “not everybody can go” sounds almost like a regret that the speaker’s own children and grandchildren could not also go abroad to make their fortune as her niece’s daughter had. uis story also demonstrates the clash between two sets of village values reflected in the two discourses. on one hand, according to the traditional worldview, when people move out of the village, it is bad, because they leave their houses empty, effectively destroying the center of the village value system, the household. uat might explain why speakers subscribe to the television maxim that soon ukraine will be uninhabited; they see (and fear) the depopulation of their village, and it is easy to accept that the same is happening across the country. on the other hand, the success of their family is of paramount importance, so that going abroad is understandable and acceptable. it is noteworthy that the two discourses, one about the country’s supposed ruin, and the other about family success, are equally attractive. people will talk at length about either topic. uerefore, in the discourse about politics, we see that covid-19 stories, like other stories of hardship, are used to prove a point, mostly in the “our country is the worst” discourse pattern. uis discourse pattern has been around for decades, and covid-19 stories, same as other stories of collective misfortune, fit well into the theme. however, the apocalyptic doom and gloom of this discourse can be mitigated by switching from a political perspective to personal perspectives about family values. covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 70 “ue end times have come”: ue supernatural in covid-19 stories do covid-19 narratives invoke apocalyptic connotations outside of political discourse? i should reiterate that the women interviewed for this article do not belong to the generation that offers supernatural explanations for the majority of events in the world around them. interviewees were reluctant to attribute supernatural causes for current events or their implications. however, a number of allusions to the supernatural, including descriptions of covid-19 times as the end times, euphemistic constructions to describe death, and appeals to supernatural forces, did occur in the language of the stories. ue “end times” were mentioned more commonly at the beginning of the pandemic, in march and april, when general confusion, fear, and uncertainty were the prevailing moods both in the u.s. and in novoselytsia. below is an example of this expression in a narrative that was partially cited above in excerpt 10: 13) b: ... тай сякі́ спра́вы | но́ та кажі́ть най вам шôсь ка́жу по́кы шчê жи́ю author: oй бо́же, мій не кажі́ть так b: a тото́ | лье́на то ни́хто не знае́ до́кі | дốкі живе́ тай всьо́ тото́ ци ви́дите яка́ прийшла́ пôслі́дниця | така́ прийшла́ шо лю́́де як му́хы мру́т тай всьо́ тай | а дô на́с ї́дуть та всьо́ бы́ло зарôбітьча́ни | іс украї́ны | пốльшча іта́лія іспа́нія | тêпếрь то всьо́ ві́тты | всьо́ позакрыва́ли там каранти́н | і выту́рюют ги дурны́х | здôрốві чи хвốрі | іді́т сôбі́ | та знае́те а у на́с і тêсьтів ниє́ ́ | ниє́ ́чи́м тото́...та дếсь каза́в ми пе́рше [name] шчо | аж ї́м у [name of town] да́ли два́цьціть пя́ть тếсьтів но тай шчо́ | тай сяко́є | такі́ то бі́ды | а і́ншого то́же ниє́ ́ ліка́рства тай | здôрốві ... выжива́ти та́й | кажі́т ми мо́же на́й вам ішче́ да́шчо ка́жу [b: ... so ask me. i’ll tell you something while i still live. author: my god, don’t say that! b: uat is, lena, no one knows how long they are going to live. do you see what came? ue end times have come. so that people die like flies [tsy vídyte iaká pryishlá pôslídnytsia | taká priishlá. shcho liúde iak múkhŷ mrut tai wsë tai]. and everyone comes here [back home to ukraine]. uere were a lot of people from ukraine who worked in poland, italy, spain, and now everything is closed there, the quarantine, and they are sent out like stupid ones, whether they are sick or healthy, just, “you go.” and we don’t even have tests, nothing to do that with ... and we don’t have tests, nothing, [a doctor from a different town] told covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 71 me that they got 25 tests in [that town]. uese are the misfortunes, and there are no drugs either. ue healthy will survive, and ... okay, ask me, let me tell you whatever else you need to know] [informant b, 21 march 2020]. ue speaker begins her narrative half-jokingly (“while i still live”), but then expresses her concerns: there were no drugs against covid-19, not enough tests, and many people were coming back to ukraine from other countries, often infected with covid-19. all that taken together indicated a significant threat, the likes of which she might not have encountered before. however, her tone during this discussion was calm; she sounded concerned but not scared. she was serious about the perspective that people were dying “like flies” and that she and her family members might die too. i cannot assess whether she actually believed that it was the end of the world, but the choice of the word pôslídnytsia was suggestive of a dire situation. an explanation about the connection between a word and a belief is in order. during my previous fieldwork in transcarpathian villages, i noticed several stages of deterioration of supernatural beliefs. a belief is in its most viable form when a speaker can recognize it by a name or a key expression, explain what it involves, and tell a story (e.g., vôwkún “werewolf” produces an explanation that it is a man who can turn into a wolf, and a werewolf story; the expression hrốshi po hórakh hôriat“money burns in the mountains” elicits an explanation and a story about robbers’ hidden treasures). ue first stage of deterioration is when a speaker cannot tell a story but recognizes a key expression and remembers a belief. (nb: it is an entirely separate issue whether, and to what extent, a speaker believes in what he describes.) at the second stage of deterioration, a speaker knows only the keyword, often as a derogatory term (e.g., vôwkún or starŷi vôwkún denotes an unsocial person or a miser) but does not know the supernatural content associated with the word. finally, the word ultimately might disappear from speakers’ memory entirely. prior to my discussions on covid-19, i had the sense that my interlocutors were positioned between the first and the second stages described above. our conversations in previous years demonstrated that they had heard some, but not all, beliefs that their mothers and elder sisters engaged with. uey themselves knew a few belief stories, but often could only state that they had heard the keywords or occasionally give a brief description of a supernatural entity. concerning their own beliefs, they did not express them openly, and my impression was that they were not sure of the truth status of their stories themselves. uey would often conclude a supernatural narrative with a phrase such as “and who knows if it was this way or not.” my interlocutors were well-versed in the art of warding off bad luck. for example, one of them taught me not to say, “i will arrive,” but rather “my bus is scheduled to arrive” to avoid jinxing myself. on another occasion, a relatively young woman refused to talk about evil spirits because it was already after sunset. covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 72 she said she would be “scared at night” if she did; i was not sure if she was afraid of dreaming of these spirits or of summoning them unintentionally. uis expertise in appeasing destiny or other unseen forces through some kind of verbal etiquette also manifested in my interlocutors’ speech during our covid-19 interviews. however, referring to the pandemic as “the end times” is nearly the opposite of what people do when they avoid talking about a supernatural entity or use euphemisms to avoid speaking its name. calling the pandemic “the end times” is a direct, and daring, disclosure of one’s picture of the world. even if the speaker does not quite believe it, she inherited this picture from speakers before her. on the other hand, older women’s ideas of the end of the world, recorded in novoselytsia in the years before covid-19, were much more elaborate: they included the cause (“because of our sins”), an exact roadmap of how the world would end, as well as who would be saved and how. uis speaker, confronted by the reality of the pandemic, does not want to expound or gloat in this way. she does not mention even the idea of the pandemic as retribution here, let alone providing details of what or how it is supposed to happen. she has heard of the older generation’s comprehensive idea of the end of the world, which she quotes in another interview, but nevertheless she distances herself from her mother-inlaw’s point of view: 14) author: давно́ бу́ли які́сь роска́зы |... яка́сь чума́ ци бу́ли ци коре́ла ци шốсь тако́є? a: но та бы́ла | го́ссподи | ти́ф быв | каза́ли ти́фус | шо тото́ | але не каза́ли | но та не да́й бо́г бы ссе́ уже́ тêпếрь бы́ло | но ма́ма [husband’s name] каза́ла ка́ старі́ лю́́де каза́ли | шо при́йде така́ хворо́ба невы́лікована | шо бду́т лю́́де | як му́хы вмêра́ти | бду́т ме́рти па́дати тай всьо́ | но тай чуе́те тêпếрькы бо́х його́ зна́є чи то́ та́к чи не та́к | шчо | і ліка́рства шче нема́ і | помêра́ють і | шчо́ тото чи́м то ся кі́нчит | стары́х но або врốді ка́жут шчо | ма́й на стары́х а молоды́х не бере́ | шчо мôлôді́ лиша́ють_ ся | ... чу́ла | но давно́ мно́го бы́ло | вся́кі бы́ли хворо́бы | лише май давно́ шчо | ме́рли | у ме́не то́же | у мốї ба́бы по ма́мині лі́нії | та на ти́ф | такі́ два лêґіні́ поме́рли | шчо лікова́ти не мо́ж было | а у [husband’s name] сестра́ тота́ шчо | в [village name] | так вна́ захвôрі́ла на ти́ф та | сьві́чку ї пали́ли шо уже́ уме́рла | та ôна́ вы́жила але на | да́ло ї на слу́х [author: did people tell stories about plague or cholera, or something like this? a: yes, there was typhus [tyf] [after wwii], they called it týfus, and god forbid it comes now! my husband’s mother said, old people told that there would be a disease without a cure, people will die like flies, they will fall and die. and now, you know, god knows if it is like this or not, covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 73 there is no medicine yet, and people die, and how will it end? old people ... they say it [covid-19] affects older people more, not the young ones, so that the young ones remain. i’ve heard … long ago there was a lot of diseases, all kinds of diseases, in more distant times, people died. in my family too, my maternal grandmother’s children, two young guys died of typhus, there was no cure. and [my husband’s] sister, the one who is in [village name], she got sick with typhus, and they already lit a candle for her, they thought she had died, but she survived, only her hearing was affected] [informant a, 20 march 2020]. ue speaker compares the features of her mother-in-law’s apocalyptic prophecy with those of the current pandemic. while she finds similarities, she is not eager to equate the two nor to draw similar conclusions. she then drops the topic of the end-of-the-world pandemic and returns to the topic of the typhus pandemic after (or during) the war, telling stories both about death and about recovery. ue apocalyptic prediction is not applicable to her experience. while she uses the traditional word pôslídnytsia “the end times.” in example 13, and the concept of a “disease without a cure” that old people had talked about in example 14, it has a different sense for her than for the older generation. euphemisms making words taboo is a familiar tactic in supernatural discourse. ue examples above illustrate two instances when this technique is used. speakers might want to avoid summoning something bad that might hear them and materialize if they say its name (e.g., the speaker did not want to talk about evil spirits after sunset to prevent contact with them). alternatively, they might want to avoid jinxing something good which might happen if it is named directly (e.g., do not boldly state that they will arrive at a designated time because something might hear them and, out of spite, cause the bus to malfunction or stage an accident, punishing their hubris by preventing them from arriving). ue same tactics of verbal etiquette in regard to the supernatural were used by speakers when talking about covid-19. euphemisms to describe death were particularly prevalent in covid-19 narratives. uese examples include those cited above and others from my database: 15) tа до́бре шчо ско́ро | потра́пив в ліка́рню та врятува́ли го | так | мі́х ка́же | уже́ та́м быв бы тай таке́ шчо | [it’s good that he was rushed to the hospital soon, so they helped him; otherwise, he could have been there already] [informant a, 1 november 2020]. covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 74 16)| tа ка́же обы́ бы́в им оди́н дếнь запізни́в ся | я́ быв там бы́в де мо́я ка́же сестра́ | [he says, “if i had been [taken to the hospital] one day later, i would be in the same place as my sister” [i.e., he would have died]] [informant d, 17 october 2020]. 17) дочка́ його́ перене́сла ле́хко | жі́нка то́ же са́моє | а ві́н ма́ло не пішốв сь_ сьві́та | [his daughter had an easier covid-19, his wife also, but he “almost went away from this world”] [informant d, 17 october 2020]. several aspects of usage are noteworthy here. first, death is only euphemized when people are talking about deaths that could have happened but did not. in these cases, they often use verbs in the subjunctive mood. when people did die, the verb pome/r(la) “died” is used rather than a euphemism. in close calls, death should not be named, likely to avoid bringing about a similar situation in the future. second, it is not the process of dying nor its result that is euphemized when a person is still living. rather, speakers avoid mentioning the place where people end up after death. uey describe it using evasive constructions: “there,” “where my sister is” (she had died shortly before), or “away from this world.” uese expressions convey not the christian paradise or hell, but the traditional otherworld, bleak and active, able to hear its name and come claim a person who has narrowly escaped it once. however, speakers apparently do not think of it overtly in these terms. uey know the verbal etiquette for using a euphemistic expression that, when used correctly, will prevent misfortune. uis situation resembles the second stage of belief deterioration: when only the word or phrase, together with the syntactic and pragmatic rules for its use, remain. death is not the only focus of euphemisms; the disease itself is as well. one would suspect that speakers would, first and foremost, avoid naming infections such as covid-19 in order not to attract the disease. however, that is not the case in novoselytsia: the verb zakhvôr'íw/-íla “got sick” is often used, although the elaboration na kôvíd “with covid-19” is sometimes omitted. yet speakers relied on a euphemism to describe transmitting the disease: nadarováty “to give” (as a gift), as in this example that was partially quoted in example 3 above: 18) b: o го́ссподи чу́єте яка́ прийшла́ ка́ра бо́жа тай гото́во | што людêй як | каза́ли шчо та́ шчо | оди́н чôлôві́к | бы́в дêсь у іта́ліі | та ві́н перехвôрі́в | но тай перені́з_ якốсь так і́хав сюды́ в чêрнівця́х ... | а жі́нку надарова́в три́цьцять сім рốків тай поме́рла | но́ та я́ вам ка́жу | тай молода́ | обы́чно ж то старі́ помира́ют а ту́й тôбі́ на | тай біда́ тай біда́ | covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 75 author: tо ві́н приї́хав і вона́ від ньо́го підхо́пила то? b: bід ньо́го зарази́лася і ôна́ поме́рла | author: боже в: но | ци го́ре сяко́є | та ві́н приї́хав ма́ло бы́в хворякува́тый тай прійшло́ тото́ йому́ | а | а і́ надарова́в тай | тай і сяко́є тото́ | [b: my god! see what a disaster it is [lit.: what kind of god’s punishment has come], that people, as … uey said one man was in italy; he had covid-19 and recovered and came here, somewhere in chernivtsi, and gave it to his wife [zhínku nadarováw]; she was 37 years old, and she died. i am telling you ... she was young; usually it is the old people who die, but here ... uat is a misfortune, a misfortune. author: so, he came, and she got it from him [voná vid nióho pidkhópyla to]? b: she got it from him, and she died [vid nióho zarazýla sia i voná pomérla]. author: my god!! nn: yes, you see it is such a misfortune. he came, he was a bit sick, and then he got over it, and he infected her [a í nadarováw] and that was it. uat is how it is] [informant b, 21 march 2020]. ue speaker first used the euphemism nadarováw. when i did not quite understand her, she shifted to using a phrase which employs a literary ukrainian word: vid nióho zarazýla sia [she was infected by him]. when she continued with her story, though, she repeated the euphemism. apparently, it is important for her, and for other speakers, to depict the process of transmitting disease as passing on something benign, possibly in order to metaphorically lessen the threat of the illness for a (potential) “receiver.” (19) uis usage likely did not emerge with covid-19, but oddly, i could not find any indication of its existence in dictionaries of adjacent languages and dialects. ue verb nadaruvaty/nadaryty is attested in literary ukrainian in the slovnik ukraïns'koï movy [dictionary of the ukrainian language] [1970–1980] and in hrinchenko’s dictionary focused on western ukrainian [1907-1909], albeit with a different imperfective formant, nadariaty/nadaryty). both dictionaries present the meaning “to give as a gift,” but not “to transmit a disease.” neither is this meaning mentioned in the slovak online dictionary [slovník.sk], nor in pyrtei’s lemko dictionary [1986] nor in onyshkevych’s boiko dictionary [1984], though the word is attested in all three. ue word itself is not attested in two transcarpathian dialectal dictionaries, covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 76 nikolaev and tolstaia [2001] and sabadosh [2008], or in the two-volume rusyn phraseologisms [chori 2015a, 2015b]. either the authors of these dictionaries systematically skipped the euphemistic meaning, or this meaning is a local innovation, at least in the dialect of novoselytsia. in addition, there is a euphemism, attested once, for being predestined for a more severe course of the disease: 19) xто́ перено́сит ле́хко но та | кі́лька дні́в температу́ра пи́в антибіо́тикы тай прійшло́ | а кого́ шчốсь полюби́ло | та ду́же тя́шко [some had it in a mild form, just a fever for a couple of days, they would take antibiotics, and everything would be all right, but those who were predestined [lit.: loved by something, kogo shchos’ poliubilo] had it real hard] [informant c, 18 october 2020]. overall, although traditional village culture has a concept of actively transmitting a disease to someone (e.g., people transmit “crying” from one’s baby to another by pouring water from the baby’s bath onto the spot under someone else’s window where light from the room reflects on the ground), (20) the concept of contracting the disease from a contact who does not mean evil, without taking any material objects from him is more of a modern medical one. uus, established verbal patterns of behavior to protect oneself from catching disease may not exist. however, this hypothesis requires more research to make any definitive conclusions. “if god grants it”: ue role of god in discourse ue last aspect of the supernatural in discourse about covid-19 relates to patterns that speakers use when mentioning god. in general, none of my interlocutors are overtly religious. i did not ask them about their religious beliefs or practices. our conversations revealed that they went to church only for important feast days, because everybody was supposed to be there. however, unlike older women, they never mentioned anything about praying or reading religious literature, talked about any stories from the old or new testament, or went to additional prayer meetings organized by the church. most of them grew up during the soviet era when it was risky to take children to church. as a result, church culture is not in their active repertoire today. uerefore, mention of god is all the more interesting, especially in the context of the pandemic. uere are several set expressions referring to god (boh) in my interlocutors’ speech, and god is mentioned only in the context of these expressions. ue expressions are: “god knows” (to indicate uncertainty), “uank god” (when talking about a positive occurrence), “god forbid” (when a potential danger is mentioned), and finally, “god gave that ...” (about some unexpected, usually good, event in the past) and “(if) god grants that ...” (talking about future plans covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 77 or wishing for something good). if the first two expressions are more straightforward, “god forbid” is apparently used as a euphemistic-like device, e.g., in the context “they keep it [the blessed water]; they use it when, god forbid, there is thunder and lightning” [informant b, 11 september 2020]. in essence, when naming something dangerous, the mention of god will prevent this dangerous event from coming to pass. in the same vein, the expression “(if) god grants ...” is used to prevent something good from being jinxed (as discussed above). ue two instances attested are both about a living person: 20) но і́ тêпếрь бу́де уже́ веснốв дêвяно́сто рốків | коли́ бы бог да́в [she will be 90 in spring, if god grants that] [informant a, 1 november 2020]. 21) дасьть бог шчо а ну ж | кêдь бдеме́ жи́ти обы́ нас лише́ [laughs] кові́д не вы́мучив бо ка́жут шо | знốву дру́га хвы́ля а шчê пốтім які́сь | тоты́ гри́пы | но та | [laughs] мо́же шчê і не буде тре́ба як ка́жут | нас вы́душать тоты́ вся́кі хворобы́ тай гото́во | [i offer to send some medicines in the mail. d refuses] maybe then [when you come], if god grants that we live, if covid does not kill us [laughs], because they say, there will be the second wave and also various kinds of flu…[laughs] maybe we’ll be dead, and that will be it] [informant d, 17 october 2020]. in both situations, when a person approaches her ninetieth birthday, and when there is covid-19 around, life is not guaranteed even if sincerely wished for. invoking god is an effective and appropriate protective measure for these situations. conclusion uis examination of storytelling and linguistic patterns in covid-19 stories from novoselytsia told by women in their forties, fifties, and sixties does not reveal any new genres or emergent story types. on the contrary, covid-19 narratives fit well into older storytelling patterns. uey are constructed along the lines of existing story patterns about deaths and accidents. in the context of the pandemic, narrative patterns adhere to long-standing structures, both in stories about people and in stories about politics. ue stories express the same village values and cultural models as before covid-19. namely the household is the center of the world, one’s personal worth is subordinate to the worth of the household, and satisfaction results from following this cultural model and contributing to household vitality. covid-19 introduced greater levels of danger but served as insufficient motivation to abandon or significantly change behavioral covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 78 patterns that made life meaningful. ue same is true for the usage of euphemisms for protection in the narratives themselves. however, a thorough examination of covid-19-era narrative and linguistic patterns allows for a deeper understanding of the village’s cultural models and language expressions and their persistence, even in the face of social and medical crises. notes 1 novoselytsia is a village in the mizhhir’ia district, transcarpathia region (zakarpats’ka oblast’), ukraine, in a mountainous area 475 meters above sea level and about 25 kilometers away from mizhhir’ia, the district center. according to the census of 2011, novoselytsia had 1054 inhabitants. since there are not many jobs available in the village, the population mostly survives off their land; they have gardens and keep cows, pigs, and chickens; some also keep sheep or goats that are herded in the mountain meadows in summer. in order to earn money, men may go abroad to work as builders. 2 ue literature on east slavic folklore that i could find devotes little attention to good deaths, cf. long paragraphs about “bad deaths” followed by a few cursory sentences about “good deaths” in slavianskie drevnosti [tolstoi 2012: 61] subject smert’ [death]. however, by examining the features of a bad death, or the death of a witch, one can glean some characteristics of a good death: a bad or a magical person dies a difficult death [vinogradova and levkievskaia 2010: 107–120 – witches, 306–320 – wizards, 326–328 – females who performed magic [koldun’ia]]; therefore, a good person must die an easy death. some features of a “good death of a good person,” as well as of a “bad death of a good person,” can be found in funeral dirges (e.g., barsov [1872] and tolstaia [2019: 292]), where the image of the deceased is constructed by the speaker/singer as an image of a good person, but this warrants further research. 3 cf. vinogradova and levkievskaia [2010: 107–116, 118–120]; literature listed on page 107 and also more broadly on witches on page 39. 4 concerning pre-covid-19 deaths, though a supernatural explanation usually crystallizes in narratives within several days after the death, sometimes people have dreams about the deceased months or years after the actual death. uese dreams sometimes change the perception of the deceased person and of their death from an unfortunate accident to a deserved divine retribution or vice-versa. 5 because the dialect of novoselytsia has not been codified, i have used cyrillic phonetic transcription in block citations. transliterations use the library of congress system for ukrainian as much as possible, but i have included phonetic transcription for sounds not reflected therein. 6 surprisingly, there is not much in literature on third-person stories about illness; anthropologists’ attention has been devoted to first-person stories (along the lines of kleinman 2020[1988]) or stories of parents and relatives of a patient [price 1987; jacobsen 2012], or both [good 1994; izquierdo and johnson 2007]. covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 79 uird-person illness stories are studied mostly by folklorists if they include supernatural elements (as fabulates or memorates); otherwise, they tend to fall through the cracks. 7 st. cyril’s day does not have a fixed calendar date; according to an explanation i was given by one of my interlocutors, st. cyril’s is held on the sunday that follows st. peter’s. st. peter’s is always held on 12 july; if it falls on a monday, tuesday, or wednesday, then st. cyril’s will be held in the same week; if st. peter’s falls on a uursday or a friday, then st. cyril’s will be held on the following week. 8 michaelmas is celebrated on 21 november. 9 see detailed transcriptions and translations of several accident stories from novoselytsia in boudovskaia [2017]: example 14 – a woman getting food poisoning; example 19 – a woman getting crushed by sacks of flour in the bakery; example 20 – a pig nearly biting off a baby's nose. 10 ue speaker uses the present tense as if the woman were still alive in her house. it was not a slip of the tongue: on the recording there is no hedging or hesitation. i understand it as one more indication that a house and its inhabitants form a unity in the speakers’ system of cultural models: if the house is still there and not occupied by another family, it still belongs to the woman, the head of the household after her husband’s death, though she also had passed away several months before. 11 as mentioned above, such stories are not commonly perceived as folklore. however, i believe that they are an important genre in the system of novoselytsia’s oral narratives. uey are opposed to, and counterbalanced by, personal and third-person experience stories; they have their own structure and purpose (see below), and they are especially prominent among the covid-19 stories i collected. finally, they, like other oral genres, shed light on the system of the village’s cultural models. uerefore, i include them here. 12 ue expression “people die like flies” [liúdy iak múkhŷ mrút] may seem to have an apocalyptic ring to it, but it is a common expression well known in east slavic languages, cf. rusyn liude ne siati dukhy: vmyravut', iak mukhŷ [people are not holy spirits, they die like flies] [chori 2015a:421]; mrut', iak mukhŷ voseny [die like flies in the fall] [chori 2015a: 452]; ukrainian iak mukhy hynuty, merty [to die like flies] subject mukha [phraseological dictionary of ukrainian online]; russian mrut kak mukhi [die like flies] attested by dal’ [1863-1866] under the entry meret’ and also in gogol’s dead souls [1842: 6] and in dostoevsky’s xe house of the dead [1862: 17]. 13 see, for example, the material on deutsche welle 2020. 14 kum is considered to be a very close degree of relationship both in russia and ukraine. medvedchuk maintains his image of putin's close friend and confidant (see 112 ukraїna 2019). he also promotes a pro-russian agenda on his television channels. covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 80 15 while this article was in progress, some of these television channels specifically belonging to medvedchuk (112 ukraїna, newsone, zik) were banned in ukraine by president zelensky’s decree of 2 february 2021, cf. ukraїns’ka pravda 2021. 16 cf. “ue radiant past” narratives in paxton’s description [2005] of a russian village and “yugonostalgia,” e.g., in macedonia [chajęcka 2015] to name a few. 17 ukraine is not unique in this regard. uis attitude is characteristic of other post-socialist countries as well. cf. “litanies” in the post-perestroika moscow [ries 1997] and similar views and discourses in poland [pine 2002]. 18 ue role of post-soviet television and other media in fostering these attitudes should not be underestimated. research on the effect of media on public views shows that “on-going [sic] repetition of threatening information may increase fear and confusion, recalling the traumatic symptomatology associated with prolonged exposure to vivid and frightening images [...]. moreover, threatening information can undermine public trust in media and government institutions if these are perceived to be overdramatizing minor risks or helpless to respond to them [sic]” [atlani-duault, et al. 2015: 44.] 19 cf. nagradit’ bolezn’iu, lit. “to award with the disease” in polissian texts (iak tu sawku stre’tysh, to mozhut’ khoroboiu nahradyty [if you meet this rusalka, they [sic] might give you a disease] [vinogradova and levkievskaia 2012: 577], brest oblast') and in multiple examples from the russian-language internet as well, e.g., za nedeliu kleshchi “nagradili” 5 smolian bolezn’iu laima ... [in a week, ticks gave lime disease to 5 inhabitants of smolensk] [rabochii put’ 2020], khoziain mozhet “nagradit’” bolezn'iu svoego domashnego liubimtsa [an owner can give a disease to his pet] [vorobieva 2020]. 20 uis is a pattern known in the carpathian area and beyond: see agapkina [2019] for treatment and a list of literature on this topic. bibliography 112 ukraїna. 2019. “путин крестил дочь медведчука по просьбе его жены, оксаны марченко” [putin baptized medvedchuk's daughter by the request of his wife oksana marchenko]. 112 україна. cited by https://112ua.tv/obshchestvo/putin-krestil-doch-medvedchuka-po-prosbeego-zheny-oksany-marchenko-496517.html. (consulted may 29, 2021). agapkina, t. a. 2019. агапкина, т.а. “параллели в области вербальной магии у восточных и южных славян.” [parallels in verbal magic among eastern and south slavs]. s.m. tolstaia, ed. с. м. толстая. славянские архаические ареалы в пространстве европы [slavic archaic areals in europe] москва: индрик, 10–39. covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 81 atlani-duault, l., a. mercier, c. rousseau, p. guyot, and j. p. moatti. 2015. “blood libel rebooted: traditional scapegoats, online media, and the h1n1 epidemic.” culture, medicine and psychiatry 39 (1): 43–61. barsov, e. v. 1872. барсов, e. в. причитанья северного края, собранные е.в. барсовым. часть i. плачи похоронные, надгробные и надмогильные. [laments of northern russia, collected by e. v. barsov. part i: funeral laments over a coffin and over a grave], москва: современные известия. boudovskaia, elena. 2017. “past tense in the rusyn dialect of novoselycja: auxiliary vs. subject pronoun as the firstand second-person subject.” journal of slavic linguistics 25(1), winter-spring: 3–62. boudovskaia, elena. 2018. “witches, wise people, and werewolves: traditional supernatural powers and popular attitudes toward ueir bearers among carpatho-rusyns in ukraine.” folklorica xxi: 1–33. chajęcka, patrycja. 2015. “narrative and economic strategies of coping with unemployment in macedonian poreče,” karolina bielenin-lenczowska,, ed. anthropology of continuity and change: macedonian porece 80 years after józef obrębski's research. warszawa: instytut slawistyki pan, 49-69. chori, iurii s. 2015a. чорі, юрій с. фразеолоґізмы русинського языка, том 1, а–н. [phraseologisms of the rusyn language, vol, 1, a-n]. ужгород: іва. chori, iurii s. 2015b. чорі, юрій с. фразеолоґізмы русинського языка, том 2, о–я. [phraseologisms of the rusyn language, vol, 1, o-ia]. ужгород: іва. dal’, vladimir. 1863-1866. даль, владиміръ. толковый словарь живаго великорускаго языка. [explanatory dictionary of live great-russian language] cited by http://slovardalja.net. (consulted 13 june 2021). deutsche welle. 2020. “олігархи і тб: хто контролює українські телеканали? (12.06.2020)” [oligarchs and tv: who controls ukrainian telechannels?]. deutsche welle. cited by https://www.dw.com/uk/олігархи-і-тб-хтоконтролює-українські-телеканали-12062020/av-53788093 (consulted 20 december 2020). dostoevsky, fyodor. 1862. house of the dead. достоевский, федор. записки из мертвого дома. klassika.ru. cited by https://klassika.ru/read.html?proza/dostoevskij/zap.txt&page=17. (consulted 13 june 2021). gogol, nikolai. 1842. dead souls. гоголь, николай. мертвые души. интернет библиотека. cited by https://ilibrary.ru/text/78/p.6/index.html. 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(consulted 21 april 2021). pine, frances. 2002. “retreat to the household? gendered domains in postsocialist poland.” hann, c.m., ed. postsocialism: ideals, ideologies and practices in eurasia. london: routledge, 95–113. price, laurie. 1987. “ecuadorian illness stories.” d. holland and n. quinn, eds. cultural models in language and xought. cambridge: cambridge university press, 313–42. pyrtei, petro.1986. пиртей, петро. словник лемківської говірки [dictionary of the lemko dialect]. cited by https://diasporiana.org.ua/wpcontent/uploads/books/16234/file.pdf (consulted 30 january 2021). rabochii put’. 2020. “за неделю клещи "наградили" пятерых смолян болезнью лайма” [within a week, ticks gave lime disease to five inhabitants of smolensk]. рабочии́ путь. cited by https://www.rabochyput.ru/news/149204-za-nedelyu-kleshchi-nagradili-pyaterykh-smolyanboleznyu-layma.html. (consulted 3 june 2021). ries, nancy. 1997. russian talk: culture and conversation during perestroika. ithaca and london: cornell university press. sabadosh, ivan vasyl’ovych. 2008. сабадош, іван васильович. словник закарпатської говірки села сокирниця хустського району [dictionary of a transcarpathian dialect of the village sokyrnytsia, khust district]. ужгород: ліра. covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 83 slovnik ukraïns'koï movy. (1970–1980) словник української мови. академичний тлумачний словник [dictionary of the ukrainian language. academic dictionary]. cited by http://sum.in.ua/. (consulted 20 january 2021). slovník.sk. n.d. “nadarit’ sa.” cited by https://slovnik.aktuality.sk/pravopis/slovnik-sj/?q=nadariť sa. (consulted 6 june 2021). tolstaia, s. m. 2019. толстая, с.м. “полесские похоронные причитания в сопоставлении с севернорусскими.” [funeral laments of poles’e compared to north russian]. s.m. tolstaia, ed. с.м. толстая. славянские архаические ареалы в пространстве европы. мосвка: индрик, 291– 329. tolstoi, n.i., ed. 2012. н.и. толстой. славянские древности. этнолингвистический словарь в пяти томаx. том 5: с (сказка) – я (ящерица). [slavic antiquities: ethnolinguistic dictionary in five volumes. vol. 5: s (skazka) iа (iаshcheritsa)]. москва: международные отношения. ukraїns’ka pravda. 2021. “зеленський заблокував канали медведчука: рнбо наклало санкциї” [zelensky blocked medvedchuk’s channels: national security and defense council [of ukraine] implemented sanctions]. українська правда. cited by https://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2021/02/2/7282097/. (consulted 23 april 2021). vinogradova, l. n. and е. е. levkievskaia. 2010. виноградова, л. н и e. e. левкиевская. народная демонология полесья: публикации текстов в записях 80–90-х годов xx века. том i: люди со сверхъестественными свойствами [folk demonology of poles'e: publication of texts collected in the 1980s 1990s. vol. i: people with supernatural abilities]. москва: языки славянских культур. vinogradova, l. n. and e. e. levkievskaia. 2012. виноградова, л. е. и е. е. левкиевская. народная демонология полесья: публикации текстов в записях 80–90-х годов xx века. т. ii: демонологизация умерших людей [folk demonology of poles'e: publication of texts collected in the 1980s 1990s. vol. ii: demonologization of the deceased]. москва: языки славянских культур. vorobieva, tat’iana. 2020. татьяна воробьева. “в тюмени нашли коронавирус у кошки” [in tiumen’, coronavirus was detected in a cat]. российская газета. cited by https://rg.ru/2020/08/18/reg-urfo/v-tiumeninashli-koronavirus-u-koshki.html. (consulted 3 june 2021). covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 84 interviews informant a. telephone interview. 20 march, 13 july, 1 november 2020. informant b. telephone interview. 21 march, 11 september, 22 december 2020. informant c. telephone interview. 6 april, 14 june, 18 october 2020. informant d. telephone interview. 17 october 2020, mid-march 2021, exact date unknown. folklorica full 2024 reviews 75 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii engel, barbara alpern. marriage, household, and home in modern russia: from peter the great to vladimir putin (the bloomsbury history of modern russia series). london: bloomsbury academic, 2022. illustrations (black and white). notes. bibliography. index. xiii+268. $100.00 (cloth). $32.95 (paper). $29.65 (e-book). isbn 978-1-350-01447-3 (cloth). isbn 978-1-350-01446-6 (paper). isbn 978-1-350-01448-0 (e-book). the prolific historian barbara alpern engel has done a great service to the field by producing this well-written and analytical synthesis of the secondary literature on all aspects of the patriarchal household in modern russia over the course of three centuries. the book can easily be used as a textbook in russian history survey and russian civilization courses, given its attention to changing political, legal, and religious policies regarding marriage, household, and home, and the varying responses to such policies from family members and individuals throughout the long durée, which was at times marked by social, economic, and cultural upheavals. engel deftly uses memoirs and diaries, correspondence, literary sources, prescriptive literature, and newspapers to make the prose come alive, as she charts the ways in which households accommodated, subverted, or reacted against policies. the first half of the book, stretching from the reign of peter the great to world war i, covers materials engel has written about elsewhere. true to her inquiring mind, she presents new materials, especially about russian noblemen and noblewomen and male merchants. the threading of individuals’ life stories through more than one section acquaints readers with intimate knowledge that supplements statistical data. engel’s superb storytelling keeps the reader engaged and eager to learn more. for example, she introduces andrei bolotov’s mideighteenth-century diary as “a rare personal narrative… a vivid description not only of how a [marital] match might be made in his milieu but also of the considerations that weighed in the balance” (13). engel delivers on her promise in a later section, noting the ways in which the twenty-five-year-old landowner had “anticipat[ed] happiness in his marriage” and sought in a spouse “a virtuous and submissive character, and competency in household management” and not simply the economic exchange of a suitable dowry (27). these new enlightenment and civilizing sentiments of happiness and love propounded by catherine ii reflected a turning point among the lives of russia’s social elites of both genders that engel ties directly to the empress’s affirmation of the gentry’s release from compulsory service in 1762. such sentimental ideas, engel argues, trickled down to the merchant class beginning in the late eighteenth century. in these vignettes, it is catherine rather than peter i who comes across as the true revolutionary. in her discussions of the traditional patriarchal peasant household, dominated by economic and reproductive concerns for survival, engel charts the dynamics of the more complex household of the extended family throughout the “largely agrarian russian core” of the empire (vii). here she pays more attention to the authority of the male head of household than to his wife, who could wield reviews 76 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii a considerable amount of power as well. engel seems to underestimate the ways in which old believer serf families and even orthodox families were able to resist and subvert their serf owners’ and bailiffs’ marital and procreational demands. beginning with the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and ensuing industrialization and urbanization engel sees a modernizing trend among peasants toward some forms of individualism and eventually the loosening of patriarchal authority. the second half of the book deals with the tumultuous twentieth century, punctuated not only by traumatic wars, revolutions, bolshevism, massive famine, and demographic crises, but also by the soviet state’s reaction of a seemingly obsessive interference in the private sphere and family that often had disastrous repercussions on marriage and family cohesion. the state’s legacy of interference, after a short experiment with freedom in the chaotic and ruinous post-soviet years, resurfaced with vladimir putin’s regime’s insistence on a return to the traditional patriarchal family. engel is the first historian to chronicle all these changes in families and intimate life over the long twentieth century and the varying responses of households and individuals, especially on the part of women, to loss, trauma, and other burdens within successive regimes that never questioned traditional masculinity. her approach is always compassionate. crediting grandmothers with being critical players within the soviet household as providers of childcare and other support and charting the ways in which masculinity became increasingly vulnerable because of demographic crises, engel goes a long way in explaining how russian women were able to dodge state demands and take control over their intimate lives. a broadly analytical conclusion would have helped to shore up these significant points. christine d. worobec northern illinois university dekalb, illinois worobec@niu.edu folklorica full 2024 i folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii folklorica journal of the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association 2024, vol. xxviii contents articles teaching genre in context: fieldwork and “hanging out” in appalachia and bulgaria sarah craycraft 1 critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore rachel stauffer 28 fairytales in the time of war: analyzing the russian war in ukraine through the lenses of cultural narratives sophia moskalenko 48 reports the index of serbian folktales. a website. nemanja radulović reviews 68 kononenko, natalie o. ukrainian ritual on the prairies: growing a ukrainian canadian identity. iryna voloshyna 73 engel, barbara alpern. marriage, household, and home in modern russia: from peter the great to vladimir putin. christine d. worobec 75 janeček, petr. spring man: a belief legend between folklore and popular culture. erin collopy müller, axel, christopher halls and ben williamson. mermaids: art, symbolism and mythology. elka petrova petrova golubeva, liubov’ v. and sofiia o. kupriianova. л.в. голубева, с.о. куприянова. материнство в советской деревне: ритуалы, дискурсы, практики в двух томах; том i: исследование; том ii: 77 79 81 ii folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii фрагменты интервью. [motherhood in the soviet village: rituals, discourses, and practices in two volumes; volume 1: the study; volume 2: interview excerpts]. veronica muskheli simona bortiș-schultz. to hold your heart in your teeth, women’s work: the visual language of the romanian blouse. a. m. lavey herzfeld, michael. subversive archaism: troubling traditionalists and the politics of national heritage. andriy nahachewsky 84 86 about seefa 89 author guidelines 90 5-aboutseefa1208 about seefa folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 171 4e slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association (seefa) is a nonprofit organization devoted to an exchange of knowledge among researchers interested in slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore. seefa promotes instruction in slavic, east european and eurasian folklore, organizes panels on these topics at national and international conferences, and encourages the preparation of teaching materials and translations as well as publishes the journal folklorica. seefa also seeks to promote joint research, scholarly exchanges and conferences, expeditions, and publications with scholars in slavic and other east european and eurasian countries. membership in seefa supports student scholarships and awards. individual membership in seefa is $35 per year, $10 for students. send checks to the secretary-treasurer: shannon donnally quinn department of linguistics and germanic, slavic, asian and african languages michigan state university 619 red cedar road b-331 wells hall east lansing, mi 48824-3402 e-mail: shannondonnallyquinn@gmail.com membership may also be paid by credit card at: http://www.seefa.org/membership.html. folklorica is published once per year. 4e journal archive appears on the seefa web site (http://www.seefa.org/) and is hosted by the university of kansas. articles, surveys, reviews, notices of conferences or expeditions, and announcements from scholars in any relevant field are acceptable. contributions will be evaluated by the editorial board or by other specialists. each contribution copyright 2020 by its author. all rights reserved. printed in kentucky, united states. folklorica full 2021_edit 6.28.22 about seefa folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 91 the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association (seefa) is a nonprofit organization devoted to an exchange of knowledge among researchers interested in slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore. seefa promotes instruction in slavic, east european and eurasian folklore, organizes panels on these topics at national and international conferences, and encourages the preparation of teaching materials and translations as well as publishes the journal folklorica. seefa also seeks to promote joint research, scholarly exchanges and conferences, expeditions, and publications with scholars in slavic and other east european and eurasian countries. membership in seefa supports student scholarships and awards. individual membership in seefa is $35 per year, $10 for students. send checks to the secretary-treasurer: shannon donnally quinn department of linguistics and germanic, slavic, asian and african languages michigan state university 619 red cedar road b-331 wells hall east lansing, mi 48824-3402 e-mail: shannondonnallyquinn@gmail.com membership may also be paid by credit card at: http://www.seefa.org/membership.html. folklorica is published once per year. 4e journal archive appears on the seefa web site (http://www.seefa.org/) and is hosted by the university of kansas. articles, surveys, reviews, notices of conferences or expeditions, and announcements from scholars in any relevant field are acceptable. contributions will be evaluated by the editorial board or by other specialists. each contribution copyright 2021 by its author. all rights reserved. printed in kentucky, united states. microsoft word folk2010e.doc folklorica 2010, vol. xv 192 klaniczay, gábor, and éva pócs (eds). communicating with the spirits. demons, spirits, witches, vol. i. budapest and new york: central european university press, 2005. index. illustrations. viii + 295 pp. $51.95 (cloth). isbn 978-963-7326-13-8. klaniczay, gábor, and éva pócs (eds). christian demonology and popular mythology. demons, spirits, witches, vol. ii. budapest and new york: central european university press, 2006. index. illustrations. viii + 284 pp. $51.95 (cloth). isbn 978-963-7326-76-9. klaniczay, gábor, and éva pócs (eds). witchcraft mythologies and persecutions. demons, spirits, witches, vol. iii. budapest and new york: central european university press, 2008. index. maps. viii + 351 pp. $51.95 (cloth). isbn 978-963-7326-87-5. this three-volume series, demons, spirits, witches is the result of an interdisciplinary conference that was held in budapest in 1999. its fortythree papers collectively explore “the relationship, coexistence and conflicts of popular belief systems, judeo-christian mythology and [learned—sk] demonology in medieval, modern, and contemporary europe” (p. 5). the articles vary considerably in methodology but they also complement each other, turning the series—like the conference upon which it is based—into a meeting point of ethnographers, historians, art and literary scholars, anthropologists, and students of religion. like the series, my review will follow a three-part structure and address only a selection of articles from each volume. *** the first volume addresses the question of communication with the other world. its essays are divided into three focus groups. the first part centers on the discernment of spirits and the various historical interpretations, which the phenomenon of possession—especially as related to the female experience—was accorded in medieval and early modern europe. nancy caciola’s and moshe sluhovsky’s essays inspect the standards by which the clergy judged whether the mystical experiences of possessed women stemmed from divine or diabolic sources. both scholars argue that regardless of the numerous attempts by the theologians to create an intricate system of evaluation, where the key element would be the idea that evil spirits possess only the body, while divine spirits enter the soul directly, no one reached an understanding of the physiology of possession, because behavioral patterns were similar in both cases. in this failure sluhovsky sees the origins of the catholic reviews 193 folklorica 2010, vol. xv church’s rising suspicion as to the divine nature of (especially) the female possession (p. 56). two other articles in this group (by renata mikolajczyk and sophie houdard) point to the gradually increasing tendency among theologians to seek rational explanations behind the possession phenomenon. mikolajczyk investigates the writings of witelo, a thirteenth-century silesian scholar, whose interest in natural philosophy urged him to interpret demonic visions as related to a possible illness of the mind or optical illusions, rather than a product of supernatural causes. houdard considers a similar interpretation taking place in the seventeenth century. she observes that the clerics at this time also began to perceive such phenomena as fraud. they no longer believed that possession resulted when a demonic spirit (a tangible entity) entered the body of the possessed. rather they saw it as a sin of self-pride and desire for glorification (a symbolic notion). this view transformed the visionaries-to-be into moral sinners in the eyes of the church. neither mikolajczk nor houdard take their investigation further by considering the origins of the rational interpretation of supernatural phenomenon. for instance, mikolajczyk’s discussion of witelo’s reliance on the medieval medical theory to explain the occurrence of the demonic visions could have been enriched had she taken into account st. augustine’s theory of the phantasm. part ii focuses on the fusion of christian and pagan practices of communicating with the spirits and the dead. wolfgang behringer investigates the unstudied origins of the association between the waldensians (the fifteenth-century heretical sect in dauphiné and piedmont regions) and witchcraft. archival sources and judicial documents allow him to uncover beliefs in the extraordinary abilities (possibly of hereditary nature) of the waldensians’ “holy brothers.” such beliefs were formed on the basis of the syncretism of surviving pagan elements in the region and christianity. in addition, the folklore of the inhabitants of the region (such as a belief in “good people” or phantoms of the night who could produce heavenly music, dance and invite people to “to fly with them during the night” [p. 179]) added to the admixture of perceived notions about the brethren. thanks to the association of the phantoms of the night and the waldensian sect (whose meetings often took place at night, and people were invited to join them), theologians drew a connection between the waldensians (who could otherwise have been perceived simply as heretics) and witchcraft with its essential elements of night flying and the sabbath. behringer makes an important contribution to the field of waldensian studies by proposing that the folklorica 2010, vol. xv 194 witchcraft association was not a mere labeling process but came as a result of central practices of the sect and was even further strengthened by the participation of many women (p. 182). the third part is devoted to the ontology of various trance and shamanistic experiences. christa tuczay studies different methods of divination, obtained in a state of trance, distinguishing between its technical and intuitive modes. she catalogues various forms, utilized for the establishment of the link to the supernatural realm through the ages, covering the period from antiquity to early modernity. two other essays focus on the elements of shamanism in medieval scandinavian literature (peter buchholz) and on christian iv’s (king of denmark-norway) encounter with the sami shamans of northern norway and the russian empire (rune blix hagen). the latter proposes that such a seemingly minute event might have been the trigger behind the growing association between the witchcraft of europe and the shamanistic practices of the lapp (sami) people that ultimately prepared the ground for witch hunts in finland. *** the second volume explores the manner in which learned demonology and popular culture nourished each other. the result of such reciprocal influences was “a syncretistic pagan and christian universe peopled by demons, protecting, escorting, harming, possessing, and healing spirits, and the figure of the ever-present christian devil that is, in many respects, related to all the previously mentioned beings” (p. 2). the first cluster of essays focuses on learned demonology, drawing its material from central and northern europe, areas poorly explored by scholars. benedek láng studies, for instance, a polish magical handbook from the early fifteenth century. he establishes that the book in question belongs to the category of image magic, but according to the nature of the texts it compiles is not necromantic. láng speculates about the possible owners of the book, which allows him to move the discussion to a broader sphere. he raises questions about the polish “clerical underworld”—i.e., the “intellectual circle to which such a book belongs” (p. 29). while he is unable to answer to what extent polish clerics were interested in the image magic, láng does point to the emergence of blurred boundaries between the “tolerated and illicit magic,” (p. 32) as well as to the fusion of magic with healing practices—a bond, which was prohibited de jure, but practiced de facto. györgy e. szőnyi’s article complements láng’s study by focusing on magical practices, allowed by the tenets of the church. such practices “were propagated and conducted by distinguished humanists with—at least in their own interpretations— reviews 195 folklorica 2010, vol. xv most pious intentions, normally in hope of getting nearer to god” (p. 73). by studying the various traditions that nourished the emerging renaissance magi—not the least among which came from the discovery of antique learning (a layer of knowledge, detested by medieval practitioners)—szőnyi argues that these scholars no longer hid in the “intellectual underworld” (as opposed to their polish predecessors from the láng’s study) but could practice within the framework of christian piety. szőnyi offers an interesting psychological perspective on such phenomena, by suggesting that the practice of magic could have been motivated by the renaissance scholars’ subconscious desire for deification: “the drive for exaltatio which has never ceased to be a major ambition of humankind” (p. 81). the subsequent section focuses on the meeting of the learned and the popular, investigating the evolution of ecclesiastical concepts of the devil and the saints. karen p. smith’s study researches the hagiographical narratives of st. margaret of antioch, unearthing a layer of pagan beliefs that associated st. margaret with the ancient goddesses of fertility, as well as with goddess-like demonic creatures. this led to the transformation of this untouched virgin-dragon’s slayer into the protector saint of childbirth and fertility. the final section of the volume deals with popular beliefs and covers a vast territory—from carpathian rus, slovenia, macedonia and the balkans, to mongolia. two articles by l’upcho s. risteski and anna plotnikova address the world of folkloric demons. the former focuses on the evil dead, hostile to humans, as well as the preventative rites that sought to eliminate or lessen the possibility of the transformation of people into evil spirits. in the eyes of the community the most susceptible to such transformation were individuals whose social status placed them on the margins of community life before their untimely death—e.g., the unmarried, the unbaptized or those who had suffered a violent death. plotnikova, on the other hand, addresses the protecting demons of places (the genii loci) and their ambiguous role as simultaneously evil beings and as guardian spirits of the community (similar to the saints). the concluding article of this section investigates the various portrayals of evil in mongolian lore, uncovering the distinct pre-buddhist and buddhist representations of the world of spirits and demons. its author, ágnes birtalan, proposes that original mongolic lore did not explicitly perceive a realm of evil, seeing the world only as an opposition of the good vs. the bad. elements of the demonic/evil and the notion of “hell” penetrated mongolian mythology only with the advance folklorica 2010, vol. xv 196 of buddhism as a means of psychological control of population: “representation of different kinds of pain, and demonic spirits of the hell were spread… to terrify people, and prevent them from acting against the rules of buddhism” (p. 254). *** the third volume is the longest of the series and reflects the central theme of the conference, addressing two focal questions: “the historical formation of witchcraft mythologies and the social-judicial context of witchcraft prosecution” (p. 1). its first part is devoted to the theme of the witches’ sabbath. martine ostorero investigates the manner in which fifteenth-century authors of demonological tractates formulated the concept of the sabbath. she approaches such texts from the socio-cultural perspective, which allows her to discern in their writings the considerable influences of the surrounding world. in particular, ostorero identifies anti-jewish attitudes, the fear of conspiracy and heresy, as well as alpine folklore as the mechanisms behind the conceptualization of “witches’ sabbath.” adelina angusheva’s article compares and contrasts the witchcraft prosecutions of the orthodox bulgaria and catholic europe, noting orthodoxy’s tendency to fight witchcraft mainly with the help of sermons and treatises, rather than taking the drastic measures of physical persecution, characteristic of the catholic church and the inquisition (p. 92). per sörlin’s essay addresses the involvement of children, who were believed to be carried away to the sabbath by witches, during the witchcraft epidemic in scandinavia. he investigates the psychological side of the children’s testimonies, who were the main and, often, the only witnesses in the courts of law. he also considers the impact of popular beliefs, peer pressure and the courtroom hearings on the structure of their testimonies. the comparative analysis of the swedish sabbath and a similar basque phenomenon allows sörlin to identify the specific characteristic of the scandinavian vision of the sabbath, which at first was perceived to be more dualistic in nature, containing a bright (white) side and a dark (evil) side. however, as the phenomenon became more and more stereotyped, it gradually turned into a darker and dismal concept. the second part deals with judicial trials and accounts. péter g. tóth’s study of the water ordeal of witches traces the origins of this ritual to antiquity (ancient mesopotamia, in particular) but also pays attention to its possible christian antecedents, such as the rites of baptism and the liturgical trial by water, implemented regularly between the ninth and the twelfth century in the ecclesiastical legal practices to solve the disputes reviews 197 folklorica 2010, vol. xv and to punish ordinary crimes. the most intriguing part of the article is the investigation of the change in the technical aspects of the ritual. specifically, tóth discovers that the ancients judged that the death of the accused proved their guilt, whereas if the victim floated, s/he was believed to be innocent—something, which was later reversed in the legal practices of early christendom and continued in early modern witch trials. ildikó kristóf provides a detailed textual investigation of the witchcraft confessions, especially those, containing the episode of the pact with the devil. the researcher traces in these testimonies—often extracted from the accused under the torture—elements of existing legal practices of the time. such treatment helped the accused “witches” shape delirious fantasies into appropriate court statements. polina melik simonian turns her attention to seventeenth-century muscovy—a territory often ignored by scholars. her study investigates the proportion of foreigners among those accused of witchcraft. noting their high number, the scholar sees traces of xenophobia among the native population who sought to demonize the “other.” in the final section of the book iveta todorova-pirgova describes her fieldwork in the peasant communities of the present day bulgaria, noting the intriguing acceptance of the magic by the local orthodox priests as well as a strange cooperation of priests with not only the local “healers,” but also with the muslim imams—a phenomenon stemming from the long history of co-existence of muslims and christians in the region. the concluding article, by mirjam mencej, presents an interesting investigation of the manner in which the witchcraft accusations are still utilized in the contemporary slovenian rural communities by “function[ing] as a kind of communal institution managing… internal tensions and conflicts” (p. 10). *** the trilogy contains a rich layer of research on the intricate coexistence, reciprocal influence, origins, and the resulting contemporary legacy of the european medieval and early modern demonological tractates and popular beliefs in demons, spirits, and witches. it addresses almost every angle pertaining to such beliefs and related phenomena, but its special focus is, of course, the thorough and systematic investigation of the judicial and trial accounts of the witchcraft prosecutions—mostly those, belonging to the hereto unexplored areas of central, southern, northern and eastern europe—which complements the thriving field of the study of the west european witch hunts. however, one area left unattended by the scholars is the contamination of the supernatural figure of a witch with other numinous beings such as vampires and werewolves, folklorica 2010, vol. xv 198 which is reflected not only in their similar overlapping characteristics and abilities, but often in the terminology as well (e.g., the greek term ‘vrykolakas’ can signify a werewolf, a vampire, and also a sorcerer/a witch; see, for example, jan louis perkowski’s vampire lore: from the writings of jan louis perkowski or leslie a. sconduto’s metamorphoses of the werewolf: a literary study from antiquity through the renaissance). thus, if further conferences or publications on the topic are planned, it would be interesting to see scholars approach this issue in more detail. on a technical side, i should also say that the trilogy, unfortunately, suffers from the typical drawbacks associated with the publication of the conference proceedings, i.e., many essays seem to be left—at least in the view of this reviewer—on the level of their “conference” form, regardless of the fact that almost six years passed between the date of the conference and the publication of the first volume, and the editors’ reassurance that the papers have been considerably reworked (vol. 2, p. 1). a few contributions still read as conference presentations (e.g., renata mikolajczyk’s or iveta todorova-pirgova’s) with one essay even being left in the point-format without any conclusions (l’upcho s. risteski’s), while the others seem to have only the bibliography updated, but with it being precisely this—bibliography—and not the works cited, it is hard to say whether the text was reworked as well. such criticism notwithstanding, the trilogy presents a pioneering investigation—even though, at times, only preliminary—in the area of demons, spirits, witchcraft phenomena and mythologies, and will be of interest to folklorists, historians, scholars of religion or literature, working in the field of the european learned demonology, popular lore, or literary tradition encompassing some of its elements (e.g., the gothic or romantic literary movement). the volumes could be used together or separately in comparative courses, dedicated to the study of folklore beliefs in early modern europe or in courses devoted to the case study of witches and witch hunts per se. svitlana krys university of alberta edmonton, alberta canada << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain 20%) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \050swop\051 v2) /srgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel 1.4 /compressobjects /tags /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages true /createjdffile false /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default 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setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice microsoft word folkloricaprotest_ii_full_final_2022 07.27.22.docx introduction to the special issue ii folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi iii editor’s introduction to the folklorica special issue “folklore and protest ii” the theme of folklore and protest in belarus and russia merits special comment at this juncture in history. the constitutions of both countries guarantee the right to free assembly (see article 31 [constitution of the russian federation 2022] and article 35 [constitution of the republic of belarus 2022]). however, since their ratification (in 1993 and 1994 respectively), the right to free assembly and thus, to protest, has been severely curtailed in both nations. in effect, the act of assembly itself is often perceived by these states as an illegal act designed to undermine social norms and foster extremist views. this attitude may have curtailed protest, but it has not eliminated it completely in either country, as we know. nevertheless, to establish the context for protest today, particularly in light of the war in ukraine, we will begin this special issue on folklore and protest with an overview of the legal changes regarding assembly in belarus and russia since the 2000s. beginning in 2005, belarus took steps to limit citizen rights of assembly with the enactment of law 193-1, the first step toward the criminalization of protest. it held protestors responsible for organizing or participating in activities of “unregistered” organizations as well as required them to reimburse court costs for “violating the order of organizing and holding mass events” [belarusian national youth council 2022]. in effect, by sanctioning protests only for “registered” organizations and, likewise, requiring all protests to be approved by state authorities, “legal” protest became nearly impossible. the state controlled both registration and permitting processes and refused (or made untenable) protests they deemed objectionable. opposition groups often lost their status as registered organizations, thereby making any of their public actions subject to legal penalties [satsunkevich et al 2020]. the law was repealed in 2019 but was restored in 2022 in the wake of the spate of protests against lukashenka’s fraudulent election in summer 2020 [cso meter 2022; slavic review 2021]. in addition, a new set of laws designed to combat extremism in the country have been enacted since april 2021 [euronews 2021]. individual activists and organizations, including political parties, trade unions, religious or other public groups, and international organizations, may be charged with extremism for protesting (e.g., by “inciting discord” as described in the law). of particular note, considering one of putin’s justifications for the war in ukraine, is the law on preventing the rehabilitation of nazism. the ministry of justice and office for religious and ethnic affairs are charged with monitoring groups to “counteract the rehabilitation of nazism…by banning activities and eliminating extremist organizations” [legal transformation center 2021]. under the auspices of this law, restrictions on journalists as well as on internet access have increased, and websites critical of the government have been fined or shuttered [meduza 2021]. the russian legislative crackdown on assembly likewise emerged in response to protests about a fraudulent election, in this case, 2011 elections for introduction to the special issue ii folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi iv the duma. alexei navalny, boris nemstov, and other opposition activists organized the so-called “snow revolution,” a series of mass protests that continued into 2012 in the lead up to putin’s reelection as president [global nonviolent action database 2012; goncharenko 2012]. the 2012 law increased fines for participants involved in protests that cause property damage or harm people, with civil servants receiving double fines; businesses could also be fined if they support or helped to organize the protests. two years later, russia passed a law that notification of all protests must be sent to state officials. while official permission was not required by this law, officials could restrict the activities in response to the notification. if activists persisted with the original plan, the protest would be deemed “unauthorized.” participants in an “unauthorized public gathering can be punished by administrative arrest,” and repeat offenders were subject to up to five years in prison [human rights watch 2014]. as in belarus, restrictions on organizations deemed to be a threat by state authorities (per the foreign agent law passed in 2012) limited dissenting voices on the web and across the country under the guise of protecting the country from “foreign influences” (namely organizations supported by money from outside the country) [radio free europe/radio liberty 2017]. the most prominent victim of the law was the human rights organization memorial in 2021 [gavin 2021]. my own research on russian legends since 2001 has shown a consistent and growing concern with attempts by the united states to undermine russia since the fall of the ussr, a trend which eliot borenstein [2019] has also documented. legend texts i have collected focus on american threats to the russian populace, particularly to children and youth, in the guise of unhealthy food, deadly diseases, drug addiction, environmental destruction, and corrupt moral and social values. putin has astutely capitalized on the general concerns expressed by the populace in these legends about the west in the lead up to the ukrainian invasion. lesiv demonstrates in her article, “not all quiet on the culinary front: the battle over borshch in ukraine,” how a seemingly mundane, even humorous, disagreement over the origins of beet soup can reflect a much more dire and critical message than one might expect [lesiv 2021: 72]. she argues that ukrainians have perceived borshch through the lens of the russian threat to their nation. similarly, these legends convey the message that the united states is a threat to russia and its populace. the stories are not just conspiracy theories worthy of dismissal by “right-thinking” people but convey serious fears. they also demonstrate the potential harm a legend text may do, as bodner et al [bodner et al 2021] have likewise documented in their study of covid-19 and qanon conspiracies. people who believe these stories may take ostensive action to thwart the “enemy” as they understand it, leading, in extreme cases, to violence. in daily life, the legends exacerbate mistrust and greater acceptance of putin’s narrative about the war in ukraine as caused by the west’s desire for russia’s downfall. despite efforts on the part of the state to curtail dissent, protests have continued in both countries. we cannot document all the events that have provoked demonstrations here, but the laboratory for theoretical folklore studies has been actively collecting material on russian protest (from one-person introduction to the special issue ii folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi v pickets to mass gatherings) since 2015. their database of vernacular responses to the russian state includes material on over 400 protests in that time, largely in saint petersburg and moscow, but also in some regional cities (for more information their scholarship in this area, see [arkhipova et al 2016; arkhipova et al 2018]). the most recent legislation to curb public protest came in response to demonstrations against russia’s invasion of ukraine. in march 2022, anti-war protests, in particular, were criminalized. protesters have been charged for “discrediting the russian armed forces,” a core component of the law, which is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. [human rights watch 2022]. simultaneously, the duma passed legislation that severely limits freedom of the press when reporting on the war [harding 2022]. in march, they also banned or limited access to many “extremist” social media platforms, including facebook and instagram (which are currently inaccessible without a virtual private network), apparently in an effort to limit access to alternative information on the war [bond and allyn 2022]. this designation means that even scholars cannot cite material from these social media platforms without potential legal consequences. while anti-war protests erupted in february in belarus and russia, since that time the laws have truly resulted in a chilling effect on public dissent, more so than previous laws have done. over 15,000 arrests have been reported in russia alone between february and june 2022, including those of prominent opposition activists, such as vladimir kara-murza [simon 2022]. certainly, some protests continue, but they are much smaller than they were in the first month after the war began. my co-editor mariya lesiv observes, in her introduction to the companion volume to this issue, that ukrainians perceive this paucity of dissent as tacit acceptance of the war, at least on the part of the russians [lesiv 2021: ix]. dissent, however, has not disappeared. out of fear of arrest, many protesters have taken alternative approaches to convey their concerns about the war. from the perspective of ukrainians facing death and the destruction of their homeland, these tactics seem insulting. however, from the perspective of folklore studies, they represent a creative vernacular expression of dissent in an oppressive context. small (often anonymous) acts of rebellion give voice and some degree of agency to those who cannot speak out more publicly without legal repercussions. see, for instance, image 1 below of graffiti (“say war aloud”) on a saint petersburg building in response to the russian law that fines anyone calling the “special operation” in ukraine a war [facebook 2022]. the words themselves are taboo, of course, and thus subversive. the fact that the slogan is painted in blue to represent the ukrainian flag reinforces both support for ukrainians and disagreement with russia’s hyper-nationalist war. the holiday of victory day in russia likewise produced a series of vernacular anti-war responses across the county. on a day when putin likened the soldiers fighting in ukraine to world war ii veterans, there was a backlash from committed activists. the instagrammer philippenzo painted rows of coffins with the slogan цинк наш! [zinc (used in the metal containers to transport dead introduction to the special issue ii folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi vi soldiers) is ours!] on a wall in volgograd (image 2) [philippenzo 2022]. two reporters from the lenta.ru news site posted anti-war articles (since removed) image 1: say war aloud on saint petersburg building [facebook 2022] introduction to the special issue ii folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi vii image 2: zinc is ours! graffiti in volgograd posted on instagram on victory day 2022 by its creator philippenzo and were fired as a result [lenta.ru 2022]. individuals were also arrested for marching with anti-war placards in the immortal regiment, designed to remember one’s relatives who had participated in combat [moscow times 2022]. victory day also produced a rumor panic of sorts; people believed that putin intended to begin general conscription of men of fighting age on may 9. in response, many young men who left the country to avoid the draft (e.g., a colleague’s son-in-law went to armenia). in fact, many dissenters, particularly in the internet technology field, had already departed [kanchev et al 2022; boutsko 2022]. according to a friend, a web designer who has worked in the united states for the last three years, her former saint petersburg coworkers all departed within a week of the war’s onset. intending to work remotely, they headed for turkey, thailand, central asian or southeastern european countries. belarus is no exception, with activists and artists often leaving for their own protection [demytrie 2022]. artists, musicians, and writers, whether in belarus or russia, have been among the most vocal in their opposition to the war thus far [sherwood 2022; zitser 2022; pinson and talmazan 2022; radio free europe/radio liberty 2022; erizano 2022]. as lesiv discusses in her overview, the arts have long been the source of protest and dissent in the regions of world that folklorica studies [lesiv 2022: iii]. against the backdrop of this cultural history, the articles in this volume bring to the fore how the creative class has responded with resistance and protest in their works. most importantly, these creators draw on the folk tradition to convey their message of dissent. in other words, they rely on informal and traditional cultural practices, often as expressed by marginalized voices, to resist and protest the status quo. all four pieces demonstrate how folk genres have been incorporated into elite cultural forms (art, literature, and medicine) to express introduction to the special issue ii folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi viii dissent with institutional practices. this phenomenon illustrates not only the power of folk tradition, but an important fact about the permeability of cultural forms, be they defined as pop, folk, or elite. they are part of an ongoing conversation for members of any culture, who may extract and employ elements, in this case, folk materials, that best suit the purpose at hand. it may seem odd to consider perinatal specialists as part of the creative class. however, tatiana kuksa presents a persuasive case for just such a classification in her piece “activism and patient vulnerability: resistance to medical authority and regulation in russia.” the midwives and doulas she interviewed repeatedly stress applying humane values and approaches to the medical system surrounding pregnancy, labor, and delivery. they have used their medical training to resist the “conveyor” system characteristic of medicine in soviet and post-socialist russia (for a discussion, see [belousova 2003; rouhier-willoughby 2008]). kuksa examines how these women have brought a new vernacular model of birth to the fore that has altered what some women expect from pregnancy and delivery. this model allows these women to reframe the rite of childbirth according to their own creative vision, challenging official medical protocols with their one-size-fits-all approach. in addition, women also rely on established folk genres to describe their (usually negative) experiences with medical professionals. ultimately, folk material, be it ritual or text, is a creative means to express dissent, resist, and protest and, as noted above, crosses among levels of culture, even into the bureaucratic realm of legal prose. izabela zdun shifts the focus to perhaps the most well-known and beloved folk genre: the tale. in her article, “hoping against hope? on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales,” she explores how the author draws on the tropes of the fairy tale in particular to express her concerns and resistance to contemporary values. petrushevskaia has written dozens of fairy tales, but zdun focuses on two stories, “happy new year, law-breaker!” and “the mirrors’ fairy tale.” they bring to the fore the author’s concern about social values that isolate urban russian citizens. in both stories, the author offers a ray of hope in a bleak existence: the chance to build community. zdun argues that the fairy tale, with its focus on the creation of families and solidarity among disparate (and often antagonistic) actors, is an especially apt choice for petrushevskaia’s call for social change in russia today. svetlana yefimenko takes us back to the 19th century in her article “listen then, avars, to what i tell you:” the unification of chechen and avar oral culture in tolstoy’s the cossacks and hadji murat.” this contribution is particularly timely, because tolstoy expresses his dissent with russia’s war in the caucasus. tolstoy, who served in the russian army during the war, incorporates chechen and avar folk song (and their performance) into these works to convey his disagreement with the imperialist conflict. yefimenko argues that these works, by highlighting the song texts themselves, force the reader to bear witness to the crimes of the tsarist army in the region. tolstoy is renowned as a champion of the marginalized, and these two pieces are no exception. tolstoy recognizes the power of (native) oral texts that allow the chechens and avars to articulate their introduction to the special issue ii folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi ix own history and culture and to reject the imperialist narrative that they were barbarians. this issue concludes with a report by sasha razor that showcases how the visual arts have served as a means to protest the current political situation in belarus. these artists have drawn on the rich folk traditions of belarusian embroidery to express their dissent with lukashenka’s election. as razor outlines in “the code of presence: belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns,” the exhibit she organized at the university of michigan library conveys how and why these women artists have chosen this medium. the traditional forms challenge difficulties with defining belarusian identity and also highlight the seminal role of women’s voices in dissent in belarus today. i want to thank mariya lesiv, my co-editor of the companion volume on folklore and protest, for her dedication and perseverance at a horrific time in her native country of ukraine. thanks also to folklorica’s editorial assistants for their hard work on both special volumes on folklore and protest, isabella palange and johnna warkentine. my gratitude goes to the contributors for their thoughtprovoking pieces and their patience with an editing process delayed by my own grief and shock over the war. the careful and detailed readings by external reviewers make my work as editor much smoother and are most appreciated. after 10 years, i am stepping down as editor as of this issue. i offer my profound thanks to the seefa members who have steadfastly supported folklore scholarship and the journal during my tenure. special thanks go to rick spencer, my editorial assistant for many years. he developed an invaluable formatting template for the journal, and his willingness to troubleshoot technical issues, even after he had left the position, merits special mention. i am pleased to welcome benjamin gatling as the new editor of folklorica as of january 2023. i am sure the journal will continue to thrive in his capable hands. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby, editor bibliography arkhipova, aleksandra, daria radchenko, and aleksei titkov, (eds). 2016. архипова, александра, дария радченко и алексей титков. городские тексты и практики. том і: символическое сопротивление. [urban texts and practices volume i: symbolic resistance]. москва: издательский дом «дело». arkhipova, aleksandra, radchenko daria, titkov, aleksei, kozlova irina, yugai elena, belyanin sergei, gavrilova, maria. 2018. “‘rally rebuild’: internet in protest and protest on the internet.” monitoring of public opinion: economic and social changes.1, 12-35. https://www.monitoringjournal.ru/index.php/monitoring/article/view/246/2 34. belarusian national youth council “rada.” 2022. crisis 2020. cited by introduction to the special issue ii folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi x https://en.rada.fm/2022/01/22/statement-3/. 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(consulted 15 june 2022). kanchev, georgi, evan gershkovich and yuliya chernoa. 2022. “fleeing putin, thousands of educated russians are moving abroad.” wall street journal 10 april 2022. cited by https://www.wsj.com/articles/fleeing-putinthousands-of-educated-russians-are-moving-abroad-11649583003. (consulted 16 june 2022). legal transformation center, belarusian helsinki committee. 2021. “new legislative regulation in belarus as the authorities’ response to the events of 2020 and how it correlates with international standards in the field of human rights.” lawtrend. 1 march 2021. cited by https://belhelcom.org/sites/default/files/new_legislative_regulation_in_the _republic_of_belarus_05.21.pdf. (consulted 23 june 2022). lenta.ru. 2022. “‘войной легче прикрыть провалы в экономике.’ путин должен уйти.” [it’s easier to cover up economic failures with a war. putin has to go.] lenta.ru 9 may 2022. cited by https://web.archive.org/web/20220509065825/https:/lenta.ru/. (consulted 21 june 2023). lesiv, mariya. 2021. “introduction to the folklorica special issue “folklore and protest i,” folklorica xxv: iii-xv. lesiv, mariya. 2021. “not all quiet on the culinary front: the battle over borshch in ukraine,” folklorica xxv: 58-77. introduction to the special issue ii folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi xii meduza. 2021. “belarus introduces sweeping restrictions on journalists and activists.” meduza. 24 may 2021. cited by https://meduza.io/en/news/2021/05/24/belarus-introduces-sweepingrestrictions-on-journalists-and-activists. (consulted 23 june 2022). moscow times. 2022. “anti-war activists stage ‘guerilla’ protests on victory day.” moscow times 11 may 2022. cited by https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/05/09/russian-envoy-to-polandsplattered-with-red-paint-on-victory-day-a77626. (consulted 21 june 2022). philippenzo. 2022. photograph: цинк наш [zinc is ours]. instagram 9 may 2022. cited by https://www.instagram.com/p/cdu4ktpm94s/. 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(consulted 23 june 2022). rouhier-willoughby, jeanmarie. 2008. village values: negotiating identity, gender, and resistance in urban russian life-cycle rituals. bloomington, in: slavica. satsunkevich, natallia, dmitry chernyh and nasta lolka. 2020. monitoring the right to free assembly: belarus 2019. cited by https://ecnl.org/sites/default/files/files/monitoring-the-right-to-freeassembly-belarus-report.pdf. (consulted 23 june 2022). sherwood, harriet. 2022. “eminent writers urge russian speakers to tell the truth of war in ukraine.” the guardian 5 march 2022. cited by https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/05/eminent-writers-urgerussian-speakers-to-tell-truth-of-war-in-ukraine. (consulted 16 june 2022). simon, scott. 2022. “opposition politician vladimir kara-murza and other dissidents detained in russia.” npr. 11 june 2022. cited by https://www.npr.org/2022/06/11/1104368981/opposition-politicianvaldimir-kara-murza-and-other-dissidents-detained-in-russi. (consulted 15 june 2022). slavic review. 2021. critical discussion forum: the sociology of protest in belarus—social dynamics, ideological shifts, and demand for change 80 (1). introduction to the special issue ii folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi xiii zitser, joshua. 2022. “video shows defiant russian audience chanting ‘fuck the war; at st petersburg concert.” business insider 22 may 2022. cited by https://www.businessinsider.com/video-russians-defy-putin-chant-fuckwar-st-petersburg-concert-2022-5?op=1. (consulted 16 june 2022). microsoft word folk2010e.doc reports 155 folklorica 2010, vol. xv notes from the field: contemporary folkways in slovenia: personal practices of commemoration at cemeteries, public monuments, and unmarked mass graves veronica e. aplenc rosemont college rosemont, pennsylvania, usa while monuments and practices of public commemoration have garnered quite a bit of attention in the north american academic literature in the past few years, cemeteries and practices of personal commemoration have remained less well explored. a lack of attention to these two very common and widespread folklore items can be found outside north america also. highly present in the folkways of both village and urban people, and displaying similarity across political divides, these two topics have oddly remained absent in the slovenian academic literature. these field notes present the initial stages of a research project into personal practices of commemoration that proliferate at slovenian cemeteries as well as monuments. building on initial fieldwork conducted in 2001 and 2002, my research points to commonalities in the form of cemeteries, similarities which derive from a shared history. there are also similarities in practices of personal commemoration across significant geographical, social, and political divides. while the first observation is not surprising, the second one points to the striking continued presence of these folkways through the socialist and post-socialist periods across major societal divisions. cemeteries are very widespread in slovenian villages and towns and the everyday practices associated with them are a fascinating topic of research. largely rectilinear, slovenian cemeteries recall the more formal layouts found in french examples, rather than the naturalistic style of anglo-american or protestant northern european places of burial. generally entered through gates and surrounded by walls, slovenian cemeteries adjoin churches or are free-standing, with village examples often falling in the first category and city ones in the second. similar to their italian counterparts, slovenian cemeteries are divided in grid-like fashion into neat rows of plots. rows of gravel or, in the case of village cemeteries, neat dirt paths, mark the grid lines. plots, in turn, generally contain a single family gravestone with several individuals’ names, rather than markers to individuals. gravestones are placed at the head of folklorica 2010, vol. xv 156 grave plots and those of the twentieth century usually take the form of a rectangular stone slab of limestone, granite or marble. a progression of styles can be noted across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in gravestone overall shape, lettering style, modest decoration, and in materials. the entire plot is often treated like a small garden and can include an ivy covering, individual plants in a gravel bed, or a combination of gravel, stone slabs and plantings. care for family plots occupies a very important place in both urban and village folkways, with expectations that a well-cared for plot will be tidy, contain managed plantings, and remain weed-free. both gravestones and plots often assume a quiet appearance, with little that can be characterized as ostentatious or flamboyant. slovenian cemeteries share their form with counterparts in the broader western european, historically roman catholic, region of which slovenia has been a part since the early medieval period. because slovenian territory fell predominantly under austrian, but also italian, french, and hungarian rule until 1918, the political, religious and social forces of these states greatly shaped slovenian life. as argued by mateja habinc, by the time of the enlightenment, slovenian burial grounds were appearing as square courtyards adjoining churches. from the late eighteenth century onward, cemeteries increasingly came under governmental management in a reflection of changing church-state relations, secularization, and emerging ideas on public hygiene. in the nineteenth-century habsburg empire, cemeteries fell under either state or roman catholic church administration, depending on their location, and the state issued legislation on the specifics of cemetery location and construction. the form of contemporary slovenian cemeteries – including surrounding walls and, for new cemeteries, locations outside settlements – is a direct consequence of the requirements of eighteenth and nineteenth-century austrian legislation. following the second world war and the introduction of the yugoslav socialist state, cemeteries were fully secularized and, at the time of this writing, burials in slovenia are regulated by a 1984 law (habinc 21–30). the ljubljana city cemetery, for example, is currently owned by a state funerary company (žale javno podjetje, d.o.o.) which manages all burials within the cemetery, as well as all cemetery matters. in an unusual arrangement that stands out against otherwise highly ordered management practices, the ljubljana city cemetery company requires individuals who own family graves to also pay a fee, termed “annual rent,” on these plots. reports 157 folklorica 2010, vol. xv practices of personal commemoration in slovenia derive from those historically present in the greater region, although the specifics of these folkways are particular to the country. the main holiday for personal commemorations of the deceased has remained the same since 1918 and three states – monarchical yugoslav, socialist yugoslavia, and independent slovenia – have maintained it under different names. the first of november was known by the religious term vsi sveti (all saints’) before the second world war. interestingly it became dan mrtvih (the day of the dead) during the socialist period. it has been called dan spomina na mrtve (literally, day of the remembering of the dead) in the independence period, that is since 1991. individuals commemorate the deceased on other holidays, too, such as christmas or/and new year’s. such commemorations are based on individuals’ beliefs and the anniversary of date of death. commemorative practices most commonly include the placing of candles on loved ones’ graves, while the laying of flowers and floral arrangements occurs less frequently. these practices flourish among all slovenians, despite significant geographical, social and political divisions. habinc dates the origins of candle-placing to early christian religious rituals, and the historical association of this practice with catholicism is clear. its migration over time to a folk practice common to catholic believers, the religiously nonaffiliated, and active (anti-religious) communists today strikes one as plausible, and field observations support its apparently universal nature. for example, during field visits to the ljubljana city cemetery in 2001 and 2002 on november 1, i noticed numerous candles lit at all cemetery sites marking the deceased. multiple candles were placed at family plots. these were for individuals. candles stood several rows deep around the very small, semi-circular garden behind the cemetery church of the holy cross. these were for those with no identified grave, meaning those killed by communist forces during the second world war and immediately thereafter. there were also seas of candles under various monuments to war-time partisans. these were for pro-communist fighters who died during the second world war. while personal commemorative practices at cemeteries have received limited discussion in the slovenian literature, no examination can be complete without a consideration of personal commemoration at monuments to the second world war and related events. as part of the former yugoslavia, slovenia experienced occupation by fascist forces during world war ii, as well as intense internal fighting that verged on civil war. the political divides of the war-time period can be roughly folklorica 2010, vol. xv 158 grouped into pro-communist, or “red,” and alternatively anti-communist, pro-fascist, and perhaps pro-catholic, or “white,” depending on the speakers’ point of view. these divisions remain highly visible in slovenian politics today. evidence of this sharp political divide can be found in the disparate portrayals of politics in the main daily newspaper delo (labor), the weekly mag (mag), and the monthlies ampak (however) and mladina (youth), as well as in commentary – from both sides – in political programs on the national television station slovenija 1 (slovenia 1), such as odmevi (echoes) and tednik (weekly). in the socialist period, the state erected numerous monuments to partisan wartime activity, including representational monuments to specific individuals or historical events, representational monuments to a generalized hero figure, and non-representational monuments to partisan anti-fascist efforts, the partisan movement, collective anti-fascist efforts, and individual historical events. on a side note, because yugoslavia did not follow the soviet union from 1947 on, concerns with socialist realism as a style are not relevant for the yugoslav case. such socialistera monuments are located throughout slovenia and, unlike other central and east european countries, have not been removed since the political watershed of independence in 1991. rather, they continue to stand and to be the sites of practices of personal commemoration – a reflection, i argue, of the continuing significance and acceptance of socialist political identity in the contemporary slovenian sense of self. for example, in 2001 and 2002, november 1 was marked by a sea of candles beneath several towering monuments erected to partisan fighters. these monuments stand at the edge of the ljubljana city cemetery and on a path called “the path of comradeship and remembrance.” this twentyplus-kilometer-long monument was planned in the late 1950s as a commemorative–recreational site marking the barbed wire ring with which italian fascist forces closed off the city during war-time occupation. in the early 2000s, the path remained heavily used for the purposes – commemoration and recreation – for which it was designed. in parallel with practices at these state-created monuments to “the fallen,” or partisan war-time fighters, one must also mention a phenomenon on the opposite end of the political spectrum, that of personal commemoration at mass graves of war-time opponents to the communists. these are quite numerous in slovenia and are estimated to number over 500. they range from small sites such as the deep cave, less than 1 m in diameter, that was shown to me by a friend in the rural primorska region and is believed to be a mass grave – to very large ones reports 159 folklorica 2010, vol. xv containing the remains of up to 1,500 individuals. remaining a very contested topic in the slovenian political arena, public discussion of these sites has proven tense and difficult. these sites, too, are the recipients of personal commemoration practices. an easily accessible example for north americans can be found in the 2008 slovenian film pokrajina št. 2 (landscape no. 2), a political thriller whose trailer and closing scene feature a thief running through a sea of lights in a forest. odd to a non-slovenian and perhaps even suggestive to north americans of folk practices related to pagans, to a slovenian the candles and forest setting clearly point to only one phenomenon, that of personal commemoration at an unmarked war-time or post-war mass grave. although slovenian cemeteries and graveside practices are of interest to folklorists, personal commemoration in the slovenian context has relevance beyond a single discipline. historians, art historians and, to some degree, architects have teased out the intricacies of cemeteries, their histories, and their relationship to broader intellectual trends. similarly, folklorists and anthropologists have concerned themselves with rituals and practices at funerals across cultures, while scholars of diverse backgrounds have considered the politics of public commemorations. the slovenian case has features that cross disciplinary boundaries and reveals striking details about contemporary slovenian folklore, culture, and identity. with contemporary personal commemoration practices taking place at family gravesites, socialist-era public monuments to war-time heroes, and unmarked locations of mass graves of communists’ opponents, these practices represent an intriguing folklore item. uniting as they do a highly divided populace and occurring at a variety of sites, they suggest the relevance of history, and of personal relationship to history, for slovenians. furthermore, they clearly point to the continuing significance and acceptance of the socialist period for contemporary political identity. and, they additionally indicate the very strong presence and unselfconscious practice of historically established folkways in everyday urban and village life. the intriguing details of these practices of personal commemoration and the insights they provide into contemporary slovenian life will be the questions that my future research will aim to explore. bibliography brun, neva, and marjan remic, (eds.), 1999. tihi pomniki minljivega časa: drobci o šegah slovesov in pokopališki kulturi na slovenskem folklorica 2010, vol. xv 160 etničnem ozemlju. [silent memorials of times past: details on ceremonial customs and cemetery culture in the slovenian ethnic territory.] ljubljana: forum 7. felicori, mauro, and annalisa zanotti. 2004. pokopaličša v evropi: zgodovinska dediščina, ki jo je treba spoznati in ohraniti. [cemeteries of europe: historic heritage that must be known and preserved.] ljubljana: mestna občina ljubljana. habinc, mateja. 2000. “gresta v nedeljo popoldne na pokopališče?” o skrbi za grobove in njihovem obiskovanju na primeru brežiških pokopališč od tridesetih let 20. stoletja do danes. [“are you going to the graveyard on sunday afternoon?” on maintaining graves and visiting them; the example being the brežice graveyards from the 1930s to the present day.] ljubljana: slovensko etnološko društvo, ljubljana. slovenia: mass grave found. new york times. 5 march 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/world/europe/05briefsmassgravefou_brf.html. accessed 18 march 2010. slovenian mass grave could be europe’s killing fields. der spiegel. 21 august 2007. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,501058,00.html. accessed 18 march 2010. world war ii mass graves open a wound in slovenia. new york times. 22 october 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/news/22ihtslovenia.1.7995453.html. accessed 18 march 2010. << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain 20%) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \050swop\051 v2) /srgbprofile (srgb 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setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice reviews 107 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii roussou, eugenia. orthodox christianity, new age spirituality and vernacular religion: the evil eye in greece. london: bloomsbury academic, 2021, 192 pp. bibliography. isbn 9781350152793 (hardback, $120.00); 9781350225398 (paperback, $39.95); 9781350152809 (ebook, $35.95); 9781350152816 (epub and mobi, $ 35.95) eugenia roussou’s intention is “to demonstrate how contemporary greek religiosity is characterized by open religious horizons, where a creative amalgamation of christianity and new age spirituality takes place at the level of vernacular religious practice” (6). roussou argues that greek orthodoxy has become more “porous” (3) and consequently, despite the opposition of a dwindling proportion of the clergy, more liable to syncretic engagement with a new age repertoire once uniformly viewed as a diabolical distraction from true faith. convincingly arguing that greek religiosity is both immanent and transcendental—icons, for example, represent both the immediacy of grace and the eternal truth of holiness—she shows how this ability to connect the two realms rendered orthodoxy receptive to new influences once the power relations between clergy and laity had shifted. these external factors include the international commercialization of paraphernalia such as chinese and japanese symbols as well as evil eye amulets. this expansion, she suggests, has allowed greeks to feel increasingly part of a global humanity. roussou bases her argument on her ethnographic research, most of which appears to have taken the form of unstructured interviews and some active participation, as healer and healed, in the ritual nexus of the evil eye. she attributes her thin treatment of social context to the more episodic and distanced fieldwork possible in cities, but then undermines that justification with some convincing vignettes in classic anthropological mode and by (wisely) rejecting hard-edged rural-urban distinctions. at its core her approach rests on a courageous reflexivity that allows her to break new ground in otherwise well-charted territory. in describing her roles as curer and cured and accounting for failures in specific situations, she provides a compelling account of the experiential and social stakes. her insistence that the evil eye is not exclusively about ocular contact rings true; some of the best passages in the book concern the tactility of the healing ritual and the relief that the touch of a familiar hand offers from the coldly scientific medical establishment. her analysis of the “good eye” as a benign ocular force operating much like its evil cousin is also novel, and her focus on consumerist influences on the production and merchandising of ritual objects yields some of the book’s most expressive moments. while there is some discussion of witchcraft, on the other hand, the dearth of context, coupled with an almost exclusive emphasis on theological questions, makes it difficult to understand whether accusations of casting the evil eye ever served her informants primarily as a strategic social practice (as vassos argyrou has argued for cypriot spells in “under a spell: the strategic use of magic in greek cypriot society,” american ethnologist 20 [1993]: 256–271). reviews 108 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii roussou’s discussion of individual bodily experience—which she discusses in terms of practice, agency (human rather than divine [74]), and performance— comes to life in her descriptions of two-way interactions, some of which are even performed over the telephone. particularly revealing are her accounts of curing sessions held between socially intimate individuals such as family members; in these sessions, the curer is especially liable to the prodigious yawning that marks the passage of the evil eye’s poison from patient to curer. such intimate insights provide a significant contribution to the study of greek family relations; detailed accounts of intrafamilial dynamics have rarely featured in previous ethnographic work on greece except in that of neni panourgiá (which roussou cites approvingly). roussou’s reflexivity takes on especially vivid tones in her account of a staged “cure” conducted for primarily experimental purposes on a japanese friend. this apparently sacrilegious challenge to greek spirituality provoked massive disturbance in roussou’s mind and body, but allowed her to discover the sometimes dramatic creativity involved in the conduct of the ritual—a focus that represents a notable departure from the more static and prescriptive style of previous analyses. roussou, a native anthropologist herself, persuasively rejects objectivist arguments against “native anthropology” (18); her analysis largely justifies such a conclusion. contradictorily, however, her desire for “distance from the field” (15) sits uneasily with her reflexivity and her defense of native anthropology. such contradictions hint at a still undigested doctoral exercise. despite roussou’s admirable efforts to introduce ethnographic comparisons from other parts of the world, an intellectual cosmopolitanism that partially mirrors her topic, readers unversed in greek ethnology will need guidance to historical nuances that roussou leaves unexplored. in particular, many higher orthodox clergy were ill-disposed to the emergent greek nation-state in the early nineteenth century and viewed with misgiving the folklorists’ burnishing of its image as heir to pagan antiquity. today, seeming to confirm their fears, extreme right-wing nationalists condemn orthodoxy as a “jewish” religion and campaign to reinstate the olympian deities. for many moderate or leftist greeks, a category that seems to include most of roussou’s informants, both attitudes are equally repugnant. i would have welcomed a clearer articulation of political affiliations in relation to ideas about the evil eye, especially as roussou does recognize the politics of ecclesiastical disapproval. regional variation also largely disappears when roussou repeatedly pairs the residents of her two field sites, rethimno (crete) and thessaloniki, as if they were indistinguishable from each other. in some sense these two populations are perhaps alike—but roussou’s exoticizing portrayal of crete (56-57) seems to contradict this. equally contradictory is her attribution of the increasing clerical embrace of unconventional spiritualism, much of which greek observers would view as pagan, to the cretan church’s independence of the state church’s authority; the cretan church answers instead to the patriarchate of constantinople, which originally opposed the establishment of the greek nation-state—a development that menaced the patriarchate’s position in the ottoman empire and also threatened to entail a pagan revival. reviews 109 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii crete, as roussou notes, is linguistically distinctive, yet she claims that as a native anthropologist she did not have to master linguistic skills. this unfortunately widespread attitude produces some simplistic linguistics. for example, roussou attributes standard greek meaning of “hear” to the common west cretan usage of the verb akouo, which leads her to interpret one phrase as “hearing [i.e., smelling] the garlic” (56-57). akouo is best translated from the dialect as “sensing,” as “hearing” has its own specific verb (ghriko) in local usage. roussou is not thinking in dialect, and this flattens the specificity of the local, reducing the potentiality of her dual regional focus for revealing contrasts. some conceptual issues also remain unresolved. roussou seems to conflate materiality with concreteness, a position that directly contradicts her recognition of the performative force of ritual. she also objects to what she sees as rodney needham’s (belief, language, and experience, 1972) rejection of the category of belief as a “predominantly western term” (154). needham, however, particularly traces the semantics of the english (not generically western!) term to the germanic root of “love” (cf. lieben), the hebrew amen (witnessing truth), and— most significantly here—the new testament (koinē) greek term pistis; this last term has generated a greek religious vocabulary (as well as a banking one, as in “credit”). precisely because the modern word is essentially identical to the koinē term, contextualized descriptions of how it was actually used are vital for judging roussou’s use of “belief” as an analytical concept. does the greek term mean the same thing cognitively and emotionally as the english word or as its new testament antecedent? how can we know? the problem of psychological inner states, which has generated a considerable literature since needham voiced critical concern, remains significant but intractable. is her opposition to needham’s dismissal of belief as a “western” category explained by her stereotypical and politically conservative assertion that greece “belongs to the west” (155), in which she perhaps unconsciously but precisely echoes the late right-wing former greek premier and president konstantinos karamanlis in his assertion of fealty to the european union? such generic declarations enshrine ideologically motivated stereotypes that do not help analysis. moreover, the shadow of belief-as-obligation, perceptible in the use of pisti(s) as “credit,” raises interesting possibilities that roussou does not address. is belief in the evil eye, for example, somehow linked to well-documented concepts of obligation such as might be created by a cure? would payment—even if it has not yet widely accompanied the commercialization of evil eye paraphernalia that roussou describes so well—invalidate the cure by removing an essential social bond? is belief in this sense dependent on a social relationship rather than solely on individual cognition? her analysis hints at such possibilities but does not explore them. some of these intermittently self-contradictory book’s problems are attributable to editorial neglect. not only are the notes completely missing despite being enumerated in the text; the text itself, despite its virtues, often reads like an unproofed thesis. repetitions aside, roussou clearly commands writerly skills necessary to bringing her fieldwork to life, but there are frequent grammatical reviews 110 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii errors, recognizably greek word sequences, and what look like clauses left over from earlier drafts. this intellectually innovative study of an old staple of folklore research deserved more attentive curation by the publisher. michael herzfeld harvard university cambridge, mass., u.s.a. herzfeld@wjh.harvard.edu microsoft word folklorica_2011g.doc history of the journal 11 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi retrospective natalie kononenko i asked jim bailey and faith wigzell to write about their involvement with seefa, the slavic and east european folklore association, and with its journal, now called folklorica, because this is my last year as the journal’s editor. as i pass the journal on, it seems fitting to take a look back. my own involvement with folklore probably dates back to my childhood. much of it had to do with listening to my mother and my grandfather tell me stories. some of their stories were traditional and some were personal narratives. many were combinations of the two genres, modifications of traditional folk narratives adapted to suit the situation at hand. listening to these stories was pure pleasure. i enjoyed the artistic renderings of my two storytellers and it should be noted that they were not related to each other; they did not form a familial line of narrators. my grandfather was my father’s dad and obviously no relation to my mother. the more intellectual push toward folklore also dates from my childhood. i was not born in north america. my family left ukraine in 1936 and headed west. i was an accident that happened in a displaced persons camp in germany ten years later. we came to the united states in july 1951 and the following fall i entered school. it did not take me long to figure out that what i was being taught in the classroom was insufficient knowledge. to really understand american culture, to be able to fit in and function, i needed the information taught to me on the playground through jump rope rhymes, clapping games, taunts and jeers, crafts, and unorganized play that ranged from ball-bouncing games and hide-and-seek to cowboys and indians. learning from folklore, as well as in the classroom, i came to understand how to function in society and, when i completed my new jersey public school education, i went on to university, first at cornell and then at radcliffe, majoring first in mathematics and then in russian literature. i entered graduate school and it was here that folklore again presented itself in the form of albert bates lord, father of the oral theory. folklore was wonderful. folklore was fun. folklore allowed me to explore a question that had come to dominate my thinking, namely why art is necessary to human existence. and folklore allowed me to work with something that had been important to me all my life. folklore 12 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi also allowed me to work on another aspect of my adjustment to the west. while i did function well in american society, i did not myself feel that i was well-adjusted. i was having what would later be called an identity crisis, questioning whether i was an american, a russian, or, as many of my ukrainian friends told me, a ukrainian. so, at the urging of lord, i decided to do something completely different and chose turkey as the place where i would do my fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation. the turks were the hereditary enemies of the slavs. if i could be accepted by the turks, i felt, i would stop having doubts about my integration into american society. there were also practical reasons for choosing turkey, of course. in both ukrainian and russian epic poetry, the dumy and the byliny, the enemy is the tatar and the turk. if i was going to work on slavic epic song, then looking at it from the other side, from that of the enemy, would be a wonderful contribution to scholarship. and, if i wanted to do fieldwork, then i had to choose a place other than russia or ukraine. fieldwork there was out of the question since, at that time, both were part of the soviet union. there was little to no chance of looking at archival materials, let alone wandering about the countryside looking for whatever performers of epic might remain. i did learn turkish. i did write a dissertation on turkish minstrel tales, a hybrid of song and prose which tells about military conflicts, like epic, but also features romantic plots, stories of star-crossed lovers, unable to realize their love because their families come from different religious backgrounds. i came to love turkey, a love that has endured even as i returned to work in the slavic area. my attraction to things turkic was most recently realized in a month-long trip to kazakhstan. what also happened as a result of my dissertation work was that i made a very important discovery about art. lord and i had assumed that the turks would sing about their conflicts with the russians and ukrainians, just as the slavs sang about fighting the turks. we postulated that the turks would boast about their victories in battle just as the slavs praised the heroism of their combatants, valiant men who kept on fighting in defence of a hopeless cause. but this proved not to be the case. the enemy in turkish minstrel tales was iran and the slavs did not figure in turkish heroic narrative. what i learned from my comparative work is that one does not sing about the conflicts in which one is victorious. art is most needed where there is pain and sorrow, the imperative to deal with loss. thus the turks did not sing about battles won, but about conflicts lost, as did the ukrainians and russians. history of the journal 13 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi after graduate school, in fact before i had completed my dissertation, i was hired by the university of virginia where i taught for thirty years. when i was being interviewed for the position, i said that i would teach any set of courses that the department wanted me to teach – as long as one of them was a folklore course. my request was granted and my folklore course was popular and grew. it grew in enrolment, and with university pressure to teach many students, my colleagues were persuaded to let my folklore courses grow in number as well until i was teaching something close to a full set of courses: one each on folk prose, folk verse, family ritual, and calendar rituals and holidays. toward the end of my career at virginia i was also teaching magic and folk medicine. i had the good fortune to work with many graduate students. their questions and their research taught me a great deal. their interests shaped mine. i would probably not have spent as much time researching ritual had it not been for my students. there were also a number of gifted undergraduates and undergraduates whose struggles shaped my work. i learned from the gifted ones much in the way that i learned from the graduate students. as for the students struggling with dyslexia or juggling the demands of university athletics and their attempts to get a real education – helping them and coming up with strategies that would maximize their learning taught me a great deal. it was also while i was at the university of virginia that seefa came into being. there had been a number of attempts at starting a professional organization devoted to slavic folklore prior to the creation of seefa. there were various folklore sections of slavic and east european organizations such as aatseel, the american association of teachers of slavic and east european languages. there were slavic sections of the american folklore society. none functioned longer than a few years until james bailey started seefa. his story of how he began this organization appears in the report written by him. here i will give my own feelings on the need for an organization of this type. from the point of view of scholars in the west, what we needed was an advocacy group. there has always been a tendency to trivialize folklore, to assume that, because we all produce and consume folklore appropriate to our own folk group, there is nothing to study. if one wants to examine the folkloric stratum in literature, for example, one can do so with no training in folklore, or so it was assumed. we who are folklorists needed to show the world that ours was a serious discipline, with rigorous standards. this would help our own careers and those of our students. 14 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi there was another reason why seefa seemed so very important at the time that it was conceived. the soviet union had fallen apart and we were now travelling to countries that had formerly been part of the soviet bloc. i was able to get relatively free access to archives even before ukrainian independence, namely in the period of perestroika (perebudova in ukrainian). with the collapse of the soviet union the prospect of not only archival work but actual fieldwork in villages became real. as we travelled and interacted with our post-soviet colleagues more and more, as scholars from the former soviet union came to professional meetings in the west, it became clear that folklore scholarship in the two parts of the world had grown apart. old folklore scholarship, the work done in russia and ukraine and throughout east europe had followed trends in the rest of europe and north america: the same sort of data was collected, the same questions were asked. the existence of a common approach to folklore ended with the stalin era. the iron curtain prevented contact between east and west and scholars in the two parts of the world developed independently and grew apart. during the soviet period, folklore followed the dictates of soviet ideology and there was only one possible interpretative approach. this made theory uninteresting. at the same time, folklore forms which might reveal religiosity on the part of the population, or nationalist feelings were taboo and collecting them was risky at best. as a result, when the soviet union collapsed, in almost all of the nation states that emerged from it, the interest was in collecting data, especially those folklore forms that could not be collected in the past. meanwhile in the west, partially to prove their standing as serious scholars, folklorists became heavily involved in theory, often to the detriment of any data collection. it became clear to me that the folklorists of the former soviet union had much to teach folklorists in the west just as folklorists in the west had much to offer their post-soviet colleagues. seefa and its journal emerged as the perfect vehicle for that exchange of knowledge. this was where scholars from the west could showcase their theoretical interpretations of folklore while post-soviet folklorists could share the data that they were collecting, data of the type that had not been collected for years. they could also offer their interpretations of their lore. there was one problem: the language barrier. early in the life of seefa its executive board decided that, in order to make the information presented available to the greatest number of people, in order to avoid any nationalist tensions that might exist between post-soviet states, any publications produced by the organization would be in english. while history of the journal 15 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi writing in english might not be difficult for scholars in the west, it was a challenge for many who had grown up in the soviet world. most submissions coming from russia and other post-soviet states needed to be rewritten. the early seefa journal did not pose that many difficulties when it came to rewriting submissions written by scholars who were not native speakers of english. the early journal was essentially a newsletter with information on folklore courses, on conferences and folklore panels scheduled for them, on expeditions and other fieldwork opportunities. as the newsletter grew, articles were added to notices and the publication started to become a journal. many people worked on the journal, fixing the english, soliciting submissions. i was one of them and i was fortunate to have the help of my husband, peter holloway, who quite early took on the task of formatting the publication for printing. the publication acquired the title of seefa, the journal of the slavic and east european folklore association, and later folklorica, the title that it carries now. my role in the organization varied over the years. i served as president. i believe i held other offices as well. i tended to help out as needed and the journal was one item that required regular help. every-sooften the journal would appear to be on the verge of collapse. i would step in to save it, often with the assistance of others. the big change in the journal came with the editorship of faith wigzell, another person who kindly agreed to my request to contribute a personal retrospective to this issue. wigzell made folklorica into the serious publication that we all wanted it to be. she insisted on double peer review of all submissions. she made sure that the english of all articles was polished. the organization still had its struggles with presidents and other officers who served in name only. but the journal was in good shape. it came out regularly and the articles were of high quality. it was during wigzell’s editorship that i was recruited by and moved to the university of alberta where i was offered a chaired professorship with a nice endowment. the university permitted me to put part of the endowment toward subsidizing folklorica. with the monies that went toward publishing and mailing costs, we were able to go to the format which the journal has now. when wigzell decided to retire, a new editor was selected at the seefa annual general meeting. unfortunately the editor proved to be one of those officers who accepted the title but not the responsibilities of the office. because holloway and i were still putting the journal together, printing it, and mailing it out, and probably for other reasons, 16 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi specifically my deep commitment to folklore in general and to seefa in particular, and also my lifelong tendency to help out as needed, i took over the editorship when i learned that the official editor had done nothing and publication time was fast approaching. i have now served as editor for five years. editing folklorica is a big job. it is a more difficult job than editing a normal journal precisely because virtually all submissions from the former soviet union and east europe need to be rewritten to get them into comprehensible english. rewriting some 200 pages every year is a lot of work. i have been assisted in this task in many ways and by many people. wigzell and a number of seefa members have taken on the task of “englishing” some of the submissions, saving me much rewriting work. i try to thank them in the editor’s statement at the beginning of each issue. the university of alberta has helped. for the last three years i have had course release time. i teach one course less per year than a normal course load so that i can devote myself to folklorica. the university has also paid for hanna chuchvaha. she is officially my research assistant, supported by the department of modern languages and cultural studies, but you know her as the capable person who handles submissions and other correspondence. she was preceded in this position by svitlana kukharenko, a research assistant supported by the kuryliw graduate student fund in the kule folklore centre. both chuchvaha and kukharenko also provided translations of some submissions that were in languages other than english. i have already thanked the kule endowment for subsidizing printing and mailing. the endowment also pays katherine bily who does the copy editing. one person who deserves special thanks is peter holloway. he has already been thanked by bailey and wigzell for formatting the journal and getting it to the printer and then to the post office. but i need to expand on those thanks by listing all of the unseen things that holloway contributes. after i am done editing all of the submissions, he reads the entire journal, often catching mistakes that i missed. he has registered the journal with the library of congress and we now have an international standard serial number, issn. holloway has done a tremendous job recruiting new members to the organization. his enthusiasm for folklore has just about doubled our readership. and holloway does this without getting paid. he feels as strongly as i do that folklorica serves a vital mission by providing a communication link between east and west. he does what he does for the good of folklore and for the sake of scholarship. for many years holloway was also the history of the journal 17 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi seefa webmaster. he would put the journal on the internet so that it could be accessed around the world. and, indeed, in recent years almost every book i review that deals with the slavic and east european world cites at least one article from our journal. holloway’s job as webmaster was recently assumed by jon perkins. perkins ran the seefa newsletter early in the society’s history. he recently volunteered to take on the web version of folklorica and has done a beautiful job. the website is professional-looking and easy to use. access to the journal functions much like that of other major journals: the most recent three years are password-protected and accessible to members only; all other issues are free and open to the public. the online access to folkorica is part of the kansas university’s serials service. all in all, the journal has achieved the level of professionalism that all of us strove for all along. this was recently brought home to me when i attended the second all-russia folklore congress in moscow where folklorica was scheduled for a special presentation session that featured recent publications in the field. the session was very well attended and interest in the journal was high. i was perhaps even more impressed by the fact that, when i was sitting in one of the moscow state university offices, waiting for transportation to ershovo, the location of the folklore congress, one of the local scholars, upon learning that i was the folklorica editor, jumped up and shook my hand and congratulated me on the service that our journal performs. this gesture validated my desire to have folklorica serve as a bridge between east and west, a link that would make western scholarship accessible in the former soviet union and give scholars from the former soviet union and east europe a means for showcasing their work worldwide. it made me feel that i had accomplished my goal and that folklorica has achieved the status and the level of recognition to which we all aspired. i have not mentioned the many officers of seefa because this retrospective is dedicated specifically to the journal folklorica. needless to say, most of them have not been problematic and have done their best to serve the organization and their colleagues. jeanmarie rouhierwilloughby who has served as seefa secretary-treasurer will be assuming the editorship of folklorica after me. i trust that, under her leadership, the journal will continue to flourish and grow. << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain 20%) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \050swop\051 v2) /srgbprofile (srgb 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can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader 5.0 and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice 2016 folklorica reviews: soviet heroic poetry in context: folklore or fakelore folklorica 2015, vol. xix 186 ziolkowski, margaret. soviet heroic poetry in context: folklore or fakelore. newark: university of delaware press, 2013. illustrations. notes. selected bibliography. index. xi + 224 pp. $80.00 (cloth). isbn: 978-1611494563. the noviny—russian soviet epic poems composed in traditional bylina style but devoted to the exploits of more recent heroes such as lenin, stalin or chapaev—are familiar to every serious student of modern russian folklore, yet most of us know very little about them. margaret ziolkowski’s soviet heroic poetry in context makes its main question clear with its subtitle: are these works folklore or fakelore (borrowing richard m. dorson’s term, which shows that western democracies have had as much manufactured “folk” material as any socialist country)? the response to the question, in sum, is that the noviny are both, and that their context is not at all simple, or merely limited to the soviet union in the second quarter of the 20th century. no one can judge the noviny either as aesthetic objects or as cultural phenomena without knowing that context. ziolkowski sets up the question of the collector or editor’s role in the establishment of national folklore canons in a chapter focusing on james macpherson (ossian), the grimm brothers, vuk karadžić, and elias lönnrot (the kalevala) and their roles in establishing national schools of folklore collection and accepted practices of folklore collection. the context immediately emerges as complex, following debates over the authenticity of works like macpherson’s ossian and their impact in europe (through translations and shifting literary fashion from neoclassicism to sentimentalism and then romanticism, and in new projects of collection elsewhere). ziolkowski notes that accusations of fraud in macpherson often reflect political tensions between england and scotland. despite subsequent scholarship pointing out the editorial tendencies of jakob and wilhelm grimm, their collected tales still enjoy great authority as a model of authenticity, through their successful “creation of the myth of an unmediated illiterate peasantry serving as a direct source for the grimms’ collection” (p. 13). karadžić edited the work he collected as well and was criticized for appropriating materials from singers who were not serbs. elias lönnrot’s work with the kalevala provoked swedish and russian objections, as well as comparisons to macpherson. “the very existence and continued celebration of kalevala day bear witness to the powerful link between politics and folklore” (p. 30). the second chapter discusses oral composition and the research of milman parry and albert lord, as well as russian folklorists and other folklorists and their theories of the oral compositional process. ziolkowski brings in translation of classical epic poems and evidence of folklorists’ growing distrust of the pernicious influence of literacy on oral performers. here too even a reader who knows the major works in folklore studies will begin to see new angles. chapter 3 looks in more detail into the work of rybnikov, hilferding, and other pre-soviet collectors. ziolkowski points out interesting and indicative details in their collections of epic songs, and she draws out the implications for their attitudes toward (and at times intervention in) the material. the fourth chapter addresses the making of the noviny by both singers and their literate assistants or directors. many of the folklorists she cites here are important in other reviews folklorica 2015, vol. xix 187 areas of twentieth-century folklore studies as well, underlining that the noviny were not a peripheral phenomenon. chapter 5 examines the interwoven poetics and politics in this genre, reaching back again to note that educated russians “were likely to focus on heroic incidents and personages from the byliny rather than vulgar examples of drunken carousing, womanizing, and other unseemly behavior. the bylina topics that found visual artistic expression, especially in painting, reflect this development.” by the early twentieth century, bylina plots and episodes were tending to accrue to ilya muromets (p. 126). ziolkowski lists typical bylina stylistic traits and ways the bylina was “recycled.” the “ghost-writing” of noviny by professional or amateur folklorists was not unique to folk production, but analogous to the practice of assigning literate and often literary partners to non-elite writers in the early soviet years (for example, in aviator valerii tchkalov’s recollections of meeting with stalin). the zhdanov period impacted the fate of the noviny, as did fadeev’s 1949 “unmasking” of aleksandr veselovsky (who had died in 1906!). ziolkowski’s dry tone adds a bracing irony to some summations, as for example, “ryabinin-andreev also quickly began to produce noviny devoted to the immensely popular theme of stalin’s brilliance” (p. 144). in the sixth and seventh chapters, the reader can trace the ways soviet folklorists and others continued to debate the status and significance of the noviny—both in the context of world folklore scholarship and in their relationship to stalin, whose fall from grace meant that many lines could never again be cited as a good example of anything. lenin, on the other hand, remained acceptable throughout the soviet period, as “politics trumps aesthetics” (p. 180). ziolkowski gives clear and succinct summaries of the various positions in the long debate over the noviny—one which in fact has never been satisfactorily resolved. many major figures in these debates had precious little to do with folklore, perhaps bouncing off maxim gorky’s gesture toward folklore as a vital source for literature in the formation of socialist realism. in the soviet union, especially under stalin, any cultural realm could turn out to have high stakes, and folklore was no exception. in the late 1990s, irina razumova (one scholar ziolkowski cites) described in a conversation her students of contemporary folklore and ethnography, who were gathering rumors at bus stops and doing other innovative projects. razumova paused to comment that in the soviet period the secret police would have taken away the students’ notebooks – as well as the folklorists themselves. another story described notebooks in an archive, written in the 1920s by undergraduate students on collecting expeditions to the same northern regions of russia where byliny were first discovered. the students noted that certain villages were inhabited by “сплошные кулаки” [‘nothing but kulaks,’ i.e. wealthy peasants] – and those bits were underlined in red by another hand; the villages in question no longer exist. folklore was implicated in soviet politics from a variety of directions. one cannot wonder that some folklorists turned to noviny as a genre with sufficient heroic pretensions for lauding the new soviet leaders (“history as ritual,” to borrow a phrase from katerina clark’s work on the socialist realist novel), while others picked up examples that had been collected (or generated) and included them in their folklorica 2015, vol. xix 188 collections and studies of oral poetry. of course folklorists could use a genre like this: folk cultural production had to be as pro-soviet as any other, and noviny let folklorists and ethnographers continue their work without the risks of working with more lively and subversive genres of oral lore (like soviet political jokes). as an example of a novina often cited by soviet scholars as good in both aesthetic and folkloric terms, ziolkowski looks closely at “all stone moscow wept” by marfa kriukova (178 ff), treating lenin’s death. it was kriukova who coined the term novina, by analogy with starina. here and throughout the book, ziolkowski gives very adequate prose translations whenever she cites original sources. her clear and often witty writing provides frequent quotable formulations of every aspect of folklore and cultural politics surrounding the epic songs. the book’s cover image is quite beautiful: as i was reading it at a conference, the person next to me asked to have a look, and as she did the person next to her wanted a look as well. a few pages (138 ff) of portraits of the best-known singers enhance the presentation. given the many citations in russian and other foreign items, the book is impressively well proofread, a credit to high standards at the university of delaware press. soviet epic folklore may seem a narrow topic, one that few even among specialists have read, but the context gives this book its informative richness and opens the way to see these texts in a new light. soviet heroic poetry in context probably will not lead to a renaissance in studies of the noviny, but it is a very informative and pleasurable study of a thorny and fascinating topic. sibelan forrester swarthmore college swarthmore, pa on the history of an anecdote on the history of an anecdote: the fly and the flea folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 35 on the history of an anecdote: the fly and the flea evgenii kostiukhin (1938-2006) herzen state pedagogical university saint petersburg, russia translated from russian by james bailey, with assistance from james p. leary (1) abstract this article explores the historical antecedents to the russian anecdote which remarks on the reactions by various nationalities’ to finding a fly in their soup and considers the function of such anecdotes in their popular usage. among folk anecdotes a majority of themes are connected with the way people of various nationalities act in situations. in regard to their structure such anecdotes present a complication of the classic pair—“smart-stupid.” the customary antithesis is blurred and becomes complicated insofar as several characters enter the action. one or more remain simpletons and one turns out to be more cunning (generally speaking “intelligent”), but the remaining ones cannot be included in the usual parameters. what is the point of anecdotes about people of various nationalities, who have turned out to be in an unusual situation? it would be possible to think that it is reduced to the self-assertion of the people to whom the teller belongs and to the ridicule of “other people.” (i will remark parenthetically that the problem of “the other” in a national culture is complex, that it is connected psychologically with the notion of the “scapegoat,” and we will refrain from any generalizations, limiting ourselves to anecdotes). self-assertion is appropriate for single-episode anecdotes with a pair of characters (such as anecdotes about a russian and a gypsy in old russian folklore, where the other always remains a simpleton). yet an increase in the number of the people also increases the possible shades of meaning in an anecdote. such an anecdote can no longer be reduced to the triumph or defeat of a jokester or to the mockery of a simpleton. however, the issue is not only the more complicated structure. any folklore forms—including those that may be anecdotal—have their own history, which often has existed for centuries. in the course of its history such a form not only undergoes various kinds of transformation, but also is absorbed into various cultural contexts. this process enriches its meaning. i would like to verify the correctness of these suppositions on the basis of a contemporary russian anecdote about a fly that has fallen in a bowl of soup. here is how this anecdote was told in a moscow student milieu about forty years ago (if my memory doesn’t betray me, it was “stimulated” by the world-wide festival of young people and students in moscow in 1957). folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 36 young people of various nationalities ordered soup in a restaurant and a fly fell into each person’s bowl. an englishman, not saying a word, put his money on the table and left the restaurant without touching the soup. a frenchman banged his bowl of soup against a wall and, waving his arms, demanded that they bring him another bowl. a german tidily put the fly on the edge of the bowl and silently ate all the soup. a russian ate the soup while blowing the fly away from himself the whole time. a chinese ate the fly, but didn't touch the soup. a jew ate the soup, sucked on the fly, and chased it over to the chinese. let us for the moment refrain from commentaries and seek close and distant analogies for the russian anecdote. it turns out that the anecdote about the fly that fell in a soup dish, as they say, “had a beard” [i.e., a russian proverbial expression for something with a long history]. it is well known in an old polish instance of the seventeenth century, “three flies—italian, polish, and german.” here the fly simultaneously falls in the kasha of a pole, a german, and an italian. the pole puts the bowl aside and demands another portion. the italian tosses the bowl of kasha on the floor. the german catches the fly, diligently licks it, throws it out the window, and then quietly eats his kasha. gathering people of various nationalities was a common device for the theater of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries [i.e. the european theater, including its russian manifestations]. a jew and a pole, a cossack and a turk, a muscovite and a gypsy, and an italian and a greek in various combinations all were frequent guests on the stage at that time. foreign attire provokes laughter, a newly arrived stranger mispronounces our speech; here you do not have to rack your brains for comic devices—these are ready-made comic masks. the choice of nationalities in the foregoing russian anecdote and in the polish variant is not accidental. only a youth festival could bring together people of various nationalities—from an englishman to a chinaman, supplemented by the jew, a traditional figure for russian anecdotes. for seventeenth century poland the strongest economic ties were with germany, while the strongest cultural ties were with italy, especially as the fires of the renaissance were burning down. the fact that there were half as many characters in the polish variant is also understandable: a mono-episodic anecdote did not involve many people–only two or three were more than sufficient. we will remark that a reduction in the number of characters does not occur without affecting the topic: the fewer characters there are the more important each one of them becomes. no one acquires greater importance in the russian anecdote. the closer we approach the end of the narrative, the more grotesque the conduct of each character becomes. in the polish variant the conduct of the pole turned out to be the most appropriate: he simply demanded another bowl of kasha, whereas the italian acted too demonstratively, and the german was satisfied with what he had. but these are finer points; there is a single source for all these reactions—a tradition of anecdotes. let us refer to the authoritative opinion of p. n. berkov: “there are no doubts that variants were emerging from folk anecdotes and from a novelistic type of folktale. in actual fact, the subjects of the majority of the variants have been derived from the novelistic type of folktale. with regard on the history of an anecdote: the fly and the flea folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 37 to age, similar folktales in a majority of cases are much older than the variants.” [berkov 1977: 10] the history of the storyline that we are interested in reveals that in fact it is older than the seventeenth-century instance. by turning his attention to this old polish variant, julian кrzyżanowski expressed the supposition that it dates back to the well-known folktale about the flea and the fly (atu 282а). [krzyżanowski 1960: 212] let us examine it more closely. the tale of the flea and the fly was entered into the aarne-thompson [now aarne-thompson-uther] tale-type index on the basis of the polish and russian variants. it was formulated in the following way: “flea and fly. things were not good for the flea in the country nor for the fly in the city, so they changed places.” in the index of n. p. andreev, where the subject is given a place under number *284, [andreev 1929] there is a single variant, which belongs to virtually the best russian teller of folktales, abram novopoltsev. the flea leaves the city and goes to the countryside, and the fly vice versa. in the summer the peasants become tired and smash the fleas, but in a gentleman’s bed everything is fine. meanwhile the fly complains that in the city there is nothing to eat, whereas in the country there are many people, both old and small, so that there always is something to eat. [sadovnikov 1884: no. 57] we will note another variant, which was transcribed in the beginning of the twentieth century in the kadnikov district of the province of vologda. this variant, on the whole, has the same content: feather beds lure a flea into a city. [imperatorskoe…, 1903: 205] what can possibly be said about these two russian texts? there is a fly, but no soup. let us continue further. a comparative index of east-slavic folktales presents information about eight ukrainian variants and one belorussian variant. [barag, 1979: no. 282 а*] among the ukrainian tales, half are about the flea and the fly; half the tales have the same opposition of the city and countryside, more precisely with an acknowledgement of the relativity of the virtues of country and city life. here a typically anecdotal situation is created–not with an antithesis of clever and stupid characters, but with simpletons behaving foolishly. although classified as an animal tale, this anecdote with animal characters in a comic light describes human society. the flea and the fly, to a considerable degree, are indistinct characters since they do not conform to the features of characters within the typology of folktales about animals, but they are unconditionally humorous, at least by virtue of their insignificance. insofar as the flea and fly in this story belong to the category of indistinct simpletons, they can be substituted for each other, and there are indeed stories about two flies or two fleas. sometimes they receive supplementary characteristics: country and city flies appear in two ukrainian variants, and in a third there are polish gentleman and peasant fleas. a social nuance, as we see, was also not alien to the basic version, which is noted in the index: the flea departed for the city to luxuriate in a gentleman’s bed. behind these social accents and the comic glorification of the delights of city and country life, the soup, into which the fly falls, has somehow been forgotten. folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 38 where is the thread that links the anecdote about people of various nationalities and the animal tale about the flea and the fly? here is that thread. in one ukrainian folktale the rural fly says, that in the village they throw you out of the bowl directly with the food. in the city first they will suck on you and then throw you on the ground. [berezovskii, 1976: no. 477] therefore it’s better in the city; they treat you more considerately there—the same antithesis of city and countryside, but with a new “soup” element. different accents appear in a belorussian variant, which was recorded in poland. [federowski, 1903: no. 392] a flea crawls out of (southern) poland, and a fly flies out of prussia. things were bad for the flea in poland: the masurians would burn the straw, where the flea lives, but among the germans it may expect great-grandchildren. and things were bad for the fly among the germans: a prussian catches you, sucks on you, and throws you out. a masurian, on the contrary, throws the fly out together with the food. a close variant has been recorded in lithuania–only with two flies, flying from famished lithuania to prussia, but their expectations are disappointed: the prussian licks the fly, which had fallen in the food. [uther, 1992: no. 33] among the six polish variants five are about the flea and the fly. almost everywhere the fly praises the country, because a peasant throws the fly that had fallen into the food directly on the floor, whereas the city dweller first of all sucks on it diligently. this gesture, in which not a drop of food should be lost, is so important in polish folktales, that julian кrzyżanowski includes it in his formulation as type 299 [atu type 282a] with this description: “the urban flea and the rural fly are boasting: the first praises the city, where people do not wear underwear, and the second praises the countryside because a peasant diligently will throw a fly on the floor with the food, but a city person first diligently sucks on the fly.” [кrzyżanowski, 1962] a review of slavic folktale variants about the flea and the fly show that the majority of them are connected with the opposition of the city to the countryside. this is where the motif of the fly falling in soup also appears. however, this motif is disappearing in russian folktales, so that poland, where it has persisted, can be considered its homeland. in that polish territory, as well as among belorussians and lithuanians, a new motif emerges: the contrast is not between the city and the countryside, but between a german and a pole (or lithuanian). and this development directly leads to the polish variant and the russian anecdote introduced at the outset of this essay. the preceding findings compel one to think about a slavic, or more precisely, polish origin for this storyline. however, this is not the case: it is not known only among the slavs and does not occur only in the oral tradition. the literary version of this storyline is much older and its history can be traced from the ninth century. a fable writer from the circle of pavel diakon [an 8th century benedictine monk and chronicler associated with monte cassino] has a tale about the flea and the gout. (2) a long, long time ago the flea was ordered to bite only the rich, but the gout was to attack only the poor. it went badly for both until they on the history of an anecdote: the fly and the flea folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 39 exchanged places. since then the gout has accompanied the rich, but the flea lives among the poor. [perry, 1952: no. 57] pavel diakon turns to the traditional models of folktale and mythology by moving the action to some immemorial time when everything could still change— to the time of creation. the experiment with the flea and the gout was completed successfully: “since then” everything has gone just as it is. clearly, this composition is presented here as a joke and the etiology customary for a myth is comic insofar as the story brings together “characters” that are incongruous—gout and a flea. the latin fable of the middle ages became a part of the tradition of european fables. the humorous etiology disappeared in this storyline and the flea gave way to the spider. the spider had things badly in a rich urban home, where they were always sweeping out spider webs, but it was worse for the gout in a peasant's home. this version became established in the fables of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and occurred in the sermon as an exemplum of the eternal dissatisfaction of a people with what they have. [tubach, 1969: no. 204] we encounter this version also in the collection of comic tales of hans sachs (1545) as a humorous example, the meaning of which approximately corresponds to the proverb, “a fish seeks where it is deeper, but a person where it is better.” [sachs, 1959: 127] sachs adheres to the principles of the ancient chivalric lyric: in his work spider and gout carry on a dispute about where it is better to live, boasting about their forefathers and proud of their nobility—for spider once was arachna and, according to ovid, infuriated athena, but gout was friendly with bacchus. sachs hastened to warn the city dwellers about the harm of over-indulgence, which leads to gout. thus the meistersinger from nuremburg introduces a wellknown subject into the poetry of the northern renaissance. finally jean de la fontaine turns to this storyline (iii, 8), paving the way for its entrance into the fable tradition of modern times. here the devil appears and suggests that spider and gout choose a convenient place to live. spider chooses a palace; gout chooses a shack because it feared doctors. however, the poor peasant, despite his ailment, chops the firewood, hoes the field and in general performs a peasant’s work, thus causing gout much torment. then spider and gout meet again—and exchange places. vasilii trediakovskii (who for some reason attributed this story to “aesop’s fables”) and dimitri khvostov rendered lafontaine’s version into russian, but it received its widest fame among russian readers thanks to ivan krylov (v, 16). without on the whole departing from the original or adorning the narrative with details from russian everyday life as he usually did, krylov did not relinquish his manner of dialog with a reader by referring to la fontaine (“la fontaine spread this rumor about the world”) and noting his passion for humorous aphorisms (“для доброго отца большие дети бремя, пока они не по местам” / “for a good father grownup children are a burden until they are settled”). the notion of the irrepressibleness of the human heart has been colored by irony in the works of the fable writers: one pursues various schemes while considering circumstances, but is unable to foresee anything clearly—life thwarts calculations. there also is folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 40 a social emphasis here: a peasant lives in filth, but his excellency suffers even in the most splendid home—life is far from perfection. the connection of the fable tradition with the folktale category of animal tales does not require any proofs. however, a fable often “straightens out” the storylines of folktales by emphasizing a moral (although a comic coloring of this moral—which from the start characterized the animal folktale—is preserved). yet in folktales the moral is optional, whereas in fables it is obligatory: here it is necessary “to tell the world,” even if it is of no benefit. the edification, however, inevitably makes the narrative texture cruder, since it strives for a moral lesson. for these reasons, the characters in the fables can become marionettes of virtue or sin, bearers of the characteristic of human character. this also has occurred in our storyline: here the incorporeal gout has appeared, a character nonexistent in folklore. the flea, which is “unsuitable” for the fable, has been replaced by spider, whose role in the fable had already taken shape. nevertheless, from pavel diakon to ivan krylov, the range of meanings is sufficiently wide: from mockery of the pretensions of insignificant creatures to thoughts about the insatiableness of the human heart. in the folktale the flea and the fly play roles because they are more familiar in the everyday life of the peasants and lower class. however, here there is no simple moral, but one that results from the antithesis of city and country life. the motif of the fly falling into the soup was, judging by everything, worked up in poland. in the next stage in the development of this storyline, the fly falls in the soup not in a city or the countryside, but into the soup of people of various nationalities. in the folktale about a flea and fly this involves the customary pair “ours—some other’s”; moreover, the “other,” in the role of which a german invariably appears, is presented comically, as a caricature of pedantry and exactitude verging on greed. finally the last step: this thrifty gentleman turns out to be among a group of people similar to himself who have likewise become victims of the situation with the fly. such examples occur in the polish instances of the seventeenth century and in the russian anecdote of the twentieth century. in this respect the comic light is shed on all human society, insofar as the traditional pair is replaced by a crowd of people and the humorous side of each is revealed. all this represents “the increase in meaning,” which we mentioned in the beginning. this is one pole in the development of the storyline of an ancient anecdote. the other pole is the acute narrowing of meaning to the point of being proverbial. there is a polish proverb: “u niemców i mucha się nie pożywi” [“even a fly starves among germans”]. [krzyżanowski and adalberg, 1970: 605] an old anecdote is reduced to a proverb so that everything becomes clear. it would seem that the meaning of the proverb is so simple, that there is no question about any other explanation of it. nevertheless, this is not so. кrzyżanowski recalls how during the first world war fate carried him away to distant kurgan, and there in siberia he somehow managed to talk about all this with a well-known lawyer. кrzyżanowski wanted to go home to poland, but the lawyer suggested he should remain in siberia: there, in europe, everything was so cramped, that it was on the history of an anecdote: the fly and the flea folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 41 necessary to force one’s way into life with one’s elbows. there, as with the germans, even a fly would not enjoy life, while here in siberia there was plenty of space. [krzyżanowski, 1960: 212] thus in the simplest proverb, as though in a mirror, a fundamental quality of an artistic text was reflected—its ability to pass beyond the limits of the apparent meaning, to become symbolic, and to correspond to the most varied situations in life. notes 1� evgenii kostiukhin (1938-2006) published this essay in tradycja i inwencja. wątki i motywy obiegowe w dawnych literaturach słowiańskich, ed. eliza malek. łódź: katedra literaturu i kulturu rosyjskej uniwersytetu lodzkiego, 1999, pp. 83-89. marina kostiukhina, evgenii’s widow, requested james bailey’s translation. for detailed information about kostiukhin’s life, education, publications, and scholarly positions (especially in the pushkinskii dom in saint petersburg), see james bailey and faith wigzell’s translation of tatyana g. ivanova, “in memory of evgenii alekseevich kostiukhin,” folklorica, volume xi, 2006. as will be evident, kostiukhin’s use of the term “anecdote” throughout this essay is not only the equivalent of a narrative joke or jocular tale, but also conforms to the prevailing classificatory terminology of russian folklorists; see victor a. pogadaev, “the origin and classification of russian anecdotes as a folklore genre,” icaf 2009: international conference on asian folklore, ed. mahāwitthayālai sinlapākǭn and khana ‘aksǭnrasāt. bangkok, thailand: faculty of arts, silpakorn university, 2009. 2� the definite article is used because gout is personified in the tale. bibliography andreev, n. p. 1929. андреев, н. п. указатель сказочных сюжетов по системе аарне [index of folktale motifs in the system of aarne]. ленинград: издание государственного русского географического общества. berezovskii, i. p., ed. 1976. березовський і.п. казки про тварин [tales about animals] kиїв: наукова думка. berkov, p. n. 1977. берков, п. н. история русской комедии xviii в. [sources of the russian comedy in the 18th century]. ленинград: изд-во “наука” ленингр. отделение. federowski, m. 1903. lud białoruski na rusi litewskiej [the belarussian people in russian lithuania] t.3. krąków: nakładem akademii umiejętności. imperatorskoe russkoe geograficheskoe obshchestvo – otdelenie etnografii. zhivaia starina 1-2, 1903. 205. krzyżanowski, j. 1960. mądrej głowie dość dwie słowie [a word to the wise is sufficient]. vol. 2. warszawa: państwowy instytut wydawniczy. folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 42 _______. 1962. polska bajka ludowa w układzie systematycznym [systematizing the polish folk tale]. vol. 1. wrocław: zakład narodowy im. ossolińskich. krzyżanowski, j. and adalberg, samuel, eds. 1970. nowa księga przysłów i wyrażeń przysłowiowych polskich [the new book of polish proverbs and proverbial sayings]. t.2. warszawa : państwowy instytut wydawniczy. perry, b. e. 1952. aesopica. vol. 1. urbana: university of illinois press. sachs, hans. 1959. сакс, ганс. избранное [selected works]. москва ленинград: гос. изд. художественной литературы. sadovnikov, d. n. 1884. садовников, д. н. сказки и предания самарского края [tales and legends of the samara region]. санкт петербург: тип. мин-ва внутрь. дел. barag, l. g., et. al. 1979. багагб л. г. и др. сравнительный указатель сюжетов, восточно-славянская сказка [comparative index of motifs, east slavic tales] ленинград: наука, ленингр. отд-ние. tubach. f. c. 1969. index exemplorum. a handbook of medieval religious tales. helsinki: suomalaien tiedeakatemia. uther, hans-jörg. 1992. märchen aus dem baltikum [fairy tales from the baltics]. wien buchgemeinschaft donauland. microsoft word 2.1 juric ceif 20201130.docx conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 1 conveying ćeif: -ree croatian folklore and folklife writings on bosniak coffee culture dorian jurić mcmaster university fruitvale, canada abstract fis article presents three short passages describing coffee and coffeehouse culture among bosnian and herzegovinian muslims in the late nineteenth century. fese texts are drawn from manuscripts collected by lay, croatian folklore and folklife collectors who submitted them to two early collecting projects in zagreb. fe pieces are translated here for the first time into english and placed into historical and cultural context regarding the history of coffee culture in bosnia and herzegovina and the wider ottoman empire as well as the politics of folklore collection at the time. by using the pan-ottoman concept of ćeif as a theoretical lens, i argue that these early folklorists produced impressive folklife accounts of bosniak foodways, but that these depictions inevitably enfolded both genuine interest and negative by-products of the wider politics of their era. introduction of all the comestibles to transition from localized context to global phenomenon, none can claim the same position of influence as coffee. charting an astronomic trajectory over the course of 500 years, coffee moved from a wild plant cultivated in modern-day ethiopia to a global trade item that revolutionized religious observance, social interactions, political process, human rights, city planning, and the nature of labor practices. fe history of that life-course is a dynamic tapestry of movement through various cultures and chronologies, full of social upheaval, poetic inspiration, and the vigorous remodeling of public and private custom. fis article is concerned with one of the earlier campaigns in coffee’s global conquest. while the plant’s initial migration brought it a short distance from ethiopia to the arab world, in less than a century it had become a major trade item of the ottoman empire. before western europeans would take diplomatic sips of the bitter drink and decide it had a place back home, coffee had already spread to the farthest reaches of the ottomans’ holdings in eastern europe, an area whose coffee culture is seldom included in popular histories of the beverage. here, i present three passages, translated from published and unpublished manuscripts submitted to two early folklore and folklife projects in nineteenthcentury croatia that concern aspects of bosnian muslim coffee culture. (1) all three were collected by croatian school teachers working in a newly occupied bosnia and herzegovina, who were attempting to explain the culture of the region to a croatian audience. by returning to these documents and the historical folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 2 circumstances that contextualize them, i hope to contribute some useful data to the study of coffee and its history for a region that is often overlooked. additionally, on a discursive level these passages also provide material for research on the academic historiography of folklore and anthropology research in an area of the world riven by political division and post-colonial legacies. fose legacies produced what bakić-hayden coined ‘nesting orientalisms’—a small scale gradient of telescoping ‘western gazes’ in a region that was itself considered marginal and too ‘eastern’ to belong to europe [1995; cf. todorova 1997]. in this context of the academic face of freud’s narcissism of small differences, croatian folklore accounts of bosniak coffee culture can not only reveal what coffee meant to nineteenth-century bosniaks but also what it meant for croats interested in learning about, as they imagined them, their “brethren” lost to the muslim faith. such a critical lens contributes to recent studies of the nexus between foodways and ethnic/racial/national politics [appadurai 1988; chen 2011; ellis 2009; jones 2017; pilcher 1998; preston-werner 2009; williment 2001] by providing a vantage into the discursive paradigms that croatian scholars employed to discuss a population which they endeavored to depict as simultaneously co-nationals and exotic others. fe concept of ćeif in this article, i argue that the three lay croatian folklorists, antun hangi, franjo murgić, and ivan zovko, in depicting a broader matrix of cultural life that surrounded bosniak coffee culture, were producing very early examples of folklife writings on foodways, “the network of behaviours, traditions, and beliefs concerning food” [long 2004: 8; cf. anderson 1971]. modern scholars of coffee culture have often remarked on the terse nature of historical descriptions of coffeehouses and the preparing, serving, and drinking of coffee before the twentieth century [mikhail 2007: 214-5 n.85]. rituals surrounding coffee use are often elaborate and coffeehouses are a lively nexus of social life that merit comprehensive exposition and yet, many historical accounts offer nothing more than brief descriptions of appurtenances and cooking methods. (2) fe three accounts provided here, though brief, attempt in various ways to convey the feel and function of a bosniak coffeehouse and the role that coffee culture played in the lives of bosnian muslims. i discuss this division between simple and layered depictions of coffee culture through the conceptual lens offered by the term ćeif. as a combined practice, drinking coffee and smoking in the western balkans are intimately tied to the concept of ćeif. fe bosnian, croatian, montenegrin and serbian (hereafter, bcms) languages, and bosnian to a much larger degree, are rife with turkish loanwords. while many are straightforward loans that simply fill a lexical gap, there is a unique set of dynamic conceptual vocabulary for emotional states in the language that are originally derived from arabic. fese words generally have an initial breadth of simplistic meaning with a depth of expanded connotation that makes them conducive to adoption and to adaptation into local idiomatic and phrasal lexicons. fe word ćeif is one such conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 3 word. (3) derived from arabic kayf, through turkish keyif, it embodies a complex of basic meanings: condition, mood, will, pleasure, good humor, etc., as well as a higher, abstract meaning—what sir richard francis burton described as “the savouring of animal existence; the passive enjoyment of mere sense” [1874 i: 89]. all of these meanings have been retained in bosnian and have been elaborated and colored by a complex of local idioms exemplified in the phrase ‘biti u ćejfu,’ ‘to be in ćeif.’ fis word, and the matrix of meaning surrounding it is intimately tied to bosniak culture in the region and regularly connected to the acts of drinking coffee and/or smoking tobacco. for most bosniaks, ćeif describes a positive and peaceful state of being where one feels removed from the flow of time and the stresses of the world. like coffee, ćeif is a pan-ottoman phenomenon; both were borrowed from the arabs by ottoman turks and thence diffused throughout their empire. westerners travelling in various eastern regions would regularly encounter the term and become enamored with the richness of its connotation. to drink coffee is to drink coffee no matter where it occurs, but to find ćeif in the drinking of coffee was perceived as a particularly ‘eastern’ phenomenon. as a region of proximity where east/west divisions were regularly constituted, challenged, and produced, the balkans, even into the present day, often acted as a microcosm of wider conceptions of difference in the eurasian sphere. by traversing distances of sometimes no more than 100 kilometers to speak with people in their native tongues, even lay croatian scholars could see themselves as engaging in the crossing of deep cultural borders to explore the “east.” in his book, život i običaje muslimana u bosni i hercegovini [fe life and customs of the muslims in bosnia and herzegovina] [1906], antun hangi [1906: 15] waxed poetic about ćeif with an unfamiliar croatian audience in mind: ćeif is something quite unique which, aside from our muslims, likely no other nation in the world recognizes. just as the french have their esprit, so do our muslims have their ćeif. but what a difference between ćeif and esprit! while esprit describes something spritely and ebullient, ćeif denotes that a man has calmed himself, that not only is his body at ease, but also his soul. ćeif is “when one ascends to some kind of carefree realm, not knowing for a moment that one is breathing, let alone that one is drinking a coffee or chomping on a tobacco cigarette.” ferefore, it is something akin to the italian “dolce far niente” [pleasant idleness]. ćeif is also, in a wider sense, that which we [croatians] would say “my pleasure” [hoće mi se, lit. i am inclined] or “gladly” [drago mi je lit. it is dear to me {to do something}]. if a man does something and someone asks him why he did it, he will reply to him “it was my ćeif to do so” [tako mi je bilo po ćeifu]. similarly, if one asks him why he did not do something, he will say, “fere was no ćeif in it for me” [nije mi bilo po ćeifu] – fen peaceful bosnia. (4) folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 4 we see in this passage how the pan-ottoman concept of ćeif can also become the utterly unique bosniak concept of ćeif, and how a bosniak word can be so foreign as to be untranslatable, but also common enough to compare easily to similar croatian and western european examples. in this article, i suggest that by depicting the ways that coffee culture was embedded into bosniak life, these lay croatian folklorists were attempting to convey the ćeif that comes with drinking coffee. as with the concept of ćeif, in portraying bosniak coffee culture the scholars struck a balance between folklife depictions that celebrated a novel phenomenon embedded with deep cultural meaning, while also employing a romanticized ethnographic gaze that brought with it a range of ethno-national political leanings and orientalist biases. accounts of bosniak coffee culture in the hazu archives fe accounts selected for this article are derived from published and unpublished manuscripts submitted from lay folklore collectors to two, early nineteenth-century, zagreb-based projects—the folk songs collections of the publishing house matica hrvatska (1896-present) and the folklore and folklife journal, =e review on folk life and customs of the south slavs (zbornik za narodni život i običaje južnih slavena; 1896-present; hereafter ‘=e review’). while these two projects have their own unique histories, their contemporaneous creation and early mandates are built on very similar programs. fe currents of their history further converged in the middle of the twentieth century when the two collections were united in the archive of the department of ethnology at the croatian academy of sciences and arts (hrvatska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, or hazu) [primorac 2010: 10]. fe three passages selected for this article are all built on a model that was formulated by the earliest editors of =e review, such that, for the purposes of this piece, only that history, and not that of the folk song collection, will be discussed [see primorac 2010: 13-17; velzek 1950]. =e review’s earliest editors envisioned the publications as presenting a tapestry of south slavic cultural variation in the spirit of the pan-slavic unification efforts that flourished at the time. fese efforts were tempered, and variously supported and undermined by contemporaneous ethno-nationalist movements. whether articulated in larger(pan-slavic, illyrian, yugoslav) or smaller-scale (greater-serbian, greater-croatian) iterations, the aims were the same—some level of unification and autonomous rule of linguisticallyand culturally-related south slavic peoples across exogenous imperial divisions. fe review was built on a grass-roots model where public calls printed in newspapers and special-interest papers encouraged priests, teachers, peasants, and any other motivated lay-collectors to enter their local communities to collect ethnological and ethnographic data. aided by a collector’s guide published by the journal, these intrepid public scholars collected a wide range of folklore, folklife, and anthropological data on various communities and submitted them to the journal in hopes that their work might be worthy of monetary remuneration and conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 5 publication, in part or in whole, in the journal [see čapo-žmegac 1997; jurić 2020; primorac 2010; radić 1897; rihtman-auguštin 2004]. fe passages that are presented here have been selected for their focus on bosniak coffee culture and practice and for the unique view each presents, both into that world and through the lens of the outsider, croatian collectors who gathered the material. fe second and third passages are only retained in manuscript form in the archive of the department of ethnology at hazu in zagreb and have never been published. fe manuscript from which the first and longest passage is derived has been published in the original croatian numerous times, but to my knowledge has never been translated into english. all of the translations in this article are my own. coffee in the ottoman empire although the pharmacological properties of the coffee bean may have been known to arab scientists as early as the tenth century [weinberg and bealer 2001: 5-6], the common practice of drinking coffee can only be firmly attested in the historical record to the middle of the fifteenth century. first cultivated from wild stock in modern-day ethiopia [clarence-smith and topik 2003: 23-25], the bean (called bunn, perhaps the corrupted source of the west’s use of the word “bean” in place of what is technically the plant’s seed) was brought to sufi monasteries in yemen sometime in the mid-1400s by adherents of the order. fese men brewed what was likely the first coffee beverage to fuel their nighttime dhikr devotions [hattox 1985: 14, 24, 26, 74-76; weinberg and bealer 2001: 3]. by the end of the fifteenth century and the first decade of the following, those same sufis had brought the drink respectively to mecca and cairo [hattox 1985: 26]. in both locations, the beverage quickly diffused into the general population through these men’s regular, diurnal business interactions. fe first ottoman citizens tasted the, at that time likely, green drink during the reign of sultan selim i (1512-20) when the sublime porte stationed soldiers in egypt and the hejaz [kreševljaković 1935: 161], but it did not physically enter the empire until 1521 during the reign of suleiman the magnificent [krstić 1974: 72]. (5) when the sultan’s fleet garrisoned the yemen littoral in 1538, he gained access to, and later control of, the mountain villages where coffea arabica was being grown [hathaway 2006: 161-2]. fis acquisition quickly ushered a precipitous expansion of the bean throughout the empire and with it the social institution of the coffeehouse. on the world stage, the ottoman annexation of yemen was serendipitous. one year before acquiring the region, a war had erupted in ethiopia, with oromo invaders disrupting the coffee trade there [clarence-smith and topik 2003: 52]. upon acquisition of the territory, the ottomans became the key exporter of the bean over land and sea through their yemeni and egyptian ports [hathaway 2006], whence it traveled to the rest of europe. fis new revenue largely supplanted the spice trade that had been re-routed with da gama’s voyage around the cape of good hope [faroqhi 2000]. folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 6 as ottoman trade networks expanded, they attempted, unsuccessfully, to protect their monopoly on coffee by prohibiting the export of living plants and fertile seeds [tucker 2011: 36]. soon, however, viable seeds and seedlings were smuggled out of the country and spread to the indies and the caribbean by dutch and english traders [clarence-smith and topik 2003: 22; tucker 2011: 37-40], enabling an international spread of the plant and establishing the global adoption of coffee into the modern period [cowan 2005: 55-77; faroqhi 2000: 20]. (6) fe extensive maritime trade routes that brought coffee to the wider world also delivered goods in the opposite direction. in the year 1600 or 1601, english merchants from the american colonies brought coffee’s constant mate, smoking tobacco, from the new world to the ottoman empire [lewis 1963: 134]. (7) in its new home, tobacco was first employed as a medicine against certain illnesses, before catching on as a simple pleasure enjoyed with coffee [krstić 1974: 72]. while coffee arrived to cosmopolitan istanbul as early as 1534 [kreševljaković 1935: 161], regular trade only allowed the first coffeehouses to be erected sometime between 1543 and 1555 [âli 2003: 129; kātib chelebi 1957: 60; peçevi 1999 i: 349]. historians offer these two conflicting dates for the arrival of two syrian traders, hakam from aleppo and shams from damascus, who purportedly opened istanbul’s first coffeehouse. at a time when mi’mâr sinân, suleiman’s royal chief architect, was expanding the capital with his austere religious buildings, coffeehouses were propagating exponentially throughout the city. by the time british colonel and author charles white [1845 i: 282] gave his impressions of the ottoman empire in the early 1840s, he estimated istanbul to have no fewer than 2500 coffeehouses. fese establishments were lively, with denizens attending daily to smoke their chibouks (a long-stemmed smoking pipe) (8) and drink their fincans (small, handle-less coffee cups) (9) of the beverage (see image 1). in an ottoman context, coffee’s earliest dissemination became particularly linked to the culture of turkish intellectuals [elezović 1938: 634] who used the stimulating drink and the socializing praxis built around it to stoke their imaginations and increase their productivity. as more coffeehouses opened and attendance became more routine, istanbul’s café culture acquired a unique connection to the city’s various tradesmen’s guilds and particularly to the furlough financial endeavors of the city’s janissaries [çaksu 2007]. beyond istanbul and throughout the entirety of the empire, coffeehouses served a much larger social function. fough members of every social class visited them, these humble premises became the primary site of male socialization for the lower and middle classes. fese groups generally owned houses that were too small to afford them adequate room for properly hosting guests—that is, a sizeable selamlık as opposed to the private portion of the home, the haremlik. fus, for poorer citizens of the empire, male socialization was extended into public houses, freeing their domiciles for women’s socialization [mikhail 2007: 147-8]. as early as the late sixteenth century, the drink had become, as white [1845 i: 280] aptly put it, “the solace of the rich and the principal sustenance of the poor,” and the coffeehouse had assumed its social role as the revolutionary site for open social, political, and intellectual expression where various social conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 7 classes mingled in novel and radical ways [cowan 2005: 152-92; hattox 1988: 91-8; image 1. a man drinks a findžan of coffee at an open-air market in the western bosnian city of cazin in 1905. =e džezva in which the coffee was prepared sits in front of him [hairlahović 2017] tucker 2011: 53-6]. fis social praxis was perhaps even more revolutionary in the islamic world than it proved to be later in europe and america. in the near east, where taverns were deemed illicit and restaurant culture was largely unknown [hattox 1985: 89, 125], this unprecedented growth of public gathering places was an alarming shift in the social fabric. in the ottoman empire, where the tenets of islam strictly circumscribed access to alcohol, the coffeehouse offered the social function of a tavern, and indeed modeled its structure to some degree on those institutions, while remaining uniquely free of the overt stigma that accompanied patronizing such establishments. (10) folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 8 coffee in the western balkans by at least the 1570s, the coffeehouse had made its way to the western reaches of the balkans. (11) fe great ottoman historian (and bosniak by matriline) i̇brahim peçevi (bcms, ibrahim alajbegović pečevija) related an account of visiting an elaborately furnished coffeehouse in sarajevo in 1591. later scholars have asserted that this café was likely predated by similar, unattested establishments in belgrade, sofia and skopje [elezović 1938: 632-3]. fis early migration of coffee into eastern and central europe reached as far as hungary, where peçevi recounted ottoman turks drinking the beverage on 4 august 1598 on the frontlines of their unsuccessful military campaign [633]. by the turn of the seventeenth century, coffeehouses had proliferated throughout all areas of the balkans under turkish authority; historians have uncovered a wealth of manuscripts mentioning cafés in some of the smallest towns in south slavic regions, as well as accounts from western travel writers who noted coffee being drunk in numerous bosnian, serbian, and macedonian cities [vinaver 1965: 33132]. fis spread coincided with the introduction of tobacco to the region. soon after its arrival to the empire, stores in the balkans were already selling tobacco pipes and the men attending local cafés could be found “drinking” tobacco with their coffees [fotić 2011: 90]. (12) fe earliest proliferation of coffee, however, was tied directly to the muslim population of the empire, starting with those ottoman turks who had immigrated to or administered the holdings of the porte’s rumelian eyalet [lit. roman province] and quickly passing into the habits of local groups, like bosniaks, who had converted to islam. while western-balkan coffeehouses were indeed sites for the mixing of social classes—peçevi noted that the sarajevo café had various sets of divans [bcms sećija] reserved for particular social classes (cf. hangi’s account below)—this mixing did not include other religious groups. since the drinking of alcohol is highly discouraged in islam, and religious mixing was frowned upon under the divisive organization of the millet system, cafés in south slavic regions were the predominant habitat of muslim males. (13) fough nonmuslims were not banned from entering muslim coffeehouses, such mixing seems to have seldom occurred [fotić 2011: 92]. even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, most christian households in bosnia drank little coffee, often only keeping some in the house in case of hosting muslim guests [vinaver 1965: 345]. fis segregation still held in the early twentieth century, with religious groups largely attending separate establishments to enjoy their coffee. only in the interwar period did this practice begin to slightly diminish [murko 1951: 42, 334, 35457 371-2], before the ideological push of “brotherhood and unity” in the second yugoslavia relegated such divisions into the realm of backward archaism. fat is not to say that the christian raja in the empire were impervious to the allure of the black bean in earlier centuries. in serbia, coffee drinking was slowly adopted into christian practice starting in the eighteenth century. surprisingly, as in the islamic world, the first christians of the empire to begin drinking coffee were priests in local monasteries [elezović 1938: 634]. conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 9 aleksandar fotić [2011: 94] has revealed how the elites of the serbian orthodox church very early embraced coffee drinking and the smoking of tobacco in mimicry of turkish high culture. by the middle of the eighteenth century, cafés had become a regular locus of culture in belgrade, though the establishments were most often opened and run by jews and aromanians [vinaver 1965: 336]. as far afield as in buda, serbs had taken coffee drinking as a regular habit [336] and by the 1780s travelers to serbia remarked on the central role cafés served in the social life of every city [341]. fe practice seems to have been fully cemented in local public and private practice by the time of the first serbian uprising (1804-1813)— a predicament given that political tensions with the ottomans made it difficult to obtain the bean [346]. in neighboring venetianand habsburg-controlled south slavic regions, adoption of coffee drinking lagged considerably. coffee was unheard of in dubrovnik until the seventeenth century, where it is first attested as a trade good in transit from egypt into bosnia via the maritime republic. later, the drink became better known in the city, but only as a beverage that turks shared with dubrovnik emissaries when the latter conducted business in the ottoman empire [vinaver 1965: 333]. coffee made its first appearance in the republic sometime between 1635 and 1640. by the 1660s, it had gained the status of a luxury item that was often given as a gift. only in the eighteenth century did the beverage become a common drink, attested by retail figures for coffee appurtenances; yet, even then, import numbers reveal its popularity as paling in comparison with neighboring regions [334]. cafés in the republic also shirked any role in social reformation. while bosnian cafés served as social and political forums for male socialization across class boundaries, dubrovnik coffeehouses remained the purview of only nobility and upper-class townsmen for some time [fotić 2011: 91-2]. rules for coffeehouses in dubrovnik were set soon after their initial appearance and curtailed many of the habits that they fostered elsewhere: fey had to close early; talk of religion and politics was prohibited, as was the reading of foreign newspapers; all gambling and games of chance were prohibited; and a certain level of social standing of attendants was de jure enforced when not de facto. one coffeehouse set firm guidelines for excluding “lower people”—here noted specifically as jews and actors—from entering [vinaver 1965: 340 n.83]. despite a long history of warand peace-time interactions with the ottomans, the habsburg empire seems to have received its coffee in a completely roundabout manner. fe first coffeehouse to open in zagreb appeared around 1749, and this establishment was built on a western model derived from austrian example [337]. while most south slavic regions received their coffee as imports from alexandria, egypt, habsburg coffee was most often a dutch import from java [339]. fe habsburgs imposed a strict imperial monopoly on the sale of the bean, which produced a lively trade for smugglers bringing contraband coffee and sugar across the bosnian-croatian border where their product immediately doubled in price [kreševljaković 1935:165 n.45]. fough belated, here too the drink spread rapidly and by the end of the eighteenth century it had become a folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 10 crucial part of social life in all the major habsburg south slavic centers (zagreb, osijek, novi sad, zemun, sremski karlovci, etc.) [vinaver 1965: 337]. in the selected passages that follow, we return to the initial site of introduction to the region. into the homes and coffeehouses of the bosnian muslim population as witnessed by croatian folklore and folklife collectors. passage #1: antun hangi – a description of a bosnian coffeehouse fe following account is taken from a book [hangi 1906] that began as one half of a manuscript submitted to matica hrvatska [hangi 1898]. fe work was collected by antun hangi (1866-1909), a croatian school teacher who moved to bosnia to find work after the territory was ceded to the habsburgs in 1878. born in the town of petrinja and educated in zagreb, hangi headed to bosnia in 1890 to assume a teaching position in the town of maglaj where he professed [1906: 5; n.d.a: 197] that he fell in love with the “sober life” of the muslims there “because of their sincerity and honesty.” he later taught in livno, banja luka, bihać and sarajevo where he died from tuberculosis at the age of 43 [kajmaković 1990: 7; softić 1985: 161]. in a letter to matica hrvatska he [hangi n.d.a: 197] described his shock and wonder at the culture he found among the bosniaks when he first moved to the region. in 1888 he began collecting various material for his work, predominantly in banja luka as well as bihać [hangi n.d.b: 198], which he hoped to publish in a single book composed of three sections: fe first would be an ethnographic and folklife work titled “fe life and customs of the muhammedans in bosnia and herzegovina” [život i običaji muhamedanaca u bosni i hercegovini] [n.d.a: 196; n.d.b: 198] which was informed by =e review’s format (given the title that he has lifted from it and his admission of reading the work [hangi 1906: 5]); fe second section was planned as a selection of folk songs titled, “harem folk songs,” which he had collected predominantly from poorer muslim women and some catholics who had served in wealthier muslim households [n.d.b: 198]; fe final section would be a concomitant dictionary of turkish-loans and regional words that provided clarity to the other two sections [n.d.a: 196]. hangi also took photographs throughout bihać and banja luka that he hoped would add color to the pages of the work [n.d.a: 196; n.d.b: 198]. for their part, matica hrvatska relied on one of their members with extensive experience collecting folk songs in the region, dr. luka marjanović, to assess hangi’s work and guide his manuscript to completion [hangi n.d.a: 196; marjanović n.d.: 9]. in the end, matica retained the songs he sent them, but only published seventeen of the songs in their larger folk song collection [andrić 1909; 1914; 1942; marjanović n.d.: 9; smičiklas 1899: 1 softić 1985: 170]. hangi’s prose manuscript was deemed less valuable to the group and returned to him per his request [hangi n.d.a: 197; n.d.b: 198-9]. after publishing sections of his work in bosnian periodicals, the work was finally published in full as a book, complete with elaborate illustrations and some of hangi’s photographs in 1899. fe book was instantly successful and reprinted in a second edition in 1906. in respect to conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 11 the subject of his work, and to shifting discourse coming out of sarajevo, he altered the name of his piece for the second edition, replacing the derogatory and dated term ‘muhammedans’ [muhamedanci] with ‘muslims’ [muslimani]. fis passage from his work [1906: 78-84], describes the look, workings, and culture of a bosniak coffeehouse, presumably in the bosanska krajina region. since our muslims have their serfs, who work in their stead, they need not worry as much about their existence as christians do. because of this, they have plenty of time for gathering and conversing. feir dearest meeting places are the stores of muslim merchants and coffeehouses [kafane], or better cafés [kahve], as they also call them thus. (14) fese coffeehouses are not the same as those in the west, but rather little, sooty rooms. in them the proprietor sits at the hearth and “bakes” the coffee. fere are a large number of cafés in bosnia and herzegovina and one would not be much mistaken were one to say that nearly every tenth or twentieth muslim house is a café. fe interiors of bosnian cafés are very simple. divans [sećije] line the walls, upon which are placed pillows stuffed with wool, reed grass, or hay. over the pillows is spread blue or red loden [čoha]. only in one corner of the divan is found a nicer, taller pillow, a proper mattress for the divan. fat spot is always reserved for one exceptional aga or beg who frequents that café every day as though it were his own. fe entire café is covered in cattail mats [hasura], while only the nicest have both cattail mats and rugs [ćilimi]. fey like to build cafés above water, such that either the entire building is above water, or else that one section is reposed along the bank while the other rests upon strong pilings [direci], posts that protrude from the water. otherwise, they situate them on some raised area or hillock from which opens a beautiful vista on all sides, for our muslim is gladly carried away by flights of fancy and those types of locations are most conducive to that. in many of the more common bosnian cafés one may also find a barber, such that, beyond drinking coffee, one may also receive a haircut and shave (see image 2). such cafés are also called barbershops [berbernice]. barbershops are small wooden shacks, regularly found in the market district, either standing alone, or else sharing their roof with another shop. barbers rent such shops and then shave and cook coffee, or else some coffeehouse-keepers will rent that shop and then invite a barber to join him so that the rent is paid more easily. fus together they ply their trades. folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 12 image 2. painting of a barber at work included in antun hangi’s 1899 text, =e life and customs of the muslims in bosnia and herzegovina. [1906: 86] let’s take a peek at that café or, if you will, barbershop and observe it from both outside and in. fe roof on such barbershops is most often short and juts out well into the street. its door is loose and short and its windows are dirty and small, very small. inside, the barbershop is packed with yellow earth or, in some, there is a very primitive plank floor. fe “architect” has laid-out a number of fat planks against one another, nailed them to the joists; then the floor is done. but when the planks dry, you can easily see what is hidden below them. in some barbershops, the walls are whitewashed, while in others the planks are bare and are regularly plastered-over with various papers, mostly newspapers and price lists. in some you will find one or two pictures with or without frames. on the shelves of nearly every barbershop the diligent barber has arranged his ibriks [metal ewers] and little džezvas [coffee pots], and beside them stand bottles of lemonade and rose water; beside the bottles are little tin boxes, full of ground [lit. pulverized] coffee and sugar—a little bit of everything. in every barbershop, the thing that will immediately catch your eye is a large bosnian earthen oven with stove tiles, in which a fire burns summer and winter, from early morning until late at night. by the fire you will conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 13 always find a large vessel—usually half the size of a tin petroleum container—a container in which water is heated. beside the vessel are arranged a number of ibriks of various sizes in which the water is heated for cooking the coffee. should a customer desire coffee in a hurry, the barber or coffee-man adds a spoon or two of toza (ground coffee) in that ibrik which the customer requests. when the water boils a second time, the coffee is done. across every barbershop, nearly from wall to wall is extended a soha, a strong, chased tree trunk or other beam, just like in a slavonian peasant home, and a small cauldron with a little spigot depending from it by a chain or rope. when the barber finishes his work, and if the customer wishes, he will move that cauldron directly above the customer’s head, he will open that spigot and immediately a warm stream of water pours down to his head. fen you enjoy it like that, underneath a small waterfall, wrapped in a white or multi-colored, but completely clean sheet, or without. afterwards, the barber dries your hair. fen you sit where you like, light a cigarette, order a coffee and wait while you dry off. fen you head home, beautified and rejuvenated. it’s a unique life in those coffeehouses. some muslims enter the café and sit on a divan; one leans his back on the wall, one leans his elbow on a pillow or reclines on a window; others sit on a divan and take out their tobacco pouch to fill their pipe or chibouk, or else some youth grabs his “box” to role a “cigar” [cigarette] of tobacco, and only then will they order a coffee. regulars, particularly more esteemed guests, have their permanent spots on the divans, while newcomers and less notable individuals sit wherever a spot is available. if you have come to the café of an older coffeehousekeeper who carries on the old customs, he will never ask you what you want. instead, sit where you wish, smoke and converse as you like, he won’t even come near you, let alone ask you what you would like unless you call to him or cajole him; he really won’t. in all the cafés where our muslims gather, it is usually very calm; visitors calmly gather, quietly converse and peacefully part. while they drink coffee and smoke tobacco they speak about everything and all things, but most happily and often about politics. while they converse, they remain very serious, and some truly dignified, as though they’re discussing god knows what important topic. some of them will even, when they’ve said something important, stroke their long, usually pointed beards as a sign that they’ve spoken the truth. folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 14 while they’re talking thus, a stranger or some unfamiliar man enters into the café. whether he be christian or muslim, the conversation grows quiet or else completely stops. if they are talking about an, according to their opinion, important topic, then some foreigner stumbles into the café, especially a “schwab,” [austrian or german] and greets everyone present, normally they all stop talking and only a couple of them here and there begrudgingly return the greeting. while such a man sits amongst them, they often change the theme of their conversation and speak about something different. fen, all the while stroking their beards, they look at one another as though they are asking with their looks, “who is this? where’s he from and what kind of work has brought him here?” every foreigner who enters a bosnian café for the first time is struck, before anything else, by the many little chalk marks on the walls, beams, or on the ceiling. whence these marks and what purpose do they serve? as with us, so too and with our muslims, credit plays a very important role in public life, including cafés. regular guests, namely those who come every day to a café, rarely ever pay immediately for their coffee, but rather pay after some time, usually around saint george’s day [april 23rd or may 6th] (15) or before bajram [eid al-adha]. (16) so that the proprietor won’t forget before then how many coffees each of his guests has drunk, he writes—either on a wall, a beam, or the ceiling—the name of the debtor in turkish letters [arabic script], or, if not that, then he makes some kind of symbol in place of the name that only he and his customer understand. when such a guest has drunk his coffee, the proprietor makes a mark beside his name or that sign for how many ibriks or fildžans of coffee he has drunk. what is owed to the proprietor is conscientiously paid. at least i, to date, have never heard a coffeehouse-keeper complain of a customer who hasn’t paid for his coffee. when someone pays his debt, the proprietor wipes those marks away with his fingers or a wet cloth, but not the name or sign. fe “ledger” carries on, for it is rare for a regular customer to leave his coffee-man for another. particularly in one café in n., a small town not far from the [river] sava, i saw something unique and for a foreigner very interesting. one day i was traveling by wagon from b. in slavonia and came before dawn to n. since all the inns were still closed, i dropped into a café, as candles were already burning there. it was cold out, but in the café the fire in the “hearth” was joyfully blazing; a true delight and pleasure for a chilled traveler. fe ceiling of that café was quite vaulted, which is truly a rare exception in bosnian cafés. in the center of the café stood a plump coffeehouseconveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 15 keeper atop some type of chest. in his hand he held a long pole and at the tip of the pole was a sharpened stick of chalk. beside him stood his lad, and everything he’s saying, the owner is marking down and marking down. all the walls in that café were already full of markings, only on the ceiling remained some empty space. it’s a true wonder that this diligent proprietor of ours could find his way in that forest of names, symbols, markings and scratches. when i entered that café, i greeted the both of them with a “good morning!” fe owner just looked at me from atop his chest completely disinterested. i sit on a divan and then just watch what they’re up to. fe owner, just as though i’m not even in the room, asks, “and suljo?” fe youth responds, “five.” “huso?” “free,” and just like that in order. in other words, the owner left early the night before to retire and in his place the youth stayed in the café. now he’s telling him how much each person drank last night. i wanted to strike up a little conversation with the proprietor. i asked this and that and he responds to everything through gritted teeth, “yeah!” or “nope!” or “oh yeah!” seeing that there’s no conversation to be had with him today, i finished up my coffee, paid, and left to an inn. in larger places there are some nicely decorated cafés in which the furnishings are oriental or à la française; here, there are not just divans and cushions, but also tables and chairs. in those cafés there is the greatest order and cleanliness; in more common cafés, cleanliness is an incidental thing. but in one and the other cafés one thing is the same, and that is excellent coffee. even in the most elegant european hotel or coffeehouse you cannot find such good coffee as in the humblest bosnian café. fe coffee in bosnian cafés is so good because our coffeehouse-keepers know how to roast it well. when roasting, they never let the coffee completely blacken or over-roast. it’s best to let it just get a little ruddy and then it’s ready. over-roasted coffee not only loses its strength, but also its scent, and that’s why coffee in [european] coffeehouses isn’t as flavorful as in [bosnian] cafés. when the proprietor has roasted the coffee, he places it in a mortar, a hollowed-out young linden or cherry trunk, or else in a hollowed-out stone and grinds it with an iron bar, a pry bar, until it’s completely ground. fen he sifts it through a very thick screen, grinding the remainder over again until it has been pounded into a powder. he places this powdered coffee into tin containers and closes them tightly, that way the coffee doesn’t lose its strength and scent. because of this too, it is much more pleasant than milled coffee. folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 16 coffee is brewed or, as the muslims say, baked in džezvas or in ibriks, and when they’ve baked it, they pour it into fildžans. (17) fildžans are little, circular, porcelain vessels, in white, red, green, or blue colors. finer, particularly white, fildžans have a golden rim around the top. a fildžan of coffee with sugar is worth four hellers, without sugar only two. (18) whoever wants to drink very strong coffee can ask for special gift [mahsuzija], that is, a double-measure of ground coffee, but this is doubly-expensive. in more common cafés, the proprietor gives his customer his coffee such that he accepts it from below with three fingers—thumb, index and middle—and while taking, it he touches his left hand to his chest. when you drink this good coffee, it is lovely to light up, but for this you won’t need a match. as soon as you’ve taken a cigarette into your hand, here’s the obliging coffeehouse-keeper or his man to serve you with a charcoal. in more refined cafés, as in ours [i.e. croatian/western], the proprietor serves the coffee on a platter with a glass of cold water placed beside it. coffee is a very beloved drink of our muslims. fey say that coffee is not only a pleasant, but also a very healthy drink. fey say it cools a man in the summer, warms him in the winter, freshens him in the morning, and strengthens him in the evening. fat’s why when someone receives you in his guest room [ahar], he will serve you coffee, if you come to his store, he’ll treat you to a coffee. if you buy or sell something, get married or have some kind of celebration, someone will give you coffee. in bosnia and herzegovina there are many muslims who can drink a great amount of coffee; it doesn’t even affect their nerves. not a one has ever complained that it made him jittery. i knew a hodja in livno [present day tomislavgrad] who drank between fifty and one hundred fildžans of black coffee nearly every night of ramaḍān [bcms ramazan], and smoked as many cigarettes, and didn’t even feel that he had drunk anything. our modern man, who is already eternally anxious anyway, would die or go crazy from so much caffeine and nicotine. coffee doesn’t harm the bosnian muslim since he’s grown accustomed to it since his childhood. he begins to drink coffee when he is two or three years old and he drinks it with the same relish as everything else in his life. he does not imbibe alcoholic drinks, nor do great existential troubles torture him. aside from that, he doesn’t feel the need for backbreaking work. he lives peacefully and contentedly with what god has given him. what use is it to him, in the end, to worry about superficial, worldly troubles when everything is already fated in advance? (19) it’s no wonder, then, that he has nerves of steel and that coffee and tobacco cannot harm him. he drinks coffee from early dawn, as soon as he opens his eyes, until late in the evening when he lays down for bed. when day conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 17 has barely dawned he’s leaving the mosque or finished his morning prayer at home and headed for the café to drink his fildžan of coffee and smoke a tobacco cigarette. only after this does he set off to carry out his day’s work. in the winter, muslims head very early to sleep, and so very early rise. since they cannot await the sabah [morning prayer] at home, some as early as around four o’ clock after midnight head to a café where, with coffee and conversation, they wait until the dawn breaks and the muezzin calls to sabah from a minaret. after lunch and after dinner they head again to the café and there they pass the time in various social games, coffee and friendly conversation until akšam or jacija [dusk and evening prayers]. (20) merchants and artisans cannot go to the cafés every evening, and even less during the day. because of this, their friends and acquaintances come to their shops, and there pass the time in conversation. so that our merchant or artisan need not send someone throughout the day to a café or else call the coffeehouse-keeper to him, he has connected his shop to the café with a cord. when he wants coffee, he pulls on the cord and in the café a small bell rings. fe coffee-man recognizes each shop’s bell and takes coffee to him whose bell has rung. whoever has been to a truly muslim town in bosnia has seen those cords stretching across the streets and has wondered why such a small place has need for so many telephone lines. aside from coffee, they particularly love tobacco. fey also begin smoking in childhood and continue to smoke as long as they live. both men and women smoke tobacco, young and old, the rich and the poor. only the children of respectable and notable parents will not light-up in front of their parents nor other prominent people, since this does not befit well-raised children. youths and women smoke only cigarettes, married men smoke cigarettes, pipes and čibuks [see note 9], and old men on top of all that will also smoke a hookah [nargile]. fose who do not smoke tobacco instead snort snuff and snus. as mentioned above, compared to many contemporary western accounts of coffeehouses and coffee culture in muslim lands, hangi’s description is pleasantly detailed and informative. from architecture and décor to ambiance and appurtenances, the coffeehouse’s description is rich and informative. readers learn how the coffee is roasted, ground and prepared, the prices of coffee, as well as the range of drinks on offer—lemonade, rose water, coffee with or without sugar and even what might be termed a “double shot.” fey learn here the difference between refined and simple coffeehouses and even considerations for ideal locations to build cafés. but what stands out even more clearly is the folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 18 revealing descriptions of the culture of the coffeehouse. hangi brings readers into the building with him where they learn practices of etiquette and commensality, where to sit, how to hail the barista and how to politely receive their drink [cf. long 2000; shuman 1983]. fe passage details who smokes what in the coffeehouse, how much coffee is drunk, and at what age these habits begin, linking the drinking of coffee to life-course considerations. readers are introduced to the interplay between coffee drinking and grooming practices through the division of work shared by the coffee-man and the barber, as well as the hierarchies that exist among attendants and the culture of devotion that creates a bond between café and customer. he describes conversation habits, the culture of exclusion that arises at the arrival of a stranger and the elaborate system of chalk-mark ledgers which politely keeps debts anonymous while also tying consumer habits into seasonal cycles—debts are paid at festival times. such thick description (albeit lacking the informant input that would make it geertz’s) was uncommon for accounts of foodways produced in this era and creates a style of narrative that made hangi’s text widely successful in and outside of bosnia upon publication. fe bosnian coffeehouse in the ottoman empire it was common to refer to coffeehouses simply by the name ‘coffee.’ fis practice begins with the arabs and their original naming (qahwah), carries through the turkish borrowing (kahve), and into the bcms languages whose members use three dialect variants that have come to be standardized by nation: kava in croatian, kafa in serbian and montenegrin and kahva in bosnian. (21) coffeehouses in the region also acquired more particular names through shortening and elision of the turkish compound noun kahvehane [lit. coffeehouse], which produced the most common name for a coffeehouse, kahvana/kavana/kafana, and which persists into the present day and generally denotes a locality with an old-style ambiance akin to an english public house and which may still prepare coffee in the turkish style. fis compound noun also produced a diminutive, kafić, which is often applied to smaller and more modern establishments in an italian/western european style and with an obligatory espresso bar [cf. bringa 1995: 111-12]. for most of its history, coffee in the western balkans has been brewed in a traditional turkish manner—water is boiled in a džezva, a small, metal coffee pot with a long handle and a protruding lip for pouring, or, in the past, optionally in an ibrik, a metal pitcher or ewer with a wide base for heat distribution and a narrow spout, (22) which was used to serve larger groups (see image 3). ground coffee is then added to the hot water which is mixed lightly and returned to the heat one-to-three times for short periods to produce a slight froth. fe coffee is then served piping hot, today into demitasse cups, but traditionally into small findžans for drinking. conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 19 image 3. illustration of a kahvedžija preparing coffee at his large earthen oven. [hangi 1906: 79] in nineteenth-century bosnia, every district [mahala] of every major city had at least one coffeehouse, while the merchant districts [čaršija] were said to have one on every street. fere was also a café in every village inn/caravanserai [han], as well as in most barbershops [berbernica]. as hangi describes, the winter, when most seasonal work was suspended, was a particularly lively time for coffeehouse attendance. coffeehouse owners/keepers [kahvedžija, turk. kahveci] would regularly hire musicians and groups to perform with the šargija, the saz/bağlama or other popular instruments of the time. attendees would also entertain themselves by telling riddles, jokes and tales, playing games—checkers, backgammon, ring games, and others, as well as billiards in the finer establishments that could afford a table—and discussing politics and current folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 20 events. esteemed locals and travelers might relate their personal experiences, and there were even occasional performances by magicians [karađoz] [kreševljaković 1935: 162]. (23) coffeehouses were also home to more formalized entertainers. fose who knew turkish, persian or arabic were often asked to relate popular folk and fairy tales from written works into the local vernacular and were usually paid for this entertainment. fis practice was referred to as “telling tavarih” derived from the arabic term for histories, chronicles, or annals [pl. tawārīkh] [162]. more importantly, through the winter, most coffeehouse owners kept singers of epic songs on retainer to entertain their guests with tales of ancient heroes sung to the accompaniment of the gusle (a single-stringed fiddle), the two-stringed tamburasamica (a simple lute reminiscent of the turkish cura saz), or various other local lutes (šargija, saz, etc.) [see murko 1951: 322-39]. fis practice found its apex in the month of ramazan [ramaḍān] when one or multiple singers (depending on the skill and repertoire of available performers) would be employed to regale audiences through the long nights over the length of the month [lord 2000: 1518; murko 1951: 355-56]. fere was also a political side to bosnian coffeehouses that is not often discussed. in most areas of bosnia, coffeehouse owners belonged to their own unique guild [esnaf]. sometime during the end of seventeenth or the beginning of eighteenth century, the ottoman state tried to extend fiscal control over coffee distribution by forcing vendors to bring their beans to a common location for grinding (actually crushing). fe grinding was called tahmis after an arabic verb meaning to quintuple or divide in five [arab. takhamus], due to the fact that one fifth of the cost of grinding was collected by the state. fe coffeehouse owners would take their beans to a designated location, a tahmishane [lit. grinding house], where the coffee would be poured into a large stone mortar [dibek, lit. pillar, column; beam] and pulverized into a fine grind with a large iron pestle. fis practice was mostly imposed on guild-members in larger cities, while in rural areas grinding was commonly done as hangi describes, in large wooden pestles made from hollowed-out trees. dictates of the sublime porte made it illegal for coffeehouses to have their own mortars, but rampant violations of this law, which disadvantaged honest dealers, led to the monopoly being abandoned in 1868 [kreševljaković 1935: 163]. bosniak habits and the orientalist gaze for south slavic academics in the habsburg empire, connecting with their linguistic brethren in the faltering ottoman empire was viewed as a necessary early step for cultural unification and political autonomy. in 1878, when the habsburgs occupied a wide swathe of bosnia and herzegovina from the ottomans, academic and political discourse out of croatia and serbia aimed to establish clear connections between serbs and croats across imperial divisions and to ensure bosniak muslims that serbian, croatian and yugoslav political visions held conceptual space for them as well. in croatian intellectual circles, conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 21 much of this discourse was informed by an honest drive to find ethnic unity across religious and political boundaries. fese croats had a sincere passion to understand how the culture of the slavs long-conquered by the ottomans and cut off from their cultural and linguistic kin by the military frontier had developed along its unique historical path. fis drive, however, also included, or was later motivated by others (such as other academics, politicians, or statesmen) towards a political vision to enfold various sections of the bosniak population into the croatian ethnonym. hangi’s politics are of particular note in this context. while working with matica hrvatska, his views reveal a croatian nationalism aimed at incorporating bosniaks into a larger croatian national program. speaking as “a croat who loves croatia above all” [n.d.a: 197], he talked about bosnian muslims as “the brothers that we lost and would happily return under the wing of croatia” [196]. in his letters [196] and in the forward to his book’s second edition [1906: 5], he remarks that his main aim in the work was to depict bosniaks in sympathetic tones to assuage the perhaps unflattering views that croatian gentlemen might have about their muslim brethren and ease rapprochement. given these political leanings, hangi’s view on bosniaks often carried overtones of orientalist simplification, albeit regularly positive ones. in the forward to the first edition of his book, he describes [5] how his sojourns in various bosnian cities had impressed upon him how “our muslims are everywhere the same; of the same honesty and character.” edin hajdarpasic [2015: 15-17] has considered this outlook toward bosnia and bosniaks as undecidable, potential co-nationals, using a phrasal interpretive device, “the (br)other.” he uses this evocative formation to manifest then contemporary serbian and croatian nationalist understandings of bosniaks as a nascent population—simultaneously insufficiently patriotic but also necessary for the national future—impregnated with the potential to choose to be, be used as, or be rejected as brother and/or other. as in hangi’s passage above, in folklore and folklife writings about bosniaks at the time, this outlook regularly manifested at a semantic level. here, the rhetoric fluctuates between the type of common orientalist othering that edward said clearly outlined in his opus [1979: 237-8]: “fe muslim does x, y, z…” and a more intimate “our muslims/our muslim brethren do x, y, z…” fis language suggested national unity while also solidifying perceptions of ethnic difference within a perceived singular linguistic zone. bosniaks were intrinsically fortified as simultaneously ‘us’ and ‘them,’ while fostering an internal hierarchy of those co-linguals who are more or less western or eastern, based on their habits and practices [bakić-hayden 1995: 92231; živković 2011: 42-75]. hangi’s passage on the coffeehouse, and the next piece by the collector franjo murgić, present clear examples of this othering discourse. fe works regularly reduce bosniaks to a simplistic caricature. it is worth noting, however, that this type of simplified description was not unique to depictions of the bosniak population, but also manifested in many folklife accounts that treated croat and serb peasants too. in many ways, this was a descriptive trope that defined the style of the submissions at that early stage of ethnographic scholarship. fere are folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 22 however, certain impressions that belong uniquely to orientalist discourse. in hangi’s passage, the bosniaks are exceptionally suspicious of foreigners entering their coffeehouses, even though similar establishments in rural croatia would likely produce identical results. fey are infinitely passive, deeming all of life as fated. fey have nerves of steel, smoke from childhood, and are impervious to the effects of caffeine and nicotine. we also encounter here a topic regularly visited in nineteenth-century western scholarship when describing cultures of the “orient:” the presumed freedom, slow living, and leisure of muslim populations. despite islamic principles that discouraged aimless leisure [hattox 1985: 12021], and a general dynamism inherent to any large group, much early-modern period writing on the ottoman empire and other regions farther afield focused on the presumed leisure of “the east” as a reductive stereotype [alatas 1977; fludernik 2014; lane 1871 ii: 31; said 1979: 49, 178, 253]. hangi’s coffeehouse attendee drinks at his leisure and is carried away by flights of fancy, staring at flowing water while his serfs do his work for him back home. in the midst of hangi’s deep description of bosniak coffee culture he cannot help but falling into western european tropes aimed at raising the bar on the exoticism of the “easterners” in his account. poetically describing the ambiance of the coffeehouse and the ćeif in the air, he reifies the (br)other in descriptive examples. fis ethnic othering did not go unnoticed though. even at this early era of academic discourse in the region, hangi’s simplification of complex regional manifestations of bosniak culture brought criticism from more astute commentators. a sharp critique came from a fellow folklorist, luka grdićbjelokosić, who produced a detailed treatise criticizing the inaccuracies and romantic tendencies in hangi’s work [kajmaković 1990: 9-11]. (24) and yet, the sincerity of hangi’s account shone through his sometimes myopic scope. fe book also stood as a rarity at that time for trying to convey such a wide description of life and culture among muslim bosnians, and many of his passages contained a wealth of information and folklife description. because of these traits, the book became quite popular upon release and garnered praise from most circles [8-9]. in fact, the book was so popular that its final fate ended up sidetracking hangi’s political leanings. his work saw publication in full at a time when the habsburg government authority in bosnia was attempting to thwart croatian and serbian expansionary goals on the intellectual plain by supporting research that focused on bosniaks as a unique ethnic group [hajdarpasic 2005: 176-86; okey 2007]. fey recognized the potential in hangi’s work for their efforts and purchased most copies of his first edition to be disseminated to school libraries [kajmaković 1990: 8]. fus, a work originally intended to support muslim identification under the croatian banner ultimately ended up supporting an independent bosniak nationalism. passage #2: franjo murgić – fe schedule of a bosniak fis passage is taken from an unpublished manuscript, ethnographic and folklore material from visoko [murgić 1898c], which describes folklore and conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 23 folklife in the central bosnian city of visoko, situated half-way between the larger centers of sarajevo and zenica. fe collector, franjo murgić, was a catholic school teacher from slavonia. in early 1898 he moved to visoko to assume a position in a newly established school constructed by the habsburg administration. here he shared a rental with a fellow teacher, stanko ljubičić, a serb from the croatian town of vrgin most (also known as gvozd) [murgić 1899]. soon after his arrival, he petitioned =e review’s editors for a collecting guide [1898a] and spent the remainder of 1898 collecting material for the journal from the town’s sizeable muslim and orthodox population. under the guidance of the journal’s editors, murgić collected the wide range of folklore and folklife data outlined in the guide and also spent considerable time collecting local history from informants. fough he regularly complained about his overburdened class sizes and heavy workload, he made a point of inviting local muslim elders into his home to conduct extended interviews with them on a range of topics [1898b]. he also attempted to collect material which the editors viewed as valuable, including photographs of local muslim women. in one of his letters, he noted that they would be impossible to photograph alone due to issues of honor, but that they could be persuaded if in a group [1899]. despite his earnest efforts, his manuscript remained quite thin and only a small number of short sections ever saw publication in the journal [see jurić 2020]. fe following short passage presents a description of the daily habits of bosniaks during the winter and summer. it is useful for conveying a general sense of the important role coffee drinking and coffeehouse attendance served in the life of bosniak males, especially during winter months. fe passage, however, is built on the same kind of generalizing tendency that hangi’s work presented, reducing an entire ethno-religious group to a singular caricature. in line with the style of the journal, and like hangi’s passage above, the text is rife with local turkishloanwords inserted to convey some regional color to the account. if one were to come in the morning in winter into someone’s house [in visoko], one would not find him in his chamber [odaja] but rather at a café. in the afternoon he is in the merchant district of town [čaršija] or at a café; if he’s not in one, then he’s in the other. at akšam [at sunset] you can always find him at home, after akšam [at dusk] he is again in a café. during ramaḍān he comes to the café for two and a half hours at akšam while he performs [lit. bows] his teravija prayers [nightly prayers for ramaḍān]. (25) fen he remains there for five and a half hours, or else spends this time visiting others. fen he goes home to wake his wife and children, so they can cook a meal while he smokes and sits and plays with his little children. (26) he will drink coffee and then, when the meal is ready, he will spend two hours eating (namely, three hours before sunrise [sabah]). fen, after finishing his meal, he will again play, smoke and drink coffee for another hour. he remains awake for this time, still two hours before sabah [sunrise], but will neither eat nor smoke a thing. fen, when they have called [okujisati] the sabah (when the muezzin folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 24 calls [adherents] from the minaret to morning prayer), they go to pray the sabah; then he will go home and sleep until noon. when they call the noontime prayer, then his wife wakes him to go pray. when he’s prayed, then [he walks] along the merchant district: up, down, up, down, like that until before the sunset prayers. fen he goes home to snack. when they eat at night during ramaḍān, they call that iftariti. (27) in that same way, whoever seeks him during the summer, will not find him at home. in the morning they go to work between 5:30 and 6 o’clock and in the evening he comes home at akšam, after akšam, or sometimes somewhere around two hours before akšam. as in hangi’s piece, murgić’s brief account conveys the central role that coffee played in bosniak social life. murgić reveals the way that daily schedules were guided by milestones of prayer times and coffee consumption, particularly in winter months when seasonal work was largely suspended. fe “typical bosniak” outlined in this piece, freed from certain duties by winter weather, shifts to a nocturnal schedule, which is implied to be supported in some part by the stimulating benefits of coffee. what murgić provides is, in effect, a foodways time-table for a bosniak male whose daily schedule is punctuated by meals and coffee. fere is, of course, as in hangi’s piece, an element of exaggeration, stereotyping, and orientalizing—as hangi’s bosniaks grow up on coffee and cigarettes and while their days away in fantasy, so too does murgić’s bosniak father sleep through every day and live at the coffeehouse—and yet, the fact that the summer season receives short shrift in the account reveals that there was something exceptional about the daily plotting of coffee habits in the winter months that drew murgić’s attention. private coffee practice in the western balkans with murgić’s passage we move away from the coffeehouse and into the private home. in private practice, both in the nineteenth century and in the present, coffee serves numerous roles: it is often given as a gift when visiting family or friends; it is a crucial item served during formal and informal gatherings, and it carries its own system of etiquette and practice: it is brewed in the specific manner outlined in hangi’s piece, always using the same, particular implements of preparation [pribor or takum], traditionally by the women of a household, poured out to all guests by the brewer before she serves herself, and always served extremely hot; as the traditional bosnian saying goes “coffee poured and a woman undressed cannot wait” [kahva nalivena i žena otkrivena ne mogu čekati]. fe drink is generally served with something sweet on the side, as opposed to the public practice in cafés of accompanying the beverage with a glass of water. for accompaniment, coffee is often paired with baked goods [kolači] of some sort, which help to break up the bitterness of the drink when served black. in bosniak homes, the drink is traditionally paired with lokum/ratluk [turkish delight], baklava, or else with large, rectangular sugar cubes (about twice as long and half conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 25 as thin as a common sugar cube) that are nibbled intermittently through the drinking (see hadžiosmanović 2007; işın 2013). historically, as european cafés began to adopt italian espresso machines in the mid-twentieth century, the traditional way of drinking turkish coffee (turska kahva, also called domaća [domestic/homemade] kahva, and very rarely, usually in a tongue-in-cheek manner, bosnian/serbian/croatian coffee [bosanska kahva/srpska kafa/hrvatska kava]), became relegated to household practice outside of bosnia. in western regions (particularly the north-west corner of croatia), it also took on connotations and stigma of backwardness and village practice as opposed to the cosmopolitan drinking of european coffee with milk in cafés. marko živković [2011: 47, 53-4] has explored the wide-reaching metonymic regional distinctions connected to the dichotomy between viennese and turkish coffee which often stand for a wide matrix of perceived internal divisions. despite this divisive side, the domestic practice of sharing coffee with neighbors, friends and family is still viewed in the region as the purest symbol of proper and healthy interpersonal relationship and a healthy community balance [helms 2010: 24-25; stefansson 2010: 67-69]. passage #3: ivan zovko – on the origin of coffee unlike the first two contributors, our final school teacher and lay folklore collector, ivan zovko, did not come to bosnia from croatia to teach, but was rather born there. a native of mostar, he worked as a teacher in a number of areas of bosnia and herzegovina. he was the author of a score of articles and books focused on croatian and bosniak folklore and folklife in bosnia and herzegovina [marjanović 2009]. in his many letters written to the editors at =e review—in his characteristically sloping, extended, nearly-illegible hand—the collector related only a few points about his personal life. during the time of his correspondence, he moved from a teaching position in konjic in herzegovina to another trade school in sarajevo, before being relocated to another school in bihać. although the majority of his correspondence relates only to edits, corrections and redactions to his manuscripts and articles, he regularly presented himself as a croatian patriot and nationalist, often ending his letters with a humorously overwrought “croatian greeting” to the editors. he talked at length about establishing a printing press in mostar and publishing regimes for croatian interest papers in mostar and sarajevo [zovko 1897: 2] as well as plans to open a croatian book store in sarajevo to better spread the croatian name in bosnia [1898: 2-3]. while he provided a wealth of data on bosniak cultural practice, his main focus was aimed at relating the folklore and folklife of croatians in bosnia. fe following legend, however, represents one of the many gems of bosniak folklore that he unearthed for submission to =e review. (28) fis legend [zovko 1892: 226] is drawn from an unpublished section of zovko’s manuscript that focuses on peasant perceptions about the origins of common foods. given collection practices of the time, this text could be zovko’s descriptive retelling of one or many accounts he heard, modelled to a first-person folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 26 narrative format. however, the passage bears the mark of a verbatim account recorded from an interlocutor. given comparative data from other collectors of the time, this is most likely the case, despite zovko leaving no information about the legend teller or the context of collection. if someone, i don’t know who, were to tell me that coffee came to be at the same time as other things, by allah!, i would not believe him. i would go so far as to swear that it hadn’t existed before. in truth, coffee appeared at that time when the prophet muḥammad wandered the earth. somehow it simply appeared on its own when it was taken from the human mind, but again, it is not as though it’s difficult for allah or his messenger to do wondrous things. truly, in that time, coffee somehow came to be, when the prophet muḥammad made the prohibition against the drinking of wine and rakija [fruit brandy]. at that time, once, when he was headed to mosque, he began to ponder which drink might best replace rakija and wine. according to his habit and as he was wont, he wished then to give alms to a pauper. but, when he dug into his pocket, he had only one, singular coin, for he had already given out all his other money. he gave this coin to one pauper who had just then sat below the mosque’s door. as soon as that coin dropped into his [the pauper’s] palm it immediately transformed into some kind of strange g[r]ain which until that time was unseen and unheard of. it suddenly occurred to the prophet muḥammad that this was some kind of sign regarding the thought he had just moments ago been thinking. when he got home, he planted that grain, for he had taken it from that pauper and prayed to allah that a coin appear in his hand so that he might give it to the pauper in place of that grain. (29) allah immediately did this for his messenger, and that grain, which he had planted, after only one, single night, sprouted, grew tall, flowered and bore fruit. fen saintly muḥammad taught everyone how to handle coffee and the entire world began to use coffee which only grows in holy places in mecca. fat’s why the plant won’t take elsewhere. here we find the origins of coffee connected to the actions of the prophet muḥammad at a time when he has decreed alcoholic beverages as illicit. fere are some interesting revelations regarding perceptions of cultural geography in the piece, e.g., the balkan spirit rakija [fruit brandy] is projected back to ancient mecca, where it did not exist. meanwhile, the bosnian fabulator who provided the tale reveals a clear knowledge of coffee as an arabic import, albeit here from mecca rather than from yemen. fe point of this legend, though, is not only to offer an explanation of origin for coffee, but to typify the drink as a sacred item in opposition to profane and prohibited alcoholic beverages. to accomplish this, sacred contexts are heaped upon coffee’s spontaneous generation; the plant is supernaturally bequeathed to the prophet from allah while the former is pondering the prospects of a righteous drink, heading to mosque, and impoverishing himself to the point of destitution with almsgiving. coffee’s conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 27 sacrality, as a traditional topic of vernacular discourse, was specifically linked to the turbulent history of debates regarding the drink’s status as a permissible food item among islamic religious authorities. fis history of the drink’s reception in the ottoman empire provides the clues that explain the storyteller’s stress on coffee’s holy character. is coffee ḥalāl? from its earliest introduction to arabic lands, coffee faced severe suspicion and backlash from conservative civil and religious authorities. fe first recorded opposition to the drink arose in mecca in 1511 when the martinet pasha of the mamluks and civic overseer of marketplaces [muḥtasib] of mecca, khā’ir beg almi‘mār held a sort of “trial against coffee” among the city’s ‘ulamā [muslim scholars consulted to interpret theology and sacred law] to convince them of the drink’s dangers. with a consensus reached (under political pressure) the religious judges [qāḍīs] of mecca sided with khā’ir beg, who proclaimed coffee illicit and had his deputies begin closing down coffeehouses, beating drinkers and sellers and burning any beans they found. fis state of affairs obtained until an official decree arrived from the sultan of cairo, supporting disapproval of social gatherings to drink coffee, but not prohibiting the drink. fis effectively ended khā’ir beg’s persecutions [hattox 1985: 30-37; weinberg and bealer 2001: 1112]. such reactions to coffee drinking in the ottoman empire were to become a common occurrence over the next two hundred years. fere were riots over coffeehouses in cairo in 1521 and 1532 [tucker 2011: 52]. in 1534-5 (a.h. 941) the city degenerated into chaos after local preachers incited mobs to attack the establishments and counter-protestors met them in the streets [hattox 1985: 3840]. in 1543, the first merchant boat bringing coffee from yemen to turkey was sunk, because of a fetva (arab. fatwa, a legal opinion produced by a mufti) issued by shaykh al-islām abū su‘ud [krstić 1974: 72]. polemics about whether coffee should be considered ḥalāl [permissible] or ḥarām [forbidden] offered lively discussion and bitter argument amongst the ‘ulamā. as a novel item neither known in the time of muḥammad and the first caliphs, nor mentioned in the qur’ān, coffee was considered bid‘ah [innovation] and thus warranted suspicion and careful weighing of its perceived merits and dangers. such innovations generally received immediate disapproval and rejection from conservative scholars and religious figures who viewed them in terms akin to heresy. more progressive voices, however, would rely on a stronger principle in islam, the concept of original permissibility [al-ibāḥa al-aṣlīya], a firm binary tenet of mutual exclusivity that decrees that all that is not illicit is perforce licit. fe naming of coffee did not help the beverage’s case. fe term qahwah was used in arabic before the introduction of coffee as an epithet for wine. fe name may have been applied by analogy, since the root q-h-w/y denotes aversion— coffee putting one off of sleep as wine was believed to put one off of food— or by folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 28 homophony, as a drink from the ethiopian region of kaffa [hattox 1985: 18-19; weinberg and bealer 2001: 24-5]. no matter the source of the initial ascription, it could not aid the novel coffee to be associated with a substance of dissipation so clearly prohibited in the qur’ān [ii.219, iv.43, v.90-91]. besides some ardent critics, most were willing to admit that coffee did not intoxicate in the same manner as alcohol. it did, however, have noticeable psychoactive effects on the imbiber, and as such was suspect as impermissible. many early critics also compared coffee to wine because it was drunk in groups and, purportedly, regularly passed amongst drinkers “from hand to hand” like wine [elezović 1938: 625; hattox 1985: 117-20]. a further objection against the inherent dangers of the drink was raised in the sixteenth century by şeyhülislâm abū al-su‘ūd efendi (1490-1574) who argued that coffee beans were roasted to beyond the point of carbonization and thus were hazardous to the drinker [hattox 1985: 114; lewis 1963: 133; peçevi 1999 i: 350; white 1845 i: 280]. fese assertions were based upon the conception of jurists that included charcoal in a list of food items which are ḥarām on grounds of “manifest harm” [ḍarar]. although contested even in al-su‘ūd’s time, this argument continued to surface in numerous fetvas and treatises. in his seminal work on coffee in the medieval near east [1985], ralph s. hattox has competently argued that most of these religious arguments were, in fact, justifications used to add weight to an ire raised by the more practical civic danger implicit in coffee drinking. fe problem was less with the drink itself, than with the social structure that arose around it and that threatened the central role of the mosque in islamic social life. coffeehouses were often sites of political discussion, unrest and intrigue, and regularly the point of origin for revolts in this time. furthermore, many coffeehouses modelled too closely the taverns that had come before them, becoming the locus of illicit behaviors such as gambling, prostitution, homosexual interactions, drug use and other unsavory vices (see image 4). fere were, however, contrary voices who argued against the connection between coffee and wine. fey supported coffee as a stimulant that could be used for diligence in work, study and prayer or outlined its medical benefits as a digestive aid, appetite suppressant, promoter of haleness, and cure for sanguinary ailments [hattox 1985: 61-67; krstić 1974: 92]. yet even these voices could not condone the behaviors exhibited in the more disreputable establishments. (30) indeed, the sixteenth century became a time of almost constant production of fetvas for or against coffee as the ‘ulamā tried to come to a consensus on how best to deal with the beverage. (31) conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 29 image 4. a seventeenth-century ottoman miniature depicting a coffeehouse. in the top right the kahveci is at his stove, at bottom-center men are playing what appears to be backgammon. attendees drink coffee and smoke chibouks. [museum with no frontiers 2020] folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 30 fe polemic also became an official matter of the porte on regular occasions. a number of sultans, under pressure from religious leaders, took measures to prohibit and curtail coffee culture in an effort to curb revolt and diminish the occurrence of the many fires that plagued istanbul and regularly stemmed from the smoking in coffeehouses. around 1580, sultan murad iii issued a number of interdictions and closed coffeehouses, ostensibly in response to fetvas that had been issued, but likely over concern of seditious activity and unflattering discussions in those locales about his brutal accession to the sultanate [lewis 1963: 133; weinberg and bealer 2001: 15]; fermans [official mandates/decrees] were issued a number of times during the reigns of ahmed i (1603-17) and again in the time of mehmed iv (1648-87) [elezović 1938: 628]. fese prohibitions reach their apogee, though, in the reign of sultan murad iv (1623-40). murad came to power at a time of disorder and anarchy in the empire. fe previous sultans had allowed janissary power to become unchecked and the empire was embroiled in an unpopular war against the safavids. by this time, coffeehouses were fully entrenched as the meeting grounds of mutinous soldiers. known for his iron-fisted rule, the splenetic murad was not eager to suffer the fate of his older brother osman ii (r. 1618-22) whose regicide had been plotted in a popular janissary café [white 1845 i: 283-4]. after a coffeehouse fire in 1633 grew out of control and consumed one fifth of istanbul, he used the opportunity as pretext to issue a ferman outlawing the drinking of coffee and smoking of tobacco and opium. all coffeehouses and taverns were ordered closed or razed and none were permitted to be built. fose who continued to sell these items or engage in their use were subject to harsh punishments including the death penalty. popular legend and historiography from this time are rife with stories of coffeehouse owners being tied in bags and thrown into the bosphorus [weinberg and bealer 2001: 15], cafés in edirne being shuttered and all of their owners hanged, and of murad himself patrolling the streets at night in disguise, sniffing the air for tobacco and executing anyone he came upon walking the streets without a lantern. fese cruel prohibitions had a long aftermath, but they too soon passed. by the last quarter of the same century the coffeehouses were reopened and thriving. finding their citizenry to be inveterate coffee drinkers and smokers willing to face the gallows for one final sip or puff, efforts at interdiction were finally abandoned. fe last bans on coffee and tobacco were removed in 1688 [fotić 2011: 93] and tobacco was finally declared licit by chief mufti mehmed baha’i efendi, who had himself been dismissed and exiled in 1634 due to his own heavy smoking [lewis 1963: 136]. as hattox has suggested, original permissibility [al-ibāḥa al-aṣlīya] inevitably overcame conservative responses to innovation [bid‘ah] [1985: 129]. fe verdict on coffee in bosnia fe edicts of the porte seem not to have reached as far as bosnia in any meaningful way. in 1658, while murad iv’s ferman still held in istanbul, the french traveler a. poullet mentioned coffee being drunk in bosnia as he traveled conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 31 through the balkans on his eight-year eastern journey [jelavić 1908: 66]. it is unclear if the ferman was ever carried to the eyalet, or if a return to equilibrium had simply been expedited in rumelia. fat does not mean that political edicts on coffee were unknown in the region; rather, they were familiar, but often localized. numerous political uprisings in bosnia also had their rabbles roused in local coffeehouses: the riots that reigned from 1747-56; the 1820 resistance put down by ali dželaludin paša; the protests that arose after the abolition of the janissaries in 1826; the 1831 revolt of the “dragon from bosnia,” captain husein-beg gradaščević; and the 1832 uprising of hasan bajraktar zubović all had their beginnings in coffeehouses. in the latter case, and likely for many others, zubović’s café was razed on 8 june 1832 after his movement had been suppressed [kreševljaković 1935: 162]. fe learned deliberations on the use of coffee were also well known in the region. sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century, while bosnians were enjoying a period of peace, the bosnian mufti of prusac, muṣṭafā ibn muḥammad al-aqḥiṣārī (died 1755/6, a.h. 1169), wrote a treatise on the use of coffee and tobacco in his native land [krstić 1974]. he was well informed of the various debates surrounding these items in the empire and decided to weigh in on the conversation. a proponent of the drink, he strongly opposed the fetvas levelled against coffee, celebrating it on numerous grounds—for inducing heartiness and a positive mood, affecting one’s productivity in a positive manner [92], causing good digestion, warming the body, and exercising holy thoughts and an inclination towards pious obedience, among many other beneficial aspects [94]. he related his own affirmative experiences with coffee which helped him actively read books and kept him awake at night, allowing him to avoid lethargy and sleep for a longer, more productive day [93]. he could not say the same for tobacco, however, spending pages adumbrating sixteen formal proofs of the harmful effects to the body and soul caused by smoking [96-99]. (32) he included tobacco in the list of detestable things outlawed for consumption under muslim sharīʿa [96], stressing that it is neither food nor medicine, has neither positive spiritual nor profane use and is only a filthy entertainment that harms the body. however, by the nineteenth century, these debates had lost their urgency and both drinking coffee and smoking tobacco had become firmly established practices among all religious groups in the region. fis popularity did not mean, however, that the stigma of the coffeehouse had been completely whitewashed, nor that the majority of religious officials viewed the practices as particularly virtuous or reputable. fough most of the ‘ulamā in bosnia had long accepted coffee as permissible, its status as an innovation remained. zovko’s legend on the origin of coffee likely stems from vernacular attempts to justify the beverage by not only projecting back in time and having the bean exist in the time of the prophet, but in fact by establishing him as the magical source for the bean’s existence. (33) folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 32 conclusion: conveying the ćeif along with the coffee it is my hope that the three passages presented here, previously unpublished or untranslated in english, will contribute to an understanding of the role of coffee in nineteenth-century bosnian muslim culture. i have endeavored to present them in a manner that places them in a historical and cultural framework that contextualizes their importance and lays bare the academic focus that undergirds the epistemic view that influenced their collection. fe three croatian school teachers whose work is presented here entered the bosnian and herzegovinian communities in which they worked to gather folklore data bookmarked for a croatian readership. fey aimed to exhibit unique and curious aspects of bosniak culture at a time when rapid political and economic change was poised to alter or overwhelm those practices. read together, these works act as a highly effective overview of the socially-embedded nature of coffee culture among bosnian muslims and present an early example of folklife and foodways research [anderson 1971; hinson and ferris 2009; long 2004; 2009; yoder 1972]. fey offer a window into the shared practices and symbolic patterns of meaning that surrounded muslim coffee culture in nineteenth-century bosnia and herzegovina. far from simplistic depictions of how to cook and drink the beverage, antun hangi, franjo murgić, and ivan zovko provided a vantage point onto the role coffee serves as an “everyday practice… that inject[ed] meaning into life’s unyieldy dailiness… [and] len[t] comfort in [its] familiarity and sharedness” [hinson and ferris 2009: 8]. frough their work, contemporary and current readers obtain(ed) a sense of being in a local coffeehouse and of watching the processes of a cultural structure play out. in their short passages, these lay scholars conveyed a sense of the temporality of coffee and its embeddedness in daily and yearly schedules, the politics of interaction that arose in sites of meaning structured around the habit of drinking, the aesthetics and ambiance that surrounded coffeehouses and other sites of coffee use, and even how the supernatural, the divine and the holy became woven into the tapestry of coffee lore in order to legitimize the practice. given these analytical achievements, it is a pity that in such seemingly mundane writing as that devoted to the drinking of coffee and coffeehouse culture, one perceives, through the interstices of their sentences, telling hints of croatian political views about bosnian muslims and wider orientalist tendencies that were an academic currency of the time. like many other bosniak practices recorded in the nineteenth century by both croat and serb scholars, the aim of relating coffee culture in bosnia and herzegovina was to simultaneously reveal the exotic and foreign habits of croatia’s south-easterly neighbors, while also stressing those similarities that bound the slavic populations together across political divides. for croatian readers of the time, newly ceded territories, sometimes less than 100 kilometers away from their own homes, could beguile in the same way that western european audiences hungrily collected fantastic tales from the one =ousand and one nights and eastern travelogues. in fact, this appeal was all the richer for the underlying similarities of their exotic, and yet familiar, (br)others. conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 33 frough the writings of murgić, hangi and zovko we are provided some unique vantages on nineteenth-century bosniak coffee culture, but also on the ways that these practices were conveyed to a croatian audience. fey strove to present the unique nature of bosniak culture, while packaging those curiosities in an epistemic frame entitled “what has happened to our brethren.” in presenting an embedded, folklife account of coffee foodways, these croatian scholars successfully conveyed the ćeif that comes along with coffee but, beguiled by the exotic notes they perceived in that added mood, they could not help but simplify, other and orientalize the subjects of their research. by translating these works we can not only gain an intimate view inside both a nineteenth-century bosniak home and coffeehouse (and reveal an interesting origin legend for the beverage), but also see the ways that croatian folklore and folklife collectors hoped to bring a sense of the bosniak’s “exotic” ways home to a croatian readership. acknowledgements i am indebted to the helpful comments on this piece provided by drs. john colarusso and naomi mcpherson, my two anonymous reviewers, and the journal’s generous editor, as well as the insight and aid of marina jurić. i also owe a word of thanks to blanka van raalte and her father bećir behrem for helping me find the right translation of a pernicious word. finally, my gratitude is also owed to the department of ethnology at hazu for providing access to their archive. part of this research was supported by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada and mcmaster university. notes 1 because of its intimate connection to the drink in the region, some reflection on tobacco use will also be discussed. 2 mikhail makes particular note of lane’s passage [1871 i: 173-75], which is indeed lacking in elaboration and depth. burton’s accounts are also quite thin [1874 i: 197, 209-10, 248; ii: 99, 206; iii: 71, 123, 147]. beyond hangi’s description presented here, charles white also offered a notable exception with his highly informative passages on the coffee [1845 i: 277-86; ii: 132-3] and tobacco [1845 ii: 125-52] culture of istanbul. 3 historically variously spelled and pronounced ćeif, ćejif, ćejf, ćef, ćeiv, kejf, etc. in the bcms languages see škaljić [2014: 176-77]. fis concept has salience throughout the balkans and middle east [e.g. alb. qejf; bulg. kef; gk. kéfi; pers. keyf] with several unique idiomatic variations in each language. in turkish, this word also carries a wide range of phrasal variety based on a number of verbal combinations, for example: keyif sürmek – to live the good life; keyif bilmek – to do as one pleases, etc. for a discussion of coffee practice and the concept of ćeif in a modern bosnian-american immigrant context, see croegaert [2011]. folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 34 4 here hangi plays on a common folk expression “i/pa mirna bosna” [and/then peaceful bosnia], meaning “and then everyone is happy/in agreement,” and used in contexts akin to the english idiom “and bob’s your uncle.” 5 it is not clear if the earliest recorded coffee preparations were kisher, the green, tea-like beverage brewed from the husks and skins of the coffee bean, bounya, the thick early predecessor of turkish coffee made from raw boiled beans, or both. on this early preparation history, see weinberg and bealer [2001: 22-3]. 6 fe ottoman yemeni port of mocha and the dutch indonesian port of java became synonymous bywords for coffee and its trade. 7 fe ottoman historians kâtip çelebi [1957: 59] and i̇brahim peçevi [1999 i: 351] give conflicting dates. for an english translation of peçevi’s account of istanbul tobacco and coffee culture, see lewis [1963: 132-36]. 8 fe turkish çubuk [lit. shoot/sapling/staff; bcms čibuk] is most commonly between one and five ells [turk. arşın; bcms (h)aršin] in length and composed of three parts: a ceramic bowl [turk. lüle, lit. ceramic hearth; bcms lula], a hollowed wooden (or reed) stem [tur. kamış; bcms kamiš], and a colorful mouthpiece most commonly made from carved amber or other soft minerals. in the western balkans, only the term lula has survived into the present day as the bcms word for a smoking pipe. smokers in the region also employed hookahs [bcms nargile], but much more rarely. cigarettes and cigars did not take a firm hold in the region until the twentieth century. 9 fe turkish fincan [cup; bcms findžan/fildžan] is a small (usually holding about an ounce and a half of liquid), porcelain, or clay, handle-less coffee cup. it was the most common receptacle for drinking coffee in the ottoman empire. finer coffee sets for homes might be set into a zarf [bcms zarf/zalf/zaf; from arab. ẓarf, lit. container, envelope], a metal, handled or handle-less holder, made of elaborate metal filigree or simple hammered tin or brass, and reminiscent of an egg-cup, into which the fincan was nested (see an illustration in lane [1871 i: 174]). fese were, however, rarely on offer in coffeehouses. fotić [2011: 95] notes that archaeologists have unearthed findžans imported from as far afield as germany and china at sites in belgrade. fe word itself has a long heritage: turkish fincan ß arabic finjān ß persian pengân ( ناگنپ ) ß greek pínax (πίναξ), the latter two denoting a shallow plate or dish. 10 for a clear, english-language discussion of the views of the four major sunni schools of religious jurisprudence on alcohol, see hattox [1985: 50-57]. 11 compare this date, and those listed below with the opening of the first coffeehouses in major western european centers: venice in 1640, oxford 1650; london 1652, marseille 1654, fe hague 1664, paris 1672, vienna 1685, or frankfurt 1689 [cowan 2005: 90; elezović 1938: 633; kreševljaković 1935: 161; weinberg and bealer 2001: 18, 64, 71, 77, 154]. 12 until the nineteenth century, the bcms languages employed the older conception that tobacco is drunk rather than smoked or blown [fotić 2011: 96]. to this day the turkish language still retains this usage (e.g., sigara içmek, “to drink a cigarette”). conveying ćeif folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 35 13 fe ottoman millet system was an administrative approach to empire which, though shifting through various formations over time, provided a significant level of juridical and administrative autonomy to various confessional communities. it was an early example of religious pluralism built out of islamic principles regarding dhimmi populations that came to influence wider conceptions of societal structure. see braude [1982]. 14 in these passages, i consistently translate the term kahvana/kafana/kavana as coffeehouse. fe term kahva/kafa/kava i have glossed as café, as the term is used in english and also means both coffeehouse and coffee in the original french. 15 croats celebrate st. george’s day [croat. jurjevdan, serb. đurđevdan] on april 23rd according to the gregorian calendar, while the majority of bosniaks, who interestingly retained this celebration through their conversion to islam, observe the holiday as the serbs do according to the julian calendar on may 6th. hangi could be referring to either, though the time of year is the same. 16 from tur. bayram festival, celebration, holiday. fis can refer to both hadžijski bajram/kurban bajram (eid al-adha), fe festival of the sacrifice, celebrated 77 days after ramaḍān and lasting for four days, or to ramazanski bajram (eid al-fitr), fe festival of breaking the fast, celebrated immediately after ramaḍān and lasting for three days. fe former is considered the greater holiday and so likely intended here. 17 fe bcms languages normally use the verb kuhati/kuvati [to boil, to cook]. hangi points out that it was common among bosniaks of the time to use the term peći [to bake]. 18 monetary denomination of the austro-hungarian empire. one onehundredth of a krone and known as a filler in hungary. 19 fis is a reference to the oft stereotyped conception of fate and the predestined nature of life in muslim worldview which regularly figure in western scientific writing [grosfoguel 2010: 32; ibn warraq 1995: 123-27, 157; lane 1871 i: 84, 357-58; ii: 200; qur’ān iii.139, ix.51, xiii.30, xiv.4, xxxii.32, xlv.26, liv.49, lvii.22, lxxxvii.2]. 20 fese terms represent both a time of day and the prayer that occurs at that time: sabah namaz (tur. sabah namazı; arab. ṣalāt al-fajr), the morning prayer time between dawn and sunrise, akšam namaz, (tur. akşam namazı, arab. ṣalāt al-maghrib) between sunset and dusk, and jacija namaz (tur. yatsı namazı; arab. ṣalāt al-‘ishā’) the fifth and final prayer of the day. 21 fe regional name for tobacco too derives from the arabic [dukhān] by way of turkish [duhan] into the local form duhan, with an eastern dialect variant of duvan (a division later cemented as the respective standard forms for the croatian and serbian languages). a turkish-derived variant form tutun [turk. tütün] and an austrian-derived tabak are also attested. 22 bcms and turk. ibrik, loaned from arab. ’ibrīq. bcms džezva from turk. cezve, arab. jadhwah. for an overview of coffee preparation in the core islamic world see hattox [1985: 82-87]. folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 36 23 from tur. karagöz, lit. black-eye. fis is the name of one of two main characters in a popular turkish shadow-puppet play, karagöz and hacivat [i̇vaz the pilgrim]. it was applied to the same show when performed in bosnia, but the term became extended to also include marionettes, jesters and magicians who performed on similar occasions. 24 fis critique served almost as a refined and locally internalized, although milder, replay of the fortis and lovrić debate over rights to representation. see wolff [2001: 228-75]. 25 bcms teravija, tur. teravi, arab. (pl.) tarāvīḥ. special nightly prayers for ramaḍān which are conducted after the conclusion of the fifth and final prayer of the day jacija namaz. 26 fe collector here oddly uses the word “zidati” [to build, to erect walls]. fis word simply does not fit the context. it is unclear what murgić meant; perhaps this typical bosniak father is playing some sort of building game with the youngest children, but the phrasing suggests infants or toddlers and is too general for such a specific act. it is tempting to read the word as “zibati” [to rock, to lull], but there is much working against this reading: fe word is clearly written twice (i.e., not lapsus calami), zibati is a widely distributed, old slavic verb that is generally familiar to people in most regions (i.e. it is unlikely that murgić is trying to present an unfamiliar, regional word and getting it wrong), and zibati takes the accusative, not the instrumental as in the example. i have simply defaulted to a translation that makes sense in context. 27 fis is a local verb form for the arabic word ’ifṭār, the first meal to break the ramaḍān fast. 28 i classify this oral narrative from zovko’s collection as a legend due to its “believable” content being situated in a historical past and its plot accounting for the genesis of a transient aspect of life, as opposed to the ancient before-time of myths that often explain broader and lasting phenomena [bascom 1965; gatling 2020; jurić 2019: 46; tangherlini 1990]. 29 fis section of the ms is difficult to discern. fe word written seems to be “alika,” but i cannot find any such word in any dictionaries. i have used the dative form of the name allah here, because it suits the context best, but i am not certain that this was the intended word. 30 for some of the more important names associated with fetvas argued for and against coffee see kreševljaković [1935: 161]; krstić [1974: 73, 93, 102]; lewis [1963: 135-6]; white [1845 i: 280]. 31 fe case for tobacco was even worse. 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(eds.). channeling wonder: fairy tales on television. detroit: wayne state university press, 2014. preface. acknowledgement. introduction. filmography. references. list of contributors. index. x+450 pp. $31.99 (paper). isbn: 978-0814339220. fairy tales adapted for the screen are not a new phenomenon. however, in the recent decade, the genre has made a spectacular comeback in live-action cinema and on television. done are the years where fairy tales were almost essentially associated with traditional film animation and children’s culture. they now fully embrace a more mature audience that keeps demanding more stories. in a way, television is unique because of the television series format that allows for variations of the same story and because of its capacity to reach people in their private realms. in this context, channeling wonder: fairy tales on television, the first collection of essays dedicated to xx and xxi century fairy tales productions made for television, is a long awaited study. the book is separated into thematic sections. the first, “for and about kids and adults”, addresses the concept of audiences. in this section, ian brodie and jodi mcdavid’s study offers engaging insights on how a child engages with a television program. emma nelson and ashley walton’s analysis of merlin as a socializing narrative is especially interesting for its look at the fan community and how the show has influenced their values and beliefs, an insight that would have brought more to this chapter if it would have been studied further. don tresca presents the adaptation of hansel and gretel in shows such as csi: crime scene investigation, criminal minds, sherlock, dollhouse, lost girl, supernatural, buffy the vampire slayer and the simpsons. while the original story shows children saving themselves, the new versions intended for a more mature audience, present them as still relying on adults. finally, jill terry rudy’s study of jim henson’s the storyteller provides original interpretation of the mediation of story and storytelling and how it addresses different age groups. she furthers analyses how sound and visual elements in cinematography support taleworld and storyrealm. the second part of the book, “masculinities and/or femininities”, addresses gender issues. using the television musical cinderella (1965), patricia sawin presents an autoethnography where she challenges the traditional assumption that fairy tales do not question conservative gender roles. christie barber looks at three japanese adaptation of the same tale: i want to be cinderella! (2006), train man and rich man poor woman. in all cases, the hegemonic model for masculinity is questioned by presenting nonnormative models. jeana jorgensen and brittany warman offer a feminist interpretation of the adaptation of sleeping beauty in grimm’s fairy tale classics, a japanese anime made for younger audience, and in dollhouse, an adult thriller series. the final chapter of this section consists of a queer reading of the anime revolutionary girl utena by kirstian lezubski. the transgressive model of heteronormativity in this animated series is contrasted with another more conventional series made by the same director, sailor moon. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 178 “beastly humans” is the third part of channeling wonder and focuses on dark fairy tales and the horror genre. in this section, the little red riding hood story is examined in chapters by pauline greenhill and steven kohm, who turn to the postmodern film noir red riding trilogy (great britain) as popular criminology, and by kristiana willsey, who questions the concept of authenticity in the current popularity of dark fairy tales with the series grimm. continuing on the same genre, andrea wright turns to snow white: a tale of terror (1997)—a film made for television. in this chapter, wright proposes an interesting psychoanalytical yet feminist reading of both female protagonists, making them much more complex than their traditional representation of good woman versus evil woman. finally, shuli barzilai’s excellent analysis of the film bluebeard (2009) in relation to art motifs and references (judith and salome, and king françois i and ivan the terrible for example) and cinematography, proposes a reading of the film where the clear binary opposition between good and evil fades away, leading to very complex yet very rich interpretation. “fairy tales are real!: reality tv, fairy-tale reality, commerce, and discourse” is the fourth section of the book. it presents issues related to the concept of arts versus economics. linda j. lee demonstrates how reality television shows the bachelor and extreme makeover: home edition are replete with fairy tale motifs. claudia schwabe examines the series grimm and once upon a time, and demonstrates how the rapprochement of the dichotomy between nonmagical and magical creates a third reality (magic realism) where both worlds coexist. the latter series is also examined by rebecca hay and christa baxter. in this chapter, the reader sees how the creation of subplots, lack of narrative closure, realistic and complex characters, and the disneyfication of everyday life enable a greater connection with larger audiences, and thus helps bolster the series' economic interest. (hay, baxter; 317) this chapter is especially interesting for its look at how online media such as facebook, forums and the official series website, are nurturing an interest in the show and letting the fans express themselves about how they relate to a specific character, as well as offering them a fictive authorship within the narrative. the last chapter of this section by cristina bacchilega and john rieder, includes an analysis of an italian series, carosello, and an american one, fractured fairy tales. the last section of the book, “fairy-tale teleography”, consists of an examination of the problems that arise when attempting to form a list of all the retelling or motifs of fairy tales produced for television. although the teleography is a rather anglocentric compilation, kendra magnus-johnston’s project to make it an online database and invite collaborators to the project, brings hope for an even larger and more diversified teleography. channeling wonder’s chapters present a variety of styles. while some readers might find it makes the purpose of the book a bit ambiguous, i believe this is the book’s strength, as it offers a broad understanding of the different fields where folklore can find its niche: ethnographic observation, descriptive review of fairy-tale-based television shows, art history, cinema, theoretical analysis and methodology, etc. it also has the advantage of pleasing multiple audiences, just like the television shows they are addressing with this book. writing the first reviews folklorica 2015, vol. xix 179 account on fairy-tales on television seems an almost impossible task, but greenhill and rudy certainly took up the challenge. the result is a smart, literary work that will take a little bit of magic to you. even if it doesn't, it will certainly be an asset in any library. overall, the book provides a good background in this field of studies for academics and is also accessible for the non-specialists. genia boivin university of alberta edmonton, canada folklorica full 2021_edit 6.28.22 reviews folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 81 colarusso, john and tamirlan salbiev, eds. tales of the narts: ancient myths and legends of the ossetians. translated by walter may. princeton: princeton university press, 2020. bibliography. glossary. lxviii + 442 pp. $24.94 (cloth). isbn: 978-0-691-21152-7. popular tales of a legendary people known as the narts are a major part of the shared cultural heritage of many peoples of the caucasus, including the adyghe (abkhazians, circassians, kabardians), turks (karachay and balkars), vainakh (ingush and chechen), and ossetes. the term “nart” itself is ossetian and derives most likely from an iranian root meaning “manly.” the origin of this body of oral literature is likewise iranian, tracing back to the medieval alans and in some cases to the ancient sarmatians and scythians before them, although in their modern forms—which differ considerably from one cultural community to the next—the tales and their characters have been embellished and re-shaped by the various caucasian groups just mentioned, each of whom claim them as their own. the nart stories, which modern ossetian scholars have organized into an “epic,” were until quite recently a loose and flexible collection of tales about a vanished race of men who lived for “feasting and fighting,” reflecting a clan-based raiding culture of which one can still perceive echoes in the caucasus today. the ideal nart is both fearless and cunning, unafraid to face giants, descend into the underworld, or even to kidnap the daughter of god himself, yet willing to resort to ruse when confronted with a stronger enemy. in the highly patriarchal nart society women play supporting roles—mainly preparing week-long feasts for their victorious menfolk—although some female characters stand out for their intelligence and initiative. insofar as the nart legends are built upon an iranian core, they exhibit many commonalities with other bodies of iranian oral literature including ferdowsi’s heroic book of kings and gorgani’s romance vis and ramin, both of which were redacted into verse during the eleventh century. one may note that while the latter two works were written down in persian, the mythical world they portray is not that of civilized persia but rather the wild, nomadic one of the central asian steppes. today’s ossetes, who are the only surviving linguistic and cultural descendants of the warlike iranophone pastoralists who dominated the eurasian plains from the balkans to mongolia throughout the first millennium bce, largely avoided the cultural disruptions brought by zoroastrianism and later islam to other iranian peoples, so that the ossetian nart legends—which remained oral and thus fluid up until they were finally written down only as late as the nineteenth century—may in some ways provide our most direct window into the earliest forms of identifiably iranian culture, and by extension that of their proto-indoeuropean ancestors. they thus hold unique value for the student of comparative mythology. that being the case, it is unfortunate that the narts have remained so littleknown and rarely studied by scholars outside the former soviet union. the main barrier has surely been language, so that the editors have done us a great service by finally making this literature available in english. the lead editor of the reviews folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 82 volume under review, john colarusso, first introduced the narts to english readers in 2002 with his edition of the circassian versions of the stories. for the present edition of the ossetian versions he has used translations from russian by the late walter may, a british communist who spent the latter half of his life in the ussr. colarusso also relied on an ossetian scholar, tamirlan salbiev, in preparing may’s translation for publication. since the stories in question were preserved in ossetian, it would have been desirable for the english edition to have been done from the original ossetian, as dumézil did for his french editions published in 1930 and 1965. a new french translation by lora arys and iaroslav lebedynsky was also done directly from ossetian and, since arys is a native ossetian speaker, it may be somewhat more reliable than dumézil’s. it may be hoped that an english translation from the ossetian will appear at some point in the future. for the time being english readers will have to content themselves with the may-colarusso-salbiev version. they will be reasonably well served by doing so, although those who can read french would be better advised to read the dumézil or arys-lebedynsky versions. the standard ossetian and russian editions were both produced in the ussr during the mid-twentieth century but did not entirely eliminate variants, which are still known and transmitted within ossetian popular culture. the french editions, while overlapping in many cases with the english, organize the stories differently and include some that do not appear in the english version. the importance of the nart legends for studies of indo-european and comparative mythology cannot be overstated. indeed, georges dumézil is said to have first come up with his famous tripartite analysis of indo-european society as a result of his encounter with the ossetian narts, who are divided according to function into three clans. happily, this material is at long last readily available to english readers in an inexpensive, reliable english-language edition. richard foltz concordia university montréal, quebec, canada richard.foltz@concordia.ca review: in the seventy-seventh kingdom reviews folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 49 reviews hiryak, mikhal. “in the seventy-seventh kingdom”: carpatho-rusyn folktales, transl. patricia a. krafcik. new york: carpatho-rusyn research center, 2015. additional features: illustrated by anna gajová. 153 pp. $34.00 (hardcover). isbn: 0-917-242-076. carpatho-rusyns are an ethnic group originally living in the transcarpathian mountainous territory bordering ukraine, poland, and slovakia. populations of rusyns also are located in hungary, romania, the czech republic, and the former yugoslavia. a significantly large group of rusyns lives in the united states. this widespread diaspora of people speaks an east slavic language and uses the cyrillic alphabet. despite forced boundary changes after the two world wars, they have struggled to maintain their identity as a people separate from ukrainians. although they have attempted over the years to establish their own identity and government, they have never enjoyed that status on a permanent basis. in 2004, however, russia recognized the rusyns as an ethnic group. religion represents an important element in their lives, as reflected in their folklore. most rusyns are either eastern catholic or eastern orthodox. “in the seventy-seventh kingdom”: carpatho-rusyn folktales is a representative collection of ten carpatho-rusyn tales. the article at the end of the book gives the background and history of this unique work. patricia a. krafcik’s english renditions of the folktales, which are based on volumes 1, 3, and 4 of mikhailo hyriak’s 1965-1979 collection entitled ukrayins’ki narodni kazky skhidnoyi slovachchyny [ukrainian folktales of eastern slovakia], is given in bilingual format. prior to the fall of the soviet union, carpatho-rusyns were considered to be ukrainian. their printed language was censored, so that hiryak’s language was ukrainianized, but the texts given in this book have been modernized into present day rusyn by shtefan sukhŷi, the poet. patricia a. krafcik has used the more recent rusyn language renditions of the stories for her translations, to which she has added descriptions and explanations where necessary for cultural understanding. “the fox and the wolf” is a cumulative tale that demonstrates the cleverness of fox, who guilts his victims into exchanging an inferior item for a better one until the thorn she asked a peasant to remove from her paw becomes a horse, for which she steals a sleigh. it is then that she encounters wolf, fox’s traditional victim. wolf pays for devouring the horse by being dragged behind another horse and by being forced to carry fox to her den. although this tales includes type 4: “bityi nebitogo vezet”: lisa edet na volke [the beaten carries the unbeaten: fox rides on wolf] and type 5: volk khvataet lisu za lapu [wolf grabs fox by the paw] of n. p. andreev’s 1929 index, this version has scatological overtones. “how dear old grandfather went to school” is andreev type 1665: dedushka-shkol’nik...[granddad, the school boy], in which an unwanted old man is sent to school as a means of getting rid of him. on the way to school, the old man finds a bag of money dropped by the postman, who suspects the old man folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 50 found and kept the money and takes him to court. the old man admits he found the money on the second day of school. the infuriated judge dismisses the case because the postman waited so many years to report the loss. “ash boy” is a version of andreev 530a: sivko-burko, in which lazy ash boy, so named for spending his days by the hearth, manages to stay awake long enough to capture a magic helper in the form of a horse, who jumps up to the princess’s window so that ash boy can remove her ring and claim her as his bride. displeased with his daughter’s choice, the king banishes the couple to a home in a hen house. later, after ash boy saves the kingdom from foreign invasion, the king learns that ash boy lives in henhouseville. he visits the henhouse, which is gilded in gold, learns the truth, and relinquishes the rule of his kingdom to ash boy. “lord debriansky” is type 545b: zamok koshki... [cat’s castle]. the tale is similar to “puss in boots,” except that a dragon takes the place of a giant as the villain. the formulaic ending is not one common to other slavic folktales. “and i, the narrator, was there behind a sack of water, and the sack burst, and i jumped onto a little table” (p. 59). endings in other stories, including “now if you were the storyteller, how would you like this story to end?” (p. 77) and “since then devils have refused to compete with humans, who have sharper wits” (p. 91) are indicative of a modern retelling. “how the world thanks you for doing good” is andreev type 155: staraia khleb-sol’ zabyvaetsia... [old hospitality is forgotten]. ivan rescues snake from the weight of a rock, and the ungrateful creature threatens to strangle him. ivan and snake search for a judge to determine whether or not snake is being fair to ivan. a maligned and abused horse and dog side with snake, but clever fox tricks snake into going under the rock again in exchange for a chicken. ivan’s wife, however, sics their dog on fox, so that ivan becomes guilty of ingratitude, proving snake’s point. this story has much in common with afanasev’s “old favors are soon forgotten.” in “the peasant and the devil,” a poor man on the verge of suicide meets a devil and tells him that he intends to smoke the demons from hell and build a monastery there. the devil gives the man a sack of gold for refraining from his plan. other devils decide to win the gold back, but they are unsuccessful in a race with a “lad” who turns out to be a hare (andreev type 1072: beg v peregonki: mladshii brat-zaiats [the race: the younger brother-hare]) and a fight in which the “old guy” opponent is a strong man. a proposal to carry a horse seven times around the barnyard is foiled when ivan decides to carry the horse between his legs (type 1082: kto poneset loshad’: chelovek saditsia verkhom [who will carry a horse: a person mounts and rides horseback]), as is a contest with a metal ball. the poor man outwits the devils and keeps the gold. in “the seven raven brothers and their sister,” a mother’s wish turns her sons into ravens. wind carries the boys to paradise. little raven, their sister, finds them with the help of moon, sun, and wind, and stays with them until an ugly, old woman sells her beads that choke and a poison apple. here the story has parallels with “snow white and the seven dwarfs.” a prince comes along, cuts reviews folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 51 down raven’s casket, which is hanging from a tree, and in the process the apple gets dislodged so that little raven awakes. the prince marries little raven, but his evil stepmother demands that he kill her and bring back the heart, eyes, and arms. the prince removes only his wife’s arms, which regenerate in a magic well. little raven gives birth to twins who resemble moon and sun. when the prince becomes king, he searches for his wife and is reunited. although andreev 451: brat’ia-vorony... [the raven brothers] has elements that coincide with “the seven raven brothers and their sister,” at least two other tale types are found within the story—andreev 709: mertvaia tsarevna...[the dead tsarevna] and andreev 706: bezruchka [the armless woman]. the eighth story, “the legend of the brigand madei,” is a rendition of andreev 756b: kumova krovat’ [razboinik madei...], combined with a beginning reminiscent of “rumpelstiltskin,” in which a father inadvertently promises the devil what is awaiting him at home, his newborn son. the boy becomes a priest in this version and searches for the devil, with whom his father made the tragic pact, in order to break the contract. on the way he meets the cutthroat madei, who asks the priest to find out from the devil how he will die. an old man acts as helper and guides the priest to hell, where the devils refuse to rescind the contract. they relent as they begin to burn when sprinkled with incense and holy water. they show the priest the bed prepared for madei and tell him how madei can avoid hell’s burning bed. the priest then accepts madei’s confession and gives him communion. madei’s soul rises to heaven in the form of a dove. “the laborer” is utterly unique and is riddled with anachronisms, such as trips to america and train travel. a poor peasant travels to america, where he works for nine years to earn money to build a new house. he falls asleep on the train while traveling back to his village, and his money is stolen. the thief dies of a heart attack, and his decomposed body is identified as the peasant’s. however, the peasant had returned to america to earn more money. his wife buries the thief, thinking it is her husband, and remarries. when the peasant returns home, he attends his daughter’s wedding and reveals his identity. his wife’s new husband comes after him with an ax, but the peasant pays off his rival, who finds a new wife. “the miraculous machine” is another uncommon tale involving a machine invented by a craftsman and used by the priest to record his voice so that he can conduct the service while in bed. the machine is taken to the printer to be “prettied up” before being taken to the tsar, who also wants to use it to speak instead of himself in person. when the tsar refuses to pay the printer for his work, the printer records a speech revealing the tsar’s stinginess and saying that god would strike down the tsar. the embarrassed ruler decides that thereafter the priest should get out of bed and perform the service in person. one is not obligated to buy an invention. “in the seventy-seventh kingdom”: carpatho-rusyn folktales presents a good representation of stories, including animal tales, magic tales, religious legends, stories about clever people and not so clever devils, about workers, miraculous helpers, miraculous spouses, and robbers, among others. the folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 52 illustrations by anna gajová are beautifully done. they have colorful, europeanstyle geometric borders, and the story characters are depicted with humor. the tale types for the most part are not specific to rusyn culture but may be found in other cultures as well. the renditions, however, are unique. bonnie marshall independent scholar meredith, nh microsoft word folk2010e.doc features of belarusian traditional funeral repasts 85 folklorica 2010, vol. xv the distinctive features of belarusian traditional funeral repasts tadevush a. navahrodski belarusian state university minsk, belarus abstract in belarusian traditional culture, the funeral repast was an important part of the structure of funeral rites. its meaning had as much to do with ethics as with sustenance and it was a required or normative part of funerary behaviour in the belarusian social milieu. the memorial repast fulfilled many functions in belarusian traditional culture. it served to commemorate ancestors and to link the living with their past. the meal performed a sacred or religious function, expressing faith in the afterlife. it performed an educational function and helped create family solidarity and promote willingness to learn about the family’s genealogy (radavod). the article, based on folkloric and ethnographic materials from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and on the results of field work conducted by the author, discusses two types of funeral repasts. one type is conducted on the day of internment and the other type includes the meals that correspond to the folk calendar and commemorate the dead. the article examines the distinctive features of funeral repasts in traditional belarusian culture and explicates the function and meaning of specific funeral meals. the meal (trapeza) is an important component of belarusian traditional culture. traditional belarusian meals typically have several dishes or courses and several beverages in appointed order. everyday meals are a central feature of life. they fulfill the main functional role in belarusian cuisine and constitute the core of the entire system of nutrition. festive and ritual repasts are seen as distinctive from the everyday meal. they are set in opposition to ordinary dining and the main feature of the holiday meal is the serving of richer foods and a greater variety of them. when examining the repast as an element of folk cuisine, it is important to pay attention to different factors such as the number of meals served, the time when and the place where the food is eaten, and the participants in the repast and their roles. it is also important to examine the courses served and the sequence in which they folklorica 2010, vol. xv 86 are presented. the behaviour of the participants and the codes of their performance during the meal are other important details to consider. moreover, the wider cultural context of the traditional meal and the fixed connotations that it carries or messages that it transmits are of interest for ethnological analysis. in belarusian traditional culture, the funeral repast was an important part of the structure of funeral rites. its meaning had as much to do with ethics as with sustenance and it was a required part or normative part of funerary behaviour in the belarusian social milieu. providing food was a way for the relatives of the deceased to show their appreciation to those who participated in the funeral rituals. it was a way to thank those who had supported the family in the difficult time that came with death and burial. furthermore, the funeral repast had a strictly ritual aspect, and one of its main goals was to show respect for the soul of the deceased. according to orthodox christian beliefs, the soul of the departed person stayed in the home for nine days after the person died and only then journeyed to heaven. thus it was important to honour this soul and please it. folk belief held that all dead ancestors, not just the newly deceased, were invisibly present at the repast table and had come to later accompany their kinsman on the journey to the other world. to honour those spiritually present, the main dishes of the funeral repast were obligatorily different from those served on normal days. in traditional belarusian culture, there are two types of funeral repasts. the first type of repast was a ritual meal served on the day of burial. the other type was the less lavish subsequent ritual dinners prepared on the third, on the ninth, and on fortieth day after death, and then half a year from the date of death. a meal on the sixth day is also attested. the second type of meal was meant for close family members only. following a centuries-old custom, the meal on the day of internment occurred immediately after the burial of the deceased. it was a lavish repast and people believed that the deceased would be offended and get angry if an inadequate meal was served. in addition, every family considered that the deceased had earned the respect of his relatives during his or her lifetime. thus each family unit tried to send their relative off on his or her last journey according to all the proper and conventional norms; they sought to execute the traditional folk code of what it meant to be human. during funeral repasts the members of the deceased’s family endeavoured to perform all the proper ritual and magical activities and to features of belarusian traditional funeral repasts 87 folklorica 2010, vol. xv adhere to all appropriate customs and traditions. hence, in vil’nia province for example, after the funerals, the relatives of the deceased put a white table-cloth on the table or bench where the deceased had laid in state before burial. then they put a glass of water and a ruchnik (ritual towel) on this bench or table. the purpose of these items was to allow the soul of the deceased to wash its hands before joining the funeral repast. the set-up with the glass and the towel had to remain in place for five to six days and no one was to disturb the items [kirkor 1882: 283]. in the mstsislaul’ region, women who arrive at the house where the deceased had lived and his body now lay in state would touch the oven three times. according to local custom, performing this ritual would insure that the household would not be plagued with additional deaths and funerals [romanov 1912: 528]. the first type of funeral repast, the one conducted on the day of internment, often carried a name that was derived from the main dish served during the event. thus, one name for this meal was “harachki” and this term was based on the name of a hot wheat bread (palianitsa), which was not supposed to be cut. to avoid the use of a knife, guests pinched off pieces of bread to eat. another name for the meal was “kliotski” (dumplings) and it was, of course, taken from the name of this food. in some regions, the names of these dishes were so strongly associated with death that they appear in proverbs and sayings as euphemisms. thus, when referring to a hopelessly sick person, people might say: “ну, клёцкі яму” [“well, dumplings to him”]. this meant that people anticipated that the person in question would die and that his relatives would soon be preparing a funeral repast. [vasilevich 1986: 28]. before a funeral repast began, a priest would perform the litany to commemorate the deceased and to bless the meal [romanov 1912: 526]. after this religious ritual and only after the ritual would the hosts invite their guests to sit down at the table. according to tradition, the place of greatest honour was given to the oldest person present at the funeral. the explanation for this practice was that it not only showed a respectful attitude toward the elderly, but also acknowledged the fact that the oldest person might well be the next one to die. this custom was seen as an expression of the natural order of things and was accepted by all as proper and rational. people made sure that young people did not leave the funeral repast earlier than others because another belief held that early departure from a funeral meal was connected to or presaged an early death. in the bykhau district, the men sat under the icons or as close to pokuts’ (icon corner) as possible. women sat at the other end of folklorica 2010, vol. xv 88 the table or even at a separate table [romanov 1912: 520]. belarusians from the smalensk region placed those people who dug the grave, made the coffin, and sewed clothes for the deceased under the icons, in other words in the place of greatest honour. other participants in the last rites were invited to sit at the funeral table only after those who had helped with the funeral were seated. while at the table, the participants of the funeral repast tried not to sit close to each other so as “not to crowd out the ancestors who invisibly participate in the conversation” [dobrovol’skii 1894: 315]. according to chubinskii, all hired people who worked on the farm or in the household also participated in the repast. however, they sat at a separate table somewhere in the yard [chubinskii 1877: 710]. the nature of the repast depended on the family’s prosperity. if the family was poor and was not able to provide a full meal then the participants of the funeral were offered kutstsia at the graveyard. however, this practice was resorted to only in cases of utmost poverty. the funeral repast necessarily included special ritual dishes. the most important among these are kanun (‘kanon’), kutstsia, koliva (‘poliva’, ‘kolyvo’), syta, harachyki, kliotski. these ritual foods were prepared differently in different parts of belarus. for example, one way of preparing kanun was to take water sweetened with sugar or honey and to crumble bread product into this liquid. the bread product could be actual bread or bagels or anything else made of dough. kutstsia could be made from any of a number of grains such as rice, millet, buckwheat or barley. at the funeral repast, unlike at other meals, it had to be sweet. in the mahileu district, kutstsia was served with raisins. sometimes a cross baked out of dough with raisins on top was placed atop the kutstsia or stuck into it [romanov 1912: 530; chubinskii 1877: 710]. traditionally the funeral repast began with kutstsia or kanun. the guests took one or three spoons of kanun from a common bowl, passing it from one person to the other. this practice continues into the present. during the repast the peasants of vil’nia and smalensk districts poured one spoon of every meal onto the table. this was said to be an offering “dlia bats’kou” (“for parents or forefathers, in other words for ancestors”). sometimes guests poured their first glass of wine and the first spoon of every ritual dish that they received into the corner where the deceased had laid in state before the burial [kirkor 1882: 283; iurkevich 1853: 290; dobrovol’skii 1894: 315]. after drinking their first glass of vodka, an obligatory toast, the participants of the rite ate pancakes followed by borsch with meat or features of belarusian traditional funeral repasts 89 folklorica 2010, vol. xv cracklings. if the funeral repast took place during lent then the borsch was prepared with fish or “muchnaia zataloka” (flour thickener) and hemp oil. other dishes might include omelettes (iaeshnia), sausages (kaubasy), stewed cabbage, noodles, pastry with meat or other filling, and fried potatoes. the meal concluded with halushki (dumplings) made of wheat or buckwheat flour. halushki, as well as kanun and kutstsia, were absolutely obligatory to the funeral repast whereas the inclusion or exclusion of the other dishes was optional [romanov 1912: 526; shein 1902: 73; dobrovol’skii 1892: 315]. in the mahileu region, the funeral repast started with kanun, and ended with kutstsia. it should be noted that the main funeral meal had to be hot and had to produce steam [navahrodski 2000: 72]. steam could come from borsch, from krupnik (a soup made of groats) or some other dish. the steam was believed to be a necessary component because the souls of the dead inhaled the steam as sustenance. in the horki district, cabbage, potatoes, and groats were cooked. in this area, the participants of the rites drank three glasses of vodka only [aimef 1993: p. 58]. in the krychau district (mahileu region), the repast usually ended with kliotski (dumplings). because of the ubiquity of kliotski, in the horki district (village of dobrae), the relatives of the deceased invited guests to the memorial repast by saying “прыходзьце на клёцкі” [“come for dumplings”] [aimef 1993: p. 58]. in many places, the hot wheat bread called palianitsa was a required item on the table. it was not cut with a knife and guests had to tear pieces off with their fingers. according to folk belief the steam which came out of the hot bread, like the steam from the various dishes, acted as food for souls of the dead ancestors invisibly attending the funeral repast [romanov 1912: 526; vasilevich 1986: 28]. during the repast, a place was set at the table for the deceased. the place setting included a glass, a bowl, and a spoon. the glass was filled with vodka in order to satisfy the deceased’s thirst. food for the departed was usually put on the plate or directly on the tablecloth. it is noteworthy that, even in the twenty first century, belarusians will not start the funeral repast without performing the ritual of setting a place for the deceased and serving him food and drink. the belief that the deceased would feel better and would help the family if his or her soul was treated properly at the funeral table was preserved in folk consciousness for centuries and into the present. there is another type of funerary meal which corresponds to the folk calendar. this type of meal does not have distinctive features such folklorica 2010, vol. xv 90 as obligatory dishes or a set order of presentation. instead, this type of repast is a social event. meals commemorating the dead take place at several points in the calendar cycle. they come in spring (radaunitsa, vialikdzen’ [easter]), in summer (traetskiia dziady), in fall (zmitrauskiia dziady, asianiny), and in winter (maslenichnyiia dziady). all the memorial meals that are called dziady are celebrated on their proper days and are vivid remnants of a cult of ancestors. they are also a symbol of the deep humanity of the belarusians. the term “dziady” [forefathers] referred to all the dead ancestors of any age and sex or to their souls. for the belarusians, their ancestors embodied their living spiritual and physical roots [vasilevich 1986: 31]. celebration of dziady was viewed as the first and foremost duty of a human in almost every area of belarus. the people believed that in the days called dziady the souls of dead ancestors came down to earth from heaven to see how their descendants were doing and to determine if they respected the memory of the deceased and took care of their heritage. all of these beliefs encouraged strict fulfillment of ritual demands and the execution of appropriate acts. the dziady can be divided into two groups according to the way that they were celebrated. one type was the commemoration rituals held in the home and the other was rites performed in the cemetery, where the dead ancestors were buried. zmitrauskiia dziady was the most important commemoration day from the first group, and radaunitsa (radunitsa) was the most important event from the second. belarusians made extensive preparations for dziady memorial repasts and they did them well before the actual commemorative day. in wealthy families, a one-year-old hog, lamb, or a bull calf was typically slaughtered and it was considered prestigious for the housewife to cook many meat dishes. the number of dishes was determined not only by family’s wealth, but also by a ritual convention. ethnographers have determined that the number of dishes ranged from five to fifteen. the dishes were served in a certain order: kanun with bagels (baranki; abaranki); a sour dish (rasol) made with beetroots and meat; krupenia, a soup made of groats and potatoes, bul’biashnik, a potato soup, halushki (dumplings or noodles), boiled meat, ladki, aladki (pancakes) which were considered especially appropriate for dead children, iushka (broth) with onions and carrots, or parsnip cooked with milk, tvaroh (cottage cheese) with sour cream, iaechnia (omelette), then kasha. the order could be modified slightly but it was absolutely necessary that kanun be the first dish and that omelette or kasha be the features of belarusian traditional funeral repasts 91 folklorica 2010, vol. xv dish served at the end. homemade vodka (harelka) was drank after kanun was served for supper [romanov 1912: 549]. for lenten or fasttime dziady when meat was not allowed, peas, kvass with mushrooms, and fish and kasha were typically prepared. for dziady that came outside of lent, the meals were more varied and richer foods were prepared. they would include pancakes and salt pork, boiled meat, kvashanina (fermented vegetables), cabbage with meat, krupnik, kasha with meat, and other dishes [shein, 1902: 373]. a saying about non-lenten dziady goes as follows: “гэта такое свята, што ні сесці, ні легчы” [“this is the sort of holiday that [after the meal] you can neither sit, nor lie [meaning that you will be too full]”]. this saying emphasizes the fact that no other event offers the opportunity to eat so much. in the pinsk region, after returning from the graveyard, belarusians ate a memorial supper in a special fashion. in the evening, those who had participated in the memorial meal covered the table with a white tablecloth, and set out dishes with beans or peas and syta (water with honey). they served poliuki made of fish and meat stock in two flavours: sweet and sour. other foods included roasted salanina (corned meat), pancakes, omelette with sausage; millet or buckwheat kasha, and sour milk or “milk” made of poppy seeds ground and diluted with water. in the middle of the table it was traditional to place a loaf of bread. also bread slices in stacks of three or small loafs of bread were placed around the table at the spots where honoured participants were expected to sit. while the lavish supper was cooking, the windows and doors remained open and the elderly members of the family walked around the house, praying and looking in the direction of the graveyard. by doing so, they symbolically invited deceased ancestors to the repast. after performing this ritual, the elderly returned to the house and sat quietly at the table, “listening” to the voices of the deceased and their conversations. when the lady of the house felt that the ghosts were properly sated with the food or steam presented to them, she made a sign to the master of the house. this indicated that it was time for him to sit at the table. he, in turn, invited all the participants of the funeral rite to sit down and have supper. the master of the house took the food first and he began with syta with beans or peas or with kutstsia. his first action upon taking the food was to offer food to the ancestors. this could be done by putting sacrificial portions of the meal into a special, separate bowl. after the head of the household performed the ritual of serving himself and honouring ancestors, the same ritual was repeated by the housewife and other participants of the memorial repast. in the same manner, the folklorica 2010, vol. xv 92 master and the lady of the house took a bit from every dish served during the course of the meal and placed it on separate plates for the spirits of the ancestors. after finishing the celebration, the food that had been set aside for spirits was given to children. some people believed that, if the children ate this ritual food honouring ancestors, they would not be frightened by thunderstorms and lightning. others gave the part of the memorial food set aside for ancestors to livestock or poultry. in the latter case, it was left on the roof of the house. some folks brought the food from the memorial repast down to rivers, lakes, or ponds and threw or poured this ritual food or leftovers into the water for the sake of the souls who had died by drowning. sometimes the leftovers of the ritual commemorative meal were taken out to graveyards where the supper was finished together with the ancestors [hurski 2003: 292-3]. another way of honouring ancestors was for each guest to take a spoonful of each dish and pour it on the table. sometimes, people left homemade vodka for their ancestors on window-sills. vodka was also left in doorways and these were left open to let the dead ancestors enter the home and participate in the supper. a detailed description of the dziady memorial repast made in 1891 goes as follows: вячэраюць у гэты дзень не так, як у звычайныя дні. кожны, хто зачэрпнуў раз, кладзе лыжку на стол. лыжка павінна ляжаць на стале столькі часу, колькі неабходна для таго, каб гэтай лыжкаю мог зачэрпнуць другі. каму не даспадобы звычай класці пасля кожнага глытка на стол лыжку, дык гэта дзецям. прагаладаўшыся за цэлы дзень (на дзяды абеду няма), дзіця хацела б хутчэй задаволіць свой апетыт, а тут нельга, дарослыя загадваюць класці лыжку. “навошта гэта?” – пытаецца малое. “вось бачыш, – тлумачаць дарослыя, – каля кожнага з нас сядзіць нябожчык (памерлы): ты зачэрпнеш адну лыжку, і яму трэба зачэрпнуць адну. вось для гэтага і трэба класці лыжку, а калі ты не будзеш класці, то твой нябожчык устане з-за стала галодным. ён разгневаецца і пакарае цябе за гэта. – “але ў нас ёсць яшчэ лыжкі, – кажа дзіця, – трэба пакласці на стол, няхай сабе нябожчык есць, колькі захоча”. – “не нельга, галубок! – зноў тлумачаць дарослыя. – нябожчык можа есці толькі тою ляжкаю, якою есць жывы, каля якога ён сядзіць, а другую лыжку ён не можа ўзяць, калі б яна і была на стале. [on those days people have supper in a manner that is different from ordinary days. everyone who has taken a spoonful of food must then place the spoon on the table. the spoon has to lie on the table as long as would be needed if another person were to take that spoon and help himself. the ones who resent the custom of putting the spoon down after every sip or every bite are the children. they get hungry during a day because there is no lunch on dziady days and so they want to satisfy their appetites. but eating fast in not allowed; adults insist that the spoon be placed on the table after every sip. the child features of belarusian traditional funeral repasts 93 folklorica 2010, vol. xv then asks, “why must i do this?” “you see”, the adults explain, “the dead ancestors are sitting next to each of us: so you will take a spoonful and they will take a spoonful. that is why you need to put the spoon down, because if you did not, your forefather would leave the table hungry. he would get angry and punish you for that”. the child answers, “but we have more spoons. why not put them on the table and let the dead eat as much as they like”. “no, we must not do that, dear!” the adults explain again. “the deceased can eat only using that spoon, which is used by the living who sit next to them. and they cannot use another spoon, even if it were be put on the table. ”] the child is thus convinced by the arguments presented by the adults and puts the spoon on the table after every sip [l.s. 1891: 2] this description shows that location of the spoon during the memorial repast had a specific meaning. the behaviour of the participants acknowledged that the dead participate in the meal along with the living. there is also evidence of concern over interference on the part of dark forces. an example is the saying: “зачэрпнуў лыжку, зараз жа пераверні яе: калі лыжка неперавернутая, да яе можа дакрануцца чорт” [“when you’ve helped yourself to a spoonful, turn the spoon over right away. if you don’t turn the spoon over, the devil can touch it”] [dobrovol’skii 1914: 164]. fear of the devil was in conflict with the fact that it was important to let the ancestors eat. we see this in the following: “the spoon has to be put on the table to let the forefathers eat. and it is important that the spoon be placed hollow side up. if this is not done, the dead will turn over in their graves. if somebody puts down the wrong way, that is turned over, the elderly notice this mistake and reprimand the person who made it.” (mahileu huberniia) [shein 1902: 611]. according to a. l. toporkov, this behaviour actualizes the isomorphism of the spoon [toporkov 1991: 196]. after the supper, the dishes with food were not removed from the table, but left overnight. people believed that the forefathers would come and treat themselves to food during nighttime. one of the dwellers of the village paselishchy (khoiniki district, homel’ oblast), a woman named sof’ia mitrafanauna iautushenka recalled, “бацькі нам загадвалі верыць, і мы гаварылі: ‘мама, ужо менш у місцы боршчыку’” [“the parents told us to believe, and we would say, ‘mama, look, there is already less borsch in the bowl.’”] [aimef 1992, p. 30]. m. v. dounar-zapol’ski gives an interesting example of what happens at the end the repast: “the master or the lady of the house takes a full cup of water and throws its contents from the direction of the table toward the entrance door saying: ‘што не даелі, не дапілі, то ідзіце на папер на двор’ [if you have not eaten and folklorica 2010, vol. xv 94 drunk enough, then go out into the yard]. people believed that these words would prevent the souls of the dead from staying in the home until the next dziady commemoration” [dovnar-zapol’skii 1909: 305]. in the vitsebsk region, the dziady ritual meal consisted of iushnik, a broth made of meat with blood, sausages, and pancakes. all the conversations during the repast were exclusively about the deceased members of the family. the conversation was started by the oldest member of the family after people had drunk their first glass of vodka. all the ancestors were recalled and remembered, from the deceased relatives closest to the living to those from the distant past. after supper, the conversation was supposed to last until the third crowing of the roosters (da tretsikh peuniau, in other words, until after midnight). those present recalled the various adventures of their deceased relatives. they talked about their personalities and told family and ancestral legends [hurski 2003: 294]. in area of the dzisna-river (vitsebsk region), the family invited about ten neighbours to celebrate dziady. the main dish served for supper was iushnik. however, if a hog was not slaughtered for this feast, then dumplings with “souls” (z dushami) were prepared. this is a special kind of dumpling made by wrapping cracklings in dough. another possible dish was pancakes with verashchaka (fritters – dough deep-fried in lard). an alternative to pancakes with fritters was sausages with cabbage. salamatka (dried apples, pears, and berries cooked and served with honey) or an oat kisel’ (pudding) with honey syta were offered for dessert. as a rule, people cooked more food than was needed, and the leftovers of meat, pancakes, and other foodstuffs were distributed among the poor. as a result every neighbour invited to a dziady celebration returned home with something [hurski 2003: 66-9]. in the mahileu region, the housewives split the very first pancake made for dziady into pieces and put it on the windowsill as an offering to the ancestors. the village herders knew about this custom and, going through the village, stopped at every house and asked: “гэй, гаспадыня! ці пякла бліны? прыслалі дзяды па бліны, свінкі па саланінкі, авечкі па яечкі, баранкі па соль, а кароўкі па сыр” [“hey, missis! did you make pancakes? the ancestors sent me for pancakes and pigs for corned meat, sheep for eggs, rams for salt, and cows for cheese”]. in response, the housewives brought out everything that the herder asked for. in those families where children were sickly and where many children had died, special pancakes called ladki were prepared. people believed that this would help prevent sicknesses and subsequent death within that family and help preserve their living offspring. after taking a features of belarusian traditional funeral repasts 95 folklorica 2010, vol. xv bath in the bathhouse (laznia), the housewife took all the pots with food out of the oven and put them on a bench near the stove, arranging them in a certain order. dishes that were supposed to be served first during the ritual dinner were placed closest to the table. then came the dishes that would be served next, and so forth. at the same time the master of the house lit the candles in the icon corner and all the members of the family prayed. during the time of the prayer, the oldest member of the family took a broken piece of pottery, and put several burning coal pieces in it. on the top of the coal he put a tuft of herbs that had been blessed in church on whit monday. then, he fumigated the pots with the meal, the table with the spoons, goblets and bread, and then the entire house. a candle was left burning from the time of the prayer until the kanun was finished. the number of dishes for dziady had to be odd. among the most popular dishes were kanun, poliuka, milk, dumplings, omelette, and kasha. meat was considered a separate dish. all the dishes were served in a certain turn, as mentioned above. sometimes the meat from the poliuka was served alone as the last course. in other families, the meat was served immediately after the poliuka. all meals had to be eaten with pancakes instead of bread. when the members of the family and their guests sat down at the table, they began their meal with kanun. it was considered obligatory to try at least a little bit from every dish. it was believed that the deceased ancestors would be angry if this was not done. another belief held that, if some food was dropped on the floor, it should not be picked up. according to a saying: “нехта есці хоча” [[dropping the food means that] “somebody wants to eat it”]. all the participants of the repast had to get up from the table together. this was a custom necessitated by the belief that, if somebody would get up from the table before the others, he or she would die before them also. after the supper, the housewife would clean the table and remove the pancakes that had been left on the windowsills [shein 1902: 608-12]. in the minsk region one of the ritual dishes cooked was the head of a ram or a hog. if people could not afford to slaughter such a large animal, then at least the head of a chicken had to be on the ritual table. the master of the house held a candle wrapped in a pancake in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other and made three circles around the table, starting at the head of it. he recited the names of deceased ancestors and relatives and even mentioned those who had lived earlier on the lands that he now possessed. the master invited them to the ritual meal, saying “прыбывайце к сталу!” [come to the table!]. sitting down to the meal, the participants poured a few drops from their glasses on the table and folklorica 2010, vol. xv 96 said “прыбывайце!” [come!]. after finishing the memorial repast, all the dishes were left on the table, spoons and knives, included. people did this because they were convinced that the deceased would come during the night and treat themselves to the meal [tyszkewicz 1847: 378-9]. in palesse, for example, during the dziady repast, people refrained from putting their feet on the crossbars under the table because they believed that the souls of the dead could be sitting there like birds perched on branches. putting ones feet on the crossbars could have offended and angered the ancestors [serzhputouski 1998: 233]. the memorial repast fulfilled many functions in belarusian traditional culture. it served to commemorate ancestors and to link the living with their past. the meal performed a sacred or religious function, expressing faith in the afterlife. it performed an educational function. the participation of children and teenagers in the memorial repast insured the transmission of the customs and belief of the clan from one generation to the next. the meal helped create family solidarity and promoted an interest in the family’s past and thus a willingness to learn about its genealogy (radavod). because of its deep meaning and its multifunctional nature, the funeral repast was and remains an important part of belarusian culture. bibliography aimef архіў інстытута мастацтвазнаўства, этнаграфіі і фальклору нацыянальнай акадэміі навук беларусі [achieve of art history, ethnography and folklore of the national academy of science of the republic of belarus], фонд 6, воп. 13, справа 67 chubinskii, p. p. 1877. чубинский п.п. труды 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setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice voloshynafinal the return of the legend folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 118 /e return of the legend: anatoly kashpirovsky’s treatment of covid-19 iryna voloshyna indiana university, bloomington bloomington, in, usa abstract ge tensions between western scientific and alternative medicine become more palpable during times of uncertainty. ge covid-19 pandemic has been a period of confusion, evoking mistrust of conventional medicine, which has been unable to fully protect people from this new disease. gis situation has compelled some to seek help and comfort elsewhere. gis article demonstrates how people in post-soviet countries and post-soviet diasporic communities resurrected their faith and trust in anatoly kashpirovsky, a legendary psychotherapist and charismatic leader who first rose to prominence in the ussr in the 1980-90s. on the basis of digital fieldwork conducted during the lockdown, i showcase how kashpirovsky once again became popular in 2020 at a moment of global economic, social and political instability. while kashpirovsky’s audience finds comfort in his professional training and medical experience, his youtube “health sessions” offer treatments for covid-19 that relegate him to the realm of folk healer, magician, or psychic. introduction in the fall of 2019 i had just moved to new york city after finishing my master’s program and, like many newcomers, i opted to settle in a place that would be affordable and, at least remotely, remind me of my home in ukraine. i rented a room in brooklyn, new york, specifically in brighton beach, a neighborhood well known for its russian, or more precisely, post-soviet community. in brighton beach one can live one’s entire life without needing to learn english. banks, pharmacies, doctors, pet groomers, schools, and essentially any business in this area readily serves clients in russian. at first, i was overwhelmed by a wave of nostalgia. i felt as if i had traveled back in time, even though my surroundings were characterized by a strange mix of soviet mentality and capitalism. culture shock soon followed. billboards were covered with posters of upcoming concerts with once notable russian pop stars, (1) whose fame in russia had long before faded away with the influx of newer, more popular performers. it was striking that people were nostalgic for the artists and music popular in the 1990s at the time of their immigration to the united states. in fact, the longer i lived there, the more i noticed how nostalgia for that period in russian history was pronounced in other aspects of life in brighton beach as well. what amazed me even more was the number of advertisements for psychics, healers, and seers. some offered predictions about one’s love life or career, while the return of the legend folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 119 others limited their expertise to divinations about obtaining a green card [gadanie na grin kartu]. on one such poster, i was especially surprised to see a photo of anatoly kashpirovsky, the once legendary soviet healer who would gather people into packed stadiums and cure individuals of a variety of diseases— his official website claims that he has treated over 500 illnesses. kashpirovsky had disappeared from mainstream media over the past several decades following the peak of his popularity and he had moved to the united states. when i shared this information with my sister in ukraine, she said, “wow, seems like that little old man decided to remember his heyday there in brighton beach. i didn’t even know he was still around. i wonder who would still believe him?” a few days later, while trying to learn more about the life of the local community, i followed the advice of my landlady and bought a newspaper russkaia reklama [russian advertisement] for 25 cents. in the weekly, 264-page newspaper, i found a fullpage advertisement about sessions that anatoly kashpirovsky was offering twice a week in a local restaurant for $35. ge ad claimed that one could experience “the greatest miracles of mankind” in these sessions [zaminonets 2016]. a few months later, in late march, when pandemic lockdown provided me some time to explore the internet, youtube suggested a video featuring kashpirovsky to me (probably based on the number of views and its popularity in my area). gis video presented his claims that he knew the cure for covid-19. in fact, he had it written down on a piece of paper and was offering to share this secret with anyone who needed the cure. while the video played, his contact information, along with his bank account and paypal information for donations, was repeatedly posted to the video’s live chat by his assistant. in april 2020, he started going live on his youtube channel more frequently (once every two or three days), and the number of views grew exponentially. gese videos presented an opportunity to investigate why the alternative healer’s services were once again in demand during the pandemic. firstly, a man whose purportedly innovative methods of treatment had gone viral all over the soviet union just at the moment of its collapse had been laying low for several decades. suddenly, thirty years later, in the unprecedented time of a global pandemic, his services were once again in great demand. in this intriguing case, i saw a correlation between the current social, political, and economic environment and the spread and popularity of vernacular beliefs about health and medicine. secondly, kashpirovsky had become the voice for a number of social anxieties, including mistrust of official media sources, health care systems in post-soviet countries, vaccines, and mass vaccination. he was also addressing existing simmering tensions between russia and the west characteristic of the cold war era. finally, the very persona of anatoly kashpirovsky combines two features that make him appealing and trustworthy to people with a wide range of views regarding health care and vernacular healing traditions. on the one hand, he is a classically trained professional physician with more than 25 years of experience; on the other hand, he embodies the features of a charismatic leader and a folk healer, at least in the eyes of his patients. the return of the legend folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 120 in this article i argue that during times of uncertainty, failures by various states to handle these situations properly puts people in a position where they are receptive to the types of messages that blend medicine and folk healing practices. kashpirovsky’s unique amalgam of medicine and magic was not only dusted off, recycled and seamlessly integrated into the contemporary pandemic context, but was even perceived as innovative, given his use of medical terminology and his tapping into currents of conspiracy theory. despite kashpirovsky’s consistent emphasis on his medical credentials, his actions and the responses of his patients reveal that he is mostly perceived as a faith healer, rather than as a medical doctor. methodology as noted above, i conducted my fieldwork digitally during the lockdown in 2020. ge main source for my research was the youtube channel “anatoly kashpirovskiy,” (2) where, starting in march 2020, kashpirovsky has been broadcasting live treatment sessions. i relied on comments from his videos’ live chats, which are posted in real-time during his presentations, as well as those from the comments sections following the videos, largely written by those who had watched the recordings later. since i cannot obtain signed release forms from these people, i only use first names or nicknames in order to protect their identities. i do not include information regarding their locations nor their ages. all of them are from post-soviet republics or are immigrants from those areas living abroad. i also cite personal memorates from my family and friends in ukraine, who graciously granted permission for their use in this article. in addition, i often refer to kashpirovsky’s official website [www.kashpirovskiy.com], which offers an array of media, including videos, newspaper articles, and interviews, as well as information about, and links to his 19 books, “statistics about miracles,” and responses from his patients. unfortunately, my attempt to contact kashpirovsky via email for further discussion was unsuccessful. (3) i begin by providing background information about anatoly kashpirovsky, since this context is crucial to understanding who he is as well as why and exactly when he became so popular in the 1980s-90s. it is important to note that at that time he was offering both in-person and virtual “health sessions” that were broadcast on national television channels. i then proceed to discuss his current activities treating covid-19 in 2020-2021, now online via his official youtube channel. in this article i showcase how kashpirovsky’s persona combines features of both a biomedical doctor and a folk healer, which is particularly relevant in periods of grand socioeconomic, political, and informational instability. ge medium of the internet is also an important factor here in providing a space for vernacular creative expressions and sharing folk understandings of available healing practices. in terms of a theoretical framework, i particularly rely upon the experiential source hypothesis offered by david hufford [1982], as well as on bonnie o’connnor’s study of alternative medicine [1995], and diane e. goldstein’s research on aids and vernacular risk perception [2004]. the return of the legend folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 121 who is anatoly kashpirovsky? anatoly kashpirovsky was born near khmelnytskyi, a ukrainian city not far from my own hometown. he graduated from vinnytsya medical institute with a degree in psychotherapy and worked at a psychiatric hospital for 25 years. in his medical practice, he claimed to have developed innovative methods for treating illnesses, both mental and physical. in his books, as well as in numerous interviews, (4) he explains that the human body possesses all the chemical elements that people need to cure themselves of any illness or disability. to achieve this goal, according to kashpirovsky, all a person needs is a push or a shock to trigger the healing process and allow the body to do its job. he calls this healing mechanism the “biological self-regulatory” function of the human body, i.e., a genetically encoded, complex process that functions on the subconscious level. gis process can also be activated during an interaction between a psychotherapist and a patient. it can be accomplished by engaging the sensory organs—listening to the doctor’s voice or to relaxing music; eye contact with a doctor; obeying hand signals, etc.—but this step is not required. in a 2010 interview, kashpirovsky described the process as follows: “gere are two types of faith—conscious and subconscious faith. my method addresses the subconscious. it is precisely through the subconsciousness that i give the commands of healing. gat is why a patient doesn’t have to believe me with their mind” [bennetts 2010]. gis explanation corresponds with what folklorist bonnie o’connor [1995] calls vitalism, a concept common to many vernacular health belief systems. o’connor [1995: 30] defines vitalism as the idea that a “body has its own ‘life force’ that promotes health and healing and is essential to wellness.” in order to understand kashpirovsky’s popularity in 2020, we must also understand his social role at the peak of his career. ge late 1980s were marked by a number of traumatic events in the ussr. in 1986, the chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded, leading to one of the most devastating environmental catastrophes in history. mass dissatisfaction with state policy was growing, leading to gorbachev’s perestroika political movement and glasnost’, an attempt to introduce freedom of speech and access to public information. in 1991, the ussr collapsed, leaving a chaotic ruin of what once was presented as the world’s leading state and a population in crisis. despite the official policy of atheism and endorsement of scientific materialism, vernacular beliefs were remarkably persistent in the ussr [kononenko 2006 cited in lesiv 2018: 38]. in their article “curing and crippling: biomedical and alternative healing in post-soviet russia,” brown and rusinova [2002: 160] state that “despite repeated efforts by soviet authorities to marginalize and punish alternative healers, ordinary people never stopped seeking them out. in the post-soviet era, these practitioners [became] more visible than ever.” simon huxtable [2017: 308] argues that the stress of the 1980s was closely connected to kashpirovsky’s popularity: “ge 1980s were a [period] when the predictability and certainty of the soviet regime disappeared. kashpirovsky’s the return of the legend folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 122 healing practices created a liminal space that perfectly captures the otherworldliness of the period.” i reached out to a person who had personal experience with kashpirovsky’s healing methods in the mid-1980s, long before he became a national phenomenon, when he was working as a psychiatrist at a hospital in ukraine. before that time, my interlocutor, tetiana, had lost a young child, a two-year-old girl, as a result of what she believed to be medical negligence. after this loss, she experienced a serious form of depression for several years. tetiana knew anatoly kashpirovsky personally through mutual friends, but she had never sought his help. after their mutual friends told kashpirovsky about tetiana’s loss, they had an informal conversation on one occasion. “after that [conversation], after years of depression and despair, i finally felt nothing. ge wound is still there, but i felt nothing. he [kashpirovsky] helped me move on” [tetiana, 22 august 2020]. since the beginning of his career, kashpirovsky has always presented himself strictly as a medical professional. however, with the great popularity of his treatment methods and a growing audience, his patients began to see his deeds as miraculous and to view him as more than just a doctor; he began to be seen as a messianic healer. in 1988, kashpirovsky held his first kyiv-moscow “telebridge” (live broadcast) when surgery to remove a tumor was conducted, without anesthesia, on a middle-aged, female breast-cancer patient. by talking to the patient on live television through a camera installed in the operating room, he purportedly helped her dull the pain. she admitted on camera that she was very nervous and asked for a glass of champagne. at one point she even started singing [kashpirovskiy 2015]. while the surgery was successful, some years later the patient confessed in an interview on ria novosti [2019] that she had actually been in a lot of pain. however, she had pretended to be fine because of the pressure of the televised event. ge doctors had also eventually given her local anesthesia as a result. soon after, in 1989, a second “telebridge,” this time kyiv-tbilisi, took place when two hernia surgeries were conducted simultaneously without anesthesia (both patients were allergic to anesthesia). ge success of these experiments created a sensation among the viewing public. a series of six “health sessions with dr. kashpirovsky” followed on central television in moscow [kashpirovsky 2020b]. he always began these sessions, held in a packed auditorium, by reading letters of gratitude from his patients who shared stories of miraculous cures; then the healing session would begin. with relaxing music in the background, kashpirovsky would begin speaking in a monotone. he did not mention diseases or healing, but rather used positive imagery, e.g., the power of laughter and positive emotions, or told stories of healing from his patients’ lives. generally speaking, to the uninitiated, his presentations resembled a stream-of-consciousness monologue. kashpirovsky, however, claims that he actually “slipped” some verbal and non-verbal psychotherapeutic tricks into his sessions that were subconscious and imperceptible to the audience. he emphasizes that he never conducted hypnosis on people, and that all of his patients stayed awake and conscious throughout their treatments. however, some of them did close their eyes, and others made the return of the legend folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 123 involuntary body movements. footage of this behavior was later presented by the media as proof of “mass hypnosis” employed by kashpirovsky. “it has nothing to do with hypnosis! forget this word when you are talking to me,” he insisted in one of his interviews [zanimonets 2016]. sometimes he would invite a few people to the stage (he claimed to choose them from the crowd on the basis of emotional feedback he felt from them), arrange them into a line, and, with a single hand motion, “drop” them to the ground. gey remained lying there until he told them otherwise. ge audience was impressed by his control over people. anatoly kashpirovsky received frequent attention from both journalists and health professionals, not to mention from millions of followers. “gey idolize me,” kashpirovsky said during a press-conference in 1989 [bennetts 2010]. some people claimed that there was a gender dynamic to his success. kashpirovsky became a sort of sex symbol for many soviet women. a news article on this topic [ntv 2020] states: “[in the auditorium], as well as behind the scenes, something spectacular and incredible was happening. according to witnesses, kashpirovsky’s charms had a huge impact on women, as if it were a love potion, impossible to reject.” reportedly, official medical consultations often prompted unofficial private ones at a later date. gose who watched the healing sessions on television also hoped to get the best of their experience. as tamila recounted to me in an interview in october 2020: […] люди, старі і малі, притулялись до телевізорів хворими частинами тіла, і вірили, що так вилікуються. а інші копіювали освячення води, як у нас в церкві священник святить і читає молитву, і ставили банки з водою коло екранів телевізора. і тоді ця вода була як свята. […people, young and old, leaned against the screen of their televisions with the injured parts of their bodies, in hope that they would be healed. others “mimick[ed] a [common] orthodox christian process of the blessing [of] water by a priest reading a prayer by putting jars with water next to television screens. later they treated this water the same way, as if it were made holy.] one of his patients, galina, said that “faith in god, and a little bit in kashpirovsky” was what helped her survive, when doctors informed her that she had less than six months left to live [timofeieva 2017]. for his part, kashpirovsky dislikes being called a folk healer or magician, and claims that he has nothing to do with any extrasensory practices. moreover, he is very sensitive to critique and has threatened [2020a] to use his powers maliciously: “whoever calls me a charlatan, know that you will receive a very serious psychological backlash […] see, i can improve the shape of one’s nose; but i can also change it in a different way.” in fact, kashpirovsky does not shy away from threatening to do harm to his patients, even when they feel extremely vulnerable and desperate. galina the return of the legend folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 124 vinogradova, author of the book saint or satan? about anatoly kashpirovsky, wrote [1996: xvii] that she once witnessed a similar situation: “please, please help me!” the woman pleaded, “you are my only hope. nothing can cure my eczema!” she was trying to make him take a look. finally, she brought her hands very close to his face. “take your hands away from my face! why do you do this? if i become angry, your hands will become even worse!” it is abundantly clear that kashpirovsky is well aware of his dominant position over his patients. in one of his youtube videos [kashpirovsky 2020a], he uses the proverb gol’ na vydumki khitra [necessity is the mother of invention] to convey that those who are skeptical about him and his methods of treatment now will come back to him later, when all other recourses have been exhausted. kashpirovsky always describes his methods as innovative, purely scientific, and based on many years of his own research. he repeatedly emphasizes this position in many interviews. for example, he once told vinogradova [1996: xviii]: “i do not hypnotize anyone. i am a psychotherapist and psychotherapy is a science. i’m not a miracle worker like those charlatans who say they have esp. i have nothing to do with that lot. try to understand me.” despite the fact that he is always extremely vocal about his standing as a health professional, the pattern of religious elements in people’s responses to kashpirovsky’s practices is revealing of their attitude toward him as a folk healer. although laypeople tend to address him as “doctor,” many treat him with an additional layer of respect by ascribing supernatural abilities to him. in “hope for ukraine, fall of america, and putin the savior,” mariya lesiv [2018: 3] explains that “in pre-soviet times, the supernatural constituted a prominent part of rural folk traditions in what is now russia and ukraine.” she also demonstrates how official media in these countries do not shy away from bringing news about supernatural events and practices based on folk belief to national media platforms. in her article “ge hypostasis of the witchdoctor in post-soviet russia,” olga gradinaru [2015] suggests that the phenomenon of kashpirovsky can be explained by the long history of the existence of witch doctors, or healers, in slavic culture: “ge post-soviet phenomenon of witchdoctors may be considered a form of a wide spiritual movement of neopaganism or neoshamanism, overlapping on the existing slavic and siberian cultural matrices and paradigms.” i should add that the popularity of such vernacular responses and acceptance of alternative healing methods in post-soviet communities should not be viewed as instances of cultural evolutionism; neither should they be “pathologized” or romanticized [mullen 2000]. bonnie o’connor [1995: 23-24] states that vernacular health belief systems have become appealing to the “college-educated middle class […] who are members of the multiplicity of health belief systems that comprise the new age healing movement.” while i agree that kashpirovsky might have fit into the requirements of a certain genre—witchdoctor, folk healer, or even a shaman—in laypeople’s eyes, there are more reasons than these slavic the return of the legend folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 125 folk traditions (addressed below) to explain why he met with such a massive response. david hufford argues for the experiential source hypothesis in considering patient descriptions of their illness (and cure). he explains [1982:15] that “certain parts [of the ‘old hag’, i.e. sleep paralyses] are culturally derived, but the experience is not.” taking hufford’s approach, i will concentrate on his patients’ experiences rather than questioning the exact nature of kaspirovsky’s healing methods. healing covid-19 online a number of leading journals in psychology and public health analyze reasons for covid-19-related conspiracies and beliefs and their relationship to alternative healing methods. a group of researchers [uscinski et al 2020] looked into the political views of their respondents and found that “belief that the virus was spread on purpose is most related to conspiracy thinking and is only slightly more concentrated among… self-identified republicans and conservatives than democrats and liberals.” in another case [allington et al 2020], three studies were conducted that employed questionnaires about social media use, conspiracy beliefs, and health-protective behaviors with regard to covid-19 among uk residents. ge authors conclude [2020: 6-7] that “all three studies found a negative relationship between covid-19 conspiracy beliefs and covid-19 healthprotective behaviors, and a positive relationship between covid-19 conspiracy beliefs and use of social media as a source of information about covid-19.” desta and mulugeta [2020: 713] argue that “the coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) overwhelmingly challenges the competency of the digital generation.” biddlestone et al. [2020:1] cite a feeling of powerlessness as one of the main factors leading to the development of conspiracy theories, including those about covid-19, on individual and collective levels. ge authors also “highlight the importance of examining the interplay between culture and both personal feelings (powerlessness) and information consumption (conspiracy theories) during times of crisis.” [biddlestone et al 2020:1] gese articles demonstrate that: 1) there is no correlation between cultural, historical, geographical or political background and conspiracy thinking, given the diversity of the groups in these studies; 2) lack of agency, fear of the unknown, and feelings of powerlessness push individuals and social groups to seek answers in alternative sources of information, which 3) indicate the compensatory function of folklore, as we see from vernacular responses often expressed on social media platforms. furthermore, we can illustrate the current situation in ukraine and russia with some statistics that demonstrate the state of informational hygiene in these countries. a new public information initiative “yak ne staty ovochem” [how not be become a vegetable], led by oksana moroz, aims to promote information literacy among ukrainians. according to the project’s preliminary research, 62% of ukrainians get news updates from social media, and four out of ten ukrainians believe that covid-19 was created in a laboratory to reduce the population of the planet. in russia, 24% of people do not trust official information about the the return of the legend folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 126 coronavirus; 35% have only some trust; while 47% of respondents believe that official mass media withholds information about the covid-19 pandemic [soroka 2020]. folklorist anika wilson [2021] suggests that “ethnically, racially, regionally, and socioeconomically marginalized populations respond to their chronic disadvantage by constructing conspiracy rumor of threat to their wellbeing perpetrated by elites.” i suspect that kashpirovsky’s patients living in both post-soviet countries and émigrés living in brighton beach, new york feel marginalized at least on some level: the former in the context of their home countries, and the latter as new immigrants often working the kinds of jobs that do not provide health insurance. in conspiracy ?eories in eastern europe: tropes and trends, anastasiya astapova [2020] examines chernobyl-related conspiracy theories circulating in the soviet and post-soviet world, particularly in light of the cold war-like tensions between russia and the west that have intensified since 2014. in the same volume, anna kirziuk describes [2020: 81] how anti-western conspiracy theories mentioned in secret documents circulated within the kgb and cpsu [communist party of the soviet union] leadership during the late soviet period. just as during the period of perestroika in the ussr, the global pandemic of 2020 resulted in an unprecedented time of instability and despair for a large portion of the population. o’connor [1995: 43] argues that “whenever there is danger, uncertainty, great incidence of chance and anxiety (even in nonmodern forms of enterprise), a proliferation of logistical and technological responses crops up.” however, while the global community of leading healthcare professionals is occupied with the development of new vaccines, vernacular responses provide answers to a number of lingering questions. anatoly kashpirovsky taps into a number of social anxieties, including fear about covid-19. on the one hand, he has criticized the russian government and healthcare system for their inability to meet the needs of the population. he also expresses mistrust of the untested american or “anglo-saxon” vaccines, claiming that the west is trying to “destroy russia and to bring the biggest and the richest country to extinction.” [kashpirovskiy 2020a]. on the other hand, he criticizes the russian vaccine, sputnik v (5): “ge mayor of yalta (6) got vaccinated, and a few weeks later he died from complications of covid-19” [kashpirovskiy 2020a]. a number of newspapers, mostly ukrainian [ostrov 2020], also reported that ivan imgrunt, the mayor of yalta, died three weeks after being vaccinated, hinting that the vaccine itself might have become the reason of his death. however, the crimean branch of kosmomolskaia pravda wrote that “the ministry of health of the republic of crimea denied rumors that the late ex-mayor of yalta, who died because of coronavirus, was vaccinated against covid-19” [timoshchenko 2020]. while he does not openly refer to conspiracy theories about covid-19 being created in a laboratory, in the spirit of the cold war, kashpirovsky explicitly hints at the western (i.e., american) origin of the virus. gis sort of explanation has already become a pattern when dealing with new unknown diseases. diane goldstein [2004: 91-99] provides a number of legends expressing the return of the legend folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 127 the opinions people held about aids having been created in a laboratory at a military institution devoted to biological warfare in maryland (usa), haiti or as created by such “older enemies” as germany and russia. in his comment about the deceased mayor of yalta, kashpirovsky also expresses mistrust of the newly introduced vaccine. while the issue of vernacular reaction to vaccination and to the origins of the disease is one part of the folk response to covid-19 [kitta 2012; goldstein 2004], there exists another factor: that of vernacular medicine. ge next section focuses on this aspect, with examples drawn from posted reactions from kashpirovsky’s online patients to his coronavirus treatment methods. ge inability to prove or disprove facts about a novel disease leaves a lot of room for speculation and for finding comfort and explanation in folk narratives. diane goldstein [2004: 73] explores this cause-and-effect link between illness and narrative. ge analysis of cultural processes also allows us to understand the reasons for and functions of these narratives. bonnie o’connor states [1995: 41] that “functionalist theories explain the existence or persistence of cultural traits such as folk belief and practice either as a function of a given set of social circumstances or constraints, or in terms of the social functions of the belief traditions themselves, or both.” being unable to obtain answers to questions about possible covid-19 treatments from official sources, people often refer to available online sources that offer alternative treatments. ge fact that the treatment is coming from a once big name, anatoly kashpirovsky, makes this treatment method seem more trustworthy. gus, the internet and social media platforms have become the link covering the misinformation gap and serve a social function as a reliable and democratic source of information. both the persona of anatoly kashpirovsky and his healing methods combine elements of conventional and alternative medicine. gis fact actually makes him appealing to a wide range of people across a spectrum of views regarding health and healing and has led to his success. diane goldstein argues [2004: 70] that “although lay models of health and illness tend to differ from biomedical models, this does not necessarily mean that physicians, medical researchers, or health educators hold strictly to medical models.” gis is precisely the case with anatoly kashpirovsky and is a fact that is especially relevant in the eastern european context. in her book conjuring hope: healing and magic in contemporary russia, galina lindquist [2005] explains another very important nuance in the position of vernacular healers in this part of the world. she writes [2005: 6] that very often healers are, by and large, people with biomedical knowledge on the level of a medical professional. biomedical education leaves many healers equipped not only with a ‘scientific’ paradigm, but also with a good working knowledge of anatomy, pathology and pharmacology. at the same time, biomedical doctors in the ussr, who did not present themselves as healers, often prescribed their patients therapies such as cupping the return of the legend folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 128 and mustard plasters. these practices show that there is a history of overlap between biomedicine and vernacular healing practices in this part of eastern europe in particular. kashpirovsky’s approach to treating various diseases, including covid-19, is both presented and perceived as innovative or progressive. mariya lesiv [2018: 45] provides an example of how “charisma building strategies involving the supernatural are closely connected to vernacular understanding of progress by the larger ukrainian and russian society.” one should not assume that this is true only about rural or remote areas. julie v. brown and nina l. rusinova [2002: 162], in their research of medical practices in st. petersburg, found that this dynamic exists in what is considered to be one of the largest economic and cultural centers of russia: after perestroika and glasnost […] those practicing in post-soviet st. petersburg include, in addition to the folk healers and psychics, homeopaths, acupuncturists, herbalists, osteopaths, bioenergetics, advocates for special diets and regimes of fasting, and experts on various asian medical theories. lesiv [2018: 47] claims that in eastern europe, due to folk healers’ long history of “pre-existing favorable reputation,” supernatural healing practices “are widely recognized by a larger society. in some venues, the supernatural has become a leading vehicle for communicating modernity, progress, and power, as understood at the vernacular level today.” gis tendency of combining vernacular and institutional medicine and seeing this combination in approaches to healing as progressive is well demonstrated by the kashpirovsky case and by his patients. on the one hand, they respect kashpirovsky and his authority due to his formal medical training and experience in biomedicine. however, they also trust him because he does not represent the biomedical mainstream and reaffirms their beliefs in alternative healing methods. offering “health sessions” online via his youtube channel, as well as in person, kashpirovsky claims that he uses strictly scientific, although innovative, methods of treating a variety of diseases, including covid-19. nevertheless, the responses of his patients show that people tend to perceive him as a folk healer, a psychic, or a magician, not primarily as a physician. on the other hand, as a medical doctor, kashpirovsky entertains conspiracy theories about the possible harm that american vaccines can do to the russian people. here his audience expresses gratefulness for addressing these important issues, relying on his professional training and experience in biomedicine primarily. below are sample responses from kashpirovsky’s covid-19 patients. some have repeatedly sought his help before and provided their feedback on various improvements to their condition. all comments are translated from russian. ge style and punctuation of the comments have been preserved in the translations. the return of the legend folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 129 natalia: i am on a finish line fighting coronavirus. before the lecture i felt very nauseous, but after i felt significantly better. i could hold my breath for 1.5 min. liudmyla: i watched the session about coronavirus at night. ge next morning, i could smell again. ge x-ray shows bilateral pneumonia. i will keep watching the video. gank you. olga: i used to be able to hold my breath for 30 seconds, but, after watching your video, i can hold it for 70 seconds. i appreciate it! elena: i am in the hospital with covid. held my breath for 1 min. it’s progress. galina: gank you for the video, it is easier to breath now. dmitry: huge thanks held breath for 40 seconds luda: i am so grateful, my health is improving every day. alena: dear anatoly mikhailovich, we are desperate, my sister is a health professional, she is in intensive care with corona, we live in a small town […], doctors can’t help, how can you help marianna: pneumonia lead to complications with bronchial asthma. don’t forget about me, please, this illness exhausted me tatiana: yesterday i could hold my breath for 27 sec, today it is 50 sec. gank you, anatoly mikhailovich. marina: 1 min 15 sec. used to be 15 sec. fantastic. svetlana: hooraaay i can smell my perfume hooraaay thanks vera: hello, anatoly mikhailovich. my eyesight got better, my body has a better odor, joint pain disappeared, my face looks younger, my lips became plumper. i appreciate it! sergei: last summer i had a light form of covid. after your live broadcasts from moscow my blood pressure normalized, it used to be 90150, it is easier to breath, i regained my good physical health ivan: anatoly mikhailovich, thank you. i can breathe with my nose, i stopped snoring, scars on my face disappeared, i have a smaller appetite and my stomach got smaller, i eat much less now. the return of the legend folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 130 as we can see, these comments offer a rather wide spectrum of responses. some people express gratitude for the help they received previously, sharing personal updates about their health improvements (“my eyesight got better”), physical changes (“face looks younger, my lips became plumper”), or habitual changes (“i eat much less now”). ge majority of the comments are related to the coronavirus, and they also vary from joyful updates about improvements or positive tendencies (“i can smell my perfume hooraaay thanks”), or words of despair stating that kashpirovsky is their last hope to provide medical help (“doctors can’t help, how can you help”). ge overall tone and context of these messages to kashpirovsky suggests a desperate need for his help, implying that faith in other options, namely, mainstream biomedicine, has been exhausted. ge comments demonstrate established, most likely one-way, almost personal or “romantic” relationships, like lindquist suggests [2005: 116], of patients with anatoly kashpirovsky (some refer to him as doctor or by his patronymic, anatoly mikhailovich, to show a greater degree of respect). notably, these relationships were built through a social media platform, his personal youtube channel, and possibly other similar platforms previously; and they were triggered by mistrust of or disappointment with both conventional healthcare providers and official media in the time of the global covid-19 pandemic. conclusions in times of crisis, people often turn to vernacular ways of finding comfort and hope in various blends of conventional biomedicine and folk healing practices. during the covid-19 pandemic, governments, official media sources, and conventional biomedicine failed to provide a necessary level of support to populations globally. as a result, people started seeking comfort and answers to their multiple questions elsewhere. for many, alternative methods of healing became the only way of coping with fear and anxiety regarding the new virus. anatoly kashpirovsky, a professional psychotherapist, healer, charismatic leader and scandalous figure from the 1980-90s, returned to meet the current needs of this group. just as he did 30 years ago, he provides his healing sessions via the same media, video connection, this time, however, via a youtube channel. despite the fact that his healing methods have been questioned by many, and despite his almost 30-year-long absence from public view, his long-forgotten services were recycled during the pandemic of 2020 and presented as still effective and, moreover, progressive. kashpirovsky combines features of a professional physician and a folk healer, which, without any doubt, widened his audiences and catered to the needs of many disaffected by biomedicine and distrustful of their government’s ability to address the pandemic. he also entertains conspiracy theories regarding the origin and the spread of the new virus, implying that the west is aiming to ruin russia and bring the nation to extinction. his patients, who are both citizens of the post-soviet republics and émigrés living in europe and north america, find this opinion especially appealing and trustworthy, since, as expressed by kashpirovsky, it conforms to their current concerns in the “cold the return of the legend folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 131 war” atmosphere of shaky international relations between these nations. all in all, kashpirovsky’s resurgence demonstrates the power of folk belief to address institutional mistrust and compensate for institutional failures during a time of crisis. notes 1 irina alegrova, liubov’ uspenskaia and mikhail shuftinskii were among them. 2 in the article i use the transliteration “kashpirovsky,” the most commonly used spelling in english-language sources. however, his official youtube channel and website use the transliteration “kashpirovskiy.” except for citations from these sites, i will use the generally accepted english variant of his name. 3 although i recognize that ukraine and the russian federation are separate countries, i consider them together for the purposes of this article. ge reasons for this decision include a shared post-soviet legacy and anatoly kashpirovsky’s connection to and popularity in both countries. 4 digital versions of his books and newspaper interviews can be found on his website www.kashpirovskiy.com. 5 while the official website calls sputnik v the first registered vaccine in the world, as of may 2021, it has not been tested in stage 3 clinical trials and has not been approved by any international healthcare institution, including the world health organization. ge same website states “ge vaccine received a registration certificate from the russian ministry of health on august 11 [2020]. postregistration clinical trials involving more than 40,000 people in russia and belarus were launched on august 25, 2020” [sputnik v]. 6 yalta is a ukrainian city in russian-occupied crimea. ge crimean peninsula became one of the first places where the vaccine sputnik v was delivered and offered to the population. as with many other policies and initiatives, this act is an effort by russia to integrate crimea into its state infrastructure and demonstrate its loyalty to the people there. bibliography allington, daniel, bobby duffy, simon wessely, nayana dhavan, and james rubin. 2020. “health-protective behaviour, social media usage and conspiracy belief during the covid-19 public health emergency.” psychological medicine (2020): 1-7. astapova, anastasiya. 2020. “chernobyl conspiracy geories: from american sabotage to the biggest hoax of the century,” in conspiracy ?eories in eastern europe: tropes and trends, anastaiya astapova,onoriu colăcel, corneliu pintilescu, and tamás scheibner, eds. new york: routledge, 2947. 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(consulted 2 december 2020). ria novosti. 2019. “воспоминания ‘пациентов’ кашпировского: ‘на самом деле было больно’” [memories of kashpirovsky’s ‘patients’: ‘in fact, i was in pain’]. риа новости. 9 october 2019. cited by https://ria.ru/20191009/1559556695.html. (consulted 10 december 2020). soroka, anastasiia. 2020. сорока, анастасия. “5g, вакцины и “цифровое порабощение”: коронавирус новый, а теории заговора старые” [5g, vaccines, and “digital enslavement”: coronavirus is new, but conspiracy theories are not]. bbc news, 11 april 2020. cited by https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-52256074. (consulted 28 december 2020). timofeieva, ekaterina. 2017. тимофеева, екатерина. “вера в бога и немного в кашпировского.” [faith in god, and a little bit in kashpirovsky]. the return of the legend folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 134 irk.ru. 23 september 2017. cited by https://www.irk.ru/news/articles/20170923/psychotherapy/. (consulted 11 october 2020). timoshchenko, aleksandra. 2020. тимощенко, александра. “в минздраве рассказали, был ли привит от коронавируса умерший мэр ялты” [ministry of healthcare revealed whether the deceased yalta’s mayor had been vaccinated]. комсомольская правда, 22 october, 2020. cited by https://www.crimea.kp.ru/online/news/4056217/. (consulted 2 december 2020). uscinski, joseph e., michelle seelig, stefan wuchty, adam m. enders, john funchion, kamal premaratne, casey klofstad, caleb everett, and manohar murthi. 2020. “why do people believe covid-19 conspiracy geories?” harvard kennedy school misinformation review. n.p., 28 apr. 2020. cited by https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/why-do-people-believecovid-19-conspiracy-theories/. 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(consulted 29 october 2020). interviews tamila. telephone interview. 29 october 2020. tetiana. viber messenger interview. 22 august 2020. seefa journal , vol ii (1997), no. 2 folklorica full 2021_edit 6.28.22 not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 58 not all quiet on the culinary front: the battle over borshch in ukraine mariya lesiv memorial university st. john’s, canada preface this article was accepted for publication in the fall of 2021, months before russia’s unjustified full-scale invasion of ukraine and the ongoing atrocities committed by russian soldiers. considering these recent events, i was deeply hesitant as to whether this piece should actually appear in print. discussing a metaphoric conflict over food seems inappropriate at a time when the entire country of ukraine has been turned into an actual battlefield. however, upon further deliberation, it became clear to me that this work is still relevant. an “innocent” dish was a creative lens that served as a reminder that russia’s war on ukraine began with the illegal annexation of crimea in 2014 and the subsequent military incursion into the donbas region. (1) through borshch, some ukrainians attempted to warn the world about the further impending danger of the russian federation, as the title of this newspaper article illustrates: “забрали крим і хочуть вкрасти борщ: чому росія на цьому не зупиниться” [they took away crimea and now want to steal our borshch: why russia won’t stop at this] [tsaruk 2020]. the international community largely overlooked the severity of the problem. the voices of ukrainian citizens may have been viewed as biased, due to their geographical and emotional proximity to what was seen as a localized conflict. however, russia did not, indeed, stop in donbas. albeit indirectly and retrospectively, this study emphasizes what folklorists know very well— we need to consider insider perspectives seriously. in the case of the ukrainian cultural activists, politicians, journalists, and regular citizens whose voices are featured in this paper, their geographical and emotional proximity provided them with a deep understanding and insight that outsiders did not have. the borshch conflict reinforces the importance of folklore studies, often dismissed as trivial, in anticipating and perhaps even the prevention of more serious and even tragic consequences. the following article is published in its original pre-war version. abstract borshch (also spelled as borscht and borsch) has lately become heavily contested as the intangible heritage of both ukraine and russia. media reports trace the roots of the dispute to a 2019 tweet by the russian foreign ministry describing the soup as part of russia’s significant heritage. in response, ukrainian cultural activists have moved the traditional beet soup from intimate vernacular settings into the political spotlight. borshch contests, workshops, and festivals are now organized in ukraine at the highest state levels involving top-ranking not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 59 politicians and activists—all meant to legitimize borshch as a ukrainian, not russian, dish. this paper focuses on the complex political trajectories of borshch in ukraine. i show that the fight over the ownership of the dish, while it may appear humorous to outsiders, communicates “unlaughter” [billig 2005] to those who reside in close geographical and emotional proximity to the real problems that the dispute communicates. this seemingly innocent dish has come to symbolize the serious matter of resistance to external threats in the context of the ongoing ukraine-russia crisis, simultaneously serving as a unifying tool within ukraine. in other words, external gastroanimosity shaped by the crisis is directly related to the efforts of internal “gastrodiplomacy” [ruddy 2014]. additionally, unlike many other forms of traditional culture discussed in resistance and protest-related literature, borshch in ukraine follows a cyclical trajectory. a dish that found its way from intimate family tables to the large international political arena returns to vernacular domains, transformed by politics. introduction (2) ½ pounds soup meat with bone 10 to 12 cups cold water 1 teaspoon salt 1 medium onion, chopped 2 medium beets, cut in thin strips 1 medium potato, diced ½ cup thinly sliced celery ½ cup diced string beans or cooked white beans 2 to 3 cups of shredded cabbage ¾ cup strained tomatoes or tomato juice ½ clove garlic, crushed, if desired 1 tablespoon flour beet kvas or lemon juice chopped dill ½ cup sour cream these are the ingredients for a traditional soup called borshch (also spelled as borscht and borsch) as prescribed by a recipe from savella stechishin’s traditional ukrainian cookery, a cookbook cherished by many ukrainian canadians [1991: 52]. while there are numerous varieties of the dish throughout ukraine and its diasporas, the above list includes the most common items. although beet-less variations of the soup exist, beet-based borshch is by far the most widespread and known. a heated dispute over the ownership of borshch as a marker of traditional heritage recently developed between ukraine and russia. this paper will not provide a definite answer as to the origins of the dish. instead, it will follow the recent political trajectories of borshch, showing how this not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 60 seemingly humble dish serves as a prism that sheds light on current turbulent realities in eastern europe. whenever we eat borshch, my husband, a fourth-generation ukrainian canadian, often jokingly remembers his great aunt, a woman who, apparently, was difficult to please. upon one of the aunt’s visits, his mother served borshch. someone praised the borshch. the aunt’s response was: “what do you mean “good borshch”!? borshch is borshch [implying that there could be nothing bad or good about it].” to me, this comment conveys more than just his aunt’s personality. it also shows the vernacular perception of borshch as something too mundane and familiar to be treated as special. i grew up in the soviet ukraine and ate borshch often. in most cases the borshch of my childhood and youth was meatless, which appeared to be the norm at the time. however, in retrospect, i realize that my family’s late soviet and early post-soviet consumption of borshch exemplified what contributors to the recent volume seasoned socialism: gender and food in late soviet everyday life refer to as the “economy of scarcity” [goldstein 2019: xiii]. meat was a luxury, neither easily available nor affordable. i have now lived in canada for the last two decades, and my current middle-class status allows me to afford the best ingredients any time i have a craving for borshch. the version i often cook has a base made of smoked ribs, giving it a special flavor. although i love borshch, it is really just a part of my habitual foodways, and the dimensions of the dish experienced at my personal family table would not have inspired the present study. it is the recent political discourse involving borshch, including the international media attention given to it as a contested heritage of both ukraine and russia, that piqued my scholarly interest. lately, ukrainian cultural activists have moved the traditional soup from intimate vernacular settings into the political spotlight, and borshch is no longer just borshch for many in eastern europe. reportedly, the current dispute began with a 2019 tweet from the russian foreign ministry calling borshch “one of russia’s most famous & beloved dishes & a symbol of traditional cuisine” [russia government organization 2019]. the ukrainian reaction, led by renowned chef and cultural activist ievhen klopotenko, immediately followed. it included numerous public events – cultural festivals, workshops, and televised projects involving the highest-ranking politicians – all meant to legitimize borshch as a ukrainian, not a russian, dish. many international newspaper headlines about the russia-ukraine dispute over borshch convey its overall militaristic connotation. the times introduced the topic as “knives come out in the battle of borscht” [bennetts 2020]; the new york times published the article “a new front opens in the russia-ukraine conflict: borscht” [varenikova and kramer 2020]; while la prensa latina media offered the headline “battle of the beets: ukraine claims borscht as its own” [tokariuk 2021]. in this paper, i will engage with the following question: why has borshch been chosen as a serious political instrument, considering that a fight over food origins often makes outsiders smile, as the above newspaper headlines (and, not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 61 frankly, the title of this paper) convey? i discuss how this seemingly innocent dish has come to symbolize the serious matter of resistance to external threats in the context of the ongoing ukraine-russia crisis, simultaneously serving as a unifying tool within ukraine. in other words, external gastroanimosity shaped by the crisis is directly related to the efforts of internal gastrodiplomacy. (3) consequently, by revealing the close interrelationship between traditional culture and national and international politics, the current dispute affects vernacular settings. borshch has now acquired a new layer of political meaning, at least at some ukrainian family tables. many historians of food indeed identify borshch as a ukrainian dish. one is viliyam pokhlyobkin (1923 – 2000), a renowned soviet and russian food expert. the entry “borshch” in pokhlyobkin’s кулинарный словарь от а до я [culinary dictionary from a to z] begins in the following way: “борщ. основное первое блюдо украинской кухни. получило широкое международное распространение и признание” [borshch is the essential first course of ukrainian cuisine. it has been disseminated broadly and received wide international recognition] [pokhlyobkin 2001 [1988]]. (4) in public interviews, klopotenko often reinforces his own views about the ukrainian origins of borshch by citing pokhlyobkin; the fact that even famous russian experts identify borshch as a ukrainian dish adds political strength to his argument [e.g., sokolova 2020]. however, in addition to ukrainian and russian sources, other ethnic cookbooks, including jewish [e.g., koenig 2015: 80-81] and polish [strybel and strybel 2005: 190-193], present borshch as a traditional dish of their respective cuisines. this situation would not surprise folklorists who are well aware that folklore exists in variations, and neighboring countries or ethnic groups residing in close proximity to one another often share numerous cultural characteristics. in the case of foodways, similarities are frequently shaped by the local availability of produce as well as close contact, whether positive or negative (such as the result of occupation by the other). moreover, folklorists know that it is nearly impossible to determine the exact origins of many traditional practices. more importantly, in line with deborah kodish’s theorization of “authenticity” [2011: 34-46], if communities practice particular traditions that they find meaningful, folklorists are obliged themselves to treat the traditions with similar respect. instead of engaging with the question to whom borshch actually belongs, i am pursuing a different question: why does it matter? why is it that suddenly, in the ukrainianrussian case, we can no longer speak about what folklorist sabina magliocco, among others, addresses as “the old style cultural diffusion,” and “social exchange or reciprocity”? [magliocco 2004: 234]. why is the idea of ownership now at the core of the borshch discourse in ukraine, while it would have been unimaginable (at least as a serious matter) as recently as a several years ago? studying borshch: contexts and methods the political trajectory of borshch in eastern europe takes us beyond what lucy long identifies as the main spheres of the folkloristic study of foodways, not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 62 namely, “mundane aspects of culture involving everyday events, activities, and people [that are, in turn,] often trivialized and dismissed as insignificant in understanding the larger systems of power […]” [2021: 8]. in ukraine and russia, borshch has reached the highest levels of political and cultural discourses. thus, we enter into the realm of documentaries, festivals, the commercial media, and official public voices. while these are not the lived vernacular realities that most frequently draw the attention of folklorists, i agree with giovanna del negro who, like others, argues that folklore should not be theoretically viewed as an independent entity. in practice, it often both informs and is shaped by other interrelated domains such as popular culture, media, and politics. moreover, it is this complex inter-relationship that is often communicated in the performance of folklore [del negro 2008]. at the conclusion of this paper, i rely on ethnographic snapshots to illustrate the inter-relationship of politics and vernacular culture through the prism of borshch. i have not formally undertaken research on vernacular foodways in ukraine. my ethnographic encounters took place in the context of my personal interactions with family and friends and were completely unsolicited. however, i find this represents a methodological strength rather than a weakness. the encounters are not the result of my pursuits and research questions that often come with subjective theoretical frameworks conveying, in turn, what appears to be important to a scholar. they come from my interlocutors themselves, revealing meanings that appear to be significant to them. this work is informed by a growing body of literature devoted to the creative dimensions of protest and the closely related notions of resistance and activism discussed in the introduction [lesiv 2021:3-4]. one element that unites many of these methodologically and theoretically diverse works is a focus on creative cultural forms and expressions as a means of giving a voice to marginalized, oppressed, underrepresented, or discriminated against segments of a population within a particular social or political unit, whether in an institution, a village or a country. the present case study of borshch is unique in this regard. on one hand, we deal with the typical situation of “weak versus powerful” characteristic of many other contexts that generate resistance. through a traditional dish, ukrainian cultural activists attempt to voice a response to official russia, their significantly more powerful opponent. on the other hand, the dispute over borshch takes place not within one clearly defined political unit but between two countries. this context comes with a unique interplay of power dynamics. the ukrainian activists do not risk their freedom, social positions or lives, as it is the case for many antihegemonic actions in other settings, especially in present-day eastern europe. their initiatives are directed at threats coming from outside of the political unit within which they live and operate. in ukraine, borshch-related resistance endeavors represent not only a bottom-up but also a top-down process. the activists’ messages find resonance at the highest echelons of political power, which, in turn, brings access to administrative resources and influential media outlets. this fact has implications for their reach and influence on the larger not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 63 society resulting in transformative effects on vernacular culture, including the consumption of borshch at family tables. laughter versus unlaughter: beets, politics, and emotional proximity widely covered and promoted by the commercial media and social networks, recent public events devoted to borshch in ukraine resonate with folklorist jack santino’s concept of the “ritualesque.” it refers to “a class of public performances that involve overtly symbolic images and actions, as well as other theatrical and dramatized elements” [santino 2009: 24]. while they share some characteristics with more formalized ritual, these “instrumental symbolic actions” are “directed less toward the transcendent and more toward the sociopolitical realm,” as they aim to transform public opinions and attitudes [santino 2009: 9, 24]. the borshch-related ritualesque transformed the dish from a traditional habitual meal into what folklorist and ethnochoreologist andriy nahachewsky would refer to as an objectified cultural symbol serving as a “logo” of ukrainianess [nahachewsky 2003: 37]. it can also be viewed as a form of “gastronationalism” [desoucey 2010: 433; jönsson 2020: 224]. examples of this process in the case of borshch include a recent move by ukraine’s ministry of foreign affairs. the ministry submitted an application to unesco requesting the recognition of the preparation of ukrainian borshch as part of the world’s intangible cultural heritage [tkachenko 2020a]. the public events surrounding borshch are, in part, meant to increase ukraine’s chance for success in this process. oleksandr tkachenko, ukraine’s minister of culture and information policy, stressed this idea while describing his own borshch initiative in a facebook post on 20 december 2020. in collaboration with olga stefanishyna (deputy prime minister for european and euro-atlantic integration), ihor petrashko (minister of economic development and trade), and roman abramovskyi (minister of ecology and natural resources of ukraine), tkachenko organized a borshch preparation contest. chef klopotenko served as the judge. tkachenko reflected on the event in the following way: минулого тижня запропонував колегам-міністрам проготувати разом борщ. така активність вкрай важлива для промоції страви та включення “культури приготування українського борщу” до списку нематеріальної культурної спадщини юнеско. і сьогодні нам це вдалося. [last week, i proposed to my fellow ministers that we cook borshch together. such activities are extremely important for the promotion of the dish and the inclusion of “the culture of preparing ukrainian borshch” into the unesco list of intangible cultural heritage. and today we succeeded] [tkachenko 2020b]. not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 64 according to tkachenko, even though it was a competition between two teams, “перемогу здобув борщ” [the winner was borshch] [tkachenko 2020b]. he concluded by commenting on related russian reactions: останнім часом щодо теми борщу активізувалися росіяни, які не можуть змиритися із правдою. вони продовжують червоніти, писати коментарі та недолуго жартувати. жарти-жартами, але нам не потрібно нічого доводити. бо борщ – наш. [lately, russians, who cannot accept the truth, have become more active on the topic of borshch. they continue to turn red with anger, write comments and joke awkwardly. jokes are jokes, but we don’t need to prove anything. because borshch is ours] [tkachenko 2020b]. as mentioned above, these initiatives, and especially the international reports describing them, may evoke at least some degree of humorous response from outsiders. they convey what anthropologist william o. beeman identifies as “the basis for most humor,” namely “the setting up of a surprise […] for an audience,” where “incongruity” plays the central role [beeman 1999: 103]. (5) while reporters often explore the root of the problem in their actual articles, the headlines appear to indicate that their authors were surprised in the same way i had been when i first heard about the dispute. i remember smiling because beets are not immediately associated with fights. the problematic aspects of foodways in various contexts have received a growing amount of scholarly attention. for example, folklorist joy fraser explores the contested political meanings of scottish haggis [2011] and folklorist diane tye, while approaching her mother’s recipe book as a diary, traces complex meanings related to gender and resistance behind her mother’s baking [2010]. journalist rose gerber compiled the list “10 times people have protested using food around the world” [n.d.], correctly pointing out that food often played a significant role in protest movements because it “has major cultural, religious, and/or historical connections with the countries and issues involved” [gerber n.d.]. the so called “hummus wars” involving israel and its arab neighbors represents perhaps the most closely related example [see avieli 2016: 19-30]. despite these examples, we generally tend to think about food in positive terms, as a friendly and unifying medium. in line with this perception, beets are too innocent to be viewed as weapons in the context of battle, and it is exactly this incongruity that makes at least some of us smile. folklorists are well aware, though, that humor is a complex entity, and audiences play a central role in its reception [see brodie 2014]. what some people may view as funny can evoke an opposite reaction in other settings. the smiles that media headlines about the ukrainian-russian dispute over borshch elicit in some communicate the geographical and emotional distance through which we perceive it. in contrast, in ukraine, the dispute is more often than not viewed as a serious matter. the very not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 65 fact that it is worth the time and energy of top-ranking ukrainian politicians speaks to this fact very clearly. my personal discussions with relatives, friends and acquaintances in ukraine further demonstrate that the topic is often treated as serious not only at the official political level but also in vernacular settings. i even had a few encounters that reflected the concept of “unlaughter” coined by social psychologist michael billig [2005]. unlaughter is “a display of not laughing when laughter might otherwise be expected, hoped for or demanded” [billig 2005: 192 cited in smith 2009: 150]. when i mentioned the topic, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, to a couple in their seventies and, later, to a female friend in her forties in ukraine, it did not elicit the humorous reaction i expected. those conversations forced me to reflect more critically on my own identity and voice in this study. even though i am a native of ukraine, return to the country on a regular basis, both to visit family and conduct research, and still have an insider understanding of many political and cultural dynamics, i too have developed an emotional distance. the media coverage of the borshch dispute generates unlaughter from those who live in immediate geographical and emotional proximity to all the country’s complexities. that unlaughter has a contextual explanation. the overall dispute is not about beets per se. it is, rather, an extension of matters that are serious and tragic, namely, the ongoing ukraine-russia crisis that began with russia’s annexation of crimea in 2014. this move by the kremlin violated the 1994 budapest memorandum on security assurance. the memorandum was signed by the united states, great britain, and, ironically, russia, and further endorsed by france and china [yekelchyk 2015: 68]. according to the document, ukraine agreed to eliminate its large arsenal of nuclear weapons in exchange for the guarantee of its territorial integrity and sovereignty [yekelchyk 2015: 68]. moreover, following the annexation, the kremlin has also been widely reported to be behind the ongoing military unrest in the donbas region of eastern ukraine [mitrokhin 2015]. thus, many ukrainians perceive official russia’s claims of borshch ownership not simply as a cultural competition but as an extension of a very real external threat and a form of what journalists and scholars describe as russia’s “hybrid war” [galeotti 2016]. a close geographical and emotional proximity does not allow many people to look at this situation through any other prism but that of the continuous news from the front reporting the number of wounded and killed soldiers on a nearly daily basis. thus, borshch became a symbolic form of resistance and protest against russia’s hegemonic expansion. this is clearly conveyed by ukrainian media headlines such as “криму їм мало: боротьба за український борщ вийшла на міжнародний рівень” [crimea is not enough for them: the fight for ukrainian borshch reached the international level] [kuzmenchuk 2020] and “забрали крим і хочуть вкрасти борщ: чому росія на цьому не зупиниться” [they took away crimea and now want to steal our borshch: why russia won’t stop at this] [tsaruk 2020]. not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 66 it is safe to hypothesize that the present-day dispute would not have happened had the russian foreign ministry’s tweet about borshch not taken place in the midst of the crisis between the two countries. prior to the tweet, chef klopotenko did not appear to treat borshch with any particular reverence. he shows this attitude in his russian-language ted talk “how food can change your life” recorded in kyiv in 2018 [klopotenko 2018]. in the presentation, klopotenko critiques ukrainians for being too conservative regarding their food choices. he confesses to holding a similar opinion until he became a young adult and discovered a variety of new products and spices: я понял, что двадцать лет я жил просто скучной едой. я понял, что от еды можно получать удовольствие. я понял, что голубцы, борщ и вареники – это хорошо, но не всю жизнь! есть мир намного больше. [and i realized that, for twenty years, i lived consuming dull food. i realized that one could receive pleasure from food. i realized that golubtsy [cabbage rolls] borshch, and vareniki [dumplings] are good but not for a whole lifetime! there is a world that is much larger!] [klopotenko 2018] in the context of this talk, borshch receives criticism as a dish that is too widespread and popular that, in turn, prevents ukrainians from creative experimentation with new foods. thus, even chef klopotenko, the main driving force behind the current borshch ritualesque, did not treat the dish as something very special as few as three years ago. the dish that may have seemed too ordinary earlier becomes special today because it helps to shape a distinct ukrainian identity and create a desired distance from russia. the present-day sentiments surrounding borshch overlap with larger official initiatives aimed at reinforcing the distance. in 2015, the ukrainian government passed the so-called de-communization laws to strip the country of the symbols of its soviet past, a past associated with russian hegemony [ukrainska pravda 2015]. while the laws are directed toward the public display of such symbols, soviet-era cuisine, which remains popular in private settings, also began to face negative reactions from some ukrainians. in addition to growing scholarly critique of the detrimental economic and ideological aspects of this cuisine [stiazhkina 2021], emotionally charged comments on the topic appear in commercial media. one example is journalist khrystyna rivera’s recent article “міф про смачну та здорову радянську їжу” [the myth about tasty and healthy soviet food]. rivera deconstructs the propagated nutritious values of some very popular ingredients and dishes of the soviet period, concluding with rhetoric characteristic for an active political protest: сподіваюся, м'ясо по-французьки згине, як і всі бутерброди зі шпротами, яйця, фаршировані майонезом і смаженою цибулею, салат "вогник" із плавленого сирка і майонезу з часником, not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 67 горезвісне "олів'є", "мімоза", "крабові палички". навіть оселедець під шубою я готова кинути у вогонь гастрономічної революції! [i hope that “french-style meat” will perish, along with all the canapés with sprats, grated eggs with mayonnaise and fried onions, the “light” salad made from processed cheese with mayonnaise and garlic, the infamous “olivier,” “mimosa,” “crab sticks.” even “herring under a fur coat” i am ready to toss into the fires of gastronomic revolution!] [revira 2020] enemies versus allies through the prism of borshch political conflicts are associated not only with enemies but also allies, and borshch is no stranger to the bridge-building process. one example is the documentary series борщ: секретний інгредієнт [borshch: a secret ingredient] produced by klopotenko. the documentary follows the chef on his trips to various parts of ukraine, where he collects diverse recipes for borshch. he travels to distinct locales such as chornobyl, the present-day frontlines of the russian conflict, and the culturally unique hutsul region. he also visits minority communities such as crimean tatars, hungarians, jews, and romanians in ukraine. the documentary is produced in two formats, as a single film [kochnev 2020] and as a number of discrete segments. while the film includes brief episodes of klopotenko’s diverse encounters, the individual episodes contain more extensive and detailed portrayals of them. the overall political message of the documentary is that while contemporary ukrainians are culturally and ethnically diverse, they are all united by the tradition of making borshch (albeit with different accents), a tradition and sense of unity that their northern neighbor russia lacks. understandably, klopotenko’s show is not ethnographic material, but a cultural production created through a producer’s gaze and accompanied by cinematic effects. it does not allow me to fully uncover his guests’ perspectives or to distinguish between their staged interactions and genuine political sentiments. what is clear is the producer’s intention. let me provide an example. one episode is devoted to jewish borshch in ukraine’s south-eastern city of odesa, a city known for its strong and vibrant jewish presence. in the episode, klopotenko is hosted by a middle-aged jewish couple, borys and marharyta. this case study is an exception to folklorist regina bendix and ethnologist michaela fenske’s observation that “[i]n its ability to communicate, eating exceeds what spoken language can do” [2014: 22]. klopotenko speaks exclusively in ukrainian while borys and marharyta speak in russian. a focal point is a play on the ukrainian and russian terms for beets. the first instance takes place at pryvoz, odesa’s famous central market, where borys purchases ingredients for borshch. borys says to klopotenko (in russian): “вот теперь слушай меня. борщ никогда не получится, если мы покупаем свеклу… потому, что нужно покупать буряк” [now, listen to me. borshch will never turn out good if we buy not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 68 svekla [russian for beet] … because we need to buy buriak [ukrainian for beet]. one may think that borys means different types or parts of beets. in fact, this is exactly what the english subtitles erroneously convey. however, a native speaker of both ukrainian and russian immediately recognizes this short exchange as nothing other than a political play on words. the wordplay is further dramatized with the help of the camera that is focused on kloponeko and captures the chef raising his eyebrow in confusion after borys mentions the russian term svekla. the confusion then transforms into a wry, satisfying smile immediately after borys mentions buriak. this language game is further reinforced by klopotenko’s conversation with marharyta who says (in russian): “во первых, надо поставить буряки варить” [first, we have to put the buryaky [ukrainian beets] on to cook]. klopotenko says (in ukrainian): “це не свекла, а буряки. це вже я знаю” [this is not svekla [russian] but buriaky [ukrainian]. i already know this (hinting at his earlier conversation with borys). then marharyta, who had been previously speaking russian the entire time, says one sentence in ukrainian: “свекла… та я вже не знаю зовсім цього слова” [svekla … i no longer know this word] [film.ua. 2020]. even though russian is their primary language, the jewish couple appears to reject the russian term for the main ingredient of borshch in favor of its ukrainian equivalent. borys and marharyta are portrayed as distancing themselves from russia and communicating their sense of belonging and allegiance to ukraine. the producer creatively attempts to build internal bridges with the help of borshch, uniting jews and ukrainians against the external enemy of russia. many accounts of ukrainians as historically good neighbors to jews have been attested. one telling example is the “righteous among the nations” database compiled by yad vashem: the world holocaust remembrance center. the “righteous among the nations” is “a worldwide project to pay tribute” to those people “who risked their lives to save jews during the holocaust” [yad vashem 2021]. an automatic search results in 1439 matching records for individuals whose “nationality contains ukraine” [yad vashem 2021]. another example comes from a recent article in the jerusalem post devoted to andrey sheptytsky (1865-1944), the metropolitan archbishop of the ukrainian greek catholic church from 1901 to 1944 [liphshiz 2020]. liphshiz discusses new evidence showing that the metropolitan may have risked his own life to save jews and may now have a chance for this honored recognition, alongside his brother klymentiy who already holds the title [liphshiz 2020]. however, the overall jewish-ukrainian history is far from happy. while there are ongoing debates about the exact nature and scale of such instances [hrytsak 1996], historians continue to uncover evidence showing that some ukrainians were involved in the atrocious acts of the nazis during the holocaust [himka 2011; lower 2021]. these more recent accounts were preceded by the anti-jewish pogroms that began in late imperial russia in territories that are part of contemporary ukraine [dekelchen et al 2010]. not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 69 continuous efforts to reconcile the tragic ukrainian-jewish past have been made in ukraine. some telling results are reflected in the voices of jewish community leaders in light of the ukraine-russia conflict. for example, while hypothesizing about the future of jews in post-euromaidan ukraine, journalist josh cohen, cites yaakov dov bleich, chief rabbi of ukraine. bleich, while fully aware of the existence of anti-semitism in ukraine, sees this as the hand of russian extremists in many instances. he says: “the ukrainian jewish community is definitely more afraid of putin and these pro-russian hooligans than of ukrainian anti-semitism” [cohen 2014]. cohen concludes that, “the threat from russia has actually brought jews and ukrainians closer together” [2014]. klopotenko’s documentary is an attempt to symbolically connect the two ethnic groups even more closely with the help of borshch. another example of an attempt to reinforce the unity of diverse regional and ethnic groups in ukraine via borshch involves crimean tatars. on 5 march 2021, the institute of culture of ukraine, created by klopotenko, and the ministry of culture and information policy held the online festival культура приготування українського борщу [the culture of ukrainian borshch cooking]. during the event, representatives from 25 regions of ukraine cooked borshch. the number 25 appeared to symbolize ukraine’s administrative map—24 oblasts and the autonomous republic of crimea—prior to the annexation of the peninsula. the participants’ attire was also symbolic. each cook wore a traditional embroidered shirt characteristic of their specific region and an apron with the inscription “borshch” followed by their region’s name. klopotenko’s chef shirt featured a stylized embroidered map of ukraine in which each region was represented by the motifs and colors of its characteristic folk embroidery. the inscription “борщ всеукраїнський [borshch is all-ukrainian]” was featured on his apron. while the 25 participants cooked various kinds of borshch based on their family recipes, klopotenko prepared a 26th version by including unique ingredients from each region. the event was widely covered in the media, including tsn news, one of the most-widely watched news services in the country. the report featured lerane from crimea as one of the participants. while traditional crimean tatar cuisine does not include borshch [sobolieva 2019], lerane’s mother had often cooked a beet-less borshch, and lerane used that recipe at the event, symbolically communicating her support for the ukrainian cause. lerane’s sense of allegiance to ukraine was reinforced by her attire: an embroidered ukrainian shirt in combination with a traditional crimean-tatar fez. in addition, in the tsn interview, lerane displayed native fluency in ukrainian. the importance of her presence at the event was further reinforced by minister tkachenko: […] встановили рекорд україни! масове одночасне приготування представниками 25ти регіонів україни традиційних українських борщів. а це вкотре доводить – наша сила в різноманітті. not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 70 і хоч страва одна, але деякі інгредієнти мене вразили. […]. із задоволенням скуштував би всі, якби зміг, але обрав кримський. формуємо усвідомлення та визнання на світовому рівні, що борщ – український. щоб маніпуляції на цьому тлі, які використовує росія, ніколи не спрацювали за кордоном [we set a ukrainian record! mass simultaneous preparation of ukrainian traditional borcshts by representatives of 25 regions of ukraine. and this proves – our strength is in diversity. and though this was just one dish, there were several ingredients that impressed me […] and i would have gladly tasted all of them, if i could have, but i chose the crimean one. we are forming an awareness and recognition at the world level, that borshch is ukrainian. that the manipulations against this backdrop being used by russia will never work abroad] [tkachenko 2021]. the annexation of crimea profoundly affected crimean tatars, the indigenous people of the peninsula, especially considering that their preannexation history with russia was nothing short of tragic. most recently, the entire crimean tatar population was forcibly deported to central asia by stalin in 1944 and was only allowed to return in 1989 [aydingün and aydingün 2007]. their fears about the 2014 annexation were not groundless. the event was followed by “draconian restrictions of freedom of speech and expression that have effectively silenced crimean tatar voices of opposition” [charron 2019: 41-42]. tens of thousands of crimean tatars found refuge in continental ukraine, having become “devoted citizens of the ukrainian state” [charron 2019: 41-42]. cultural and political geographer austin charron, while focusing on the growing presence of crimean tatars in ukraine’s creative arts landscape, sees this phenomenon as part of ukraine’s new pro-european orientation and narrative of multiculturalism [2019]. the recent borshch-related events involving crimean tatars is an extension of the same narrative and sense of crimean tatar—ukrainian allegiance under the auspices of traditional culture. activism and vernacular culture while the majority of related literature focuses predominantly on the role of traditional culture in the context of resistance and protest initiatives, the present case study allows me to take one step further. it enables me to address the cyclical trajectory of borshch. a dish that found its way from intimate family tables to the large international political arena returns to vernacular domains transformed by politics. not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 71 on a summer day of 2020, when the covid-19 pandemic restrictions in our province had eased, my husband and i invited a couple whom i will call ol’ha and viktor, both in their thirties, to our house for dinner. considering that ol’ha and viktor had recently arrived to canada from ukraine, we served some traditional ukrainian dishes, including borshch. as newcomers at the time, ol’ha and viktor followed ukrainian news very closely. “have you heard that borshch was recently included in the national list of intangible cultural heritage items in ukraine?” — asked ol’ha as soon as i began to serve borshch. she then continued: “thank god! finally! otherwise, russians would have continued to call it their own. how can that be?” ol’ha referred to the widely reported news that, due to the efforts of klopotenko and his team, borshch was indeed approved to be included in the national ich list on 7 october 2020 [pyrih 2020]. clearly, for ol’ha, in light of the present-day ukraine-russia crisis, borshch ceased to be just borshch. she now eats it politically. at least she did at my family table. my second example communicates the vernacular efforts of symbolic distancing from soviet heritage and, thus, russian influences, via resistance to soviet-era cuisine. as mentioned earlier, despite the emerging critical discourse surrounding this cuisine and ukraine’s official efforts to eliminate the remnants of its recent past, soviet dishes remain popular among many ukrainians, even including those who are very nationally conscious. this situation can partly be explained by the fact that the dishes do not immediately evoke explicit political associations but are consumed as habitual family meals. it would require a special intellectual effort to reflect on them in political terms. my close relative, a man in his late thirties whom i will call oleh, is one of those citizens of ukraine who recently began to make such efforts. even though the following encounter is not related specifically to borshch, it is directly connected to the activist efforts of ievhen klopotenko. in fact, it was oleh who first introduced me to the chef’s endeavors to strengthen a ukrainian national identity via food. klopotenko regularly critiques soviet-era cuisine, and instead draws attention to widely unknown traditional recipes that he has collected all across ukraine. the chef’s research findings, imparted with his professional touch, are presented in his recent book, зваблення їжею з українським смаком [seduction by food with ukrainian flavor] [klopotenko 2020]. albeit in a humorous way, oleh often criticizes me for engaging with soviet food heritage in a way that he finds to be “too much,” especially my celebration of new year with two distinctly soviet-era salads known as oliv’ie [olivier] and shuba [fur coat or herring under a fur coat]. for me, the salads communicate a sense of nostalgia for the taste of my childhood and youth. oleh sees my annual obsession with the salads as nothing other than a part of my identity that he finds to be disturbingly too soviet. while preparing a meal for his family celebration of new year’s eve in 2020, he purposely excluded all traditional soviet dishes associated with the holiday and cooked several items featured either in klopotenko’s book or on the chef’s website. oleh phoned me on 31 december 2020 while cooking and said: “як ти спробуєш зробити ці канапки, ти навіки забудеш про 'олів'є' і 'шубу'” [if you try to make these canapés [referring to a not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 72 specific recipe by klopotenko], you will forget about oliv’ie and shuba for the rest of your life.” clearly, oleh’s family table on new year’s eve was consciously imparted with a distinct political flavor. the dishes communicate a direct connection with the political activism of resistance that makes folklore and politics virtually indistinguishable. concluding remarks in ukraine, borshch is no longer just borshch. cultural activists have moved the dish from family tables, incorporating it into the borshch ritualesque. at the political level, the dish now operates along two axes. one is what political scientist braden ruddy calls “gastrodiplomacy” [2014] while the other is its opposite, gastroanimosity. while ruddy’s concept deals with the role of national foods in international relationships, in the ukrainian case, beets cross internal borders. they help to build internal alliances, while simultaneously reinforcing gastroanimosity toward external threats. it is only with historical distance and a relatively stable socio-political situation that we are able to view regional heritage in the positive terms of cultural diffusion or reciprocity. when stability is undermined, and when it occurs in close historical and emotional proximity to the destabilizing force, the meanings of heritage may shift. in the case of borshch, the idea of ownership pushed the notions of cultural diffusion or reciprocity to the margins. the claims of ownership of the dish are directly related to the recent loss of possession of physical territory. when military forces are insufficient, culture generates alternative means to claim ownership or, as anthropologist galina lindquist would put it, “alternative forms of hope” [2005: 9]. in response to the significantly more powerful army of its opponent, ukrainian cultural activists brandish borshch as a symbolic political weapon of resistance against external aggression. borshch tastes the same as it ever has, but is imparted with new layers of meaning. (6) furthermore, the current borshch discourse in ukraine shows that politicized food can sometimes follow a cyclical trajectory, moving from family tables to resistance initiatives and back to vernacular settings. this supports del negro’s idea that folklore cannot be treated as a distinct entity. it is the institutionalization of the vernacular that appears to play an important role in the transformation of the meaning of a piece of folklore. the recognition of borshch at the government level, the official inclusion of the dish in the list of intangible cultural heritage, and the involvement of top-raking politicians in the borshch ritualesque significantly contributed to a shift in meaning at some family tables at least. the institutionalization of select forms of vernacular culture and their formalization via official government channels and acts appear to impart the vernacular family table with a new idea of heritage ownership. the matter is serious. the fight over the origin of borshch, while it may appear humorous to outsiders, communicates unlaughter to those who reside in close geographical and emotional proximity to all the actual problems that the dispute represents. it is not really about beets at all. not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 73 notes 1 unless directly citing sources that use other spelling variants, i transliterate ukrainian placenames from the official ukrainian spelling. unless otherwise indicated, all translations from ukrainian and russian are my own. 2 this paper is a revised and extended version of my part of the presentation “when beets cross borders: contested meanings of borscht” cowritten with my colleague, jillian gould. the paper was presented at the 2021 international society for ethnology and folklore (sief) congress as part of the panel “contested food heritages” organized by håkan jönsson, maja godina golija, and ester bardone. i focused on the current ukrainian-russian dispute over borshch while professor gould explored the meanings of the dish within the jewish north american diaspora. i significantly benefitted from our collaborative work as well as the panel discussion that followed our presentation. i am also thankful to jeanmarie willoughby-rouhier and the two anonymous reviewers who helped me to strengthen this work. 3 the concept of gastrodiplomacy was first introduced by political scientist braden ruddy [2014]. 4 pokhlyobkin’s dictionary has been digitized and is available in electronic forms on multiple russian-language platforms. 5 beeman’s definition is in line with the incongruity theory of humor, which is considered to be one of the most influential approaches to the study of humor. for a brief comprehensive summary, see morreall [2020]. 6 “humble” traditional foods changing meanings under the influence of contextually-specific socio-political processes is a rather widespread phenomenon [see, for example, everett 2007; tye 2011; lewis 1989; pilcher 2012]. bibliography avieli, nir. 2000. “the hummus wars: local food, guinness records and palestinian-israeli gastropolitics.” gastronomica: the journal of critical food studies. 16 (3): 19-30. aydingün, ismail and ayşegül aydingün. 2007. “crimean tatars return home: identity and cultural revival.” journal of ethnic and migration studies 33 (1): 113-128. beeman, william. 1999. “humor.” journal of linguistic anthropology 9 (1-2): 103-106. bendix, regina and michela fenske. 2014. “eating politically – food and eating in politics,” in politische mahlzeiten/political meals. regina bendix and michela fenske, eds. berlin: lit verlag dr. w. hopf, 17-29. bennetts, marc. 2020. “knives come out in the battle of borscht.” the times, 13 october. cited by https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/knives-come-outin-the-battle-of-borscht-nssc8mz3p. 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(consulted 3 december 2021). not all quiet on the culinary front folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 75 jönsson, håkan. 2020. “a food nation without culinary heritage? gastronationalism in sweden.” journal of gastronomy and tourism 4 (4): 223-237. klopotenko, ievhen. 2018. “как еда может изменить вашу жизнь.” [how food can change your life] tedxkyiv. cited by https://tedxkyiv.com/en/video/eugene-klopotenko. (consulted 3 december 2021). klopotenko, ievhen. 2020. зваблення їжею з українським смаком. [seduction by food with a ukrainian flavor]. київ: книголав. kochnev, dmitry, dir. 2020. “борщ: секретний інгредієнт” [borshch: a secret ingredient]. film.ua. cited by https://sweet.tv/en/movie/20705-borschtsecret-ingredint. 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(consulted 3 december 2021). folklorica full 2021_edit 6.28.22 reviews folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 85 kanigel, robert. hearing homer’s song: the brief life and big idea of milman parry. new york: alfred a. knopf, 2021. notes. index. 336 pp. $28.95 (cloth). isbn 8-2094-5255-0-978. in his biographies of figures like frederick winslow taylor, jane jacobs, and srinivasa ramanujan, robert kanigel has proven to have an intellectual love affair with unconventional academics, especially those who come from unlikely backgrounds and offer revolutionary contributions to intellectual society. this is a suitable description of his latest subject, milman parry (1902-1935), the classicist, homeric scholar, and founder of what has come to be known as the oral-formulaic theory. despite his humble roots, at the time of his death at age 33, parry was an assistant professor at harvard and the man who had made irrelevant the centuries-old homeric question. like kanigel’s prior subjects, parry is a figure who looms large in a particular scholarly sphere but is basically unknown outside of it. he is thus perfectly suited to the author’s skill for translating the complexity and significance of ground-breaking ideas to lay audiences. hearing homer’s song is no exception, proving equal parts introductory university lecture, gripping family drama, murder mystery, and travel adventure novel. to understand parry and bring him to life in this text, kanigel has consulted every academic article, graduate thesis, biographical snippet, interview, obituary, and piece of correspondence written by or directly about parry and his family. he has also interviewed living relatives and consulted important contemporary scholars to grasp the nuances and intricacies of parry’s personal and professional lives. these disparate threads are woven together on every page, revealing the care the author has taken to step into parry’s life as best as anyone can from such a temporal distance (what a pity that parry’s first true biography must come 86 years after his death). this is heady work! and yet, hearing homer’s song offers a brisk and lively narrative that carries the reader through a series of short, riveting, and digestible chapters. chapters 1-2 serve as an introduction, presenting parry, along with his protégé and later champion, albert b. lord. kanigel tempts readers with the highlights of parry’s biography, making the case for why the story is worth telling and explaining how he first became interested in it. chapters 3-8 bring us back to parry’s childhood and early life in california, starting with his family background and early education, and following through his undergraduate years at berkeley where he married his wife, marian thanhouser, joined a bohemian campus element led by anthropologist alfred kroeber, and fathered his first child, marian. this section concludes the completion of parry’s ma thesis (1923) wherein he first highlighted the basic foundation of the theory that would undergird his academic career. chapters 9-16 find the parrys in paris where the young scholar refined his theoretical ideas and defended his two phd theses (1928) at the sorbonne. we learn of his relationships with his academic advisors and witness his introduction to matija murko whose work inevitably led parry to test his theories in yugoslavia. paris also brings the birth of parry’s son, adam. chapters 17-21 travel with the family back to the usa where parry taught at drake before reviews folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 86 assuming a post at harvard. there, he formulates his plan for a field trip to test his theories in an ethnographic context, while his busy work life, and a current of anti-semitism among his colleagues continue to exacerbate marital problems that arose in france. chapters 22-25 outline parry’s two field trips to yugoslavia in 1933 and 1934-35. readers bounce over bumpy roads in the scholar’s ford sedan as he, albert lord, and their guide and interpreter nikola vujnović recruit yugoslav bards. taken to various local hotels, the singers exclaimed their epic songs into the bespoke recording device parry had commissioned for the expedition, etching heroic tales of thousands of verse-lines onto the 3,500 aluminum records still held at harvard today. this section culminates in the discovery of the moslem singer avdo međedović, who proved to parry and lord that exceptional artists of homer’s caliber could still be produced in a traditional milieu. finally, chapters 26-27 cover parry’s senseless end in a california hotel room in 1935 and the rumors that surrounded it, before providing a final assessment of the scholar’s legacy. parry’s story cannot be told without also covering some of the life of albert lord, who almost single-handedly turned parry’s epiphany into a field of research that infiltrated and revolutionized a number of disciplines. lord is depicted sympathetically and shines through many chapters, especially in kanigel discussion of how honor-bound he felt to finish parry’s work, even if the responsibility initially overwhelmed him. the book also offers one final gift: a smattering of commentary about parry’s research from david bynum, once albert lord’s heir apparent, who has been absent from academic engagement for more than a decade due to parkinson’s disease. bynum died in june 2021, and kanigel is one of the last people to have engaged with him before his death. these few insights are welcome echoes of a once familiar voice now lost. for all the research that has gone into this book, the few errors and oversights that made it into the final print are overwhelmingly contained in the sections pertaining to parry’s yugoslav research. unfortunately, it seems that none of the scholars consulted on this material were given the task of reading the final proof of the text. there are abundant typographical errors: the letters č and ć are often mistaken, č and š have their carons inverted to circumflexes, etc. there are also morphological and spelling errors: opanci [traditional peasant shoes] appearing in the accusative rather than the nominative (182), or the word paše [pashas] rendered as pase and pas (191). one also finds odd stylistic choices, such as anglicizing and latinizing heroic names in epic song titles (184), only to later offer others in their original forms (188). finally, there are a series of lacunae and errors in content: the town of udbina is referred to as a country (212); the wax cylinder recordings made by parry’s predecessor matija murko seem to have eluded kanigel’s attention (179, 184); and croatia’s dalmatian hinterland is consistently ignored as a region where epic singing was practiced and where singers were recorded by both parry and murko (4, 129, 160, 177, 178, 180). these problems will only bother the specialist, though, and are largely superficial in view of the target audience of the book (for an academic assessment of parry’s reviews folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 87 research, see the 1971 introduction to his collected works penned by his son adam). parry’s short life was storied and dramatic enough to make for an engaging page-turner, but his research into the formulaic utterances that allow epic singers to craft their songs is not exactly bestselling non-fiction. despite the family drama detailed here and the vivid descriptions of various cities in the early part of the twentieth century, parry’s theoretical revelation and his single-minded marriage to it are the real subjects of this story. it is a testament to kanigel’s writing that he has been able to pay due homage to parry’s theory without letting its explication impede his narrative. this book will captivate and engage an audience unfamiliar with parry’s work—perhaps classicists and folklorists will receive a new wave of students—while also filling in many small biographical gaps for those who are more familiar with parry’s professional than his private life. dorian jurić university of ottawa gatineau, quebec, canada djuric@uottawa.ca zhivaia starina in 2016 zhivaia starina in 2016 folklorica 2016, vol. xx 177 zhivaia starina in 2016 maria v. akhmetova the russian presidential academy of national economy and public administration moscow, russia in 2016 zhivaia starina published the results of regional folklore studies, the activities of russian academic folklore and ethnographic centers, fieldwork and materials and archives. much attention was given to a variety of vernacular literary documents (from old russian manuscripts to naive literature and peasant memoirs). the first issue opened with a new section “in the academician’s study.” the section features interviews with leading russian and international specialists in folklore and traditional culture. the first offering was an interview with s. yu. neklyudov (the journal’s former editor-in-chief, current member of the editorial board) “from king gesar to the persian princess.” the author tells the reader about his academic path to folklore studies and shares his professional plans for the future. the section “folklore and ethnography of the russia’s peoples” brought together articles on family rites, demonology, and folktales of the romani (n. v. bessonov, “fetters on the girls from gypsy’s camps”); the kabardians (a. v. koz’min, “materials on ethnography and mythology of the adighe aul oulyap”); the altaiac peoples (d. yu. doronin, “between a goat and a cannibal: mythological narratives about the almyses in altai”); the nağaybäks (s. yu. beloroussova, “‘here nağaybäk’s soul opens’: commemorational rite ash biru”); and the mordvins (v. i. rogachev, “funeral rites of the erzya and moksha”). the section “regional folklore: the ukrainian enclave in the saratov region” was dedicated to the materials from ethnolinguistic expedition to the samoylovsky district (saratov region, middle volga) by the centre for typological and semiotic folklore studies in the russian state university for the humanities). the study of this ukrainian enclave in the saratov region addresses the rite of folklorica 2016, vol. xx 178 announcing bride’s virginity (n. n. rychkova), the image of magicians (m. i. baiduzh), beliefs in communication with the dead (d. i. antonov), and rituals of buying and selling of cattle (s. s. makarov). the preface to the section was written by e. e. levkievskaya, head of the expedition. the section “mythological personages in folklore” reviews both traditional and contemporary folk material. e. a. dorokhova’s article presented narratives about so-called dobrokhoty [invisible/hidden people] recorded in 1989 and 2014 on the border between russia and belarus’ (the novozybkovsky district in bryansk region and the vetka district in the gomel region). m. o. garder analyzed the motif ‘cows appear from the water,’ which is widespread in the russian north and seems to be analogous to finnish folktales. v. i. shilkin discussed material on magicians and witches collected in volgograd region. o. v. boitsova reveals the genesis of image of the imaginary donor (‘hares’ and ‘foxes’) that parents invented to give presents to their children and transformation of this image in the 20th century. the section “expeditions” includes the material collected in the velsky district, arkhangelsk region (articles by e. p. strel’tsova, a. yu. ulanova, o. yu. emets and a. p. strel’tsova); in the dyachkino sloboda in rostov region (a. v. bredikhin); and in the village of volokovaya in nenets autonomous okrug (a. n. rassykhaev). the second issue opened with the section “word—text— image” dedicated to the visual aspects of the traditional culture. l. n. vinogradova analyzes the image of death personified in the iconography of western europe and old russia and compares it with slavic beliefs. v. ya. petrukhin reviews ‘obscene’ motifs in descriptions of mythological personages and creatures mentioned in chronicles, comparing them with personages from russian and finno-ugrian folklore. the article “burial altars: literary solutions to archaeological problems” by l. a. belyaev provides ethnoarchaeological commentary to literary references to burials on altars that contradict the tradition (but not the canon). g. i. kabakova discovered the literary source of a 19th century lubok ‘genesis and evolution of baba yaga’ – ‘the tale of the nobleman of zaoleshye…’ by v. levshin (1780).” the article “about bliny, the zhivaia starina in 2016 folklorica 2016, vol. xx 179 son-in-law and the mother-in-law” by a. b. moroz is based on the lubok ‘bliny-maker’ (the end of the 18th century) and discusses erotic connotations connected with pancakes and the process of making them in calendar rituals, wedding rites, and non-ritual folklore. o. yu. boitsova analyzes the vernacular prohibition on taking photos from a semiotic viewpoint. regional material from perm made up the section “folklore studies in academic centers: the perm university.” e. m. chetina gave an overview of the activities of the laboratory of visual and cultural anthropology at perm state university. the articles included in the section present the results of collecting and academic conceptualization of peasant’s written memoirs and family chronicles: “‘everything happened, both good and bad…’ (‘story of one family’ by nina ivanova)” by e. m. chetina and e. a. klyuikova; “modern rural biographic narrative: galina anfyorova’s essay ‘granny’” by s. yu. korolyova, k. v. vinogradova, and n. m. teplova; materials on naïve literature “‘home poetry’ by pyotr ivanov” by a. s. belomestnova, and i. v. osipova; “‘life story and fate in form of poems’ (works by ekaterina zvereva)” by m. v. kurochkina and s. yu. korolyova; “‘naïve’ civic poetry by georgy bashkirtsev: texts and contexts” by b. v. kondakov and m.v. kurochkina. the section “regional folkore: eastern frontier of the vologda and kostroma regions” presents the material collected during the toponymical expedition by the ural federal university in 2015 (in the south of the sharyinsky district in kostroma region, the western and central parts of the nikolsky district in vologda region, the south of the kichmengsko-gorodetsky district in vologda region, and the pyshchugsky district in vologda region). e. l. berezovitch, v. s. kuchko and o. d. surikova publish and comment on magic spells and laments. k. a. bormotova and ya. v. mal’kova analyze phraseological units and idioms expressing the beliefs about the supernatural: “to raise jesus christ” (the tradition to cook kisel at the ascension of jesus); “the dead man bite/pinch” (about a bruise), “a magician stayed overnight” (about a badly heated banya), etc. e. l. berezovitch and t. v. leontyeva review a particular form of chastushkas as navetka [hints] from the viewpoint of their content folklorica 2016, vol. xx 180 (information on the love life of the singer) and discuss etymology of name of these chastushkas. v. s. kuchko addresses the dialect lexis regarding the concept of deceit. the “expeditions” section includes the material collected in belarus’ (“narratives about obmiraniia [death experiences] in the krychaw district of the mogilyov region” by o. v. belova). the “jubilees” section marks the ninetieth birthday of v. g. smolitskiy, theorist of literature and folklorist and author of numerous works on epic folklore, history of folklore studies, folklore in russian literature, etc. (article by o. v. belova). the third issue opened with the section “folklore and literacy” and presented a range of materials, including the 18th century compilation of tips and tricks and magical prescriptions (a. l. livshits); a folk prayer for cattle with the mention of mysterious creatures chiuchelo and miachelo from 18th century manuscripts (a. v. dadykin and v. i. erofeeva); herbalist manuals from the 19th/20th centuries (a. b. ippolitova); manuscripts about magical stones: ‘eagle stone’, ‘swallow stone’, ‘hen stone’, etc., from the 18th century natural book (o. v. belova); and a manuscript of magic spells and folk prayers from volgograd region (v. a. shilkin). a detailed folkloristic and linguistic commentary to the publication by a. v. dadykin and v. i. erofeeva was published in the fourth issue of the journal in the section “reviews” (“back to the published: ‘chiuchelo-miachelo’” by e. l. berezovitch, o. v. belova). the section “ethno-confessional communication and folklore” featured articles dedicated to cooperation and mutual influence of representatives of different cultures and confessions. o. n. palikova analyzes unofficial anthroponyms of mixed russian and estonian villages in the territories of the western chude, where the russianspeaking population is represented by both old and new believers. s. n. amosova studies folktales about the relations among the latvians, russian and jews in the period between the two world wars. m. g. solomatina reviewed the expressions on faith and faithlessness in the arkhangelsk dialects, providing broad linguistic material, with a focus on the lexis defining religious people and atheists. a considerable portion of the articles published in the section zhivaia starina in 2016 folklorica 2016, vol. xx 181 “folk costume” concerned the contemporary state of the culture of russian old believers living in other ethnic environments. t. morris (yumsunova) dedicates her article to the clothes of the old believers living in the state of oregon (usa); o. g. rovnova wrote about the old believers in latin america; and i. v. dynnikova compared the old believers’ clothes for the newborns and the dead in latin america. material on the russian old believers was reviewed in the article by l.v. sinitsyna titled “traditional costumes of the smolensk region”. the 30th anniversary of the nuclear accident at the chernobyl nuclear power plant was marked by the section “chernobyl: after 30 years.” this section included materials on the folk calendar, magic and demonology, and rites and religious folklore collected from the natives of the villages sivenka and chervonny kut in the vetka district of gomel region who were resettled after the accident (g. i. lopatin). the year of 2016 marked the 20-year anniversary of the death of n. i. tolstoy, academician and first editor-in-chief of zhivaia starina. the section “memorable dates” contains two letters written in 1975 and 1994 by n. i. tolstoy to the byelorussian slavist g. a. tsykhun, his friend and colleague. the “expeditions” section presented field materials collected in the bryansk region (“the week after pentecost in the local tradition of the northeastern bryansk region” by a. a. mazhukina) and in the oryol region (“expedition to the soskovsky district in the oryol region” by p.a. skrylnikov). the “jubilees” section marked the birthday of saintpetersburg folklore specialist and theorist of literature a. f. belousov, a researcher of urban folklore and the culture and daily life of the pre-revolutionary and contemporary school, and local texts of russian provinces (the article by m. v. stroganov). the first section of the fourth issue is dedicated to “folk writing,” including written vernacular memoirs, epistolaries and diaries. a. v. pigin published excerpts from the diary of the peasant g. ya. sitnikov from the mezensky district (19th-20th centuries) concerning the cult of the local saint iov ushchel’skiy and his miracles. s. yu. korolyova and a. s. belomestnova reviewed correspondence of the stranniki [wanderers] old believers’ sect. folklorica 2016, vol. xx 182 naïve memoirs were analyzed by s. yu. korolyova and k. v. vinogradova (“‘just life’ of the komi-permyak klavdia berenyuk”), by m. v. stroganov (“‘the memories i wrote down’: memoirs of m. m. shirkina (tver)”), and by n. m. kurennaia (“from the ‘memoirs’ by the saint-petersburg worker boris shteinfas”). a new section titled “tradition — symbol — brand” was featured. the section is dedicated to local symbolism and engagement with traditional culture elements in local branding efforts. the article by e. v. minyonok titled “‘all-sagutyevo’s’ feast ‘dremá’” reviewed the process of the holiday restoration and outlined the differences between present and former celebrations. e. g. boronina discussed the restoration of the traditional dance quadrille in the old believers’ village of stepanovo (orekhovozuyevsky district in moscow region). t. v. volodina analyzed the semantics and erotic subtext of the byelorussian ritual game “the cat” (“to bake the cat”, “to celebrate the cat”, etc.) on the final day before the nativity fast. m. v. akhmetova reviewed vernacular interpretations of the coat of arms of the city of narva (estonia). material collected in italy provided the basis for the article by s. a. sidneva in which she described the patronal festival of madonna, the saint patron of the trastevere district of rome. t. gunnell highlighted the genesis and modern functioning of the characters of fjallkonan (the lady of the mountain) in the icelandic national tradition. the section “archival files” included an article by t. k. pasternak in which she examines the ethnographic activity of e. n. kletnova (1869—1938) as well as the reflection of russian folk motifs in her literary works. the publication by t. k. pasternak entitled legends of local peasants (with commentaries by m. v. akhmetova and o. v. belova) presented folk legends, fables and fairy-tales collected by e. n. kletnova in 1910s. “in the academician’s study” centered on the career of the slavist l. n. vinogradova, member of the editorial board of zhivaia starina, who discussed her academic path and published excerpts from her 1970s field diaries. “expeditions” presented materials collected in ukrainian villages in belgorod region (v. e. zhivaia starina in 2016 folklorica 2016, vol. xx 183 dobrovol’skaya, “traditional bakery in the ukrainian village of kozinka (grayvoronsky district, belgorod region)” and in villages of old believers in latvia (a. a. plotnikova, “about the expedition to the latgalian old believers”). it also included expeditions by the center of jewish studies “sepher” to the vitebsk region in belarus’ (o. v. belova), the latgale region (latvia), the smolensk region (russia) and to israel (s.n. amosova). in 2016 the journal published 15 reviews of new scholarly publications, (8 on russian publications and 7 on works from other countries), 8 academic chronicles, one conference review and a description of the publications of the n. a. rimsky-korsakov saint petersburg state conservatory. each issue contained a bibliographical overview of new books (“new literature on folklore, ethnography, ethnolinguistic” by o. v. trefilova). translated by ekaterina s. polkovnikova folklorica author guidelines folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 100 author guidelines folklorica publishes materials in english. authors are encouraged to translate their manuscripts into english prior to submission. submissions in slavic and east european languages may be considered 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should be addressed to: the editor, dr. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby e-mail: j.rouhier@uky.edu folklorica style sheet available online: https://journals.ku.edu/folklorica/about/submissions#stylesheet transliteration chart available online: https://journals.ku.edu/folklorica/about/submissions#transliteration book reviews length: 800-1200 words. format of entries: author. title in italics (series name, if applicable). place: publisher, year of publication. additional features: notes. bibliography. author guidelines folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 101 glossary. index. (if applicable in the order they appear). number of pp. price (cloth). price (paper). isbn number for each. doe, jane. introduction to slavic folklore (world folklore series). boston, ma: slavic publishing, 2006. notes. bibliography. index. xv+314. $45.95 (paper). isbn 0-123-456-789. if the language is other than english provide a translation of the title. if the author’s name is in cyrillic, provide a transliteration. give the publication information in the original language as it appears in the book, do not transliterate. give the page number for all direct quotes in parentheses (179-81). no bibliography or footnotes; please incorporate into the text of the review. please end your review with your name, affiliation, city, country and email address left-justified. direct all reviews and inquiries to: laura olson osterman book review editor, folklorica university of colorado, boulder germanic and slavic languages and literatures 276 ucb, mckenna 129 boulder, co 80309-0276 (lolson@colorado.edu) structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 1 articles structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats’ka oblast’ of ukraine: a case study elena boudovskaia georgetown university washington, d.c., usa abstract this article analyses the transcript of the story-telling session with two participants, an 89-year-old woman and a 54-year-old man, that i audio-recorded in august of 2014 in the village of novoselytsia in the transcarpathian region of ukraine. although western ukrainian and rusyn folk stories have been extensively collected since 1880-s (hnatiuk 1897, 1898, 1900, rozdol’s’kyi 1899, 1900, etc.), entire story-telling sessions in these region have not been studied. my transcript reflects certain features of story-telling performance’s macroand micro-structure that either do not get recorded or get edited out in publications of folk texts, such as interaction between participants, discourse markers for organizing performance, repetitions, and digressions into everyday reality. after analyzing these features using hymes’ approach to linguistic and discourse markers in folk performance, i foreground the precise mechanism through which the collective creation of folklore [jakobson and bogatyrev 1980 [1929]] takes place. introduction in the summer of 2014 in novoselytsia i was fortunate to have the opportunity to record approximately an hour-long story performance: an 89-yearold woman and her 54-year-old adopted son were telling me stories that dido ‘old man’, the woman’s late husband, used to tell. i transcribed the entire story-telling session, which consisted of twenty-one stories and the remarks during and between stories. the stories are listed below; the complete transcript may be found in the appendix to this article. at first glance, the transcript of the recording appears awkward. each storyteller uses a lot of repetitions, repairs, and filler words; participants interrupt each other, add some details, argue about others, and remember things after the story is finished. however, all these features are important because they capture the story-telling session i witnessed and participated in. they are essential for analyzing this session as performance, which is the goal of this article. i argue that these corrections, interruptions, and discussions, usually omitted from publications of folk texts, are in the performance for a reason; they are pivotal in establishing the two-way connection between participants, which in its turn shapes the performed piece. jakobson and bogatyrev [1980 [1929]] defined folklorica 2015, vol. xix 2 folklore as a collective creation, and it has been one of central ideas in folkloristics for almost a century, but the exact mechanism of collective creation needs studying in the context of each tradition. my research starts to fill this gap for the rusyn story-telling. the approach to folklore as performance is also part of the mainstream in folkloristics today. there have been several approaches that stress the central role of performance in folklore. one approach views oral performance, analyzed from the point of view of language and discourse, as central for understanding the connection between verbal art, culture, and society, since performance constantly creates and re-creates tradition. (1) as hymes put it, “in an oral tradition performance is a mode of existence and realization that is partly constitutive of what the tradition is” [1975: 19]. a great deal of research taking this approach has been done, mostly on native american and other non-european cultures. (2) another approach that emphasizes performance and its constitutive role in tradition is the oral theory, beginning with parry and lord’s work on homer and yugoslav epics (3); this approach has largely been confined to the slavic tradition, and focuses only on epic songs (see, e.g., the overview in foley [1996a]), rather than on slavic prose genres. my basic goal was to study the features of the recorded performance and their functions. following hymes, i relied on a number of his methods. working with the disappearing tradition of chinookan narrative, hymes distinguished between performance, which is the main, constitutive aspect of tradition, and other dimensions of folkloric knowledge that may exist even when the tradition of authoritative performance is no longer there. he noticed three dimensions of competence in a cultural tradition, namely, the ability to report, interpret, and perform a certain aspect of culture [hymes 1975: 14 ff]. hymes’ insight that reporting and performance are different, though interconnected phenomena, has been corroborated in my material; for one, performance turned out to be more gender-specific than reporting and interpretation (both performers knew, and could discuss the meanings of, all the stories, but they had distinct preferences in telling them.) the reasons for this distinction merit further investigation. second, hymes paid special attention to linguistic features of performance, including its discourse features. applied to the story-telling session in novoselytsia, this attention to linguistic phenomena revealed that both the macro-level and microlevel in the performance contained a number of structural features that were mostly overlooked before. the reason why these phenomena largely remained invisible for folklore study was that they almost never made it into published texts. on the one hand, they were traditionally considered to be useless interruptions for the smooth flow of narration. in addition, before the advent of audio-recording technology, they were too difficult or even impossible to record. on the macrolevel, the phenomena i have observed in this session are: interruptions during performance, exchanges between participants (suggestions by listeners and acceptance or rejection of these suggestions by story-tellers, etc.); discussions before and after stories (negotiations of meaning and supplying additional details); and choice of a new story to tell. (4) on the micro-level, they include structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 3 certain types of discourse organizing devices: inversion of word order, connectors, and repetition. other types of discourse devices used for organizing performance, namely, poetic formulae, have also been studied in epic poetry by the school of lord and parry. my material does not include poetic formulae per se; however, i show that certain devices present in my material, namely, connectors and repetition, play in prose story-telling a role which is similar to the role of formulae for poetic genres: both groups of phenomena organize performance for performers, giving them time to think, and for the audience, providing a feeling of suspense. finally, i show that the features of performance present in my material on both the microand macro-level are pivotal to the shaping of stories during the process of interaction between story-teller(s) and their audience. this interaction is the precise mechanism of the collective creation, which is the essence of folklore according to jakobson and bogatyrev [1929]. i was especially interested in the following issues, which i will address in detail below after a discussion on the narrators’ background and the performance context: 1 general organization of the performance on the macro-level: its parts, markers for specific parts, ways of linking parts together (e.g., what happens between one story and another); 2 techniques for participation of the two story-tellers; their roles, respective contributions, their interaction with each other and with me, their corrections and explanations; 3 how the text is generated (in the assumption that it is not all told from memory); what elements are used in its generation; how the text is organized on the micro-level; 4 ways of connecting the world of the stories with the present, and the status of stories for the tellers as truth; finally, i will consider the roles of these elements generally in the creation of the folk performance and/or text. background information novoselytsia the village of novoselytsia is situated at 48º 41’ 59" n 23º 29’ 12" e, in the zakarpats’ka oblast’ (region), mizhhir’ia district, in a mountainous area 475 meters above sea level. there are 1054 inhabitants in novoselytsia according to the 2011 census. the zakarpats’ka region was part of the austro-hungarian empire, and then, between the wars, became part of czechoslovakia, but novoselytsia itself is only a couple of miles away from the mountain ridge separating the zakarpats’ka region from the l’vivs’ka and ivano-frankivs’ka regions that once belonged to poland. these historical borders are still remembered; in novoselytsia people often referred to the linguistically and folklorica 2015, vol. xix 4 culturally similar population of the neighboring villages of l’vivs’ka and ivanofrankivs’ka regions as poliaky (poles). the climate in novoselytsia is moderate, but the winter is long, about 5.5 months, and snowy. the main crop that can be cultivated in this climate is potato; also important are cabbage, cucumbers, onions, beets, and several types of beans; before wwii, people also used to grow oats for bread. much of the land is used for mowing grass for hay. most inhabitants practice traditional agriculture: they have gardens, and keep cows, pigs, and chickens; some also keep sheep or goats that are herded in the mountain meadows in summer. there are not many jobs available, and people mostly survive off their land. in order to earn money, men may go to other countries to work as builders; women can earn money by gathering blueberries in summer for sale. there are two schools in the village, an elementary school (4 grades) and a high school (11 grades). fieldwork and language i came to novoselytsia several times between 1986 and 1992, recording texts and collecting information on the dialect. in 2010 during the expedition financed by a collaborative research project grant from neh to study dialects and folklore of transcarpathia and adjacent regions, i visited novoselytsia again for a one-day pilot study. since that time, i have travelled to novoselytsia several times, recording dialectal texts, mostly from women, and from some men, in their 70s and 80s. (5) the language my informants speak between themselves and the one i address them in is rusyn. rusyn is an idiom with a number of regional varieties; in slovakia and serbia, it is viewed as a minority slavic language, and in ukraine as a dialect of ukrainian; for more detailed treatment see, pugh [2009: vii-20]. my field materials, on which the article is based, reflect the variety spoken in novoselytsia, which may vary from other types of rusyn. informants, recording session, and its results the recorded story-telling session took place in august of 2014 in novoselytsia. my informants were: hk, female, 89 years old, illiterate, and her adopted son, is, 54 years old, high school graduate. the family’s brief history is as follows: hk was born in pryslip, the neighboring village, in 1925; she married a man from novoselytsia and moved there in the 1940s. they had one son who died in 1970; after that they adopted their remote relative, is, who was in the 9th grade. the goal of adoption was to have a person who could help them work, take care of them in their old age, and inherit their house and land after they were gone. later is got married and lived in the couple’s house with his wife, ls. his children are now college students and have moved away. is performs the functions of a reader in the local church; he is respected as a teetotaler. hk’s husband died several years ago, leaving his wife, adopted son and daughter-in-law (around 50 years of age) in the house. their interaction is friendly and respectful. is and ls do work in the house and in the field on behalf of hk; structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 5 she is still active and participates in household tasks; they ask her not to strain herself, but she states she cannot ‘sit around doing nothing.’ the interaction took place in hk’s house. i was brought in and introduced by the principal of novoselytsia high school; he began with the standard introductory words that i was from america and had been coming to novoselytsia for a number of years because i was interested in ‘how people lived in olden times.’ i indicated my wish to talk with hk because she was the oldest person in the household and i wanted to record what the members of the older generation remembered. having received hk’s oral consent for recording and using materials for possible publication in america, i started asking her open-ended questions about household practices in the times past (e.g., how did you spin and weave? how did you do laundry? how did you bake bread? etc.). i turned the recorder on at the beginning of the session and left it on for the entire conversation. hk was interested and talked with enthusiasm for about an hour; sometimes i would ask her for explanations or switch the topic, if she was silent for a while. i asked hk first about weaving and flax and hemp-working techniques and then about christmas rituals. at some point is joined us; i repeated that i wanted to record the elder generation. he was very understanding and did not volunteer much information, though he listened with great interest. generally, i discourage members of the younger generation from participating because elderly people sometimes feel embarrassed that they do not ‘speak the proper language,’ especially when the younger generation starts to correct their speech offering nondialectal, ‘city,’ or literary ukrainian forms instead. however, is was speaking the village dialect to his adoptive mother, and she did not change her manner or speaking habits when he joined us. is reminded hk if she forgot certain details, but other details were unknown to him, and he was interested in what hk was saying. after about twenty more minutes, hk and is started discussing village events that had a supernatural twist, i.e., how and why a certain woman got struck by lightning, and from there they switched to other folk stories of various genres. i did not interrupt them, and they were talking for quite some time. then i started asking whether they heard such and such a story, suggesting plots i had heard in other carpathian villages; they most often had not heard these stories, but remembered other stories similar in some respect, and then they added even more stories. apparently, hk was more of authority in weaving and even in christmas rituals than she was in stories, where she accepted is’s suggestions more often than not. hk and is mentioned that some of these stories were the ones dido (‘the old man,’ i.e., the deceased husband of hk and adoptive father of is) used to tell. they repeated several times what a good story-teller he was and what a pity it was i had not met him. the whole story-telling session lasted for approximately fortyfive minutes; at that point is stepped out, and hk continued talking and answering my questions for about fifteen more minutes. then she invited me to have a meal with them, and i turned off the recorder. however, in the course of the meal hk or is sometimes remembered another story; then i would turn on the recorder again, record the story, and then turn it off till the next story. in such a way i folklorica 2015, vol. xix 6 recorded an additional 12 minutes of story-telling. altogether i recorded twentyone stories, including an account of the death of hk’s own son and the two dreams she had in this connection. story content a brief summary of the plots of their stories is in the chart below. an entire transcript of the stories may be found in the appendix: # content place in recording teller who sugges ted genre #1 a woman in the village says she is not afraid of lightning and then she is struck by lightning 21-1:04 21-1:06 (6) hk hk memorate #2 three pregnant women receive prophecies about their children’s future deaths; all three children die exactly the way it was predicted 21-1:06 21-1:10 hk is religious legend #3 a young woman wants to go to church but cannot do so because no one can sit with her baby; when an unknown old man (an angel) lets her go, she sees a full church and hears a beautiful sermon; when she comes home, the old man tells her there were only three people in the church, and the priest was driving bricks; when she asks the priest, it turned out he was really thinking about building his house and not about the sermon 21-1:10 21-1:14 hk is religious legend #4 a soldier is going home, asks to sleep in a certain house, in this house a woman gives birth and the soldier hears someone prophesy that the newborn girl will be this soldier’s wife; the soldier puts a girl on a stick in the fence and leaves; years later 21-1:14 21-1:21 hk is tale of fate akin to atu 930 structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 7 # content place in recording teller who sugges ted genre he marries that very girl and then recognizes her by the scar #5 a student is going home, an old man in an oxcart gives him a ride, when they are in the middle of a river the old man tells the student to get off the cart; then the student stays for a night at the old men’s house, steals the fried goose from the oven and leaves old shoes in the oven instead 21-1:21 21-1:27 hk, is hk anecdote #6 st. peter expresses a wish to be god, and has to herd geese for the whole day 21-1:27 21-1:29 hk hk religious legend / jest atu 774d #7 st. peter and jesus encounter a lazy young man and a hardworking girl, and jesus says this man will marry this girl because this way they will both survive 21-1:29 21-1:30 hk is religious legend atu 822 #8 st. peter and jesus stay for the night at the house of a man and his wife who is drinking hard, and she beats st. peter twice 21-1:30 21-1:34 hk is religious legend / jest atu 791 #9 a roma outwits a priest: first the roma says he killed a rabbit by shooting it with a hoe, and then they have a dreamtelling contest where the roma cheats the priest out of the rabbit 21-1:34 21-1:37 is is anecdote #10 a monk in a monastery exorcises a devil out of a person 21-1:38 21-1:40 hk, is memorate #11 a person from a village makes a thief who stole his harrow bring the harrow back to him 21-1:41 21-1:42 is ? memorate folklorica 2015, vol. xix 8 # content place in recording teller who sugges ted genre #12 a man is going by cart; when he passed a building site the builders magically stop his horses; he makes horses go again and makes one of the builders hurt himself 21-1:42 21-1:46 hk hk memorate #13 a woman in the neighboring village magically stops a tractor that trespassed on her land 21-1:46 21-1:47 is is memorate #14 certain tree in the forest is destined to kill a person 21-1:50 21-1:51 hk is belief? memorate ? #15 a man gets lost in the woods because he went to the woods on sunday; he only can find the way when he makes the sign of the cross 21-1:52 hk memorate #16 three girls are going across the rail track before a train but are not killed; devil says he cannot harm them because they are protected by the sign of the cross or by prayer 21-1:53 21-1:54 hk religious legend #17 in a place where a person got killed by a tree there is a voice that says ‘watch out, watch out’ 21-1:56 hk belief? #18 how the speaker’s son died and what two dreams she saw in this connection 21-1:58 21-2:05 hk personal experienc e tale; memorate #19 roma outwit a rich landowner who wanted to know how they earned their living, and cheat him out of his two horses 22-00 2202 hk ? anecdote #20 ‘don’t pity an orphan, don’t tell the truth to your wife, don’t let a rich landowner borrow your money’ 22-03 2207 hk, is hk realistic tale, akin to atu 893 the unreliabl e friends and atu structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 9 # content place in recording teller who sugges ted genre 910-919 good precepts #21 devil introduces hard liquor, makes a man beat his wife, and makes people behave like foxes, like wolves, and like pigs 22-07 2212 hk is? religious legend similar to at 1427.1 organization of the performance on the macro-level the performance i attended was different from what a regular performance would be like, first and foremost because i was (in) the audience. my initial request to hear “about the old life” was an artificial occasion, and i was an unusual listener. i also wanted to listen mostly to hk, which could have influenced the distribution of roles in performing. on the other hand, this performance was closer to a regular performance than to a one-on-one recording session in the sense that there were two performers, who were not only bearers of the same culture, but members of the same household, apparently with experience of participating in similar events in their family circle. they seemed to incorporate me in their event, not worried by, but alert to, my presence. this alertness mostly showed in their being extra helpful, explaining meanings of words and realia to me, a stranger (1:12, 1:14, 1:16, etc.). there seemed to be more of such explanations than there would be, for example, at a session including a younger family member. otherwise, it felt like a normal and successful performance, in the sense that both performers seemed to have a good time telling stories to a new audience, as good performers usually do. the general pattern of the session was as follows: one person would remember and suggest a story, then s/he or the other person would tell it, while the one who was not telling would listen and comment. the comments were usually short, from a couple of words to a short sentence, but numerous, up to 67 comments during a 5-minute long story. the commentator would either explain what was going on (is: “she did not have anyone to leave a baby with,” 1:11) or anticipate what was going to happen (hk: “and off he went,” 1:22). the teller would mostly agree with the comments and continue with the story. when the story was over, the participants would discuss it, repeating key moments from the story, explaining the characters’ motivation and commenting on the general meaning of the story (e.g., see the discussions at the end of #1 at 1:05, or #4 at 1:21, or #19 at 02 in the appendix). this discussion would last for some time until one of the tellers suggested another story. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 10 differences in the story-telling of hk and is the two performers each had a distinct part in the telling. hk told the most stories. her stories were intricate and captivating, though her memory, probably due to her age, was at times faulty: while telling, she sometimes said she was not sure of a detail (1:07, 1:09, 1:16, 1:20, 1:43, 1:46, etc.), or she would forget something and add it as an afterthought (1:09), or is would add it for her (1:18). she also was the only one to add a long digression to one of her stories (how she used to go on foot to the nearest town 1:15). when is was telling a story, hk would comment from time to time, mostly to suggest a word (1:24), to anticipate a narrated event (1:22), or just to agree (1:22). hk told three times as many stories (18 stories out of 21, 3 of them together with is, 15 independently, while is told 6 stories, 3 of them with hk, 3 by himself). however, is was also able to tell stories, which he did a couple of times when he thought hk was wrong or when she did not remember the plot (1:22 the story of the student, 03 ‘don’t tell secrets to your wife’). in terms of number of words, hk said only a little more than twice as many words as is (hk 6683 words, is 2687 words). that is, is was true to his word and let hk tell more stories, but at the same time he himself was talking a lot. on the one hand, his stories, though fewer, tended to be long and elaborate, containing a number of episodes each, as well as a lot of detail and dialogue (#5, 9, 20). on the other hand, he gave a lot of commentary and explanations on a number of topics, from explanations of words and realia (1:12, etc.) to commentaries on the plot and the characters’ motivations (1:13, 1:14, etc.). he often rephrased something that had been already said, or added a detail. he also corrected hk if he felt she was mistaken (1:22). he also often remembered a new story and suggested that hk tell it (stories #2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 14, possibly 21). the difference between the styles of the two performers seems to stem from their attitude to the stories and, generally, to the tradition. hk was inside the tradition; she did not perceive story as object (7); for her, the performance and the story were fused. she did not think i might need explanations on the story during performance and only rarely provided spontaneous translations (1:12). is was more conscious of story as object, and of the possibility that i, a stranger, would not understand it, so he was providing report and interpretation during the telling. (8) in addition, is apparently felt in charge not only for the text, but also for the performance. when he did not know something hk knew, he urged her to tell about it (1:47, about the tree killing a person). several times when she forgot a detail he perceived as important, he jumped in and supplied it (1:12 about the angel seeing only the three people who prayed devoutly as the ones really present in the church; 1:18 about the soldier rejecting the idea that the girl he saw being born would become his wife, etc.) on several occasions he thought of a story and reminded hk of it, so that she could tell it. however, besides organizing the performance, he also could perform (in hymes’ terms), and was just as good a story-teller as hk was. structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 11 there also seemed to be a difference between the genres of stories each person preferred to tell. the stories include: memorates (in which i also include the stories told by ‘friend of a friend’, i.e., ## 1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15), religious legends and tales of fate (##3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 16, 20, 21), and anecdotes (##5, 9, 19, 20). among the six memorates, most were, expectedly, told by hk (told 4, suggested 2). is told, or participated in telling, three memorates, and suggested only one. however, the two memorates he told on his own (##11 and 13) are short and not as impressive as, for example, a well-developed #12, suggested and told by hk. the overall impression is that memorates were not is’s favorite genre. memorates # teller who suggested 1 hk hk 10 hk, is 11 is ? 12 hk hk 13 is is 15 hk out of eight religious legends and tales of fate, hk told eight and suggested two; is told one (together with hk) and suggested five. again, hk was the main teller. is often suggested a tale, but rarely told it himself (maybe because i had said i wanted hk to talk). however, he seemed to know them all, and if hk forgot something, is was eager to step in (#20). religious legends, tales of fate # teller who suggested 3 hk is 4 hk is 6 hk hk 7 hk is 8 hk is 16 hk 20 hk, is hk 21 hk is? in anecdotes and non-religious legends, is was more often a teller than in other story types: he told three stories out of four (two of them with hk), and suggested one, while hk told three (two of them with is), and suggested two. though hk may have suggested an anecdote and start telling it, is just could not help himself because he was sure he knew the story better and could tell it better (as in #5). with stories of other types, according to my request, is tried to let hk tell as many stories as she remembered, but with anecdotes, more often than with other types of stories, is told the stories himself. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 12 anecdotes # teller who suggested 5 hk, is hk 9 is is 19 hk ? 20 hk, is hk thus, the recorded storytelling session showed a difference between male and female roles in storytelling performance, if not in the knowledge of the stories of various genres. is knew all three types of stories, i.e., memorates, religious legends, and anecdotes, but he preferred to tell anecdotes. my impression was that he was not particularly interested in memorates. however, he vividly discussed one memorate (#12), possibly because he knew and trusted the person (dido) who used to tell it. hk knew and told all three types of stories, but memorates and religious legends seemed to be more to her taste. thus, we can hypothesize that anecdotes are more of a men’s domain, while religious legends and memorates are women’s. this contention is supported by previous research as well; see, dégh [1999: 582] noticing that in contemporary story-telling, “[d]evelopment of genre specialization may be observed between the sexes: the märchen and the ghost stories became almost exclusively feminine, whereas men became the tellers of jokes, lies, and humorous and adventurous occupational and personal narratives,” or kiliánová [1999:104] stating that among her informants in rural slovakia in 1981-83, “the best narrators of anecdotes from the society’s point of view (and also my own view) were men…while the best performer of magic tales and ghost stories was a woman.” moreover, dégh [1989: 159] observed during her fieldwork in the hungarian village of kakasd in the 1940s-50s, that religious legends “were especially favored by […] women.” thus, the fact suggested in literature that men are more prone to telling certain types of stories (i.e., anecdotes), and women, others (i.e., religious legends), is supported by the recording session in novoselytsia. what is significant is that it while performance is gender-specific, knowledge of the stories is not. both is and hk were equally familiar with narratives of all three genres. organization of the performance on the micro-level both hk and is followed particular patterns when telling a story. first, they suggested a story: they referred to it either by a plot summary (that happened more often with short, uncomplicated stories): “how one person was told that he would die from a tree, when a beam fell on him” (#2), “how st. peter was herding geese” (#6), “how a woman beat st. peter” (#8), “a woman stopped tractors” (#13), “where moonshine came from” (#21), etc., or by using the initial, expository portion: “how that woman wanted to go to church” (#3), “how a soldier was returning from the army” (#4), “how a student crossed a river” (#5), “how that guy was lying under a pear-tree when they were passing by” (#7), or, less frequently, by a punch line: “when god permits, a hoe fires” (#9), “don’t pity an structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 13 orphan, don’t tell the truth to your wife, don’t lend money to a nobleman” (#20). the majority of such references were relative clauses beginning with the word “how.” they may not be titles in strict sense. since some of them include deictic elements (“that woman”, “that guy”), they might be occasional descriptions rather than fixed titles for these specific stories, and might have only a mnemonic function. (9) stories usually started with a sentence where a subject and predicate were in the reversed order, i.e., predicate (underlined in the examples below) subject (bolded): #1: hk | сиді́ли три́ жо́ны | у кантốрі | ‘three women were sitting in the office’ 1:04; #3: hk а | тото́ | тото́ ішли́ | ішли́ три́ жо́ны | бе́ремêньні | ай ішốв за ни́ми ді́до | та не́ | ді́до | а́нгель_ ішốв | за ни́ми | ‘once, three women were walking, three pregnant women, and behind them, an old man was walking. it was not an old man, but an angel, he walked after them’ 1:06, etc. this word-order in the closely related russian language “ha[s] long been associated with folklore, poeticity, and stylization [e.g. adamec 1966, kovtunova 1980]” [yokoyama 1986: 284]. however, in the recording session, this word order occurred not only at the beginning of a story. it also marked the occasions when a new person was (re)introduced in the narration: | она́ бы ішла́ до цếрькви | і ту́й захо́дит ді́до | до хы́жі ‘and this one wants so much to go to church. and here an old man enters the house.’ (1:11); она́ бы́ла пішла́ айбо діти́ну | а́йно ниє ́на ко́го лиши́ти | но і захо́дить ді́до | ‘she wanted to go, but there was no one to leave the baby with. and so an old man comes in, …’ (1:11); | бо́г приє́мле | лише́ трôї́х | а дру́гых нєт́ | но | ду́мат она́ тогды́ сôбі́ но шчо́ | ‘god accepts only three, but not others. well, then she thinks to herself…’ (1:13); ді́до пішốв ге́т | буде́ ôна́ іти́ до попа́ | бде́ каза́ти се попо́ви | ‘the old man went away. she [decided] to go to the priest, will tell that to the priest…’ (1:13), etc. overall, this word order seems to be a device to shift the focus of the narration to a new person, whether it is at the beginning of the story or in its middle, rather than a specific device for starting a story. in the text of each story one can detect a number of discourse markers with framing functions. (10) the expressions а ‘and’, і ‘and’, туй, туйкы ‘here’, уже́ ‘already’, но ‘well, and’, а́йно ‘yes, well’ mark a beginning of a new episode (framing devices are underlined in the examples below). (11) they may be combined, as in быв | ішốв із | сол… | із а́рміі солда́т | і ту́йкы уже́ ся примếрькло ні́ч | ‘a soldier was returning from the army, and it already became dark, the night started’ (1:15; the english translation is not a word-by-word translation and does not always convey the clustering of markers), or: | і каза́в | но | сếї жоны́ ся вто́пит сếї жоны́ | но забы́ла м шчо́ | а сếї жоны́ | де́рево убь’є́ | а́йно | но і ту́йкы уже́ | хлốпці повыроста́ли | росту́т | ‘and he said, this woman’s [child] will drown, this woman’s i forgot what, and this woman’s [child] will be killed by a tree. yes. and then boys already grew up, they are growing’ (1:07). the expressions тай нич / но і нич / но і всьо ‘and that’s it’, ‘nothing more happened’, ‘ok’ usually close an episode and at the same time build suspense, making listeners anticipate what is coming: іс пі́п ду́мав шчо | шчôзь_ вы́грати шчế | гк піп вы́грат іс но | най бу́де | но тай ни́ч | пôліга́ли folklorica 2015, vol. xix 14 спа́ти спля́т | а за́яць у печи́ | пече́ ся | ра́но пробуди́ли ся | is: ‘…the priest thought he would win something. hk: that the priest would win. is: well, ok. ok. they went to sleep, they are sleeping, and the rabbit is in the oven, baking. in the morning they woke up…’ (1:36). the words тай та́к ‘and that is it; and that is how it was’ often served as an episode closing marker; sometimes they ended the whole story (1:14, 1:30, 2:05), but they also could end an episode (1:26, 08) or a digression within a story (1:15). these markers indicating the opening and closing of an episode may appear to be mere fillers, but in fact they function similarly to formulae in oral poetry by giving the teller time to think, and, at the same time, creating suspense for listeners. unlike the formulae in oral poetry, these markers do not have rhythmical structure, as one would expect in a prose genre, but they add both structure and suspense, allowing the listeners to detect what part of episode they are in, and at the same time holding them in anticipation about what content they are going to hear. (12) another device that functions similarly to opening and closing markers is repetition, as in: | но тай ліга́ют спа́ти | тай пôліга́ли спа́ти тай | ‘and they go to sleep. and they went to sleep’ (1-24). the repetition is never exact, but repeating the word with slight variations in several sentences allows the storyteller to gain time to think, and slows the story down for the listeners, building suspense. (13) in the recording session there were no specific folkloric formulae closing a story (of the type e.g., of the rhyming “i stepped on a rock, and that was the end of the story. i stepped on a stick, tell me if [what i told] was not right” as in pan’kevych [1938:463]. pan’kevych recorded this ending in a humorous personal experience tale; though generally such endings are known from fairy tales, it appeared in another type of story in this case. theoretically an ending like this could have appeared in one of the stories in the session; however, it did not. it is not clear whether such endings are generally not typical for genres other than fairy tales (14), or have disappeared from the story-telling practices, or whether they are still in usage under specific circumstances, e.g. if the end of the story is also the end of a story-telling session, or whether some tellers use them while others do not. after a story would end, the two participants would start a discussion, repeating the punchline if there was one, discussing the meaning of the story, its connection to everyday life (“so that’s how it is now too” 1:14), returning to a specific episode of the story and repeating something from the text or adding what they had forgotten to say, and then again returning to the overall meaning of the story, tying the details with the main message. this commentary would take some time. its point seems to be to keep the audience and the tellers in the story-telling mood; this mood lingers while the discussion is going on until someone thinks of another story to tell; if no one does, the session is over. my questions to the two story-tellers whether they knew of such and such story seemed to fall within the framework of a story-telling session; these questions helped the story-tellers remember a new story even though usually it was not the one i suggested. in my view, it was appropriate to suggest a story to hk and is, since that was what they structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 15 did between themselves as well. i also asked questions about details of the previous story and that prompted them to expand on the explanations and, therefore, to stay in the story-telling mood. the only difference i could see between my and their discourse strategies is that i asked questions, while they did not; their suggestions, explanations and even questions would be in the form of a statement or a request. the general role of questions and statements in discourse in the dialect of novoselytsia may be different from english (e.g., the normal way of saying “i don’t know” is а я́ зна́ю? ‘(what) do i know?’). however, in this case, i think i have an understanding of hk and is’s usage of statements in form: even if they expressed their uncertainty about specific details, their statements might have indicated their knowledge of these stories, in terms of both meaning and context, while my questions indicated i was ignorant of the tradition and asking for assistance in a way. in order to make clear how these elements operated in context, i will now provide an analysis of the transition from one story to the next on the micro-level. below is a transition between stories #18 and #19, at 02, in english translation. 1. hk: [finishing the story] […] the roma got on the horse and says: now one pull [the coach], and the other, push it. and off he went, and never came back, this way he went to fetch the manta [deception]. they [the roma] took both horses. and the coach remained, and the nobleman remained, and his coachman remained. 2. is: the roma got on the horse and says: fare you well… 3. hk: yes, yes, fare you well… 4. is: one person, pull it, the other, push it. 5. hk: and the other, push it. so that one would pull it, and the other, push from behind. 6. is: that’s the manta. 7. hk: yes, that’s the manta. and the roma live from that manta. they deceive here and deceive there, and so they live from manta. well, and also i remembered another story, and i think let it be here, so that you have it. first, in (1), hk ends the story, then the (rhyming) punchline is repeated and corrected by is (2, 4), and hk agrees (3, 5) and explains the meaning of the punchline (5). then is explains what the roma’s words mean (6), and hk agrees and explains the connection between the story and the real life (how roma live from manta); in the meantime, she remembers another story to tell (7). when is interrupts hk, who is the story-teller at the moment, to add his own commentaries, he is not saying the whole thing at the time, but gives a short utterance (half of a punchline, or a short comment) every time, as if he is pondering what and how to say. hk approves of his words every time, and only then does is go on with another detail. on the other hand, hk not only approves folklorica 2015, vol. xix 16 of is’s words, she then, true to her role as a teller of this story, expands and explains is’s words, as in (6) and (7), as if improvising on the theme given by is. this exchange during which both participants, one as the story-teller, the other as the audience, are shaping the story together, seems characteristical not only for this story-telling performance, but for many others that i recorded in novoselytsia. true or false? tellers’ attitudes toward stories and techniques for connecting them to the real world in the excerpt quoted above, one can see another feature that is common to many stories in this session. the explanation about the roma living from manta connects the world of the story with the world of here-and-now, and thus validates the story’s truthfulness. (15) the majority of stories have some type of anchoring device, though the exact means used to anchor them may vary depending on the genre of story. we can summarize the anchors as follows. typically, all the memorates contain personal and/or place names (ivanycka; there was one yurchak; the father of that evka diakova; somewhere in volosianka, etc.) religious legends and tales of fate often contain either: 1) ethnographic details (often in the form of digressions introduced by the explanation that “it used to be that way long ago”, as in #2 – the digression about beams and chimneys and in #3 – the digression about walking long distances); or, 2) the remark that “such things happen now too” (#3 nowadays people also get distracted in church, #6 nowadays geese also damage gardens, #16 nowadays one also needs to pray before going somewhere, #21 people also get drunk now). anecdotes contain 1) one referral to some authoritative person who told the story (and that is why it is truthful) e.g., #5; or, 2) ‘such things happen now too’ #19 (as in religious legends). thus, the stories of near past are grounded in the world of here-and-now by mentioning real and familiar (at least to the performer) people and places. (16) the stories of olden times are connected with the present by referring to certain details from the story that still may be found in the present and are familiar to listeners (such as geese damaging gardens) or that have changed recently, but are still familiar to performers (such as walking long distances on foot before the time of cars and buses). while the first type of linking is a typical verisimilitudinal device, the mentioning of archaisms may serve to preserve “the long-ago setting of the tales.” (17) the figure of a respected story-teller who used to know and tell the story also can be evoked to ground the story in the tradition and thus to confirm its truth. the devices to connect two worlds, the one of the story and the one of the performance, thus are various and genre-specific. it did not seem, however, as if the tellers were using them to convince the listener of the reality of their artistic creation in which they did not believe themselves. on the contrary, based on their commentary, it was clear that the belief of the two tellers in the truthfulness of their stories was sincere, possibly absolute, regardless of the genre. in the course of the session, neither of the tellers said anything that could be understood as structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 17 doubt about the truthfulness of any story. the recording contains one instance of a statement about stories being true, when is mentioned, after finishing an anecdote about a student outwitting a peasant: “that is not that someone made it up, it was like that. that is what our old man, blessed be his soul, used to tell” (1:27). during the discussions after the end of each story, the two tellers at times disagreed about details (e.g., when exactly the soldier married the girl that had been destined to become his wife or whether a new monk would make a good exorcist), but only once one of them doubted the truthfulness of the story, when, between the stories #10 and #11, the question arose whether the old man who said that thieves would bring him back stolen sacks really meant it, i.e., whether he had some powers to make it happen. even in this case, the question was whether this man was bluffing in this particular case, not whether such things were possible; that was beyond doubt. hk was more often using a story as a source of teaching about right and wrong, as an instruction for living right, while is was less moralizing and seemed to tell stories more for entertainment, but for both of them, the stories were true. conclusion until recently, recordings of entire performances of slavic tales have been scarce. (18) for rusyn, they have been nearly non-existent. such recordings are an invaluable source for an analysis of the structure of folk narrative, which some researchers, beginning with hymes, call ethnopoetic features, and others, namely bauman, call keying of performance. this approach, in its turn, is important since “careful attention to linguistic details can reveal much about the poetics and aesthetics of the source-language versions” [webster 2008a: 441]. such analysis is a variant of the discourse-centered approach to language and culture developed by sherzer [1987, 1990], urban [1991], webster [2008a]. though particular discourse features of a folkloric performance can be recovered from a text dictated to a person who recorded it by hand ([hymes 2003] and [webster 2008a], etc.), a transcript of an audio performance can reveal much more. for example, although the majority of his stories are simply texts as dictated, pan’kevych [1938] has also published a few transcripts of audio texts. these transcripts show an impressive number of details of narrative structure missing from dictated texts alone. one can appreciate the drastic difference in discourse devices between two stories, #36, audio recorded from an informant born in a village from the irshava district, and #35, dictated by an informant from the same district: in the story transcribed from the audio recording, the word но ‘well,’ a sign of continuation of a narrative, occurs ten times in a text less than a page long, while in the dictated story, но does not occur even once in a narrative of more than two pages. this example shows that when recording by hand, important discourse elements can be considered unnecessary fillers even by thorough dialectologists such as pan’kevych and will be omitted at the stage of narration. conversely, faithful transcripts of audiorecorded texts allow us to preserve more elements that are vital to understanding narrative and performance. even more information can be provided by transcripts folklorica 2015, vol. xix 18 of entire performances, including not only the stories, but also all the communication that takes place before, after, and between them, which, as far as i know, has not yet been done with rusyn or ukrainian material. such sound recordings can be pivotal for understanding the overall organization of folkloric performance in the area. published collections of folkloric texts from western ukraine and specifically carpathian region, despite their abundance, may not provide necessary details for such research. this article is the first attempt to analyze an instance of story-telling performance based on rusyn material. even though, as i mentioned, this performance cannot be considered totally typical since i was present in the quality of a listener, it allowed us to highlight several important factors about performance structure in rusyn culture that merit further investigation. first, there is a definite structure to a story-telling session. stories are suggested, and then told (not obligatorily by the one who suggested them). while they are told, other participants can suggest corrections, explanations, and anticipate the next move. when the story is over (there were no specific folkloric endings to stories in the recorded session), the story-teller and other participants usually discuss this story, adding details, teasing out the overall meaning of the story and its connection to their lives. during this discussion, another participant may remember another story and tell it or suggest it to another participant as a possible narrative for the session. if no one remembers another story, someone may suggest something else to do, and the story-telling will be over. this discussion between the stories, as well as the interruptions by other participants during the story, seem to be the very instruments of the “collective creation,” as well as of “preventive censure” that jakobson and bogatyrev mention as characteristic features of folklore [1980[1929]: 20 and passim]. these two forms of interaction during a story-telling session convey folk knowledge and the expectations of the entire audience to the current story-teller, and also allow for the collective negotiation of the meaning of the story. it is noteworthy that during the recorded story-telling session the current story-tellers agreed with, and incorporated in their stories, most of the suggestions by the other participant. this practice is thus a living example of how “collective creation” works. the role of an individual performer in creating and maintaining the rusyn folk tradition certainly needs more research, since our sample is limited. there were only two performers in the recorded session; their roles were different in one respect, and similar in other. however, we can make some preliminary conclusions: the gender and age of performers influenced their performance. the male story-teller seemed to be more prone to tell anecdotes (anecdotes), while the female story-teller preferred religious legends. however, both were similar in their living knowledge of tradition and the ability to perform a variety of genres. both knew each other’s repertoire in all genres, commented on each other’s tales, and helped out when the other performer forgot certain details. the younger performer, is, at 54 years of age, was as good a story-teller as his 89-year-old adoptive mother hk. moreover, he felt responsible for the whole performance and tried to organize it as best he could, helping hk with details, but at the same structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 19 time complying with my request to let hk talk more. the overall impression was that the younger generation can maintain the story-telling tradition, not only in the sense of knowledge of tradition, but also in the sense of the ability to do an authoritative performance [hymes 1975:69]. thus, the traditional rural folklore in novoselytsia continues to thrive, (19) at least in the generation which is now 50-60 years of age, even if the tradition for them is more “external” than for the elder generation, i.e., they are more likely to view the stories as objects, as we have seen. moreover, the serious attitude towards tradition and the belief in the truth of the stories coming from a traditional source as demonstrated by is ("that is not that someone made it up, it was like that. that is what our old man, blessed be his soul, used to tell”) indicate that the tradition continues to have authority in this generation despite of many other influences. is’s respect to tradition is not diminished by the fact that he is also a high school graduate and an active member in the church. his sharing of a traditional worldview seems to be rooted in his rural lifestyle and daily communication with like-minded people. the demographic data on the transcarpathian region show solid and growing rural population. (20) that suggests that the rural environment continues to provide an opportunity for traditional rusyn folklore to live and develop. on the micro-level, a performed story includes a number of linguistic markers indicating the beginning or an end of an episode and the introduction of a new person. these markers seem to orientate listeners within an episode. they also seem to build suspense, as well as give the speaker time to think of what to say next; that is, they perform a similar function to what formulae do in epic genres of folklore. however, in prose stories they do not carry the function of maintaining the required rhythm. building suspense and giving the speaker time seems also to be the function of repetition of words and phrases, similar to its function in poetic folklore genres. stories and participants’ comments also contain a number of verisimilitudinous devices connecting the world of story and the world of story-tellers and their audience, either through digressions about details that are similar in both worlds or by referring to the authority of tradition. thus, the micro-structure of a story-telling performance, same as its macro-structure, abounds in devices that may seem to interfere with the smoothness of narration (and that is why they are usually omitted when stories are dictated or edited for publication), but are absolutely essential for building the two-way connection between story-tellers and their audience. (21) this connection, in turn, is the very mechanism that propels the “communal creativity”, which is, according to jakobson and bogatyrev, the mode of existence of folklore. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 20 appendix: transcript of the recording session recording, minute text (22) translation [21-1:04] (23) гк … у на́с ви́диш як | у | у кантốрі коли́ жôну́ грі́м у у | сиді́ли три́ жо́ны | у кантốрі hk: …in our village, you see how…in the office when a woman was k[illed] (24) by lightning…three women were sitting in the office. [21-1:05] іс кôлгốспні гк га іс кôлгốспні гк кôлгốзьні | коли́ при кôлгốспі | тай сі́ли тай та́м неда́леко і шчо́тчик | а жо́ны ся вітсува́ют а она́ ка́же | а вы́ ся ка́же боіте́ | жона́ ка́же | а | та боіме́ ся | а она́ сі́ла | тай грі́м ци не убі́в йêї́ та́мкы | аа | іванêцьку іс каза́ла шчо не бойếть_ ся гк ôна́ каза́ла шчо не бойếть_ ся | не за тто́ | йếй уби́в шчо каза́ла шчо не бойếть_ ся ай | за то́ шчо така́ і судьба́ бы́ла | обы́ від ôгня́ уме́рла | |…|(25) is: collective farms. hk: what? is: collective farms [office]. hk: collective farms. at the time of collective farms. so they sat down, and there was an electric meter not far from there, and [these] women moved further from it, but she said: oh, you are afraid? one woman said. -sure, we are afraid! and she sat there, and you know, the lightning killed her there. her, ivanycka. is: she said she was not afraid. hk: she said she was not afraid. not because of that, she got killed not because she said she was not afraid, but because it was her destiny, to die of fire. [interviewer: have you heard about someone predicting how another person would die, and later it would turn out to be true?] [21-1:06] гк а я́ зна́ю |…| гк шчốзь_ бы́ло тако́є бы́ло тако́є | hk: i don’t know. [interviewer: or maybe someone could predict the time when he himself would die?] structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 21 recording, minute text (22) translation іс но то́ я́к однốму чôлôві́ку каза́ли хто́ тто́ каза́в шчо | ві́д де́рева умре́ | коли́ гря́тка на ньо́го упа́ла | гк а | тото́ | тото́ ішли́ | ішли́ три́ жо́ны | бе́ремêньні | ай ішốв за ни́ми ді́до | та не́ | ді́до | а́нгель_ ішốв | за ни́ми | і ка́же | сьếсь ся уто́пит | одếн віт чо́го умре́ іс … гк … ві́т чо́го єде́н ка́же | hk: there was something, there was something like that. is: well, it is how one person was told, who was that told him, that he would die from a tree? when a beam fell on him. hk: ah, that? once, three women were walking, three pregnant women, and behind them, an old man was walking. it was not an old man, but an angel, he walked after them and he said: this one will drown, one will of what will he die? is: [unclear] hk: [unclear] what will one die of, he said? [21-1:07] єде́н ся уто́пит | іс мо́же маши́на убьє́ ци шчо́ | гк но забы́ла м | а | і каза́в | но | сếї жоны́ ся вто́пит сếї жоны́ | но забы́ла м шчо́ | а сếї жоны́ | де́рево убь’є́ | а́йно | но і ту́йкы уже́ | хлốпці повыроста́ли | росту́т | і то́т о я́ не зна́ю ци то́т ся ско́рше утопи́в ся я́к | і того́ держа́ли лише́ | на печи́ | обы́ го де́рево не уби́ло | іс аа ті́ хлốпці шчо ма́є ся уро́дити гк тоты́ три́ хлốпці | і они́ уже́ вы́росли тоты́ хлốпці | такі́ шчо уже́ | вели́чкі бы́ли хлốпці | і ни́ґде не пушча́ли | ни́ґде бись не йшốв бо тебе́ ма́є де́рево уби́ти | і ни́ґде one will drown? is: maybe he would be hit by a car or something. hk: well, i forgot. so, and he said, this woman’s [child] will drown, this woman’s i forgot what, and this woman’s [child] will be killed by a tree. yes. and then boys already grew up, they are growing, and that one, i don’t know if one drowned first, or how, but that one was only kept on the oven so that he does not get killed by a tree… is: that was these boys who had to be born… hk: these three boys. and they already grew up, these boys, so that they were guys. and that one, [his parents] did not let him go anywhere, don’t go folklorica 2015, vol. xix 22 recording, minute text (22) translation бись не йшốв | а давно́ бы́ли такі́ | но | старі́ хыжі́ | така́ бы́ла гря́тка | і гря́тка | тота́ ся | anywhere because you will be killed by a tree, don’t go anywhere. and long ago, there were such old houses, and there was such a beam, and that beam [21-1:08] відломи́ла у хы́жі | і уби́ла | того́ на печи́ | де́рево го уби́ло | іс такі́ дві́ вібли́ці | нє́ гк а у ко́го бы́ли дві́ | а у ко́го | єдна́ ли́ше бы́ла | іс та на єдні́ гря́цьці | на одні́ вібли́ці держа́ло ся | дві́ бы́ли гк тай ві́д | від сьціны́ дô сьціны́ бы́ла гря́тка | іс но а на тốму дрыва́ скла́довали гк аа | но тото́ коли́ бы́ли | бы́ла шчê й тота́ | коли́ | дымнянкы́ бы́ли | а́йно | дымня́нка такі́ хыжі́ бы́ли такі́ дымнянкы́ | шчо | ту́й кла́ли серет хы́жі ôгня́ | а у пôва́лі тако́є вікно́ бы́ло | і туды́ ды́м ішốв | |…| гк ко́мина не бы́ло | і тото́ так | лю́де жи́ли | но айбо тото́ | давно́ | давно́ тото́ бы́ло | но | і то́т | і то́го | му́сіла | раз | got broken in the house and killed that one on the oven. he was killed by a tree. is: there were such two beams. hk: some people had two, some people had just one. is: so on one beam, on one beam it was all supported, were there two? hk: and the beam was from one wall to the other. is: people used to keep firewood on that. hk: yes. it was when there were…when there were houses without chimney. yes. houses without chimney, there were such houses that here, in the middle of the house they would make fire, and there was such a window in the ceiling, and the smoke went there. [interviewer: there was no chimney?] hk: there was no chimney, and people lived this way. but that was long, long ago. and so…it had to… [21-1:09] ві́н від де́рева мав уме́рти | іі | так уме́р іс і ни́ґда не йшốв лише́ у ха́ті сиді́в | і гря́тка | he had to die of a tree, and that is how he died. structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 23 recording, minute text (22) translation гк і гря́тка тото́ ся відломи́ла | і на ньо́го упа́ла | і уби́ла і всьо́ | но́ а тре́тый я́ забы́ла шо | іс маши́на його́ ма́ла уби́ти а ну́ шчо́ | гк е та маши́н тогды́ не бы́ло я́ не зна́ю | е | ма́в ся задави́ти | но | єди́н ся утопи́в | то́т ся ма́є задави́ти а то́го ма́є де́рево уби́ти | тай всьо́ | а́йно | і та то́го | ді́до вы́казав і ді́да не ста́ло | а ді́до за ты́ми жона́ми ішốв | і так каза́в | за ты́ми трьома́ шчо ішли́ бе́ременьні перед ни́м | |…| is: and he did not go anywhere ever, he only sat in the house, and the beam… hk: and the beam broke, and fell on him, and killed him, and that’s all. and the third one, i forgot what happened. is: he had to be killed by a car. do you remember? hk: but there were no cars then. i don’t know. ah, he had to choke. yes, one drowned, the other had to choke, and the third one had to be killed by a tree. that’s it. yes. and that old man, he said that and disappeared. the old man went after these women and said so, after these three women that were pregnant. [interviewer: so that was not an old man?] [21-1:10] гк то а́нгел бы́в | то не ді́до бы́в | то лиш ді́до | кі́п | ді́дів бы́в | а́йно | то не ді́до бы́в | а хто́ быв тото́ | хто́ бы тото́ зна́в тако́є | айно | і тото́ та́к ся пôлучи́ло всьо́ | я́к ді́до каза́в та́к ся тото́ всьо́ пôлучи́ло | іс а шчế роскажи́те як тота́ | до це́рквы хôті́ла йти́ | коли́ | ді́до ї пусти́в | не ма́ла на ко́го лиши́ти | гк но | бы́ла нêві́стка | та́ґ_ бы ішла́ до цêрькве | та ка́же уже | ма́чôсі | ма́ттери уже́ чôлôві́чôві | ма́мо ка́же пусьці́т мене́ ка́же до hk: that was an angel, not an old man. he only looked like an old man, that was not an old man. but who else could know that? and it all happened like that, as the old man said, it all happened like that. is: also tell how that woman… wanted to go to church when an old man let her go. she did not have anyone to leave her children with. hk. yes. there was a young woman, she wanted so much to go to church, and she says to her stepmother, to her husband’s mother: please let me folklorica 2015, vol. xix 24 recording, minute text (22) translation цếрькви я́ бим ка́же та́к ішла́ до цếрькви | а нє́т | я́ йду | уже́ | ма́ти ка́же | я́ йду ты́ не йде́ш | но і зобра́ла ся | і пішла́ | ма́ти пішла́ | go to church, i want so much to go to church. oh no, i am going to church, the mother[-in-law] says, i am going, and you are not. so she got ready and went, the mother-[in-law]. [21-1:11] і ту́й зає́нно шчо | она́ бы ішла́ до цếрькви | і ту́й захо́дит ді́до | до хы́жі іс не ма́є на ко́го діти́ну лиши́ти | гк а діти́на малếйка а діти́на у колы́сьці | тай ниє́ на ко́го діти́ну лиши́ти она́ бы́ла пішла́ айбо діти́ну | а́йно ниє́ на ко́го лиши́ти | но і захо́дить_ ді́до | тай | тай ка́же шчо ішла́ бим до цếрькве та ішла́ | та я́ ка́е тебе́ пу́шчу ка́же ты́ йди́ | я́ ка́е з діти́нôв ка́же буду́ | но́ | тай | ді́до ся лиши́в ізь_ діти́нôв | а ôна́ пішла́ | дô цếрькви | і прихốдид_ дôмі́ | уже́ бы́ла на слу́жбі бы́ла в цếрькви | прихо́дид_ дôмі́ | тай | ді́до | коло діти́ны ді́до всьо́ | тай зьві́дат | но я́к | у цếрькви | йốй ду́же ка́же фа́йно бы́ло так | і людếй бы́ло | і | а ка́заня тако́є фа́йноє бы́ло ка́же шчо | я́ ка́же | ду́же ка́же ми ся пôлюби́ло | and this one wants so much to go to church. and here an old man enters the house. is: she did not have anyone to leave a baby with. hk: and the baby was little, baby in the cradle. and there was no one to leave the baby with. she wanted to go, but there was no one to leave the baby with. and so an old man comes in, and she says that she wants to go to church, and he says, i’ll let you go, you may go, i will stay with the baby, he says. and she went to church. then she returns home, she was in the church, she was present at the service. so she comes home, and the old man is sitting with the baby. and he asks: how was it in the church? she says: oh, it was so good, there were a lot of people, and the priest said such a fine sermon. i liked it very much, she says. [21-1:12] іс прốпôвідь | рôзумі́єте гк но | аа пі́п | а а а ді́до ка́же | е | лю… | людếй лише́ тро́є бы́ло у цếрькви | а пі́п | не ка́заня каза́в ай це… | це́глу вози́в | ци зна́єте | is: the sermon, you know? hk: yes. and the priest…and the old man says, there were only three people in the church, and the priest did not say the sermon, he was driving bricks. structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 25 recording, minute text (22) translation це́гла | но | ка́же лиш | тро́є людếй бы́ло у цếрькви | та де́ она́ ка́же | та де́ пốвна цếрькôв бы́ло людếй мно́го | тай пі́п фа́йноє ка́заня каза́в | а ді́до ôпья́т | лише́ тро́є бы́ло в цếрькви | а пі́п | це́глу вози́в | іс цілу́ слу́жбу | гк цілу́ слу́жбу | но | ни́ч | іде́ тото́ іде́ | а то́ | усі́ ма́ли | и́нчі думкы́ | не ду́мали ты́м | do you know what bricks are? well. he says there were only three people in the church. how come, she says, the church was full, there were a lot of people. and the priest said a nice sermon. and the old man says again: there were only three people in the church, and the priest was driving bricks. is: the whole time of the service. hk: the whole time of the service. ok. and that is, everyone had other thoughts, did not think about… [21-1:13] а тро́є лише́ шчо ду́мали шчо ôни́ на слу́жбі | іс шчо моли́ли ся гк шчо моли́ли ся шчи́ро так | бо́г приє́мле | лише́ трôї́х | а дру́гых нє́т | но | ду́мат она́ тогды́ сôбі́ но шчо́ | тай | ді́до піш…. | ді́да уже́ не ста́ло | ді́до пішốв ге́т | буде́ ôна́ іти́ до попа́ | бде́ каза́ти се попо́ви | прихо́дит ка́же | я́ бы́ла ка́же на слу́жбі тог/ды і тогды́ | та ка́же вы́ каза́ли ка́же ка́заня | і людếй бы́ло | но і ôна́ уже́ росказа́ла уже́ шчо ді́до у нếї бы́в | якь_ йêї́ пусти́в на слу́жбу | і | ка́же | та каза́в шчо вы́ | не ка́заня каза́ли | ай це́глу сьте вози́ли | а пі́п ся будова́в тогды́ | та у попа́ | не бы́ло тôтố у гôлôві́ шчо ві́н ка́же з еванге́лия | ай ду́мав | я́к він за́втра буде́ | and there were only three people who thought they were at the service. is: those who were praying. hk: those who were praying from their heart, god accepts only three, but not others. well, then she thinks to herself… the old man disappeared, he went away. she decided to go to the priest, will tell that to the priest. she comes to the priest and says: i was, she says, at the service then and then, and, she says, you said a sermon, and there were a lot of people. so she told him that there was an old man at her house, how he let her go to the service, and, she said, that old man said you were not saying a sermon, but driving bricks. and the priest was building his house then, and he did not think of what he folklorica 2015, vol. xix 26 recording, minute text (22) translation was saying from the gospel, but he was thinking, how he was going to [21-1:14] це́глу вози́ти на хы́жу та | я́ґ_ буде́ будова́ти | ци рôзумі́єте | но | тай та́к | іс цілу́ слу́жбу це́глу вози́в | гк цілу́ слу́жбу | пі́п і при ка́заню | та не ка́заня каза́в ай ду́мав | ба я́к | ба я́к я бду́ | це́глу за́втра та ко́го я закли́чу хто́ мні́ приве́зе на хы́жу це́глу | іс говори́в одно́ а ду́мав дру́гоє гк но | та та́к тото́ є і тêпếрькы тото́ | коли́ ся іде́ до цếрькви та тре́ба ся | а тре́ба ду́мати шчо я́ йду́ до цếрькве та слу́хати | бốжі слова́ | айбо кếть то́ не та́к | то не та́к ся полу́чит | то́ дру́гі думкы́ | май перếбь’ют не та́к | іс а шчế роскажі́т як солда́т із а́рмиї йшốв | а ну́ ж | drive bricks the next day to build his house, and how he will build it. do you understand? well, it was like that. is: during the whole service he was driving bricks. hk: during the whole service. the priest, at the time of the sermon…and he did not say the sermon, but he was thinking, but how i am going to…the bricks tomorrow, who i could call that would drive the bricks for me so that i could build the house. is: he was saying one thing, and thinking another thing. hk: yes. so that’s how it is now too, when one goes to church one needs to think that i am going to church, and listen to god’s word. but what to do if it is not so, it happens otherwise, other thoughts interfere, right? is: and also tell the story how a soldier was returning from the army, please, [21-1:15] … забы́ли | гк но та та́к шчо ішốв быв | ішốв із | сол… | із а́рміі солда́т | і ту́йкы уже́ ся примếрькло ні́ч | іс маши́н не бы́ло так як тêпếрь have you forgotten it? hk: so it was this way: a soldier was returning from the army, and it already became dark, the night started. is: there were no cars, as there are now. structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 27 recording, minute text (22) translation гк то пішко́м | то | не та́к ги тêпếрь як | я́ | я сама́ | та з вôлі́вця мо́же два́ццêть ра́з им і у воло́вêць пішко́м | ци зна́єте де́ воло́вêць | і у воло́вêць пішко́м і туды́ м не́сла і з вôлі́вця пішко́м і ві́тты м не́сла | до два́ццьêть ра́з а аж ім не бы́ла тай ра́з | а тêпếрь де́ тêпếрь | о́де кі́ло | о о па́ру крốків | йốй кобы́ маши́на бы́ла я́ не го́нна піти́ | но тай та́к солда́т ішốв із а́рмії | тай ту́й ся примếрькує уже́ | тай | йốй де́ бим і(?) спа́в | но і | зайшốв до хы́жі і | hk: so he had to go on foot, not as now. even i, from and to volovec, i went there maybe twenty times on foot. do you know where volovec is? so i went there and back on foot, twenty times, carrying loads. and now, forget it. if i have a kilogram to carry, a couple of steps, oh i wish there was a car, i cannot walk! ok, so the soldier was returning from the army, and it was becoming dark. he thinks: where will i sleep? he entered one house, [21-1:16] попроси́в ся | прия́ли його́ від ра́зу прия́ли | там де спа́ти буде́ш | но а давно́ не бы́ло ты́х постêлі́в та дива́нів тай хы́жі́в | хы́жа єдна́ | та́м єдна́ яка́сь пốсьціль пі́ч | там при́пічок | там ла́ва така́ ширốкі бы́ли ла́вы | і куды́ хто́ | пôліга́ли і спи́т | но | ба де́ бде́ спа́ти | солда́т | кладу́д_ го на сьці́в | шчốсь там постели́ли ци бы́ло шчốсь ци я́к іс сто́лы дốвгі бы́ли | дốвгі не такі́ як тêпếрь | гк аа дốвгый сьці́в бы́в | шчế май не такы́й | гі у на́с он тота́ пла́шка шчê май дốвгі́ бы́ли | покла́ли на сьці́в і | буде́ш спа́ти ту́йкы | ту́й жôну́ | іми́ли пêрếймы | ро́дити | но | and asked if he could sleep there. they agreed at once. where will you sleep? and long ago there were no beds or coaches or many rooms. there was one room, and there was one bed, one oven, a bench next to an oven, and a bench, such wide benches. and people slept where they could, they lied down and slept. and where should the soldier sleep? they put him on the table. they put some cloth there, i don’t know whether there was something. is: tables were long ag that time, long, not as now. hk: yes, the table was long. maybe even longer than our table, here with this board, that table was still longer. so they put him on the table, “you will folklorica 2015, vol. xix 28 recording, minute text (22) translation sleep here”. and a woman went into labor, she will have a baby. [21-1:17] і ту́й | жона́ у хы́жі всьо́ в хы́жі | і | і солда́т на стôлі́ | іс ві́нь_ нібы́ то спи́т гк ві́нь_ нібы́ то спи́т | а а́нгелы | єди́н на двôрі́ | а єди́н у хы́жі | та то́т ізо дво́ру зьві́дат | ци є́ уже́ | діти́на | а сếсь іс хы́жі ка́же шчế ниє́ | най є́ | тог/ды ôпья́т | ма́ло пốвіть | ôпя́ть зьві́дат | ци є́ | ниє́ | но ôпья́ть | че́кат че́кат | тогды́ ôпь’я́ть зьві́дат ци є́ | є́ | а шчо́ | ді́вочка | сесе́ ка́же бде́ он тốму ка́же жона́ шчо о́де спи́т на стôлі́ | а ві́н чу́є | солда́т чу́є всьо́ | но ай то́ | ві́н нібы́ то спи́т | а ві́н всьо́ чує | но й тото́ всьо́ уже́ | упôряткова́ли діти́ну уві́… і то́то́ уже́ шчо тре́ было то | and there, the woman is in the house, everything is in the house, and the soldier is on the table. is: he is pretending that he is asleep. hk: he is pretending that he is asleep. and the angels, one in the yard and the other in the house, and the one from the outside asks: is there a baby already? and the one from the house answers, not yet. then again, a bit later he asks again, if there is a baby. not yet. and again. he waits, waits, and then he asks again if there is a baby. yes, there is. and who is it? a girl. this girl, he says, will be married to that guy who is asleep there on the table. and he hears, the soldier hears everything. well, and… he pretends he is asleep, but he hears everything. and all that already…they did what they had to do with the baby, swaddled it…everything that was necessary, [21-1:18] помы́ли пу́п підрі́зали всьо́ пôпôряткова́ли | і | пôліга́ли спа́ти | і діти́ну уже́ пови́ли пови́ли | покла́ли так на стốвп діти́ну | коло | та́к на печи́ | спля́т | пôліга́ли | а́ солдат пома́лêйкы уста́в | ти́хêнько | і | діти́ну на ру́кы | і | на двір́ | де́ | мо́я жона́ о they washed the baby, cut the umbilical cord, did everything, and went to sleep. and the baby was swaddled and put on the oven, next to the people who were sleeping on the oven. so they went to sleep and the soldier got up quietly, and took the baby and went outside. structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 29 recording, minute text (22) translation тото́ бы́ла обы́ о тото́ бы́ло | і | як ішốв | і та́к діти́ну на копа́ч | натягну́в | на двôрі́ | у плốті копачі́ такі́ бы́ли | ге плі́т шчо гôрốдят та два́ копачі́ | і та́к на єди́н копа́ч | натягну́в | тôту́ діти́ну | і са́м | пішốв | устаю́т | ни діти́ны ниє́ | ни солда́та | іс де́ то мо́я жона́ бу́де гк ге іс ду́мат де́ то мо́я жона́ бу́де “how come that will be my wife!” and as he was walking, he put the baby on the stick, in the yard, there were such sticks in the fence, so when they make a fence there are two such [vertical] poles, so he put/impaled the baby on one of the poles, and went away. the people woke up, there is neither the baby there, nor the soldier. is: “how come that will be my wife!" hk: what? is: he thinks, how come she will be his wife. [21-1:19] гк но | пô двôру́ пô двôру́ ра́с ви́дят шчо | діти́на | ізьді́та | і | взя́ли діти́ну ди́влят | ни́ч лиш так | ні́жочка | бы́ла ма́ло | роспоро́та | ага | тай ни́ч | іс жива́ діти́на | гк і діти́на росте́ дівочка росте́ ді́вочка | ту́й уже́ вы́росла шчо | і віддава́ти уже́ | і ту́й | прийшốв і тот узя́в тôту́ ді́вочку | тот солда́т | уже́ | жи́ли | якốсь ся она́ убира́ла | бы́ла оно́ тото́ якốсь ся́ стыди́ли єдно́ дру́гого | і ôна́ ся убира́ла якốсь і ві́н доди́вив ш…шкра́м | на ні́сьці | на нôзі́ | а шчо́ у тебе́ ка́же тото́ є́ ка́же | та́мкы | ге | іс ві́н не зна́в шчо тото́ та́м гк ба де́ він зна́в | hk: yes. and they went in the yard, and they see that the baby is on the stick, and they took the baby and they see, there is nothing, only one leg was a little cut. ok. is: the baby was alive. hk: and the girl is growing up, growing up. then already she grew up and it is time to arrange a marriage. and there, he came and married that girl, that soldier. and they already lived together. and once she somehow got dressed, because they were a bit ashamed of each other. and she got dressed, and he somehow saw the scar on the leg, on the leg. and what do you have here, he asked, there. is: he did not know it was there. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 30 recording, minute text (22) translation hk: of course he did not know. [21-1:20] ві́н не зна́в | но і она́ нача́ла роска́зовати ся́к мêні́ ка́же роска́зовали шчо | ішốв солда́т із а́рміі та спа́в у на́с | а я́ ся уро́дила | та узя́в ня | та зьді́в ня на копа́ч | а то́т | самы́й уже́ | іс она́ йôму́ росказа́ла гк не зна́ву шчо | поду́мав | шчо тото́ ві́н | і взя́в тôту́ | і жи́ли так | но айбо я́ уже́ не зна́ю ци каза́в ї шчо ві́н тото́ зроби́в сесе́ я́ уже́ не зна́ю іс мо́же і каза́в гк мо́же пак дếсь ся розговори́ли та мо́же і каза́в а від ра́зу мо́же і не каза́в | но | іс як а́нгел упôві́в шчо то його́ ма́ла бы́ти тай | му́сіла бы́ти | гк но | тай му́сіла бы́ти іс мо́же через два́цьціт рốків гк тай му́сів чека́ти два́цьціт рі́к {лі́т} но а мо́же і не чека́в два́цьціт рốків мо́же | май ско́рше а хто́ його́ зна́є | мо́же як тото́ | іс ….на́цьціт гк зна́єш як | студе́нть_ ішốв | через вốду | …. he did not know. so she started telling him: i was told, she tells him, that a soldier was returning from the army and he stayed for a night in our house, and i was born, and he took me and impaled me on a stick, and that one, that very one… is: she told him. hk: i do not know. he thought… that was he… and he had married her, and they lived together. but i don’t know if he told her that it was he who had done that, i don’t know that. is: maybe he did tell her. hk: maybe later, when they were talking, maybe he told her, but right then maybe he did not. yes. is: as the angel said that she had to be his wife, so she had to become his wife. hk: yes, she had to become his wife. is: maybe in twenty years. hk: and he had to wait twenty years. or maybe he did not wait twenty years, maybe earlier, who knows. maybe… is [unclear] hk: you know how a student crossed a river. [unclear] [21-1:21] ді́до прика́зовав | ішốв студе́нт | іш_ шко́лы | а ту́йкы | надыйшла́ бу́ря | туй our old man used to tell. a student was going home from school. and there a storm came, structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 31 recording, minute text (22) translation до́шч | вода́ | тре́ба бы йти́ | а ді́до іде́ із во́лы | тоты́ | а | ге | но | якы́сь ді́до іс пішốв на дрыва́ гк ци на дрыва́ ішốв ци де́ | ка́же | вы́ бы ка́же мене́ не переве́зли | через ріку́ | а | та переве́зу тя ка́же | но а | та ты́ шчо́ за єдếн | я́ ка́же студе́нт | но | а шчо́ бы ты́ роби́в як бы | серед воды́ | быкы́ ся вы́прягли | rain. there was a river. he had to cross, and there is an old man going by a cart with oxen. that…well, some old man. is: he went to get firewood. hk: maybe to get forewood, or for some other reason. he says: could you give me a ride across the river? ok, he says, i will give you a ride, and who are you? he says, i am a student. - well, and what would you do if in the middle of the river the oxen get unharnessed, [21-1:22] а | ру́д упа́в в вốду | я́ уже́ забы́ла шчо каза́в шчо́ зро́бит | іс то́ не та́к бы́ло гк …. іс ві́н сі́в | на ві́с | та і́дут і́дут | тай ту́й | широ́ка ріка́ така́ | ді́до серед воды́ ста́в | …. | волы́ ста́ли серед воды́ пью́т воды́ | ді́до ка́же зліза́й | зліза́й із во́за | серед воды́ | гк ага́ а́йно а́йно іс а ві́н бы́в у ходака́х | такі́ ходакы́ бы́ли зна́єте но | гк та́к та́к | іс ві́н у ходака́х бы́в | но | я́к туй серед воды́ ка́же | куды́ я злі́зу | серед воды́ з во́за | а ві́н | зна́єте волы́ | …. ру́д такы́й бы́в поме́жі | а та́м ярмо́ | а ві́н ско́чив на ру́д | та пô рудо́ви пішốв та | та вы́тягнув свốрінь | то́ шчо там ярмо́ | а ту́й | а та́м бы́в and the pole falls into the water? i already forgot what he said he would do. is: no, it was differently. hk: [unclear] is: he got into the cart, and they started off. and here, the river was so wide, and the old man stopped the cart in the middle of the river. the oxen have stopped in the middle of the river, and they are drinking the water. the old man says, get off the cart. in the middle of the river. hk: yes, yes, yes. is: and he was wearing homemade shoes. such homemade shoes, do you know what these are. hk: right, right. is: he was wearing such shoes. well, how i can get off the cart here in the middle of the river, folklorica 2015, vol. xix 32 recording, minute text (22) translation такы́й …. | сі́в на ярмо́ іми́в ся за ро́гы | тай | гк тай пішốв | іс перене́сли | волы́ його́ на тốд_ бі́к | in the middle of the river. and he… you know, oxen… there was such a pole between the two oxen, and the yoke was on it, and he jumped on this pole, and went on the pole, and pulled out the peg that was holding that yoke… and there was such a…and he sat on the yoke and grabbed the horns… hk: and off he went. is: the oxen carried him on the other bank. [21-1:23] йốй а то́т ді́до нача́в | йốй та | лиши́в ся ді́до серед воды́ | йốй заведи́ заведи́ волы́ запряжи́ бу́деш у ме́не уже́ і ночова́ти | і всьо́ бо то́ уже́ до́ста ве́чером бы́ло | та уже́ ві́н якốсь там оберну́в волы́ якốсь там дôсягну́в тот ру́т | ôпья́т | запря́х | гк ві́н студе́нт | іс но | ді́до хôті́в прові́рити шчо́ ты | шчо́ ты зна́єш якшчо́ ты́ студе́нт | тай всьо́ приі́хали | тай | уже́ прийшли́ дôмі́ | дове́зли ся дôмі́ а то́ уже́ ве́чером то́ уже́ змêрька́є ся но уже́ бу́дес_ спа́ти у на́с | а то́ бы́ла великốдня субо́та | ві́н ішốв на вели́ґдêнь дôмі́ | а на дру́гый дếнь уже́ вели́ґдêнь | но і всьо́ а ты́ уже́ | буде́с_ спа́ти а за́втра ра́но уста́неш тай піде́ш то́ шчế тре́а бы́ло дêсь через | на дру́ге село́ іти́ | пішко́м | черес се́ла так | та́к як із and that old man started… so that old man was left in the middle of the river. oh, bring back the oxen, harness them, i will let you sleep in my house. and that’s it, because it was already in the evening. and he somehow turned the oxen around, somehow reached that pole, and harnessed the oxen again. hk: that student did. is: yes. the old man wanted to check what you… what do you know if you are a student. and well, they came home. they came home, and that was already in the evening, and it was getting dark. “so you will sleep in our house.” and it was the saturday before easter. he was going home for easter. and the next day is already easter. “ok, so you will sleep here, and tomorrow early you will get up and go,” he still needed to go to the next village, on foot structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 33 recording, minute text (22) translation вôлівця́ як вы́ ка́жете | но і ни́ч айбо то́ ишчế | гусака́ | through several villages. so as from volovec, as you were saying. ok, and there also, they need to slaughter a goose, [21-1:24] шчế тре́а зарі́зати бо обов’яско́во | гусака́ тре́ кла́сти у коша́р | на вели́кдêнь | сьвяти́ти | такы́й обы́чай бы́в у ни́х | они́ шчê там зарі́зали гусака́ ско́ро то ôпску́бли всьо́ | тото́ | гк наряди́ли іс наряди́ли всьо́ покла́ли | ба́ба покла́ла в пі́ч | гусака́ печи́ | покла́ла у пі́ч | ді́до сôбі́ | та́м уже́ | кôсьцю́м выла́джує на за́втра | гк ходакы́ | іс ходакы́ то́же ходакы́ у ді́да які́сь нові́ ходакы́ уже́ на вели́кдêнь | не́ тоты́ старі́ | ходакы́ ді́до то всьо́ начи́стив всьо́ там сôбі́ скла́в дếсь коло поро́га | вбы́ ра́но то всьо́ гото́воє бы́ло | но тай ліга́ют спа́ти | тай пôліга́ли спа́ти тай | ишчế і не спля́т від ра́зу | шчốсь сôбі́ каску́ют | а ді́до зьві́дат уже́ студе́нта | а якы́й у ва́с тêпếрь у́рят | у сêлі́ | хто́ у вас там тêпếрь | а ві́н ка́же | студе́нт ка́же | because it is necessary to put a roasted goose in the basket on easter, to bless it, they had such a custom. they slaughtered the goose, plucked it fast, all that. hk: dressed it. is: dressed it, put everything there. and the wife put the goose in the oven to bake. she put it in the oven. the old man is preparing his clothes for the next day. hk: the shoes. is: the shoes, also the shoes. the old man had some new shoes for easter, not those old shoes. so the old man cleaned all that, and put all that together somewhere near the threshold so that in the morning all that is ready. and they go to sleep. and they went to sleep, but still they are not sleeping, still talking. and the old man asks the student: and who is in power in your village now? who is the boss? and he says, the student says, [21-1:25] бы́в гусакôвськы́й | а гусакốвськый пішốв у тôрбốвськый | а ходакốвськый та його́ бра́т на його́ мі́сьцье | а ді́до ага́ | та́к як бы ві́н їх зна́в | ты́х | …. | не зна́в ни ді́до ни́ то́т | mr. goose was before, but mr. goose went to bag-town, and mr. shoe and his brother are in his place. and the old man says, yes, as if he knew them. these people. he did not know, neither the old man nor the folklorica 2015, vol. xix 34 recording, minute text (22) translation то шчи́ та́к | сусі́дньоє село́ | тай ни́ч | они́ заспа́ли всьо́ спля́т | студе́нт у ночи́ встає́ | гусака́ | іс пе́чи | гк у тốрбу іс дôсі́гат і в тốрбу кладе́ | тоты́ ді́довы ходакы́ | шчо ді́до вы́ладив до це́ркви | у пі́ч | покла́в у пі́ч закры́в і всьо́ | но тай ра́но пробуди́ли тай | тай | я́ встаю́ бо я́ йду́ | мêні́ шчê тре́ йти́ | ишчế на дру́ге село́ | на вели́ґдêнь уже́ | тай то́т тốрбу взя́в та пішốв | но тай они́ вста́ли ді́до з ба́бôв тай уже́ там по хôзя́йству попо́рали(н/д) ся шчо́ | но тай | іду́т выла́джовати коша́р уже́ там ба́ба йде́ | гусака́ | student. it was the next village. ok. they went to sleep, fell asleep. in the night the student gets up, takes the goose from the oven… hk: into his bag. is: he takes the goose and puts it in his bag. and the old man’s shoes that the old man prepared to go to church in, he put them in the oven, closed it, and that’s it. so in the morning they woke up and [he says]: i am getting up because i need to go to the next village for easter. and he took the bag and off he went. and they got up, the old man and his wife, and took care of the household. and then they are going to prepare the basket, and the wife goes to get the goose… [21-1:26] гусака́ тото́ | ді́до уже́ та́м | ди́вит уже́ ôді́вать_ ся | ходакы́ | ходакі́в ниє́ | но ка́же взя́в | взя́в ô тот хода́к ка́же | взя́в тот моі́ ходакы́ | но взя́в тай взя́в тай ді́до найшốв які́сь старі́ тоты́ шчо вчо́ра хôді́в | на дрыва́ | но та у стары́х а у чі́м піде́ | то́т узя́в ходакы́ | но | ту́й ба́ба | ди́вить_ ся у пі́ч | гк а гусака́ ниє́ | іс а гусака́ ниє́ | гк гуса́к пішốв у тốрбу гу́с[акốвськ….] іс ай ходакы́ у печи́ | но́ ка́же ді́ду | ту́й тво́і ходакы́ | the goose… the old man already is looking to put on the shoes, and there are no shoes. well, he says, he took the shoe…that guy took my shoes. ok, so he took the shoes. so the old man found some old shoes that he was wearing the day before when he had gone to get firewood, and he had to go in the old shoes, because there was no choice, that guy took the shoes. and then the woman looked in the oven… hk: and the goose is not there. is: and the goose is not there. structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 35 recording, minute text (22) translation а гусака́ ниє́ | но́ ка́же ба́бі | шчи́ ми ка́же сно́чи каза́в шчо ка́же гусакốвськый пішốв у тôрбốвськый | а ходакốвськый та його́ бра́т ка́же на його́ мі́сьці | но тай так є | тай та́к студе́нт вы́мудровав | а ді́до хôті́в прôві́дати но шчо́ він ся научи́в шчốсь шчо ві́н | шчо ві́н зна́є шчо його́ там у́чат | hk: the goose went into the bag. mr. goose… is: and in the oven, there are shoes. she says, old man, here are your shoes, and there is no goose here. well, he says to the woman, he told me last night that mr. goose had gone to the bag-town, and mr. shoe and his brother, he said, were in his place. and it was like this. like this, the student was smart. and the old man wanted to check what the student had learned. what he knows, what they teach them there. [21-1:27] но то́ …. | то́ не́ хтôсь вы́думав то́ так бы́ло | ссе́ ді́до | прôшчі́н бы на́ш роска́зовав | я́ тото́ запо́мнив | гк ді́до мно́го зна́в іс ôô | ді́до сякы́х казо́к зна́в ду́же мно́го | |…| но | роска́зовав | гк но | а тото́ | як петро́ гу́си пас | |…| іс роска́жете вы́ ци я́ роска́жу | гк но | ішли́ уже́ христо́с іс петро́м | ішли́ | іс села́ на село́ на пра́зник | тай йду́т | а петро́ ка́же го́споди я́ бы ка́же так гố… | я́ бы хốтів хôдь_ єде́н дếнь бо́гом бы́ти | well that… that is not that someone made it up, it really was like that. that is what our old man, blessed be his soul, used to tell. i remembered that. hk: our old man knew a lot. is: oh, our old man knew a lot of such stories. [interviewer: did he by any chance tell stories about jesus going around together with st. peter?] is: yes, he told that. hk: well, and that one, how st. peter was herding geese. [interviewer: i haven’t heard that one, please tell it!] is: will you tell or i should tell? hk: well, jesus and st. peter were going from one village to another to the village church folklorica 2015, vol. xix 36 recording, minute text (22) translation feast. so they are walking, and st. peter says: lord, i would like so much to be god at least for one day. [21-1:28] но тай йду́т йду́т | а | скота́рь… скота́рь вы́гнав гу́си | па́сти | на по́ле | вы́гнав | тай лиши́в | тай | і | іде́ сôбі́ | а христо́с ка́же | но | а на ко́го ты лиши́в | тôту́ худốбу ка́же | та | ка́е піде́ ка́же по | пô лютьськы́х гря́т… | та́_ ги у на́с пô грятка́х піде́ та | піду́т та шкốду нарốблят | гу́си | а | а то́т пасту́х пôві́в | а | ня́й іх дôзі́рат гốспôдь бо́х | а христо́с ка́же | но́ пе́тре | ты́ ннếська бо́гом та | бу́дь із гусьми́ | скота́рь із гусьми́ | іс петро́ ці́лый де́нь гу́си пас гк та христо́с пішốв | so they are going, and a person has taken geese to a field to graze, and has left them there, and he is walking away, and christ asks: to who did you leave these creatures to herd? they will, he says, go to people’s gardens… as here, if they go to vegetable patches, they can make a lot of damage, the geese. and that person said: let god look after them. and christ said: listen, peter, you are god today, so be with the geese, herd the geese. is: st. peter was herding geese for the whole day. hk: and christ went [21-1:29] на пра́зник до цếрькви | а | петро́ ся лиши́в із гусьми́ | скота́рити із гусьми́ | іс а я́к то́т під гру́шêв лежа́в коли́ ішли́ гк ôпя́т ішốв христо́с іс петро́м | но тай іду́т іду́т | та зві́дают єди́н лежи́т під гру́шев | а куды́ о доро́га туды́ та туды́ | а то́т нôгốв указа́в | ге он туды́ ка́же | он туды́ | іду́т | ôпя́т | а | ді́вочка | ци цу́рь’я пôлôка́ла в ріці́ ци шчо́ | зві́дадь_ ді́вôчку | а куды́ от доро́га | доро́га туды́ та туды́ | а она́ ся пі́тхватила тай уста́ла тай ка́же | йốй он to church at the village church feast, and st. peter stayed with the geese, herding geese. is: and how that guy was lying under a pear-tree when they were passing by? hk: again, christ went together with st. peter, so they are walking, and they ask, they ask one guy lying under a pear tree, “where is the road there and there?”, and that guy pointed with his leg. there, he says. they go again, and a girl was whether rinsing clothes in the river, or something. they ask the girl: where is that road structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 37 recording, minute text (22) translation туды́ он туды́ йốй іді́т о туды́ та о туды́ та о туды́ | there and there? and she came and said: oh, there, and there, oh, go there, and there. [21-1:30] іду́т | іс дале́ко пôбі́гла з ни́ми гк ішла́ дале́ко ука́зовати | сюды́ та туды́ | іді́т се́в дôрốгôв сюды́ | показа́ла | но тай | они́ пішли́ а ді́вочка ся верну́ла | а петро́ ка́же | а шчо́ бы | сі́ ді́вôцьці ка́же за се́ шчо на́с ка́же так вітпра́вила спра́вила та | та он то́го шчо о́нде під гру́шев лежи́т ка́же | но | тай та́к | іс петро́ ка́же бо́же но тай я́к | така́ чи́тава ді́вка та тако́го | гк ліни́вого | но | а христо́с ка́же та та́к бо як бы ôбốє чи́таві́ тай та́к а я́ґ_ бы ôбốї ліни́ві тай та́к недо́бре | ай му́сит бы́ти єнно́ ліни́воє а єнно́ чи́тавоє | іс по при ню́ і ві́н прожи́є гк приє́мноє | обы́ приє́мноє бы́ло | шчо́ лю́бы на́шôї ті́лько ниє́ | ты́ йде́ш дойи́ти so they are going… is: she went far with them. hk: she went far to show them the way. here, and there, take this road there. she showed them. and then, they went on and the girl returned. and st. peter says: what will be given to this girl that she showed us the way? -that one that is lying under the pear-tree, jesus says. well. and it was so. is: st. peter says: lord, but how come, such a hard-working girl and such a hk: lazy one. well. and christ says: it is because if they were both hard-working, it will be like this, and if both were lazy, that is not good either, so it must be one lazy person and one hard-working. is: he will survive next to her. hk: good, that one person should be good. why is our luba not coming for so long? will you go and milk the cow? [21-1:31] іс шчế та́м шчôсь ішли́ то́же | шчо́ то шчế бы́ло | а я́к | петра́ жона́ би́ла | зна́єте чу́ли сьте гк а | а | чу́ла | чу́ла м як петра́ жона́ би́ла | давно́ | давно́ так бы́ло шчо жо́ны | жо́ны керьова́ли людьми́ | is: there is another story, they also went, what was it? how a woman beat st. peter? do you know, have you heard that one? hk: yes, i heard it, i heard how a woman beat st. peter. long ago, long ago it was so that women bossed men around. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 38 recording, minute text (22) translation іс ста́рші́ жо́ны гк ста́рші жо́ны чôлôві́к ни́ч | жона́ сôбі́ піде́ і на́пь’є ся і шчо́ і при́йде і чôлôві́ка на́бь’є і | а ты́ тото́ не зроби́в а ты́ он тото́ на́бь’є чôлôві́ка і всьо́ | бо і вếрьх | но і ту́йкы | іс бо петро́ все́ жо́ны жа́ловав гк аа а петро́ а́йно жа́ловав все́ жо́ны | is: women were bosses. hk: women were bosses, and men not at all. a wife would go and get drunk, and come and would beat a man: you did not do that, you did not do this, and she would beat her husband, and that’s it. because she was the boss. and here… is: because st. peter always pitied women. hk: yes, st. peter really always pitied women, [21-1:32] шчо жона́м біда́ біда́ | то́ все́ | жі́н жа́ловав | іс то петро́ вы́просив | шчобы жо́ны бы́ли ста́рші | гк но | но і ту́йкы | прийшли́ тоты́ уже́ два́ | христо́с іс петро́м | і запроси́ли они́ ся до чôлôві́ка до хы́жі | ци ты́ бы нас спа́ти прия́в чôлôві́к до́бре | а жоны́ ниє́ | жона́ сôбі́ у кốрчмі | і прихо́дит ту́й пь’яно́ {п’я́на}(26) нача́ла на чôлôві́ка ва́дити ся гốйкати | а то́ сь не зроби́в он то́то́ | а он тото́ шчо́ тото́ | спля́т у по́стели | она́ і по́кі тото́ | я забы́ла м | іс бốжі ста́рці гк бốжі ста́рці ци я́к а́йно | тре́ба было і каза́ти да́й пốкій | а тота́ взя́ла | о́жіх ци шчо́ | because women’s life is hard, so he always pitied women. is: that was peter who asked that women were bosses. hk: yes. and then… these two already came, christ and st. peter, and asked a man to let them in his house, whether you would let us sleep in your house. the man goes: ok, and the wife was not there, the wife was at an inn. and she comes back drunk, and starts yelling at the husband, yelling, you did not do this, you did not do that, and what are these, sleeping in the bed, and she… i forgot. is: god’s old men. hk: god’s old men or what. ok. he should have told her “leave them alone”. and she took a poker or something [21-1:33] нача́ла би́ти а петро́ іс кра́ю спа́в | а христо́с по при́ сьціну | нача́ла петра́ би́ти | and started beating… st. peter was in the bed on the edge, and christ was next to the wall. she structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 39 recording, minute text (22) translation тай пішла́ на дві́р | а на дві́р ишчế | за чи́мôсь би́ти ишчế | но | петро́ ка́же | йốй ка́же пусти́ ка́же мене́ та́м бо ка́же за́йде та ôпя́т ка́же мене́ бде би́ти | а жона́ зайшла́ та нача́ла | аа шчế м вон то́го пса́ не би́ла коло сьціны́ | та ôпья́т нача́ла петра́ би́ти | но́ пе́тре іс петро́ двы́чи быв би́тый | о́жогом гк христо́с ка́же | но́ пе́тре ты́ | ци обы жо́ны ка́же ста́рші бы́ли | йốй ка́же ні́т го́споди ка́же ня́й бде́ чôлôві́к ста́ршый | started beating st. peter. and went outside, to fetch something else to beat with. well, st. peter says: oh, he says, let me there, because, he says, she will come back and she will beat me again. and the woman come in and started… oh, i haven’t yet beaten that dog next to the wall, and she started to beat st. peter again. well, peter… is: st. peter was beaten twice, with a poker. hk: christ says, well, peter, do you still want women to be bosses? oh, lord, no, he says, let men be bosses. [21-1:34] шчế м он то́го пса́ не би́ла | |…| ка́же шчê м он то́го пса́ ка́же не би́ла за христа́ а христо́с | а то́ ôпя́т петро́ тамкы ой го́споди іс а шчế …. як | пі́п | за́йця коли́ уби́в | іс ци́ганом | вы́ мо́же і забы́ли | пі́п каза́в шчо | коли́ бо́г дає́ | так і моты́ка стрі́лят | гк моты́ка стрі́лят | іс а ци́ган так | жи́в бли́ско коло попа́ | коло фа́ры | та все́ так до | до попа́ заходи́в | “i haven’t yet beaten that dog”! [interviewer: what?] hk: she says: “i haven’t yet beaten that dog”, about christ, and christ… and it’s peter again there. oh my god. is: and also… how the priest… when he killed a rabbit, with the roma. you may have forgotten this one. the priest said, when god permits, a hoe fires. hk: a hoe fires. is: and the roma lived near from the priest’s house, and always dropped by to the priest’s. [21-1:35] тай усе́ | …. коли́ бо́г дає́ так і моты́ка стрі́лят пі́п ка́же | тай ра́с ту́й | іде́ пі́п на ôхốту | у попа́ бы́ла | пу́шка | а and [unclear] the priest says: if god permits, even a hoe can fire. and once the priest goes hunting, the priest had a rifle, folklorica 2015, vol. xix 40 recording, minute text (22) translation ци́ган іс жôнốв там копа́ют шчốсь на гôрốді | бу́лі ци шчо́ там кôпа́ют | тай дếсь там за́яць | біжи́т | тай | пі́п підня́в та бу́г | а ци́ган підьня́в моты́ку та бу́г | то́же | тай ци́ган біго́м за за́йцьом пôбі́х | тай | хо́пив за́йця | но а пі́п ка́же | я́ уби́в за́йця | а ци́ган ка́же я́ уби́в за́йця | я́к ты уби́в чи́м ты́ уби́в за́йця | а вы́ каза́ли шчо коли́ бо́г дає́ то і моты́ка стрі́лят | та́к | я́ уби́в за́йця | моты́кôв | но | но шчо́ с то́го | супере́чають_ ся {супере́чать_ ся} спốрят | но тай шчо́ туй дока́жеш | но ка́же пі́п | но | най буде́ | бдеме́ ра́зом і́сти | and the roma and his wife are digging something in the garden, potatoes or something. and here a rabbit runs. the priest raised the rifle and bang. and the roma raised the hoe and bang, also. and the roma ran after the rabbit and grabbed the rabbit. the priest says: i killed the rabbit, and the roma says: i killed the rabbit. -how did you kill it, what with? - and you said that when god permits, a hoe can fire, so it was me who killed the rabbit, with my hoe. well, so what? they are arguing, arguing, but what can you prove here. well, the priest says, let it be, we’ll eat it together, [21-1:36] ма́тушка згото́вит | она́ до́ма згото́вит | і | бдеме́ ра́зом і́сти | но й прийшли́ до попа́ | та́м уже́ то́го | облупи́ли | покла́ли та́м то́же так у пі́ч | за́йця | пекчи́ | печи́ у пі́ч | тай | пôліга́ли спа́ти | ци́ган уже́ спи́т у попа́ | бо | обы́ не втра́тив за́йця | уже́ у попа́ спи́т | но тай ка́же пі́п | ка́же | кôму́ | ма́й фа́йный со́н буде́ сни́ти ся | тай то́т | то́го буде́ і за́яць | но ци́ган ка́же | на́й бу́де | но | пі́п ду́мав шчо | шчôзь_ вы́грати шчế | гк піп вы́грат іс но | най бу́де | но тай ни́ч | пôліга́ли спа́ти спля́т | а за́яць у печи́ | пече́ ся | ра́но пробуди́ли ся | но | пі́п ка́же | но а ну́ роска́зуй шчо́ тôбі́ ся my wife will cook it, it will cook it at home, and [we] will eat it. well, they came to the priest’s house, skinned the rabbit, put it in the oven, to bake the rabbit, and went to sleep. the roma is sleeping at the priest’s so that he does not loose sight of the rabbit, he is sleeping at the priest’s. and the priest says, the one who sees a better dream, he will take the rabbit. well, ok, the roma says. the priest thought he would win something. hk: that the priest would win. is: well, ok. ok. they went to sleep, they are sleeping, and the rabbit is in the oven, baking. in the morning they woke up, and the priest says: well, tell me structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 41 recording, minute text (22) translation сни́ло | ци́ганови ка́же | ци́ган ка́же | what dream you saw. he says that to the roma. the roma says: [21-1:37] та я́к я буду́ каза́ти та кажі́т вы́ ка́же вы́ ма́й | ста́ршый | кажі́т вы́ | но пі́п нача́в роска́зовати | мні́ са сни́ла така́ высо́ка драби́на | аж до не́ба | і я́ пô ті́ драбині лі́з лі́з лі́з | аж на не́бо | пі́п ка́же | ци́ган ка́же | па́не о́тче | я́ вас там ві́дів | аж на вы́шнôму ціпку́ | я́ ду́мав шчо вы́ не ве́рнете ся ві́тты | а я́ за́йця ізі́в | а ци́ган у ночи́ вста́в | та стрипа́в за́йця | я ду́мав шчо вы́ ся ві́тты не ве́рнете та я́ | шчо вы́ в ца́рство уже́ пішли́ | та я́ ізьзі́в за́йця | я́ вас ві́дів аж на вы́шному ціпку́ | а ци́ган усе́ | вы́хêтровав | гк но | до́шч паде́ е́ | іс шчốсь тако́є | how will i tell, you tell first, you are more important, you tell. so the priest started telling: i dreamed, there was such a high ladder, so that it reached the sky, and i was climbing this ladder into the heaven. the roma says: father, i saw you there on the highest rung of the ladder, i thought you were not coming back from there, and i ate the rabbit. and the roma had woken up at night and ate the rabbit. i thought, he says, you wouldn’t come back from there and i… thought that you already went to heaven, and i ate the rabbit. i saw you on the highest rung of the ladder. so the roma outsmarted the priest. hk: yes. see, it is raining. is: something like this. [21-1:38] |…| гк є́ | є́ такі ́є́ | іс а́ | та да́вно бы́ло шчốсь тако́є гк а тêпếрькы | а тêпếрь уже́ май бі́льше | та іду́т по монастыря́х та тêпếрькы | а давно́ | давно́ бы́ло тако́є шчо помага́ли якốсь | єнны́ дру́гым | тêпếрь по́пы помага́ют | |…| [interviewer: have you heard, are there such people that can see devils and help possessed people?] hk: there are such people, yes. is: yes, long ago there was something like that. hk: and now… and now already more often… people go to monasteries now. and long ago, people used to help one another somehow. now it is the priests who help. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 42 recording, minute text (22) translation гк помага́ют | ту́й | бізі́вно у на́з бы́в | ге юрча́к | но та ходи́ли | у бôрốняву | та́м бы́в такы́й пі́п | іс мо́нах гк мо́нах | по́пы нє́т | тото́ лиш мона́хы | могли́ помочи́ | но та пішли́ там | у монасты́рь | та прика́зовала уже́ жона́ | [interviewer:] do they? hk: they do. here, in our neigborhood there was one yurchak. so they went to boronjava, there was such a priest… is: a monk. hk: a monk. priests cannot do that, it is only monks that could help. so they went there to the monastery, and the woman told us, [21-1:39] шчо там які́ привози́ли | та́м | и́рже гốйкат | уся́ко | рычи́ть_ гі коро́ва | уся́ко | но та | єнні́ жôні́ | уже́ каза́ла шчо | ôна́ від ні́ | коли́ чита́в | тот мона́х єнні́ жôні́ | та ка́же | чита́в | до чоты́ри | до чоты́ри го́дины | каза́ла шчо та́к із ньо́го уже́ лиш вода́ па́дала ее текла́ та́к як цюрько́м | іс ізму́чив ся бы́в гк ізму́чив ся быв | но і ка́же выходи́ | а | а із нếї ка́же | не вы́йду | ка́е не вы́йду | а да́ле | ôпя́т мо́лить ся мо́лит ка́же выходи́ | не вы́йду | і та́к | аж дру́гый дếнь пак | вы́йшôв | that such cases were brought there, people who neighed as horses, yelled, mooed as cows, all sorts. and one woman says, that monk was reading [prayers] over a woman until 4 am [or: 4 hours in a row?], she said that he was sweating, streams were running down his face. is: he got exhausted. hk: he got exhausted. and then he says: come out! and it responds from inside her: i am not coming out! and he is praying and praying again, and says: come out! -i won’t! and so only the next day it came out [21-1:40] із | іж_ жоны́ | ага́ | є́ тако́є є́ | ôна́ каза́ла шчо тто́ | та́мкы уже́ | та и́ржут гốйкают | іс но́ злі́ духы́ | із люди́ны выхốдят гк злі́ духы́ но | іс є́ тако́є | from that woman. yes, such things happen. she said that people there neigh and yell. is: yes, evil spirits come out from a person hk: yes, evil spirits. is: such things happen. structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 43 recording, minute text (22) translation гк його́ пак ві́тты взя́ли я́ забы́ла де́ | тêпếрь із бôрốнявы дру́гый | мона́х | та | практику́є ся | бо́г зна́є як | ци | ци бде́ так | та мо́же і бде́ | молитвы́ | всьо́ молитвы́ | іс як він бу́де та тре́ | ма́ти си́лу гк но ай я́к | |…| hk: he was later transferred there, i forgot where to. now there is another monk from boronjava, he is learning that. i don’t know if he will be able to do it too. but maybe he will. it’s all in prayers. is: it depends how he will turn out. one needs to have strength. hk: of course. [interviewer: i heard in a different village that a priest could see a witch on easter.] [21-1:41] гк пі́п | іс мо́же і бы́в такы́й | яснови́дêць гк всьо́ мо́же бы́ти іс є́ | ясно́ви́тьці | шчо лу́ди́ну ви́дит | шчо | чи́м ві́н ды́хає | у на́с ту́т нема́ такы́х но | но є́ є́ яснови́тьці | |…| гк а тото́ | тото́ то́же | тото́ то́же та́к | бы́ло шчо якốсь | могли́ | могли́ тото́ уга́довати якốсь | іс так ма́йже êсêї | е́вкы дякốвôї | отếць | нє́ | коли́ бо́рôну якы́сь від ньо́го укра́в | hk: a priest? is: maybe there was such a priest. a clairvoyant. hk: maybe. is: there are clairvoyants that can see a person, what he breaths with. we don’t have such people here, but there are clairvoyants. [interviewer: maybe there were such people who could divine who stole something and where the stolen thing was.] hk: oh, that, that also, that also so… it was that somehow they could… they could divine that somehow. is: and maybe the father of that evka diakova, no? when someone stole a harrow from him. [21-1:42] гк кого́ | hk: what? folklorica 2015, vol. xix 44 recording, minute text (22) translation іс бốрôну від ньо́го коли́ укра́в быов | гк мо́же та́м є ді́до коли́ каза́в за мі́хы | шчо | прине́се | прине́сут | іс а | тай ді́до про́сто та́к каза́в | гк ай мо́же | |…| гк ту́й єди́н бы́ов чôлôві́к та я́к | каза́… | та прине́сли му пак бốрôну | іс но | так ві́н шчốсь і зна́в | і ка́же | ві́н прине́се самы́й | самы́й прине́се ту́ бốрôну но ві́н шчôзь зна́в є́вкы дякốвôї | отếць гк та шчốсь зна́ли зна́ли іс но | ві́н шчôсь там | помоли́в ся ци шчо́ і то́т на | то́т прині́с бốрôну | і шчế каза́ли шчо ты́м о́стрыми зубка́ми на плếчі сôбі́ пôкла́в | і держа́в по́кі тốй не упôві́в шчо клади́ | і то́т держа́в на пле́чох | но | зна́ти зна́ли зна́ли тото́ лю́де | гк но́ | та давно́ зна́ли ви́диш я́к | іс то́т самы́й прині́с ни́хто | за ни́м не йшốв | гк і ді́до наш | е славу́ників | славу́ник | is: when someone stole a harrow from him. hk: maybe there is an old man who told about the sacks that he will bring… they will bring… is: no, the old man did not mean that. hk: but maybe… [interviewer: what?] hk: there was one man here, and as he said, they later brought it to him. is. yes. he knew something. and he says: the guy will bring it himself, he will himself bring that harrow. he knew something, this father of evka d’akova. hk: yes, he really knew something. is: yes. he somehow… whether prayed or what, and that guy, he brought back the harrow, and people also said that he put it on his back these sharp nails down, and he was holding it untill the man told him to put it down, he was holding it on his shoulders. yes. people used to know something. hk: yes, long ago, they knew, see. is: that guy brought it back by himself, no one went after him. hk: and our old man, slavunik. structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 45 recording, minute text (22) translation [21-1:43] коли́ на рôпу́ ходи́ли | но тай йшли́ | на рôпу́ | он туды́ ге́т за ху́ст | на рôпу́ давно́ з бочка́ми сякы́ми ходи́ли та | іс у соло́твино | гк ісь_ кі́ньми | а іс у соло́твино гк но та йшли́ ві́тты | а будова́ли | хы́жу лю́де | но тай ішли́ тай | ра́с кốні ста́ли | і кốні не піду́т | іс на мі́сьці ся тốпчут | гк на мі́сьці ся то́пчут і | ві́шта ві́шта ві́шта ай кốні не піду́т | на мі́сьці ся то́пчут | а якы́сь там бы́в | ка́же а ну́ | ка́же іди́ та принеси́ ми ка́же | трі́ску | ві́тты з будо́вы | но | тай па́к | ді́дови тôту́ трі́ску тот прині́с | но тай ді́до шчốсь я́ не зна́ю шчо там уже́ роби́в | і | ді́до | ві́шта | і кốні пішли́ | і | ді́до іде́ | when he went to get the brine, so they were riding there, beyond khust. long ago they went to get brine, they took such barrels. is: to solotvyno. hk: in horse driven carts. is: to solotvyno. hk: so they went from there, and people were building a house, and they were passing this house, and here, the horses stopped and wouldn’t go. is: they were stamping their feet, but not moving, stamping in place. and there was such a man there, and he says, go and bring me a sliver. from there, from the building site. and he brought the old man that sliver, and the old man did something, i don’t know what he was doing there, and the old man said: gee! and the horses started. and the old man is riding, [21-1:44] ту́й | гốйкают із за́ду | чека́йте чека́йте чека́… а ді́до шчи́ май кốні | ру́шат | о́бы | кốні | ішли́ | ага́ | но та па́к | іс ди́вит ай чôлôві́к біжи́т із за́ду | гк чôлôві́к біжи́т біжи́т дога́нят | но́ тай | ді́до уже́ ма́ло хốтів | і пôмуштрова́ти то́го | ты́х | тай | ді́до уже́ ста́в | а шчо́ є шчо́ | ді́до такы́й му | шчо́ є шчо́ | йốй and here someone is yelling from behind: wait, wait, wait! and the old man makes his horses ran faster, so that they ran. and then… is: they look, and a man is running towards them from behind. hk: a man is running after them, and catches up with them. the old man already wanted to teach them. so the old man stopped his horses: what is it? folklorica 2015, vol. xix 46 recording, minute text (22) translation ка́же бі́йте ся бо́[га] | ка́же | чôлôві́к ка́же | ци пôруба́в ся ци уми́(і)рат | шчốсь тако́є | ага́ | но ка́же но іди́ іди́ ка́же | ни́ч му ка́же не бде́ ка́же | но обы́ сьте ка́же бі́льш ка́же тако́є не роби́ли ка́же | ді́до пôві́в | тай ді́до шчốзь_ зна́в і | іс но | але якы́сь то́же зна́в | іс ты́х | гк і та́м зна́в і ді́до знав | відверну́ти | та́м зна́в то́т іспе́рти фу́ру | that’s what the old man asks him: what? oh, he says, what are you doing, don’t you fear god, he says, a man there, whether he cut himself badly, whether he is dying, something like that. aha. well, the old man says, go now, nothing bad will happen to him, but you guys don’t do that again, he says. that’s what the old man said. the old man knew something. is: yes. but someone from these guys also knew something. hk: there, a guy knew something, and the old man knew how to undo it. the guy there knew how to stop the cart, [21-1:45] а ді́до зна́в то́же шчốс | но | а хто́ його́ зна́є шчо́ він | но тай шчо́ він роби́в | на ті́ трі́сьці | де ôни́ будова́ли | |…| гк будова́ли ха́ту іс посла́в там дру́гого шчо прині́с | ві́тты | то пішốв іт ті́ будốві та прині́с йôму́ | дếсь та́к … но гк ві́тты | но та недале́ко тото́ будова́ли дếсь коло доро́гы шчо то́т із… | іспе́р і кốні | іс та́м де любу́ трі́ску буде́ теса́ти а те́шуть | то та́м and the old man knew also something. and who knows what he… and what he did with this sliver from the building site. [interviewer: i just didn’t understand from where he got this sliver.] hk: they were building a house. is: the old man sent another person to bring from there… that person went to this building site and brought him… something like that. hk: from there. so they were building somewhere near the structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 47 recording, minute text (22) translation круго́м | круго́м тріскы́ | круго́м буди́н[ка] гк а ді́до загна́в | то́го вже сôпє́рника {супу́тника} сво́го | іди́ ми ка́же | принеси́ трі́ску ві́тты | тай ві́н прині́с тай ві́н | ді́до шчốсь на ті́ трі́сьць | шчốсь прôмốвив | тай то́го чôлôві́ка | тай | кốні ся ру́шили тогды́ | а чôлôві́к | упа́в шчо | road so that that guy could stop the old man’s horses. is: there, any old sliver, they hew wood, and all around there are slivers, around the house. hk: and the old man sent that person who was going with him, go, he says, bring me a sliver from there, and he did, and the old man said something on this sliver, and that guy… horses could move then, and the guy, either fell or what, [21-1:46] я́ не зна́ю ци | пôруба́в ся ци | ци та́кôй при смêрти́ бы́ов іс шчôсь му недо́бре ся зроби́ло | гк а́й недо́бре ся зроби́ло та | чôлôві́к упа́в та | но | а | іс а трі́ска вы зна́єте шчо | шчо теса́ти гк но і | і | то́т пак | доганя́в ді́да | уже́ дру́гый доганя́в не то́т | а ді́до шчế шчế | цу цу́ кốні цу цу́ | кобы́ кốні ішли́ ма́ло | чого́ они́ тако́є рốблят іс но тадь_ ді́до каза́в тếсьць мі́й шчо де́ то у вôлôся́ньці ци де́ | яка́зь_ ба́ба трахто́ры спе́рла | кôлгốспні трахто́ры | гк но | тай …. іс ішли́ дếсь через йêї́ | ве́зли | вози́ли гні́й веснốв | і дếсь пішли́ через йêї́ зếмлю | шо не зві́дали ся | ду́мают колго́с тай колго́с | і ба́ба | і трахто́ры туй ра́з нача́ли | всьо́ | на мі́сьці і | і спе́рла i don’t know if he cut himself, or was dying. is: something bad happened to him. /[he fainted] hk: yes, something bad happened to him. /[he fainted], and he fell down, yes. is: and do you know what a sliver is? when they hew wood. hk: yes, and… he who then ran after the old man, it was another guy, not that guy. and the old man still more … gee gee horses, so that horses go a bit. why would they do that. is: and the old man said, my father-in-law, that somewhere in volosianka, or somewhere, a woman stopped tractors, tractors from a collective farm. hk: yes [unclear] is: they were going through her… they were carrying manure in spring and somewhere went through her folklorica 2015, vol. xix 48 recording, minute text (22) translation трахто́ры | і да́льше | ходи́ли | ту́ ба́бу проси́ти | шчобы пусти́ла тото́ | трахто́ры но | land, and did not ask permission. they think, it is collective farm, after all. and the woman… and the tractors at once started … in one place. so she stopped the tractors. and later they would go to that woman to ask her to let tractors go. [21-1:47] шчо́ то жêлі́зо | іспе́рла но | то ді́до роска́же тố у вôлôся́ньці бы́ло | то́ де льві́вська о́бласьць уже́ | гк не у вôлôся́ньці ай о́де | тота́ | іс в ялинкôва́тім | ялинкôва́ті гк бога́тьська | іс а бôга́тьська | но | то трахто́ры спе́рти то | кốні то́ йшче́ та́к | но а трахто́ры то́ уже́ жêлі́зо то́ | і всьо́ і трахто́ры на мі́сьці стоя́ли і ни йшли́ | не могли́ ру́шити ся і всьо́ | гк ай мно́го тако́го | мно́го тако́го | шчо | шо є́ | є́ людếй шчо они́ шчốзь зна́ют | зна́ют | є́ іс а шчế мо́же роскажі́т як лі́с руба́ли давно́ як пушча́ли | пô ри́зах | де́рево | то́же інтере́сно | лісору́бы коли́ руба́ли | ба́ба то́ | зна́є май всьо́ it is iron, and she stopped them. that the old man can tell, it was in volosianka, it is already the lviv region. hk: not in volosianka but here, that… is: in ialynkovate hk: bohatska. is: ah, bohatska. well. to stop tractors, it is something. to stop horses, it is not that difficult, but tractors are iron. and all the tractors were standing in one place and did not go, could not move, and that was it. hk: but there are many such things, many such things are. there are people who know something, there are. is: and also maybe you will tell as they cut wood long ago and let it down by such troughs, wood, that is also interesting, when the woodcutters cut wood. our old woman knows that. [21-1:48] … гк с то́го бốку жоло́бы | і с сьо́го бốку де́рево і с то́го hk: there are troughs on that side, wood from that side, wood structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 49 recording, minute text (22) translation бốку де́рево | і та́к | я́к о о́нде з | ге́ руба́ли близнếць но айбо не тако́є | та то́ | роби́ли тото́ ри́зы та́к шчо іс айбо та́м на сьпі́д які́сь дошкы́ кла́ли гк м іс дошкы́ якісь на спі́т | нє́т гк не дошкы́ ай тоты́ | баланьчі тоты́ | тôнкі́ май де́рева тоты | гôрі́ | но тай як | як | руба́ли | та гôрі́ | і дôлі́ ты́м ма́ло так пушча́ли | іс там якốсь коти́ли в ри́зы | гк но та якốсь | уже́ у ни́х тото́ там бы́ло я́ | шчốсь тако́є пốмню | бêрова́ли та | іс тако́є рошши́рêня мо́же бы́ло там | гк та ли́ш іс і туды́ | кача́ли де́рево ішло́ по рі́зах тоты́х | то дале́ко мо́ж бы́ло | from this side, and like this, as here. so they were cutting wood, on the twin mountain, but not like this, and they were making such troughs, so that… is: but they put some boards underneath. hk: what? is: they put some boards underneath, no? hk: not boards but such… small pieces of wood, these thin trunks. up there. when they cut wood up in the mountains, they let it go down these troughs. is: they put it somehow in these troughs. hk: yes, they had this up there. i remember something like that. they were strong. is: maybe there was such wide place there. hk: should be. is: and they rolled the wood there, and it went down these troughs, it could go far. [21-1:49] гк дале́ко дале́ко йôй та пра́вда шчо там | іс куды́ хôті́ли цапи́нами гк го́споди | тай | я́ коли́ бы́ла у тốму | о́нде у при́слôпі | іс айбо сіда́йте бли́же бо | не бде́ чу́ти гк а вы́ пи́шете | у сі́янці | но hk: yes, very far, that’s right. is: they pushed it where they wanted with hooks. hk. oh. and when i was there, in pryslip… is: move closer, or you won’t hear. hk: and you are writing? in the nursery where they grow folklorica 2015, vol. xix 50 recording, minute text (22) translation так тêпếрь та ссе́ уже́ конếць | іс шчо гк та ішло́ де́рево та і всьо́ та і шчо́ там іс но та ка́жу я́к тото́ там пушча́ли я́ не зна́ю гк пушча́ли де́рево і сходи́ло тото́ ге́ то аж | на стака́ду | а́йно | як пушча́ли | та́к із го́ры | а я́ бы́ла | …. у дру́гім сêлі́ | у сі́яньці | смêрічкы́ сьме сади́ли | то́ ся тра́пит | но та | а лю́де дале́ко дале́ко | young spruces. well, now it is the end already. is: what? hk: the wood was going, and that’s it. is: yes, and i say i don’t know how they let it go down there. hk: they let the wood go down and it went down. the let it down from the mountain. and i was in a different village, in a nursery, we were planting spruces. that happens. and people far away [21-1:50] руба́ли та пушча́ли | дерево та́м | уу | неда́леко коло се́бе | а єнна́ шту́ка ся він_ ни́х | вы́рвала | то́ я свốйима очи́ма тото́ | ві́діла мно́го рас | та | дале́ко та́к як | о́н із он то́го вêрьха́ | як | ге́т он та́м | та́ шту́ка | як ішла́ | та вда́ріть_ ся у пня́ | та д гốрі | а да́ле та́к іде́ іде́ | і та́к і та́к | і тото́ через зру́б дале́ко ішло́ | і дốті шчо прийшло́ | мы́ єнны́ | но | ско́рше мы пішли́ та на дру́гый бі́к исьме | перебі́гли ско́ро | та гốйкаєме | на дру́гых тіка́йте тіка́йте бо | де́рево іде́ | ага́ | через зру́б | мы́ ві́діли | они́ не ві́діли тото́ де́ там | ішчế ся лиши́ло | ай мы́ ві́діли зру́бом | were cutting wood and letting it go down. the wood. not far from themselves. and one log got away from them. i saw it with my own eyes, many times. and it was far, like from that mountain over there. this log, as it went down, it hit against a stump and went up, and then went down like this, through the trough (?). and until it came… we… we went before that and went to the other side, run there real fast, and we are yelling to others: run, run, because a log is going down, across the trough(?). we saw it and they did not see it. it was still there, and we saw how it went down the trough. [21-1:51] і прийшло́ і пак | уда́рило было но шчо пак ї зві́тты прине́сли | я́ пак забы́ла | пак у бо́лници бы́ла | шчо | and then it hit, and then they brought her from there. i forgot how it was. she was in a hospital then, it did not kill her. structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 51 recording, minute text (22) translation зốвсім на́сьмêрть і | не уби́ло не́ | тото́ | тото́ є́ тако́є шчо | де́рево | і де́рево тако́є є́ | шчо му́сит попа́сти | на ко́гось шчо му́сит уби́ти | та́к каза́ли ка́жут а бо́г зна́є | |…| гк є́ тако́є де́рево ага́ | шчо му́сит попа́сти обы́ | уби́ло | всьо́ є на сьві́ті | бо́г сяты́й зна́є | всьо́ є на сьві́ті | |…| гк я́к |…| гк та ка́ут шчо є́ | that happens that a tree, there is such a tree that must hit a person, that it must kill someone. that’s what people say, god knows if it is right. [interviewer: that there is such a tree?] hk: there is such a tree, yes, that must hit someone and kill. there is everything in the world. holy god knows. there is everything in the world. [interviewer: does it happen that something makes a person gets lost in the forest?] hk: what? [interviewer: does it happen that something leads a person astray in the woods?] hk: people say it happens. [21-1:52] ка́жут шчо є́ є́ шчо | мо́же мо́же | як ра́з іва́н учо́ра | сно́чи прика́зовав ôрі́хы тốвк | я́ та у на́с єде́н ту́йкы | сếсь шчо я каза́ла | сếсь | юри́к | миха́йло ю́рьйович каза́в | шчо глухы́й на у́хо | вы коло ньо́го бы́ли коло то́го | шчо глухы́й | ага́ | но | та каза́в шчо пішốв на ôрі́хы в нêді́лю | давно́ шчê і при кôлгốзі | ага́ | та́м на єнно́ по́ле | і каза́в шчо води́ло го | шо ві́н не зна́в куды́ вы́йде | туды́ пішốв а три́ ра́з ôбыйшốв | нао́коло та тогды́ ся оптями́в | шчо води́ло го у | я́ каза́ла they say that there is something that… yes, it happens. ivan just told last night, when he was grinding walnuts. there is one guy here, the one i told you, this one, yurik, myhailo iurievych told, the one who is deaf in one ear. you were to his place, the one who is deaf. yes, so he said that he went to gather nuts once on a sunday, long ago, at the time of collective farms. yes. there he went to a field, and he said something made him lose his way, so that he did not know where he was going. he went there, and went three times around, and then he came to himself. something led him folklorica 2015, vol. xix 52 recording, minute text (22) translation шчо за то́ шчо в нêді́лю йшốв | при слу́жбі́ | astray. i said it was because he went on sunday at the time of the church service. [21-1:53] та за тто́ го води́ло | є́ є́ тако́є є́ | куды́ йде́ люди́на | перехрести́ти ся тре́ба | помоли́ти ся тре́ба | ішли́ | три ді́вочкы | черес штрếку | ішốв пốіст | і они́ як ра́з | прийшли́ | прийшли́ і ду́мают | пере́скочиме | і они́ пере́скочили | штре́ку та | ли́ш пере́скочили тай | тай пốіст | так | а | то́ загна́в | ста́ршый дия́вол ме́ншого | дия́вола | обы́ іх | уби́в | обы́ іх там | маши́на уби́ла | тогды́ прихо́дит | ка́же | а чôму́ сь ка́же не зроби́в чôму́ они́ ка́же перейшли́ | and because of that something led him astray. there is something like this. if a person goes somewhere, one needs to make a sign of the cross over oneself, and pray. once three girls crossed a railway. a train was coming, and they came to the rails and thought: we’ll jump it. and they jumped it and as soon as they were on the other side, the train came. and a chief devil sent a younger devil so that he should kill them, so that they get run over by the train. so the devil comes back and that one says: why didn’t you do that, how come they could cross safely? [21-1:54] бо ка́же | єнна́ ся перехрести́ла | а дру́гу ма́ти перехрести́ла | а тре́та ôпя́т | моли́ла ся | і ка́же і не мі́г я тото́ ка́же зроби́ти | то всю́ды тре́ба лиш | пôмоли́ти ся перехрести́ти ся | іде́ в дôрốгу перехрести́ти ся | а́нгелика проси́ти прêсьяту́ ді́ву на пốмôч | тай | бо́г пома́гат тогды́ | |…| но та і то́ ка́жут шчо і тото́ | є́ тако́є | но | тай шчо́ | то́ від усьо́го лиш тре́ба ся моли́ти | and this one answers: because one made a sign of the cross over herself, and the other, her mother crossed her, and the third one prayed. and, he says, i could not do that. everywhere you go, you need to pray and make a sign of the cross, if you go somewhere, and ask an angel, and the holy virgin to help you. and then god helps you. [interviewer: does it happen that a person sees something at night?] hk: yes, people say that also happened. and what, you just need to pray against everything, structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 53 recording, minute text (22) translation [21-1:55] від усьо́го | [при]ви́дить ся і | ся бойи́т та моли́ти ся тай | тай тото́ якốсь | прохо́дит бо́гочко | хорони́т | люди́ну | як ка́жут | без бо́га й не до поро́га | |…| у лі́сі | та я тото́ то́же чу́ла но а я́ зна́ю ци то́ мо́же бы́ти | шчо то́ а́йно у лі́сі | чека́йте | шчốсь то шчê хốтіла каза́ти | against everything. it can show itself to you and… one is afraid, and one needs to pray, and that thing somehow disappears. god protects a person. so they say, without god you cannot go even as far as a threshold. [interviewer: and people say, something one can hear music in the woods?] hk: in the woods? i also heard that, but i don’t know whether it can be… what that is… yes, in the woods… wait, what was it that i wanted to say? [21-1:56] є́ є́ тако́є є ́| де́ люди́ну убьє́ | убьє́ ци ге́ | та́к гі де́рево вать шчо́ | і та́м гốйкат гốйкат | і ссе́ ге́ шчо іва́н ка́же шчо | шчо сьме пе́рше говори́ли | сêсі́ ри́зы шчо сут | та та́м | уб’є́ чôлôві́ка | не ра́з каза́ли лю́де шчо | я́кôсь ся не вітсту́пит і де́рево | надле́тить_ і убь’є́ і всьо́ | і пак там гốйкат | ва́рды ва́рды гốйкат та́к як лю́де гốйкают та | такы́м го́лосом гốйкат ва́рды ва́рды ва́рды вбы́ ся вітступа́в ва́рды | ге то та́к у | людếй шчо роби́ли в лісу́ та такі́ слова́ | слова́ бы́ли | не ка́же шчо вітступи́ ся ай ва́рды ва́рды ва́рды | yes, there are such things. where a person gets killed, so as, for example, a tree kills a person, there something shouts. and that is, what ivan said, that we just talked about, that there are these troughs, and there, people said many times that, if one does not move over and a tree goes down and kills him, then later it shouts there: vardy vardy! it shouts like people shout, it says vardy vardy, so that one gets out of the way. that is, people who worked in the woods, they had such words, they wouldn’t say “get out of the way”, but vardy vardy. [21-1:57] |…| із вівця́ми | |…| [interviewer: and when people go herding sheep, do they see something there?] hk: herding sheep? folklorica 2015, vol. xix 54 recording, minute text (22) translation я́ шчôсь не чу́ла | обы́ вівчарі́ тото́ каза́ли | ци мо́же тако́є бы́ти | шчốсь | не зна́ю | |…| як |…| а́нгел | |…| [interviewer: when they stay there.] hk: i haven’t heard shepherds say anything like that, whether such things happen. i don’t know. [interviewer: and does it happen that people see something in dreams?] hk: what? [interviewer: say, they see an angel…] hk: an angel? [interviewer: or something like this. or a person who has died.] [21-1:58] а́ | люді́на ся сни́т | а́ | тако́є ся сни́т сни́т людина́ | як | шчо умре́ | но та шчо́ сни́т ся | у на́с бы́в | єдếн хлốпіць | у два́ціть три́ ро́кы утопи́в ся у ла́твії | а́рмію вы́служив всьо́ | пішốв на рôбốту тай | тай та́м ся втопи́в | і ві́тты го пак приве́зли сюды́ | ту́й | ту́й исьме го хорони́ли | та м[êнь]і́ ся | то́же пак сни́ло | а перет то́го | ишчế як ма́в | уже́ | вы́йти дôмі́ ци мав уме́рти ци шчо́ | та ві́н ся самы́й не втопи́в ай | дру́гый го втопи́в быов | дво́х людếй | єдếн лиши́в чôлôві́к сем…. шесте́ро дітếй | hk: yes, one can see a [dead] person in a dream. such things come in a dream, people who have died do appear in a dream. we had one son, and when he was twenty-three, he drowned in latvia. he finished his army service, started working there, and there he drowned. and they brought his body from there here. we buried him here. and i had a dream. even before, when he had to come home, or had to die, or what. but he did not drown by himself, another person made him and another guy drown. that guy left seven… six chilren behind, [21-1:59] шчо утопи́в ся | то́т прі́гнув {ско́чив} | як они́ сі́ли | дếсь | ма́ло тото́ | дếсь | уве́зли ся на лốцьці | та они́ два сі́ли | на́ш | хлốпêць тай | той то́т the guy who got drowned. and this person jumped, after they sat… they went somewhere in a boat, and they two were sitting there, our son and that structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 55 recording, minute text (22) translation чôлôві́к іс синичо́ла о́нде | тай ве́зли ся а то́т | при́гнув якốсь на лốтьку і лốтьку переверну́в і всьо́ | та на́ш попа́в у круті́ль | та́к | сто́ячи го й найшли́ там не мі́г ві́тты ві́н ду́же зна́в пла́вати тай | борони́ти ся віт тако́го | попа́в у круті́ль і не мі́г | но́гы вы́тягнути ся́к но́гы му бы́ли в піску́ | а то́т | то́т ся утопи́в то́же | чôлôві́к | шчо зна́ю каза́ти | та перет то́го | мні́ ся сни́ло і сни́ли сны́ ми ся сни́ли | man from synychiv, they were in the boat, and this guy jumped somehow in the boat and turned the boat over, and that was it. and our son got into a whirlpool like this, standing. because they found him there, he could not get out from there. he had known how to swim, and how to protect himself from such things, but he got into a whirlpool and coud not get his feet out of there, and his feet were in the sand. and that other guy also drowned. i don’t know much about that. and before that, i saw a dream, i saw several dreams. [21-2:00] усе́ | жона́ у бі́лім і ді́до у бі́лім | і о та́к | та́к як о та́к сі́в | і они́ там стоя́т а я́ ту́й | тото́ всьо́ бі́лоє комна́ты бі́лі | усьо́ | усьо́ | бі́лоє тако́є шчо | но | та́ґ_ як сьні́х | но і жона́ мêні́ за є́нно писа́ла | ба айбо кêдь ни́ґда не тямлю́ | не | на́шчо бду́ каза́ти шчо тто́ вадь тто́ бо | я́ не тя[млу́] | а она́ мêні́ всьо́ писа́ла | шчốсь писа́ла | і ра́з мні́ ся сни́т | но чека́йте | ôпя́т такы́й | такы́й вели́кый ді́м | і о та́к | дêсь ся́к сякы́й вели́кый калідо́р | і сь сьо́го бốку коси́сі і с то́го бốку | and it was always, a woman in white and an old man in white, and like this, and he were standing there, and i was here, and all that was white, and the rooms were white. everything was white as snow. and that woman was always writing… but i don’t remember, and i won’t say what it was, because i don’t remember. and she was always writing, writing something. and once i saw a dream. wait, how was it. again, there was such a large house, and such a large hallway. flowers on that side and on this side, [21-2:01] тото́ всьо́ у коси́цях | ві́тьсі захі́д | і я́ якốсь | тото́ іду́ іду́ | туды́ | і | і та́ґ_ гі бы у дру́гі ко́мнаті тай і о та́к у кốмнаті | а/йбо і тото́ | бі́лоє | а та́м о everything was covered with flowers. from there, there was an entrance, and i was walking there something, into another room, and in that room folklorica 2015, vol. xix 56 recording, minute text (22) translation такі́ діточкы́ | та́к яґ_ бы іх пôстри́х усьо́ у бі́лім | і межи ни́ми ді́до | у бі́лім | ді́до вы́шшый | а діточкы́ оть_ сякі́ круго́м | усьо́ у бі́лім у бі́лі оде́жи | і ка́же мні́ | і ка́же ді́до мні́ | ишчế нам ка́же єдно́… | єди́н хыби́т | о та́к мні | ішчế живы́й бы́в | уже́ уме́р | та я́ не ка́жу ай | ай ка́же шчế нам ка́же єде́н | тре́ба нам ка́же | єди́н хыби́т | но і ни́ч та тото́ со́н | я́ тот со́н ни́ґда не мốгу забы́ти | everything was also white, and there were sich kids there, all the same height, and all in white, and among them there was an old man in white. the old man was taller, and the children were like this, around him, all in white, in white clothes. and he says to me, the old man says: we are missing one more, one more. and so i saw it… he was still alive… or already died. i don’t say anything. and he says, we need one more. and that’s it, that was my dream. i cannot forget this dream. [21-2:02] і то́д_ ді́до передо мнốв і тоты́ діточкы́ | но то́го бы́ло | коло ді́да | і я́ | мêні́ тото́ уже́ ни́ч | но ай | і ту́й рас | утопи́в ся | выхо́дит шчо | уже́ звốнят ви́тты шчо | не ка́жут шчо утопи́в ся ай | нешча́сный слу́чай тай | пак пішốв туды́ уже́ чôлôві́к | уже́ го там не заста́в бо они́ го вітпра́вили ві́тты бы́ли | маши́нôв | о́й го́споди | но тай | тогды́ коли́ і́х уже́ ве́зли | та ту́й исьме ходи́ли уже́ на по… | то все́ | но та шчо́ я́к як шчо́ | якы́й слу́чай | не хôті́ли каза́ти шчо втопи́в ся не хôті́ли лиш слу́чай тай | and i see this old man in front of myself, and these children, around him. and that was it. and then my son got drowned. they send me… they called me from there and said… they did not say he drowned himself, they said it was an accident. and my husband went there, but he did not find him there because they already had sent the body from there in a truck. oh my god. and then while they already sent here these two bodies, we went to ask diviners. and what was it, what kind of an accident, they did not want to tell me that he had drowned, did not tell, just said “an accident”. [21-2:03] поби́ли поби́в ся та ссе́ та тото́ от | но й ни́ч | і ту́й мні́ ся уже́ коли́ іх ве́зли дôмі́ | і чу́й мêні́ ся сни́т | уво львốві | whether he hurt himself, and this, and that. and i didn’t say anything. and again, i hear in a dream, “they are in lviv, in structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 57 recording, minute text (22) translation та | у ôльвốві су́т | і на дếвядь_ го́дин ка́же буду́т ту́йкы у новосе́лиці | і ві́діла м які́ | тото́ тру́ны | та́м шчо шчі у львốві бы́ли | та́м им ві́діла | які́ тру́ны | і я́ ту́йкы | уже́ у ня́ ту́й уже́ спля́т | сестра́ тай с при́слопа нêві́стка | ту́йкы сут | тай ка́жу | устава́йте ге́т | та ка́жу | ладі́т да́шчо і́сти а шчо́ | ка́жу на дếвїдь_ го́дин ка́жу | ту́й буду́т ка́жу лю́де везу́т ка́жу | не́ поби́тых ка́жу ай мертвы́х ка́жу дво́х ка́жу везу́т | они́ нача́ли у дві́ на ме́не | lviv, and they will be here at nine o’clock, here in novoselytsia”. and i saw the coffins, when they still were in lviv. i saw them in a dream, what the coffins looked like. and here, i had a sister in my house and a relative from pryslip, they were here, and i said, get up, and, i said, make something to eat, because, i say, at nine o’clock there will be people here, they are bringing not the injured people, but dead people, i say, two of them. they both started saying, [21-2:04] шчо́ ты тако́є шчо́ ты тако́є со́н та со́н | шчо́ ты у со́н | ві́руєш тай шчо́ | я́ ка́жу не ві́рую ка́жу но та́к ка́жу | буде́ | ка́жу на дếвять і то́чно на дếвять_ го́дин бы́ли ту́й у новосе́лиці | ту́й о́де га гати́ | но тай тай і шчо́ | ра́с ся | потопи́ли і потопи́ли | ту́йкы | шо́фер уже́ то́т шчо вы́віс | тай ка́же і́х ка́же утопи́в ка́же они́ ся ка́же сами́ не потопи́ли | айбо | та ка́же | обы́ іх дава́в обы́ го дава́ли на тото́ | та́ґ_ гі в су́д | а мы́ пак ся | пора́дили ка́жу | чôлôві́ку | та шчо́ нам ка́жу тото́ да́сьць | шчо його́ пôсу́дяд_ василя́ ка́жу не не бы́ло | ниє́ тай не бде́ ка́жу | а на́м шчо та обы́ алиме́нты вбы нам плати́в та шчо́ тот | шчо іх утопи́в | what are you talking about, it was a dream, do you really believe in a dream. i say, i don’t believe, but it will be like that, at nine o’clock. and exactly at nine o’clock they were here in novoselytsia, there on the bridge. and so what. they got drowned. here, the driver who brought the bodies here, he said, that one made them drown, they had not drowned by themselves. and he said, that guy should be sued. and we talked about this, and i said to my husband: what use will it be to us that that guy will be in court? vasyl is dead, and why we need the money that the one who made them drown should pay us. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 58 recording, minute text (22) translation [21-2:05] не тре́ба | ка́жу нам іва́не | ни алимếньтів ни ни́ч | бо василя́ ниє тай | тай на́с ка́жу ту́й мо́же ско́ро не бде́ | тай | сімдêся́того рốку | сімдêся́того рốку лише́ | вже́ кі́лько тото́ | за́раз | тото́ | сốрôк рốків | о го́споди бо́же мій | но тай та́к | та бы́ли сьме да́шчо хốдь і́ли ма́ло ivan, i say, we don’t need this money or anything, because vasyl is dead, and we will probably be dead soon too. it was in 1970, in 1970. how long ago was it? forty years ago. oh my god. well it was like that. will you come and eat something? [22-00] ……………. (27) гк ішốв | пан так як | ґрốв | я́ґ_ бы тêпếрь каза́ти |…| рôзумі́єте | но шчо | його́ всьо́ | там | тốня пшени́ця сесе́ всьо́ та йшốв тото́ диви́ти | та ві́з го кốчіш | но́ уже́ на | іс кốньох гк на ко́нях на ті́ | я́к тото́ ся ка́же | на бры́цьці | ага | на такі́м | дві́ ко́леса вели́кі | і | тото́ тако́є | бры́чка | каза́ли | і іду́т | і стріжа́ют | ци́ганы | ци́ганы іх | но і | ци они́ стрі́тили ци я́к уже́ | стрі́тили цига́нів | тай та́м гôвôря́т | тогды́ пан ка́же | а | а я́к вы жи́єте іс чо́го вы́ жи́єте | па́н зьві́дат ци́ганів | мы́ з манты́ | …………………… hk: a nobleman was riding, such as a count, how would we say now? [interviewer: i understand.] hk: you understand? well, so that everything was his, there was a large plot of land, wheat, all that. and he went to look at that all. and a coachman was driving him. well, on… is: horses. hk: on horses, on… what do you call it… in a coach. yes, on such… two large wheels, that was a coach, they called it. so they were going, and they met roma. or roma met them. or they met roma, or however it was. and they were talking. the nobleman said: how do you live, how do you earn your living? that’s what the noblemen asked the roma. we, we live from manta. [22-01] ци́гане ка́жут мы́ з манты́ жи́ємо | та яка́ тото́ у ва́с ма… із якốї манты́ | та мы́ бы вам ка́же | указа́ли айбо ту́й the roma say: we live from manta. -what is that manta of yours, from what manta do you live? -we could tell you, they structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 59 recording, minute text (22) translation ниє́ | бо лиши́ли сьме | дếзь_ закопа́ли | в зếмлю там | ту́й ниє́ коло на́с ай йти́ бы за ним | за нếв | коби́ сьте нам да́ли кôня́ та | пішốв бы | о́де | єде́н ци́ганин | ага́ | но тай на́те та ка́же | та йді́т та прине́сете | пішốв тот | чека́ют чека́ют | ниє́ того́ | ниє́ того́ з мантốв | но | тай ниє́ тай ниє́ ба шчо́ ниє́ го | йốй ка́же тото́ я́ закопа́в | а ві́н не мо́же найти́ | да́йте нам | да́йте нам кôня́ | та піду́ й я́ тай | при | прине́се | манту́ | но | тай тото́ | вы́прягли кôня́ | say, but it is not here, because we left it somewhere, we buried it in the ground there. it is not here, we would need to go get it. if you could give us a horse, then one roma could go fetch it. -ok, here is a horse, the nobleman says, come and bring it. so one roma went off. they were waiting and waiting, the roma did not come back and did not bring the manta. he is not coming, so where is he? and [another roma] says, oh, i buried it, and that guy cannot find it. give us a horse so that i can also go, and i will bring it. well, they unharnessed the horse. [22-02] ка́же а ну́ на | сіда́й | то́т на кôня́ сі́в | но́ ка́же | тêпếрь | єде́н тягні́т дру́гый пха́йте ка́же | а то́т | а то́т пішốв за мантốв наохте́ма та ôба кốні взя́в | а тота́ | а коли́ | тота́ кôчі́я ся лиши́ла і па́н ся лиши́в | і кốчіс_ ся лиши́в усьо́ іс ци́ган сі́в на кôня́ та ка́е | здôрốві бува́йте гк а́йно а́йно здôрốві быва́йте іс єдно́ тягні́т а дру́гі | пха́йте | гк а дру́гі пха́й обы́ | єде́н обы́ тягну́в а дру́гый бы | труча́в із за́ду | іс от тôбі́ і манта́ the nobleman says, get on the horse. the roma got on the horse and says: now one pull [the coach], and the other, push it. and off he went, and never came back, this way he went to fetch the manta. they took both horses. and the coach remained, and the nobleman remained, and his coachman remained. is: the roma got on the horse and says: fare you well… hk: yes, yes, fare you well… is: one person, pull it [the coach], the other, push it. hk: and the other, push it. so that one would pull it, and the other, push from behind. is: that’s the manta. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 60 recording, minute text (22) translation гк но тай тôбі́ манта́ | тай цига́не та́к із манты́ і жи́ют | та́м ôбманя́т та́м ôбману́т тай цига́не так жи́ют із манты́ | но | шчế м ся нагада́ла та д[у́маю] уже́ і сесе́ | оби́ сьте ма́ли hk: yes, that’s the manta. and the roma live from that manta. they deceive here and deceive there, and so they live from manta. well, and also i remembered another story, and i think let it be here, so that you have it. [22-03] [си́]рôту не жа́луй | а жôні́ пра́вду не кажі́ | а па́нови́ гро́… | ци па́ну | ци кốму іс а па́ну гро́шêй не зы́ч гк па́нови грốшêй не зы́ч | оно́ так є́ бо | бо | бы́ов уже́ чôлôві́к но | жона́ | тай шчốсь тото́ гôвôря́т тай ка́же | чôлôві́к | я́ ка́же | та́м жи́да | а ві́н не зарі́зав | я́ ка́же зарі́зав жи́да | жи́да ка́же | айбо оби́сь ка́же | никốму ка́же не каза́ла | оби́сь не пôві́ла | но тай ни́ч | ра́зь_ ві́н прихо́дит ци вы́пившый ци шчо́ тай шчốсь | на жôну́ шчốсь та́м нача́в | іс е та бы? вы́ роска́зуйте гк ге іс жи́да поча́ли гля́дати | уже́ і пôлі́ція | і всьо́ жи́д пропа́в | а ві́н ся договори́в із жи́дом | я́ тебе́ спря́чу дếсь | та бу́ду каза́ти шчо я́ тебе́ | уби́в | но | тай | туй пішла́ шуми́ха по селу́ | гк бо я́ | бо я́ уже́ і забува́ю | don’t pity an orphan, and don’t tell truth to your wife, and money… don’t lend money to a nobleman? or to who? is: don’t lend money to a nobleman. hk: don’t lend money to a nobleman, that is right, because… there was a husband and a wife, and they speak, and the husband says: i, he says, i killed a jew. but he didn’t kill this jew. he said: i killed the jew, just don’t tell anybody, don’t tell. ok. so once he comes home, either drunk or what, and started saying something unpleasant to his wife. is: [unclear] you tell. hk: what? is: people started to look for the jew, already the police started searching, the jew had disappeared. and that man arranged it with the jew, i will hide you somewhere, and i’ll say that i have killed you. so there was unrest in the village. structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 61 recording, minute text (22) translation hk: because i forget things sometimes. [22-04] вши́ткоє іс но | жи́т пропа́в | гк но тай ни́ч | а ві́н прийшốв дôмі́ тай шчốсь на … | но на жôну́ нача́в гốйкати іс а жона́ ка́же | я́ никốму не упôві́м | бо | ка́же жона́ | шчо́ ты такы́й сумны́й хо́диш | та | ни́ч | та ты́ ми пôві́[ч_] та я́ никốму не упôві́м та я́ твốя жона́ | бо йôму́ каза́ли шчо жôні́ пра́вду не кажи́ | та ка́же зна́єш я жи́да уби́в | шчобếсь не пô… та де́ я никốму не упôві́м | но тай да́льше уже́ | гк но тай | нача́в шчốзь_ гốйкати | а ôна́ | іс заві́в сканда́л такы́й | із жôнốв | гк а́йно | чека́й | ты́ ка́же жи́да уби́в ка́же | та ты́ ка́же | я́ ка́же тебе́ загôлốшу | ты́ жи́да уби́в | іс вы́бігла на у́лицю тай поча́ла гốйкати | уби́в жи́да тай мене́ хо́че вби́ти | гк а́йно | но | іс а каза́ла шчо никốму не упôві́сьць | гк но а жона́ | everything. is: well, the jew disappeared. hk: ok. and the man came home once, and somehow he started shouting at his wife. is: and the wife says: i won’t tell anybody. because the wife had started asking: why are you so sad? -well, nothing. -but do tell me, i won’t tell anybody because i am your wife. because someone told him not to tell the truth to his wife. - you know, he says, i killed a jew. don’t… -no, no, i am not telling anybody. and then… hk: so he started shouting for some reason, and she… is: he started an argument, with his wife. hk: yes. wait, you killed the jew, she says. you, she says, i will denounce you, you killed the jew. is: she ran outside and started yelling: he killed the jew and now he wants to kill me. hk: yes, yes. is: and she had told him that she wouldn’t tell anybody. hk: and the wife… [22-05] но та за тто́ | шчо | ка́жут шчо жôні́ пра́вду не кажи́ шчо она́ на нếї | не вы́держит and because of that… people say, don’t tell the truth to your wife, because she won’t be able folklorica 2015, vol. xix 62 recording, minute text (22) translation шчо она́ | му́сит | вы́пôвісти | бу́ть шчо́ |…| а си́рôту не жа́луй бо | си́рота | при́йде тай | іс служи́в | оди́н е то́же чôлôві́к жи́в са́м оди́н | і наня́в сôбі́ слугу́ | но слугу́ обы́чного слугу́ | но | айбо ту́й прійшло́ уже́ мо́же і три́ ро́кы | уже́ чôлôві́к ка́е уже́ мêні́ не тре́ба тебе́ | забира́й ся уже́ | забира́й ся ге́т | уже́ мні не тр… | айбо | си́рот… | слуга́ уже́ і не йде́ | я́ ка́е я́ уже́ ту́й прожи́в туй рокы́ я́ уже́ ту́й ма́ю | ма́ю сві́й у́гол | я | уже́ не йде́ всьо́ | но | тай ту́й | уже́ чôлôві́к да́в того́ | у су́д | шчо то́т не хо́че | не хо́че йти́ | гк выступа́ти to hold it, she just needs to tell it, whatever the circumstances. [interviewer: and why should you not pity an orphan?] hk: and don’t pity the orphan because the orphan will come and… is: he served… one man lived alone, and hired himself a servant. a servant, a regular servant. but it happened so, maybe three years later… that man says, i don’t need you anymore, go, go, i don’t need… but the orph… the servant won’t go. he says: i have lived here for these years, i have my own place here, i… and he is not leaving. that man sued him, because the servant did not want to go. hk: to leave. [22-06] іс выступа́ти хы́жу {с хы́жи} | тай пода́в у су́д | тай ни́ч тай су́д | су́дит | но | чôлôві́к ка́же | ві́н | три́ ро́кы чи жи́в чи не жи́в мо́же і не жи́в а то́т ка́же | я́ жи́в я́ шчế й ту́ ха́ту ка́же будова́в | ка́же | я́ там | а давно́ не бы́ло гвốзьдів | а о тоты́ коли́ роби́ли кры́ші | тоты́ ла́ты там забива́ли чо́пами дêрêвя́ными чо́пами | а ві́н пішốв | на черда́к | поличьив усі́ | чо́пы | поличи́в всі́ чо́пы кі́лько та́м бы́ло | ка́же на суді́ | я́ ті́лько й ті́лько чốпів натеса́в | я́ сю хы́жу будова́в | якшчо́ не ві́ртите піди́т is: to leave the house. so he sued him. ok, there is the court. the man says: he lived at my place for three years, whether he lived that long, whether he did not. and the servant says: i did live there, i actually built that house. long ago there were no nails, and when people made roofs, they nailed these planks with wooden nails. and he went to the loft, and counted all the wooden nails. he counted the wooden nails, how many were there. and in court he says: i have made that many wooden nails, it was me who built that structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 63 recording, minute text (22) translation пораху́йте | ты́ пішли́ | порахува́ли то́ччно ті́лькô чốпів | а зьві́дают | зьві́дают уже́ хôзя́іна | хôзя́ін не зна́є | кі́лько чốпів | а ві́н | а ві́н зна́є | но тай шчо́ но тай | тай присуди́ли йôму́ | гк хы́жу іс та не хы́жу но | house, and if you don’t believe me then come and count. they went, counted the wooden nails exactly the number he had said. and when they asked the master, the master did not know how many wooden nails were there. so what? the court gave him… hk: the house. is: not the whole house, [22-07] яку́сь там ча́стку уже́ | ôдьді́льну ко́мнату ци я́к | гк обы́ жи́в | обы́ там жи́в | іс но | тай ка́жут шчо си́рôту не жа́луй | гк а́йно | си́рота хôть шчо́ мо́же зроби́ти іс а па́ну гро́шêй не зы́ч | якшчо́ ты́ позы́чиш па́ну гро́шêй ві́н тôбі́ нико́ли не відда́сьць | такы́й про́стый відда́сьць а па́н не відда́сьць ка́ж[е] па́ну грốші не зы́ч | тай то́ та́к є́ | |…| ……………. |…| іс ві́ткы самого́нка пішла́ гк бы́в чôлôві́к та жона́ дітếй у ни́х не бы́ло | но тай чốлôві́к пішốв ора́ти | іс сам | із вола́ми гк тай | га | іс са́м оди́н із вола́ми some part of it, maybe a room or what. hk: so that he could live there. is: yes. and that is why people say, don’t pity an orphan. hk: yes, the orphan can do whatever. is: and don’t lend money to a nobleman. if you lend money to a nobleman, he will never pay you back. a common man will pay, but not a nobleman. so they say, don’t lend money to a nobleman, and that is true. [interviewer: i also heard a story once that people had to take their parents to the woods… did you hear that?] ………………….. [interviewer: please tell me that one!] is: where moonshine came from. hk: there was a man and his wife, they did not have children. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 64 recording, minute text (22) translation гк са́м із вола́ми пішốв ора́ти | so the husband once went to plough his field. is: on his own, with his oxen. hk: on his own, with his oxen, he went to plough his field. [22-08] тай прихо́дит ід ньо́му хло́пчик | ка́же | я́ бы вас ка́же | я́ бы ва́м | помага́в ка́же | быкы́ гони́ти шчо́ но | я́ бы вам помага́в | та я́ ка́же | узьмі́т мене́ ка́же служи́ти ка́же я́ вам бу́ду ка́же помага́ти | а чôлôві́к ка́же я́ ка́же ва́с не вốзьму | не беру́ тя ка́же ай пора́диме ся ж_ жôнốв ка́же та тогды́ ка́же | но́ | тай | при́йдеш за́втра тай та́к тото́ бы́ло чôлôві́к уже тот дếнь | роби́в | тай поради́ли ся ж_ жôнốв | уже́ у вêчếрі | но | та на́й буде́ | тай | дру́гый дếнь ôпья́т прихо́дит | хло́пчик | но ай я́к | іс на по́ле гк но та́ | буде́ш | но тай уже́ | та́к | і быкы́ хốдят і всьо́ | та́к тото́ йде́ | чôлôві́ку шчо́ | на | насі́яли на | насади́ли | сі́я… насі́яли and a boy comes to him, and says: i could help you drive the oxen or whatever, i could help you, and, he says, take me as your servant, i will help you. and the man says, i won’t take you, i won’t, but i need to consult with my wife, and then, [i’ll decide,] he says. well, come tomorrow, he says. and it was so that the man worked that day, and then he talked to his wife in the evening, and she was ok with it. so the next day again, the boy came… is: to the field. hk: yes. you will be my servant. and then… and the oxen were going well, and the man was lucky in everything. so they planted… sowed… [22-09] зе́рна мно… ô то́го пшени́ці | но | тогды́ | чôлôві́к ка́же но та всьо́го є́ всьо́ ка́же є́ | но шчо́ бдеме́ с ты́м роби́ти | іс а то́т слу́жить_ і слу́жит | гк а то́т слу́жи́т | а | тот хло́пчик ка́же | та ни́ч ка́же a lot of grain, that wheat. and then the man says, there is a lot of everything, what will we do with all that. is: and the boy keeps serving. hk: and the boy keeps serving. and the boy says, it is ok, structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 65 recording, minute text (22) translation бдеме́ моло́ти та | гôрі́вку вари́ти | іс іс пшени́ці | в осени́ гк іс пшени́ці | бо пшени́ці є до́ста | ай я́к | а́ | будеме́ | но тай | хло́пчик тото́ | намоло́ли | причини́в | навари́ли | но а тêпếрь шчо́ | но́ | кли́чьте гốсьців | накли́кав чôлôві́к гốсьців | а́ | бо не мі́г і[х] ізра́дити обы́ они́ ся ва́дили | іс ізве́сти не мі́х гк уже́ хло́пчик | ду́мат та́к та́к тото́ тото́ | обы́ | іс бо чôлôві́к іж_ жôнốв ду́же фа́йно жи́ли | гк ду́же фа́йно жи́ли а́йно іс нико́ли не свари́ли ся гк а не мі… | не могли́ іх ізра́дити {ізроби́ти} обы́ они́ ся ва́дили | we’ll grind it and make moonshine. is: out of the wheat, in the fall. hk: out of the wheat, because there was a lot of wheat. ok, we’ll do that. and the boy… so they ground the wheat, started fermenting it, made moonshine. and what now? -now, he says, call in guests. so the man called a lot of guests. because that guy could not make them quarrel. is: he could not make them quarrel. hk: that boy. he was thinking, how can i do it so that… is: because the husband and the wife lived very nicely together. hk: very nicely, yes. is: they never quarreled. hk: and he couldn’t… they couldn’t make them quarrel. [22-10] ния́к | і ту́йкы уже́ і | закли́чьте ка́же гốсьців | но | закли́кали айбо они́ фа́йно | не ва́дять_ ся ни́ч тото́ та́к фа́йно | і пью́т | уже́ гốсьці і гốсьцять_ ся | і | вы́пили єди́н стака́н | дру́гый стака́н | така́ во́тка до́бра | іс [ка́же] ди́влят на́ ся спершу́ та́к як ли́сы | гк ага́ | вы́пили єди́н | ни́ч ишчế | дру́гый вы́пили | та уже́ такі́ вêсêлі́ та́к на ся ди́влят | іва́н ка́же ги ли́сы | by no means. and then already, he says, call in guests. so they called the guests, but the guests are nice, they don’t argue or fight. so they drink, the guests drink. they drunk one glass, another glass, the vodka is so good. is: people say, they look at each other so as foxes. hk: yes. they drank one [glass] nothing. they drank another glass, and they are already so happy, they look at folklorica 2015, vol. xix 66 recording, minute text (22) translation іс уже́ як вốвци ди́влят оди́н на дру́гого гк а тре́тый вы́пили | уже́ ту́й нача́ли | єди́н на дру́гого | гốйкати | а́ | ты́ мні́ та́м переора́в ты́ мні пока… перекоси́в ты́ тото́ мні́ уже́ зроби́в | уже́ нача́ли єди́н на дру́гого | сусі́ди | но й ту́й поналива́ли погары́ | і | она́ | жона́ шчốсь прине́сла | each other, as ivan says, as foxes. is: they already look like wolves at each other. hk: and when they drank the third glass, they started yelling at each other: you took my land and ploughed it, you mowed my hay, you did that to me… they started yelling at each other, the neighbors. and they poured vodka in their glasses again, and the wife brought something… [22-11] вы́льляла стака́н | тốї гôрі́вкы | іс зачêпи́ла якốсь гк а чôлôві́к | уже́ на ню́ | но | уже́ іх зьві́в | уже́ зьві́в уже́ кếть | іс а́бо уже́ і уда́рив жôну́ | і вда́рив і шчо́ ты… гк та ты́ тако́є вы́льляла та тото́ не мо́ш тай… іс то́ бы́в такы́й рішка́тый | лише́ ві́н не зна́в я́к іх | я́к їх | обы́ ся | ізве́сти гк як і́х із… | ізве́… | обы́ они́ ся ва́дили | но ай та́кь_ іх і ізьві́в шчо они́ ся | му́сіли іс черес самôгốнку гк но та черес самôгốнку іс до́ті ни́хто самôгốнку і не вари́вь_ і не зна́в я́к то | гк і ту́йкы | нача́ли ся ва́дити ссе́ тото́ | і ту́й до́ті ся she turned over a glass of that vodka. is: she offended him somehow. hk: and the husband already at her… he [the devil] already made them quarrel. is: and he even hit his wife, he hit her, why did you… hk: why did you turn that over, it is a bad thing to do… is: that was he, the horned one, he just did not know how to … how to make them quarrel… hk: how to make them quarrel, so that they would quarrel. and this way he made them quarrel, so that they had to… is: because of the moonshine. hk: yes, because of the moonshine. structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 67 recording, minute text (22) translation | і ва́дили | шчо пак я́к ото́ | єнны́ пішли гі ли́сы єнны́ гі вốвци | а трếті | переба́ште та́к як сви́ні | усю́ды ся | is: before that, no one made moonshine, and people did not know how. hk: and here they started to argue, about this and that, and argued until… some went as foxes, some as wolves, and some, forgive the rude word, as pigs. all over the place, [22-12] кача́ли пô бôлốтôви | і ни́ч не тями́ли | через | через вốтку | но а́йбо ци та́к оно́ є́ | ге́ | но а ну́ ж | а ци́ пью́т у тốму у аме́[риці] they were rolling in the mud and did not remember anything. because of the vodka. yes. ain’t it so? see. and tell me, do they drink in that, in america? notes 1 see an overview of works on discourse, performance, and culture, including folklore, in scherer [1990: 4 ff.], and on linguistic ethnopoetics in friedrich [2006: 214 ff.] 2 see hymes [1975, 1981, and 2003, 370 ff.] for comparison of alter’s findings on biblical hebrew narrative and hymes’ own findings on the chinook myth narrative, and 2003, 435-9 for the list of work on verse analysis for a number of cultures; [sherzer 1987, 1990, 2001]; [tedlock 1983], [urban 1988, 1991], [webster 2008, 2008a], [rumsey and niles 2011], etc. 3 see lord’s explanation of the relation between the performance and the (epic) song’s text which emphasizes the role of performance as creation and performer as creator: “each performance is the specific song, and at the same time it is the generic song. the song we are listening to is ‘the song’; for each performance is more than a performance; it is a re-creation” [lord 1960: 101]; “a song has no ‘author’ but a multiplicity of authors, each singing being a creation, each singing having its own single ‘author’” [ibid., 102]. 4 only a few researchers of folklore given any attention to the textual features of the feedback provided to the story-teller by the audience or to the story-teller’s response. toelken describes listener’s reaction to the performer as crucial to the style of performance: “the audience plays a central role in the narrative style” ([toelken 1976: 155]; see also toelken [2003: 135-136 and ff.]). for east european folklore that phenomenon has not been well documented. dégh [1989: 114] notes that while recording hungarian folklore in the village of kakasd, she could record only one text that included both the story-teller’s and folklorica 2015, vol. xix 68 the listeners’ contributions. she lists the types of listeners’ comments (including: spontaneous exclamations, commentary, connecting of individual experience, praise for the narrator, impatience, etc. – [ibid., p. 119]), but does not indicate how the narrator reacts, except stating that he answers all questions and “sees encouragement in every commentary, even if it is derisive or expresses doubt” [ibid.] dégh [1995 (1976)] described the context of an in-house session and the reaction of two performers, husband and wife, to each other’s words while the wife was telling belief legends, and the husband, jokes. (the actual event took place in the us, but the performers were hungarian immigrants.) 5 i am deeply thankful to anna ivanivna zavadiak, teacher at the novoselytsia high school, and her husband ivan iurievych zavadiak, principal of the same school, who have been helping me since 1986 in so many ways, from introducing me to my informants to helping me afterwards with understand the language and culture behind certain places in the recording i could not understand myself. i am thankful to hk and is for letting me be a part of the current story-telling session. i am thankful to all other inhabitants of novoselytsia who spend their precious time with me, telling me their stories, allowing me an insight into their world. 6 in the text, the notation refers to the minutes in the transcript in appendix. there are two consecutive recordings transcribed in the appendix: recording #21, containing the first part of the session, and recording #22, containing the part that took place at the meal table. if the notation reads 211:35, the two digits before the dash indicate the recording number, the digits after the dash the time in hours and minutes in the recording; e.g. 21-1:35 denotes the recording #21, minute 1:35 (i.e., 1 hr. 35 min.) in the text, recording numbers were mostly omitted and only numbers of minutes indicated; if the notation reads 1:15 or 18, the numbers denote minutes. the minutes from 1:04 to 2:05 belong to the recording #21, while the minutes from 00 to 22 belong to the recording #22. thus, to find, e.g., 1:22 one should find in the appendix the transcript of record #21 and in it, minute 1:22; to find 03 one should find the transcript of the record #22 and in it, minute 03. 7 see hymes [1975: 68 ff.], where he distinguishes between the role of a narrator as “performer of a narrative” and as “collaborator in inquiry, to whom the narrative is also partly an object”. 8 i distinguish here, in terms of hymes [1975: 14ff], between three dimensions of competence in a tradition: the ability to report (tell about), to interpret (explain), and to perform; see also endnote 7. 9 story titles can play an important role in folklore; [cf. hymes 1981: 263-272] on the myth and story titles. it seems not to be so for rusyn storytelling, but more research will be needed to explore this hypothesis. 10 on the role of framing devices in folk poetry and myth see webster [2008: 448 ff.]. here the devices are not as sophisticated as the ones he studied, but they certainly play a role in the organization of narrative. 11 hymes [2003: 380 and elsewhere] states that in native american myths and oral prose narratives, “initial words and phrases, such as particles structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 69 translatable as ‘now,’ ‘then,’ ‘so,’ ‘well,’” are used to divide the speech into verses which are “‘measured,’ rather than metrical.” he researches the rules of composition and grouping of these verses into larger units he calls stanzas in different native american traditions as well as in english language narrative [hymes 2003: 102, 305]. applying these methods to the prose text of the performance from novoselytsia will be a promising topic for future research. 12 in epics, formulae in strict sense are units which are rhythmical, long, and carry lexical meaning; according to parry’s definition, a formula is “a group of words regularly used under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea” [1971: 272]. foley and gejin [2012: 404] call formulae “‘large words,’ which may be a colon, a line, or multiple lines in length.” regarding the content, formulae vary from noun-epithet phrases to descriptions of whole situations. formulae are flexible (words inside a formula may vary if rhythmic requirements are satisfied). they are also stackable, e.g., a noun-epithet phrase can be put in a subject position in a formula several sentences long and denoting a standard action, as saddling one’s horse. the functions of formulae in the performance are different for the performer and the audience. the performer uses formulae since they allow him/her an opportunity to think, while rhythmically and meaningfully carrying on the performance. the audience enjoys the style and the suspense while the formula describes at length something that could have been just named. at the same time, formulae can organize the performance on the macro-level, e.g., forewarn listeners about specific turns in the plot, as in the case of a formula describing a character saddling his horse points to a coming battle. formulae also can carry the function of organizing the discourse on the micro-level, e.g., introducing a character’s speech, which serves as a type of quotation marks, etc. in this case, they do not have to be lengthy or rich in content. in homeric greek, “[t]he small phrase ἀλλ̓ ἄγε [lit. ‘but come, go’ author’s note], which occurs 149 times in the homeric poems, regularly serves two idiomatic purposes: (1) it divides one section of a speech from another, preparing the listener or reader for a change of focus; and (2) it leads to a command or prayer” [foley, gejin 2012: 412]. at least three of the functions mentioned above, i.e., providing the performer time to think, creating suspense for the audience, and organizing the performance on the micro-level, are seemingly common functions for both the formulae in oral poetry and the discourse particles, or clusters thereof, in the story-telling performance in novoselytsia. 13 on the role of repetition, both “exact repetition” and “near repetition” in folkloric texts, see webster [2008a: 443 ff.], where the history of the research on repetition is traced starting from jakobson 1960. on the “near repetition,” or pleonasm in south slavic epics, foley [1996: 21] comments: “this rhetorical and tectonic figure involves partial or complete repetition of a phrase from the preceding line […] none of these continuations is syntactically necessary; rather each one of them glosses what precedes with what amounts to an optional enrichment of the main thought.” we find a similar situation in this story-telling session, if we think in terms of phrases, not lines. folklorica 2015, vol. xix 70 14 that would seem the most probable explanation. formulaic beginnings and endings in a number of other traditions have been described as characteristical of those prose narratives that are perceived as distinctly fictional, not true; see bascom [1965: 6] and tedlock [1983: 164]. 15 tedlock [1983: 165] notices a similar device in explanatory myths of the zuni and states that a conclusion drawn from a myth, if true, serves as an argument proving the truthfulness of the whole myth: “[e]xplanatory elements, […] since they refer to real conditions, lend an air of reality to the stories that lead to them. this is paralogism, a literary device described by aristotle: “just because we know the truth of the consequent, we are in our own minds led on to the erroneous inference of the truth of the antecedent.” faulty logic it may be, but aristotle approved of it as a verisimilitudinal device.” 16 this is a well-described practice for legends; see bennett [1989: 305 ff.]. 17 see tedlock [1983: 175]. 18 the bulk of western ukrainian and rusyn collection of folk tales and stories (hnatiuk [1897, 1898, 1900], chubinskii [1872-78], rozdol’s’kyi [1899, 1900], etc.) were dictated and written down by hand, before the advent of recording technology, which totally precluded the recording of the communicative event as a whole, though some ethnographers were very attentive to linguistic features, namely hnatiuk. the story collection in the appendix to pan’kevych [1938] contains a number of transcripts of sound recordings, along with hand-written texts that constitute the majority of this collection, but the transcriptions represent distinct stories. collections of tales and stories from the second half of the 20th c., mostly published as entertainment, also contain only single stories, retold in standard rusyn [hyriak 1965] or ukrainian, sometimes with certain dialectal features, e.g., khlanta [1989] and lintur [1979, 1984], and not performance sessions. in the ukrainian scholarship, such newest collections as britsyna and golovakha [2004] contain transcriptions, but not of whole performances, though the context of each story is well documented. 19 see similar conclusions about traditional ukrainian folklore in golovakha [2006], based on her fieldwork in central ukraine described in britsyna and golovakha [2004]. 20 on 01.01.2015, 62,9% of transcarpathian population lived in villages. in 2014, the natural increase in the rural part of transcapathia was the highest in ukraine, +2401 persons (to compare, only in one other region, the rivne region, there was a natural increase in rural area, 911 persons, and in all other regions of ukraine, there was natural decline in the rural population); in urban areas, transcarpathia had the second largest natural increase of population, (after the rivne region.). [data from: state statistics of ukraine, http://database.ukrcensus.gov.ua/pxweb2007/ukr/publ_new1/2015/zb_nas_14. pdf, accessed august 26, 2015] 21 on the history of editing practices of prose folklore in ukraine see britsyna [2006: 58 ff. and passim]. structure of a story-telling performance among carpatho-rusyns in zakarpats'ka oblast' of ukraine folklorica 2015, vol. xix 71 22 notes on transcription: the text is in rusyn; however, several issues are presented differently from the standard rusyn orthography in order to preserve dialectal features: the difference between the open and closed o and e is marked (the letters ô and ê are used for the closed sounds); words such as дêнь ‘day’ are spelled with a closed ê rather than with и, for example. in addition, stress marks are indicated, and there is no punctuation, except for the sign | which denotes a pause. the sign …. denotes a place in the recording i was unable to decipher. 23 the number in the first column, e.g., #21-1:04, consists of: the number of the recording (21), and the time in the recording (1 hr 04 min), see endnote 6. 24 in the translation, square brackets [] around a word or a part of a word indicate that this word as such is not present in transcription, but it is implied and in translation it needs to be added for adequate understanding of the text. 25 the sign |…| in transcription indicates the interviewer’s words. they are not transcribed, but in the translation column, their english translation is given in square brackets: []. 26 the notation {} presents corrections: if an informant apparently made a speech error, i give their exact words, and then the correct version in {}. 27 the sign ……………… indicates an interruption in the recording, where the recording was stopped and later resumed, so a chunk of conversation is missing from the recording. bibliography adamec, přemysl. 1966. адамец, пржемысл. “порядок слов в современном русском языке” [word order in contemporary russian language]. rosparvy československé akademie věd, řada společenských věd, 76, prague: academia. bascom, w. 1965. “the forms of folklore: prose narratives.” the journal of american folklore, 78(307): 3-20. bauman, richard. 1986. story, performance, and event: contextual studies of oral narrative. cambridge [cambridgeshire]: cambridge university press. bauman, richard. 1992. folklore, cultural performances, and popular entertainments: a communications-centered handbook. new york: oxford university press. bauman, richard. 2004. a world of others’ words. malden, ma: blackwell. bennett, g. 1989. “‘belief stories’: the forgotten genre.” western folklore, 48(4): 289-311. ben-amos, dan, ed. 1976. folklore genres. austin: university of texas press. britsyna, o. iu, and inna golovakha. 2004. бріцина, о. ю., головаха, і. прозовий фольклор села плоске на чернігівщині: тексти та розвідки [prose folklore of the village of ploske, chernihiv region: texts and research]. київ: інститут мистецтвознавства, фольклористики та етнології ім. м. т. рильського. britsyna, o. iu. 2006. бріцина, о. ю. українська усна традиційна проза: питання текстології та виконавства [ukrainian oral traditional prose: folklorica 2015, vol. xix 72 issues of textology and performance]. ukraïnsʹka usna tradytsiĭna proza: pytannia tekstolohiï ta vykonavstva. київ: інститут мистецтвознавства, фольклористики та етнології ім. м. т. рильського. chubinskii, p. p. 1872-1878. чубинский, п. п. труды этнографическостатистической экспедиции в западно-русский край [works of an ethnographic-statistical expedition to the western russian region]. тт. 17. санкт-петербург: императорское русское географическое общество. dégh, linda. 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“a discourse-centered approach to language and culture.” american anthropologist 89(2): 295-309. sherzer, joel. 1990. verbal art in san blas. cambridge: cambridge university press. sherzer, joel. 2002. speech play and verbal art. austin: university of texas press. tedlock, dennis. 1983. the spoken word and the work of interpretation. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. toelken, barre j. 1976. “the ‘pretty languages’ [sic] of yellowman: genre, mode, and texture in navajo coyote narratives.” in folklore genres. dan ben-amos, ed. austin: university of texas press. 146-170. reprinted from: toelken, barre j. 1969. “the ‘pretty language’ of yellowman: genre, mode, and texture in navajo coyote narratives.” genre 2, 211-235. toelken, barre. 2003. the anguish of snails: native american folklore in the west. utah state university press: logan, utah. urban, greg. 1988. “the pronominal pragmatic of nuclear war discourse.” multilingua 7(1-2): 67-93. urban, greg. 1991. a discourse-centered approach to culture. austin: university of texas press. webster, anthony k. 2008. “‘to all the former cats and stomps of the navajo nation’: performance, the individual, and cultural poetic traditions.” language in society 37(1): 61-89. webster, anthony k. 2008a. “running again, roasting again, touching again: on repetition, heightened affective expressivity, and the utility of notion of linguaculture in navajo and beyond.” journal of american folklore 121(482): 441-472. yokoyama, olga. 1986. discourse and word order. amsterdam/philadelphia: j. benjamins. microsoft word folkloricaprotest_ii_full_final_2022 07.27.22.docx reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 105 greenhill, pauline. reality, magic, and other lies: fairy-tale film truths (series in fairy-tale studies). detroit, mi: wayne state university press, 2020. notes. bibliography. index. 264 pp. $84.99 (cloth). $32.99 (paper). isbn 9780814347829 (cloth). isbn 9780814342220 (paper). the basic premise of greenhill’s reality, magic, and other lies is that, despite elements of the fantastic, not only are fairy tales linked to the experiential reality of those who tell them—a kind of “truth”—but the wonder elements of the wonder-tale explicitly frame the narrative as fictional—an “untruth,” if you will. far from being paradoxical, the fairy-tale’s true magic lies in its ability to tell figurative truths, rather than literal ones. and what is true for the märchen is equally true for films based on, or which reference, those stories. despite dividing the book into two main sections—how the balance of verisimilitude and anti-mimesis are presented across entire oeuvres (be it the work of individual studios, directors, or writers), and a more thematic section examining several different cinematic treatments of individual tales (hansel & gretel, the juniper tree, and cinderella)—the overall book coheres nicely. overall, i am not only persuaded by her arguments, i am in full agreement with them. i have been teaching the fairy-tale film as anti-memetic for years, drawing on many of the same sources greenhill cites. reality, magic, and other lies offers chapters i can use in my “film & folklore '' classes. the central idea of the book is that fairy-tale films weave narratives of unreality: the films she discusses foreground artifice and their own construction in such a way as to violate what “traditional wisdom” would call the willing suspension of disbelief. in fact, fairy-tale films are predicated on “disbelief,” because those moments when the filmic world is ruptured, by the revelation of the author’s hand, or self-consciously used special effects (like cgi), are invitations for the audience to read these moments discursively. the suggestion is that we do not believe in the mimesis of the film narrative but recognize its presentational frame as a fiction which needs discussion, an incorporation of the storytelling audience. greenhill is also correct in focusing her analysis on illustrative sequences in the film, grounding her discussion in close textual analysis. in her chapter on tarsem [singh]’s films the fall and mirror, mirror, as well as his television series emerald city, she introduces the highly useful terms “heterospatiality” and “heterotemporality:” the latter term coming from brian l. price’ s 2012 article and refers to a cinematic mixing of different time periods in a single shot, of having characters in historical costume visually (as if unaware) mixing with the contemporary, for example (68); such heterotemporality is very much a practice of postmodernism. greenhill develops price’s idea to include heterospatiality, a means of graphically mixing “spatial locations within the confined visual settings of the camera’s gaze” (69) too. while, explicitly, the practices of heterotemporality and heterospatiality underline the anti-mimetic qualities of the fairy-tale film, they further, implicitly, are presented discursively welcoming the audience into the processes of signification. i will be borrowing these ideas for use in my own teaching. reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 106 at times, greenhill, in laying bare her own methodology for this study, gives away too much and this opens her up to criticism. for example, throughout the book, she is much too dependent on citing the international movie database (imdb) for “generic” descriptors; such is not necessary—i would rather see her generic descriptors for a film, than imdb’s. also, as she notes in her “hansel and gretel” chapter, her selection of films for discussion is predicated on rotten tomatoes aggregate scores, rather than anything inherent in the films themselves: greenhill excludes films under a certain rating, and thereby misses potentially significant films (133). her connecting william friedkin’s the guardian (138141), i, robot (147-150), and the cabin in the woods (155-158) to “hansel and gretel” are fuzzy connections at best. i have other problems with this chapter as well. in her “hansel and gretel” chapter, greenhill evokes lee edelman’s “no future” and jack halberstam’s “queer art of failure” theses to the end that such child endangerment and infanticidal narratives operate in a “queer” challenge to the cultural assumptions of heteronormativity and heterosexuality (131). while i like edelman’s work, at least as a provocation, greenhill does not make the case that “hansel and gretel” (and in particular, the films she discusses) are thusly “queered.” seeing apocalyptic imagery in these films is, according to greenhill, part of an edelmanian embrace of our own destruction (132). i am not disagreeing with the connection of edelman to apocalyptic horror; but i am unconvinced by greenhill’s argument to illustrate this. if greenhill referenced robin wood’s highly influential “introduction to the american horror film” and his 1979 discussion of “apocalyptic horror,” the case could be better made. the problem is that she wants to connect apocalyptic horror to “hansel and gretel” explicitly. this is where i question the success of some of her connections. i noted previously that she sees the cabin in the woods as an ersatz “hansel and gretel” narrative, particularly with the film’s apocalyptic ending. the two survivors of the narrative (but not of the apocalypse), dana and marty, are not adam and eve figures whose heterosexuality will repopulate a future humanity but are “just friends.” as greenhill notes, “refusing the heterosexual, replacing it with the heterosocial, by implication places marty and dana in the realm of nonreproductive relationship, imputed as queer in american popular culture, as edelman outlines” (157). perhaps. but i would have liked to have seen the case made stronger, by using wood (for example). clearly this is one of the chapters i engaged the most with (and will be using in my class), which is why i wanted to see her connection of the fairy tale to edelman and halberstam more explicitly. i will also be using her chapter on “intersectional” cinderella narratives (191-231), a chapter which i think best illustrates how the fairy tale film’s anti-mimetic presentation of narrative becomes discourse. i have some minor quibbles, most of which i hold wayne state university press responsible for: the use of informal contractions, for example. or the phrase “played by” parenthetically when referencing the actor who plays a character. i would always avoid, whenever possible, using a film’s dialogue as evidence of filmic discourse, rather than the performative aspects of the sequence, visually reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 107 and textually, to frame the dialogue. as an example of this last point, in her discussion of year of the fish (213-221), greenhill uses bold typeface in her dialogue transcription to reflect changes to the editing and image construction (218-219). what greenhill does is not incorrect; but in film studies, we would present it differently. greenhill does not engage with eastern or central european films per se, although an occasional reference is made in passing. however, i would like to see other film scholars adapt greenhill’s work to other film cultural contexts, such as applying her study of laika studio’s animation (33-65) to švankmajer’s stopmotion animation, with particular attention to the revelation of the animator’s hand. but that might be a different book. overall, reality, magic, and other lies is a particularly informative book which deserves recognition. i hope that having published this volume, we can move the study of the fairy-tale film onwards, from the overly descriptive work of jack zipes in the enchanted screen (2010) to a more discursive study of what it means to tell these stories through this medium. and greenhill’s book is a major step in the right direction. mikel j. koven university of worcester worcester, united kingdom m.koven@worc.ac.uk 38 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii eschatological folk songs and poetry in the manuscript tradition of the russian old believers of latgale tatiana filosofova university of kentucky, lexington, kentucky, usa abstract eschatological beliefs and teachings form the core of the russian old believer theological doctrine and world view and are broadly reflected in their writings and oral literature. this article sets out to examine the particularities of the body of the eschatological folk songs and poetry known to the russian old believers who live in the eastern part of contemporary latvia (latgalia). the latgalian old believer community is considered one of the richest, well preserved and fully functional communities of the bespopovtsy (the "priestless") branch in europe today. this current research was based on material from the manuscript collections held in the drevlekhranilishche irli (st. petersburg, russia) and field work carried out in the latgalian community between 2007 and 2010. first, the article describes the repertoire of eschatological songs and poetry that form the core of the written anthologies widely circulated in the latgalian tradition. it then moves on to analyze how the eschatological teachings were interpreted in folk songs and poetry. specifically, the research focuses on the folk interpretation of the timing of the end of the world, the figure of the antichrist and his realm. finally, the article examines some linguistic particularities of the religious songs and poetry and how they were completed, edited and recorded in the old believer manuscripts. folk songs of russian old believers of latgale 39 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii eschatological teachings of the russian old believers and the nature of their cultural heritage eschatological beliefs and teachings form the core of russian old believer theological doctrine and world view and, as a result, are broadly reflected in their writings and oral literature. certainly, the old believers are not unique in this regard. as the prominent scholar, g. p. fedotov, states in his classical work on russian folk religious songs; “eschatology holds the key to any religion. it is here the ends meet; where the concealed nerve of a religious mentality reveals itself. the purpose of any religion is to solve the problem of death” [fedotov 1991: 105]. it is accepted by scholars that eschatological teachings deal with “the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell” [oxford english dictionary on line: eschatology, def.] at two levels: firstly, at a personal level, concerning an individual’s death, afterlife, sins and punishment and, secondly, at the global level, concerning the end of the world, the second coming and the last judgment. old believer culture, essentially in its nature orthodox and written, is guided by medieval russian culture and early christian literature from before the time of the russian orthodox church reform of 1653-1666. (1) the old believers inherited and adapted a wealth of works dealing with all aspects of eschatological teachings, including those written by early christian and medieval orthodox russian theologians, apocrypha, and a rich body of mainstream russian oral literature [belousov 1979; belousov 1980; gur’ianova 1996; izbrannye tvoreniia sviatykh ottsov 1998. sakharov 1879; zenkovsky 2009]. however, what distinguishes old believer culture and beliefs is their original interpretation, in their writings and oral literature, of certain aspects of christian eschatological teachings. the old believer movement emerged in response to the controversial russian orthodox church reform of 1653-1666; they attempted to preserve the patriarchal nature of their community, pre-reform ceremonies and to keep sacred books free from innovations or corrections. however, from the start religious dissidents were faced with an extremely challenging task, namely 40 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii finding a way to lead an orthodox christian life without the spiritual guidance of the church that had been rejected by the old believers as an institution after the reform. the endless disputes and disagreements about the way forward, in the absence of the institutional body of the church, emerged right at the start of the break-away movement. the old believers had become a diverse and loosely cohesive religious group that consisted of an increasing number of smaller branches and factions (soglasiia/tolki), who could not reach agreement on core theological issues [zenkovsky 2009, melnikov 1999, staroobriadchstvo 1996]. thus, it is necessary to take into account the distinctions of each particular soglasie and tolk when discussing old believer history, teachings, writings, beliefs and folklore. the study of the development of some genres of their folklore, in particular, religious songs (dukhovnye stikhi) presents two additional challenges. firstly, a large body of religious songs became an inseparable part of the old believer written tradition; they were recorded and copied into old believer manuscript books. at the same time, religious songs were routinely performed on different ritual occasions or for entertainment. often the oral and written repertoires of religious songs do not fully coincide [filosofova 2010: 14-34; nikitina 1989: 149-161; nikitina 1993]. therefore the study of regional repertoires of religious songs and poetry in a particular manuscript or oral tradition has proved to be the best approach to examine the large and diverse body of religious folk songs [buchilina 1999; malushev 1960; nikitina 1982: 91-126]. secondly, the development of the body of religious songs and poetry in the manuscript tradition is quite distinctive. once a folk text (in our case, a religious song) was included in a manuscript book, it was copied, edited and circulated in the same way as any other literary text intended for reading. the abovementioned issues have been central to the research presented here. this article aims to give an account of the body of eschatological folk songs and poetry known in the manuscript tradition of russian old believers of the bespopovtsy pomorskogo soglasisia (the priestless faction that originated in the northern regions of russia) who have been living in the eastern folk songs of russian old believers of latgale 41 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii district of latvia (the latgale) since the end of the 17th century. over the years this 350-year old community, along with the old believers of riga (grebenshchikov parish), became a cultural, religious and educational centre for the old believer “bespopovtsy” branch in europe, outside of russia. material used for this research this article is based on a catalogue that i compiled [filosofova 2010: 227-307], while studying manuscript collections from the former soviet baltic republics held in the drevlekhranilishche irli (st petersburg, russia). the complete baltic collection of drevlekhranilishche was created as a result of nearly fifty years of annual expeditions carried out by specialists at pushkin house to the old believer regions of latvia and estonia [malyshev 1978; markelov 1989: 410-438]. this is the largest and most complete manuscript collection of the bespopvts-pomortsy of the baltic states. in particular, the manuscript tradition and written repertoire of the latgalian old believers is represented in two collections: • a private collection of 354 manuscript books and hectographs gathered by a prominent and well respected old believer scholar, i. n. zavoloko (1897-1984) who used his knowledge and expertise of old believer history and culture (indicated by zav. below). • the latgalian collection of 462 manuscripts and hectographs based on result of field work in eastern latvia (indicated by lat. below). it is worth noting that religious folk songs and poetry form approximately 15% of the whole written repertoire of latgalian and zavloko collections and are mainly recorded in manuscripts dating from the middle of the nineteenth century and 1930s. the compiled catalogue contains more than a thousand religious folk songs and poems and religious poetry composed both by known and anonymous writers. it would be safe to conclude that the material available for our use represents the comprehensive overview of the development of the repertoire of religious folk songs and poetry in the manuscript tradition of the latgalian old 42 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii believers in a period spanning the second half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the last century. local men of letters included religious folk songs and poems either in special anthologies (stikhovniki) or as a part of collections of legends, apocrypha and didactical texts compiled from various quotations. up until today, the old believers of the latgale managed to preserve and develop their ancient singing tradition using the medieval russian neumatic notation (kriuki/soli). the majority of stikhovniki in the latgalian collections texts are accompanied by neumatic notation that indirectly attests to a solid knowledge and use of such notation in local communities in the last two centuries. the latgalian manuscript tradition has another distinctive feature – the circulation of books produced by hectographs, (2) which include anthologies of religious songs and poems. it is worth noting that such basic copying equipment as the hectograph produces 100 copies at a time. therefore, any text included in books made by hectographs was likely well known and widely circulated in the local tradition. many eschatological songs and poetry were included in hectographic stikhovniki and that fact, undoubtedly, helped to ensure their popularity among local communities. the body of the eschatological folk songs and poetry of the manuscript tradition of the old believers of the latgale before we examine the particularities of eschatological folk songs and poetry in the manuscript tradition of the latgale old believers, it will be necessary to establish what eschatological songs and poems were known to local communities. as was mentioned earlier, eschatological beliefs and teachings form the core of the russian old believer theological doctrine. therefore, not unexpectedly, folk songs and poetry about sin, punishment, death, the end of the world, the realm of the antichrist and the second coming, became the largest and most representative type of oral literature known to the old believers, as it reflected the eschatological essence of their religious teaching. the repertoire of the latgalian old believer communities is no exception. the large folk songs of russian old believers of latgale 43 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii and diverse group of eschatological songs and poetry includes songs and poems borrowed from mainstream religious folklore and texts produced by the old believers themselves. the body of the eschatological songs and poems circulated in latgalian manuscripts can be divided into five thematic subgroups: 1. global eschatology: songs and poems about the end of the world, the last judgement and god’s punishment that aim to horrify the sinners. 2. global eschatology: songs and poems that provide a quite detailed and personified image of the antichrist. 3. global eschatology: satirical poetry that mocks the vices and sins of contemporary society. 4. personal eschatology: songs and poems about death that are commonly called in manuscripts “poems on the separation of the soul from the body”. 5. personal eschatology: penitential songs that focus on personal remorse and catharsis. the following table provides some selected examples of the most popular texts that represent all five groups: global eschatology: themes examples songs/poems dealing with issues of the end of the world, the second coming “you, man, climbing the mount of sinai...” (“vzyde ty, cheloveche, na sionskuiu goru…”); “our lord is coming at midnight, the groom is coming in full glory …” (“gospod’ griadet v polunoshchi, zhenikh idet so slavoiu…”); “when our lord descends to punish everyone according to their sins…” (“egda pridet gospod’ suditi komu zhso po grekham vozdati…”); “when the judgement day is coming …”(“egda pridet strashnii sud…”); “the current years are moving fast, the end is near…”(“idut leta sego sveta, priblizhaetsia konets…”); “god has punished us for our sins by sending misfortune upon our 44 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii land…”(“po grekhom nashim, na nashu stranu popustil gospod’ takovu bedu…”); “the lord descends in the year of the eight thousand…” (“pridet gospod’ v os’moi tychiache…”); “the prophecy by the prophet isaiah has already come through…” (“uzhe prorochestvo sovershilos’ proroka isai…”). songs/poems defying the antichrist the poem about the antichrist “what is happening today…” (stikh ob antikhriste “chto na nyneshnee vremia…”); “the last days have come” (“uzhe ostanoshnoe veki …”); “when the world ends …” (“egda pridet konchina sego sveta…”); “the evil antichrist was born…” (“narodila zloi antikhrist…”). satirical poems the poem about tea “what can tea tell us…” (“o chem govorit chai…”); “the story about sins and vices of our time. popular satire” (“o slabostiakh i nevozderzhaniiakh v poslednie vremena. narodnaia satira”); “the story told by the fool kirillushka” (“rasskaz muzhichkadurochka kirillushki”) and 7 versions of “the newspaper from hell” (“gazeta iz ada”). personal eschatology: (3) poems about death (on “the separation of the soul from the body”) “a man lives on earth as if he is the grass that grows...” (“chelovek zhivet na zemle, kak trava rastet…”); “our lady, please accept your humble servants prayers…” (“chudnaia tsaritsa, bogoroditsa, uslysh’ molitvu rabov tvoikh…”); “men, be terrified by those who are above you…” (“cheloveche, boisia, kto nad toboiu…”); “o, doves, white doves…” (“uzh vy golubi, uzh belye…”); “death scares a sinner…” (“strashnaia est; smert; greshniku…”); “death pulls out a soul from a body…” (“smert; bo dushu iz tela…”); “the folk songs of russian old believers of latgale 45 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii white day is coming to its end…” ( “beloi den’ korotaetsa…”). penitential songs “why don’t you cry, you who broke god’s law…”(“chto mne ne plachet, prestupivshego zapoved’ vysh vyshniago…”); “what have i done, what will happen with me…” (“uvy mne, chto budu i sodeiu…”); “if only you knew, my soul, the vanity of this world …” (“ashche by vedala dusha, suety mira sego…”); “a sinner has died…” (“kako padokh okaiannyi…”); “our life is not for ever, the glory of this world is vanity…” (“zhitie vremennoe, slava suetnaia…”). “living in the realm of the antichrist”: interpretation of the eschatological teachings in the folk songs and poetry the old believer eschatological folk songs and poetry shares topics, images, colorful vocabulary, metaphors and religious symbolism of the russian mainstream eschatological oral literature (this observation is relevant to the old believer eschatological oral literature as a whole and especially to that of the bespopovtsy branch). both eschatological oral literatures, mainstream and the old believers’, are largely based on the apocalypse of john and other works by early christian theologians [sakharov 1879; izbrannye tvoreniia 1998] and contain an instructive message for their audience. they remind listeners/readers about the transitory nature of human life and the inevitability of death and depict threatening pictures of the punishments that await all sinners in the afterlife. the eschatological songs and poetry depict the sufferings of mankind at the time of the second coming and describe awful natural world disasters such as great storms, floods, earthquakes and gigantic fires on a legendary scale that will occur when the world comes to an end. many old believer eschatological poems contain the following horrifying scenes of “the fallen world”: 46 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii • a river of fire will sweep all living things from the earth. • earthquakes will split the earth in two. • mountains will collapse. • huge winds will sweep the earth destroying all in their path. • a gigantic cloud will cover the earth. • our world will sink hopelessly in to great misery and darkness. • all living things will be shaking from an unimaginable horror and suffering, etc. for example: (4) загорится матушка сыра земля: со восхода загорится до запада, с полуден загорится да доночи. и выгорят горы с раздольями, и выгорят лесы темные. и сошлет господи потопие и на три дни, на три месяцы. и течет по земле речка огненна, пламя пышет из реки до земли. тогда земля потрясется, камение все распадется, церковная завеса разрушится .... mother earth will catch fire: the fire will spread from east to west, it will burn from midday to midnight. all the mountains and valleys will burn, all the forests will burn. our lord will punish us with a great flood, which will last for three months and three days. (lat. 204) the river of fire flows over the earth, a flame from the river burns the earth. (zav. 38) in these times an earthquake will occur, all stones will fall, the foundation of the church will collapse. (lat. 261) however, the bespopvtsy old believer branch, in particular, is especially persistent in conveying one central idea, namely that folk songs of russian old believers of latgale 47 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii the antichrist has already descended to earth and the world has fallen into his hands. this issue lies at the heart of bespopvtsy teachings and, as a result, a sense of urgency is reflected in all their literary work and eschatological folk songs and poetry. therefore, their folk tradition has a distinctive flavor when compared to mainstream russian religious oral literature. the artistic (i.e., literary) time of the old believer eschatological poetry coincides with the present (perezhivaemoe vremia). therefore, whenever a poem is read, the audience feels that it is living in the dire realm of the antichrist. in the eschatological poems, two literary devices are employed to describe the present as the “end of days”. first, past perfective verbal forms dominate. the use of the perfective verbs is a grammatical indication of the concept that actions that have occurred in the past have reached their logical end in the present. for example: (4) пришли времена лютые, пришли годы тяжкие: не стало веры истинныя, не стало стены каменныя, не стало столпов крепких, погибла вера христианска не могу быть без рыданья. страх антихристов мир устрашил, милость с лестию в мир пометал. brutal times have come, harsh years have arrived: there is no true faith, there is no stone wall, there are no strong foundations, the christian faith has perished. i cannot stop sobbing. the fear of the antichrist has terrified our world; the antichrist has mixed good with evil. (zav.2) secondly, the constant refrain of epithets referring to the “end times” throughout this eschatological poetry conveys the urgency of situation. in old believers’ poems, the present is described as poslednie veki (“final centuries”), ostanoshnye vremena (“the remaining times”), poslednie vremena ( “the end times”), posledniia konchina (“the final end”). for example: 48 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii уже останошные времена, уже последняя кончина, народился злой антихрист, злой антихрист – дух нечистый .... последние ноньче веки, что в растлении живут молодые человеки ... the last days have come, everything has reached its end. the evil antichrist has been born, the evil antichrist – the diabolical force. (lat. 48) now is the end time, because young people are living in debauchery. (zav.42) however, some poems (for example, “the poem about the antichrist”) point out the time that we all should expect to be our last days by a precise figure os’maia tysiacha (“the eighth millennium”). it is likely that the folk tradition borrowed this carefully circulated “date” of the fall of the world from two very popular readings among the old believers – kirillova kniga (the book of kirill) [1644] and kniga o vere (the book about the faith) [1648]. these books were the last books to be published in moscow before the church reform and were highly respected by the old believers. they interpreted many of the issues discussed in both volumes as firm evidence that the old believers were correct in their teachings, including the fact that the end of our days would be 8 thousand years from the creation of the world, which apparently coincided with the seventeenth century ce. the figure of the antichrist as a result of the belief that the end of days had already arrived, the old believers of the “bespopvtsy” branch were obsessed with the idea of the reign of the antichrist, who plays a central role in the songs [belousov 1979:3-12; belousov 1980]. their eschatological folk poetry provides a vivid and horrifying portrait of this figure. in some poems, the antichrist is depicted as a soulless demonic force who aims to destroy holy russia and all folk songs of russian old believers of latgale 49 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii living beings. even all saints, the protectors of mankind, are powerless against this force. сошлет господь пророчество, илью пророка и онофрия и сойдет на землю бездушный бог, бездушный бог антихристос: он поколет святое пророчество. от той-то от святой крови загорится матушка сыра-земля. our lord will send his prophets, the prophets elias and onofrey and the heartless god, the heartless god antichrist will descend to the earth: he will destroy these holy prophets. and from the holy blood of these saints the mother earth will catch fire. (zav 38) the most common epithets describing the antichrist describe his frightening appearance and destructive nature. the eschatological poems portray him as “the ten-horned beast” (desiati-rozhnyi zver’), “the seven-headed monster” (sedmiglavyi zmii), “the damned monster” (zmii, sobaka) etc: уже антихрист народился, змий собака воцарился ... погибла вера християнская .... ..... десяти-рожный зверь сия погубил, седмиглавый змий тако учини ... the antichrist has already been born, the damned monster has established his realm the christian faith has perished. the ten-horned beast has destroyed this, the seven-headed monster has as well. (lat.271) the folk poetry explains that the antichrist brought to this world a great number of temptations, and he attempts to catch as many people as he can in his “invisible net.” his invisible net is a metaphorical representation of the antichrist’s attack on humanity: 50 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii народился злой антихрист, злой антихрист – дух нечистый. он рассеял свою прелесть по всей матери вселенной. разметал он свои сети по всему своему царству. он и станеи всех прельщать, в свои сети уловлять. the evil antichrist has been born, the evil antichrist the spirit of darkness. he spreads his temptations across the whole of mother earth. he has spread his nets throughout his kingdom he has started to seduce us all, in order to catch us in his nets. (zav.10) many poems concerned with the figure of the antichrist provide an instructive message that the antichrist’s realm and the horror of our last days is a well-deserved punishment from god for the awful sins of humanity. the unforgiveable sin, as was understood by the old believers, was, of course, nikon’s church reform and the loss of the true orthodox faith that inevitably led the world to the fall, as we see in this song: церкви божия истребишася, тайнодестия вси лишишася, но и пастыри попленилися, жалом диявола умертвилися ... god’s churches have been destroyed, we have lost all our sacraments. our priests have been imprisoned and murdered by the devil’s stings. (zav.10) analysis of the many complex theological matters of the old believer doctrine forms a separate scholarly subject and is beyond of the scope of this article. however, even a brief examination of the old believer eschatological poetry concerning the end of the world and the realm of the antichrist allow us to make two observations that are essential for the current discussion. first, the old believer folk tradition fits the general pattern of mainstream religious folklore by being highly selective in its objects for interpretation. popular imagination chooses only those basic ideas that can be easily explained and understood by a general audience. the prominent russian scholar f. i . buslaev considered folk songs of russian old believers of latgale 51 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii mainstream religious poetry to be “a bridge” between christian and folk cultures [buslaev 1990:295]. i suggest that the old believer eschatological poetry served a similar function in their culture and became “a bridge” between the old believer theological teachings and the popular imagination of those that followed these teachings. for example, the firm belief that nikon’s church reform was the reason for the fall of the last stronghold of christianity into the hands of the antichrist became the core of their ideology. it was broadly accepted by all followers of “the old piety” and transferred to the folk poetry as shown in the examples above. secondly, the eschatological folk poetry of the old believers has another distinctive feature. however terrifying the content of poems about the end of the world and the antichrist is, none of the poems refer to the absolute demise of mankind. this indirectly gives the audience hope of finding ways to salvation. these aspects are also seen in another group of old believer poems: satirical folk poetry. satirical poetry by the russian old believers: the evil and tempting world according to old believer teachings, historical time stopped for orthodox christianity when nikon’s church reforms were fully and finally implemented and a border was drawn between “the saviors of the old piety” and the rest of the world, which had turned from the light of the true faith to the darkness of hell. the old believer communities became the last stronghold of religious piety in what they saw as this hostile, evil world full of temptation. however, in their writings and folklore, old believers were keen to expand their knowledge of this outside and “evil” world to protect themselves from its temptations. therefore, their fundamental mission was to preserve their way of life, including everyday customs, ideology, church services and books, from the rest of the world. they set, in the figurative sense, a spiritual border (ograda), between themselves and the world ruled by the antichrist. for example, in the old believer eschatological folk poetry, the most common epithet used to describe the world, is 52 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii “evil and full of temptations” (zloi i prelestnyi). since the world “had fallen”, old believers resisted every new aspect of everyday life. as time passed, with the world still under the rule of the antichrist, any new temptations from the outside world were considered to be the “intrigues of the devil” (kozni satany). new food and drinks (such as tea and potatoes), new customs (smoking tobacco, shaving beards), new ways of conducting church services, the latest fashions and later, even new technologies (computers, the internet) were condemned and mocked in their literary and folk traditions. in particular, they employed satire, irony and mockery to show their disgust and loathing for the outside world. they established a distinctive form of religious satirical folk poetry rooted in the genre of russian satirical novels, which reached the peak of their popularity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries [adrianova-peterts 1977: 110-115]. this genre served the task of debasing, through mockery, the customs and occurrences in the “evil side” of society. these songs are based on the medieval principle of the carnival and the concept of the otherworld [likhachev 1984: 16]. the old believers gave new life to satirical folk poetry, producing funny, sharp-witted texts with colloquial language and memorable images and metaphors. the body of the old believer satirical folk poems is very large and covers almost every aspect of our sinful everyday existence in the “evil world” that, in the old believer interpretation, deserves mockery and loathing. the latgalian manuscript collections feature four satirical folk poems which are good examples of this type of genre in old believer tradition. they include: reader, take note of what tea tells us…”(“o chem govorit chai, a ty, chitatel’ zamechai…”) , “the story of our time”(“istoriia nyneshnego veka”), “the story told by the fool kirillushka” (“rasskaz muzhichka-durochka kirillushki”) and “the newspaper from hell”(“gazeta iz ada”). “the newspaper from hell” is one of the most popular satirical texts among old believers of different branches [budaragin 1995; rozhdestvensky 1910 (1900)]. the poem was well known to latgalian old believers and can be found in their manuscripts in seven original variations in six copies dated folk songs of russian old believers of latgale 53 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii between the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. a detailed examination of latgalian versions of this poem can improve our understanding of how a literate old believer edited and modified popular texts. as expected the old believer men of letters followed a well-established method of editing and modifying a written text as had been done for centuries in mainstream medieval russian orthodox manuscript tradition. among the most common methods of modifying a text are the creation of a short and a full edition of the text with flexible content and using a certain traditional format (‘template’) for creating the compiled versions of various texts. for instance, a latgalian variation of the “newspaper from hell” from a manuscript dated to the beginning of the last century (lat. 358) provides us with a fine example of the use of a list of sins and sinners as a traditional ‘template’ for this popular poem. however, a local man of letters made his contribution to the development of the text by giving to each sin and sinner a subtitle and a number: 1 о грешниках 1 about sinners 2 о пьяницах 2 about drunks 3 о блудниках 3 about fornicators 4 о господах 4 about the privileged man 5 о чернецах 5 about monks 6 о окупщиках и т. д. 6 about pawnbrokers, etc. (lat.358) the order of the sins and sinners in this list deserves special attention and provides us with an insight to how the folk imagination interpreted the degree of each sin and the punishment that each sin deserves. i suggest that the order of these sins is from the lesser sin to the deadliest one. according to the description, the drunks who were placed in the beginning of the list would be told off and kicked by satan: сатана дал тычек ему (пьянице – тф) и приказал внуку, чтоб его испросил, satan kicked him (a drunk – tf) and ordered his grandson to interrogate the drunk to find out 54 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii кто его ис пиянства так искусил... who tempted him with drink… (lat. 358) it is commonly known that smoking and sniffing tobacco were considered to be mortal sins by old believers. the local version of the “newsletter from hell” confirms this contention. the smokers are placed at the end of the list and can expect severe physical punishment, such as the pulling out of his nostrils with sharp hooks and bathing in boiling pitch: (сатана) приказал принести отстрые крючки, прочистя носы табачны. приказал со смолой месить квашни. (satan) gave the order to bring sharp hooks to clean the noses of the tobacco users. he also gave the order to prepare hot pitch. (lat.358) some of the satirical poems produced by the old believers were inspired by the list of rules regulating everyday life and customs of good christians (zapretitel’nye ustavy). for example, in the poem about tea “reader, take know of what tea tells us…” (“o chem govorit chai, a ty, chitatel’ zamechai…”) serves as one example of such a text included in latgalian manuscript books (begunov 1972: 244-248). finally, latgalian collections include a single copy of a rare satirical text – “the story told by the fool kirillushka” (“rasskaz muzhichka-durochka kirillushki”). the poem was not circulated elsewhere and was likely composed by an anonymous local. in this text the narrator, who calls himself kirillushka the fool, describes how he visited the pope, who drowned in his horrible sins of sodomy and blasphemy: в самом риме я был, с папой вместе гостил. имя папе макар, он не так еще стар. ну уж лет ща полста, i have been in rome i stayed at the pope's his name is makar, he is not that old, in his fifties perhaps. folk songs of russian old believers of latgale 55 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii а все хулит христа. ненавидит креста и не имеет поста. и живет с папой втай казачок оплетай. and he still scolds christ he hates the cross, he does not observe lent. he took his serving man called opletay as his lover. (zav.66) the poem also provides us with deep insight into the popular interpretation of wealth as it might have been understood in a rural farming community: папа очень богат, он и землю купил и дом новый срубил. для быков и коров он настроил дворов, жеребцов и кобыл табуны наплодил. the pope is very wealthy he bought some land and built a new wooden house. he also built many cattle-sheds for his bulls and cows, he multiplied the herds of horses. (zav.66) it is evident from the above example that the world view reflected in old believer satirical poetry has two layers: the down-to-earth peasant concept of well-being and a firm christian belief in old believer interpretation thereof. this particular poem distinguishes itself from the majority of poetry of a satirical nature by focusing on the close examination of a corrupt world ruled by diabolic force. personal eschatology and penitential songs folk songs and poetry concerning death, afterlife and the inevitable punishment of all sinners is considered to be “personal eschatology” [fedotov 1991 (1935):105] as opposed to global eschatology dealing with the apocalypse. songs and poems concerning various aspects of personal eschatology contain instructive messages. they remind the audience about the transitory nature of our lives and the inevitability of death and draw horrific pictures of the punishments that await all sinners in 56 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii hell. the topics of personal eschatology were held dear by old believer communities, and the latgalian tradition is no exception in this regard. local men of letters borrowed a large number of poems about death and the afterlife from mainstream russian religious folk songs and poetry. in some old believer communities these songs were sung as a part of the traditional funeral rites and at besedy (parties for women who gathered to knit and sew) during lent. (4) extracts from mainstream folk poems concerning the punishment of sinners after their death appeared in the lubki, popular books including cheap art reproductions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries aimed at reaching a wide audience. naïve folk images in the lubok style were much beloved in old believer communities and were used to decorate houses. (5) penitential songs and poems on “the separation of the soul from the body” were especially popular in the latgale. like the songs related to personal escatology, songs and poems of this type were borrowed from mainstream russian religious folklore. however, in latgale songs and poems about sin, death and afterlife, as well as the satirical poetry, became an area of creativity. latgalian collections include a few poems by local writers that deal with personal eschatology. many authors followed a method of compiling or editing quotations from various well known texts to produce their own verses. this method was very common in old believer writings as a whole and especially for religious songs and poems. each text produced by this method of compilation merits individual examination and can provide us with interesting and unpredictable results. i will give only one example, the very popular religious song “wonderous empress, mother of god, please accept your humble servant’s prayers…” (“chudnaia tsaritsa, bogoroditsa, uslysh’ molitvu rabov tvoikh…”) was borrowed by the old believers of latgale from the mainstream folk repertoire and has been used as core material, along with some other texts, to produce several independent texts, including “the white day is coming to its end, beautiful sun is going down…” (“beloi den’ korotaetsia, krasno solntse zakataetsia…”) and “the evening is approaching...” (“den’ idet ko vecheru…”). folk songs of russian old believers of latgale 57 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii synthetic nature of the oral literature of the old believers old believer ideology, culture, literary traditions and folklore have a peculiarly syntactical nature that resulted from practical necessity and the desire of this particular religious dissident movement to recreate an old medieval orthodox cultural model applicable to a new, ever-changing historical, political and social environment. in particular, in developing their own writings and oral literature, the old believers employed borrowing, compilation of, and quotations from texts and ideas, mainly from the work of early christian theologians, apocrypha and mainstream russian religious folklore they deemed suitable. over time, literate old believers relied on the wealth of these borrowed materials as the main sources for their own didactical, polemical and literary works covering a broad range of theological, philosophical and moral issues. old believer oral literature has thus developed along similar principles as the literary tradition. it offers a unique blend of religious folk songs, poetry and narratives, borrowed from mainstream religious folklore, old believer oral literature, early christian penitential songs and works by anonymous and well-known russian authors. christian folk poems from the mainstream russian religious folk repertoire and old penitential poems by orthodox monks were particularly cherished and enjoyed great popularity in old believer circles. they were acknowledged by writers as meeting the norms of religious devotion and they became an important element in the creation of a cultural base on which old believer christian literature was built. in simple and accessible language, these texts spoke of basic christian doctrine and instructed in the faith and related, in didactic fashion, the main events of christian history. the devout were expected, in their spare time, to create models of these texts in order to promote a pastime, which was, in the words of the old believers “dignified with piety” (blagochestivoe vremiapreprovozhdenie). the religious poetry and songs, both folk and literary, became an area of creative work in the old believer communities and continues to develop as a living tradition even today. 58 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii as mentioned above, the old believer folk tradition is largely based on mainstream russian religious songs and narratives. however, it has some very distinctive features. first of all, oral literature became an inseparable part of the old believer written manuscript tradition, a result of their interpretation of learning and reading from medieval russia. books, both printed and manuscripts, have always held unquestioned authority among “the saviors of old piety” (khraniteli drevliago blagochestiia). in the words of the old believers, reading an appropriate book was considered to be a process to rediscover “god’s true knowledge,” essential for the “formation of the soul,” rather than the for the process of learning new things, and provoking questions and thought [bubnov 1998:51, pozdeeva 1998:15]. the importance of keeping and preserving the past as a model to be copied and repeated again and again was understood as a basis of education. therefore, all oral literature considered appropriate for “the saviors of old piety” was recorded and circulated within the communities as manuscripts and, later, in printed volumes as well. to be included in a book, a text had to correspond to one universal criterion set for all written work within old believer communities: it must educate a christian soul according to the old believer teachings (“to be good for the soul”). the subtitle dushepolezny (“good for the soul”) appears to be the most common one in the old believer collections of religious folk songs and poetry. in the old believer communities, the mainstream dukhovnyi stikhi were sung, preferably from a book. (5) however, most of the religious poetry produced by the old believers themselves was intended for reading rather than singing. they were composed using a complex syntax, a dominance of church slavonic vocabulary and often lack rhythm. four important conclusions about the intersection of the folk and manuscript traditions may be drawn from this analysis of the eschatological songs and poetry in the manuscript tradition of the latgale old believers. religious folk songs and poetry have been considered to be “a bridge” between formal theological teachings and popular imagination. they served to translate the core aspects of teachings to a general audience and made them folk songs of russian old believers of latgale 59 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii appealing to everyone. eschatological folk songs and poems focused, in particular, on the most important doctrinal matters. for example, the timing of the end of the world was firmly linked to the church reform of 1653-1666 in both formal old believer doctrine and popular interpretation of the event. the figure of the antichrist also drew much attention in folk and authored poetry by the old believers. his personality and signs of his realm on earth were vigorously investigated in the popular songs. in addition, the old believers developed satirical poetry, an original means to protect “the truth faith” by mocking the outside world for all its faults and temptations and by exposing human vice and sins. of particular note is the fact that personal eschatology, especially penitential songs, is well represented in latgalian manuscripts due to the successful preservation of the singing tradition, using neumatic notation, which has enabled the development of hymnography in the local musical manuscript tradition up to the present day. finally, compilation of several texts and/or authored variations built on a fragment, theme or line of a popular folk text proved to be the most common method implemented in the manuscript tradition. it would be fair to say that the old believers inherited this method from the medieval written tradition and used it as a core method to develop their own writings and compilation of manuscript books. eschatological songs and poetry from the latgale are particularly good illustrations of this compilation method. as mentioned above, the old believers of the latgale today are a fully functional community that strives to pass on their wellpreserved cultural heritage and traditional values to the next generation. as an important figure of that community, father alexii zhilko, chairman of the central council pomeranian ancient orthodox church, stated to me in an interview, “to be a russia old believer today means to have the old believer mentality”. i would suggest that the very rich and diverse body of eschatological songs and poetry that has been preserved and developed in living latgalian tradition equip us with an essential tool required for a better understanding the mentality and culture of this group. 60 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii notes 1 patriarch nikon (1605-1681) initiated and led the russian orthodox church reform. the reform, to unify church services and edit translated holy books, was carried out between 1653 and 1677 and became a prolonged, difficult process and proved to be controversial. the comprehensive review of the old believer movement can be found in [zenkovsky: 2009, melnikov 1999]. a very detailed review of works by theologians that influenced ideology, literature and folklore of the old believers and mainstream russian religious folklore can be found in [sakharov 1879, belousov 1979: 3-12, belousov 1980, gur’ianova 1996, zenkovsky 2009]. 2 hectographs are a basic copying device. 3 the majority of songs of this group were borrowed from mainstream religious folklore. 4 in the original, all verbs are given in italics and are used in the past perfect form. however when translated in english, the verbal forms do not always coincide, e.g., to be. 5 this observation is based on my fieldwork among the russian old believers in dugavpils in 2007-2010. archival materials all numbers of the manuscripts are provided according to the catalogue of the manuscripts of the drevlekhranilishche im. v. i. malusheva, irli, st petersburg. accepted abbreviations: lat. – latlalian manuscript collection zav – the collection of i. n. zavoloko bibliography adrianova-peterts, v., 1977. адрианова-перетц, в. русская демократическая сатира [russian democratic satire]. москва: наука. folk songs of russian old believers of latgale 61 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii belousov, a. f. 1979. белоусов, а. ф. “о влиянии старинной письменности на мировоззрение русских старожилов прибалтики” [an influence of the old written literature on the world view of the russian settlers in the baltic states] in учение записки тартусского государственного университета. труды по русской и славянской филологии xxxi. литературоведение. № 491. тарту: тгу. belousov, a. f. 1980. белоусов, а. ф. литературное наследие древней руси в народной словесности русских старожилов прибалтики. автореферат диссертации на сооискание ученой степени кандидада филологических наук [influence of the old russian literature heritage on the oral literature of the russian settlers in the baltic states. summary of the dissertation]. тарту: тгу. bubnov, nikolai. 1998. бубнов, н. старообрядческая книга третьей четверти xvii века как историкокультурный феномен [the old believer books of the third quarter of the 17th century as historical and cultural phenomenal]. ленинград: наука. buchilina, e. a. 1999. бучилина, е. а. духовные стихи. канты. сбоник духовных стихов нижегородской области. [religious songs. chants. religious songs from hizhnegorodsky district]. москва: наследие. budaragin, v. p. 1995. бударагин, с. п. “газета из ада (по материалам дрелехранилища пушкинского дома)” [the newspaper from hell (based on the manuscript collections kept in the drevlekhranilishche irli)] in русские утопиии. канун.альманах. вып. ii. спб: ирли. buslaev, f. i. 1990. буслаев, ф. и. избранное. о литературе. [selected publication on literature]. москува: наука. burgaft, s. g. and ushakov i. a. 1996. бургафт, с. г., ушаков, и. а. старообрядчество: лица, события, предметы и символы. опыт энциклопедического словаря. [the old 62 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii believers: people, events, subject and symbols. the encyclopaedic dictionary]. москва: церковь. fedotov, g. p. 1991 (1935). федотов, г. п. стихи духовные (руская народная вера по духовным стихам). [russian religious folk songs (russian popular beliefs as they appear in russian religious folk songs]. москва: прогресс, гнозис. filosofova, t. v. 2010. geistliche lieder der altglaubigen in russland. bohlau verlag köln. gur’ianova, n. s. 1996. гурьянова, н. с. история и человек в сочинениях старообрядцев xviii века [history and man in the literary works by the old believers in the 18th century]. новосибирск: наука. сибирское отделение. izbrannye tvoreniia sviatykh ottsov, 1998. избранные творения святых отцов [selected works by recognized orthodox teachers]. москва: церковь. kirillova kniga. 1664. кириллова книга: книга иже во святых отца нашего кирилла, архиепископа иерусалимского на осмий век [the book of kirill by our archbishop of jerusalem in the 8th millennium]. москва: печатный двор. kniga o vere sviatoi, istinnoi i pravoslavnoi i osviashchennoi tserkvi vostochnoi. 1648. книга о вере святой, истинной и православной и освященной церкви восточной (издана тщанием о. ст. вонифатьева) [the book about the faith]. москва: печатный двор. krotov, y., кротов, я. “русская православная церковь” [russian orthodox church in soviet times], http://krotov.info/acts/20/1970/shtric_15.htm (consulted 1, february, 2013). kuraev, andrei, кураев, андрей “доклад митрополита ленинградского и новгородского никодима на поместном соборе 31 мая 1971 г.” [a report by the bishop of leningrad and novgorod district at the church coucil], http://kuraev.ru/smf/index.php?topic=32865.0 (consulted 8, march, 2013). folk songs of russian old believers of latgale 63 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii likhachev, d. s., panchenko, a. m., ponyrko n. v. 1984. лихачев, д. с., панченко, а. м., понырео, н. в. смех в древней руси [laughing in medieval russia]. ленинград: наука. malyshev, v. i. 1960. малышев, в. и. усть-цилемские рукописные сборники xvi-xx вв. [manuscript books from ust’-tsilma of the xvi-xx centuries]. сыткывкар: коми изд. malyshev, v. i. 1978. малышев, в. и. древлехранилище пушкинского дома. [drevlekhranilishche irli ]. ленинград: наука. markelov, g. v. 1978. маркелов, г. в. “коллекция рукописей и. н. заволоко” [zavoloko manuscript collection], труды отдела древнерусской литературы. [works of the department of ancient russian literature]. т. 34. ленинград: наука. markelov, g. v. 1989. маркелов, г. в. “латгальская рукописно-книжная традиция” [zavoloko manuscript collection], труды отдела древнерусской литературы. [works of the department of ancient russian literature]. т. 42. ленинград: наука. melnikov, f. e. 1999. мельников, ф. е. краткая история древлеправославной (старообрядческой) церкви [a brief history of the old believer church]. барнаул: лествица. nikitina, s. e. 1982. никитина, с. е. “устная традиция в народной культуре русского населения верхокамья” [oral tradition of popular culture of russian population of verkhokamie], русские письменные и устные традиции и духовная культура. москва: наука. nikitina 1989. никитина, с. е. “о взаимоотношениях устных и письменных форм в народной культуре” [on the relationship between oral and written forms in popular culture], славянский и балканский фольклор. москва: наука. 64 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii nikitina, s. e. 1993. никитина, с. е. устная народная культура и языковое сознание. [oral folk culture and linguistic consciousness]. москва: наука. pozdeeva, i. v. 1998. поздеева, и., в. “комплексные исследования современной традиционной культуры русского старообрядчества. результаты перспективы” [a comprehensive study of the contemporary culture of russian old believers], мир страробрядчества. живые традиции. москва: российская политическая энциклопедия: 12-20. pozdeeva, i. v. 1999. поздеева, и., в. “личность и община в истории русского старообрядчества” [a person and a community in the history of the russian old believers], мир страробрядчества. история и современность. москва: изд-во мгу: 3-28. rozhdenstvensky, t. s. 1910 (1909). рождественский, т. с. “памятники старообрядческой поэзии” [the poetry of the old beivers], записки московского археологического иститута. т. 6. москва: изд-во сытина. sakharov, v. p. 1879. сахаров, р. п. эсхатологические сочинения и сказания в древнерусской письменности и влияние их на народные духовные стихи. [the old russian eschatological literary works and legends and their influence on the religious folk songs]. тула: типография н. и. соколова. scheffel, d., 1991. in the shadow of antichrist. broadway press: canada. subbotin, n. i. 1875-1885. “субботин н. и. материалы для истории раскола за первое время его существования” [materials covering the history of the schism during its first period], v. 5. москва: братское слово: 227-228. the oxford english dictionary online: "eschatology, n.", def. a, oxford english dictionary, http://oxforddictionaries.com/ us/definition/american_english/eschatology (consulted 5 july, 2013). folk songs of russian old believers of latgale 65 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii zenkovsky, s. a. 2009. зеньковский, с. а. русское старообрядчестово. в двух томах [the russian old believers. in two volumes]. москва: квадрига. ди-дик zhilko, a., farther zhilko, a current chairman of the central council pomeranian ancient orthodox church of latvia, dob 1945, native of riga, interviewed 01/25/10 in daugavpils. zol’nikova, n. d. 1992. зольникова, н. д.“современный писатель-старообрядец с енисея” [a contemporary old believer writer from enisei], традиционная духовная и материальная культура русских старообрядческих поселений в странах европы, азии и америки. сборник научных трудов. новосибирск: наука. сибирское отделение: 283-288. 0.i-toc1208 folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv i folklorica journal of the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association vernacular responses to the covid-19 pandemic 2020, vol. xxiv contents editors’ introduction to the special issue ii articles an urban project in rural crisis: responding to coronavirus in bulgarian villages sarah craycraft 1 pandemic, but make it fashion: ukrainian embroidered ppe in the time of covid-19 katya chomitzky 27 covid-19 narratives in a carpatho-rusyn village in transcarpathian ukraine elena boudovskaia 51 we heralds at the bells: messages of hope from west balkan bards during the coronavirus pandemic dorian jurić 85 we return of the legend: anatoly kashpirovsky’s treatment of covid-19 iryna voloshyna 118 folklore and conspiracy weories of a covid dissenter: we life and sermons of father sergii (romanov) j. eugene clay 135 reports the encyclopedia of coronavirus rumors and fakes: a report natalie kononenko 163 about seefa author’s guidelines 171 172 microsoft word folkloricaprotest_ii_full_final_2022 07.27.22.docx reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 108 kivelson, valerie a., and christine d. worobec, eds. witchcraft in russia and ukraine, 1000–1900: a sourcebook (slavic, east european, and eurasian studies series). ithaca and london: northern illinois university press/cornell university press, 2020. timeline. notes. index. xxx+506. $32.95 (paper). isbn 9781501750656. valerie kivelson and christine worobec number among the leading scholars who study the history of witchcraft in russia and ukraine. in this volume, they have joined together to recap the conclusions of their previous research published in monographs and scholarly articles and to share examples of the historical documents from which they drew them. they collaborated with numerous other scholars in this effort, including most notably elena smilianskaia, aleksandr lavrov, and kataryna dysa, who contributed to this volume archival documents they had found and transcribed along with their insights into them. thus, this book expresses the collective knowledge of many scholars and constitutes a summation of their consensus. as a “sourcebook,” the volume features 100 documents relating to witchcraft. while a few originated in the period of kyivan rus’, most date to a later era, the 16th century through the mid-19th. the documents are rendered into accurate, readable english translation, with adequate notation concerning the terminology in the original. when not providing the entire document, the authors have opted for longer passages rather than shorter, so that readers can get a sense of the context. as a result, these documents speak to more than just the conceptions of witchcraft in russian and ukrainian society, to encompass judicial practice, gender relations, folk belief and customs, and daily life. although many of the documents were previously published in their original language (often old russian or polish, in addition to modern russian), many others are unpublished, and this volume provides the only option for ready access to them. the editors have chosen to focus on legal and judicial texts of which they are experts, rather than literature or ethnography. for the premodern period, ethnographic materials scarcely exist, and so the chronological scope of the volume perhaps dictated excluding such texts. the volume includes several excerpts from chronicles of the 11th through the 16th century recounting the activities of suspected sorcerers, but not fictional tales. in short, the editors excluded purely literary depictions of magic to direct attention instead to “real” witches. the types of sources the editors selected color the image of witchcraft in dark tones. readers who are hoping to find depictions of light-hearted magic and kindly wise women as in folktales and ethnographic reports will be taken aback by the vision of the world in this volume. much of the magic that appears in this book harmed others, deliberately or inadvertently. the witches themselves were banal, casting their spells out of desperation or in hopes of modest rewards or just as a favor to a relative or neighbor. most did not identify as witches at all, but came under suspicion because they possessed herbs, roots, amulets, or (especially) written material. mostly, these accused witches came under suspicion because reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 109 they had the wrong family, friends, or enemies. the government authorities who investigated the allegations of witchcraft come across as unfeeling executors of cruel policies. readers hoping to find the texts of spells and incantations will find numerous examples in this volume. judicial inquest records occasionally recorded them verbatim, and the editors have reproduced them here. accused witches described their rituals in detail, as well as the circumstances which prompted them to use magic. because most of this information was extracted under threatening interrogation and torture, readers cannot be certain whether these descriptions represent actual magical practice or versions that hapless victims of government investigations believed would satisfy the authorities. either way, the texts yield much information about conceptions of witchcraft. the editors also provide lavish commentary on the practice of witchcraft in its cultural context in the twelve-page introduction to the volume, in the introductions to each chapter, and in the introductions to each of the documents. they point out the prevalence of magical practice among all layers of society, elite and common, clergy and laity, educated and illiterate, men and women. in russian lands, males greatly outnumbered females in the ranks of accused witches; in ukrainian lands, it was the opposite. unlike in western european lands, the witches of russia and ukraine infrequently enunciated any association with satan or any sophisticated demonology; much more often they invoked figures from the christian pantheon, albeit in uncanonical ways. the hardships and inequities of life prompted people to seek relief through the power of magic. but while witchcraft might tip the scales of the moral economy in favor of the weak, so could appeals to the authorities with allegations of forbidden magic. once the government got involved, though, the situation rarely was resolved in anyone’s favor. all too often, both accused and accusers suffered grievous interrogation, torture, imprisonment, exile, and death. for any serious scholar of russian and ukrainian witchcraft and magic, this volume is a “must read.” even though the overall conclusions may be familiar from the editors’ earlier publications, the additional insights that emerge from the discussions of specific documents add nuance and crucial information. scholars of folklore and popular culture also will find much of value, particularly in the second part of the book, which is organized around aspects of magical practice— healing and harming, sex and love, demon possession, and orality, among others. however, the distribution of the source texts into different thematic chapters is somewhat arbitrary, as the editors themselves admit, because so many of them touch upon multiple aspects of magical practice. thus, folklorists would be advised to read all the chapters, so as not to miss material of interest to them. the volume is suitable for undergraduate students, too, particularly as a resource for class discussion and term projects. the lack of a glossary of terms and the limited inclusion of subject headings in the index are regrettable in this context, but the timeline of the history is very useful, as are the notes, which clarify terminology and direct readers to additional scholarly publications. finally, scholars of reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 110 witchcraft outside the area of russian and ukrainian studies can use this volume as an entrée into that milieu. eve levin university of kansas lawrence, kansas, usa evelevin@ku.edu kononenkofinal the encyclopedia of coronavirus rumors and fakes folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 163 reports <e encyclopedia of coronavirus rumors and fakes: a report natalie kononenko university of alberta, emerita waterloo, ontario introduction as a member of the folklore commission of the international committee of slavists, i am privileged to listen to the presentation of new research conducted in the countries of the slavic world. on july 10, 2020, the commission heard nikita petrov of the russian presidential academy of national economy and public administration in moscow present the encyclopedia of coronavirus rumors and fakes. qis website is run by petrov, aleksandra arkhipova and their team of dar’ia radchenko, anna kirziuk, maria gavrilova, irina kozlova, sergei belianin and boris peigin. qe encyclopedia can be found at the following link: https://nplus1.ru/material/2020/04/08/coronarumors. encyclopedia units; unit 1: covid lore categories the site contains a list of types of covid-19 folklore, or popularly generated covid-19 stories and beliefs, identified by the encyclopedia team. the categories isolated are: 1. pseudo-medical advice, that is posts giving advice on preventing covid-19 infection. qe posts attribute this advice to young doctors such as iura klimov, presumably more believable because of their age, and to famous israeli doctors. 2. folk and religious cures for covid-19 or folk and religious covidprevention strategies. preventative measures include using garlic or ginger, the latter of which needs to be tied to one’s foot, nailing a cross to a tree, or using olive oil to draw a cross on the inside of one’s door. 3. warnings such as notices telling people that black helicopters will be flying over the city at night to spray the area with disinfectants and that all residents should take cover and even stay away from windows to avoid harm from the disinfectant. 4. first person accounts of experiences with covid-19 that may be real, albeit exaggerated, but which then get circulated and amplified on social media. 5. “documents” made to look like official notices or press releases. the encyclopedia of coronavirus rumors and fakes folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 164 6. stories about the origin of the virus, narratives that usually suggest local government involvement or international conspiracies. unit 2: examples and analysis scrolling down the webpage, the next section gives detailed examples and analyses of coronavirus posts collected and studied by the encyclopedia staff. each example is followed by the name of the encyclopedia team member who investigated the story, gathering locations and dates of attestation, international social media parallels, and similar accounts in other media. qis section of the website is essentially a series of articles, each carefully researched and documented. in addition to the reproduction of the posts that form the impetus for each story, the article offers embedded links to relevant sites. i should note that one cannot find a collection of all of the posts of a particular type collected by the compilers of the encyclopedia. qis is not a research site where one can search through massive amounts of raw data. rather, this is an analytical site with data that has already been processed by the staff. qe examples given are the following: story 1: newly introduced 5g network towers weaken the immune system and make people susceptible to catching the coronavirus. qe discussion of this rumor includes a drawing shared online, variants of the post about the threat of 5g, along with the places where those variants were attested. bill gates receives blame, just like in the west, along with entire countries, specifically the united states and china. qere are accounts of supposedly real events that might have stimulated the 5g rumors, namely a massive bird-kill near a broadcast tower and rumors of anti-5g actions and protests in countries outside of russia. story 2: migrants spread the disease. apparently seasonal migrant workers were left in russia after the outbreak of the virus and were unable to return home. qe encyclopedia reproduces a web page with warnings to be wary of the migrants and their threat of bodily harm, both as desperate perpetrators of street crime and as carriers of covid-19. qe discussion notes when the rumors first appeared online. it characterizes the language used, which is surprisingly neutral and unemotional, and lists the ethnic groups most frequently identified as the types of migrants likely to pose a threat to russians. story 3: posting coronavirus jokes on social media such as whatsapp and instagram will be punished by a 100,000 ruble fine. presumably “jokes” means fake news posted with the intent of being humorous. qe notice was first documented in kazakhstan in march 2020 and then spread across russia, despite attempts by official media to declare it to be false information. qe discussion states that the irrepressibility of this rumor is due to lack of trust in official bodies, combined with an expectation that any government reaction would, indeed, be excessive. qe media posts apparently led to a number of pranks and, in cheliabinsk, the pranksters did receive a fine, though not an excessive one. the encyclopedia of coronavirus rumors and fakes folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 165 story 4: an online warning about masks soaked in narcotics. qe post relates that people are walking door-to-door, claiming that they are official representatives of the local government. qey hand out masks asking the person answering the door to try the mask on for size. qe treated mask causes the person who unwittingly puts it on to faint, thus allowing the imposter handing out the masks to rob the home. qe text posted in russia may be a translation of an english language warning about official-looking personnel going door-to-door in las vegas with a similar intent of robbing their victims. it has also appeared, often in english, in india where the rumor stated that people on the street wearing masks would offer masks similar to their own to passers-by, their intended victims. qe unwitting victims faint when they put on the mask and are robbed. qe shortage of protective equipment may contribute to the wide circulation of this post. story 5: online warnings about thieves dressed in authentic-looking hazmat suits knocking on one’s door. qe people in hazmat suits arrive at an apartment saying that covid-19 infections have been detected in the building and announcing that they must urgently decontaminate the premises. qey then render the person who opens the door unconscious in a manner similar to story 4 and rob the home. some versions of the story are made more contemporary and real by warning people to tell their children and their elderly not to answer the door. both children and the elderly are presumed to be more gullible and, with children not in school because of the virus and with the elderly left on their own for the same reason, these groups have become especially vulnerable to thieves using threats of virus infection to deceive their victims. qe team member investigating the story points out that this rumor exists in other countries, only there the people in hazmat suits talk their way into apartments in order to sell their victims fake coronavirus paraphernalia, whereas, in russia, the intent is robbery, just as in story 4. story 6: a notice that elders at mount athos advise all orthodox christians to put a cross on the inside of their doors. qose who do not own a cross should draw one using olive oil. qis advice is accompanied by photos of what is supposed to be mary, mother of god, or a cloud in her likeness, in the sky. it is she who notified the praying monks of the actions that need to be taken. qere are also images showing how the cross on the door should be drawn. qe pronouncement is followed by public reaction posts saying that there can be nothing wrong with drawing crosses. qese posts proliferated despite clergy statements, including digital media posts, pronouncing the notices to be false. qe clerics also posted information instructing people on ways to cleanse themselves of the sin of spreading false information. qe encyclopedia staff point out that a knowledgeable person is able to detect that the posts are fake and not a pronouncement from mount athos because they contain stylistic problems: language patterns and terminology that would not be used by orthodox clergy. qere is also evidence of general lack of knowledge of orthodoxy. qe writer of the article of this example of covid-19 lore draws parallels from folk responses to earlier epidemics, stating that fake ecclesiastical pronouncements are a typical reaction to situations of catastrophic illness. the encyclopedia of coronavirus rumors and fakes folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 166 story 7: polina from italy. qis is a post that the afore-named polina, a citizen of st. petersburg, now living in italy, shared on her vkontakte (a russian social media site similar to facebook) account. she warns her fellow russians of the dangers that are coming their way by providing a description of what she sees happening in italy. qis is presented as a first-person account—things that polina actually witnessed—but in fact describes a general situation that the author could only have heard about, not actually seen or experienced herself. qe warning became an incredibly popular post with thousands of likes and reposts. it was even picked up by kirill, patriarch of moscow and all russia, and used as a warning to the faithful. qe encyclopedia gives links to “polina’s” initial post and to the online pronouncement by patriarch kirill. it also gives examples of reactions that were not reposts, but confirming comments. qe encyclopedia attributes the impact and popularity of the polina post to the fact that it is a warning of impending disaster combined with the power of the supposedly eyewitness account by a real person who was even given a last name, golovushkina, making her all the more credible. polina’s post inspired secondary posts that confirmed the original warning by saying that the posters had friends in italy who had described the situation there in similar terms. qese secondary accounts of a disastrous situation served to strengthen the veracity of the polina account by adding a second tier of eye-witnesses. story 8: a little-known pushkin poem. a poem that seeks to console the reader by saying “this too will pass” was circulated online as a verse written by pushkin in 1827 when he was in isolation at boldino because of the cholera epidemic that took place during that time period. qis post, too, became extremely popular with multiple likes and reposts. unfortunately, this is not a case of pushkin reaching out from the past to offer comfort in the present. rather it is a contemporary creation by the kazakh poet and blogger urri grim written to celebrate the iranian/persian holiday of navruz, celebrated widely by muslims in russia and central asia. apparently, a reader of grim’s posts named seule attached the attribution to pushkin and the year of composition and then reposted the text as a joke. she retracted her joke three minutes later but, by then, it was too late—the post had gone viral. according to the encyclopedia, errors within seule’s attribution should have alerted readers to the fact that it was a fake, but no—the inevitable happened and the text, using the power of pushkin’s name, went viral. who was responsible for the fake, encyclopedia asks, and answers: everyone, but especially the readers and re-posters. story 9: a curfew announced in moscow. qe post in question is meant to look like an official document generated by the ministry of defense announcing that there will be a curfew in moscow on 30 march 2020 between 8pm and 5am for the purpose of a chemical treatment (presumably disinfection) of the city. qe difference between this and the black helicopter story is that this post is meant to look like an official document, whereas the black helicopter warning is a personal communication from someone who, allegedly, was privy to insider information. qis post was almost immediately denied by the ministry of defense which blamed “neighboring countries” for the false warning. qe encyclopedia staff the encyclopedia of coronavirus rumors and fakes folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 167 argue that this is probably a hoax generated by a youngster and support their claim by citing the type of language used and the errors found in the text. qe errors include formatting and content that differ from actual official notices. finally, the encyclopedia draws parallels to similar pronouncements during soviet times that were circulated, not online, but on message boards. story 10: vodka kills covid-19. almost everywhere (not only on the internet) one can find advice stating that using vodka protects against covid-19. qe meaning of the term “using” varies and includes drinking vodka, using it as a disinfectant cleanser, and soaking masks in it so that one ends up breathing through vodka. qese uses are proclaimed and supported not only by popular, but also by some government, sources including belarusian president lukashenka. advice that urges the populace to use vodka can be serious and it can be humorous. in the latter case, it serves to trivialize the threat of the pandemic. as the encyclopedia explains, russians and belarusians have long accepted vodka as a cure-all but, in the west, this is a new idea. in one series of posts, western recommendations to resort to vodka are attributed to st. luke’s hospital in kansas city. in japan, the use of vodka was advocated by a journalist who proposed it as an effective alternative in the absence of hand sanitizer. drinking vodka as a prophylactic led to tragic consequences in iran where alcoholic beverages are banned, and people turned to bootlegged spirits, apparently methanol, and died. in russia, attempts to discourage the use of vodka fell on deaf ears and the encyclopedia explains this by the fact that, in problematic situations, people often turn to commonly available substances such as garlic, ginger and, of course, vodka. vodka also has a pronounced flavor and is psychoactive, reminding people of medicine. qe last argument in support of the use of vodka is that it is perceived as native, a truly russian substance, and thus effective against illnesses that come from a foreign source. story 11: water of life/water of death. in february 2020, rumors started in tomsk, novosibirsk, and kemerovo that local authorities were adding disinfectant to the drinking water, making it unsafe to drink. qese rumors were believed because certain infections, such as cholera and bubonic plague, can, indeed, be water-borne. qe other basis for their believability is that cities have, in the past, added disinfectant to drinking water when there were threats of hepatitis a and other infections. of course, when actual massive treatment of drinking water occurs, the public is officially notified; there is no need for rumors. rumors about water made dangerous with disinfectant seem to have originated in hong kong. a drinking water rumor in france held that the municipal water supply carried the coronavirus itself. in china, there was a post that authorities were adding chlorine in maximum concentration to the drinking water, making it unsafe to drink. chinese rumors, the encyclopedia proposes, spread to russia and then to europe. qere were even comic versions of the rumors, namely notices that the city had added alcohol to the drinking water. qese were meant to discredit the original warnings. story 12: an open letter from russian doctors. an open letter, claiming to be from the association of russian physicians to president putin, the government the encyclopedia of coronavirus rumors and fakes folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 168 of russia, and various other officials circulated online. it contains a series of warnings, essentially stating that the coronavirus epidemic is non-existent and that it is a hoax meant to facilitate control of the population. other points in the open letter state that making people deathly afraid makes them easily manageable, that coronavirus threats are an international conspiracy aimed at creating an electronic concentration camp, that coronavirus is a plot by the world’s ultra-rich, that the quarantine is a pretext for introducing a 5g network, and that threats of the virus are a way to microchip the population. qe discussion provided by the encyclopedia staff points out that the above-named association of physicians does not exist and is the fictive creation of the russian rebirth party. qe “open letter” was made believable by its references to experts and its publication on parents’ and workers’ chat groups. qe text first appeared on april 1 and many of its recipients took it as an april fool’s joke, but its widespread republication, its official appearance, and its endorsement by individuals personally known to recipients added to its credibility. qe encyclopedia lists various internal errors and contradictions which show that the “open letter” is a fake. nonetheless, people, not just in russia, but in the united states and elsewhere, are willing to believe that there are government conspiracies aimed at controlling the population and the encyclopedia lists past instances when such conspiracy rumors circulated. unit 3: requests to readers for new information qe list of stories is followed by a request to the readership of the site to share their own experiences with coronavirus rumors and fakes. qose submitting are asked to fill out a set of forms that ask for the rumor, its source, and the geographical location of the person supplying the information; the person’s age and gender are also requested. qe forms further ask for the platform on which the rumor or fake was first encountered. qe respondent is then asked to evaluate the credibility of the post and is prompted to reproduce the post (screen capture), if possible. at the end, the respondent has an opportunity to provide an email address, should s/he wish to communicate further with the encyclopedia staff. attribution at the bottom of the page there is a signature stating that the encyclopedia is the work of the laboratory for qeoretical folkloristics at the school of humanistic studies of the russian presidential academy of national economy and public administration. qe laboratory’s members and their guest contributors are again listed. qe preparers of the coronavirus encyclopedia, and the members of the laboratory of qeoretical folkloristics as a whole, have a general interest in folklore. one of their posts is the discussion of a legend that recounts how a young woman committed a sacrilegious act by dancing with the icon of st. nicholas and was punished for her transgressions. qe event took place during the soviet era in kuibyshev and the post features an account of the legend, photos of icons depicting the event, narratives of related miracles, and a discussion the encyclopedia of coronavirus rumors and fakes folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 169 of folkloric parallels. in short, the members of the laboratory of qeoretical folkloristics are producing a treasure trove of carefully processed russian folk belief and narrative. qe laboratory for qeoretical folklore studies while the future of the coronavirus rumors and fakes project is not apparent from the website given above, communication with the staff at the laboratory for qeoretical folklore studies informed this author and the folklorica staff that further work, based on more recent materials, is planned. qey referred us to the following english-language site: https://www.monitoringjournal.ru/index.php/monitoring/article/view/1778?fbcli d=iwar0cehhidplwktofkkilp1h4fg7fbwy7rkmv_rhjjqzuopx0scen bxu0ooe. it provides information about the monitoring of public opinion: economic and social changes journal. qey also recommended the main site of the laboratory of qeoretical folkloristics (http://shagi.ranepa.ru/lab/folc). here users can find a list of the laboratory’s projects, publications, and researchers. qe members of the laboratory of qeoretical folkloristics were kind enough to also provide us with a description of their research interests and their approach to their work. qeir team emphasizes fieldwork and making every effort to capture and study the expressions and the practices of communities as produced by the people themselves. qeir regional focus is russia and eurasia. qey seek to uncover those cultural texts that a society creates about itself, hoping to help educate a citizenry free of ideological manipulation. qe laboratory is currently working on three projects. qe first is run by sergei nekliudov and deals with semiotic ideology and the logic of meaning creation in folklore texts. drawing on the concept of linguistic ideology, this project seeks to understand the emic process of symbol creation and decoding, emphasizing the functionally semantic level of the study of tradition. comparing emic and etic views allows researchers to see the normative hermeneutics of a culture. looking at a culture as an assemblage of semiotic ideology helps access the depth and complexity of culture as a living process. qe second project, run by nikita petrov, deals with twentiethand twentyfirst-century folklore and post-folklore in urban environments and emphasizes narrative and behavioral strategies. it looks at the growth of new media, its bearing on the transmission of texts, and the impact of those texts on the landscape of the city. qe main goal of the project is to study the cultural mechanisms at the basis of the transmission of city lore and the reasons why people react to events in a particular and communal way. qe third project is also run by petrov and looks at the contemporary city and its cultural texts and street practices. it examines city texts and practices (from meetings to rituals in public places) looking for development and change. qe goal is to find expressions of vernacular culture and to understand their mass appeal. the encyclopedia of coronavirus rumors and fakes folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 170 qe russian presidential academy of national economy and public administration website qe encyclopedia of coronavirus rumors and fakes is one unit of the russian presidential academy of national economy and public administration website. qe site also contains units on physics, astronomy, biology, and robots and drones. it has a sub-unit with current coronavirus information, including very recent material such as information on the pfizer, astrazeneca, and other vaccines. qe current coronavirus facts page has sub-headings with information on the long-term effects of covid-19 in those who have recovered from the disease, information on what characterizes a super-spreader event, a discussion of the relationship between blood type and susceptibility, descriptions of differences between russian vaccines and those produced elsewhere, and other current information. in sum, the efforts of the russian presidential academy of national economy and public administration are impressive, and the laboratory of qeoretical folkloristics is doing cutting edge research. qeir encyclopedia of coronavirus rumors and fakes deserves attention and emulation. folklorica full 2024 reviews 77 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii petr janeček. spring man: a belief legend between folklore and popular culture (studies in folklore and ethnology: traditions, practices, and identities). lanham: lexington books, 2022. list of figures. notes. appendices. bibliography. index. xiv+228. $100.00 (hardback). $45.00 (ebook). isbn 978-1-66691-375-0. (hardback). isbn 978-1-66691-376-7 (ebook). petr janeček’s spring man: a belief legend between folklore and popular culture is a comprehensive study of an urban folklore character from his appearance in 1919 in bohemia to his current form in popular culture as a symbol of czech nationalism, the working class, and social activism. janeček covers the origins, appearances, behaviors, and functions of spring man [czech, pérák] who appeared in legends largely in urban areas throughout the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. janeček maintains that the idea of the spring man of folklore as a wwii resistance fighter arose from post-war literature and ideologically based scholarship and creative work and that spring man was morally ambiguous rather than heroic. while tales about spring man as a resistance fighter exist, far more common are tales in which he terrorizes the populace or attacks women. the one consistent characteristic in the tales is spring man’s ability to escape, usually by leaping away. the reader is introduced to spring man in three vignettes intended to show the metamorphosis of spring man from monster to hero. the first, set in prague in 1945 during the german protectorate period, describes a boy returning home at night who sees a “dark figure… bounding down from the hill’s crest with unnaturally high leaps” (1). the boy recognizes him because of his appearance: dressed in black and masked, and, most importantly, wearing shoes with springs in the soles. frightened because he has heard stories about spring man’s attacks on innocent people, the boy crouches next to his gate. as spring man passes the terrified boy, he grimaces at him and lets out a sound like the “bark of a rutting deer” (2). the second vignette describes the 1965 screening of the animated film spring man and the ss (1946). children and teens are enthralled by the film and create games featuring the czech superhero fighting the nazis or attempt to mimic him by attaching springs to their shoes. the third vignette depicts a 2015 social action by an anonymous person purporting to be spring man, who criticizes the czech nation for hypocrisy in commemorating auschwitz while ignoring the former concentration camp in lety which was the location of a pig farm at the time of the action. janeček provides these vignettes as snapshots of the transformation of an urban legend into a principled superhero. the book’s first chapter provides personal accounts and newspaper reports about spring man from 1919 through the 1970s. these legends first appeared in the mining and laboring regions of bohemia and proliferated throughout protectorate-era czech lands during the later years of wwii. many of the tales were collected by janeček and his colleagues from informants who were children at the time the legends and rumors about spring man were circulating. chapter two covers the history of spring man and similar characters that appeared in reviews 78 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii poland, germany, and slovakia throughout the twentieth century. janeček considers spring man to be a manifestation of a migrating legend about “prowling ghosts” (64), the best known of which is the folkloric character spring-heeled jack of victorian england. in addition to their uncanny ability to escape, another commonality among tales about spring man and similar beings is that they arise primarily in urban, working-class areas. in the third chapter janeček addresses the psychological and social functions of these tales. he argues that one reason tales about spring man were so popular was because of spring man’s insolubility in his transgression of “fixed cultural categories” (142). by retelling the rumors and legends about spring man, people attempted to reconcile spring man’s paradoxical nature of being both human and demonic and both positive and negative, while also reacting to the difficult times in which they were living. in the final chapter, janeček describes spring man’s metamorphosis from urban folkloric demon to a figure in popular culture. creative works featuring spring man produced after wwii were influential in this metamorphosis, including the animated film spring man and the ss (1946). spring man has been increasingly commodified since that time, turning into a heroic character in comics, films, and theater. however, janeček sees the most current iteration of spring man—the social activist—as something of a return to the earlier ambiguous figure. the story of spring man and his subsequent metamorphosis is fascinating. janeček extensively researched the topic, providing convincing evidence of the complexity of spring man, whose current manifestations as a heroic figure in popular culture conceals the negative aspects of the original folklore. he argues persuasively that spring man loses his ambiguous liminal nature when taken from the oral tradition and developed into the anti-nazi resistance fighter of the 1946 film. the legends janeček and his colleagues gathered from informants who remember spring man from their childhood are also of value. much similar information has been lost over time. this book would have benefited from more careful editing. besides missing or misused words, the syntax is sometimes cumbersome and ungrammatical. i also found some of the theorizing in chapter three distracting, particularly the inclusion of monster theory, which was only partially applied and in an abbreviated form. nonetheless, this does not decrease the value of the work which will be of use to scholars of popular culture, cultural studies, east european history and culture, and folklore, particularly urban legends. the book is broadly researched with citations from theories of folklore, psychology, anthropology, and sociology. spring man is a significant figure in czech folkloric, literary, and popular culture and merits scholarly attention just for that, but the present work also provides a template for similar works. erin collopy texas tech university lubbock, texas erin.collopy@ttu.edu reviews folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 95 harris, robin p. storytelling in siberia: the olonkho epic in a changing world [folklore studies in a multicultural world]. urbana, chicago, and springfield, il: university of illinois press, 2017. glossary. notes. works cited. index. xv+235. $60.00 (cloth). isbn 978-0-252-04128-0. $30.00 (paper). isbn 978-0252-08552-9. with storytelling in siberia, robin harris provides an engaging and detailed account of an epic tradition’s near disappearance and revitalization over the past century. it will be of special interest to those working on intangible cultural heritage, music, and post-socialism. harris lived in siberia’s sakha republic (officially designated as yakutia within the russian federation) for a decade from 1995 onward, and returned for fieldwork between 2009 and 2011. accordingly, she possesses time-tested insight and an ethnographic network that many would envy. olonkho is traditionally an unaccompanied solo genre that narrates lengthy mythico-historic epics through song and recitative chant-speaking. respected performers known as olonkhosuts formerly traveled peripatetically between small winter settlements, providing entertainment to their hosts by narrating a single epic tale over the course of several extended evenings. drawing on foundational research on oral poetry by lord/parry and bauman, harris describes how the olonkhosut would use formulas and a variety of improvisational strategies to elaborate or truncate their tale, depending on the emergent reaction of audience members. in the soviet era, olonkho suffered from diminishing audiences and a loss of performers’ improvisatory skills in the context of political mixed messages and a newly literate populace. however, a successful application in unesco’s first competition to identify masterpieces of intangible cultural heritage (ich) pulled olonkho “back from the brink of permanent disappearance” (135). throughout the bulk of the book, harris explores how this happened, and devotes limited space to musical or thematic analysis. although a few brief musical transcriptions are included, along with a list of typical features, there is no actual translated text of a master olonkhosut’s performance included in the book or the accompanying website. while olonkho’s untranslatable orality is fundamental to harris’s argument, it still would have been interesting to get a flavor of the verbal art as it unfolds. harris acknowledges her own limited knowledge of the sakha language, but she puts her russian skills to good use, frequently quoting eduard alekseyev, a sakha ethnomusicologist who has been writing prolifically since the 1960s. after introductory chapters, the book shifts to a chronological presentation, describing solo olonkho at its artistic peak (the late 1800s into the 1910s), the farreaching effects of soviet governance, and the period of national resurgence that led to the successful masterpiece application. the final chapters are dedicated to extensive reflection on the masterpiece program’s implementation during the two “decades of olonkho” declared successively by the sakha government since 2005. as harris notes, despite all of the projects undertaken since then, olonkho as a solo improvisatory artform is still at risk of disappearing. as of 2013, all of folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 96 the sakha republic’s few officially recognized olonkho masters (skilled tradition bearers capable of improvising in the old style) had died without being replaced. a newer theatrical form of olonkho performed by a collective cast has proven much more accessible to mass audiences. today, solo olonkho is more valued as a universal symbol of sakha identity than enjoyed as entertainment, and when performed, it is generally in brief memorized snippets on a brightly-lit concert or competition stage rather than in an immersive home setting. compounding these problems, the russian federation has never ratified unesco’s convention on ich, meaning that the republic of yakutia is ineligible to apply for unesco funding (being on the list does not guarantee external funding—an application actually represents a years-long financial commitment for the applicant). in the absence of interest from moscow, yakutia must provide all funding for olonkho revitalization from its own budget. harris’s book provides a valuable corrective to critiques of unesco’s ich program that see it mostly as a tool for nationalist self-aggrandizement. here, unesco recognition has allowed sakha intellectuals to build scholarly alliances and collaborate on conferences and publications with other asian states and siberian republics, outside of the direct oversight of an imperial center that is increasingly re-asserting control. olonkho thus becomes a site for the periphery’s pride and agency (although the sakha republic contains religious minorities and non-sakha indigenous peoples with their own relationship to olonkho, shamanism, and the locally dominant sakha people, glancingly revealed in a few brief comments). harris’s close read of the relationship between unesco’s goals for revitalization and their practical outcome as implemented through yakutia’s parliamentary action plan is detailed and thoughtful—the kind of analysis that deserves to be done for any cultural revitalization project. harris’s primary theoretical contribution is the discussion of stable and malleable elements in cultural traditions, and how these two aspects interweave in transmission and innovation, both necessary for resilience. in this, she draws on recent ethnomusicological work on cultural sustainability that draws from sociolinguistic models, primarily turning to her colleagues neil coulter and brian schrag, who like harris are associated with sil international (a christian linguistics organization, formerly known as formerly known as the summer institute of linguistics, supporting missionary work and publishing) and the affiliated dallas international university. harris adapts coulter’s “graded music shift scale” and schrag’s “graded genre health assessment” to analyze olonkho, ultimately determining that solo olonkho is somewhere between “threatened” and “locked” (still performed, but becoming rigid and disconnected from community life). she then analyzes each olonkho component (e.g., musical materials, performance contexts, audience verbal responses) in terms of stable and malleable elements, finding that as time has passed, there is generally less malleability and agency, which damages both transmission and possibilities for innovation. she assesses the newer form of theatrical olonkho at slightly better than “threatened,” even approaching “vigorous.” harris sees theatrical olonkho not as a threat to the improvised tradition’s vitality (or not merely as a threat), but as an artistic reviews folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 97 “descendent” that can help to rebuild the “epic sreda” (milieu) necessary for sustainability. while the chapters on revitalization are frequently repetitive and the stability/malleability dialectic at times feels like a truism confirming what we have already learned, this kind of analysis could also be helpful in assessing cultural revitalization projects. harris admirably foregrounds the voices of many interlocutors throughout, and does not shy away from presenting the diversity of opinions among them. one official’s extended description of the masterpiece application is particularly engaging, featuring a comedy of errors during a trip to moscow to obtain state documents. this bureaucratic ethnography has almost enough intrigue, stakeouts, deus ex machina, and last-minute reversals for a film plot. besides culture workers and political officials, the author also interviews members of the general public and olonkho listeners and performers, including an extended interview with the late pyotr reshetnikov, one of the last improvising master olonkhosuts. those who understand russian can listen to many audiovisual interview clips on the book’s website (which also includes the recorded sources of the music scores provided in the book). the only downside of this emphasis on local voices is that, other than at specific moments like the introduction and conclusion, harris’s own voice seems to be backgrounded. although she is certainly present in the narrative throughout—for example, describing her powerful experience sitting “under the mouth” of reshetnikov’s live improvisation (2)—at times i found myself wanting her to state her own opinion or indulge in more self-reflexivity. harris does explicitly tip her hand in the concluding chapter with specific recommendations and hopes (she suggests identification and compensation of more tradition bearers; creation of performance and learning milieus that better reflect traditional spaces). ultimately, this is a powerful and grounded work of scholarship on an understudied region, with useful insights for applied folklore and ethnomusicology. matthew e. knight independent scholar winnipeg, canada matthew.e.knight@gmail.com folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 98 folklorica full 2021_edit 6.28.22 folklorica 2021, vol. xxv i folklorica journal of the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association 2021, vol. xxv contents co-editor's introduction to the folklorica special issue “folklore and protest i” iii articles revolutionary kašpárek: the life cycle of the radical puppet cheryl stephenson 1 protesting retrospectively: oral memories and social practices of migrants from the areas of artificial water reservoirs in soviet ukraine iryna koval-fuchylo 21 sviće “smurf”: intertextual linkages in protests against montenegro’s 2019 freedom of religion law nikolina zenović 36 not all quiet on the culinary front: the battle over borshch in ukraine mariya lesiv 58 reviews sawin, patricia and rosemary lévy zumwalt, eds. folklore in the united states and canada: an institutional history maria carlson 79 colarusso, john and tamirlan salbiev, eds. tales of the narts: ancient myths and legends of the ossetians richard foltz 81 brzozowska-krajka, anna. ethnoculture in the diaspora: between regionalism and americanization thaddeus v. gromada 83 kanigel, robert. hearing homer’s song: the brief life and big idea of milman parry dorian jurić 85 būgienė, lina, editor. the storytelling human: lithuanian folk tradition today guntis šmidchens 88 folklorica 2021, vol. xxv ii about seefa 91 author guidelines 92 folklorica full 2024 reviews 79 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii müller, axel, christopher halls, and ben williamson. mermaids: art, symbolism and mythology. exeter, university of exeter press, 2022. references. acknowledgements. index. 168 pp. $61.00 (hardback and e-book). isbn 978-1-804-130032. examining the genesis and cultural assimilation of symbolic images, particularly that of the mermaid, presents a complex and multifaceted challenge. this compelling figure is frequently associated with bodies of water in slavic folklore and mythology. the precise origins and terminology of this feminine entity still needs to be discovered and has prompted extensive academic inquiry. the book, mermaids: art, symbolism, and mythology by axel müller, christopher halls and ben williamson, offers a meticulous and comprehensive exploration of the representation of the art, symbolism, and mythology of mermaids. this examination traces the origins and evolution of mermaids, especially within western cultures. according to the authors, the mermaid exists in many cultures worldwide. she is often depicted as a woman with the tail of a fish, playing a significant role in folklore across diverse global regions. the authors clarify the mermaid’s characteristics at the beginning of their explanation: “a mermaid is a half-human, half sea-fish creature with the upper body (from the head to the hip) of a pretty young woman with one or two fish tails instead of legs” (3). aquatic environments are home to various types of mythological creatures, such as nymphs and sirens; these are distinguished and described in the book, accompanied by corresponding illustrations. a distinct contrast is observed between western and slavic mythology, in which mermaids are portrayed without fish tails, possessing legs, and inhabiting the forest rather than the water. in this book, the focus is placed on specific art objects and their accompanying narratives, serving as representative examples of ancient and modern civilizations in the middle east and europe. the authors highlight the impact of christianity, which fundamentally altered the appearance, understanding, and role of mythical creatures like mermaids. before the influence of christianity, mermaids were often linked with the sea and its perils. however, christianity transformed them into symbols of temptation, depicting them as beings who entice men and lead them to ruin. the book further examines the utilization and propagation of mermaid imagery in european cultures and art movements. the historical presence of christian depictions of fish-tailed mermaids in eighth-century manuscripts in central and western europe underscores the significance of mermaids in human culture. the term “mermaid” appears globally in the folklore and legends of diverse cultures. this comprehensive book presents an engaging and accessible examination of mermaid folklore, challenging traditional interpretations and exploring mermaids within the framework of evolutionary theory. the book invites readers to adopt an open-minded approach, fostering a sense of intrigue and intellectual curiosity. a significant portion of existing research on mermaids focuses on the creature and its role in mythology, folklore, literature, and linguistics. this book provides a comprehensive analysis of this topic, while also providing extremely reviews 80 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii detailed and enriched research, and a separate chapter has been added that examines the role of mythical creatures in modern mass culture, including in children’s books, games, and films. in this way, this book can be used in courses in cultural studies, intercultural communication, language learning and translation, as well as interdisciplinary courses like “mythology and modernity.” furthermore, the additional aspect of mermaid nature in modern times can be used by researchers as they conduct comparative studies of the creatures. in a separate chapter, the authors discuss the evolving symbolism of mermaids: while in ancient and medieval times they represented seduction and fear of the unknown, later they became cherished characters in children’s fairytales and modern entertainment media. the chapter expounds on the evolving portrayal of these entities within modern mass culture that encompasses children’s literature, games, and films alongside conventional domains such as mythology, folklore, literature, and linguistics. the book can be viewed as an outline for the origin and development of other myths that involve hybrid animal and human mythical creatures. the book presents a comprehensive and thought-provoking analysis of mermaids. it covers their historical origins, scientific significance, and cultural impact as viewed through various perspectives, even including evolutionary theory. the book caters to a diverse audience of scholars, students, and mythology enthusiasts and provides a wealth of insights to deepen their understanding of this captivating subject. elka petrova petrova paisii hilendarski university of plovdiv plodiv, bulgaria elka.petroff@gmail.com microsoft word folklorica_2011g.doc 163 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi ukrainian folklore in kazakhstan natalie kononenko modern languages and cultural studies university of alberta edmonton, ab, canada pavlodar is on the other side of the earth – quite literally. there is a 12 hour time difference between edmonton, alberta, canada, where i live and pavlodar, kazakhstan, where i spent a month of my summer. thus when it is 6am in edmonton, it is 6pm in pavlodar. getting to pavlodar takes a full day. i left on the evening of june 15 and, had i made all my connections, i would have arrived on the morning of june 17. coming home, my travel time, with plane changes, was 23 hours and 45 minutes. so why go to pavlodar? part of it is the adventure of it all. why go to penticton when you can go to pavlodar? anyone can go to penticton; pavlodar is more of a challenge. but it is not just the risk-taking side of my nature that took me to pavlodar. there were many other reasons. the personal ones revolve around a desire to see central asia, to compare the kazakh steppe to the ukrainian one and to the canadian prairies, to learn more about the turkic world. like many ukrainians born outside of their home country, i had an imagined ukraine, a constructed and romanticized picture of my homeland that i had formed in my mind and that begged to be compared to the real thing. i have been able to satisfy my desire to see the real ukraine, having done extensive fieldwork there since a few years after ukrainian independence and having travelled to many regions of the country. unlike many ukrainians, however, i also had an imagined central asia. i am not sure how i acquired this image. perhaps it was my work on ukrainian dumy, epics in which turkic warriors come charging from the steppe. perhaps it was the time that i spent in turkey working on my doctoral dissertation. whatever the cause, i had acquired my imagined central asia – and i had never seen the real thing. thus my curiosity was great. there were also academic reasons for going to pavlodar. many of the villages to the north and east of pavlodar, villages with names like khmelnitskoe, were settled by ukrainians at about the same time that ukrainians came to canada. studying folklore in these villages would do a great deal towards helping me understand ukrainian folklore in 164 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi canada. i had learned over my long academic career that comparative work is enormously rewarding. if one can look at a phenomenon such as adaptation to a new setting from more than one perspective, then the insights one gains are multiplied many-fold. so, when the opportunity to do fieldwork in kazakhstan presented itself, i accepted. i will not pretend that i did not hesitate. i knew that the trip would be difficult and that the circumstances under which i would work would be trying. later when things went wrong and a money transfer i sent was not accepted, when email failed to function, when i was unable to reach any of my contacts by phone, my doubts about the wisdom of my decision to travel mounted. but i went nonetheless. the catalyst for the trip was the second all-russia folklore congress in moscow, held in february, 2010. a friend talked me into going – then cancelled her trip so that i ended up being the only person from north america at the meeting. but the adventures of that meeting are the topic of another story. prior to that congress i had felt that one of my tasks as a scholar was to present the folklore of the slavic world, specifically ukraine, in a manner that my soviet ukrainian colleagues could not. soviet ideology dictated a certain interpretation of folklore and allowed collection of only those genres that supported a sovietapproved world view. thus genres that might be construed to extol ukrainian nationalism, such as historical poems or dumy, were taboo and i felt that it was my duty to write about these poems and other historical genres and about the professional minstrels who performed them, which i did. the second all-russia folklore congress was not all-russian by any means. in fact, there were many colleagues from ukraine and other nation states that had once been part of the soviet union. the papers these folklorists, and those from russia itself, presented were very good. listening to them i got no sense that something was being left unexplored or that scholars were forcing an interpretation onto their data, as had happened during soviet times. their folklore work was of the highest quality. at the same time it became painfully clear that similarly good folklore work was not being done in canada. people would ask me about the study of ukrainian and other slavic traditions in canada and i had to admit that much of the collecting work here was done by students. the sort of detailed and systematic research that was being done in the post-soviet world was sadly lacking in canada. it was this realization that led me to commit myself to ukrainian canadian folklore research. 165 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi i started on ukrainian canadian fieldwork in the summer of that same year. i headed out to the peace country of northern alberta with colleagues from the history department who were documenting the sacred heritage of the canadian prairies, photographing rural churches that had fallen into disuse and might soon disappear. working with this group i asked the historical questions that they wanted answered and, for the folklore component, i asked about rituals. i asked about holidays such as christmas and easter. i gathered information about weddings and funerals and baptisms. i also did some documentation of material culture, namely embroideries and other textiles, and interviewed collectors of ukrainian folk art. my work in ukrainian canada was most enjoyable and rewarding, but i knew it could be better still with a comparative dimension. here too the second all-russia folklore congress came into play for it was there that i met alevtina tsvetkova, a folklorist from pavlodar toraigyrov state university. she invited me to join her on a fieldtrip to the ukrainian villages of kazakhstan. for her, inviting me was an opportunity to learn about western approaches. she perhaps also saw a chance to advance her own position at her university by bringing in a prominent scholar from canada, something that few of her colleagues could do. i know that she wanted to push for more attention to the study of slavic folklore in a political atmosphere that promoted all things kazakh at the expense of other nationalities. bringing in a foreign ukrainianist would do that and, indeed, my visit did draw attention and i was interviewed on kazakh television. for me going to kazakhstan was that chance to go to central asia. academically, the kazakhstan project was to be similar to my work in canada: it was to be the collection of ritual information. the comparative part was to include both canada and ukraine because my many trips to ukraine had also produced extensive documentation of ritual. i must thank tsvetkova for giving me my kazakh opportunity and i must also commend her for having the courage to invite a woman whom she had barely met to come and live with her for a month. i am also deeply indebted to mykhailo paripsa, the head of the ukrainian organization in kazakhstan for taking care of the practical and bureaucratic aspects of my visit and doing it well. it was he who issued my letter of invitation, a letter that easily got me a kazakh visa. considering the problems i and others have had with visas to russia, paripsa’s efficiency is much appreciated. it was paripsa who contacted the ukrainian cultural organizations in the villages we visited, thus 166 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi laying groundwork for the contacts with officials, the housing, and all the other practical arrangements that we enjoyed as we did our work. i learned a great deal in kazakhstan. i learned about ritual processes and adaptation to a new environment, the academic purpose of my trip. i also learned about possible reactions to the post-soviet world and variation in the creation of new nation-states from old soviet fabric. i learned about ethnic tensions. i learned about the role that folklore plays in the lives of people no matter who or where they are. my trip began with official duties. bureaucracy and proper procedure are very important in kazakhstan, perhaps as much as they were in the soviet union, and this was brought home to me time and again. my flight into kazakhstan was plagued with problems from delayed take-offs to missed connections and lost luggage. when i finally arrived in pavlodar i was allowed to rest briefly and then sent to perform bureaucratic chores. i was told i had to register my residence, something that had always been demanded when i travelled to the soviet union, but also something i have not had to do in ukraine since it became independent. after standing in line for a long time to learn that canadians no longer need a residency permit, my hostess and i went to pavlodar toraigyrov state university where i had to pay my respects to a myriad of officials. we went in reverse order, first the various lesser officials and then the higher level dignitaries. after that i went to pay my fees, a process that was in itself a bureaucratic nightmare. i could not simply sign an agreement saying that i would pay a certain price for my transportation and lodging; before i left canada i had to send a letter from my university, complete with an official signature and a stamp. since stamps are not part of canadian bureaucracy, as onerous as it may be, finding something that would pass as a stamp proved to be a challenge. once stamped, this letter had to go to kazakhstan in hard copy; a fax would not do and, since registered mail is seldom sent between edmonton and pavlodar, this official letter (in three copies) took almost a month to reach its destination, something that made both me and my hosts very nervous. but the letter did arrive shortly before i did and i paid the agreed-upon fees. the pressure to follow protocol did not end with my day of bureaucratic formalities at the university. in every village we visited i had to check in with the local akim or government head, and i had to pay my respects to every district akim as well. if the akim was not there on the day of my arrival, i had to go back and pay my respects at a later date, even if it interfered with my work, but not following proper 167 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi procedure was not an option. when my trip was over, i had to return to the university for a round of formal farewells, something that i found quite burdensome since i was trying to pack and to make copies of all of my data, but i did get a striking kazakh robe as a gift at the end of all of the formalities. the soviet-like formalities were time-consuming, something that i was painfully aware of since i had only one month to do my work. i also got the uncomfortable feeling that i was constantly under surveillance, that my every move was being watched. this too reminded me of soviet times. but as unpleasant as the formalities may have been, they did have their benefits. because the whole trip was quite formal and official, there was always a place for us to stay. sometimes there was transportation to the next village. people were ready for us and tsvetkova and i did not have to spend several hours explaining what we were doing. often local officials had identified several people for us to interview. if i compare this to my field experiences in ukraine where everything was quite freewheeling and where my field partners and i would arrive in a village with no prior notice, no contacts, and no certainty that we would find a place to stay for the night, i can see that the formality of my kazakhstan arrangements did have its advantages. even being constantly tracked and monitored had its plus side. in ukraine i had been taught not to let people know that i was a foreigner. i was told not to register or check in with village officials because that might make the people whom i wanted to interview nervous. the pressure to go unnoticed trained me well and i got very good at blending in and virtually disappearing. this almost led to a real disappearance on one occasion when a couple of thugs in a particularly poor village did discover that i was a foreigner and decided to kidnap me and hold me for ransom. i faced no such dangers in kazakhstan. in addition to the bureaucracy and the close monitoring of my activities, there were many other things in kazakhstan that reminded me of my times in the soviet union. one was the lack of consumer goods, especially western ones. there are no mcdonalds in pavlodar, or even the capital astana. you cannot buy a coke, though ukrainian juices and horilka (vodka) were available and the local beer was quite good. there are some imported goods, like clothing and appliances, but most are from neighboring china or the middle east, with a few things from europe and nothing from canada or the united states. the official reason for lack of consumer goods is a policy of protectionism, keeping out foreign products that might compete with kazakh-produced merchandize in 168 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi order to give the kazakh economy a chance to grow. there may also be some attempt to keep the local population from knowing about life in the west, much as there was in the soviet union. i cannot speak to this because this was not mentioned by anyone. i can say, however, that most television shows featured local or russian programs. foreign films dubbed into the local languages, kazakh or russian, seemed more scarce than dubbed foreign movies in russia itself. while people in kazakhstan got little chance to learn about life in the west, they could potentially see economic prosperity rivaling that of any western city right in their own capital. there is a stark contrast between the countryside and the opulence of astana. many villages lack roads and one simply drives across the steppe to get to where one is going. electricity was available in all locations that i visited, but there was no gas except that sold in canisters and there was no plumbing except in a few houses where the owners had installed water pumps. meanwhile, astana has gorgeous and literally shining buildings, coated with colored glass to reflect the sun. there are stunning flower beds with flowers planted to look like kazakh decorative motifs. there are recreation and amusement areas with such frivolous attractions as an indoor wave pool and miniature replicas of world heritage monuments such as the statue of liberty. and there is an observation tower from which one can survey the whole glittering panorama. people did not seem to resent the astana/village contrast. rather, they seemed to take pride in what had been accomplished in astana, presumably hoping that improvements would eventually come to villages as well.. man-made factors are not the sole determinant of life in kazakhstan. climate and topography are very important. the land is harsh. the area where i was is flat and gets little rain. lakes or ponds are few and many of the ones that do exist are salt lakes and not potable; little grows around them. in the summer the temperature can reach forty degrees celsius or about 100 degrees fahrenheit; in the winter it can be minus forty a point where the two temperature systems converge. winds blow with no impediments and are strong enough to virtually knock you off your feet. a particularly fierce storm is the winter buran, a white-out snow storm characterized by horizontally blowing snow. trees grow only on river banks and in villages where they get some shelter from the wind. attempts to plant rows of trees as windbreaks, something that was done successfully in the ukrainian steppe, has, on the kazakh steppe, produced rows of blackened tree stumps. it is difficult to convey the overwhelming feeling of isolation that one gets in the wide open spaces 169 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi of kazakhstan. the horizons are endless and the land featureless. but the strongest impression was the feeling of falling off the edge of the world that i got when i reached the end of a village. inside a village one is surrounded by houses and vegetation. there are streets and animals and people. but when you come to the end of a street, as i did while walking around villages looking for the homes of people i had been told to interview, you are confronted with nothingness. the village ends; the street ends – and there is steppe, just steppe, an endless expanse of brownish, sunburnt grass stretching as far as the eye can see. there are no houses, no trees, no animals – nothing. sometimes far, far in the distance i could see a black mass – the village cattle herd. sometimes, closer by, there would be the lone silhouette of a horse on the horizon – a beautiful picture, but one that emphasizes the isolation of the steppe. needless to say, this is not an easy place to grow anything. all garden plants such as tomatoes are surrounded by little dams meant to trap the precious few drops of water. the most successful farm products are wheat, cattle, and sheep. the latter are consumed primarily by kazakhs; the slavs prefer beef to mutton or lamb. the diet consists of various dough products and meat, which may not sound bad until one has eaten meat, often fatty meat, with various forms of boiled dough and virtually no vegetables for a month. this is a very practical diet. the manty and pilmeni, two forms of dumplings filled with chopped meat, can be cooked for the midday meal and reheated for the evening meal and for breakfast. but it is a very monotonous diet and i had no idea how tasty something like corn or broccoli would seem until i had spent a month in kazakhstan. there was also a lack of fruits. villagers did have berries such as strawberries and raspberries in their gardens, but i seemed to be one of the few people interested in eating them raw. most people saw them as suitable for conversion into jam which would be eaten with the enormous quantities of tea with milk or sour cream that everyone drank. kazakhstan is a very large country, the ninth largest in the world, but it is sparsely populated. it has mineral resources and oil and gas, but it is just not that wealthy. kazakhstan’s low population density and its flat landscape, probably along with its remoteness from moscow and its non-european indigenous population, prompted the soviet government to select it as the site for its atomic bomb testing program. the area around semipalatinsk, not that far from pavlodar, was the location of some 460 nuclear explosions between 1949 and 1989. nuclear testing has stopped but its legacy lingers. kazakhstan is still an area where 170 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi pollution is tolerated. in pavlodar itself there is an aluminum plant with three enormous smoke stacks which constantly spew toxins over the city. concerns about its health effects surface constantly and time and again the choice between the population’s health and economic prosperity is resolved in favor of the latter. as i drove around kazakhstan, i saw other factories with smokestacks touching the clouds and adding a brown streak to them. i could not help but notice the general ill health of the population, the high blood pressure, the aches and pains, the mobility problems. was this caused by pollution? it is almost impossible to tell without a systematic study. what i saw could also be the result of lack of health care: medical services, especially in villages, are difficult to obtain. what was striking was that people had an almost macho approach to the situation. pollution was one of the many adversities that the harshness of life in kazakhstan presented and they took a certain pride in facing adversity. the climate was a challenge and pollution was another aspect of the environment that needed to be dealt with and overcome. the attitude toward pollution was analogous to the attitude toward the economy. there was optimism that, now that kazakhstan was independent, the problems would be solved. ukrainian villages the specific villages that i went to are called ukrainian villages. they were founded by ukrainians more than one hundred years ago as a result of the stolypin reforms. petr stolypin, russia’s agricultural minister and later prime minister, opened up lands such as those located around pavlodar and encouraged the settlement of peasants by granting private ownership of land. this measure, he hoped, would make capitalists out of farmers and lead them to support tsarist rule. it was the stolypin reforms that first brought peasants from ukraine to kazakhstan. the stories i heard about the early settlers were tales of courage. i heard about groups of men coming to an essentially barren land and building sod houses, literally carving up the steppe to make dwellings, then bringing their families to join them. the names of the founders were known in most villages and current residents took pride in being descended from them. there were also interesting legends about stolypin himself. a number of people claimed that he had actually visited their villages once they were officially founded, usually around 1908/1909, and that he had approved of what he saw. krasilovka a 171 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi village whose name derives from krasa, a word that means beauty, boasted that the name of the village was bestowed by stolypin himself. later migrations of ukrainians came in the 1930s in response to the holodomor. kazakhstan itself experienced a famine at that time, but land was more plentiful and requisitioning efforts not as severe. russians also came to kazakhstan, though there does not seem to be a specific period of russian immigration. a big influx of population came during the second world war. as kazakhstan was used for dangerous nuclear tests, so it was also used for people who were deemed dangerous by the soviet regime, namely ethnic germans, specifically those that had been living along the volga. ukrainian villages were among the recipients of exiled germans. the last big influx of new settlers came with the virgin lands program in the late 1950s and early 60s. in response to khrushchev’s plan to turn the kazakh steppe into a major grain-producing area, people came from ukraine, russia, and elsewhere in the soviet union. the first assumption that i encounter from people in the diaspora who hear about my trip is that the ukrainians in kazakhstan were victims, exiled there by soviet authorities. ukrainians, especially people who had converted to protestant religions associated with germany, were indeed exiled to kazakhstan during soviet times, but they went to areas other than pavlodar. the people in the villages around pavlodar were not exiles and not victims; they were anything but that. they saw themselves as brave pioneers, conquerors of a wild frontier. they were people who took charge of their lives. one woman i interviewed in shcherbakty had been the head of a ukrainian workers brigade sent to build the grain elevator. she met her future husband and stayed and she was proud of her life and her contribution to the village. the downside to the frontier mentality of the local population is the willingness to tolerate pollution. otherwise their positive outlook is most heartening. the villages have experienced new challenges in recent times. when the soviet union collapsed, many ethnic germans left for germany. right now large portions of some villages are deserted with collapsed houses or completely empty lots because of german outmigration. farms, grain elevators, and factories sit idle. as i worked in the various villages to the east and north of pavlodar, there would be stark contrasts from village to village. the soviet union had produced a relatively efficient system of working the land. family plots were small and the villagers worked in large collectives, seeding huge tracks of land with wheat, barley, buckwheat and even corn. collectives owned literally thousands of heads of cattle. land was privatized when kazakhstan 172 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi became an independent nation. if people took their individual allotments, and especially if there was a loss of population due to the departure of germans, then the villages struggled. if, however, the collective stayed together, then the villages prospered. this was the case in orlovka where the village head under the soviet system, a descendant of the original turn-of-the-century ukrainian settlers named poliakov, kept the village together as a corporation in which each resident held a share. in orlovka the streets are clean and in good repair. the fields are green and not fallow. the village owns 8000 head of cattle, some beef and some dairy, and has worked out an interesting system of letting the herd stay in the steppe and trucking the milkmaids and milking equipment out to the cows. needless to say, no one has left a place like orlovka and there are no empty houses. in villages that did not follow orlovka’s example, some people have done relatively well. there has been a shift from keeping large animals such as cows to raising small ones such as fowl. still, there are people who keep literally hundreds of geese and chickens which they sell for meat. these farmers also have at least a few head of cattle and sell sour cream and butter, the dairy products that keep well. most villagers, however, have not prospered under privatization unless at least one member has a job outside the family farm such as in the village administration or the village school. i learned a great deal in kazakhstan and not just about keeping chickens and separating milk and making little dams to concentrate water on tomato plant roots. i learned about folklore and culture and, comparing what i saw to what i had seen in canada and ukraine, i was able to gain the insights into cultural adaptation that i had sought. i think that one of the most important things that i learned is that each geographical region develops its own culture and folklore. the culture and lore cannot be fully explained by the region in which a particular group finds itself though the nature of the region is important and that is why i have given the description above. but climate, geography and contact cultures cannot fully explain what is going on and neither is there a uniform process that occurs whenever a culture moves outside its home. rather, culture seems to be an entity which takes on a life of its own and develops much like a living organism. the ukrainians in kazakhstan have developed a unique culture. this culture varies from village to village, but there is enough consistency to make it clear that there is a north kazakhstan ukrainian culture. the people speak a language that they call khokhlaitsky, a term derived from khokhol, the russian slang word for “ukrainian.” this is a 173 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi mixture of ukrainian and russian, but it is not the surzhyk ukrainian/russian mix found in ukraine itself. rituals like weddings also have a mix of ukrainian and russian elements, but, like the language, the mix is different from what i have seen elsewhere. the consistency of the mix from village to village made it clear that this was a regional tradition, with variants, of course, but still enough common features to make it identifiable as a local type. as in canada, practical considerations play an important role in shaping local ritual. in canada where one rural priest serves ten to fifteen churches, the christmas eve service can be on christmas eve, or on christmas day, or several days before or after christmas, depending on when the priest can visit a particular parish. khram, or praznik, the special celebration which takes place on the day of the saint after whom a church is named, is often moved to the summer if the particular saint’s day falls in winter when country roads make traveling difficult. provody, the remembrance day for ancestors that should take place a week after easter, can take place then or well into the summer, many weeks after easter and sometimes as late as after pentecost. this tends to be the day when people who have moved away from a village return to visit family gravesites and reconnect with their place of origin. because this is such a big event, it is often combined with khram or praznik and baptisms and weddings are often scheduled for the same day. about the only things which cannot be scheduled to coincide with provody are funerals. the dominance of practical considerations is understandable in canada where there is an absence of magical world view and rituals are more a matter of social convention than an attempt to influence the future. in kazakhstan a magical world view persists and may be even stronger than in ukraine, perhaps because of the harsh living conditions. but rituals are governed by practical considerations nonetheless. while malanka, the new years eve celebration has flourished in urban canada, perhaps because it offers one more party to add to the holiday season, in kazakhstan the big social event is maslenitsa, the shrove celebration before great lent. the choice of maslenitsa is not motivated by the importance of lent to the local population. in fact, lent is largely ignored, probably because there are no legumes or other vegetables to substitute for the meat and milk protein that constitutes such an important part of the kazakhstan diet. rather, maslenitsa has come to the fore and become an event celebrated, not just in the home, but in the village center, with officials, school children, in fact most of the village in attendance, because it comes close to coinciding with navriz, the 174 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi holiday of the new year celebrated by the kazakh population. with the emphasis on kazakh culture that has come with independence and the new, kazakh-led regime, celebrating a ukrainian holiday that can be combined with one that is part of the dominant culture is a good way to promote one’s own. kazakhstan does not have the practice of assigning one priest to serve a circuit of churches and, as a result, many villages have no church and no clergy person. the practical solution to this situation is for villagers to perform various rites themselves, including important religious ones such as baptism. weddings can be performed with no clergy present. they are then officially registered to meet bureaucratic demands. registration can occur before the wedding, as in ukraine, or it can occur after the wedding, sometimes long after the wedding. it does not seem to matter as long as the ritual itself, the folk aspect of the wedding, is performed. perhaps the most striking practical performance of a ritual act comes at iordan, or kreshchenie, usually called epiphany in the west. water is blessed in church on this day and people take it home to use for illness. they use it to bless the house and the cattle and keep it for any situation where a little divine help is necessary. with no village church, there is no place to get water blessed on epiphany. the solution to this problem is very simple. people go out to the well on the eve of epiphany and draw water which they sincerely believe has magical properties. any number of people, both villagers and urban dwellers, swore that the water was special and had magical and healing powers. as evidence they pointed out that epiphany water, unlike regular water, would not spoil: there was never any trace of sediment or algae. some people said that simply drawing water on the eve of january 19 was not enough and that special actions needed to be taken. these included drawing water at a certain time, usually midnight, though 4am and 6am were also mentioned. some people said that the water needed to be left outside for several hours so that the light of the moon and the stars could shine on it and confer the power of the heavens. a very few said that water either needed to be drawn at the time that a church service would normally take place or that it needed to be set out at that time. the belief in the magical properties of epiphany water was remarkably widespread. i found it among religious people and those who were not religious but had the magical world view we often associate with the folk, especially those living in villages. i also found it in the city. a very sophisticated and educated city dweller and an avowed atheist also swore by the power of epiphany water and gave me a number of other 175 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi instances where he had observed the intervention of the supernatural into his life. we cannot make neat categories and state that a magical world view is characteristic of uneducated country folk only. a similar combination of the practical and the magical can be found in the area of folk medicine. folk medicine includes, in addition to holy water, various herbs and tinctures made from them. physical manipulation, bone-setting included, falls in this category. there is also wide-spread use of charms and magic actions such as rinsing the face of a colicky baby with dirty dishwater and wiping it with the inside of one’s apron or skirt. some of these charms or actions need to be performed by a specialist, but many do not. in fact, in the absence of specialists, people write down charms and instructions for performing actions and say the charms and perform the magical actions themselves. cures are used to relieve human suffering and are also widely applied to farm animals, especially cattle, which is quite understandable considering the importance of cattle to the local economy. in kazakhstan, people were not reluctant to talk about resorting to various magical practices; they showed me their books of charms and let me photograph them. to them, this was just something that was done and not really anything special. this is quite different from the situation that i found in ukraine where magic practices, charms and magical actions among them, abounded, but were hidden from view. people were reluctant to admit to knowledge of magic in ukraine, but not in kazakhstan. this is possibly the result of more extensive persecution of behavior that would be deemed superstitious and thus un-soviet in ukraine, a country closer to the soviet heartland than the remote areas around pavlodar. the contrast between ukraine and kazakhstan is also quite curious and needs further investigation since people in kazakhstan attributed the source of their magical knowledge to ukraine and, indeed, the notebooks that they showed me with charms and instructions for performing magical curative acts were written in ukrainian, not khokhliatsky. people took magic seriously in kazakhstan and they fully believed in the efficacy of ritual acts. at the same time they viewed rituals as fun occasions, a chance to have a good time. the ritual elements that are most consistent between ukraine, canada, and kazakhstan are not the solemn ones, the ones that seal the bond of matrimony, for example. instead what people remember and what persists from country to country are carnivalesque elements such as cross-dressing at weddings. in all three places the solemn part of the wedding is followed by a mock wedding with a humorous mock bride 176 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi and groom. who gets dressed up as the fake and funny couple varies, but some sort of costuming, complete with feasting, often on stolen food, is a regular feature. people felt that weddings were important and solemn occasions, but they did not feel that they had to be solemn throughout the ritual process. lack of consistency did not bother anyone and even some destructive behavior, such as stealing chickens and scratching up the walls of the groom’s house, was tolerated. comic and destructive elements are found not only in weddings but also in calendar rituals such as christmas and maslenitsa/shrove. people even talked about the necessity of joking at funerals to entertain the deceased and stated that this was especially important while washing the body. a serious approach to ritual does not preclude levity. throughout my professional career i have sought to understand why folklore persists. travelling through a number of villages fairly quickly as i did on this trip it became obvious that folklore is necessary for wellbeing. perhaps the benefits of folklore stood out with special clarity against the harsh natural and political environment of kazakhstan, but they were impossible to ignore. those villages in which people actively engage in various forms of folklore turned out to be much more cheerful and friendly. in some villages no one does embroidery and the only embroidered objects were heirlooms made by mothers or grandmothers. when i asked about embroidery, people said that it was a thing of the past and that the old items, many of which were indeed treasured, did not really fit in the home any more. as a result, they gave them to local museums. in rozhdestvenka, inspired by an elderly and locally born resident named klavdia tereshyna and a woman who had moved to the village from ukraine named evheniia bikotserkivets, everyone embroiders. they do some embroidery of the traditional type on ritual towels called rushnyky and they do rushnyk designs on pillow cushions and runners. they also do a very modern adaptation of needlework, namely embroidered pictures. many pictures show scenes reflecting life in ukraine, or ukrainian life as the artists image it to be, but most pictures have modern and area-specific motifs such as local flowers and even a mosque. the women in rozhdestvenka are also remarkably cheerful. their village is not super-prosperous like orlovka and neither is it run-down like krasilovka. but the women are noticeably happier than women who do not engage in crafts. i should note that, in northern alberta, women with a similar disposition are also embroiderers or weavers or people who enjoy another craft such as crochet and the embroiderers also make pictures, often featuring canadian scenes. 177 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi embroidery is only one of the folklore forms that leads to spiritual and physical well-being. in several villages there are groups that get together to sing. some of these groups are formally organized by a local official such as the dom kul’tury (house of culture) worker. the formal groups get together to sing for personal enjoyment. they also perform at various holidays and other community events where they not only sing, but showcase crafts and foods, and engage in competitions akin to bakeoffs. some groups get together informally. in khmelnitskoe, a group of widows gathers to sing and chat. we joined them for a birthday celebration that featured food, drink, and plenty of singing. both formal and informal groups tend to be multi-ethnic. in the case of services provided by a village official, multi-culturalism is a government mandate. but informal groups are also inclusive. the one in khmelnitskoe is predominantly ukrainian, but also has two russian members and a kazakh. the songs they sing are also predominantly ukrainian, though all members know and perform russian and kazakh songs as well. maintaining ethnic purity, so frequently a concern in ukrainian diaspora groups both in canada and the united states is just not a concern here. in fact, it was not a concern in rural alberta and people made or sang what appealed to them, regardless of its ethnic origin. ethnic purity, like maintaining solemnity during rituals or differentiating the magical from the scientific is not important. that being said, ukrainian culture did dominate in many ways. alevtina tsvetkova, an ethnic russian herself, said that it was because ukrainians prize their culture more than other ethnic groups. other reasons might be that ukrainians outnumber other nationalities in the villages that i visited or that they, as village founders, have established their culture more firmly. in any case, there are more ukrainian clubs in various villages, more singing groups that dress in ukrainian costume (or what they think is ukrainian costume) when they perform. perhaps the most striking attestation of this fact were old photographs of weddings. in my effort to get a sense of the history of ritual practice, i asked not only about contemporary rituals, but about rituals as they were celebrated in the past. i also asked to see old photographs and rephotographed whenever i could. in kovalevka we were interviewing an elderly ukrainian woman whose daughter had married one of the local germans and moved to germany when the soviet union collapsed. the younger couple had come back from germany to visit. i asked about weddings and the man who now lived in germany, spoke german, and had the very german name of jacob blok, showed the wedding photographs of 178 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi his older sisters. they were wearing white dresses, but on their heads were very ukrainian-looking wreaths, complete with ribbons. the weddings had taken place in kovalevka and the family, while maintaining their german identity, saw no problem with adopting ukrainian wedding wreaths. there are ethnic tensions in kazakhstan. while this country was under soviet domination, everyone resented the russians because it was they who got the best jobs, the best schooling, the nicest living quarters. now that kazakhstan is independent and ruled by an ethnic kazakh, albeit one who was communist party head prior to independence, everyone who is not a kazakh resents the kazakhs. virtually every village akim that i met and all district akims were kazakhs. the police officers were kazakhs. the officials at the border when i flew in were all kazakhs. but resentment against any nationality exists in the abstract only. just as kazakhs helped ukrainians when they first came to settle in this land, so now individual kazakhs and ukrainians and russians and germans are on the best of terms. in uspenka a ukrainian family whom i interviewed had kazakh neighbors and the little kazakh child living next door not only regularly played at the home of the ukrainian couple, but called them baba and dido, the ukrainian words for grandma and grandpa. i stayed with kazakh families as well as with ukrainian ones. there are legends about the past which blame the kazakhs for plugging up springs with felt and thus depriving the area of water. but the legends voice precisely the general and abstract hostility that people feel. concrete individuals are honored and cherished, regardless of nationality. and this report would not be complete without the mention of at least a few of the many moving individual stories that i heard. i talked to a couple both of whom had tragically lost their spouses and descended into depression, but then found each other and recovery and happiness. i talked to several couples who had been together all their long lives and shared their enthusiasm for ukrainian song and other folk arts. there was a man who had become an alcoholic and whose wife and children left him. he had recovered with the help of his mother and music and now kept his mother’s house, which was immaculate and played the accordion while his mother played guitar. i am truly lucky that people will allow me into their lives and talk to me and share their arts. when we went to uspenka, the otherwise careful planning of my various trips failed and we were not expected when we arrived. at first the village akim, one of the few officials who was an 179 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi ethnic ukrainian, was quite hostile. but when i started interviewing some of the local residents, the akim and the other villagers whom he had summoned decided that what we were doing was actually quite interesting – they were able to learn about themselves as well as help me learn. as a result, the akim offered to have us move into his home and drove us all over everywhere, actually not giving me as much of an opportunity to stretch my legs as i would have liked. again, i am most fortunate that i have an occupation that is useful to others. it allows me to travel and to learn. and incidents like the one in uspenka reassure me that i am not just getting something from the people i talk to, but giving something back. this essay is just the first of what i hope will be a number of pieces about kazakhstan. i hope that the people i talked to as well as the readers of these words benefit from my observations and my work. 180 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi map of kazakhstan. the three arrows point to astana, pavlodar and semipalatinsk. the area i visited is the white oval above pavlodar. alevtina tsvetkova, on my right, with the kazakh family with whom we stayed in khmelnitskoe 181 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi petro maslii and his wife antonina, members of a folk song group in pavlodar taisiia lytvynenko, on the left, who came as a builder to shcherbakty standing with evheniia rybalka, the head of the culture organization. 182 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi the local culture club welcomes us with bread and salt in krasilovka the edge of the village kovalevka 183 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi aluminum factory in pavlodar astana: bay terek, the observation tower is in the middle << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain 20%) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \050swop\051 v2) /srgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel 1.4 /compressobjects /tags /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages true /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /detectcurves 0.0000 /colorconversionstrategy /cmyk /dothumbnails false /embedallfonts true /embedopentype false /parseiccprofilesincomments true /embedjoboptions true /dscreportinglevel 0 /emitdscwarnings false /endpage -1 /imagememory 1048576 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/hrv (za stvaranje adobe pdf dokumenata najpogodnijih za visokokvalitetni ispis prije tiskanja koristite ove postavke. stvoreni pdf dokumenti mogu se otvoriti acrobat i adobe reader 5.0 i kasnijim verzijama.) /hun 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can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader 5.0 and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 81 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii reports a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu dorian jurić university of ottawa gatineau, canada i have the pleasure of writing to folklorica’s readers from an extended research trip in the northwestern krajina region of bosnia and herzegovina. on my way into the field, i stayed in zagreb, croatia, where i was once again provided access to the great wealth of data housed in the archive of the department of ethnology and folklore at the croatian academy of sciences and arts (hrvatska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, hereafter hazu). one of my current research topics involves a significant folklore collection project conducted in this region at the end of the nineteenth century. between the autumns of 1886 and 1888, (1) the croatian lawyer and ethnographer, luka marjanović—leading a small team with a shifting roster of students, writers, and scholars from zagreb and other regions—collected 290 epic songs (and thirty lyric songs) from thirteen muslim singers from the bosnian krajina. (2) some of these songs were recorded in the krajina on five separate fieldtrips, some were submitted by correspondents, and a large number were collected from three singers who were brought to matica’s main offices in zagreb to record their songs and have their photographs taken. marjanović’s star singer, mehmed kolaković, also performed for an audience of zagreb’s high society. over the next ten years marjanović pored over these works, comparing variants, compiling a rich dictionary of unfamiliar terms in the songs, and selecting what he deemed to be the fifty finest to be published in the third and fourth volumes of matica’s hrvatske narodne pjesme [croatian folk songs] collection (1898 and 1899). although the project and subsequent publications were heralded at the time for their rigor and exactitude, subsequent scholars reviewing the manuscripts were shocked to learn the drastic alterations marjanović applied to the songs to bring them in line with his literary aesthetic [krstić 1956; lord 1991: 35-36, 125; 1995: 16-18, 223; mučibabić 1981]. i will have more to say on this in upcoming publications. whatever his failings as an editor, though, marjanović was a scrupulous collector for his time. certain impositions he likely enacted on the singers during their performances cannot be removed from the collected manuscripts. but, otherwise, given that no audio recording technologies were yet available and all these songs were transcribed with pencil and paper, the manuscripts are a testament to the highly empirical collection regimen imposed by the scholar. for nearly every song collected, hazu retains an original copy (pencil on quire) recorded during performance, which was then re-written in ink on a separate document. the originals were then carefully archived, largely unmolested, and all edits and alterations were applied only to the second copies— and those, intentionally, in such a way that the original verses are mostly legible. a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 82 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii finally, for a few songs, a third clean copy was produced for the printers though, understandably, most of these were disposed of. what this means for a contemporary scholar of epic is that one can generally undo the editing applied by marjanović and explore the original songs as they were first sung. this has critical implications for those influenced by the later theories and findings of the team of milman parry, albert lord, and nikola vujnović (and matthias murko before them), who based their conclusions of the oral-formulaic theory on the muslim epic songs of bosnia-herzegovina and whose work would not have been possible without the methodological practices and analytical findings published by marjanović. to this day, most of the songs in this collection remain unpublished, and the pristine states of their mss are largely unknown outside of the balkans. for each song, marjanović also wrote a summary page including plot points, general quality of the work, from whom the singer learned the song, original verse length and/or edited verse length, and known variants from other singers in the collection and in other works published to that day (most notably the kosta hörmann collection and that of vuk stefanović karadžić). all of these and other useful comments peppered throughout the mss make navigating the archive from within a very rewarding task for the historical folklorist. and yet, despite all of this, the vast and untapped material in this collection remains another hidden treasure, unintentionally obscured from the wider public. while i was pursuing a specific research question in the marjanović collection, it occurred to me that a comprehensive list of its songs has never been published. such a list could be of great use to scholars working with other published south slavic collections or with the milman parry collection of oral literature in widener library at harvard. knowing what is held in the marjanović mss at hazu could be of benefit to those seeking variants/multiforms of other bosniak epics. to that end, i decided to very quickly take note of the titles of all the songs collected by marjanović and have produced here a comprehensive list for folklorica’s readers. in table 1, readers will find a full list of the songs of every singer included in marjanović’s project, including the (when possible original) verse length of each song and the ms call number under which they are housed in the archive. i have also included a second table, table 2, which lists the number of songs each singer provided as well as a total verse count and an average song length for each singer. this second table further expands the vague data presented by marjanović in his first volume [1898: xi]. because my intended audience is scholars of oral epic, i have only included analytical data for epic/narrative songs; lyric songs within these mss have been retained in the song lists, but i have not included the few small mss that only contain lyric songs. i have accounted here for various aberrations in the compilation of these mss (songs in incorrect order or compiled in the wrong ms) but must otherwise admit that this list is not a critical exploration. given the small amount of time i was able to devote to this task, i was forced to take marjanović at his word regarding song lengths, even though i know he often miscounted by small a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 83 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii margins. (3) for some songs, he was prudent enough to list both the original sung length and his edited final length which could differ positively or negatively by hundreds of verse lines, while for others he only listed a single ambiguous number. i have done my best to provide the original song length when this was quickly discoverable, but this was not always the case. some of these numbers will require corroboration. this same rushed pace also defined the collection of song titles. most epic singers did not give their songs concise titles in a literary manner but only, when pressed, related the main character(s) of the song (e.g., “a song about dizdarević meho”) or else gave a breakdown of the main plot points (for example, alija babić’s third song below is titled “mustajbeg of the lika wins two turkish maidens in the horse race held by the ban of seget and marries them to the two [brothers] elezagić”). the latter type of title regularly extended to great length and often consisted of a full paragraph of character names and event details. for most of the songs in these mss, marjanović and his team applied or offered two or three titles, and it is never particularly clear if any of them came from the singers themselves (at least in an unprompted manner). this is both a blessing and a curse, as some of the song titles are quite long but many of them explain the events of the song well enough to make their status as variants of other songs quite clear. a more polished, publishable title might have, in fact, obscured this. i thus endeavored, when multiple titles were available, to choose the one which described the songs best while also remaining somewhat concise. it will fall to other scholars working with these songs to choose which title is most apt for their needs. there are some errors or variations in capitalization practice, spelling conventions, dialectal use of grammatical case, and more which i have simply represented as written. some very minor edits have been applied to clear errors in spelling. i finally wish to again note the celerity with which this list needed to be compiled and beg the forgiveness of my peers if future scholarship reveals any errors. because this list will largely be of use only to specialists, i have not provided english-language translations of the titles but only originals. table 1. songs list song # name length ms ibro topić 1 kunić mehmedaga čini mejdan s mandušićem vukom 1130 mh 121a 2 čustović osman osvećuje svoju braću na tinterlatininu, ženi sebe i pobratime 876 a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 84 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 3 ograšev alija oprošta sebe i trijest sužanja tavnice banović matije pomoću ličkog mustajbega i ličana 581 4 nevjera kozlica (skumovanje kozličića s nukić-kapetanom sa kotara) 657 5 tamnovanje i ženidba ibre bajraktara 583 6 dva brata babića sa cetine i jele cmiljanića 899 7 svađa i izmirenje osmanagić mehe i alage od novoga 1111 8 mitar jelina 71 9 hrnjica mujo izbavlja zlatiju bojčić del-alije, brata halila i dva pobratima 1092 10 ograšev alija osvećuje ličane i krajišnike i vodi janju korlatskoga bana 1359 11 ženidba vrebca sa sjenicom 44 12 junaštvo i ženidba babić mehmedage (bartulić serdar) 1772 13 krvava ženidba brdarića alage 825 14 mehmedbeg ljubović trguje volove, ide za cara na mejdan i dobavlja bosni novoga vezira 993 15 hrnjica mujo traži popović jovana u vratnik planini, a hrnjica omer brata i društvo mu 853 16 boždarić vuk ufatio hrnjicu muju 548 17 ženidba mehmedage od cetine sa zlatijom dunavskog dizdara i velik boj s kotarani 960 18 ženidba i junaštvo nukanović ibre 790 19 orlan buljubaša (bajraktar) izbavlja ličkog mustajbega i 30 sužanja iz petro[varadina] 860 20 vlahinić alija odvede zaručnicu svog ujaka žagrovića 764 mh 121b 21 krvava ženidba osmanbega alajbegovića od skradina i nevjere crnog omerbega 939 22 lički mustajbeg ženi sina bećirbega 780 23 bosnić meho osvećuje dva pobratima 429 a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 85 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 24 bojčić delalija čuva mustajbegu čardak na vučjaku 786 25 junaštvo i ženidba bećirbega sina ličkog mustajbega i dvaju ćejvanagića 1023 26 mejdan ajan osmanage od pečuja s puškarićem markom od prozora 1812 27 ćordić mehmedaga pomoću unđurovaca povraća tri turske djevojke i ženi se 1292 28 hanka dizdara budimskoga izbavlja barjaktara osmana i 32 turska sužnja iz tavnice bana janjočkoga 1257 29 junaštvo i ženidba lalić ahmetage i desnić mehmedage 784 30 omer bajraktar izbavlja osmanbega od kaniže i njegova ženidba 626 31 garić bajraktar i dizdarević ibro od požege otimlju anu požunlije bana 801 32 ženidba i vezirstvo omerbega od budima 1283 33 ženidba mustajbega delibegovića od požege sa zlatijom zaima alajbega od kaniže 1248 34 bešlagić mujaga traži dvoje djece smailalajbega od kaniže i njegova ženidba 854 35 junaštvo i ženidba mehmedbega od ostruga 914 ahmed čaušević 1 mejdan i ženidba malete serdara i musić bajraktara 2540 mh 122 2 mejdan i ženidba lipovače mehe 4043 3 hrnjica mujo i babić husein 2837 4 tamnovanje, izbavljenje i ženidba dizdarevića mehe 4268 5 dizdarević meho odvede jelu mandušića a mandušić ilija zlatu kninskoga dizdara 2410 6 dizdarević meho ženi oca, dopada tamnice, izbavlja ga kahvedžija ibro 4447 a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 86 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 7 čustović osman osvećuje svog ujaka alagu od ribnika 1246 8 ženidba bojčić delalije s anom ledeničkog bana 1404 ibro karabegović 1 smail-alajbeg i sin mu osmanbeg od glasinca 1029 mh 123 2 hrnjica mujo i zrinjević ban 1085 3 fazlagić alaga odvede ružu pilipa oberstara sa primorja 1542 4 ženidba hrnjice halila sa jelom smiljanića 1886 5 sorguč omerbeg i ban janjočki 1773 6 mejdan i ženidba mladalijć ćehaje 446 7 komoranski ban popali varad[in]. odvede bejzadu dautbegovu i pogubi ju u potjeri 460 alija babić 1 ibro bajraktar izbavlja brata i sestru iz zadra 2172 mh 124 2 ženidba i mejdan mustajbega delibegovića od požege 2109 3 lički mustajbeg dobiva na obdulji segetlije bana dvije turkinje djevojke s kojima ženi dva elezagića 1602 ibro hrnjić 1 ahmetbeg od budima i zlata kaniškog dizdara 1554 mh 124 omer (h)ukić 1 ženidba i junaštvo jelačković-muje 725 mh 124 a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 87 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii ibro dervišević 1 osman čustović i vuk brinjanin 514 mh 124 2 pet pobratima turaka osvećuju se vidu latininu radi zlatije mahmut-tefterdara 1287 3 bosnić meho osvećuje otca i pobratima 539 4 ženitba bajagić omera 1121 5 plinski serdar odvodi zlatiju kunićevu a povrati je dizdarević meho 640 hasan majetić 1 mujo od jelače i ana pilip kapetana 1068 mh 124 2 čustović osman i ribnik 787 3 ženidba đulić bajraktara 1515 4 sužanjstvo muje merdanagića 860 5 dizdarević meho i zadarski bane 1547 6 svatovanje grge kapetana 1035 7 hrnjica mujo i kostreš harambaša 520 8 mejdan musić mehmedage i bosnić mehmedage 1217 9 hrnjica mujo i vuk bilobrk [fragment] 280 vele ahmetović 18 kurtagić hasan i ban zadranin 161 mh 124 19 milan čobanin i dva hajduka 181 20 hrnjica halil i ćirko harambaša 221 21 krvava ženidba komnena kaurina 247 22 junaštvo i ženidba lipovače mehe 741 23 hrnjica mujo oslobađa turkinju djevojku iz senja i napulja 738 a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 88 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 24 udbinjani izbavljaju ličkog mustajbega iz tavnice bana zadarskoga 446 25 halil i mujo hrnjica s krajišnici i udbinjani oslobađaju musić-bajraktara 475 26 ajka udbinjkinja izbavlja brata i dragoga iz tavnice zadarskoga bana 513 27 nejačak omer (hrnjica) i ana zadranina bana 299 28 ženidba i junaštvo gojena halila 715 29 kraljević marko i ljuba anđelija 137 30 kraljević marko, maleta hajduk i ljuba markova anđelija 158 31 gojeni halil odnese na obdulji anu od kotluka bana 344 bećir islamović 1 omeraga poprženović izbavlja zaručnicu s malete 704 mh 125a 2 teferič mustajbegovice 507 3 lički mustajbeg vraća najam jankoviću stojanu 684 4 vrcić bajraktar odvodi jelu vladikića i sastaja se s mehmedbegom bratom ličkog mustajbega 1025 5 ajka hrnjičina ide na mejdan vladikić jovanu 1214 6 ajka hrnjičina ide za cara na mejdan 713 7 nakić husein dobiva obdulju u svatovih kunićhasanage 914 8 dvije sultanije robinje u kandiji 363 9 đulić bajraktar oslobađa alagu zenkovića iz tavnice gale-kapetana 875 10 hrnjica omer traži braću na malti 883 11 druga ženidba hrnjice halila sa 2 djevojke 1235 12 junaštvo i ženidba dizdarević mehe 895 13 hrnjice izbavljaju šarca mehmedagu 986 a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 89 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 14 gračanlija alija i četić osmanaga izbavljaju turke sužnje iz tavnice zadarskoga bana (jovan kapetana) 842 15 ženidba ćejvanagić mehe sa katijom silen osmanbega od osika 1133 16 hrnjica omer traži braću muju i halila u vratniku 710 17 nevjera kozlice huremage 773 18 bosić buljubaša i karlovčani 783 19 ženidba grge kapetana antunića 718 20 zlatija đunlagić junaštvo i udaja 1266 21 harambaša janja i hlivnjanin alaga 495 mh 125b 22 bosnić meho osvećuje ujaka i pobratima 300 23 ženidba bajagića omera kćerju od klise mustajbega 434 24 turci izbavljaju svoje sužnje iz tavnice bože kapetana 330 25 ličani turci oslobađaju dvi turkinje djevojke sa morskih škuljeva 379 26 đulić bajraktar odvodi jelu konjevića iz senja 1109 27 alibeg šestokrilović i njegov bajraktar ibro izbavljaju turske sužnje iz beča 1433 28 šeh gaibija i njegov babo proriču gubitak budima i unđurima 129 29 žunić kapetan i lički mustajbeg (cifrić omeraga itd.) 948 30 đerzelez alija i porča sa havale 111 31 đerzelez alija carev mejdandžija 251 32 dvostruka ženidba sokolović ibre 1175 32b junaštvo i ženidba sokolovića ibre s jelom bana komorhanskoga 1175 a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 90 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 33 bordžulović ibro od skradina (sa podnovlja) i kapetan djevojka (ili b. i. izbavlja troje djece hodži muminage) 961 34 ajka bajagića izbavlja brata omera iz tavnice pilip-kapetana 515 35 junaštvo i ženidba hadžagić mujage i pobre mu velagić-ahmeta iz nadina 1392 36 pogibija djece kune hasanage i mladoga delibegovića (sina alibegova) od braće vučkovića 363 37 babić osmanaga izbavlja i ženi šure čengić alibega 1279 38 ženidba civića huseina s katkom dizdar mehmedage u cetini 348 39 junaštvo i ženidba pandžić mehmedage (od knina, inače gračanin) 792 40 hrnjica mujo i babić husein idu na maltu i ženidba ovoga 535 41 hrnjica mujo i kostreš harambaša 356 42 bosnić mehmedaga izbavlja rankovića ibru i sestru mu ajku i crnac-mehmedagu iz tavnice dubrovničkog bana 606 43 ženidba dvaju ćejvanagića 1664 44 ćesar i kralj hoće da išćera cara iz carigrada, bojevi u unđurskoj i boj na kosovu, smrt cara murata od ruke miloša kobilića 1065 45 smrt jankovića stojana 290 46 smrt hrnjice muje 99 47 smrt ličkog mustajbega 173 mehmed kolaković 1 ženidba bojčić delalije i ličkog mustajbega 878 mh 126a 2 ženidba i mejdan bajagića omera i boj s kotarani 1017 a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 91 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 3 janković stojan i hodžić husein 1057 4 janković stojan udaje posestrimu turkinju djevojku 768 5 dizdarević meho vodi iz zadra dvi djevojke 755 6 babić osmanaga i gavran kapetan 608 7 pandžić mehmedaga izbavlja bojagić alagu, i ženidba njihova 785 8 krvava ženidba sirotka alije 580 9 teferič ličkog mustajbegovice 875 10 janković stojan i vidimljić meho 443 11 dizdar osmanaga i mujo bajraktar 460 12 budimlijć alije i gavran kapetan 1121 13 čaušević meho i katulić ivan 459 14 hrnjica mujo izbavi pobratima šarca mehmedagu iz tamnice zadranina bana 1002 15 ivan kapetan ženi bećira sina ličkog mustajbega 615 16 konjević mujaga otvara pute u kotare 1093 17 nevjera plemena kozlica i njihova kazna 1254 18 mejdan hrnjice muje sa vukom brinjaninom 765 19 lički mustajbeg odnese veliku obdulju zadranina bana i ženi dva elezagića 866 20 maljković stipan oslobađa merdanagića muju iz tavnice brinjskog kapitana 1260 21 zašto je maljković stipan pobjegao u turke 790 mh 126b 22 jug brinjanin udara na ribnik (4) 720 23 nuhan đulić dolazi u službu ličkog mustajbega 438 24 janković stojan razbija svatove hruste atlagića 465 25 borčulović ibro i kapetan djevojka 1296 26 crnkić sulejman razbija svatove vuka bilobrka 466 27 mejdan lipovača mehe i vučkana kapetana 702 a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 92 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 28 umija kozlić hurem-age [?] tanković osmanaga 545 29 mejdan i pobratimstvo bišćanina bana i duralagić ibre 697 30 hrnjica mujo vodi kostreš harambašu u stambul 686 31 ženidba hrnjice muje s malte, a babić huseina s like 1059 32 žunić kapetan i lički mustajbeg 1054 33 mejdan i ženidba odobašić mehe 629 34 pavišić luka se osvećuje hajser-generalu 628 35 omeraga babahmetović izbavlja šuru alibeg čengića i druge turke sužnje iz tavnice zadarskoga bana 978 36 bećiragić meho i ana zadranina bana 642 37 čelebija hasan izbavlja ličkog mustajbega iz sužanjstva 728 38 nesretno udaranje kapetana stanića na vrhovac 475 39 nesrećna ženitba hadžagić mujage s nevjerna kozlica 414 40 janković stojan i smailbeg od duvna 316 41 mazul alibeg postaje beg sokulović od glasinca 406 42 ženidba mustajbeg delibegovića s janjom ćurčibaše-kneza 558 43 šarić kapetan i vrcić bajraktar 410 44 đulić bajraktar i harambaša bilobrka 505 45 sužanjstvo mehmedbeg brata ličkog mustajbega 1207 46 čustović osman i ninka tintor latinina 739 mh 126c 47 ivan kapetan odpušta turke sužnje i djevojke 485 48 maleta serdar i musić bajraktar 334 49 ženidba ahmeta velagića zlatijom ahmedbega kanižkoga 871 50 čustović osman i ribnik 573 a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 93 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 51 brehulja šimun i šuvel-efendija 751 52 ženidba alage od novoga i ćerim bajraktara 415 53 ženidba dvoju ćejvanagića sa dvije turkinje i dvije mostarkinje 744 54 glumčević alija i berber udovica 1306 55 mali mehmedaga i glendić osmanaga 809 56 mali mehmedaga i glendić osmanaga [the same song?] 809 57 nesretna ženidba grge kapetana antunića 1035 58 kako je budalina (šušnjar) tale došao u liku 579 59 sužanjstvo sedam hrnjičića kod senjanina ivana 526 60 bosnić novljanin osvećuje ujaka i pobratime 765 61 lički mustajbeg brani liku od dva bana 725 62 ženidba i mejdan mehmedage kunića 841 63 ćejvanagić meho odvodi/odvede vidu vidovića 1052 64 kumalijć mujaga ženidba i junaštvo 705 65 hrnjica mujo i halil pomažu durutagić ibri izbavljati sestru 698 66 sorić kapetan i kumalijć alaga 925 67 mehmedbeg alibegović osvećuje netijake sinove kune hasanage 425 68 jusufbeg alajbeg od rakitne osvećuje dva sina na miladinu knezu 678 salko vojniković-pezić 1 janković stojan se turči i dolazi u kotare 1324 mh 127a 2 junaštvo bećiragića mehe i njegova ženidba s anom zadarskoga bana 1471 3 baša husein i obro bajraktar izbavljaju dvi sinovke osmanbega od kaniže 3353 4 janković stojan i korić bajraktar 1134 5 ajka bajagić izbavlja braću 2436 a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 94 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 6 lov i mejdan skopljančića muje i livaka omera i njihov mejdan sa savom od jasena i trivunom od brloga 358 26 bašagić ahmet povraća svoju jaukliju od nakić i jović kapetana 554 7 ogrošev alija i gal-kapetan 2595 mh 127b 8 ženidba ahmetbega delibegovića sa zlatkom ahmetbega od budima 2440 9 gerzelez alija ide na mejdan sibinjaninu janku za cara murata 1428 10 osmanbeg sin dobojskoga kapetana dijeli mejdan s bartulić-serdarom 1133 11 oklada bana zadranina i gavran-kapetana za mejdan matije zadranina i tankovića osmana 687 12 mejdan jančik-kapetana i šahdanović-ibre 456 13 car od stambola i lehovkinja mara 1645 14 kotar alibeg ide za cara na mejdan i dolazi na bosnu 684 mh 127c 15 hasanpaša predojević osvaja bihać 906 16 grubeša serdar i ferizagić ahmo 557 17 ženidba cirić hasange sa zlatkom od cetine 531 18 vidinljić meho izbavlja turske sužnje od janković-stojana 777 19 rahman buljubaša osvetio dva sina zaim hasanbega sa rakita 774 20 nesretno vojevanje bana ošpergana na ferhadpašu od banje luke 432 21 janković stojan zarobio duvnjak mustajbega kod sužice i povratak ovoga poslije 13 godine 958 22 dvaju pobratima selima mejdan sa savom i ostojom u svatovih bega atlagića 655 23 hajser general gradi kulu bojčić-delaliji 641 a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 95 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 24 kako je maljković stipan sa dva pobratima pogubio vučkovića serdara i za alagu zenkovića doveo njegov alata 331 25 janko kapetan i turski sužnji 795 27 glumčević alija i berber-udovica 1846 28 mejdan ličkog mustajbega i bana zadarskoga[,] ajka sestra hrnjičića[,] bajraktar paši radosliji 1504 29 vid marušić i blažević omer čuvaju čardak ličkog mustajbega 532 30 plačković vojvoda osvećuje se zirić-šahinagi 483 31 ženidba đulić-bajraktara s jelom smiljanića i bejzom pločanskog alage 435 mh 127d 32 nesrećna ženidba sirotka tanković alije od nadina sa zlatkom skradinskoga dizdara i kako je ova djevojka odhranila tankovića osmana 734 33 četovanje blaževića omera i glendića bajraktara i ženidba 713 34 janković stojan udara na cetinu a odbi ga sopta husein i paša radoslija 913 35 teferič gospoje ličkog mustajbega 1250 36 čelebijć hasan izbavlja iz sužanjstva ličkog mustajbega 990 37 šabanagić meho traži mati i sestru 574 38 janković stojan udaje posestrimu turkinju djevojku za kurtagić-hasana 1067 39 janković stojan i hadžić husein 1364 40 ženidba bojčić-delalije s ajkom ličkog mustajbega 1428 41 bosić buljubaša otvara mustajbegu pute u kotare 1284 42 braća ibro bajraktar i sopta husein otimlju dvi banove kćeri 683 43 zukan bajraktar poprženovića mujage iz bišća izbavlja alibega od cetine sa malte, dovodi anu maltezlije kralja i dobiva sestru alibegovu 1107 a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 96 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 44 mejdan bosnić-mehmedage s braćom popovići 705 mh 127e 45 džanan buljubaša osvećuje dvoje djece dizdara udvinjskoga na pavešiću knezu 480 46 ženidba dvoju ćejvanagića s 2 turkinje i 2 kaurkinje 1143 47 četić osmanaga i šaban bajraktar od novog otimlju 60 kotarskih djevojaka 403 48 babić mehmedaga ostavlja na udbini ženu i dva sina, priženi se na glasinac zlatiji zajim hasanbega ali se za 9 godina vrati na udbinu 412 49 mejdan lipovače mehe s jugović-stojanom 934 50 bojčić delalija osvećuje brata 415 51 smrt ličkog mustajbega (5) 292 / 340 52 durutbeg od gračaca izbavlja pobratima bajagić-alagu i kazni njegovu ljubu 440 53 tale (šušnjar) dolazi u liku 278 54 ženidba hrnjice halila sa zlatkom dizdara od udbine 745 55 ženidba hrnjice halila s anom zadranina bana 1003 56 hrnjica mujo i tanković osman i brehulja šimun 471 57 hrnjica mujo brani kulu od zrilovića bana i kajsar generala, dolazi mu u pomoć mustajbeg i fazlipaša bihaćki 827 58 hrnjica mujo uhvati kostreš harambašu i vodi u stambol 938 59 hrnjica mujo čuva čardak ličkoga mustajbega na veljun planini 379 60 hrnjica mujo i omer pomažu durutagić ibri osloboditi sestru njegovu na obdulji karlović ivana 676 61 hrnjica mujo pogiba od zlatna zrna katurice meha 252 mh 127f a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 97 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 62 hrnjica halil povrati turkinje djevojke, što jih je tomić mihajlo bio zarobio 349 63 hrnjica omer traži brata halila 826 64 ženidba hrnjice halila sa savkom save samardžije 500 65 sužanjstvo sedam hrnjičića kod senjanina ivana 649 66 ženidba mustajbega (delibegovića) s janjom ćurčibaše kneza 363 67 ženidba jelečković muje s anom crnobrnje marka 654 68 hercegovina dolazi pod cara 208 69 tanković osman dolazi u službu ličkog mustajbega 349 70 smrt janković stojana 215 71 cifrić omeraga od kaniže okaja svoga otca na žunić-kapetanu pomoću ličana 1211 72 ženidba odobašić mehe 1079 73 junaštvo i ženidba sirote alije muje bajraktara od kaniže 882 74 vidimljić alija i gavran kapetan 2749 75 junaštvo i ženidba bega ahmetbega mahmutpašin sina od budima 1035 mh 127g 76 buljubaša mujo povraća svoju jaukliju od janjočkoga bana 550 77 tamnovanje i ženidba kunoglić alije od budima s anom janjočkoga bana 464 78 dva brata velagića i pilip madžarin 660 79 vojevanje morkovčića kralja s budimskim vezirom i mejdan kraljev sa zrinjičićosmanagom 773 80 zadnji i najbolji budimski vezir i zašto su turci budim i unđurovinu izgubili 1777 81 oršankinja ana i osmanbeg od osika 1112 82 osman bajraktar ženi omerbega od pečuja 992 a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 98 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 83 velagić alage ženi pobratima hadžagić mujagu, nevjerni kozličići u svatovih zovu jih na džilit, izdaju jih pilip obrstaru, zatim boj i ženidba 642 84 mejdan sorić kapetana i kumalijć alage 613 mh 127h 85 alibeg šestokrilović od požege izbavlja turske sužnje iz beča 2400 86 silen osmanbeg brani osik od tokulije i zrilovića bana i hajsar generala 955 87 bošnjaci na kosovu 381 88 kraljević marko i musa harbonosa 330 89 kako se je prepao kraljević marko 78 90 ajka durutbega i maunić omer 203 91 brat mora mrtvom bratu glavu sjeći 226 92 momak alija i dvije djevojke 62 93 dva đulagića i dvi djevojke 94 94 dva pobratima i dvi sirote djevojke 106 95 djevojka prodaje paši cvijeće i bude mu ženom 93 96 jedinjak mujo i jedinica fata 49 97 djevojka jagoda i alibeg 42 98 mujo i janja 24 99 nesretno ašikovanje 48 100 dilber duda i sopta alija 45 101 tuđa majka 26 102 od ašika otmica lipe nazle 44 103 četovanje bega nadilbega od stojna gradiškoga na eskije (ustaše) prije okupacije bosne 150 104 pjesma o bosanskoj buni 1876. 2218 a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 99 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii table 2. narrative/epic song totals singer # of epic songs total # of verses average song length ibro topić 33 31,481 954 ahmed čaušević 8 23,195 2,899 ibro karabegović 7 8,221 1,174 alija babić 3 5,883 1,961 ibro hrnjić 1 1,554 1,554 omer (h)ukić 1 725 725 ibro dervišević 5 4,101 820 hasan majetić (6) 9 8,829 1,069 vele ahmetović 14 5,376 384 bećir islamović 47 34,755 740 mehmed kolaković (7) 67 49,456 738 salko vojnikovićpezić 94 82,162 874 total 289 255,738 13,892 average 1,158 notes 1 technically, twenty-two of these songs were collected on a follow-up trip in 1898. 2 marjanović lists 290 epic songs in the foreword to his introduction [1898: vi], but by my count there are 289 in the archive. songs fifty-five and fiftysix by mehmed kolaković appear to be exact copies despite being assigned separate numbers. all my accounting above reflects the 289 songs that i was able to locate but i retain marjanović’s total, trusting he would not publish such an error. the discrepancy requires further investigation. 3 the songs of ahmed čaušević are an exception to this rule. i have been working closely with the manuscript and the verse lengths here are all corrected to the original ms. 4 kolaković’s song twenty-two is not located in the proper place but was mistakenly bound in bećir islamović’s ms, mh 125a, between songs two and three. a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 100 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 5 there are two versions of this song included here with different total lengths. it is not clear from my brief review of the ms which is the original, so i have included both. i used the longer song length in calculating vojnikovićpezić’s total and average song lengths. 6 the average here does not include song number nine which is a fragment. 7 song fifty-six is not included in these numbers because it appears to be a copy of song fifty-five. see note 1 above. bibliography babić, alija, ibro dervišević, hasan majetić, and vele ahmetović. 1888. pjesme – prijepisi [songs transcripts]. [sign. mh 124]. manuscript in the archive of the department of ethnology, hazu. čaušević, ahmed. 1888. pjesme-prijepisi [songs transcripts]. [sign. mh 122]. ms, hazu. islamović, bećir. 1888a. pjesme i – prijepisi [songs i transcripts]. [sign. mh 125a]. ms, hazu. islamović, bećir. 1888b. pjesme ii – prijepisi [songs ii transcripts]. [sign. mh 125b]. ms, hazu. karabegović, ibro. 1888. pjesme (prijepis mh 129) [songs (transcript of mh 129)]. [sign. mh 123]. ms, hazu. kolaković, mehmed. 1887/8a. pjesme – prijepisi i [songs – transcripts i]. [sign. mh 126a]. ms, hazu. ———. 1887/8b. pjesme – prijepisi ii [songs – transcripts ii]. [sign. mh 126b]. ms, hazu. ———. 1888. pjesme – prijepisi iii [songs – transcripts iii]. [sign. mh 126c]. ms, hazu. krstić, branislav. 1956. “лука марјановић и никола андрић као издавачи народних песама” [luka marjanović and nikola andrić as publishers of folk songs], прилози за књижевност, језик, историју и фолклор 20 (34): 241-53. lord, albert b. 1991. epic singers and oral tradition. ithaca: cornell university press. ————. 1995. the singer resumes the tale. ed. mary louise lord. ithaca: cornell university press. marjanović, luka, (ed.). 1898. hrvatske narodne pjesme. knj. 3, od. 1 junačke pjesme (muhamedovske), knj. 3 [croatian folk songs. bk. 3, sec. 1, heroic songs (mohammedan), bk. 3]. zagreb: matica hrvatska. ————. 1899. hrvatske narodne pjesme. knj. 4, od. 1 junačke pjesme (muhamedovske), knj. 4 [croatian folk songs. bk. 4, sec. 1, heroic songs (mohammedan), bk. 3]. zagreb: matica hrvatska. mučibabić, đurđica. 1981. “redaktorski postupak luke marjanovića na primjeru pjesme »dvostruka ženidba sokolović ibre«.” [luka marjanović’s editorial process in the example of the song “the double marriage of ibro a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu 101 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii sokolović”] poseban otisak iz godišnjaka x odjeljenja za književnost instituta za jezik i književnost u sarajevu. 159-70. topić, ibrahim. 1888a. pjesme ibrahima topića (prijepisi i) [the songs of ibrahim topić (transcripts i)]. [sign. mh 121a]. ms, hazu. ———. 1888b. pjesme ibrahima topića (prijepisi ii) [the songs of ibrahim topić (transcripts i)]. [sign. mh 121b]. ms, hazu. vojniković-pezić, salko. 1887/8a. pjesme (prijepisi i) [songs (transcripts i)]. [sign. mh 127a]. ms, hazu. ———. 1887/8b. pjesme (prijepisi ii) [songs (transcripts ii)]. [sign. mh 127b]. ms, hazu. ———. 1887/8c. pjesme (prijepisi iii) [songs (transcripts iii)]. [sign. mh 127c]. ms, hazu. ———. 1887/8d. pjesme (prijepisi iv) [songs (transcripts iv)]. [sign. mh 127d]. ms, hazu. ———. 1887/8e. pjesme (prijepisi v) [songs (transcripts v)]. [sign. mh 127e]. ms, hazu. ———. 1887/8f. pjesme (prijepisi vi) [songs (transcripts vi)]. [sign. mh 127f]. ms, hazu. ———. 1887/8g. pjesme (prijepisi vii) [songs (transcripts vii)]. [sign. mh 127g]. ms, hazu. ———. 1887-89. pjesme (prijepisi viii) [songs (transcripts viii)]. [sign. mh 127h]. ms, hazu. microsoft word folkloricaprotest_ii_full_final_2022 07.27.22.docx reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 99 reviews gierek, bożena and wojciech kosior, eds. feast as a mirror of social and cultural changes (beyond language vol. 6). san diego, ca: æ academic publishing, 2020. notes. index. 211 pp. $44.99 (paper). isbn 978-1-68346-1968. feasts, or celebrations that include festive events and a special meal, are an indispensable part of human life. all over the world we see the revival of local traditions as a counteraction to the globalization and secularization of cultures. in the introduction to feast as a mirror of social and cultural changes, editor bożena gierek argues that traditional feasts and festivals can provide unique and valuable “materials for researching social and cultural changes, including the influence of urbanization on rural feasts” (6). this collection includes ten case studies that explore the current state of traditional festivals in different countries. the volume’s strengths are its global reach and the sheer variety of the material. the authors are focused, for the most part, on celebrations that took place within the past ten years. colored photographs greatly enhance and support the text. geographically, the essays span three continents, addressing festivals both large and small in various european countries, as well as asia (buryatia, india) and africa (uganda). each chapter is accompanied by a substantial bibliography. part i addresses the role of festivals in maintaining or creating an ethnic identity. authors in this section generally agree that “closed” (addressed to a narrowly defined specific community) non-commercial festivals, based on deeper religious, cosmological, and mythological concepts, tend to lose participants and shrink, while “open” public festivals attract a much wider audience, including young people and tourists. ewa novicka examines the concerted efforts by buryat intelligentsia and authorities to maintain and reinforce the buryat cultural identity by the means of three new annual festivals. the geseriada, based on their national epic and centered around the famous mythological hero geser, lasted for only four years. the next festival, the night of yokhor, organized around a traditional circle dance, began in 2008 and is still going strong. the most successful festival, altargana, is a large biannual international event that offers a blend of tradition and modernity, including sports competitions, a song contest and even a beauty pageant. monika salzbrunn shows how recent swiss carnivals reflect the changing concepts of self and other in contemporary multicultural society. traditional carnivals were unthinkable without irony and grotesque. sadly, in the multiethnic city of payerne, carnival-like festivals at some point included unacceptable jokes about minorities and women. in response, the festivities in 2017 featured a giant swimming pool with women in burkinis, which were “meant to symbolize a global reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 100 message for peace and tolerance” (46). on the other hand, in lausanne’s carnival there were no xenophobic comments, but the carnival looked more like an ethnic festival, celebrating local immigrant cultures. the author concludes that in these new carnivals “there is neither derision or irony, nor an upside-down turning of stereotypes here: it is a mise-en-scene of an imagined self rather than an imagined other” (48). she notes that carnivals are changing, but there is still a place for irony, masquerade and wordplay. alina romanovska addresses what she sees as creolization of local cultures in the latvian city of daugavpils, located near the border with russia. here different ethnic groups—latvian, russian, polish, belarusian, or jewish— regularly celebrate their holidays. young people prefer open public festivals, like russian maslenitsa, to “closed festivals”, addressed to one particular ethnic group; they enthusiastically accept the celebrations, including foods, which leads to creolization and hybridization of local traditions, and establishes daugavpils as a multicultural city. lászló mód shares his research on hungarian grape harvest feasts and demonstrates how a tradition, popular in the first half of the 20th century, was reimagined in order to better express local identity and also attract tourists. part ii concentrates on today’s religious and traditional festivals. in a detailed essay, kiyoshi umeya analyzes the spiritual and cosmological meaning of lengthy and elaborate funeral rituals, ceremonies and meals in jopadhola culture in uganda. “funeral rituals are one of the largest and most eye-catching among all activities in padhola” (81), he notes. however, today “the feasts, funerals and relationship between the dead and the living are changing extensively” (93). they are shrinking because of migration to the cities, smaller families, and the intrusion of professional funeral services. tatiana minniyakhmetova shows how food-centered rituals help keep tradition alive. she discusses the ways of the udmurt, a so-called “trans-kama diaspora group,” were able over the centuries to preserve their pagan beliefs and avoid christianization. ritual feasts, some of them honoring domestic animals like cows, horses and geese, are still very important here. minniyakhmetova underscores the “close relationship between food and identity” (113) because some of her respondents “cannot imagine their lives without these festivities” (114). bożena gierek explores the changes in lajkonik, a beloved kraków festival based on medieval historical events. the enduring popularity of this festival, for both local residents and tourists, can be explained by the fact that it is a multisensory celebration. the audience can participate in “watching, listening, touching, dancing and feasting” (133), and costumes and performances have been updated. frédéric armao shows how a medieval irish ceremony, originally a cattle fair and a ceremony to protect the cattle, acquired a new life as the fire festival of uisneach. in “a fine example of social and cultural changes” (156), the president of ireland michael higgins attended the festival in 2017 and lit the ritual fire. “his gesture is arguably as political as it is symbolic. the president of reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 101 ireland, the representative of the irish state . . . inscribed himself into a millennial tradition, that of holders of power and knowledge bringing ‘light’ to the country” (155). people dressed as witches and fairies joyfully danced around a bonfire “in a pagan or pseudo-pagan ceremony.” armao concludes that “at the dawn of the 21st century, it seems that a newer, more tolerant, more syncretic irish society is on the rise” (156). the chapter by tigran simyan and ilze kačāne brings new insights even to the well-researched topic of new year celebrations in soviet and post-soviet russia. the authors demonstrate how the staple of new year’s eve shows, the head of state’s televised address, was reimagined in the christmas and new year shows of newly independent latvia and armenia. in contrast to the celebratory tone of the majority of the essays, marek moroń discusses the danger of igniting ethnic conflicts, when festivals can be used to pitch community groups against each other. in bengal, india during highly politicized confrontations there were cases of muslims slaughtering a cow, a sacred animal for the hindu, for the holiday of eid ul-adha while the sacrifice of another type of domestic animal would be acceptable, and hindus were playing loud music near mosques. the issue was resolved only through government intervention. although the volume would benefit from some english language editing, this is an informative and timely contribution to the field of festival studies that can be useful to both scholars and the general public. amina gabrielova purdue university west lafayette, indiana, usa gabrielo@purdue.edu folklorica full 2021_edit 6.28.22 reviews folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 83 brzozowska-krajka, anna. ethnoculture in the diaspora: between regionalism and americanization. translated by robert a. orr. lublin: maria curieskłodowska university press and new york: columbia university press, 2020. bibliography. index. 315 pp. $60 (cloth). isbn 978-83227-9367-1. polish folklorist anna brzozowska-krajka of the marie curie-skłodowska university in lublin has made a significant contribution to cultural anthropology in general and to diaspora studies in particular in her recent book, ethnoculture in the diaspora: between regionalism and americanization. the book was originally published in polish in 2012 and is now available in english thanks to a translation by the canadian slavist robert a. orr. brzozowska-krajka maintains that scholars in the field must avoid making unwarranted generalizations and instead should take into account internal diversity caused by sub-ethnic groups. she illustrated this in her latest book by focusing on a sub-group, the tatra highlanders (górale) within the polish diaspora in america. her choice of subgroup was influenced by her earlier research on the rich folk culture of the tatra highlanders in the podhale region, which resulted in a major book o współczesnej poezji podhalańskiej 1945-1980 [contemporary highlander poetry in podhale 1945-1980]. during her research for that book, she was surprised to find that many of the materials for her study were found in the tatrzański orzeł/the tatra eagle, a bilingual quarterly published in the united states in the state of new jersey since 1947 by the gromada family, who are members of the polish highlanders diaspora. at the time, the communist regime in poland did not support highlander regionalism so there were very few outlets available for góral creative artists. prominent folk poets like andrzej florek skupień, aniela gut stapińska, hanka nowobielska, and stanisław nędza kubiniec submitted their poetry to this american periodical, which avoided political topics, and therefore was discretely circulated in poland. based upon this work, brzozowskakrajka began to think about eventually doing research in america to learn what had happened the tatra highlander folk culture in the polish diaspora. opportunities for this research arose in 1999 and continued over eight years. her research was done in polish highlander communities in the greater chicago area and also in northern new jersey (passaic, clifton and garfield), where she engaged in participant observation and adopted a cultural studies approach advocated by the australian scholar chris barker. the result was a study that is neither historical nor sociological. after meticulous research in those communities as well as in major public and university libraries, including the archives of the polish museum in chicago and the polish institute of arts & sciences of america in new york, brzozowska-krajka concludes that the polish tatra highlanders in america have not only been able to preserve the main elements of their folk culture within urban american contexts but were able to expand and develop it further to co-exist within america’s multi-cultural urbanism. in the 12 chapters in part 2 of the book, brzozowska-krajka painstakingly describes and analyzes the manifestations, processes and ethnic markers (music, reviews folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 84 song, dance, dialect, costumes, family customs, religious observances, and folk art and architecture) that evince the vitality of this subgroup in america. she highlights its strong efforts to maintain an authentic folk culture and its careful imitation of cultural patterns and models of podhale, the original homeland region. she credits two institutions for playing a role in maintaining the identity and folk culture of the “górale” in america; the polish highlanders alliance of north america (związek podhalan w północnej ameryce) based in chicago, and the tatrzański orzeł/the tatra eagle; the latter is described by the author as a primary shaper of the highlander’s essential ideology (171). i would agree with the author that retaining markers of polish góral ethnicity acts as a defensive mechanism against being forced to jump into the “melting pot” and becoming a standardized anglo-american; but it is not a barrier to americanization. polish american highlanders are not resisting americanization, especially since the 1970s with the greater emphasis on diversity and cultural pluralism in american society. this community demonstrates that it is possible to be an american without giving up one’s cultural heritage. brzozowska-krajka rightly supports roman reinfuss’s theory that “urban civilization does not by itself cause the disappearance of folk cultures, rather it is the inferiority complexes of those cultures vis a vis urban culture. but when a folk group has a positive selfimage and values highly its culture, it can without conflict co-exist and even flourish and take advantage of all the amenities of urban culture” (262). as this book shows, tatra highlanders, both in poland and america, tend to have a high positive self-image and are extremely proud of their folk culture. thaddeus v. gromada new jersey city university jersey city, new jersey, usa tgromada@mindspring.com folklorica 2016 folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 62 yershov, pyotr. fearless ivan and his faithful horse double-hump. retold by jack zipes. minneapolis, london: university of minnesota press, 2018. table of contents. afterword. author and reteller’s biographical. 3–88. $18.95 (hardcover). isbn: 978-1-5179-0482-1 fearless ivan and his faithful horse double-hump is also commonly known in the english language under the title, the little humpbacked horse or the magic horse (конёк-горбунок). with this new book, jack d. zipes (b. 1937), well-known folklorist, academic, and fairytale specialist, offers a new look to this beloved story that is part of russian children’s literature tradition. the little humpbacked horse was initially written by pyotr yershov (1815– 1869) in 1834 while he was still attending university. like many of his contemporaries, such as aleksandr pushkin (1799–1837), yershov wrote his fairytale in verses. eventually, he became a high school teacher and later a school director in tobolsk, central siberia. while he never stopped writing and published dramas, short stories, and poems, none of his later works were as successful as the little humpbacked horse. �e story brought yershov instant fame. according to children’s writer korney chukovsky (1882–1969), the little humpbacked horse appealed to the common people because its author used their colloquial speech, their type of humor, as well as their perspective on life (p. 84). in addition, the author’s story borrowed elements from russian traditional folktales such ivan tsarevich and the fire bird and sivka burka. interestingly, the little humpbacked horse became so popular that locals began retelling it orally. �us, yershov’s poem, which was based on folklore, re-entered the russian vernacular tradition. because the story satirizes and criticizes the ruling classes by exposing their hypocrisy and offered an unflattering depiction of the tsar, the little humpbacked horse was censored in the 19th century (p. 84). ironically, for the same reason, it is also one of the rare fairytales that was acclaimed by the soviet regime after the 1917 russian revolution. consequently, it was adapted to the theatre in 1922. an 1864 ballet choreographed by arthur saint-léon (1821–1870) was also created followed by a marius petipa (1818–1910) revival in 1895, and a more recent version by alexander radunsky in 1960, based on a 1955-new composition by rodion shchedrin (b. 1932). finally, alexandre rou (1906–1973) adapted the little humpbacked horse to live-action cinema in 1941 and ivan ivanov-vano (1900–1987) made it into animation in 1947 and 1976 in films produced by the main soviet state-sponsored animated studios soyuzmul’tfil’m. like the little humpbacked horse, fearless ivan tells the story of a young peasant boy who outwits his enemies with the help of his magic horse. �e story is divided in three parts. part one consists of ivan’s adventures on his father’s land, how he manages to outwit his conniving brothers, and rises from poverty to become the new royal groom. in part two, one can read about his adventure at the palace, how he defeats a jealous government minister and manages to succeed at all of the king’s unreasonable demands. finally, part three consists of his last heroic task. in it, one reads about how he won the heart of the princess and got rid reviews folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 63 of the cruel tsar. ivan’s loyal double-hump pony accompanies him in all of his quests and, most of the time, saves the day. as a character, ivan is lazy and an unambitious hero but who still manages to touch the reader because of his naiveté and innocence. unsurprisingly, in the end, kindness wins over evil and ivan becomes the new ruler. �e readers expecting to find an english equivalent of yershov’s poetry in this book will be disappointed as zipes does not reproduce the russian author’s style. for example, in the beginning of yershov’s original verses, the reader will notice his strong musicality and rhythm: за горами, за лесами, за широкими морями, против неба на земле жил старик в одном селе. у старинушки три сына: старший умный был детина, средний был и так и сяк, младший вовсе был дурак. past the mountains, past the forest, past the wide oceans, under the sky – on the land lived an old man in a village �e old man had three sons: �e eldest child was smart, the middle one was okay and the youngest was a complete fool (rough translation by the author) in his attempt in telling the story in prose, zipes had to change several incidents of the story. however, as the reader will notice in his text below, he was able to keep the folk style and the main elements of a classical tale. “many years ago in the great empire of russia, where wicked winds and cruel storms tormented the lives of poor peasants, there lived a shriveled old man with his three sons. if truth be told, the sun had never bothered to shine down on this gray-haired man. he had lost his wife right after the youngest son was born, and he had been compelled to raise the three boys by himself. �e eldest was as sharp as a razor. �e second was neither dull nor bright. �e youngest was unfortunately a dunce. some thought he had lost his wits after his mother died giving birth to him,” (p. 3). zipes’ retelling is particularly interesting because he finds ways to fill the original text with more cultural, historical, and narrative detail. for example, he provides geographical (in the russian empire) and social specifications (the class struggle) to make the story more specific. he also explains the third son’s idiocy by linking it to his mother’s death. in yershov’s original text the mother is simply non-existent and this absence is never addressed. zipes’ changes certainly bring a richer story to the reader and while he loses the text’s musicality, he certainly makes the narrative more believable. fearless ivan is illustrated with colorful postcard images of the little humpbacked horse by artists such as nikolai kocherin (no date), mikhail folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 64 kupriyanov (1903–1991), vladimir milashevsky (1893–1976), v. grishna (no date), alexandre alexeieff (1901–1982) and n. straganova (no date). unfortunately, the work of each artist is not identified throughout the book and makes further research on these images difficult. if this is a lack for the academics, one must mention that the 30 images make the reading quite pleasant and helps to keep the readers’ interest with visual stimulation. in general, the book is an easy read addressed to most non-specialists and would be valued in any fairytale lover’s personal library. if the prose retelling is not quite like the original poem, the readers will nevertheless find in fearless ivan most of the essential elements of yershov’s work and of the russian folktale tradition. as mentioned in the afterword, zipes’ hope in adapting yershov’s poem was that “tyrants will be exposed and deposed,” (p. 87). in today’s rise of tyranny throughout the world, he couldn’t have found a better story to express this message. genia boivin university of sudbury ontario, canada folklorica full 2025 reviews 125 folklorica 2025, vol. xxix omarbekova, gulnara and erik aasland. contemporary kazakh proverb research: digital, cognitive, literary, and ecological approaches. new york: peter lang, 2023. notes. bibliography. index. xviii+236 pp. $35.95 (softcover). $35.95 (ebook). isbn 978-1-4331-9588-4 (softcover). isbn 978-1-4331-95907 (ebook). this interesting, edited volume provides a valuable and timely addition to the field of paremiology. it demonstrates how kazakh proverbs continue to evolve and maintain their cultural significance in the context of modern digital and ecological realities. the volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives bridging kazakh scholarship with broader international debates in folklore, discourse studies, and cognitive linguistics. the book is divided into two main parts. the first part presents the current state of proverb studies in kazakhstan, highlighting key challenges and opportunities. these chapters analyze the impact of globalization and technological advancements on the transmission dynamics and functional roles of proverbs within kazakh culture. a significant element is an in-depth description of the kazakh proverb corpus and its functional capacities, as this demonstrates how modern digital corpora can preserve the cultural heritage of a given people. the second part of the volume focuses on the creative and transformative use of proverbs in literary, humorous, and media discourses. several chapters examine the phenomenon of anti-proverbs and other modified proverbial expressions that challenge, subvert, or playfully reinterpret traditional meanings. through analysis of proverb usage in contemporary fiction, digital media, and comparative contexts, contributors demonstrate how these expressions remain culturally vibrant, reflecting shifting social values and the dynamics of modern communication. this section underscores the adaptability of proverbs and their continued relevance as tools of commentary, critique, and cultural reflection. the book successfully combines historical approaches with modern sociolinguistic methods, placing proverbs within the broader context of discourse, cultural knowledge, and linguistic identity. all these studies demonstrate the importance of the linguistic worldview of the kazakh people, in which proverbs act as living guardians of their history, culture, and linguistic and social development. a distinctive strength of the collection is its attention to empirical research. fieldwork among students and senior scholars reveals not only how knowledge of traditional proverbs is maintained but also how new forms—such as antiproverbs—are emerging to comment on contemporary realities. the volume introduces the term “anti-proverb” in the context of kazakh folklore, applying it for the first time to modified kazakh sayings. as noted by aisulu yessimkhanova in her chapter “the language ecology of contemporary kazakh proverbs,” antiproverbs in the kazakh context are newly adapted versions of well-known traditional proverbs, modified in form or meaning to reflect modern realities, including humor, irony, and social commentary. by introducing this concept into kazakh paremiological studies, yessimkhanova highlights how proverb usage reviews 126 folklorica 2025, vol. xxix evolves in response to shifting cultural and communicative norms, positioning anti-proverbs as dynamic expressions within contemporary discourse. this marks a significant shift in local paremiological analysis, aligning kazakh studies with broader international trends in the transformation of proverbs. these antiproverbs illustrate how linguistic creativity interacts with changing cultural and technological contexts, demonstrating that proverbs are both resilient and flexible. chapters addressing gendered representations and the role of proverbs in soviet and post-soviet literature add an important historical and critical dimension. by tracing how writers such as m. auezov integrated proverbs into their works, the book shows how proverbial language has served as a tool for both cultural continuity and subtle social critique. another valuable dimension of the volume is its engagement with ecological discourse, both linguistically and culturally. chapter 8, “the language ecology of contemporary kazakh proverbs,” authored by aisulu yessimkhanova, describes proverbs as “living, mobile organisms” that absorb and reflect the realities of modern life, thereby contributing to the linguistic ecology of contemporary kazakh (184). this perspective highlights how proverbs evolve in form and function through abbreviation, re-composition, or lexical substitution, adapting to new communicative contexts. at the same time, yessimkhanova identifies indicators of an ecological crisis within the lingua-cultural system. younger speakers reportedly use fewer proverbs, struggle to interpret their meanings, and exhibit a narrowing of proverbial knowledge, all of which suggest a weakening of intergenerational transmission (188-189). in this context, the study of proverbs is positioned not merely as a linguistic endeavor, but as a vital cultural practice aimed at preserving intangible national heritage. the ecological approach is further expanded through discussions of linguistic hybridity and the influence of modern technology, which simultaneously challenge and revitalize traditional forms. as such, the volume effectively argues for the role of proverbs as indicators of cultural sustainability, resilience, and evolving national identity. a notable aspect of this volume is its focus on the pedagogical potential of proverbs in contemporary education. several chapters discuss how the revitalization of kazakh proverbs through digital corpora can support bilingual education and heritage language learning, particularly among younger generations who may otherwise be disconnected from this rich oral tradition. by illustrating concrete ways in which proverbial knowledge can be integrated into curricula and teaching materials, the volume offers valuable insights for educators working not only in kazakhstan but also in other contexts where local folklore faces challenges from globalized media and shifting cultural values. additionally, the focus on anti-proverbs provides students with new perspectives to explore when studying language play, irony, and cultural commentary. this demonstrates that proverbs are not only teaching tools but also flexible language tools that can adapt to new social situations. the collection is comprehensive, but some chapters are primarily descriptive and could have benefited from a more in-depth engagement with comparative reviews 127 folklorica 2025, vol. xxix international scholarship. the book remains valuable as a bridge between kazakh paremiology and broader global discussions about language and folklore. contemporary kazakh proverb research is indispensable reading for scholars of folklore, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, and central asian studies. it will also prove valuable for educators exploring the role of traditional knowledge in bilingual and digital pedagogical settings, as well as for readers who want to understand all aspects of this culture. in this sense, the book does not merely document a fading cultural form; it actively contributes to sustaining and reimagining its place in modern discourse and education. this methodologically organized volume shows us that kazakh proverbs, far from being empty vessels in which to pour ancient wisdom, are dynamic cultural entities that both mold and mirror social reality. in highlighting tradition and change, flagging the traditional ground and the new turns in proverbial speech, the editors and authors of this volume help us remember that proverbial speech remains an essential tool for understanding how communities navigate transforming landscapes. this book deserves a place in any serious study of the relationship between folklore, language, and cultural resilience in the twenty-first century. elka petrova petrova paisii hilendarski university of plovdiv plovdiv, bulgaria elka.petroff@gmail.com reviews folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 81 reviews адоньева, с.б., и а.в. степанов (ред.). магические практики севернорусских деревень: заговоры, обереги, лечебные ритуалы. записки конца xx – начала xxi в. [adonyeva, s.b., and a.v. stepanov, (eds.). magical practices of northern russian villages: charms, amulets, healing rituals. records of the late 20th-early 21st century]. 2 т. (т. 1. архангельская коллекция. т. 2. вологодская коллекция). спб.: пропповский центр, 2020. notes. bibliography. glossary. index. vol. 1 584 pp. vol. 2 513 pp. maps. isbn: 9785-6044326-0-0. a book detailing magical practices in the villages of the russian north obviously benefits anthropologists, ethnographers, and folklorists. any russophone reader interested in folk magic from a scholarly or practical point of view; linguists studying regional discourse; historians; readers or scholars of literature interested in village culture as depicted in fiction—all these readers will enjoy and learn from the rich store of primary material in these two volumes, largely zagovory [charms] and incantations but also their contexts and other materials. �is scholarly collection with detailed apparatus includes records from expeditions ranging from the 1970s to the 2010s by students and scholars from leningrad/st. petersburg state university. many reports go into fine detail, noting all participants in a conversation. �e name, date of birth, and home village of every informant is conveniently given at the bottom of the relevant page. �e “north” of the title is northwest russia; most informants, though not all, are women, with birthdates as early as 1900—an impressive stretch of experience. �e second volume ends with a glossary of dialect and other unusual words. in her substantial introduction, adonyeva describes how scholars’ opinions about zagovory have changed over time, necessitating changes in their methods and approaches and adaptation of concepts and tools from other fields. soviet and now russian medicine have followed the positivist tradition, considering magical practices part of folklore rather than part of medicine. adonyeva outlines the evolution of methodologies of collection and reviews the literature on changing understandings of folk medicine (listing russian and some western sources). she notes that magical and other traditional practices are kept not for old times’ sake, but because they are observed to be useful (based on observation of experience rather than on scientific experiment). besides awareness of the unity of physical and mental/spiritual elements, a proper relationship to time is essential for healing: здоровье и недуг определены умением человека быть чутким ко времени, его циклам и ритмам. надо знать, как себя вести в то или иное время, различать его качество, ибо время «переходчиво», как сказала одна из наших деревенских собеседниц 82 [health and ailments are defined by a person’ ability to be sensitive to time, its cycles and rhythms. you have to know how to behave at this or that time, to distinguish its quality, for time is “transitory,” as one village woman who spoke to us said] (19). healing practices also change and evolve while retaining certain features: заговаривать от тоски нужно над проточной водой, у реки, как объясняла мне одна из моих собеседниц, но в городе «ты можешь и над батареей», в ней тоже вода течет [you have to say the words to ease toska [longing] over running water, by a river, one of my female interlocutors explained to me, but in town “you can do it over a radiator,” in which water flows too] (25). rather than grouping magical practices by the malaise or issue they address, each volume of the book is divided by smaller geographical region (for example: the kirillov region around the sheksna river), with entries put in order from earlier expeditions (working with handwritten notebooks) to more recent ones who made more detailed audio recordings. each part includes three sections, based on the concepts of maintaining the norm [podderzhanie normy], shift [sdviz], and conflict [konflict]. first is magical etiquette: how to behave when entering a forest or bathhouse, addressing the forest of bathhouse spirit or calling on mary the mother of god to lead one safely out, etc. (as others have observed, beliefs that encourage respect for the natural world and fear of looting natural resources bring many societal and environmental benefits.) �e lengthier second sections give amulets/talismans, protective prayers, and transitional rituals, organized by the kinds of ailment or situation addressed; these often include bits of dialogue between the collectors, who ask questions, and village residents who answer or elaborate. some of the ailments will be familiar to anyone who knows russian (sglaz and porcha—evil eye and “spoiling”), while others may be unfamiliar to city dwellers. �e zagovory tend to be brief, though some run to multiple pages. when an audiofile showed tellers speaking rhythmically with pauses, these lines are arranged like poems. �ey may be followed by instructions (“run your ring finger over the sore place”). anyone who knows russian zagovory will see familiar features: framing words; calling on certain saints; invocation of sympathetic magic (e.g., saying that since a dead person’s teeth do not hurt, the person with the toothache should not have sore teeth either). �ird and last in each geographical part are healing practices, including rituals for particular occasions and zagovory. �e texts have been minimally edited and reflect oral language with repetitions, interjections (“ums”), and non-standard forms—interesting for students of russian regional speech or discourse pragmatics. in many cases, especially with more recent records, the entries include written commentary from the collectors and compilers; some of these include comparisons with materials collected earlier, especially interesting when they are from nineteenth-century reviews folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 83 collections. some were copied from handwritten notebooks, a few of which are completely reproduced at the end of volume ii. texts are individually numbered, and easy to find later. just one example (in my hasty translation) (i, 69): to avoid bodily tiredness during reaping 47. as the first sheaf was reaped, people said these words for their backs, took three ears of grain and added: “as these ears lean down, so too let god’s servant marya bend and bow her back. at no time, at no moment, neither morning, nor evening time, let it ever hurt.” for any scholarly or practical purpose, this book is a splendidly varied, informative and responsibly compiled contribution to the literature on russian village traditions. sibelan forrester swarthmore college swarthmore, pennsylvania, usa sforres1@swarthmore.edu microsoft word folk2010e.doc st. stefan of perm’ folklorica 2010, vol. xv 1 articles st. stefan of perm’: a dialogue between traditions and the tradition of dialogue pavel limerov institute of language, literature and history komi science center of the russian academy of sciences syktyvkar, komi, russia abstract bishop stefan of perm’ was a religious figure of considerable importance in medieval russia, famous for converting a finno-ugrian people, the permians (now known as the komi) to christianity. the permians inhabited lands in north eastern europe bordering the central and northern urals, known in the russian chronicles as perm’ vychegodskaia and greater perm’. the selfless work of st. stefan was highly appreciated by his contemporaries; thus in documents dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries he is listed among the most outstanding russian orthodox churchmen: figures such as petr and aleksii of moscow, leontii of rostov, sergii of radonezh, kirill of the white lake, and varlaam of khutyn [lytkin 1889: 13]. he was officially canonized in 1547 at metropolitan makarii’s council, one of the first thirty saints to be canonized in muscovy [golubinskii 1889: 204]. a few years after st. stefan’s death in 1396, epifanii premudryi, a monk at st. sergii’s trinity monastery, composed his vita [prokhorov 1995]. to this day this work remains the chief source of historical information about st. stefan of perm’. st. stefan was born circa 1340 in the town of ustiug in the principality of rostov in north-east russia. his father, simeon, was a cleric attached to the cathedral church of the assumption of the holy mother of god, while his mother was a christian named mary, who, according to legend, was a komi woman who had been baptized. this would explain how st. stefan came to speak komi (permian) as well as his choice of spiritual mission. epifanii talks of an exceptionally gifted boy who learnt to read and write in just one year and rose to become kanonarch (lead chorister) and later psalm reader in the same cathedral as his father. when he was twenty stefan took his vows in the monastery of folklorica 2010, vol. xv 2 st. gregory the theologian in rostov, where, along with his monastic duties, he studied greek, theology, philosophy, and finally devised a permian runic alphabet before translating liturgical texts into komi. in 1379 st. stefan was ordained and departed on his mission to vychegodskaia perm’, located north of ustiug on the river vychegda. that mission, which was fraught with difficulty and danger, was successful, and in 1382 stefan was consecrated bishop of a new diocese in the town of ust’-vym’, the center of perm’. epifanii writes that st. stefan built churches, monasteries and schools, where both children and adults could acquire literacy via the books in permian that he had translated, and so learn the basic tenets of christianity in their own tongue. on april 25 1396 (9 may n.s.) stefan died while on a regular trip to moscow on official business and was buried in the church of st. savior-in-the-forest in the kremlin, in the ancestral burial-vault of the ruling dynasty, the riurikids. the high esteem in which st. stefan’s contemporaries held him stemmed from the fact that, as riccardo picchio remarks: “this was the first time the slavic orthodox church appeared not in the role of disciple ... but as teacher and apostle” [picchio 2002: 136]; in the figure of st. stefan of perm’, the russian orthodox church confronted permian paganism. as we know, such encounters between different religions and cultural traditions have often led to war, waged unto the death of the weaker culture. stefan’s achievement lies in his choice of dialogue over holy war, one that placed the permian pagan tradition on an equal footing with the orthodox church in that dialogue. his only weapons were the permian (old komi) written language and his translations of holy books. rather surprisingly, these weapons were sufficient to conquer the permians and bring them into the christian fold. in his vita epifanii premudryi aimed to create an ideal image of st. stefan, a man whose missionary activity was equal to that of the slavic missionaries, cyril and methodius, and even the apostles. epifanii’s strategy in constructing the plot, as well as in his stylistic organization of the text of the vita was therefore to subordinate them totally to this task. at the same time the events described in the vita possess a high degree of historical authenticity, thanks to the biographer’s personal acquaintance with his subject. however, there exists a quite different image of stefan – one devised by the creative genius of the komi people. the existence of an image of st. stefan in the folklore of the society, that had been so successfully converted by him, indicates that a certain perception of stefan is deeply integrated into permian cultural tradition. this would st. stefan of perm’ folklorica 2010, vol. xv 3 suggest that permian tradition which experienced the christianizing influence of russian culture via stefan of perm’ was engaged in a dialogue with it. therefore, the creation of a specifically permian folkloric image of stefan became its response to russian hagiographic tradition, a response which goes much further than expected, for stefan’s folk image bears little in common with its literary counterpart. the distinctiveness of this image is primarily related to its semantic content. if epifanii’s stefan is the permian apostle, missionary and cultural hero, a man who coordinated the parameters of a new life for the permian people, the folkloric stefan is a miracle-worker, a prophet, and even, something of a surprise, a sorcerer. the folklore neither sees the intellectual and spiritual readiness of stefan, his theological erudition, nor recognizes stefan’s creation of the written komi language and the books he translated. in short, the folklore ignores what was important to epifanii. instead it focuses on stefan’s miraculous qualities: his ability to float on a stone raft, to prophesy, to alter the landscape, and above all, his possession of magic powers. for folklore the nature of his magic, divine or demonic, is irrelevant. given this situation, the question that then arises is: what role do the literary texts play in the formation of the folkloric image of stefan of perm’? the first legendary tales about stefan were created within the church environment of the perm’ diocese and were part of local ecclesiastical tradition. they evolved under the direct influence of hagiographical topoi, but also included local legendary motifs. subsequently, the повесть о стефане пермском (the tale of stefan of perm’) was composed on the basis of these legendary motifs [vlasov 1996b: 61-70]. some episodes in the tale have parallels with folklore texts recorded relatively recently. the image of stefan of perm’ in the tale differs substantially from that in the vita. here we have the image of a miracle-worker, by whose command the pagans attacking him go blind; a man who can feed a thousand pagans with five loaves and who fells the monstrous pagan tree – the “prokudlivaia” [magic] birch. the image of stefan as miracle worker then passes from the tale into folklore where it acquires additional connotations. the semantic range of these connotations is so broad that along with general russian folk conceptions of sanctity it also reflects earlier komi pagan beliefs. that is why in different texts stefan acts as saint or magician, and sometimes both simultaneously. it may be assumed that the image of stefan as magus and sorcerer was closer to the semi-pagan mentality of the newly baptized komi folklorica 2010, vol. xv 4 people than his hagiographic image. it was closer because it corresponded to their dominant mythological concepts; even the victory of christianity over paganism was more comprehensible, since it explains the defeat of paganism as a consequence of stefan’s magical powers rather than his missionary activity. it is therefore logical that, in compiling texts about the conversion featuring stefan, tradition makes use of old legends about sorcerers’ contests. the plot of narratives of this kind is relatively straightforward: two sorcerers argue about which is the stronger. to resolve the question they challenge each other to a duel in which each casts spells on his opponent, on specific objects or natural phenomena. the loser is the one whose spells are weaker. tradition places stefan of perm’ in the role of one of the sorcerers, turning the sorcerers’ contest into a religious trial by single combat. epifanii premudryi was evidently familiar with this type of story, since he took the duel by debate between stefan and the chief sorcerer of perm’, pam sotnik, about the advantages of their religions and placed it in a separate chapter “о препрении волхва” (on the sorcerer’s debate). here he drew parallels with early christian tradition and more specifically the clashes between st. paul and elim the sorcerer, and st. peter and simon the magician [prokhorov 1995: 111]. perhaps it would be an oversimplification to regard the formal similarities in plot as a consequence of the transformation of literary themes in folkloric space, or, conversely, to consider the plot of the “debates” between stefan and pam as the hagiographer’s interpretation of the folkloric battle between two sorcerers. in each case, it is possible to find arguments supporting these contentions. in my opinion, both the literary and the cultural versions of the plot about the duel between saint and sorcerer formed autonomously and independently, although the formal similarities suggest that both versions have a universal mythological proto-text. therefore, my task here is to consider both versions from the viewpoint of the dynamics of plot-creation and to elucidate the differences in meaning and the points of interconnection. the idea of dialogue between different cultural traditions forms the semantic background: on the one hand, we have the russian christian written tradition, and on the other the pagan oral tradition of the permians (komi). thus, the duel of the saint and the magician may be seen as one form of this dialogue. it would be wrong to think that christianity came to perm’ without friction. for any nation a life-changing decision such as the choice of faith must involve drama. epifanii writes about the religious schism that shook the permians: st. stefan of perm’ folklorica 2010, vol. xv 5 и случилось, что народ разделился на две части: одна сторона называлась “новокрещеные христиане,” а вторая “неверные кумирослужители.” и не было между ними согласия, только распря; и нет мира у них, только разногласие. и потому кумирники ненавидели христиан и не любили быть с ними едины. [and it came to pass that the people divided into two groups, one known as “newly baptized christians” and the other “pagan idol worshippers.” and there was no agreement among them, only argument, and no peace among them, just dispute. and so the idol worshippers hated the christians and did not like to associate with them.] [prokhorov 1995: 107] the split marked a turning point in st. stefan’s mission. on the one hand, it is apparent that for some permians their new faith was so entrenched that they were ready to take an open stand against the pagans; on the other, it is also clear that the authority of pagan belief, albeit shaken, remained largely intact for the majority. in this situation the balance might swing either way, depending on which party advanced the most convincing arguments. apparently, both parties were aware of this, and hence the conversion story presents new forms of “proof” that one or other party was right. for epifanii they took the form of public debates on matters of faith, writing that one day stefan was approached by: некотории от пермян, суровейшии мужи, невернии человеци, и еще некрещении сущее, собравшеся мнози, и от них ови суть волсви, а друзии кудесници, инии же чаротворци и прочии старци их иже стояху за веру свою иза пошлину пермския земля. [some of the permians, men most stern, unbelievers, and not baptized, many having gathered together, and among them some were wizards, and others sorcerers, and others spell-binders and other old men who stood firm for their faith for the traditional customs of the permian land.] [prokhorov 1995: 105] the culmination of these discussions, as indeed, of the whole plot of the vita, is the episode depicting the clash between the future bishop of perm’, stefan, and the chief sorcerer and ruler of the permian land, pam sotnik. the chapter describing these events takes the form of a dialogue between the two men. the fundamental importance of this dialogue for the plot of the vita is that during the debate the key tenets of the two opposing faiths are discussed, and, no less significantly, the religious and cultural bases of the contrasting religious traditions, russian and christian versus permian and pagan, are examined. by comparing the debate between stefan and pam with the biblical scenes of the struggles of moses with pharaoh’s sorcerers, jannes and jambres, st. paul with elim the sorcerer and st. peter with simon the magician [prokhorov folklorica 2010, vol. xv 6 1995: 111], epifanii can place this episode in a series of events in world history, and thereby imply that the future triumph of the christian faith in perm’ is predetermined. a.iu. kotylev derives the theme of the religious dispute from the tradition of cyril and methodius, and the description of the religious debates in the vita constantini in particular. he argues that constantinecyril’s disputes with the representatives of different creeds may be considered preparatory stages for his main mission. with this in mind the dispute of stefan and pam sotnik may be understood as “a significant addition to the series of discussions in the vita constantini, logically culminating in the triumph of orthodoxy and christianity as a whole” [kotylev 2007: 121-22]. however, the descriptions of the disputes in the vitae of both constantine and stefan may easily be considered in the broader context of the traditions of polemical literature in late antiquity and the middle ages. the sources of this tradition lie in the literary polemics of the early christian writers and their classical opponents, who represent pagan religion and culture as a whole. however, though similar formally, the dispute in the vita of stefan of perm’ differs substantially from early christian examples in terms of its content. for behind the pagan critics of christianity there stood the state and millennia of greek classical culture, obliging christian apologists to defend the church and demonstrate the superiority of christianity over the religiousphilosophical systems of antiquity; conversely, in the dispute between stefan and pam, the former represents christianity as an established religion, while the sorcerer defends the beliefs of his forefathers and his people. moreover, by the time stefan’s vita was composed, christianity had a thousand-year-old tradition in europe of converting pagans, in which incidentally religious disputation between christian missionaries and representatives of barbarian religions is virtually absent. debates of this kind were not possible, because to include a pagan representative in inter-faith communication would presume that the pagan religion possessed both authority and dignity, something christian missionaries would have rejected on principle. what is more, medieval christian missionaries, stefan of perm’ included, were guided by the action program, outlined in deuteronomy 7: 5: “ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and hew down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire” [limerov 2008: 71]. this position is not articulated literally in the vita; rather, it can be characterized as biblical reminiscence, as faith wigzell has shown [wigzell 1971: 233]. to put it st. stefan of perm’ folklorica 2010, vol. xv 7 differently, epifanii premudryi does quote directly from deuteronomy, but rephrases the sentiments, applying them to stefan’s activity. nevertheless, all stefan’s work in pagan perm’, as described by epifanii, follows this program literally. thus, the chapter “on the sorcerer’s debate” is constructed in a form of a dialogue based on the pattern of an apologetic polemical text. during the dialogue, each participant tries to demonstrate the advantages of his religion. when, however, the participants eventually exhaust their arguments, they summon each other to a trial of ordeal known as the judgment of god. in medieval legal practice, the procedure of judicium dei, known as ordalia was a widespread method of seeking juridical truth and was a part of the so-called “varvarskie pravdy” (barbarian truths), which included the first russian legal codex, the russkaia pravda (russian truth). although details differ, ordeals included trial by fire and water, with the triumph of truth guaranteed by the will of the lord [gurevich 2003: 400-04]. in the vita those undergoing the test were to enter a burning house together, and then swim underwater from one hole in the ice to another. pam, however, could not face the ordeals, thrice refusing to step into the fire, as well as being shamed by failing to get into the ice hole. his defeat was convincing proof of the strength of the christian god, and so the permians wholeheartedly went over to stefan’s side and demanded the death of the sorcerer. in general, the debate between stefan and the permian sorcerer is treated as a historically accurate fact. it is possible that the hagiographer knew about an episode of this nature, but it is also possible that epifanii constructed his plot on the basis of well-known rhetorical figures [kitch 1976]. a similar plot pattern features in contemporary byzantine polemical literature. for example, in john cantacuzenus’ “conversation with the papal legate paul,” one of the polemicists, the byzantine emperor, concludes his argumentation by suggesting that they build a bonfire and step into it together. the papal legate paul refuses, saying, “i want to live, not die”. the emperor replies: “so do i, but i am absolutely certain that, thanks to divine intervention on behalf of the orthodox christian faith, i shall not merely not burn, but will also be able to assist you. that’s why i’m not afraid of stepping into the bonfire. you, it appears, have doubts about your faith, and hence you fear death” [cantacuzenus 2008: 48]. the reference to “divine intervention” shifts the polemic from а disputation about each other’s views to the ordeal, in which the arguments of one side or the other will, allegedly, be empirically proven. in this particular case, the motif of ordalia is used by the author as a folklorica 2010, vol. xv 8 literary device, but a very significant one, because for the participants in the dialogue as well as the author the judgment of god represents the ultimate authority. thus, the plot of the apologetic narrative may be considered a composite structure combining a dialogue between the parties and the motif of ordeals, united by the theme of the trial of faith. for john cantacuzenus, as for byzantine literature in general, the literary model of polemical writing was socratic or platonic dialogue [prokhorov 2008: 25]. however, unlike its classical models the christian variant reflects a dogmatic authoritarianism, according to which truth is not achieved in the process of dialogue, but is known beforehand to one of the parties, thanks to his belief in the true god. the ordalia motif (or a rhetorical reference to it) serves to indicate one person’s total conviction that he is right. the byzantine model of apologetic dialogue was evidently assimilated by early russian book learning, and by epifanii in particular, who developed his model of dialogue, which was functionally directed towards condemning the arguments of the pagan religion as worthless, and so asserting the true faith.(1) it must be remarked that dialogue with a pagan opponent is not a compulsory component in a hagiographical work. the main task of the hagiographer is to confirm the sanctity of the hero via the miracles he has performed. victory in a disputation with a pagan or heretic cannot be viewed as miraculous, although it does imply the implicit participation of god on the side of the winner. the symbolic meaning of the ordeal lies in god’s assistance to one of the participants with the aim of confirming the truth of his faith, and hence victory in the ordalia resembles a form of revelation, a miraculous gift to a charismatic hero. in the oldest versions of the polemic about faith, verbal dialogue is absent, with the theme of a trial of faith by ordeal much more to the fore. the most splendid example is a depiction of the judgment of god at work in the seventh-century “life of st. patrick,” patron saint of ireland, by miurchu moccu machteni [miurchu 2006: 363-90]. to determine the superiority of the pagan or christian religion, the irish king loigaire orders st. patrick and a druid to cast their sacred books into the water. the druid refuses because he considers that water is st. patrick’s god (a hint at the role of water in baptism). then, the participants in the trial build a house half of dry wood and half of green wood. the druid, dressed in the saint’s vestments, enters the green half of the house, and a boy, one of the saint’s pupils, dressed in druid costume, enters the dry half of the house. the house is set alight, and the druid is burnt to death, but st. st. stefan of perm’ folklorica 2010, vol. xv 9 patrick’s vestments remain whole and the boy emerges safe and well [miurchu 2006: 373]. the origins of the theme of trial of faith can be found in the biblical conception of the testament between god, creator of heaven and earth, and humankind, as formulated in the book of exodus: “and he took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said, all that the lord hath said will we do, and be obedient” (exodus 24:7). the testament guarantees the personal participation of the creator in the people’s lives in return for their unconditional loyalty. as s.s. averintsev points out, “all old testament miracles are situated around one central miracle, which is symbolically concretized around the readiness of the eternal and unconditional to be involved in the ephemeral and fortuitous” [averintsev 1997: 77]. thus, the meaning of the miracle rests in the idea that god by his will can suspend the laws of nature, laws that have been established by his will [averintsev 2006: 498], and so grant his grace to an individual disciple, but only if he is filled with faith. the trial of faith is required to confirm the truth of the testament and in so doing confirm the truth of the faith itself. looking at it from this point of view, the trial of faith may take different forms, from walking through the waters of the red sea to the prophet’s elijah’s sacrifice on mount carmel, the content of every form being a manifestation of divine will [prokhorov 1995: 151]. returning to the text of the life of stefan of perm’, it must be remarked that the sorcerer pam explains stefan’s power in a completely different way. for him as for all other permians, baptized or not, stefan is a magus like him, but stronger: “i have not learnt how to conquer fire and water, but your teacher stefan as a child and young man learnt from his father by sorcery and spell-making how to charm fire and water, such that fire does not burn him nor water drown him” [prokhorov 1995: 151]. the first appearance in christian writing of the motif in which a defeated pagan accuses a saint of magic practices was in the tale of the clash between st. peter and the magician, but epifanii, who never fears using quotations and reminiscences from other literary texts, does not quote the vita of st. peter. for him, the pagan’s reaction is no more than a manifestation of his spiritual weakness, and hence the biblical parallel can be ignored, leaving the narrative on a purely historical plane. let us remember that stefan’s father simeon was a “khristoliubets muzh” [a lover of christ], a cleric at the church of the holy mother of god in ustiug. evidently simeon, hoping his son would inherit his rank and position, ensured he could read and write [prokhorov 1995: 6]. the folklorica 2010, vol. xv 10 possibility of the cleric simeon being able to charm fire and water is remote indeed, but for the pagans no other explanation of stefan’s power is possible. those facets of a theistic religion like the testament, faith and loyalty to god, and the notion of service to the one god were inconceivable even to a remarkable pagan like pam. where the christian places his trust in the creator and his divine intercession, the pagan can only rely on the power of his magic. the nature of this power it totally different, since it is of an individual kind that permits the magus personally to affect the object to be charmed. according to malinowski, the power of magic: is always the power contained in the spell, for, and this is never sufficiently emphasized, the most important element in magic is the spell. the spell is that part of magic which is occult, handed over in magical filiation, known only to the practitioner. to the natives knowledge of magic means knowledge of spell, and in an analysis of any act of witchcraft it will always be found that the ritual centers round the utterance of the spell. the formula is always the core of the magical performance. [malinowski 1954: 73]. the absence of the right magic “formula” in pam’s personal armory reduces him to a state of near panic, since, as far as he is concerned, stefan’s confidence can be only explained by his knowledge of appropriate spells, handed down to him by his magus father. both christian and pagan argue on the basis of radically different mental outlooks, the result of two different religious worldviews. they exist in two different semantic systems, and hence they ascribe opposite meanings to the same concept. epifanii’s point in the vita is that for pam and the unbaptized permians there is only one way to understand and accept stefan’s arguments: they have to believe. however, the adoption of faith cannot be instantaneous; it is inevitably a lengthy process, in the course of which the entire philosophical system of an ethnic group has to shift into a completely different semantic system. in fact the time gap between the conversion of vychegda perm’ and that of greater perm’, two parts of the same land according to epifanii, was a whole century. and what is more, the christian religion and culture had to be learned and absorbed, something that also took a good deal of time. it is, therefore, hardly surprising that pam and the newly baptized permians should understand stefan’s power as “magic and sorcery.” for them there is no other option, and they perceive the debate between the sorcerer and the saint as a magic contest between two sorcerers. this perception of stefan’s image in the culture of the people he had converted existed for a long time, until relatively recently, judging by st. stefan of perm’ folklorica 2010, vol. xv 11 folk legends recorded in the early twentieth century. it cannot be said that stefan appears as a sorcerer on behalf of the christian god in every folk legend, but at least in the majority of them he does. a text from 1934-35 in the archive of the ust’-sysol’sk folklore commission is particularly instructive in this respect. it represents the informant’s own reflections on the topic of the conversion of the komi people, and the appearance of the tradition of spells in komi culture in particular. “sorcery began to spread after stefan of perm’ invaded, when stefan assigned prophets to the villages and instructed them to tell the people the words of god… therefore stefan of perm’ brought wizards and sorcerers, who were his prophets, and designated them “pogoshchane” (lit. parishioners). the number of pogoshchane grew rapidly, and whoever was against them and criticized their bad deeds, and spoke out, these the pogoshchane considered sorcerers. poor peasants, whom the pogoshchane had humiliated, as a form of rebuff memorized some spells. when the pogoshchane came to the poor peasants to preach, and the sorcerers came to curse at them, they were conjuring how to respond – and so spell casting, known as nimkyv, developed out of that” [poroshkin] (2). as we see, the appearance of the spell among the komi is linked by the informant to the name of stefan of perm’, who fostered the first “sorcerers and magi” calling them “pogoshchane.” the term is derived from the word “pogost,” designating the type of komi settlement that became characteristic after conversion. pogosty, christian settlements with churches for the baptized komi, began to be constructed away from earlier pagan dwelling places, as a result of which nowadays there are no settlements established before the fifteenth century. the informant, who labeled the christian pogoshchane sorcerers, was in fact expressing the point of view held 540 years ago by the chief permian sorcerer pam. it is noteworthy, that according to the informant, the notion of sorcery and the tradition of spells appeared among the komi as a reaction to christian preaching, perceived as christian magic. i should add, however, that a negative evaluation of stefan’s activities like the above, is uncharacteristic of komi folk tradition. it may well be that it appeared in the 1920-30s, facilitated by the accepted hypothesis of the day that the conversion of the komi people by stefan was a violent and bloody affair, since his aim was annexation of the komi land to the russian state. this hypothesis, stripped the aura of sanctity from stefan’s image, on the one hand, as it were, inscribing his name on the list of medieval muscovite officials, while on the other strengthening his popular reputation as a sorcerer. folklorica 2010, vol. xv 12 the folk legends about stefan of perm’ can be divided into four thematic groups. the first comprises legends about the chud’, encompassing the motifs of baptism and self-burial of the chud’, the flight of the chud’, the death of a chud’ woman, and chud’ treasures. in komi tradition those who converted came to be called komi, while the chud’ were those who remained pagan. the second group consists of legends about stefan (here called by the popular version of his name, stepan) and his travels, with the corresponding motifs of floating down the river on a rock, the naming of settlements, calling the pagans “sleporodtsy” (congenitally blind) and “belkoedy” (squirrel eaters), as well as the saint’s prophecies. a separate, third group comprises legends about the baptism of the inhabitants of ust-vym’, with the motifs of the blinding of the pagans, the raising up of a mountain, and felling of the sacred birch. finally, the fourth group comprises texts about stepan’s duel with the pagan shaman or “tun” in komi. plots are usually formed by combining motifs from the given thematic group to create various plot modifications. stepan’s missionary activities that provoke a backlash from his pagan counterparts form the core of all plots regardless of group. since in this study the focus is on the duel between saint and sorcerer, i shall be concentrating on the fourth thematic group, with scant reference to texts from other groups. here the main plot of the legends revolves round stepan’s meeting with the tun, the head of a particular locality. the duel takes the form of a series of magic actions on both sides, culminating in stepan’s victory and the death of the sorcerer. from the perspective of the pragmatics of the text, this scene can be expressed by the formula “hero – antagonist” where it is assumed that both personages possess magic powers. this means that at the structural and semantic level, the plots of the narratives about stepan are of the same type as those about magic contests a separate thematic group. this kind of narrative was first described in the 1920s by professor a.s. sidorov, who collected and published unique material about komi sorcerers [sidorov 1997]. he suggested that “instead of heroic epic, the komi developed ‘sorcery epic’. historical legends, for example those about brigands operating in the komi lands, as well as legends about local heroes, are always less about their physical exploits than their feats of sorcery” [sidorov 1997: 51]. these feats include what he calls “sorcery contests”, which sidorov places in a separate subsection in the book. here he discusses the tradition of contests as well as the contemporary state of affairs, that is in the 1920s, mentioning that “tales about sorcery contests are found everywhere” [sidorov 1997: 50]. the st. stefan of perm’ folklorica 2010, vol. xv 13 plot of these tales has already been outlined, but can be elaborated here. the magic contest between the two sorcerers is known in komi as vynon etshas’em. when it is clear that the spells of one are less efficacious, that contestant falls to the ground, frothing at the mouth, while the pine tree, the focus of the winner’s spell, withers and dies, and if the contest takes place while out hunting, the vanquished loses his luck in the hunt. further plot development either pursues the theme of the victor, following his later life and other exploits, or focuses on the defeated sorcerer, who, having recovered, puts the evil eye on the victor, who subsequently dies. thus, the element that creates the plot appears to be the clash between antagonist and main hero, in which the hero’s powerful reaction takes the antagonist by surprise, and he is defeated. the only positive result is that the hero’s magic power is revealed, and the discovery accordingly forms the key motif that draws in additional plot elements, leading to the formation of the narrative structures of other stories. the plot of the magic contest is undoubtedly archaic, as sidorov and other scholars have observed [konakov 1999: 61-64]. its primacy in relation to the plots telling of stepan’s contest with the sorcerers can be assumed, given that these and other plots exist in the modern komi folk tradition alongside each other, without replacing or displacing each other. it may therefore be possible to trace the transition of a plot from one group of texts about the sorcerers’ contest to another – about the duel between saint and magician. to look at this more closely i shall turn to texts based on the motif of the magic contest, found in both groups: много лет назад жил пома (фома). и теперь еще за деревней удор есть поле помавидз (луг фомы), и гора помакерос (фомина гора). ведь если бы он не жил там, так бы не назвали. так вот пома когда-то жил здесь. а на вычегде тогда же оказывается жил кортайка (железный старец, богатырь). и вот пома отправился на лодке на вычегду, не знаю, с какими целями, может, для того, чтобы помериться с ним в знахарских способностях. плывет, а кортайка что-то варит. пома говорит: «сусло стой!». а кортайка отвечает: «лодка стой!» и сусло и лодка остановились [many years ago there lived a man called poma (foma). even now behind the village of udor there is a field called pomavidz (foma’s meadow), and a mountain called pomakeros (foma’s mountain). if he had not lived there, it wouldn’t be called that. so, poma once lived here. and at that time in vychegda there lived kortayka (old man of iron, bogatyr’). and so poma went by boat to vychegda. i do not know why, maybe in order to test his magical abilities against his. he sailed by as kortayka was brewing something up. poma says, “wort, stop!” kortayka responds, “boat, stop!” and both the wort and the boat stop] [ankundinova 2005: 82]. folklorica 2010, vol. xv 14 this plot-forming motif is fairly widespread in komi folklore in a version of the magic duel between two sorcerers, a boatman and a brewer, who in turn stop the brewing of the beer and the progress of the boat. the dialogue between boatman and brewer is magical in nature, and the phrases they utter evidently possess the force of magic, aimed at establishing the supremacy of one of them. it should be noted that the dialogue is conducted in russian, while the rest of the text is in komi, indicating the perception of russian as a magical language. this is not just a contest of magic power, but also of the knowledge of spells, the language of magic. the result is a stalemate, since both sorcerers know the magic language, and hence their spells are equally powerful. recognizing this, they remove the spell. the plot structure of this narrative is equivalent to the dialogue between two magicians, because the dialogue in itself represents a contest in magical power. the plot does not extend beyond the dialogue, although in some variants a stalemate may be resolved in favor of one of the sorcerers with whom the narrator sympathizes. in this case the plotline may expand slightly. since such cases are rare, the plot of the stalemate should generally be considered fixed. as a consequence the dramatis personae may be described as brothers or friends. the fact that the heroes’ names are associated with real place names and they appear to be the lords of these places further suggests that they are to be seen as equals. in komi oral tradition kortaika is the hero of local legends from the village of kortkeros (note the local toponyms: kortkeros means an “iron mount”; kort-iag, “iron pine forest”; kort-ty, “iron lake”; kort-viiam, “iron strait” and consequently kortaika means “man of iron”). the name of foma (poma) is also connected to local place names, as the informant above remarks. what catches the eye in this text is that the name of poma (foma) appears to come from the old komi name, pam or pama [rochev 1982]. furthermore, the text was recorded in the village of kniazhpogost (now the town of iemva), which was the residence of pam (pan sotnik). other than in epifanii’s vita the existence of pam is attested in entries in the vychegoda-vym’ chronicle for the years 1380, 1384, and 1392 [doronin 1958: 258-60]. the entry for 1380 partially corresponds to the text of the tale of stefan, though here it forms an extended narrative [vlasov 1996a: 21]. the tale refers to the residence of pam as “mesto imenuiema kniazh’ pogost” [a place called kniazh’ pogost] [vlasov 1996b: 61], from which he launched attacks on the christians. these facts would seem to indicate that the folkloric image of poma comes from the pam of vita and chronicles. in folklore field recordings, the term st. stefan of perm’ folklorica 2010, vol. xv 15 pam(-n) occurs only twice: recorded first by v.p. nalimov in the early twentieth century among the sysol’ komi-zyrians and then by v.v. klimov among southern komi-permians in the mid-twentieth century. nalimov notes that this term appears in combination with a personal name in the legend of pam shypicha: “according to the zyrians, pam is a name of a man with tremendous will-power who can command the natural elements and the forest folk. apart from that, he possesses some good personal qualities; his energy and knowledge are deployed in fighting the enemies of the zyrians” [nalimov 1903: 120]. the title pam combines magic functions with military and civil power. apart from these qualities, pam shypicha is also a powerful sorcerer and a brigand leader.(3) kudym osh (bear), the hero of komi-perm’ legends, also has the title of pam inherited from his father. he too possesses some magic powers, but he is better known as a military leader and cultural hero. most likely, in pre-christian komi class hierarchy the title pam(-n) designated the highest rank, that of hereditary prince. however it is not inconceivable that a pam(-n) combined princely with religious and magic functions. the latter would appear to have survived in various komi charms and cumulative folktale texts, in which pam (-n) is an owner of a knife needed to sacrifice an animal. in the komi etymological dictionary, the word pan in eighteenth-century sources means a “priest” (folkl.) or “vladyko” [a ruler], and derives from the root of the verb panny (< *paŋ-) meaning “to found”, that is to have a firm basis, possess authority, be strong [lytkin, guliaev 1999: 216]. for medieval russian authors, who did not know komi, the name pam(-n) sounded like the personal name of the leader of the vym’ pagans, and as such entered the chronicles. over time, the term pam(-n) was lost, being replaced in the mid-fifteenth century by the borrowed russian term kniaz’ (prince). this occurred when ermolai from the family of princes of vereia was despatched by moscow as governor of perm’ [doronin 1958]. thus, princely patrimonial estates were established at the same place as pam had resided in vym’. as a result, in folk legends the name of stepan’s enemy and leader of the pagans also acquires the name of kniaz’, the ruler of kniazhepogost. this term displaces the previous name of pam sotnik and becomes established in the plots of legends about stefan of perm’ as the name of one of his opponents. two more plotlines in the legends about stepan are linked to the name of kniaz’ [prince]. the first leads to contamination with the legend of george and the dragon: folklorica 2010, vol. xv 16 stepan velikopermskii came and said: “let’s build a church here”. and then kniaz’, who lived in kniazhpogost, killed some girls … a girl was brought to kniaz’ to be eaten, the last remaining girl. every day kniaz’ ate one girl, alive. but george the victorious rode up on his white steed to see kniaz’. the mother and father of the girl are sobbing because it’s their last daughter and they’ve got to hand her over to kniaz’ to be eaten. everyone had already handed over their daughters and just the one girl from the wealthiest family was left. and so george the victorious arrived on his white horse and said to kniaz’: “you’re never going to eat anyone again!” kniaz’ toppled over, turned into a dragon and lay beneath the hooves of george’s horse. “victorious” means that he conquers everyone. and the dragon, that means kniaz’ who’d turned into a dragon, wrapped himself round the four legs of the horse. and george stabbed him with a bayonet, and the dragon died. and that’s how george saved the girl. she became tsarina aleksandra afterwards, after her marriage, she became tsarina aleksandra” [limerov 2005: 170-75]. most likely, the story as depicted on icons, which the narrator would have known, influenced the narration. the detail of the dragon entwining himself “around the horse’s four legs” while george stabs it with his “bayonet” (lance) reflects the iconic image, whereas in the vita st. george brings the defeated dragon to town and slays it with his sword before the people [senderovich 2002: 40]. the substitution of stepan velikopermskii with george the victorious is explicable if we bear in mind that both saints are known as fighters against paganism (the dragon commonly being seen as an allegory of paganism). furthermore, in christian iconography, st. george is seen as the protector of the church, here “represented as a female figure, as well as conqueror of the devil in dragon’s guise” [senderovich 2002: 32]. in this context, the motif of the duel between stefan of perm’ and pam (kniaz’) becomes a metaphor of the last eschatological battle between the archangel michael and the antichrist as dragon. subsequently, this plotline evolves through the accretion of literary motifs, such as blindness overcoming attacking pagans or a birch being felled. the analysis of these motifs is, however, beyond the scope of the current article. the second plotline constitutes a development of the plot about the sorcerers and the boiling wort: there once lived two brothers, kört aika and kniaz’. kniaz’ lived in kniazhpogost and kört aika lived in kortkeros. however much you beat him, kört aika did not give in; his body was made of iron. his body was of iron; therefore the village is called kortkeros, the iron mountain. people tried to catch him and even stabbed him, but no blood came out – he was iron. kniaz’ too was very strong. every day, he would brew a vat of sur [beer] and drink it. once he was brewing some sur when stepan of perm’ came sailing down the river emva on a large rock, right past kniazhpogost. and he st. stefan of perm’ folklorica 2010, vol. xv 17 shouted: ‘wort, stop!’ and the wort stopped boiling. but kniaz’ also shouted: ‘if the wort is going to stop, then stepan must stop!’ and stepan stopped right there in the middle of the emva. then kniaz’ called out: ‘it would seem that this one is stronger than me. i’ve been boiling this up for a long time, and still it hasn’t turned into sur!’ and then suddenly he plunged into the vat and emerged in the emva. and then he went all the way to kortkeros. and there were two of them, brothers, who often went to visit each other on foot or by boat. and kniaz’ said: ‘i’ll go to see my brother and ask why stepan is a more powerful sorcerer than us. kniaz’ left, and stepan sailed away to ust’-vym’. this is the story my father told me [rochev 1984: 70-71]. this text is interesting because here instead of poma-pam, stepan appears in the role of boatman, and turns out to be a more powerful sorcerer than the two brewers. stepan does not simply take pam’s place here; rather he himself becomes pam (cf. pan – ste-pan), while pomapam represents the personification of kniaz’ and is ousted to the riverside where he functions as one of the brewers. we have the magic dialogue between stepan and kniaz’ resulting in the traditional stalemate, but the image of stepan brings new meanings that are totally uncharacteristic of the traditional sorcery text. the plot is located in the much broader context of the theme of christianization. this automatically places the text among the genre of legends. as a consequence, the narrative incorporates typical legendary motifs, such as the baptism of pagans or sailing on a rock to ust’-vym’, the center of the future diocese. within the given text, as in other texts about stepan, these hagiographic constructs are not only symbols of stepan’s sanctity, but also form part of his magic power. stepan’s power is indisputable, and so, despite their equal knowledge of charms and magic formulae, kniaz’ has to admit defeat. stepan moves beyond the barrier created by magic. this is an important transformational moment in the development of the narrative. a semantic shift occurs that destroys the original story line, resulting in a new narrative theme in which the magic barrier set up by the brewer is overcome by the man in the boat. in principle, as far as the plot is concerned, it is irrelevant whether stepan is on the bank or in a boat, but folkloric tradition connects him with sailing [limerov 2008: 191-213]. given stefan’s image, other solutions are impossible: the plot conflict develops according to the genre criteria of legends. as a result of this, the motivations for the magic contest change – now kniaz’ as pagan sorcerer opposes stepan, the christian magus, with the victory of the latter interpreted as the triumph of christianity. folklorica 2010, vol. xv 18 there are two further observations to be made about the narrative line; it includes two additional apparently unconnected motifs: the brotherhood of kortaika and kniaz’ and the underwater journey through the vat of beer. the motif of brotherhood arrived in this text from earlier plots, in which the protagonists opposed each other as equals. here on the one hand it shows the pagan forces united, and on the other, underlines stepan’s power, pitted against these combined forces. the motif of pagans joining forces against stepan is fairly common in vym’ legends about stefan, and is also found in the hagiographic texts. in the case of the motif of the sorcerer’s underwater journey, this is typical for komi magic narratives. in the folk tradition of the komi, sorcerers, particularly those living in the olden days, possessed the ability to rule the waters, so long distance underwater travel forms a part of their magic abilities. transferred to the texts about stepan, the underwater journey becomes the pagan way of traveling as opposed to the christian one. the christian hero travels on the surface, as illustrated by the account of the duel between stepan and paliaika, a sorcerer from the village of tydor. according to the race rules, the sorcerer had to swim under water from one village to another, while stepan had to go over the water [limerov 2005: 176]. as stefan of perm’ is considered the apostle of all the komi people, it is not surprising that texts about him are found over a wide area, even including regions he never visited. apart from the vym’ and vychegda river regions where he did go, legends about him are also found in the upper pechora, upper vychegda, on the river mezen’, and even around the river kama. as a result, the number of opponents whom stepan is obliged to fight increases. the legend about meleika recorded by p. g. doronin in 1929 illustrates this point well. it was recorded in the river mezen’ area, and in it stepan’s opponent is a sorcerer called meleika (lit. the bogatyr from melei) from the mezen’ village of melent’evo (in komi: melei): stepan is floating down the river mozyn (komi for mezen’) and sees from a distance that on the bank of the river the tun meleika is preparing wort for beer. stepan shouts out: “wort, stop; wort, do not flow!” in response meleika says to stepan who is coming closer to the bank: “if the wort stops, then boat, you stop as well!” and meleika’s wort and stepan’s boat stopped at the same time. the spells were equally powerful. then stepan said, “wort, run!” “if the wort runs, then your boat will too,” said meleika. and the wort flowed and the boat moved forward. again, the spells were equal. when stepan was about to land, meleika blocked his way with the following words: “i know why you’re coming. leave us alone, go back home. you know my strength; st. stefan of perm’ folklorica 2010, vol. xv 19 you can’t stand up against me.” “i’m not afraid of you,” said stepan and began to tie up at the bank. then meleika began to scream like an animal, and to hurl arrows at stepan and throw all kinds of things at him. stepan cast a spell on his attacker’s weapons and meleika’s arrows and blows became harmless. he warned his companions not to let meleika get to the river, as all his magic power came from water. seeing that his way to the river was blocked, meleika rushed to his vat of hot wort and pronounced a spell over it, so that it cooled down. then he jumped into the vat uttering a spell as he did: “my wort, my wort of grain, help me against my enemies!” the wort started to seethe and foam and to overflow, flooding the whole area. stepan’s companions were afraid and went to return to the boat, while meleika laughed a nasty malicious laugh as they retreated. stepan said, “it’s too early to celebrate, oh sorcerer,” and placed a counter spell on the fire and the wort: “fire, blaze, and wort, boil!” stepan’s spell worked. meleika sprang from the vat scalded and ran off to the river shouting. stepan’s companions again blocked his way and started to hack at him with their axes. meleika fell to the ground but was not dead yet. they went on striking him until meleika himself suggested cutting off the lower part of his body to ease his suffering. meleika was buried at that place and his grave laid with stones. [limerov 2005: 333] it should be noted that in the traditional plotline which features the motif of the boiling wort, the highlight of the magic contest is the dialogue between boatman and brewer, which establishes the magic powers of each. in fact, the essence of the contest lies precisely in the dialogue. after exchanging magical formulae and establishing each other’s strength, the opponents go their own way and the story ends. the topic of conversion, associated with the image of stepan, requires the plot to develop and conclude with the saint’s mandatory victory, or else the conversion of the enemy. however, the semantic framework of the magic dialogue is too constraining for this, and so tradition seeks additional motivations for stepan’s victory and finds them in the development of the traditional plot through the addition of elements like a demonstration of the opponent’s magic powers and their neutralization by the saint, or the demonization of the antagonist, or else the motif of the sorcerer’s difficult death. in this way, the narrative structure of the legend becomes more complex, the plot of the narrative expanding through the addition of reciprocal magical actions by the characters. these in effect also become a manifestation of the magic contest. as a result, the plot structure of the narrative emerges as a combination of two major plot elements, dialogue and magic contest, united by the theme of the trial of magic powers (etshas’em). formally that scheme is similar to the scheme of the apologetic plot highlighted above, which consists of dialogue and ordeal, folklorica 2010, vol. xv 20 united by trial of faith. the difference between the two is that that the trials of faith and of magic power are not equal. if the first theme presumes the idea of personal faith and god’s help, the second depends on the existence of personal magic qualities and skills. because of this, pam and st. stefan of perm’ see the meaning of the ordeal differently; stefan considers it a judgment from god, whom he serves devotedly; while for pam it is a magic contest and it is the absence in his personal fund of skills and knowledge of charms for fire and water that forces him to accept failure. it is, therefore, impossible to talk a “semantic field shared by russian and komi cultures, in which the depicted confrontation looks completely credible” [kotylev 2008: 124]. while not doubting the historical likelihood of the events described by epifanii, i would note, however, that the semantic fields of russian christian culture and the pagan culture of the komi were utterly different at that time, leading both monk and sorcerer to evaluate the events differently. from the point of view of stefan, his enemy pam was a vassal of god like himself, albeit a disloyal one, while for pam stefan was a sorcerer, but more powerful [uliashev 1997: 8]. as has been seen, folklore supports pam’s point of view and portrays stefan as a sorcerer and conjurer of the elements. the folkloric stepan competes with other sorcerers, and so, paradoxically, the motif of the magic challenge enters christian legend. further development of this plot results in the loss of the traditional dialogue, apparently because it hampered the narrative dynamics. as the magic significance of the formulae ceased to be understood by narrators, the dialogue very often comes simply to be seen as the starting point for the plot. new variants have appeared in the narrative cycle about the kortkeros sorcerer kortaika alongside texts with the dialogue between boatman and brewer. in these, the boatman is stopped by a chain stretched across the river, as a short example shows: “kort-aika wouldn’t let anyone through. he ate people. he only let those people through, who had given him a lot of pelts of fur-bearing animals. and his river was blocked. only stefan of perm’ could get through. and after that people began to celebrate st. stefan’s day. that’s how the village kortkeros came into being” [uotila 1995: 330]. in the more developed versions of this narrative, the sorcerer blocks the river with an iron chain, which stepan has to destroy before sailing on. this magic chain could only be broken by stronger magic. being an object of exceptional magical strength, the cross is what stepan uses. he hits the chain with the cross and it breaks. the same motif is found in st. stefan of perm’ folklorica 2010, vol. xv 21 legends about the pechora sorcerer kyska [limerov 2005:186]. in the absence of magical dialogue the plot is realized according to a different principle. the plot-making motif here is the journey by water, undertaken by stepan for missionary purposes. the concept of an accidental meeting, characteristic for texts with magical dialogue, is eliminated. here, by contrast, stepan has deliberately set off on a journey to meet the pagan sorcerer and, the story focuses on a detailed description of the magical contest. the story also has additional motifs from sorcery epic: the sorcerer turns into a giant pike and a bear; he swims underwater (paliaika); he goes fishing in a place where he will not miss stepan; he has a difficult death, and only stepan knows how to alleviate his death pangs. in the case of meleika, stepan recommends that his belt be cut; he indicates how kyska, whom a spell protects, should be hit with an axe (by swinging it away from the body) and how to shoot an arrow at oshlapei in a special way. one may also add the motif whereby the place where a sorcerer dies becomes a toponym: the village of oshlap’e is founded where oshlapei died; kortkeros where kört aika fell, while stepan builds a church and the troitse-pechorskii monastery where kyska died. the dialogue between boatman and brewer does, however, survive in the general fund of plot motifs and is used by tradition in a number of legends about sorcerers’ trials [paniukov 2009: 127-32]. outside the theme of trials this motif does not have a function, as recorded variants from the neighboring vologda region reveal a deep deformation of the meaning: there exists a popular belief that certain peasants, who are not sorcerers and healers, wanting to do some harm to someone, when they go into a house while beer is being brewed can ‘stop the wort’ just by thrice uttering the phrase ‘boat stop and wort stop’. people are convinced that after these words the wort stops flowing from the vat. and if somebody wants to stop the process of oil being pressed from seeds, then he says: ‘boat stop and oil stop!’ three times. they also assert that after these words have been uttered three times, oil will stop coming out of the seeds [russkie krest’iane 2008: 43].(4) the conversion of the komi to christianity in the late fourteenth century marked the beginning of a dialogue between russian christian written and komi pagan oral traditions. for the russians, participation in the dialogue meant the christian salvation of a pagan people and the political control of muscovy over the vast territories of perm’. for the permians, engagement in dialogue was very probably also politically folklorica 2010, vol. xv 22 motivated. leaving aside the ecclesiastical and political aspects, it should be admitted that dialogue was only made possible thanks to the development of an appropriate conceptual apparatus, enabling the participants to understand each other. the initial impetus was created by stefan of perm’s translations into permian of the basic tenets and beliefs of christianity. the complexity of stefan’s mission lay not just in the accuracy of his translated texts, but more that the translation required the creation of semantic equivalents for christian images in a non-christian tradition that was in no way prepared for them. for their part, in order to accept and adopt these new concepts, the permians devised their own semantic equivalents by drawing on their own cultural symbolism. the key image signifying the point of contact between the two traditions was that of stefan of perm’. russian tradition expressed its own understanding and acceptance of perm’ in his vita, which is both a biography of stefan and the history of his voyage to perm’. over a long period the image created by the creative genius of epifanii premudryi consolidated its hold on the permians and their land, but the main thing is that this image was accepted by muscovite rus’. for its part, permian tradition expresses its own understanding of stefan’s image and activities in a series of folkloric texts about christianization. in this interpretation russia accepts perm’. thus, a dialogue between christian russia and pagan perm’ became possible, and russia made a first step into eurasia. the integration of stefan’s image into the pagan system of komi culture could not have happened all at once, and should instead be construed as a long process of assimilation and appropriation of a new semantic field. as a result the system underwent such radical reconfiguration that its initial parameters were changed. the image of stefan fulfilled the function of attractor, the semantic field of which modeled a new systemic organisation of culture, attracting at its base the semantic structures of both russian orthodoxy and the old pagan system. at the same time, the reconfigured system itself as it progressed altered the image of stefan in accordance with its needs. the semantic range of this image is quite wide and includes both meanings associated with general russian conceptions of saints and sanctity plus certain hagiographic traits of st. stefan, as well as those associated with the remnants of pagan belief. as a result, in different texts stefan acts as a saint or a sorcerer, and sometimes both at once. the choice of one or other meaning is determined by the preferences of local tradition, but it should, however, be remarked that it is the magic dominant of stefan’s image that prevails. the basic concepts were recoded, such that stefan’s st. stefan of perm’ folklorica 2010, vol. xv 23 saintly ascesis was assimilated by pagans as a demonstration of great magic power; thus a new semantic equivalent of stefan was created that corresponded to the semantic norms of tradition. accordingly, the key scenes representing the clash between the two religions are described in the literary and folk traditions by different means. on the one hand, we have a socratic dialogue between stefan and pam, complicated by the motif of the trial of faith, but on the other, plots about magic contests where stepan takes part in tests of sorcery. moreover, many of the legends in the stefan cycle exist freely in the broad narrative tradition of the komi, conventionally defined as “magic epic”, meaning the whole set of folk narrative texts about sorcerers, including magic contests. notes 1 what is more, the boundary between literary fact and historical reality may be highly unstable. in the mid-seventeenth century, a close associate of the archpriest avvakum summoned his opponent (a supporter of patriarch nikon) to a trial by fire. that may have been just a rhetorical flourish on avvakum’s part, but all too soon his followers, the old believers, were to choose self-immolation, seeing it as a test of their faith. 2 all texts in komi have been translated by the author. 3 n. a. krinichnaia also notes the identification of pans with brigands [krinichnaia 1987: 107]. 4 as described by the peasant papa sobanin from the village monastyrikhi, berezhnoslobodskaia volost’, totemskii uezd. the author is grateful to o.v. belova for pointing out this source. bibliography ankudinova, m. a. and v. v. filippova, (comps.). 2005. анкудинова, м.а.и в.в. филиппова, (сост.). историческая память в устных преданиях коми: материалы [historical memory in komi oral legends]. сыктывкар: изд-во сыктывкарского гос. ун-та. averintsev, s. s. 1997. аверинцев, с.с. поэтика ранневизантийской литературы [the poetics of early byzantine literature]. москва: кода. averintsev, s. s. 2006. аверинцев, 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[russian historical folk prose: problems of genesis and structure]. ленинград: наука. limerov, p. f., (comp.) 2005. лимеров, п.ф. (сост.). му пуксьöм – сотворение мира. [creation of the world]. сыктывкар: коми книжное изд-вo. limerov, p. f. 2008. лимеров, п.ф. образ св. стефана пермского в письменной традиции и в фольклоре народа коми. [the image of stefan of perm’ in komi written tradition and folklore]. москва: наука. lytkin, g. s. 1889. лыткин, г.с. зырянский край при епископах пермских и зырянский язык. [the zyrian land in the time of the permian bishops and the zyrian language].санкт-петербург: тип. имп. академии наук. lytkin, v. i and e. s. guliaev, (eds). 1999. лыткин, в.и., гуляев е.с., (ред.). краткий этимологический словарь коми языка. [concise st. stefan of perm’ folklorica 2010, vol. xv 25 etymological dictionary of the komi language] сыктывкар: коми книжное изд-во. miurchu moccu machteni. 2006. мурьху мокку махтени. “житие святого патрика.” [life of st. patrick], в одиссей. человек в истории. с. в. оболенская, в. и. уколова, а. л. ястребицкая, (ред.). москва: наука, 363-90. malinowski, bronislaw. 1954. magic, science and religion: and other essays. garden city, ny: doubleday anchor books. nalimov, v. p. 1903. налимов, в.п. “зырянская легенда о паме шыпиче” [the zyrian legend about pam shypicha]. этнографическое обозрение, 2: 120-24 paniukov, a. v. 2009. панюков, а.в. динамика развития коми фольклорных традиций в контексте теории самоорганизации. [the dynamics of development of komi folklore traditions in the context of the theory of self-organization]. сыктывкар: изд-во коми нц уро ран. picchio, r. 2002. пиккио, р. история древнерусской литературы. [history of early russian literature]. москва: круг. poroshkin, m. s, b. 1906. записи порошкина м.с. 1906 г.р. фонд национального музея республики коми [archive of the national museum of the komi republic] 199. л.219-20. prokhorov, g. m., (comp.) 1995. прохоров, г.м., (сост.). святитель стефан пермский. санкт-петербург: глагол. prokhorov, g. m. 2008. прохоров, г.м. “предисловие переводчика” [translator’s foreword] кантакузин и. беседа с папским легатом. против иудеев и другие сочинения, сост., вступит. статья, комментарии и перевод с греч. г.м.прохорова. санктпетербург: «алетейя». rochev, iu. g. 1982. рочев, ю.г. “жанры несказочной прозы” [nontale prose genres]. на кнц ф.5, оп 2, д.279. л.57. rochev, iu. g., (comp.) 1984. рочев, ю.г., (сост.). коми легенды и предания. [komi religious and other legends]. сыктывкар: коми книжное изд-во. russian peasants. 2008. русские крестьяне. жизнь. быт. нравы. материалы “этнографического бюро” князя в.н. тенишева. [russian peasants. life. family life. mores. materials of prince v.n. tenishev’s ethnographic bureau]. т. 5, кн.. 4. вологодская губерния. санкт-петербург. senderovich, s. ia. 2002. сендерович, с.я. георгий победоносец в русской культуре [st. george in russian culture]. москва: аграф. folklorica 2010, vol. xv 26 sidorov, a. s. 1997. сидоров а.с. знахарство, колдовство и порча у народа коми. [magic healing, sorcery, and spoiling among the komi]. санкт-петербург: «алетейя». uliashev, o. i. 1997. уляшев, о.и. “образ стефана пермского в традиционных представлениях коми.” [тhe image of stefan of perm’ in the traditional imagination of the komi], в научные доклады коми нц уро ран. сыктывкар, 385 uotila, т. е. 1995. “syrjänische texte.” [zyrian texts] memoires de la société finno-ougrienne iv. helsinki: suomalais-ugrilainen seura. vlasov, a. n. 1996a. власов, а.н. “миссия русской православной церкви в пермском крае” [mission of the russian orthodox church in perm’], в история пермской епархии в памятниках письменности и устной прозы. а.н. власов, (ред.). сыктывкар: изд-во сыктывкарского гос. ун-та, 4-58. vlasov, a. n., (ed.) 1996b. власов, а.н., (ред.). “повесть о стефане пермском” [tale of stefan of perm’], в история пермской епархии в памятниках письменности и устной прозы. сыктывкар: изд-во сыктывкарского гос. ун-та, 61-70. wigzell, f. 1971. уигзелл, ф. “цитаты из книг 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setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice folklorica full 2021_edit 6.28.22 protesting retrospectively folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 21 protesting retrospectively: oral memories and social practices of migrants from the areas of artificial water reservoirs in soviet ukraine iryna koval-fuchylo rylsky institute of art studies, folklore, and ethnology kyiv, ukraine abstract between the 1920s and the 1980s, soviet ukraine saw six large hydroelectric power plants constructed on the dnipro river and one on the dnister river. (1) the projects necessitated the creation of artificial water reservoirs, resulting in the destruction of a large number of old villages. the residents of these places were forcibly resettled. in the 1960s and 1970s, a time period that constitutes the main focus of this paper, the only form of protest to forcible resettlement was defiance: according to the state plan, while people were required to demolish their houses and build new ones in a specially designated place, many did not. any other form of protest was dangerous in a totalitarian state. the weakening and further collapse of the soviet regime altered the political climate, and ukraine has since witnessed numerous expressions of discontent in the forms of strikes, rallies, collective statements, etc. these experiences led to a rethinking of the soviet past and a search for protest where it previously had not existed. the present article focuses on narratives and social events that serve as creative responses to the forcible resettlement. it shows that these forms of protest have emerged as a result of changing perceptions of the feasibility of hydropower and an understanding of the losses caused by the flooding of forests, pastures, and farmlands. the present case study illustrates that protests, typically associated with immediate response to political events, can sometimes form retrospectively, and can be directly shaped by the processes of the formation and traditionalization of memory. introduction between 1927 and 1981, a number of hydroelectric power plants were constructed in soviet ukraine. six large plants were built on the dnipro river and one was erected on the dnister river. the projects necessitated the creation of artificial water reservoirs resulting in the destruction of a large number of old villages. the areas along the dnipro river alone saw the demolition of over 400 settlements [horbovyj 2012: 321]. my interlocutors frequently mention that people initially did not believe that it was even possible to flood their village, asking “where will the water come from?” or “where is the dnipro, and where are we?” when it became clear that flooding would occur, they had to accept the fact of resettlement and prepare for it. villages were relocated in a variety of ways. most often, a number of villages were merged into one. migrants could also resettle to other previously protesting retrospectively folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 22 existing villages. the villagers received plots of land where they could build a house. the state gave people money for construction, but the sums were small and insufficient. since such a large number of individuals and families were moved at the same time, building materials became scarce, and it was difficult to find contractors to undertake the construction. no special time for construction was allotted: individuals had to attend to their regular jobs and could only work on building their houses after work hours and on weekends. the relocation of villages from floodplains was a real disaster for their inhabitants. ukrainians, especially the elderly, are strongly attached to their land. (2) many villagers had already rebuilt their homes following the destruction caused by world war ii and had established a relatively normal life. the mass relocation of entire villages was a difficult event, especially for senior residents. the real heartbreak was the relocation of cemeteries. according to popular ukrainian belief, the dead must not be disturbed, and yet the villagers were now faced with the need to rebury previous generations. this act was perceived both as contempt for the dead and a danger to the living. moreover, the physical appearance of new villages was not like the original ones. the old villages were located in picturesque spots near rivers, springs, lakes, straits, and forests, while the new villages were built in open areas, “in the steppe,” as people often remember today. in the 1960s and 1970s, a time period that constitutes the main focus of this paper, the only form of protest to forcible resettlement was defiance: according to the state plan, while people were required to demolish their houses and build new ones in a specially designated place, many did not. any other form of protest was dangerous in a totalitarian state. moreover, people were wary of outright protest against the forced relocation at the time, as state repressions, the holodomor (the state-manufactured famine of the mid-1930s), and the horrors of wartime were all still part of recent memory. while reflecting on the situation retrospectively today, many victims of the soviet resettlement initiatives justify the lack of active protest at the time with a rhetorical question: “what would it [protest] achieve? we couldn’t change anything.” that is, no one protested, because it would not change the decision “from above” to flood these lands. the political climate began to change in the final years of the soviet regime, and, since ukraine’s declaration of independence, the country has witnessed numerous expressions of discontent in the forms of strikes, rallies, collective statements, etc. these post-soviet experiences led to a rethinking of the soviet past and the search for protest where it previously had been impossible. this article focuses on contemporary narratives and social events that serve as creative responses to forcible resettlement. i show that these forms of protest have emerged as a result of changing perceptions of the feasibility of hydropower and an understanding of the losses caused by the flooding of forests, pastures, and farmland. while protests are typically associated with an immediate response to political events, the present case study illustrates that they can sometimes emerge retrospectively and be directly shaped by the processes of the formation and traditionalization of memory. protesting retrospectively folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 23 this study is based on fieldwork, including participant observation and personal interviews, as well as published sources. between 2012 and 2021, i conducted oral history interviews with individuals who had resettled from villages surrounding the dnipro river in the kyiv, cherkasy, kirovohrad, and poltava regions in the 1960s and from villages along the dnister river in the khmelnytsky region in the 1980s. i also consulted published memoirs by authors who describe their village resettlement [sorokova 2015: mykhnyak 2018; mykhnyak 2020; kostiukova and yevtushenko 2010]. (3) in addition, i observed numerous social gatherings commemorating forcible resettlements. these include annual or occasional meetings of former villagers beginning in the year 2000, the establishment of monuments and museums devoted to the flooded villages, and social swimming events known as “the roaring dnipro.” the idea of retrospective resistance to forced resettlement appeared prominently and repeatedly in this research. in what follows, i attempt to trace some trajectories of its formation. oral memories: the images of old man and old woman researchers of oral history are well aware of the fact that all memories eventually undergo review, editing, and rethinking. these processes are clearly marked in the memories of resettlement from the flood zones. despite the constant variability of memories, remoteness in time causes what folklorist stepan myshanych calls “epic distance.” that is to say, there is a stability of autobiographical stories about a certain important event in the life of a person or community, by which memories acquire a “traditional form” [myshanych 1986: 5]. when asked about protest, various narrators frequently communicated a story about an old man and an old woman who refused to relocate. when their former village was flooded, the couple was trapped on the roof of their house and had to be rescued, either by boat or helicopter. the recurring images and the repetition of similar motifs give grounds to classify these narratives as folklore. i view this story as a verbal traditionalized form of resistance. through the use of this formula, present-day narrators infer protest during the time of resettlement. it does not matter to the narrators in which village this happened or who the old couple were. what is important is to know and tell others that there had been brave people who had not been afraid to resist the totalitarian system, had refused to leave their land, and, unlike the rest of their fellow villagers, protested against the resettlement of their village. they refused to relocate, claiming that they were prepared to drown rather than leave their home territory. here are some examples of such accounts. antonina fedorivna motailo shared the following story: одна баба з дідом у самовиці…зробили землянку і в землянку увели корову і сами жили в землянці. і отаким хмизом накрили, бо воно в лісі, красіво. а тоді ж видали себе, бо топили, а там же димарь. а комисія як ходила, то найшли, то уже в послідню очередь їх переселяли. а хто не хотів хати валять, то валяли бульдозером protesting retrospectively folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 24 уже последнє время, бо надо було срочно, бо вже літом, ото весною в [19]59-ім до червня місяця всіх виселили. а після червня, хто не виселявся – нахально уже ходила комисія, провіряла, де хто є, всіх виселяли. вопше! [one old man and woman in samovytsa…made a dugout house and took a cow into the dugout and lived in the dugout. and they covered it nicely with bushes, because it was in the forest. but then they gave themselves away, because they were burning wood for heat, and there was a chimney. and as the commission was going through, they found them, and relocated them at the last minute. and those who did not want to demolish their houses, their houses were demolished with bulldozers at the last minute, because it was urgently necessary, because by summer, or in the spring of 1959, by june, everyone had been evicted. and after june, whoever hadn’t resettled, the commission boldly went through, checked where everyone was, and resettled everyone. what a shame!] [afm, 15 may 2012]. mariia ivanivna hrechka related a similar, albeit shorter, account: казали, шо там уже затопляли, а дід і баба не хотіли переселяться, казали: «лучче ми потонемо». то не знаю, чи їх виселили, чи вони потонули. люди не хотіли ніяк. [they said that they were already flooding that area, and an old man and old woman did not want to move, they said: “we’d rather drown.” i don't know if they were resettled or if they drowned. people did not want to [move out] [mih 19 may 2012]. the following is an excerpt from my (ікф/ikf conversation with mykhailo lohvynovych chepynoha (млч/mlch), who also refers to an old couple: млч: було в районі, шо дєдушка один і баба осталися і сказали: «не підемо і все». село уже залило, а вони на хаті сидять. ікф: то в якому селі? млч: кажись, у придніпровському… a може, й демки. [mlch: it happened in the region where an old man and old woman remained and said: “we will not go and that's all.” the village was already flooded, and they were sitting on their house. ikf: so, in which village? protesting retrospectively folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 25 mlch: it seems, in prydniprovske… or maybe demky] [chml, 19 august 2014]. nadiia illivna zhmen’ko did not specify the age of the people, but her narrative conveys a similar motif: там даже було таке, шо чула, те, що бувало, шо сиділи даже люди, не хотіли виселяться, шо сиділи даже на криші своєї хати. їх примусово знімали звідти і вивозили. [there was also something i heard, something that happened, that people were even sitting, they didn’t want to move out, that they were even sitting on the roof of their house. they were forcibly removed from there and taken away]. [nizh, 2 august 2014] it is not only oral memories but also publications devoted to the flooded villages that provide similar references. for example, kostiukova and yevtushenko write, “the water came quickly, but in each village, there were certain owners who stayed in their homeland till the very end, even dug a dugout house in the tract above the reservoir and lived there for ages” [kostiukova and yevtushenko 2010: 4]. the generalized motif of an old couple protesting the resettlement was formed retrospectively under the influence of certain interrelated factors, including traditional rural beliefs and worldviews, soviet-era propaganda at the time of resettlement, and present-day reflections on the event. i explore these influences in the subsequent sections. traditional beliefs and worldviews oral history not only sheds light on past events but also often reflects and communicates particular beliefs and worldviews surrounding the events. the formation of the image of an old couple who resisted resettlement can be partly explained by the additional challenges that resettlement brought to the elderly. these challenges are frequently addressed both in oral histories and written memoirs. for example, mykola yukhymovych chyrkov explains why older people found it much harder to relocate than their younger family members and neighbors: “оці старі люди, які переселилися на оце поле, – робить нема чого, для них безділля таке, вони з ума сходять, нема ні деревинки, нічого немає” [these old people who have relocated to this field – there is nothing for them to do, for them there is just idleness, they go crazy, there is not even a tree [in a new village], there is nothing] [myuch, 22 june 2019]. similarly, during our interview, andrii petrovych berezhnyi points out that the destruction of their houses was often the hardest factor for the elderly to accept. when i asked him whether he had heard of anyone mourning for their house, he replied, “та канєшна плакали. так жаліли баби, діди за тим…” yes, of course they wept protesting retrospectively folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 26 [for the destroyed houses]. the old women and old men felt so sorry about that] [apb, 19 may 2012]. written accounts include similar remarks stressing that resettlement resulted in a deterioration in the health of the elderly. for example, mykhniak writes, “my grandfather could not forget his land. my grandmother could not handle those difficulties and died” [2018: 219]. similarly, kostiukova and yevtushenko point out, “it was very difficult psychologically for the old people to leave the place, and the younger, healthier ones adapted faster” [2010: 72]. the paired image of old man and woman in memoirs and in ukrainian folklore is very common. “once upon a time, lived an old man and old woman...” is a typical beginning for ukrainian and other slavic folk tales. in ukrainian, the same word is used to denote old man and grandfather and old woman and grandmother. in these narrative accounts, the old man [did, didus’, less often diedushka] is always a positive character (i will discuss the grandmother motif in more detail below). my hypothesis is that the positive folk characters of the old man (and old woman) on the roof of a house protesting the destruction of their village has arisen in contemporary memories because, in the narrative tradition, the characters of grandparents are always positive. the grandfather is strongly connected with the land, is a caring master of his household, a skilled craftsman, and a knowledgeable benefactor for children. the titular did [grandfather, old man] became the basis for the word pradidivs’kyi [great-grandfather’s], which, in the memories, appears in the phrase pradidivs’ka zemlia [great-grandfather’s land], as exemplified in the following passage: “the village of zarubyntsi was evicted completely off their original great-grandfather’s lands” [sorokova 2015: 6]. the claim of the loss of land is the most important argument for the modern characterization of resettlement as an unjust, ill-considered decision, which led to greater losses than gains. mykhailo lohvynovych chepynoha points out in this regard: такі землі затопить! дуже шкода. хай те васюгання, шо казали, там вічна мерзлота, хай би оте затопляли, а такі землі – поспішили. поспішили, бо було на ура: «дайош електрику, п’ятирічки!» і на дніпрі, придніпров’я – шість електростанцій потужних! це ж багато дуже. дуже багаті землі. [how could they flood such lands! it is such a pity. let that area of vasiuhannia, where they say, it is permanently frozen, let that place be flooded. they [the state leaders] hurried because there was a cry: “give me electricity. the five-year plan!” and on the dnipro, in prydniprov’ia – there are six mighty power plants! that’s a lot. these were very fertile lands] [mlch, 19 august 2014]. the word pradid [great-grandfather] often appears in resettlement narratives to imply a close relationship to the land on which previous generations lived. for example, oleksandr hryhorovych nykuliak points out, “це пам’ятник нашим protesting retrospectively folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 27 пра-пра-пра-прадідам. це наше село. це хата була, а в кінці города текла річка” [this is a monument to our great-great-great-great-grandparents. this is our village. here is where our house was, and at the end of the garden the river flowed] [ohn, 18 july 2014]. connection with the land communicates a memory of the agricultural labor of the male representatives of previous generations, and their land management, as exemplified in the following written memories: “the people of zarubynci were engaged in never-ending agricultural work” [sorokova 2015: 19] and “grandfather was a master. he had a mill, an apiary with 30 hives, he made wooden objects, all this with his own hands” [myhniak 2018: 210]. the list of stereotypical characteristics connected with the grandfather figure include wisdom, experience, unusual skills, and knowledge of various historical and everyday situations. narrators often refer to the decisions of their grandfathers as correct, worthy of praise, and their deeds and actions as fit for imitation: “grandfather vasyl could read the fate of people in the stars and predict the course of events and natural phenomena” [mykhniak 2018: 172]. furthermore, an important feature of the grandfather figure is his friendly relationship with children: “my grandfather hryhoriy and i went and brought the sheaves home and threshed them” [sorokova 2015: 41]. the image of the grandmother [baba, babusia, less often – babunia, babka, babushka] in the memories is often paired with the figure of the grandfather but has its own original features. the grandmother is closely connected with the house. she is a caregiver who provides shelter and food. for example, sofia ihorivna hych remembers, “нас шестеро! і всі рвем щавель, і баба варить нам борщ” [there were six of us! and we all picked sorrel, and grandmother cooked us borshch] [sih, 21 june 2019]. the role of the grandmother appears to be especially prominent in the memories of the post-world war ii period. since many men were killed in battle, women (including grandmothers) were forced to do both men’s work in the field and women’s work in the home. (4) for example, while describing her grandmother, sokolova shares the following memory: “like all widows, grandmother liuda did both women’s and men’s work” [2015: 138]. in the narratives, the grandmothers are very hard-working; they are also masters of folk crafts, often weavers or embroiderers, as illustrated by the following recollections: “grandmother antonina put a machine in the house and weaved cloth” [sorokova 2015: 121] and “grandmother was gentle, goodnatured, calm, knew how to embroider well” [sorokova 2015: 163]. like grandfathers, grandmothers are often friendly with children, and also often play a central role in their upbringing. sofiia ihorivna hych remembers: “нас воспитувала баба. мама, батько всігда на роботі.” [we were raised by our grandmother. mother and father were always at work] [sih, 21 june 2019]. furthermore, grandmothers are depicted as knowledgeable individuals who share interesting stories about the past and family. they are also seen as the carriers of traditions and beliefs. nadiia illivna zhmen’ko remembers her grandmother in the following way: protesting retrospectively folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 28 я пам’ятаю, баба розказувала, ніколи в житті не можна прив’язувати себе до кладовища, – шо не можна отак, як оце зараз: осьо людина лежить, і біля неї місце залишене. [i remember, my grandmother told me, never in your life should you tie yourself to a cemetery, you can’t do as it is done now: here lies one person, and near it another place is kept [referring to the contemporary practice of reserving a place in the cemetery]]. [nizh, 2 august 2014] considering the views of both grandmother and grandfather figures in traditional rural culture, it is not surprising that it is precisely this image that has become a prominent traditionalized motif in retrospective protest narratives about the resettlement of flooded villages. the influence of propaganda whether they are communicated implicitly or explicitly, the images of an old man and an old woman, or that of old people in general, is prominent not only in the folk worldview but also in the mass propaganda associated with the soviet resettlement initiatives. considering the overall resistance to relocation, the state had to resort to propaganda campaigns involving officials, activists, artists, and a variety of other creative forms including song writing and cinematography. people had to be convinced that a better life would begin in a new place and that relocation was necessary for the good of the whole country. thus newlycomposed songs appeared dedicated to the construction of hydroelectric power plants. one example is “дніпрельстан” [dniprel’stan], written in the 1930s by iaroslav hrymailo (1906–1984) [nud’ha 1960: 171–172, 371]. hrymailo, who describes the dnipro as “proud rebel,” writes that on the banks of this rebellious river came detachments of workers to convert the power of the dnipro into electricity and to force the river to also become a worker. another similar creation, “пісня про каховське море” [song about the kakhovka sea], was written by the famous ukrainian poet-singer teren’ (terentiy) germanovych masenko (1903– 1970) in 1952 and published in masenko’s collection of poems весняні журавлі [spring cranes] in 1956 [nud’ha 1960: 372]. in this song, the creation of artificial reservoirs is presented as a victory over dry winds, the realization of dreams, and, owing to these changes, the dnipro will flow in a new way. the idea of conquering the dnipro, fighting the elements, and claiming victory over nature did not resonate with the elderly; this attitude requires young, hard-working, and adventurous individuals. indeed, young people, as my interlocutors were at the time, often saw resettlement as an opportunity to move to a new home and to acquire new friends. at the time, many of them believed the propaganda about a new life and about how the dnipro would now serve the people. the idea that old people are not very open to change is not new in traditional culture. it is reflected in numerous proverbs and sayings. for example, the proverb “старе дерево не пересаджують, молоде дерево гнеться, а старе protesting retrospectively folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 29 ламається” [you cannot transplant an old tree, a young tree bends, but an old one breaks] implies that elderly people do not tolerate change well. in the official discourse on the necessity and usefulness of artificial reservoirs, senior residents were often portrayed as being guilty of resisting and delaying resettlement. they were frequently viewed as individuals who did not understand the importance of what ivan lukovych man’ko referred to as “державної ваги будівлі” [statewide significance of construction] [ilm, 31 july 2014]. this idea was clearly articulated by the renowned soviet ukrainian screenwriter and film producer, olexandr dovzhenko, in his screenplay поема про море [poem of the sea]. it was then further reinforced in the film of the same name, made in 1958 by yuliya solntseva, dovzhenko’s widow [solntseva 1958]. literary critics of the time presented the image of dovzhenko as a promoter of the new man-made sea. their main attention was focused on the “theme of glorifying the laborer” [koba 1979: 184], “the power of the human spirit” [pisarevsky 1959: 20], and the “renewal of nature” [ryl’sky 1959: 110] in connection with the construction of the dam and the artificial sea. discussion of these themes was no accident, as they are present in dovzhenko’s poem of the sea and in his diaries. it is obvious that this attitude was, so to speak, ordered by the state: to create a work that would glorify the new, monumental soviet construction. despite the intentions of the official propaganda machine behind dovzhenko’s work, he still skillfully managed to convey the popular perception of the flooded villages as a “new grief,” in line with the following entry in his diary: “i remember sn and his wife and the words ‘our new sea – our new grief.’ this is how the people talk about the sea” [dovzhenko 2004: 375]. (5) the screenplay and the subsequent film devoted much attention to the tragedies behind the construction of the hydroelectric power plants in the region. in the film, the tragedy is especially powerfully captured in a scene depicting an old woman mourning for her house. soviet creative works of this kind have reached many ukrainians. the relationship between traditional rural worldviews and professional cultural products at the time was undoubtedly reciprocal. in the case of oleksandr dovzhenko, his screenplay is informed by imagery from actual rural life while his creative product further reinforced this very imagery. noteworthy is this regard is dovzhenko’s other work, зачарована десна [the enchanted desna] written in 1956 [dovzhenko 1956] and then developed into a film by yulia solntseva [solntseva 1964]. while not related to the construction of hydroelectric powerplants, the enchanted desna, based on dovzhenko’s childhood memories, addresses the theme of natural flooding. it includes a scene showing villagers climbing onto the roofs of their houses in order to escape the rising water. considering the ongoing importance of dovzhenko’s legacy in ukrainian culture, it is safe to hypothesize that the image of the old couple on the roof of their flooded house in present-day narratives about resettlement could have at least partly been shaped by his work. protesting retrospectively folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 30 this fact gives me grounds to further hypothesize that, in addition to rural folk worldviews discussed in the previous section, soviet cultural products, often informed by traditional views, played a role in traditionalizing and solidifying the image of the old man and the old woman in present memories devoted to resettlement. it is not surprising that this image has now become a requisite symbol of protest against the loss of native villages. after half a century, this desperate resistance of the “little” person has become a poetic image of protest against the destructive system. in my opinion, the image of the old couple in these narrative accounts follows trajectories of formation that are similar to those of legends [e.g., degh 1996]. while they are undocumented and, thus, not historically verifiable, such accounts still carry the power of truth. it is the component of general contextual truth that has helped to solidify and traditionalize the old couple motif. present-day reflections on the past understandably, the soviet state authorities responsible for the construction of the hydroelectric power plants and the associated flooding were not interested in publicizing information about any potential problems. in addition to resettlement-driven trauma, this construction project was responsible for the destruction of “thousands of hectares of fertile chernozem [black earth],” for inhibiting wetland formation and the elimination of forests and habitat for birds and animals [koba 1979: 182]. it was not until the early 2000s, when various initiatives aimed at drawing public attention to the liquidation of villages, the destruction of fertile lands, and the loss of the historical memory, culture and identity of old settlements were organized in ukraine. today these initiatives include annual or occasional commemorative meetings of the former residents of flooded villages; exhibitions of photographs and publications about these sites; archiving and conservation of data on the flooded settlements in the forms of books and memorial markers (e.g., signs, crosses, and chapels); attempts to organize museums dedicated to the flooded villages; and the promotion of these activities and related information in the media. an excerpt from my conversation with vasyl mykytovych reveha (вмр/vmr) sheds light on the restoration of memory about this page in the history of the region as a very recent phenomenon: вмр: займатися вплотну комарівкою ми стали, коли вже діти почали працювати в музеї [в національному історикоетнографічнoму заповіднику “переяслав”]. ікф: як ви можете розказати про цю історію? […]. якось відновлюється пам'ять? бо, я так розумію, що тривалий час про ці села нічого не було. вмр: взагалі забули, що вони й були. ніхто ніде не згадував… protesting retrospectively folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 31 [vmr: we started working closely on komarivka [a flooded village] when the children began working in the museum [national historicethnographic reserve “pereyaslav”]. ikf: how can you tell this story? is the memory becoming restored somehow? as far as i understand, for a long time there was no information about these villages. vmr: in general, people forgot that they even existed. nobody mentioned it anywhere] [vmr, 20 june 2019]. what contributed to the growing interest in this page of history and the increasing need to commemorate the flooded villages? why were the collective resettlement experiences forgotten for such an extensive period of time and only now appear on the agenda of former villagers? while theorizing about commemoration of traumatic experiences, aleida assman, a scholar of collective memory, concludes that commemoration processes require that: […] a community of memory is developed that not only combines […a particular] anniversary date with specific concerns and a clear message but also succeeds in generating its message by having it anchored in relevant institutions. [assmann 2016a: 196-197]. recent initiatives of migrants from the flood zones reflect such endeavors. research on these initiatives should be considered in the context of changes in memorial culture in the wider european context. as assman points out: […] since the 1980s, more open forms of representation of history have emerged, and they blur the seemingly obvious distinction between fact and fiction, as well as between history and memory. what is new here is that individual experience is also recognized as an opportunity to understand the emotional and other equally important dimensions of history [assmann 2016b: 187]. my fieldwork experience with migrants from flooded areas and analysis of publications about flooded villages leads to the conclusion that contemporary symbolic forms of protest against flooding reflect the desire to preserve and construct the memory of former villages. this goal appears in the annotations to such publications, and even in their titles. examples include kostiukova and yevtushenko’s book title незатоплена пам’ять [unflooded memory] and mykhnyak’s description of his edited volumes as “a real spiritual memorial to the lost villages of trakhtemyriv and the monastyrok” [mykhnyak 2018: 4] and as “a kind of monument to them [the flooded villages]” [mykhnyak 2020: 6]. the semantics of protest are also visible in a symbolic memorial complex dedicated to flooded villages. for example, a monument to the villages of protesting retrospectively folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 32 khudiaky and taldyky, located in the current village of khudiaky, in the cherkasy region, opened on 14 october 2009. it depicts houses being demolished by a wave of water. this image emphasizes the semantics of destruction. it is important to remember that, in fact, no building was flooded or demolished by water because all the buildings were dismantled and used for the construction of new houses due to a shortage of new building materials at the time. it can be argued that the image on the monument either reflects a situation that has been psychologically experienced by the settlers or that it conveys the emotional side of history, blurring the boundary between fact and fiction, to put it in assmann’s terms. they interpret resettlement as destruction. mariia ivanivna ievtushenko reflects: “і мені дуже подобається він, цей пам’ятник: хати, ніби їх залива вода. хати – мов вони перекинулися, наче вони перекидаються на воді, ці хати” [and i really like it, this monument: the houses are flooded. houses, it is as if they are overturned, as if they were overturned on the water, these houses] [miie, 12 june 2021]. it is clear that human logic will always protest against unjustified destruction and annihilation, which is how migrants now interpret the flooding of their villages. this idea is apparent in the memories of my research participants. such considerations, as well as reflections on a possible return to the old place, a constant motive in the memories, are also an indirect, albeit retrospective, form of resistance to forced relocation. conclusion a temporal distance from an experienced event causes the formation of cultural memory about the past event in the collective consciousness. this memory defines a set of basic motifs, plots, and images. cultural memory in the course of history undergoes constant interpretation, discussion, and updating as its content is understood by future generations, and it must satisfy current needs and challenges. researchers of oral history identify two important trends characteristic of autobiographical memories. first, these memories are subject to new self-review, editing, censorship, and revaluation. what a person says about themselves today will be more or less different from their story in ten or twenty years. secondly, the content of self-presentation, vision, and evaluation of the past is influenced by social processes that occur in a particular time. these two characteristics of memories—variability and dependence on historical circumstances—are reflected in the stories about resettlement from villages flooded by the construction of reservoirs and hydroelectric power plants. these factors influence the images of protest against flooding and the resettlement of villages, albeit retrospectively. these are reflections on the (in)expediency of hydroelectric power station construction and flooding of surrounding lands, the construction of monuments and memorials to flooded villages, and the publication of books about these settlements. in oral memories, the idea of protest is embodied in the folkloric image of an old couple who refused to move and remained on the roof of their house until the flood arrived. the presence of such an image in the memories indicates a desire to disagree with the resettlement and flooding of protesting retrospectively folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 33 numerous villages and agricultural lands. whether verbal or action-driven, these forms of protest communicate the idea of resistance via people’s desire to preserve the memory of former villages. the present case study illustrates that protests, typically associated with immediate response to political events, can sometimes form retrospectively, and can be directly shaped by the processes of the formation and traditionalization of memory. notes 1 all geographic terms are transliterated from the official ukrainian spelling. 2 for more information, see [koval-fuchylo 2018]. 3 unless indicated otherwise, all translations from ukrainian and russian are my own. 4 while women did work in the fields, traditionally they spent most of their time tending gardens, caring for children, and doing other domestic work. 5 sn appears in the original. list of flooded villages bakota, kamyanets-podilsky region, khmelnytsky oblast calabarok, novogeorgievsky region, kirovograd oblast khudyaky, cherkasy region, cherkasy oblast komarivka, pereyaslav-khmelnytskyi region, kyiv oblast konylivka, kamyanets-podilskyi region, khmelnytskyi oblast kryvchany, kamyanets-podilskyi region, khmelnytskyi oblast morozivka, hlobyne region, poltava oblast penkivka, novogeorgievsky region, kirovograd oblast pidsinne, pereyaslav-khmelnytskyi region, kyiv oblast sahunivka, cherkasy region, cherkasy oblast skorodystyk, partially flooded, former irkliiv region, poltava oblast, now cherkasy oblast vyunyshche, pereyaslav-khmelnytskyi region, kyiv oblast zarubyntsi, pereyaslav-khmelnytskyi region, kyiv oblast protesting retrospectively folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 34 bibliography assmann, aleida. 2016a [2006]. shadows of trauma: memory and the politics of postwar identity, trasl. from german by sarah clift. new york: fordham university press. assmann, aleida. 2016b. ассман, аляйда. новое недовольство мемориальной культурой, пер. с немецкого б. хлебникова [new discontent with memorial culture, transl. from german into russian by b. khlenkikov] москва: новое литературное обозрение. dégh, linda. 1996. what is a belief legend? folklore 107: 33-46. dovzhenko, oleksandr. 1956. довженко, олександр. зачарована десна [the enchanted desna]. київ: дніпро. dovzhenko, oleksandr. 2004. довженко, олександр. сторінки щоденника (1941–1956) [pages from a diary (1941–1956)]. київ: вид-во гуманітарн. літератури. horbovyj, oleksandr. 2012. горбовий, олександр. образ затоплених сіл переяславщини в історичній пам'яті їхніх колишніх мешканців [the image of flooded villages of pereyaslav region in the historical memory of their former inhabitants]. наукові записки з української історії. 2012. # 29: 320-326. koba, s. 1979. коба, с. олександр довженко. життя і творчість [olexander dovzhenko. life and work]. київ: «дніпро». kostiukova, olena, yevtushenko, maria. 2010. костюкова, олена, євтушенко, марія. незатоплена пам'ять [unfilled memory] черкаси: «вертикаль». koval-fuchylo, iryna. 2018. коваль-фучило, ірина. концепт «земля» в оповідях про примусове переселення [the concept of “land” in stories about forced relocation]. lemkovia, bojkovia, rusíni – dejiny, súčasnosť, materiálna a duchovná kultúra, tomus vii, časť 2. banská bystrica: 25–40. mykhnyak, mykola (ed.). 2018. михняк, микола (упоряд.). затоплений рай: андруші у спогадах та документах [flooded paradise: andrushi in memoirs and documents]. київ: український пріоритет. mykhnyak, mykola (ed.). 2020. михняк, микола (упоряд.). були над дніпром трахтемирів і монастирок. документи, спогади, світлини [trakhtemyriv and monastyrok were above the dnipro. documents, memories, photos]. київ: український пріоритет. myshanych, stepan. 1986. мишанич, степан. усні народні оповідання [oral folk tales]. київ: наукова думка. nud’ha, hryhorij (ed.) 1960. нудьга, григорій (упоряд.) пісні та романси українських радянських поетів. 1917–1957 [songs and romances of ukrainian soviet poets 1917–1957]. київ: радянський письменник. pisarevsky, d. 1959. писаревский, д. 1959. александр довженко и его «поэма о море» [alexander dovzhenko and his “poem of the sea”]. москва: изд-во «знание». ryl’sky, maksym. 1959. рильський, максим. поема про море. олександр довженко: зб. спогадів і статей про митця [olexander dovzhenko: protesting retrospectively folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 35 coll. memories and articles about the artist]. київ: держ. вид-во образотв. мистецтва і муз. літератури: 109–112. solntseva, yuliya, (dir.). 1958. солнцева, юлия. поэма о море [poem of the sea]. москва: мосфильм. solntseva, yuliya, (dir.). 1964. солнцева, юлия. зачарована десна [the enchanted desna]. москва: мосфильм. sorokova, sofija. 2015. сорокова, софія. не летять ластівки у зарубинці: історико-краєзнавчий нарис [swallows do not fly in zarubynci: historical and local lore essay]. переяслав-хмельницький. interviewees berezhnyi, andrii petrovych (бережний, андрій петрович), migrant, born in 1950 in the village of morozivka. recorded in the village of novoselivka, kremenchuk district, poltava region on 19.05.2012. chepynoha, kateryna andriїvna (чепинога, катерина андріївна), born in 1931 in the village of skorodystyk. recorded in the village of skorodystyk on 19.08.2014. chepynoha, mykhailo lohvynovych (чепинога, михайло логвинович), born in 1929 in the village of skorodystyk, ex village head, teacher, school director. recorded in the village of skorodystyk on 19.08.2014. chyrkov, mykola yukhymovych (чирков, микола юхимович), migrant, born in 1957 in the village of vjunyshche, higher education, veterinarian. recorded in the village of cybli perejaslav-khmelnyckyi district kyiv region on 22.06.2019. hrechka, mariia ivanivna (гречка, марія іванівна), born in 1927 in the village of novoselivka, kremenchuk district, poltava reion. recorded in the village of novoselivka on 19.05.2012. hych, sofiia ihorivna (гич, софія ігорівна), migrant, born in the village of pidsinne. recorded in the town of perejaslav 21.06.2019. ievtushenko, mariia ivanivna (євтушенко, марія іванівна), born in 1948 in the village of sahunivka, migrant. recorded in the village of khudiaky cherkasy district cherkasy region. 12.06.2021. motailo, antonina fedorivna (мотайло, антоніна федорівна), migrant, born in 1937 in the village of kalabarok. recorded in the village of hlynsk, svitlovodsk district, kropyvnytskyi (kirovohrad) region on 19.05.2012. man’ko, ivan lukovych (манько, іван лукович), migrant, born in 1948 in the village of skorodystyk. recorded in the village of skorodystyk on 31.07.2014. nykuliak, oleksandr hryhorovych (никуляк, олександр григорович), migrant, born in 1929 in the village of konylivka, bookkeeper. recorded in the village of horaivka, kamianets-podilskyi district, khmelnytskyi region on 18.07.2014. reveha, vasyl mykytovych (ревега, василь микитович), migrant, born in 1945 in the village of komarivka. recorded in the town of perejaslav 20.06.2019. protesting retrospectively folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 36 vasylyshyna, hаnna petrivna (василишина, ганна петрівна), migrant, born in 1927 in the village of bakota. recorded in the village of horaivka, kamianets-podilskyi district, khmelnytskyi region on 18.07.2014. zhmen’ko, nadiia illivna [жменько, надія maria], born in 1960. recorded in the village of skorodystyk on 02.08.2014. microsoft word folkloricaprotest_ii_full_final_2022 07.27.22.docx folklorica journal of the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association volume xxvi 2022 folklore and protest ii microsoft word 4.3-lesivbuyskykh1201.docx folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 86 буйських, юлія. колись русалки по землі ходили: жіночі образи української міфології. [buyskykh, julia. once upon a time the water nymphs walked the earth: female images in ukrainian mythology]. харків: клуб сімейного дозвілля, 2018. notes. bibliography. index. 320 pp. 123 hr. [$4.50] (hardcover). isbn 978-617-12-5113-7. in ukraine, there is growing interest in the distant past. it is rooted in late soviet and early post-soviet identity crises and their corresponding revivalist initiatives. many believe that traditional village culture sheds light on the ancestral ways of life and provides a key to understanding old slavic mythology. in the spheres of education, literature, politics, media, and business, as well as in new religious movements such as neo-paganism, people are referencing numerous symbols and narratives that present contemporary interpretations of the past. yese popular initiatives have pushed academic studies of folklore to the margins. instead, what iuliia buyskykh calls “quasi-scholarship” on folk tradition dominates the shelves of bookstores in ukraine. buyskykh’s monograph колись русалки по землі ходили: жіночі образи української міфології [once upon a time the water nymphs walked the earth: female images in ukrainian mythology] is a response to these trends. in agreement with other ukrainian scholars, the author finds that, under the umbrella of ancestral wisdom, certain adaptations and interpretations of traditional folklore serve manipulative, and often detrimental, political agendas. even though it is based on parts of buyskykh’s candidacy dissertation [kandydats’ka dysertatsiia], the primary goal of the monograph is not to make an innovative contribution to scholarship. instead, it is written in the spirit of applied folkloristics and anthropology, aiming to educate a broader readership. in order to do this, the author adjusts her prose, avoiding the complex academic jargon that is especially characteristic for eastern european scholarly literature. it is in this approach that the main strength of the monograph lies, especially considering that such applied studies are only beginning to emerge in ukraine, and buyskykh is one of a few pioneers in the area. ye author accomplishes three tasks. first, she sheds light on some of the most well known recent mythological constructs by unveiling both methodological gaps and the political biases behind them. secondly, she extensively outlines differences between academic and popular sources in order to show how lived reality described and conceptualized by professional ethnographers differs from ideologically-biased interpretations. yirdly, buyskykh invites the reader into the world of “lived religion” and spirituality in present-day ukraine, showing how ethnographic methods help to understand complex cultural formations, including mythic imagination, as experienced and interpreted by insiders rather than outside ideologists. yis part is based on the author’s own fieldwork among middle-aged and elderly women in the villages of ukraine. ye book consists of four chapters. in chapter 1, “між етнографічною дійсністю та кабінентним” [between ethnographic reality and office fiction], reviews folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 87 buyskykh provides contextual background for her study. berenhynia, one the most controversial phenomena, widely perceived as an ancient goddess, constitutes one of the main foci. considering that the book is meant for a readership in ukraine where berehynia is very well known, the author only briefly focuses on contemporary ideological interpretations surrounding this entity. for example, she refers to the works of ukrainian feminist historian and ethnologist oksana kis, who illustrates how berehynia became a political tool that indoctrinates women into patriarchal ideology under the overall nationalist paradigm of thinking. berehynia conveys a historically inaccurate idea that the distant ancestors of present-day ukrainians were governed by matriarchy. however, the very notion of matriarchal power is linked to ideals of domesticity and motherhood (22). among “quasi-scholarly” sources devoted to berehynia, buyskykh cites writer serhii plachynda, who, while positioning his interpretations as scholarly, wrongfully views berehynia as an ancient sign of protection that eventually transformed into the trident [tryzub], the national symbol of present-day ukraine. buyskykh sees some more radical interpretations as catastrophic, such as those of writer and artist valerii voitovych who positions himself as a researcher of ukrainian mythology, and whose works are often published as scholarly (25). voitovych places berehynia in the context of ukrainian mythology whose richness, in his opinion, indicates that “ukrainians constitute a core of the oldest white race on earth…” (26). buyskykh does not analyze these views, but instead, debunks them. drawing on numerous ethnographic and archival sources, she traces the historical trajectory of berehynia to show its recent arm-chair origins. ye concept owes its popularity to two 20-th century ukrainian writers, vasyl skurativs’kyi and vasyl ruban. yis invented symbol is a product of what buyskykh calls “office mythology,” nourished, in turn, by the now infamous concept of “dual faith” [dvovir’ia]. ye author ends this chapter with the introduction of “lived religion” and related ethnographic methodologies. chapter 2 is devoted to a diachronic overview of scholarly literature dealing with the study of mythic imagination in various areas of present-day ukraine. ye author further develops this theme in chapter 3 entitled “жіночі постаті української нижчої міфології” [female images in ukrainian lower mythology]. here, buyskykh utilizes previous scholarship to identify female beings, describing their functions in traditional folklore. scholars may see little, if any necessity, in these two chapters, where the author does not offer new insights but, rather, summarizes what is known. however, the chapters are justified considering that buyskykh’s main goal is to educate a broader readership that often prefers “quasi-scholarship” over academic literature. here, the reader receives a glimpse into the world of traditional mythology that portrays documented ethnographic realities rather than office-based contemporary interpretations. in her concluding remarks to this chapter, the author emphasizes that traditional worldviews are dynamic and complex, and can only be understood in relationship to multiple socio-cultural spheres of daily life. referring to the classical anthropological folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 88 studies by victor turner and clifford geertz, she briefly focuses on the role and mission of an anthropologist in understanding and explaining these complexities. yis discussion leads the author to her final chapter “’що ж я тобі розкажу, я жила собі й жила, всякого виділа…’: усні тексти, етика запису тапублікації” [what can i tell you? i’ve just lived a life and have witnessed all sorts of things: oral texts, the ethics of recording and publication]. in this chapter, buyskykh further expands on the principles of fieldwork with a particular focus on ethical aspects, an important issue for ukraine, where a code of ethics in ethnographic research is not yet established. she stresses that ethnographers should not overstep boundaries that would turn their work into a form of inquisition that, in turn, could potentially cause harm to their research participants. she further lets her own consultants speak for themselves, extensively citing personal experience narratives about female mythical beings introduced in previous chapters. yese texts are meant as examples of ethnographic reality in contrast to “office mythology.” some parts of the book would benefit from a more extensive analysis. ye author’s overview of ethnographic literature is largely uncritical. certain scholarly concepts she cites represent particular trends and schools of thought and can be viewed as biased. one is the concept of “lower mythology” used recurrently throughout the text. “lower mythology” is an outside label that implies a hierarchical division of culture and does not represent an insider’s perspective. nonetheless, the author convincingly presents her views as both researcher and activist. buyskykh’s work is not a contribution to knowledge in a conventional sense, at least not in line with the expectations of western scholarship. its contribution is, rather, broadly educational in the context of present-day ukraine. ye author shows that “office mythology,” whose creators often self-identify as scholars and attempt to justify their views by referring to traditional folklore, is indeed far removed from lived traditions. with the help of accessible and engaging prose, she introduces a balanced scholarly voice into a broader segment of ukrainian society where it had been nearly non-existent before. yis book will be of interest not only to ukrainians but also to readers of ukrainian who are interested in wider slavic and east european post-socialist cultural dynamics. mariya lesiv memorial university of newfoundland st. john’s, newfoundland and labrador, canada mlesiv@mun.ca microsoft word 4.5-safranjelen1201.docx folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 92 jelen, sheila e. salvage poetics: post-holocaust american jewish folk ethnographies. detroit, michigan: wayne state university press, 2020. notes. bibliography. index. xxii+379. (cloth). $69.99. isbn 978-0-8143-4318-0 yere is a certain kind of book about eastern european jewish culture that academics tend to dismiss as a bit too pop. printed in large runs and many editions, these books provide what most north american jews and non-jews know about jewish life in russia and poland before world war ii. maurice samuel’s 1943 =e world of sholem aleichem, with its summaries of the yiddish author’s dark, hilarious stories, denuded of their irony and wordplay and told as if they were true, and mark zborowski and elizabeth herzog’s 1952 life is with people, an ethnography that shrinks the geographic variety of jewish settlement to “the shtetl” and relies on informants who themselves retold yiddish stories by sholem aleichem and others as though they were fact, were the sources of the 1964 fiddler on the roof, the most sentimental, reductive, and popular sholem aleichem derivative of all. an adjacent category of books gets more respect, but scholars still sometimes worry they may idealize the ashkenazic jewish experience: abraham joshua heschel’s 1945-1950 =e earth is the lord’s, a characterization of judaism that relies on hasidic stories; irving howe and eliezer greenberg’s 1954 anthology, treasury of yiddish stories, and lucy dawidowicz’s 1967 essay anthology, =e golden tradition; albums of photographs and paintings, including roman vishniac’s 1983 a vanished world, alter kacyzne’s 1999 poyln: jewish life in the old country, and even, perhaps, the 2007 =ey called me mayer july: painted memories of a jewish childhood in poland before the holocaust, by meyer kirschenblatt and his daughter, the prominent scholar of folklore and performance, barbara kirschenblatt-gimblett (whose work inspires the book reviewed here). jewish studies scholars all own these books, we read them, we use the images in our presentations, and we assign sections to our students, and at the same time we want to make sure people know that we know they do not give us the whole picture. we know that pre-holocaust jewish life in the old country was not some bastion of merry fiddle tunes, freshbaked challah, rituals affirming an unbroken connection to an ancient religion, populated exclusively by warm multi-generational families; we know about class divisions, oppressive gender norms, murderous tensions between religion and revolution, violence in which jews were not only the innocent victims of pogroms. we are all skeptical about “salvage ethnography,” with its impulse to romanticize and fetishize select elements of the past and ignore the rest. yese too-pop books about jewish culture are the object of study of sheila jelen’s book. instead of reiterating the familiar complaints about them, jelen takes these books on their own terms. she does not hold them to the standard of scholarly ethnography based on fieldwork, but understands them as examples of what jack kugelmass calls “folk ethnography,” meant to “focus group understanding of the self and thereby reinforce the cohesiveness of the population that sponsors it and consumes it” (26). yese books are, in kirshenblatt-gimblett’s terms, “hybrid,” in that they combine artistic and ethnographic impulses (19). reviews folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 93 yey use “salvage poetics,” meaning devices that mediate texts or images “in an effort to create an accessible description of a lost culture” (1). jelen sees all these texts as worthy of analysis in their own right for someone who wants to understand post-war american jews. she argues that the creators of these books were drawn to the pre-war materials that they exhibited (sholem aleichem stories, hasidic stories, photographs taken in the 1930s; kirshenblatt’s paintings, though, are more recent) because these too were salvage operations, highly mediated and already conscious of loss. yat loss – the rapid cultural shifts that began well before the holocaust – was real, and nostalgia was a healthy response to it. jelen understands that these books rely on fiction and visual images to represent jewish culture, rather than the rabbinic texts that have traditionally constituted the jewish canon, because american jews for the most part lack the literacy they would need to read rabbinics, and she scorns neither the authors she studies nor the readers they address for this undeniable fact. jelen’s book is a powerful reevaluation and reclaiming of the popular american jewish bookshelf. in historicizing the authors of some books that scholars do not always take seriously, she should prompt us to inquire into the roots of our own dismissiveness. what emerges most powerfully here is the stories, and passions, of the compilers of the folk ethnographies, understood not only as representatives of the american jewish post-war but as idiosyncratic and creative individuals. ye final two chapters, on vishniac’s multiple reuses of his photographs and then on the ways that kirschenblatt’s and kacyzne’s images were curated by their daughters, are especially insightful (and could easily be assigned to undergraduates). ye book concludes with a bracing self-reflection about how the author as a scholar evolved away from the graduate school imperative to reject nationalism and the folkloric and focus instead on modernist literary experimentation, toward a willingness to see nostalgia and popular ethnography as also worthy of analysis. yis book grows ever more persuasive and the writing stronger and stronger. ye introduction and the early chapters are less self-confident and wordier than the later sections, over-loaded with references to other scholars. ye introduction argues for the importance of visual sources for salvage poetics, as though the primary story here is about the move from textual to visual literacy, but the first chapters address books that are still about texts (granted, fiction rather than rabbinics); only in the final two is the visual truly at the center. i urge readers to keep going; this book will grow on you, as it did on me. to jewish studies scholars, jelen offers a helpful corrective to our reflexive rejection of the nostalgic, and to scholars of folklore, she offers serviceable concepts – folk ethnography, salvage poetics, ways to understand the use of photography in those endeavors – that we can use to think about other groups. readers of folklorica who work on the history of folkloristics and ethnography or the memory projects of other immigrant communities will find jelen’s book particularly helpful. folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 94 gabriella safran stanford university stanford, california, usa gsafran@stanford.edu bookreviews microsoft word folklorica_2011g.doc 145 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi memoirs about my soviet adventures james bailey university of wisconsin, emeritus madison, wi, usa these memoirs refer to my personal experiences as an american in the soviet union, especially in moscow. they concern only my unusual “soviet adventures” and not ordinary experiences such as visits to concerts, plays, ballets and museums. i also will not touch upon visits to leningrad or to several old-russian cities which played a fascinating role in russian culture and history. i probably have made mistakes in my recollections since some forty years have passed and the soviet union is no more. sputnik, the satellite that the soviet union shot up to spin around the world in 1957, frightened americans profoundly. one of the results was a cultural exchange agreement between the us and the ussr. part of this was an exchange of graduate students. i was among the first selected and spent the school year 1958-1959 at moscow state university (mgu). that was the hardest year of my life in part because the locals had been told that “all americans are spies” and many had come to believe this – and there i was: an american. the exchange was set up by an american organization that later became known as irex, the international research exchanges board. we lived in the new building of moscow university — one of those stalinist sky-scrapers which consisted of several sectors. four of us lived in sector g on the seventh floor; sector g was for people in philology. you had to have a pass to get into mgu and anything you brought with you was examined by the women inspectors at whichever entrance you chose to use. our clothing and especially our shoes always gave us away as americans. one thing we soon learned was that when you wanted to have a serious conversation, you went for a walk. that is because the rooms were “bugged.” but the “bugs” did have their plus side and sometimes we would have conversations with the “bug” in our room just for something to do. everywhere you went, you crossed lines which told the kgb (the soviet secret police) where you were: in mgu, making a free telephone call from the dormitory alerted the kgb, as did visiting the lenin library, or going to a play, concert, or ballet, and maybe even buying something in a store. the lenin library was the equivalent of the 146 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi library of congress and i and most other foreign scholars spent much of our time there. in order to understand the difficulties of being a foreigner in moscow you need to know that foreigners were limited to an area of forty kilometers (25 miles) from the center of moscow. if you wanted to go farther and to stay over night you had to get advance permission from a place called ovir which was a bureaucratic nightmare. the ovir was the place where one received a residence permit and any change of residence, even for one night, had to be duly reported to and registered by the ovir. my second stay was during the summer in 1966 when a group of americans who taught russian took part in a language program for americans. after receiving another irex grant i experienced my third stay in the spring semester of 1970. i spent february in leningrad and then four months in moscow. my fifth stay, sponsored by combined fulbright and irex grants, was in the spring semester of 1988 when the soviet union was obviously changing. again i spent february in leningrad and then four months in moscow. with all this background information in mind, i will now turn to my experiences themselves. during my first stay in moscow i had one good russian friend, dima, who twice invited me to his parents’ apartment. those were the only times i saw how people lived in moscow. his father evidently worked for the foreign service so that dima knew many things about the rest of the world. because of his worldliness, we never had an argument about anything. this contrasted sharply to interactions with others: arguments with typical soviet citizens tended to focus on the relative merits of the soviet and american systems and they were all too easy to start and almost impossible to win. dima was studying english drama after the second world war and so his english was excellent – but we always spoke russian. he showed me many wonderful things in and around moscow that, otherwise, i would have never seen. and these were things that were part of soviet life and yet unknown to foreigners. for example, on christmas eve he took me to a church that was somewhere in the northwestern part of moscow. it was holding a christmas service and was packed since few churches functioned as religious organizations in soviet times. we entered through a side door and emerged in the space between the railing and the iconostasis in an orthodox church, a place few people are apparently allowed to enter. most of the service is sung in a russian orthodox church. the choir, which was high up above on a balcony, was wonderful. when i 147 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi mentioned this later to dima, he said it was the choir of the bolshoi theater (opera house) in downtown moscow. on yet another occasion dima took me on a pretty spring day to the “serebriannyi bor,” a beautiful pine forest somewhere to the west of moscow. it was wonderful walking around such a well preserved forest along the moscow river. evidently, in recent years, the newly rich moscow millionaires have started building residences there. and then there was the “novodevichii monastery,” a well preserved nunnery which then was a museum. a fine russian white-stone church and a small cemetery are also there. what may be the largest cemetery in moscow is located on the other side of the nunnery. many famous people, writers, artists, actors, and others are buried there so it is interesting to walk around looking for distinctive tomb stones. even non-famous people had interesting graves: a soviet general had a huge grave stone with a cannon mounted on top of it! each american on the exchange was assigned a russian professor to be his “advisor.” mine was professor kuleshov who taught russian literature written in the first part of the nineteenth century. we would meet in “the old building” which was the original site of moscow university and was downtown across the street from the kremlin. we had to ride bus no. 111 to get there from the “new building.” one time i took a number of slides (diapositives) i had made in california, mostly in san francisco, to a meeting with kuleshov. i had a battery operated small viewer you could hold in your hand. when i showed him a picture of the golden gate bridge he said, “we have a bridge like that.” he could not tell me just where. he insisted that there was nothing special in the united states and certainly nothing that was in any way better than things in the soviet union. another time he said that the west did very little to help the soviet union during second world war and that millions of soviets had died. he had served in the army during the war and so he knew, he said. i pointed out that hundreds of american and english sailors had died on ships trying to take supplies to murmansk past german submarines off the coast of norway. the united states shipped supplies through iran and p39 fighter planes were flown to siberia from alaska. i also mentioned lend lease. maybe i won that argument when i asked him whether he had ever ridden in a jeep; he admitted that he had. once i mentioned that i had read that tchaikovsky had apparently lived for awhile in the city of klin northwest of moscow. i asked kuleshov why it was so hard for an american to get permission to go there. i had been 148 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi exchanging language lessons with a young russian woman who also lived on the seventh floor of sector g at mgu. when i returned to the new building that evening and again met with her she said, “james. why don’t we go visit klin?” that was how fast things got done then in moscow. and most russians, to this day, call me “james”; only a few call me “jim.” another conversation with kuleshov concerned the increasing trouble between the west and the soviets concerning berlin. when i was serving in the army in frankfurt-am-main my future german wife hanna had a friend whose mother came to visit her from east germany. obviously this was before the berlin wall was built. among other things, the mother said that they still had food rationing in east germany in 1956, eleven years after the end of ww ii! when i was talking with kuleshov about berlin, he said that they had to restrict visitors because west berliners would come to east berlin to buy things that were cheaper there. when i told him they still had food rationing in east berlin some eleven years after ww ii, he stopped talking about the subject. that meant that i had won an argument about the merits of the soviet system once again. in most cases, however, it was best not to argue with a “real” soviet citizen because the argument could go on and on. the last memorable episode concerns how i stopped meeting kuleshov. as i got better and better at reading russian, i started exploring various writers. i bought a collection of the poetry by the symbolist poet aleksandr blok and started reading it. somehow kuleshov heard about this, called me, and said he wanted to talk to me about reading this “decadent” poet. blok is actually one of russia’s finest poets from the beginning of the twentieth century. i don’t remember how the conversation ended. when i was in moscow that first time, i succumbed to what i call “the russian scholar’s disease,” a disease that would plague me on subsequent visits. this “disease” causes you buy any and all books on subjects in which you have even the vaguest interest. in soviet times it was easy to become infected because there were many used book stores (“bukinisty”) and the books were extremely cheap, especially by western standards. and as a lonely american in moscow one of the things i did was roam around used book stores once or twice a week. gradually i learned which stores tended to have things i wanted on several scholarly subjects; i will not bother you with the details. another thing to keep in mind is that in those bygone days no one used backpacks (except maybe 149 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi tramps) and so i had to carry all of that scholarly stuff in my briefcase. that of course would bend you over to the right or to the left as it made your back bend the wrong way. a great stimulus for book-buying was that you could take a pile of books to the post office in the main “telegraf” building that was on the corner of a block not far from red square and from a subway station. the women there would wrap the books and you would write your soviet address and your home address on the package. you had to get special permission from the lenin library to mail anything published before 1918; later this was changed to 1945. mailing books was unbelievably inexpensive. many years later, around 2004, i took some ten books to the main moscow post office. it turned out that bush had abolished surface mail so i had to spend about $75 to send just ten books home by air mail – quite a change from years past. today russian books cost close to what books cost in the united states. several years ago i had the 3000 odd slavic books in my library appraised. to my surprise they were valued at over $75,000! i donated half the books to the university of wisconsin library and the other half to the university of kentucky. and of course i took a small deduction from my income tax as a charitable contribution. what beautiful empty shelves i now have! i guess i am now finally cured of the russian scholar’s disease. yet another event from my first stay in moscow is worth exploring. near the end of my stay dima gave me a large folder of typed poems by mandelshtam, all in manuscript form, dated from the period of the poet’s exile in the provincial city voronezh, if i remember correctly. mandelshtam eventually became known as one of russia’s finest poets from the first part of the twentieth century. he eventually perished in a gulag or prison camp. dima was worried that it might be discovered that i got the manuscripts from him. also the typewriter of the person who had copied the poems could be identified in those days. i had a large trunk and put the folder on the bottom, under all of my stuff. i checked the trunk when i bought my ticket to ride the train from moscow to helsinki through leningrad and made a point of not having it with me. the soviet border town with finland was vyborg. after the guards inspected the things we had with us in our compartment, i and another american left the train to have something to eat in the restaurant at the station. we were sitting there for an hour or so when a woman ran in and shouted that little time was left for the guards to inspect the luggage that we had in the baggage car. we walked slowly but deliberately toward the baggage car. while a guard was going through my stuff, a whistle 150 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi signaled that the train was about to leave for helsinki. the guard did not have time to reach the folder of mandelshtam’s poems on the bottom of my trunk. who knows what would have happened if he had. at the very least he would have confiscated the folder. the mandelshtam story continued after i returned home and started graduate work in slavic languages at harvard university in the fall of 1959. i was apprehensive about showing the manuscripts to anyone or even talking about them. i did not want to cause any harm to dima back in the soviet union. it was perhaps as late as my third year at harvard that i mentioned the manuscripts to professor vsevolod setchkarev who asked to read them. after going through the poems he said that they were excellent and that they should be sent to professor gleb struve at the university of california at berkeley because he was collecting and publishing poets whose works were forbidden in the soviet union. i asked professor setchkarev to mail the folder to struve and i asked him not to reveal how he had received the folder. later struve included the poems in a collection of mandelshtam’s works and described the manuscript in the notes. eventually i gave my name to struve who sent me the collection with his personal dedication. for several years he sent me collections of russian poetry that he was editing and publishing. thus dima, and to a small extent i, contributed to the preservation of the heritage of mandelshtam. moving back to my memoirs, i need to note that during the summer of 1966 dima called me at the dormitory in mgu and invited me to spend the weekend with his wife masha in a small house (“dacha”) they were renting outside of moscow. dima told me to go to a certain subway station, take a particular exit, walk to a bridge, and go down below to wait for a train to new jerusalem. there i found no posted schedule indicating when and where the trains were going so i waited for several to pass before i asked someone for help. when i got on the right train at last, i found the car was jammed with people because it was saturday and they were eager to get out of moscow in the summer time. i stood in the platform at the end of a car next to a policeman. the train stopped several times but there were no signs and so there was no way for me to tell where we were. finally i asked the policeman for help. he turned out to be friendly, even to a foreigner, and told me where to get off. i did so, only to discover that dima was not there waiting for me! so what was i, a suspicious american, doing so far outside of moscow? what could i do? i waited and waited until dima finally showed up. we walked through a small town, across a stream, and through some trees until we 151 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi reached the little house. later masha showed me around the area and asked me to help her pick mushrooms, but not what she called “little pagans,” that is, toadstools. we walked by a collective farm where masha pointed out containers and explained that this indicated that the peasants were making alcohol to sell “on the left,” that is, to make money by selling for profit merchandise that was not in the collective farm register. just imagine — moonshining in the soviet union! that evening everyone got together for dinner in the large house. i had brought along a bottle of scotch as a present. i had bought it at a berezka, the only place in moscow where you could buy a bottle of scotch and a place where you had to pay in dollars — more about berezka later. dima took the bottle and put it on the table. one man present poured out the scotch and drank it as though it were vodka, shot after shot! i, of course, was horrified and felt that he had no appreciation for the value of my gift. the next morning dima and masha wanted to walk barefoot to see the nearby new jerusalem monastery. along the way dima showed me where german troops had dug trenches as they approached moscow during the second world war. unfortunately a thunderstorm started so we gave up going to the empty monastery. i should mention that four or five years ago someone took me to see the monastery which had played an important cultural role in russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. so i did get to see it after all, but only much later. as for my trip to visit dima and masha, that evening one of the very few people who had a car in the soviet union gave me a ride back to moscow and dropped me off at a subway station. the second event during my stay in moscow came during the summer of 1966 and also involved masha and dima. they lived in an apartment which belonged to masha’s mother, a well-known actress. the apartment was located on what used to be called gorky street but since has reverted to its old name tverskaia street, one of the main streets in moscow leading toward red square. as i remember, they lived on the sixth floor. on the next to last day that my group was to spend in moscow, dima and masha invited me to dinner and i took along another american. during the day masha ran into a french friend whom she also invited for dinner. eight of us were sitting around a long table and enjoying ourselves. overhead on the ceiling was a spot as long as the table which was caused by rain water leaking through a decorative balcony overlooking the street. when i stood up to propose a toast, the ceiling fell down in two parts. one shattered over my head and the other piece swung toward the frenchman sitting at the end of the long table. 152 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi fortunately he swung away from the slab which nevertheless grazed him. masha and dima put me on a bed and tried to wash the plaster off me; eventually it started drying hard on my head. i had brought along all my remaining american “luxuries” which dima put on top of the refrigerator in plain sight. dima screamed to masha, telling her to hide the foreign goods so that officials would not see them. then she ran into the living room where all this had happened to pull an icon off the wall — again so that officials would not see a picture of a saint. she pulled and pulled but could not make it budge. dima first called the police. a policeman, who was from novgorod and spoke in a dialect, looked at me, demanded my documents, and asked me questions, but did nothing more and left. then dima called the firemen who did the same thing. finally dima called the ambulance to take me and the frenchman to a moscow hospital. when we walked out of the building downstairs into the courtyard a crowd was standing there, waiting. they had heard that an american had been killed! so away we rode in an ambulance with the sirens screaming through moscow to a hospital. they examined me, took an x-ray which revealed nothing serious, and asked me to stay for the night. i knew i might not get out of the place soon so i said no. they called for a taxi to take me back to the mgu dormitory. shortly thereafter, for our last class in russian language, the teachers asked us to write an essay showing how our russian had improved. so i wrote about my ceiling incident. it turned out that the story was a familiar one to the teachers and to people living in moscow then. apparently ceilings fell with regularity. that evening i returned to say goodbye to dima and masha. they had spent the whole day talking to all kinds of officials about what had happened. it turned out that the woman in charge of the apartment building was responsible because she had done nothing to repair the leaking balcony despite many requests from masha. the woman came to them for a signature to relieve her of responsibility. she knelt on the floor, cried, and said her life would be ruined if masha did not sign. after masha signed, the woman stood up and ran out of the apartment without even saying thank you. i asked masha and dima whether the officials had searched the apartment above theirs to see what could be done. the man living there had refused and they had not. to my utter surprise, officials in the ussr could not enter someone’s apartment without the resident’s permission. dima said the man refused because he was a “speculator,” the soviet term for someone selling something for a profit, that is, a capitalist. this was totally illegal in a communist country! so i said goodbye to dima and masha. thus 153 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi ended my second stay in the ussr. at home i told this story to several people. some time later, at a convention, a russian whom i had once met walked up to me and said the same thing had happened to him, thus confirming that falling ceilings were nothing exceptional! my next memorable adventure occurred in moscow in the spring of 1970. thanks to masha’s mother, she and dima had moved to an apartment for mxat, that is, the moscow art theater. the building was on a street then named “nemirovich-danchenko” after a famous director. one time there i briefly met masha’s famous actress mother. dima and masha were friends with a doctor who was a specialist in cancer treatment. the husband of a woman the doctor had treated was in charge of hunting lodges scattered in various places. he wanted to express his appreciation by arranging a visit to a hunting lodge on a barge on a lake shore maybe some 150 kilometers north of moscow. dima wanted me to go there with them even though he knew it was far beyond the allowable limit of 40 kilometers from the center of moscow to which foreigners were supposed to adhere. all this was in the beginning of may when the kgb tended to go through and clear their records. “why are you friends with foreigners? why do you get so much foreign mail? why do you read non-communist books?” these were the questions that dima and masha might expect to be asked. also at the beginning of may came three holidays: may day, victory day (a celebration of the end of the second world war on may ninth), and some important person’s birthday, whose, i no longer remember. i told dima that i had a cold, was worn out, and did not feel like a long trip. so i returned to the academy hotel where i was staying. dima called me by the phone in my room. “jim, it is a beautiful spot. it is only 150 k north of moscow. no one will know.” again i told dima i had a cold, was worn out, and didn’t feel like a long trip. my first reaction was to think, “dima. what are you doing to me!” ten minutes later dima called again. same conversation and same answer by me. five minutes later the phone rang again. a deep rough voice spoke slowly. “we want to congratulate you on arranging a holiday. we understand that it is sad to be alone on a holiday.” and on and on. finally i said, “who is calling?” the voice answered, “it is not important who is speaking, but what he says.” so much for a foreign literary scholar in soviet moscow repeatedly saying he would not go. those eavesdroppers wanted to do their duty and show they knew everything. and it was they who decided who would or would not go and where. this may be my best “soviet adventure.” 154 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi often after i finished working in the lenin library where room no. 1 was reserved for academicians and foreigners, i would walk to spend the evening and have dinner with dima and masha. i would take different routes there so that i could see different parts of moscow. one thing i was curious about was an apartment complex not far from the lenin library. every time i walked by, there were cars with chauffeurs parked outside, usually the cars were volgas, the best soviet car. only big shots had such cars and chauffeurs as well. there were no signs indicating this structure as an official building and so i had no idea what was going on. only years later did i read in an american reporter’s memoirs that this was a special place where big shots shop, especially for groceries. shopping in soviet times was miserable because there was little in the stores and you never knew what might be for sale on the street. you always carried a bag called “avos’ka” (perhapsnik) just in case you ran into something being sold on the street. if you returned ten minutes later, it would all be gone. after another walk from the lenin library i made another such discovery. i got to the entrance of the building where dima and masha lived. you would have to tell a door keeper there you wanted to see so and so. someone came in with me and rode the elevator with me up to the floor where dima and masha lived. the man also got out on that floor. when i rang the doorbell and masha opened the door, the man ran down stairs. masha said i had been “tailed.” my adventures in moscow include this small incident. when you wanted to buy something in a store, you would select what you wanted and get the price from a sales woman, then go to the cashier who sat in a booth in another part of the store; you would pay and get a receipt, and then take the receipt back to the saleswoman who would give you the item. one time in a shop i went to the cashier and paid. when i was walking away she said: “thank you comrade. no, he is not a comrade but i don’t know what he is.” i guess my american accent betrayed me again and i could not be anonymous even in this quotidian space. every hotel that provided rooms for foreigners had a special place called “berezka” (little birch) where some foreign things as well as some russian things hard to find in ordinary shops were sold, but only in exchange for foreign currency, especially dollars. one time i took masha to the biggest berezka in moscow. this berezka was near the hotel rossiia, at that time a new hotel built not far from red square, mainly for foreign tourists. it stood near the moscow river and was recently torn down. i paid dollars for the things masha needed and we left the 155 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi store, walked a way along a side street near the moscow river. there i noticed an entrance to a store that was selling luxurious items not available in normal soviet stores. when masha and i tried to enter, a man stopped us and told us we were not allowed inside. thus we discovered yet another ritzy place that only the soviet upper class could use and it was located right in the middle of the land of the people. service in stores usually was poor and frustrating, probably because so few things were available and people were willing to work hard at getting what they needed. people sometimes resorted to a “berzobrazie,” that is, yelling at someone and raising hell to get their attention. what follows is literally “an ugliness” which was typical of many everyday occurrences. even if you are an english speaker sooner or later you learn enough russian to indulge in such madness at times. the occasion that i remember most vividly took place in the bookstore of the academy of sciences located on gorky street close to red square. one section was for used books and i often went there because one of the women remembered me and sometimes set things aside for me. once i entered the store soon after it had opened after its hour-long break for lunch. a woman asked the clerk if they had the multi-volume collection of translations of jules verne, the french popularizer of science fiction. the clerk said yes and told the woman how much it cost so she could pay for it at the cashier’s desk. some man standing behind her reached over her shoulder and said he had already been there before the break, that the huge collection had been promised to him, and that he had a receipt showing that he had already paid for it. the two people started yelling at each other and the poor saleswoman over who actually had a right to take the many volumes. i left the store and came back some twenty minutes later. the “bezobrazie” was still going on. i do not know who won the screaming match over rights to many volumes written by a french writer and being sold in moscow. on one occasion i indulged in a “bezobrazie” in an american establishment when staff did not respond by helping me. this was in a us bank when i just could not get someone’s attention so that i could be let into the room where the safe deposit boxes were. and the bank staff did not respond the way the soviets did; instead they threatened to call the police! i guess a russian “bezobrazie” does not work well in this country. i have to add that things have changed in russia and it has been a long time since i have witnessed a “bezobrazie” type fanfare in either moscow or petersburg. almost everything is available somewhere now and having money is what matters; just like here in the united states. 156 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi yet another small incident began with my professor friend at harvard, kiril taranovsky, asking me to find him a book by a well known russian scholar. usually it was easy to find such things in used book stores, but this particular book was one that i simply could not find. so i asked dima what could be done. on sunday he took me to a place on the same street as the moscow art theater. people were selling all sorts of things at one intersection, including foreign publications of banned russian writers. these were books that had been confiscated by border guards from people trying to bring them into the soviet union. dima talked to one of the people on the street and told him what i was looking for. the fellow said he would find it and would meet me somewhere else on that street several days later. standing cautiously in the entrance way where our meeting was scheduled to take place, the man slipped me the book. i do not know how much i paid but it probably was in dollars. this small episode once again shows how skilled dima was at getting things done in soviet moscow. some more trivia follows. one afternoon when i came to see dima and masha some men were working on the steam radiator in the living room. dima introduced me to the workers as an american. one of them said i should be hanged and then he laughed. this was just another example of the hostility toward americans that the government had managed to inculcate in ordinary citizens. dima and masha were renting a small modest dacha outside of moscow near the istra river. when i went there i had to sleep on a hard bed or even on a board, but i was woken up by nightingales. this was the first time in my life that i ever heard nightingales. staying at the dacha, we would walk to and along the istra river. this too is a lovely memory. but, paradoxically, what i remember most is the large and box-like wooden outhouse. when i sat down in it, i read the words lend lease on the wall. this proved that what i had said about american aid to the soviets during the second world war and the lend lease program was true. only i had to travel all the way to the soviet union to see those words on a container! on sunday the people there gave us a ride to the railroad. since we were beyond the 40 kilometer limit, dima gave me a book to read and told me not to say a word since we would be sitting in an open coach. the book turned out to be a collection of brodsky’s poetry, something not published in the ussr. i had a collection of brodsky’s poems at home and had read them so i thumbed my way through the book and started reading a ballad about a young couple murdered on the shore of a rural lake. the man sitting next to me on the 157 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi bench was taller than me and he started looking over my shoulder to see what i was reading. suddenly he said, “esenin wouldn’t have written such a poem.” fortunately masha was sitting opposite me. she started talking to the man to distract him and to keep me from revealing my american accent. she talked all the way to the station in moscow. once there i called another friend who asked me over for dinner. we ended up talking until such a late hour that he asked me to stay for the night. i arrived back in the academy hotel on monday morning, just as the maid was cleaning my room. she was from a provincial town and often talked to me. she had already noticed that i had not slept in my bed, but she decided that she needed to be discreet and said not a word. so ended another weekend for the man taken to be “american spy” in moscow. when i was in moscow in the spring of 1970 i often went to the us embassy because they had a special room full of american books on all kinds of subjects. you could take all you wanted, walk out of the embassy, and give them to russian friends. i went there often because dima was fluent in english and had a deep interest in american literature and life. sometimes i left with such a heavy briefcase that i could barely carry it. i gave dima so many books that he had no more room for them and piled them up on shelves above the entrance hall in their apartment. and back home in the united states it was possible to request that books be sent to russian friends, perhaps through irex. i wanted to send dima a webster’s dictionary because he needed such a dictionary, at least for american english, but irex would not send it because it was too expensive and too heavy. so one of my attempts to repay dima’s many kindnesses failed. the last time i saw dima was the evening when i was leaving moscow for helsinki. considering the amount of luggage i had, i probably took a taxi to dima’s place where i had dinner with dima and masha. he must have ordered a taxi to the leningrad station where he saw me off. going through things from past years i found a lot of letters from dima and one from masha about his death in the summer of 1974. i also have several books in which he wrote a dedication to me. wonderful, wonderful memories. i thank you for them, dima, my friend. i should write a few words about where dima died. he and his wife masha had acquired a cottage on the island of hiiumaa in the baltic sea off the coast of estonia which then was part of the soviet union. friends liked to join them there because they felt as though they had almost escaped from the grips of the ussr. it was no accident that soviet border guards were there to keep people from escaping. dima and 158 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi masha could invite only relatives to visit them, but for some strange reason, they had many relatives. that is where dima died in 1974, the same year when my father and hanna’s mother died. i lost three refuges in my life: one in california, one in germany, and one in moscow. thanks to some mutual estonian friends i visited hiiumaa in the summer of 1994 where masha and her second husband vadim had just finished building a large home with beautiful wooden paneling. when i went to the ussr in the spring of 1988 i called masha and was invited by her to the same apartment that her mother had lived in. masha’s second husband vadim was a singer. he traveled around many parts of the country and gave concerts for which he was paid well by soviet standards. when people gave him all kinds of gifts (odds and ends) after a concert, he could not carry all the extra stuff with him and so he usually gave it to the servants in the hotels where he stayed. he had served in some capacity in the armed forces and knew jujitsu, if my memory has not deceived me once again. he had contacts with the higher military authorities, something which evidently helped him stay out of service in afghanistan. he obviously understood how things were really done in the ussr and knew how to take advantage of his contacts. for example, he was able to buy a “volga,” which was one of the finest cars in the ussr, but this created another problem: how to find a garage in which to park the car and keep it out of the reach of vandals. again, using his contacts, he found a garage in the courtyard of the apartment complex where he and masha lived. these examples explain what happened to me during another of my personal adventures. i was again living in the academy hotel. one morning, when i was brushing my teeth, i noticed something hard. i pulled out something white and realized that it was a piece of a tooth! i went downstairs to where various services were provided for the people staying in the hotel. they told me to go to a special clinic presumably one for foreigners, on a street near the belorusskii railroad station. they gave me the wrong address but i found it anyway. when the clinic let me in, they had me fill out a form. i sat down next to a polish woman who had been waiting for several hours already and had been there several times. she had nothing good to say about the place. after i waited three or four hours i saw a dentist. he looked at my mouth, saw the problem, and said: “go home! there is nothing we can do for you here!” i had about three months left to stay in moscow on my exchange so what was i, an american, going to do? 159 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi when i went to see masha and vadim that evening, vadim said he knew a dentist who could do the job. he was working “on the left,” which meant he was making money on the side, in addition to what he earned at his official job. that probably meant that i would have to pay the dentist in dollars, which i was willing to do because i did not want to go home. when we saw the dentist, he said i should have two crowns and that these would be made out of first-rate imported german material. i was skeptical because, by that time, a time close to the collapse of the soviet union, fake foreign things were being sold as genuine imports. but i agreed because i had no choice. thank heavens vadim had a car because he drove me to many places scattered all over moscow to see several dentists, each of whom did something different with my teeth. when they ground the tips off my teeth, they did little or nothing to cover the exposed tops as is done in the united states. after about a month of assorted procedures, vadim took me to get the crowns put on by the main dentist. that evening we went to the emergency dental clinic for all of moscow. the large entrance room was full of people moaning and groaning while they waited for treatment. vadim took me in and we walked right past all those miserable people to the dentist’s room. in a short time he put the crowns on my teeth and everything was finished. i think i paid him or his assistant several hundred dollars. this many years after the event i am not sure precisely where or how much i paid. needless to say, without vadim’s know how i would not have been able to live through all of this torment and doubt. when i got back to the united states, i went to our dentist and told him my story. he examined the crowns and said that they were genuine german material and that the workmanship was excellent. so even good things could happen in the ussr. masha came to visit us in madison, maybe in the fall of 1988. we showed her the delights of madison and helped her buy things she needed to take home since it had become difficult to buy many things in moscow. unlike the soviet union where there were specific limitations on travel by foreigners, here masha rode a bus to visit friends, i believe in chicago and detroit and, after leaving us, may have stayed with friends in new york on her way home. i also bought a computer for masha to take home. i have pictures of her wrapping things so she could take them as luggage. i believe the computer arrived separately in moscow and it took a big effort on vadim’s part to get it through customs at the moscow international airport, sheremetevo. 160 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi vadim’s son played the oboe, the instrument i had played when i entered university in 1948. i asked vadim if i could buy and send his son an excellent french oboe once i was back home; he agreed. the oboe teacher in the music school at the university of wisconsin helped me order and buy the proper oboe. the problem was how to get it to vadim because it would have been expensive to mail the oboe and to pay customs duties. instead i asked a colleague in the slavic department to take the oboe with him on his trip to moscow. somehow i managed to let vadim know and he met my colleague at the airport and picked up the oboe. the instrument easily passed customs without any import duty! that is the way i managed to thank vadim for all that he had done for my teeth. vadim wanted his son to go to germany and get a position in a german orchestra, in other words, to escape the soviet union and the mess that life had become as the soviet system fell apart. many musicians were trying to arrange this and many succeeded. vadim’s son had to stand in line for hours every morning at the german embassy to get his application confirmed. hundreds evidently were doing the same thing. i am not sure how long it took, but vadim’s son finally succeeded. he eventually became well established in germany and began living there. another difficulty was that he was in line to be drafted into the military but somehow vadim managed to have the draft pass him by. years later in petersburg a friend who had children playing string instruments told me that they left russia to play in germany and that the groups they had played in at home had fallen apart. a sad situation in a country that had produced so many fine musicians. when the soviet union was breaking up in 1990, foreigners were at long last able to visit and live with friends. so i visited and lived with masha and vadim in the summer of that year. vadim took me to register at ovir and then register again at a nearby police station. i was easily able to meet friends and then to return in the evening to masha’s apartment. as i remember, dozens of different newspapers were being published and sold on the streets since there no longer was any censorship. and i watched tv showing the supreme soviet in session as representatives debated changes in the country. i believe i watched the atomic scientist sakharov advocating various changes after he had been released from exile in a city well away from moscow. crowds were demonstrating on the streets and demanding changes although i do not recall that i saw much of that first hand. i should also mention that vadim took me by train to visit his friends in tallinn, a beautiful city in 161 reports folklorica 2011, vol. xvi estonia. not only did we travel that far away from moscow without any permission, but we also stayed with his friends. things were changing in the soviet union. i could go on and on with bits and pieces about my adventures in the soviet union but i believe i have written enough to give the american reader some idea about what living in that country was like for an “alien american.” my experiences after the end of the soviet union are a different story with a different atmosphere which i will not write about here. enough! << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain 20%) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \050swop\051 v2) /srgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel 1.4 /compressobjects /tags /compresspages true 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/hrv (za stvaranje adobe pdf dokumenata najpogodnijih za visokokvalitetni ispis prije tiskanja koristite ove postavke. stvoreni pdf dokumenti mogu se otvoriti acrobat i adobe reader 5.0 i kasnijim verzijama.) /hun 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can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader 5.0 and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice microsoft word folklorica_2011g.doc a century of czech tramping 19 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi articles a century of czech tramping jan pohunek institute of ethnology, faculty of arts, charles university prague, czech republic abstract the article describes the history and major characteristics of an independent czech youth movement called “tramping”. the movement originated in the 1910s-1920s as an unorganized offshoot of boy scouting and e. t. seton’s woodcraft and quickly became popular among urban teens and young adults. it was simply a way of spending time outdoors with friends at first, heavily influenced by early western movies and wild west aesthetics in general, but became a distinctive subculture and cultural phenomenon during the following decades. some of its unique aspects include specific music, slang, art and dress code. czech tramping is also an interesting example of an early youth subculture, which is comparable to post-ww2 subcultures and which survived into the present day although its participants were often persecuted, especially under the communist regime. another topic discussed is the fact that the movement kept its independence even under political pressure, rejected all attempts to organize it hierarchically and while it sometimes had a dimension of a protest culture in the 20th century, it can be considered to be apolitical in general. it is now almost a hundred years since an interesting modern folk cultural phenomenon began to establish itself in bohemia. ‘tramping’ (1), as it is called nowadays, can be described as an unorganized youth movement, or a subculture, that is heavily inspired by the romantic image of the american wild west and that manifests itself mostly through outdoor social activities such as hiking or camping, accompanied by specific styles of music, slang, architecture, art and clothing. the phenomenon of tramping has influenced both modern czech folklore and mainstream culture, but it has also always been on a brink of legality. this article attempts to present an overview of the history of the 20 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi movement, its characteristics and its importance to social anthropology and folklore studies. the history of tramping in bohemia is tied to the history of scoutlike youth movements and modern outdoor sports activities. organizations related to outdoor sports were becoming increasingly popular in czech society during the 1880s. some of them were inspired by universal gymnastic movements, especially by their precursor sokol (2), while others, like the czech tourist club or clubs of first skiers, were more related to specific emerging sports. some of these organizations also had their own divisions for children and young adults. both lord baden-powell’s boy scouting and e. t. seton’s woodcraft movements were introduced as a novelty in 1912 by various enthusiasts [břečka 1999: 11-12]. however, there were also groups of young people, including some former boy scouts who were inspired by these movements and interested in hiking and camping on a regular basis, but who disliked the tight control and official nature of established organizations. such groups of “friends” (kamarádi), usually factory workers, apprentice craftsmen, or students, spent their weekends camping in wooded, romantic valleys in the area south of prague [hurikán 1990: 14-15; moidl and moidlová 2010: 10]. a significant increase in the number of these unorganized campers came after the end of the first world war and the formation of czechoslovakia. camping and hiking became more popular among young people from prague and, increasingly, from other large cities. the reason was that such activities allowed young people to spend weekends together in nature without having to belong to an official organization. the experience of the war had contributed to both their desire for personal freedom and to their outdoor skills. another key factor in this process was the notable increase of the influence of american culture, a phenomenon related to american support for the young czechoslovakia, to the post-war international importance of the united states, and also to the activities of organizations like the ymca. films and novels contributed to the popularity of things american as westerns were imported in great numbers and attracted large audiences (3) [waic and kössl 1992: 9, 12-22; břečka 1999: 11]. young independent campers were called “wild scouts” at this time, because the number of former boy scouts among them had increased after the war. most of these were recruited from the first generations of boy scouts who had outgrown their early teenage years. the concept of rovering as a way to keep such people attracted to scouting even as they a century of czech tramping 21 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi became young adults, did not fully develop until after 1917 [břečka 1999: 43] and scouting organizations, with the exception of a few leading boy scout clubs, had little to offer them. the “wild scouts” quickly embraced the romantic life of the wild west and did so in a playful manner, seeing it as a kind of a game or a weekend lifestyle (4). they introduced western-like items of clothing into their camping equipment, which otherwise consisted mostly of civilian and army surplus clothing. the specifically western pieces of clothing included studded wide belts, brass sheriff stars, and “stetsons” created by refashioning old hats; all were home-made. some groups of “wild scouts” combined their garments in an eclectic manner while others kept a unified style, for example dressing in black cowboy-like clothing heavily inspired by tom mix movies. m1910 us army haversacks became quite popular at this time and became one of the “trademarks” of the movement in the following decades (5) [hurikán 1990: 19-21; waic and kössl 1992: 63; moidl and moidlová 2010: 11; description of the haversack available at rottman and volstad 1989]. these groups of wild scouts also began to use permanent camping places, sometimes with the consent of the landowner and sometimes without. cover names were occasionally used for dealing with the authorities when renting a place for camping. such names included “the table fellowship”, “the fellowship of filmmakers”, “the friends of america”, “the settled scouts” and even “the association of catholics of the municipality of prague.” many names had aspects of a practical joke [hurikán 1990: 55]. tents, simple huts, and log cabins were erected and the term osada (“settlement” or “colony”) began to be used for both a particular place and the group linked to it. osadas adopted romantic names (6) and had their own symbolism, which was represented by flags, badges, and similar items. however, the transition from hiking (7) to sedentary camping was not universal – less frequently visited, smaller, more simple and rent-free campsites, called campy or kempy, remained in use also, especially in areas where it was not possible or necessary to build a larger cabin osada. the term “wild scouts,” used to describe these campers, was perceived as somewhat pejorative and around the mid 1920s they began to call themselves trampové, with the word tramp likely taken from the works of jack london. the movement spread into other cities during the second half of the 1920s and its popularity was increased even more by the great depression, which forced more people to spend their free time on a low budget. tramp campsites became centers for amateur sports 22 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi such as volleyball, canoeing, and even boxing, and for social and cultural life [waic and kössl 1992: 14-16, 23-24, 64; hurikán 1990: 16-19, 2325; for regional examples see vinklát 2004: 17; krško 2008: 13]. performing music was especially popular. initially, “wild scouts” used to sing military-themed songs describing the hard life of soldiers, national and folk songs, and contemporary czech and american hits. they especially favored melodramatic pieces. the most popular musical instrument was the guitar, but others like the violin, accordion, banjo, or comb were also used. this song repertoire was soon partially replaced with new songs made up by the tramps themselves. at first these were only rewritten versions of older songs, but with time the song repertoire evolved into a distinct and original genre of “traditional tramp songs”. these original songs were often created by amateur composers and writers with professional (8) skills. traditional tramp songs were still heavily musically inspired by contemporary popular music, but were usually composed for the guitar and were intended to be sung together by friends around the campfire. texts of the first original tramp songs were often semi-anonymous and spread and evolved both as oral folklore and through hand-written songbooks (řevníky – “roarbooks”). the typical subject matter of these songs was either humorous or sentimental [waic and kössl 1992: 66-67; mácha 1967: 6 et seq., 26 et seq.; noha 2007: 22-23]. the word potlach (a word-play on the american northwestern native term potlatch and czech verb tlachat – to tattle) was used to describe larger and more ceremonial tramp meetings that included activities such as playing music, reading short stories and poetry, and playing various games by the campfire. campfires lit at potlachs had a “sacred” status inspired by the symbolism of e. t. seton’s woodcraft, to wit, the campfire was usually placed in a decorative stone circle and it was forbidden to use it for “profane” activities such as burning waste and cooking. the symbol of woodcraft – a circle with buffalo horns – was later (possibly as late as after ww2) adopted as a symbol of tramping. other communal activities of tramps included sports tournaments, meetings in country pubs, and playing practical jokes. typical practical jokes popular among tramps were called kanadské žertíky (canadian jokes). these were usually attempts to disconcert friends or other groups of tramps in a funny way; sometimes even in a rather harsh, but socially acceptable manner. a “canadian joke” had to be accepted stoically and repaid in kind when possible. a century of czech tramping 23 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi the tramp movement and mainstream culture often found themselves in conflict for a number of reasons. there was a strong leftwing, or even pro-communist faction in tramping, which included some people who dressed themselves in a “soviet” style and used red army equipment and communist badges. this styling was, however, more romantic than violent or radical. it should be also noted that some tramps joined the interbrigades in the spanish civil war. but while this left-wing faction was notable, on the whole tramping still remained apolitical and unorganized. [waic and kössl 1992: 45-49, 91-92; krško 2008: 89-102; noha 2007: 29-30] tramps were seen as a disturbance by many figures of authority either because of their disrespect for rules or because of their supposed low level of morals, even though tramping was not fundamentally anti-system nor was it a free love movement. it was, however, part of the more liberal wing on the first republic’s social scale. tramps were both welcomed in the countryside because tourism as a whole increased revenue in poor regions, and shunned because they did not behave “properly” and were sometimes, often unjustifiably, suspected of petty thievery and misbehavior. the most important attempt to get tramping under control was the “kubát’s law” of 1931, a decree of the czech provincial president hugo kubát, which forbade unmarried couples camping together, swimming where prohibited, and swimming without proper bathing attire. it also outlawed the carrying of firearms and the singing of “indecent” songs. this decree led to an increase in persecution of tramps by the gendarmerie and also inspired unsuccessful attempts to organize the movement to increase its importance. these attempts mostly originated among left-wing tramps, but all of them were short-lived and did not succeed in encompassing the majority of tramping culture. [waic and kössl 1992: 37-60; hurikán 1990: 246-247] the decree of 1931 was ruled to be unconstitutional by the supreme court in 1935 [hurikán 1990: 247] and tramping rapidly became even more widespread, reaching more regions, slovakia included, and encompassing more social classes. it became a part of the recognized popular culture in the 1930s, especially because of the popularity of prolific singers and composers of tramp music, some of whom became professional performers. some tramp music was performed by professional singers who, themselves, were not tramps. the movement, while still viewed ambivalently by the authorities, prospered. more magazines published by tramps and for tramps, like tramp, naše osady (our colonies) or pages in ahoj na neděli (ahoy for sunday), were printed on both amateur and commercial levels [hurikán 1990: 230-232]. 24 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi sports and clothing shops sold professionally manufactured equipment for tramping. movies and books about czech tramps were two more indications of tramping’s public acceptance. there were, however, also rumors that the movement was losing its edge and becoming too close to mainstream culture. (9) [waic and köosl 1992: 33-34] the nazi occupation of the former czechoslovakia, and the second world war did not influence tramping directly; being a tramp was not in and of itself a reason to be persecuted, but the personal freedoms associated with this pastime were limited and some tramps drew suspicion to themselves by participating in resistance activities or joining foreign armies [waic and kössl 1992: 91-98; noha 2007: 34-36]. more intensive persecution, leading to a temporary decline in tramping, came in the 1950s after the communist coup d’état of 1948. the communist regime attempted to destroy or control all youth movements, replacing them with a unified supplemental education model based on the organization of young pioneers (pionýrská organizace) and the the union of czechoslovak youth (svaz československé mládeže sčm). junák, the most important and largest organization of czech and slovak scouts, was taken over by communist collaborators and dissolved in 1951. a similar fate befell other scouting clubs and organizations such as the gymnastic movement sokol, the league of czech woodcrafters, and the ymca. scout leaders and older boy scouts were persecuted and subjected to lengthy imprisonments and judicial murders. they were described as members of counter-revolutionary imperialist organizations and potential fifth column organizations. some of them went into exile; others drastically limited their activities or managed to recreate undercover scout clubs illegally or under the guise of various sports and tourism clubs. after the regime solved the “problem” of scouting, its repressive forces increased their pressure on tramping as well [břečka 1999: 221-226]. the position of tramping was, however, different from that of organized sports and scouting – there was no central organization of tramps and even various osadas or other communities were organized in an informal manner and based on personal friendships. legalized weekend cabin colonies usually had some formal structure and it was possible to destroy that organization; but much harder to destroy shared community places, as these colonies often consisted of private properties too small to be nationalized. the most common methods of persecution included various bans on communal activities, brutal police attacks on potlachs, roundups of tramps on railway stations and everyday minor a century of czech tramping 25 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi harassment, including random police patrol destruction of any items of clothing, which looked too “american”.[vinklát 2004: 56; mácha 1967: 80-84; kučerová 1997: 13-15]. it should be noted that there was a lack of commercially available clothing acceptable for tramping because of the general supply problems of the post-war economy, while many uniforms and army surplus items were readily available. parts of american uniforms were especially sought after and became quite prevalent in western bohemia, the only region liberated by the americans. military clothing became increasingly popular with tramps, because it was practical for outdoor activities, unobtrusive when worn in forests, and if they were items of western origin, included an aspect of symbolic passive resistance [altman 2003:266]. tramps also began to wear emblems with symbols of their osada on their left sleeves; these emblems were called domovenka and were possibly inspired by military emblems or scouting badges (10). such personal usage of symbols also reflected changes in tramping, as it was not easy to create new colonies of cabins and there were many osadas which had no permanent legal communal place and preferred to hike and use simple hidden campsites (campy). the numbers of tramps decreased and a partial generation divide appeared for the first time – many older tramps reduced their activities and found inner exile in communal life in their cabin colonies. on the other hand, younger tramps who were not very numerous, preferred hiking to sedentary camping and understood, and sometimes even proudly accepted, the role of pariah assigned to them by the communist regime. tramping was still a kind of escapism and inner exile, not an official, fully-fledged resistance movement, but its antagonism to official structures was more pronounced [for comparison see kučerová 1997: 13-15: noha 2007: 37]. the decline in tramping was reversed during the 1960s, when the communist regime was undergoing the slow liberalization that culminated in the events of the prague spring of 1968. the first positive mentions of tramping in the official press appeared in 1963 and the movement’s popularity among a new generation of young adults increased steadily [vinklát 2004: 72-73; kučerová 1997: 16-21; petrová 2009: 61-63]. there were several reasons for this. more people joined the ranks of tramps because the level of persecution was lower and thus the activity was more acceptable. at the same time, tramping still included aspects of disrespect for authority, informal friendship, and personal freedom. american culture remained popular with young people and new westerns, some filmed in the eastern bloc, were shown in 26 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi cinemas. travelling abroad became possible in the late 1960s, but it was still fraught with bureaucratic and economic obstacles. thus the idea of tramping remained as a kind of game which allowed participants to create their own little romantic adventures, using the czech landscape as a backdrop for the projection of their imagination. the 1960s also introduced some other changes in tramping. while there was a strong and sometimes politically active left wing in pre-war tramping, the actual sovietization of czechoslovak society and the stigmatization of tramps after 1948 proved to be a fatal blow for this leftist part of the movement. the social structure of tramps changed too. many tramps of the 1920s and 1930s were members of the lower social classes: workers or apprentice craftsmen. the society of the 1960s, by contrast, was more homogeneous and tramping was no longer a predominantly blue-collar form of recreation [kučerová 1997: 16-21]. the general consensus in post-war tramping was that the movement was apolitical, which actually constituted a political statement in its own right because it took place in a society where almost everything was expected to have a political dimension. another reason for tramping being apolitical dated back to pre-war times and was based on the belief that tramps should be friends with each other. heated political debates, it was felt, could quickly turn personal and thus did not belong at a campfire [see hurikán 1990: 246-247; waic and kössl 1992: 48-49]. communist control of the formal, totalitarian organization of all aspects of czech and slovak society and the permanent presence of political propaganda had only increased the need for escapist, egalitarian, and informal social space. post-war changes included the further evolution of tramp music, which had absorbed influences from american country music, bluegrass, and modern folk. this transformation had been taking place since the 1950s, but culminated in the late 1960s with the appearance of a new and powerful generation of tramp musicians represented, among others, by the groups greenhorns and hoboes. new tramp music was more open to being intermingled with other genres and song lyrics included not only the relatively simple sentimental, exotically-romantic and humorous motifs found in earlier times, but also more complicated symbolic, sarcastic, or earthy motifs, similar to those used by non-tramp modern folk singers and songwriters. this experimentation was sometimes criticized by older tramps who felt that earlier and now traditional tramp music was endangered and might disappear. but both old and modern a century of czech tramping 27 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi songs coexist in the common tramp repertoire today [vinklát 2004: 72; mácha 1967]. liberalization came to an abrupt end with the warsaw pact invasion of 1968 and the beginning of political “normalization”. scouting, renewed for a short time in 1968, was forbidden again, and again continued under the guise of various other organizations [břečka 1999: 239]. the regime, while undoubtedly totalitarian and quite able to use coercive violence, was not as brutal as in the 1950s. the secret police were everywhere and dissidents were persecuted but almost nobody, including the more pragmatic party members, actually believed in the victory of communism and the regime focused on preserving the status quo. this included allowing people to pursue their hobbies instead of participating in political life as long as these activities did not clash with the desired image of a socialist society and did not include potentially suspicious acts like travelling to western countries or publishing uncensored texts or music. many people from the cities turned to summer huts and former german cottages in the countryside and used them as second homes. this process led to an additional increase in recreational suburbanization near large cities, often at places where tramp cabin osadas, which had lost part of their historically simple character, had been located (11). the invasion of 1968 also initiated a wave of emigration; some of these emigrants were tramps and they adhered to their lifestyle even in exile. there are still tramp ex-pat osadas in countries like the united states, canada, and australia. [http://domov-trampu.home.comcast.net/~domov-trampu/ (consulted 26 june 2011)]. the regime was antagonistic to tramping, but did not attempt to destroy it completely as it had in the 1950s. instead, it kept tramping under surveillance and practiced a certain level of police harassment while still permitting sanctioned pro-government organizations to run events such as music festivals featuring folk and country music and granting some space to tramps in the popular youth magazine mladý svět (young world). the most important music event sanctioned by the government was the competitive festival porta, a massive non-political but politically supervised event. the porta was popular with tramps, but not only with them, and introduced many genuine new musical talents, including young tramp musicians.[vinklát 2004: 182-183] not all cultural activities related to tramping were official, however. some were and some were not. many tramps were prolific amateur writers and poets and their works were published in legal, semi-legal, and samizdat 28 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi publications [petrová 2009: 61-72]. the submissions to an influential contest for amateur tramp writers and poets named trapsavec were established in 1971, then banned for political reasons, and then their publication was renewed in 1979. [http://www.sdruzeni-avalon. cz/trapsavec.php (consulted 26 june 2011)]. the themes of tramp poems and stories most often centered on poetic descriptions of nature and tales from the lives of tramps; they could also be related to tramp outdoor experiences in other ways. there was also a prominent element of the fantastic and of mystery fiction in these tales. some of them included science fiction elements, often presented in a light-hearted manner, while others were based on contemporary legends popular among tramps. these were usually tales about ghosts and strange murders with motifs taken from campfire legends or related to legend tripping [for definitions see tucker 1999: 205-208]. the revolution of 1989 opened many new possibilities for czech tramps, including freedom of speech and association. at the same time the numbers of actual tramps dwindled noticeably over the course of the 1990s. (12) the reasons for this decline have not yet been analyzed, but there are probably three main factors. the first one is freedom of movement combined with the affordability of foreign travel. since 1989 it has been relatively easy to visit other countries, even exotic and distant ones, and there has been no need to find substitutes for such experiences by romanticizing the czech landscape. the second factor was tied to the increasing diversity of possibilities of self-realization. under the communist regime there had been lots of free time because there was a lack of emphasis on effectiveness in many jobs. simultaneously, recreational possibilities were limited and the system made it difficult for talented hobbyists or people with organizational skills to stand on their own and try and turn their hobbies into professions. this was reversed after the velvet revolution – there were suddenly many more possibilities of self-realization, both in occupational and recreational activities. this was combined with an increasing emphasis on effectiveness on the job and work productivity. these factors had a negative effect on the amount of personal leisure time that most people, especially minor entrepreneurs, who have started their own businesses, could enjoy. the third factor is generational and related to the role of tramping as a passively antiestablishment subculture with ties to the “second culture” of the more politically active underground. tramps, with their escapist mentality and emphasis on freedom and friendship, can be considered to be a part of the “inner exile” movement, communities located in the grey zone a century of czech tramping 29 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi between the social world of the communist party and the underground of dissenters. after the revolution, however, the need for such lifestyles was lost. most young people did not feel the need to participate in such mild and passive anti-establishment activities and competition from other subcultures and movements of possible anti-establishment or generational significance increased. the youth of the 1990s and 2000s were also more interested in participating in specialized out-of-school activities that were more profitable than in scout-like clubs based on the idea of universal education. and there were fewer young people with outdoor skills and inclinations toward spending their free time out in nature – which meant that there were also fewer potential tramps. it is, however, interesting, that while tramps are not the subject of political persecution in today’s czech republic and slovakia, tramping itself as an outdoor activity still remains on the brink of legality because of the manner in which it utilizes the landscape [altman 2003: 260]. czech forests, and the landscape in general, are free access areas according to law. this applies to privately owned forests as well as public land, although access may be limited for justifiable reasons such as game-keeping, the protection of property from vandalism, military training and, most significantly, the protection of nature. camping in forests without a permit, and especially making campfires, is illegal in most cases for safety reasons. this leads to a conflict of interests between tramps, with their disrespect for authority, and state agencies for the protection of nature and wildlife. such conflicts became most apparent in sandstone areas such as the so-called bohemian-saxon switzerland or bohemian paradise. these were popular with czech tramps who built their camps under sandstone abris. the management of these areas, which were often archaeological sites dating back to the mesolithic era, attempted to restore them to as nearly a natural state as possible and tried actively to locate and fine groups of tramps. the management was in turn attacked by tramps for an indiscriminate and excessively severe approach [jenč and peša: 2006: www.ontheroads.net/ services/chatbox/chatbox.php?whatview=read&id=579; http://www.roverky.cz/dokumenty/oirp.pdf (consulted 26 june 2011)]. such conflicts of interests sometimes problematize relations between tramping and environmental movements in general – even though both groups are claiming to be nature-friendly and had occasionally cooperated in the past when both were members of the “grey zone” of communist czechoslovakia [petrová 2009: 77-78]. 30 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi tramping in 2010 is certainly different from the tramping of the first “wild scouts” but the difference has been achieved more by accretion than by replacement. there is a generational difference between younger tramps, who tend to prefer hiking and simplicity, and older ones, who are focused on weekend communal life in cabin colonies. these are not two separate groups, however, but rather two sides of one continuum. both old pre-world war ii and modern tramp songs are played by campfires and large potlachs are usually attended by all generations. there is also a difference in clothing: younger tramps prefer either simple clothing in natural colors or parts of military uniform (13), while decorative cowboy-like and western-styled clothing is more often seen among members of the older generation. defining tramping today as a single unit may be problematic, as it is both a way of spending time outdoors and also a lifestyle. the movement has its core of traditionalists and lifestyle tramps, but there is no formal divide between these and the fringe represented by occasional campers or people, who have some of the attributes of tramps, but do not consider themselves to be members of the movement. the attributes in question include wearing tramp-like clothing, adhering to the unwritten ethical code of tramping (which includes friendship even with unknown tramps and respect for nature), spending leisure time in a tramp-like manner (camping and hiking), respecting the traditions of the movement and following tramp customs (e.g. using a special handshake, greeting others with the word ahoj (14), addressing all other tramps as kamarád and using special tramp nicknames for friends (15)), being a member of an osada, considering oneself to be a tramp, and being considered a tramp by other tramps. tramping has left a deep mark on czech culture over the hundred years of its history. it has been one of the preferred forms of recreation and socializing for several generations of young people, especially in the 1920-1930s and the 1960-1980s. the tramp lifestyle has contributed to the general popularity, not only of tramp music, but also of related genres such as folk and country (16). tramp songs are often played by campfires even by non-tramps and they constitute a large part of commonly known folk repertoire. tramping has also influenced the character of the suburban landscape and recreational architecture because tramp osadas function as a nucleus and inspiration for other recreational colonies. various artifacts produced by members of the movement such as carved totems, invitation cards (zvadlo), diaries (cancák), small clothing accessories, communal event memorabilia, and others can be a century of czech tramping 31 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi considered to be a part of modern folk art. the subculture also has its own legends, traditions and slang. from a social scientist’s point of view, tramping, because it originated as an offshoot of scouting and a unique reflection of the romantic image of america in czech society, also represents a much bigger and multi-faceted social phenomenon. it is an unorganized, openended, self-sustaining movement that can be considered to be both a precursor to post-ww2 youth movements such as the hippies or the rock subculture – and also a distinct alternative to them. tramping bears characteristics which allow it to be labeled as a youth subculture from a sociological point of view. it was and still is usually adopted in the late teenage years, a liminal period in which the constraints placed on social behavior are challenged and independence from the family is sought. it leads to the creation of distinct communities which offer belonging and status. it also has a dimension of collective rebellion directed against the mainstream society. this countercultural aspect is relatively mild in the case of tramping, but ever-present, and part of the movement’s moral code. the distinctive identity of the movement is supported by the presence of its symbols in material culture, art, and folklore [for details on youth subcultures see hodkinson 2007: 2-5 and following]. the history of tramping also provides a unique insight into a youth subcultural movement, whose evolution was partially rebooted by outside influences. the tramping of the first half of the 20th century began as the hobby of a few and a fringe offshoot of a respected scouting movement. it then gained mass popularity during the 1920s as a prominent youth subculture with countercultural aspects and was heading for absorption by the mainstream culture in the 1930s. these stages of development seem to be typical for many youth subcultural movements of the 20th century, but this was probably the first modern and largescale youth subculture to be born and experienced in bohemia. a possible local precursor, the romantic movement of the 19th century, was influential, but more an expression of generational protest than an attempt to create an independent social space. as it turns out, tramping was not allowed to be completely absorbed (or exploited) by the mainstream culture. the communist regime pushed it back into the grey zone and, through attempts to tame it, paradoxically boosted its countercultural aspects. by then, however, the movement was already deeply rooted in czech society and tramp motifs were embraced by the mainstream culture whenever it was politically possible. this development of acceptance, which took place in the late 1960s and also 32 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi in the 1980s-1990s, in some ways mirrored the original evolutionary stages of the movement. tramping has been repeatedly described as a unique phenomenon in the previous paragraphs. the aforementioned primacy of tramping as a modern czech youth subcultural movement is only one of the reasons for making such a statement. another reason lies in the fact that it has always been limited to czech and slovak populations: all known tramp osadas in other countries are formed by ex-pats and, while the word “tramping” is still used in english to describe various hiking activities, the meaning is different. it is therefore advisable to use the term “czech tramping” or something similar, in cases of possible confusion. czech tramping, while not officially connected with a specific nationality, was not adopted by many members of other groups, the large german minority of pre-war czechoslovakia included. a similar movement of slightly different origin, the wandervogel, was more popular among germans. wandervogel was (and still is) a youth romantic hiking scoutlike movement officially founded in 1901. it differs from tramping in terms of its slightly higher level of organization and the fact that is draws its inspiration from german mythology and history rather than from the american wild west. [http://www.wandervogel.de/ (consulted 26 june 2011)] there is no mention of tramping bearing any relationship to the wandervogel. rather, it is more likely that both movements sprung up independently and grew to fill similar niches. there were friendly contacts between representatives of the two groups, but these were more accidental than frequent [vinklát 2004: 8-9]. the relationship between tramps and czech scout-like organizations was often verbally antagonistic, at least on the official level, as there was competition between them; at the same time contacts on the personal level were far less tense. there were many people who were active in both, especially when scouting was banned by the communist regime. in such times, the “them” of “us versus them” divide were the communists. totalitarian regimes also indirectly forced banned boy scout clubs and similar organizations to create proxy clubs under a “false flag” and, if such clubs were also banned, their leaders and older members often continued their activities as tramps, at least for a while. this blurred the borders between the different movements and eased the transmission of customs, songs, symbolism, and people between them [makásek 2004: 56; krško 2008: 62-69]. for example, the typical tramp handshake is now often also used by cavers, rock climbers, young tourists, folk musicians, and others. western reenactment and living history or euro-indian a century of czech tramping 33 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi groups also became part of this milieu around the 1970s [http://indiancorral.cz/cz/index.php?p=3 (consulted 26 june 2011)]. but whilst there certainly were personal connections between them and tramping and attempts to recreate native american customs in a realistic way had already existed previously (especially among woodcrafters), their focus was often different. tramping stresses hiking and communal activities with friends and does not favor the introduction of many rules. their dress code is forever under discussion, but a tramp’s clothing does not need to be realistic. tramps of today usually do not go outdoors to imagine that they are cowboys, as they more often did in the 1920s and 1930s. the movement has stabilized; it has a long tradition and most tramps leave their homes on weekends simply to be tramps. (17) notes 1 the word tramping was introduced into the czech language from english as a description of an activity – similar to the introduction of camping or, more recently, bungee-jumping. its meaning has shifted from the original english and is used solely for describing the subculture in question or the behavior of its participants. other transcriptions include trempink or trampink. tramping as an activity may be called trampování or trempování; a participant in the activity is a tramp or tremp. this variance does not indicate a difference in meaning of the word; it just represents different attempts to resolve conflicts between czech and english pronunciation.[pergelová 2004: 30-31] 2 for example the catholic gymnastic movement orel or the social-democratic dělnické tělovýchovné jednoty (workmen’s gymnastic unions).[břečka 1999: 12] 3 popular authors included j. f. cooper, j. o. curwood, z. grey, b. hart, j. london and e. t. seton. one of the most popular early movies was the 1917 american serial bull’s eye directed by j. w. horne featuring eddie polo. [waic and kössl 1992: 13; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0008935/ (consulted 26 june 2011)] 4 “aničkas, máničkas and boženkas became annies, maries, bobinas or daisies, betsies and virginies overnight; it was even worse concerning boys. jarda became harry, pepík became bob, ota turned into brandy, zdeněk into iron fist or wintrop, edie and sometimes even swenny, grizly, káča, říman, bill, old saterhand (sic), farnum, dawson, jack etc. etc. (...) there were never so many sheriffs in the 34 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi world as in bohemia in 1919-1920. there was not a group without a sheriff, not even a couple without a sheriff.” [hurikán 1990: 16-17] 5 the haversack, of all pieces of camping equipment used by tramps, probably has the most slang terms attached to it. most of them are derived from the term us torna (u.s.backpack) – usárna, úeska, uzda, usařina or usranec (the last one being a word play on us ranec – a us pack – and usranec – a slang neologism which also refers to a piece of excrement or a “shitty” person) or its shape – hadraplán (a rag plane), špekbuřt (a speckwurst) or mrtvý dítě (dead child). the style of packing a haversack is considered to reflect the personality and skills of its owner. [http://www.ontheroads.net/rubrics/tramping/batoh_uska/uska.php (consulted 26 june 2011)] 6 the name of an osada was often preceded by the abbreviation t.o. (standing for trampská osada). other letters were sometimes added to emphasize the place of origin of the osada or its other characteristics – for example t.o.p. could mean trampská osada pražská (a tramp osada from prague). some examples of characteristic names of various tramp osadas and camps follow: ztracená naděje (lost hope, 1918), měsíční údolí (moon valley, 1922), el paso (1927), fort adamson (1930), grey grizzly (1931), askalona (ashkelon, 1933), pistolníci (pistolleros, 1944), zlatý klíč (golden key, 1956), mimo zákon (out of the law, 1963), cabaléro (caballero, 1966), mississippi (1967), mývalové (racoons, 1976), ministerstvo vnitra (ministry of the interior, 1979), the thirten stars (sic, 1986), zlatokopové (gold diggers, 1987), kamarádi dlouhých cest (friends of long journeys, 1988), galadriel (1994), pod psí skálou (under the dog rock, 2002), krakonošovo quantanamo (rübezahl’s guantanamo, 2008). selected from an extensive list in [moidl and moidlová 2010: 136-163]. 7 the most common terms used for tramp trips were vandr (from czech version of german wandern – to wander, to hike) and čundr (from german tschundern to wander, to walk in a sliding manner) [pergelová 2004: 31, 25]. 8 some popular early composers and performers of traditional tramp music were jenda korda, pedro mucha, jarka mottl, eda fořt, géza včelička and eduard ingriš.[hurikán 1990: 201-210; mácha 1967] 9 there is a word in tramp slang that describes a non-tramp in a pejorative manner – paďour. the word is etymologically unclear, but probably related to the word padavka (weakling) or the word djaur – a non-muslim person – which was taken from the adventure novels of karl may and other authors and used by tramps as ďaur – a playful, non a century of czech tramping 35 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi serious invective. thus pa-ďour acquires the meaning of “false or imperfect djaur” – a double invective. the process of tramping or of individual tramps losing their edge was called zpaďouření (a process of turning into a paďour). a term used for a passively malevolent nontramp is mastňák (greaser), stereotypically a fat, sweaty bourgeois-like person leaving waste in the forest, especially greasy papers left after a picnic.[waic – kössl 1992: 64-65; pergelová 2004: 28] 10 an extensive online collection of domovenkas, flags of tramp osadas and other related art may be seen at: [http://picasaweb.google.com/nastramp (consulted 26 june 2011)]. 11 [zapletalová 2007] offers an overview of the czech summerhouse phenomenon; discussion of its relation to tramping appears on pages 24-25. 12 there are almost no estimates of the total number of tramps during different historical periods, including the present. researchers studying tramps often base their comparisons on the numbers of tramps at the most popular suburban passenger train lines. according to them, there was usually at least one wagon full of tramps on weekends for each day train during the 1920s, 1930s, 1970s and 1980s. today, the number is just 10 tramps on such a train. [personal opinion: p. borský, jílové u prahy, 2010] 13 the wearing of these uniform components is usually motivated by tradition, their suitability for outdoor activities, simplicity, and unobtrusiveness in nature. since the 1990s there are also some groups of tramps who consider themselves to be fans of military history. they wear real uniforms (usually post-ww2 american ones) and combine their trips with activities such as airsoft games or survival training. such “war games”, while taken quite seriously during the course of play, still retain their recreational character and are not necessarily linked to political extremism. [krško 2008: 102; moidl and moidlová 2010: 13-16] 14 the word ahoj! probably originates from the english sailor’s greeting a hoy! [pergelová 2004: 24], it was extensively used by canoeists and tramps and later entered mainstream czech language, where it is used as a common informal greeting. 15 the nicknames of tramps are most often americanized versions of their given names (marie = mary), word-plays on their names (rudolf = rudan), animal names or attempts to characterize the tramp metaphorically or by a typical feature of their body or behavior [pergelová 2004: 18-19]. 36 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi 16 examples of both old and contemporary tramp music may be found on many czech internet sites. searches for keywords “ryvola” and “hoboes”, “greenhorns” and “vyčítal”, “f. t. prim”, “nedvědi” or “wabi daněk” on youtube usually offer representative examples of modern tramp music sung by professionals and advanced amateurs. older songs dating to 1920-1930 are less well represented on the internet, but searches for “stará trampská píseň” or “vlajka vzhůru letí” on youtube also yield some results. texts with chord markings for guitar may be found at [http://www.zpevnik.wz.cz/?id_a=82 (consulted 26 june 2011)] for example. a facebook group dedicated to tramp songs up to the 1970s also exists and many examples, both recordings and movies from recent live plays, are posted there: [http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=87010509354 (consulted 26 june 2011)] 17 a collection of photographs of modern tramps may be seen for example at jan moravec’s online gallery: [http://www.etf.cuni.cz/ ~moravec/fotky/ind-tr.html (consulted 26 june 2011) bibliography altman, k. 2003. “...jak někteří trampují” [...how do some of them tramp], in rajče na útěku. kapitoly o kultuře a folkloru dnešních dětí a mládeže s ukázkami [tomato on run. chapters about culture and folklore of today’s children and youth with examples], j. pospíšilová, (ed.) brno: doplněk. břečka, b. 1999. kronika čs. skautského hnutí [chronicle of czechoslovak scouting movement]. brno: brněnská rada junáka. hodkinson, p. 2007. “youth cultures: a critical outline of key debates,” in youth cultures. scenes, subcultures and tribes. hodkinson, p. and w. deicke, (eds.). new york – london: routledge. hurikán, b. [pseud. of peterka, j.] 1990. dějiny trampingu [history of tramping]. praha: novinář. jenč, p. and v. peša. 2006. “projekt obnova skalních dutin stavu přírodě blízkému v chko český ráj” [project “renewal of rock cavities into a state close to nature”] in pískovcový fenomén českého ráje [sandstone phenomenon of bohemian paradise] jenč, p. and l. šoltysová (eds). turnov: zo čsop křižánky 41-50. . krško, j. 2008. meziválečný tramping na rakovnicku [interwar tramping at the rakovník region]. rakovník: state provincial archive at prague – state provincial archive at rakovník. a century of czech tramping 37 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi kučerová, b. 1997. tramping po roce 1945 [tramping after 1945]. diploma thesis. charles university faculty of gymnastic education and sports: praha. makásek, i. h. 2004. kluci z neskenonu. cesta ekumenického skautingu [boys from neskenon. path of ecumenical scouting.] nika: praha. mácha, z. ed. 1967. kronika trampské písničky [chronicle of tramp song]. praha: bonton. moidl, z. and o. moidlová. 2010. sbírka trampských domovenek a jiných atributů [collection of tramp sleeve patches and other attributes]. liberec: rosa. noha, r. 2007. odlesky táborových ohňů [reflections of campfires]. jílové u prahy: regional museum at jílové u prahy pergelová, k. 2004. trampský slang ve slovanském kontextu [tramp slang in slavonic context]. intermediate term thesis. prague: charles university – department of slavonic and eastern european studies. also available at: teketapa.sweb.cz/slang_-_klara.doc petrová, j. 2009. zapomenutá generace osmdesátých let 20. století. nezávislé aktivity a samizdat na plzeňsku [forgotten generation of the eighties. independent activities and samizdat at plzeň region]. plzen: jana petrová. rottman, g. and r. volstad. 1989. us army combat equipments 19101988. london: osprey publishing. tucker, e. 1999. “tales and legends”. in children’s folklore – a source book. b. sutton-smith, j. mechling, t. v. johnson and f. r. mcmahon (eds.). logan: routledge, 193-211 vinklát, p. d. 2004. kronika trampingu v jizerských horách. 1934-2004 [chronicle of tramping at jizera mountains 1934-2004]. liberec: knihy, 555. waic, m. and j. kössl. 1992. český tramping 1918-1945 [czech tramping 1918-1945]. praha: práh, liberec: ruch. web pages: (all consulted 26 june 2011) bull’s eye (1917). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0008935/ der wandervogel: http://www.wandervogel.de/ domov trampů v zahraničí [a home for tramps in foreigh countries]: http://domov-trampu.home.comcast.net/~domov-trampu/ indian corral. indian hobby in the czech republic: http://indiancorral.cz/cz/index.php?p=59 38 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi klasické trampské písně – zpěvník s akordy [classical tramp songs – a songbook with chords]: http://www.zpevnik.wz.cz/?id_a=82 klasické trempské písně [classical tramp songs]: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=87010509354 on the roads – diskuze tramping vs ochrana přírdy, ubývání “divočiny”, ... [on the roads – discussion – tramping vs. protection of natre (sic!), diminution of “wilderness”, ...]: http://www.ontheroads.net/services/chatbox/chatbox.php?whatvie w=read&id=579 on the roads – trampský bágly: uska [on the roads – tramp backpacks: us haversack]: http://www.ontheroads.net/rubrics/tramping/batoh_uska/uska.php picasa web albums – náš tramp [picasa web albums – our tramp]: http://picasaweb.google.com/nastramp sdružení avalon – trapsavec [avalon association trapsavec] http://www.sdruzeni-avalon.cz/trapsavec.php trampoviny [tramp stuff] http://www.etf.cuni.cz/~moravec/fotky/indtr.html zakládací listina nezávislé občanské iniciativy roverští patrioti [foundation charter of independent civic initiative patriots of rover rocks] http://www.roverky.cz/dokumenty/oirp.pdf a century of czech tramping 39 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi wild scouts dressed like cowboys. southern vicinity of prague, circa 1918. archive of regional museum at jílové u prahy first sheriff (an elected, symbolic representative) of osada “dashwood” near prague, circa 1928. archive of regional museum at jílové u prahy. tramps near a cabin named “hudson”. near sázava river, before ww2. archive of regional museum at jílové u prahy. 40 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi a placka or camrátko – a piece of decorated wood. these are usually created by tramps to commemorate a social event and distributed among its participants. this one is placed on a memorial campsite named zlaté dno (golden bedrock) and is related to an 80 years anniversary of founding of the camp. it also reminds of a group of tramps named brdští supové (vultures of brdy hills) who used the place and were participating in anti-nazi resistance. other inscriptions include nicknames of brdští supové and a “brdy snowflake” – an unofficial symbol of the region. photo: jan pohunek, 2009. two members of “kamarádi staré řeky” (friends of the old river), a tramp osada and traditional tramp music group established in 1966, performing at a minor music festival. photo: jan pohunek, 2010. a century of czech tramping 41 folklorica 2011, vol. xvi a simple contemporary tramp camp at brdy hills. photo: jan pohunek, 2005. contemporary tramps with us haversacks on a family trip. photo: jan “netopejr” moravec, circa 2008. << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain 20%) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \050swop\051 v2) /srgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel 1.4 /compressobjects /tags /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages true /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /detectcurves 0.0000 /colorconversionstrategy /cmyk /dothumbnails false /embedallfonts true /embedopentype false /parseiccprofilesincomments true /embedjoboptions true /dscreportinglevel 0 /emitdscwarnings false /endpage -1 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/hrv (za stvaranje adobe pdf dokumenata najpogodnijih za visokokvalitetni ispis prije tiskanja koristite ove postavke. stvoreni pdf dokumenti mogu se otvoriti acrobat i adobe reader 5.0 i kasnijim verzijama.) /hun 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can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader 5.0 and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice reviews 104 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii smith, alison k. cabbage and caviar: a history of food in russia. london: reaktion books ltd, 2021. glossary. references. bibliography. acknowledgements. photo acknowledgements. index. 352 pp. $39.00 (cloth) isbn 978-1-789-143-645. cabbage and caviar: a history of food in russia by alison k. smith provides a profound and high-quality exploration of russian food and its historical significance. the book’s argument is nuanced and complex, and the writing captivating, making the reading experience satisfying. cabbage and caviar conveys a simple yet powerful message: food plays a central role in our understanding of russian history. smith’s research, descriptions, and storytelling showcase how food is not merely sustenance; it is a cultural, historical, and societal artifact that carries the weight of generations. from the iconic borscht to delicate blini, from the opulence of caviar to the humble pirozhki, each dish becomes a portal into russia’s past and the lives of its people. the book’s varied sources include texts, archaeological records, interviews, family budgets, cookbooks, maps, drawings, postcards, photographs, menus, recipes, etc. in the opening pages of the introduction, “let us begin with soup,” the author guides readers through three distinct yet interconnected histories of russian food. these histories encompass the writings of vladimir burnashev, august von haxthausen’s commentary, and the observations extracted from the travelogs and accounts of foreign workers. as one delves into these early narratives, a pattern unfolds—and endures throughout all the chapters— portraying the russian table as in a constant state of flux, oscillating between “abundance and luxury” (17) on one hand and “poverty and dearth” (15) on the other. smith lays the groundwork by considering a fundamental question: what defines russian cuisine? in inventive fashion, she uses the famed leninka canteen as a metaphorical time machine, whisking her readers through time to uncover some of russia’s most iconic dishes (32-34). these culinary staples take on versatile roles, occasionally occupying the periphery and at other times assuming a central role in shaping the historical, cultural, and political fabric of russia. here, smith’s work stands out for enabling readers and critics to approach the material from a multitude of perspectives. in the context of this review, i focus on bread, a quintessential element in russian cuisine. this humble staple can serve as a lens through which to comprehend the ebb and flow of empires, the ramifications of global trade, and the resilience of people who have endured countless challenges. bread in russia’s history, as smith observes, was not merely a staple food but a powerful and transformative agent. socially and culturally, it held profound significance, symbolizing hospitality and serving as the cornerstone of sustenance, transcending societal and economic boundaries (52). weddings were accompanied by ornate karavai bread, exemplifying bread’s religious and cultural importance (60). bread was versatile and adaptable, as shown by the widespread consumption of kvas, a low-alcohol beverage crafted from stale rye bread (66). in reviews 105 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii various historical contexts, bread took on dual roles, both as a choice and as a means of punishment and deprivation. during periods like great lent, some voluntarily adhered to strict fasting, consuming only bread and water, or even abstaining from all other food. this demonstrated bread as a conscious choice for spiritual discipline and self-control (123). however, in the harsh confines of the gulag system, bread and potatoes dominated the meager diet, subjecting inmates to grueling conditions that often led to widespread vitamin deficiency illnesses (251). in early twentieth century russia, bread shortages and discontent reached a critical juncture. this culminated in a pivotal moment when female workers in petrograd staged a walkout on international women’s day in 1917 to protest issues related to bread distribution. their actions sparked a general strike, a soldier revolt, and demands for radical governmental changes, eventually leading to the collapse of the tsarist state (231-233). the significance of bread was often accompanied by the haunting specter of hunger and famine. in this context, smith recounts some of the most harrowing episodes in the country’s past. over the centuries, famine was attributed to various factors, from divine retribution for perceived sins to inadequate transportation systems and crop failures, often forcing desperate migrations in search of sustenance. while the nineteenth century saw some relief efforts, the twentieth century bore witness to devastating soviet-era famines, notably in the 1930s, resulting in millions of deaths due to collectivization, especially in the kazakh steppe (246). this compressed overview harks back to smith’s remark that the history of food in russia is one of “abundance, of dearth, of variety, of simplicity, of continuities, but perhaps above all of change” (31). by delving into various facets of russian history and its food, such as the social, cultural, and economic significance of vodka, the profound impacts of serfdom during imperial russia, or the consequences of collectivization in the soviet era, one can uncover analogous patterns of societal transformations and resilience. bread serves as just one illustrative example of this phenomenon. the epilogue, symbolically titled “russia again,” concludes on a personal note as smith offers readers a glimpse into her personal travels across russia, all viewed through the lens of food. this shift in narrative style, though it may evoke recollections of earlier travelers, ultimately emerges as a distinct and emotionally evocative way to bring her profound and multifaceted exploration of russia to a close. cabbage and caviar is a reminder that a nation’s food heritage not only mirrors its cultural traditions but also embodies the intricate interplay of historical, economic, agricultural, political, and social dynamics. while occasional excursions into broader historical and political contexts overshadow the central focus on food, the narrative maintains a commendable balance. in my opinion, the exploration of the soviet era, particularly the “soviet experience,” would have been even more enlightening if it had placed greater emphasis on the cold war and the space race. furthermore, expanding on the global connections of russian cuisine and its influences on international gastronomy could add a new layer of reviews 106 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii understanding. this magnum opus by alison k. smith should be an important addition to any library’s collection. it will provide a valuable resource for folklorists, history enthusiasts, cultural explorers, and anyone with an appetite for knowledge. ruzhica samokovlija baruh memorial university of newfoundland st. john’s, canada rsamokovlija@mun.ca microsoft word 3-beissingermemorium1201.docx in memoriam folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 77 in memoriam james orville bailey, an unstinting champion of the study of russian folklore, died at the age of 90 on july 20, 2020 in madison, wisconsin. he was born in la junta, colorado on september 28, 1929 but grew up in california. jim attended the university of southern california, after which he served for several years in the u.s. army, learning russian at the army language school in monterey. he met his wife hanna in frankfurt, germany during his service as a russian translator; they married in 1956. jim earned a master’s degree in slavic studies in 1958 at indiana university and spent the 1958-1959 academic year at moscow state university as an exchange student in the first year of the cultural exchange between the u.s. and ussr. jim went on to receive his ph.d. from the department of slavic languages and literatures at harvard in 1965. he was on the faculty of the slavic department at the university of wisconsin-madison from 1967 to his retirement in 1995. during that time he was chair of the slavic department, head of the russian area studies program, as well as head of the folklore program, of which he was a co-founder. jim was also instrumental in the establishment of seefa and served as its first president as well as the editor of the seefa newsletter, which later became folklorica. jim originally worked in russian versification and was a recognized scholar in this field. but he soon shifted from the study of literary verse to oral literary poetry as he became fascinated by the intricacies of oral traditional lyric, ritual, and narrative genres. jim became an established authority on russian “folk” verse and folklore, publishing widely in this field. his 1998 anthology of russian folk epics, an informative and beautifully translated volume co-edited with tatyana ivanova, is a classic of folklore scholarship. it is by far the best annotated english-language anthology of byliny and is widely used by students and specialists alike. jim’s many articles and several books all reflect his meticulous scholarship, informed by a deep understanding of the mechanics and meanings within poetry. jim was a wonderful teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend. i was lucky to overlap with him in the slavic department and folklore program at the university of wisconsin during his last six years there as professor. jim, who taught for decades, delighted in sharing his knowledge and passion for oral traditions and poetry with his students. among a variety of courses, he regularly taught russian folklore. it was such a joy for jim to introduce students to the world of oral traditional russian culture—a topic not often in university course offerings. he never took his many years of teaching for granted, however. he knew that teaching well was an ongoing challenge and told me many times what great (but humble) teachers know: there is so much to learn from students. as jim would tell me, students open our eyes in such untold ways, sometimes leaving us astounded as they come up with amazing questions and subtle readings of “texts” of all sorts. since jim’s death, echoes of the respect and admiration that he inspired and his devotion to his students—both undergraduate and graduate—have resounded and been a moving tribute not only to the depth and influence of his scholarship and mentorship folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 78 but also to his integrity. former students, junior scholars, and other colleagues have expressed their academic and personal esteem for jim as well as their debt to him for turning their attention to, nurturing their love of, and even convincing them to stay with the study of russian folklore. jim motivated and encouraged countless students and scholars of slavic oral poetry—through his teaching, colleagueship, publications, and character. jim, who travelled frequently to the soviet union/russia, was well-known and deeply respected there, as he engaged in collaborative work and nurtured friendships with russian scholars of folklore. as a mark of the respect that he garnered among them, much of his work on oral epic, lyric, and ritual poetry has been translated into russian and published there. moreover, jim was extremely generous and supportive as he helped russian folklorists who came to america (and madison) settle here. on a somewhat more personal note, there was always something so genuine about jim. jim welcomed me so warmly into the slavic department and folklore program when i began teaching there in 1989. he impressed me from the moment i first met him in madison as someone utterly fascinated by, and of course thoroughly knowledgeable about, russian epic, lyric, and ritual oral poetry. jim loved oral epic in particular, and he loved to talk about it. whenever and wherever we met, he would eagerly tell me of some new observation about epic (or even recount some epic plot), with such a happy glint in his eye and a broad, heartfelt smile (usually punctuated by his inimitable laughter)—representing his pure delight in the nuances and meanings of oral poetry. jim was also, as so many have reminisced, a consummate raconteur. he always had a story and a (sometimes corny) joke—such an endearing part of jim as a person. jim delighted in bringing back the latest jokes “collected” on his frequent trips to the soviet union/russia, sharing them among us. jim also treasured his family. i and many others were guests in the home where he and beloved wife hanna lived. not surprisingly, “evenings” at the baileys’ were “folklore events”—he would gather us for memorable evenings to meet and talk at length about oral poetry and traditional culture. jim always spoke so warmly of his sons and grandchildren, and when i “attended” (virtually) jim’s funeral in august, i was moved by the memories and affection expressed by them in their remarks. jey appreciated jim, of course, in a more personal way—as father and grandfather. but everything they said measured up to the jim i knew: always there for the people and things that he cherished, always ready with a story to tell, a joke, and always so “genuine”—there was absolutely nothing fake or affected in him. jim was instrumental to the establishment and furthering of the study of slavic and east european folklore. he inspired countless students and scholars, and his publications on epic and oral traditional poetry have contributed substantially to the field. jim was a person of deep integrity whom we all sorely miss. may his memory continue to inspire us. in memoriam folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 79 margaret beissinger princeton university princeton, new jersey mhbeissi@princeton.edu folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 80 microsoft word folkloricaprotest_ii_full_final_2022 07.27.22.docx folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi folklorica journal of the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association (formerly seefa journal) seefa executive board president: mariya lesiv, memorial university of newfoundland vice-president: dorian jurić, university of ottawa secretary-treasurer: shannon donnally quinn, michigan state at-large board members: elena boudovskaia, georgetown university jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby, university of kentucky webmaster: dorian jurić, university of ottawa folklorica editor: jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby, university of kentucky book review editor: laura olson osterman, university of colorado, boulder online content manager: jon giullian, university of kansas editorial assistants: isabella palange, university of wisconsin johnna warkentine, university of kentucky editorial board oleksandra britsyna, rylsky folklore institute, ukrainian academy of sciences maria carlson, university of kansas larisa fialkova, university of haifa linda j. ivanits, pennsylvania state university vladimir klyaus, institute of world literature, russian federation katia mikhailova, institute of folklore, bulgaria faith wigzell, ssees-university college london aleksey v. yudin, ghent university, belgium publication supported by the university of kentucky issn 1920-0234 craycraftfinal an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 1 articles an urban project in rural crisis: responding to coronavirus in bulgarian villages sarah craycraft ohio state university columbus, ohio abstract de unprecedented situation of covid-19 has created a unique response from village-based projects in rural bulgaria. my research from 2019-2020 followed three projects that facilitate urban-rural intergenerational connection as a form of rural reinvestment. with project planning uncertain and interactions between generations discouraged due to the pandemic, my research, and the cultural work i am following, took an unexpected turn. rather than fulfilling their core missions of connecting young and old, rural and urban people together to pass on rural culture, these projects transformed their rhetoric and practices to support the elderly in a time of crisis. by drawing on my experiences in the field throughout bulgaria’s early onset of pandemic and lockdown measures as well as “virtual ethnography” (being in the virtual spaces where communication and online events are happening), i explore how two of the intergenerational projects aimed at heritage-based rural reinvestment in bulgaria have adapted and organized to fill different needs in a time of crisis. during the coronavirus pandemic, these projects served as a well-poised mechanism for responding quickly to shifting needs and contexts. introduction baba violeta pats out a smooth, elastic ball of dough on her kitchen table in a northwestern bulgarian village on 22 march 2020, the first day of spring. (1) she shapes the mass into a flat, thick oval, making two parallel sets of cuts on either side and affixing the strips she created in the center of the shape to form small, doughy arms with clasped hands. she describes the process as she works: ето сега ще покажа. това е едното. режем за ръчичките. tака така се реже. ръчичките се свиват. това е млад ново детенце. ето го новото начало. [here, now i will show you. dis is one. we cut it for the arms, like so; like so it’s cut. de arms connect. dis is a young new child. dere it is, a new beginning.] [rezidentsiia baba 2020a] violeta demonstrates the making of mladentsi [sing. mladenche]—small bread “children” or dolls—to welcome the spring season as part of the bulgarian ritual an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 2 calendar [macdermott 1998]. she performs this practice in a three-and-a-halfminute video shared to facebook in which she exudes a sense of calm reassurance and matronly authority over the kitchen space [rezidentsiia baba 2020a]. (2) dough this bread ritual may call to mind similar video clips on youtube featuring elderly women preparing traditional recipes, this short film stands apart from similar performances due to its context. de video was shared just one week after bulgarian officials announced a national state of emergency due to the onset of covid-19 as part of a larger social media campaign in response to the pandemic. indeed, violeta’s bread making becomes a background performance in this short film, as the activity provides an occasion for a discussion about the tactics necessary for enduring emergency lockdown. ivan, a resident of violeta’s village, stands off-screen while filming the process and is heard, not seen, as he asks violeta to describe her life in the village during the pandemic. she lists practices such as drinking water with lemon and taking vitamins, fishing in the river, working in her garden, and keeping to herself as preventative measures against the coronavirus. she mentions drinking medicine when needed. ivan jokingly breaks the frame of her recitation, asking if by medicine, she means the homemade liquor rakiia, a source of pride for some bulgarians, that many claim can kill the virus. violeta laughingly insists that she does not mean rakiia and returns the conversation to bread making. aside from ivan’s joke, the conversation takes a lighthearted but earnest tone as it conveys the serenity, resilience, and sensibility of isolated village lifestyles, which seem to escape the atmosphere of panic caused by covid-19. indeed, this video is not meant for other villagers but rather is directed toward an urban audience. ivan asks violeta what advice she would recommend to city people without the ability to take part in the practices she describes, and violeta prescribes that urbanites should leave home rarely, follow the emergency measures set out by the state, and consume thoughtfully, buying only what is needed to ensure that enough products are left on store shelves for others. villagers have a cellar, she explains, and so they need only buy basic cooking staples. de mladentsi-making, combined with this conversation about health practices, suggests a relationship between folkways and wellness. dis short film clip is notable for a number of reasons. first, we see an annual practice recontextualized during the pandemic. like many in-person activities, the village’s springtime holiday was cancelled, and there would be no gathering in the local chitalishte [cultural center, pl. chitalishta]. de alternative format of youtube video demonstration provided violeta a different audience for performing this ritual in the absence of normal contexts. second, she associates the properties of ritual performance not only with the new beginnings of the seasonal round, but with a new beginning in relation to the current health crisis. de making of a mladenche is a signifier of ongoing ritual practice, in spite of the interruptions caused by the coronavirus, which welcomes viewers into a village home and into the sense of calm contained within. dis practice indexes a different sort of rhythm, one of timelessness and the healing that comes, the viewer is asked an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 3 to believe, through connection to folkways. perhaps most poignantly, the making of mladentsi brought together two generations during a time in which physical connections between young and old, especially those from different communities, was seen as cause for alarm due to transmission risks. de video clip enabled young people to join the practice, if from a distance. as demonstrated by this short video clip, the threat of viral covid-19 transmission in face-to-face interactions afforded an occasion for transmission of a different sort: cultural sharing via virtual means. dough violeta rolls out her mladentsi in front of just one other person, her art is made visible to potentially thousands of viewers via facebook, not as a stand-alone video shared by her or ivan, but as part of a larger campaign by an ngo based in sofia, bulgaria, fabrika za idei [ideas factory]. as a part of this campaign, her video joined other short clips, health tips, and updates that were shared during the early weeks of the pandemic. even before bulgarian officials declared a state of emergency, the fabrika za idei team had ceased visits to villages and had redirected its energies to focus more specifically on the needs of the moment, all the while discouraging the actions that it exists to facilitate—interactions between the young and the old. dis team is not alone in reconfiguring trips between city and village; lives around bulgaria were interrupted as people who normally move between cities and villages were suddenly confined to one place. mobility is a significant and crucial part of life for many living in bulgaria, but movement, somewhat ironically, was deemed to be one of the riskiest aspects of life during the pandemic. ethnographic fieldwork based on my fieldwork experiences and observations in bulgaria during the covid-19 pandemic, this field report explores how two cultural initiatives shifted to the online transmission of ideas and practices when the physical movement of bodies was restricted. two projects—rezidentsiia baba [granny residence] and selo nazaem [borrowed village]—draw upon and foster the intergenerational transmission of folkways as a means of connecting urban young people with elderly village residents. (3) in light of the extreme risk posed to the elderly by the coronavirus, both projects reimagined their work in early march 2020, expanding their foci on cultural transmission to also include elderly care in a time of crisis. both rezidentsiia baba and selo nazaem were able to unite and strengthen communities during this period through the exchange of folk knowledge. contextualizing these responses within a broader landscape of change and spatial renegotiations—online and in-person. i will discuss how the creation of these two social media campaigns echoed larger patterns of response to the crisis. by moving the space of transmission and exchange online, the projects were able to draw upon already-established networks to highlight the interconnections among vernacular practice, health, and community care. rather than concluding that the transmission of folklore and folk practice simply “went online” during the pandemic, this article highlights the necessity of prior in-person relations for the an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 4 successful transition to an online environment. dese digital connections relied on a preexisting foundation of vernacular practice that had effectively reconnected young urbanites to elderly villagers inhabiting rural spaces. background to understand the impact of the covid-19 on village-based intergenerational projects and their various responses, it is necessary to first examine why young, urban people would be interested in village lifeways and why intergenerational programming in bulgaria generally takes place in villages rather than in cities. traditionally a space of work and agricultural everyday life, the village has seen a steady decline over the last decades from its thriving status during socialist times. despite this fact, the village is often conceptualized by those who were born around or after 1989 as a place of play and childhood summertime memories with grandparents. for those lacking an active familial connection to a village, these small communities are often imagined as unexplored, exotic places seen from train windows and understood as an important but residual piece of national collective memory. villages evoke different memories for older generations and often connote a backwardness or crudeness that urbanites seek to escape. drastic transformations of the bulgarian village throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, due to industrialization and regime change, have shaped what is often described as a demographic crisis; many villages are now all but emptied of living residents. (4) indeed, bulgaria itself ranks as one of the most rapidly depopulating nations worldwide, with a 2019 united nations report projecting a population decrease of over 1.5 million by 2050. (5) despite these rates of depopulation, villages have become a surprising site of activity for young, urban bulgarians. dirty years after socialism, a noticeable wave of young people is relocating to villages, as well as initiating village-based projects that attempt to direct funds to, increase interaction with, and foster culture and means to secure a livelihood in the bulgarian countryside. whereas socialist ideology framed the village as a historically important but backward and anti-progressive element of the bulgarian past [kaneff 2004], a growing body of scholarship on the post-socialist village suggests changing attitudes: a subset of the younger generation is seeking deeper connections to rural lifeways and reevaluating rural bulgaria in the process. (6) however, that generation’s experiences of vernacular practices, and by extension village life more generally, are significantly shaped by socialist reframing. as silverman [1983: 60] writes in regard to the manipulation and sanitization of village, regional, and ethnic folk practices in bulgaria during the late socialist period, “a new generation of bulgarians is emerging, a generation shaped by government-sponsored folklore rather than by village traditions.” citing kirschenblatt-gimblett, valdimar hafstein [2012: 508] writes that “to possess heritage is to be modern; it is a modern way of relating to the past.” village lifeways were framed as cultural heritage, a tool to catapult socialist bulgaria’s modernization project. de resulting crystallization of national folklore an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 5 during this period positioned village traditions as fading, pre-modern practices. dis, in turn, directly shaped the way urban and rural people understand villages and their associated cultural practices [buchanan 2006]. some of these crystallized ideas appear to be open for reinterpretation in the present moment. as such, ideas about village life and traditional practice are mediated for younger generations not just by forms of representation, but by the processes of transition by which those forms and the places they call to mind were shaped. de village that young people remember and/or seek is a different place in many ways than the village that was lived by their parents and grandparents. dis manifests in fascinating ways in contemporary bulgaria. de generational gap in memory between experiences of the socialist village and today’s struggling villages creates space in some ways for a particular longing for rural bulgaria informed by nostalgia, loss, ideology, and memory [todorova and gilles 2010]. (7) more recent european union reforms have further decimated small-scale farming and all but robbed many young bulgarian villagers of viable livelihoods, with the exception, of course, of the urban-rural commuter-worker [filak 2015]. nevertheless, interest in villages abounds. young activists and enthusiasts i have spoken with often frame the reclamation of village lifeways as repair, in response to cultural and generational breakage inflicted by socialism and a botched transition to democracy. despite this understanding, they embrace a folk tradition that is a mix of socialist staged performance, pagan and orthodox practices tied to the ritual calendar, and a growing preference for the domashno or handmade as signifiers of “authentic” folklore and folklife. (8) layers of what is indexed by “village” overlap to inform a contemporary social imaginary of this space and its associated meanings. (9) de much-discussed topic of depopulation in bulgaria and the burgeoning investments in rural spaces and practices are contextualized and often inspired by these realities and interpretations of vernacular culture. initiatives dedicated to village revitalization span the country. some are implemented by government institutions, some by grassroots organizations, but all speak to a growing contemporary salience of village life for (re)fashioning broader cultural meanings in bulgaria. as rural places are reimagined and recreated, the presumed boundary between rural and urban often becomes reified as a boundary between the elderly/traditional and the young/modern, even as young actors seek to rebuild connections across this dichotomy. interestingly, young people seem not to be abandoning the urban, but rather are creating new pathways and reinforcing connections between places and generations that have slowly eroded since the early twentieth century. pandemic in bulgaria when bulgaria entered a national lockdown, i had been living in sofia and conducting ethnographic research for roughly six months. having just made it through the slow, contemplative winter season, i was gearing up for the most active part of my fieldwork. simultaneously, the cultural projects i was following an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 6 were waking up from winter slumber and moving into the annual season of project implementation. up to that point, i had attended fundraisers and festivals, planning retreats and team meetings, and spent weekends with villagers young and old to acquaint myself with the rhythms of and motivations for these grassroots village residencies. across the country, early spring is a time of seasonal thaw; just as garden preparations begin in earnest, spring is also the season in which ngos move from winter dormancy and reflection into the more active stages of summer planning. in 2020, the arrival of spring also marked the arrival of a new word in everyday conversation, prompting different sorts of preparations—coronavirus. as march arrived, every conversation and lingering decision turned at some point to the threat of this new illness. people were uneasy, wary of close quarters and sneezes in enclosed spaces. conferences went online, and whole offices chose to work from home out of an abundance of caution. even before a state of emergency was declared following the first coronavirus outbreaks, covid-19 had already entered the daily surround. on 13 march, bulgaria entered a state of national emergency and the country officially imposed protective measures—restricted border crossings, cancelled bus routes, and limited travel from one’s place of work or permanent address, provided one could produce the appropriate documentation. almost overnight, the importance of location gained new immediacy as citizens chose where to remain for the lockdown period. (10) some city dwellers chose to relocate with friends or family to village houses as the lockdown measures confined residents to apartments in the urban environment and city and national parks were closed to the general public. (11) i began to notice subtle changes to the urban landscape as official and unofficial changes arose—a dirty mask smashed into the sludge at the edge of the street, a new toilet paper display at a local café. a mannequin in my neighborhood market [image 1] and famous statues about the city donned facemasks, while open-access spaces like parks were cordoned off with caution tape. stores installed plastic shields at registers and distance markers with corporate logos along the aisleways. bursts of clapping filled the nighttime soundscape at 9:00 pm each evening, a “thank-you” to overburdened healthcare workers. someone had laid recently purchased groceries in my building’s stairwell to air out. my own apartment transformed into a coronavirus shrine. de entryway shelf was lined with masks, rubber gloves, and rubbing alcohol, and the living room was converted into a home office. it was a time of fearing one’s neighbor but also lending a helping hand; fellow apartment residents hung letters offering assistance with groceries in common areas, and bags of bread and jars of fruit preserves were left on street corners for the hungry. an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 7 at the same time that life went indoors, calendars began to explode as virtual concerts and social events began to fill the long hours of isolation. as occurred elsewhere, the new reality of life online brought with it a massive wave of homemade and handcrafted practices for resisting both the physical and mental torpor of lockdown. as my own research plans were largely suspended, i turned my attention to the changing world around me. humor, fear, and folklore mixed with skepticism about official action; vernacular responses flourished throughout the emergency situation in bulgaria. one of my interlocutors, clad in a cooking apron painted to resemble a folk costume, began making traditional recipes like banitsa [cheese pastry] via facebook live. jokes about the potency of the bulgarian homemade liquor, rakiia, against the virus abounded in casual conversation, meme pages, and even in festival costume as the coronavirus prompted creative adaptations to masqueraders’ outfits. de martenitsa, a bracelet given out on the first of march as a token of health and happiness, was invoked as a shield against the virus in various memes and social media posts. immune-boosting folk remedies were also shared online. one elderly woman even expressed that her community in the rhodope mountain range was safe from covid due to the pine trees and clean air. all the while, the village danced in the background as a topic of conversation and a destination of growing interest. two key occurrences during the early weeks of lockdown gave rise to the village’s prominence in the coronavirus discourse. on the one hand, the urban centralization of resources became woefully apparent, especially after bus routes between cities and villages were restricted or discontinued altogether. pharmaceutical supplies, healthcare, and other resources were less accessible without reliable transportation to rural areas (many pensioners rely on bus services and visiting relatives to provide their weekly needs). students living in villages struggled to keep up with school as poor internet connection or lack of devices isolated them from virtual classrooms. image 1. a mannequin dons a facemask at ivan vazov market in sofia, bulgaria [sarah craycraft, 2020] an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 8 likewise, elderly residents without devices were cut off from normal modes of communication with relatives living in cities and abroad, especially those who relied on chitalishte [cultural center] or café internet services to use their cell phones. dus the interdependency between urban and rural living was made clearer at this time. in the village, commensal routines such as coffees or beers with friends, or choir and dance practices were interrupted. urban-rural movement was also highly restricted. on the other hand, many aspects of everyday village life continued as they had prior to the pandemic, albeit with minor alterations to facilitate continuity. (12) for example, one woman in her seventies informed me that the women in her village merely moved their daily café gatherings to her backyard, thereby skirting formal restrictions (somewhat to my dismay). de relative freedom and access to green space in villages also prompted urbanites to book guest houses or obtain special paperwork to ride out the pandemic in a village house, rather than in their city apartments. as a result of coronavirusinduced migration, villages were fuller than usual for this time of year. with shifts in the use of physical space came shifts in virtual space as well. as i traced the movements of friends and connections who had relocated to villages, i noticed that they were also explaining this choice with moral reasoning, shared online and during our conversations. cities were overcrowded, unhealthy, and disconnected from lifeways that are vital to a truer existence, went the logic. it was not enough for these young urbanites to take the plunge and physically move, they also had to share about it through social media networks. roughly a month into the emergency situation, i was added to a new facebook group where members shared survival tips for and experiences of village living, with the idea of fostering community between village enthusiasts. some of these enthusiasts had relocated temporarily from cities, some already lived in villages full-time, some had recently made the permanent move, while others merely admired the village from afar. posts displaying flowers, gardens, and home-cooking were accompanied by self-aware captions such as “taka e na selo” [this is what it’s like in the village], or videos explaining why village living is healthier than the urban lifestyle for promoting calmness and safety during the pandemic. a few of my interlocutors viewed this moment as crucial for reframing the idea of village life. one even stated that she believes each person will think more seriously about the village lifestyle after the fear of the coronavirus passes, but that “real village people” do not have time to share pictures of their food online. (13) as i discuss below, these new instances of articulating the village as a pleasant and desirable alternative to unhealthy city life are noteworthy in light of the strategic ideological framing of the village as backward during socialism. dus we see that physical and ideological changes to place bled into and shaped virtual spaces as well during the onset of the pandemic. at a time when the fate of bulgarian villages is already in a state of demographic crisis, a crisis of a different sort brought the village into even sharper focus. dis, then, is the context within which the two projects i discuss below, rezidentsiia baba and selo nazaem, operated. an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 9 village residencies respond to covid-19 my research traces networks of young bulgarians who are engaged, in some capacity, in the reframing and reclamation of village lifeways. dis is particularly visible in a somewhat new form, residency projects: short-term immersive experiences that allow young, urban people to live temporarily in villages around bulgaria. dese curated forms of (re)attachment to place are responses to a complex set of interactions between urbanization, industrialization, depopulation, and ideological manipulation, which have fueled rural depopulation, among other impacts. my fieldwork followed three residencies, though i became aware of others during my research. i discuss two of these residencies in this paper. each year in late summer, elderly hosts (almost exclusively women) open their homes to participants, temporarily welcoming new life into villages for the duration of these intergenerational residency projects. participants learn traditional recipes, interview local residents, and document folk practices like canning, weaving, and folk singing. while some of these practices are living traditions, others are resurrected merely for the purpose of demonstration. most importantly, different generations spend time together, often creating festivals or large final events to mark the end of the experience, complete with folk costumes and horo [line dancing]. each project is enacted in a different way and at different scales, though all are facilitated by larger umbrella organizations. founded in 2015, rezidentsiia baba is one of many projects hosted by fabrika za idei. all over bulgaria, participants in this project undertake ethnographic documentation and relationship building for roughly one month, guided by principles of social innovation, design thinking, and transnational skill-sharing [stoianova 2016a, 2016b]. selo nazaem has taken place each year since 2016 in a single village, facilitated by the staff of the dolni vadin chitalishte [cultural center] on the banks of the danube river. de project compliments other programming of the chitalishte, whose primary purpose is to support the needs of community members. dough selo nazaem places more emphasis on pre-organized experiential learning and is shorter in duration (roughly one week in length), both programs view reconnection to village life as a path toward healthier, more fulfilling lifestyles and a necessary experience for bulgarian well-being [radulova 2020]. (14) below, i discuss how these projects have built upon their networks and accumulated wisdom to support the communities they work with during the pandemic, despite lockdown measures. rezidentsiia baba in early march, the communication strategies for rezidentsiia baba began to change. typically, followers of its work are kept informed of project timelines, results, and upcoming programming through facebook and instagram posts as well as by updates to the project website. dese informative posts are interspersed with content that was collected by participants over the past five years and shared an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 10 as glimpses into the rezidentsiia baba experience and its growing archive. for example, interesting snippets from interviews or photos of young people learning crafts offer followers a small experience of the annual residencies. just before the declaration of the national emergency in bulgaria, rezidentsiia baba’s posts took on a dual purpose, to convey folk remedies and wisdom associated with the village lifestyle and also to appeal for help in addressing the interruptions of typical resource distribution pathways to villages. with interruptions to weekly trips between cities and villages, new modes of resource distribution filled these gaps. additionally, videos from elderly residents, like the example above from violeta, shared updates on rural experiences of the pandemic and fostered a connection to villages that many urbanites could not access from their city apartments. de captions framing these videos prompted followers to learn resilience from elders. posts featuring herbal remedies promoted natural preventative medicine and connection to the environment for strengthened immunity. for example, the image below explains uses of the leaves and roots of hryan [a horseradish varietal], documented by a participant during one of the rezidentsiia baba cycles. de caption of this infographic asks followers to share other immune boosting plants that they have learned about from elderly relatives. an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 11 baba [granny] knows, that… horseradish is a powerful immune booster and helper for: a stuffy nose: the root can be grated and squeezed. de squeezed juice can be used as nasal drops joint pain: the leaves can be smeared with honey, applied to the affected area and wrapped in cloth. sleep one night with this compress and remove it in the morning, and “along with the bandage, the pain disappears.” shared by baba tsetsa, village of sinagovtsi. documented by nelina, resident in the village of sinagovtsi [rezidentsiia baba 2020c] not all of the posts and actions taken during the emergency situation involved folklife. in fact, much of rezidentsiia baba’s work during this time left ethnographic sharing behind almost entirely as the team shifted its day-to-day activities to outreach and resource redistribution. dis work depended heavily on the team’s already-existing resource bank of grassroots networks, relationships to villages, and practical experience; the knowledge the team has accumulated throughout their five years of practice exceeds the folk songs, audio clips, recipes, and photographs recorded in the rezidentsiia baba archive. all of my interlocutors, including team members, reported learning more about the needs of villages through participation in this project. pandemic interventions drew upon these years of learning. having already established strong relationships based on years of studying village traditions, the fabrika za idei team and past participants communicated with the elderly to inquire about their needs in this new situation. rezidentsiia baba’s plans for the 2020 program were cancelled and, with donor permission, funds were rerouted to purchase medication and pharmaceutical supplies for elderly villagers. as with most ngo projects, rezidentsiia baba followed its action with reports and demonstrations for online followers, sharing the narratives of their work during the early weeks of the lockdown. de project’s facebook feed featured photos of facemask-wearing mayors handing pills to elderly women and of cars packed full of supplies ready to be shipped from the city to the village. used digital devices such as mobile phones and tablets were also collected and sent to villages for the elderly and students. as one team member stated, their work was even more intense during this period than before the pandemic. (15) because rezidentsiia baba’s activities already involved staying in touch with village hosts even after the residencies ended, it was quite natural to check in on contacts from past cycles. with these networks in place, team members were able to draw on what they had learned about rural marginalization, cultural breakage, and loss of place to reorient their mission and to convey advice to followers. dis is seen most clearly in a series of five infographics featuring health an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 12 tips that recommended adjustments to intergenerational interactions during the pandemic. dis short series of posts featured cream-colored backgrounds with a colorful folk element stretched across the top of the graphic flanking the words aktsia zdrave [health action] and a prescriptive message in the center. de posts shared tips to care for at-risk elders and chronically-ill relatives, giving suggestions such as organizing trips to the pharmacy on their behalf, warning grandchildren not to visit baba, donating rubbing alcohol for use in villages, reminding grandparents to self-isolate, avoiding city transport, and paying bills online. health action dis sunday (and until the end of the month) do not go for cake at baba’s! call her and talk to each other to hear how you both feel, lift her spirits or, on the other hand her, your own! rezidentsiia baba tips – how to save our loved ones over 60 years old [rezidentsiia baba 2020d] an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 13 as can be seen in these graphics, a fascinating component of rezidentsiia baba’s emergency work involves the ways in which online audiences are positioned in relation to both the elderly and to place. de experience of life in a specific village was often scaled up in their messaging to index village life in general: the village is a place where people know how to live calmly, in close relationship with the environment, removed from urban panic. baba, too, is framed not just as a singular person but as a generalized figure for whom all must care, yet also to whom all can look for an example of resilience and mental strength. dese depictions and the interconnections towards which they gesture form the foundation of rezidentsiia baba’s response to the pandemic—bringing health, ideas about village life, and elderly wisdom into conversation. followers are asked to take responsibility for the elderly, but also to learn from them. indeed, in the same way that rezidentsiia baba served the elderly, so too did the elderly help to calm urban project workers. (16) several posts explain that the team members looked to older village residents for reassurance during the national emergency, even as they had directed care and resources to the villages. dis dual positionality is reflected in the content shared on their facebook page featuring the elderly village women who participated in rezidentsiia baba. de team’s social media presence assumed an active, knowledgeable stance regarding how the group’s followers should interact with villagers, while simultaneously displaying a certain degree of vulnerability in comparison to the capability of elderly villagers; rezidentsiia baba regards these elders as resilient in spite of their marginalization. for example, baba vasilka, a residency host, states in a video that despite being elderly (and thus at higher risk of infection), she is more worried about young people’s ability to cope with the lockdown and the pandemic. (17) she recommends trud [hard work] in the garden or yard, if possible, to take one’s mind off of sickness as hard work facilitates life. likewise, the caption accompanying violeta’s aforementioned mladentsi clip reads as follows: оказва се, от разговорите ни с тях до, момента че са много поустойчиви психически от нас и способни да действат градивно и умерено. като че ли е поразумно да се обърнем към тях за съвети що е то устойчивост в извънредно положение. [it turns out, from our conversations with them until now, that they [the elderly] are much more mentally stable than us and are able to act constructively and moderately. it seems more prudent to turn to them for advice on what emergency resilience is.] [rezidentsiia baba 2020b] de project’s facebook posts (including captions and video/photo content) demonstrate a balance between these two positionalities, as can be seen through a close reading of the rhetorical tools used to convey rezidentsiia baba’s messaging. wellness tips collected from elderly villagers (“baba knows, that…”), an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 14 written in a conversational tone, present the information as everyday knowledge shared in a casual and friendly manner from baba to the team or resident and, finally, to the follower. coupled with captions like that above, which express that rezidentsiia baba is taking its lead from the elderly rather than prescribing action, these choices amplify the advice of the elderly and simultaneously serve to protect them from urban visitors. in this way, the rezidentsiia baba team achieved a rhetorical shift from knowledgeable project facilitators to open learners as it looked to the elderly as guides for navigating this period. rather than reading this position as an abrupt departure from rezidentsiia baba’s prior encouragement to visit villages, this shift conveys a subtle but sensible reiteration of their messaging—if residency participants desire to gain insights from village life, part of that process involves taking seriously the needs and perspectives of village residents. dis stance echoes the project’s overall philosophy for social change as well. in their regular programming, the team prioritizes and teaches participants to engage in careful listening before action to understand village resources and needs. dis is a method they have honed over time, with each cycle of the residency. (18) over the course of the national emergency rezidentsiia baba essentially redistributed wellness by drawing on its varied connections to village lifeways. de team’s authority to give and request advice is backed by a range of sources: folk wisdom collected and archived over the years; medical and practical advice gathered from news briefings; conversations with people on-the-ground (mayors, village and regional chitalishte directors, local residents), past participants (some of whom are also in contact with their village hosts) as well as with donors, supporters, and other culture workers. deir connections to these sources are portrayed via social media, as followers are introduced to a range of actors: photos of (masked) team members holding or transporting medical supplies; village contacts (mayors, chitalishte staff) distributing vitamins sent by the team; the elderly receiving supplies or narrating village life, etc. videos featuring the elderly recount how gardening and difficult work can calm and distract people from fear, and captions act as framing devices that call for slower living, closer listening, and quietness as village practices that urban residents can emulate. in sum, rezidentsiia baba frames experiences and perspectives from village living as tactics for resilience that can guide life during the pandemic despite one’s location, invoking both state of mind and practice as prescribed by elderly residents. of course, it is highly likely that many young followers have grandparents, friends, or relatives living in villages and could hear about village conditions directly from them. however, as a voice of authority with years of experience, the rezidentsiia baba team was able to create an online space of sharing and exchange that put traditional practice into current context and quickly enabled mutual aid through informal networks. dis resource is especially notable when considering bulgaria’s institutional failure to address the impact of this crisis on peripheral spaces in a timely manner. (19) in comparison to the more humorous memes and social media statuses about coronavirus that i discuss above, an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 15 rezidentsiia baba’s social media presence is earnest and even reverent in its reference to folkways. by sharing video clips and images of practices like the rhythmic kneading of bread, the washing of an old enameled pot in an outdoor garden sink, listening to a folktale, or asking neighbors what they need, rezidentsiia baba frames and promotes such practices as a particular kind of alternative response to the coronavirus pandemic rather than the more common flurried and urgent responses. selo nazaem de approach to pandemic intervention exhibited by selo nazaem also incorporates tactics of multidirectional listening and sharing between villagers, project organizers, and residency participants. for many villagers living in dolni vadin—a “village without an exit” at the end of a road to the bulgarian-romanian border—life can be solitary. de children and grandchildren of most villagers reside in cities or live abroad, and their peaceful community of less than 150 residents (roughly 90% of whom are pensioners) is not exactly a destination for many. (20) for a growing group of young urbanites, however, this village on the periphery has grown in relevance. de project selo nazaem provides a glimpse of what aid can look like when manifested from within a community and how connections to a network across bulgaria reduced some of the additional isolation of this crisis beyond that produced by daily life for the elderly. de impetus for the first cycle of selo nazaem in 2016 grew out of the main focus of the chitalishte of caring for village residents, as project co-founders anelia spasova and nina borisova explained in an interview with the popular bulgarian series da khvanesh gorata [to catch the forest] [shtŭrbeva 2020]. (21) as the secretary and librarian (respectively) of the chitalishte, they view their main responsibility to be community care, with a focus on cultural activities. selo nazaem is one such activity, which fills a void in the community each year— intergenerational interaction in the absence of grandchildren, most of whom live abroad—by hosting young, urban visitors in the village. its primary goal in the new emergency situation, however, was the preservation of life. in the interview with da khvanesh gorata, anelia asked young people to avoid visits for the time being, to preserve the health of at-risk villagers. dis message was later reiterated on their social media accounts. as residents of the village themselves, anelia and nina found new ways to support the community even as in-person cultural programming took a back seat. due to the lockdown measures and uncertainty about the duration of the coronavirus threat, the dolni vadin chitalishte closed temporarily in mid-march, along with other chitalishta around bulgaria. anelia and nina’s work shifted from planning a cultural calendar to distributing medicines, books, and groceries to village pensioners. as they explained it, this was just a continuation of their care work [katracheva 2020; personal communication]. similar to rezidentsiia baba, part of selo nazaem’s intervention involved reimagining the networks and spaces it had created online to facilitate new modes an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 16 of intergenerational exchange. anelia and nina quickly moved the selo nazaem program up a few months to take place during the emergency situation, calling the 2020 cycle “selo nazaem – na edin klik raztoyanie” [borrowed village – one click away]. as one elderly villager put it, the annual residency makes life “not grey anymore.” (22) dus, a continuation of the program in a new form filled a psychological and emotional need during the crisis. dis online version amplified some of the aspects of past iterations that had developed over the years. de first year of selo nazaem, for instance, was heavily focused on village heritage. de residents performed rituals, made homemade recipes, and learned folk songs and dances to understand aspects of what life in the village is about. de following cycles built on this first year to include more volunteer service, interaction with a wider range of villagers, and even the transmission of knowledge from young to old such as composting demonstrations and medical lectures. de online residency built on this two-way transmission and featured a familiar cast of performers that villagers had already gotten to know in previous years. past participants prepared short performances to share online with viewers in dolni vadin. dey posted home videos of craft-making in varna, baking in sofia, and herbal medical knowledge demonstrations from pleven. others sang folk songs, recited poetry, and read story books. library outreach is a critical service provided by the chitalishte and these performances brought storytelling to life at a time in which the library was less active. anelia and nina also assembled short films about holiday rituals that occurred during lockdown, allowing for online distanced gatherings to celebrate these holidays. “grand master” video clips recorded in the village and presenting villagers demonstrating folk arts were also shared for facebook followers. (23) although few of the elderly have tablets, smart phones, or computers, anelia and nina ensured that community members would have safe options to view the videos. some went to the chitalishte in small groups of two and three to watch the clips. in cases where elders were unable to leave their homes, the two women made home visits and played the videos on their own devices. (24) in this way, the typical transmission of village lifeways from the old to the young was reimagined, with young participants sharing performances to interrupt the isolation of elderly village residents and elderly participants sharing their lifeways with a broader audience. interestingly, some of the young participants shared performances more typically associated with the village or the elderly, such as those featuring folk song and herbal demonstrations. dis disrupted some of the tropes regarding which customs belong in cities and which in villages. de circulation of such practices around bulgaria brought visitors into the homes of viewers each week and placed a marginalized community at the center of nationwide cultural exchange. an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 17 conclusion de adjustments to the programming of rezidentsiia baba and selo nazaem during the pandemic demonstrated a myriad of responses in reaction to an unprecedented moment. what can the adaptations of village residencies tell us about the turn to folklife in response to the coronavirus pandemic? first, we can consider the ideas of preservation and transmission present in both projects. before covid-19, the work of rezidentsiia baba and selo nazaem was centered on the preservation of villages and the transmission of village lifeways to young people in response to a different crisis: village depopulation. de switch to emergency action emphasized the preservation of human life and brought new prominence to easy-to-overlook but important distinguishing factors between living folklore and heritage. although aspects of regular programming from both projects involve the detachment of practices from context or their revival simply for the sake of demonstration, other components emphasize the necessity of exchange and circulation as crucial elements of what keeps a tradition traditional—movement and variation shaped through performance [ben-amos 1971, toelken 1996, noyes 2016]. in their attempts to prevent coronavirus transmission while continuing on with their vital work, rezidentsiia baba and selo nazaem utilized new technologies for sharing information, entertainment, and resources. in this way, selective transmission of folkways online was tailored to fit the current moment and gave performers and audience members a reason to adapt practices to the constraints of the occasion. dough i cannot speak to whether these posts actually caused a follower to knead dough or rush to create an herbal remedy, we all know someone who baked homemade bread for the first time during lockdown. posts like those shared by rezidentsiia baba contextualize the sudden impulse to “make” within larger annual rhythms and systems of belief, grounding the anxieties of the moment in cultural practice. videos shared through selo nazaem prompted participants to select something from their repertoire of skills that would be relevant for their audience in a moment of isolation and detachment. dus, we see the folk process at work. de role of the archive, too, adds another important layer. droughout my fieldwork, i asked different team members at rezidentsiia baba why cultural documentation and archival curation were central parts of the residency projects. i never received a clear answer; although preservation was an important component of their work, the relationship between preservation and village revitalization remained ambiguous, even for the team members. dough carefully organized according to year, village, file type, and sometimes genre, their archive exists in what stewart [1991] calls fragments: decontextualized bits of folklife that at some point struck a project participant as folklore, worthy of documentation. de typical rezidentsiia baba facebook posts present these items to an enthusiastic audience who have opted into weekly doses of village life. i recall being fascinated by a casual moment in early march in which my roommate, the face behind rezidentsiia baba’s social media presence, told me an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 18 she was sharing some archival material that dealt with health matters because of rising concerns about the coronavirus. in a moment of crisis, she had turned to the group’s archive to make sense of it, using folk wisdom shared with the group’s followers. perhaps an answer to “why document?” in these projects is more complicated than salvage ethnography. without necessarily knowing it, team members and participants were collecting and saving folklife for a rainy day, such as the situation presented by covid-19. placed within the broader scope of reframing and reclaiming villages in contemporary bulgaria, these practices align with other trends toward a preference for the handmade, seeking alternative lifestyles, and finding a role for the past in the present. as mentioned above, this archival sharing geared toward urban viewers was part of a larger strategy that included turning to and incorporating the perspectives of the rural elderly (especially women) in pandemic-related communications. dus archival findings joined a multi-directional exchange of advice and experiences, to open up the typical use of rezidentsiia baba’s social media platforms. we can also consider the encounters and spaces created by these initiatives, as well as the impacts on how space is regarded more generally. performances of all kinds allowed for glimpses into kitchens, bedrooms, and gardens. pensioners in villages spoke directly to urban dwellers, while young people addressed village residents and other project participants, all scattered across bulgaria. everyday spaces became zones of play and creation [abrahams 2005], unique stages for performance in front of an imagined group that expanded the scope of daily life, already made strange by national emergency. dese practices were, of course, geared specifically toward communities bounded by online membership in public groups, but actions like sharing videos or playing them in front of family members in the home potentially stretched the audience and allowed them to contribute to the growing online space given to villages at this time. de move to a virtual space was not just a temporary remedy or new avenue for transmission, but rather created a new context as well as a tightening and focusing of the motivations for sharing between generations. de social media campaigns discussed in this article emphasized villages and their residents as resources and, simultaneously, as spaces and people in need of resources. dey demonstrated the relevance of place to the experience of pandemic as well as the affordances and drawbacks of one’s location to offering meaningful support. rezidentsiia baba and selo nazaem provide lessons from two positions with the facilitators of one project located in a city reaching out to villages, and the other located in a village, drawing the resources and people from the city toward locals from within. anelia and nina, as staff at the chitalishte, are the sort of people the team at rezidentsiia baba liaised with in order to accomplish their network-sourced distance emergency support. as on-the-ground locals who can ensure supplies and cultural exchange are accessible to the elderly, they are necessary links in the chain of resource decentralization, as are the urban organizers on the other end. dese two examples raise a question about the potential gains of collaboration between actors working out of different locales – what would happen if such efforts joined forces? an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 19 as yet another layer of issues connected to place and positionality, we can consider how the idea of the village and the folkways ascribed to this space as a social imaginary served as a resource. discourses on the potential role of contemporary villages range from arguments about quality of life, to village practices as desperately needed resources for a potentially grim future. de village as a site of potentiality has a longer history in bulgarian collective memory that rose to the occasion of the pandemic. whereas connections to villages offered a means for survival during the financial crisis of the late 1990s to provide access to food and resources in a moment of dire scarcity, the contemporary desire for reconnection to rural bulgaria by younger generations prompts forms of experimentation in which art and culture are tools for a different sort of survival. (25) further investigation might consider the connections between these ruralurban interdependencies in times of need. finally, the importance of community care during the pandemic warrants attention. de enhanced focus on elderly care during this period necessitated a shift in the positioning of both projects (most clearly rezidentsiia baba), as both requested that young people living in cities avoid visiting elderly villagers despite the importance they place on interaction between generations. although this course of action was mandated by the state, given the high risk to elderly populations, it is noteworthy that these two residencies not only followed state recommendations by discouraging village visits, but followed up with new forms of care. in the case of selo nazaem, elder care was already a priority, as anelia and nina view their work for the chitalishte to encompass community care. dey had identified intergenerational interaction as an element of this care and, as such, the choice to expand to online connection was a sensible adaptation. by structuring the sharing as two-way, they met the needs of community members and young urban people, moving their programming up from late summer to midspring to fill a collective void. relatedly, rezidentsiia baba expanded its central focus from addressing a need for rural connection to centering the needs of village elderly. a balance between rural and urban needs has always been crucial to its programming, as demonstrated by the entrepreneurial components of its residencies, which encourage participants to develop programs that source funding to villages as part of the experience. de pandemic appears to have crystallized or synthesized this outreach in a new way and to have made more space for the voice of elderly villagers in the process. by drawing on pre-existing networks, these projects—themselves precariously positioned due to funding scarcity—were able to support communities in a time of crisis, and both strengthened and united through the sharing of folk knowledge. deir quick action and interdependency on preexisting networks demonstrate several roles for cultural work in times of crisis and provide models for enacting care based on these relationships. an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 20 notes 1 baba is the kinship term for grandmother. it also connotes a more personal or affectionate dimension when used to address elderly women that extends beyond kin relations. when speaking about these women in english, bulgarians often use baba or translate the term as the english diminutive “granny.” when naming specific elderly women involved with the intergenerational village residencies, i keep with these practices. i use the more general category of “elderly” to denote specific groups of pensioners living in villages where my fieldwork took place. although these collectives include men and women, more often than not elderly participants are women. when apposite, i specify some groups specifically as “women pensioners.” 2 i am grateful to deodore charles for helpful discussions about the place of ritual bread making and domashna rakiia in coronavirus discourse. deodore’s dissertation [forthcoming] addresses these topics more thoroughly [see also rezidentsiia baba 2020]. 3 i employ ‘project’ to signify precariously funded initiatives that cluster around a particular topic, theme, or goal, in this case projects that strive toward village revitalization in some fashion. i draw on the writings of bendix, bizer, and noyes [2017], who articulate the “interdisciplinary project as a social form” and “a hybrid, with both the limitations and the affordances of that condition” [1, 5]. 4 de edited volume global villages: rural and urban transformations in contemporary bulgaria [duijzings 2013] provides a thorough overview of transformations to bulgarian villages. de volume presents “ethnographic accounts of global processes in specific rural places without losing sight of urban contexts” [1]. it makes the insightful argument that spatial connections have long been larger than local, refuting the popular claim that bulgaria has historically been a “small nation of small peasants” [5]. in the volume, anthropologist deema kaneff argues that the relationships between cities and villages in bulgaria result from and are shaped by globalization—they do not fall along a stark dichotomy of rural versus urban, but are rather fluid. continuing waves of transition in bulgaria give the sense that villages and rural life are anything but stable and timeless. as bulgarian provincial artisan markets for the ottoman empire disappeared with the empire’s collapse, postottoman economic decline led to a surge of village repopulation as artisans lost their trade market and turned to agriculture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. pre-socialist land redistribution during the stamboliiski years (1920s) reconfigured village life, family make-up, and understandings of the rural as the ideal national past. dese impacts continued through socialism with the shift from agrarian to industrial bulgaria [duijzings 2013; creed 2013; neuberger 2013]. de redistribution of young, educated people to villages as per communist work assignments further reconfigured family ties to place. although contemporary village depopulation is certainly connected to continuing industrialization and urbanization after socialism, these trends began considerably earlier, impacted by each wave of transition. what more, as gerald creed [1998] an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 21 demonstrates in bulgaria and katherine verdery [2003] in romania, the process of de-collectivization during the transition to democracy did not yield a return of young people to villages but rather the opposite—young families stayed in the cities where they had settled. 5 united nations world population prospects [2019] positions bulgaria as one of the most rapidly depopulating nations worldwide. further population data can be traced via the annual population and demographic processes reports published by the bulgarian national statistical institute [stoyanova et al. 2020]. 6 petya dimitrova [2019] explores urban-rural internal migration and gavrail gavrailov et al. [2016] draw on the rising interest in villages to suggest tourism opportunities as one form of village revitalization. de research teams smelo na selo [brave the village] and zhizneni prekhodi transformirashtoto selo [life transitions in the transforming village] explore village transformations more broadly. reports on the progress of their research can be found at brave the village [n.d.] and de village in transition [n.d,] respectively. 7 following mary bucholtz [2002: 528], i draw on the sociolinguistic concept “shifter” to signify an understanding of age as myriad and relational, defined in and by context. dat is to say, my use of “young” and “old” or “elderly” follows the patterns of usage my research suggests—that the meaning of these words shifts according to context. a 50-year-old woman living in a village might be considered young or old, depending on who else is present with her in a real or imagined context. 8 several conversations during my fieldwork reveal what regina bendix [1997] discuss as a longing for authenticity, which manifests as a desire to experience and consume cultural practices and styles that are believed to be genuine, as opposed to spurious or modernized versions. i have also had fruitful conversations with rezidentsiia baba team members about their developing notions of authenticity. whereas bright colors used in handmade items like socks and mittens used to signify inauthenticity for one team member, she now sees these innovations as “signs of life” in which change indicates that the tradition is alive. 9 danille christensen [2015] challenges the idea of folk revival as merely an appropriation and taming of cultural forms, pointing to the revival of home canning as an identity-affirming practice at the grassroots level in both urban and rural spaces. dis is not to say, of course, that a single social imaginary of the village exists—hardly! rather, i argue that we can read the complexities of folk revival in bulgaria as much more complicated than merely guided by nationalistic impulses and that revival can point to layered and sometimes conflicting understandings of folklore and authenticity. people living in villages and cities alike hold complex notions of how rural transformation has shaped their identities as bulgarians and the role of village lifeways in these identities. 10 de original lockdown period was issued for a duration of one month on 13 march but extended to mid-may around the orthodox easter holidays. lockdown measures ebbed and flowed as politicians tried to keep pace with evershifting scientific evidence and their eu neighbors. political squabbles regarding an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 22 the measures between president rumen radev and prime minister boyko borisov (and their respective parties) also contributed to shifting measures. measures restricting transportation were relaxed in april and then tightened once more as the easter holiday neared in anticipation of crowds at midnight services. 11 on 24 march, one friend shared with me that her mother and many others were devastated by measures restricting mobility within bulgaria. de requirement to live at one’s permanent address or place of work had an unintended consequence of keeping many families away from village homes at the time when they would typically be seeding gardens. her municipality amended their measures to allow residents to apply for special permits to travel to their villages. ironically, this resulted in long lines at municipal offices and excessive amounts of paperwork for mayors and other staff. 12 dis ethnographic sketch draws on daily fieldnotes, interviews conducted during and after lockdown, and conversations with friends and interlocutors. news updates including daily briefings by major general ventsislav mutafchiiski, the face and head of coronavirus operations, also provide context. 13 correspondence with td on 15 april 2020. 14 a third project, priemi me na selo [accept me in the village], takes place in the gabrovo municipality, but cancelled all 2020 programming outright and thus is not addressed in this paper. it is worth mentioning, though, that this project is municipally funded and, out of the three residencies, most strongly presents village lifeways as heritage—residuals of the way life used to be, rather than an interweaving of contemporary village life with traditional practice. 15 although this article primarily speaks to the triumphs of emergency adaptation, it is worth noting that one team member framed these new initiatives as unsustainable reactionary work that placed an extreme burden on the fabrika za idei team in an already-precarious moment for cultural workers. 16 during a conversation with one of the rezidentsiia baba team members, i asked if it felt ironic that they were actively discouraging intergenerational interaction at this time. she responded very energetically that yes, this moment felt very ironic. deir team wanted to create a video campaign in which elderly women told young people not to visit them—“it’s funny,” she explained, “that now these women are becoming this voice of wisdom, authority, and experience” [fieldnotes 15 april 2020]. 17 boriana, a 2020 participant of rezidentsiia baba, reported that she and baba vasilka agreed that this moment changes life more so for young people than for the elderly in villages. 18 i am not claiming that all elderly villagers were wary of visitors from cities, due to the threat of coronavirus. in fact, some villagers (as well as urbanites) i spoke with were skeptical of the virus’s existence and critical of the restrictive mobility measures. rather, i am claiming that in promoting an official position regarding travel to villages, rezidentsiia baba made use of certain tactics, including listening to and sharing select elderly voices, to craft its messaging, and that this messaging aligns with its overall philosophy to incorporate and take seriously the desires of the elderly it works with. an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 23 19 dis is not to say that there was no state or municipal aid, but rather that projects were able to mobilize quickly and flexibly. 20 conversation with selo nazaem co-founders [fieldnotes 31 july 2020]. 21 dis episode of da khvanesh gorata aired on 21 march 2020. it featured the work of anelia and nina during the emergency situation and covered selo nazaem more broadly. de novatv program, hosted by galia shtŭrbeva, follows and interviews families who move to villages and has become a household name. de views shared in this video were reiterated by personal communications with anelia and nina in may and july of 2020. 22 late in the summer of 2020, i was fortunate to visit dolni vadin and have wonderfully fulfilling conversations with anelia and nina, as well as outdoor chats with several women who had hosted participants in previous years. i understood from these conversations and interviews that the greatest impact of the selo nazaem program to the community is the life, energy, and relationships that these intergenerational residencies have brought to the village. 23 dese clips have since expired, though the posts still exist. my field notes record one video that shares tips for starting a garden. 24 personal communication with anelia radulova, 31 july 2020 and 13 march 2021. 25 during the 1990s, rural-urban familial food networks are said to have been a source of survival for many families and continue to serve as a resource as jars of preserves, sauces, and bundles of dried herbs travel to city relatives from village households [ghodsee 2009, 2011; personal communications with lindsey foltz; interviews conducted during 2020]. “survival” here invokes several meanings. of course, some village projects stand out as clear instances of heritagization and safeguarding. a number of bulgarian villages have been transformed into open-air museums for tourism, a (sometimes) lucrative way of commodifying the village space. others host annual festivals that transform the village space into a temporary stage for heritage performances of song, dance, folk ensembles, food, ritual, and holiday celebrations. in these situations, the idealized rural village is frozen as relic of the past or serves as the backdrop/surround for staging folklore. still others are home to experimental ecocommunities or small-scale farms, connoting survival that requires adaptation of lifeways, rather than a fixing of practices. bibliography abrahams, roger d. 2005. “zones and borders,” in everyday life: a poetics of vernacular practices. pittsburgh, pa: university of pennsylvania press. ben-amos, dan. 1971. “toward a new definition of folklore in context,” journal of american folklore 84 (331): 3-15. bendix, regina. 1997. in search of authenticity: [e formation of folklore studies. madison, wi: university of wisconsin press. an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 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(consulted 26 december 2020). stoyanova v., n. karlezhova, d. popcheva, s. ilieva, a. ivanova, kr. petkova, and d. vukovska. 2020. в. стоянова, н. кърлежова, д. попчева, с. илиева, а. иванова, кр. петкова, д. вуковска. population and demographic processes 2019. national statistics institute, sofia, bulgaria. cited by an urban project in rural crisis folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 26 https://www.nsi.bg/sites/default/files/files/publications/dmgr2019.pdf (consulted 26 december 2020). stewart, susan. 1991. “notes on distressed genres,” [e journal of american folklore 104 (411): 5-31. shtŭrbeva, galia. 2020 щърбева галя. “‘да хванеш гората’: младите в помощ на пенсионерите в с. долни вадин” [“to catch the forest”: young people helping pensioners in the village of dolni vadin]. nova.bg. cited by https://nova.bg/news/view/2020/03/21/282213/да-хванеш-горатамладите-в-помощ-на-пенсионерите-в-с-долни-вадин/. (consulted 26 december 2020). todorova, maria, and zsuzsa gille. 2010. post-communist nostalgia. london: berghahn books. toelken, barre. 1996. [e dynamics of folklore. logan: utah state university press. united nations, department of economic and social affairs, population division (2019). world population prospects 2019: highlights. st/esa/ser.a/423. verdery, katherine. 2003. [e vanishing hectare: property and value in postsocialist transylvania. ithaca: cornell university press. de village in transition. n.d. селото в преход. facebook. cited by https://www.facebook.com/selotovprehod/. (consulted 8 may 2021). folklorica full 2024 reviews 73 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii reviews kononenko, natalie o. ukrainian ritual on the prairies: growing a ukrainian canadian identity. montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press, 2023. illustrations. notes. bibliography. index. vii+303. $44.95 (cloth). $34.95 (paper). isbn 978-0-2280-1681-6 (cloth). isbn 978-0-2280-2193-3 (paper). natalie kononenko’s latest book, ukrainian ritual on the prairies: growing a ukrainian canadian identity, is an important addition to the existing body of literature on ukrainian folklore in general and on ukrainian diaspora studies in particular. it offers a fresh view of the ukrainian diaspora in the canadian prairies through the lens of the rituals—both private and those that take place in family and public community events. the book stems both from the author’s decade-long involvement in the sanctuary project, in which she and her colleagues documented ukrainian churches in parts of alberta, saskatchewan, and british columbia, and from her life-long role as an ethnographer. the author positions herself in the book as a “hyphenated ukrainian” (4) with a rich experience of doing fieldwork in ukraine, which also provides her with useful insights. an important highlight of the book is the term “vernacular nationalism” (4) that kononenko coins, inspired by leonard primiano’s idea of “vernacular religion” from his 1995 article “vernacular religion and the search for method in religious folklife.” she acknowledges that in different contexts, both personal and political, nationalism can be both a good and bad thing. realizing the predominantly negative connotations that nationalism has gained in western academia, kononenko emphasizes that there are different types of nationalism. she delineates three types of ukrainian nationalist ideologies: 1) “the nationalism of ukrainians living in the country itself who are seeking to define and promote ukrainian identity,” 2) “the nationalism of ukrainians living abroad, who sought to safeguard what they viewed as a pure ukrainian culture for export back into ukraine once the country was free,” and 3) nationalism that is “focused on canada rather than ukraine and one that looks to life in the present rather than trying to preserve or resurrect the culture of the past… nationalism without dogma”—that is, vernacular nationalism (10-11). later she goes on to demonstrate concrete cases when, in her opinion, vernacular nationalism is embodied in the ritual practices of ukrainian canadians living on the prairies. for example, in chapter three on “vernacular religion,” the author discusses how, because of the harsh weather conditions, parishes along with priests often had to introduce modifications to certain rituals, like the blessing of the water outside at yordan in the freezing temperatures of january or even blessing easter baskets outside. such decisions, she claims, involve “flexibility on the part of the church hierarchy [that] encouraged prairie ukrainian-canadians to accept flexibility in other spheres of their lives” and “allowed them to develop a concept of ukrainian identity that is not rigid and does not follow the dictates of any official body” (62). in chapter four, “ukrainian wedding on the prairies,” reviews 74 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii kononenko also describes modifications and adaptations of traditional ukrainian rituals, like introducing the wedding fruitcake or even a fake cake made out of styrofoam (104) alongside the korovai—a traditional ukrainian wedding bread— or a bride’s white wedding dress instead of ukrainian traditional clothes that were “much maligned by anglo-canadians, who saw it as another marker of the uncivilized, even brutish, nature of ukrainian immigrants” (118). kononenko explains that these decisions were not dictated by an attempt to assimilate. on the contrary, such changes demonstrate the construction of a unique ukrainian canadian identity, in which both aspects of these identities are present but also allow for a new identity to emerge: “ukrainian immigrants did treasure their ukrainian identity, but they were also canadian, and at the wedding they were performing a ritual that would ground them in canadian life” (114). funeral and death rituals also reflect intercultural connections, “a link between people and the new land in which they buried their deceased… it was a way to plant ‘seeds’ from which new identities and new possibilities might grow” (149). it is not unusual for older people to prepare traditional ukrainian outfits, including those brought from or made in ukraine, for their interment. kononenko speculates that this might be “a way to ‘go back’ to the original ukrainian home in spirit, if not in fact” after death (154). for her project, kononenko mostly interviewed the descendants of the socalled “second wave” of ukrainian immigrants to north america that happened during the interwar period, who were predominantly farmers, as opposed to the third wave of political immigrants or exiles after wwii, consisting mostly of educated intelligentsia. thus, she favors primarily what we might call rural nationalism, following the distinction between rural and urban nationalisms introduced by folklorist ray cashman in his essay “visions of irish nationalism” (2008). in addition to its significance in enriching the fields of folklore, ukrainian studies, slavic studies, and diaspora studies, kononenko’s ukrainian ritual on the prairies enters the realm of scholarly conversations on nationalism. the idea of vernacular nationalism is so central here that i wish it were reflected in the book title. while the scholarship on nationalism is dominated by historians, political scientists, and literary scholars, the view of a folklorist is a much-needed contribution to existing discourse. iryna voloshyna indiana university bloomington, indiana ivolosh@iu.edu microsoft word folkloricaprotest_ii_full_final_2022 07.27.22.docx reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 111 warner, elizabeth and svetlana adonyeva. we remember, we love, we grieve: mortuary and memorial practice in contemporary russia. madison: university of wisconsin press, 2021. notes. bibliography. index. 304 pp. $79.95 (cloth). isbn 9780299330705. there are two ways of studying practices associated with care for the deceased, depending on the location of the research object. in the global north, such practices are seen as a consequence of the funeral business in a particular region. researchers seek to show how the phenomena of modern funeral culture (embalming, cremation, grief and so on) are associated with economic, legal, and demographic variables (see, for example, tony walter [“three ways to arrange a funeral: mortuary variation in the modern west,” 2005] [“why different countries manage death differently: a comparative analysis of modern urban societies”, 2012]). on the other hand, in the global south, funeral practices are studied through local religious beliefs and the participation of local communities in care for the deceased (see, for example, piers vitebsky [“living without the dead: loss and redemption in a jungle cosmos,” 2017]). researchers show what social functions a funeral rite performs in a particular community. such a polarity in the explanation of funeral practices lies in the peculiarities of the formation of the anthropological discipline, or, more precisely, in a specific pathway of the colonial world system and the place of anthropological knowledge in the world order in the second half of the 20th century. at that time, scholars tended to group countries into big clusters: modern countries, i.e., the global north (consisting of the united states, western europe, and their allies), and archaic countries, i.e., the global south (consisting of the ex-colonial countries). though such a division might seem simple and outdated, it continues to inform conceptual oppositions in the comparative understanding of culture, including the funeral. however, this simple binary division does not allow for some countries to be classified as either the first or the second type; for example, the countries of the former socialist camp, including russia, are difficult to place in either type. the soviet and post-soviet world took not only a “middle” position between two different systems (western ex-empires and their ex-colonies) but also had a unique experience in the building of a socialist state. understanding this “intermediate” position allows researchers to describe russia alternatively. thus, some explanatory models depict the soviet/post-soviet world as an “alternative modernity” or as a complex interweaving of archaism and modernity (see michael david-fox or stephen kotkin). this approach is also relevant to the funeral practices of modern russia. is it about funeral business (modern) or religion and local communities (archaic)? could we see it as something else (alternative)? this third approach is adopted in warner and adonyeva’s we remember, we love, we grieve: mortuary and memorial practice in contemporary russia. this book does not belong to either of the two traditions and allows us to see the fine interaction of the archaic and the modern. the book’s dual attention to the modern and archaic is informed by its descriptive nature. there are few theoretical anthropological discussions. this is reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 112 not surprising considering that adonyeva and warner are recognized ethnographers/russianists who have been collecting field material for more than a decade. additionally, the descriptive orientation of the book is beneficial, as it serves as a type of methodological rejection of theory, while also directing the reader’s attention toward the meaning of the material. finally, all fieldwork was carried out in rural post-soviet russia, rather than in large cities, which allowed for unique, detailed descriptions of the relationships between the living and the dead in post-soviet villages and rural spaces. warner and adonyeva’s work shows numerous important facets of mortuary and memorial practice. first, there is the surprising absence of any funeral businesses in the regions studied, where it is rare to see the role of funeral directors and funeral infrastructure (cemetery management, mortuaries, transportations) during organization of funerals and commemoration. it is interesting that this could happen; on the one hand, russia appears to be a country that has implemented many technological breakthroughs for decades, but at the same time it preserves archaic elements in social life. considering this, warner and adonyeva depict not only the controversial world of funeral rituals in rural russia (including small towns), which were not affected by market relations, but also the failures of the soviet urbanization project. the authors also address the stability of traditional ideas about the role of the dead in the life of the living (from pagan to christian, although they avoid such genealogies (247). these descriptions are surprising to anyone interested in soviet culture and ideology. how have these practices and beliefs remained so pervasive over the decades? why and to what extent were they left untouched by the soviet ideology? how do they intertwine with modern life? the book answers a number of these questions. the chapter “the cross, the birch, and the kawasaki motorbike: the visual rhetoric of russian rural cemeteries in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” draws our attention to the interweaving of archaism and modernity of the material world, characteristic of the cemetery culture of rural russia. chapters on the role of eternal flame, destructive wars, and human losses in the memorial culture of the ussr are also devoted to this topic. warner and adonyeva’s work is a unique source. unfortunately, there are still too few materials on practices related to death and dying in soviet and postsoviet culture, a fact which is also noted by the authors in the introduction. one can list books and articles by nina tumarkin, catherine merridale, catherine verdery, anna sokolova, and the author of this review. in this regard, we remember, we love, we grieve: mortuary and memorial practice in contemporary russia is an excellent source to complement future research, which presents many more unanswered questions. this book is an important contribution to the field for scholars interested in funerary practice in these regions. sergei mokhov liverpool john moores university liverpool, uk svmohov.hse@gmail.com folklorica full 2024 the index of serbian folktales folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 68 reports the index of serbian folktales. a website. nemanja radulović university of belgrade belgrade, serbia this june a new website has been launched: a digital aath/atu index of serbian folktales (snpindeks.weebly.com). this report presents the background to the project, what its aims are, how it looks, and what our plans are for the website. for a better understanding, it is important to contextualize this project in the history of serbian and south slavic folkloristics. there is no published index of tale types in serbian folklore studies. in the south slavic area, there is a bulgarian index, and the first volume of a slovenian index has recently been published. still, it does not mean there has been a complete lack of indexing. the classical scholar and folklorist veselin čajkanović based the order of tales in his two influential anthologies [1927; 1929] on aarne’s 1910 index. over several decades (starting before world war ii), the ethnomusicologist ljubica janković compiled a systematic and alphabetic index of “motifs, themes and cycles” using a system of her own [1969; n.d.]; only in the 1950s did she become familiar with both of thompson’s indices when she was given them by thompson himself. still, her project remained uncompleted and unpublished. as folk epic was in the limelight of serbian folklore studies, branislav krstić completed a balkan slavs’ songs motif index that was published by the serbian academy of arts and sciences (sasa) in 1984, relying on thompson’s motif index. after 1945, institutes for folklore were founded in the major cities of the former yugoslavia, where activities included indexing too, and some folklorists published historical-geographic monographs on specific types of narratives or ballads. nada milošević djordjević (1934-2021), a folk literature professor at the faculty of philology in belgrade, otherwise responsible for the move toward structuralism in serbian folkloristics, indexed a large collection of tales from southern serbia from the manuscript of the priest dragutin djordjević. published by sasa in 1988, this collection remains a model for critical editions of folklore texts. in 1992, snežana samardžija, another folk literature lecturer from belgrade, included an index in her thesis at the faculty of philology that detailed every published collection of serbian and croatian folktales published before 1900. this impressive work encompassed more than 4000 tales from eighty-nine publications. however, that part of her thesis has remained unpublished. some other publications have also included indexes of prose material, such as the ongoing project, started in 1990s, of publishing folklore material from nineteenthcentury journals in book form, jointly run by the institute for literature and arts in belgrade and matica srpska in novi sad. finally, some collections were the index of serbian folktales folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 69 indexed as part of ba and ma studies at the faculty of philology of the university of belgrade. some thesis research has also included indices and/or work on specific tale types. for example, nemanja radulović defended his thesis [2010] at the university of belgrade on atu 930, 930a, 931, 934, and similar types, based on published and unpublished sources. marina mladenović mitrović defended her thesis this year at the university of belgrade on the tales in the ethnographic collection of the sasa archives (up to 1914); the thesis included an index of a vast array of materials from thirty-four collections. variants of some other tale types in serbian-speaking areas have been listed and researched in other monographs and articles (e.g., atu 505-508, 980, and 981). this historical introduction is necessary for the sake of explaining the present project’s aims. this decades-long work is scattered across various editions; many of them—published in old journals or kept in university libraries— are not readily available to researchers or even widely known to exist. the digital index of serbian folktales aims to present this research in one place and make it more available to folklorists. the emergence of other digital indices has been a nudge in this direction—irish [duchas project n.d.], georgian [dadunashvili n.d.], dutch, norwegian [eventyr og sagn. n.d.], the maerchenlexikon, and various indices available at the russian website ruthenia.ru. all have served as an impetus or models for our endeavors. the idea—at least in this initial stage—is not to create an entirely new index using all folk sources, but to create a kind of aggregate in which difficult-to-access research is compiled into one convenient index. the abovementioned indices are included, like samardžija’s index, from published books and students’ papers; the project’s creators have also included materials from their theses. the digital index encompasses ninety-five collections or similar sources, most of them in their entirety, some only in part so far. the types range from 1 to 2200, with some being absent of course. the oldest publication is from 1821 (vuk karadžić’s first collection); the most recent is from 2007. some are the product of recent professional folklorists’ work, based on transcripts of informants’ speech; some are the work of nineteenth-century amateurs in which the language was often changed in the process of publication. some contain only a couple of tales, while others encompass a few hundred. the collection of vuk karadžić, the founding father of serbian folklore studies, whose tales have a status comparable to those of the grimms in german culture, is not unknown to the international readership of folklorists. it is interesting to mention that karadžić’s collection has been indexed three times: by the czech folklorist rudolf lužik, the croatian folklorist maja bošković-stulli in her review of lužik, and samardžija in her thesis. lužik and bošković-stulli’s work was included in the critical edition of karadžić’s collection in 1988. some others have been included in thompson’s or uther’s index editions, such as dragutin djordjević’s 1988 publication or friedrich krauss’ book of south slavic tales in german translation. some of the included sources are less well known even to folklorists, especially sources from materials in the sasa ethnographic collection, which is a folklore archive. because the index includes research conducted in previous periods, in some cases the index of serbian folktales folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 70 the index used is aarne-thompson 1961, though uther’s 2004 has been used in newer studies. in some instances, eberhard-boratav’s index was used (for example, for type 126), and elsewhere the bulgarian index by daskalovaperkovska and her collaborators proved more useful. then there is a contamination of types occurring so often (e.g., atu 735+460в+737в*) that it can be considered an ecotype. the website is divided into five sections: 1) the main part is the index itself available in ms word format in google docs (no log-in needed); 2) an overview of the sources with an explanation of abbreviations; 3) a short history of indexing in serbian and former yugoslav folkloristics; 4) links to studies of specific types, if they are available online (atu 313, 327, 505-508, 510a, 736, 431, 930, 934, 980, in serbian mostly) and some studies on the sources themselves too; and 5) a project description. the website includes both serbian (cyrillic and roman) and english versions. it is possible to search the index by scrolling or using the search option for a tale type number or a specific collection. if a tale from the archival collection has been published, this information is provided in parentheses as well. the project’s team members are nemanja radulović, professor of folk literature at the faculty of philology, belgrade; marina mladenović mitrović, researcher at belgrade’s institute for literature and arts; and ivan praštalo, assistant at the faculty of philology, belgrade. the english version of the website is provided by danijela lekić (institute for literature and arts). praštalo is responsible for the visual and graphic elements, including the original main theme illustration that was created specifically for this project. it is important to emphasize that this project has been conceived as an ongoing one with long-term aims in mind. the idea is to keep adding new materials. while this is currently being done with the remaining indexed materials, in the future the project will add unindexed sources. thus, the integration of existing research should serve as a springboard for a more encompassing index. the entire project has been created on a free hosting site, and the faculty of philology at the institute for literature and arts and the association of serbian folklorists have provided friendly support to ensure greater visibility and links to the website. bibliography dadunashvili, elguja. n.d. “web platform of comparative folk narrative research.” cited by https://www.folktreasury.ge/folklore/. (consulted 25 july 2024). djordjević, dragutin. 1988. srpske narodne pripovetke i predanja iz leskovačke oblasti. [serbian folktales and legends from the region of leskovac]. belgrade: sasa. duchas project. n.d. “index of international folktales.” cited by https://www.duchas.ie/en/aath. (consulted 25 july 2024). the index of serbian folktales folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 71 eventyr og sagn. n.d. cited by https://www2.hf.uio.no/eventyr_og_sagn/index.php. (consulted 25 july 2024). janković, ljubica. 1969. “ogled klasifikacije i sistematizacije srpskih narodnih pripovedaka,” [an attempt in classification and systematization of serbian folktales], glasnik etnografskog instituta 11-15: 161-167. ———. n.d. azbučni pregled tema, motiva i ciklusa u narodnim pripovetkama po časopisima i kalendarima. [an alphabetic overview of themes, motifs and cycles in folktales in journals and calendars]. legacy of ljubica janković. national library of serbia. ———. n.d. građa za bibliografiju narodnih pripovedaka po časopisima i kalendarima. azbučni spisak tema i motiva [sources for the bibliography of folktales in journals and calendars. an alphabetic list of themes and motifs]. ethnographic collection of archive of sasa. sign. 409. ———. n.d. sistematski pregled tema, motiva i ciklusa u narodnim pripovetkama po časopisima i kalendarima [systematic overview of themes, motifs and cycles in folktales in journals and calendars] legacy of ljubica janković. national library of serbia. krauss, friedrich. 1883/4. sagen und mārchen der südslaven i-ii. leipzig: wilhelm friedrich. krstić, branislav. 1984. indeks motiva narodnih pesama balkanskih slovena [motif index for the epic poetry of the balkan slavs]. belgrade: sasa. maerchenlexikon. cited by http://www.maerchenlexikon.de/sucheat.htm. (consulted 25 july 2024). mladenović mitrović, marina. 2024. rukopisne zbirke narodnih pripovedaka u etnografskoj zbirci sanu do 1914. godine [manuscript collections of folktales in the ethnographic collection of the serbian academy of science and arts (sasa) until the year 1914]. doctoral thesis. belgrade: faculty of philology. radulović, nemanja. 2010. motiv sudbine u srpskoj usmenoj prozi [motif of destiny in serbian oral narratives]. doctoral thesis. belgrade: faculty of philology. ruthenia. n.d. “фольклор и постфольклор: структура, типология, семиотика. сюжетно-мотивные указатели и базы данных” [folklore and postfolklore: structure, typology, semiotics. plot-motif indexes and databases]. cited by https://ruthenia.ru/folklore/indexes.htm. (consulted 25 july 2024). samardžija, snežana. 1991. štampane zbirke narodnih pripovedaka na srpskohrvatskom jeziku u xix veku ii (bibliografija, indeks i registri) [published collections of dolktales in the serbocroat language in the 19th century ii (bibliography, index and registers)] belgrade: faculty of philology. čajkanović, veselin. 1927. srpske narodne pripovetke [serbian folktales]. belgrade: srpska kraljevska akademija. the index of serbian folktales folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 72 ———. 1929. srpske narodne pripovetke [serbian folktales]. belgrad: rajković i ćuković. 139 reviews folklorica 2013, vol. xvii turner, kay and pauline greenhill, eds. transgressive tales: queering the grimms. detroit, mi: wayne state university press, 2012. notes, bibliography, index, 358 pp. $29.95 (paper). isbn 978-0-8143-3481-2. transgressive tales collects thirteen diverse studies applying queer theory to the grimm brothers’ collections and associated topics. originating in kay turner’s 1998 university of winnipeg course in feminist and queer theory in folklore, this compilation has had a long gestation, as reflected in the formidable review of contemporary scholarship that the contributors present. there is good work throughout, though the breadth of analysis may be disconcerting to readers with tight preconceptions of what queer studies should encompass. turner and greenhill’s introduction gives a good accounting of how “queer” is defined for this volume’s purposes. at its broadest, queer theory discusses and problematizes “any non-normative expression of gender, including those connected with straightness” as well as questions about “marginalization, oddity, and not fitting into society generally.”(11) this scope allows for a wide spectrum of perspectives, including analyses that would have been considered feminist in other contexts (all the protagonists here are female except those in the last chapter), as well as creative interpretations of the body and desire in the grimms’ tales and their successive reinterpretations. transgressive tales’ first section, “faux femininities,” addresses subversion in heteronormative stories through the expansion and transformation of female-gendered protagonists’ roles, bodies, and relationships. christina bacchilega’s chapter contrasts two similarly-titled tales, “clever gretel” and “clever else,” where the two characters, one conventionally shrewd and the other ironically dense, play trickster in reconstituting the power dynamics of their marriages. jeana jorgensen explores protagonists who avoid marriage altogether (at least temporarily) in three versions of “the maiden who seeks her brothers.” in each of these tales, a young woman sees her brothers transformed into birds, and her own marriage is either disrupted or postponed until 140 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii she reverses the enchantment. jorgensen frames the tales as concluding with a thoroughly queered familial relationship, as opposed to a marriage that conventionally closes the fairy-tale cycle. the first section’s other two chapters focus on bodily transformation and desire. kevin goldstein’s critique of “the goose girl at the spring” examines how the old woman in the tale exemplifies the midwife-related roles of “witch” or “wise woman.” the old woman cares for a young princess, magically disguising her charge as an ugly girl until she allows a royal suitor to see the princess’ beauty as she bathes. goldstein does not belabor the salacious transformation, however. rather, he focuses on potentially queer dynamics of the relationship between the two women, albeit in terms of homosocial rather than (necessarily) homoerotic desire. margaret yocom closes out the first section with a chapter on the multiple queer aspects of “allerleirauh (all kinds of fur).” the story begins with a princess escaping her father’s incestuous desires by disguising herself with furry camouflage. captured by the king’s men, the protagonist eventually becomes part of the royal household. yocom makes the case that, while dressed in furs, the character loses gender, constantly being asked “what are you?” indeed, in the german original, neuter pronouns replace feminine references while the character is in furs. when the princess emerges from the suit, eventually marrying the king, she resumes her female gender. amid these queer gender switches, yocom wonders openly if the princess doesn’t marry her father after all; the tale does not expressly state if there are one or two kings involved, adding to the queer potential. the second section, “revising rewritings,” focuses on adaptations of the tales. kimberly lau’s chapter explores the intertextual relationship between the grimms’ “little brier rose” (along with other “sleeping beauty” tales in traditional folklore) and angela carter’s vampire story “lady in the house of love,” showing how carter transfers agency from the grimms’ fairy-tale prince to a vampire countess. jennifer orme takes on an arguably trickier text, jeanette winterson’s novel sexing the cherry, which 141 reviews folklorica 2013, vol. xvii borrows from the grimms’ “twelve dancing princesses.” orme traces how winterson’s intertext reimagines princesses working for shared interests into prostitutes with widely divergent desires and motivations. while lau and orme both recognize how twentieth-century fiction has opened classic tales to “queer voices and queer choices” (159), andrew friedenthal laments how disney’s adaptation of “snow white and rose red” sapped that tale of its transgressive power. the film transforms the active snow white of the grimms, who frees a metamorphosed bearprince from his curse by challenging a misanthropic dwarf, into a passive character with no control over her life. later interpretations by children’s author dan andreasen and graphic novelist bill willingham have reclaimed some of this spice, largely by reviving the discarded character of rose red and imbuing her with the agency sapped from her folkloric sister. the four chapters in the third section, “queering the tales,” shift to transformatively queer readings. the section opens with a tour-de-force chapter by pauline greenhill, anita best, and emilie anderson-grégoire. they note the many grimm tales where a man must discard an enchantment that makes him ugly, but must reach through several strains of world folklore (including several versions of “peg bearskin”) for tales where an ugly woman must transform to become beautiful; that trope is absent in the grimm corpus. joy brooke fairfield also takes up queer transformation, showing convincingly that “princess mouseskin” grows horizontally through her tale of misunderstanding and reconciliation, adding the capabilities and limitations of a peasant man as she progresses rather than ascending socially as a “straight” paradigm would have her do. kay turner takes on perhaps the most radical transformation, casting the tale of “frau trude,” where a girl is transformed into firewood by a witch, into a story of queer desire and fulfillment. turner is particularly personal here, reflecting on how the girl’s rejection of her parents’ warnings about frau trude resemble a familiar coming-out story. the odd chapter out here is catherine tosenberger’s treatment of “fitcher’s bird.” tosenberger shows the inversion of gender power and the powerful woman-centered imagery throughout, but this chapter 142 folklorica 2013, vol. xvii would go better with the themes of the first section; it could easily be switched with yocum’s chapter, which better fits the transformative model. the final section offers two “odd one out” chapters. margaret mills shares an excellent analysis of an afghan tale about a presumptive “mullah” (whose religious studies amount to one book) and the clever wife who cleverly thwarts his amorous ambitions—in a very embarrassing and scatological way. the book ends with elliot gordon mercer’s attempt to write a queer update to the grimms’ “the grave mound,” a tale already offering queer possibilities in its homosocial exposition and ending. mercer changes the main characters from tradesmen and soldiers to drag queens playing trickster against a now-defunct mortgage lender. audacious as mercer is, he may have missed a real opportunity here. the grimms portray a wealthy farmer who dies regretting his un-christian selfishness. it would have been satisfying to see this character queered as a closet case who dies with regret, but perhaps that would cast a heteronormative shadow that gordon eschews here. as noted above, this collection has many strengths. the contributors’ rigorous use of contemporary queer folkloristics will be especially valuable to scholars in all areas, though it may have been helpful to include explanations of technical nomenclature for non-specialists; for example, the abbreviated citations throughout of the aarne-thompson-uther tale types might make this book a cold entrée to the field for non-folklorists. likewise, the contributors’ expansive definitions of queerness do pose a challenge to purists: by including so many variations under the queer purview, the contributors risk diluting the term’s meaning. that said, the analyses offered show a great deal of insight and creativity, and this is an exacting, irreverent, imaginative compendium that will prove valuable to those interested in the grimms, gender theory, or any permutation thereof. b. stu burns editor, fine lines literary journal omaha, nebraska, usa folklorica 2016 reviews folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 57 reviews katherine arden, the bear and the nightingale (2017), the girl in the tower (2017) and the winter of the witch (2019), (winternight trilogy). new york: del rey. notes. glossary. $27.00 (hard cover) 978-1101885956, $28.00 (hard cover) isbn 978-1101885963, and $28.00 (hard cover) isbn: 9781101885994. �e winternight trilogy is the collective title for three novels by new writer katherine arden. �e fantasy series is set in 14th century russia and heavily relies on russian folklore. although arden finished the first book in the trilogy in 2014, the books were published in relatively quick succession, partially in response to the complaint of long publishing timelines between books in the fantasy genre. arden studied at middlebury where she received a bachelor’s degree in russian, and she spent two years living in russia. her familiarity with russia’s history, language, and culture shows through in the trilogy, as does her desire to have her audience appreciate russian folk culture. the bear and the nightingale is the first book in the winternight trilogy. �e book is a coming of age tale that centers on vasilisa petrovna, a young girl born with the power to see the magical creatures of russia’s folklore in a time when russian orthodoxy is pushing these beings out of existence. like many heroines in folk tales and fairy tales, vasilisa is motherless and her widowed father soon introduces a stepmother into their lives who fears her stepdaughter and her unseen powers, and her resentment of vasya only grows as she and the village falls under the influence of a priest determined to end the old belief system. as vasilisa’s stepmother makes plans to marry her off as a way of curbing vasilisa’s wildness, vasya is faced with an even bigger challenge: a war between death and moroz: two warring forces who take an interest vasilisa because of her second sight. domovoi, rusalki, vazili, and other creatures help guide vasya as she tries to help keep their world alive. arden’s russia is one of magical realism, and her descriptions of russia in winter are vivid and striking. the bear and the nightingale establishes the folklore that will serve as the backbone of the series. �e second book in the series, the girl in the tower, starts shortly after vasilisa has left her village. however, although vasilisa successfully fended for herself in the first book, she quickly discovers that traveling is full of dangers for a young woman, even one under the protection of moroz. as the dangers on her journey intensify vasilisa must go to moscow to help her cousin the grand prince dmitri fend off the looming mongol threat, yet she is stuck between two identities: the young warrior she pretends to be and her true self. the girl in the tower sees vasilisa reunited with her older sister olga and her older brother sasha, who is now brother sasha, a well-liked monk willing to help his cousin defend the empire. however, the reunion is not all that vasilisa had hoped. her older sister, as the wife of a minor royal, is bound by the rules of the court. olga is content to live her life according to the strict social rules that govern moscow’s 14th century folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 58 nobility and wants to see her sister do the same to keep both herself and her family safe. arden creates an interesting family dynamic; olga and sasha love their sister yet neither understand her and her desire to break free. one of the more interesting aspects of the girl in the tower is how arden explores traditional gender roles in muscovite russia. while vasilisa is the hero of the series, she is certainly not viewed that way in society, and her victory in the previous book does not grant her immunity from judgment. while modern readers might cheer her need to buck the system and find her own path, the characters around her fear her and view her willingness to fight as a violation of the norm. if scholars like pinkola estés argue that vasilisa is a tale of female liberation and empowerment, arden shows how a young woman like vasilisa might be interpreted in her own time and by her own people. �e final book in the series, the winter of the witch, is grounded in russian history, which may also explain why it is the darkest in the series. while the folk elements of the first two books still come through in the trilogy, the setting and history of medieval moscow take precedence as the work builds to the battle of kulikovo. in the winter of the witch the folk characters become a safe haven for vasilisa petrovna: they represent a time when her world was much smaller and known to her. unlike the first two books, the third drags a bit in pacing. at times the plot gets too bogged down by both vasilisa’s family history and moscow’s history. however, arden’s fantastical version of the battle still hits at the heart of the matter: which direction will russia go, and who will lead her there? who will her people side with, and what happens to the things left behind? since her writing is not specifically geared towards russian scholars, arden guides the way with a glossary and notes at the end of each book that become more sophisticated as the series progresses. her glossary for the bear and the nightingale includes entries for russian neophytes that range across folklore, culture, and language: “baba yaga—an old witch who appears in many russian fairy tales. she rides around on a mortar, steering with a pestle and sweeping her tracks away with a broom of birch. she lives in a hut that spins round and round on chicken legs” “kvas-a fermented beverage made from rye bread” and “devochka-little girl” (p. 286). her author’s note at the end of the first novel acknowledges both her non-russian and slavist audience, “i wanted these russian words to be reasonably pronounceable and aesthetically pleasing to speakers of english” (p. 285). by the third book, arden contextualizes her trilogy in both the note and the glossary, “�e battle of kulikovo really did happen in 1380 on the don river, �e grand prince dmitrii ivanovich acquired his historical moniker: donskoi, of the don, by leading a combined force from several different russian principalities…” (p. 355). arden’s trilogy is not a study of russian folklore and should not be read as such. a scholarly reading of her texts will only lead to frustration since her novels only lightly brush against the facts. her novels are intended for a wide massmarket audience with little knowledge of russian culture. however, arden’s knowledge and appreciation of russia’s folklore and culture shine through, and her series brings the tradition of russian folklore to a new and wider audience. reviews folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 59 jill martiniuk university of south florida florida, usa folklorica full 2021_edit 6.28.22 sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 36 sviće “smurf”: intertextual linkages in protests against montenegro’s 2019 freedom of religion law nikolina zenović indiana university bloomington, in, usa abstract elements of traditional folklore and popular culture were invoked in protests opposing the 2019 zakon o slobodi vjeroispovijesti ili uvjerenja i pravnom položaju vjerskih zajednica [montenegrin law on freedom of religion or belief and the legal status of religious communities], hereafter referred to as the 2019 freedom of religion law. the 2019 freedom of religion law replaced an older law on religion and caused controversy for its various articles that would thereafter require evidence of church property ownership, without which such properties would transfer into state property. many people identifying as serbs in montenegro protested the updated law to express their concern that holy sites of the serbian orthodox church in montenegro might become government property under the new law. protest materials intertextually linked traditional folklore and popular culture characters to the movement. as intertextuality refers to the relationship between two or more texts brought into the same frame, folkloric elements emerged in protests in montenegro and representations on social media through intertextual linkages. this paper addresses intertextual references made by the hip hop collective beogradski sindikat in their song and music video supporting the protests, “sviće zora” [dawn breaks] and people’s recontextualizations of the popular culture figure of papa smurf, from the cartoon franchise “the smurfs,” in montenegro and abroad. in analyzing such protest materials, i argue that an intertextual approach to protests facilitates understandings of protesters’ meaning-making processes and the semiotic interactions between folklore and protests. introduction (1) through the emergence of social media and technological innovations, new creative forms of protest have become possible. such new forms are not wholly detached from traditional expressive strategies, but rather they build upon them to creatively assert protestive stances. as folklore connects people to their pasts, it also helps them make sense of their presents. therefore, in connection with protests, folkloric elements can serve as points of inspiration and sources of strength for protesters. over the last few years, numerous protests have taken place in montenegro. throughout 2019, anti-corruption protests called for the resignation of president milo đukanović and his government based on accusations of links to organized crime [tomovic 2019]. many anti-corruption protests took place throughout sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 37 2019, but december held something else in store. on 27 december 2019, the zakon o slobodi vjeroispovijesti ili uvjerenja i pravnom položaju vjerskih zajednica [law on freedom of religion or belief and the legal status of religious communities], hereafter referred to as the 2019 freedom of religion law, replaced an older law on religion. the 2019 law caused an uproar amongst members of the serbian orthodox church in montenegro who opposed its articles effectively requiring evidence of religious community property ownership dating prior to 1918. without such evidence, properties held by religious communities would transfer into the property of the state. protests in response to this updated freedom of religion law erupted both in and outside of the country, with many people who identify as serbs participating [paleviq 2020: 75]. (2) protesters expressed concern that the holy sites of the serbian orthodox church in montenegro might become government property under the new law. beginning in the winter of 2019-2020, these protests then circulated transnationally as diaspora populations opposing the law organized protests in the united states, serbia, australia, and elsewhere [paleviq 2020: 75; srbija danas 2020; reese 2020]. during protests against the 2019 freedom of religion law in montenegro (spanning 2019 and 2020), protesters intertextually linked creative elements to support their movement. such elements included the song “sviće zora” [dawn breaks], the song’s music video, and the popular cultural figures of the belgian comic and cartoon franchise, “the smurfs.” (3) intertextual linkages become apparent in the protestive expressions of “sviće zora” and signs referring to papa smurf. texts are taken to be semiotic objects or stretches of discourse that can be identified as bounded, internally cohesive, and intelligible “things” [silverstein and urban 1996: 1; bauman 2004: 4]. intertextuality is an interdiscursive process in which texts are related to other texts [bauman 2004: 4]. texts are indexically tied to particular contexts; thus the following discusses how texts, through intertextual linkages, are decontextualized from one context and recontextualized in others to creatively express opposition to the 2019 freedom of religion law [silverstein and urban 1990: 15]. through attention to protest texts, this article highlights the value of attention to intertextual linkages in considerations of the semiotic interactions between folklore and protests. throughout the following sections, i refer to news sites and social media posts to provide evidence of how locals, protesters, or those supporting the protests interpreted the intertextual elements of these protest materials. i consider how some protesters identifying as serbs in montenegro and in virtual spaces embedded references into the protest materials they produced or considered implementing. i also explore how a few serbs in the balkans and serbian or serbian-american members of the diaspora interpreted such intertextual materials. (4) although there are many other voices to consider in this protest context, they are outside the scope of this paper, although they merit further investigation. sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 38 this paper seeks to explore how and from where protesters invoked strength and resistance to the 2019 freedom of religion law. after providing examples of intertextual linkages in the context of protests against the freedom of religion law, i address the significance of the uptake of such interconnections and their intended audiences. considering questions of intertextuality in protests can help us better understand the folkloric interconnections that often motivate protest texts, particularly at a time where such texts often circulate virtually beyond their origins. thus, the following explores instances of intertextuality in the song and music video of “sviće zora” and the re-contextualization of papa smurf in the protests against the 2019 freedom of religion law. attending to intertextual linkages reveals the semiotic interactions among folklore, popular culture, and protest materials that protesters utilize. i argue such an approach facilitates nuanced understandings of protesters’ sources of support and inspiration as well as of the circulation and interpretation of such supporting materials. background the 2019 freedom of religion law declared that if religious communities cannot provide evidence of the ownership of assets, then their religious sites and land on the territory of present-day montenegro (from public revenues or those that were in state ownership prior to 1 december 1918) would become state property [zakon o slobodi vjeroispovijesti 2019]. the 2019 freedom of religion law effectively requires religious communities to give evidence of property ownership dating prior to 1918, which caused an uproar among members of the serbian orthodox church in montenegro, because the law would potentially transfer properties currently held by the serbian orthodox church to the national government [heckert 2020: 11]. although i refer to this updated law as the 2019 freedom of religion law for the sake of brevity, those protesting against these updates did not express opposition to religious freedom. rather, protesters opposed articles in this law that would require specific evidence of property ownership [zakon o slobodi vjeroispovijesti 2019]. these articles would particularly impact religious communities with religious centers outside of present-day montenegro, such as those of the serbian orthodox church [zakon o slobodi vjeroispovijesti 2019]. demonstrations against the 2019 freedom of religion law began in the winter of 2019-2020 and spanned much of 2020. many people identifying as serbs participated in protests in montenegro and abroad (new york, indiana, serbia, austraila, and elsewhere) [paleviq 2020: 75; srbija danas 2020; reese 2020]. although the protests may appear to solely indicate discontent with a law about religious freedom and properties, they are embroiled within a larger context of ongoing strains between montenegrins and serbs in montenegro over the country’s national identity. while this historical overview is abridged, it serves to situate the particular protest materials discussed throughout this paper. there are numerous competing historical voices on montenegrin identity, and conflicting narratives of unified or separate national identities have been invoked in the sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 39 region throughout political disturbances [lazarević 2011: 174]. however, in the case of the protests against the updated 2019 freedom of religion law, it is important to note that serbian and montenegrin identities have not always been considered as mutually exclusive [džankić 2014: 353]. identifications are complicated in this context, where some people in montenegro consider themselves serbs and members of the serbian orthodox church, while some consider themselves montenegrin and identify with the montenegrin orthodox church [lazarević 2011: 189]. furthermore, the 1990s brought a new phase of differentiation for these identities [džankić 2014: 353]. as ties to serbia became unfavorable to some politicians in montenegro (due to the political and economic situation resulting from the wars), a new articulation of montenegrin ethnic identity further separated montenegrins from serbs [lazarević 2011: 181-182]. by the late 1990s and 2000s, those who identified as both montenegrin and serbian sometimes reconciled their ethnic identities with their positions on montenegrin independence [džankić 2014: 355]. additionally, over the past thirty years, there has been a dismantling of joint montenegrin/serbian identities with respect to tensions over local identities, nationhood, and statehood, against the backdrop of the autocephalic conflict between the serbian orthodox church and montenegrin orthodox church [džankić 2014: 371; paleviq 2020: 70]. as a result, protests against the 2019 freedom of religion law are situated in this ongoing consideration of montenegrin national identity and the interpretations of this national narrative by its citizens. methodology this paper is part of a preliminary exploration of the potential of intertextual readings of protest materials and their uptake. protest materials and responses to them described in this paper express the perspectives of a few serbs participating in or commenting on protests against the 2019 freedom of religion law. this project is inspired in part by my observations of protest materials and online discussions by diasporic populations beginning in the winter of 2019-2020 and extending into the summer. the covid-19 pandemic inhibited my intended fieldwork amongst protest participants in montenegro. due to these limitations, the following analyses rely upon my observations of publicly available commentaries on news articles and videos (from montenegro and serbia), a music video on youtube, posts on twitter, and a since-deleted facebook post. my interpretations of such comments/posts are thus drawn from my own positionality of being raised in the united states but spending childhood summers in serbia and montenegro, and understanding of the situation in montenegro while residing in the united states during the time of the protests. texts, intertextuality, and protests sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 40 entextualization can be thought of as “thingification,” or the process by which a phase of discourse or configuration of signs with “thing-like” qualities becomes bounded in some way and is made into a durable identifiable object, a text [silverstein and urban 1996: 1]. this process stabilizes a stretch of talk or configuration of signs into a text that can then be referenced, classified, transcribed, reanimated, etc. [silverstein and urban 1996: 2]. entextualization objectifies a stretch of discourse and in doing so renders “a text extractable from its context of production” [bauman 2004: 4]. from this perspective, bauman [2004] defines a text as “discourse rendered decontextualizable” [4]. such decontextualization precipitates the recontextualization of this “thingified” text into another context [bauman 2004: 4]. it is precisely these co-constitutive processes that facilitate textual circulation [bauman 2004: 4]. texts are considered broadly here, as “durable, repeatable, classifiable” things, (most often stretches of talk or configurations of signs) available for decontextualization and recontextualization, that are relationally linked to other texts [bauman 2004: 1-4; hanks 1989: 95]. thus, this paper discusses the following: songs, music video, image of papa smurf, tweets, and commentaries as texts. intertextual practices are inherently interdiscursive as they link elements and can embed other discourse [goodman et. al. 2014: 450]. therefore, interdiscursivity and intertextuality are related concepts dealing with the process of discourse and texts referring or pointing to one another. intertextual processes can be consciously or less consciously undertaken, as we constantly use the texts and words of others but do not always draw attention to the ways in which we live in a “world of others’ words” [lazar 2015: 243; bakhtin 1986: 143]. in what follows, i discuss protesters’ conscious intertextual recombinations in this protest context. intertextuality is a stimulating framework with which to look at protests because it not only draws attention to elements identified and transplanted into protest spaces but also subsequently considers their newly created re-presentation in those novel contexts. the contextual nuances of intertextual linkages reveal a better understanding of the sources from which protesters draw strength, support, and encouragement. therefore, studying the utilization of intertextual processes in this context further identifies and contextualizes the audiences that are for or against that which protesters demonstrate. under such an intertextual lens, folklore becomes a significant topic of focus because of its potential to be revealed to or recognized by particular audiences of shared backgrounds or understandings. furthermore, such an approach encourages questions of why and how protesters take up particular elements in communicating their opposition. i argue that attention to protesters’ conscious intertextual recombinations can reveal which folkloric elements protesters identify with and elect to amplify. scholars have commented on the importance of intertextuality as a tool available to protest movements. (5) anthropologist sian lazar [2015] applied the concept of intertextuality to discuss street demonstrations in bolivia and argentina. lazar [2015: 243] frames intertextuality as the process through which texts borrow from one another, creating relationships between the texts that sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 41 highlight “the communicative aspect of symbolic action.” she argues that the references constituting a citation result in both a physical and visual intertextuality and that this intertextuality is significant to the “symbolic economy of protest and political action” [lazar 2015: 243]. therefore, studying such interdiscursive processes illuminates attention to the range of possible readings and audiences of intertextual acts [lazar 2015: 252-253]. lazar confirms that a consideration of intertextuality and protests can provide distinctive insights into understandings of agency and intentionality. ben said and kasanga [2016: 78], while writing about tunisian and egyptian protests, also emphasize the recombinatory aspect of intertextuality. they reference fairclough’s [1992] description of intertextuality as texts “being full of snatches of other texts,” and emphasize the resulting “new hybrid or nodal” texts [ben said and kasanga 2016: 78]. in ben said and kasanga’s [2016: 78-79] case, instances of intertextuality of a sign and slogan’s reverberations across events created a hybrid discourse between protests and general displeasure. their analysis reveals how language mediates and becomes embedded in protest, acknowledging intertextuality’s meaning-making potential for protesters and wider audiences upon circulation of protest texts [ben said and kasanga 2016: 78-79]. as protesters choose to carry signs and banners, they likely express their beliefs through references to ideas and messages relevant to them. (6) as such, studying intertextual linkages in the context of protests can provide a detailed understanding of the sources of inspiration and support from which protesters pull as well as the new or hybrid elements created out of such linkages in the current protest context. in these instances of protest, signs, banners, and supportive anthems can be multi-vocal and intertextual by altering and transforming components of what they aim to replicate as representative of the protestors’ messages. the interplay of voices in intertextual practices created in, or, as a result of, protests is a powerful source of insight into protesters’ envisioned message and goals. through audiovisual, artistic, and literary intertextual linkages, protesters navigate and converge the time-space of their actions within their sociohistorical context. familiarity with contextualized references in intertextual elements is necessary for such linkages to be recognized as such. as interdiscursive linkages can strengthen symbolic power, they can also create contestations of events or, in many cases, interpretations that fail to convey [lazar 2015: 243; nakassis 2013: 70]. in any case of intertextuality, intertextual gaps, the “semiotic and/or ideological space” between a text and its prior iteration, occur [goodman et al. 2014: 453]. with each intertextual reference, a text is made available for endless uptakes, exposing it to potential acceptance or failure through misinterpretation. however, this failure of referential recognition provides valuable insights into the perspectives from which people interpret the intertextual acts in question. as such, failures, or misinterpretations, of intended intertextual linkages can be as informative as their successful uptake. considering intentional intertextual linkages in protests can help us better understand the folkloric or popular cultural sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 42 embeddings that motivate protest texts, particularly at a time where such materials often circulate beyond their origins virtually. folklore, protests, and virtual spaces the work of trevor blank and lynne mcneill acknowledges the internet as a space of folkloric production and circulation that facilitates intertextual uptakes. according to blank [2014: 4], folkloric expression is “reflective and serves as a ‘mirror’ of societal and cultural values; folklorists should therefore use this mirror to analyze society and culture.” for blank [2014: 11], the internet’s virtual space remains bound to the physical field with which folklorists are familiar as it shares with the physical field the presence of folk groups, customs, relationships, and other communicative forms. the protest texts that circulated virtually in the context of the protests against the 2019 freedom of religion law draw from sites such as twitter and facebook that reconceptualize person-to-person communication and encourage folkloric transmission [blank 2014: 14]. furthermore, as sites of daily social interaction, facebook and twitter can be particularly significant gathering spaces for members of the diaspora as they may bridge some physical, geographical, and situational boundaries [mcneill 2009: 83]. since folklore appears where social interactions take place, the internet embraces folkloric circulation [mcneill 2009: 82-83]. when discussing memes, mcneill [2009: 85] has noted how “the basic idea of a piece of lore surviving through a combination of successful transmission and cultural relevance” can be applied to the transmission of folklore, especially in digital spaces. while folkloric intertextual references are made in face-to-face interactions, the internet has allowed such linkages to circulate to wider audiences by way of its technological and communicative features. the following analyses, therefore, consider such folkloric circulations in virtual spaces. additionally, traditional folklore can be intertwined with protests due to its ability to connect protesters with each other as well as with their audiences. the materials created for protests and chosen to represent people’s struggles have the capacity to make visible that which is erased or ignored by those against which people are protesting [brenner 2021: 507]. folktales invoked in protests and protest art often depict symbols and images that communicate protesters’ shared thoughts and understandings [brenner 2021: 506-507]. discussing semiotic relations mediated by the internet, in what follows, a protest music video, signs, and social media posts are considered in terms of their intertextual facilities and intended audiences. “sviće zora:” the song, the music video, the protest as the protests in montenegro unfolded and circulated, a serbian hip-hop collective from belgrade, beogradski sindikat, released the song “sviće zora” and a subsequent music video. the song and its video support the struggle of those protesting against the 2019 freedom of religion law. “sviće zora” incorporates sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 43 the sound of the gusle, a single-stringed balkan instrument. the gusle is regarded as traditional, evoking a sound inseparable from epic poetry and oral history. in the guslar’s [gusle player, bard] performance with the gusle, “the past is related to the present by means of reverberative memory, both in the voice and the gusle string that together form a vocal-instrument feedback circuit” [ernst 2017: 45]. the gusle has long been a significant medium through which serbian oral epics and folk traditions are recreated and thus transmitted in the present [ernst 2017: 46]. therefore, the use of the gusle in the song and music video emphasizes ancestral continuity, invoking traditional folk music to support the protesters’ cause. the oral poems and epics disseminated by the vibrations of a guslar’s singing alongside the gusle strings “re-presence,” or through the lens of intertextuality, index the operative past [ernst 2017: 46]. thus, oral epic memories are brought into the present and re-constructed through each performance, maintaining both similarities and differences from their initial forms [ernst 2017: 46]. “sviće zora” commences with the sounds of the gusle. the traditional instrument invites listeners into the story that will follow, tuning their ears to the message that will be told and setting the tone for the song. as the sounds of the gusle fade out, a more contemporary beat punches in, and the rap begins. throughout the song, strong beats are intertwined with undertones of traditional serbian folk music. at its peak, the chorus includes the following lines: свиће, свиће рујна зора, [it breaks, it breaks the ruby dawn, cве од брда па до мора. from the hills to the sea. одјекује глас са гора, a voice resounds from the mountains, народ да пробуди! to awaken the people!] [beogradski sindikat, 15 february 2020, youtube] (7) throughout the song, the lyrics interweave serbian history and montenegro’s prominent features of its mountains and coastline. additionally, the video clips it weaves together repeatedly highlight the protest slogan “не дамо светиње” [“ne damo svetinje,” “we do not give up our holy places”]. (8) as the song fades out, the sound of a crowd clapping and chanting “ne damo svetinje” from a protest in montenegro builds and closes out the song. in the music video, this portion of the song is accompanied by a video clip of a protest from which this sound was ostensibly obtained. as the song and video conclude, the last image viewers are left with is a message of gratitude to the protesters from beogradski sindikat. while the song draws on the melodic significance of the gusle to introduce its message, as its modern beats “kick in,” another reference is introduced. “sviće zora” invokes traditional elements and local history through the gusle as well as its auditory resemblance to a well-known folk song. the song is strongly influenced by the famous traditional song “još ne sviće rujna zora” [ruby dawn is not yet breaking], which some have deemed “the unofficial anthem” of montenegro [telegraf 2013]. “sviće zora” takes the melody and structure of “još ne sviće rujna zora” and couples it with the accompaniment of sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 44 the gusle and protestors’ chants. through its name and melodic structure, “sviće zora” immediately indexes this famous folk song. by transplanting the melody of this traditional song into “sviće zora’s” 2020 interpretation, continuity with the past is established, yet marked as a modern take on a significant folk tune. according to feđa dimović of beogradski sindikat, “sviće zora” was inspired by the group’s visit to montenegro where they attended a liturgy on epiphany, followed by the swim for the holy cross in the morača river adjacent to the morača serbian orthodox monastery [politika 2020]. dimović claims the song “wrote itself” upon the group’s return to belgrade out of their desire to give back to those protesting the 2019 freedom of religion law [politika 2020]. inspired by their experiences in montenegro, beogradski sindikat composed “sviće zora” as a message of support for the protesters and their cause. however, not only did they compose a song to convey their support, but they also created a music video that visually represents and records the protests in a digital space. in the music video, the sounds of the gusle are paired with images of serbian orthodox churches and monasteries in montenegro and people marching in the snow holding religious icons and banners. aerial shots of protests and videos taken on the ground make up the majority of the music video, featuring numerous protestors and various locations. glimpses of protest signs, flags, religious icons, and banners are featured throughout the video. in addition, clips of serbian orthodox priests speaking at protests and gatherings are paired with the melody and lyrics of the song. protesters, diverse in age and gender, are shown united in their marches against the 2019 freedom of religion law. “sviće zora’s” music video takes viewers on a tour of various protest events, highlighting intertextual banners along the way. about sixteen seconds into the video, an intertextual image appears in a clip that pans over people holding up an image of petar ii petrović njegoš, prince-bishop of montenegro from 1830-1851, with the following quotation: “тврд је орах воћка чудновата не сломи га ал зуве поломи” [the hard walnut is a peculiar fruit, you won’t crack it, but you will break your teeth] [njegoš 1847 [1989]: 40]. njegoš’ gorski vijenac [the mountain wreath] is a play in verse based on local historical narratives of njegoš’ ancestor metropolitan danilo’s efforts to regulate tribal relations in eighteenth-century montenegro [pavlović 2003: 144]. the quotation features a line written in a letter by the character bishop danilo to the vizier (a high-ranking ottoman official). this line is a response to the vizier’s letter, which mentions “јаки зуби и тврд ораx сломе” [strong teeth can crack even the hardest walnut] [njegoš 1847 [1989]: 39]. this particular line cited by the protesters indexes qualities of strength and resistance by those in montenegro against outside forces that are re-contextualized in contemporary protests against the 2019 freedom of religion law. protesters, therefore, appear to employ this citation to index strength in their expression of resistance to the new law. the historical play is considered a significant literary work for many serbs [pavlović 2003: 145]. (9) the protestors’ use of this quotation from the mountain wreath potentially draws on the prominence of petar ii petrović njegoš as a historical hero [pavlović 2003: 145; domachowska 2020: 38]. (10) furthermore, sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 45 because the play is inspired by epic poetry, often disseminated by guslars, its reference in a protest sign indexes folk traditions conveyed by the gusle, as discussed above. this intertextual reference in the protests would be recognizable to those familiar with the mountain wreath’s local social significance. although the source of this video clip is not disclosed in the music video, beogradski sindikat’s choice to incorporate it into their video implies their resonance with its intertextual appeal. therefore, drawing on folk music and local histories, the song and video intertextually bring aspects of the past into current protests. “smurfing” resistance: intertextual links of papa smurf in acts of protest in addition to intertextually linking traditional folk music and epic poems to protest acts, protesters invoked the popular culture figure of papa smurf in their demonstrations. the uptake of smurf imagery and references included in these protests against freedom of religion law in montenegro stem from papa smurf’s recontextualization in a montenegrin elementary school. around 30 january 2020, at the osnovna škola jugoslavija bar [yugoslavia elementary school in bar], third-grade teacher rada višnjić’s students drew papa smurf in the center of the serbian flag during a classroom activity (see image 1). while some news sources and social media posts mention that višnjić asked students to draw papa smurf over the serbian flag, others report višnjić’s statements that the idea came from her students [kolektiv.me 2020]. the images made their way into digital circulation with višnjić’s posting of them on social media (reportedly with parental permission), and continued to diffuse over social media and local news articles [kolektiv.me 2020]. taking papa smurf’s character as a text, here he is partially decontextualized from his original smurf village home. however, retaining his emblematic red hat and white beard, papa smurf is recontextualized and brought into another text as he merges with the serbian flag. in this way, papa smurf is singled out as significant to the protests against the freedom of religion law because of his red, blue, and white appearance that parallels the colors of the serbian flag and represents the protesters’ ties to the serbian orthodox church in montenegro. although papa smurf may have been invoked in the protests earlier, the event in the elementary school in bar, montenegro provoked the viral spread of this figure. discussing the classroom activity and its circulation on social media, an article by the news site novosti re-circulated images of the students’ drawings and asserted that, as a result of the activity, papa smurf “…bez sumnje je postao novi simbol borbe za očuvanje srpskih svetinja u crnoj gori” [...has, without a doubt, become a new symbol of the struggle for the preservation of serbian holy sites in montenegro]” [novostionline 2020]. sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 46 thus, as the images created by the children spread through local news stories and on social media, papa smurf as a symbol of resistance to the 2019 law on freedom of religion was born [kurir.rs 2020]. because papa smurf’s relation to the protests appears to have originated in an elementary school, he may have initially been selected due to his readabilty to children who are likely familiar with the cartoon character. however, papa smurf was taken up in other contexts by adults as well, suggesting his meaning was readable to those of various ages. intertextually invoking papa smurf in protest materials and discussions about the protests is both elaborated on through social media platforms as well as in news reports and interviews. for example, ivan marojević, a serbian writer, commented: image 1. somee of rada višnjić’s students’ drawings reported by the novosti’s article with parental consent [novostionline 2020]. sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 47 мора да буде неки симбол који је јасан свима, и тако је, ето, дошао до цртаног филма. а можда и постоји дубља порука у виду да црна гора јесте један цртани филм мада један доста мрачан цртани филм. [there has to be a symbol that is clear to everyone, and that is how, here, it came to an animated film. and maybe there is a deeper message in the vision that montenegro is an animated film, though, a rather dark animated film] [rts oko 2020]. with a hint of sarcasm, marojević, who supports the protests, asserts that papa smurf, as a symbol, is readable to “everyone.” he, then, goes further to consider the significance of papa smurf being indexed in the context of the protests, pointing to both the figure’s cartoon origins and to his deeper signification as a character that perseveres. extending his interpretation of papa smurf’s intertextual appearance in the protests, marojević compares the situation in montenegro to that of a dark animated film, referencing his discontent with the circumstances. papa smurf's re-entextualization, re-making into a new identifiable text, in connection to the protests in montenegro was taken up in numerous acts of protest against the 2019 freedom of religion law. some opposing the updated law have invoked papa smurf’s indexicality of resistance to a stronger hegemonic power. many view milo đukanović as autocratic and corrupt, failing to maintain the democratic standards he claims to espouse [tomovic 2019]. a tweet by the account @therightserb goes as far as to identify đukanović by a new nickname, “gargamilo”: “#montenegro regime’s oppression against citizens is expected to escalate, as the corrupt president milo djukanovic, now known as #gargamilo, visibly shaken in power he’s held for more than 30 years, has no recourse save for brute force, intimidation and retribution” [serbhero 2020]. in the smurf comics, gargamel is the nemesis of the smurfs who hunts them ruthlessly with the intent of turning them into gold [rovin 1991: 13]. in this tweet, this user creatively recombines a personal view of đukanović with that of gargamel, intertextually linking the two into a new frame of reference. this reentextualization is used by the tweet’s author to voice discontent with đukanović and intertextually “hashtagify” him as a villain. when đukanović is compared to gargamel, the evil wizard who towers over the small smurfs, for some, the intertextual reference of papa smurf in the protests draws attention to his persistence in the face of challenges from more powerful adversaries. in an interview, film director danilo bećković breaks down the symbolism of papa smurf and gargamel in the protests as follows: ко је велики штрумф, а ко је гаргамел то је јасно. штрумпфови су одговор на апсурд који власт намеће као правило. не само да су узели себи за право да намећу све највеће неистине о црној гори, историји, култури него захтевају и од људи који знају истину да се sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 48 те истине одрекну и захтевају да се на њихову лаж пристане и да им се помаже лагати. [who is papa smurf, and who is gargamel, that is clear. the smurfs are a response to this absurdity that the government imposes as a law. not only have they taken it upon themselves to impose all the greatest untruths about montenegro, history, culture, but they also demand, from people who know the truth, to renounce those truths, and demand that their lies be accepted and that they help them lie] [rts oko 2020]. here, bećković outlines that the indexicality of papa smurf representing the protesters against the 2019 freedom of religion law and gargamel referring to đukanović “is clear” in this context. bećković and marojević’s explanations evidence the meaning-making process of protesters intertextual linkings of papa smurf and gargamel to the protest context. further uptakes of these smurf references are exemplified by numerous news reports and social media posts, as discussed above. beyond his re-entextualization in the classroom, social media, and broadcast interviews, papa smurf was also carried in protests in montenegro, as captured by the scene in the “sviće zora” video. an image of papa smurf appears on a black flag held by one of the protesters. although the clip is brief, it speaks to the active use of papa smurf in protests on the ground in montenegro. papa smurf is once again intertextually invoked to amplify the protesters’ resistance to the 2019 freedom of religion law. this instance of intertextuality is multi-layered, in that papa smurf is invoked in the protests on the ground, and this scene is then captured and featured in the “sviće zora” music video. given that the music video compiles numerous protest clips, the decision by beogradski sindikat to include this particular scene was likely to support the smurf’s intertextual linkages related to the protests. as such, it appears that, as marojević mentions, the effect of papa smurf’s adoption in relation to the protests is intelligible to many. due to the numerous appearances of papa smurf in protest materials in montenegro, this intertextual linkage was likely perceived as useful by those who physically held up such signs and was confirmed to be an effective reference by commenters on news articles and circulation on social media. however, the use of papa smurf to express opposition to the 2019 freedom of religion law also provoked debate. although many seemed supportive of this character’s association with the protests, others were dissatisfied. this debate over the smurf's legibility as a sign of resistance to the 2019 law illuminates questions of intertextuality in relation to protests and social movements. although he may function as a compelling symbol for protesters in montenegro and some of their supporters, papa smurf did not travel well in the diaspora. papa smurf's signification spread globally in the form of memes and images from the novosti article. around the time of the article’s publication, conversation about papa smurf being taken up as a symbol of resistance had begun on a facebook group for serbs and serbian-americans, presumably in the united sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 49 states. a conversation about smurf imagery in u.s.-based protests in solidarity against the 2019 freedom of religion law encouraged those planning to attend to draw on papa smurf’s success at attracting media attention in montenegro. the original poster argued that dressing up as smurfs would have the same effect and would illustrate the protesters’ demands to an american audience. however, some countered that this kind of attention would not favorably amplify their cause. a debate over the efficacy of smurf imagery thus ensued. although papa smurf had been successfully interpreted as a signifier of resistance in montenegro, some commenters rebuked the original poster and claimed that the smurfs, because of their cartoon origins, would only discredit their cause. this is not to say that people in former yugoslavia would welcome the idea of dressing as smurfs, but rather points to the conflicting beliefs of the serbian or serbian-american facebook users engaging with this post. some commenters argued that such a protest would be flashy and garner attention by american audiences, while others expressed the belief that these costumes would attract ridicule from americans. although the reason for the post’s deletion is uncertain, it may very well have been deleted due to the extensive comments opposing and attacking the idea of smurf imagery in u.s.-based protests. as we can see, papa smurf made his intertextual journey from a classroom to news reports and online spaces such as twitter and facebook. each intertextual act brought with it a different audience and opportunity for the interdiscursive link to be recognized or overlooked. intertextuality, uptakes, and intended audiences through both references to traditional and popular cultural texts, the protesters invoke elements of history and perseverance in their stance against the law in question. however, as exhibited in the facebook group, intertextual linkages are open to debate in terms of their semiotic efficacy and legibility. recall that intertextual gaps, the distance between texts and their prior iterations, can compress this distance emphasizing the construal of an act as intertextual. however, this intertextual recognition is not a given. rather, the communicative competence of the intertextual act’s recognition as such rests on an intended audience’s understanding of its linkages to prior texts. in this way, entextualizing papa smurf in the context of the protests is dependent on peoples’ recognition of both papa smurf in his original cartoon context and his distinct use as transplanted into protest images. re-contextualizing papa smurf here erases his childish attributes and instead reanimates him as signifying resistance against a more powerful adversary. in doing so, papa smurf becomes more than just a smurf but rather a signifier of resistance, pointing to the ways in which he is not exactly the small, red, blue, and white character being reproduced. even if an intertextual link is achieved, its interpretation or uptake can be disputed due to differences in perspectives and contexts [gal and irvine 2019: 139; nakassis 2012: 627]. concerning protests against the 2019 freedom of religion law, the intertextual linkage of papa smurf failed in an instance abroad sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 50 where some questioned proposed uses of smurf imagery in protests in the united states. the challenges to or support of papa smurf’s semiotic efficacy in the united states are reflective of the perspectives of facebook users who engaged with this post. recognition of intertextual linkages is limited to a set of texts and their accompanying discourses with which one must be familiar to successfully grasp the reference. thus, to an audience unfamiliar with the situation in montenegro and local histories these interdiscursive linkages of pairing of the gusle in “sviće zora” with “još ne sviće rujna zora” and its music video portraying a reference to njegoš’ the mountain wreath may interpretively fail. such failures of recognition of intertextual acts as such illuminates an intentional intertextual linkage’s dependence on audiences’ contextual uptakes. this fact leads to questions about the intended audiences to which protesters communicate their struggles and discontents. the language of protest signs can be telling in determining whether protestors aim to speak to local, regional, or international populations. however, protesters may also simultaneously speak to multiple populations. in this instance in montenegro, the predominance of signs in serbian, both using cyrillic and latin scripts, suggests the protests being directed toward local or regional observers. the use of serbian is intelligible to audiences in montenegro; thus, protestors’ signage focuses its communication on locals. the lesser use of english in protests on the ground assumes the protesters were more concerned with addressing a local audience rather than speaking to the international community, with which the english language is often associated. (11) however, by referencing papa smurf in protest signs and tweets, protestors do also certainly speak to international audiences for which smurfs have been decipherable characters with diverse meanings inscribed upon them [gajanan 2018]. this conclusion is further supported by the two tweets discussed above, which were published in english, and likely directed at both diasporic and international audiences. considering the different scales of the audience, papa smurf’s representation across local, national, and international spheres could produce differing opinions that challenge its interpretation as a signifier of the movement. although papa smurf may have had some recognition as a protest symbol in montenegro, he did not appear that way to some abroad, who rather believed that smurf imagery would discredit the protests to audiences outside of the balkans. furthermore, to international audiences, citing materials such as the mountain wreath may not effectively portray the protesters’ socio-historical positionality as these audiences may be unfamiliar with the local significance of this text. in montenegro, citing njegoš and the mountain wreath in these protests is likely readable to the montenegrin government against which protestors are demonstrating, because both are historically and culturally significant in montenegro [domachowska 2020: 36]. while some may overlook these references to the mountain wreath, njegoš or papa smurf, to others, they are clear stances meant to amplify and show support for the protests. therefore, to strengthen their movement, protesters cited locally significant figures, history, traditional folklore, and internationally recognizable characters such papa smurf. sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 51 through their circulation, “sviće zora” and papa smurf's meaning in the context of the 2019 freedom of religion law protests became readable to some, but not to others. this highlights the significance of protesters’ meaning-making processes in relation to their intended audiences, differing interpretations of semiotic configurations, and the role of perspective on uptake of a message. although the smurf's relation to the protests against the 2019 freedom of religion law emerged out of physical drawings of the character on a serbian flag, most of papa smurf's dissemination as a representation of the protesters’ struggle occurred digitally. additionally, while not a physical protest, the music video protests the 2019 law in a spatiotemporally transcendent form on the internet. the ability to replay and share the video electronically transcends its folkloric inspiration and expands the reach of the physical protests. such digital aspects lend themselves to questions about the role of online spaces in protest and social movements and what digital creations or recreations do for such movements. traditional folklore might lose or displace something of its original context when it is digitized [ernst 2017: 52-53]. however, in this process, it also gains a different meaning and significance when re-presented and re-generated digitally. traditional folklore’s transplantation into digital spaces facilitates its availability for further intertextual uptakes as it is transformed, decontextualized, and then recontextualized. thus, the internet facilitates electronic circulation of folklore and preserves oral traditions through the very form that may also alter them [blank 2014: 12]. the digital space can provide for “collective seeing” and a new form of participation in protest movements, as is especially seen by the many protests that have taken place during the covid-19 pandemic, paving the way for creative virtual means of participation through social media [wetzstein 2017: 26-27]. the pandemic has amplified alternatives to in-person participation in protests by expressing solidarity over social media and other virtual platforms. these innovative and developing forms of protest participation or amplification inspire questions about the future composition and reach of protests. as social media and virtual participation grow, we can only guess how memes, visual representations, and the spread of protest information influence the composition of protests. moreover, we must wonder whether technologies influence how folkloric elements become embedded in protests. conclusion in the over thirty years since yugoslavia’s dissolution and fourteen years since its independence, montenegro appears to be in a renewed state of flux in regard to its citizens’ sense of belonging. in august 2020, a parliamentary election resulted in the opposition party’s election to replace the dps, đukanović’s party, that had been in power since 2006. however, this political shift likewise drew protests from dps supporters. fast forward to december 2020, when montenegro’s newly elected parliament approved amendments to the 2019 freedom of religion law, appeasing many of those who had previously protested the law. in turn, this decision again triggered protests from those opposing the sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 52 changes [rfe/rl’s balkan service, 2020]. while some protested against the freedom of religion law, others protested its amendments. in sum, we are left with a complex situation that has yet to fully unfold. intertextuality can be a useful framework for understanding the intricacies with which people embed folkloric components in protests. this situation in montenegro invites such an intertextual reading of protest. protesters engaged in creative linkages of texts to support their cause. this article has identified a few notable intertextual elements of the protests against the 2019 freedom of religion law in montenegro and has shown that attending to such linkages can provide valuable insights into the inspirational anchors from which protesters draw support. the examples discussed attend to the intertextual process of meaningmaking from folkloric anchors and reveal protesters’ creative self and grouparticulations of opposition. while each example discussed can elaborated upon further, this paper has summarized a few instances to illustrate multiple ways in which intertextuality appears in protest materials. as in-person fieldwork and interviews were not possible, the data presented here require ethnographic contextualization. further ethnographic research conducted alongside protesters and their counterparts is intended to expand this study of the interdiscursive processes described. in this case, intertextual acts and their uptakes influence articulations of protests and their participants’ goals and communicative efforts. protesters use texts as building blocks, charging them with new meanings. attending to such purposive intertextuality can reveal how this process shapes protest movements and the relationship between protesters, that against which they protest, and outside audiences. such an intertextual approach to protests, therefore, illuminates how protesters evaluate and put into motion semiotic relations in demonstrations of opposition. notes 1 i would like to thank mariya lesiv, jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby, my anonymous reviewers, eliza frenkel, and my colleagues at indiana university for their insightful input on this article. 2 it is possible that people not identifying as serbs participated in the protests as well. however, addressing potential non-serbian protesters is beyond the scope of this paper and requires further ethnographic clarification in the field. 3 the smurf, or in bosnian/croatian/montenegrin/serbian štrumf, invoked in protest materials was most often that of papa smurf, the oldest smurf and “head of the village” who “often saves the smurfs from the most perilous situations using his wisdom and knowledge” [the smurfs]. papa smurf has a white beard and wears a red cap and pants, distinguishing him from his counterparts in white and marking him in iconic resemblance to the serbian flag (which many protesters readily recognize). sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 53 4 as i was unable to individually ask each social-media user how they identify, i am relying on my observation of users’ presence on serbian-related facebook pages or references to being serbian in my identification of them as serbian or serbian-american. 5 see bjork-james 2020, lazar 2015 (citing tilly [1993] and werbner et al. [2014]). 6 although more research is needed to clarify protesters’ choices in carrying signs and banners, it is implied that, in a public demonstration, protesters are aware that their signs will be read by others and are likely chosen to express particular beliefs about the protest context. 7 i have kept capitalization somewhat consistent with that of the lyrics included by beogradski sindikat in their youtube video description. i cannot confirm any further significance for this capitalization but have included it to remain true to the original. furthermore, other capitalization of verses and punctuation follows the grammar of the line as though it were prose. 8 capitalization here reflects most instances of slogans on protest signs. later references to this slogan will reflect typical serbian capitalization practices. 9 for further information regarding the mountain wreath and its interpretations see pavlovic 2003 and domachowska 2020. 10 further research and interviews with the protesters who created or held this sign are needed to further contextualize why they chose to cite the quotation above and represent njegoš in their protest sign. 11 this is not to say that there was an absolute absence of protest materials in english. there were clearly protest materials in english that circulated abroad on social media, but most signs on the ground in montenegro were in serbian, based on news reports and internet materials. however, there may have also been english materials present on the ground that escaped notice. further research amongst protest participants and attendance at protests is needed for any definitive conclusions. bibliography bakhtin, mikhail. 1986. “from notes made in 1970-71” in speech genres and other late essays, vern w. mcgee, trans. caryl emerson and michael holquist, ed. austin, tx: university of austin press, 132-158. bauman, richard. 2004. “introduction: genre, performance, and the production of intertextuality” in a world of others’ words: cross-cultural perspectives on intertextuality. malden, ma: blackwell publishing, 1-14. ben said, selim and luanga kasanga. 2016. “the discourse of protest: frames of identity, intertextuality, and interdiscursivity” in negotiating and contesting identities in linguistic landscapes. robert blackwood, elizabeth lanza, and hirut woldemariam eds. london, bloomsbury publishing, 71-83. sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 54 beogradski sindikat [београдски синдикат]. 2020. beogradski sindikatsviće zora [beogradski sindikat – dawn breaks]. youtube. 15 february 2020. cited by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxpovsv37kk. (consulted 29 november 2021). bjork-james, carwil. 2020. “unarmed militancy: tactical victories, subjectivity, and legitimacy in bolivian street protest.” american anthropologist 122(3): 514-527. blank, trevor j. 2014. “toward a conceptual framework for the study of folklore and the internet.” in toward a conceptual framework for the study of folklore and the internet, 1–23. boulder: university press of colorado. brenner, elise m. 2021. “social protest folklore and student critical consciousness,” journal of international women’s studies 22(1): 504-522. domachowska, agata. 2020. “njegoš and memory disputes in montenegro” rocznik instytutu europy środkowo-wschodniej 18 (2): 33-58. džankić, jelena. 2014. “reconstructing the meaning of being ‘montenegrin,’” slavic review 73 (2): 347-371. ernst, wolfgang. 2017. “‘electrified voices’: non-human agencies of sociocultural memory,” in memory in motion: archives, technology, and the social. ina blom, trond lundemo, and eivind røssaak eds. amsterdam, amsterdam university press, 41-60. gajanan, mahita. 2018. “what to know about the rise and fall of the theory that the smurfs are communists.” time. 16 november 2018. https://time.com/5431298/are-the-smurfs-communist/. (consulted 29 november 2021). gal, susan and judith irvine. 2019. signs of difference: language and ideology in social life. cambridge: cambridge university press. goodman, jane e., matt tomlinson, and justin b. richland. 2014. “citational practices: knowledge, personhood, and subjectivity.” annual review of anthropology 43: 449-463. heckert, fynn-morten. 2020. “protests against the law on religious freedom in montenegro. a challenge to the ‘đukanović-system’?” contemporary southeastern europe 1: 11-24. kolektiv.me. 2020. “učiteljica višnjić: učenici su predložili šta da crtaju, radim već 30 godina, poštujem zakon.” [teacher višnjić: students suggested what they wanted to draw, i have been teaching for 30 years, i follow the law] kolektiv.me. 30 january 2020. cited by https://kolektiv.me/151130/uciteljica-visnjic-ucenici-su-predlozili-sta-dacrtaju-radimvec-30-godina-postujem-zakon/. (consulted 29 november 2021). kurir.rs. 2020. “kad štrumpfovi zapevaju oj svijetla majska zoro: simbol srpskog inata pojavio se kao njegoš, kosovski junak, vođa litije.” [when the smurfs start singing the montenegrin anthem bright may dawn: the symbol of serbian spite appeared as njegoš, the kosovo hero, the leader of the liturgies] kurir.rs, 31 january 2020. cited by sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 55 https://www.kurir.rs/region/crna-gora/3403015/kad-strumpfovi-zapevajuoj-svijetlamajska-zoro-simbol-srpskog-inata-pojavio-se-kao-njegoskosovki-junak-vodja-litije. (consulted 29 november 2021). lazar, sian. 2015. “’this is not a parade, it’s a protest march’: intertextuality, citation, and political action on the streets of bolivia and argentina,” american anthropologist 117(2): 242-256. lazarević, dragana. 2011. “inventing balkan identities: finding the founding fathers and myths of origin – the montenegrin case.” serbian studies 25 (2): 171-197. mcneill, lynne s. 2009. “the end of the internet: a folk response to the provision of infinite choice,” in folklore and the internet: vernacular expression in a digital world. edited by trevor j. blank, 80-97. boulder: university press of colorado. nakassis, constantine v. 2012. “brand, citationality, performativity,” american anthropologist 114(4): 624-638. nakassis, constantine v. 2013. “citation and citationality.” signs and society 1(1): 51-77. njegoš, petar petrović ii. 1847 [1989]. горски вијенац [the mountain wreath]. translated and edited by vasa d. mihailovich. second edition. beograd: publishing house vajat. novostionline. 2020. “štrumpf u centru trobojke kao simbol borbe za očuvanje srpskih svetinja: pogledajte crteže učenika iz bara koji su uzdrmali crnu goru (foto).” [the smurf in the center of the tricolor flag as a symbol of the struggle for the preservation of serbian holy places: look at the drawings of students from bar who shook montenegro] novosti, 30 january 2020. cited by https://www.novosti.rs/vesti/planeta.300.html:844502-strumpf-u-centrutrobojke-kao-simbol-borbe-za-ocuvanje-srpskih-svetinja-pogledajtecrteze-ucenika-iz-bara-koji-su-uzdrmali-crnu-goru-foto. (consulted 29 november 2021). paleviq, edina. 2020. “ethno-nationalism in montenegro, kosovo and serbia during the pandemic.” humanističke studije 8: 65-80. pavlović, srdja. 2003. “literature, social poetics, and identity construction in montenegro.” international journal of politics, culture, and society, 17(1): 131-165. politika. 2020. политика “kako je nastala pesma ‘sviće zora’ nezvanična himna litija (video)” [how the song ‘dawn breaks,’ unofficial anthem of the liturgies, was written] politika.rs, 19 february 2020. cited by https://www.politika.rs/sr/clanak/448190/kako-je-nastala-pesma-svicezora-nezvanicna-himna-litija-video. (consulted 29 november 2021). reese, sarah. 2020. “‘it’s against the identity of our people’: serbs march in solidarity with protesters in montenegro.” nwi times, 16 february 2020. cited by https://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/lake/its-gainst-the-identityof-our-people-serbs-march-in-solidarity-with-protesters-insviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 56 montenegro/article_5bb92091-42b3-5b6e-9e36-d685285ce02e.html. (consulted 29 november 2021). rfe/rl’s balkan service. 2020. “lawmakers in montenegro back changes to contentious religion law amid protests.” radio free europe radio liberty, 29 december 2020. cited by https://www.rferl.org/a/montenegroreligion-law-serbia-church/31024392.html. (consulted 29 november 2021). rovin, jeff. 1991. the illustrated encyclopedia of cartoon animals. new york: prentice hall press. rts oko. [rts oko zvanični kanal]. 2020. oko magazin: crna gora, protesti i veliki štrumpf [oko magazine: montenegro, protests and papa smurf] [video]. youtube. 4 february 2020. cited by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygfrku5vf5u&t=8s. (consulted 29 november 2021). serbhero. 2020. “@therightserb thread on montenegro and president milo djukanokic. twitter. 30 january 2020. cited by https://twitter.com/therightserb/status/1223126483239153664?s=20&t=x qnsy0x36zlvbhf-gp_ppa. (consulted 29 november 2021). silverstein, michael and greg urban. 1996. “the natural history of discourse” in natural histories of discourse. chicago, il: the university of chicago press, 1-17. “the smurfs.” 2021. the smurfs. cited by https://www.smurf.com/en/discover/thesmurfs/. (consulted 18 april 2021). srbija danas. 2020. “srbi u americi na nogama! njujorkom odjekivalo: milo lopove, ne damo ti svetinje! (foto).” [serbs in america are on their feet! new york echoed: milo thief, we do not give you our holy places (photo)] srbija danas. 12 january 2020. cited by https://www.srbijadanas.com/vesti/region/srbi-u-americi-na-nogamanjujorkomodjekivalo-milo-lopove-ne-damo-ti-svetinje-foto2020-01-12. (consulted 29 november 2021). telegraf. 2013. “’još ne sviće runja zora’ nastala u futogu?” [“‘red dawn is not yet dawning’ originated in futog?”] telegraf.rs. 31 may 2013. cited by https://www.telegraf.rs/vesti/730328-jos-ne-svice-rujna-zora-nastala-ufutogu. (consulted 29 november 2021). tilly, charles. 1993. “contentious repertoires in great britain, 1758-1834.” social science history 17(2): 253-280. tomovic, dusica. 2019. “montenegro protesters keep up demands for djukanovic’s resignation.” balkan insight. 16 march 2019. cited by https://balkaninsight.com/2019/03/16/montenegroprotesters-keep-updemands-for-djukanovics-resignation/. (consulted 29 november 2021). werbner, pnina, martin webb, and kathryn spellman-poots. 2014. the political aesthetics of global protest: the arab spring and beyond. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. wetzstein, irmgard. 2017. “the visual discourse of protest movements on twitter: the case of hong kong 2014.” media and communication 5(4): 26-36. sviće “smurf” folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 57 zakon o slobodi vjeroispovijesti ili uvjerenja i pravnom položaju vjerskih zajednic. [law on freedom of religion or belief and the legal status of religious communities]. 2019. službeni list crne gore 74, 280-289. folklorica full 2024 reviews 84 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii simona bortiș-schultz. to hold your heart in your teeth, women’s work: the visual language of the romanian blouse. eindhoven: set margins’, 2023. illustrations. notes. bibliography. 196 pp. $25 (paper). isbn 978-90-833501-65. simona bortiș-schultz’s to hold your heart in your teeth, women’s work: the visual language of the romanian blouse transcends the boundaries of ethnographic discourse, presenting a richly illustrated memoir. in this work, the romanian blouse emerges as a textile sign that weaves bortiș-schultz’s identity into romanian history and womanhood. in the initial section “history + origins,” bortiș-schultz undertakes a semiotic analysis of the blouse, tracing its origins from romania’s tribal prehistory through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and examining its appropriation as a symbol of communist populism. this garment, she argues, serves as a complex cultural signifier, encapsulating the experiences, identities, and work of romanian women. the author highlights the blouse’s dual semiotic components: the woven hemp fabric and the embroidery. these elements— crafted by women—function as a visual language, encoding and transmitting cultural information and values across generations. in the second section, “sewn codes,” bortiș-schultz delves into the iconographic visual signs embroidered onto romanian blouses, which are like stamps on an “ethnographic passport” (62). through detailed descriptions and illustrations, the author elucidates these ornamental sign systems, drawing upon both her scholarly understanding and the traditional wisdom imparted to her through her family upbringing. she also emphasizes the localized nature of these signs, comparing them to regional dialects; they are distinct and unique to their specific cultural communities and vary from woman to woman rather than universal and widespread. for example, when bortiș-schultz references the western region of romania where she is from, she notes that regional peculiarities, such as black threaded geometric designs with bursts of vibrant colors and intricate lace collars, are due to the dialogic nature of embroidery—it changes over time while also incorporating influences from other women, both in their communities and further off. this chapter, much like a finely stitched pattern, intricately maps the landscape of romanian embroidery through historical and contemporary imagery, philately, museum and private collections, and personal experiences. in the concluding section, “a symbol of home,” bortiș-schultz intertwines her narrative as a migrant to the united states with the broader context of the romanian diaspora, noting that “romania is the fifth largest diaspora in the world in relation to its national size” (138). she underscores the significance of these blouses as vital threads that maintain connections to the homeland, accompanying romanian women wherever they may find themselves. this personal connection is poignantly illustrated through the inclusion of her grade school photos in phoenix, arizona. bortiș-schultz reflects on her adaptation to american life and the new opportunities it afforded her while articulating the dor [heart-felt longing] reviews 85 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii she feels for the home she left behind. thus, the blouse becomes a textile symbol of cultural continuity amidst the dislocation of migration, contributing to the ongoing construction and adaptation of romanian cultural identity. initially conceived as a graphic design mfa project, bortiș-schultz’s book manifests as a small press-produced artist book with the author herself responsible for its design and illustrations. the book as a physical object engages the reader aesthetically: the white cover is embellished with embroidered design elements and subtle white work debossing. the thread-stitched book block, highlighted with red thread, ensures the book lies flat when open, facilitating an enjoyable reading experience. however, the trendy choice of exposed swiss binding reveals a structural vulnerability; during my initial reading, the minimal strip of glue securing the envelope to the book block failed, detaching two-thirds of the way through the first read. this book, akin to the romanian blouse itself, serves as a testament to the resilience and continuity of romanian identity. bortiș-schultz intertwines the exploration of personal experience with broader cultural significance, presenting the romanian blouse as a resilient symbol that transcends time and place. through her scholarship, she applies a cultural semiotic framework to reveal the blouse as more than a garment—it is a nuanced communicatory system that signifies the complexities of romanian womanhood. through vivid storytelling and in-depth exploration, bortiș-schultz demonstrates how the romanian blouse serves as a conduit for cultural memory with its embroidered motifs and craftsmanship reflecting the collective experiences of romanian women and offers readers an understanding of how cultural identity evolves over time. ultimately, the romanian blouse becomes a powerful cultural text, encapsulating personal stories and broader historical shifts. bortiș-schultz invites readers to consider the enduring power of textiles in shaping collective identities and maintaining connections across time and space. by examining the intricate semiotic nature of the blouse, she celebrates the richness of romanian heritage and underscores its lasting relevance in contemporary discourse. a. m. lavey new york public library new york, new york amlavey@gmail.com folklorica full 2025 reviews 118 folklorica 2025, vol. xxix wanner, catherine. everyday religiosity and the politics of belonging in ukraine. ithaca: cornell university press, 2022. notes. bibliography. index. 225 pp. $130.00 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). isbn 978-1-5017-6495-0 (cloth). isbn 978-1-5017-6496-7 (paperback). everyday religiosity and the politics of belonging in ukraine is composed of five chapters plus an introduction, conclusion, and a preface. wanner has produced a remarkable volume on the role of vernacular religion in ukraine among the “just orthodox,” that is those who do not align with any of the three orthodox churches in ukraine but rather with the faith tradition as a whole. the book is clearly centered in the ukrainian experience and draws from fieldwork between 2014-2020; it explores the role that orthodox faith and vernacular religious practices play in secular ukraine. her research is extremely valuable for scholars working on orthodox practices in the post-socialist space in general. wanner discusses the influence of the shift from an official policy of atheism and the role of current events, from the maidan to russia’s ongoing war (beginning with the 2014 annexation of crimea). wanner elucidates the complex interactions among vernacular faith, politics, national identity and memory in ukraine. chapter 1 lays the groundwork to understand the pervasive nature of orthodoxy in daily life (even though most citizens are not active members of a congregation) and the political backdrop in ukraine. this study explores orthodox religion as it is lived and the intersections of national faith traditions and a ukrainian national identity. in chapter 2, kyiv serves as the centerpiece for her argument about the importance of the sacred atmosphere of place. wanner argues that the intersection between secular and sacred in ukraine is central to an understanding of daily life, the role of belief, and political attitudes among the just orthodox. she demonstrates how the infusion of the sacred into secular places lends a numinous, extraordinary atmosphere to place. for example, she explores how prayer animates place with an aura of religiosity, according to believers. visits and pilgrimage to such spots have become some of the most prevalent ways to connect to the sacred, removing people from daily life and providing them with a sense of calm and release. wanner also discusses how private spaces, such as homes or businesses, can be imbued with religiosity, e.g., installing icon corners or blessing by a priest. the ability for orthodox ukrainians to create such sacred sites, both in private and public, imbues the secular landscape with a power akin to longestablished monasteries and holy sites. chapters 3 and 4, dedicated to the maidan, are the centerpiece of the book. wanner first outlines the shift that this event represented in contemporary ukrainian identity. in addition, she illuminates how this seminal political event became synonymous with faith. people now ascribe the location of the maidan with a numinous power similar to that of the religious sites in the previous chapter. more importantly, it is an excellent demonstration of the ease with which religious and secular belief systems are intertwined in the ukrainian consciousness, and not only among the orthodox. wanner describes how greek catholics, the ukrainian reviews 119 folklorica 2025, vol. xxix orthodox church, and protestant religious figures all made statements about how the treatment of citizens violated religious tenets; an interconfessional tent chapel was installed for ecumenical religious liturgies. in chapter 4, she explores this process in more detail through commemorative sites dedicated to the heavenly hundred, the protestors killed by a sniper on the maidan. at first, memorials were a means to grieve this horrific loss of life. however, because of the association between the victims and christian martyrdom, these spaces became associated with orthodox vernacular mourning practices. people not only placed flowers, but religious objects, e.g., icons and rosaries, as well as candles. thereby, a secular political space became charged with numinous power. the final chapter is especially intriguing because it explores the development of military chaplaincy as a result of the war in the donbas after the crimean annexation. chaplains are employed by the ministry of defense to serve at the front with the soldiers and also counsel veterans upon their return home. on the surface, it would seem that a study of this official institutional position, which relies both on military imprimatur and religious ordination, is out of place in a book on vernacular religion. however, wanner convincingly demonstrates how vernacular understandings of christian practice formed the basis for these men’s commitment to and creation of these new roles. in addition, it also meshes with her overall argument about the secular-spiritual connections in orthodoxy. it may seem out of place, given that the topic of the book is eastern orthodox practices, but i wished, given wanner’s excellent treatment of protestant sects in communities of the converted: ukrainians and global evangelism (2007) that she had included a bit about protestant military chaplains. i hope a study on chaplains of other faiths will appear in other venues, since this material would be extremely useful for researchers of religion and the east slavic world. protestantism in eastern europe has often been overlooked by scholars of religion, and this study would help to fill this gap in the literature. overall, wanner has provided a much needed and excellent study of orthodox practices in ukraine today. she explores the intersection of institutional and vernacular religion in a way that most other religion scholars studying this region have not. as i have mentioned, while the book is dedicated to ukraine, it is an extremely useful model for those studying orthodoxy in eastern europe broadly. her nuanced treatment of the role of the national church in identity and how secular spaces become numinous is worthy of attention by scholars in many fields outside of religious studies, including political science, anthropology, folklore, history, and sociology. this volume would certainly make an excellent addition to graduate courses related to these disciplines. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby university of kentucky lexington, kentucky j.rouhier@uky.edu folklorica full 2024 reviews 81 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii golubeva, liubov’ v. and sofiia o. kupriianova, л.в. голубева and с.о. куприянова. материнство в советской деревне: ритуалы, дискурсы, практики в двух томах; том i: исследование; том ii: фрагменты интервью. [motherhood in the soviet village: rituals, discourses, and practices in two volumes; volume 1: the study; volume 2: interview excerpts]. volume 1, 320 pp. volume 2, 896pp. санкт-петербург: пропповский центр, 2022. volume 1: list of informants. archival photos. list of collectors. maps. volume 2: list of abbreviations. glossary of dialect words. $110.00 (hardback). isbn 978-5-6044326-2-4 (volume 1). isbn 9785-6044326-3-1 (volume 2). liubov golubeva and sofia kupriianova’s two-volume russian-language opus motherhood in the soviet village: rituals, discourses, and practices, edited by svetlana adon’eva and published by the propp center in saint petersburg, russia, is devoted to the concept and everyday realities of motherhood in the arkhangelsk and vologda regions of russia. the book spans from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. there is a particular focus on transitions during the soviet period. the analysis of changing and surviving traditions is structured around four key areas: pregnancy and childbirth, introduction of the infant to the family, infant care, and crises with the infant. the study presented in the first volume is based both on extensive extant archival materials and new field interviews that were collected by the authors in the russian north since 2003. there, they talked to mothers and grandmothers, who were born between 1917 and 1970, about their experiences of motherhood. the results are presented in what the authors refer to as a “thick” (literally, enriched [насыщенное]) anthropological description (i:5). using the conceptual frameworks of marcel mauss’ body techniques, michel de certeau’s practice of everyday life, erving goffman’s frame analysis, and harold garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, golubeva and kupriianova document both a continuity of body habits and their modifications from the pre-october revolution agrarian context to the contemporary urbanized environment. the need for such a body focus was made particularly clear to the collectors when they asked an older informant to demonstrate the procedure for swaddling a baby. unexpectedly, the informant sat down on the floor, extended her legs, and placed a demonstration doll on her extended legs with the doll’s head towards her feet, an approach that the collectors later observed in multiple locations. this contrasts with the contemporary technique of diapering a baby on a horizontal high surface, such as a table or bed. the authors also analyze how women talk about their maternal experiences, noting (un)spoken prohibitions on subjects such as pregnancy, the onset of labor, or a baby’s health. the researchers convincingly show change in register from everyday language to ritual language, which is characterized by tone shifts, euphemisms, and metaphors. a major theme is young women transitioning their reliance from the patronage of their mothers-in-law to reliance on their own mothers and stateprovided medical services. the first section of the first chapter devoted to rites reviews 82 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii and practices of childbirth is titled “помощь свекрови и повитухи” [assistance by the mother-in-law and by a traditional midwife] (i:23). further in the chapter, in a section titled “роды с фельдшером” [birth assisted by a medical professional] (i:42-49), the authors demonstrate the shift to more medicalized and hospital-based childbirths as one of the factors in the changing position of a husband’s family in the maternal experience. the authors convincingly argue that in a traditional exogamous marriage, when a woman entered her husband’s household often distant from her native village, the patronage by the mother-inlaw and her assistance in the birth and infant care were critical, especially for a first-time mother. traditionally, the father was a participant in the childbirth. the stress on the paternal family is evident in the requirement to immediately wrap the newborn in the father’s old shirt, symbolizing the entrance of a new member into the paternal household, as described in the second chapter. however, thanks to khrushchev’s residential and daycare policies in the 1960s, when a new family acquired an opportunity to live separately, women had a choice between submitting to their mother-in-law or living independently; the authors see a generational conflict centered on this shift. the theme of the authority of the mother-in-law or transition away from it continues throughout the four chapters of the first volume. chapter three, devoted to infant care, again has a section titled “патронаж свекрови и старших” [patronage by the mother-in-law and other elders] (i:147-152). chapter four, dealing with critical illnesses, accidents, disappearances, and the deaths of children not only presents and analyzes narrative materials of dire circumstances and loss but also notes the role of the mother-in-law in keeping previous generations of mothers healthy. golubeva and kupriianova frequently refer to interviews published in the second volume, which by itself constitutes a mini-archive of almost 900 pages, based on materials held at the saint-petersburg university folklore archive and the propp center electronic archive. the second volume is organized along the same four thematic areas as the first volume, but it is also further subdivided geographically and functionally with tags, e.g., “#afterbirth” [#послед] (ii:155). both volumes have multiple appendices; aside from an extensive bibliography of primarily russian-language sources, volume one contains an alphabetical list of nearly 650 informants to whom the authors express their gratitude, six archival photos, a list of over 275 collectors, and historical information and maps of the regions; volume two contains a list of abbreviations and a glossary of dialect words. the reader may not always be entirely satisfied with the descriptions in the text. there is, for example, surprisingly little information on the actual techniques of frequently mentioned diapering and swaddling. are there ties or pins involved? how does the special swaddling ribbon [пеленальник] work? if a kind of a hood is left to cover the baby’s face, what are the actual folds? if, as the authors mention, the mother-in-law’s old skirt is used for swaddling, is the skirt modified in any way before such use? moreover, there is only a single sentence that refers to the type of swaddling—in the past, it was “tight” [тугое пеленание] with the baby’s arms and legs straightened (i: 104), or “little soldier” style [солдатиком]. reviews 83 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii “free swaddling” [свободное пеленание] or “wide diapering” [широкое пеленание], both of which are considered preferable by russian medical professionals these days, are not mentioned at all. are there any generational conflicts related to different views on how to swaddle an infant? golubeva and kupriianova present a detailed and coherent picture of shifting motherhood practices in the region. as a systematic analysis of extensive materials, the text is an important contribution to research on the anthropology of motherhood, both in historical terms and for understanding the worldviews of contemporary mothers in russia. the work addresses current academic interest in motherhood and meets societal demands for knowledge of traditional practices in rethinking and reevaluating existing practices in pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare. it is relevant for medical and cultural anthropologists, folklorists, scholars of literature and art, medical professionals, and the public at large. a great service to anthropology would have been a translation of the work into english, which would make this study available to a greater circle of researchers into motherhood worldwide outside of russia. veronica muskheli university of washington seattle, washington nika@uw.edu zhivaia starina in 2015 zhivaia starina in 2015 folklorica 2016, vol. xx 171 zhivaia starina in 2015 olga v. belova the institute of slavic studies, russian academy of sciences moscow, russia 2015 was declared the year of literature in russia, so that the periodical focused on the interrelation of the literary and oral traditions, the importance of written sources in the formation and existence of oral texts, the language of popular culture, and the role of the performer and the bearer of the tradition in its transmission and preservation (issues 3, 4). in keeping with the celebration of the 70th anniversary of victory in world war ii, we focused on the theme of war in popular memory (issue 3). 2015 also saw the 25th anniversary of the state republican centre of russian folklore. the centre’s activity in russian folklore and traditional culture studies was covered in a section in issue 4. as usual, topics related to regional studies in folklore and ethnography, the study of living forms of folk culture, and the discussion of problems and future of the studies of “living antiquity” were featured as well. issue 1 opened with a section entitled “time and calendar in popular culture.” t. a. agapkina in her article, “feast — idle time? (the benefits of violating taboo)” addressed the problem of personification of the concept of “idleness” in popular rituals associated with specific calendar dates. the author “the rakhmans’ easter in podolia (19th—21st centuries),” o. i. shalak presented an analytical overview of the rituals associated with the regional celebration of the easter cycle and traced the transformation of the tradition for two centuries in ukraine. e. a. samodelova’s “yuletide christmas carols of the kaluga, orel and tula regions”, introduced materials recorded in 1985. the article by p. khristov and e. v. petrova, “‘one’s own’ holiday calendar of bulgarians in the odessa region and the ukrainians of sofia,” shows how diaspora groups living in an urban environment manage to retain their identity through folk religious symbolism in the calendar. the section “beliefs and rites” also addressed the calendar theme and the theme of time in vernacular culture. r. sliužinskas, folklorica 2016, vol. xx 172 in “‘the jew’ as a shrovetide mummer in lithuania,” characterized regional features of mumming characters representing ethnic neighbors and pointed out the main ethnic and cultural stereotypes basic to construction of the image of the “other” in the folk calendar. g. i. lopatin’s “easter customs and traditions in the gomel region,” presented field materials from the collection of f. g. shklyarov vetka museum of old belief and byelorussian traditions. the article by v. v. zaporozhets, “memorates about ‘inopportune times’” was based on narratives about the evil eye, curses or unusual cases that occurred at times viewed in the folk tradition as “bad” or “odd.” a large section “folklore and ethnography of the peoples of russia” brought together articles on karelian folk culture (m. v. kundozerova. “big oak: the mythologeme of the world tree in the karelian runes”); evenk folk culture (n. a. mamontova, “the khosun legends of the ilimpeyan evenks”); mordovian folk culture (v. i. rogachev, “the rite of bride abduction in mordovia (based on the 19th — early 20th century materials”); romani folk culture (n. v. bessonov. “the brides of ‘foreign blood’ in the gypsy camp”); v. n. yanysheva, “romany horror stories”); tatar folk culture (i. a. bessonov, “folklore and rituals of tartars in the town of galich”); and bashkir folk culture (g. r. khusainova, “chelyabinsk bashkirs’ folklore in its modern state”). the “expeditions” section featured materials from the ural region (e. v. rychkova, “folk bible of the old believers in ural region”); the komi republic (l. s. lobanova, “materials from the village yortom, udorsky district of the komi republic”); and the lower volga region (v. a. shilkin, “holiday soroki in the volgograd region”). the “jubilees” section offered congratulations to n. yu. danchenkova, an ethnomusicologist and one of the leading experts in the sphere of musical folklore. in the issue 2 the section “the game in folk culture” combined articles exploring different russian folk games (m. v. gavrilova, “‘subject of the action’ and ‘character’ in russian folk games of the 19th — early 20th century”); various regional forms of the folk games (v. yu. kolchev, s. v. meshcheryakov, “the folk game ryukhi in the town of ostashkov of the tver region”; v. a. shilkin, zhivaia starina in 2015 folklorica 2016, vol. xx 173 “children’s games in the volgograd region”; o. a. choekha, “children’s games in the aegean sea islands”); the lexicon and terminology of games (g. i. romaniy, “regional city names in the children’s games ‘chain’ (‘boyars’)”); and the geographical distribution of games (g. r. shagapova, “five stones”). the section “russians in latgale” is devoted to folklore and traditional culture of the russian people living in poly-ethnic and heterodox environments. it includes articles and publications based on the field research materials in the south-eastern regions of latvia in 2011–2014 and addresses oral history, folklore, and the traditional spiritual culture of long-time russian residents of the baltic states: “expeditions in latgale” (s. n. amosova, s. i. pogodina, m. v. vyatchina); “stories of the appearance of the old believers communities in latgale” (m. v. vyatchina, s. i. pogodina); “toponymic legends of latgale” (m. b. gecht, d. v. tereshina); “‘alien faith’: narratives about ethnic neighbors religion” (yu. o. andreeva). this issue contains a new section, “folklore in research centers,” devoted to investigation, training and teaching, field research and publishing activities of russian and international universities and research centers, where folk and traditional culture studies is a fundamental discipline. zhivaia starina intends to invite colleagues to address contemporary trends in folklore studies and new methods and approaches to the investigation of cultural heritage. our first contributors to this section were from the department of folklore at the philological department of lomonosov moscow state university. included were articles by ya. yu. solovyova (“rites of the easter period in the kuibyshev district in kaluga region”); t. v. soboleva (“on the sixth we buried the cuckoo…”); a. a. ivanova (“rusalki joy on dukhovskaya week...”); a. a. ivanova, t. v. soboleva (“on ivan kupala witches go breaking crops...”); and a. f. balashova (“the world of the living and the world of the dead in the view of the seekers”). the section “expeditions” contains materials from the komi republic (p. a. shakhmatskaya, “beliefs about domovoy [house spirit] in the mining settlements of the komi republic”) and the folklorica 2016, vol. xx 174 crimea (s. v. alpatov, a. n. voinik. “crimean expedition of the moscow state university in 2014”). the “jubilees” section focused on m. p. cherednikova, a specialist in children’s folklore, in contemporary folklore, and in the traditional culture of the ulyanovsk region (middle volga). issue 3 opened with a section “the war in people’s memory”, devoted to folklore samples which reflected the events of the world war ii in the collective and individual memory (see also issues of zhivaia starina in connection with the anniversaries of world war ii in 1995, no. 2; 2005, no. 2; 2010, no 2). the section contains nikita ilyich tolstoy’s letters from the front by (prepared for publication by s. m. tolstaya). v. n. sedykh published materials from the family archive (“the song helped us to survive and win”) on the organization of the army song, dance and music ensembles. several publications are devoted to oral personal narratives and memoirs: n. yu. danchenkova. “the memory of the war in the laments of m. a. korolyova (tatarovo village, vladimir region)”; “poetic memoirs by n. a. vetrova” (a publication by m. v. stroganov); “war narratives from the selizharovsky district of the tver region” (a publication by m. n. tolstaya). the section “the mythological locus in the folk tradition” reflected the diversity of genres in which the concept of space and the symbolism of locus play a role setting the scene; the ritual acts associated with specific places and locales were considered as well: d. v. gromov. “legends of the galich lake”; m. v akhmetova. “the legend of sonya’s grove (bologoe, tver region)”; g. i. lopatin. “the holy springs in vetka district, gomel region”; i. yu. vasiliev. “the monuments of krasnodar city in the residents’ judgements and modern rites”; and k. e. shumov. “environment in beliefs of circus performers and sportsmen.” the articles in “written sources and popular culture” are devoted to the interaction of written and oral forms of culture. in the article by a. g. avdeev, “inscriptions in the epic: stones on the crossroads (notes of an epigraphist),” the inscriptions mentioned in epic songs are analyzed in the context of medieval artifacts. d. a. radchenko’s article “handwritten ‘heavenly letters’ in russia of the 19th century: ‘letter from the languedoc’” provides textual analysis zhivaia starina in 2015 folklorica 2016, vol. xx 175 of a manuscript from the middle of the 19th century, a version of the so-called “heavenly letter” in comparison to other russian and western european counterparts. the article by s. n. amosova, “legend of the 12 fridays in handwritten notebooks of latgale,” presents a classification of the apocryphal versions of this legend and contains a list of newly discovered variants. v. p. ershov’s “apocryphal prayers from karelia” introduces texts from a typewritten collection of apocryphal texts transferred in 1986 to the karelian museum for the history of religion. the article by m. v. kalashnikova, “when the song isn’t a song anymore: the genre transformation in albums and songbooks,” is devoted to the existence and transformation of song genre in a new context. the “exhibition” section presented the materials from the exhibition “clinking coin: coins in traditional cultures of eurasia” in the russian museum of ethnography in st. petersburg (authors of the publication are a. b. ostrovsky and a. v. ratnikova). “expeditions” was centered on field research from serbia, montenegro and bosnia (a. a. plotnikova, “traditions of the orthodox and the muslims on the borderlands of serbia, montenegro and bosnia”) and from the mogilyov region of belarus’ (v. a. kuhtina, n. a. savina, “the expedition to the russianbyelorussian borderland”). issue 4 was primarily devoted to the 25th anniversary of the state republican center of russian folklore. the articles presented center activity dedicated to the study, preservation and promotion of the folk tradition; on its coordination the work of folklorists in russia and abroad; and its academic, publishing, archival, fieldwork, methodological and educational activities (v. e. dobrovolskaya, “scholarly-methodical and publishing activities of the center of russian folklore”; d. v. morozov, “field research and archival work of the center of russian folklore”; a. b. ippolitova, “northern russian herbals of 17th century”; v. e. dobrovolskaya, “copybook with folk tales of the bryansk province”; e. g. boronina, “the whitsunday rite of bypassing the yards in the east of moscow region”; a. g. kuleshov, “alexey ivanovich denshin and the revival of dymkovo toy handycraft”; m. v. stroganov, “death and fate in heartbreaking romance (on the materials of the folklorica 2016, vol. xx 176 tver region).” the section “language of folk culture” is devoted to the existence of the word in vernacular culture, to the verbal code of culture, to characteristics of the language of folk genres, and to the theoretical aspects of folklore. in the article “speech acts and speech genres in folklore,” s. m. tolstaya examines the boundaries between the speech genres in spontaneous speech and folklore, the correlation of the content of a folk text content and the context of its existence, and the spectrum of proverbial pragmatic functions. a number of articles are devoted to folk phraseology, argot, proverbs and sayings: “what is a ‘blind rain’?” by l. n. vinogradova; “why a woman is a ‘husk’, or russian skalds on the banks of vitim river” by a. v. korovashko; “podarish went to paris: the russian proverb in the european context” by s. v. alpatov; “verbal magic of folk gardening in east slavic tradition” by n. a. savina. in the section “personality — repertoire — text” the researchers focused on the problems of individual performance, the individual’s role in preserving and enriching the folk tradition. materials featured include those from the kirov region (l. v. fadeeva, “legends, memorates and fabulates by nina dmitrievna penkina”); the gomel region of belarus (the publication by g. i. lopatin, “spells from ekaterina evdokimovna chueshkova’s notebooks”); and the perm region (s. yu. korolyova, “the naïve prose by ivan fedoseyev”; i. s. fedoseyev. “once there was my village...”). the field work section included materials from the komi republic (publication by t. s. kaneva and d. i. shomysov, “yavlennaia bogoroditsa [miraculous appearance of our lady icon] in nonburg village (komi republic).” “jubilees” honored a. n. vlasov, a researcher of folklore and literature and a leading specialist in regional folklore studies. “in memoriam” was dedicated to mikhail aleksandrovich lobanov (1943–2015), musicologist and enthusiastic researcher of epic poetry (the author of the publication is v. a. lapin). zhivaia starina also published 17 reviews of monographs and edited volumes on folklore, ethnography and anthropology (14 reviews devoted to the russian publications and three to international ones) and 13 chronicle articles. microsoft word folkloricaprotest_ii_full_final_2022 07.27.22.docx reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 102 astapova, anastasiya. humor and rumor in the post-soviet authoritarian state (studies in folklore and ethnology: traditions, practices, and identities). lanham, md: lexington books, 2021. index. xii+171 pp. $95.00 (cloth). isbn 978-1-7936-2429-1. although the dramatic intensification of political repression in belarus since the fraudulent august 2020 presidential election makes this a particularly timely book, this publication is in fact the product of seven years of fieldwork. folklorist and humor scholar anastasiya astapova collected hundreds of jokes, rumors, and other interview data, both in her native belarus and among the belarusian diaspora in several countries from 2011 to 2018. the resulting monograph provides a compelling account of what the author calls (after the political anthropologist james c. scott) the “hidden or backstage transcript” of contemporary life and popular discourse in a country that has widely been considered the most unreconstructed “soviet” of all the post-soviet states for more than a quarter of a century. in this regard, humor and rumor in the post-soviet authoritarian state is a significant new contribution to the “everyday turn” in the scholarly study of the former second world, represented by the work of timothy johnston, sheila fitzpatrick, jochen hellbeck, and many others. the book also breaks new ground in the fields of contemporary folklore studies and interdisciplinary humor research, and in particular the wide-ranging tradition of joke studies, represented in the slavic and east european sphere by authors such as alexandra arkhipova, david brandenberger, jonathan waterlow, and elliott oring. astapova begins with a useful preface that briefly describes the situation in belarus since august 2020 and predicts the lasting relevance of her work despite the uncertainty of future developments: “[w]hat has been documented in this book will remain crucial, whether for the study of belarus or any other country with a history of nondemocratic rule” (vii). this nod to the exportability of her tightly focused study of popular political expression in one small nation is elaborated on in the subsequent chapters, both with direct comparisons between belarusian texts and similar material from other countries (including the ussr and several of the independent nations that emerged from it in 1991) and with frequent yet judicious deployment of more general theoretical sources from various disciplines, including history, discourse analysis, anthropology, and such emerging subdisciplines as surveillance studies. the thoroughly sourced introduction includes a careful, informed discussion of astapova’s terminological choices, including her rationale for using the phrase “authoritarian state” rather than “dictatorship,” a label that has been widely applied to belarus for over a decade (after condoleezza rice first popularized the term “last dictatorship in europe” in reference to president alexander lukashenko’s increasingly authoritarian regime). this chapter also contains a helpful elaboration of the term “political folklore,” with an impeccably sourced and detailed taxonomy of scholars’ various approaches to this category of popular cultural production. the thoroughness and generosity to the reader shown in this reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 103 introductory chapter is maintained throughout the book. in her chapter on surveillance rumors, for example, astapova includes a nuanced primer on the subtle differences between the genres of rumor, legend, “contemporary legend,” and conspiracy theory. these theoretical and methodological exercises are all firmly grounded in the specific examples collected by the author, and convincingly integrated into her overarching argument about the contemporary functions of humor in non-democratic societies. the empirical chapters are organized thematically according to the topics of the texts analyzed therein: surveillance rumors; political jokes; metajokes; lukashenko’s image; the potemkin-village-style efforts to please the president and other political elites on their official visits; and the increasingly farcical elections that have been conducted every four or five years in belarus since 1994. astapova acknowledges that all these topics are more or less directly about lukashenko himself, but she does a good job of teasing out the often-subtle distinctions between jokes and rumors about, for instance, the president’s official biography and popular reactions to what she calls the “vernacular panopticon” of living in a police state. the author is adept at demonstrating links between the various themes of the jokes and rumors that are not immediately obvious. for example, in her discussion of the belarusian kgb and its ubiquitous yet vaguely defined monitoring of nearly all aspects of life in the country, she cites the following joke, which is ostensibly about bureaucratic inefficiency, but at the same time alludes to the paranoid meticulousness that characterizes the country’s special services in the popular imagination: “when did the second world war start?” “on september 1, 1939.” “and when did the great patriotic war […] start?” “on june 22, 1941.” “what were [the] germans doing in between?” “clearing […] belarusian customs.” (30) astapova’s translations of the hundreds of texts she analyzes are clear and readable. it is understandable that the russian and belarusian originals are not given for most of the jokes and rumors cited, due to space concerns, and the book’s potential appeal to area-studies specialists will not be diminished by the absence. in the instances that she does provide the original, it is because the text’s meaning or humor relies on phonetic or other untranslatable linguistic features. one might take issue with astapova’s ready acceptance of scott’s claim that “the stricter the regime is, the richer political folklore becomes” (9). the history of the political anekdot in the soviet union, where the genre’s heyday coincided not with the stalin era but with the comparatively “vegetarian” thaw and stagnation periods that followed, belies this argument. this very minor quibble aside, astapova’s book will certainly be of interest to students, scholars, and other reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 104 readers interested in what she terms the “current vernacular reactions” of citizens in belarus and other non-democratic societies to the political contexts in which they live. seth graham university college london london, uk s.graham@ucl.ac.uk folklorica full 2024 reviews 86 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii herzfeld, michael. subversive archaism: troubling traditionalists and the politics of national heritage. durham: duke university press, 2021. bibliography. index. xvi+239. $102.95 (hardcover). $26.95 (paper and e-book). isbn 978-1-4780-1500-0 (hardcover). isbn 978-1-4780-1762-2 (paper). isbn 978-1-4780-2224-4 (e-book). michael herzfeld’s subversive archaism is based upon his 2018 henry morgan lectures at the university of rochester. he focuses on two communities with which he worked extensively as an anthropologist: zoniana, a mountain village in crete, greece; and the urban enclave of pom mahakan in the center of bangkok, thailand. repeated visits to both sites allow him to demonstrate intimate knowledge of the localities and to show how their situations have changed over time. the book is not structured so that he treats one of the communities in a large unit and then the other in a separate section. rather he switches back and forth from one to the other every few pages, often every few paragraphs or sentences. this approach effectively maintains focus on the conceptual issues. i appreciate this as a reader who can then more easily apply the subject matter and ideas to my own research domains. both zonianians and the chao pom (people of pom mahakan) exist(ed) in some state of tension with their respective nation-state (i.e., with the monarchy, politicians, bureaucracy, and/or police) and both actively engage(d) cultural features that predate those used symbolically by the nation-state. this is made clear by the book’s subtitle, “troubling traditionalists and the politics of national heritage.” herzfeld explores the efforts of the zonianians and the chao pom to protect and promote their local ways of life, which often pit them against the nation-state and render them as “subversive.” herzfeld spends some time describing the positions, strategies, and characters of the agents of the nation-states. he provides a brief history of greece and thailand, emphasizing how modern nation-states are relatively recent constructions and strongly connected with western colonial history. greece and thailand each “conceptually airbrush” their official histories to claim continuities that are much more direct than historically experienced and much longer than their current political formations (modern greece became independent in 1828 and the chakri dynasty was founded in 1782). herzfeld argues: neither country was officially colonized by western states, but both were constantly under pressure to conform to western demands, demands that were cultural as well as political and economic. i call the indirect but often humiliating domination of these states “crypto-colonialism.” (12) in this description, the modern nation-state claims a monopoly on moral and cultural authority: “the ethnonational state abhors internal exceptions” (81). state players, including the thai monarchy, greek local and national politicians, diverse bureaucrats, journalists, certain neighbors, and the police, insist on their own legitimacy, naturalness, consistency, and correctness. unofficially, this reviews 87 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii opens them up “to criticism as bearers of foreign values and as agents of foreign interference” (12). herzfeld provides sufficient information to show us that his communities are not particularly marginal but clearly “marginalized” (cf. 150), not particularly ethnic but “ethnicized,” and likewise “vilified,” “illegalized,” stereotyped, and “othered” in various ways by the nation-state’s actors. the nation-state’s representatives demonstrate significant agency when they feel their ideals are challenged, but they are presented in a rather unflattering way as mostly two-dimensional characters/caricatures. true to the goals of the monograph, these government representatives are presented primarily as a foil for his main protagonists, the people of zoniana and pom mahakan, who rise in this reader’s imagination as much more colorful, creative, and sympathetic. zonianians and chao pom shared “an awareness of the replacement of an older polity by a modernist nation-state of largely foreign inspiration” (42). in zoniana, elements older than the modern nation-state included partial retention of a patrilineal clan structure (as well as related blood vendettas, sheep stealing, and use of guns). while the state preferred social organization based upon nuclear families, the chao pom partially organized their community in a traditional, centralized way herzfeld identifies as a mandala or moeang. in this system power, legitimacy, and status are focused at the moeang’s center and irradiate downward and outward in somewhat concentric circles to elastic edges. remnants of moeangs can be found on many overlapping levels in thailand and other places, though the nation-state prefers exclusive dominance of an official moeang, centered on the thai king. the chao pom were more inclusive of ethnic diversity than the increasingly ethnonational thai monarchy and bureaucracy. they were not legal owners of their property but made special claims to the area by being exceptionally good stewards of this historic neighborhood, self-regulating lawfulness and cleanliness, and promoting their heritage architecture through their own initiative. all these features “contradicted the state, positing an alternative antiquity, social organization, and moral order” (81). following herzfeld’s nuanced descriptions, we come to realize that these two communities were only partially archaic and only partially subversive. in other ways, they were quite modern and loyal. most members were strongly supportive of their nation-states in principle. indeed, sometimes these community members identified themselves as more greek than the bureaucrats that marginalized them, or better at following thai buddhist ideals. neither were they anti-modernist: the zonianians were unusually expansive in business ventures. both groups used technologies, strategies, and arguments like the state to try to advance their own positions: “subversive archaism is a performance of conformity with ideals of national heritage, but one that deliberately sets a trap [to recognize alternate authorities] and tempts the state to fall into it” (144). i appreciate herzfeld’s discussion in chapter five, where he describes his use of the concept of “polity” in a loose, “transgressive” way, as “a system of governance that is significantly more generic than the idea of state and is informed by an ethic of shared understanding of the universe” (99). using this approach, polities can sometimes also be temporally impermanent “as a shared way of life reviews 88 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii or an evanescent moment of mutual understanding” (97). this move allows him to observe the interactions and compare the nation-states, the capital cities, and the small communities on a somewhat level playing field. similarly, he finds it useful to deal with “cosmologies” as a broader and more flexible conceptual category than “religions” (chapter four). civility (hospitality, good manners, proper dress, and other expressions) is understood as a basic positive quality by all four main polities in herzfeld’s study. he describes how their relations and negotiations tend to go through modes of civility, strained civility, vilification, and sometimes violence. one of herzfeld’s focal communities continues to enjoy substantial success in their subversive archaism, though the other locality has been physically destroyed and its citizens disbanded. herzfeld’s subversive archaism focuses specifically on two small communities of the type that is typical of classical anthropological research (“i thought i was going to study kinship and marriage, just as an obedient oxfordtrained anthropologist should” [ix]) and their challenging relations with another common unit of study—the nation-state. advantages of this approach are that he can rely on rich comparative scholarly resources, and that the two very different case studies can be juxtaposed with some common frames of reference. these two communities, however, are not the only possible settings for subversive archaism. as i was reading, i often thought of other examples of archaisms invoked in relations between groups at different scales: within empire-building and empiremanaging contexts; within the nation-building process itself; among subgroups of artistic and occupational communities; and even in the context of individual relations. of course, these diverse scales of comparison surely feature their own diverse qualities, tendencies, and patterns. herzfeld recognizes several variations in his comparative comments dispersed throughout the text, in his flexible use of “polity,” and in a dedicated sub-chapter “mutations of subversive archaism” (164-167). i appreciate these gestures as an additional move that can bring the subject matter closer to home for many readers cross-culturally. andriy nahachewsky university of alberta (emeritus) edmonton, canada andriyn@ualberta.ca microsoft word folkloricaprotest_ii_full_final_2022 07.27.22.docx on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 34 hoping against hope? on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales izabela zdun mcgill university montréal, canada abstract jack zipes mourns the disregard for what he, after ernst bloch, refers to as the utopian purpose of the folktale: its capacity for fostering human autonomy and proposing means to alter the world. building on bloch’s concept, zipes contends that what has been missing is seeing life as a process that can be altered and the difficult realities of the present actively faced, not escaped. he asserts that contemporary fairy tales succeed at reviving the utopian function when they are self-reflective and experimental, that is, when they question the forms and themes that the folktale and the fairy tale have developed [zipes 1983: 170-193]. they succeed also when they nurture the urge for individual and social transformation. this paper examines two fairy tales of a renowned contemporary russian author liudmila petrushevskaia from this perspective. although veiled in her customary grim vision, which includes existential uncertainty and sociopolitical instability, petrushevskaia’s fairy tales project an impulse for individual and social change. the paper outlines how the author envisions individual and social transformation in today’s world. the wonder tale is a remnant of miracles past in which the storyteller himself does not believe, but for whose reign he nevertheless longs. [siniavskii 2007: 73] known predominantly as a prolific prosaist and playwright who has ignited fervent controversy throughout her career, liudmila petrushevskaia is considered one of the most prominent contemporary russian writers. petrushevskaia is chiefly recognized as a writer of chernukha, hyper-naturalist prose that emphasizes “[e]veryday cruelty and crime, tortures and humiliations of recruits in the army, the horror of prisons and other penitentiaries, the ordinary life of homeless derelicts and prostitutes, coupled with the interest [...] in the corporeal aspects of the everyday, especially sexuality” [lipovetsky 2011: 179]. the gloom of her fiction and drama pertains to the disturbingly dark themes she explores, which include suicide, alcoholism, child abuse, broken marriages, one-night stands, unwanted pregnancies, homelessness, abject poverty, and physical and psychological violence [goscilo 1996: 18]. as they deal with the dark side of humanity and sociopolitical life, it is unsurprising that petrushevskaia’s works were considered too bleak for publication in the soviet union. (1) on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 35 petrushevskaia is also the author of hundreds of fairy tales, which, although numerous, comprise a largely unacknowledged segment of her oeuvre. while tapping into the russian and western tradition of this genre, petrushevskaia’s fairy tales are not exactly fairy tales in the traditional sense of the term. they employ the characteristic structural and stylistic components of the folktale, including stable plot trajectory and stock characters, motifs, formulaic beginnings and endings, and at the same time—imbued with authorial creativeness—they revise genre attributes and conventions. (2) crucially, petrushevskaia’s fairy tales break with the utter hopelessness conjured by the portrayals of spiritual and material poverty so characteristic of her prose and drama. although loss may be the dominant theme in her fairy tales—and in this they hardly differ from her customary writing—it is followed by a path toward recovery. the hope for recovery, inherent in the folktale tradition, is what differentiates her fairy tales from her other works. in the fairy-tale context, recovery may be associated with a maturation process through which one figuratively transforms and so enters a new stage of existence. (3) arguably, the most lasting transformations occur when the characters become active participants in their own lives, when they make choices resulting in their growth. such transformations also reverberate most with the readers who themselves appraise the process of maturation of the heroes. in petrushevskaia’s fairy tales, transformation comprises a symbolic death and rebirth founded on exercising individual and social agency. this paper explores the motif of transformation in petrushevskaia’s two tales, “с новым годом, преступник!” [“happy new year, law-breaker!”] [2010] and “сказка зеркал” [“the mirrors’ fairy tale”] [2005], as particularly apt examples of addressing and illustrating the urge for individual and social change in today’s world. the questions this paper poses are the following: how does petrushevskaia envisage hope for transformation in 21st-century russia, in an ever more cynical and disenchanted world? is this individual and social transformation attainable? jack zipes’s studies of the utopian function [1983; 1988; 1991; 1994; 2002], like ernst bloch’s before him [1918-1923; 1938-1947], offer valuable insight on the significance of individual and social renewal—and, as such, are helpful in understanding petrushevskaia’s narratives, specifically the possibilities of individual and social transformation. although it is not possible to provide a comprehensive answer to the question of the folktale’s function and exactly what the folktale offers its audience, zipes insists on one enduring characteristic of the genre: its predisposition toward projecting transformational hopes for individual and social change [zipes 2002: 154]. for, as zipes maintains, it is specifically the folktale that “projected the wish and possibility for human autonomy and eros and proposed means to alter the world” [zipes 1994: 142]. zipes notes that folktales “fostered a sense of belonging and the hope that miracles involving some kind of magical transformation were possible to bring about a better world” [zipes 1991: x, xii]. in his analyses, he gestures toward bloch’s notion of literature’s utopian function, which has its roots in oral tales. in the spirit of utopia [1923], bloch signals that the time has come for human beings to take life into their own hands on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 36 and shape their destiny. it is through the utopian function of literature that human beings learn and analyze themselves and their goals. the utopian kernel is determined by what bloch calls “anticipatory illumination,” or an image closely linked with the possibility of rearranging social relations, which engenders a “home we have all once sensed but never experienced or known” [bloch 1988: xxxii]. such images of “home” illuminate, or motivate, the ways into the future. building on bloch’s concept, zipes contends that generating wonder, that is, awakening regard for the miraculous condition of life, has been largely undermined in fairy tales over the course of the centuries. (4) more specifically, what has been overlooked is seeing life through fairy-tale wonder as a process that can be changed and the difficult realities of the present faced, not escaped. what is important today to writers and readers alike is thus to rediscover that utopian essence. it comprises the “original impulse of hope for better living conditions as it was formed in the oral tradition” [zipes 1988: 29]. it also empowers people and nurtures their hope to hold a cracked mirror up to ossified reality, as it suggests ways to transform their life and the world [zipes 1994: 154, 159]. zipes concludes that fairy tales, including contemporary fairy tales, revive the utopian function and retain their revolutionary power when they are selfreflective and experimental, that is, when they question the forms and themes that the folktale and the fairy tale have developed. they succeed also—and that is what interests us here most—when they seek and explore the possibilities for a better self and a better world, and when they do so through “the immediacy of the common people’s perspective” [zipes 2002: 156]. it might be surprising for petrushevskaia’s readers to see her likened to marxist scholars such as bloch, since her fiction at large emerges as a grotesque and mocking discreditation of the aftermath of the soviet ideology. in addition, her works are also not marked by straightforwardly political implications. petrushevskaia’s position is not revolutionary per se, either, in that it does not call for radical overthrows of the government, yet her fairy tales may be read as manifestos. although petrushevskaia has never taken the route of direct political engagement, some of her works contemplate better scenarios, which, along the lines of bloch, we are capable of realizing with our own powers. the emphasis on “our own powers” is especially relevant in this analysis, as it views the driving force of change in the collective, in common people, who are at the heart of both bloch’s and petrushevskaia’s writing. the common people for bloch, as a marxist, are the lower-middle class, youth and marginal groups whom he considered pivotal for bringing about socialism [zipes 2002: 157]. in petrushevskaia’s fairy tales, they are fellow post-soviet city dwellers, the elderly poor, people deprived of their families and belongings during the 1917 revolution and the world war ii years, as well as those who suffered during the turmoil of the 1990s. bloch’s writing is informed by a critique of capitalism and a resulting alienation as daily life became more structured, work more rationalized, and institutions more bureaucratic. petrushevskaia’s fairy tales are written in the hyper-capitalist era and offer a critical commentary on the ossified reality of contemporary humanity: spiritual emptiness, the ever-growing desire for on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 37 immediate gratification, intellectual passivity, and preference for the internet and television as a pastime. petrushevskaia’s common people, her everyman, are at the same time psychologically and socially entangled individuals of today’s world: looking for the meaning of life, while being affected by its superficiality and consumerism. her heroes and heroines are often also solitary, rejected, and unfairly treated individuals. in this regard, these characters resemble the fairy-tale hero in that they are the underdogs, or good-for-nothing heroes, to borrow meletinsky’s term [meletinsky 1975: 236, 242]. (5) admittedly, given the dark side of human nature they often reflect, the picture of many of petrushevskaia’s common people as potential heralds of revolution is not a promising one. yet, in this tapestry of ordinary people, as it were, there are characters in her fairy tales who release self-agency by gaining control over their own lives and who are propelled to action by discontent with current sociopolitical conditions and human relations. they are capable of confronting their lot and facing adversity. importantly, they actively participate in individual and social transformation without the aid of magical helpers, be they supernatural beings or talking animals. what is crucial—as we will demonstrate below—is that the possibility of individual and social transformation in petrushevskaia’s fairy tales hinges on the strengthening of interpersonal relations. petrushevskaia’s approach to togetherness echoes bloch’s and zipes’s position: “meaning cannot be achieved by a human being alone. the dependence on other beings must be acknowledged if the individual is to raise himself up and to stride forward in an upright posture toward home, which, as we know, is the beginning of history, a realm without alienating conditions” [zipes 2002: 167]. at the same time, petrushevskaia’s insistence on meaningful togetherness has a less political dimension and approaches instead the idea of universal brotherhood, a concept particularly important in 19th-century russian literature and explored by such writers as tolstoy or dostoevsky. the call for brotherhood has its roots in the old religious idea of sobornost’ [the spirit of communality] but petrushevskaia deemphasizes the religious aspect of atonement and universal guilt and responsibility (carrying one another’s burdens) and stresses instead the attempts to create interpersonal bonds in the midst of post-theological life, in the here and now. (6) when petrushevskaia’s heroes and heroines manage to forge meaningful interpersonal bonds, these bonds are not so much a source of moral value for them as they constitute spiritual support and help alleviate their quotidian existence. petrushevskaia’s evocations of togetherness thus constitute a kind of secularized spirituality, or spirituality beyond religion, wherein a fellow human being (re)gains humanistic, more profound value in an unjust, impersonal, and alienating world. the tale “с новым годом, преступник!” [“happy new year, lawbreaker!”] is a good case in point to explore both sociopolitical and spiritual awakening through meaningful togetherness. it is one of the most explicitly political tales in petrushevskaia’s repertoire, given not only its sociopolitical background but also its outright identification of those who subvert the status quo on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 38 and fight for human rights. the story is set on new year’s eve and begins with a reference to anna karenina. alluding to the famous opening sentence of tolstoy’s novel about the ordinariness of all happy families, petrushevskaia’s family is, as the narrator claims and as we will verify, not ordinary: “однако, как было сказано в классической литературе, эта одинаковая обыденность свойственна только счастливым семьям. а мы приступаем к рассказу о семье не такой, как у всех” [as was said in the classics, this ordinariness is characteristic only of happy families. but we begin to tell the story of an extraordinary family] [petrushevskaia 2014: 501]. (7) at first glance, though, it does not seem like petrushevskaia’s family is unordinary. it is a fragmented family typical of her prose or drama that resembles many others in contemporary russia. varvara is left by the father of her three young children with whom she did not have much in common, especially after he fell in love with another woman: “и надо сказать, что вообще-то разговоров у варвары и олега почти не завязывалось – так, всё по делу, кому в магазин и что купить и кто с детьми сегодня гуляет” [it must be said that there were almost no conversations between varvara and oleg – only about business, who should go to the store and what to buy, and who is going out with the children today] [petrushevskaia 2014: 503]. varvara is nevertheless fearless and capable of enduring life’s burdens. her kindness draws a number of people into her life. one of her admirers is ivan, a shy and rather silent man who bears resemblance to the common russian tale hero ivanushka the fool, whose low consciousness hides a lofty essence, to use meletinsky’s term [meletinsky 1975: 236, 242]. as varvara is on her way to buy mayonnaise for her unfinished herring salad, a dish so common it further evokes the ordinariness of all russian families, ivan calls to tell her he has been arrested. the story moves to the police station where varvara—who now takes up the role of the princess delivering a youth in distress—meets ivan’s family: his parents and his younger sister. the scene she witnesses as she arrives depicts veronika, ivan’s sister, loudly declaring her disgruntlement over her brother’s detainment: какое имеете – вы – право – арестовывать – людей – тридцать первого числа? потому что право на митинги и собрания записаны в тридцать первой статье нашей конституции? только поэтому? несанкционированный митинг – тут какой-то бред! как можно не разрешать встречу! митинг – это по-английски просто встреча! друзей на улице! на улице каждый может встретиться и говорить! [what – right – do you – have – to arrest – people – on the thirty-first of december? because the right for meetings and gatherings is written in the thirty-first article of our constitution? is that the only reason? unauthorized meeting – this is some kind of nonsense! how can a meeting be forbidden! meeting in english simply means a meeting! to meet friends on the street! on the street, everyone can meet up and talk!] [petrushevskaia 2014: 505]. (8) on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 39 veronika, as the narrator suggests, resembles valeriia novodvorskaia, who was a soviet and post-soviet dissident and political activist: “вероника была довольно крупная девочка в очках и, когда она так приветливо улыбалась, то неуловимо напоминала валерию новодворскую. как говорится, сквозь мягкие черты юности проглядывало её твёрдое будущее” [veronika was a rather large girl with glasses, and when she smiled so cordially she imperceptibly resembled valeriia novodvorskaia. as they say, her solid future peeked through the soft features of her youth] [petrushevskaia 2014: 505]. ivan’s parents display equal courage and civic engagement. while his father manages to speak with the chief of the police station to have his son released, ivan’s mother demonstrates her diplomacy and good heartedness as she offers the police officer homemade food. as the whole company enjoys a modest new year’s eve supper at the police station, we learn further details about the reasons for the mass arrests, which eerily resemble the actual sociopolitical situation in russia. more and more participants in the “unauthorized meeting” are brought to the police station; some of them are wounded and assaulted: “народу в отделение набилось много. судя по тихим разговорам, там стояли уже опытные бойцы, многие прошли через аресты и мордобитие” [there were many people packed in the police station. judging by the quiet conversations, there were already experienced fighters among them, many having gone through arrests and beatings] [petrushevskaia 2014: 509]. the measures against dissidents have changed, but not substantially. while novodvorskaia was arrested, imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital, and falsely diagnosed with schizophrenia, in today’s russia “dissidents” are arrested and jailed for illegal rallies and protests. (9) ivan’s father eventually manages to have his son released. as varvara, ivan, and varvara’s children are returning (to what will be their) home, they see other protesters and remark on the fraternity between them: причём шли они как-то порознь, не компаниями – создавалось такое впечатление, что в этом потоке брели преимущественно одиночки и что они справили новый год где хотели – не сами по себе, по норам, а на людях, там они братались, наливали из припасенных бутылок соседям, все вместе и всласть кричали своё “ура”, причём стоя в самом центре москвы, в сердце россии, у кремлёвских стен, под вои курантов, плечом к плечу, в восторге! [they were walking kind of separately, not in companies – you got the impression that predominantly loners wandered in this current and that they celebrated the new year where they wanted – not on their own, in dens, but with people, where they fraternized, poured from the stocked up bottles to their neighbors, all together and to their hearts’ content they shouted “hurray,” standing in the very center of moscow, in the heart of russia, by the kremlin walls, bells chiming, shoulder to shoulder, in joy!] [petrushevskaia 2014: 510]. on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 40 this scene is especially evocative and conjures a sense of solidarity in the participants’ shared civic cause. as such, it has a simple yet potent message: people must join together for a common social and political objective. collectively, individuals can change their circumstances, including sociopolitical structures, thus acting on and for the sake of their freedom. petrushevskaia’s emphasis on communal bonds reverberates with zipes’s, and bloch’s before him, revolutionary spirit and his advocacy of releasing “the resilient latent qualities of humankind manifested in the struggle for a better world” so as to become makers of our own history [zipes 2002: 146]. more specifically, this scene evokes bloch’s concept of anticipatory illumination, that is, a hint of happiness that maps out possible ways to attain happiness in the future. the sense of fraternity in a common goal, especially as it is juxtaposed with authoritarianism and repression, is read as a moment of happiness, which captures this tale’s utopian essence. finally, in line with the latter, this tale may also be compared to what jean-paul sartre once called littérature engagée [committed literature], or literature critically involved in the historical and political situation of the day that aims to change the world not merely by disclosing but by inspiring action. thus, importantly, literature that reveals the urge for change. petrushevskaia’s depiction of the dissidents as loners in the opening sentence of the same quote is equally evocative. the image of dissidents as “predominantly loners,” walking for the same purpose but “kind of separately” exposes featureless collectivism––a body of lonely individuals. this image implies skepticism about attaining the blochian home and communicates that individuals revolting against oppression should not only be tools in the process. they need not be alienated and depersonalized as to lose their interior existence, and so be deprived of depth. petrushevskaia’s suggestion is simple and yet potent again: meaningful social existence is inseparable from an individual’s spiritual dimension. the latter comprises for petrushevskaia a spiritual strengthening that occurs in relatedness to and in solidarity with a fellow human being and acquires a universal value in today’s secular world. the answer to alienation and depersonalization is poignantly expressed in this tale through the depiction of forging bonds at a micro-stratum—at the family level. petrushevskaia’s contemporary family continues the search for home as a safe harbor, in a very mundane setting at that. varvara realizes she loves ivan, whose devotion she had overlooked. she communicates this in the final paragraph when she sees ivan sleeping on the floor in her bedroom and covers him with a blanket. the blochian home in this tale can be understood literally: as a realm without alienating conditions and marking the beginning of history, as varvara and ivan begin a new history founded on love and communion. in this regard, petrushevskaia’s portrayal of home leaves out the sociopolitical loftiness revered by bloch and acquires instead another kind of magnitude: closer to the human being and possible to be achieved in everyday life. the need for social togetherness thus parallels the need for attaining happiness on a smaller, more intimate, scale. on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 41 the gesture toward anna karenina at the beginning of the tale is not incidental and becomes more comprehensible at the end. petrushevskaia’s interest is in fact not unlike tolstoy’s in that it lies in spiritual searching through the portrayals of family (un)happiness as well as a broader human connection. in petrushevskaia’s reversal of the classic, however, it is family unhappiness turning into happiness. given the meaningful bonds they manage to forge, petrushevskaia’s family can indeed, as the narrator claims, be considered unordinary in today’s world. what we observe is an ordinary––unhappy––family turning into an extraordinary––happy––family thanks to experiencing meaningful togetherness. we may interpret this movement as a shift from disintegration to reintegration. apart from political allusions, the sense of disintegration in this tale is further expressed through the depiction of contemporary new year’s eve dinners, which are shared by disengaged, fragmented families, and where the extraordinariness of the yuletide is no longer sensed or appreciated. this time of the year has now become associated with self-interested consumerism and evergrowing search for amusement. in contrast, the deeper meaning of the yuletide is accentuated in this tale in extraordinary circumstances––during the modest new year’s eve dinner shared at the police station but in the atmosphere of empathy and compassion––thereby evoking the sense of re-integration, wherein spiritual emptiness is filled in by authentic togetherness. meaningful togetherness, the ability to experience union with others, is therefore understood as the missing home for unhappy families and societies alike. the invocation of the new year’s eve is thus not incidental either, as it heightens the symbolism of transformation, felt especially at this time of the year. (10) on this night, after all, everything is possible. new year’s eve is considered a powerful, liminal time of the year when antisocial behavior rules. the gatherings on the streets might be deemed antisocial behavior in the current russian political context. the night at the police station also leads to a fundamental change in varvara, to her self-discovery. she passes through this period, living one life up to new year’s eve and beginning a new life on new year’s day. this transformation is reflected in her emerging love for ivan. it can be concluded that petrushevskaia’s tale communicates the possibility of individual and sociopolitical transformation. at the same time, the empowerment that her characters gain exposes to the reader what is missing in today’s world in terms of human relations and social and political norms. the ensuing contrast betrays petrushevskaia’s protest against this reality. the tale “сказка зеркал” [“the mirrors’ fairy tale”] also takes place around the time of christmas and explores the motif of transformation. it is a tale of becoming aware of oppression, defining it as a shared experience, and opposing it by way of self-sacrifice for one another and for humanity at large. the title of the tale is evocative, and the tale itself centers on the eponymous mirrors. of all magical objects, it is the enchanted mirror that has a special status in the folktale. as christine mains observes, magic mirrors reflect both the surface appearance and the inner soul of the person looking into them [mains 2005: 528-530]. mirrors symbolize truth and insight and often provide a glance at worlds different from on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 42 our own. mirrors in petrushevskaia’s tale reflect precisely these two traits, albeit in a petrushevskian, questioning fashion. petrushevskaia introduces us to a fairy-tale world, where once upon a time, there was a shop window with a variety of mirrors, for example: psiche [cheval glass], the oldest of mirrors in the window case, krivovatoe zerkalo [crooked mirror], and diadia svist [uncle whistler]. using their mirror attributes, they reflect landscapes and passers-by immersed in their everyday lives. distressed about becoming forgotten and perishing, they compete to reflect the most beautiful images and are malevolent to each other. they are especially cruel toward the smallest mirror in the window case, an example of petrushevskaia’s rejected and unfairly treated characters. because of his exceptional and arcane ability to reflect not just surface appearance, as the other mirrors in the window case do, but also what is concealed, the other mirrors scornfully call him genii [genius]. he is said to know about secret agents, murders, and conspiracies. genii enigmatically pronounces that he is able to stop “something imminent” and that he would subsequently perish as a result. the imminent destructive force in the tale is called odinochestvo [solitude], which––passing as opaque darkness––conjures associations of oppression. odinochestvo’s intended victim is ryzhaia kroshka [carrot-top poppet], the redhaired granddaughter of the shopkeeper and beloved object of reflection for all the mirrors. genii calls the destructive force’s attention to the girl (thereby upsetting the other mirrors, who fear her and, by extension, their own demise) with the single-minded goal of forcing it to look into his reflective surface: “вот она! смотирите! вот! тут! хрипел гений” [there she is! look! here! here! genii wheezed] [petrushevskaia 2014: 374]. when odinochestvo finally looks into the mirror, it sees its own reflection, which puts an end to its pursuit of the girl. genii’s courageous deed of reversing the image of the destructive force thus leads to suspension of its sinister acts. consequently, as a result of his sacrifice, genii breaks into pieces. the destructive force carries different meanings in this tale. first of all, it is marked by political overtones (genii’s knowledge of secret agents, murders, and conspiracies). but it can also be interpreted literally, as solitude, and––more broadly––as death. the fear of solitude in this tale indeed overlaps with and is understood as the fear of death. the mirrors are obsessed with the thought of their demise and being forgotten, which is why they compete to reflect the most beautiful images, albeit mere surface appearances. allowing themselves to be overwhelmed by the destructive force makes the mirrors withdraw from one another, thus isolating them. conversely, genii is able to see in depth, is already solitary, and is not afraid of death or any other form of oppression. his capacity to reflect back to itself a denizen of the otherworld, death itself, evokes one’s coming face to face with death (or, in a parallel understanding, solitude), realizing and accepting it. his deed may also speak to people’s inherent need to overcome isolation through oneness with others. there is a suggestive moment in this tale. although genii breaks into pieces, he does not cease to exist. rather, he transforms into a new life. at the end of the on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 43 tale, genii’s last shard falls into a new mirror mold that is eventually used in a children’s clinic: его непонятно почему купил один суровый старик, по профессии главный врач, и повесил в раздевалке своей детской поликлиники. там оно отражает бегающих детей и солидных подростков, а также младенцев [...] и когда-нибудь туда обязательно придёт одна рыжая молоденькая дама с младенчиком... [strangely enough, one stern old man, chief physician by profession, bought it and hung it up in the locker room of his children’s clinic. there it reflects running children and solid adolescents, as well as babies [...] and one day one red-haired young lady with a baby will certainly come here...] [petrushevskaia 2014: 377]. it appears that although the small mirror is broken, his potential to demystify the negative does not perish; neither does, in a broader understanding, the courage to oppose all forms of oppression. in other words, losing wholeness, breaking into fragments, and sacrificing oneself, foregrounds the (re)birth of a keener awareness as the prerequisite for countering oppression by destructive social elements. transformed, the mirror is poised to be used by the next generation, which points to the hope of rebirth. genii’s rebirth is further highlighted through the invocation of christmas: “зеркало знало, что эта встреча произойдёт зимой, на рождество [...] и зеркало радостно засияет” [the mirror knew that this meeting would take place in winter, at christmas [...] and the mirror would shine with joy] [petrushevskaia 2014: 377]. genii’s deed as well as the reference to christmas inevitably bring to mind the image of christ; as in christian belief, and in line with messianic prophecies, christ was born to atone for the sins of humanity. without a doubt, apart from comprising this tale’s utopian kernel, genii’s sacrificial deed in the name of the common good as well as his faith in reflecting the beautiful in the future are suggestive of a religious parable. his beautiful act, however, is juxtaposed with the cruel world, the world of indifference and self-obsession. by contrasting genii––a selfless, christlike figure––with these harsh realities, petrushevskaia propels her readers to appraise the value and the plausibility of success of this sacrificial act, especially as set against the humanity’s condition in the present. petrushevskaia’s stance may be further explained through another perspective. as in the preceding tale, we observe her challenging approach to the classics. this tale echoes hans christian andersen’s “the snow queen,” especially its first part (about the mirror and its pieces), which petrushevskaia inverts. unraveling this intertextual link between the two tales provides further insight in understanding her stance. in andersen’s tale, an evil force creates a magic mirror that distorts the appearance of everything it reflects, magnifying the evil and the ugly. as the evil force, along with its pupils, lifts the mirror toward on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 44 heaven to ridicule god, it falls and shatters into pieces. the splinters of the distorting mirror morally corrupt people, freezing their hearts and making them see only the evil and the ugly. the path to salvation in andersen’s tale is indicated through altruism and love, which are presented as having the ability to defeat evil and are interpreted as the extension of the divine power. the fact that there is no other mention of the evil mirror suggests a promise of eternal happiness. indeed, concluding with a passage from the bible, what andersen proposes for his protagonists (and readers) is to seek refuge and salvation in god if they want to secure a spot in heaven. (11) years later, in the post-religious world, petrushevskaia revises this scheme. petrushevskaia’s tale begins in medias res in terms of andersen’s prototype. envious and malevolent to one another, the mirrors in her tale do not become, but have already been corrupted before the tale begins. apart from diadia svist, who realizes what has happened and explains what genii has accomplished, the other mirrors do not understand his act; nor are they willing to acknowledge his heroism. the other mirrors are aware of the existence of the destructive force, but do not have the courage to oppose it. their cowardice foregrounds the ignoble side of human nature and its acceptance of oppression. the silence on their part, their civic disengagement in the face of the oppressive force, indeed resembles the silence of the russian people in the face of authoritarian repression, as postulated by human rights activists such as valeriia novodvorskaia. another difference between the two tales is that it is not the evil distorting mirror that shatters into pieces but the good mirror genii, who summons the courage to reverse the imminent threat to the girl and, by extension, to the dire condition of posterity. this approach thus again brings to mind petrushevskaia’s movement from disintegration to re-integration, but as opposed to andersen’s paradigm, it is stripped of certainties, divine and otherwise. the question arises, is genii’s sacrifice fruitful, then? does it transform the cruel conditions and beautify the fellow mirrors’ souls? although genii manages to defeat the evil force, he is at the same time depicted as the only one capable of realizing it. preoccupied with the persistent thought of death that they muffle by focusing on reflecting surface appearances, most of the other mirrors still do not recognize his heroic feat. in other words, there is no lesson learned and no transformation in them. except perhaps for the readers of the tale whom petrushevskaia intended to provoke, the other mirrors’ lives continue unchanged. this fact counterbalances the plausibility of any lasting victory. the revision of the classic on the part of petrushevskaia thus suggests that altruism and sacrifice may not fully prevail over malice, suffering or misery; as a result, any absolute and definitive transformation may be unattainable. we may make the same conclusion regarding petrushevskaia’s other tale, where any permanent sociopolitical success is debatable, especially if it involves individuals alienated from one another and from their own being. skeptical about andersen’s unspoiled belief in the absolutes, petrushevskaia is cautious in projecting idealized scenarios that may give rise to false hopes. thus, although her stance does not preclude hope for individual or social transformation, this hope is nonetheless debated. imbued on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 45 with unresolved tensions, petrushevskaia’s open-ended tales reflect the longing for an ideal, but also a sober awareness of the fact that the path toward it is difficult and potentially impossible, despite our resistance and protest against negative forces in our lives. yet, we might add, in line with the utopian function attributed to the folktale, ideals do not exist to be realized but to direct us, to harbor unfulfilled wishes and project possibilities for their fulfillment. the importance of petrushevskaia’s stance, then, is not in eradicating the destructive force, which would give an illusion of the possibility of effacing death, solitude, or other forms of oppression, but rather in underscoring the very movement toward collective action against it through the act of compassion, selflessness, and sacrifice. if only temporarily, the world then becomes purged of evil. despite the ingrained negative tendencies of our fellow human beings and society, and even if the characters’ attempts at non-conformity and autonomy are, for the reader, illusory or implausible, the triumph of petrushevskaia’s heroes is nevertheless possible. it lies in their not complying with these tendencies, in defending themselves against them, and attempting to alter them for themselves and for others. it is precisely the moment, however fleeting, of self-empowerment and acquiring the will to face life head on that offers an alternative and invokes a “ray of light in the kingdom of darkness” [goscilo 2015: 175]. (12) these rays illuminate harsh and distressing conditions and, doing so, encourage individual and social transformation through giving oneself and continuing to oppose oppression. unsurprisingly, it is here––in the search for spiritual voices for her ordinary people and stressing their potential––that petrushevskaia opts for the fairy-tale genre, so as to awaken an attitude of hope for, or faith in, better scenarios, without which life is a bleak business indeed. notes 1 i would like to thank my peer reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. 2 this paper’s intention is not to analyze the self-reflective and experimental side of petrushevskaia’s fairy tales, that is, the questioning stance toward the forms and themes that the folktale, and in particular the fairy tale, have developed. its purpose, then, is not to characterize her narratives in terms of genre studies, which is beyond the scope of this paper. 3 transformation in the fairy-tale context is first and foremost associated with physical, and magical, shape shifting, e.g., pumpkins turning into golden carriages or frogs into princesses. although petrushevskaia’s fairy tales feature shape shifting, this paper does not focus on this aspect of the genre. 4 in the 20th century, the utopian impulse has been subjected to production as a commodity. to take one example, the fairy tale was “disneyized” in the western world, that is, “subjected to saccharine sexist and illusionary stereotypes of the disney culture industry” [zipes 1991: xxvii]. as a result, the power of commercialization has distracted readers (or viewers) from social problems in on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 46 their respective societies, unlike traditional tales, which focus on these issues. the fairy tale has been increasingly used “to produce a sense of happy end and ideological consent and to mute its subversive potential for the benefit of those social groups controlling power in the public sphere” [zipes 1991: xxiv]. most importantly, as zipes maintains throughout his analyses, fairy tales have been routinely intended to provide escape from the difficult realities of the present, and thus have been largely associated with entertainment. 5 eleazar meletinsky refers to two basic types of hero in the fairy tale: the prince ivan type (noble birth, good looks, and feats) and the ivanushka the fool type (the “low” or good-for-nothing hero). the latter occupies an inferior position and is scorned by others. however, “his low appearance hides his lofty essence” because he is the one who is concerned with others, ready to help the poor and treats animals kindly [meletinsky 1975: 236, 242]. 6 the quest for universal brotherhood is famously depicted in dostoevsky’s the brothers karamazov and demons or tolstoy’s resurrection. for an insightful study of brotherhood in dostoevsky and tolstoy, see anna berman [2015]. 7 all translations are mine. 8 it is noteworthy that the word miting (митинг) is understood in russian as a mass meeting or as a rally, not as a casual meeting between friends. 9 valeriia novodvorskaia (1950-2014) was a prominent oppositionist in the soviet and post-soviet periods, assailing the soviet power and then russian government’s authoritarian tendencies. petrushevskaia’s family members were also persecuted. her grandfather, nikolai iakovlev, was a renowned linguist whose professional interest in marrism, the theory of the class-based origin of language, resulted in his downfall. after stalin declared the theory untenable and unscientific, iakovlev was fired from his job and suffered from a serious mental illness. 10 a christmas story is distinguished by the following elements: the story is set around the time of christmas and contains miracles, moral lessons, spiritual transformations, and happy endings. it concludes with a miraculous change of the world or of the hero. in terms of literature, charles dickens's christmas carol is a well-known example of a christmas story that offers hope. tat’iana kozina argues that the revival of the christmas theme in contemporary russian literature occurred after the soviet period. this fact contributed to the appeal to christian traditions and the revival of the orthodox cycle. the reason for the renascence of the christmas story thus lies in the renewed appeal of religion [kozina 2012: 295]. drawing on kozina’s analysis, i read petrushevskaia’s return to the christmas story (and, by extension, to hope) as marked by secular, post-religious, rather than strictly religious implications. that is, i see the genre of the christmas story as a way for petrushevskaia to indicate the possibility of earthly transformations (individual and collective) rather than to return to any absolute divinity or ideal(ized) and mythic past. its secular vector is reflected, for example, in the revolutionary social potential petrushevskaia’s characters either have or seek ways of fostering. on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 47 11 salvation in the context of andersen is interpreted along the lines of the christian faith (andersen was a staunch believer), to denote deliverance from sin brought about by faith in christ. as zipes remarks, “andersen offers a pseudocriticism of real social conditions to guarantee that children of all classes will mind their manners and preserve the status quo—all to the advantage of those who control the dominant discourse” [zipes 1983: 99]. and elsewhere: “andersen pondered these questions [on injustice and domination] and presented them in many of his tales, but he rarely suggested alternatives or rebellion. rather he placed safety before idealism and chose moral compromise over moral outrage, individual comfort and achievement over collective struggle and united goals [...] both the happy and sad endings of his narratives infer that there is an absolute or a divine harmonious power, and that unity of the ego is possible under such power” [zipes 1999: 109-110]. humaneness—humanity’s noble side reflected in kindness or altruism—is important for both authors. however, the role played by humaneness sets them apart. for andersen, it presupposes self-abasement and is a foundation for or a means of possible divine deliverance. whereas for petrushevskaia, a secular humanist, humaneness is not a means to achieve divine deliverance but an end in itself and constitutes humanity’s sole lifeline in the present. for further details on perushevskaia’s dialogue with hans christian andersen, see izabela zdun [2018]. 12 referring to nikolai dobroliubov’s essay, “a ray of light in the kingdom of darkness” [1860], which offers a bitter account of russian life, goscilo argues that petrushevskaia’s novella time: night, a “bleak tale of lacerated psyches,” does not envision any ray of light [goscilo 2015: 175]. works cited berman, anna. 2015. siblings in tolstoy and dostoevsky: the path to universal brotherhood. northwestern university press. bloch, ernst. 2000 [1923]. the spirit of utopia, transl. by anthony a. nassar. stanford university press. bloch, ernst. 1986. the principle of hope, transl. by neville plaice, stephen plaice, and paul knight. cambridge, mass.: mit press. bloch, ernst. 1988. the utopian function of art and literature: selected essays, jack zipes and frank mecklenburg, eds. and transl. cambridge, mass.: mit press. goscilo, helena. 1996. dehexing sex. womanhood during and after glasnost. ann arbor: university of michigan press. goscilo, helena. 2015. “narrating trauma,” in russian literature since 1991, evgeny dobrenko and mark lipovetsky, eds. cambridge: cambridge university press. haney, jack. 2001. russian wondertales. tales of magic and the supernatural. london. new york: m.e. sharpe. on transformation in liudmila petrushevskaia’s fairy tales folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 48 joosen, vanessa. 2007. critical and creative perspectives on fairy tales. detroit: wayne state university press. kozina, tat'iana. 2012. козина, татьяна. “tema rozhdestva v sovremennoi proze,” izvestiia penzenskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta imeni v. g. belinskogo (27): 292-295. kravchenko, maria. 1987. “preface,” in the world of russian fairy tale. berne: peter lang. lipovetsky, mark. 2005. “introduction,” in politicizing magic. an anthology of russian and soviet fairy tales, marina balina, helena goscilo, and mark lipovetsky, eds. evanston, illinois: northwestern university press. lipovetsky, mark. 2011. “post-soviet literature between realism and postmodernism,” in the cambridge companion to the twentiethcentury russian literature, evgeny dobrenko and marina balina, eds. cambridge: cambridge university press. mains, christine. 2005. “mirrors,” in the greenwood encyclopedia of science fiction and fantasy vol. 2, gary westfhal, ed. westport, ct and london: greenwood press. meletinsky, elzear. 1975. “the “low’ hero of the fairy tale,” in the study of russian folklore, felix j. oinas and stephen soudakoff, eds. hague, paris: mouton. petrushevskaia, liudmila. 2014. петрушевская, людмила. kak mnogo znaiut zhenshchiny. moskva: ast. propp, vladimir. 1968. morphology of the folktale, louis a. wagner, ed. austin: university of texas press. siniavskii, andrei. 2007. “ivan the fool,” russian folk belief, transl. by joanne turnbull and nikolai formozov. glas 41. zipes, jack. 1983. fairy tales and the art of subversion. new york: routledge. zipes, jack. 1988. “the changing function of the fairy tale,” the lion and the unicorn 12(2): 7-31. zipes, jack. 1991. spells of enchantment, the wondrous fairy tales of western culture. penguin books. zipes, jack. 1994. fairy tale as myth. myth as fairy tale. lexington: the university press of kentucky. zipes, jack. 1999. when dreams come true. classical fairy tales and their tradition. new york and london: routledge. zipes, jack. 2002. breaking the magic spell: radical theories of folk and fairy tales. lexington: university press of kentucky. zipes, jack. 2015. “introduction,” in the oxford companion to fairy tales. the western fairy tale tradition from medieval to modern. oxford: oxford university press. zdun, izabela. 2017-2018. “liudmila petrushevskaia’s dialogue with hans christian andersen, or andersen forever revisited,” new zealand slavonic journal 51-52: 69-87. mamadysh kriashen folk music traditions in contemporary recordings mamadysh kriashen folk music traditions in contemporary recordings folklorica 2016, vol. xx 149 reports mamadysh kriashen folk music traditions in contemporary recordings (review of materials collected in 2013) elmira kayumova republican center of development of traditional culture kazan, tatarstan, russia abstract the article characterizes folk music traditions of kriashens, the christianized tatars of the volga-ural region. the author focuses on materials collected during an expedition in 2013 to the mamadysh region of tatarstan, russia. recordings of music and poetry samples, notation, transcription of verbal texts, and photographs were made by the author. the author presents remarks on the genre structure of the material (including lore associated with calendric rites and divination; life cycle rites; game and dance songs; childlore; religious lore as well as the instrumental musical tradition) and discusses the current state of the mamadyshsky kriashen tradition. in the villages of vladimirovo, iukachi, ziuri and komarovka the core of the folk music tradition is mainly composed of ritual songs. in the village of nikiforovo, liturgical chants (a folk version of orthodox prayers) tend to dominate the tradition. introduction over the last 20 years i have been collecting and studying of the folk music of different tatar ethnic groups. for the past several years, i have undertaken from 2 to 4 expeditions annually to various regions with heavily tatar populations. this expedition report is based on the field work i performed in june 2013 in the mamadysh region of tatarstan, russia. (1) i will present my initial findings on the state of the material in that region. a more in-depth analysis of folklorica 2016, vol. xx 150 the musical tradition of the mamadysh kriashens is planned for the future. the mamadysh region is densely populated by the kriashens (christianized orthodox tatars), who occupy more than 20 residential areas. they are the bearers of the so called trans-kazan subdialect [borһanova 1977: 80; baiazitova 1986: 15] and are part of the near kama territorial group that is considered to be the oldest settlement of tatars in the region [vorobiev 1967: 57; mukhametshin 1977: 21]. i recorded materials in 6 villages: vladimirovo, yukachi, ziuri, nikiforovo, komarovka, as well as in shadchi (which is predominantly populated by the muslim tatars). the locations were determined by the route of an expedition performed under the auspices of the ibragimov institute of language, literature and art of the academy of sciences of the republic of tatarstan (kazan, russia). the genre structure of the material collected may be characterized as follows: 1) folklore of calendric rituals, namely plangent roundelay songs performed on the trinity, and divination songs performed during the celebration of nardugan (the equivalent of yuletide); 2) folklore associated with the life cycle, namely wedding and funeral songs as well as farewell songs for departing soldiers; 3) game songs, round-dance songs, and dance-refrains (takmak); 4) children's folklore including lullabies, nursery rhymes; 5) orthodox prayers; 6) instrumental melodies (folktunes performed on harmonica). the musical style of the material may be characterized by three multi-cultural layers that fall into three time periods: 1. early subethnic – defined by the ethnographers as krăshenkȯe [kriashen tune], represented mostly by ceremonial plangent melodies that are characterized by a long verse form (9-10 lines in length), a regular rhythmic pattern, and intonational formulicity; 2. late general ethnic – tatar kȯe [tatar tune], game songs and lyrical songs auyl kȯe [village tune]; kyska kȯi [short tune], uen kȯe [game tune], all of which often performing the function of ritual songs that are characterized by a short mamadysh kriashen folk music traditions in contemporary recordings folklorica 2016, vol. xx 151 verse form (8+7 lines in length), a syllabic rhythm of equal beat, and a four-fold structure; 3. iman jyrulary [church singing], essentially folk interpretations of christian songs. (2) the kriashens have been able to preserve archaic features of art and culture captured in melody, poetic imagery, and the manner of execution. it could be said that the kriashen ritual singing embodies distant epochs from their past in the volga basin. however, this tradition is being lost because the musical works have almost all gone out of use in daily life; the mechanism of succession has been disrupted; and the number of bearers of this tradition is rapidly decreasing each year. those born in the 1930-40s, or rarely, in the 1950s still preserve traditional kriashen song styles, but their numbers are rapidly shrinking. younger people, even those in folk choruses, do not maintain the tradition as their elders do. thus, our expedition focused on the older generation, and i will present some of the material we were able to gather that demonstrates the traditional patterns and song styles of the kriashen tatars in this expedition report. our expedition data demonstrate that micro-local traditions of the villages of vladimirovo, yukachi, ziuri and komarovka have much in common. however, the village of nikiforovo presents a special case. first, it is distant from the other kriashen settlements, but it also boasts a distinct folk music system. their tradition is dominated by liturgical chants, which have largely replaced ritual chants (there were actually very few songs recorded in nikiforovo because people seemed reluctant to remember them). in the other villages the situation was quite the opposite; the core of their tradition is made up of song and ritual samples, while the religious genres are rather marginal. family ritual folklore: wedding and funeral songs the largest group of songs collected in this expedition falls into the category of tui jyrulary [wedding songs]. this is not surprising because the traditional kriashen wedding features continuous folklorica 2016, vol. xx 152 singing. each episode of the full wedding ceremony (hanging of the bride’s crafts; opening the trunk with gifts; meeting and seeing off guests; matchmaker dialogues; wishing the engaged couple well; serving ritual dishes; thanking the hosts and the like) is accompanied by a particular verbal and musical arrangement. the informants proudly discussed this feature and regretfully noted that in contemporary culture it is all quite different; weddings now feature a toastmaster and guest artists instead of community singing. the lyrics would be sung in the “long” and “short” tunes of both older intonation patterns as well as in innovated, newer forms. among traditional guest tunes common in vladimirovo, ziuriand komarovka villages, one song has become a popular piece in concerts: “urmannarda iȯrdem” [in the woods i walked], with lyrics by g. zainasheva. based on data collected in an expedition to the region in 2000, this melody was also common among kriashens of the tiuliachi and rybno-sloboda regions. in mamadysh folk culture this tune serves several functions: it is not only performed at weddings but also at other ceremonial meals, including the memorial ceremony. according to my respondents, the tradition does not allow crying and singing at funerals or wakes. such rituals are accompanied by the performance of religious pieces: it is customary to read psalms over the deceased (during nightly vigils) and to say orthodox prayers such as “sviatyi alla” [holy allah or trisagion] and “ăi, ku̇ktăge atabyz” [our father] among others. at the same time, there are very few examples of farewell songs for the deceased (vladimirovo). at the wake on the fortieth day after death, these songs sometimes are performed following and in addition to the prayers, either in the house at the end of the community meal and/or on the street when seeing off the guests. (3) the text and melody of a wedding/guest song are usually adjusted for this purpose, as in example 1 below, (see also music example № 1 at the end of the article). example 2 is the variant of the same song used at the wedding for departing guests: (4) mamadysh kriashen folk music traditions in contemporary recordings folklorica 2016, vol. xx 153 example 1 «урманнардайөрдем» “in the woods i walked” (fragment) урманнарга кердем, ай, мин керде(у)м, чыкланганнар əле, дый, үлəннəр. (2) ашадык, тый, эчтек, искə алды(у)к, бəхиллəб үк китсен, дый, үлгəннəр. (2) into the woods i went, i went, covered with dew still the grasses. ate, drank, remembered, let them go with peace (pardoned) the deceased. example 2 җырлап та, ла, җырлап мин карыем, килешерлəр булса, дый, көебез.(2) килешерлəр булса, ай, көебез, җəланшушылайберлəргəҗөрер без.(2) безгə əтекəбез бер ат бирде(у): «җирəн алалар белəн алыш»,– дип.(2) безгə əтекəбез шуны əйтте(й): «якшы əдəмнəр белəн таныш»,– дип, «яхшы əдəмнəр белəн таныш»,– дип. singing, singing i will try, if the refrain fits. if the refrain fits, again in such a way we shall meet. our father one horse has given us: “for the ginger-speckled one don’t you change”, having said. to us our father advised: “with a good person should you meet”, having said. “with a good person should you meet”, having said.] the words to songs for parting with the dead may be sung to a melody or recited without one. there were only two examples found folklorica 2016, vol. xx 154 in the village of vladimirovo village. (5) the song component in the structure of the funerary and memorial cycle is considered to be a vestige of the past dating back to pre-christian times. a wide variety of melodies for orthodox chants was recorded in the village of nikiforovo, including “izrail kory jirdăn” [from the arid land of israel], “ei, kotkaruchy” [hey, the savior], “ei, khodai, kibengăn jiren͡gă” [prophet elijah, save us from drought], “ei, nikolai ăti” [hey, saint nicholas], etc. these were sung in a duet and in a trio by older women (ranging from 73 to 77 years of age), who usually sing in the village during church services. for example, the tune structure of “izrail kory jirdăn” (see example 3 and music example № 2 at the end of the article) is composed of an alternation of two contrasting elements. the psalmodic recitative element is based on one sound (in the initial construction) and is sequenced with plangent fragments and tempo slowdown in the completion of phrases. the scale is a hemitonic tetrachord in the succession of fifths a–c–d–e (major third mode with sub-third). the musical structure is monodic. in group singing (duet or trio), minor spontaneous differences could be observed. the melodic line is sung by the lead singer, while the rest of the singers pick it up at different times. most singing is done from memory, but some female performers held photocopies of lyrics from old books. for example: example 3 «израил коры җирдəн» (озату иманы) “from the arid land of israel” (prayer for the deceased) – fragment израил коры җирдəн үткəн күк диңгез төбеннəн үтеп, үз артыннан ковып килгəн параванның батканын күреп əйткəн: «аллага җиңү җыруын җырлаек»,– дип. from the arid land of israel fleeing, on the bottom of the sea having walked, seeing the drowning of pharaoh, rushing after him, he said: “to the god we shall sing the victory song”. mamadysh kriashen folk music traditions in contemporary recordings folklorica 2016, vol. xx 155 r: эй, ходай, үлгəн бəндəңнең җанын(ы) тынычландыр. r: hey, god, the soul of the deceased should you save. it is important to emphasize that the village of nikiforovo was home to vasilii timofeev (1836–1895), the missionary, educator and the first priest of kriashen tatars, who was a companion of nikolai ilminskii. (6) being a teacher and the director of the central kazan tatar christian school, he frequently traveled to kriashen settlements where he conducted talks and readings of religious and moral literature. as a result of these trips, between 1864–1867, several schools were opened in the villages of nikiforovo and arniashin mamadysh county and in the village of apazovoin kazan county [tatar encyclopedia 2010: 640]. my field research shows that many traditional rituals and holidays in the village of nikiforovo had long not been observed. the rapid disappearance of traditional rituals and their songs is not typical for the kriashens, but can be explained by the persistent influence of religion. the christian worldview is so deeply embedded in the consciousness and daily life of local residents that native folk beliefs and customs, (including pre-christian beliefs), are perceived as irrational and frivolous remnants of the past. for example, nardugan is scornfully defined as the shaitan tue [devilish wedding]. the basis of the musical culture, as stated above, is formed by the church singing, which has replaced the songs previously sung in daily life. on saint peter’s day, when rainmaking prayers are organized, people go to church or to the local holy spring and chant prayers, not traditional folk songs. observing the practices of muslim tartars reveals a similar pattern of ritual folk activities being replaced by more formal religious and signals that their practices are also evolving. family ritual folklore: farewell songs for soldiers while we recorded farewell songs for soldiers, it was impossible to record any of the more archaic tunes in this genre as we did with the wedding and funeral songs described above. the poetic texts are now performed to melodies that formed at a later time; the general tune type is auyl kȯe [village tune] in the villages folklorica 2016, vol. xx 156 of vladimirovo and ziuri, and kyska kȯi [short tune] in the village of komarovka. informants refer to them as soldatozatu kȯe [soldiers’ farewell tune] and uram kȯe [street tune]. calendric folklore lyrics characteristic of the tatar song tradition have also entered into the scope of the calendar ritual folklore, as evidenced by the musical content of the yuletide [nardugan] and summer round-dance processions we collected. traditions for the celebration of nardugan were also performed in all the surveyed kriashen villages in the past. while many of the practices described below are no longer performed, the ritual is being revived and is now observed in the form of a communal celebration organized by professionals. the most full and complete findings were recorded in the village of ziuri. according to the inhabitants of this village, mumming is central to the celebration of nardugan. the mumming period lasts from january 7 to 12 (and for some kriashens, according to informants, until january 19). by its end (january 13), they tell the future using rings. january 14 marks the old new year (in the julian calendar), while january 19 is epiphany. the ritual actions performed from january 7 to 19 form a single yearly-cycle rite. mamadysh kriashen folk music traditions in contemporary recordings folklorica 2016, vol. xx 157 image 1. pectorals (fragment), ziuri village. photo credit: author image 2. bracelet and ring with pendants, ziuri village. photo credit: author folklorica 2016, vol. xx 158 mummers used to go around households in the evenings. a group of young people would wear costumes so as not to be recognized. participants disguised themselves as a bear, a horse, an old man, a roma, or a corpse. while visiting a house they first uttered good wishes to the owners and then entertained them by either dancing, singing while rocking a spindle, or telling fortunes. there were no special ritual songs performed according to my respondents. the mummers’ primary goal was to make as much noise as possible by rattling of spoons or banging samovar pipes together. divination using rings [iȯzek salu] took place to the singing of a series of songs called on new year's eve, observed on january 13 according to the julian calendar. a group of 14-16 people typically gathered after midnight. three people would fetch water for the reading. they had to be relatives from three generations: eldest, middle-aged and youngest. the trek to get the water was to be done after sundown and by midnight in complete silence. they would cut a hole in a sheet of ice on the river in the shape of a cross, fill buckets and carry them on their little fingers (in this way they limited the amount of water in the bucket). upon entering the house, they would say, “tyn jitte” [talking is allowed now]. only then could they resume talking. at that point, the divination began. first, a special ring with an image of a horse called atly iȯzek was lowered into the bucket of water. they covered it with a towel and listened to how the ring fell. if it descended quietly, then the next year would be peaceful, if they heard a loud sound, then an unpleasant incident would occur. after this, each person would lower their rings into the bucket. a person could put from ten to twelve rings each rings into the water. each ring was marked by different thread so that they would not get confused with each other. while lowering the ring, a person would silently make a wish or ask for solutions to a pressing issue. the bucket was then covered with a towel, and a fortune-telling text called nardugan takmagy was then read over it. at this time, one of the males present would stir rings by hand, and when he finished reading, he would remove one. we recorded a divination song that was sung as each ring was removed. participants made wishes not only for themselves but also for the mamadysh kriashen folk music traditions in contemporary recordings folklorica 2016, vol. xx 159 fates of their relatives. they began the ritual with rhymed wishes for the well-being of the farm; good crops and healthy livestock, for example. they would then proceed to singing verses sung to “short tunes.” they also recited these verses without music. in the former case, the tune to “almagachy” [apple tree] was used as the melodic base. almagachy was popular throughout the whole tartar community. example 4 below, and music example № 3 at the end of the article are typical of rhymed wishes. example 4 “йөзек салганда җырулар “ (нардуган) биллəрендə путалар, алар нəселлəре белəн беренче урын тоталар. [“songs for divination using rings” (nardugan) on their waist they wear waist-bands they, all their kin together, stand on the first place.] according to the performer maria aleksandrovna petrova, (b. 1951, see her in image 4 on the right), this verse was sung when she asked, “could we build a house?” indeed, that year they finished building their house. they would return home at about one o’clock in the morning. before their departure, all the participants washed their faces with water used during the divination ritual because it was attributed with magical properties. as they exited, another divination ritual was also performed. walking backwards, they would reach towards a fence with both hands; if they clasped an even number of slats, that foretold their marriage. clasping an odd number of slats meant they would not marry in the new year. of great importance to the calendric system were roundelay songs [tu̇gărăk uen kȯe] associated with the major holiday of oly băirăm. in the villages of vladimirovo and yukachi, this holiday fell on trinity (truchyn, troisyn), while in the village of ziuri, it folklorica 2016, vol. xx 160 corresponded to st. peter’s day, (once called pitrau). it was also observed in the village of albaevo. kriashens often associate it with sabantuy [plow festival]. (7) the oly băirăm celebration went on for one week. the slow roundelay tunes were named for the village where they were prevalent, e.g., “vladimir kȯe” [tune of vladimirovo village], and “albai kȯe” [tune of albaevo village]. therefore, each local tune was seen as the namesake and marked those villages song styles. they were also performed in other situations, for example, when the peasants were going or returning from game-playing and haymaking sites in the fields. the melodic formation from the early stages of development still remained in the repertoire of the generations born in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. we recorded one song representative of this type in vladimirovo. for our informants born after the 1930s, auyl kȯe [village tunes] occupied this niche. instrumental music in the village of shadchi, the talented accordionist alexander maksimovich arkhipov (born in 1946), contributed to our recordings of ancient and modern dance tunes as well as instrumental versions of traditional folk melodies. he plays the talyanka, (a 12-key single-row button accordion), the saratov harmonica, and a standard accordion. despite repeated inquiries about gusli [psaltery], we could not find any trace of a performance tradition in the kriashen mamadysh region. mamadysh kriashen folk music traditions in contemporary recordings folklorica 2016, vol. xx 161 image 3. accordionist alexander maksimovich arkhipov (1946), shadchi village. photo credit: author summary we should note that the music and folkloric tradition of the mamadysh kriashens as a whole has much in common with the traditions of other local subgroups of kriashens of the near kama region (in particular the pestretsy and tiuliachi regions). we find similarities in the composition of the genres, in the characteristics of the form of the songs and the unity of their melodic structure. an exception to this are the traditions of nikiforovo, since the central component of this tradition is canonical orthodox chant. folklorica 2016, vol. xx 162 folk culture is generally best preserved in places where there are motivations for its active use. in the contemporary world of the kriashen region, most ritual and song traditions continue to exist as a secondary form within the framework of folk art. it is symptomatic that the majority of the tradition bearers are the former or current members of rural folk groups (for example, singers of the yukachi village, see image 4). those who stopped performing in concerts or have no experience singing on stage do not always remember the words and melodies, and their performances occasionally depart from the original lyric patterns. image 4. tatiana nikolaevna vasilieva (b. 1937), lydia fedorovna beykina (b. 1940), elmira rinatovna kayumova (collector of folklore), anna illarionovna ovchinnikova (b. 1949), yukachi village. photo credit: author one example of the importance of a village chorus is the kumyryk ensemble, a performing group from the village of komarovka (see image 5). they have enabled a substantial group of traditional performers to maintain the original style. out of all settlements surveyed, komarovka is most characterized by stability mamadysh kriashen folk music traditions in contemporary recordings folklorica 2016, vol. xx 163 and variety in its repertoire of traditional songs. the folk singers there even remembered “krasnoyarsk kȯe,” a tune brought by immigrants who left the area over one hundred years ago, but founded a village of the same name in the krasnoyarsk region. the tune was common in the village of komarovka at one time, but had been forgotten. the recent meeting of the mamadysh people with their krasnoyarsk counterparts restored the tune to their repertoire. image 5. “kumyryk” folk ensemble, komarovka village. photo credit: author playing live music maintains a tradition’s vitality and prevents its disappearance. this may also be true for traditional orthodox music culture. the vibrant church choir in nikiforovo helps preserve and transmit musical traditions from generation to generation. however, preserving the traditional song styles from this region will require more than an active folk chorus. the rural folk groups at present consist mainly of young and middle-aged artists, since the elderly find it difficult to maintain an extensive concert schedule. but younger generations, as a rule, do not know the traditional vocal style and sing more contemporary forms derived from popular folklorica 2016, vol. xx 164 culture and other song styles. notes 1 song recordings, notation, transcriptions of the lyrics, and photography were performed by the author. 2 stylistic multilayering of musical culture is not only a characteristic feature for the mamadysh tatars but for the other tatar-kriashen groups as well [almeeva 1989: 15; pesnitatarkriashen 2007: 14-15]. the new melodic style was established in the second half of the xix century, when, during the general integration processes, (consolidation of various groups of tatars and the formation of the contemporary nation as well as the development of a standard language), a new layer of songs of supradialectal content was created. for additional details, see kayumova 2005; regarding church-singing in the kriashen folk tradition, see iliasova 2008. 3 legends state that the soul finally travels to the otherworld on the 40th day. according to older residents, they would escort the deceased to the cemetery. it was believed that the deceased was invisible, but present. at some point, they began to accompany the dead only to the church, but more recently, they only go as far as the street. 4 musical and textual examples contain only fragments of the recorded songs. 5 the first sample (one strophe long) was recounted by ekaterina gurievna sapurina (b. 1939, birthplace bolshoi artash, mamadysh region). according to the informant, she learned the song from her mother, who advised her only to sing it after orthodox prayers. the second sample (two strophes long) was delivered by anna semenovna dolgova (b. 1953, see image 7), who in turn heard it from ekaterina sapurina (see music example № 1, verse 1). 6 nikolai ivanovich ilminskii (1822–1891) was an asianist, teacher, missionary, and a member of the st. petersburg academy of sciences who developed the plan for the christianization and russification of the non-russian peoples. 7 sabantuy [plow festival from saban [plow], tuy [fest] was an archaic folk celebration of the kazan tatars. originally it was mamadysh kriashen folk music traditions in contemporary recordings folklorica 2016, vol. xx 165 celebrated before spring sowing in the villages of one district, and then in each village thereafter in a particular succession. in the twentieth century sabantuy acquired the status of a national holiday in tatarstan. bibliography almeeva, n. y. 1989. альмеева, н. ю. “к определению жанровой системы и стилевых пластов в песенной традиции татар-кряшен” [to the question of defining genre and stylistic layers in the song tradition of the kriashen tatars], в традиционная музыка народов поволжья и приуралья: вопросы теории и истории. казань: ияли им. г.ибрагимова кфан ссср. 5-21. baiazitova, f.s. 1986. баязитова, ф.с. говоры татар-кряшен в сравнительном освещении [comparative study of the tatarkriashen subdialects]. москва:наука. borhanova, n.b. 1977. борһанова, н.б. “казан арты керəшеннəре сөйлəшен төп билгелəре буенча төркемлəү” [main features of the trans-kazan kriashen subdialect group], татар теле һəм əдəбияты = труды по татарскому языку и литературе. кн.6. казань: ияли им. г.ибрагимова кфан ссср. gilyarevsky r.s., grivnin v.s. 1970. “languages identification guides”. cited by http://www.indiana.edu/~libslav/slavcatman/trtatar.html. (consulted 6 june, 2016). il’iasova, a.t. 2008. ильясова, а.т. церковно-певческая практика татар-кряшен [church-singing praxis of the tatar–kriashens], в автореферат диссертации на соискание ученой степени кандидата искусствоведения. казань: казанская государственная консерватория (академия) имени н.г. жиганова (кгк им. н.г. жиганова), 2008. 26. kayumova, e.r. 2005. каюмова, э.р. татарская народнопесенная культура нового времени: проблемы традиционного мышления и жанровой атрибуции [tatar folk singing culture of the modern age: problems of folklorica 2016, vol. xx 166 traditional mentality and genre attribution]. казань: иялианрт. mukhametshin, iu.g. 1977. мухаметшин, ю.г. татарыкряшены: историко-этнографическое исследование материальной культуры (середина хiх – начало хх в.) [kriashen tatars: historical and ethnographic research of the material culture (middle xix – early xx centuries)]. москва: наука. pesni tatar-kriashen, 2007. песни татар-кряшен [songs of the kriashen–tatars]. вып.1: пестречинская (примешинская) группа / сост. н.ю. альмеева. спб–казань: риии, 2007. vorobiev, n.i., hisamutdinov, g.m. 1967. воробьев н.и., г.м. хисамутдинов. “расселение и численность” [settlement and population], в татары среднего поволжья и приуралья. москва: наука. zemtsovsky, i.i. 2010. земцовского, и. и. татарская энциклопедия [tatar encyclopedia]. vol. 5. казань: институт татарской энциклопедии ан рт. appendix musical examples mamadysh kriashen folk music traditions in contemporary recordings folklorica 2016, vol. xx 167 music example № 1. “in the woods i walked” (traditional guest tune) was recorded in the vladimirovo village and performed by anna semenovna dolgova (b.1953). image 6. “in the woods i walked” image 7. anna semenovna dolgova (b.1953), vladimirovo village. folklorica 2016, vol. xx 168 music example №2. “from the arid land of israel” (prayer for the deceased) was recorded in nikiforovo village and performed by maria ivanovna ivanova (b.1936) and theodosia pavlovna stepanova (b.1939). image 8. “from the arid land of israel” image 9. maria ivanovna ivanova (b. 1936), theodosia pavlovna stepanova (b. 1939), tatiana ivanovna kazakova (b. 1940), nikiforovo village. mamadysh kriashen folk music traditions in contemporary recordings folklorica 2016, vol. xx 169 music example № 3 “songs for divination using rings (nardugan)” was recorded in zyuri village with maria aleksandrovna petrova (b.1951, birthplace komarovka village). image 10. “songs for divination using rings (nardugan)” folklorica 2016, vol. xx 170 image 11. nadezhda ivanovna nikitina (b.1948), maria aleksandrovna petrova (b. 1951), ziuri village. translation from the russian: vera sepeshvari. clayfinal folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 135 folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter: 1e life and sermons of father sergii (romanov) j. eugene clay arizona state university tempe, usa abstract je religious studies scholar bruce lincoln famously defined myth as “ideology in narrative form” that “naturalizes and legitimizes” social taxonomies. over two decades, father sergii (romanov), a convicted murderer who turned to religion while in prison, has used myth to shape his public persona, legitimize his spiritual leadership, cultivate the loyalty of his followers, and articulate a vision of holy russia that seeks to reconcile the soviet and imperial pasts. weaving his personal biography into a narrative of national redemption from the sin of regicide, he has helped construct and lead a complex of monasteries. drawing on a variety of narratives that emphasize russian exceptionalism, sergii and his admirers present the cleric as a divinely appointed emissary to lead their nation to spiritual greatness. je conspiracy theories that support this worldview have also encouraged sergii to denounce both secular and ecclesiastical authorities and to reject public health measures designed to stem the coronavirus pandemic. despite his revolt against his bishop, sergii remained in control of his convent until his dramatic arrest on 29 december 2020. jis article analyzes some of sergii’s most significant narratives, traces their origins, and weighs their social implications. introduction je religious studies scholar bruce lincoln famously defined myth as “ideology in narrative form” that “naturalizes and legitimizes” social taxonomies [lincoln 1999: 147]. in the hands of a skillful narrator, such as the notorious “covid dissident” and excommunicated russian monk sergii (nikolai vasil’evich romanov, b. 1955), a myth is not simply a static “pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom,” as bronislaw malinowski argued [malinowski 1926: 23], but a way to “recalibrate” the sociotaxonomic order “by introducing new categories, eliminating old ones, or revising both categories and the hierarchic orders in which they are organized” [lincoln 1999: 150]. myths belong to the small category of narratives which are both credible and authoritative, whose truth is regarded as paradigmatic [lincoln 2014: 23]. (1) over two decades, sergii, a convicted murderer who turned to religion while in prison, has used such narratives to shape his public persona, legitimize his spiritual leadership, cultivate the loyalty of his followers, and articulate a vision of holy russia that seeks to reconcile the soviet and imperial pasts. weaving his personal biography into a narrative of national redemption from the sin of regicide, he has helped construct and lead a complex of monasteries, convents, folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 136 and hermitages in memory of the martyred emperor nicholas ii. retelling stories from a variety of sources, sergii and his admirers present the cleric as a divinely appointed emissary to lead russia to repentance, rescue it from a global jewishmasonic conspiracy, warn his fellow citizens against the wiles of the imminent antichrist, and reveal the truth about the pious christian leader joseph stalin, who merely pretended to be an atheist revolutionary in order to make russia great. although president vladimir putin and the leadership of the russian orthodox church also embrace a version of russian exceptionalism, sergii’s extreme views led to conflict in the fraught year 2020. in january, sergii openly denounced his ecclesiastical superiors and the russian president; by april, he had condemned public health measures intended to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic. sergii contended that the epidemic was not real, but simply an excuse to force everyone to be injected with an ersatz vaccine containing microchips that would allow the coming worldwide government to turn all humanity into compliant automatons. from his headquarters in the convent of the mother of god, sporitel’nitsa khlebov [the grower of crops], sergii specifically denounced all of the russian orthodox church’s precautions to prevent the spread of the virus and appealed instead to the authority of the spiritual elders on mount athos. although sergii was defrocked in june and excommunicated in september, he continued to conduct religious services until his dramatic arrest on 29 december 2020, when russian special forces stormed his convent. for the most part, sergii did not invent the grand narratives that he has disseminated and that have informed the construction of his personal biography. conspiracy theories about the evil intentions of jews and freemasons, for example, have a long history in russia. in the early twenty-first century, a lesson plan on masonic conspiracy was even incorporated into a high-school curriculum published in a major educational journal [abramova and zaitseva 2003]. by embracing a belief about a nefarious supercomputer in brussels named “the beast” that collected personal data on everyone in the world, sergii unwittingly helped spread a story that conservative american protestants had invented to promote an evangelistic campaign in 1972. je “dulles plan,” a secret cia plot to destroy the ussr and the russian federation by undermining the morality of its citizens, originated as an excerpt from a late soviet novel that came to be widely circulated as an actual project of american intelligence agencies. similarly, sergii relied on a fake, but widely distributed, version of stalin’s last will and testament, in which the soviet dictator confessed his secret christian faith [stalin [trapeznikov] 2004]. although quite disparate, these various narratives all sounded similar themes: russian exceptionalism, suspicion of international institutions and norms, the close alignment of orthodox christianity and russian statehood, and the spiritual significance of russia’s great power status. for sergii, these narratives also offered a way to reconcile the glories of russia’s imperial past and the martyred royal family with the glories of the stalinist past, with its scientific, military, and industrial achievements—and especially the soviet victory in world war ii. jey provided frameworks for developing a compelling personal story, in which orthodox christians could participate in national and folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 137 global redemption through their devotion to russia’s great pious rulers, from st. vladimir (d. 1015) to stalin. in other words, these narratives elided the contradictions between soviet communism and imperial russia, while legitimizing and naturalizing a powerful patriarchal state. conspiracy theories play an important role in sergii’s construction of reality. among all the different versions of legend, such theories offer a particularly salient example of “ideology in narrative form.” in the 1940s, karl popper famously defined the “conspiracy theory of society” as the mistaken view that “whatever happens in society—especially happenings such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages, which people as a rule dislike—is the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups” [popper 2013 [1945]: 306]. although popper admitted that conspiracies existed, he pointed out that they were seldom successful, contrary to the expectations of the adherents of conspirologists. while some scholars have sharply rejected popper’s analysis and the very term “conspiracy theory” as simply a way of dismissing certain types of social critique [husting and orr 2007; dehaven-smith 2013: 6-11], most have recognized the need for such a category, even as they have struggled to find an adequate definition [byford 2011: 20-37; douglas et al. 2017; uscinski 2018: 5381]. in general, such definitions highlight the importance of a compelling narrative [fenster 1999: 106] about “malevolent clandestine groups” [stojanov et al. 2020: 1]. conspiracy theories ease epistemic crises by providing apparently clear and certain knowledge; they “explain a complex and seemingly random environment through the adoption of a simple model of causality” [campion-vincent 2005: 107]. with a distinct set of villains, conspiracy theories are “characterized by their neatness, aligning narrative frameworks from many disparate domains in an efficient and compact manner” [tangherlini et al. 2020: 61]. by using such legends, sergii has sought to legitimize his calling as a priest, monk, ascetic elder, and leader of a monastic community. his own personal story and the story of the monasteries that he has helped to create are part of a grander narrative that celebrates both holy imperial russia and stalinism, eliminating or ignoring the contradictions between them. je nuns in sergii’s convent are able to sing wartime favorites, such as isaak liuban and pavel shubin’s 1943 “zastol'naia volkhovskogo fronta” [drinking song of the volkhov front], and the jesus prayer with equal enthusiasm [luk’ianov 2020 (time stamp 09:14); srednii put’ 2020 (03:50)]. folding their personal lives into a broader eschatological narrative that identifies a clear group of external evildoers, sergii and his followers can participate in the redemption of their society without confronting the inherent cognitive dissonance of being an orthodox christian stalinist. je making of a post-soviet monk born on 19 march 1955 in the village of kriusha (gorky (gor’kovskaia) oblast’) in central russia, nikolai vasil’evich romanov resembles a character in a dostoevsky novel. nothing in his early biography hints at his dramatic transformation from a hooligan of the late soviet period to a charismatic holy folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 138 priest in the early twenty-first century [skoibeda 2017; karamzin 2020]. sergii’s admirers note that his given name is strikingly similar to that of the last russian emperor, nikolai aleksandrovich romanov, assassinated by the bolsheviks in july 1918 [aliev 2014 (50:30)]. at the close of the twentieth century, the younger nikolai romanov would become a central figure in promoting the cult of the last emperor, helping to build a monastery that commemorated the martyrdom of the royal family. like nearly all young men of his age, romanov served two years of obligatory military service from 1973 to 1975, rising to the rank of sergeant. after his discharge, he entered the ministry of internal affairs police academy in omsk, graduated in 1979, married, and worked for a time in law enforcement. by 1984, however, he had divorced his wife, left his profession, and taken up a life of crime [karamzin 2020]. in april of that year, along with two of his friends, he committed a particularly brutal homicide. enticing a geography teacher with promises of sex and alcohol, the three murderers drove their victim to a deserted spot, beat him to death, and threw his lifeless body into the moscow canal [skoibeda 2017]. on 25 october 1984, romanov was arrested on unrelated charges (theft of government property and causing wrongful death in a traffic accident) and in 1985, he was sentenced to four years in a correctional colony. when the authorities learned of his role in a premeditated murder, romanov underwent a second trial, which extended his sentence to thirteen years. as a former policeman, romanov was sent to correctional colony 13 (ik13), a special camp for former law-enforcement officers in nizhnii tagil (sverdlov (sverdlovskaia) oblast’), not far from the site where the bolsheviks assassinated the last russian emperor in 1918 [il’ina 2013; ostapov 2013, 2014; skoibeda 2017; karamzin 2020]. known as the krasnaia utka [red duck], the camp was notorious for its high-profile prisoners from the security and judicial services. originally founded in the 1940s, the camp was reformed in 1951 in response to the such’ia voina [bitches’ war] that pitted the suki [bitches]— criminals who agreed to serve the soviet state during world war ii—against the vory [thieves], who preferred prison to the battlefield [varese 2001: 165-166; galeotti 2018: 49-59; lonsky 2020: 9-13]. je “red duck” prison camp became a place where criminals with a past in the security services (bitches) could be separated from the thieves. its nickname alludes to the underworld argot in which the color red signified strict adherence to all official regulations and the word utka (i.e., podsadochnaia utka [decoy duck]), an informant. by contrast, chernyi [black] camps were run according to the criminals’ code of honor [smirnov 2017; zhadaev 2020]. life in the red duck offered romanov the opportunity to meet prominent criminals and to develop networks in both the underworld and the security services. during his 13 years of imprisonment, romanov might well have become acquainted with leonid brezhnev’s former son-in-law, iurii churbanov (19362013), who served as deputy interior minister at the very moment when the future monk was smashing the skull of his hapless victim. convicted of corruption in 1988, churbanov spent five years in the nizhnii tagil prison until president boris folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 139 yeltsin granted him amnesty in 1994. both men produced fancy ice-cream bowls in the prison factory, and romanov eventually worked as an electrician repairing the machines that fashioned the bowls. romanov also might have met yelstin’s friend and colleague general dmitrii iakubovskii (b. 1963), who spent four years in the nizhnii tagil colony after he was convicted in 1994 of stealing rare books from the russian national library in st. petersburg. moreover, in 1989, as prison conditions deteriorated in the soviet union, the camp commander created a spetsnaz [special forces] team for the red duck. during his time in prison, romanov also met a local vor v zakone [thief with a code of honor, mafia godfather], temuri mirzoev (also known as timur of sverdlovsk, 1957-2014), a yazidi kurd who later converted to orthodoxy. after he became a priest, romanov was rumored to be mirzoev’s father confessor. in the years after his release, romanov has found support both among the russian mafia and the siloviki [military and law enforcement] [pushkarev 2015b, 2020; gulagu.net 2017; korsakov 2017: 75; petrov 2018]. during his imprisonment, romanov developed a religious consciousness, thanks in part to the expanded role of the russian orthodox church among incarcerated prisoners. jroughout most of soviet history, the church could not legally engage in any form of social charity, and prisons were off limits to religious organizations. in 1990 new laws guaranteeing freedom of conscience provided greater liberty to the church, which quickly developed social ministries in hospitals and prisons. in the barracks where romanov slept, the prisoners were allowed to have an icon corner, and the former policeman turned to christianity. he helped to build a church dedicated to st. nicholas that was consecrated at the camp in 1996. moreover, his good behavior won romanov the opportunity to work outside the prison. dire economic conditions in the early 1990s led the camp authorities to sign contracts with local farms and businesses; the camp provided their inmates as a source of cheap labor. as a part of this brigade, romanov enjoyed considerably greater freedom during the final years of his sentence. inmates in the work detail had the right to wear civilian clothes and keep some cash. romanov led a team that renovated a school, a church, and a sports complex in the nearby village of krasnopol’e. according to one account, romanov made good use of his relative freedom and fathered a daughter with his third wife in 1993, while he was still formally completing his prison term [karamzin 2020]. on 21 july 1997, romanov was released early from his sentence, and he sought to fulfill his religious vocation. initially, in 1998-1999, he became a riasofor [novice] at the newly created monastery of the new martyrs in the village of alapaevsk, a pilgrimage site where several members of the imperial house of romanov (including empress alexandra’s sister, elizaveta) had been killed in may 1918. he remained in the monastery for about 18 months but came into serious conflict with the abbot and founder of the monastery, father moisei (ianis laimstarovich pilats, b. 1970) [e1.ru 2020; pushkarev 2020]. having failed in his first efforts at the monastic life, romanov moved to ekaterinburg. at the time, the diocese of ekaterinburg was in turmoil, and its leader, bishop nikon (oleg vasil’evich mironov, b. 1960), suffered attacks from both right and left. from the folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 140 right, a group of orthodox monks and laity accused nikon of both engaging in homosexual acts and of protecting and promoting closeted gay clergy. on the left, liberals charged nikon with burning the books of aleksandr men’ (1935-1990), a reforming priest and theologian of the late soviet era who was mysteriously murdered at the end of the soviet period [gordon 1999]. although an ecclesiastical commission cleared nikon of both charges, he was dismissed in 1999 for his failure to keep peace in the diocese and was replaced by an older and more practical administrator, archbishop vikentii (viktor aleksandrovich morar’, b. 1953) [sinod 1999]. for a time, romanov found a true partner and patron in vikentii. during the decade of his reign over the ekaterinburg diocese, vikentii engaged in a vigorous program of church construction. with the archbishop’s approval, romanov became a monk, took the name sergii, and set to work building a monastery in ganina iama [ganya’s pit], the site where bolshevik executioners disposed of the royal family’s remains in 1918. already a place of pilgrimage in the 1990s, ganina iama became even more venerated after the russian orthodox church canonized nicholas ii, his wife, and his five children in august 2000. using his considerable talents as an organizer and his contacts among the entrepreneurs of the urals, sergii found generous sponsors—including the billionaire andrei kozitsyn (b. 1960), head of the ural metal mining company— to support the new monastery. on 23 september, patriarch aleksii ii (aleksei ridiger, 1929-2008) approved the plan to build a monastery, and by 27 december 2000 the first church, dedicated to the royal passion-bearers, was already completed. soon afterwards, sergii made a pilgrimage to mount athos, the international center of orthodox monasticism, where serbian monks presented him with a copy of a wonder-working icon as a gift for the new monastery [sedmitsa.ru 2010; martem’ianov 2020]. ordained as a deacon and then, on 25 december 2001, as a priest, sergii served as the monastery’s namestnik [abbot] [kolezev 2020]. initiation stories in retelling the story of his life, sergii and his followers have connected his biography to a larger narrative about russia’s place in the world as a great power, both militarily and spiritually. in these stories, sergii often appears as a divinely chosen emissary. for example, in 2001, sergii told a visiting orthodox journalist that many years earlier he had met a blessed stranger in moscow who predicted that he would render a special service to the royal family—a divine prophecy that found its fulfillment when sergii became abbot of the ganina iama monastery [zhogolev 2009]. other elements of sergii's life were also refashioned to highlight his special role in russian religious history. je fatal automobile accident, for which sergii was found criminally liable and for which he was first imprisoned in 1984, became a miraculous turning point for the future monk. although sergii survived the accident, in the retelling, the other victims who perished are forgotten: folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 141 сестра мария рассказала, что отец сергий когда-то давно попал в очень сильное дтп и даже пережил клиническую смерть. в этот момент он даже видел свое тело со стороны. после этого будущий священнослужитель понял, что его миссия – основать обитель, что он и сделал [sister mariia said that father sergii once got into a terrible car accident and was even technically dead. in that moment, he could even see his body from the outside. after this, the future priest understood that his mission was to found a monastery, which he did] [stoianov 2020]. in another, more elaborate version of this story, the jeotokos herself appeared to him during this moment of crisis to affirm his divine mission: якобы еще в 80-е годы, управляя автомобилем, он попал в серьезное дтп. у сергия . . . врачи диагностировали клиническую смерть. однако в морге он пришел в себя. душу в тело вернула богородица, с которой романов встретился на небесах. она обязала его спасти православную русь, наделила прозорливостью и вернула к жизни. однако из-за того, что его пассажир погиб в дтп, романова приговорили к длительному сроку наказания [allegedly, back in the 1980s, he got into a serious accident while driving. je physicians declared sergii . . . to be clinically dead. but in the morgue, he regained consciousness. je mother of god, whom romanov had met in heaven, returned his soul into his body. she ordered him to save orthodox rus’, bestowed on him the gift of spiritual insight, and returned him to life. however, because one of his passengers had died, romanov was sentenced to a long prison term] [antonenkov 2020; cf. martem'ianov 2020]. despite his critics’ accusations that he hid his past as a murderer (a crime that should have disqualified him from the priesthood, according to canon law), sergii himself has claimed that he was always completely honest with his ecclesiastical superiors, who ordained him over his own protestations of unworthiness. in june 2020, when he faced the condemnation of a church court, sergii admitted his criminal past, but emphasized aleksii ii’s prophetic approbation of his spiritual vocation: 36 лет назад я, схиигумен сергий, преступил уголовный кодекс, за что получил наказание по законному решению областного суда. вину признал и раскаялся. отбывая наказание, по благословению построил храм в честь святителя николая на итк 13. написал прошение святейшему патриарху алексию ii об освящении храма. находясь с пастырским визитом в екатеринбурге, святейший folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 142 патриарх алексий ii освятил этот храм. при посещении ганиной ямы святейший патриарх алексий ii сказал мне в присутствии многих: «монах, священник, наместник» [jirty-six years ago, i, schema-monk sergii, violated the criminal code, for which i received punishment by the lawful decision of the district court. i admitted my guilt and repented. after serving my prison term, i, with the [bishop’s] blessing, built a church dedicated to st. nicholas in correctional colony no. 13. i petitioned the most holy patriarch aleksii ii to consecrate the church. while on a pastoral visit to ekaterinburg, the most holy patriarch aleksii ii consecrated this church. during his visit to ganina iama, the most holy patriarch aleksii ii, in the presence of many people, said to me, “monk, priest, abbot”] [shestak 2020]. sergii likewise recounted his remarkable meeting with patriarch aleskii ii at the church of st. nicholas, the house church of the tretyakov gallery in moscow, where one of russia’s most sacred objects, the vladimir icon of the mother of god, has been located since 1999. (2) — рукополагал меня владыка викентий. находясь в москве, в храме святителя николая, в третьяковской галерее, где находится чудотворная икона божией матери владимирская, в это время в храм приезжает святейший патриарх алексий ii. сняли сигнализацию, открыли икону для святейшего патриарха алексия ii. он пригласил приложиться к ней после него и спросил меня: «где служишь?» я ответил: «у владыки викентия в екатеринбурге». он спросил: «вы передали владыке, что я благословил вам наградной крест?» я ответил: «да, сказал владыке викентию». святейший патриарх алексий ii сказал: «передайте владыке викентию, что я дважды не повторяю» [while i was in moscow, in the church of st. nicholas, in the tretyakov gallery, where the wonderworking icon of the vladimir jeotokos is located, the most holy patriarch aleksii ii entered. jey turned off the alarm and took out the icon for the most holy patriarch aleksii ii. after kissing the icon, he invited me to do the same, and he asked me, “where are you serving?” i answered, “under bishop vikentii in ekaterinburg.” he asked, “did you tell your bishop that i wish for him to award you an honorary cross?” i answered, “yes, i told bishop vikentii.” je most holy patriarch aleksii ii said, “tell bishop vikentii that i will not repeat myself twice”] [shestak 2020]. sergii has claimed a connection with spiritual elders on mount athos and with the well-respected archimandrite kirill (ivan dmitrievich pavlov, 1919-2017), who served as patriarch aleksii’s confessor until 2003, when kirill suffered a stroke folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 143 that left him unable to speak. in an open letter written in july 2020 to sergii, metropolitan kirill (mikhail vasil’evich nakonechnyi, b. 1961) flatly denied sergii’s claims and accused him of deceiving vikentii and of hiding his criminal past [kirill 2020]. sergii’s defenders, in turn, have produced their own evidence that his ecclesiastical superiors were fully informed about the nature of his prison sentence long before his ordination to the priesthood in 2001 [66.ru 2020b; zharkov 2020]. je sredneural’sk convent whatever the truth of the matter, sergii enjoyed a successful clerical career after his release from prison. as early as 2002, while still serving as abbot of ganina iama, he helped lay the groundwork to create a convent nearby that would be dedicated to the icon of the jetokos, the grower of crops. je icon, which portrays the virgin mother seated alone on a cloud in the heavens above a field with her arms stretched out in prayer, linked the new convent to a venerable tradition of charismatic spirituality. it was originally commissioned in 1890 by the famous spiritual elder amvrosii (aleksandr mikhailovich grenkov, 18121891) of the optina monastery, who served as the model for father zosima in dostoevsky’s novel fe brothers karamazov. according to one widely circulated origin story, the icon illustrated a vision that amvrosii had received from the jeotokos [komova 2006: 213]. je new convent quickly found powerful patrons. in august 2002, the local power station donated a plot of land that had once held german prisoners of war to the church, and the construction of the new monastic complex began. many volunteers, excited by the prospect of supporting a religious community, sold their property and gave the proceeds for the new project. however, sergii also put significant pressure on local farmers to donate their land or sell it at a reduced price; by 2005, when the russian orthodox church formally resolved to make the convent an independent community, sergii used his strategic location to restrict the access of several neighboring farmers to water, roads, and electricity [sinod 2005; agenstvo agrofakt 2005]. many years of bitter court battles followed, and only in 2019 did the church finally buy out the neighboring landowners [ostapov 2013; smirnov 2013; pushkarev 2015a, 2015b; pushkarev and pliusina 2020]. in 2005 sergii was replaced as abbot of the ganina iama monastery and was expelled from the correspondence course of the moscow jeological seminary because of his poor academic record [karamzin 2020; kirill 2020]. je church still needed his skills as an administrator and fundraiser, and sergii was appointed father-confessor for the newly independent convent nearby. a year later, with archbishop vikentii’s blessing, he took the schema, a special vow to lead a more intense ascetic and contemplative life. traditionally, schema-monks withdraw from all administrative duties. sergii, by contrast, continued to participate actively in leading and organizing the convent, which established several hermitages deep in the taiga. je convent’s relationships with its neighbors did not improve, and sergii remained a controversial figure. in 2011 archbishop vikentii, the bishop folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 144 who had made sergii’s career possible, was transferred to the see of tashkent, uzbekistan. with vikentii’s departure, sergii was removed from the official list of clergy in the ekaterinburg diocese and added to the clergy of tashkent—even though he remained physically in ekaterinburg [karamzin 2020; kolezev 2020; 66.ru 2020a]. in the following decade, sergii achieved greater fame and notoriety, as the convent assumed a more prominent role in sverdlov (sverdlovskaia) oblast’. his critics, including the indefatigable orthodox journalist raisa il’ina, uncovered his criminal past and raised questions about the mistreatment of children whom the convent had taken in. in 2013 il’ina published an open letter to the sverdlovsk authorities, accusing the priest of abusing his power [il’ina 2013]. sergii’s aggressive promotion of the cult of the royal family led his critics to accuse him of tsarebozhestvo [deifying the tsar]. however, church authorities, including the new bishop of ekaterinburg, defended sergii and published a documentary about the convent (fe dwelling place of faith and love), which portrayed him as a holy ascetic and practitioner of hesychasm, the discipline of constant prayer [telestudiia ekaterinburgskoi eparkhii 2013]. je invasion of crimea in 2014 opened new avenues for sergii’s public persona. he quickly became a strong supporter of the annexation and ostentatiously traveled to the ukrainian border to pray for peace. je orthodox activist and filmmaker ruslan (sergii) aliev completed a second documentary, fe confessor, that celebrated sergii as a modern-day wise elder, with an especially strong following among the military [aliev 2014]. his increasing fame brought new admirers to the convent, including the right-wing politician natal’ia poklonskaia (b. 1980), who had been appointed the first prosecutor-general of the newly annexed republic of crimea [skoibeda 2017]. another prominent rightwing figure to embrace sergii was the retired special forces colonel vladimir kvachkov (b. 1948). known for his strong antisemitic views, kvachkov was acquitted in 2008 for the attempted assassination of the politician and businessman anatolii chubais (b. 1955), one of the architects of russia’s controversial privatization program in the 1990s [luk’ianov 2020]. sergii’s eschatological kerygma like many orthodox christians who have aspired to become spiritual elders, sergii increasingly emphasized his own charismatic authority over time. by spring 2017, sergii was performing dramatic rituals of exorcism in his convent, where he identified and battled the demons of modern life, including “компьютерный бес, . . . интернет, . . князь тьмы эйфон, дух чародеев” [the computer demon, the internet, prince of darkness i-phone, spirit of sorcerers] [lenta.ru 2018 (25:10)]. sergii dramatically demonstrated his power over the supernatural world by casting out demons from his followers oppressed by them. like the charismatic orthodox spiritual elders and other religious virtuosi of prerevolutionary russia, sergii exercised this authority over possessed klikushi [shriekers]—primarily women—who traditionally made up part of the entourage folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 145 of a russian holy man [worobec 2001]. in spite of his apparent aversion to the internet, sergii, aided by young, tech-savvy admirers (such as vsevolod moguchev and ruslan aliev), created his own youtube channel to propagate his teachings. sympathizers, such as the channel tsarskii krest [royal cross], also posted sergii’s messages [lenta.ru 2018]. sergii’s sermons became increasingly apocalyptic, drawing from scripture, christian tradition, and contemporary folklore. in a sermon delivered on 3 march 2018, for example, sergii drew from the canonical book of revelation, the american myth of a computer called the “beast in brussels,” and the post-soviet russian legend of the “dulles plan” to warn his congregation against the coming age of “electronic slavery” [lenta.ru 2018; justmedia.ru 2018]. early in the sermon, sergii highlighted the fiendish role of the united states in the evolving eschatological saga: the current global decline in morality was initiated by allen dulles (1893-1969), the first civilian director of the central intelligence agency, many decades earlier. идеолог «холодной войны» аллен даллес говорил, что россию нельзя победить в открытом бою. ее можно победить только безнравственностью. он писал: «будем вырывать духовные корни, уничтожать основы народной нравственности… главную ставку всегда будем делать на молодежь, станем разлагать, развращать, растлевать ее. мы сделаем из них циников, пошляков, космополитов». к сожалению, многое из этого уже исполняется на наших глазах. и не только в нашей стране. более 100 стран в настоящее время живут по законам разврата подобно печально известным городам содому и гоморре, т.е. в них узаконены однополые браки, транссексуализм, скотоложство, педофилия. живут как язычники – «бери от жизни все пока молодой». и даже не задумываются о том, что завтра предстоит встретиться с вечностью, дать ответ пред богом [allen dulles, the ideologist of the cold war, said that it was impossible to defeat russia in an open battle. russia can only be defeated through immorality. he wrote, “we will tear out the spiritual roots, destroy the foundation of the morality of the people. we will focus always on the young people, whom we will degrade, subvert and corrupt. we will turn them into cynics, perverts, cosmopolitans.” unfortunately, much of this is being fulfilled before our eyes. and not only in our country. more than 100 countries at present live by the laws of depravity like those of the infamous cities of sodom and gomorrah. jese countries have legalized same-sex marriage, transgenderism, bestiality, pedophilia. jey live like pagans: “take everything from life while you are young.” and they don’t even think that tomorrow they will meet eternity and have to answer god] [lenta.ru 2018; justmedia.ru 2018; cf: ivanov 1976: 49]. folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 146 in this passage, sergii cites directly from an apocryphal work first attributed to dulles in a series of nationalist articles and pamphlets published in 1992 and 1993. according to his alleged plan, dulles recognized that the ussr could be conquered only from within, by corrupting soviet youth, undermining their morality, and weakening their ability to resist a foreign hegemon. in fact, however, allen dulles had no part in the creation of the “dulles plan,” which is no more than a pastiche of texts from the mouth of a villain in the late soviet novel vechnyi zov [fe eternal call]. written by the prominent author and publisher anatolii stepanovich ivanov (1928-1999), the novel, which went through three editions and was serialized as a television show, features the anti-hero arnol’d mikhailovich lakhnovskii. a member of the tsarist political police in 1908, lakhnovskii joins a trotskyist cell after the revolution in order to commit acts of sabotage. during world war ii, he becomes a german officer and reveals how the nazis intend to derail communism and make russia capitalist again. since its initial publication as a separate manifesto by allen dulles, the “dulles plan” has often been cited in russian academic literature as an accurate source for the aims of american intelligence [il’inskii 2009: 81-82; golunov and smirnova 2015: 32; panchenko 2018: 129-136]. je beast computer of brussels as he continued his sermon, sergii also attacked the increasingly anonymous, globalized financial system that, in his view, threatens to dehumanize the members of his flock, replacing their names with numbers and eliminating any possibility of privacy. в электронном рабстве у каждого человека вместо имени есть свой номер, как у скотов. то есть инн, в котором есть число зверя — 666. если вы даете согласие на обработку персональных данных, вся информация о вас передается во всемирный компьютер, находящийся в брюсселе. имя ему — зверь! [in the system of electronic slavery, each person has a number—like cattle—instead of a name. jat is the t[axpayer’s] i[dentifying] n[umber], which includes the number of the beast—666. if you agree to have your personal information processed, all the information about you will be sent to a worldwide computer, located in brussels. its name is beast!] [lenta.ru 2018 (12:45)]. like many other orthodox conservatives [papkova 2011, 120-38], sergii connected the official taxpayer’s identifying number (introduced in the late 1990s to rationalize the russian tax system) with 666, the number of the evil apocalyptic beast revealed in revelation 13:18. in warning his flock about the supercomputer in brussels called “the beast,” sergii was repeating a story that had originated as part of an american evangelistic campaign by the pentecostal folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 147 pastor david wilkerson (1931-2011) in 1973. as part of an advertising campaign to promote his ministry's apocalyptic film, fe rapture [wilkerson 1972], wilkerson had created a mock newspaper, fe signs of the times, filled with fictional stories about the calamities that would take place at the end of the world. one of the articles in the fake tabloid, “je birth of the beast,” recounted the very story that sergii referenced nearly four decades later. located in brussels, the capital of the “common market confederacy,” the supercomputer “would assign each citizen of the world a number—to use for all buying and selling” that would be “invisibly ‘laser’ tatooed (sic) on the forehead or back of the hand” [wilkerson 1973: 3; musser 2011]. although wilkerson's story about the beast was entirely fictional, growing anxieties about the development of a surveillance society made it especially salient in the united states of the 1970s. rumors about the sinister brussels supercomputer circulated widely in conservative protestant publications and in church advertisements in local papers. wittingly or unwittingly, congregations seeking to increase attendance often repeated elements of wilkerson’s story word for word when advertising their services. for example, on 18 october 1975, ebenezer baptist church of plymouth, pennsylvania, ran an ad in the wilkesbarre times leader with the headline “how near the end?” that included the following information: writing in the april issue of gospel call, published by the eastern european mission, mr. englund describes a recent unveiling of a three story computer in the brussels headquarters of the common market. as other articles released over the past year have done, mr. englund says, “that it has been nicknamed ‘je beast,’” and is designed to assign each world citizen a number which would be laser tatooed (sic) on the forehead or hand, a walking credit card to be used in all buying and selling [ebenezer baptist church 1975: 10]. as more and more newspapers spread the fictional story, they all seemed to confirm the existence of the beast computer. with its citation of “other articles released over the past year,” the ad clearly participated in a self-referential flow of information. very quickly, the news about the beast in brussels spread outside of the conservative protestant communities where it had originated. rulon clark allred (1906-1977), the leader of a polygamous mormon community, cited the story as proof of the prophecies of his church's founder, joseph smith (1805-1844) [allred, 1982: 115]. je alabama author mary stuart relfe (1916-2011) incorporated the beast computer in her 1981 book when your money fails: fe 666 system is here, which was swiftly abridged and translated into russian independently by apocalyptically minded immigrants [relfe 1981: 15, 42-46]. in 1981 the émigré and radical nationalist pavel vaulin (1918-2007), a professor at the university of south alabama, published a translated section of relfe’s book in his russian-language journal niva [vaulin 1981: 3-6]. by the late 1980s, russian baptists and old believers had made independent translations of parts of folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 148 relfe’s work, sending the story of the beast computer back to the soviet union through their international religious networks. in the 1980s in the region of sverdlovsk, not far from where nikolai romanov was serving his sentence for murder, old believers were writing extensively about the beast computer, drawing upon information published by their co-religionists in oregon [soboleva 1997: 211, 217; ageeva 1997: 11, 16]. je dissolution of the ussr and its marxist-leninist worldview encouraged eschatological speculation among russian orthodox christians. by 1991, after the fall of the soviet union, the nationalist and monarchist press printed versions of the beast computer story that were shared widely [akhmetova 2011: 146-148; panchenko 2015: 132-133; 2017: 81-83]. je orthodox activist and former dissident vladimir nikolaevich osipov (1938-2020) used the same story to attack russia’s new tax identification number system: “один гигантский компьютер с данными на граждан планеты находится в брюсселе (он-то и называется ‘зверь’ прямо по иоанну богослову!), другой в страсбурге” [one gigantic computer with data on the citizens of the planet is located in brussels (and it is called “the beast” – exactly as john the jeologian prophesied!), and another is in strasbourg] [osipov 2000]. sergii’s break with authority: 6 january 2020 sergii’s condemnations of allen dulles, american intelligence services, globalist supercomputers, and a dehumanizing financial system did not go beyond the views of many conservative russian orthodox christians. after all, metropolitan ioann (ivan matveevich snychev, 1927-1995) of st. petersburg had been one of the earliest publishers of the dulles plan [panchenko 2015: 125]. even sergii’s dramatic exorcisms, presented as scandalous in the tabloid press, had precedents. at the venerable trinity-st. sergius lavra, sergii’s colleague, archimandrite german (chesnokov) (who died in august 2020, a victim of the pandemic) was famous for driving out demons from the pilgrims who thronged to him. however, at the christmas eve service on 6 january 2020 (24 december 2019 in the julian calendar followed by the russian orthodox church), sergii deliberately attacked his secular and his ecclesiastical superiors, president vladimir putin and patriarch kirill (vladimir mikhailovich gundiaev, b. 1946) of moscow. dressed in the white vestments appropriate for the holiday, sergii greeted the congregation in the packed church with a hearty welcome to the celebration of the vigil for the feast of the nativity. quickly his tone grew darker as he took up several themes illustrating how far russia had fallen since joseph stalin had ruled the country [sergii 2020]. sergii began with a reference to the overton window, a concept invented by the american sociologist joseph overton (1960-2003) that describes the spectrum of acceptability of public policy options. although the overton window was originally intended as a “model for understanding how ideas in society change over time and influence politics” [mackinac center 2019], many people now see it as a means to manipulate, rather than measure, public perception. as folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 149 vice-president of the conservative mackinac center for public policy, overton believed that his center could contribute to the common good by expanding the range of acceptable policy solutions through a program of public education. politicians were unlikely to champion policies that had little support, but by bringing new solutions for social problems into civic discourse, overton hoped to provide a platform to discuss new (especially libertarian) approaches to social questions. jrough open discussion of new ideas, the overton window could be moved or widened to allow for more effective responses to common problems. perhaps influenced by the american commentator glenn beck (b. 1964), whose 2010 novel fe overton window featured a secret conspiracy bent on destroying the united states, russian social scientists have developed a much more sinister vision of the overton window as a weapon of mind control. je overton window is a technology of persuasion, according to andrei gusakov, marketing manager of dataforum llc, whose article, “технология, которая вас шокирует, но поможет сдвинуть с места мертвые продажи” [technology which shocks you, but will help you get dead sales moving] appears in the business journal kommercheskii direktor [commercial director] [gusakov 2019: 22]. likewise, a russian textbook for prison librarians defines the overton window as “технология изменения отношения общества к некогда принципиальным для этого общества вопросам как к совершенно чуждым обществу идеям” [a technology for changing the relationship of a society towards questions that were once of principal importance for that society as well as towards ideas that are completely alien to that society] [dvorianskov 2018: 14]. rather than a positive way to expand public discourse, conspiracy theorists also present the overton window as a means to manipulate the masses. by using this tool, the argument goes, one can make ideas that once seemed radical into the prevailing norm [legenda 2020 2020]. for example, some russians attribute the dramatic transformation of social attitudes toward homosexuality over the last three decades to elites who used the overton window to effect that transformation [baranchik 2014; skoblikov 2016: 81]. in his christmas eve sermon, sergii suggested that the overton window had been used to fool russians into accepting a fake putin. je real president putin, he declared, had long ago been replaced with a double. such stories about putin’s doubles began circulating soon after he became prime minister in 1999; it was said that russia’s security services employed putin look-alikes to ensure his safety, a topic of special concern during the brutal second chechen war (19992009). in 2000 the leader of the federal protection service of russia, evgenii murov nevertheless dismissed the idea of a putin double as absurd [murov 2000]. je rumors continued and became especially important when putin announced that he would run for a third term in 2012 [andreev and novinskii 2016]. for sergii, proof that putin has been replaced by his double can be seen in putin’s friendly relations with the jewish community. sergii found it shocking that putin donned the kippah, prayed at the western wall, and lit candles in a menorah in a jewish synagogue. folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 150 finally, sergii offered a full-throated defense of joseph stalin that, remarkably, reconciled the georgian dictator with the royal family that he had helped to overthrow. ignoring stalin’s history of persecuting the russian orthodox church, sergii read excerpts from the general secretary’s fictional last will and testament, created by the writer aleksandr trapeznikov as part of his 1997 novella завещание красного монарха [fe testament of the red monarch], which was also published in the right-wing nationalist newspaper zavtra [tomorrow] [trapeznikov 1997a: 59-60; 1997b]. in his roman à clef, trapeznikov represented russian history as a manichaean struggle between the judeo-masonic conspiracy and the russian order, a secret organization founded in response to the foreign masonic threat. like the tsars who had preceded him, stalin was also a member of the order. although entirely a work of fantasy, the will was republished, without reference to its original source, as an authentic historical document in 2004 in the newspaper rodnaia sibir' [native siberia] [stalin [trapeznikov] 2004], and sergii cites it as a true expression of stalin's actual convictions. je dying stalin claimed that he had never been a revolutionary and that all of his efforts were directed at protecting russia from the conspiracy of worldwide zionism. emphasizing stalin’s rapprochement with the church in 1943, sergii portrayed the first general secretary of the communist party as a defender of morality and the true faith. sergii and the pandemic broadcast over the internet on his youtube and telegram channels, sergii’s christmas eve sermon marked the beginning of the end of any positive relationship with his ecclesiastical superiors. je pandemic only heightened tensions between the radical monk and the bishops to whom he technically owed obedience. within a month after sergii’s sermon, on 31 january, two chinese nationals in siberia were the first residents of russia to test positive for the disease [komarova 2020]. authorities, both secular and religious, were slow to respond to the crisis. not until 17 march did patriarch kirill of moscow institute strict hygienic procedures, including continuous disinfection of the spoon for the eucharist, in order to satisfy state health guidelines and keep the churches open. even so, these modest steps provoked sharp criticism from conservative churchmen, many of whom denied that the life-giving sacraments could ever spread disease. president putin did not address the nation about the pandemic until 25 march and then he left the responsibility for taking sanitary measures with local leaders. as some regions instituted lockdowns, kirill encouraged orthodox believers to stay home and called on his fellow hierarchs to cooperate with state authorities for the good of all. for some, however, these measures were too late: on 5 april, the patriarchate announced that several moscow priests had fallen ill with the virus. on 21 april, the forty-eight-year-old father aleksandr ageikin was the first priest to die from the new disease, a few days after pascha (orthodox easter) [luchenko 2020]. folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 151 ageikin’s personal tragedy did not silence those who criticized the patriarch and like-minded bishops who had closed parishes to contain the spread of the virus. father sergii was particularly incensed and called on both kirill and putin to resign and to hand over all power to him. for his insubordination, church courts banned him from serving as a priest in april, defrocked him in july, and excommunicated him in september. protected by his supporters, which include right-wing mercenaries, sergii continued to operate the monastery that he founded and to broadcast his messages via the internet. however, other more responsible figures in the church also turned to conspiracy theories. on 19 may 2020, the synod of the orthodox church of moldova, the largest religious body in that country and an autonomous branch of the russian orthodox church, appealed to the moldovan government to refrain from implementing any program of compulsory vaccination against covid-19. je appeal, signed by the primate of the church, metropolitan vladimir (nicolae cantarean, b. 1952), and all seven of the church’s bishops, cited international legal norms, including chapter two, article 5, of the oviedo convention on human rights and biomedicine (1997), which made the patient’s “consimțământul liber și în cunoștință de cauză” [free and informed consent] a necessary condition for any medical intervention. at the same time, the bishops also noted several disturbing events that, in their view, fulfilled the biblical book of revelation and “proorociilor sfinților părinți” [the prophecies of the holy fathers] [orthodox church of moldova 2020: 2, 6]. for example, in a speech delivered just a few days earlier on the floor of the italian parliament, the legislator sara cunial (b. 1979) had accused bill gates (b. 1955), the american billionaire co-founder of microsoft, of crimes against humanity. gates, she claimed, had used vaccines to kill and paralyze children in india and africa [parents for healthcare rights 2020]. moreover, many others believed that the future vaccination program against covid-19 was simply part of gates’s latest evil plan: bill gates este considerat principalul responsabil pentru crearea tehnologiei de microcipare a populației, prin intermediul unui vaccin care să introducă în trup nanoparticule care reacționează la undele transmise de tehnologia 5g și permit sistemului să îl controleze pe om de la distanță [bill gates is believed to be primarily responsible for creating technology to microchip the population through a vaccine that introduces nanoparticles into the body that react to waves transmitted by 5g technology and allow the system to control humans remotely] [orthodox church of moldova 2020: 5]. je bishops suggested that gates, the hungarian-born billionaire george soros, and israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu were all part of the “globalist antichrist system,” described long ago by st. john the jeologian in revelation, the last book of the new testament. folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 152 conclusion sergii’s rebellion against the church and state took a new turn on 29 december 2020, when special forces invaded the convent, arrested sergii, and brought him to stand trial on three different charges. first, by refusing to obey his bishop and the church courts, he stands accused of illegally interfering with the activity of a religious organization. second, for the same reason, he is being brought to account for samoupravstvo [arbitrary rule]. finally, because he asked his followers in one video sermon, “and are you ready to sacrifice yourself for russia?” sergii has been accused of encouraging suicide. despite his excommunication, sergii continues to wear his clerical vestments in prison. je circumstances of his sudden arrest (which was quickly followed by the arrest of the dissident aleksei naval’nyi (b. 1976) and the mass repression of his movement) have raised concerns among both liberals and conservatives [novaia gazeta 2021]. over his 65 years, sergii has reinvented himself many times. in his first four decades, he took on the roles of soldier, policeman, cold-blooded murderer, and model prisoner. upon his release from prison in 1997, he has continued to remake himself, drawing on stories, myths, and traditions to fashion a religious trajectory from felon to ascetic saint. tying his initial vocation to one of the most revered holy objects of both russian orthodoxy and russian nationhood—the vladimir mother of god—sergii continued to seek out tangible symbols of sanctity (especially those connected with the royal romanov family) that linked him to a sacred russian past and a divine destiny. his natural gifts as an organizer and his ruthlessness in managing monastic property helped him to build his little vatican in the urals, and his ability to weave together powerful folkloric narratives and broadcast them across the world was crucial for building a nationwide following. in the end, however, sergii was unable to bridge the deep contradictions in the narratives that he told and the life that he lived. while casting out computer demons named “i-phone,” sergii promoted himself on youtube and the internet. a seminary dropout, he portrayed himself as a hesychastic master. although theoretically initiated into the deepest level of ascetic practice—the schema—he did not step away from administration of monastery property. when in january 2020, he decided to rebel against both patriarch and president, he made himself vulnerable to retaliation and removal from his convent by the authorities; only in december, nearly twelve months later, was he finally arrested. both church and state were clearly reluctant to take forceful action against sergii, for the errant monk’s struggles to define himself reflect the broader struggles of the post-soviet church to define its own identity and role. for nearly two decades, the russian orthodox church hierarchy embraced sergii. in churchproduced films, such as fe dwelling place of faith and love (2014), prominent clergy publicly celebrated sergii’s spiritual gifts and leadership. his organizational abilities apparently proved invaluable as the russian orthodox church developed a series of monastic complexes memorializing the royal family and the lost christian empire that they once led. both sergii and the church folklore and conspiracy 1eories of a covid dissenter folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 153 required a narrative to link pre-revolutionary russia with the post-soviet present. in his accounts of his initiation into the religious life, sergii took pains to make such a personal connection with the holy russia of the romanovs. drawing from narratives that were already circulating among right-wing orthodox believers, sergii also selected stories that emphasized russia’s unique eschatological role in the world (for example, as the defender of the traditional family and heteronormative sexual morality). orthodox traditionalists, such as the ekaterinburg bishop, metropolitan kirill (nakonechnyi), supported and sympathized with this aspect of sergii’s moral campaign. however, sergii went far beyond kirill’s capacity for tolerance when he styled stalin as a secret defender of orthodoxy. jis legend of the pious stalin, fashioned in the 1990s, was especially useful to post-soviet believers nostalgic both for pre-revolutionary holy russia and for stalin’s industrial and military achievements. by treating the novelist aleksandr trapeznikov’s fictional testament as a genuine historical document, sergii simply denied the conflict between stalin and his tsarist predecessors and tried to eliminate the cognitive dissonance of the twenty-first-century christian who venerated nicholas ii and celebrated joseph stalin. sergii’s vision of holy russia reconciled the soviet and imperial pasts—but at the cost of forgetting stalin’s victims. in his open letter of july 2020 to sergii, kirill—who years earlier had praised the monk for his spiritual acumen—sharply criticized him for ignoring the martyrs who had suffered at stalin’s hands [kirill 2020]. sergii’s remarkable rise and fall as an abbot illustrates both the power and limits of the narratives that he wielded in his cause. for a time, he was able to perform the role of spiritual elder and to gain the support of his ecclesiastical superiors and fellow clerics. je more difficult task of finding an acceptable and authoritative narrative that could satisfactorily reconcile the sharp contradictions between stalinist and imperial russia eluded him. je crisis of the pandemic heightened, but did not create, the tensions that already existed in his ministry. jese tensions exist in the broader church as well, which both celebrates the stalinist victory in the great patriotic war and commemorates stalin’s victims in the canonizations of new martyrs. notes 1 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(consulted 1 may 2021). zharkov, ivan danilovich. 2020. жарков, иван данилович. “экс-глава свердловской гуфсин заступился за опального отца сергия” [je former head of the sverdlovsk main administration of the federal service for carrying out punishment has interceded for the fallen father sergii]. 19 july. cited by https://www.ural.kp.ru/video/791414/. (consulted 29 april 2021). zhogolev, anton. 2009. жоголев, антон. “царский салют” [tsarist salute], благовест, 3 september. cited by http://xn--80aaaabhgr4cps3ajao.xn-p1ai/-public_page_8483. (consulted 29 april 2021). folklorica full 2021_edit 6.28.22 reviews folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 79 reviews sawin, patricia and rosemary lévy zumwalt, eds. folklore in the united states and canada: an institutional history. bloomington: indiana university press, 2020. notes. bibliography. index. 322 pp. $85 (cloth). isbn 978-0-253-052872. $35 (paper). isbn 978-0-253-05289-6. folklorists have studied the heritage and genealogy of various communities, so it is only fitting that a new history of the field of north american folkloristics should examine the genealogy of folklorists. while not quite a “biography” of the field, the 26 discrete articles in folklore in the united states and canada: an institutional history, edited and with an introduction and conclusion by patricia sawin and rosemary lévy zumwalt, examine the evolution and history of folkloristics as it evolved in 24 (mostly) graduate programs in american and canadian colleges and universities. the volume’s articles are divided into three sections. the first explores programs that emerged prior to the 1960s; the second looks at the prospering of folklore programs in the 1960s and 1970s, primarily at public canadian and american universities. this section begins with a nostalgic article by zumwalt on “‘the great team’ of american folklorists: characters large in life and grand in plans,” in which she looks at the “young turks” who became the “founding fathers” of the field in the 1960s (stith thompson, richard dorson, alan dundes, dan ben-amos et al.). the collegiality and collaboration (in spite of some notable rivalries) that built the field emerge clearly in her essay. she points out that the team of american folklorists “did not develop from one center outward but was an interconnected flow of people and ideas among centers of folklore,” each strengthening the others and being strengthened in turn (72). the third section looks at the period of innovation, reshaping, and diversity from 1980 to 2010. thus, program descriptions run the gamut from the academic degree program in folklore and mythology at harvard, established in 1967 by albert bates lord (written by rachel kirby and anthony bak buccitelli) to the recently founded (2007) community-oriented program in cultural sustainability at goucher college (amy e. skillman and rory turner). the essays reveal an enormous variety in program structures: while some folklore programs are based in a department or institute of their own, others have found a home in related disciplinary departments (notably languages, ethnology, anthropology) and interdisciplinary programs (regional and area studies). none of the essays is long, yet each provides detailed documentation about the people who created the programs and taught in them, the challenges they faced, and the accomplishments they achieved. many photographs of leaders in the field enhance the volume. no less important, the essays provide practical hints about how to win friends within the institution, get support from colleagues at other academic centers, engage in strategic thinking about program building, and negotiate with one’s own administration for a place in the curriculum. reviews folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 80 not surprisingly, given its american and canadian scope, the volume focuses primarily on regional north american, anglophone, francophone, and immigrant folklore, although many of the larger programs include international folklore. of particular interest to slavic folklorists is natalie kononenko’s essay, “from ukrainian studies to folklore on the prairies,” in which she outlines the history and achievements of the kule center for ukrainian and canadian folklore at the university of alberta. with its primary (but not exclusive) focus on ukrainian emigrants to canada, the kule center occupies a special niche in the history of folkloristics in north america. to the program descriptions the volume adds an essay on “the future out of the past” (jesse a. fivecoate, kristina downs, and meredith a. e. mcgriff). appropriately, its authors are junior scholars and members of the planning committee for the conference on the future of american folkloristics (held 1820 may 2017 at indiana university bloomington). after raising the issues that professional folklorists confront, they emphasize that “the discipline cannot speak with one voice, but that when we speak together, and to each other, we clarify visions of our future and make progress toward realizing them” (286). folklore in the united states and canada: an institutional history is comprehensive in its scope. it was written by and for scholars of folklore and related disciplines and should be read by them, on the principle that those who seek to find the path forward should know where the path led from and what has been gained (or lost) along the way. after all, not all folklore programs escaped institutional dismantlement (including major ph.d. granting programs at the universities of pennsylvania, texas at austin, and california, los angeles). folkloristics, like other fields, has had to deal with shrinking budgets, changing administrative priorities, and the corporatization of higher education. when the volume’s intended readers pick it up, they will be certain to turn first to the program where they studied and which shaped them (which this reviewer confesses she did), but they should come away from the volume with a much better sense of their own academic legacy and of the astonishing variety of academic folklore (heritage, popular culture, etc.) programs that exist in north america today. each has its own emphasis, theoretical profile, ethos, and mission, but together they have the power to be greater than the sum of their parts. the volume also reminds readers that, while folkloristics may no longer be an “emerging” discipline, the future health of the field will need constant and careful curation. maria carlson university of kansas lawrence, kansas, usa mcarlson@ku.edu folklorica full 2025 folklorica 2025, vol. xxix folklorica journal of the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association (formerly seefa journal) seefa executive board president: dorian jurić, indiana university vice-president: sarah craycraft, harvard university secretary-treasurer: shannon donnally quinn, michigan state university university board members: iryna voloshyna, indiana university benjamin gatling, george mason university folklorica editor: benjamin gatling, george mason university book review editor: laura olson osterman, university of colorado, boulder online content manager: jon giullian, university of kansas editorial board oleksandra britsyna, rylsky folklore institute, ukrainian academy of sciences maria carlson, university of kansas larisa fialkova, university of haifa linda j. ivanits, pennsylvania state university vladimir klyaus, institute of world literature, russian federation katia mikhailova, institute of folklore, bulgaria faith wigzell, ssees-university college london aleksey v. yudin, ghent university, belgium issn 1920-0234 i folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii folklorica journal of the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association 2023, vol. xxvii contents articles decoloniality and russian music: finno-ugric legacies in contemporary st. petersburg anya shatilova 1 pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom jennifer boivin 25 “i felt frightened and then i started singing”: songs at russian protest actions irina kozlova and elena levochskaya 51 reports a complete list of luka marjanović’s bosniak epics housed at hazu dorian jurić reviews 81 astapova, a., colăcel, o., pintilescu, c., and scheibner, t., eds. conspiracy theories in eastern europe: tropes and trends. kiril avramov 102 smith, alison k. cabbage and caviar: a history of food in russia. ruzhica samokovlija baruh 104 roussou, eugenia. orthodox christianity, new age spirituality and vernacular religion: the evil eye in greece. michael herzfeld 107 about seefa 111 author guidelines 112 folklorica journal of the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association volume xxiv 2020 vernacular responses to the covid-19 pandemic folklorica full 2025 reviews 120 folklorica 2025, vol. xxix amato, anthony j. the stark carpathians: ritual, text, and authority among ukraine’s hutsuls. lanham: lexington books, 2024. illustrations. maps. notes. bibliography index. xxvii+477 pp. $150 (cloth) isbn 978-1-793 6-0838-3. with his second highly original book on the hutsuls and their region, anthony j. amato is proving himself to be the most impressive american scholar of the subject. he already has authored a major work of environmental and economic history on the hutsul region, the carpathians, the hutsuls, and ukraine: an environmental history (lexington books, 2021). these two hefty and learned volumes shed a penetrating light on the vagaries of the region as a physical and economic space and on the lifeworlds and dogged agency of the fascinating highland population of the eastern carpathians (today in ukraine) known as the hutsuls. the hutsuls were for centuries a remote and relatively isolated pastoral and equestrian peasant folk dwelling in the frontier region that was the mountains, speaking an east slavic dialect related to ukrainian and professing the greek catholic faith. they also have a rich, compelling, if at times gruesome and raunchy, folklore. according to amato, the hutsul region, and not transylvania, should be credited with supplying the vampires on which bram stoker’s dracula was based. amato’s work has been informed by his profound contact with the region and its people, already visible in his 1998 dissertation “in the wild mountains: idiom, economy, and ideology among the hutsuls, 1848 to 1939,” which was based on fieldwork in seven hutsul villages: dora, holovy, hryniava, kosmach, krasnoïlia, kryvorivnia, and sheshory. instead of publishing that in lightly revised form, the author appears to have used what he learned, plus much additional reading and research, to write these two very different books. this one in particular gives evidence of a very close reading of his sources, be they archival or from the extant secondary literature, in at least seven languages and the hutsul dialect. he also proves well read in the relevant anthropological literature. the notes amount to a hundred pages, suggesting—rightly—the learned nature of the book. the book’s title encapsulates its focus well. it is a study of hutsul “culture as it was manifested in rituals and texts” in the period 1848 to 1939—that is, the period beginning with peasant emancipation under habsburg rule through the interwar years under polish rule (xiii). not easy to pigeonhole, the book is a work of ethnography, anthropology, history, and popular culture. the author demythologizes the hutsuls, claiming no particular special origins or nature for them, while still uncovering much that is novel and original. already the introduction probes the application and use of the name “hutsul” and the creation of the hutsuls as an ethnographic group, as well as the highlanders’ relation to the authorities near and far, be they habsburg or polish officialdom, greek catholic clergy, or other non-hutsuls. the first two chapters introduce the book’s thesis, the hutsuls, and the region. chapter 1 provides information on the range of sources utilized in the stark carpathians while highlighting the interplay of text and ritual to come. reviews 121 folklorica 2025, vol. xxix chapter 2 is a tour-de-force review of the history of the highland environment in which the hutsuls functioned. a veritable summary of amato’s previous book of environmental history, the chapter could stand on its own for use in an environmental history course. with intriguingly cryptic and clever titles and penetrating, often unsettling, observations, the next thirteen substantive chapters shed light on various aspects of unexpurgated hutsul life with all its rough and racy edges. the author takes an intertextual approach to the complexity of hutsul texts and rituals, which he sets in context. despite their relative isolation, as this book amply demonstrates, the hutsuls were not so isolated as to lack contact with texts, that is, with the printed as well as spoken word. the former could come in the form of terse state documents, almanacs, scientific works, ethnographic studies, belles-lettres, and newspaper and travel accounts. these texts, together with hutsul rituals, were creatively reconfigured or plumbed for new meanings by the hutsuls, in a number of instances not in keeping with the purported purpose of a given text. chapters 3 and 4 deal with the greek catholic clergy who ministered to the hutsuls. the first of these, “bisons and lutherans,” focuses on the priests and their leanings, including the russophiles (the titular “bisons”), and how the hutsuls saw them. chapter 4, “pagans and calvins,” presents the seemingly lessthan-orthodox beliefs of the lightly churched hutsuls as well as their relations with the authority that was the clergy. chapter 5, “not in our club,” interestingly investigates peasant literacy. amato debunks the myth that all hutsuls were illiterate (literacy rates were rising), while also explaining what the challenges were—and how hutsuls variously interpreted what they read. also based on hutsul readings, “astrology and folkhealing” as well as hydrotherapy—which became all the rage among tourists in the region—are the subject of chapter 6. chapter 7, “peasants, priests, and the plow” shows how conflicting messages about land cultivation were conveyed by greek catholic clergy to the hutsuls, traditionally a pastoral people. the next three chapters deal with various aspects of hutsul political life. chapter 8, “marching in the hollows,” sheds light on internal village politics and shows how highlanders joined clubs and political organizations—the most noteworthy of these being the radical gymnastics and firefighting organization known as sich. dealing with the language of politics, “don’t cry, satan” analyzes the švejk-like stereotype of the “stupid hutsul,” used by the highlanders to their advantage, as well as one of the most striking historical aspects of highland life, brigandry, which nineteenth-century hutsuls came to romanticize as the quintessence of freedom. chapter 10, “cossacks and heretics,” engages with various hutsul narratives and considers how hutsuls ultimately came to embrace the cossack heritage. the final five substantive chapters provide insight into various aspects of hutsul rituals and culture and the controversies surrounding them during this period. “vampire collusion and the ungrateful dead” covers how hutsuls dealt with vampires and witches in their midst. a thoughtful chapter 12 considers the relationship between the titular “belief and superstition.” chapter 13, “godless reviews 122 folklorica 2025, vol. xxix carols,” is a penetrating study of the hutsul tradition of caroling from house to house at christmastime. chapter 14, “playing dead,” examines the seemingly frivolous games traditionally played at wakes. and “it’s all over but the splashing” deftly deals with the gendered and generational uses and abuses of water on “drenched” or “wet” easter monday. a succinct yet insightful conclusion ties the threads together. in sum, hutsuls are shown to be the ultimate producers of their own hutsul-ness. this identity can appear inconsistent or off-putting to readers and observers. in any case, it stood apart from the stereotypes or mythologized versions of hutsuls propagated by outsiders. that said, hutsuls did not create hutsul-ness in a vacuum but rather interacted with ethnographic and other texts about them. hutsul-ness increasingly became performative. the stark carpathians is a thorough and thought-provoking analysis of hutsul lifeworlds. it should be noted that, in keeping with his field research, amato focuses mainly on the experience of hutsuls living within austrian galicia and the second polish republic, not their brethren in hungary/czechoslovakia/transcarpathia or bukovyna/romania. however, he does occasionally refer to texts that touch upon those regions. the reader interested in hutsuls, ethnography, or popular culture will be amply rewarded. this reviewer’s one major beef is with lexington books: the binding is poorly done, resulting in the occasional loose page on first turn. the book deserves better. patrice m. dabrowski harvard ukrainian research institute boston, massachusetts pmd639@g.harvard.edu microsoft word folkloricaprotest_ii_full_final_2022 07.27.22.docx reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 113 gabovich, mikhail (mischa gabowitsch), editor. pamiatnik i prazdnik: etnografia dnia pobedy (monument and holiday: an ethnography of victory day). saint petersburg: nestor-istoriia, 2020. notes. author biographies. 98 color illustrations. 416 pages. isbn 978-5-4469-1777-8. pamiatnik i prazdnik is a valuable collection of essays about victory day, which commemorates the 9 may 1945 victory of the soviets over nazi germany in the “great patriotic war,” and is celebrated in russia and by the russian diaspora. despite victory day’s prominence in the late soviet-era and its elevated significance in the post-soviet period, there is still much to learn about what this holiday meant to various populations within and bordering the soviet union between 1945 and 1991 and what it means now. under the leadership of mischa gabowitsch and elena nikiforova, an international team of scholars conducted historical research on local commemorations of victory day and then on 9 may 2013, observed the celebration of victory day ethnographically in twenty-three cities in eleven countries, from berlin to grozny. as the title “monument and holiday” suggests, the volume specifically documents commemorative practices that took place at the sites of soviet war memorials, which are often located in cemeteries or at the sites of mass graves. another central goal of the study was to counter typically moscow-centric and state-centric approaches to commemorations, fostering analyses that instead bring out the local and the transnational aspects of celebration rather than only the national aspects. the authors shift their focus away from official narratives emanating from “the center” to the concrete celebration practices of local celebrants as they interacted with the built environments and geographies of war memorials. this more democratic approach focuses on the meanings that participants in numerous cities ascribed to the commemorations, and on the “emotional regimes” that the celebrations generated at the grassroots (9). a different research team (also co-led by gabowitsch) conducted similar research in 2015 and produced a volume entitled kriegsgedenken als event: der 9. mai 2015 im postsozialistischen europa (ferdinand schöningh, 2017). the publication of pamiatnik i prazdnik was delayed by the 2014 annexation of crimea, among other reasons, but the volume is well worth waiting for. by serendipity, this volume captures a key historical moment, the celebration of the last victory day before the russian annexation of crimea transformed geopolitical relations among eastern european countries. the geographic and conceptual range of the volume is impressive; it contains an analysis of celebrations in places with a wide variety of relationships to the canonical russian/soviet version of the great patriotic war. the case studies include austria, former eastern bloc countries such as germany and bulgaria, former soviet republics such as belarus and lithuania, and the ukrainian city of sevastopol nine months before its annexation by russia. within the russian federation, the researchers studied both non-russian cities such as grozny, the capital of the chechen republic, and sortavala, in the karelian reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 114 republic, as well as moscow and saint petersburg, russian provincial cities such as rostov-on-don, and the small settlement of pervomaiskaia in tula oblast’. the diversity of these studies is one of the book’s greatest strengths. because the editors encouraged each of the researchers to focus on their own areas of interest within a set of common guidelines, there is a panoply of different theoretical constructs and a wide variety of methodologies complementing the broad geographical scope of the volume. one of the most significant conceptual contributions of the volume is its demonstration of the multi-directionality of cultural customs and influences, and the importance of “the local” in creating victory day traditions. while it is toooften assumed that customs travel from “the center” outward, these essays prove otherwise. one of the most interesting and surprising, to me at least, findings in the volume is the investigation of the claim that “on the initiative of a frontovik,” who was “the director of the local gas factory” (124), the very first eternal flame in the soviet union was lit in honor of victory day in the small settlement of pervomaiskaia in tula oblast’. the pervomaiskaia lighting occurred months, or possibly even two years, before the illumination of the well-known eternal flame on mars field in leningrad, which was dedicated for the fortieth anniversary of the october revolution in fall of 1957. the 2013 ceremony in pervomaiskaia celebrated this local history with a rebuilding and rededication of the eternal flame, asserting that this phenomenon, which later became ubiquitous at great patriotic war memorials, was a local and not a central innovation. other essays show that the core idea of what became known as “the immortal regiment” was also already being practiced in multiple locales before it was given a name by organizers in tomsk in 2012, spread widely, and then was adopted with great fanfare by moscow in 2015. because of its role in commemorating the sacrifices of millions of specific individuals, victory day holds a special place among both soviet and post-soviet holidays in the development of grassroots traditions that have the potential to spread nationally and transnationally. pamiatnik i prazdnik also shows the complicated ways in which each local celebration both continues and adapts soviet traditions, while also introducing new local, national, and transnational elements. the celebrations in minsk, for example, were particularly conservative in continuing many soviet-era elements. in other places such as sevastopol, new symbols like the “saint george ribbon,” associated in particular with contemporary russian nationalism, were distributed enthusiastically by a russian-funded organization “moscow house.” another recent phenomenon is the organized tourism of russian orthodox travelers to victory day celebrations in berlin, carrying out religious pilgrimages to commemorate the sacrifices of the soviet fallen. each participant in victory day navigates the intersection of local and personal meanings with celebratory traditions that might be brand new, or decades old, or both. these essays also allow us to think about problems of post-memory now that the war generation is nearly gone, and to see how the varied cultural, social, and political forces influencing the celebration of victory day play out on the ground. reviews folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 115 the ethnographic approach of this book offers a richness and a complexity in answering the question of what victory day means to the individuals who celebrate it – a complexity that is all too often flattened out and homogenized in the analysis of holidays and commemorations. for example, the examination of the celebration of victory day among soviet and russian emigrants to berlin documented differences in the ways that the various immigrant clubs from the cities of odessa, leningrad, baku, moscow, and kiev commemorated victory day. many of the essays also pinpoint absences and suppressed memories, such as the nature of the holocaust, the extent of collaboration with the nazis, the deportation of finnish residents from sortavala in 1944 as the soviets reoccupied the land, the abandonment of the sailors and soldiers in the 35th battery in sevastopol by the soviet leadership in july 1942, and the strained relations between belarusian partisans and the local population because of partisan looting and violence against civilians. the authors reveal a kaleidoscope of variegated participant viewpoints from their particular locales. this is the real strength of the volume. karen petrone university of kentucky lexington, ky, usa petrone@uky.edu folklorica full 2025 frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 1 “songs and laughter were heard”: frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war enes tastan the ohio state university columbus, ohio abstract during the great patriotic war, performances of music and songs were an important part of soldiers’ lives in the red army. this study examines how these songs functioned in unofficial aspects of the lives of frontline soldiers. there was a “cult of folklore” in the soviet union in the 1930s and 1940s, which meant that the depiction of folklore in film and literature was an official policy. however, the fact that such performances featured in officially sanctioned artistic works raises the question of how much was propaganda and how much reflected actual practices. to answer this question, i looked at all the references to the performances of songs in over seventy russian-language diaries and volumes of letters written by members of the soviet military. i did not use journalism to avoid propaganda, nor memoirs to avoid the problem of the transformation of memories over the years; instead, i used sources written during the war itself that reflected the everyday lives of soldiers. introduction music has always had an important role in military life across the world. it has traditionally been a part of key moments of the military experience, from campaigns to maneuvers and parades. it has served as signals, cadences, and marches performed by military bands. moreover, it has expressed the emotions of individual soldiers. not only professional soldiers but also folk musicians in the ranks have resorted to song to depict heroic sacrifices, spiritual values, and the joy of victories. in literature and films depicting the great patriotic war but made after the war, there are often scenes that show soldiers performing traditional folk or contemporary music. a very famous, well-loved example is the 1973 movie в бой идут одни “старики” [only the “old men” are going into battle]. in the film, directed by leonid bykov, an air force squadron has its own folk orchestra that performs such songs as “смуглянка” [swarthy girl]. (1) by 1944, “swarthy girl” was already being performed by the red banner ensemble as well as playing on the radio [ament 2018: 30]. many films made during the great patriotic war also have scenes of these performances. the precedent was set by the series of боевые киносборники [battle film anthologies], made in 1941–42, before the evacuated soviet film industry had the ability to create full-length feature films. these films were clearly frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 2 intended to raise public morale. in battle film anthology number 4 (released on 9 september 1941), there is a noteworthy scene towards the end of the frame narrative where soldiers in a camp perform the “донская казачья” [don cossack] folksong. (2) the actress liubov’ orlova, playing a village postmistress and reprising a role that she played in the 1938 blockbuster волга, волга [volga, volga], dances in a recognizably folk manner with one of the soldiers. while this is clearly a staged performance, the performers are not supposed to be part of a frontline entertainment unit, but rather they are ordinary soldiers with no special training who sing spontaneously as if singing folksongs were a routine activity. in fact, battle film anthology number 4, like several of the other film anthologies and later feature films made during the war, e.g., the 1943 film два бойца [two fighters], depicts performances of unofficial songs and dances by ordinary soldiers as everyday behaviors and as continuations of authentic russian and, in some cases, ukrainian folk traditions. however, the fact that the performances occur in films that were released at least in part for propaganda purposes raises a question: to what extent was the depiction of folk music performed on the front a reflection of actual practice rather than just art? the same question can be asked of nostalgic depictions of folk performances in post-war films like only the “old men” are going into battle and even of discussions of folklore in post-war memoirs. the issue of authenticity is important because, as frank j. miller [1989: ix] notes in his study, folklore for stalin, there was a statesponsored “cult of folklore”— particularly of russian folklore—in the ussr that began in the 1930s: “this cult of folklore was sufficiently hegemonic that for much of the stalin era no film could be made without a folklore episode.” (3) this article has two main goals. the first is to answer these questions empirically, by drawing on primary sources that were written during the great patriotic war by active-duty members of the soviet military, rather than written as propaganda, state-controlled literature and film, or post-war memoirs and recollections. this research shows that performances of folksongs were not merely artistic conventions but actually occurred in the lives of soldiers in the soviet army. not only was art imitating life in film and literature, but life could imitate art in a process that has been called folklorization [rothstein 1995: 82], in which works originating in elite or mass culture acquire the typical characteristics of folklore, including circulation in multiple variants, anonymity of authorship, and interpersonal performance. the second goal of this article is to examine what functions folksongs had in their original performance contexts in the lives of red army soldiers as recorded in primary sources. clearly, there was usually, if not always, an element of entertainment in these performances, but folklore performances are characteristically anchored in specific events, especially ones perceived as specially marked out from “ordinary” life [see ben-amos 1971]. this article considers who performed the songs and when, where, and why they were performed. to answer these research questions, i looked at references to the performance of folksongs—despite whether they can be classified as genuine frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 3 folklore—in over fifty russian-language diaries and volumes of letters written by members of the red army during the great patriotic war. i did not use memoirs written after the war to the avoid the potential distortions involved in memory and memorialization; i restricted myself to sources written during the war itself that reflected the everyday life of ordinary soldiers. (4) for the same reason, i did not use the diaries of generals, who would have had limited contact with ordinary camp life. though i did use diaries and letters written by voenkory [war correspondents embedded with troops], i excluded their published articles because they were written under the control of state censorship and were created partially for propagandistic purposes. that wartime journalism was written in a large part for propagandistic purposes was not unique to the soviet union; all combatant countries controlled what journalists could publish, and war correspondents were under military supervision. in this work, i emphasize the performance of songs by soldiers themselves, not by professional entertainers. during the great patriotic war, soviet officials made it a priority to provide artistic entertainment to frontline troops. for example, they created концертные фронтовые бригады [frontline concert brigades], which were magnificent vehicles to entertain troops. in these brigades, one could find almost all the performing arts. among these performances were shows that dated to prerevolutionary times, live performances, stage concerts, classical music performances, and performances that were directly ordered by the kremlin. the staff of the brigades, both men and women, came from various artistic backgrounds, including in theaters, concert halls, conservatories, the film industry, etc. [stites 1995: 126–27]. staff consisted of both volunteers and mobilized performers. the main governing body that organized these units was the союз работников искусств [the union of arts workers]. this committee from the first day of the war were given instructions by the government and military authorities to initiate performances. when the war broke out, the union of arts workers sent a letter to recruitment offices and railway stations, notifying them that artists would accompany navy and army units on the front [kuznetsova 1996: 372]. hundreds of diaries and letters from the great patriotic war have been published. to limit the material under consideration here, i took my primary sources from the online library военная литература [war literature], a noncommercial repository of military literature that has been in operation since 2001 and is rated as a “top 100” site on rambler, one of the main russian internet browsers. (5) i utilized all the available wartime sources in the “diaries and letters” section, excluding civilian and non-russian-language sources. the total number of sources came to fifty-two, although not all provided equally rich information. i conducted global searches for the following keywords in all their inflected forms: frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 4 1 instruments: балалайка [balalaika], баян [bayan], гармошка [accordion], гармонь (на гармошке) [(on the) accordion], and гитара (на гитаре) [(on the) guitar]. 2 genres: музыка [music], песенка [song], песни [songs], плач [weeping], пляски [dance], припев(ка) [refrain], причитание [lamentation], стихи [poems], строки [lines], фольклор(ный) [folklore(ic)], частушка [ditty], and четверостишие [quatrain]. 3 performance-related verbs and verbal nouns: играть [to play], исполнение [performing], исполнять/исполнить [to perform], написать [to write], напеть [to hum], певать/петь [to sing], поиграть [to play a little], плясать [to dance], сыграть [to play], спеть [to sing], and сочинить/сочинять [to compose]. 4 other: звуки [voices], катюша [katiusha], and смех [laughter]. for each “hit” in the search, i skimmed the context to determine whether the example was relevant. i copied each relevant example along with its surrounding context—usually, the entire letter or diary entry. i then did a close reading to determine who performed the songs, where and when they were performed, and why they were performed if it was stated explicitly. frontline music during the great patriotic war the great patriotic war was very productive for the arts, not only literature with more than 150 major works published during the war from 1941 to 1945 but also music [brintlinger 2012: 91]. nearly one hundred songs were composed during the first days of the war in moscow alone [sokhor 1944: 249]. songs composed during the war tended to linger in popular memory and are frequently mentioned in post-war memoirs. even before the great patriotic war, it was widely recognized that songs were vital for raising both military and civilian morale, inspiring patriotism, and unifying citizens around the state. the editor of the anthology красноармейский фольклор [red army folklore] notes that when folklorists asked an old partisan which songs had been sung in his detachment he answered, “бойцу без песни никак нельзя. с песней и умирать и голодать легче” [a warrior cannot live without a song. it is easier to die or starve when you have a song] [sidel’nikov 1938: 9]. in the 1930s, songs highlighted the country’s readiness against unnamed adversaries. for example, the 1938 song “если завтра война” [if tomorrow war comes], written by the well-known soviet poet vasiliy lebedev-kumach, was one of the most famous songs at the time: если завтра война, если враг нападет, если темная сила нагрянет, как один человек, весь советский народ за любимую родину встанет. frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 5 if tomorrow war comes, if the enemy attacks, if the dark force comes up, all the soviet people, as one man shall rise for the free motherland. this song, performed as a march, exemplifies the official 1930s’ emphasis on массовые песни [mass songs], that is songs intended for singing by large groups and expressing collective emotions at the expense of individual ones [rothstein 1995: 76]. the song additionally highlights the government’s desire to prepare soviet citizens for war that was also seen in intensified civil-defense training and in visual and verbal propaganda in the later 1930s. one such mass song was “священная война” [holy war], which was composed by a. v. aleksandrov with words by v. i. lebedev-kumach during the first two days of the war. the song, officially sponsored and used as a national anthem—“the musical emblem of the war” [rothstein 1995: 79]— was published in newspapers on 24 june, and from 26 june onwards it was customarily performed on railway platforms to troops who were being sent to the front. it also served as the daily morning wake-up call on soviet radio. it was very popular not just during but after the war as well, often eliciting strong feelings in audiences [rothstein 1995: 79]. it is well documented that “holy war” had a strong motivational effect on soviet listeners, military as well as civilian. one of the women interviewed by svetlana alexievich for her book the unwomanly face of war, who had been wounded in the first days of the conflict, recalled: i was taken to the field hospital from there. we lay on the floor next to each other. many of us got sick then i had a high fever. chills. i lay there––i cried. the door to the ward opened, the doctor says from the threshold (he couldn’t get any further, the mattresses were lying so close to each other): “ivanova has plasmodium in her blood.” me, that is. she didn’t know that for me nothing could have been scarier than this plasmodium, ever since i read about it in a textbook back in the sixth grade. and at that moment the radio played: “arise, vast country…” i heard this song for the first time then. “i’ll recover,” i thought, “and go to the front at once.” [2017: 40] yet “holy war” did not remain merely “official”; it was also performed in individual settings. another of alexievich’s informants, tamara lukyanovna torop, recalled: the war was going on. i was growing up. in the evenings papa and i sang “the internationale” and “the holy war”; papa accompanied on the accordion. when i turned eighteen, he went with me to the recruiting office. [2017: 172] frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 6 folklorists might not consider “holy war” to be a folksong; besides having known authors, it was institutionalized and officially promoted in newspapers and on the radio. it did not undergo any adaptations into new versions typical of folklore. its language is that of high rhetoric, quasi-religious rather than folksy. yet statements like torop’s suggest that it was adopted by soviet citizens as their own outside of official performance contexts in person-to-person communication, that is the essence of folklore, as ben-amos notes: for the folkloric act to happen, two social conditions are necessary: both the performers and the audience have to be in the same situation and be part of the same reference group. this implies that folklore communication takes place in a situation in which people confront each other face to face and relate to each other directly. [1971: 12–13] songs that undeniably meet these folkloristic criteria for folksongs were quick to appear. the song “двадцать второго июня, ровно в четыре часа” [on the twenty-second of june, at exactly four o’clock] was first documented in the fall of 1941 [rothstein 1995: 77]. even here, the tune was taken from a pre-war popular love song, “синий платочек” [the blue kerchief]. significantly, as rothstein points out, this earliest known folksong of the war was an expression not of mass but of individual emotions. soon after the beginning of the war, lyric songs—that is, songs expressing individual emotions rather than the collective spirit of 1930s “mass songs”— gained new acceptance: “on the twenty-second of june” exemplifies the “interactive” character of the wartime repertoire: songs by professional composers and lyricists provoked responses and reworkings, and old melodies acquired new texts written by (often anonymous) amateur poets. world war ii was a time when the soviet concept of “mass songs” (massovye pesni), songs for the masses, took on the new meaning of songs by the masses. [rothstein 1995: 77]. this change of emphasis was already recognized during the war. in february 1942, aleksei surkov, a well-known poet and the author of numerous articles on poetry and songs, wrote, “песни хочется не только распевать песни хочется и напевать” [you don’t always want to sing songs at the top of your lungs. you also want to hum them, in private] [rothstein 1995: 94]. surkov also observed that, since the start of the war, even published (i.e., state-controlled) poetry was focused more on individual feelings, expressed in a lyrical manner and emphasizing the individual side of front-line folklore [rothstein 1995: 87]. one of the main characteristics of folklore is variation; its anonymity leads to a sense of collective ownership [brunvand 1998: 12]. thus “on the twentysecond of june” quickly developed numerous variants. the same is true of another iconic song of the war, “katiusha” written in 1938 by mikhail isakovskii. this song is not originally a folksong, although it draws on both the musical and verbal frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 7 motifs of genuine folksongs; it is about a greeting sent by a young girl, katiusha, to her beloved who is serving as a border-guard in a distant region. katiusha asks her beloved to guard their motherland just as she protects their love. in the years before the war, “katiusha” was one of the most popular pieces of soviet popular music, and it was perceived by the soviet public as “one of their own” [rozanov 1964: 310)]. during the war, it underwent full “folklorization”; the folklorist rozanov collected over fifty variants [rothstein 1995: 78]. soldiers sang not just on the front but also in hospitals. because the wounded often belonged to different units, their contacts with fellow patients gave them opportunities to transmit tunes and lyrics via the folk interpersonal transmission process. wounded soldiers, when they were recovering, also had more time for leisure, including music and verse. to be sure, it was rare for soldiers to sing publicly because hospitals enforced a regime of quiet, except when official concert brigades came to entertain wounded soldiers. music, both public and private, helped soldiers overcome the trauma of combat [pushkarev 1995: 35]. a vivid depiction of the value that music could have on patient morale is found in the memoirs of v. viazovskii: shvachko [a severely wounded soldier] asked the surgeons in a muted tone, “allow me to sing before the operation, to ease my soul. have them bring the guitar.” what he asked for was unusual; however, his request was granted as a very rare exception. they brought the guitar and he, nearly in a whisper, sang several lines from the song about the motherland: “great is my motherland…” shvachko died on the operation table.” [1978: 27] posidelki as a traditional context for folksongs and dances, the posidelka was a seasonal form of youth gathering in the autumn-winter time. ostensibly, posidelki were convened for certain types of collective work among unmarried girls of a village, but everyone understood that the unmarried young men of the village would show up sooner or later, uninvited, to socialize and customarily bring treats and musical instruments. these events usually included jokes, flirtation, games, singing, and dancing, as well as unsupervised courting. typically, they were held in empty cottages, borrowed or rented buildings, or the front rooms of bathhouses [uzenëva 2009: 196–197]. posidelki were characteristically cheerful, often rowdy events. to go with that atmosphere, participants often performed chastushki—humorous or satirical songs in colloquial language. thus is a very popular genre, recorded from the nineteenth century to the present by anonymous authors and circulated via the interpersonal contact characteristic for folklore. chastushki can be a poetic way of responding to current events, so they are often narrative in character. however, they can also include second-person pronouns and satirize the behaviors of members of the audience. structurally, they consist of one or more quatrains in an frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 8 abab rhyme pattern; each line generally has a maximum of four stressed syllables. the songs are typically performed loudly in a fast tempo, often with the accompaniment of an accordion, guitar, or balalaika [lazutin 1975: 444-445]. the words can be traditional or improvised on traditional models to fit the occasion. (6) however, chastushki are not always sung at the top of one’s lungs; they can also be read as poetry without any musical accompaniment [kviatkovskii 1966: 334]. this may be the case for some of the front-line transmissions that are mentioned in diaries or letters without any details about their performances. as z. vlasova [1963: 149] notes, the subject matter of chastushki varies, but the genre is characteristically a means of expressing a performer’s own perspectives. thus, even though they are not lyrical, chastushki during the time of the great patriotic war provide a good example of re-focusing on individual experiences, as mentioned above, because chastushki can vividly convey emotions aroused by the events of war. the performance of chastushki in wartime conditions is documented in one of the diaries of timofei sergeevich liadskii, a fighter pilot who received the highest military honor, hero of the soviet union, in 1945. liadskii was born in kirovohrad oblast (now ukraine) in 1913; he began his postsecondary studies in leningrad but soon transferred to the military aviation school in engels. skilled in flying several types of aircraft, he was sent to the front in 1942 and flew a total of 185 combat missions. after the war, he lived in vitebsk and worked in transport aviation at the local airport. he died in 1995. liadskii began keeping a diary in may 1942, when he was stationed on the kaliningrad front, and stopped in may 1945, the month of the victory in czechoslovakia, where some of the final battles of the war were fought. his diaries, first published in 2001, report a long series of events, often very similar, juxtaposed with the impressions and emotions of a sensitive man longing for peace and home [liadskii 2001]. as recounted by liadskii, the everyday life of pilots alternated between monotony and danger. they had to fly combat missions in often challenging weather conditions. if they were shot by enemy anti-aircraft guns or fighter planes, they could burn up in mid-air or be maimed or killed in crash landings or parachute jumps, after which they could be captured by the enemy. constantly facing violent death, pilots often expressed fatalistic opinions, some of which liadskii quotes. we read in his diaries that, when fighter pilots received their pay, they immediately sent it to their families or loved ones or else quickly squandered it in bouts of partying. the reason was simple: tomorrow, the money might not be needed because death was hovering around them. while the tone of liadskii’s diaries is mostly dark, at times he recounts how the members of his unit spent their time in cheerful gatherings. on 13 december 1942, on the kaliningrad front, he and his friends attended what was clearly a posidelka, held despite wartime hardship. liadskii portrays the posidelka as a very cheerful event and depicts the scene in a detailed way, even mentioning how local attendees were dressed. evidently, he wanted to emphasize the “folksiness” of the gathering as inside the cottage, several teenagers and younger children were seated on the floor. (7) most wore traditional peasant clothing—kozhukhi frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 9 [sheepskin jackets] and valenki [felt boots]. only a few had modern shoes, acquired in visits to the city, and only one of the girls was wearing a dress that was not homemade. an older man with an accordion was playing music, and some of the girls were dancing in a folk style. soon some of the girls began singing a chastushka. the words had a non-narrative and comic character, bantering with the soldiers about their stinginess—evidently, they failed to bring the treats expected on such occasions—and their attempts to romance the girls. liadskii provides no information about the author of the chastushka; it may have been improvised for the occasion, following traditional models: здравствуйте, военные, как вы поживаете? все девчата говорят, что плохо принимаете... он военный, он военный, он военный—непростой. он на севере—женатый, а на юге холостой. [liadskii 2001] hello, soldiers how are you doing? all the girls say, that you’re not good at playing host... he’s a soldier, he’s a soldier, he’s a soldier, not an ordinary guy. in the north—he’s married, and in the south—he’s a bachelor. what we see in this entry in liadskii’s diary is a fully traditional event; the peasant girls (and, presumably, their visitors) seem to be behaving just as their ancestors might have in the 1880s. the verses show that some of the folklore experienced by frontline soldiers was traditional and pre-soviet even under wartime conditions. additional evidence for the performance of chastushki in frontline conditions can be found in a 1942 entry in the diaries of pavel luknitskii, who worked as a special war correspondent for the state news agency tass. from 1941 onwards, he participated in the defense of leningrad and then in counterattacks. in the blockade of leningrad, he participated not only in military operations, but he also interacted with civilians suffering extreme hardships. in the 1960s, he complied his frontline diaries and published them under the title ленинград действует [leningrad acts]. (8) luknitskii wrote his diaries in a factual rather than impressionistic manner, as he himself states in the introduction, frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 10 and provided a tremendous number of details, not just about battle scenes, but also about the everyday lives of the heroic defenders of the city. luknitskii discusses the performance of a chastushka in his entry for 7 october 1942 [1971]. at that time, he was stationed on the leningrad front; he was embedded in the nevskiy operational group during the sinyavino offensive. the audience for the chastushka performance included infantrymen and female anti-aircraft gunners of the thirteenth battery. they had gathered for a ceremony in which the commanding officer, major zengbush, read a letter commending the unit and announced the promotion of several of its members, starting with the battery officer platov, who had recently shot down his tenth airplane. while the event was an official ritual, zengbush himself set the tone for a transition to more informal interactions, as he personally embraced and kissed those being promoted. after the commander, batia [daddy], left, the attendees continued to celebrate on an unofficial footing, and the event began to be reminiscent of a peasant posidelka with young women and men socializing together. the chastushka that luknitskii cites was more suitable for the celebratory atmosphere than a somber, lyrical song would have been. unlike the chastushki recorded by liadskii above, this song was new rather than traditional; the words were composed by luknitskii himself, but they were also performed in an entirely folkloric manner, spontaneously and from memory, by the unit cook and gunner dusya, whose “cunning eyes were sparkling” [luknitskii 1971]. luknitskii provides no information about the tune to which it was sung. the chastushka, which is written from the perspective of a woman, is a narrative of individual experience; it does not focus on the official “heroes” of the occasion but instead on the courage of a rank-and-file female anti-aircraft gunner who did not receive a medal. he writes: первый раз дошла до фронта, но бояться не пришлось, столько фрицев с небосклона в землю носом сорвалось! из отечественной пушки научилась я стрелять, навалила у речушки пикировщиков штук пять. если в сене есть иголка, все равно ее найду! от зенитного осколка фрицы с неба упадут! ехал гад на самолете, да нарвался на стрелка, коль ты гад—лежи в болоте, frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 11 а не лезь под облака! катит он илья-пророком, по-над тучей, в город мой, да пришлëпнется он боком к ленинградской мостовой! [luknitskii 1971] it was her first time at the front, but there was no need to be afraid, so many fritzes went nose-first from the heavens to the earth! from our cannon of the fatherland, i learned how to shoot, by the stream, i downed some dive-bombers, about five of them. if there’s a needle in the haystack, i’m still going to find it. from the battery’s shrapnel, the fritzes are falling from the sky! the vermin came in an airplane, and got ripped apart by our fire. if you’re vermin, stay in the swamp. don’t crawl up to the clouds! there he goes like elijah the prophet, above the storm clouds, to my city; let him get smashed up sideways, onto the leningrad pavement! dusya performed the chastushka in a ritualized and collective context. while singing, she “grabs the shoulders of the first soldier that she comes across and starts dancing with him,” again as would be likely to happen at a peasant posidelka [luknitskii 1971]. there is no hierarchy during this event; the cook and, probably, other members of the battery sing and dance with the infantrymen, regardless of rank. folklorists previously used the term “fakelore,” coined by richard dorson in 1950, to deprecate writings by professional authors that are presented to the public as examples of folk creations but do not meet most of the criteria for defining authentic folklore––transmitted traditionally, passed by word of mouth over time, typically anonymous, and informally shared. nevertheless, contemporary folklorists have examined fakelore itself as a reflection of traditional culture and have shown that it can function as a substitute for the real frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 12 thing in times of need [brunvand 1997: 6]. this is clearly the case for luknitskii’s chastushka, written at the front for frontline combatants. although a member of the intelligentsia, luknitskii understood the appropriate structure, tone, and style required by the folk genre, and his composition was accepted and performed as a “real” chastushka, no different from the traditional ditties that the participants of the event might had heard in their pre-war lives. rites of passage during the great patriotic war, songs and poems were also performed during rituals, both official and improvised. occasions of both kinds can be seen in entries from the wartime diaries of dmitri alekseyevich shcheglov. shcheglov was a member of the soviet intelligentsia. he was born in 1898, and his father was a military doctor; during the october revolution, he worked as a messenger in smolnyi and then served in the baltic fleet (one of the hotbeds of revolutionary fervor) until 1925. a playwright, shcheglov was the author of the plays пурга [blizzard], побег [escape], and девичье озеро [maiden lake], among others. when the war started in 1941, he volunteered to join a fighter battalion; later in the war he worked in the political department of the army. he also participated in combat missions ranging from leningrad to berlin. one ritual, which shcheglov vividly describes in his diary, is as a rite of initiation. the ceremony took place on the leningrad front on 21 january 1942 [shcheglov 1960]. about two hundred soldiers—the entire regiment, including the commanders—assembled in a tight formation on a lawn surrounded by a “grey forest.” as the day was very cold, they were dressed in jackets, valenki, and fur caps with earflaps. the atmosphere, as described by shcheglov, was “proud and official” rather than intimate. the ceremony began with a greeting speech from the head of the red army political department, pankov. after this, there was a switch to a more personal focus, as sergeant major ivan dmitrievich vezhlivtsev, a famed sniper who was soon thereafter awarded the order of hero of the soviet union, shared his experiences on the front. (9) then the entire assembly collectively recited an “клятва истребителей” [oath of the destroyers] in verse. this was not the standard soldier’s oath “военная присяга” [military oath], recited individually by all recruits to the red army before being trained or even receiving a uniform in a ritual that initiated them into military status. according to shcheglov, he and poet lev levin received orders to write a new oath for the soldiers graduating from sniper training. following vezhlivtsev’s speech, the oath was performed collectively—not individually, like the basic military oath—with the initiates repeating after shcheglov himself. after taking the oath, the soldiers threw their fur hats in the air with exclamations of “hurrah.” finally, the political director, with tears in his eyes, closed the ritual by shouting the slogan “вперед, на победу” [forward, to victory]. this performance is a clear example of a rite of passage initiating participants into a new status. according to the anthropologist victor turner, frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 13 during times of social displacement, rites create comradeship as well as a sense of the sacred. turner calls the solidarity created in rituals communitas (latin for community). communitas is necessary for establishing a person’s position in a social structure, which involves the recognition of generalized bonds and social ties within the commune [turner 1969: 360]. thus, when shcheglov read the sniper’s oath, echoed by the initiates, he felt, as he records in his diary, “excitement and an uncommon feeling of love for all those soldiers” [shcheglov 1960: 266]. he praises the success of this work on the morale of the collected soldiers—that is, its effect in creating communitas. it is particularly significant that shcheglov and levin composed the oath in verse in what shcheglov calls “былинным стилем” [byliny style]. byliny is a genre of russian folk epic—verse legends about knights and heroes (богатыри) and historical events in medieval times [kviatkovskii 1966: 68]. central to byliny are images of heroes endowed with remarkable strength or skills, admirable moral qualities, and self-sacrificing devotion to the motherland. because of this, byliny are probably more important to russian national identity than any other form of folklore. shcheglov and levin’s use of an ancient epic form followed established precedents. in the pre-war period, folksingers, with the encouragement of the state, began composing patriotic works in traditional styles; their main emphasis was russia’s high military position in the historical context. when the war started, these folk poets joined the war effort by composing and performing new byliny [miller 1990: 14-15]. in the given example, shcheglov celebrates heroism in the soviet union by using the traditional byliny style. the new bylina with its ancient style and subject-matter was intended to inspire its audience with a sense of belonging to a grand tradition. the event that shcheglov describes had the function of a ritual of initiation—a rite of passage in which the community symbolically took initiates out of their old status as plain soldiers so that they could be reborn into their new status and transformed into a select group of heroes. shcheglov’s choice of the byliny form was very timely. the most famous byliny depict feats of valor by the heroes dobrynia nikitich, ilia muromets, and alesha popovich [miller 1990: 15]. in the early days of the great patriotic war, these ancient heroes were mobilized in official propaganda for the war effort. the resurgence of the heroes’ theme was undoubtedly inspired, in part, by stalin’s reference to medieval russian heroes in his speech on red square on 7 november 1941: let the courageous image of our great ancestors –– alexander nevsky, dimitry donskoy, kuzma minin, dimitry pozharsky, alexander suvorov, mikhail kutuzov inspire you in this war! let the victorious banner of the great lenin fly above you!” [1997: 86] stalin’s words were quoted on several posters featuring the “great ancestors” as ghost warriors inspiring or fighting alongside red army troops. the theme of frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 14 the “great ancestors” could be explicitly juxtaposed with references to the heroes of folklore. shcheglov’s verse oath has a narrative and serious character. it incorporates motifs and phrases from actual byliny. in its conclusion, it makes each initiate into an embodiment of the trio of knights muromets, nikitich, and popovich: подымайтесь, советские витязи! наши славные добрыни никитичи, ильи муромцы да алеши поповичи! стойте крепко грудью могучею за добро и за ласку великую, за привольные нивы родимые! размахнись рука саблею острою, бей по недругу, пуля меткая! не стоять врагу на родной земле, не топтать цветов, не сжигать домов, не затмить ему солнца нашего! [shcheglov 1960: 266] arise, soviet knights! our glorious dobrynia nikitiches, ilya murometses, and alesha popoviches! stand firm with your mighty breasts, for good and for our great love, for our vast native fields! hand, swing the sharp sabre. strike at the enemy, bullseye bullet! the enemy will not stand on our native land, not trample its flowers, not burn its homes, he will not eclipse our sun! in his diary, shcheglov records a more spontaneous rite of passage that also involves verse. on 25 november 1941, he received an order recalling him from his battalion, which was at the time stationed on the leningrad front near the neva river. the next day was to be his last at the front. unable to sleep, he tried to get out of his trench, but he immediately dropped down because an enemy shell exploded nearby. he called to the second unit and told them he wanted to say goodbye to his friends, if possible. in a wide field that contained the ruins of a forest, there was a path that branched out to all the other units and platoons. shcheglov’s fellow servicemen lobasov and ulyanov and the political instructor mironchik waited for him there. they immediately set out for to a zemlyanka [dugout] in the snow-covered forest. shcheglov spoke briefly about the circumstances of his departure and his desire to create a gathering for a farewell— in other words, to implement a ritual of leave-taking. saying goodbye in life-and-death situations tends to be fraught with emotion and ritual significance. during the farewell gathering, shcheglov’s friend frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 15 lobasov poured tea. then mironchik raised a toast with a glass of wine. drinking together often features in rites of passage, both as a symbolic form of sharing in the new state and as a symbolic form of separation from the old state [van gennep 1960: 29]. as shcheglov describes it, mironchik suddenly lowered his glass and began singing in a ritualistic manner, in an enthusiastic and slightly “naive” manner [shcheglov 1960: 236]. presumably, shcheglov uses the word naivnost′ [naiveté] to signal that the style of singing was simplistic, different from polished, professional performances. над балтикой серой холодные ветры, осенние тучи кружат. ты помнишь, товарищ, боев километры к победе ведут ленинград. такого, как он, не найдешь ты на свете, он––город сражений, он––город-герой. в нем матери, жены и малые дети с надеждой следят за тобой. [shcheglov 1960: 236] over the grey baltic blow cold winds, autumn clouds encircle it. you remember, comrade, kilometers of fights, led leningrad to victory. you won’t another city like it in the world. it is a city of battles. it is a hero of a city. in it, your mothers, wives, and little children, are following you with hope. after mironchik finished singing, shcheglov reports, nobody said anything for a while; they drank in silence (a typical marker at ritual boundaries). this suggests that each listener was immersed in his own world of emotions, sharing in the rite. shcheglov broke the silence by asking mironchik whether the poem was his own work. he acknowledged that it was and added that shcheglov could now depart with good emotions. in sum, the shared event described by mironchik became an improvised rite of passage, marking shcheglov’s departure from the collective to a new social status. compare the russian rite of присесть на дорогу [sitting for the journey], when a traveler is about to depart for a long term, that also involves an obligatory period of silence. although many older folkways were gradually disappearing in the soviet union, there was a constant need to create new rituals; songs and verses were typical markers that separated an occasion as ritual rather than as part of the everyday. “frontline folklore” and folklorization frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 16 in several of the diaries that i investigated, authors mention texts that they themselves call “frontline folklore,” in recognition of the fact that these new texts were being transmitted by traditional means, just like folklore. one poignant example of such a text is detailed in a letter written by lieutenant nikolai chekhovich to his fiancée shura on 23 january 1944 and published by one of the foremost state publishers, молодая гвардия [young guard] in 1945 [chekhovich 1945:90]. the 23 january letter to shura, sent from the leningrad front, was the last that chekhovich was able to write for himself; he was seriously wounded the next day and died soon thereafter in a military hospital. chekhovich writes in detail about his preparations for an attack planned for the next day. he says that, if he survives the battle, he will tell shura all about it in detail. he also tells her that he will be carrying her last letter with him into battle: и если мне суждено пройти невредимым сквозь огонь штур¬ма, оно пройдёт вместе со мной. ощущение его в кармане наполняет сердце радостью и еще больше воодушевляет меня. [chekhovich 1945: 91] and if i am fated to go unharmed through the fire of the storm, [the letter] will go with me. feeling it in my pocket fills my heart with joy; even more, it inspires me. this reminds chekhovich of a frontline song, which he proceeds to quote: в грудной карман зеленой гимнастерки вложил я трижды читанную весть и в бой пошел на штурм немецких дзотов, неся на сердце и любовь и месть! твое письмо прибавило мне силы, оно придало мужества в бою. я сквозь огонь фашистов ураганный пронес в кармане весточку твою [chekhovich 1945: 91-92] into the pocket of the green tunic [it went] i put the message i had read three times and into battle to storm the german pillbox went i, carrying both love and revenge in my heart! your letter gave me strength. it gave me courage in battle. i [went] through the hurricane of fascist fire. while i had your message in my pocket. the song quoted by chekhovich recalls a romantic song from konstantin simonov’s famous 1941 poem “wait for me,” which was adapted as a popular song and inspired countless wartime love poems [rothstein 1995: 84]: frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 17 жди меня, и я вернусь, всем смертям назло. кто не ждал меня, тот пусть скажет––повезло! не понять неждавшим, им, как среди огня ожиданием своим ты спасла меня. как я выжил,––будем знать только мы с тобой,–– просто ты умела ждать, как никто другой! [simonov 1949: 159-160] wait for me and i’ll come back, escaping every fate! “just a lot of luck!” they’ll say, those that didn’t wait. they will never understand how, amidst the strife, by your waiting for me dear, you had saved my life! only you and i will know how you got me through! simply––you knew how to wait! no one else but you! chekhovich is our only source for this “слова фронтовой песенки” [little frontline song] [chekhovich 1945: 91]. the context in which it was communicated was an informal, shared event; chekhovich sang it along with his soldiers. the motivation for this song is compelling. the author says that he is ready to do anything and go anywhere with these soldiers. in a sense, this song and its collective performance give him a strong motivation. it inspires not just his individual emotions but a sense of communitas. it is worth emphasizing that the officer is singing the folksong along with his enlisted men without any notion of hierarchy. another reference to frontline folklore occurs in the diaries of a young soldier with the extraordinary name of elektron evgen’evich priklonskii [2008]. born in 1924, priklonskii began his diary while studying at the chelyabinsk tank technical school (june 1942–early 1943) at the age of 18, in june 1942 and continued it through victory day (8 may 1945). he describes months of intense fighting in difficult living conditions, often experiencing half-starvation, but he also praises the professionalism of his instructors who trained students to fight on the front. later, priklonskii served as a lieutenant in a unit of the самоходная артиллерийская установка [self-propelled motorized artillery] and took part in many combat missions on the territory of the soviet union, latvia, ukraine, frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 18 estonia, poland, and germany. he recounts how he had to change tanks and units repeatedly and how he lost comrades. despite these traumatic events, priklonskii’s style is not melancholy but instead full of subtle humor. in his diary entry for 2 august 1943, while on the belgorod front, priklonskii describes a spontaneous performance of folksongs after dinner. one of the tanks was encircled by several others. from that direction came the sound of an accordion, and singing and whistling could be heard. these unfamiliar songs grabbed his attention. priklonskii came closer so that he would not miss a word of one song, which he describes as “песня была танкистская, из фронтового фольклора” [a tank song from frontline folklore] [priklonskii 2008]. the song has a serious, narrative character: прощай, родная, не забудь. проводят нас в последний путь. слышна команда: «заводи!» разрывы встали впереди… [priklonskii 2008] farewell, dear and don't forget [me]. we are about to set off on our final journey. the command is heard: “start the engines!” explosions are rising ahead… priklonskii says that the mood of the song was sad and drawn out, which reminded him of an old miner’s song about a young horse driver who died in a mine collapse. priklonskii gives moving details about the overall atmosphere: the servicemen had strong and stern voices, the field darkened, the black helmets of the tank crews, the heavy dark blocks of tanks, a scarlet sunset, moving tanks, uncovered barrels of tank guns, and nearby rumbling artillery. all this together made an impression on him. his commander, petya kuznetsov, was lost in his thoughts, standing next to the gun, and leaning on the gun turret. he stubbed out his cigarette, hiding it in his fist. the song transfixed the young priklonskii for a while; then he returned to his duties as new orders arrived for the next day’s battle. while priklonskii writes that he was unfamiliar with this song, it is in fact a frontline remaking of an old miner song entitled “молодой коногон” [young konogon], which dates to pre-revolutionary times and is an adaptation of a version of song entitled “по полю танки грохотали” [tanks rumbled across the field]. in other words, “tanks rumbled across the field” is based on the same “konogon.” the song begins with the line “гудки тревожно загудели” [sirens began to buzz anxiously], so the song is often referred to by this line. the word konogon means driver of a horse that pulls a trolley in a coal mine [ushakov 1935]. the song “young konogon” became well known when it was sung in the 1939 film большая жизнь [a great life] directed by leonid lukov and starring boris andreev and mark bernes. (10) the film is about a small donbass miner’s settlement in the 1930s. in the movie, the song is sung by a character named frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 19 makar liagotin, performed by lavrentii masokha, who plays the tune on an accordion. the significance of this example is that the song began as miners’ folklore, was made famous by a film, and then was re-folklorized in various adaptations during the great patriotic war. folklorization was a widespread phenomenon [rothstein 1995: 82]. non-folklore forms easily became folkloric when transmitted repeatedly in wartime conditions, especially when these texts were drawn from soldiers’ memories. soldiers could recite poetry—their own or published—or sing songs from popular culture, but the contexts of these performances did not differ significantly from those in which they sang folksongs. conclusions amateur performances, including those of folksongs, were an important part of life in the red army, not just in official propaganda. these folksongs expressed diverse emotions, ranging from cheerfulness and optimism to lyrical feelings and longing for families and loved ones at home. singing folksongs gave strength to weary soldiers and helped them keep faith in an ultimate victory. at the same time, the songs fulfilled functions that were not individual but rather communal and collective, making the songs more resemble folkloric performances. this was true not only for actual folksongs, such as chastushki, but even for works by wellknown composers. the way that soldiers used the songs at the front belies any clear difference between folklore and popular culture in the process known as folklorization [rothstein 1995: 82]. the process of folklorization, i.e., the remaking, making variations, or adapting songs, changed the text, melody, or tunes to which they were sung. considering that these songs spread through oral tradition, by means of word of mouth, rather than through press or publication, demonstrates how folklorization allowed songs to resonate with large masses and effectively address soldiers’ feelings [rothstein 1995: 82–83]. in the context of wartime performances, no clearcut boundary existed between folklore texts and songs from popular culture or between musical pieces and spoken verse. soldiers recited esenin and sang songs from pre-war movies and popular broadcasts, but in so doing they turned those poems and songs into their own folklore. notes 1 “swarthy girl” is not actually a folksong but rather a popular song with music and lyrics that imitate folk music. however, in the setting of the film it is transmitted and performed like a folksong. 2 the lyrics of the song were written and published by the poet andrei ugarov in 1940 in a style imitating folklore. ugarov was the pseudonym of iosif itskok-aizikovich ostropol’skii. frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 20 3 throughout his book, miller emphasizes that many of the texts in this cult of folklore were actually “fakelore—popularized adaptations of folk art” [1989: ix]. i argue in this paper that fakelore was used in the contexts of performance just like actual folklore, so that the distinction is too blurred to be maintained. 4 merridale [2006: 195–97] discusses how songs were “beloved” by red army soldiers, but all the sources that she cites are either memoirs or second-hand accounts. 5 for the history and statistics of the site, see https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/военная_литература_(сайт), consulted 27 october 2023. 6 for example, a journalist writing on 7 august 1942 from demjansk, near novgorod, recounts how red army soldiers mocked the propaganda broadcast by “baron von busch” (general ernst busch of the wehrmacht 16th army) in the form of a chastushka: “наши бойцы сочинили не очень благозвучную, но зато правильную частушку” [our warriors have composed a not very euphonious but nonetheless correct chastushka]. “у фон буша рожа бита —мы отметили бандита” [von busch has had his ugly mug beaten; we’ve put our mark on the bandit] [solonitsyn 1986]. the title of that collection, for the sake of life on earth is a quote from the war correspondent and poet alexander tvardovsky’s “vasilii tërkin,” a depiction of an everyman soldier that circulated widely among troops during the war. 7 the inclusion of pre-teen children is a non-traditional element here, as posidelki were traditionally held by village youth, i.e., young people who had been recognized by society as of marriageable age. 8 the three volumes of luknitskii’s diaries were published separately in 1961, 1964, and 1968 and in a single volume in 1971. 9 shcheglov mentions earlier in his diary entry for 13 december 1941 that vezhlivtsev was already the subject of frontline folklore, as the hero of а song circulated by “безыменные солдатские поэты” [nameless soldier poets]. 10 “a great life” was a big success in 1940 with 18.6 million viewers; the director was awarded the stalin prize. bibliography abramson, b.p. 2011. абрамсон б. п. дневник войны [diary of war]. публ., вступ. и прим. и. комаровой // звезда. 2011(8). agafonov, y. p. 2001. агафонов ю. п. солдатский треугольник. великая отечественная война в судьбах зауральцев [soldier’s triangle. the great patriotic war in the lives of the trans-urals residents]. шадринск: исеть. alekseev, m. n. 1986. алексеев м. н. тетрадь, начатая под сталинградом. очерк, наследники: повести. воен. дневник [notebook, started near stalingrad. essays, heirs: stories. war diaries.] м.: досааф. frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 21 alexievich, svetlana. 2017. the unwomanly face of war: an oral history of women in world war ii. new york: random house. ament, suzanne. 2018. sing to victory! song in soviet society during world war ii. brighton: academic studies press. avericheva, s. p. 1966. аверичева с. п. дневник разведчицы [diary of a spy]. ярославль: верх.-волж. кн. изд-во. ben-amos, dan. 1971. “toward a definition of folklore in context,” journal of american folklore 84(331): 3–15. biriukov, n. i. 2005. бирюков н. и. танки—фронту! записки советского генерала [tanks to the front! notes of a general]. смоленск: русич. brintlinger, angela. 2012. chapaev and his comrades: war and the russian literary hero across the twentieth century. boston: academic studies press. brunvand, jan harold. 1997. the study of american folklore. new york: w.w. norton. bunin, i. a. 1988. бунин и. а. дневники 1939–1945 гг. 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(из дневников сигнальщика с ледокола «суур-тылл») [kronstadt–tallinn–leningrad. the war in the baltic in july 1941–august 1942 (from the diaries of a signalman from the icebreaker suur-tyll)]. спб. turner, victor. 1969. the ritual process: structure and anti-structure. chicago: aldine publishing. uranova, s. s. 1967. уранова, с. с. четыре года в шинели: фронтовой дневник художницы [four years in an overcoat: the frontline diary of an artist]. м.: олма-пресс. ushakov, d. n. 1935–40. ушаков д. н. толковый словарь [explanatory dictionary] м.: огиз. uzenëva, e. s. 2009. узанева, е. с. “посиделки” [evening gatherings]. славянские древности. этнолингвистический словарь. 4: 116–200. van gennep, arnold. 1960. the rites of passage. chicago: university of chicago press. varganova, v. v., (ed.). 1988. варганова, в. в. русские народные песни [russian folksongs]. м.: правда. vernadskii, v. i. 1995. вернадский, в. и. “коренные изменения неизбежны...” дневник 1941 года [“fundamental changes are inevitable…” diary 1941.], новый мир 5: 176-221. viazovskii, v. v. 1978. вязовский, в. в. дни фронтового госпиталя [days of the frontline hospital]. волгоград. vishnevskii, v. v. 2002. вишневский, в. в. ленинград. дневники военных лет [leningrad. diaries of the war years]. м.: воениздат. vladimirov, p. p. 1973. владимиров, п. п. особый район китая. 1942–1945 гг. [special region of china. 1942-1945]. м.: издательство агентства печати новости. vlasova, z. i. 1963. власова, з. и. “частушки” [chastushki]. русский фольклор великой отечественной войны, 149–94. zimin, v. v. 1990. зимин, в. в. художник на войне фронтовой дневник и рисунки [frontline diary and drawing of an artist at war]. свердловск: средне-уральское книжное издательство. folklorica 2016 folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 60 leland, charles godfrey. the hundred riddles of the fairy bellaria. jack zipes, ed. minneapolis, london: university of minnessota press, 2018. introduction. note on the text. author and editor’s biographical. 7–169. $24.95 (hardcover). isbn: 978-1-5179-0608-5 charles godfrey leland (1824–1903) was an american writer, journalist, and folklorist. in popular culture, he became famous for his humorous book titled hans breitmann’s ballads (1869), which depicted the adventures of the main character in an unusual german-english dialect. �e book was a success and continued to be well liked in america and england through the nineteen and twentieth centuries. humorous fiction was not leland’s only talent. his interests lay in many fields such as classical and foreign languages, philosophy, myths and beliefs, and magic and the occult. for this reason, the academic community looked upon him with scorn for having “too many irons in the fire” (p. 7). nevertheless, leland’s contribution to folklore studies cannot be overlooked as he also wrote extensively about the english romany – the english gypsies (1873), english gypsy songs (1875), the gypsies (1882), gypsy sorcery and fortune-telling (1891), – native americans – the algonquin legends (1884), and italian culture – etruscanroman remains in popular tradition (1893), legends of florence (1895-96), aradia, or the gospel of the witches (1899). however, the book which i present in this review is quite different from leland’s previous work. edited by jack d. zipes (b. 1937), well-known folklorist, academic, and fairytale specialist, it introduces the readers to one of leland’s lesser-known literary work: the hundred riddles of the fairy bellaria (1892). the hundred riddles of the fairy bellaria tells the story of a very wise fairy named bellaria who falls in love with a king whom she eventually marries. one day, a cruel and evil king named ruggero marches with his army and takes their kingdom. ruggero loved wisdom and cleverness and once vowed that he would never harm anyone who could outwit him. hearing that the queen was extraordinarily clever, ruggero decides to test her wisdom by having her answer one hundred riddles. should she answer them all, he would depart in peace and leave her and her family unharmed. in the case that she could not complete the task imposed to her, she and her husband would be executed. bellaria agrees but demands instead a life for a life: should she answer all the riddles, ruggero would be executed. �inking that no one could guess his many riddles, the angry king agrees with the queen. �e rest of the story essentially consists of the many riddles which bellaria answers. every riddle is introduced by ruggero’s ritual introduction: “off with your head, oh queen, unless you answer me this riddle: […]” as the riddles unfold the queen’s answers become more and more complex creating individual narratives framed within the main story, thus resembling the structure of the canonical collection of tales one �ousand and one nights. �rough her stories, the fairy mocks the king, teaches him lessons and makes him reflect on her philosophical words. �e rhythm and beauty of bellaria’s answers sharply reviews folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 61 contrast with ruggero’s simplistic and repetitive introduction. �ey show her superiority in wit and in poetry but also create dynamism to an overall repetitive story. only at the end does the fairy change her answer from a poetic form to a text in prose with which the story ends. �e hundred riddles was first published in london by t. fisher unwin. surprisingly, this 2018 edition by the university of minnesota press is only the second one available. according to zipes, this situation is due to leland scholars’ lack of interest in the book which, he finds, brings together leland’s elements of research on etruscan mythology and personal beliefs about women’s strength and intelligence, as expressed in his work the alternate sex or the female intellect in man, and the masculine in woman (1904). unfortunately, zipes does not offer more explanation or examples for the readers who are not familiar with leland’s work to support his argument. �e hundred riddles is a light story, easy to read, and has all the elements of a classical fairy tale: a wise hero, a tyrant oppressor, some magic, a quest (the one hundred riddles challenge), and the success of good over evil. while it remains repetitive, it is still an interesting read. however, the reader who first tries to guess the riddles (i did!) will soon become discouraged by the complexity of the answers and the impossibility to guess them correctly. in this way, leland’s work keeps the reader in a very passive role; which can be frustrating at times. like many of leland other works, the hundred riddles also includes leland’s own engravings; 102 in total, including the title page. each riddle has its own illustration and this visual addition also contributes to the reader’s interest. however, zipes’ claim that they were made in the arts and crafts movement’s style remains dubious to me. �e cover of the book certainly shares similarities to the work of william morris in its use of interlaced wines, animals, and title framing but most of the illustrations inside the book are not as refined. it seems to me that the reader would get a better sense of leland’s interest in the arts and crafts movement by comparing the covers he produced for his different studies in folklore. to my knowledge, no study of his artistic style and approach has been undertaken and it certainly would have been interesting to know more about it. to conclude, i believe zipes enthusiasm in the hundred riddles might come from his own specialty in fairy tales, but one can only applaud at this second longawaited new edition. as a folklorist, i found this book particularly interesting, but mostly because of leland’s prose and because of his general background and research interests. �e author’s incredible life story and career path is something that could have been more developed, especially for the non-specialists. but overall, the book succeeded in sparking my interest in charles leland and left me hungry for more of his work. for this, one can say to zipes, “bravo!” genia boivin university of sudbury ontario, canada folklorica full 2024 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii folklorica journal of the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association (formerly seefa journal) seefa executive board president: mariya lesiv, memorial university of newfoundland vice-president: dorian jurić, indiana university secretary-treasurer: shannon donnally quinn, michigan state university university board members: elena boudovskaia, georgetown university benjamin gatling, george mason university webmaster: dorian jurić, indiana university folklorica editor: benjamin gatling, george mason university book review editor: laura olson osterman, university of colorado, boulder online content manager: jon giullian, university of kansas editorial board oleksandra britsyna, rylsky folklore institute, ukrainian academy of sciences maria carlson, university of kansas larisa fialkova, university of haifa linda j. ivanits, pennsylvania state university vladimir klyaus, institute of world literature, russian federation katia mikhailova, institute of folklore, bulgaria faith wigzell, ssees-university college london aleksey v. yudin, ghent university, belgium issn 1920-0234 microsoft word folkloricaprotest_ii_full_final_2022 07.27.22.docx activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 1 activism and patient vulnerability: resistance to medical authority and regulation in russia tatiana l. kuksa center for medical anthropology, institute of ethnology and anthropology hse university, moscow, russia abstract the paper analyzes the opposition and adaptation of russian patients, independent perinatal specialists, and professional human rights activists to normative regulation of obstetric care, medical authorities, and the practices of the russian maternity hospital. during my ethnographic research, i have collected personal stories about the clashes of women in labor and their assistants (primarily doulas) with the medical system, stories of collective and individual appeals to authorities, and protest flash mobs. the article presents the history of the transformation of the russian system of obstetrics and the development of grassroots movements by midwives and doulas. it outlines the features of human rights and perinatal protest discourses and identifies the tactics of legal and vernacular resistance and non-resistance to medical authorities encountered during fieldwork. introduction (1) in the course of ethnographic research starting in 2017, i have collected contemporary birth narratives describing the decisions and interactions of women and their families with medical professionals and midwives, doulas, and other external perinatal specialists. in narratives from the soviet and post-soviet eras, there was practically no mention of independent choice and freedom of action in medical institutions and official discourses, or indeed of the involvement of family members or independent participants in medical care during childbirth [belousova 2003, 2012; olson and adon’eva 2013; rivkin-fish 2005; rouhierwilloughby 2003, 2008: 66, 91]. however, in contemporary narratives, russian women convey their agency in some detail and negotiate with the obstetric system for various options [gramatchikova 2020; kuksa 2020b, 2021a, 2021b; kuksa and shnyrova 2021; temkina and rivkin-fish 2020]. thus, my fieldwork shows that women now plan and shape the birth process much more than they did in first two decades after the fall of the ussr. this more active patient position of russian women is connected primarily with grassroots activities and training by independent perinatal specialists (midwives and doulas). as a rule, they have had several children, hold college and graduate degrees (often both), and had a different experience in childbirth, either at home or in the hospital, than the average woman. these midwives and doulas construct the boundaries of patient agency and teach tactics to overcome bodily and mental vulnerability. they also interact with doctors during labor and delivery activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 2 and provide variety of non-medical support for women at all stages of the birth process [kuksa 2021a, 2021b]. my analysis of both discourse and narratives from independent specialists reveals how and why women have become more active in pregnancy and childbirth as well as demonstrates the role of grassroots activists in legal and vernacular protest to medical authorities. as kleinman [1978] wrote, each group of “agents of care” (from popular, folk, and professional arenas of the health care system) has its own “explanatory models” of health/sickness with its specific idioms—abstract or concrete, technical or non-technical, impersonal, or highly personal—that they need to convey to each other. he has argued that there are conflicts “between professional medical (especially biomedical) explanatory models that construe sickness as disease and lay (popular culture) explanatory models that construe sickness as illness” [1978: 88]. given the multiplicity of “agents of care” and actors during delivery and their divergent interests and expectations, i explore representations of birth (including popular, folk, and professional explanatory models) and the interpretations of experiences from different perspectives, including of the patient and her family, physicians, the law, and perinatal specialists. according to bakhtin’s theory of speech genres [1986: 159], we must approach the analysis of speech utterances as a dialogical and interactive process that considers speaker and addressee goals and genres that they may choose and use in certain contexts. in this paper i will apply bakhtin’s and kleinman’s conceptual approaches to reveal the multiplicity, polyphony and heteroglossia of discourses by participants in childbirth. participants’ models and discourses rely on speech genres with variable meanings and functions that are affected by legality, legitimacy, degree of stigma and contexts (or frames) [bakhtin 1986]. the grassroots activism and legal or vernacular tactics of resistance to medical authority described in this article are only formally similar to american feminist and anthropological critiques of biomedical and technocratic childbirth in favor of individual “control over childbirths” [davis-floyd and sargent 1997; rapp 1999; sargent and gulbas 2011]. in this framework, we would be forced to classify tactics to counteract medical authorities as part of a contemporary feminist agenda and as a struggle for political and neoliberal rights and social control over reproduction. any evaluation of grassroots activism and legal and vernacular protest in russia must take into account the following essential factors, which the feminist approach ignores: 1) the variable meanings and functions of bureaucratic and vernacular texts (depending on genre, addressees and communicative contexts (or frames) [bakhtin 1986; kuksa 2020b]; 2) differences between collective and individual forms of legal prose; 3) obstetric policies at different regulative levels and in local contexts [kuksa 2021b]; 4) illegal and stigmatized homebirth practices, which are difficult for ethnographers to observe [kuksa 2018, 2021a]; 5) recent medicalization, financing, and technologization of russian obstetric care; and 6) the majority of obstetricians and gynecologists, from the soviet era to the present, are women, unlike in the united states [kuksa 2018; rivkin-fish 2005; rouhier-willoughby 2003, 2008; sargent and gulbas activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 3 2011]. my approach highlights how informants reclaim agency in vulnerable situations and their oppositional and adaptive tactics when interacting with the obstetric system. a primary avenue is hiring independent midwives and doulas, and this paper will focus on how they have been able to resist and even transform the birth process, at least for some women. this research is based primarily on a corpus of semi-structured in-depth interviews collected from doulas, midwives, physicians, and parents living in moscow and saint petersburg (since 2017) or in cities located in the central, northwestern, volga, the urals, siberian, and far eastern federal districts (since 2020). for this article, i have also relied on data from an online survey of muscovite and regional perinatal specialists conducted during the covid-19 lockdown in spring and summer of 2020 on the attitude toward medical interventions by women in labor. i have explored federal statutes regulating childbirth as well as materials from medical, midwife and doula conferences, lectures, and training sessions, which i attended as a participant or online listener. i focus on documented digital and verbal opposition to the practices of russian obstetric institutions. in particular, i study midwife, doula, and parental discourses and resistance tactics used by human rights activists, independent perinatal specialists, and laypeople. in this article, i present the most characteristic methods for legal and vernacular resistance to medical authorities as well as opting-out (e.g., home birth) encountered in my research. i analyze the dependence these types of resistance on the agency of parents and perinatal professionals in the contemporary maternity hospital. the practice of written refusal of a woman in labor to routine medical interventions is a relatively non-confrontational and common form of the mobilization of law. it is guaranteed within a legally stipulated framework of informed consent to medical intervention. private conflicts at the grassroots level are resolved through individual complaints, appeals and, less commonly, lawsuits initiated by patients to compensate for harm done to them, investigate medical misconduct, and hold medical professionals accountable for their actions. the use of petitions signed by citizens (usually unknown to one another) to protect women generally also mobilizes the law through a collective appeal to state authorities or as part of a class action lawsuit [kuksa 2011; 2020a]. all three variants of routine law enforcement and legal conflict fall within the framework of the concepts of “everyday legality” [ewick and silbey 1998, 2003] and “law mobilization,” a term coined by black [1973, 2010] to express that the law exists not on paper, but only when citizens use it to protect their rights. these legal tactics display overt women’s resistance to medical authorities in the maternity hospital. while legal tactics are used by some, the more common approach to counter medical authorities is vernacular resistance. vernacular articulation of the problems of patient rights and agency and the physical and mental vulnerability of pregnant women, women in labor, and mothers is seen in online protest flash mobs and accusatory discourses. in my view, they serve the same function— resistance to and protest of the system—as urban folklore about medicine. urban lore about doctors, hospitals and diseases exists in a variety of genres, including activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 4 rumors, gossip, fakelore, and conspiracy legends, and expresses dissent with institutional medicine and treatment (for more on this topic, see kitta 2019). i examine “victim” narratives and accusatory texts distributed by perinatal specialists and women who have experienced psychological and bodily trauma in a maternity hospital from three perspectives. first, these texts function as a “socially sanctioned outlet” for protest [dundes 2003] and a modern ritualized form of behavior [rouhier-willoughby 2003, 2008; kitta 2019]. they also help narrate and contextualize psychophysical experience [kleinman 1978; khristoforova 2020; kuksa 2020b]. finally, they allow for “symbolic resistance” (what scott calls the “weapon of the weak” [scott 1985]) by traumatized women and independent perinatal specialists not embedded in the medical and bureaucratic hierarchy. a distinctive feature of grassroots perinatal movements in russia are forms of female opting-out that express dissent, but that are invisible to bureaucratic institutions—by analogy with yurchak’s concept of “outsideness/out-of-reach” [yurchak 2014: 267-270, 563-571]. yurchak applies this concept to the soviet citizen, who discursively and performatively shifted authoritative ideological discourses towards their own interpretations. they include illegal practices of home and solo childbirth among russian educated women, which are stigmatized in the institutional space and were especially popular in 1990s and 2000s [belousova 2003, 2012; kuksa 2018, 2021a, 2021b, kuksa and shnyrova 2021; rouhier-willoughby 2008]. i also have recorded a surge in home births since the spring of 2020, especially outside of moscow. they resulted from the introduction of anti-covid restrictions that reduce the agency of women in local hospitals, e.g., prohibition of partneror doula-accompanied births and separation of mother and child (discussed in more detail below). transformation of the russian system of obstetrics russian women can exercise their agency and opt for a delivery in accordance with their expectations as a result of the transformation and financing of obstetric infrastructure over the past two decades. some key historical events resulted in a shift in the system toward a focus on women’s needs and the development of grassroots movements dedicated to parenting and the training of midwives and doulas. as a result of federal funding for the delivery certificates program in 2006, regardless of the mother’s place of residence (as recorded in the propiska [official place of residence indicated in the person’s passport and state accounting system]), a pregnant woman received the right to access any russian maternity hospital within the framework of compulsory medical insurance (hereafter cmi). cmi was introduced in 1991 to ensure the constitutional right to free medical care and protection of the health of the citizenry. patients thus present an insurance card and receive a delivery certificate (in electronic form as of july 2021) from a medical institution, which guarantees coverage for medical services (e.g., prenatal clinic, maternity hospital, or children’s clinic) from the social insurance activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 5 fund or its regional branches. however, actual choice among obstetric organizations, according to the testimonies of interviewees, was primarily implemented only in large cities, where there are enough hospitals to create real competition for cmi and private deliveries. at the initiative of the moscow-based obstetrician-gynecologist mark kurtser, founder of the only network of private maternity hospitals in russia (2), since 2006, midwives at the moscow center for traditional midwifery and family medicine (hereafter ctm (3)), could legally accompany women in labor only in one pilot program at the 6th maternity hospital (now closed). these trained professionals from ctm taught natural childbirth and promoted the popular approach of “soft childbirth.” tamara sadovaia, the founder of ctm and “traditional” midwife, defined this term as follows: «мягкие роды» — это организация условий для проведения естественных родов с максимальным использованием внутренних резервов женщины и минимальным медицинским вмешательством. [“soft childbirth” is the organization of conditions for natural childbirth with the maximum use of the woman's internal reserves and minimal medical intervention] [tamara sadovaia, 14 april 2018]. today ctm works officially with some moscow maternity hospitals and doctors with a unique program for personal obstetric services, which include non-invasive anesthesia and other “soft” treatment practices designed to benefit women and children, as sadovaia discusses: мы абсолютно легитимно работаем. в нашей инструкции нет никаких нарушений отечественных стандартов практики [протоколов]. может, это для кого-то звучит парадоксально. то, что мы называем торопить роды, то, что мы называем агрессией и насилием в родах — это не отображено в стандартах [протоколах], это просто стереотипы и дурные привычки нашего постсоветского акушерства, с которым мы стараемся как-то работать и их искоренять. наша практика, которая говорит о том, что женщина имеет свое время, она может рожать долго и она может рожать в любых позах не только в первом, но и во втором периоде, что мы можем использовать воду. [we are absolutely legal. there are no violations of domestic standards of practice [protocols] in our instructions. maybe it sounds paradoxical to someone, what we call birth, what we call aggression and violence in childbirth—this is not reflected in the standards [protocols]. these are just stereotypes and bad habits of our post-soviet obstetrics, with which we are trying to somehow work and eradicate them. our practice, which says that a woman has her time, she can give birth for a long time, and activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 6 she can give birth in any position, not only in the first, but also in the second period, that we can use water.] [tamara sadovaia, 19 march 2018] the 2011 federal law “on the basics of protecting the health of citizens in the russian federation” № 323 (hereafter 323-fz) guarantees the option for partner-accompanied childbirth (with a husband or another family member) without a fee (using cmi). however, it is subject to the availability of a ward in a maternity hospital, and the partner must submit medical test results, the extent of which may vary in practice (due to the lack of an exhaustive list of required tests in the law and at the discretion of the hospital) [kuksa 2018, 2021a, 2021b]. a freelance obstetrician-gynecologist at the moscow department of health in 2019 reported on the positive impact of spousal participation in childbirth and said that a third of muscovites have partners in the delivery room [olenev 2019]. for the last ten years, two dozen moscow maternity hospitals (with the exception of three specialized ones) have offered the option of partner-accompanied births, at least with the father of the child. the situation with non-familial support is somewhat different. at first, doulas worked exclusively outside of medical institutions. after 2011 independent personal, non-medical support of childbirth was arranged through private (paid) contracts in some maternity hospitals [kuksa and shnyrova 2021]. later, birth partners without a medical education were allowed (since 2015 in some moscow maternity hospitals) without confirmation of a kinship relationship (effectively as quasi-relatives). occasionally they have been admitted as unpaid volunteers since 2018. doula services, especially in the case of informal admission as quasi-relatives to deliveries with cmi are much cheaper for clients than paying for two separate contracts with a maternity hospital and a medical center of midwifery. this fact allows doulas to compete for clients who do not have the financial means to hire an individual midwife for the delivery, as a moscow doula describes below: сейчас независимым акушеркам, не работающим в центрах типа цта или акушерство клаб (у центров есть лицензия на медицинскую деятельность и официальные договоры с роддомами), нет нужды мимикрировать, они оформляются на кусочки ставки во все интересующие их роддома и таким образом имеют право работать как акушерки в роддоме. прямо роды принимать. роддомам это выгодно, чтобы купить контракт с такой акушеркой, необходимо купить контракт с самим роддомом. мимо роддома нельзя. то есть 100–150 [тысяч рублей] роддому плюс 50–60 [тысяч рублей] за акушерку. это вам не с доулой по омс пойти [now independent midwives who do not work in centers such as ctm or the obstetrics club (the centers have a license for medical activities and official contracts with maternity hospitals), there is no need to double up activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 7 [contracts], they are employed part time in all maternity hospitals of interest to them, and thus have the right to work as midwives in a maternity hospital. to attend a delivery directly. this is profitable for maternity hospitals, to contract with this kind of midwife, you need to contract with the maternity hospital itself. you can't avoid the hospital. that is, 100-150 [thousand rubles] to the maternity hospital plus 50-60 [thousand rubles] for a midwife. this is much more expensive than with a doula using cmi] [doula 2, 15 january 2020]. the popularity of independent midwives from the initial grassroots wave of perinatal specialists and family birth partners has contributed to the admission of new participants, namely those with no family ties or medical education, into labor and delivery. non-medical and emotional support for a woman has become attractive for mothers with many children who are on maternity leave, for psychologists, and for other perinatal specialists, who may benefit from additional earnings [kuksa 2021a]. it has promoted demand for private doula educational programs (like the institute of perinatal support (4)). the availability of remote learning also has led to the spread of this occupation outside of moscow and to a second wave of the grassroots perinatal movement throughout russia. activists united in the association of professional doulas (hereinafter apd (5)) are trying to legalize the profession and the admission of trained doulas to maternity facilities [kuksa 2021a]. the interviews collected for this study also indicate that individual choice of relevant management of childbirth (e.g., vaginal birth without intervention or after a caesarean, a “soft” caesarean, delayed cord clamping) and a variety of psychophysical practices (e.g., non-medicalized pain relief, freedom of movement, skin-to-skin contact with newborn during the first “golden hour” after birth) are in demand among pregnant women. therefore, they require personal assistance by midwives or doulas from attending doctors, at least in paid contracts. however, generally women with childbearing experience and of financial means articulate this kind of agency [kuksa and shnyrova 2021]. according to my interlocutors, the farther from the larger cities, the more conservative the staff are in maternity hospitals. as a result, fewer opportunities exist for independent choice by women in these areas. thus, regional and local features of the obstetrics system also play a role in a woman’s options and degree of agency. therefore, diversity, competition, and interaction of providers and “explanatory models” of childbirth have contributed to the gradual transition from solo and home childbirth to “natural” and “soft” childbirth with a midwife in maternity hospitals (at least in moscow, where independent midwives are legal) [kuksa 2018, 2021a]. in addition, we see the rising popularity of spousal childbirth partners and professional doula support [kuksa 2021a; kuksa and shnyrova 2021]. as a result, changes in obstetric infrastructure and policies have led to the “humanization” of moscow maternity hospitals and competition among all the parties potentially involved in the process. hospitals try to attract private clients of midwives and/or doulas, or patients with delivery certificates activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 8 requesting state-sponsored deliveries with partners or quasi-relatives (doulas). these social and legal changes have resulted in the introduction of more humane and patient-centered obstetric care (mainly in the private sector), the emergence of separate maternity wards and family wards in regional maternity hospitals, the development of medical “tourism” to moscow for state-sponsored or private (forpay) deliveries with non-familial or familial support. despite slow implementation of updated protocols of obstetric care by medical personnel, the grassroots movements by perinatal activists have transformed maternity hospitals to meet women's needs. they have likewise encouraged the active involvement of women in the training of delivery and legal protection of her interests in the maternity hospital, as we will see below. protecting patients: official and unofficial approaches at the individual level the first wave of independent midwives, who established the russian home birth movement, call themselves “materi-spetsnaz” [mothers-special forces]. this term accentuates the difficulty of survival under post-soviet conditions of information isolation and lack of material goods. they, like elite troops, overcame these difficulties through active training and self-help, as a moscow doula explains: старая школа, 1990-2000-е годы, тогда был такой рассвет домашнего акушерства. какой их основной посыл был? женщина должна очень хорошо подготовиться физически к родам, взять на себя всю ответственность за роды и подготовиться. то есть обливание, баня, там закаливание, физические нагрузки. вот физические. и тогда она хорошо выносит, хорошо родит. взять на себя такую внутреннюю ответственность за этот процесс. и тогда было достаточно много самостоятельных родов, когда женщины всю ответственность брали и рожали без акушерки. потом сами становились акушерками — вне медицинского подхода. потом они заканчивали всякие медицинские, но потом. сначала начали практиковать просто от посыла «мы взяли на себя эту ответственность». «взять ответственность» — это первый посыл [old school, 1990-2000s, then was the dawn of home midwifery. what was their main message? a woman should be very well prepared physically for childbirth, take full responsibility for childbirth and prepare. that is, washing with cold water, the bathhouse, hardening, physical activity. those are the physical ones. and then she endures well, gives birth well. to take on such internal responsibility for this process. and then there were quite a lot of independent deliveries, when women took all the responsibility and gave birth without a midwife. then they themselves became midwives—outside of the medical approach. then they finished all sorts of medical [courses], but later on. at first, they activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 9 started practicing simply from the message “we took this responsibility upon ourselves.” “taking responsibility” is the first message] [svetlana shnyrova, 17 february 2018]. as we see, the explanatory model of the first perinatal wave endorses psychophysical and informational preparation for the process and recommends that women take responsibility for decisions about financing and care. however, they regretfully note the tendency of russian women to perceive themselves as passive subjects, rather than independent actors, as a moscow midwife told me: очень маленький процент женщин готовится к родам. […] когда предлагаешь поработать в родах с ощущениями (поменять положение, подвигаться), отказываются, предпочитая анальгезию. персоналу роддома на потоке невозможно работать иначе, чем стандартный протокол, так как только такой протокол обеспечивает безопасность мамы и ребенка в отсутствии возможности реализовать индивидуальный подход из-за нехватки персонала. для женщины, идущей на роды осознанно, как субъект процесса, реализовать свой план родов возможно только либо по контракту с индивидуальными специалистами, либо активно отстаивая свою позицию, что в родах не всегда реализуемо, так как процесс родов достаточно яркий и требует несколько другого состояния, чем активное отстаивание своих прав [a very small percentage of women prepare for childbirth. […] when you offer to work a delivery based on bodily sensation (change of position, moving), they refuse, preferring analgesia. it is impossible for the staff of the maternity hospital to work differently than from the standard protocol, since only this protocol ensures the safety of mother and child in the absence of an option to implement an individual approach due to the lack of staff. for a woman who goes into childbirth deliberately, as the subject of the process, to realize her birth plan is possible only either through a contract with individual specialists or by actively defending her position, which is not always feasible during delivery, since the birth process is quite vivid and requires slightly different conditions than active defense of one’s rights] [midwife 1, 7 april 2020]. doulas are ascribed illegal status at maternity hospitals, except when hired through private contracts or serving as official volunteers. referring to the boundaries of competence and the concept of respect for patient choice, they support any decisions the woman makes, including requesting or refusing forms of (non)-medical care. this right lies at the core of the explanatory model of the second perinatal wave. therefore, for ideological, practical, and ethical reasons, they rarely complain about the passivity of their clients. as a rule, doulas, like activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 10 midwives, blame the “conveyor” system in labor and delivery, e.g., the use of standard protocols to the detriment of a patient-centered approach, excessive medicalization to speed up labor, high burnout in the medical environment, and outdated practices that are convenient for doctors and bureaucrats, as we see in this excerpt from an interview with a moscow doula: и всё до потужного периода более-менее естественно выглядело (они как бы встали на путь гуманизации). но, когда женщина раскрылась в полное раскрытие, её, как обычно, посадили на кресло, собралась вся бригада, и её стали жёстко растуживать. […] а детский врач подошла и начала командным голосом: «так, ребёнку очень плохо, он сейчас страдает, ты должна постараться, давай, делай вдох и тужься изо всех сил». ну как обычно вот эта вот история, выпучив глаза, да? акушерка ей показывает так пальцем: «ну что ты ещё, дай ей спокойно войти как бы в процесс», а та показывает на часы: «время, мне идти пора, давайте уже родим, и я пойду». то есть здесь включаются не интересы женщины, а интересы персонала — собрались около родильного стола: «ну давайте уже побыстрее её родим». и тогда всё в ход идёт эпизиотомия, потому что она ускоряет — расширили просто проход. а то, что у женщины потом будет на самом деле шов, там будет у неё достаточно глубокий рубец, там будут затянуты ткани. и это будет долго заживать — это целый месяц восстановительного периода. потому что это шов, он болит, он как бы там стягивается, его надо обрабатывать, его нужно там, за ним ухаживать всяко. сидеть нельзя. ну, куча всяких неудобств [and everything before the active period looked more or less natural (they seemed to have embarked on the path of humanization). but when the woman was fully dilated, she was, as usual, put on a chair, the whole team gathered, and they began to heave her around roughly. […] and the pediatrician came up and began with a commanding voice: “so, the child is very bad, he is suffering now, you have to try, come on, take a breath and push with all your might.” well, it’s the usual story, with bulging eyes, yes? the midwife points her finger at her, like this: “well, what more do you want, let her calmly enter in the process,” and the pediatrician points to the clock: “it’s time, time for me to go, let’s give birth, and i’ll go.” that is, it is not the interests of the woman, but the interests of the staff—they gathered around the delivery table: “well, let’s deliver her as soon as possible.” and then the episiotomy comes into play because it speeds it up—they just widened the passage. and the fact that the woman will then actually have a suture, there will be a fairly deep scar there, the tissues will be tightened there. and it will take a long time to heal—this is a whole month of recovery. because this is a suture, it hurts, it kind of shrinks there, it needs to be treated, it needs to be cared activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 11 for in every way. you can’t sit. well, a lot of inconveniences] [svetlana shnyrova, 17 february 2018]. this doula emphasizes the medical personnel’s responsibility, not the woman’s, unlike the midwife above. they approach the situation from two different perspectives and explanatory models, given their roles in the process, it appears. importantly, while preparing for childbirth, women can choose personal assistants suitable for them and plan the degree of medical intervention that is acceptable to them. thus, despite their difference in status, roles, and explanatory models, personal midwives and doulas provide “empathic witnessing of the existential experience of suffering” [kleinman 1988: 10]. based on interviews and my observations in maternity hospitals, i have found that women striving for “natural” childbirth in hospitals (according to a popular explanatory model held by parents) refuse a number of medical interventions. for example, they sign an informed consent waiver for oxytocin stimulation (typically prescribed for an anhydrous period or for weak or irregular labor, according to delivery protocols, but in deliveries with cmi, it is administered in most cases to speed up the process), anesthesia or pain relievers, amniotomy, episiotomy, and infant vaccinations. as a moscow doula told me [doula 4, 1 april 2020], “идеальная практика невмешательства в роды — без навязывания сценариев протокола — редко, но случается” [the ideal practice of non-interventive childbirth—without imposing protocol scripts—is rare, but it does happen]. in order to minimize the risks of excessive intervention, some resilient russian women calculate arrival time at the hospital to avoid the routine use of invasive procedures and drugs, but to ensure adequate medical care during the active phase of labor. they may also prepare an oral or written plan and, less often, properly executed refusal of these treatments, if they are trained in legal genres [bakhtin 1986; hull 2012]. the practice of written informed consent forms or the refusal of routine medicalization (for certain forms of medical intervention) was established by federal law 323-fz and is one of the most common ways to mobilize the law in the everyday context of contemporary obstetrics system [black 1973, 2010; ewick and silbey 1998, 2003]. however, as the preceding and next interviews both show, it is difficult for women to ensure the implementation of their plans due to the nature of the communicative situation and the specifics of medical speech practices (see also belousova 2003; 2012 and kuksa 2020b for further discussion). но вы знаете, врачебная какая штука есть. что, если женщина начинает отказываться, они начинают объяснять так, что женщине становится страшно. ну, то есть «если ты не подпишешь, ты, конечно, можешь не подписывать, но, если ты не подпишешь, все умрут». типа такого, да? ну, так везде, мне кажется. … мне кажется, врачи некоторые говорить так учат врачей, в общем, немножко запугать, потому что они всё-таки отвечают, там, за жизнь, да? и им activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 12 тоже наверно немножко тревожно, если женщина от чего-то отказывается, что они считают абсолютно необходимым [but do you know this medical thing. that if a woman starts to refuse, they begin to explain in such a way that the woman becomes scared. well, that is, “if you don’t sign, you certainly cannot sign, but if you don’t sign, everyone will die.” like that, right? well, it’s everywhere, it seems to me…it seems to me that some doctors teach doctors to speak like that, in general, to intimidate a little, because they are still responsible for life, right? and they, too, are probably a little anxious if a woman refuses something that they consider absolutely necessary] [doula 8, 10 april 2020]. as kleinman has argued, the meanings of illness (and, i would add, its treatment) are “polysemic and multivocal” [kleinman 1988: 8], which we can see in patient and family stories. even though some women reject certain medical interventions, my interviews reveal that other women have different expectations and ideas about childbirth. they do not refuse early or prolonged hospitalization, medical intervention, or analgesia. women describe worries about having an experienced anesthesiologist on staff (or on the delivery team) and the availability, sufficient quantity, and quality of analgesics during labor with cmi. therefore, these interlocutors arranged for an early arrival at the hospital to have time for procedures prescribed by standard protocols or entered into informal relationships with the anesthesiologist and other personnel in order to provide quality care [kuksa 2020b]. it should be noted that, in some metropolitan and most regional maternity hospitals, doctors generally oppose the right to refusal by patients within the framework of deliveries with cmi. и у нас точно нет в петербурге такого, что при подписании этих бумаг (информированных согласий) как-то это обсуждалось на потоке, скажем так, да. то есть, как правило, пожелание, какой-то план родов, может обсуждаться клиенткой, если это контрактные роды с выбранным врачом. или если это домашние роды с акушеркой [and we certainly do not have this in saint petersburg that, when these papers (informed consent) were signed, it was somehow discussed on the fly, let’s say. that is, as a rule, a wish, some kind of delivery plan, can be discussed by the client if it is a contract delivery with a chosen doctor. or if it’s a home birth with a midwife] [doula 10, 16 may 2021]. if the refusal of interventions as provided by 323-fz produce conflict, or the parties encounter violations in medical care and interactions, there are cases of formalized confrontation and medical and patient litigation, when midwives, activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 13 doulas, or birth partners can strengthen the position and agency of a woman. medical staff also fear prosecutorial and judicial investigations as a result of adverse consequences after childbirth (especially if it did not conform to the established protocol). as a consequence of this concern, according to my interviewees, the practice of defensive medical litigation has spread recently in russia. attending doctors at maternity hospitals use expedited court procedures to file claims against “unreliable” patients, as a petersburg doula explained, однажды на женщину, которую я готовила к родам, 10 роддом санкт-петербурга подал иск в суд с формулировкой «угроза жизни и здоровью ребёнка» в 2017 году. причина — женщина ушла до выписки и написала отказ от госпитализации. благодаря хорошему юристу суд был выигран. я оказывала помощь в поиске адвоката [once the 10th maternity hospital of saint petersburg filed a lawsuit against a woman whom i was preparing for childbirth with the wording “a threat to the life and health of the child” in 2017. the reason—the woman left before she was discharged and wrote a refusal to be hospitalized. thanks to a good lawyer, the case was won. i helped find a lawyer] [doula 6, 4 april 2020]. at the same time, the stories tell of courageous women who, in the face of intimidation and disregard for their wishes, take advantage of their right to change doctors, break contractual agreements, or submit pre-trial complaints to higher authorities while in labor or after childbirth, as we see in the quotation below: это как раз было там, где врач отказался меня пускать на роды, он стал потом давить на женщину, что роды надо возбуждать. в итоге она разорвала контракт, потому что, когда она отказывалась, он давил на нее психологически, пугал [this was exactly where the doctor refused to let me into the delivery, he then began to put pressure on the woman to stimulate labor. as a result, she broke the contract because, when she refused, he put pressure on her psychologically, frightened her] [doula 3, 1 april 2020]. written records produced by women about ignoring their wishes in situations of legally guaranteed patient choice force physicians to respond quickly and resolve conflicts in situ to avoid a formal legal appeal. therefore, the stories sometimes tell of cases when electronic appeals and pre-trial complaints have the desired effect on the staff, as in this citation: была направлена жалоба с сайта минздрава саратовской области в 2017 году: женщине угрожали — не выписать ее из роддома без внутреннего осмотра дежурным гинекологом. через полчаса activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 14 пришла заместитель главного врача, мило улыбалась, спросила в чем суть претензии — не нашла повода не выписывать. и они ушли домой [a complaint was sent from the website of the ministry of health of the saratov region in 2017: they threatened not to discharge a woman from the hospital without an internal examination by the on-call gynecologist. half an hour later, the deputy chief physician arrived, smiled sweetly, asked what the essence of the claim was — she found no reason not to discharge. and they went home] [doula 5, 2 april 2020]. sometimes doulas take part in individual complaints and claims to protect the injured woman, as we see below, or testify in defense of the client if a claim is filed by a medical organization. however, the illegal status of non-medical assistants in the maternity hospital and informal participation as quasi-relatives does not allow them to be in targeted opposition to the system without potentially negative consequences for their career, except in rare cases. one doula told me “медики плохо относятся к доулам, на одну жалобы даже подавали в прокуратуру” [medical providers have a bad attitude towards doulas, one complaint was even filed with the prosecutor’s office] [doula 9, 20 september 2021]. another outlined a similar situation based on her experience. я написала жалобу на врача в 2013 году, который непотребно себя вел с моей клиенткой, писала в департамент. это спустили главному врачу. в итоге этот заведующий отделением мне потом отомстил — в следующий раз он отказался меня пускать в 18 роддом москвы (сейчас закрыт) [in 2013, i wrote a complaint against a doctor who had behaved improperly with my client, i wrote to the department. this was kicked down to the head physician. as a result, this department head later took revenge on me—the next time he refused to let me into the 18th maternity hospital in moscow (now closed)] [doula 3, 1 april 2020]. the controversies they describe, which had reached the stage of filing official complaints and lawsuits, are a variant of civil and criminal law mobilization [black 1973, 2010; kuksa 2011]. they are initiated to compensate for harm, investigate the improper provision of medical services (medical misconduct or legal infractions), and to hold medical professionals accountable. despite these descriptions of clashes between participants in obstetric care, litigation mechanisms to resolve conflict are rarely used by patients or doctors in russia. nevertheless, criminal prosecution of doctors has an enormous perlocutionary effect and is actively discussed in conversations and in thematic perinatal social media groups. they emphasize women’s powerlessness and vulnerability, obstetric aggression and medical neglect and harm, and the activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 15 inhumanity of the system. at the same time, the medical community in the media space condemns patient litigation (calling it “patient extremism”) and laments the lack of protection for doctors in the face of legal prosecution and by the prosecutor general's office in particular [kuksa 2020a]. the activism on the part of perinatal specialists led to a range of network and vernacular strategies to protect women, particularly since individual legal remedies are so rarely an option, because of ignorance of legal genres. such cases, as we see below, demonstrate how midwifes and doulas have mobilized women to take a more active role in childbirth. protecting patients: vernacular resistance strategies in 2016, two regional representatives of the doula community with degrees in psychology launched the flash mob #violence_in_childbirth. they have collected more than 1000 digital anonymized stories of russian women, written mainly in the genre of abuse narratives on a single social network [goriacheva and ushankova 2016]. the organizers of the network action believe that “тема акушерской агрессии табуируется обществом, ведь главное в родах — это живая мама, живой ребенок. а роды — ну да, больно, страшно, грязно, следует потерпеть, а потом попытаться все забыть” [the topic of obstetric aggression is taboo in society, after all, the main thing in childbirth is ‘a living mother, a living child,’ and childbirth—well, yes, it hurts, is scary, dirty, you should be patient, and then try to forget everything] [goriacheva and ushankova 2016]. separate hashtags were proposed to classify the types of violence in childbirth, namely psychological abuse (insults, blackmail, gaslighting) and physical violence (face slaps, forcing out a child, cutting the perineum and other interventions without the woman’s consent). using these classifiers and the stereotypical narrative model for describing childbirth [see kuksa 2018 for a discussion], women negatively described their experience of being in a modern maternity hospital, obstetric aggression, medical neglect and harm, and psychological and physical abuse during childbirth. the following quotation displays typical invectives and accusations from medical personnel, as described by an anonymous woman on the digital flash mob: …каждый раз мне говорили, что так я угроблю ребёнка. сил от этого не прибавлялось, прибавлялся дикий страх и истерика от собственного бессилия. через 2 часа такого “тужения”, у меня начались настоящие потуги и меня заставили лезть на стол высокий (это с обездвиженной одной ногой), хорошо муж был и затащил меня туда. и тут мне сказали, что ребёнок застрял в родовых путях и в этом виновата я. ко мне в палату в ближайшие 1,5 часа человек 15 врачей заходило, все взволнованные бегали. моего ужаса не передать. сил тужиться не было совсем, все ругали меня и пугали ещё больше. в итоге сделали мне эпизио, но и оно не помогло и activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 16 тогда 3 человека локтями начали давить ребёнка. достали дочь всю фиолетовую, с обвитием […every time they told me that i would ruin the child this way. strength did not increase from this, added wild fear and hysteria from my own impotence. after two hours of such “pulling,” real contractions began, and they forced me to climb onto a high table (this is with one leg immobilized), it was good that my husband was there and dragged me up there. and then they told me that the child was stuck in the birth canal, and i was to blame. in the next 1.5 hours, about 15 doctors came to my ward, everyone ran excitedly. my horror is indescribable. i didn’t have the strength to push at all, everyone scolded me and frightened me even more. as a result, they did an episio[tomy] to me, but it didn’t help either and then three people began to crush the child with their elbows. we got our daughter all purple, with entanglement [from the umbilical cord] [anonymous, 20 october 2020]. on the one hand, the narratives presented are anonymous and not directly addressed to actants that are assigned the role of rapists and abusers. according to bakhtin, every statement has an addressee, “the reciprocal understanding of which the author seeks and anticipates” [bakhtin 1986: 322-323]. the actual readers of the network flash mob (addressees of the message) are an indefinite circle of people involved in a single emotional experience, most likely the initiators and authors of stories, as well as journalists and researchers. functionally, network narratives about medical abuse reproduce the pragmatics of the widespread ritual practices of “closing labor” [kuksa 2020b], which are actively used by individual perinatal specialists for a woman’s postpartum recovery. the continued revitalization of traditional rituals in modern urban culture testifies to the continuity with the “post-soviet maternity ritual complex” [rouhier-willoughby 2008]. on the other hand, despite changes in infrastructure and a new context for labor and delivery, some of the motifs in childbirth narratives testify to the partial continuity of invective speech genres [belousova 2003] used by physicians along with the “conveyor” practices of obstetrics. the confessional narratives of the flash mob (as well as the modern rituals of closing childbirth) allow women to voice their traumas, suffer, and let go of unjustified expectations and resentments. they strengthen and transform negative emotions through narration, gain support from similar stories, and express solidarity with other victims. such texts rather quickly “infect” the network communicative spaces and become explanatory folk models [garro and mattingly 2000; kleinman 1978, 1988]. vernacular discourse and narratives thus describe psychophysical experience and contextualize the interaction between women in labor and medical personnel [bakhtin 1986; garro and mattingly 2000; khristoforova 2020; kitta 2019; kleinman 1978, 1988; mattingly 1998], becoming an acceptable and formulaic “socially sanctioned outlet” [dundes 2003], with which one can try to express an uncomfortable traumatic experience activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 17 of childbirth and designate a guilty or responsible actor. as rouhier-willoughby has argued, an essential feature of the (post-) soviet ritual complex is simultaneous resistance and acceptance [rouhier-willoughby 2008: 112]. if the model of a network flash mob implies personal articulation of traumatic experiences and collisions with suffering, emotional solidarity with the victims of “obstetric aggression” and “psychological” and “physical” violence presupposes the use of appropriate psychoanalytic terminology and a stereotypical narrative model that mandates a suffering victim and an abuser. in comparison with formulaic folk models of narratives, online petitions require participants (petitioners and signatories) to have a different, bureaucratic conversation and require people to arm themselves with human rights terminology, so that the format and content of the appeal is accessible and understandable to the addressee, as we will see below. protecting patients: collective network strategies russian perinatal specialists and human rights activists commonly organize online (or, less commonly, hard-copy) petitions to protect the rights and free cmi of pregnant women and their families. online activism mobilizes the law through collective appeal to public authorities within the framework of pre-trial feedback or class action legal proceedings [kuksa 2011, 2020a]. two cases from my fieldwork, one from 2017 and another from 2019, will illustrate this process. on 29 march 2017, perinatal rights activists olga arutiunian and nadezhda anan’eva from krasnoiarsk and ekaterina mariposa from moscow, with the assistance of the lawyer arina pokrovskaia, launched a network campaign to protect pregnant women, regardless of their place of residence, material resources and marital status, and ensure their right to free childbirth accompanied by a partner of their choice [arutiunian et al 2017]. the authors of the petition hoped to amend article 51 of 323-fz to expand support for patients in state-sponsored wards during labor and delivery. theу argued that the current interpretation of the law by medical organizations was too narrow. hospital personnel sometimes demand documented proof from relatives and allow only a husband, mother, or an adult daughter into the delivery room. therefore, from the point of view of the authors of the petition, they discriminate against those that do not meet these criteria, e.g., widows, unmarried women, and military wives, to name a few (for a complete list, see (6)). the authors of the petition also wanted to eliminate the requirement for medical testing for certain diseases (by analogy with visits to an intensive care unit). they also demanded birth-partner access to the operating room, as is customary elsewhere in the world. they also pushed for removal of the right of physicians to set restrictions on partner deliveries “at their own discretion,” because the wording (“taking into account the state of the woman in labor”) is vague and can justify barring birth partners for no actual medical reason. the petition was posted on the change.org portal under the title: “supported childbirth should be available to all russian women.” a year later, on 12 march activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 18 2018, pokrovskaia announced that she had sent a collective appeal by registered mail to the authorities of the russian federation. the departments promised her to take into account the proposed “legislative initiative.” over the last five years, the petition has garnered 13,861 signatures (as of 10 june 2022). despite significant numbers of supporters, not a single legislative initiative about these proposed changes has been introduced. two years later, in 2019, the founder, director, and lead educator at the doula link institute of perinatal support (the largest educational doula project in russia) ekaterina jitomirskaia-sсhechtman also began an online appeal directed at regulators. she is also a renowned doula, a former midwife, and a member of apd. on 26 february 2019, jitomirskaia-sсhechtman initiated a campaign on facebook to send appeals to the russian ministry of health and regional health departments in protest of restrictions on doulas’ volunteer initiatives and professional support for mothers [jitomirskaia-sсhechtman 2019]. a template with blanks for a woman to complete was developed for this purpose. their testimonies confirm discriminatory situations when using cmi: if denied the opportunity to call a spouse or mother, other birth partners were refused admittance. doulas also pointed to the closure of volunteer projects based at maternity hospitals, which has led to the elimination of free professional support from doulas during delivery. in informal conversations, officials explained to the doulas that there was no significant demand for professional support from patients. however, in response to numerous individual appeals from women that responded to jitomirskaiasсhechtman’s initiative, regulators provided the standard response that the law does not guarantee the right to a “non-family” partner during delivery when using cmi. as one moscow doula reported, despite patient and doula support for an amendment to the law, they would not succeed without blat [pull, connections] [doula 1, 29 august 2021]. to date, the ministry of health of russia continues to ignore requests by the institute of perinatal support and apd, despite the implementation of a state program to support volunteerism and unpaid assistance by civic activists in medical institutions since 2018-2019. therefore, unlike the vernacular narrative model discussed above, these statements are produced by legally competent senders trained in this genre and directed toward regulators of the russian obstetric care system. network statements functionally reproduce the legal pragmatics of individual and collective appeals to public authorities with a request, proposal, complaint, or claim within the framework of the methods of pre-trial feedback or legal proceedings [kuksa 2011, 2020a]. protecting patients: collective strategies in the covid-19 pandemic the covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated the situation for perinatal specialists and patients. spring 2020 regulatory restrictions to prevent the spread of covid-19, digital surveillance, and sanctions (in the form of fines for violations) have temporarily suspended daily physical communication and nonactivism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 19 medical assistance in medical institutions (at least in the moscow region and tatarstan). at the same time, interdependence has increased, while patient choice and the usual pre-covid volume of medical care for patients have been reduced [kuksa 2020a, 2021a, 2021b]. pregnant women and women in labor found themselves in a forced medicalized “covid-19 reality” while in an extremely vulnerable state, feeling insecure, fearful, and even guilty about making decisions about care. my informants have intensified their protests since march 2020. moscow doulas and human rights activists released strident statements in the media, on social networks, at conferences, and in interviews about the illegality of the prohibition on partner births and the forced separation of mothers and babies in moscow and regional maternity hospitals [kuksa 2021b]. restrictive decisions by the moscow rospotrebnadzor [the russian federal service for surveillance on consumer rights protection and human well-being] and the moscow department of health on 12 and 13 march 2020 that “prohibit the admission of visitors to hospitals” led to an absolute ban of family-oriented births in the wake of the general lockdown [kuksa 2021b]. appealing either to the “quarantine” regimen or to the “ban on the admission of visitors to hospitals,” by the end of march 2020 (and through august of that year), all moscow maternity hospitals, except for one private hospital, had suspended birth partners of any kind from both cmi and paid deliveries. a moscow doula describes her reaction to these restrictions as follows: но вот именно попытки запрета партнерских родов я переживала тяжелее, чем то, что сейчас. потому что ощущалось, что все, что мы выстроили (мы это обсуждали в доульском сообществе), все, что мы строили столько лет — эти доверительные отношения с роддомами, которые немножко откатились назад после ситуации [уголовного дела на перинатального специалиста]. и вот сейчас все стало вроде исправляться. и началось опять волонтерство потихоньку. и опять все схлопнулось! и опять черте что, извините [but i have experienced more difficult attempts to ban partner childbirth than there are now. because it felt like everything that we built (we discussed this in the doula community), everything that we built for so many years—these trusting relationships with maternity hospitals, which had rolled back a little after the situation [of the criminal case against a perinatal specialist]. and now everything seems to be getting better. and once again, volunteering had begun slowly. and again, everything collapsed! and again, all to hell, sorry] [doula 2, 31 march 2020]. by default, as with partner births, support by doulas was prohibited. as a rule, due to their illegal status, doulas were viewed not as perinatal professionals, but as quasi-relatives of any woman in labor relying on cmi, as this doula went on to explain: activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 20 до этой недели, которую путин объявил типа выходной/нерабочей насильственно, пускали в 70-й роддом. потом с обеда субботы, последней субботы, доул перестали пускать. и пап стараются не пускать в 70-й роддом. под прикрытием того, что: «да, главный санитарный врач, конечно, не может запретить партнерские роды, но путин сказал: «все обязаны сидеть дома». значит, папы должны сидеть дома и доулы должны сидеть дома». понятно, доулы бороться не могут, папы бороться могут. а до этого было очень дружественно к доулам и можно было по омс пройти доуле с папой вместе в 70-м, да [until this week, which putin declared forcibly as a day off/nonworkday, we were allowed to enter the 70th maternity hospital. then from saturday afternoon, last saturday, doulas were no longer allowed. and they try not to let dads into the 70th maternity hospital either. using the excuse that “yes, the chief sanitary doctor [the head of rospotrebnadzor], of course, cannot prohibit partner childbirth, but putin said: “everyone is obliged to stay at home.” so, dads should stay at home and doulas should stay at home. it is clear that doulas cannot fight, dads can fight. and before that it was very friendly to doulas and it was possible for a dad and a doula together to get into the 70th using cmi, yes] [doula 2, 31 march 2020]. moscow doulas pointed out the injustice and discrimination against women, who were prohibited from having birth partners during state-sponsored childbirth, while the private perinatal hospital md group provided for partners at a cost few could afford despite the pandemic regulations to reduce the spread of coronavirus infection. since pregnant women were denied the presence of their spouses, even in deliveries when paying themselves, women urgently sought out new doctors and maternity hospitals where birth partners were allowed or drew up private contracts with midwives who worked in maternity hospitals that welcome a “soft birth” approach in “commercial” departments. in interviews and on social media, professional doulas with a legal education complained frequently about the limits of the anti-epidemic regulation and the fact that the edict issued by rospotrebnadzor should not abridge the rights of pregnant women guaranteed by 323-fz [kuksa 2020a]. for example, the same moscow doula mentioned it in her interview as well: да, в этом постановлении нет ни слова о партнерских родах — там только о посещении стационаров. посещение стационаров законом не гарантировано. а партнерские роды — с отцом, по крайней мере, с членом семьи, — законом гарантированно. и под это дело мы тушкой и чучелком — папы с моим заявлением, которое я для них разработала, — пролезали в роддома до последних дней. я сама проходила — вот последний раз я была 27 марта в роддоме — в 70activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 21 м, в новогиреево. сейчас москву зарубили на эту тему полностью. сказали: «все, все мы боимся — не будем пускать никого, может только самых настойчивых пап». и партерские роды у нас остались только в московской области. […] я надеюсь со своей девочкой съездить, потому что у нее сломана спина и первые роды, ей не нужна эпидуральная анестезия, ей нужны естественные методики помощи. мы очень уповаем на возможность все-таки родить «партнерски» [yes, in this resolution there is not a word about partner childbirth—there is only about visiting hospitals. hospital visits are not guaranteed by law. and partner childbirth—with the father at least, with a family member— is guaranteed by law. and in this case, by hook or by crook, the dads with my application, which i developed for them, got into the maternity hospital until the last few days. i myself got through—the last time i was in the hospital on march 27—in the 70th, in novogireevo. now this topic has been completely shut down in moscow. they said, “everyone, we are all afraid—we will not let anyone in, maybe only the most persistent dads.” and delivery with partners remained possible only in the moscow region. […] i hope to go with my girl [a client], because she has a broken back and it’s her first birth, she does not need an epidural, she needs natural methods of help. we hope very much for the opportunity to attend partner births] [doula 2, 31 march 2020]. from the point of view of russian human rights activists, if a “state of emergency” had not been introduced, it is only through legislative means that federal laws (namely article 51 of 323-fz) may be suspended [kuksa 2020a]. lawyers and professional doulas with a legal education, as one discusses below, also wrote to the administration of maternity hospitals, rospotrebnadzor, and to prosecutors of moscow and the moscow region asking for an explanation of the legal grounds for limitations on the rights of patients as guaranteed by 323-fz. мы с марией […] написали обращения в роспотребнадзор и прокуратуру. но пришла отбивка, что ответят в течение месяца. это было 18-19 марта. когда роддома стали захлопывать для партнеров массово. и некоторые мои женщины написали жалобы. но некоторые и смирились [maria [a lawyer] and i […] wrote appeals to rospotrebnadzor and the prosecutor's office. but they wrote that they would answer within a month. that was march 18-19. when maternity hospitals began to close en masse for partners. and some of my women have written complaints. but some have resigned themselves] [doula 2, 31 march 2020]. activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 22 a similar situation unfolded in other regions, but not as quickly as in moscow. perinatal specialists in those areas relied on human rights activists and their support initiatives, including with money transfers for legal costs. one regional doula told me that she hoped that “чтобы нашлась отважная роженица с мужем, которые бы отстояли свое конституционное право на партнерские роды в условиях ограничений в связи с коронавирусом” [a brave woman with a husband could be found who could defend their constitutional right to partner delivery despite covid restrictions]” [doula 5, 2 april 2020]. in rare cases, married couples outside of the moscow region tried to defend the rights guaranteed by federal law 323-fz in the courts, as a pskov doula told me: и вот [одна] из последних побед — в наше ковидное время мы добились. была такая пара, они работали с юристом. […]. благодаря ей эта пара прошла в роды сейчас, вот буквально неделю назад прошел муж на роды. [а во время ковида и до сих пор нельзя [было]]? нет, закрыто, закрыто. ковид и все. роспотребнадзор, главврач роспотребнадзора запретил. дальше был суд. и были выставлены требования — при каких условиях можно пройти. они эти требования соблюли. и все — они родили вместе…вот неделя, 10 дней назад [and here is [one] of the last victories that we have achieved in covid time. there was this couple, they worked with a lawyer. […]. thanks to her, this couple went to the delivery now, just a week ago, the husband went into delivery. [and during covid and up to now [was] it was not allowed]? no, closed, closed. covid and all. rospotrebnadzor, the head physician of rospotrebnadzor forbade it. next was the trial. and the requirements were set—under what conditions you could get in. they met these requirements. and that's it—they were at the delivery together…a week, 10 days ago] [doula 14, 18 september 2021]. after the subsequent official relaxation of restrictions (for a vote on a constitutional referendum) and changes in the march decree by the mayor of moscow on 8 june 2020, partner birth did not return to moscow maternity hospitals. on 11 june 2020, human rights activist and member of the apd maria molodtsova posted a proposal for the return of partner deliveries entitled “supported childbirth should be available even in an epidemic” on the “russian public initiative” website [molodtsova 2020]. this internet resource was created to accommodate public initiatives by citizens pursuant to presidential decree №183 (4 march 2013). such initiatives mobilize the law through a collective appeal to public authorities. a proposal will be considered by federal authorities if signed by more than 100,000 citizens. voting on molodtsova’s initiative ended on 21 december 2021; only 528 votes supported the idea, 95 votes were against. the low number of supporters can be partially explained by the fact that partnered activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 23 births in moscow were once again allowed in august 2020, so that the proposal had become moot for in the moscow region. meanwhile, perinatal specialists from other regions complained that, unlike in moscow, partnerand doula-accompanied births were still not possible in most cities. one doula said “cейчас только в платном можно. […] да, а родовспоможение лет на десять в прошлом в сравнении с москвой” [now you can only [have a doula] in a for-pay [ward]. […] yes, but, compared to moscow, obstetric care is ten years in the past] [doula 11, 15 september 2021]. another expressed the same opinion: “ну и вообще доступ в роддома ограниченный. иногда мужей пускают, но доул, кроме мужей, не пускают. и то мужей пускают только в два роддома из семи, вот, и то по контракту только” [well, in general, access to the maternity hospital is limited. sometimes husbands are allowed, but doulas, other than husbands, are not allowed in. and then husbands are allowed only in two out of seven maternity hospitals, there, and then only under a contract] [doula 12, 17 september 2021]. since the beginning of covid-19, perinatal activists have been mobilizing all available forms of civic and human rights activism—from volunteer projects and network protests calling people to fight for partner birth, support by a doula, and patient rights, to complaints to the prosecutor’s office and the organization of collective appeals and petitions to federal government bodies. doulas note with regret that some russian women show aggression towards rights activists, and the overwhelming majority display inaction and nonresistance, even if they can improve the situation through bureaucratic means. a moscow doula describes this situation: просто люди же разные: не все хотят бороться. меня в том же инстаграме в нескольких местах просто помоями облили. мы делали общий прямой эфир […] про партнерские роды. […] и очень многие сказали, что «я враг, что я враг всех врачей, хочу, чтобы мужья заразили врачей. и вообще меня нужно распять, убить и так далее». люди у нас, к сожалению, в отличие от нью-йорка, где мамы выбили себе партнерские роды, написав губернатору, и у них все это восстановили и возобновили. у нас, к сожалению, очень многие люди сами не хотят, хотят сильную руку и все вот это печальное, что меня вгоняет в около депрессивное состояние, скажу вам честно. ну что ж? будем держаться [it’s just that people are different: not everyone wants to fight. in the same instagram in several places, they just trashed me. we made a general live broadcast [...] about partner childbirth. […] and many people said that i was the enemy, that i was the enemy of all doctors, that i want their husbands to infect doctors. in general, i needed to be crucified, killed and so on. unfortunately, our people are unlike new york, where mothers knocked themselves out for partner childbirth by writing to the governor, and they have it all restored and resumed. activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 24 unfortunately, many people here do not want to do for themselves, they want a strong hand, and all this is sad that it drives me into a depressive state, to be honest. well, we’ll be hold on] [doula 2, 31 march 2020]. in pandemic conversations, other pessimistic doulas describe the manifestation of “learned” helplessness and inertia in russian women, especially in comparison with the victories of western perinatal specialists, which, from afar, seem much more impressive than their own russian successes. сейчас у них ограничение — один человек. и женщины вынуждены думать, кто это будет или муж, или доула, да, например. это то, с чем я сталкиваюсь в разговорах с коллегами из израиля. некоторые больницы у них запретили вообще. вообще запрет касается женщин, которые поступают в роды с признаками инфекции, да, респираторной. но это как бы, мне кажется, это нормально и понятно, да, почему это происходит. но тем не менее какие-то ограничения ввели сразу. в том же нью-йорке наши коллеги говорят, что… ну, вы знаете эту историю, да? [читала.] что женщины просто отстояли. и поэтому им разрешили. у нас, к сожалению, женщина очень инертна. и добиться вот такой массовой инициативы, мне кажется, это очень сложно. не думаю, что это вообще нереально, но это должно быть какое-то прямо движение, движение. у нас еще сидит такое, что, ну, сказали: «нет». значит, нет. или вот еще: «ну, все же рожали без поддержки, ну и я какнибудь рожу». то есть, женщины сами себя… [now they have a limitation of one person. and women are forced to think who it will be—either the husband or the doula, for example. this is what i come across in conversations with colleagues from israel. some hospitals have been forbidden to them altogether. in general, the ban applies to women who enter childbirth with signs of infection, yes, respiratory. but it seems to me that this is normal and understandable, yes, why this is happening. but nevertheless, some restrictions were introduced immediately. in new york, our colleagues say that... well, you know this story, right? [i read it.] the women defended it. and so, they were allowed. unfortunately, our woman is very inert. and to achieve such a massive initiative, it seems to me, is very difficult. i don’t think it’s unreal at all, but it must be some kind of movement, movement. we still have such a thing like, well, they said: “no.” so, no. or here’s another: “well, everyone used to give birth without support, well, i'll give birth somehow”. that is, women do it to themselves…] [doula 7, 5 april 2020]. some perinatal specialists nevertheless reacted with understanding to quarantine bans and isolation of women in labor from families, as in the quotation below, activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 25 since they are familiar with similar restrictive policies in other countries and, in principle, consider them reasonable and permissible. сопровождения запрещены. это карантинная мера. и они запрещены по всем роддомам москвы. [...] [а запрещены и папам тоже, да?] да. всем. партнерские роды вообще. ну, это карантинная мера. это форс-мажорные обстоятельства. да, то есть мы должны понимать, что это не потому, что врачам захотелось перестать пускать партнеров на роды. это именно для того, чтобы избежать распространение инфекции. как бы, понятно, что к этому есть вопросы. но тем не менее…как бы главный санитарный врач выпустил такое распоряжение. все роддома прикрыли до особого распоряжения. в принципе это нормальная мера. это то же самое, как сезонный карантин по гриппу, да, когда каждый роддом сам принимает решение [partner support is prohibited. this is a quarantine measure. and they are banned in all maternity hospitals in moscow. [...] [and dads are also forbidden, right?] yes. everyone. delivery with partners in general. well, this is a quarantine measure. these are extreme circumstances. yes, that is we must understand that this is not because the doctors wanted to stop letting partners into delivery. this is precisely to avoid the spread of infection. as it were, it is clear that there are questions about this. but nevertheless…the chief sanitary doctor [the head of rospotrebnadzor] issued this order. all maternity hospitals have been closed until further notice. in principle, this is a normal measure. this is the same as seasonal flu quarantine, yes, when each maternity hospital makes its own decision] [doula 7, 5 april 2020]. since the very first days of the pandemic, the freedom of choice for the location and the team for the delivery, which provided for competition between maternity hospitals and doctors, has been restricted in larger cities. both individuals providing and receiving medical aid have lost their pre-covid agency and have been turned into objects of medicalization and budgeting (of the ministry of health of russia) and are subject of public health and epidemiological controls (of rospotrebnadzor). this situation has led, once again, to a rise in opt-out strategies for some women. opting-out during the covid-19 pandemic during the pandemic, some russian women made choice for home birth with the support of a midwife and doula out of fear. they worried about the risk of infection during childbirth, increased medical interventions, and separation from the newborn in a maternity hospital. pregnant women, women in labor, and their relatives, who, pre-covid, have legally guaranteed statuses of patients, activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 26 partners, legal representatives, or visitors, became “coronavirus threat sources” while on the premises of healthcare facilities, for doctors and for their own babies. the suspension of partners and doulas, and restrictions on the baby remaining with the mother, according to informants, contributed to a significant increase in illegal home births in the regions. вроде как партнерские роды из-за ковида стали невозможны — у нас жесткий карантин был в роддомах. […] женщины все чаще решают рожать дома, как вижу так — издалека. но это очень в диковинку. и родные потом очень плохо это воспринимают. индивидуальных акушерок с медицинским образованием нет. я знаю трех доул, одну домашнюю акушерку. только если договор с врачом заключать, но это совсем не гарантия мягких родов [it seems like partner-accompanied births became impossible because of covid—we had a strict quarantine in maternity hospitals. [...] women increasingly were deciding to give birth at home, as i see it—from afar. but this is very unusual. and then the relatives perceive it very badly. there are no individual midwives with a medical education. i know three doulas, one homebirth midwife. only if you conclude an agreement with a doctor, but this is not at all a guarantee of a soft birth] [doula 9, 20 september 2021]. [а большой процент женщин, которые на это [домашние роды] идут? и в связи с чем? вам это известно?] да, большой процент и он увеличивается с каждым разом. потому что, во-первых, в условиях пандемии сейчас, когда закрепилась практика разлучения мамы и ребенка до анализа пцр на коронавирус, стали очень бояться вот этого момента и больше стало домашних родов. […] потому что женщины стали бояться роддомов, перестали перекладывать ответственность на врача, стали сами изучать физиологию беременности и родов. […] и негатива, конечно, много по этому поводу. […] [да, это я знаю, стигматизация до сих пор очень сильная. […] 20–30% по вашему региону?] [...] больше, конечно, от домашних акушерок эту статистику мы слышим. у них очень много. они вообще не сидят без свободного времени. у них прямо вообще все под завязку. [а вы не знаете, они имеют официальное образование или сами учились?] да, конечно, это женщины, как правило, с большим опытом работы в государственных роддомах, и в частных, и всяких. они в итоге просто уходят в домашнее акушерство [and the large percentage of women who go for this [home birth]? and in connection with what? do you know?] yes, a large percentage and it increases every time. because, firstly, now it’s pandemic conditions, activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 27 when the practice of separating a mother and child before the pcr test for coronavirus had become established, they have become very afraid of this moment and there are more home births. [...] because women began to be afraid of maternity hospitals, they stopped shifting responsibility to the doctor, they began to study the physiology of pregnancy and childbirth themselves. [...]and, of course, there is a lot of negativity about this. […] [yes, i know that, the stigmatization is still very strong. […] however, 20-30%?] [...] more, of course, we hear these statistics from homebirth midwives. they have a lot. they are constantly busy. [do you know if they have a formal education or did they study by themselves?] yes, of course, these are women, as a rule, with extensive experience working in state maternity hospitals, and in private ones, and all kinds. they end up just going into home obstetrics] [doula 13, 17 september 2021]. unlike in moscow, in other regions, epidemic-control restrictions banned partner and doula accompaniment for an extended period of time. opportunities to choose the location and team for childbirth were reduced—thus, patient and parental rights were limited. under authoritarian restrictions of patient agency, women have turned to home births and perinatal specialists have shifted to interactions with women into a space uncontrolled by and invisible to the state as in the first two post-soviet decades. therefore, these self-same authorities have ironically undermined, to some extent, the objectives of preventing the spread of covid19 by excessively reducing family and patient agency in maternity hospitals. this decision by women in regions usually seen as more conservative or traditional is strong evidence for the influence of perinatal activists on the russian obstetrics system as a whole. conclusion we have seen that protest and resistance to the medical system during labor and delivery may take many forms and has been significantly influenced by the grassroots efforts of independent perinatal specialists. they have changed the view of childbirth significantly, leading to vernacular models that call for “humane and soft” approaches to the process. while medical personnel may hold to established medical protocols, patients and perinatal specialists have, at least in some cases, means to resist them. individual legal strategies of resistance are used exclusively by women who are prepared for childbirth, with experience in childbirth and/or a familiarity with requisite linguistic skills to negotiate the legal system. in addition, professionals with legal and/or doula skills rely on collective legal strategies addressed to regulators. the only resistance strategy that involves two-way interaction is discussions the woman’s plan and expectations for labor and delivery with the staff within the context of informed consent forms. optingout to avoid the system is chosen by women who had a negative experience during activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 28 their first delivery or in situations where the usual or expected patient agency and freedoms have been prohibited. if a woman is inexperienced in these areas or unaccustomed to confrontation to express their agency, they choose retroactive strategies to protest the medical system. for example, they may share their narratives in digital flash mobs. most often, flash mob abuse narratives describe situations of obstetric care using cmi and employ the vernacular genre of victim narratives. alternatively, they may cope with their trauma during postpartum rituals to “close the birth,” which have become widespread over the last ten years. in either case, we find active perinatal specialists who participate in protests and develop women’s interactive skills with medical staff or help to cope with birth trauma. signature collection on electronic and hard-copy petitions links patient, medical and bureaucratic discourses and frames. whether based on a template or not, digital or on paper, individual or collective letters to the authorities allow activists to articulate problems and indicate solutions acceptable to women and perinatal specialists. they can be perceived by senders as a kind of digital resistance calling for human rights. in general, mobilization by perinatal human rights activists of various methods of direct and symbolic protest communication with powerful actors gives women a greater voice. it has allowed for the successful presentation of patient rights in the maternity hospital. they have laid the legal and scientific groundwork to challenge established medical protocols by teaching and promoting new ideas and values that have led to this new vernacular model of childbirth in russia. notes 1 i am very grateful for the careful proofreading, thoughtful editing, and invaluable assistance of jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby, the recommendations of anonymous reviewers as well as the information provided by my interlocutors. 2 a contract delivery in private moscow maternity hospitals of mark kurtser with an experienced obstetrician-gynecologist, according to independent midwives, costs more than 800,000 rubles. for more information on md medical group, see https://mamadeti.ru/about/rukovodstvo/. 3 for more information on the moscow center for traditional midwifery and family medicine, see https://center-akusherstva.ru/o-nas/. 4 the institute of perinatal support (https://doula.link/) has produced 24 cohorts, for a total of over 800 professional doulas in their six-year existence. 5 for more information on the association of 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[everything was forever, until it was no more: the last soviet generation]. москва: новое литературное обозрение. interviews doula 1. moscow, russia. interviewed over messenger. 21 february 2019, 29 august 2021. doula 2. moscow, russia. interviewed over video messenger. 15 january, 31 march 2020. doula 3. moscow, russia. responded to questionnaire. 1 april 2020. doula 4. moscow, russia. responded to questionnaire. 1 april 2020. doula 5. volga region, russia. responded to questionnaire. 2 april 2020. doula 6. saint petersburg, russia. responded to questionnaire and interview. 4 april and 17 august 2020. doula 7. moscow region, russia. interviewed over audio messenger. 5 april 2020. doula 8. far eastern region, russia. interviewed over audio messenger. 10 april 2020. doula 9. far eastern region, russia. interviewed over messenger. 8 may 2020 and 20 september 2021. doula 10. saint petersburg, russia. perinatal conference. 16 may 2021. doula 11. siberian region, russia. interviewed over messenger. 15 september 2021. doula 12. volga region, russia. interviewed over audio messenger. 17 september 2021. doula 13. ural region. interviewed over audio messenger. 17 september 2021. activism and patient vulnerability folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 33 doula 14. northwestern region, russia. interviewed over audio messenger. 18 september 2021. midwife 1. moscow, russia. interviewed over video messenger. 7 april 2020. sadovaia tamara, the founder of ctm and “traditional” midwife. meeting with pregnant women. 19 march and 14 april 2018. shnyrova svetlana, moscow doula. north goa, india. interviews. 12 and 17 february 2018. 0-insidecover1125 folklorica journal of the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association (formerly seefa journal) seefa executive board president: mariya lesiv, memorial university of newfoundland vice-president: dorian jurić, university of ottawa secretary-treasurer: shannon donnally quinn, michigan state university board members: elena boudovskaia, georgetown university jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby, university of kentucky webmaster: dorian jurić, university of ottawa folklorica editor: jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby, university of kentucky guest co-editor: dorian jurić, university of ottawa book review editor: laura olson osterman, university of colorado, boulder online content manager: jon giullian, university of kansas editorial board oleksandra britsyna, rylsky folklore institute, ukrainian academy of sciences maria carlson, university of kansas larisa fialkova, university of haifa linda j. ivanits, pennsylvania state university vladimir klyaus, institute of world literature, russian federation katia mikhailova, institute of folklore, bulgaria faith wigzell, ssees-university college london aleksey v. yudin, ghent university, belgium publication supported by the university of kentucky issn 1920-0234 chomitzkyfinal pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 27 pandemic, but make it fashion: ukrainian embroidered ppe in the time of covid-19 katya chomitzky university of alberta edmonton, canada abstract embroidered pandemic wear has become one of the newest cultural fashion trends to emerge in ukraine and within its canadian diaspora. jis article explores the ways in which embroidery as a traditional form of culture retains meaning within modern contexts, while also serving as a vehicle for experimenting with atypical applications of cultural symbols and representations. jroughout the covid-19 pandemic, cloth masks have been recommended by public health officials, including the world health organization, as a preventative measure to limit the spread of the virus. on the basis of digital fieldwork, i discuss the meanings and inspirations behind these embroidered masks, while conducting a material culture analysis of the objects themselves. i argue that, through a subversion of their common purpose— to hide one’s identity— masks have been used in the pandemic as an open/performative display of culture. i contend that this display acts as a means to promote tradition through ephemera and assert cultural importance. jis, coupled with the personal/private use of embroidery as a protective talisman, has fueled a trend of embroidered personal protective equipment in popular culture. in this article, i examine the purpose, use, and form of these masks in order to bring light to the ways in which cultural traditions and objects act (and developed prevalence) as a form of pandemic response. introduction as an integral part of ukraine’s national cultural history, embroidery retains a prolific heritage through its use in folklore, traditional costume, and various household and spiritual objects. je newest form of ephemera to be adorned with the traditional stitches and patterns is that of face masks worn during the covid19 crisis. scholars, including robert klymasz [1987], shawna lemiski [1994], and olena vasylivna shevchenko [2018], have outlined the cultural significance of traditional embroidery patterns, the act of embroidery as well as the folklore surrounding them within the ukrainian context. more recently, during the covid-19 pandemic, the traditional art of ukrainian embroidery has begun to appear on face masks and other forms of personal protective equipment (hereafter ppe) recommended by public health officials to limit the transmission of the virus. (1) while this article does not explore the effectiveness of face masks in pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 28 preventing the spread of covid-19, it does examine how those masks are adorned in ukrainian culture. with face masks and various forms of ppe bearing this cultural identifier, a variety of techniques have been utilized to create or replicate traditional embroidery patterns. for example, some artists and designers have begun to use faux embroidery (2) in order to protect the integrity of the fabric [see image 1]. to avoid creating tiny holes in the top layer of the cloth with the embroidery needle, some favor the use of vinyl transfers on fabric or painted-on depictions of crossstitched styles. while these masks function on a number of levels, this article focuses on the use of embroidery on masks as a traditional protective symbol and as a symbol of ukrainian macro-identity through the open/performative function of folk art. here, i explore the traditional cultural beliefs surrounding embroidery patterns as protective symbols, the identity politics that inform open/performative displays of culture, and the subversion of traditional uses of masks as a form of identity concealment in this pandemic. by addressing these phenomena, this article examines the function of embroidered masks as folkloric cultural ephemera within ukrainian national and canadian diasporic contexts. jis research is valuable as it not only focuses on a new and pressing global phenomenon, but also contributes to longstanding discussions about the general role of embroidery. ukrainian embroidery has only been re-popularized in society and fashion since the first celebration of world vyshyvanka [embroidered shirt] day in 2006. since then, embroidery has been used as a symbol of cultural unification and identification, a trend that was particularly visible during the 2013-2014 euromaidan revolution of dignity. following this resurgence of embroidery in popular fashion, there has also been an increase in the presence of traditional and modern embroidery in ukrainian diaspora, particularly within canada, demonstrating a valuable transnational connection of material culture. in her master’s thesis “je embroidery of vyshyvanka: from traditional technique to contemporary technologies,” kseniia snikhovska asserts that the popular resurgence of embroidery in ukraine is due to the use of embroidery as a “manifestation and a symbol of [ukrainian] national identity” [2017: 5]. while this same incentive exists when people choose to wear embroidered masks, i image 1. silk screened onto the fabric, the pattern on this mask mimics the cross-stitch technique of embroidery in a common geometric floral print featuring roses and intricate lines in black and red. pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 29 believe that there are three primary functions that such embroidery serves which contribute to the overall popularity of culturally decorated ppe; those items also serve as a sign of patriotism and cultural recognition, a fashion statement, and, perhaps less prominently, as a talisman or symbol of protection in regards to the personal/private function of embroidery. to fully explore the impact of ukrainian embroidered face masks within the macro-culture of ukrainian society, both national and diasporic, we must first investigate the two groups responsible for the popularity of the masks: the creators and the consumers. to better analyze these groups and their role within the trend, i have conducted two brief surveys, one directed towards the consumers who wear and purchase masks with embroidery or ukrainian symbols, and a second directed at the artisans and designers who create the masks. both surveys were distributed to ukrainian nationals and ukrainian canadians. prior to receiving responses, i had hypothesized that cultural pride would act as an influencing factor in the choice to purchase or create these masks. i argue that cultural ephemera work to build community and preserve traditional forms of folk art within the covid-19 pandemic, a trend that may be both revealing and valuable for the larger sphere of material culture studies and studies of traditional folk art adaption and preservation. background as a form of “informal, expressive culture” [kule folklore centre 2011], a standard definition of folklore, ukrainian embroidery occupies a unique space in the study of material culture. jis form of folk art is traditionally found on objects such as vyshyvanky [embroidered shirts] and rushnyky [ritual cloths], as well as applied to other household objects, such as ceramics, through the process of decalcomania (the process of transferring designs from prepared paper, such as vinyl, onto another object). embroidery, as a cultural medium, functions on two main levels, open/performative and personal/private. je open/performative nature of embroidery functions on a similar level to performative culture. maksym karpovets’ emphasizes that when we think of performance, we tend to focus on the theatrical elements of what it means to entertain, but the “…увагу людини на специфічній естетичній та емоційній взаємодії між артистом і аудиторією” [attention to a specific aesthetic and emotional interaction between the artist and the audience] [karpovets’ 2018: 140] that is integral to all performance, is the same focus and interaction which informs displays of embroidery. in embroidery, though, the role of the artist is often removed with connection being created instead between the wearer and their audience. je open/performative nature of culture exists when the object in question displays a message to those who view it. robert klymasz [1987: 4] describes “the public function of ukrainian embroidery… as a form of open display to underline a fidelity to ethnic loyalty and origin.” with the familiarity of embroidered symbols and patterns within ukrainian culture, displaying identity is at the forefront of mask wearing as cultural ephemera. je second function, personal/private, focuses on the pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 30 protective elements of masks and the beliefs, both sacred and secular, that accompany certain patterns. while these two functions can exist separately, they do not contradict or oppose one another and often exist concurrently within folkloric material culture. additionally, these functions act as motivators for those who choose to wear and create the masks. in order to fully understand the ways in which face masks and embroidered ppe impact those who wear them and the worlds around them, it is important to first consider ways in which these two functions impact different aspects of life. emphasizing the role of embroidery within the ukrainian canadian diaspora in the 1980s, klymasz provides more background into the nature of the open/performative function, discussing the importance of acknowledging the ways in which embroidery can act as a symbol of outward fidelity to one’s culture. within his understanding of the performative nature of the traditional folk craft, he acknowledges the necessity of the simplification and modernization of embroidery patterns and styles when included on cultural ephemera, a trend that is visible on many of the masks that have been created. however, orysia paszczak tracz [1998] reminds researchers, embroiderers, and the general public that we must acknowledge the commercialization of the handicraft when presenting new styles and variants of traditional patterns, rather than simply equating the patterns as one and the same. by recognizing this, we are able to connect the original meanings to modern iterations and understand why image 3. an example of a modernized pattern of larkspur image 2. a traditional example of larkspur combined with other botanical imagery on a woman’s vyshyvanka c. 1950s from the bukovyna region. in collection at the musée ukraina museum. pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 31 these patterns are important and used today. it is necessary to simplify these patterns often for the sake of replicating them on non-traditional mediums like face masks, or when using non-traditional methods such as decalcomania and machine stitching. for example, image 2 depicts a portrayal of a generic larkspur plant, possibly the field larkspur (consolida regalis) found in ukraine and also known as del’finii, on a covid-19 face mask. image 3 depicts a more traditional embroidery pattern of larkspur in the top right corner, featuring multiple colors of pinks, blues and yellows on a long stalk, progressively getting smaller towards the top. je larkspur plant is rarely found alone in traditional patterns. rather, it is often included in large floral designs with a number of flowers accompanying it. in order to make the pattern suitable for a mask, the single flower is simplified and enlarged to best fill the space of one side of a mask, as opposed to the use of a replicated pattern such as the one depicted in image 3. jat much larger motif only depicts a small version of the larkspur and runs the length of a woman’s vyshyvanka sleeve. many changes are present between the two styles, including the use of machine stitching on the mask as opposed to cross-stitching, to make the pattern more easily replicable and, therefore, more suitable for mass production. additionally, the pattern including only the single flower is better able to be mass produced, as opposed to the manual labor required to create a large motif similar to the one in image 3. while some artists have adorned entire masks with a single motif, the majority of masks featuring ukrainian embroidery only display patterns on one side of the mask, or have two small matching patterns on each side, rarely covering the mouth with embroidery. at this time, it is unclear to me why this might be, however the shape and construction of the mask—often featuring a seam down the middle making it a difficult spot to evenly stitch over— may influence the choice of which patterns to replicate and how. while pandemic wear is not a new phenomenon—masks were worn in the 1918 spanish flu epidemic and in 2009 to prevent transmission of the h1n1 virus (3)—the prominence of ppe as a fashion object is relatively recent. je availability of differently styled and patterned face masks has increased as global communities share designs and products on digital marketplaces, and there is a clear chronology to that growth. early in the pandemic, many digital marketplaces placed restrictions on the sale of medical masks and other high-demand objects, such as sanitizers, food items, and toilet paper. (4) price restrictions were later placed on these objects, as several members of various digital communities began to overcharge for them, with one user from sydney, australia, selling a box of disposable face masks for the price of $500. (5) adam mosseri, the head of instagram, commented on the sale of these objects on facebook marketplace, in a now deleted tweet, saying “supplies are short, prices are up, and we’re against people exploiting this public health emergency” [2020]. with new restrictions in place and the demand increasing for face masks, many artisans began to sew and create masks to sell on digital marketplaces for additional sources of income. jis was especially true for many who had lost their jobs due to covid-19. (6) je digital marketplace etsy reported “$346 million worth of masks [sold] during the pandemic, accounting for 14 percent of all sales pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 32 across small sellers on the platform” [hollister 2020. emphasis in original]. on this platform, designer dayna konopelny, the owner of the shop emilkakono, began to sell ukrainian-styled masks for a number of reasons, including “having people ask about [her] making them since it fit with [her] brand” [konopely 2020]. as one of many sellers featuring culturally inspired facemasks, konopelny utilized her digital market as a way to keep busy and generate income when her schooling and work abruptly ceased due to the pandemic. je unprecedented world of face masks has been difficult to navigate, with information about the objects and their effectiveness changing frequently due to new research into the covid-19 disease. (7) while this variability has caused a lot of confusion amongst members of the public, different marketplaces have worked to control disputes about advertised masks. for example, vistaprint includes a disclaimer stating that “reusable face masks are not medical devices or personal protective equipment (ppe)” [vistaprint 2020] in the product description for the cloth masks that they sell. due to the novelty of face masks as a fashion accessory, there is little prior research available regarding their stylization or their cultural trends. jus, we must turn to other relevant areas of research that can aide in understanding this new fashion, such as the function of embroidery as a talisman or amulet [odarchenko and tsarynnyk 1991; sciacca 2013; khlystun 2015]. similar to the anglo-saxon context, dating between 450-1100 ad, where embroidery was utilized as a means to “ward off evil and provide protection against unknown threats” [lester-makin 2019: 99], ukrainian embroidery patterns have been traditionally “regarded with mystical awe and in many circumstances as magical and protective talismans” [sciacca 2013: 2]. jis concept is comparable to the “symbolic powers that could protect [a] wearer from evil and strife” [kmit, luciow, and luciow 1984: 9] that are associated with the geometric, floral, and zoomorphic patterns of ukrainian embroidery. je majority of scholars have studied these patterns in reference to the traditional rushnyk [ritual cloth], since that object is designed as a protective gift for the home. je continued use of these objects reveals that various applications of embroidery continue to carry these traditional meanings [see image 4]. one prominent example of the talismanic nature of embroidery is visible in olena grigorivna shevchenko’s discussion of the use of a woman’s traditional vyshyvanka, a traditionally embroidered blouse. shevchenko notes that a “woman who [had] had a lot of children [would loan] her shirt to a woman who could not get pregnant” [2018: 121], with the shirt carrying an implied talismanic property that would aid in fertility. jis shared belief that exists within ukrainian culture demonstrates the ways in which material objects and patterns function within a unique realm of paganism that continues to exist alongside christian belief, expressing the magical properties of symbols often tied to traditional deities such pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 33 as berehynia. (8) with masks, this belief is expressly visible when the symbols are used by designers and wearers alike as a protective symbol. ukrainian embroidery on masks is an especially interesting phenomenon to explore, as it occupies a unique space within the fields of folklore studies and material culture studies. je art form of embroidery is continuously evolving to accommodate the modernization of tastes and the industrialization of the craft. as noted by anastasia varyvonchyck, “oстаннє десятиріччя хх століття позначилося стрімким спадом… виробництв художніх промислів, не витримавши ринкової конкуренції” [the previous decade of the twentieth century was distinguished by the quick decline… of arts and crafts, which were unable to withstand market competition] [2015: 250], largely due to the introduction of the sewing machine. since this is a relatively new area of study, this research is based around the work of other scholars in the field of ukrainian material folklore studies [klymasz 1987; lesiv 2013; khanenko-friesen 2015]. i build off of the work of these scholars in order to decode the mass popularity of current trends in embellished embroidery appearing on face masks and other ppe. by combining this research with further examination of different embroidery patterns in traditional ukrainian culture [dragan 1958; hordynskyj 1948; kelly 2003; tsybul’ova and havrylova 1982; voznytsia 2005], this article emphasizes the connections that exist between the intentions of both creators and wearers of embroidered face masks, as well as the importance of the masks in a ukrainian cultural context. for example, colors employed within ukrainian embroidery were, and still are, often symbolic of the regions in which they are created, and not chosen purely for aesthetic appeal. moreover, the meaning behind each color employed, just as behind each pattern and motif, often effectively communicates cultural practices, truths, and knowledge which help preserve the history and tradition of the people. for instance, in ukrainian tradition, white often symbolizes purity, integrity, and sanctity [kelly 2003: 19], while red often symbolizes beauty, as the word krasnyi is used both to refer to the color red and the word beautiful. by connecting the symbolic meanings of patterns and colors to responses generated in my research, it is evident that the use of embroidery on masks still reflects these traditions, with the use of traditional colors on masks during the covid-19 pandemic. image 4. qe above mask features red and black cross-stitching in a traditional pattern. stitching is limited to the first of three layers and only covers one side of the mask. pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 34 rooted in history: ancient traditions in a modern pandemic having declared its independence on 24 august 1991, ukraine as a nation state is relatively young in comparison to the rich traditions and cultures of the various regions and peoples who make up the country. pre-dating the era of kyivan rus’ of 882 c.e., the motifs popular in what is now considered traditional ukrainian embroidery are seen in wall paintings depicting rituals of that time. engravings in trypillian pottery from the later neolithic period (5000 – 2500 b.c.e.) provide depictions of clothing at that time that bear similar embroidery patterns to the ones used today. one such artifact depicts the “fertile field,” [kelly 2003: 13] a motif that “looks like a diamond with four dots in it, [which is] incised on the stomach of [a statue of a pagan] goddess indicating her pregnancy” [kelly 2003: 13]. jis same pattern is found today on pysanky (ukrainian easter eggs) as well as in embroidery motifs, including those added to masks. a notable development in the use of traditional patterns of face masks is the wide variety of regional representation available. artists, such as iryna khrystynych of hoyra studio, have attempted to create diverse patterns that represent a variety of regions, while still creating general patterns that represent the macro-culture of ukraine [forrest 2020]. each region possesses its own style of embroidery, varying in thread color, technique, and pattern. je symbols and motifs found in ukrainian embroidery can be divided into three main categories, including geometric, zoomorphic, and floral patterns. within the realm of covid-19 cultural ephemera, floral and plant patterns have become increasingly popular and appear most frequently on face masks. (9) stylized flowers in clothing are used as a symbol to “protect against ‘evil spirits’, misfortune and diseases” [wasin 2021]. ukrainian scholar iuliia nikishenko [2012] emphasizes the importance of the continuation of floral motifs in modern embroidery, drawing on the history of such symbolism within the culture, she writes: рослинний світ—дерева, квіти, трави — міцно вкорінений у традиційній свідомості українського народу… вони є неодмінними атрибутами лікувальних та магічних дій, родинно-побутових та календарних обрядів. [je world of plants—trees, flowers and herbs—is firmly rooted in the consciousness of the ukrainian people… they are indispensable attributes of healing and magical actions, family and calendar ceremonies]. she emphasizes the importance of this symbolism not only in embroidery, but also on ceramic products, pysanky, and in petrykivka paintings (a traditional style of painting that dates back to the seventeenth century and is commonly used to decorate household objects, walls, and architecture). je use of specific motifs and styles not only helps communicate particular meanings but can also communicate the region from which that embroidery originates. for example, floral motifs are found in embroidery from northern regions, particularly kyiv, pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 35 while geometric patterns are found most commonly in the hutsul region in the west. with floral patterns and plant life being some of the most prominent styles used to decorate ukrainian covid-19 face masks, it is important to understand the meaning of these patterns in order to grasp their relevance for the portrayal of macro-national identity in the open/performative function of embroidery. mallow or mal’vy (malva), which is often embroidered in bright colors such as blues, reds, or pinks, symbolizes “love for native land, for nation and [the] people that represent it” [krotenko 2018: 63], and is frequently found in the zhytomyr region. je plant itself is used in folk medicine for sore throats and dry coughs. as these symptoms are also commonly associated with covid-19, the use of this pattern on face masks seems particularly appropriate. je mask above in image 5 is a 3layer mask, with a machine-stitched embroidery pattern on the top layer. while the pattern could be identified as a number of different flowers, the designer lists this pattern simply as “chervona mal’va” [red mallow] without any further nomenclature provided about the chosen flower. another noteworthy pattern that has been modernized and replicated on face masks is that of the kalyna, or guelder rose [viburnum opulus]. known as an ethnic symbol of ukraine, kalyna is prevalent in both traditional and modern folk songs such as chervona kalyna [red guelder rose] and odna kalyna [one guelder rose], as well as in folk medicine, poetry, and in many other contexts. according to orysia paszczak tracz [2001] “its beauty cannot be denied; its status in ukrainian folk life is irreplaceable.” je plant represents beauty, blood, love, image 5. this mask features an embroidery pattern of the mallow flower, or mal’va, known in folk tradition for its healing properties specifically for sore throats and dry coughs, symptoms associated with covid-19 pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 36 womanhood, motherhood, and national resurgence; kalyna is “the color of the ‘nation’s soul,’ the core of the kozak spirit and the symbol of national unity” [krotenko 2018: 73]. je depiction of kalyna has become increasingly important in recent years as a national symbol “expressive of ukraine’s yearning for freedom” [balan 2016]. jis proliferation is reminiscent of its role in the time of the communities of the kozaky [cossaks] in the sixteenth century when kalyna was used as a reminder of the motherland and “familiar places left behind” [ukrainian dance world 2014]. by displaying national symbols, such as the kalyna, on masks, people outwardly depict a macro-culture used to distinguish themselves from other nations and traditions. by representing different regional embroidery patterns on masks, and by working to create a macro-representation of culture through the generalized use of these patterns, embroidered masks have acquired the attributes of folk motifs in embroidery, playing “a significant role in educating and stimulating… patriotic feelings [in] citizens of ukraine” [drozdova, soroka, and vityuk 2017]. je belief that these traditional motifs can be utilized for contemporary purposes comes to the forefront when one considers the role that embroidery played as a tool of protest during the euromaidan revolution of dignity. (10) by infusing modern elements into traditional folk forms, ukrainian embroidery has been adapted to accommodate “the new normal” of daily life. by incorporating these styles on face masks, national unity is displayed through the open/performative function of embroidery to outwardly exhibit cultural and national fidelity. it is important to recognize the different shape and construction of masks in comparison to traditional vyshyvanky and rushnyky. jis construction influences where embroidery can be placed, what patterns are feasible, and which types of stitching are more appropriate for certain areas on masks. for example, merezhka embroidery, a type of cut-and-drawn openwork embroidery that creates gaps in the fabric, is an inappropriate style for ppe, as it would be permeable. masks have most commonly displayed either forms of cross-stitch or of lyshtva— also known as a leaf-stitch, a form of two-sided satin stitch with long single lines that appear nearly identical on the front and back of an item—even when they are not made with needle and thread embroidery. for example, masks that feature decalcomania image 6. qis mask features a pattern of guelder rose or kalyna, a national symbol of ukraine. pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 37 still attempt to replicate the cross-stitch style, featuring patterns made up of little “x”s or squares to mimic the appearance of the original stitching style. jis representation of embroidery, while not truly embroidered, has been favored among many designers and healthcare professionals. staff at the kitsman central district hospital in bukovyna and the lviv regional clinical hospital painted their protective suits to simulate embroidery patterns for international vyshyvanka day 2020, on 21 may, during the covid-19 pandemic. (11) understanding the appeal: research methodology because data collection is still in progress at the time of this writing, i have yet to receive a full range of responses. however, i am able to provide a number of valuable preliminary results to contextualize the research. subsequent research will include data based on additional questionnaires. when more responses have been gathered, i intend to analyze trends based on gender identification, geographical location, and age. due to the small sample size employed for this paper, analyses based on wider trends have proven impracticable and identifying distinctions between diaspora and national respondents has been difficult. je first survey, distributed to artisans and designers, addresses the following questions: 1. did you have experience with ukrainian embroidery or ukrainian folk art prior to the covid-19 pandemic? 2. what inspired you to include ukrainian motifs on your masks, or to sell masks featuring ukrainian folk art? 3. would you describe your patterns as traditional or as a modern interpretation/style? 4. is your current work on masks influenced by the traditional meanings behind specific embroidery patterns or colors? 5. what does ukrainian embroidery and folk art mean to you? jese open-ended questions are intended to evoke answers which will provide further information about each artisan’s motivation for creating embroidered designs. jey are also aimed at revealing the shift (if one exists) from other commercial products that feature embroidery to face mask production. je survey for artisans and designers has been distributed to 30 participants, with six having responded at this time. contact with members of the general public regarding mask wearing has been more successful, with 25 participants having responded to date. having shared this survey through various public forums online and by word of mouth, 19 of the respondents have been from north american communities, while only six were residing in ukraine at the time of their response. as i was living in pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 38 canada at the time of the research and had primarily advertised the questionnaire on digital english-speaking forums, there was a significantly higher response by north american participants than those in ukraine. je following questions were asked of wearers of ukrainian embroidered face masks: 1. do you own any masks with ukrainian embroidery, embroidery-like patterns, or ukrainian folk art on them? 2. if so, what were your motivations for purchasing it/them? 3. do you own other objects with ukrainian embroidery or embroiderylike patterns on them? if yes, please list (i.e., embroidered clothing, housewares, etc.). 4. are there any particular meanings that you associate with embroidery? 5. what does ukrainian embroidery mean to you? 6. how do you feel/react when you see someone wearing traditional embroidery or embroidery-like patterns in person or in the media? my preliminary findings allow us to gauge this phenomenon in its earliest forms. not only do i intend to expand my survey to include more participants, but i believe this research should be expanded to include members of other cultures who also use face masks as a new medium for cultural representation through textiles. preliminary results only half of the desired number of respondents have participated at this time in the consumer/general public survey, with 24 percent of those respondents from ukraine and eight percent identifying as male. additionally, of the six designers interviewed, five were residing in ukraine at the time of the survey and only one was in canada; all of these participants have been female. jus, at this stage it is difficult to make distinctions based on gender or nationality without relying upon significant generalizations when analyzing the results for both the consumers and the producers of embroidered masks. currently, respondents have provided a variety of answers to the questions, both confirming and expanding on my initial hypothesis. one motivation, which i had not previously considered, was the philanthropic effort to financially support community members through the purchasing of masks. for example, jana lalach purchased her masks in order to support a ukrainian orthodox children’s camp through the funds raised by sales [lalach 2020]. another unexpected motivation was the wearing of masks to indicate family ties. with her mother creating the masks out of boredom and “for something to do during the pandemic” [anonymous #1 2020], one respondent pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 39 said that she now wears the masks because they were created by her mother (see image 7 for an example of the masks submitted by this respondent). while one respondent who owns ukrainian masks does not have any additional associations with embroidery, 24 respondents made up of both national and diaspora ukrainians, had a range of associations. based off the most commonly used phrases or words from each of the consumer respondents, i have compiled the following chart [figure 1], depicting their associations. each bar depicts how many respondents mentioned the listed item as an association with ukrainian embroidery, both on masks and in general. so as not to influence opinions, i left the questionnaire open-ended for participants to write in their own responses, rather than pre-selecting “buzzwords” to choose from. several respondents listed multiple associations with embroidery; therefore, there are more than 25 listed associations. however, the chart reflects that the majority of consumer respondents associated culture and heritage, as well as national pride with depictions of ukrainian embroidery. while i am hesitant to make any strong claims about connections between nationality and the responses due to the small sample size, four out of the five people who mentioned artistry and appreciation for craft as an association with embroidery were ukrainian nationals. an equally common association is national pride, with four out of six ukrainian nationals also mentioning this category. in consideration of the open/performative nature of embroidery and face masks, the survey asked, “how do you feel/react when you see someone wearing traditional embroidery or embroidery-like patterns in person or in the media?” jis question was answered by 60 percent of respondents with the word “proud.” associating cultural pride with the outward display of ukrainian embroidery, participants noted that the display suggested a cultural connection and a sense of commonality between themselves and other wearers. jrough these assumed connections held by witnesses to embroidery, the open/performative function of embroidery to promote tradition through ephemera and to assert cultural importance is evident. in contrast, only eight percent of respondents mentioned that they wore masks or associated them with spiritual protection, both secular and sacred, suggesting that fewer consumers recognized the traditional personal/private functions as motivators when choosing masks. image 7. qis mask was created, and hand stitched, by a local woman in saskatoon, sk. pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 40 figure 1. respondent associations with embroidery by comparing the answers from both designers and wearers, i have concluded that the element of protection is primarily recognized by the former of the two groups. franklin sciacca notes, in his article “ukrainian rushnyky: binding amulets and magical talismans in the modern period,” that a late nineteenth-century ethnographer observed the creation of rushnyky during a time of plague as a ritualistic form of protection. sciacca also highlights that “at the moment of passing under the sacred cloth the community is protected and born anew, disease is banished” [2013: 6], demonstrating that those who have created ritual objects are often responsible for the protection of their villages. jis sentiment carries through to the mentality of artists today. when asked about the traditional talismanic properties of the embroidery on the face masks she creates, designer anna marchuk responded that “в кожній нашій вишивці є зміст” [in all of our embroidery there is meaning] [marchuk 2020] and that the masks she had made were only for the use of her employees as a form of spiritual and physical protection. more commonly, responses from both designers and wearers reflected on the visualization of national identity. for one respondent, wearing these masks is “a way to show off [her] heritage and pride for [her] ukrainian cultural background” [anonymous #2 2020]. participants who mentioned national culture as a motivating factor often owned a variety of objects with embroidery, including modern clothing, traditional costumes, vyshyvanky, rushnyky, and ceramic glassware. seeing these masks on others also evoked “a huge sense of pride” [heather 2020] that “inspired [respondents] to wear [these patterns] as well to showcase… [their] culture” [senick 2020]. seeing others wearing the masks also evoked a sense of relatability in respondents, suggesting that they and these strangers may share similar passions regarding culture, language, and history. journalist steve forrest recounts how iryna khrystynych, the designer behind hoyra studios in lviv, stated that they create masks “for reasons of hygiene (so as not to touch one’s face), psychology (to look good in difficult circumstances), and to support national pride” [2020]. khrystynych notes that “embroidery is a symbol of our national identity and spirit; it’s what i do best” pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 41 [forrest 2020], demonstrating that such nationalistic sentiments exist in designers, just as they do in wearers. with the market for modern ukrainian embroidered clothing continuously increasing, it is evident that the trend of ukrainian embroidered masks is not only a welcome one, but a positive one that promotes cultural identity and pride. jese preliminary results not only support but expand upon my original hypothesis, demonstrating that conceptions of patriotism, philanthropy, and fashion motivate both wearers and designers to engage with these products. perhaps most notably, these responses demonstrate that it is the open/performative function of culture that acts as the most common motivation for engagement with embroidered ppe. je demonstration of pride, cultural allegiance, and promotion of tradition aligns with the “concomitant politicization” [klymasz 1987: 4] that accompanies public displays of culture. in comparison, the personal/private function of the symbolic protection associated with the patterns is only mentioned by artisans as well as consumers who are ukrainian nationals. jis fact suggests that the personal/private function of embroidery is less prominent in diaspora than that of the open/performative functions. furthermore, my research results reaffirm klymasz’s belief that “je closed/personal [or personal/private] category of milieu is almost totally eclipsed by the public function of ukrainian embroidery, which is maintained chiefly as a form of open display to underline a fidelity to ethnic loyalty and origins” [1987: 4]. jis overwhelming shift towards the open/performative functions of embroidery can be understood as politically motivated, in order to assert cultural distinction. being seen to be heard: identity politics and masks to better understand the utility of masks as a cultural object, it is necessary to first understand the symbols they are decorated with as a form of communicative media. je open/performative function of embroidery, and of material culture generally, places a heavy emphasis on visual communication. jese objects are utilized in outward displays of culture. with the rapid increase of the availability of and demand for face masks due to the pandemic, masks have become, arguably, one of the most valuable forms of communicative media available at this time. one element that is prevalent in folk-art as a medium is that, while there are links and similar patterns shared between different cultures throughout the world and history, there are an infinite number of variants which make it nearly impossible to describe folk-art in specific terms. jerefore, we must consider masks as a broad representation of a macro-culture to understand such limitless terms. pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 42 while some criticize the use of masks as “capitalism’s newest product… [reducing] the people who wear them to walking advertisements” [pawluk 2020], consumer responses to the mask survey suggest that masks have made a positive cultural impact as another way to advertise affiliation with one’s culture and heritage. using masks as a form of communication utilizes the performative function of embroidery to the fullest extent, with attention focused, quite literally, on the faces of those within and external to the culture who see these masks. one respondent to the consumer questionnaire from saskatoon, sk, who was not ukrainian and did not own a ukrainian styled mask, noted that seeing the masks encouraged her to learn more about cultures she was not a part of [gabby 2021]. another commented that seeing others outwardly represent their culture inspired him to do the same [anonymous #3 2021]. journalist vladislav inozemtsev attributes the collapse of the soviet union “not so much [to] economic crisis or ideological disillusionment following the end of communism as [to] its constitutive republics’ attempt[s] to reclaim sovereignty all at once” [2017] however, the shift from these traditional meanings towards modern patterns that simply represent a macro-culture is just as valuable when considering the function of these face masks. with a current emphasis on the performative nature of embroidery, we must understand the shift away from regional representation through folk costume to a generalized national ukrainian identity [see image 8]. myroslav melnyk [2019: 110] emphasizes this shift as a “rejection of… social (cossacks, serfs, farmers), religious (orthodox, grecocatholics, jewish), regional (ruthenians, boyky, lemky, hutsuls) and other identities [to the benefit of a] national concept of ‘ukrainian.’” tatiana zhurzhenko addresses the roles of identity in ukrainian politics, stating that there exists “a widespread anxiety about the lack of a strong "national identity” [that is] supposed to fill the ideological vacuum left after the collapse of communism” [2014: 249]. she notes the division between ukrainian regions but discerns that it is not a useful narrative to pursue. however, “the ‘clash of civilizations’ approach” [2014: 250] is precisely what is being used by the russian image 8. two examples of generalized ukrainian face masks with black, red, and white color schemes, floral patterns, and cross-stitch style pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 43 and ukrainian governments in present conflicts in order to create division amongst ukrainian nationals. by creating one macro-ukrainian identity, this approach is no longer validated. it is the conceptualization of a macro-identity through the modernization of traditional embroidery patterns that truly politicizes the use of ukrainian styled face masks. with the soviet ukrainian identity never having fully disappeared, ukrainian nationalism was considered to be a minority belief [2014: 252-253]. yet, it is this nationalism that has grown through the polarizing events of the euromaidan, the annexation of crimea, and the war in donbas. je identity of a unified and distinct ukrainian people is now continuously recognized in the folk craft of traditional embroidery. when examining the ways in which embroidery is represented on these face masks, there is an evident shift towards this generalized macro-identity. looking at artists such as anna marchuk whose work reflects a more modern style of embroidery, we can see the ways in which the newer embroidery technique of cross-stitching has become identifiable as ukrainian. allowing artists to design and represent a number of patterns, the increased use of cross stitch, or crossstitch-like patterns, in floral motifs may be one of the most widespread identifiers of macro-ukrainian identity. as mentioned earlier, floral patterns appear most frequently on masks depicting ukrainian culture, and these generalized florals, often depicting roses, sunflowers, and poppies, are increasingly used to represent ukrainian-ness. flowers are seen in ukrainian hair wreaths [vinok], petrykivka paintings, and on khustky, traditional ukrainian scarves used to cover a woman’s hair. while they were previously prevalent in embroidery, the overwhelmingly increasing floral patterns are being worn not only across ukraine, with hoyra studio having “sent orders out to nearly every region of the country” [forrest 2020], but also throughout the diaspora. image 9. featuring the ukrainian tryzub, or trident, the first mask reads “heroiam slava” [glory to our heroes]. qe second features a decal of a tryzub, contrasting the cross stitching of the mask to the left. pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 44 jis drive towards the creation of a macro-identity has also culminated in the use of more non-traditional embroidery patterns or masks depicting different national symbols. while these masks are outside the scope of my research, as they do not have embroidery, traditional or otherwise, on them, they are worth mentioning when considering the open/performative function of cultural ephemera like covid-19 face masks. one prominent symbol is that of the tryzub or trident, which is the coat of arms of the state of ukraine [image 9]. while the pattern can be found in some more modern forms of embroidery and infrequently in pieces from the soviet period, it is not a traditional pattern. jis symbol gained significant popularity during the euromaidan. orysia paszczak tracz [2016] states that the symbol was frequently used “during times of persecution (and there were so many), [as] one way of expressing patriotism and resistance” when incorporated into folk art. paszczak tracz states that the symbol was “anathema to the russians, whether tsarist or soviet,” as it represented ukrainian nationalism and separated the cultures of the two nation states. with masks being used frequently to conceal identity, whether through folk traditions such as malanka plays and ukrainian carolling masks or in the form of the masked russian aggressors known as the maskirovka, (12) the function of masks has been altered with the inclusion of these cultural symbols. with the use of masks as an outward performance of culture during covid-19, the previously held concepts and ideas of masks being used to hide one’s identity no longer exist in this context, temporarily having been subverted. instead, consumers are proudly displaying their culture and being recognized by other members of the ukrainian community by these symbols. concluding remarks je prevalence of the creation of a macro-identity through the revitalization and continuation of ukrainian embroidery trends has enabled mask wearers to embrace the open/performative nature of displaying culture with everyday objects. jrough the responses i have received to the survey to-date, the consumers wearing the masks are most frequently doing so in order to support their community and recognize their cultural heritage. most importantly, by asking the respondents about their associations with embroidery, it became evident that the open/performative function of the patterns as a cultural identifier, has overshadowed the personal/private function of embroidery as a talismanic or protective symbol. with the open/performative function, these masks are being worn for the sake of sharing one’s cultural identity, as opposed to concealing it. jis is done through the manipulation of traditional patterns by designating new meanings to the performance or display of the item. while this research has provided a preliminary look at the motivations to wear or create masks with traditional embroidery patterns, it has the potential to expand significantly to explore where these trends and responses are most prevalent and examine trends among different diasporic communities as well as different regions within ukraine. as many pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 45 cultures share the tradition of embroidery, this research could be further expanded to explore how different groups utilize traditional patterns on masks. furthermore, the idea of understanding the beautification and politicization of personal protective equipment produces numerous questions when considering the approach taken to creating and wearing masks across a variety of cultures. notes 1 jis research does not address the effectiveness of masks or their scientific properties. for more information regarding the scholarly recommendations and studies regarding the use of facemasks in reducing the spread of the covid-19 virus, see chu, et. al (2020), and the advisories shared by the world health organization [world health organization 2020]. 2 “faux embroidery” is a term used by this author to describe the recreation of embroidery-like images through means which do not include a needle or thread. jis includes decalcomania, painting, drawing, and similar means. 3 je use and effectiveness of face masks during different pandemics, such as the spanish influenza and the h1n1 virus is documented in the research of cowling, et. al [2010]. 4 documentation on price gouging on digital platforms, including amazon and facebook, can be found in digital articles by palmer [2020] and hutchinson [2020]. 5 see hutchinson [2020] for further information on facebook marketplace pricing and specific examples. 6 for more information on face masks as a source of income, see alie [2020], hinds [2020], homaid [2020], and kaushik [2020]. 7 on 29 february, the united states surgeon general, jerome adams, tweeted “seriously peoplestop buying masks! jey are not effective in preventing general public from catching #coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” [u.s. surgeon general 2020, emphasis in original]. since this statement, more information has been released on the effectiveness of masks in reducing covid19 transmission. for more information, see current who recommendations and chu, et. al [2020]. 8 for more information on the relationship between paganism and christianity, as well as the role of paganism in modern ukrainian life, see lesiv [2013]. 9 jis observation is made by the author based on a collection of 55 different masks purchased from or donated by designers in ukraine, the united states, and canada. 10 for more information on the role of embroidery on fashion during the euromaidan revolution of dignity, see ferrier [2015]. 11 information about painted protective equipment is sourced from bbc news ukraine [2020]. pandemic, but make it fashion folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 46 12 for more information on maskirovky, see jompson [2014]. bibliography alie, terrique. 2020. “face masks is proving to be a viable source of income during lockdown,” qe jobsportal. cited by https://www.thejobsportal.co.za/article/face-masks-proving-be-viablesource-income-during-lockdown. 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bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 85 -e heralds at the bells: messages of hope from west balkan bards during the coronavirus pandemic dorian jurić university of ottawa gatineau, canada abstract between march and may of 2020, a number of guslars (bards) and other traditional singers from bosnia-herzegovina, croatia, montenegro, and serbia flooded youtube with songs about the covid-19 pandemic. yough the musicians chose divergent vantage points from which to approach the topic of the pandemic, all settled on a similar goal. yey sought to deliver a message of solidarity and hope to those struggling with the realities of life under lockdown measures and to allay the fears and uncertainties that spread with the virus. yis article provides a critical overview of the guslars’ songs to explore their shared and divergent tropes, themes, and tones, and to highlight the goals of their singers in disseminating their messages in traditional form. here i comment on what the high degree of convergence in the songs’ final messages reveals about vernacular responses to the pandemic and folk views on the measures taken to halt the virus’s spread. finally, the article places these songs into a wider historical context of contemporary singing to the gusle, remarking on the vagaries of navigating authority when one sings subjective opinion in the name of a collective. introduction when the coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) first arrived in the western balkans in the early spring of 2020, a number of vernacular artists published musical responses to the pandemic on the online video sharing platform youtube. between march and may, these musicians released a range of songs—spanning at least five folk genres and ranging in tone from humorous and jocular to serious and didactic—that approached the event from a number of stylistic, generic, and personal positions. yis article focuses critically on songs produced by the traditional bards of the region, guslars, who, despite their various approaches, all converged on messages of solidarity and hope aimed at supporting the populace as they headed into a series of strict lockdowns and government-imposed restrictions to curb the spread of the virus. ye modern iterations of an ancient tradition, these folk singers hold important positions in the culture of bosniaks, croats, montenegrins, and serbs as retainers of cultural memory and chroniclers of modern events for folk consumption. acting, in a sense, as folk-journalists, the guslars “routinize the unexpected” [žanić 2007: 17], processing novel events through collective and individual aesthetic filters to produce communal discursive products that offer an interpretive framework for listeners. ye guslars provide their audience with ways the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 86 to think about and respond to external events, creating “order and continuity from the disorder of experience” [cruikshank 1998: 118]. by generating songs that are codified in stylistic and aesthetic patterns with ancient cultural pedigrees, the guslars’ works are largely accepted by a subset of these nations as both, and simultaneously, individual artistic creations and communal/collective products [see žanić 2007: 47]. in this article, i explore the shared and divergent tropes, themes, and tones of three songs produced by guslars in response to the covid-19 pandemic as well as how their messages reflect upon the artists’ own personal repertoires and the wider response of vernacular musicians in the region. i investigate the various approaches that the songs take, while noting the high degree of convergence in their overall messages. in the second half of the article, i explore the figure of the guslar in the novel context of a global pandemic to reveal some insights into the processes that inform the bards’ navigation of their position in society as individuals who speak for, to, and in the name of a collective. by targeting a notable shift away from the guslars’ common antagonistic stance toward government imposition, these conclusions also provide opportunity for some cross-cultural comparison. (1) folk singers respond to the covid-19 pandemic in march, when the pandemic was declared and lockdown measures began, social life in the western balkans, as elsewhere, was pervaded with a chaotic air of uncertainty. as public health officers began imposing new measures to curtail the spread of the virus—social distancing, curfews, mask wearing, school closures—people began to fear and prepare for the worst. shoppers emptied grocery store shelves of necessities they worried might vanish due to closed borders and severed supply chains. questions began to arise about the source of the virus, the guidance informing government responses, and the true nature and severity of the rapidly spreading disease. at the height of this uncertainty, a large number of vernacular singers published songs on youtube to comment on the pandemonium. yis song production took two major forms: humorous songs, which attempted to lighten the mood and encourage people to take a moment to laugh at the chaos, and more serious songs, which sought to define the moment, relay singers’ perceptions of the events unfolding, and offer a message of hope and support to listeners. ye market on comedic songs was monopolized by a folk genre, the bećarac, a predominantly humorous genre of singing accompanied by tambura orchestras or accordion, which is performed at and associated with weddings in the slavonian region of croatia [see barišić 2014, 2016; rončević 2013]. yese songs poked fun at the mass buying of toilet paper, flour, soap, and masks [stapić 2020; štrkalj 2020], the heightened stress placed on frequent hand washing by public health officials, people’s increasing fear of interaction, and the ubiquity of folk remedies touted as protection from covid-19 [stapić 2020]. other songs parodied physical distancing, the problems associated with quarantining in homes, the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 87 people “letting themselves go” in isolation [lončarić et al. 2020], and the vagaries of distance education and social interaction performed online [lončarić et al. 2020; štrkalj 2020]. while the bećarci were giving listeners a chuckle about the more absurd side of the pandemic chaos, the traditional bards of the region, the guslars, came to the fore between march and may to assume their common duty of folk reportage. yey chronicled in song the events unfolding in a serious and concerned manner, contextualizing the growing pandemic for their listeners. (2) guslar songs in contemporary contexts named after their instrument, the gusle, a single-stringed fiddle, the guslars of the western balkans are best known in a historical context as the purveyors of traditional oral epics. a series of changes, starting in the final half of the nineteenth century and concluding in the second half of the twentieth, found the art form shifting from one based on an oral transmission model to a written one. (3) ye craft became increasingly dependent on various media as a bridge between performer and audience—starting with published song books, through to vinyl records, cassette tapes, cds, and into modern digital technologies—in place of traditional models of exclusively live performance. ye modern guslars, like their traditional forebears, are still elective artists, drawn from all walks of life but predominantly with rural, working-class backgrounds. he, and more rarely she [see đorđević-belić 2013; 2017: 225-243; jurić 2019: 40-41], does not perform for a living, but carries on the tradition in his spare time. dressed in traditional folk costume (complete with decorative weapons from the early-modern period), or else in formal western attire, the guslar performs at various gatherings, including weddings, fairs, and church events, as well as at special guslar concerts where multiple artists perform throughout an evening. ye majority of guslars learn their art from family members or through training with elder artists in various guslar clubs, and more recently public school music programs. ye topics of their songs are diverse: ranging from traditional epics learned from nineteenth-century academic collections to modern epics outlining the exploits of various twentieth-century war heroes, from comedic songs (known as lakrdije [lit. farce/burlesque/jape, but with the implicit sense of humorous song in folk circles. see golemović 2008: 86-92]) to tragic accounts of rapes and car crashes, from folk reportage of current events to private reminiscences of personal family history. disparate and often highly personal in content, the songs all coalesce in style and structure: yey are all voiced in the traditional format of the stichic decasyllable—although the modern influence of popular music has brought end-rhyme and other once-foreign poetic-tendencies into the genre—and they are united in a general subject matter aimed at translating contemporary information into stylistic patterns acceptable to the sensibilities of “the folk.” yese articulations are always figured in terms of speaking to and for a collective, often constituted in various social and historical figurations and largely subsumed under generic titles such as narod [people, folk], but predominantly manifested in nationalist terms. despite shifting and idiosyncratic figurations of the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 88 perceived/intended and accepted/received audience, the often highly personalized narratives focus on a generalized symbolic inventory that demarcates clear boundaries on binary poles—“us / them,” “rural / urban,” “friend / foe,” “hero / villain”—while celebrating “the heroic” at all levels. modern guslar songs are sometimes written by the bard, but are also often written by vernacular poets for the guslar to memorize and perform [golemović 2012: 140-1; primorac and ćaleta 2012: 181]. while long-format epics, similar to those once propagated by the traditional oral-formulaic model of transmission [foley 1991, 1995; lord 2000], are still produced, they are usually committed only to cd and cassette recordings to be purchased at performance events. shorter songs, covering a much wider range of topics, are cultivated for public performance to avoid trying the limited attention spans of modern audiences and in order to allow for a series of singers to be showcased within the time frame of contemporary folk concerts. yrough the dramatic social re-organizations experienced in the region under the influence of competing national and supranational state projects over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the political affiliations and sensibilities of modern guslars have become quite varied and sometimes conflict. however, the predominant political crystallization of ethno-national sentiments leading up to the wars of secession in the 1990s has had a drastic effect on the bards, solidifying their current common image as fundamentally traditionalist and conservative ethno-nationalists [čolović 2008: 162-66, 171-78; golemović 2008; 2012; primorac and ćaleta 2012: 159-67]. (4) a note regarding the transcription of songs while guslars will often memorize the songs that they regularly perform, songs regarding events such as the outbreak of the novel coronavirus are usually written (by the guslar or another poet) in rapid response and then quickly performed for recording, with the bard reading the lyrics from a written text. if the song proves popular, it may be committed to memory, but many are not. as a result, there are often variations between the written text and the performed versions. yese variations do not represent innovation in performance as described by the oral-formulaic yeory of milman parry and albert lord [lord 2000]; rather, they generally represent an assortment of misreadings and undesired slipsof-tongue in the heat of delivery. ye way that these variations manifest in performance, however, can bear some relationship to parry and lord’s basic innovative principle inasmuch as the singer may, in misreading a verse line, defer to a syntax, phrasing, or dialect form that is more comfortable to his singing style or native vernacular and that is based on a heightened familiarity with the natural syntax of decasyllabic meter as well as a stock of common, learned and practiced formulae [see primorac and ćaleta 2012: 181]. given the root of this variation, differentiating slips of tongue from misreadings in these recordings often proves impossible. for the songs in this article whose written and performed texts have differed, i have deferred to the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 89 transcribing the versions as recorded in performance. divergence is noted in endnotes which convey and compare the written form of the text. sources of variation are noted when certain from context; in all other cases i have used the abbreviation “ll” to denote those variations which might either be lapsus linguae, lapsus lectionis, or some combination of the two. regarding english-language translations, many guslars make heavy use of folk idioms in their song-writing process. i have used equivalent english expressions when easy parallels are possible, with necessary context added in footnotes appended to the initial bosnian, croatian, montenegrin, or serbian [hereafter, bcms] phrase. when these equivalences are more difficult, i have chosen to translate the text literally and to explain the saying in footnotes appended to the english verse line. guslar songs about the covid-19 pandemic two guslars, mirko crljen from the village of ruda in croatia and života jevremović from the village of igrište in southern serbia, took the clearest and most concise approach to the task of chronicling the pandemic. both had their songs recorded by local television stations that later uploaded them to youtube channels (respectively published on 28 march and 17 may). ye songs they produced are short and simple, outlining the arrival of the virus before urging listeners to stay at home and place their faith in the recommendations of public health officials. at 12 verse lines, mirko crljen’s song, “oj korono” [hey, corona] [2020a] is the shortest guslar’s song produced in response to the pandemic. in a simple and concise structure, the song acts as a message of support to listeners facing growing uncertainty. oj korona, zarazo prokleta, šta učini (5) od cijelog sv'jeta?! truješ ljude, i djecu i žene, bez milosti i bez opomene, i napade domovinu moju. al' ćeš zube izgubit' u boju; mi smo narod nikad pokoreni; sa stožerom svi ujedinjeni. moli boga i doma ostani; zaštiti se, ne izlazi vani; i vedro čelo i rumeno lice. pozdravlja vas guslar s kamešnice. 5 10 hey, corona, damned contagion, what is it doing to the whole world?! you poison people, both children and women, without mercy and without warning; and you assault my homeland. but you shall lose your teeth in the battle. we’re a nation never subjugated; all are united with our headquarters. pray to god and stay at home; protect yourselves, don’t go outside. a clear forehead and a rosy face. (6) your bard from kamešnica sends his regards. filmed in a natural location and dressed in the traditional garb of his birth region, the cetinska krajina, crljen starts the video with a charming and knowing wink to the audience as he begins to play his gusle [image 1]. ye song then opens with the bard invoking and cursing the virus in a model that has a long heritage in the traditional folk songs of the region [cf. pavlinović 1876]. yis same trend is reflected in other novel songs in traditional registers uploaded to youtube at the time, particularly a covid-themed sevdalinka—a traditional urban genre of lyric song from bosnia—from an anonymous western balkan truck driver working in the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 90 belgium [unknown b 2020]. (7) crljen outlines the damage that the virus is doing and likens the task of facing the threat to that of a battle between the nation of croatia and the virus. he implores his listeners to keep faith, reminding them that in the “battle” against covid-19, croatians are united with their health officials at the stožer civilne zaštite [headquarters for civil protection], the body of medical experts created to advise and lead the country through the pandemic. it is also no surprise to find crljen reflecting on the threat of the pandemic in terms of battle and assault [ll. 5-7]. a veteran of the croatian war of independence, crljen has dedicated a large part of his career as a guslar to songs recounting events of the war [crljen 2020b]. moreover, despite this song presenting as a generic form of short-format folk news reportage, all decasyllabic songs sung to the gusle bring with them strong, inherent linkages to the genre of oral epic, which is intrinsically martial in tone and content. yus, we see the same tenor repeated in a second guslar song, pesma o koroni [a song about corona], written and performed by the serbian bard života jevremović [2020]: еј, (8) кад је господ стварао чудеса, створио је земљу и небеса. откада (9) нама дарива планету, није било на овоме свету такве бољке што напада људе; тој болести сви се редом чуде. нарочито што напада старе; ту никоме не помажу паре. не помаже нато алијанса. пред короном, свима иста (10) шанса. па у таквом непријатном стању, србија се приклони сазнању; да србију воде умни људи, јер ту живот са њима се буди. телали смо тада на сва звона: „мора да се победи корона.“ са љутим чекамо је даром: еј, бели (12) луком и ракијом старом. еј, да би ову болест победили и у мирну луку упловили, па да после не буде кајања, потребни су витези од знања. (13) србија их на 'иљаде има па на челу тог витешког тима 5 10 15 20 hey, when the lord worked wonders, he made the earth and the heavens. since [the time when] he gave the planet to us there has never been on earth this kind of illness which [now] afflicts people. all, in turn, wonder at that illness, particularly since it attacks the elderly. in this, money is help to no one, nor can the nato alliance help. before corona, all have the same chance. well, in such unpleasant conditions serbia defers to knowledge, that intelligent people might lead serbia. and your hope for life awakens. (11) we heralds are then at all the bells, “corona must be defeated!” we await it with a deadly [lit. angry] gift: with garlic and with aged rakija [fruit brandy]. hey, to overcome this illness and [so we can] sail into a peaceful harbor, so that there will be no contrition afterwards, knights of knowledge are required. serbia has thousands of them; and at the head of that knightly team image 1. screen capture of mirko crljen performing “oj korono” [crljen 2020a] the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 91 изабрасмо дарију и кона; србији се предаде корона! 25 we have chosen darija and kon. corona surrenders to serbia! here the martial character is voiced in neo-medieval trappings and associative expressions that draw the listener into a historical frame of reference connected to the vast precedent of the traditional epic songs and their many medieval heroes and subjects. just as crljen invokes the croatian health officials uniting the nation in defense against the virus, jevremović presents serbia’s križni štab za suzbijanje zarazne bolesti covid-19 [crisis headquarters for the suppression of the infectious disease covid-19] as scientists transformed into knights and lead by the heroic (and most visible) public health officials in serbia, predrag kon and darija kisić tepavčević. (14) yis epic conflict plays-out to conclusion in the song: the public health knights head into battle against the virus while the guslars spread the word as heralds—the turkish loan telal [herald] harkens more clearly to the register of traditional epic and its reservoir of expressive devices and so is chosen over the native glasnik, which is used exclusively in the modern language. armed with scientific knowledge and folk remedies, the scientists prevail; the virus surrenders to serbia and the nation “sails into a peaceful harbor.” filmed sitting on a chair outside his rural home, the retired taxi driver jevremović [image 3] casts the figure of a comfortable “physical-distancer.” dressed predominantly in typical rural casual wear, the guslar’s outfit is accented by two items: a piece of traditional serbian headgear, a šajkača, and a simple, blue disposable face mask which hangs about his neck. yis charming visual is complimented by the song’s inclusion of folk remedies, garlic and aged rakija in the nation’s arsenal, a wink and a nod to an older generation in the balkans who believe in the efficacy of these and similar items in boosting the immune system and warding off illness. at 74 years of age, the jocular jevremović is keenly aware that his listeners do not derive from young generations “who have coca-cola in their bloodstream and hamburgers in their brains” (15), but to an older demographic who might get a chuckle out of the tools deployed against the virus. mention of folk-remedies also draws the song into the discourse of digital folklore—both songs [stapić 2020 ll. 9-10] and memes [see image 1; cf. russia beyond 2020]—that proved popular at this time and played humorously with slavic and balkan folk medicines employed against the virus. a similar wide sphere of folklore is engaged with the symbolism of ringing “all the bells” [cf. čolak and mikulić-jukić 2020; nemanja harmonikaš 2020; stapić 2020]. yis imagery belongs to a number of variations on a common phrase: udarati/stavljati/zvoniti na sva zvona [to strike/put [a message to]/ring all the bells], which denotes making something exceedingly (or excessively) public or known far and wide. ye phrase has seen steady usage in news and other media during the pandemic, assuming a stock role in regional conventional discourse that was only superseded by our new global repertoire of catch phrases—flatten the curve, new normal, social distancing, unprecedented times, etc. while one might see this phrase in metaphoric linkages to the well of poetic resonances the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 92 linking church bells to funerary ceremonies and systems of news transmission during historical plagues, mikulić-jukić and jevremović (the two writers interviewed who employed this phrase [respectively on 4 november and 30 october]) were quick to disabuse me of digging too deeply into the symbolism. both crljen’s and jevremović’s songs offer a similar model of commentary on the covid-19 pandemic through the traditional form of guslar chronicles, or songs written in response to current events. both lead listeners through three experiential frames: the arrival of the virus; the fraught conditions in pandemic (lockdown); and the projected positive communal exit that will inevitably be accomplished after public health figures conclude their battle. yis is a common frame and story-arc for the guslars’ pandemic songs, but is followed most succinctly in jevremović’s piece. in crljen and jevremović’s songs, the message is clear: the people, united with their government’s health officials in battle against the virus shall overcome it. ye final guslar’s song (examined below), however, used the opportunity of the pandemic to trace a second argument based on a morally didactic message delivered in a contrasting tone. ye final song in this group, uploaded to youtube on 22 march, was produced by a duo whose work i have highlighted elsewhere [jurić 2020a], the herzegovinian croat team of folk poet frano mikulić-jukić and guslar marko čolak. beyond a popular wartime epic centered on commander blago zadro, the two are known in traditional music circles for producing inflammatory political songs that rail against perceived injustices and the hypocrisy of political elites, church figures, and other authorities [jurić 2020a: 672-73]. as citizens of bosniaherzegovina, the pair are subject to the difficult sociopolitical realities and bleak economic opportunities that typify the nation post-dayton accords. anthropologist larisa kurtović [2016] has described the transformative political actions of grassroots activists in the 2014 protests in bosnia in terms of the “politics of indignation.” yough čolak and mikulić-jukić inhabit a very different social milieu than most of kurtović’s collaborators, i find this provocative phrase apposite for describing the tone and ethic of their work, which could easily be defined as “songs of indignation” [cf. rihtman-auguštin 1972: 149-50]. as čolak image 2. folk medicine meme. [meme 2020] the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 93 conveyed succinctly in an october 2020 interview, “frano and i can’t tolerate injustice, so we sing about all that through our songs”. yis imperative is in full display in their song, “virus korona 2020.g.” [coronavirus 2020], that discusses the pandemic in moralizing discourse as a deadly but, ultimately, useful reset for a nation beleaguered by corrupt politicians, social leeches, and globalist agendas [čolak and mikulić-jukić 2020]. ej! svi mediji na sva zvona zvone, (16) a svijetom hara virus od korone. živoga smo istirali (17) vraga pa nam stigô do kućnoga praga. nekom sprijeda nekom od pozadi pa računaj o čemu se radi. čudan virus iz kine dolazi; neozbiljno njemu se prilazi, neposlušnost kô i samovolja, za virus je podloga najbolja. na brzinu okolo se sije po evropi (19) preko italije. rasprostro se za nekol'ko dana zbog nemara samih talijana; pa zbog stila nihovog života u crno se europa mota; voda je se zalila za uši, ali treba priznati po duši; što sijasmo sada nam je žeti; svako zlo se na koncu osveti. godinama punili nam glave zbog fotelja, novaca i slave; radile se (22) kô na kakvoj traci; samozvani nekakvi mudraci. od naroda pravili su ovce da bi tuđe pokupili novce. radi sitnog interesa svoga, otuđili svakog od svakoga. razbijali obitelj i slogu, i narode što su vjerni bogu. svim silama oni udarali, a slugama debelo plaćali. svijet pravili po vlastitoj mjeri; prekoseći (23) prirodi i vjeri, i htjeli su dogurat' do toga; sami sebe zamjenit' za boga. bez krčmara račun se radio; očito se krivo nasadio. jedan virus čovječanstvo budi da konačno postanemo ljudi. u krivome krenuli smo smjeru i svakom (25) smo prevršili mjeru: mladost nam je loše odgojena; politika krivo usmjerena; dok živote mediji nam kroje, svi vragovi na tronu nam stoje; sjeme siju mržnje i razdora; ta skupina opakih zlotvora. sada bježe u mišije (26) rupe. svi stratezi politike glupe. 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 hey, all the media are ringing all the bells while the world’s harried by corona’s virus. we drove out the devil alive only to have him reach our home’s threshold, (18) for some, at the front and for some, at the back. well, reckon what it’s all about. a strange virus arrived from china; it’s not taken seriously; disobedience and contrariness, the best foundation for the virus. rapidly it is sown about throughout europe by way of italy. it spread out in a few days because of the negligence of those very italians. well, because of their lifestyle europe was laid low; (20) water up to our ears. (21) but one must admit from one’s soul; that which we have sown, we must now reap. every evil in the end is avenged. for years they filled our heads because of cushy seats, money, and fame. lined up like on some assembly line. some kind of self-proclaimed wise-men, they made sheep of the people so that they could collect others’ money because of their petty interests. they alienated everyone from each other, shattering the family and harmony. and the people who are faithful to god, they struck them with full force and fatly paid their servants, creating a world of their own devising, spiting nature and faith, and they wished to drive it to that, to replace god with themselves. with an absent publican, a tab was started; (24) obviously, it was seeded incorrectly. a single virus has woken mankind, that we finally become people. we set off in the wrong direction and went too far on every count; our youths are brought up poorly; our politics incorrectly oriented; while our media tailors our lives, all the devils sit on our throne. they sow seeds of hatred and discord, that group of malefic evildoers, now they flee into mouse-holes. all strategists of stupid politics, the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 94 sve udruge što maglu prodaju sa svih scena odjednom nestaju. di ste sada silne junačine, razne b.a.b.e. i druge skupine? čim zagusti, svi se u bjeg date; kad se smiri, novac nam sisate. za sve ovo vi ste nama krivi i bit ćete dok budete živi. kreirali sve ste naopačke; okrenuli narod naglavačke; a na trku ste čitav život sveli, a narodu dušu ste oteli. otuđenje zatim uništenje, to je bilo vaše određenje. jedan virus, sve u vodu pada (27) jer panika na zemlji nastada. (28) sada bježe u domove svoje; drugačije (29) sada gaće kroje. di su sada silni globalisti? napokon su svi računi čisti. svak u svoje, torove se gradi; nitko glavu na polje ne vadi. globalizm sada funkcionira; svatko svoju sviralu dok svira; stigla kazna odozgo sa neba; neka, neka, tako nam i treba; sad se narod mora resetirat'; il' je živjet' ili je umirat'; (31) u obitelj život se povraća; c'jeli svijet na temelja (32) vraća. svako zlo će nešto dobro dati ako narod tu poruku shvati: (33) u oblaku kule se ne grade; na temelju to pametni rade. čuvajte se, mislite na druge, bez panike i velike tuge. i gore smo preživjeli dane. uv'jek zora iza noći svane. samo hrabro i uz pomoć boga; izat (34) ćemo jači iz ovoga. 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 all associations which sell snake oil disappear from every scene. where are you now, you powerful heroes, various b.a.b.e. and other groups? when the going gets tough, all take flight, when things calm down, you suck out money. you are at fault for all of this and you shall be while you remain alive. you designed everything inside out; you turned the people upside down; and made all of life into a race; and abducted the nation’s soul. alienation and after that annihilation, that was your plan. a single virus, everything falls to the ground since panic on earth ensued. now they flee to their homes; now the underwear is tailored differently. (30) where now are the powerful globalists? finally, all accounts are clean; each to his own, cotes are built; no one sticks his head outside; now globalism functions; each to his own while he plays his pipe; the penalty has arrived from the heavens above; let it, let it, we need it thus; now the nation must reset; either we live or die; life returns to the family; the whole world returns to its foundations. every evil will contribute something good. if the people comprehend this message: towers are not built in the sky; the intelligent do that on foundations. take care of yourselves, think of others, without panic and without great sorrow. we have survived worse days [than these]. the dawn always breaks after the night. just be brave and with god’s aid we shall come out stronger after this. čolak and mikulić-jukić’s song uses the pandemic as a jumping-off point for a sharp critique of perceived moral decay in the modern, globalized world, and particularly of social and political conditions in the contemporary balkans. ye poet’s “disease surveillance” allows us to follow the journey of the virus as it spread, complete with critical commentary on the habits that allowed it to proliferate. from its mysterious source in china through transmission to italy, where irresponsible italians acted with impunity and disregard for others, (35) thence to the balkans and to the rest of europe. ye virus itself, though, largely takes a backseat in the critical considerations of the song. ye real targets are crooked politicians, vampiric aid groups leeching off of tax dollars, and a wide range of political and cultural snake-oil salesmen charged with undermining stable society, poisoning peoples’ minds, and leading them away from a moral and christian life of family values and faith in god. the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 95 covid-19, in this regard, is an unfortunate mishap brought on by the failings of the very globalist system that fostered its creation, an act of god that quickly undermined culpable nations and laid bare their shortcomings. society has come to a stand-still; all the political “heroes” have fled from public view into their “mouse-holes;” and a frightened populace, now relegated to its homes, is placed in a beneficial position from which to see the liars for who they really are while rediscovering the foundations of a proper and honest life. čolak and mikulić-jukić’s most critical songs tend to highlight a range of political actors by name, publicly denouncing them in conservative circles [see jurić 2020a: 673-75] as antithetical actors working against a traditional ethical and moral system. it is interesting in this light to note that no politicians or public figures are named in this song. at a time when covid-19 was spreading through the balkans, and online message boards were full of banter condemning politicians for not closing borders [e.g., prokhorov 2020], mikulić-jukić is notably silent on croatian and bosnian officials. instead, he saves his ire for a single group, b.a.b.e. (budi aktivna. budi emancipiran. [be active. be emancipated]), a feminist rights organization based in zagreb. (36) ye poet targets them as a typical example of a social welfare group based on hypocritical principles. to him, they are a body that devours state funds when there are no problems to be solved, but disappears when the wrath of god falls on the country. as he explained to me in an october 2020 interview: b.a.b.e. je udruga u hrvatskoj koja živi na proračunu (sve bivše komunističke žene), koje kritiziraju sve u društvu, dociraju svima, glume dobrotvore, itd., a kad je došlo do frke sa kovidom, uskočile su u mišije rupe. usput, bio je potres u zagrebu, pa umjesto da pomažu u nesreći, za što sisaju novac od države, niti jedna nije makla prstom... to se odnosi i na druge slične udruge džabalebaroša koji su glasni samo na tv. [b.a.b.e. is an association in croatia that lives off the state coffers (they’re all former communist women). yey criticize everything in society, they talk down to everyone, act like fancy benefactors, etc. but then when we got into this mess with covid, they jumped into their mouse-holes. yere was an earthquake in zagreb at the same time. rather than help in that crisis—the whole reason they bleed money from the state—not one of them raised a finger… yat goes too for other similar associations of jobless layabouts who are only loud when they’re on tv.] stylistically, the song boasts a menagerie of folk idioms and proverbs or novel recombinations of these phrases that set a lexical tone meant to position the song clearly in folk discourse. by peppering his piece with “folk wisdom,”—a common practice among vernacular poets—mikulić-jukić engages with a series of metonymic markers and coded integers aimed at drawing an audience of receptive listeners into the idiom of the genre, what john miles foley called the immanence of the art [foley 1991; 1995: 6-7]. in many of mikulić-jukić’s songs, the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 96 and particularly in this piece, the language is especially dense for the genre. ye choice may simply be an aesthetic one, but it hints at a higher functional purpose. while considering himself, first and foremost, a poet in the belletristic sense, in a november 2020 interview mikulić-jukić explained that he enjoys writing for guslars because of the deep roots the tradition has in the culture, the apposite nature of this format for delivering current events, and the utility of the guslar’s social role, which can serve as the most direct channel to deliver messages effectively to a particular audience. (37) yese comments coupled with the highly ideological/didactic tone of his pieces often makes me wonder if this dense language and idiomatic coding also serves as a poetic cypher to exclude etic listeners. as the poet conveyed to me in an earlier conversation regarding another piece, his songs, “speak volumes… to those who can think or have a mind to think with” [jurić 2020a: 673]. in this song, too, listeners are encouraged that mikulićjukić’s hopes for the nation can be attained only “if the people comprehend this message” [l. 82]. if the song does not exclude those who do not “have the mind” to decipher it, it might at least signal to them that they are not the intended recipient of its message. given their repertoire, this duo can hardly be expected to offer the same positive message as jevremović and crljen—to follow heroic health officials as they lead the country into and out of battle with the virus. it is notable, however, that čolak and mikulić-jukić’s song converges with the others on a general sentiment of support. while these two artists use their platform to critique the over-arching social and political realities of life in western balkan nations, theirs is more a moralizing message than a political one. yey significantly forgo an opportunity to call out singular politicians, instead converging with the other two bards on a positive message: stay inside; wait out the pandemic; be strong; have faith in your resilience; your guslars are experiencing this with you and sending their support. ye pair do, of course, combine this message with a general critique of moral norms and political corruption, but it is, nonetheless, present and prominent, reflecting a high degree of convergence with the other vernacular songs produced at the time. yese facts, combined with a notable absence in these songs opens a window to some provocative, though quite possibly subjective, cultural and cross-cultural observations, both about the pandemic as received by “the folk” and about how the social role of the guslar might impose certain parameters onto his artistic expression. “we are the opposition to all governments”: public perceptions and guslar politics ye processes employed for the successful performance and transmission of novel messages in modern guslar songs were highlighted during the wars of secession in the 1990s that divided yugoslavia. it has never escaped the notice of scholars, literati, and the guslars themselves that the bards’ public role ebbs and flows, but always emerges to prominence in times of war [mažuranić 2019: 10409; murko 1951: 66, 70, 236-37, 302-18, 376, 516, 527; žanić 2007: 46, 74, 86the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 97 108]. when political upheaval brings violence to the forefront of society, it is natural for those in peril to connect their lived experience to historical chronicles of similar events. in the context of a war fought over nationalist divisions, the cultural currency of “us and them” narratives increases, and songs that celebrate “our soldiers/heroes” find positive reception among traditionalist and nationalist audiences, particularly those whose brothers, sons, and fathers constitute those heroic ranks. even in rare conditions where particular campaigns prove disappointing, shameful, or regrettable, a singer may still tap into popular sentiment by shifting tone and content from panegyric to tragedy and lament. in many ways, narratives figured in terms of speaking for a collective and based on traditional moral dictates regarding heroism are easy to produce and submit for collective adoption in times of war. now, twenty-five years after the cessation of fighting in the balkans, much of the fervor around the gusle has diminished; many guslars who were popular in war-time have receded from the limelight, and most have reverted to, or adopted for the first time, repertoires composed of classical material and songs of a journalistic nature. scholars are now posed to follow the art as it resettles into peacetime, albeit in a particularly novel manifestation that has been drastically affected by the advent of the internet and media sharing websites. it is interesting under these circumstances to explore the social dictates that may surround choices in content, theme and tone, both in times of peace and in unique crisis conditions such as the covid-19 pandemic. ye active participation of guslars in the wars of the 1990s—in military action, in ideological roles of support to both soldiers and nationalist politicians, and as a channel of vernacular journalism— had a drastic effect on their image in popular opinion [čolović 2008: 142-45; žanić 2007]. in the aftermath of the wars, as the newly formed nations attempted to stabilize their economies and reintegrate into global systems and markets, educated and urban public discourse began to regularly cast the guslar in a markedly unflattering light. often speaking and singing publicly against policies defined as “liberal” or “modernist,” guslars celebrated war criminals tried in the international criminal tribunal for the former yugoslavia (icty) at ye hague as national heroes betrayed by the international community and their own people [čolović 2008: 163;171-78; jurić 2020a; trubarac matić 2019]. while lauded in particular geographic and cultural zones where the art form still thrives, the guslar is elsewhere regularly derided as an antagonistic figure: a bellicose anti-intellectual, anti-elite, backward-looking nativist, a war-monger and a supporter of the extreme right [čolović 2008: 15766; primorac and ćaleta 2012: 155-59, 171-72]. (38) yis position should suggest some comparisons to a north american audience which has borne witness in the pandemic to a deluge of renewed public engagement from anti-vaccination movements and an upsurge in novel conspiracy theories among a similarly maligned population concerned with government overreach and the true nature of the pandemic [bodner et al. 2021: 95-116; kitta 2012; 2018]. small-scale news outlets and independent users have flooded the internet with articles, memes, and other media declaring the nefarious intents that the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 98 undergird many aspects of the pandemic or government responses to it. ye outcome of these information currents have ranged from more benign attempts to set boundaries on both real and perceived infringements on civil liberties—such as personal and communal protests to wearing masks in public—to some isolated but extreme examples of racist attacks, obstructions of the functioning of medical professionals and institutions, and other forms of dangerous ostension [bodner et al. 2021; brown 2021; canadian report 2020; gmi reporter 2020; lilley 2020; true pundit 2020; watson 2020c]. we might then ask why singers, who seem from afar to represent a parallel social group in the balkans, and who have a history of antagonism towards government officials and infringements on personal freedoms, found themselves producing songs encouraging people to follow lockdown orders and listen to health officials. anti-lockdown songs have been produced by commercial and independent musicians in the west [kreps 2020; macdonald 2020] and found a following there, but, among the guslars, no such songs exist. yere are hints of parallels between the two populations. on message boards and facebook groups devoted to guslar songs, whose members include aficionados as well as singers and poets, there are three common post types: songs conveyed in textual or video formats; tirades by members stating that their nation is the true genitor of the art form [čolović 2008: 166-71; cf. jurić 2020b:14-20]; and posts which peddle victimization narratives about the inordinate suffering of certain nations in past wars. among these common materials, one also finds today an irregular smattering of posts expressing antagonistic responses to government lockdown measures and relaying conspiracy theories about covid-19, chemtrails, and other popular themes [e.g., my gusle, the dearest music]. in private conversation, many of the singers who produced songs about the covid-19 pandemic revealed some engagement with these stances: mirko crljen wrote and recorded a song that voices support for health officials but, in conversation in november 2020, he suggested that government officials have overblown the severity of the virus and admitted to not wearing masks unless stores demand it for entry. mikulić-jukić also believes that the government has overstepped in the pandemic. in two discussions in october and november, he suggested that a sensible approach would have focused on isolating and financially supporting vulnerable populations while allowing healthy individuals to remain working and acquire natural herd immunity. he also firmly supports the theory that covid-19 was created in a chinese laboratory, the product of experimentation with the sars virus [see bodner et al. 2021: 35-49]. in later discussions (in the early months of 2021) he has become even more critical of the pandemic saying he neither fears nor worries about the virus and will only receive a vaccine if it is forced upon him. in the song he wrote, though, the pandemic is. the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 99 figured only as an act of god, an existential threat producing moral imperatives (39) ye song hints at the conflict between national and international policies that undergird many of the stresses and fears behind modern conspiracy theories, but stops short of making more pernicious or specific claims. it is decidedly antigovernment, anti-globalist, and anti-elite, and yet, its criticism is generalized and toned down compared to some of his other work. such personal views do not perforce reveal that guslars wish to write anti-mask or antilockdown songs. like any large population drawn from a wide range of locations and personal backgrounds, their views are varied, often conflicting and drawn from myriad private beliefs, histories, and positions. jevremović, for instance, is sober about his chances of surviving the virus, confiding to me in october: “no one’s going to save me if i get ill. i won’t be getting that respirator. i’m over seventy years old… yere’s no saving me. if this thing gets hold of me, that’s the end.” he has isolated himself in his rural mountain home [image 3], declaring it his own “independent republic” with a sign at the end of his driveway that reads “corona, stop!” to discourage visitors. i would be remiss if i were to characterize guslars a priori as a generalized group rather than individuals of varying and often competing views, loyalties, goals, and impulses. ye fact remains, however, that many of the (equally broad and varied) sentiments held by “anti-maskers” reflect currents of thought found amongst the guslars and a portion of their audience. ye tone and sentiment of these beliefs also echo a common stance among guslars vis-à-vis the state. in this regard, the quandary is not so much a question of presence as one of absence. guslars must not necessarily be conspiracy theorists or anti-vaccine proponents, but some of them likely are. with four guslars producing songs about the pandemic and hundreds of others in the region and in diaspora sitting out the topic, one wonders how not a single bard came forward to take any of these positions in song—positions that would likely find support from a sizeable portion of their audience. at the risk of creating prescriptive and leading hypotheses, i suggest a series of considerations that might explain this absence, factors that may also image 3. screen capture of života jevremović performing “pesma o koroni” outside his rural mountain home [jevremović 2020] the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 100 reveal unique aspects of vernacular culture in the western balkans and provide some insightful cross-cultural comparisons. “well, reckon what it’s all about” one fairly prosaic answer lies in the timing of events. in the earliest months of the pandemic, many of these conspiracy theories simply had not yet reached the region. yere was widespread discussion about the true danger of the virus, or lack thereof, and fear of government overstep in enforcing lockdowns, but the virus was still new, and, while spreading quickly, its true nature was obscure. ye first reactions by politicians in the region were also often well measured and reasonable (much to the surprise of many guslars). it was in mid-april when conspiracy theories imported wholesale from north america, such as those regarding philanthropist and business magnate bill gates, began to take hold on bcms-language facebook pages aimed at translating memes and news stories [e.g. conspiracy against humanity; balkaners rise up], as well as in online videos and local fringe media [koprivica 2020; zona 2020]. by late summer those trends had picked up velocity. at that point, with death-counts falling short of early projections [hoft 2020a, 2020b], and examples from nations like sweden that forewent strict measures without significant spikes in infections or deaths [freiburger 2020; irwin 2020], other data began to be weaponized as counternarratives that spoke to a wider swathe of people in the area. yese factors were coupled with a series of blunders and over-steps by politicians and a range of confusing and contradictory public health messaging [mazzocco 2020] that raised the ire of the population and promoted broad diffusion of social media folklore questioning government measures. in discussion, mirko crljen cited the early fear regarding the unknown nature of the virus as his greatest motivating factor in producing a song about the pandemic: “…kad se pojavila, bili smo svi zatečeni i krenula je medijska hajka tako da je narod bio prestrašen u samom početku” [when it first appeared, we were all caught off guard and then the media brouhaha began, really terrifying the folk in the beginning]. to allay their fears, reporters in split approached crljen with the idea that he join other public figures in addressing local citizens. perhaps the unknown nature of the virus caused the bards to converge on an important message of support, but then one might ask why in later months no critical response arose from others. it is not unknown for guslars to return to important topics when new information or turns-of-events can motivate novel perspectives; it is unlikely that other singers felt their opportunity had passed. moreover, jevremović’s song was published in may, two months after the first guslars chimed in with no apparent qualms from the artists or audience. various government decisions and pandemic events throughout the year could have served as fodder for another covid song, so that their absence must be the result of other factors. the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 101 a second answer is likely that vernacular culture in the region does not have as strong an anti-science bent as in north america and western europe. most popular “dark web” forums for the balkans show poor support for anti-science narratives and facebook pages devoted to these topics have significantly smaller followings than their western counterparts. even online meme culture and trolls on message boards regularly insult anti-vaxxers and ridicule those who question established science rather than supporting them. (40) yis is not to say that there is no organized anti-vaccination movement; a small community does exist and appears to be growing in the pandemic [barberá et al. 2021], but it has neither the numbers nor the history of those in the west [bodner et al. 2021: 95-97; radovanović 2017; trifunović 2019]. individual adherents exist as well, but they largely belong to a younger cohort than the majority demographic, middle-aged and older, who comprise the core audience of guslar songs. vesna trifunović [2019] has discussed the paternalistic models employed by the socialist state medical system in yugoslavia and the legacy of that relationship in modern serbia. even in post-socialist contexts where government corruption remains high and poltical decisions are highly scrutinized, default acceptance of the decisions of medical officials may remain the norm for the guslars, their song writers, and their core audience who were raised in an older system built on different values. yis tendency, however, does not preclude the creation of an antivaccination-inspired song from a bard who ascribes to these views. any singer might also ignore the anti-vaccine and conspiracy arguments and focus instead on government response to the pandemic, discussing it as overstep and infringement on personal and statutory rights. i believe that the primary answer instead lies in a humble observation regarding the role of the guslar and the limitations he faces in negotiating his position. yis simple fact is often taken for granted or overlooked by the audience, by scholars of the art, and even by the singers and writers themselves: simply put, a guslar must motivate popular consensus towards his refined, but ultimately subjective, opinions and there are implicit limits, as a result, that may set boundaries on the attitudes he can express for communal adoption and consumption. much attention has been drawn to the “adjustments” made by artists in performance to cater songs to the needs of their audience; and yet, very often these discussions treat the content of the songs as immutable products, leaving the guslars a limited range of options: shorten the song for an impatient audience or stop it altogether and shift to another piece [golemović 2008: 24; lord 2000: 17; murko 1951: 371-72]. when discussing the steps taken by an artist to prepare for a performance, stress remains on selection of pieces from an established repertoire. factors affecting these decisions often include efforts to accommodate apposite themes that support audience tastes [golemović 2008:21-30], suit notable events like commemorations of public figures, weddings, etc. [primorac and ćaleta 2012: 146, 186], or that do not offend ethnically mixed audiences [murko 1951: 241, 371-72; žanić 2007: 51-53, 83-84]. here, again, the adaptation of the length of pieces for various performance circumstances is also regularly a topic of concern [golemović 2008: 24 n.37]. i believe that the covid-19 songs the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 102 provide a window into the thematic production of songs from their nascence to go beyond discussions of limited alterations to established poetic products. i suggest that they reveal some of the choices (whether conscious or not) that go into producing songs that appeal to intended audiences while allowing the guslar to retain his position of authority. ye guslar as vox populi: negotiating authority and antagonism as the voice of the people as a cultivated nexus of traditional patterns and novel insights that is regularly embraced, tacitly, as meaningful by their audience, the songs produced by guslars often provide an avenue for social scientists to access a distilled essence of “folk” attitudes and perceptions. and yet, singing to the gusle has always been an elective art, one assumed and never assigned. common wisdom ascribes the signified role of vox populi to the signifier of the guslar singing decasyllabic songs accompanied by the drone of the maple-wood instrument [čolović 2008: 142-43; golemović 2012: 134; primorac and ćaleta 2012: 185; trubarac matić 2019: 103; žanić 2007: 45, 54]. however, an analytical framework that vests sole power in a traditional symbol (even the symbol par excellence) serves to obscure the ways, even if they be minor, by which artists must obtain, retain, and negotiate the right to represent collective thought through the constant maintenance of their art form. while traditional oral epic included the production of novel songs to convey emerging circumstances, the practice was more intensively focused on communal sharing of known standards, albeit continually re-worked through transmission and the improvisational technique specific to performance. conversely, the repertoires of modern guslars have nearly inverted the ratios of traditional and novel songs, with unique and modern productions often forming the core of many singers’ catalogues. yis slow transition to novel production and an appreciation of it among their audience occurred over a series of decades as older songs became calcified in national culture as historical documents and literature [bošković-stulli 1975: 148; lord 2000: 124-38 cf. đorđević-belić 2016: 173-74] and as the method of artistic transmission shifted to its modern form. ye shift brought the authority of communal tradition into a contemporary, literary-based system that provides heightened freedom to bards to draw personal experience and outlook into public view with near de jure approval as collective consensus. (41) ye majority of this authority is, indeed, tacit and assumed, vested ab antique through the symbolic resonance of the role of the guslar. marko čolak revealed the recursive nature of this authority in conversation when asked if guslars represent the voice of the people. he responded by simply citing two verse lines that open a guslar’s song as an axiomatic proof in and of themselves “gusle moje, glas naroda moga / ja vas molim kô dragoga boga…” [my gusle, voice of my people / i pray to thee as to dear god…]. (42) for many, the symbol justifies itself through the repetition of its position which, in turn, becomes the justification of its position. the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 103 a number of scholars have highlighted this very privilege of the modern guslar. so long as the bard carries his symbolic trappings (gusle, folk costume, weapons, etc.), sings traditional songs recognized as the collective patrimony of the nation, and remains devoted to a celebration of integral ideals—heroism over cowardice, justice over injustice, faith over disbelief—promoted by the value system, his choice of subject and opinion in novel songs can remain surprisingly open. in fact, it can even include the celebration of entirely contradictory political actors and movements [bošković-stulli 1983: 181; čolović 2008: 142-66; primorac and ćaleta 2012: 163-64; žanić 2007: 45, 50, 54-56, 78]. ye guslar and gusle act as the sort of open symbols that roland barthes discussed, constituted by a “floating chain of signifieds” [1977: 39]. if the guslar sings of heroism, his heroes can be ancient medieval knights, pre-modern bandits, socialist-era apparatchiks, or today’s celebrities. similarly, a wide range of personal opinion can be accepted as representative of “folk opinion,” so long as the final narrative object is marshalled in the accoutrements of a recognizable weltanschauung that responds to the communal and aesthetic concerns of the intended, largely hermetic, audience [medenica 1939: 60-61]. yus, a guslar has to negotiate his position as vox populi, recognizing that by electing himself to the position he must balance a sense of freedom to speak his mind with having his opinion accepted by his community. a certain responsibility comes with that power. ye role of the people’s voice and retainer of collective memory imposes a converse restriction on the bard to follow a noble ethic, supporting his collective as a protector and defender at all times. normal circumstances allow for that defense to be voiced in various forms of critique. when political figures make contested decisions, guslars usually find themselves in a safe position to rail against the perceived injustice and mobilize public opinion. even in war time, when such songs sometimes fueled violence, song production was often removed from the political machinations that relied on the sentiments of that thought-world to legitimate hostility. a political figure in war time might employ a guslar to rally popular support, but battlefield decisions are not left to the bards, beyond, of course, those rare politicians, war lords, and highranking soldiers who were themselves guslars [žanić 2007: 26-33]. ye only pitfall by which a bard’s legitimacy might be revoked is to produce songs that are very clearly rejected by the population or that cause them to question the privileged voice assumed by and assigned to the singer [cf. golemović 2008: 22-30]. it is here where the responsibility of the guslar can curtail his ability to voice certain opinions. in the context of a pandemic, if a bard spreads misinformation, that act could endanger lives. it would be remembered, undermine his authority, rest on his conscience, and potentially alter the very public opinion that validates his voice. yose guslars that may wish to use their platform to condemn government overreach in the pandemic, or to vent frustrations with government mandates, find themselves in a double-bind. whether consciously or not, i believe that they are aware of these dangers and that awareness forces them to voice support for healthcare professionals or, at bare minimum, to suggest that people stay at home and wait out the storm. the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 104 in conversation in october, jevremović conveyed this sentiment well. even though he was not speaking about guslars in particular, the logic of his approach to personal responsibility can be carried over from those who might get infected to those artists who might hypothetically foment further suspicion and lead others into peril. е, сад што људи 'оће да пркосе, то је у њиховој природи. како год да направите, неће им ваљати. ако им забраните и заведете полицијски час, и мени не одговара, али они кажу: „ооови к'о фашисти!“... ниједна власт никоме никад није ваљала, па не ваља ни ова... не верујем ни да је тамо, да су људи тамо задовољни […] не знам, не ваља им председник, не ваља им градоначелник, не ваља им шеф полиције, не ваља им, не знам ко им све не ваља... али, ако би променили власт, да променимо фигуративно рецимо, онда, она опет не би ваљала некоме. значи, постоји једна код нас што каже: „народу није нико ручак посолио.“ и сад то је, рецимо, кад он неће да носи маску ил' да се повинује, е […] нечему што је […] дато од стожера, како ви то кажете […] од власти... то је његов јавни пркос. то он на тај начин обструира оно што власт хоће да спроведе. у реду. ја се са тим слажем али би рек’о овако: ако се ти, душо моја, будеш заразио вирусом, онда ти си сâм крив за то, онда сâм и сноси трошкове лећења. ако би то било тако него: „ја 'оћу да идем како ја хоћу а кад ми се деси, онда ми треба да легнем у болницу да ми држава обезбеди кревет и аспиратор [sic] (не дај... боже). а ако нема довољно лежајева онда је власт крива а нисам крив ја што сам иш'о тамо негде где не треба да буде“... сви су пркосни док неко којег знају не буде болестан... овде има једна реклама […] каже један тамо проматер [sic] за неку пољопривреду: „ја вам кажем како треба, а ви радите како 'оћете.“ [ye fact that people are defiant, that’s in their nature. however, you do it, it won’t be good enough for them. if you ban them and implement a curfew… i don’t like it either, but they say, “yeeey’re fascists!”… no government has ever been good enough for anyone ever; so, of course, this government is no good either… i doubt that people over there [in canada] are satisfied […] i dunno… the president is worthless, the mayor is worthless, the chief of police is worthless, i don’t know who else is worthless… but if they changed the government, let’s just say… then they’d be worthless to someone else. i mean… there’s this one [saw] over here that says, “no one has ever salted the folk’s lunch.” and so, let’s say, when someone won’t wear a mask or won’t submit to […] whatever is […] suggested by the [health officials] […] from the government… that’s his public defiance. in that way, he obstructs what the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 105 the government is trying to implement. okay. i’m okay with that, but i would say this: “if you, my friend, catch the virus, then you alone are at fault, so you take care of the hospital bill.” if it were like that instead of, “i want to go where i please, but if it happens to me, then i need to lay in a bed in the hospital and the state has to ensure i have a bed and a respirator (god forbid). and if there aren’t enough beds then the government is at fault, not i who went where i shouldn’t have been…” everyone is defiant until someone they know gets sick… yere’s an advertisement here […] some promoter for some farmer [supply company] says, “i tell you how it needs to be done, you do whatever you like.”] jevremović recognizes a human need to fear and defy oppression, viewing it in an understandable, if not positive, light, but he also stresses an ethic of personal responsibility that must keep defiance at bay. here, the collective is reformulated as those in a small country who must communally pay for the foolish mistakes of their co-nationals. yat the government is the arbiter of these funds and dictates how others may act is subservient to the harm that an individual (and by extension, a bard) can do to his/her nation. one must also remember that even in their modern iteration, guslars retain a praxis of artistry that is more attuned to public performance. yey navigate the waters of mediated performance with some liberties but with no impunity, and often have very little engagement with or control over the digital afterlives of their song uploads. many are recorded in studios run by professional or lay audio technicians that perform the necessary mixing; others are recorded by local news channels who choose where and how to air their songs; yet others are recorded on cell phones by younger family, peers, or the guslars themselves who then enlist aid in uploading to digital platforms. beyond the upload, songs enter the ether of the internet and take on a life, or at least a digital journey, of their own. while the bard in recorded performance may speak to an imaginary/distant audience [đorđević-belić 2016: 105-07, 112] in the same way that he engages with a live one, he lacks the critical and real-time feedback that a live audience provides. richard bauman [1992: 44] wrote generally of the act of performance that it “makes one communicatively accountable; it assigns to an audience the responsibility of evaluating the relative skill and effectiveness of the performer’s accomplishment.” yis definition carries beyond the act of performance and into the message conveyed by performance artists. much like stand-up comedians [quirk 2015: 78], guslars will often test and refine their songs on live audiences. yey will judge, from reactions and post-performance discussion, how suitable the song and its component verses are for public consumption [medenica 1939: 60-61; primorac and ćaleta 2012: 185]. yese evaluations can lead to alterations and refinements of verse lines as well as the wholesale abandonment of entire songs, and in this way open the “immutable” voice of the bard to a process of refinement subject to reflection, evaluation, re-evaluation, contention, and dispute [đorđević-belić 2016: 168, 171-73, 206]. in pandemic circumstances, live the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 106 performances have been postponed, and test audiences have become limited to close family and friends. ye songs produced under these conditions must perforce be tempered by conservative considerations to ensure that a receptive audience is guaranteed. a hypothetical guslar’s song that covers anti-mask, antilockdown, or conspiracy theory topics regarding the covid-19 pandemic would likely find a receptive audience. however, i believe that, due to the very aspects of social legitimacy that give authority to the role of the guslar, the bards are in many ways inhibited from making such songs in the current context. (43) “we heralds are then at all the bells”: a conclusion when the covid-19 pandemic reached the shores of the western balkans, the chaos that ensued prompted a series of vernacular artists to pen songs and take to youtube to disseminate them. of the wide range of material shared at that time, notable were three songs by three guslars, marko čolak from ledinac (donji mamići), bosnia-herzegovina, mirko crljen from ruda, croatia, and života jevremović from igrište, serbia. each came to the task with a different goal: crljen wanted to calm the people whom he believed the media was frightening with their incessant and panicked focus on the pandemic. čolak and his regular writing partner, the vernacular poet frano mikulić-jukić, saw injustices playing out in the pandemic and were once again called to speak out with one of their “songs of indignation.” jevremović admits that, more than anything else, he wanted to demonstrate how great his home of igrište is by producing a traditional response to the virus that would exhibit his poetic skills and draw attention to his home town. yese songs also differ in their delivery and their approaches to the topic: crljen and jevremović chronicle the events of the pandemic in simple terms highlighted by war metaphors that pit their nations’ public health officials in a battle against the virus. čolak and mikulić-jukić use their typical inflammatory approach to take on globalist politics and those they deem corrupt: politicians and vampiric ngos and aid groups. crljen and jevremović paint the virus as an “enemy at the gates” about to meet its match, while čolak and mikulić-jukić portray it as the hand of god sent to punish the evil and to return the good to their foundations. ye divergent aims of all three songs converge on a strong message of support for the people, asking them to stay at home and to wait out the storm that must surely end. many guslars and members of their regular audience currently see a danger in the government’s response to the pandemic. an anti-government stance is also quite common among guslars and is certainly a common ethic that informs their songs. despite these facts, many antagonistic sentiments regarding the pandemic, including a number of conspiracy theories that are found in currents of thought shared amongst and believed by guslars and their audience, are notably absent from these songs. i contend that the very public support that allows guslars to claim a position of authority among their audience as “the voice of the people” reciprocally confers upon them a duty to serve as figurative defenders of that the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 107 population (or at least their interests) and thus must inevitably restrain their ethic of revolt and critique which, in a global pandemic, might lead their listeners into harm and thereby undermine the guslar’s authority. notes 1 as is the case for many of us, the global pandemic upended my fieldwork travel plans. ye research for this paper was conducted from abroad and relies largely upon online material collected and interviews conducted over social media platforms between october 2020 and april 2021. i owe a great deal of thanks to mirko crljen, marko čolak, života jevremović, and frano mikulić-jukić for generously providing their time and thoughts to co-create this work with me. dužan sam vam na mislima i pomoći. hvala lijepa, gospodo. yanks also to marina jurić, drs. naomi mcpherson and jeanmarie rouhier willoughby, and my anonymous reviewers for their input on the article. 2 while this article focuses on three songs with a serious tone, there was a fourth, humorous song produced by an unnamed guslar (likely the montenegrin vaso đondović) in april of 2020. ye song, šta se mala s’tobom desi [babe, what is going on with you?] [unknown a 2020], paints a sentimentalized and jocular account of a village man frightened that his love interest has waited until a pandemic to requite his affections. unlike the bećarac songs that targeted the many novel, humorous, and absurd conditions of the pandemic, this song imagines an amusing scenario within those conditions. 3 đorđević-belić [2016; 2017] uses nekliudov’s [1995] concept of “postfolklore” to describe this shift. 4 for more on the traditional art form of oral epic singing to the gusle, see foley 1995; jurić 2019: 37-42; lord 2000; murko 1951. on the contemporary form of the art see đorđević-belić 2016, 2017; golemović 2008, 2012; primorac and ćaleta 2012. 5 yis presumably should read “učiniš” “what are you doing…” and may represent an error in performance. crljen did not provide me with a written text. 6 a clear forehead means one’s brow is not furrowed with stress or worry; a rosy/ruddy face is used as a sign of good health. ye line could best be translated as: “stay positive and healthy.” yis verse is hendecasyllabic with the initial “i” acting, though not actually functioning, as a hypermetric exclamation. 7 ye song is a covid-themed update to the traditional mostar sevdalinka, “čudna jada od mostara grada” [a strange affliction from mostar city], best known from the 1990 recording by meho puzić and made popular in recent times by the band mostar sevdah reunion [2003]. for more on sevdalinka, see efendić 2015. 8 anacrusis in verses one and 19 is caused by the insertion of hypermetric shouts. verse 18 is begun with such an exclamation, but it is devoiced and abandoned part way through. verse three is hypermetric, extended to a hendecasyllable by the substitution in performance of “откада” [since] for its variant form “откад” in the written text. verse 17 is hypometric (nonasyllabic). the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 108 9 ll. original text reads “откад” which better conforms to meter. 10 ll. original text reads “свим је иста шанса” 11 lapsus lectionis. ye original line reads “јер ти нада за живот се буди” [since your hope for life awakens] but is sung in performance as “јер ту живот са њима се буди” [with them, life here awakens]. a substantial variation; translation reflects the intended meaning. 12 lapsus linguae. “белим.” 13 ll. ye original text reads “витезови знања,” which offers the correct plural and lacks the superfluous preposition. ye variation in performance, however, does not detract from the meaning and remains unambiguous to listeners. 14 predrag kon is head of the department for immunization at the institute of public health in belgrade. darija kisić tepavčević is an associate professor at the department of medicine at belgrade university and deputy director of the milan jovanović batut institute for public health in serbia. 15 he also regularly differentiates those who do and do not listen to folk music (a distinction he often conflates with age) with a great touch of folk witticism as those whose music is above the belt (traditional) and those whose music is below the belt (modern). 16 verses one and two begin with hypermetric shouts. verses two, five, 33, and 61 are performed as hypermetric hendecasyllabic lines, possibly due to čolak filling out words that were elided in the original text (five, 33) or inserting an extra conjunction in performance (two, 61). some or all of these may have been in the original text when written for the performance. 17 ll. original texts reads “istjerali.” both forms are common in the region. 18 i am unaware of this as a folk idiom, though it may be. mikulić-jukić explains these two lines to mean that “one gets what they are asking for.” here it is meant to represent those working in a chinese laboratory who played god with the original coronavirus and created something outside of their control (see below). 19 ll. “europi.” ye original, as written, would require elision and the singer has (intentionally or unintentionally) shifted to (or simply performed) a variant pronunciation which, today, is more associated with standard bosnian and serbian but still open to bards of all denominations for metrical imperatives. 20 to wrap oneself/someone in black [zamotati/zaviti (se) u crno] is an ancient metaphor linked to the imagery of widow’s weeds. it means to aggrieve oneself or another because of someone’s death which is extended to a broader sense of drawing someone into or finding oneself in a difficult situation. 21 yis is drawn from a folk expression: kad se magarcu voda zalije za uši, tek tad propliva [when the water reaches the ass’s ears, only then does it begin to swim]. here it is meant to suggest that the people of croatia only recognized and understood how far they had strayed from a righteous/sensible path when they were debilitated by a pandemic. the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 109 22 lapsus linguae. ye text reads “redali se” [lined up, aligned] while čolak sings “radile” [they worked, f. pl.]. i have translated the intended meaning in english. 23 ll. “prkoseći.” english translation reflects intended meaning. 24 “praviti račun bez krčmara” [to start a tab without the publican (present)] is to count on something which is not assured. 25 ll. “svaku.” ye meaning is retained. 26 in standard language “mišje.” ye inclusion of an extra syllable to fill out meter carries from the text as this variant form is common in the spoken language of čolak and mikulić-jukić’s region of herzegovina. 27 ll. “pade.” meaning is retained. 28 ll. “nastade.” meaning is retained. 29 ll. “drukčije se.” ye english translation conveys the intended meaning. 30 krojiti gaće (kome)” [to tailor (someone’s) underwear]is an idiom implying that someone is performing work for others but in their own way or for their own benefit. 31 ll. “il’ nam je umirat’.” meaning is retained. 32 ll. “c’jeli svijet se temeljima vraća.” yis verse illustrates the remnants of an oral-formulaic, improvisatory tendency. while no longer based on an oralderived model of training, prolonged experience to versification in decasyllabic meter has čolak naturally converting mikulić-jukić’s hendecasyllabic line into a sensible (albeit grammatically imperfect) decasyllabic line in the heat of performance. 33 lapsus linguae. “s’vati.” yis is likely an intentional shift from mikulićjukić’s dialectical/idiolectical phrasing to a more comfortable standard. 34 ll. “izić’.” yis, too, might represent a somewhat conscious shift to a preferred form. 35 yese comments are aimed broadly at italian social interactions (seen as warm and casual in opposition to northern european practices) and, more specifically, at certain events that occurred in march. in a december conversation, mikulić-jukić particularly noted a series of mass festivities in lombardy that were linked to a soccer victory by the team atalanta b. c. that turned into a superspreader event [azzoni and dampf 2020]. italy was also criticized for its slow reaction time in closing its borders as well as for some early efforts to combat antichinese racism such as the “hug a chinese” campaign launched in florence, which received backlash from various groups as an act of “virtue signalling” that increased the spread of the virus [malloy 2020; watson 2020a, 2020b; yahoo!news 2020]. 36 a zagreb-based, non-government organization founded in 1994, the group fights for gender equality and women’s rights, largely by offering legal and psychological assistance as well as shelter to victims of rights abuses and genderbased violence. ye adjectives in the group’s name alternate from feminine to masculine to reflect their intended mission of gender equality; the acronym, too is intentional, as it mirrors the word “babe” [old women]. the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 110 37 he also notes external forces that dictate this relationship, namely that there is a dearth of writers in the region and that many guslars come to him when they want a song written about a particular event. 38 yis stance is not entirely a product of contemporary circumstances, but a current of anti-authority posturing that finds echoes in the guslars of former eras. see, for instance, primorac and ćaleta 2012: 160-63; rihtman-auguštin 1972: 149-50; žanić 2007: 45-46. mirko crljen says of guslars, “…[mi] smo opozicija svim vlastima” [we are the opposition to all governments]. see also the critical responses of guslars regarding the practices of bards who propagandize for governments and their opinions of their poor reputation in certain elite circles in đorđević-belić 2016: 193-200 and primorac and ćaleta 2012: 171-73. 39 ye only vernacular song that hinted at conspiracy theories was the “korona bećarac” [grubešić and grubešić 2020]. ye second stanza begins: “političari, znanstvenici bruje / nitko ne zna što se iza kuje / mudri vele zavjeru nam kroje / moćne sile iza svega stoje / drugi opet da smo kraja blizu / nevjera je izazvala krizu / na rubu smo posljednji vremena / nešto nam se uveliko sprema” [politicians and scientists are buzzing / no one knows what they’re plotting behind [closed doors/the scenes, etc.] / ye wise say they’re plotting a conspiracy /great powers are behind it all / others say that we’re near the end / lack of faith has caused a crisis / we’re on the verge of the end times / something big is being prepared for us] [ll. 9-16]. here, too, the concept is barely pursued before the singers re-route the message, preferring a moralizing christian narrative. formulations of the pandemic as divine retribution seem to have found a unique purchase among croatian catholics. some explanation of this may be found in the fact that the arrival of covid-19 corresponded with the worst earthquake (5.5 magnitude, centered on zagreb) to hit the region in 140 years [markušić et al. 2020]). yat quake was followed by a series through the year as well as drastic flooding in july, a conglomerate of events that might have the most steadfast atheist questioning whether some deity was angry. 40 see, for instance, the aspersions cast upon tennis star novak đoković in online circles after he contracted covid-19. a prominent vegan anti-vaxxer whose wife, jelena, is an alternative-health and lifestyle blogger, đoković held an exhibition charity tennis tour, the adria tour, in june. ye tour’s first match in belgrade was highly criticized for its full crowds and lack of physical distancing and mask requirements. after the second match in zadar, đoković, his wife, and three other contestants tested positive for the virus. local internet message boards soon exploded with witty criticisms, e.g., “quickly, vaccinate him… oh wait;” “he should take jelena’s mother’s-milk soap [as a cure]” [iguana775 2020]. 41 yis situation should not be understood as a transition of technique, but rather as a slow replacement of singers working on the older model with those working on the newer and a concomitant shift in audience expectations. 42 unfortunately, čolak could not remember whence these lines derived. i am unable to find this particular song in collections or online media. ye first line, however, mirrors a number of similar multiforms found elsewhere in initial contextual formulae [đorđević-belić 2017:90-104] that open guslar’s songs. e.g. the heralds at the bells folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 111 “gusle moje, diko roda moga” [my gusle, pride of my people] [momčilo 2016], “gusle moje od javora suva” [my gusle of dry maple[wood]] [opačić-ćanica 1987:95], “gusle moje drvo javorovo” [my gusle [of] maple wood]. 43 a reviewer for this article has perceptively asked a pointed question that i too have pondered in this research: whether or not contemporary guslars might also be actively trying to repair their public image. i will be exploring that question in a future publication. bibliography azzoni, tales, and andrew dampf. 2020. “game zero: spread of virus linked to champions league match,” ye associated press. cited by https://apnews.com/article/ae59cfc0641fc63afd09182bb832ebe2. 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(consulted 9 december 2020). interviews čolak, marko. interviews over facebook messenger. 28-31 october, and 1 december 2020. crljen, mirko. interviews over facebook messenger. 16 november, and 2 december 2020. jevremović, života. interviews over facebook messenger audio call. 5 july, 30 october, 1 december, and 13 december 2020. mikulić-jukić, frano. interviews over facebook messenger. 25-26 october, 4 november, 30-31 december 2020, 1 january, and 15 april 2021. microsoft word folk2010e.doc on the history of the term “ethnomusicology” 129 folklorica 2010, vol. xv on the history of the term “ethnomusicology” bohdan lukaniuk mykola lysenko lviv national music academy lviv, ukraine abstract it is generally accepted that the fundamental term “ethnomusicology,” as universally accepted in contemporary scholarship, first appeared in 1950 and was invented by the dutchman jaap kunst. in reality, the birthplace of this term is ukraine where it was proposed and defined in detail in 1928 by klyment kvitka. before world war ii the term “ethnomusicology” migrated to poland, thence to western europe and the usa, and from there to all the world. the date of birth of the term “ethnomusicology” is accepted to be 1950 and the inventor of this term is considered to be the dutch researcher of musical folklore (1) jaap kunst (1891-1960). he used this term in the subheading for his work musicologica: a study of the nature of ethno-musicology, its problems, methods and representative personalities [kunst 1950]. the second edition of his book had the title ethno-musicology [kunst 1955], albeit hyphenated. and it was only the third edition that introduced the term as it is currently used, namely without a hyphen: ethnomusicology [kunst 1959; 1960; 1969]. kunst justified his invention of the term ethnomusicology by saying that it corresponded to the discipline more accurately than the nineteenth century term “comparative musicology” (2). he also argued that: “the name of our science is, in fact, not quite appropriate; it does not ‘compare’ any more than any other science. a better name, therefore, is that appearing on the title page of this book: ethno-musicology.” [kunst 1950: 7] this neologism was immediately picked up in the united states (3) after which it began its triumphal global journey. earlier terms such as “musical ethnography (ethnology)”, “comparative musicology” and “musical folklore studies” were either replaced or forced to obtain a new, mostly secondary, meaning [see for example goshovskii 1985]. nowadays the discipline which studies musical folklore is called “musicology” almost everywhere. the majority of institutions and folklorica 2010, vol. xv 130 periodicals accept the same name and this term for the discipline is generally found in reference works and scholarly literature. the almost universal acceptance of kunst’s innovation as a major step forward in scholarship should be called into question. wide acceptance applied only to the term in itself, and not its meaning. the discipline was still amorphously conceived and so kunst’s neologism did not offer anything fundamentally new. like its predecessors, it also did not provide a definite answer to the main methodological questions: namely the what, why and how of the discipline of musical folklore. in other words, what are this discipline’s subject, goals, and methodology? besides, the supporters of this terminological substitution were unable to elucidate the exact difference between ethnomusicology and musical ethnography, musical folklore studies and comparative musicology. furthermore, they could not capture the essence of the discipline which usually focuses not only on general comparative musical analysis, but also shares concepts with classical comparative studies such as those used in geology, biology, anatomy, psychology, sociology, ethnography, linguistics, and, to certain extent, literature studies, applying them to the non-written history of mankind. this study seeks to research the history of the unusual neologism “ethnomusicology,” not so much to clarify chronology as to understand its initial meaning, the conditions of its origin, and the reasons that necessitated it. moreover, it seeks to point out that, despite the prevailing attribution of authorship, one that has already penetrated authoritative encyclopedias and scholarly literature [hood 1969; krader 1980; myers 1992], the originator of the term was not kunst. he only announced the term at an opportune moment when leading researchers were looking for a new word to replace an old term that had exhausted its usefulness and had even been discredited to certain degree. as often happens with successful beginnings, a messiah has forerunners: the great dutchman also had his precursors, who had even published the term period to his usage. jan stęszewski may have been one of the first to question whether kunst coined the word ethnomusicology [stęszewski 1992]. he proved convincingly that the term was used in the 1930s by lucjan kamieński (1885-1964), one of the originators of contemporary polish folk music scholarship. in his unfinished article, kamieński pointed out that the folk music recordings in the sound-archive of the warsaw ethnographic museum (4) could be used during public “ethno-musical lectures.” [stęszewski 1992: 529]. the article was dated 13 december 1934, and on the history of the term “ethnomusicology” 131 folklorica 2010, vol. xv thus shows that the birthday of the term ethnomusicology, albeit with a hyphen, predates kunst’s usage by a decade and a half. there is an important detail, namely the fact that the author used the term without any elucidation, a fact that implies that this word was already used by his associates and well-known. moreover, as jadwiga sobieska (1909-1995), kamieński’s student and assistant and later a prominent post-war folklorist confirmed, the professor used the term “ethnomusicology” synonymously with “comparative musicology,” “musical ethnology,” and “ folklore studies” in his classes at poznań university[stęszewski 1992: 529]. according to piotr dahlig, the term ethnomusicology was widely used in warsaw folklore studies, perhaps under kamieński’s influence [dahlig 1998: 519-520]. at any rate, in october 1937, one of its representatives, walerian batko (1906 1947), the music instructor in the warsaw institute of folk theaters and author of a folk song collection from the lublin region [batko 1936] called filaret kolessa an “ethno-musicologist” in his review of volyn’ folk songs for mixed choir (rivne, 1937) [dahlig 1998: 268]. this was probably the first appearance of the term in polish periodical literature and it used the same spelling as in kamieński’s. the term was next published a year and a half later in the journal teatr ludowy [the folk theater] in a response to an amateur collector who was asking where he should turn with his recordings of folk songs. the response, written in february 1939, probably by batko, stated that folk recordings were “processed by ethnography, ethnology and ethnomusicology [my emphasis – b.l.], new sciences that, for now, have a whole cohort of researchers in this field.” [dahlig 1998: 518] here, ethnomusicology was printed as a single word (no hyphen) and put on a par with ethnography and ethnology, although perhaps seen as a somewhat different discipline, with the differences unspecified. but what should constitute this difference is a question that remained unanswered in the editorial text. both jan stęszewski and piotr dahlig assume that the creator of the new term could have been kamieński himself. his language was generally marked by uniqueness of vocabulary and a penchant for neologisms [stęszewski 1992: 529; dahlig 1998: 519]. even if he were really the inventor of the term, still he had he precursors. earlier, in 1928, this neologism was proposed by another prominent researcher of folk music, one of the founders of ukrainian school of ethnic music studies, klyment kvitka (1880 1953). he was not only the first to use the term in print, he also argued for its appropriateness, giving it a clear folklorica 2010, vol. xv 132 definition and spelling out the essence of folk music studies – their subject matter, objects, goals and research methods. perhaps kvitka’s suggestion influenced his polish colleagues, but neither his nor their innovation made an impression on the world folklore studies community and was not properly appreciated at the time. the main reasons for this are obvious: ethnomusicology, like all liberal arts in eastern europe, was isolated from world scholarship and appeared nonexistent. also important is kvitka’s unfortunate fate, a fate experienced by many scholars of ukrainian origin and one that doomed his legacy to obscurity. because of an incurable illness from his youth (approximately 1896 on), kvitka was forced to renounce a career as pianist, the career he desired (5). but he had an amateur interest in folk music and devoted his free time, first as a student and later as a lawyer, to the thorough study of available ethnographic literature, occasionally collecting folk songs. in 1908, together with his wife, the ukrainian poetess lesia ukraïnka (larysa kosach), he took an active part in the famous joint project of recording dumy, which were then transcribed and published by kolessa [kolessa 1969]. in general, during the first twenty years of his not very systematic musical-ethnographical work, he managed to publish only two compilations of folk melodies, two occasional articles, and two reviews of a popular character (6), a meager indication of his creative potential. capping the amateur period in kvitka’s life was his collection of folk songs recorded from lesia ukraïnka (7). kvitka’s high level of scholarship, his fastidious recording, his classification by genre and content, his publication of musical and lexical variants, his analytical textual comments quickly brought him recognition as the producer of classic ukrainian folk song collections. the rest of the folk music gathered by kvitka became a part of his next anthology [kvitka 1922], which was fundamentally different from the previous one in genre. it was to be a representative collection of folk song tradition from all ukraine on the pattern of the publications by ilmari krohn [krohn 1893-1933], františek bartoš and leoš janáček [bartos and janáček 1899-1901], osyp rozdolsky and stanislav liudkevych [rozdolsky and liudkevych 1906-1908], béla bartók [bartók 1924], and others. due to extremely unfavorable circumstances kvitka was unable to fully implement his project (8). the concise survey statement in the preface to the collection showed serious changes in kvitka’s outlook: he had gone from a romantic amateur who sought to capture the creativity of the people to a professional researcher, a on the history of the term “ethnomusicology” 133 folklorica 2010, vol. xv scholar, who “felt like a member of the joint project aimed at contributing new data to scholarship, data that resulted from the study of folk music as one of the phenomena of the process of cultural history” [kvitka 1971: 33]. at that moment kvitka consciously decided to study folk music as one of the least researched fields of ukrainian humanities: “if i had observed that musical folklore was being thoroughly investigated by qualified ethnographers, i would have turned to the study of the visual and plastic arts,” he wrote [quoted in storozhuk 1998: 12]. in 1920, he became an employee of the all-ukrainian academy of sciences (auas), where he organized the first ukrainian research center for collecting musico-ethnographic materials, both sound recordings and scores [kvitka 1930: 5-22]. it is indicative that this center’s original name “the office of comparative musicology” was quickly changed to “the office of musical ethnography” (9). full of enthusiasm, kvitka developed a program for extensive folk music research [kvitka 1923]. but it proved impossible to implement this program even partially. kvitka encountered indifference from the auas administration and, despite his efforts to develop the office and to surround himself with active, knowledgeable colleagues, he continued to be the office’s sole worker. despite the lack of support and the lack of professional colleagues, which was mitigated only by correspondence with foreign colleagues, kvitka made giant strides as a researcher. he produced several essays every year that retain, and will probably always retain their significance (10). a prolific scholar, he produced his most important publications on ukrainian ethnomusicology during the relatively short kyiv period of his work. he made a significant contribution to the development of ethnomusicological thought and became a leader of ukrainian scholarship. the bolshevik repression in ukraine that aimed to destroy its scholarly elite and national intelligentsia did not bypass kvitka. to escape, he followed many other prominent ukrainian scholars such as volodymyr vernadsky, mykola zerov and others, and left kyiv in the summer of 1933 to work as a teacher in the moscow conservatory. but the following year the soviet secret police arrested kvitka and he was sent to one of the countless soviet concentration camps. accidentally released two years later, he returned to moscow, where he allegedly engaged in scholarly work, lectured on musical folklore at the conservatory and even headed the office of folk music. the facts indicate that, after the trauma he experienced in 1931, kvitka ceased folklorica 2010, vol. xv 134 publishing his research. during the two decades that he lived in moscow he managed to publish only a single article [kvitka 1941: 123-131] and that under the patronage of leningrader evgenii gippius. in the post-war thaw of the late forties, kvitka again tried to return to research, as his numerous manuscripts (11), including clean typescripts ready for the printer, attest. but the short thaw was quickly replaced with a new stalinist freeze and none of kvitka’s manuscripts were published during his lifetime. only a small fragment of those works was published posthumously (12). one can only guess how much more kvitka would have contributed to scholarship had the circumstances of his life been normal. honored pro forma, mainly for his erudition, kvitka was ignored or even disregarded to the point of contempt (13). his small scholarly heritage, some three dozen articles published in ukrainian journals with a limited circulation, was similarly overlooked. a true miniaturist, kvitka did not try to write a monograph (14) and lived for many years in oblivion. as if anticipating his lot, he wrote in one of the essays: “for one who is alone in his field or has only a limited number of colleagues and students it is a tragedy of life that reviews of his work, if they even appear, are limited to general phrases that prove that no one has troubled to study the works in detail. the anticipation that the same general phrases will also appear in the obituary, to be followed by total oblivion, is like the spectre of a second death – the death of one’s work. anabiosis (15) is a matter of accident; there may be some who resuscitate one’s work or reveal an active interest in it – and then again there may not. when the state of morbidity comes from one’s work being completely ignored, that is not so bad; dogmatic recognition is worse.” “one must always stick to that prescription when speaking to students of folk music because that branch has no secure place, either in the community, or in the scholarly enterprise supported by the state. it depends on accident; will individuals appear who are profoundly interested in this field? do these individuals have a constitution strong enough to undertake this work? will their life circumstances permit them to become enthusiasts and idealists? such individuals are not found in every country, or at all times, and the continuation of work in this field is always problematic.” [kvitka 1928: xlvii] enthusiasts and idealists actively interested in kvitka’s works were found. attracted by the level of his scholarship they did revive his work. especially important were the efforts the folklorist-musicologist from lviv volodymyr hoshovs’kyi (1922-1996). in the early 1970s he prepared the majority of kvitka’s works for republication in russian translation, adding a number of his unpublished manuscripts. he on the history of the term “ethnomusicology” 135 folklorica 2010, vol. xv provided thorough and thoughtful commentary to every work, giving it its due and revealing its content and significance [kvitka 1971, 1973]. anatolii ivanyts’kyi supplemented hoshovs’kyi’s efforts and expanded the moscow edition [kvitka 1985, 1986]. those collected publications and the commentary to them revealed kvitka for what he was: a connoisseur of oral-musical culture, a dedicated servant to the cause of its recognition, and also a profound thinker, brilliant innovator, well ahead of his era, who expressed ideas that would become “epoch-making discoveries” only after his death. these ideas include kvitka’s criticism of the concept of the historical primacy of the pentatonic in the development of modal thinking. kvitka voiced this idea some thirty years before the “revolutionary” breakthrough by walter wiora and others [wiora 195: 185-208; kvitka 1971, 1: 274-278, 308-311]. also important are kvitka’s studies of folk music in context, an approach that came to scholarly research only in the final third of the last century as a result of the “musical-anthropological” revelations of alan merriam [merriam 1964; kvitka 1971, 2: 253, 277278, 325-326]. kvitka’s structural typology of folkloric plots, it turns out, was later “invented” by philologically oriented folklorists for the classification of tales [kvitka 1971, 2:194-196]. his methodology of algorithmic modeling melo-typology, his statistical data interpretation of melo-geography [kvitka 1971, 1: 59-60, 1971, 2: 193], textological aligning of musical-ethnographic sources [kvitka 1971, 2: 38-39], and many other innovations remain unprecedented in folk music scholarship. kvitka worked much and purposefully on musicological terminology, its refinement and development, and introduced many completely new concepts and terms (16). it is he who suggested the neologism “ethno-musicology” (with the same hyphenated spelling as used by kamieński, batko and kunst). he proposed this neologism in an article that examined the historical value of the first printed collection of ukrainian folk melodies (17) [kvitka 1928: 119-144]. for some reason this article was not reprinted by either hoshovs’kyi or a. ivanyts’kyi. its original, of course, was inaccessible due to the ban on the literature of the so-called “ukrainization” of 1920 – 1929 period. this literature was available exclusively in special library collections which could be used only after having receiving permission from soviet government authorities. this probably explains why this work by kvitka went unnoticed by scholars and remained little known not just by the general public, but even by most experts. this has been a loss to scholarship because the work contains valuable considerations of general folklorica 2010, vol. xv 136 methodological significance as well as a detailed review of theoretical issues concerning the scholarly disciplines and the terminology that deal with folk music. we should mention that 1928 was not the first time that kvitka concerned himself with terminological issues. in an article of purely propaedeutical orientation [kvitka 1925: 8-27] published several years earlier, he opposed the replacement of the traditional term “musical ethnography” with the more fashionable “comparative musicology” (18). kvitka stressed that “in principle, both terms deal with ways of positing the problem rather than with the subject of analysis.” “musical ethnography or comparative musicology actually involve the music of less developed or non-european peoples and, within the european cultural world, it addresses only the music that is transmitted without scores and the benefit of the written musical text.” (19) the difference between these two disciplines is rather illusory, he continued, because they both seek to solve historical issues. we might note here that, in those days, ethnography was considered to a historical science. as summed up by kvitka, in view of the unity of both the subject and the purpose of analysis, “the parallel existence of these two sciences is unjustified.” “[...] by excluding what might belong in the domain of comparative musicology, musical ethnography would cease to be a science; but if it is to remain a field of study, it can exist only as comparative and evolutionary scholarship” [kvitka 1925: 9]. kvitka asserted that the two terms should be regarded as virtually synonymous and that preference for one or the other be given only according to national traditions. he personally preferred the term “musical ethnography” (20) and put his preferences into practice by changing the name of the institution he had organized from the “office of comparative musicology” to the “office of musical ethnography” (see note 9). kvitka returned to the problem of terminology several years later in his article about m. maksymovych’s collection. here he tried to clarify his understanding of basic terms as they reflect the fundamental methodological issues of the field of oral music. as he wrote, the “name ‘musical ethnography’ is established in our country and is usually used superficially and too generously.” “strict conditions should be used to define the direction of investigation and it should be clear that it is an area of ethnography.” it “should be characterized by the direct observation of facts and phenomena, their all encompassing comprehensive description, and generalization on the basis of precisely on the history of the term “ethnomusicology” 137 folklorica 2010, vol. xv this kind of work”. it was kvitka’s conviction that “multiyear stationary ethno-musicographical [my emphasis bl] work in the village could bring much that is missing to anthropological study.” in other words, thorough and comprehensive “observation of musical life” [kvitka 1928: lxiii], would aid in understanding the processes of song creation, the migration and transformation of song, the interrelation of the individual and collective in folk art. fieldwork would help us see the relation between professional and non-professional folk music, especially in connection with folk instrumental dilettantism. it would help develop proper folk music terminology and help us understand musicality in a particular place. field observation would reveal, “those aspects of melody and rhythm that are the achievement of the folk as a group and those aspects that should be attributed to the virtuosity of gifted individuals”. it would reveal how below-average singers simplify or deviate from the norm [kvitka 1928: lxiii] (21). at the same time “one can state that, at this time, we still lack a musical ethnography in the strict sense.” emphasized kvitka. [kvitka 1928: lxiii] kvitka also asserted that the scholarly field which studies folk music should be seen not only as a part of ethnography, but also as a branch of musicology. this is “analogous to other disciplines which the study other types of folk art and are both branches of ethnography and branches of the appropriate art disciplines. [however,] we cannot conclude that this approach requires the introduction of the term ‘ethnomusicology’ [emphasis supplied – b.l.] to supplement the term ‘musical ethnography’ already in existence. in the realm of ethno-musicology one can envision the core of the discipline and the analysis of the melodies themselves” [kvitka 1928: lxiii]. kvitka did not develop this last statement any further, apparently having in mind the classic analysis of musical works (22) outside of their actual existence, which developed in the nineteenth century and is still taught in all ukrainian schools [see for example marx 1839; riemann 1889; sposobin 1947; mazel’ 1960; liudkevych 1921; iakubiak 1999]. thus, in kvitka’s system, music, taken as a whole should be divided into two fundamentally different research domains. one of them is the european world; it is music that exits under the constant control of the written musical text (i.e. “written music”) (23). the other is music devoid of such control, or “oral music,” what can also be called “folk” or “ethnic music” and abbreviated “ethnomusic” (24). written music is studied by the discipline commonly known as “musicology” (ukrainian – muzykoznavastvo). oral music should be subdivided into branched folklorica 2010, vol. xv 138 lines, depending on the emphasis of the study on either the musical works themselves or on the context of their performance. the first branch, which is close to musicology, should accordingly be called “ethno-musicology”, while the second, should be named “musical ethnography” (or perhaps “ethno-musicography”). here the methodologically of ethnography should apply. kvitka’s train of thought can be presented graphically in this conceptual-terminological system: such was the reasoning that led kvitka to the invention of term “ethno-musicology.” this reasoning is consistent with contemporary views on the main internal divisions in the study of oral music. here the objects of study are differentiated into two sub-disciplines: one of them dealing with music per se (musical works, their lyrics sound or printed music), and other dealing with musical life as it manifests itself in musical culture and its functioning in the community. [nettl, 1992: 266277; czekanowska 1987; żerańska-kominek 1995]. in those distant 1920s, no one except kvitka raised the issue in these terms. although the problem did come up in studies of oral music, works of oral music, texts in musical notation, remained the main object of study, along with, as liudkevych put it, the circumstances under which those works were performed [liudkevych 1906, 1908: xi]. special interest in musical life appeared only with the establishment of the sociological and functional approached in ethnography (25). from the middle of the twentieth century onward, the latter deliberately studied ethnomusic, thus on the history of the term “ethnomusicology” 139 folklorica 2010, vol. xv inaugurating a new discipline, best known from alan hart merriam’s musical anthropology [merriam 1964]. it was this work that lead to the proliferation of the term and its recognition. generally, the term “anthropology” has three meanings. in ukraine it most often means the biological science that studies the origin and evolution of man, differences in physiology, origin of human races, and so on. less often it is used to define the philosophical study of the essence of man, particularly in terms of his existence. on the other hand, in english-speaking countries, mainly in the united states, the term anthropology usually refers to analysis of the culture of different peoples, especially primitive ones. it is usually treated as a synonym for ethnography, in the sense of ethnology or the study of peoples. contemporary musical anthropology generally corresponds to “musical ethnography” (“ethno-musicography”) in kvitka’s conceptual and terminological system. as can be seen, kvitka’s prediction came true: thirty years after his research on musical life finally became a separate discipline, although not in his homeland, but overseas. kvitka’s musical ethnography is not quite the same as a. p. merriam’s musical anthropology. dissimilar concepts stand behind these different terms the sub-disciplines to which they are applied. having a common object, they study different subjects, specifically different aspects or viewpoints or, to use kvitka’s expression, different ways of posing the problem. ethnography and its musical branch are historical sciences that try to understand music in cultural context from a diachronic perspective. anthropology, which is closer to sociology than to ethnography, studies the same object only from a synchronic point of view, avoiding the historical perspective. today, musical anthropology has become a leading discipline in the study of oral music. as a result, many enthusiastically share the views of its founder, that “ethnomusicology ... is the study of music within culture” [merriam 1964]. thus, as once was the case with “comparative musicology,” the same error of identifying of parts with the whole is made and musical anthropology is seen as as a separate sub-discipline of oral music in all its diverse manifestations. at the same time, the term earlier proposed by kvitka has developed in the opposite direction. after all, according to merriam, “musical anthropology” is an antonym of “musical ethnography” or “ethno-musicography,” but their synonym. as a result, another area of research on oral music for which kvitka invented neologism, again remained untimely without a term to label it. folklorica 2010, vol. xv 140 such incidents can be seen as the negligent attitude toward terminology that has come to be a hallmark of the humanities. scholars in the humanities, it seems, have become accustomed to employing wellknown terms at their own discretion and without troubling to look for the term’s initial meaning. therefore, different authors, and sometimes even the same author, can interpret the same concept differently. sometimes the same term can be used in opposite meanings, as is the case with the musicological terms “intonation,” “mode,” and others the have no meaning outside a certain context. scholars in the humanities do not study terminology. moreover, for most of them, the existence of strict rules of origination and use of terms seems exotic. hence, in works in art history, literary studies and similar disciplines, terminology use as strictly as in the exact sciences. rather, it represents spontaneously developed terminological-like wording. in the case of the term “ethnomusicology”, the problem is rooted in the very nature of oral music scholarship, which has been and remains a heterogeneous discipline that deals with many disparate spheres of human activity beginning from art and ethnography and ending with psychology and acoustics. each sphere pursues its own interests and uses appropriate methods, considering them to be the only correct ones. their separate approaches have not been subordinated beneath a common denominator and universal theoretical concept signified by a single term. if, however, the study of oral music were conceptualized, not as branches of related disciplines, but as components of an independent science with its own range of general methodological questions, with its own distinct object, subjects, aims and means of attaining them then one would be able to avoid the endless substitution of one partially useful term for another. there are various reasons why it is hardly possible to return to kvitka’s original intentions. one of these reasons is that, in his conceptual system, “ethno-musicology” refers not to all scholarship devoted to oral music, but to a subdivision of this area of work. the issue of subdivisions versus broad terms bothered kvitka less than the need for distinguish the new ethno-musicographical aspect of research from the existing ethno-musicological. thus the problem of a unifying term was not resolved, though the word combination ethnomusicology certainly fits this role better than the expression comparative musicology. it was kvitka’s radical approach that lead to the appearance of this neologism, though it is not impossible that the term was actually invented independently in three different countries over a twenty year on the history of the term “ethnomusicology” 141 folklorica 2010, vol. xv period, first in 1928 by kvitka in ukraine, then in the 1930 kamieński in poland, and finally by kunst in the netherlands in 1950. there is likely a certain historical connectedness between these events. for the time being, there is no direct evidence, but it is worth positing that the new word combination, proposed by the ukrainian scholar, traveled through poland and then reached western europe and the united states. could the term “ethno-musicology” move from ukraine to poland? it would be difficult to imagine that kamieński or batko could have borrowed the term directly from kvitka’s article. perhaps kyivan academic periodicals were still able to reach poland at the end of the 1920s. if so, historians, ethnographers, linguists and other specialists considered it their professional duty to examine periodicals in their disciplines would have been exposed to them. all three of the most prominent polish folk music researchers of the inter-war period kamieński, pulikovski, and chybiński earned their credentials in german universities and were oriented to the berlin school of comparative musicology. they were not much interested in the academic work of their eastern european colleagues. except for kolessa and lin’ova, scholars from eastern europe were almost unknown. furthermore, kvitka was virtually unknown at that time, and even remains so even today. his name is completely missing in the collections of works by jadwiga and marian sobiescy [sobiescy 1973], chybiński [chybiński 1961], bielawski [bielawski 1999], and even in the world history of ethnomusicology, recently published at the university of warsaw [żerańska-kominek 1995] (26). and this happened despite the fact that kvitka’s survey of pentatonic of the slavic peoples, one of the major systems of polish folk music, was published in krakow [kvitka 1930: 196-200]. the term could come to poland through kvitka’s personal relationship with some of the three above-mentioned leaders of polish musicology. it is doubtful whether he knew either kamieński or pulikovski (27). when they began to organize phonogram-archives in poznań and warsaw, an undertaking in which kvitka was greatly interested, the iron curtain fell on the western border of soviet ukraine and any private contacts across the border became unthinkable. hence, we can exclude both prominent representatives from poznań and warsaw from kvitka’s direct contacts. nevertheless, the probability of influence should not be discharged altogether, and we could presuppose that, among people in kvitka’s milieu, some intermediate connection might be found. folklorica 2010, vol. xv 142 this link could be kolessa, who lived in lviv, then part of poland, and who was kvitka’s friend. but again, it is unlikely that kolessa could have transmitted kvitka’s idea for he does not mention this concept in his writings (28). even if kvitka’s idea had attracted kolessa’s attention, he would not have shared it with his polish colleagues because it was time when poles and ukrainians did not develop close relations, a fact that greatly surprised kvitka. in his letter to kolessa he wrote: further to your words that you are working alone in lviv, allow me a question: does chybiński work in the conservatory, and are national relations even between persons of scholarship so strained that scientific discourse is impossible? although there is struggle going on in kyiv, it is not so acute that it would be unpleasant for specialists to consult one another, and if there were chybińskis among the russians in kyiv, i would be much happier. (29) kvitka’s proposition could have been picked up only by one scholar, the head of the institute of musicology at lviv university chybiński (1880 1952) who, among his diverse activities, paid much attention to folk music [chybiński 1961]. kvitka treated chybiński with respect, referred to his work in his articles, and reviewed his book on folk musical instruments of podhale [kvitka and chybiński 1924]. more important, he was in occasional correspondence with chybiński and sent him reprints of his works (30). whether kvitka’s article about maksymovych’s collection was among them is unknown. all that remains is only one fascicle of kvitka’s works with his dedication to chybiński (31). it does not contain this article (32). in addition to the fascicle, the offprint of one review has been preserved. [kvitka 1925: 239-250] the rest was lost because it is unlikely that kvitka would have stopped mailing offprints of his works to kolessa, one of his best lviv contacts. kolessa would have been receiving material from kivtka regularly until 1931. (33) if chybiński had somehow become acquainted with kvitka’s article, then he would have noticed the originality of his idea and shared it with his polish colleagues. he communicated with them frequently, especially the editor of kwartalnik muzyczny [musical quarterly]. through him the neologism could have reached scholars in poznań and warsaw and established itself first in oral use. from oral use it could have penetrated academic periodicals. batko printed the term. he was a propagandist rather than a scholar and could afford to use freely the terminology of couloirs slang expressions. the innovation did not appear in the strictly academic texts of the late 1930s written by chybiński, pulikowski, and on the history of the term “ethnomusicology” 143 folklorica 2010, vol. xv kamieński. the distinctive kvitka hyphenated spelling was quickly replaced by the unhyphenated single word in the works of batko, and kunst and others. this may well be not a simple coincidence but an indication of oral use. chybiński might have copied the hyphenated spelling in a letter to some of his warsaw and poznań addressees but, without proper definition, it was seen as yet another synonym and kvitka’s special meaning remained unknown. only oral circulation gave the term currency, albeit in a somewhat new meaning because kvitka’s call to study oral music in situ would have come as a surprise to polish musicologists. eventually the term became familiar and was brought by a scholar from warsaw or poznań to the west. we can assume that this scholar was mieczyslaw koliński (1901-1981), a native of warsaw. in 19261933, he was an assistant to the head of the berlin school of comparative musicology erich moritz von hornbostel (34). later koliński lived in bohemia and belgium, where he participated in research on the ethnomusic of non-european nations. he likely had contacts with his polish counterparts (35), as well as with kunst, who worked at the amsterdam institute of the tropics from 1936. koliński published a number of kunst’s articles posthumously. kunst moved to the united states in 1951 and became a promoter of the new term [koliński 1957, 1959], even initiating a move to rename the society of comparative musicology to the society of ethnomusicology (see note 1). a purely hypothetical chain of transmission of the term ethnomusicology would be: kvitka ⇒ a. chybiński ⇒ l. kamieński / w. batko ⇒ m. koliński ⇒ j. kunst, in other words: ukraine ⇒ halychyna ⇒ poland ⇒ netherlands ⇒ usa. it is the author’s home that documents supporting his suppositions will eventually be found. in the meantime, it suffices to state that the term “ethnomusicology” (with the hyphenated spelling “ethno-musicology”) and the definition it has today was proposed for the first time in 1928 by klyment kvitka. kvitka himself tried to use his own term. in the concluding lines of the critical analysis of theory of primary of pentatonic in the evolution of musical thinking, written in 1928, he wrote: self-control is most difficult when it comes to dividing time and energy between different and, at the same time, inseparable aspects of scientific work. as it applies to the ethno-musicologist [italics – b.l.] there is a need to balance the expenditure of time between the need to expand general scientific and philosophical horizons and the need to expand knowledge of the field of musicology. furthermore, one must balance work within the bounds of the chosen academic discipline with the need to expand general musicological folklorica 2010, vol. xv 144 erudition and enlarge ethno-musicological knowledge [italics – b.l.]. conflicts also exist between comparative ethnological and cultural-historical studies on the one hand and the more detailed comprehensive study of the ethno-geographic field on the other. a third principle division is between deepening the theoretical base of knowledge and expanding its empirical base. finally there is the conflict between work at one’s desk and fieldwork. [kvitka 1928: 82-83]. later in the same document we read: “let fieldworkers work directly under the supervision of a theoretician and according to his instructions. this happens infrequently in ethno-musicology [italics – b.l.]” unfortunately such opportunities were few for kvitka. as noted above, after 1930 he virtually withdrew from contributing to scholarship. jan stęszewski, writing about the history of the term “ethnomusicology,” appealed to the academic community, asking that “in new music dictionaries, encyclopedias and instruction manuals the name of lucjan kamieński and the date – 1934 not be forgotten” [stęszewski 1992: 529]. it only remains to add our plea to these words and ask that we also remember the name of klyment kvitka and the date 1928. notes 1 here and further, the term “musical folklore”, “folk (musical) art”, “folk music”, “ethnomusic”, “oral music” and “ethnomusicology”, “musical ethnography”, “musical folklore studies” are used as synonyms. 2 the term “vergleichende musikwissenschaft” (fr. “musicologie comparée”, eng. “comparative musicology”, rus. “сравнительное музыкознание”) was proposed by guido adler (1855 – 1941) in his programmatic article in the first issue of the musicological journal, edited by him: adler:14. 3 in late 1953, the journal entitled ethno-musicology newsletters, and in 1955 the term “ethnomusicology” was announced as official, and the society for comparative musicology, founded in 1930, was renamed society for ethnomusicology and began to publish the journal ethnomusicology in 1956. 4 that archive was organized in 1935 by the prominent polish musicologist of the interwar period julian pulikowski (1908 – 1944). about it see: piotr dahlig 1993: 119-156, or his 1998: 517-628. 5 kvitka studied piano as a scholarship recipient of the musical college of the kyiv chapter of the imperial musical association. 6 see the list of the published works in kvitka 1973: 2: 376, №№ 1-5, 7. on the history of the term “ethnomusicology” 145 folklorica 2010, vol. xv 7 ukraïnka, lesia 1917/1918. 8 kvitka’s letter to f. kolessa from 30 july 1922 in zales’ka and ivanyts’kyi: 324-325. 9 in his last known letter to f. kolessa from 14 july 1931 in zales’ka and ivanyts’kyi : 414. kvitka styled himself as head of “the office of comparative musicology of the auas” (the fact that was even noticed by f. kolessa, who underlined the words “comparative musicology”), although in all previous letters and in kvitka’s last article from the kyiv period, “the office of musical ethnography of the allukrainian academy of sciences” appears everywhere under the name “the office of musical ethnography of the auas.” is it possible to assume that it was merely a slip, or did such a change hide a deeper meaning? 10 see the list of kvitka works in the note 23. in 1923 №№ 10-12, in 1924 – №№ 14-15, in 1925 – №№ 19, 22, 24, in 1926 – №№ 27, 3031, in 1927 – №№ 32-33, in 1928– №№ 35-37, 39, in 1929 – №№ 41, 43, in 1930 – № 45, 48. 11 see: kvitka 1971, 2: 381-384. 12 see: “посмертные издания”, kvitka 1971, 2: 379-380, also we should add: kvitka 1956: 160-193; also twelve works are in the editions: kvitka 1985, 1986, and kvitka 2001. 13 an example of that can be at least some passages in the memoirs of the famous soviet folklorist lev kulakovsky, who once had the opportunity to hear kvitka’s lectures on comparative musicology in the m. lysenko higher music and drama institute in kyiv. kulakovskii: 3336. 14 one in his letter to f. kolessa from 4 september 1928 (2 verso) kvitka confessed that “he is unable to create a big work” zales’ka and ivanyts’kyi: 382. 15 here: recovery (from the greek αναβίωτις returning to life, revival). 16 kvitka 1971/1973, 1: 285 (“ангемітоніка”); 2: 67 (“етнофонія”), 157 (“межиспів”) etc. 17 the article was written between 22 july and 4 september 1928, as can be seen from the correspondence of kvitka and f. kolessa. see 22 july 1928 (leaf 3 recto) and 4 september 1928 (leaf 2 verso). zales’ka and ivanyts’kyi: 380, 382. 18 we should notice that in 1930 the society for comparative musicology was founded in the usa (cf. fn. 7). folklorica 2010, vol. xv 146 19 kvitka 1925 a: 8-9 (p. 4 in russian translation). it is worthwhile to draw attention to the fact that kvitka gave an unequivocal definition of the subject of study of so-called folk (traditional) music long before it became urgent fifty years ago, moreover, it usually coincides with the definitions that are currently used in classical western ethnomusicology (merriam, 1977: 201-204. earlier in the foreword to his second collection, kvitka declared that the same broad understanding of the concept, signifying that “... folk song is not exclusively a peasant song, but any massively popular song in some segments of society without scores and without the constant control of a fixed printed verbal and musical text.” (kvitka 1922: ix), whereas, b. bartók, f. kolessa, and others categorically identified with folk music with peasant music. bartók 1966: 11-12; kolessa 1938: 3. 20 he argued: “if the question relates to whether ukrainians should use the traditional title “musical ethnography” or change it, the more serious reason to change would be adapting the recent, but stronger tradition of german scholarship, as expressed in the studies of highly regarded scholars” (stumpf, a. hornbostel, r. lach, g. schönemann and others. – b.l.) and adopt the term “comparative musicology” (ibid.). as can be seen, such an argument was crucial to kvitka, when he was choosing a name for the office, but later this became less convincing. 21 in his other article kvitka formulated the goals of musical ethnography: “... musical ethnography is not only the recording of melodies; to embrace the whole complexity of its tasks one must make direct observations, talk with the villagers, query them about many things, determine their attitude towards various form of music and songs, study the different preferences of different generations, various professional groups, write down folk music terminology, utterances that express folk attitudes toward music, evaluation of songs and instrumental pieces, etc.” kvitka 1929, 11: 3. 22 naturally, as it is amended by the oral nature of the subject. 23 other term used in the scholarship is “artificial music” (from latin. arte + faсio – i make artificially). 24 the term “natural music,” as opposed to “artificial,” is practically unused. 25 in greater detail cf: tokarev: chapters 8-9; czekanowska. 1983: 21-24 26 kvitka is mentioned several times in works by czekanowska 1983: 43, 44; 1972: 29; 200: 289, and in the work of her student piotr dahlig, 1998: 537. on the history of the term “ethnomusicology” 147 folklorica 2010, vol. xv 27 in 1929 kvitka wrote: “within the boundaries of today’s polish state the work of musical ethnography is conducted by drs. foliaret kolessa and adolf chybiński.” kvitka 1929a 8: 234). 28 kvitka’s typed article on m. maksymovych’s collection now is in f. kolessa’s private library. mel’nyk-hnatyshyn: 28, № 249. 29 zales’ka and ivanyts’kyi: 330 (letter of 31 july 1923. – leaf 2 verso). we should admit that chybiński valued highly f. kolessa’s academic work and research (chybiński 1910, 16: 168-173), but he did not offer him to work at the musicology institute of lviv university. as it is known, the letters of such polish researchers as a.chybiński, z. jachimiecki, k. klimaszewska, k. moshyński, and a. fischer could be in f. kolessa’s archives. 30 in the second half of 1923 (letter from 31 july 1923), kvitka wrote: “chybiński is of great interest to me, especially should i be sending him my works.” (zales’ka and ivanyts’kyi: 330). from the postscript in the other letter (3 april 1926) we learn that kvitka had sent a. chybiński three letters, but did not receive his response to the last one. (zales’ka and ivanyts’kyi: 353). 31 having received from kvitka offprints of his works, a. chybiński turned them over to the musicology institute library at lviv university. 32 the fascicle includes the following works by kvitka: 1925c, 1923, 1926b, and 1924. now, it is housed in the ndlme [state research laboratory of musical ethnography?] reference library in the m. lysenko lviv state musical academy. 33 at the end of his letter (14 july 1931), kvitka informs f. kolessa that he mails him an issue of the magazine pobut that includes detailed information about the work of the office for the years 1921-1930. zales’ka and ivanyts’kyi: 414. this concerns the work: kvitka 1930. 34 about the connections of l. kamieński and hornbostel see: dahlig 2000a and 2000b: 118-122. 35 the name of m. koliński is mentioned in the letter of l. kamieński to hornbostel of 14 october 1930 (dahlig 2000b). we can state that kvitka referred on the publication of the dissertation of m. koliński 1930 in his manuscript “пентатоніка у вірменській народній музиці”, which can be dated tentatively 1932–1933. 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[m. lysenko as a collector of folk songs]. київ. kvitka, klyment. 1924. квітка, климент. професіональні народні співці й музиканти на україні: програма для досліду їх діяльності та побуту [professional folk singers and musicians in ukraine: the program of research of their work and life]. київ: українська академія наук. kvitka, klyment. 1925a. квітка, климент. “вступні уваги до музично-етнографічних студій.” [introductory notes to the musical-ethnographical studies]. записки етнографічного товариства 1: 8-27. kvitka, klyment. 1925b. квітка, климент. “песни крыма. собраны и записаны певцом-этнографом а.к. кончевским […]” [songs of crimea. collected and recorded by the singer-athnographer a.a. konchevskii…] записки історико-філологічного відділу уан 5: 239-250. kvitka, klyment. 1925c. квітка, климент. “потреби в справі дослідження народної музики на україні.”[the needs in studying folk music in ukraine]. музика 2-3: 67-73, 115-121. on the history of the term “ethnomusicology” 151 folklorica 2010, vol. xv kvitka, klyment. 1926. квітка, климент. “українські пісні про дівчину, що помандрувала з зводителем.” [ukrainian songs about a girl who wandered with criminals] етнографічний вісник уан 2. kvitka, klyment. 1928a. квітка, климент. “ангемітонні примітиви і теорія сокальського.” [anhemitonic primitives in the theory of sokal’sky]. етнографічний вісник уан 6: 82-83. kvitka, klyment. 1928b. квітка, климент. “максимович і аляб’єв в історії збирання українських мелодій.” [maksymovych and aliab’ev in history of collection of ukrainian melodies]. первісне громадянство та його пережитки на україні 1: 119-144. київ: державне видавництво україни. kvitka, klyment. 1928c. квітка, климент. “порфирій демуцький.” [porfyrii demuts’kyi]. етнографічний вісник уан 6: xlvii. kvitka, klyment. 1929a. квітка, климент. “и.к. зданович. белорусские народные песни гродненской губ., м. селец.” [i.k. zdanovich. belarusian folk songs from grodno guberniia, town selets]. труды государственного института музыкальной науки. сборник работ этнографической секции. вып. 1-й. москва. етнографічний вісник уан (1929) 8: 234. kvitka, klyment. 1929b. квітка, климент. “в справі досліду народньої музики неукраїнських елементів людности усрр.” [to the question of studying of folk music of non-ukrainian peoples in usrr] бюлетень етнографічної комісії всеукраїнської академії наук 11: 3. kvitka, clement. 1930a. “la système anémitonique pentatonique chez les peuples slaves.” pamiętnik ii. zjazdu słowiańskich geografów i etnografów odbytego w polsce w roku 1927. kraków: komitet organizacyjny ii. z.s.g.e. 2: 196-200. kvitka, klyment. 1930b. квітка, климент. “кабінет музичної етнографії всеукраїнської академії наук: здобутки.” [the office of musical ethnography of all-ukrainian academy of sciences: achievements]. побут 6-7: 5-22. kvitka, klyment. 1941. квітка, климент. “об областях распространения некоторых типов белорусских календарных и свадебных песен.” [about the regions of spreading of certain types of belarusian calendar and wedding songs]. белорусские народные песни / составитель з.в. эвальд. москва-ленинград: 123-131. kvitka, klyment. 1956. квітка, климент. “іван франко як виконавець народних пісень.” [ivan franko as a performer of folk songs]. folklorica 2010, vol. xv 152 творчість івана франка київ: 160-193 ан урср інститут літератури. kvitka, klyment. 1971. 1973. квітка, климент. избранные труды в 2 тт. [selected works in 2 vol]. составление и комментарии в.л. гошовского; общая ред. п.г. богатырева. москва. советский композитор. kvitka, klyment. 1977. квітка, климент. “записи народної творчості. пісні, записані з голосу лесі українки.” [recordings of folk art. the songs recorded from lesia ukrainka]. леся українка, зібрання творів у 12 тт. т. 9 київ: наукова думка. kvitka, klyment. 1985, 1986. квітка, климент. вибрані статті. у 2 ч. 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wprowadzenie do etnomuzykologii [music in culture: introduction to ethnomusicology] warsaw: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu warszawskiego. translated by hanna chuchvaha and andrij hornjatkevyč << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain 20%) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \050swop\051 v2) /srgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel 1.4 /compressobjects /tags /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages true /createjdffile false /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /colorconversionstrategy /leavecolorunchanged /dothumbnails false /embedallfonts true /embedjoboptions true /dscreportinglevel 0 /syntheticboldness 1.00 /emitdscwarnings false /endpage -1 /imagememory 1048576 /lockdistillerparams false /maxsubsetpct 100 /optimize true /opm 1 /parsedsccomments 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setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii journal of the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association (formerly seefa journal) seefa executive board president: mariya lesiv, memorial university of newfoundland vice-president: dorian jurić, indiana university secretary-treasurer: shannon donnally quinn, michigan state university university board members: elena boudovskaia, georgetown university benjamin gatling, george mason university webmaster: dorian jurić, indiana university folklorica editor: benjamin gatling, george mason university book review editor: laura olson osterman, university of colorado, boulder online content manager: jon giullian, university of kansas editorial assistant: ang dinardo, george mason university editorial board oleksandra britsyna, rylsky folklore institute, ukrainian academy of sciences maria carlson, university of kansas larisa fialkova, university of haifa linda j. ivanits, pennsylvania state university vladimir klyaus, institute of world literature, russian federation katia mikhailova, institute of folklore, bulgaria faith wigzell, ssees-university college london aleksey v. yudin, ghent university, belgium issn 1920-0234 folklorica full 2024 author guidelines 90 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii folklorica publishes materials in english. authors are encouraged to translate their manuscripts into english prior to submission. folklorica accepts original submissions only. do not send a previously published article, even if it has appeared in another language. manuscripts should be submitted electronically (files in microsoft word (.doc or.docx) or rtf format as an email attachment). each article must be preceded by a 200-word abstract. manuscripts normally should not exceed 35 pages in length (including end notes). for more detailed information, see the folklorica style sheet (https://journals.ku.edu/folklorica/about/submissions#stylesheet). peer review all manuscripts will be submitted for evaluation to two outside reviewers. reviewers are anonymous. decision on publication normally takes up to three months. all submissions should be addressed to: the editor, benjamin gatling email: bgatling@gmu.edu transliteration chart available online: https://journals.ku.edu/folklorica/about/submissions#transliteration book reviews length: 800-1200 words. format of entries: author. title in italics (series name, if applicable). place: publisher, year of publication. additional features: notes. bibliography. glossary. index. (if applicable in the order they appear). number of pp. price (cloth). price (paper). isbn number for each. doe, jane. introduction to slavic folklore (world folklore series). boston, ma: slavic publishing, 2006. notes. bibliography. index. xv+314. $45.95 (paper). isbn 0-123-456-789. if the language is other than english, provide a translation of the title. if the author’s name is in cyrillic, provide a transliteration. give the publication information in the original language as it appears in the book, do not transliterate. give the page number for all direct quotes in parentheses (179-81). no bibliography or footnotes; please incorporate into the text of the review. author guidelines 91 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii please end your review with your name, affiliation, city, country and email address left justified. direct all reviews and inquiries to: laura olson osterman book review editor, folklorica university of colorado, boulder germanic and slavic languages and literatures 276 ucb, mckenna 129 boulder, co 80309-0276 e-mail: lolson@colorado.edu folklorica full 2024 teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 1 teaching genre in context: fieldwork and “hanging out” in appalachia and bulgaria sarah craycraft harvard university cambridge, massachusetts abstract folklore classrooms often teach genre—a contested concept—as an introduction to the complexities of folkloristics. as folklorists interrogate the colonial legacies inherent to core concepts like genre, we must develop new teaching models that equip students to recognize cultural process while emphasizing how totalizing classification systems disenfranchise folk groups by obscuring cultural difference. this article juxtaposes experiments with sociality in east european folklife and appalachian ohio folklife, in which young people attempt to connect with older adults through culturally specific forms of sociality that do not easily fit within etic genre categories: the sedianka [work bee] in bulgaria, daily bench talks, and “liars club” coffee meets in appalachian ohio. these examples illustrate the impact of intersectional identities on the legibility and usability of generic forms, while emphasizing how an understanding of genre framing can contribute to intergenerational relationship building. as sabra webber [2015] points out, emic genres that resist global classification can evade the totalizing, product-focused analysis that was built into colonialist systemization projects; attention to such forms can prioritize the agency of local cultural frameworks. cross-cultural comparison offers fresh opportunities for examining how intersectional group dynamics are made visible through genre in our own folk groups. teaching genre in context how—and should—genre be taught in introductory folklore courses as a core organizing concept for our field? one of eight keywords historicized in burt feintuch’s [2003] edited volume, eight words for the study of expressive culture, genre has long been a cornerstone of folklore studies. for the scholar, genre “remains the generally stable trampoline from which folklorists and budding folklorists can spring into the constantly changing future of folklore studies,” providing folklorists with “a basic common terminology and a basic system of classification,” as noted by trudier harris-lopez in her contribution to the volume [2003: 116-117]. for the instructor, genre serves as a scaffolding to introduce the dynamic traditions we study, long enough for new students to grapple with text, texture, and context in the classroom and as encountered in their lives. introducing folklore through lists of genres can simplify a notoriously difficult-to-define field, especially in distinguishing it from disciplinary cousins teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 2 like anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and area studies. with lynne mcneill’s [2013] helpful reframing of the major genre buckets of “verbal lore, material lore, customary lore, and belief,” as the more approachable categories of “things we say, things we make, things we do, and things we believe,” the task of convincing new students that folklore is, truly, all around us has never been easier. in this way, instructors can quickly move past the need to justify folklore as more than old stuff and onto the work of guiding students through key concerns: the different aesthetic parameters, skills, and knowledge of communicative and performative frameworks that shape the expressive forms we study. attention to genre can reveal diverse expressions of meaning, value, and work done by expressive culture in the world; genre can serve as rhetorical resource, illuminate the complexities of performance, and be a mode of negotiating power and agency. (1) still, genre presents scholarly, classificatory, and ethical challenges that call into question the usefulness—and indeed, ethics—of this concept [ben-amos 1969; 1976; harris lopez 2003; n’diaye 2021; prahlad 2021; shuman 1993; webber 2014]. for many north american-educated students and instructors, genre lists make sense for the simple reason that mainstream education has already trained us to think generically. most have been trained to separate and categorize from a young age through education systems heavily shaped by eurocentric philosophies and canons, rather than to question classification systems as hierarchical constructions of power. as enlightenment tools of mastery, collection and classification can represent and actively enact the suppression of contemporaneous traditions of knowing, exemplified by tim frandy’s [2018] eloquent reflection on western science pedagogies and indigenous knowledges and zhang’s [2020] discussion of the effects of implementing eurocentric, western ethnological models and classification systems in china. this article explores how genre is entangled with systems of power and ways to retain the concept’s capacity to elucidate how distinct communicative, rhetorical frames do work in our world through folk processes. it is not a defense of genre, nor is it a rejection of genre; it is an attempt to review how some of the complexities gestured at above might better be reflected and implemented in introductory folklore classes. such work may lead to a decentering of genre, placing our emphases on other questions and concepts. indeed, by setting out to write about the topics i present in this article, i found myself not only focusing on genre, but also expanding my reading to revisit the different meanings of genre that we evoke, and collapse, in our field, as well as entanglements between genre, performance, and context. here, i think through how instructors can prepare students to leave our courses with the most crucial lessons learned and how we might captivate their interests without watering down the key ideas. to do so, i reflect on the place of genre in my own pedagogy, particularly in courses geared toward undergraduate students new to the field. using moments from fieldwork and personal life experience, i think about how different approaches to documentation and listening might be fruitfully employed in my teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 3 own classes. i first consider historical and contemporary discourse surrounding genre in folklore studies, revisiting the long legacy of genre discourse and efforts to negotiate the relationships between analytic categories and lore as it is lived and understood on-the-ground, especially in response to contemporary social justice issues. while scholarly responses to covid-19 drew on genre to notice and process covid-era folklore, texts such as the summer and autumn 2021 issues of the journal of american folklore, among others, point to the role of folkloristic concepts like genre in perpetuating systemic racism by imposing, for example, global categories and aesthetic priorities onto local traditions. both topics have prompted me to revisit my approach to teaching our field, in and beyond the classroom. i draw on sabra webber’s [2015] discussion of genres in context to examine a lived example of “genre trouble” that i encountered during fieldwork in bulgaria with young urbanites invested in rural revitalization, who sometimes turn to folklore as bridge-building avenues to connect with villages, village-dwelling older adults, and cultural heritage. these encounters, in turn, illuminated my own efforts to strengthen intergenerational connections back home. together, these experiences resonate as cross-cultural, intergenerational encounters in unfamiliar settings. by discussing how they inform my understanding of the relationship between genre, intergenerational (mis)communication, and place, i offer several ideas for preparing students for more nuanced and meaningful fieldwork and data analysis. further, i suggest that bringing such moments of miscommunication and blurriness [geertz 1980] into the classroom opens opportunities for discussing the structural issues bound up in discussions of genres as sites of contestation about the authority to define systems of knowledge and ways of knowing [shuman 1993]. this approach can help students more clearly see connections to folklore in their daily lives. i also believe that a deep understanding of genre has a crucial role to play in the teaching and reflexive mediation that folklorists regularly perform with community partners outside of the classroom in public-facing work and collaborative projects— including responding to lingering colonial and imperial legacies in our field. genre: persisting problems the year 2020 acted in many ways as a tipping point for already turbulent times. the collision of covid-19 lockdowns and continued, unaddressed police brutality against black americans renewed attention to systemic racism, white supremacy, and imperialism entangled in many realms, including folkloristics. in our field, these colliding events produced instructive but oppositional ideas about the role of genre in the folklorist’s toolkit and everyday life. covid-19 bifurcated my dissertation fieldwork in bulgaria into pre-and post-pandemic experiences, as i discussed in the 2021 special issue of folklorica [craycraft 2021]. from my vantage point abroad, i followed along as colleagues in the united states turned to our folkloristic toolkit to observe, process, and document responses to the pandemic. articles and videos by maribel alvarez [2020], james deutsch [2020], teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 4 andrea kitta [2020], and others effectively put genre to use, helping scholars and the public notice how forms like material culture, humor, legend, conspiracy theory, etc. were used to make sense of our shared, yet increasingly atomized, experiences of the pandemic. i still teach these pieces to demonstrate how folk groups use varied communicative frameworks in everyday life to different ends. at the same time, global protests spurred by police brutality in the united states demanded a full-scale reexamination of structural marginalization and racialized violence. as mentioned above, the summer 2021 issue of the journal of american folklore published a transcription of the francis lee utley memorial panel, “race and racism in the practice and study of folklore” (delivered at the 2020 virtual meeting of the american folklore society). other texts in the issue called upon folklorists to closely examine our field, methods, and contributions to structural inequality. similarly, recent books such as theorizing folklore from the margins: critical and ethical approaches [otero and martinez-rivera 2021], implied nowhere: absences in american folklore [ingram, mullins, and richardson 2019], and advancing folkloristics [fivecoate, downs, and mcgriff 2021] reiterate these calls. in particular, anand prahlad’s [2021] essay, “tearing down monuments: missed opportunities, silences, and absences—a radical look at race in american folklore studies,” renewed attention to these histories and presences. prahlad invites us to revisit and reexamine how collection, classification, and erasure work in tandem with racialized violence. prahlad writes: closely connected to the practice of collection is the concept of genres. is there any concept more critical to folklore studies or that more closely parallels linnaeus’ erasure of indigenous typologies and conceptual frameworks and the replacement of them with those of european colonizers? similar to the centuries-old debates about the terms “folk” and “folklore,” folklore studies has continued to revisit the notion of genres—but rarely in the interest of arguing that they are unnecessary, colonially inspired, or forms of cultural violence. [2021: 261] writings by sabra webber [2014] and mary hufford [2003] resonate with these views. webber writes: before [an] artistic “product” becomes an object of academic study or national pride, it has frequently been wrested from its folk community and fitted into one “etic” or “universal” genre or another… cut from its moorings by folklorists, sociolinguists, cultural anthropologists, historians, or any of the myriad scholars who study narrative today. [36] the trouble with genres is that when they are reified (concretized), they stultify dynamic processes. [40] teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 5 hufford likewise agrees that genre can problematically decontextualize folklore and reorder it in a western system of logic, inscribing traditional knowledge within global, rather than local, contexts (a threat of etic categorization), all while obscuring these frameworks. both webber and hufford use “genre” as a shorthand, but i believe both mean to refer to genre in terms of extraction and classification rather than the understanding of genre in which identifiable expressive forms make up everyday discourse and social life. this is a commonplace flattening that often happens in discussions about genre, a means of simplifying and indexing a complex history about which much has been written. when scholarship and classroom lectures conflate genre as an abstract concept with genre as a system of categories, though, we risk reifying these systems and obscuring the ways that power informs classification as a way of knowing. in collapsing this difference, the field faces two interlaced problems. first, we risk losing the memory of the centrality of genre study in producing the performance shift, in which conversations about genre were a key component of grappling with power, hierarchy, eurocentrism, and western perspectives in the development of contextualized folklore. second, we lose the clarity necessary for distinguishing which aspects of genre study are harmful and which can be reappropriated for the development of a more liberatory, pluralistic study of folklore that makes space for the role of systemic issues like racism and the politics of culture. considering the heightened, though not new or unprecedented, racialized violence of the past four years, i briefly review here the familiar history of discourses about genre and context, both of which were key components of the reorientation toward performance in the 1970s. one of the most important contributions to this shift was dan ben-amos’s [(1969) 1976] essay “analytical categories and ethnic genres,” which drew on debates about etic and emic genres to advocate for an approach that recognizes the difference between imposed analytic categories and “ethnic” or local/native categories. this approach emphasized the importance of fieldwork for understanding context and the stylization of social actors in cultural practice. as joe graham [1981: 12] writes, “studying native classification systems provides insight into the importance of the alternative, ‘ground-level’ ways of ordering and giving meaning and value to life.” the performance turn, or the turn to contextualism, transformed our field’s earlier preoccupation with the analysis of decontextualized texts (itself a transformation from the earlier collection of popular antiquities), shifting attention instead to the contingencies of performance, the manipulation of audience attention by performers, and the importance of “local” categories [benamos 1971]. close analysis of variants of texts reveals that context is a crucial element that gives shape to form. through attention to framing devices, that which is framed, and the flow of everyday life from which the frame sets apart expressive culture, contextualists demonstrated how performers direct attention back and forth across these elements. context, as mary hufford [2003: 168] describes it, “is a historically contingent framework that we generate, shape, contest, and teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 6 critique through our cultural productions… a frame of reference created in order to constitute and interpret an object of attention.” this move did not displace the “text” component of “text, texture, and context” but instead drew attention to the interrelations between text and context as mutually constituting aspects of performance and practice, in which contexts are more than static backdrops [benamos 1993; georges 1980]. context can invoke contemporary frames and historical precedent, as well as physical but also imagined or “remote contexts.” while vital, these conversations often excluded marginalized perspectives that already held these views, and they have not necessarily led to a field-wide grappling with the ways we continue to center collection as a crucial task of folklore scholarship and teaching [bailey 2021; n’diaye 2021]. feminist interventions as well as perspectives informed by critical race theory and postcolonial studies crucially argue that the notion of ethnic classification systems in and of itself rests on cultural relativism and homogenous “local” worldviews, an approach to performance that reproduces power hierarchies and fails to recognize distinctions within groups, not to mention unequal access to interpretive authority [ryan 1981; roberts 2009; sawin 2002; shuman 1993]. these interventions expanded the scope of the performance turn, as well as the fixation on an ethnography of communication approach to folkloristics and folklife. as valerie lee’s [1996] work demonstrates [bailey 2021], the same is true of genre classification systems, which can obscure and reject expansive notions of folklife that do not center around genre study. amy shuman [1993] helpfully distinguishes between genre as an abstract concept and genres as a system of categories, noting that genres are not neutral, fixed objects, nor are systems of genre classification. genres may be coherent at specific moments, but they are contingent forms subject to change. as she writes, “genre classifications are themselves cultural artifacts or constructions, positioned in historical and political situations” [shuman 1993: 77]. the classification systems scholars use to organize and study genres reveal ideological questions: what are the grounds for “privileging, canonizing, or authenticating particular kinds of texts?” [shuman 1993: 73]. genres are shaped by ideology, but they can also be ideology-shaping forms that express and encode different orientations toward community, belonging, and identity [cashman 2007]. recognizing the ideological weight of communicative forms that different actors wield or appropriate is a valuable task, and one that must be done with the politics of classification in mind. neutrality in collecting, classifying, and describing genres will always be interpretive, and interpretations are ideological. yet, contemporary critiques of genre also point out that the central focus on an identifiable text limits the scope of what folkloristics can address. in short, not all groups understand genre in the same way, and not all studies of folklore need center on genre or classification to be taken seriously by our field. as folklorists know, our shared language of genre is not always legible to nor appropriately descriptive of lore as it is lived, and etic genre categories do not easily capture the nuances and meanings of culturally specific, or emic, forms. because of the nuances of group and the authority granted by interpretive power, teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 7 the liberating idea of emic forms becomes tricky. indeed, imposing outsider, global categories can mask important distinctions and locally understood boundaries between modes of expressive culture. they can impose boundaries that do not exist at all. there exists a long, reflexive history of folklorists thinking critically—and skeptically—about genre and context. these are practices we should continue to foster and histories we should continue to teach. rather than fully reject genre, webber, for example, points to exemplary, eloquent studies of locally grounded forms that she explains as emic understandings of “hanging out”: forms of sociality that are directly shaped by cultural and societal contexts. these include henry glassie’s [1982] and ray cashman’s [2008] studies of the céilí, dwight reynolds’s study of the sahra, richard bauman’s [1972] study of general store gatherings on la have island, nova scotia, and webber’s [1991] own study of similar gatherings among tunisian women. webber also points to “strolling events” described by giovanna del negro and harris berger [2001]. we might also include retirement to the porch in appalachia [lozier and althouse 1975]. these practices share similarities: spontaneity, unspoken rules for behavior and boundaries of participation within the group, and communicative expectations of “speech situations” [bauman 1972: 333]. further, webber points out that these practices resist global classification precisely because of these specificities, and for the simple fact that they’re so ingrained into the everyday flow of life as to not be easily extractable. she emphasizes that these practices are sensual forms that engage all our senses, producing affective meaning and often manifesting in tangible outputs (adorned bodies, the production of folk objects). langston collin wilkins’s [2023] study of hip hop culture also productively grapples with questions of context and the production of heritage. indeed, through the example of slab car culture, wilkins exemplifies how attentive noticing during fieldwork can illuminate the importance of an emergent tradition once immersed in place. these examples synthesize and make clear the sorts of situated, familiar traditions students are likely able to find in their own lived experiences. understanding how folklore constitutes reality is an important goal for any student of folklore. both etic and emic genres shape our realities, either by reinforcing dominant narratives or by expressing in-group meanings and points of view, in correspondence to the contexts prompting and texturizing the lore. while students often come to folklore classes for the “stuff,” a crucial goal for our courses must be to help them deconstruct text and context as fixed entities. the task, then, is not to train our students to find folklore and delineate its forms according to etic systems of classification. instead, it is to train students to recognize when, how, and to what ends aestheticized communication is used in everyday life and specially marked moments—and indeed, how those moments and flows are formed through performative framings. the above conversations inspire me to refocus my teaching efforts on the development of keen observational skills: where, when, and how do people spend time together? how do these contexts set the stage for, and shape, expressive culture? how might teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 8 disruptions to context impact the cultural flows of everyday life? how might lore resist or adapt to such disruptions? ideally, attention to context can raise questions of power, agency, identity, and structural inequality. for example, attention to the dynamism of context must reckon with the ways race, class, religion, gender, and age inform who spends time where, the expressive repertoires they draw upon to communicate value and meaning in these contexts, and the discursive frames that situate places and performances vis-à-vis modernity. contextualism recognizes that place, too, is not a fixed reality [lefebvre (1974) 1991], but rather a production or construction to which folklore contributes and even mediates [bauman 1992; hymes 1975; kirshenblatt-gimblett 1975]. attention to context addresses the ways in which folklore “powerfully constitutes reality” [hufford 2003:154]. these topics suggest a need for more attention on the relationship between text and context. with this view in mind, i present below two intriguing cases that negotiate form, group, and context and which i plan to bring into my own introductory folklore classroom. reactivating the sedianka a difficulty—or pleasure, depending on your perspective—of teaching genre is that genres are not a-priori fixed forms. they are frameworks negotiated and utilized in context. when young people attempt to use culturally familiar genre forms to connect with older adults—self-consciously invoking traditional folklife—these efforts do not always yield desired results. in my fieldwork with intergenerational village revitalization projects in bulgaria [craycraft 2022], i noted several occasions in which younger group members tried to mobilize traditional forms in new ways, with varying degrees of success. in what follows, i discuss old and new meanings of the sedianka (plural sedenki)—a festive work gathering centered around some form of labor—as used historically and in the contemporary moment by young urbanites who seek to connect with villagers via traditional lifeways. (2) i point to the effects produced by new usages and suggest that part of the difficulty they experience hinges on a mismatch, or misperception, of form and context. simultaneously an occasion for handwork, singing, dancing, courtship, ritual, friendship, and competition, the sedianka is both a recognizable social form and a context that produces and is produced by the performances of many genres. the traditional sedianka is a mostly archaic working party that takes its name from the verb sedia, to sit. as angel goev [1984] writes, the sedianka was more than a working party; it was a way of life. lyuben karavelov and dimiter marinov document the seasonal and gendered nature of the traditional sedianka [goev 1982]; its arrival marked the conclusion of harvest work and the coming of slower moments. when used now, sedianka is often glossed to indicate a women’s sewing circle or is sometimes used to simply mean the afternoon hangout sessions of the elderly, but the traditional form had many complexities and variations, in which naming conventions followed the specific task at hand. a sedianka referred teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 9 to a gathering where participants completed their own handiwork, while a tlaka or medzhia referred to a gathering in which participants worked on a collective task for their host (like stringing tobacco, shucking corn, and other agricultural tasks). naming conventions can differ from region to region, and similar practices appear throughout the balkans, with locally specific naming conventions and differences. consider the following passage recounting the youthful memories of linka gekova gergova, a celebrated elder and folk singer from a village in western bulgaria, as recorded and narrated by martha forsyth: in the fall, after the harvest was in, the girls began to gather for sedenki (and of course, where the girls go, the boys go too…). working by the light of that flickering vidale (kerosene lamp), spinning or embroidering or making lace—lord, what lace they made to deck themselves out when they went to the dance! even in those poverty-stricken years they somehow managed to find thread to make lace—extravagant lace that showed beneath their heavy outer garments, almost from the knee to the ankle! they vied with each other, hiding the full splendor of their handiwork until christmastime or easter came, when they would unveil their newest finery. whose sleeves were the best? who had discovered the most wonderful lace pattern, set in beads or sequins or tiny coins in the most ingenious way? “oh, at those sedenki we’d just sing and sing and sing—the boys would come, every boy would sit down next to the one he liked, we’d knit and crochet, and spin and do our work… they do this in the fall, and they keep it up all winter long. they like to get together at houses where it’s quiet, where there aren’t a lot of menfolk around, where there aren’t so many men in the house—they get embarrassed if there’s a lot of men around. and the boys come too—or if they don’t show up, ‘c’mon, let’s go out and sing something—they’ll hear us, and then they’ll come!’ so we’d sing one of those good rousing ones (na búčeno)—maybe ‘the small village had supper early’. and then the boys would come …. one would sit down beside one girl, another beside another, and they’d chatter away. oh, it was so much fun! you’d sit there and you’d work, and your boyfriend would sit beside you—all evening long, we’d tell jokes, and then we’d get up and dance a little, and then we’d sit down and work some more.” [1996: 63, 393] gergova’s memories demonstrate the dynamism of the sedianka and its flexibility in relation to the social situations of the moment. at a time when young people had limited agency regarding choice of marriage partner (especially young women), the sedianka served as a context for interaction, flirtation, and, for young women, demonstration of one’s capabilities as an efficient, skilled worker. young women claimed some agency in the courtship process through the collective lighting of a secretive zaklazhdane [sedianka fire]. the zaklazhdane is held without the presence of young men to both mark the beginning of the season and teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 10 manifest their partner of choice, through ritual invocation. by performing a series of tasks, chants, and rites, they hoped to draw their preferred suitors to the ensuing season’s sedenki [goev 1979]. older, married women, too, participated in sedenki, but not always with the younger generations. while for older women, working parties were more often intended to enliven obligatory work while keeping good company, for younger girls the obligation of completing work and producing an enviable dowry doubled as occasions for courtship and socialization. the activities of the moment—when to dance, when to sing, and when to tell jokes and chatter amidst the work—would arise fluidly as a dynamic of the performances typical for the sedianka, in response to the contexts and configurations of performers in each new gathering. the sedianka also demonstrated a playful twist on surveillance: though youth were less surveilled by older adults, peers (both boys and girls) observed one another closely, as simultaneous instigators and audiences for collective performances of song, dance, verbal play, and craft. as a genre and context that produced lore, then, the sedianka can be understood through several overlapping temporal frames: the folk calendar as shaped by seasonal labor rhythms, courtship, and ritual rites of passage. this complexity is clearest in the song repertoire associated with sedenki. in the bulgarian folk song catalog, songs performed at the sedianka are sedianka songs—those sung and collected at or recalled from sedenki. these might include songs with meta-themes related to sedenki, e.g., making, courtship, marriage, and love, but sedinki also include songs that young people wish to sing and dance to, pulled from other seasons, exemplifying the dynamic relationship between individual and situational contexts and tradition in performance [bauman 1983]. song selection and performance were based on who was present, their preferences and singing abilities, and desires to entice participants to the event due to their resonance and musicality. song choice, timing, and location depend on contextual elements: who was in the house, where were the boys and was their presence desired, and which songs would produce the context most desired for their performances of both song and sewing and, one imagines, gossip and storytelling, joke telling, dancing, and of course the pretense and/or reality of work. sedenki songs often offered meta-narrations, both contextualizing what happened from moment to moment and also producing the moments depicted. put in hufford’s [2003] terms, song performances were framed by the sedianka-as-context but also drew attention to and created the frame, invoking other remote contexts and reminding participants of the many layered meanings of this form. (3) the sedianka as described above has largely faded from practice, save for demonstrative performances and self-conscious revival performances that bring new meanings and goals. as villages and everyday performance contexts shifted during the socialist period, so too did the cultural practices of everyday life [silverman 1983; kaneff 2004; buchanan 2006]. bitova kultura [everyday or household customary culture]—the interwoven practices of folksong, verbal lore, material lore, and courtship with shucking parties, sewing circles, and the lore that animated these already dynamic contexts—was spliced and separated from above teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 11 by state actors who sought to reframe aspects of everyday life within the framework of national heritage, as staged performances that undergirded the socialist modernity project. traditional textile production was industrialized, professionalized, and eventually traditionalized and heritagized, as well. the fullscale production of textiles and handiwork at home became somewhat superfluous and was relegated to free time, separate for most from their production for the state. (4) for example, one villager showed me a bureau filled with textiles— doilies, table runners, and handmade socks—all produced during work breaks at the factory where she was employed before retirement. for older adults in the present, the sedianka can represent both collective and individual, site-specific memories. one older woman i know, for example, locates the sedenki of her youth under a specific walnut tree, such that the landscape evokes and holds memories, akin to keith basso’s [1996] discussions of lore and place. many recall stories of dynamic sedenki as narrated by their mothers and grandmothers, if not as living memories of their own. though the pieces of the sedianka remain, they are fragmented and distributed across life in the postsocialist, capitalist village arrangement, relegated to new contexts of creation. practices like sewing, knitting, crochet, and embroidery are still performed by women in villages, in the winter months especially, but for most the social aspect is absent from their making. older women explain that nowadays, they generally produce textiles alone while watching television, such as their beloved turkish soap operas. folk singing and dancing still occur in many villages, but in choirs composed of small groups of mostly pensioners. and of course, young people are more likely to court using cell phones and café meetups than in sedinki. because handwork has become less common amongst young women as a necessary occupation, it has likewise ceased to be a prominent occasion for hanging out in their everyday lives. for this reason, sedenki are more easily associated with older women and villages, as the actors and contexts most often linked in collective memory to traditional practices. curiously, though, young urbanites are increasingly drawn to villages and presocialist lifeways (both real and imagined). sometimes, those engaged with village revitalization projects draw on the concept of “sedianka” in new ways that gloss the above history and selectively focus on the aspects that are useful to young people in the present: the display or discussion of traditional skills, memories of craft and making, and time spent in community, especially with older adults. these new uses invoke contexts of the present but also the remote contexts of the older sedianka, in which the gathering is more than simply a hangout, part of a growing repertoire of traditional forms used in new ways in contemporary life. (5) i have most prominently observed this in my work with fabrika za idei, or ideas factory, an ngo that hosts the annual village residency program called residentsiia baba [granny residence]. this program facilitates urban-rural intergenerational relationship-building by placing young urban-dwelling bulgarians in the homes of older adults living in villages. the residencies prompt young participants to draw on art and folklore as ways to improve rural life and teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 12 revitalize desirable cultural practices that have dwindled over time. sometimes, these involve planning meetings that invite locals and project facilitators to think about village livability together, events that fabrika za idei sometimes refers to as “sedenki,” though the purposes of the meetings are to generate ideas and share information for upcoming cultural programming, rather than spin yarn or embroider a tunic. the facilitators occasionally weave traditional forms and language into their contemporary practices in this way. in one instance, the ngo hosted a neighborhood intergenerational gettogether in the capital city of sofia, inviting older residents of the neighborhood to join for a meal and a sharing of memories about the local neighborhood. when older locals failed to join the evening’s events, the young people turned to reflection. collectively, they pondered whether generational social expectations for gathering (such as bringing a dish or gift for the host) may have impacted locals’ decisions not to attend the event. the group discussed the use of sedianka as an open possibility; perhaps inviting people to join for the common purpose of completing handiwork and story-sharing together could open new possibilities for intergenerational exchange. to the young urbanites, the sedianka-as-frame offered a tantalizing possible bridge between generational systems of meaning. months later, i was able to test this potential bridge during my fieldwork with residentsiia baba, in the northwestern village of deleyna in the vidin province. in this border village, life revolves mostly around the rhythms of pensioners, their yards and housework, and the two establishments remaining in the village: the krŭchma [café/bar] and magazinche [small shop]. locals gather in the central square each morning for coffees and groceries, and they return in the late afternoons for a second coffee or beers. each day, groups of women gather for afternoon chats on shady neighborhood benches around the village. along with six other participants in their twenties and thirties, i was tasked with creating an interactive arts project for the village residents. my collaborator, elena, and i decided to document the textile collections and stories of six women and showcase them in a photography exhibit. we photographed their individual pieces—handwoven pristilki [traditional aprons] and towels, crocheted socks and lacey doilies—as well as the women who had inherited and added to these multigenerational collections. we also planned an interactive story circle inviting women of all ages to share their memories connected to these textiles and explained this event as a “малка седянка за разказване” [a small sedianka for conversational sharing]. we spread news of the event by word of mouth and by distributing handmade invitations, pictured below, to ensure that the women would clearly understand our intent. teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 13 figure 1: handwritten invitations to a village story circle. photograph by author. the invitations read as follows: каним те на малка седянка за разказване: кои са текстилните ръкоделя, които се крият в къщата ти? кои са историте, свързани с тeзu ръкоделия? моля, избери едно ръкоделие, което носи история, която искаш да споделим с малка група слушатели. кога: сряда 17:00 ч. къде: пред читалището донеси твоето ръкоделие, твоята история, и твоята прекрасна усмивка! [we invite you to a small storytelling session: what are the textile crafts that hide in your house? what are the stories connected to these handcrafts? please choose one handcraft that carries a story which you would like to share with a small group of listeners. teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 14 when: wednesday at 5pm. where: in front of the chitalishte (cultural center) bring your handcraft, your story, and your wonderful smile!] the event was well and cheerfully attended by about fifteen local women. together, residency participants sat in a circle with the older generations, poised to listen to one another’s stories. however, very few of the women came to the event with a handcraft in hand. they explained that they rarely sew anymore— why would they bring a piece they’d already finished to a sedianka? we quickly pivoted, and the women took turns sharing somewhat stifled memories about sewing circles of the past with some coaxing from us facilitators. eventually, our “story circle” became a jolly conversation, in which the women talked to us and each other about old production techniques and treasured items they used to have. despite a shared identity as part of the national body of bulgarians (for all but myself), nested layers of insider and outsider much more complex than the insider/outsider binary allows for, and the generational positioning of each participant all shaped how they oriented to this moment. we, the young guests from the city, had invoked “sedianka” as a frame for memory sharing about practices in which the women used to participate; this use of the sedianka-asframe asked the women to move back and forth temporally, recognizing a continuity between storytelling in the present and making in the past. this framing omitted other aspects of sedenki that the older women may have associated with the form, such as courtship, sociality, making, singing, joking, and other emergent forms. we had come to this moment, “the situational context,” with different “contexts of meaning” in mind, or perhaps unspecified ideas of what the context of meaning for a contemporary sedianka could be [bauman 1983]. as outsiders hoping to learn about and animate folklife, we were less attentive to the living traditions that are part of the daily lifeways of older adults in the present. (6) but insofar as we created an occasion to spend time with these women, the event was a success. we had gathered an intergenerational group, and we had spent time thinking about handwork together. in hindsight, we recognized that there was already a context in the village for hearing memories and stories: the daily coffee gatherings the women were already participating in served as the emic form of socialization in the present and the local context for story-sharing. this is rather backward from the typical etic/emic situation, in which outside scholars try to impose a global category on a local context. our experience suggests that emic, living genres will shift as all living forms do, and that revitalization contexts might produce different meanings for familiar forms. by overlooking the ways that generational position differently situated group members, memory, and proximity to tradition, we also overlooked the contexts and frameworks that participants brought to our story circle and, thus, the frameworks for interpreting a new invocation of the sedianka. the momentary confusion we all experienced was produced by intersecting positionalities and the ways they impacted genre production and reception. teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 15 more than anything, this moment revealed the slippery nature of group, reminding us that the esoteric meanings of lore will take on new significance when groups are heterogenous (which they almost always are) and thus the ways they interact with tradition must be understood through an intersectional lens [borland 2021]. attention to context can lead students to more nuanced understandings of genre and group, as illustrated here by presumptions of shared identity that are complicated by the revitalization context. i point to this example because it was highly instructive for me as a budding ethnographer attempting to understand shifting intergenerational relationships to people, places, and traditions in bulgaria. this is not to say that lore-contexts cannot be reimagined, reanimated, and recontextualized, nor that there is a problem with performing forms like the sedianka in new ways; as many scholars have demonstrated, tradition entails change. being knowledgeable about, and showing appreciation for, the practices in which people used to participate can be interpreted as a kind of caring and a way to build relationships based on trust. (7) rather, it is to emphasize that new uses can create confusion when the framing and keying are not made clear. like scholars, everyday actors often operate with appropriate categories in mind, an aspect of adapting performances to context [bauman 1975]. this echoes the patterns that introductory folklore students often encounter as they begin grappling with the nuances of performance, genre, and living traditions in context. when instructors guide students to look for lore, we often send them out into the world with a metaphorical butterfly net of sorts, tasked with extracting an item from their everyday lives to examine through the microscope of the fieldnotes journal or the short reflection paper. in my experience, this sometimes produces confusion and lackluster results. careful analysis by sharp students will attend to the nuances and dynamism of context, but often their understanding of context stops at the level of a flat stage upon which lore is performed. they don’t gain a deeper understanding of the robust interplay of the elements and positionalities that produce reality-shaping, living traditions in all their complexity. a deeper understanding of the interactions between genre, context, and group might make sense of missteps, without mapping typologies and hierarchy onto groups and their lore. these skills can also be instructive for organizations like fabrika za idei. despite coming from an entirely different cultural background, i can share fieldwork tools and folkloristic concepts that are helpful for community engagement between bulgarians of different generations. i have observed that training young bulgarians to first notice how life works in rural spaces, in order to build projects alongside the practices of older villagers, can produce more meaningful intergenerational connections and more thoughtful community programming. understanding not only form and aesthetics, but also the parameters producing and shaping which elements of tradition will resonate across space and time, is a crucial skill that most instructors want their students to glean from folklore courses. the skill of noticing allows us to think about, for instance, structural challenges to intergenerational bonding in rural spaces, and to devise teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 16 ways of venturing across those boundaries for meaningful interaction. we can appreciate that certain contexts facilitate gathering more than others, the ultimate prerequisite for other forms of sharing and the sensible stage upon which vernacular verbal lore lives in the everyday lifeworld. we can appreciate, too, that young people in very different places attempt intergenerational connection in similar ways. as such, we might have lessons to learn from one another, beyond revitalizing named genres of folklore. illuminating home: the mcmen of southern ohio (8) engaged teaching goes hand in hand with self-reflection about ongoing projects of one’s own. my immersion in deleyna prompted significant reflection about my own home region and my relationships to the older generations in my life. likewise, these reflections have inflected my teaching. my fieldwork especially prompted me to consider more carefully the habits and hangouts of my father, ralph. i have always thought of my dad, a former farmer and telephone line repairman, as a witty joker, a clever storyteller, and a keen observer of everyday life, someone at the ready with proverbs and quick one-liners. though i have recorded a small number of his stories, it was not until i returned from fieldwork that i began to recognize his regular participation in a conversational context all its own: near-daily morning meetups at a local mcdonald’s, with a group that refers to itself as the “mcmen.” in fact, this is where he met his nowwife, suzy, the honorary “referee” of the mcmen and one of the few women who participates in these meetups. throughout my childhood, my dad would go uptown in our small community for a coffee with the friends he had accumulated throughout his life in southern ohio. his regular “coffeeshop” visits, as he refers to them, were, for me, a facet of what dorothy noyes [2016: 148] refers to as the surround: “aspects of practice that are not sought out as unusual experiences but taken for granted as already present and, at least in the modern west, devalued as trivial,” and that entails various “frameworks of social interaction.” dad likes his coffee, and he likes to shoot the breeze with his old buddies. he returns in the late morning. from my perspective as a busy youth, this was just an insignificant part of life’s rhythms. later attending university in a large city—columbus, ohio—i was socialized into a different sort of adulthood than that of my parents and older friends, one filled with happy hours, hip restaurants, museum visits, and bookshop browsing. the one thing my dad and i easily shared was our perpetual coffee drinking. upon arriving home from college for a weekend, i would be greeted with the announcement that “coffee’s on the pot.” we’d catch up over cups of folgers and non-dairy powdered creamer, or we’d grab a cheap cup of mcdonald’s coffee and drive around the county doing errands. as i grew into adulthood and began to travel, i’d occasionally bring my dad a souvenir of local ground coffee or a mug, because coffee felt like a shared language for us. however, my dad was not impressed by my high-priced “mud coffee.” with my immersion in different spaces, our tastes had diverged. teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 17 graduate study as a folklorist reframed my understanding of some of these attempts to bridge intergenerational, spatial gaps. with my ethnographer’s eye, as well as the lens one develops after leaving home and returning regularly for occasional visits, i began to pay more attention to the rhythms of my childhood home. the adult rhythms and preferences shaping the daily lives of those who had raised me were a mystery of sorts, and it took fieldwork with young people and older adults in bulgaria to turn my eyes intentionally back to questions of sociality in my own region. such realizations, of course, are not processed on one’s own, but with one’s cohort. i have been lucky to discuss these slow revelations with a friend and colleague, jordan lovejoy, who shares with me a small-town, working-class appalachian upbringing. among other insights, our ongoing conversations about folklore, home, and region have revealed significant overlaps in our fathers’ habits. jordan’s father hangs out with his buddies not at a local mcdonald’s, but instead in front of a local gas station. he is a member of the gas station’s “guard shack,” a group of local men who are recognized locally by a lighthearted name (in reference to their regular presence by the door), and members gather for socialization at places not intended to facilitate deep hanging out. despite differences in locale, the groups are similar in member demographics and activity. jordan and i have compared their patterns of moniker, class, gender dynamics, and the presence of a fluid flow of verbal lore produced by, in, and about these groups and the contexts in which they gather. (9) bauman [1972: 340] reflects on similar speech situations among the la have islanders in nova scotia, in “talk situations of the general store as a culturally defined scene,” situations in which talking is enjoyed for its own sake as a form of sociality, not for specific performative aesthetics. both the men of the west virginia guard shack and the mcmen of mt. orab gather for sociality, as do the women of delyena, bulgaria. their “lies” or tall tales, jokes, stories, and ruminations on daily life arise as part of the aesthetic flow of conversation. as webber [2015] writes, such emic gatherings are resistant to global classification yet resonate cross-culturally with local, situated flair. to know where to go to encounter living tradition, we must spend time in the flow of sociality. as dynamic contexts that produce, and are themselves, lore, we can see parallels between the bench-sits, café conversations, and bar sessions of bulgarian villages, the mcdonald’s and gas station hangouts of older men in west virginia and ohio (among other places), and the ways of “hanging out” familiar to contemporary young people. i recently attended my very first meetup of the mcmen; at least three decades younger than the most junior member of their regular circle, not to mention a woman, i was certainly an anomaly. with my stepmom, suzy, and my dad as mediators, i met the people who have populated the surround of my life for years. rising earlier than i normally would, i joined them for coffee and breakfast at a set of tables farthest from the cash register. i was nervous, not knowing exactly how to position myself in relation to this group of jokesters. what stories had been shared about me, the liberal-voting, world-traveling daughter with a career my teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 18 father struggled to describe to his friends? i needn’t have worried, as the most awkward conversations took place between my dad, stepmom, and me. the mcmen were on their best behavior and more subdued than i’d anticipated. perhaps we were all a bit bashful. clad in a uniform they surely must have agreed upon beforehand—buttonup plaids and trucker hats from our county fair—they earnestly asked me to tell them about what i was up to in life, told me about their connections to one another and even to me, e.g., “your mom used to babysit my son.” most interestingly, they narrated their relationship to mcdonald’s, noting its changes in management and décor over the years and the ways this had shifted their group’s meetups. for example, chairs and tables bolted to the floor hindered their ability to gather closer together. i realized that for the group, mcdonald’s offers a space for sharing stories about life in this community and the lives that pass through and around it; with the decline of public life in my community and the closure of other local “greasy spoons,” as my dad calls them, options are limited. thus, retooling a corporate environment that serves affordable coffee and doesn’t rely on customer turnover for tips is a good option for this group. what’s more, they are attuned to similar groups who meet up at mcdonald’s franchises around the ohio valley, even noting redecorations and top-down changes to some of the stores. beyond the genres of verbal lore that pass among them—jokes and stories, yes, as well as nicknames and personal narratives—my brief first introduction to the mcmen gave me a new way of imagining my hometown, its neighboring communities, and my elders. it left me curious to better understand the meetups of different social groups who call my county home, to know more about how people communicate and perform for one another in their daily lives. in first noticing the places for “hanging out” characteristic of my own intergenerational folk groups—in contexts i now know play host to lore—i can then begin to pay more attention to the aesthetics of expressive communication and cultural practice that arise in spaces that have not been heritagized or raised to attention as “art” or “occasion” [noyes 2016]. this kind of noticing illuminates what is important to this group: not just coffee, nor mcdonald’s per se, but an accessible “third space” for gathering for everyday modes of sociality outside the home [oldenburg 1989]. in societies that largely do not prioritize weather-safe, not-for-profit spaces in which aging adults may gather and in which community infrastructure does not offer comfortable places to gather (as in bulgaria, where benches and village centers are plentiful even in small villages), third spaces like community cafes and chain restaurants become sites of sociality deeply ingrained in daily rhythms. this initial noticing opens possibilities to entertain the questions and observations that scholars like prahlad [2021] and n’diaye [2021] have urged folklorists to consider more deeply in the wake of 2020: who is or is not present and why (gender dynamics, class, race, and traditions of whiteness); that is, the layers of context situating lived experience and emergent expressive culture. teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 19 conclusion: thinking with and beyond genre as maribel alvarez and selina morales [2022: 164] write, “cultural expressions are always embedded in contexts of power.” so, too, are our tools for conceptualizing and unpacking forms and contexts. responding to the above, my introductory folklore lectures attempt to introduce the histories shaping the study of folklore alongside the stuff itself, but i have also been slow to overhaul my methods and pedagogies. i still organize my course units and weekly lectures according to genre, and my assignments still ask students to identify and describe folklore in the world using mock fieldnotes exercises: look for jokes, proverbs, festivals, coming-of-age rituals in your everyday life. what might the genre be? what does this generic framing tell you about the messages conveyed by the lore? i have explained how and why folklorists have used genre as a tool, while making clear that genres, like other classification systems, can deprioritize and even erase local systems of meaning. my intent is to help my students notice and understand both the nuances of the forms that folklorists study, as well as the history of folklore’s shifting approaches to and understanding of genre. i try to make clear that the field itself is grappling with these challenges, and i invite them into these conversations; for example, i leave space for them to debate whether we should carry on using genre as an organizing heuristic for the field of folklore studies. in the most recent iteration of my class, i introduced genre along with a lecture providing background on the enlightenment and folklore’s role in nationbuilding projects. one question in their midterm exam asked students to discuss the affordances and consequences of using analytic categories or “universal genres” to document and study folklife. one student’s response reflected on discrepancies between the messages i taught in lecture, the assignments i asked students to complete, and the syllabus that i had constructed. as the student replied: at its core, folklore is totally fluid and examines all of what makes the folk the folk, and what makes the group the group. so, when trying to set up the contexts within which we study each type of individual folklore, it would make sense that some sort of fluidity would be carefully noted, but instead, the class, which serves as harvard’s introduction and therefore probably an accurate introduction to the subject, separates each genre into its own module. this is totally valid, and makes the study of folklore easy to follow, but… the rigid classification [can] also detract from the value, and ultimately, from the fun and connectedness of folklore… genres of folklore are helpful in distinguishing what exactly is being discussed, but they generally are overly restrictive when it comes to highlighting the importance of the forms, and can actually detract from the goal of folklorists, which is generally to note, analyze, and understand interaction. rigid genres cannot have space for notes about interaction, and while the genres are not inherently rigid, studying teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 20 folklore within any boundary holds back the holistic study of the folk that should be key in the field. (10) in many ways, i am proud of, and take some credit for, this student’s capacity to evaluate and critique the frameworks the course presented, even as i recognize from this reply that i, as an instructor, and the student, as someone new to the field, still have some learning to do when it comes to conveying the material i want my students to glean from our time together. (11) by asking my students to find and classify folklore as an entry point to the field, i replicated some of the very problems i drew to their attention. instead of dwelling on the complexities of living lore in all its richness and even capacity for harm, i find myself policing boundaries. this leaves me and my students collectively unsatisfied, even as i believe we are thinking deeply about the role of genre in folkloristics and our lives. many of our discussions end up focusing on genre leakage and what is and is not traditional. but these are conversations that should be happening in the classroom, and conversations that we can and should build into our course designs. by doing so, we set students up with the tools to make connections between difficulties with identifying ideal types vs. the reality of lore as it is lived and problems of boundary marking and categorization in broader realms (such as national boundaries). i am very much at the drawing board, so to speak, as i test out new ways to convey genre, context, and performance to an introductory folklore class. for my part, i will not be eliminating genre from my instruction, but i will be rethinking how i approach, and ask students to approach, its complexities alongside other core concepts. i offer the following recommendations for instructors, me included, to try the next time we teach an introductory folklore course. the below list does not offer novel approaches, but suggests subtle shifts guided by the analytical insights of our field put toward the questions about power and systemic injustice students must be prepared to grapple with today: 1 introductory courses should address how genre systems are implicated in political questions and how they carry colonial and imperialist legacies. 2 our courses must differentiate between genre as an abstract analytical system, abstract types for thinking with, and existing forms as they are lived, named, and recreated in context. 3 for those of us who organize our syllabi around genre groups, we might revisit and reframe our courses around, instead, the crucial questions for the study of everyday life that our field addresses or problems/situations that specific genres address well. if i may extrapolate from my own experiences and that of fellow graduate students alongside whom i moved through my studies, new instructors can feel the pressure to cover the wide range of genres that our field can address at the expense of the pressing questions exemplified by some forms. moving away from a class plan structured around genres gives some freedom to explore these topics without ticking off a genre checklist. teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 21 4 craft classroom assignments that guide students to spend less time collecting and more time hanging out. folklorists sometimes place more emphasis on text and texture than context. i believe this sets students up to treat context as the last step in folkloristics, rather than the one that so many folklorists actually begin with in their own work. students stand to gain deeper learning when we craft assignments that place less emphasis on collecting and more on first grappling with already-existing contexts for group expression and the relationships within and between groups. (12) 5 alternatively, set students up to collect “ideal type” examples of a particular genre and build in class time to unpack their experiences. were they successful, or did they struggle to locate ideal types? what might we learn from these experiences of “failure” in the field about the relationships between categories, the everyday flow of expressive forms, and the relationships between analytic categories and folklore on-the-ground? such an approach emphasizes the tensions around the edges and places their focus on process, not product, setting the stage for performance and practice frameworks to further enliven their thinking. 6 introduce genre later and context first. maybe this actually looks like situating genre in historical context, or maybe it means assigning walking tours, trips to the city library, or a guest visit with an extension agent to understand the politics of the place in which they are learning about expressive culture. undergraduates need more guidance in keeping both the contingencies/emergences of the present and structural power dynamics in mind. a context-first approach might help them bring these crucial aspects of performance to the forefront, rather than simply tacking them onto a genre analysis at the end of the semester. 7 model this kind of contextual approach by teaching messy examples, like those described above. while they do not perfectly exemplify an ideal type of a genre, they illustrate the sorts of complexities young people are more likely to encounter in their everyday lifeworlds and can be pathways toward learning how understandings of old forms can be illuminating in emergent contexts. when done well, a folklore class provides a guide for, and an approach to, a more observant, empathetic life that recognizes the everyday artistry and knowledge all around us, underacknowledged by other sorts of institutions and dominant histories. in my current introductory class, i plan to use the two situations described above midway into the semester as case studies that illustrate how concepts like group, genre, and context might morph and change in the present moment, as experiences i have lived through and collaboratively shaped. they are not the clearest examples of group, context, and genre; they are actually quite messy as introductory examples. for me, this is part of their appeal, as they are examples that ask students to think critically about the ways social actors try to negotiate complex layers of belonging: spatial boundaries, generational boundaries, and temporal boundaries. they usefully illustrate what can happen teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 22 when people with different positionalities within a group try to engage with “insider” practices or try to use an older form in a new way. the bulgarian case gets us to the meat of the matter: why young people might turn to (dormant) traditions and what happens when they do. it also provides a peek at collecting that we can interrogate together, under my guidance, by pointing out the sorts of documentation sessions that rarely yield lore as it is lived. this, i hope, will be instructive for them as they think about folklore in their own groups. with the proper framing, it can subtly introduce them to the complexities of public-facing work, heritage, and self-conscious tradition. the example from my hometown, on the other hand, demonstrates the sort of hanging out that i’d like them to participate in, as well as my own willingness to be uncomfortable to more deeply understand the life of someone close to me. by guiding them first to think about contexts of sociality, then through the nuances of noticing framing devices and the work of genre in moments of interaction, and finally to make links between structural change, profit, and the ways our everyday lives are entangled with both, i hope to overcome some of the barriers to understanding the value of attention to living lore that my student and our colleagues have noted. a folklore education that is committed to the dynamic role of context in cultural practice and performance can better demonstrate the relevance of our discipline, while simultaneously furthering the goal of reckoning with the inherent harms of our core concepts. while i still view genre as an important aspect of folklore for students to understand, either as part of our field’s history or one tool of many in our tool bags, my challenge, and ours, is to adjust our work— assignments, examples, syllabi, class exercises, and applied practice—such that it aligns with the narratives we craft about the field of folklore’s own meta traditions of continuity and change. acknowledgements i am grateful to amy shuman, danille christensen, the anonymous reviewers, and the folklorica editorial team for their invaluable comments on early drafts of this manuscript. notes 1 a robust folkloristic literature explores the relationship between etic and emic genres, intertextuality among genres, and genre, power, and ideology. see briggs and bauman [1992], graham [1981], cashman [2007], gilman [2009], and of course the rich overview by harris-lopez [2003], among others. 2 sedianka is often transliterated in english-language scholarship as sedyanka. indeed, it is a vernacular word transcribed as eye dialect; pronunciation teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 23 and transcription, let alone transliteration, appears differently throughout the country and publications about the form. 3 most scholarly mentions of sedianka discuss the event as the setting for folk song with a brief discussion of the dynamics of the form beyond its place in the seasonal round. see donna buchanan [2006], mercia macdermott [1998], and timothy rice [1994; 2000] for examples. angel goev [1984] and martha forsyth [1996] are notable exceptions, providing deeper illustration of the dynamism of sedianka as context and complex genre. 4 the professionalization of textile production is an exception, especially in the case of dantela [shuttle lace], chiprovtsi chergi [carpet runners from chiprovtsi] and kilim [carpet] production that have been outsourced to villages throughout southern and southwestern bulgaria [pisancheva 2022]. the production of some textiles, like lace, once connoted modernity. other textiles have been relegated to the realm of the past—appropriate for staged performance, but no longer part of the modern home or adorned modern body. textile production deemed consequential to national memory became reframed as heritage. textile production as economic enterprise underwent a different story. today, western european clothiers relegate their clothes production to rural bulgaria. see kapka kassabova [2023] for creative representation of the impacts of these processes in southwestern bulgaria. 5 for another, though different, invocation of sedianka, see iva kyurkchieva’s [2018] discussion of sedyankata, a craft meet-up meant to support the transmission of dwindling textile craft knowledge, founded in 2011 and still active today. 6 i, the outsider from a different cultural background, was coincidentally the only young person participating in the residency from a rural community. nonetheless, i was an outsider to the sedianka-as-frame. 7 i am grateful to danille christensen for pointing out the value of showing others we care about their practice. 8 i thank my father and stepmother, ralph and suzy craycraft, as well as the mcmen of mt. orab, ohio, for welcoming me kindly into their group on an early december morning, and i thank my father for putting up with my continued efforts to draw connections between tradition and everyday life in our shared southern ohio experiences. 9 ongoing personal communications, 2023-2024. i am grateful to jordan lovejoy for our generative sharing, and i thank her for permission to note our discussions of her father’s sociality practices. 10 i thank my student, malachi, for permission to include and attribute this portion of his exam response and to cite him by name, at his request. malachi is a second-year student at harvard university. 11 for example, i would have been more satisfied if my student had expressed that folklore is not just present in a romanticized “flow of life” but is actually situated within multiple contexts, set apart from the “flow” by aesthetics and framing devices. both student and instructor have lessons to learn. 12 see morales and alvarez [2022: 162]. teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 24 bibliography alvarez, maribel. 2020. “folklife in the age of pandemics,” border lore. cited by https://borderlore.org/folklife-in-the-age-of-pandemics/. 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[1969] 1976. “analytical categories and ethnic genres.” in folklore genres. dan ben-amos, ed. austin, university of texas press, 215-242. ———. 1993. “‘context’ in context.” western folklore 52(2/4): 209-226. borland, katherine. 2021 “sugar cane alley: teaching the concept of ‘group’ from a critical folkloristics perspective.” in theorizing folklore from the margins: critical and ethical approaches. solimar otero and mintzi auanda martínez-rivera, eds. bloomington, indiana university press, 131156. briggs, charles. l., and bauman, richard. 1992. “genre, intertextuality, and social power,” journal of linguistic anthropology, 2(2): 131–172. buchanan, donna a. 2006. performing democracy: bulgarian music and musicians in transition. chicago: university of chicago press. cashman, ray. 2007. “genre and ideology,” midwestern folklore 33(1): 13–27. ———. 2008. storytelling on the northern irish border: characters and community. bloomington: indiana university press. craycraft, sarah. 2021. “urban project in rural crisis: responding to coronavirus in bulgarian villages.” folklorica 24: 1–26. ———. 2022. “младите на село: резиденцията като експериментална форма на съживяване на селата” [young in the village: the residency as experimental form of revitalizing the village] bulgarska etnologiia 1: 123–141. del negro, giovanna and harris m. berger. 2001. “character divination and kinetic sculpture in the central italian passagiata (ritual promenade): interpretive frameworks and expressive practices from a body-centered perspective.” journal of american folklore 114(451): 5-19. deutsch, james. 2020. “the values—and dangers—of folklore during a global pandemic,” smithsonian center for folklife & cultural heritage. cited by teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 25 https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/values-dangers-of-folklore-globalpandemic. 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[listen, daughter, and remember well: the songs and life of linka gekova gergova from the village of bistritsa, sofia], sofia: universitetsko izd-vo “sv. kliment okhridski.” geertz, clifford. 1980. “blurred genres: the refiguration of social thought.” the american scholar 49(2): 165-179. georges, robert a. 1980. toward a resolution of the text/context controversy. western folklore 39: 34-40. gilman, lisa. 2009. “genre, agency, and meaning in the analysis of complex performances: the case of a malawian political rally.” journal of american folklore 122(485): 335–362. glassie, henry h. 1982. passing the time in ballymenone: culture and history of an ulster community. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. goev, angel. 1979. гоев, ангел. “заклаждане на седянка” [lighting the sedyanka fire]. българска етнология [bulgarian ethnology] 1:69-79. ———. 1984. гоев, ангел. седянката: български празници и обичаи [the sedianka: bulgarian folk customs and rituals]. sofia: septemvri state publishing house. graham, joe. 1981. “the caso: an emic genre of folk narrative.” in “and other neighborly names”: social process and cultural image in texas folklore. richard bauman and roger abrahams, eds. austin, university of texas press, 11-43. harris-lopez, trudier. 2003. “genre.” in eight words for the study of expressive culture. burt feintuch, ed. urbana-champaign, university of illinois press, 99-120. hufford, mary. 2003. “context.” in eight words for the study of expressive culture. burt feintuch, ed. urbana-champaign, university of illinois press, 146-175. hymes, dell. 1975. “breakthrough into performance.” in folklore: performance and communication. dan ben-amos and kenneth s. goldstein, eds. the hague, mouton, 11-74. ingram, shelley, willow mullins, and todd richardson, (eds.). 2019. implied nowhere: absence in folklore studies. jackson: university press of mississippi. kaneff, deema. 2004. who owns the past?: the politics of time in a “model” bulgarian village. london: berghahn books. teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 26 kitta, andrea. 2020. “covid-19 gossip, rumor, legend, and conspiracy theories,” youtube. cited by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6gkug6dte. 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[1974] 1991. the production of space. cambridge: blackwell. lozier, john, and ronald althouse. 1975. “retirement to the porch in rural appalachia.” international journal of aging & human development 6(1): 7–15. macdermott, mercia. 1998. bulgarian folk customs. london: jessica kingsley publishers. mcneill, lynne. s. 2013. folklore rules a fun, quick, and useful introduction to the field of academic folklore studies. logan: utah state university press. morales, selina and maribel alvarez. 2022. “10 lessons in community love.” journal of american folklore 135 (536):164–179. n’diaye, diana baird. 2021. “telling our own stories: reciprocal autoethnography at the intersections of race, class, and gender.” journal of american folklore 134(533): 252-257. noyes, dorothy. 2016. humble theory: folklore’s grasp on modern life. bloomington: university press. oldenburg, ray. 1989. the great good place: cafés, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts, and how they get you through the day. new york: paragon house. otero, solimar and mitzi a. martinez-rivera, (eds.). 2021. theorizing folklore from the margins: critical and ethical approaches. bloomington: indiana university press. pisancheva, bistra. 2022. писанчева, бистра. дантелата: културни технологи и социални практики [lace: cultural technologies and social practices]. sofia: universitetsko izdatelstvo “sv. kliment okhridski”. prahlad, anand. 2021. “tearing down monuments: missed opportunities, silences, and absences—a radical look at race in american folklore studies.” journal of american folklore 134(533): 258–264. rice, timothy. 1994. may it fill your soul: experiencing bulgarian music. chicago: university of chicago press. ———. 2000. “bulgaria.” in garland encyclopedia of world music volume 8 europe: part 3: music cultures of europe: bulgaria. edited by timothy rice, james porter, and chris goertzen, eds. new york, routledge, 921941. roberts, john w. “african american belief narratives and the african cultural tradition,” research in african literatures 40(1): 112-126. ryan, marie-laure. 1981. “on the why, what, and how of generic taxonomy.” poetics 10: 109-126. teaching genre in context folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 27 silverman, carol. 1983. “the politics of folklore in bulgaria,” anthropological quarterly 56(2): 55-61. shuman, amy. 1993. “gender and genre.” in feminist theory and the study of folklore. susan hollis, linda pershing, and m. jane young, eds. champaign, university of illinois press, 71-85. wilkins, langston colin. 2023. welcome 2 houston: hip hop heritage in hustle town. urbana: university of illinois press. webber, sabra j. 2015. folklore unbound: a concise introduction. long grove: waveland press. zhang, juwen. 2020. “the concept of ethnic genre as a paradigm shift.” western folklore79 (1):13-44. microsoft word 4.2-borensteinarkhipova1201.docx folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 84 архипова, александра, и анна кирзюк. опасниые советские вещи: городские легенды и страхи в ссср. [arkhipova, aleksandra and anna kirziuk. dangerous soviet yings: urban legends and fears in the ussr]. москва: новое литературное обозрение, 2020. (сериа «культура повседневности» 536 pp. cloth. $24.00. isbn 978-5-4448-1174-0. ye twenty-first century is shaping up to be a great time to be a thing. objectoriented ontology continues to find adherents. yings can be ascribed agency. and, thanks to built-in sensors, smart homes, and wearable technology, things even have their own internet. nevertheless, things continue to circulate both as objects and as the stories we tell about them. where would material culture be without its immaterial side? yough aleksandra arkhipova and anna kriziuk’s wonderful new book is entitled dangerous soviet eings, its subtitle makes clear that the things themselves are a pretext: “urban legends and fears in the ussr.” russian urban folklore is no stranger to fear, as the popularity of brutal children’s rhymes called “strashilki” might suggest. but the strashilka tames its morbid subject matter through humor, a russian counterpart to such contemporaries as the unrhymed american “mommy, mommy” joke (“mommy, mommy, i’m tired of walking around in circles!” “shut up, or i’ll nail your other foot to the floor) or dead baby jokes that alan dundes wrote about back in 1979. ye stories that arkhipova and kirziuk study, by contrast, are told in earnest, conjuring up a plethora of threats that lie in wait for unsuspecting soviet citizens. ye authors provide a quick but thorough survey of the existing scholarship on urban legends, doing a service for readers who may be encountering the topic for the first time. after laying out the differences between the psychoanalytically inflected “interpretive” approach and the more recent moves toward memetic analysis, arkhipova and kirziuk split the difference, promising both interpretation of content and an informed treatment of the “viral” spread of urban legends throughout the soviet and post-soviet space. ye result is both compelling and comprehensive. arkhipova and kirziuk are not merely applying existing theoretical models to local (russian) material; the book’s stakes are much higher. questions of danger, enemies, and secret threats are already integral to our understanding of the soviet century. ye very fact that one of the formative historical events in the soviet union is called the “great terror” reminds us just how justified fear could be, while the stalinist emphasis on internal enemies such as “wreckers” wove paranoia into the fabric of everyday life. yus, the relationship between urban legends and official soviet culture turns out to be quite complicated, changing over the course of the decades that the authors examine. to paraphrase the old slogan, the stalinist terror was born to turn urban legends into life. or rather, to propagate false tales of internal enemies that would, in turn, spread from state propaganda to folk culture. along the way, this becomes less about witch hunts and more about a generalized hermeneutics of suspicion. if the internal enemy could pass for a friend, he could also exert an unseen reviews folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 85 influence on the otherwise politically reliable soviet symbolic system: “it was assumed that this enemy, deprived of the opportunity to act in the open, devoted himself to what we call ‘semiotic sabotage’ [semioticheskoe vreditel’stvo], that is, he infects soviet things with signs of his presence” (chapter 2). yus, swastikas were said to be found in the buildings constructed by german prisoners of war, and pictures of mao hidden within the fabric of chinese carpets. as these examples suggest, a significant portion of soviet urban legends unveiled the malign influence of the foreign within the domestic. as the country opened up, with the encounter between decent soviet citizens and actual foreigners growing more statistically likely, stories proliferated about the danger they brought with them. if, under stalin, the threat was explicitly ideological and existential, by the brezhnev years, the real problem was the enticing glamour of consumerism that foreigners brought with them. urban legends dramatized the conflict between official soviet values and the irresistible lure of the shiny new objects brought over the border. america folklore is full of stories about rats in fast food, and suspicious chinese meals. but such tales are usually in the services of a racist hierarchy: the food is dangerous because it is made by subhuman others. ye americans who tempt soviet children with lethal bubble gum are different, presumably motivated by sheer malice. and if the fancy toys and delicious treats brought by foreigners turn out to be deadly, the reigning anti-consumerist ideology is implicitly justified. in these cases, it is not enough that the grapes be sour; they must be toxic. arkhipova and kirziuk are at great pains to convince their readers that soviet urban legends arose from “above” and from “below,” in this, they are implicitly aligning themselves with the more nuanced approach to ideology and soviet civilization that has slowly gained the upper hand in western scholarly accounts. some of the urban legends discussed in the book would seem to support the official line. others subvert it, and still others manage to do both at the same time. in analyzing a wealth of thoroughly fascinating material, the authors develop their interpretive frameworks without letting them overwhelm the stories themselves. come to this book for the hidden pictures of trotsky and rumors of poisoned matzoh, but stay for arkhipova and kirziuk’s patient insight. eliot borenstein new york university new york city, ny, usa eb7@nyu.edu 6-endmatter1208 author guidelines folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 172 author guidelines folklorica publishes materials in english. authors are encouraged to translate their manuscripts into english prior to submission. folklorica accepts original submissions only. do not send a previously published article, even if it has appeared in another language. manuscripts should be submitted electronically (files in microsoft word (.doc or .docx) or rtf format) as an email attachment). each article must be preceded by a 200-word abstract. manuscripts normally should not exceed 35 pages in length (including endnotes). for more detailed information, see the folklorica style sheet (https://journals.ku.edu/folklorica/about/submissions#stylesheet). peer review all manuscripts will be submitted for evaluation to two outside reviewers. reviewers are anonymous. decision on publication normally takes up to three months. all submissions should be addressed to: xe editor, dr. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby e-mail: j.rouhier@uky.edu transliteration chart available online: https://journals.ku.edu/folklorica/about/submissions#transliteration book reviews length: 800-1200 words. format of entries: author. title in italics (series name, if applicable). place: publisher, year of publication. additional features: notes. bibliography. glossary. index. (if applicable in the order they appear). number of pp. price (cloth). price (paper). isbn number for each. doe, jane. introduction to slavic folklore (world folklore series). boston, ma: slavic publishing, 2006. notes. bibliography. index. xv+314. $45.95 (paper). isbn 0-123-456-789. if the language is other than english provide a translation of the title. if the author’s name is in cyrillic, provide a transliteration. give the publication information in the original language as it appears in the book, do not transliterate. author guidelines folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv 173 give the page number for all direct quotes in parentheses (179-81). no bibliography or footnotes; please incorporate into the text of the review. please end your review with your name, affiliation, city, country and email address left-justified. direct all reviews and inquiries to: laura olson osterman book review editor, folklorica university of colorado, boulder germanic and slavic languages and literatures 276 ucb, mckenna 129 boulder, co 80309-0276 e-mail: lolson@colorado.edu folklorica full 2024 fairytales in the time of war folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 48 fairytales in the time of war: analyzing the russian war in ukraine through the lenses of cultural narratives sophia moskalenko georgia state university atlanta, georgia abstract this article investigates the influence of childhood fairytales on the cultural narratives, attitudes, and behaviors of ukrainians and russians during the aftermath of the 2022 large-scale invasion of ukraine by russia. drawing on psychological theories such as theory of mind, social learning theory, operant conditioning, and significance quest theory, the study explores how early exposure to fairytales shapes adult moral values and influences mass public responses, particularly in times of crisis. by comparing traditional ukrainian and russian fairytales in published collections, this article identifies distinct narrative motifs in each culture, shedding light on the unexpected military performances of the ukrainian and russian armies during the conflict. the findings reveal that fairytales published in ukrainian collections more often emphasize resilience, wit, and hard work, aligning with the strategic prowess exhibited by the ukrainian military. in contrast, tales published in russian collections more often portray protagonists relying on magical coincidences, echoing the lackluster performance of the russian army. recognizing the influence of these cultural narratives provides valuable insights for understanding and addressing complex geopolitical events. fairytales in the time of war folklore is important for understanding cultural narratives––story lines that describe something unique to a culture and its people. they help to define a cultural identity, frame its history, and shape choices about the future [lamont 2019]. here, i propose a psychological theory that connects culturally prevalent narratives from ukrainian and russian folklore––fairytales––with differences in attitudes and behaviors of ukrainians and russians in the immediate aftermath of the russian large-scale invasion of ukraine in february of 2022. building on the theoretical and empirical work related to developmental psychology’s theory of mind, behavioral psychology’s social learning theory [bandura 1969] and operant conditioning [skinner 1971], and social psychology’s significance quest theory [kruglanski et al. 2022], i will demonstrate how fairytales encountered in early childhood can shape adult moral values, and how, especially in times of great upheavals such as during wars or political conflict, they can be crucial in shaping mass public responses. in what follows, i will first lay out the psychology research relevant to the appreciation of fairytales fairytales in the time of war folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 49 encountered in early childhood. then i will compare fairytales typical of ukrainian and russian folklore collections, highlighting psychological schemas underlying each. finally, i will suggest how the differences in these cultural narratives can be related to differences in each culture’s response to the russian invasion of ukraine in 2022. fairytales represent a diverse genre, varying in length, content, complexity, and the age of the intended audience. for the purposes of this paper, i will focus on a particular type of fairytales, specifically, those in published collections and aimed at children aged at least four or five. these tend be short stories that include a human or human-like protagonist, clearly defined good versus evil, an element of magic, and a happy ending and/or a moral [applebee 1978]. theory of mind: childhood paradise lost the psychological concept of theory of mind involves the capacity to comprehend and envisage the thoughts, needs, and expectations of others as separate from one’s own [wellman 2011]. this cognitive ability typically emerges in children as a developmental milestone around the age of four or five. prior to reaching this stage, children usually lack the ability to consider the world from someone else’s point of view [wimmer and perner 1983]. as theory of mind develops, children undergo a transition from the egocentrism prevalent in infancy and toddlerhood, when they perceive the world as centered around themselves, to recognizing that others may possess distinct feelings, thoughts, and perspectives. being able to grasp the idea that others may see them differently, children also realize that the way others perceive them doesn’t always match their own self-image. this recognition of a disparity between an “ideal” self and a “real” self, which may fall short of expectations, marks the development of selfawareness [rochat 2003]. in social psychology, the acknowledgment of this difference between the “real” and “ideal” selves is termed “objective selfawareness,” and it can be an uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing experience even for adults [duval and wicklund 1972]. studies on objective self-awareness reveal that when confronted with the mismatch between their real and ideal selves, people employ various strategies to divert attention away from themselves to reduce the discomfort that the realization of one’s shortcomings inevitably brings. these strategies include activities like watching television, listening to the radio, or reading [moskalenko and heine 2003]. for children, fairytales offer a particularly attractive means of escaping the discomfort of realizing their own shortcomings. beyond providing a break from the uneasiness of objective self-awareness, fairytales also supply guidelines on how to meet cultural moral standards [moskalenko and mccauley 2018], helping to align real selves with an ideal. theory of mind and objective self-awareness introduce children to the notion that others might perceive them as less than perfectly lovable, important, or deserving. this realization, termed “significance loss” [kruglanski et al. 2022], creates an uncomfortable state that motivates children to embark on a fairytales in the time of war folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 50 “significance quest”: actions aimed at regaining recognition, a sense of importance, and worth. down the yellow brick road: fairytales as a quest for significance fairytales serve as the original significance quest during the age when children first recognize the gap between their self-perception and others’ judgment [moskalenko 2024]. this moment marks the first-ever loss of significance, a mental departure from the garden of eden of early childhood innocence. knowledge bestowed by theory of mind propels children into the realm of objective self-awareness, where they strive for lost perfection through significance quests. this initial loss of significance triggers early attempts at significance quests, which, if successful, can become a blueprint for later life choices and actions. in these early significance quests, children must learn societal expectations and practice striving for these standards. fairytales have likely culturally evolved to address such motivational needs, providing the content of cultural norms and moral values, as well as a means for children to practice striving for these values through identifying with fairytale characters [moskalenko 2023; moskalenko and mccauley 2018]. moral lessons prevalent in fairytales often portray “good” characters as conscientious, hard-working, kind, generous, selfless, courageous and loyal. by contrast, “bad” characters are often lazy, mean, violent, selfish, unreliable, and cold. through fairytales, children are given a clear blueprint for who is considered “good” and “bad” within their cultures. fairytales hold a unique influence over children, fostering identification with main characters and motivating them to emulate desirable traits [wong 2008]. they inspire character development through empathy and imagination, rather than through adult commands or instructions [moskalenko and mccauley 2018]. achievements unlocked: learning through fairytales learning through fairytales involves two psychological forces: learning by modeling [bandura 1969] and learning by operant conditioning [skinner 1971]. social learning theory suggests that children can acquire complex behaviors by learning about fictional characters who exhibit these behaviors, which then serve as models for achieving cultural ideals and attaining significance [bandura and walters 1977]. operant conditioning, on the other hand, emphasizes the role of rewards and punishments in shaping behavior. by engaging with fairytales, children identify with characters, and the intrinsic rewards of these characters become virtual rewards for the child, reinforcing behaviors associated with a positive outcome. this two-step learning process––learning about a character trait or behavior that can be emulated and then the vicarious experience of joy at the character attaining significance that reinforces the learning––is a powerful virtual medium for children’s socialization. fairytales in the time of war folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 51 fairytales also play a crucial role in cultural contexts. they form a foundation for communication through common phrases and expressions, shaping a “naïve” personality psychology that influences how individuals form impressions and predict actions. for example, even if one does not know what internet trolls do, the use of the fairytale term, troll, immediately conveys negative connotations. “if i could wave a magic wand,” “we’ll all live happily ever after,” “lost boys,” “snow queen”—these and other fairytale motifs often feature in adult discourse because they offer colorful and emotionally evocative descriptions rooted in shared cultural foundations. fairytales socialize children into cultural norms, eliciting positive reactions to characters who follow these norms and negative reactions to those who deviate. in finding their place in the cultural landscape, fairytales undergo a form of natural selection: stories that resonate with both children and caretakers become favorites that persist through generations, whereas those that seem too boring, too cruel, or too sad fade into obscurity. this cultural selection of fairytales reflects and influences social norms, values, and preferences. for example, tales published in chinese collections tend to depict the loss of wealth as a form of punishment, the acquisition of wealth as a reward, and the possession of wealth as an indicator of a character’s goodness, reflecting distinct cultural perspectives on prosperity [doyle and doyle 2001]. consistent with this, research suggests that the prevalence of achievement themes in fairytales across cultures correlates with the cultures’ economic growth [mcclelland and clelland 1961]. similarly, tales published in french collections often celebrate acts of rebellion against authority [obergfell 1983; reddan 2021]. examples include bluebeard’s wife defying her husband’s instructions not to unlock a secret room, cinderella rejecting her stepmother’s command to stay home instead of attending the ball, and thumbelina resisting multiple attempts to arrange her marriage, choosing her partner herself instead (though of course versions of these stories also exist outside of french collections). this recurrent theme in french collections may be intertwined with the long-standing and characteristically french tradition of protesting [carpenter 2019]. another prevalent motif in french collections centers on the role of fashion and style in achieving personal significance. characters like puss in boots transform from mere animals to distinguished individuals through the acquisition of special attire. puss in boots not only gains boots for himself, but also secures elegant clothing for his master, enabling the master (a poor miller’s son) to pose as marquis de carabas and vie for a princess’s hand in marriage. similarly, cinderella’s transformative journey from rags to riches, in most french versions of the tale, relies on her dress and crystal slippers, elevating her from scrubbing pots and pans to a “happily ever after.” the tale of donkeyskin [perrault, translated by johnson 1921] narrates how a princess, facing an unacceptable marriage proposal from her father, requests as a condition of marriage extraordinary gowns and her father’s donkey hide. wearing the hide as a disguise, fairytales in the time of war folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 52 she escapes her incestuous father and later uses the glamorous gowns to win the heart of a prince. these tales in french collections consistently portray main characters progressing to their happy endings via fashion in their quests for significance. the emphasis on fashion as a quest for significance in such tales aligns with the contemporary reality: france, the birthplace of fashion, is to this day considered the “fashion capital of the world” [fashion industry worldwide 2022, n.d.]. over 600,000 french individuals chose to seek personal significance through careers in the fashion industry [travagli 2023]. this connection potentially underscores the enduring influence of french fairytales on cultural perceptions and aspirations surrounding fashion and success. cultural adaptations of fairytales of course, fairytales often undergo cultural adaptations as they move through different speech communities [george 2007]. for instance, the tale of little red riding hood predominantly exists in german and french collections. in many german renditions, the tale concludes with a hunter saving the girl and her grandmother by killing the wolf—the bad are punished, and the good saved by a mighty hero. in contrast, most french versions lack a heroic figure, and instead of a happy ending concludes with a cautionary moral: young girls should be cautious of wolves, particularly those who appear harmless [thomas 1988]. although based on the same core narrative, the different endings would likely inspire children to learn different lessons and pursue different paths to significance. the selection of which fairytales endure and are transmitted through time involves a dual process: children’s preferences and adults’ values both play a role. fairytales that resonate deeply with both children’s imaginations and adults’ sensibilities become enduring favorites that reflect societal norms and values. the american “sanitization” of dark themes in fairytales, for example as in later disney adaptations, is consistent with american parents’ increasing anxiety and over-protection of their children since roughly the 1980s until today [lukianoff and haidt 2019]. not only do fairytales adapt to different cultural environments while spreading geographically, but they also change as the culture changes over time. for example, the tales collected by the brothers grimm originally included some antisemitic narratives such as “a jew in the bumbles” that told of a thieving and cheating jew, whose appearance was changed by the grimm brothers from “an old man” to “a man with a goat beard” to make the character more devil-like [george 2007]. “a good bargain” was another antisemitic story in the grimms’ collection, read widely in pre-nazi germany, which likely reflected the popular sentiment of german adults and also instilled antisemitic views in many german children at the time [thomas 1988]. grimms’ fairytales, especially those that emphasized patriarchal orders like “might makes right” and heroic ideals were heavily promoted in children’s fairytales in the time of war folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 53 magazines during the pre-nazi weimar period [zipes 2019]. after nazis rose to power, the third reich education minister presided over efforts to use fairytale collections to glorify nazism and hitler [thomas 1988]. the narratives were altered to make “happy ending” contingent upon following hitler and his ideals of aryan german superiority [george 2007]. because of their strong associations with the third reich, grimms’ fairytales were briefly banned by the american allies occupying germany in 1945 [zipes 2019]. in this case, the power of fairytales to guide significance quests had been used for evil. the cases above suggest that fairytales offer a window into the collective psyche of a society, not only entertaining but also shaping cultural beliefs and aspirations. in summary, fairytales provide unique insights into the foundation of mass psychology, influencing children’s significance quests through modeling, operant conditioning, and cultural context [moskalenko 2024]. fairytales offer a rich cultural landscape that shapes personality, values, and behavior, making them a powerful force in childhood development and an important influence on cultural values, social norms, and political trends. dire straits to fairytales amos tversky and daniel kahneman [1974] famously demonstrated that decision-making is often biased, relying on heuristics that offer decision shortcuts that feel like intuitive judgments rather than careful consideration [kahneman 2003]. when cognitive and emotional resources are strained, deliberate reasoning gives way to intuitive reasoning, drawing on scripts, schemas, stereotypes, and authority [cacioppo and petty 1984]. this makes early models of significance quests particularly likely to impact people’s choices and actions in times of crisis. therefore, for adults, fairytales may hold a unique appeal in situations of high stress, high stakes, and low control that challenge cognitive and emotional capacities. under such challenging conditions, people may be especially susceptible to the influence of early models of behavior that are found in fairytales. war and violent conflict represent ultimate high-stress situations where life or death decisions hang on minute choices. in this context, simplified models of good versus evil derived from childhood collections of fairytales may become especially salient [moskalenko 2008]. in this sense, the 2022 russian invasion of ukraine presented a unique opportunity to observe reactions to this crisis through the lens of the above theory. consistent with it, the reactions often fell into fairytale categories. the war brought about broad international support for ukraine and condemnation of russia [boyon 2022]. interestingly, this support has often been expressed in terms reminiscent of fairytales, such as the use of “orc” to describe russian invaders [kryvushenko 2022]. in other words, many in the broader international public observing the russian invasion of ukraine seem to have resorted to the early moral models from fairytales when issuing social judgments about these political events. these judgments led them to support one side and fairytales in the time of war folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 54 condemn the other, contributing to their personal sense of significance by aligning with what they perceive as “the right side of history.” another interesting connection with fairytales and the war in ukraine has to do with the surprises of ukrainian resistance on one side and the russian army’s early incompetence on the other side. when russia attacked in february 2022, very few individuals in the western world anticipated that ukraine could mount any significant resistance against the unprovoked aggression. even trained political analysts in europe and the united states made substantial misjudgments in their assessments of the ukrainian civilians’ determination to resist the russian army [merchant 2022]. several weeks into the conflict, it had also become evident that many had overestimated the russian army’s determination and capacity to fight [jones et al. 2021]. at the same time, the ukrainian army’s resolve to resist a numerically, technologically, and strategically superior opponent was also underestimated [jonas 2022]. in short, western experts have vastly underestimated the ukrainian will to resist and vastly overestimated the russian army’s will to fight. i propose that the surprising turn of events in the ukraine war, contrary to expert predictions, can in part be attributed to cultural differences between russians and ukrainians, and that these differences, reflected in the fairytales of their childhoods, potentially contributed to the unexpected performance of each country’s military forces. fairytales in ukrainian collections in collections of ukrainian classic fairytales, unassuming protagonists navigate formidable challenges, demonstrating resilience and transforming from vulnerable underdogs to triumphant heroes. these fairytales adhere to a familiar narrative pattern. in these collections, the protagonists are unlikely heroes, but their bravery, resourcefulness, and determination propel them to success, after which they return to their normal life and duties. thus, a typical tale published in ukraine includes the following narrative motifs: 1) an unlikely hero, 2) a reluctance of the protagonist to engage in conflict, 3) the use of wit and skill to defeat a foe, and 4) a return to normal as a happy ending. the following typical examples of ukrainian fairytales fit the above model. they are often featured in collections of folktales, making them widely familiar. ivasyk-telesyk an elderly childless couple carves a log into a son named ivasyk-telesyk, who, through the mother’s love, comes alive into a little boy. as he grows, he fishes to provide sustenance for his parents, guided by his mother’s voice to return safely to shore. a deceitful snake tricks ivasyk-telesyk by mimicking his mother’s voice and captures him. the snake plans to cook the boy and serve him as a dish to her dinner guests. but in a clever twist, ivasyk telesyk outsmarts the fairytales in the time of war folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 55 snake’s daughter who stands guard over him, and the snake daughter is the one who ends up baked and eaten by the snake’s unsuspecting guests instead of the clever boy. to escape the pursuing snake, ivasyk-telesyk seeks help from passing geese, who agree to carry the boy on his back. after a challenging fight with the powerful snake, he returns home safely, revealing himself to his parents and thanking the heroic goose. kyrylo kozhum’aka a dragon, zmey gorynych, attacks the kievan-rus and captures beautiful girls. the daughter of the kievan prince becomes a victim, prompting her to feign affection for the dragon to discover its weakness. the dragon confides to the princess that only kyrylo, a kozhum’aka [hide tanner] from kiev, can defeat him. the princess shares this secret with her pigeon, who informs her father. the prince seeks kyrylo’s help, but the tanner declines the offer of wealth and power. the prince then assembles hundreds of children to plea with kyrylo, and the tanner relents, agreeing to fight the dragon. in the ensuing battle at gorynych’s lair, kyrylo triumphs, heavily beating the dragon with his wooden club. fearing defeat, gorynych proposes an alliance, but kyrylo cunningly demands they rule separate halves of the world. exploiting the dragon’s foolishness, kyrylo coerces it to plow a border and even divide the sea. in the end, gorynych obeys and meets its demise by drowning. kyrylo returns the princess to her father and returns to his tanning duties. fairytales in russian collections in contrast to tales published in ukrainian collections, tales published in russian collections often portray a character as unintelligent and indolent, spending their days lounging in bed while their diligent older brothers toil. the challenges the main character faces are not a hostile monster but rather the duties the protagonist is unwilling or unable to perform. another typical element of these stories is the protagonist coming across a magic animal (e.g., a frog, a horse, a wolf, a bird, a fish, or a cow), who uses its magic to complete the protagonist’s duties and fulfill his wishes. the protagonist then gains riches, status, and sometimes a beautiful woman, thus achieving a happy ending. in short, tales published in russian collections typically contain the following elements: 1) an unmotivated hero, 2) a reluctance to engage in effort, 3) the use of a magical animal to achieve glory, and 4) riches or a beautiful woman as a happy ending. the following are examples of russian fairytales are often featured in collections of folk tales, making them widely familiar. they fit the above model. by pike’s wish in a village, lived three brothers. the older two were prosperous merchants, while the youngest, a fool by the name of emelya, spent his days sleeping on the fairytales in the time of war folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 56 stove. one day while fetching water from the ice-hole, emelya caught a magical pike. the pike promised to grant any wish if he released it, providing him with the magic phrase to command the pike to do his bidding, “by the pike’s wish, at my command.” emelya first commanded his water pails to return home on their own, and then he directed his ax to chop wood for the fire. the news of this wonder reached the tsar, who summoned emelya to the palace. upon arriving, emelya used the pike’s magic to make the tsar’s daughter fall in love with him. in response, the tsar ordered the pair to be placed in a barrel and thrown into the sea. however, emelya invoked the magic words once again, and the waves carried the barrel to the shore of a beautiful island. with the pike’s magic, emelya constructed a magnificent marble palace. at the princess’s request, he transformed himself into a handsome and intelligent prince. one day, the tsar visited the island and recognized his daughter and emelya. the tsar sought forgiveness, and they lived happily ever after. sivka-burka long ago, there was an old man with three sons. the two elder sons managed the farm and enjoyed fine clothes, while the youngest, ivan the fool, preferred venturing into the forest for mushrooms and lounging on the kitchen stove at home. when the father fell ill, he instructed his sons to bring bread to his grave for three consecutive nights upon his death. the eldest son persuaded ivan to take his place the first night. ivan, agreeable, brought bread to his father’s grave, and at midnight the father rose and inquired about the world. pleased with ivan’s visit, the father ate the bread and returned to the grave. this pattern repeated the second night with the second brother. on the third night, ivan’s turn came. after complying with his father’s request, the father praised ivan for being the only son to fulfill the task and instructed him to call the magical horse, sivka-burka. the horse transformed ivan into a handsome young man, and the horse’s magic allowed ivan to win the hand of the tsar’s daughter in a remarkable contest. despite his brothers’ skepticism, ivan succeeded, and with the help of the magical horse he married the princess and lived happily ever after. relative prevalence of different motifs in ukrainian and russian fairytales collections because russia and ukraine are adjacent countries with shared histories, it is reasonable to suppose there would be overlap between the tales published in russian and ukrainian collections, and that the above motifs and tales exemplifying them would be represented to a comparable degree in each country’s tale collections. to empirically investigate this possibility, a comparative study was carried out across collections of russian and ukrainian fairytales. to collect source data for the study, a research assistant unfamiliar with the proposed theoretical differences was engaged and tasked with finding fifteen books representing collections of russian fairytales and fifteen books fairytales in the time of war folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 57 representing collections of ukrainian fairytales. using search terms in both russian and ukrainian, correspondingly, for “russian fairytales” or “ukrainian fairytales” in google, the criteria for retaining a collection was that it was in the corresponding language (i.e., russian collections in russian, and ukrainian collections in ukrainian), that it was published in the corresponding country (i.e., no russian tale collections published in ukraine and vice versa), and that the book included a table of contents. the resulting cases included one russian collection and two ukrainian collections that contained non-native fairytales, such as arabic, german, or french fairytales; these collections were dropped from analyses. an additional search was carried out to replace the dropped collection, achieving a total sample of fifteen russian and fifteen ukrainian collections, resulting in a total of thirty collections. the collections varied greatly in the number of tales they contained, ranging from six to fifty tales for the russian collections (the average number of tales per collection was twenty-one), and from eight to 135 (the average number of tales per collection was forty-one) for the ukrainian collections. tales representing the motif of “magical animal brings the protagonist glory” as well as the motif of “underdog hero prevails through wit/hard work” were each identified in both ukrainian and russian collections. the differences in frequency of appearances of each motif were apparent in the number of collections containing no instances of a motif. thus, the number of collections published in ukraine that contained no instances of “magical animal brings glory” motif was ten out of fifteen. by contrast, all the russian collections included instances of this motif. in other words, sixty six percent of ukrainian collections did not mention the “magical animal brings glory” motif, as compared with zero percent of russian collection that did not feature it. similarly, when it came to the “underdog hero prevails by wit/hard work” motif, nine out of fifteen russian collections did not contain a single instance of a tale representing it. by contrast, only one collection of ukrainian tales did not include a representation of such a motif (russian collections omitting motif: sixty percent; ukrainian collections omitting the motif: seven percent). additional comparisons considered not only the fact of a motif’s appearance in a collection, but also the number of tales in the collection exemplifying it. thus, if a collection only has one instance of a “magical animal brings glory,” it can be claimed that this motif is less frequently represented than if a collection contains two, three, or more tales representing the same motif. because the number of tales per collection varied so widely, the findings for this comparison are reported as average percentages of tales per collection reflecting a particular motif. figure 1 depicts the comparison between fifteen collections of tales published in russia and fifteen collections tales published in ukraine with respect to the relative frequency of them featuring tales that each of the two motifs: “magical animal brings the protagonist glory” and “underdog hero prevails through wit/hard work.” a list containing the sources for the analyses is in the appendix. fairytales in the time of war folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 58 figure 1: average percent of fairytales that each motif (magical animal brings glory; underdog hero prevails through wit/hard work) in russian and ukrainian collections of fairytales. as the quantitative results above demonstrate, there is a consistent difference between russian and ukrainian representations of the two motifs, with tales in russian collections more often than tales in ukrainian collections featuring magic animals that bring protagonists glory, whereas ukrainian tales more often feature an unlikely hero prevailing through wit/hard work. it seems reasonable to conclude that an average russian would be more familiar with the former motif and see it as more culturally-consistent than the latter motif––and vice versa for an average ukrainian. future studies might examine this hypothesis empirically, by surveying russians and ukrainians about their familiarity with the motifs and their notions about the cultural consistency of these two fairytale motifs, to compare survey responses with the above findings from printed fairytale collections. the theoretical considerations above, supported to some degree by the analyses of fairytale collections, suggest that the cultural scripts for achieving significance are quite different for ukrainians and russians. while ukrainians are inspired to rely on wit and resilience in opposing a formidable foe, russians might 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 russian fairytales collections ukrainian fairytales collections average percent of fairytales representing each motif in russian and ukrainian collections magic animal brings glory underdog hero prevails fairytales in the time of war folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 59 be inspired by tale characters to “sit tight” and hope that a magic coincidence will propel them to glory. whereas ukrainian fairytales suggest hard work as normative, russian fairytales suggest a laissez-faire attitude. finally, while ukrainian fairytale collections see a happy ending as going back to one’s home, family, and returning to one’s work, “business as usual,” russian tale collections see a happy ending as a gain in riches, status, and women. these narrative motifs, legitimized as culturally valued social norms, can perhaps help explain the disparity in the behavior of ukrainian and russian troops and civilians in their responses to the russian invasion of 2022. even though the ukrainian military was numerically and technically far inferior to the russian army, it managed to hold off the invading force through clever maneuvers, such as flooding ukrainian flatlands by releasing water from a dam in the vicinity of the capitol, kyiv, thus preventing the russian forces from advancing on the city [kramer 2022] or allowing russians advances inland only to then cut off their supply lines, starving them of ammunition and fuel before encircling and successfully attacking them [barnes 2022]. by observers’ judgment, the ukrainian strategy has been to “outsmart and wear out” the russians, surprising them: with underwater drone attacks on their military ships, deep-behind-the-front-lines attacks on their ammunition depos, and other unexpected tactics [kullab 2023]. after almost two years of war, prominent western generals lauded the ukrainian military for its successes, highlighting especially the decentralized nature of military initiatives, which allowed quick and adoptable maneuvering by small mobile units [sonko 2023]. thus, starting at a great disadvantage, the ukrainian army was able to successfully oppose a much stronger opponent by clever maneuvers and perseverance, just like ukrainian folk heroes in the published tales found in children’s fairytale collections. by contrast, the russian army, which was seen as the world’s second strongest before the invasion, has performed remarkably poorly in ukraine since 2022 [kofman and lee 2022], demonstrating incompetence and a lack of morale and fighting spirit [sirgany et al. 2023]. desertion and voluntary surrender rates were so high that the russian government implemented a tougher penalty for deserting or surrendering, making it punishable by a prison term of up to ten years [kyiv post 2023]. the russian government, facing opposition to conscription from potential recruits, incentivized them with sizable monetary compensation [atlamazoglou 2023]. russian soldiers have overwhelmingly engaged in looting, stealing, and transporting to russia everything from the jewelry of people they killed, to washing machines from the apartments they invaded, to artwork from the museums and cultural centers they took over [“looting by russian forces during the russian invasion of ukraine” 2023]. additionally, russian soldiers have perpetrated rape against ukrainian women and girls on a systemic and massive scale [un news 2023]. russian soldiers exhibited little will to fight, although they often volunteered for the war because of financial incentives and engaged in theft of property and the raping of women once in ukraine. in a way, they acted similarly to the main characters of tales in published russian fairytales in the time of war folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 60 collections, who at first show no initiative, but, once in possession of power, use it to obtain riches and women. faced with unprecedented challenges, the russian army has displayed subpar morale and performance [smolkin 2022]. in stark contrast, ukrainian forces have showcased a remarkably adaptive response, evolving from underdogs to heroes through sheer determination and resilience, defying the odds with spectacular resolve [sovsun 2022]. the differences between fairytale collections published in ukraine and russia may offer insight into the disparate performances of their respective armies, which are, after all, comprised of individuals, each with their own ideas of cultural norms and values, that, when facing mortal danger, are likely to simplify down to basic motifs. the russian war against ukraine, however, must be viewed in a context that is not always favorable to ukraine. before the invasion, for example, the russian army was strategically positioning around ukraine’s borders in a manner that made major analysts and news outlets around the world warn about an imminent invasion. yet, ukrainian authorities rejected these worries, and instead of preparing for the invasion advised ukrainians to avoid panic [basu 2022]. important opportunities were thus needlessly squandered, which contributed to ukraine’s extreme disadvantage in the early days and months of the war, including the loss of ukraine’s south, left largely unguarded [lvova 2024]. likewise, after the northern ukrainian city of kharkiv was liberated in 2023, ukraine had time to build fortifications to guard against future attempts by russia to attack the major city. however, that opportunity was likewise neglected, and in 2024 russian troops again crossed the poorly guarded border on foot, requiring enormous sacrifices from the ukrainian troops to beat back the attack [beale 2024]. russia has fully capitalized on these kinds of lapses by ukraine, jumping on opportunities to advance its positions. in this sense, not only is ukrainians’ resistance against the odds (made more unfavorable by ukraine’s lack of vigilance) but also ukrainians’ eagerness to return to “business as usual” that has cost them dearly is consistent with ukrainian folktale motifs. similarly, not only is russia’s initial poor showing in combat but also its ability to later seek out and capitalize on opportunities to advance its position are consistent with russian fairytale motifs. conclusion it is true that most adults often don’t actively ponder the folk and fairytales of their childhoods. and yet, these early narratives, filtered through the intense lenses of childhood emotions, can play a pivotal role in shaping our worldview. they serve as a deep-rooted foundation for our responses, particularly during challenging times. fairytales equip us to identify archetypal characters, discern between good and evil, and grapple with themes of love, death, victory, and betrayal, influencing our decisions amid life’s dichotomies and especially in times of crisis. fairytales in the time of war folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 61 comparing ukrainian and russian tale collections within the psychological framework of significance quest helps to explain cultural difference and distinctions in behavioral choices that seem inexplicable to western analysts who rely only on economic and political data while ignoring the subtle influences of cultural narratives. as the world becomes smaller and more closely interconnected and the potential of conflicts to reverberate far and wide grows, fairytales hold a unique potential to illuminate deeply held beliefs and wishes that guide people through difficult times. according to steve jobs, the visionary founder of apple, “the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller” [farmer 2021: para. 2]. this article delves into the psychological mechanisms echoing jobs’ assertion. fairytales, serving as both an escape from the challenges of lost significance and a guide to moral values, immerse children in virtual quests for significance. through modeling and operant conditioning, early significance quests become ingrained, influencing adult decision-making. regardless of age, individuals want to be the hero of their stories, to confront evil, and to reach a happy ending. fairytales’ power lies in their ability to simplify life’s complexities to fundamental dichotomies (good vs. bad) and to offer actionable intelligence for attaining a happy ending, whatever that might be. a skillful leader can wield fairytale themes to mobilize their followers for war or peace, violent riots or peacebuilding [moskalenko 2024]. like nuclear power, the elemental force of fairytales can illuminate and warm––but also harm and annihilate. individuals can be cast as either beasts to kill or heroes to emulate, women as fairy godmothers or witches. recognizing the influential role of fairytales opens avenues for crafting policies and governance that mobilize collective action in addressing shared challenges like climate change, mass migration, and political polarization, leading us all toward a “happily ever after.” acknowledgements the author extends deep gratitude to defne siraz gurkan for help in collecting source data for the comparative analyses of russian and ukrainian fairytale collections. conflict of interest disclosure the author receives funding from the office of naval research (grant n000 14-21-275485). however, any opinions, findings, or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the 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[100 folktales. 3rd volume]. київ: а-ба-ба-га-ла-ма-га. pytel, liudmyla. 2023. питель, людмила. магічна подорож україною. нк богдан [a magic journey through ukraine]. київ: mountain mill. українські народні казки [ukrainian folktales]. 2017. київ: юнісофт. українські народні казки: улюблені казки [ukrainian folktales: favorite folktales]. 2019. донецьк: пегас. українські народні казки. кращі казки [ukrainian folktales. the best folktales]. 2021. харків: ранок. харків: ранок. zіnchuk, mikola antonovich. n.d. зінчук, микола антонович. українські народні казки. книга 5 [ukrainian folktales. book 5]. тернопіль: нк богдан. ———. n.d. зінчук, микола антонович. українські народні казки. книга 10 [ukrainian folktales. book 10]. тернопіль: нк богдан. editorsintrofinal editors’ introduction folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv ii editors’ introduction to the folklorica special issue “vernacular responses to the covid-19 pandemic” 3e exponential spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) through the hubei province of china in december of 2019 had the world watching and fearing a repeat of the 2002-2004 pandemic of its predecessor, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 1 (sars-cov). 3ose fears were realized on 30 january 2020 when 7,818 cases across 19 countries prompted the world health organization to declare a public health emergency of international concern. 3at status was upgraded to a global pandemic on 11 march [who 2020] due to rising cases in iran, japan, south korea, and particularly in italy, the primary entry point of the virus into europe. a newly discovered zoonotic virus, sars-cov-2 is closely related to the first sars coronavirus as well as to a number of viruses found in bats and pangolins [sun et al. 2020]; it is believed to have passed to humans through the processing of bats for traditional chinese medicine. 3e initial virus outbreak has been tentatively traced to a wet market in the city of wuhan, although contact tracing in search of an index case, or patient zero, has thrown this source into question [areddy 2020. see also bodner et al. 2021: 32-34, 185-86], and scientific investigation has not ruled-out the possibility that the virus escaped from the wuhan institute of virology [kramer 2021]. as the virus spread, nations across the globe scrambled to prepare their medical systems for a wave of infection based on highly variable projection models. rushed attempts to obtain and distribute necessary supplies and to establish channels of national and international communication coincided with an assortment of lockdown measures implemented in highly divergent fashions and with varying timelines. anthropologist jeremy walton [2020] has compared this jarring institution of state power to foucault’s well-known description of the disciplinary projects introduced as anti-plague measures in early modern france [foucault 1995: 195-98]. walton stresses how surveillance, curtailment of movement, and the coercive power of government bodies have been rapidly imposed in the pandemic upon a wide swathe of society that has been heretofore largely or completely sheltered from these aspects of state power. 3e adjustments precipitated by this have been neither simple, nor heterogeneous. a year and a half out from the initial spread of the disease, the disruptive realities of the pandemic have become, for many of us, routinized. while commentators in the earliest months were quick to draw parallels between covid-19 and past epidemics (the swine flu, sars, the 1918 flu, or even the black death), the true response to this pandemic has been historic in its own right. as yuval noah harari [2021] writes in his recap of a year with covid, modern science, digital infrastructure, and global linkages have turned what were once uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. global connections have allowed us to monitor chains of infection and trace the spread of the virus editors’ introduction folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv iii image 1. a matrioshka doll wearing a face mask and surrounded by covid-19 germs. painted by tamara koryova in a factory in semenov, russia [euronews 2020] like none before, while digital technologies have allowed large sections of society to work from home, assuaging some of the prohibitive economic costs of extended lockdowns. 3at same digital infrastructure has also provided scientists and doctors throughout the world the ability to share information in real-time, leading to fast-tracked sequencing of the virus and production of vaccines. with a highly uneven roll-out of covid-19 vaccines and new strains of the virus being discovered, we have yet to reach a clear certainty of where the future of the pandemic will lead. 3e benefits of modern technology, though, have allowed for a response that has no parallel in human history, suggesting a prompt exit from pandemic conditions in the near future. yet, as einstein once noted, our technology often outpaces our humanity. indeed, it has been our cultural and specific legacies that have most resembled past manifestations in other epidemics and have shown both their best and worst sides in the responses to this pandemic. global flows of wealth have created a hierarchy of nations based on access to life-saving medical supplies and technologies, making some countries’ pandemic experience much more similar to past plagues. political leaders—drawn between sometimes opposing national and global concerns and presented with a rapidly evolving understanding of the virus—have had to shoulder serious burdens through the pandemic and many deadly mistakes have been made navigating those positions. digital surveillance, which allowed for precise and controlled monitoring of disease vectors, has also set some very dangerous precedents regarding government overreach into editors’ introduction folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv iv personal privacy and data collection on citizen populations. 3e hope that currently unfolding vaccination regimens will prove successful is also bringing with it the perceived threat of “vaccine passports” and other digital and bureaucratic tracking technologies. while such policies may positively curtail viral spread, they may also simultaneously divide societies in harmful ways and infringe on constitutional and human rights. among regular citizens, discrepancies in our work forces between those who could and could not make the move to online functioning and work from home has laid bare clear disparities in socio-economic class. it has also produced a cadre of front-line workers whose proximity to heightened danger has been largely compulsory. strict capacity and masking rules, as well as imposed closures of small and large businesses that rely on in-person attendance (arts venues, cinemas, and restaurants to name a few), will pose an economic toll that we have not yet fully grasped and is already revealing still greater economic disparities [davis 2020]. at the very outset of the pandemic, too, we saw the fear of broken supply chains leading to panic buying of supplies in many countries, which created the very shortages that were, in most cases, never a credible threat. in this environment of uncertainty and stress, our unique position as the story-telling species has led to an explosion of expressive culture and artistic production, the vast majority of which has been digitally mediated. it has, in fact, been difficult to avoid both positive and pernicious folklore throughout the pandemic. ritualized communal cheers have been orchestrated to support medical practitioners [booth et al. 2020], who have responded with tiktok videos of elaborate dance routines [jennings 2020]. pandemic jokes, songs, memes, and anecdotes have been shared across numerous online networks [see images 1, 2, 3, and 4], and folk genres such as sea shanties have seen modern-day revivals in viral online form [smyth 2021]. as people receded into their homes and sheltered in place, many expanded their horizons for digital connection or used the internet to project vernacular messages of support to the world (an overview of the trajectory of english-language folklore over the first months of the pandemic can be found in pennesi [2021]). 3ere has been an antagonistic side to pandemic folklore too. widespread distribution of conspiracy theories and rumors across social media platforms has disseminated misinformation, fear, and mistrust regarding government measure, scientific findings, medical practices and the nature of the coronavirus itself. 3is material has also spawned an expansive proliferation of critical and often hostile ostensive practices—the ways in which people act out legend narratives or rumors in real life [see fine and ellis 2010: 112]. protests against lockdowns, masking rules, and other facets of government pandemic responses have been organized in numerous cities across the globe, while active campaigns to “reveal the pandemic as a fallacy” (for instance, the #filmyourhospital movement [bodner et al. 2021: 57]) have obstructed the functioning of medical systems and imperiled doctors and nurses. various ethnic and racial groups, especially asians, perceived to have played a disproportionate role in the spread of the virus, have the victims of racist editors’ introduction folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv v verbal and physical attacks [human rights watch 2020]. politicians and public figures like bill gates [greenspan 2021] have had elaborate webs of conspiracy theory woven around their intentions and actions in responding to the pandemic. everywhere, government measures for mitigating the spread of the virus have been met with suspicion and distrust, and the ever-present messaging of antivaccination proponents has been taken to their bullhorns, finding a new and receptive audience. from the outset of the pandemic, various commentators began drawing parallels between folk responses to this and past epidemics [foss 2020; klein 2020]. echoes in contemporary lockdown conditions of the plague circumstances which prompted the 100 tales in boccaccio’s decameron became a clichéd topic of academic focus in popular print [cbc 2020; findlen 2020; kungel 2020; marcus 2020; spicer 2020] and even prompted ke new york times to produce a short-story collection called 3e decameron project [new york times 2020]. but it has fallen to folklorists to engage systematically and comprehensively with the vernacular productions that have both responded to and shaped the character and course of this pandemic. we are engaged in this work even as our normal research toolbox has been upended, and many have been forced to navigate the world of exclusively online research [oha 2020]. 3e intrinsic role that folklore serves in image 2. coronaviruses for sale in a slovakian shop window [radio 101 2020] editors’ introduction folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv vi alleviating stress and offering individual and communal vantages to claim a sense of control in times of uncertainty means that its production and dissemination is exponentially increased in conditions like the current pandemic. as maribel alvarez [2020] has so succinctly stated “folkorists are the archivists of the art of coping.” now, more than ever, it has become critical for folklorists to take part in the public and professional dialogues surrounding vernacular production and cultural movements vis-à-vis the pandemic, and we have had our hands full. at the time of this writing (in the early months of 2021) there have already been numerous online and print efforts to document this folklore in its nascence, to capture some essence of the scope and form of these manifestations, to trace the traditional aspects that have been re-packaged, reinvigorated, or completely remade in this novel pandemic, and to respond to the function and importance of these expressions. a series of university departments, institutes, and archives, as well as folklore associations and centers, have established collection projects to gather submissions of vernacular responses to the pandemic or to present academic analyses of such collected material. 3ese include the university of aberdeen’s elphinstone institute archive’s “lockdown lore collection project” [university of aberdeen 2020], cork folklore project’s “chronicles of covid-19” [cork folklore project 2021], 3e digital archives of latvian folklore’s “diaries in the time of pandemic 2020-2021” [garamantas 2020], and image 3. romanian cucii mummers distributing metaphoric vaccines in brănești, ilfov county [cucii din branesti 2021] editors’ introduction folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv vii unesco’s “call for submissions about experiences related to intangible cultural heritage during the pandemic” [unesco 2020]. sites aimed at critical professional analysis, collection and tracking of pandemic folklore have also been created, including the encyclopedia of coronavirus rumors and fakes created by 3e laboratory for 3eoretical folkloristics at 3e russian presidential academy of national economy and public administration’s [rpanepa 2020. see kononenko’s report in this issue]. numerous folklorists have been active in public outreach during the pandemic, penning articles for various online and print publications aimed at nonacademic audiences. examples of these have been too numerous to cite [see, for example, bock 2020; deutsch 2020]. however, special attention should be drawn to the range of materials disseminated by long-time anti-vaxx, conspiracy theory, and rumor scholar andrea kitta [east carolina university 2020; kitta 2020; 3urston 2019], whose latest book, ke kiss of death: contamination, contagion, and folklore [2019], was published at a surprisingly opportune moment. 3is serendipity allowed for a normal book publicity plan to serve as an opportunity for critical public outreach. 3ough her book is not focused directly on covid19, it deals with a number of topics regarding social responses to disease that have become exceedingly salient in the pandemic. given current circumstances, the book’s author and publisher, utah state university press, have offered a digital version of the text for free download on the press’ website for a limited time [upc/usup 2020]. eliot borenstein’s ke plots against russia: conspiracy and fantasy after socialism [2019] and two other texts spearheaded by anastasiya astapova, conspiracy keories in eastern europe: tropes and trends [astapova et al. 2021a] and conspiracy keories and the nordic countries [astapova et al. 2021b], also center on conspiracy theories and feature a regional focus of particular interest to folklorica’s readers. all three of these books provide an impressive breadth of analysis regarding past and current conspiracy thinking in eastern and northern europe. 3ese volumes, too, went to press before covid19’s arrival, but much of the vernacular background against which coronavirus lore is currently being integrated in europe is explored by the books’ authors. finally, a series of important folklore publications that emerged from the covid-19 pandemic itself have already begun to hit presses or wend their way through peer review. most notable to date has been a series of works specifically targeting the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories through, predominantly, online channels of social media. 3e misinformation review at harvard’s kennedy school published a special issue on the pandemic in the summer of 2020 [mcginty and gyenes 2020], offering a series of articles tracing the development of a diverse range of phenomena surrounding the spread of conspiracy theories and online misinformation in the pandemic. topics covered include the psychology that informs most online sharing and the unique role served by news and social media in spreading misinformation about covid-19. elsewhere, timothy tangherlini and his computational folkloristics team at university of california, berkeley have continued their work into the generative editors’ introduction folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv viii modeling of contemporary legends, conspiracy theories and other lore during the pandemic. 3ey have produced some exceptional recent works that explore the transmission patterns and structural make-up of legends, conspiracy theories, and other pandemic, and pre-pandemic lore [tangherlini et al. 2020; tangherlini and roychowdhury 2020]. image 4. “healthy and happy easter” by polish cartoonist waldemar rukść. kis cartoon of the easter spirit driving away covid-19 circulated widely on eastern european facebook pages in spring 2021. [rukść 2021] 3e final months of 2020 brought us covid-19 conspiracy keories: qanon, 5g, the new world order and other viral ideas, a book penned by a team of scholars including folklorists jon bodner, wendy welch, and ian brodie [bodner et al. 2021]. from qanon and pizzagate to 5g towers and the political art of ben garrison, the book provides an exhaustive explanation of the way that pandemic lore has settled into, built upon, and developed existing north american vernacular conspiracy culture. 3e book will stand as a hallmark folklore text of this pandemic. more recently, the bulgarian academy of science has produced an edited volume, етнология и епидемии социокултурни измерения на пандемията от covid-19 [ethnology and epidemics: sociocultural dimensions of the covid-19 pandemic] [baeva and ilieva 2021]. 3is text presents a wide sweep of the social and cultural implications of the pandemic in bulgaria, including important contributions from ethnologists, musicologists, and editors’ introduction folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv ix folklorists, and is available for free digital download [pmdphobas 2021]. we also soon expect to see additions to this research, including ben bridges, ross brillhard, and diane e. goldstein’s edited volume behind the mask: vernacular culture in the time of covid-19 [bridges et al., forthcoming] and a multidisciplinary volume on covid play edited by anna beresin and julia bishop [anthropology of children 2021]. in addition, folklore collectives and journals such as journal of the american folklore society, contemporary legend, city lore, and cultural analysis have all issued calls for submissions on pandemic lore for special issues or other publications. into this mix we submit this special edition of our journal. from the earliest months of the pandemic, we at folklorica followed the dramatic and abundant production of covid-19 related memes, songs, jokes, conspiracy theories, legends, and other lore that was issuing from the areas of the world under our purview. discussions in may of 2020 among seefa’s executive board produced a call for papers in july that has engendered the present volume. with our special issue, we wanted to gather submissions from scholars who were tracking the inchoate and tumultuous early vernacular responses to the pandemic in eastern europe and eurasia. we welcomed experimental, tentative, and inprogress research in the form of both articles and reports. our goal was to take an early scholarly snap-shot of how eastern europe and related and neighboring areas were experiencing and reacting to the pandemic from the initial spread on european shores in early march until the late summer, when pandemic measures had reached their most stringent form in many countries. we hope that this volume will add to the discussions currently being held in folklore circles about manifestations of pandemic folklore by representing a specific region of the world with a unique history influenced by its geographic location at the border between europe and asia and its largely post-imperial and post-socialist heritages. moreover, the most notable works assessing covid-19 folklore produced to date have concentrated heavily on the pernicious, antagonistic, or anti-authority positions taken by people in various parts of the world, particularly in north america. 3e discussions surrounding those movements are of critical importance to understanding the climate of the pandemic and recent trends in global politics. most assuredly, those currents of expressive culture are explored by many of the submissions presented in this special issue. however, many of our authors have also explored the positive, supportive, generative, and beneficent aspects of covid-19 folklore—vernacular attempts to support public health services, calm nervous populations, and entertain the common people in both lockdown and frontline work environments. 3e articles in this issue have emerged from research on the folklore of the pandemic in east slavic traditions (russia, rusyns in carpathia, and ukraine), in south slavic traditions (bulgaria, bosnia-herzegovina, croatia, montenegro, and serbia), as well as in diaspora among many peoples from eastern europe and eurasia. 3ey represent all the major areas of our discipline: material culture, oral lore, and practices. we have organized the articles to capture these disciplinary editors’ introduction folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv x relationships, beginning with two pieces on material culture, followed by two on narrative and song, and finally by two on practices as endorsed by charismatic leaders. as we have discussed, folklorists faced challenges as well as benefits from the forced curtailment of planned fieldwork. many of the authors had their research plans change suddenly but were able to pivot when a serendipitous topic related to coronavirus lore fell into their laps. we can relate to this dilemma. jeanmarie’s three planned trips to russia to wrap up research for a book manuscript on holy springs were put on hold, while dorian was forced to forgo two planned trips to croatia and bosnia-herzegovina to begin his postdoctoral fieldwork on the migrant crisis. jeanmarie responded by shifting her attention to two projects on north american folklore of the pandemic: one on the vernacular response to the kentucky governor as a legendary hero of the pandemic (forthcoming in the contemporary legend special issue on pandemic folklore) and another on pandemic pet adoption. dorian took another tack; he relied on “remote” fieldwork, gathering new songs from the internet and followed up by online interviews with the bards who sang them to produce his article for this volume. sarah craycraft was in the field when the lockdown was imposed in bulgaria. her planned trips to study village-based projects that foster intergenerational connections among the urban and rural populace were cancelled. however, her previous work on this topic allowed her to proceed with a virtual ethnography project on how these organizations themselves retooled to serve another purpose entirely during the early months of the pandemic: to provide solace and support to fellow citizens. drawing on established networks and their existing online presence, two of these groups made a point of using the internet to connect with the village elderly to check in on them virtually after physical visits had been curtailed. 3ese villagers, in turn, responded by sharing their folklife, as they would have with the visitors, but with a goal to assuage concerns about the pandemic. 3ey shared secrets of medicinal plants and how to make traditional bulgarian dishes or crafts (as well as songs and stories). as craycraft demonstrates, these folk practices, having been preserved (in part as a result of these groups’ efforts), came to the fore during the pandemic to provide much needed solace. we have seen many similar examples of foodways serving this purpose in the north american context, but the villagers’ efforts went beyond perfecting bread baking while stuck at home. 3ese women represent fortitude in the face of a crisis, living as they do in remote villages, and they conveyed care through the power of vernacular knowledge about objects and practices to their fellow (largely urban) bulgarians. katya chomitzky presents a similar picture in her study of facemasks with traditional ukrainian embroidery techniques both in ukraine and among the ukrainian diaspora. certainly, the masks themselves are designed for protection from the virus, but, as she documents, the addition of motifs from traditional embroidery gave them added benefit as a “protective talisman.” just as the bulgarian women shared their secrets about healing plants, these women used editors’ introduction folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv xi natural elements, such as flowers, in their decorations to access the restorative power of the plants themselves. as in the bulgarian situation, the masks, like other embroidered items, convey an important sense of identity about being ukrainian, a pride in the cultural heritage and its preservation. buying the masks also supported the community financially in a difficult time. chomitzky’s data from both mask producers and wearers demonstrates the power of folklore to tap into various resonances of identity, often simultaneously: from politics to heritage (be it national, ethnic, or regional) to folk healing practices. recognizing the performative function of material culture, whether bulgarian food videos online or ukrainian masks, is key to understanding the power of these messages to group members. elena boudovskaia’s material also centers on the intersection of politics— local, national, and, in some cases, international—and local identity among rusyns in ukraine. 3e narratives she collected from this region reveal first the persistence of pattern in narrative. covid-19 stories were not novel or unique, but rather conform to established story types about death and illness in the village tradition. while bulgarian and ukrainian material culture served as protection from the virus, these narrators relied on protective language by avoiding speaking about the afterlife or about death itself. more importantly, as boudovskaia shows, the stories convey an understanding of proper behavior in the village and in the family. 3e narratives serve as a means of negotiation for the tellers, who are coping with shifting village demographics, the vagaries of national politics— including the lack of concern for the average person, especially those in rural parts of the country—and personal and communal loss as a result of the pandemic. 3e stories allow a space both to criticize improper behavior and to reaffirm the power of local values and ways of life. stories then open a window onto family and village practices, but boudovskaia’s work also reveals how storytelling can reframe the conversation and create reality in and of itself. dorian jurić’s bards similarly have the power to establish a state of affairs in the world. in their chronicle songs about the pandemic, produced between march and may 2020, they presented a united front: conveying solidarity in the face of crisis. despite holding different political views, these bards urged people to come together and join with the government and medical authorities to defeat the virus. 3ey drew on the martial characteristics of a rich epic tradition to describe the battle against the coronavirus. however, in interviews with the author, they revealed the complexity of their opinions, many of which were not conveyed in the songs themselves. unlike boudovskaia’s interlocutors, these men are in the public eye and, as the voice of the people, they walk a fine line. 3e bard, as a result, is bound to take the authorities to task for failing the people. however, expressing critical opinions about government actions during a pandemic may result in harm to others and threaten their social standing as defenders of the folk in the long run. jurić demonstrates how these singers strove to balance these contradictory roles at a time of crisis in an effort to protect fellow citizens. editors’ introduction folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv xii iryna voloshyna studies another sort of “defender of the folk” entirely. in the context of new york city, among the diaspora, she discovered that the popular alternative physician anatoly kashpirovsky had reemerged during the pandemic. in the context of a revival of the “cold war” and a nostalgia for a lost socialist “golden age,” the 90s cult figure was once again receiving a great deal of attention in an online environment. he purported to have a cure for the virus and was willing to sell it. voloshyna demonstrates how kashpirovsky, despite his claims to be a scientist and medical doctor, draws upon the traditions of folk healing. his patients respond in kind, ascribing to him a kind of mystical power that goes well beyond that of the typical physician. a doctor who draws on both medical and vernacular expertise, as ekaterina belousova [1998] has shown, is particularly powerful in the post-socialist east slavic cultural context. kashpirovsky’s defense of the common folk, unlike the south slavic bards, did not include defending them from possible harm from conspiracy theories about the virus. rather, he tapped into rhetoric about the west’s goal to destroy russia by creating the virus itself. while such rumors spread about china in the north american context, in the view of this “cold warrior” at least, the true enemy was america. he simultaneously capitalized on anxiety and dissatisfaction about the russian government by challenging the safety of the sputnik v vaccine. in other words, only he could be trusted to defend the people from the nefarious plans of the authorities. while alternative medicine may be the solution for kashpirovosky’s adherents, j. eugene clay offers up another option for those facing the pandemic crisis: russian orthodoxy. in a profile of the apostate monk sergii (romanov), former abbot of the ganina iama monastery near ekaterinburg, clay explores how sergii has used his extraordinary social standing to support anti-western conspiracy theories supposedly intended to destroy russia as well as the belief that stalin was a secret christian. ultimately, his insubordination against church authorities in the face of covid-19 restrictions on religious services resulted in his arrest by special forces and excommunication by the russian orthodox church. while the pandemic is but a brief chapter in sergii’s biography, clay illustrates how a chain of conspiracy beliefs espoused by this conservative cleric parallels developments in russia broadly and in the conservative wing of the russian orthodox church in particular. sergii’s path from a convicted murderer to a charismatic church leader (the subject of two popular documentaries with his own youtube channel) and back to prisoner illustrates the power of folk narrative and vernacular belief. legends served as the hallmark of sergii’s personal philosophy, and he relied on them to capitalize on disaffection with the current state of affairs in russia to enhance his own position. he ties those beliefs to faith in russian orthodoxy, encouraging both (secular) belief and ostensive behaviors on the part of the laity to engage in practices consonant with these stories, e.g., to persist in celebrating mass and taking communion throughout the pandemic. despite his popularity, he finally overstepped in his conspiratorial response to the pandemic. 3is article reveals striking parallels to the development of conspiracy theories espoused by qanon [cf. bodner et al. 2020] and reminds us that the crisis editors’ introduction folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv xiii of faith in institutions and the culture wars are far from restricted to north america. in that vein, the issue rounds out with a report by natalie kononenko on a web database compiled by members of the laboratory for 3eoretical folklore studies at the russian presidential academy of national economy and public administration in moscow. she presents an overview of the materials on the site, both the texts themselves and the analyses offered by the team. 3is piece will be especially useful for those without russian-language skills, but who want to trace textual variants of particular narratives in non-english contexts. while we have organized the articles based primarily on the genre of folklore they study (although, in some cases, the pieces are not limited to only one genre), there are several recurring themes that cross these genre (or, indeed, national) boundaries. not surprisingly, in a pandemic context, questions of vernacular medicine come to the fore in several of the pieces. while craycraft discusses how women shared knowledge of natural remedies with fellow citizens in bulgaria, voloshyna highlights the interaction of biomedicine and vernacular healing in her study of anatoly kashpirovsky. although kashpirovsky may have discovered an actual treatment for the virus, the aim of vernacular medicine is not always cure, but prevention and protection, a theme explored by craycraft, boudovskaia and chomitzky. kononenko provides examples of both treatments and prevention attested in the web database of the laboratory for 3eoretical folklore studies. prevention, of course, is not always against physical illness, but against spiritual threats or curses. boudovskaia, in her discussion of euphemisms, and clay, in his mention of the belief that communion could not infect the faithful, touch on this topic as well. protection indeed is the common factor of the charismatic figures profiled in the articles by clay, jurić, and voloshyna. 3ese powerful men, despite their vastly distinct social roles, tap into the human desire for security in the wake of a crisis through vernacular practice and oral folklore. in that vein, these men also reveal why citizens of these various nations feel so precarious in the first place. certainly, the pandemic plays a role in the fear, but the underlying concerns center on institutional failures—be they the failures of governmental, medical, or religious institutions. 3ese same themes are echoed in the village narratives and material culture that boudovskaia, craycraft and chomitzky discuss. 3is issue demonstrates clearly what folklorists already know and struggle to convey to those outside the field: the power of vernacular culture to provide solace and make sense of the world. in some cases, folklore holds the answer for us, be it in the form of a talismanic face mask or of a traditional song. engaging with the material is enough to give people hope and restore a sense of order. in other cases, folklore gives voice to human concerns but provides little relief. legends, rumors and conspiracy theories, in particular, grapple with the nature of reality and our anxiety about it. in many cases, though, they only exacerbate our concerns, rather than assuage them. nevertheless, these narratives do not disappear, because they offer a space to debate these (often taboo) fears about our editors’ introduction folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv xiv daily lives and social ills. all too clearly 2020 has revealed the power of folklore to those outside our field. while unfortunately many may not realize that fake news and bread baking are the purview of the discipline, they have paid much more attention to core material in folkloristics, both to bring comfort and to destabilize social order. folklorists have long studied both aspects of vernacular culture and recognize both its power to harm and to heal. in that vein, this issue adds the voice of the slavic, east european, and eurasian nations to the conversation. we hope it likewise demonstrates the importance of folk studies to an understanding of the covid-19 pandemic not only in this region of the world, but across the globe. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby, editor dorian jurić, guest co-editor bibliography alvarez, maribel. 2020. “folklife in the age of pandemics,” border lore. cited by https://borderlore.org/folklife-in-the-age-of-pandemics/. (consulted 21 january 2021). anthropology of children and youth interest group. 2021. american anthropology association. cited by https://acyig.americananthro.org/2021/05/05/seeking-chapter-submissionsfor-covid-play-academic-volume/. (consulted 3 july 2021). arredy, james t. 2020. “china rules out animal market and lab as coronavirus origin,” ke wall street journal. cited by https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-rules-out-animal-market-and-lab-ascoronavirus-origin-11590517508. (consulted 10 december 2020). astapova, anastasiya, onoriu colăcel, corneliu pintilescu, and tamás scheibner, (eds.). 2021. conspiracy keories in eastern europe: tropes and trends 1st ed. london: routledge. astapova, anastasiya, eirikur bergmann, asbjørn dyrendal, annika rabo, kasper grotle rasmussen, hulda 3órisdóttir, andreas önnerfors. 2021. conspiracy keories and the nordic countries. london: routledge. baeva vihra, and angelina ilieva (eds.). 2021. етнология и епидемии социокултурни измерения на пандемията от covid-19 [ethnology and epidemics: sociocultural dimensions of the covid-19 pandemic]. sofia: издателство на бан „проф. марин дринов“. belousova, ekaterina. a. 1998. белоусова, екатерина а. “наш малыш: социализация новорожденного в современной городской культуре” [our kid: socialization of the newborn in contemporary urban culture], живая старина 2: 24-25. editors’ introduction folklorica 2020, vol. xxiv xv bock, sheila. 2020. “deliberate infectors & exotic origins: 3e folklore behind covid-19,” unlv new center. cited by https://www.unlv.edu/news/article/deliberate-infectors-exotic-originsfolklore-behind-covid-19. (consulted 22 february 2021). bodner, john, wendy welch, ian brodie, anna muldoon, donal leech, and ashley marshall. 2021. covid-19 conspiracy keories: qanon, 5g, the new world order and other viral ideas. jefferson, nc: mcfarland & company. booth, william, karla adam, and pamela rolfe. 2020. “in fight against coronavirus, the world gives medical heroes a standing ovation,” ke washington post. cited by https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/clap-forcarers/2020/03/26/3d05eb9c-6f66-11ea-a156-0048b62cdb51_story.html. (consulted 28 march 2021). borenstein, eliot. 2019. ke plots against russia: conspiracy and fantasy after socialism. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. bridges, ben, ross brillhard, and diane e. goldstein. forthcoming. behind the mask: vernacular culture in the time of covid-19. bloomington, in: trickster press. cbc (canadian broadcast corporation). 2020. “how this anthropologist found inspiration and quarantine comfort in a 700-year-old book,” canadian broadcast corporation. cited by https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/storiesare-soul-fire-1.5800701/how-this-anthropologist-found-inspiration-andquarantine-comfort-in-a-700-year-old-book1.5801359?fbclid=iwar2lf8mdwrhok5fve6p3uo6yoo8_e3wzr42bo suxzg72a3-6lfsnb9e0puw. (consulted 13 november 2020). cork folklore project. 2021. “chronicles of covid-19,” cork folklore project. cited by https://corkfolklore.org/3epeoplesarchiveofcovid19/s/chronicles-ofcovid-19-ireland-2020-beyond/page/home. (consulted 20 march 2021). cucii din branesti. 2021. “unnamed image of cucii with vaccines,” facebook. cited by https://www.facebook.com/cuciidinbranesti/photos/pcb.37597736340763 20/3759772370743113. (consulted 17 march 2021). davis, wade. 2020. “3e unraveling of america. anthropologist wade davis on how covid-19 signals the end of the american era,” rolling stone. cited by https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/covid-19end-of-american-era-wade-davis1038206/?fbclid=iwar2yvzh3fmft8zwov960rxpn4m607xdnpzrpco 5-bvk-jkw1ey1joo059bg. (consulted 6 august 2020). deutsch, james. 2020. “3e values—and dangers—of folklore during a global pandemic,” smithsonian center for folklife & cultural heritage. cited by https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/values-dangers-of-folklore-globalpandemic. 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(consulted 30 november 2020). witches, wise people, and werewolves witches, wise people and werewolves folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 1 articles witches, wise people, and werewolves: traditional supernatural powers and popular attitudes toward their bearers among carpatho-rusyns in ukraine elena boudovskaia georgetown university washington, usa abstract this article explores the attitudes of the inhabitants of one village in the zakarpats’ka oblast’ of ukraine towards the bearers of supernatural powers. on the basis of my own fieldwork, i describe several supernatural powers known to people in the village: milk-stealing, performed by women; self-protection against attacks; and turning husbands into wolves. attitudes are shaped by one core value: fairness; the villagers strongly resent unfair usage of supernatural powers against those who cannot protect themselves. however, story characters who use such powers responsibly in self-defense and restore the status quo to punish aggressors are exonerated from blame by story-tellers and their audiences. in daily life, people do not like to be associated with supernatural forces for fear of being accused of using them unfairly. introduction while folklore is a window into the worldview of a culture, analysis depends on the nature of the collected text. for example, texts published in collections of carpatho-rusyn tales often represent the literary standards of the collector rather than the actual performance, which would include the reactions of performers and listeners. (1) capturing these elements allows one to understand much more about the culture, its attitudes and values. (2) this paper attempts to describe the attitudes and values of carpatho-rusyn village culture conveyed in performances of stories about people with supernatural powers. rusyns, or carpatho-rusyns, are a recognized minority in slovakia, serbia, and some other countries of eastern europe; in ukraine their status is dubious. their language belongs to the east slavic group (3), and a number of regional varieties exist. (4) the recordings that form the basis of this article were made in in the village of novoselycja, zakarpattja region, mižhir’ja district, ukraine. some were recorded in 1987 and others between 2011-2016. most stories and motifs that i have recorded are known in the carpathian area and elsewhere. (5) i recorded not only stories, but entire sessions and, therefore, i have a vast collection of performers’ and listeners’ comments on texts and character behaviors. analyzing this material is similar to reading the comments section of a newspaper article published online; a comment and its replies resemble a folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 2 conversation, and the attitudes of the community members are revealed. of course, attitudes strongly depend on individual people’s personalities; nevertheless, certain patterns can be found. the attitudes of people encountering supernatural forces reveal a great deal about their understanding of themselves and the world. stories about people with supernatural powers center on the idea of fairness; magical properties serve to punish and prevent unfair use of power by other members of the social group (6), while the unfair usage of magic to the disadvantage of non-magical people is controlled by gossip. if an offense happens, the ideal outcome is for offenders, threatened by magic on the one hand and guided by the society on the other, and given an opportunity to repair the damage done, cede their unfair gains and apologize to victims. this is the ultimate goal for dealing with both non-magical and magical offense as expressed in these stories. interestingly, that goal, known also to other cultures without a state-supported justice system, has recently been introduced as an alternative to western criminal justice system under the name of “restorative justice” (see below for discussion). types of characters: witches and milk below is the text of a story told in 2012 by a man in his late 80s. i also heard it from several other people in the village. the story is about one of the most common types of supernatural activities: stealing milk from other people’s cows by using magic. the speaker told two such stories without pausing; i chose to present only one of them in the interest of space. 1. girl milking a rope (7) 207 | дру́га бы́ла при́чта | бы́в чôлôві́к ві́н уже́ уме́р давно́ і сêмья́ його́ поумира́ла | чôлôві́к бы́в | сам | но тай сêмья́ у но́го бы́ла яка́сь | тре́ба бы́ло слу́жниці допомо́гы | there was another incident. there was a man, he died already a long time ago, and his family died since. he was there, and he had a family, so he needed a female servant, 0208 обы гна́ла коро́вы па́сти ци шчốсь обы жôні́ помочи́ | і пішốв ная́в сôбі́ дếсь туды́ в за́вицьці ци в ті́тківци ци у при́слôпі ді́вочку | віддани́чку | помага́ти за слу́жницю су́хыр | ... | | тай прийшốв тай привью́в | пішла́ тота́ дойи́ти коро́вы уже́ so that she could herd his cows or help his wife. and he went and hired himself somewhere in zavydka or titkovec’ or in pryslip, a girl of a marriageable age, to help as a servant. suxŷr was his name. [...] so he brought her home. she went to milk cows, witches, wise people and werewolves folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 3 0209 не бде́ йти́ хôзя́йка дойи́ти кôрốв[у] бо є́ ́слу́жниця ді́вочка така́ пітхôдя́шча шчо за коро́вы зна́є дойи́ти тай до́бре знає дойи́ти пішла́ дойи́ти коро́вы | айбо она́ надойи́ла бі́льше | тоты́ коро́вы ни́ґда ті́лько молока́ не дава́ли гі она́ роздойи́ла | йốй гốй | чу́дуют ся шчо́ то́то хôзяі́н уже́ і тота́ хôзя́йка шчо́ то тако́є мо́же бы́ти чôму́ тото́…мы́ не додо́йовали коро́вы ци шчо́ | ге | ка́жут ї я́к тото́ ка́жут ты́ бі́льше молока́ надойи́ла гі я́ надо́йовала | пішла́ тота́ дойи́ти | уже́ не слу́жниця ай пішла́ сама́ хôзя́йка дойи́ти | та де́ | тото́ молоко́ шчо і бы́ло у нêї́ | того́ ниє́ ́шчо ді́вка заноси́ла | на́чали сьліткова́ти за тốв | ді́вкôв | як пішла́ коро́вы дойи́ти | захốдят са́мо тако́ | кра́цьці диви́т | а она́ са́мо ож мôтузо́к через ґеренду́ пове́рла в ста́йни тай пітста́вила відро́ тай | до́йит | молоко́ тече́ | the wife won’t milk cows already if there is a servant, a good girl that knows how to milk cows. but she [the girl] got more milk, the cows never gave so much milk as she got from them. the man and his wife are surprised, how could it be, maybe we did not milk cows well enough, or what. well, they tell her, how come you got more milk than i used to get? she went to milk the cows, already not this servant girl, but the wife there is again only the amount of milk that she used to get, and that is less than the girl got. so, they started to watch after the girl. when she went to milk cows, they come to the shed, secretly, and they see she threw a rope over the main beam and put a bucket under it, and milks the rope! and the milk flows! 0210 зане́сла до хы́жи но небо́го | льльи го ка́же ци свиня́м ци быко́ви | і забира́й ся та йди́ сôбі ́дôмці́ з бо́гом | мêні́ такы́х слу́жниць не тре́ба | обы́ мôтузо́к шчо молоко́ з ньо́го тече́ | she brought it into the house, and [he] says hey, pour it to the pigs or to the bull, and go home, i don’t need a servant like you that milks a rope. milk from one’s own cow has long been a major food staple in the rusyn culture. if a cow starts giving less milk, or the milk contains less fat than before, people often blame a witch who is stealing milk by magic. it is clear for any bearer of the village culture that milk (magically) flowing from a rope does not come from nowhere; it must come from someone else’s cow. stories like this one are very common; they are a large part of many storytellers’ repertoires, including folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 4 this storyteller who told two of them in sequence. stealing milk is the main harm brought about by a witch, bosorkan’a, a female carrier of supernatural powers. stealing milk by magic is always considered bad, because it robs someone else of sustenance and dooms them to poverty and hunger while the witch profits. in and of itself, this practice goes against the grain of the peasant “subsistence ethic” [scott 1976], which considers it moral to ensure the right to enough food for survival to all members of the community. this community share is ensured through an elaborate network of technical and social arrangements. stealing food is a grievous offense in village life. furthermore, depriving people of subsistence by magic is especially unfair, because people without magic abilities cannot protect themselves. in this story, the head of the household displays a common attitude towards magical milk stealing: he could have benefitted from getting more milk from his cow, but he does not want to associate with a wielder of these forces. indignation and disgust are common attitudes shared by everybody in the village who mentioned milk stealing. the only thing people can say in favor of a person accused of milk stealing is “maybe it is someone else, not her.” on the contrary, expressions of negative attitudes are widespread and various. when a victim goes for help to a wise person (see below) to discover who the witch was, the wise person can offer the victim choices: damage to or even the death of the witch, harm to the witch’s cattle, or simply identification of the witch. the gravity of the options are a clear indication of how people feel towards a person who steals their milk. my interlocutors reported that they chose to identify the witch, but not everybody might be so generous. the identity of a witch may be discovered unintentionally. for example, villagers might maim a toad or a dog who had strayed into their cowshed. the next day when a woman is found dead or with similar injuries, people might then believe that she was actually a witch. i heard many such stories in novoselycja (they are generally common in the east slavic tradition and elsewhere), and neither story-tellers nor listeners have ever shown sympathy for the injured woman. if they commented at all, they would state that she got her just desserts. witches’ magic abilities are also said to interfere with the normal transition from life to death. women who steal milk are reported not to be able to die until they transfer their powers to someone else. when they finally die, they cannot take the stolen milk with them, so that it pours out of their eyes, nose, and ears. when the transition to the other world finally happens, witches receive punishment there. in one story i collected in novoselycja in 2012, told by a female teller in her 70s, a woman has been asked by her daughter why she has a lot of butter, but the daughter has little. the woman throws a piece of her butter in a river, where frogs and snakes consume it. the mother tells the daughter devils in hell will tear apart her soul in the same way, because she gets her butter through witchcraft. the woman could have taught her daughter to magically increase the fat content of her cows’ milk too, but she chose not to, protecting her daughter’s soul from suffering in the afterlife. the connection between milk stealing and suffering in hell is clear, as demonstrated for the naive daughter, but it is common knowledge in the village, as these stories (and others i have collected) witches, wise people and werewolves folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 5 demonstrate. negative attitudes to milk stealing are so pervasive in the culture that even children become frightened when they believe they have witnessed witchcraft. below is a vivid childhood memory of a woman born in 1936, recorded in 2012, some seventy years after the actual encounter, and her comments: 2. children see a woman doing witchcraft | а я́ рас скота́рила невели́ка я бы́ла шчế дітвако́м | та то́же на сяко́є ся́то | мы скота́рили | тай ви́диме | йде́ жона́ | зави́та у вила́х | та́к шчо ї́ не ви́тко ге́т вила́х до | до то́го | іде́ та усе́ | усе́ схы́лить_ ся та де́ коро́ва ста́ла та сь_ сліда́ бере́ | гли́ны | та ду́маю сôбі́ го́споди а мы́ ті́чеме бо мы́ ся боіме́ | ді́ты | а тêпếрь си ду́маю о́споди ко бы́ла тото́ | мні́ ннếсь та та́к была м ї іма́ла та та́к бы́ла я бы́ла ї подиви́ла шчо тото́ за она́ | and once i herded cattle, i was little, still a child, and [it was] also on a holiday, we herded cattle, and [we] see, there goes a woman wrapped in a homemade cloth, so that one cannot see her at all, the cloth is up to... there... [she] walking and all the time [she] bending where a cow stood and, from the footprint, [she] takes clay. and [i] think to myself ‘oh, my god.’ and we run away because we are scared, children. (8) and now i think – ‘oh, my god, if i were... had i met her today, i would have caught her and i would have seen who she was. this excerpt demonstrates the range of feelings, both as a child and as an adult, at witnessing activities associated with milk stealing: children get scared, while a more powerful adult woman feels indignation and is ready to expose, and possibly punish, the witch. another thing witches can do is transfer disorders such as plač (persistent night-time crying) from their own babies or children to other people’s children. to transfer plač, witches bring bathwater used on their own child and pour it onto the patch of ground lit by a light from the window of a house where another baby lives. here again, they do magic for selfish gain, while subjecting unsuspecting people without magic powers to harm. even worse, the spell is directed toward babies. people might know who has harmed their child (especially if the suspect had a child of her own who reportedly had been crying previously), but sometimes they have no clue. however, usually knowledge of who the offender is does not help to cure the condition. even though sometimes people ask the suspected witch to take the plač back, she typically denies the accusation. curing plač is painstaking business involving a number of possible remedies (such as washing the child with water where a certain number of live coals have been extinguished, or washing the child with rainwater that drips from the roof, etc. all with appropriate spells), and it does not always work. therefore, attitudes toward folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 6 witches who make others’ children sick are no better than attitudes toward those who steal milk from cows; in fact, these witches are particularly resented. despite the dismay associated with witchcraft in general, there are also grey areas. most people agree there are women (and even men), who bring bad luck if they cross one’s path—they are called nedọbri na perexid ‘bad for crossing.’ not all agree whether this is an innate quality or the result of some event, e.g., some say that if a person has been weaned twice, s/he might acquire this trait. there is also disagreement about intention: perhaps a person just cannot prevent the bad luck or perhaps people curse others out of spite. the term ‘witch’ (bosorkan’a) is usually not applied to these people. if a person with specific powers, or even without any recognizable powers, looks at someone with malevolence or envy, they might inadvertently jinx that person. one can take preventative measures against a curse, such as putting a safety pin in child’s clothes or wearing something red, but even if one suspects someone, one cannot tell whether they were jinxed purposefully or not. stealing milk or transferring plač, on the other hand, cannot happen involuntarily; both require ill will and a series of intentional acts. thus, a witch is evil; she does these two things with a distinct intent to harm. in addition, her magical abilities give her an unfair advantage over others. evil intent and unfair advantage are why these activities, and the people who perform them, invoke such distinct, strong, negative feelings. wise people luckily, there are other types of people with supernatural abilities: the wise men or women [mudri l’ude / žonŷ]. below is a story recorded in 2014, coperformed by two people, a 89-year old woman (hk) and her 54-year old adopted son (is). it is from the repertoire of the deceased dido [old man], hk’s husband and is’ adoptive father, who was known a good story-teller. 3. “the old man and the builders” 211:42 гк і ді́до наш | е славу́ників | славу́ник | hk: and our old man [told us], [there was this one,] from the family of slavunyk. 211:43 коли́ на рôпу́ ходи́ли | но тай йшли́ | на рôпу́ | он туды́ гет за ху́ст | на рôпу́ давно́ з бочка́ми сякы́ми ходи́ли та | іс у соло́твино | гк ісь_ кін́ьми | а іс у соло́твино once he went to get the brine, they were riding there, beyond khust. long ago, when they went to get brine, they took barrels like these. is: to solotvyno. hk: in horse-drawn carts. is: to solotvyno. witches, wise people and werewolves folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 7 гк но та йшли́ ві́тты | а будова́ли | хы́жу лю́́де | но тай ішли́ тай | ра́с кốні ста́ли | і кốні не піду́т | іс на мі́сьці ся тốпчут | гк на мі́сьці ся то́пчут і | віш́та ві́шта ві́шта ай кốні не піду́т | на мі́сьці ся то́пчут | а якы́сь там бы́в | ка́же а ну́ | ка́же іди́ та принеси́ ми ка́же | тріс́ку | ві́тты з будо́вы | но | тай па́к | ді́дови тôту́ трі́ску тот приніс́ | но тай ді́до шчốсь я́ не зна́ю шчо там уже́ роби́в | і | ді́до | ві́шта | і кốні пішли́ | і | ді́до іде́ | hk: so, they went from there, and people were building a house, and they were passing by this house, and there, the horses stopped and wouldn’t go on. is: they were stamping their feet, but not moving, stamping in place. hk: they were stamping their feet, but not moving, stamping in place. [people said:] ‘gee! but the horses wouldn’t go, they were stamping their feet in place.’ and there was this man there [in the cart with the brine party], and he says, ‘go and bring me a sliver. from there, from the building site.’ and he brought the old man that sliver, and the old man did something, i don’t know what he was doing there, and then he said: ‘gee!’ and the horses started moving. and the old man is riding, 211:44 ту́й | гốйкают із за́ду | чека́йте чека́йте чека́... а ді́до шчи́ май кốні | ру́шат | о́бы | кốні | ішли́ | ага́ | но та па́к | іс ди́вит ай чôлôвіќ біжи́т із за́ду | гк чôлôвіќ біжи́т біжи́т дога́нят | но́ тай | ді́до уже́ ма́ло хốтів | і пôмуштрова́ти то́го | ты́х | тай | ді́до уже́ ста́в | а шчо́ є шчо́ | ді́до такы́й му | шчо́ є шчо́ | йốй ка́же бі́йте ся бо́[га] | ка́же | чôлôві́к ка́же | ци пôруба́в ся ци уми́(і)рат | шчốсь тако́є | ага́ | но ка́же но іди́ іди́ ка́же | ни́ч му ка́же не бде́ ка́же | но обы́ сьте ка́же бі́льш ка́же тако́є не роби́ли ка́же | ді́до пôві́в | тай ді́до шчốзь_ зна́в і | and here someone is yelling from behind “wait, wait, wait!’ and the old man makes his horses run faster, so that they run. and then... is: they look, and a man is running towards them from behind. hk: a man is running after them, and catches up with them. the old man wanted to teach them a lesson. so, the old man stopped his horses: ‘what is it?’ that’s what the old man asks him: ‘what?’ ‘oh,’ he says, ‘what are you doing, don’t you fear god?’ he says, ‘a man back there, either he cut himself folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 8 іс но | але якы́сь то́же зна́в | іс ты́х | гк і та́м зна́в і ді́до знав | відверну́ти | та́м зна́в то́т іспе́рти фу́ру | badly, either he is dying, something like that.’ ‘aha. well,’ the old man says, ‘go now, nothing bad will happen to him, but you guys don’t do that again,’ he says. that’s what the old man said. the old man knew something. is: yes. but someone out of these guys also knew something. hk: there, a guy knew something, and the old man knew how to undo it. the guy there knew how to stop the cart, 211:45 а ді́до зна́в то́же шчốс | но | а хто́ його́ зна́є шчо́ він | но тай шчо́ він роби́в | на ті́ трі́сьці | де ôни́ будова́ли | and the old man also knew something. and who knows what he... and what he did with this sliver from the building site. this story belongs to another common type in my collection: stories of contests between two people with supernatural powers (most often men) or stories of attack and retribution. in these stories, a person who is knowledgeable about magic attacks the main character, thinking him to be a non-magical person. however, the main character has supernatural powers too. he can both repair the damage and mete out retribution. the attacker is punished for using supernatural powers against a supposedly non-magical opponent. in these situations, people usually consider use of magic by the main character justifiable. the main character who uses his powers in self-defense usually has the sympathies of both the teller and the audience. in this story, both tellers mention the fear and haste of the builder after the old man caused another builder to hurt himself; neither teller expressed any sympathy for the builders. remarkably, the builder running after the cart asks if the old man has the fear of god, i.e., blames the old man for using magic to cause harm (and also for the seriousness of the harm), but in his desperation, he forgets that it was the builders who started the magical attack. the old man, on the other hand, is shown in a positive light, as powerful but generous. oftentimes, as in this story, the main character forgives the offender when the later demonstrates his pitiful state and/or asks for help, and may revoke the punishment. as the story-teller in this story notices, the old man just wanted to teach the builders a lesson. there are also stories where a non-magical offender, (male or female), causes harm to a wise man in a natural way (stealing something from him, detaining his horse for trespassing on his land, etc.). the wise man would respond witches, wise people and werewolves folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 9 using supernatural powers (e.g., send snakes to the offender’s house; make the offender’s mouth droop; have the offender bring back the stolen goods and stand with them on his shoulders until forgiven), but often he would revoke the punishment if the offender came to him with apologies. in a similar story type, wise men or wise women can repair magical damage caused to others. they usually find and punish the witch who stole a cows’ milk. all these types of stories evoke the feeling of rightful retribution; attackers, whether natural or supernatural, are punished or warned, at the very least. apparently, using supernatural powers for self-defense and protection of one’s well-being is not perceived negatively nor as a threat to the wielder, since it is employed explicitly to counteract unjust acts. the same idea of just retribution underpins the above mentioned stories where a witch goes to a cowshed as a toad to steal milk. after the toad gets maimed or killed, the next day a woman in the neighborhood turns out to be injured. the only difference between them is that the antagonist here is a good person with no supernatural powers who triumphs over an evil magical person. female self-defense: two wolf stories (9) below are two stories i recorded in 1987 from a skillful female story-teller born in 1920. she talks about two cases of a rare supernatural power: transforming from a human into a wolf. these stories are particularly interesting in the light of the conclusions above about justified retribution. they discuss the fairness of using supernatural power in more complicated cases, comparing and balancing the advantages of magic with more earthly societal powers and privileges. 4. two stories about a husband turning into a wolf 450 |...| я зна́ю я́к тото́ шчи́ і мêні́ была́(!) і не чу[д]жа́ | шчо была́ чôлôві́ка пусти́ла у вôвкуны́ | та́к было уже́ | пюбра́ли ся мôлôді ́| пюбра́ли ся ай | а він́ йêіі́ збыткова́в | все́ він на нь(/)у збыткова́в та ка́же | я́ тебе́ нау́чу ... я́ тôбі ́ука́жу | i know how it was, [she] also was my kin, the one who made her husband into a wolf [lit.: werewolf]. it was like this. a couple got married, they got married, but... but he beat her, he constantly beat her, and she says: ‘i will teach you, i will show you,’ 451 та́й тогды́ піде́ у ха́шчу | і при́йде вốвк | ід жôні ́| і ты́рмат | йшли́ у по́ле роби́ти сі́но | я́ уже́ ссе́ ка́жу шчо як сі́но пішли роби́ти | шли навпе́ред сін́о роби́ти | та́ то уже на пốслітку | ні́т на упе́рет | і пішли́ у по́ле сін́о роби́ти но і and then he goes to the forest, and a wolf comes back, to the woman, and he pulls her... they went to the field to make hay. i will tell it how it was. they went to make hay. first, they went to make hay... no, that was later... no, it was first. so, they went to the field to make hay, folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 10 ві́н пішốв у ха́шчу і ві́тты прихо́дит вốвк і лю́́де відби́ли і ле́двы зби́ли бо вốвк ге́т на ні́й пі́вку пірва́в і | но й ві́н ві́тты пішốв у ха́шчу наза́т ві́н ся уже́ розроби́в | прийшốв | шчо́ ты туй пишча́ла шчо́ тото́ бы́ло тай шчо́ | та вốвк ка́же чôлôві́че бо́жый туй бы́в | та ка́же ма́ло ня не ізьзі́в тай шчо́ | но́ тай і они́ уже́ по ... сі́ли пôôбі́да ... попôлу́дновали | тай сі́ли тай | уже́ і́сти | хốтят | пôпôі́ли | тай ві́н ї ка́же | шчобы му поди́вила у гốлôв | поди́вила | і она́ йôму́ ди́вит у гốлôв диви́ти ї в зу́бы and he went to the woods, and from there, a wolf comes, and people beat it and barely chased it away, because that wolf, it totally tore her skirt. and he came back from the forest, he already turned back [into a man]. he came: ‘why did you cry, what was it, what?’ ‘but there was a wolf,’ she says, ‘hey, man [lit: god’s man], it was here,’ and, she says, ‘it very nearly ate me.’ so, what then... and they already... sat down, ate lun... ate lunch, and they sat down, they wanted to eat, they had a lunch, and he says to her: ‘check my head for lice, check it.’ and she looks at his head, she looks at the teeth, 452 а то то́чно ниткы́ | з йêї́ пі́(ю)вкы | но уже́ лицю́́є пі́вку | а у зуба́х ізь_ йếї пі́вкы | ниткы́ | ка́же она́ ты слу́хай ка́же | васи́лю | слу́хай ка́же та ты́ ка́же | та ты́ ка́же ма́єш із мо́єї пі́вкы | у те́бе у зуба́х ниткы́ | а ві́н каже ее а́йбо ка́же ци напу́дила сь ся | йốй я́к я ся ка́же напу́дила | я́ ся напу́дила | а ві́н ка́же ты кьêть хо́чеш ка́же ви́діти но я́к ты тото́ зро́биш но она́ йôму́ зачала́ но я́к ты ста́неш чôлôвіќ у вốвка ста́неш | і ты́ вốвком на́рас при́йдеш вốвком | і ты́ чôлôві́к но коси́в | йốй ка́же я́ ся ка́же бốю я́ бим ти ка́же указа́в | айбо .... ти ся тілько дурны́й быв бо шчо пôві́в лише оби сь ка́же не пôві́ла скамêні́в би сь | я́ ка́же піду́ and exactly there were the exact threads from her skirt, that one makes a skirt with (?), in his teeth there were threads from her skirt. she says: ‘listen,’ she says, ‘vasyl’, listen, but you,’ she says, ‘but you have, from my skirt, there are threads between you teeth.’ and he says, ‘ah, did you get scared?’ ‘oh how i got scared,’ she says, ‘i got scared.’ and he says, ‘if you want,’ he says, ‘to see...’ ‘but how will you do that?’ she started saying to him, ‘but how you will become, you are a man, and you will become a wolf? and you will immediately come back as a wolf? and you are a man?’ ‘see,’ he mowed the hay. ‘oh,’ he says, ‘i am afraid, i would tell you,’ he says, ‘but you...’ he must have been stupid (?), because he said: ‘only don’t say i wish you become a rock.’ he says: ‘i will go...’ 453 і він́ ôна́ уже́ підмета́в копи́цю выoсо́ко ма́й | бо она́ ся бôя́ла | and he... she... he already made the haystack a little higher, because she witches, wise people and werewolves folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 11 га́дат сôбі́ закля́т би сь кêдь ты́ такы́й йếсь та я́ тя уже і нê хốчу ка́жеш шчо обы не пôві́ла скамêні́в бись а ге а она́ уже́ | тай тогды́ він́ ся она́ ôбви́діла ві́н ся перекоти́в так три́ ра́с | настоя́шчий вốвк | ві́ткыс у ньо́го і сếрсьть і всьо́ і | і вốвк тай | настоя́шчий вốвк | а она́ уже́ пôві́ла а він́ ся зача́в роска́човати | айбо ôна́ пôві́ла скамêні́в бись | прийшло́ ві́н зача́в зава́йдав копи́цю | він́ бы бы́в ї там заі́в | уже́ | і ві́н на суд бо́жый пішốв | пішốв наохте́ма у вôвкы́ | і тогды́ прийшло́ она́ зача́ла там пишча́ти | на ті ́... на ті́ е онде́ | на тім́ | зача́ла пишча́ти йốй мене́ каже вốвк ісьць | мене́ | лю́́де | was afraid. she thinks to herself: ‘damn you, if you are like this, i don’t want you; you say that i should not say i wish you become a rock,’ and there, and she already... and then he... she saw (?) he rolled [or: did a somersault] like that three times, and he became a real wolf. from where did he get wolf’s hair, everything – a wolf, a real wolf. and she already said... he started rolling back, but she said i wish you become a rock, and it happened... he started jumping onto the stack (?), he would have eaten her already. and he went away forever, he became a wolf forever. and then, she started crying there, on that... there... on that... she started crying – ‘oh,’ she says, ‘a wolf is eating me. me... people...’ 454 та пишчи́т но тай лю́́де ви́дят круго́м | і лю́́де ся збі́(г)ли хто з ви́лами хто з кôсốв | хто ш шчи́м | тай уті́к | но | та сесе́ єнна́ та́к | ци тото́ говори́т туй | но | та я́ шчи і шче́ дока́жу | а дру́га жона́ пібра́ла ся пібра́ла уже́ ма́ли четве́ро дітếй | все́ він збыткова́в і збыткова́в ї і тогды́ він ка́же я́ йду́ на сьвя́тый вếчір на смêрі́чку | а она́ га́дат сôбі́ а йди́ | я́ тебе́ пу́шчу у вôвкуны́ | і він пішốв і она́ пусти́ла його́ у вôвкуны́ | то́ бы́ло неда́леко о́де у рекі́тах | і то все́ мо́я ма́ма при... та́то прика́зовав | і пусти́ла у вôвкуны́ | його́ ниє́ ́і ниє́ ́| ра́но на сьвяты́й вêчір о уже́ | зра́на ві́н пьюшốв зра́на і на вếчір прихо́дит | вốвком | д хы́жи | and she cries, and people around see that, and people came, one with a pitchfork, another with a scythe, everyone brought something, and [the wolf] fled. well. and this one... does this thing speak here? [=does this recorder here record what i say?] well. then i will tell this one too. and another wife, she got married, got married, they already had four children, and he [the husband] beat and beat her. and then he says, ‘i am going to get a christmas tree for the christmas eve.’ and she thinks to herself, ‘go, i will turn you into a wolf [lit.: werewolf].’ and he went... she made him into a wolf [lit.: werewolf]. that was not far from here, there in rekyty. my mom always... my dad used to tell. so she turned him into a wolf [lit.: werewolf]. he is not coming back, folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 12 and he is not coming back. in the morning on christmas eve... he went in the morning, in the morning, and in the evening, he came as a wolf, to the house. 455 а ді́ти на тье́ тье тье́ та хлі́ба ме́чут | шчо | дают а вна | іди́ ка́же загốйкала ку́ме іди́ о́де вốвка убếй | но вốвк прийшốв вốвк та́й | жили они́ жи́ли | они́ уже́ відби́ли то́го ку́м стрі́лів айбо не устрі́лів у ньо́го ай | якốйсь так бо́г догада́в шчо пішло́ у лю́́фт | пішốв він | і ка́же но може́ бы́ла она́ вже до́вго жи́ла сімдê... уже́ ма́ла ві́сімдêсят рốків жи́ла рокы́ | і прийшло́ кона́ти | айбо ба́ба не мо́же скона́ти | пôспôві́дать_ ся жо́ны д ні прихốдят ты́ якы́йсь грі́х ма́єш ты́ якы́йсь грі́х учини́ла | нага́дуй ся якы́й ты грі́х учини́ла она́ уже́ про ньо́го й забы́ла | а аж не забы́ла айбо не хốтіла вы́явити | она́ до́ты скона́ти не могла́ | тогды́ ка́же | and the children go, ‘here, here,’ they throw... they give it bread, and she says, ‘come,’ she called, ‘come, kum [godfather of her child/ren], come here, kill the wolf.’ well, it was a wolf who came, a real wolf. so they lived and lived... they already ... the godfather shot, but did not hit him, but somehow god made it so that the bullet missed. it [=the wolf] went... and they say, maybe she lived long, maybe seventy years... she was already eighty years old, she lived a long life. and it was time for her to die. but the old woman cannot die. she has confessed her sins to a priest, and women come to her, ‘you must have some sin, you committed some sin, go ahead, remember what sin you committed,’ and she already forgot about it, and, if she hasn’t forgotten, she was not willing to tell. and she could not die. then she says... 456 она́ пішла́ пак цу́рья зобра́ла тото́ ай де́ він лиши́в цу́рья розобра́в ся та лиши́в | она́ то цу́рья забра́ла та покла́ла у ста́нôв | піт? ста́нôв давно́ старьйо́ у да́вні хыжі ́та́ покла́ла та́м піт ста́нôв | і ка́же | но́ та вы́вêзіт ми ка́же попа́ | буду́ ся спôвіда́ти | нагада́ла ся жо́ны кумы́ прийшли́ | жо́но уже́ дêся́та доба́ ты́ уже́ ге́т іско́нат уже́ ско́нат | уже́ і не ды́хат | she went and took the clothes, where he had left the clothes, he had gotten undressed and left the clothes, and she had taken those clothes and put them into the barrel ... under the barrel, as old things are put in old houses, and she put it under the them. and she says, ‘well, call the priest to me, i will confess, i remembered.’ women came, her children’s godmothers. you know, it is the tenth day already, and she cannot die, she is witches, wise people and werewolves folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 13 пришло́ уже́ ї | і ко́нат і ко́нат і не мо́же скона́ти | і они́ тогды́ она́ ся дорахова́ла тай шчо́ тай ка́же бері́т ка́же цу́рья ка́же | а| тай попо́ви уже́ с попо́м ся спôвіда́ла а пі́п ка́же я́к я мốжу тôбі́ розріше́ниє да́ти | я́ тогды́ тôбі мốжу розріше́ниє да́ти кêдь ві́н при́йде дôмі ́| твій́ грі́х тôбі ́отпу́стит | а я́ тôбі́ розріше́ниє не мốжу да́ти | not breathing already, and dying, and dying, and cannot die. and they... she thought it over, and she says, ‘take [his old] clothes and...’ and to the priest... she already confessed to the priest, and the priest says, ‘how i can give you an absolution, only then can i give you an absolution when he comes home, and forgives you that sin, but i cannot give you an absolution 457 за сякы́й вели́кый грі́х | а она́ ка́же бері́т ка́же бы́ли у нếї і ді́ти бері́т ка́же та́м є | вітьцьо́во цу́рья | піт тốв ста́нôвльôв та́м ка́же переверта́йте тôту́ ста́нôвь_ і та́м є цу́рья | і бері́т і несі́д_ го ка́же та́м у свина́рькы та́м мы́ роби́ли все́ та гада́ю сôбі́ | мы́ быва́ло хо́диме та гада́єме ци на ôті́ бôрôзьді́ тото́ | скака́в та чини́в ся і учини́в ся вốвк ци на ôті́ та мыo прига́дуєме сôбі ́| бо та́то там уже́ коси́в тай быва́ло то прика́зує та ка́же ге ту́йкы пішốв | мій у́йчаник ка́же у вôвкуны́ | жона́ го пусти́ла | но ай ка́же но ни́ч | они́ уже́ тогды́ | пішли́ поне́сли | чека́ют | а то не мож ... | поне́сли они́ там цу́рья | поне́сли они́ та́м цу́рья | айбо тото́ дếнь айбо тото́ два́ | тай ниє́ ́| тай три́ | for such a huge sin.’ and she says: ‘take...’ (she had children), she says: ‘take your father’s clothes, there, under that barrel,’ she says, ‘turn over that barrel, and there are clothes there, and take and carry them,’ she says, ‘to svynar’ky.’ we used to work there, and i used to think... we used to walk and think, if it was on that furrow he was running and turning... and was turned into a wolf, or on this furrow, we were trying to guess, because my father used to mow hay there, and he was telling this story, and he would say ‘right there he went, my cousin became a wolf, his wife turned him [into a wolf].’ ok, and they then... went and carried [the clothes.] they are waiting, and it is so hard... they went and brought there the clothes, they brought there the clothes, and then a day passed, and two days passed, and he did not come, and three days... 458 га́дат сôбі́ уже́ жо́ны гôвôря́т | но бêзі́вно як ві́н | дếзь го уби́ли | у вôвка́х | уби́ли го | тай вже́ і она́ вісімдêся́т рốків ма́є а ві́н êшчê ста́ршый бы́в | та бêзі́вно не жи́є | но ни́ґда не умре́ та не мож диви́ти на му́ку | ді́ти ім she thinks, and the women already are saying, ‘he is most probably dead, he got killed somewhere, while a wolf, he got killed. she was eighty years old, and he was still older, so he is dead for sure.’ and she cannot die, one cannot watch folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 14 су́т | ви́дят в яку́ му́ку ма́ма за́йде? | і прийшло́ | дêвя́тôї дôбы́ прихо́дит | дêвя́тôї добы́ | прийшốв | ру́кы пôôбби́вані обрốсьлі | сюды́ обро́слый | так як настоа́шчий вốвк лиш цу́рья на ся узя́в | такы́й страшны́й шчо ра́з | і ка́же | прийшốв і поклони́в ся | і ка́же | дя́кую я тôбі́ жо́но | шчо ты́ мене́ шче наверну́ла на сво́є обы́сьця | та ка́же | уши́тко ти инґеду́ю how she suffers. and there are children, they see how their mother suffers. and then, the ninth day, he comes. the ninth day, he came. his hands were scarred, covered with hair, and here, he was covered with hair... like a real wolf, only he had put on his clothes. he was so scary. and he says... he came and greeted her, and said: ‘thank you, my wife, that you returned me to my household.’ and he says, ‘i forgive you everything,’ 459 і прийшốв і пôцюльова́в ї | вши́тко ти инґеду́ю | і я́ недо́бре роби́в зача́в ві́н і свốї(е) гріхы́ каза́ти | і я́ недо́бре роби́в бо я́ тебе́ зада́рь не ра́з би́в | збыткова́в | ни́шчив | та ка́же я́ тôбі́ вши́тко инґедую лиш ти тото́ не инґеду́ю шчо на сьвяты́й вếчір ді́ти мені ́не́сли хлі́ба | та мета́ли | а ты́ гốйкала ку́ме ку́ме пốй уби́ти | а я́ сôбі ́гада́ю го́ссподи та коби́ м пожи́в я́ уже́ бы́в в вôвкуна́х | та коби́ м пожи́в | ві́н сôбі ́та́к поду́мав тогды́ | і ка́же мêні́ ты́ ся ка́же сни́ла | шчо ты́ стра́шно ся му́чиш | ты́ ви́сиш на мôтузі та не мо́жеш ни до зêмлі ́до... | прихыли́ти ся | ни на́ вêрьх | а все́ ожи́єш та ожи́єш | та фу́рт ис ми ся сни́ла в вôвка́х | но а та я́к ты туды́ жи́в та я́к бы́в | and he came, and he kissed her, ‘i forgive you everything, i also did bad things,’ he started to confess his sins, ‘i also did bad things because i beat you often for nothing, beat you... and,’ he says, ‘i forgive you everything, only that i cannot forgive that on christmas eve children were giving me bread, they were throwing it to me, and you said ‘kum, come and kill it.’ and i think to myself, ‘oh, my god, if i lived... i was already a wolf... if i lived...’ that is what he thought to himself. ‘and,’ he said, ‘i dreamed of you, that you suffered a lot, that you were hanging on a rope and you couldn’t either touch the ground, or go up, and you kept getting alive... and i dreamed about you all the time when i was a wolf.’ ‘and how did you live there, how were you?’ 41:00 тай ка́же не инґеду́ю тай ка́же зна́єш ка́же як мы́ туды́ бідова́ли | мы бідова́ли ду́же | бо ка́же | коли́ нам бо́х па́лицьов пока́же | де йти́ | і мы́ там пі́деме і ду́же сме бы́ли гôлốньні | бо́г нам пак па́лицьôв показа́в до єнно́го ґазды́ | і мы́ прийшли́ and he says: ‘i don’t forgive... you know,’ he said, ‘oh, how we suffered there. we suffered a lot, because,’ he says, ‘every time when god pointed with a stick where to go, we would go there, and we were very hungry. once god pointed to one peasant’s yard, and witches, wise people and werewolves folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 15 бо мо́ж бы́ло ку́чу розломи́ти | та бо́г нам лише́ вêлі́в по єнно́му ярча́ти взя́ти та зьзіс́ти а | а не́ усьо́ трати́ти а они́ тогды́ ста́ли страти́ли | та за мі́рный рік ни́ч не і́ли | ли́ш шчо пи́ли вốду та гли́ну і́ли | та траву́ | а и́нче ни́ч ім не слốбьюдно бы́ло взя́ти | ім ро́т заклине́ный | і они́ і́сти не могли́ ни́ч | та ка́же вши́тко ти ка́же инґеду́ю лише тото́ ти не инґеду́ю | но́ тай як за́к не пôві́в ї шчобы она́ спочива́ла з бо́гом до́ты она́ не спочи́ла | і ка́же но́ спочива́й з бо́гом | we came, because we could break into a shed there. and god only told us to take and eat one lamb each, and not to slaugter everything, but we slaughtered everything, so after that for an entire year we didn’t eat anything, we only drank water and ate clay, and grass, and nothing else, we could not take.’ they [=we] had cursed their mouth, and they could not eat anything. ‘and,’ he says, ‘i forgive you everything, but i cannot forgive you this.’ and until he told her to repose with god, she did not die. so, he says, ‘repose with god, 41:01 я́ сво́є перебы́в | може я́ ся спôкута́в | та то́ я пôку́ты свốї прия́в то я тебе́ збыткова́в тебе́ ни́шчив | но тай я́ недо́бре роби́в а ты́ з бо́гом спочива́й і тогды́ она́ скона́ла | а я́ ка́же ты́ ми не инґеду́й я такы́й ма́ла дурны́й рôзу́м шчо _а тебе́ у тото́ пусти́ла я́ не ра́з жалі́ла айбо я́ уже́ не мо́гла | шчо была́ м те[бе́] наверну́ла | ты́ бы быв | мене́ збыткова́в і шчế май ду́же ни́шчив | я не мо́гла | бо я́ ся уже́ ісь_ сьві́та ганьби́ла | та я́ за то́ ті́лько пôкута́ла дốвго ка́же | пôкута́ла і я́ скона́ти не мо́гла | а не мо́гла м тот грі́х вы́явити | но тай му́сіла го вы́явити бо до́ты не могла́ скона́ти | i got my due. maybe i already had my penance, i had my penance, because i had beaten you, well, i did wrong, and you repose now with god.’ and then she died. ‘and me,’ she said, ‘you forgive me, i had such a stupid mind that i turned you into a wolf, i regretted that many times, but i couldn’t already... had i gotten you back, you would have beaten me again, maybe even more than before, so i couldn’t, because i had been already very much ashamed. so, i had my penance for that for a long time, that i could not die. i couldn’t tell about that sin.’ but she had to tell it, because otherwise she could not die. the first story (beginning at 4 minutes, 40 seconds) reports how a woman’s husband went to the forest, returned as a wolf, attacked his wife, disappeared in the forest, and returned as a man; later the woman recognizes him by the threads from her skirt sticking between his teeth. having discovered this fact, the woman ensures that her husband is trapped in wolf form for the foreseeable future. (10) the teller also describes the wife’s motivation. the woman turns her husband into folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 16 a wolf because she does not want to live with a werewolf, and also because, as she said at the beginning of the story, she wants to keep him from beating her. wife-beating is a recognized element of life in novoselycja. the woman in the story, like many other women past and present, is under the total control of her husband and has no socially recognized means to defend herself. in other cultures, a defenseless party in a desperate situation is known to recourse to magic for selfprotection. kivelson [2013], researching early modern russian witch trials, notices that for the people of 17th-century russia witchcraft was a tool for the weak to protect themselves from the abuse of the powerful when they acted in unjust and unbearable ways. kivelson [2013: 8] states that: ideas about witchcraft grew, in large measure, out of a consensual understanding of where the limits to abuse resided, where violence or physical torment or exploitation was acceptable, and where it strayed into excess. magic ... erupted at precisely those points of trespass. in its latent or active threat, witchcraft served to patrol those norms and obligations, to mitigate the harshness. this story presents a parallel case. the female teller despicts the husband as having an unfair advantage over the wife by having the right to beat her. by using magic, the wife nullifies his advantage and stops the abuse, thus ensuring fair treatment. however, the abuse the husband might perform as a wolf is even more unjust than the abuse he performed as a man. as we have seen, using supernatural powers against an average person is considered evil in novoselycja, because the victim does not have similar powers and cannot defend themselves. in the story, the woman wants to prevent her husband from attacking her in the shape of a wolf, i.e., from harming her using his unfair advantage. remarkably, the wife has no supernatural powers herself (she is only saying the magic words her husband told her not to use). it is a case of self-defense on two counts at the same time: a powerless female defending herself against a powerful male, and a non-magical person defending herself against a magical one. on both counts, turning her husband into a wolf presents an elegant solution to the problem and thus cannot be judged too harshly. the woman is justified, as a defendant in a court of law might be acquitted if she used an offender’s gun against him in self-defense.. in the second story (beginning at 4 minutes, 54 seconds), which the teller told immediately after the first one, only stopping to check if the recorder was working, the initial situation is the same: the wife is abused by her husband. however, unlike the woman in the first story, this woman is a bearer of supernatural powers, and she wants to turn her husband into a wolf from the outset. she uses her supernatural powers for self-defense to prevent her husband from beating her; however, when her life comes to an end, she cannot die. this fact, coupled with the prolonged suffering before death, is in novoselycja a sure sign of a grievous offense committed by the dying person, usually stealing milk witches, wise people and werewolves folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 17 or other manner of using magical gifts for an evil cause against non-magical people. nevertheless, her use of supernatural powers against her husband is eventually forgiven by the victim, and her deed is thus presented as excusable. her reversal of the transformation is the primary reason for this attitude. neither the repentance alone, nor the confession to a priest could bring relief. moreover, the priest in the story explained unequivocally that the sin of using magical transformation against a non-magical person needed to be undone, and that it is only the offended person could forgive this sin. this argument does not reflect official doctrine; in the orthodox and greek catholic church practices, (11) sins are commonly confessed by the perpetrator and then absolved by the priest, perhaps after giving the sinner penance. however, in the story, the priest says this sin is especially grievous, and, therefore, it is beyond his powers. the only solution is to reverse the spell. remarkably, after the woman does that and her husband becomes a human again, he forgives her immediately. after coming back, her husband’s first words are thanking his wife for returning him home and forgiving her for turning him into a wolf. he grants her his permission to die peacefully on the spot. moreover, before dying she has a lengthy conversation with him, asking him about his experiences while a wolf and telling him why she did not return him earlier. during this entire exchange, the husband does not demonstrate any animosity towards her, which indicates that his forgiveness is genuine. an important detail in the story is that, unlike the transformation from a human into a wolf, which remained secret from the community, the process leading to her husband’s reverse transformation unfolds openly and is undertaken with the community’s guidance. the transformation into a wolf was not described in the story; such omissions are common in novoselycja whenever an application of supernatural powers is to be mentioned. (12) however, later, when the woman in the story is nearing the end of her life, she is constantly surrounded by people: other women that remind her to confess and to remember a sin she must have committed; the priest who tells her to reverse the transformation; her children who go and take the husband’s clothes into the woods and who watch her suffering until their father comes back and forgives her. all these people converse with her, advise her, commiserate with her, and eventually help her on her way to undoing the sin and restoring her husband to his human form. the actual reverse transformation itself occurs in the woods far from people’s eyes, but all the steps leading to it, such as getting the man’s old clothes from under the barrel and carrying them into the woods for him to put on, and even waiting with anticipation for the transformation to occur, are carried out by other people and in full view. these actions are not secret; they do not need to be hidden, because they are not considered evil. the woman herself functions within the net of social connections. she listens to and eventually follows the advice of the community, thereby adhering to societal norms. while milk stealers are aand anti-social, she, at this point, is not; she is re-united with the community and its values. by presenting the woman’s actions in plain view, under the influence and with the help of the community, the teller indicates her approval of the woman’s actions. the folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 18 community leads her through the correction of her transgression, and once she completes it, the victim also forgives her. this second story is typologically a story of an attack on a person who happened to have supernatural powers and who used them for self-defense. as in the stories about people who stole from bearers of magical powers, the transgressor who attacked a magical person is punished. when the spell is reversed, the unfair advantage withdrawn, a state of fairness is restored. reversing the magical harm and asking forgiveness is the acceptable pathway for redemption in the eyes of the community, even for a bearer of supernatural powers who applied them against non-magical people. these nuanced stories demonstrate that even though the use of magic against non-magical person is forbidden, in the eyes of a female teller it can be justified or at least is presented as justifiable, if it is used to counter a greater evil, such as domestic abuse. in addition, it must be in compliance with other socio-cultural norms, namely the need to reverse the action to obtain the victim’s forgiveness, the need to be part of the community, and the like. magical knowledge: passing on skills since magical powers are dangerous and must be used with great caution, their transmission is also traditionally controlled so as to minimize the potential damage. the question then arises: how do people acquire magic powers? below is an excerpt from a conversation between hk, a woman 91 years old at the time, l, her daughter-in-law, 53, and b (the author). 5. how people pass on supernatural knowledge l но | є́ тако́є | но | я́ зна́ю тêпếрь чи хốдяд_ або | коли́сь ходи́ли | бы́ла така́ чу́тка | шо ходи́ли молоко: ́відбêрали від | дру́гых кôрів сôбі ́там я зна́ю шốсь там они́ роби́ли там у ни́х там | робо́та сво́я | така́ шко́ла шо там тре́ба научи́ти тре́ переда́ти хтốсь ма́в переда́ти кôму́сь рôзумі́єте та | то передава́ло ся іс пôкôлі́ня в пôкôлін́я b то́ ся передава́ло ? l | тто́ ворожби́тство но | b ді́йсно? l так та́к | l: there are such things. i don’t know if they [=witches] go now or not, but in the old times they would go, people said, they went and took milk from others’ cows to themselves, and did something else, some kind of their work. they would learn it, someone would have to transfer the knowledge to them, and otherwise it would not work. it was passed on from one generation to the next. b: and that got transmitted? l: that sorcery/witchcraft, yes. b: is that so? l: yes! witches, wise people and werewolves folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 19 hk так є́ | як я́ зна́ла | та я́ тогды ва́с учи́ла | а вы́ да́ле | l свốїх дітếй вну́ків | hk а́йно | l та́к передава́ло ся с пôкôлі́ня хто́ зна́в така́ роди́на шчо зна́ла они́ тым передава́ли свốїм ді́тям | b мгм l а да́хто каза́в но | як ка́жут шчо | шчо зна́в ба́тько або не переда́в никốму бо то́ быв наре́мный то́д_ бы біду́ зроби́в вели́ку дру́гôму тôму́ не мо́ж да́ти | а такы́й котра́ люди́на така́ шчо бы́ла | рôзду́мана шчо я́к то роби́ти шо | а то́ є́ такі ́ шо нарếмні та хôть кốму біду́ яку́сь .... | тадь батько́ не переда... hk: for example, if i know, i will teach you, and you will pass it on, l: to your children, and grandchildren hk: yes l: it was passed on from one generation [to the next]. you know, such a family that knew, they would pass it on to their children, you know. b: uh-huh l: and some said, well, as they say, that a father knew, but he did not pass it on, because his son was impulsive, he could have caused a large misfortune to someone else, he would not be given the knowledge to. and another [= a son in another family] would be more sensible, would think how to do and what... but if someone was impulsive, thoughtless, he could have done bad things to anyone, so father would not pass it on to him. both l and hk agree that magic knowledge had to be transferred, that is, taught and learned. when l wants to elaborate on the topic, she imperceptibly switches from talking about the transfer of knowledge among women (which was apparently the case in the example her mother-in-law gave) to the transfer generally in the family, and then to men passing knowledge on to men (father to son). she says that men feel responsible for transferring the knowledge into good hands, and this kind of cultural selection weeds out those candidates who do not have the right qualities to handle magic power without causing unnecessary harm to others. she does not return to the topic of women’s milk stealing, since this activity is inherently bad. instead, she switches the topic to powers of other sort that only inflict harm when used by bad or impulsive people. according to other narrators’ accounts in my collection, some people are born with magic skills (that sometimes comes together with certain physical indicators, such as a tail that a witch may be born with). more often, however, a supernatural skill, just like any skill, is a type of knowledge which can be passed on in a family or learned from someone else. in a different village situated on the other side of the carpathian ridge, but within 30 km from novoselycja, i heard a story of a person who knew how to cure snake bites, but had no other supernatural powers; he learned this skill from a woman in america, where he went to work. after returning home, he practiced it a great deal and then passed it on to one of his sons, who, in his turn, folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 20 did not pass it on to anyone. except for the mention of america, this is a typical story of power transmission. the transfer of supernatural knowledge as separate skills also explains why men do not steal milk or transfer diseases to children. in a traditional culture where each gender has specific labor roles, there are skills considered appropriate for one gender, but not the other. this division apparently extends to both natural and supernatural skills. (13) the transfer of magic powers through learning also explains certain concerns village people have today. the teller of the rope-milking story complained to me repeatedly that now that there were a lot of magic books around; every woman could pick a book and learn how to steal milk. “i won’t do that, why do i need that?”: denial of knowledge when i asked people questions about anything to do with the supernatural, they were often eager to share stories about other people with supernatural powers, or about themselves as victims of them. however, when asked for explanations of how the magic was performed, they emphatically denied any knowledge both of the mechanisms and the procedures. as we can see in story cited above (the old man and builders), the narrator gave a very detailed account of how the old man punished the builders, but then added an unsolicited explanation that she did not know how he achieved it and what he did with the sliver. another woman , when her cow’s milk became less fatty (“like water”) was given advice by her neighbor who knew, but she did not follow it: 6. woman did not pour milk on live coals | тод_ бра́т | йêї ́| мêні ́казав | а я́ то | я́ не роби́ла бо я́ ду́маю я́ не рốблю бо я́ не зна́ю | кêдь я́ не зна́ю до пути́ та на́шчо я́ буду́ шчốзь роби́ти | є́вочко ка́же | ты́ сôбі ́ ка́же кôрốву вы́дій | ôгня́ наклади́ до́бре в печи́ | та вы́сып тото́ молоко́ всьо́ в пі́ч | обы́ му та́к се́рце гôрі́ло ги тото́ | ги то́ молоко́ кыпы́т | ци рôзуміе́те | та в гра́нь вы́сып та зна́єте шчо всьо́ бде́ | я́ то не роби́ла я́ бы не ді́ждала мêні ́ аж не каза́ли [?] ся́к бим занімі́ла | та його́ уже́ нне ннếсь ниє́ давны́м давно́ но він каза́в мені ́| та кêдь бы шчốсь не зна́в та бы не ра́див | а я́ ду́маю я́ не рốблю на́й да́шчо бде́ на́шчо мêні́ то | а́й сôбі ́хто ро́бит най сôбі ́ро́бит я | я́ то перебу́ду and that brother of hers told me and i didn’t do that, because i thought, ‘i did not know how to do that, why should i do that?’ he told me, ‘eva, milk the cow, build a fire in the oven and pour all that milk in the oven so that her [=the witch’s] heart boils just as this milk boils. pour it on the live coals...’ i didn’t do that. i would rather die... when he told that to me, i went numb... he died long ago, but he had told me to do that. had he not known, he would not have advised me. and i thought ‘i won’t do that, what if something happens, why do i need that? let the one who usually does it do it, and i will wait, maybe it will stop by itself.’ and it all ended eventually, and there are no witches, witches, wise people and werewolves folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 21 коли́сь ми вже́ і не буде́ тто́ | тай пêрêйшло́ та вже́ ниє́ ни бôсôркані́в ниє́ тать молоко́ є́ | і смета́на є́ | а т... | чôму́ не бы́ло ? | він́ ка́же ? | чôму́ не бы́ло | на вôді ́бы бы́ло | та́к як вода́ | та якусь кôрốву ты де́ржиш | бы́ло | шчо бы́ло то бы́ло now i have milk and sour cream. and why there had been no sour cream on my milk? did he say? ... [unclear] ... the milk was like water. you have a cow... it was so, yes, it was so. the neighbor who gave advice apparently knew some magic, but the woman did not want to do as he advised to fix her cow’s milk, even though she was in dire need. she had ten children, and the quality of the milk was very important. nevertheless, she decided not to act. she also described how she “went numb” at the very suggestion of magic, and how horrifying the idea was to her. in the long run, the situation corrected itself. she preferred having lower quality food for an indefinite period of time rather than resort to using magic. one wonders why would she choose being hungry with her children over using magic to defend her sustenance from a magic attack. one reason, according to scott [1976], is the conservative economic strategy that minimizes risk and stems from a subsistence culture’s necessity to avoid failure rather than increase production. however, there are other cultural reasons for her choice. one is likely to be the church’s disapproval of magic rituals in general. since being a good christian is an important component of villagers’ identity, they often explain their distancing from magic in religious terms. this same woman pointed out that “god did not make your/one’s mind to do such things, but to work and pray.” another reason the speaker mentioned was the fear of the magic act going wrong if done without sufficient knowledge, which could lead to unexpected consequences both on earth and in the afterlife. however, she did not mention, because it is obvious to her (14), but which seems at least an equally potent fear is being accused of doing magic by one’s neighbors. a person’s reputation is an important asset, and people do not want to give others food for gossip, which is greatly feared in the village. this reason is especially worrisome for people who have been accused of witchcraft before, such as the teller of this story. for some reason, she had been targeted by her neighbors, a fact that she did not explain to me. her emphatic and repeated denial of knowing anything to do with magic and of not doing magic ever, even in a dire situation, is a means to protect herself from nasty rumors and a bad reputation, a stance shared by most village inhabitants. conclusion the stories and comments about the bearers of supernatural powers in novoselycja reveal that the essential issue is fairness. it is not fair to use supernatural powers against people who do not have such powers, to take advantage of them, steal their livelihood and threaten their health, or attack them folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 22 in a wolf’s skin. a person who does any of these things is regarded as evil and their action as an exceptionally grievous offense. (15) on the other hand, if a person with supernatural powers uses them in self-defense in a situation when nothing else works (against a thief, an abuser, or against another magical person), it may be deemed acceptable practice. however, one must reverse the spell eventually, if supernatural powers are to be used only for teaching a lesson, rather than for inflicting permanent harm. even people who do not possess supernatural powers may find themselves in a situation when they may use such powers. if it is a case of self-defense, they are justified in doing so, and they do not have to (and, of course, they cannot) reverse the spell. supernatural powers thus are regarded as something similar to natural powers and abilities. they exist in the social world and should not be used for gaining unfair advantage over other community members. (16) fairness is generally regarded as a fundamental human value; it underlies law and many other cultural institutions, and it has been the subject of much research in moral psychology and ethics. haidt [2007: 1001] suggests that fairness is one of the “five psychological foundations, each with a separate evolutionary origin, upon which human cultures construct their moral communities.” (17) the idea of fairness is prevalent in the stories because community members must rely solely on problem-solving mechanisms already present within the village social structure. in contemporary western law the presupposition is that, as a result of the social contract, individuals have delegated to the state their right to implement justice. any crime is understood as an offense not only against the harmed individual, but also against the state, and thus is responsible for its investigation, trial, and punishment. the state allows citizens’ application of justice only in rare and strictly defined cases (e.g. self-defense). however, in the world of the stories, the state does not play any role, as if it does not exist. (18) the procedure and the underlying worldview conforms not with retributive justice meted out by the state and based on punishment, but with the recently emerged, in western countries at least, community-based restorative justice that “actively involves victims and offenders in the process of reparation and rehabilitation” [van ness & heetderks strong 2010: 22]. in this system, the response to crime [is], not to add to the harm caused by imposing further harm on the offender, but to do as much as possible to restore the situation. the community offers aid to the victim; the offender is held accountable and required to make reparation. attention [is] given not only to the outcome, but also to evolving a process that respected the feelings and humanity of both the victim and the offender. [wright 1991: 112] moreover, since it is not only the victim who is wronged, but also the community whose values have been breached by the offense, a necessary part of the restoration of justice is censure in the legal sense of the word, i.e., condemnation of an offensive action. this step reaffirms the victim’s and the community’s moral witches, wise people and werewolves folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 23 values. in restorative justice, this act is done jointly by the victim, the community, and the offender; by participating in the process, the offender accepts and reaffirms the values that were violated by his offense [wenzel et al., 2008: 37980]. we see a similar process the story about the builders and especially in the second story about the wolf-husband, in which the community is actively involved in reversing the damage and ensuring forgiveness. the contemporary concept of restorative justice may also include the threat of punishment to make the offender more cooperative [wenzel et al. 2008]. this is also the case in the context of novoselycja stories: if offenders consider themselves to be in a position of power and entitled to abuse it, powerful mechanisms must come into play to reinforce the restoration of justice. once a person has a choice between magical punishment and restorative procedures, they are usually much more willing to choose the latter. moreover, fear of magic is also a powerful deterrent to future offenses. magic stories from novoselycja, as in newfoundland and in early modern russia, where the law-enforcing state is remote (and not involved in local affairs) or abusive, can frighten people into considering fairer treatment of others. this practice is an especially important instrument for the weak in their attempts to “patrol norms and obligations,” [kivelson 2013: 8]. accounts of magical punishment serve to put the fear of god, or rather, of crossing one’s neighbor, into the hearts of powerful and abusive husbands, bullies attacking passers-by for the fun of it, and even milk-stealing witches who can be detected and punished by “wise people” possessing stronger magic. on the other hand, magic is too strong a power to be given free rein in society. an adversary possessing supernatural abilities will win over a nonmagical person in every case, which is again unfair and enables potential abuses. for example, if a person decides to use his/her supernatural abilities out of the human failings of greed or spite, s/he will have the upper hand. thus magic needs to be controlled as well. if a magical person does not want to undo the action and compensate the victim, if s/he insists on keeping the ill-gotten gain, other mechanisms come into play. there are a (super)natural mechanisms to remind magical wrongdoers of their transgressions: they cannot die; or when they die, the stolen milk will spill out of their eyes and mouth. however, that mechanism only works at the end of one’s life. there is another, societal, mechanism which works more quickly: gossip. to be associated with the unfair application of magical practices and to be accused of witchcraft is bad for one’s reputation. haidt calls traditional communities “reputation-obsessed” [2007: 1000], and rightly so. spoiled reputation is punished by social ostracism, an easy, low-cost, and very effective technique to make one miserable [haidt 2007: 1000]. although belief in magic, which haidt does not mention, seems to be one of the most powerful traditional instruments of social control, gossip and subsequent isolation are also extremely effective tools. it punishes, justly or unjustly, those suspected of any association with the unfair use of supernatural powers. i venture to suggest that it is rather the fear of that isolation than the fear of the supernatural powers as such folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 24 that makes people publicly deny, and possibly avoid altogether, any insider knowledge of supernatural skills. i have so far only met two people who did not deny that they “knew something:” a female healer and a man who said he could bring good luck. both had a good reputation in the village and therefore were not afraid of being accused of witchcraft. thus, knowledge is power, especially if it is magic knowledge. as one of the known types of power, it is built into the traditional system of power and resistance in a traditional culture of novoselycja. notes 1� the majority of rusyn folk texts have been published in l’viv or uzhhorod starting at the end of the 19th c., and during the turbulent century that has passed since that time, the collecting and publishing norms for rusyn folklore have also undergone changes. according to britsyna [2006: 60 ff], a ‘literary’ model of collecting and publishing folk texts that had developed in eastern ukraine in the 19th c. (i.e., texts were written down and then edited by folklorists according to their understanding of what the text should look like) became dominant in ukraine in the soviet period; that was also the model brought into the rusyn territory after 1944 (see below). a different model that britsyna calls ‘ethnolinguistic’ [britsyna 2006: 93] developed at the end of the 19th c. in the austro-hungarian province of galicia (before wwi, it was represented by verxrats’kyi, shuxevych, hnatiuk, rozdol’s’kyi, after wwi, pan’kevych, etc.). the scholars using this model were interested in language as well as folklore; they preserved linguistic and textual features as closely as they could, taking down from dictation being their best option without technical possibilities of sound recording. however, these techniques were not without fault; dictation dispenses with the atmosphere of performance, so that the performers (or folklorists) might choose to omit certain parts, e.g., repetitions [britsyna 2006: 74-5], or certain linguistic features that might turn out to be structurally valuable (see boudovskaia [2016: 17] for analysis of one of such features in two tales from the same district in pan’kevych [1938: 460-463]). nevertheless, scholars from the ‘ethnolinguistic’ school published rusyn texts that held high standing up to the end of the 20th c. however, the ‘literary’ model of folklore collection and publication, possibly aggravated by the soviet practices of producing ‘ideologically correct’ fakelore [britsyna 2006: 88], became the main model for rusyn folk texts in the subcarpathian territory from 1944 on. in the soviet era, rusyn folk texts were published in literary ukrainian, i.e., in translation at best, and their syntax and style often were distinctly literary (cf., e.g., lintur and chendei 1965, lintur and turianytsia 1979, lintur et al. 1984, khlanta 1989, etc.) 2� the performance-centered approach to folklore puts material into its social context, studies the clues that the performance sends to its audience about how to interpret its meaning, as well as examines the feedback from the audience and the reaction of the performer(s) to this feedback. hymes [1975: 18] defined witches, wise people and werewolves folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 25 performance as “cultural behavior for which a person assumes responsibility to an audience.” he [1975: 71-2] concludes that, “1) knowledge of tradition is not the same as performance, though they are interwoven; 2) tradition that had been the emphasis of previous folkloristics, is only a means, while for the participants, performance is the goal, and 3) tradition underpins performance, but performance keeps tradition in existence and also makes change possible.” similarly, bauman [1975, 1984] argues that verbal art is performance, which is a social action; the audience evaluates and shapes the performance; and that it is not only the residual culture that is worth of studying, but “the totality of human experience.” this concept of performance from the works of bauman [1975, 1977], hymes [1975], ben-amos [1971], abrahams [1972], toelken [1969] has become central to the discipline. sawin [2002] takes issue with bauman’s model, arguing that it undertheorizes the audience, leaving out the role of emotions in their perception and evaluation of performance. the performance approach by itself is diverse. one of the issues is the role of culture in performance: bauman takes an anticognitivist position, at least in his later work: in 2013 he criticizes hymes for his ‘mentalist’ orientation, disapproving of hymes’ [2003] attitude as “preoccupied with what was going on in storytellers’ minds” [bauman 2013: 36]. he was reacting to hymes’ conclusion [2003: 11] that “to say that stories exist only in performance is to say that between performances narrators do not think. that they are prisoners of the presence of an audience. that they go about their daily lives, encountering nothing that makes them remember a story. that the stories they know never pose them problems, from perceived incompetence to contradictions, with one another or with their own experience. that, in short, they have very limited minds. we should be embarrassed to denigrate them so. to do so seems to me intellectually constipated.” in this dispute i side with hymes’ opinion that the culture displayed in folklore pre-exists – and underpins – performance, while performance is a means to both maintaining and changing cultural models of participants. similarly, i concur with toelken [2014: 8] when he asked himself at a performance: “what does the [native] audience know that i don’t? what do they bring to this dramatic experience that makes the narrative mean something for them?” his answer is culture-specific knowledge: “a good story ... makes you experience or reexperience something. and that something is an otherwiseabstract but real idea from your culture, made concrete and experiential through the imagination and knowledge | which you bring to the story performance, enhanced by the power of the performer” [toelken 2014: 4-5]. both hymes and toelken express the conviction that cultural values are an integral component of performance without which it cannot be experienced and understood to a meaningful degree. there has been a large body of research dealing with cultural values within the performance approach, e.g., hymes [1975] analyzed the performance-based features of a myth and a story based on the same myth, and traced the connection of formal features of the two performances and the two sets of values: the older values reflected in the myth (validation of the life of the native people along the river) vs. contemporary ethic concerns reflected in the story (tall folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 26 stories enforcing the limits of sexual exploit and pretense for men, and cautionary stories for women). among other examples are such diverse works as foley [1991], limón [1994], raby [2007], toelken [2014], etc., and also work done with narrative and folklore within the cognitive model school in anthropology, such as hill [1995], mathews [2005]. price [1987], etc. however, rusyn folklore has not yet been analyzed from this point of view. 3� except for the language of vojvodina rusyns, see pugh [2009]. 4� for more detailed discussion see pugh [2009:vii-20]. 5� there are numerous systemic similarities between the materials recorded in novoselycja and materials from other east slavic traditions, other slavic traditions, and even neighboring non-slavic traditions, such as hungarian and romanian ones. some sources will be noted below. nevertheless, i will not include a consideration of parallels with other traditions, however tempting it might be, because it is beyond the scope of an analysis of attitudes to supernatural powers based on the material from one particular village. the carpatho-rusyn material from the territory south of the carpathian ridge may be found in bogatyrev [1929/1998], hnatiuk [1897, 1898, 1900], lintur & turianytsia [1979], lintur et al. [1984], khlanta [1989], hyriak [1965], etc. material from the northern slope of the carpathian mountains is presented in rozdol’sk’yj [1899, 1900]; hnatiuk [1899, 1902, 1902a, 1904], franko [1901-1910]; onyščuk [1909], to name a few. relevant material from polissia, eastern ukraine is systematized in vinogradova & levkievskaja [2010].; hungarian material may be found e.g., in dégh [1989]. 6� the concept of fairness i use to describe the values in novoselycja is not to be confused with the idea of limited good. according to foster [1965], the idea of limited good is a feature of peasant mentality which considers all good things in the community to be limited: not only wealth, but also social goods such as respect, as well as health, etc. therefore, if one member of the community increases his/her relative well-being in any regard, other members are suffering because the corresponding amount of good has been taken from them. thus, the peasant has to either keep the status quo or conceal his advancements from the community. however, fairness as i understand it here is something different than not getting ahead of others; it allows competition, but demands competing on equal footing with other people, using the same means as they do, and not employing stronger tools, such as magic, to secure unfair advantages for oneself. 7� stories 1, 3, and 4 contain additional information about the number of the recording they are transcribed from, as well as the time in hh:mm. story 1 is taken from recording #2 in the collection of 2012, minutes 7 through 10. story 3 is taken from recording #21 in the collection of 2014, hour 1, minute 42, through hour 1, minute 45. story 4 is taken from recording #4 in the collection of 1987, minute 50, through hour 1, minute 1. 8� the woman apparently was performing witchcraft. taking clay from cows’ footprints is one of the acts people do when they intend to steal a cow’s milk. the facts that the woman was wearing only a sack, and that it happened on a holiday, also suggest witchcraft. witches, wise people and werewolves folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 27 9� i am very grateful to professor vera bergelson (rutgers law school) for her invaluable advice on the possibilities and limits of application of contemporary legal doctrine to the two werewolf cases. 10�there are other versions of the same story i recorded in this village, but they are shorter. other tellers ended the story with the recognition, or added that after it, the husband turned into a wolf and fled. all versions were recorded from female tellers. 11�novoselycja was greek catholic until the transcarpathian territory was annexed to the ussr in 1944-45; from 1946 on, people were forced to convert to orthodoxy. by 1987 they followed orthodox rites. however, the two denominations share similar practices of confession and absolution. 12�speakers may volunteer to provide a description of what they witnessed, but they usually are reluctant to talk about how supernatural powers work, apparently for fear of being accused of knowing too much about magic, which is tantamount to an accusation of actually performing witchcraft. this issue will be discussed below. 13�there is a large body of literature about gender division of labor in traditional agricultural societies; such division is considered to be characteristic of, and historically, possibly the basis for, patriarchy; see, e.g., the discussion in quinn [in press]; the understanding of such division as normal and morally righteous tends to linger in more modern, but in essence still patriarchal societies, where a person defines their identity through their (gendered) labor [cf. paoletti & cavallaro johnson 2007]. gender-age groups are known to have distinct roles not only in physical labor, but in rituals and in other forms of folklife; e.g., in slavic tradition for traditional russian culture(s); see bernshtam [1988] and olson & adonyeva [2012]. it is not surprising, therefore, that genders in novoselycja have distinct roles in magic activities: men do building magic and repel thunderstorms, while women engage in milk stealing and transferring diseases. both genders can magically detect and punish a witch or another offender. a more detailed account of gender-based division of supernatural activities in novoselycja merits further investigation. this division seems to exist in other slavic cultures as well. ostling [2011: 127-8]), basing on material from witch trials. states that in poland, and throughout europe, “witches were, above all, thieves of milk.” this is corroborated by polish court documents from the 15th and 16th centuries, while records of witches harming other household animals are almost non-existent. 14�silence is often a way of signalling a culturally default point, obvious and not worthy of mentioning in the eyes of community members. however, as in this case, this point is important and worthy of mention for outsiders to understand the culture. as hill [2005: 180] points out, “one part of finding culture in narrative is noticing what speakers do not tell stories about, and what they seem to ‘leave out’ as they narrate.” 15�supernatural abilities, as mentioned above, can also be used to ensure fair treatment of the less powerful and to scare the powerful into a more respectful stance towards the powerless; see kivelson; see also rieti [2008] describing the folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 28 witch lore of newfoundland, where the main pattern of witch stories is that a woman comes to somebody’s house to ask for food or clothing; the owner of the house does not give anything and receives magical retribution. newfoundland witch lore coincides in its ethics with the lore of novoselycja in several important points. firstly, rieti [2018: xiv] states that the organizing point of newfoundland witch lore is the idea of reciprocity and fairness. secondly, rieti mentions that newfoundland is the poorest part of canada in terms of per capita income, but it is also ‘a national leader in charitable donations, which may indicate that newfoundland inhabitants, practicing subsistence economy until recently, also retained the idea of fairness described by scott [1976], i.e., it is moral that each member of the community should have sufficient sustenance. thirdly, rieti [2008: 24] mentions that ‘witching offered women a voice’ in fishing and other areas that were otherwise exclusively male domains, i.e., witchcraft served to partially compensate for gendered power imbalance. finally, according to rieti [2008: xiv] quoting story [1969: 33], newfoundland villages had been without administration or state-imposed law for a considerable time in the 18th and early 19th centuries.; instead, people had customs “unenforced by magistrate, constable or town council.” see also note 4 [rieti 2008: 153]. this similarity is striking when compared to the world of novoselycja, where the state as enforcer of justice is not mentioned at all and seems not to exist. 16�fair treatment should be given even to mythical creatures. in novoselycja i recorded a story about a povitrulja (in other villages of the transcarpathian region and the neighboring ivano-frankivsk region it is told about perelisnycja kira sadoja, personal communication). the povitrulja (or perelisnycja) is a creature who follows an unmarried young man, sleeps with him, and does not leave him until he becomes magically sick and dies. in this story, a woman starts sweeping the floor in the morning and sees a povitrulja sleeping with her son; the povitrulja’s long hair is hanging down onto the floor. the woman picks it up and puts it on the bed next to povitrulja, who wakes up and says, ‘you have shown respect to my hair, and i will show respect to your son.’ she leaves and never comes back. therefore, even an inherently evil creature responds to fair treatment in kind and, after being shown respect, decides to leave the young man alone and spares his life. 17�the other four are: harm/care; loyalty; authority; and purity [haidt 2007:1001]. 18� i am not specifying the type of social organization of village life that this type of ethics might correspond to. one possibility is self-governance, similar to the one svetieva (2005) describes for macedonian village of porece with traditional punishments for common offences meted out by village head together with elected officials. however, my focus is more on the system of ethics than on customary law practices. witches, wise people and werewolves folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 29 bibliography abrahams, roger d. 1972. “folklore and literature as performance.” journal of the folklore institute 9(2/3): 75-94. bauman, richard. 1975. “verbal art as performance.” american anthropologist 77(2): 290-311. bauman, richard. 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[folk demonology of poliss’ja: publication of texts recorded in the 1980s – 1990s. vol. 1: people with supernatural abilities.] москва: языки славянских культур. wenzel, michael, tyler g. okimoto, norman t. feather, and michael j. platow. 2008. “retributive and restorative justice.” law and human behavior 32(5): 375-89. wright, martin. 1991. justice for victims and offenders. philadelphia: open university press. interviews story 1. “girl milking a rope.” told by m, male, born 1925 in novoselycja. recorded 21 july 2012. story 2. “children see a woman doing witchcraft.” told by a, female, born 1936 in novoselycja. recorded 17 july 2012. story 3. “the old man and the builders.” told by hk, female, born 1925 in novoselycja and is, male, born 1960. recorded 16 august 2014. story 4. “two stories about husband turning into a wolf.” told by p, female, born 1920 in novoselycja. recorded in january 1987. witches, wise people and werewolves folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 33 story 5. “how people pass on supernatural knowledge.” told by hk, female, born 1925 in novoselycja and l, female, born 1962. recorded 7 july 2016. story 6. “woman did not pour milk on live coals.” told by e, female, born 1938 in novoselycja. recorded 7 june 2016. all stories recorded in novoselycja, mizhhir’ja district, zakarpats’ka oblast’, ukraine. folklorica full 2025 lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 25 lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses]: investigating the layered histories, meanings, and tensions that chronicle a nation’s life ema noëlla kibirkstis independent researcher london, canada abstract lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [hill of crosses] is a hauntingly beautiful and chaotic site in the northern part of the country, attracting tourists and locals alike. with vague beginnings as a defensive mound in the ninth to fourteenth centuries, to a place of rebellion against the soviet occupation, and finally, as an official national heritage site recognized by pope john paul ii, the hill of crosses holds historical, religious, cultural, and aesthetic significance within the nation. throughout its history, the hill has suffered constant devastation due to abandonment and oppressive regimes, but since lithuania’s independence in 1990, crosses have accumulated continuously. hundreds of thousands of crosses cover the site today, mainly thanks to a small market selling religious paraphernalia to visitors. a parking lot, tourism center, and market were constructed near the hill to accommodate the increase in visitors since the pope’s 1993 visit. these additions have been a topic of debate due to how they facilitate visits as well as concerns over mass-produced crosses overwhelming larger crosses of national cultural heritage significance. in this article, i examine the histories of the hill and the tensions in maintaining it while also reflecting on the meaning of the chaotic beauty of the hill as a spontaneous shrine and site of assemblage. introduction just twelve kilometers from the city of šiauliai in the central-northern region of lithuania, kryžių kalnas [hill of crosses], stands proudly against the flat baltic agricultural landscape. a small sign along the a12 highway, connecting kaliningrad to riga, points toward the curving country road that eventually leads to a large parking lot, tourism center, small market, and walkway leading to the hill of crosses. at the forefront of the hill, a large crucifix gifted by pope john paul ii after his visit in 1993 greets visitors. a few meters behind it, the hill bleeds into the surrounding landscape with seemingly unlimited crosses (see fig. 1). large wooden crosses protruding from the ground display lithuania’s reputed cross-making craft, inscribed in 2008 on unesco’s representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, and give the small hill a cathedral-like height. approaching the hill, what looks like vines climbing the large crosses reveals themselves to be tiny crosses, rosaries, and mementos hung by visitors looking to leave their mark (see fig. 2). walking through the narrow pathways up lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 26 the hill, messages from various languages and faiths become apparent, some praying for a lost loved one, others hoping for a happy marriage, and many just placed by tourists when on holiday. figure 1: visitors gathered around pope john paul ii’s crucifix at the forefront of the hill of crosses. the crucifix stands out because of its placement apart and its noticeably darker, treated brown wood. photo taken by the author on 12 june 2015. lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 27 figure 2: religious memorabilia dangling from and overtaking a wooden cross, almost completely hiding the figure of christ. photo taken by the author on 12 june 2015. whether it’s “the atlas obscura guide to lithuania” [2024] or lonely planet’s “12 things you can only do in lithuania” [kaminski 2024], the hill is always listed among the ranks of top things to do when visiting the country. additionally, there are countless videos on youtube of visits to the hill, showcasing its uniqueness, oddity, and sometimes creepiness to the world [e.g., great big story 2016; kara and nate 2017; national geographic 2018]. personally, having visited the hill in my youth, it always struck a sense of awe and wonder in me, which is why i later conducted research here as a folklorist and anthropologist. the history [dailidė 1993; smilgys 1999; šinkūnaitė 2000; kazlauskaitė 2000; miknevičienė and nemunienė 2008; valiulis and žvirgždas 2008; motuzas 2014; rimkus 2014], archeology [salatkienė 2000a, 2000b], and religious identity [olson 2009] of the hill has been studied thoroughly. the hill has shifted lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 28 meanings and uses over the centuries: from a medieval defense ground to a place of mourning, to a site of rebellion, to a religious altar, to a national monument and a touristic hotspot. however, the hill has not transitioned from one meaning to another, but rather transcends all these meanings at once, allowing visitors to choose the meanings to which they wish to cling. the hill gives agency to its visitors to extract the meanings that suit them best, as the hill continues to adapt and grow with every visit. this article begins with an overview of three significant historical periods of the hill’s history. the first period draws mostly from archeological resources and local lore, spanning from the ninth and fourteenth centuries up until 1956, beginning with when the man-made mound was formed to when individuals began erecting crosses as part of local custom. the second period begins in 1956 when lithuanians began returning to their homeland after soviet-forced deportations to siberia. upon their return, lithuanians from wider environs began using the mound to share painful suppression stories and express religious resistance to soviet rule. the final period, spanning from 1990 until the present, begins with lithuania’s newly reinstated independence, an “official” recognition of the hill by local catholic institutions, and finally, as an important place to visit for both lithuanians and tourists. these layers of histories have generated a mix of narratives about the hill, which in turn have become “a sort of chronicle of the nation’s life” [rimkus 2014: 3]. the final section examines tensions with the hill, namely due to its function as a spontaneous shrine and site of assemblage. the chaotic nature of the hill makes it difficult to manage, as different figures and organizations disagree about whether they should or should not limit additions to the hill and whether a distinction between pilgrim and tourist is meaningful. methodology in the summer of 2015, i conducted fieldwork at the hill as part of my master’s degree in social and cultural anthropology at the university of amsterdam. i was residing in the nearby town of šiauliai with a family friend, rita šopienė, for about twelve weeks and taking intermittent time to visit family and other historical sites across lithuania. about twice a week, i made the twelvekilometer trip to the hill, either by bus or bike. there, i would spend a few hours taking detailed fieldnotes on observations based on my surroundings, paying special attention to visitors frequenting the hill and nearby shops, and wandering between the crosses while taking pictures. i attended mass twice in the chapel in the franciscan friary nearby, and i took part in the yearly holy weekend of šv. ona [st. anne], which consisted of a vigil on 25 july 2015 and a pilgrimage from šiauliai to the hill and holy mass, broadcast on national television on 26 july 2015. for background information, i spent time in the archives of p. višinskio public library in šiauliai, reading books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles that mentioned the hill. i also visited the martynas mažvydas national library of lithuania in vilnius for additional materials on the topic. lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 29 for this article, i cite formal interviews that i conducted with five key informants: archeologist birutė salatkienė, architect apolonija nistelienė, šiauliai bishop eugenijus bartilus, seniunija [eldership] of meškuičiai organizer virginija remutienė, and worker audrone bačiunienė. i reached out to these individuals for interviews because they were either recommended to me by šiauliai residents when chatting informally about my research or because i had read about them during my tour of the libraries and archives. all these interviews were recorded with their consent and spanned approximately an hour, though some pleasantly extended for longer as conversations meandered over treats and tea. first period: ninth to fourteenth centuries to 1956 underneath the mass of crosses today, lies a mound dating back to sometime between the ninth and fourteenth centuries [salatkienė 2000b]. known as kulen or kula stemming from the name of the nearby kulpė river, the mound was pilled and adorned with a wooden castle used as fortification against the livonian order until it was burnt down in the sixteenth century [bučas 2000: 115; salatkienė 2000b: 38]. throughout this period, the hill held many names: hill of prayers, begging castle, holy hill, jurgaičiai mount, domantai mound, castle hill, or simply the castle. after being abandoned, archeological digs in the late twentieth century revealed an “old burial place at the mound” [salatkienė 2000b: 30], dating back to the mid-1800s. the russian empire annexed žemaitija, the northwestern region of lithuania, after the third partition of 1795 and the final disintegration of the polish-lithuanian commonwealth. the russian empire imposed the russian language, russian culture, and the orthodox religion within the region, but they were met with great resistance due to dominant catholic belief, supported by the local catholic institutions, and so conversion (both institutionally and religiously) was never successful. as noted in a brochure for the hill, many believe that graves discovered at the hill belong to anti-tsarist rebels (e.g., catholics) who were “secretly buried there and they began erecting crosses both for the perished and lost” [kryžių kalnas, n.d.] sometime between 1831 and 1863. circa 1850, an estimated twenty crosses were atop the hill, perhaps for this commemoration. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, archeologists investigated and documented the site, proving that the hill was wellknown, well-used, and held historical significance among lithuanians [gimbutas 1958: 96; smilgys 1999: 9]. in 1888, crosses depicting the fourteen stations of the cross were present. by 1900, there were 130 crosses, 155 by 1902, 200 by 1914, and finally over 400 by 1923 [smilgys 1999: 9]. according to the hill’s official website [katalikų interneto tarnyba 2008], in the interwar period and during lithuania’s independence from 1918 to 1940, the number of crosses on the hill was staggering as people regularly gathered there for religious services. by 1928, an estimated 10,000 crosses occupied the hill. a chapel was built atop the hill in 1929, but it was destroyed in 1935. on 15 june 1949, the soviet union occupied lithuania through the molotov-ribbentrop pact of 1939, and on 22 june lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 30 1941 nazi germany invaded the soviet union and occupied lithuania. eventually, in july 1944 the nazis were expelled from the country, and lithuania was re-occupied by the soviet union. during this war-ridden period, the hill was destroyed and forcibly abandoned, and it laid barren until a decade later. alongside this history constructed from archeological reports, written accounts, and photographs are legends that inform the significance of this place, namely its association with miracles: “even the most extraordinary legends prove, that they have been part of its history and the hill of crosses has always been the object of permanent concern for people” [rimkus 2000: 185]. some legends focus on the war-ridden history of the region, such as when ričardas dailidė writes that where the site lies today once “raged a great battle. many a warrior died. relatives buried the dead and, in their memory, built the hill in three days and nights” [1993: 18]. other stories are more detailed but follow a more fairytale-like cadence in being situated in a distant past, yet still grounded in the lithuanian landscape, such as a recounting by lithuanian writer bronius kviklys: once upon a time, there lived a man whose beloved daughter was so seriously ill that nobody could help her. he sat by her bedside day and night, and once, when he was very tired, he fell asleep. the man dreamed of a woman clad in white, who told him: “if you want your daughter to get well again, you have to make a wooden cross and carry it on castle hill near meškuičiai.” the poor man did what he had been told. the cross he made was very heavy and it took him 13 hours to carry it to the hill. the man kissed the cross and mounted it on the top. he had made only half of his way back home when he was met by his recovered daughter, who told him that as soon as he had left for the hill she started feeling better, and when he has reached it she rose from the bed. [valiulis and stanislovas 2008: 6] this rendition of the hill is timeless and mysterious, referring to a fantastical, indistinguishable history and providing an air of magic to the site. in a short historical and photo book, laima šinkūnaitė includes a more concrete history, still paired with some magical spirit but with additional names and dates that seemingly provide more legitimacy, though still debatable: approximately in 1850, maricijus griškevičius, a treasurer of šiauliai economy, wrote about a very unhealthy man from the jurgaičiai village, who had made a promise to god in 1847 – in case he recovered, he will put up a cross. “it happened so that the man regained his health while erecting the cross.” the news immediately widespread and influenced the infinite process: crosses began springing one after another. [2000: 62] throughout these legends, religious symbolism is at the forefront, namely related to the hill’s ability to heal, save, and protect its visitors. whichever origin legend one believes, the stories all mark that the man-made mound once known lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 31 as kula entered local customs as a place to erect crosses in hopes for some sort of divine intervention. as hubertas smilgys writes, by the beginning of the twentieth century, “the hill of crosses was already a well-known place; in addition to visits from many people, it was also a site of masses and religious festivals” [1999: 9]. even so, it was visited mostly by local lithuanians and didn’t become well-known countrywide until the second half of the twentieth century. in a french tourism book from 1938, the authors write that “le plus impressionnant lieu de sépulture est la fameuse colline des croix” [the most impressive of the burial grounds is the famous hill of crosses] [schmittlein 1938: 27], however it wasn’t until folks began returning to lithuania from forced deportations that a wider range of lithuanians made a point to visit this place. second period: 1956 to 1990 between 1941 and 1952, lithuanians were deported to remote areas of the ussr by the soviets, such as desolate areas of siberia. some were simply displaced and forced to leave their homes to live in extremely harsh and foreign conditions, whereas others were prisoners in labor camps and mainly forced to work in coal mines and forestry. after joseph stalin’s death in 1953, the главное управление исправительно-трудовых лагерей [chief administration of corrective labor camps], commonly known as the gulag, began shutting down, and both displaced people and prisoners slowly started being released and allowed to return to lithuania. many lithuanians did not have the finances or the paperwork to return to their homeland, and so some were left stranded or decided to remain in their newly made home. beginning in 1956, people began returning to their homes in lithuania in the jurgaičiai region and many placed crosses on the hill (see fig. 3) in thanks for being back in their homeland as well as to commemorate those lost in siberia [dailidė 1993: 25; šinkūnaitė 2000: 62; rimkus 2014: 3]. vytenis rimkus, a local scholar and painter, explains that the hill harbored narratives of struggle and suffering due to the soviet occupation, and the “scopes and the content of the hill of crosses became openly adversarial to the soviet ideology” [2014: 3]. additionally, the obvious christian symbolism was as a point of contention because “[f]rom the point of view of soviet ideology, religious outlook on the world was anti-scientific and that is why of no value, still being an obstacle creating socialist society” [streikus 2000: 71]. crosses on the hill were proof of soviet mistreatment and criticisms of the soviet regime. lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 32 figure 3: photograph of the hill of crosses provided to me by audronė kiršnaitė, which she dates to circa 1960. a year later, the hill of crosses would have been bulldozed and destroyed by soviet authorities. photographer unknown. from 1961 until 1977, the soviet authorities began to control all interactions with the hill, and “t[ook] measure to ban visits and to isolate the hill” [bučas 2000: 115]. the most notorious of these procedures was the “bulldozer atheism” or “tractor-type atheism,” when soviet officials demolished the hill with a bulldozer in 1961, 1973, 1974, and 1975. other than physically destroying the area, there were also attempts at making the hill less accessible, such as ditches being “dug across the roads leading to the mount, [and] bus-stops were closed” [dailidė 1993: 27]. there were even plans made, but never fully carried out, to make the hill more unreachable by expanding the nearby kulpė river to create a pond in 1977 or to turn the hill into an island in 1982 [dailidė 1993: 26-28; mačiulis 2000: 60; šinkūnaitė 2000: 62; kryžių kalnas 2002]. one of my informants, birutė salatkienė, an archaeologist who currently works for the šiaulių “aušros” muziejaus [šiauliai’s “aušros” museum], explained to me in an interview that the soviet authorities had to come up with new ways to ensure lithuanians would not place crosses on the hill because the restrictions were not deterring individuals from placing crosses sneakily overnight. one method was to turn the hill into a historical, preservation site due to its medieval history as a defensive mound. in 1968, jurgaičiai mound was added to the “lithuanian map lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 33 of archaeology,” and in 1973 “jurgaičiai mound was included into the list of state-protected monuments as an archaeological monument of state significance” [salatkienė 2000b: 29]. by declaring these important historical titles, the government aimed to preserve the mound as a historical site and restore it to its original state as just a bare hill, before the tradition of erecting crosses began. salatkienė writes that the “archaeological excavations may have concealed true motive—destroyal of the hill of crosses” [2000b: 30]. salatkienė was invited to lead the excavations due to her previous work at the base of the hill, but she declined, knowing the project would involve removing the crosses. fortunately, no one else agreed to take her place, and the excavations never took place. through bulldozing, banning, and threatening, crosses continued to be placed on the hill, many of which had to be placed under the veil of night, while strategically avoiding soviet authorities along the way (see fig. 4). this peaceful resistance was a way in which lithuanians could express an element of their lithuanian identity and their christian beliefs, all the while identifying themselves as distinctively anti-soviet. after 1986, there were no longer any attempts to stop lithuanians from placing crosses, and in 1990 lithuania was the first republic to declare independence from the soviet union. by 1990, an estimated fifty-five thousand crosses of various sizes stood on top of the hill. lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 34 figure 4: the slow rebuilding of the hill after soviet bulldozer atheism. photo taken by dania abromavičienė in august 1976. permission granted by the photographer. lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 35 third period: 1990 to present day on 7 september 1993, pope john paul ii visited the hill and held mass at the small outdoor chapel that was built near the hill to accommodate the pope’s arrival. his appearance was greeted by about a hundred thousand lithuanians and christian pilgrims and is today seen as the climactic moment that introduced the site and lithuania to the rest of the christian world [liutikas 2009: 180]. (1) the pope wrote in a letter in 2000, “during the most difficult period of lithuanian history, šiauliai’s crosses proved that faith in christ and fidelity to the church is an inexhaustible source of strength and stronghold” [2000]. it is especially important to highlight that the church, as an institution, began becoming involved with this site only during the 1990s, the time of the pope’s visit. dangiras mačiulis expands on this subject in a report made at a community conference about how to best preserve the hill for the future: during the soviet era spontaneous (with a few exceptions) religious life continued on the hill of crosses. it was the place for self-expression of unrestricted individual religious beliefs. the reason of live functioning of the hill of crosses was that the place became important for individual expression of faith, fearing no publicity in a totalitarian state. the church did not make attempts to “institutionalize” it in any way or to hold official church festivals as in šiluva or žemaičių kalvarija. in some way this policy somehow protected the site, the hill of crosses did not become problematic for official institutions (from annual informational reports to lcp cc political bureau). [2000: 60] though the church still does not own or regulate the hill, it is now very important to the church, especially to the nearby cathedral in šiauliai’s šventa apaštalų petro ir pauliaus katedra [cathedral of the apostles saints peter and paul]. the regional diocese was built nearby in 1997. a yearly pilgrimage is held from this cathedral to the hill, all of which is organized by the diocese, specifically by the bishop eugenijus bartilus who is originally from kaunas. there are links on the website of the cathedral and the diocese to the hill’s website, which is regulated by the katalikų interneto tarnyba [catholic internet service]. there is a saying that salatkienė told me during an informal conversation that questions whether šiauliai is near the hill or if the hill is near šiauliai. indeed, it is a widespread belief in the area that the hill has increased tourism and perhaps boosted the economy of the nearby city, which includes the cathedral and local diocese. the hill is proof of what a strong christian faith can do, making it a useful resource to promote catholic belief. the church does support the hill by directing pilgrims towards it, but its management is under the supervision of the district municipality of šiauliai and maintained specifically by the meškuičių seniunija [eldership of meškuičiai]. (2) lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 36 the hill has undergone the most physical changes during this third period, namely in adapting to the increased tourism in the area. on 24-25 february 2000, the “historical roots of the hill of crosses and its preservation problems” conference was held in šiauliai. the goal of the conference was to “draw attention to rapid changes of the hill of crosses and its environment” [salatkienė 2000a: 7], held under the phare credo program of the european union. the main point of discussion was “the reconstruction of the territory of the hill of crosses and means to popularize it” project, which implemented the construction of the visitor center and parking lot that were built just a few hundred meters from the hill. in 2000, a franciscan monastery was also built three hundred meters away at the encouragement of pope john paul ii (see fig. 5). within the monastery, there is a small chapel, where, instead of an altarpiece, is a large, floor-to-ceiling window that showcases the hill. though there aren’t any other developments yet, there are also rumors of goals to build a church near the hill [šinkūnaitė 2000; delfi 2011; petrulienė and bradauskas 2011]. figure 5: the hill today: a) kryžių kalnas, b) information center and parking lot, c) franciscan monastery, and d) pope’s outdoor chapel. [google: n.d.] attempts to increase visits to the hill have been successful. in 2014, there were four times the number of foreign visitors as lithuanian ones [šiaulių rajono turizmo ir verslo informacijos centras 2014]. when visiting the hill during my fieldwork in 2015, i observed visitors to the hill who were writing fieldnotes of the process of their visit and taking photographs. many tourists hop off of a tour bus or personal vehicle at the tourism center, which was built in 2008, to buy a lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 37 cross from one of the vendors at the little market, mark the cross, take pictures of the hill, sometimes have a tour guide provide a history of the place, and then, while venturing through the pathways of the hill, finally, plant their cross. with improved infrastructure for visitors and the ease of adding crosses to the hill, it has become inundated with crosses, without any lingering fears of oppressive destruction. wandering through the site, i read and took pictures of many crosses, many of which commemorate a deceased loved one, hope for a happy marriage, pray to god, or express thanks and wonder as a visiting tourist. changes and tensions at the hill the three periods that i have discussed mark considerable changes in meanings for the hill and the lithuanian people. the creation of the hill dates to as early as the ninth century before the king of poland and the grand duke of lithuania initiated the christianization of lithuania in 1387, which only reached the region of samogitia decades later. as such, christian beliefs would have slowly permeated the area, adjusting to the pre-christian beliefs of the time and never fully replacing them. lithuanian archeologist and anthropologist marija gimbutas writes in ancient symbolism in lithuanian folk art, that cross-crafting and cross-erection are pre-christian traditions [1958: 3, 91-92]: roofed poles and crosses were encountered not only in places such as cemeteries or crossroads, but practically anywhere in front of a homestead, at the edge of the village, amid fields, by “holy” springs, or in the forest. they were erected on the occasion of a person’s marriage or serious illness, in commemoration of an untimely death, during epidemics among men or animals, or for the purpose of ensuring good crops. they rose from the earth, as the folksong had risen, as various customs had risen, out of religious beliefs that challenged definition through artistic creation. [1958: 1] in this sense, the crosses on the hill are not unique within lithuania but rather are unique for the longevity of their livelihood and scale. additionally, gimbutas adds that “all outgrowing elevations are popularly endowed with peculiar powers rising from this great source [earth]” [93], and so mounds, even if manmade, strengthen the holiness of the crosses laid upon it, “as if pointing up the power emanating from the earth” [93]. further emphasizing this connection to the earth and pre-christian ideologies are the symbols used in the art of crosscrafting, such as astrological and plant (see fig. 6) and animal depictions (see fig. 7), alongside familiar christian iconography (see fig. 7). finally, the many large crosses of untreated wood on the hill also mark a connection to the earth, conveying a sense of temporality because they will eventually weather and decay in harmony with the natural life cycle. rūta saliklis writes about contemporary lithuanian wood art: lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 38 most contemporary sculptures are monochromatic, made of untreated wood, so that an outdoor sculpture will weather and crack. this emphasis on natural raw material can be seen as an expression of national consciousness as well. leaving the wood bare makes it a more authentic cultural expression because nothing is hidden under the paint. [1998: 1718] figure 6: these two crosses feature sun motifs, centering on the intersections of the crosses. the cross on the right also contains a circle and three flowers. photograph taken by the author on 12 june 2015. lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 39 figure7: rūpintojėlis [pensive christ] figure surrounded by two birds. photograph taken by the author on 26 june 2015. the exhibited temporality of the untreated wood crosses resonates with the history of destruction by tsarist and soviet rule, both of which also threatened, but ultimately failed, to assimilate and destroy lithuanian culture. during tsarist and soviet rule, the hill was a spontaneous shrine, which jack santino defines as “temporary memorials that people construct, on their own initiative, to mark the site of untimely deaths” [2011, 98]. the term “spontaneous” in this case means “the self-motivation of the actors involved” [98], and “shrine,” although it does have a religious connotation, santino specifies as “a portal to the otherworld, a place where two-way communication can occur” [99]. during the 1950s when lithuanians were returning from siberia, they placed the crosses in memory of those lost. it was only later with bulldozer atheism that it became evident that these crosses were temporary. santino notes that spontaneous shrines have two important qualities: commemoration and performativity [2006: 1]. commemoration can be observed as visitors place crosses, rosaries, and objects on the hill in memory of someone or something. performativity, santino writes, “draw[s] attention to a social issue and convince a broad public of the accuracy of their position on it” [2006: 2]. graves are meant to commemorate the death of individuals, and so spontaneous shrines also have an ulterior motive: social commentary. at the hill, the spontaneous erection of crosses communicated the injustices lithuanians experienced at the hands of the soviet regime. lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 40 spontaneous shrines are makeshift and are not built to last. so, eventually, as the social issues that they commemorate either get resolved or are forgotten, such sites are typically abandoned [santino 2011: 98]. however, as bulldozer atheism and other soviet strategies to reduce the number of visits to the hill waned and lithuania reclaimed independence in 1990, the hill’s temporality and social commentary were no more, distancing it from the spontaneous shrine it once was. after lithuania’s reestablishment of independence, crosses no longer represented symbols of hope and opposition to the current sovereign. after pope john paul ii visited the site, the conference in 2000, and the development of the surrounding area, the discourse previously used to identify the hill as a spontaneous shrine is now part of the official narrative, marked on plaques, tourist guides, and online. one plaque, just a few steps from the hill, reads: the hill of crosses is a unique place in terms of both its scale and its history. at present some 200,000 crosses of various sizes adorn the hill. by continually putting up crosses there, people express their devotion to christ, pray for his help and mercy, and identify lithuania as a christian land. the hill of crosses gains immense significance in the lives of lithuanian believers during the soviet era as a sign of resistance to the totalitarian regime. after the re-establishment of independence new life has been breathed into the hill of crosses and it has become a symbol of the entire nation’s unshakeable faith, its past suffering and hope. the hill of crosses gains fame throughout the world on 7 september 1993 when pope john paul ii visited it and celebrated the holy mass for 100,000 people who gathered there. in 1994 a cross was put up on the site using the crucifix that john paul ii gave to lithuania. the cross blessed by pope benedict xvi was added in 2006. at the foot of the hill of crosses stands a franciscan monastery built with encouragement of pope john paul ii and consecrated in 2000. the feast of the hill of crosses, reinstated in 1997, draws large crowds each year on the last sunday of july. this plaque was produced by jono pauliaus ii pilgrimu kelias [pilgrim route of john paul ii], a website (www.pilgrimukelias.lt) that provides information about john paul ii’s routes in lithuania in 1993 and current pilgrimage news. the hill as an official site is now buried in crosses, making it difficult to distinguish what crosses are official. indeed, it even seems as though a spontaneous shrine has sprung up on top of the now official monument, a phenomenon santino defines as an assemblage. santino calls an assemblage “a category of art, a genre of sculpture done with found objects, a kind of three-dimensional collage” [1992: 158]. paulette g. curtis’s [2010] article “stewarding a living collection: the national parks service and the vietnam veterans memorial collection” describes how the national park service (nps) sorts and organizes the ever-growing vietnam veterans memorial collection (vvmc). the curators have sorted, documented, lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 41 and kept every object in a facility in maryland since 1984. all objects make it into the collection, no matter how mundane they might seem because “the rationale for collecting the memorial objects lay in what they uniquely preserved and reflected of contemporary life… the vvmc, by contrast, consisted of objects left by the visiting public and was not the product of any collector’s choice” [2010: 55-56]. however pure the intentions, it became known that these objects were being collected in storage, and so people were no longer spontaneously leaving objects, but instead donating objects to be part of the collection. some objects have nothing to do with the memorial itself or the vietnam war [57]. a similar situation has been occurring at the hill. the official narrative, as found on the plaque, represents an idyllic reality that lithuanians and christians travel across the globe to come to this very spot to place a cross. however, in 2014, there have been four times more foreign visitors than lithuanians to the hill, and so it is fair to assume that most crosses are not placed by lithuanians. the hill suffers a similar issue as the vvmc because the management of the hill must decide whether they have the right to perform the impossible task of sorting through which materials belong and which do not. and so, the hill continues to grow. though some crosses are placed on the hill in a prayer of continued freedom for lithuanians (see fig. 8), many take on new messages from a wider variety of people than ever before. in such, comes two new struggles with the hill: its management and regulation. in a 2015 interview, eugenijus bartulis, šiauliai district's first bishop, explained to me that the visit of the pope in 1993 had come as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, awareness of this unique, small local place of worship spread across lithuania and the world, when it was acknowledged as a place of power by the highest figure in roman catholicism; on the other, an influx of individuals from around the world now flocked to the hill to be a part of its glory, regardless of their intent. as shops were built near the tourism center selling small crosses, parking was also installed and bus routes expanded. it became easy to add to the hill, when previously it was strenuous and, at times, hazardous. bartulis expressed concerns about the degradation of the site, recalling one german tourist complaining to him that the hill was a šiūkšlynės [garbage dump]. lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 42 figure 8: plaque with caption, “almighty and omnipresent god, protect our country’s territory and people from alcoholism, vandals, thieves, fascists, communists, murderers. let honesty and true democracy thrive. adolfina and adomas ganusauskai lithuania year 2002.” photograph taken by the author. indeed, mass-produced crosses and rosaries climb up and pile up intricately carved crosses, sometimes making them indecipherable (see fig. 2). walkways are tight and often display broken crosses along the tall grass. though there are signs that deter visitors from lighting candles, it does seem as though on particularly hot and dry days the hill could go up in flames. bartulis suggested the potential construction of a separate structure for tourists to place their crosses to avoid the šiukšlė [trash] that accumulates and make the hill easier to upkeep, but he expressed, exasperated: jie sako, turi būti chaotiškas kryžių kalnas, kaip žmonės nori, kad čia būtų toks, kaip jau žmonių sudėta, tegul taip ir būna. o ne tai, kad būtų tvarkinga labai viskas. tai įvairių tų nuomonių yra ir labai žmonės nenori, kad ten kištus, kad ten tvarkytų per daug. [they say that the hill of crosses should be chaotic, as people want it to be, as people have already arranged it, so let it be. and not that lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 43 everything should be very tidy. there are various opinions and people really don’t want to interfere there, to have too much organized there.] the tourist-pilgrim dichotomy becomes apparent here, as christian travelers are deemed as more worthy to add to the hill than secular tourists by bartulis and the local diocese. regina bendix describes pilgrimage as a predecessor to modern day tourism, as the “path to absolutism, pacing the way to the afterlife in heaven, travel was the enlightened road to knowledge” [2018: 17]. travel among the elite, such as scholars looking to expand their worldview in the late medieval ages, held similarly high esteem for pilgrimage as their travel wasn’t for their own personal pleasure or satisfaction, but rather was for the pursuit of knowledge and, presumably, the betterment of mankind. as travel became more affordable to lower classes of people due to improved mobility and infrastructure, a dichotomy between traveler and tourist blossomed. as bendix writes, “the dichotomy between individualistic travelers and mass tourists is maintained as a lucrative construct, as it provides individuals desirous of distinction with a means to perceive themselves as successors of enlightened or romantic revelers in search of inner betterment” [2018: 18]. bartulis’ suggestion that having a separate zone for tourist contributions exacerbates the belief that pilgrims have more intent behind their visit and therefore should be held at a higher esteem than the everyday tourist. separating tourists from pilgrims at the hill has proved an impossible feat because the two are not so easily discernible. in an article by marion bowman and tiina sepp, they write about caminoization as “the process whereby various aspects and assumptions of the contemporary camino [de santiago], particularly as encountered by non-traditional pilgrims, are transplanted and translated to other pilgrimage sites, routes and contexts” [2018: 75]. the camino de santiago is a network of pilgrimage routes in northern spain that lead to the shrine of the apostle st. james in the santiago de compostela cathedral in galicia, spain. as the camino gained recognition from cultural institutions, such as a cultural route by the council of europe and unesco, it increased in popularity beyond its historical, religious pilgrims, as well as its developed access and infrastructure. on the one hand, this increased accessibility, but on the other it popularized it, ruining the site because it is no longer an isolated, difficult, quiet, and pensive retreat, but instead a now overcrowded route. in the eyes of the local diocese, the visit of the pope in 1993 had validated the holiness of the hill, but for others, namely locals who had frequented the hill during soviet occupation, this visit led to infrastructure that catered to tourists rather than locals. apolonija nistelienė, a retired architect, was adamant in an interview with me in 2015 in her kaunas home that these tourism facilities were created to generate a profit: kam jis reikalingas dabar? aš nesuprantu prie ko tas turistinis centras ir prie ko čia piligrimai. sakau čia pasidarė ir ten pasidarė biznis. todėl kad yra tursimo centras čia yra biški susiryšę su bažnyčia. čia nesuprasi, nu vyskupija, ten jie turbūt gauna kiek pinigėlių. žinai čia yra biznelis labai. lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 44 [why is it needed now? i don’t understand what the tourism center is for and what the pilgrims are for. i’m saying that it has become a business here and there. because it is a center of wealth, there are people here who are closely connected with the church. you don’t understand here, well, the diocese, they probably get a lot of money there. you know, there is a lot of business here.] nistelienė added that in addition to it being proof of greed, that the landscape was no longer complementary to the hill—as it used to be a miracle in a desolate place, one that needed to be sought out to visit. just as people debate “is šiauliai near the hill of crosses, or the hill of crosses near šiauliai,” many criticize the local diocese for attempting to build a church near the hill, as they view the hill as holier than any possible church. archeologist salatkienė explained to me: mano nuomone tas kryžių̨ kalnas turėtų likti pats savimi ir bažnyčios globos jam kokios nors ypatingos nereikia. valstybės globos, visuomenės globos, vietinių žmonių talkinimo, šito butinai reikia, be to jis tiesiog neišgyvens. bet bažnyčia jam nieko negali duoti. tuo kad jis kryžių̨ kalnas, o ne šventovių, ne koplyčių ir ne stabukų, o kryžių̨ kalnas, jis jau tą savo nu sakykime duoklȩ...jau atiduoda tuo kad jau reiškia yra krikščioniškas. [in my opinion, the hill of crosses should stay as is and doesn’t need any help from the church. it definitely needs state patronage, public patronage, support from local people, without which it would simply not survive. but the church cannot give it anything it doesn’t already have. just because it is the hill of crosses, not a place of shrines, no chapels, and no idols, but the hill of crosses, it already gives its—let’s say— tribute... it already gives it, in that it already is christian.] the rumors about building a church near the hill, mentioned to me by bartulis, don’t seem to make sense to salatkienė because she, as well as kiršinaitė and nistelienė, view the hill as a church without a roof. they believe that this place is holy because of its organic and natural development and that the planned building of the church is unnatural and would impede on the existing holiness of the site. the tourism center was built to accommodate increased tourism due to the visit of the pope, and so these women consider it ironic that bartulis would complain about the state of the hill, when the church played a key part in popularizing and commodifying it. as for bartulis’ suggestion to create a separate structure for tourists to add to, my informants shared anxieties about restrictions because they could jeopardize the spirit of the hill. audronė kiršnaitė, an employee at the šiaulių rajono savivaldybės viešoji biblioteka [šiauliai district municipal public library], has lived in šiauliai her whole life and states that trying to regulate the hill based purely on aesthetics misses the true beauty of the hill: lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 45 koks jisai yra, toks, koks susiformavo, toks jisai yra. tada mes turim uždraust priekybininkus, tada turim kažko leisti arba neleisti... o jeigu žmogui tai yra gražu? juk ir kapinėse. mes matom vienam kažkokia ten žvakė, tam stiklinė, jinai yra tokia—jinai yra man graži. kitam yra graži kokia nors marija, kurios viduje dega parafinas. [what it is, the way it was formed, that’s what it is. we would have to ban vendors. we would have to allow some and restrict others… but what if it is beautiful to that person? after all, even in cemeteries, for one person we see some candle, for another a glass—to me, that is beautiful. for another, a mary is beautiful, inside which paraffin is burning.] and as kiršnaitė explained to me, because some people might tie two twigs together for a loved one who is recovering from a deadly disease and cannot afford a seven-foot beautifully carved cross, that small cross might hold more meaning than the tall ones—you cannot tell intent by the aesthetics of an object. while examining the caminoization of english anglican cathedrals, bowman and sepp explain that visitors with no religious affiliations were actively participating in pilgrim-like behaviors: “not only taking guided tours of the cathedral or reading guidebooks, but also lighting candles, praying, meditating, thinking about deceased loved ones” [2018: 84]. similarly, regardless of identity or faith, many tourists are noticeably and actively engaging with the spirit of the hill in meaningful ways by going out of their way to visit, learning its history, and adding crosses (see fig. 9). to restrict access and additions to the hill would go against the spirit of the hill as a spontaneous place of visitation. even so, kiršinaitė, nistelienė, and salatkienė all nostalgically looked back at a time when the hill was a little-known place of prayer that was more peaceful and serene than chaotic, like in figures 3 and 4. lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 46 figure 9: pile of crosses, most of which were purchased at the market near the tourism center, at the base of a large, wooden cross. photograph taken by author on 26 june 2015. conclusion vytenis rimkus explained at the conference in 2000 that the hill’s surrounding area had to be developed to “satisfy the needs of visitors” [2000: 189]. the conference saw that the surroundings of the hill, which at the time was just a poorly paved road, did not satisfy the existing needs of visitors. additionally, there was a desire to increase tourism to the place by non-locals. by improving the facilities near the hill, the hill could be compared to other tourism sites across europe, and as rimkus writes, it was a “matter of image-building not lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 47 only for the hill of crosses, but šiauliai and lithuania” [2000: 189]. imagebuilding across the country facilitated lithuania’s membership in the european union in 2004 and has increased tourism since. bartulis’ anxieties over the cleanliness of the hill comes from a similar desire to accommodate visitors’ expectations, as well as lithuanians putting forth images of the way they want to be seen as a nation. i would argue, however, that the hill is more honest than most touristic sites, as it unabashedly showcases the reality of a place rather than a sanitized version of what a nation wishes to be. and it is not as though the place is left in ruin: every summer, a group of people from the meškuičių seniunija is hired to clean and upkeep the hill. the primary goal is to rid of any broken crosses and move any objects that are obstructing paths, but otherwise the caretakers do not think it is their place to choose what deserves and doesn’t deserve to be placed on the hill, and thus preserve its natural, even if chaotic, integrity. when visiting the hill as a child and then as an adult, the melancholic environment felt exacerbated by the historical instability of the country. since its creation over a millennium ago, the hill has survived oppression, destruction, and abandonment, rising from the ground as a spontaneous shrine to criticize oppressive rule. even today, as lithuanians fear globalization and tourism overtaking their culture, current debates surrounding the hill express these same anxieties: that the hill will become so overpopulated by outsiders that it will lose its lithuanian individuality and originality. even in these concerns over trash, there is power in the unkept beauty of the hill, a beauty in its chaos. gimbutas writes in ancient symbolism: the old cemeteries of lithuania held trees that had never been touched by a pruner’s hand, for the folk adage says that to cut a cemetery tree is to do evil to the deceased. in no case may a live cemetery tree be cut and consumed for fuel. only the fallen dead branches may be collected for this purpose by the poor. neither is it permissible to mow the grass: “from cemetery grass our blood flows,” says the old proverb. [1958: 57] reading this passage, i can’t help but think about the discussions i had with my informants about the natural life of the hill and my perceptions of the hill as alive and continuously growing. ėglutė trinkauskaitė compares the clustered appearance of the hill to a forest, stating “crosses, shrines, and wooden sculptures of saints also seem to be alive, as if growing out of the landscape” [2019: 49]. the eldership only takes what has broken and left the hill natural. tall grass thrives between the crosses. to remove what is already there means to remove some of the life it breathes. just as it had survived abandonment and bulldozing, the hill will survive tourism. by allowing the hill to grow and be cherished by all those who visit, it will continue to be a “chronicle of the nation’s life” [rimkus 2014: 3] rather than an artifact of the past. lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses] folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 48 notes research for this article was conducted during a msc in social and cultural anthropology at the universiteit van amsterdam in 2015-2016. translations were completed by the author with the help of her mother, regina kibirkstis. 1 for more on the pilgrim-tourist dichotomy, see bendix [2018, 17-18]. 2 lithuania is divided into ten counties, sixty municipalities, and 537 elderships. an eldership is the smallest administrative division of lithuania that consists of a very small region and usually administers small-scale, local matters. see [lietuvos savivaldybių seniūnų asociacija 2020] for more information. bibliography bendix, regina. 2018. culture and value: tourism, heritage, and property. bloomington: indiana university press. bowman, marion and tiina sepp. 2018. “caminoisation and cathedrals: replication, the heritagisation of religion, and the spiritualisation of heritage.” religion 49(2): 74-98. bučas, jurgis. 2000. “the social importance of associative landscapes with religious phenomena,” in historical roots of the hill of crosses and its preservation problems, transl. by regina jocaitė. sigita tauterienė, birutė salatkienė, and virginija šiukščienė, eds. šiauliai, šiaulių “aušros” muziejaus leidykla, 95-116. curtis, paulette g. 2010. “stewarding a living collection: the national park service and the veterans memorial collection.” museum anthropology 33(1): 49-61. dailidė, ričardas. 1993. the mount of crosses. vilnius: žurnalas “veidas.” delfi. 2011. “kultūros ministras pritarė bažnyčios statybai prie kryžių kalno” [minister of culture approves the construction of a church near the hill of crosses]. delfi. cited by: http://www.delfi.lt/news/daily/lithuania/kulturosministras-pritarebaznycios-statybai-prie-kryziu-kalno.d?id=47621197. 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(consulted 8 august 2024). urbonienė, skaidrė. 2017. “cross-crafting heritage in the lithuanian diaspora in the united states: expressions of national identity.” in cultural heritage in migration. nikolai vukov, lina gergova, tanya matanova, and yana gergova, eds. paradigma, sofia, 437-449. valiulis, skirmantas, and žvirgždas, stanislovas. 2008. the hill of crosses and its interpretations through history. šiauliai: aušros moziejus leidykla. biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 113 biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia nadezhda oinotkinova siberian branch of the russian academy of sciences novosibirsk, russia abstract: the article deals with the ethnic specificity of biblical legends about the flood and the tower of babel in the folklore of the turkic peoples of southern siberia (the altai, tuva, khakassia and shor). these folk legends, rooted in early christianity, confirm the cultural and historical contacts between the peoples of central asia and peoples holding christian beliefs. the subjects of the legends, associated with the biblical idea of the creation of the world and man and the flood, found their way into siberia even before the russians initiated the process of christianization in the region from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. this assertion is confirmed not only by the specific features of folk legends under discussion, but also by historical data on the influence of manichaeism and nestorianism on the culture of the central asian peoples, including on the turkic peoples of siberia. the persistence of these legends can be attributed to the fact that their plots are often adapted to local realities, concepts, myths, and events. in the construction of these narratives, use is made of national mythological terminology and conceptual systems. the saturation of the folk legends with local mythology and local beliefs in the siberian context may be a contributing factor to their ongoing existence as a part of the folklore. the appropriation of the contents of biblical legends by the peoples of siberia also shows the seriousness of their adoption of christian ideas in the distant past. biblical legends about the flood are found in many nations, including among the turkic peoples of siberia (the altai, tuva, khakassia, shor), who, to a greater or lesser extent, have been folklorica 2016, vol. xx 114 influenced by christianity. legends connected with the old and new testament are one of the most fruitful areas for exploration of mutual influences in the folk cultures of various nations. for many years, research on christian folklore was rare in folkloristics, but at this point, we have solid textual sources as well as significant research on east slavic folk material. for this study, we drew on the works of o. v. belova [2004, 2006, 2008], v. s. kuznetsova [1997, 2008, 2009], and v. v. napolskikh [1990]. the goal of our study is to identify the historical and ethnographic context, as well as ethnographic features of folk legends about the flood and the tower of babel in the folklore of the turkic peoples of southern siberia and to demonstrate that they were adopted into local folklore much earlier than the 18th and 19th centuries, when russian missionaries came to these lands. this analysis was based on texts from the altai, tuva, khakass and shor in the works of n. f. katanov [1907] and v. i. verbitsky [1893] as well as those in volumes “tale prose of the altai” by n. oinotkinova et al. [2011], “myths, legends and traditions of the tuva” by n. alekseev et al. [2010], “folklore of the shor” by l. arbachakova [2010] in the series памятники фольклора народов сибири и дальнего востока [monuments of folklore of the peoples of siberia and the far east] (4 plots with 9 variants of those plots). v.i. verbitsky [1893] published only russian versions of the texts and were provided as options in order to trace the development of certain themes and motifs. (1) we do not have the originals of those texts. indigenous peoples of siberia deep in the past were animists and shamanists. aboriginal myth-ritual folklore originated based on animistic beliefs. great sky (teneri) was a deity of the ancient turks. grandiose prayers to him were held in the days of the ancient turkic khanate. in medieval epitaphs carved on rocks, there are direct references to the sky: “tengri!” they stated: “the sky is so desired,” “the sky (heaven) is my (god)—a roof to us!”, “the sky bestows a divine state, the people—the great hagan, liberty and destiny—to every person” [malov 1951: 62, 66, 99]. ancient turkic monuments also referred to erlik, lord of the underworld. erlik khan was one of the most powerful creator gods and was revered by all turkic peoples. he received sacrifices in the distant past and still biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 115 does today today. for this purpose, turkic peoples choose the best horse, typically a pinto, from the herd and devoted it to erlik; this horse was called yyyk (yzyh). scholars of history and ethnography have suggested that christian ideas first penetrated central asia together with manichaeism [sagalaev 1984: 4; kyzlasov 1999, 2000]. (2) in later centuries, christianity arrived in central asia with a wave of nestorianism [tokarev 1936: 134; sagalaev 1984: 4]. (3) s. a. tokarev noted that nestorianism in central asia was dominant in the state of the khereids and the naimans; it was also strong among the genghisids and left its imprint on the religion of the altaians. the cosmogonic myths of the altaians, recorded by v. i. verbitsky, show a close resemblance to biblical cosmogony and, in all likelihood, have a nestorian origin [tokarev 1936: 134]. central asia, primarily the territories of present-day mongolia, was the object of direct missionary activities of the nestorians from the west, since middle asia, iran, and the middle east had trade relations with central asia. it also might have experienced the influence of nestorians from china. nestorianism did not achieve complete success in central asia, but “by the middle of the ninth century or somewhat earlier, the nestorian type of christianity came into some degree of acceptance among the kyrgyz aristocracy and, subsequently, among the wider layers of population, yet it did not drive out the local shamanic cults” [kliashtorny 1959: 167]. the folklore of many of the present-day central asian peoples, most of whom do not now follow christianity, for example, the kazakhs, the kirghiz, and the bashkirs, also contains the legend about the flood, god’s creation of the first people, the tower of babel, the end of the world, etc. the legends containing biblical stories penetrated into this vast territory at different times with different peoples as a result of cultural contacts. folklorization of christian ideas through oral narration of legends contributed to their wide distribution among various cultures. the subsequent wave of christianization of siberian ethnic groups occurred during the russian settlement of siberia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. in that period, through the efforts of the altai spiritual mission that worked in the altai and in folklorica 2016, vol. xx 116 shoria, a significant portion of the holy scriptures, some psalms, the commandments, and prayers were translated into the altai language. it was not likely that the siberian peoples adopted russian folklore in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, since at that time there were almost no schools, and only a small percentage of the population could learn a foreign language. the comprehensive learning of the russian language became only possible in the early twentieth century after the october socialist revolution. the appropriation of the contents of biblical legends by the peoples of siberia provides evidence for their adoption of christian ideas in the distant past. the religious beliefs of the modern altaians, tuvinians, khakasses, and yakuts demonstrate syncretic elements: most of the population remains animist, while a small portion adhere to buddhism or orthodox christianity. many scholars who have studied the religion of the ethnic minorities in siberia note that these peoples were christianized only formally. currently, for example, in the altai mountains only about 1–1.5% of the indigenous population hold to the orthodox religion; according to the 2010 census, there were 81,096 altaians, 72,959 khakasses, 12.888 shors, 263,934 tuvinians, and 478,085 yakuts in the population. orthodox traditions among telengits of the ulagan district of the altai republic have been revived in the last 20 years. for the turkic peoples of siberia, orthodoxy remains a foreign culture. very few people go to orthodox churches in spite of the fact that they exist in many areas. our field observations show that legends with christian themes are told not only by baptized indigenous people, but also by animists. in their words, they heard these stories from their ancestors. altaic narratives relating biblical plots, such as the recordings made in the end of nineteenth century, at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in the 1980s-90s would likely be classified as legends, because they retain at their core ancient biblical stories. more contemporary texts composed in the late twentieth century more resemble an abbreviated toponymic tradition; they do not retell bible stories in any detail, but include references to biblical figures and locations, indicating a shift in the biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 117 oral tradition. the folk legends of the turkic people of siberia about the flood consist of the following essential elements: noah’s preparations for the flood and his construction of the ark; confrontation with the devil, who aims to destroy the human race; the continuation of the flood for 40 days (and the death of the mammoth); the termination of the flood and the release of birds from the ark. adaptation within borrowed biblical legends often occurs at the level of vocabulary (e.g., character names, names of flora, place names, etc.) as wells as insertion of plot details. for example, the text “shayyk [the flood]” (see appendix sections 1-4), composed by the kumandins, a northern ethnic group in the altai, and its variants present the image of a mythical blue goat [kӧk teke] with iron horns, who, sensing the approaching catastrophe, ran around the earth seven times [oinotkinova et al. 2011: 116–117, 428]. the epithet kök 'blue', may indicate the goat’s origin in the element of water, thus logically associating this animal with the flood. the legend says that this creature appeared before the flood: шайык шыгарда, тебир мӱӱстиг кöк теке чети кӱн, чети катап чер айландыра, мараап чат чӱгӱрчӱрдир. чети кӱн чер силгинен. чети кӱн кырлар кӱйген, чети кӱн ньанмыр чагтыр. чер чарылган. чарыктарын сары суг толгон. чети кӱн тоол кирген, мӱндӱр барган. чети кӱн кар тӱшкен. ан соондо соок болгон… [when the flood occurred, a blue goat with iron horns, bleating, in seven days ran seven times around the earth. for seven days, the earth trembled. for seven days, the mountain burned, for seven days, there was a downpour. the earth split. cracks were filled with water. for seven days they were filled, and hail fell. for seven days, snow fell. then it was cold...]. [oinotkinova et al. 2011: 116] in this text, it is clear that the appearance of the blue goat portends disaster associated with the element of water. the goat’s role as a harbinger of water-related disaster is consistent with the content of folklorica 2016, vol. xx 118 another legend, in which people saw the goat for the second time before the ice age began. mythical images related to this element are comparable to the image of the red bull, a harbinger of disaster associated with the element of fire. altai legends about the flood as well as the legends about the creation of the world and humans clearly manifest the idea of the dualism of light and dark principles typical for manichaeism. the text, “shayyk [the flood]” says that instead of noah and his family, seven brothers were saved in the ark; the eldest of them was erlik (the devil), and the youngest was ulgen (the god). in the old testament the devil is not mentioned as a character. the narrator of this text indicates the precise number of the survivors, i.e., a total of eight people. in the bible the number of noah’s family is not written: “and noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood” [king james bible, genesis 7: 7]. in the altaic “legend of noah” ulgen, or kudai (this word has persian (indo-iranian) origin), says to a righteous man named noah that the flood will come soon. erlik, having learned that noah wants to be saved from the flood and is building an ark, tries to prevent noah from doing this. in this variant the devil comes to noah’s wife in the form of a man in a yellow felt coat, (erlik’s traditional way in altaic folklore), and thus he was “imported” into the biblical story intact. the name of noah has also been replaced by ӧbӧgӧn [husband], kizhi [man], and ayyldyn eezi [the owner of the yurt] [oinotkinova et al. 2011: 126–131]. in addition, another altai legend, “kovcheg [ark]” precisely specifies the number of noah’s family that boarded the ark, namely eight people: noah, his sons, their three sons, and their wives. adaptation of the plots borrowed from biblical legends among the turkic peoples of siberia often included the introduction of myths that explain the creation of cultural artifacts or that explain the division of society into different tribal groups, clans or the system of various types of individual character. for example, when noah’s wife helped to raise the oars, she tore the clothes on her back. biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 119 ripping her clothes is a reference to a slit in the fabric on the chegedek, the traditional coat worn by women in the altai. this element is derived an etiological myth explaining the appearance of some altaic peoples: озо-озо, озогы öйдö, алтайда ноой деп кижи jаткан. jер ÿстинде агаш-таш бар öйдö, ол тушта чайык чыккан эмтир. ноой бала-барказыла кожо jаан сал, кайык эткен. jаан тайгага, себи бажына, мал-аш чыгарып, анайып тынын алгандар. [long ago, in ancient times in the altai there was a man named noah. when on earth has already been created by nature, it is the flood, then came the flood, it turns out.] ноойлор — ол ло аргаданып, арткан улус. ол улустаҥ ноой-майман, ноой-кыпчак, ноой-тодош — кöп арткан улусты ноой улузы дежер. [noah and his children made a large raft with oars. on the big mountain, at the top of [mount] sebi, they raised cattle fodder, so they were saved. noahns are the people who escaped the flood and remained there. from those people came many believed to be the people of noah: noah-maiman, noah-kipchak, noahtodosh]. [oinotkinova et al. 2011: 130] that man gave his children’s children their names. children were named for the body parts of animals. one who ate giblets (was called) chapty, one who ate the internal fat (was) kipchak. in one altaic legend erlik sends his wife, in the guise of a mouse, to visit noah’s wife to learn what noah has been doing. this well-known episode from biblical legend lore includes, in this case, an etiological myth that explains how the altaic peoples learned to make arak [milk vodka] from sour milk [kefir]. the mouse teaches his wife to make arak for noah and to give him this drink to learn noah’s secrets. noah’s wife got onto the ark only when her husband got angry and said, “devil’s wife, come into the ark!” the mouse was then able to go with her onto the ark and gnawed a hole in the bottom of the ship. a cat caught and ate the mouse [oinotkinova et folklorica 2016, vol. xx 120 al. 2011: 430–431]. this episode is almost identical to an episode of the legend recorded among the shor people (see appendix, text “shaiyk [the flood]”). in addition, a similar plot occurs in east slavic texts about the flood, where an animal also performs the role of savior, e.g., a cat, lion, or frog [belova 2004: 267–273]. fragments of the confrontation with the devil are also present in the russian translation of the legend recorded by n. f. katanov in kachin khakas [1907: 417–418]. (4) according to this story, noah’s wife conspires not with the devil’s wife, but with the devil himself, called aina, an evil spirit in local folklore. however, in this case, the event is treated somewhat differently: the devil persuades noah’s husband to give noah wine before he gets on the ark, so that the devil could sneak on as well: катты ебiндä одыр-чатса, кiрпiк аның ебiнä аiна. “ерiң kaiдāр парҕан?” тiдiр. пilä-чоҕылбын, ерiм kаiдāр-kаiдāр парҕан!” аiна “чä”, тīдiр, “таңда сенi ерiң парāң, тыkтан! тīр, ынабассаң!” тī-дiр”. “сен чōkтīрзаң аҕа: ебiмнi тастап, мен kаiдāр параңмын? тiп, парҷаңмын? тiп, ынабассаң!” тī-дiр, “оҕā-ла тың кÿстäп-парīза, чōkтīрзаң аҕа: парар ползаң, пар позың! мен парбаспын! едī тiзäң, сенi kырызар: чä, чōрт, тīр! едī тipä, анаң паразаң!” едī-lä ÿгрäдiп, аiна сыk-чōрiб-icчiк . [the devil says to noah’s wife, ‘you do not get on until the water reaches your knee. then the water will rise to the top edge of your underclothes. you do get on even then. then it will reach your chest. then your husband will say to you, ‘get on, damn it [lit. devil]!’ having said this this, he will call me also. then we all get on the raft together!’ when noah’s wife was in no hurry join her husband in the ark, he said in a heartfelt way, “get on, damn it [lit. devil]!” it turned out that he had called the devil also]. [katanov 1907: 303] in a khakassian legend about the flood episode, the plot surrounds the death of the mammoth. v. s. kuznetsova [2008: 5– biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 121 13] argues that the myth about the disappearance of the mammoth is one limited to local, siberian plots in particular. in the folklore of other siberian peoples, as this researcher has shown, this motif is presented in texts unrelated to the flood. the texts, recorded in the khakass and altai regions, the mammoth’s pride led to his death. in khakass legends the cause of death of the mammoth were birds that landed on his head while he was swimming in the flood waters: […] олар кеlįп, кįрҷįктäр керäпкä. пырāi kус, аң тōза кįргäн аҕа. мамыт тǟн аң кįрäгä ынабāн. ол аң чōkтапчадыр: “кырыk чылды мен чÿзÿп-тǟ сыдīрбын!” паза kусkун ынабаҷыk кįрäргä: “кырыk чылды мен учуҕуп-тā сыдīрбын!” тī-дiр. калап сыkkанда, тōзалары аk-сыkkан. “чä, чōрт!” тǟн-дä, аiна керäпкä'к кįрпарҕан kада. олар едī пiдī чöр-чāлар. едī чöр-чатkанда, керäптäрįнä суҕ кįрчā. кōскаҷаk oiлап-чöрįп кÿскä тāб-алҷыk анда, тудубалҷыk. аiна, кÿскǟ kубулуп, керäптį тезä керткäн полтыр. анаң сыҕāра кōсканың аkсы пыртаk пол-ҷаң. кырыk чылҕа четтiрä чöргäннäр. чöрįп, пįр-lä кÿн четпīн, мамыт аңның тегäjįнä ызыҕас kусkаҷаk одырҕан. ол мамытты суҕҕа кīрä пазыб-ысkан. аң анда ölгäн, ол ōзынаңпу чердä чоҕыл ол аң. суҕ сенгäн; чергä сыkkан kырыk чылдың пазында.” [[…] they came onto the ship. all the birds and beasts came. a beast called mammoth did not want to get into the ship. it said: “i can swim forty days, can float, and not be on the ship!” raven also did not want to enter into the ark: “forty days i can fly!” he said. when the deluge came, everything swam. when [husband] said, “well, hell,” then the devil came onto the ship with them. they sail this way and that. when they therefore were sailing, the ship began to leak. a pussy cat, who was running around, found a mouse and caught it. it turned out that the devil had turned into a mouse and gnawed through the ship. so, the cat’s mouth is considered to be unclean. been there are 40 days of age. while they were swimming, just one day into the flood, a folklorica 2016, vol. xx 122 bird, a titmouse, landed on top of the mammoth’s head, and the mammoth drowned immediately. the beast died there, and since then it does not exist on this earth. the water subsided, and after 40 days they went to the ground]. [katanov 1907: 303-304] in this text narrator mistakenly used the 40 years instead of 40 days. the number of the texts about a mammoth differs. the modern text only touches on the story of the flood and the mammoth: пурунда чир ӱстӱнде уғаа улуғ потоп полыптыр. ол суғ нинҷе пар чир ӱстӱн тооза чайылтыр. хырых кӱн кӧдiрiлген ол чоғар. чон корабль иттiр. ол корабльға нинҷе пар кiзi, аң-хус сыыптыр. ол корабльға мамин тiп аң на одырбиндыр. ол аң: “суғ ӱстӱне позым сығам,” – тiптiр. iди сыхчатханда, нинҷе пар хус мӱӱзiне одырыбыстыр. аның аарына сыдап полбин, ол аң суғ алтына кiр партыр. амғы тағлар, кӧллер, суғлар ол потоп соонаң полыптыр. тағлар хумнаң полған, имiс. мамин аң уғаа улуғ аң полтыр. ам даа тидiрлер: ол хайдағ-да кӧлнiң тӱбiнде чадыр. ол аң хайдағ, хищнай ба, чох па полған, пiлбинчадырбын. [for a long time on the ground was huge flood, it turns out. this water covered the entire earth. forty days later, it [the ark] climbed to the top. people built the ship. on this ship as there are people, animals, birds, [all] fit, it appears. only the animal called mammoth did not get on the ship. this beast said he would get out of the water himself. when he so chose, all the birds took turns sitting on his horns. unable to bear this weight, this beast sank into the water, it turns out. today's mountains, lakes, rivers came about after that flood, it turns out. the mountains were as if made of sand. the mammoth beast was a huge beast, it turns out. and now, they say, he's lying at the bottom of some lake. what kind of beast it was, predatory or not, i don't know. [mindibekova et. al. 2016: 80] biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 123 however, the altaic text contains another reason for the death of the mammoth: it sinks in water, because he hoped to rely on his strength: кöп чактар мынаҥ озо, jердиҥ ÿстинде чайык чыккан эмтир. ол тужунда кижи коркушту jаан сал эткен. jердиҥ ÿстиндеги бастыра тындуларды бир эжердеҥ алып, салына отургузып алала, талайла кайкаладып jÿрген. ол онойдо бастыра тындуларды öлÿмнеҥ аргадаган. jе ол аҥдардыҥ эҥ jаан кааны, jаан деген аҥ, салга отурбаган, мойноп айткан: “мен сен jоктоҥ до бойым чыдажып jÿрерим. мен бастыра аҥдардыҥ кааны». ол тöртöн кÿнге талайла эжинип jÿрген. оноҥ чыдашпай, талайдööн чöҥö берген”. [many centuries ago, there was a flood on the earth. at that time one man made a very big raft. and he took one pair of all the animals of the earth and put them on his raft and began to sail the sea. he saved all the animals from death. but the biggest khan these beasts, the beast called d’aan, did not get on the raft. he refused and said, “i am without you he will survive. i am khan all the animals”. he sailed for forty days by the sea. then, unable to bear it, he sank into the sea]. [oinotkinova et al. 2011: 118] in some siberian texts, the flood story has been contaminated with legends about the creation of the earth. o. v. belova believes that this practice is characteristic of several “bible” legends [belova 2006: 273]. the creation of the world and the flood share the common concept that the world after the flood was created nearly from scratch: in that day will i raise up the tabernacle of david that is fallen, and close up the breaches thereof; and i will raise up his ruins, and i will build it as in the days of old: that they may possess the remnant of edom, and of all the heathen, which are called by my name, saith the lord that folklorica 2016, vol. xx 124 doeth this. [king james bible, amos 9:11–12] this idea, for example, occurs at the end of a shor legend: анаң сал шаптырпартыр эӊне мöзÿк таға арарат теп, таға. анаң аң-куштар по черге кадак чайалғаннар…[then the raft washed up on the highest mountain ararat, ararat mountain. then the beasts and the birds began to be created again on this land…]. [arbachakova 2010: 332] in the altaic text “the flood” the story of the flood combines with legends borrowed from buddhist folkloric tradition that feature a competition for supremacy in the government of the world between its creators. according to this legend, humans were created after the flood. the text notes seven brothers knew it would flood; the older brother was named erlik, and the youngest was ulgen: ӱлген дезе кижи чайап эттир. ол дезе, кöк чакайакты алалып, алтын айакка салалып, кижи чайап ийдир. улуг кардашы, эрлик, аны артык кöрип, чарым чакайаны оорлап алтыр, ӱлген шылап, кижи чайап ийдир….[ulgen also created man. then he took the blue flower, putting it in a golden cup, and created a person. the elder brother, erlik, envied him, robbed him of half of the flower and like ulgen, made a person]. [oinotkinova et al. 2011: 116] this legend also describes in detail the episode in which birds were released from the ark in order to learn about the lowering of the water level: карташтар кереб чазап алтырлар. ол керебге чердиҥ сыртында чугы бар, пеес-куш, куртаҥ, аҥдардаҥ – пир тöйдеҥ кожо аланар. ӱлген дезе, шайык пожоды ба, деп тааканы керебтеҥ пожот ийдир. така дезе, соокка тогып калган. аҥ сонда касты божоттыр. кас дезе сугле ыгып, ойдо ньанмынсан. ӱчӱнче катап ӱлген кускунды ийдир. кускун база ойдо келбеен, öлӱмниҥ эдини очип чӱрдир. [[before the flood] the brothers built the ark. this ark held biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 125 everything on earth: birds, insects, animals, they took one pair of each. to check whether the flood was over, ulgan released a chicken from the ark. the chicken froze in the cold. after this (ulgen) released a goose. the goose just floated on the water and did not return. the third time ulgen sent a raven. the raven also did not return, but flew off to hunt meat… ]. [oinotkinova et al. 2011: 116–117] the text omits the episode of the dove that flew back into the ark with an olive branch in its beak. this text hints, in addition, to a secondary plot connected to the main plot about the creation of the first humans and the dog, which god created so that it could guard the humans while he was in search of a soul for them. erlik, supplanting the god ulgen, breathes his soul into the prone bodies of the humans. the emergence of this myth about the first man and the dog in this story, a motif widespread in the world’s folklore, supports our claim that these legends had existed among the peoples of siberia for a prolonged period. this myth exists in eurasia and north america. since this myth is also found in american indians, it suggests that it existed in eurasia prior to the indian migration to america. iu. e. berezkin thinks that the myth of siberian plunger existed since the paleolithic era. otherwise he would not have been brought to north america [berezkin 2012: 151]. iu. e. berezkin concludes that there are several basic variants about the creation of humans in world folklore. according to the myth about the creation of humans recorded from the peoples of eastern europe and siberia, the creator set a dog to guard the inert human figures he had made. however, god’s antagonist outwitted the watchman and enlivened them himself. in variants from eastern europe and siberia, the dog did not cope with the task god had set, while, in southern of eurasia, it was able to defend their inert bodies [berezkin 2012: 147]. in the myths recorded in india, namely from the munda peoples, darada of hindu kush and abkhazians, the dog defended a man from a horse that had tried to kill him. in the myth written down in india, god makes male and female figures of clay and leaves them to dry. one or two, often winged, horses break the folklorica 2016, vol. xx 126 figures. the creator creates a dog or two dogs that banish the attacking horses. the horse was punished: it was deprived of wings, and the creator gives it away to serve man [berezkin 2012: 146]. in the mongolian (oirot) version, a cow, not a horse, attempts to destroy the figures [berezkin 2012: 144]. the biblical legend of the deluge, published in v. i. verbitsky’s book altai foreigners [1893], has undergone significant changes due to the peculiar interpretation of important plot episodes on the basis of various facts from the history of altai, in particular when they were under the influence of the oyrot culture and lamaism (buddhism). in this legend the main character's name is not noah, but nam (lama ‘a buddhist priest’). the names of his three sons are soozun-uul, sar-uul (lit. ‘yellow-son’) balyksa (lit. ‘fisherman’). the etymology of the name soozun-uul is unknown; we can only posit that it is possibly arose from two altaic words: suu [water, river] with the possessive affix nun and uul [fellow, son]. it might also be related to the mongol word susug [respected, honored, religious] [cheremishov 1937: 309]. one consistent element of this biblical legend is narration about the origin of various ethnicities on the earth. according to the altaic legend, the peoples who practice paganism and shamanism emerged from nam’s son balyksa [the biblical ham – author’s note]. his father cursed him because, when he (nam) fell ill, balyksa called on the services of a shaman. nam’s two other sons, soozun-uul and sar uul, were blessed by god, so that wiser peoples came from them [verbitsky 1893: 127]. the text details episodes on noah’s preparation for the flood, the construction of the ark, and the end of flood. ulgen tells nam to build a raft of sandalwood. to check whether the flood had ended, nama releases a crow, crow and magpie and finally a dove. the dove came back with a birch branch [verbitsky 1893: 125–126]. in the bible, the dove brought an olive leaf: and it came to pass at the end of forty days, that noah opened the window of the ark which he had made: and he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth. also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 127 face of the ground; but the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth: then he put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark. and he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark; and the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth. [king james bible, genesis 8: 6–11] the altaic and tuvan versions relate that shamans came from the accursed son of nama (noah), balyksa (ham). nama’s son balyksa does not receive a blessing from his father for turning to the services of a shaman: после потопа балыкса захворалъ и призвалъ къ себе человека, по имени тянгару, заставивъ его камлать. обоихъ ихъ эрликъ научилъ: одного призвать кама, а другого – камлать. тогда ульгэнь сказалъ балыксе: “ты будь слуга эрлику, потому что ты не мне приносишь жертву, и после смерти ты пойдешь къ эрлику.” тянгара сказалъ въ ответъ ульгэню: “пожалуй, я и тебе такимъже образомъ буду приносить жертву, какъ эрлику.” ульгэнь сказал ему: “отныне будетъ имя твое кам. кто будет подражать тебе, тотъ не будетъ иметь богатства на земле.” других двухъ сыновей намы, соозун-уула и сар-уула, ульгэн благословилъ и сказалъ: «отъ васъ произойдетъ народъ благоразумный, книжники и пророки, ари и ханы, и созун-уула я возьму къ себе на небо!” [after the flood balyksa fell ill and summoned a man named tyangar and asked him to sing and perform shamanic rituals. both had been taught by erlik: one to call a shaman, and the other to sing and perform shamanic rituals. then ulgen said to balyksa, “be thou erlik’s servant because you do not offer sacrifices to me, and after death you will go to erlik.” folklorica 2016, vol. xx 128 tyangara said in response to ulgen, “i think, that i will make the same sacrifices to you as to erlik”. ulgen said to him: “from now on your name will be kam. he who will imitate you will not have the wealth on earth”. …nama’s two other sons, soozun-uul and saruula, ulgen blessed and said to them, ‘you become wise people, scribes and prophets, kings and khans, and soozun-uul i’ll take up to me in the sky’. [verbitsky 1893: 126–127] this negative character expressed the idea of condemning the shamans, the worshippers of the pagan deities. this erroneous interpretation appeared on the basis of homonymy of two words: the hebrew name ‘ham’ means ‘hot’ (according to the haggadah, the rabbinic literature concerning the talmud, the sons of ham inhabit tropical countries and have a passionate character) [king james bible, genesis 9: 20–27], while the turkic word kham/kam means shaman. the name tyangar recalls the name of the legendary hero djangar from the epic oirot. in this story, he appears to the readers as a shaman, a person without credibility. according to the biblical story, noah cursed his son ham because he ridiculed him when he was drinking wine and lying naked, while the two other sons of noah turned away without looking at the nakedness of his father and respectfully covered him: and noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: and he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. and ham, the father of canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. and shem and japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness. and noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. and he said, cursed be canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. and he said, blessed be the lord god of shem; and canaan shall be his servant. god shall enlarge japheth, and he shall dwell in the biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 129 tents of shem; and canaan shall be his servant.” [king james bible, genesis 9: 20–27] in both cases, the sons defy social prescriptions appropriate to their respective cultures about respect for the father. the legend idealizes the image of kaldan khan: обратившись къ саруулу, ульгэнь продолжалъ: «я пошлю вамъ царя съ неба. онъ будетъ царь царей, сила его будетъ велика, никакой богатырь его не одолеетъ, имя ему будетъ калдан-каан. онъ не будетъ воевать против царей. все народы безъ войны ему покорятся. [turning to saruulu, ulgen continued, ‘i will send to you the king of the sky. he is the king of kings, the force of his will be great, no hero will be able to overcome him, his name will kaldan khan. he will not fight against emperors. all nations will bow to him without war.’]. [verbitsky 1893: 127] in fact, galdan (kaldan), who took the title of khan in 1677, became the absolute ruler of all oirats dzhungaria. this text notes that after the flood namu (noah), out of gratitude and respect, was called yayachi (lit. creator). v. i. verbitsky remarks that: to this day biisk and kuznetsk foreigners annually, primarily in the spring, sacrifice a white sheep on a high mountain to nama, under the name of yaik khan, (lit. ‘khan of the flood’). they also call on yaik khan if the livestock are not thriving, because foreigners believe that their deceased relatives lead the cattle away with them to the house of the dead, from whence yaik khan, upon sacrificing to him, takes and forces them [the livestock] out with a flood. [verbitsky, 1893: 126] this text thus also explains the practice of ritual sacrifice by shamans. according to the altaic version, the mountains were created out folklorica 2016, vol. xx 130 of the people’s fear that there would be another flood: по отшествiи яячi на небо, выросъ лесъ на обращенныхъ къ северу скатахъ горъ – арга; народ размножился и наполнилъ землю; все говорили, впрочемъ, однимъ языкомъ. люди, боясь потопа, вздумали сделать гору. богу это было непрiятно. онъ посылаетъ сильныя бури, такъ что и людей и камни сбрасывало сверху горы. [upon the departure of yayachi [‘creator god’ – author’s note] to the sky, a forest grew up on the north-facing slopes of the mountains [arga]; people multiplied and filled the earth; everyone spoke, by the way, one language. people, fearing a flood, built a mountain (not a tower!). god was displeased. he sent a furious storm, so that the people and the stones were flung from the top of the mountain]. [verbitsky 1893: 127] in this case, the events take place in the forested mountains, while the biblical events took place in a sandy valley. the narrator, instead of the word “tower”, used the word “mountain”; apparently he either did not have a lexeme to match the former or the highest items in his environment were the mountains, so that they became part of the legend. this episode contrasts to the episode in the bible. the descendants of noah (the tribe of ham) constructed the tower out of fear of displacement and subjugation to slavery. they began to build a big city along with a high tower, which could serve as the center of all the tribes, and, at the same time, a sign of their equality [king james bible, genesis 11: 1–9]. interestingly, the shamanic character named tyanar (dzhangar/junggar), who serves as an anti-hero in this text, is the mediator between god and the people. he asks them to stop construction of the mountain. the people do not listen to him, so that tyanar left them. then god commanded them, saying, “you did not listen to me and tyanar, whom i sent to you, so that you would speak different languages” [verbitsky 1893: 127]. the appearance of the name of tyanar to some extent demonstrates biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 131 respect for the ruler who abandoned his subjects. the recording and publication of the legend undoubtedly had the purpose of passing on the didactic lesson of obedience to the ministers of the church as well as to condemn shamans. in the altaic and tuvan versions of the biblical legend of the flood, the events take place in the sayano-altai range, up in the mountains “in a particular altai valley there lived a husband and wife with their children. the husband was hardworking, intelligent, and wise, he could do anything” [oinotkinova et al. 2011: 126–127]. other texts are also bound to a particular site, in particular to a certain mountain, “the remains of the raft-ark are on mount t’al menku, so older people said” [oinotkinova et al. 2011: 430–431]; “at the top of the mountain manchurek at the very high top, in a place called erinnig-oi, young people who lived there, a man and a woman, built an iron raft” [alekseev et al. 2010: 47]. the motif of the flood served as the theme for the generation of various toponymic legends. many such texts have been recorded in several areas of the altai mountains, which mention mountains where people allegedly were saved from the flood and, on the tops of some of these mountains, people still find remnants of the ark [shinzhin & iamaeva 1994: 367]. thus, in the ulagansky district of the altai republic, where the traditions of orthodoxy have been revived in recent decades, we recorded legends about the flood and the mount of d’eti-kyol’. here is one variant told by the christian believer telengit t. i. tokoekov: чайык болтонын билген на. сал эткен дийт. бастыра тынар тындудаҥ экидеҥ jууган, куштаҥ-эштеҥ, тынду немедеҥ, бир иркек, бир тижи, jууйла, салга салала барган. jети-кӧлгӧ jеделе, ондо бажында карантык jерге аргаданган на. jети-кӧл база ла jазулуда. ойндо анаҥ байа чайык токтоордо, кандый куш ийеерен эди? jер бар ба деп бар кӧрзин деп. ол куш jалбырак тиштенеле келген. [[noah] knew that there would be a flood. he made a raft, people say. he gathered two of each kind of animal, one folklorica 2016, vol. xx 132 female and one male of all birds and the rest of the animals, and having placed them on the raft, he launched it. they saved themselves on dry land climbing the d’eti-kyol’ to their peaks. the area called d’eti-kyol’ is also on the high ground of yazula. when the flood ended, what was the bird that was released? in order to fly and see whether there was land. that bird came back with a leaf in its beak]. [oinotkinova et al. 2011: 132] as we see, transformation of the legends occurs not only in terms of the time of the events, but also in terms of space, incorporating local historical events and geographical sites. adaptation of the legend plot to local folklore, myths, images and concepts promoted the assimilation of foreign culture, but nevertheless highlight local elements. thus we conclude only those with a knowledge of archaic local myth would have adopted this material, a fact suggestive of the contention that these legends came to the siberian peoples in the distant past. we hypothesize that biblical legends about the flood and the tower of babel entered the folk tradition of turkic peoples of siberia as a result of their adaptation to local cultural and historical, ethnographic, mythological details and concepts. in constructing a story, narrators rely on national mythological terminology and figurative conceptual systems, e.g., as is clear from the example of the element of water symbolically embodied in the form of blue goat, a being associated with water in native mythology. some texts do not even preserve the names of the main characters (noah and his sons), but use instead nick-names or the names of historical figures known to listeners. as a result of to their prolonged existence in the oral tradition, these legends have undergone some transformations in the siberian environment, as we have seen. on the basis of these data, it appears that old testament legends about the creation of the world and man and about the flood, which consolidate christian values designed to deter people from sin and warn them about the last judgment, entered the culture of the peoples of siberia as a result of centuries of contact with the peoples who came to central asia spreading the ideas of manichaeism and biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 133 nestorianism. we therefore can conclude that certain christian concepts had entered the culture of the central asian peoples long before the process of christianization by the russian settlers began in the region. acknowledgement the author would like to thank dr. jeanmarie rouhierwilloughby, professor in the modern and classical languages, literatures and cultures department at university of kentucky for her help with the translation of this article. notes 1 verbitsky [1893: 127] cites in russian another biblical legend, “on the tower of babel” that is related to the flood cycle we have been examining. v. i. verbitsky was a missionary, his role in spreading the ideas of christianity, and there is the legend itself. 2 manichaeism was a religious and philosophical doctrine originating in the third century a.d. in the middle east. from the third to the eleventh centuries it spread from northern africa to china. manichaeism found a fertile ground in middle and central asia and in the eighth–ninth centuries became the state religion of the uighurs. the founder of manichaeism, the persian mani (216– between 274 and 277), a native of babylon, considered zoroaster, buddha, and christ to be his forerunners. manichaeism arose among the followers of zoroastrianism and adopted the doctrine of the good and evil principles underlying the world from zoroastrianism. on the basis of the iranian zoroastrianism, mani combined some elements of christianity, buddhism, and the ancient babylonian religion [toporov 1988: 103–105]. since the iranians were the disseminators of manichaeism, they carried the ideas of zoroastrianism along with the ideas of christianity, buddhism, and the ancient babylonian religion, as is well known, zoroastrians were fire worshippers. the cult of worshipping fire is particularly clearly expressed in the folklore and rituals of the altaians. 3 “nestorianism, religious movement in christianity, which arose in the byzantine empire in the 5th century. founder of folklorica 2016, vol. xx 134 nestorius, patriarch of constantinople in 428-31 [before a priest in antioch (syria). the nestorians, retains elements of antique rationalism, the subject of criticism was the christian mystical concept of ‘man-god’)” [kazhdan 1974: 522–523]. 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(consulted december 25, 2015). kyzlasov, leonid. 1999. кызласов, леонид. “манихейский храм в котловине сорга (республика хакасия)” [manichaean temples in the sorghum valley (republic of khakassia)], российская археология 2: 181–206. kuznetsova, vera. 1997. кузнецова, вера. дуалистические легенды о сотворении мира в восточнославянской фольклорной традиции [dualistic legends of creation in folk folklorica 2016, vol. xx 136 traditions of the eastern slavs]. новосибирск: сибирского отделения российской академии наук. kuznetsova, vera. 2008. кузнецова, вера. “рябчик и мамонт в легендах русской фольклорной ‘библии’” [grouse and mammoth russian in legends of the folk “bible”], сибирский филологический журнал 3: 5–13. kuznetsova, vera. 2009. кузнецова, вera. “фольклорные версии легенд о библейских событиях и персонажах: источники и механизмы формирования” [folklore version of the legend about biblical events and characters: the sources and mechanisms of formation], сибирский филологический журнал 4: 5–13. malov, serdey. 1951. малов, сергей. памятники древнетюркской письменности [the monuments of ancient turkic writing: texts and studies]. москва –ленинград: издво ан ссср. mindibekova, valentina, sychenko, galina. 2016. миндибекова, валентина, сыченко, галина. несказочная проза хакасов [tale prose of the khakas]. новосибирск: наука. (памятники фольклора народов сибири и дальнего востока; т.34). napolskikh, vladimir. 1990. напольских, владимир. “миф о возникновении земли в приуральской космогонии: реконструкция, параллели, эволюция” [myth about the origin of land in the ural cosmogony: reconstruction, parallel evolution], советская этнография 1: 65–74. oinotkinova, nadezhda, shizhin, ivan, iamaeva, elizaveta, yadanova, kuzelesh. 2011. ойноткинова, надежда, и др. несказочная проза алтайцев [tale prose of the altai]. новосибирск: наука. (памятники фольклора народов сибири и дальнего востока; т. 30). sagalaev, andrei. 1984. сагалаев, андрей. мифология и верования алтайцев: центрально-азиатские влияния [mythology and beliefs of the altaians: the central asian’s influence]. новосибирск: наука сибирское отд-ние. shinzhin, ivan and iamaeva, elizaveta. 1994. шинжин, иван и ямаева, елизавета. алтай кеп-куучындар [altai legends.] горно-алтайск: ак чечек. biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 137 tokarev, s. a. 1936. токарев, с. а. докапиталистические пережитки в ойротии [pre-capitalist relics in oirot]. ленинград: социально-экономическое издательство. toporov, vladimir n. 1988. топоров, владимир. “мани” [mani] в мифы народов мира. edited by s. a. tokarev. vol. 2, pp. 103–105. verbitsky, vladimir i. 1893. вербицкий, владимир. алтайские инородцы [altai foreigners]. edited by a.a. ivanovsky. moskva: этнографическим отделом императорскаго общества любителей естествознания, антропологии и этнографии, состоящаго при московском университете. appendix shayyk [the flood]. published: oinotkinova, et. al. 2011: 116– 119. recorded by f.a. satlaev in 1984, at p. top-pyankova choya district of republic altai, f.a. popyeva 1916 born, to a kuzen tribe. translation f.a. satlaev, and refined by n.r. oinotkinova. text in kumandin’s dialect. 1 шайык шыгарда, тебир мÿÿстиг кöк теке чети кÿн, чети катап чер айландыра, мараап чат чÿгÿрчÿрдир. чети кÿн чер силгинен. чети кÿн кырлар кÿйген, чети кÿн ньанмыр чагтыр. чер чарылган. чарыктарынсары суг толгон. чети кÿн тоол кирген, мÿндÿр барган. чети кÿн кар тÿшкен. ан соондо соок болгон. шайык шыгар деп, четти карындаш уҥнанар. анар арыг кижилер болганар. улуг карындашыныҥ ады эрлик болтыр, аҥ кичийиниҥ ады ӱлген болтыр, кудай сööктиг, номчы кижи. карташтар кереб чазап алтырлар. ол керебге чердиҥ сыртында чугы бар, пеес-куш, куртаҥ, аҥдардаҥ – пир тöйдеҥ кожо аланар. ӱлген дезе, шайык пожоды ба, деп тааканы керебтеҥ пожот ийдир. [when the flood occurred, a bleating blue goat with iron horns ran seven times around the earth for seven days. for seven days the earth shook. for seven days the mountain burned, for seven days there was a downpour. the earth split open. cracks were filled with folklorica 2016, vol. xx 138 water. for seven days they filled up, and hail fell. for seven days snow fell. then it was cold. only seven brothers knew fact that there would be a flood. they were pure people. the eldest brother was called erlik, and younger was called ulgen, [he had] come from the gods, a scribe. the brothers built an ark. this ark all was everything that exists on earth, – birds, insects, animals – they took one pair with them. ulgen, to check whether the flood was over, released the chicken from the ark.] 2 така дезе, соокка тогып калган. аҥ сонда касты божоттыр. кас дезе сугле ыгып, ойдо ньанмынсан. ӱчÿнче катап ӱлген кускунды ийдир. кускун база ойдо келбеен, öлÿмниҥ эдини очип чÿрдир. ӱгреде четти шын карындаш керебтеҥ шыкпартырлар. ӱлген дезе кижи чайап эттир. ол дезе, кöк чакайакты алалып, алтын айакка салалып, кижи чайап ийдир. улуг кардашы, эрлик, аны артык кöрип, чарым чакайаны оорлап алтыр, ӱлген шылап, кижи чайап ийдир. ага каны курган ӱлген шогырсалтыр аҥ чайан кижизини, пийде айдып: – кара каш курлу кара калык болзын, сееҥ чайан албатыҥ! мееҥ ньоным кÿн шыгар ньанса, барсын, сеҥ кара албатыҥ кÿн падыш ньанса барзын! [the chicken froze in the cold. after this [ulgen] released a goose. the goose, after it swam away on the water, did not return. the third time ulgen sent a raven. the raven also did not come back, it flew off to hunt. then the seven righteous brothers left the ark [onto dry land]. ulgen made a human. then he took a blue flower, put it in a golden cup, and made a human. the elder brother, erlik, envious, robbed him of half a flower and, like ulgen, created a human. enraged at him, ulgen cursed the human he had created, saying, ‘black people with black leather belts will be the people you have created! may my people go toward the rising sun, while your black people go in the direction of the sunset!’] 3 пир катап эрлик ньаа öргöö кöрип алтыр. очаан келеле, кöрзе – аҥ ичинде чылач кижилер чатчын. ӱлген дезе пу эрлик чугы-чугы этпезин деп, эгерди эжик алдында артыссалтыр, biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 139 эрликти божатпа деп, эрлик дезе эгерди айлындырып, айттыр: – шпа деп, мен саа чылыг некей берин, сокка тограссын. аш берем, аны чийип алзаҥ, пир ай аштабасыҥ. эгер дезе аг ÿрбегине пÿткел, эрликти öргöҥ ичинса пожот ийдир. эрлик киреле, айдыр: «пу мынар пеес меҥ калыгым полор» – деп айдала, бойыныҥ кудыны чатчын кижилере ÿбÿре пертир. кижилер тирилпанар, уйгудаҥ турган шылап. [once erlik saw the new palace. he approached it and looks in, there are naked people inside. so that erlik could not do interfere in any way, ulgen had placed a dog at the door, ordering him not to allow erlik in. erlik, who drove the dog into a frenzy, said: ‘wait, i'll give you a warm coat in the cold so you do not freeze. i will give you food, if you eat it, you will be full for a month.’ the dog believed him and let erlik into the palace. when he entered, erlik said, ‘these birds will be my people.’ having said this, he breathed his soul-kut in the people lying there. people came to life as if awakened from sleep.] kovcheg [ark]. published: oinotkinova, et. al. 2011, p. 126-131. rec. by k.e. ukachina in 1974, at vill. bol’shoy yaloman of ongudai district of republic altai from a.t. agadina, 78 years old, a tribe maiman. trans. i.b. shinzhin, e.e. yamaeva, n.r. oynotkinova. 4 бу чöрчöк озодо jаан чайык болгоныла колбулу. алтайда, кандый да бир кобыда, бала-баркалу эмеген-öбöгöн jуртаптыр. öгöни иштенкей де, санаалу-укаалу да, нени ле эдип билер кижи болгон. ол кижи jуртап jаткан эжине бир де неме айтпай, jÿре ле берип турар. ол тужында ÿй кижи эр кижинеҥ: «кайда болдыҥ? неге бар jадыҥ?» — деп, сурак бербейтен. ондый jаҥ болгон. онойып, ол кÿнÿҥ ле jÿре бер турар, эҥирде арыган, jобогон, суузаган келер. эмегени ÿн де чыгарбай, кара суунаҥ уруп ла берер. байагы кижиниҥ арыганы jоголо берер. онойып узак öйлöр öткöн. эмегени кара суула азырап ла койор, чылаган кижиниҥ арыганы-jобогоны jылыйып калат. folklorica 2016, vol. xx 140 [this fairy tale is connected with a great flood that was earlier. in the altai in some valley a husband and wife lived with their children. her husband was also a hard-working and wise, he knew how to do everything. this man left, saying nothing his wife, with whom he lived. at that time a woman didn’t ask a man, ‘where have you been? where do you go?’ such was the custom. so every day he goes somewhere and comes back tired, worn out, and hungry in the evening. his wife, without saying a word, just poured out some black water for him. and this person’s tiredness disappeared. it continued this way for a long time. the wife shall give [her husband] black water, and his tiredness, fatigue fades away.] 5 бир кÿн ÿй кижи айлында jаҥыскан отурарда, jер алдынаҥ курумжы тонду бир кижи келген. кир келген кижини эмеген алтай jаҥду кÿндÿлеген. нени берген дезе? байагы кир келген кижиге кара суунаҥ уруп берди. айылчы кижи ичеле, айткан: — бу кандый тату, jакшы аш! кижиниҥ арыганынчылаганын jоголтор! — сÿттеҥ тамган суу эмей — деди. эҥир кирип, кÿн ажарда, айыл ээзи эр кижи база ла терлеген, кара сууга аккан, арыганjобогон jанып келди. эпши кижи байагы ла jылымзу ажыла азыраган. арыган кижи ÿч айак jылымзу курсактаҥ ичип, кижи эзирерде, эмеген сураган: — jаан улустыҥ jаҥыла, эмеген кижи айылдыҥ ээзи нени эдип турганын сурабайтан, jе андый да болзо, сурайын деген кÿÿним бар. сен кÿнÿҥ ле кайда болуп тургаҥ? эҥирде арыганчылаган jандыҥ? кару эжине айтпаста, кемге айдарыҥ? [once, when a woman was sitting in an ail (yurt), a man in a felt coat appeared out of the ground. according to altai custom woman offered him hospitality. what did she give him? she poured a black water for the man. the guest drunk it and said ‘what a delicious, good drink! it removes a man’s fatigue!’ ‘it's water obtained from milk,’ she said. when evening came, the sun went down, and the man who owned the ail returned all sweaty, covered in black sweat then, tired and warn out. the homemaker gave him the same warm biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 141 drink to drink. when the tired man had drunk three cups of the warm drink and got drunk, his wife asked, ‘according to custom of the elders, a woman should not ask the master what he was doing, but still i want to ask about this. where did you go every day? [why] do you come back in the evening tired and worn out? if you don’t tell your dear wife, then whom can you tell?’] 6 айылдыҥ ээзи эр кижи калап калган, тили jымжап, айтты: — мен — эр кижи, кандый да болзо, сескир болор учурлу. сен неме сеспей туруҥ ба? удабас ла jаан чайык чыгатан эмтир, jер эмештеҥ кыймыктап турганын билбей туруҥ ба? мениҥ эдип-jазап турган неме jажытту эмей. оны не jарлаар? бÿгÿн эдетен, jазайтан немени бÿдÿрдим. эмди коркыыр-ÿркÿр неме де jок. ол кÿннеҥ ала бÿгÿнги кÿнге jетире капчык (сал) jазап турган эдим. бала-баркамды, сени, бойымды аргадаар керек. öскö до öзöктиҥ улузы капчык jазап турган болор. кажы ла тынду неме тынын аларга турган болбой. эмеген-öбöгöнниҥ мынайып эрмектежип, куучындажып турганын байагы сары курумжы кийимду, jер алдынаҥ чыккан кижи jажынала, угуп jаткан. jадала сананган: «акыр, бу улуска эмеш каршуум jетиретем». тÿнде барала, капчыктыҥ тÿбин ойып койгон, суу киреле, бу улус чöҥип калзын деп. айылдыҥ ээзи билеле, капчыктыҥ тÿбин ойто jазап койгон. [drink had loosened the master of the house, the man’s tongue, and he said, ‘i am a man, and no matter what, i have to be cautious. do you sense nothing? soon there will be a big flood, it turns out, do not you feel that the earth is shaking a bit? what i do, it's secret after all. why announce it? today, what i did, i was building, i finished. now we will not be afraid of anything. from that day until today i built an ark (raft). i need to save my children, my heirs, you, and myself. in other valleys people are probably also building arks. every living being, of course, wants to save its life.’ she told what her husband had said to the man in the yellow felt clothes that had appeared out of the ground, who had been hiding, and eavesdropping. laying down he thought, ‘let me do a little harm these people.’ at night he goes out there, he had drilled a hole in the folklorica 2016, vol. xx 142 bottom of the ark so it would flood, so that these people would drown. the master of the house found out and repaired the bottom of the ark again.] 7 онойып турганча, суу кöдÿрилген, чайык башталган. балдары, бойы, сегис кижи капчыкка отыргылаган, кажы ла агаштыҥ ÿренинеҥ, тобрактаҥ алып, öрö jÿзерге ле турарда, эмегени качып jÿгÿрген. jÿгÿрип отырган эмегенди кайыгыла кийнинеҥ ары öрö кöдÿреле, капчыкка отургызып алган. келинниҥ кийип алган кийими кийининеҥ ырыла берген. оноҥ ло улам эмди ÿй улустыҥ чегедегиниҥ кийини jырыкту болуп калган. jе ол ло болгон. олор капчыкка отырып алала, тынын аларга jÿзÿп ле jÿрген. чайык тöртöн кÿнниҥ туркунына болгон. тöртöн кÿнниҥ туркунына суу кöдÿрилген. ол jемирилип, талтабыш коркышту ла болгон, кÿзÿрт эмес кÿзÿрт турган. [meanwhile, the water rose, the flood began. the children, he himself, eight people had boarded the ark, taking along seeds from every tree, some earth, and as soon as they started to go up [river], the wife began to run away. [the husband] picked up the paddle and pulled his runaway wife back onto the ark., the clothes she was wearing got torn in the back. that’s why, since that day, a woman’s chegedek [robe] back has a cut in the. and so it was. all those who boarded the ark to save themselves kept on sailing. the flood continued for forty days. for forty days the water rose. everything was destroyed, there was a terrible noise, like thunder, like it was thundering.] 8 капчыкта отырып алган улус суу ÿстинде кайкалап jÿрген тындууны jууктада тартып алып, оныла ла ажанган, аргаданган. оноҥ чайык jабызап, суу тöмöндöгöн кийнинде, кобылар, jиктер, капчалдар бÿткен. эмдиги таркап барган улус ол ло капчыкла аргаданган балдардаҥ таркап барган. агаш олордыҥ кажы ла агаштаҥ алган ÿреннеҥ öзÿп jаранган, алтайды бÿркеген. ол эр кижи балдарыныҥ балдарына ат адаган. балдарыныҥ ады малдыҥ кажы ла ÿйе-сööгиле адашташ. чандыр jигени — чапты, картазын jигени — кыпчак. biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 143 оноҥ арыгызын ундып койгон. [the people on the ark caught nearby animals floating on the water and ate them, so they survived. then, after the flood began to break, the water began to decline, gorges, meadows, and valleys appeared. then children were born to the people who had survived on the ark. trees have grown from those seeds taken from each tree, that have covered all of altai. that man named his children’s children. the children were given names according to the body parts of animals. one who ate tripe, [named] chapty, one who ate fat kipchak. what happened next i have forgotten.] shaiyk [the flood]. published: [arbachakova 2010, с. 328-333]. rec. l.n. arbachakova in 2000 in the village usinsk mezhdurechenskiy district of l.n. akushakova. 9 пир эр кижи қатынма ийгеле пала чоқ чаттырлар. эртен тура ла, қатынға пирда небе айтпан, ээде ле малта алыбал, парыбысчаттыр. анаң иирде маттар кÿжÿ шықпар, келчитқан полтур. кÿн-сайа ээде иштеп, чöрчаттыр. қаты ааң сурағанда, пирда небе айтпанчаттыр. — қачен иштебиссем, анаң айдарым! — теп. [one man alone lived with his wife with no children. [the husband] gets up in the morning and always leaves her without saying anything. he took an ax along. he came home very tired. and so every day he goes to work. when the wife asked where he go, he would not say a word to anyone. — when i’m done, then i’ll say!] 10 анаң пир кÿн эри ишке парыбысқанда, ол қатқа при кижи келтир. анаң қатын сураптыр: — сеең эриң қайа чöрча, ноо иштепча? — теп. қат айттыр: — эзе, сурапчам-но, пирда небе айтпанча. folklorica 2016, vol. xx 144 азы тезе айттыр: — че, сен чақшыба суразаң! ааң соонда қаты қадақ сураптыр, азы пирда айтпача. ол кижи тезе кÿн сайа кел, сураптыр: — оңнабалдың ма? — теп. кат айтча: — пирда айтпанча, теп. анаң ол кижи айттыр: — ээде полғанда, сен эриңе араға иштепперзең. ол темде айна ол позу, кижи полчöрчитқан полтур. анан по қат айттыр: — қайча араға иштерге, мен пирда оңнабанчам. айна айттыр: — мен саға айдаперем қайде иштерге: поза урсал, — теп, айттыр. — поза турсалзаң, ÿш-тöрт кÿн турған сооның анаң тигибаларзың, — теп айттыр. — қайча тикчениң мен полужарым, — теп айттыр. [one day, when her husband left for work, a man came to his wife, then he asked the woman, ‘where does your husband go, what is he doing?’ the woman said, ‘hey, i ask him, he doesn’t not say anything.’ and the man says, ‘hey, ask about it in a better way!’ after that, his wife asked again, he did not say anything. and the same person comes each day and asks, ‘did you learn anything? she replied: — he does not say anything. then the man said: — if so, make your husband some araga. at that time aina [the devil] was in human form. then the woman said: — i don’t know how to make araga. aina said: — i'll tell you how to do it. you put on a dish, — he said. and after three or four days, distill the araga,” he said. “i will help you to distill the araga,” so he said.] biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 145 11 анаң ÿш-тöрт кÿн сооба, по айнаба қат араға тигибалтырлар. арағаға тигибалғанда, айна айттыр: — ам эриң келип, кÿжÿ шықпарза, орта стакан урубал, — теп, айттыр. эриң сурар “ноо небе, қайдаң алған?” — теп, сен айдарзың: «сен кайда айтпан чöрчазың, мен сага ээдоқ айтпан чöрерим”, — теп. анан айна позу чашынпарып уқчаттыр, эр эзирпарза, ноо айтқанын. ам қатын эри келген ле, по кÿжÿ шықпар келтир. анаң қаты аға орта cтакан араға урпертир, анаң чииш чиирге одурғанда. эри сураптыр: — по ноо небе? — теп. қаты айттыр: — че ишсең, сага чақша полпарар! че қаты най кичепчинде, позу ижибистир, анаң айттыр: — қайдыг қазыр, ачығ небе теп, по ноо небе иштим? — теп, қатын сураптыр. қаты айттыр: — че ишсең, саға чақша полпарар! [then after three or four days aina and woman had distilled araga. once they had distilled the araga, aina said: — now when your husband arriveds tired after work, you pour him half a glass [of araga]. when your husband asks: “noo, what’s that, where did you get it,” you say, “just as you say nothing, i will not tell you anything either.” then aina hid to overhear what her husband would say when he was drunk. her husband came back very tired. when he sat down to eat, his wife poured him (half a cup) of araga. her husband asked her: — what is that? my wife said: — well, have a drink, you’ll feel good!] 12 че қаты най кичепчинде, позу ижибистир, анаң айттыр: — қайдыг қазыр, ачығ небе теп, по ноо небе иштим? — теп қатын сураптыр. folklorica 2016, vol. xx 146 қаты айттыр: — сен қайда маға айтпан чöрчаңноо иштепчитқанын, мен саға эдоқ айтпассым. че, анаң чÿче одуруп, айттыр: — пар полза, еще перзең, чақша полпарды. анаң қаты еще урпертир. анаң пазок ижибискенде, ага чақша полпартыр. анаң айттыр: — все равно ам сага айтпассым, ам кöп тем қалбады ол ижимни иштебизерге. қачан иштебиссем, анаң пирге парарыбыс кöрерге. [when my wife insisted that her husband drink, he says: — what a strong, bitter drink, what did i drink? — he asked his wife. his wife said: — just as you go and say nothing to me, i won’t tell you anything. well, after sitting a little bit, [the husband] says: — i feel good, if there is more, give me some (more). then my wife poured (some more). when he had drank it up again, he felt good, he said: — i (still) won’t tell you. now there’s not much time left. i’ll do my job, then we’ll go together to see.] 13 анаң по чат узупертир. эртен қатты турғанче, уже эри парыбыстыр. по айна қадақ келтир: — чоқ чақкша сурабадың? — теп сураптыр. — эзирпарған да, сурар кереқ-но. анаң по айна қатқа айттыр: — пÿÿн келзе, пазоқ араға урперзең, канче ла сураза, öжен урпер. анаң ийги кÿн ээде полтур. анаң ÿжÿнче кÿнÿнде эри айтпертир. — ам пир кÿн қалды, кöпчег (сал) иштепчам! — теп. қаты айттыр: — ол ноо небези? — теп. biblical legends in the folklore of the turkic peoples in southern siberia folklorica 2016, vol. xx 147 [then he lay down to sleep. in the morning, before the wife got up, the husband had (already) left. again aina appeared: — why didn’t you not ask him again? — so he said. — you had to ask again while he was drunk. this aina said to the woman: — today, when he comes, you serve it again, no matter how much he asks for, pour him that much. this was repeated for two days. on the third day her husband says: — now only one day remains— (the ark), the raft will be ready! the wife said: — what’s that?] 14 айна тезе чашынпар уқчаттыр. ол қатты сурағанда, эри айттыр: — ол эңне мöзÿк тағында сал иштепчам. анаң сураганда: — ол салды нöрек иштепчаң? — тенде. ааң эри айттыр: — ам вот-вот қалбада, по чер чарықта эбире наводнение полар, — тедир. — ноо, ол салға по чер чарықта қанче ла пар аң-қуш параба ол салада полар, анаң пир эр, пир қат. ол наводнение сооның қалган аң-қуш, қалған кижи чайалар! че, по айна уғубалтыр, қайдығ черге иштепчитқанын. анаң қараазыба ол кöпчекты тилеп партыр. анаң тилеп пар, табалып, эбире чöр кöртир, анаң санапчаттыр по ноо иштебизерге. по ааң-қушпа киже қалбазын, по черге чöр санабал. анаң пурба албалып, тешик кöпчеққе пурубустыр, чтобы суғ кирзын теп. [at this time, aina was eavesdropping, in hiding. when the woman asked this, her husband said: — on the highest mountain i’m building an ark. when she asked: — why are you building an ark? the husband said: — now (just about) (the flood) will soon be all over the earth — he said. — in this ark from all over the earth will gather all the living folklorica 2016, vol. xx 148 beings, as many animals, birds as there all — all in pairs, then one man and women. after (the flood), which drown everything, all will be reborn from the surviving birds, animals and people! aina overheard everything, where, in what place he was building the ark. at night he went to look for the ark. after he had gone, he began to walk, to think about how to make all people and creature die. there would be no birds, no animals, no people left on the earth! then he took a drill and made a hole in the ark, so that water could get in [in the ark].] 15 че, анаң по эртен эри айттыр: — че, ам параң, эмге паза келбеспис, кöпчекте қаларыбыс. че, анаң салға кирзелер, парчын аң-қушты пир парадың салдылар. анаң салга кирдилероқ, сал кöдÿрÿлибистир, весь по черде суғ öре кöдÿрÿлÿбискен. анаң ээде ле салда ал чöрчаттыр. анаң по эр кöрзе, по салда суғ кирчаттыр. анаң ноо поңма иштерге. че, анаң ээде тилепчитқанда, кöшкечек келкел, кузуруғын тешиқке суқсалтыр. анаң суг кирбенсалтыр. по кижилербе аң-қуш тириг қалтырлар. анаң сал шаптырпартыр эңне мöзÿк таға арарат теп, таға. анаң аң-ауштар по черге қадақ чайалғаннар. [then in the morning her husband says: — well, now let's go, we will not return home again — we will remain (on the ark). but when they came to the ark, then they let on all sorts of birds, animals (in pairs). then they got on [the ark], the raft rose up right away in the water, everything around them flooded. right away the raft was weaving back and forth. then a man sees that water was coming into the ark. he began to think about how to close the hole. but while he was thinking, (a little cat) came, stuck its tail in the hole. then the water could not get in. all people, animals, birds survived. then the ark washed up on the highest mountain ararat, ararat mountain. then, on this earth, the beasts and birds began multiply again. ] microsoft word 4.4-chevalierferg1201.docx reviews folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 89 ferguson, jenanne. words like birds: sakha language discourses and practice in the city (borderlands and transcultural studies series). lincoln: university of nebraska press, 2019. notes. bibliography. index. 336 pages. $65.00 (hardcover, ebook) isbn 978-1-4962-0888-0. isbn 978-1-4962-1239-9. anthropologist jenanne ferguson’s monograph words like birds, the latest offering from the university of nebraska press’s “borderlands and transcultural series,” offers an insightful and informed view of the remarkable resilience of the sakha people and language. _e sakha are a turkic-speaking people residing in the republic of sakha (yakutiia) in northern siberia. siberia has been identified as an important linguistic “hot-spot,” with a high concentration of linguistic and cultural diversity. most of the languages and cultures of siberia other than russian, however, are facing extinction. sakha language and culture remains a notable exception to this trend. ferguson’s research focuses on sakha language practices and ideologies in the republic capital yakutsk, examining how sakha language and culture have managed to survive, adapt, and thrive in post-soviet space. _e book begins with a first-person account of sakha language practices in yakutsk during soviet times. although sakha language was never explicitly banned, ethnic sakha experienced an unspoken taboo against using their native language in public spaces. decades of soviet policies valorizing the russian language resulted in a de facto suppression of sakha language in the city. ferguson details the process of revitalization that has taken place in the decades since the end of the ussr. her account makes an invaluable contribution both to our understanding of the sakha language and culture and to the growing body of academic research about the process of language revitalization. ferguson introduces the main focus of many of her chapters through direct quotes from her ethnic sakha informants. _ese first-person narratives provide the reader with a visceral connection to the residents of yakutsk and their views about sakha language and culture. ferguson explores the core beliefs and practices that have led to the remarkable resilience of the sakha language and culture. _e result is a compelling, informed, and vital analysis of language revitalization from the bottom up. chapter 1 provides an overview of the main themes of the book and situates yakutsk and the sakha language and people in time and space. _e aim of the book is to show how changes in the way sakha perceive their own language and culture, their “language ideologies,” have contributed to the revalorization of sakha language and culture. _e title of the book, “words like birds,” is an iconic reference to the sakha belief in the spiritual power of their language, which has proven essential to sakha revalorization. in this chapter ferguson also introduces readers to the ways in which sakha language practices have adapted to contemporary urban life, a topic she explores more in-depth in subsequent chapters. sakha have not only revived traditional practices, both cultural and linguistic, but they have been able to adapt them to urban life, ensuring their folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 90 continuing relevance and importance. ferguson ends the chapter with a description of the ethnographic methods she used for her research. chapter 2, “sakha under the tsars and beyond,” presents an historical overview of language contact in the region. _e discussion is framed by an account of the revival and expansion of the yhynakh celebration, a celebration of the summer solstice, and its continued relevance to sakha life (49-53). _is festival, banned in soviet times, has undergone a renaissance in recent years, and serves as an icon for the revival of sakha language and culture. ferguson traces the evolution of sakha language prestige, providing a concise summary of soviet policies that valorized russian and led to the de facto soviet taboo against sakha language and sakha cultural practices. _e second half of the chapter details the tactics and strategies used by sakha to resist russian cultural and linguistic dominance during the soviet years. chapter 3 examines sakha communicative practices in the post-soviet period. she begins the chapter by describing how attitudes towards the sakha language and culture shifted in this period, fostering the process of sakha revitalization initiated in the 1990s (83-97). _e first post-soviet president of the republic, nikolaev, helped shift public consciousness by involving sakha community leaders in a comprehensive effort to bring about sakha language revitalization. at the same time, yakutsk itself began a demographic transformation as ethnic sakha from rural areas moved to the city in increasing numbers, replacing ethnic russians who began to leave the republic at the end of the 1980s. _ese events contributed to a shift in attitudes towards the sakha language. _e soviet view of sakha culture as “backward” and “less civilized” was replaced by a reconnection with sakha cultural roots and in a shared belief in the aesthetic value of sakha language. in this chapter ferguson presents a concise and insightful description of the complex factors at play in sakha revalorization. one might, however, object to her description of the state of secondary and elementary school education in yakutsk as “bilingual” (113). research conducted in yakutsk in 2017 (joan f. chevalier, 2018, “school-based linguistic and cultural revitalization as a local practice,” nationality papers vol. 45:4) revealed that there are only a handful of schools in the city where sakha is used as the language of instruction more than two to three times a week. recent federal education policies and updated federal education standards have reduced the number of hours available for sakha language instruction in elementary and secondary curricula to no more than three. chapter 4, “one drop along a great artery,” details how sakha who live in yakutsk maintain robust sakha language repertoires. ferguson shows that urban sakha maintain important social connections with their rural hometowns. _ese connections to their homelands help to maintain linguistic ideologies that revalorize sakha. while urban sakha are all bilingual in russian, speaking sakha has become an essential element of their cultural identity. in chapter 5 “sakhalyy in the city” ferguson analyses the phenomenon of language mixing in yakutsk. _e process of revalorization fostered the emergence of a “syncretic register” in yakutsk. _is syncretic register, which typifies urban reviews folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 91 informal speech in yakutsk, features mixing of russian and sakha. while rural speech is still considered “purer,” mixing both languages in the speech of sakha residents has become accepted and widespread. _e acceptance of code mixing in urban speech is yet another example of the resilience and adaptability of sakha and their languages. in chapter 6 ferguson focuses on the impact of individual and family decisions on the trajectory of sakha language in recent years. _is chapter features eyewitness accounts, detailing “linguistic trajectories,” giving voice to ethnic sakha who were silenced during the soviet period. chapter 7 presents a fascinating account of how sakha cultural and oral practices have been adapted to urban spaces and contemporary life. she details the creativity with which sakha youth are experimenting with cultural and linguistic practices in yakutsk. ferguson also explores the growing use of the sakha language on the internet and details how online media have become a “third” place for maintaining and developing community. ferguson’s words like birds is a skillfully written, thoroughly documented, cogent analysis of sakha linguistic adaptation and survival. _e image of “words as birds,” as language perpetually adapting and changing is an effective metaphor for the adaptability and resilience of sakha language and culture. joan f. chevalier united states naval academy annapolis, md, usa chevalie@usna.edu folklorica full 2025 i folklorica 2025, vol. xxix folklorica journal of the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association 2025, vol. xxix contents articles “songs of laughter were heard”: frontline songs and poems in the folklore of the great patriotic war enes tastan 1 lithuania’s kryžių kalnas [the hill of crosses]: investigating the layered histories, meanings, and tensions that chronicle a nation’s life ema noëlla kibirkstis “i signed the house over to a cat”: humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests anastasiya fiadotava and stsiapan zakharkevich 25 52 habsburg empire to the americas: transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination andriy nahachewsky and olga zaitseva-herz 76 reports isidor levin and tajik folklore studies: a brief biographical sketch of a forgotten folklorist ravshan rahmoni reviews 109 folklore and ethnology in the soviet western borderlands: socialist in form, nationalist in content amy bryzgel 116 everyday religiosity and the politics of belonging in ukraine. jeanmarie rouhier-willoughby 118 the stark carpathians patrice m. dabrowski witnesses to interwar subcarpathian rus’ david l. cooper 120 123 ii folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 125 contemporary kazakh proverb research elka petrova about seefa 128 folklorica full 2024 critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 28 critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore rachel stauffer virginia polytechnic institute and state university blacksburg, virginia abstract this article describes rationales and methods for critical pedagogical approaches to teaching russian folklore. critical pedagogy and folklore are interrelated in their grassroots orientations, which critically counternarrate the top-down dominant and high cultural themes that are commonly taught in humanities survey courses on russian literature and culture in postsecondary institutions. this article argues that critical approaches have the potential to more effectively affirm culturally, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse identities for liberation, rather than indoctrination. the article discusses decolonization, excavating the field’s past to interrogate historical and ideological influences on the study of russia and the soviet union in the united states. for practical application, the article provides examples of teaching commonly taught topics in russian folklore classes in the united states. the author describes methods for teaching russian laments [prichitanija], epics [byliny], and for teaching spiritual, verbal, and material culture pertaining to apiculture in russian folklore, or “bee”lief. introduction humanities courses on world literatures and cultures in the united states, including russian-speaking literatures and cultures, are likely to emphasize high art, major cities, sites and sources of cultural heritage; symbols; historical, legal, and cultural values of dominant groups; and the lives and achievements of national heroes. such content is intended to deepen learners’ familiarity with dominant and high culture, in part to deliver education for upward social mobility. courses in folklore, including the folklore of russian speech communities, are more likely, though not exclusively, to focus on popular aesthetics, traditions, values, and practices among rural, peripheral, and working-class identities and communities. in fact, for marginalized, minoritized, and underrepresented identities in educational settings, studying folklore “is inherently empowering because it involves attention to individuals and communities operating outside of arenas of institutional power… folklorists tend toward description of what is rather than prescription of what should be” [hamer 2018: 53]. this essay will combine concepts and topics in teaching russian folklore with the goals and practices of critical pedagogy. in this essay, critical pedagogy refers to two instructional aspirations: 1) to affirm learners’ intersectional identity factors [crenshaw 1989], and 2) to disrupt dominant narratives and to illuminate forms of oppression, such as “exploitation, critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 29 violence, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and marginalization” [young 1990: 40]. as such, instructional applications of critical pedagogy must be antioppressive to avoid the situation paulo freire describes in which “education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students with the ideological intent… of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression” [freire 1970: 78]. critical pedagogy employs content and practices for liberation in education, not indoctrination. to be clear, “[w]e do not want our students to think just like us—to vote for our favorite candidate or prioritize issues as we might, to participate in all the same social actions, or to convey their opinions exactly as we do. that is indoctrination and it is not anti-oppressive” [rodríguez and swalwell 2022: 40]. in other words, education, including critical pedagogy, is only successfully liberatory when it is concomitantly, unsuccessfully indoctrinatory. in pursuit of liberatory education, bell hooks names critical pedagogy as vital to the co-construction and production of knowledge that occurs in postsecondary settings: if we examine critically the traditional role of the university in the pursuit of truth and the sharing of knowledge and information, it is painfully clear that biases that uphold and maintain white supremacy, imperialism, sexism, and racism have distorted education so that it is no longer about the practice of freedom… [a] rethinking of ways of knowing, a deconstruction of old epistemologies, and the concomitant demand that there be a transformation in our classrooms, in how we teach and what we teach, has been a necessary revolution. [1994: 29-30] relatedly, the study of the russian-speaking world in the united states is politically charged, owing to a variety of social, cultural, financial, and historical contributors. this must be considered in the teaching of russian folklore as well, and warrants applications of critical pedagogy, considering “proponents of a complex critical pedagogy appreciate the fact that all educational spaces are unique and politically contested. constructed by history... educational practice… can operate under the flag of democracy and justice in oppressive and totalitarian ways” [kincheloe 2012: 155]. subsequently, teaching and the selection of course content are not neutral, but political, as both are characterized by choices and rules that reflect top-down decision making and/or that take place in settings with discrete power differentials. therefore, critical pedagogy and teaching folklore share common goals: “through studying folklore, students may critique the hegemonic or idiosyncratic views presented by fine artists and see instead the value of grassroots, democratic views expressed by folk artists” [hamer 2000: 58]. similarly, critical pedagogy seeks to teach content in a way that illuminates power relationships, transactionality, and top-down oppression to elicit grassroots liberation. in this way, folklore can be an affirming content area for students whose life experiences reside beyond cultures of affluence. as lynne hamer argues, “folk arts tend to represent a more egalitarian, populous view than do fine arts. such informal, local critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 30 art runs counter to the capitalist forms of elite and popular culture, of which most students, their friends, and their family members are consumers rather than producers” [hamer 2000: 59]. in us culture, including in postsecondary courses in the humanities, representations of socioeconomically diverse people are minimal or unfavorable, “a situation that is even worse for people of color experiencing poverty… they are portrayed as intellectually deficient or morally deviant” [gorski 2018: 96]. dominant narratives and ideologies in educational settings are a form of cultural imperialism in that they convey “worldviews about what seems natural or logical. in the united states, this typically means centering heterosexuality, cisgender identities, maleness, christianity, whiteness, able-bodiedness, middle and upper-class positions, documented status, the english language, the global north, settlement, and colonialism” [rodríguez and swalwell, 2022: 4-5]. cultural imperialism creates oppressive conditions in which “[a]cademia largely ignores the increasing numbers of working-class students and downwardly mobile middle-class students” [muhs 2020: 155]. subsequently, academia typically fails to affirm socioeconomically, culturally, and linguistically diverse learner identities in postsecondary settings, thus there is a need for critical pedagogy. the american council on education (ace) recently noted the following findings from an ongoing study about racial and ethnic identity in postsecondary education in the united states: although the white population has continued to be the largest racial and ethnic group in the us, its share of the overall population decreased from 69.1 percent in 2002 to 59.2 percent in 2022… postsecondary education also experienced a demographic transformation due to the increased enrollment of students from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds… between 1999-2000 and 2019-20, the share of white students among all undergraduate enrollment dropped from 65.9 percent to 47.6 percent, while the share of students of color increased from 32.2 percent to 49.9 percent. [kim, soler, zhao & swirsky 2024: 3] while student diversity in us postsecondary institutions is on the rise, faculty diversity is less ascendant. the academy in the united states historically and generally is a place of generational privilege, by virtue of white supremacy, patriarchy, and the historical roots of systemic exclusion from education based on identity factors such as race, sex, and class. the ace simultaneously observed that “despite increased shares of non-white students at all levels of higher education, college faculty, staff, and students remained predominantly white… 69.4 percent of all full-time faculty and 56.2 percent of newly hired full-time faculty were white” [kim, soler, zhao & swirsky 2024: 11]. in terms of class and socioeconomic status, “faculty are on average between 12 and 25 times more likely to have a parent with a ph.d. than the general population, and about twice as likely as other individuals who hold a ph.d.” [morgan, et al 2022: 1625]. the academy therefore reproduces race and class privilege, as a predominantly white critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 31 system designed for and administered by beneficiaries of socially constructed hierarchies of color, gender, and class. the next section discusses the historical roots of the particularly elite nature of education about russia in the united states to establish a foundation for why teaching about russia and specifically about russian folklore has utility for the goals of critical pedagogy. education about russia in the united states: history, identity, and ideology courses, canons, and curricula in the humanities in us post-secondary institutions, including those pertaining to the russian-speaking world, reproduce dominant narratives [du bois 1903; gay 2018; muhs 2020; kendi 2018; picower 2021; ladson-billings 1995; leonardo 2009; love 2019; rodríguez and swalwell 2022; woodson 1933; yacovone 2022]. in recent years, the field of slavic languages and literatures, in which russian folklore courses in the united states are often, though not exclusively, situated, has been seeking diverse and decolonial remedies to repair endemic features of teaching and research in the field including anti-blackness, anti-indigeneity, settler colonialism, orientalism, native speakerism, classism, homophobia, islamophobia, transphobia, and patriarchal paternalism. these ideologies, at least in part, contributed to a unique homogeneity of race, class, and gender identity among us-based scholars in the slavic field in the twentieth century. observable evidence of these dominant narratives and ideologies abounds within related textbooks, courses, degree programs, and professional associations [azimova and johnston 2012; byrnes 1994; lugo de fabritz 2013; murphy and ghaedi 2021; st. julian varnon 2020; shardakova and pavlenko 2004; stauffer 2020]. the history of the study of russia and the soviet union in the united states clarifies how the field’s scholars, canons, and curricula came to be largely homogeneous in their representations of identity. leading up to and during its most formative years in the united states, starting after world war ii, the teaching and learning of slavic languages and literatures was predominantly undertaken in selective, private institutions in the northeast. columbia university sociologist charles mills contemporaneously observed, “in this particular epoch a conjunction of historical circumstances has led to the rise of an elite of power” [1956: 28]. the interconnectedness of power elites meant that academics and universities shaping the slavic field were well-funded internally and externally. the philanthropic arms of some of the previous century’s wealthiest industrial tycoons, e.g., rockefeller, carnegie, and ford, aligned with universities, the us military, elite postsecondary institutions, and professional associations like the american council for learned societies (acls), modern language association (mla), and the social science research council (ssrc) to steward the field, establish its centers and associations, and create and shape federal grant programs that remain vital to its survival today [parry 1967; byrnes 1997; borstelmann 2001; hartman 2008; engerman 2009]. accordingly, curricula on the region were formed in the shadows of mccarthyism, segregationism, and broader conservativism and anticommunism. critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 32 whereas critical pedagogy asserts that teaching and choices about instructional content are not neutral, but political, slavists did not see it that way: “american specialists on the soviet union during the decade or two after 1945 remained above political controversy and acquired a deserved reputation for thorough and careful analyses, regardless of the directions in which political winds blew” [byrnes 1988: 523]. courses and curricula on the region appear to have been whitewashed to dispel potential political attitudes or sympathies with communism. the us government was particularly suspicious of black, african american, african, latin american, asian, indigenous, and other intellectuals and revolutionaries of color, who were often accused of harboring communist sympathies, though this is a presumption of white supremacy, not of actual evidence. conflation of race and ideology in this regard and the fear of being labeled a communist meant that slavists ultimately avoided potentially controversial or perceptibly political discussions. content related to the multicultural and multiethnic diversity of the many peoples of the soviet union may therefore have been construed as political. byrnes argues: “aware of the deep political controversies within the united states that soviet domestic policies and the zig-zags of soviet foreign policies created and of the crucial need that scholarly work remain free from involvement in political debate, these scholars helped train young men and women to obtain and describe the facts as objectively as they could… to stand removed from the political controversies that divided the american public” [1994: 131]. appearing politically neutral—as individuals, as a field, and in curricula—was an act of self-preservation and conveniently served to mostly, but not entirely, shield the field and its predominantly white male scholars from mccarthyist scrutiny. the field’s homogeneity made the whitewashing of curricula inevitable, while also providing the appearance of ignorance about or lack of alignment with the ideologies of soviet multiculturalism and multilingualism. mccarthyism and its offshoots in american conservatism rejected soviet propaganda that was critical of racial segregation and white supremacy in the united states. relatedly, the field’s power elites did not publicly express solidarity with global movements for racial and social liberation during the cold war, although other humanities fields, english and american studies, for example, and professional associations like the mla did so. the philanthropic arms supporting the field, perhaps, given their benefactors’ identities and ideologies, were uninvested in racial or social equality. for andrew carnegie, for example, who supported jim crow-era segregation, the “preferred educational model for black americans—one promoting training in industrial and agricultural practices… would leave unchallenged white domination and black subordination in cultural, social, and economic life” [morey 2021: 36]. it is also worth mentioning that carnegie’s philanthropic arm robustly funded eugenics research until 1939 [kendi 2018]. “the major soviet studies programs… all took their inspiration, organization, personnel, and pedagogy from wartime military programs… philanthropic foundations fostered this environment as they applied their funds to meet their own intellectual and political goals” [engerman 2016: 181]. as an impactful critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 33 result, the curriculum leaned into dominant culture and russocentrism because “there were a number of conceptual and practical limits on slavicists’ work… studies of soviet culture meant, with rare exceptions, studies of russian literature and were limited almost exclusively to works in russian” [engerman 2009: 131]. the history of initial academic interest in russian folklore in the united states similarly warrants critical historical analysis. according to clarence manning’s 1957 history of slavic studies in the united states, a book in english on russian epics was published in 1885, a few years before the founding of the american folklore society [1957: 23]. it was authored by a us-born white woman of higher social standing from boston, isabel florence hapgood, who was born in 1855, studied languages in private school, and traveled to russia on several occasions [ledkovsky 1998]. hapgood’s the epic poems of russia, published in 1885, “received rave reviews” [ledkovsky 1998: 5]. byrnes attributes hapgood’s popular success to the fact that “american interest in russia began in the mid-1880s when the translations… of turgenev, tolstoy, leskov, gogol, and dostoevsky made by isabel hapgood, nathan haskell dole, and others led to almost a ‘russian craze’” [1994: 4]. the bulk of hapgood’s volume consists of translations of russian epics (in prose, rather than verse), and the introduction discusses the content, history, personae, performance, and regional variation of epics, alongside a history of their study in russia by russian scholars. the introduction includes a brief discussion of the slovo o polku igoreve [igor tale], including the controversies around its origins, which stands in contrast to a claim from ernest simmons, who taught russian at cornell and columbia, who attributes the first academic interest in the igor tale in the united states to samuel cross in the 1930s [jakobson and simmons 1949: 10]. this fact is particularly interesting since in an article in the same volume by avrahm yarmolinsky a different volume by hapgood (on russian literature) is cited. hapgood’s the epic songs of russia is especially worth mentioning in the history of slavic folklore studies in the united states. harvard’s cross, alfred parry, albert lord, and roman jakobson, along with felix oinas at indiana university are most often cited as the initiators of the study of russian epics in the united states [beissinger 1992; flier 1996; kononenko 2006]. it is unclear if hapgood’s volume was unknown or unacknowledged by slavists several decades later, or if it was simply not construed as a scholarly volume. if either is true, was it owing to hapgood’s sex, lack of graduate degree, or to something else? further inquiry into this question as well as more comprehensive research for a critical history of scholars and inquiry in russian folklore in the united states would be worthwhile pursuits to clarify more about the field’s origins and stewardship. franz boas, for example, the well-known columbia university anthropologist who influenced the study of folklore in the united states, including scholarship on slavic folklore, although recognized by some for having more progressive views on race, actively expressed anti-black racism and anti-semitism, writing in 1921 that “the negro problem will not disappear in america until the negro blood has been so much diluted that it will no longer be recognized just as anti-semitism will not disappear until the vestige of the jew as a jew has disappeared” [kendi critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 34 2018: 554]. critical historical and social inquiry offer pathways to excavate the past of academic disciplines to contribute to a more equitable and antiracist future of the field for all learner and scholar identities. critical pedagogy and decolonization the privileged identity of the power elites who have historically shaped the field is a source of the slavic field’s expressed need to reconsider curricula and redefine its identity today, which many have referred to as a need to decolonize the field. calls for the decolonization of curricula in postsecondary education confront dominant culture intending to center minoritized identities, indigenous ways of knowing and learning, and diverse forms of individual expression. critical pedagogy contributes to decolonization efforts, and critical pedagogy applied to the study of the region helps to deconstruct and disrupt dominant ideologies born of settler colonialism. decolonization of curricula, however, also requires critical examination of the history of institutions and systems contributing to the production of knowledge [smith 1999]. this includes the history of scholarly foundations and existing canons insofar as their connections to features of white supremacy and settler colonialism are concerned: the de-colonial epistemic shift proposes to change the rule of the game—and not just the content—and the reason why knowledge is produced: decolonization, instead of working toward the accumulation of knowledge and imperial management, works toward the empowerment and liberation of different layers (racial, sexual, gender, class, linguistic, epistemic, religious, etc.) from oppression, and toward the undermining of the assumption upon which imperial power is naturalized, enacted, and corrupted. [mignolo and tlostanova 2016: 130] classification and categorization, for example, while useful for folklorists, have historically been methods and sources of minoritization and marginalization in the united states and the russian empire. colonization weaponizes identity for purposes of subjectivity based on purely invented hierarchies of socially constructed categories such as race, sex, and class. the study of the region is not exempt from the racist history of eugenics in fields like history, psychology, biology, sociology, and anthropology to validate subjugation because of identity [du bois 1903; woodson 1933; kendi 2018]. it is therefore important to separate decolonization from critical pedagogy. the two strive for distinctly different outcomes. the former aims to dismantle settler colonialism and associated ideologies, institutions, and systems, representing a fundamental disruption and transformation of dominant culture. while curricula can theoretically be decolonized, such action is merely mitigative when curricula are delivered within colonized institutions that are oppressive systems, so decolonization also intends to dismantle and reinvent structurally oppressive institutions and systems—not only canons and curricula. amid calls critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 35 for decolonization, postsecondary institutions persistently reproduce ideologies of colonization, not only by physically occupying stolen lands, but also by gatekeeping, controlling, and selling the construction, production, and distribution of knowledge, and perpetuating dominant narratives. critical pedagogy can be undertaken in colonized educational settings, but it does not requisitely nor concomitantly pursue decolonization as its goal. instead, it seeks to affirm student identity and develop critical awareness of oppression through liberatory practices of education. therefore, it is worthwhile to clearly assert that decolonization is an altogether different undertaking than critical pedagogy, though the two have interconnected goals. with this and the above content in mind, the remainder of this essay unites practices of critical pedagogy with the teaching of commonly taught topics in undergraduate courses on russian culture or folklore conducted in english. some content and activities are merely creative suggestions for instructors to consider and have not yet been attempted with students and others have already been achieved successfully. russian folklore will be emphasized here as it is the primary domain of my expertise, however these methods can be applied and adapted accordingly for other regions of focus or extended for inclusion of other slavic folkways. subsequent sections offer examples of combining concepts from critical pedagogy with content for teaching about specific themes in russian folklore: 1) lament [prichitanie] with a creative approach to affirm student identity, 2) epic [bylina] with a proposed application of generative artificial intelligence (ai) to illuminate modern geopolitical oppression, and 3) the spiritual, verbal, and material culture of “bee”lief in russian folklore as a critical pedagogical tool to illuminate systemic oppression contributing to climate change. critical pedagogy and teaching russian lament the content and performance of russian laments can achieve critical pedagogical goals toward affirming student identity and disrupting dominant narratives, while also illuminating oppression. in and of itself, women’s performance of ritual laments is an observable and powerful confrontation with patriarchy, powerlessness, and cultural imperialism. a widow’s lament on the loss of her husband or another male family member may also be a lament about a loss of livelihood and care in a world that otherwise offered limited options for women’s independent survival. a mother lamenting the departure or death of her soldier son directly and emotionally confronts dominant, paternalistic, and nationalist narratives that justify violence for hegemonic gains. a bride’s performative lament confronts patriarchy, protests her lack of agency and choice, and expresses her fear and uncertainty. as roberta reeder describes, “[the bride] sometimes compares herself to a green reed, to an unripe berry: the girl was often given away very young, almost an adolescent, and she was afraid of the backbreaking work awaiting her in a strange home” [1993: 16-17]. for girls and women, death, departure, and marriage all potentially represented critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 36 marginalization, powerlessness, and exploitation, alluding to the fact that women are among the most vulnerable and therefore disproportionately provide care for their families and communities in the absence of other sources of livelihood and security [nadasen 2023]. as a form of critical pedagogy, antisexist discussion of the subjugation of women illuminates the oppression of powerlessness, violence, and cultural imperialism that women experience from patriarchy and paternalism, both features of dominant culture and white supremacy. subjugation in and of itself restricts women’s freedom of expression. for a mother whose son has been drafted, over which only the patriarchal state has control, or a young woman forced into marriage, over which only her father and future father-in-law have control, the performance of laments illuminates marginalization and powerlessness of sexism. the study of laments for weddings and soldiers especially highlights imbalanced power relationships, and it also serves as an example of community resilience. russian communities outside ruling class centers sustained pre-christian traditions, such as lament and associated wedding rituals, long after the establishment of christianity. christianity was an urban phenomenon in the tenth and eleventh centuries, whereas a “majority of people in the countryside remained largely unaffected by the new religion” [zguta 1978: 7]. christianity itself and its imposition by the state can be viewed as a form of topdown state control that peripheral communities were sometimes able to resist or avoid. through a critical lens, dual belief [dvoeverie]—if we wish to consider it despite recent criticisms—is simply a predictable result of distance, physical, social, economic, and political—from ruling class centers. sometimes, communities distant from centralized power can resist state and spiritual cultural oppression. this is all to say that illuminating liberation and community preservation of culture is as useful to critical pedagogical aims as illuminating oppression. to dive deeper into understanding laments, lyrics in translation and video examples of different types and settings offer students examples of laments’ structural, compositional, and performative features. as creative synthesis, one potential class exercise is for students to compose their own laments on the theme of saying goodbye to something or someone by following structural and compositional rules, and the option to perform them, if desired. alternatively, students could compose a lament that to be performed at a wedding or funeral outside of the united states or russia, considering students’ unique cultural heritages and diverse personal experiences. for students whose families and/or origins extend beyond the united states, this offers a particularly affirming opportunity to more deeply examine the traditions of their personal cultural identity. the study of laments offers rich opportunities for students to deepen their awareness of power relationships and systemic oppression, while also inviting opportunities for identity affirmation. it can open conversations on values and ideologies related to individual and community identity such as gender, sexuality, community, kinship, and death. sandra duval terms discussion of these topics deep culture, which “moves us beyond heroes and holidays and invites us to talk critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 37 about expectations, childrearing practices, concepts of beauty, family, and community” [2018: 52]. critical pedagogy and teaching russian epics describing and participating in the performance and collection of folklore are meaningful experiences for students to learn more about themselves, their peers, and their communities and affirm identity. in a 2020 special issue of the journal of folklore and education on the theme of “teaching for equity,” diana baird n’diaye notes, “in the service of social justice and building bridges, the act of recording and communicating personal and community narratives… can be powerful and transformative” [2020: 19]. here, n’diaye is speaking to the power of video and audio recordings as evidence of anti-black violence in policing in the united states, considering the murder of george floyd in the same year as the special issue. students’ folklore collecting efforts can be critically approached in the same way: for the purpose of preserving, affirming, and protecting diverse communities and cultures. a common practice in the study of folklore is to engage students in collection. in my past folklore courses, students have collected descriptions of rituals common among their peers in the united states, such as super bowl sunday, back-to-school shopping, mother’s day, and trick-or-treating. many of these more modern rituals in the united states have a capitalist, consumerist goal, which for critical pedagogical purposes may be used strategically to illuminate ways that capitalism is an exploitative system of oppression. likewise, in the age of social media, folklore collection can be a hands-on, practical method for students to engage with people and information in the real world, as opposed to behind a screen. however, there are ample opportunities to do folklore collection behind screens as well. social media sites are a treasure trove of human experiences and personal testimonials. also, generative ai, which pulls its knowledge from human data, offers emergent pathways to engage in the study and collection of folklore, and potentially also in the creation of examples of folklore. specifically, generative ai can be prompted to compose examples of folkloric texts that illuminate the oppression of violence and cultural imperialism in contemporary geopolitics. figure 1 shows the output from chatgpt to the following prompt: “compose a text in english in the style and meter of a medieval russian былина [epic] about the russo-ukrainian war that started in 2022. include vladimir putin and volodymyr zelenskyy, use fixed epithets with predatory birds, and zelenskyy is the victor”: critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 38 figure 1: chatgpt epic in style of a russian epic about the russoukrainian war. here, chatgpt describes the subject matter of the russo-ukrainian war while maintaining the common structural elements of russian epic, such as its fixed epithets and predatory bird symbolism, and still critically reflecting power critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 39 imbalances associated with current geopolitics in the region. using generative ai in this way engages critical pedagogy, both in terms of giving students a chance to compose something creative on a topic of their choice and of discussing violence and cultural imperialism in the context of contemporary geopolitics, all through the veil of a medieval medium. the prompt that i used asserted a particular outcome, but it might also be left to chance. ai is known to “amplify the bias on the internet” [bowen and watson 2024: 18], so instructors and students alike need to be thoughtful about both prompting and critical about outputs from ai. students can engineer prompts to further specify the criteria for their epics according to their interests and values related to contemporary geopolitics. with accurate prompting that specifies the qualities of verse composition, students may be able to elicit equimetrical examples of russian epics in english. ai composition also builds a collection of all students’ composed epics to consider them, identifying recurring and varying themes, motifs, and structural elements like a folklorist might do in the field. students can consider what questions to ask about the collection and its significance to understanding the russo-ukrainian war. certainly, there are many ways such a collection could be approached in teaching folklore. the subject matter of russian epics, after all, is typically concerned with power relationships and stories of victories over oppressors, which contributes to its utility in illuminating oppression. simultaneously, epics heroify rulers and strongmen at the top of social hierarchies, which offers an altogether different utility in recognizing how epic reinforces cultural imperialism. using ai in teaching epics is one example from russian folklore that may benefit from the ways ai “prioritize[s] the ability to ask new questions, connect and interrogate new ideas, evaluate, iterate, and adapt to new responses” [bowen and watson 2024: 44]. although i have not yet personally tried this method in my courses, i intend to do so in an upcoming course on heroes and villains in russian literature and culture. despite the many fears of and prohibitions on ai that postsecondary educators and institutions assert, the potential uses of ai offer many still unknown possibilities for critical pedagogy and liberatory education, including in the teaching of folklore. simultaneously, in the interest of critical pedagogy, social justice, and collective liberation, it is also important to note for students the environmental oppression caused by ai and big data, both in terms of the rapid consumption of dwindling natural resources and the exploitation of labor for extraction of natural resources necessary for the technology. critical pedagogy and teaching russian “bee”lief for a course on russian civilization and culture at a postsecondary institution in the us south, i developed a unit on the verbal, material, and spiritual culture of russian apiculture or “bee”lief. the folkloric significance of apiculture is prevalent in many aspects of russian history and culture, from the earliest times to the present: critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 40 folklore clearly shows the importance of bees, wax, honey, and hives in early russian society… proverbs and adages abound with references to bees, wax, and honey… charms could be recited over honey that the individual then smeared upon himself, and like other members of solitary professions forest beekeepers sometimes were considered to be sorcerers (kolduny). [lahana 2018: 33-34] the many elements of russian “bee”lief in verbal, material, and spiritual culture serve to highlight the essential role of bees for pollination and food production, a role that is increasingly imperiled by global warming, chemical contaminants, deforestation, and climate change. as critical pedagogy, the topic of russian apiculture illuminates the interconnectedness of humans and bees and its representations in russian folklore toward deepening student awareness of oppression in the form of the exploitation of natural resources that leads to climate change and endangers pollinating insects, including bees. in the area of verbal culture, there are many russian proverbs [poslovitsy], sayings [pogovorki] about bees and honey, incantations [zakliatia], and folk verse in songs. verbal culture around bees reflects folk understanding of bees’ role in pollination and food production, as the russian proverb states, “есть пчела в саду, будет яблоко на ветке” [if there is a bee in the grove, there will be an apple on the branch]. spring songs and invocations of spring use bee imagery at winter’s end: “oh, little bee, / ardent bee! / fly out beyond the sea, / get out the keys, / the golden keys. / lock up winter, / cold winter! / unlock summer, / warm summer, / warm summer, / a summer fertile in grain!” [reeder 1993: 93]. there are also texts with elements of “bee”lief that originated in oral tradition such as “месть княгини ольги древлянам” [“olga’s revenge on the derevlians”] and “повесть о петре и февронии” [“the tale of peter and fevronia.”] in the former, princess olga is heroified for weaponizing honey in the form of a mead that intoxicates the derevlians, making them easy, drunken targets for an ambush. it is also worth mentioning that olga was calculatingly using up the enemies’ resources with this strategy, “olga sectioned off hunting grounds and honeying grounds, beekeeping being a particular derevlian speciality, and controlled access to them” [brown 2021: 261]. importantly, these policy decisions remained in place long after olga’s reign ended. in the “tale of peter and fevronia,” fevronia is described as “a peasant who became a princess and eventually a saint… the daughter and sister of men who climbed tall trees in the forest to harvest honey” [lahana 2018: 33], which endowed her with the knowledge necessary to cure peter’s illness. the verbal culture of “bee”lief also includes analyzing words with roots associated with bees and bee products, noting, for example, the similar forms of the words for bee and bear (“honey-knower” = mëd “honey” + ved’ “know”) in several slavic languages and in the indo-european root for honey. these linkages in language and culturally relevant texts serve as evidence of ancestral awareness of the interconnectedness of humans and bees, further illuminating the importance of climate conservation efforts for bees’ survival. critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 41 in the area of material culture, to familiarize themselves with the implements, products, and entities involved in beekeeping in russia, my students observed apicultural imagery in high and popular culture via paintings (e.g., vasnetsov’s 1909 prizvanie variagov, bogatov’s 1875 pasechnik, and stanisławski’s 1895 ule na ukraine, among others) and in the decorative styles of handmade crafts like shkatulki [keepsake boxes] and textiles. non-ritual uses of bee products like wax for candles and waterproofing, pollen and honey for healing and nutrition, and the important role of bees in agriculture for the pollination and production of food are all important concepts in recognizing bees’ ecological centrality. pollination is necessary for many traditional russian foods including, “[a]pples, plums, raspberries, and cherries; cabbages, carrots, and cucumbers; mint, dill, mustard, and marjoram; flax and buckwheat” [lahana 2018: 29]. darra goldstein confirms the importance of these foods, “russians relished fresh apples, cherries, pears, plums, melons, and berries in season, eating them fresh, baking them (especially apples), and using them to sweeten porridge” [2015: 584]. in a similar vein, “bee”lief is also observable in russian regions and cities which use the bee or the bear on official coats of arms [lahana 2018; ruban and yashalova 2022]: “although special studies are necessary to analyze the actual people’s perception of these symbols, it is logical to hypothesize a very significant contribution of the regional coats of arms to… awareness… towards wildlife conservation and its public support… to draw the people’s attention to the biodiversity awareness and conservation needs” [ruban and yashalova 2022: 24]. to more deeply engage students with a hands-on, sensory experience for awareness of biodiversity beyond the classroom, i contacted a local beekeeping association, which happily supplied a volunteer who met the class on a mutually agreeable date and time at the university arboretum, where students observed behind glass an active bee colony and attempted to locate the queen. students were invited to taste edible products like honey and bee pollen and to touch and smell other things like propolis, wax, and royal jelly. the beekeeper was enthusiastic and willing to answer the students’ questions and incorporated broader themes into their presentation related to the role of bees in the context of sustainable development. for the study of material culture related to russian “bee”lief, the hands-on observation was a meaningful way to bring the topic to life beyond the classroom and also engaged the local community. for places without a local beekeeping association, there may be local apiaries to visit as a field trip or an option for student extension and enrichment. in the area of spiritual culture, russian “bee”lief comes to life through the folk beliefs of beekeepers, particularly as folk etymologies for “bee”havior, (i.e., if bees are flying into the hive, it will rain; if they are sitting on the walls, it will be hot). additionally, honey as a healing and nutritional substance is a symbol of raw to cooked [lévi-strauss 1969], wherein bees transform “raw” pollen into “cooked” honey and beekeepers alone have direct access to this transformational power. nutritionally, honey was magical because of its high sugar content: “most of the russian populace lived their lives on the edge, teetering towards hunger critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 42 and dependent on an annual harvest that could be destroyed by untimely frosts, drought, hail, insects, or commissars” [goldstein 2024: 2]. the nutritional density and magical power of honey gave it special status, making it highly symbolic in ritual foods like bliny and kut’ia for life-cycle and yearly-cycle transitions such as from life to death at funerals, from winter to spring, and from fasting to feasting, and vice versa. honey and wax were believed by many to have healing properties, “dressings for cuts, burns, and puncture wounds included honey and applications based on honey were even recommended for treating eye problems or bad teeth. herbs might also be kneaded into wax and swallowed, a primitive time-release capsule” [lahana 2018: 47]. beekeepers believed protection for bees was elicited from the water spirit [vodianoi], “they presented him with honey and wax in an attempt to prevent excessive humidity, which destroyed their hives” [ivanits 1994: 73]. likewise, after christianity, “the patrons of beekeeping were saints zosima and savvatii, whose feasts (17 april and 27 september) more or less marked the swarming and hibernation of bees in russia; in places, nicholas was also regarded as patron of bees” [ivanits 1994: 29]. there is also value in noting the belief in a perceptible difference between the skill set of someone who harvested honey and wax from wild forest hives [bortevoi pchelovod] as opposed to someone who kept bees at home for personal cultivation [domovoi pchelovod] [vitvickij 1835]. in contrast to the home beekeeper, it was the forest beekeeper who was believed to have access to extraordinary or supernatural abilities due to his capacity to harvest wild honey. “peasants tended to attribute occult powers to herdsmen, millers, blacksmiths, beekeepers, carpenters, and stonemasons… they regarded the special knowledge or skill of these professionals as inaccessible to an ordinary person and therefore as beyond the human realm” [ivanits 1994: 111]. in the contemporary context, a music video for a 2019 russian pop song, (“pchelovod,” by rasa, with english subtitles), in which the singer proclaims the object of affection to whom he is singing is a bee and he is the beekeeper, is an excellent example of how “bee”lief remains important in contemporary russian popular culture, though the song’s themes are not exclusively drawn from russian folklore, small traces still remain. the social distinctions and the modern song similarly reflect virtues of russian masculinity that conflate certain skills with supernatural abilities. from the perspective of critical pedagogy, this observation can further illuminate the marginalization caused by oppressive, subjective socially constructed hierarchies. deeper understandings of humanity’s relationship to the natural world through the study of folklore then, may have utility in sustainability efforts during an unprecedented period of climate change. climate change is a local and global issue that has relevance to current and future generations of college students. systemic oppression and social inequities are experiencing no shortfalls because of climate change, and climate change itself is a product of the oppressive exploitation of natural resources through the perpetuation of petrocapitalism. mainstream challenges of sustainability, like many social, political, legal, and economic phenomena in united states, can be traced to colonialism: “in the beginning, conservation was tied to racist, sexist, and classist notions of critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 43 wilderness protection in order to serve urban, bourgeois, white men’s desire to construct themselves as rugged frontiersmen” [curnow and halferty 2022: 148]. in the present century, however, environmental destruction is tied to global, bourgeois corporations’ desire to be profitable at all costs, one of the highest of which is the exploitation of natural resources. implications and future considerations the application of critical pedagogy in teaching russian folklore provides rich opportunities for understanding how power, identity, and oppression operate in russian speech communities. folktales [skazki] have not been discussed above, but certainly there are avenues for critical analysis of skazki, particularly of their characters. for example, a critical examination of magic tales could consider how identity and power are in play among recurring characters. baba yaga, vasilisa the wise/beautiful, prince ivan, and koshchei the deathless represent different aspects of social status within russian folk belief. in many tales, vasilisa is orphaned or abandoned, leaving her no options in a patriarchal society, and her associated troubles unfold accordingly. baba yaga is isolated from all members of society, living in a hut in the forest and labeled a witch [baba], and resides as a liminal being between the living and the dead, the clean and the unclean, the magical and the ordinary, and the good and the bad. she is uncontrollable and volatile, like nature, and she also has the magical capacity to control nature. baba yaga and koshchei are not unlike the shepherds, skomorokhi [minstrels], millers, blacksmiths, beekeepers, and kolduny [magical practitioners] believed to have special powers, and they also represent types of identities that are out-grouped as outliers. in contrast, prince ivan represents the ruling class and structures of state authority that can act in ways that are either heroic or foolish, but that often serve to preserve hegemonic power. heroification and vilification in folktales and other folkloric texts communicate deep cultural values about identity in terms of subjectivity and alterity. overall, there are many potential avenues for critical pedagogical applications in the teaching of russian folklore beyond those suggested here. crucially, “it needs to be acknowledged that in the contemporary global-facing university, the production of knowledge proceeds largely from epistemological assumptions deeply rooted in the western philosophical tradition” [seats 2022: 679]. however, “cultural literacy cannot be viewed as simply the acquisition of western heritage values aimed at safeguarding our so-called common culture. this view endorses the reproduction of western cultural hegemony” [macedo 2006: 47-48]. it is worth mentioning that even though many postsecondary educational institutions in the united states teach sustainable development and express performative solidarity with social liberation in mission statements, the most powerful and wealthy of those institutions invest endowment funds in exploitative, extractive, and exclusionary systems such as fossil fuels, the military-industrial complex, and prisons [oparah 2014]. illuminating oppressive systems and their enablers within postsecondary institutions themselves has critical pedagogy and teaching russian folklore folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii 44 similar utility and purpose in the context of critical pedagogy. teaching folklore cannot repair the many challenges confronting institutions and future generations; however, it can potentially serve as a mechanism for bringing awareness to matters of identity and oppression toward social justice and educational liberation. bibliography azimova, nigora and bill johnston. 2012. “invisibility and ownership of language: problems of 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(1933) 2011. the mis-education of the negro. new york: tribeca books. yacovone, donald. 2022. teaching white supremacy. new york: pantheon books. young, iris marion. 1990. justice and the politics of difference. princeton: princeton university press. zguta, russell. 1978. russian minstrels: a history of the skomorokhi. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. microsoft word folkloricaprotest_ii_full_final_2022 07.27.22.docx about seefa folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 116 the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association (seefa) is a nonprofit organization devoted to an exchange of knowledge among researchers interested in slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore. seefa promotes instruction in slavic, east european and eurasian folklore, organizes panels on these topics at national and international conferences, and encourages the preparation of teaching materials and translations as well as publishes the journal folklorica. seefa also seeks to promote joint research, scholarly exchanges and conferences, expeditions, and publications with scholars in slavic and other east european and eurasian countries. membership in seefa supports student scholarships and awards. individual membership in seefa is $35 per year, $10 for students. send checks to the secretary-treasurer: shannon donnally quinn department of linguistics and germanic, slavic, asian and african languages michigan state university 619 red cedar road b-331 wells hall east lansing, mi 48824-3402 e-mail: shannondonnallyquinn@gmail.com membership may also be paid by credit card at: http://www.seefa.org/membership.html. folklorica is published once per year. 4e journal archive appears on the seefa web site (http://www.seefa.org/) and is hosted by the university of kansas. articles, surveys, reviews, notices of conferences or expeditions, and announcements from scholars in any relevant field are acceptable. contributions will be evaluated by the editorial board or by other specialists. each contribution copyright 2022 by its author. all rights reserved. printed in kentucky, united states folklorica full 2024 about seefa 89 folklorica 2024, vol. xxviii the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association (seefa) is a nonprofit organization devoted to an exchange of knowledge among researchers interested in slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore. seefa promotes instruction in slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore, organizes panels on these topics at national and international conferences, and encourages the preparation of teaching materials and translations as well as publishes the journal folklorica. seefa also seeks to promote joint research, scholarly exchanges and conferences, expeditions, and publications with scholars in slavic and other east european and eurasian countries. membership in seefa supports student scholarships and awards. individual membership in seefa is $35 per year, $10 for students. send checks to the secretary-treasurer: shannon donnally quinn department of linguistics and germanic, slavic, asian and african languages michigan state university 619 red cedar road b-331 wells hall east lansing, mi 48824-3402 e-mail: shannondonnallyquinn@gmail.com membership may also be paid by credit card at: http://www.seefa.org/membership.html. folklorica is published once per year. the journal archive appears on the seefa web site (http://www.seefa.org/) and is hosted by the university of kansas. articles, surveys, reviews, notices of conferences or expeditions, and announcements from scholars in any relevant field are acceptable. contributions will be evaluated by the editorial board or by other specialists. each contribution copyright 2024 by its author. all rights reserved. folklorica full 2025 about seefa 128 folklorica 2025, vol. xxix the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association (seefa) is a nonprofit organization devoted to an exchange of knowledge among researchers interested in slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore. seefa promotes instruction in slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore, organizes panels on these topics at national and international conferences, and encourages the preparation of teaching materials and translations as well as publishes the journal folklorica. seefa also seeks to promote joint research, scholarly exchanges and conferences, expeditions, and publications with scholars in slavic and other east european and eurasian countries. membership in seefa supports student scholarships and awards. individual membership in seefa is $35 per year, $10 for students. send checks to the secretary-treasurer: shannon donnally quinn department of linguistics and germanic, slavic, asian and african languages michigan state university 619 red cedar road b-331 wells hall east lansing, mi 48824-3402 e-mail: shannondonnallyquinn@gmail.com membership may also be paid by credit card at: http://www.seefa.org/membership.html. folklorica is published once per year. the journal archive appears on the seefa web site (http://www.seefa.org/) and is hosted by the university of kansas. articles, surveys, reviews, notices of conferences or expeditions, and announcements from scholars in any relevant field are acceptable. contributions will be evaluated by the editorial board or by other specialists. each contribution copyright 2025 by its author. each contribution is licensed under a creative commons attribution non-derivative license (cc by nd) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. 2016 folklorica deformity reviews folklorica 2015, vol. xix 183 schmiesing, ann. disability, deformity, and disease in the grimms’ fairy tales. detroit: wayne state university press, 2014. index. bibliography. xii + 225 pp. $29.99 (paper). isbn: 978-0814338414. performance studies is a discipline that has led to important revelations. first it made scholars aware of the tremendous impact that the audience have on the performer and the text that s/he produces. awareness of external influences on the text has now expanded to include collector biographies and how these have shaped which tales were collected and how the tales were then processed for publication (e.g. the teller’s tale, ed. by sophie raynard, suny press, 2012). ann schmiesing’s contribution falls in the latter category and takes the investigation of collectors in a new and fascinating direction. herself suffering from hearing loss, schmiesing has chosen to look at the grimms’ ideas of wellness and illness and to see how these ideas played out in the work for which they are famous. she discusses the health of the brothers themselves and the historical context of their work to give the reader a new and revealing way to view some of our most familiar stories. schmiesing begins by giving a brief survey of disability studies in general. when it comes to folktales, discussions of disability are few and many of them, psychoanalytical interpretations in particular, view disability in tales as symbolic. schmiesing, on the other hand, argues that, when tale characters are presented as disabled, their physical condition should be interpreted in historical context. from this introduction, the author moves to the views that wilhelm and jacob grimm had of the german folktale tradition and its tellers, especially the main source of stories, dorothea viehmann. the brothers felt that the soul of the german folktale tradition was healthy but that its current “incarnation” was flawed. the transmission of tales was not what it once was and they set out to fix the situation, to “heal” the tales. their editorial corrections, the author argues, were their attempt to make the tales whole. after presenting the attitude of the grimms to folktales in general, schmiesing turns in chapter two to specific tales and examines “the three army surgeons” and “brother lustig.” in the first of these tales, army surgeons boast of their skills and demonstrate them on each other by removing eyes or other body parts and then restoring the parts and the health of the subject. of course, something goes wrong (in one version a crow flies off with one of the removed eyes) and an animal body part must be substituted for the missing one. brother lustig is a discharged soldier who travels with st. peter and sees the latter bring the dead back to life. he tries to imitate his companion with disastrous results. here schmiesing relates the events in the tales not only to the grimms’ own experience with the medical profession and its cures but also to the historical events of the period, specifically the large number of soldiers returning from battle and needing prostheses. this was my favorite chapter and it is a central one because schmiesing argues that the grimms saw their editorial work precisely as providing prostheses to aid and restore crippled oral tales. in chapter three schmiesing goes from soldiers’ prostheses to “the maiden without hands” and the silver arms that she receives in place of the natural ones folklorica 2015, vol. xix 184 chopped off by her father. gender plays a role in how disability in tales is perceived and disabling women makes them more passive, while disability marks men as other, even monstrous, as in the case of hans my hedgehog who actually kills with his deformity. disability is not uniformly gendered, schmiesing points out, and one of the virtues of her work is precisely her complex and nuanced analysis of tales. in “the maiden without hands,” for example, she sees a series of substitutions which contradict alan dundes’ interpretation of the tale as one about a woman’s desire for her father and the resulting punishment. chapter four deals with super-cripples, seemingly monstrous creatures who have an extraordinary ability to survive and thrive and are rewarded with a normal body in the end. super-cripples can be amputees like the runner in “how six made their way in the world,” who must detach his presumably prosthetic leg to run at ordinary speed. more often super-cripples are children who are born deformed, yet have extraordinary abilities. misbirth was seen as a moral problem, as well as physical one, and children who did not look normal were considered to be god’s punishment; they were monstrous and questionably human and, in tales, even their parents express a desire to destroy them, thus eliminating the anomaly. yet deformed characters can be endowed with remarkable abilities and donkey, from the tale with the same name, becomes a marvelous lute-player, despite his hooves. many tales conclude with the erasure of disability and donkey and hans my hedgehog are rewarded for their efforts to function in society by being granted the ability to shed their animal skins and to assume fully human form. not all disabled characters achieve normalcy in the end. aging animals, the super-small thumbling, and the dummy, all discussed in chapter five, remain as they are. they learn to compensate for what they lack physically or mentally and even use their disabilities to achieve their goals. thumbling, for example, uses his small size to sneak into small spaces and thus gain an advantage. the naiveté of the dummy, or simpleton, proves similarly advantageous under certain circumstances. this chapter offers the most direct validation of disability. the book concludes with a chapter that focuses on aging and the misunderstandings that it brings. as schmiesing argues, the grimms were quite concerned with disability. they saw their own bodies as flawed and felt that, like the cripples in their tales, they needed to compensate, doing mental work to make up for the physical things they could not do. this view was especially characteristic of wilhelm, the brother who worked most extensively on the tale collections. the brothers’ view of themselves as physically flawed led them to champion the underdog, disabled characters included. schmiesing’s book is an excellent contribution to folk and fairytale scholarship and provides a new way to view classic tales. my only objection to this book is the fact that the tales discussed are not provided or summarized anywhere in the text. the reader needs extensive knowledge of kinder und haus marchen and also the earlier tale collections mentioned in the book. i realize that including all of the tales discussed would have made this a large, expensive, and unwieldy tome, so perhaps wayne state university press could publish a companion volume of tales. reviews folklorica 2015, vol. xix 185 natalie kononenko university of alberta edmonton, alberta, canada folklorica full 2021_edit 6.28.22 revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 1 articles revolutionary kašpárek: the life cycle of the radical puppet cheryl stephenson bates college lewiston, maine, usa abstract throughout the czech national revival and the final years of the austrohungarian empire, the puppet stage served as a site of resistance, of advocacy for czech sovereignty, and criticism of germanic influences on czech culture and everyday life. the undisputed star in these efforts was the puppet hero kašpárek, the little czech jester who uses his wits to defeat austro-hungarian petty bureaucrats, police officers, and other deputies of imperial authority in hundreds of puppet plays throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. this article explores how kašpárek laid austria to rest, a 1918 performance which saw kašpárek’s role shift from one of resistance to one of revolution. in this play, performed in pilsen (plzeň) in the final weeks of the first world war, kašpárek no longer faced off against austrian officials, but rather met a much larger opponent, the two-headed imperial eagle, symbol of the empire itself. in this performance, kašpárek does not need to outwit his opponent; he is a dominant force from the start. after beheading the eagle, the performance becomes a kind of funeral mass for the empire with kašpárek serving as both priest and master of ceremonies, bringing a kind of jubilation to the usually somber context. in this discussion, i examine this turning point from the interconnected perspectives of social history and semiotics. this dual approach exposes both the developments and conditions that allow for this striking symbolic victory on the puppet stage, but further an exploration of the ways the folk archetype of the jester and, by extension, a folk-based image of czech national identity navigate radical political change. introduction on september 23, 1918, the little czech puppet kašpárek caused the collapse of the austro-hungarian empire. at the end of an evening’s performance full of songs gleefully mocking the empire and its decline, the puppet rose up on the stage, wielded a sword, and beheaded the imperial eagle—the official symbol of the hapsburg family and its three centuries of control over the czech lands. the act was a shocking one. kašpárek was a symbolic representative of the czech nation and he had enacted a symbolic, decisive victory over the foreign oppressor. perhaps even more shocking was the fact that he did it in front of imperial censors who, vastly outnumbered by the czech audience and lacking any other options, could only sit by while their monarchy and their empire crashed down onto the revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 2 stage. it would take another month before the legal dissolution of austro-hungary would officially come on 28 october, but kašpárek was given full credit for the empire’s demise. the czech diplomat emil walter would recall, “…té neděle, kdy státní úřady mlčky snesly tuto výzvu a tento odvážný, zatěžkávací pokus. 28. říjen byl pro divadélko…jenom důsledek 23. září” […that sunday, when the state officials silently tolerated that challenge and that daring and weighty endeavor. for the theater, 28 october was… merely a consequence of 23 september”] [walter 1928: 29]. walter’s response speaks not only to the withered state of imperial control over cultural production, but also to the immense power of the little jester, bolstered by his own role and that of the puppet theater within czech romantic nationalism and the more recent campaigns for czech sovereignty. little kašpárek’s beheading of the imperial eagle could rightly be called one of the most potent symbolic victories in theater history. this potency came in no small part from the context of the tumultuous final weeks of the last world war and of the empire as a whole, but it was also the result of a centuries-long struggle to assert czech identity and sovereignty within the austro-hungarian empire. the puppet theater—and kašpárek plays in particular—had been central to the czech national cause since the mid-nineteenth century, serving as popular venue for antiaustrian sentiment and a forum for codifying what it meant to be czech. with the struggle of czechs against austrian authority as a clearly defined conflict, the emblematic actors of kašpárek and the hapsburg eagle, and the symbolic battleground of the puppet stage, this performance had all the necessary elements for a decisive symbolic victory. the present study considers both this singular theatrical event and its context with attention to its past, present, and future. broadly, it addresses the question of how a puppet who is thoroughly grounded in a discourse of anti-authoritarianism coopts authority for himself and what that transformation does and means for that hero and for the puppet theater as a whole. in the first section’s exploration of the groundwork of the performance, i examine the historical and semiotic forces that imbue this victory with such weight that walter would declare it the actual moment of the empire’s collapse. in the second section, i address the performance itself, asking what exactly is won in this theatrical battle and what tactics make it possible. in examining the resources and associations the performance draws upon to achieve its victory, i explore the ways historical czech authority is projected onto the body of the jester puppet, allowing his victory to become a national victory. in the final section, i consider the aftermath of this performance and its impacts on kašpárek’s position in czech theater and culture. while the political and historical implications of the victory are fairly unambiguous with the demise of the empire, the implications for the jester are less clear. the idea of the jester without a king is already a precarious one, but kašpárek sees additional complicated roles as the post-revolution revolutionary and as a kind of victorious underdog. these new and complex aspects of kašpárek’s identity and the new roles which allow him to navigate those changes expose larger questions of the ways seemingly timeless or universal folk characters shift with changing historical contexts and of the ways transitions towards democracy can destabilize established folk archetypes. revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 3 setting the stage for symbolic victory like all symbolic victories, kašpárek’s triumph over the hapsburg eagle reflected a broader conflict: the centuries-long czech struggle for sovereignty and the various official and popular campaigns to legitimate the use of the czech language, both central to the czech national revival. this movement and the puppet plays which contributed to it often tended to paint the status of czechs in the austro-hungarian empire as one marked by oppression— a kind of intereuropean colonialism—and this is certainly an exaggeration, albeit a quite useful one in propagating a widespread political and social movement [bezděk 1983: 911]. puppet plays both fed and were fed by this constructed narrative of national oppression. throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, puppet play repertoires across europe were dominated by fairly unambiguous tales of good versus evil, often constructed through juxtapositions of the wicked and powerful against the righteous oppressed [jurkowski 1996: 278-80]. performed by itinerant puppeteers, these structures were tailor-made for the usual puppet theater audiences, made up most often of rural or less privileged people, children, and others excluded either financially or situationally from other modes of theatrical performance. in the czech context, these reductive narratives of good and evil gained a special status, reflecting both the condition of the less privileged classes and the broader correlation to the national grievances about the czechs’ less privileged status in the empire. this dual meaning was a boon for the czech puppet tradition in latter half of the nineteenth century, lending a newfound legitimacy that brought the puppet theater from the market square or fairground and into schools, social organizations, and the homes and milieus of middleand upper-class czech patriots. in the context of the early twentieth century, when the vestiges of romantic nationalism continued to promote images and ideas of czech identity as one tied to an imagined pastoral national ideal, the puppet theater gained preeminence in urban patriotic contexts not despite its origins in village squares, but because of it. while it might seem rather obvious, one of the most significant aspects of the czech puppet theater—and one central to the role it would play in the czech national movements—was that it was performed in czech. the czech puppet theater and the czech language have a specific, historically established relationship dating back to the late eighteenth century and the austro-hungarian restrictions on czech-language theater. under the imperial structure of theater licensing, czech-language theaters were rarely granted permission to perform, while performances in german were widely promoted and supported by the state. the puppet theater had a special status in the czech national revival project of reviving the czech language and curbing the germanization of the czech lands. the puppet theater was marked as essentially the only theatrical medium with performances in the czech language and this association with czech theatrical culture in czech forged a connection between the puppet theater, the language, and the national cause [dubská 2004: 39-40]. this association was still very much present through the first half of the twentieth century as the puppet theater revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 4 progressed from a forum for promoting the czech language to a forum for performing ideas of czech identity and the czech cause as a whole. kašpárek performances were often directly engaged in the promotion of the czech language, both through modernizing and disseminating traditional czech legends and historical plays—made new and more entertaining with kašpárek’s hijinks—and, more often, by mocking german and german speakers with multilingual puns and other demonstrations of the puppet’s masterful bilingualism. in one theatrical prologue published in 1913, kašpárek intervenes in the germanization of czech children most literally, stepping into the classroom to prevent the devil from teaching the children german numbers: kašpárek: to je dobře, že vás není málo, však se mi už po vás stýskávalo. za to, že jste přišly, mám vás rád, budem se dnes smát, smát, smát. (k čertu;) a co ty zde děláš, ochechule povzteklá? zde nemáš co dělat, táhni do pekla! čert: nepřišel jsem já dnes pro špás, já učím děti der, die, das. kašpárek: ty jedna obludo rohatá, ošklivá, nohatá, chlupatá, zde v této světnici ty děti hezké, ti hoši a děvčátka, to děti jsou české. (k dětem) dětičky, pravda, že všechny jste češi… pravda, že němčina málo vás těší, že do škol jen českých chodit chcete, dětičky, že nikdy němci nebudete? (k čertu): nadarmo, čerte tu hledáš spolky. budeš-li nás ještě někdy učit der, die, das, vypráším ti gatě, zlomím ti nos, uvidíš, že nejsem ledakdos! (čert odletí.) tak, a teď začne divadlo se hrát, každý z vás bude smát… [kašpárek: it’s so good that there are so many of you, i have missed you so much! i’m so glad you’ve all come, and today we’re going to laugh and laugh and laugh. (to the devil) and what are you doing here, you venomous hag? there’s nothing for you to do here, so shove off back to hell! devil: i didn’t come to play pranks, i’m teaching the children ‘der, die, das.’ kašpárek: you horned monster, all ugly, long-legged and shaggy, revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 5 here in this room these lovely children, the boys and the girls, these children are czech. (to the children) children, isn’t it true, that you are all czechs, and that you don’t really like german so much, and that you only want to go to czech school, and that none of you will ever be german? (to the devil) you won’t find any allies here, hurry off if you want and find yourself a german school. if you ever try to teach us der, die, das again, i’ll mess up your breeches and break your neck, rip off your ears and bite your nose, you’ll see that i’m somebody! (the devil flies away) well then, now the theater can begin the show, and all of you will laugh and laugh…] [kraus 1913: 12] (1) even here, five years before the collapse of the empire, we can see the extreme liberties taken by kašpárek on the puppet stage, which would only escalate over the course of the war. the devil-cum-german teacher in this interaction can even evoke a sense of pity, admitting as he does that he has not come for any ill purpose. in some ways, the text is so unambiguous that it almost defies discussion, but the ways the contrast between czech and german languages and identities is established here is helpful in understanding the particular role of language in the puppet theater in czech patriotic discourse. beyond serving only as a medium— where performance in the czech language is itself a patriotic act—language serves as the conflict itself. little kašpárek brings a complementary pair of promises to the classroom, offering violence and threats to the german teacher and a newfound sense of fun and laughter to the czech children, delivered by replacing the formal structure of german language pedagogy with the informal, but equally educational, mode of the puppet play. performing in czech gives kašpárek a tool to mock the german devil, but his success in transforming the german classroom into a puppet play is the central victory of the prologue, presaging the kind of multivalent puppet victories to come. the little jester and his puppeteers the symbolic capital of the czech language was matched by that of kašpárek himself, despite the perhaps surprising fact that the jester is not technically czech himself. kašpárek hails from a long, european tradition of jester figures which gradually mutated and evolved from the italian pulcinella of the commedia dell’arte into regional variations across europe, including kasperl, a jester character adopted from germany [jurkowski 1996: 279]. it was the austrian puppeteer johann laroche (1745-1806), with his repertoire of plays starring kasperl, who likely brought the character to prominence in the czech lands, first performing in prague in 1764. the dramaturgical aspect of kašpárek’s revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 6 transformation from austrian import to an icon of czech national and linguistic identity is complex and convoluted, largely because the jester rarely played the leading role in performances until late in the nineteenth century, and so is often absent from published scripts. (2) rather, kašpárek was inserted as a minor comic character into all measure of plays, ranging from european standards like hercules and faust to a growing collection of plays depicting the glorious past of czech kings and heroes. despite the haziness of his origins and his transformation from kasperl to kašpárek, the character had become firmly entrenched in the czech puppet theater repertoire by the middle of the nineteenth century [dubská 2004: 58]. in the twentieth century, kašpárek’s reign as the dominant force in czech puppet theater—and later as a potent symbol of the czech nation itself—is founded on a specific brand of popular humor and a political climate which made humor a crucial outlet for popular political dissent and czech nationalism. critique of the current social and political environment added to the comic effect, bringing popular entertainment into the realm of subversive pleasure as audiences laughed in the face of authority. kašpárek must change to some extent with each new dramatic context, but his humor remains grounded in opposing rigid, formal, and aggressively proper characters and ideas with his own natural, easy, and flexible approach, just as he did in his insults and threats made towards the german devil in kraus’s prologue. surrounded by one-dimensional characters and caricatures of authority figures, kašpárek enjoys a natural complexity and a sense of subversive fun. in the specifically czech context, kašpárek’s natural behavior opposes the artificiality of imposed, external authority and marks the little guy as superior. this process connects kašpárek to this fundamental element of humor, the undermining force that reverses structures of authority. his being a puppet extends this effect even further. the little czech jester is already an unlikely hero, but the little czech jester puppet—in a sense an inanimate object literally manipulated by an external authority—becomes the ultimate comic hero, attacking all forms of logic and authority with wit and especially with language. in this extended metaphor made realized, the puppet kašpárek has both a power and a sense of freedom which more formal authority lacks, and he takes this power from his ability to play and joke with serious ideas and serious representations of authority. this sense of play is rendered all the more impactful by the historical and cultural associations that bear upon the puppet stage. all of the forces of these associations—with czech language, with the overarching narrative of the witty underdog, with romantic nationalist ideas of the authentic czechness of the puppet plays of the previous century—all converge onto the body of kašpárek, imbuing his words and gestures with massive symbolic power. while kašpárek’s iconicity emerged from his immediately recognizable jester-hatted figure, the puppet is, of course, not a puppet without a puppeteer, and the puppeteer who animated the performance of how kašpárek laid austria to rest deserves special attention. in the pre-war years of the twentieth century, the jester was animated by a growing number of professional, urban puppeteers. foremost among them was josef skupa (1892-1957), who would both write and revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 7 perform how kašpárek laid austria to rest. (3) skupa joined pilsen’s loutkové divadlo feriálních osad [puppet theater of the vacation camps]—lovingly known as the feriálka—in 1917, and it was there that he would bring kašpárek to his striking victory over the hapsburg eagle. skupa was brought into the company in an attempt to modernize, moving beyond the traditional stylings of the company’s older puppeteer karel novák (1862-1940), whose performances drew heavily on nineteenth-century visual and performance styles [vašíček 2000:15]. however, skupa was entirely adept at incorporating traditional and more modern styles of the puppet theater, and his early contributions to the feriálka’s program offered attractive combinations of new ideas and old forms, drawing on the wartime audience’s complex demands for both nostalgia and relevancy. over the course of the war, pilsen had seen rapid growth due to its massive armaments factory’s expansion to serve the needs of the empire in wartime. this urban, working population demanded more engaged forms of entertainment which focused more on present conflicts and questions than on the historical imaginings of novák’s repertoire, but were not yet ready to part with the familiar aesthetics of the puppet theater of their youth [malík 1962:56]. in the autumn of 1917, skupa worked to modernize the theater’s space and its equipment while preparing his premiere, the 1909 alois jirásek play pan johanes, followed by a loose interpretation of franz von pocci’s castle of owls. (4) in the latter of the two, skupa began to unleash his talents for improvisation and comic adaptation, transforming kašpárek into a caricature of a government minister and filling the characters ’ speech with rhymes and puns. with the success of this production, skupa moved into a leading role at the feriálka, creating a series of cabaret evenings centered on the popularity of his kašpárek performances [vašíček 2000:19]. as one audience member recalled: čísla vážná, obyčejně vlastenecká, střídala se v programu s čísly veselými, poťouchle až dovádivě veselými a mezi čísly byl to vždy kašpárek, který pečoval o takřka familiérní kontakt zákulisí s hledištěm. nebylo státnických ‘veličin ’ bývalého rakouska, nebylo jediné podařené stylizované zprávy z bojiště, aby se humor konferenciérův nesvezl po ní svým žahadlem. kašpárek řečnil, parodoval, zpíval, básnil, přednášel, tančil… [serious numbers, usually patriotic, were interspersed with funny ones, cunningly or playfully funny and between the numbers there was always kašpárek, who took care of the so-called familiar contact between the stage and the audience. there wasn’t an official of old austria or a single artful piece of news from the war that he wouldn’t tackle with the humor of a master of ceremonies. kašpárek spoke, parodied, sang, waxed poetic, lectured, danced…] [wachtl 1918: 90]. revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 8 while skupa would largely leave kašpárek behind after the war, he was careful to feature the jester puppet in wartime performances, despite the public cries for modernization. performing the idea that kašpárek was still central to the puppet stage and that he could take on new ideas and respond to current events brought the feriálka a huge advantage, letting them use all of the authority and iconic force of kašpárek in the final months of the long-fought struggle for czech sovereignty. laying austria to rest the performance of laying austria to rest was a kind of convergence of massive forces. the entire history of kašpárek, the czech puppet theater and its connection to the czech language and the national narrative of the underdog came together with the very-much contemporary situation in pilsen. the disgruntled population of workers in the city, working to produce armaments despite the complex feelings that they were producing arms in a war against themselves and supporting a dying empire which never respected their historical claim to sovereignty came together in the theater despite the chaos and hardships of the end of the long conflict. all of the historical and contemporary struggles and the questions of who and what would determine the czechs’ fate at the end of the war all came together at the feriálka for an evening’s cabaret on 23 september, 1918. laying austria to rest was only one act of several that evening, and the written part of the text consists only of two songs, but josef skupa took full advantage of the kinds of symbolic load kašpárek could bear, drawing not only on the historical connection between the puppet theater and the righteousness of the czech cause, but further invoking sources of external authority. in some ways, the performance of laying austria to rest is a story of a single, symbolic gesture, of the moment the eagle loses its head as the moment when the symbolic authority of the empire is lost. but in the larger context, this performance is one of citation—in many ways the lifeblood of the puppet theater—and the way the puppet and the puppeteer draw on, transform, and amplify external sources of authority to make statements that expand far beyond the diminutive puppet body. full of often parodic references to religious and historical texts, laying austria to rest reimagines authority, stripping it away from the eagle and everything else associated with the empire, letting kašpárek perform the notion that god and history are on the czech side. these references and invocations of the forces which could justify czech sovereignty take on a force matched only by kašpárek’s sword. before the jester even emerged on the stage, laying austria to rest capitalized on established songs and texts to manipulate audience expectations. the performance began with a recorded broadcast of chopin’s funeral march, a most familiar sonata in a most unusual context. the concepts of funerals and death are cast into a new light in the puppet theater, the space where animate and inanimate converge and where questions of life and death are much less dire. while we unfortunately do not have records of the audience response to these first moments of the performance, the odds of laughter seem rather high in the puppet revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 9 theater, where a piece so somber can only be seen as absurd. the song was followed by an excerpt of the latin funeral rights, also recorded and still without any action on the stage. kašpárek and skupa, despite the performance’s general stance towards all things imperial, would be magnanimous enough to give the eagle a catholic funeral. it is quite striking that both the march and the mass precede the death itself, but there is a sense to this order when thinking about the political context. the death of the empire itself—particularly for czechs seeking independence—would not be a moment of mourning, but one of rebirth. the only appropriate time to mark the passing of the empire and the eagle was in these final moments of its existence. these two introductory pieces mark that passing using a specifically foreign and ceremonial modes of performance; they use the language of the empire to memorialize the empire. tellingly, they also present the inevitability of the demise not as a specifically czech premise, but as one which is upheld by greater authorities including the catholic church. (5) the continuation of the performance saw a kind of transfer of power, moving from the foreign voices of chopin and the latin funeral rites into a more familiar and local authority. as the lights rose, kašpárek appeared on the stage, weeping beside a catafalque bearing a beleaguered, dying, two-headed eagle, the symbol of the austro-hungarian empire, and began to sing a lullaby to austria: dobrú noc, rakousko, sladce spí, nech sa ti snívajú c.k. sny. sladce spí, dobrú noc, už se neprosíme o pomoc! [good night, austria, sleep tight, sweet dreams of imperial might. sleep tight, good night, and we won!t be asking for your help anymore!] [koval 1928: 48] from these first words, we can see the kind of armory skupa and kašpárek assemble, the weapons they will use to perform czech authority and to contrast the formal religious modes of authority used earlier in the performance. the lullaby at the beginning of the performance feels rather sweet and innocuous, but already deals a tremendous blow to the power relations of the empire, revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 10 undermining the paternalistic force of the empire over the czechs and creating a new structure where the czech’s have a newfound parental authority. the lullaby itself carries a force that isn’t immediately clear to the foreign viewer, but which carried a clear and deep resonance for czech theatrical audiences. while this version was written by skupa himself, the lullaby had deeper origins in the czech tradition and the national revival, drawing on a traditional song of slovak origin, but also historically popular in moravia and bohemia. beyond the general promotion of czech—and slovak—folk songs broadly throughout the national revival, this song had a particularly elevated status from its nineteenth-century inclusion in antonin dvorak’s 1886 op. 73 no. 1 (“v narodnim tonu” [“in folk tone”]), a collection of four folk songs arranged by dvořák and made popular in theaters and drawing rooms as an elegant expression of the pastoral image of the national ideal. (6) the original lyrics are much less pointed: dobrú noc, má milá, dobrú noc, nech je ti sám pán búh na pomoc, dobrú noc, dobre spi, nech sa ti snívajú sladké sny. [good night, my dear, good night, may god himself be a help to you. good night, sleep well, may you dream sweet dreams!] the wishes for a good night remain consistent, but there is a notable difference in the two versions’ presentation of god’s protection and authority. while the original resigns the child to the care and help of god, skupa’s version takes the position of the children liberating themselves from the supposed—and no longer desired—help of the parents. in this revision of the song’s lyrics, kašpárek shifts the focus from religious authority to earthly authority, identifying the shift in child-parent dynamics in the czechs’ relationship to the empire using a weapon so seemingly tender that it takes on a new light. while in a few moments, the jester would execute the eagle with a sword, in this moment he makes an almost more drastic move, harnessing a new spirit of condescension to assassinate the eagle with a lullaby. without allowing the audience any time to respond, kašpárek flew up onto the catafalque and beheaded the eagle with a single blow of his sword, completing the most literal of the evening’s attacks. after pausing to allow the cheers and laughter of the audience to subside, kаšpárek changed the tone of the performance from a funeral for austria into a celebration of rebirth for the czechs, singing another adapted song, this one taking its tune from the famous czech fifteenth century hussite battle hymn, “ktož jsú boží bojovníci” [“ye who are god’s soldiers”], calling for the czechs to return to their role as warriors. after revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 11 demanding the rise of the czechs, the final verse of this version of the hymn completes the burial of the austrian empire: marné jsou vzteky všech. vaše mocná sláva — všechna stará práva vyoře otec čech [all of your anger is in vain. your powerful glory — all of your old authority will be plowed under by father čech] [skupa 1948: 29]. this verse is not the same kind of close adaptation as we see in the lullaby, but rather an addition to the historical text, an addendum to the story of the czechs’ previous glory days, now explicitly connected to the present situation. in its historical context, the original song was both a reminder to its singers that the czechs had god on their side in the religious wars of the fifteenth century and also a kind of martial weapon in its own right. rumors abound of how the hussite armies would sing the song so loudly and with such ferocity that enemy armies were scared off before battles could even commence. this final verse revives that level of intimidation and adds a direct address to a specific enemy, bringing the performance of the funeral, the last rites, and the mother’s lamenting lullaby into the new phase of the burial. the evocation of the burial in this final song is relatively unsurprising, but the specific image of plowing something or someone under has particular resonances in czech legend and historical conceptions of czech sovereignty. the last line of this final verse invokes not only the legendary founder of the czech nation, forefather čech, but also přemysl oráč, the plowman who, according to legend, founded the powerful přemyslid dynasty which ruled the czech lands from the ninth century until 1306. přemysl oráč—whose legend is codified in the twelfth century chronica boemorum and in alois jirásek’s 1894 staré pověsti české [old czech legends] rose from his humble roots as a peasant plowman, marrying the czech heiress to the throne and bringing legitimacy and a sense of fair counsel to czech leadership. his image as a non-aristocratic ruler was particularly popular in nineteenth and early twentieth century movements to promote a democratic future for the czech nation. in skupa’s text, the image of přemysl is brought together with that of forefather čech, who embodies the connection between the czech people and the czech lands. while přemysl symbolically connects the czech people to a tradition of righteous rulership, čech connects the czech people to the land itself. brother of rus and lech, who made similar efforts for russians and poles, forefather čech’s legend sees him bringing his people to their promised land in a quest for peace and abundance. taken together, the image of the plowing under, which concludes kašpárek, presents a revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 12 literal conception of revolution, of turning over the native czech soil, burying the austrian authority and bringing czech authority back to the surface where it belongs. the intersection of these two legendary figures with the form of kašpárek on the stage creates a semiotic tour de force, each offering a specific claim about the righteousness of the czech cause. this point of contact with the depth and breadth of czech history, conducted by a puppet with his own deep associations with czechness, was a potent acknowledgement of the puppet theater’s capacity for addressing the past, present and future of the czech lands. the new ways skupa’s kašpárek was taking on—rather than fighting—forms of authority would mark a massive shift in the medium in the coming years. in the short-term, the little jester was celebrated as one of the budding republic’s most radical and revolutionary heroes. the production met immediate success and public acclaim and played twice weekly from september until the declaration of czechoslovak independence on 28 october. the lyrics to the production’s subversive songs were distributed and sung throughout pilsen through october and beyond [koval 1928: 50-1]. in 1928, the czech diplomat emil walter recalled the performances, the significance of the lack of censorial response, and their enduring significance, confirming skupa and kašpárek’s success with the claim that the collapse of the empire was a consequence of this performance [walter 1928: 29]. walter’s reaction highlights the audacity of performing this piece with officials present, and their inability to react certainly signaled a kind of impotence on the part of the austro-hungarian authorities. beyond this brazen disregard for the official presence in the audience, the performance itself undermined and ultimately destroyed the symbolic authority of the empire, positing kašpárek and the songs he sings as czech national symbols capable of overpowering the decrepit imperial symbol of the eagle. kašpárek, his rendition of “ye who are god’s warriors,” and the revised lullaby singing the empire into eternal sleep play into different elements of czech national sentiment, history, and the assertion of sovereignty. as we have already seen, the puppet hero himself, despite his relatively recent import from the german tradition, had evolved through the national revival into the distinct personification not only of czech humor, but czech morality, and had demonstrated time and time again how the “little czech” could use his wits to navigate and overcome the challenges posed by external authorities. this production does not pit the czech lion—the firmly established national symbol of the czech crown since the thirteenth century—against the eagle. rather, by allowing the smallest of czechs to bear the full weight of the historical righteousness of the czech national cause, this performance proposes an opposition to the concept of empire as a whole, presenting a movement led by the small and its capacity to overcome the mighty forces of authoritarianism. the playful treason of this war between national symbols on show in laying austria to rest is a striking manifestation of the particular kind of agency accessible to the puppet grounded in the puppet’s simultaneous status as an object and an actor. kašpárek indeed remains the dwarfish jester and a symbolic revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 13 representation of the czech nation, but—and crucially—kašpárek occupies and performs in a world that is constructed to his scale. he is not fighting the empire itself; he is a national symbol fighting a national symbol. if he is but a toy or an object, then the hapsburg eagle is a toy as well. while the kašpárek puppet and the sculpture of the eagle exist as tangible, inanimate objects, the act of performance transforms them both into something more. the animation of the puppets onstage transforms the inanimate figures into dynamic, moving forces, the forces that not only dominate and determine, but constitute the world they occupy. in the context of this performance—the end of a long war where the opposing parties were technically fighting on the same side—the symbolic opponents of the jester and the eagle made the actual conflict tangible in a way that life outside of the theater could not. the performance of laying austria to rest not only revealed kašpárek’s capacity for massive semantic loads but would also reveal a great deal about the symbolic force of the puppet theater as a whole. with the long-standing association between european puppet theater and parody, along with the specifically czech connections between puppet theater and the patriotic cause, the choice of the puppet theater as a venue for any particular performance bears a significant communicative weight, both before and beyond the context and content of the performance itself. even with the ideas of dread and horror occasionally invoked by the puppet theater’s loose distinction between animacy and inanimacy, it certainly remained primarily associated with fun, entertainment, and mocking humor. addressing the death—or assassination—of the empire specifically in the puppet theater places the national symbols of kašpárek and the eagle onto equal footing, but also implies that the contest between them is some kind of joke, that the collapse of the empire is something to mock or pity. the symbolic assassination is of course a powerful anti-hapsburg expression, but the performance of this act in the puppet theater is in many ways the truly seditious act. this moment contains all of the complexities of the puppet theater and its relationship to the national revival. the puppet theater was so historical and so powerful that it was able to accomplish the ultimate national revival goal of ousting the hapsburgs from the czech lands, but it did so by reducing the empire to the scale of a puppet, rather than elevating the czech nation to the scale of the empire. throughout the hapsburg period until the collapse of the empire, the czech puppet theater had been a crucial venue for small-scale seditious acts, where czechs could embrace their pride at the historic might of the czech people while expressing frustration at their current lack of sovereignty and authority. the physical presence of censors in a puppet theater audience, as we saw in laying austria to rest, was a rare occurrence, and the puppet theater largely avoided strict censorial control by remaining small, mobile, and seemingly naive or innocent. in many ways the puppet theater had all the advantages of a public platform without the harsh limitations of official scrutiny. the very lack of official support or perceived legitimacy of the puppet theater was crucial to the success of the puppet revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 14 theater as a forum for political and social critique, and throughout the last century of the austro-hungarian empire, puppet theaters found great advantages in the fact they their public faces were “only puppets.” while delivering biting parodic and satirical representations of the austro-hungarian government and society, puppeteers were able to counter accusations of sedition with the defense that they were mere puppets and that, considering their diminutive scale and social status as a form of pure entertainment, their provocations were certainly closer to impishness than to treason. laying austria to rest was certainly an extreme example of the lax censorial response to the puppet theater’s parodies of austrian authority, but it speaks to the potential of both the false innocence of the puppet theater and the power of the puppet’s inherent fluidity. the puppet can be both the whole world and just a puppet. in the performative realm, kašpárek can be every czech and all of czech history compressed into one figure, using his sword to end three hundred years of foreign rule, not despite, but because he is “just a puppet.” the jester without a king transitioning through the end of the war, the collapse of the austrohungarian empire, and the formation of the first czechoslovak republic, czech puppet theater would have to adjust not only to the end of imperial censorship, but to its own growing authority and the changing position of a medium so heavily associated with opposing authority in the newly democratic state. changes in the repertoire, aesthetics and audiences would raise questions about what puppet theater should be and how it fits into new twentieth century models of popular culture. however, the largest question facing the czech puppet theater in the early days of the first czechoslovak republic was whether it would survive the burden of its own history. it remained to be seen whether josef skupa and his peers could create a new, twentieth-century puppet theater that would assert the crucial role of fun, play, experimentation and innovation in the puppet theater, or whether the newfound authority kašpárek had invoked in his devastating blow to the empire would come to crush the medium under the weight of its firmly asserted historical and social significance. despite the impact and boldness of his revolutionary gesture, czech independence put kašpárek into a state of flux, a jester without a king and a national hero whose rebelliousness was no longer desirable. two questions loomed as puppeteers and audiences determined the jester’s future. first, once authority was no longer imposed from outside, could or should the model of the czech people remain a rude, disobedient trickster? as it turned out, the answer to this question was both yes and no. many of kašpárek’s pre-1918 plays would remain popular throughout the interwar period, re-contextualized as artifacts of the czech national revival and independence movement. and despite the end of austrian bureaucracy and control in the czech lands, kašpárek’s defiant ways would be channeled into opposing nosy landlords, strict bartenders, and other less powerful, but equally oppressive forms of authority. but, in the vast majority of cases, the answer to whether the old trickster kašpárek was welcome was a firm revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 15 no. shirkers and tricksters had no place in the upright culture of the new democracy culture. despite this seeming mismatch, kašpárek could not be simply abandoned in favor of new, more suitable puppet characters. he was too popular and too central to the czech puppet theater tradition. rather than casting the beloved kašpárek aside, amateur puppeteers and teachers across the country set about refining kašpárek’s performances and his character, transforming the trickster into a model of positive behavior for the first generations of children raised in the first czechoslovak republic. campaigns to shift kašpárek’s symbolic status were active throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a period when the czech puppet theater was immensely popular as a mode of pedantic entertainment. in schools and cultural organizations— particularly in the mass sporting clubs like sokol which promoted healthy bodies and minds as a key to a healthy young nation—kašpárek and concerns about using his character effectively were a frequent subject of attention. in a 1928 article in the sokol bulletin, an anonymous puppeteer identifies the potentials of working with kašpárek in the sokol puppet theaters: kolem nás bují lehkomyslnost, hon za požitkářstvím, bezmezné sobectví, tanec uvolněných poválečných zmatků, kteří rozleptávají národní naši odolnost a soběstačnost. vracíme-li se k dětem, obracíme se v naději k lepší budoucnosti národa. bude jen naším štěstím, budou-li naše káňata moci žít opět velikým národním všelidským ideálům. a pro děti je jich tlumočitelem kašpárek. chraňte kašpárka a zachráníte i děti i kus naší budoucnosti. [the equable, robust, and cheerful attitude towards life that we have in the sokol inspires us to make kašpárek into a symbol, one that will prove our precedence over the whole rest of the world. we owe it to ourselves and to our little ones. all around us we see recklessness, hedonism, unchecked selfishness, the boundless chaos of the post-war world, which eats away at our national resilience and independence. but if we bring our focus back to the children, we can focus on the hope for a better future for our nation. we will only find joy if our little ones can once again live their lives in our great, national, universal ideals. and for children, the transmitter of these ideals is kašpárek. if we can save kašpárek, we can save our children and a piece of our own future] [anonymous. “kašpárek sokolských děti” 488]. two decades previously, kašpárek had been the ultimate symbol of just that “recklessness, hedonism, unchecked selfishness… [and] boundless chaos” from which the jester was now supposed to rescue czech children. in this new position, kašpárek not only loses his anti-authoritarian raison d’être, but actually becomes an authority over children in his own right. the reformed, post-independence kašpárek reflects the larger challenges of transforming folk or cultural icons through a transition into democracy on a broad revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 16 level. in severing the eagle’s head in 1918, kašpárek cuts off the possibility or advantageousness of his own distinctive naughtiness, ushering in a new phase where he is expected to act as a leader and as a role model. the lack of any external enemy to oppose—at least until the rise of nazi germany—and the fact that he had himself demonstrated that his naughtiness was limited to the specific context of opposing outside oppressors left kašpárek with a much more limited range of dramaturgical possibilities. increasingly through the interwar years, the opponents kašpárek fought were more abstract concepts that actual puppet villains as he was used in mass public health education projects, campaigns to sell savings bonds, and other national efforts. in the wake of the interwar financial crisis, kašpárek plays increasingly served to help children understand the changes in the world around them and the part they could play in it. in one prologue from this period, he preaches a discourse of personal and collective responsibility to his young audience: učte se dívat. kolem vás je hodně skrytých slzí. snažte se všude pomáhat a uvidíte brzy, že tváře všech se rozjasní a smutek matek zmizí. tož — všichni chutě do boje a hurá proti krisi!” [learn to look around you, to see all of the hidden tears around you. always try to help and soon you will see that everyone’s faces light up and mothers’ grief disappears. so, let’s all head eagerly into the battle and let’s defeat the crisis!] [malík 1933: 153] while kašpárek’s post-independence roles preserve his status as a folk icon of czech national identity, these modes of responsibility are absolutely antithetical to the spirit of pre-independence kašpárek. looking back to the jester’s intrusion on the german schoolteacher’s lessons and the impunity with which he threatens violence on the teacher, the transition from a mode based on opposition to one based on cooperation is clear, but others are perhaps less evident. some factors contributing to kašpárek’s pre-independence power were simply lost. the fact that he speaks czech in particular fades quickly from importance even by the start of the 1920s. in theatrical culture, though, the biggest loss for kašpárek is the widespread loss of his adult audiences. the post-war kašpárek is still a funny little man who dresses in red and speaks in rhymes, and that suffices to maintain his popularity in children’s puppet theater through the interwar years. the revolutionary kašpárek, however—the one who evoked comments from ambassadors and the howling laughter of munitions factory workers—is crushed under the weight of his newfound authority. it is—in some ways—another stunning victory. the subversive, revolutionary kašpárek is so fundamentally antithetical to modes of authority that he destroys even himself when he takes the seat of power. revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 17 notes 1 all translations are my own. 2 collections of theatrical prologues, short scenes performed just before the main play of a performance, were a popular venue introducing more pointedly political commentary into the puppet theater. dozens of collections of such prologues were published from the turn of the century through the 1930s, overwhelmingly featuring kašpárek engaging in the same kind of unsubtle commentary seen in this example from josef kraus. 3 tracing the early transformation of kašpárek into his adopted czech identity is further complicated by two factors: the fact that many itinerant puppeteers and many of their audience members were illiterate and that those puppeteers who could read and write would be hesitant to record their intellectual property in a form that could be used by their competitors. before the boom in home puppet theaters of the late nineteenth century and its attendant rise in published collections of puppet plays, the most celebrated collection of czech plays which includes kašpárek is komedie a hry matějě kopeckého [comedies and plays of matěj kopecký]. matěj kopecký (1775-1847) is regarded as the founding father of both the czech puppet tradition and of the largest family dynasty of czech puppeteers. this collection, documented and published by his son, offers early examples of ways kopecký and others would insert kašpárek into czech and foreign established plays. 4 josef skupa is best known for his work in the interwar years, when his puppet duo spejbl and hurvínek provided new icons for newly independent czech audiences. the massive popularity of skupa and this comic duo let skupa build a multi-media empire, releasing record albums of puppet dialogs and producing mass-manufactured merchandise in addition to producing touring productions which brought spejbl and hurvínek to audiences across europe. 5 pan johannes was extremely popular in the final years of the empire, featuring the lowly czech tomáš protecting his innocent love-interest from the exploitative advances of the king of the mountains. castle of owls is an austrian play, but the 1912 czech translation incorporates kašpárek into the tale of a lord’s supernatural and ill-fated rise to power. 6 while the czech lands remained diverse in religious affiliations through this time period, the historical memory of the counter-reformation, which many czechs would associate both with the loss of sovereignty and with the suppression of the czech protestant or hussite movements creates a strong association— particularly in the puppet theater’s trade in symbolic shorthand—between catholicism and imperial authority. 7 antonín dvořák is among the composers most closely associated with the czech national cause. through his works directly engaging with the czech national struggle (op. 7 in particular), his use of exclusively czech librettos, and his celebration of czech and slovak folk music give his work and the lullaby featured here particularly strong national resonances. op. 73, where “dobrú noc má milá” [good night, my dear] appears, allows for an importation of folk revolutionary kašpárek folklorica 2021, vol. xxv 18 aesthetics into more privileged urban spaces in a mode quite similar to that of the puppet theater’s movement into middleand upper-class cultural spaces around the turn of the century, creating a purified and codified version of folk culture more suited for mass distribution to more discerning audiences. 8 the fact that the song is slovak and not czech in origin is of relatively little consequence here, particularly as this version was historically popular in moravia as well. bibliography agnew, hugh 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vašíček, pavel. 2000. plzeňské loutkářství: historie a současnost. plzeň: divadlo alfa. veselý, jindřich. 1939. 30 let s loutkami: loutkářství před válkou, za války a v budoucnu. choceň: tiskárna loutkář. veselý, jindřich. 1987. “od pravlasti loutek k českému loutkářství,” in svět loutkového divadla. františek sokol, (ed.). prague: albatros, 16-17. vodičková, eva. 1987. “josef skupa a česká loutkářská tradice,” in svět loutkového divadla. františek sokol, (ed.). prague: albatros, 129-135. walter, emil. 1928. “má účast na kašpárkové revoluci.” in jak plzeňský kašpárek pochovával rakousko: jubilejní almanach. plzeň: loutkové divadlo feriálních osad, 28-30. zhivaia starina 2017 zhivaia starina in 2017 folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 43 reports zhivaia starina in 2017 at the start of 2018, zhivaia starina journal changed ownership and is currently being published by polenov russian state folk art house (moscow).the journal’s key topics for 2017 involve the role of tradition and innovations in folklore genres and the interconnection between folklore and folk mythology as well as between folklore texts and oral history. additionally, issues 3 and 4 feature sections to commemorate the 870th anniversary of the founding of moscow and the centenary of the russian october revolution. issue 1 the first issue opens with the section “genres of folklore: the folktale”, which includes papers on the practice of recording fairy-tales (a. s. lyzlova’s paper on the first audio recordings of fairy-tales from the 1940s (currently stored in the archive of institute of linguistics, literature and history of karelian research centre, ras) on v. e. dobrovol’skaia’s comparative analysis of slavic and baltic versions of sus 425m (the husband-serpent) along with v. v. zaporozhets’ text of the same type, recorded in the krasnodar region. the other papers in the section present recent field research from the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries in the volgograd region (v. a. shilkin) and in the yaroslavl region (v. e. dobrovol’skaia). the section “folklore texts: old and new” focuses on comparing traditional elements and innovations in different folklore genres and forms: epic folklore (a paper by n. v. petrov about russian bylinas’ transformed since the 19th century under the influence of other genres), syncretic song-and-dance forms (m. v. stroganov’s paper on contemporary solo song and dance), and children’s folklore (e. g. matveeva’s article about transformations of children’s “scary stories”). m. o. garder studies how soviet-era folkloristics understood the genre of bylichka [memorat], and presents a survey on problems of terminology in folkloristics. the section dedicated to dream symbols in folk culture includes papers on zoosymbolics in oral and literary traditions of dream interpretation (in an article by a. v. gura, based on a huge amount of slavic material), on the texts of bedtime prayers intended to provide good dreams (o. v. chokha’s paper about greek spells mentioning maria magdalene), and also field reports, i. e. narratives on prophetic dreams, dreams about the other world, and dreams about god and the saints, recorded in the krasnodar region (v. v. zaporozhets) and in the mogilev region (o. v. belova) and the gomel region of belarus (g. i. lopatin). the section “folklore studies in research centers” features papers written by the research fellows from barents center for the humanities (kola science center, russian academy of sciences, apatity, murmansk region). it opens with the review of the center’s studies (by i. a. razumova). the papers address folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 44 shamanic legends of the sami living on the kola peninsula (o. a. bodrova), the social life of things in the urban culture (o. a. suleimanova), and a reflection on the folklore and oral history of church-building (a. s. davydova). the section “archive shelf” includes a paper by a. v. pigin and a. s. sokolov, who present an analysis of the soviet “bylina about the tubozersky kolkhoz” written by the karelian epic singer n. v. kigachev in the 1930s; the text, which exposed disorder in the kolkhoz, was declared subversive, and the author was arrested as a result. the “expeditions” section contains two papers. n. g. golant’s field report on rites of the passion and easter weeks was recorded among the romanian subethnic group in the eastern serbia; iu. a. krasheninnikova and s. g. nizovtseva present a field report on the calendar rites, nicknames, household rites, folk medicine, and spells, of the troitsko-pechоrskii district of the komi republic. issue 2 the second issue opens with a section titled “paleofolklore.” the first paper, authored by s. iu. nekliudov, explores what paleofolkore is. according to nekliudov, oral sources of literary works can be detected through typological reconstruction, determining structural and semantic parallels and likening the literary monuments and themes to fabulas and motifs from the oral narrative tradition. the method is illustrated in the reconstruction of the cultural contexts of the ancient egyptian tale “about truth and lie.” the egyptian theme continues in e. g. tolmacheva’s paper about the concept of “the soul as a bird” as seen in the ancient egyptian mythology. iu. e. berezkin analyzes widespread motif-types, such as the “difficult task,” by using mapping and statistical methods. employing the same methods, d. s. nikolaev distinguishes widespread and rare motifs and discusses their role in the context of the global folk tradition. the remaining articles explore the lunar myth in early japanese culture (l. m. ermakova), the figure of the hairy maiden in medieval chinese texts (a. b. starostina); f. b. uspenskii uncovers the semantics of the name sigrfluga (lit. ‘fly of victory’) featured on the king of norway sverre’s banner according to scandinavian epics. the section titled “language of folk culture” includes papers on cultural semantics of russian dialect, lexicon, and phraseology. s. iu. koroleva and e. a. kliuikova present variants of the folk psalm “theotokos’ dream” in material from the iurlinsky district of the perm region. o. a. teush reviews metaphorical terminology for whirlpools as found in dialect dictionaries. m. b. gekht and s. i. pogodina discuss pejorative utterances (from teasing to invectives) addressed to the “the other” on the basis of material from latgale (latvia), where the russian, latvians, latgalians, and jews used live side by side. the section “the northern mosaic” focuses on different aspects of material and spiritual culture of northern russia and includes material from field studies, museums, and private collections: a paper on the art of basmas (ornamented zhivaia starina in 2017 folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 45 metallic plates from icons) in karelia (v. p. ershov); biographical data on female folk singers recorded during expeditions to mezen (in the arkhangelsk region) in the 20th century by s. a. butovskaia and a. s. semenova; and narratives about witches in the koigorodsky district of the komi republic by p. a. istomina. the paper by e. a. chaiko, published in the section “from the history of scholarship,” contains a field report on folklore and ethnographic expeditions of 1947–1955 to the southern urals, which were carried out under the direction of the famous russian folklorist v. e. guseva. the field diaries of the participants contain material on traditional costume and weaving, traditional and contemporary celebration, and old and new forms of social life. in the section “exhibitions,” s. v. vorobieva and zh. v. gvozdeva review an exhibit dedicated to the everyday life of northern russian peasants — epic singers. it coincided with the 215th birthday of famous russian epic singer trophim riabinin (1801–1885) and was on display at the kizhi state open-air museum of history, architecture and ethnography in petrozavodsk from march through july of 2016. the “expeditions” section presents recent field research recorded in karelia (a paper by iu. v. litvin and s. a. minvaleev about an expedition to the lyydiköt, a karelian subethnic group, which followed the trail of a 1950s ethnographic expedition), while a paper by i. s. butov, v. n. gaiduchik and v. s. aleksinskii on mythological narratives about unsuccessful black magicians and devilry in belarus. the release of photographs of nekrasov cossacks taken by iu. f. lunkov in the 1980—1990s, with a preface by v. n. nikitina (medvedeva), coincided with the 55th anniversary of the return of a large group of nekrasov cossacks return to russia in 1962. the journal celebrated the 70th anniversary of the archeologist, anthropologist, and ethnologist iurii e. berezkin, author of a database of world’s mythologies (text by a. s. arkhipova). the memorial section was devoted to the estonian folklorist arvo krikmann, a friend and contributor to zhivaia starina, who passed away in 2017, february 27th. issue 3 the key section of the third issue is “on the 870th anniversary of moscow” and contains materials on moscow archaeology (a paper by l. a. beliaev about archaeological finds on the site of tsar alexei mikhailovich’s 17th-century palace in kolomenskoe and in red square, and also a note by v. a. berkovich about another moscow find: clay brick from the soviet period with the text of an obscene chastushka carved into the brick before firing); on moscow necropolis studies (a paper by n. g. propirnyi and a. s. iashin about 20th-century lyric epitaphs found in moscow cemeteries); and on memoirs describing moscow at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (m. v. akhmetova and t. v. zhgilëva published a fragment of schoolwork written in 1899, where a pupil from a rural school in the novgorod province depicts his 3-year life in moscow; our editorial folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 46 team published a fragment of memoirs written by a moscow teacher n. v. kolotukhina (1891—1984) and currently stored in the editorial archive). the section “folk religion: 20th—21st centuries” contains papers on the world’s popular religious traditions, on the creation of new cults influenced by traditional models of sacred personages and objects. i. s. butov presents archive and field research on the legend of the miraculous self-renewal of roadside crosses in belarus of 1930s—1950s. k. ogannisian, l. avetisian and l. simonian discuss cults of sacred places in armenia along with the folk religious practices concerned with the sacred places (tukh manuk, st. stepanos nakhavka, nakhavik and ishkhanavank). l. m. ermakova analyzed the origin and function of modern japanese cult pokkuri, whose elderly followers believe that the deity pokkuri-san will help them to pass away without suffering and spare their relatives from having to nurse them if they become incapacitated. authors in the section “animals in folklore” analyze different aspects of folk zoosymbolics in traditional culture of slavs and their neighbors. a. v. gura explores the folk taxonomical classification of animals through criteria such as ‘pure—unclean’, ‘wild—domestic’, ‘male—female,’ etc., in slavic material o. v. belova’s work features the motif of animals’ miraculous transformation (when a sacred character punishes, curses, or rewards an animal, or a human turns into an animal or a plant). v. s. kuznetsova discusses an etiological “folk biblical” motif explaining the origin of the forked swallow’s tail. k. a. kozhanov and a. v. chernykh analyze romani (kalderash) beliefs and practices concerning the frog as a magic talisman. m. m. makartsev discusses albanian and macedonian beliefs about a cuckoo and its first cuckooing. the research fellows of the russian museum of ethnography (o. g. baranova, l. s. gushchian, m. a. dokuchaeva, et al.) in the “exhibitions” section present the museum’s exposition “tea and coffee, with(out) ceremonies,” which took place from april through september 2016 and explored different ethnic traditions and rituals of tea and coffee-drinking. the publication was accompanied with photographs from the museum’s archive. in the “expeditions” section, e. a. samodelova published narratives about efim chestniakov (1874—1961), an artist, a writer and a philosopher, who lived in the kostroma region and was considered to be a clairvoyant by the peasants. v. a. shilkin presented field materials from the khutor ozerki (the ilovlinskii district of the volgograd region) including narratives about traditional food, calendar rites, demonology and childlore. the journal also remembered xenia m. bromley (1937—2017), the well-known russian ethnomusicologist. issue 4 the fourth issue opened with the section “regional folklore: russian— belarus borderland,” the latest installment the journal’s long-established exploration of regional and local traditions and their typology. four papers are based on field studies in the zlynkovskii district of the briansk region (russia) on the border with belarus: the tradition of bearing a cross in burial processions and zhivaia starina in 2017 folklorica 2017, vol. xxi 47 its annual transfer (a. b. moroz); taboos and prescriptions concerning grianaia week, a period during pentecost (v. a. komarova); narratives about witches and witchcraft (n. d. petrova); and summer calendar rites (d. k. vyskrebentseva). two additional papers are based on material from other areas on the belarusian border: e. m. boganeva analyzed beliefs concerning mythological characters such as ‘invisible people,’ legends about their origin and their relationships with humans (including matrimonial), and g. i. lopatin presented field research on calendar rites, folk christian beliefs and demonology. lopatin’s material was recorded in the village staubun in the gomel region. “beliefs and rites” contained papers on regional rain-making rituals in the diveevskii district of the nizhny novgorod region (iu. m. shevarenkova) and in the volgograd region (v. a. shilkin); on the wedding rites in a ukrainian enclave in bosnia and herzegovina (g. p. pilipenko); and on ritual bread in matchmaking rites of cossacks who had settled in the historical territory of the first don okrug [county] (t. e. grevtsova). the section “folklore and revolution” was dedicated to the centenary of the russian october revolution and introduced papers reflecting on the corresponding crisis epoch in folklore, oral history, memoirs and naïve peasant literary texts. m. v. stroganov studies field records from the kalinin / tver region in the 1970s—2000s, and analyzes changes in informants’ attitudes toward the russian revolution and civil war. m. v. akhmetova published three peasant poems, attested in the 1930s, that reflect some notable social signs of the new epoch. s. m. tolstaia published a fragment of the memoirs written in the 1990s by vera i. tolstaia (1903—1999), the granddaughter of leo tolstoy; the text discusses the tragic events of the first half of the 20th century, including the revolution, civil war and the emigration. closely related material is found in an article on the oral memoirs of the famous russian linguist v. a. dybo by a. s. krylova. dybo’s narrative deals with his father anton t. dybo, the academician whose autobiography was written in the 1970s. the “expeditions” section contains two papers. k. v. osipova analyzed spring calendar rites of baking zhavoronki [skylarks] cookies in the north-eastern part of the kostroma region. v. e. dobrovol’skaia presented materials on calendar rites, wedding and funeral rites, mythological narratives, and legends from an expedition to the kimrskii district of the tver region . maria v. akhmetova, phd (cand. of science in philology), the russian presidential academy of national economy and public administration, deputy editor-in-chief of zhivaia starina olga v. belova, phd (doctor of philology) institute of slavic studies, russian academy of science, editor-in-chief of zhivaia starina folklorica full 2025 humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 52 “i signed the house over to a cat”: humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests anastasiya fiadotava estonian literary museum tartu, estonia stsiapan zakharkevich european humanities university vilnius, lithuania abstract post-electoral protests in 2020 were unprecedented in belarus: not only in terms of their massive size and long duration, but also because of the abundant use of humor by the protesters. as a phenomenon that has both cognitive and emotional sides, humor plays an important role in political protests. it can help as a way to cope with anger and fear, but it can also mark people’s belonging to certain social groups. using belarusian 2020 protest posters as data sources, we explore what topics of protest humor were popular, how protest posters functioned as a prominent instrument of political activism, and why humor played such a pivotal role in 2020 belarusian political protests. we argue that one of the most significant and appealing aspects of the use of protest humor was how it allowed individuals to express their political views in creative ways as opposed to the more simplified and straightforward rhetorical tools of authoritarian systems. with the rise of police brutality and repression against protestors, humor became a way to demarcate clear boundaries between a violent “them” and a creative, intelligent, and peaceful “us.” introduction the year 2020 began normally in the belarusian political landscape, despite looming presidential elections scheduled for august. alexander lukashenko, who has been president since 1994, and his supporters did not expect the election campaign to attract much interest or cause social upheaval. indeed, despite consistent reports about election fraud [yakouchyk 2016; sejersen 2019], most of the previous (re)elections of alexander lukashenko did not provoke mass-scale protests across the country apart from several days of protests in spring 2006 and a large protest rally on 19 december 2010 that was brutally dispersed by police [padhol and marples 2011]. the 2015 elections did not provoke any upheavals, largely because belarusian society was wary of the revolution of dignity and the illegal annexation of crimea by russia in neighboring ukraine and because many belarusian opposition politicians were either imprisoned or tired of fruitless attempts to challenge lukashenko’s power [astapova 2017: 39]. moreover, international support was unequal for belarusian opposition politicians and humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 53 lukashenko’s regime: while the latter enjoyed the ideological and economic support of putin’s russia, the former were in favor of closer relations with western countries, but they could not count on the same level of support from them. however, the 2020 campaign turned out to be different. the unconventional reaction of the belarusian government to the covid-19 pandemic in spring 2020—when no lockdown or other disease prevention measures were introduced [åslund 2020]—triggered contradictory feelings in belarusian society. belarusians felt that lukashenko and his administration were not making any efforts to protect the population [bedford 2021: 811-812]. many people, including those who stayed away from politics before 2020 or were lukashenko’s loyal supporters, became critical of the government and lukashenko’s neglect of public health issues, and thus began doubting whether lukashenko and his team should remain in power. the rise of independent news and social media also contributed to belarusians’ change of opinion as they started receiving information that was more reliable than state propaganda [guriev 2020: 275]. this gradual evolution of belarusian society that also began to favor political liberalization over traditional paternalistic political models became one of the less visible, though extremely powerful, factors in the 2020 protests [bekus and gabowitsch 2023]. when the presidential campaign officially started, several new candidates, including a bank manager viktar babaryka and a blogger syarhey tsikhanouski, appeared in the political arena alongside long-established opposition politicians. unlike previously known belarusian opposition politicians whose target audiences were mostly nationally oriented intelligentsia, new candidates reflected the previously underrepresented interests of the mostly urban middle class and thus provoked its active participation in political life during the last months before the election. the turbulent 2020 presidential campaign in belarus culminated with the election on 9 august. its official results—alexander lukasheko was credited with 80.1% of the votes—were not recognized by dozens of countries, opposition leaders, and many belarusians due to multiple reports of electoral fraud [bedford 2021]. dissatisfaction with the election triggered protest marches as soon as the results were announced. these protest marches were met with violent responses from the authorities and police, especially during the first four days of the protests, when around seven thousand people were arrested and subjected to police brutality in detention centers [onuch 2020; nikolayenko 2022]. disagreement with the election results as well as the government’s lack of willingness to stop police brutality resulted in further escalation of the conflict; hundreds of thousands of people all over belarus have participated in protest activities since august 2020, and around 70% of them stated that they had never participated in protests before 2020 [onuch 2020; bedford 2021]. protests became a catalyst for belarusian civic society [kazharski 2021], and they took various forms ranging from peaceful mass rallies to flash mobs, showcasing the symbols of protest in local (online) communities [paulovich 2021]. humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 54 one of the common features of most forms of post-electoral protests in belarus was folk humor. it penetrated both real-life and digital realms, resulting in the creation of many memes and “virals” [shifman 2014]. several news satire groups such as чай з малинавым варэннем [tea with raspberry jam], ха-ха, я тут жыву! [ha-ha, i live here!] and sovetskaia belorussiia [soviet belorussia] became very popular on social media. the former two provide ironic perspectives on belarusian news, while the latter is the namesake of one the most prominent belarusian newspapers and publishes parody news mimicking official belarusian news rhetoric (1); its postings were sometimes mistakenly treated as genuine. other humorous products include comic sketches (хай так tv [so be it tv]), humorous political songs (“arystakratychnaia blednasc’” [aristocratic paleness] and “krasnaia zelen’” [red greenery]), (2) stand-up comedy shows performed outside of belarus by comedians of belarusian origin, such as slava komissarenko’s gags and andrey skorokhod’s show pobedy shoushenko [shoushenk’s victories], (3) and countless vernacular/user-generated humorous images, videos and textual jokes. interestingly, new humorous media that ridicules the repressive belarusian reality continues emerging even two years after the massive post-electoral protests: for example, the bylol tiktok channel that humorously comments on belarusian news was created in august 2022. apart from its omnipresence on the internet, humor was especially visible during mass protest rallies in the summer and autumn of 2020. rallies included elements of carnivalesque aesthetics [bakhtin 1984]: some of the protesters wore costumes, others came out with a coffin (referring to the dancing pallbearers meme); they also carried the material representations of protest symbols such as cockroach figures, sneakers, etc. (4) there were plenty of humorous slogans and chants at rallies, such as “are there drug addicts?” “are there prostitutes?” (5) many protesters also carried humorous protest posters that we analyze in this article. the massive popularity of humor during and in the aftermath of the protests is especially striking given that humor is a relatively recent phenomenon in belarusian political communication. the ruling classes of contemporary belarus have almost never used humor in the public sphere and do not consider it an important feature of the contemporary political establishment. quite the contrary, belarusian officials’ political communication style is based on strict discipline, the repression of creativity and the freedom of speech, and even often on humiliation. this puts the belarusian government and members of parliament in sharp contrast with the “new politics” and personalization strategies of their western european and north american colleagues [van aelst et al. 2011; selvaruiz and caro-castaño 2017; laineste et al. 2022]. meanwhile, the belarusian opposition had already sometimes employed humor before the 2020 elections. in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the satirical newspaper navinki made fun of lukashenko’s regime. (6) humor was also occasionally used in opposition political campaigns. for example, one of the opposition presidential candidates in the 2010 election, andrei sannikov, used the slogan “пора менять лысую humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 55 резину” [it’s time to change bald tires] for his electoral campaign, alluding to alexander lukashenko’s lack of hair. another ironic slogan was occasionally used by belarusian oppositional activists in the 2000s: “беларусь в европу, лукашенко в жопу” [belarus must be in europe, lukashenko must fuck off]. however, such attempts at humor were relatively rare and remained marginal in belarusian political discourse. the 2020 political crisis clearly stands out—not just in terms of the massive participation of people in protests, but also in the unprecedented popularity of protest humor. this has inspired the current study where we aim to respond to two research questions: what topics of protest humor shaped how it functioned as a prominent instrument of political activism and why did humor play such a pivotal role in the 2020 belarusian political protest. theoretical background as humor has social, cognitive, and emotional components [cf. martin 2007], we look at our research questions from a broader perspective than simply as emotional expressions. we also consider the social and cognitive functions of humor in the context of belarusian protests. we discuss why a considerable part of belarusian society that had previously been reserved in its public expression of emotion became suddenly very vocal in it and used their moral indignation and loss of fear for mass mobilization [nikolayenko 2022]. we also discuss how this vocality and its accompanying humor helped to establish an emotional community of protesters [vazianau 2023]. by looking at the use of humor, we gain insights into how belarusians underscored their belonging to certain social groups and how they used protest memes as hallmarks of humorous expression. understanding these issues lies not only within the boundaries of political communication, but also in the cultural background of contemporary belarusian society and its political folklore that remains a less studied area. (7) emotion in politics when studying political humor, it is necessary to consider the issue of emotion in politics. although humor is closely connected to cognition and intelligence, in many cultural environments, including the belarusian and russian-speaking ones, people often discuss the sense of humor. thus, the vernacular perspective on humor places it into the realm of feeling and emotions. moreover, humor, especially political humor, always evokes both positive and negative emotions [lee and kwak 2016]. therefore, political humor must be considered in relation to people's emotions. the belarusian political protests of 2020 were extremely emotional [vazianau 2023]. in the current study, we do not analyze the individual characteristics and emotional states of the people who participated in the protests; we limit ourselves exclusively to the social features humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 56 of humor and emotion. we analyze people’s emotional reactions to contemporary political circumstances [cf. marcus 2000: 221–250]. emotion in politics and its connection to political humor are understood as evaluations that arise because of emotional processes, regardless of previous or accompanying cognitive processes [marcus 2000]. these processes can influence not only emotional expression, but also thoughts and political behavior [marcus 2000: 223]—including the use of political humor. as marcus puts it: “[i]t is highly unlikely that any [political] target of consideration is devoid of emotional content or influence” [2000: 232]. emotions accelerate and amplify political protests [van stekelenburg and klandermans 2013]. while many emotions that tend to be associated with protest are negative, such as anger, fear, and shame (negatively valanced emotions), positive emotions also play a part in fueling and sustaining political protest: for example, the combination of anger and joy was instrumental for protests in rural australia [ransan-cooper et al. 2018], and anger and hope were combined by a peace movement in israel [halperin 2022]. these combinations of positive and negative emotions create so-called “moral batteries” that energize action and generate protest [jasper 2011]. the role of emotions in the political space, e.g., hate speech and stylistic reductions, irony, and memes in the public sphere, has long been the object of research of scholars belonging to the irrationalism movement [lebon 1913; sorokin 1925; edwards 1970]. scholars were interested in the emotionality of crowds and the suppression of basic human instincts during revolutionary movements. political scientists and sociologists have repeatedly raised questions about the role of emotions in political movements and revolutionary transformations [smelzer 1962; gurr 1970; feierabend et al. 1972; midlarsky 2011]. their starting point was the idea of deprivation, and they regarded political violence as a reaction to deprivation when there was a mismatch between expected and received benefits. here we should also recall the j-curve theory of the sociologist j. davies [1962], which was based on the hopes and expectations of people and the determination of the role of emotions in political conflicts. goldstone et al.’s [2022] studies on revolution recorded the emotions and feelings of people as an influential factor in political movements and conflicts and thus had a significant influence on studies of emotions in politics. emotions are very important for the creation, maintenance, and organization of collective political actions [goodwin et al. 2000; 2001; selbin 2010]. spontaneously arising collective emotions are shared by communities that, thanks to them, have the opportunity and desire to express their agreement or disagreement. according to ron eyerman [2007: 42-43], it is emotions that set the process in motion, triggering mobilization mechanisms. the well-known anthropologist sara ahmed notes the social nature of emotions and argues that collective emotionality also depends on how the government gives meaning and values “others” [(2004) 2014: 9]. collective emotionality also depends on the circulation of information and its emotional humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 57 coloring in social networks, being together during protests, mass communications through social media channels and mainstream media, etc. emotions can be considered a form of social presence [ahmed (2004) 2014: 10]. politics provides a fruitful ground for this, and humor becomes not only a matter of individual ability but also a social phenomenon. belarusian protest humor from the perspective of humor theories one of the most popular theories of humor—the relief theory—is also closely connected with the emotional side of vernacular expression. its proponents argue that using humor is a way to express ideas and thoughts that are difficult or even impossible to express in a serious manner and thus vent the pressure off our psyche [spencer (1911) 2009; freud (1905) 1963]. this theory can at least partly explain belarusian protest humor: in summer 2020, especially immediately before and after presidential elections, the tension in belarusian society reached its apogee as the government’s activities contradicted moral and legal norms [bedford 2021]. among other ways to respond to these atrocities, the psychologization of resistance to lukashenko’s regime was employed to help people cope with the tension caused by the absurdities, atrocities, and violence of the belarusian government [vazyanau 2023]. political humor became one of the means to release this tension in a creative and non-violent way. as mentioned earlier, humor had not been a typical element of political communication in belarus before 2020, so its prolific use during the 2020 protests was unconventional for the participants themselves and transgressed their emotional norms and cultural expectations. during the protest rallies, participants took photos of humorous posters, laughed at them loudly, pointed at them, and were surprised by them. they did not deny the posters’ relevance, but rather they embraced and welcomed them. this might be partly explained by another widespread humor theory—the incongruity theory, according to which humor stems from the discrepancies between our expectations and reality [attardo 2014]. however, not every incongruity provokes laughter; elliot oring [2003] introduced the concept of “appropriate incongruity” to show why some incongruities result in humor while others do not. in the case of belarusian protest humor, the humor creators and sharers acknowledged the gap between how the election process ideally should look and how it actually looked [cf. davies 2011: 273]. being aware of the broader political and social context of belarus, they also understood how different, and seemingly unrelated, elements of political life can be appropriately combined for humorous effect. humor not only has psychological but also social and cognitive functions during oppression and political protests. opinions on the role of jokes in political confrontations vary: while some researchers consider jokes as a form of protest that becomes more pertinent under more oppressive regimes [banc and dundes 1986: 14], others point out that the existence of jokes that ridicule political institutions does not mean that joke tellers and listeners protest against these humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 58 institutions but rather that participants use jokes as a form of entertainment [draitser 1989]. christie davies [2007: 300] argues that political “jokes are a thermometer not a thermostat; they can be used as an indication of what is happening in a society but they do not feed back into the social processes that generated them to any significant extent.” in other words, humor appears alongside serious political protests, not instead of it. approaching this issue from the other perspective, oring [2004] notes that jokes told under repressive regimes do not aim at confronting the power or changing the political system, but rather at creating a private space that was not penetrated by official propaganda, hierarchies, and economic conditions. similarly, alexei yurchak considers soviet political jokes one of the ways of “pretense misrecognition” [1997: 178]; according to him, the existence of these jokes shows that people understood that official propaganda was lying to them, but they pretended that they believed it and acknowledged that they could not fight against it. most of the scholarship on humor under oppressive regimes has focused on the use of humor in private [cf. yurchak 1997: 179]. in the case study analyzed in this article, however, protest humor became a part of the public sphere. even though much of it circulated in private oral and digital interactions, humorous protest posters were also visible on the streets, funny memes were published in news outlets, and humorous videos were made publicly available on popular social media websites such as facebook or youtube. the public humor of belarusian protest is in many ways like what sørensen [2013] label “humorous political stunts.” humorous political stunts are public, and they confront a dominant worldview and mostly aim at transforming the status quo. the butts of political stunts are usually those in power; stunts go from the grassroots level upwards and not vice versa. in her study of humor in serbian political movement “otpor,” sørensen outlines the key functions of humor as a non-violent resistance tool: “facilitating outreach and mobilization… facilitating a culture of resistance… [and] turning oppression upside down” [2008: 175]. based on their analysis of humor during the 2011 egyptian revolution, anagondahalli and khamis [2014: 12] add an enforcement function of humor as it was—alongside other means—aimed at bringing social change. moreover, humor in political protest movements may be used to expose the inconsistencies and incongruities of the ruling regime. this function was noted by takovski [2020: 504] in his discussion of humor in the macedonian colorful revolution. these functions could be also traced in the use of humor in belarusian political protests, as the subsequent analysis will illustrate. sørensen [2015] also discussed various challenges that activists face when they opt for the use of humor—from the risk of being misunderstood to the possibility of trivializing the issue with a non-serious approach to it. dumitrica further illustrates the ambiguous nature of protest humor by showing that it not only “subvert[s] dominant political discourses, signal[s] grassroots agency, help[s] amplify a collective message and build[s] collective identity” [2021: 13], but it also can reproduce and reinforce established hierarchies and conservative humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 59 norms. therefore, public protest humor should be analyzed in its complexity, and its multiple aspects should be contextualized against the background of the political, social, economic, and cultural affiliations of its creators and sharers. methods and data the data for this paper come primarily from humorous protest posters that are either in the authors’ personal collections (seventy-two photos of posters) or among the photos of protest posters that were published in lesha pearce’s [2021] book “ia vykhozhu” [“i’m coming out”] in the category of “humor” (101 photos of posters, two of them depict the same posters that authors have in their personal collections). the photos were taken at protests rallies in belarus between august and november 2020. the humor of the photos in our personal collections was assessed based on our deep knowledge of belarusian context and familiarity with the mechanisms of humor production [cf. dumitrica 2021: 6]. we analyzed the data using the qualitative methods of content (both visual and verbal) and context analysis. we categorized the posters based on the topics they reflected. we then grouped these topics into two broad categories: general issues and particular humorous memes. the former included posters that reflected the most prominent topics of belarusian protest, namely, electoral frauds, police brutality, (lack of) freedom, the persona of lukashenko, and the identity of protesters. the latter category consisted of posters that directly referred (visually, verbally, or both visually and verbally) to events during the protest. in cases of photos from personal collections, we arranged the posters diachronically to trace the dynamics of their use. while posters constituted the core of our data, in some cases we also analyzed other forms of humorous and non-humorous expressions (such as internet memes, jokes, protest slogans, etc.) to trace the intertextual references that abound in our data. general issues: frauds, freedom, police brutality, lukashenko’s persona, and protesters’ identity humorous posters’ topics often mirrored those of serious ones, and, generally, reflected protesters’ demands for free elections, democracy, lukshenko’s retirement, and punishment for those involved in police brutality against the protesters. the humor of these posters clearly demonstrated the stances of their creators and left no room for ambiguity in their interpretation. among the most popular humor mechanisms were wordplay, juxtapositions between image and text in the multimodal posters (or, in some cases, also between the text and the form of the placard, see fig. 1), and the recontextualization of folk and popular cultural references. humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 60 figure 1. the inscription on the straitjacket reads in russian “смирись ты уже” [calm down finally]. in russian the word for straitjacket (smiritel’naia rubashka) is related to the verb meaning “calm down” (smiris’). photograph from authors’ personal collection, 30 august 2020. among the folk references were well-known proverbs. for example, one humorous poster visually alluded to the belarusian militia and read, “сила есть, ума не надо” [once there is (physical) strength, intelligence is not needed]. an equivalent english proverbial expression is “strong like a bull, dumb like a stump.” there were also tongue-twisters. for example, a poster rephrased the russian tongue-twister “тридцать три корабля лавировали, лавировали, да не вылавировали” [thirty-three ships were tacking and tacking, but did not manage to tack], so that it became “стабилизировал, стабилизировал, да не выстабилизировал” [(lukashenko) was stabilizing, stabilizing, but not did not manage to stabilize]. the poster alluded to lukashenko’s constant claims that he has made belarus a “stable” country devoid of social, political, and economic upheavals that happen elsewhere in the world, and this stability rests on the relation between him and the people [maples 2014: 17]; however, the protests showed that the presumed “stability” of belarusian social and political development was not as absolute as lukashenko had hoped. another example of traditional folklore that was adapted to the context of political protests was a rhyming inscription on a poster in belarusian: “баба сеяла гарох і казала: ‘каб ты здох’” [granny was sowing peas and said: “i hope you die”]. this is a remake of a popular nursery rhyme that reads, “баба сеяла гарох і казала дзеду ‘ох!’” [granny was sowing peas and told grandpa: “oh!”]; it has been used in children’s humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 61 play on water to accompany rhythmic movements such as splashing water or diving in and out of it. while such short forms of traditional folklore were the easiest to appropriate on humorous posters, some of the posters also allude to less formulaic genres of folklore, for example, folk beliefs. figure 2 shows a man who looks as if he is sitting on a santa claus, and the poster in his hands evokes the belief that only those children who behave well get presents from santa claus (or dzed moroz [grandfather frost], as he is more commonly known in belarus). figure 2. poster in russian: “саша, ты себя плохо вёл в этом году” [sasha (lukashenko]), you’ve misbehaved this year]. photograph from authors’ personal collection, 30 august 2020. humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 62 obscene and sexual references were also sometimes used to ridicule lukashenko and/or his supporters. similarly to what dumitrica [2021] described in her analysis of romanian protest posters, belarusian posters that employed sexual references reinforced patriarchal values, symbolically depriving the belarusian regime of its masculinity (see fig. 3). given that lukashenko positions himself as belarus’s father and embraces the discourse of his hegemonic masculinity [kascian and denisenko 2021: 126], such ridicule appropriately challenges this image and hints at its flaws. figure 3. the poster is held by a young girl, and the inscription (in russian) reads: “у моего парня дубинка больше” [my boyfriend has a bigger baton] and includes a picture of a police baton that became one of the symbols of police brutality against protesters in 2020 [pearce 2021: 164]. while humorous posters reflected protesters’ serious demands, the very use of humor added new shades of meanings to these demands. whereas one of the aims of the 2020 belarusian protest was to make lukashenko step back from power, humorous posters often alluded not just to his retirement, but also to his death as a desirable outcome. he was also compared to other unpleasant human and non-human entities: other authoritarian leaders, cockroaches, covid-19, etc. humorous poster creators also alluded to lukashenko’s flawed mental health and excessive alcohol consumption. when the falsified outcome of the presidential elections was mentioned, protesters sometimes openly accused the regime of electoral frauds, but in other cases approached the issue more subtly and ironically suggested that the results might be unintentionally wrong (see fig. 4). humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 63 figure 4. the inscription in russian reads “женщина, у вас калькулятор сломался” [lady, your calculator is broken] and obviously addresses lidia yermoshina, the head of the central election commission of belarus who is also depicted on the right with buttons instead of her eyes and “80%” instead of her mouth. this is a reference to the percentage of voters, that, according to yermoshina, voted for lukashenko. photograph from authors’ personal collection, 16 august 2020. finally, a smaller but visible group of humorous posters was directed at the protesters themselves. mostly, such humor revolved around the incongruity of particular people, or groups of people, who were engaging in political protests. one of the photos in “ia vykhozhu” book, for example, depicts an old lady holding a poster in russian: “всё так плохо, что вышли даже глухонемые бабушки” [everything is so bad that even deaf-mute grannies came out (to protest)] [pearce 2021: 176]; similarly, another portrays a girl of color with a poster in russian: “всё настолько плохо, что вышли даже чернокожие” [everything is so bad that even black people came out (to protest)] [pearce 2021: 175]. a poster in the authors’ personal collection reads in belarusian, “ідзі ты ўжо! праз цябе ў хаце месяц падлога нямытая” [go away finally! the floor in the house has not been washed for a month because of you]. the photo was taken on 6 september 2020, almost a month after the protests started. another poster that found its way both to the “ia vykhozhu” book and our personal collection features a “coat of arms” of armchair warriors (see fig. 5). humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 64 figure 5. the coat of arms reads in russian: “диванные войска. группа медленного реагирования” [armchair warriors. slow reaction force]. the slogan next to it reads “даже мы с вами!” [even we are with you!]. photograph from authors’ personal collection, 23 august 2020. by calling themselves “unconventional” protesters, the creators of these humorous posters not only engaged in self-irony, but they also showed that protests had become so widespread that even groups of people that had traditionally been on the margins of social and political life in belarus (e.g., elderly people or people belonging to other ethnic or racial groups) or had just been too passive to engage with politics (preferring to be “armchair warriors” and stay at home minding their own business) had suddenly become active participants in the protest activities. the atypical amplitude of protest in belarus thus became a topic of humor in and of itself. humorous memes alongside more general topics that were central to belarusian protests, some humorous posters also referenced more specific events and instances that could be labeled as memes due to their quick and broad spread across belarusian society. many such memes stemmed from the incongruous words or deeds of lukashenko and his supporters [cf. takovski 2020]. for example, at the end of a protest rally that took place on 23 august 2020 in minsk, lukashenko flew in his helicopter over the city and observed the protesters—most of whom had already left by then—from above, making comments such as “blizhe, blizhe” (“closer, closer”) (addressing the pilot) and “как крысы разбежались” [(the protesters) ran away like rats] [reform news 2020]. as the video of lukashenko in the helicopter was posted online, it immediately became the target of ridicule in social media, and during the next protest rallies on 30 august 2020 and 6 september 2020 some of the humorous posters alluded to this helicopter ride. not only the posters themselves, but also humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 65 protestors’ outfits creatively engaged with lukashenko’s comments, exaggerating their absurdity in a humorous way (see fig. 6). figure 6. the poster written as if on behalf of the rats reads in russian: “саша, нам некуда бежать, я/мы у себя дома!!!” [sasha, we have nowhere to run! i/we are at home.] photograph from authors’ personal collection, 6 september 2020. another instance that stimulated viral humorous reactions was the meeting between lukashenko and russian prime minister mikhail mishustin on 3 september 2020, when lukashenko claimed that his security agency had taped a conversation between berlin and warsaw where the agents from these countries allegedly denied that russian oppositional politician alexei navalny was poisoned. the day following the meeting, lukashenko’s press service posted an audio clip where two people’s voices (referring to each other as “mike” and “nick”), dubbed into russian, discuss not only navalny but also their failure in dealing with lukashenko who turned out to be “a hard nut to crack” [euvsdisinfo humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 66 2020]. (8) both the technical aspects of the audio clip and its content made it clear that it was fabricated, and the dialogue between “agents” became yet another reason to ridicule lukashenko (see fig. 7). figure 7. the poster reads in both polish and russia: “o, kurwa, нас спалили! перезвони на viber” [oh shit, we are revealed! call me back on viber] [pearce 2021: 186]. in both cases described above as well as in other similar instances, humorous reactions underscored the contrast between reality as it was and lukashenko’s attempts to see—and impose on the others—a distorted version of it. humor was employed not only to point out the gap between reality and its representations but also to do it in a playful and enjoyable manner, representing the protesters as more sound-minded and reasonable human beings than lukashenko—even though some of them had to dress up as rats to make this point. temporal and spatial aspects of belarusian protest humor even though it is impossible to make exact calculations, the proportion of data in our personal collections, as well as the backgrounds of the “ia vykhozhu” volume’s photos, in which people are mostly dressed in summer clothes, indicate that the temporal distribution of humorous posters was uneven. many humorous posters and costumes appeared at protest rallies during the first few months of large-scale protests, but many fewer were documented during late autumn and winter. one possible interpretation lies in the fact that the danger of being arrested increased, repressions intensified. to expand mcgraw et al.’s [2014] theory, the psychological distance from the tragic events of 9-11 august 2020 increased to humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 67 allow for humorous reactions. but as the situation became threatening again, the psychological distance decreased, and thus less humor was involved. moreover, protesters had to become more cautious as it became increasingly difficult to get to protest rallies’ meeting points without being detained, and bringing posters could have increased the danger because they helped the police to identify protesters more easily. as mentioned earlier, the humor of the belarusian protests was not limited to the posters that people carried during rallies. much of it was also created and disseminated in the digital realm. internet humor and posters were not separate from one another; they influenced each other’s form and content [cf. blank 2013]. belarusian independent media often showcased protest posters—including humorous ones [e.g., nashaniva 2020], and the photos of protest posters circulated widely on social media after each rally. thus, the posters moved from the faceto-face to digital realm and could be seen by those who were not physically present at the protests. there was also a drift of humor in the opposite direction, from digital media to the face-to-face settings of protests. some protest posters either implicitly referenced popular internet memes or even quoted them directly. for example, in figure 8 a protester is holding a poster that depicts a popular internet meme that had been spreading across ukraine, russia, and belarus for more than a decade. the formula of this meme—a grandmother finds out that her grandson did something inappropriate and thus deprives him of his inheritance—is generally used in political contexts and most likely originates from ukraine [ratsybarsʹka 2012]. in 2020, the meme spread both online and in the form of leaflets and posters in belarus. figure 8. a protester holding a poster that reads: “узнала, что внук омоновец. переписала хату на кота!!!” [i found out that my grandson is a special police officer. i signed the house over to a cat] [pearce 2021: 169]. (9) humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 68 this meme-based poster reflected the demographics of belarusian protest: the participants of protest rallies were mostly young and middle-aged urban dwellers who were active internet users [titarenko 2022]. therefore, it was natural that they, on the one hand, drew upon familiar digital popular cultural references while making their protest posters, and, on the other hand, transformed many of the protest rallies events and slogans into humorous internet memes, such as lukashenko’s helicopter flight or the “nick and mike conversation” described above. it also is emblematic of the impact of social media on the 2020 belarusian protests. social media was employed to coordinate protest activities and share news and reflections on the protests [bush 2020]—including the humorous ones. moreover, it is a part of a more general trend of using digital/technological metaphors in contemporary face-to-face protests [e.g., anagondahalli and khamis 2014: 11]. conclusion political upheavals trigger strong emotions. the 2020 belarusian presidential elections and subsequent protests were no exception. for the first time in many years, many belarusians felt the possibility of change, participated actively in the elections, and felt new emotions that inspired and united them. in these conditions, evident falsifications during the elections, as well as an unexpected level of police brutality against peaceful protesters, shocked many people [nikolayenko 2022]. undoubtedly, numerous social and mass media outlets contributed to this by broadcasting video and photo coverage of these events. during the 2020 belarusian political protests, many participants got the opportunity to publicly, openly, and creatively express political emotions for the first time in their lives, including using unprecedented humor in the public sphere, in contrast to a much more common practice of using humor in private settings [fiadotava 2021]. one of the most significant and attractive aspects of using protest humor was using it as an opportunity to express one’s political views in a creative way as opposed to the more simplified and straightforward rhetorical tools of an authoritarian system. the use of humor in protest posters both emphasizes protesters’ messages and makes them more subtle. the reliance on incongruities helps humorous posters, on the one hand, to trigger emotions and thus attract attention, but on the other hand, to interpret these incongruities as appropriate and understandable within their protest agendas. using humor during protest rallies also mirrored many patterns of communication on social media, as the latter is frequently punctuated by humor. political humor became one of the ways to release emotions and show the absurdity and inappropriateness of lukashenko and his regime. many of the protest posters in particular targeted lukashenko, thus adding to the personification of the belarusian authoritarian regime. posters also reflected broader issues in belarusian protests, such as election fraud and police brutality, humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 69 in creative ways. the mechanisms, styles, and forms of humor were diverse: from verbal puns to visual juxtapositions, from subtle irony to openly aggressive ridicule, and from internet meme-like posters to carnivalesque costumes that were essential to delivering a humorous protest message. the community of the creators and the audiences of protest humor was also a crucial aspect that affected posters’ contents, forms, and popularity. many protestors belonged to the so-called creative class [florida 2012], and thus they used creative forms that aligned well with their self-identification. in line with sørensen’s [2008] observations outlined above, humor also contributed to protesters’ solidarity. the use of humor in protest posters could be connected to the increasing globalization and digitalization of belarusian society that allowed belarusian protesters to follow and partly mimic the humor of other political movements and protests, some of which happened close to belarus, for example protests in poland [brzozowska and chłopicki 2024]. the ability to understand and create subtle and clever humor became an important aspect of belonging to the protest community in belarus. with the rise of police brutality and repressions against protestors, humor became a tool to demarcate a clear boundary between a violent and reliant-on-physical-power “them” and a creative, intelligent, and peaceful “us” [cf. davies’s 2011]. therefore, protest humor not only helped belarusians cope with their anger and fear, but it also provided an outlet for their creativity and helped to create and maintain group boundaries [meyer 2000]. these multiple functions of humor that appealed to protesters emotionally, cognitively, and socially conditioned the broad spread of humor in the 2020 belarusian protests. however, the use of humor during political protests does not only bring positive effects, as described above. the playful and ambiguous nature of humor also contributes to the trivialization of messages that are expressed in humorous forms [negrea-busuioc et al. 2024]. the humor of protest communications could make it seem less persuasive and more focused on entertainment than on addressing serious issues in the political agenda. because humor can facilitate the reduction of uncertainty [graham 1995], its use in belarusian and other protest movements can also be a way to cope with the uncertainty of political crisis without engaging it in more serious and practical ways for resolution. in belarusian protest movements, humor tended to be a handy tool, as it fit into the protesters’ social identity and helped them to underscore contrasts between their creativity and the brutality of lukashenko’s regime; nevertheless, on a more general level humor always plays various roles in political movements, and the appropriateness and effectiveness of its use is always context dependent. humor of the belarusian 2020–2021 protests folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 70 notes 1 currently the newspaper is called sb—belarus’ segodnia [sb—belarus today], but it is still colloquially called sovetskaia belorussiia. 2 the name refers to the colors of belarus’ official flag, which has become one of the most notable symbols of state propaganda since the beginning of the protests. 3 shoushenk is a fictional character in the show that alludes to lukashenko. 4 “cockroach” was one of the symbols sergei tikhanovsky used to refer to lukashenko. sneakers, flippers, and other footwear were also actively employed by tikhanovsky and some of the other candidates as an allusion to killing cockroaches. 5 these chants refer to lukashenko labelling protesters as prostitutes and drug addicts. protesters humorously reappropriated these labels [laineste and fiadotava 2024]. 6 the title of the newspaper is both a non-standard, diminutive form of the word “naviny” (“news” in belarusian) and a colloquial name for a psychiatric hospital in minsk, which is in the district of the same name. the archival copy of the newspaper’s website is available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20060712220222/http://www.navinki.net/porta l/. 7 for exceptions, see [astapova 2015, 2017, 2021; laineste et al. 2022; laineste and fiadotava 2024]. 8 “a hard nut to crack” (in russian, “krepkii oreshek”) is also the russian translation of the die hard film title; the reference was probably meant to highlight lukashenko’s toughness and masculinity. 9 special police forces (amap in belarusian, omon in russian) have been particularly brutal in suppressing protests. acknowledgements this research was supported by estonian ministry of education and research grant ekkd 126, “source documents in the cultural process: estonian materials in the collections and databases of the estonian literary museum ii,” and 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(2) when asked about other versions of the folk tale, she did not know of them. even in the furthest reaches of kazakh geography, khaydarov’s tale had seemingly become canon. folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 44 in my conversation with gali, i brought up the differences between the original folk tale and khaydarov’s film, but gali shook his head in dismissal. he told me, “[je story] was khaydarov’s. it was kazakh” [zawlacki 2019]. i first encountered the film during my last day of language class at nazarbayev university, the preeminent university in what was then astana, kazakhstan. while i sat for the short ten minutes, my classmates and i celebrated a completed summer with the world of swallow by amen khaydarov. je film retold the traditional kazakh folk tale of the same name. it began with a mother and child living in an idyllic springtime pasture, and then moved into snowcovered mountains where an aging three-headed dragon thirsted for rejuvenation. after consulting a fox shaman and ordering a mosquito to obtain life-giving blood, the dragon king waned as he waited for the return of the insect. once the mosquito finally extracted the blood of the innocent kazakh child, his task was complete, and he returned to the dragon’s lair. fortunately, the swallow intercepted the mosquito, conquered the dragon, and saved the mother and child. in this essay, i uncover how a uniquely kazakh pastoral nationalist vision, an ideation that entwines the foundation of the nation of kazakhstan with its nomadic history, was represented through the kazakh language version of swallow. by deconstructing cultural elements and motifs within the film, i reveal the many variables that became kazakh during a period when khrushchev’s jaw had opened the door for a reexamination of the soviet project and past crimes. i demonstrate that the concept of “kazakh” was created in a specific context for certain reasons. what at first appeared to the audience as aboriginally kazakh, as a particular vision of national identity, was in fact a culmination of relatively arbitrary elements, past and present, found across contemporary national boundaries in central asia and beyond. i argue there are elements of the film deeply resonant with kazakh viewers at its inception and in contemporary discourse, despite their not being originally kazakh. i will perform a close reading of the film and, in the spirit of eric hobsbawm [1992], deconstruct “traditional” kazakh elements. because of the film’s interwoven elements of folkloristics, art history, history, and ethnomusicology, this essay grounds itself in the shot by shot reading of the film. by taking an “animated look,” i plan to apply approaches from these different disciplines to uncover the film’s constructed nature as a defining moment in kazakh national identity. armed with this interdisciplinary approach, i aim to shed light on aspects of the film by looking at etymological roots, pre-national history, the massive losses during soviet occupation, and other historical and cultural moments. understanding the context of these synthesized kazakh components will became foundational in interrogating the film as an allegory for kazakhness. following the close reading and deconstruction of the film, i will apply the theoretical approach of the ethnomusicologist jomas turino to analyze the constructed nature of national identity. my analysis will be supported using concepts i borrow from benedict anderson, the prominent theorist on nationalism, the psychoanalytic folklorist geza roheim, literary theorist linda hutcheon, the folklorists roman jakobson and petr bogatyrev, the filmic !e allegorical aĭdaḣar folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 45 folklorist juwen zhang, and the philosophers gilles deleuze and felix guattari. ultimately, we will return to the film and see it as a construction of a specific nationalist narrative, one that holds surprising allegorical elements of loss through the inclusion of the aĭdaḣar, thus exposing unseen aspects of the broader nationalist vision. jis essay hopes to illuminate how seemingly authentic portrayals of national identity are displayed in popular culture and operates under the assumption that constructed artistic representations can reveal the complexity of nationalist narratives. domestic and international context trained in soviet animation in moscow, amen khaydarov (aмен хайдаров or əмен қайдар) (3) worked mainly in set and background design at kazakhfilm before directing his own animation film [nugerbek, nauryzbekova, mokysheva 2005: 160-163]. given the inexperienced crew he worked with, his naïveté as a director, and the significant alterations he employed in the narrative, it is a marvel that why the swallow’s tail is forked was a universally acclaimed success. despite the film’s international obscurity today, it received two significant accolades: a prize at the 1968 all-union film festival and the bronze medal at the 1974 new york animation festival [torsynbaiuly 2012]. many early 2010s newspaper articles on kazakh animation archived at the national library in almaty, kazakhstan, concur with the awards of the past. among critics, there is consensus around its position as the best kazakh animation film [ibragimova, 2010: 26-29; nugerbekov 1980: 134-138; baimyrzaeva and khorabai, 2014: 8-13]. in a series of interviews with contemporary animators written by t. jurgenov of aĭqyn magazine, the film is never mentioned explicitly, but a single still looms over the text like a god, a lone frame reminding the reader of its status [2015: 3]. what started as a small state-funded project to create a highquality animation film became—in the present day—mythic in its reception and reputation. jis film has rooted kazakh animation tradition from the beginning. in art historical discourse, khaydarov fits within an animation movement referred to as the period of “plasticity” by russian scholars [nugerbek, nauryzbekova, mokysheva 2005: 162]. (4) laura pontieri, a scholar of soviet animation of the 1960s, argues that the time was not only an instant when authorities held less power than before [2012: 75], but also a moment in which animation directors were able to enact a “pure manifestation of the artist’s subjective vision” [2012: 2]. jis movement sits in stark contrast to a previous era where censors worked side by side with directors, and instead allowed for the artist to exert personal sensibilities. khaydarov was one of the early kazakh filmmakers who became what is referred to as an auteur in film scholarship, a concept that had not existed in russian cinema for decades. (5) by being freed from the previous constraints of film censors, khaydarov was able to depict kazakh culture in a novel way. not only has swallow been considered the quintessential example of kazakh animation by critics and audiences alike, its position has also solidified within discussions of broader folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 46 kazakh cultural identity and national identity. to fully understand the nuances of the film, however, one must first look at the film’s many intersecting narratives and its constructed nature. je intricacies of this important cultural product have never been fully examined; this essay will take an “animated look” to scratch the surface of a folk tale through the lens of a children’s animation film. i. why the swallow’s tail is forked imagined, commemorated, and dreamt realities je film opens with a shot that quickly zooms into the mother and child. it begins with whimsical dreamlike music, common in fairy tale film introductions, and positions the viewer as if they were dropping into a dream from the clouds above. we can read the opening of the film as displaying the intimate relationship between folk tale and dream as posited by the first psychoanalytical folklorist, geza roheim. roheim’s persistent thesis argues that all folklore originates from dreams [roheim and dundes 1992: xvii]. while the viewer is lulled into a dreamlike state by the music and mother’s rocking of the traditional cradle board, the viewer is comforted by this pastoral past. roheim’s proposed relationship between dream and folk tale is memorable because it suggests the dreamlike nature of identity formation. remembering the oft cited benedict anderson, communities are imagined as a result of various factors: print media, mapping, and censuses, to name a few [2006]. (6) considering the difference between the imagined and the remembered, bruce privratsky offers this in regards to soviet collective memory, “[commemoration] is a processing mechanism by means of which people reach back into their past, idealizing and criticizing it, and thus articulate a future for themselves” [2015: 19]. (7) in my animated look of swallow, i suggest that if communities can be actively imagined, as anderson defines it, and commemorated, in privratsky’s sense, then it follows: they can be collectively dreamt, or day-dreamt, into existence. after the experience of a vivid dream, one often idealizes selected aspects and entirely forgets or misremembers others. if this story could be treated as a dream of kazakh collective identity, what might each element and motif tell us about a kazakh reality? only as a completely lucid participant can we notice seeming trivialities that might be forgotten upon wakefulness. !e allegorical aĭdaḣar folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 47 image 1: ae mother tending to her child surrounded by traditional kazakh items. [why the swallow’s tail is forked, 1967] je mother wears a kimeshek, a traditional head scarf, tending to her child in a traditional central asian cradle board, besīk, on top of a traditional felt woven rug, tekemet [image 1]. immediately, the audience is confronted with objects representative not only of the kazakh cultural past, but of the past that had, in theory, been left behind, or intentionally erased. in the 1960s, following khrushchev’s ousting and the political jaw, the people of the soviet union compared their lifestyles to those of europe and the united states through television, music, and film, and developed different tastes in fashion as a result [kozlov and gilburd 2013: 402-435]. je kimeshek would have been regarded as old-fashioned, dated, islamic, parochial, and indicative of a pre-soviet time period. je besīk would have existed in villages and some city dwellers’ homes, but is a tradition closely tied to rural, provincial, village life [zawlacki and derrick 2020]. je tekemet is one of many representations of kazakh felt art traditions, but its place in the film represents the cultural standing of traditional felt rugs, carpets, and tapestries. in central asian art, vladimir lukonin and anatoli ivanov note [2013: 182] that following the forced sedentarism of nomadic groups, “many utilitarian objects of the past became souvenirs.” je inclusion of these items in the film reaffirm their integral and purposive position within the pastoralist tradition. folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 48 a few seconds later, the shot moves to the mother helping a fallen swallow fledgling. she picks up the fledgling and returns it to the nest in a gesture of harmony between humans and animals [image 2]. (8) jis seemingly basic motion of kindness conveys cosmological significance within the kazakh cultural milieu. image 2: ae mother returns the swallow fledgling to its nest. [why the swallow’s tail is forked, 1967] cosmological context while competing histories of religion exist in contemporary kazakhstan, scholars such as jierry zarcone and angela hobart have pointed out [2013: xxii] in shamanism and islam: sufism, healing rituals and spirits in the muslim world, that “[kazakhs] remained firmly respectful of their animist and shamanic past and had a veneer of muslim culture only.” (9) because of the nomadic nature of those living on the steppe, the cultural crossroads that was central asia, and the deeply ingrained animist/shamanist indigenous faith, islam never fully took hold as a substantive religion. islam was introduced to pre-kazakh nomadic tribes in the 9th and 10th centuries along what is now called the great silk road, but was unable to establish roots because of the constant wanderings of the nomadic people. islam conflicted with the indigenous practice of tengrism, an allencompassing cosmology that included elements of shamanism, animism, mono and polytheism, and ancestor worship that was widespread in a broad geography !e allegorical aĭdaḣar folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 49 we now call central asia [basilov 1989: 59]. jis is not to say islam was inherently contradictory for nomads of the steppe, but rather that it was difficult to gain traction among those who already had a deeply rooted belief system and who were unable to accommodate the five pillars of islam (10) into their lives [zawlacki 2019; geraci and khodarkovsky: 2001; zarcone and hobart: 2013]. it is difficult to find vestiges of tengrism in contemporary central asian society. jis leaves the proposed tripartite model of shamanism open to critique because of this erased past. ronald hutton, in shamans: siberian spirituality and the western imagination, argues [2001] the three-world model is an oversimplification of complex cosmologies, it is still the most prominent understanding of tengrism. je cosmological worldview of tengrism consisted of three parts: a heavenly world, a subterranean world, and the human occupied middle world. humans act as the bridge between the three worlds, with shamans given the specific task of maintaining this balance through rituals and musical performances. tengrism is also hierarchical in the sense that not all living things occupy the same world. je heavenly world is ostensibly the most correct version of the middle world, containing sacred animals, such as swallows, swans, horses and animals specific to a given region [zawlacki 2019]. je middle world consists of all animals with no special distinction given to humans. jus, when reading swallow, it is important to remember the cosmological distinction between the human and the bird. jis explanation contextualizes the act of the mother as she aids a sacred animal from the middle world. she is in a position to provide assistance and does so, helping the swallow chick back into the nest, and into the upper world of the sacred birds. je subterranean world, on the other hand, consists of human-like creatures as well as animals such as snakes and insects. creatures featured in the film—such as the mosquito—represent the lower world that is potentially cosmologically dangerous to the middle world and its inhabitants. je cosmological connection with nature that defined nomads of all kinds had been reimagined in the brutal years of collectivization and was ultimately a thing of the past [cameron 2018: 91]. harmony still existed among humans and animals, in the sense of rural villages with large plots of land for animals to graze, but the spiritual connection and nomadic lifestyle was forever changed in the wake of forced collectivization in the late 1920s and early 1930s. je swallow in kazakh culture as noted in the preface of giuseppe pitre’s ae swallow book [2016: 5], “because of her sociable habits and her friendly disposition, the swallow from earliest times has been observed and beloved by all the peoples of the world.” kazakh culture is no exception. je swallow assumes particular significance in the film and folk tale as an animal that not only occupied the heavenly plane of existence in tengrist cosmology, but held symbolism in multiple kazakh cultural traditions, practices, and legends. folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 50 one of these cultural practices is tūsaukeser, the kazakh practice of celebrating a toddler’s first step. je ceremony symbolizes the initial steps in life by cutting a black and white rope binding the toddler’s legs. besides the obvious umbilical reference embedded in the ceremony, the coloration, mirroring the swallow, represents the harmony of good and evil [nysanbaev 1998]. by cutting the rope, the toddler is imbued with the wisdom of being able to distinguish good and evil in his or her walk through life. similarly, the swallow’s coloration is connected with the dichotomy of good and evil, as the swallow often possesses the wisdom to guide between them in folk tale iterations. je swallow is key to kazakh self-perception as it exists in kazakh practices, tengrism, the nomadic lifestyle, and kazakh history. (11) in the long pan across the hillside, a variety of subjects are introduced in the shot. (12) je first two objects in the opening credits scene are the traditional mudbrick house and the nomadic u̇ĭ. in magnetic mountain: stalinism as a civilization, steven kotkin [1997: 169] investigates the history of the construction of the soviet mining town magnitogorsk. during the development of the planned city, administrators were constantly plagued by the mudbrick houses that offered workers relief from the low-quality temporary tents provided by the state. in the eyes of the administrators, the style represented the so-called backwardness of the peasantry and the many non-russian soviet citizens working there. khaydarov’s inclusion of mudbrick houses and u̇ĭs is therefore indicative of the pre-soviet past. while both buildings in the film are standard representations of historical domiciles, they also represent the reported backwardness soviet administrators criminalized and constantly tried to eradicate in their social and cultural policies. as the shot pans to the right, we see two horses grazing on the hills and a balbal, (13) before two more structures come into view [image 3]. both have the islamic crescent moon above rounded domes, but are purposefully opaque in light of the official soviet position on religion. je larger structures with square-like perimeters seem to indicate mosques, while a few stand-alone structures may be grave sites, tombs, or turbe, a tomb that is the site of a pilgrimage. je light coloration of the bricks, indicative of weathered mudbrick buildings in general, is emblematic of both structures. however, the ambiguity of the structures is less important than the obvious islamic iconography in the crescent moon. jis iconography suggests the inseparability of islamic and kazakh identities in the pastoralist past. given the relatively recent history of kazakh islamicization and deep tengrist ties, this portrayal of islamic sites suggests an ancient relationship between kazakhs and islam, and yet it was not until the 1860s that mullahs, schools, and mosques appeared on the southern edge of what is now kazakhstan [geraci and khodarkovsky 2001: 280]. jus khaydarov, intentionally or not, creates a reimagined vision of the pastoral kazakh past as islamic. while the islamic structures are not purely anachronisms, this image reduces a complicated past of religious variety and replaces it with a unified religious and cosmological vision. je representation of islamic cultural artifacts in the film illustrates one of the many elements of kazakh identity historicized as a part of the pastoral !e allegorical aĭdaḣar folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 51 nationalist identity in khaydarov’s retelling. as we have seen, these various aspects all function to establish the “kazakhness” (14) of the folk tale, despite the tale itself having been created long before the notion of “kazakh” existed (see below for discussion). image 3: ae shot pans across vague islamic structures in the countryside. [why the swallow’s tail is forked, 1967] a significant element of the film not yet mentioned is the critical role of sound. in order to position the western orchestral and traditional kazakh music of the film, we must first begin with the verbal aspect of sound in the film. je entirety of the kazakh language narration in the film rhymes, which roots it in a long lineage of central asian, specifically islamic, rhythmic modal poetry found in the kyrgyz epic of manas or the works of kazakh poet abai khunanbayulu, to name two examples of this rich tradition. je lilt of the narrator’s voice entices the viewer by elongating kazakh words and phrases and placing the vowel stress in unusual parts of the word for the sake of rhyming or emphasis. jis aspect of narration calls to a pedigree of islamic poetry and legitimizes the folk tale as well. je choice to rhyme the narration was conscious on the part of khaydarov, because it brings in an additional element of tradition into the film. je opening shot of the film carries a fairy tale musical melody as the audience begins to fall into a dream. it feels familiar, and would have even to the inexperienced film viewer of the time, in that it creates a sense of wonder and folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 52 peace, like a tale itself. in addition to the objects seen while panning across the countryside, the viewer hears an altogether different type of music, that of the kazakh ku̇ĭ. je kazakh ku̇ĭ je kazakh ku̇ĭ is a musical tradition defined by its wordless instrumental narrative. (15) generally, a ku̇ĭshī [күйші], performer of ku̇ĭs, begins the musical performance by telling a short history and providing context for the ku̇ĭ he or she is about to play. in a traditional, communal, and live music-making context, after the short, spoken portion of the performance, the musician would begin to play the dombyra, a two-stringed lute instrument, or qobyz, a traditional horsehair twostring instrument. (16) as the ku̇ĭshī would play, the ku̇ĭ would imitate aspects of a narrative, sometimes described beforehand, sometimes hinted at in the title of the ku̇ĭ, but always mimetic. strumming and plucking hand motions often revealed narrative elements. as jeodore craig levin and valentina süzükei [2006: 133] have noted in the instrumentation of the tuva people, ku̇ĭs relating to birds, for example, include hand motions that indicate the flapping of wings or splashes of lake landings. jese performative qualities could be parts of interpretative sonic narratives that mark the ku̇ĭ as a unique musical practice. je ku̇ĭ that plays during the introduction credits of swallow is aqqu, white swan, another sacred bird in tengrist cosmology, performed by nurgisa tlendiev. tlendiev was the writer of the score for swallow as well as for numerous other films, both animated and live action, at kazakhfilm film studio for over twenty years. (17) tlendiev’s aqqu follows a lineage of ku̇ĭs titled the same, all telling a similar narrative, with similar instrumentation. ku̇ĭs never exist in a vacuum; they are always a part of the lineage of previously performed ku̇ĭs [levin, daukeeva and kȯchu̇mkulova 2016: 279]. an explanation of aqqu’s narrative can best be displayed in a traditional qobyz performance by raushan orozbaeva [2014]. je kazakh qobyz was uniquely associated with shamans in pre-soviet times because of the shaman’s healing ability while replicating the sounds of animals [levin, daukeeva and kȯchu̇mkulova 2016: 331-337]. with this fact in mind, we can identify the mimetic quality of orozbaeva’s performance. je opening of the ku̇ĭ mimics the sounds of a swan’s call with surprising accuracy. as the ku̇ĭ progresses, sounds of wings flapping and swan calls echo throughout. je single plucks of the horsehair string represent the missed arrow shots from a hunter in the bushes. as the swan rises from the pond, dodging the interspersed plucks, the ku̇ĭ softens in volume. je plot builds in tension until just as the listener thinks the ku̇ĭ is over and the swan has escaped, a final pluck indicates the true shot of the hunter’s arrow. je story of the swallow is told through a tradition that cannot be attributed to a singular author. historically, ku̇ĭ performances would end with the performer saying, “deĭdī” or “dombyra deĭdī” meaning, “it was said” or “the dombra said.” jis phrase shows the intersecting, interrelated position of instrument and performer. jey both have agency, yet share personhood. je performer is merely !e allegorical aĭdaḣar folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 53 a conduit necessary for the instrument to speak; the dombyra and qobyz act as agents in telling stories in a separate non-linguistic musical language. (18) kazakhs, and the many other central asian ethnic groups, understand instrumental language through a strong lineage of wordless narrative traditions [levin, daukeeva and kȯchu̇mkulova 2016: 278]. tlendiev takes aspects of this traditional ku̇ĭ and molds it by varying the composition. in tlendiev’s performance of aqqu, we follow the flight pattern of the bird through the rhythmic picking and strumming in the ku̇ĭ, recalling for the listener the flapping of birds’ wings. as tension rises, tlendiev’s strumming doubles in quickness and flutters between notes in a sonic struggle representing the quickened pace of the wing flaps. je notes rise and fall in tension before finally returning to the normal flying rhythm of the swallow. similar to the individual stylistic differences in recitations of oral epics in central asia, as well as in eastern europe, the narrative of the ku̇ĭ is adapted in every telling [lord 1960]. tlendiev maintains motifs from more traditional versions of the ku̇ĭ, but contributes distinct differences that add dramatic tension and elements specific to the plot of swallow. after the opening credits, the next scene opens with kazakh language voiceover narration as the camera zooms into the clouds between two snow-capped mountain ridges revealing a door carved in the side of a rock. behind the large doors lies a black three-headed dragon with three minions to the left of the shot. je narrator speaks of a dragon king who had lived in the mountains for a long time and was now dying. je three fantastical creatures then carry the heads of the dragon to the open windows in what becomes one of the most compelling feats of artistic direction in the film. as the dragon’s heads hang outside the rock wall windows, a yellow outlined ghost of a thinner, more vicious dragon bursts forth [image 4]. je statement most clearly made by these actions is that nothing escaped the wrath of the dragon king in his prime. jrees resonate throughout the film as the narrator recounts the savagery of the aĭdaḣar’s rule while the ghost dragon engulfs animals of air, land, and sea: ducks, deer, and fish. all creatures were subject to the terror of the dragon king: creatures of the upper, middle, and lower realms of the tengrist cosmology. khaydarov’s illustration of the wrathful dragon is so convincing one might assume the dragon’s aboriginal place in all tellings of the folk tale. surprisingly, khaydarov’s aĭdaḣar stands in stark contrast with previous versions. baurjan momusholu’s account baurjan momusholu’s well known kazakh novel native home [1918/2003: 29-31] includes an account of this folk tale spoken by a grandmother to a child caught teasing a swallow. (19) je story is told as a way to teach the child to respect animals. i will provide a brief summary of this episode in momusholu’s novel for comparison. folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 54 image 4: ae younger aĭdaḣar of the past bursts forth from the memory of the dragon king. [why the swallow’s tail is forked, 1967] a snake had come to king suleiman’s castle after successfully defending the king’s land. (20) je king expressed his gratitude and asked if he could grant the snake a wish. je snake first confesses his base placement on the earth as a wingless, armless, and legless creature that invoked fear among all who see him, and then asks to know the animal with the tastiest blood in order to know what to eat. suleiman, able to speak the languages of all animals, sends the flying insects in his kingdom across the earth to find the tastiest blood. sometime later, the swallow sees the mosquito returning to suleiman’s castle. je swallow asks the mosquito twice which animal had the tastiest blood, but the mosquito refuses to answer. upon the last probe by the swallow, the mosquito shouts that human’s blood is the tastiest. je swallow accuses the mosquito of lying, but the mosquito does not relent. je swallow then attacks the mosquito and pulls its tongue from its mouth. seeing the bees and wasps returning to king suleiman, the swallow also plucks their tongues from their mouths. once the insects return to suleiman, he asks what they found, but they are unable to speak, making unintelligible buzzing noises. suleiman says that he cannot understand them and asks again what they found. !e allegorical aĭdaḣar folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 55 je swallow, flying above the scene, says to suleiman that she understands what they are saying, and that frog’s blood is the tastiest. (21) suleiman trusts the swallow and decrees that the snake is to eat frogs. je snake accuses her of lying to suleiman, but the king remains unmoved and states he cannot alter a decree. out of frustration, the snake lunges at the swallow and pulls the middle feathers from her tail. je story ends with the grandmother restating the protective qualities of the swallow over humans and how swallows must always be respected. comparing these iterations of a classic central asian folk tale elucidates complex changes. je film’s story is written by amen khaydarov himself with no reference to any other writer or legend. je most obvious aspect changed is the abrahamic allusion. je king suleiman of momusholu’s version is not just a placeholder for a king, but uses his skill of speaking to animals, as observed in other accounts of suleiman. (22) je second abrahamic aspect of the narrative is that of the snake. in the snake’s appeal to suleiman as a wretched creature, we are reminded of the abrahamic associations in the garden of eden. jese changes on the part of khaydarov to shift from abrahamic characters and mythologies to alternate mythologies have repercussions. in changing the accepted tale of suleiman and the snake, still seen in contemporary retellings as recent as 2017 [seitzhanov, ponomareva and baigabulov 2017: 27-31], khaydarov shifts the audience’s traditional associations with the folk tale. jere could have been advantages for khaydarov to make the story less explicitly religious, but as the film itself has shown, there are subtle references to islam through images of mosques and gravesites, and in the lilt and rhyming of the narration. jis shift away from explicit references to islam, the removal of king suleiman for instance, could have been to avoid censorship. considering the only references to islam are in quick shots and vaguely referenced in the lilt of the narration, they may be potentially too subtle for the average viewer to notice. unless the viewer is intently looking, and listening, he or she might not notice the mosque in the fast-paced pan across the hillside, nor the subtle nod to traditional persian islamic poetry through the tale narration. khaydarov’s aĭdaḣar: neither serpent nor dragon je replacement of the snake with the aĭdaḣar by khaydarov is effective for a multitude of reasons. firstly, a three-headed dragon compared to a single snake offers an incredible opportunity for creative animation. separate heads equate separate motion thus displaying a dynamic character. aesthetics aside, three heads, three windows, and three minion creatures resonate with the tripartite tengrist cosmological view, as well as the three dominions of the dragon’s past: air, land, and sea. jese three divisions are even seen in the depiction of the dragon’s body itself: wings (air), feet (land), and scales (water/underground). (23) kazakh folklore has few instances of dragons. je word “dragon” is difficult to translate as there are multiple variants of the creature in kazakh mythology. folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 56 aĭdaḣar, as it is solely referred to in the film, holds the additional connotation of “evil lord” or “demon.” jese connotations, however, are less important than the aĭdaḣar’s explicit association with the underworld of the tengrist cosmology as a being possessing the power to move souls between the middle and lower worlds. қазақтың этнографиялық категориялар, ұғымдар мен атауларының дəстүрлі жүйесі [je traditional system of ethnographical categories conceptions and designations of kazakhs] makes reference to vladimir propp’s analysis of dragons as creatures that dwell specifically in urban and sedentary cultures [nursan 2011: 87]. propp further explains that because of the sedentary nature of dragons, it would be easy to assume that they are an import from a sedentary culture into kazakh tradition. je word aĭdaḣar complicates this analysis because of the usage of the letter ‘h’ in the kazakh language. as described by t. kengesbaev and g. musabaev, [1975] “«h» фонемасы келетін сөздер қазақ тілінде өте аз…жəне кейбір шығыс тілдерінен енгенсөздарде (sic) (гауһар, жауһар, каһарман) кездеседі” [the letter “h” is rarely seen in kazakh language…and there are some loan words that came from eastern languages]. je fact that this word is exclusively used for older words, and could be borrowed from one of the sedentary cultures the word aĭdaḣar itself conveys as a loan word from an eastern language (persian, farsi, mandarin, etc.), helps us understand the role of aĭdaḣar in the film. contrasted with the bright colors of the nomadic life in the opening shot, the three-headed dragon king sits in a dark, subdued lair. je coloration not only indicates a subterranean color palette but also urban sedentariness more broadly as it depicts gloomy stone-colored walls. jese are not the quick-to-dry mudbrick houses of nomads, but palaces, castles, and homes representing an altogether different lifestyle. jis is representative of the monumental divide between the sedentary dragon king and the purported free peoples and animals of the steppe and mountains. in a brief “dragonological” analysis, i will attempt to differentiate between the varying types of dragons and show their origins. in his analysis of swallow, b. r. nugerbek [2005: 162] makes the distinction between the two different portrayals of the dragon in the film. “ертегідегі aйдаһар—тəтті қанды аңсаған, алып күштің иесі болса, фильмде ол күні санаулы, қартайған аждаһа” [je dragon of folk tales is bloodthirsty and strong, but the dragon portrayed in the film is an aged azhdaḣa]. azhdaḣa is also found in zoroastrianism, one of the oldest known religions centering around a monotheistic principle with a dualist cosmology of good and evil. in zoroastrianism, azhdaḣa originates from “aži dahāka,” “aži” meaning “serpent” or “dragon” and “dahaka” as a proper noun. in the avesta, one of the oldest texts of zoroastrianism, the azhdaḣa is depicted as “the three-mouthed, the three-headed, the six-eyed, who has a thousand senses, that most powerful, fiendish druj, that demon, baleful to the world, the strongest druj that angra mainyu created against the material world, to destroy the world of the good principle” [darmesteter 2019]. jis seems like a faithful representation of the young ghost aĭdaḣar in the film with one major exception, an aĭdaḣar traditionally has a single head. additionally, the azhdaḣa of kazakh !e allegorical aĭdaḣar folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 57 culture loses the explicit zoroastrian associations and is similarly translated as “demon” or “devil.” alternatively, in the iranian epic, the shahnameh, the azhdaḣa is represented as a giant serpent with wings often defeated by epic heroes [tousi 2019]. russian and eastern european dragon lore add a perspective to these matters, as it complicates khaydarov’s multi-headed dragon. je zmei (змей) of russian and eastern european origin is often represented as a three-, six-, or nineheaded dragon. (24) while it is impossible to know which type of dragon khaydarov implied when he made his film, it is clear that his depiction of the aĭdaḣar could have been influenced by any of these mythical creatures. jis choice nevertheless illustrates that a core element in the film is not indigenously kazakh. jese varying manifestations reveal the complexity of “dragonology.” no singular entity exists independently from another. je zmei and the azhdaḣa could be separate iterations of the same being, originating anywhere between presentday southeastern europe and iran. jese types of hunts could be interpreted as distracting, but it is important to note that the aĭdaḣar does not exist alone as a uniquely kazakh symbol. if it is to represent anything beyond a villain, it would support the interpretation of the aĭdaḣar as an inherently external foe and a critical representation of otherness. it is first and foremost a creature outside of kazakhness, a representation of exteriority, of non-inclusion. upon the return to the castle of the yellow-outlined aĭdaḣar, or aged azhdaḣa, the aĭdaḣar hangs his heads in a sign of despair and retreats to his throne. noticing the dragon’s labored breathing, the three minion creatures converse. (25) je narrator informs the viewer that the fox has been brought to the dragon to determine his ailment. (26) je fox looks under the dragon’s wings and inside his mouth before writing a spell. je shot includes the notation of the spell in russian, and reads, “мощь вернёт властелину вновь, как цветение, живая кровь. лис [je power of the ruler will blossom once more with life giving blood. fox].” (27) with fantastical orchestral sounds accompanying the score, the fox whirls his arms and transforms the written spell into a potion bottle. he places a dead fish inside as the narrator explains that upon placing the correct blood in the potion, it will give life to whoever drinks it. after the potion is created, the mosquito is called by the aĭdaḣar and receives the shrunken potion bottle from the fox. je mosquito flies to the countryside in search of the correct blood to awaken the dead fish placed in the potion bottle. je mosquito unsuccessfully collects blood from a deer and a donkey before arriving at the mother and child in the countryside. when nugerbekov [1980: 134] interrogates the psychological effects of animation, he writes about the coloration of the kazakh textile items in the scene preceding the mosquito attack, stating, “по мере приближения камеры к ребенку мы ощущаем тревогу. такое настроение нагнетается кроваво-красным цветом орнамента. наши тревожные ожидания оправдываются: комар жалит ребенка [as the camera approaches the baby we feel anxious. this anxiety is caused by the blood-red color of the textile ornaments. our anxious waiting folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 58 becomes true: the mosquito stings the baby].” je bright colors of the previously comforting tekemet contrast with the impending evil, not under cover of darkness, but in a joyful moment between a mother and child [image 5]. image 5: ae colors of the tekemet foreshadow the attack of the mosquito. [why the swallow’s tail is forked, 1967] during the shots following the mosquito in its quest for the proper blood, the film alternates to scenes within the castle. je three minions first try to tempt the aĭdaḣar with food to aid him. je middle head raises to meet the plates and shakes its head in refusal, illustrating the aĭdaḣar’s frail condition and dependence on others. following a failed attempt of the mosquito, the film shifts to a dance and musical performance for the aĭdaḣar. je three minions play instruments that resemble the uzbek doyra, the kazakh dombyra, and a generic reed instrument indicating anything from a turkic zurna to an armenian mey. in an attempt to raise the spirits of the king, three mouse dancers enter the castle and perform. je performance continues for almost forty-five seconds before returning to the plot of the film. je scene feels unnecessarily long in the flow of the rest of the film because it adds very little to the plot, but it introduces elements of orientalism and positions the aĭdaḣar as external. in the music played the listener hears a bright timbre of the reed wind instrument as well as the wide interval, called the augmented second by music scholars. jis interval indicates the use of a modal system (mugham, maqom, etc.) that proliferated in the pre!e allegorical aĭdaḣar folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 59 soviet local musical practices of the era. however, the movements employed by the mice are anything but central asian and represent an orientalism of middle eastern influences. in other words, a key moment of animation in the film has an imported element. je luxurious extravagance and belly dance costuming and gestures of the mice herald a widespread orientalist view in the soviet region. jis orientalism does not seem to demonize the geography of the middle east, but rather rejects past imperial persian and ottoman powers that governed these regions by the music played, the typical belly dancer apparel of the mouse dancers, and the extravagance of the situation. a possibility for why this was included in the film could be because it was the very first sequence of animation the studio had produced. in an archive file at the national film archive in almaty, a 1968 news update about the kazakhfilm studio shows this very scene in black and white as an example of the studio’s work. jis could suggest that it was the first actual piece ever produced and acted more as filler than as a necessary piece to the film. climax and resolution to understand the significance of the retrieval of blood, we must understand the synthesis of land and people in kazakh culture. historically, nomadic peoples have been both colonized and solely historicized through the eyes of non-nomadic peoples. je greeks wrote of the scythians, the british wrote of the australian aborigines, and the russians and soviets wrote of the people of the steppe. in the eyes of empires, nomadic blood always equaled imperial land. (28) keeping this coupling of geography in mind, we can investigate the notion of blood as cure. je short reminiscence of the past aĭdaḣar consuming everything in air, land, and sea demonstrates the tyrannical rule of the king in the past: he consumed resources. in a final gesture of sovereignty, he moves beyond the metaphorical act of resource depletion, and to the people themselves. as the narrator tells us, “бесікте жатқан нəресте, ең жұмсақ жемдік емес пе [jere wasn’t a more vulnerable prey than the newborn child in the cradle].” synchronous with the soviet ideology about the russian imperial past, the aĭdaḣar must literally taste and drink the blood of his human subjects to survive. after the mosquito extracts the blood from the child, and the potion reawakens the fish within the bottle, he celebrates and then returns to the castle. fortunately, the swallow intervenes in the chase scene between the swallow and mosquito, musics play a pivotal narrative role. (29) when the shot focuses on the mosquito, western orchestral music opposes the swallow’s pursuit. when the shot alternates to the swallow, however, sections of tlendiev’s aqqu plays [image 6]. without voice-over narration during the chase scene, music acts as another example of narrative mimesis. unlike western animation that often uses music to enhance emotional reactions or narrative points, the kazakh ku̇ĭ acts in a narrative capacity. tlendiev’s aqqu illustrates the flapping wings of the swallow and carries previous connotations of the sacred bird and the hunt, but the roles have been reversed. je sacred bird becomes the hunter in saving the mother and child from folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 60 being subjects of the aĭdaḣar. with a deeper understanding of the elements of the ku̇ĭ, some audience members watching the film may recognize how the musicality adds to the narrative in a way wholly unique to central asian culture. je struggle between the mosquito and swallow does not need to be narrated with words, but rather with the familiar narrative tradition of the ku̇ĭ. image 6: tlendiev’s aqqu plays during the chase scene between the swallow and mosquito. [why the swallow’s tail is forked, 1967] after the swallow forces the mosquito to drop the bottle, which crashes into the rocks below, where a group of flowers sprout, the mosquito escapes to the dragon’s lair. je swallow pursues it and ultimately ingests the mosquito. as the swallow attempts to escape, the weakened aĭdaḣar lifts a head and bites the middle feathers from the swallow’s tail, the same motif seen in all the folk tale versions. je swallow tumbles to the ground and struggles to flee. in a frantic chase by the dragon and his minions, also represented in the tension of the ku̇ĭ, the swallow narrowly escapes the castle. je dragon king, in his attempt to grab the swallow, crashes through the castle wall and falls to the crags below. je dragon does not die, but explodes and transforms into three snakes that scurry off into the rocks, resonating with momusholu’s account [image 7]. nugerbek [2005: 135] makes an astute observation when he writes, “жамандық жойылған жоқ. ол бар, һəм, ол тек ұтылып қалады. жамандық қайта жаңғыруы мүмкін. [evil is not eliminated. it exists; it has just been defeated. evil can be revived again.]” je !e allegorical aĭdaḣar folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 61 swallow is incapable of eradicating all evil, but instead allows for its inevitable resurgence. image 7: after the aĭdaḣar crashed into the ground below, he transforms into three snakes. [why the swallow’s tail is forked, 1967] jis transformation of the dragon king into three snakes is a complex artistic decision on khaydarov’s part. unlike momusholu’s telling of the story, this change indicates the anticipation of a new threat. je interwoven black and white rope of the toddler’s ceremony remains unfrayed; good and evil persist in unison. jis ending relates to the film in its capacity as a retelling of a traumatic history. changing the possible to the inevitable reveals a specifically vulnerable worldview. je film concludes with the swallow returning to the tree above the mother and the smiling infant. je narrator summarizes the story explaining the swallow’s forked tail and the bond between swallow and humans. as the screen fades to black with the end credits rolling, the audience is left with khaydarov’s authentically kazakh film iteration of a traditional folk tale, or so it seems. ii. untangling the roots in music as social life: ae politics of participation, turino [2008] coins the term “semantic snowballing.” je term refers to the agglutination of unrelated folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 62 practices into a cohesive entity. his key example of semantic snowballing emanates from his analysis of the recent creation of african nation states. turino illustrates that zimbabwean state identity construction was enabled when governments combined various tribal musical performances with speeches from state officials [turino 2008: 146]. jis practice, in effect, snowballs the indexical relationships of the separate tribes and unites them through traditional music underlain by the remarks of government administrators. turino’s vocabulary allows us to understand why the swallow’s tail is forked as a collection of separate central asian cultural elements that have been snowballed into a culminating creation of a unitary notion of kazakh culture. as i have examined the many elements of this film, it has become apparent that no single element of this film is “uniquely kazakh.” je film, however, is hailed as a true representation of kazakh identity in contemporary discourse as seen in this quotation by zhanat zakiya, counsellor of the kazakhstan national commission for unesco, “je animation studio kazakhmultifilm produced quality classical animation films, representing folklore of the different nations of kazakhstan and promoting cultural diversity. for example, the film why the swallow’s tail is forked, made in 1967, was a colossal success” [bendazzi 2016: 262]. despite their origin, these elements aspects hold symbolic value for kazakhs. jus, we must look to the story itself as a possible representation of kazakh authenticity as well. by looking at swallow-motif folk tales from different cultural traditions, we can query this conception. je italian folklorist giuseppe pitrè gathered folk stories about swallows from all over the world in ae swallow book [2016]. je first story, similar to momusholu’s, is classified as a circassian legend [pitrè 2016: 41]. a second version of french origin is considerably shortened, but contains the final scene where a snake bites the middle tail feathers of the swallow [pitrè 2016: 44]. other variations of this story include a 1902 version recorded by a chicago public school principal for students [holbrook 2009: 19], a 1938 telling in a collection by a daughter of her mother’s recount of the tale in ireland [martin 1938: 198], and a version in 1907 found in folk-lore from the holy land: moslem, christian and jewish [hanauer and pickthall 1907: 283-286]. just how far back these stories date can never be concretely determined, as there is simply no way to find the beginning of any folk story. however, all of these stories contrast with khaydarov’s film in that the swallow prevents human suffering altogether, as it does in momusholu’s version. none of the aforementioned versions include a dragon, an evil ruler, a blood sacrifice, a human victim, or a shaman. additionally, none of the versions illustrate a world of continued subjugation by the inhabitants. jese stories acknowledge human blood only in passing, as the tastiest of all. humans are never the center of the slightly different plots, nor are they involved in any of the other versions beyond appearances as singular characters or as having tasty blood. while khaydarov’s film diverges from these many iterations in different capacities, one thing is certain: this folk tale plot is not exclusively kazakh either, despite its perception as such. !e allegorical aĭdaḣar folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 63 defining “kazakh” scholars such as sally cummings [2012] and bhavna dave [2007] have studied the development of kazakh, as well as central asian, identity politics and identity formation. as the kazakh political sociologist diana kudaibergenova [2014:160] states regarding national identity formation, after the collapse of the soviet union the newly independent states of central asia found themselves having to form their own national “imagined communities,” partially to legitimate their existing territorial integrity and the rights of their titular ethnicities. je process of such formation expressed itself in the creation of particular symbols, myths, and rituals that not only would distinguish the nation, but also legitimate their sovereignty. all central asian countries were “drawn” and “created” by the soviet union in the 1920s. prior to soviet occupation, imperial rulers were little concerned with the steppe nomads. in the mid to late 18th century, catherine the great wanted to settle the nomadic peoples in order to make them more “productive,” but never followed through with implementation. (30) nor did any other autocratic ruler, until josef stalin [cameron 2018: 20]. sarah cameron informs us that the term “kazakh” initially referred to a social and ethnic class in the late 15th century [2018: 11]. “kazakh” referred to the uzbek-kazakh khanate located in what is now uzbekistan, from which many subjects had fled, but scholars speculate that it meant “vagabond” or “adventurer,” based on turkic etymology [cameron 2018: 24]. je term “kazakh” became more difficult to define when the soviets colonized the region. je region that is now kazakhstan was referred to as the kirghiz autonomous soviet socialist republic (assr) and the “kazakh” people as “kyrgyz,” (31) before this territory was changed to the kazakh assr in 1925. while the original definition was not originally an ethnic one, national identity, as imposed by the soviets, paradoxically became the basis for an ethnic identity. (32) as shirin akiner argues in her book ae formation of kazakh identity: from tribe to nation-state, kazakh history is highly disputed [1995: 3]. although claims about the origin of the ethnic group have been tarnished by ideological and nationalist rhetoric, we can pinpoint the moment when an ostensibly new kazakh national identity became a prominent socio-cultural and political descriptor of the peoples living in what is now kazakhstan during the stalinist period. forced sedentarization and kazakh identity formation in ae hungry steppe, sarah cameron studies the unfolding of forced collectivization under stalin in the late 1920s and early 1930s. she demonstrates that the implications of agricultural conversion in the steppe were severely misunderstood by soviet officials. jis led to an avoidable catastrophe resulting folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 64 in the death of over 1.5 million kazakhs [cameron 2018: 170]. je devastation to livestock was also destablilizing, with the death of roughly 29,000 livestock out of a total of 40,000 from 1929 to 1931 [cameron 2018: 109]. while these figures tell a story of mass suffering and loss during forced collectivization, they obscure the larger picture. in the lead up to forced sedentarization and collectivization, the soviet regime prompted local kazakhs to purge the loosely determined bourgeois class, “baĭ,” in their dekulakization campaigns [cameron 2018: 96]. je wholesale destruction of the baĭ and the massive loss of human life from collectivization decimated the social hierarchy of kazakhs that had existed for centuries. clan ties were destroyed, villages were dismantled and relocated, and entire family lineages were lost. je previous notion of kazakhness, be it the “adventurer,” a definition theorized by scholars, or the denotation of the group that had left the uzbek-kazakh khanate, had been obliterated. nonetheless, kazakh identity did emerge as a direct result of this decimation. cameron observes “in the aftermath of the famine, nationality became the most important marker of kazakh identity” [2018: 172]. all other markers having been removed, “kazakhness” came to represent a national identity rooted in loss. jis new definition placed the nomadic past of the pre-soviet nomads in a troubled position. were they “kazakh?” and was there always a specifically national, as in people belonging to a nation-state, identity for those who lived on the steppe? to answer how this dilemma was resolved, we must examine how the nomadic past has been used to define kazakh identity in the years following collectivization. by the time swallow was released in 1967, three decades after forced collectivization at a time when criticism of stalinist policies was encouraged, the pastoral nomadic lifestyle was available to be idealized as a fundamental aspect of kazakh identity. jis new view of the past also planted the seed for a nationalist vision after soviet collapse [akiner 1995: 2]. je nomadic past was historicized as “kazakh” to establish continuity between the area in which nomads lived, the kazakh and proto-kazakh peoples, and the formation of kazakhstan as an independent state after the collapse of the soviet union [akiner 1995: 12]. jis posited continuity justified the existence of a republic without a primordial or ancient concept of a historical state. jus, the film plays a role in this process in multiple ways. it is a product of this kazakh reimagining of identity with pastoral nomadism at the forefront of the film. with a couple changes in costume and design, or perhaps even none at all, the folk tale could represent kipchak, karakalpak, turkmen, kyrgyz, mongolian, or altaic people, to name several of the many steppe nomads. je combination of the specific elements mentioned in the analysis above, however, is now understood as distinctly kazakh, because the nomadic past had been firmly rooted as a representation of a particular kazakh nationalist identity. as indicated earlier, turino’s concept of semantic snowballing is useful in the analysis of the cultivation and fabrication of kazakh identity. as we have seen in this brief summary of kazakh identity, the snowballed “kazakh” elements in the film were chosen somewhat arbitrarily. je inclusion of particular kazakh !e allegorical aĭdaḣar folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 65 motifs, such as blankets, balbals, mosques, carpets, domiciles, etc., helps to create the notion of authentic “kazakhness,” despite none of them being inherently kazakh. additionally, none of these elements, i argue, are as integral to the film’s reception as the inclusion of the aĭdaḣar, a mythical embodiment of collective loss. when khaydarov joined these arbitrary cultural elements with a pastoralist vision that incorporated the innovative element of loss, he created a film received as a great kazakh work of art and a ubiquitous kazakh cultural artifact in contemporary discourse. (33) film and folklore no one can ever know how the sparrow folk tale was received by the nomadic people of the steppe, nor its origin. (34) we are better placed to examine how this tale was adapted into a film with such cultural resonance. in a aeory of adaptation, linda hutcheon [2006: 92] describes adaptations as “multilaminated” in their intertextuality. adaptations always exist in some kind of connection with previous versions. within adaptations, however, change is inevitable, “and with change come corresponding modifications in the political valence and even the meaning of stories” [hutcheon 2006: xvi]. khaydarov’s film not only altered the meaning of the folk tale, but his version was well received among audiences, never a guarantee when adapting a classic work. to understand this positive reception, we will look to two classical folklore theorists. roman jakobson and petr bogatyrev used saussure’s structural models to understand the retelling of folklore. jeir fundamental argument centers on how saussure’s distinction of parole, the individual iteration of language, and langue, the structure of language, act differently in the telling of folk tales. je langue, in this sense, is the consistent qualities of a body or genre of folklore: its structures, plots, and motifs. je parole, in contrast, is the infinite variations of the actual tellings of a folk tale [jakobson 1966: 4]. at what point a folk tale breaks outside of the langue in its variations is difficult to determine, especially in a case such as khaydarov’s film. whether or not it exists within the langue of swallow-tail origin stories is irrelevant beyond the fact that it is bound with these other versions in some capacity. jakobson and bogatyrev offer insight into the adoption of khaydarov’s version as the supposedly “correct” version of the tale. if the film had not resonated with the audience, if the adjustments to the story’s langue had been too extreme, it would have been forgotten. but that was not the case. by stretching the boundaries of the folk tale to include entirely new plot elements, it was embraced by kazakh audiences as an authentic representation of kazakh identity in the minds of journalists, animators, and scholars. as hutcheon [2006: 29] concludes, “palimpsests make for permanent change.” in rico isaacs’ book film and identity in kazakhstan, he makes a seemingly fair claim about the extremely popular kazakh film from 1970, kyz-zhibek. in regards to director sultan khodzhikov’s film, he writes [2018: 86], “for the first time on screen kazakhs were introduced to their nomadic past, erased and forgotten through the stalinist period, the nomad became real and visceral in kyz folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 66 zhibek, the nomad became sacred.” however, isaacs is mistaken; this film was not the first film to depict this version of the past. he also posits [2018: 89] kyzzhibek as part of a larger pastoralist national vision of kazakhstan. swallow predates kyz-zhibek by three years, and yet his argument about the national vision holds true. je pastoral nationalist vision emerged at a time distanced enough from the brutal past to become part of the national discourse. under the new soviet reality of khrushchev, denouncing the stalinist past was not only accepted, but encouraged. it allowed kazakhs to reclaim, reimagine, and dream up their identity. juwen zhang’s analysis of chinese filmic folklore [2005: 263-280] uses a broad definition of this term that includes films about folklore, e.g., documentaries of local folk culture, as well as folkloric films, e.g., folk tales reimagined on film, animated or otherwise. he finds filmic folklore artificial because it is too far removed from traditional styles of folklore. jis approach may explain the indeterminate status of khaydarov’s film in jakobson and bogatyrev’s usage of langue. zhang holds [2005: 277] that film adds nontraditional elements to folklore and states the “emergence of filmic folklore shows a historical and social need for reconstructing the cultural identities of china.” in the kazakh context, swallow supports zhang’s claim. both swallow and khodzhikov’s kyz-zhibek appeared at a moment in which nomadic pastoralism was recognized and being constructed as part of the kazakh national identity. zhang’s argument explains not only the dramatic shift of the langue of the folk tale, but also why it emerges at that moment. a final consideration when thinking of parole and langue is the inclusion of the dragon. khaydarov’s altering of the folk tale establishes the position of kazakh nomadic pastoralists as always under threat from external rulers, past, present, and future; the swallow does not prevent human suffering altogether, but rather prevents its recursion. jis folk tale begins long after the aĭdaḣar has wreaked havoc on its dominion. in dragon-slayer stories where the dragon has killed, eaten, or devastated a human population, the destruction does not last long. as qiguang zhao states [1992: 160] in a study of dragons: east and west, once a dragon interferes in human affairs, the dragon-slayer arrives. in the film, though, there is no dragon-slayer, only a swallow who saves the nomads from further domination. jis dramatic shift to the story’s langue could have been rejected outright by audiences, but it was not. jus, we can interpret this new aspect of loss as integral to the kazakh pastoralist narrative. khaydarov’s inclusion of the aĭdaḣar shows how loss became inseparable to the pastoralist narrative. kazakh identity is, in effect, rhizomatic, to borrow deleuze and guattari’s [1987] useful analytical tool. (35) identity exists as a structure without a finite beginning or end, without a central unifying factor, but as a culmination of infinite circular pathways. in reading this film, we can see the pastoral nationalist elements in the aftermath of collectivization: tekemet, u̇ĭ, cradle board, ku̇ĭ, dombra, headdress, etc. jese rhizomatic roots had been cut, but not erased; new systems lead to the same destination, and these new pathways create the façade of aboriginality. je process of tying the manifold aspects portrayed in the film to !e allegorical aĭdaḣar folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 67 kazakhness is just as messy and tortuous as the rhizome itself. jis model, for all of its infinite complexity, has allowed us to analyze the piece from different perspectives instead of following a single path of analysis. image 8: a portrait of amen khaydarov sitting before frames of his second film “aqsaq qūlan” [national film archive in almaty, kazakhstan, 1967] iii. accidental resistance while there is no evidence to support khaydarov being a resistance filmmaker, hutcheon [2006: 94] reminds us that “an adaptation can obviously be used to engage in a larger social or cultural critique.” unique to this version of the folk tale is the weakening and dying dragon king. given that this film was made in 1967, the beginning of brezhnev’s re-freezing of khrushchev’s jaw, khaydarov was living in a very different soviet union than the one he grew up in. in mukhamet shaiakhmetov’s memoir following world war ii, a kazakh teacher's story: surviving the silent steppe, the author [2012: 158] states how khrushchev’s open criticism of stalin “sowed the seeds of doubt in the folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 68 infallibility of the people’s leader.” je desperate effort on behalf of the aĭdaḣar to consume the blood of his subjects could be interpreted as the final straw for khaydarov. despite praise from the west for policy advances, the soviet union under khrushchev had been perceived as weakened by many kazakhs [shaiakhmetov 2012: 163]. je film could be implying the weakness of the state and the ensuing chaos a vulnerable state can lead to; one that devours its people. as a firm believer in the socialist project [khaydarov 2015], it is possible khaydarov could have been criticizing the weakness of the state as embodied in the new leadership. regardless of khaydarov’s intentions however, the aĭdaḣar as a concept resonated with kazakh audiences and continues to resonate to this day. fin in its “animated look” at the film, this essay has attempted to break down the host of “kazakh” elements in amen khaydarov’s why the swallow’s tail is forked. je essay began as a thorough investigation of seemingly aboriginal motifs that are actually a part of a popular pastoral nationalist narrative [akiner 1995: 12]. jis vision gained prominence in the late 1960s as pastoral history was open to reflection in the post-stalinist world. in that remembrance, however, there is an undeniable element of loss, as embodied in khaydarov’s alterations of the folk tale to include the aĭdaḣar. while the pastoral nationalist vision is only one of a variety of nationalist visions in kazakhstan today, this film helps to position the resurgence of these discourses at its initial creation in 1967 and in recent discourse. jis essay hopes to shine light on how seemingly authentic portrayals of national identity are displayed in a popular film, and operates under the assumption that constructed artistic representations can reveal the complexity of nationalist narratives. my analysis has deconstructed the complex idea of kazakh identity. looking at etymological roots, pre-national and national history, collective sedentarization under soviet occupation, and beyond, i noted that kazakh nationality is a synthesis of varying components. understanding the context of these components became foundational in searching for filmic allegory. jis particular analysis has allegorized a film as representative of larger concepts in the realm of kazakh identity and nation formation. it is an original work of analysis as far as no other source has delved into the subject to this degree, but it certainly has been affected by certain assumptions. je first assumption is that all nations are constructed, as opposed to primordial, and that they can be deconstructed to reveal their internal inconsistencies [anderson 2006]. without this assumption, turino’s tool would prove useless, in that snowballs cannot be primordial, and the very deconstruction of this film would be impossible. je act of arguing for the constructionist view of nations takes place within a historical context of the rise of nationalism in 2020. jis analysis provides an example of a past popular cultural film and how the assumption of “kazakhness” is in fact a construction, sometimes so convincing that we forget people have dreamt it into !e allegorical aĭdaḣar folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 69 existence. jis essay should not be faulted for this allegorizing, but rather should be understood in conversation within a particular context at a particular time. why the swallow’s tail is forked has provided insight to the pastoral nationalist construction. as perhaps the earliest filmic representation of this particular pastoral nationalism, this analysis reveals the amalgamation of that identity. it has also revealed the link between the pastoral national identity and a narrative of loss, as seen in the introduction of the aĭdaḣar into the film. even in the nostalgic act of reminiscence by contemporary animators, journalists, and academics, the connection of the pastoral identity and perpetual suffering seems obvious. it has therefore become impossible to look back on the nomadic past of those that roamed the kazakh steppe without prophetically acknowledging the suffering to come. je acts of khans and baĭs became trivialized in the looming shadow of the allegorical aĭdaḣar. acknowledgements jis essay has been supported by my esteemed colleagues and mentors, without whom this essay would not have come together. fatima moldashova, my gracious kazakh language professor, provided expertise in helping understand the nuance of very difficult kazakh academic articles and providing support in my academic pursuit. i cannot thank nelia lanets rodriguez enough for her gift of time in accessing russian, a language beyond my reach. alma kunanbayeva shared her life experience, her research expertise, and her personal anecdotes to enrich my interpretations. gali murzashev opened his arms wide in greeting me in almaty, kazakhstan. he showed me kazakhfilm studio and conversed in a type of beautiful spoken kazakh i had never heard before. sofia sultankhan took me into her home and shared valuable experiences and insight. i am fortunate to call her əпкем. my advisors pavle levi, denise gill, and gabriella safran of stanford university have provided me with constant feedback and supported this project from its inception. i am also thankful to the national film archive in almaty, kazakhstan for their assistance in this project. notes 1 je title of the film is sometimes translated from the russian as why the swallow has a tail with two little horns, and in the interrogative, why does the swallow have a forked tail? for the remainder of this paper i will refer to it in the aforementioned to keep with the most common translation into english, or simply as swallow. 2 neither i nor sofia could find an existing copy of the textbook in olgii, mongolia. 3 khaydarov has only been recently referred to as qaĭdar [қайдар]. je variations of his name show a quick example of the contemporary political reclamation of kazakh cultural figures by removing russification. folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 70 4 jis term is also defined as “authorial animation” by laura pontieri in soviet animation and the aaw of the 1960s: not only for children (bloomington: indiana university press, 2012). 5 see peter wollen’s use of levi-strauss in signs and meaning in the cinema (london: palgrave macmillan for the british film institute, 2013), 105. 6 widely observed film might also fit within anderson’s conception of “print media” in that it supported those watching it as a part of a larger imagined group. 7 i am grateful to a reviewer for recognizing the need to address soviet practices of commemoration as a way to build group identity. further scholarship on the topic includes maggie adams’ playing at war: children's instsenarovki (skits) in classrooms and playgrounds in soviet kazakhstan. in central eurasian studies society annual conference. (je ohio state university, 2011). 8 a personal anecdote from a reviewer stated they remember being told that the animal stories were the oldest and most kazakh of tales. jis contrasts with stories of gin (genies) that were marked as being persian or having some other non-kazakh origin. my essay contends this notion with a close reading of other versions of the folk tale to think differently about kazakh folk tale origins. 9 see also robert p. geraci and michael khodarkovsky, of religion and empire: missions, conversion, and tolerance in tsarist russia. (ithaca: cornell university press, 2001) 280-288 for the complex relationship kazakh steppe nomads had with islam and other religions. 10 je pillars are: 1) shahada: the pronunciation of faith, 2) salat: the practicing the five-times daily prayer, 3) sawm: observing the fasting and obligations of the holy month of ramadan, 4) zakat: alms-giving, and 5) hajj: completing the pilgrimage to mecca. 11 je significance of the swallow in kazakh mythology can best be described in the story of the dzhongar invasion of what is now kazakhstan. tole bi (also referred to as the “swallow bi” because of this very story) was a renowned orator and poet who acted as an advisor to tauke khan in the 17th and 18th centuries [kaskhabasov 2011]. during the dzhongar invasion of tauke khan’s territory, all the inhabitants escaped the dzhongars, except for one lone u̇ĭ. tole bi awaited the impending arrival of the dzhongar army. upon the army’s arrival, the zhongar leader asked, “why did you stay when you knew we were coming?” tole bi told the horseman there was a swallow’s nest in his u̇ĭ, and that he was unable to move. je horseman nodded in understanding and rode past tole bi, respecting the sacred relationship between humans and swallows. jis sacred relationship can also be seen in an experience of a fellow peace corps volunteer living in an u̇ĭ in rural mongolia. towards the end of her volunteer service, a bird nest appeared in the top cross hatch of the u̇ĭ. je birds flew in and out of the u̇ĭ continuously and upon the babies being hatched, grew exponentially noisier. after days of enduring the commotion she asked her host family if she could move the nest. je durvod mongolian host parents were adamant that she not touch the bird nest, as they were sacred. she was offered the option of moving into the house, but the birds had to stay in the u̇ĭ until they were ready to leave. !e allegorical aĭdaḣar folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 71 12 during the pan across the countryside, the russian language opening credits begin. je lack of kazakh language credits in the kazakh language version of the film denotes the secondary importance kazakh held in soviet society of the time. considering the relative ease of layering credits over animation, cost and labor would have been negligible factors in why kazakh credits were not included. 13 jese balbal are believed to have been constructed by a turkic tribe dating to roughly 500 ad [basilov, 1989: 59]. je figures are often of warrior men holding a vessel to signify a burial location. many of these stones still exist in the central asian and mongolian steppe as they are extremely heavy and difficult to steal. 14 “kazakhness” here refers to an ethnic ideal bearing “authenticity” of traditional ethnic kazakh culture. 15 see jeodore craig levin, saida diasovna daukeeva, and ėlmira kȯchu̇mkulova, ae music of central asia, (bloomington, indianapolis: indiana university press, 2016), 278-306 for a comprehensive analysis of the kazakh ku̇ĭ. 16 traditionally, this instrument, as well as many other central asian instruments, was not taught through written means, but rather apprenticeship. 17 i have heard tlendiev affectionately referred to as the “god of the ku̇ĭ,” and after seeing a recorded performance of him playing two dombyras at the same time, i’m inclined to believe the accolade. 18 jis usage can best be understood through the short folk tale, aqsaq qūlan, which tells the story of the death of a mongolian khan’s son. je rule of the land was that whoever brought bad news to the khan would have molten lead poured down his throat. when the khan’s son disappeared, everyone was afraid of telling him what had happened, for obvious reasons. according to the legend, a ku̇ĭshī was forced to the court of the khan and tell him what happened. je ku̇ĭshī didn’t speak, but rather played a ku̇ĭ telling the story of how the khan’s son died. upon hearing it, the khan poured lead down the throat of the dombyra because it was the dombyra that had ultimately spoken the bad news. 19 je novel was initially a series of short stories and was not published as a uniform novel until 1974. 20 jis is the biblical king solomon referred to by his islamic name. 21 je decision to use the gendered pronoun ‘she’ for the swallow follows giuseppe pitre’s usage in ae swallow book. kazakh language does not have identifiers for gender in the third person. je swallow in khaydarov’s film is also portrayed as a mother to the two baby swallows. in russian, “swallow” takes the feminine gender. 22 je ability of king/prophet suleiman to speak to animals is the result of a mistranslation of 1 kings 4:33 and this verse from the qur’an. “and certainly we gave knowledge to david and suleiman (a) and they said: praise be to allah, who has made us excel many of his believing servants! 16 and suleiman was david’s heir, and he said: o men, we have been taught the speech of birds, (a) and we have been granted of all things. (b) surely this is manifest grace” (qur'an 27:15-16). folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 72 23 tripartide patterns are common in folk tales: three brothers/sons, daughters, horses, beers, acts for redemption, eyes of the monster, etc. see propp’s morphology of the folktale [1968] for further examples. 24 je bylina of dobrinya and the dragon [bailey and ivanova 2015: 8197] is a popular example of a three-headed dragon in russian folklore. 25 it is important to notice the three minions as unnatural animals. jey are unrecognizable and hold traits of various animals in a chimeric fashion. jis could be read as underworld creatures aiding the underworld king. 26 je fox in kazakh mythology holds the position of a trickster figure, and metaphorically sits in direct opposition to wolves. because the fox hops and jumps as it moves, it makes the fox more difficult to kill thus making it seem crafty and intelligent. je kazakh language also has a variety of phrases and proverbial expressions that refer to the fox to convey meaning or judgment. if a child wakes from a nightmare the mother will tell the child it was “fox’s excrement” [tu̇lkīnīng boghy], meaning a trick. another example of this phraseology is the “fox’s character” [tu̇lkīnīng mīnezī] implying a traitorous or untruthful character of a person. kazakhs often see themselves as “coming from wolves” which puts the relationship between sedentary and nomadic peoples in perspective when contemporary uzbeks are sometimes described as “foxlike” or untrustworthy. in the eyes of nomads, they come from separate animal lineages. additionally, the fox inhabits a liminal space between the tengrist cosmology as it can move between different realms. 27 jis note only exists in russian. despite the kazakh narration, a separate kazakh language frame did not replace the russian language note. jis may have been a result of funding, oversight, or time constraints, but the frame would have been a relatively easy addition to the film. je decision to not include a kazakh language frame may indicate the depth of russification of the kazakhs. it may have never been acknowledged as potentially exclusive to kazakh language speakers. 28 for a philosophical take on this relationship between nomads and history refer to gilles deleuze and félix guattari’s a aousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1987), 392. 29 “musics” is used in the plural to encapsulate all the modes of central asian music well beyond the scope of the western term “music.” a ku̇ĭ and fantastical music must be compared separately, closer to the differences of a sculpture and a painting as opposed to genres of “music.” 30 see michael khodarkovsky. russia's steppe frontier: ae making of a colonial empire, 1500-1800, pgs. 34-39 for catherine the great’s plans of sending tatars to make kazakhs “better muslims.” 31 in superbly racist fashion, the distinction made by the soviets between kazakhs and kyrgyz was based on appearance. kazakhs were incorrectly identified as kyrgyz while kyrgyz were identified as black kyrgyz (qara qyrghyz) because of their darker complexion. 32 when living in the kyrgyz republic, i often heard the main distinction of kazakhs and kyrgyz being that of geography. kyrgyz lived in the mountains !e allegorical aĭdaḣar folklorica 2019, vol. xxiii 73 and kazakhs lived on the steppe. in many contemporary kyrgyz minds, the distinction was as simple as that. 33 i am grateful to my reviewer in pointing out that kazakh authors of the period realized they could write stories based on appropriated content, which would receive comparatively less attention than soviet literature. jis option gave them some degree of freedom to integrate more critical content. 34 given the multiple versions of the folk tale predating khaydarov’s, there could be an argument that the film’s version attempts to erase the lineage of the folk tale. je film contains many objects and practices deemed as kazakh which could ignore competing non-kazakh histories. jis analysis of erasure, however, falls outside the scope of this essay. 35 see deleuze and guattari, a aousand plateaus, 12. je rhizome is used by deleuze and guattari to reveal the infinite connections of aspects within an idea. je authors reject “arboreal thought” as having a single root and trunk but instead show the rhizome as a way to temporarily oppose varying ideas. jey argue that the dichotomies used in analysis last only as long as necessary and aren’t inherent in the structure of thought. bibliography akiner, shirin. 1995. ae formation of kazakh identity: from tribe to nationstate. london: royal institute of international affairs. anderson, benedict r. 2006. imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. london: verso. bailey, james and tatiana ivanova (eds.). 2015. anthology of russian folk epics (folklores and folk cultures of eastern europe). london: m.e. sharpe. baimyrzaeva, j.a. and m. m. 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[2006: 830] while attempts have been made to incorporate postcolonial critique into the realm of russian studies, such research mostly focuses on post-soviet spaces outside of decoloniality and russian music 2 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii russia [spivak, condee, ram and chernetsky 2006; koplatadze 2019; moore 2001; tlostanova 2015; tlostanova and mignolo 2012]. on the other hand, colonized peoples and cultures within the russian federation that constitute a large portion of the country’s population and remain politically and culturally subjugated are rarely discussed in the context of postcolonial discourse. in this article, i bring attention to small, non-slavic finno-ugric populations indigenous to the lands of present-day st. petersburg and leningrad oblast. three groups collectively known as the ingrians—ижорцы [the izhors], водь [the votes], and ингерманландские финны [the ingrian finns]—as well as вепсы [the veps] have been subjects of colonial rule for many centuries, and the ownership of their land was disputed by the grand dutchy of moscow, swedish empire, russian empire, and soviet union [matley 1979]. while the izhors, the votes, and the veps inhabited these lands long before the slavic domination, the ingrian finns moved to ingria only in the seventeenth century. they migrated from finland to the territory inhabited by the izhors and votes when this region was under the rule of the swedish empire. they came from two areas in finland: äyräpää in the central part of the karelian peninsula and the province savo in southcentral finland (they became known as äyrämöiset and savakot) [matley 1979: 2]. while under russian influence, the izhors, the votes, and the veps adopted the orthodox faith, the ingrian finns preserved lutheranism, which helped them to resist acculturation [kuznetsova, markus, muslimov 2015: 154]. the gradual decrease of the finno-ugric population and assimilation into the socio-cultural environment of the slavs, with whom they have been sharing the land, resulted in a significant loss of their cultural and ethnic identity. more harm to ingrians and the veps was done during the early twentieth century because of soviet dekulakization and collectivization campaigns and further during world war ii, when most finno-ugrians of the st. petersburg region were deported to central asia and later to siberia [kon’kova and kokko 2009: 7, 16; kon’kova 2009a: 96; kon’kova 2009b: 51]. only after 1954 were ingrians and the veps allowed to resettle on their native land [kurs 1994: 112]. (1) focusing on the music legacy of these finno-ugric groups, i use the idea of coloniality as luis chávez and russell p. skelchy [2019] define it in ethnomusicology. differentiating colonialism and coloniality, chávez and skelchy point out that the former “refers primarily to a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a people or nation-state rests on the power of another nation” [2019: 121]. in turn, quoting nelson maldonado-torres, chávez and skelchy [2019: 121] note that coloniality refers to “the longstanding patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administration.” by applying the notion of coloniality to the lived musical experiences of finno-ugric peoples of the st. petersburg region, i offer two modes of decolonial knowledge production in russian music studies adapted from chávez and skelchy’s definition [2019: 118]. first, it can be achieved by shifting focus from the tradition of western art music as the predominant research area associated decoloniality and russian music 3 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii with russian music studies in the anglophone scholarship; and second, by attuning to and implementing musical knowledge and experiences of the nonslavic populations of the russian federation, including ethnic minorities and коренные народы [indigenous people]. to employ the strategies of decoloniality, i propose that “russian” in the context of russian music studies should not be perceived as a homogenous term associated exclusively with the musical practices of ethnic russians but also should be used in a broader sense, incorporating the knowledge production of other ethnic groups within the russian federation. this article presents two case studies that focus on the music groups talomerkit and ingervala, who are involved in the reawakening of finno-ugric traditions in contemporary st. petersburg and demonstrate different ways of engagement with the tradition. talomerkit, a group that was formed by ethnic ingrians, uses a so-called traditional musical approach that is based on minimally altered primary material. the group acts as local cultural activists and works on the repatriation of ingrian heritage to the population. in contrast, ingervala, whose members do not have ethnic connections to ingrians, uses more radical musical strategies that involve electronic and electric sounds along with composed elements in their interpretation of finno-ugric material. perceiving local slavic/finno-ugric musical heritage as a constituent part of the cultural identity of the st. petersburg area, ingervala uses it as a tool of their musical creative process and to promote inclusive multi-ethnic and tradition-based musical spaces. based on fieldwork completed in june 2018 and may 2019, in this article i present ethnographic observations of talomerkit and ingervala’s musical activities and focus on issues related to the repatriation of finno-ugric musical heritage to a local community in st. petersburg after the interruption of these traditional musical practices during the soviet period. being born into a family of an ingrian mother and an ethnic russian father, my position in the field was twofold—as an ethnic insider but also a cultural outsider. like many of my generation, whose families belonged to the silenced ingrian community, i grew up with limited access to local finno-ugric cultural knowledge. while some customs, like lutheran baptism and traditional food, were passed on to me and my siblings unhesitatingly, language and family history were kept at a distance from us. summers and school breaks spent in one of the ingrian villages near gatchina became those times when most of my cultural learning would informally occur. my grandparents would put me on финки [kicksled or potkukelkka in finnish] and make guest visits to other ingrian houses in nearby villages. we would drink goat’s milk with munavoi [egg butter open sandwiches] for breakfast and celebrate lutheran christmas, but none of these customs were explained to me and articulated as something i should perceive as my ethnic identity. after summer breaks, my parents, siblings, and i would move back to our apartment in st. petersburg, and the time i spent in our micro-ingrian world would feel like something distant, existing in parallel. i started researching ingrian history and culture only after my grandparents had passed away, and i sourced most of the information on the topic from academic publications and ethnographic fieldwork. after beginning my decoloniality and russian music 4 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii ethnomusicological training, i have been investigating sites of ingrain knowledge transmission, such as festivals, churches, and museum exhibitions, and establishing contacts with local musicians and activists. during fieldwork in 2019, i conducted several in-person, semi-structured interviews with talomerkit and ingervala and engaged in ongoing digital fieldwork. in the first part of the article, i introduce the group talomerkit in conjunction with a non-profit grassroot organization, pietarin inkerin liitto [st. petersburg union of ingrian finns]. i offer a description of one of the main festivals of the local finno-ugric community—juhannus [st. john’s day]. further, i look closer at talomerkit’s signature song “tulkkaa tyttäret tulelle,” which belongs to the category of calendar songs of the kalevala-meter genre of ingrian oral poetry. i contextualize it within the ritual setting of the traditional celebration of juhannus and trace the history of the oral transmission of this song and ingrian singers. in the second part of the article, i examine the group ingervala and focus on its artistic thinking as a popular music band that engages with local finno-ugric tradition. i discuss the sources that ingervala uses to build its repertoire and examine one of its early songs “undarmoi ja kalervoi,” an arrangement of an izhorian runo song which was included by elias lönnrot in the karelo-finnish epic, the kalevala. i emphasize the significance of this runo song and izhorian cultural legacy as a source of inspiration for many now well-known musical and literary works, and how the nationalizing of the kalevala by finns blurs the distinction between finnish and ingrian cultures. the aim of this article is to rethink established slavic-focused modes of musical knowledge production in the st. petersburg region and the relationship between land and community. as pointed out by chávez and skelchy, “[a]utonomy over land is not about mirroring the frameworks of the nation-state but challenging existing colonial ideas about property and ownership by asserting native perspectives” [2019: 121]. following this line of thought, i present these two case studies to demonstrate the musical agency of the finno-ugric population and their legacy as a constitutive part of the regional cultural fabric and to add their voices to global discussions about decoloniality. by doing so, i address the importance of postcolonial hermeneutics, which according to david chioni moore, “might add richness to studies of place” [2001: 124]. i argue that legacy of finno-ugric population should be included in correcting the socio-cultural asymmetry of the region. while the cultural reawakening of the finno-ugric population in st. petersburg began in the late 1980s, it remains a mainly grassroots initiative without the major support of local cultural and governmental institutions. talomerkit: revivalists of traditional ingrian music in previous centuries, special patrimonial tokens, talomerkit, existed in the households of the votes, izhors, and ingrian finns. they were placed on work equipment, boats, fishing tackle, felled timber, and sometimes even on grave crosses. a family’s talomerkit was passed from father to his eldest son, and any decoloniality and russian music 5 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii remaining sons had to choose a new sign for themselves. in the seventeenth century, talomerkit were also used in documents as a personal signature, especially if the signatory was illiterate, which was characteristic of orthodox ingrians. (2) these days, talomerkit is known as the name of a local music group based in st. petersburg and made up of the members of the local organization pietarin inkerin liitto. this non-profit organization was founded in 1988 with the goal to promote the traditional culture and language of the ingrian finns and serves as an advocate for the rights of ingrians and even assists in individual cases of political rehabilitation. today, talomerkit is one of only a very few groups in the city that present and promote local finno-ugric music using a so-called tradition-based musical approach. talomerkit performs traditional songs and dances of the ingrian finns, votes, and izhors, all sung in their original languages and based on ethnographic recordings collected by researchers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. the history of talomerkit can be traced to the year 2000, when an anthropologist and ingrian activist, olga konkova, formed an amateur choir. it was mainly formed by students of the finnish language classes at inkerin liitto to learn and sing traditional ingrian songs. at that time, the choir consisted of sixty people, and one of the singers was vetka lappolainen, who now sings with talomerkit. according to lappolainen, konkova chose some of the most vociferous people to perform ancient runo songs. “сначала мы просто орали” [at first, we were just screaming], comments lappolainen, “как объясняла конькова, народное пение—это когда в деревне на одной горке поешь, на другой тебя должны услышать [as konkova explained, folk singing is when you sing on one hill of the village, people should hear you on the opposite side] [lappolainen 2019]. (3) in 2009, after the disintegration of the choir, as informants to my research put it, enthusiastic members of inkerin liitto founded the group talomerkit. from 2009 to the present day, the membership of talomerkit has varied, and at the time of my research, the group had four or five regular members—irina demidova, dmitri harakka, aina jaokkola, vetka lappolainen, and julia tuomo. demidova, who joined the group a few years after its formation, became the conductor and leader of the group. studying folklore in the st. petersburg conservatory, demidova specialized in russian slavic music, but became interested in finnougric culture in the process of working with talomerkit. demidova helped talomerkit to compile a new selection of songs and record two albums, tantsikuahan and souva laiva, which were produced with the financial support of inkerin liitto, the finnish society of ingrian culture (inkerin kulttuuriseura), and the russian izhora community. throughout its existence, talomerkit has performed at ingrian celebrations in st. petersburg such as joulupäivä [christmas], (4) kalevalan päivä [kalevala day], (5) laskiainen [shrovetide], (6) juhannus [st. john’s day], (7) and inkerin päivä [ingrian day]. (8) the musicians also regularly visit ingrian diaspora communities in estonia and finland and perform at local festivals and events in decoloniality and russian music 6 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii st. petersburg dedicated to the heritage and cultures of numerically small, indigenous peoples of northwestern russia and leningrad oblast. thus, talomerkit’s target audience predominantly consists of ingrians, enthusiasts participating in local celebrations in russia and neighboring finno-ugric countries, or those interested in the heritage of the indigenous peoples of northwestern russia. as a result, talomerkit is participating in the construction of an ingrian identity, musical and social, and in doing so aims to highlight the ethnic distinctiveness of the ingrian population of st. petersburg from the dominant slavic identity. even though inkerin liitto was founded by the ingrian finns, it also acts as the all-ingrian organization and does not separate its traditions from that of other ingrians—the izhors and the votes. similarly, talomerkit features the songs of all three groups in its performances. to form its repertoire, members of talomerkit mainly relied on archival materials, the studies and personal collections of olga konkova, and on the book народные песни ингерманландии [ingrian folk songs] compiled by eino kiuru, terttu koski, and elina kylmäsuu in 1974. published by the karelian branch of the soviet academy of sciences, this volume is one of a very few printed sources of ingrian music and the only collection of ingrian songs that was published during the soviet period. figure 1: imatra, finland. talomerkit (dmitri harakka –first left, vetka lappolainen – first row, second left, and aina jaokkola – first row, second right) with the dance group piirileikki at imatra päivä. 19 august 2018. photo published in talomerkit’s official facebook group on 9 september 2018. “traditions from the past are used not only to signify difference, but also to create a sense of continuity,” notes tina ramnarine in her monograph on finnish folk music [2003: 15]. in the case of ingrian traditional culture, as emphasized by decoloniality and russian music 7 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii the members of talomerkit and ingrian liitto, such “a sense of continuity” was forcefully interrupted: ингерманландская культура долгое время не развивалась, потому что не говорили, не пели. единственное чем поддерживали культуру—это религиозные богослужения, они практически не переставали осуществляться. даже в сибири люди молились в своих домах, захватывали из ингерманландии церковную утварь. в ленинградской области практиковалось даже такое, что мужчин пасторов не было (как должно быть традиционно) и тогда женщины исполняли роль проповедника—они собирались в домах, читали вместе книги. позже, когда появилась возможность слушать радио, слушали финский канал. поэтому все культурное наследие в архивах, а не в памяти людей. [ingrian culture has not been developing for a long time, because people did not speak, did not sing in ingrian languages. the only thing that supported the culture was religious services, which did not cease to be performed. they were done in houses, however, not churches. even ingrians in siberia continued to pray, supplying their houses with seized church utensils from their native land. in leningrad oblast, when there were no male pastors available (as it should be traditionally), women played the role of a preacher—they gathered in houses and read books together. later, when it became possible to listen to the radio, they listened to a finnish channel. therefore, the entire cultural heritage is now in the archives and not in people’s memory]. [jaokkola, lappolainen, and tikka 2019] starting from the time of perestroika, ingrians have been revitalizing traditional cultural practices despite interrupted knowledge transmission. one of the first finno-ugric autochthonous celebrations revived by the ingrian finns was the mid-summer festival juhannus. in an interview with the newspaper bumaga, one of the activists from inkerin liitto, susanna parkkinen, recalls that during the first years of juhannus’s official reappearance in ingria, the celebration attracted approximately two thousand people [chirin and kudriavtseva 2017]. “come, girls, to the bonfire”: mid-summer festival juhannus in summer 2018, when i attended juhannus, it took place in a valley near the oredezh river, in an area of leningrad oblast previously abundant with ingrian villages. although juhannus is the name given to the celebration of the summer solstice by the ingrian finns, nowadays, it brings together all finno-ugrians living in the st. petersburg region. usually, local performance groups of traditional ingrian dance and music participate in the festival along with guests from finland and estonia. juhannus 2018 was not an exception. the festival started around decoloniality and russian music 8 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii noon and went on until dusk, which allowed the festival to conclude with an old ingrian ritual—the dance around the bonfire. on one side of the valley, surrounded by fir trees and pines, stood the stage from which musicians, dancers, and speakers communicated with the audience. along the river, there were numerous tents selling merchandise, handicrafts, as well as traditional food, historical books about ingria, cds, and dvds of the performers. the open space in the middle was allocated for interactive entertainment, like souvenir workshops and traditional games. a group of women in ingrian costumes and flower crowns circulated the perimeter of the valley with the kantele hanging around their shoulders to entertain the idly lounging public with ingrian tunes. (9) figure 2: women in traditional costumes are playing tunes on the kantele while interacting with visitors at juhannus. photo taken by the author on 23 june 2018. when speaking about celebrations of juhannus in the late nineteenth century, susanna parkkinen explains that its format as a song and dance festival, which continues these days, was introduced by the ingrian composer mooses putro [chirin and kudriavtseva 2017]. however, in earlier times, it had a more ritual nature. for the izhors, for example, bonfires played a central role in the midsummer celebration, which they call jaani. olga konkova describes this ritual in her book about izhorians: decoloniality and russian music 9 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii [c]амые небывало красивые костры были у северных ижор на карельском перешейке. за две недели до праздника молодые пастухи из бревен и поленьев воздвигали башню высотой до 10 м! а рядом ставили несколько дровяных башен пониже. все костры обносились оградой с воротами, где все жерди были соединены берестой. и вот светлой ночью, на фоне еще не остывшего от заката неба, вспыхивало новое зарево: горели костры, пылала ограда и в воздухе, как огненные птицы, летали подожженные берестяные шары, сплетенные пастухами в длинные ночи перед яани. [the most unusual bonfires were made by the izhors of the karelian isthmus. two weeks before the celebration, shepherds would erect a tower from logs up to ten meters high, and several wood towers were lowered next to them. all bonfires were surrounded by a fence with a gate, where the poles were connected by birch bark. on the night of jaani, bonfires and fences were burned and emblazed birch bark balls preliminary woven by shepherds for the occasion flew in the air like fireballs. the bonfire was supposed to burn with a very bright flame, as a purifier of the human body and soul from evil forces and evil spirits. young people jumped over the bonfires believing that they would be cured of ailments, and if you jump high, then the bread will become tall and thick]. [2009a: 165] one of the songs that was sung at jaani to invite girls and women to the bonfire was “tulkkaa tyttäret tulelle”: izhorian russian english tulkkaa, tyttäret, tulelle vanat naiset valkkioille, kuulkkaa, naiset, kuin miä laulan, pankkaa päähä kui pajatan: kyl on heikko herran valta – kukko on kuuvvella talolla, kana kaikilla kylällä приходите, дочери, к огню, старые женщины, к костру, послушайте, женщины, как я спою, запомните, что скажу: худые же владенья барина – один петух на шесть домов, одна кура – на всю деревню. come, girls, to the bonfire, old women to the light! women, listen as i sing remember that i will say: the landowner’s vile possessions – one rooster for six houses, one hen for the whole village. (10) decoloniality and russian music 10 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii figure 3: lyrics of the song “tulkkaa tyttäret tulelle” in izhorian and russian languages [kiuru, koski, and kylmäsuu 1974: 78]. english translation by the author. this sonic enactment of the ritual was revived by talomerkit and now can be heard at the celebration of juhanuus. as i discovered after listening to talomerkit’s version of the song, the group adapted the lyrics from the version of “tulkkaa tyttäret tulelle” sung by the izhorian-votian singer nat’u lukina. lukina’s singing was recorded in 1968 by the editors of ingrian folk songs and published as number thirty-two in that volume [kiuru et al. 1974: 78–79, 495]. as mentioned in the commentary to the song, in earlier recorded versions, singers would add a line, “whoever does not come to the bonfire... let that woman give birth to a girl.” however, in the version sung by talomerkit, the singer simply ridicules the squalor of neighboring villages [kiuru et al. 1974: 495]. “tulkkaa tyttäret tulelle” was characterized by kiuru et al. as a calendar song, the vocal genre that belongs to ingrian kalevala-meter poetry, which was given its name after the publication of the finnish epic kalevala by elias lönnrot in the nineteenth century [1974; kallio 2010: 391]. other genres typical for this type of poetry in ingria were epic songs and medieval ballads, lyrical songs, lullabies, round-dance songs, wedding songs, and laments [kiuru 1974: 6–23]. (11) kiuru points out that ingrian calendar and wedding songs were performed in the villages of the soikkola peninsula in ritual contexts as late as the first few decades of the twentieth century. however, by the time of the publication of ingrian folk songs, those rituals were almost completely forgotten and remembered only in fragments by villagers of older generations [kiuru 1974: 9, 13]. although in ingrian folk songs, the editors provide only brief accounts of the singers, such as their date and place of birth, i was able to locate a more detailed biography of nat’u [natalya] lukina (1898–1977) via an open access digital project “votian and izhorian folk songs.” (12) according to finno-ugrian scholars paul ariste and hans-hermann bartens, lukina was born in the village of luutsa [luzhitsy] to a votian father and izhorian mother, speaking the votian language as her mother tongue. (13) after her marriage, lukina moved to jõgõperä [krakol’e]. (14) from interactions with lukina during the expeditions, the collectors wrote some reflections regarding her character and singing style: naťu was a good storyteller and a great singer. she spoke fast and would not repeat anything she said. folklore collectors have written beliefs and traditions, oral history and songs from her. naťu had a rich repertoire of ingrian songs, she was well versed in wedding rituals, and participated as a singer in weddings celebrated according to old traditions until an advanced age. she knew many more ingrian songs than she did votian ones and had learned the few votian songs in her repertoire mostly in her home village luuditsa. like the songs of duńa trofimova and oudekki figurova, naťu’s votian songs display considerable ingrian influences decoloniality and russian music 11 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii (ingrian features tend to emerge in the songs of those singers who have performed in both votian and ingrian environments). naťu also knew bawdy songs, but would not sing these to the collectors, as they were not decent. lengthy russian ballads constituted the majority of her repertoire. according to paul ariste, naťu enjoyed speaking about and crying over her difficult life. [ariste 1986; ariste and ergo-hart 2005; bartens 2012 quoted in kuusk 2015] (15) “tulkkaa tyttäret tulelle” is a calendar song with distinguishable characteristics of kaleva-meter style such as the narrow range of the melody and repetitive poetic devices like alliteration and parallelism. the song metrically belongs to a type of trochaic tetrameter with 5/4 groupings and their variations [kallio 2010: 399; saunders 2017: 33, 40; siikala 2000: 256]. according to my observations, melodically, talomerkit’s version is almost a replica of the archival recording of another izhorian-votic singer—anna kivisoo (born 1881), a contemporary of lukina. although talomerkit’s main intervallic and stylistic gestures are very similar to kivisoo’s, their vocal style in the album lacks microtonal ornamentations characteristic to kivisoo’s singing: figure 4: the first two lines of “tulkkaa tyttäret tulelle” sung by talomerkit (souva laiva cd). (16) the above descriptions of the old and new versions of the mid-summer festival, known among ingrians as juhannus and jaani, demonstrate some of the strategies that the local finno-ugric community implemented in recreating the “sense of continuity” mentioned by ramnarine in relation to traditional culture [2003: 15]. as shown in my analysis of “tulkkaa tyttäret tulelle,” the interrupted oral transmission of kalevala-meter songs resulted in a syncretism of musical and textual elements drawn from various sources and locales. this sonic decoloniality and russian music 12 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii reconstruction of izhorian ritual by talomerkit absorbed the legacy of many generations of ingrians, which presents a finno-ugric perspective on sociocultural environment in the st. petersburg region. ingervala: finno-ugric legacy and popular music although the trio named ingervala only appeared in public in 2018, its history began much earlier in the 2000s, when russian “ethno-folkers” started experimenting with celtic music. (17) georgii mazhuga, the founder, arranger, flutist, and electronics mixer of ingervala, shares his memories about that period of celtic obsession: в 1990-х—начале 2000-х был интересен жанр фэнтэзи, особенно про хоббитов… мои коллеги меня, возможно, как-то превратно поймут, но мое представление такое – где хоббиты, там и кельты, толкиен и так далее. на этой основе образовалось огромное количество команд в том числе, например, московская группа «мельница», которая абсолютно из этой «толкинутой» тусовки. [in the 1990s and early 2000s, people were fascinated by the genre of fantasy, particularly hobbits... my colleagues may somehow misunderstand me, but my idea is where the hobbits are, there are celts, tolkien and so on… on this basis, a considerable number of bands were formed, including, for example, a popular group from moscow мельница [melnitsa], which was absolutely from the “tolkienobsessed” crowd]. [mazhuga 2019] mazhuga further says that he became involved in that scene with the band минус трели [minnus trelligh], which he and his friends from st. petersburg founded in 2007. along with celtic music, minnus trelligh took up the scandinavian tradition, specifically swedish music. the engagement of the band in swedish tradition comes from mazhuga’s family history—his great-great-grandfather, carl fredric andersson, came to st. petersburg from stockholm in the nineteenth century to study architecture and continued his career in the russian empire. later, minnus trelligh gradually moved from an exclusively instrumental music format toward experimentation with vocals. those experiments led to collaborations with a choir from the swedish consulate and a singer, katya dolmatova. the alliance culminated in joint concerts and the recording of an album of swedish christmas songs, which was presented in their show at st. anne’s lutheran church, a popular venue for various art and music shows. eventually, due to artistic disagreement, some members of minnus trelligh established a separate band, ingervala, with a stronger vocal component. while still with minnus trelligh, mazhuga started contemplating the idea of including local finno-ugric musical material in their repertoire: decoloniality and russian music 13 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii в какой-то момент я подумал, чего ради мы будем играть какую-то историю, связанную с чужой музыкой? все равно в сша или великобритании будут играть лучше, потому что у них это в крови. [at some point, i thought, why are we playing the music of somebody else’s culture? anyway, in great britain, ireland, and the united states, musicians play this music much better because they have it in their blood]. [2019] in the early 2010s, the niche of local ingrian music arranged in the popular music styles was almost vacant. as mazhuga remembers, only the group конец лета [konets leta] was engaging with the music of the indigenous peoples of the st. petersburg region. however, mazhuga notes that the genre of the music produced by konets leta was stylistically close to the eclectic nature of “world music,” where ingrian elements are only ingredients in the melting pot of various musical traditions [2019]. mazhuga invented the name ingervala by merging the words kalevala and ингерманландия [ingermanland or ingria]. two members of the trio had professional music training: the singer, katya dolmatova, was trained as an ethnomusicologist-folklorist and the guitarist, alexander nikolaev, who replaced the co-founder of the band sergey bukreev, graduated from the st. petersburg state university of culture and arts. although mazhuga is the only member without a formal musical education (he graduated from the department of fine arts at the herzen pedagogical university), since his sophomore year in college he has been involved in the music scene of the city, playing the flute with different popular music bands. mazhuga shared with me that the initial idea of ingervala was to popularize the traditional music of the northwestern part of russia, which includes both finno-ugric and slavic songs [2019]. stylistically, the band has been moving toward the arrangements of traditional songs in the genre of electronic dance music, particularly dubstep and trance. as a newly established music group without a direct ethnic connection to ingrian culture, ingervala took a stand on discovering and reintroducing ingrian music heritage to popular music listeners. certain parallels can be observed between the steps taken by talomerkit and ingervala in repatriating the ingrian music legacy. both groups were forced to use only secondary sources in constructing their repertoires due to the disappearance of people who remembered ingrian oral poetry or instrumental music. according to mazhuga, ingervala attempted to go on an expedition to record some songs from one of the very few living native ingrians and bearers of ingrian oral tradition, but the woman got seriously ill, and the fieldwork was canceled [2019]. he also emphasized the scarcity of ingrian archival musical materials, especially those available for public use. like talomerkit, the collection ingrian folk songs [kiuru at al. 1974] serves as a principal source that the musicians of ingervala use for their arrangements. other sources that ingervala found useful in repatriating ingrian musical decoloniality and russian music 14 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii knowledge are the choral composition, unustatud rahvad [forgotten peoples], and a dissertation written by erik reid jones [2006], which is a detailed musical analysis of that composition. forgotten peoples is a collection of six cycles of a cappella choral music by estonian composer veljo tormis (1930–2017). this composition was written between 1970–89 and set to songs and languages of the livonian, karelian, ingrian, and vepsian peoples, “peoples whose language and songs have all but disappeared – ‘forgotten peoples’” [ecm records liner notes 1992]. at the time of writing, tormis perceived the cultures of karelians, ingrians, veps, and livonians as dying, and the songs included in the cycle were characterized by music critics as tormis’s “personal sound museum of a lost world” [reinvere 2017]. “у нас основной принцип – надо поиздеваться всласть над музыкой, что бы вообще никто не узнал! порушить все основы, позлить традиционалистов и консерваторов!” [our main principle is to fool around with music to our heart’s content, so it becomes almost unrecognizable. to break all foundations and annoy traditionalists and conservatives!] [mazhuga 2019]. those are the words of mazhuga regarding the level of distortion of the original musical material in ingervala’s arrangements. initially, having concerns about the reaction of native ingrians to the band’s interpretation of finno-ugric material, the musicians of ingervala sought approval from olga konkova, who encouraged the band to continue their work on promoting ingrian culture. in mazhuga’s view, who is a proponent of the modification of traditional music, the sonority of local finno-ugric songs is rather uncomplicated and could benefit from the involvement of arrangers, contrasting it to the development of irish music tradition: все восхищаются ирландской музыкой, но она такая продвинутая в том числе, потому что очень много народу, в том числе композиторов, внесли свой вклад. например, торла о’каролан. половина стандартов ирландской музыки написаны подобными людьми. а местная финно-угорская песенная традиция осталась нетронутой… этот материал интересно взять и как-то переработать. [everyone admires irish music, but it is so sophisticated because a lot of people, including composers, contributed to it. for example, turlough o’carolan. half of the standards in irish music were written by such people. but local finno-ugric music remained very raw. it is interesting to do something with it]. [2019] to enrich the knowledge of local finno-ugric traditions, ingervala also often collaborates with musicians of ingrian backgrounds. one of the band’s long-time friends and collaborators is ksenia kanevskaia–reshetova, an ethnic izhora, who often consults with ingervala about the musical material for its arrangements (see fig. 4). kanevskaia–reshetova is a self-taught singer of traditional ingrian songs decoloniality and russian music 15 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii who is interested in verse translations of ingrian poetry to the russian language and actively participates in local ingrian celebrations as a performer [kanevskaia– reshetova 2019]. figure 5: a screenshot of a photo of ingervala with oke kanevskaia (ksenia kanevskaia–reshetova), alexander nikolaev, katerina dolmatova, and georgii mazhuga at the revolution festival in st. petersburg. this photo was published on ingervala’s official facebook page on 15 april 2019. undarmoi ja kalervoi: izhorian oral poetry in the global context “undarmoi ja kalervoi” is the first finno-ugric song mazhuga and minnus trelligh decided to arrange, and later it became one of the group’s signature songs. it is an ancient runo song about family estrangement between the brothers untamo and kalervo and kalervo’s son kullervo. the cycle of runo songs relating to the story of kullervo is included in the karelo-finnish epic kalevala which was compiled by elias lönnrot and based on the oral poetry that he collected in finland, karelia, and ingria. the kalevala consists of “popular songs, ballads, charms, and runic poetry strung together into an artistic whole by the genius of dr. lönnrot” [billson 1895: 320–21]. the runo songs about kullervo were added to the kalevala in the second edition under the number thirty-one and were collected by lönnrot primarily from southern karelia and ingria [pentikäinen 1999: 40]. indeed, kullervo was published in ingrian folk songs [1974] under the number five as an ancient izhorian epic song. as noted in the commentary, its story was collected in ingria in 1847 by finnish folklorist, linguist, and archeologist, david emanuel daniel europaeus [kiuru 1974: 489]. as early scholars of the kalevala noticed regarding runo songs about kullervo, “this group of stories has nothing at all in common with the rest of the kalevala story…” because “the kalevala is a mere patchwork of popular runes, but fortunately the decoloniality and russian music 16 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii original elements are themselves in existence” [billson 1895: 339, 322]. the story of kullervo describes “a quarrel between brothers which leaves one dead, the other the murderous guardian of the dead brother’s newborn son kullervo. the boy grows up to exact revenge for his family’s destruction but is himself destroyed by his discovery of his unwitting incest with a sister he did not recognize” [j.r.r. tolkien, verlyn flieger 2010: 211–12]. runo songs about kullervo that were based on izhorian oral poetry inspired many now widely known works of music and literature. one of the earliest and famous compositions based on this story is the symphonic poem, kullervo, by jean sibelius completed in 1892, less than fifty years after the publication of the second and final edition of the kalevala. another famous figure on whom the kalevala and the story of kullervo had a tremendous effect was j.r.r. tolkien. the first time tolkien discovered the kalevala was in 1911, at the time when “elias lönnrot’s compilation of finnish folk-ballads was a relatively recent addition to the world’s mythological literature” [j.r.r. tolkien, verlyn flieger 2010: 211]. “it has long been known from tolkien’s own comments in his letters that the finnish mythology of the kalevala had a powerful effect on his imagination and his legendarium,” which is explicitly evident in his two unpublished works “the story of kullervo” and “on the kalevala” [j.r.r. tolkien, verlyn flieger 2010: 211]. the most recent and internationally acclaimed work based on ingrian musical heritage is the above-mentioned tormis’s choral work, forgotten peoples, in which part of the cycle, called izhorian epic, closes with the song, “undarmoj ja kalervoi.” as mentioned earlier, the runo song, “unto ja kalervo,” with the same text is included in ingrian folk songs (fig. 5). the difference in spelling of the title can be explained by different linguistic approaches. the editors of ingrian folk songs used the characters of the finnish literary language to transmit the nonliterate language of izhorian oral poetry, in this case, the soikkola dialect [kiuru et al. 1974: 24]. tormis’s source is unknown, but he specifies that “the original texts have been adapted for the present purpose” by linguists from paul ariste centre for indigenous finno-ugric peoples at the university of tartu [1996: 57]. unto ja kalervo undarmoi ja kalervoi english translation mäni miisi kyntämähä, mäni miisi kündämähä, a man went to plough, maan rajoilla raatamaa. maan rajoille raadamaa. to till the face of the earth. kynsi kymmenän vakkoa künsi kümmenä vakkoa, he made ten furrows, ja vakkois sata vakkoo. ja vakkoi sada vakkoo, he managed a hundred furrows. decoloniality and russian music 17 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii ja vakkois sata vakkoa ja vakkoi sada vakkoa he managed a hundred furrows yhen kannon ympäriilt, ühen kannon ümbäril, around a stump, уhen kannon ympärille. ühen kannon ümbärille. around a stump. halkesi kanto kaheks, halkkeesi kando kaheeks. the stump split in two, halkesi kanto kaheksi – halkkeesi kando kaheeksi, the stump split in two and syntyi kaksi poikoilast. sündüi kaksi poigoilast. two boys were born. yks vaa unnoissa ylleeni, üks vaa unnoissa ülleeni, one of them grew up in undoila, toine kazvoi karjalas. toine kasvoi karjalaas. the other was brought up in karjala. (18) mikä unnoissa ylleeni, migä unnoissa ülleeni, he that grew up in undoila se ylleeni untarmoiks; se ülleeni undarmoiks, came to be called undarmoi, (19) mikä kazvoi karjalas i, migä kasvoi karjalaasi, he that was brought up in karjala se kazvoi kalervikoiks. se kasvoi kalervigoiks. came to be called kalervikkoi. figure 6: the lyrics of the runo song, “unto ja kalervo,” in the version published in ingrian folk songs (first column) and in the liner notes to the cd forgotten peoples by tormis [1992] (second column). the archival recording of the song was digitized and posted on the website of “the center for the indigenous people of the st. petersburg region.” (20) this version was recorded from an izhorian singer from the soikkola peninsula, ekaterina aleksandrova (1902-1986), one of the last bearers of ingrian oral poetry [konkova 2009a: 197]. notably, over time the kalevala became heavily nationalized and associated mostly with the finnish culture—thereby the impact of ingrian and karelian oral poetry on the formation of the epic has been somewhat curtailed. yet, most of the runo songs from the kalevala were collected in east karelia and ingria which eventually became the “holy land where artists, musicians, and literary men, not to mention troops of folklorists, had made pilgrimages to seek creative inspiration and to imbue themselves with the spirit of the kalevala” [wilson 1975: 141]. even though finns, karelians, ingrians, and veps are linguistically and ethnically closely connected, they have distinct self-identifications. such co-opting of the kalevala as a finnish epic erases the distinctiveness of those baltic-finnic decoloniality and russian music 18 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii peoples, a notion that heidi haapoja-mäkelä characterizes as “one of the dimensions of the finnish ‘colonialistic glances’” [2020: 7]. being surrounded by slavs for many centuries, ingrians and, to a lesser extent, karelians absorbed many cultural elements of ethnic russians, which is also reflected in their oral musical tradition. mazhuga highlights that in the process of ingervala’s creative thinking, their engagement with finno-ugric traditions was motivated by a search for local sonic color. by substituting a global celtic element in the band’s music with a local ingrian one, the musicians referred to tolkien’s source of inspiration—the izhorian runo song about kullervo. as the history of this song and its global adaptations reveal, despite the years of obscurity in its native land the izhorian heritage has been circulating in cultural spaces outside of ingria. nowadays, through the efforts of ingervala, it is experiencing a revitalization in a new sonority and finding its niche in a popular music soundscape of st. petersburg. concluding thoughts in this article, i offered several vignettes about finno-ugric cultural spaces in st. petersburg through the lens of the musical work of talomerkit and ingervala. in addition to calling for a recognition of ingrian knowledge as a constituent part of the st. petersburg cultural space, this article is an invitation to consider perspectives of decoloniality by reassessing the scholarly approach to studying russian music and culture. it is my hope that these two case studies, as an example of grassroots activism and cultural resistance, will contribute to decolonial epistemology and destabilize the slavic focus in anglophone russian music and cultural studies. as russian media artist and writer anna engelhardt noted, “[p]ost-colonialism is a struggle that doesn’t have ready answers, but which might inspire how we can search for them” [2020]. the ongoing aggressive war in ukraine and the russian political elite’s imperial ressentiment demands the integration of postcolonial thinking not only with respect to former imperial and soviet territories, but also to ethnic minority groups living within the russian federation. disputes over land possession in izhorian villages in the soikkola peninsula (21) and rosphotos’ cancellation of a photo exhibition dedicated to the persecution of the ingrian finns in the soviet union (22) demonstrate how multi-ethnic dialogues that would scrutinize colonial history and its effects have yet to be integrated into russian cultural discourse. in september 2022, the russian hip-hop artist, oxxxymiron (miron fedorov), posted on his youtube channel a video of a song, “ойда” [oida], that was filmed in his native st. petersburg. soon after its release, when the song had amassed millions of views, the russian organization, “лига безопасного интернета” [safer internet league], applied to the prosecutor general’s office to investigate the song for extremism. (23) a similar petition to prosecute oxxxymiron for extremism was published by “зов народа” [zov naroda], an advocacy group proclaiming its purpose as the “protection of russia and its peoples, development of its traditions, culture, morality, spiritual bonds and decoloniality and russian music 19 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii history.” (24) according to the petitioners, the closing words, “ингрия будет свободной” [ingria will be free], were used by oxxxymiron to divide russian society and to call for the “splitting off the city of st. petersburg or leningrad oblast from the territory of our country.” (23) contrary to such a statement, i interpret the phrase “ингрия будет свободной” [ingria will be free] from the decolonial perspective—to call for freeing ingria and ingrians from cultural suppression. on one hand, the title of the song “ойда” [oida] can be read as a compound word made of the first words of the chorus “ой, да заберите дом / ой, да поселитесь в нём / ой, да подавитесь в нём” [oi, da zaberite dom / oi, da poselites’ v nem / oi, da podavites’ v nem] [oh, take the house / oh, live in it / oh, choke in it]. on the other hand, it can also be viewed as a reference to a traditional ingrian runo song theme, “oi dai.” (25) like the russified title “oida,” a stylized female traditional polyphonic singing in the chorus can be heard as a slavicization of the traditional vocal practices of the region. while such analysis is only speculation, the statement that oxxxymiron made by releasing this song emphasizes russia’s decolonial agenda. oxxxymiron, who is not known for any ethnic connection to ingrians, joined the ranks of local musicians and activists like talomerkit and ingervala to give a voice to the culturally silenced finnougric ethnic minorities through music. notes 1 for more information about ingria and ingrians as well as for discussion of the russian term коренные народы [indigenous peoples] in the context of indigenous studies, see shatilova 2021. 2 this is information from talomerkit’s official group on vkontakte posted on 6 january 2016. the text was originally posted in the group, “ingermanlandia,” on vkontakte on 5 january 2016. 3 all translations from russian were made by the author unless otherwise noted. 4 lutheran ingrian finns celebrate christmas on 25 december and orthodox izhors and votes on 7 january. 5 kalevan päivä is known as finnish culture day and celebrated on 28 february in honor of the karelo-finnish national epic the kalevala. 6 laskiainen is celebrated about seven weeks before easter. the finnish name laskiainen comes from the word laskea meaning “descent.” according to finnish researchers, this relates to the idea of “lowering” or “immersing” into fasting (in finnish catholicism, lent begins after this day). easter received the name pääsiäinen, which means “exit” from fasting [chirin and kudriavtseva 2017]. 7 the summer solstice is celebrated on the day between 20 to 30 of june. the ingrian finns call it juhannus. the izhorian name of the holiday is jaani. eastern slaves call it kupala night or ivan kupala. 8 inkerin päivä is celebrated in honor of the wife of yaroslav the wise— the swedish princess ingigerd (ingrid, inkeri) on 5 october. decoloniality and russian music 20 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 9 the kantele is a plucked zither of balto-finnic peoples. 10 translation to english was made by the author from the russian version of the text provided in ingrian folk songs [1974]. 11 if the songs of kalevala-meter poetry are found mostly in the repertoire of izhors and votes, the rhymed songs are attributed to ingrian finns who brought them from savo province in finland and the vyborg district [kiuru 1974: 19]. by the beginning of the twentieth century, the ancient runes were almost forgotten by ingrian finns and had been replaced by rhymed singleand multi-verse songs of the so-called “new style” brought by ingrian finns from finland and which were later heavily influenced by styles of the neighboring ethnic russians [kiuru 1974: 19]. 12 the “votian and izhorian folk songs” digital project presents a selection of recordings of izhorian and votian folk songs from several vocal genres. in addition to archival recordings, translations of lyrics to the russian and english languages, and comments about the melodic details and historical context of the songs, the website contains short biographies of izhorian and votic singers: http://www.folklore.ee/pubte/eraamat/vadjaisuri/en/index. 13 luutsa is located in the kingiseppsky district of the leningrad oblast. 14 krakol’e was a village in the kingiseppsky district in leningrad oblast. now, it is a part of the ust-luga village. 15 in this quotation, the authors use the term “ingrian” to refer to izhors. there is a lack of consensus among scholars regarding the usage of the word “ingrian.” some associate “ingrians” only with the ingrian finns [karanov 2015; rappu 2008], some with the izhors [kuznetsova, markus, and muslimov 2015; kalinitchev 2011; kurs 1994], while still others identify all of the indigenous population of ingria as “ingrians” [nissilä 1961 and grünthal 1997 quoted in rappu 2008]. in this article, i use “ingrians” as a common name for all three groups (the votes, the izhors, and the ingrian finns) that are associated with the historical territory of ingria. 16 the music transcriptions are made by the author. 17 this term was used by mazhuga in an interview with the author [2019]. based on my observations, the term “ethno-folk” is ambiguous in the russian context and mostly relates to the fusion of contemporary genres with traditional music. those fusions became popular in the 1990s in many former soviet republics and russia. “ethno-folk” can refer to both the genre of “world music,” when musicians adapt the traditional musics of other cultures and to the genre of ethno-music which, in the ukrainian context, as described by maria sonevytsky, is the combination of “local sonic markers” and “global popular music styles” [2019: 7]. 18 a different spelling of karelia. 19 also spelled untamo. in the note to the izhorian runo song, kiuru et al. indicate the alternative spelling—unttoi as a short version of undarmoi and kalervoi as a short version of kalervikko [1974: 261]. 20 http://kmn-lo.ru/document/1410902985.mp3 (consulted june 2, 2020). decoloniality and russian music 21 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 21 the construction of the international trade port of ust-luga in leningrad oblast, the land inhabited by the izhors and votes, is perceived by the indigenous population as a threat to their traditional way of living and can result in elimination of some of the votic villages. for more information on the topic see the articles of радио свобода: https://www.svoboda.org/a/26615458.html and the platform заповедник: https://zapovednik.space/material/more-eto-kak-chlen-semi (consulted june 1, 2022) 22 for more information of the topic see the note in the village: 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anna-leena. 2000. “body, performance, and agency in kalevala runesinging,” oral tradition 15(2): 255–78. spivak, gayatri chakravorty, nancy condee, harsha ram, and vitaly chernetsky. 2006. “are we postcolonial? post-soviet space,” pmla 121(3): 828–836. tolkien, j. r. r and verlyn flieger. 2010. “‘the story of kullervo’ and essays on kalevala,” tolkien studies 7: 211–278. tormis, veljo. 1996. vepsa rajad: viies osa sarjast unustatud rahvad: tsükkel vepsa rahvalaule segakoorile [vepsian paths: the fifth part of the series forgotten peoples: a cycle of vepsian folk songs for mixed chorus]. music score. helsinki: fazer: warner/chappell music finland. tormis, veljo, tõnu kaljuste, and eesti filharmoonia kammerkoor. 1992. forgotten peoples. cd. münchen: ecm. tlostanova, madina v. and walter mignolo. 2012. learning to unlearn: decolonial reflections from eurasia and the americas. columbus: the ohio state university press. tlostanova, madina. 2015. “can the post-soviet think?” intersections. east european journal of society and politics 1(2): 38–58. decoloniality and russian music 24 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii wilson, william a. 1975. “the ‘kalevala’ and finnish politics,” journal of the folklore institute 12(2/3): 131–155. folklorica 2016 reviews folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 65 kononenko, natalie. ukrainian epic and historical song: folklore in context. toronto: university of toronto press, 2019. acknowledgements, introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. xiv+330. $85.00 (cloth). isbn 978-14875-0263-8. natalie kononenko’s latest foray into the traditional songs of ukraine draws readers into the history of mendicant bards, their traditional songs and the culturehistory contained within them. �e work ostensibly focuses on epic songs (dumy), but genre boundaries (which are never so clear to begin with) are forsaken here to a higher cause. while most specialists will argue with the claims made about the novelty of the theory supporting this work (p. 41-43), the true innovation here lies in formatting and presentation. rather than categorizing the dumy and other songs into corpora or genera and isolating them into stock, numbered lists, kononenko has inventively opted to embed the songs into a historical treatise focused on the lives of the common people who were largely the singers and subjects of the songs. �e resultant book presents a wolfian social history on the lives of kozaks (an intentional fresh spelling of the familiar word [p. 18]), blind bards, and peasants, garnished with the songs whose content and context dictate the flow of the narrative. it is a refreshing and engaging format which will no doubt be repeated by others in future publications. with the songs as guides, the chapters explore the history of the dumy, as well as their singers, subjects and collection. chapter one focuses on the history of the study of the dumy, outlines their general tone and character, and discusses their (predominantly thematic) relation to other oral epics. chapter two explores the history of the genre itself, the social context which birthed and fostered the art, as well as the lives of the bards (kobzari and lirnyky) who sang them. from here the book enters into a focused overview of the historical circumstances that undergird the subject-matter of the songs: the turko-tatar slave trade in ukraine and the role that bondage or its threat plays in the songs (p. c3); the historical and social conditions that spawned the kozaks (p. c4), and their later formalization under the leadership of bohdan zynovyi khmel’nytskyi (p. c5); as well as the daily conflicts and family strife of conventional life in the period after khmel’nytskyi’s death (‘�e ruin’) that influenced the most popular songs of the 19th century (p. c6). �e book concludes with an epilogue that begins as a personal reflection by the author on the role that epic songs have played in her own life, but continues into some very thoughtful consideration about the purpose of epic singing and the psycho-social role that it plays in society. �e historical material presented throughout the book is focused and comprehensive while remaining digestible for the lay diaspora audience at whom the text is predominantly aimed (p. 40). readers are given a solid overview of all the necessary topics without being over-burdened with dense terminology or theory. �is is not to say that scholars will not appreciate the linkages provided between the historical contexts and their nuanced echoes in the songs. at times these historical surveys are very comprehensive, particularly discussions of the social structure of the turkish slave trade—including some highly insightful and folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 66 pointed discussion on the role of language in the integration of slaves into ottoman society (147-9)— (p. c3), kozak maritime warfare (p. 192-205), and the history of the khmel’nytskyi uprising (p. c5). �e work is also peppered with allusions to modern film interpretations of the songs as well as reflections on the history and folklore surrounding russian and soviet efforts to suppress them, all further testament to the breadth and depth of ways in which kononenko has engaged with these traditions through her career. for those predominantly concerned with the song translations, the book offers beautiful, contemporary english-language renditions of one multiform of all 33 dumy found in kateryna hrushevska’s 1927-31 collection, as well as 16 historical songs, five ballads and seven sundry minstrel songs. eight of the songs presented (six begging/religious songs and two historical songs) are drawn directly from kononenko’s 1998 book ukrainian minstrels and the blind shall see with minor emendations to the translations; the rest are novel to this text. for those who cannot access the dumy in their original language, it is a pleasure to find here four multiforms of songs published in the author’s earlier work which serve well for comparative purposes. �ere are some small issues with the text that stand out: many of the englishlanguage terms could use glosses (i found myself wondering, for instance, which ukrainian word has been replaced by the english ‘duke’ on pp. 186-91) and the text is not free of minor errors. �e inclusion of the babylonian myth, the enûma eliš, in an overview of oral and written epics feels misplaced (p. 24) and one can only wonder why it was necessary to tell readers which dumy collections the author owns copies of (p. 38-39). on a more fundamental level, one feels at times that the strong adherence to a cultural-historical approach in this work falls short of providing a complete understanding of the songs. kononenko has done a fantastic job of addressing the shallower historical ‘fossilizations’ (p. 41-42) of fourteenthto sixteenth-century ukrainian experience that were retained in the dumy, but has opted not to plumb deeper levels that she is well acquainted with for the sake of a simplified approach. one is reminded of david bynum’s criticism of early proponents of such research: many oral traditional tropes simply have much deeper roots than the cultural milieu in which they are found and efforts to ground them with only one group (as cultural practice or detritus) must be forced. speaking horses (p. 180-181), unsuspecting heroes dressed in rags (p. 172-175), and heroes felled in foreign wars who are described by compatriots as having married foreign maidens (p. 113-114) are all reduced in explanation here to specifically ukrainian phenomena, when all appear in a wide range of eurasian epic traditions and other lore. in fact, every one of these tropes is very common in south slavic epos and presents fertile grounds for comparative research. a critical use of such folklore insights would not detract from the book’s aims, but rather enhance them by revealing ukrainian bards as local artists in a grand tradition. �ese criticisms, however, will likely not concern the average reader who will find in this book a careful handling of the complex historical events and conditions which lend necessary context to the dumy so adeptly translated here. reviews folklorica 2018, vol. xxii 67 �e text is bound in a beautiful, crimson cloth and the university of toronto press has bequeathed it an eye-catching kozak depicted on the dust jacket. �e quality of the binding and the reasonable price mean that the book should find a ready home in the libraries of both scholars and enthusiasts. �ose ukrainians in diaspora who look to the dumy as, in kononenko’s words, ‘talismans’ (p. 7) of their cultural identity will find in this book a fuller and renewed appreciation for dear and familiar traditions. dorian jurić mcmaster university fruitvale, canada folklorica full 2025 isidor levin and tajik folklore studies folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 109 reports isidor levin and tajik folklore studies: a brief biographical sketch of a forgotten folklorist ravshan rahmoni national university of tajikistan dushanbe, tajikistan isidor haimovich levin (1919-2018) was an important scholar of structuralist methods in folklore studies, who guided the classification and systematization of folklore texts in the former soviet union. regrettably, his work is unknown to many folklorists in the present. this research note considers his biography and contributions to soviet folklore studies. levin was born into a jewish family on 20 september 1919 in the city of daugavpils (dvinsk), latvia and died on 24 july 2018 in hamburg, germany. at the age of six, his parents sent him to hebrew school. he later entered a four-year jewish gymnasium, receiving his diploma in 1937. his teachers were graduates of the university of jerusalem. in the same year, levin entered the university of tartu in estonia to study judaism. the department of jewish studies in tartu had been organized at the suggestion of the world-famous physicist albert einstein to save jewish science in europe, which had been destroyed by the nazi party in germany. levin ended up studying in two departments: the department of jewish studies in the faculty of philosophy and the department of comparative anthropology in the faculty of religion. in tartu, classes were held in german, which levin spoke well. at the university, he wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to study biblical and oriental studies with the well-known scholar uku masing (1909-1985)—orientalist, folklorist, philosopher, philologist, poet, and translator—but levin first had to learn estonian. levin mastered the language during his first two semesters in tartu. in those years, levin was also able to study with the famous semitic studies scholar, lazer gulkovich, who had come to tartu from the university of leipzig after the nazi rise to power. finally, and perhaps most significantly, in tartu levin was a student of comparative world and estonian folklore with walter andersen (1855-1962). anderson at the time was perhaps the leading global researcher of folktales and knew over forty languages. he was also the foremost scholarly representative of the finnish estonian historical-geographical school; he had distinctive views about folktales and their transmission and repetition. anderson importantly even conducted experiments to examine the texts of spoken prose, especially of folktales [1951; 1956; venediktova 2019]. in total, levin’s education in tartu came from the most prominent and prolific scholars of his time, many of them steeped in philological methods. levin not only spoke multiple languages, but he also became familiar as a philologist with a range of language families: baltic, germanic, romance, slavic, finnoisidor levin and tajik folklore studies folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 110 ugric, and ancient and modern sami languages. he graduated from the university of tartu in 1941 and continued his life there after estonia was occupied and annexed by the ussr. when world war ii began in 1939, jews, of course, were severely under threat from the nazis. in estonia, levin at the time was a tenant in the house of his teacher and tutor, masing. in 1942, at the wannsee conference in which the nazis planned their “final solution” to deport and eventually murder the jewish populations of europe, they noted that few jews remained in estonia. however, at that time levin was at least one of them. masing, along with his wife and a few friends, risked their lives to hide levin from the nazis. later, levin recalled in his memoirs, entitled “from the treasures of my life and thoughts,” that whenever there was news of nazis coming, masing would hide levin. once, he was taken to a sheepfold and remained there until the police left. he wrote that at that time “every day, every hour, every moment could have been the last for me” [2009]. however, in 1942 levin was taken prisoner by the estonian government. he spent three years living under assumed names and enduring terrible suffering in various prison camps: pechora prison, tartu camp, tallinn prison, and eventually stutthof concentration camp near gdansk. in each case, his knowledge of baltic languages saved him; he always claimed to be from estonia. on many occasions, he didn’t even provide his real name. when the police asked him during his arrest which state he was fighting against, levin shrewdly replied, “i am not against any state. i consider myself a subject of the god of the gospel” [2009]. the ethnographic lessons that he had learned at the university of tartu were useful in prison as he met people from different nationalities. he was both internally and externally cautious; several fellow prisoners recognized him, but levin was always vigilant and quickly found ways to tell them in private that they did not know each other. levin’s knowledge of german helped him to survive because he was able to fill out prisoners’ paperwork as an interpreter. after much suffering, on 8 march 1945 approaching soviet troops compelled levin’s nazi jailers to flee, stranding stutthoff’s prisoners. levin recounts in his memoirs that he could have stayed in poland, but that the city of tartu called to him. he spent some time in poland, sick, hungry, and wounded, among prisoners and other refugees. soviet occupying forces did not know polish, and thus in 1945 levin began working as an interpreter for soviet soldiers and only with great difficulty eventually returned to tartu. in estonia, he learned that his parents and all his other relatives had been murdered by the nazis in latvia in 1941. in 1945 in tartu, levin had a pleasant reunion with masing, but levin was again arrested, this time by soviet authorities for being an alleged nazi collaborator. he spent another year in prison until he was eventually proven innocent and released [levin 2009]. from 1946-1947, levin studied law at the university of tartu and then devoted himself entirely to folklore research. levin went to leningrad in hopes of matriculating into the institute of folklore at the ussr academy of sciences for postgraduate studies. folklorists vladimir propp and mark azadovsky administered his comparative folklore exam in 1947 and were amazed by his isidor levin and tajik folklore studies folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 111 knowledge of folklore scholarship [kostjuchin 2016: 997]. however, soviet authorities were unable to accept his diploma from tartu, so levin instead studied russian language and literature at the leningrad pedagogical institute named after herzen from 1952 to 1955. from 1956, levin worked as a researcher at the leningrad institute of germanic studies. levin already entered soviet folklore studies in leningrad with his own unique theories and comparative and structuralist methods regarding the stratification of texts, text variants, and the identification of tale types. he had cultivated this approach during his time studying in tartu from 1937 to 1941. it was only during the late 1940s and 1950s that he began to put these ideas into practice. although soviet folklorists and literary critics highly appreciated his theoretical knowledge, levin could not work as a folklorist in the soviet union until he earned a postgraduate degree. turning to ancient sources, levin spent years writing his dissertation. after significant work on the history of one ancient babylonian tale type (aath 537 or aath 222+b+313 b), he wrote a thesis entitled “etana. sumerian-akkadian legend. source research,” a summary of which appeared in fabula in 1966 [levin 1966]. he eventually defended his thesis in 1967 [levin 1967]. levin’s student, vera venediktova [2019], argues that aath 537 is among the oldest folktales in the world. the etana legend concerns the folkloric sumerian king etana, who flew into the sky on the wings of an eagle. etana’s life and bravery attracted the attention of ancient poets and singers. levin found traces of written works and oral tales about etana in the historical plots of various ancient jewish, persian, and european medieval literatures. to analyze the legend, he engaged in deep source study, examining 400 variants of folkloric texts from around the world. levin’s thesis was an important contribution to folkloristics. at his defense, he was awarded the title, candidate of philological sciences. moreover, a few months later members of the institute of oriental studies of the ussr academy of sciences unanimously accepted his thesis as a doctoral dissertation, and levin was recognized as a doctor of philological sciences. his extensive knowledge and deep and accurate research were highly praised by important soviet folklorists such as azadovsky, propp, and viktor zhirmunsky, orientalists like igor dyakonov and iosif amusin, literary critic and translator efim etkind, and others [levin 1967; venediktova 2019]. from 1966 to 1984, levin headed the гурўҳи табақабандӣ ва пажуҳиши сохторшиносии матнҳои [group for the classification and structural research of texts] in the folklore fund at the institute of language and literature named after rudaki of the academy of sciences of the republic of tajikistan. under levin’s supervision, folklore texts that were collected during fieldwork expedititions from across the tajik ssr and continguous persian-speaking areas were organized according to international standards and levin’s own specific methods. each folklore text in the collection, both small and large along with their variants, was individually identified. after this process was complete, under the leadership of rajab amonov and using levin’s methods, the folklore fund began work on a multi-volume publication that catalogued all of the texts in the collection: isidor levin and tajik folklore studies folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 112 куллиёти фолклори тоҷик [compendium of tajik folklore]. levin compiled several volumes of the compendium, including the first volume, published in 1981 in moscow: куллиёти фолклори тоҷик. масалҳо ва афсонаҳо дар бораи ҳайвонот [compendium of tajik folklore. proverbs and fables about animals]. levin authored a detailed russian-language introduction to the work along with tale texts both in tajik and russian. the compendium contains several items particularly useful for researchers working on the spread of tajik folklore, including lists of tale types, performers, and textual forms; maps that included the geographic distribution of texts; and related indexes [levin, rabiev, and iavich 1981]. levin’s approach attracted the attention of folklorists from other soviet republics and, as a result, levin ultimately guided the classification of archival holdings of armenian and other caucasian folklore materials using the same approach. at a conference in chisinau, moldova put on by the ussr academy of sciences, amonov and levin gave a well received presentation entitled, “таҷрибаи таҳияи куллиёти фолклори тоҷик” [experience with the compilation of the compendium of tajik folklore] which was later published as a book chapter [amonov and levin 1984]. another of levin’s key contributions is on the classification, quantitative analysis, and structure of the anecdote, which he completed in the 1980s but was only published years later in 2007 as a continuation of the compendium: куллиёти фолклори тоҷик ҷилди ii (латифаҳо) [compendium of tajik folklore volume ii (anecdotes)]. the book offers a detailed introduction to the collection of tajik anecdotes and makes important contributions to folklorists’ understanding of genre theory and classification. although additional volumes of the compendium appeared in 1981, 1986, 1992, and 2007, all using levin’s innovative methods, unfortunately their publication was uneven and scattered. in total, these works offer the clearest portrait of levin’s structuralist theories about the organization and stratification of folklore texts. this work was perhaps even more influential in shaping the scholarship of many other prominent folklorists in tajikistan [iavich 1986; rabiev 1986; ulugzade 1986; shermuhammedov 1987; tilavov 1989; isroilova 1999]. levin published over 150 individual pieces of scholarship. he especially engaged in the study of folktales globally, paying particular attention to their interpretation and typological analysis. he considered armenian, dagestani, turkish, avar, ossetian, abkhazian, and principally tajik folktales, as well as ancient aramaic narrative repertoires. he translated collections of caucasian, armenian, abkhazian, russian, and tajik folklore [levin 1978; 1982; 1984; 1986], and additionally he wrote articles on the history of science and scholars such as annist, afanasev, azadovsky, masing, and propp. he published articles in the popular press on the german language, hebrew, the history of religion, philosophy, and historical events of which he was a part. levin was a founding member of the international society for folk narrative research (isfnr) and was awarded the order of the white star, fourth degree, by the president of isidor levin and tajik folklore studies folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 113 estonia in 2001. he additionally was a recipient of the peter italia prize (1987) and the friedrich gundolf preis (2004). from 2006 until the end of his life in 2018, levin lived with his wife gisele schenkovitz in hamburg, germany. regrettfully there has been little englishlanguage scholarship on levin’s contributions to folklore studies, though portions of his memoirs have been published in estonian, yiddish, and russian in internet publications. translated by benjamin gatling. bibliography amonov, rajab and isidor levin. 1984. амонов, раҷаб и левин исидор. “опыт создания свода таджикского фольклора” [experience of creating the tajik folklore collection]. in фольклорное наследие народов ссср и современность [folklore heritage of the peoples of the ussr and modern times]. кишинёв: ан ссср. 382-387. anderson, walter. 1951. ein volkskundliches experiment. helsinki: suomalainen tiedeakatemia. ———. 1956. eine neue arbeit zur experimentellen volkskunde. helsinki: suomalainen tiedeakatemia. iavich, mirra. 1986. явич, мирра. “таджикские сказки о животных” [tajik tales about animals]. in опыт количественного анализа таджикского фолклора. [experience in the quantitative analysis of tajik folklore]. бозор тилавов, ed. душанбе, дониш, 9-68. isroilova, t. 1999. исроилова т. таджикские четверостишия (опыт количественного анализа содержания корпуса рукописей). автореферат диссертации на соискание ученой степени кандидата филологических наук. [tajik quatrains (an attempt at quantitative analysis of the contents of a corpus of manuscripts). abstract of a dissertation for the degree of candidate of philological sciences]. душанбе. kostjuchin, evgenij. 1996. “levin, isidor,” in enzyklopädie des märchens: handwörterbuch zur historischen und vergleichenden erzählforschung, vol. 8. rolf wilhelm brednich, heidrun alzheimer, bausinger, wolgang brückner, daniel drascek, helge gerndt, ines köhler-zülch, klaus roth, and hans-jörg uther, eds. berlin, de gruyter, 997–999. levin, isidor. 1966. “etana. die keilschriftlichen belege einer erzählung. zur frühgeschichte von aath 537 (=aath 222+b+313 b). eine textkritische erörterung” [etana. the cuneiform evidence of a narrative. on the early history of aath 537 (=aath 222+b+313 b). a text-critical discussion]. fabula 8: 1-63. isidor levin and tajik folklore studies folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 114 ———. 1967. левин, исидор. этана. шумеро-аккадское предание. источниковедческое исследование [etana. sumerian-akkadian tradition. source study]. ленинград: ан ссср. ———. 1978. märchen aus dem kaukasus [fairy tales of the caucasus]. düsseldorf-köln: hugendubel. ———. 1982. armenische märchen (die märchen der weltliteratur). [armenian fairy tales (the fairy tales of world literature)]. düsseldorf-köln: diederichs. ———. 1984. zarensohn am feuerfluss. russische märchen von der weißmeerküste [tsar's son at the river of fire. russian fairy tales from the white sea coast]. kassel: erich röth. ———. 1986. märchen vom dach der welt [fairy tales from the roof of the world]. düsseldorf-köln: diederichs. ———. 2007. левин, исидор. куллиёти фолклори тоҷик ҷилди ii (латифаҳо) [compendium of tajik folklore volume ii (anecdotes)]. душанбе: дониш. ———. 2009. левин, исидор. “как исидор левин выжил в годы второй мировой войны: из копилки моей жизни и мыслей. воспоминания” [how isidor levin survived the second world war: from the [memory] bank of my life and thoughts]. memories.]. cited by https://muuseum.jewish.ee/stories/isidor%20levin%20elu_ru.pdf. (consulted 4 june 2025) levin, isidor, jalil rabiev, and mirra iavich. 1981. левин, исидор, ҷалил рабиев, мирра явич. куллиёти фолклори тоҷик. масалҳо ва афсонаҳо дар бораи ҳайвонот [compendium of tajik folklore. proverbs and fables about animals]. москва: наука. murodov, f. and s. fathulloev. 2007. ф. муродов, с. фатҳуллоев. куллиёти фолклори тоҷик.ҷилди vii. ҳамосаи гўрғулӣ. гўянда: одина шакар [collection of tajik folklore. volume vii. the gurguli epic. narrator: odina shakar]. душанбе: дониш. rabiev, dzhalil. 1986. рабиев, джалил “классификационое значение повествовательных сердств таджикской народнойпрозы” [classification value of the narrative center of tajik folk prose]. in опыт количественного анализа таджикского фолклора. [experience in the quantitative analysis of tajik folklore]. бозор тилавов, ed. душанбе, дониш, 67-134. shermuhammedov, bahrom. 1987. шермухаммедов, бахром. рецепция произведений таджикско-персидской поэзии: текстологические исследования. опыт количественного анализа вариативности [the reception of tajik-persian poetry: textual studies. an attempt at the quantitative analysis of variability]. душанбе: дониш. tilavov, bozor. 1989. тилавов, бозор. таджикские пословицы и поговорки. опыт количественного анализа таджиксокого фольклора. том 2. (исследование современного устного репертуара) [tajik proverbs and isidor levin and tajik folklore studies folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 115 sayings. an attempt at the quantitative analysis of tajik folklore. volume 2. (a study of contemporary oral repertoire)]. душанбе: дониш. tilavov, bozor, f. murodov, and k. khisomov. 1986. бозор тилавов, ф. муродов, к. хисомов. куллиёти фолклори тоҷик. зарбулмасалҳо ҷилди iv [compendium of tajik folklore. proverbs]. душанбе: дониш. ———. 1992. бозор тилавов, ф. муродов, к. хисомов. куллиёти фолклори тоҷик. зарбулмасалҳо ҷилди v [compendium of tajik folklore. proverbs]. душанбе: дониш. ulugzade, e. s. 1986. улугзаде, э.с. “таджикские народные четверостишия” [tajik folk quatrains]. in опыт количественного анализа таджикского фолклора. [experience in the quantitative analysis of tajik folklore]. бозор тилавов, ed. душанбе, дониш, 135-219. venediktova, vera. 2019. венедиктова, вера. “’без него наша жизнь была бы намного беднее': 20 сентября исполняется 100 лет со дня рождения исидора геймовича левина” [“without him our life would be much poorer”: september 20 marks the 100th anniversary of isidor geimovich levin's birth]. cited by https://evrejskaja-panorama.de/article.2019-09.beznego-nasha-zhizn-byla-by-namnogo-bednee.html. (consulted 4 june 2025) pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 25 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom jennifer boivin independent abstract the worldwide outbreak of covid-19 caused most countries to declare a national lockdown during the spring of 2020 to avoid the further spread of infection. by the end of april of that year, most large urban centers in the world faced empty streets, closed businesses, and an eerie absence of their human population. during the lockdown, a new legend emerged, largely popularized by the media and different social networks: around the world, wildlife was repopulating and reclaiming the urban space once occupied by humans. this article addresses wildlife tales that appeared in the media during the first major lockdown of the covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020. i argue that these stories share narrative patterns with other catastrophe tales, that they were created as a vernacular mechanism to cope with confinement, and that they were also a creative manifestation of human hope for a better post-pandemic world. introduction the year 2019 saw the birth of a dangerous foe that assaulted humanity and changed people’s behavior worldwide. strange, invisible, unexplained, and unpredictable, the covid-19 virus killed more than just people at risk like the elderly. it also killed the young, the rich, as well as doctors and nurses, who represented the victims’ frontline defense. within a few months, and with the help of society’s new mobility, the virus had reached every country on the planet leaving nearly no place untouched. virtual maps of the spread of the virus circulated on the web as most national headlines offered a daily count of the number of sick people and of the dead. the outbreak caused many countries to declare a national lockdown. by the end of april 2020, most large urban centers in the world displayed empty streets, closed businesses, and an eerie absence of their human population. (1) people in lockdown came to perceive the pandemic as an uncontrollable and destabilizing entity that equaled death, fear, and the unknown. like most pandemics, covid-19 was prone to a narrative construction process that spread worldwide with the help of the internet and social media. (2) these stories shaped the new reality of humans who were desperately looking for an explanation and for hope. this article addresses the wildlife stories that appeared in the media during the first major lockdown of the covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020. (3) these narratives were part of an ephemeral phenomenon that lasted several weeks during the lockdown and later completely disappeared from internet discussions. (4) i argue that these stories share narrative patterns with other catastrophe pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 26 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii narratives such as the flood myth, that they were created as a vernacular mechanism to cope with confinement, that they are an expression of humans’ anxiety with regards to global environmental issues and are a creative manifestation of human hope for a better post-pandemic world. these narratives circulated on english-speaking social media and news media platforms around the world and in specific internet communities. (5) benedict anderson [1983] argues that even if members of a community are not physically together (such as on the internet) they nonetheless form a community, albeit one existing on an imaginary level. based on the data collected, i noticed most members of these internet communities share some fluency in english, have access to an electronic device and an internet connection, are part of one or several social media networks, and are somewhat aware of global environmental issues raised by the covid-19 animal stories. therefore, one can assume most of the informants are from modest to highly educated middle-class or well-off backgrounds. because the population’s movements were reduced to a minimum during the lockdown, with meetings forbidden, and public spaces such as libraries, museums, restaurants, and archives closed indeterminately, social media platforms became essential to human communication. one of the only legal ways to engage with other human beings (and without masks) was through the internet. therefore, the covid-19 animal stories were a vernacular product of a society whose members were forced “to relocate from a real to a digital public life” [allison 2020]. this probably explains why the phenomenon existed exclusively on the internet. furthermore, as a scholar also in lockdown, the only legal way i could do research was through the internet, making it my ethnographic field. for this reason, i used fieldwork data gathered from a wide range of digital sources indiscriminately. this includes, for example, different official and non-official online newspapers and magazines, blogs, newsreel websites, and popular online platforms such as twitter, youtube, and facebook. while this research method is radically opposed to the traditional way of performing fieldwork, it has allowed me to fully experience contemporary netlore, or folklore transmitted through the internet [frank 2011: 9]. many scholars have written extensively about how the internet and social media platforms allow for the production and widespread transmission of folklore. (6) considering the blurred lines between the real and digital worlds, the images, videos, and other digital materials shared by users can be seen as a form of dialogue or everyday argument [fialkova and yelenevskaya 2001; hess 2009; andén-papadopoulos 2009; smith and mcdonald 2011; blank 2009; guo and lee 2013; milner 2013; peck 2014]. some even argue that the internet “is gradually assuming the role of reservoir of collective memory” [fialkova and yelenevskaya 2001: 64]. this makes social media a particularly rich source of social expression and vernacular data, especially during the pandemic lockdown. pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 27 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii covid-19 animal stories: creation, transmission, variation by march 2020, most locked-down populations experienced the outside world via a digitally framed reality and extraordinary news spread in the media. italy, one of the most affected countries in the world, was experiencing the return of its wildlife. indeed, many social media users and news platforms announced the return of dolphins in the venice canals. for example, canadian global news headlines reported that “dolphins return to italy’s coast amid coronavirus lockdown” and that “[n]ature just hit the reset button” [wray 2020]. in addition, a new york post journalist declared that “dolphins and other wildlife are now emerging in the country’s much-clearer-looking waterways” [woods 2020]. across the globe, gulf news dubai also argued that “one positive thing that has come out of [the pandemic lockdown] is how nature is prospering” adding that “before the outbreak, the canals were swarming with tourists and heavy boat traffic, and the city was struggling with a large number of people coming in and impacting the environment” [gulzar 2020]. most news articles were supported by a 30-second amateur video of a dolphin swimming near docks in an unknown location [wray 2020; woods 2020; gulzar 2020]. (see figure 1) all around the world, humanity gazed at this miracle happening because of the “lack of tourism and docking cruise ships” [wray 2020]. apparently, this caused the waterways to be much “clearer” than usual [woods 2020]. with 101,739 people infected and the number of deaths rapidly increasing, which resulted “in almost 50% of excess deaths from any [other] causes in march 2020,” italy was at that time one of the most severely hit countries in europe [megna 2020; alicandro, remuzzi, and la vecchia 2020]. the video of the dolphin swimming in venice was widely shared and came as a balm and comforting vision of life and nature overcoming death. figure 1: screenshot of @notlacazette’s tweet. [@notlacazette 2020] pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 28 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii soon, other animal narratives proliferated on the web. (7) according to a viral tweet, venetians witnessed the return of swans in their canal. despite its misleading claim—swans are regularly spotted on the italian coast—the initial tweet by a new delhi resident was widely shared by internet users [nayak 2020]. (8) around the time of the italian wildlife miracle, other animal stories were shared worldwide. for example, the washington post issued an article claiming that hordes of mountain goats were spotted wandering in the streets of llandudno, wales [mccoy 2020]. (see figure 2) meanwhile, in india, buffalos and a rare malabar civet were photographed in the empty cityscape [evon 2020; gill 2020]. other sources later claimed that wild cougars were strolling in the streets of santiago, chile and boulder, colorado [mccoy 2020; dapcevich 2020; mcdonnell and poblete 2020; rogers 2020; reuters tv 2020]. mallard ducks were also spotted in paris and wild pigs were seen under coronavirus closure in israeli cities and in barcelona [voice of america news 2020; backgrid 2020; getty images 2020; williams 2020; mccoy 2020]. in addition, deer were filmed wandering in the empty streets of polish and japanese cities, and orcas were observed in british columbia [daly 2020; spry 2020; rfe/rl 2020; kuebler 2020; travelweek group 2020]. these astonishing narratives even included “a group of elephants [that] had sauntered through a village in yunnan, china, got drunk off corn wine, and passed out in a tea garden” [daly 2020; spry 2020]. (see figure 3) finally, the covid-19 pandemic animal stories also included a bizarre street encounter in calabasas, california, between a lobster and american socialite kim kardashian [marine 2020; kardashian 2020]. (9) figure 2: mountain goats spotted wandering in the streets of llandudno, wales. [furlong 2020] pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 29 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii figure 3: screenshot of @spilling_the_t’s personal tweet. [@spilling_the_t 2020] according to most sources, it is the absence of human beings that allowed animals to repopulate cityscapes worldwide. within a few weeks, these narratives were shared across the planet with the hashtags #natureishealing or #earthishealing. (10) several images, real or not, supported the claim that the environment was generally better now that traffic and human activity had stopped and the presence of wildlife in urban environments was proving that. for example, one headline even announced that “[a]s humans stay indoors, wild animals take back what was once theirs” [mccoy 2020]. furthermore, television and news networks widely cited a tweet claiming that “[n]ature just hit the reset button on [humanity]” suggesting the creation of a “world without us,” or at least, a new order in which humans had no place [woods 2020; @lucadb 2020; wray 2020; mcnamara 2020]. these post-apocalyptic narratives were both daunting and wonderful. as communication scholar marcia allison explains: pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 30 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii [t]he discovery of coronavirus 2 (sars-cov-2) has played into cultural narratives of the consequences of unfamiliar pathogens erasing humans and the resulting dystopian future – crumbling urban infrastructures, overgrown flora, empty supermarket shelves, deserted urban centres, large predators roaming the streets and the remaining few humans reduced to prey. [2020] past the anxiety of humanity’s erasure and a conceivable guilt over environmental issues, the pandemic animal stories ultimately expressed the need to believe in nature’s recovery [daly 2020]. as they continued to thrive, the covid-19 animal narratives presented a subsequent popular hashtag, #wearethevirus, suggesting that the pandemic was a divine punishment from nature and that humanity deserved this fate for threatening wildlife and the environment. (11) for example, some internet users compared humans to a disease infecting the earth and mentioned that “it [was] time for payback” [debjyoti 2020]. (see figures 4-7) this idea was supported by several users, environmentalists, and journalists, who saw a link between the destruction of the environment and the emergence of diseases. for example, news platforms announced that covid-19 was a “stern warning from nature” [webb 2020; the newsmakers 2020]. others argued that “covid-19 [was] nature’s wake-up call to complacent civilisation [sic]” and even speculated that “these [environmental] changes indicated that some portion of humanity ought to die” [monbiot 2020; mcneill 2021]. finally, another news platform presented articles claiming that covid-19 was “mother nature’s revenge” punishing humanity for wildlife trafficking, believed at the time to be the cause of the explosion of the virus [weisman 2020; turtle conservancy 2020].(12) figure 4: screenshot of sunny randhawa’s tweet. [randhawa 2020] pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 31 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii figure 5: screenshot of debjyoti saha’s post. [debjyoti 2020] figure 6: screenshot of @thomasschulz’ tweet.[@thomasschulz 2020] pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 32 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii figure 7: screenshot of prade pradeep’s post. [pradeep 2020] a few weeks later, these animal narratives were criticized as part of the “‘infodemic’ of rumours [sic] and misinformation” that spread on the web during the pandemic [palma 2020]. for example, the images of dolphins were not taken in venice but in another location in italy [palma 2020]. the video of boars dated from 2019 and the malabar civet, a “critically endangered” species last spotted in the 1990s, was in fact a small indian civet, listed as “least concern” on the international union for conservation of nature’s red list [2015]. many of the examples of animals repopulating cities were also exaggerated, as most were already part of the urban environment prior to the coronavirus pandemic such as ducks in paris, goats in wales, indian civets in india, and orcas in british columbia [d’urso 2020]. covering these “fake” stories on news networks is not unusual. as andrew peck and trevor j. blank argue, “when mass media coverage of digital trends feeds back into the network, it might reify and spread those trends, occasionally turning viral hoaxes into widely practiced reality” [2020: 12]. (13) as we will see later in this article, these facts did not prompt social media users to delete their posts. interestingly, the most popular tweet linking to the national geographic article that exposed the fake animal stories was considerably less compelling than the stories it was referencing. (14) as the breaking news of this expansive scam circulated, a new form of narrative emerged, now based on humorous posts and memes, a form of “evolving tapestries of self-referential texts collectively created, circulated, and transformed by participants online” [philips and milner 2017: 30]. largely influenced by covid-19 animal stories, this new imagery claimed the return of imaginary wildlife to the environment. these included cows returning to the sea, semi-trucks pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 33 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii to the rivers, pizzas repopulating the forests of italy, gummy worms enjoying parks, and trolls returning to norway, to name a few. (15) (see figures 8-11) each of these images was accompanied by the words or hashtags #natureishealing or #wearethevirus, clearly mocking the earlier wildlife narratives and the people who propagated them. (16) this new form of folklore is what russell frank refers to as “newslore,” or folklore that comments on current events [2011: 7]. in this case, it developed in reaction to the covid-19 animal stories and their overtly positive claim that nature was healing. these memes contributed to creating another imagined community of opposing members who did not believe in the earth’s recovery. as jessica maddox argues, “[m]emes often operate as a form of collective identity using in-groups’ humor to become a shared social phenomenon, which underscores the groups’ ‘intricate social dynamics’” [2023: 142]. as we will see later in this article, just like the covid-19 animal narratives, the hashtags also expose society’s anxieties toward environmental issues, and while their criticism might seem fair, the ongoing animal narratives that emerged during the pandemic lockdown were an important vernacular mechanism used to cope with confinement and a creative manifestation of human hope for a better post-pandemic world. figure 8: screenshot of mark lee’s tweet. [lee 2020] pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 34 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii figure 9: screenshot of u/km8907’s reddit post. [u/km8907 2020] figure 10: screenshot of tri-state weather’s post. [tri-state weather 2020] pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 35 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii figure 11: screenshot of ida tolgenbakk’s tweet. [tolgenbakk 2020] covid-19 animal stories: narrative structure, genre, and function covid-19 animal narratives take root within a wider representation of human experience and were formed by established mythological patterns that were already present. covid-19 animal narratives share similar structural elements with other catastrophe narratives such as the biblical myth of the flood. the flood myth is a fine example of an etiological myth—a story explaining the origin of certain phenomena whose origin we do not control—and is one of the oldest myths in the world [dundes 1988: 2]. in the bible, it tells the story of noah and the ark [gen. 6-9]. god decides to provoke a flood to wipe out humanity from the earth after seeing humankind’s violence and treachery. god chooses a righteous man that is faithful to him (noah) to build an ark that would hold his family and two, a male and a female, of all living creatures, to repopulate the world anew after the catastrophe. at the end of the story, god promises never to send another flood of this nature and makes rainbows the sign of his covenant. while this narrative uses water as a background element, many stories worldwide, such as the story of sodom and gomorrah, are similar and present similar structural elements [kluckhohn 1969: 50-52]. in most versions, a natural catastrophe such as a flood, fire, or epidemic, wipes out the world or most of its population. this catastrophe is always a divine punishment that highlights humanity’s powerlessness and fragility. after the catastrophe, the survivors rebuild a better world. covid-19 animal stories, as presented in the media, share a similar structure to these catastrophe narratives. first, a mysterious coronavirus pandemic pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 36 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii appears and threatens humanity. images of empty cityscapes support the idea that human beings were wiped out from the earth. moreover, the hashtag #wearethevirus regarding wildlife’s “return” to empty cities potentially emphasizes that the pandemic was a punishment, created by a divine force— mother nature in this case—to punish human beings for the way they treated nature and the environment. this aspect of the narrative, which hans kelsen calls “the motif of retribution” is a common element of catastrophe tales and “one of the oldest ideas of humanity” [1988: 126]. finally, the hashtag #natureishealing presents an alternative world made anew that can be rebuilt by the survivors of the coronavirus. (17) while covid-19 animal stories share similar patterns to some biblical tales, covid-19 animal stories are also distinct from biblical catastrophe narratives due to their profane purpose. generally, myth is perceived as a sacred narrative that explains the creation of the world and defines humanity’s place in it [eliade 1963: 11]. myth is anonymous and collective, and its symbolic nature makes it dynamic, changeable, and open to interpretation [lule 2001: 4; philip 1999: 6; dundes 1984: 1; eliade 1963: 1-8; bidney 1966: 4]. in covid-19 animal stories, although mother nature acts as a god-like figure, she is not part of any religious morality. rather, the super powerful goddess is used in the story to explain the source of the plague humans must endure. for this reason, covid-19 animal stories could be seen as contemporary legends with contemporary environmental morals that present some mythic parallels found in a wide range of stories and cultures, rather than a classical myth. as gail de vos argues, “[contemporary] legends emerge as news with their described events or beliefs directly relevant to the audience even though the motifs and structure of the tales are quite old” [2012: xxi]. this use of tale patterns in contemporary media discourse is not an isolated example. (18) legends and archetypical figures are frequently utilized by internet users and journalists to explain certain events. as media specialist jack lule argues: sometimes […] in describing some experience, in reporting some event, reporters and editors draw upon a fundamental story of earthly existence, a universal and shared story of humankind, and they use that story to instruct, inform, celebrate, or forewarn. like tellers from every age, journalists can draw from the rich treasure trove of archetypal stories and make sense of the world. [2005: 104] following lule’s theory, we can argue that pandemic animal narratives were created as a warning about how humans treated nature and an expression of anxiety toward global environmental issues. this is not surprising as contemporary legends “often embody an emergency as well [as], dealing with an urgent social problem” [ellis 2001: xiv]. as everyday folkloric expression encodes broader cultural issues and often reveals social anxieties [phillips and milner 2017: 28], these animal legends remain significant in telling us about a social group in the context of repressive lockdown measures. arguably, at the pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 37 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii time of the pandemic, making sense of the world was a necessity. more than just cautionary tales, these narratives also helped with coping with confinement by offering the positive outcome of building a better tomorrow. however, the message these narratives presented remains ambivalent. indeed, using the hashtag #natureishealing, the narratives offer comfort despite an uncertain future. through images of wildlife reclaiming space made previously inaccessible to them, the legends propose a more balanced world between nature and humanity. however, the hashtag also remains ominous, as it suggests that nature is healing from humans because they are thankfully absent. furthermore, the humorous yet cynical memes also question the possibilities of nature healing and of a better tomorrow. while in the biblical flood myth, humanity survives because some humans are still worthwhile in the eyes of god; the animal narratives, on the contrary, present a world where humans do not seem to have found a place and where they are not in control. they create a sense of powerlessness and insecurity about the future and are thus more complex because they do not seem to offer any clear conclusion or solution for how to build a better world. one wonders if the solution, however, is not already implied in the message as minimizing humanity’s impact on the environment has been part of the global environmental discourse for several decades now. covid-19 animal stories were born out of the lockdown. therefore, they focus mainly on the reduction of movements (gas emissions) and activities (consumption) to create a more harmonious relationship between humans and nature. like the flood myth and other catastrophe tales, animal stories’ roles are to remind humanity of its own fragile existence regarding the power of gods or mother nature [lule 2001: 25]. in this way, the narratives ensure the cohesion of a group by creating social balance and by humbling humanity. this can be seen for example, in the extensive sharing of these stories on social media. for a moment, this participatory digital culture united all nations worldwide who were going through the same lockdown experience and witnessed a possibility of a human-less world. furthermore, the few who shared animal narratives online and understood the urgency of their message are those who are willing to change their habits, become stewards of nature, and create a better world, just as god chose noah and his family in the biblical flood myth. this is supported by allison’s argument that: “covid-19 has wrought into being human desires for a fresh start in regard to climate change, where reduced emissions bring hope to finally resolving the climate crisis” [2020]. the coping mechanism expressed by sharing these stories might explain the ambivalent reaction generated after people found out that they were “fake.” for example, one online magazine considered the viral story of drunken elephants to be “adorable” [weisberger 2020], even if false and some argued that “the apparent resiliency of the natural world is leavening a global tragedy with brief moments of wonderment” [mccoy 2020]. the feeling of hopefulness was also expressed by social media users to explain why they did not delete their posts after finding out that they were misleading. for example, kaveri ganapathy ahuja from new delhi, india, admitted not having created the tweet about the swans “returning” pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 38 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii to venice maliciously. she did not delete it either, mentioning that “[t]he tweet was just about sharing something that brought me joy in these gloomy times,” thus supporting the theory of the story as a vernacular coping mechanism [daly 2020]. she argued that “it’s still relevant because waters in venice are clearer than usual—a result of decreased boat activity—and that’s what matters” [daly 2020]. ahuja was not the only social media user to react this way. on march 30, 2020, british author robert woodshaw tweeted that “[o]n a positive note, at least nature is returning to our cities,” supported by a video showing a family of boars, “returning” to bergamo, italy [woodshaw 2020]. after finding out the video was from 2019, he reposted a note indicating that the information was misleading, mentioning he would be having a word with the friend who sent the video and suggesting that people should still enjoy the “unnewsworthy ligurian boars!” [woodshaw 2020]. woodshaw did not remove his tweet either. in an interview, woodshaw said: “if this were fake news about a potential cure, for example, i’d delete it immediately [but] i think we need lighthearted material such as this to help us through this ordeal” [d’urso 2020]. incidentally, several online reports mentioned that during the confinement, people were desperate for “scraps of joy amid all the gloomy mood” [d’urso 2020]. the nature of the covid-19 animal legends might also explain why they were perceived as positive. indeed, “[a]nimal and pet images play a key role in keeping internet spaces habitable, lighthearted, and fun” [maddox 2023: 3]. maddox believes that, in general, cute animal images and videos provide a tool for coping with the negative aspects of day-to-day life and internet cynicism [2023: 9]. this idea is consistent with covid-19 animal stories that feature wild animals, mostly mammal, and that are generally perceived as beautiful. interestingly, none of the stories mentioned pests living in urban settings such as rats or mice. they too probably thrived during the lockdown, but their presence arguably would not have provided any positivity. several researchers noted that people rejoiced when they shared animal stories posts and when they realized the number of likes and retweets they generated [felton 2020]. allison even considers, “[t]hese digital vignettes [to] have become an antidote to somber pandemic reporting” [allison 2020]. another element of positivity worth mentioning here is the symbol of the rainbow. although not directly linked to covid-19 animal stories, rainbow images were initiated on the web at about the same time as the legends. the images of the rainbow with the words “it will be alright” became a symbol of optimism and became a massive global trend. (19) within a few weeks, homes were decorated with drawings of rainbows, drivers put rainbow stickers on their cars, and internet users added photo frames to their profile pictures. perhaps done in an attempt at empowering humanity in the face of the pandemic, the slogan “it will be alright” suggests that a greater future was not just a possibility but a certainty. one cannot help but see a parallel with the rainbow of in the biblical myth of the flood that appears as a sign of comfort and a symbol of god’s protection. while not part of the animal narrative per se, the rainbow phenomenon is perhaps another way to elicit a positive outcome for society and a better tomorrow amid pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 39 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii the lockdown. therefore, keeping uplifting animal narratives alive despite knowing they were fictitious was legitimate because these legends, like the rainbows, helped people deal with the stress of the pandemic. in addition, this demonstrates that, even in our contemporary society, mythical themes and storytelling in general are essential to communicating social experience. covid-19 animal stories: continuity of tradition using mythical themes and legends in contemporary discourse, as in covid-19 animal stories, produces images that follow certain values, norms, hopes, and fears shared by the group that expresses them. according to anthropologist mihai coman these images are accepted by society precisely because they are symbolic and because they function the same way as societies’ mythological systems and rituals [2005: 46]. in myth in primitive psychology, bronisław malinowski argues that myth is important to society because it is the expression of a form of social faith, a living reality, and that it continues “to influence the world and human destinies. […] myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization” [1933: 78-79]. in that sense, myth is closely linked to the continuity of tradition and culture. malinowski also argues that it is alive in present-day lived experience to strengthen tradition [1933: 122]. media spaces also promote the continuity of tradition and culture. they are an important part of human culture because they are a means of communication as well as the symbol of modernity and global social transformation [peterson 2003: 2]. during the covid-19 quarantine, social media, television, and the internet became safety buoys for those whose social interactions were brutally altered and who were desperately trying to explain their situation and to predict the uncertain future. furthermore, in social media spaces, everyone is free to share or even create stories. in that sense, everyone can be a reporter or storyteller. this makes each sharing of animal stories or rainbows in media an active contribution to vernacular culture and offers the sharer an opportunity to feel empowered when facing an unusual situation. media both promote and preserve mass culture, which make them important vectors for the dissemination of culture, but also for market structuring and cultural production [durand 2005]. therefore, media as an imaginary space is a perfect location where mythical-influenced discourse can be formed [sumiala 2013: 3]. this puts media at the center of the social construction of reality. comparing mythmaking and television, communication scholar roger silverstone, argues that contemporary narratives borrowing from mythology are at the border between the known world and an unfamiliar reality: mythe et récits mythiques sont profondément impliqués dans la définition et le maintien de la réalité du sens commun, constamment à l’œuvre pour traduire et rassurer, à la frontière entre le monde familier et sûr du quotidien et le monde inconnu, incertain, qui s’étend au-delà [...]. et je soutiens que la télévision est l’expression contemporaine du mythe. chacune de ses formes—les journaux télévisés, les documentaires et les pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 40 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii feuilletons—travaille journellement sur la politique, la science, la vie privée, l’étrange et le provocateur, offrant des exposés du monde qui ont un seul objectif en vue: procurer du plaisir, fournir un réconfort. [1990: 217] [myth and mythical narratives are deeply involved in defining and maintaining the reality of common sense, constantly at work to translate and reassure, on the border between the familiar and safe world of everyday life and the unknown or uncertain world which is extended beyond […]. and i argue that television is the contemporary expression of the myth. each of its forms – television news, documentaries, and soap operas – work daily on politics, science, privacy, the bizarre, and the provocative, offering accounts of the world with one goal in mind: to provide pleasure and to provide comfort.] therefore, one can conclude that the animal narratives produced amid the coronavirus pandemic functioned as entertainment but also provided a comforting vision of a better world. our contemporary human experience expressed through the known structure of the myth helps us make sense of the world [lule 2001: 7; huisman 2006: 27]. mythology, as a narrative form, uses a collective heritage to generate stories that are negotiated, modified, and opened to interpretation as part of a larger social dialogue. through mythology and storytelling, society has the possibility to refine and redefine social values and order [coman 2005: 47-54]. in this sense, media is not only a place where human experience is shared but it also contributes to preserving tradition and, by sharing covid-19 animal narratives about the reconstruction of our world, each social media user actively participated in a larger storytelling construction meant to bring hope of a better future across the globe. covid-19 animal stories: the end of the story the coronavirus pandemic and the confinement of people during lockdown profoundly changed how people perceived themselves and the world around them. through mythical themes and storytelling, humanity expressed a new awareness of its own fragility. the ongoing animal narratives that emerged during the pandemic lockdown reminded us of our precarious existence regarding divine forces such as mother nature [lule 2001: 25]. in that sense, it strengthened our social cohesion by making us humbler as a social group. after the disappearance of the world as we knew it, animal narratives proposed its rebirth and introduced the idea of balance between humanity and nature in a better and stronger world. these stories allowed us to understand and accept our new reality. during confinement, the narratives of animals taking over cities and of nature healing its wounds offered an optimistic conclusion to the pandemic and a hope for a better post-pandemic world. mythical narrative themes thus found new ways of expression through contemporary media and new ways of social interactions. pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 41 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii therefore, each retweet and share of the “fake” animal story is an active contribution in the making of storytellers. these narratives are active recurrences in the contemporary sphere and patterns of meaning-making that should be seen as real demonstrations of spontaneous human communication strategies. notes 1 more than ninety countries had compulsory or recommended lockdowns, curfews, and quarantines. in total, more than 3.9 billion people or half of the world’s population were asked to stay at home to prevent the spread of the covid-19 virus [sandford 2020]. 2 for examples of the narrative construction process during pandemics, see [lee 2014; kitta 2019]. 3 a version of this paper was first presented at the folklore studies association of canada’s annual conference in 2021, which took inspiration from [boivin 2018]. 4 although covid-19 animal narratives disappeared after the lockdown, the general idea that they generated—mother nature taking revenge on humans because of how they treated nature and the environment—persists to this day. for example, on 13 july 2023 acquaintances mentioned local thunderstorm and tornado alerts at the local hardware store. they considered these events to be “normal” since we disregarded the earth and that “it was time for us to pay back” [boivin 2023]. 5 interestingly, scholars barbara myerhoff and jay ruby argue that “it is possible to see news journalists as ‘folk’ or naive ethnographers” [1982: 13]. 6 see for example, [kirshenblatt-gimblett 1998; dundes 2005; howard 2008; blank 2009; frank 2011; de vos 2012; philips and milner 2017; peck and blank 2020]. 7 these animal stories presented some common features: they were all about wild animals as opposed to pets, none of them were pests, and except for swans, most animals were mammals and are generally perceived as beautiful. 8 this person’s twitter account seems to have been deleted after she was denounced as the initiator of the first animal story. 9 whitney philips and ryan m. milner argue, “[b]y posting something obnoxious to an internet forum […] a person might be messing with their audience for a laugh. on the other hand, they might sincerely hold an absurd or outright contemptible opinion. both options are equally plausible, and, in most cases involving unknown strangers, equally unverifiable” [2017: 51]. since it is not clear if kardashian’s tweet was meant to be humorous or not, i include it nonetheless in my data. 10 lynne s. mcneil [2020] argues that hashtags should be seen as a form of folklore rather than just a word or phrase. 11 this hashtag already existed before the emergence of covid-19 animal stories. it generally accompanies comments and imagery related to environmental issues and animal rights. pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 42 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 12 james robert breen and pamela pensini [2022] argue that the anthropomorphizing of nature can improve attitudes toward pro-environmental behavior. 13 more on hoaxes can be found in [de vos 2012]. 14 it had received 6,700 tweets and around 16,000 likes as of january 2021. in comparison, posts describing “nature healing” and humanity as the “real virus” received over tens of thousands of retweets. they also received hundreds of thousands of likes [bosworth 2021; nayak 2020]. 15 for an analysis of pandemic “nature is healing” memes regarding the environment, see [bosworth 2021]. 16 the “nature is healing” jokes that circulated during the lockdown were deemed the “pandemic’s best meme” [mcneill 2021]. 17 it is important to mention that not all animal stories appearing during the pandemic follow this pattern. for example, one of them claimed that russian president vladimir putin released 500 lions to force people to stay indoors during the pandemic. rather than focusing on animals, this tale criticized putin’s repressive politics in general. another widely shared story was that of a humpback whale that appeared in the port of montréal in may 2020. this happened at a time when confinement was about to be lifted in the city. the unusual presence of the animal in town was not perceived as a miracle like animals “repopulating” empty cities, but rather as a curiosity. the whale died six days later of unknown causes [chattopadhyay 2020; remili 2020; thomas 2020; o’malley 2021]. 18 see for example, [lule 2001; lule 2005; frank 2011]. 19 other variations of this phenomenon included the words “everything will be alright,” “it will be ok,” “it’s gonna be ok,” “we will get through this together,” “stronger together,” and unicorns with a rainbow and clouds. it seems that it was first initiated in bari, southern italy [otte 2020]. 20 translation by the author. bibliography @lucadb. 2020. “venice hasn’t seen clear canal water in a very long time. dolphins showing up too. nature just hit the reset button on us.” twitter post, 17 march 2020. cited by https://twitter.com/lucadb/status/1239863383354224641 (consulted march 2021). @notlacazette. 2020. “thought i’d spread a bit of positivity for you guys. since the lockdown of venice without the pollution from boars the water has begun to clear up and a dolphin has been spotted in the canal for the first time in nearly 60 years!” twitter, 17 march 2020. cited by https://twitter.com/notlacazette/status/123986087211946704 (consulted march 2020). @spilling_the_t. 2020. “while humans carry out social distancing, a group of 14 elephants broke into a village in yunan province, looking for corn and other food. they ended up drinking 30kg of corn wine and got so drunk that https://twitter.com/lucadb/status/1239863383354224641 https://twitter.com/notlacazette/status/123986087211946704 pandemic, imagination, and the rise of the animal kingdom 43 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii they fell asleep in a nearby tea garden.” twitter, 18 march 2020. cited by https://twitter.com/spilling_the_t/status/1240387988682571776 (consulted april 2021). @thomasschulz. 2020. "wow...earth is recovering." twitter, 17 march 2020. cited by https://twitter.com/thomasschuiz/status/1239935787619115012 (consulted april 2023). alicandro, gianfranco, giusseppe remuzzi, and carlo la vecchia. 2020. “italy’s first wave of the covid-19 pandemic has ended: no excess mortality in may, 2020,” the lancet, 3 september 2020. cited by https://www.thelancet.com/article/s0140-6736(20)31865-1/fulltext (consulted march 2021). allison, marcia. 2020. “‘so long, and thanks for all the fish!’: urban dolphins as ecofascist fake news during covid-19,” journal of environmental media (1) supplement, august 2020: 4.1-4.8, (online). andén-papadopoulos, kari. 2009. “us soldiers imaging the iraq war on youtube.” popular communication 7 (1): 1-27. anderson, benedict. 1983. imagined communities: reflection on the origin and spread of nationalism. london: verso. backgrid. 2020. “ducks venture into the streets of paris, france, during the coronavirus epidemic (covid-19),” the telegraph, 31 march 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april 2022). wray, meagan. 2020. “dolphins return to italy’s coast amid coronavirus lockdown: ‘nature just hit the reset button,’” global news, 18 march 2020. cited by https://globalnews.ca/news/6697281/dolphins-italycoronavirus/ (consulted march 2021). microsoft word folkloricaprotest_ii_full_final_2022 07.27.22.docx belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 72 the code of presence: belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns exhibition report sasha razor independent scholar and curator abstract since the fraudulent presidential elections of 9 august 2020, the republic of belarus has become a battleground between the women-led democratic opposition forces and the authoritarian regime of alexander lukashenka. current forms of political oppression in belarus make open public protest dangerous. this exhibition report highlights safer ways to express dissent in a dictatorial society by grounding it in the textile arts, collective labor, and participatory practices. “the code of presence: belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns” is a permanent digital exhibition that i curated in 2022 hosted by the university of michigan library. the exhibition features 12 textile projects created by professional female artists from belarus, including the works of rufina bazlova, masha maroz, varvara sudnik, anna bundeleva, nasta vasiuchenka, lesia pcholka, vasilisa palianina, dasha sazanovich, yuliya tsviatkova and da(r)sha golova. the exhibition explores how craftivism, a global trend in contemporary art associated with political activism, correlates with the artists’ perceptions of the country’s textile heritage. the purpose of this report is to introduce individual artists, their voices and projects. it is grouped into three distinct, albeit overlapping, categories: 1) individual craftivist strategies in belarusian protest embroideries; 2) collective craftivist embroidery practices; and 3) traditional textile patterns in other media. galvanized by the protests of 2020–2021, political artists’ embroideries and ornamental graphics emerged as a protest ritual of a new kind, igniting a powerful process of cultural heritage revitalization, and documenting the events of the protests, working with such themes as feminism, female labor, memory, and trauma. introduction (1) since the fraudulent presidential elections of 9 august 2020, belarus as a country has become a battleground between women-led democratic opposition forces and the violent authoritarian regime of alexander lukashenka. the belarusian political system currently operates as a dual government, with sviatlana tsikhanouskaya, the independent candidate who likely won the election, heading a government in exile in vilnius, lithuania, and lukashenka, who continues to usurp power in belarus. according to the belarus freedom forum [2022], from august 2020 to march 2022, 40,000 belarusians were prosecuted based on politically motivated charges and went through the country’s belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 73 penal system, while 1,077 political prisoners are still awaiting release. hundreds of thousands of belarusians have left the country, but no reliable data exist on the numbers of those who have emigrated. belarusian society remains divided between the 39 percent who support lukashenka and the 49 percent who actively oppose his regime [chatham house 2021]. this struggle for democracy in belarus has been exacerbated by the loss of the country’s autonomy and the ongoing russian military aggression in ukraine. since winter 2021, belarusian territory has effectively been occupied by russian forces and, with cooperation from the belarusian military, is being used as a launchpad to attack ukraine [sullivan 2022]. it is also crucial to note that these events are occurring without the consent of belarusian citizens, who are deprived of secure methods of expressing their dissent. they now find themselves under two oppressive regimes: the illegitimate rule of belarusian dictator alexander lukashenka and that of the russian armed forces. this report introduces an exhibit that addresses a safer and creative means to express dissent in a dictatorial society through textile arts, collective labor, and participatory communicative practices. “the code of presence: belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns” is a digital exhibit displayed by the university of michigan library. it includes 12 textile projects created by professional women artists from belarus since the beginning of anti-government protests in august 2020. (2) as i wrote in the materials accompanying the exhibit: the title polemically alludes to the seminal work by belarusian philosopher valiantsin akudovich entitled the code of absence: basics of the belarusian mentality (2007), the foundational text explaining the difficulties in articulating belarusian ethnic identity. contrary to the concept of “i do not exist,” which is widespread among predominantly male belarusian intellectuals, this exhibition designates lines of presence through what are often described as ‘traditional women’s practices’ or from institutional art hierarchies [razor 2022]. while not all artists are familiar with the term and do not identify their work in this way, from an outsider art critic perspective, belarusian protest embroideries appear to fit the large global art movement, craftivism. this term was coined in 2003 by the american author betsy greer as a way to combine craft and activism: “craftivism is a way of looking at life where voicing opinions through creativity makes your voice stronger, your compassion deeper & your quest for justice more infinite” [greer 2007]. her website encourages people to use their artistic talents in order to improve the world by expressing their opinions and supporting their causes. “instead of being a number in a march or mass textile ‘craft’ often excluded protest, craftivists apply their creativity toward making a difference one person at a time” [greer 2007]. while craftivists use many different techniques, knitting and embroidery are among the most popular. in addition to addressing social and political matters, craftivists are closely linked with third-wave feminist belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 74 movements. in belarus, craftivism became known through publication of the article “крестик не для крестика” [a cross-stitch is not for an x] [kyky 2011] and several workshops hosted in 2017 and 2018 by makeout, the lgbtq platform. the well-known ukrainian art group shvemy organized a lecture on craftivism and a workshop focused on working with clothes, texts, and images during its 2017 visit to minsk [makeout 2017]. additionally, makeout held a workshop titled “free the nipple” [2018], which featured nipple embroidery on clothing. during the so-called protest year, 2020–2021, another artist from minsk, lesia pcholka, organized multiple craftivist workshops under the title “embroidery practices.” in february 2021 another craftivist event was held, a workshop organized by a curator from moldova, sofia tokar [2021], which included works by belarusian artists. background: embroidery in belarusian contemporary art there has been a trend in contemporary art towards the use of textiles and folk-art forms for at least the last five years. the ukrainian art critic alisa lozhkina described the 2017 venice biennale as “dominated by textiles of all types and shapes” [lozhkina 2017]. in the following half-decade, the trend continued to develop across the globe, while textile diy practices gained even more relevance during the covid-19 pandemic. a review of the new museum triennial 2021, for example, noted the “return of folklore and crafts, adding to these an even greater sense of retreat from anything too inyour-face or definite, maybe in reaction to an over-crowded, hyper-mediated culture” [davis 2021]. in belarus, a politically isolated country without a welldeveloped infrastructure for contemporary art, a similar trend is clear: during the protests of image 1. cemra, spadchina (2019). fragment of a triptych. embroidered home-spun belarusian dress with elemennts of graffiti. hrodnna, belarus. belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 75 2020-2021, a significant number of belarusian contemporary artists turned to textiles and traditional folklore. the embroidery medium had been used in belarusian contemporary art previously, but not widely. for example, one may cite alexei lunev’s project shit-clouds (2009-2010), elements of embroidery in zhanna gladko’s exhibition inciting force (2012), olia sosnovskaya’s project of our women, a two-channel video installation (2015), and vasilisa palianina and anna bundeleva’s artist embroideries [razor and bazlova 2021]. an evaluation of the use of embroidery within the broader context of post-soviet contemporary art in belarus reveals that this particular appeal to nationhood is relatively new and has emerged only within the past few years, as exemplified by the triptych titled spadchina [heritage] (2019) by the hrodna-based artist daria semchuk, who works under the alias cemra [darkness] (see image 1). the impetus behind her work is to raise awareness and to confront the loss of belarus’ cultural heritage [razor and bazlova 2021]. from the beginning of the protests in august 2020, traditional folklore became one vehicle for articulating protesters’ feelings, be it folk song performances or the use of traditional belarusian bagpipes during rallies. the increased volume of production and dissemination of traditional textile designs in the digital sphere belongs to the same category. in the events surrounding the 2020 election, belarusians used many different types of textiles, including embroidery, to signify their belarusianness at a time when visual communication was an important tool [lavey 2021]. even though embroideries occupy a relatively marginal place in the entirety of the protest corpus, their dissemination online has a symbolic impact. this medium captured the public imagination in the first days following the elections, when artwork from the instagram account of praguebased belarusian artist rufina bazlova made the rounds on social media and across a diverse spectrum of media outlets, including radio prague international, die welt, gazeta wyborcza, belarusian radio svaboda, meduza, the moscow times, the russian version of republic, the calvert journal, and global voices, among others. since august 2020, the idea of political embroidery has been actively implemented on several art platforms simultaneously. from august 20 to 26, ў gallery launched the “tomorrow is every day” project, in which over ten artists offered their sketches to create a joint canvas-embroidery about the august events in minsk. on november 5, another event titled “embroidery practices,” an online workshop on craftivism by the minsk artist lesia pcholka, took place. pcholka’s larger project deals with researching family archives and embroidering women’s maiden names onto their archival portraits. collages by the germanbased belarusian political artist marina naprushkina, which started as a part of “tomorrow is every day” and were then disseminated on facebook, stand apart somewhat. she combines popular slogans in belarusian with archival blueprints made by her father who had been a soviet era architect; additionally, she does this all on the immediately recognizable backdrop of school notebooks. other subsequent protest embroideries include works by anna bundeleva, varvara sudnik, nasta vasjuchenka, daria sazanovich, vasilisa palianina, masha maroz, and da(r)sha golova. as we can see, an entire community of belarusian belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 76 embroiderers has emerged from among the county’s artists, galvanized by the protests, who are documenting these events and working with themes such as feminism, female labor, memory, and trauma. notes on methodology in order to better understand the protest embroideries and their creators, i gathered embroidery files posted by belarusian artists on instagram and facebook, interviewed the artists, and created a classification system. my research has revealed three distinct, albeit overlapping categories or storylines: 1) individual craftivist strategies of belarusian protest embroideries; 2) collective craftivist embroidery practices; and 3) representations of traditional textile patterns in other media. i restricted my study to established professional women artists and excluded anonymous work posted online. the first storyline, “individual craftivist strategies of belarusian protest embroideries,” explores the limits of applying the framework of craftivism as a socially engaged movement to the works of anna bundeleva, varvara sudnik, and nasta vasjuchenka. the second storyline, “collective craftivist embroidery practices,” considers the collective aspects of protest embroideries, such as the “tomorrow is every day” project, lesia pcholka’s “embroidery practices” workshop, and two more recent works: “zastolle” [feast] created by dasha sazanovich and yuliya tsviatkova, and vasilisa palianina’s collective tapestry. the third and final storyline, “traditional textile patterns in other mediums,” provides a glimpse into how artists are reworking traditional textile and embroidery ornaments in various media, and the identities they channel. this section includes protest-related works by marina naprushkina, masha maroz, da(r)sha golova, and rufina bazlova. while interviewing the artists, i asked three consistent questions: 1) what was the impact of the protests on your work? 2) how do you relate to the craftivism movement, and do you associate your work with it? 3) how does your work relate to belarusian folk heritage and what does it mean to you? whenever possible, i also indicate whether the artists consider their embroidery and textile work intrinsic or extrinsic to their main body of work. in addition, it is essential to note that these communities are still a newly emerging phenomenon. parallel developments took place on several platforms, and through the process of interviewing for this report, some artists learned about the work of others. story 1: individual strategies of belarusian protest embroideries artists born and raised both in soviet and post-soviet belarus converge as they reimagine the traditional crafts that formed the core of their art education and belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 77 follow the growing interest in fiber arts in international contemporary art. the following group of artists is represented by vilnius-based anna bundeleva, minsk-based nasta vasiuchenka, and a recent exile from belarus, varvara sudnik. anna bundeleva is an artist and designer known for textile exhibitions that gained popularity in 2018, including “action postponed” and “tabula rasa.” the artist articulates her view of the medium as following: текстиль, канву, полотно я рассматриваю с точки зрения чистого листа –– нетронутого, тактильного пространства. выбрала именно этот медиум из-за его сложности, подвижности, из-за трудозатратного, напряженного, сосредоточенного характера работы с ним вопреки тезисам о вышивании, как терапии или медитации [i view textile, canvas, or fabric as a tabula rasa inhabiting an untouched, tactile space. i chose this particular medium due to its complexity and mobility, its laborious, intense, and concentrated nature, and in spite of the stereotype that embroidery is a form of therapy or meditation] [bundeleva 2021]. bundeleva did not design her two exhibitions in a craftivist vein. in fact, she claims that she was not familiar with this art movement: с термином «крафтивизм», признаюсь честно, почти не знакома. никогда не стремилась обрамить свои проекты «измами», image 2. anna bundeleva, i/we olga khizhinkova (2020). embroidered tights. vilnius, lithuania. belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 78 придерживаться или блюсти рамки какого-нибудь художественного направления в искусстве [i have to admit that i am not entirely familiar with the term craftivism. i have never strived to frame my projects in isms, to stick to or adhere to the framework of a specific art movement] [bundeleva 2021]. with the onset of the protests in belarus, the artist began to make explicit political statements. consider her embroidered tights for the belarusian beauty queen and conte advertising model, olga khizhinkova, who was imprisoned for 42 days between november and december 2020 (see image 2). embroidering the phrase “i am/we are khizhinkova” in white threads on black tights was bundeleva’s way to show support. it should also be noted that this work is posted on bundelva’s personal instagram account and is not in her creative portfolio. therefore, it is perceived by the author herself as a civil initiative. her art, according to bundeleva, “has been on pause from the beginning of the protests” [bundeleva 2021]. varvara sudnik is a queer artist who relies on craftivist strategies without separating her art from politics. in doing so, sudnik’s artworks combine traditional folklore and craftivism, working with the theme of fear in a society traumatized by political repression and significant human rights abuse. she began image 3. varvara sudnik, horned goat (2021). embroidered duvet and lace. minsk, belarus. belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 79 working with textiles in february 2021 after attending a craftivism workshop taught by sofia tokar, a curator from moldova. the artist describes her work in textiles as follows, “я впадаю в трепет от ткани, ее сминания и тактильности, ценю необходимость сосредоточиться и замедлиться” [i am fascinated by fabric, its creases and tactility, and appreciate the need to focus and slow down] [sudnik 2021]. since fabric was the most accessible material for sudnik, she chose textiles as a medium for her artwork and mastered embroidery [sudnik 2021]. sudnik, who generally adheres to a craftivist philosophy, is very cautious when it comes to political statements due to the harsh political climate in the country. her latest work, however, focuses on the domestic political situation through the theme of fear (see image 3). the author interprets fear, an intense emotion that dominates civil society, through the children’s finger-game ritual каза рагатая [horned goat]. this is a traditional russian finger game in which an adult folds their fingers to make a goat-like figure and points at a child, saying, “идет коза рогатая за малыми ребятами, забодает, забодает, забодает” [there is a horned goat who comes for the little ones: she butts, she butts and she butts]. embroidering these words on a soviet-style mini-duvet cover, the artist estranges the emotion of fear and reduces it to a game. according to the artist, belarusian folk heritage plays a crucial role in her work, “эта связь очень поглощающая, она дает мне понимание того кто я и как я впитываю людей, которые были здесь до меня” [this connection is very consuming. it gives me an understanding of who i am and how i absorb the people who were here before me] [sudnik 2021]. nasta vasiuchenka is a designer who approaches belarusian folk narratives in a more direct manner that utilizes craftivist concepts. after receiving an art education at the belarusian state academy of arts, vasiuchenka became known in 2017 for a collection inspired by the radziwill family (3) and baroque style mixed with streetwear that she designed for the belarusian clothing line mark formelle. (4) vasiuchenka’s protest work also combines casual style, minimalism, and historical elements. her kanva line features archival images of village women, straw earrings, necklaces, and kerchiefs. during the protests, vasiuchenka designed a t-shirt with the iconic inscription flower power embroidered with beads in national colors (see image 4). in addition to its more recognizable allusion to the international pacifist slogan, this work references a specific protest action in the country. vasiuchenka’s portfolio on behance, an online platform showcasing creative work, includes images from the kamarousky market, the site of the well-known protest by women in white that took place on belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 80 12 august 2020. (5) vasiuchenka’s interest in folk heritage began during her studies at the academy and took in a new, therapeutic turn during the protests: у нас были целые семестры, летние практики, посвященные народному костюму. […] в нем живет наш культурный код. а без своей культуры нам не идентифицироваться, не быть нацией. я стараюсь продвигать культуру через костюм, моду. […] уровень тревожности нашего болота побудил искать новые техники и средства художественной выразительности. поэтому моя одежда, то, что я произвожу сейчас, приобрела медитативный и терапевтический характер. это много вышивки и ручной работы для успокоения нервной системы и для отражения эмоций здесь и сейчас [we had whole semesters and summer internships devoted to folk costumes […] our cultural code lives in traditional folklore. without our culture, we can’t identify ourselves; we can't be a nation. so, i strive to promote culture through costume, fashion, and ethnic music. […] as protests broke out, the level of anxiety in ‘our swamp’ drove me to explore new techniques and means of artistic expression. [...] embroidery and handicraft help me calm my nervous system, relax, and process my emotions here and now] [vasiuchenka 2021]. in regard to craftivism, the author did not know the term but acknowledged its relevance to her current situation, “если под творческой сублимацией принимать карафтивизм, то да, это, чем я занимаюсь последний непростой год” [if you accept a creative sublimation for craftivism, then this is exactly what i am doing in this difficult last year] [vasiuchenka 2021]. image 4. nasta vasiuchenka, flower power (2020). cotton t-shirt and beadwork. minski, belarus. belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 81 even though only varvara sudnik explicitly attributes her work to craftivism as an art movement, all three artists appear to apply certain craftivist strategies. they add a distinctly regional dimension to the global movement by either drawing on belarussian traditional folklore or responding to traumatic experiences in the region. story 2: collective embroidery practices the second group of textiles emphasizes the participatory aspect of textile work, which is characteristic of both protest movements and embroidery as a process. group embroideries function as protest rituals and as a way unite communities. artists and artworks presented in this section include lesia pcholka, a recent refugee to poland; #заўтракожныдзень [tomorrow is every day], a project developed by the famous minsk ў gallery; дю (dy), a multimedia artistduo based in bremen; and a collective embroidery initiative realized by minskbased artist vasilisa palianina. lesia pcholka organized the workshop “embroidery practices.” she is an artist, art manager, and instructor who began the veha initiative to preserve the visual history of belarus. on 23 january 2021, the artist was detained in minsk for picketing and left the country upon her release from jail. since april 2021, pcholka has been dividing her time among various art residencies abroad. pcholka’s embroidery project maiden names (2018) (see image 5) (6) was exhibited at the крылья халопа [wings of a serf] gallery in brest as part of the collective exhibition mother matter. it aims to restore the names of women, often image 5. lesia pcholka, maiden name (2018/2020). mixed media. sourced from zoom workshop. belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 82 several generations living under one roof who have different surnames: “when getting married, a woman traditionally assumes the husband’s surname, thus respecting the new family. however, a change of the surname not only means a new status and symbolizes the rejection of a part of one's own life [pcholka 2021]. by researching social memory and family photos, the artist noted that there was little information about women in response to this problem. she then decided to embroider their maiden names on archival images to re-establish these lost genealogies [pcholka 2021]. the artist’s red thread and cross-stitch connect these names to traditional folk embroideries. additionally, the cross is reminiscent of how illiterate people used to sign their names before the october revolution. according to pcholka, the cross also symbolizes the glaring absence of family archives that many belarusian families have experienced [pcholka 2021]. designed to oppose the patriarchy, pcholka’s “embroidery practices” workshop also coincided with mass protests led by women in her country. as part of this event, participants embroidered and discussed critical social issues. this series is not currently available for public access and remains a work-in-progress. while organizing these events, the artist was aware of the historical link between radical activism and needlecrafts throughout the history of women’s suffrage. according to pcholka, the communicative component of this ongoing group project amplified the voices of the embroiderers [pcholka 2021]. #заўтракожныдзень [tomorrow is every day] ran concurrently with “embroidery practices.” the renowned minsk ў gallery launched this project in august 2020 and promoted it with this hashtag on social media. from 2009 to 2020, this gallery has been one of the country’s leading platforms for the promotion of contemporary art. the collective embroidery project was one of the last in the gallery’s existence. (7) the idea for “tomorrow is every day” was conceived by artist and curator marina naprushkina, curator lena prenz (both berlin-based), and the ў gallery’s minsk-based co-founders anna chistoserdova and valentina kiseleva. both chistoserdova and kiseleva have recently emigrated to germany. the gallery’s facebook and instagram announced the project as follows: belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 83 […] больш за дзесяць мастакоў і мастачак прапанавалі свае эскізы для сумеснага стварэння рукатворнага дакументальнага палатнавышыванкі, у якім можа прыняць удзел кожны з вас! акрамя таго, што мы разам з вамі ставарем буйны твор мастацтва, працэс вышывання вельмі добрая тэрапія і медытацыя, каб перажыць і асэнсаваць усё тое, што нас кранае […more than ten artists have proposed sketches for the joint creation of the hand-made documentary embroidered canvas, and each of you can participate in its creation! besides the fact that we will create a large work of art together, the process of embroidery represents excellent therapy and meditation that helps us to live through and process everything that touches us] [ў gallery 2020]. it is noteworthy that, although the traditional red-white-black palette was used to create this collective artwork, the embroiderers used a variety of stitching techniques, not just cross-stitch. furthermore, this description avoids the term craftivism altogether but highlights the project’s therapeutic component. as the hashtag suggests, there is no beginning or end when inside an event, and for it to succeed, collective action must continue every day. this idea was later reused in the most prominent belarusian political art exhibit “кожны дзень. мастацтва. image 6. anonymous, tomorrow is every day (2020). communal documentary embroidery. minsk, belarus. photographer: viktoryia kharytonava. belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 84 салидарнасць. супрацiў” [every day. art. solidarity. resistance] in the mystetskyi arsenal (26 march–6 june 2021 in kyiv, ukraine). (8) the fragment represented in image 6 depicts the women in white’s very first protest, when they appeared in front of the kamarousky market in minsk on 12 august 2020. the embroidered inscription says: “камароўскi рынак. сардэчна запрашаем” [kamarousky market. welcome.] to date, the artwork remains unfinished and lacks proper documentation, not unlike the protests themselves. дю (dy) is a multimedia artist-duo of belarus-born artists daria sazanovich and yuliya tsviatkova. daria sazanovich is an artist, designer, and illustrator who studies and works in bremen. as the events in belarus were unfolding, they would meet to talk about the news and embroider stories that has captured their attention. the zastolle project reflects and documents social and political processes in belarus. the work refers to a traditional feast, which is “attended” by various representatives of the belarusian society, from repressed students to the police. communication is represented in the form of visual symbols sewn into the fabric. the zastolle performance took place at the bremenbased platform araum on 23–29 september 2021. one such story (see image 7) tells how a protest leader, maria kalesnikava, tore up her passport when the regime tried to deport her in september 2020. (9) according to daria sazanovich, she does not frame her work as craftivism, even though she is familiar with this term. as a digital artist, she does not want to confine herself to a rather specific belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 85 and narrow movement [sazanovich 2021]. the inspiration for the project comes from the extracurricular art education she received as a child in her hometown of bobruisk, “всегда нравилось что-то делать своими руками, с детства ходила во все кружки, мама была начальницей внешкольного образования, и я много занималась соломкой и дпи” [i always liked to do things with my own hands. from childhood, i went to all sorts of classes on handicrafts because my mother was the head of the after-school education program. so, i ended up doing a lot of crafts with straw and the so-called “applied arts”] [sazanovich 2021]. although sazanovich’s embroidery does not visually reference traditional textiles, she feels a connection with traditional folk culture not only via her training but also because one of her female ancestors was a whisperer, a word for folk healers in the region known to treat their patients with prayers and spells. in image 7. дю (dy), fragment of zastolle (2021). embroidery performance. bremen, germany. belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 86 2021, the artist created a multi-media installation about witches in contemporary culture entitled “how and why i would like to become a witch,” consisting of four spells reflecting her “artistic research tackling different forms of oppression against women” [sazanovich 2021]. (10) vasilisa palianina claims that her connection to folk culture resides in the medium of embroidery itself. palianina made a name for herself with her work on sexuality and taboo violations. since the beginning of the protests, these themes remained important to her, but they began to intertwine with or were supplanted by reflection on the ongoing protests: “с началом протестов возросла моя степень гражданской осознанности и личной включенности в развитие собственной страны” [when the protests started, [her] degree of civic awareness and personal involvement in the development of my own country increased] [palianina 2021]. this process resulted in “а кожны, хто верыць у мяне, не памрэ ніколі” [whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die] (20202021). she created this massive, embroidered tableau in minsk in collaboration with various artists who visited her studio (see image 8). (11) when it comes to traditional folklore, palianina stresses the following: наследие –– очень важная часть культуры человека. это то, что формирует наш внутренний стержень и его сила зависит от отношения с наследием. текстиль и вышивка, как отсылки к image 8 vasilisa palianina, fragment of whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die (2020-2021). canvas, threads, photo print. collective emroidery. minsk, belarus. belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 87 истокам фольклорного языка –– энергетически очень мощное высказывание [heritage is a vital part of human culture. this is what forms our inner core, and its strength depends on how we relate to our heritage. embroidery and textiles refer to the origins of folk language and are energetically compelling statements] [palianina 2021]. the artist does not use the term craftivism but notes that her work could easily be situated within this movement [palianina 2021]. additionally, she emphasizes that the very medium of embroidery, with its lengthy process, provides the necessary distance for reflection: то, что с беларусами произошло и происходит сейчас очень важный и болезненный процесс взросления, который даст свои плоды в будущем. пока проживаешь стрессовое состояние, сложно отойти в сторону и оценить ситуация беспристрастно. это касается и творчества, и отношения к событиям в целом [what has happened to belarusians and is happening now in the country is a critical and painful process of growing up that will bear fruit in the future. while we are under so much stress, it is difficult to take a step back and assess the situation in an impartial manner] [palianina 2021]. the artwork was unveiled to the public in a group exhibition titled “калi формы становяцца стаўленнем,” [when forms became attitude] curated by ilona dergach at the fundacija villa sokrates in krynki, poland in september 2021. (11) the second group of textiles presents examples of craftivism as participatory collective labor. two of these projects, lesia pcholka’s “embroidery practices” workshop and the “tomorrow is every day” community embroidery project, remain works-in-progress. these collective embroideries stage a protest ritual and ensure community cohesion through collective labor and communication. even when the appearance of these embroideries does not necessarily convey a folk ethos, their medium functions as a message and contextually denotes a connection to belarusian heritage. story 3: representation of traditional textile patterns in other media the third group of artworks illustrates how craftivist textile works are represented symbolically in other media, from felt-tip pen drawing to silkscreen printing and vector graphics. artists participating in this work include berlinbased marina naprushkina, minsk-based masha maroz, amsterdam-based da(r)sha golova, and prague-based rufina bazlova. belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 88 marina naprushkina is a belarusian-german feminist artist and activist who works with video, performance, drawings, installations, and text. in august and september 2020, naprushkina came to minsk, where she launched “tomorrow is every day” at ў gallery. additionally, she created a series of posters with references to embroidery on school notebooks, writing slogans in belarusian with a red felt-tip pen: “далучайся! забастоўка! салiдарнасць наша зброя.” [join us! strike! solidarity is our weapon.] (13) as soon as the works were completed, they were posted on facebook, on the artist's page, and deposited in the protest art archive cultprotest.me. they were also displayed in two exhibitions: “a secret museum of the workers’ movement” hosted by hoast art gallery (on view 27 february to 3 march 2021 in vienna, austria), and “every day. art. solidarity. resistance” at the mystetskyi arsenal in kyiv, ukraine. the explains her work as follows: image 9. marina naprushkina, solidarity is our weapon (2020). paper and felt-tip pen. berlin, germany. belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 89 i am showing exercise books that i also used when i was a child. these are official school notebooks. and i chose some slogans from the street, which i had heard in belarus in august and september last year and combined them with images from factory buildings. my grandfather was an architect, and he built a lot of factories in belarus. the workers’ strikes [observed across belarus after the fraudulent election] were one of the most important parts of the protests. for me, it was also personal, because i knew these very buildings from my grandfather’s drawings. the slogans also gesture at the cross-stitch embroidery technique, which alludes to female work [naprushkina 2021]. (14) “solidarity is our weapon” (see image 9) includes a drawing of a carpet factory in brest built in 1958-1960 that refers to the country's textile industry. school notebooks and factories are unmistakably channeling soviet belarusian identity and industrial labor as opposed to the artisanal production modality of the pre-revolutionary era. masha maroz is a multimedia artist, designer, and ethnographer from minsk who works on collective memory and national identity topics. in 2014, maroz graduated from the belarusian state academy of arts with a degree in costume design. she is the founder and curator of past perfect, a platform dedicated to preserving and popularizing belarusian historical and cultural heritage. maroz describes her role as “a mediator, a bridge, between the symbolic world of [the] image 10. masha maroz, selfie-time (2020). digital artwork. minsk, belarus. belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 90 ancestors and a modern world” [polevikova and maroz 2021]. (15) she is especially inspired by belarusian polesia, the region located in the southwestern part of the eastern-european lowlands, because her family comes from there, and it is where she was born [dergach and maroz 2020]. “the long way home,” the artist’s first solo exhibition, took place on 26 june 2020, in nekrasova 3, one of the state galleries in minsk. the exhibition content became the artist’s protest against the official narrative of belarusianness put forth by the lukashenka regime: “today, many items associated with belarusian culture––at least in the government’s official narrative––are imported directly from the soviet era: straw dolls, vodka, and large, state-backed competitions and festivals celebrating everything from milkmaids to tractor drivers” [polevikova and maroz 2021]. maroz, on the contrary, experiments with “social, ideological, visual norms of modern belarus for the preservation of folk culture” [polevikova and maroz 2021]. tradition, according to maroz, is of central importance as a method of channeling information that is vital to society. by combining handwoven rugs and authentic polesian interior design with computer graphics, the artist closes the gap between codes, the material of everyday culture and the digital, through ceremonial, multilayered space [polevikova and maroz 2021]. immediately after the presidential elections on 9 august 2020, maroz took her exhibition down in a gesture of a protest against state violence [dergach and maroz 2020]. earlier in july, the digital work in image 10, featuring a traditional pattern of a female figure behind bars, appeared on her instagram profile under the title selfie-time. some images from this exhibition and those from the past-perfect archive were later shown in the netherlands as part of an exhibition titled “voices of belarus. chapter two: restoring connections” (on view at puntwg from 27 july to 1 august 2021 in amsterdam). belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 91 postcards of solidarity, another work from the same exhibition, is an ongoing project developed by amsterdam-based artist and designer da(r)sha golova (in collaboration with masha maroz, artemiy sei, and sasha kulak). the exhibition’s introductory text states that political problems in modern belarus are directly related to the destruction of the belarusian ethnic heritage: “the majority of belarusians don't know their roots, culture and are ashamed of the belarusian language, considering it ‘peasant-like.’ that is one of the reasons why we, as belarusians, have been asleep as a nation for a long time and are now seeking the process of building and forging a new structure between us as humans, repairing connections between the land and people” [golova et al 2021]. golova’s mail art project (see image 11) features two editions of postcards from european cities with traditional textile patterns from polesia printed across them. the patterns come from maroz’s past-perfect archive. according to the artists, such superimposition of west european and polesian images advance the “reparation of liaisons within the family, the reconnaissance of ornamental language, the image 11. da(r)sha golova, postcards of solidarity. (second edition) (2021). screen-printed paper. amsterdam, netherlands. belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 92 visualization of the heritage that was never accessible to us, the remembrance of the names of ancestors to restore the way home” [golova et al 2021]. each of these cards is addressed to a different political prisoner in belarus. the creators view these postcards as fragments of a broader message, i.e., an ornamental code of belarusian tapestry and embroidery [golova et al 2021]. all the elements contain crucial information, from the recipient’s name and address to the stamp, the ornamentation, and the place of departure. “everything is ready for you to activate this––not necessarily verbal––communication by picking one of them and dropping it into the postbox. by doing so, you are delivering hope, a cheerful gesture of awareness, acknowledgment, and support” [golova et al 2021]. there is, however, a functional drawback to the project: exhibit visitors often sign these postcards in foreign languages, and they get through censors at random. rufina bazlova, an illustrator, performer, and puppet master who lives and works in prague, also uses the code of traditional textiles, but combines it with figurative elements, documenting ongoing events in the country via her instagram account. she began her “history of belarusian vyzhyvanka” (16) cycle on a night of protests when the country was experiencing an internet blackout and used image 12. rufina bazlova, the history of belarusian vyzhyvanka (2020-2021). machine embroidery. prague, czech republic. belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 93 vector graphics to ensure fast production. according to the artist, vyzhyvanka is a pun on two words, vyshyvats’ [to embroider], and vyzhyvats’ [to survive] [bazlova 2021]. her images went viral on instagram within days and appeared in several major newspapers. since then, bazlova’s work has appeared in many exhibits and on the covers of several journals and magazines. in addition to her vector graphics, bazlova produced some physical embroideries and serigraphs. even though the artist identifies with the craftivist movement and cyberactivism, her choice of medium is inspired by her family tradition: “my grandmother was a jack (or jill) of all trades: she sewed, knitted, wove, and did macramé. my mother could do a little less, and the only thing that i was left with is embroidery” [bazlova 2021]. additionally, bazlova practiced embroidery during her training as an artist and recognizes its importance in traditional culture: for a long time, women were taught to neither read nor write. i learned that embroidery could be read as a kind of text. everything they saw was reflected in their embroideries, which became their form of expression. my white and red motifs come from our folk culture. after all, the events that are taking place now, can be seen as the formation of the nation. and when such a powerful historical and cultural code depicts current events, it makes an impression on people [bazlova 2021]. on one hand, bazlova speaks about “nation” and “people’s art” and is set to create “an embroidered epic of the belarusian revolution, in which each tableau corresponds to an episode of its recent history” [bazlova 2021]. but she also engages with narratives of feminism and state violence, which, in her case, appear to be experientially and not theoretically driven. in terms of its content, her artwork also gestures toward diversity. it represents certain social groups, such as women, retirees, or people with disabilities, who have been previously excluded from the political process. by representing these diverse groups and assembling the entirety of her work within one long tapestry (45 cm × 735 cm), bazlova has created a collective embroidered saga of the belarusian uprising (see image 12). this artwork was first exhibited as a part of every day. art. solidarity. resistance exhibition which took place in kyiv’s mystetskyi arsenal from 26 march to 8 june 2021. it was later exhibited as a part of belarus––screams of the silenced exhibition at haage’s grey space in the middle from 7 august to 18 august 2021. this third and last group of artworks is concerned with textile ornaments represented symbolically in other media. ideologically, this corpus represents a spectrum of attitudes towards the idea of belarusian identity, from the marked soviet identity in the works of marina naprushkina to the search for mythical polesian roots in the works of masha maroz and da(r)sha golova, or the articulation of national and civic feelings through the inclusion of marginalized voices in rufina bazlova’s digital activism. concluding remarks belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 94 this report introduced 12 textile projects that were initiated by belarussian artists in response to the fraudulent presidential election in 2020. the works are grouped into three sections: 1) individual craftivist strategies of belarusian protest embroideries; 2) collective craftivist embroidery practices; and 3) traditional textile patterns in other mediums. from perspective of an art critic, the belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns discussed in this report appear to fit the large global art movement called craftivism, even though some of the artists do not self-consciously embrace the concept. for some of the artists, these projects represented new undertakings; for others, they developed from themes and socio-political concerns that had already constituted parts of their legacies. the first group, represented by the works of anna bundeleva, varvara sudnik, and nasta vasjuchenka, relies on individual craftivist strategies. in two cases out of three, the artists assigned intrinsic value to the themes of trauma and therapy in their works. the second group of textiles focuses on collective participatory work, characteristic of both the protest movements and embroidery as a process. two examples surveyed in this report, lesia pcholka’s “embroidery practices” workshop and the “tomorrow is every day” community embroidery project, remain works-in-progress. the function of these collective embroideries is to stage a protest ritual and ensure community cohesion. even when the appearance of these embroideries does not necessarily convey a folk ethos, the medium functions as a message and contextually denotes belarusianness. the third group of artworks involves textile ornamentation represented symbolically in other mediums, from felt-tip pen drawing to silkscreen printing and vector graphics. ideologically, this corpus represents a spectrum of attitudes towards the idea of belarusian identity and gestures towards inclusion and community recompositing necessitated by or following mass incarceration and migration from the country. the artists and their works described in this exhibit report inhabit a wide ideological spectrum, from the perceived belief that folk embroidered patterns represent the code of the nation, as is the case with masha maroz and da(r)sha golova’s work, to completely disdaining the nationalist discourse while showing respect to the country’s textile heritage. the exhibit claims to “break the traditional discursive bond between textiles and the study of ethnic nationalism in the region by focusing on women’s voices and labor and expanding the discussion to include a spectrum of civic identities in belarus” [razor 2022]. this claim is buttressed by several factors. first and foremost, a number of the artworks represented redirect the spotlight away from the product and focus on the process of its creation, emphasizing collective labor. secondly, alongside the ethnic belarusian identities showcased, these artworks engrave new identities of diverse social, not ethnic, groups, e.g., victims of the lukashenka regime or political prisoners in the narrative of the belarusian uprising. finally, when they are posted online, these artworks, whether hand-made, machine-made, or vector graphics, enter the realm of digital activism, the purpose of which is not an abstract notion of nation-building, but rather a more concrete and direct political action. the belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 95 displacement of belarus’s young political artists in exile and their participation in international art residencies may eventually open a new, transnational chapter in belarusian art textiles and create new discourses reflecting processes of community recomposition. notes 1 i would like to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their timely critical input in developing this exhibition report; members of the curatorial team, aristide lavey and kendra eaton; dr. irina aristarkhova and the university of michigan librarians for their assistance in hosting this digital exhibition, as well as all embroiderers and activists who agreed to be interviewed for this project and shared their work, talent, and aspirations. 2 the exhibit may be viewed at https://apps.lib.umich.edu/onlineexhibits/exhibits/show/code-presence. 3 the radziwill family is a powerful magnate clan originating from the great duchy of lithuania that resided in nesvizh castle on the territory of belarus from the 16th century up until 1939. 4 mark formelle is a belarusian line of clothing that was founded in 2009 by svetlana siparova and andrei serikov (https://markformelle.by/). 5 women in white is a massive female protest movement in belarus which took place in august-september 2020. the name of the movement dates back to the eponymous telegram channel that was co-founded by anastasia kostyugova and marina mentusova. it started with women dressing in white and holding flowers taking to the streets of minsk and other belarusian towns. the movement continues to this day featuring an anonymous group of women dressed in white, red, and black clothing performing artistic interventions on the streets of minsk. 6 both the title of the project, maiden names, and its description were provided by the artists in english. 7 one of the gallery’s co-founders, alexander vasilevich, was already in jail at the time this workshop took place. vasilevich was arrested in minsk on 28 july 2020, and was subsequently recognized as a political prisoner. he was released on 4 february 2022. for more on vasilevich, see koroleva 2022. 8 for more information about this exhibition, see https://artarsenal.in.ua/en/vystavka/evere-day-art-solidarity-resistance/. 9 maria kalesnikava is one of the three female leaders of the belarusian protests who was kidnapped on the streets of minsk on 6 september 2020 and taken to the border with ukraine with the intention of expelling her from the country. kalesnikava famously tore her passport to prevent her deportation and was taken to a detention facility, where she remains to this day. for more about maria kalesnikava, see roth 2021. 10 see the full description of the project here: https://sheeborshee.com/why-and-how-do-i-want-to-become-a-witch. belarusian protest embroideries and textile patterns folklorica 2022, vol. xxvi 96 11 among the minsk artists who came to embroider with palianina are mariam astryam, sasha dorskaya, sashen galerik, kristina brukshpyn, polina siriska, katerina ignashevich, anna kruk, ulyana dulkina, tatiana karpacheva, masha maroz, ira j, tasha katsuba, and aleksandra osipovich. 12 the exhibition title alludes to a historic exhibition by harald zeeman, when attitudes become form, which was exhibited in 1969 at kunsthalle bern. 13 naprushkina’s work can be found at https://cultprotest.me/. 14 the original interview text was in english. 15 the original interview was published in english. 16 the original title is in english, while the belarusian word vyzhyvanka in the original language reads as “выжыванка.” bibliography belarus fashion week. 2018. “mark formelle by vasjuchenka&starikova,” bfw. cited by http://www.bfw.by/ru/designers/32969/. 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(consulted 29 august 2021). lozhkina, alisa. 2017. “zapiski s venetsianskoi biennale. chast’1: pod tiazhelym odeialom sovremennogo iskusstva.” old fashioned radio. cited by https://ofr.fm/pod-tyazhely-m-odeyalom-sovremennogo-iskusstva-chast1/?fbclid=iwar17h5qmalme__3xozwjupt_dmzdla_zhr4zupt3haztsjovneqyp -epv2y. (consulted 19 november 2021). lavey, a.m. 2021. “reading belarus: the evolving semiosis of belarusian textiles,” journal of belarusian studies 11(2): 175-205. makeout. 2017. “интенсив по арт активизму: техники. методики. практики” [intensive course on art activism: techniques. methods. practices]. 2017. makeout. cited by https://makeout.by/2017/12/18/intensiv-po-artaktivizmu-tehniki-metodiki-praktiki.html. (consulted 29 august 2021). makeout. 2018. “воркшоп по вышивке ‘free the nipple.’ регистрация уже открыта!” [embroidery workshop “free the nipple.” the registration is open]. makeout. cited by https://makeout.by/2018/12/01/sofya-tokarprovedet-v-minske-vorkshop-free-the-nipple-registraciya-uzheotkryta.html. (consulted 29 august 2021). maroz, masha. 2020. доўгая дарога дамоў [long road home]. exhibit program. golova dasha, sasha kulak, and masha maroz. 2021. “voices of belarus. chapter 2. restoring connections,” atelier wg. cited by https://puntwg.nl/en/voices-of-belarus.-chapter-two-restoringconnections?fbclid=iwar0m6dadgpjjnhvhhri52q7ac8rydwgpabddrieqhw9vz7tffnwdys2z7e. (consulted 29 august 2021). polevikova, olga and masha maroz. 2021. “long way home: collecting the artefacts of a forgotten belarusian past,” the calvert journal. cited by https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/12999/long-way-homeartifacts-belarus-heritage-protests-masha-maroz. 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(consulted 5 june 2022). soroka, iana, vika gebennikova, varia sudnik, and astrantius mon. 2021. “три интервью об искусстве, идентичности и жизни в беларуси здесь и сейчас” [three interviews about art, identity, and life in belarus here and now]. makeout. cited by https://makeout.by/2021/06/21/tri-intervju-obiskusstve-identichnosti-i-zhizni-v-belarusi-zdes-i-sejchas.html. (consulted 29 august 2021). sullivan, becky. 2022. “why belarus is so involved in russia’s invasion of ukraine?” cited by https://www.npr.org/2022/03/11/1085548867/belarusukraine-russia-invasion-lukashenko-putin. (consulted 15 march 2022). ў gallery. 2020. facebook post, 25 august 2020. facebook. cited by https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3a%2f%2fwww.f acebook.com%2fygallery.by%2fposts%2f3418163898246633&display= popup&ref=plugin&src=post. (consulted 29 august 2021). interviews bazlova, rufina. prague, czech republic. interviewed over zoom. 25 january 2021. bundeleva, anna. vilnius, lithuania. responded to questionnaire. 28 july 2021. naprushkina, marina. berlin, germany. interviewed over zoom. 4 june 2021. palianina, vasilisa. minsk, belarus. responded to questionnaire. 21 july 2021. pcholka, lesia. tbilisi, georgia. responded to questionnaire. 6 august 2021. sazanovich, daria. bremen, germany. interview over zoom. 23 july 2021. sudnik, varvara. minsk, belarus. responded to questionnaire. 6 august 2021. vasiuchenka, nasta. minsk, belarus. responded to questionnaire. 20 july 2021. folklorica full 2025 reviews 123 folklorica 2025, vol. xxix krafcik, patricia a. witnesses to interwar subcarpathian rus’: the sojourns of petr bogatyrev and ivan olbracht. lanham: lexington books, 2024. notes. bibliography. index. map. x + 317 pp. $130 (hardback). $117 (e-book). isbn 9781666931709 (hardback). isbn 9781666931716 (e-book). this richly detailed volume offers literary and scholarly biographies of two figures who did significant work in and related to the subcarpathian rus’ region of czechoslovakia (transcarpathia in other nomenclatures) in the interwar period. it will not replace full biographies, which are otherwise lacking for both figures in english, but it offers a rich contextualization of their work on the region in relation to their larger life trajectories and political and social contexts and serves as a comprehensive introduction for folklorists and specialists with an interest in rusyn studies. petr grigorievich bogatyrev (1893–1971) came to prague in 1921, following a brief time in berlin, already a graduate of moscow university and a budding ethnographer and folklorist. he took a position as a translator with the newly established soviet embassy through the mediation of his close friend roman jakobson (37) but soon began ethnographic expeditions to the subcarpathian rus’ region through the support of the czech academy of sciences. the theoretical ideas that underlay his interpretive practice coalesced within the prague linguistic circle (est. 1926) with its structuralist approach. he continued his fieldwork in the 1930s while teaching at comenius university in bratislava and only returned to the soviet union in early 1940 (to rejoin his wife and child, who had left in 1928). as krafcik and others portray him, bogatyrev had great sympathies for the folk, but his scholarly concerns and interests superseded politics. he remained largely apolitical even as he was eyewitness to the tumult of the century (his first return to prague was in 1968 and was interrupted by the warsaw pact invasion). in contrast, ivan olbracht (pseud. of kamil zeman, 1882–1952) was a journalist and brilliant writer with strong political convictions. a co-founder of the czech communist party in 1921 (he visited the soviet union for six months in 1920) and chief editor of its news organ rudé právo from 1926–27, he was expelled in 1929 for his anti-bolshevik views (118-124). he first visited the subcarpathian rus’ region in 1931, eager to investigate conflicting accounts of the economic transformation there pursued by the czechoslovak government, and continued to visit frequently until 1936, publishing ethnographic reportage and literary works set in the region and portraying its rusyn and jewish inhabitants (his jewish mother had converted in order to marry, 181). olbracht hid in a small village in southern bohemia during the nazi occupation, readopting his given name, which was not associated with his communist political activities, as cover (258), and worked on screenplays and story adaptations for children. following the war, he rejoined the communist party, became a member of its central committee for the remainder of his life, and served as minister of information from 1945–49 (277). reviews 124 folklorica 2025, vol. xxix bogatyrev and olbracht may have crossed paths in the prague linguistic circle of the 1920s (203), and when bogatyrev began his study of the brigand folklore of the region he referenced olbracht’s novelistic account (213), but there is no evidence of any real contact between the two. they are nonetheless united by their interest in the region and its way of life and remain two of the most important sources on this from the period before that way of life was to dramatically change. subcarpathia was a multilingual, multiethnic region in which traditional lifeways still dominated, though these were facing significant pressures of modernization from the new czechoslovak state, including divisive questions of national identity given the diverse population that included slavs, germans, hungarians, jews, and roma. as krafcik importantly reminds readers, while the region was often seen as backwards, “ancient,” and exotic, it also had a history of an emergent high culture (10). bogatyrev was primarily interested in traditional folkways. while he likely shared some of the ethnographer’s temporal prejudice about the ancient aspect of these, he interpreted magical acts and rites from a synchronic perspective based upon the functions and meanings they had for their contemporary practitioners, not as vestiges of ancient beliefs. olbracht’s interest was political, directed against the bourgeois czechoslovak state’s colonial practices, motivated by concern for the residents’ rights and freedom, and marked by great sympathy for their way of life. bogatyrev and olbracht’s sojourns resulted in an impressive list of significant publications and cultural products. both penned notable ethnographic studies: olbracht’s ethnographic reportage from the region was collected in two volumes, země bez jména [land without a name] (1932) and hory a staletí [mountains and centuries] (1935). bogatyrev published ethnographic reports and his major study, actes magiques, rites et croyances en russie subcarpathique [magical actions, rites, and beliefs in subcarpathian rus’] (1929). their overlapping interest in brigand tales and songs resulted in olbracht’s major novelization of the life of a recent brigand, nikola šuhaj—loupežník [nikola the outlaw] (1933), and several articles and a book by bogatyrev. olbracht also wrote stories set in the region, including among the jewish population in the volume golet v údolí [exile in the valley] (1937), which included the masterful “the sorrowful eyes of hannah karadjich,” and a major motion picture, marijka nevěřnice [marijka the unfaithful] (1934) on which he collaborated with the writer vladislav vančura and the composer bohuslav martinů. krafcik provides readers with an information-packed, balanced account of their lives and detailed overviews of their works. this is an important introduction to two major figures who helped the world to come to better know a region that has had real significance in national movements, and in a moment before it was utterly transformed by wwii. david l. cooper university of illinois urbana-champaign urbana, illinois dlcoop@illinois.edu about seefa 111 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii the slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore association (seefa) is a nonprofit organization devoted to an exchange of knowledge among researchers interested in slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore. seefa promotes instruction in slavic, east european, and eurasian folklore, organizes panels on these topics at national and international conferences, and encourages the preparation of teaching materials and translations as well as publishes the journal folklorica. seefa also seeks to promote joint research, scholarly exchanges and conferences, expeditions, and publications with scholars in slavic and other east european and eurasian countries. membership in seefa supports student scholarships and awards. individual membership in seefa is $35 per year, $10 for students. send checks to the secretary-treasurer: shannon donnally quinn department of linguistics and germanic, slavic, asian and african languages michigan state university 619 red cedar road b-331 wells hall east lansing, mi 48824-3402 e-mail: shannondonnallyquinn@gmail.com membership may also be paid by credit card at: http://www.seefa.org/membership.html. folklorica is published once per year. 4e journal archive appears on the seefa web site (http://www.seefa.org/) and is hosted by the university of kansas. articles, surveys, reviews, notices of conferences or expeditions, and announcements from scholars in any relevant field are acceptable. contributions will be evaluated by the editorial board or by other specialists. each contribution copyright 2022 by its author. all rights reserved. printed in kentucky, united states “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 51 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii “i felt frightened and then i started singing”: songs at russian protest actions irina kozlova russian presidential academy of national economy and public administration, moscow, russia; nicolaus copernicus university toruń, poland elena levochskaya russian presidential academy of national economy and public administration moscow, russia abstract this article explores the role of songs in russian protests. data are drawn from ethnographic observations made at protests held between 2015 and 2022, mostly in moscow and st. petersburg, as part of the project, “monitoring contemporary folklore,” based at the russian presidential academy of national economy and public administration. the authors consider materials from 240 protests. viewing protests as an act of communication, the article analyzes the circumstances for song performances and suggests a hypothesis for songs’ communicative goals. the article additionally demonstrates how song choice changes from common 1980’s protest songs to new tracks that gained later popularity. the article demonstrates how song production depends on the types of protests and the levels of participant engagement. introduction on 15 march 2014, the day before the referendum that marked the annexation of crimea, protestors sang the song, “take me through the maidan,” written in the 1980s by the bard musician sergey nikitin based on lyrics by the ukrainian writer vitaly korotich. people sang with posters in the background which said, “take me through the maidan” and “no war,” ukrainian and russian flags, and yellow and blue balloons. the word “maidan” became an index of the ukrainian revolution which was seen by many protestors as a hope for changes in russia itself. many people were angry at the annexation of crimea, but there was also a feeling of expectation that day. it was the biggest protest action moscow had seen in years. the so-called, “snow revolution,” which had been the beginning of the protest movement in russia in the 2010s, was in the past. regular protest actions, both small and large, allowed and not, all dispersed with varying degrees of severity and were episodically covered in the media. on 13 march 2022, one of us went to observe an anti-war action in moscow, which was supposed to be on manejnaya square. the square was cordoned off by riot police, and there were police officers on adjacent streets. many citizens were there too, but it wasn’t clear who were protestors and who were only passersby. there was no singing, words, or signs. in march 2022, after laws were passed that “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 52 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii set punishments for making statements against the russian armed forces and calling for sanctions, the era of street protests in russia came to an end. protests had begun in december 2011, when russians engaged in mass street protests that demanded a revision of the elections to the state duma. protestors’ demands were not met, but because of the rallies in 2011–2012 a culture of street protest developed that lasted until the spring of 2022 [arkhipova and alekseevsky 2014]. this article asks what the russian public resistance of the 2010s was like and how did it evolve and answers through attention to what protestors listened to and sang and when they did it. we argue that in addition to being simply entertainment or filling time before or after rallies, protestors used specific music to regain a sense of human dignity and agency, to overcome their fear of riot police, and make original political statements. study data, methodology, and design šmidchens [2014] writes about the importance of singing during protests in the soviet baltic republics in the 1980s. however, most researchers argue that song has not played as central a role in other post-ussr street protests. first, it is not common in russia to write songs soon after events [shenkman 2020]. (1) in addition, it is also not common to sing during protests, either from the stage or spontaneously [sapronova et al. 2019, shulman 2021]. from our experience observing the protests of the late 2010s, we also did not often hear songs. however, there was some singing at almost every large-scale event in moscow or st. petersburg during the 2021 protests. both researchers and journalists noticed this change in favor of the musical components of protests that year [shenkman 2021]. the shift toward song in protests changed into total silence after the previously mentioned legislation. now, protestors are threatened with criminal penalties in addition to administrative terms. 27 february 2022 was the last action during which we recorded fixed songs. the materials for this study were collected through participant observation and interviews during events as well as later in-depth interviews with the authors, performers, and audiences of the songs. this article draws on material collected by two projects of the institute of social sciences of the russian presidential academy of national economy and public administration: “monitoring contemporary folklore” (mcf) and “strategies of generating and perceiving poetic texts in rural and urban cultures.” in the fall of 2014, alexandra arkhipova organized the mcf research group, which united specialists including sociologists and folklorists, some of whom had been at protest actions as citizens. one of the main goals of the group was to monitor public protest activity. since 2015, the group, including the authors of this article, has been systematically observing russian public protests. we have attempted to attend all public street events, from large-scale rallies to one-man protests, regardless of their agenda, e.g., political, societal, or environmental. we monitored media and social media for announced events. during the events, we took pictures of posters and recorded interviews with participants. it is during the “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 53 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii context of this work that we have made our observations on the songs. (2) when creating the mcf group, we wanted to understand the grassroots reactions to socially significant events, so we tried to look at street politics “from the inside” and listen to the voices of both ordinary participants and protest leaders. overall, the mcf group has observed more than 400 street events across twelve cities, with the majority being in moscow and st. petersburg between january 2015 and march 2022. we have not only observed protests, but also street rallies in support of the current government. however, in this article we only discuss opposition rallies. we divide protest actions primarily into two main groups: 1) approved protest events, and 2) unapproved protest events. as for the forms of these events, we classify them into a) marches, b) rallies, and c) one-man protests. (3) to conduct a public street action, organizers must coordinate with the administration of a constituent entity of the russian federation. practically, there were often situations when permission to hold an event was not given, but organizers still urged people to go to specified places at specified times. these non-approved rallies were different than approved ones: they did not have a stage and equipment and had a high risk of arrest. for the purposes of this study, we only analyze materials from 240 events (4) that our research group observed in moscow (fiftyseven events), st. petersburg (177 events), and one rally each in volokolamsk, vologda, kazan, chelyabinsk, novosibirsk, and tomsk between july 2015 and march 2022 (for an explicit classification of street actions, see table 1). using the results of our observations, we correlate singing situations with different types of songs, actions, and protestors’ interviews. we rely on erving goffman’s frame analysis [2004] and his concept of social dramaturgy [2000] to understand the reasons protestors sing certain songs in certain situations. another important criterion for analyzing songs during protests is the difference between presentation and participation as principles of performance, as defined by thomas turino [2008]. participative style means that songs have no performer or audience, but rather only actual or potential participants. presentational style is defined as one group of people performing for another group who listens and watches [turino 2008]. turino stresses that music has an impact on emotions and identities which are “at once individual and social” and connected with life experience [1999: 221]. he uses peircian semiotic theory to reveal different ways that music works. the interpretation of a sign depends on “the social frame defining the type of interaction” as well as the manner of singing, visual codes, and the body language of participants [turino 1999: 237]. turino’s two styles correspond to goffman’s different types of interaction. the participative style can exist in an intra-group communication when everyone is part of a single group. the presentational style implies two groups—performers and listeners. in some cases, protests included protestors and sympathetic listeners as two different groups, in other cases all protestors were one group against the police. next, we will show how changes in the framework of rallies, which occurred because of tightened political constraints, made singing more participatory. “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 54 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii protest song: when and how? we documented singing during seventy-two anti-government protest events, which totaled thirty percent of all the events that we observed. in fifteen cases, participants only listened to songs through speakers. (5) for the remaining fiftyseven cases, twelve events included singing from the stage by invited artists. in the remaining cases (as well as twice after the events with “staged” singing), groups of attendees (if not all) sang in chorus and were joined by other groups. singing may have been planned (e.g., when the organizers called upon everyone to sing, handing around printed lyrics) or spontaneous (e.g., when some attendees suddenly started singing during the event). the correlation of types of street actions with singing formats is presented in table 1. table 1 (6) form of the action total number recorded music broadcast singing from the stage organized choral singing spontaneous singing 1. approved mass opposition march 13 3 4 1 rally 72 18 12 4 7 2. unapproved mass opposition march 35 3 3 16 rally 28 2 1 6 single pickets 92 2 3 different modes of musical accompaniment illustrate some of the features of different modes of participation. at approved events, performances are mostly presentational in turino’s terms. however, unlike pro-government events where only presentational styles remained possible, sometimes there was also participatory singing at approved events. at unapproved protest actions, on the contrary, performances were exclusively participatory in turino’s terms, even as events might have still been organized. musical accompaniment included: 1) amplified music, 2) singing from a stage, 3) organized choral singing, and 4) spontaneous singing. listening to amplified songs corresponded to minimal involvement for participants. organizers selected songs that meshed with their agendas; music created more of an atmosphere than made a statement. when singing from the stage, musicians’ performances were more akin to speeches, with participants remaining primarily passive recipients. with organized collective singing, the level of participation increased. protestors were no longer merely listeners but were also participants in the speech acts themselves. in the case of spontaneous actions, participants became not only the subjects of the speech acts, but also their creators. as we see in table 1, recorded music (from the equipment) was mostly used at approved rallies, where it usually was played before speeches began. an article “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 55 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii about a moscow protest in defense of the social media platform telegram on 30 april 2018 noted (7), “songs by monetochka (“mama ia ne ziguiu” [mama i don’t say heil]) and yegor letov (“ia ubil v sebe gosudarstvo” [i killed the state in myself]) were played from the stage; people were singing along” [gannenko 2018]. sometimes music was played during approved marches by putting loudspeakers on top of cars that rode in front of columns of protestors, particularly at may day events, which brought together both organized and non-organized opposition groups. (8) on rare occasions, we observed music played with smartphones at unapproved processions and single pickets. (9) although we have mentioned that merely listening to music corresponds to only minimal levels of involvement in the protest, music played with smartphones is different because both the songs and the time to play them were chosen by the protestors spontaneously. usually, when a song was played from a smartphone, people not only listened to it but also sang along, at least to the chorus. in general, this fits into a more general trend where playback from devices was preferred to live performances. it is still acceptable to sing with instrumental accompaniment, most often guitar, but playback from devices has gained popularity: “the guitar, it is usually passed from singer to singer... and first-year guys, they didn’t play the guitar at all. they took out a loudspeaker, turned on music and went on listening. it was so weird to me” [male, born 1992, moscow, may 2020]. playback from devices changes the very essence of relationships between people and texts; there is no longer a need to know lyrics by heart. if someone likes a song, they can easily find it online to play on their smartphone. however, technology has not yet replaced or canceled live singing at street actions. artists often performed live from a stage as part of an organized main program. however, this was impossible at unapproved street actions because protestors were often driven off by the police. in cases of musicians performing from a stage, a performance often turned into a statement; the organizers usually invited those artists whose songs fit their agenda. for example, an environmental meeting in 2019 was attended by musicians whose songs were about fighting against the construction of a landfill at shiyes: artemiy ulanov performed his song “malen’kii shyes, bol’shaia strana” [little shies, big country] and anton slon played his song “vagony s musorom” [cars of waste] [field report from “all-russian environmental protest day,” 22 september 2019, udelny part, st. petersburg]. (10) amplified sound from loudspeakers creates a common information field, just like speeches do. large meetings involving more than a thousand people usually had a center where people listen to speakers and music and a periphery where attendees preferred to talk to each other informally; while the former were likely to listen and maybe sing along, the latter could well ignore songs completely. greater involvement occurred with planned group singing. we have seen this format of singing at opposition rallies almost as many times as performances from the stage. we saw such singing at approved actions, both at marches and rallies. at approved marches, singing usually occurs in columns. for instance, at “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 56 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii a large march in moscow dedicated to the 100th anniversary of russian red army, a man with a guitar marched ahead of the “left front” column and performed “i vnov’ prodolzhaetsia boi” [the battle goes on]. other people sang along, but no other columns were singing, or, in some cases they had their own songs [field report from the march dedicated to the 100th anniversary of red army, 23 february 2018, moscow]. this format of singing was sometimes seen at unapproved events as well, but only at smaller ones that did not risk conflict with the police. it was that way on 8 march 2021; after their application had been rejected, about 250–300 participants decided to walk on sidewalks to avoid breaking traffic laws, without posters but singing songs from kirochnaya street to nevsky avenue [field report from the unapproved action “walking and protesting for women’s rights,” 8 march 2021, st. petersburg]. the organizers made a list of songs beforehand and only had to hand them out on printed papers. in these situations, singing went beyond being a mere individual statement and became a collective statement. the songs were thus a part of the agenda, intended to unify the participants. organized choral singing was an example of the participatory mode of performance and the greater involvement of ordinary participants, even as the choice of songs was still determined by the organizers. the maximum degree of participant involvement appears in cases of spontaneous singing, which was a characteristic primarily of unapproved street actions. we observed thirty-three cases when a participant unexpectedly began to sing a song and other participants picked it up. in this case, singing could be accompanied by guitar, a song played on a smartphone, or without any musical accompaniment at all. for example, alexei navalny (11) held unapproved rallies against corruption on the day of russia in moscow, st. petersburg, and other large cities on 12 june 2017. mcf observers noticed the following at the tverskaya protest: пение “ла-ла-ла, богородица, путина прогони” (не подпевали, но смеялись одобрительно), дудение в утиный манок, пение гимна россии, попытка петь “стены”, включение “перемен” с телефона, пение песен под гитару: “про ходорковского, что в россии всем на все пофиг” и “гуси-гуси, га-га-га.” [singing “la la la, holy virgin put putin away” (not sung to, but there were supporting laughs), using duck calls, singing the national anthem, trying to sing “steny” [walls], (12) playing “peremen” [changes] (13) on phones, singing “about khodorkovsky, and that no one gives a shit in russia,” accompanied by guitar, and a nursery rhyme about gees.] [field report from the unapproved action “we demand answers,” 12 june 2017, moscow] meanwhile, police suppressed protestors at another unapproved event at mars field in st. petersburg. at one moment, a group of young people gathered near “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 57 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii the memorial and sang “peremen.” at the end of the rally, the ones who remained after many hours of arrests gathered and sang russia’s national anthem [field report from the unapproved action “we demand answers,” 12 june 2017, st. petersburg]. in 2021, spontaneous singing frequently accompanied mass protests. 2021 in russia began with navalny’s return and his subsequent arrest. his arrest sparked massive street protests across the country. rallies and marches in support of navalny took place from january to april 2021 [arkhipova et al. 2021]. here is one field report from the protests: впереди дорога оказалась перегорожена омоном, начались задержания, все побежали назад, стало понятно, что мы в окружении, но утешало, что нас там было около тысячи человек и всех задержать было бы проблемно. в итоге как-то собрались, повернули на большую конюшенную. снова начали кричать кричалки и хлопать. несколько парней запели “всё идет по плану”, песню подхватили и с песней мы шли в сторону невского проспекта [...] у казанского собора снова начались задержания, мы перебежали через невский проспект, у дома книги кто-то включил на телефоне пеню ic3peak “смерти больше нет” — молодежь стала подпевать припев, танцевать и хлопать в ладоши. [the way ahead was blocked by riot police, they started arresting people, everyone ran back and soon we understood we were encircled. the good news was that we numbered more than a thousand, and they wouldn’t be able to catch everyone. in the long run, we managed to gather and turned to bolshaya konyushennaya, starting to shout and clap again. some guys started singing “vcё idёt po planu” [all is going according to plan] (14), others followed, and so we went toward nevsky, singing together. [...] next to kazan cathedral, there were arrests again. we crossed nevsky, and when we reached the central bookstore, someone put ic3peak’s “smerti bol’she net” [death no more] (15) on their phone, the guys sang along with the chorus, danced, clapped their hands.] [field report from unapproved march against navalny’s arrest, 23 january 2021, st. petersburg] in this case, we see how involved participants became in the protests. not only did they sing together, but they also chose what and when to sing. the protest itself was completely participative as well; there were no performers and no audience. as a result, everyone, whether singing or not, was perceived by passersby and police as part of the unapproved march, gathering and singing in breach of the law. in this section, we have shown different types of singing, each of which shows different modes of involvement and participation in protest. the ability of organizers to turn on equipment and invite professional musicians decreased “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 58 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii every year after 2015 and eventually disappeared by 2020. it caused the development of participatory singing and, accordingly, a higher involvement of participants in protest actions. songs sung during protests table 2 details the seven most popular protest songs that we observed over a decade of fieldwork and the performance modes in which we observed them. the four songs that were most popular at russian street protests were “peremen” by the band kino [movies] (16), “steny” by the band arkady kots (17), “the internationale” (18), and the official anthem of the russian federation. all these songs were performed from seven to twelve times during the events, and we have heard them at protests repeatedly over the years. these four songs are very different in content, style, and meaning in russian culture. we will discuss each one in turn. table 2 music from equipment singing from the stage organized choral singing spontaneous singing “peremen” [changes] 7 11 “steny” [walls] 1 6 5 “the internationale” 1 1 4 1 russian national anthem 7 “eto proidet” [this will pass] 1 4 “vcё idёt po planu” [all is going according to plan] 4 “smerti bol’she net” [death no more] 1 2 “peremen” was written by viktor tsoi, the frontman for kino, in 1986 and was included in the soundtrack of sergey solovyov’s movie assa in 1987. the “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 59 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii secret of peremen’s popularity lies perhaps in its historical context above all. this song anticipated perestroika, the fall of the ussr, and the dawn of a new country. tsoi himself said that the song was not political, but it nevertheless became the anthem of perestroika for many people. in terms of genre, it is usually defined as “russian rock,” a style that was common for protest music in the late 1980s. the song has not lost its popularity; it was used in the soundtracks to modern films dust (2005) and major grom: plague doctor (2021) and has resulted in quite a few cover versions by later russian artists. it was played from acoustic systems as the opening or closing theme to protests up to 2019, during unofficial marches in 2019 and 2021, and from cars. all eleven times mentioned in the table it was sung spontaneously. “peremen” is special because it isn’t specific to one age group; older people know it from their youth and young people know it because of its continued popularity. “steny” is the second most popular song and even more frequently sung live. according to mcf records, it has been sung twelve times at rallies. the original version was written in 1968 in catalan by lluis llach and later translated into russian by kirill medvedev in 2011. since then, the russian version has been performed by the band arkady kots, sometimes live from the stage during protest events. unlike “peremen,” “steny” is mostly popular among political activists. it is often performed at left-wing events and feminist protests. in 2019–2020, it also became the anthem of environmentalists protesting a dump in shies [kozlova 2020]. “peremen” and “steny” are indexes of russian peoples’ protests, and, perhaps, the songs’ popularity was one of the reasons for their singing: when you try to unite people, you should sing something familiar to them and have a clear, traditional message. the third and fourth most popular songs are “the internationale” and the anthem of the russian federation. “the internationale” was once the official anthem of the russian soviet federal socialist republic (from 1918 on) and then of the ussr (from 1922 to 1944). it was usually sung in a version corresponding to the former national hymn, mostly at events that coincided with “soviet” dates, like 1 may, 7 november, or 23 february. in the 2010s, such events united both organized and sporadic left-wing opposition groups. “the internationale” is popular among people of various ages but is mainly a leftist song, associated with groups aligned with the ussr (19) and the “new left.” (20) we have only heard the official anthem of the russian federation played at events organized by the anti-corruption foundation (acf) and performed mostly by young people, aged below twenty-five to thirty. while singing it, protestors on 23 january 2021 also led a round dance “karavay” [loaf] around a snowman. the original words of the dance-play which is common for the children’s holidays are “каравай, каравай / кого любишь выбирай” [loaf, loaf / choose whom you love]. at the center of the circle there was a snowman. the crown on his head, the money and red paint symbolizing blood in his mouth, his small eyes and a triangular nose indicated that the snowman was an icon of putin. thus, their singing of the anthem was only ironic [field report from unapproved march against navalny’s arrest, 23 january 2021, moscow]. “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 60 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii turino offers the example of jimi hendrix’s woodstock performance of the us national anthem in terms of how a song can create indexes: “the anthem (indexically associated with nationalistic contexts) creates a new meaning specifically within the broader social context” [1999: 242]. associations with the vietnam war through the images of bomb sounds included the song in anti-war protests. in our case, protest actions have not inverted the meaning of the anthem totally, but still have given it some extra semantic range, such as the impossibility of choice, the transformation of citizens into children, and the president into a bloody idol. in an interview conducted in 2022, (21) one protestor spoke about the singing of the anthem during an april 2021 pro-navalny rally in chita: мы пели гимн […] ну, к тому же сложно арестовать людей, которые поют гимн, мы так посчитали. это было бы слишком абсурдно на тот момент. сейчас уже ничего не абсурдно. [помогло?] да, нас никто не задержал. хотя там какой-то полицейский говорил: “ыы какой-то флешмоб организовали, это там что-то нарушает”. ну, никого не задерживали. ну, по крайней мере у меня на глазах. [we have sung the anthem […] and, besides, it is difficult to arrest people, who are singing the anthem, as we considered. it would be too absurd for that moment. nowadays, nothing is too absurd... [did it help?] yes, none of us was arrested. although a policemen said: “gee, what a flash mob you have organized, it offends something”. so, no one was arrested. at least, i haven’t seen.”] [male, born 1996, st. petersburg, 16 april 2022] the interviewee remarks on all official symbols such as the anthem and flag “такого оттенка не имели в апреле прошлого года” [they haven’t that shade on the april last year]. during the spring of 2022, all state official symbols were discredited by war, and the singing of the anthem was introduced in some schools as an element of patriotic education and thus could no longer be used by protestors in any context. at the same time, in our interviews with protestors during 2022, the singing of the ukrainian anthem was mentioned at least twice: по-моему, пели еще гимн “ще не вмерла украiна”, гимн пели точно, неоднократно, 24-го пели. [to my mind, they also sang the hymn “ukraine has not yet died,” they sang the anthem accurately, repeatedly, they sang it on the 24th.] [male, born 1991, st. petersburg, 8 april 2022] здесь уже люди пели гимн украины. я, насколько мог, подпевал, надо доучить слова. но, в целом, люди пели “ще не вмерла “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 61 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii украина”, там пели люди из украинской диаспоры и не только, я видел своих знакомых российских активистов, они тоже пели. [here already people sang the national anthem of ukraine. i sang along as best i could, i need to finish learning the words. but, in general, people sang “ukraine has not yet died,” people from the ukrainian diaspora and not only sang there, i saw my acquaintances from russian activists, they also sang.] [male, born 1998, yerevan, 31 march 2022] we would like to underline the fact that people had to specially learn the words to the ukrainian anthem. apart from these four songs, our observers also heard other songs more than once. those songs can be classified into several categories: soviet-era songs, author (bard) songs, rock songs, and new songs written in the last few years. soviet-era songs as well as the author (bard) songs (22) were mainly sung by elderly people. left-wing parties used soviet-era songs to express nostalgia for the ussr. for example, we often heard them at marches against raising the retirement age in 2018. author songs were sung by the same aged people who listened to soviet-era songs but who had more liberal (formerly anti-soviet) views and were usually found at small-scale events related to architectural activists or memorials. for example, we heard them at boris nemtsov’s (23) and anna politkovskaya’s (24) memorial events. in recent years, when there were no longer approved actions and the risk of arrest at small uncoordinated actions increased, the singing of author songs stopped. rock is the most common genre played or sung at protests. russian rock from the 1980s is most often the music of forty-somethings, the demographic who constitute the base of today’s democratic opposition or at least those groups that manage to have their events approved. this music was inherited by young people in contrast to earlier generations’ preference for soviet and author’s songs. one key rock song was “vcё idёt po planu” [all is going according to plan] written by yegor letov, frontman of the group grazhdanskaia oborona [civil defense] between 1986 and 1988. like kino, grazhdanskaia oborona was a russian rock band with a punk sensibility. although “vcё idёt po planu” is more than thirty years old, it is usually sung by younger people. for instance, in 2021, while one of us was teaching high school, students aged seventeen to eighteen years old chose to add civil defense to their poetry-class curriculum. other songs frequently played were those of yuri shevchuk of ddt. it is worth mentioning that a new protest punk rock genre was being developed in the 2020s, represented by the band pornofilmy [porn movies] (25). their song, “eto proidet” [it will pass], was another hit at today’s street protests. the song was composed during protests against the non-admission of independents in the elections of the moscow city duma. the song features police brutality during mass protests, mentions siberian forests that were on fire at that time, and references the war in eastern ukraine and a landmark 2019 politically motivated legal case against the journalist ivan golunov. we observed young “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 62 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii people singing this song during unapproved mass gatherings in both 2020 and 2021. it was also played from a phone during an anti-war demonstration on 27 february 2022 in st. petersburg. one additional song popular among protestors was “smerti bol’she net” [death is no more] by ic3peak. ic3peak, founded in 2013, plays experimental electronic music. written in 2018, and the band performed the song on stage during an approved rally against the banning of independent candidates for elections on 10 august 2019. we also subsequently heard young people perform it during the 2021 pro-navalny events. in addition to participant observation, we also interviewed participants about the songs that they sang during protests. during interviews on 21 april 2021 (26), we asked two questions: which songs do participants associate with today’s protests, and which songs have they themselves heard at events. the results were surprising. although “peremen” was the most common response (thirteen people had heard it, and twenty-two people associated it with protests) the only other songs that people mentioned were “eto proidet” and “smerti bol’she net.” “eto proidet” was familiar to three respondents, while five said that they associated this or other songs by pornofilmy with protests. two respondents had heard “smerti bol’she net,” and five associated it with protest. some other songs were also mentioned: gudkov’s “akvadiskoteka” [aquatic disco], composed in 2021 and inspired by navalny’s investigations, “vsё kak u liudei” [all the proper way] by rapper noize mc (2019), and “vykhodi guliat’ so mnoi” [come walk with me] by the rap group kasta (2019). “peremen” attracts protestors because of its universality and relevant historical and cultural contexts. the songwriter never spoke explicitly about his political views, which allowed protestors to interpret its meaning broadly: “ну, обычно в любой непонятной ситуации на любом митинге, неважно левый, правый—все поют песню «перемен»” [actually, “peremen” is sung by anyone, at any rally, no matter if right or left] [female, born 1999, moscow, 21 april 2021]. because the song lacks specific historical or political references, the perspectives of protestors demanding change fit the song well. one respondent said, “я считаю, что это вообще гимн сегодняшнего времени” [i think it’s actually the anthem of our day] [female, born 1978, moscow, 21 april 2021]. newer songs brought more variety to the russian street protest soundtrack in 2021. sometimes respondents even said that they had learned new protest songs at the events themselves: “в прошлый раз, когда я была, включали люди музыку из машин, и я познакомилась с прекрасной песней группы порнофильмы, которая называется «это пройдет», вот, узнала о новом треке с протестной акции” [last time i attended one, there were people putting music on from their cars. that was how i heard a great song by pornofilmy, called “eto proidet.” so, i learned a new song at a protest event] [female, born 1993, moscow, 21 april 2021]. still, respondents mostly said that they learned about new songs (and old ones as well) from social media: “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 63 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii [может, у вас есть какие-то песни, которые ассоциируются с зимними митингами?] я думаю, что это соцсети популяризировали... я слышала в tiktok, в instagram “перемен”, ic3peak тоже какая-то песня была… [подруга подсказывает] — “пусть все горит”. [[perhaps you could name some songs that you associate with this winter’s events?] i think they became mainstream from social media [...] i’ve heard “peremen” on tiktok and on instagram, also some song by ic3peak [a friend adds “let it all burn” (27)].] [female, born 2001, moscow, 21 april 2021] it was thus largely due to technology (music on phones or the internet, for example) that new protest songs appeared at rallies. sometimes informants knew songs but not the artists of the songs, saying they heard the songs online as tracks that accompanied information about the protests: [а слышали какие-нибудь песни сегодня?] да, я слышал пару песен группы “порнофильмы” и “пусть все горит”. [я тоже ее слышала. это, новая для меня песня “пусть все горит”, кто ее поет?] я не знаю точно исполнителя, но в различных социальных сетях под эту песню как раз проходили массовые сборы, призывы к тому, чтобы выйти. [[have you heard any songs today?] yes, i heard a couple of songs by pornofilmy and “let it burn.” [oh yes, i’ve heard it too. this song, “let it burn,” is totally new to me, who’s the artist?] i don’t know exactly, but this song has been used on social media to organize mass meetings, accompanying calls to going out to protest.] [male, born 2002, st. petersburg, 23 january 2021] the fact that a song accompanied a protest made it become more important to the public than simply knowing its lyricist or performer alone. social networks, in 2021 primarily tik-tok, and mobile phones for accompaniment and reading texts during street actions made it possible for new protest songs to appear. as a result, new songs competed with classics, but whether any of them will equal the popularity of “peremen” still remains to be seen. in 2022, we conducted fifteen additional interviews. in addition to the songs named earlier, interviewees also mentioned the ukrainian national anthem and the children’s song “pust’ vsegda budet solnce” [may there always be sunshine]. we wrote about the ukrainian national anthem above. as for the children’s song, its appeal is in its pacifist message, which anti-war protestors turned into political slogan. we also observed other times when protestors used children’s songs or spoke about them in interviews. for example, in 2021 protestors used a song from “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 64 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii the cartoon bremenskie muzykanty [the bremen town musicians] called “nichego na svete luchshe netu,” [there is nothing better in the world] associating the songs’ lyrics “нам дворцов заманчивые своды / не заменят никогда свободы” [the tempting vaults of the palaces / will never replace freedom for us] with putin’s palace, which navalny showed in his investigation on the eve of the protest. we will now turn to protestors’ motivations for singing or playing music at protest actions. motivations for songs and singing at protests the question of the communicative objective of music and songs during protests raises a few methodological questions. during interviews, participants answer without realizing their objectives or veil them retrospectively; meanwhile, during protests themselves we can only understand the way that singing correlates with specific situations, not draw any cause-effect links. although we realize these limitations, we can still generalize some of the purposes of song and singing in protests, both conscious and unconscious ones. songs and singing do not just express protestors’ identity or position, which is relevant at a symbolic level and connected with the songs’ texts (turino calls this “thirdness”), but songs and singing also mark the space of an action, fill the event time, and help protestors not to focus on their own fear, which connects to emotions (what turino calls “firstness”) and indices: for example, “peremen” refers to perestroika in the soviet union, and “steny” refers to the fight against franco’s dictatorship (“secondness”) [turino 1999]. in everyday life, singing can fill idle time. people sing or recite to themselves during long journeys, when they cannot fall asleep, or are in a hospital, for instance [yugay 2000]. at approved protest events, songs are also played at the beginning and end to fill downtime as people arrive and leave. this same function is demonstrated by singing during one-person protest “queues,” when time is not filled by a defined program. songs also perform a similar function at progovernment rallies. during unapproved events, people sometimes turn on music or sing while waiting: дошли до банковского моста, стали переходить через него, так как мостик узкий, в людей было очень много, получилась пешеходная пробка. кто-то включил на телефоне “перемен”, следом включило еще несколько человек, остальные стали хором подпевать — так пока стояли спели всю песню от начала до конца. [we reached bankovsky bridge and started to cross it. since it’s a narrow bridge and there were quite a lot of people, there was sort of a pedestrian jam. someone began playing “peremen” on their smartphone, several persons followed suit, the rest started singing along; so while being in this jam, we sang the entire song from beginning to end.] [field “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 65 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii report from an unapproved protest against navalny’s arrest, 31 january 2021, st. petersburg] however, in unplanned acts, even the message of “filler” music becomes important. people standing on the bridge, for example, are at risk of being arrested by police and singing increases that risk. when artists play from the stage at approved events, music was simultaneously a statement about the agenda of the protest itself and entertainment, allowing for a break between more serious speeches and intended to set the mood. in pro-government actions, entertainment was the main function of songs. most often, famous pop singers performed from the stage, and their songs were not related to any agenda. at approved opposition rallies, organizers selected songs based on their messages, but this too did not negate their simultaneous function as entertainment. for example, one of the organizers of an event in a small town told us why he believed it was important to invite artists to play during mass meetings: как считали у нас коммунисты (кпрф), что митинг — это дело серьезное, вроде там надо вещи озвучивать серьезные, а не какой-то концерт. но мы потом их переубедили, почему “архимеда” и позвали в тот момент, что все-таки надо такой момент делать, чтобы человек расслабился и потом дали информацию, опять же немножко расслабился и снова подали информацию. поэтому митинги только в конце прошлого года пошли музыкально-говорильные, до этого были в основном говорильные. [our communists (the city cell of the communist party of the russian federation) believed that a rally was a serious thing with serious speeches, not a concert or something. but we managed to convince them and eventually invited archimedes (28), because we understand that people also need some fun and relaxation before listening to serious stuff again. so, it was not until end of last year that mass meetings became composed of both music and talking, while it used to be just talking before.] [artyom, born 1991, syktyvkar, online interview recorded in may 2020] different people, mostly strangers to each other, came to street actions, both approved and unapproved, and their performance of song helped them feel like a team. singing songs at protest actions often functioned similarly to singing on hikes, at youth camps, etc. it is no coincidence that the organizers of some street actions brought paper lyrics with them related to the agenda of the event. organizers wanted to both entertain and unite participants, as they made a political statement. at those unapproved events that lacked organizers or speakers, participants themselves intuitively chose choral singing to express themselves and create that feeling of unity. chants performed a similar function at street actions. “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 66 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii for example, at many unapproved marches in moscow and st. petersburg, we often heard the chant, “when we are united, we are invincible.” interviewees mentioned songs’ unifying role: “мне кажется всякие присказки, кричалки и песни они здорово сплачивают людей” [i think that all those adages, chants and songs are great for bringing people together] [female, born 1996, st. petersburg, 18 january 2021]. musicians too similarly noted: на улице, это коллективно все, тут задача не себя получше презентовать, а чтобы все вместе пели, все шумело, смысл для общей борьбы. тут музыка имеет более практическое значение. но это и хорошо […] это и развлечение одновременно, да, у тебя есть задача постараться сделать так, чтобы эта акция была повеселее. [when you’re outside, you’re all together, you don’t need to look like a rock star, just to make everyone sing together, make some noise, fight together. music has practical value here. and that’s okay [...] it’s for entertainment, too, ‘cause you have to make this event more fun.] [kirill, born 1974, moscow, interview june 2021] singing also helps participants overcome their fear: [есть ли какие-то песни, кроме приведенных примеров, которые показывают твое отношение, если оно есть, к повестке современной?] эта вот прекрасная “перемен”, или “стены”, да, это просто вот. я помню я стояла на митинге в своем городе, мой город, это странное место, где на митинге товарищей в форме было больше, чем людей, которые вышли протестовать [...] и помню, как я стою и в одиночестве ору вот это вот “стены” потому, что больше никто этот текст не знал. да. и для меня это самый политический текст из возможных. из тех, которые я знаю, наверное. [“peremen,” [is] an awesome [song], or “steny,” these rock. i remember standing in a mass meeting in my town [miass, chelyabinsk oblast], and my town is a weird place with more police than actual protestors coming to the event [...] and i can recall standing alone and yelling those “steny,” all alone because no one else knew the lyrics. yeah. this text is so very political to me. of all the ones i know, i guess.] [female, born 2000, moscow, april 2021] another young woman explained that she was very scared at the protests both for herself and her parents: “вот какой-то, да, абсолютный страх. и в то же время я не чувствовала, что я могу стоять и молчать. у меня не было в руках плаката, я не смогла нарисовать плакат. мне же нужно было что-то сказать, нужно было выразить то, что я чувствую. поэтому я пела “стены”” [there was some, yeah, absolute fear. but at the same time, i never felt i could just stand “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 67 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii there in silence. i had no poster, i couldn’t come up with one. but i had to say something, let my feelings out. that’s why i was singing “steny”] [female, born 2000, april 2021]. at a st. petersburg rally on 21 april 2021, people started shouting “we are not afraid” and “we are the power here” and then began singing “eto proidet.” [field report from the unapproved march “medical assistance for navalny,” 21 april 2021, st. petersburg]. activists at an environmental camp on shies sang “steny” during clashes with representatives of security forces as well. (29) we found multiple mentions of choral singing during protests on social media, such as singing during protestors’ detainment on buses that transported them to police stations. (30) turino similarly noted that participants in protests in the united states in the 1960s talked about how they sang each time before going to demonstrations to bolster their courage [2008: 218]. the prevalence of a particular function, whether filling time, entertainment, making a political statement, uniting participants, and overcoming fear, largely depended on the type of action and the mode of singing. and, often each performance carried with it more than one function. at approved events, singing and listening to songs were more often used to fill time, entertain, or make a political statement. during unapproved events, song more likely served the functions of uniting and overcoming fear. conclusion this article has demonstrated how there is no universal pattern for song performances at protest actions, even as there seems to be a set playlist, including “peremen,” “steny,” “the internationale,” and “vcё idёt po planu.” each song has its own history in the protest movement, and still other songs become protest songs, such as the russian national anthem and certain soviet-era and children’s songs. even so, the choice of song, the format of a protest action, and the mode of singing do not always correlate with each other. songs might be played on equipment, performed from a stage, or sung collectively. they may be listened to passively as in the case of many approved actions or experienced as participatory singing as in many unapproved actions. the level of participation might grow depending on increases in risk. at those events where the most police violence occurs, unapproved mass actions, spontaneous collective singing is common. taken together, songs across all the protests that we observed had two larger functions. the first was simply as entertainment and scene setting for the protests’ time and space. that is how organizers used music during approved protests with invited musicians or music played through equipment. however, riot police’s actions similarly framed protests through cordoning off rallies and arresting individuals. protestors’ active programs increasingly became watching riot police and running away from them. the second function of songs was for those people who found themselves in this situation. they used music to regain a sense of human dignity and agency, to overcome fear, and make original political statements. they did this through songs performed spontaneously or played from a cell phone. singing, unlike a poster, “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 68 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii leaves no traces. it only needs a temporary gap for safety. lately, at unapproved actions, songs became even more involved as participants themselves increasingly made their own expressions in addition to those of the organizers. people were looking for something that could unite them as a group, so they chose songs familiar to most attendees or something that expressed their individuality. our observations of the protest actions of february-march 2022 demonstrate that singing only helps to overcome protestors’ fear and unify them as a group up to a certain point. in a contest between protestors and authorities, there comes a moment when it is unsafe, punishment increases, and no time remains to make a statement through song. at that point, singing cannot provide agency and human dignity, and therefore it disappears. on 13 march 2022, police in the center of moscow outnumbered protestors, passersby, and tourists. protestors were unable to form any kind of group, and posters, songs, and shouts ceased. the protest became numb and silent. acknowledgements the article was written on a ranepa state assignment research program. the study was funded by rfbr, project number 20-09-00318а, “strategies of generating and tactics of perceiving poetic texts in rural and urban cultures” and by the centre for polish-russian dialogue and understanding. we express our sincere gratitude to our colleagues from monitoring contemporary folklore: alexandra arkhipova, maria gavrilova, boris peigin, sergey beljanin, anna kyrzyuk, and volunteers anna orlova and nina aleksandrova. we thank our colleagues from the public sociology laboratory (ps lab) for their interviews. we are also grateful to alexey titkov for his advice and the center for typology and semiotics of folklore, rsuh for their fruitful discussion. notes 1 this article was written in 2021, and the statement was true then. after 24 february 2022, the situation changed. new songs with actual agendas were written in spring 2022. however, we will not discuss them in this article because they weren’t mentioned in street protests. the reason is impersonal—the mass anti-war actions took place during the first two weeks of the war. the last of them was on 6 march. the songs appeared later. 2 for additional mсf scholarship on the anthropology of russian protest, see [arkhipova et al. 2017], [arkhipova et al. 2018а], [arkhipova et al. 2018b], and [arkhipova et al. 2021]. 3 single pickets stand apart because they did not require a permit until april 2020. marches and rallies imply large-scale involvement, from 100 to tens of thousands of people. meanwhile, a one-man protest means that there is only one person participating; however, in effect, people come in small groups and hold their posters in turns. from april 2020, single pickets were forbidden because of covid-19. “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 69 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 4 we were guided by two criteria in choosing street actions for this article. firstly, the thematic (agenda)—we don’t consider non-political actions or actions in support of the current government. secondly, the presence or absence of singing at an action. 5 there were thirteen events where, in addition to music from the speakers, participants also sang (in some cases from the stage, in others as spontaneous choral singing), so in total we heard music at twenty-eight protests. 6 the number of songs is greater than the number of street actions, because some actions may have more than one performance format. 7 in 2018, roskomnadzor [the russian federal service for supervision of communications, information technology and mass media] tried to block telegram in russia. at least twelve thousand people rallied against that decision on 30 april 2018. the decision was later reversed. 8 we have never observed singing from cars about which noriko manabe [2013] writes. we did observe singing from cars in warsaw on 11 november 2021 at the march of antifascists [field report from the approved action “to your freedom and ours!” 11 november 2021, warsaw]. it was impossible to sing from cars in russia after 2015. 9 single pickets were not banned until 2020. picket lines became popular in 2018–2019. usually from ten to 100 people came to a certain place with posters and stood each with a poster in turn for about five to ten minutes. the rest of the participants, while waiting, lined up one by one in a real queue, like a queue in a store, until all participants stood with their posters. 10 these songs were written in 2019 in connection with an environmental protest at the shies railway station in the arkhangelsk region. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_wekllkm5o&t=10s and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu5_sncjm9s. for more information about the protests on shies, see [zhuravlev, alexandrova, and lupenko 2020] and [kozlova 2020]. 11 alexey navalny is a well-known russian politician. in 2013, he ran second in the moscow mayoral elections. in 2018, he was nominated for president of the russian federation, but was not approved as a candidate. in january 2021, he was arrested and on 2 february was sentenced to prison for two years and eight months. rallies against corruption were a significant phenomenon in 2017 in response to the investigative film “he is not dimon to you” produced by alexei navalny and his anti-corruption foundation and dedicated to investigating the wealth of russian prime minister dmitry medvedev. 12 стены (l’estaca) [walls] is a song composed by the catalan singersongwriter lluís llach in 1968. for the history of the song, see [ionikova 2020]. for the lyrics of this song in russian and english, see the appendix. 13 перемен [changes] is a song of the group kino. for the lyrics of this song in russian and english, see the appendix. 14 всё идет по плану [all is going according to plan] is one of the most famous songs of the russian punk musician yegor letov and his group grazhdanskaia oborona. “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 70 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 15 смерти больше нет [death no more] is a song of the group ic3peak. for the lyrics of this song in russian and english, see the appendix. 16 kino [movies] (1981-1991) was one of the most popular soviet rock bands of the 1980s. 17 for more on arkady kots, see https://www.fhu.art/arkadiy-kotsband?fbclid=iwar0ddodgendddtmpb9btqha67dkan794ugk5tz3yylg rmlxyalgo8iws-zy and the group’s website, https://arkadiykotsru.translate.goog/ogruppe.html?_x_tr_sch=http&_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=ru&_x_tr_pt o=sc 18 the internationale in the version of arkady yakovlevich kots in russia became the generally recognized party anthem of revolutionary social democracy from the beginning of 1918. it was the anthem of the soviet state and then the ussr until 1944. 19 these are the russian federation communist party (rfcp) and some others, including but not limited to the united communist party (ucp), rotfront, etc. 20 the term “new left” denotes left-wing movements focused on global left-wing values, e.g., internationalism, feminism, etc. it is represented by a few small movements that lack cohesion, such as the russian socialist movement (rsm), socialist alternative, left union, etc. 21 the interview was collected between february and may 2022 by researchers from ps lab and volunteers. 22 author's song, bard song, or poetic song is a song genre that arose in the middle of the twentieth century in different countries. its distinctive features include: the performer as the author of the text and music, guitar accompaniment, and the importance of the text over the music. the genre was very popular in the ussr in the 1960s-1980s. 23 boris nemtsov (1959-2015) was a russian politician and statesman and the first governor of the nizhny novgorod region (1991-1997). since 2008, he had been in opposition to the current government until he was killed in february of 2015. 24 anna politkovskaya (1958-2006) was a russian journalist, press secretary of the novaia gazeta newspaper, human rights activist, and writer. she was killed on 7 october 2006. 25 pornofilmy [porn movies] is a russian punk-rock band from dubna founded in 2008 by vadim kotlyarov (born 1987). until 2017, the group was known mainly in punk subculture spaces. it gained fame after a series of bans on its performance. greater popularity, in our opinion, arose in 2019 after the song “it will pass” was released. for the lyrics of this song in russian and english, see the appendix. 26 researchers from two teams, monitoring contemporary folklore and the public sociology lab along with volunteers, recorded eighty-nine interviews following questionnaires that included questions about songs. fifty informants gave positive answers to these questions. “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 71 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 27 “let it burn” is a line from the chorus of “death no more” by ic3peak. 28 ded arkhimed [grandpa archimedes] (whose real name is dmitry, surname unknown) is a video blogger known for performing satirical rap songs with a social focus. he appears in makeup as an old man, affecting an elderly voice and behavior. 29 for more information on the songs people sang during protests at shies, see [kozlova 2020]. for a video, see: https://vk.com/im?sel=70745244&z=video70745244_456239308%2f5c8e8aceb 27557c3be%2fpl_post_70745244_3250м. 30 the most famous of these videos is the performance of “steny” by detained musicians from the band arkady kots; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfzkifjc2bs. bibliography arkhipova, alexandra, and mikhail alekseevsky (ed.). 2014. архипова, александра, алексеевский, михаил. “мы не немы. антропология протеста в россии 2011–2012 годов” [we are not dumb. anthropology of protest in russia 2011–2012]. tartu: elm. arkhipova, alexandra, dmitry doronin, elena yugay, anna kirzyuk, daria radchenko, alexey titkov, and maria volkova. 2017. “légitimation et disqualification par l’histoire dans les manifestations de rue en russie (20112016)” [legitimization and disqualification by history in street protests in russia (2011-2016)], le mouvement social 260(3): 129-148.arkhipova, alexandra, sergey belyanin, anna kirzyuk, irina kozlova, and elena yugay. 2018а. архипова, александра, белянин, сергей, кирзюк, анна, козлова, ирина и елена югай. “жизненный цикл мема… в чайках, бакланах и уточках” [meme lifecycle in seagulls, cormorants and ducks], искусство кино 1–2: 300-312. arkhipova, alexandra, daria radchenko, alexey titkov, irina kozlova, elena yugay, sergei belyanin,belyanin, and maria gavrilova. 2018b. архипова, александра, радченко, дарья, титков, алексей, козлова, ирина, югай, елена, белянин, cергей и мария гаврилова. “«пересборка митинга»: интернет в протесте и протест в интернете” [“rally rebuild”: internet in protest and protest on the internet], мониторинг общественного мнения 1: 12-35. arkhipova, alexandra, alexey zakharov, and irina kozlova. 2021. архипова, александра, захаров, алексей и ирина козлова. “этнография протеста: кто и почему вышел на улицы в январе — апреле 2021?” [the protest ethnography: who and why went to the streets in january — april 2021?], мониторинг общественного мнения 5: 289-323. gannenko, v. 2018. ганненко, в. “мы умнее своих родителей. в москве прошел митинг против блокировки telegram. репортаж «медузы»” [we are smarter than our parents. a mass meeting in moscow against locking of telegram. a report by meduza agency]. cited “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 72 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii by https://meduza.io/feature/2018/04/30/my-umnee-svoih-roditeley (consulted 5 december 2021). goffman, erving. 2000. гофман, ирвинг. представление себя другим в повседневной жизни [the presentation self in everyday life], transl. by a. kovaleva. москва: канон-пресс-ц, кучково поле. ———. 2004. гофман, ирвинг. фрейм-анализ. эссе об организации повседневного опыта [frame analysis. an essay on the organization of experience], transl. by r. bumagina, yu. danilova, a. kovalyova, o. oberemko. москва: институт социологии ран. ionikova, anastasia. 2020. ионикова, анастасия. “стены рухнут. история легендарной песни, ставшей символом протестов в каталонии, польше, россии и беларуси” [the walls will fall: the history of the legendary song symbolizing the protests in catalonia, poland, russia, and belarus]. cited by https://discours.io/articles/culture/steny-ruhnut-istoriyalegendarnoy-pesni-stavshey-simvolom-protestov-v-katalonii-polshe-rossiii-belarusi (consulted 5 december 2021). kozlova, irina. 2020. козлова, ирина. “песни шиеса: рождение музыки из духа экопротеста” [songs of shiyes: music born from environmental protest spirit], фольклор и антропология города 3-4(iii): 206-231. manabe, noriko. 2013. “music in japanese antinuclear demonstrations: the evolution of a contentious performance model”, the asia-pacific journal 42, 11(3): 1-36. sapronova, yulia, evgeny tarasenko, damir yanaev, sergey zimin, darya shirokova, elmira minikaeva, and yulia vorobyeva. 2019. сапронова, юлия, тарасенко, евгений, янаев, дамиз, зимин, сергей, широкова, дарья, миникаева, эльмира и юлия воробьева. “from letov to face: who has performed at mass meetings in russia and what were they singing about.” cited by https://www.rbc.ru/society/27/09/2019/5d8b33b79a7947c837aefe6d (consulted 5 december 2021). shenkman, j. 2020. шенкман, я. “«мы не быдло, стадо и трусы!» под какую музыку протестуют в беларуси и сша” [we are no scum, no herd, no cowards: music accompanying the protests in belarus and the usa]. cited by https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2020/07/10/86225-my-ne-bydlo-stado-itrusy?utm_source=vk&utm_medium=novaya&utm_campaign=kazhdayazabastovka--pesnya.-kazhdoe-ubiys (consulted 5 december 2021). ———. 2021. шенкман, я. “никто не запретит мне танцы” [no one will stop me from dancing]. cited by https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2021/02/08/89115-nikto-ne-zapretit-mnetantsy (consulted 5 december 2021). shulman, e. 2021. шульман, е. “как я сходила на митинг 23 января” [how i visited january 23rd’s rally]. cited by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvbiealalic&t=1103s (consulted 5 december 2021). “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 73 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii šmidchens, guntis. 2014. the power of song. nonviolent national culture in the baltic singing revolution. seattle, wa, london: university of washington press. turino, thomas. 1999. “signs of imagination, identity, and experience: a peircian semiotic theory for music,” ethnomusicology 2(43): 221-255. ———. 2008. music as social life: the politics of participation. chicago: university of chicago press. yugay, elena. 2020. югай, елена. портрет стихотворения в интерьере: практики чтения [portrait of a poem in the interior: reading practices], новый мир 6: 162-180. zhuravlev, oleg, violetta alexandrova, and darya lupenko. 2020. “in russia’s new protest cycle, a demand for a democratic state emerges”. cited by https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-new-protests-democraticstate/ (consulted 5 december 2021). interviews 1. vyacheslav, male, born 1992, moscow, interview recorded 29 may 2020 2. male, born 1996, st. petersburg, interview recorded 16 april 2022 3. male, born 1991, st. petersburg, interview recorded 8 april 2022 4. male, born 1998, yerevan, online interview recorded 31 march 2022 5. female, born 1999, moscow, interview recorded 21 april 2021 6. female, born 1978, moscow, interview recorded 21 april 2021 7. female, born 1993, moscow, interview recorded 21 april 2021 8. female, born 2001, moscow, interview recorded 21 april 2021 9. male, born 2002, st. petersburg, interview recorded 23 january 2021 10. artyom, male, born 1991, syktyvkar, online interview recorded 27 may 2020 11. female, born 1996, st. petersburg, interview recorded 18 january 2021 12. kirill, male, born 1974, moscow, interview recorded 25 june 2021 13. alisa, female, born 2000, moscow, interview recorded 13 april 2021 field diaries 1. field report from the approved action “all-russian environmental protest day,” 22 september 2019, udelny part, st. petersburg 2. field report from the approved march dedicated to the 100th anniversary of red army, 23 february 2018, moscow 3. field report from the unapproved action “walking and protesting for women’s rights,” 8 march 2021, st. petersburg 4. field report from the unapproved action “we demand answers,” 12 june 2017, moscow 5. field report from the unapproved action “we demand answers,” 12 june 2017, st. petersburg “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 74 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii 6. field report from unapproved march against navalny’s arrest, 23 january 2021, st. petersburg 7. field report from unapproved march against navalny’s arrest, 23 january 2021, moscow 8. field report from an unapproved protest against navalny’s arrest, 31 january 2021, st. petersburg 9. field report from the unapproved march “medical assistance for navalny,” 21 april 2021, st. petersburg 10. field report from the approved action “to your freedom and ours!” 11 november 2021, warsaw appendix 1. viktor tsoy (kino). peremen [changes] виктор цой. перемен viktor tsoy. changes. (https://www.language-translationhelp.com/supportfiles/russian_lyrics-victor_tsoi.pdf) вместо тепла — зелень стекла, вместо огня — дым, из сетки календаря выхвачен день. красное солнце сгорает до тла, день догорает с ним, на пылающий город падает тень. instead of warmth there’s the green of glass, instead of fire — smoke. a day is plucked from the calendar’s grid. the red sun burns to the ground, the day burns with it. a shadow falls on a city in flames. перемен — требуют наши сердца. перемен — требуют наши глаза. в нашем смехе и в наших слезах, и в пульсации вен: “перемен мы ждем перемен” our hearts demand changes! our eyes demand changes! in our laughter, in our tears, and in the pulsing of our veins — we are waiting for change. электрический свет продолжает наш день, и коробка от спичек пуста, но на кухне синим цветком горит газ. сигареты в руках, чай на столе — эта схема проста, и больше нет ничего, всё находится в нас. electric lights extend our day, and the box of matches is empty. but in the kitchen gas burns like a blue flower cigarettes in our hands, tea on the table. this is a simple plan. and after that there’s nothing else, everything can be found in us. “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 75 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii перемен — требуют наши сердца. перемен — требуют наши глаза. в нашем смехе и в наших слезах, и в пульсации вен: “перемен мы ждем перемен” our hearts demand changes! our eyes demand changes! in our laughter, in our tears, and in the pulsing of our veins — we are waiting for change. мы не можем похвастаться мудростью глаз и умелыми жестами рук, нам не нужно все это, чтобы друг друга понять. сигареты в руках, чай на столе — так замыкается круг, и вдруг нам становится страшно что-то менять. we can’t boast of the wisdom in our eyes make clever gestures with our hands we don’t need all that to understand each other. cigarettes in our hands, tea on the table, that’s how a circle draws close. and suddenly we’re afraid to change something. перемен — требуют наши сердца. перемен — требуют наши глаза. в нашем смехе и в наших слезах, и в пульсации вен: “перемен мы ждем перемен” our hearts demand changes! our eyes demand changes! in our laughter, in our tears, and in the pulsing of our veins — we are waiting for change. 2. arkady kots. steny [walls] аркадий коц. стены (translation from catalan by kirill medvedev). walls (english translation from russian) однажды дед говорил мне когда светало вдали мы с ним у дверей стояли и телеги мимо ползли видишь ли эти стены? за ними мы все живём и если мы их не разрушим то заживо здесь сгниём one day grandfather told me, when it was getting light far away we were standing at the door with him and the carts crawled past do you see these walls? we all live behind them. and if we don't destroy them, then we'll rot here alive. давай разрушим эту тюрьму здесь этих стен стоять не должно так пусть они рухнут, рухнут, let's destroy this prison these walls shouldn't stand here so let them collapse, collapse, “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 76 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii рухнут обветшавшие давно и если ты надавишь плечом и если мы надавим вдвоём то стены рухнут, рухнут, рухнут и свободно мы вздохнём collapse run-down for a long time and if you push with your shoulder and if we push together then the walls will collapse, collapse, collapse and we will breathe freely руки мои в морщинах с тех пор прошло много лет и сил всё меньше и меньше а стенам износу нет я знаю, они гнилые но сложно их одолеть когда не хватает силы и я прошу тебя тебя спеть: my hands are wrinkled many years have passed since then and the forces are less and less and there is no wear on the walls i know they're rotten, but it's difficult to overcome them when there's not enough power and i ask you to sing: давай разрушим эту тюрьму здесь этих стен стоять не должно так пусть они рухнут, рухнут, рухнут обветшавшие давно и если ты надавишь плечом и если мы надавим вдвоём то стены рухнут, рухнут, рухнут и свободно мы вздохнём let's destroy this prison these walls shouldn't stand here so let them collapse, collapse, collapse run-down for a long time and if you push with your shoulder and if we push together then the walls will collapse, collapse, collapse and we will breathe freely деда давно не слышно злой ветер его унёс но мы с ним стоим всё там же под тот же грохот колёс и когда кто-то проходит мимо я стараюсь погромче петь ту песню, которую спел он прежде, чем умереть grandfather has not been heard for a long time, the evil wind took him away, but he and i are still standing there, under the same rumble of wheels, and when someone passes by, i try to sing louder, the song that he sang, before he died: “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 77 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii давай разрушим эту тюрьму здесь этих стен стоять не должно так пусть они рухнут, рухнут, рухнут обветшавшие давно и если ты надавишь плечом и если мы надавим вдвоём то стены рухнут, рухнут, рухнут и свободно мы вздохнём let's destroy this prison these walls shouldn't stand here so let them collapse, collapse, collapse run-down for a long time and if you push with your shoulder and if we push together then the walls will collapse, collapse, collapse and we will breathe freely 3. vladimir kotlyarov (pornofilmy). eto proidet [this will pass] порнофильмы. это пройдёт pornofilmy: this will pass все пройдет, точно майские грозы, чьи-то слезы, 2 пальца у рта, как мандат ах.евшего единороса, как допрос, как усмешка мента, как лефортовские коридоры, как беслан, как норд-остовский газ федеральная свора бездушных майоров севастополь, донецк и луганск. это точно пройдет. someone’s tears, a v sign on the mouth, like a united russia mp’s mandate like an interrogation, like a cop’s sneer like the corridors at lefortovo prison like beslan, like the poison gas at nord-ost like the federal pack of soulless majors sevastopol, donetsk and luhansk this will definitely pass. это точно пройдёт! с пакетом мокрым на голове, с электрометками на руке моя россия сидит в тюрьме, но верь же мне: это пройдёт! this will definitely pass! a wet plastic bag on its head electric shock marks on its hands my russia is behind bars, but trust me: it will pass! какой же черный нам выпал век, а мне мерещится вдалеке живой надежды забытый свет.. так верь же мне: это пройдет… what black times we live in but in the distance i seem to see the forgotten light of living hope, so trust me this will definitely pass “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 78 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii словно свастика русского мира, как пожары в сибирских лесах, срок для честных ребят из пензы и питера, как набитый детьми автозак, и из "ящика" врущую нечисть, 228 и шмон в 5 утра, как омоновец храбро калечащий женщин, как декабрь, январь и февраль это точно пройдет. like the swastika of the russian world like the fires in siberia’s forests prison sentences for honest guys from penza and petersburg paddy wagons packed with children or the lying scum on the telly article 228 and shakedowns at five in the morning like riot crops bravely maiming women like december, january and february this will definitely pass. это точно пройдёт! с пакетом мокрым на голове, с электрометками на руке моя россия сидит в тюрьме, но верь же мне: это пройдёт! this will definitely pass! a wet plastic bag on its head electric shock marks on its hands my russia is behind bars but trust me: it will pass! какой же черный нам выпал век, а мне мерещится вдалеке былой надежды забытый свет.. источник teksty-pesenok.ru так верь же мне: это точно пройдет… what black times we live in but in the distance i seem to see the forgotten light of living hope, so trust me this will definitely pass все пройдет, все проходит когдато, через год, через день, через миг, в одиночестве в морге вчерашний диктатор, а теперь просто мертвый старик. и с петель срежут двери в лефортово, и россия воспрянет от сна, малазийским истерзанным взорванным бортом к нам с тобой в ледяную избушку ворвется весна. all of it will pass, everything passes sometime in a year, in a day, in an instant yesterday’s dictator will lie alone in the morgue now just a dead old man and the doors at lefortovo will be cut from their hinges and russia will rise from its slumber like the battered and blown-up malaysian airplane spring will burst into your icy hut это точно пройдёт! с пакетом мокрым на голове, this will definitely pass! a wet plastic bag on its head “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 79 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii с электрометками на руке моя россия сидит в тюрьме, но верь же мне: это пройдёт! electric shock marks on its hands my russia is behind bars, but trust me: it will pass! какой же черный нам выпал век, а мне мерещится вдалеке живой надежды забытый свет.. так верь же мне: это точно пройдет… what black times we live in but in the distance i seem to see the forgotten light of living hope, so trust me: this will definitely pass 4. ic3peak band. smerti bol’she net [death no more] ic3peak. смерти больше нет the performance of the song by the group at the rally on 10 august 2019 can be watched and listened to here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= e8msuhnms3k ic3peak. death no more you can listen to the song: https://lyricsfa.com/2020/11/23/ic3pe ak-смерти-больше-нет-death-nomore-english-translation-lyrics/ я заливаю глаза керосином пусть всё горит, пусть всё горит на меня смотрит вся россия пусть всё горит, пусть всё горит (х2) i fill my eyes with kerosene let it all burn, let it all burn all of russia is watching me let it all burn, let it all burn (х2) я теперь готова ко всему на свете я отсидела свой срок в интернете выхожу на улицу гладить кота а его переезжает тачка мента я иду по городу в чёрном худи тут обычно холодно, злые люди впереди меня ничего не ждёт но я жду тебя, ты меня найдёшь now i’m prepared for anything at all i’ve already spent my time in the internet jail i’m going out in the street to play with my cat but the cop car runs the cat over i’m going through the city wearing my black hoodie it’s cold as usual and people are wicked nothing awaits me ahead but i’m waiting for you, one day you’ll find me в золотых цепях я утопаю в болоте кровь моя чище чистых наркотиков вместе с другими тебя скрутят на площади wrapped up in gold chains, i’m sinking in this swamp my blood is purer than the purest narcotic drugs you and the others will get hooked for street protest tomorrow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= “i felt frightened and then i started singing” 80 folklorica 2023, vol. xxvii а я скручу в своей новой жилплощади and i’ll go off the hooks in my new accommodation unit (dсе x2) (all x2) смерти больше нет (х4) death no more (х4) folklorica full 2025 transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 76 habsburg empire to the americas: transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination andriy nahachewsky university of alberta (emeritus) brussels, belgium olga zaitseva-herz university of alberta edmonton, canada abstract most studies of diasporic vernacular singing focus on song lyrics and emphasize the preservation of pre-emigration repertoire. in this two-article study, we focus in detail on one narrative song to illustrate the complexity of transculturation in ukrainian-canadian vernacular singing. empress elisabeth of the habsburgs was assassinated in 1898, and this event was commemorated in a song in ukrainian. the song has been documented over a wide territory and changed periodically to produce four clear chronological redactions. in this article, we examine the history of the song lyrics in available texts from ukraine. the patterns are strikingly atypical for a “traditional folk song.” whereas the literature on the genre of “song-chronicles” emphasizes brief lifespans and limited local distribution for any given song, this example has been sung for over a century, diffused orally across hundreds of kilometers, and on two continents. whereas previous scholarship on folksong transmission emphasizes vertical transmission “from generation to generation,” we show that this song was much more often learned “horizontally,” from peer to peer. whereas most literature on 20th century folkloric transmission emphasizes the great power and influence of media, it is clear in this case that published versions of the song were rare and surprisingly un-influential. “то є король франсісяк, ше давно давно, то її забили, ту… ту царівну, й я знаю за ню співанку [sings]. uh huh, правдива, yeah. [a де ви її навчилися?] то так люди співали.” [it’s about king franciszek, long, long ago, they killed her, that princess, and i know a song about her (sings). yes, it’s a true one. (аnd where did you learn it?) well, people were singing like that.] nastja masiowsky, interviewed by robert klymasz, fork river, manitoba, 20 july 1964. transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 77 introduction many studies of diasporic vernacular singing emphasize the preservation of pre-emigration repertoire or, contrastingly, its “loss” to assimilation. ukrainiancanadian vernacular singing has been treated in this binary way as well [koshetz 1950], though also sometimes with a more positive interest in hybridity and transcultural qualities [hnatiuk 1902; fedyk (1911) 1927; rudnyc’kyj 19561963; melnyk 1972; klymasz and porter 1974; klymasz and medwidsky 1983; klymasz 1992; shevchenko 2012; see nahachewsky 2018: 99-100]. the overwhelming focus of publications has been on the lyrics of the songs [exceptions include koshetz 1950; klymasz 1968; cherwick 1999; koszarycz 1997; zaitseva-herz 2024]. one song attracts our attention in this article because of the textual and musical features of its variants and transmission to the canadian diaspora in two redactions. the song narrates the death of empress elisabeth of the habsburgs in 1898 and has been the subject of one previous article, written by bohdan medwidsky [1978], to whom this study is dedicated. in this article, we step back to the core territories of the song in what is now western ukraine and discuss the lyrics and their variability across twenty-nine full and partially documented texts over 125 years. we observe that the song circulated orally in four clear chronological redactions over its history, each reflecting an increasing distance from the initiating event and each influenced by the changing environment in these lands. this song’s documented texts illustrate a pattern that contrasts with many clichés about folksong transmission and diffusion. whereas the literature on narrative songs relating recent historical events emphasizes their brief lifespans and limited local distributions, this song spread widely and quickly and was still sung via oral transmission over a century after the event. secondly, whereas previous scholarship on folksong transmission emphasizes vertical distribution “from generation to generation,” we show that this song was much more often learned horizontally, from peer to peer. thirdly, whereas most literature on twentieth-century folkloric transmission emphasizes the increasing power and influence of media, we demonstrate that published versions of this song were rare and surprisingly un-influential (at least until the fourth redaction in the twentyfirst century). empress elisabeth of the habsburgs (“цісарева” or “цісарова” [wife of the emperor], nicknamed sisi by her intimates), was visiting geneva in the fall of 1898. on 10 september, as she and her attendant, lady-in-waiting irma sztáray, were walking along a lakeside promenade to board a steamer to montreux, anarchist luigi lucheni punched her in the chest with a thin metal file. this assassination was consistent with a larger anarchist movement promoting violent “propaganda by the deed” in europe and beyond at the turn of the twentieth century [graham 2005]. she stood up again after the blow and walked to the steamer, then collapsed on the boat, which thereafter returned to dock to allow her to be carried back to her hotel. the thin blade resulted in an eight and half centimeter deep wound and had penetrated her heart (as later found in the transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 78 autopsy), making her survival impossible, and she died in about an hour [yasenivs’kyi 1914: 164-181; medwidsky 1978: 30-33; matray and krueger 2000: 67]; “die kaiserin lag in schmerzloser agonie. die mediziner erkannten schnell, dass keinerlei hoffnung mehr bestand” [the empress lay in a state of painless agony. the doctors quickly recognized that there was no longer any hope] [matray and krueger 2000: 67]. (1) the murder and state funeral were described extensively in the media. the empress’s assassination became related in song in ukrainian very soon after the event. western ukrainian ethnographic territory was then part of the austro-hungarian empire, and the empress was a very high-profile figure. it is intriguing that the song became popular in ukrainian, though we have not been able to find evidence of similar songs about her in hungarian, polish, german, or other language communities in the habsburg empire, which were equally impacted. (2) neither can we explain its popularity in the absence of songs of a similar character for other high-ranking members of the habsburg court, such as crown prince rudolf or archduke franz ferdinand, who also met high-profile tragic deaths, nor the absence of songs about the demise of the emperor franz josef himself. the song about elisabeth blurs the boundaries between public commemoration and vernacular mythmaking, allowing performers to draw a humanized imperial figure into local imaginaries. relations between the monarchy and its diverse subjects were very complex, but ukrainians in this rural eastern crownland seem to have felt more than average support for the royals [see himka 1988; zubrytskyi and sysyn 2013; and more generally magocsi 1985; subtelny (1988) 1996; plokhy 2016]. on the other hand, we do not wish to fall into the same naive binary as in beginner folk prose discussions, in which personal experience narratives are believed to be “true” whereas fairy tales are “fictional.” one cannot make blind generic generalizations about the many levels of engagements a storyteller has with the contents of a story, nor that a singer must understand the words that are being sung. we will demonstrate below that the text variants of this song are a rich and evolving mixture of historical truth and falsity. in terms of its meaning, the song can variously suggest patriotism, political identity, national/ethnic identity, nostalgia, sympathy for the victim, and gender-based empathy, and at other times disassociation, satire, and counter-cultural rebelliousness. further, it was probably often sung, like many other traditional songs in vernacular settings, because of an aesthetic disposition for the act of singing, pleasure and satisfaction for its successful performance, the eloquence of a refined composition, emotional release, personal wellbeing, and/or for the intimacy and camaraderie of the singing occasion. we note, to illustrate, that the empress’s name never appears in any of the text variants. this may have been a function of respect, identifying her by title rather than name (although the emperor himself is sometimes identified by his first name), but it may also have been an indication of relational distance (the emperor’s name is quite often corrupted and inaccurate), and surely, sometimes the result of simple ignorance about who she was (as evoked in the epigraph describing a “princess long ago”). we cannot be sure who empress transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 79 elisabeth of the habsburgs was for the diverse singers, nor their motivations as they may have changed and combined over time. the meaning of the song to a singer may tend to be less opaque in the more recent documentations, though singing the song at a wedding or during a choral concert certainly suggests complexity and ambivalence. especially for some of the older documentations, we can’t know the mindset of rural tradition bearers, nor the impacts of when an educated person (with their own political position) came from the city, perhaps with an exotic machine, and asked them to sing out of context. we note that even the expert ethnographers of the early documentations were almost universally silent on the political sophistication and views of the singers, their overall song repertoire, the logic of their selections during the recording sessions, and usually even the sampling method and the contexts of recording sessions. these were simply not key issues in research at that time, though researchers were very scrupulous in documenting and commenting on other aspects, as we show below. singers might have had multiple and diverse reasons to choose this song rather than another. the early performances of the song about the empress may have functioned as expressions of personal admiration and cultural belonging, while many of the later ones seem to have had a satirical tone. influenced by these arguments, the goal of this study is not to focus primarily on the social environment and political context for the song. we acknowledge the prudence of restraint in our evaluation of its meaning in specific cases. rather than focus on why the song arose and achieved popularity, we direct our attention to questions of how and when. our methodological approach is to delve deeply into the textual and musical variation of the documented performances to reveal significant patterns in the singing tradition itself. questions of meaning and social context are certainly involved, but are secondary, maximally derived from our primary data, the empirical textual and musical evidence itself. early history of the “tsisareva” song text many intellectuals were interested in folklore texts as characteristic features of “the nation” in ukrainian nation-building process at the turn of the twentieth century. they actively documented song lyrics and other folklore genres, publishing many in periodicals or scholarly works. variants of the song about empress elisabeth were written down and reported by diverse collectors, and additional versions were recorded but not published. (3) all these songs are structured in kolomyika form, that is, two lines of 4+4+6 syllables each (typically accented as | –èèè | –èèè | –èèè | – – |), rhyming to create one verse. the kolomyika was the dominant productive form in most areas of western ukraine at the time [hnatiuk 1905; kolessa (1928) 1970: 40]. significantly, the nine early versions of the song with geographic information were recorded in widely dispersed villages, hundreds of kilometers apart in some instances: “народна пісня про смерть цісаревої єлисавети належить зараз до найбільш поширених народних пісень в галичині: її записи надійшли до нас майже одночасно з різних околиць” [the folk song about the death of empress transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 80 elisabeth is now among one of the most widespread folk songs in galicia: i’ve received documentations of it from various locations almost at the same time] [franko (1905) 1963: 97, cited in dei 1972: 21]. none of the available versions are identical in their textual content. figure 1: locations documented for “tsisareva” song versions, all within the bounds of the eastern crownland of galicia and lodomeria (dotted lines). the five available complete early texts of the songs share the same overall content, featuring six “scenes” (locations in which the narrative is set): scene one, vienna, the emperor and empress plan to give medals to their citizens; scene two, vienna and a narrative space, foreshadowing her death and sadness and describing her difficult life and good works; scene three, switzerland, she should not have gone to the spa there; scene four, geneva, the lakeside murder, efforts to save her, and her death; scene 5, vienna and the empire, the emperor and citizens learn about her death and grieve; scene 6, vienna and a narrative space, the funeral, mourning, and a panegyric. many of the lines within each of the scenes are similar in content and sequence across variants, though they often vary in length and finer details, such as specific vocabulary, filler syllables, and dialectal forms. the two versions published by ivan franko in 1900 are the most similar and suggest a more recent common source; they are also geographically least distant, both in buchach county. the versions sung by fit’ and dutchyk have several more significant differences, including the transposition of parts of scene three into a different sequence, as well as numerous unique phrases and lines. the first and last two lines of the dutchyk version, for example, present a brief framing scene, transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 81 depicting village girls thinking about the empress and composing the song. (4) otherwise, however, the text of every version recorded in the first decade after the murder is easily recognizable as “the same song,” the same “type set,” or the same “redaction.” a sense of their similarities and differences can be gained by comparing the first sentence of scene one in these variants: (5) ой наш цїсар з цїсарівнов взяли ся радити: | ой які би то призента тим людьом зробити? [our lord, the emperor and the empress began to deliberate | what kind of presents to make for those people?] ivan zhylavyi (singer and transcriber), slobidka horishnia, buchach povit. [franko 1900: 54] а наш цїсар, цїсарева зачили радити: | ой які би тим жовнярам призента зробити? [our lord, the emperor and the empress started to deliberate | what kind of presents should we make for those soldiers?] m. hnatiuk (singer and transcriber), koropets’, buchach povit. [franko 1900: 54] а наш цісар з цісаревов взєли сі радити: | «яку би [нам] тим жомнєрам памнєтку зробити! [our lord, the emperor and the empress began to deliberate | what kind of presents should we make for those soldiers?] ivan fit’ (singer), volodymyr hnatiuk (collector), brodky, l’viv oblast’, 1900. orthography revised by dei [1972: 174-175]. взьались цьісар с цьісарiyноу, взьали сьи радити, | йакіж би то й тим жоуньарам призента зробити. [our lord, the emperor and the princess began to deliberate | and what sort of presents to make for those soldiers?] iosyf rozdol’s’kyi (collector), pecharne, zalishchyky povit, 1901. [rozdol’s’kyi and liudkevych 1906: 154] а наш цьісар с цьісаровоу взьили сьі за руки | посьідали конец стола, і думайут думки. transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 82 [our lord, the emperor and the empress took each other by the hands | they sat at the end of a table and are thinking thoughts] iosyf rozdol’s’kyi (collector), liubin’ malyi, lviv povit. [rozdol’s’kyi and liudkevych 1906: 160] а наш цьісар с цьісаревоу стали сьа радити, | а йяк би то тим жомньарам презента зробити. [our lord, the emperor and the empress took to deliberating | what kind of presents to make for those soldiers?] iosyf rozdol’s’kyi (collector), dunaїv, peremyshliany povit. [rozdol’s’kyi and liudkevych 1908: 179] ой сів цісар з цісаревов, стали се радити: | ой що ж би то за призента жовнірам зробити? [our lord, the emperor and the empress began to deliberate | what should we give as presents for the soldiers?] unknown singer, lesia ukrainka (collector), 1900-1901, burkut (?), lviv oblast. [ukrainka 1971: 263; 2019] наш пан цїсар з цїсаровов стали сї радити, | йикі би тим жовньирикам презента зробити: [our lord, the emperor and the empress began to deliberate | what kind of presents to make for those dear soldiers?] third and fourth lines in this version, following a framing verse. ivan dutchyk (singer), volodymyr shukhevych (collector), 1902?, zhab’ie [now verkhovyna], kosiv povit. [shukhevych 1902: 183-184] we present two full texts relevant to our analysis below: m. hnatiuk version, 1900 [franko 1900: 54-55] masiowsky version, canada, 1964 [klymasz n.d.] (6) scene 1 -------------------------------------- а наш цїсар, цїсарева зачили радити: ой які би тим жовнярам призента зробити? слава богу найвишшому, що-смо тілько жили: подаруймо тим минтелї, котрі в нас служили. а наш цісар з цісарівнов, взяли си радити які ж би-то тим жовнярам презента зробити. вже п’ятдесят літ минуло як ми царствували подаруй-мо їм метелі, щоб нас памʼятали. scene 2 -------------------------------------- ой наш цїсар франц йосиф, думає о бозї а царівна від ворогів умерла в дорозі. transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 83 ой наш цїсар сідит в видни, тай ся там турбує, що за панев цїсарівнов цілий край банує. тай жалує, тай жалує як не жалувати? вона була така добра, як та рідна мати. рідна мати добра була, що нас породила, а царівна добра була, ввес край боронила. скасувала всї улицї, кайдани тай буки, тай зазнала від ворогів тяженької муки. scene 3 -------------------------------------- наша пані цїсарівна єсть з людського роду, післали ї бай купати в швайцарівну воду. бодай тота швайцарівна була ся розпала, тай була би цїсарівна муки не зазнала. була би ся бай скупала в медї тай в молоці, тай би була не терпіла спіса в лївім боцї. а наш цісар-цісарівна княжеського роду, поїхала купатися в швайцарськую воду. бодай то та швайцаріва була ся запала, була би ся цісаріва в нашім краю скупала! тай була би ся скупала в меді та в молоці, тай була би не терпіла тріла в лівім боці. scene 4 -------------------------------------- старий батярь нехрещений, в парижу роджений. циж він так сам із себе чи він намовлений? циж він так сам із себе чи він намовлений? що прискочив до царівни, як той пес скажений. що прискочив до царівни, як той пес скажений. пустив у ню острий пильник, що був затроєний. затроєний, запущений тяженького трійла, ай, що вона, така панї, тілько витерпіла! майор жовняр взяв ю в шіфу тай взяв пізнавати, зараз зачав до цїсара смутний лист писати, бакер-букер не хрещений, в парижу роджений тай прискочив до цариці, як той пес скажений. взєв се перник завострений, трілом запущений та й прискочив до цариці, як той пес скажений. наша пані цісарівна в шовковій сорочці та й не було ніде знаку, лиш в одній квіточці. взяла пані цісарівна на шіфу сідати, пан капітан ві там шифі, зачив пізнавати. пан капітан на том шифі зачив пізнавати, зачив же він до цісара сумний лист писати. scene 5 -------------------------------------- зачьив цїсар, зачьив цїсар смутний лист читати, не міг, не міг три годинї з жалю відозвати. тай розписав той сумний лист по цілій державї: вмерла панї цїсарівна в такі сумні славі. тай той сумний лист великий по цілій родинї, що віддала богу духа в четвертій годині. писав же він сумні листи по всій родині, що віддала богу душу в четвертій годині. scene 6 -------------------------------------- тай з'їхала сї вся родина з цїлої держави, тай зачьили жалувати найяснішої панї. transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 84 scene 1 -------------------------------------- and our tsar-emperor-princess, started to deliberate how could they make a present to the soldiers. glory to god in the highest, that we've lived so long: let's give medals, to those who have served us. and our tsar-emperor-princess, started to deliberate how could they make a present to the soldiers. “now fifty years have passed that we've reigned let's give them some medals, so they'll remember us!” scene 2 -------------------------------------- oh, our emperor franz-joseph, is thinking of god and our empress, from enemies, has died on the road oh, our emperor sits in vienna, and has his worries there, that for our lady the empress, the whole country grieves. it’s in sorrow, it’s in sorrow, how could it not be in sorrow? she was so good to us, like our own dear mother. our own mother was so good, as she gave us birth, and the empress was so good, she protected the whole country. she abolished all gauntlets, chains and canings, and now she has suffered great tortures from the enemies. scene 3 -------------------------------------- our lady empress is of a people's family, they sent her off to bathe in swiss water. that switzerland should have fallen apart, sothe empress would not have known such injuries. she would have bathed in milk and honey and would not have suffered a spear in her left side. and our tsar-emperor-princess, of the princely family, went swimming in swiss water. that swiss water should have sunken, she would have just stayed in our land for a bath! here she could have bathed in honey and milk, and she wouldn't have suffered poison in her left side. scene 4 -------------------------------------- an old hooligan, unbaptized, he was born in paris. did he do it on his own, or was he ordered to it? did he do it on his own, or was he ordered to it? that he jumped at the queen, like a mad dog. that he jumped at the queen, like a mad dog. sent into her a sharp file, that was set with poison set with poison, contaminated with heavy venom, oi, that she, such a lady, suffered so greatly! backer-buker, unbaptized, he was born in paris. he jumped at the queen like a mad dog. he took a sharpened penknife, laced with poison. he jumped at the queen like a mad dog. our lady, the queen, was in a silk shirt and there was no sign anywhere, but a single [red blood] flower. our lady the princess went to board the ship, the captain on that ship started understanding. transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 85 maior, a soldier, took her to the ship, and started understanding, and right away he began to write a sad letter to the emperor. the captain on that ship started understanding. he began to write a sad letter to the emperor. scene 5 -------------------------------------- the emperor started, the emperor started to read the sad letter, he couldn't, he couldn't, respond for three hours for the sorrow. and he wrote out that sad letter out to all the land the empress has died in such an inglorious way. and that great sad letter went out to the whole family, that she gave her soul to god at the fourth hour. he wrote sad letters to the whole family, that she gave her soul to god at the fourth hour. scene 6 -------------------------------------- and the whole family came together from the whole land, and they began to grieve this most excellent lady. the consistency of the six-scene structure and the numerous identical expressions among geographically distant variants by 1900 strongly suggest the existence of an influential and elaborated text within months of the event, which then spread widely. (7) this song’s creation surely involved mediated information at its very core. most співанки-хроніки [song-chronicles] were composed in the immediate vicinity of the event itself, perhaps by neighboring villagers [kolessa (1928) 1970: 53-58]. the events described in this song, however, took place in geneva and vienna, many hundreds of kilometers away and far beyond the personal geographic horizon of most of the singers, (8) yet the song text still communicates numerous accurate details. the singers knew, for example, that the murderer was born in paris, the attack was swift, the weapon was a sharpened file, and the empress stepped onto a steamship in the aftermath—particulars available initially only through journalistic reporting or some other media technology. other models for the origin of songs with elaborate scenarios suggest multiple independent fragments combining and overlapping and sometimes then crystalizing as mergers. (9) if this was such a composite text in the beginning, its structure became assembled, harmonized, and stabilized very quickly, probably within months of the event, and certainly before the geographically widespread diffusion of 1900 and 1901. the identity of the original author of this song has inspired speculation: franko notes that zhylavyi was a long-time soldier in the austro-hungarian army and that the narrator’s positionality is consistent with such a soldier [1900: 55]; the dutchyk version suggests village girls near zhab’ie composed the song [shukhevych 1902: 183]; (10) one commentator argues that the song is a translation of an original german poem [yasenivs’kyi 1914]; and later descriptions venture that it was originally composed and disseminated by lirnyky, transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 86 blind itinerant minstrels playing the hurdy-gurdy [zhulakivs’kyi 1928: 11; ielyzaveta bavars’ka 2024], a peasant named kovbasniuk, or a criminal sitting in jail with the assassin [medwidsky 1978: 33, 35]. hnatiuk writes about this specifically: коли якась нова пісня утворить ся, простолюдин почувши її і знаючи, що вона нова, а не знаючи, як широко вона вже відома, любить підшивати ся під її автора і подавати себе за нього. про се я переконав ся на піснї про смерть цїсаревої єлисавети. я дістав коло 10 її варіянтів із ріжних сторін краю, нераз дуже віддалених від себе. майже під кождим варіянтом було написано: зложив той і той, там і там. очевидно, зложити пісню на одну тему кільком людям у ріжних місцях, річ можлива; неможливо одначе, щоб вони зложили її так, аби вона мала однаковий ритм, однакове число стихів, однакові реченя і то на стілько, що в тих 10 варіянтах не можна навіть віднайти двох редакций! натурально отже, що всї претенденти на її авторство—фальшиві претенденти. [1902: 2-3] [when some new song is created, a common man, having heard it and knowing that it is new, but not aware of how widely it is already known, likes to pull himself in and claim to be its author. i became convinced of this by the song about the death of empress elisabeth. i received about 10 variants from different locations in the land, sometimes very far apart from each other. under almost every variant, it was written: composed by such and such, there and there. obviously, it is possible for several people in different places to create a song about the same topic. however, it is not possible that they all composed it using an identical rhythm, an identical number of verses, identical sentences, and so much that in those 10 variants one can’t even find two different redactions! it is natural then, that all the pretenders to its authorship—are false pretenders.] hnatiuk clearly sides with what became the majority view in debates of the time: “the authors of most studies of folklore involving fairy tales, ballads… and other complex forms assume monogenesis rather than multiple origins” [georges and owen jones 1995: 138-139]. oleksii dei [1974: 21-25] is more accommodating about the local peasant claims of authorship than hnatiuk. in any event, we have only a fraction of the evidence necessary to reconstruct the exact origins of the song text. we propose that because of the sensational assassination and the empress’s celebrity the song was composed quickly in at least a rudimentary form in an environment with access to journalistic reporting. from there, it spread like gossipy wildfire in the immediate aftermath, retained interest, and was integrated into ever more singers’ repertoires for a longer period than most songs about current events. whereas most newly composed folksongs about recent events transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 87 never developed beyond local interest and had short life spans [kolessa (1928) 1970: 45; dei 1972: 6-7], this event, which shook the entire empire and resonated in its upper and lower classes, was exceptional. songs such as “tsisareva” were not particularly interesting to the many folklorists who were oriented to the romantic notions of archaic origins and pure “national character.” this part of the peasants’ repertoire, however, did attract the attention when academic discussions turned to the more post-romantic question of whether folklore was dying out, or whether traditional people’s creativity continued to be productive. several scholars thus wrote about the formation of new narrative songs in the ukrainian oral tradition. volodymyr hnatiuk [1902], filiaret kolessa [(1928) 1970], and others called them “пісенні новотвори” [newly created songs]. soviet ukrainian scholarship defined “співанки-хроніки” [song-chronicles] as an independent genre in the 1960s and related it to ballads and historical songs [dei 1972: 7]. according to oleksii dei, the chief designator of this genre, співанки-хроніки were most characteristic in the carpathian and pre-carpathian regions—western ukraine. earlier, kolessa had characterized them in this way: до найбільш характерних признаків пісенних новотворів оповідального змісту належить, безперечно, реалізм зображення, відбиття безпосереднього враження від подiї, що дала привід до зложення даної пісні, багатство реалістичних локальних рис та подробиць… щоби пісня могла прийнятися в широких кругах поза місцевістю, де з'явилася, мусить отрястися із локальних подробиць, важливих і зрозумілих лише для найближчої сфери, мусить позбутися індивідуальних рис якогось одного відірваного факту… колектив, властиво цілий ряд колективів, через які сей твір переходить, мандруючи з покоління в покоління, з краю в край… мають тенденцію стирати все індивідуальне, зв'язане з обставинами місця й моменту, а полишати й розвивати найбільш загальне, яке віддає настрої типові, загальнолюдськi. [колесса (1928) 1970: 45, 47; see hnatiuk 1902: 10] [certainly, among the most characteristic features of newly composed folk songs with narrative content are the realism of their depiction, representation of direct impressions about the event that inspired the creation of the given song, a richness of realistic local features and details… so that a song can become incorporated into broader circles beyond the location in which it appeared, it must shake off its local details, which are important and understandable only for the closest sphere, it must rid itself of the individualistic qualities of one particular isolated fact… the collective, rather a whole series of collectives, through which this text travels as it moves from one generation of singers to the next, from one locality to another… have the tendency to wipe away all individual elements, tied to the specific situation of that place transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 88 and that time, and allow only the most general to develop, which produces more generic human emotions.] kolessa also writes that songs in their youngest phases tend to use local dialectal language, even though they often immediately also use poetic elements: archaic forms, extensive diminutives, special grammatical turns, established epithets, parallelisms, and others [(1928) 1970: 58-59]. dialectal idiosyncrasies tend to decrease as the song integrates into the broader folkloric tradition, and the poetic tone and linguistic devices tend to increase. songs get “polished” through repetition, as each singer “re-composes”/“remembers”/“searches for” the next word, expression, and rhyme during each performance. the most comfortable rhythmic, poetic, and euphonic solutions tend to leave an impact, get repeated, become more solidly memorized, and stabilize [hnatiuk 1902: 2; kolessa (1928) 1970: 48; see also lord (1960) 2000; and more generally, olrik (1909) 1965; ong (1982) 2002: 31-76; lord 1987]. franko describes his two 1900 versions of the “tsisareva” song as obviously in statu nascendi [1900: 54; see also hnatiuk 1902: 2]. all within a few years of the assassination itself, the diverse dialects remain clear in the eight early texts, while poetic devices remain rather modest, including a few standard epithets (наш пан цісар [our lord kaiser], пес скажений [mad dog]), and diminutives (рідненька мати [dearest mother], тяженькії муки [severe suffering]). the feminine rhyme (two or three syllables deep) and rhythm structures are quite consistent and strong. numerous elements are repeated in these song variants, elements which can be interpreted as folklorizations of historical facts. (11) each scene is somewhat reduced to a tableau, usually with a maximum of two active characters. in two versions, the heroine’s identity mutates from цісарева [wife of the emperor] to цісарівна [daughter of the emperor, princess] [franko 1900: 54; rozdol’s’kyi 1906: 154]. indeed, princesses were typical key characters in traditional folk narratives of this era, characteristically passive captives or victims of the main villain. (12) the early versions emphasized how the empress suffered terribly, providing dramatic effect and a standard image of a violent death. the historical descriptions, meanwhile, indicate that she verbalized that she was not in pain and might not have even been aware of being stabbed and then later lying mostly unconscious [matray and krueger 2000: 67]. the sinister idea that the weapon was laced with poison appears from the earliest texts and is then repeated in all later song redactions, becoming a somewhat stable epithet “oстрий пильник, що був затроєний [sharp file, that was poisoned]; острий пильник, трійлом напущений [sharp file, poison-dipped]; пустив у ню трійло [introduced poison into her]; тай була би не терпіла тріла в лівім боці [so she wouldn’t have suffered poison in her left side].” no poison was reported in the historical accounts or descriptions of the autopsy [matray and krueger 2000]. (13) also, ahistorically, the captain of the ship is described as the one who informs the emperor by writing a letter. letters were a common motif in folk songs [klymasz 1969a]. in a typical balladic tableau, the emperor sits immobilized for three hours transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 89 after reading the news. the songs consistently declare that she died at four o’clock, perhaps in part because the phrase “в четвертій годині” [at four o’clock] has six syllables that fit very comfortably into the second half of a kolomyika line. historically however, the pronouncement of death was made at 2:10 pm. each of these numerous elements is consistent with a folklorized narrative of a gruesome homicide two literary versions a slightly later text adds complexity: an anonymous sixteen-page booklet was produced by publishers chaikovskyi and kelbusievych in lviv in 1907 entitled, піснь руско-народна о покійній цїсареві єлисаветї що погибла з рук анархісти люкенього в женеві дня 10. вересня 1898 [a folk-ruthenian song about the late empress elisabeth, who died by the hand of the anarchist lucheni in geneva on 10 september 1898]. the booklet consists simply of the song text and a reproduced photograph of the empress on the cover. whereas the versions described above were also “published,” they were presented by folklorists or ethnomusicologists with an intent to communicate the orally transmitted vernacular song transparently to their readerships. perhaps the zhylavyi and hnatiuk versions were “cleaned up” by the literate rural men who wrote down the texts before they sent their letters to the newspaper office in lviv [franko 1900: 54], though franko is confident that these are “folk songs,” i.e., not actually composed by zhylavyi or hnatiuk. each person creating the paper documentation certainly had to decide on the orthography of the transcript, punctuation, line spacing, resolution of unclear syllables, etc. in general, however, rozdol’s’kyi, liudkevych, franko, and shukhevych surely followed ethnographic best practices of the time in presenting the oral text as accurately as possible. indeed, rozdol’s’kyi and liudkevych invested heavily in the cumbersome new phonograph technology specifically because their goal was to fix the smallest acoustic details as dependably as possible. (14) the 1907 booklet, however, presents a different situation altogether and unequivocally shows substantial individual poetic creation overlaid upon existing oral model(s). it can be characterized as a literary text more than a vernacular song; however, these categories certainly overlap greatly. (15) similar song booklets were produced by publishers in ukrainian parts of the habsburg empire (and beyond) at this time, and in some ways they can be seen as a late modification of broadside sheets. like a “піснь народна” [folksong] referenced in its title, the 1907 poem also features kolomyika verse form, and presents the same six scenes and approximately twenty of the same lines as the earlier orally documented texts. however, the lines are incorporated within a much-expanded body of 240 lines in total. whereas hnatiuk noted that individuals often claimed authorship of orally transmitted songs, the reverse is observable here—a clear individual text was labeled a “folksong” and presented anonymously. this author was obviously familiar with some orally transmitted versions but then supplemented them with transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 90 a great deal more detail about the murder and death: scene four occupies approximately eight lines in the earlier versions, but sixty-two lines in this text. it provides substantial detail about the brief physical attack; rumored interrelations among several anarchists; that the empress was helped to her feet and walked a further hundred meters to the steamship; that she collapsed after stepping onboard; that she was massaged and given a drink; that her tight corset was loosened and that they discovered a stab wound only then; that the ship left the dock but returned soon thereafter, so that she could be carried on a makeshift stretcher back to her hotel; and that two doctors and a priest attended to her at the hotel bed, but that she died soon thereafter. these facts are consistent with historical descriptions of the attack and could have only been known to an eyewitness and, much more likely, from reading the detailed accounts assembled and promulgated by journalists in its aftermath. the same pattern is repeated in scene six, which occupies two lines in each of the earlier versions but ninety lines in the 1907 poem, where it presents details about the funerary proceedings in vienna the following week and a long panegyric. whereas the vernacular texts also present a perspective sympathetic to the empress and the emperor, the point of view of the 1907 author shows a much more explicit and intentional political stance—very conservative, religious, and monarchist. the more specialized and technical vocabulary, as well as the lesser euphonic qualities of the additional contents, give an impression of a less “polished” versification than in the earlier oral texts, a feature characteristic of a composition project made by an educated amateur prioritizing narrative content and ideology. we have seen that the processes of anonymization and reduction of detail are already evident in oral versions from 1900 and 1902—these qualities are strongly reversed in the 1907 poem, which abounds in concrete facts and details. for example, this author correctly names luigi lucheni [люкені] as the assassin and calls him an anarchist, while the oral versions refer to him namelessly and variously as an unbaptized hooligan and troublemaker [лайдак гунцвот, старий батярь, батьир нехрещений]. the 1907 author also names the empress’s lady in waiting, countess irma sztáray [стараєвна], doctors golay [ґаляй] and mayer [маєр], the priest [паґніс], and others. he describes where black flags were hung in vienna, that eight horses pulled the coffin in the parade, that the emperor and his daughters followed behind it, and that a solemn march was played with large drums. an official mourning period of six months was declared. the vernacular texts had also occasionally mentioned a grieving period but presented it from the perspective of rural folk: “а за панев цїсаровов чельидь банувала, | та нї в сьвита нї в недїлї вже не данцувала.” [and the girls sorrowed for the lady empress | and so ceased their dancing on sundays and on holidays] [shukhevych 1902: 184, lines 39-40]. one more literary version of the song about empress elisabeth’s assassination was produced in 1914, this time in a ukrainian publishing house in winnipeg, canada [yasenivs’kyi 1914: 182-184]. it was part of a 192-page biography of the empress translated by maksym yasenivs’kyi from a source in the german language die märthyrerin auf dem kaiserthrone [the martyr on the transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 91 emperor’s throne] attributed to countess marie louise larish-wallersee [märthyrerin 1900]. (16) yasenivs’kyi simply calls the verses a “song” and presents it anonymously. this text also follows the six-scene composition closely, has thirty-four lines, and strongly resembles vernacular versions from earlier years. the language and orthography of the yasenivs’kyi version uses more modernized ukrainian. interestingly, it does show some possible influences from the 1907 publication, but very few. for example, like the 1907 author, he notes correctly that the empress is “наша пані цїсарева з баварського роду” [оur lady the empress is from a bavarian family line (emphasis added)], whereas most of the early vernacular singers included the same sentence but not the “bavarian” adjective, using instead a variety of other ascriptions for her background (людського [people’s], руського [ruthenian], боярського [boyar], боварського [a corruption of boyar]). he calls the ship a “корабель,” rather than the earlier versions’ дамшіфа [dampfschiff]—german for a steamboat. he follows the 1907 text in that the emperor was incapacitated for “two” hours when he heard the news, rather than three hours, like in all the folk versions. interestingly, yasenivs’kyi also names the murderer specifically, though he spells his name “лючені” [probably lju:tʃɛni:] rather than “люкені” [lju:kɛni:] as in the 1907 version. this point is unequivocal evidence of written rather than oral transmission; he does not know italian, has not heard it pronounced orally, and imagines the surname “lucheni” as a german or english speaker would read it from paper, with a “ch” sound. yasenivs’kyi does not share the 1907 author’s emphasis on glorifying the kaiser nor bemoaning that the empress’s death took place in “чужина, за границев” [in a foreign land]. (17) a second redaction of the vernacular text the emperor died in 1916, and the habsburg empire itself collapsed at the end of world war i in 1918. the pro-monarchist tone of the song had lost much of its currency by that time, and empress elisabeth’s personal celebrity was diminished twenty years after her passing. serhii plokhy [2015] notes that ukrainophiles tended to be pro-habsburg prior to the war of 1914-1918, whereas a competing political orientation, the moscophiles, supported tsarist russia. plokhy explicitly suggests that the “tsisareva” song may have sometimes taken on this political connotation beyond the austro-hungarian political context and after 1918 [2015: 267]. members of village intelligentsia may have promoted or suppressed peasant song repertoires somewhat in that period to reflect their own ideologies. the habsburgian patriotism of the 1907 author became less significant to vernacular singers as western ukrainian lands were contested during the period of the ukrainian national republic and then after being incorporated in pieces into the second polish republic, czechoslovakia, and romania. in particular, this song was not very attractive for the burgeoning post-war ukrainian national movement with its many romantic nation-building features: the song was clearly not ancient and dealt with an event that took place outside of ukrainian territory, transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 92 featuring protagonists who were not ukrainian, represented a non-ukrainian ruling nobility, and thus could not be used as an illustration of the beautiful ukrainian national character (nor polish, czechoslovak, or romanian for that matter, all states which owed their current political status to the demise of the habsburgs). some forty ukrainian songbooks published in the twentieth century were perused for this project, and this song about the assassination of empress elisabeth was not found even once. the song clearly persisted in vernacular repertoires, though it was not promoted or sustained by powerful agents and media of official culture. exceptionally, two fragments of the song are reproduced in a nostalgia-filled short story by ukrainian nationalist marian zhurakivs’kyi, printed in a ukrainian student’s journal in warsaw in 1928: сліпий лірник грав на лірі і співав захриплим голосом. співав про цісареву: як то вона пішла си купати в карілзбадьську воду, як — — — лукин батир нехрищений | в парижу роджений як прискочив до царівни | як той пес скажений, як запхав її в перса шпиндель затроєний — — — від тогди всякий сум йде, | терпить русь світая, а на небі появилась | мітла вогневая…, кажут люди, що ворожит | войну, помір, труди, і здаєтси, що на руси | добра вже не буде. хилились мужичі голови до долу — жінки плакали. [1928: 11] [a blind hurdy-gurdy player played on his instrument and sang in a hoarse voice. he sang about the empress: how she went to bathe in the karlsbad waters, how — — — lukyn the unbaptized hooligan | born in paris how he jumped at the empress | like a mad dog, how he stuck a poisoned spindle into her breast — — — since then, many sorrows persist, | holy rus’ suffers, and in the sky appeared | a fiery broom…, people say that this foretells | war, death, struggles, and it seems, that in rus’ [ukraine] | we will no longer have good fortune. men bowed their heads low — women cried.] zhurakivs’kyi clearly quotes the traditional song, referencing scene three, quoting scene four, but he features a different ending. he presents an image of a comet in the sky as a dark portent, incorporating it into scene six. indeed, 1898 and 1899 were exceptional years for comet observations [see denning 1897], which were likely discussed in local media and inspired anxiety and fear according to traditional beliefs. (18) significantly, in this song the comet foretells dark days for rus’-ukraine, no longer for the habsburgs. one might think that transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 93 zhurakivs’kyi invented these lines to fit his storyline, but several other documentations of “tsisareva” suggest otherwise. though the zhurakivs’kyi text is incomplete, it features a striking resemblance to a version sung by a. burman, documented by sofia hrytsa in 1970, east of lviv [dei 1972: 176] and one sung by y. elyjiw in toronto for bohdan medwidsky in approximately 1977 [medwidsky 1978: 35]. (19) elyjiw was a migrant from western ukraine to canada during the second world war, thus his song and zhurakivs’kyi’s 1928 fragment imply that these themes were established in the interwar period. (20) the similarities among these three distant documentations suggest that the motifs became somewhat stable. conforming with dei [1972], we identify this as a separate redaction of the “tsisareva” song. we quote these latter two texts to illustrate the new features of this redaction and give an impression of their consistency: наша пані цісарева тєжко занепали, так, же, правє, два месьонци з лужка не вставали. зажурився пан наш ясний, такі слова рече: “може, би сі викупала, стало би ти лекше.” наша пані цісарева ради вислухала і на другий день раненько зофорт виїхала. наша пані цісарева з ганьсбурського роду поїхала сі купати в карлісбадську воду. ледви вспіла шати знєти та й шпригнула в ванну, юж сі зрада зготовила на шляхетну панну, люкин-батєр затрацений, в паридзу зродзений, запхав пані цісаревій шпіндель затруєний. запхав шпіндель в саме серце, кровця сі полила, не минули цвай секундлі, ганц духа спустилa. якби був так франц пирішко мав бабу на воці, була б жила, не терпіла шпіндля в лівім боці. бодай тую швайцарію кров ясна залліла, була б наша цісарева до дзісь дзісяй жила. з тої пори велик туск став, терпить русь святая, і на небі появилась мйотла вогневая. кажуть люди, же вість чують, войну, голод, труди і же юж на святій русі та й добра не буде. [our lady, the empress has gone down seriously in health so that, really, for two months she has not gotten out of bed. our bright lord became worried, and uttered these words: “maybe, you might take a bath, you’ll feel better.” our lady the empress listened to the advice and early on the second day, she quickly departed. our lady the empress of hansburg lineage transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 94 went to bathe in karlsbad water. she had barely taken off her resplendent vestments and jumped into the tub, and already treachery is being plotted against the most noble lady. lukin-the bedeviled scoundrel, born in paris, thrust a poisoned spindle into the empress. he thrust the spindle right into her heart, blood was spilled, not two seconds passed, she gave up her spirit completely. if that franz the dumpling would have kept his eye on his woman, she’d have lived, not suffered the spindle in her left side. may that swiss land be inundated with bright blood, our princess would have lived until this very day. from that time a great sorrow has arisen, holy rus’ is suffering, and in the sky a fiery broom has appeared. people say that they feel premonitions, war, famine, suffering and that on holy rus’ there will no longer be good fortune.] a. burman (singer), s. hrytsa (collector), holohory, zolochiv county, lviv oblast’. [dei 1972: 175-176] our lady, the empress fell gravely ill so that for almost three weeks she did not get up from bed. our magnificent lord stood at her side and is looking down on the bed but since he is not a doctor he can’t help her a bit. our magnificent lord stood at her side and spoke the following words: maybe if you somehow took a bath then you will feel better. our lady the empress of bavarian lineage went to bathe in swiss water. she had not yet taken off her resplendent vestments nor gotten into the tub and already treachery is being plotted against the most beautiful lady. some unbaptized scoundrel born in paris thrust a poisoned spindle into the empress. he entered the poisoned spindle, blood was flowing, not two minutes passed, she gave up her ghost completely. he thrust the poisoned spindle between the white breasts and the lady, the empress will not breath anymore. the very lord, the emperor is weeping for her, holy rus’ is weeping, and on the sky a fiery broom appeared…. y. elyjiw (singer), b. medwidsky (collector and translator). [medwidsky 1978: 35-36, lines 7-26 of 34] this redaction presents some notable creativity and an increasing proportion of historically inaccurate images that might be fitting for a generic “murder at the transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 95 spa” narrative; the longer versions invoke the image of a famously beautiful woman undressing and hopping into a bathtub when the assassin strikes, whereas in reality she was attacked on the street while fully clothed in her customary long black dress. she has not explicitly morphed into a “princess” in these versions, but she jumped [шпригнула] into the tub in a way that is uncharacteristic of a sixty-year-old woman (even if the empress was renowned for her physical fitness). the killer stabs a spindle rather than a metal file into her heart, blood flows, and she dies in two seconds or two minutes. historically, the blood did not “flow,” but instead the tiny weapon and her tight corset kept internal and external bleeding to a minimum. only when they loosened her clothing on the boat did they reveal a small “flower” of blood on her underclothes above her left breast and then realized that she had been stabbed rather than just punched. she did not die instantly, but after about an hour. most notably, the burman and elyjiw versions of the song have taken on a parodic tone. this is in direct contrast with the zhurakivs’kyi mood. in the burman version, the emperor “franz пирішко” [franz-the-dumpling] is reproached for “not keeping an eye on his woman” [dei 1972: 175-176, line 15]. (21) we can sense a bit of erotic innuendo with the image of the lovely lady undressing or entirely undressed, and the spindle being thrust between her white breasts [medwidsky 1978: 35-36, lines 15, 23]. whereas earlier versions conclude with an elegy to the empress, to the emperor, or to the empire, this version ends with the dead woman lamenting that she will no longer sleep with her husband “franciscus” on a spring bed [lines 31-32]. the burman “tsisareva” text is one of a few that were collected in the postworld war ii period, after western ukraine was annexed to soviet ukraine. indeed, all the later versions published by dei appear to have been collected by sofia hrytsa or other people from 1966-1971, specifically in preparation for the anthology volume співанки-хроніки [dei 1972: 8-9, 514-515]. (22) dei makes a point of emphasizing the parodic aspect of numerous versions in his description of the song. this fits the soviet ideological perspective that good soviet people would not want to preserve a positive representation of a decadent prerevolutionary monarch. we have not found the song in other soviet ukrainian published collections. (23) elyjiw’s version and medwidsky’s analysis, however, show that this caricaturization of the subject matter was not entirely a soviet bias nor dei’s prejudgment. we see the word батяр [batiar, baciar, baciarz in polish, apparently derived from the hungarian betyar] in the “tsisareva” song text as early as 1900, referring derogatorily to the killer. at that time, the word generally referred to a street person, troublemaker, hooligan in the city of lviv. however, a батяр countercultural movement gained positive prestige and peaked in the 1930s in lviv, a sort of “hipster” scene of comfortable outcasts. viktor morozov, musician and a leader of a second батяр revival of the 1980s and 1990s, characterizes батярі as nonconformist and ironic, celebrating cultural hybridity with polish, ukrainian, and jewish intersections and disrespect for established authorities [stefanchuk 2024]. the extensive use of polish words in the burman text may have been an transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 96 intentional stylistic device. the song seems to have enjoyed a reformulation in the interwar generation, now no longer about a current event or lamenting the loss of a celebrity and not supported by official ideologies, but as a somewhat jubilant expression of counterculture, political incorrectness, and anachronism. the third and fourth redactions this ironic, burlesque quality is even more evident in a third redaction, sung by b. husak in 1969 in the village strilky, starosambir county, lviv oblast’. the first ten lines of the song reflect scenes one, three, and four of the early versions in a condensed form. then the song medley takes on a livelier tempo and presents a completely different scene, not found in any earlier variant, apparently appended from a separate song about the emperor: наш татуньо франца-йосиф, як йшли воювати, взєли з собов штирі доні, як штири гармати. перша коня му подала, друга осюдлала, третя його напуяла ще й поцілувала. а четверта, наймолодша, дала му рушницю, жеб єї встрілив, як програє, у саму гузицю. b. husak (singer), m. starovoit (collector). [dei 1972: 175] [our daddy franza-joseph, when he was going to war, took with him four daughters, like four cannons. the first presented him his horse, the second afixed the saddle, the third gave it water, and even kissed it. and the fourth, the youngest, handed him his rifle, so he’d shoot her, if he loses, right in the ass.] (24) a seemingly independent documentation by roman bil’ from 2009 presents a very similar juxtaposition of these same two parts as one song, only over fourteen lines in reverse order [romanart 2009]. these two distant attestations forty years apart suggest the linkage of these two songs was not a one-time experiment. a fourth redaction of the song in ukraine, related to the second, has appeared on the internet in recent decades [observator 2003; rox 2008; pav1o 2013; shapiro 2022; mklvivkavamuzklub 2023; mys’ko-pasichnyk 2023; seniv 2024; ielyzaveta bavars’ka 2024]. the song might have become more attractive to potential singers because of the large wave of celebrity that “sisi” enjoys in recent decades, through numerous films and other media, though the sources of our texts do not refer to them specifically. several sources do mention l’viv sculptor emmanuil mys’ko as a catalyst for its popularity. mys’ko lived from 1929 to 2000 and was raised in the village of ustryky-dolishni near the sian river, now ustrzyki-dolni in poland, part of the population that was “repatriated” after world war ii. he reportedly enjoyed the song very much and often led singing at transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 97 weddings and parties [mys’ko-pasichnyk 2023]. (25) self-reported on the internet, these are not exactly specialist ethnographic documentations like many from the early twentieth century, but they do shed light on the trajectory of the “tsisareva” song text. numerous sentences and phrases demonstrate clear continuity with the early oral versions and especially the mid-century second redaction. they also generally maintain the traditional scenic structure established by 1900. they are consistently shorter than the early versions and mostly consist of brief rump scenes: two lines each of scenes three, four, five, and six in the traditional order [see romanart 2009; shapiro 2022; mklvivkavamuzklub 2023; mys’ko-pasichnyk 2023; seniv 2024; ielyzaveta bavars’ka 2024]. the first two scenes are absent, and the song incipit therefore changes to “наша пані цісарева” [our lady the empress]. these six versions all share a sentence like the zhurakivs’kyi text, disrupting the six scenes slightly: “бодай тую швайцарію кров нагла залєла. | була б наша цісарева аж до дзісяй жила” [may that switzerland get flooded suddenly with blood. | our empress would then have lived even until today]. the first line of this final exclamation is transposed from scene three into scene six. this closure is intentionally absurd, as the empress would be some 180 years old by now. the midand later-twentieth century texts provide strong evidence of continuing processes of oral transmission and innovation. none of the texts listed here are identical, though some of them are repeated in more than one site online. the image of the empress undressing is repeated in many of the recent variants— “шати зняти” [to take off her splendid clothing] is wonderfully euphonic. the resort town where she was attacked is identified as “карeлсбадські води” [karlsbad waters], referring to the famous czech spa karlovy vary, which was part of the austro-hungarian empire in empress elisabeth’s lifetime. this altered location appears in all nine versions of the fourth redaction. this makes the continuing references to switzerland in scene six illogical and her death in a foreign land anachronistic. the two references to karlsbad waters in variants of the second redaction and in a fragment by william niniowsky recorded by medwidsky [1978: 35] in edmonton all imply an interwar timing for this geographical slippage, one that became traditional and now dominates completely. most of the versions in this redaction are written in a more modern ukrainian language and orthography than the early songs, perhaps with a few remnants of upper sannian dialect [надсянський говір], where mys’ko was born, though they feature many active and playful injections of polish and german words into the text: zwei secund'i [two seconds], ganz [very], шпиндель [spindle], юж [already], and найсвєнтша [most holy]). the earlier texts also include words from other relevant languages, but apparently because they were common in the normal vocabulary of those singers. in this redaction by contrast, the words clearly function as intentional code-switching to conjure the distant exotic austrohungarian setting and lighthearted impropriety. overall, these texts continue the tendency of a more convivial and parodic tone. this aesthetic is consistent with a significant revival/reinvention of the батяр movement in the city of lviv and transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 98 elsewhere, in polish and ukrainian artistic circles starting from the late 1980s. the assassin is consistently called a “батяр нехрещений” [unbaptized hooligan] in the texts of the fourth redaction, indicating a traditional meaning for the word батяр, but also possible playfulness with moralizations about it. this coincided with the demise of official soviet socialist realism. the “tsisareva” song seems to have re-risen in part in association with that aesthetic trend [stefanchuk 2024]. scant influence of the published texts as noted above, we postulate printed media as significant informational sources for the composer(s) of the “tsisareva” song text in the days and months after the empress’s demise. at this point, no such published sources have been identified. тhe 1907 and 1914 published versions of the “tsisareva” song text could have been duplicated in many copies and distributed widely and quickly. (26) though these booklets are rare a century later, paper copies were not as ephemeral as oral performances. one might imagine that published media may have been powerful catalyst for the continued transmission of the song and thus a major influence after 1907 and in the post-war context. (27) however, except for one brief mention that a rural couple enjoyed reciting the verse “наша пані цісарівна” [our lady the princess] by heart in the 1960s and 1970s [liuba 2015], we have no direct evidence of such mediated interaction for this song. despite this important potential, and undoubtedly the aspirations of the authors and publishers, these mediated texts seem not to have influenced the orally translated texts hardly at all. if some twenty lines of the oral versions up to that time were the same as in the 240 published lines in 1907, it is apparent that the literary text copied the vernacular lines and not the other way around. significantly, there is very little evidence of any influence of the remaining 220 lines of literary text on the later orally transmitted versions. the additional lines and themes in the publication simply did not inspire vernacular singers. a few possible exceptions are discussed below. in the burman and elyjiw versions of the second redaction, we find a tableau in scene two in which the emperor actively suggests that the empress should go to the baths. this resembles a moment in the 1907 publication. that text depicts her being ill from mourning her son rudolf’s death (nearly ten years after the fact), and doctors advising her to go to a spa for therapeutic bathing [pisn’ ruskonarodna 1907: lines 49-56]. in numerous texts from the interwar period on, the murderer is called “лукин” [lukyn]. his name, even in this corrupted form, is not found in any of the pre-1918 vernacular documents, but only in the published verses. the captain of the ship is sometimes called its “mayor” [franko 1900: both zhylavyi and hnatiuk versions; shukhevych 1902; dei 1972: 174], a possible transposition because one of the doctors who is reported to have attended to the empress was a dr. mayer. in several newer texts, the emperor learns of the killing by “телеґрам” [telegram], a word that is found previously only in the 1907 poem [shapiro 2022; ielyzaveta bavars’ka 2024; seniv 2024]. these minor potential influences from the published texts were adopted, became popular, and are transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 99 retained in newer versions into the fourth redaction. as our sources for the fourth redaction are themselves from the internet, evidence of mediated interaction among them is more substantial. considering the power of media technologies on folklore and popular culture in the nineteenth century, and how it is increasing today, their small influence on the “tsisareva” song until the fourth redaction is remarkable. overall, in the past 125 years, the four redactions are strongly identifiable and consistent within their time period. almost all documentations of the first redaction were created in the first decade after the assassination. the second redaction belongs primarily to the interwar period and rarely up to the 1960s. the third redaction is not as well defined, with only two instances fixed, and is also less chronologically circumscribed (documented in 1969 and 2009). versions of the song documented since the 1990s belong almost exclusively to the fourth redaction. each redaction, therefore, seems to have spread over space much more than it spread over time. most singers in each generation learned the redaction most popular during their time and not the redaction that might have been known by their parents. we see, then, that “horizontal” transmission dominates, the song being learned from peer to peer much more often than from a significantly older singer to a younger one. this pattern conflicts directly with kolessa’s and dei’s assertions that song-chronicles rarely left their source localities and these researchers’ emphasis on intergenerational transmission. this dominant pattern of horizontal transmission has only a few exceptions: two documented examples of the first redaction were sung in the 1960s by interviewees in the village of kosmach [dei 1972: 515]. we imagine that this was associated with an active local male singing tradition in that specific locality in the mountains, frequent opportunities to perform informally, and a local appreciation of good memory and tradition. these songs were sung by seventy and eighty-year-olds at the time they were recorded. the only other examples of strong “vertical” transmission, consistency over long periods of time, are found in canada. we will discuss the canadian variants of the song texts in a second article describing the results of this study. conclusion in this first half of our twin articles on the “tsisareva” song, we concentrated on its text and context in ukraine. the general outlines of the song’s history are clear. the song thrived in vernacular settings among ukrainian speaking populations of the habsburg empire. the song was not taken up into the “national” ukrainian song repertoire with its characteristic literary influences, active promotion, tendencies to standardization, editorial influence, published authority, fixed texts, and ideological conformity. thus, the “tsisareva” song continued to change rather organically over the subsequent 125 years through informal oral transmission and was periodically given new momentum as social and political conditions evolved. four clear redactions of the song are identifiable. transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 100 this analysis of the “tsisareva” text in ukraine is significant in several ways. firstly, it is notable that this vernacular song (and presumably others) diffused horizontally (over space) much more intensely than vertically (over time and generations). the changes over time are important; they have implications for understanding traditional culture, but also the history of the scholarship. we have noted several instances of lay persons as well as scholars using quotations from the fourth redaction to try to comment on attitudes of “the folk” immediately after the assassination, when the first redaction would have been dominant. our study has shown that the words and the meaning of the song had changed significantly over that time span. historians have long recognized that it is important to focus on documents from the relevant period to make historical observations. too often, however, this has not been applied equally to vernacular sources. the lingering romantic tendency to assume that “traditional” songs are “timeless” and unchanging must finally be rejected as anachronistic. the observation that the “tsisareva” song texts changed significantly over time in western ukrainian territories but remained unchanged among canadian emigrants appears to reinforce the longstanding cliché assertion that cultural elements tend to be more conservative and archaic on the peripheries of a cultural sphere, in the diaspora, farthest from the centers of cultural creativity and innovation. this conservatism might seem to contradict our first conclusion above and our insistence that vernacular songs need to be understood in their specific cultural timeframe. we propose to resolve this apparent inconsistency in the second part of this two-article publication. in the upcoming text, we examine the “tsisareva” song from two additional angles. first, we explore the context in which the canadian prairie versions circulated and were recorded. several factors seem to have facilitated and reinforced this conservatism in practice. in this light, the conservatism was an active phenomenon rather than passive inertia. secondly, most importantly and most innovatively, we introduce musical and performance characteristics into the analysis. while the texts of the song remained generally unchanging, the melodic features and the singing styles in the canadian prairie recordings reveal that the “tsisareva” song there did reflect powerful and complex transcultural adaptations after all. the song has undergone important shifts on both continents, in both cultural contexts, however these were changes of a very different kind. notes 1 a reference to the neue freie presse newspaper from 13 september 1898, wien. 2 for example, the extensive polish wikipedia article on the empress, in a long list of “commemorations,” notes that there is a ukrainian language song about the assassination but does not mention a polish one [elżbieta bawarska 2024]. at least one version of a song about empress elisabeth’s assassination transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 101 has been documented in german, in lower austria, though it is not similar [gamsjäger und deutsch 2025: 20-22]. empress elisabeth was a renowned hungarophile, and one might expect similar expressions in that part of the empire. our initial explorations of that possibility have not resulted in success but are admittedly incomplete at present. 3 published early documentations are listed below. unpublished variants were reportedly recorded by iu. rohuzhyns’kyi (1900), luka harmatii (date unknown), and an unknown collector (1909) [dei 1972: 515]. 4 such introductory and concluding segments are not uncommon in songs about current events [dei 1972: 28-39]. several other versions of the “tsisareva” song also contain them. 5 the three additional texts recorded within a decade of the empress’s assassination, which dei [1972] mentions but for which he does not provide the texts, are also assigned to this redaction of the song, his “variant a,” and thus likely start in the same way. 6 the profile of the singer is found in klymasz´s fieldwork indices as kly-p1.77. the sound file can be accessed here: https://archives.ukrfolk.ca/index.php/a-nash-tsisar-tsisarivno. 7 we have not been able to identify any “original” publication to date, and no such early published text is noted by franko, rozdol’s’kyi, liudkevych, shukhevych, hnatiuk, or dei. the 1907 published version shares some features with a broadside ballad, but it seems to have been produced only after the song was already widely popular and stable. 8 certainly, another exception to the typical intimacy of song-chronicles are songs about emigration, such as those published by hnatiuk [1902-1903], in which singers in western ukrainian territories sang about events even farther from their own homes, in brazil, the united states, and canada. however, in these cases, some of those involved did travel to the scenes of the events depicted. personal travel and lived experience seem much less relevant for the “tsisareva” song. 9 indeed, when volodymyr hnatiuk initially reported on this song in 1900, he apparently removed the first six lines, corresponding with our scenes one and two, commenting that they are not well connected with the main subject of the assassination. this would be consistent with the hypothesis that the widespread song scenario was a composite. he displaced these lines into a footnote. oleksii dei disagreed and re-connected these lines in his publication of hnatiuk’s documentation [1972: 514]. since all nine pre-1908 texts include versions of scenes one and two, the link among these first lines and the assassination was strong. on the other hand, these two scenes were almost unanimously dropped again in later redactions. 10 this itself is not an unusual trope for this genre of songs [dei 1972: 21-25]. 11 admittedly, some of these details may have been inspired by the countless rumors and conspiracy theories that abounded in print and in gossip, e.g., she had a heart attack, she was poisoned, it was an italian monarchist plot, etc. transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 102 conspiracy theories and gossip, however, are genres of folklore as well and may have tended in similar directions. 12 this element, mis-identifying the empress as a princess, is intriguing in that it occurs only in a minority of cases, but very widely dispersed geographically and chronologically (1900, 1901, 1964, 1964, 1969, and 2015). this pattern suggests polygenesis for this feature. in addition to the early versions by m. hnatiuk and in pecharna, it is found in two of the canadian texts, as well as a version by b. husak (singer) and m. starovoit (collector) in the village of strilka, starosambirsk county [dei 1972: 175, 514], and in an online inquiry by a woman, who called herself “liuba,” who remembers her grandparents reciting such a verse [liuba 2015]. 13 it is possible that a description of the murder weapon, потроєний пильник [a three-sided file] first became re-imagined as затроєний пильник [a poisoned file], was an example of linguistic ambivalence rather than a descriptive exaggeration, however the word потроєний [three-sided] never appears, even in the earliest texts. 14 however, due to recording practices at the time, only the first verse of the song was typically recorded, leaving out the rest of the text and music. this allowed for an accurate capture of the initial melody, but musical variations and subsequent verses were left unrecorded. 15 a polemic about the folk versus literary origins of another early ukrainian canadian set of texts, immigration songs published by teodor fedyk, is reflected in medwidsky [1992]. his conclusion that texts reflect hybrid authorship was foreshadowed by hnatiuk [1902: 12]. entire volumes of “folk songs with literary origins” were later collected and published, and their histories have become part of school curricula in ukraine [see boiko 1978]. 16 also known as countess marie louise larish von moennich and countess marie larish. 17 geneva was outside the borders of the enormous austro-hungarian monarchy, and the fact that she died outside her realm was expressed as very problematic for the 1907 poet. the earlier vernacular versions did indeed note that she died “на дорозі” [on the road], a grievous matter in folk perceptions, and included vocabulary such as “держава” [country] and “в сім краю” [in this land], but mostly as vague geographic concepts. from yasenivs’kyi’s perspective after emigrating to north america, the political boundaries of the austro-hungarian realm were not as relevant as they were for the habsburg patriot of 1907. 18 we propose that this motif may have been included in early versions of the song which have not been preserved. we think it was less likely to have been added in later years when awareness and discussions of those comets would have faded. alternately, this theme may have been appended to the song in 1910, the year in which the great daylight comet and halley’s comet both aroused trepidations. further evidence in the form of additional early texts would be required to resolve this question. transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 103 19 medwidsky’s 1978 article presents only an english translation. the article was translated into ukrainian and published in narodoznavchi zoshyty in 2010. unfortunately, the translation does not provide niniowsky’s nor elyjiw’s ukrainian originals but only consists of new re-translations from medwidsky’s english back into contemporary ukrainian. these retranslations are not useful for this analysis. 20 personal conversations with adriana helbig indicate that the song was known in several cities in the united states in post-world war ii ukrainian immigrant communities. other than via migration itself, informal correspondence across the iron curtain was severely restricted, and singers were extremely unlikely to write about this song across the atlantic during the cold war. thus, their versions did not likely acquire post-war features from ukraine. in informal conversations, medwidsky described singing the song with his friends in north america in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly with his compatriots in the plast organization. medwidsky reported that some of the versions he heard had “an ironic tone” as well. 21 two additional variants of this phrase are offered by commenters to the text on pisni.org.ua [romanart 2009]. 22 perhaps other versions were collected, but they have been lost or remained inaccessible in archives. neither was the song discussed much in research. when liuba asked for information on this song online in 2015, the best answer she received was a reference to medwidsky’s 1978 canadian article, translated into ukrainian and republished in lviv in 2010. 23 except for the ukrainka collection mentioned above [1971]. unless intentionally excluded, the song should have been expected in soviet anthologies of historical songs or ballads. 24 the husak text plays with ambivalence. it is not clear whether the third daughter kissed the horse or her father. similarly, it is not clear if he should shoot her or himself in the buttocks. in the later version by roman bil’, it is clear he should shoot himself. 25 the song attracted the attention of volodymyr pasichnyk, who composed a multi-voice choral arrangement, which has recently been performed by the nadsiannia choir, as well as the галицький академічний камерний хор [galician academic chamber choir] [mys’ko-pasichnyk 2023; mklvivkavamuzklub 2023]. 26 the 1907 booklet seems to have been popular, as suggested by a separate typesetting and printing, using the same 240 song lines, perhaps by a different publisher. we have not yet been able to ascertain the date or place of publication of this alternate edition. medwidsky suspects it was in winnipeg [1978: 32; surmach 1978]. 27 much folklore research indicates the power of mediated transmission on folkloric texts/memes and their diffusion. literary influences about ukrainian folk songs have also been studied extensively [see boiko 1978]. transculturalism in a song about sisi’s assassination folklorica 2025, vol. xxix 104 bibliography boiko, volodymyr and andrii omel’chenko, eds. 1978. бойко, володимир, та андрій омельченко. пісні літературного походження [songs with literary origins] kyiv: naukova dumka. 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and ethnology: traditions, practices, and identities). london: lexington books, 2024. notes. bibliography. index. 302 pp. $110 (hardback). isbn 978-1-66690-653-0. the notions of nation, national identity, and shared identity in the postsoviet sphere have come even more to the fore with the events of the last ten years and the russian federation continuing to stake its claims on the territory of ukraine. this volume is yet another important piece to understanding the mechanisms behind the framing of nation and national identity. the scholars that have contributed to folklore and ethnology in the soviet western borderlands advance the understanding of the development of folkloristics and ethnography in the “western borderlands,” meaning the territories on the western border of the former soviet union, through a study of their historiography. the essays in this volume tell the story of how national and ethnic identities were framed in the context of the stalin-era cultural policy of “socialist in form, national in content” and its legacy. fourteen scholars across twelve chapters delve into various aspects of the development of approaches to ethnology and folklore in latvia, lithuania, estonia, poland, moldova, ukraine, east germany, and hungary. the book is divided into four sections, the first dealing with the socialist period and the relationship between socialism and nationalism in soviet russia. the second part looks at the role of minorities in the construction of socialist national policies. in part three, the essays look at the implementation of socialist ideas of folk culture through the management of artistic expression and the roles of different agencies in this process. lastly, the final section looks at the relationship between nationalization and sovietization, modernization and colonial power. ķencis’s first chapter sets the stakes for the subsequent case studies. he defines folklore as “a sociocultural semiotic system” and analyzes the “cultural logic of folk in the era between world war ii and the demise of the union of soviet socialist republics” (33). in examining the language of folklore, we can understand the mechanisms behind various social constructs underpinning the building of the soviet union and of communism. both his chapter and the book as a whole aim toward a “comparative dialogue” (2) rather than discussions of uniqueness. that said, most of the subsequent essays are written along national lines: traditional songs in estonia, latvian folk ornament, and folk art in poland. perhaps it is for the reader to draw the comparisons, or that could even have been the task for the afterword. nonetheless, each of the individual essays contributed a fascinating exploration of particular concerns from the researchers’ varying areas of expertise. it was also refreshing to see a refined consideration of the region, not focusing solely on soviet nations but also on socialist neighbors from east germany, poland, and hungary. reviews 117 folklorica 2025, vol. xxix while this book is clearly about the past, it is also about the present, which bronner makes clear in his afterword. he notes that the russo-ukrainian war was “indeed related to folklore in the region and its study and presentation there” (267). he further states: the war was, in fact, intertwined with the legacy of folkloristic education in the soviet period and the frequent claims of regional/ethnic groups to the same land, the colonialist implications of a mythological russian “motherland,” and independence movements of breakaway republics inspired by divergent ideologies of cultural nationalism, religious theocracy and western democracy. the preceding essays in this volume in fact laid out precisely this idea. but knowing this, in the academic sense, and understanding this, in the “real world” are two very different things, and through no fault of its own the influence of this book is unlikely to extend to policy makers. in an age when we can read headlines on a daily basis questioning the utility and future of the humanities alongside those detailing ongoing global strife involving conflict along national and ethnic lines, it is always surprising that those who lament the latter fail to consider what the former can offer. those of us in these fields know that there is a lot that culture, identity building, and knowledge generation can tell us about the present conflicts we are witnessing in the middle east, ukraine, and russia, and elsewhere, and that is what makes this volume so important. it outlines how these concepts that are often considered or claimed to be intrinsic were in fact carefully constructed, all with the aim of creating a soviet union out of discrete nations and peoples from scratch. but much more work needs to be done to bridge the gap between academics and its real-world applications, and perhaps that would be a topic for a future study. amy bryzgel northeastern university boston, massachusetts a.bryzgel@northeastern.edu